That didn't take long

What day did I come back here?  Saturday, I think.  So it's Monday morning and I'm already having panic attacks.  Damn this game, I swear.

Last night, I was invited to hang out and help with The Hills Are Alive KSNM.  As luck would have it, I also needed the egg from that fight and just happened to have exactly 99 Kindred Seals left to my name.  So I switched to Dark Knight in order to help out with skillchains (Samurai would've been better, but I was lazy) and headed to the battlefield.  We didn't do many fights...4 total, I think, but we ended up going 2/4 with the eggs.  As it turns out, I was one of the two lucky winners.  So now I have all three items to get a black belt for my Monk class that I have sorely neglected.  Yay me!

Hoping to skip past the nonsense of the purple and brown belt quests, I borrowed a brown belt from Bey and ran to Neptune's Spire.  Of course it couldn't be that easy.  Head held down, I walked out of the spire and looked up where all these stupid NMs spawn.  Due to my packrat nature, I had most of what I needed for both belts.  I was just missing Nue's Fang, Malborger's Vine, and a Rampaging Horn.  Off to Nue I go, I suppose.

I didn't spend much time out there before it spawned, and I was lucky to go 1/1 with it.  That made me happy.  So next up was that damn Marlboro.  After spending what seemed like an hour just to reach the spawn location, I was somewhat thankful in the knowledge that no one could possibly stumble upon this NM by accident and kill it out of boredom.  To reach this thing, you have to want to find it.  I arrive at the spawn location and notice it isn't around.  Son of a bitch.  Who the hell thought it was a good idea to come kill this thing when I want to do my quest?  People are so inconsiderate.  Looking at the spawn conditions, I realize this isn't something I'm just going to sit and wait for.  21-24 hour timed spawn.  Yeah, screw that.  However!  It was 10am and we had an impending update coming.  I figured maybe we'd have a server reset and the NM would spawn when they came back up.  I let myself time out there during maintenance and hopped on as soon as the servers were back.  To my dismay, no NM.  So I'm back to being flustered.  Next I decide to run out and find this Rampaging Ram.  Naturally, I've been out here for 2.5 hours with no spawn.

The frustration level was rising, and I'm already recovering from the flu.  Added stress isn't something I should be pursuing.  While doing all this, I'm watching some chatter in an LS that I'm visiting (I don't consider myself a memeber right now).  Of course, by no fault of their own, it's the usual "x event is so easy, I can solo such-and-such NM, look at all my shinies" conversation that takes places everywhere I try to avoid.  Chatter like that directly hits my self-esteem for whatever reason, and compound that with the frustration over this quest and I began to feel myself slipping away into that void of self-doubt that I seem to find myself in more often than not.

Before I let myself go completely, I zoned out for a moment.  I have to stop doing this to myself.  The reality of it is that I truly am trying too damn hard to keep up with people.  That's where I'm wrong.  I don't have to keep up.  What I have to do is be me.  That is what got me to the point where I am today as a player.  Of course, this doesn't mean that I will give up my desire to have nice things.  That's stupid.  I am still going to work on my Empyreans, and one day, I will have a relic.  I want to join a Neo-Nyzul Isle static and get awesome gear from there, as well as do the new Einherjar and Limbus.  By no means is this is a declaration of living contently with what I have no and relinquish all desire to improve.  It is; however, a realization that if I don't stop swatting the ghost of my own iniquity, that I am going to cause myself serious pain.

Over time, I have come to develop that elitist mentality, and I am worse off for it.  I have a saying in my bazaar, "You are what you believe yourself to be."  It's true, and I am becoming a victim of such thoughts.  I believe that I am not a good enough player to be considered among the upper echelon of people.  I have had numerous people say things to the contrary, but my self-esteem doesn't allow me to believe them.  I've run parses and have come out on top or within the top 3 during several fights.  I am not some incompetent person who operates without a clue and just "lols" through every screw up.  I learn from my mistakes and always strive to improve.  I have blogs written about me by my friends.  I don't know what I've done, but I must have done "something" right in my time here.

Sure, my name my never appear in the FFXIAH listing, and I might live my entire FFXI life without more than a handful of people who know who I am.  However, those who do know me have stated many times that they enjoy my presence.  Hell, some of them even adore me, and I adore them.  That means something.  Will I ever reach the ranks of the top-end players?  Probably not, and I have to learn to be ok with that.  Chasing the love of those who don't know me while shunning the love of those next to me will inevitably leave me a very lonely and isolated player...as well as a person.

So, I'll continue my farming of these stupid ass NMs and slowly make my way to having another Empyrean weapon.  I'll work on the rest of my projects and finish what I can in the time that I can afford to give them.  If hanging out with my friends means that I don't get whatever awesome item is out at the exact moment of release, that's ok too.  What matters is that I don't lose myself in the process, and that I keep those precious few friends of mine close.  Ranking be damned.

Of course, saying this is easy.  Making myself believe it and stick to it will be the challenge.  I can do it, right?