Bruised and battered

2320 update

• Played 32 games (17 wins, 14 losses, 1 draws, for a total ΔELO of +14)
• Did not play on Friday. I didn't feel like playing at all, so after discussing the pros and cons of playing or not with the ICA team, I decided it was better not to play.
• Weekend break with no games
• After falling sick and having low energy for 3 days back-to-back, I came back on Monday, still ill, and completely lost my mind playing online. I played a large and a small pace on Lichess, completely red-minded. But the real problem was on the rival platform, where I had a melt-down and played over 50 games in a day, with horrible results, as you'd expect. More on this below.
• Today, I'm back to my normal self.
• Zen Mode is a marvelous thing! After a teammate pointed it out to me, I turned it on and started playing so much better that it's not even funny.

I screwed up!

Yesterday, I was feeling very low on energy still, after dealing with an annoying cold over the weekend. I couldn't concentrate on much, but it had been so long since I had played that my mouse-clicking hand was itching.

I burned through my Lichess pace in what felt like minutes. I waited an hour, barely, and burned through a small pace. Then I went into a rival platform intending to play a small pace there, as usual. I was rushing so much that I blundered on all first four games in the first 20 moves, so I turned a small pace into a large pace. I burned through that like it was nothing. So I started another small pace. There was simply no stopping me... I was free-falling.

I had one last arrow left in my quiver: my chess pacing sheet. It has no room for more than 12 games a day in each platform. So when I jotted down my 10th game, I realized I only had 2 more games to play. I started my 11th game fully intending to be present and taking it serious. After the opening, however, I remember putting my feet up: very bad sign!

Blunder! Blunder! Resign. Started the 12th game. Blunder! Blunder! Resign. And before I knew it, I started a 13th game. I actually won that game because my opponent blundered quicker than I could. But then I realized: there was no empty cell in my sheet to write down the result. And then I was gone!

Before I knew it, I had played more than 50 games, 45 of which I have no memory.

Recovery

My wife had a nickname, growing up: the pale devil. She was so kindly dubbed by her brother's and for good reason. She used to sneak into their rooms, take their cassette tapes, and use her tiny little pinky to pull out all of the tape. Her brothers would get understandably - let's say - frustrated about this and used to yell at her and find ways to get her in trouble to get even.

I realized a long time ago that some times I feel like my brother-in-laws' cassettes: disheveled, messy. And I just like those tapes, I realized that 9 times out of 10, you can carefully and effectively rolled that tape back up, and still play it. Sometimes we dig a really big hole in the span of a minuscule amount of time, and sometimes it takes a lot of effort to find our way out of it, but 9 times out of 10, it's doable.

I did two simple things:

• Yesterday, I eventually stopped myself before it got even worse.
• Today I sucked it up, and came back at it with a better attitude.

The take-away

I can always spend any amount of time quarreling with myself about why I did what I did, but that's now what is going to help me repair the damage. The only thing that repairs the damage is repairing the damage. Or much better put:

“Every minute you spend feeling sorry for yourself is another minute not getting better, another morning you miss at the gym, another evening wasted without studying. Another day burned when you didn’t make any progress toward your dreams, ambitions, and deepest desires.” - David Goggins in Never Finished