Trust

So there I am yesterday, sitting at the Deep Run Tram Station, waiting for the train to go to Stormwind from Ironforge.  I had a little time to think about what I wanted to write about and I remembered a conversation I had a few days before with a fellow healer during a raid where he said that I had to learn to trust the other healers, since my job was to main tank heal, but I was healing the raid along with the tank and it wasn’t working.  He expected me to get upset with him, but he had a point.  It’s very hard for me to trust other people to do a job I know I can do well.

Now I’ve been raid healing with him since the beginning days of Kara (see my previous post), and he’s one of the few healers I would trust to heal my group when I wasn’t healing.  He’s usually a paladin healer, and we’ve 2-man healed a lot of things we shouldn’t have been able to without a 3rd healer because we work well together.  But on this night he was on his Shaman.  He is the best Paladin healer I’ve ever run with, however he’s recently taken to tanking on the pally and healing on the shaman when we need a healer rather than a tank.  I think if he’d been healing on the paladin, this may not have come up, although he’s a great healer on the shaman as well.  But to me, it’s like when I’m healing on my druid instead of  Whimzee.  I’m pretty good on the druid, but I don’t feel as confident as I do on the priest, so I make more mistakes.  So I feel he’s pretty good on the shaman, but not as good as when he’s healing on his paladin, if that makes sense.

I had another person tell me that I’m too hard on other healers.  I don’t think I am, or if I am, I feel that I’ve earned the right to do so and I would never deliberately go out of my way to hurt their feelings or tell them what they’re doing wrong, but I am constantly looking at how other healers heal and comparing my performance, and I have whispered a suggestion or two when something is clearly not working.  And sometimes other healers ask me for advice, which I encourage from priests, but can’t really answer well for other classes.  It kills me when I see healers (especially priests) that have way better gear than I do underperform or who spam flash heal, instead of using their other spells, especially when they should use prayer of healing or binding heal for efficiency’s sake.  It amazes me how many priests don’t use binding heal or watch their own health, yet there was a time when that was me and I realize it’s all part of the learning process.  When I was first learning how to heal, binding heal wasn’t even an option, so it did take me some time to get used to using it, but I can’t tell you how many times it’s saved my life. 

The other thing, though, is that I do my research.  I read forums and articles and blogs about healing because it’s what interests me.  I experiment with ways to do things better, and use what works for my style of healing and throw out what doesn’t work for me.  But I have to remember that’s me.  A lot of people who heal got into it because they saw a need for healers rather than having a passion for it, so they can do the work adequately, but they will never excel; however, I can say that about a lot of things in life.  And originally, that’s how I got into healing.  There was a need, I decided to try it.  The difference is, I fell in love with it, and I suck at dps and I’m afraid to even try tanking.  I’m good at healing, I like being important and in demand, and since I mostly hung out with a prot warrior, while I was leveling and first raiding, it was a synergistic relationship, since there’s always a need for a tank and a healer.  What I need to remember is that there are other healers out there who love it and excel at it as well and I need to give them the benefit of the doubt.

But to get back to the issue of trust, it’s definitely something I need to work on in all aspects of my life, not just healing.  I just don’t know how to get there because it seems like every time I do trust someone or something, I get burned.  So there’s always a little piece of me that holds back and is waiting for the other shoe to drop and when it does, because invariably it does, I feel like going, yup, I knew that was going to happen.  But does it happen because I’m waiting for it or would it have even happened if I’d just let go and trusted things to go right in the first place?  Cart/horse or horse/cart?  Anyone know?

I’m sure this is a topic I will re-explore at a later date because I think it’s central to my self-growth at this time.  My next topic I wanted to write about was teamwork.  I was going to write about it tonight, but it’s already way past my bedtime, so it’ll have to wait.

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