Mental Health Awareness Week - Gollum and Me

 This is mental health awareness week and so I’m going to write a bit of an odd blog about something that is a current issue for me and is affecting my approach to the UK Games Expo..

First, though.  I’m not a person who usually ever talks or write about mental health.  I’m 46 years old and right at the tail end of the generation that just reckons you should suck it up and get on with things, and so even when I have in past struggled with mental health I’ve virtually never sought help or support, I’ve just sucked it up and got on with things.  It’s always been a completely inadequate solution to a complex and protracted problem, and a solution that may well make things worse over time, but it’s how I was raised so that’s what I did.  I’m mentioning this only because if somewhere in here it sounds like a very poorly-worded and badly phrased or mishandled attempt at dealing with mental health that’s because I come from a generation famed for their mishandling of mental health issues.

Gollum and Me

I touched on this subject before, when I began prepping for Worlds in January: I have something I call my Gollum – a mean and cruel inner voice.  My Gollum believes I’m the best at anything I do and so it demands that I have to win at every game I play, I have to be champion of every tournament I enter, I have to prove I’m better than anyone else.  Gollum believes and demands all these things despite the complete lack of any evidence for believing that I *am* the best at anything I do (I‘m not), or that I *will* be champion (I never am).  And when Gollum doesn’t get what it wants it can get very angry with me for failing to secure the prize it wanted.

Gollum is a poisonous presence, once he comes out.  He twists how I think about the games I play, how I think about the results of playing.  It’s usual gradual and insidious, beginning with expectations of success, becoming a need and a hunger to achieve it, becoming a twisted self-hatred and sense of injustice around the reasons why I didn’t succeed, ultimately become a need for revenge/redemption through achieving even greater success next time.  A vicious cycle of the emotional stakes being inexorably raised, and my failure to achieve success creating deeper and deeper moods.

It's probably worth underling that none of this is rational or reasonable.  Gollum doesn’t care about the fact my opponents might be really good at the games too, and he certainly doesn’t care about the fact that dice have multiples sides and some of those sides are blank.  Gollum demands results and there’s only two possible outcomes – I fail and Gollum gets angry, or I actually succeed and Gollum raises the bar for the next event.  Gollum will never be happy.

It’s probably also worth saying that at no point does Gollum affect anybody but myself, at least not directly.  The only impact Gollum really has is on creating a toxic relationship between myself and the games I play.  But when Gollum has a hold of my mood he indirectly affects people around me, like my wife, who have to deal with me being snappy and bitter with Gollum being at the wheel.

So, without externalising this to anyone I did the ‘suck it up and get on with it’ thing, and just bottled Gollum up and developed some coping strategies.  One of the key methods by which I do this is deliberately hamstringing myself whenever I play an event, which is also something I’ve talked about before.  If I don’t try my absolute best to win an event then I have a handy excuse to point to when I don’t win it, and I can keep Gollum happy: yes, Gollum, we would have won if we’d really tried.  We’d have crushed them all.  You can go back to sleep now.

I’ve probably been coping like this with Gollum for 20 years or more, striking a balance between being as interested in competitive games as I can be because that sort of thing is my jam, while also making this just enough more difficult for myself so that I have an excuse for losing.  Playing a list I’ve never played before, playing a list I’ve made myself, playing a janky combo just to see if I can, playing something that I know has a bad matchup into the best lists… these are all ways that I can get my ‘fun’ out of the game without ever riling up Gollum.  I could be the Dread Pirate Roberts, fighting and losing with my left hand and being ok with losing, because I never have to find out if I would also have lost using my right hand.

By and large, it’s worked at keeping Gollum in check.  

But it’s been a rocky road learning how to manage this issue and X-Wing is maybe my 3rd or 4th attempt at keeping Gollum in check and I’ve left other games because I let him get out.  Gollum is why I quit with the World of Warcraft TCG and he’s why I quit Netrunner - in both cases I went to a fairly big event and did pretty well but came away twisted up about the fact that I hadn’t won.  I deserved to win.  I was the best.  I had the bet deck.  I understood the game better.  Nobody deserved to be ahead of me… and that’s Gollum being at the wheel, not me.  I know from my time playing Magic: The Gathering that letting Gollum drive the bus for any length of time can turn into a serious mental health issue, so in both cases I quit the game and took a break from playing anything competitive.

Gollum and X-Wing

Pretty much my entire involvement in X-Wing tournaments, right from when I started in 2016, has been about managing Gollum.  

From the outset I was playing non-meta lists that I’d made myself, often lists I’d deliberately refused to practice with.  Yes, I tried to make my lists as strong as I could because understanding a game and trying to exploit what I know is what I get from playing games, but so long as I was on the outside looking in I had an excuse.  I didn’t play a Crack Swarm I played my Slaughterhouse Five.  I didn’t play Triple Scouts, I didn’t play Paratanni I played Bobatanni (because I knew it was worse).  I never played aces, or big ships, or TLT, or Miranda, or whatever the best list was.  Not because I wanted to be a special snowflake, but because it wasn’t safe for me to pick up a meta list and play that.  So I played Snap Shot A-Wings, or A Score To Settle Quickdraw, I championed Quadjumpers and 4-LOM at the start of Second Edition, Scimitar Bombers, C1-1OP, Cartel Spacers and Alpha Squadron Interceptors.  Whatever the proven hot stuff was at the time I made damn sure I wasn’t playing it.  Playing a good list means I’m trying to win and trying to win means Gollum is going to start paying an unwanted interest.

