<human>: Can you summarize the given text in a few sentences?

Though I used to cook on occasion (especially weekends) when I was younger, I've really only been doing extensive cooking for myself over the last couple of years (I'm 21, a junior in college). That said, for better or for worse, I hate following recipes. When on a tight budget and sharing refrigerator space with 3-4 housemates, you don't have the same capacity to just have all of the ingredients you would want at all times. So any time I would look up something I want to make, it requires things I don't have so the recipe is almost unusable anyway (I can still use some of the ideas, but still). Further supplementing my reluctance to use recipes is my regular viewing of food network competition shows, mostly Chopped, which rely largely on improvising with what you're given (albeit they have thousands of pantry items that give chefs a hell of a lot of options).

So basically, I just improvise almost every time I cook. I'll buy stuff like boneless chicken breasts and various fish fillets and just do...whatever with them using the limited ingredients I have. It's not like the end products are terrible (in fact, the most complete meal I've ever made in terms of taste and presentation, the latter of which I usually suck horribly at, was based on nothing but instinct, guesses on how tastes and textures would combine despite having never done anything like it before), but I'm concerned there's a lot of technique that I'm missing out on and I might be slowing my learning process with the way I do things. Plus, I'm not building up a mental recipe bank like my parents both seem to have because I don't really use any. So what I'm asking is A) see title question and B) what really is the best way to improve my skills as a chef moving forward? I love cooking and only want to better my skills
<bot>: I have only a couple years of somewhat regular cooking experience but I improvise pretty much everything I cook. Also read the last couple of lines for the questions I'm asking because I'm to lazy to rewrite them