Why I Quit. Why I'm Sorry.

I've been up for 22 hrs, I'm restless, and I felt like just dumping all my current thoughts into a post, so here it is:
I went and hung out at a tournament for the first time in about 6 months today. Seeing friends that I haven't seen in a long while and being in that environment got me thinking a lot about my relationship with melee. I'm going to share my thoughts and be honest with myself and you so that ppl like my friends can better understand why I refuse to go to tournaments unless my boyfriend wants me to go with him.

Reasons why I quit:
1. Tournaments remind me of bad times in my life as well as parts of me/things I did that I wish I could forget.

2014-2017 were probably the worst years of my life. I went to so many tournaments just to ignore my personal problems. When I had bad tournament performances on top of really bad days, I would completely break down. I will never forget how bad I felt during these years.

When I go to tournaments now, I'm reminded of those days. Especially when I lose. It's like some of that anger and sadness comes back for a little bit. It's like peeling off a scab when you know you shouldn't. I wasn't nearly as sad or mad when I lost at the few tournaments I went to last year, but they still reminded me of that dark time in my life. I never ever want to feel the way I did during those years again.

Tournaments also remind me that I'm not the nicest person and that I should have treated some people better and not done/said certain things. I feel like I might regret some things forever.

2. Tournaments aren't fun to me/competing isn't something I'm passionate about anymore. Dedicating an entire day/night driving to a tournament and waiting around to play is also not something I want to do with my limited free time. Why do that when I can go play at a friend's place or just netplay at my own leisure?

3. I became bitter. Growing up with all the amazing players in SoCal made me feel like I was never special or good enough. I always felt overshadowed and mediocre (this feeling got even worse when I did videos for ssbm tutorials). I spent half my life playing and practicing and it really feels like it wasn't time well spent. I often find myself wondering, "what if I had tried to learn X instead? What if I had put this time into something more meaningful?". Maybe if I hadn't put all this time into melee, I could've done things that I could actually be proud of. Who knows.

4. Then once I quit, I became even more bitter when it felt like most of my friends didn't care if they saw me or not. So I spent the past year shutting people out and not making an effort to really see anyone besides my closest friends.

Why I'm sorry
1. There are a good number of people who were really supportive and kind to me when I was competing. Like Algebra. I feel like I never properly expressed my gratitude to the people and friends that cheered me on and said nice things to me. For that, I am sorry. Thank you so much for encouraging me.

2. I probably came across as whiny whenever I complained about ppl crediting Kira for my tutorials. If you've ever watched any of my videos, I really want to thank you from the bottom of my heart. I'm sorry I never voiced much appreciation until now. I hope that the videos I made were helpful to even just a few people. I'm also incredibly grateful that Kira and Kellen trusted me and gave me the opportunity to make videos for their channel. Thanks for everything, guys.

3. Sorry for quitting multiple times throughout the years. I was young and dumb. I think back on how I behaved and feel like I must have been so annoying. This is the last time, though. I've changed and matured a lot over the past few years and I know that I am done taking melee as seriously as I used to.

I realized that this post is really a bummer, which is not what I intended, so I'll leave some final notes about how I've been feeling:

I'm currently the happiest I've ever been. Life is rocky and I still have bad days/weeks here and there, but I'm much more resilient now than I was before. Kampy is an amazing boyfriend that has shown me nothing but unconditional love since we started dating and I'm really excited to settle down with him in the future. I've never loved anyone as much as I love him :)

Also, I still really love playing melee for fun. I don't understand why but I always come back to it. No other game that I try can come close to feeling as good as melee does. Fortnite almost replaced it but their dev team is full of 30 IQ mongoloids desperately trying to Sakurai the game with each new patch so that noobs won't rage quit the game lmao.

Tl;dr: tourneys make me feel bad but I still really like playing melee.

Sorry for the huge wall of text. I've been thinking about all of these things lately and I needed to get it off my chest. Thanks for reading. I might delete this if I wake up later and change my mind about sharing these thoughts lol.