The past few months

A friend of mine passed off their Quest 2 as a hand-me-down, and the only thing I really use it for is Beatsaber.

Initially, I thought I would only use it for VRChat. I've been thinking about getting a headset for a while so that I could try teaching Toki Pona sign language in the VR World. I ran three Discord sessions teaching it to the Toki Pona VR group a year ago, with the intention to teach in VR when I had a chance. But I'm a far more anxious person than I ever did realize I was, and I swoon everytime I enter a social situation in VRchat, as if I was a noble gentlelady, as if I was still in the epoque where voluntarily swooning was peak femininity.

My skin is too delicate. My mother tells me to toughen up. Her skin is calloused, hard, perhaps from labour, perhaps from a genetic skin condition. My grandfather gave us all eczema, psoriasis and scaly feet, to different degrees. As a baby, my brother itched himself red so frequently that we had to bind his little hands with socks. Then we laughed and laughed at his fine motor coordination failures. Then he got his diagnoses.

I was a stone-faced when the psychiatrist first handed me the prescription for Vyvanse. She had known me for maybe 20 minutes before making the judgement call that I had agonized over for the last five years. Finally, I was certified. I was broken. But it wasn't my fault. That's all that mattered.

"I don't care," is how my mother responds when I orally clarify that it wasn't my fault that my father hadn't put the chicken in the toaster oven before we arrived home from the dojo. When things go wrong around her, I often clarify that things aren't my fault. It's a nervous tic of mine. I'm not scared that my mother will hurt me. At least, I don't think that's the reason.

Muscle memory is really how I'm able to make any progress at all in Beatsaber. I use the Practice mode feature to play in slow motion, trying to get my hands to remember the pathing. But the maps I play on apparently aren't charted out correctly, so the muscle memory I'm building is apparently faulty.

The Beatsaber community of indie mappers apparently decided that it was more ergonomic if the maps never feature two hits in the same direction; a down hit can't be followed by another down hit. This way, the player can fluidly move from target to target, without needing to backtrack. The original creators only started following the community's direction in the later song packages that they released. The early song packages apparently instill 'bad habits.'

I used to wring my hands through my hair; it was always a strip of hair to the right of my face, the left hand would follow the right hand. "Stop doing that!" she would say. Sometimes, when she said that, I would wring my hair faster, like I was trying to exorcise a demon.

The Vyvanse gave me stomachaches, but I found that moving my body would keep them away. The more I progressed in Beatsaber levels, the less I would sweat, as I was relying more on my wrists. My mother didn't used to think that she sweated. It makes genetic sense. But then she started line dancing with the ladies from the Chinese Senior's Association, entered menopause, and started sweating more. The ladies all think that she's only half Chinese. But all of my mother's skin conditions indicate that my grandmother was a loyal wife, even if I look more like a quarter than a half.

Reddit tells me that I was supposed to be getting high scores on Expert levels within four weeks, but it has been longer than that. I think r/beatsaber implies that I should be sideloading songs and not playing with the default maps, due to the aforementioned bad habits. It's too complicated to go out of my way to seek out that kind of novelty, especially when the thought of opening up the Quest 2's file system seems way too technically intimidating.

I wanted to leave the VRChat meetup the second that I joined. The lack of shadows. The limited colour range. The absence of texture. I didn't really have skin in this world, or eyebrows, or hair. I couldn't communicate with my eye gaze that I didn't want you to approach me.

"You just need to throw more shit at the wall," she says. I stare at the dashboard, fidgeting with the expired seaweed senbei packet. "You just need to keep trying and trying, you need to be networking, going in there with a smile and asking to speak with the manager. It's so hard to find good people nowadays. Someone will take you."

I search for the right words to say. "I just... need to get out of this rut."

When we get home from the dojo, my father has already tossed the chicken into the toaster oven and prepared half the salad. I shuffle past him and the kitchen, and retreat to the basement. I fit the headset over my head.