depression

Yon Bus of Struggle

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I am getting around to posting a bit later than normal today, because I am a bit sick and fighting some generic respiratory crud. I think it is largely allergies because we are in Ragweed season… and it is by far my worst allergy. I also kicked up a bunch of dust last week in the garage and think I am paying for it. I am struggling a bit right now and find myself in a bit of a funk where nothing seems to “fit right”. I am certain I am dealing with a depression, because how could I not after losing my spouse earlier this year. There is likely no way I got out of that without mental and emotional baggage that I am dealing with pretty regularly. My emotions feel like a scalded tongue… that I cant quite taste things in the way that I used to before. Joy is hard to find… and I keep wandering back and forth between things without much luck. The other day Tipa commented “I don’t know how you fit so much into your day!” and the secret is… I keep bouncing around like mad between a dozen different things and never really making much traction in any of them. I also have no other human to suggest that I do something other than desperately look for something to kill the time.
I am still popping into Destiny Rising each day to play some of the various daily activities, but this is honestly a game that I find myself enjoying the most when Ace and I happen to connect with our schedules at the same time. I am doing the thing that is very familiar in Gacha games where I am trying not to spend any currency and bank it up, so that when the next character banner drops I can immediately purchase a bunch of pulls for it. I am 16 away from the five star choice on the default banner, and whenever I hit that, I am likely going to choose Ning Fei so I have an Arc Champion that is actually pretty decent. Mostly I am chipping away at various lore tasks from different champions and forcing myself to do the planetary dailies on Ikora just to get them done. I think my favorites are still Jolder and Estela right now… with Gwynn and Umeko being close in the running. Wolf has sadly been relegated to the sidelines, and I actually started playing some Tan-2 to get used to the way that he plays a bit.
In Diablo 4 I have officially respecced to the proper endgame build, but am still lacking some of the components. It gave me a bit of survival so that Torment III is now as comfortable as Torment II was previously. Bossing on T3 is still a bit of a crapshoot and depends upon the type of damage that a given boss is dealing. My resistances are still complete crap, and I should probably work on that. The biggest challenge that I am having at the moment is that everything I am doing… feels like a complete waste of time. I need two things… an Ancestral Vasily’s Prayer, and an Ancestral Tibault’s Will. The first comes specifically from Echo of Varshan which means I need to be running Whisper caches to get keys for that. The second is a general drop unique and can come specifically from anywhere… but specifically is apparently on Andariel and Harbinger of Hatred loot pools. The challenge in both cases is that it feels like Ancestral gear drops so freaking infrequently. The above image shows a T3 Beast in the Ice drop pool… with zero ancestrals dropping which is pretty much the norm.
Mostly I have been focused on chipping away at various seasonal trappings like the challenges, battlepass, and the Reign of Chaos quest chain. The amount of farming required to finish the last bit… seems excessive. I feel like Blizz has made the determination that they need to slow things down… to eek more player engagement out of a season, when in truth Season 7 was the best… because it felt like a really fun weekend, similar to how Diablo III seasons used to feel. The game is not detailed enough to be played in a manner like Path of Exile… so any slowing of things down just feels like overstaying its welcome. Wouldn’t you rather have your players saying “wow that was a blast, can’t wait for next season” instead of trying to decide if they give a crap enough to keep grinding. I am rapidly the approaching the point where I am questioning how much I still care.
Legion Remix starts next week on the 7th, and as a result I have been trying to poke my head back into World of Warcraft in an attempt to get into the swing of things. Friends… I really want to finish up the War Within campaign but I am finding it so hard to care about anything that is going on. I tried again last night, and I was just checking boxes off a spreadsheet in the way that I was engaging with the content. I am playing my Dark Iron Dwarf that I rolled during the Pandaria remix event, and honestly… I like playing a defensive warrior about as much as I like playing anything else. The combat though… just feels so much less interesting than it does in Guild Wars 2, which is the game I have mostly been mainlining in the MMORPG world for awhile. I think mostly movement just feels bad, since at its core… World of Warcraft is just prettier Everquest and there is not any real action elements of my movement that factor into how combat resolves. So long as I am in rage of the target and my bounding box is connected to their bounding box… mashing a button makes a thing happen. It does somewhat make me worry how Legion Remix is going to land… but regardless I am still going to give it a shot I think.
In other things happening on the 7th… the Monster Hunter Wilds crossover event is opening in Final Fantasy XIV. I thought this might have been a good signal to get back into the game and quest through things… given that I have not really played actively other than logging in to keep my house active since the patch that dropped the Arcadion. As a result I am fully decked out in that gear… but am going to be yet again… too short to ride the ride since the Guardian fight is going to require 725 gear. This is the thing that I always hate the most about playing Final Fantasy XIV, is that when it comes time for a new expansion… my gear is never good enough to make it through all of the content without either grinding a bunch… or buying my way out of the problem. I hate having to buy a crafted set from the auction house to bail my ass out for having not played reliably during the patch cycle. Since Stormblood… I have basically been a player that plays heavily at the beginning of an Expansion, and then returns at the very end of one… and it is honestly a play pattern that feels like crap because of the required catch up. Even Gacha games every so often throw you a bone with a full set of gear that is good enough to do whatever the latest content drop is.
Since you have made it this far, and listened to me whine about my frustrations and struggle to get attached to anything right now… I will reward you with another photo of Gracie. So often when I am gaming anymore, she will crawl up on the headrest of my new office chair and complain that I am not giving her attention. I am just looking for anything right now that gives me some focus.. and ultimately delays me thinking about the fact that my human is gone. I could be out doing things with friends… but I feel way more “alone” when I am out in public than I do when I am finding something to distract me at home. I spent a lot of time alone since shifting to remote work… but I almost never left the house without my spouse. So going into the world… makes me realize all that I am lacking and missing. There are a lot of things that I want to do around the house, but I end up in ADHD logjams while trying to do them. Mostly I am just trying to keep moving the needle forward with small amounts of progress every single day. Anyways… if you have made it this far. Thanks for reading. The post Yon Bus of Struggle appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

