Growing up is weird.
Hold up, wait, don't touch that backspace key just yet. There is actually a story behind this post, and it is not a sad one. Not a happy one either, but that's the truth when it comes to growing up. Things change, and whether for the better or worse no one can really be certain. It's also a story about roleplay.
I wasn't a particularly popular kid in middle school. By which I mean I had a small coterie of sneering boys who called me retarded every chance they got. I got put in special classes, you see, at first because I stuttered, and after that because I did not make friends. Not really.
Every day I would go to school and after lunch go up to a room with kids that shouted and screamed, whined and hollered. I met with who they liked to call my 'speech therapist' once a week, and when I did not . . . well. I ended up in academic lab.
It's code you see, one of those innocent words that isn't so innocent at all.
Study hall is where you go and lay out your books and homework and do them. Or at least, that's what they'd tell you. Academic lab is where they send other students, the students on three kinds of meds and didn't take any of them. The ones with attitude problems. On good days I huddled small as I could and picked a Ray Bradbury book off the shelves. On bad ones I put my head down and tried to chew through my arm in frustration.
What can I say. Some kids had stress balls. I would have thrown it away had they given one to me. Ironic that the worry about appearing strange had me biting down on myself instead of squeezing a small ball.
In middle school it becomes so much easier to understand the world, and so much harder to fit yourself in. You become hyper-aware of where the world wants you to be. Down in study hall maybe, smiling, laughing, having fun. Not huddled in a book while some kid you barely know screams at a teacher, or pointedly looking at nothing but what's right there in front of you while kids tell me exactly what is wrong with me.
You see, words hurt worse than any other thing. Because no matter who's saying the words, after a while you start to believe they're true.
This is backgrounds. The beginning. Me, dumb and young and pure, crippled with worry and anxiety, convinced every person who had ever said they liked me was lying and that I was scum of the earth. It was not a healthy thing, I'm sure people would tell me. I'm sure some of you would tell me. I retreat into the internet.
Roleplaying was not my thing, any more than writing was my thing. I was not exactly very good at it. But for some reason I clung to it. And I started an account and a roleplay forum dedicated to a franchise I'd taken to, six years ago.
What forum? I won't tell. Don't ask. It's embarrassing.
I'll be honest it was a little silly, but I couldn't recognize that. But it seemed amazing to me. The whole thing. I loved it, and I was so nervous about it. Some of you may know how completely insecure I was when I first came here. How insecure I remain, to this day. That was nothing. I did not know what to expect. I made a character, and made some friends who were about as good as I was. Meaning, well, not very good at all.
And we looked up to other roleplayers. To moderators and their characters. And when we did, we found actual quality. Not just the sort of wonder that comes to you when you're young and everything looks amazing. It was actually good. I saw that, we saw that, and everything snapped into perspective.
I wanted to be good enough to be worth playing with them.
I got better, very quickly. The difference between zero and one is incredible and we crossed that threshold. People liked to roleplay with me. They really did. By the end of the school year I was no longer on anyone's shit list. I was not great, but for a quick thread? It was enough. And I had friends who'd climbed that distance with me. And make no mistake; it was friendship. Not just the shallow company that people use the internet to fill, but the madness of teenagers trying to keep each other sane, and making it out more or less okay.
More I knew about writing, real writing, the more I knew how shitty I was. The more I spotted my mistakes. Sure I knew grammar but that was simple. It was easy. It was the wooden planks that made the houses, and my houses were all wrong. But I loved it. My keyboard kept me company, my characters came alive in my mind. I won't say writing saved me. But in those years when everything seemed terrible and vicious, writing made me. And roleplay gave it to me.
I became a moderator on that site, did any number of dumb things.
The oldest of us were in college. The youngest were in high school or earlier. And stories got more mature. I got into reading, I tossed older ones for new. My friend - because it was friend, singular now - worked out plots with me. We created character with real depth. And as we grew up, we saw the bones of the system we created in our childhood and decided to replace them with better ones, piece by piece.
And I was in high school, still in the same dumb class, still gritting my teeth but not biting on my arm quite as often, and writing in my notebook about what my character would do when they got home, and trying to draw something that turned out just about as good as you'd expect.
Admins and moderators came and went and brought their drama with them, but the roleplay lived, survived and thrived years after their creators were gone. I joined to escape reality, but five years later I was writing a story about a boy infiltrating a labor camp and enduring the worst of what they had to endure.
And I moved like a ghost through high school, no one really talking to me, but no one teasing me. Better, but not great, but not torment either. I was thinking about stories all day; I wanted to try NaNoWriMo, I took a creative writing class. I stole time in the library during lunch to check my PM box and watch for new posts.
The premise of the site was silly. It was absurd and more than a little dumb. It was the sort of site that bunch of kids made when they realized how much they didn't like whoever was in charge of the fansite. It was as dumb as you could get, it was them. And it changed with them, grew up with them. I came along halfway in, and rode the wave up.
I went to college, smiling because nobody would know me and there were too many people to really shun me, and because there was no academic lab. I wrote a NaNoWriMo that went past November and into early February that was at least eighty thousand words long.
I created a force of prisoners bound by supernatural oath to serve, until death. I took charge of a nation on the Sand and continued a plot about assassination, religious fanaticism and a hungry desert God.
And I grew up. But, the fun thing about playing on site with other children is that they grow up too, and the roleplay evolves along with them. I put my fingers into it, changed it. Tried to make it better. And it changed right back, turned me into something that could make it better.
Six years of that.
It made me into what I am today. It saved me from my self-pity and gave me something to look forward to. It gave me a goal, and a purpose, whoever silly and small that might have been. And now I can't imagine really enjoying anything more than writing silly stories. That's the truth.
It's a niche roleplay, and that niche is getting smaller, so I found some other place where I could create, where I could find a place to play. And I found some stranger world; a setting that I didn't tolerate for the RP, but that was fascinating on its own. Worlds and magics and cities that were fascinating on their own. And roleplayers that knew what they were doing.
But though I told myself I probably would, I didn't leave that place. I hung in the background, a spectator only rarely interfering. I spent a quarter of my life there, growing there. And while Mizahar is incredible and I can't imagine ever leaving it by choice, there's something just as incredible about a place that grew up as you grew up, no matter how silly or ridiculous it must have been at first. Something about a place that helped make me who I am, and the people who walked with me down that path.
It's a good thing. And it's something that's brought all of us here, and kept us all intertwined. It is people, and writing, together. And while nothing is perfect, it is at least immortal, and beautiful. And if you haven't been changed by it yet, I hope you are one day, and I hope you will love it as much as I do. |
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