Though play connotes enjoyment, it, too, has negative implications. In my own experience, it seems that play can sometimes lead to an overextension of one's boundaries, as well as the rejection of reality's boundaries; in play, we adopt new codes of conduct, and disregard those which have been placed before us by authority figures. In doing so, the perils of play are most apparent. When children role-play, they introduce their own understandings of that which is "other" to them; however, this act can lead to the transgressing of physical boundaries, both violent and sexual.

When I was a child, my parents were perhaps too indulgent of my desire to play, probably because they themselves are fond of "playing." This created dysfunction in our household: I played with my toys, my mother played games on the computer, my father read and watched TV; meanwhile dust gathered, papers piled up, and hardly anything got cleaned. Often on Sunday evenings, when my mother told me to clean up my toys, I would insist on leaving them out, saying that I would want to pick up where I left off last weekend. My room was cleaned maybe once a year, and it usually took a push from my grandmother to accomplish that. As I grew older, and family influence lessened, I became even more indolent, and my room has been a perpetual mess probably since I started middle school.

            As a child the schoolyard is one of the most unsupervised places where play happens. Though adults may be present to ‘supervise’ there is no way for them to keep a watch over every student and this opens up a whole new realm of possibilities for children to be hurt. I don’t mean just hurt physically, I mean emotionally as well. The schoolyard is a place where a lot of bullying happens. While I was lucky enough never to have been truly bullied on the schoolyard, mostly because I made sure to stay out of the line of fire, I have seen how bullying can occur through the eyes of my younger sister.

  Tim Edensor's "Playing in Industrial Ruins" alludes to ways that play might be problematic. For teenagers and adults, play can include activities like alcohol abuse, destruction, unsafe sex, and other types of unrestricted behavior. Edensor broke these types of play down into four categories: Destructive, Hedonistic, Artistic, and Adventurous. These activities can potentially hurt both the person doing them and the people around him or her. Many of them blur the lines between pleasure versus necessity, productivity versus mindlessness, and more.

Play slowly transitioned from a fun way to spend time with friends to a competition I was not fond of. It no longer meant my neighbors and I on our street, coming up with games, running and laughing. It meant me in my school’s gym not being picked for dodge ball, missing all the free throws in basketball, or not running to the next base fast enough. It was my classmates yelling at me for costing us a point. I learned to stop playing, it was no longer a carefree game. I resonate with the line in Henig’s article that says “Out in the schoolyard, there was no raising your hand with the right answer.

Free, but not Equal

Play is not always fun. It can sometimes be harmful, in that it incites unhealthy competitiveness and conflicts with discipline at times. 

I experienced the problematic play for several times in my childhood memory. For example, as I mention in my last post, I got extreme myopia and spinal curvature, failed many exams in finals and almost lost my social life when I was addicted to playing video games. This situation is more likely classified into the mental problem. I also experienced physical problems when I played.

Shapes of Silence: Writing by Women of Colour and the Politics of Testimony

 By Proma Tagore

“There is a silence that cannot speak.

            There is a silence that will not speak.

            Beneath the grass the speaking dreams and beneath the dreams is a sensate sea. The speech that frees comes from that amniotic deep. To attend its voice, I can hear it say, is to embrace its absence. But I fail the task. The word is stone.

            I admit it.

            I hate the stillness. I hate the stone. I hate the sealed vault with its cold icon. I hate staring into the night. The questions thinning into space. The sky swallowing the echoes.

I was bullied quite a bit as a child. There were probably a number of reasons for this, including the administration's refusal to intervene, the antipathy several faculty members had for myself ad my mother, class differences, the parents' refusal to dicsipline their children and tell them that their behavior is unacceptable; however, the fact remains that I was bullied almost every day between kindergarten and 6th grade.