who only by moving can balance

Hi, I'm Alex, my pronouns are they, I have hilarious boardgame-related trauma; I'm going to want five minutes to read the rules in silence before we start; and if I ask a question about gameplay that isn't addressed to you by name and you're not me_and, please pretend I didn't say anything.

As I periodically mention, mostly whenever I make notable progress of any kind, for a variety of hilarious reasons I find the vast majority of boardgames intensely stressful, and this gets worse the less I know the people I'm playing with. Like I said in my previous post, over the past two years I've gone from "cannot even start to play a game I've had long-term interest in, in my own home, with my partner, who I trust, with no-one else present, without bursting into tears twice just reading the rules" to "getting a bit of an adrenaline kick when I start my second new game of an afternoon with strangers, in a pub, when I was already primed for social anxiety for reasons that do not need exploring at this juncture".

In order to usefully trace this in any kind of detail, I should probably begin with (at least a sketch of) the beginning: I'm happy and comfortable playing Scrabble socially and non-competitively, mostly in silence while people whose turn it isn't read a book or exclaim over weird words they just found in the dictionary or whatever else. Admiring clever plays is nice; who actually wins any given game isn't a big deal. When I got old enough, and Mama was still alive, she and he and I and one other adult would play Scrabble every evening after dinner we were in Cornwall; nowadays my mother and I play with Papa. (Afterwards, Papa makes cocoa.) That's my baseline: that's a game I can Just Play, and it helps that I'm fairly good at it by amateur standards.

Other (non-Snakes-and-Ladders) games I had early experience with were chess and Monopoly. They are, to oversimplify, the context in which I got "being scared of not being good enough/not being able to strategise enough/spoiling everyone's fun", really thoroughly mixed up with needing to be quick and clever and dazzling to avoid being sneered at. So board games, apart from Scrabble, turned into setting myself up to fail, and to spoil everyone else's fun, so I avoided them as much as possible and was incredibly stressed and unhappy and prone to bursting into tears when I couldn't, which did not exactly Help with the sense that I was Ruining Everyone's Fun.

The Great Desensitisation Project basically happened because this is a hobby of A.'s I actually could, in principle, engage with, unlike a bunch of his other hobbies that for various reasons I Really Can't, and that he actually would like to do with me, and also I know an increasing number of people for whom Board Game Social is a Thing. I wanted to be able to participate, instead of knitting grumpily in a corner. So it went A Bit Like This:

1. I had a partner I trusted a lot, and felt very safe with, who was interested in me actually sinking time and effort into this, and who was willing to dedicate a lot of his own time and effort into facilitating same.
   
2. I started teaching A. Scrabble. As Resident Expert, I got to set tone and expectations about how it would work and how we'd interact over it, and get a sense of A's general attitude to games. This wasn't a zero-stress option for me, but all the stress was around "will this person who's important to me enjoy something this important to my sense of continuity of self?" rather than "I'm not good enough".
   
3. We talked a lot about what my problems were, and why they were there, and what sort of thing I might need; a really central point was "repeated affirmation, at the beginning of basically every attempt to play a game, that it's completely okay for me to tap out and abandon mid-game, and I won't be ruining everything and you won't think less of me". Also prominently featured were "I need you to let me sit down with the rulebook and read it by myself for 5-10 minutes before I even start asking you clarifying questions; do not try to insist that it would be faster and easier for you to just explain the rules to me" and "I am going to find this intensely stressful and I'm likely to snappish about asking clarifying questions due to anxiety; I'd rather this weren't the case but if you're not prepared to deal with that and be soothing at me through it we shouldn't try this".
   
4. The first not-Scrabble game we tried together was Thud!, which I'd spent a long time curious about but had never realistically had the opportunity to get to grips with. It was something I actively wanted to do, independent of A., but he had a copy and he had time and willingness and patience. It helped that he'd not played it much either: this meant that we got to do the thing of playing collaboratively, working it out together, rather than playing in competition. (This is also how we're doing Scrabble teaching at the moment -- both racks visible to both players, with lots of discussion.) It was still pretty grim -- I still cried a lot, I still needed to take breaks, I was still anxious and snappish about asking clarifying questions, I needed a lot of reassurance and snuggle during and after. But also I did it, which was useful.
   
5. Over subsequent months I increasingly actually went along to boardgame socials accompanied by A. I didn't participate in any games at all, but I would watch intently and suspiciously from behind my knitting and occasionally ask questions. Hosts would be informed before I accepted invitations that I'd be watching rather than participating, and given a chance to say they'd rather I not come along after all. This was where having rehearsed the breezy "oh no, I have hilarious board game-related trauma, I'm just watching" came in very useful, because people (bless them) were very concerned about me feeling left out and were very eager to include me, and it was Not A Good Idea.
   
6. After some of this, I started learning new games at home (very, very occasionally) with A., from his collection. The first few were still always stressful, but from there I reached the point where I was familiar with non-Scrabble games and could play them with sebastienne and shortcipher, also Trusted Humans who knew the Alex Rules, in my own home, without strangers present.
   
7. A thing with boardgame socials is that people don't tend, in my circles, to play a game more than once. What I actually wanted to do (and did a little, increasingly, at home with Trusted Humans) was watch one play-through suspiciously, to get my head round the rules, and then do another round that included me. However! At one about six months ago, I watched people play one round of a game and more-or-less got the hang of it... and then a second round did get played, with expansion packs I felt more-or-less okay about winging. So that was the first time I played a game with strangers, having done the introductory spiel (ha) about not answering my questions unless you were A., and to my delight I did in fact successfully bluff A. into believing my in-game motivations were Other Than They Were. Nobody hated me! Nobody got cross with me! Nobody condescended to me! It was pretty great.
   
8. ... and then this weekend just gone, I managed to play two new-to-me games with people I didn't know terribly well, in public, and I didn't cry at all. I was still snappish when I was correcting A. on the rules (having just hypervigilantly memorised the lot of them, to a panicked degree that most people don't bother with, because that's not the point); it helped that by this point I'd got comfortable with the idea that a lot of these people would be playing any given game for the first time, too, so I wouldn't be the only one, and that I felt much more socially secure in the group as a whole (despite not knowing a significant chunk of them).

I still wouldn't say I enjoy games (other than Scrabble), as such, or even that I can see how I would -- but I'm getting an enormous sense of accomplishment over the real and substantial progress I'm making in managing my anxiety and feelings of inadequacy, and the experiment in increased social contact it provides a framework for. I'm sort of expecting -- intellectually, not emotionally -- that the next step is starting to find it satisfying and interesting to try to solve for a complex set of constraints in the ways that I enjoy solo gaming or puzzles, and interesting to get more stuck in to the social wrangling involved. At the moment, though, a lot of it is honestly having a very self-centred metric for success and victory, and making it very clear to everyone choosing to play with me that I will be prickly and irritable, and therefore being okay myself with being prickly and defensive and irritable.

I am, as ever, interested in your various thoughts. <3