Reconnecting

[Eltu]

Hi everyone,

During the past week I've spent more time on the forums than I have for quite some time, and talked to more than a few people I had not spoken to in a great number of years. Even after eleven years, amazingly, this community is still here and its heart still beating. I'm realizing that despite this community being very small in size these days, there's still those of you who still frequent the forums, and there will also always be people who stop by just to reminiscence and remember a chapter of their lives.

As such, I wanted to make this thread to give everyone who stumbles upon it over the years an opportunity to catch up, share where their lives have gone, and reconnect with the community however brief it may be.

I'll be making a post of my own here but would also encourage anyone who wants to, to share a few words on where their lives ended up ten years later.

[Eltu]

I myself have mentioned bits and pieces of my experiences of the last decade, but I would like to take a moment to also share certain things that have gone unspoken until now.

Towards the end of my most active time on Tree of Souls, in late 2011, I was pouring most of my time and effort into the Blue Moon Tribe - a few of you may know of it, but for those who do not, it was a group of people with its roots in AF and ToS with the goal to find a feasible way to live off the land in a shared physical location as an independent community. A proper attempt at getting as close to a real-life Na'vi life as it gets, if you will.

Despite the obvious countless challenges to such an effort, such as finding a location where this could even be possible in the first place, it was a very real and focused effort and there was quite a bit of progress at making this a reality.

As anyone who reads this might imagine though, any such projects are far more likely to fail than not, and after some time it was winding down quite a bit with many active members moving on. At this point I might have poured even more resources into revitalizing the entire movement, if it wasn't for a specific event that caused me to completely reevaluate what I actually wanted out of my life.

That event was meeting Unknown through the Tree of Souls IRC channel. We started talking to each other in late October 2011 and I knew almost instantly that then and there I had found a soulmate. Mostly everything else felt unimportant, and so my journey turned from trying to change the world, to simply growing as a person and making the most out of life that I can.

As anyone who talked to me during ToS' most active days might remember, I was always quite fervent in my opinions and really did believe that I had all the answers - or at least felt that finding said answers was more important than anything else. At this point, I think partly because of simply getting older and partly because falling in love helped me grow as a person, those priorities faded.

Unknown and I finally met up in person during the 2012 AvatarMeet meetup in Seattle, which I think will always be the best week of my life. From there on, things turned into quite a blur! She moved to Sweden not too long afterwards where we lived for a while, we got married there in 2014, and a year later we moved to the US where we have been living ever since.

Throughout all this I have kept pursuing a career in game development, as was also the case in 2010-2011. It's gone fairly well and I currently have my own game in development along with other various projects.

From 2015 onwards, I have slowly been settling in and establishing a comfortable life in Eugene, Oregon. Unknown and I bought a house a couple years back, have been building a life together, and overall I'd say that I'm now very happy with where I am and how my life turned out.

Yet I have Avatar and ToS to thank for literally everything, and that is not something I will ever forget.

But -- that's more than enough about me! I would love to hear what everyone else has been up to, if anyone happens to come across this thread

[Empty Glass]

Great post, glad to hear things have worked out well for you and Unknown.

I'm a bit private so I hope I can be forgiven for not sharing much. I will say a couple things though - Tree of Souls has given me one lifelong friend whom I've had the great fortune of knowing offline, and I'll always be grateful to this place for that.

I think that for a while I too thought that I had "all the answers" back in the earlier days of this forum. Or that's just impression of myself that I have now. In any case I now think that it's folly to ever think I could get close to being that way. I don't know s***, I'm going through life with only the best guesses I can make and sometimes I turn out wildly wrong. Some posts here were typed with my same fingers but they were connected to a different brain back then.

Maybe I'll add more later. I've always appreciated having this place as a spot to reflect.

[Empty Glass]

One more thing, actually. I still make it a point to always log on to this site every single day. Maybe sometimes I skip a day if I'm especially busy or traveling, but I otherwise make Tree of Souls part of my daily routine. A decade ago there were still lots of people coming here who had just seen Avatar and were feeling all kinds of amazed, delighted, confused, sorrowful, and other strong emotions. I went through that too, and y'know what - to have a single movie have that kind of an effect on you is scary. It can be exhilarating and good things like friendships and marriages can come from it, but it can also make you question your sanity. So whenever I see anyone new here who seems like they're going through that stuff, I try to let them know that they're not alone and that we've spent many a thread trying to figure out why Avatar hit us as strongly as it did, so perhaps all our musings can help. I don't care if I barely see anyone like that coming here anymore, or if I go for an entire week without seeing new posts...I don't want to miss anyone and have them think they're alone. I've just admitted that I don't know s*** but I do know that I can at least show some respect for what they're going through. That's why I continue to stick with this site.

[Eltu]

I'm really happy to hear that ToS continues to be a part of your life!

