Before we start at the beginning, lets start with more current events. Earlier this year I posted up a thread titled “Fate worse than death for Sylvanas,” in which I posited just that: What if Anduin used shadow priest powers to mind control Sylvanas for the rest of her life? This was one response I got in that thread:
07/01/2018 06:07 AMPosted by ThreeslotbagThis is like the 10th version of this thread we've seen in 6 months. Should we be worried about the posters and start linking them to websites that offer help?
The irony in Threeslotbag’s post is that shortly before this thread I had been diagnosed by a psychiatrist with severe depression. Now, this did not actually determine a start time my depression, not any more than the statement Benjamin Franklin discovered electricity means that electricity didn’t exist before the legendary kite experiment. No, this had been the case my whole life. I just had never sought out to address it before.
I was born in Mexico. My parents got work visas and brought me over to California when I was two and a half. Shortly after they applied for green cards, and the three of us were granted them and permanent residency in the U.S., which all happened before my earliest memories. I was technically Mexican, and my brown skin definitely always reminded me of that, but my first language is English, and my Spanish is terrible. But I grew up a very happy, very energetic, very outgoing, and very social child, and went to elementary school in the most affluent part of northern California, during a time in which I was one of two Hispanic children in my grade. I was a rarity, and for the most part people didn’t bother me, but they didn’t really know what to make of me, either. I wasn’t black, I wasn’t white. This was a time and place where people didn’t know what to make of brown, except for the occasional yelling of “You don’t belong here!” from the doorway of wealthier people’s houses that I did not comprehend at that age. What I did comprehend, though, at the time, was a message I heard over and over again. I don’t remember who said this specifically to me, but I remember reacting at the age of seven to the message of “I always feel God’s love.” Whether you were white or otherwise, most everyone was Christian of one form or another, or Jewish. But at the age of seven, I looked around at the world after hearing that, and then looked inwards, and I realized… I didn’t. I didn’t feel God’s love. I didn’t understand these people. They looked content and happy from God loving them. Why didn’t I? I looked around, at the age of seven, and saw the world as very limited. There was no magic in this world. There were no super powers. There were no Yoshis or leaves that could give a racoon tail that would let you fly. Imagine, if you can, at the age of seven, looking around at the world, lacking a comprehension of how the rest of the world comprehended the world, but still saying to yourself: There is no God.
This, along with body issues from being so slim and skinny, completely shut me down. I was no longer extraverted, but deeply introverted. In hindsight, this was actually the depression taking hold of my life, but as a child I didn’t understand that. And this carried through to middle school, which I entered into right after a time where there was a flood of Hispanic immigrants into my part of California. I was no longer a rarity because of my skin color. Now brown people were just as common as white people. But that didn’t mean I fit in. The opposite. I was so culturally different from other Hispanic people that the moment I uttered a single word they knew I wasn’t one of them. So now I was alone. I wasn’t American, because at this time American still meant white. But I certainly wasn’t Mexican, not any more than technically, as I was treated as an outsider just as much for how I was on the inside, my personality and mannerisms, by other brown people. Now, my middle school was not very academically successful, though, and because of that, I was treated as special in one regard: I actually did my homework and got good grades. My middle school made a big deal of this, and recommended me to a private high school as I approached graduation. And that private high school offered to pay for my tuition, which I was pressured into accepting.
So, I went to a private high school for very rich teens. To be a token Mexican so they could meet their diversity quotas.
This quote inspired me to write out my story. I do not know any of Feldaran’s story. I do not know how much we can actually relate to each other. But imagine, if you can, being surrounded by high society white kids who lived in multimillion-dollar houses, while you were an under the poverty line brown skinned kid that lived behind a cantina. That you knew that you had been a big fish in a small pond, but here you were a guppy academically compared to your new supposed peers that had nothing in common with you. That you had nothing in common with anyone. When anime was a thing you stayed up until midnight for on Saturday nights to catch Toonami because that was the only mainstream way to connect something you actually felt spoke to you when nothing else did. That you wore every day a giant, oversized suede leather jacket to hide your body, and sword-themed necklaces that clanged with every step you took. If you want the story of a self-loathing loser, you just read one.10/03/2018 01:04 PMPosted by FeldaranFrom my earliest school memories up through my freshman year of college or so, I was a loser. Early on, a lot of this was an extrinsically imposed label, but by middle school or so I'd internalized that narrative and sunk into a fair amount of self-loathing.
But I am considerably older than a high schooler, and so my story carried on. In high school I came to study physics and chemistry, finally understanding the limits that I had always seen placed on the world but not understanding what they were yet. And when my high school told me I had to choose a career path, I fell into heading towards engineering. And so, I went to UC Santa Cruz after that high school to be an electrical engineer. I had also gotten accepted into UC Berkley, but after four years of being surrounded by rich kids, I wasn’t about to put another four years on top of that. Unfortunately, I only made it three years through UC Santa Cruz. My freshman year I had an amazing roommate. My sophomore year I rented an apartment with my roommate, his girlfriend, and his best friend. That ended up being too many people for me, and on my third year I got a solo hotel room off campus through a partnership UC Santa Cruz had with the hotel. This was a mistake. Self-isolated and alone, my depression completely crippled me. I stopped getting out of bed. I stopped eating. I stopping going some of my classes. Other classes I went to just take the finals, which was all it really took to ace the classes I did choose to finish. A college counselor looked at my grades and saw a dizzying arrangement of A’s and F’s and Withdrawals and Incompletes in the same term and could not make heads or tails of it. Just before I would start to head towards my last year and my thesis, I knew I wasn’t going to make it, and so before the school could kick me out, I dropped out on my own.
