I recently got back into playing a tabletop RPG as more than a sit-in for somebody's NPC, and do you know what I did for my character?

I made her someone who could have as many trauma responses as she needed; someone nonsensical because she'd been hurt. https://twitter.com/itsginnydi/status/1391530233073856515

Her name was Genevieve, and her verbal responses to others were pulled out of a bag which held slips of paper, some transcribed from 68 random books out of a friend's library. The top full sentence on page 40, drawn randomly.

It held about 20 other slips of paper too, 16 of which were variations on "coherent response" and 4 of which were things like "silence" or "singing."

The trick was that the coherent responses went BACK into the bag, but the quotes got discarded.

So the idea was that the longer she was in steady, reasonably functional company, the more coherent she would become.

I had a random bag of actions, too, which were fifty percent "moment of clarity" and fifty percent "trauma responses." Once she was in clear and present danger, she defended herself and others. But until she understood that, she might just sit down and cry.

Some of the responses were funny, but I didn't create Genevieve to be entertaining, and not to make fun of people with trauma or mental health problems.

I wanted to be someone who could be honestly hurt. And I wanted to see her get better.

At first I didn't think of her as such a clear projection of myself.

But as I stood there transcribing those sentences, I realized how dear a fantasy it was.

Someone who could be unapologetic in her suffering and mental illness, someone who healed before my eyes, someone who defended the weak even when she didn't know how to help herself.

Playing her changed the way I think about myself.