Having another Pokémon Go summer

Image credit: Niantic

I’m probably not alone when I say that the Pokémon Go summer of 2016 was the last time I felt truly at peace. For me personally, it was right after I graduated college and wrote a really cool senior thesis all in French, and I was hired as a screenwriting intern for a show that I’m pretty sure never aired (that’s showbiz, baby!). I was looking for jobs and still thought I would be qualified for a decent one that will let me move to the city soon (lol). My friends were still in town, all of us freshly graduated and bright-eyed for the future ahead of us.

Summer 2016 was also when the new phone game Pokémon Go launched and everyone was excited to become a Pokémon trainer. I remember the day it came out, my friend Jordan and I went to downtown Batavia on the riverwalk to catch some pocket monsters, and so was everyone else in town—I even saw people from high school I almost completely forgot about on their phones, excited to catch a Squirtle or some shit. My friends and I started hanging out more, going on long walks to try and catch some cool ones. I’d brave the muggy suburban heat myself and take solo adventures down the bike path on the Fox River because I had nothing else to do and this was the only phone game that needed physical activity to be beat (I mean Wii Fit also makes you do that I guess, but Pokémon Go never body shames you). I was walking more than I had in a long time (and has started my addiction to walking long distances and pondering by the lake—my favorite current pastime). 

This isn’t the first time anyone has said this, but that summer we were all just experiencing joy with each other, outside on summer nights. Maybe it was just the fact that I was at the perfect time in my life to be blissfully unaware of the outside world, that nothing was affecting me directly yet that made me feel this way. Even so, I never really felt the same after that summer. Things were (if you know you know) not super great for a few years. I started to feel carefree again after I moved out of my parents’ house into my place in Chicago, getting into improv and stand-up and all that. Then the pandemic happened, and then I got back to feeling good and carefree about my life again.

That all went away recently once again. Not to get too deep into it, but there is an illness in the family that has completely turned my life upside down. Not only was the diagnosis awful, but everything seemed to go downhill at 90mph in a single moment. I’m trying to do my best to still have fun, still write and perform when I can. But it’s hard. The timing just can’t be worse. I finally started to feel like a person again, had a booming social life, and was working on projects I was really proud of. Now my time is spent researching options for home health care and talking with doctors on the phone, trying to figure out what’s going on from far away. I’m not really allowed to be carefree, to stay out late at night at open mics or seeing shows, to overbook myself for endless fun on the weekends. I now have to be serious, hardworking, and on call and available for any emergency that could come my way. 

It’s tough for anyone to be in this kind of position, but I just really feel it hard because I have just started to become the person I wanted to be, working on my dreams and goals I’ve had for so long. Everything is temporary, but it’s hard to see things go in the meantime.

But anyways, what does this have to do with Pokémon Go? Like a lot of people, my use of the app faded over time. I stopped having my phone on the app when I went on walks—I’d forget about it for so many months my phone would soft-uninstall it to save storage. Once this illness hit my family, though, I found myself opening up the game just as something to do on my phone while watching my mom sleeping in the hospital. There’s something about appearances that matter so much. It looks lazy and aloof to start, say, crocheting or reading a physical book while also attending to someone. But a phone? Everyone’s on their phones now. 

Being on a phone, it may look like I’m researching diseases or talking to family members about the situation—things that are productive. Sure, those are things that I still do but there’s much more time to fill while waiting to be called upon, and I can’t just stare at a wall and do nothing. I don’t like social media much, and texting my friends is difficult when there’s nothing much good to say. So in the meantime, I started to play Pokémon Go again from my bedside chair, a simple game that doesn’t require a lot of attention but still gets me excited when a monster I haven’t seen in a while appears.

When I’m not in the suburbs, I’m still playing Pokémon Go now. I’m that loser who has their phone open while walking to work. It’s become something small and nice that I can do for myself while doing all the regular things I need to do anyways. There’s no way to go back to the joy that I felt in 2016—we’ve hit a point of no return on Core Life Events for that—but it’s still a nice thing to play a little bit every day even if I look like an outdated nerd idiot on the streets doing it.