EPTLife's hard. I've done a lot in life so far, mostly involving work and getting paid... gone to a college of (apparently) likeminded, driven gamer-artists for a while, paid off the debts associated with that schooling, have done work in residential construction in BC, Ontario and many places inbetween from the age of 14. I've volunteered to make indie games, interacted over the internet with people sharing similar interests, and am now wholly and completely unfulfilled.
It goes way back... and also way forward.
When I was a kid growing up my parents were religious, my Dad was a pastor of the Christian Reformed Church, and my two brothers, two sisters and I would be forced to move every couple of years to accomodate my father (who art on earth)'s career.
When I was still a kid, this was perfect. The comforting blanket of religion ensured that I was surrounded by people that were "nice", I had a social group I was introduced to that meant I could have fun and would teach me how to interact with people like a normal kid. I don't remember this time clearly (I would have been 8-10 in these years) but I remember having a small world of people I liked, and being quite content with that.
Then I learned what moving was about. At first, as a kid, it was exciting. Then it was "Wait... my friend Luke! Will I see him again?" "Where are we going to live?" but there were no answers to these questions that left me with a choice. I still don't know what happened to Luke or any of my friends from my first school. Strangely enough, I can remember his face and can still feel the loss, but I was a kid, and this was my introduction to what life would be.
So we moved (actually the third time in my life we were moving, but my first memory of a move) from Grand Rapids, Michigan, to a small town in suthern Ontario. Great! Let's rebuild. Except I hate it. I didn't want to rebuild. I had friends! I had security! Why was that being thrown away?
Eventually, the small, private gradeschool's wily ways eased me back in to being social. I knew a guy (Greg! :D) who was a year younger than me that went to my Dad's church. We, over time, got to know each other fairly well. We'd spend a lot of time with our bow and arrows, BB guns, 4wheelers (or ATVs, if you prefer) doing all kinds of fun exploring, adventuring and shooting shit, then setting it on fire. It made me like farmers and the farmer life, and in a rural Ontario town that was probably a good thing, because they're a lil' more prevalent than the city people I would have been used to up until this point.
So gradually, life became okay again. I was back in a comfortable christian society, I had a whole bunch of friends to hang out with, I was learning stuff that was boring but apparently useful, and I was comfortable and content. I also "loved" a girl (as much as you can in grade 7) who we'll call Felicity, and I one day warned my mom that if we tried to move again I wasn't coming with, because I was going to marry Felicity and live in Ontario for the rest of time. After my first year of high school, and after a 7-year stretch of living in the same place, we moved again.
That fucking -SUCKED-. Here's why : Public High School.
We weren't rich. My mom was a full-time mom (and working part time whenever she could!) and my dad only earning his salary as a reverend meant that we didn't own a house (We lived in the parsonage - a house the church owns) and didn't really have any money, especially considering that three of my siblings had already gone through some years of private high school, and my little sister was only two years behind me in her approach of high school. My parents were already in debt fairly heavily, and the final aligning of the stars was the closure of the private school I was intended to go to. I'd heard talk that public schools could be slices of hell, and I didn't know what to expect, but again I didn't have a choice and I was going to be once again vaulting in to a new space with new people and my old contacts nowhere to be found.
...and I fucking loved it. My one year of public school was a defining moment in my life. I met Eli, who was a down-on-his-luck guy dealing with an abusive father and his substance-abusing mom, plus a history of unfortunate stuff that had helped make him what he was those days. I also met Dawn, who was a girl that liked rock, played electric guitar and was as "one of the guys" a girl as I'd ever met. I also met Phil, who dealt drugs, came from a family that dealt drugs, and wholly and entirely respected my desires to neverever touch that shit.
I think you need to come from a religious background to truly understand that last paragraph. "Oh boo-hoo", your normal human might say, "He's got an abusive father and his mom does too many drugs"... in my world, you DON'T TALK ABOUT THAT SHIT. EVER.
My grandfather was a pedophile and/or sexual deviant. He was convicted but I didn't know about it until into my teen years. One of my uncles has done some terrible stuff which to this day is something my extended family is VERY hush-hush about. My christian upbringing was around people that yes, had problems, but under no circumstances were you supposed to ADMIT that you had problems!
So this was new to me. It felt like I was finally meeting humans for the first time - people that suffered openly, and that I knew were suffering. This was an awesome new world, because I could then share my suffering, and admire the full reality that really in my life to this point, I'd had it fucking MADE. Comfortable home, loving parents, fun and caring siblings. Security, comfort, love. My problems were paltry and nonexistant (so I thought!) in comparison to what these incredible humans had survived.
Then I met her. You KNEW it was coming, because what whiny sorrowful blog about a life story is complete without a significant other that got away? She's Staicha. We met when we were 14. I was a good little christian boy, she was a metalhead and an extrovert and she did up my fly for me because she noticed it was down and WHAT THE FUCK, DO NOT FUCKING TOUCH ME EVER.
I am NOT touchy feely. I've speculated whether or not this is trauma connected to my deviant grandfather, but I'm honestly not at a point where I really want to know. Plus he's dead, so... there's that.
