An Opponent

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone. Today's post will be romantically leaning, but will be about life in general and some changes I've experienced between my teenage years to my adult years.Yes, another reflection post, I apologize, please stop throwing tomatoes.

This is a sentiment that I'm not sure is translatable to the experiences and thoughts of others, but I'm interested in placing it in the open regardless.

All my life, I've grown up focused on winning. Having two older brothers and living in the house of a sports-minded father, competition was endless. My philosophy had become that all of life is a challenge, and I am to overcome it. To that end, I've strove to place myself into situations where I can prove my "worth" through victories. Two specific types of situations in particular:

Gaming; and
Argumentation

I did not do this because I relish winning insomuch as I wanted desperately to show people that I'm worth respecting because of my skill or my intellect. It was this need for outside affirmation that has given me much of my self-esteem issues over the years.
However, I'm not making this post to be a debbiedowny, as I completely realize that the only affirmation I need is from myself. So long as I respect my abilities and decisions, there is little else needed.

Rather, my aim is to highlight how I've transformed this somewhat consuming desire into something a little more... reasonable. Sometime in the last few years, I started caring a lot less about actually winning games, and I started really enjoying games that proved to be ridiculously difficult. See:
Cave Story
Dark Souls
Binding of Isaac
Risk of Rain
Smash Brothers
etc.

There's a unique sensation that I get from games like this; the adrenaline of everything going wrong at once. I cannot say why I've become so enamored with watching my progress grind to a screeching halt of frustration, but it's immensely rewarding to find something that is difficult without being arbitrarily so. Meaningfully arduous.

With this change game a profound boredom with games that are too easy.

Along this road, I've come to realize that I'm not interested in winning anymore. Winning is simply a potential outcome for the path I want to take for the path's sake.
I want an opponent. I want fiercely to have an opponent that is worth playing against. No matter how good or how bad I am at a game, I want someone who's as good or better than me to play against/with.
Not just in the realm of games, but in all of life. I want someone around me who beats me (not physically, preferably). Someone whose comebacks, insults, and teases lash with deadly wit that I cannot match on most days. Someone who forces me to second guess my thoughts. Someone who, if I'm to compete, forces me to play at the top of my game.

I do not want someone "better" than me per se. Better is not an apt word for it, since we are all better or worse in varying things. I do not want to hold someone back or use anyone else as a crutch. Rather, I want someone I need to keep up with- someone who's worth keeping up with to me. Someone that I can defeat on my best days, but someone against whom losing is simply inspiring.

This is what I want out of life, games, relationships: I want something difficult enough to pique my interest and thrash me, captivating enough to ensnare me, and wise enough to know that when it tries to give me assistance and I refuse, it's not because of anger, resentment, or jealousy- but just because I want to be worth that level of difficulty, whether I win or lose.


If you have someone that you love, sit them down, stop everything else, focus on each other, and tell that person how much they mean to you and why. Make it a memorable expression of your personal emotions and thoughts.

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone.