Ahh the hole again, huh?

Yeah… been in there for a long time without realising it.

Well hello there, it has been very quiet here for a while now. That usually means I was doing pretty okay. And I kinda was… until I realised I wasn’t.
Since the last blog post in May 2021 a lot has happened, and nothing. I created a small one-man company for my streaming and Youtube stuff but not because I became successful, more because you kinda have to when you make a little bit of money in Germany. I don’t want any legal trouble so I just did it. No big deal.

For a while now I got money from the state, because I don’t make nearly enough money with the stuff I want to do. I kinda have a deal with them until May 2023 to see if I can grow my business enough to sustain my life with it so they leave me alone for now. Spoiler Alert: My project/business/passion (whatever you wanna call it) is not nearly as big and does not nearly generate enough money for me (and I don’t need and don’t want a lot of it).

For 3 years now I streamed for at least 30 hours a week and for 2,5 years I published 2 videos a day. I still have less than 10 viewers in my streams and not enough subscribers on Youtube to even get monetized. Apparently, the stuff I do and love is not interesting & entertaining enough. Of course I could just look up the trends and the stuff that works and just do that but firstly I mostly hate these things and secondly I don’t want to be a Youtuber/streamer/influencer. I just want to play videogames and make people laugh eventually. I would be fine to not be famous in any way if I can just do that and make enough money to pay the bills. So yeah I have a strict border with things I can and want to do.
And I tested a lot of things, changed stuff, tried other approaches. Nothing. Well nothing is unfair in regards to my small community, which I am grateful for, but the bottom line is it doesn’t work. Maybe I am not likeable or entertaining enough. I don’t know honestly. I think a big part is the games I play. I mostly play smaller singleplayer games that end eventually. So it means I change up games quite often. And that’s not good. On Twitch and Youtube you have to do/play one thing/game and stick to it. But I hate that, everything gets boring for me really quick. I just like to experience new things/games and I like to finish stuff and move on. That’s the worst you can do to grow as a streamer unfortunately.

In the last half year I really realized that I grow WAY to slow and that my stuff is probably never big enough to have even a part time income. That’s what I mean with I was in the hole for a long time before I realized it. I am miserable at the moment, honestly. I don’t know what to do. Over the last months I tried to prepare myself mentally for a part time job. But I can’t… I am scared of everything! It paralises me completely. Every aspect of a potential job scares me. Conflicts with colleagues, fucking up easy things, getting a challenging task, you name it… I am even scared to loose my will to life again.
And with those thoughts I then realized fear is an even bigger problem for me generally than I knew before. I am even scared of going to the psychiatric again, because I don’t want to be put in a clinic and not being home. The only place where I feel calm is in my flat. And lately I had a lot of problems with my flat so not even my safe place was reliable the last 2 months.

Currently, I need to go to some kind of coaching to help me find a way to work a normal job again. The state suggested this to me but what they actually mean is (in my opinion) “do this or you’ll get fined or don’t get any money anymore”. Honestly I don’t know if this helps me. It might, it might not.

My biggest problem is as soon as there is an external factor that expects something from me, I only feel fear and I freeze. External factor can be anything really but the main problem is, of course, an employer. I can’t even explain why. It can be the same task, if I do it for me, because I want or need to do it, it’s mostly fine. If someone else wants me to do the same it’s just fear. I hope I can at least reach a state where I don’t feel so much fear to be able to work part time.

It does not help that I probably suffer from the “Imposter Syndrome” in which people doubt their skills, talents or accomplishments and have a persistent internalized fear of being exposed as a fraud. Maybe this syndrome is creating the fear, maybe it just boosts it. I don’t know.
What I know is the next few months will be scary!

And that’s it for now folks. I hope you enjoyed the read and maybe can relate a bit.

Until the next one, Peace!

How do you perceive yourself, man?

Damn that’s a tough one…

What’s good everybody? Loooong, long time since the last post, I know. Thankfully this time of not writing stuff was rather good than bad. I was focusing so hard on my project on being free, I basically had no real time to “think” about stuff too much. I just did stuff. Started Youtube also! This and daily streams is more work than you might think. Also, I moved during that time. Had to go out the kinda toxic (for me at least) city and back to the city where I studied! Living alone and nobody is bothering me at the moment, yaaaay! Yeah that’s basically the status quo, not too much thinking more doing and grinding.