And absolutely, the whole journey has been such a huge range of emotions and experiences for so many people. It's easy to forget that many of these emotions, in particular early on, were not necessarily positive ones - after all we ended up coining the term post-avatar depression! At least for me that portion of my life, desperately wishing I could escape to Pandora, the feeling of missing something important (even the whole CNN debacle - how crazy that seemed at the time, when it was such a trivial thing!), it was all so overwhelming.

One of the memories that stands out the most to me personally, was the very first day after I had seen Avatar for the first time and gradually being filled with a sense of emptiness without really understanding why. My mind kept moving back to the movie and unable to get it out of my mind, I found Avatar-Forums that same day. That evening I read through that one thread - I even recall its name, "Ways to cope with the depression of the dream of Pandora being intangible" - and amazingly, I was filled with this sense of warmth and belonging like I'd never really felt before. Sure, over the next year I'd feel moments of longing or sadness, but that one moment still triumphed it all.

And that moment and that feeling is why I even today often think of ToS and this community, and want to make sure it can always be around. It's rare in a persons life to feel such a powerful sense of belonging and compassion - in fact I've only really felt it in that way twice. Once on that evening I found what would become this community, and once when Unknown came into my life. In both cases it's marked a meaningful and amazing milestone of my life and as others experience the same thing for all sorts of reasons, I can only be grateful that this is how I did.

After all these years I've came to realize that it was never truly about Avatar, but rather where we all were in our lives, what we wanted but did not realize, all the questions in our lives we were coming to terms with. In our case, the one thing that became the catalyst for all these feelings was Avatar, but I've since talked to other people who have had extremely similar experiences after say, seeing Lord Of The Rings for the first time. The same sense of escapism, of wishing to be a part of a different world or looking for meaning in life. The entire experience around Avatar and this communities says a lot more about the community than it does about the movie, but it's a beautiful thing that despite our lives all being different, we all saw hope and guidance through this one experience.

And that's of course not meant to devalue the beauty of the film, it's wonderful and amazing in more ways than I can put words to. But even more beautiful is how it has held up a mirror to all of us and become even more meaningful through our own life situations and the ways we have all grown and changed.

And as you say, if even a single more person finds ToS and goes through the same journey, that makes it worth ensuring it's here and offering a family.

[Woodsprite]

Holy crap you were featured in a CNN article?

[Eltu]

Ha, I forget that not everyone here was necessarily around and active during the earliest Avatar-Forums days...

Indeed, in early January 2010 the "post-Avatar depression" phenomena had become a bit more widespread, and CNN had taken note of the Avatar-Forums thread I mentioned in my earlier post. I had at this time posted in it quite a bit, and I was reached out to by Jo Piazza, a reporter for CNN at the time. Over email she asked me a bit about my experiences, and ultimately I was quoted in the article I linked above, as well as on live news:

After this had aired I was also contacted by a few others, such as the Dr. Phil show, who wanted me to go on air and talk more about my experiences - but for obvious reasons I declined these offers!

At the time, there was a lot of animosity at AF directed towards CNN for the way they portrayed things, but as the years have passed I've come to not really feel all that strongly about it. After all, at the end of the day these were still my direct quotes, and while it felt a bit sensationalist they did take the effort to point out towards the bottom of the article that these experiences are turning towards something positive.

There were a few other news outlets that quoted CNN's article and did take things too far - for instance, there was a Croatian newspaper that mentioned me by name and reported that I had committed suicide, which... obviously was not exactly factually correct!

Over the years I've seen some other things come out of this, I've for instance been emailed by a handful of academics who have been writing theses about the whole thing and wanted my perspective - but for the most part it was a brief moment of craziness that then (thankfully) got pretty much forgotten about

Looking back, there is one more element to this whole thing - I think that being featured in the CNN article actually contributed a bit to my involvement in the formation of ToS. Obviously we were a handful of people (six, to be precise) and everything that happened during those months was the product of far more than just me. Nonetheless, the CNN article was the largest factor in making me a bit more well-known around the community at the time and was probably what also gave me the confidence to get behind ToS and really push it as an independent forum. In retrospect I think it also led me to start becoming a bit more narrow-minded since suddenly I had a bit more saying power without anything really behind it, but at least I can look back to that today and see it as a lesson!

It was a weird and crazy month as I was thrown into my 15 minutes... but it was quickly forgotten in the light of the emerging community that would become my home for the next several years

[Woodsprite]

Oh don't get me wrong, I was around AF since its inception and am well aware of the PAD thing. I just didn't know you were featured.

[Eltu]

That's what I recalled as well! But yeah, it was somewhat brief since once it came out and was talked about for some week there wasn't really a reason to bring it up all that much later on

[Ja'k Dawsiin]

thanks for all this i am still here.

[Theorist]

Wow, congrats. Who else is still here?