I’ve started telling my therapist about my experiences in game. I had gotten to early on, talking about some of the drama between people during Emerald Nightmare. And something I didn’t expect happened. Instead of getting upset and tired and depressed, as I summoned up those memories, I laughed.

I was talking about the issues I had with my healing team at the time. I told her that when I led mythic pugs, I had 3 healers who were regulars, and were highly supportive of me. So I felt that everything I did was in collaboration with my healers, and if I needed something done healing-wise, they worked with me and ended up getting it done. In my opinion, this was what put our mythic pug ahead of many guilds, since I believe good healing and good support between healers and raid leaders is really key to success during progression.

However, my healing team in Syzygy during Emerald Nightmare seemed to always be fighting with me. They had a healing channel, and when I joined it they got upset. They wanted themselves to figure out healing CDs and for me to just listen to whatever they decided without adding any of my own input. And god forbid I ask a healer to help out when dps made mistakes, they would be seriously offended and think that I was asking way too much of them and instead should only be making sure dps never made mistakes.

In this background we had Allie. She got close to our healing officer Ultra, and together they did mean girl stuff, by companionably griping to each other in a toxic manner about others in guild and about the guild. They treated healers they viewed as weak with contempt, and early on this would affect whom we decided to bring in and sit (at the start I gave my raid officers more power to decide who to bring in and sit). Since I hate all that sort of stuff, as time wore on I worked against it, and it felt sort of like a political struggle to me. Eventually I joined their healing channel, and would sometimes override Ultra’s and Allie’s decisions if I felt the raid team would be benefited if we made another choice.

On top of this, because we didn’t have enough healers, and the healers we had weren’t all that strong, we had to just take whatever new healers we could, and our group composition would often suffer. There was a time when we had 3 people of the same class as Allie (holy paladin), one who was Allie’s friend and one who was Judy’s friend. Allie got extremely upset at that the one night it happened and I think basically just left the raid that night. Of course, Allie often came to raid late and left raid early in those times, and if I ever let raid to even a minute overtime and she had not yet left, I knew she would throw a fit with her friends and then her friends would come and complain to me on her behalf.

But, in those early weeks, we didn’t have enough healers, and she was close to our healing officer, and if I didn’t accommodate her the best I could it’s perfectly likely she would leave, get her clique of people to leave (the five people that I call Amber’s clique), possibly get my healing officer to leave, and we would not be able to raid. So I felt I had no choice but to accommodate her the best I could while I continued recruiting as many good healers as I could so that I no longer had to do things like shrug it off when she did things most guilds would allow no guildie to do.

So I did everything I could to never go overtime even by a minute. I turned a blind eye to her attendance and the fact that her mean girl tendencies was causing healers who shouldn’t be sat to be sit. And I immediately transitioned Judy’s holy paladin friend to a dps role instead of a healer role, so the composition would not anger Allie so much.

But there’s more. Allie’s holy paladin friend was showing himself to be a stronger healer than her. And she was getting upset at this, because she wanted him to come in to help but not to the degree that he seemed better than her. Now, when I led pugs, if we were progressing, I would always bring in the strongest people I could during key progression moments, so we could have more success as a group. But in this situation I did not feel like I could do that, at least until I had recruited enough people to diffuse the threat of Allie’s potential ability to create an exodus in our guild during key progression weeks. So by the time I felt I could have more say over which healer to bring in, I still did not feel I could always just bring Allie’s friend in even though it was objectively the best thing to do. Plus, Allie’s friend himself felt the pressure of their friendship and seemed to sense that if I ever chose him to come in over Allie (when she wanted to be in), it would harm their friendship, so he himself was not really willing to come in that much.

So I was telling this to my therapist, and she said that she was surprised there were so many little things like this going on behind the scenes, forcing me to make leadership decisions in a way that went against my own principles and preferences.

And I said, yah, a big difference between my leadership of Syzygy and my leadership of mythic pugs was that I could make decisions that I felt were objectively optimal and fair in my mythic pugs, while I often had to go against my own assessments, judgements, and preferences when I was leading Syzygy, and often had to accommodate people I preferred to bench until they got their acts together. And I told my therapist about how actually, a lot of people during my time in Syzygy would mention that sort of as a failure of my leadership, that I was not strict enough or not strong enough as a leader.

My therapist said that people always know best in retrospect, and I said I felt it wasn’t even that. Perhaps in retrospect I should have gotten rid of all these toxic members in Amber’s clique much sooner, but since that decision wasn’t made at the time, we don’t actually know in retrospect if that decision would have helped the group more. Because, many months later I allowed my officer at the time to be strict with people that I felt we needed to accommodate (this type of drama and problem doesn’t just exist with Allie or Amber’s clique, it happens almost all the time in almost all guilds, except, miraculously, Syzygy seems free of it now). So my officer in that later time was strict and punished those who didn’t have their acts together, and so those people left and took others with them, and we suffered for months afterwards, and when that officer burnt out not longer later, I was the one left to clean up after that fiasco.

So I got to that part in my narrative, and I laughed.

I wasn’t upset. Of course at the time each of these things happened, I was upset, exhausted, and for some of it in deep depression. But as I was talking about it with my therapist yesterday, my dominant emotion was amusement at the silliness of people insisting they know best in situations where their assessment is by no means a guarantee of a good result. I was tickled by the folly and weakness of human nature. My amusement was mixed with resignation, to be sure, but those were my primary emotions.

So I realized. I must be healing? For the years I was leading Syzygy, and the years after when I was trying to recover, I could not think about these things without feeling upset and blaming myself for not being a better leader. Recalling these emotions would put me in a depressed state for weeks. It is, in fact, a reason why I couldn’t continue writing about my past experiences in this blog. Of course, that laugh was just a one time thing so far. But at least, maybe, I’m finally starting down the road to recovery and healing.