Over the weekend, I watched as hordes of Mongol horsemen returned to Eastern Europe, burning and pillaging towns and cities along the way. The weekend before, I watched as the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth abolished the Sejm, the historic legislature of nobles who elected the king and consulted on matters of state.

These events didn’t happen in real life, but in my favourite video game, Europa Universalis 4. EU4, as it’s called, lets you play any nation starting in the year 1444 and the game runs until 1820. The game is ten years old but is still a favourite pastime of mine. In ten years of playing, I have put 5,481 hours into the game, or over 228 days.

A quick look at my recent play stats show that I’ve averaged an embarrassing 11 hours per day playing this game over the last two weeks. Now, some context: I frequently leave the game running in the background while I work, going back to it occasionally when I need an ADHD attention break from whatever I’m doing. But the fact remains that I have been escaping the current political reality by conquering and pillaging across various parts of the world.

The news lately has been tough to consume as a trans person in the U.S. It feels like every day I’m waking up to some fresh horror that my government wants to impose on my life. From the passport nonsense, to the recently proposed rule that would let health insurance companies exclude my coverage for gender-affirming care again, President Donald Trump’s administration seems bound and determined to stick the government into the most private areas of my life.

As a trans journalist who primarily covers trans issues, it can get to be too much sometimes. I cannot follow every little bit of news or it will break me. It’s happened to me before.

In the first Trump administration, I devoted myself to covering every possible bad thing Trump was doing to my community, sometimes in triplicate. The first time Trump banned trans people from the military, I wrote 12 stories in two days. I didn’t sleep, but I paid several months of rent with the freelance fees. Yet the lasting impact on my mental health that week is still with me.

I first became aware of it with about eight months to go in Trump’s first term. The COVID-19 pandemic was launching into full effect and I was doing double duty for Vox, covering breaking news on weekends and writing three to four politics pieces each day, Monday through Wednesday, and then also writing extended features about trans and LGBTQ2S+ rights for their since-shuttered Identities team. I wasn’t playing computer games back then. I simply didn’t give myself the time.

The burnout came slowly and then suddenly all at once. I felt a weight on my shoulders every time I logged on to write something new, and a gnawing pain in my gut and my brain would slowly grow throughout the day. I finally managed to fix and then replace my old gaming PC that had been broken since New Year’s Eve 2016 and I started playing computer games again. First it was the first-person hero shooter Overwatch, and then I returned to my pre-transition favourite, EU4. It had been a long time, but the old, familiar mechanics brought me comfort and the control the game gave me over the environment let me feel in control even as the real world felt more and more overwhelming.

Playing games in my off hours helped take my mind off the work I had been doing, and probably bought me months of productive work.

And then suddenly, all of the weight I was symbolically carrying on my shoulders came crashing down on me and I had a breakdown. I couldn’t open Google Docs to write another word. I put myself on cruise control and I don’t remember much of anything that I wrote between the last few months of the election and Biden’s inauguration. But once he came into office, I had to put down the keyboard for extended periods of time—for my own survival.

Throughout Biden’s first term, I felt almost absent from the trans journalist scene, even though I know others don’t feel the same way. I used to be the trans woman who knew about and tracked everything, and then I wasn’t. Others emerged and took over much of the work I used to do. The guilt over not doing the work only added to my newfound sense of uselessness.

Eventually I stopped doing hard news reporting, once the bread and butter of my workload, instead opting for the lighter lift of writing opinion.

I just couldn’t do the hard reporting anymore. I couldn’t bear to interview another terrified trans person getting attacked by a conservative politician in a red state. I had to tune out the rising tide of hate emerging on conservative media. The burnout was extensive and ran deep. I threw myself into games instead, only tuning into the news when I needed an idea for a new column. The guilt of giving up my old workload still sits heavy on my psyche.

I felt the burnout start to recede in the middle of 2024. When it became clear that a second Trump term was not only possible but likely, I knew I had to be ready to meet the political moment once again. But I also knew I needed a plan to put off the burnout when it would inevitably return.

My answer? Fighting the Ottomans, France or Castille in EU4.

The second Trump term started with a blitzkrieg of actions hostile to trans life in the U.S., and I was there to cover every bit of it. I knew it was coming and stored enough energy and reserves to tackle everything. And then I started feeling it again, that old weight on my shoulders, the burn in my gut.

Last time, I kept pushing through it all. This time around, I gave myself a break. Instead of forcing myself to write that next piece, I fired up EU4.

We all need ways to take a break from the news cycle. It’s okay to disengage and not see the next thing coming at us. There are enough good people keeping track of things that it’s okay to take breaks. We can catch you up on the news when you come back. No one can drink from the firehose forever.
You may not have an appreciation for watching the Ming collapse or colonizing the virtual new world, but there’s an EU4-level activity out there for everyone. Fight the burnout; find yours.