It's common knowledge around the people I spend time around that I have spent a lot of time playing WoW. Three years, to be exact. During those three years, my amount of play has gone from super slow leveler to PvP-extravagant to progression raider five nights a week. In the time I've spent as a progression raider I have had to dedicate a lot of time to learning and re-learning the encounters from three different points of view. Playing a Paladin gives you the opportunity to see three of the four aspects of the game; tanking, melee DPS, and healing. Every aspect provides different challenges and a variety of things to get done. Learning a boss fight is time consuming and sometimes, a slow and incredibly annoying process. The fact that you have to learn it with nine to 24 different people does not make it any less frustrating. You may be doing everything correctly but others are dying in fire, not moving enough, moving too much, etc. Wiping for ten minutes to even two hours wears on your patience. Yet all 25 people press on until the brick wall you've been smashing your face on for the last three weeks finally hits that magic zero-percent and screams of nerd-joy echo in Ventrilo.
Why am I talking about WoW? Playing it has taught me some things about life. "What a loser, he spends too much time playing a video game and he thinks it helps his social skills? He's going to end up fat and living in his parents' basement." Well, to keep it short and sweet, and to prevent this from getting to be a rant about something irrelevant, you're wrong. Plain and simple. In the three years I have played I have made many friends through the game. A few of my real-life friends even play the game still. Some have stopped claiming that it's a regret for their lives.
Anyway, back to the subject matter. Life is a huge raid. It's full of bosses and transition phases that you have to get through in order to make yourself a better person. But it's impossible to take down a boss on your own. You have to go in with a group of friends. You have to have a support system and people behind you no matter what happens. You need people to turn you around so you don't hit your face on the brick wall and even pull you out of that fire. For most of my life, I have been lucky enough to have a great composition. Through high school I had my small group of friends. I'm talking about five or six guys that were always there to hang out with. We sang, we played, we had our good times. I even lucked out and met the girl that I still believe I will be my pocket healer for the rest of my life. (I'm a nerd. I accept it.)
I soon learned that high school was just the first wing of this raid I like to call Life. Now I'm smashing my face on the brick-wall that is living away from everything I knew and became familiar with during my second year at Washington State University. This wouldn't be so bad but now I consider myself alone. I don't have my family here. I don't have those five to six guys that I grew so close to. And lastly, I don't have my girlfriend around. I even had to take a break from WoW so the people I have been spending five nights a week with are gone. Sure, I can jump back in and be a part of that gaming community whenever I want, but that's beside the point. Plus, I have classes to focus on and I don't want to use WoW as an out if I end up under-performing.
"Common sense" answers to my alone problems are as follows---
1. Get in the circles of people that went to high school with.
My answer here--not possible. In the month that I have been here I have not even received a courtesy invite to anything that they do. Does it annoy me? Yes. Can I do anything about it without looking like the bad guy? No. Victimizing ones' self is annoying and if I were to bring this up, then all I'll get are pity invites. Those are worse than no invite at all.
2. Make new friends.
Yeah, that's easy to do. Not. Granted, I have re-networked myself with my roommate from last year but it's still not the same brotherhood that I had back home. In WoW, changing guilds is easier to do; get in, pump 15k DPS on Deathbringer and be done. That's all fine and dandy, but those are acquaintances, not real friends. I don't just want to know a bunch of faces and names to which the only thing we have in common are we went to the same party that one Saturday night. The relationships I want seem to be impossible because things like that take time, you can't just jump into it. Making real friendships is a process and it requires you to jump off the deep end. I haven't had to do that since fifth grade. The thought of exposing myself like that is daunting.
My point is, life is impossible to get through on your own. I am in that transition phase where I have to find out who is really backing me up. In the four weeks I have been out in Pullman again I have come to the realization that I have nobody here to catch me when I fall. I only have acquaintances that I can only be generic with. It sucks being alone. And by "alone" I mean really alone. No girlfriend to back me up, no family to chill with, no close guys to spend time with. I guess now is when I find out who I really am. What am I really made of and how much tenacity do I have? Answer to these questions---I don't know. All I can do is take things in stride. No matter how hard it gets, I have to keep it in perspective and know that I will be a better person for it.
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