I saved a bunch of conversations that made an impression on me from WoW. While preparing for each post, I go back to the conversations that happened during that time, and in the process, sometimes pass through various other ones. I really shouldn’t stop and read those, since they don’t have anything to do with the time frame I’m writing about, but seeing folders of them, or scrolling up through private messages, I sometimes get curious and spend 10 minutes here and there reading through them.

One that I read was about how this buyer thought we were the most wonderful guild, and that buying from us was the best experience he had in game in his entire 12 year WoW history. That I was the sweetest raid leader he’d ever met. That put a smile on my face.

One that I read was about a PUG from a top guild telling me I was the best raid leader he’d ever come across, better than most at top guilds. That made me feel good about myself.

But then I also come across other ones.

The one that I just read was one I came across as I scrolled up in my conversations with my ranged officer at the time, Isam. Eventually, he would rage quitting the guild mid-progression, then give other guildies a long list of why I suck as a leader and that this will cause our guild to fail. Because I railed at him on finding out about this, he copied that list to me. The list didn’t just incorporate what he thought, but also a list of what Carain/Allie thought. Items on the list include things like I’m “a terrible leader”, I “allow people to openly talk about misogyny and hate like it’s a good thing”, I’m “bullheaded and only do things my way”, and “if you want to stop the constant bleed of good players perhaps you should look at the personal issues they were having, that perhaps there’s a connection to it all cough cough”. This was 4 among a list of maybe 40 things that he had first told several other guildies, in the context of telling them that “though his rage quitting the guild mid-progression would halt your progression for awhile, until these things are fixed the guild will slowly deteriorate”. Later, he apologized to me, and agreed that he had acted badly in a moment of anger based on things he misunderstood and incorrectly blamed others for.

However, regardless of the fact that we later resolved things and he treated me well afterwards, rereading conversations like this feel like a punch to my stomach. Particularly because I know how things continue to play out. Despite him saying we would fail and leaving us in such a way, we were I think about US 60 for that raid, better than I think he had ever managed in any of his guilds. And then, after having gotten us there, after one more raid tier passed I would be subjected to another such list. Only this one was much worse, because it was the same sort of thing, only coming from an entire one of my raid groups. Coming from people who had seen how hard I’d worked for a year. Coming from people who had already seen how successful I could make us (and who treated me well while I had the energy to keep things good). And that list was worse because people would actually give contradictory criticisms, and seem to feel that I was to blame for both sides of any conflicting issue (i.e. I didn’t listen to people enough. I also listened to people too much).

Then, this kind of list thing, where people keep listing reasons for how I fail as a leader, would continue with regularity either from my raiders as a group, or from individuals, on a frequency of a couple times a week, for the next year or so. Being so immersed in WoW that I had little time for anything else in life, this was about 99% of my feedback concerning who I was as a person for that year.

Rereading these conversations, I am again reminded of how though there were valid reasons for why people would say this, still, much of it was them making me into a scapegoat for whatever they were unhappy about, often to a degree where their criticisms of me were simply ridiculous. But I am also reminded of how it wore me down, to have criticisms like this leveled at me twice a week, while any sort of praise would only happen once every few months (and often from people who were not my guildies, making me feel that they only praised me because they didn’t know the real me: my guildies knew the real me and they only had bad things to say about me). Of course, I also know there were many guildies who thought many good things about me, but they had little reason to randomly come and tell me I’m a good leader or whatever. So in the end, criticism abounded while affirmation vanished almost completely. And so I’m reminded of how awful I felt, of why I eventually came to believe that I did not deserve to live. No matter how I know objectively that I am not as terrible as my critics made me out to be, even now I cannot overcome that sentiment that I must truly be a horrible person to deserve such constant, harsh criticism, from those I gave the most of myself to.