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What Makes Me Cry

Byjack
What Makes Me Cry

It’s not the fact that I loved her

Or the fact she used to read my blog every morning

Or the sound of her pretty voice

Or her jokes

Her emotions

Her caring side

Her acceptance of everything about me, even the dark parts

Her deep love for me

Or her photographs

Not her neediness

Or her eagerness to please me

What makes me cry

Is thinking about

How I always thought

I would be the one

To take her

Away from all the pain and suffering in her life

Hold her in my arms every night

Give her a space to heal and blossom

I thought I would be the one

To save her

But I’m not

That

Makes me cry

3 AM In the Morning

Byjack

Early this morning I parted ways with a friend and a girl who I loved deeply. While everything is fresh, I want to write everything I loved and hated about her in order to deal with the heartbreak and to understand better what I want in a girlfriend.

What I loved:

  • She didn’t expect anything out of me, let me do whatever I wanted, allowed me to express how I felt
  • Was very intelligent fast learner
  • Was beautiful and soft and small
  • Always interested in my thoughts and ideas
  • Had a great sense of humor
  • Understood me, or at least tried to understand when I explained it to her
  • Validated a lot of my ability to read her mind, made me feel safe
  • Was comforting when I was feeling unwell or insecure
  • Was submissive and wanted me to dominate her
  • Had strong opinions and a deep internal landscape
  • Was reasonable in our conversations, could take feedback
  • Was needy and made me feel loved
  • Was extremely emotional and passionate

What I didn’t like:

  • Cold and distant, like to laugh sarcastically and say hurtful things when upset
  • Said she wasn’t very creative and didn’t try to come up with things to talk about
  • Played a sum loss game and would be in denial and extremely defensive
  • Liked being toxic to people when they did badly or were slightly annoying
  • Would give up extremely easily
  • Defiant and stubborn, inflexible
  • Poor memory for happy times when she’s upset, spirals
  • Didn’t like singing or dance
  • Didn’t like trying new food
  • Sometimes gaslighting and in denial when it threatened her ego
  • Was not interested in working on herself

Overall, I felt that my needs were getting met less and less because she would never deal with any trauma that came her way, choosing to avoid things instead. I felt that she stopped being so objective and instead was really unable to listen to the truth when it hurt her ego. However, I still love her very much and hope she will at least come back and want to be friends. I do feel some relief though to be able to focus on myself and explore dating in the city. I feel very alone without her. I hope she is doing ok and will see one day that I really did love her.

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The Cavern Inside My Heart

Byjack
The Cavern Inside My Heart

I think I love her more now

I think about her

And I feel warm inside

But when I ask for the things I need

And they are met with derisive laughter

Blame

And defiance

I feel angry

That the girl

I knew was the one for me

Is gone

And left a girl who only knows about fairness

When a relationship isn’t about

Counting things

But about giving

Feeling safe

Listening

Talking on the phone

Holding hands

Being intimate

A relationship is about risk

Not about playing it safe

And my rage like a burning wildfire

Sweeps towards her friend

All that they broke together

And she takes the ruined pieces and proclaims

I am responsible

Dares to deny me

What I want

My love for her burns equally bright

And smells of rosewater

Whispered promises at night

The trust we created

How I imagine it feels to cuddle with her

Under the blankets

I miss her

Like a great big hole has opened in my chest

And I cannot close it

Because no matter how many times I ask

There is another thing

Another game

Another reason

Why she cannot call

I feel abandoned

And I don’t want to be alone

But I feel guilt when I talk to other women

I don’t want them

I only want her

If only

She would offer herself to me

Fully

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Valorant 17: Choosing My Own Path

Byjack

I’ve looked at multiple things recently:

  • My lesson with a CS Go / Valorant coach
  • A excellent video of someone reaching radiant from silver
  • A video of how to aim well by Scream a team liquid professional valorant player

What I realized is that there are many ways to improve and win valorant games and climb to plat. There are somethings that will make it easier but you don’t need to do all of them.

Valorant, like life, is a game with specific rules, but how you play it is up to you.

A few different examples:

  • You can play only solo queue (deciding to team up with random people)
  • You can play only with people you know
  • You can play the game to gain rank
  • You can play the game to try out the different agents
  • You can play the game for the high reaction time and mechanical skill like aiming
  • You can play the game for the strategy required

I decided to make a list of how I want to play Valorant in the context of this challenge.

  1. I want to play with people who are fun to hang out with
  2. I want to make the entire game comfortable to play for me
  3. I want to focus on the actual objective, killing all the enemies and winning each round

Step 1: Finding people to play with

The most efficient way is just to focus on playing with people I already like playing with and try to meet new people by adding new people from games I play. I should also focus on unadding people I don’t like playing with.

