After I gave birth there was a period of time when I just didn’t have the motivation to play video games. Strange, isn’t it? I’m someone who’s played video games for all of my life, so how could I have lost my passion for video games suddenly? Well, I was actually traumatised by the last week and a half of pregnancy, and that trauma made my baby blues a bit worse, resulting in me not wanting to do anything.
Without getting into the details too intimately, the following series of unfortunate events occurred:
- I found out that my baby was in a breech position during the 36th week of gestation;
- I did an external cephalic version procedure in an attempt to turn the baby around but it failed;
- I got diagnosed with preeclampsia the following day due to the failed procedure and had to be admitted to hospital;
- 3 days later I had a hypertensive episode where my blood pressure got too high that I had to be administered magnesium; and
- Then I had an emergency caesarian the following morning.
After these things had happened I was emotionally and physically drained, and then immediately after a night of ICU due to the caesarian I was thrown into the chaos of parenthood and had no time or energy to even think about games. I was such a wreck that it was difficult to feel a maternal bond with my little one right away and I dreaded every second that my husband wasn’t with me, because I didn’t feel that I was up to the task of looking after a tiny baby. Eventually I got discharged after a few days and nights and upon returning home my husband asked me whether I’d like to play a video game – I refused. I think that may have been because I was still trying to accept all that had happened and was feeling overwhelmed such that I’d want to cry when thinking about it. I was effectively paralysed and I just wanted to sit on the couch and just watch One Piece. I knew it was odd not wanting to have a controller in my hand or to turn on my PC, but I couldn’t bring myself to do so.
So how did I eventually get back into gaming? Baby steps. I started off with backseat gaming with my husband playing God of War: Ragnarok while logging into Final Fantasy XIV and just loitering or doing small tasks like checking my retainers. When I felt a little more comfortable actually doing combat in Final Fantasy XIV, I did some duty roulettes to reacquaint myself before diving into savage raiding. When my husband finished God of War: Ragnarok and got the platinum trophy he started to sit back and watch me play Trials of Mana and the PS4 port of Final Fantasy VIII, but that was after a lot of encouragement from him while I was hesitant. A little under 4 months in and I’m playing a certain game on the Playstation 5 that if named I might be labelled a bigot (whoever does so has a problem) during my little one’s cat naps and Final Fantasy XIV when it’s their bedtime. I know that I’ll never be able to play as much as before (Ultimate clears are going to be impossible), but at least I got my motivation to play back and it was mainly thanks to my husband egging me on. Perhaps he felt that I wasn’t myself if I wasn’t playing video games?
I’ll leave a question for anyone who’s made it this far and has gone through anything extraordinary that made you get a slump in gaming. How did you get back your motivation to play video games?