I can think of three things I’m glad I didn’t give up on from recent memory that are worth posting about. This is one of the longest posts I’ve ever written for Smogon to this day (save for a few RMTs), so grab your favorite drink, pull up a chair and get comfortable. Feel free to read these individually or all at once- either way I appreciate your time and being able to share these stories with you all.
Going to and graduating college is the big one. I graduated high school during the class of 2020 (were my fellow pandemic grads at?) and eventually committed to a bachelor’s degree in human services halfway into my second year. I made it very clear on multiple occasions to multiple people that I wanted to drop out and leave, but in part because of my own stubbornness I graduated on time in 2024. Since graduation I was dealing with a pretty tedious job search, telling myself at the time I didn’t really want to work and that college was a waste of my time, but I knew if I was just a little more patient that things would work out. I am now working my first job I’ve ever had in my field since late February and I plan on seeking a promotion from my internship when I’m able to. For the first time in my life I feel like I have some semblance of financial stability and, dare I say, an actual freaking purpose in this world beyond “that guy that’s fun to hang out with every so often”. Keep my stressful second year (specifically late 2021) in mind as you continue to read this post. That will be important later when I talk about a… certain someone and some of the people I grew up near.
I knew I would be able to “survive” college, for lack of a better word, in major part because that wasn’t the only time I spent years trying to accomplish something. Granted, there’s a huge difference between a college level education and a Pokémon spin-off game, but words cannot begin to describe the sheer amount of agony, sweat, and tears that went into what I consider the single hardest and most unbelievably rare thing I’ve ever done in a video game by a long shot. I’ve spoken the details of August 7th on this site plenty of times before so I’ll try not to repeat myself too, too much. Over 350 hours of in-game time over multiple save files, even more hours spent preparing for the hunt on top of that, and four years of playing Pokémon Rumble World of all games finally culminated in 2019 in a shot in the dark, callout prediction that happens maybe once in a generation if you’re lucky. That was the night Espeon skyrocketed into the ranks of one of my favorite Pokémon in the franchise, but it didn’t stop there. Practically every year after this, I would go back on my 3DS (or my new 2DS I got after the main one broke, lol) and play that game in honor of this hunt, but I also couldn’t help but notice that a smaller but noticeable, slowly growing number of Espeon-related coincidences kept popping up on the anniversary of that day. “Espeon Day”, as I’ve called this event, was perhaps at its most prominent so far during the 2023 iteration, on which me and a good friend had a Shiny Hunting session in Pokémon Scarlet & Violet that resulted in three Shiny Espeon in the span of 25 minutes, and that’s considering we only actually checked about half of the spawns (there were more off camera on the other edge of a small cliff) during the first 10 to 15 minutes. Had I checked every spawn on my screen in my loading zones, we very easily could have found even more.
If 2019 was the dagger, 2023 was all of the confirmation I needed to believe Espeon wasn’t just a Pokémon that I happened to really like before all of this happened. 2023 was the spark that cemented Espeon into my Top 5 for all of time going forward. That wasn’t the only thing that happened in 2023, though. During the pandemic, I had started realizing that I had a crush on someone from the high school class just behind mine. Thing is, I hadn’t noticed I was starting to have a crush until it was time for me to move to college and I was working a part-time summer job. Long story short, I spent almost a whole year wondering if I should make my move. To this day, she remains the only person I ever even thought I had feelings for, let alone actually did. 2021 would present… other challenges, though. That was the year I was arguably at my lowest point physically, mentally, and emotionally, and when my high school friends inadvertently told me to give up on trying to talk to her, going as far as to say negative things about me and my dad, that… that hurt. That conversation killed any desire I had to try and reach out to her again…
…but wait, you ask. I thought this thread was about not giving up. So why am I still talking about this? See, that’s just it. For the past three and a half years now I’ve been fighting a battle with myself to figure a couple of more… personal things out, see. Let’s just say that for a while I was wondering if I even supported the idea of romance and relationships at all, and that’s the PG version of some of the absolutely disgusting things I was hearing about men and women alike back during my college days. Eventually I decided, enough was enough. I’m going to stay single “for the rest of my life”, I told myself. Or at the very least, until something-or someone- just happens to come along and change my perspective. It’s not exactly easy to unhear some of what I heard. Double points because spoiler alert, I went to a Christian college. “Christian”. Okay. My stubbornness and singleness was finally rewarded by who else but my former crush’s father (or uncle? He was one of the two, I can’t remember) at my job at a fast food restaurant that I actually still work at now. We hit it off great during my lunch break as he happened to be a customer at that time and I told him some of what I was going through (the appropriate parts, anyway). I didn’t mentioned I liked her for shyness reasons- that, and she has a husband and kid now so it would have come across as insensitive- but thankfully he seemed to catch onto what I was saying and he taught me that I was able to let myself work on myself more and not be so worried about what other people thought. In retrospect, I think he was trying to help “train me” for whenever I finally feel ready to come out of my social shel and give this whole “dating and crushes” thing another shot. Something that might be easier now than it was in 2021-23 now that I actually have some kind of money, you know? I had never met this man in my life prior to this and yet in a single conversation he made me feel way more confident in myself than most of the so-called “Christians” that I grew up near. How the heck did that happen…?
