gravity, rushed

this girl is straight-up addicted to falling. falling down staircases, falling into old habits, falling out of fashion. falling in hopeless love, falling in with the wrong crowd at the wrong time. falling apart, a passive witness to the mindless atrophy of a body she never asked to inhabit – or else falling more and more deeply inwards, heeding the siren call of self-oblivion. she's a ragdoll girl bruised by invisible barriers, a girl who kisses the pavement on the regular, whether as a desperate prayer or as a consequence of mischievous physics.

this girl is partly me. for the past year, i've struggled with intermittent access to my HRT prescriptions, entrapping me in a state of constant emotional vertigo. i buckled under the weight of this "second puberty," unable to trust my own distended feelings. the experience has left me hollow, and i've forgotten how to take care of myself; these days, i feed candied experience points to the gacha girls on my screen as i languish, malnourished, on my couch. my heart's all gunked up by a resinous membrane of grief. dissociation offers shallow respite. even now, i feel like i'm spiraling, further and further away from myself.

the girl i'm describing is also someone named kat, the teenage protagonist of a game called gravity rush (and its sequel, gravity rush 2). when we meet her, she's an amnesiac who wakes up in an unfamiliar city named hekseville – a skybound city rent apart by a slow-burn apocalypse, an archipelago of disjointed islands floating in an auburn sky. her only companion is "dusty," a phantasmal cat who grants her the power to shift the orientation of gravity. meanwhile, otherworldly monsters known as "nevi" leak from dark storms overhead. despite kat's natural impulse to use her newfound abilities to help the downtrodden, fend off the nevi, and piece the city back together, the people around her treat her as a freak and a second-class citizen; she begins the game unhoused and rejected, forcing her to establish a home for herself in the sewers.

kat's life is much more difficult than mine by many degrees. yet gr1 and gr2 resonated with me in a way that i didn't expect, reflecting the turbulence i've been experiencing in my own life.

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angels, dragons, harpies, faeries. from icarus to bladud, from superman to astro boy, humanity has long been bewitched by the fantasy of flight. the oscillation between thrill and fear, between self-liberation and self-destruction – an intoxicating cocktail of desire, inspired by something as simple as the sight of a bird blotting the sky.

video games have traditionally served as one of the most direct and accessible ways of simulating flight. it's embedded into the medium's history; 1982's microsoft flight simulator was a killer app for the IBM PC, launching what continues to be microsoft's longest-running line of software. then came dogfighting in ace combat, tethering yourself to cars and parasailing across highways in just cause, gliding over wind-swept meadows in the legend of zelda: breath of the wild. if, at any point over the past twelve years, you've ever smoked weed and played gta v with someone, it's likely that you spent a significant fraction of that time speeding to los santos' airport in order to barrel onto the tarmac and hijack a plane.

in these contexts, flight is an expression of freedom. after all, when it comes to video games, freedom is supposedly the key value proposition: the freedom to run over pedestrians in a cop car, the freedom to give your elven avatar both giant tits and a monster cock, the freedom to use an ancient knife to save the world. on the surface, games offer wish fulfillment, the basest of their pleasures, a way to bypass the restrictions of the material world.

i admit that when i started playing gravity rush this past february, i was actively looking for this kind of wish fulfillment. i'd been having a difficult year, and a lot of that had to do with hormones.

i started HRT in the summer of 2022. at first, estrogen imbued my surroundings with a hypnagogic shimmer. everything – every street, every conversation, every moment – felt so vivid. the hormones escalated my emotions to dizzying heights. i was struck by a torrent of electrifying epiphanies. it felt good to dress differently. my skin got smoother, and i sort of grew breasts. i started taking progesterone, too. i didn't even mind putting on a little lip gloss. the residue left glitter on my fingertips. like a starry sky after a bad day. all my friends were so nice to me. being called cute, or hot, or pretty for the first time – it made my heart flutter in a way i didn't know it could. i'd sneak glances at my reflection on storefront windows. my mom started gifting me things like handbags and pocket mirrors. the succulents in the yard seemed plump and self-satisfied. i'd wave at them from our window. even the asphalt seemed to glow with summer heat. i wanted to talk about gender with everybody i knew. a part of me is still riding that high, which is why i even bother writing things like this in the first place. but back then, it truly felt like my corner of the world brimmed with empathy and grace. it felt like i could do anything.

one thing, though, was that my mood just wouldn't sit still. it turns out crying on estrogen hits different. sometimes it felt like it was never going to stop. then, early in 2023, i got laid off and lost my insurance. eventually my access to hormones became tenuous. gaps between doses spanned from weeks to months.

it's a given that everyone responds to HRT differently. in my case, the whole "second puberty" thing i'd heard about from other trans girls turned out to be excruciatingly accurate.

