Learning Japanese Is a Tool to Function Within Japanese Society

At first it was really cool because I could blow away all the Japanese people. They were super impressed. Most of them had never met a foreign speaker of Japanese who was at my level. But after that point where I kind of had this shift where I went from comparing myself to other learners of Japanese to native speakers of Japanese. It doesn't really matter if you are good for a foreigner, if ultimately you're still bad for a Japanese speaker. So you naturally start holding yourself to the standards of a native speaker. And once I went through that transition, I suddenly felt really awful about my ability and realized, oh, I'm nowhere even close.