brianbraunduin

[brianbraunduin]

The Daily Struggle

You ever go on a super prolonged losing streak in Magic? I'm talking months and months...maybe even years. It's happened to me a few times before. During those periods, everything is incredibly confusing. I play a tournament and lose repeatedly to the best deck. I play the best deck and lose repeatedly to brews. I follow the generally accepted best practice sideboard plan for the mirror match and lose repeatedly to my opponents all doing a different sideboard plan considered "inferior." I then adopt and try the "inferior" plan and lose repeatedly to people just doing the normal thing.

During this period of time it is incredibly difficult to figure out what is going wrong. Am I playing bad? Am I choosing bad decks? Am I getting unlucky? You isolate and correct one problem--I'll play the same deck as my buddy--and then they crush the next tournament and you fail. So then it must mean I'm playing badly, right? But when that same buddy watches you play he thinks you're playing great. So it's variance, surely? But how likely is it that you lose at your current rate for a super prolonged duration off of variance alone? Not particularly. It must then be a combination of factors, you say, but then how do you correct for something you can't isolate and work on to fix?

This is how I currently feel about my personal mental health. I've been depressed for about 14 months now. It ebbs and flows, but ultimately it keeps coming back. If anything, it's worse now than it's ever been.

I keep thinking I've pinpointed the reason for my depression and that if I correct for that thing, I'll start to get better.

I thought it was loneliness. I felt all alone in Virginia. I moved to Seattle with Brad and Amber and now I have roommates that I interact with regularly and daily. I'm not lacking for social interaction with humans if I want it. Yet I don't feel any less lonely than I did before. I feel trapped inside my own head; that nobody else but me will ever truly understand me as a person. That is a sobering and lonely thought.

I thought it was social media. I think social media breeds depression. There are two extremes to social media. One is that you see people posting about themselves at their best moments. It's easy to compare yourself unfavorably to the constant images of people having better moments than you do and become depressed about how your life sucks in comparison. Personally, I don't think this is the problem for me. I trained myself a long time ago to not compare myself to others but rather compare myself only to where I want myself to be. I think I am actually successful at doing this.

Because of that, I thought I was safe from this aspect of social media. But I was wrong, because it goes deeper than that. The next level for me was realizing how fake it all is. The internet is full of people rising to fame by potraying a fake and glamorized version of themselves and if you dwell on that reality it can breed into cynicism that poisons your mind. I'm incredibly cynical right now. My mind has been poisoned.

The other extreme of social media is the extreme negatives. You also see the worst of humanity. War, hunger, people tearing each other down, distrusting each other, yelling at each other, mocking each other, gatekeeping, abuse of power, mob justice, cancel culture taken to excess, are all also omnipresent online. This, I can say for sure, has definitely poisoned my mentality significantly. I don't think it's possible to be exposed to this level of negativity day after day after day and have it not affect your mindset in some capacity.

I had to get away from social media. I couldn't take one more controversy where everyone piled on to the point of excess, where all nuance was lost, and where people just screamed at and blocked each other at the first sign of tension. I just was not strong enough mentally to deal with watching it even if I didn't take part in it myself. I couldn’t take one more story where yet another massive injustice occurred. It had become too much for my mind to take.

I thought that was the source of my depression. It was not. I've been mostly off of Twitter for about 3 weeks or so now, maybe close to a month at this point, and while my day to day productivity has increased massively and while I no longer experience the extreme frustration I had at social media, it has not cured me of my depression...or really made a significant dent in it. My life is better, but my mental health is not.

In fact, like my initial analogy, it has only bred confusion for me. On one hand, I think it's valuable to cut ties with things that are negative influences on your life, and social media definitely is a huge negative. On the other hand, I've learned time and time again in my past that running from my problems is not a viable solution. Cutting off ties to the outside world around me or the Magic community that has been a huge part of my life for years is certainly running away from my problems. It's a temporary band aid and I'd be far better off in the long run just facing my problems and plowing through them, no matter how hard it is.

I think boiled down, I just can't seem to handle people's lack of empathy and base selfishness. I'm not even trying to escape blame here. I can be just as much of a piece of shit as everyone else is. The lack of empathy on social media is astounding. Even people who claim to be empathetic and care about making the community/world better mostly just do lip service to the idea and don't care about anything that doesn't affect them personally or are completely unwilling to consider things from viewpoints other than their own. Worse yet, people use controversy as a launch board for their personal brand. It's easy, even for well meaning people, to seek out and amplify controversy if it helps their bottom line. I’ve been guilty of all these sins myself, plenty of times. But still, seeing this play out day after day has completely eroded my faith in people and I don't know how to get that faith back. I question regularly whether humanity is redeemable in any way.

