The Confessions of Someone Who Wants to Win 

I feel like I can relate to the trans girl hypothetical thingy you talked about. I really do see you as a type of hero and someone I want to be. Knowing that someone who loves smash as much as me has dealt with thing that im dealing with right now gives me a big comfort along with seeing that person win. But I feel that even if you lose its ok! Getting up and being willing to play and do your best is what makes you so inspirational for me. Not like you need to always play your best but it does make me really happy to know that success as a trans girl is not impossible even amongst all the hardship. Thats all i wanted to say, thank you for being someone i can look up to :)

I'm rooting for you in game and in life. You're rad and I'm wishing you the best.

Thank you so much for sharing this, Magi, I relate to a lot of what you're saying. I feel like there are similar dialectic tensions to a lot of goals in life, whether it's "winning" or "creating" or "meeting others expectations" or pretty much any goal. What we do in pursuit of those goals can be moral or immoral, healthy or unhealthy, pro-social or anti-social, sustainable or unsustainable, because none of those things are the axis we're focusing on--we're focusing on the goal. It makes me think of the people who focus on making money, whether it's ground level hustlers or corporate CEOs. The ones who do the most will do everything from building alliances and engaging in charity to doing lots of harm and being cutthroat because they're so fixated on the goal of making money that everything else is incidental. So I guess the question is, "What is my goal and what am I both willing to do and not willing to do to achieve it?" Because focusing on any single goal to the detriment of all others... kind of makes us into monsters? And hurts us. And sometimes that strategy can succeed but success isn't guaranteed and even if it were, is it worth it? There's just this constant tension there and maybe sitting with it and making choices one after the other is all there really is, I dunno'

Really interesting video! I don’t see myself as a conpetitive person, so I don’t necessarily have the same perspective that you have. I think your realization that you shouldn’t tie your whole existence to your Melee success and accepting losses shows is such an important lesson. Honestly I wouldn’t mind more of these videos because hearing your thoughts on different topics is interesting. Looking forward to seeing you succeed more in Melee!

I feel like an alternate version of myself is explaining what I’ve been doing and feeling my whole life. Thank you. This is super relatable. ur awesome and inspiring.

This vid went hard I loved listening to while i was working. i hope it blows up!

This is a such a touching and sobering piece. As someone who really enjoys melee and wants to get better but doesn't feel super competitive is a prospective for me to understand. As a fan of yours, it feels good knowing that you're focusing on the support support of myself and others help push you to keep going and go further. Please don't ever feel we're disappointed. Looking forward to following your journey and cheering you on!

thank you so much for this such a real video that makes me feel not alone in some of the thoughts i have

You’re a huge inspiration for me! I love your content, and I hope you’re doing well.

ty for sharing, i feel like ive had a lot of these feelings but have never been able to analyze things and introspect as cleary as you do

First off, PHENOMENAL video, thank you so much for sharing. I've never heard someone else voice this feeling I have of "Hating losing and feeling relief (if anything) with winning." I'm an artist and I've always felt "dropped" into this path because I liked it when I was young and now I've kind of lost a reason why I keep doing it. This video opened my eyes to maybe it's because you can't "win" at art, and that's why I feel so discontent? I did some fan art of you a while ago, I don't expect you to remember, but you and your community showed me a lot of love. So, thank you TWICE, now

cool that you are saying some real shit thanks for sharing homie dont see a ton of stuff like this

Beautiful video Magi! I find so many smash players have a difficult time processing their emotions and mentality, and I really really hope this video reaches out and inspires/helps people. Inspires them to not only think but talk about themselves better. I learned from this video that smash has really helped me fight my fear of failure, and recently as I've been getting better wins and results I've been able to confront my fear of success (which is much worse). I would love to know more about your mentality during, after/before sets. And possibly a future update to this video if you ever have any changes in how you feel! Thank you!!!

