Everyone thinks I’m ok based on the notion I’m not actively trying to hurt myself or others, and as long as I’m crawling across the finish line I’ll still get my participation reward. The amount of time it’d take to crawl this marathon means I’d die of thirst before even getting halfway. People don’t even know that I’m in the race. Everyone is just running past me. Every now and then someone trips over me but they just get up and move on. Once the dehydration really sets in I can just sit on the street and pass out.

I’m nothing.

I’m a really hard worker who found himself proudly grinding something I love for 12 hours straight every day on the weekends. I’d only been playing for a year and I was really starting to get the grips of playing in a team environment and all around my understanding of the game made me unpredictable. Although I sometimes didn’t play that much as I was scared to fail sometimes, I could still bounce back and talk to my teammates.

I needed counseling of some kind. My irrational fears of failure were keeping me from practicing and doing nothing was the only way I could truly fail. But I don’t have any coping skills for any of my issues. One of my skills is that I can’t take so much crap before even showing a crack in my character. But after taking this double-edged sword and attaching it to a motor to have it rotate like a ceiling fan and sticking my head in it I realized that I taking emotional punches every day wasn't actually a way to deal with my problems.

So what I did to combat this issue was absolutely nothing.

Being scared to practice while being consciously aware of how the only way fails is to never try and then not trying is an emotional blender. I’m extremely insecure about my own unproductivity.  I’m so self-aware and so overly introspective that I can’t help but hate every single action I take, and every word spoken. My own ability to empathize with people and to correct my issues internally is so good that I just disassociate from everything.

My nothingness is a safety blanket carefully woven by mindset to only accept perfection.

This blanket is so perfect that I dare not to sleep on it as I might ruin the fabric.

I consistently stay up until 2 o’clock in the morning so I can spend some dedicated time to improving my mechanics. I’ll record my play then review it the next day of play to try and identify mistakes and start building better habits while getting rid of the bad ones. On this quest to become as consistent as possible, my deepest issues and insecurities step up before me and the challenge goes away from the game. But my ability to deal with it directly affects it. While the people who have authority in my life don’t as much as they can, I take steps day by day to attempt to overcome my anxiety. I’m never sure how I’ll turn out but if I don’t put every second into trying my hardest to be the best I possibly can, then I will have truly failed.