However, in the last few weeks I started to “think” again. Not necessarily the bad kind of thinking where you cannot stop and go in circles all the time but nevertheless thinking. As I said I live alone right now, which is good. I figured I need to be alone a lot. So yeah for now and the foreseeable future it’s the ideal environment for me. My thoughts, however, went further than that, though. Do I want to be alone my whole life? Do I generally want a girlfriend/wife? First answer to that question for me would be yes. With more thought behind it, it gets complicated. The difficult thinking is not about her. Let’s skip the attributes and characteristics she’d need to have. I am not particularly picky, it just has to be a natural fit.
Difficult for me in this thought construct is: Me! Let me try to explain. I am thinking back and forth on this for probably a decade or so. Ever since my last “intimate” relationship with a woman which is more than a decade ago. When I think about all the teen relationships I had I kinda feel sorry for the girls I dated. “Why?” You might think. Well that’s the hard part. It’s about how I see myself or how I perceive myself as a human being. I feel sorry for them because they dated me, made out with me, cuddled with me, etc.
When I try to imagine myself with anybody in those situations I am disguted.

By myself!

I don’t know why. When I look at myself in the mirror for example I am not disgusted. It’s not that I like myself in those situations, rather there is just nothing feeling wise. I just see a human being, no bad or good feelings at all. It’s just in these imaginary situations with women (come on we all do it) that I am disgusted. Because of this “issue” I don’t know if I can ever be not single. I doubt this feeling will go away ever honestly. It doesn’t matter how often people tell me “I am attractive” or a “handsome young man”, it changes nothing deep inside me. It’s of course nice to hear and maybe makes my day but that’s it. No change in my core perception about myself.

The thing is I don’t know what to do. Should I try to start dating in hope of “the right one” changing this perception with the risk of me suffering from these thoughts and feelings everytime I look at her or should I just stay alone?

I wonder if I am the only one with this problem.

Honestly I don’t know when the next post is coming. Initially I wanted to post stuff regularly but I figured out it doesn’t work for me. I can’t just write stuff regularly. I need to have something to say like today. However, I try to write a new post more frequently than every 10 months. The last one was August 2020…
Yeah that was it for today, I hope you liked it and can relate in some way. Thank you for reading this!
Also, I hope you are healthy in this pandemic. Stay safe, get vaccinated when you can and see you in the next post! Peace!

Do you remember the hole?

Unfortunately, YES…

Well… shit! I bet a lot of you guys know the situation when you made future plans (eventually with big changes after a hard time), are really excited for this “new” future and then it happens… something rather unforeseen happens and one puzzle piece of your plan does not fit anymore and the whole plan shatters to pieces. Well, at least in your head in the beginning.

This happened to me today! I got a message that something I really wished for does not work out the way I hoped. Honestly, my world and my future lie in shattered pieces in my mind atm. Even though I was going quite personal in this blog in the past I don’t really want to go in too much detail. All I share for now is that it’s work related. I’d rather talk and write about things I did or that happened to me rather than telling people want I want to do in the future. So I keep it more general here.

Basically, I am at the edge of the infamous hole staring into the infinite abyss of darkness, desperation and fear.

It’s just so frustrating and I don’t know what to do now. I hope I find a solution in the next days but in the moment where I am writing this I don’t know what to do. If I was able to cry, I guess this would be a fantastic moment for it…

The thing is I originally got the message two days ago but I was too scared to read it. I generally have the “problem” where I delay reading messages. I don’t really know why yet, tho. Well, apparently my guts said this message is bad so I was afraid too read it immediately. I knew I had to read it soon because, as I said, it was important for a “no” or a “go” for my plans.
– Quick sidenote: if you happen to be someone who waits for a response from me atm, I mean no offense, it’s just like that currently and I’m working on it. I’m sorry! –

So yeah, I feel like I got punched in the face laying on the ground completely dizzy right now. Need to gather my thoughts right now and in the next days. Hope I find a solution or an alternative soon. Don’t know what happens if I don’t find one. This brings this huge fear of the future back, the one I did not really feel during the last weeks.
FUCK MAN, WHY?
Why can’t I be some sort of mindless drone, working in just a regular job, coming home in the afternoon, doing stuff for a few hours, go to sleep and repeat everything every day and being fine with it and the system?
Why do I have to think all the time?
Why don’t I fit in?
Why is the world like it is?
Why do I have to be scared all the time?
Why is it not different?
How would the world be different?

