I suppose since the rest of you oldbies are giving status updates, I might as well. As I said previously, I've been married since 2005. I found the perfect husband (he thinks leveling up is "the fun part" of RPGs), and after a desperate bid to flee the Midwest for a while and drink lots of really excellent beer in Seattle, we have returned to Minnesota, where my husband's from, to drink excellent beer in Minneapolis instead.

As some of you will no doubt be much relieved to hear, I am neither a lawyer nor a nurse, nor will I be spawning any rugrats. *shudder* So by day I work in corporate grocery merchandising (job hunting in a new city in the midst of a recession = TOTALLY AWESOME) and by night I am the local food preservation expert, kind of DIY-crazy, and am heavily involved in the urban agriculture movement. I'm working on my Braille transcription certification, a book on pressure canning, and improving my aim a tad more to qualify for rifleman, at the moment, because apparently I wasn't scary enough before.

I'm a complete video game luddite -- I don't play many of these newfangled 3D-looking talking games you kids are all into now, where you have to interact with actual people to play, but I do still hook up the SNES every so often to give the older games a play-through.


Quote Originally Posted by Knox View Post
Nothing that severe, and I know it reads melodramatic. But I did hurt a lot of people due to overwhelming self absorption and a callous disregard for anyone that was not me, or couldn't benefit me in some way. And I get that a lot of things like this are already in the past for people - it's just hard for me personally knowing that I was that way, and knowing that even if they're over it or have forgiven me, there's still that lingering memory in people's minds of this old me who did these bad things and was this bad person, who I put down in 07 but still can't fully get rid of.

I wish I could make more sense - it's been a long day - but that is why I haven't tried to reconnect for the most part. And when I have, I have generally been met with polite but cold responses, which I must accept, because I understand - basically, a "I forgive you for who you were, but I don't want to know who you have become" - and if Daniel hadn't told me my name had been brought up I probably would have stayed away.

tl;dr of all this is if you and I used to be friends and you want to reconnect, I am absolutely receptive, but for the most part I can't initiate while I've still got this cloud of guilt. It will feel like an imposition and I have imposed enough for one life.
I think it's hard for a lot of us to reconnect with people we used to be really close to, even when the parting was on good terms, for some of the same reasons you go by a different name now -- we're all different people than we were five or ten or fifteen years ago, to a greater or lesser extent. Time goes by, some joys and heartaches fade into the past or are dwarfed by greater concerns, and life whacks you over the head another ten or twenty times with change or loss or unexpected developments...all of a sudden you look back and realize you don't really understand that person you used to be, anymore. And you realize you've grown in a lot of ways, but in doing so, to move forward, you have had to give up a lot of the once-familiar common ground you shared with people as who you used to be.

This is how I think of it sometimes -- some of these people, here, and some who aren't here now, but with whom I have reconnected in other ways, saw me as the least likable version of myself I can thus far recall having been. And even before I had had a chance to learn equanimity, or tact, or break out of the tiny little backwards world I had grown up in, even at my most mercurial, insecure, and least stable, they were still my friends. I could come here and have silly, carefree fun, and also have real conversations about things that actually mattered, and no one would bounce me out the door for being the pathetic teenager I was.

So think about all that and consider that this many years later, some of that still exists -- there are still people who, no matter how much you may cringe thinking of your past self, remember you fondly enough to say, "Hey, where's ____?" and notice if you're missing.