Reflection: The First Taste

I knew once I saw the title for this chapter in the listing that it would have to be for Grey to experience Isadora’s bite. Knowing how the Hecata bite is, and that I chose that for her clan meant that eventually someone was going to have to take the hit, and more than likely it was going to have to be Grey. 

One of the surest ways to know that we can trust someone is to watch them suffer pain or discomfort on our behalf. Many children see their parents suffer silently for them to have better lives, spouses and significant others will grin and bear things they don’t enjoy for the other (say a concert you’re not interested in or the ramblings of Warhammer… not that I’ve had that experience…), and friends will listen to your pain to commiserate with you rather than judge you. Pain, for all its flaws, is a great indicator of love. 

Now, we should never associate being harmed with being loved. It’s a balancing act. In the case here of Grey and Isadora, he knew that giving her his vitae would cause him excruciating pain, but that pain was worth ensuring that she was both alive and healthy (insofar as much as she could be as a vampire). It’s all about what we’re willing to endure for one another, and knowing they’d be willing to endure for us as well. Isadora doesn’t know that about Grey yet, she doesn’t trust him yet, and while his actions are very much the kind that a conniving or suspicious person would determine to be manipulative, he did them because he was, indeed, selfish. 

That line about telling my students that being selfish is only bad if its the only thing you are is true. I would say that a lot while I was teaching. We, as a society, have made the word ‘selfish’ into such a four-letter word, that we’ve forgotten what it really means. Simply put, being selfish is thinking about your needs and your ‘self’ first and foremost. Every day we talk about ‘self-care’ or ‘self-love’ we are talking about selfishness. And that’s good! It is good to be selfish, just not all the time. 

I don’t have children, I never want to, I taught enough kids to know that I don’t want to be a father. I’ve gotten some flack for that, about it being a selfish decision, but I’ve learned to push back on that one by asking: “why did you have kids?” Any answer other than ‘the condom broke’ usually started with “I want” and then I could immediately shut them down. By saying “I want” your decision is inherently selfish. If you want something or don’t want something, you are being selfish. And that’s fine. You’re allowed to want the life you want, and not want the life you don’t want. Be selfish, every now and again, but never become selfless out of being afraid of being selfish and lose your sense of self. 

Grey knows all this all too well. As manipulative and single minded Grey has become, our shared selfish selflessness reigns supreme! What I mean by that, is simply that I, and by extension Grey, have a tendency to offer help and give even to our detriment, where we over promise and under deliver simply because we want to do so much. If you’ve not figured out Grey’s plan yet, I won’t give it away here, but he’s got some grand ideas and machinations rolling around in his noggin, and I often suffer from the same fate, though trying to get them to come to fruition tends to be quite difficult. He’ll need to be a bit more selfish at times to make sure that he can achieve what he wants to achieve, but at the same time, I know that I’ll have to do the same, and I struggle with that. 

That ties us into our final point here… the wight. Now, people who don’t know what a wight is in WoD, it's what a kindred becomes when their humanity reaches zero. If you allow your beast to fully take over, allow your connection to the world of your birth to sever entirely, you become a mindless monster, a killing and feeding machine that doesn’t differentiate between mortal or vampire. It is a walking, not really talking, Masquerade breach, and it is a major problem for our little fledgling coterie. More importantly, however, is the fact that it is also a living representation of what you become when you sever your connection to everything you are and everything you love. 

Grey is seeking to create something of his new unlife, something I was trying desperately to do at the time of writing this through a career path that doesn’t fit who I am or what I stand for. There was a way for it to work, though not with the people I was surrounded with or the mentality of the industry I was working with at the time. Now I may be able to find that balance of self sustaining work and moral high ground, but back then… It was a struggle. This monster was meant to represent what I could have become if I followed down that path, and it still represents what Grey can become if he doesn’t hold fast to those bonds keeping him human. Submitting to the game to become its greatest player is still submission, and Grey needs to learn just how much of the game he needs to play, just how much like these bigger players he needs to emulate, and just how much he needs to pull back so he doesn’t allow himself to get lost. 

And that is probably something that everyone is trying to balance at this time. So from someone doing it to someone who may be forced to do it… It’s good to know the rules, its good to play the game, but remember what matters at the end of the day isn’t a shiny trophy on the wall or the ability to say “I’ve won!” What matters most, is that the next time you sit down and lay out the board and pieces that there are still people who want to sit down with you.