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And I Didn’t Cry

Byjack
And I Didn’t Cry

It was on my run that I decided, I needed to leave

Dread in my heart

Peace in my head

And I didn’t cry

I told her shortly after

Fear in my head

Anxiety in my stomach

And I didn’t cry

I saw the message she sent me

Pain in my soul

Shame on skin

And I didn’t cry

Tonight I told a council of kings

Of a girl I loved

Too young

Too far

Too virtual

I told them I knew it was still special

I told them that I knew she gave up

I told them that I knew I had let go

That I cannot fix or change someone

Just because I need them

I knew it was the right thing to do

And finally

I cried

 

Tonight was a transformative experience for me. I sobbed today like I haven’t in years. It’s as if the pain, the shame, and the fear were just holding everything back. When I let go, all I felt was sad. I felt relieved, at peace, but so sad I cried for a long time.

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Her Anger Like A Fire

Byjack

Her Anger Like Fire

I felt her anger like fire

Burning in my face

Searing like acid

Felt the heat of it

Within her body

But all I could think of

Was the weight of the cold stones filling my heart

While I wondered

What happens

When love

Gives up

 

I realized something today. Sometimes when you love someone so much, you can’t give them space. Love needs space to grow, absence to remind you what it is made of. Sometimes, if you really love someone, you have to let them go. Even if it means they may never come back.

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Valorant 10: Catching People On Your Crosshair

Byjack

I just did it. I cracked the CODE on aim.

It’s not Miyagi do the method. It’s not movement-based aiming. Its not feeling out the timing. It’s not the last bullet method.

It’s a combination of EVERYTHING I’ve learned into a more simple mindset – catch them on your crosshair.

This method works if you are lagging, on low FPS, can’t hear anything and have a bad mental state.

Believe me, last night I was playing on my laptop with low FPS (sub 60) and terrible audio (laptop speakers) and not the best mental (unhappy, nervous and angry) and I still used it to drop tons of headshots.

I outlined the mentality in my earlier post about the “last bullet” exersise, but I’ll break it down again.

  1. Start out by holding a tight angle, and waiting for them to walk into your crosshair
  2. Get the feeling of “catching them” like you would catch a ball, adapt to their movement naturally, and try to click when you catch them on your crosshair
  3. After you feel comfortable with that, try to “catch” people while pushing them aggressively, this requires you to intuitively feel where they might be before swinging. Don’t swing until you are ready. This is an intuitive way to “pre-aim” as we like to say.
  4. When you are warmed up, go into a real match. Go on intuition on whether it is easier to catch them walking into your crosshair or if you need to catch them while peeking out at them. There is usually an option that helps you isolate more kills. 

 

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Valorant 7: Embracing Death (and Improving Movement)

Byjack

I’ve been thinking about what small exercise I can do right now to level up my gameplay and progress in Valorant since I haven’t had much time to play or practice recently.

After meditating on it a little bit, I settled on something that I know has held me back in Valorant since I first started playing the game – the fear of death.

The fear of dying in the game:

  • Makes me stressed out, and not think clearly
  • Makes me shoot too fast without aiming
  • Makes me frustrated when I lose
  • Makes me exhausted after playing for a few games

I’ve decided to learn how to accept death in the game, and to understand it better overall.

For example, understanding the “time to death” from an intuitive sense (and knowing how to extend that time) could be a GAMECHANGER.

It will intuitively let me know:

  • When to peek
  • If I whiff, whether I should peek back, crouch down, or keep spraying
  • How much time do I have to aim before I get killed by the enemy
  • Stay focused even after dying a frustrating number of times

So I hopped into a couple of deathmatches and gave it a shot!

I started out just trying to predict when I would die, but dying stresses me out too much to tap into my intuition (you need to be relatively clear-headed to feel things intuitively). I focused then on saying “die” aloud every time I died or predicting when I died. This is taken from a sports exercise of intentionality (you vocalize what will happen, for example, if you are playing badminton, you say “hit” when you hit the birdie, and “miss” if you miss). This exercise is supposed to train your intuition and powers of prediction and anticipation.

