Afternoon Entry: A bit on the personal side...Life,Gaming, and How I have been changed by change. BLAUGUST #7

I posted this graphic on Twitter earlier today and I had no idea that it had stirred some thoughts within myself. The below entry gets a bit deeper and raw than I had anticipated, but that's OK.

Afternoon Entry:
Gaming-life-stuff
I am just going to jump into yacking about gaming today as I don't know how much time I have left on my "Mommy Free Time watch" :) AKA the babies are sleeping! So I was thinking today about my love and hate for gaming. It is definitely a double edged sword. At-least for me it is. I am a mother, I am a wife. I have "real world-ish" duties that I put before any hobby of mine as I believe any decent parent and person should do. Well they should do that if they wish to maintain a healthy marriage and not regret missing out on some of the treasures our little ones share with us everyday. We really can not get those moments back. Do I want to look back at my kids young years and think about how many battlegrounds I won in a row or how my babies eyes gleam when they are happy and bouncing around and singing? I think you know I would choose the second option hands down. The double edged sword is not me having to choose my family over my gaming, no not at all, that is honestly not even a choice! It is a decision I made when I gave birth to my little ones. The minute I became a mom I signed a life long contract to put them first always and forever and it is a joy to do that and I feel that joy in every cell of my being.

The hard part I have found is finding that same joy in your hobby that is also the same hobby as millions of other people! You enjoy gaming and people are "OK", so you dive into the gaming pool, but once you are in there you realize you have to swim around with EVERYONE. You have to find the part of the pool where your "people" are. Yeah, you came to swim there on your own free will but damn...who knew it was going to be so draining at times!? HA! I mean, sure! You don't have to talk to anyone if you don't want too! You don't have to visit forums or be on social media to be a gamer, but then how will you know what is going on with your game or your class? I would still be a hunter wearing cloth and rocking out spirit gear in Warcraft if I never talked to another player the entire time I was logged in or never visited a forum or learned something from a you tube channel! The hard part is swimming around and finding people like you when you are surrounded by competitive people , crap talking trolls, people with endless amounts of time to mid max every aspect of the game..... I mean really. It can be such a chore!

I didn't realize how draining it can be as much as I have the past 7 months. When my father past in December of 2014.... I changed. I had spent my life up until that point with my guard up. On my defense. A witty comment ready to fly at the next asshole who wanted to fight with me. Part of this is just who I am, a constant supporter, representative, and defender of the under dog! Part of this is due to many years of trusting the wrong people, working in toxic environments, surrounded by prejudice.... you name it. It all started to add up. When I became a mom, my guards were raised even higher. I knew that I was now the protector of two more souls and no longer just looking out for my own safety.

When I lost my father, I started to look at the world differently. It is fleeting. People die every second of everyday. I had never experienced this type of a loss before. Watching someone you love with all of your heart die right in front of you changes you. Knowing that the forehead you are kissing as you say your last goodbyes is really YOUR LAST goodbye, shifts something inside of you, or at-least it did in me. It froze time. It made me whip out a very large magnifying glass and examine everything. Even how I viewed how I was using my time. The past no longer exists. The future is not here. The only thing that matters is this moment, right now. Am I happy in this moment right now? Am I safe in this moment right now? Is everyone I'm caring for happy and safe right now?

I had to start asking myself these things because I had developed some freakish thing called Anxiety. I say freakish because I had never felt this way before. The severe nausea, shortness of breath, emotionally shutting down and feeling detached... NONE of this had I ever experienced before. I had heard of it, but I had never felt it. Until now. Until I started gaming again. I came back to play Warcraft after being on a hiatus and the minute I get in our team-speak there is Guild Merging discussions, and decisions and confrontations. I wanted NO PART OF IT. I found myself being cornered and I no longer could breath. I literally was at a loss for words. I could not muster the the energy to reach for my handy dandy "Bitch Switch" that I have always relied on. I felt caught off guard and did not understand how to process the negativity. I knew one thing though, I had just came back to play a game and to ENJOY MYSELF. The old Esme would have easily put ass-hats in their place, and I know deep down that person is still in me, but the care to do so is not. That is the unfortunate part of Gaming with others in my opinion. We bring our real world baggage into game along with everyone else. We don't always know what someone is dealing with. Some just care about progression, "pissing contests" and who's transmog is the best. Someone else just feels blessed to have made it through another day. We are indeed stuck taking turns on both sides of the coin when we share a hobby that involves other humans.

When I say I have changed I really mean it. I went from a person who cried twice a year to someone who is touched by the most intricate parts of life and also someone who had become hyper sensitive. The Old Esme who could pile a load of life's shit on her shoulders no longer wanted too. This made me look at gaming differently. I really do not have to game with competitive shit talking people if I don't want too. I don't have to be belittled because I am a girl, I do not have to watch people force their views and values on others. I am a mom and like to game. I don't need to apologize for logging in AFTER my kids go to bed because those are the personal moral values I have.I don't have to make excuses for why I have not raided on a raid team ONE DAY IN MY LIFE because it never interested me and never fit into MY life.

I have never ever ever been a competitive person and that has always been the rough part about gaming because it brings out the worst in people who are competitive. They no longer can game for fun, they grow into some sort of green eyed monster who loses sight of why they started gaming in the first place. They start comparing themselves against the best of the best and they kick themselves when they don't compare. They turn on their friends and start micro managing them and their performance because they feel so poorly about their own. They think the amount of fake things in a fake world they have accumulated means they are somehow superior to others but with a quick pull of a plug honey all that GOES AWAY. That is life and that is change and that is inevitable.

Change will happen through your life. You can not get around it. Nothing stays the same. What you value now? What you think your life revolves around now? Yeah that will change too and the tricky thing about change is that you don't always get to call the shots. Sometimes it just happens to you. Sometimes it is a little dose of change, sometimes it is so huge that it totally rearranges who you are as a person and you come out feeling a better sense of what matters and how you treat others through the grand scheme of things matters more then being better than them. Sometimes it does not change you on the first trip around but after 12 more rounds of change? Yeah, you're going to start feeling the shift. Mark my words, you will always be touched by change. You can either decide to make the best of it or be a victim of it. You can choose to adjust to the change and grow or you can sit down and attempt to escape it. Change happens in and out of game and it will affect how you play no matter what world you are playing in. The best thing I can suggest is to do your best at being true to yourself and roll with it.

Whoa.

Well. I had no intent to spill this much, but it is a diary type blog, so there it is...My entry for the day. Time to get lunch going as my babies are to be rising soon =D
Take care <3
Esme out!