When I was first traumatized, many years ago, I did not feel I had the luxury to try to rest and recover. Leadership in WoW mythic guilds is putting out fire after fire, or putting out the embers before fires start, non-stop, on top of the endless work of boss preparation and character maintenance. So I kept going despite the trauma, for over a year, constantly deepening my trauma since the stuff that traumatized me are just normal things guild leaders have to contend with (hence why suicide is common among guild leaders, and the large majority of us eventually burn out and quit the game).

This time I am so lucky. With shandare here, being strong (though it was an enormous blow for him too), taking more stress upon himself, I have the luxury of trying to recover. Since it happened, I only go online for necessary things (though of course I continue with recruitment and boss prep and discussing these things with shandare). When online, I barely talk. And when I’m not online, I don’t allow myself to think much when I turn down people’s need for me to tank their dungeons. I don’t allow myself to feel stress when I see that people aren’t hanging out and bonding on discord. I play games with people I have trusted for years and have proved over and over that their characters are golden and that they would never choose to hurt others to make themselves feel better. I watch wholesome and inspiring movies that I watched as a child. I spend a lot of time in bed, often writing these posts to try to process things.

And I can feel myself, if not recovering, at least not staying stagnant. For the first 48 hours I could not stop constantly crying. Then, I slowly started being able to smile at things again, and stop crying. I started thinking maybe I can support shandare again instead of being so caught up in my pain I was useless to the world. But I still felt constant pain, and it was still very hard for me to accept how shandare and I were treated. I went back to reread what was written, and it’s not like it’s terrible (no one called me a cunt or anything this time, or told me I don’t deserve to be treated with respect). I’m decently confident it only felt so particularly terrible to me personally because of my personal traumas. And though I had stopped crying constantly, the pain was still constant, just not overwhelming. This lasted a few days, and now I can say that the pain is barely there. Now I’ve moved on to no real pain, but depression. My lack of motivation and insomnia have returned in strength, and I’m breaking out into hives a lot more, and my acid reflux is back.

It has been about a week since this all happened. And I’m rather amazed with my, if not improvement, at least movement. And I wonder, is this what recovery is? There are supposed to be stages to grief, are there also stages to trauma? The last time I tried to recover was when I quit WoW before, and I can say it looked nothing like this at the time. But my therapist told me I wasn’t healing, because I was still stuck in my trauma for all the years I was away, I was just trying to live without wanting to die, but I was stagnant. This time, it doesn’t feel stagnant at all. So, maybe this is recovery?