Some takeaways:

  • Crouching can make most people miss if they are shooting at you.
  • The direction you run and bunny hop is very important, need to figure out the most evasive ways. Sometimes running directly at them has zero chance of success. I need to work on sometimes facing the side not just forward to be more evasive.
  • The timing of peeking is important, how they have been spraying bullets is important.
  • When you are running behind a wall, before you peek, you don’t need to bunnyhop, just run normally, feel out intuitively, the moment you should peek out
  • I should start just by shouting out dead, every time I actually die, then try to predict
  • I need to aim higher to knife to the head, I keep knifing the body.
  • What I should try next is to stay alive for as long as I can.
  • I should also focus on letting the shock and frustration from dying play out before going again so quickly.

 

My intuition also tells me that I should focus on what I’m missing or losing when I’m dying and focus on those feelings right after dying.

The Way Star Signs Might Work (A Theory)

Byjack

One of my good friends is obsessed with star signs and by proxy, I’ve gotten pretty into them as well. However, I’ve had my doubts. While it seems possible they actually tell you about what kind of person someone is (although I find it to be far less precise than systems like Myers Briggs and the Enneagram) one thing has always bothered me. Star signs make no logical sense.

How can the position of the sun and the moon determine your personality? Do all people who are born at the same time and place have the same personality? Where did they even come up with the correlations? Isn’t this based on mythology?

The first thing you should know about star signs is that everyone has multiple signs. The sign that most people focus on is the “sun” sign (basically the positioning of the sun when you are born) as it is supposed to be the dominant sign. However, there are signs for the positions of all the planets and the moon.

The three most “important” signs according to astrologers at the Sun, Moon, and Ascendant signs (in that order), and actually gave me this idea of why star signs are not completely bogus.

The Sun, for example, is dependant on the month of the year you are born, the moon the time of the month, and the Ascendant the time of day and location of your birth.

What first got me thinking was that it occurred to me that the personality attributed to each sun sign seemed to match the general climate and weather of the months the signs were connected to. For example, Capricorns are people born between December 22nd and January 20th the coldest times of the year for many places. Capricorns are incidentally known for being cold, calculating, and driven by a need to succeed. Taurus, known to be easygoing and mild are born April 20 – May 20 the most warm and mild times of the year. Leos are known for their fiery passion and confidence are born between July 23 – August 22, the hottest times of the year. 

I asked before how everyone born at the same time in the same place had the same personality – perhaps they DO in some small part. Perhaps the climate and the time of day and month, the location on the planet have a profound effect on who we become and what we like because it determines the environment we are born in.

It is not inconceivable to me, for example, that babies born in winter may grow up to be harder colder, and more driven people (as a large generalization). And it’s not inconceivable that people born with the same Ascendant sign (with the same time and place of birth) might share a thing or two in common.

Even more beautiful is the thought that just as the position of the sun affects us with our seasons, perhaps the position of ALL the stars and planets affect us in some way – even if the effects are unseen and mysterious. Perhaps we are more a people of the stars than we know. I know I’d love to believe that.

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I Wonder If I Ever Meant Anything

Byjack
I Wonder If I Ever Meant Anything

I wonder if her words had any weight

Like sturdy old fashioned railcars laden with

Golden promise

Or if they were as ephemeral and false

Like the carcass of a shattered plate

Once with pleasing curves

And a sureness

Like that of unspoken feelings

I wonder now

If I imagined it all

And the distance was an ocean

That I mistook

For a puddle

 

A Penny From The Top of The Empire State Building

They say, that an oridinary penny

Dropped from the top of the empire state building

Will cut a hole through the concrete sidewalk below

The penny is in me now

Burning a hole

Through the bottom of my heart

 

These poems are about the fear that there was never a real connection, that I made it up in my own mind. I wonder if there was even the possibility of love, or if I was simply deluding myself.

I wonder what I wasn’t able to give her. Was I not attractive enough? Not fun enough? Did I not give her enough space?

