I don't understand my rating ups and downs

So I'm not usually one for posting on here but I'm so confused I thought I'd share my thoughts here:

I've been up and down between around 1250 and 1400 for a while. I've found that I spent most of my games in the 1250 - 1300 rating and once I get well into the 1300s I tend to go on a run and do quite well. For whatever reason 1250 - 1300 is a tough place to be and I'm really hoping I don't end up back down there!

Any have anything similar? Any tips to keep me from going back there?

These kinds of rating ups and downs are super common and I've noticed that after you pass a threshold (like 1400), then you inevitably drop below it (back to 1300s) and work hard to recover it and then drop below it again and this process repeats several times before you seem to stay above that amount "for good" (or at least for a while).

This is just part of the learning process and variance is a very real thing. You can't really stop ups and downs from happening, but the closest thing you can do is try to make sure you aren't unnecessarily dropping rating due to tilt, or mood, or an off-day etc. Implementing a stop-loss system to your chess can help you not suffer as huge of rating drops as easily, but mathematically-speaking, they will still happen on occasion as you suffer back to back sessions of rating drops.

Thank you for the reply.

I'm wondering if you (or any higher rated players out there) would be up for looking over some of my recent games and give me some feedback. I'm currently hovering around the low 1400s and would like to push on but I'm not sure where to focus my attention! Any help would be greatly appreciated

I looked through some of your recent games and in your last 3 losses in rapid, your King was a bit vulnerable in all three games. In the only game you castled into a fairly safe position, you had this position and then immediately played f4 and weakened your castled King:

In a different game, you had the following position and played Rg1? Was this a misclick from a 20 min game? Either this, or you had a creative attacking idea of supporting g4-g5, but this is a bit slow here and your King won't have a safe shelter to castle. Better than Rg1 was to just play O-O. In the game, you moving the Rook lost this option and you ended up having to play O-O-O later which got you into trouble.

For advice unrelated to King safety, one instructional moment (which I see even 1600+ players sometimes make the mistake of) was this position where you played ...b6?! I believe this is a positionally questionable move. This gives yourself too many weak light-squares on the queenside. Better would be normal piece development and getting castled. Similarly, a few moves later, white captured with cxd5. You recaptured ...cxd5, but from a pawn structure perspective it was better to play ...exd5; this can be complicated to explain why in-detail, but one relevant benefit to this would be that it would help your c8 Bishop get developed outside of the pawn chain (since I was not a fan of the ...b6 and ...Bb7 plan there).

Here are some videos of mine which might help. Both of these videos are from months ago. The first one is what side to castle in chess. It gives several example positions and you have to decide where your King will be safer. The other video is why pawn moves weaken a castled King. This applies to your f4 error in the first diagram I showed, but the explanation I give regarding weak squares even applies to your ...b6 move, despite your King not castled there.