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Alpha Mail: Diagnosis Gamma 2

VD
March 5, 2015
Continued from Part 1:
Are You Gamma: Part 2

"You constantly throw out flippant remarks with the expectations they are always amusing, appropriate, and funny."

I do this a lot, it seems to be my main form of communication. Is it all about having a front, I don't really want people knowing who I am perhaps?

Ive also developed a tendency to stay "mad stuff". When I say mad I mean stuff your either not meant to say, its shocking or perceived to be shocking. The only purpose in saying it is to be shocking. Not sure whats happening there but I sometimes cringe the next day when I think about it. I did that last week about something. It tends to be with people who will laugh along whether its funny or not. If I suspect people will blank me or expose me I tend to just go quiet. I find people who I regard as "real men" intimidating, they are much less likely to find those things funny and I'm going to tend to feel cut out of conversations with them. They are what I'd think as "normal". I'm not sure exactly what "real men" and "normal" is but I know it when I see it. I think its to do with adulthood and maturity perhaps.
This, of course, confirms what we already knew. The Gamma's breezy, cheesy confidence is a massive false front. He is trying to impress people and establish a false impression, which often leads to attempting to control the narrative in order to prevent the falsity of that impression from being exposed.

The solution? Stop lying. First stop lying to yourself. Then stop lying to others. And quit being flippant. It's not clever, it's seldom funny, and it tends to be passive-aggressive:

This relates to the part of the list about competition, dealing with winning and losing. I've always played quite a lot of sport or competition although nothing athletic any more. One thing I've found playing pool is Ive found a level I'm winning at and rarely go any higher if it means my win rate will suffer. If I sense I haven't got an edge then I'll tend to move away from that or play that level the minimum amount of times.

I played in division 1 of regional league, till last year, and can compete reasonably well with lower level/B internationals if I'm playing well. I've had one particularly good run in a tournament at that sort of level but played very few. Given my ability I should probably be or have qualified for B international a few times over the years. The problem is competing at that level means I will definitely not feel in control, I'm up against players my own level or often better. The anxiety levels are much higher. In the tournament I did well in I struggled to eat or drink the whole day. When I did get beat I felt utter relief when I lost, all that anxiety gone, I joked to my friend at the time that you'll never see a guy with a bigger smile on his face after losing (more witty remarks?). This along with other experiences put me off playing at that level. Just didn't want to have to deal with those feelings/emotions.

The other thing is winning at pool makes me feel good but more importantly it can give me status in certain settings. Given I don't have it pretty much anywhere else in my life being "the guy who's good at pool" gives me some level of feeling of higher status. I can only get that at a lower level where those players look up to my game. Saying that I'd never play at a level where everybody is very bad I'm not sure why though but don't think it would feel like I'm "good". Need to beat people who at least think they are pretty good players to feel the sense of status I'm looking for. Objectively I am a "good" player, but being good and ending up with a 40% win/loss record feels worse to me than going a bit lower so it will be 60%+.

Had a bustup last year which is why Ive gone to another team in Div 2. It involved a guy who's about my level. A lot of people talk about frame and his seems to be very strong. I feel like guys like him can see straight through me. He was new to the team and perhaps over estimated how brittle I am given how I try to cultivate myself as the "drinker" "banter" "doesn't care" guy. He was just joking/ribbing with me, as well as going on a run of wins while we were practicing. I bottled this up a bit but it stung a lot, and I kept it in, getting ratty over that is pathetic so feeling that way must be kept in in my head. I got drunk later on and got ranty over who knows what. Think I stopped playing week after and wormed my way into another side at the club where I can play bad, scrape some wins, and still get legend status off the guys.

I'd rather play for Div 1 side and play in the tournaments but to do it I have to know how to manage those feelings/emotions so I don't end up blowing up and over reacting (over reacting doesn't have to be outward, can just be dropping out/bottoming out of things given little obvious signals to other people). I tend to avoid any situation where anxiety will increase to certain level, but in doing that I miss out on a lot. Its likely alcohol makes all this worse, however its become a huge social crutch to me, and my whole social life revolves around bar/pool/darts.
Being a big fish in a small pond is just another way of stating "fear of failure". What GW needs to do is STOP AVOIDING FAILURE. He needs to stop protecting his precious feelings at all times. My advice is for him to go into Division 1 and take his lumps. You have to learn how to lose before you can learn how to be a winner, which is different than merely winning.

When I was in high school, my private academy was in a strange situation athletically. Minnesota had a two-class sports classifications based on school size. We were single A in terms of our class size, competed in single A in most of our sports, but for some reason, we competed at the AA level against much bigger schools in a number of sports in which we were historically strong, which were soccer, tennis, skiing, and track. That was only with regards to the state tournaments in those sports, however, our conference competition all consisted of single A schools.

My senior year, I won the conference championship in the 100m and 200m. However, in the AA regional championship, we competed in the inner city region against schools like Minneapolis North, Minneapolis South, Minneapolis Roosevelt, and Minneapolis Henry, AA schools that featured mostly black teams. In the finals of both events, I was the only non-black sprinter and I finished 5th in the 100m and 3rd in the 200m, thereby missing out on state, as only the top two sprinters from each region went on to the tournament. (Guess which region usually won those two events?)

However, the single A "state champion" was a sprinter from my conference, a guy I'd beaten in every single race we'd run that year. I even ran him down from about five meters behind after a bad pass in the 4x100 relay, which was probably the best race I ever ran. So, a fair number of people subsequently asked me if I was upset about that, if I felt I should have been the "state champion" instead of him. But I never felt that way, because I always wanted to run against the best, and in fact, I ran my fastest high school times in both events in the regional races I did not win.

To be the best you can be, you have to go up against those who are better. And if you don't, the knowledge that you didn't will always eat away at your confidence and destroy any lasting pleasure you take in your lesser triumphs.

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