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I have suicidal depression.

That’s not a great opening line, and it’s not something I enjoy talking about, but it's an important piece of who I am. From the age of 16 onward, depression led me to slowly curl in upon myself until the idea of leaving the house left me pressed into the corner of my room, shaking.

Most of what happened to me over the last 10 years was never seen by others because I made damn sure that it stayed hidden. But things leak out. There was the time my girlfriend came up to visit me (quite how I managed to maintain a relationship at all is a genuine enigma to me even now), and as we squeezed into my single bed, she slid her hand under the pillow—and froze.

“Why do you have a knife?” she asked me, understandably alarmed. I paused for a second, wondering how best to explain myself without making her run screaming from the room.

I liked horror movies, I told her, but sometimes after I’d seen one, my imagination would spook me. Some nights, I couldn’t shake the irrational fear that zombies would burst in or that vampires would attack and I had no way to protect myself. I kept the knife under my pillow as a way to stop my brain from being so silly. Perfect—if slightly stupid—logic.

My girlfriend settled back into the bed, satisfied I wasn’t crazy. The night, and our relationship, continued.

But while that explanation was technically true, it was also a flaming great lie. While I did have those sorts of thoughts, they weren’t why the knife was under my pillow. The knife was there because its presence comforted me. Holding that wooden handle as I tried to fall asleep made me feel safe. Because it was the knife I’d been using, for years, to self-harm.

By the time my girlfriend found the blade, my ragged mind had rationalized and reasoned itself around in a full 180-degree spin from normality. The knife had become a comfort—indeed, a reward. I would tell myself daily, “If you can get through today, then you can think about killing yourself before bed.” I used suicidal thoughts as a way to motivate myself to stay alive, to appear normal.

Once I had to go in to university, but I didn’t feel up to it. I had missed a number of lectures already and couldn’t afford another unexplained absence. So I physically beat myself up. I stood in my room and punched myself repeatedly as hard as I could—on the arms, on the cheek. Something to leave visible bruises. Job done, I sent an e-mail to my lecturer saying I didn’t feel safe coming in that day because I’d just been mugged. I stayed in my room, unable to leave, convinced that what I had done was rational. Well done, me; time for my reward.

I hid all this pain because more terrifying than any of the insane things I did or thought was the idea that something was wrong with me. So I did what people do about anything they don’t want to deal with; I ignored it. I kept going to university. I kept going to work. For years I did absolutely everything in my power to maintain an appearance of normality, even at the most absurd cost to myself.

Social events were the worst. They became a sensory warzone—full of chaos and noise. But I was totally normal, obviously, so I kept going to them. I found ways to cope, sitting in corner seats so that I could see everyone and no one would be behind me. I always had my phone so I could fake a call and leave without warning, obligation fulfilled. For every conversation, I had a script. For every situation, a strategy.

But aside from the whole crippling depression thing, I’m a highly sociable person. It sounds like a punchline, but it’s true. When I am on form I can guarantee I will be the center of the room, spinning tales and cracking jokes. Those moments are like solar flares; the crackle of energy from one person to another, the sheer verve and life bouncing around the room, and they have always been the purest joy I know.

So you can see how this situation might cause problems.

Unboxing

I’ve always enjoyed board games. For years, while my mind was caving in on itself, Monopoly was my favorite. I was “that guy who knows all the rules from memory.” I would crack the game open at any occasion I could. Over time, I even found ways to make it a drinking game, and I invented a truth-or-dare variant. I foisted that game on everyone I know. As my depression worsened and social situations gradually became horrendous, board games helped—really helped. At the time, I couldn’t see that. I just knew that I liked to get people playing Monopoly.

In time, most forms of social interaction completely vanished from my life. An extended period of overwhelming isolation followed. I lost the ability to do the most basic of activities: pick up the phone, leave the house, and—at times—even speak at all. But the most crushing damage, the most brutal thing that had slowly been taken from me was the ability to be happy. No, it was more than that; I literally could not imagine what happiness was. It was a word from an alien language that I could no longer pronounce. I simply existed—and that was all.