I don’t know!

I don’t think I belong here…

Am I the only one thinking the way I do?

What the fuck is going on in this world? My mind is just filled with a corroding black cloud of dissappointment, hate and resignation – and it’s growing every day. Honestly, there is so much stuff happening all the time making my sanity breaking apart more day by day.

I seriously believe that my mind and my thinking is so far away from humanity or at least the huge majority of all humans. I don’t think I belong in this world – or in this time – I don’t know. I’m flying so high above everyone watching all the stuff that’s happening and shaking my head constantly. Nothing makes sense anymore. The stupidity of people not being able to open up the tunnel of their views and believes, the ongoing work against each other of politicians and countries and the egoistical greed for power and money of so many people is just killing me.
I’d wish I could say leave me the fuck alone with your bullshit and keep destroying each other but sadly I have to kinda play along if I wanna keep staying alive – need to have money etc. to afford necessities. So I need to do a random ass job and interact somewhat with the society in this world and time I don’t even feel I belong in. So that’s great! I’m curious when the majority realizes that nothing makes sense.

Where are we going with this system?

Where? Tell me!

I don’t think anyone has an answer…

Is there anyone having the same thoughts or am I alone?

Is anyone feeling me?



I have so much to say and nothing at the same time. Need to find a way to bring it to paper. It’s hard, tho.

Anyway, despite the really dark vibes I have due to the stuff I brought to paper here I am doing quite okay and made lots of progress in the last few months.
Hope you “enjoyed”. Peace!

Hey man, do you cry a lot?

Well, I wish I did…

Man it has been tough to get inspired or find a topic for the blog in the last couple of days. When I started it I had so much in mind, so much to say but somehow it’s as if I talked about everything without anything left. That’s not true, though! I feel kind of empty in my head regarding writing. And that’s exactly the topic I want to adress today. I start to feel something again. For a long time I couldn’t say that at all. I talked to a bunch of other people with depression and a lot of them experience rushes of “bad” emotions without the ability to control them. For example they start to cry and/or a sudden rage comes over them. For me, however, none of this was ever the case. For me, the exact opposite developed over time. I didn’t really feel anything for a long time…

“Hey isn’t it way better to not feel any emotion than to start crying for no reason or destroy stuff you actually like in a sudden rush of anger?” you may ask yourselves. Well maybe, but let me tell you that not feeling anything is also no joke. It probably started with me not caring about little things in my life. “What am I gonna wear today? It doesn’t matter!” This developed over time of course. At some point nothing mattered anymore. And it’s somehow logical. Compare those two situations: You get a raise at work and your friend cancels the visit he/she wanted to do. Well, the raise should make you happy and the canceling friend should make you sad or angry. If you can’t feel anything those two situations “feel” exactly the same. It’s just a dull line like a the one of a stopping heartbeat. Why should you matter about anything from now on, because everything that happens is the same to you? Often times you don’t even know how you are doing. If you don’t have any emotions how do you know what needs you have at that given point in time? At some point I didn’t care whether I am alive or dead anymore.

The thing is, my mind is playing a huge role in my emotional dullness. As I said I had/have no emotions for a long time but when I was faced with either bad or good situations where I should have been e.g. happy or angry my mind kind of told me what I was supposed to feel. It’s so hard to explain. Upon receiving good news I just knew I was or was supposed to be happy but I did not feel happy. Does that make sense? Probably not but there is no better explanation sadly.

