“I ramble and give up, once upon a shut up.”


Just to get it out the way I played both Milk inside a bag and Milk outside a bag back to back, and like others here have said, I highly recommend that you do this, if you decide to play this.

Important notice: I find it difficult to talk about these plays without devolving into personal experiences from my life, so if you would like to continue the comfort of knowing nothing about me, please do yourself a favor and don’t read this. If you do continue, then take care.

For the sake of understanding, I will be referring to the protag as “Null”. I saw Erato do it in her review and I found it more understanding and comes off less demeaning than referring to her as “girl” or “milk”.

I’m going to try my best to organize my thoughts although it can be quite difficult but what you end up seeing is what you get.

Maybe you can help?

Exploitation and “The Connection.”
So to briefly touch on the topic of whether or not these plays are exploitive of mental illness.. I believe it’s understandable to have that gut feeling upon its first impressions considering the lain like art-style/aesthetics. Lain is something I question the intentions of but still feel some connection to it for a reason I am still internalizing to this day, it still feels paradoxical to me. I believe for this play, there’s something deeper than that. Perhaps it’s not as deep as what I wanted it to be but maybe it doesn’t have to be? Maybe the fact that it has the potential to begin new thoughts to be created in my mind is enough? Maybe not new but different, it’s always different.

Upon playing Milk inside a bag of milk, I already felt some form of emotional connection with its eerie music and atmosphere, the preparation of leaving your home to the store, rehearsing your social role/ques over and over again, then getting overwhelmed by your own thoughts and saying “I’m ready to burst into tears!” When I read those words I started crying a lot. It was that moment that I really felt like I was crying with this play, not at it. Which is an important distinction to me. The last time I felt this connection was playing Disco Elysium for the first time (and the other many many times..) in October, 2019.

Dissonance.
As hinted from the title, Milk inside a bag of milk is focused entirely on the internal conflicts and rambling of Null. Yet Inside a bag of milk still holds a level of dissonance, you have a name, she talks to you, asks you questions under her boundaries. The only time your name is said is if you’ve been nothing but disruptive and hurtful towards her, that’s when she gives up getting milk and you as well, hoping to find someone else for next time. Successfully helping her buy a bag of milk then leads to the beginning of Milk outside a bag of milk. Which then opens another level of dissonance where you can see her and she can see you, as if you’re really there, as if she trusts you.
In Disco Elysium, you play and interact with Harry Du Bois and his dissociative mind, you decide which thoughts come and go, his contradictions, his political beliefs, etc, in a matter of days. While the Milk plays have you as some form of entity projected by Null, it’s the only thing she has to not be alone, she doesn’t like the silence, she finds your presence to be “grateful” at times. By the words you choose to say, you can influence her emotions and lead her in directions in thoughts, causing either a level of understanding or a panic attack. This also influences the dream she will have when she finally goes to bed. The milk plays is an interactive dissociative experience, only witnessing a single day of Null’s life.

Medication.
”When I am under the influence of drugs, terrible and unpleasant melodies sound in my head. Mixing with the sounds of the world around me, they create a terrible dissonance in my head.”

Both entries also touch on a subject that I found to be lacking when talking about the experiences with mental illness, that would be the relationship with medication and its effects.

Null’s lifestyle is messy and unconventional, especially with her medication intake, either she takes none at all or more than she needs too, or just wastes them completely. She believes she can handle it without it until the “pain” comes back and she has to take her medication with defeat.

Psychiatry is what I would describe as a sensitive tread on wire in brain chemistry. It took me the twenty four years I’ve been alive for me to really internalize that the altering of chemicals in your mind can only do so much when everything else about your life fucking sucks. Of course, I thought I knew that enough to do a fine job during my psychology courses in college but it took a while for me to place that into my own life.

When I was growing up in my teens, all I did was sit in my room and feel bad about something, whether that would be something in my head or the effects of the medication. I mostly took antidepressants and amphetamines. I hated taking my meds, I hated how they made me feel, how it made the world feel, just all of it. At worst I felt awful, at best I felt nothing. But I took them because they were supposed to help me “function”, giving me this push to do labor which at the time was just school. I’ll let you know that I’ve dropped out of school multiple times. I dropped out of public high school because of a paranoia induced panic attack, I didn’t feel safe there, I couldn’t. I tried home schooling, I was too mentally disfigured at the time to really do it, my father tried to help but he just simply wasn’t patient enough. All I could hear when he tried to help me with algebra was how much I annoyed him. I would later get my GED which would feel like a drugged up trance, a lot of the details are very blurred to me when looking back. The medications I’ve had throughout my life have given me sprints of euphoria and long droughts of sedation.

