CW: This is about depression, and specifically my depression. If you have responses about how to defeat these lies, I am willing to hear them. But understand: this is not a post I make lightly, and these are not lies that are easily defeated. That is the point of the post. If you want to engage with me on this directly, be prepared. If you, instead, want to engage with this by, in fact, doing the things I comment could actually defeat the lies below, without actually engaging with this? That'd probably be a much less stressful use of your time. Here we go.
So there's a truism in the mental health community, and it's not wrong: Depression Lies. It's supposed to get you to realize and understand that the negative things you are thinking are a function of the depression, and not innate, reasonable thoughts. The way you are supposed to combat this is by asking 'learner' questions, trying to attack depression's bad logic and lies.
A good example of this is the first step question: a behavioral therapist might ask someone who has an issue, 'If the issue was gone, what would your life be like?' For depression, people might say things like 'I'd get out of bed on time' or 'I'd take a shower' or 'I'd eat breakfast regularly' or 'I'd have friends'.
Then the therapist tells you, 'But you have friends.' And for a moment there's this disconnect, and then you are supposed to realize, 'I do have friends. There is hope. What you want is achievable.'
Self-hating is another good example. You might say 'I hate myself'. Why do you hate yourself? Is it because you forgot to brush your teeth? Nobody should hate themselves for not brushing their teeth. What you mean is 'I'm not happy I didn't brush my teeth today.' Then you can take steps to resolve the actual problem, and get rid of that negative self-destructive speech.
I have a problem, though: my depression is good at lying. Very good. And it's had a head start, and a lot of reinforcement. So good that even when I interrogate the lies, they're still mostly true. So I'm going to write down an example of the depressive spiral I am in right now, after going from 7-0 to 7-4 in GP Washington DC 2019, the 'lies' I am being faced with, the truth behind them, and why I am trapped. And why my tactics are mostly on mindfulness and distraction, because I can't defeat the lie.
'Lie 1': I got varianced so hard. Harder than other people get varianced. This is situation normal for me, but doesn't seem normal for anyone else. Therefore, this is going to happen forever, and you should have no hope.
To defeat this lie, there are several options. One of them is, 'well, actually, other people get varianced like you do.' Except if that is true, there's no data I can find to support it. My mulligan percentages are higher than people who I ask at limited tournaments. When people think my deck is good, it does not correlate to a good performance. One might think, 'another variance tiltmonster who just can't see that there's ways to improve'. I've probably played a hundred GPs now. A. Hundred. GPs. I have a lot of data wired into my mind at this point. I've spent a lot of money and time and effort into this game. But yeah, I'm a tiltmonster who doesn't want to improve. </sarcasm>
If I had a reasonable picture of other peoples' variance, and it was as bad as mine, then I could defeat this. But I don't. I'm the only one that has bad beat stories. Nobody talks about it. There's no definition. There's no theory. There's no _practice_. There's nothing other than going 'yep, got screwed again'.
That does not mean I don't look for ways I might have been able to change the game (although depression makes that harder.) But that leads to the second 'lie', which we'll get to in a moment.
Another way to defeat this would be 'well, sure, but it can't happen forever. law of large numbers/regression to the mean, right?' That is a full-blown lie magic players tell themselves. If a coin has flipped tails 100 times in a row, what's the chance the next one will be heads? It's still 50%. There is no 'innate' regression to the mean: that is just a property of systems. The thing is... there's still someone out there who's flipped a coin 100 times in a row and got 100 heads. It can happen. It's unlikely. But just because it's unlikely doesn't mean they're due.
A deck of cards is another good example of this. Every ordering of a 52 card deck is unique. Every one is incredibly unlikely. But there's still an ordering. And once you see one ordering, that doesn't make any of the other orderings more or less likely. There are lottery numbers that are pulled 0 times, and those that are pulled multiple times. Variance owes you nothing, and to expect something out of it is a statistical and logical fallacy.
So the best I can do with this lie is to say 'Forever is a long time. It's more accurate to say that my variance has been poor, but could go better next time.' An addict's truth if I ever heard one. The problem is that when the first half is unarguable, the second half feels more likely. Hard to defeat that lie, but possible. But let's get to lie 2, because all of this locks into a circle.
'Lie 2': Nobody wants you around. Magic improvement all-but-requires other people, and nobody wants you around. You can't find GP teams. You couldn't find PT teams. You don't room with anyone. You don't get decklists from anyone. You don't go out to dinner like other people do. People won't even talk to you about your own games when they're watching. Of course you're destined for failure.'
