Friday, August 28, 2009

The Tyranny of the "What If?"

I'm going to get philosophical, but it's better than the rages that Bryan doesn't understand and send him running to check the calendar.

Life is a mix of pleasure and pain, and WoW is no exception. I play a game that I enjoy, at a level that I enjoy (most of the time), with people I enjoy. However, there are frequent reminders of how different I am, and it's beyond my control.

Oct got his priest to 80 this week, and I'm getting to see how different it would be playing Kyrania if I didn't have CP by watching him. I'm starting to feel like I'm being compared to Oct again, and it hurts. As much as I love being guilded with him again, at times I wish he'd never come back. There are factors in marriages where one spouse is disabled and the other isn't that most couples never have to consider. When my husband declines to run something, and the group pugs someone rather than ask me, I feel immensely jealous.

A couple things have happened over the past week that have made me feel quite marginalized in the guild. It's leaving me feeling stranded, like there is nowhere I belong. I don't have the twitch and reaction time to run with the big dogs, and yet, I'm hardcore enough in my personality that a guild that doesn't have a lot of raiding discipline would drive me crazy. That's when the "what ifs" take over. What if I didn't have CP and could react to things fast enough? I listen to Bryan push buttons and wonder how he manages to cast so quickly and not get hung up on the global cooldown.

I know Bryan sees me hurting, and he's powerless to fix it. I'm sure it's been a relief to him when I've gone to Baelgun to level my paladin when I don't know how to deal with the pain without causing drama.

At the end of the wall of what if's, this truth remains: I am unique, and I have found a guild that has embraced that uniqueness. One of my friends told me last week, while trying to take the bite out of something that was said in my hearing, "I don't play with you because you're pro, I play with you because I like you." If that can't be enough, I need to stop playing altogether.

No comments:

Post a Comment