Look at awoo's rating graph.

You've never seen a negative delta up until now, why are you depressed?

dude these are literally fake internet points. Don't put your selfworth in your performance in contests.

No one can just consistently be good, it's how they responded to failure. Imagine if your parents, at your first cry, just tossed you on the streets instead of persisting. Instead, they (probably) persisted and became better parents.

You became specialist (cyan) in 6 contests what else do you need.

I feel like if cp is giving you depression, you should stop doing cp.

Watch some Naruto. especially Gaara vs Lee.

Idk why you should feel depressed about virtual rating on some internet page. Thats nice to have high rating of course, but whats wrong with being not perfect there? Can you really benefit from being good at cp?I

If you are doing cp for self confidence maybe you should seek for some other , more real thing.

Just think about it like about uno game with your friends, you dont care if you lose it, dont u?

For me, failing in contests shows me that I still have much to learn so I try to learn new stuff and that's most of the fun. The rest is seeing practice paying off every once in a while. If everyone could have good performances all the time, nobody would have to practice to get better right?

If it's depression you're suffering, I'd say you see a psychologist about it and not a bunch of random programmers.

"CP is great experience only if one is doing great." I don't know about you but the great thing about CP is that problem-solving is that it's fun and not the rating that someone gets. I think what matters for activities like these is the journey and not the destination. If you're having fun while solving problems that's great but if you're only after a goal like reaching GM, it's not going to be fulfilling. Reaching a goal like that only gives momentary happiness and it won't be worth your time.

"Otherwise it can be depressing as anything else." This means that you aren't passionate about CP or place too much importance in the competitive part. Do something that you're passionate about and you'll see that even if you fail you wont care about it. Also, there's not much point in taking CP very seriously since ratings and placements aren't really important to most people and wont get you much.

Just keep on enjoying it as a sport and [user:Sanitizer]keep ongoing. Think of it as a share market at the end the graph would go up for sure if you survive in the long run.

keep solving problems and you'll get better, bad performances don't invalidate your progress <3 trust the process you can do it~

Only if you care about rating or comparing your CP progress with others, you feel depressed.

I am also depressed :') I make silly mistakes , I cannot do as expected . I do not know if I am worth to be expert :')

someone i know once said "if i am stuck at specialist , that's ok , i will reach expert when i am good enough to be an expert , right now the best thing i can do is learn from my mistakes and keep practicing, no point in getting depressed " , and now he is real close to being a candidate master

It's probably not CP. Depression often doesn't need a reason to just come in to your life. I would probably stop doing CP for a while and find something that you find really fun and if your depression stops (and if you live a happy life, it will eventually, never give up) you can come back if you want or don't. Just never forget that your psyche and general health is the most important thing in your life.

Answering from Indian perspective since your account seem to be Indian.

If you are preparing for job interviews, then doing competitive programming is kind of overkill and probably tangential as well. There are better sites out there for that purpose.

If you want to graph of a guy who is around similar rating level for a long time, see mine :P I still sometimes take part in the contests because it is fun, sometimes even train a bit before the contest.

May be don't stress much over CP. It's not that useful skill in real life. I kind of think it like puzzle solving.

Leaving you with Petr's quote.

Play soccer, find a girlfriend, study something not related to programming, just live a life – programming contests are only programming contests, and nothing more..