When last I left you, we were on the deck of a ship. (Not literally, mind; you’ve got to use your imagination a lot on this show.)
We were on the deck of a ship–or I was, anyway–attempting to chart a course through tumultuous waves splashing up over the bulwarks and drenching the curled vellum of the map I’d intended to lay out in front of me. I was attempting to add landmarks to it, to take notes, but the four winds just weren’t having it. I could see stars above me, but I didn’t quite know how to read them.
What an adventure it was!
Ah, yes. Adventure. That’s where we left off.
I was fifteen years old, and had just joined a live-action role play group (LARP). It was autumn, one of the most magical times of the year. In fact, it was the weekend over Halloween, which is generally recognized in the western world as the time of year when the veil between the realms of the mundane and the spiritual is at its thinnest.
I had never done a LARP before. I had, at that point, never tried tabletop role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, or even Powered by the Apocalypse games like “Monster of the Week”. I had none of that knowledge going into it. What I did have was myth, imagination, a love of costume, and a lifetime of camping trips. The woods are my happy place.
I also had a few years of summer youth drama camps under my belt from the local community center. But improvisation was never my strong suit, auditions made me involuntarily shaky, and I was usually cast in side roles like: School Marm in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, or Ghoulfinger, the spooky old groundskeeper in The Hound of the Baskervilles.
RPGs were only on my radar at all because of my boyfriend at the time. I had gone to this LARP to play make-believe with him. And if you recall from our last episode, make-believe was actually a form of unmasking for me. It was another layer of reality; a human brain’s reconciliation with the rest of life’s circumstances, mysteries, and ambient information. A layer of processing. An exertion of will. An expression of freedom and belonging. A replacement for religion or spirituality.
Pretty immediately in that weekend-long event, though, that boyfriend had pushed me away.
He had no room for me in his imaginings. He told me, “Go find your own story.”
So, I did.
Perhaps I should have just gone home. I might have realized some things then. But, as I am a slow processor and a thorough observer who hates to miss out on anything that could conceivably become important or interesting… and I did like being out in nature… and I did like wearing these unusual garments I’d crafted… I stayed.
Under the guise of a character I named Talitha (pronounced similar to Tabitha, after an elementary school classmate, but alternatively pronounced ta-LI-tha, for which the meaning in Aramaic is simply “little girl”), I ended up on a walk through the dark woods with a small cohort of new companions–one called York, another Jonathan–following a trail of luminous moss.
It was utterly magical. We thought: this bio-luminescent thing must surely contain some mystical properties. In fact, we were so convinced of this that we followed the trail into the mouth of a cave, came face-to-face with several enormous poisonous frogs, and fought with them for the opportunity to stuff as much of this moss into our pockets as we could possibly manage.
One of my earliest memories of Jonathan is the extent to which he vomited afterward (on account of the poison). But he was the one with the dark eyes and the capacity for affection I mentioned last time.
The following Monday, I had a clump of neon green polyester fiber and a dead glow stick in my pocket, and the rejuvenated feeling that magical things were absolutely possible. I had experienced it. I had felt it. The ache was still in my muscles; the fresh air still circulated in my blood. I was hooked.
But LARP made the “real” world feel… even more wrong. Crooked. Missing something.
I was not yet so versed in metaphor and deeper analysis. I wouldn’t get much better at that sort of thing for at least another… five to eight years afterward. Until then, I was still just a sponge experiencing whiplash.
We’ve managed to make landfall, now, but… let us tread very softly over this next period of time. Its grave is shallow, buried in haste, and I’d rather not disturb the draugr who wait there just yet.
When we tour this place, there are no guardians to be found. However, to your left, you might notice a ghostly figure. Don’t worry–this one won’t harm you. They merely stand vigil here. But be silent. Don’t try to guess their name. You’ll upset them, and they’ll lose that delicate focus. They’re just as susceptible to the draugr attacks as the rest of us–if not more so.
The figure stands on the periphery of a dirt field littered with stones. They appear to be in their mid teens, wearing an olive green flannel with sleeves rolled up to the elbows, hanging open over jeans and an old black t-shirt with a graphic of pills arranged in the form of a music note. Their dark-rimmed glasses and layered shoulder-length hair frames a pale face with unblinking eyes. Their worn converse shoes are partly obscured by a viscous fog which creeps slowly over the ground. There’s a tiny silver figure with wings clinging to the helix of their ear, and a black string of Mardi Gras beads wrapped seven times around the opposite wrist.
Once we’ve passed through there, into the shelter of the trees on the other side, let me explain the concept of draugr, in case you didn’t recognize it.
