EPThttp://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/513650-post-pro-gaming-the-aftermath-part-one
The idea is to review and tell what I've been up to the past 5 years basically, counting from the day that I stopped playing Starcraft 2 professionally. This post is pretty personally revealing and at least for me, is tough to write about, some of you might find it overly dramatic, some of you might find it down right made up. But I assure you it is not. This is my way of venting my thoughts and dealing with some of the shit i've been through the past couple of years. Hopefully it can be of some lessons to others if you have the endurance to read through this giant wall of text. If not, the TLDR pretty much sums it up
TLDR;
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Life goes to shit and merz finds himself on a path of self-destruction. Will he find his way back?
September 2013 - January 2014
Writing my thesis in law school is something I look back on with joy and it's a period in my life which I cheerish a lot. Granted the last 4-5 weeks or so was nerv wrecking, all in all I've never had so much freedom in my life. Writing your thesis is different to other semesters in law school. You actually don't have any classes to attend, you are free to dispose of your time as you please, the only thing important is that you make your deadline.
What I'm trying to get at is that I just really enjoyed life when I only had a deadline to focus on. I knew what needed to be done and when it needed to be done, and I got to design my plan on how to reach that deadline. Deadlines work the same way as set out goals in life. You have a point that needs to be reached in a not so distant future, your task at hand is to make sure you reach that point at the time you have set out.
This meant that I had absolute control over how my schedule looked from a day to day basis. This meant I could sleep in to 8 AM if I wanted to, hit the gym at 9 AM, take a shower, have a nice and long lunch, then work on my thesis from 12:00 PM til 7 PM and then do whatever the hell I wanted til bed time. This also meant that I could decide on a friday that, fuck it, I've done so much work on my thesis monday til thursday; there's no point doing any today, i'll just take friday and the rest of the weekend off. Early on I identified that if could only deliver 2 really high quality written pages per day, my thesis would be done in mid november, the deadline was set til the 17th of januari 2014.
My personal life was just going really well as well. I had broken up with my old girlfriend of 3,5 years in the beginning of february 2013. At the start of may 2013 I met a new girl which was pretty much everthing that my prior girlfriend was not. We just instantly clicked and, this is going to sound SUPER CHEESY, I realized what being in love actually felt like. Given my current situation I could also priortize spending time with her the way I wanted. We could have breakfast, lunch, dinner together because we could adjust our schedules to fit eachothers. She was also very supportive of my new found interest in fitness and food, which meant that she even joined me in my power walks or training sessions once in a while and she respected that I did not want to eat certain foods or snacks. All in all, the only few weeks in this period of my life that were really stressful was probably december - january. The reason being that despite having my thesis pretty much 95 % done at the end of november 2014, you kinda stress about wanting the thing you've worked on for nearly 3 months to be really good. Meaning I spent the majority of the last two months fine tuning and revising my thesis. I even re-wrote the analysis section like three times and I had a couple of "FUCK THIS IS NEVER GOING TO WORK" moments but they passed almost as quickly as they came up. I would estimate that the last 3 weeks prior to deadline I spent pretty much all my free time (except sat - sundays) going to the gym and working on my thesis. It did not feel bad, it felt good, I had the rough work cut out for me by the end of november, now it was just fine tuning it. And fine tuned it I did. All in all my thesis ended up being a 80 page long essay dealing with how the exclusive rights of an intellectual property holder ranks up against rules forbidding anti-competitive conduct in antitrust law. I tried to answer the question where the line goes where antitrust law in the end actually overrides these intellectual property rights if needed and if so, when, or if intellectual property rights are immune to any sort of antitrust law enforcement. Sounds boring? Well we all like different things.
By the end of January 2014 I graduated Law school and my thesis was awarded with the highest grade. Thus I actually managed to stay true to the goal I set out in november 2012 and I also managed to confirm for myself that I could actually plan and organize my time with no one looking over my shoulder and still deliver on a set deadline.
January 2014 – March 2014
What was a brief period of immense relief in my life quickly passed to be replaced by an immense feeling of stress and pressure. I can honestly say that graduating is indeed truly stressful because this is where your mental strength is tested the most. Forget the achievement of actually being in possession of a LL.M. degree, what matters is putting that to use i.e. getting an actual job as a lawyer, which in retrospect is a hundred times tougher than actually getting into law school. I would estimate that I sent out roughly 30 job applications during the period of November 2013 - march 2014. I came up with 0 interviews. For each time, I got a reply from an employee reading "We're sorry to inform you that you will not be called for an interview" or messages of that sort, my confidence in myself died a little bit each time. You think studying or working is painful? Looking for a job is a full-time job. Revising and re-writing your personal letters and trying to re-do and polish your resume only to get shot down again and again is truly frustrating and can make anyone feel like they are not worth shit.
