Well I guess I'd best open up to the clever people who can help me with thins kinda thing.
Recently I've come to the decision that I am, indeed, a mediocre player. That isn't really much of an epiphany to me, I never considered myself to be a top-tier tourney-er, but I was content to maintain that I am fundamentally above average. Now I don't know. I am questioning my skill, my motivation, my ability to keep up good fundamentals and my focus on the game.
I am a relatively decent player in my scene - that is to say, I can sometimes beat the best player, which makes me the second-best by default. He is, however, much better than me. So much better. I play him near-daily, and I tend to get frustrated and upset by how good he is at basic stuff like reads and footsies, to the point where he can body me near-effortlessly on a good day. The fact that he outright told me he doesn't take the game too seriously and can forego his full potential when he fights me - gotta say, that was a bit of a kick in the teeth in terms of my self-confidence. But I'm glad he said it, because now I know that I have a ways to go before I can say I'm truly content with my gameplay.
Right now, I'm experiencing something of an existential crisis. On the one hand, the idea of going to tournaments and fighting good players for fame and glory is pretty neat; on the other hand, I question my desire to spend time and money I don't have to go halfway across the country to probably get beaten with no real goal in sight. I must wonder if I am trying to run before I can even crawl, since I have yet to even win a local tournament, much less something on the national scale (but Ireland is a pretty small nation, so it's realistically feasible for me).
I don't know how to get better. I've told my friends many times over, just play the game, you will naturally pick up on things and improve bit by bit every time you enter a match. Yet I am beginning to question the veracity of my own wisdom. Whenever I enter a match recently, whatever theory or gameplan I have in my head dissipates; I become flustered and scared, I can't hit the right buttons, I flub everything and I die spectacularly. I can do well against players relatively weaker than me, but whenever I am faced with a player who knows what they're honestly doing, I fall apart. I don't know how to fix this. I go to training mode regularly, I watch videos of top-level players, I play decent players on a regular basis, yet I can't discern exactly what I need to do to improve or how to do it. I know I am pretty poor at reading and adapting, in addition to the fact that my tech skill isn't as good as it should be. I don't know how to fix that. It depresses me.
I don't really know where to go or what to do. I am hoping somebody here can help me out, because with the rut I am currently in, I don't know how much I can take before I throw in the towel and concede I am beyond repair.
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