47 days from now I will celebrate my three year anniversary of being on a site dedicated to breeding, trading, and decorating cats.
My interest and play time on this site has dwindled greatly, but it helped me through a lot of hardships I could not have conquered without it. CB, standing for cat breeding site from now on as I wish not to expose it's full name, allowed me to find more of who I was, and consumed a majority of my 2011 summer. I would not be here today with CB.
CB helped me threw my Dark Ages, which I will cover in tomorrow's blog post. I met new friends, and found a better way to communicate with the old. I discovered my passion for writing and I became a tad more outgoing - even if it was only within my trapezoid of friends. Today, I let the messages and news posts, gone out many weeks before, pile up before me only being read when I travel down Memory Lane and visit CB.
Every year around this time I begin to think about CB and what impact it had on me throughout some of the hardest points in my life. I spent the summer of '11 on this site, undoubtedly "doing" the site incorrectly; but I enjoyed it. While many others artistically bred cats, trying to fashion one with all white markings or attempting to breed 500 kittens of the same color scheme, or possibly even have 10,000 litters of gorgeous cats as a CB site "end goal," I found myself roleplaying the basic cat you began with, and I bred him with any other cat who was open for free stud. I had no intention of ever turning my hobby of roleplaying into something that would impact my life forever. Next thing I knew I was creating guide after guide on the site's various topics, playing all of the games, even the ones cast off as "too much work for too little pay," creating custom designs for a price, and, most unexpected of all, joining an amateur breeder's group and buying cats with "breeding potential," my mentor called it. I, of course, had reached the peak. And it was a steady drop down. I rarely visited the site after a good percentage of my roleplay partners quit, my cats grew beyond breeding age, my stash of currency I thought I had saved depleted, and the "clan" I created in honor of a clan in one of my favorite books lost all its members to an inactive account purge. I still loved the site. It'd just lost it's charm.
I remember one day, when I was feeling much more depressed than I usually felt during the Dark Ages, I found myself on CB. This was during the point where being on CB was a rare occurrence; it wasn't my homepage, nor on my bookmarks bar (It was buried away in a folder). I was greeted by the "You've got a message!" notification. I sheepishly clicked on it, expecting it to be a leader from a group or clan or community I'd been a part of at one point reminding me to log on or I'd be kicked out. But instead I was greeted by a quite charming message from someone who had changed their screen name to Anonymous. It read;
Hello stranger.
Many people around the world, on and off the Internet, suffer from countless disorders, sickness, diseases, and other incurable symptoms and cumberments. Perhaps you are someone, sitting in a hospital bed, wishing for love, or something to cure your hamperment. Maybe you are at home, depressed, feeling unwanted and alone, begging for someone to listen.
I don't know if I can help but I can try.
If you need to, reply to this. I can answer, or I can ignore it if you'd like. This can be a place you can vent too, and if you specify, I will not read the message, just delete it immediately. You can say anything, and I will not read it if you don't like. But if you need a shoulder to lean on, an ear to listen, I am here, waiting.
Please, do not hurt yourself or others, tonight, tomorrow, three months from now, ten years from now. You don't know what's ahead of you. Twenty years from now you will look back on yourself and say, "I feel bad for that child. Because they did not know what was ahead of them. They did not know that if they kept their head up, if they just kept on going, they would make it by. They would look back on themselves twenty years, and say, 'hey, child, you can do it. It's bad, but it can only get better.'"
- A friend
I read this over and over. Many times, until I could recite it until my jaw hurt, my ears rang, and the words didn't make sense. I knew this guy sent it to many random users, because he could. I would never know him, but I had his words.
CB could be angry, hateful, spiteful, jealous, rude, and immature at times. But I knew there were people like this Anon who could...help. No one knew why they helped; perhaps they were going through their own troubles, and someone helped them, and they wished to give back? Did CB change their lives? Or was it an automated bot behind the screen, copy/pasting the words over and over again, going through the numbers assigned with each user until everyone had received these words, only to do it again?
It didn't matter. Anon helped me realize, yes, life will be tough. But you can get through it. If you're at your bottom, you can only go up. I found myself with CB. I am proud to be a member of an ever-growing community of crazy, cooky, strange users. I am blessed to have met those roleplay partners, still active or not. I lived through many changes on the site, and I find myself coming back, whether for two minutes or two days of constant refreshing.
CB changed my life. I was shaped by it.
Thank you.
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