Also the panic that erupts when you consider the facts; you have spent 4,5 years to earn a law degree and now you are not able to get work in that field. Did I put myself in debt for years to come and spend 4,5 years of my life only to be forced into a line of work that has nothing to do with my degree? My pro-gaming days were catching up to me, and not in a good way this time. Every work place demanded experience in the field prior to graduating. Meaning they demanded that you spent your summers and your evenings working at a law firm, insurance company or something of the sort; summers and evenings I spent playing StarCraft 2. Also, despite being able to turn my grades around for the latter half of law school, I was still haunted by my sub-par performance the first half, meaning my grades were not matching up against the people I was competing with for the jobs.
My personal life and my relationship suffered from this immensely. My girlfriend still had one year to go before she graduated and I was trying to find ways to stay in the same town as her because the last thing I wanted was to move away and have a long-distance relationship. I was conflicted. Three or four years earlier I would never let a relationship or another person get in the way of my personal career goals, but I was suddenly at a point in my life where I started to question what was worth more in the long run. Do I pour my time and effort into my relationship with my girlfriend or do I look for a job hundreds of kilometers away from her? What happens if I let my career goals go, in favor of her, what if our relationship doesn't work out and I'm stuck in a dead-end job that I choose because I wanted to be with her?
Around mid-march in 2014 I was still unemployed and my savings were starting to run out. I was running out of options. I applied for jobs that would mean I had to move away from my girlfriend but still no interviews. I was forced to take extra classes at university simply to have a source of income (student loan) but that also meant building more debt. Also, my motivation to study was basically zero, I was a graduate, finding motivation to study anything past that was a hard thing. I finally decided that my relationship was more important than my career and decided that I would look for jobs that weren't in my field but I'd still try to look for jobs that at least meant that my law degree wouldn't be for nothing. I started looking for jobs like claims handler at insurance companies. With the motivation that the field was heavily regulated by law and that handling claims at least wore the resemblance of real lawyer work, also Insurance companies have huge Law divisions and maybe if I just performed well enough I could advance within the company. To my relief I found that one of the biggest insurance companies in Sweden were looking for temporary employees April - September to cover for the regulars during the summer period. I applied to the spots open at the office in the town where I lived and I was immediately granted an interview. To be honest, anything but an interview would have probably sent me down a deep depression because I was over qualified as fuck for the job and if a law degree couldn't give me a job as a claims handler then I simply don't know what I would've done from that point.
I applied and was also employed to a position as a claims handler within the company’s health insurance division. The job was not something that required you to have prior knowledge about how the law works. The insurance company made sure that their employees were educated as they went along about the things they needed to know. What a law degree did, however, was that I already knew all the stuff that would take other people 1 - 2 years to fully grasp and learn. Meaning I had a big lead in the start. To much comfort for myself, I was also handpicked to start in the division roughly translated to "Large & Complex Claims" or "Top-X" as the division was called internally. This all sounds very fancy but it was not, however the work was more complex than in the other divisions. Basically, the unit handled all the claims that exceeded one million Swedish crowns (~100 000 USD) in pay outs and it also handled all the cases where people were diagnosed with complex diseases (because these were tricky from an insurance stand point, they could ultimately lead to the company having to pay out millions in claims and it was important that they were investigated properly and with care).
March 2014 - pretty much March 2015
All in all, this had me being contempt, not pleased, with my current situation. The salary was shit, nowhere near a lawyer salary, but it was still twice the amount than what student loans offer and it wouldn’t put me in debt. The hours were shit as well, it was classic 8 AM to 5 PM work in an office landscape with 10 others in office boxes. You had to be at your desk at 8 AM sharp because the phone was open from that time until you went home and you were not allowed a work cellphone or a work laptop so there was no other option than being there. Also, it was incredibly taxing on my mental health having to answer to, and defend to all costs, the company’s policy on every claim ever rejected. Bear in mind this was health insurance, the people making claims where either ill themselves or it was the parents of kids who were ill. Having to reject their claim and then defend that decision from the insurance company’s standpoint was not always an easy task. We had phone days 3 days a week and 2 days to investigate claims. Phone days where I would basically spend an entire day getting yelled at by people who had their claims rejected. Fuck my life, was the feeling going through my head those days.
