DEVASTATED.
For like DAYS I gave up. I literally gave up and just writhed in my own seething failure.
Let me back up a hot minute. In this real-time, global geocaching type game I play called Ingress, you can get these badges - as is the trendy thing to do these days - for actions you take in the game. You need these accomplishments and other action points in order to level up. Each badge has five color-levels, so, you earn the badge and sort of get a nicer color or whatever the more you do the same thing.
I can't really tell the difference between some of the colors, but, I digress about Ingress...
The Sojourner Badge is earned by hacking a portal every day. So, you have 24 hours after your last hack to hack again to count. For 359 days I have hacked a portal every 24 hours.
Every f**king day, I have hacked a portal.
I have taken at least one action everyday in this game for 359 days straight. No breaks. Flu. Fatigue. Travel. Rain. Snow. Drunk. EVERY DAY.
So, anyhow, back in 2015-2016, at like 322 some days or something I missed a day when in Lake Placid and was back to square one. And then I was devastated.
This badge was the easiest thing in the world for me to accomplish. It required nothing from me. Other badges require you take more involved actions like linking portals, destroying other peoples portal-stuff or putting up portal-stuff or playing a mini-memory game or to walk kilometers - and I'm an American so I don't know how to walk a kilometer, I only walk in miles . .. or like. . .feet.
Pre-marriage, I had a portal I could hack from my couch and at work I (still) have a portal I could hack from my desk - so losing it when it was so easy during that time made everything seem totally overwhelming.
This badge came out on March 5th, 2015 meaning I have no goddamn reason not to have acquired it on March 5th, 2016.
360 f**king days and you are at day 1? What's the POINT of life?!
And here I am.
Anyhow, to make it more horrible, I moved shortly after and lost my couch-portal. I actually had to leave the house every day to go hack a portal. "Hey, I got to hack a portal." I would say. And then get myself together to drive to the closest portal to click a series of three buttons and then drive back home.
Oh, and I lost my count again at some point because I wasn't use to leaving the house on weekends. So, fantastic! I'm sure someone could do the math to figure out how many times this sucker got reset from March 5, 2015 to July 19, 2017. That sounds like something that's fun. . .this is fun.
After losing it for the second time, I decided I needed to get this badge. It would be the only way to wipe away the corrosion of failure after failure from losing something that was built as if an angel came down and saw how easy it would be for me to do and made it a real thing. People who had it far worse than me - who lived in the sticks or like another planet - got this badge.
And I am here with a couch-portal and a desk-portal and I f**ked it up.
To psych myself up, I would tell myself that in the summer of 2017 I would be done. I tried to make the numbers look different and not look so intimidating and overwhelming - maybe if I told myself I only have 11 months or 300 days or if I just calculated the day - everything would seem better.
It did not. The perpetual motion of trying to make something change by squinting at it doesn't actually change the truth you are looking at. Because at the end of the day, everyday, I had to hack a portal. I stopped thinking about it and just did it.
As I stabbed my hazard lights on next to a portal one day, I thought, once this is done I will NEVER have to leave my house on the weekends. I would not have this extra clock ticking in my head telling me I better hack a portal and that I hacked my last portal at 3:30pm today, ok, let's say 3pm, so, tomorrow I have to be sober and ok get out at 3pm just to make sure. And was I out on Saturday and it felt like it was 2am but I think it was 11pm and that means I can go out at 8am to hack it because Monday I will have hacked something at 7am when leaving the house to go to work and if I got up early on Saturday and hacked a portal at like 8am I wouldn't be able to sleep in on Sunday because I would need to be back at a portal before 8am or I would lose it so I need to leave the house at, let's say, 3pm so that I can sleep in...
....The anxiety of "DID I HACK A PORTAL?!" will be gone, I told myself! It will taste like the wine of victory - I will be a pantsless, shoeless, carefree soul, cavorting with anything I wanted whenever I wanted and if I never left the house for weeks at a time - it wouldn't matter. I will have the badge. I would have earned my freedom! I will have cleared out the consequences of not appreciating my luck and status and also not paying good enough attention. HA!
It's not anxiety, though.
I mean, without this little game and this little badge I probably never would have left my new house. I would never have found at least two cool historic-type-landmark-type spots. Or a bunch more right outside my door. I would never have explored so much on my own. I would never have been connected to other people who understood something about me without question.
Then I wondered, what if I never left my house? How easy would that be? Why, pretty easy! I mean, I'm an idiot in my internal conversations as much as in my external conversations - it would be easy. It would be the freedom from the failure I created and structure I had to create. That's the point, I said to myself. Duh.
And then I wondered - what if what I became while trying to acquire this badge was a better version of who I would be after I accomplished it?
Now, I have the highest level Sojourner Badge and an existential crisis.
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