Wrist injury, Being Overwhelmed, Past/Present, & Creating a Better Future

Hello everyone!



2018 Spring split will be the first time I am not playing on a team in over 4 years. I wanted to talk about how it came to this and my thoughts, as I haven't really shared anything too personal in over 3 years.



My Wrist



My desire to practice all day has never gone away, but it seems that over the last couple years of my roughly 7 year playing career (amateur/pro), my hand & wrist gradually lost the desire to do the same. I remember the difference between being able to play without a limit very vividly. For a long time, I'd play all day, clicking endlessly. I felt that spam clicking so much kept my hand warmed up, and I felt that specifically as an ADC, it gave my mechanics an edge. I even wrote blog posts back in season 2 or 3 about how I felt that having a high APM was actually useful in league, even if 90% of your clicks aren't doing anything but making your movements hard to read & keeping your hand ready. This is the way that I learned to play the game at a high level. I wasn't perfect but I always felt like if I had lost, it was because I lacked game knowledge. All this is not to say that my problems are not improving / getting better; I am currently recovering, but feeling how I did was a shock and I didn't previously have the tools or knowledge to deal with it correctly.



EnVy



I think since around the time I joined EnVy, things switched for me. The first few weeks of scrims / solo queue / LCS, I felt like a god. I thought my play was on the right track to becoming a top ADC in NA. I think people were surprised by me, but I knew this was the level I could play at all these years. I was so hungry to study everything I could and play the max solo queue possible. After about week 3 though, things started to change. I got pain running all over my hand and arm. Sometimes I'd wake up in the morning and my hand would be locked into place, even after I used a wrist brace. I'd have to leave it like that for 20 minutes and slowly start clicking it out of place. My hand started to feel slow, like it didn't want to cooperate with me anymore. I couldn't click as fast, I became less accurate, I had partially lost the thing that every play relies on entirely, my mechanics. I bought a wrist brace, tried KT tape, started religiously doing wrist exercises. I started to do everything I could to try to fix this. It's not like I hadn't been doing wrist stretches the whole time, but I had been more loose about them. I still feel like I ended that split as a top 4 ADC (partially thanks to Hakuho being a really good support).



Even though I could bare through it, I started noticing that I could no longer give it my all in solo queue without repercussions for scrims / LCS (long lasting pain which would make me play even worse in the long run). I would go from winning every game duoing with my support, to not being able to win anything. I stopped wanting to duo queue with anyone, I stopped wanting to climb, I would get challenger and then play on a lower elo account and practice playing more slowly and clicking less. It slowly started to seep into scrims too; when our scrims wouldn't go well, I'd stop clicking a lot and play noticeably worse. I figured it wouldn't matter because on stage I'd just play correctly and all would be right again, but losing so many scrims destroys team morale. I felt that having a problem with your wrist was tabboo, so even though I complained slightly here & there, I tried to keep everything to myself as much as possible. I didn't want anyone to know what was wrong with me.



I think by the time the offseason hit, peoples opinions of me were lowered from the beginning. I started practicing with extremely slow clicks and just tried to be more efficient. It started to make me a much worse player and I had trouble climbing. I'd get paired up vs an ADC I considered good, and try to play to my maximum sometimes, and it would destroy my hand/arm for hours, so I just gave up. There was a point where I'd mindlessly play games, barely trying even 50%, and just accepting it and not caring every time I lost. I tried to stream it and talk about how important it was to be positive in life, as I got repeatedly shit on in every solo queue game, because I myself was struggling a lot with the direction things were going. I practiced for months just playing slowly and resting my hand as much as possible. I wasn't giving up though; I made positive changes, started to eat better and go to the gym, always wearing a brace when I could, etc.