Then, completely by chance, I encountered the board game Twilight Imperium (3rd edition). In casual conversation, my brother mentioned that he had seen a video of people playing it. Particularly entertaining, he said, was one player repeatedly insisting that his horribly beweaponed warships had been built simply to spread high-speed Internet across the galaxy. This sounded funny but forgettable. A month later, several people pooled their money and bought the game as a Christmas present for my brother. I was sitting across the room when he unwrapped the ridiculously big box. When he opened the lid, I saw row after row of tiny model ships, an intimidatingly large deck of cards, and gobs of people and planets and tokens.

It. Looked. Incredible.

On Boxing Day [the day after Christmas], two other family members and a nearby friend got together, and the four of us sat down to play. I was actually… excited.

But Twilight Imperium is infamous for length and complexity, and my brother didn’t even know the basic rules. His explanation took over two hours as we checked and re-checked every paragraph, backtracking time and again through a rules labyrinth from which we could not escape. To make matters worse, my dad—the engineer and endless pedant—kept asking about every permeation of every rule until, in order to not go totally berserk, I started singing Christmas carols in my head and making my ships do dance routines across the table.

After three hours, we got the board set up. In another hour and a half, we finished round one. Half an hour later came dinner, and we had to stop playing and clear the table.

Though I had just been marched through some board-game circle of hell, I found—magically—that this was actually the most fun I had experienced in years. (Which tells you exactly how low things were for me at that point.)

Terrible as that experience had been, the fire of a strange new interest had been kindled. I found the video my brother had watched. It had me simultaneously fascinated and in stitches—even just watching other people play this ridiculous game was an amazing experience. I grabbed a friend and we bought our own copy of Twilight Imperium. In a frenzy, we dredged up a few friends, spent a few hours wrestling with the rules, and within a week were all sitting down to play.

And... I had fun. I had so much fun. Once we were over the admittedly massive rules hump, I found myself at a table with friends and strangers, connecting. Privately confident in my own ability to strategize and outplay, I instead got to watch my master plan go up in smoke. I formed a hasty alliance with a neighboring player, promising to feed his technology addiction if he didn’t attack me. It worked… until it didn’t. An hour into the game, I suddenly realized that my neighbor, now glutted on the finest cutting-edge technology in the galaxy, could not be stopped from trampling my empire into dust. Trying to give nothing away, I privately accelerated into a desperate rush of weaponry, only to have my tech-neighbor turn round to me and ask suspiciously why I was building an army so close to our shared border. Fast talking wouldn’t save me now, would it?

It was worth a shot—but I had forgotten about the other four players at the table. All of them could hear our conversation, and all of them were looking for weakness. Damn! What exactly should I say?

The entire game was like this, a constantly evolving quickstep of half-real, half-imagined problems. I spent almost the entire eight-hour game with a cartoon grin on my face—which may well have been why other players were so suspicious of me. I didn’t care; I was having fun.

It’s hard to express in words, but after years of literally nothing less than constant, all-pervading mental agony, it meant so much to me to be able to... not feel that? To experience something good? The closest word I can find for it was “love.” Giddy, goofy-grinning love, being unlocked from the black hole of my terrified mind by cardboard and plastic and rules, combining to connect me to the friends I had missed so very, very badly.

Over the next few months I hunted down games in earnest. I found that there were many board games out there that made Monopoly look like, well, Monopoly. A friend of a friend brought round the Battlestar Galactica board game one night—and I had fun. For my birthday, two of my family members bought me Tales of the Arabian Nights—and again I had fun. Over and over again, these weird little cardboard boxes let me be, for a time, someone I had forgotten I could be.

The games challenged and engaged me in new ways—bluffing, storytelling, diplomacy, even pure logical strategy—and every game held a different puzzle. Each one drew me out of my suicidal shell, and each one gave me a new way to smile. I could spend twenty minutes being a murderous madman or spend an entire day plotting the most convoluted of military machinations. I interacted with people again, and I wasn’t freaking out. I was arguing and laughing and lying and running around the entire gamut of emotions in the company of friends, and it wasn’t overloading me. It was strange, and to my stupid, stupid brain, unsettling.

I had been living for years a life increasingly monochrome. These board games, these beautiful boxes of bits, gave me a way to have an afternoon with the color turned on.