How to get rid of obsession with perfection and the "anxiety" from submitting scores.
Hello everyone, whoa this post got a little longer than I expected, but I wanted to give a little extra context to my situation to show that there is more to it than it just being a simple skill issue. At the end I attached my stats from both standard and mania, since I first started as STD player and formed that habit there. I am sorry for the google dockey, it's kinda hard for me to meaningfully describe it.
The TL;DR is basically that somewhere during my Osu! journey I have subconsiously drilled into my head that all my submitted scores have to be perfect (either fc or at least an S rank for harder charts that are too hard for me to fc). This mindblock leads to me spam-resetting plays after each miss or too bad accuracy (below 96%) and effectively being stuck both in terms of skill and rank. I don't really know where it comes from because I am nowhere near being a perfectionist IRL, yet while playing Osu I have this overwhelming urge to reset on every mistake, effectively playing with permanent self-induced SD modifier.
As funny as it might sound, it has been genuinely the biggest roadblock on my osu!(mania) journey, not necesarily beacause of lack of skill, but more because of lack of submitted scores. It's so bad that I might probably be the lowest ranking player with one of the highest play counts.
So to give a bit of context, I first started playing in June 2015 ( almost 11 years ago) and mained STD at that time. I got absolutely hooked and played almost every day. After some time I was able to fc nearly everything below 2* and so I started playing with mods a lot and trying to play higher diffs. But there was an issue, these harder diffs - I couldn't fc them so easily anymore. But since the whole scoring system in STD (v1) is based around combo, I did not want to submit scores that were not fc and I would just spam-reset after every single miss or sb. And that mentality got hard coded into my brain. Also back in the day we didn't have the score v2 mode in the game so there was no way to just play the map and practise it till the end without ranking the score. By mid 2017 I peaked at around 160k (don't remember the exact tho) and was technically able to pass (but not clear) 4* maps and even randomly got a medal for my first 5* pass (B rank, 87% acc, mostly jump-oriented DnB map), and although it was nothing wasn't exactly good, for me it was pretty solid achievement. My average play count/map was around 30 before i either cleared, or gave up, but it went to as much as 100+.
But then life happened and I had to take a hiatus for almost 8 years with a few irregular comebacks here and there and came back fully a month ago. During these short instances I noticed that my aim got so rusty that it became genuinely frustrating to play and so I fully mode-swapped to mania.
So far it's been fun and good riddance and I was even able to clear the first 2 intro 4k dans with 98,4% fc and 96,99%. Right now I am generally able to pass and fc most of charts below 2*. But these are becoming a little too easy for me and so I started attempting maps in the 2-3* range. I can pass most of them fine but not always fc them. And that's when I realized that the "must fc at all cost" mentality that I developed years ago had transfered into my current self as well. I am pretty strict on myself in this regard, I either want to fc the chart or at the very least S rank it, anything less than that I deem unworthy publishing and have no issue restarting the play at the very end of the chart if the conditions are not met. Surprisingly this haven't lead to any significant mindblocks or flustration, apart from pattern-oriented mind blocks where my brain just freezes every time I see any sort of jack, jump stream or asymetrical chords in 7k, which is mostly a reading issue and can probably be sorted with the fabled Play more™ method.
The real issue is that since my comeback a month ago, I amassed total of 3 000+ plays without really moving somewhere and have like 40 seconds average play time before reset. I do not fear frustrating myself into quitting, I really enjoy mania and have a lot of motivations; I would like to lean more towards 7k, but I currently suck at it generationally, mainly in the reading and eyes-fingers coordination departments, and my perfectionism doesn't exactly help with that. + I would really like to start making my own charts for both 4k and 7k. I have always admired mania charts and osu beatmaps that looked good visually and synced well with the song even though they were too hard for me to attempt personally, and even have a pretty good imagination in that regard, but I've learned that the general consensus mostly is that you should be able to at least pass most of your own diff spread and gather some experience to help you tell if the charts are playable or not unless you have someone willing to playtest it for you. But with that block I am not really heading anywhere and my overall improvement rate is very slow.
So yeah, how to get out of this endless cycle of restarting over and over and over, most of the times without even setting a score in the end.