Committing to attending Worlds this year was a calculated risk.  I couldn’t justify the expense of going to Worlds without at least TRYING to do well (even with Asmodee picking up most of the bill the trip still ran up a bill as the most expensive tournament I’ve attended since Grand Prix Toronto in 2010).  Spending three months practicing and iterating my First Order list 6for Worlds makes my Worlds list the most games I’ve ever played with a single squad.  Usually by 10 games with a squad, maximum, I’m getting ready to tap out and try some other bad ideas, but I played nearly 50 games with 6FO.

I went into the practice period very concerned about how Gollum would react, but in truth he was refreshingly quiet.  I think the fact that I was heading to the World Championships and that I would playing in the toughest room for X-Wing I’d likely ever be in had tamed even Gollum.  I played a list that I’d made myself, but which I was confident was good because it was running parallel to what other groups had found to be very good.  But there was still a huge question mark over where I would stack up against that caliber or players and so when I emerged in 25th place at the end of road I was genuinely delighted, and as I flew back with my arms full of swag even Gollum had to accept that I’d done pretty well.

There, and Back Again

And then it started.

25th at Worlds was really good.  But hadn’t I thrown away one of my games by being an idiot?  And hadn’t I been terribly unlucky to lose another one?  And hadn’t a list very much like mine actually won Worlds?

Why hadn’t I won Worlds?  I could have done.  I should have done.

For April I pushed the intrusive thoughts away, picked up some janky lists and had fun.  And then the Regional at the UK Games Expo was announced, and I decided to play in it.  And there’s a Worlds invite on the line.  And really nice template trays.  A lot like the ones I should have won at Worlds but failed to get.

I was 25th at Worlds.  3rd highest UK player.  There’s 4 template trays at the UKGE.  That template try is mine.

And then the expectation that we’d be using new points gave way to probably using the same points we currently have.  I could fly 6FO.  

I'm going going to crush everyone.  I'm not going to repeat my mistake in the game I threw away, I'm not going to get screwed over the by the dice.  I'm going to win the UKGE and prove that I should have won Worlds.

I could fly the 6FO that I should have won Worlds with.  Anything other than winning the UKGE will be a failure.  

And again, none of this is reasonable or rational.  I threw a game away because I'm entirely capable of throwing games away.  I lost to the dice in a game because I'm playing a dice game and sometimes you lose to the dice... I probably won my fair share of games with hot dice too.  It’s not a reasonable thing to think that I will win UKGE.  It’s not a rational thing to think.  But Gollum is driving the bus now, at some point over the last couple of weeks he snuck past me and has a hand on the wheel.

I’m writing this blog on the 16th of May.  The list submission deadline for UKGE is the 19th of May.  I had every intention of flying my Worlds list one last time but I’m no longer sure if I can actually do that and maintain the right frame of mind.  I don’t like how I’m visualising the UKGE, and specifically I don’t like how I’m visualising using 6FO in that event.  

It was one thing to go into a big event at Worlds when I didn’t know where I stacked vs the other players and I didn’t know how good my list was, it’s another thing to go into the UKGE ‘knowing’ that I’m the 3rd best player in the UK (based on the results of this one event, which is fucking ridiculous to use as a measure but then this isn’t about being rational), and ‘knowing’ that I’m playing THE GREATEST SQUAD THAT’S EVER EXISTED IN X-WING (also ridiculous).  Gollum doesn’t care.  Gollum demands results.

So in the next four days I have to pick my squad.  I *want* to fly 6FO but I may not be able to.  I may have to take back control and play something else instead, something that I know has a ceiling so that I can sit back and be happy with coming 22nd.

I do want that template tray, though.  Or do I?  I don’t think I do - I’ve never cared about prizes and swag before, really.  I think Gollum wants it, but it’s been a bit harder to separate the two of us this week

So...

If this has felt a bit rambling it’s probably because I don’t really have a neatly tied-up narrative flow for this problem.  I don’t have a solution to tie it up into a neat bow at the end.  And as I badged it up as a mental health thing I think a healthy dose of perspective is needed.

Not knowing which plastic ships you should choose to play with in a Star Wars game seems like such a meaningless thing to have as an issue.  How can I even bundle something like this up into ‘mental health’ alongside all the much bigger problems that people have to deal with and which has a much bigger impact on their lives?  But I think to an extent that’s what makes mental health issues into mental health issues – the scale of the impacts don’t have rational connections to the scale of the causes.  So it's about plastic spaceships but also it's about that I’ve spent decades running away from these issues.  I'm unable to fully embrace what *I* want to do because I’m afraid of how it can and will spiral out of my control, and how much it can and will affect people around me if I let that happen.

Plus I know that I can always pull the plug on Gollum if need to by just doing what I did to World of Warcraft TCG and Netrunner, and just slamming the door on him and walking away.  But if I can avoid doing that then I will, I think at this point I've managed to sustain playing X-Wing longer than any other game, maybe even including Magic.  I don't want to, but I know I can go cold turkey, and lots of people with 'real' mental health problems don't have that escape hatch.

Gollum is part of who I am.  Maybe he comes from being raised by a family of teachers so I whizzed through my school years expecting gold stars and merit badges and the real world has come up short in terms of the external validation that Gollum craves.  I don’t crave it (I think I’ve a long history of self-sabotage on social media platforms to demonstrate the lengths to which I’ll sometimes go to ensure I don’t get external validation) but Gollum does.  

Gollum is part of who I am, but I don’t have to like him and I don’t have to let him win.   And sometimes that’s a bigger struggle to manage that at other times.  This week, which happens to also be Mental Health Awareness Week, it’s on my mind a lot.  And this time I decided to share how my wacko mind works sometimes.  Thanks for reading