I guess a reason why my mind unconciously started this emotional dullness thing is to save me from unpleasant situations. It kind of makes sense right? Before getting overwhelmed with bad emotions and doing bad things based on that let’s better not feel anything at all. So we can be rational. Unfortunately, that led, as I said, also to not feeling anything positive anymore and also to dissociations I started to develop. And I can hear you ask “What are dissociations?”. Well, dissociations can show themselves in a lot of ways. I don’t want to be a lecturer so I will just write down what I experienced. Go to the following website if you are interested in more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissociation_(psychology)

Summed up you can understand dissociations as detachments from reality (I copied that from the wikipedia article :P). I experience them in two ways. From certain times in the past I almost have no memories. I can barely remember anything of the first half of 2019 because I was so fucking stressed out due to work. It’s also hard to explain, of course I know what I was doing the first half of 2019 (working) but at the same time it’s just as if this time does not exist. Very weird. I also have this feeling about the first two weeks in the depression clinic I was in. I know I was there but it’s kind of gonein my head, too. The second kind of dissociations I experience is when I am in an unpleasant situation. When it happens then my mind wanders of somewhere else and I don’t really feel like me anymore. It’s really hard to follow conversations and remember things then. It feels like I am more of a neutral and invisible observant from outside. Now the detachment from reality thing makes sense, right? The problem with it is, however, without knowledge and therapy you don’t really know when you experience them. That makes it so hard to work against. What do I do when I realize I am drifting of? I try to inflict harmless pain to myself. I press the pain point between the thumb and the pointer. This helps me come back in the moment and is completely harmless. It really hurts, though. Fortunately, it doesn’t happen to often anymore. Probably also, because I became less dull emotionally and know when I don’t feel comfortably and stuff like that.

That was it for this week. I hope you liked it!
And in the end I have to adress the obvious. Yes we have a pandemic going on right now but please don’t act like a stupid retard and do hamster shopping and freak out about it. Take it seriously but don’t overreact. In my opinion the media and its reporting has a lot to do with the panic of the people so let me suggest you one last thing. I just go to this website to inform myself about “corona” with facts and not with stupid headlines because the media wants to make money. Go here and check it out for yourself: https://www.who.int (World Health Organization).

Peace!

Do you know when your problems started?

Let me tell you a story of my youth…

I was really struggling to find a topic for todays post. Seems like I don’t have a lot of inspiration at the moment. However, I managed to come up with something so you have something to read (isn’t that great?). Most of my post are either settled in the present or are non-time-related things. This part, however, takes me way back into my teens. I am talking about 10-15 years in the past. Why? Well, because that’s probably were some it started – the corrupting and blackening of my mind.

Back in the day I was a completely different person. People I got to know since I started to study in 2013/14 did not meet the Luke from his teens. Back in the day I was probably one the sportiest persons you’d ever meet. I played football (soccer for the Americans) since I could think I guess. My parents even told me I was kicking the ball before I was able to walk at all. So yeah, football was my life. Nothing else mattered – ok I was gaming all my life too but it was never such a “religion” or lifestyle like football was back in the day (nowadays it is, tho).

Almost everybody I knew I met through football. Football was all there is. Because of that, I was very ignorant and probably the opposite of open minded. I could not understand why someone is not sporty and does not love football. Not only that, I was also very good at it, too. In fact I was that good that I probably was the best in all my early teams and I made it in several selection teams with ease. Football wise a lot of people looked up to me (I guess). And yes, my goal was always to become a football pro someday. I think I was the happiest person alive when I heard of the interest of one of the best german clubs “VFL Wolfsburg” (for everyone not having a clue, this club plays in the first league in germany).

To speed things up: I decided to transfer to the club and was a step closer of achieving my dream. This sounds awesome, right? A young lad passionate about something one step closer to his goal. Normally I would agree but not this time. In retrospective this was the decision that changed everything. Of course I did not know that at the time. I was just so happy to play for the club.
Again speeding things up: I played for the club for half a season. I was not thrown out for being too bad of a player or for screwing up otherwise. It was my decision to leave the club. Everybody was irritated and without understanding. After all I apparently was a guy with a lot of potential (there was a lot of talk about me among the people in the club – at least I heard that, I don’t know if it’s true). So you may ask, why would someone just give up on their dream after half a year without any obvious reason? I can understand that question, I really do. Let me explain. First I will tell you the reasons I told everyone back in the day, especially my parents.

