I bought another month in WoW. I guess this means I’ve decided to really return.

Much of the last month was spent in trying to learn how to take things slow and learn to enjoy myself in WoW again. It feels like the most counter-intuitive thing I’ve ever done. All my life I have approached my goals with a single-minded intensity, giving 200% of myself to over-achieve. So there are only two types of feelings I’m used to having with regard to my projects: effective work or procrastination. Either I was finding a way to solve a problem, or solving it, or being lazy and procrastinating. Even resting in the past was a form of problem-solving, because it was done purely to be able to continue tackling challenges.

Now that I’m returning to WoW, Syzygy is once more a major project for me. And I keep seeing ways that I could contribute to make things even better than they are now. I could revive LijiPUG, using it to simultaneously recruit for the guild, provide a good activity for guildies, and help form an atmosphere even more focused on self-improvement and good performance. I could reach out to guildies, become friends with them more, and help them become stronger raiders. We have something like a 23 person roster now, I could recruit more by reaching out in all the ways I used to, to make it a 25 person roster, which would be even more stable and provide Shandare more leeway to enforce guild rules and expectations. I could play more, make my character stronger, so that even more guildies want to play more with me and hang out with me, giving me more opportunities to generate positivity in the guild. I could create more characters to play on, so that I can be useful to the guild in more ways. I could spend more time studying the bosses so I could provide more information for guildies, to help them progress better. So many things to do, and all these things are interconnected, so that the more of them I do, the more effective each thing is.

But I’m not doing any of that. Or if I am, I’m doing it at an extremely slow pace. Normally, I would interpret this as my being lazy and procrastinating. But now I constantly remind myself it is my choice to take things slow, that it is ok to do so, that my responsibility now is not to make things better for Syzygy, but to learn how to help them sustainably, without burning myself out again. Terra told me a long time ago that leading a guild is a marathon, not a sprint. Circumstances at the time made it so that I either had to sprint or watch Syzygy die, so for 2 years I would sprint whenever I was not completely exhausted. That’s why, as time wore on, my sprints got shorter and shorter each time, and the periods of exhaustion longer and longer. So this time, I’m trying to treat it as a marathon.

It is a bit excruciating for me though, knowing clearly that I can help and not helping. Being clearly aware of how I can become so much stronger in game if I work harder, and choosing to not work harder. But I know I need to do it. When I created Syzygy, I had all the energy in the world, and I was able to implement all the solutions to all the problems I saw, overcome all the challenges, so as to make Syzygy strong. Not a single person, both inside and outside guild, thought we could achieve anything like what we achieved in the time frame we did it in, and I believe the success was only possible because of my unlimited energy to do all the things I knew I should do. When things got bad, it was because, even though I knew what I should do, I no longer had the energy to always implement my solutions in time.

I started seeing a therapist not long ago, and I told her what I’ve been doing. I told her how, recently, I feel like I am slowly getting more energy to do stuff, and not immediately using up that energy as soon as I have it. I said that I hope allowing myself to be so casual will recharge me and return me to that version of myself years ago, who was happy, motivated, and successful at anything to which I set my mind. Then I said, but I’ve been resting for over two years, since I stopped WoW before, and I didn’t feel recharged at all. She replied that it was because I had been incapacitated, crippled by the trauma I experienced in WoW, and in that state of mind I was not able to truly rest, not able to truly recharge. I hope this means that I am slowly recovering now. And I hope this experience will help me learn how to do things slowly, but steadily, so I can get back to being happy and motivated, and once again find it easy to succeed at my goals.