i always suck at most competitive things. be it chess, or smash bros, or anything, i always feel like im so bad at it, and when i eventually lose i end up being really fed up with myself, cry, and not improve.
it's particularly bad when there is a rating somewhere telling me im going way down, and it feels so insulting. once i lost like half a dozen matches in smash and it put me at a score of 40'000, which means im at the bottom 40'000 people in the world playing. i've seen people with scores of 4M, so the game just told me im in the bottom 1% of players, which wow thanks.
i also played a bit of chess recently, cos i wanted to get into it. i did it with my brother who is a bit better at it, and got me to a slightly higher ELO score, and now im playing with people which are much better than me, but even then the computer at the end tells me stuff like "your accuracy on good moves is 4%" so i feel pretty bad.
if it was just with games, i'd be fine with it (even tho i percieve them as fun so it's kinda bad i cant play those). it's that i feel like everything around me is so competitive, jobs, art, school, everything, and i feel like im totally unfit to do any of those things necessary. all the weird capitalist struggle to survive, the pulling yourself up your bootstraps, haing to compete in the market, all that stuff makes me so anxious about my future that i wanna cry rather than having to deal with it. not that crying fixes anything.
kind of the reason why i want to be a teacher, since they dont get to do much competition after they've been hired, although i guess there is some competition in the hiring process. something for me to be anxious about next i guess.
EDIT: oh heck i forgot pokemon!! i was never good at it and tbh to be good at online pokemon you gotta use the same two things with maybe a bit of variation; using a non standard team is so punished. i never got more than 1200 ELO on showdown. the community is fun but i cant bear just having to sit and get beaten everytime
I've noticed a lot of beginner to intermediate players get really stressed about the perfect play, move value competitive angle. Like a lot of people I got back into chess after some years because of quarantines, and a more chess experienced friend of mine gave me the best advice: for most beginners focusing on openings is a trap, engine evaluation is pointless at low levels. Getting into the game, get used to assessing the board and worry less about "best value moves".
Like you said, learn your pins, discovered attacks, positioning and fundamentals. People get too caught up in making their moves based on engine evaluation, and that leads to a lot of stress. I used to get really stressed about playing vs humans, but just accepting that I'm learning makes an (admittedly abstracted) competitive environment like Chess.com ladder much less stressful. Second learning endgames btw, I've seen so many players basically fall asleep and make a lot of careless choices in endgame.