Modern reflections are absolutely necessary for the guidance of others and the future. Thank you for this!!

i got here just for curiosity and i really needed to hear this great video ty

Your words resonate with me so hard. I've been hovering for a while over this idea of why it was so important to win/lose for me, that it would cause me to be overly upset. I no longer feel this way and that does take a bunch of the drive and strive for competition I had, but in turn has made me way more at peace with myself. I don't intend to compare myself to you in that sense tho cause like you said, you feel like giving something back to the people who supports you and I think that's great. I still play games competitively because it's still fun for me, but I am not climbing any mountain, I'll get there if I do or I won't and that's ok. I guess I'd rather be at peace with myself and I am so thankful with myself for being able to break that barrier. You speaking of this tho and saying almost word for word the things I've also concluded makes it feel more real tho, and for that I thank you greatly, not a lot of players talk about the mental health aspect of competing. Thank you for doing this Magi, from the bottom of my heart

I relate to your perspective and will probably go back over this as I process my own messes. It's particularly frustrating as introvert dealing with imposter syndrome, as there's a severe tug of war between the desire to seclude and the need to seek external validation; I've found that during covid especially, I've turned more readily to the internet as a source of external validation, which is attractive for the same reason it's addictive: I don't have to go out to get it. However, I find that experience kind of shallow, but preferred compared to the alternative. I mention these things because the most satisfying experiences of my life have been when a big risk is rewarded; I can't feel as happy as I want to be without feeling fear just as much. There are three principle fears that drive my endeavours: the fear that I will be outdone in my chosen skill; the fear that not focusing on one skill will ruin my potential; and the fear that even if I am the best at something, I will never be good enough. Nothing is more terrifying to me than being a waste of potential. I write the preceding not to force you to process my own insecurities/code, but to indicate that your video had some successful purpose. (aside from just being my soundtrack to - you guessed it - getting tilted on unranked) See you on the next stream or video or tournament!

Super inspirational video, I will definetely remember it, I relate to some stuff you say, and if feels good to hear and i'll try my best to keep this as a lesson on how I need to grow as a person, so thank you so much for that. I hope that things get clearer for you and that you'll be able to find a good mindset to keep on competing. I wish you the best, much love from a trans sis

Hello again. I'd definitely like to add to the "good video" comments aswell. I am always interested in "raw" videos with only a few or no jumpcuts. If I may add one critisism to the video - and it's definitely not important to include it in the future: It would be great to also get the Smash tag of people the first time you metion them. The reason behin this request is that I'm not watching any melee / smash but I quite like to add a picture of the person you're talking about. KHJ has been on this channel enough to be a person, however Howard is not really a known entity to me. It's very possible that that's just me though and I'll definitely watch the next one of these videos (if there is one) as it comes out. If nothing else please know that many people like content that feels so very honest and authentic. kind regards that dude from that timezone

I like the videos, cant always watch streams when they're made and theyre more made for the immediate viewers

i dont play melee super competitively, but i produce music and tend to get very competitive w it like most things i care about. originally i fell in love w music because i would daydream about being well-liked and playing music at school for kids in my class and impressing them bc i was very anti-social/anxious/young and music was my way to relate to the world and other ppl lol. for a while i was insanely productive. I would make maybe 5-6 beats a day, bla bla. probably at least 5 hrs a day and if i didnt skip school once-twice a week to work on songs i would feel like shit. around this point in time my focus shifted from earning respect/validation to some obscure vanishing point of "success". I cant put into words what it would be other than listing off a bunch of daydreams that I know will materially never happen. eventually i started getting hit over the head w imposter syndrome by comparing myself to my peers and making less and less music. that was a couple years ago. nowadays i barely open my DAW (and when i do i usually just stare at the blank screen for like 30 minutes n then go watch star trek or some shit). Its been hard since then getting back into it where it feels intuitive and natural. when i compare what made me productive before and what i dont have now its community. Before, my best friends were musicians, or whatever. People who made great music who i was constantly competing with and trying to outpace or getting lapped by and who mutually built me up/put pressure on me to actually work on stuff i care about. but that social scene kind of imploded bc we just all grew up, and left me with really no musical friends to care about. now the people i compete with are people i dont know but admire who i will never ever ever ever ever ever hold a candle too. it makes feel like shit in a way that i think would sound insane to a therapist. its hard lol i dont know exactly what to do with it but i resonate with what youre talking about.

