I’ve been experiencing some anxiety recently around Melee,
and my place in it. One of the greatest causes of anxiety is uncertainty, isn’t
it? Am I supposed to be with this guy/girl? Should I pick a different major?
Should I be doing something else with my life? Even when we’re happy, we tend
to ask and ask ourselves what we should
be doing. It’s a burden of living in a privileged society - too many options.
You know what happiness is? It’s knowing exactly what you
want. Or to phrase it in the inverse, and to quote Mr. Glass, “You know what
the scariest thing is? To not know your place in this world.”
Back in the Golden Era, what I wanted was simply to be good at Smash. That was one reason why Smash was the most important part of my life at that time - it was a definable goal in a world of ambiguity and subjective success. Free time? Watch videos of your opponents. Husband’s coming over? What matchups are you feeling weak in. Every minute spent practicing Smash was a minute well-spent ... I never questioned it. That’s what I mean by happiness is knowing what you want.
Then everything went south and I went through an extremely
difficult process of grieving the SSBM dream. And then suddenly it wasn’t dead:
it was miraculously alive and eventually thriving again. So for me, everything
in the Platinum Age is like an afterlife. I’ve had so many dreams about Ben
coming back to life, and the feeling I get when I see JuggleGuy’s statistics on
record-shattering attendance isn’t terribly different from the feeling I wake
up with after those dreams. Except this is real.
So it was easy in the beginning, because my head was just
spinning. MLG wants us back - wants me back?
I’d be honored. We’re at Evo again? I’ll feel privileged just to watch it from
home. 5,000 Twitter followers and an AMA that - if I earned at all - I earned
years ago? I don’t even know how to digest that, but sure, great!
Then the devil comes, accompanying uncertainty. I have 10k
Twitter followers … what can I do with that? What if I had 25k? How can it benefit me? There’s money
being made … but I despise money; money often makes me feel dirty and I know
that, but it’s hard not to think about. It’s hard not to think about success.
It’s hard not to hear the people singing my praises and think - but how much
more could I do? How far can I take this? Doing Twitter is a lot of fun, but
before I know it I’m branding my YouTube page, even though I have no interest,
I’m designing an entire Twitch brand even though I don’t entirely “get”
streaming and always said I wouldn’t, and keeping track of all my social media
statistics even though I’m a private person. It’s because I don’t know what the
goal is, yet still feel those competitive impulses.
And THERE comes the anxiety. What am I working toward?
Without an answer to that question, I end up just feeling lost. Sometimes
silly. Which is unfair, because Smash and Smashers have always accepted me as I
am, throughout a few different phases in the last 12 years.
So it’s time to answer a question, Wifey: what do you want?