Step 2: Making the game comfortable for me

The areas I need to focus on being more comfortable:

  • Minimap
    • Being able to visualize where everyone is just looking at the map
  • Aiming
    • Being able to comfortably get the physical mechanics of aim and crosshair placement down
  • Movement
    • Knowing the different ways and distances to peek comfortably
  • Abilities
    • Knowing lineups and ability planning
  • Clearing
    • Knowing how to path through a site properly
  • Switching weapons
    • Knowing the physical coordination of switching knife, pistol and main weapon

Step 3: Focusing on winning rounds

Usually, I am laser-focused on two things:

  • Abilities
  • Killing people and not getting killed

I want to reframe Valorant for me.

Generally, you want to either play for a plant/defuse or try to kill every member of the enemy team. 

As a result, I want to think about Valorant in the following plays:

  1. Brute force brawl with team, if team is pushing site together
  2. Try to get the enemy to trip up and make a mistake by confusing them and holding weird angles or lurking
  3. Try to set myself up for an ace by having my abilites and pathing planned out

Overall I think Valorant meets the following needs for me:

Growth: Getting better over time

Significance: The chance to practice my learning techniques in a measurable area

Love and connection: Playing with people who I like hanging out with

Here is what I think my routine should generally be:

  1. Warmup physically, and stretch, get pumped up with music
  2. Warmup in deathmatch, get a feeling for the mouse
  3. Warmup in the range and spike rush and defuse
  4. Meditate
  5. Play a game, focus on winning rounds
  6. Vod review, focus on the minimap awareness
  7. Practice in custom game lineup and setups to win next time or win by more
  8. Meditate, reflect and write blog post

 

The Perfect Job

Byjack

For the longest time, I’ve thought that my job was pretty much perfect. It wasn’t the highest paying job, or the one that I loved the most, but I think it has many many good elements such as:

  • Good enough pay to never have to worry about money
  • Good work/life balance, lots of work sometimes, little work others
  • Lots of traveling
  • Get to practice speaking and work on fun projects

Obviously, I could find a job even better in every area, but this is quite good already.

I realized recently why I still feel tired and think that it is too much work so often. THE WORK LIFE BALANCE IS HORRIBLE.

Ok, I understand I just contradicted myself there, but the reason why I think the work life balance is good is because on paper, there are lots of downtime where I can do whatever I want. However, because of the amount of emotional pressure that I put on myself, I’m actually always thinking about work which means that there is actually no worklife balance at all.

I worry if I kick back and ignore work for a while:

  • I will not be able to focus when I really need to so I need to get all the work done that I can
  • I will not be able to have enough time to get my work done when I really need to so I need to be working all the time
  • Someone will ask me what I’ve been working on and I will be outed as someone who is not contributing anything

Some of the anxieties I have around actually working:

  • I worry I will create ugly applications and I will come off as bad and incompetent
  • I worry I will not build enough for my application and I will come off as lazy or incompetent
  • I worry that when I go into meetings I will look unprepared and stupid

If I am able to deal with the emotional burden of this job and turn work into something soothing and relaxing for me, I will actually be so happy in this job. This will be the easiest money I will ever make and it will free me up to make money in other ways as well.

I’m going to do this in a couple of ways:

  1. Practice acceptance of where I am. Give myself permission to be bad
  2. Reprogram the idea that I will be rejected if I am not perfect
  3. Look for ways to make my job extremely easy
  4. Find ways to meet my needs through my jobs

So Step 1:

I am lazy, incompetent, unproductive and stupid. I accept myself for it. I give myself permission to be this way as much as I want to be.

Step 2:

The Bossy Man

In the meeting

Which I spent

Almost no time preparing for

He asked me to show

Something

I didn’t want to show

I said no

The meeting

Was under my

Control

 

The Finicky Architect

I created something

That I didn’t think

Was good enough

To stop him from asking question

Yet I showed up not to impress

But to help

And we were both happy

By the end

Step 3:

Where are the hardest parts of my job?

1 – Learning about new technology

  • Takes a long time
  • Hard to know what to focus on
  • Hard to remember

Ideas on how to make it easier:

  • Create materials for myself to make my life easier (cheat sheets, presentations)
  • Look for a way to make my life easier
  • Timebox an attempt to learn quickly
  • Focus on one area that has impact

2 – Building mockups

  • Takes time to understand the customer’s process
  • Hard to formulate what I need
  • Hard to understand how to design it
  • Hard to work out the technical parts of building out a process

Ideas on how to make it easier:

  • Clearly articulate what I need
    • The interfaces
      • What the style is
    • The processes
    • The data structures
    • The priority
  • Get help on the UI
  • Get help on the build itself

3 – Presenting the product

  • Never know what they will ask me to explain or click on
  • Hard to boil down the flow to a few steps
  • People may want to test you on areas that they don’t understand or may be hard to show

Ideas on how to make it easier:

  • Get the clarity I need:
    • Why they are asking the question?
    • What are they testing me on? What is the thing I need to prove?
    • What do they already know or understand?
  • Pause
    • Think about my gameplan
    • Use metaphors to bridge understanding gaps
    • Walk through what I’m about to do in my head before I do it on the screen

