A letter from May 19th, 2020

Dear FutureMe, Today is May 19, 2020. And we are currently right in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic. These past few months have been ones of great struggle and confusion, but it’s also been a time for immense personal growth. The way I perceive the world around me has forever been altered. One challenge I’ve faced thus far is finding motivation to do anything, some days you might as well just stay in bed ALL DAY, because, why not? It’s not like anyone is going to see you or you have anything better to do. I’d try to convince my self, but what I’ve come to realize, is your never “hopeless”, you never have nothing to do, and you have to be the driving force, nothing will change unless you change it, this is something a lot of people my age and even some adults haven’t fully grasped yet, so they make excuses about why they are where they are in life, blaming on external factors, or other people claiming “it could never be my fault”. When the fact of the matter is you are in full control of where you are in life and where you want to go. This was a concept I had a very hard time fully grasping, and when I really sat down and thought about everything in my life so far, I made this realization and it was definitely a massive eye opener for me. One that’s changed the way I go about nearly every aspect in my life, even in video games, I used to say things like “the *** is over powered” , “he’s hacking” “there is no way I died there it was a glitch”, but what I’ve notices is phrases like these, they train your brain to think, I did nothing wrong in that situation and there is nothing I could have done better, I played perfectly, and it was the games fault. And when you get trapped in this mindset, you no longer gain any more skill, you never become better, because instead of analyzing what went wrong, what mistakes did YOU make, and then fixing those mistakes, you are trapped in a false advertisement of your own skill level, you will be disappointed by your performance consistently, because you will genuinely believe and tell yourself that you have done nothing wrong in every single situation. But now, when I die in a video game, instead of yelling at my teammates for not being there, I actually calmed down watched the replay and broke down interaction to see where exactly did I mess up, what exactly did I do wrong, why did I end up dead and he end up alive, was my aim off? Was my positioning bad? What could I have done to win me this encounter, and I really started to abuse the fact that hindsight is always 20/20, and it’s MASSIVELY improved my gameplay, when I started to do this, I saw results and improvement almost immediately, I was more tactical and calm going into engagements and I found myself making less mistakes. Your best teacher in yourself, you have everything you need within you, you don’t need any other person to do something for you, because you can do it yourself and do it correctly. It’s sad it took me a pandemic to realize these things, but I’m glad I did. Along with lots of personal growth, some fun times have still come about during this notoriously extremely boring time. My personal favorite memory so far has to be going swimming in my friends secluded rock quarry that’s in his backyard basically. Me and my 2 good friends drove up there (so sorry social distance laws) and we got to explore a forest/ sandy beach type area. It was a very interesting biome to be in, you couldn’t tell if you were at a lake, forest, beach, sand dunes, or a suburban town. It was so nice to get outside and have a different landscape than my bedroom. I hope that the whole world has found something positive during these times because it really is so easy to only see the negative, being optimistic is exhausting and requires a much more creative and. Constructive way of viewing the world. I hope the world will come out of this better people to one another, I hope we can all realize that we are all in this together, no one has any idea what there doing and we’re all just getting by. And a little help would always be appreciated. I hope everyone enjoys the time they get on this planet, good days and bad. I hope that when I read this in 5 years I can without a doubt say that the world is in a better place than it is now, and i hope it keeps getting better after that. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.