I am finally starting to get it

 I started playing chess with my brother when we were kids by taping the names of the pieces on top on top of checkers. knowing little to nothing of chess theory i played occasionally up through the years. after high school i moved away from home and lived with some friends who were avid players. it would have beneficial except we were also avid drinkers and often combined the two. for the next decade or so i continued to feed my sporadic interest in chess by playing mostly against computer players and occasionally friends and family, and again playing but not really knowing what i was doing. learning how to not make blunders but not really having a solid game plan from the beginning. it is only now after playing chess for roughly 25 years and 7 months after joining chess.com that i can say that i am finally starting to get it. being able to explore my past games and study book openings as well as the much used tactics trainer provided by this site, my game finally has improved to a point that i can confidently play human opponents with pride in my game.

Your story sounds familiar, it is only after you encounter good players that reality hits :). 

For me I was winning and eventually ventured out of my comfort zone to a club and met my worst nightmare, the chess clock!

After loosing consistently to time pressure I decided to study chess and improve my game.

I recently joined this site and I am yet to tap into all its perks and resources. However I am getting there.

I now feel good about my game, well that is until I reach my peak and have to struggle to improve all over again ..lol..

I studied the game seriously for many years. However, as soon as I started teaching chess as a profession, my game got so much better. I think its because I have to explain complex positions and ideas to kids (and some adults) so I had to create a world on analogies. Those analogies reinforced my knowledge base and allowed me to see things clearly. I'm either playing, writing lectures, giving lectures, analyzing student games and reading books for at least 5-6 hours a day. Total immersion has greatly improved my game.

Of course, the maddening thing about chess, and also a point of fascination is that you can never fully master the game. You can get good or even great but you'll never uncover all of its layers and mysteries. That keeps me coming back for more. When I was a kid, we'd make paper pieces and boards to play at school. OMG that sounds like something my father would say: "Son we were so poor that we had to make chess pieces out of dirt clods and our chessboards out of our underwear." My father was a marine corp lifer so the more horrible the situation, the more he loved it. "When I was a boy we played chess on the backs of dinosaurs and we loved it..."