:: Essay Contest ::: : win 100,000g, 50000g, or 10000g

I love gaia.

<3	100.0%	[ 284 ]
Total Votes:			[ 284 ]

[animega90]

bump4

[animega90]

bump5

[JinJin blackrose]

gaia is shiny and i heart it 4laugh

[Losertastic124]

~Bump #2~

[Chie]

heart pirate

[Losertastic124]

~Bump #3~

[Faydra Alexandria]

Bump.

[Chie]

heart

[Watashi wa Sailor Sun]

Bump 5

[blesseddarakunightz]

and of course bump 5 blaugh almost fergot burning_eyes

i still love gaia though heart

[The Shadow-Star]

I shall give it a go. So here we go.

This is my second Gaia account. It is fairly new but I've already had some good times on it. I first joined Gaia in its second year. Sadly, I became unable to go on Gaia regularly, and my old account became lost to me. I recently moved to a new town and, as something new, I decided to get a new Gaia. I also decided to get a new account because a girl who lives across the street from me, who just so happens to now be my best friend, has one.

The reason I first joined Gaia was to connect with long distance friends. I didn't really know what Gaia was. All I knew was that I had met friends at camp and they had some. So that's why I joined. That's not why I stayed. I stayed because Gaia became my escape from the real world. I've never really been into this whole 'reality' thing. I prefer stories and fantasies. Worlds in your head that you slip in to as you drift off. Sadly, those world dissapear as you snap back into conciousness. I've always loved reading. Writing my own stories is a big hobby of mine and I hope to get one of my stories finished and published one day. But that's another story for another day. Anyway, from what I've told you, I'm sure you can figure out what I got in to. That's right, thanks to Gaia, I found one of my favorite things to do. I am Shadow, and I am an RP dork. I RPed a little and learned the ropes with my first account. I never really got much money, so my avitar never looked too good. But that was years ago. This is now.

With my new account and the help of my best friend, I've gone places in a very short amount of time. I've matured in the years in both my writing and my ideas. I'm still an RP dork, but now I'd consider myself a super-dork. I have started many stories. That's what I call them, because that's what they are. You could say that I actually no longer RP. I write stories with other members on Gaia. I have a good time. Maybe I'll talk with my fellow RPers and we'll take our story and turn it into a collaberation story and get it published. It is an option. An option that would not be possible without Gaia.

I am different than other people. I am an individual. But even individuals think about what others think about them. I also use Gaia as a place to just be me. When I first joined those years ago I was depressed. I believed that no one accepted me for who I was. At first I even hid myself while on Gaia. But then I started to open up. I began talking with people honestly. I made many friends. And then it started affecting who I was in the real world. I began to heal. I realized that the people not accepting me were not worth my time. I needed to be me. And it was almost instant. I stopped going on Gaia because I couldn't go on anymore. But I didn't need to. I was my own person.

I moved away from that town. Moved away from those people. And I bloomed into the person I now am. Random, fun, and slightly insane. But I'm me. Not some empty, depressed shell of a person. I've got a few things to thank for that. Gaia is one of them. And that's why I'm proud to say I'm a Gaian and wishing Gaia a happy birthday.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY GAIA!!!
from shadowPLAV

[Xoisure]

I joined back in 2004 after the site was recommended by a friend who was otherwise...intriguing. Back then, all I knew about anime was Gundam Wing and .hack//SIGN, and I had no particular interest in anything else besides videogames. Computers were the same way - I had no use for them either. My friend was a writer of fiction and told me that the site had a good forum for videogaming, so I went on a limb and joined, expecting just a couple of geeks like me drinking soda and playing Halo all the time.

The first few weeks I had joined had the same experience as the rest of the '04 "oldbies" could tell you. You posted and polled for five hours at a time just to get a pair of socks, and if your total wealth on the site was under fifty-thousand, no one even paid attention to you. So I felt like this site was not the place for me. I talked about it to my friend and he told me "LOL, FIND AN RP, YOU ARE PRETTY SMART." RP? Roleplaying. When I was a kid, I had no friends, so I always created my own world to escape to. I always pretended I was some hero in a foreign land like any other prepubescent boy, swinging a piece of wood and conjuring up mythical wonders in my mind. I did not foster an interest in written literacy, nor did I feel inclined to writing something. Nonetheless, I searched through the Barton forums, looking for something I can get my hands on, and I came across ADPAU, an angels and demons university roleplay. I submitted my character and waited to see what would happen.

I met a woman named Saint, and I began my first romance/action comedy roleplay, and I quickly found that I reaped pleasure in the act of controlling an imaginative world for me to roam around in. My character reflected the feelings and thoughts that I showed in the real world: pain, lyricism, action, and big swords that cut trees down; but I never saw it as a display of literary art, nor did I see it as a gateway to my spiritual connections to the earth...it was just me, as a little character, in a little world, pixelized.

I then met a young girl named Barbara, who was also a player in that little world. I can remember talking with her over PMs for hours and hours and hours, every single day. What food we liked, what shows we liked to watch, our families...it was as if my reputation for being a sort-of "outcast" meant nothing here. I was just me, Connor. I had a friend. And I reaped more pleasure from that fact.

I focused my time in roleplaying more, and I must say that I got pretty good at it. I was respected by players and liked by people, and they did not even have to see my face. In a way, I found that I sought some form of approval to confirm that I existed in the world, and this site, this world was my ticket.

Some time passed and the RP met a halt and closed. Searching for more RPs to play with Barbara in, she told me that I would be great at making one, and so, I did. And every post and every word I spilled into it meant more of me than anything. In the real world, I drew a deeper interest in writing and composing my own fiction, and when people found what I had written, they told me it was good. I had talent in the literary world. It was a purpose for me.

