Concepts

I forgot to mention that anchor of yours in a previous comment, but I undoubtedly believe that such an anchor is yourself. I feel like even if it there was any sort of thing that would seemingly sever it, you would probably return back to it one way or another and it would therefore show at least partially through your actions, regardless of the circumstances. Your current behavior is kind of not who you are intrinsically for all intents and purposes if that’s not necessarily what you want to be doing in the future either for all of your time, even if the behavior is a constant from what you’ve discussed here it’s more of a habitual constant than a chosen one. Not to remove responsibility away from one’s self of course, because in the moment you do also choose to make suboptimal decisions based on your aims and I think that is something which must be recognized, but as you put it such things aren’t what you “pour yourself into”, they are rather more of a scattered effort. The intention is obviously lacking in comparison to the career goals, of course.

I would like to examine that statement of you being “no good” at your chosen profession, however. You have to take into account a bunch of metrics such as your intentions for said area, how other people (outside of graduate school based stuff as well) fare in comparison to yourself tor the same stuff, and also how skill itself can never be fixed in place in comparison to other things. All basic things to acknowledge and possibly stuff that you’ve thought about beforehand, but they lead to more points, and then some more, and yeah, thinking often gets you places good or bad.

I am of the opinion that your action in terms of pouring yourself into such things was the only thing you’ll will have the most control over in comparison to relationships, both in terms of quantity and quality, and that at least in comparison to people, when it comes to knowledge you sort of get what you give for the most part. Rates of progress may vary between people, certainly, but the core differentiating factor is usually what they give. Time, money, any sort of currency or value, I feel like if you’re going to invest into your profession you at least made a good choice in comparison to putting all of your potential hopes into a human, which, as you know, can often be finnicky and also only resemble the concept of said person, not actually objectively whoever you are spending all that on. Of course, the same could potentially be said for fields and careers, but I like to think that the majority of people (unfortunately) know them more than their spouses by the time retirement rolls around. Then again, that often depends on the person, and you don’t necessarily need to know too much in order to get to some place in which you are comfortable with.

A lot of these things are like sliders of some sort that affect the others opportunity cost wise, and we’re often juggling all of them inside our heads. I’m not surprised that sometimes people drop the ball here or there, sometimes in bigger ways than others, but a bunch of the time you can pick it back up thankfully enough.

The strangest thing I could say though is that you could punish yourself if whatever is up there above doesn’t do it for you. Resigning yourself to a solemn oath of dedicating a entire life to one particular cause, whether you like it or not, in my case kind of helps. I will never forget or forgive the prior mistakes I have made in the past when it comes to my usage of time, and I know that I can’t counteract that but I can see myself suffer by leaving behind all forms of casual interaction with the world and throwing myself into a specific discipline, regardless of what happens, for the rest of my life. And it feels nice knowing that this would be the best form of punishment for myself considering how it targets exactly what I refused to improve upon for all these years of my life, how it will reveal my inadequacies and the sheer amount of damage such foolishness on my end has caused to my entire existence, alongside how I will be forced to acknowledge these wrongs and the continuing wrongdoings through the rigor of whatever everyday actions may follow, cementing that, yes, I did, in fact, fuck up. No misunderstandings in terms of being able to change the past or possibly even atone for all my years of playing, well, Roblox amongst all things, rather just the journey to understand the sheer quantity of what I have affected, and all the situations in which I will not be prepared enough due to lacking the time that not making such mistakes would have given me. I’m more than eager for it, but that assumes that I have any kind of merit to that degree. Nah.

And of course, I’m not saying that everyone should do that, but you know, if you have enough self-hate there… Subpar advice, but I hope these words give you some company.