There were two reasons for me to leave the club. Firstly, I did not like that I did not have time for anything else anymore. During the week I had school obviously and I was picked up by the club at around 4 pm for training and came back home at ca. 9pm, 4-5 days a week. So I just had time for homework, eating and sleeping. On the weekend I had a game with sometimes hours of travel-time. Secondly, I lost my passion for football because playing at a semi-pro level you have to perform everytime. It’s not only fun anymore, you have to be at your best play at all times to not get cut of the team. That pulled the fun out of me. With that being said I do want to clear out: I did not lie back then, I was really thinking those were the reasons. But they were not!

I found out the real reason due to my therapy. Yes you heard right, I (or something inside my mind) somehow convinced myself of fake reasons to conceal the truth. The reason I quit playing for the club was just one simple reason: Fear! I was just afraid I could not do it. There was so much pressure from myself, from the club, from almost everyone I knew from football from my hometown and that was just killing me. I realized that like I said just recently – 12 years after everything happened. For 12 years I conciously believed in the wrong reasons. The odd thing about it is also I always knew that this was not true and I was just afraid, but also I didn’t know. It was more like an unconscious thought that popped up every now and then. Now I’m sure, though. And I’m not ashamed to be honest about it. I was afraid, and still am a lot of time. Some of it is probably just my personality but I try to cope with it in my therapy of course. It’s hard, because the world scary I’m not gonna lie.

For years I did not mention anything of my football past when meeting new people. I was afraid of coming across as arrogant. I really was kinda ashamed to adress that, honestly. Nowadays it’s easier for me to talk about it, because I know not everybody things I’m an arrogant asshole when I tell them I was very good at football and so on. Also, probably a lot of people just don’t care at all and I understand as well, it’s actually better that way.
This post was a quite personal story of my past I wanted to write down and share. I hope it was a good read. Take care of yourselves and don’t be afraid to be afraid! It’s fine. Peace!

Hey how are you? Do you think you can work again?

Well, please stop asking this FUCKIN’ question…

Work, work, work… It’s all about work, everywhere and everytime. I’m sure there will be several people not liking this post or having a complete opposite opinion about the stuff I am about to write down. That’s fine. This is just my fundamental attitude and also one of the roots of my condition and situation right now. I feel like the system does not really care if you are better, it’s just interested in you being able to work again. Because then you are no burden for it and the society anymore, right? “We will help you to do all that’s necessary that you feel better.” actually means “We will try everything to get your ass to work again, because we don’t want to pay you anything anymore. Oh and once you work again you obviously have to pay insurance fees again :)” Well fuck that, man! The only question I heard in the last couple of months was “Is there a plan or a date when you start to go back to work?”. No “how are you?” or “do you want to do the same job again?” or “what do you actually want to do?”. It’s just assumed that I accept the world and the system and go back to my job eventually continue to live this pathetic and boring life. Did I have a choice to live in this system and society? I don’t think so.

Wake up – get ready – go to work like a puppet among all the other puppets – go home somewhen after +8 hours – have a few hours of “free time” – go to sleep – repeat.
Think about it and do the math: a day has 24 hours, you sleep for about ~8 hours (not everybody sleeps that long but it fits for my example), everything regarding work takes about 10 hours (8 hours of actual work time, 0,5-1 hour of travel to and from work , 0,5 hours of breaktime and the time from waking up to stepping out the door in the morning 0,5-1 hour), that means you have roughly 6 hours of “free time” a day. I put the free time in “” because cleaning, doing groceries, going to doctors, some responsibilities, etc. are included in there. So you often have less than 6 hours for the stuff you actually want to do.

I don’t know what you guys think about that but I think this is crazy. Why would I want to live this forced, boring and repetitive life? Why exist at all when you have to do something you don’t want to do the majority of your life? Oh and please don’t come up with something like “a job is good for you, it gives you structure in life, bla bla”. This is bullshit. If you can’t structure your life, weeks or days without an external force or entity telling you exactly what to do and when to do it, you have a problem in my opinion. Don’t get me wrong, it feels good to have something to work on and progress (I just realized it with this blog and with me starting to stream on twitch.tv) but there’s a difference between something you are voluntarily doing because it gives you a good feeling or because it excites you and something you have to do 8 hours a day to not die or live a miserable life under a bridge.

