Well, that sucked.

I came in saying that the one word that could be used to describe my gameplay was "improving", and my goals were not to win but to improve, to identify what I do well, and to identify what I could stand to improve in the future. I believe I accomplished all of those. Improving from 11th to 3rd for a personal best was pretty dang cool! I also identified that I have a hidden talent for UTR gameplay and for jury management, neither of which I thought I could do well before. As far as things I could improve, I have determined that while I thought my problem was that I get too comfortable riding in people's pockets, I think now I've determined that there's always going to be someone in the room with a more forceful and dominant (or persuasive and smooth) personality than I do, and that the solution to that is not to try to be someone I'm not but to listen to my gut more (I tried listening this game, but I'll have to listen really really really hard in the future, because as I said in my Jury thread, I can't intuit an oncoming train if I'm tied to the tracks and I hear the whistle blow) and, more importantly in a way that I hadn't noticed before, to have the confidence to act on it. Despite how many people were pulling for me to win, I don't think I could have convinced them to vote for me at FTC because I wasn't confident that I had played the best game. A good game, for sure, but not the best game. I've had issues with this before, but this is the first time I've gotten close enough to the end for it to really hit me. I think in the future, in order to try out a more confident version of myself, I'll sign on to an alias game with the express intent of slipping into someone else's skin. The only other alias game I've been in was one in which I played as a version of my cat that was able to type, and I played quite differently than I normally would have. I've felt in my previous games like someone who keeps going to the therapist, identifying my problems, and then failing to execute when it comes to actually doing anything about said problems. This time, I at least have a plan for how to improve my gameplay, and a reason: Making it deep into the game is a lot more fun!

Thanks to everybody, and I look forward to PWing next season if you'll have me!

We would love to see you PW next season!