That brings me to my next point of confusion. I believe I'd be way happier in my life if I just didn't care about any of that and lived in my own bubble and never engaged with social media ever again. But I can't make myself not care, and I feel personally responsible to use my platform to stand up for what I think is right and try to create a better place. The guilt I feel from running away from it all adds up. I've spent weeks now trying to divorce myself from the problems of the world around me but I'm not sure I can escape it. I waffle daily between a desire to find happiness living my life isolated from the problems of the world and feeling an obligation to engage myself with those problems, even if it spits me out a bitter, sad, defeated man in the end.

On the flip side, I find myself simultaneously unable to care about things that I should be passionate about. I don't care about how well I do in Magic events, even though I'm currently at the peak of my Magic career. I don't care if I succeed or fail in my career. I don't know if I'm capable of caring about other human beings on the personal level that I see other people exhibit. Somehow I've managed to both care too much and not be able to care enough about things at the same time.

Another potential cause of my depression that I thought might be "the one" was my body. I've battled with weight my entire life. People who knew me 5 years ago will note that I've gained a lot of weight since then. People who knew me 10 years ago will see that at one point I lost over 100 pounds, and then over the course of 6 years, I've gained most of it back, with lots of ups and downs in the mix.

For two weeks now I've been dieting and exercising regularly, without breaking routine or slipping. This has greatly improved how I've viewed myself. I always feel guilty eating unhealthy food. Avoiding the shame and self-loathing that comes with shoving your face with junk food has been excellent. I feel better physically and I feel great about myself for finally mustering the motivation to do this. Hasn't lessened my depression, though.

Another potential cause for my depression is a lack of intimacy. I'm not talking about sex, I'm talking about personal intimacy that comes with a close relationship. To be honest, I still think this might be it, or at least a massive factor, but as time goes on and all the other areas in my life I've changed fail to even put a dent in my depression, I'm growing skeptical. I want to start throwing myself into the dating ring, but I feel guilty, because I don't honestly know if I am capable of reciprocating caring about someone else anywhere close to the level they would potentially care about me. I'm also cynical about the chances of success in finding someone I'm interested in and not sure I have it in me to try and fail repeatedly in the process of getting there.

The last potential cause for my depression is a lack of a mission. I feel purposeless. I feel a sense of listlessness--that I'm just floating through life and not actually accomplishing anything or doing anything other than ticking down the days till my body eventually stops functioning and I die. I want a goal. I want something to work toward, something with real, true meaning, and the feeling that I'm actually doing something useful on my way there. Much like the intimacy thing, I also strongly think this might be "it."

The likelihood, however, is that my depression is probably a combination of a ton of factors. Loneliness, lack of intimacy, weight, abject despair at the state of humanity and the world around me, social media depression, no purpose, and so forth all factor in. But that brings me back to the initial analogy. At that point, how do I figure out how to break through the morass of it all? It's so confusing and daunting. I think about this all the time and I can never come to a meaningful breakthrough. My life is a constant shift between a state of giving up on everything and not caring about anything vs a state of caring too much about everything. I constantly bounce between the idea that if I cared less I'd be happier and the idea that if I cared more I'd be happier. This happens multiple times throughout each day, and it's all incredibly confusing to me.

Honestly, I think something is wrong with my brain. I don't know what it is, but I think my brain is straight up broken. I've been putting it off for a while now, but I made the decision earlier this week to find and go to a professional for help, assuming I'll ever be able to muster up the motivation to go. I'm honestly skeptical they can fix me, but it's frankly irresponsible for me to not try.

For what it's worth, I have no desire or thoughts of self-harm in any way. I also don't feel negatively toward myself. I don't blame myself for my current state at all. If anything, I have a fairly positive self-image. I know I'm trying as hard as I can to fix my life. I also remain optimistic that I can get out of this eventually.

But goddamn it's fucking depressing to go through every day with a sense of aimless hopelessness seemingly without end. My depression is fucking depressing me. I just want it to be over. I want to experience what happiness is like once again. I know it exists. It's been a while, but I've been there before.