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Poem Draft and Other Thoughts

Byjack
Moth Dust

I had a dream she messaged me
All caps and smiling letters
Like old times
When I was a boy
My friend showed me a bush
Full of moths
He grabbed one and showed me the dust that came off its wings
I wondered
If the moth
Like me
Felt something missing

 

Besides the poem, I also came up with a HUGE epiphany that suddenly makes everything clear. I realized that the main reason I’m so upset is that something that I thought was a friendship was much closer to a relationship than I would admit. The cycle I’m dealing with is less of a troubled friendship but rather a single>relationship>breakup>single cycle instead.

In order to move on, I need to start thinking like someone who is single who is getting over a breakup. It’s a bit embarrassing we weren’t actually in a relationship, but who cares about stupid commitments and labels. The feelings I had were far beyond friendship and the fact that they were reciprocated made it something more.

This also gives me insight into how I behave in a relationship, I’ll break it up into two categories, single mindset and relationship mindset.

My Mindset When Single
  1. Focus on being myself and doing things that make me happy
  2. Want to meet new friends and lovers who can accept me for exactly who I am
  3. Not afraid to open up to people because I welcome rejection (so the people who remain I feel 100% comfortable and supported around)
  4. Freedom is what I’m searching for
My Mindset When in a “Relationship”
  1. Focus on exploring and deepening the connection between us
  2. Not interested in meeting anyone new, feels like too much work
  3. Especially not interested in talking to romantic interests because I find it hard to imagine they will be able to accept how much I love someone else (feels like I can’t open up about a huge part of my life)
  4. Love is what I’m searching for

Everything makes sense now – the feeling that I have to “find myself” and get time alone was basically my understanding (at the time) of reconnecting with my single person mindset, asking her to “pull me back” was my plea at asking her to go back to our pseudo-relationship. I had a strong feeling that I needed to just process my loss of what we had instead of trying to “fix” things and now I know why. We are basically not on the same page anymore and any semblance of a relationship is gone. In fact, it’s been slipping away for some time now.

Once I am able to fully process this “breakup” I can fully reconnect as a single person.

Side thought: I think I’m probably a monogamist from this experience. I can only hold strong feelings for one person at a time.

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Poem Draft: Peanut Butter Diamonds

Byjack
Peanut Butter Diamonds

They say that even peanut butter turns to diamonds when you crush it hard enough

peanut butter

spread onto the sandwiches in a million homes

by the knives of moms in aprons every morning

turned rare and special

under the treads of an iron industrial tractor

 

the ones I found

took the shape of words of a girl

laughing, crying, and clinging on to me

like the warm reflection of faraway lands

in the morning dew

 

I let myself fall in

and it was like the sigh of the ocean

the freedom of running as hard as you can

before your lungs remember they need air

but then

 

it slipped away away

and trying to catch it

I wondered

if those diamonds fall back

to peanut butter

when the tractor moves on

 

This poem is about mourning the loss of who someone was and celebrating all the magic they brought to your life before learning to accept them for who they have become. It is my first iteration.

Health Checkup 10/25/2021

Byjack

I feel worried about posting about this topic since it can be kind of gross.

However, I feel that physical health is one of the most important things to understand in life as it controls your energy levels, affects your mental strength, and dramatically affects your physical attractiveness or beauty.

Tracking and problem solving my health issues will not only help me but may provide inspiration for others.

Digestion

Symptoms: bloating, gas, diarrhea, distended belly, sensitivity to cold, stress, and exhaustion

Brainstorm:

  • Raw ginger – seems to add an overall boost to blood flow (yang qi) and stomach circulation
  • Farmhouse Culture Gut Shots – tastes absolutely disgusting, feels like it may actually help
  • Unlocking/moving/stretching hips – ever since my knee injury, my hips are tight and contribute to the blockage in my stomach
  • Stomach massage – helps smooth out the knots and blockage points
  • Increase overall circulation – qi gong, running and cardio all help increase overall circulation and remove blockages overall
  • Activate digestion while eating – eat slower and smell food more
  • Eat less – to 70% fullness

Current Focus:

I need to improve my baseline before going after a specific treatment plan. The baseline will focus on two basic areas: overall circulation, reducing strain. The goals need to be very small so they are easy to maintain.

