A conversation with myself about Ladder Anxiety
A conversation with myself about Ladder Anxiety
I want to want things. Sometimes my brain gets in the way, and I have a conversation with it. This is an example of one of those conversations.
I haven't played Dota in two weeks. There’s an asterisk to how bad that sounds.
I decided that I was going to be relative low-key about my expectations for playing games for Ranked, and that was for the best. At the moment I'm unemployed, and that means I have other priorities, a side effect of that is a magnifying glass on how I choose to spend my time.
I've been trying to be more present lately. That takes a lot of effort on my part.
Being able to take yourself out of the internal conversation that you're having with yourself means bringing yourself back to both your current mental and physical feeling, usually with the sensation of breath. Presence causes me to focus on what's right in front of me, and there's usually an effort to say "What am I feeling right now?", rather than “How.”
That internal conversation was something I wanted to explore in this post; I have a similar "present vs not present" thought when I'm debating queuing up for a ranked match, or even opening a resource to learn more. Maybe we just throw up a conversation where my Thinking Brain (TB) is talking to my Being Brain (BB).
I have conversations like these with myself often, even if they aren’t literal; sometimes they can be a fast-forward of the feelings and emotional resolution, without words being exchanged.
Being Brain: So, you've got some time. How about queuing up for a game?
Thinking Brain: It feels like there’s a lot of weight attached to that decision.
BB: Like what? I mean, it can't be that bad, right?
TB: I mean, there's a lot of things that could go wrong.
BB: Again, like what?
TB: What if...
BB: (Ah, okay, we're on that roller coaster again.)
TB: What if we lose? We had some good progress before, and we actually won some games! What if that number goes down? What if the losses are just that bad?
BB: Why does that matter?
TB: I mean, it would feel like I didn't learn anything at all. It would feel like I hadn't made progress. It would feel like I would be consigned to an ongoing struggle. It would feel like the discomfort around “making up for lost ground” is permanent, and immutable.
BB: Isn't that a bit of an exaggeration? Haven't you put time into thinking about how to get better? Even if you're losing, can you not say you're making progress as a player?
TB: Sure, but isn't that reliant on a confidence I feel I don't have? I don't feel I'm practicing or drilling those skills enough to actually improve.
BB: Well, if that's the feeling, why aren't you doing that, then?
TB: Doing that would be a reinforcement of how clumsy it feels to try, and how permanent that inadequacy feels. Like right now — considering whether I act or not — I already feel exhausted. I know that I would need to exert effort to get out of the overly negative mind space, *and then* still play the game. My mood afterward feels like a weighted coin flip: losing makes it worse, and entrenches the feeling.
BB: So... you're not going to play the game because you're afraid of the reinforcement of the inadequacy, and you're also not practicing because you're afraid of a... lesser feeling of inadequacy, even if it would contribute to lessening the bigger feeling over time?
TB: I mean, short answer, yes. Although I’m not even sure that practice would lessen that bigger feeling. Even if I win, I still wouldn’t be feel like I earned it. For all I know, I could just have won because the enemy team imploded, or I got carried.
BB: I mean, if that's how you're feeling, it seems like an okay choice to not play. You’re not obligated to spend your time with something that stresses you out.
TB: … you're letting me off the hook too easily.
BB: So you're not... even letting me agree with you?
TB: No, that's too kind. You doing that isn't going to help me. I'm going to take advantage of that kindness, and never actually do anything.
BB: How do you know?
TB: I just do. If I let you give me that kindness, I'm going to sit here, never play, never learn, and then this project will fail, Doing that for other areas in my life means I'll never do anything, end up boring, and stagnate as a person..
BB: I mean... that seems a bit drastic.
TB: Does it? How do I know that I can trust myself to not be?
BB: Has that kind of thinking or process led to you actually getting somewhere and not just further burnout? Has putting more pressure on yourself to act for the sake of acting actually worked out?
TB: ...
BB: Do you just want me to ask you “why are you really doing this?” so you can justify feeling worse about yourself, because you're not living up to some standard?
TB: Yes please.
I swear this isn’t as crazy dramatic as it reads 🙂.
A lot of my mental health issues involve working on solid foundation of confidence and self-esteem. Ranked
, as a project, is a way to poke and prod at this in an environment that wasn’t exactly safe — because hey, y’all can read it — but challenging. I don’t mean “challenging” as in “difficult;” more just that there’s friction.That sense of urgency around figuring how “how to want to want something
” criss-crosses into a lot of emerging gaming trends. As brands decide “hey, we want to be a lifestyle brand” in order to invade your day-to-day existence, it means that they’re competing with other companies who have the same idea.
Not everyone in their life has room for multiple lifestyle brands, especially if the reward is based on choosing only one. Trying to juggle a few means you can’t enjoy the strengths of one.
This piece isn’t necessarily that, though.
The first positive step with Ranked isn’t sitting here and saying “I’m going to play ten games a month and focus." It's more breaking down my approach to play (and practice), which has a lot of pressure attached.
(I don’t particularly know how I’m going to do that yet, but bringing an unconscious feeling into a conscious one seems like a good step.)
It feels different than just saying “I’m going to play for fun”, because there’s a goal attached; the goal isn’t “hit this number”, it’s “understand how pursuing that number makes you feel.” The play is incidental.
I could be doing this type of project with woodworking or breadmaking or language-learning, but gaming seems like the path with the least friction involved. Maybe that’s a good thing, or maybe it isn’t.
So let's say you've been studying how to play on [musical] changes and you go to do a gig and you can't play on the changes.
The adult goes and the ego of the adult says, oh man, I suck. You know? I'll never get this. You know? You make a bunch of grandiose statements that don't help and they're not true. The truth is that you've been practicing playing on changes for say three months and it wasn't ready to happen yet. You know?
They have a saying in the various programs, you know, [Alcoholics Anonymous] and all that. They say, don't quit a day before the miracle happens. And that could very well apply to your practicing. If you're trying to learn to play in five or you're trying to learn to play in a weird key or you're trying to learn to play better lines than you play, don't quit a day before the miracle happens.
Your mind messes up more than one flow. It messes up the flow of playing, but it also messes up the flow of practicing.
— Kenny Werner, “A Master Class in Jazz Performance and Creativity with Pianist Kenny Werner”
That “ego of the adult” is what I’m zeroing in on, here.
That, and the creeping fear that if I didn’t put pressure on myself (like Thinking Brain up there), I would do nothing. Not doing anything on purpose requires the ability to remain present while doing so, without having an ongoing internal conversation.
That leads to self-doubt, which is the real killer. It’s been here a long time. It’s rusted in.
But rust can be broken, one blow at a time.
Amazon Links in posts will have affiliate codes.
I'm taking the names of "Doing" and "Being" from the two modes of "being" from The Mindful Way Through Depression; "Doing Mode" is the brain that is putting pressure on myself to be doing something specific, or to "use my time wisely." "Being Mode" is the idea of being present, in the moment, and not feeling like I need to be constantly pushing myself towards a specific goal.
I think this is the point where I’ve stopped caring about italicizing Ranked and Linked as publication names.
"[…] [A]nhedonia is currently used by researchers to refer to reduced motivation, reduced anticipatory pleasure (wanting), reduced consummatory pleasure (liking), and deficits in reinforcement learning.”