I used to be "the best of my friends." I was that guy. At least I knew I was bad, but while I never had anyone better than me to face, it was hard for me to get better. But, honestly, I was content with winning the little tournaments we held between our friends every month.

But this past week, I moved from small town Missouri all the way to a huge school in SoCal. And like. I'm hella awkward, and stressed about being far from home, making friends, y'know, average freshman stuff. So, obviously, I thought the best thing to do was to join a club, and luckily the school just so happens to have an eSports club with a Smash 4 subdivision. I met a couple of guys who played, but only one was a friendless nerd like me who could play Smash all day. (He was the only one that took Smash semi-seriously along with myself.)

So yesterday, I went up to his dorm and played for a bit. The dude was good. Not like. Pro or anything, but definitely better than me. He'd been to tournaments and played friendlies with Larry Lurr, Nairo, Esam, and more. I played my friends (only two of which owned a Wii U). I got bodied first match, so he switched to a secondary, and it was a lot more even. We kept switching characters for a while until eventually, we were both picking random. I didn't care what character I got, I wasn't too focused on winning. Instead, I knew this was an opportunity to start breaking bad habits. I started working on no longer playing on auto-pilot. I lost a lot, but won a few. And when we did a main match before I left, it was dead even the whole time, and I would have won if I hadn't misinputted.

The next day, today, I'd had a really rough day, so I invited him over to play. I played his main, got bodied. I played his secondaries, got bodied. I was getting really tilted, and just picking characters I knew how to play, because I was focused on other things. And then, I picked my main and decided to focus back on the matches, since it would be better to focus on a game than to focus on shit that's getting me down. I started working on reading, breaking bad habits, etc. I got rekt so many times, but each match, I improved a little bit. I lost A LOT tonight. But each win showed how much I was progressing. And like. It's such a weird feeling to see yourself leveling up in just the span of two days.

TL;dr When you're breaking out of bad habits and trying to play more consciously, you're going to lose, a lot, especially if it's against someone better than you. But slowly, you'll start to see progress, and all the salt in the world becomes worth it.