Some of you probably think now “Dude, when you hate the ‘normal’ work routine and 9to5 life then simply don’t do it and just make money with what you love. You can do what you want nowadays.” Well… Firstly, the things I like to do normally have no value for anyone else but me. So how should I make money with it? Secondly, there’s a significantly higher risk when trying to do that. Meaning if it takes a while to build you have to work something else and that means you do the shitty work to finance your dream of the “good” work without even knowing if it’s worth it. That’s fucked up imo. Thirdly, when you must do the stuff you like every day to survive I don’t know if it’s that amazing anymore. Just the thought of I have to do this now every day to get money, to pay rent and groceries, to live essentially… is frightening.

Despite all that I just started to try to make money with my own stuff with streaming on twitch.tv/mrluukyy. Besides that, I have other things in mind that I want to do. Why? You may ask. Well, the reason is simple. This is the only way I can imagine my future life without having the immediate urge to vomit and/or jump out of my window. So it’s basically one tiny rope I am holding myself onto right now. If this rope tears, I don’t know what I’m gonna do.

Also, I don’t get why work is always a huge subject in the society. It’s always one of the first things you get asked – or get judged by. “Oh this man is 50 and still works at the counter in the grocery store? I don’t like him, he is not ambitious and does not want to achieve anything in life.” Yeah maybe he doesn’t… So? Maybe he values free time over money, power and standing? You thought about that? Besides that there could be a million reasons why he works there. Officially every person’s value is the same but we all know that’s not true, sadly. If you don’t have a “good” job you are not worth much apparently. I don’t get this and it makes me sick. This endless talk about ambition and achieving stuff. We should not judge or rank people depending on their jobs or ambition(s), we shouldn’t judge them at all. And if we do judge people than please how people treat other people and not what they do for a living.

I guess that was quite a rant about work, the system and society but I needed to write this down somewhere. Maybe, deep down, some people think the same or at least similar. If not, then my feeling of being different and not belonging here is confirmed.
As always I appreciate you reading this and please feel free to share this blog if you think it is of value to someone.

Peace!

Have you been in the hole lately?

Well, yeah. no. I don’t know actually

So I’m gonna be honest with all of you. I’m rather uninspired today as I sit at my desk and write down these words. It’s a strange day today, the dark entity in my head tries its best to take me down again but I’m not letting it. This post may appear unstructured and not planned because it is.

“What’s the dark entity you mentioned?” you may ask. Well for starters it’s kind of like a voice in my head. Unlike someone that hears voices I don’t really hear that other voice. It’s more like thoughts that pop up in your mind without you being able to do anything against it. They feel somehow like your own thoughts but at the same time they feel like someone elses. Really hard to describe – and probably comprehend. Basically, these thoughts tell me how senseless everything is and how shitty the world is. This entity hates everything and everyone, it doesn’t want to do anything all day and stay in bed. Just laying there to suffer.

Fortunately, after almost a year of therapy and stuff, I start to understand how to deal with this entity. When it’s present and “talks” to me I simply talk back to it and calm it down. Try to think of it like talking to a kid that is upset or is crying because of something. Maybe it’s not that accurate (I don’t have kids and don’t actually know how I would do this task to calm it down and stuff) but the best metaphor I can think of atm. I cannot get upset or “loud” with the entity, because that’s what it wants in a way. If I either do this or just give in and do nothing I’m lost and i fall in a deep, dark hole – at least for the day. Describing what the hole is like is kind of hard. This entity takes over everything of you, your thoughts, your emotions and even your body in some cases. Everything is obviously still yours but it also feels controlled externally. You get flushed with bad thoughts that often do not have ends but rather loop around and come again. In those situations I know that not everything what I think is necessarily true or logical but at the same time your “other self” makes you believe it. You slide down this really slippery slide and can’t do anything against it.

Luckily nowadays I can mostly avoid falling in this hole for a whole day. That doesn’t mean that I win every battle with the entity. Like today I wanted to go to a store to buy colors and brushes after therapy but it made me go home. This is something I have to deal with at the moment, I win some and I loose some battles. Accepting this is a first step towards dealing with depression. You just have to remind yourself that if you loose a battle today it doesn’t mean you will loose the next battle and the one after that etc. As I said I lost a battle today but fuck it, I am going to buy the paint and brushes tomorrow. The war is long, it’s not won in one battle.

