I launched a Dungeons & Dragons campaign for five of my friends so we could have something nice to do online due to covid-19 shutting us all inside. I made us a discord server which I looked forward to opening every morning. I’m the Dungeon Master, and I pour a lot of hours for our adventure, and it was going good and it felt great to have people be hyped for something. We’ve had five sessions so far, and I’ve gotten lots of good comments and input from my players. Everyone has told me they have fun, and people haven’t felt left out. It was good to have something to look forward to and focus on to whenever I felt anxious or sad about anything, and it felt exciting to come up with dungeons and npcs and encounters that would give everyone something they wanted.

We were supposed to have a session this weekend, but two players had to bail out for completely understandable reasons. I thought it was okay, maybe the rest of us could do something like just hang out on our voice channel, maybe watch something theme appropriate, or talk about character backstories etc. Just to keep company, because it’s hard for me to reach out and I could have used a pick-me-up. No-one of the rest of the players, who were fine with originally playing today, bothered to come at least say hi to me when I asked hey wanna still hang. Even if they’re clearly online and see my messages. Suddenly I feel like I’m only good whenever I’m entertaining people or when I’m not asking for anything. Feels childish, but I’ve already gotten fucked over by two of my closest ex-friends this year when I started to actually ask for help when I’m feeling lonely or anxious or despairing. This left me in an emotional downspiral for a while. This whole DnD project was because I wanted to get out of the rut of feeling sorry or angry for being used and to see that people do like me and my company. And now I’m once again just crying because now it feels like I’m only wanted around when I’m giving and giving and giving.

I’m kind of seriously considering just deleting the whole server and not talking to any of my players for a while. I don’t think I want to run anything for them anymore because I feel so resentful and I can’t look at my campaign in a happy light.