The first thing you need to know about me is that it’s hard for me to make friends. I’m a perpetual outsider, always watching from the sidelines and never diving in. I’ve been this way for as long as I can remember. I was an eternally anxious child and an even more anxious teenager, skirting on the outside of friend groups and leaving every school dance early. There wasn’t anywhere that I felt like I fit in. In college, I thought I’d finally found a place, but it all blew up in my face and I was left thinking I was just meant to be alone.
Last September, I was invited to join a friend’s D&D group. If you don’t know what Dungeons & Dragons is, it’s a tabletop roleplaying game that was originally released in 1974. It’s experienced a resurgence in popularity in recent years, thanks to the ’80s nostalgia craze and programs like The Adventure Zone and Critical Role. As a lifelong writer and creative writing major, it seemed like exactly the thing I would be into, but I was too shy to seek out a group, so my friend’s invitation was exciting and terrifying at the same time. I had known everyone in it for a bit, but I didn’t know them particularly well and I didn’t even know if they considered me a friend. It felt like I would be invading something that was already so well established.
I started out just observing their sessions so I could get a feel for the game and how it worked, and I instantly felt at home among their shenanigans. They took the game both completely serious and not serious at all — one moment they were turning a big enemy into an egg and another I was watching a broken relationship between sibling characters slowly being repaired. Everyone was super welcoming to me being there and nobody made fun of me for not knowing much about the game. I felt like a part of the group before I even had a character to join their campaign.
The first character I made was nothing like me. She was tough and mean — the leader of an assassin’s guild. I made a lot of bad decisions and was rude to a lot of non-playable characters, but at 10:30 p.m., I always went back to being myself. I know some writers say there’s a part of themselves in every character they make, but I don’t think any piece of myself was in her.
My second character, the one I’m playing now, sometimes feels too similar for comfort. She’s my sweet flower child, and while she tries her best to be kind, she’s a little immature and has a fit of anger that burns quietly because of how she was treated in the past. I’ve learned a lot about myself because of her and have been able to confront some real-life experiences I’ve had in a fictional setting through her. She’s me — but also not me — and that somehow makes it feel safer to be more open about who I am. In a way, she’s made me braver.
My experiences would be nothing without the people who sit around the table with me. They’re the ones who support me, who lift up my writing, who I can yell with during plot twists and cry with when a character nearly dies. We’ve been to concerts, murder mystery parties, and even other states together. I found them in one of the lowest points of my life, and I don’t know if I would have been able to drag myself out without them. I had no idea that joining a D&D group would change my life so profoundly, but I wouldn’t change it for the world. If you’re anything like me, someone who struggles to just exist, I hope you can find people like this too — people who help you become more of yourself.