カルビン · @calvininput
9th Apr 2019 from TwitLonger
What's Been Going On + Where I Go From Here
Hey ya'll. It's Calvin here. As some of you have seen on my Twitter/YouTube over the past year or so, I have a history of popping up, then disappearing. Changing my language, then going back to Japanese. I wanted to talk a bit about why I have been doing that and what I am going to be doing in the future. I believe it is appropriate to go all the way back to March 2018.
March 2018 was when I founded the AJATT method through mattvsjapan and decided that I was going to be learning Japanese. This was quite exciting for me. I was excited to not only learn Japanese, but to also show the world my progress. Well, throughout the journey I struggled immensely. My discipline was out of whack and I held myself to ridiculous expectations. I got to a point where I would literally set deadlines in my Journey that were due 7 years from now. In general I had this "all of nothing" mentality. I figured that if I wasn't doing Japanese as much as I possibly could, then I just simply wasn't doing enough. Due to toxic thinking like this, I struggled immensely. And another HUGE factor that let to my failures was the pressure of people seeing my struggle. I was so terrified of posting a big goal that I have on YouTube, then come 1 year later, I didn't make any progress. So, when that happened, I said to myself that I can "start over" and make things right. I do that by starting over in another language. That way, I can show people a Calvin that is actually making good progress in his language journey. The problem here is that the language I switched was a language that I didn't care enough to learn. I would convince myself that I wanted to learn it, but I truly didn't. So then over time I would eventually go back to the language that I want to learn, Japanese. This is in a nutshell what has been happening. I wanted to post this to be 100% real with you guys. So, where do I go from here?
Well, now I am going to fit Japanese into my life that is practical. I am also not going to get so caught up in YouTube and social media in general. The fear of failure would CRIPPLE me. The fear of being seen as a failure online would cripple me so incredibly hard. So, long gone are those days. I am just going to do Japanese, immerse everyday, do my reps in solitude. I am also going to be okay with things not going exactly as I planned them. Instead of thinking of an end goal, I am going to be thinking of a "trajectory" with my Japanese. This will be a lot less stress and way more practical. I would like to personally thank YogaPants for taking the time out of your day to talk with me for an hour and a half about all of this. Your words truly helped.
I will no longer being saying "K bye" on here or YouTube. I don't want to just drop of the face of the earth. I am just gonna be chill and not worry about all of that extra stuff right now. I am just going to focus on living my life and just incorporating Japanese into it in a healthy manner. My relationship with social media is not very good, so I won't be super active, but I will check in every now and then.
To those who have read all of this, thank you for taking the time to do so. I am happy to be completely honest with you all and I wish you all the best of luck with your goals.
Peace