Near the end of 2019, I wrote a post about saying farewell to my beloved custom pink DualShock 4 controller. As I mention in that post, I have a history with pink controllers and systems, as it’s been my favorite color for most of my adult life. Ever since Nintendo began offering multiple color choices for their controllers with the N64, I’ve frequently bought and cherished the options that really spoke to me. With the N64, it was the red controller I bought to celebrate my purchase of Castlevania 64. Hey, please stop laughing. I thought it was going to be amazing, okay? I was really excited for it. I even forced myself to beat the whole thing. You… you can stop laughing now.
Pink has, of course, long been offered as a “girls version” of various products, which (I suspect) is why the option typically comes after more “popular” or “neutral” colors like blue, red, yellow, etc. There have been some options, though, and I always jumped at the chance when an official accessory was released in pink. I have a pink Xbox 360 controller, pink Xbox One controller, a Princess Peach Pink Wiimote, pink Nintendo DS, and the aforementioned pink DualShock 4, which was a custom job by a company called ColorWare. I loved that controller, and even learned how to take it apart and replace the joysticks and battery so that I could extend the life of it. But that farewell post wasn’t exclusively about learning to let go of a cherished peripheral. It was also about letting go of the past.
The controller was a gift from my ex, who knew how much I loved my pink Xbox controllers and wanted to surprise me for my birthday. It was a great gift, especially given that Sony never officially released a pink controller (outside of rose gold, which is its own thing and is very different than the soft pink I like). Letting go of the controller was, in a way, me attempting to let go of my relationship, too. We’d been together for seven years and after our breakup I was living fully on my own for the first time in my life. I’d lived alone in the barracks when I was in the Air Force, and I’d had periods of living on my own (like being deployed for five months), but this was the first time I was living completely independently with no plans on that changing. I didn’t say much of this in that post about the DualShock 4. I tried to subtly imply it, but saying it out loud felt like a bit too much. Sometimes we process trauma with allegory and metaphor, sometimes we engage it directly. With this post, I guess I’m having it both ways, now.
I was talking with a friend about custom controllers recently, and we both decided to order a custom DualSense controller for our PS5s from ColorWare, who’d just began offering the service for next gen controllers. I went with a combination of soft pinks and opted to leave the buttons the default clear, because it was cheaper (and I still think it looks great). Both colors are matte, which feels very soft and nice. The exterior is a pink they call Glamour, and the center and trackpad are Cotton Candy. I received my controller just after beginning Resident Evil Village, so I’ve loved having it to play through both Village and Mass Effect Legendary Edition, two games I am having a blast playing through.
But, as you might have guessed, there is something symbolic about this controller for me. That custom pink DualShock 4 was purchased for me. I did love it, of course, but it was irrevocably tied to my previous relationship. I purchased this custom DualSense controller myself. It’s been four years since the end of that relationship and I’m still living on my own. I still struggle. I’ve had bad weeks. Months. Hell, 2017-2019 were the hardest years of my life in terms of mental health. I’d had plenty of dalliances with depression when I was younger, but the headspaces I would occasionally find myself in during these years were literally reality-altering. I’ll spare you the details, but it was (at times) rough. I’ve since had lots of therapy, done tons of journaling, and worked on myself and my mental health in a myriad of ways. I’m not at my best, but I am better. A part of my journey has been coming to terms with what it means to be truly independent. When I was younger, what it meant to be “independent” seemed pretty obvious. You pay your own bills, make your own decisions. But as I’ve aged into early antiquity, I’ve come to realize that it’s about more than that. You can pay your own rent and decide you’re going to eat that whole pint of Ben and Jerry’s Cherry Garcia ice cream for dinner, and that certainly constitutes a version of independence. But ultimately, for me anyway, it comes down to emotional dependence. Allowing the thoughts and feelings of others to dictate your mood or choices or path… that’s not very independent. You’re still living your life for others and not yourself. That’s not to say that you can’t be considerate and take others’ feelings into account, of course. But, in my case, I would find myself going through a depressive episode or feeling angry and sad that a joke didn’t land or a tweet went unnoticed or an idea was dismissed or even poked fun at. I would have periods of hypersensitivity like these, where a seeming lack of positive attention from friends (or even internet people) would make me wonder just how much I mattered to people. No one likes my tweets. No one reads my blogs. No one thinks I’m funny or smart. Those were the kinds of thoughts that would run through my head. Why try, then? If no one cares, why produce anything?
Look, I know. This all sounds very self-indulgent and selfish. And it probably is, to some extent. But I suspect that many of these thoughts are fairly common. Many of us have insecurities about what we do or don’t put out into the world, whether that’s content or commentary. But living on my own added a new layer of that for me. I didn’t have the one person to fall back on when feeling vulnerable. In previous relationships, when I would begin to feel things like that, it was easy to think some version of “well, it doesn’t really matter. At least they care about me.” Living on my own? I didn’t even have that. So, what would normally snap me out of these dangerous thoughts, was confronting myself with the question: “why does it matter?” And sometimes I would struggle with it, sometimes the answer was clear: “it shouldn’t.” And that process, of having to realize again and again that I don’t want my happiness and self-worth to be dictated by others, is what I come back to again and again when I think of independence. It’s what I struggle with, still.
And this controller, as silly as it might seem, is symbolic of that journey for me. Nobody bought this controller for me. I bought it for myself. It was, financially, an “independent” choice. But it means more than that to me. It is a reminder that I don’t need approval from others. If someone doesn’t like pink, they can judge me all they want for buying this controller, but it doesn’t change the fact that I like pink. If they think it was a bad financial decision, that doesn’t change my belief that, for me, it was worth it. I have a long way to go in my journey to be “truly” independent. I know there will still be plenty of instances where I allow myself to be negatively affected by what other people think of me. But I’m determined to keep working at it, beautiful new pink controller in hand.
A New Game Plus 