The positive things to take away from the line of work I was in was however a lot as well. I was in a position where I handled claims, meaning it was my job to investigate their right to their claim and I had mandate to make a call and I had to make sure that decision was the right one looking at that person’s insurance policy. We were all struggling with the work load and we all had set out goals to oblige from our employee when it came to the number of handled claims, the amount of answered phone calls, the amount of answered e-mails. We had to prioritize, some claims were “A PRIO” meaning they needed to be dealt with ASAP. All in all, the job had you struggling to manage the work load while the persons making claims would call you 24/7 asking “what the fuck is taking so long?” The harsh reality and answer to them was “There’s at least 80 people who made claims before yours and I must handle them first”. I often struggled on holding back on adding “Maybe I’d get to your claim quicker if you didn’t waste my time three times a week yelling at me over the phone for 15-30 minutes.” This gave me experience with a heavy work load, this forced me to prioritize, and it also forced me to make decisions I wasn’t very comfortable with and move on to the next one, well-knowing I’d get a call from a very angry mom or dad or perhaps both. It also forced me to defend, and argue for why I rejected a claim and it also forced me to learn how to handle people who often were in desperate need of help.
Ultimately doing this, made me realize what job I would eventually look for. Fuck jobs who force you to work exactly between 08:00 AM - 5:00 PM at an office desk day in and day out. No, I wanted a job that could offer me the same freedom as writing a thesis could. A job where I get to pick when I work and when I don't. A job where coming in at 09:15 AM or even 10:00 AM is okay, a job where working from home is an option, a job where if you work 60 hours one week, you work 30 hours the next one. I've come to realize that the way companies think about their employees work routines are totally and utterly outdated. Looking at jobs where the key elements to being able to do one’s job is a laptop, smartphone and an internet connection; having enforced office hours between two set times is totally ridiculous. People value freedom of choice, people want to feel in control. If an employer gives their employees a sense of that they can control their time as they want, I think a lot more companies would find more success and a happier work force.
If I can do my job from my computer at home, or at the train, hell I can even write an appeal while on a god damn air plane, why is it so key for us to come in to an office every day and be bound by certain hours? Isn't the real value for a company and thus the employer that its employees perform at a high level and that they do what they were hired to do? Aren’t deadlines and responsibility the key, not where I sit when I do what I'm paid to do? This also relates to the idea that you can only be said to be "doing your job" if you work 8 hours a day. This idea is also fucking absurd. Again, employers should be paying their employees to deliver what the employee asks and put up good results. If I can get my shit done in 5 hours is it the hours put in what my employee pays me for? I think not. Sometimes I need to put in a lot more than 8 hours to get the things done due to how complex the task at hand is, sometimes I don't. It’s the results that matters, nothing else.
Now this cannot be applied to every work there is out there, some fields actually require you to be on a certain site for a certain amount of time. But my field of work does not, and a lot of other fields does not, and I did not pick a work which requires me to dedicate a set period of time five days a week til I retire.
Path of self-destruction begins
My personal life and my relationship with my girlfriend slowly but surely started to take bigger and bigger hits because of this. It’s funny how ultimately a decision you made because you cared for something so much in the end means the destruction of that very same thing. When I got home I would be so fed up having talked to people over the phone constantly for 8 hours, even making regular small talk was exhausting, I wanted to come home, go to the gym, eat dinner, and just pass out on the sofa watching series on Netflix. My girlfriend took up a part-time job because she also found herself with a lot of free time while writing her thesis and I guess (I don’t really know) she found it suiting seeing how I worked 8 to 5 anyways. We slowly regressed to one of those couples who both work 8 AM – 5 PM then come home, and suddenly have no energy to spend on each other. We stopped doing things together on weekends, we started prioritize hanging out with friends or doing personal hobbies on Saturdays and Sundays rather than spending time with each other. Somewhere along the line we were so busy with managing our everyday life that we forgot why we lived together and I forgot why I took up the god damn job in the first place.
I will be clear and say that having reflected upon this period A LOT, most of it was my fault. I couldn’t bring myself to see the need to care for our relationship. I was too unhappy with the whole situation at hand. I was employed in a line of work where I was over qualified with a law degree. I was stuck at a 8 AM – 5 PM schedule and I didn’t really like how it affected my personal life. I was no longer in control over my daily life and it was painful. At the time, I could not identify why I was so unhappy and I did a classic mistake; I started blaming it on the relationship. I figured I must be unhappy because something is wrong between me and my girlfriend, we’ve lost the spark, I don’t love her anymore or I deserve better. All of which was false. Looking at it realistically it wasn’t the relationship or her, it was me being beaten down by the fact that I was stuck at a place in life which made me unhappy, I just couldn’t face the reality of it which was; my law degree is going to waste, I’m not where I set out to be in my career.
