So my online poker journey started many years ago. I've been playing for a while, had a few years break and came back again in 2016. In 2018 I've started playing live, played around 11 tournaments, won 15k $ in one placing 3 out of around 1200 player (i treat this as a live beginners luck).

Online seems different. I am trying to grind from microstakes mtts and sngs, not to put in 1k$ instantly and loose it on higher stakes.
Total loss for this years is -500$ with 839 tournaments played.
I had few deep runs online in micro tournaments but no bigger wins ever.

Something is not working...went through pokerstrategy, different kind of articles on upswing etc. My thinking process (according to myself) seems ok: following the preflop charts, postflop decisions etc. I can't blame everything on variance tough.
I don't have any friends playing so can't discuss with them, which is a big problem.
How can I improve and re-evaluate my game, starting from the ground up?
Anyone struggling with such problems leaving microstakes?

I think you play to little,you played 839 tournaments in a year which is like so small sample. If you play larger fileds you can expiriance even bigger downswings and variance. So i would first increas volume, than try using this forum and find people playing same stakes same games, try to build frendships online, try entering or starting discord chat and strategy groups. Buy solver when you grind money ect. Gl

please elaborate.

Me to mechanic: My car isn't running right. It used to run differently, but now it isn't running as well. I read the manual, looked under the hood, and read some car bulletin boards, but my car still isn't running right. What is wrong with it?
Mechanic: ....

Post some hand histories of interesting situations or decisions, explain your reads and your logic (don't post the outcome of the hand, just post up to the point of the key decision). This will help people here understand how you are thinking, and how to fine tune your game.

It is not easy to become a solid winner in MTTs. The reason is that one needs to study both the cash game books and the tourney books and integrate them together, as well as understand those books, and get experience that also needs to be understood and figured out. Then if aiming at 100 buy-in level, they might be so tough that overcoming the variance is impossible without getting a fair share of luck, that many top players (who taught us to play) haven't had in many years.

That is why I gave up walking this path, as too risky. The MTTs are also getting tougher and there is very good training material available that can also integrate the practical and theoretical aspects to make you play still better, and if you understand it and integrate it further, still better.