Guild Wars 2 is the new Prozac

Well, here I am... posting after way too long of a break. As excited as I was to start this blog, I thought I'd keep up with it better. But life can suck you into a whirlpool sometimes and I find myself wondering how I got in the water in the first place.

By no means have I lost interest in Guild Wars 2 or this blog. In fact, I'm still following the game obsessively and although I missed most of the last beta, I'm keeping up to date by watching the various youtube videos and reading all the interviews, blogs, etc. My heart is still in it, my mind is a whole other ordeal.

It's been a crazy year for me; I got married, lost my job of 4 ½ years, took a trip to Southern California, had a few medical emergencies for our dog, and I am still desperately searching for a job. That's just the gist of my life currently, but what really makes it hard is my depression.

Now it may seem odd for me to talk about my depression in a blog about gaming, but lets be honest, depression has a deep impact on the lives of people it affects. I've had to deal with it my whole life, and games have served as a distraction from the pain and the darkness that can occur from depression. For this reason, gaming has always been very important to me.

Anyone dealing with depression knows it can be hard to function at a normal level. Once more, it's a fairly taboo topic and many people shy away from talking about it for fear of appearing whiny or being a “downer.” This fear only adds to the loneliness that is a symptom of depression. For me, makes it hard to post a blog entry while this deep pressure of emotion is weighing on me and I'm trying not to show it.

Now that the cats out of the bag, I'm gonna give it a toy to play with. The toy is called Guild Wars 2. As I said before, gaming has helped me with my depression throughout my life. It's not just that you're in a fantasy world that distracts you from reality, but that you have goals to reach and reaching them gives you a feeling of accomplishment which helps you feel better about yourself. Moreover, an MMO, especially one like Guild Wars 2, allows you to have social interactions with people, and diminishes the loneliness you may feel.

What I wanted from this blog was to portray a more personal perspective of a gamer and I can't do that while hiding an major aspect of my life. Truth is, I'm an introverted, empathetic person who feels things deeply, but tries to hide it so I can fit in better with society (I owe a lot of that to my many customer service jobs). But from here on, I'll do my best to embrace it. After all, you cannot spread awareness, you cannot unit others like you, if you hide what you are.