The year was 2004; essentially half a lifetime ago for me. I was a college sophomore, although not really, as I had been tossed out of school for the Fall semester for the egregious student policy violation of attempting suicide on campus. In spite of all of my support and coping systems being tied to my found family at university, it was determined, in the infinite wisdom of my superiors in Student Affairs, that the best thing for me would be to force me to move back in with my parents. In Redding, CA. A town that was, at the time, deeply in the process of being taken over faith healing cult. So, great idea on their part.
Of course, my parents had absolutely no idea what to do with me or how to help me and they honestly never had (remind me to tell y'all someday about the hilarious story of why my mom and I don't talk any more), and the only therapist I could get in to see regularly insisted that the answer to all of my problems was accepting God into my life, because, remember, cult town (the actual answer to all of my problems, I would discover many years later, was estrogen, so I guess we can call it six to one, half dozen to the other?). Needless to say, this situation was not at all helpful for my quickly deteriorating mental health.
With my betters from college actively blocking my friends from there from trying to get in contact with me, my only source of companionship at all, at that point, was an online RPG forum (JRPG, in this case, though I'm sure there were a few D&D nerds kicking around), and one of its members was recruiting for a fantasy football league. This is a story about fantasy football, remember. So I joined up, because why not (I had actually joined up before this all went down, but the season hadn't started yet). It would end up being literally the only thing I would have to look forward to for the entirety of the Fall. See, one of things about major depression they don't really talk about (or at least didn't back then) is that, as a disorder, it's not really about sadness, but actually emotional numbness. You stop enjoying things, you stop caring about things. It becomes a struggle just to get out of bed in the morning. And this was certainly true for me; six days of the week I would basically never make it out of bed before the clock flipped to P.M. I had, basically, nothing to do with my life. I struggled to even play video games.
But on the seventh day, things were different (so maybe my therapist was on to something after all).
Every week I was out of bed by 9:30am at the latest. I had to check injury reports for the early games, see. The TV would be on to whatever game I could watch, which would often be a 49er or Raider game, which in 2004 would be a pretty miserable experience, but whatever, football. I would be out of bed, on my computer, a tab open to the gamecast and box score for every game being played. Six days a week I was a lump. On Sundays I was the Billy f'in Beane of fantasy football. I out-paced the rest of my league on the waiver wire by a significant margin. And I dominated the league that year because of it (of course drafting Shaun Alexander also helped a tad). Even on the days I had absolutely nothing to look forward to... I did still have something to look forward to. Sundays. Fantasy Football.
And I played Fantasy Football every damn year since, and I usually did great, because I never stopped watching every box score like a hawk for the sleepers and marginal pickups. I mean, at least until the Kaepernick saga, when my relationship to the NFL took a turn, but that's neither here nor there, and I ultimately couldn't quit the sport I spent my whole life loving (and which, I can honestly say, probably saved my life) for too long.
I guess the moral of the story is... don't get banished to your cult-run hometown when you're suffering through a mental health crisis? And if you do... find something, anything, to hold onto? Even something as asinine as competitive stat-crunching.