Eventually what helped me recover was connecting with my two younger siblings – both born citizens of the U.S. and inheriting such fair skin from our Italian and Spanish ancestry while I inherited more from our Aztec and Mayan bloodlines that we didn’t look anything alike, and, frankly, they passed for white. I was five years older than my brother, and almost a decade older than our younger sister, and if you can imagine, during high school as a teenager I wanted nothing to do with them, as I locked myself in my room and blared angst music as loud as I could. But years later, I was finally getting to know them for the first time, and they helped me pull myself together. So, three years after I dropped out of college for electrical engineering, I went through a program at a homeless shelter where I got culinary training in a program fittingly named Fresh Start that put me to work in the cafeteria there. Then I started working in a café. And then got a job a Cheesecake Factory as a busser, and climbed my way up through every position up to being a server. I then was a banquet server for a luxury resort, at which point my younger sister, who loved baking, proposed to me that we go to college together, to The Culinary Institute of America. I couldn’t turn my sister away, so I waited for her to approach graduating high school, we both applied, and we both got in. So, very unusually, I ended up going to college again, this time alongside my little sister. And a bunch of other kids her age fresh of high school when we got there. If you ever want to feel older than you are, try being more than a decade older than some of fresh-faced teens and being in the same college classes as them. It was a very strange experience, but I kept mostly to myself, my sister helping push me through the times when my depression almost got the better of me and I would have been serial repeat dropout if it wasn’t for her. Both our parents – long since divorced – became U.S. citizens during this time to help co-sign private loans with me so we could pay for going to The Culinary Institute of America, as banks required at least one co-signer be a citizen, and we had to juggle both our parents as co-signers for the loans I took out to make things work. But in the end, I graduated second in my class with a Bachelors in Culinary Science – second to my sister, who was the top of our class, for though I had more academic experience than her and so was able to help her with all the science material, my sister will forever be a better baker than I will ever be at cooking anything.
After finally being a college graduate, I got hired on to do regulatory work for a specialty food company, combining my ability to comb through data with my knowledge of food. What started as a $22/hour a job in less than two years became a $60k a year salaried position in reflection of how much my company appreciates and cares for me. I also became a U.S. citizen earlier this year myself. So, to boast a bit, I’ve achieved the American Dream. I picked myself up, dragged myself out of the pit I had dug myself into with the help of my sister to keep pushing me, and have secured a job that pays me enough money that I can pay the crazy expensive rent out here in California and pay all my bills and repay my loans and be financially stable and secure and on par economically with the rest of most of the country. And having cleaned up my sense of fashion and wearing clothes that fit my form, I can even look in the mirror nowadays with a bit of vanity.
Forsaken fans, I want you know, from the bottom of my heart, I hate everything that you probably enjoy at the Forsaken. I hate them forcing more people to suffer the same fate they have. I hate every act of evil they have done – in the name of survival, in the name of Sylvanas, in the name of hatred, or even just because they can. I hate that people try to justify them for having their positive emotions stripped away and left with mockery of who they were when they could feel alive. And above all, I hate the nauseating use of the word "pragmatic" people keep using over and over again.10/24/2018 05:25 AMPosted by Darethythe sheer amount of vitriol directed at the Forsaken, and how they should suffer for their culture over the last several years, honestly makes me feel little empathy when we get something and the other fanbase suffers.
Which isn't logical. I understand the Night Elves have gotten completely !@#$ on this expansion.At the same time it's hard to feel any sympathy for a group rumbling for the destruction of my cultures core identity.
I want the Forsaken replaced entirely. I want a pre-BfA Voss to lead them into an era of preventing the furthering of undeath. I want Sylvanas replaced with a new Desolate Council that encourages a reunion with family. I want the Forsaken replaced with more of those from Before the Storm and the likes of Thomas Zelling showing Undead that can still feel and appreciate what they did in life. I want the evil Forsaken entirely gone from existence.
But, here’s the thing, Forsaken fans, I know you don’t want what I want. I know you might take this as a personal attack. But this isn’t one. Even if I hate the Forsaken, I hold nothing against you personally. I don’t know you. I don’t know your lives. I hold no ill will towards you for enjoying the Forsaken. I simply don’t understand you. I will never understand you. You are not a matter of black, white, or grey morality to me. You are a matter of yellow and purple morality to me. So alien – and I do not use that word lightly, being an alien citizen myself in a country that does not want me here – is your mentality that I cannot comprehend you any more than anyone who would respond with “But it’s just a game” “It’s not real” can comprehend me.
I hate the Forsaken because I see everything I hate about my own life in them. Being trapped in skin that disgusts others for no fault of your own, and being unable to feel positive emotions and festering in negative ones instead because of a cruel chance of luck that left your mind like this. This alone is enough to make me flinch at the Forsaken. That they would do this to others makes me outright despise the Forsaken. Loath the Forsaken. Want the Forsaken gone from existence.
But the Undead in Before the Storm and Thomas Zelling give me hope. Hope that the undead can get help. Along with Genn, I can see now that not all Undead are evil. But Hamuul Runetotem believed that as well. That the Undead can be helped, cured, even if just spiritually. That’s why he helped bring them into the Horde in the first place.
It took me a long time to get help. Weeks can go by where I can feel okay – what I assume it feels like to feel normal, to be able to feel happiness and joy and wonderment and awe and laugh lightheartedly and maybe even enjoy existing. These weeks tricked me for years, always making me think I’d finally just be okay this time. But the depression always came back. Even after I got myself in a place in life where my life is, frankly, great: The depression still came back. I finally had to admit that I needed help. And I was diagnosed with the obvious. And, maybe, that helps you understand me a bit better.
TL;DR: https://m.youtube.com/watch?feature=youtu.be&v=xrmM51Kldv0&t=2m36s