I want to preface this post by saying I did have fun at Low Tide City, and I don’t want to give the impression that I didn’t. I want to make a full post on the whole experience when I’m in a better headspace.
Usually, when I lose in bracket, I’m able to say, “okay, I can practice against that”, or “I know what I did wrong, I’ll practice that next”. I avoid the “that character is so easy to play” or “I got cheesed” thoughts. I’m good at reminding myself that I lost because I got outplayed, and I just need to work on getting better. However, right now, I don’t want to touch the game with a ten foot pole. I don’t want to hear or read about it either.
I’m very burnt out. I’m not particularly bothered about my loss at my first major, because I fully expected it (although to be honest I did not expect to embarrass myself in-game). What bothers me is I don’t know how to move forward with Smash at all.
For the entire month of September, I tried my hardest to be in Training Mode for at least 2 hours a day. If my afternoon wasn’t spent in Training Mode, it was spent at a local tournament – I tried to go to two a week. This is already a lot of Smash for any person, but I was dedicated to at least having a chance at Low Tide City.
Thing is, I know that what I was doing wasn’t healthy. Because I know that I play preemptively and not on reaction, I would set Training Mode to very specific situations (Training Modpack is useful for this), and attempt to react to the option the CPU chose. It was obviously difficult, so I started getting frustrated. If I made a single input that was not based on what the CPU was doing, I would yell, no, scream at myself “React!”. This started to work and I felt like it was helping, so I kept doing it. Day after day. I also literally bought candy to use operant conditioning to get myself to do certain techniques with consistency. To say that training myself like this was intense would be an understatement. None of this felt normal, or healthy, but I felt like it was working, so it didn’t matter.
After bracket yesterday (Saturday), I felt extremely lethargic, and went home and slept. This is how I’ve responded to high stress for years, and it’s not healthy. This was so common in high school that I named it “stress sleeping”. Unfortunately, I have not received any good advice or help for this other than “don’t let yourself get that stressed”.
I guess the bright side here is that I do want to continue to compete, I just don’t know how to do that healthily anymore. I want nothing more than to improve, but I can’t see myself doing that without burning out again, or literally driving myself insane.
I wish I had someone to talk to about this, but at the same time I don’t really want to talk about it right now. There’s someone in particular that I want to talk to about this (later), but I can’t talk to them at all. I just don’t know how to move forward. I don’t know that I can move forward. It sucks. It hurts, even.
So I’m taking a break from competitive. This is a pretty big obstacle in this journey, if not the end of it. School and work and “real life” have been ramping up as expected for someone my age, and I just don’t know that I have enough spoons for Smash.