Reflecting on the Jihad and the Cause[tm]

Anniversaries always make me reflect.  My archived mail shows the elements
of my reflection around the year anniversary of my induction into TRES
Corps, and hence the Jihad.  I did plenty of reflecting at the time.  It
had just been a rough time, most of my Jihad friends had retired/went on
indefinite leave, and I was dealing with one heck of a huge attitude
problem.  I didn't have good relations with my commanding officer in TRES,
and my relationship with the higher ups in VRDET was not much better.  
Needless to say, after a whole lot of reflection, a bike ride out to the
Rockridge BART station (an event which I will talk about below), and a
good ass kicking, I realized that the Jihad is really what you make of it.  
My year in the Jihad had not been very productive.  I realized I was
pulling off a version of the Jihad's Imminent Demise[tm] with myself, and
it was basically that I had to change my attitude or retire.

Anyway, the bike ride to Rockridge BART was an attempt to get away from
the world, to run and run and see where I'd get.  Rockridge is where I
got, and there I found a memorial for those people who died in the Oakland
Hills Firestorm of 1991.  But more importantly, it was built by/for the
survivors of the Firestorm.  Like a phoenix, they rose from the ashes and
rebuilt.  As someone who had just gone through her own personal firestorm,
the memorial was a reminder that I had a choice.  I could chose to wallow
in my misery and never live up to the potential I had (the potential DL
must have seen when he decided to take a chance on me) or I could rise,
like a phoenix, out of the ashes I had created for myself.  I had to start
anew.  That is what I chose to do, and I accomplished more things in the
last three months than I had in the year previous.

Now, it comes time for another anniversary.  It is the one year
anniversary of the founding of VRDET.  It doesn't seem like it was that
long ago, but yet it also seems that it was years and years ago.  I look
at the person I was then, a newbie looking to help out a friend who'd just
been handed a daunting assignment.  Between the two of us, we managed to
survive and even thrive and (with Mal's help and a merger) create the
organization we know today as VRDET.  Looking back on some of it, it seems
fairly ludicrous, some of the stuff that happened. In those days, however,
moulding the old Blood Jihad and not knowing if the org was going to live
or die was quite a lot of fun.  It was one of the few times in the course
of my first year that I actually got excited about something.  I wasn't
trying to fix the inequity of the Jihad or any such nonsense like that.  
I was having fun.

Having fun is what I think the Jihad is all about.  Sure, the Cause[tm] is
our primary purpose, but what is a cause that just drags you down?  It's
your deathbed--you either burn out or finally explode.  And I have seen
both happen. The burn outs just fade into the mists without saying goodbye
to the Jihad they once loved and the exploders explode out of the Jihad
scene with a lot of heated accusations and hurt feelings all around.  The
reason for either of these reactions is simply because the Jihad was no
longer fun.

In this organization, we have people who are basically here for the
roleplay aspect.  We have people who are basically here to get rid of the
Wyrm in that thing we like to call real life.  We have people who
philosophize upon the nature of the Beast, and hence the nature of
humanity.  And we have people who do combinations of these things.  In no
way or form is any of these people wrong.  By having so many different
aspects under one roof, so to speak, we increase the chances of people
finding a niche where they can have fun and thereby keep the Cause[tm]
alive.

The best way to have fun is to simply get involved.  Get involved heavily.  
Don't get so involved that you burn out, and make sure you keep some space
for that morass called real life, but get involved to the point that you
can.  Do stuff.  The way to serve the Cause[tm] is by doing stuff, not by
sitting on your rump, or whining to your commanding officer that there's
absolutely nothing to do.  If doing too much burns you out, so does doing
too little.  And when you start taking this whole net thing too seriously,
take a break.  Otherwise, you'll explode.  That's probably worse than
burning out, because other people get hurt.

Perhaps I'm preaching to the choir here.  But don't make the mistake I did
of not doing much my first year and thereby spiraling off into your own
personal version of The Jihad's Imminent Demise[tm].  It's not pretty to
watch, and it's even worse to go through it.  So my advice is to believe
in yourself, have fun, and remember the Cause[tm].  If you follow this,
you'll probably end up serving the Cause[tm] well.

Thank you for letting me ramble on like this.