Balancing / Fanime 2025 / Self-Worth / Burnout

Life is indeed, like a balancing act.  But the analogy extends to more than just the act of weighing different parts of life against each other, trying to find the right equilibrium for yourself.  Sometimes, life throws unexpected things at us.  If we are already struggling to find our balance, it's more likely that we'll drop what we are carrying as we scramble to catch these things.  And when we do, it takes more effort to bend down and pick back up the pieces that it does to simply maintain something that was already in harmony.

Sometimes you need to adjust your balance.  Other times you might need to move to a new location.  It turns out that walking (or running) while doing a balancing act is hard, too.  Sometimes you have things that are securely buckled down, things that you are holding onto tightly such that you know they won't fly away.  But not everything is like that.  When you need to, what will you do?  Will you walk more slowly so that you can keep things steady?  Will you try to tilt the tower in the direction of your goal, and then run after them to catch up?  Will you put something down, to lighten your load and let you move more easily?

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I didn't really write about Fanime 2024, but I guess I can say a few words about this year.  Fanime 2023 continued a trend of being "chill".  This year continued a different trend where my experience has become more and more about supporting and celebrating those friends of mine who staff at Fanimaid Cafe.  And I didn't really have a problem with that, really.  I was happy to lie low and to "condense" the other parts of my con experience.  All in all, I had a surprising amount of success with that.  I played some TGM2+ and got doubles clears with A-zu-ra and Kitaru, including a new PB (by like, 1-2 seconds, after 12 years lol).  I didn't spend a ton of time shopping, but I browsed a bit and picked up some nice things.  I stopped by Sakuradragon's booth as well and had a nice time chatting with the folks there.

Thanks to me not really spending as much time wandering the halls (or maybe just a sign of the times...) there was only one person who stopped me for a photo, but it was someone who was happy to see Journey representation and we chatted a little bit; I told them about the yearly anniversary event that happens and how I still try to play every year (....though I haven't been these days, sigh).

So yeah.  It was good...it was enough.

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There's been a lot of internal work and struggles, confronting sadness and all that, about self-worth.  I don't really know what to write about it here, I guess I've sort of touched on it a little bit already.  I always knew that I easily take things personally, that I have a lot of insecurities, all that stuff, but I think what really hit hard for me was the thought of "what would it be like to think that I'm enough" and having a lot of trouble even visualizing or comprehending what that is like.  I don't know if I've like =never= felt that way, but it feels so foreign and out of reach to me now and I was =sad= about that, like downright sad.

And it's not like the thoughts and feelings around this are anything new, I've already =done= a lot of feeling sad about being discarded, or being unloved, or all the frustrations that my younger self had, blahblahblah.  But just because I've done a lot of feeling sad about that doesn't necessarily mean I'm =done= feeling sad about them, and also doesn't necessarily mean that I've healed from those wounds either.

It takes work to heal from those things.  Maybe a lot of the time we don't think about it because like, it seems like the natural way that the body works is to be all resilient and heal from things gradually -- almost automatically -- over time.  Wounds close and even if there is some scarring there, things get fixed up, patched up.  But like, I had a surgery many years ago and there's actually a part of myself that maybe hasn't fully "healed" yet, it's something that if I want to ever restore it actually requires active effort.  And like, I don't know if that will ever happen, actually, but shouldn't I be trying to do that, not just letting it be?

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I may not have learned how to be in a healthy two-way relationship from all of those letters I wrote to all those people, but I did learn a thing or two along the way about my side of relationships.  What it's like to put in effort, what it's like to put in =too much= effort.  There is this really natural tendency that when a relationship is not working out I just want to put more into it in order to "fix" it.  The problem is that there is this point where I just don't actually have enough capacity and positive energy around it, and it just ends up burning me out and making me bitter.

I've learned to recognize that feeling and to try and rein myself in, but it's still a difficult balance to strike at times.  Because there =is= merit to making sure that you push yourself to show up in relationships during the times when it isn't necessarily the most easy or "fun" and all that.  Being deliberate and consistent and all that has always been one of my strengths.  But as I said, there is still a point when putting more into the relationship makes it worse, not better.  It's something that I'm trying to be mindful of.  I've certainly been on both sides of that balance, I think.  There was times when I put too much effort into my Christmas letters and felt really bad.  But then there was also a time when I put too =little= effort into my Christmas letters and felt really bad.  It took me some calibration to find what was best for me.

And it's...complicated.  I still have complicated feelings about all that energy and effort that I spent back then.  I have complicated feelings about how I don't spend as much effort now as I did before.  Is it "good" or "bad"?  I think it's easier to say that it's "good", but I also don't think it makes sense to just place a value judgment on it.  I think it's because it's not obvious to me anymore what a "good" relationship is like.  Maybe that is in itself a sign of maturity (?), that I don't think that is a trivial answer, because maybe it just depends.  Just like it seems like a folly to chase after "rules" for relationships because isn't the whole point of a successful relationship that it's tailored to bring happiness to the actual people who are a part of it?