Temerity Jane

Wintersaber: The Epic Version, Part 1.

(See the short version here.)

As of midnight, zee bet, she is officially ovare! This is definitely not going to be the most fun post to write ever, but it should be written.

First of all, thank you for being patient while I got this post together. I honestly didn’t realize so many people were so… invested in this bet. I mean, I like to see BRK lose as much as anyone, so I guess I understand.

So, I did lose. Actually, I gave up. Stopped going to Winterspring a while back. I have what I consider to be a good reason, at least, it was good enough to get me to admit defeat to BRK, so you have to assume it was pretty decent.

What had happened was, I started to think that maybe I wanted to get back into raiding. I was kind of bouncing the idea around for a while, but for me, it’s a pretty intimidating prospect. I’m still going back and forth here, on how much detail to give, how personal to get here, but I think in order for you to appreciate the magnitude of the awesomeness that is my guild, I’m pretty much going to need to lay it all out.

First of all, at the time I started to think about raiding, the guild was working on clearing Kara. I was off in Winterspring every day, tra la la, killing furbolgs and elite giants and whatnots, and thinking about how being out there, I certainly wasn’t getting any experience with the Outlands stuff (I don’t know if I’ve said this before, but I essentially soloed all the way to 60 – I used to lead MC with a vast array of 5 mans I had never set foot in behind me), and definitely not upgrading my gear or anything. When Cay and Fio (our GM), heard that I was thinking about raiding, and that my gear was certainly not up to it, they both swooped in together and Cay did all the legwork required to have the Battlecast Hood and Pants made for me, mats came in from Fio, and Doom hopped on vent to talk me through socketing it all, then enchanted everything on me, down to my e-underpants.

After that, I think, it was pretty much sealed that I was going to attempt (notice I say attempt!) raiding, because so many people had already gone to so much work, for no reason other than, you know, being nice people. Now don’t get me wrong. Even after all that, not a single one of them held any expectation of any sort that I now “owed” it to them to raid, or expected me to, or anything. It was all always completely up to me. And it was definitely a tough call, a lot of things came into play. Before I could raid, the officers, aside from BRK and Doom, who were already aware, and our MT/RL were going to have to be made aware of the situation.

This is the part I don’t know how to best explain. I guess the easiest way to go about it is to define what “overstimulation” is and how it affects me and my ability to raid. Say you’re at work, and your boss is standing at your desk talking to you. You listen to what he says, and, you know, follow through. In the same situation for me, my boss can be talking to me, but I also hear the spaceheater next to me, the other people in the office talking, keyboards clicking. I can see people moving around, I can see my computer screen, I’m aware of the chair I’m sitting in, whether I’m hot or cold, what my boss is asking me to do, my right eyebrow itching, the nasty tuna smell from someone’s lunch. Now, all of that would be around you, too, but I cannot pick out, from all that stimuli, which is the one with top priority. It all comes in on the same level of importance. What my boss is saying registers in my mind on the same level as the fact that I think my little toe on my left foot might be asleep. Can’t separate the signal from the noise, you might say. I do my best in general, and we’re talking about life in general here, to avoid crowded places, noisyness, flashing lights – getting overstimulated is not just a matter of me asking my boss to repeat herself. Having all that information coming at me all at once, knowing I’m supposed to be getting SOMEthing from it but not being able to pick up what that is, makes me upset, and frustrated, and it’s a downhill slide from there, leading to anything from me completely tuning out to not being able to verbally respond to flat out flapping my hands and panicking. There’s not anything to do about it. Once that happens, it’s very difficult for me to calm down, and as you can imagine, it’s an extremely unpleasant situation to be in. One, it’s flat out uncomfortable and distressing, and two, it’s a matter of pride, to me, that I not be seen “acting autistic.”

So, if you can imagine this in a raid situation, you could possibly understand that I would be willingly entering a hectic situation where specific things are required of me, and other people depend on me to accomplish those things. Before I was going to raid, I wanted all of this explained to Cay and Fio, and Celliana, the raid leader. Obviously I was not going to be able to raid under normal circumstances, and I needed to ask them to make some sacrifices and do some extra work to make it possible. That kind of chaffed me, a lot, and still does “Hi, can you please take on this burden, so I could have some fun? Thanks.” I don’t think anyone is comfortable, not 100%, doing something like that. And I wasn’t going to raid, at all, period, if they were even vaguely uncomfortable with the idea, and I absolutely would not have blamed them for a second.

Part 2 coming up a bit later today…