This is the first in a series that goes into tremendous detail on the nature of the most common mis-takes in Magic in an effort to greater understand their nature, and consequently, over-come them. They will likely also possess knowledge that will apply to your life outside of Magic.

Listen to Me at Gunpoint. I am Your Demon. You're Destined to Fail.

You are terrified of most things. You're frightened of the dark, you sniveling child.

And by God, do you suck at Magic.

Or guitar. Or marriage. Or reading. Put in whatever verb you want. You're a disgrace to it.

You caused that divorce, that person is dead because of you, and you never exercise enough. There's an odor you have that you don't notice but that ruins the day of everyone else you get near, and you're sweating more than any human person should. Talking to you is complete misery.

You stupid, stupid nerd.

Whether by an ensemble of things you couldn't have controlled but that is still somehow your fault, or by a singular event for which the coin of your pathetic life turned from heads to tails, never to return again, the fundamental cash value truth about you is the same no matter how you cut it up:

You suck.

Story Circle

If we threw this kind of language at others, we'd be mostly mortified; however, when we think it about our-selves, it completely skates by unimpeded.

I think most people talk like this to themselves sometimes, at least a few times in their lives at minimum. I suspect it's probably fairly common in heavily invested Magic players. Magic historically attracts people that are willing to be a little on the fringe of normalcy without much ado, which means they're going to be mentally on their own more often. They're going to have less affirmation from social groups because they're more naturally willing to operate outside of social norms in pursuit of something they feel is more important.

Has this ever been you? Is this you now?

Self-doubt is most dangerous when it operates in an agent that doesn't frequently have social validation to fall back on. For an extroverted social butterfly, self-doubt is an annoyingly frequent bug that has technicians on call. When the bug shows up, you press some buttons on your phone or your keyboard and someone re-plies with some nice words to fix your peace of mind. Functions executed. Back to optimum.

But if you're not the kind of person to want to be plunged headlong in conversation and human affairs at every opportunity, your darkest hours may get lonelier. Self-doubt isn't a benign nuisance you run into once in a while; it's a fully entrenched mind virus. Unchecked, it can run roughshod all over your mental models, including those you have of your very self. It produces ugly and violent fear instincts and the terrible, unfor-givable voice you hear that tells you you're garbage at games, sex, breathing, whatever.

Every time you threw away a Magic game for no good reason, that voice at least knocked on the door, didn't it?

When you screw up in a stupid way, it shows up to tell you a story about you. A deeply hurtful story.

See, Here's the Thing Though

Let's invite that voice in. The one that tells you you're the world's most inefficient stool sample generator. The one that calls you an idiot and makes fun of you for screwing up easy Magic plays. The one that laughs at you for trying to exist peacefully.

The one that says, "you don't deserve to be happy."

Hear it right now. Hear that voice with its impish cadence. The one that measures all of your crayon napkin first drafts in life against the highly budgeted, idealized, finished stuff passing by your eye line and right into your insecurities all the time.

The voice walks in and sits down. It's stirring a tea with us with its legs crossed.

Listen to it. Let it say whatever it wants to.

...

Hear that?

...

What story is it telling?

Because see, here's the thing: that's all it can do.

Your self-doubt is a story. It's a model. It's a dream in your head, just like everything else you actively experi-ence. Pictures of your kids, traumatizing school memories, all of it. It's compressed data so that with your lim-ited senses and a boatload of evolution, you can live and exist in the way you do every moment you've ever known.

Your brain is an organ, like your lungs or your bunghole. Sometimes it's going to have a lousy day and it's going to make for a generally bad experience for you, maybe even on your prom night or wedding day or, God for-bid, Wrestle Kingdom.

But that's it. Without the rest of the context of your life, your brain exists as electricity and wet meat. It is only allowed to exist by the grace of you, the God that can play Magic games, think about the future, and fall asleep on really fast chairs in the sky. With-out your permission to internalize, echo, and embed thoughts of self-doubt, they're little more than fleeting sparks of abstract, empty, powerless sparks too small to register.

You're obsessed with the fear stories in your head because at some point in the history of your species, they increased your odds of staying alive. That is no longer the case during the overwhelming amount of time you spend in life. The voice of self-doubt tells scary stories that you no longer need for motivation. It's a crappy television show that you can turn off if you practice it enough times.

In addition to increasing therapeutic options for people struggling with their existential place in the universe, there's the good news that assuming you don't have a disorder (see previously mentioned therapeutic op-tion), you get to pick which stories in your head you give power to, and it's a generally great idea to believe the most useful ones.

The ones that call you a piece of crap, obsess over your misplays and mistakes in Magic games, and think you're a bad partner or shitty parent aren't useful. The chances anyone else has that same story as their model of you is virtually zero. You're almost assuredly the only one with this model of yourself.

It's incorrect. Let it go.

Give yourself a better story.

(~_^)

The Rascal

The Indestructible Danny West