A Difference in Mindset

“Well, maybe we can just make our own casual team?” Tianchu suggested, glancing out the corner of his eye to gauge my reaction.

Night had fallen at the TRekt BlizzCon house, and we sat with my fiancee, Adam, in the kitchen while the others were out partying. We’d all been pretty excited about the Shadowlands announcement, but it admittedly put me in an awkward position: I knew that I did not want to return to a team that could barely scrape past Cutting Edge, and that meant that I probably did not see myself returning to World of Warcraft. Further, I had dissolved our Final Fantasy XIV static (raid team) as a result of a growing frustration: I wanted to raid competitively, and it had felt like on all sides that in both teams, there had simply been people not on the same page as that.

I shook my head, wincing. “I can’t do it,” I explained. “I’ll play for story, but I’ve tried the casual life and it’s just not something I can do.”

As the convention came and went, and I had some amount of time to myself in the resulting con crud, I began to take a hard look at what had really burned me out with both teams (because, frankly, it wasn’t entirely the game), and how these mindsets differ.

The Sudden Upheaval

“Hey, Mom, I’ll call you back a bit later,” I said, lowering the phone. Of course, I’d only just called her during my lunch break. I felt pretty bad hanging up just twelve minutes into the call, but the tone of the dogs’ barking had taken on a notable edge. I’d retired to the back room when the walker had arrived, mostly so that my mom and I could hear one another over din of their excitement.

“Callie?” the dogwalker said, knocking my door gently. “Your neighbor’s outside the door, and he’s screaming.”

Whiplash

I looked uncertainly around the bus, fully convinced I’d not find a seat. Our buses were all designed roughly the same: there’d be around 3 seats reserved for handicapped at the very front that lifted for wheelchairs, then 3-4 rows of front-facing seats. Over the wheels, a row of around 4 seats would face inward, then 2 where the bus had a bend in the middle. The back door followed there, surrounded by another set of front-facing seats. Finally, the back had a U-shaped set of seats that had been raised over the bus’s engine.

I liked to read or write on the bus, and tended to prefer the front-facing seats. That day, there weren’t many seats left. I had to select from the middle seats that faced inward toward the aisle, sitting next to a man who smiled at me and nodded when I apologized for accidentally nudging him with my backpack strap. He rose, offering his seat up to an elderly woman carrying a small bag of groceries.

The bus filled, and we pulled away for the longest ride I’d experienced.