I used to take this game way too seriously back then, especially on 2017 because for whatever reason I decided I had to become really good at something and I ended up choosing osu!, I wanted to get better at it no matter what while believing that: more playtime = more skill. However this is far from the truth and honestly I was just crazy, rather than playing the game in a good way, respecting myself and my desires to not play it sometimes and thus achieving a healthy and spontaneous experience, I put insane and unnecessary expectations, forcing myself to play and achieve crazy scores in a daily basis, so because this situation (which I created myself) was taking a toll on me I wasn't making significant improvement either. In my first 4 years actively playing the game (2017 to 2020) I only made some very few friends, almost all of the time I played completely alone just to improve myself as far as I could go and nothing else (peaked at #11505 on late 2020), so pretty much all my osu! related relationships were parasocial.

When I look back at this situation now, I see that I really love osu! and I genuinely enjoyed training by myself, however it's also true that it could have been way better and less stressful. If I could go back in time and relive my experience with osu! I would do it, however I would give some tips to my past self.

Competition is not everything, if you are open to go through new experiences (meet new people, play new maps, try different skins, try new grips, etc) and really connect yourself to other players, you will be way closer to achieving a peak experience in which you both feel healthier and get better at the game. I believe I could have evolved much more both as a person and player during those active years of playing osu! just by finding similar people to share my journey with rather than being so lonely (probably people that live close to me, you can easily find that in game). When you don't talk to other people, you limit yourself to your own knowledge.

Nowadays I'm "restarting" my experience with osu! focusing on meeting new people and I'm really enjoying it. Even though I'm suffering from elderness with my incredibly high age at 22 (as of late 2022) there's always time to reshape yourself and try different things. Eventually I ended up meeting a lot of people mainly through discord/twitter interactions, which massively reshaped my social circle for the best and for that I'm just insanely grateful.

tldr: enjoy game and socialize over anything else