AggroChat #205 – Behemoths and Escapism

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Featuring:  Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra and Tamrielo

aggrochat205_720

Tonight we change things up a bit and instead of recording the Game of the Month show…  we are in fact doing a normal style show. By normal… I mean we are recording with a Tam who has been day drinking.  We start off the discussion with Dauntless that just launched on the 24th… and by launch I mean it is a free to play game going into open beta which is absolutely a launch.  Ash talks about Hyrule Warriors on the switch and his experiences playing through it and all of the new content that came from the 3DS version. Tam talks a bit about Far Lone Sails a game where you drive a sailboat train and constantly keep moving ever steadily to the right.  Finally we talk about games as escapism and this turns into a far darker discussion than I had intended it to. We each sorta talk about how we use games to cope with whatever we are dealing with.

Topics Discussed:  

  • Dauntless
  • Hyrule Warriors – Switch
  • Far Lone Sails
  • Games as Escapism

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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Pushing Away

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Lamentation

I posted the above statement, but I didn’t really have the strength to go into more detail last night.  Essentially I have been sifting through my blog in an attempt to summarize the year… which is one of those things that you feel like you SHOULD do at the end of a given year.  There are so many end of year traditions going on in the blogosphere, and I guess in some what I felt like I needed to do something.  The problem with this notion is it seems like the person that existed in the first half of the year, was one hell of a lot happier than the person for the last half of the year.  In January I had just attended my first gaming convention, and was super excited about Final Fantasy XIV and the raid…  and still pretty damned excited about the progress being made in World of Warcraft.  I was somehow juggling as many as four nights of raiding a week, streaming pretty regularly, along with a new column on MMOGames and a second podcast in the form of Bel Folks Stuff.  Now zooming back to today, both the FFXIV and WoW raids are dead in the water…  and I have backed almost completely out of MMOGames and essentially killed off the Bel Folks Stuff podcast… and it has been several months since I have even vaguely attempted to stream anything.

I know at some point I just got overwhelmed and started locking up… and I guess I never quite unlocked.  I am still in trauma mode where I am moving from day to day on mostly muscle memory.  There are a lot of things that I just don’t do anymore, not the least of which is read blogs on a regular basis.  During the “Bonanza” column I was reading roughly 450 blogs and every post on them all in preparation for my weekly column highlighting the posts contained within.  Once I handed that column off to another blogger… I quite literally stopped reading blogs all together for awhile.  I had turned this thing that I got a lot of enjoyment out of into a job, and that is the sure fire way to make me stop wanting to do something.  I now read blogs… but do so extremely infrequently…  and feel like a complete failure for allowing myself to get to that state.  I think as a result my own blog has suffered, because so often there would be a topic going around the blogosphere…  and reading the thoughts of another friend would end up sparking me to write my own take on it.  Now I sit down each morning and struggle to come up with anything to write about at all.

