I guess I ought to be writing here more, so here goes.

I'm starting to believe that I'm not broken, I guess.  Maybe.  I feel like for me, the thing that usually makes me feel most "safe", most confident, most sure that things will be okay, is knowing that it has worked out in the past.  Having already tackled the same problem before.  Having already suffered some of the same things before, and knowing that it will be okay.  These are the sorts of things that make it easier, each time, to continue to move forward.

Which makes it hard, then, when your past experience isn't particularly encouraging.  When I delve into my memory banks and find that, oh, maybe it IS true that I am broken in some way.  In those moments, I'm reminded not of all of the times when things worked out, but all of the times when they didn't.  That, I think, is what leads to a feeling of helplessness.  It's not that you failed one time, but that when you look back, you see that you ARE a failure, and you regrettably label yourself as such, because that is what your emotions are telling you.  Logic and memory are blind in the face of feelings.

But despite that, I guess I'm okay.  It's weird, I guess, thinking about the pain that I have suffered in the past.  A lot of it, seems so much clearer to me now, than it did in the moment.  I mean, of course it does; these things are always hard to understand and deal with when they are happening to you.  I'm not sure how it makes me feel.  Sad, I guess, for my past self, for having to go through that pain and suffering.  I wish...that my past self didn't have to.  I guess a lot of it was necessary; painful learning experiences are a part of life after all.  But it's too sad, thinking about all that I had to go through in the past.  I think thinking about that makes me think, "I should make sure they don't have to go through more of that again".  But of course, it's easier said than done.

Anyways.

I've been continuing to play Melee online, through unranked netplay, but...I'm wondering if I should stop.  I think at the beginning, it was sort of an exercise in courage, of sorts.  There's always a sort of intimidating that you can feel, jumping into an online game, much less one where you're directly put against someone else.  I had put off playing Melee online for a long time because of this.  And in the beginning, yeah, it felt really awkward, as I adjusted to the latency, the feeling of moving around again, how to control everything well.  I still miss a ton of stuff, more so than I would offline I'm sure, but once my hands are warm I at least can feel like I'm somewhat in control.

But I think I'm past the fear of playing, which I guess is good.  It's become something that I've gotten used to.  On the other hand, that just leaves playing Melee with random people, which...is somehow, not as fun as I felt it might be.  I've noticed that I'm starting to get a feeling of...pointlessness?  After playing a bunch.  Maybe that's simply because I'm not approaching it with an eye toward serious improvement, maybe it's because I don't have any real "goals", maybe it's the stress of measuring your own skill against that of another.  But somehow after a session I realize maybe it didn't actually make me that happy in the end.  So maybe I should stop.

I tried booting up Caesar 3 to give Lugdunum another shot -- I'm going to have to try to successfully tackle it at some point.  I didn't get super far, but remembered some things about how I want to approach the mission, so we'll see if I can gradually come into some sort of workable strategy.  That ought to be something that I can look forward to, but it's been surprisingly difficult to muster the activation energy to tackle it.  In the meantime I guess I've been making progress through Mother 3, alongside trying to do some physical exercise.

I...have both come so far from where I used to be, and also feel like I have not gotten anywhere at all.  It's a strange feeling.  My birthday is coming up and with it I think of all those birthdays in the past when I wondered why I felt so bad on mine.  At first I didn't understand; I just thought it was a thing for me to not have a good time.  Then I started getting bitter because my birthday served to remind me of all of the people whom I wanted to care about me more but didn't.  It made me think about the state of my relationships, and that wasn't really something I could be proud of.

As it approaches again this year during this time I feel...worn.  Of course, I think about the depression that I'm currently in and I feel bad, but I think more than that I think about all of the depressions that I've had on the way here and it just makes me feel really terrible.  I wouldn't really say that I've wasted my time getting here, or that I've been focusing on the wrong things.  More just, that all along the way it feels like I put in so much effort to so many things but somehow don't have the happiness to claim for it.  I can point back so clearly to the thoughts I had when I was...what was it...16 years old?  Somehow, I've come so far since then, but also not gone anywhere at all.  Unlike most times, this lack of change is unsettling.