The entity starts to loose power over you once you find reasons (for you personally) to keep going and to get up in the morning. Another way to put it is you simply have to do stuff. Then you don’t have as much time to think and stay in your head. That’s one of the reasons I started this blog and started to stream on twitch (twitch.tv/mrluukyy). As I mentioned earlier I want to buy stuff to paint, because I also want to keep doing this. Oh and I found my love for reading again. I think I read about 17 books since last summer. Not only you can experience awesome stories with books but it’s also the quietness I really enjoy. Especially in those fast loud times nowadays this is a good method to escape the insanity of our world – more about this insanity maybe in a future post – for an hour or two.

This is a rather short one but as I said I had a strange and uninspired day today. I think considering those circumstances I nevertheless put something valueable to paper.
Hope you liked it, feel free to share this blog. Thanks for the support!

Peace i’m out!

Stop gaming and educate yourself man!

That’s eXactly what i’m doing right NOW…

After two tough posts about (my) mental health it’s time for something else again. While I know this post won’t get as much attention as the two previous ones, I don’t really care either. I’m doing what my gut says and today it says write something positive about your passion: Gaming! In my first post with this topic I wrote that you can develop really useful skills when playing videogames. Not only it’s fun as hell but you can also grow and develop as a person – isn’t that great? Again, this is no scientific paper or anything similar, I just write down what I experienced and gained over the years.

First let me state the obvious, in our modern, digitalised world you naturally gain some basic knowledge about software, networks, how to handle computers and similar stuff (ofc depending on what you play). I heard that’s great if you apply for jobs nowadays.
To elaborate my headline a bit I will talk about the genre shooter now. What is a shooter you may ask? Well, as the word already implies: you shoot people (or other creatures) and try to stay alive yourself. Ain’t that horrible, right? Well in real life this is really horrible but try to see the bigger picture and don’t focus on what you are actually doing there. As I said you want to stay alive while shooting other players (in case of a multiplayer shooter), that means you have to stay aware of your surroundings at all times. Someone can jump around the corner any minute and if he does you need to shoot him first. In order to do that you need a really fast reaction time. If you are playing with and against other people you probably need good communication and teamwork. Those are main points you develop while playing that genre. Also, eventually you start to analyse the enemies behaviour and predict where they come from. There are probably more things to gain but let me go to another genre.

Playing adventures gives you many advantages in life. In case you don’t know what adventures are: you basically advance in the game by solving the most divers riddles. Sometimes you need to find an unusual way to pull a stuck lever in an abandoned building or a guard in front of the factory needs to be distracted in order for you to sneak in. How are you gonna do that? In very good games you have more than one solution for those problems. How about hooking a dogs’ leash to the lever and throwing a ball far away to make the dog run very fast away from the lever in order to pull it (I made that up but there probably is a game where you have to do exactly that). “Ahh now I can use the ball I found at the beginning of the game and did not know where to use it“. There you have it, problem solving and creative thinking combined with weighing up and excluding all given possibilities. Honestly, I cannot count the times I read “problem solving capabilities” and “creative mind” in job descriptions.

Let’s get a little emotional know – shall we? Firstly, because I come to my favourite genre know and secondly because this section is about (sometimes emotionally hard) decisions you’ll face in (modern) role-playing-games. It starts with decisions “do you kill the murderer of a family of 4 and get a lot of money from the brother of the father who hired you to kill him or do you go to the police and hand him over like a hero would do (without getting any money)?” and ends up in very difficult to solve situations with no good or bad but only grey zones. Imagine this:
A wealthy individual asks you to find his wife and daughter who are missing for several weeks. During your investigation you find out that the people you have so search for suffered from domestic violence from you drunken contractor. Once you confront him with it he seems really sorry and quite miserable about what he did. Also, he opens up to you and tells you his wife gave birth after he raped her. Because of the world this game is settled in, this baby, however, is cursed and buried now as a zombie like creature that comes out at night. Do you kill it or try to release it from this curse to let it finally die? Once you find the wife and daughter do you send them back to your contractor, because you believe that he is sorry and will change or do you leave them be and tell the husband that they are dead somewhere in the woods? (the gamers among you probably know what game I am talking about btw).
This was only a rough wrap up of the situation but I think you see how hard it is to decide what to do there. Not only the decision itself is hard but thinking about the consequenses you will suffer on either side. When your contractor somehow finds out you lied to him and the two women are still alive somewhere, he will maybe come after you and try to kill you. This is a perfect example for learning to make difficult decisions and to live with the consequenses however they will unfold.