Cessation

There have been several points this year where I have contemplated just stopping all of it.  I’ve considered backing out of the podcast, and stopping with the daily posting.  It feels like I have been pushing away from all of the things I have cared about, one by one…  and each time I do it I just feel more of a failure for doing so.  I have been struggling greatly with just existing, let alone being happy and excited and engaging.  What makes this even harder is looking back and seeing that apparently I had whatever magical sauce there is at the beginning of the year, but it is almost completely gone now.  The frustrating part about it is…  I am not sure how to get it back.  I realize I have to start putting myself out there, a little bit at a time…  but even the thought of logging into voice chat on a nightly basis feels like the biggest possible hill to climb.  It has been at least three months since I have regularly logged into voice chat on a nightly basis, and maybe that is a good first step.  The problem being that the games that I am playing right now and not the games that the rest of the AggroChat and Stalwart crews are playing.  I really am enjoying World of Warcraft again, but even when I am logged in it feels like I am completely disconnected from everyone in it.

There were moments last night where I was asked to help out a few friends, and it felt like it took all of the effort in the world to accept.  I spent time with Giulietta doing the Pit daily quest, and I need to do this more often since I too need a bunch of them to complete the flying requirement.  I had fun while doing it, but it always requires so much effort to get over that hurdle to put myself out there… and actually do something with another human being.  Similarly I forced myself to go do stuff with Finni/Qav when I was hordeside because I knew once I got started I would enjoy myself, but it is entirely too easy to stay mired in my own oblivious world.  I realize what I am describing is depression, and I have battled it my entire life.  I am going through what I would term as a “down cycle” but this one seems to have been going on longer than most.  Generally I go through a few weeks of retreat and then that energizes me to the point of being able to engage again.  This time… it just seems to keep dragging on and no amount of “fake it until you make it” is working this time.  There just seems to always bee some external stress force bearing down on me, and I am hoping that being off for the Christmas break will help some of this.

Ashenvale

Pushing Away

As far as gaming goes…  I feel like I had a night without a lot of progress.  The focus of my evening was largely  the holiday event, where I complete all of the daily quests on the four characters that can do them…  mail all of the tokens to Belgrace… and then become crushed when I realize that yet again I have no mounts.  Lodur and I decided that we are going to create #Team360NoMount and the only requirement is that RNG and Blizzard hates you too.  I have this lengthy history of not getting holiday mounts to drop.  I have the two from Brew Fest, but other than that I have a perfect record of always participating… but never getting the mount.  The sorest point for me is always going to be the Headless Horseman mount, because it is probably the one I want the most…  but will never actually see.  I do admit though that this years Yeti mount is going to be a close second in the amount of pining I will do if I don’t get it to drop.  There are few cooler things than riding around on the back of a big damned Yeti.

As far as actual game progress I managed to push my Warlock to 21 and am now sitting in Ashenvale.  I took the start quest from the adventure guide, and happily cancelled all of the quests from the Northern Barrens.  I am wondering just how long I will actually be questing in Ashenvale before I do the same and move on to whatever zone comes after it.  The biggest positive of this of course is the fact that I can actually summon my Vendor Mammoth and sell things whenever I feel like it.  This is the toughest part of the sub 20 game in World of Warcraft, is being so insanely used to summoning a vendor whenever you want… but suddenly not having that ability.  I swear that mount is the single best item I have ever purchased in this game.  If I can ever get the cash to purchase the Yak from Pandaria, I am sure I will say the same about it….  since being able to Transmog my gear is just about of equal importance to me.  If I could summon a transmog vendor at any time I would never look fugly again!  Other than that I managed to knock out a few parts of the Hellfire LFR on the Cow, but didn’t really get anything worth writing home about other than a few more runes and some gold thanks to queuing as a partial group.

Positivity, Cynicism and Thankfulness

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On Thankfulness

Positivity, Cynicism and Thankfulness

One of the problems with depression is that your brain lies to you.  It tells you that things are going horribly, that no one likes you… and that ultimately you are a failure in everything you do.  It is because of these lies that I find it extremely important to give myself a reality check every now and then, and really appreciate how lucky and blessed I really am.  The Thanksgiving holiday has become my favorite over the years, and the reasoning behind that… is pretty simple.  It cuts through all the pretense, and is just a holiday about sharing a meal and some conversation with your family.  Granted my particular view of Thanksgiving may be dictated by the fact that we never host… but for us at least it is showing up someplace with a few dishes of food in hand… and then sitting down to have a lovely meal with folks that you don’t see as often as you might like.  There are lots of times I wish we could convince our family to treat Christmas as Thanksgiving 2.0… because for me at least it is the getting together part that is the important bits… not necessarily the often times awkward gift exchange.