Step 4:

The most annoying things at work and how I will meet my needs through it:

  • Building mockups
    • Contribution: Who am I helping with this?
    • Growth: What will I do better with this demo?
    • Significance: What special signature will be mine?
    • Uncertainty: What is it that interests me the most about this demo?
    • Certainty: What do I want to copy? Who can make my life easier? How long do I need realistically?
  • Filing expense reports, doing training and filing quarterly reviews
    • Love and Connection: Who can I have a working/hangout session with?
    • Uncertainty: What time challenge should I give myself?
  • Boring meetings/trainings
    • Certainty: Why am I joining? What questions do I need to ask? If none, make a note of what I need from the meeting and watch the recording.
    • Love and Connection: Reach out to the presenter and tell them what you liked
  • Giving demos and presentations
    • Contribution: How can I be the most helpful?
    • Significance: Why am I showing this? 
    • Uncertainty: Don’t prepare
    • Certainty: What am I afraid of?

Ok, that’s it for now. I will say that writing this blog post has been tremendously helpful. I will be referencing this over and over again it is just so useful. Hopefully after using it many many times, it will be ingrained within me and I won’t need to look at it anymore.

Core Wounds 9

Byjack

I kind of dropped the ball on these because I don’t know if I feel like challenging my core wounds, but I think I need to keep going for the 21 days at least. It is interesting because you are supposed to focus on one core wound. I don’t know which one I would focus on, but maybe if I just keep going there is one that I will want to focus on.

I was talking to a friend about how it is hard to work on yourself sometimes. What I told her is that it is sometimes scary to think about who you might change into, but I think there is another reason. Sometimes it is hard to work on yourself because in order to work on yourself you first need to look at yourself in the mirror and face who you are, and that isn’t easy to do.

I think a big core wound or belief is that there is something wrong with me, that no one will actually like me if they know who I really am, that I’m weak and creepy and unattractive.

She Said I Made Her Day

Walking up to her out of the blue

On the streets of new york city

On the college campus

They both told me

I made their day

The next girl

Will think you are the one

She told me

And when I asked the girl

Lost in her own world

In a song she just found

Whether or not she thought I was attractive

She said yes

I felt she wanted to say more

But was too shy

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Finding My Feet In Austin

Byjack
Finding My Feet In Austin

Today I’m walking around with Yad

And I feel anxious because I don’t know what will happen next

What should happen next

But as I move

As I talk to girls

To guys

I feel more and more

Like this is the adventure I was looking for

This is the freedom I’m looking for

I don’t know where this is going

I just need to be able to stay in my body

And have courage

I’m so scared

But I feel a little hope now

This poem is about feeling so lost all the time. Not wanting to meet anyone or talk to anyone, but feeling so incredibly isolated and lonely. I’m afraid of wasting time but I don’t know where to focus my energy. But right now I realize that I just need to have an adventure and make an effort to overcome my fear of getting close to people or showing them who I am.

It’s not important to make the right decision, more so that I am able to feel the feelings.

Core Wounds 8

Byjack

Today I wanted to look at the core wound of feeling like no one will truly understand me and or truly love me.

Sharing Circle

I was in the circle

Of kings they said

I didn’t want to be there

I was just too sad

But they opened up the space for me

To tell my story

Of how I fell in love with a girl

Who I felt others wouldn’t approve of

But I still loved

How I felt like things went wrong

But not because I broke them

But because life

Sometimes

Isn’t easy or simple

I cried

When I thought about it

Felt safe to feel it

Like the time when I was at the party

Solomon turned to me

And said

I know how that feels

And Tim asked me to

Channel it into the karaoke 

My pain my loss

I feel that pain now

Core Wounds 7

Byjack

Today I want to address the core wounds of feeling creepy and uncomfortable in my own skin.

Awkwardness in the Library

I remember wanting to feel free

To say anything to anyone

To have the power to

Take my destiny in my own hands

And walking up in the library

Feeling so much fear

What if she gives me a weird look

Like the man in new york who beckoned to me

The girl who walked away

No I don’t

She said

We all exist

Here

Perhaps, they are only trying to do the same

To be themselves

To make the world

A safe place for themselves

I can live with them

Leaving

But I’m sad

That it makes me feel alone

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Valorant 16: Initial Thoughts From The Coach

Byjack

I had an initial discussion with a Valorant coach on a couple of things on improving in Valorant and here are the main takeaways:

  • In low elo (gold and below), aim and mechanics are more important than gamesense as low elo doesn’t have much gamesense worth learning
    • I suspect it is because low elo doesn’t have many patterns or strategies that are worth learning to play against
  • In low elo, try to take as many gunfights as possible to get better
  • To train gamesense, try to play with as many people as possible, ideally five stack
  • Stop playing so much sheriff in the deathmatch because it isn’t the gun you use in your games as much
  • In solo queue, try to play off of your teammates more, try to entry together more