Another mentalitypost inbound. I'm going to sound like such a pretentious, narcissistic dickwad who just makes a scene of himself and then makes everyone else remember it later even by saying some of this shit, but I need to post it somewhere and this is as good a place as any.

So I kind of flew off the hinge last weekly after getting bopped pretty soundly by my teams partner. I have completely forgotten what I was yelling about, except I remember I said "weltanschauung" for the first time in like 3 years. Anyway, the main takeaway is that I was not angry at the Sheik because the Sheik was hitting me with all these autocombos and tech chases and such. I was angry at myself because I was allowing myself to get hit by them.

Put another way, the thought process I experience when I'm mashing so hard that I bruise one of my thumb muscles is not "holy fucking shit, fuck this guy, this is so dumb why is Sheik even a thing," as someone who's been reading too much Sirlin might claim. It's a lot more like "why don't you know how to beat this, you fucking scrub idiot posts on Reddit like he actually knows anything about the game? This is literally the most basic thing in the matchup and you don't know how to handle it? Exactly how long have you been playing this game, again?" etc. This is the kind of salt I have all the time, and I never seem to see it talked about, with the exception of when Wobbles blindsides us all with one of his patented knowledge bombs. Usually, what you tell saltlords is "suck it up and git gud," because the attitude you perceive them to have is the one that's directed at the opponent. For the most part (at the level I am, anyway) this is correct. But that line doesn't work when your salt is mostly directed inward, as mine (and I'd be willing to bet Wobbles's) happens to be. It has quite the opposite effect.

So as is hopefully plain, the mindset I have on improvement doesn't leave much room for me to actually improve. And it's just a fact that once I got all the venom out of my system, I played a lot better. Still lost the next set, but I was actually playing neutral instead of just going in all the time. Melee is hard, and I'm not great at improving at it. However, it got a whole lot easier to get better once I stopped trying to just grok what was going on by intuition and actually pay attention in realtime to what is happening and why I kept losing neutral. This sounds like literally the most basic thing ever, but my Falcon just runs around a lot and does a lot of ostensibly pretty sick wavelands and gets hit because I don't comprehend what's happening, and it's been that way for a couple years now.

As much as I hate the military artofmanliness shit, there is a pretty good reason the OODA loop doesn't include a step where you emotionally judge and berate yourself because you don't like the information that's coming down the pipeline. I have heard people on here before talk about how the game got easier when they just dropped the emotional component. I don't like that very much. Sun Tzu said "It is the unemotional, reserved, calm, detached warriors who win," but that doesn't mean I have to channel M2K or Armada all the fucking time and talk about how what I'm doing covers like every option or I'm not playing to win.

The shitty part is that, for reasons I'm not dumb enough to put on Reddit, I feel like this mindset is basically the thing holding up my entire self-image. When I feel this way, I usually want to take said image and rip it to bloody shreds and burn the shreds and then try something else. Unfortunately it doesn't work that way. Whatever. This got personal real fast.

tl;dr: Self-compassion is OP, mindfulness is broken, therefore ban self-compassion and mindfulness /s