Thanksgiving is also a great time to sit down and review the past year.  I could look at this year as nothing special, but in reality I was surrounded by my support network of friends and managed to continue releasing daily blog posts and weekly podcasts without missing a beat.  That seems like a pretty great thing to be thankful for.  More importantly I am thankful for my friends.  There are so many of you that I talk to on a daily basis, and you are always there to offer a word of support or sometimes a much needed bringing down to earth.  I am also extremely thankful for my amazing wife…  who helps to center me… and keep me from going off the deep end sometimes.  I’m also thankful for my very excellent work family, because they too make the daily grind thing much easier.  I’ve been lucky to be under the same boss now for four or five years of my going on eight years at my current job… and I have to say he makes it enjoyable.  I am also thankful to this blog and its readers, because whether or not you realize it…  this daily writing routine and the interactions I have with you all about said writing is therapeutic.  There is something about reconciling my thoughts and putting it onto paper, that helps organize my cluttered mind, and I thank you all for joining in the journey with me.

On Positivity

I’ve always thought that Thanksgiving made a much better day for reflection and resolutions than New Years.  For me at least it has taken on this meaning of looking back at the things you did well, the things you didn’t do quite so well… and the things you would want to change.  I am not exactly sure when I set down the path I am currently on, but it has at least been a year now since I started purposefully trying to cut as much negativity as I could from my life.  I was tired of feeling bitter and frustrated with the world, and I set down a path of “fake it until you make it”.  As goofy as that phrase sounds… it really does work because as time has gone on… I’ve myself become a much more positive person in my interactions with people… and in return my outlook on the world.  I am a happier person today than I was a few years ago, and my hope is that I will be a happier person still in the coming year.  It isn’t like I have some gauge to measure happiness by, but I know at least that I have less days where I am struggling to drag myself out of bed and confront the day.

I will likely always have the darkness of depression hanging over me, but I am getting better at simply not listening to the little voice in my head that is constantly replaying all of the things that are wrong with me.  I doubt I will ever shut that off, but I’ve started to develop better coping mechanisms for blocking it out.  I want to be someone that makes the lives of those around me better, not someone who brings others down.  So even if that is just a brief message somewhere in the social media sphere, I want to leave a positive effect on those I interact with.  I am never going to be a full on Pollyanna, because I am just too jaded for that to ever work… but I do want to be someone who is actively making things better rather than consistently making them worse.  While what I do is not really important in the grand scheme of things, it is my hope that at least it is a legacy of good…  not one of suffering.

On Cynicism

By all accounts I was an almost painfully happy child, and based on all of the photos I have seen…  I am willing to accept that at face value.  Something happened along the way however to turn me into a fairly bitter, jaded and cynical person.  I am good at what I do, because I plan for failure…  because I don’t just accept it as a possibility… I expect it to happen.  So being an eternal pessimist has been great for a career in software development… but pretty horrible for my outlook on the world.  While I am not a doomsday prepper by any means, my mind just naturally works along the lines of preparing for the worst possible thing to happen in every single interaction.  I can tell you the constant battling of my brain is tiresome when you take this instinct and mix it with the depression.  My brain can make some pretty insane leaps, as failure to shake someones hand…  ends up leading to me being out cold and hungry on the streets.  There is a whole irrational segment of my mind that is constantly churning out doomsday scenarios out of average every day occurrences.  Maybe I simply took my Eagle Scout training a little to seriously, with the whole “Be Prepared” motto.

Now all of these instincts that I am talking about are pretty deep rooted, but it doesn’t mean I think they are good things.  It is my hope over the next year to work towards being less cynical.  I write about video games, not industrial accidents.  I should have more child like joy about the things I am doing, rather talking about how this or that is a portent of a big coming failure.  I am tired of seeing the bad in my hobby, and I am tired of feeling like everything is going to shit… and quickly.  I mean the world around us does a pretty good job of eternally bumming me out on a regular basis, I really don’t need my hobby to do it as well.  So along with the methodology of faking it until I make it… I am going to try applying that positivity more thoroughly and hopefully root out some of my cynicism towards everything.  I want the coming year to be an awesome one, and I want to spend more time enjoying the awesome things around me… rather than worrying about the things that aren’t.  I can’t say that I think it will be easy, but I think it will be good in the long run for my own mental health and happiness.

In closing… I hope each of you has your own personal day of reflection upon all the ways you are lucky in your life, and all of the things you would strive to change.  I hope you enjoy your time with family and friends, and enjoy the ritual of sharing a good meal.  Thanksgiving is this day that has a special meaning for me, and it is my hope that it develops a special meaning for each of you.  May you have a very Happy Thanksgiving, and even if you are not celebrating it…  may your day be excellent as well.