TGTCML, Part 3

This is post 25 of 31 for the Blaugust event. To check out more Blaugust posts and sign up to participate, visit the Blaugust Nook!

Aywren, one of the Blaugust participants, posed an impromptu writing prompt on her blog asking:

Do you have a game you feel changed your life? Blaugust about it!

This post is part three of this journey. You can view part one and part two at your leisure.

In the last post, I talked about WoW, and how I discovered it. The last part I detailed was moving over to Llane to play with some friends from college who were more laid-back and not raid-focused.

I had recently moved to Georgia for graduate school, which was a result of various circumstances both in real life and in my game life. Some of the friends I had made, that I was close to at the time, over on Ravenholdt lived in Georgia, so I felt that I had a bit of a support network available through them if I got into the graduate school I wanted.

Things worked out a little differently than I wanted. I got into grad school, but I ended up drifting away from those friends for various and sundry reasons. Sometimes friends aren't meant to stay in your life forever, as much as you would like certain ones to. I was also at a fluid time in my life, being out on my own for the first time, and needing to explore myself and all that jazz. I kind of hit that spot in my life a little later than most people who start hitting it as soon as they start their undergraduate degrees (or earlier).

So, because things ended up differently, I started up a character on Llane to play with my friends. Soon after, however, I ended up meeting Chaide online. I don't know if I've ever talked about how we met. It was on a dating site. We'd chatted for a few weeks online, when we decided that it would be neat to meet up at a restaurant for some coffee.

At the time, things weren't very good--my depression and anxiety were off the charts, I was away from my family whom I missed dearly, and had never been so far away from before, I had no support system in the area, and no friends to speak of despite trying to join various groups to hang out with. I even had half of my stuff packed up, thinking I would quit graduate school and move home with my parents.

I didn't do any of that, though. I found Chaide. We were both into gaming, and he had just started up his WoW account again. We talked for hours about gaming and various geeky things. And we hit it off. Some of our first dates were leveling our druids together. In fact, we both remember one of our first dates being sitting at a coffee shop together with our laptops out, and running around Mulgore for the Easter event.

I don't think I'd have met Chaide without WoW, quite honestly, Despite all the crap I was going through during my time playing the game, it was worth it because I had the courage to go to graduate school away from my family.

So, yeah. WoW changed my life. I met my amazing husband because of it. And even if we don't play anymore, we still have a lot of great memories that go with it.