I think one of the worst medications I’ve experienced was when I was put on Zoloft. It made the world spin and feel so slow, the voices I could hear at the time were slow, almost paul stretched whispers. I couldn’t understand them and for some reason that only angered me. I wanted to scream it all out of me but I couldn’t, just felt dazed instead. There’s an intense Thanksgiving story that’s very much about my episodes from the influence of Zoloft but ask me about it later. Speaking of medication induced episodes, did you know heavy use of amphetamines can cause episodes of psychosis? I sure learned that between the years of 2019 - 2020. I hate every medication I was put on! You name it. I hate Vyvanse, Adderall, Ritalin, Lexapro, Wellbutrin, Fluoxetine, and of course fuck Zoloft. I fucking hate Zoloft.

Ever since my last breakdown in early 2022, I’ve been clean from medications, I haven’t taken anything since. I’ve mostly been taking it easy and focusing on what I can do about how I live my life, to make it less suffering. I aim to be productive every day, to talk to someone, do literally anything but nothing. My episodes of psychosis have worked in conjunction with my long episodes of depression. If I learned anything last year, it’s “Inevitable depression when I do nothing.”. Of course, I’m not saying medication is just bad and that no one should take it, it can help, even save lives. But the relationship between one and their medication isn’t always as simple as taking a painkiller to make the pain go away. It’s complicated, it can hold pros and cons, like I said in the beginning of this: it’s a balancing act.

Repetition

“I do not repeat because I repress, I repress because I repeat.” - Guess who said this.

The repetition in Milk outside a bag of milk is miserable. The repetition of the same bad day, the same initial breakdown, over and over again. It’s just sometimes Null’s entity can influence her late night to be ok or worse. Don’t confuse this as me saying this is a “bad” thing about the play, on the contrary, this is fitting for the type of lifestyle she and many others live.

“So every thought would make a senseless and merciless circle in my head, destined to go back to where it started.”

Your conversations with her are nothing but circular thoughts that she's had before and will have again. She leaves everything in her room at their exact place to help her collect her thoughts, it supposedly helps her see. Whether that’s true or not, I am not sure. It is simply explaining an idea with another idea. Null’s lifestyle is nothing but repetition in disguise, interacting with these displaced objects of past and present. The synthesis of the past is tied to these objects in the present, this affects the synthesis of the real/present. Think of it like this, the objects you interact with are sets and inside the sets are elements of memory. (We’re going to talk more about this later.). Null desperately wants to forget her memories of the past but is still emotionally clung to these memories. The mind is constantly infatuated with the pure past, looking to understand its pure past. She doesn’t want to forget, you can’t forget, it’s about understanding. She begins to understand through reminiscence when interacting with these objects that contain the elements of memory, the objects in her room. You must collect all of her thoughts through this reminiscence for her to reach a greater understanding of herself.


-The book bag reveals that she hasn’t been in school for a long time, and how her last day of school was like. In addition, with prodding, you get a glance of what her relationship with her father was like, as well as detail that she was too old for her school curriculum at the time.

-The notebook consists of early sketches that Null has done, while the rest are blank unused pages. She doesn’t want to use the rest of the notebook because that would mean she would be out of paper. Being out of paper means you have to get more, having to get more means you have to go outside, having to go outside means problems. You can suggest that she asks her mom for a new notebook, all she does is insult herself and her way of thinking in response. The wind blows, moving the pages. This causes her distress, she closes her eyes, preventing any engagement with her past drawings. You convince her to open her eyes, none of the pages moved, she hears the rustle of pages and closes her eyes again, but only reveal is a firefly, one of her thoughts.

- The “bizarre” laptop that she had for years. She used to have plenty of hobbies with the laptop until she encountered the web. Similarly to the book bag, you can prod to gain more information about her time with the web. This part was very interesting because here you get to learn how she sees the web and the people on it and what she considers is “friendship.”. Here she explains that people on the web aren’t actual real people, that in fact they are just like computing programing, nothing but numbers. Yet she is eager to be friends with these people on the web just based on similar interests. It doesn’t matter if they don’t know her, if they both like video games then they are friends. This isn’t that bizarre of a perspective on the internet, in fact, I’ve encountered plenty that were similar. Her idea of friendship isn’t fully developed because clearly she doesn’t have a lot of experience with different forms of friendship to reference on. Well that’s until she manages to form a deeper relationship with someone on the internet, this person convinces her that he’s real, in her words, he tricked her. He cyber bullied her with bots and put her information online, this results her to believe that there are people watching her, always. You learn that part of information if you go to the balcony which results in


Death
Null can die two times in Milk outside a bag of milk. It triggers during specific things you say/lead her to do as her thoughts. These are just glimpses of dissociation episodes of her experiencing her own death, whether that's strangulation or jumping off of a balcony. What I find interesting about this is that you can’t gain a deeper level of understanding of Null without having to experience these parts of the play. It’s a lot like experiencing your own episodes, it’s not a good time in the moment but to reach a level of understanding of yourself and your conditions you have to engage with why and how it happens in the first place. The episodes of death have a major impact with how the rest of the night will go for Null. It affects her dreams when she finally goes to sleep.