A year passed, and in the spring of 2005, I found another RP, filled with powerful and respected players. I again felt at the bottom of the chain and just went with the flow, but as more people discovered me, I found myself to be one of the more highly regarded players, and co-founded the guild for that RP later that year. I developed deep, enriching characters, my skills getting stronger and more believable in writing. And when it came time to find a new leader for the guild, I was nominated and unanimously voted in as the leader of the Dens. Master Zero, MasterBM...I had many titles, but even more friends. During this time as well, Barbara and I started dating, and we led a happy and meaningful relationship.

At least, until we broke up in January, 2006.

Faced with being left by her, I found myself in the same spot I was a year ago: alone, scared, seemingly worthless in my eyes. I made many stupid decisions out of rage that I never really understood myself until this day. I lost friends, I lost reputation, I lost myself. But slowly, I got it all back, only to find that these titles, these characters, these worlds I created and ran were nothing more but plays of the mind.

But, that did not mean I quit, I just had a deeper understanding of my world, and just kept on playing. It was soon that I was playing in many RPs at once, and being invited to RP guilds for my talent in comments that came in the words: "DUDE, YOU CAN RP."

2007, I found an interest more in chat as well, and felt my charisma and my off-color humor a worthy asset to my personality, and found myself in CRITICAL ERROR in the chatterbox. If you are familiar with it, I apologize for any comments that seemed harsh and crude, they were just words sent to others in meaningless, funny, and often sexually-stimulating dialogue. This brought out a person I did not understand in me. I grew out my hair, listened to different music, and wrote different kinds of poetry, lyrics, stories, and found an interest in comedy as well as mythology. It was at this point I had found and lost two people in my life: Brittany, and Miche.

Brittany was everything I could ever want in a woman. She was smart, funny, beautiful, and loved me and all of my flaws. I felt like I had become a man in the respect of once being just another boy in the schoolyard. I was into more mature things, adult jokes, serious discussions, the world around me, and sex.

Sex...upon uttering that very word I string together what made me lose her. Our relationship felt like a casual part of me, and I felt like I needed a liberating sense, feeling like I was smart enough to get out of anything, and cheated on her. At that moment in time, I realized that I overextended myself, and that I was turning into the monster I so hated in school, a pretentious, arrogant, and selfish A-hole. I then fostered a love in the very woman I cheated with, Miche.

My relations with her were turbulent to put it vaguely. We fought, made up, broke up, kissed, kicked, banned, struck, hugged...until I learned a lesson I will remember to this day, and it was the same thing I had known all of my life: I was not perfect. And in childish arrogance, I neglected that, and lashed out at the ones I loved, feeling like the end was near. The Dens, CRITICAL ERROR, even my own family did I lash out at. I had ruined my own life. The BM that everyone knew and loved, was dead. And I never wanted him back, because to everyone else, he was just a kid. Selfish, arrogant, a waste of air. It was then that I left Gaia. I would not come back to the pleasures I knew until just before 2008.

I was still a writer, a dark one. The months that I had left this site marked for a lonely time in my life. But for some reason, I kept seeing the things I saw and learned about in Gaia: friendship. The enemies I had suddenly came to me and apologized for hurting me in the past, and told me, the one I thought was the worst person in the world, that I was...

A great guy.

Greatness. It was a word I reserved for the people who did great things, but what the friends I found taught me, and that until that moment I was unable to realize, was that greatness was not made from hand or mouth, nor was it of accident at birth, but was something we come to realize. It was my personality that people admired, not my writings nor my jokes. It was my brains and heart that reached out and touched those that I came across...I was just afraid to see that. And at that point, when I was starting a book, that I gathered myself and came back as BM1. And to my surprise, I was welcomed back. Of course there were those that cut me down for the past emotional outbursts, but as George Carlin and Bill Hicks and Bill Maher all told me, they could kiss my pink, potty-mouthed butt crack.

I even found an RP, and that would be my greatest challenge, to find what brought me all these experiences in the first place. It was called Dearly Beloved, a literate RP, and a test of everything I thought of myself. Of course it took time, but I again found that pleasure I drew from an RP, from writing, from laughing with others - and that was growth. That was when I met my last love, Beth.

She...well, he, was a more noteworthy person at the establishment. She suffered from the same thing I did, and that was a fear of her own self. I saw her, she saw me, and I reached my heart to her. And through all of the hate and flaws I suffered from, she accepted and loved me dearly. Then and there, in it all, I realized that I was truly, or at least in the eyes of my peers, a great person.

And now it is 2009, and here I sit in my desk chair, a college student, but wiser, matured, not a man, but a person. A person of the pen, of the mind, of the tell-tale, of the heart. And already it seems that I burned away words with meanings that no one could see and share with me...but that is merely because I cannot ever describe in words how important this experience was for me. Not Dearly Beloved, not CE, not the Dens, not Beth, nor Miche, nor anyone else...but Gaia.

I went from "I am no good" to "LET'S DO THIS". I went from "these people are too good for me" to "you know, these people just suck as much as I do". I left as a person of fear and cowardice, and remained as a person of maturity and love, and with every person's heart I touch, and with every person that touched mine, I grow stronger and more proud of myself.

And when those who were like me and found themselves alone come to me and ask what I did, what they should do, I tell them all one thing:

Believe.

No words can ever express what Gaia has done for me. Website or not, it was a portal to a greater understanding of myself, and what it means to be alive.

And every day, even when I feel that somewhat impending-doom feeling, I tell myself, with all of the people I love beside me:

Believe.

[Faydra Alexandria]

Bump 2.

[Xoisure]

And-a one.

[Chie]

heart