it was like one good selfie and a dozen hideous outtakes. a bug squashed against the monitor, glaring at me like a dead pixel. seeing myself in the mirror began to yield mixed results. the sparse stubble on my face felt more noticeable than before. every follicle was like a minute curse. sand on a dinner plate. i was a bit paranoid that everyone around me was just being polite. then i started getting cat-called. my finger idly tracing a constellation of bug bites on my inner thigh. rays of sunlight needled my eyes through the windshield. bloodthirsty lobbyists seemed to claim a new victim every time i checked my phone. my mismatched swimsuit made me look freakish. a page torn from a magazine, glossy and misshapen. shouldn't the plumeria have bloomed by now? i'd spent all dinner playing with my food. staring at the kitchen sink and listening to the crickets scheme in the dark, the eager friction of their wings. sometimes i didn't know what i was feeling. when i cried, it was like i heard myself crying from a room down the hall. the muzak coming from my phone's speaker while on hold with the insurance company – a piano melody shredded up by distance and bit reduction, notes crushed into telephonic surf. adrift by the shore and wasting away.

i was dysfunctional and didn't know how to fix myself. i didn't want anyone to see me like this, so i mostly spent time at home with my partner. we'd bicker, and i'd snap at her a lot, unable to tame my unruly feelings. i became petulant, needy, and cruel. when she went to bed, i'd stay up for hours getting stoned. i was dissociating all the time.

it often felt like i'd fallen into a dark pit with no end in sight – held captive by gravity, bracing myself for an impact that might never arrive. frozen in the moment before a grisly death.

when i booted up gravity rush in february, the first thing i noticed was that kat makes falling look beautiful – so beautiful that it almost resembles flight.

"flying" in gravity rush works like this: you press a button to generate a "gravity field" that suspends kat in a floating stasis. you point the camera to where you want to go, and then you press another button to shift gravity, sending kat falling in that direction. it doesn't always look graceful; sometimes, she moves as if dragged through the air by a prankish act of god, her limbs flailing helplessly in the wind. but over longer distances, she eventually orients her body to fall head-first, and then it really feels like she's flying – the tangerine skybox smeared across the edges of her vision, the vociferous currents of wind tearing up her ear. the city skyline askew in the distance, piercing the clouds.

then you either hit a hard surface – the face of a building, the roof of an airbus, the cliffside of an asteroid islet – or suspend kat in stasis again, allowing you to repeat the process. you use this technique to travel across, above, and below the game's floating urban landmasses, a slapstick superhero colliding into skyscrapers as she hurls herself across the sky.

kat can't stay suspended in mid-air forever, either. shifting gravity depletes a limited "gravity gauge" that only replenishes when you're not using her powers. run out of fuel and kat falls for real, in the "normal" direction of gravity. so crashing all the time is inevitable, even for the most graceful gravity shifter.

the thing about kat is that she can't save the world without blemishing it with small fits of destruction. she's prone to accidentally picking up innocent passersby in her gravity field, and the wrong move might send them hurtling into the sky. she can use her powers to fling nearby objects at her opponents, too; no park bench, garbage can, or streetlamp is safe from her telekinetic reach. this is partly why the people of hekseville dismiss her as a public nuisance, even as she runs herself ragged saving their lives.

but when i say that kat makes falling look beautiful, it's not because it looks perfect or effortless; it's because she makes falling seem exhilarating. her clumsiness is part of her charm. her surroundings, though cruel and unsympathetic, become a playpen. it makes shifting gravity feel like riding a skateboard through a shopping mall.

when i first played gravity rush, i envied that about her. at the time, it'd felt like dysphoria and dissociation had rendered me completely inert. kat, on the other hand, is like a radiant wrecking ball. she can't resist a crash landing. she ends every show by jumping into the drum kit. i love that about her.

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i also appreciated that kat, like me, is estranged from life as a normal teenage girl, though our reasons for that obviously differ.

during one section of gravity rush, kat meets a boy her age – newt, a student at a nearby high school – who charms her into helping him find his missing friend, echo. though kat's reluctant at first, newt peppers her with compliments, and she quickly finds herself smitten. she goes to great lengths to assist him, disguising herself as one of his classmates and whisking him on an aerial overview of the school's campus.

however, kat soon learns that echo is actually newt's longtime crush. to make matters worse, once they find her, echo gets possessed by a nevi and mutated into a monster. as always, kat saves the day, and she's forced to stand on the sidelines as newt and echo enjoy an emotional reunion. the ordeal leaves her depressed and listless. her student disguise becomes a bitter reminder of the adolescence she's been denied. later, it becomes a costume for kat to wear.

kat's effervescent optimism makes her trusting to a fault. throughout both gr1 and gr2, she meets plenty of people who try to take advantage of her indiscriminate altruism – even when their needs are tedious or mundane. she's treated less like a local do-gooder and more like an all-purpose errand girl. over the course of dozens of sidequests, she's coerced into doing things like advertising ice cream, delivering newspapers, and walking dogs, usually before she even has a chance to understand what's happening.

during one sequence, for example, a skeezy talent agent approaches kat to offer her the leading role in an action film. once again, she falls for his thinly veiled flattery, and she accepts the proposition, dazzled by his promise of fame. when she shows up to set, kat is annoyed to discover that she's only filling in as the stuntwoman. in situations like this, kat recognizes that she's simply a means to an end.