Dreams

“Imagining myself to be outside of my mortal shell, but at the same time still being me. Ridiculous, like milk outside a bag of milk.”

The dreams Null can experience vary and are based on a few things. How many thoughts you collected, which deaths did you experience if any at all, did you explore certain thoughts deeper, and did you pick up that phone number? The results always show which of the five dreams Null ends up experiencing.

The shop dream is the above quote taken to the most literal. Null is experiencing a re-contextualized perspective on the beginning of her day (Milk inside a bag of milk inside a bag of milk..). This said perspective is a projection of her negative thoughts towards herself. This is also influenced by how she believes everyone around her sees her. Treska (the boy she's helping go to the store.) interacts with a customer, asking for directions. This causes a bad interaction as the customer wanted nothing to do with Treska, as the boy stood there in fear. Treska causes a scene, disrupting the atmosphere of the store. This displeases everyone. The part that stands out is how everyone talks to Null, and refers to Treska as her son. (The cashier also calls Treska a very mean word!) Null pays for the milk (and outrageous fees) with anger and leaves with Treska. After Treska’s attempts at breaking the silence are ignored by Null, he begins walking away from Null, and says “It seems like you’re not helping me at all.” (This is what Null says to you when you do a bad job during Inside a bag of milk.). The thoughts I took away from this was perhaps this is also showing how it was like for her to go to the store with one of her parents. Also I think in attempts at a meta narrative, it’s displaying how people were feeling when exposed to Null and her neurodivergent behavior. It expresses the undeniable frustration that’s emoted from everyone involved in this specific context.

[Here's a note you can read!]
[ As we get closer to this topic (the social perspective on the neurodivergent) it gets more difficult not to express more of my thoughts on it. At best I believe people treat neurodivergent people as children and at worst, subhuman. Either way, it's a very frustrating thing to spectate and experience myself. The tone of discussions about it are always a mix between being condescending and accusatory. People get frustrated over others putting themselves down, thinking they can’t do said things because [insert flavor of neurodivergence here]. But never wonder why that’s the case? Why do they put themselves down? Perhaps, it’s because no one wants to help or no one wants to understand? Everyone is so indulged in their own selfishness, that anyone that's acting out of the social script is too much of an inconvenience to handle. It’s this ‘settle your own shit’ type of attitude that helps nothing! All these different flavors of the same discourse is nothing but just a meaningless cycle of psychic assaults. I realized that when expressing this whole paragraph made me realize that this could be applied to a lot of other different contexts of discrimination (because what I’m describing here is basically ableism). That’s because this shit is just a symptom of power in our current socio economic environment but I finally digress.]

The shop dream is, what I believe to be, the default dream. This is the dream you get on your first playthrough. Or at least you’re most likely to? (I learned from my girlfriend that she got the mirror ending on her first playthrough. I believe the shop dream is triggered based on the first death.) Remember that repetition? That sweet synthesis? It’s still here, and something that’s to be experienced to witness Null’s other dreams.

The mirror dream is probably the most simple one out of the five. Wake up everyday, feel the weirds again, look at the mirror, my face is dumb, repeat. Her face changes all sorts of ways, shit you would see on a piccrew- no offense. Anyways, it’s a weird feeling, that’s the best I can describe it. It’s a little humorful out of all the dreams, which makes sense. It is easy to make fun of your own appearance. It’s really easy. Trust me.

The next two dreams are interesting because they are more like nightmares in comparison to the other last mentioned dreams. It makes sense that they’re more intense because they are triggered if you let Null go to bed without collecting all of her thoughts. Which nightmare you get seems to dictate whether you decided to learn more about her history on the web (that includes going to the balcony.).

The room and field dream is a suffocating, paranoia induced nightmare. Everything about this dream is completely influenced by her thinking deeply about her time on the internet, everything that happened, and being on the balcony. It’s the common moment in a dream where you physically fail to do one task in every way that’s possible, it tends to feel slow and clutching to me. In the context of this dream, it’s opening a door while being trapped in a dark silent room. The sounds that play during this dream are noteworthy here, the beginning is nothing but these rapid wooden staccato taps and quiet droning in the background, while the field section is a louder drone with whispering wind. The dream consists of running from the uncertain darkness, then the slow dread in the fields with a looming presence of, you guess it, dark uncertainty! Null screams questions of Who are you? What do you want? Just for this presence to explode into darkness, looping back to the beginning of the dream- she wakes up.

