Experiencing the five stages of grief as a gamer during load shedding
When Bane spoke his famous words, "You merely adopted the dark; I was born in it," in The Dark Knight Rises, chances are that he was talking about a childhood in Bangladesh. Because, let's face it, the constant bouts of electricity outages that've been plaguing us are enough to drive anyone to insanity.
Gamers, however, operate on a different league of insanity when their monitors suddenly go dark in front of their eyes. If you happen to be an ardent gamer who has been experiencing power outages mid-game for some time now, chances are that you've spiralled into the five stages of grief before.
Denial
As the lights go out and a little part of your soul exits your body, you try to remain calm. For all you know, it might not be a power outage in the first place. Maybe it's just an episode of your life flashing before your eyes. After all, you were just on the verge of a clutch. Surely that won't be taken away from you. Right?
Anger
By the time you realise what happened, you feel engulfed by rage. You blame the country for robbing you of your moment in the spotlight. At that moment, you discern the need to break something in order to let the anger out. In a moment of oblivion, you grab your keyboard, ready to go to town with it.
But as you raise it high up in the air, you realise that it cost you an arm and a leg to afford the entire setup. Feeling dejected, you place the keyboard down gently and think of the next best thing — bargaining.
Bargaining
At this point, you might be begging your parents to hook the back-up generator lines to your computer. Sacrificing the lights and fans is only a small price to pay for salvation, after all. If that doesn't work, you can always try and convince them to break the bank and buy you an UPS. However, you refrain from taking the leap, because doing so could make your worst fear come true — they might tell you to get a job instead.
Depression
Once you've exhausted all other options, depression and sorrow seem to be your only companions. You curse the salesman who convinced you that paying an obscene amount of money for RGB peripherals would solve all your problems in life. As you despair, you wonder why you ever sacrificed your mental well-being and started gaming in the first place. Maybe, if you listened to your strict Asian parents and spent 13 hours a day studying, things would've turned out differently.
Acceptance
After everything is said and done, and the dust settles on the horizon, you come to terms with the harsh reality we live in. Maybe online video games were never meant for you in the first place. Perhaps you'd be better off sticking to board games and occasional social interactions. You look back on all the times you made fun of mobile gamers, and realise that you were the laughing stock all along.
The electricity might come back, but the fire that was once lit within you will never be reignited.
Ayaan is obsessed with organising spreadsheets. Send him well-formatted emails with bullet points at ayaan.shams@gmail.com