What EWE and Editor Have Learned From Blogging

Hello, mortals!  Well, are we in for a treat today.  You see, my fellow spell-slinger, The Well-Red Mage posted a query to our blogging community, wanting to know the answer to the following:

Me?  You want to ask me, the living embodiment of snark and cynicism what I’ve learned since I started communicating with you feeble humans?  Oh, now you’re…in for…what’s that sound?  Music?

………

Hello, friends – Editor here.  I thought that the Well-Red Mage’s question deserved some thoughtfulness and introspection, and well…I think we all know that those aren’t the first things that EWE goes to when a query is posed to him.  So, I decided that I would be a better fit to respond for the both of us.  Don’t worry – he’ll be ok.  See, he doesn’t know it, but all I have to do is put on something relatively sad and/or sappy (in this case, “After All” by Cher and Peter Cetera) and he goes completely catatonic.  It’s like rolling a shark over onto it’s back – and since I’ve compiled an entire Spotify playlist of them, he’ll be locked up for hours.  Don’t tell him though – typically he has no memory of it once he snaps out of it, and his denial is rather amusing.

So…what have we learned since our first blog post?  My goodness – it’s been a little less than a year, but it almost seems like forever.  As those of you who have been following this little literary lark for a while know, this blog began as a coping mechanism.  A short time before, our world had come crashing down at the hands of the person we trusted most.  The resulting depression was very, VERY deep – and but for the intervention of our eternal bestie, Malevolent Moogle, as well as some unexpected kindness from some fantastic folks at IGN, it might have been permanent.  But they brought us back from the edge of that abyss, and then the question became what to do in order to begin to heal the wounds and be able to connect with people again.  Having always enjoyed writing, the decision to try blogging seemed somewhat obvious.

As anyone that looks back at those first few entries can attest to, EWE was firmly in control of our little endeavor – I was only able to prevent him from making any truly horrific mistakes.  And that was a direct reflection of the place we were in – hurt, angry, and alone.  But then something completely unexpected happened, and it leads into what I’ve learned.  As trite as it may sound, I learned that I wasn’t alone.  I was welcomed into the blogging community by so many other amazing, talented writers.  I developed friendships with fantastic people from all over the world, whom I’ve never seen, but who have been there to listen to me and share in my journey back from the place I was in.  And slowly, but surely, they helped to draw the scattered pieces of me back together so that EWE and myself could start to reassemble them.

This is actually an incredibly accurate depiction of EWE and Editor – which can’t possibly be healthy.

Along the way, as I found myself again, this blog found its voice as well.  In the beginning, I honestly didn’t know what this would be – other than a place for EWE to vent and melt down without resorting to screaming at stuffed animals like a COMPLETE lunatic.  But as my friendships with so many talented people in the games and entertainment community grew, I found a niche in offering my thoughts on all sorts of offerings in my hobbies of choice.  As someone who has often sought escape from my world into those of others, I’ve always loved books, movies, comics, manga, anime – anything that I could get lost in, with characters I could grow attached to.  And then there was my day job as an attorney – one of the few things that I can claim without feeling arrogant to be fairly good at.  There are my posts about cooking, which grew from something I only liked doing when I could do it for someone else into something I get to share with all of you.  And so, while it may seem like a fairly eclectic hodgepodge of subject matter, it is me.  In sharing all of these things with others, I found that I was opening up more to all of you than I had to almost anyone else, ever.  And while EWE would likely kill me for telling you all this – I’ve been grateful for the acceptance I’ve found in doing so.

Have there been setbacks?  Of course there have.  I’ve been called pathetic some whom I hold very dear; I’ve been mocked by some that don’t see why I even bother with this blog as an outlet.  But instead of letting those define me, I have instead focused on the support I have continued to have from my friends and loved ones, both in my daily life and in the wider Internet community.  It’s a process, and one that I keep working at each and every day.  So in a way, what I’ve learned since first starting my blog is something that I’m still continuing to learn each day.  As Tolkien put it:

And so, I’ll keep following the road, wherever it leads.  And I’ll continue to be grateful for each of you that is beside me along the way.

Now, it would appear that EWE appears to coming out of his daze, which is my queue to quietly step aside.  Thanks to you all for indulging in a little introspection with me!  And remember – don’t tell EWE about our little trick.  First, it’s unlikely to keep working if he were to catch on.  And also, there’s a decent chance he’d be so humiliated that he’d burn the entire globe to a cinder. – Editor