Reflection: My Touchstone
“Touching grass is not enough! I need horrible things to happen to powerful people!”
This is a soundbite that I come across often in my late night doom scrollings. It gets a laugh out of me every time because, let's face it, many of us are feeling the same way. Hell, I have a bottle of champagne sitting in my fridge right now just waiting for the day I’m going to pop it in celebration of the day the world gets a little less… let’s say “orange.”
I’d forgotten, having written my last reflection on chapter three before rereading chapter four, that Grey begins to explore his own personal power fantasies, and they do seem rather monstrous. An important point to highlight here is that we’re playing in the World of Darkness, where the character you portray is not a good person, as much as you may want them to be.
You are a monster.
Vampires are monsters.
Un-live with it.
But that is one of the reasons why having a touchstone to your human life is so important. Why it’s so important that people with any form of power like that not live in a bubble of power and influence, but have something that keeps them in touch with the world at large. Once we become removed from society, we start to see society as something that exists, like an anthill, rather than something that supports and uplifts billions of people despite the influence of those who separate themselves from it using it as just another tool in their toolbelt to get what they want.
The story Grey is reflecting on is real. It happened. And while the Iron Giant is a good movie, god I wish I could have reached that remote. I could easily pop on Facebook or something and check on that friend, but as I said, we’d drifted apart over the past decade and while I’m sure we’d be polite and pleasant, we don’t know each other anymore. But knowing someone shouldn’t be your metric for helping someone. That’s the true core of what a society should be. Little acts, helping one another, being there to support each other, that’s what a society is. The people at the top of the pyramid, those who stepped on millions, if not billions, of others to get there, will one day fall. And the foundation will not catch them.
In game, a touchstone needs to be a person that is still alive that you can go visit who can remind you of your humanity. When I need that, I often go to my friends and family who helped shape my moral compass. They’re the ones who help me cut through the muck and mire of the world and remind me of all the reasons why I do what I do, remind me of who I am and who I want to be, and pull me back from the emotional mess that I can become when anger begins to poison my soul. We always make the joke in my friend group: if all of us got super powers, they damn well knew who would become the villain. The touchstones that they are, however, would probably be the only thing that would keep me from really letting my ID take control, just as their influence helped keep Grey from allowing that beast within him to influence him.
Long story short, we all have that beast in us. Whether like me, yours is powered by righteous anger, or if it comes from somewhere else like frustration, trauma, vengeance, or hate, there is always a part of us that wishes we had the power to affect brutal change on the world, to hammer it into a shape that is more befitting what we want it to be. In those moments, I implore you, don’t let your beast win. Reach out to your touchstones, remember what really gives you power, and connect to the world that exists behind the curtain of misery and pain created by the greed and corruption of the elites. Their money and influence only gives them power if we let it.
You don’t need to take their money.
You don’t need to obey their orders.
You can be who you really are, and in that moment, you silence the beasts in their cages and get to live the way you were meant to live: completely and utterly free.
