EPTThanks again to everyone who commented on my last blog post with words of encouragement, advice, and Papa Roach.
So I decided to skip all of the rest of the practice matches and go right into the placement matches.
I am very happy right now because I actually won a placement match. No tricks, no proxies, no reaper rushes (edit: not that reaper harass isn't a legit tactic!). I won a match.
I still have one more placement match to go, but I wanted to take a second and describe how this feels.
Imagine you're a 21 year old nobody studying abroad at an international summer program in some foreign (developed) country. You're taking classes on the country's language and culture plus intro to economics, and it's interesting to be out there and stuff but you still can't quite shake this unfocused anxiety in the back of your head. Are you in the right place? Is it worth it to be there? Are you just there because you're in denial about not knowing what you want to do with your life? Are you just marking time until school starts up again?
One day you decide to do something different and take the subway over to a big shopping mall across town. There are floors and floors of clothing, furniture, electronics, food, and shoppers, but that's not what you're there for. You take the escalator all the way up to the 11th floor and open two huge wooden doors with chrome metal handles to see ... darkness, because your eyes haven't adjusted yet from the brightness outside.
There are plastic folding seats arranged in rows in front of a stage. You sit down in the front row and wait.
The lights turn on, the fog machine starts, the girls start screaming behind you, and suddenly there's a huge screen that comes to life in front and above you and booths on the stage that have lit up to receive two young men in racer-type jerseys while three men in suits sit at a slick podium and fill the air with amplified streams of sound in a language you can only begin to comprehend.
And yet ... and yet ... everything's quiet inside your head, because in front of you, powered by the a glow equivalent to a thousand light bulbs and a passion driven by millions of people, is ... a hatchery. And drones.
And suddenly you know that it's all been worthwhile and that your whole life has been leading up to this point and that this is where you're meant to be and this is what you are meant to do.
That's kind of how I feel right now.
Ok back to training.