Draugr is a creature from Old Norse folklore. Much like a zombie, it is a reanimated corpse, smelling of decay and terrible to look at. Unlike a zombie, though, it isn’t mindless; it’s not compelled by a virus or external command. It retains some aspect of the spirit it possessed in life–usually an aspect of greed, envy, or vengeance–and, in that way, it functions more like a ghost. Draugr haunt the place where they were buried. They have unfinished business. They are very hungry, and very dangerous.
Ah, there–just up ahead, through those branches. There’s a light. Let’s have a look.
I never did manage to secure an amorous relationship with the person behind Jonathan, one of my companions from that early LARP adventure, but somehow they have remained my friend to this day. She goes by Felicity now–a name meaning happiness and expression–and it was she who ultimately coaxed me and our other companion, York, into each other’s line of sight.
And that man is now my real-life husband, Rick.
Oh, before we get too far along… Right down here, by your feet, there’s this dry patch of dirt with deep furrows in it. It’s easy enough to see that it had once been an area of thick mud, where I’d dragged myself out of the draugr field before. Rick had actually let me grab onto his ankles and helped pull me out of that spot while he walked. It wasn’t really the most efficient thing for either of us, but, we made it work.
Let’s see… I was twenty-one, then. I had moved back in with my parents, after that span of years called the “Bad Time”, and enrolled in community college. I figured that maybe if I got a degree, I would be able to get a better-paying job, and maybe that would make things easier for me down the line.
We’ll… get back to the issue of employment eventually, but this particular tour is still about guardians, not occupations.
It was in my first college writing class that I met Linda. (Hi, Linda!)
Composition 1 was one of those liberal arts prerequisite courses that you have to take no matter what degree you’re pursuing. It’s the one that teaches you how to write essays and cite sources while you’re in college, taking all those other classes. As such, there were many options for that course, and a handful of professors to choose from. I wanted to be prepared, and I wanted to have the best experience possible this time around, so I looked each of them up on that “rate my professor” website.
Linda was one of my potential professors. She actually had pretty bad reviews, but (I thought) for really good reasons. Where other students complained of strictness and work, I saw structure and clearly defined goals. I knew from experience, particularly in high school math classes, that teachers described by rowdier students as “strict” were often the instructors I liked best. They were the most down-to-earth for me. And Linda was an absolute winner.
If you’re familiar with the writing of Diana Wynne Jones–author of Howl’s Moving Castle, and part of a literary holy trinity involving Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett–you might have a good inkling of my perception of Linda already.
I really enjoyed her sense of humor, and her matter-of-fact-ness. I still love to think about her smile. She had such a squinty, mischievous sparkle in her eyes. She was an old woman from a fairy tale. Sturdy. Wise. Full of cheek. A perfect mentor character.
That light up ahead, along the path? It’s coming from her window. That’s where she lives in my mind, this little cottage in the woods, like Baba Yaga–but with more of a British aesthetic than a Slavic one, which is why I mentioned Diana Wynne Jones.
The best part is that Linda took to me just as quickly. She took me aside one day and earnestly advised that I should continue to pursue writing. That I was really good at it. She convinced me in no time to take the creative writing courses offered there and to go on to pursue a particular technical writing degree she was familiar with at another university. She showed an interest in my hobbies, and myself as a person. She helped me get a scholarship for the following year. I could tell she was invested, and I was immensely delighted for the help. For the connection. To have a real path to follow again–for a while, at least. I didn’t feel so lost anymore.
After Linda became my mentor figure, and college became a kind of path that I could actually fathom, Rick became my guardian in a different sense. You would think, or hope, that with the amount of stock I’d put into romance over the years, I ultimately considered him the soul mate I had been looking for. That we had fallen deeply and inexorably in love.
This was not quite the case. Romance was… not dead, but… forbidden. Rick demonstrated care through action. But it was action not unlike the periphery care of my parents, who had housed and clothed and fed me for most of my life. If anything, from my perspective, my parents had shown more care, because there had been more hugs to go around. They were more liberal with “I love you”s. Rick did not like to visit those words, and cuddling made him anxious. He would suffer it sometimes, but I learned to recognize when he was merely enduring, and endurance is a far cry from intimacy. To further baffle our relationship, he did enjoy sex, but I had a hard time finding enjoyment in the thing when I’d spent so much effort learning to tamp down those deeper emotions.
What he did seem to have, though, if not affections, were answers. Rick is wildly intelligent. We could talk about things at length–even if we were stuck in an argument, and didn’t seem to be speaking the same language, he would continue to try to explain things and use metaphors to make me understand them. He never resorted to the “that’s just how it is” shrug-adjacent advices that my parents seemed to default to after a certain point. We had a similar take on information gathering, the two of us, and that was important to me, even if we didn’t quite have the right methods to effectively exchange it.
