It’s the best kinda game that I can enjoy at the moment. It’s very fast, mentally demanding, and quite creative. It’s also challenging in ways that weren’t obvious to me immediately: it’s intimidating. Both intellectually and socially. Especially socially. That’s because it is intimate. You are doing an activity and only that activity with another person. In silence (usually).

Your mind is also communicating with another mind. You both know the rules and the common tactics. You then improvise and check if your opponent will notice. If they don’t, you feel awesome. If the roles are reversed, you feel shitty.

So the challenge for me was overcoming the mental barrier of not wanting to feel embarrassed and stupid each time I lost or made a mistake. Each chess match can be a bit anxiety inducing.

But the more matches I play, the less impact an individual match has as a whole, and with it the intensity of each blunder. Then I realized (just now, really) that that’s the case for pretty much any situation that forces you to be on display for others to observe, judge and hopefully get inspired by.