Aaaanyways I hated her. She was loud and different and always doing crazy things and she sent emails that had black backgrounds and font sizes that scaled to volume and would end the emails with things like Love Tigger x0x0x0x0x0x0x and we'd talk about how she OMG I H8-ed so and so while I'd type in my unfailingly pretentious and seemingly well-educated manner (almost exactly as you see now!), doing my damnedest to maintain respectable grammar and diction as I knew how to. And there were a lot of these emails. And many long, many hour phone calls. Long walks. Sitting on the beach or on a dock or just lying in a field staring at each other.
And we built something of a history. It was always complicated. My great friend Eli, see, had a crush on her and self-esteem issues. I was the good christian boy who didn't really understand and didn't like her, so of course she would come to like me and tell Eli that, which didn't do Eli any favours. Then there was Becky, who was Staicha's friend, and -she- liked me and had her own self-esteem issues, so we ended up in an awkward situation where everyone liked me, but I couldn't do anything because I'd hurt someone's feelings.
Fast forward a few weeks and I ended up dating Staicha's best friend Kelly, because Staicha asked me to. This is when I learned that sometimes people will ask you to do something as a test, and saying "yeah sure!" isn't always the right choice and apparently complicates things more in the end.
Then, right in the middle of all this tension and confusion and almost-dating but not quite, I moved across the country to BC. This fucking sucked. This fucking sucked so hard that the cumulative scars from years of doing this before tore open so violently that you can to this day see the lasting damage done by that move. My first "best friend" that I felt I could share -ME- with, and not just the pleasant parts of me, gone. My first female friend that was definedly female, cute, excited about life, willing to share it, and someone I genuinely was fascinated by. The places I was familiar with, the history I'd built... gone. New life, let's start again.
I didn't. I went back to a Christian High School, now aware of the facade it was. Gone was the inspiration from fundraisers that raised money for kids in africa... it was clear that this was purely self-service, fixing a "problem" that was so very far away that we don't actually have to deal with it, we can just hand money over and never have to muddy our white linen gloves. Gone was the feeling that I was surrounded by good and wholesome people - these were people just as dirty as the rest, just less inclined to deal with the problems and more inclined to ignore them. While I won't say I didn't have friends (no matter where I go, people tend to like me!) I will say that they were mostly friends by virtue of the fact that we were forced to share the same space. I was tainted and no longer "one of them", and there was no real lasting connection formed to anyone in those last few years of high school.
...Well, there was Lisa, but we never got off the ground because I got in touch with Staicha again, excited to share stories of my potential romance with someone I assumed was a friend... only to gain a better understanding that SHE wanted me, and that meant she didn't want me to have anyone else.
...And there was Ashley, who was fantastic and one of the strongest people I will ever meet, but broke up with me in the last few months of senior year, because she saw I was too broken for her to fix without jeopardizing her own future.
So I sought out other social avenues. I'd always enjoyed games. Back in gradeschool, Greg and I would play Red Alert after church, we'd play Diablo and Warcraft 2 at each others houses, my brothers and I would play Risk or Monopoly or Scrabble or computer games from that Head 2 Head disk that had demos of Rise of the Triad and Warcraft and some other stuff. So I went to the internet and MMOs to find other humans. They're social, but a loose kind of social. I can move to Australia - my friends are still accessible. I can move to the other side of Canada, they're still around. If I'm having a bad day, I can ignore them. If they're being dicks... well, there are plenty of MMO-fish in the MMO-sea!
It was safe, and they were friends that I wouldn't lose by moving; they were always with me when I needed them, and it felt like a sensible solution to this fucking moving that happened all the time.
This was all happening during an era where my mom and dad were separating, and my mom would take it out on me. My oldest brother was long gone, and my second oldest brother was never home. I, however, was on the computer or in the house most of the time, and my Dad's family pattern of pre-determined female roles had kicked my mom into a point where her family pattern of establishing a pecking order but never attacking the head man of the house, because to do so was a death wish culminated in to my mom taking her frustration and wrath at my dad out on me, upon occasion to the point where she'd physically start swinging at me in frustration. Fortunately, I was well enough into my teen years at this point to not get beaten and bruised... but it was a confusing and terrible time, and my internet friends helped carry me through it.
But that never left. I'm not antisocial. I don't go out of my way to make people dislike me or stay away from me. I AM heavily introverted, but this is mostly because I, growing up, learned that friends will only ever be temporary and losing them hurts.
So I stay in my own shell, but something has to change. The healing process is slow and painful, and while I need to take more risks... I'm 25 now. I'm not getting younger, and I don't know where to turn to find friends anymore.
There's always more to the story, but I'm growing bored of typing so I won't continue in to how I'm losing my half of our business (as of last sunday!) and am currently unemployed, with only one friend nearby and absolutely no idea what I want out of life.
Or my ended history with Staicha, how we got back in touch almost a decade later and she accidentally forgot to tell me she was dating someone else when I came to visit, so I intentionally told her that if she wasn't going to be with me, then I couldn't afford to have her in my life in any capacity because I clearly wasn't going to get over her any time soon, and having her not in my life miiight help speed up that process.
I want to go to Europe. I want to appeal to a bunch of TLers in various countries in Europe and couch-surf for a month. Force myself to meet other gamers and hang out with like-minded people, regain some perspective on life and hear other people's stories, hear about their favorite games, watch a major tournament, laugh about things and feel at home somewhere, because it sure isn't here.
Anyone? Anyone? I promise I don't stink, won't cry, and am a cool enough dude!
(This is the part where the blog randomly ends, because I'm done typing. Cheers!)
I don't live in Europe though. 
