There's something about like, "fear of failure" where you're supposed to just "go out and fail a bunch" and get it out of your system, supposedly, right?  Like, oh, if you're afraid of rejection, just go out and "practice" getting rejected a bunch.  If you're afraid of losing, just go and rip off the bandaid and go get some Ls so that it's not such a big deal anymore.

To some extent I can get behind it.  I always talk about how I went through this era of One Hour Compo where I had to kind of get used to the fact that I'm just gonna make stuff that I feel is sub-par sometimes, and that's just how it's supposed to be.  And of course we all know that playing games, and video games -- especially competitive ones -- can really drill into us the experience of trying to deal with losses or failures.

But also, like, those are different because you're also succeeding along the way too, right?  Sometimes when you have a fear of failing something it's not just some excuse that your mind is making up to get out of pushing beyond your comfort zone, it's an active defense mechanism of a calculated sort.  In other words, the fear is rational; we aren't just conjuring it out of nowhere.

Doesn't going and failing a bunch just end up substantiating the fear that you had in the first place?  Perhaps you got rid of the "worry" that you'll fail, but in return, where did you end up -- despondency?  We learn really quickly from negative outcomes, so much so that it's a really common skill fallacy in competitive gaming (or heck, even just simple probability and games of chance) for people to fall into the trap of trying to avoid the thing that caused them to lose, even if it's supposed to be understood to be optimal.

Sure, we may have had fear pulling us away from giving things our all before, but the brain is also really adept at trying to optimize away things that it doesn't think are going to work out.  Why bother spending effort on something that is not going to pay off with any reward?

Buddhism is supposed to tell us something about the risks of being attached to outcomes (or anything, really).  But despite the suffering it brings, it feels like attachment is also a core part of the human experience.  To struggle, to hope, to persevere, to hold sacred those "irrational" dreams that are =meaningful= to us rather than simply convenient.

We are told at once that to deal with our losses, to deal with our failed dreams, we must both spend time grieving them, but also move on from them.  "Spend time sitting with the grief", they say.  But what if the grief still remains?  Like a silent shadow looming in the background of your life, it lingers, no matter how much you try to therapize and rationalize it away.

For a while, I chose to simply adopt grief into my life.  Maybe the idea is that you're stuck with it for a while, you have to "put in your time".  Maybe you have to wait until it teaches you the right lessons, or until you're just "ready to move on".  The sad (?) part is that "moving on" is another way of just saying you gave up.  In some sense, that's sad; isn't it depressing how many hopes and dreams we have to stamp out?  But in another sense, I guess that is the only outcome moving forward in the end -- it may take us years, but in the end we reconcile with what is true in reality.

Do you think happiness, then, stems from a repeated practice of abandoning what is out of our reach?  Where are we left in the end?

I grow older, uglier, more tired, less forgiving.  I see myself standing a little taller than before, a little more "mature", but at what cost?  How many more of our dreams must be shattered before we can find our way to the promised land?  The death of dreams is not such a dramatic thing as it is sometimes portrayed.  We do not at once turn into hollow shells, spilling out despair and grief in a horrifying yet somehow relatable tragedy.  We simply lose small parts of ourselves, silently, one by one.

You always seemed youthful.  For a long while, you were still growing, still forming your full and whole self, and even after that, you smiled like warm pink clouds swirling about in a cotton-candy dream.  But you, too, somehow, seem like you feel this weariness.  It's no longer a wistful forlorn look.  I understand.  We're tired of it all.