...after much begging, i got a gameboy so i could play pokemon myself. not just a regular gameboy, but THE SPECIAL POKEMON YELLOW EDITION. it had a pikachu on the case and everything!!! i was over the moon (even tho it was both my birthday AND christmas big present that year)

so of course being the elementary schooler i was, i immediately settled in to playing it. pokemon yellow was my first pokemon game. you can probably see why, even though i got Let's Go Eevee, i immediately went to viridian forest and caught a pikachu to follow me around.

i made it all the way to the seafoam island cave... and... stumbled across articuno. and i was SO EXCITED. because i knew from recess how cool the legendary birds were, and articuno was the PRETTIEST of all of them. (swooshy, elegant, and blue. i was sold.)

so i made sure i had everything ready, i carefully whittled down articuno's health, and then...

...my pikachu got a crit.

"you have defeated articuno!"

now this is the point where other kids would probably have cried about it and then moved on or asked their parents to buy them a gameshark or whatever. unfortunately, i was not most kids (a reoccurring theme in my life), so instead i just panicked. (and i think i also did cry.)

instead of doing anything sensible, i put my gameboy away and then... didn't touch it. because every time i thought about it, i just felt ashamed, because it was my fault that i failed. and all i could think about was that failure.

so i pretended to be not interested in pokemon anymore, and then went back to the games that i knew on the PC. it would be years before i played a game myself on a console. i was well into college before i tried a handhold console again.