I was in Birmingham for Camelot, a small¹ larp convention. It was the first time it’s been run, and it was fine. It ran smoothly, everything was on time, it was inexpensive, snacks showed up during the day, there was a nice selection of topics, and lunch was edible if confusing.² I know all that sounds like damning with faint praise, which isn’t really my intention.

The simple fact is it was a very small convention, so there was a single track of speakers. One track of speakers means no breaks to switch rooms between talks. No breaks to switch rooms means no one loitering in the lobby to talk to and no options to swap rooms to a talk that better fits your interests. That’s not a criticism, it’s just an inevitability of scale.

The talks were all pretty good, but they were kind of awkwardly bridging the gap between UK larp and other larp traditions. One of the talks were on the nuts and bolts of arranging a permanent larp site in the UK, which felt a little too much like inside baseball³ to me, and there was an academic talk on theory and a presentation on transparency which both felt like the introduction to conversations that are already happening elsewhere. But you’ve got to start those conversations somehow, and the organizers have already announced they’ll be running it again next year. I suspect the attendee list will double.

I had wanted to be able to hang out afterwards, but most people hopped trains to get home immediately after the final session; I’m so used to traveling to these kind of things it hadn’t actually occurred to me that was possible or even desirable. And I could have stuck it out and tried to make new connections, afterwards, but an overloud crowded dinner among strangers, combined with a severe overdose of sitting still for nearly eight hours and a slow burn of a larp drop meant I needed a quiet corner with close friends, and that didn’t seem in the cards. So I went back to my hotel room and crashed, mentally and emotionally, for the better part of two days.

I knew coming off an intense larp a week ago, coupled with 16 hours on a train to visit family after my aunt’s death and immediately followed by a transatlantic redeye flight, my nerves were going to be frayed for a while. I also knew that staying with a friend and socializing before the larp convention was going to postpone the drop I was feeling for the better part of a week.

I’ve realized for a while that I can’t process larps the way a lot of people seem to, writing character epilogues and fanfic and discussing endlessly the minutiae of the game. I’m far more introspective. And while I’ll gladly overshare war stories during the afterparty, that tendency seems to mercifully fade pretty quickly. Even the writeups I do here, I’m typically trying to find interesting angles on the design or the safety or the plot rather than rehash my personal experience. I mean, it’s still personal, but it’s not really the kind of writing that helps me process.⁴

I’ve likewise noticed that I can’t process and socialize at the same time. I greatly enjoy being around friends I’ve played with after a game,⁵ and there’s some critical things that happen right after a larp ends,⁶ but in the days and weeks afterwards if I’m hanging out with people I’m mostly postponing dealing with the emotions of the game. Some games that’s fine, minimal bleed, no big deal. Some, not so much.

So it was building up. I wasn’t surprised I was getting increasingly sensitive to crowds and noise. When a friend arrived in Birmingham the night before the convention and asked if anyone was around to hang out, I knew I was spending about what I had left.⁷ And when I was done, the next night, I was well and truly done.

I am often lonely. No surprise there; I’m often alone. But it’s not because I’m travelling. It’s deeper than that — I frequently felt alone before I left, even in places I lived for years, where I was ostensibly surrounded by my friends. In a way, it’s because I’ve always struggled to feel that sense of belonging that I’ve been able to travel in the first place. It don’t find it all that much harder to feel connected to people now than I did before.

But I almost always feel at least slightly disconnected from the rest of the world. It’s like a radio that’s always playing in the next room. Sometimes it’s loud and overwhelming, sometimes it’s faint and murmuring in the background just beyond your ability to make out the words. But it’s only on very rare occasions that it’s ever fully off.

You get used to it. I know, intellectually, that these feelings are just chemicals sloshing around in my brain, the result of hundreds of separate biological systems each squirting out their milliliters of psychotropic chemicals. You can certainly influence it, from time to time — there’s a reason I’m visiting art museums and not garbage dumps — but we have a rough emotional set point, and this is the one my brain returns to. I get depressed. I mean, I’m always a little depressed, but sometimes I get really depressed, maybe for a weekend, maybe for a week, and then I’m over it and the radio’s tuned down to a reasonable volume for another month or so.

I see a lot of friends online in various stages of meltdown. I wish I had something to offer, some advice or hard-fought wisdom to pass on. But I only have the vaguest idea of how all this works for me, let alone other people. I’m not sure it generalizes. These are our own private underworlds.

For me, it’s often best to just ride it out, see how long it takes to recover. I was curled up in bed by 8pm on Saturday and — minus a break from noon to 3pm on Sunday when I swapped hotels — stayed there until this morning around 11am.⁸ During that break I went to brunch at a fancy, overpriced all-you-can-eat buffet. I watched the new Rick and Morty. I ordered room service nachos for dinner. I napped. I faffed about online, vaguely considering a new programming project, looking up new tools.⁹

I know I don’t talk about this with friends much. I’m not sure it would do any good. It just is, like the weather. Talking about how miserable you feel, absent any solutions, can just end up making you feel worse. It’s different if it’s a temporary thing, I think. You can talk through a bad breakup or getting fired or losing a loved one. This feels more elemental. Whatever systems are supposed to pump out the chemical cocktail that makes me a functional human just burn out and take a breather on producing dopamine or some such for a bit.

What does help, in a roundabout way, is seeing friends and hanging out. Having people check in on me. People saying hi, or saying they missed me, or trying to make plans if we’re going to be near each other. I’ll still drop off the face of the earth from time to time — bad biology is bad biology — but it seems to make these things less likely, maybe even make them shorter when they happen. If you can’t find solutions, invest in abatement.

I’m now at the airport, waiting on my flight to Brussels. I’m feeling mostly better, more rested, more calm, ready to get back to my life. Maybe that’s all I’ve got in terms of advice. If your brain goes sideways from time to time, and you can tell when it’s happening, sometimes the best thing to do is to find a calm, safe space; flip on the television; and wait for the clouds to clear.

It’s still a rainy, gloomy, overcast day in Birmingham. The weather in Belgium is reportedly sunny and clear. My flight leaves in an hour.

Next: Brussels (BRU) to Tallinn (TLL)
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Footnotes

¹ Fewer than 50 people

² Some of the stuff was vegetarian, but some of it was gluten-free vegetarian, and only about half of it was labeled, which if you’re already frayed from trying to focus without squirming on three hours of presentations was honestly a lot for someone with ADD to juggle.

³ Inside cricket?

⁴ If it were, there would be far more swearing on this blog.

⁵ It is a totally valid thing to play a larp solely for the afterparty.

⁶ If you’re like 90% of the larpers out there, as soon as it’s over you’ll either be starting to or will shortly begin to question every decision you made during the larp. Take the time to go around and thank everyone who improved your game. It helps.

⁷ And I don’t regret it for an instant. It is a long, painstaking process to keep and mend a support network while traveling, and every instance to hang out with friends is even more valuable than time alone. I get lots of time alone. I need friends.

⁸ The ibis Budget Hotel at the Birmingham airport has far nicer bedding than the one in downtown Birmingham, for whatever reason.

⁹ There’s a bash alternative called “xonsh” which I’m vaguely considering switching to, since it’s Python-based and honestly, so am I.