Rick also has an uncanny knack for storytelling. This had never been so well demonstrated until 2019, when so very many things happened, including his RPG campaign: Heroes of Brehill.
This was the first opportunity, ridiculously, that I’d had a chance to explore ideas like religion and friendship and even romance in a wholly imaginary, fictional context, which was partly self-propelled, but also partly reactionary.
It was not a bodily experience, in the way LARP had been. Nothing happened in real time, as LARP had. Everything about the story we told together, in a compact group of only six people, was more cinematic, contained more possibilities, and was also slowed down to a point where I not only had time to think about my responses before using them, but I had clearly designated turns which were my space to act.
In LARP, to avoid the higher probability of offenses taken by those present, religion was effectively banned. There was no talk of deities or divine power. Anyone who practiced magic was effectively a wizard, a scholar.
So this smaller, tabletop, theater-of-the-mind game was my first opportunity to play a Cleric: someone who communes with and is granted magical powers by a deity (from which there are an incredible number to choose from, fictional and mythological, all accepted in the canon of that world).
It would be my delight to explain to you the entirety of Heroes of Brehill at some point, but, uh… I might have to reserve that for an entirely different podcast.
Just know that that was one of the most cathartic, cooperative, meaningful, magical small-community oral-tradition style experiences that I have ever had. And Rick gave us that.
There are a lot of people who play D&D, who play RPGs, and… I think a lot of them don’t even comprehend the potential, the magnitude, of what that experience can be. With the right game master, with the right player attitudes. Honestly, the stars aligned for that one. It was amazing.
Rick and I also got married that same year. He had proposed to me that summer, after I finally graduated college, at a small Renaissance festival we still frequent called Ren in the Glen. He’d been part of a medieval tourney entertainment group for a couple years then (an upgrade, since we’d stopped going to LARP), and had called me out onto the field after one of their shows to capture cheers from the audience one more time. (I have a post about the proposal with some video if you’d like to see how it went.)
Then we played that Heroes of Brehill campaign, among a small group of friends, in which I got to rediscover and re-explore a lot about what love and protection actually meant to me.
And then, on the weekend before Halloween, ten years after we first met, Rick and I were married.
2019 was the most bizarre, magical year of my life.
And then there was COVID. Because of course. Why not?
Let me wrap this one up by bringing you back into the present day. Out of the woods and beyond the metaphors, as fun and intriguing as they are.
The truth that I’ve learned–far too recently learned–is that no one can have just one Guardian. That’s a lot of responsibility and a lot of weight, a lot of strain, to put onto one person, or one entity. It’s not right. The gods help those who help each other.
In having learned more about our neurodivergences, about Autism and ADHD, about disability and mental health and systems of oppression, which all very much intertwine, I’ve also been learning a lot about the importance of community. About the importance of asking for help, and having multiple resources available to us.
I’ve been lucky. While Rick has a stable job and has been paying for things like our mortgage and health insurance, I’ve been able to take some time to rest, and to reach out to others for assistance. I’m taking entrepreneurship classes and working with an independent living coach through Vocational Rehabilitation Services. I’ve found a therapist who’s actually been able to help guide and reassure me. Rick and I have neighborhood friends, who literally live down the street from us. And I’ve met other autistic people—people who, for the first time, I have actually been able to recognize as having real similarities to myself. I don’t feel like the odd one out anymore. Through writing this podcast, I’ve been able to remind myself of and process some things that I haven’t thought about in a really long while, or hadn’t before had the time or the resources to even notice.
When I rediscovered Illich, I cried. Because he represented an aspect of myself that I had so repressed, I had actually forgotten his existence, and what that meant to me, and how that relates back to my needs today, in the present moment.
I had to ask for this help. I had to realize that I could and that it was possible to actively ask for this kind of assistance. We live in an era where information abounds, and new answers and new perspectives are being revealed and discovered all the time. There are still a lot of flaws to work through, but a lot of those flaws are not on us as individuals. That’s why we have diversity, so that we can help each other fill the gaps in our existence. That’s why adventurers travel in parties, because it’s easier than fighting alone. And that’s what relationships are. That’s what religion or spirituality and friendships and romance all have in common. They’re counter weights, and connection points. They’re what, in another RPG campaign–this time resembling Star Wars–we called Cadwyn, which is literally just the Welsh word for “chain”. It’s what binds us together. It’s what makes us stronger. You are not alone. You never were. Have courage. Reach out. Our guardians are everywhere.
If you like the show, you can reach out by visiting @spectralpod on Instagram.
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Good luck out there.
Don’t forget to use your imagination.
Much love,
Mariah Lamour