this holds true on a metatextual level, as well. the rewards for gr1's optional sidequests are usually costumes: a maid outfit, a military uniform, a slim-fitting cat-themed spy get-up. gr2's sidequests expand kat's wardrobe, letting you dress her up as a waitress, a nurse, and a pop idol. while the costumes themselves are pretty cute, this particular selection feels a bit lecherous. gr2 arms you with a camera, allowing you to snap photos of kat in a variety of playful poses.

even still, kat has integrity. she seems neither desperate for validation nor overly self-confident. instead, her gullibility comes off as a natural byproduct of her youthful naivete, behavior you'd expect of a teenage girl who's still trying to figure her shit out. it's just that there's little time to focus on adolescing when you're buried under a litany of thankless jobs, especially when one of them is to prevent an apocalypse.

i, on the other hand, have less of an excuse. i turned thirty last december, but the false puberty i've experienced has left me even more emotionally dysregulated than when i was a teenager.

the hormones aren't exclusively to blame for my heightened dysphoria. i remain daunted by all the rituals that are required to maintain an image of womanhood in the eyes of other people. i'm more aware of others' gazes than ever before.

when i was a boy, i never wanted to look in the mirror. my version of boymoding was wearing thrifted sweaters with bizarre images and nonsensical word art on them – anything that could distract from my actual physical appearance. but now i'm a thirty-year-old woman who never learned how to properly style her hair, or how to shop for bras, or how to lose the stranger who seems like he's been tailing her to her car. nowadays, i find myself consulting mirrors all the time.

i don't think gender's real. i regard it not just as a social construct, but as an accident, a result of the friction between a person's self-expression and the normative expectations of others. that's why i take HRT – not because i think hormones make a person a woman, but because i consider them an effective tool in guiding people's perception. i don't see gender as something you can claim purely through self-determinism.

i see gender as something that can actually be taken from you. they can refuse to use your pronouns, humiliate you in the restroom, revoke various forms of ID. they can force you into unemployment, homelessness, or incarceration. they can violate or even murder you and claim self-defense. they can celebrate your suicide and make a mockery of your suffering. they can take away your HRT and hope it kills the part of you that longs to be free.

so i've also become especially weak to the kindness of others. after all, i require their permission to be a woman. i'm easily flustered by compliments related to my appearance. i don't think it's right to act so obsequious; i'm just too fearful to know any better.

i have never once regretted my decision to start HRT. but over the past year, all these questions have been nagging at me: how much of this dysphoria, i wonder, emerged from the shadow of this one choice? how much of it has always been there, lurking in the depths of my subconsciousness? if hormones don't make me a woman, then what does? what would i lose if the government managed to take my estrogen away? why does that thought make me so terrified that i spend hours dissociating on the couch? why does it hurt all the time? will things ever get better? will i ever find my footing again?

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i've been getting electrolysis done on my face. before my first session back in february, i consulted the clinic's website for information about how painful it might be. i read that, as a distraction, my electrologist recommends picturing yourself somewhere tranquil and far away. later, as the heat bloomed from the filament inserted into my upper lip, i tried to picture myself as kat, hurtling over hekseville, the gaudy cityscape sequined with streetlamps.

i narrated most of my experiences in the past tense above, but i haven't really stopped spiraling since last year. a close friend of mine passed away while i was writing this, and my partner of nine years left me shortly after. i still struggle with refilling my estrogen prescription from time to time. i still dissociate frequently. i still find strands of her hair in weird places.

i never finished gravity rush 2. instead, i did just about everything you can do aside from the last episode of the main questline, which would supposedly resolve the game's many cliffhangers. i aced every time trial, obtained every outfit, and completed every sidequest, but i never beat it.

instead, i've been content not knowing what happens to kat. i prefer to indulge myself in the fantasy that she'll always be the version of her i know, a hot mess searing through the sky. a girl who isn't just grateful for her makeshift sewer house, but actively prefers to live there. when i was new to gravity rush's mechanics, i'd forget that the gravity gauge drains even while kat is suspended mid-flight, and i'd just leave her hovering there, a lava lamp in the shape of a girl. then, after watching her for some time, panning the camera to take in the scenery, she'd fall.

in reality, i'm sick of falling. i want badly to be caught, to be held, to be told everything is going to be okay. i want to be the one who gets whisked away by a heroic goddess. but if i'm going to feel like this for a while – like i'm plummetting endlessly towards an uncertain death – i'd like to summon some of kat's courage. i'd like to at least look good while doing it.

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an aside

i'd like to start posting shorter and more casual bits of writing here soon. i think i'll publish my yuri manga rankings after this. i want to write about composing music, too.

however, in the meantime, you should check out my friend artemis' blog stop caring. she's been both a prolific source of inspiration and a major supporter of my work since i started publishing this kind of writing last year (i.e. games criticism-slash-personal essay-type shit). she wrote a thoughtful piece about the water ritual in caves of qud that you can read here.

i think my next published piece will be this essay i'm writing about death stranding 2. if you're interested, look out for it towards the end of the month over at bullet points.

lastly, if you're a friend of mine, let me know if you want to hang out or catch up. message me if you want my steam ID and feel like slaughtering some guys together in nightreign. i'm lonely, you know?