My Other Life – Lila Mill’s Second Life Blog

Today is the last day I’ll spend online. Well if you’ve read my other posts, you’ll know I won’t take a complete break. You’ll still find me in worlds once a week and in between that, I might pop in to fix acute situations. What will change is my focus. SL has taken a big part of my life, both socially and practically and that won’t be possible to continue. I need to take care of my self now and my RL.

I’ve met very good friends in SL and I’ve had a wonderful time during my years there. And I’ve lived my SL life as I live my RL. I care about other people and causes. A (former) friend of my said once that I’m pushing people away because I’m too serious. I don’t know exactly what she meant but I think she was right. But if that means I have to change who I am and to stop caring, then it’s no use. I don’t want to change and I don’t think it won’t be possible for me to.

My SL life has been very intense at times and at other times it can be long between my visits, but I guess you can’t stay just as interested in something for several years. First few months in SL I almost replaced my RL with my virtual one. I spent every waking our there. Of course it was an amazing world I had discovered but it probably said more about how I felt at the time. I had starting to see the first symptoms of my depression and me being overworked. Those two aspects of my RL has been following me during my SL life too.

I also discovererd SL related forums. Those too replaced a social life that I didn’t have the strenght to keep up in my RL. Being part of a community has given me so much good things and I’ve found some really good persons I can call my friends. I’ve also experienced the opposite. I know that you shouldn’t let word affect you, but no matter if it’s spoken or written words, they can have a huge impact on you. I’ve become a lot better at not letting it affect me, but on the same time, I can’t really enjoy it as much. I lose something else.

What’s always been the biggest part of my SL life is the creative part. I love playing in Photoshop and in 3D and in SL I could do both. Economically, my creativeness hasn’t been a great success. Only a few of my products sell and only at short periods of time, it’s been worth having an in world store.  Except the fact that I really would need some extra cash for my RL, it’s never been a main goal to make any money on my creative work. I love doing it and that’s always been enough. Before I got my stores, I used to give away my products and I always loved seeing them used.

Now I’ve sold my land, downgraded my account to basic, got rid of my stores. All this because I can’t afford keeping it. It feel sad in a way, but very necessary. It’s now come to the next step. I need to move my focus to my RL to save what’s possible to save. That means not writing this blog for a while and it also mean I won’t be reading the xstreet forum and not post anything there. I’ll still have my products listed at xstreet. If I sell something, that’s really good, if not, that’s ok too. I’ll also still be going to the salsa dance every sunday which is hosted by my oldest and best friend in SL. Look me up and say hi if you want.

This will be my ‘I’m taking a break, but will be back’ post. The last post on this blog before my RL is taken care of. Take care everyone and thanks for reading my blog. If you want, then post some nice comments here. I will read those. See you.