Creating trust in your skills and talents isn’t a reflex, we weren’t born with it. To get to the point where you automate your actions and reactions, you need consistent repetition of a process that involves accepting failure, learning from mistakes, adapting to new needs and demands, having the capacity of self-observation to understand where we stand, deep knowledge of our strengths and (primarily)weaknesses, and the desire to change even though it might involve accepting alterations, additions, and eliminations of beliefs and behaviors that you have accepted and followed from long ago.

The desire to build the certainty that you will respond self-assuredly to difficult situations consistently involves changes in your persona that will definitely have an emotional effect on you because parts of your present self will have to be erased, or modified to shape a new you. As emotional beings, the mere thought that we will have to accept new rules and regulations that will affect our principles, views, opinions, perceptions, and theories is enough to throw us off balance. Almost everyone desires to change, but nobody wants to accept that evolution requires altering, bending, creating, and destroying parts of the person we’ve been until now. That’s why only a very low percentage of people succeed at really becoming the person they want to be. That is what true, raw, and authentic transformation of our identity looks like, that’s a real productive response to reality to adapt to consistent, uncomfortable, unpredictable, and adverse twists of life.

I believe that my fandom is in part a reflection of my desire to succeed, and not having yet reached the success I want, I was attaching myself to someone else’s outcomes; I was trying to be a part of someone else’s team, and as such, I was sharing the emotions of the wins and the losses. My decision to change was part of a process to learn to keep my mental state more balanced. I wanted to learn to watch anything or anyone that I supported perform, but I wanted to have a still state of mind, not passionate and overflowing with emotion, trying to put myself in the shoes of the performer and keeping an assertive, relaxed, and analytical mentality.

Being passionate about someone else’s life means that I was focusing on a goal that didn’t belong to me, instead of focusing on pursuing my own goals. My fanaticism for the teams, causes, or organizations that I supported had given me unforgettable memories of joy, and some others of pain, but I hadn’t applied a principle that I strongly believe, excessive fanaticism is toxic, period. I’ve always believed that strong fanaticism for anything distorts reality. When you let strong emotions control you, your mind stops thinking clearly and independently, you allow something or someone else in the environment to influence you, and when it happens repetitively over a long period of time, delusion (or brainwash) takes over. The more you think about it, the more it takes over your life. That’s how addictions happen, the more you go back to drugs, or sugar, or ideologies, the more dependent on it you become; you give up your will to decide for yourself, just to find yourself at the mercy of someone or something else until you feel like you can’t live without it, but in your mind, you have the unrealistic idea that any time you decide to, you can stop doing it.

Something that you spend a lot of time thinking of would obviously create a stronger emotional attachment to it. I believe unchecked fanaticism usually ends up leading to fanatism, and once you embrace fanatism, fantasy and reality become the same. That’s the foundation in the mind of serial killers, fantasy is the driving element in their lives and a vital detonator of their murders; they aren’t pushed to kill only by their thought patterns, they are driven to kill by an invasive and distorted view of life. That’s how much emotions can wreck and affect our functioning if we don’t keep track of our thought patterns. This knowledge led me to a decision, that was it for me, I wasn’t going to let anything nonessential or trivial have a strong emotional impact on me. I simply decided that I was going to be more selective in choosing who or what I allow to focus on, I became more careful picking out what, or whom I permit to enter my mind