I was talking about this a bit in chat just now, and I thought I'd share it with a wider audience. (It might also be a nice bonus for those of you who haven't yet managed to find the Bucket of Sap in Sam's new game.)

In six days' time, the first races of this America's Cup season will begin here in Auckland. Four years ago this month, the previous Cup season was beginning, and I was starting a new job working on the official website for the races. That job brought me online for the first time, and to Rinkworks.

Four years ago today, I was playing Fantasy Quest and being startled to discover friendship here. I have not told many people about what was going on in my life at that time, but coming to Rinkworks was both an escape and a source of healing.

I was going through a great turning point in my life. In just one day, everything in the world suddenly became different and wrong and false, and for the following months I was in a sort of emotional limbo, struggling to think what I should do about it. I felt I was faced with deciding between duty and happiness. I chose duty. Rightly or wrongly, I chose it for the four years which followed, four years which have been the hardest of my life. I made that same decision over and over again in those years, and what that took out of me is something I will never be able to describe. But all the time, it was being replaced through the knowledge that there were people here who would care about my problems if I told them. I didn't tell them. It was enough to know they would have cared.

I have written other posts from time to time about what my friends here have meant to me, but this post is different in one way. I'm sitting here with Fantasy Quest 2 open in another window, and a new America's Cup season beginning, and it seems to me as though I'm starting all over again. But this time, for the first time in my adult life, I'm at a turning point where all the paths I can see lead to nothing but happiness. This time is the flip side of four years ago.

In the last four years I've had a lot of fun, and I've had some wonderful times and enjoyed them, but whether or not anybody realised it, I was never happy. Now I am. I feel as though, at the age of 31, my life is finally beginning. It still fills me with wonder to say this to myself: I'm so very happy.