What caretaking taught me about skill-based hobbies

   When I was younger I fell victim to the "former gifted and talented kid" trap. I would start something up and if I wasn't instantly good at it, I'd quit. It was easy to buy into the hype of starting something new until it became work, putting it to the side with a "this just isn't for me." Then addiction happened, then sobriety, then caretaking. 

  I spent all of my early adulthood in varying states of mess and necessity. I was an addict, a criminal, a thief, and somehow I managed to avoid getting caught (I say somehow like the clearance rate for crimes isn't 44% for violent crimes and 18% for property crimes: the police are fucking useless.) Then my Nana called me and told me she needed my help, I quit cold turkey, moved to Oklahoma, and detoxed by myself. At 21 years of age I don't think I had found joy in anything I had done save playing guitar in a punk band. I started playing World of Warcraft again to give myself something to do with all of the free time I found, eventually got a job as a 911 Dispatcher, and spent my days taking care of my Nana and Poppa, then just my Nana for a long while. 

  Poppa lived for 3 years after I moved, I lost him in 2011. He was on dialysis, blind from Diabetic Retinopathy, and a tinkerer. Being stuck in the house drove him crazy; he continued running his used refrigeration business and messing with various things around the house, some of which I had to set to rights after he took them a bit too far. He frustrated my Nana to no end, but she loved him as infinitely as he annoyed her. Those three years set the foundations for the patience I have today, the follow-through I pride myself on, and the importance of taking care of the folks I care about. 

  After Poppa was gone I found myself doing a balancing act. Nana was obviously in a bad place emotionally, but I found that if I didn't leave a mess behind she would stay in bed for days on end. It took a while for me to realize this, but I started taking the ass-chewings gladly because they meant she'd get up and move around. The patience and follow-through truly became cemented in my character during these years. 

  I lost her in 2017 and found myself rudderless for a while, but these traits stayed strong and as I came out of that particular nasty depression I began climbing the ladder in competitive StarCraft II. The patience I learned and allowed to become a part of my character was indispensable in competitive gaming, I wasn't instantly good, hell I was terrible initially, but through will and work I got better. I kept that mentality over the years and it's been so useful in beginning to relearn league. I get frustrated with my lack of progress in game, then shake it off and remind myself that it will take time. 

  This year I started gardening and sadly, despite the prodigious plant size, I only managed to get one zucchini out of my yield. Some kind of bug ate through the root just above the dirt level on three of my four plants. This wasn't seen as a personal failure, rather an opportunity for learning. My bed was too dense and gave ample cover from natural predators like birds, I need to thin it out a bit and let nature take its course as I grow the kind of things that will encourage pollinators, birds, and other creatures to spend time on my little plot. It was an abject lesson into how I can do better in the next season.

  I originally started this blog as an exploration of the world through my hobbies, and that's the goal here, writing about myself through the framework of the hobby as well as finding my writing voice, but it's very much also become about character and mental health, emotional honesty and security. I have no idea who will ever set eyes on this, but I think it's a good journal for me over time. I also honestly think if this gardening setback had happened to me in my early 20s I may have seen it as a lack of virtue and just quit gardening altogether. Hell, I know that's probably the case because I experienced my first frustrations with League of Legends way back in 2010, and I only occasionally have touched it through the years as a result of leaning on that experience and thinking "I'm not very good at this," but Jake the dog had the right of it:

Gotta fail to learn.