**
Long time no see, friends. After taking a break of over two months following an unfortunate familial incident, I decided to get myself back into the groove of regular practice, with mixed results. The time away from the board was enough to make my intuition slightly fuzzier and some patterns less familiar than usual, so without being able to rely on the usual crutches of playing by feel or out-joseki'ing my opponents, my characteristics and habits that are most damaging to improvement and general enjoyment came to the spotlight. Since I'm not distracted as much by preparing or going to tournaments or participating in online leagues right now, I figured this might be the best, if not the last such opportunity to tackle them. I would like to ask for your counsel on the faults of mindset; while it might be a topic useful for more people than myself, this post might get very self-indulgent and rambling at times, so chances are keeping it in, well, what is more of a 'the study of self' journal at this point, is for the best. Even if it gets no replies, maybe it will serve as a stimulus to think about the subject deeper, however unsure I might feel about the helpfulness of that.
This is a hard post to write, actually. I considered just talking it out with people I could trust to give insight that wouldn't introduce more confusion than necessary, but it turned out to be more complicated to formulate my thoughts in a conversational style than expected. What I'm doing is essentially asking for help, but I find asking someone for help with what are essentially character issues to be one of the most egoistical exercises in self-indulgence, so I'm struggling to find the right way to do it. You may reckon that this sounds absurd - it's certainly not a helpful way of going about things - but people have their own problems and I don't think of my own, especially ones that pertain to getting better at a board game, are any more important. (As an aside, I only realized recently, that this is one of those weird obstructions to self-development that I thought of with disdain as an absolute weakness of the mind when I was younger; what a laughable irony.) A recent post on r/baduk made me also realize that it highlights what may possibly be the crux of the matter - the emotions being in control of what should be a rational process. If you managed to get through some of my previous posts before, it may strike you that if that was the case, then that would be the lock to bind together all of the past problems with improvement.
The complete solution can probably only be obtained with a complete context, if at all. I don't know how much context I have to or can give. Again, I'm asking for help, but if I drown you with unnecessary details, no help will be given, because who has the time for that manure? Even the necessary ones may be too much. However, I'm at my wits' end; something's wrong, I don't exactly know what it is or what its root cause is, I don't know what questions to ask nor what to do; however, this isn't a state I want to prolong any more. It's probably exacerbated by the current happenings (or the Backstreet Boys Reunion Tour, as it is known in some circles), but at least it can't be ignored any longer.
So what is wrong? The symptoms include lack of a learning response, excessive dismissal of authority and general animosity to extensive complication. I restarted doing tsumego drills, but since I got out of shape, the attempts at solving one boil down to two approaches: either follow the variation I already know should work for the situation, without checking the validity of the solution e.g. for edge cases involving numbers of liberties; or get intensely frustrated as I get lost in the variation tree for minutes on end. I'm not a fan of the 'work on it until the solution is found and verified to work by extensive search' approach; in more exotic cases there can be moves that we are usually blind to, but turn out to flip the candidate solution on its head. Case in point:
And here (Jesus, finally) we get to the point of mindset. The habits of thought, is it? I have to rewire my head in order to progress. But what does that mean? What does that entail? What are the right habits to obtain? I am who I am; lying to myself will require a lot of commitment of effort and time. But what if it's for nothing? How is it that some people can just push through the uncertainty and find their way, but some stumble when faced with an uncertain challenge? How can I fix this? I abhor giving up, but by heavens, I'm lost. Is this just laziness? Aversion to failure? How can a man live a fulfilling life cowering away from even the smallest challenge? How can he achieve any heights if even the slightest pressure overwhelms him?
I'm not satisfied with how this turned out. It's missing a couple questions that probably should be touched upon, like if there is even a point in trying (like David Sirlin said, not everyone has to get good at games and that's okay), or why it is so important to me to get this right, but the post is long already and I don't even know what's important anymore. Thank you for your time, all the best.