All the absolutes in this statement are the weakest parts. But if you change the absolutes to qualified negative statements... it's just not incorrect as far as I can tell. Nobody interacts with Magic like I do. People say it's the gathering: I'm lucky if I get to 'gather' with 10 people over the course of a GP weekend. I don't get to talk about Magic during the week. When I've tried to put together spreadsheets of analysis, people would say, 'Don't track your draws, don't blame a loss on variance'. Don't tell bad beat stories. Don't have emotional reactions. Blame everything on yourself.
That's suicide. Flat out, that last advice is operationally equivalent to saying, 'Get better or kill yourself trying.' Some people might argue that going to 100 GPs over 8 years like this is pretty close to that, but what're you gonna do there?
As far as I can tell, this lie just isn't a lie. Without ways to improve, without people to support you, without the tools that literally every other long term successful magic player has access to, there's just... nothing I can do to move the needle except bash my head against the wall and hope it breaks before I do.
Here's the thing, though: because nobody wants to talk with me, interact with me, that makes it even more impossible for me to beat Lie 1. How do I have a baseline? Coverage doesn't talk about players scrubbing out, they talk about players winning. About how various people can't lose. Nobody tells me stories. The few factual statements I have about magic players saying 'yup, variance is a thing' doesn't actually defeat Lie 1, because of course variance is a thing. It's a statement of degree, not kind.
A good example of defeating Lie 1 comes in the context of women sharing stories and experiences. Women have shared stories and experiences so that they can realize that they are not crazy for seeing the components of the patriarchy for a very long time. This is not unique to women, everyone shares experiences, but it is particularly notable because it is a case where a large structural problem is visible, and only by sharing it with others can the human mind put it in a context where it's not just them.
You know how nobody talks about bad beat stories? About how nobody quantifies variance? Yeah. You get destroyed by the system and have nobody to help you analyze, and nobody to help you commiserate? Depression is gonna win that battle, because you can't defeat the lie. And then lie 2 leads to lie 3.
'Lie 3': You don't win, you don't seem to improve, you don't have the magic relationships everyone else has, you don't have the magic success other people have, and you keep doing this. You are a crazy failure that should hate himself, because it's obvious your good traits are not enough to outweigh your bad ones, and that's unlikely to change ever. Even if you got lucky, you're in a poor position to leverage it into success, because of how bad you are at this now.'
And that is the lie that cinches the other two together into one incredibly difficult to fight package. Nothing in the statement is false except maybe 'should hate himself'. But what can you put there? The rest of it is as true as I can find it. I can hope for change, I can try for change, but I can't make anyone's reaction to me change. There is no place to find 'self-worth' because self-worth is an illusion: it is always defined in relationship to concepts that are not your own. I mean, in my best year I was top 400 in the world on pro points? I'm somewhere in the top couple thousand now? And it's _irrelevant to everyone_. Irrelevant to WotC, irrelevant to other players, and therefore irrelevant to me.
And so this is why my only effective tactics are distractions and misdirection. Because when I'm in the loop... there's nothing to break the lie. Yes, there are people in the world that care about me: none of them can help me at Magic. Yes, people want me at my job, but there's an incentive structure there that makes that not-fully-true and fragile. I've been fired before, after all.
All I can do is focus on tactical operations, which I am very, very good at nowadays: as long as I'm live in a tournament to achieve a goal, I am able to maintain a tactically functional mindset most of the time. But online? Or when I'm dead? It's a game of 'where's the lie' and it's too hard to shake.
I keep trying to find friends, to find resources, in the hopes that I can break lie 2, thereby breaking lie 1, and thereby breaking lie 3. But... yeah. Yeah. 8 years. 8 years of being told that because I want to commiserate about bad beats, I'm not worth your time. That I obviously don't want to improve. That Magic the Gathering is the greatest game in the world with the greatest welcoming community in the world, except you aren't really welcome, just tolerated.
It's hard to recover from that, even before you throw my issues with organized play in the mix, adding more layers of 'you aren't wanted'. That's a longer discussion.
So there it is. I have no resources or tools to improve, I have no emotional stabilizers, and that means that I can't break the lies, because they're just not lies enough. That's depression for you. Anxiety? Doesn't help here either. But that's a discussion for another time.
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