Life Lessons in Course Correction From Ms. Pac-Man

My dream as a kid was to be an Olympic roller skater.

Never mind that roller skating isn’t in the Olympics — that was a small obstacle to my ten-year-old brain. Childhood felt powerless, with everyone making all of the decisions for me as I was pulled along for the ride, willing or not. But adulthood, man, that was going to be the jam. My vision of being a grown up had no room for tiny details like my dream not existing — in my head, the future molded to me.

Blessed/cursed with a vivid imagination and a brain that doesn’t shut up, I pictured myself on a bright rink in front of thousands of people and a panel of judges. As I swirled and leapt with perfect landings, I could feel the air moving around me and the particular tactile sound of my wheels as they hit the floor with each push of my legs. I don’t recall daydreams of score cards and podiums. Those were extraneous to what really mattered — that everyone loved me and thought, “damn she’s good.”

But time marched on in a storm of hackneyed cliches about days being long and years being short. I grew up, now filling the space somewhere between Peter Pan and taxes. I was still devoted to skating but was pretty dedicated to being a teenager, as well. Lots of drama, day-long “romances,” friendships, and… Ms. Pac-Man (At no point did I say I was a cool teenager — I was still spending my Friday and Saturday nights at a skating rink for fuck’s sake.)

**The National Literary Device Service has issued a severe extended incoherent analogy warning – please seek the shelter of your nearest dry textbook immediately**

Ms. Pac-Man is fairly predictable. The ghosts move in patterns according to the color of the level. Just give it your best up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a, start and you’ve pretty much mastered the game. You take your yellow anthropomorphized pie through formulaic levels with low-hanging fruit to pass through cut scenes of her life. Always the same. She meets Mr. Pac-Man. They chase each other around for a bit. They have a baby delivered via stork.

This is essentially how I pictured adulthood — in control, though with fewer storks.

You’re all laughing with me now, right?

I say Ms. Pac-Man is fairly predictable, because some of the ghosts do move in semi-random patterns. You’re floating along, munching on dots and thinking you’ve got everything pretty much figured out when suddenly you run headlong into danger and get spun around into the wah wah wah wah noise of nope, try again. For the love of dog, you were just trying to enjoy eating some dots and maybe go through this portal over here so why, oh why.

In fact, the most assured way to encounter a quorum of ghosts is to move resolutely along the same path for no other reason than it being straight ahead, or what you planned. You act like it’s just dots. Dots all the way down.

If we’re lucky, we learn that rather than running heedlessly for a goal – the last dot or the bunch of grapes floating in the air – sometimes we have to take the long way around. And, even then, sometimes the semi-random ghosts will get us. Wah wah wah wah. The path looks clear until you turn a corner and you didn’t even see it coming, or you did but couldn’t stop it. Sometimes, you’re just. too. tired. to. bother.

Life is really nothing but a series of course corrections; a gentle tap of the joystick to nudge yourself back along the path that best fits your values or the death grip jerk to pull yourself out of danger quickly. I am prone to the reactionary yank, myself; I over correct like a pinball, and that’s just the wrong game, Rhiannon. I will think so stubbornly and intensely about ways around my weak spots that sometimes that new path becomes it’s own mind trap. Basically? I make things too hard on myself, mostly by overthinking and thus over correcting. There’s nuance in this human experience that I may never fully master. Perhaps none of us ever really do.

I guess the biggest lesson I have learned in the last five years is that sometimes, no matter what you do, or how hard you think, you’re going to run into a ghost or two. We don’t get to design the structure our own game levels anymore than Ms. Pac-man does. We work with what we’ve got. Fortunately, what we’ve got is dimensions. Where Ms. Pac-Man can only move in cardinal directions, we are free to wander.

Within these extra planes we can get so hopelessly lost, but there are so many more opportunities. It turns out that those four big safety dots are really our friends and support systems ready to tag themselves in long enough for us to catch our breath and deal with a few ghosts head on, and they really do extend all the way down.

And when it all fails to keep me safe?

That’s why I keep a pocket full of quarters I’ve picked up along the way.