I've been struggling, recently, as no doubt some of my more perceptive readers will have noticed, in my writing of this blog. Just choosing to write, and share it, choosing to try to commit to something even though I've been bad at that in the past, and challenging myself to do something I find hard, that is, do something at all... all of these have been ways in which I have been struggling towards something... perhaps a bit blindly. I didn't know what I was progressing towards, only that I have been trying, and working, to get somewhere.
In retrospect, probably the greatest thing that I've accomplished out of this is demonstrating my willingness, is being willing, to struggle anyway even though I don't know what I'm struggling for. This is very important, because I'm a very analytical person, and I can tell that I don't know, sometimes, when I don't know. And I know that sometimes it's impossible to find out the answer while you're still not moving because you don't know the answer. This is paralysis, and it affects a lot of people in a lot of different struggles.
Let me talk to you about Leveling Up. It's a game mechanic. But it can be a very apt metaphor for real life sometimes, too. I started using it to describe my own life at about 15, after I'd been playing The Sims quite a lot.
The funny thing is that everyone knows Leveling Up is a clumsy construction intended to make the gradual accumulation of skill and experience on a sliding scale easier to measure, it's not that you practice for so long, making no progress at all, and then suddenly - Ding! You get better all at once and can start improving again. We all know that doesn't make sense. It's common knowledge that you get better as you practice, not all at once after struggling fruitlessly for hours.
Except... sometimes you're practicing for hours and don't seem to be making any progress, and it's not until you take a break to rest or do something else... or maybe even give up altogether and surrender yourself to not making progress... that you find yourself, eventually, coming back and finding that you can do something new, that you couldn't do before. Sometimes the analogy of leveling up is actually very realistic.
I think I have leveled up, recently. Some things are coming easier, and even my own frustrations don't seem quite so hard to deal with. It's hard to say what I've leveled up in, though, since it seems to effect pretty much everything. My guess is courage, personally. Fear holds me back from doing things, quite often, and courage frees me of many limitations, when I have it. It seems, for the moment, that my potential for courage, how often I feel it and to what degree, has improved. Fear does not seem so impossible to overcome, anymore.
Be happy for me, friends. It is a glorious victory, after struggling for so long, not knowing what I was struggling against.
