2024-2025 / multimedia
This piece is a lyric game (or game poem) and a love letter for caregivers. As someone who has provided care to my partner battling cancer and to my mother who sustained severe injuries from a serious car accident within the past few of years, I wanted to create an experience that honors the ease, comfort, solace, and rest caregivers might need as they provide care for loved ones (biological and chosen). The unseen and quiet work of caregiving comes in all forms and permutations. While I acknowledge the professional work of front-line workers such as nurses, certified nursing assistants, and home health care professionals, these are jobs compensated by a company or institution. While vital, they are enabled through industry, capital, and a circuitous insurance system and complex infrastructures.
You are not a Monster (2024-2025) is intended to be played over 28 days (a typical moon cycle), but it may be played or read in any way the player sees fit. It is dedicated to the caregiver who bathes their mother or takes their partner to the hospital in the middle of the night with an alarmingly increasing fever, to the individual who cooks, cleans, and provides order despite unexpected and often unpredictable situations that require quick response and unwavering resilience, even when the caregiver provides care through fatigue and pain.
The work is named after experiencing intense emotions, including envy, anger, rage, and sadness, during caregiving moments. Yet, being socialized and conditioned to provide care and be in service to another, when these feelings arose, I often associated them with feeling monstrous because those feelings seemed counterintuitive to care. Caregiving is not meant to be a joyous experience. Yet, as a culture, it is often associated with emotions and themes of selflessness, charity, and obligation, particularly for women or feminine figures. Through this work, I want players, particularly caregivers, to feel that a moment of “play” is explicitly meant for them. This work is intended to serve as a reminder that embodying emotions is vital to healing and liberation, as caregivers require constant healing to remain present.
Dorothy R. Santos, Ph.D. 