Learning to Trust Again

One thing that I've found particularly difficult about being depressed is that I've learnt to not trust my feelings. Since I've felt bad for so long, and been told that everything's fine, I've come to have a deep distrust for my emotions. One way this has manifest itself is by making it very hard for me to know when I'm not well. I can easily recognise obvious signs of physical illness, such as a blocked nose or fever, but I really struggle with symptoms that are potentially psychogenic. Some symptoms that I get quite frequently are insomnia, headache, nausea, loss of appetite and the whole gamut of emotions like anxiety, sadness, contempt and disgust with myself.

When I get these symptoms, it's hard for me to know if I am "genuinely" unwell, or if I just need to "get on with things". I'm often stuck worrying if I should take time off work, see my doctor, my psychologist, and all the other things that I know help me when I'm depressed, or if I should go to work and try to push through it. Most of the time I do the latter, but every now and then I'll call in sick and feel guilty as I'm not convinced that I'm "really" unwell.

This might be the result of a latent belief that mental illness is not "real" illness, and that it's all in my mind. Or I might have been scarred by spending 9 years in a job where the culture was to make everyone feel really guilty for calling in sick. Or it might be because of my childhood where my mother was in turns sceptical of us when we were sick, and strangely easy to convince we were unwell on the basis of vague and minor symptoms.

Probably it's a bit of all of the above.

Anyway, it'd be nice to be able to just trust how I'm feeling, be able to say to myself "I'm not well today" and take time off without feeling guilty for doing so. But then, that's probably on par with saying it'd be nice to not feel depressed.

Board games for fun and profit

For the past 2 years I have been playing board games socially. When I say board games I am not referring to the kind of game that I played as a child, like Monopoly or Cluedo. The games that I have been playing are all modern and generally fit within a category often called "Eurogames". These are games that conform to a design philosophy that aims to make the game fun to play, rather than fun to win. While most people have a fond nostalgia for the games they played as a child, when I think carefully, most of these games really weren't all that fun. Monopoly, in particular, took way too long, eliminated most players long before the end and made it painfully clear when you had no hope of catching up.

Eurogames, on the other hand, generally keep all players in the game until the very end, often can be played in 30 - 60 mins and usually have a scoring mechanic that makes it hard or impossible to know who's won until the very end of the game. Alternatively, there are many games that are purely cooperative, so all players work together to win the game. Other aesthetic themes are to have simple wooden play pieces and to be quite abstract representations that have simple rules but deep strategy.

One of first games I played was Pandemic, and then its expansion On The Brink. This is a purely cooperative game in which 2-5 players take on roles as specialists with the CDC and attempt to save the world from being overwhelmed by disease. The game uses no dice, but has some (very clever) card shuffling mechanics to add randomness to the game. The expansion really beefed the game up, and I now consider it essential.

Over the past two years I have moved through a phase where we played Pandemic at every opportunity (including our lunch breaks at work), replacing it with Munchkin (and some of its thousands of expansions), then Carcassonne (and all of its expansions).

My workmates and I became so obsessed with Carcassonne that we ended up playing at least 1 game, and sometimes 2, every lunch break for a year and a half and maintaining a league table. This got serious enough that I implemented a TrueSkill algorithm for our league and some of us even bought our own custom "meeples". Heady times, and I eventually made it to the top of our league, but only after the previous leader (my friend R) resigned and changed jobs! In that time we developed very sophisticated tactics and strategies (not the same thing), and I often felt bad for newcomers who'd join in for a game or two.

Anyway, we periodically returned to Pandemic, usually when catching up with R, who became obsessed with winning the game on the highest possible difficulty level. The difficulty of the game is determined by four factors. The four factors are:

1. Number of players. Being a sociable lot we'd always play with whoever was there, whih was almost always 4 or 5 of us. Unfortunately, more players makes the game more difficult.
2. Roles. I would have been (mostly) alright with simply choosing roles, but R was insistent that we always select randomly. This meant that often we'd have a combination of roles that didn't work well together, or was underpowered.
3. Number of "epidemic" cards. Players can choose to use between 4 and 6 (7 with On The Brink) epidemic cards, with each additional one increasing the difficulty.
4. Optional challenges. On The Brink includes 2 optional challenges, a virulent strain and disease mutation.

Just recently I returned to playing Pandemic after 6 months of playing other games. We'd previously won the game, after months of losing (!), when playing on "Legendary" difficulty (7 epidemic cards) and with the "virulent strain" challenge. This time we decided to go for broke and try for Legendary, with both the virulent strain challenge and the "mutation" challenge.

And we managed it! Sort of.

Unfortunately, all of the extra challenges, and having played for several hours in a row led to me inadvertently cheating as I forgot to implement a rule on 3 or 4 turns, slightly reducing the difficulty. Now I'll probably have to wait another 6 months until R's back in town to try again.

Oh well, there's always Arkham Horror to keep me going until then.