Dignitas



When I joined Dignitas, I actually started to feel like myself again, I thought everything was going great and the past 5 months was going to be put behind me. In Korea, however, I had a difficult time eating the food, we had no access to a gym, the living quarters were small, and I got food poisoning several times. I'm already fairly skinny, but I think I lost 10 pounds in 3 weeks. We lost nearly every scrim, and I think everyone was a bit sad about it. I was having a bit of a rough time as I had not been playing correctly in the offseason. I had to fix my play, so I said fuck my wrist, and grinded 300 solo queue games in 21 days. I was playing pathetically at first, but in the last week, I had a 70% win rate and was about 20 LP from challenger before I got on my flight.



I returned to NA and felt amazing again; I crushed everyone in solo queue and felt like my mechanics were just flat out really good again. My wrist pain was unnoticeable. Sadly, the day before we started scrimming in NA, I got extremely sick with a fever and was shaking in bed for 5 days. I felt like I had improved so much, but then I couldn't play properly because I got really sick. It's ok, I knew that I'd prove to my team in LCS that I was good now.



Spring Split



First week of LCS comes, and I felt like we did well. We did well vs P1's bot lane, and almost beat C9. There were a few problems for me personally which made it difficult to feel healthy / positive; such as living in a spider infested house where I constantly got bit (it happens), having a Korean-only chef when I couldn't stomach Korean food (yet! I love it now), not having a car or gym memberships, and being far away from LCS. To be honest, it felt a bit depressing. I felt so unhealthy, and all the positive life changes I had made in the off-season seemed to wash away within a month. I felt a bit trapped. I thought that eating well and working out was helping my wrist a lot before, and I had basically lost access to that. I couldn't gain my weight back from Korea, and I just became a zombie. On top of this, our translator was an extremely nice person & a good translator, but it was his first time trying to translate for a pro e-sports team, so having intense game-related discussions with our Korean coaches / players felt impossible, and it was difficult to see eachother's points of view. I was extremely isolated and didn't really feel much anymore. We trucked along and ended up getting to playoffs, where I failed miserably. By the end of the split, my wrist problems started to come back. I mindlessly grinded games because I wanted to be working hard, but in the end, the lack of balance was hurting me a lot. I felt like a shell of my split on NV, and wasn't even sure if I could be the best anymore.



Summer Split



I figured though, that the year was not over, and there was always time to change things. I told my team/org I needed to take a 2.5 week break from using computers and put my hand in a brace, I focused on a good diet + exercise, and tried to just better myself overall. When the team got back to start scrimming, I think I sucked pretty bad because of my long break, but I started playing super hard again and 1 week before LCS Summer began, I felt amazing. I was so excited at a second chance with this team because I respected everyone a lot and wanted to prove myself. Instead, I got a huge bite on my arm (not sure if related), and then mysteriously ended up getting sick 24 hours later, a week before LCS started. I obtained a fever of 102-104 for a week straight, which made me feel delirious and unable to practice. I was shaking uncontrollably for a week and I eventually ended up in the hospital. It was so intense that when I recovered, I still felt completely dead, but I promised myself I'd have a good split no matter what.



After the first 2 games of summer split, even though we won, I played inadequately. I was so depressed over my performance that I went and sat in the bathroom staring at the floor for an hour after the games. I'd rather have an okay performance with 0 excuses than a poor performance with an excuse. In the following couple weeks, I never spent a second not playing Solo queue or working out. I still was recovering from the fever but I gave it my all in practice. Around the second week, I started realizing from talking to people outside of my team that I had basically been replaced. I believe my replacement was obtained around the first week the split started but they had not told me. It was a bit frustrating getting lied to more than anything, but with my previous performances I kind of understood. It felt weird, but I understand how sports are, and I respected the teams wishes. Ultimately no one deserved to lose because of me, and I just wanted to see my team succeed. So I played twice as hard. I still felt like shit, but we managed to beat TSM. Losing to TL, however, was basically the final straw for me. I felt like by the 3rd week, I was fully recovered, and had a really good performance vs P1 and EchoFox. But it didn't matter, the loss to TL had already set the gears in motion. I had pretty much already been replaced



I did feel pretty salty; Adrian & Johnny are a top tier bot lane IMO, but despite starting the split with a 104 degree fever, I practiced endlessly and we actually started 5-1. It shocked me that this would happen when our team was tied for 1st. I felt like even though I was struggling at first, I had bounced back completely by week 3. After this, I think I was given 1 LCS game and 1 scrim block, and then never got to play again. I had a pretty bad attitude about this, because I didn't even understand why or what was happening, I just got vague, half-hopeful hints that I might get an opportunity to play again, so I kept practicing but slowly realized that it just wasn't happening. I couldn't not be happy for the team though, they started doing great; but it's like people forgot that we started the split 5-1, and I was apart of that.