  • Circulation – eat ginger every morning, run around the block once every morning (minimum 5 min)
  • Reducing strain – focus on eating as little as possible, meditate once in the morning and night (minimum 5 min)
Hair

Symptoms: thin hair (but seems to be thickening), itchy scalp, hair falling out, dandruff

Very strange that my hair is thickening but falling out at the same time. Pretty sure my massage is working but the new hair growing in is so thin it falls out easily.

Brainstorm:

  • Vigorous scalp massage – increase blood flow and already thicken hair a great deal
  • Wash hair – more often, with cold water and apple cider vinegar if possible to reduce inflammation and increase circulation
  • Oil/fatty acids – use huge amounts of conditioner and castor oil to thicken hair and prevent breaking and falling out

Current Focus:

I need to cleanse and increase circulation

  • Wash hair every day with cold water and apple cider vinegar, need to use lots of conditioner to counter the stripping effect of washing your hair too much
Knee (injury)

Symptoms: afraid to put pressure or impact, no feeling at surgery area, pain

Brainstorm:

  • More movement – motion is lotion to the joints
  • Increased muscle mass around the joint – muscle is needed to support the joint
  • Gua sha – need to tear up the scar tissue around the area and increase blood flow
  • Warmup/loosen hips – hips are too tight reducing range of motion

Current focus:

I need more circulation

  • Gua sha (or graston) for at least 5 min per day
Posture and Alignment

Symptoms: jutting forward head, misaligned hips, shoulders rounded forward

Brainstorm:

  • Cobra yoga pose – let the hips relax into better balance
  • Wall posture exercises – strengthen back muscles
  • Foam roller stretch – stretch chest muscles
  • Practice standing/walking – try to establish perfect alignment
  • Move joints more – joints are where everything attaches, moving the joints mean more relaxed and fluid movement

Current focus:

I need to see a chiropractor and also just slightly improve posture while doing things bad for posture (computer, phone):

  • Find a chiropractor within my health insurance
  • Focus on finding a comfortable way to look at the phone with head back (put your phone on your knees)
Vision

Symptoms: dry eyes, headaches (happens not very often), worsening vision

Brainstorm:

  • Relax into looking farther – stretches eye muscles
  • Move vision more – gets the eye muscles to work a little more
  • Do more active sports – forces your eyes to focus on things moving and far away
  • Blink more – resets the eyes

Current Focus:

I want to just relax my eyes more when looking at far away things, rather than trying to move closer.

To Love and Lose Love 2

Byjack

I was feeling extraordinary pain in my heart because everywhere I look, everything from TV Shows to notification sounds reminded me so much of her, and I was hit by the realization I may NEVER talk or hear from her again. I may never laugh and smile at something she sent me. I may never be able to tell her something exciting from my life, may never joke around and have fun together.

It was so painful I did a “shamanic journey” meditation in order to connect with my feelings and try to grow from the deep excruciating pain that I feel from losing her. Here are the steps:

  1. Turn on shamanic drumming music
  2. Lay down and close your eyes
  3. Imagine a room in your mind’s eye
  4. Go down from the room into your heart
  5. Meet with the different parts of yourself and ask your questions

My internal landscape was all storm and hard edges. I asked, “How do I deal with this pain? How do I deal with the overwhelmingly painful feelings I feel whenever something reminds me of her? How do I even go on with my life?”

I received the answer: Many things in life I actually put on hold because she took up so much of my life. I can focus on those things. To name a few:

  • Singing – she hated that
  • Drawing – I was too busy with work and thinking about her to work on it
  • My business with my sister – Again too busy
  • Valorant – Too busy again
  • Making other friends – I didn’t care about anyone else

Then I was filled with despair. “What if I forget her? I loved her with all my heart and cherish so many happy memories that I’m not ready to let go of yet.”

I received the answer: There are still many, many things that remind me of her, and all of our happy memories. She will always be with me in a way. I can always turn to those things to remind me of her even if it is painful.