This is how i was with TF2. Eventually i found alan watts, and listened to his lecture series on Buddhist and Zen philosophy, it helped.

as someone with adhd that switches games constantly just to be better then new people i can feel this competiveness

Hi Magi, I hope this comment is not too long, but I watched your whole video and I need to tell you something I think is important. It seems like you have been going through some kind of Melee-related existential crisis. To preface this, I will be graduating with a Bachelor's in Philosophy if everything goes well in the spring and I can tell you that your video reads very existentialist to me. One of the most quintessential philosophers of the existentialist movement is Jean-Paul Sartre who wrote a book called "Being and Nothingness" about where meaning comes from, how affects us, and why we suffer. If I were to summarize what I think is most relevant to what you are going through it would be this. Meaning is something that is not a fully real thing, it is a part of our subjective experience. It is up to each person to determine what is meaningful to them, and it is wholly them that is in charge of what they should care about. However, back to how meaning is not a real thing, it is kind of like an illusion that drives our being. In order to remain happy, we must make sure our "being", our "true existence", which manifests in our physical actions, corresponds most closely with what our meaning to live is, what our ideals are. So, I would argue that it is not necessarily immature to choose to live for improving at Melee and playing it in a competitive setting, it may be a dangerous meaning to wish to be number 1 as there is a very low supply of number one players (literally one out of millions), but a person may choose to have this if they so desire. However, suffering, for an existentialist comes from a divergence between our life's meaning (what we value, what we wake up to in the morning, or most philosophically, the illusion that we perceive our ideal selves to be) and what we literally are as physical beings. If you perceive to be the best, you will suffer from not being the best. If you perceive yourself, and your ideal self, to be Magi (who you physically are), you'll be comfortable living in your own skin. However, there are some psychological challenges that arise when it comes to what your subconscious feels is your ideal self, and what you consciously feel is your ideal self. For the existentialist, we are in a constant battle, as biologically determined beings, between what we want to be as a conscious being, and what our subconscious drives us to be from our predisposed heuristics (Say your ADHD for instance). When you say something like "I know it doesn't mean anything to be good at melee, but I still want to be good at it anyways. I'm not sure where that comes from." This comes from you consciously knowing that you can be close to your ideal self without necessarily being good at melee, and your subconscious that existentially begs to differ. This here is key: what determines a biological being's subconscious meaning is how much time they spend doing something and idealizing a certain perception of who you want to be. In other words, psychologically speaking, we have mental inertia, when we spend a lot of time doing literally anything, our subconscious will start to infer that what we are doing is more and more important, whether you consciously do or not. This is why one must either align their ideals with where they truly believe they will end up with themselves, or start conditioning their subconscious to align with their conscious as to what their purpose is, and what is important to them, by doing more of the tasks that you find to be most important to your subjective meaning. Magi, I've been kind of a fan of yours for a few years now and I'm sorry that this came out a bit lengthy. But I feel like this kind of phenomenon is what you have been going through on an existential level and I think you might resonate with this. If you have any questions, I'm more than happy to give some answers.

I was so scared of failing exams and schoolwork and stuff I ended up getting three degrees (for free because STEM). I was good at getting grades in exams and it felt good as well tbh. Now I'm supposed to do original research and I started failing because fear of failure in an open ended exploratory task is kinda useless. Not sure what I'm saying but the guilt of like, "I got here and I can do nothing for a week because no one knows what I do and I don't know why I do this" is something I struggle with all the time.

good video

Great video, you don't often get to see the perspective of an esports athlete this closely. Even though you seem to know yourself really well and have a solid group of friends and supporters behind you, I think you should look into getting a sports psychologist to coach you. Someone like that would have expertise in helping you sort out exactly the type of things you talk about in this video.

WAIT yo, you mentioned laser tag, do you remember your system that you used? (if you can remember) Just seeing you participate in things openly , just having representation at all for being anywhere is awesome. (makes me happy to see other trans people being successful in their craft) So mental health is something everyone needs to work on, you are allowed to have those feelings about feeling like you don't belong. But its good to know your traumas are not invalid because you've had it easy despite the odds of the world. Working on your mental health is a huge win, despite the challenges that each person has to do. You are awesome! thank you for being an awesome and inspiring person in my life, Thank you

I’m sorry I can’t watch the whole video, but I think I get the gist. Competitive anything is hard to get into, and Melee has a particularly gruesome meta culture. But I feel like the only way to change that is to win for yourself but hold on to your humility. I would definitely feel good if someday I could get a couple games over Leffen lol

Hi

Oh shit I clicked on the thumbnail thinking it was another moist-verse person. Not saying I thought you were a guy, just that you looked like a Charlie look-a-like in the thumbnail.