All of those mentioned skills are transferable to the real life and of course there is much more to learn and aquire. I probably will go over more skills in futures posts, because I don’t want to make the post too long. As you see it’s not only clicking and pressing buttons, you have to let your brain work either by reacting really fast and predicting or take you time and think things through, depending on the genre and the game.

I hope this post was enjoyable and could give you new perspectives on gaming.
Thanks for reading, peace.

Dude, you just laughed. Are you really depressed?

Yep I’m sure. You just don’t see everything.

Yeah people with depression actually can and will laugh. Firstly, as I said in my previous post, you are not always down and sad when you are depressed. That means if a joke is fuckin’ funny then it’s fuckin’ funny. You laugh, just as every ordinary person. Also, most of the time people have an at least “ok” day, otherwise you would not see the person that day. You probably won’t see a person on a “bad” day, because they are not going outside (exceptions confirm the rule) of course.
Secondly, depressive people really should be acting in Hollywood movies. Bold statement, you might think. Let me tell you this, though. There is this thing called work and/or responsibilities. In other words, things you have to do. What would you do if you had mental problems and were generally in depressive moods alsmost every day? Yes, you would put on a mask and act like nothing is going on. Day in, day out. And that’s exactly what I did for years. I’m sure a lot of affected can relate. You lie every day arriving at work answering the question of how you are doing. You laugh, you joke, you pretend to care. Every fucking day. On the one hand side nobody will notice what’s really going on (depending on your acting skills ofc), but on the other hand side this mask is slowly eating you from the inside out. It costs so much energy that I couldn’t do anything anymore after work. I just wanted to be myself again at home.
If you do this long enough you eventually start to loose the sense for yourself and for who you really are. Due to the suppressing of my real emotions every day I started to experience a complete lack of emotions. Imagine a heart rate monitor after people die. Just a dull line, no ups and downs no matter what happens. I feel like for some time I somehow conviced myself that the fake emotions I showed around people were my real emotions. My brain somehow fucked me over, probably to protect me or something (I don’t know actually). And let me tell you it’s so hard to absolutely feel no joy or happiness for close people when they tell you good news from their lives. There was just nothing there, I knew I was happy for them, because I like them ofc but there was no emotion there. Knowing something and feeling something is different. The mask has to stay on of course.

“But why don’t you just tell your friends/family what’s really going on?”

The short answer is because you don’t want to bother them. This makes probably no sense for people that never experienced a depression, because as friends/family you help each other when problems occur, right? I mean it should be like that but let me explain it to you with the long answer.
Many depressed people hate themselves. They don’t think they are worth anything or are only worth something when they perform really well everywhere. So basically as a depressed person you don’t think you are worth the hassle. If you don’t believe you are worth anything why would you believe that other people think you are worth the hassle? Because, you don’t want to be a burden to anyone you stay quiet.
In my previous post I wrote that depressive people think about their environment and other people before they think of themselves. This is a huge factor with the mask thing. Let’s say the reason why you keep on the mask everywhere is not because you think you are not worth anything. Let’s say you somehow know certain people really love you and would want to help you etc. Why would you still keep on the mask? Because, you care so much for everyone but yourself you don’t want to make them worry. Your brain is really fucked up in that regard. So you keep on the mask and keep on acting day in and day out. This behaviour draws so much energy, though.

So just in case you see yourself in what I just described: Please stop the masquerade, it eventually will break you! I know you don’t think it’s true but everything will get better if you tell someone! I eventually asked my doctor for help (before I told anyone else) and that saved my life up until that point. Honestly, I don’t know if I would be here if I did not find the courage to tell someone. Talking about it with someone is such a big relief! Up until this point I only had good experiences when opening up to somebody. If I could I would do it earlier in retrospective.

This post is quite short but this was a rather tough one for me to write. I hope this was an eye opening short description of every day life with depression. Feel free to comment, like and/or share this blog if you want. Much appreciated.

Peace!

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