Spicy Soul Survival

I’m not a hot mess, I’m a Spicy DISASTER!

Have you seen the funny restaurant sign MEMEs? El Arroyo is one of the popular ones. One of my Minecraft friends sent me a link to the El Arroyo website with a cutting board made to look like the sign with this statement. It was so perfect, but I haven’t been in a place to drop $50+ on a cutting board…so there the link sits in my Bookmarks bar. Maybe one day.

You might be scratching your head and wondering, “What the heck is a spicy cashew?” That’s a boring story, but I’ll tell you anyway. When I created my Minecraft account “who knows how long” ago, I clicked the button on a random gamer name generator a few times and decided “SpicyCashew” was interesting enough. I am really awful at coming up with my own character names. It’s a wonder that I was able to name 5 children (and a few pets)!  Little did I know, it would actually become like my second identity over a decade later!

I grew up playing video games. It wasn’t an obsession like that might imply. It was just one of the things my siblings and I did together (and often our mom too). We had a second-hand NES system for the entirety of my childhood. We watched the SuperNintendo, N64, GameCube, Sega, and many other game systems come and go, but we only ever owned the NES. My favorite games were Super Mario Bros. 1 & 3 because 2 was annoying (IYKYK), Kirby’s Adventure, and Super Spike V’Ball (I find it interesting that I later went on to thoroughly enjoy playing volleyball in my middle and high school years).

When I say our mom played too, what I mean to say is that she was probably the most skilled gamer out of the 4 of us (until my bro got an Xbox after I’d moved off to college and hit his Halo and Call of Duty years). She would stay up late beating the whole game. If speedruns were a thing in the late 90’s, she would have been a master. She knew all the secrets, and played better than any of us. She’s turning 60 this year, and she still spends some of her free time gaming with us. These days, it’s usually Minecraft, but once in a great while, we will break out some Halo. The grandkids love that Nana will play Minecraft, Mario Kart, or their Kirby games with them. You could say we really are a gaming family. We enjoy playing all kinds of board games as well, and Hubs and I even play some D&D here and there.

Gaming was also probably one of the things that brought Hubs and me together when we were first dating. We spent more than one holiday break racing on Gran Tourismo or running raids in World of Warcraft. When we were first married, we even managed to connect with two other married couple friends who also played WoW, and it was a grand old time running around with them! We started playing Minecraft almost as soon as the game was released. I didn’t have much interest at the time. PvP (player vs. player) isn’t my jam, as I have horrible reflexes in tense situations. BUT I remember he got me set up on a server where I could build without fear of being attacked. I could just let my creativity run wild. One of my first big builds was the Rapunzel tower from Tangled. I don’t remember if I figured it all out for myself or if I followed a tutorial. I really don’t remember YouTube being much of a thing back then, but my memory is wholly unreliable these days.

We played off and on for the next few years until K1 was old enough to be introduced AND Minecraft launched an iOS version of the game (known as Bedrock or Pocket Edition). Once she took interest, we really never looked back. Once each kiddo was about 3 or 4 years old, they would want to play with Mom, Dad, and the older siblings. Minecraft recently celebrated 15 years, and our family has been a part of most of that. I lost interest for a great while. I’m sure it had a lot to do with raising babies and being exhausted all the time. About 4-5 years ago, we discovered Minecraft YouTubers. We found some family-friendly ones that were so fun, and the kids have been hooked. In the beginning of 2021, we decided to join a Patreon server with one of those YouTubers, and little did we know, I would be the one that really found a place there! That is where Spicy was born. Haha There are people in this world that only know me as “Spicy,” and my kiddos are the Cashews, and we are the Cashew Fam. 

There is so much more to Minecraft than one might think. It is considered a “sandbox” game, where you have a lot of freedom to get really creative. It isn’t just creativity, though. There are power circuit components that stretch your engineering brain and really give room for technically-minded players to thrive, building machines and automated contraptions that will do just about anything you can imagine. There are vast worlds full of sprawling biomes to discover and explore. Dangerous creatures and peaceful creatures. There are servers where people have built mini games within the game for those who enjoy an arcade play style or battle arenas. There is problem-solving, strategizing, organizing, designing, and even the relaxation of fishing, boating, flying, and farming. Millions of players have joined hundreds or even thousands of servers, building civilizations with economies and governments – all starting with a few tools and building blocks like dirt and stone.

One of the reasons I have really taken to playing Minecraft is that I found it gave me a place to just “be” during some of my darkest times. PMDD was beating me down relentlessly to the point that I was literally hiding from my family so that I wouldn’t yell at them for asking me simple questions and so I wouldn’t rage around the house fueled by the anxiety and overwhelm at NEVER being able to keep up with all of the tasks (and my kids not keeping up with their own tasks). I felt like a literal monster that I couldn’t get under control. I kept everyone fed and safe, but beyond that, I would sit at my desk for hours, one and two weeks at a time (because that’s how long the worst of my PMDD would last each cycle). Focusing on whatever I was building or exploring at the time kept me from listening to intrusive thoughts and those voices in my mind berating me – telling me what a horrible mom, wife, friend, sister, daughter, etc. I was; telling me I was hopeless and worthless and couldn’t handle life; telling me my husband would have been better off with someone else because he was having to pick up so much slack with me being essentially non-functional some of those days. Playing Minecraft gave me somewhere to plunge myself into while I flailed around in the worst of all of that. The server I played on was a place of community during a time that I really needed as much community as I could get. They didn’t know the struggles I was facing, but just being able to hang out with them and play this game together and laugh with them was such a salve for the deep pain I was facing most days.

I did not intend to dive that deep into my PMDD world yet, but there is a glimpse of it. I am thankful that a friend recommended microcurrent neurofeedback therapy a little over a year ago. It has been life-changing for me and my family. I still have a little of my PMDD symptoms creep up now and again, and I still struggle with anxiety and depression on a daily basis but on a MUCH smaller scale. (from a 10 down to a 5 or 6 at the very worst moments). I truly believe that Minecraft is a good outlet for anxiety (but I wouldn’t recommend exploring any of the dark caverns if you’re already feeling anxious, though LOL), and it is in my rotation of creative outlets as well.

It’s also a really good way to connect with your kiddos if they are really into it. I’m actually thinking about starting a YouTube channel specifically for moms (or dads, aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc.) to learn about Minecraft so they can play with their kids for some quality time. My kiddos happen to think it’s pretty cool that their mom is a fairly competent Minecraft player (or at least I think they do…HAHA). It kind of reminds me of how I thought it was pretty cool that my mom could speedrun Super Mario Bros 3 back in the day!

Thanks for sticking with me on this one. I know it was a bit longer than most of my other posts. I hope it didn’t get too boring there in the middle if you’re not very interested in computer/video games. I hope you were able to feel connected to some part of this post. Until the next one, just in case you need someone to say it – It really is okay to not be okay.