L’Envol by Élise in the Clouds

Video games have been for a long time my lifeline. I was born a very turbulent but smiling boy, had troubles focusing on things, was always daydreaming about nothing and everything… My mother told me later that she originally didn’t want to keep me, she already had my older brother with which she had a very strong relationship.

I felt very quickly that other than my sister (and my brother to a lesser extent), I was pretty alone. I was the happiest when I spent time with my brother and sister, playing video games, trying to see what stories are unfolding.

Playing video games was my gateway to feeling at peace with the physical world, where everything was complicated, strict and unbending. I was born in Belgium, traveled to Russia, then to China during all my school years. Russia was especially hard, we didn’t speak the language, we didn’t understand why we were there, it was gloomy and sad. My parents were never home, they had to work hard to earn money as restaurant owners. I’m grateful that my siblings were there during this period of my life.

I had a hard time relating to physical world things. I made friends in high school (they still are) around video games. I was living in China at that time, and we were unsupervised kids that could easily go out at night in bars drinking alcohol, going into LAN bars playing video games all night… when I think about it, it was outright dangerous and irresponsible from a parenting standpoint. But I have fond memories about it. Video games helped me connect with other people. At school, some of us were very ostracized for being “geeks”, “nerds” I don’t think I cared much, I just had fun with people that appreciated me!

I traveled to France for my uni years, I wanted to become a clinical psychologist. I remember telling myself “I want to help people”, and it was obvious that I had to work in mental health to do that. I started therapy around that time also. Video games were still an important part of my life, it’s also a period of my life where I played too much Starcraft 2, and I was having difficulties balancing my romantic life with my partner that I still love and share life with today. I wanted to prove my individual value, thinking that if I were good at a video game, people would love me. It’s irrational, but at the time it made sense.

I also didn’t know what Master’s degree I wanted to do. I decided to specialize in “Psychoanalysis, video games & virtual worlds”. I wanted to do something that others didn’t do. It was a novel specialization field, nowadays it’s less unknown. But I also had the firm belief that I could help people by making sense of the games that they played, either in therapeutic settings, or from their personal stories. I still work in this field most of the time, I’ve been doing this for nearly 10 years now!

As time went on, I felt knowledgeable intellectually speaking, but I still completely ignored my body, and felt ‘incomplete’.

Still a man that never looked himself at the mirror, and never cared about looks. I felt the most represented in narrative games such as Planescape: Torment, Disco Elysium, Gris, Night in the Woods, Little Nightmares, Pillars of Eternity, Flame in the Floods… These games all deal with stories that are centered around psychological & emotional crossings. It’s complex, it’s morally grey, it’s complicated, it’s abstract… Answers are very subjective and not simple. And thinking about the best moral, narrative choices that I must make in a video game was my way of enjoying myself!

I also always created female main characters. It was weird, because when I played female characters, I always felt a disconnect, as if what I was living in the video game couldn’t exactly translate to what I was feeling in my body; yet when I forced myself to play male characters, I could play the games thoroughly, but I couldn’t identify with the characters at all. They were strangers.

My little one was born four years ago. I rediscovered my passion for music at the same time and was (and still am) playing tabletop roleplaying games with friends. With no surprise, I felt more tranquil when creating female player characters, and could tell my own stories more naturally, and in a way that made sense to me.

Several months after the birth of my baby, I had my gender identity breakthrough. I realized that I am a woman, I can’t remember what triggered it, but I couldn’t resist it anymore. What I remember though, is that suddenly, life became SO CLEAR! As if an enormous weight just released from me. Things just made sense; I knew exactly what I wanted for me. No more doubt, no more chains, I could just be myself.

I came out in late 2021. I’ve stopped playing video games around that time too. I do play the occasional video game when I really want to play it, but it’s just that, playing video games without the psychological, unnerving, unending torment of trying to understand nothing and everything. Instead, I’ve started being a music composer, was positively supported by other professional composers that immensely helped me start my career. I started to talk publicly on social media, sharing personal vulnerabilities & thoughts, without the imposing shadow of interdicts that always told me ‘Nobody cares about you’, or ‘You don’t know what you’re saying’.

I also realized that I didn’t want to be a psychologist anymore and am actively trying to transition my professional careers slowly but surely. To be a psychologist is hard, you can’t talk about yourself either during session or on public space such as social media. You always need to have an ear for others’ suffering. It’s dogmatic and constricting in a way, in which I felt imprisoned. I thought it gave me purpose, and it did for a while, but it certainly didn’t let me be who I’ve wanted to become.

I’ve never been this happy in my whole life.

Written by Élise in the Clouds