In 2022, I got accepted to study at a prestigious university in India for a year. That was a really big deal to me, the prospect of doing an exchange year in India was a big reason for me to study Indian Studies in grad school in the first place. I had never been to the Old Country and was looking forward to improve my Hindi, make new friends and connect with a part of my heritage that I unfortunatley felt (and still feel) fairly detached from. Two months after my arrival, a mixture of health issues and financial troubles forced me to leave the country again.
This is technically the first full-fledged blog post on this website and I don’t want to be much of a downer. However, I do want to list most stuff that had happened to me in those two months because retrospectively, it is very funny that all of this happened within just eight weeks. Plus, I promise I’m going somewhere with this. It has something to do with my enjoyment of Citizen Sleeper. Somehow, I swear.
- Upon arrival, it turned out my host university had postponed the semester start by a month without telling my home university. In other words, I arrived a month early and could not be registered as a student yet. Because of this, I legally couldn’t get a room in student housing and had to scramble to find accommodation. I found and booked some Airbnb which turned out to be very shady and a borderline scam. And obviously a lot more pricey than student housing would have been.
- After five years of straight up refusing to meet with me, one of my partner’s parents called me. The three-hour call essentially boiled down to them telling me to break up with my partner because I am trans and still in college. They also for some reason thought my parents had disowned me and that I was on drugs so there’s that.
- I got Delhi Belly and had diarrhea for a week or so.
- I got Covid and it was pretty miserable. A very very strong fever and I had to puke and dealt with a super tenacious cough. Because I was living alone, I had to order all my food via delivery which was fairly pricey too. There was no kitchen in my Airbnb so I couldn’t even cook for myself.
- I lost my phone and had to get a cheap replacement including SIM card which of course cost money again.
- At some point around here, I started being broke. Kinda dumb but admittedly I did not have much money saved up to begin with but I was burning through money I expected to spend in four to five months within less than half that time. I had to borrow money from friends and family.
- After recovering from Covid, I went back to the student housing office. Turns out the university postponed the semester start by yet another month, so I had to book an Airbnb again for a month.
- And then I got hit with Long Covid. CW gross body functions. Digestive issues paired with puking. There was this cartoonish scene in which I was queuing to pick up meds in a pharmacy. Literally as I was about to talk to the cashier, I felt The Vom Rising which forced me to run out on the street. I didn’t entirely make it out of the store in time so my puke landed by the entrance. Then I ran back in, handed the cashier the money for my meds and left. There were bits of snot and puke sticking to the Rupees as I handed them over. Good times.
- A couple smaller things too: My trusty bass bag breaking after 11 years of service, the cord to my good studio headphones breaking etc.
At some point I just took the L and left. In the last week before my flight, I was recovering from Long Covid and spent most of my time laying around, eating exclusively fruits and crackers and playing a game called Citizen Sleeper. You know how sometimes a piece of media comes along that just resonates with you so much more than you expect? Yeah, that.
Citizen Sleeper is a game in which you control the eponymous Sleeper, human consciousness occupying a robot body. Somehow having escaped the corporation that owns you, you find yourself stranded on a space station that seems to have fallen into disarray. You don’t know anyone and it is up to you to build a new life from scratch and keep afloat financially – in spite of your body literally disintegrating.
It was almost uncanny how much the themes in the game seemed to be applicable to my situation in India. Being in the old country made me feel weirdly out of place in two ways. I’m a fairly white-passing mixed person (I think), so I feel like an impostor a lot as is. Paired with me coming across Desi women my age in cool clothes and jewellery, presenting in ways I wish I looked really made my dysphoria skyrocket quite a bit. In Citizen Sleeper, you control a character whose ambivalent relationship to their body is an issue that is broached multiple times. Furthermore, because of their body, the MC is constantly treated as an outsider, always othered. I think aside being gender nonconforming, this could also allude to being an immigrant. Which is a neat segue into the next point.
A central theme of the game is arriving somewhere new and making a life for yourself. Paraphrasing a friend’s thoughts on – if I recall correctly – Chulip: I’m a big fan of games in which you’re in a small town of some sort and help out your local community in small but significant ways, help improving people’s lives that way. That’s the thing that hit hard, because I just went through two hellish months in which it seemed like I failed at exactly that. I only made two-three new friends but I never had the chance to build a new life. Fully discovering a new town, discovering new favorite restaurants, getting to know certain areas super well – that didn’t happen. Of course, comparing a refugee’s situation with mine (coming from one of the richest countries in the world as an exchange student) isn’t exactly a great comparison admittedly but yeah.
In a youtube review of the game I came across a while ago, the reviewer really hit the nail on the head. You’re often being the one being helped rather than being the one that helps and the game eventually proves to be a game where “people come together and cling together for support. (…) There is a real sense that (…) everybody, even the ones that don’t get along are on the same team.”
I think if there’s something that really really resonated with me in that particular situation, it was this sense of community. I was ground into the dirt by forces outside of my control but in spite of that, the community I’ve built for myself over years, sometimes decades, came to my aid – be it just by lending me an ear or even lending me financial aid. My partner and I liked to joke about this being their parents hexing me for being trans with all the bad luck befalling me. And my friends and family overseas sending me money and emotional support is the climax of a dorky anime where the protag manages to overcome their obstacles through the power they receive from friends and family.
According to an interview with dev Gareth Damian Martin, a central theme of the game is trying to keep afloat financially in the gig economy even when you deal with (mental) illness. Out of nowhere, you can randomly hit a day when you just can’t gather much strength to do much of anything. In the next half year after my return to Switzerland, I spiralled into some pretty bad depression. I moved back in with my parents, was in debt, broke, unemployed and something you could call a dream of mine (living in India) just completely evaporated in front of my eyes.
In the midst of depression there was this negative feedback loop of having days where I just couldn’t bring myself to apply for any jobs or I undersold myself in interviews. There was this one particular job I ended up actually getting but I was fired from during my first shift because I was just too depressed and overexhausted to show much enthusiasm during work. So this aspect of the game struck a chord with me aswell.
This has all been a very long-winded way of saying the game really resonated with me in a way I truly didn’t expect. If you enjoy more reading-heavy games and are into space aesthetics and themes of community building and solidarity, definitely give this game a shot.
Also, here’s a shameless self-plug (hey look it’s my blog after all 😂) because I covered one of the tracks off the OST a while ago:
This was kind of fun to write up although I must say writing about why I enjoy a videogame was surprisingly tough for me. I’d like to think I’m pretty decent at writing lyrics and/or academic papers but this is a completely different beast. Maybe I’ll write more about media I like going forward? But yeah, Citizen Sleeper is great!! Check it out sometime.