All of this was bolstered by something else. Turns out when you lose like 50 pounds and add on some muscle you are all of a sudden a lot more interesting to the opposite sex. Not so much because everyone is super shallow but more because if you personally are confident in the way you look, that confidence will shine through and in itself be very attractive to other people. I was experiencing an unprecedented attention from attractive girls whenever I’d go out to a night club or a bar. This coupled with me being in an unhappy state of mind made me seek out the attention and made me want the attention a lot more. I needed confirmation, somewhere, that I was still wanted and needed. The fact that I had an awesome girlfriend who cared and loved me somehow wasn’t enough. I’m going to be clear right here and say that I did not cheat on my girlfriend but the advances I’d get from girls would just enforce my thought that it was the relationship that was causing me to feel unhappy. I was pretty much like “Look there’s plenty of fish in the sea that wants a piece of this, I can do so much better than her.” I know how that sounds and it was, and still is, a fucking disgusting and immature mentality. But I take comfort in that we’re all human and sometimes, acting like a prick and thinking like a prick is human. The important thing is admitting to yourself that sometimes you can be straight out mean and a fucking douche, and you must learn from that and make sure you try to not fall into such behavior again.
Ultimately, one cold spring night in the middle of march 2015, it all almost went to complete shit. I was walking a girl home who had been blatantly flirting with me for months prior to this after another night at a night club. Meanwhile my girlfriend was home visiting her parents over the weekend. I was drunk off my ass and so was she, while I was convincing myself that I was only walking her home because she was drunk and shouldn’t be walking home alone at 3 AM at night, what a knight in shining armor I was. She was fine when we were walking but when we got to her apartment door suddenly she says she can’t find her keys. All of a sudden she starts acting really drunk and says that I need to find help her find them and help her unlock the door. Like the idiot I am I play a long and I find her keys who she just so happens to have in her jeans pocket, I unlock the door and then she says I will have to lead her into her room (jesus this is even embarrassing to write about). Once in her room she jumps me, trying to push me down with her into her bed, and in my drunken state of mind I feel an urge to just let whatever is about to happen, happen. But like in a god damn movie or a novel story, all of a sudden I don’t feel drunk at all anymore. My mind feels crystal clear; I have a thousand thoughts rushing through my head and my heart is pounding at probably 200 BPM and adrenaline is just flowing freely in my body. What feels like minutes is probably just a matter of seconds but greater senses prevail and I push her away from me and say “Well, I must go now, good night”. I almost run out of her apartment and when I close the door behind me I remain outside of her apartment for a minute or so just breathing heavily and trying to collect my thoughts on what just nearly happened before I could bare myself to start walking again.
Now people might think I’m proud of what I accomplished there. I’m not. Despite not actually cheating on my girlfriend I came as close as someone could ever come to cheating. And mentally for a split second I was going to give into the urge and just go through with it. That’s practically a point in which you cannot turn back from, even if you didn’t follow up on it. And ultimately, that’s why I decided to just tell my girlfriend about what had happened the second she came home from her parents, which was the morning after the events, and the reply I got was “Honestly, given what you have told me, I can say that I trust you even more now”. Not the reply I was expecting, given how I’ve never doubted myself so much in my entire life. I couldn’t bare myself to tell her that for me, this was a catastrophe, because I came so close to doing something awful to her that would hurt her feelings immensely and god knows what could’ve happened if I was a little drunker or if I “find myself” in a situation like this again. Now arguments can be made that if I didn’t want to find myself in a situation like that, I wouldn’t. That is true. Which is why, after reflecting upon what happened, I decided that I don’t trust myself in the current state I’m in anymore. I needed to break up with my girlfriend before I find myself in a situation like that again.
So we broke up, at the end of march 2015, 2 weeks after I nearly found myself cheating on her, and I was stuck in a dead end job with little relevance to my law degree and I no longer even had the thing I took the job for; my relationship. Things were looking pretty fucking grim and I was about to embark down the path of self-destruction even further before I could manage to turn things around.
But more of that another time…
All the best to anyone who actually managed to read the entire thing
