Starting Over; It's a Good Thing

It's amazing how much one's life can change over the course of just a few short months.

I gave up a guild that I had been part of for two years at about the same time that I lost my fiance of six years. Happily the two events were completely unrelated, or else I don't think I'd be able to continue playing.

Now I'm not going to sugar-coat this: it sucks. This was the girl with whom I was planning to spend the rest of my life, and we'd been actively making plans almost up to the end. Only somewhat less disappointing, I'd made a number of good friends in my old guild and was cultivating a fairly talented raid team. On both fronts, I see little things that remind me of them... random pictures or screenshots, talk about the old days. Moving on is hard.

But I also think I'm in a better place than I was six months ago. Hauling oneself out of a rut is a difficult and potentially painful process, but you can't really see the progress you've made until you can see look back at where you started. It would have been a disaster for me to stay in the relationship that I was in. In WoW, I was getting frustrated with our lack of progression, and that frustration wasn't helping anyone.

Do we ever really start over? To some degree, it's impossible - you carry your experiences with you, but I think it's entirely possible to separate yourself from those experiences, sort the good from the bad, and decide what to take with you when you try it all again. In life, I won't make the same mistakes I made with my ex... I'm looking forward to making an entirely new set of mistakes with the next one In my new guild, I'm still the main tank and raid leader, and I'd like to think that I've learned a lot about fulfilling both roles.

So am I advocating dropping what you're doing so that you can start over yourself? Not at all - I think that you can get perspective on your playing and on life in general without 'quitting.' Its the perspective that's important, not how you come to it. In that respect, I do advocate starting over every single time you start playing, even every single time you wipe on a boss. You can learn from your past failures, or you can dwell on them - I don't think I need to tell you which way you'll be more likely to succeed in the future.