Sing a little

Recently I have been thinking about "high stakes" situations in which to theorize about compromise, or agency. It seemed to me that the stakes had to be high on some kind of universal level in order to be worth thinking about or to be impactful in any kind of lasting way. When I read Hull and Katz's "Crafting an Agentive Self: Case Studies of Digital Storytelling" last semester, I loved the idea that digital story telling could perhaps help a marginalized young person (which to an extent is all young people, whose needs and skills are never valued, only 'crafted') to craft a sense of agency for themselves. But I worried that it would be only that: a sense of agency. One of my concerns perhaps was that the stakes of "succeeding" at DUSTY were too low.

The authors claim that the cases they studied "demonstrate how digital storytelling, in combination with supportive social relationships and opportunities for participation in a community based organization, provided powerful means and motivation for forming and giving voice to agentive selves."

I wasn't convinced at the time, though I wanted to be, that any old community based organization could possibly provide this. Last night at my weekly D&D session, I was given a good reason to reevaluate the presence of "high stakes" (whatever that means; does anyone know?) as a requisite to meaningful change.

D&D is probably considered by most standards to be a pretty low-stakes enterprise for me. Nothing critical is hanging in the balance: it's a game that I play with several like-minded peers. But last night, I did two things that show how the process of role playing with these people has for me (keep in mind, I do not purport to say this happens for everyone) changed my sense of agency, at least in this space, perhaps beyond.

Many people do not know that I began my college career as a vocal performance major. I was good enough to get into the program but not good enough to get out of it, I like to tell people. Actually there were many factors that went into my decision to switch to being an English major, and many of those factors also led to me pursuing an MA in Rhetoric and Composition instead of English Literature, but that's another story.

The point is, I have always felt music very deeply within me, and as a music major, I was unable to effectively divorce the technical aspects of music from my complex emotions related to it. So I quit, and I stopped enjoying music for a while. Only occasionally would I get brief glimpses of the former beauty I saw in the performance of music. I am still haunted by the fact that I no longer find the sound of hundreds of people singing Christmas songs at a candlelight vigil to be beautiful. I can only hear it as technically flawed.

So when I tell people that I like to sing, it's actually letting them in on a part of my life that goes beyond mere biographical detail. By the time I get around to actually singing for someone, it means exposing a part of myself that I usually keep covered.

It happened innocently enough: Kat, my friend's character, suggested that my character, Marille, play our party a lullaby while we waited for morning. As my friends joked about what lullaby I could possibly sing, I thought of a song from Oh Brother, Where Art Thou. When I said aloud that Marille would sing that song, not knowing the name of it, I decided spur of the moment to sing a snippet of it. It was awkward, I think, but maybe only because it was surprising for all of us. And it was surprising because it was raw, at least to me.

I could not have exposed this part of myself if I weren't beginning to feel a sense of agency within the group. To sing for someone, for me, usually requires me to feel confident in myself and secure in the friendship of those listening. The act of crafting a character and learning to react like she would react instead of how I would react has allowed me, I think, to experience a kind of ability to see how I can shape my own life chances and gain a modicum of control, as Hull and Katz summarize their framework on agency--even in this small situation with this small group of friends.

And now I find that I must call them my friends. Later in the game, the group unwittingly stumbled into my personal minefield of sorrow. Although my anxieties surrounding fitting in with my fellow gamers did not go away, I chose in that moment to stay and express my sadness in a quiet way until it passed, and my friends did what no mere gamers would do: they let me be what I was.

Some of those gamers will probably read this and gain further insight into what was going on with me last night, but that's not the point of this. In my mind, they already know everything they need to know about what happened: we were all who we wanted to be in that situation, I think, and I was able to make choices that not only did not damage my agency in the space of D&D, but I was also able to expand my agency to a network of friends.

I hope I've convincingly showed that for me, at least, the stakes were very high last night. And maybe in my rhetoricians quest to improve the agency of the marginalized people who populate this world, that's the best I can do.