Doing great, but not good enough?

Day off today, after two straight days of working. I'm on my feet all day when I work, so after a couple of days, my hips start to feel like they are filled with sand. I try to keep pushing and get as much work done around the house as I can, but the question always comes to my mind, "how many years do I have left that I can do this?" When I was turning 30, I wasn't sure how much mobility I'd have at 40. Now with 40 just around the corner, I know I will greet next January able to walk, but I also know I'll be lucky to have 10 more years before it's time to look at mobility aids beyond the bright blue cane that I use around the house occasionally.

Like I said before, real life is intruding upon on the guild in a major way. Almost a quarter of our raiding core is in the process of some sort of positive life change right now. This means I'm getting to raid more, but it also means I'm finding myself in places I was never expecting to be.

Last night, the guild was working on Hodir hard mode. Dev and I pretty much had an unspoken agreement that I would not be in for this fight. However, since we had four mages, two warlocks, two elemental shamans, and two hunters, it made sense to go for it.

The Hodir hard mode achievement requires buff and debuff management and killer dps. Ironically, since breaking out the NPC's is a higher priority in hard mode, and standing in toasty fire is essential, I had that buff for most of the fight on all attempts, and that allowed me to do well over 5000 dps, and thanks to storm cloud, I had some shadow bolts crit for over 30,000 damage.

After one attempt, Dev read off the ranged dps in order from greatest to least damage, in order to see what the tops dpsers were doing that the lower dpsers were not. I wasn't really feeling picked on at first, although I had to stop myself from saying "this is my first night of hard mode" in vent. I hate being taken to task over the damage meter like I'm not doing all I can, and I had to say to myself, "Car, if you want Dev and Larry to treat you like a normal raider, you can't get defensive when they do." As Dev was asking what Flip and I weren't doing that everyone else was, I heard one of the guys say, "Wait a second, Carol did 5800 dps on that fight, she's doing great." There was not an ounce of pity in his voice, just an acknowledgement of the journey, and the fact that I worked just as hard for my 5800 as Tide did for his 14000.

As my and Flip's spec was being discussed (we play the same spec because we like it and it works) and Oct was increasingly getting concerned that I was going to get all upset and cry or raise my voice in vent, I was able to stay calm. Conventional wisdom says destro>affliction for that fight. Conventional wisdom doesn't know me or what I can do. Can I do enough dps for hard mode? I don't know. Will I get the chance to try? I hope so. Will we realize that we influence what other people can do on this fight? I hope that too.

There's a bit of "if I knew then what I know now" in my reflecting on the Hodir fight in general. When I was begging for help on the forums, no one said, "we can make the mages a priority so you should be able to get close to a toasty fire." A change made to benefit my dps would benefit everyone, not just me. Maybe I should have been more assertive, I don't know. It's just hard to realize how a small change could have made all the difference for me, and painful to feel like I wasn't important enough to help. That sounds harsh, I know, but take it for what it's worth.