It was especially frustrating because our lack of communication ended up in us double blindpicking and getting double countered bot lane every game. I felt unable to pick stronger bot lanes like Caitlyn (which later became first pick/ban) so I just did what I thought was best for the team. A team cannot function with 5 people wanting to hyper-carry. Vs EF & P1 however, I got to play every pick that I wanted, and it felt much easier playing as a team and we went 2-0 again. Regardless of that, I then got replaced. That week, the meta switched to favour hard-carry ADC's like Twitch & Tristana and became bot-lane centric again. On top of this, the team completely changed the way we played; we started picking tank tops more and playing around bot lane entirely, something we never did before. In an interview, SSumday even said something along the lines of; "I'm glad our bot lane is doing well, I am sacrificing for them a lot". I am NOT saying Adrian+Altecs success was undeserved or given to them. However, the combination of these things happening compounded how shittily people viewed me tenfold. Suddenly it was like we were lucky to have even started 5-1 because I was so awful, and I could never have carried games like our new bot lane. People called me abysmal, and I got put on the bottom of Phreaks meme list rankings after going through all of that, which caused me to just get flamed even harder and considered the worst ADC to ever step foot in LCS.



Conclusion & Outlook in 2018



Everything felt unfair. I'd never felt so overwhelmed in my life. Playing competitively and always having a chance to prove myself with my actions the next week was my voice, but I lost that completely and even started making pointless youtube videos complaining about my situation. I hadn't felt that depressed since the year I was 16 and was age-locked out of LCS. But I think a lot of life is unfair, for everyone, and how you view & deal with the shitty situations that happen in your life is what will help to define the non-shitty situations. Deep down, maybe I am a bit bitter about everything that happened in my career, and everything that has happened weighsed too heavily on me, but taking better care of my wrist is something I'm solely in charge of. Staying positive like many people do, against all odds, is something that I'm solely in charge of. You're not judged off your intentions, but by your actions. My intentions were there, but my actions were not strong enough in the past year and a half. Ultimately, I was blessed just to have the opportunity to play a few splits in LCS, something I know a lot of people still strive for.



I'm not entirely sure what path I have to take to get back to where I want to be, but I'm taking the first couple steps and seeing where they lead me. I want to play on stage again so badly it almost eats me alive just thinking about the fact that I won't be at all this split. Not just to play on stage, but to be able to fully respect and be content with the way I'm playing, and not have to feel like I'm holding back to protect my wrist. Even if that means I'm trying as hard as I possibly can and still get crushed, I feel like only then do you feel like you're learning something.



All in all, this break is not me losing the motivation to play or giving up, it's the opposite. In these few months I will be trying harder than I ever have before to correct what has gone wrong in my life. I want to mend people's opinions of me, whether it be just in solo queue or competitive.



For the people out there that have felt like I have, try to keep your head up and realize that your life can change next week, next month, or next year without you knowing how or why. Simply going through life with the wrong mindset could change your outcome without you even knowing. Don't be afraid to talk to people about it and always try to look for a new outlook, as you can potentially perceive anything in any way you want. For better, or for worse.



If you're an aspiring pro player, make sure to keep taking good care of your wrist, preventatively, as you never know when you'll start feeling the effects of sitting at a computer 24/7!



Also, in 2018 I will namechange to "Benji". I made the name LOD when I was 10 years old and never really wanted to keep it.



Finally, thanks so much to everyone who has read all this and continues to cheer me on :D ! You guys are the best. I'm really happy to try much harder and look to get on a team again next year.

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