The stairs ending is awful. It’s nothing but degrading, numbing, and despair. This is absolutely the dream she gets when you don’t even fucking try to help! Everything visual and sonically about this dream is abrasive and cold like metal. The giant concrete structures with stairways even look like drill bits to me. It reminded me of a recurring dissociation I would experience where I felt paralyzed and someone was drilling a hole in my head. Funnily enough there’s something about this dream that reminds me of Cruelty Squad. It’s most likely the abrasiveness and the flashing abstract smiling face. Also it quotes Wozzeck out of nowhere. Which speaking of which what the hell? (It explains the whole blood moon sky that’s going on in this play.) This dream is insanity inducing because it’s exactly what it’s like. Am I recovering? Am I making progress? Where am I going? Does it matter? Is it all meaningless? Do I have control? No, I don't have control. I cannot move my body, I cannot say what I want to say, I am trapped in my own head. There’s no thoughts, it's just words. Everyone is looking but not talking. There isn’t actually anyone, there is no me either. Everything is empty yet everything is heavy as well. I WANT TO SCREAM UNTIL MY EARS RING, I HATE DOING NOTHING, I HATE BEING NOTHING.

“I DON’T DOUBT THAT YOU’RE GOING THROUGH SOME HARD TIMES. BUT YOU HAVE TO MAKE SACRIFICES. GROW UP. ONLY THEN YOU’LL BE ABLE TO OBTAIN THE MEANING OF LIFE. DO YOU GET IT? TRY THAT IF YOU FIND IT IMPORTANT. EVERY PASSING DAY IS A PRECIOUS GIFT.”

“IF YOU SHARE A PIECE OF THAT GIFT WITH THE WORLD EVEN ONCE, IT’LL SEEM LIKE A SPECK OF DUST. DO YOU GET IT? NO, I’M SORRY. I WON’T GET THAT, THEN. DO YOU GET IT?”

“DO YOU GET IT? DO YOU GET IT? YES, EVEN YOU GET IT. WHEN YOU NOTICE HOW PEOPLE LOOK AT THEMSELVES IN THE MIRROR WHEN YOU LOOK AT YOUR OWN REFLECTION AND REALIZE THAT IT EXISTS IN REALITY. DO YOU UNDERSTAND HOW EXACTLY IT EXISTS?”

“I WEEP”
“YOU ARE A ROTTEN HUSK”
“YOU OVERFLOW WITH BOUNDLESS POWER.”
“YOU HAVE THE SOUL OF AN EMPEROR”
“SACRIFICIAL HERO. BLESSED BY PRIMORDIAL LUCK.”
“YOUR FRIENDS ARE IN HELL YET YOU SMILE.”
“ONLY GOOD THINGS WILL COME TO SOMEONE LIKE YOU”
“SET GOALS. HAVE A TEN YEAR PLAN. INVEST. WAKE UP EARLY. CEO MINDSET.”
“GOOD LUCK”

The Last Dream and The Empty Set

“This is how the story of time ends: by undoing its too well centered natural or physical circle and forming a straight line which then, led by its own length, reconstitutes an eternally decentered circle.” - Guess who said this.

Before I move on to the last dream. Let’s talk about her sweatshirt or specifically the symbol on her sweatshirt. The symbol is referred to as the Null sign. I’ve been referring to her as Null this entire time because I feel like she truly identifies with this symbol. She goes on the whole mathematical rant about people on the internet not being real, and explains things with number binaries.

“If I lose something and then find it, it’s just going back to the starting point. No changes at all. A zero sum.”

The Null sign is the mathematical notation of “the empty set”, nothing resides within the empty set, there cannot be multiple empty sets, hence the name the empty set. It is a void but it is not nothing. No, a set is something. It is an empty bag.

The last dream requires a collection of all her thoughts, don’t trigger any deaths, and lastly to pick up a small thing on the ground. Some people say this is her phone, it’s probably that (or the phone number to the pizzeria.). Visually, this is the most mundane of her dreams, it’s the closest you’re gonna get to reality in this play. It starts with her sitting on a balcony with her phone, then throughout the dream she roams around the city. She’s mainly expressing all of her thoughts through texts on her phone.

“I’m all alone, but at the same time it feels like I’m not. There’s a lot of thoughts in my head, they always keep me entertained. I can create a whole world with them. I’m sure it’ll be able to fill the void around me if I try hard enough!”

If it wasn’t obvious enough, this dream is just thoughts about emptiness, she feels neither sad nor happy, but the places she finds herself to be are safe. She feels the world is empty around her, like a void. A lot of the thoughts displayed here are very circular, here’s an idea, she responds to it with another idea. If her presence is a waste of time, is there a point to it? Is she just part of the void instead of containing it? If the place I’m in feels nothing, then how come I can warm myself with warm thoughts? I can fill the void around me with my thoughts! Wait a minute. I’m still here even though there’s nothing around me? Ah. The world ain’t so empty after all.