Do you miss the Moogle Cavern?
I might, but I still keep in touch with a lot of those people on discord now. If you know what the Moogle Cavern was, you know it eventually became Sonic Eats Rings, and there is a Sonic Eats Rings discord where most of the usual suspects have collected. Itās not super active, but itās far from dead. More active than the actual SER forum was in the last six or seven years.
So whatās there to miss? I still have my friends. We still hang out together. Maybe not quite as closely as we used to, since weāve all kind of drifted more in our separate ways over the years, but weāre still in the community together. And for the few people that arenāt in the SER discord for one reason or another... I keep in contact with some of them, too, through other means.
(There are a few stragglers that havenāt circled back around to the discord or whatever, but I assume they will probably show up at some point. Everyone eventually checks up on what their old friends are doing.)
If there were grounds to miss the Moogle Cavern still, it would be for the websiteās content, which... yeah, I could kind of see that. The hoaxes and such. But also updates on that front slowed down well before the forums were shuttered, so I was already fully in the expectation that The Moogle Cavern was just a forum where my friends were.
And now itās Sonic Eats Rings, which has become a discord where my friends currently are.Ā
I do suppose I miss āthe old timesā in general, though. But who doesnāt? That encompasses more than just missing The Moogle Cavern. I miss being thinner, and having more hair, and still living in Colorado. But those are romanticized things, too. The good times then were better than the bad times now, but itās important to remember the āgoodā of right now is also better than the good of back then, too.
I may āmissā the times where I had fewer responsibilities and more happiness, but thatās just rose tinted glasses speaking. I just had a very, very long post about the depression and anxiety I suffered from back then. Were the olden days really better than now, or is my memory just selecting the happiest feelings?
I mean, itās true that I was thinner, but thatās because my anxiety was stopping me from eating. I was trapped in a loop of feeling sick, and then not eating because I felt sick, not knowing that the reason I felt sick was because I wasnāt eating. I was probably dangerously malnourished because of my anxiety. And now, Iāve been told that the reason Iām overweight is because my body overcompensated when I finally realized that eating food wasnāt going to kill me. So yes, I was thinner back then, but was I really healthier? Probably not physically, or even mentally.
Which is to say nothing for all of the Moogle Cavern community who has gone through other types of transition since those days. Would any of us really, truly want to go back to who we actually used to be?
The Moogle Cavern was a great, formative place for me and many others to grow up. I cherish the people that posted there, and the times we spent together. Though my memory is often poor, there are some things about that place I will never, ever forget, and for that, I am deeply thankful.
But though the Moogle Cavern itself hasnāt been with us in a long time, that community still lives on. And Iām thankful for that, too.
