Struggles and Doubts

The past few days have been pretty rough for me. After taking a one week break from climbing to recover my elbow and finger injury, I still feel a little off form every now and then during training and even on non-training days. I'm not sure why this is starting to happen to me but I can think of a few reasons other than my injury, because a few weeks ago I have been climbing consistently well and just bearing with my injury throughout. One of these reasons is that I'm waking up earlier these days compared to the summer holidays period when I can just get as much sleep as I want. Another reason is that I'm starting to feel the pressure of my academics as I am really confused and lost during lectures nowadays and the content I am studying for chem eng is just so freaking difficult to understand. It feels like once I thought I've understood the concepts from the lectures, I just get shot down by the insanely difficult tutorial questions and I can't do them without referring to solutions and this makes me really worried. I've never felt this stressed before for my academics because this is one of the few moments in my life that I just feel like I'm not intellectually capable enough to cope with this, and damn it, it really does worry me a lot. Maybe this bugging thoughts have been hindering my climbing the past few days. All of these doubts just lead to struggles on the wall, and all of these struggles on the wall just lead to more doubts of my climbing.

I absolutely hate feeling off form while climbing and I think all of these excuses I came up with are just signs of my weak mentality. Everyone else has school too and everyone else has their own problems to worry about. I have no excuse. I just have to get my thinking and mentality straight for climbing and my academics and I am sure everything will get better. I just have to believe in myself.

Maybe I'll start writing down what I did well and what I did badly and also include what are the areas for me to improve on for every route so that I am more aware of my mental state and try to understand why I choose to follow certain beta instead of others.

In the meantime, I really have to study so much harder this semester. It's only week 3 yet I'm already feeling the pressure. But I have to constantly remind myself that I am studying out of passion and the thirst for knowledge. If it isn't challenging, then there's no interest and fun in learning it anyway.