Wolf In White Van - Emotional Reactions
Possible trigger warning: references to gun violence and descriptions of stress reactions. I don’t think this will trigger anyone, but I’m particularly conscious of it right now.
I just finished the book Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle, and I have some thoughts about how it relates to game design and game culture, but this isn’t where I’m going to talk about them. Maybe I’ll write another post, later. I’m writing this now because the book stirred up a lot of feelings for me and I need to get them out. I’m sharing it because I think sharing it will help me, not because I think you need to read it.
Here’s the important bit: I liked Wolf in White Van; I recommend it. For the first fifteen minutes I hated the performance of the audiobook, but I grew to love it, and now I think it might be important.
The rest of this is about me.
Sometimes, gun violence is a trigger for me, because in 1999 I went to high school in Littleton, Colorado, and one April just up the street from me fifteen people died at Columbine. This doesn’t affect me much in day-to-day life, but some depictions of violence in media - especially guns in proximity to schools or troubled adolescents - hit me very hard.
I typically don’t seek that content out (I still haven’t watched Bowling for Columbine or played Super Columbine RPG, although maybe I could, fifteen years later), but when I see it coming I typically don’t shy away from it, either. I try to stay present for it, and pay attention, like prodding on open wound to gauge how badly it might be infected. I’m writing this, for one, because it seems important to me that I mark this. Like keeping a journal.
I listened to Wolf in White Van on audiobook, and when the climactic final scene came, I was fixing dinner. It took me by surprise, even though I knew it was coming. I had not wanted to think about it ahead of time. My body continued to move meticulously as normal, while I felt distanced from it. Trying to capture the feeling, I imagined myself as a tiny operator in a module suspended inside the giant metal robot of my body. This is a common fantasy for me, but I felt it much more keenly than usual. The distance between me and my exterior shell was vast. I felt like I had taken my hands off the controls and the robot was driving itself, for the moment. Like when you take your hands off the handlebar of a bicycle, and its momentum carries it forward.
I went for a walk. I thought a lot about high school. I tried to verbalize my feelings. I felt mild panic grip me a couple times, but I kept to my routine.
I had a strange realization, which also feels worth recording. It was strange because it seemed so rare. I felt like two disparate parts of my identity were suddenly connected, like in the dramatic reveal at the end of a movie. And they were connected by the long-telegraphed climax of this book, in which the protagonist describes his suicide attempt and explains that there really wasn’t any reason behind it, as though it was something that just happened, something that he couldn’t control.
I’ve always had an attraction to a sort of fatalism that I can’t really reconcile with my other beliefs. I believe that people have enormous power over themselves; that they can define themselves, and that they can change themselves. This is a pretty core belief for me.
But sometimes, like when I read Slaughterhouse Five or White Wolf in Van, I get this idea that maybe people do things just because. That the things people do are just what happens, and sometimes they can justify it afterward, but that it doesn’t necessarily make any kind of sense. We make choices that aren’t choices, really, because ultimately we can only do what we do. If I choose Option One, then the person who chooses Option Two is a different person than me. For me to choose Option Two I would have to be a different person than I am. Sometimes I try to explain this to people, but usually they don’t understand, and I get confused and give up because it doesn’t make sense to me either.
It never occurred to me, before I read this book, how hard I fall back on this pattern of thought when I imagine what it was like for Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold to kill thirteen people and themselves in a school just down the street from me, sixteen years ago. Because that’s what I do, every time it comes up: I imagine walking into a building with a gun and the intention to use it. I imagine how it would feel. I imagine how I would react to finding myself in that situation.
I imagine that moment suffused with fatalism. I imagine that they did what they did because that’s who they were, and they couldn’t have done anything else. It helps me, somehow, to believe that things couldn’t have gone any other way. It makes it okay for none of it to make any sense. It makes it into something like a force of nature, beyond sense, even for the people who perpetrated it. It’s just something that happened.
Just to be perfectly clear, this is not a cry for help. This is an exercise in therapeutic writing. I sometimes suffer from intrusive thoughts, but not frequently or overwhelmingly. I sometimes suffer from anxiety attacks, but they are not unmanageable. I don’t intend harm to myself or anyone around me.
