So I have been a regular in the various goth events and communities here in Columbus since late 2021 or thereabouts. The lockdowns were still somewhat going on, and it had been a chaotic year for me that had left me extremely shut in and drunk all the time playing Conan Exiles.

My therapist had encouraged me to find a reason to go out, and if I was going to continue drinking myself stupid I should at least do it around other people. Being a neurodivergent queer poc, I didn't want to walk into a random bar and hope for the best though. Columbus is pretty progressive, but certain parts of town invite fairly awful people, especially around campus.

I had gone to a goth night a couple times in undergrad courtesy of a dear friend of mine who was somewhat a regular herself. It seemed to be a fairly lowkey thing full of dorks in leather, and I figured I could see about being one of them. The community was extremely welcoming, and by the end of 2022 I was considered a regular.

Now, my Dad feared the goth subculture. I'm guessing he caught something on one of those hitpiece news shows that used to be popular in the 80s and 90s. He forbid my older brother from being among them, and put a healthy fear of it in me as well. He was profoundly uncomfortable with me joining a Star Wars group in the early 2000s called the Dark Brotherhood. We were dorks who dueled each other in Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight with red lightsabers. But he just was so paranoid I might fall down some cult hole. For someone who hated and distrusted the church as much as he did, he sure shared a lot of their anxieties.

The goth community is pretty normal though. Geeks of all kinds, queer friendly if not queer themselves. Pretty white, but not like white normative. I've had many a drunken conversation with lots of lovely people long into the night, dancing to music that ranges from pretty mediocre to my perfect jam.

Over time it's become more and more popular in the city though, and it's definitely grown beyond the 10 or so of us that used to hang out together. These days the clubs are hitting capacity on special event nights and my ability to have a good conversation has significantly dwindled in a crowd of people who range from good friends to drunken assholes.

Still, I do go though I leave early a lot more often, especially since I don't have much of an interest in drinking anymore.

To nobody's surprise though, I have met several players of various Vampire the Masquerade games, from the tabletop to the larp at goth events. I had played the game quite a bit in high school, which had brought quite a bit of consternation to my Dad due to him having seen a news special on it and how it could warp the minds of the youth. I had to explain to him that our game was incredibly stupid and had concluded with us chasing UFOs in the desert and being abducted by one.

It still annoys me, to be honest. My Dad had always encouraged me to think for myself and never believe everything I read or hear, especially from the news. But he was human and had his own cognitive biases and I don't think he ever quite accepted my interest in the spooky.

But I digress. I found myself attending regular vampire larps this past summer, having wanted to do so since drunkenly sad watching LA By Night on youtube through 2021 (which might have affected my decision to go to goth night, in hindsight). I had attempted to join a larp group in 2022 but they were not able to keep their group from disintegrating. And my attempt in 2023 was derailed by excessive drinking. Having freshly sobered up, I attended a large larp at the Origins Game Faire in June, and was welcomed with open arms.

It has been a trip. Generally I have a lot of difficulty as a player in tabletop roleplaing games. I find myself gnawing inward whenever I have to focus on a single character and I am especially agonized when I am unable to do anything even in the background. But larping is a whole different animal. I can always do something in the background, and the Columbus game is so gigantic I can wander around and find someone to talk to or something to do basically constantly.

And I have found some catharsis in making myself go and talk to strangers. I find it much easier to do so in a game as someone who is not me. In the past I'd been advised to play as much as I could, and it has been difficult for me to find people to play with. I've found a dear friend I can share my toy hunting with, and my DnD group is having a great time with our admittedly sporadic game, but most of my life has an element of banal purposefulness to it; Hunting toys to increase collections, or running DnD to tell a story in me.

At the larp, however, I find there to be quite a bit of purposelessness to it. To pretend to be a vampire involved in vampire politics with a community of people doing the same, all hyperfocused on this fictional world I found myself interested in some twenty years ago. For the first time in many years, I feel like I am making new friends beyond the scope of my college friendgroup (or rather what's left of it).

This is a form of healing for me, since I used to be a social butterfly and spent a great deal of time meeting new people and making new friends. I isolated for a long time, even before the lockdowns, due to several betrayals and friendships fizzling out. I lost faith in my ability to make friends and developed a fairly crippling social anxiety that I thought I had managed to permanently shake many years before.

And lately it's felt like I'm shaking it off again. And sometimes that's how life feels, a series of lessons learned and unlearned and relearned and it is exhausting overall. But the upswings are comforting when they come, and I think this is one of them.