On Keeping My Mental

   I took a day off of work yesterday. I wasn't necessarily doing bad, but I just didn't feel good, you know? 

  It seems a little silly to burn my PTO like that, but I largely self-isolated, walked the dogs, played video games, watched a TV show for a bit. I kind of only really responded to text messages and just really spent some time alone, it was refreshing. I really enjoy the peace I've cultivated in my life, especially since I moved to the City. 

  Part of that was continuing my journey in League of Legends. I played a handful of games on Miss Fortune and I'm not entirely sure I'm going to make it to 15 ranked games with her. I may just drop her off of my roster, because while I have felt like I've done decent on her...

My awful winrate speaks for itself

   I feel like no matter how I improve on her, it's just not worth playing. ADCs are inherently squishy, I know, but nothing I do feels like I'm making progress. I'm not sure how to respond when I'm getting bullied out of lane constantly and everyone is going for kills kills kills. I don't feel like I can wield any pressure in lane, but I also feel like (despite my ATROCIOUS showing of KDA) playing MF really prepared me to better deal with her and I was more readily able to counter her poke in my last Xayah game. 

  I also feel like I had a better understanding of what to do on other ADCs, so maybe it isn't all wrong or a waste, but when you factor in my other games on MF, it goes from a 1-in-5 winrate to a 1-in-8, and part of the process of keeping my head level is to understand when something I'm doing isn't serving me. 

  I definitely improved at my CS, going from under 5.0 average in games before Miss Fortune to over 5.0 a minute. It certainly still needs to improve, but there are some mechanical fundamentals that really got pushed home by my time playing this champ. 

  I caught myself tilting during one of the games and had to recenter myself, being honest about feeling like I'm not actually progressing. Sometimes I feel like ADC isn't worth playing due to all of the early aggro compositions I'm coming up against, and according to hearsay smurfing is rampant though I'm not willing to blame the issues I'm dealing with on anything other than myself. Sometimes a lack of trackable progress can feel incredibly frustrating, there's so much to learn and do. I'm not sure where to position myself in teamfights when I can just be deleted by a Diana looking sideways at me and not being able to rely consistently on the person who signs up to play support definitely has me looking at something more survivable, but I committed to this learning path and I'm going to hold to it. 

  That said, the plan may need to be altered bit by bit if I find myself feeling like I'm not progressing at all or, even worse, find myself not having fun. I had a quickplay game where I went 14/3/4 and while that was a great result, I realized partway through the game that I just wasn't enjoying playing MF. It's time to hang up the spurs and admit when something isn't working instead of toughing it out, this is about learning and I'm not going to do it when I'm frustrated as all hell. 

  One of the biggest flaws I have is a mentality I developed both to protect myself and to win back in spite against the world is embrace the suck. When I was lifting weights and living by the mantra "suffer the pain of discipline or suffer the pain of regret" (its own special form of socially acceptable self-harm, by the way) I refined "embrace the suck" to "when I have nothing else I will be defined by my capacity to endure." This is an extremely useful mindset in a lot of places:enduring growing pains, living in survival mode, and dealing with hardship, but it also leads to me attempting to put my nose to the grind stone and push through something I don't enjoy in a place where that isn't necessary. 

  I'm playing this game to get better at is, yes, but I'm also playing it in my leisure time to enjoy it. There are going to be times where my joy is less, like when I'm losing particularly hard, but I shouldn't be feeling like I dread playing the champion I'm playing. It makes no sense in this context to embrace the suck, but makes perfect sense to pivot to the champions I know I enjoy like Yunara, Xayah, and Sivir. 

  One of my biggest focuses early on is my mental, and that means in and out of game. If my fun is dampened by circumstance that's one thing, but if I'm not enjoying myself at all in my leisure time I need to learn to remove myself from the situation. I'm already at war with myself on so many other fronts, this doesn't need to be one of them!