My journey into tanking

"How does one become a tank?" you might ask. Some do it by choice, others out of necessity, some just fall into the role. I feel that the last one is where I happened into the role. Perhaps some background on my 5 years in WoW is in order...
I came into Wow during the open beta in the fall of 2005. A friend of mine and I had been talking about it and when open beta enrollments started, we both enrolled and were accepted. The game was buggy, lagged like hell and was just a total headache to play a lot of the time. Comments and complaints flew to Blizzard who seemed to make adjustments nearly everyday. We rolled in as Alliance, myself taking a Dwarf Paladin. I didn't make it very far in the beta, only hitting my mid teens before it ended.
Launch night, I was able to secure a copy and started into the game. We started again as Alliance, myself taking a Dwarf Paladin. We grew bored quickly and decided to delete our characters and roll into Horde on the Stormrage server. I chose an Orc Hunter. I muddled through my hunter, placing talents all over the place and becoming rather frustrated with the class altogether (mind you, this was pre-Hunter easy mode and pre-Patch 1.7 when the hunter talents were redone). We had joined a guild and then the guild disbanded, with ourselves and several other members forming another guild immediately. We grew bored with this server and found that my friend had a couple friends on Mannoroth who wanted us to come over. We dumped our characters and made the reroll on Mannoroth (my original Hunter sits to this day at Shadowprey Village on the coast of Desolace where I left him when we made the jump).
I pondered for a few days on what I should roll, as I was unhappy with the Hunter class. My friend suggested a Priest and told me about the Shadow tree (again, WAY before shadow priests were viable DPS at all). I figured why not and rolled a Forsaken Priest - Morbiun. He rolled a Troll Mage. We more or less leveled together until 60. We had joined a guild, which became rather large on the server but our raiding success was negligible, and we never made it through Molten Core and only getting as close as Sulfuron.
Despite having a large player base in this guild, and a well geared main tank, we found it difficult to clear content. Dissension began to grow nearing the launch of Burning Crusade until right before BC launch, a large portion of the guild quit and joined a newly formed guild. I had started a Warrior, Kamula, but he was relatively low at this point and I had only tanked a couple low level instances, never really wanting to become a regular tank. Also by this point, my friend had started an Orc warrior and had managed to get him to 60 nearing the end of vanilla WoW. The newer guild was in need of a main tank, a role which he filled and did well at until our main tanks from our former guild split to come to the new guild, at which point my friend became a highly skilled DPS Warrior. I had played my Priest into BC until 62, when I grew bored with being squishy, despite Shadow getting a huge overhaul. Naturally, I rolled a Blood Elf Paladin - Solanis. I fell in love with the class as a whole and leveled him to 70 and choosing the Retribution tree as my spec. I caught a ton of flack about this and suffered through the "Retnoob" and "Lolret" names, not always jokingly called. I continued to gear myself up and managed to bring my DPS to decent levels, knowing that I would never be a hugely viable raid DPS.
Enter Patches 2.2 and 2.3. Paladin DPS raises considerably. I become a front runner for raid DPS in our guild, wanted and respected in all of our raids. I built a slight tanking set but was never able to do it effectively. I decided to swear off tanking, never figuring to be good at it. Around April of 2007, I had become very burnt out on the game in general, despite our guild penetrating deeper and deeper into Black Temple with each run and testing the waters of Sunwell. At one point, we were ranking extremely high on Mannoroth among the raiding guilds, depsite the fact that we did not adhere to the usual strict rules that the top raiding guilds typically enforced. In a quick decision, I canceled my account, uninstalled the game and decided I was done. I had lost my main source of income, had a new child on the way and knew that I would be needing the money and the time when she arrived.
Fast forward to November 2007. I had been reading off and on about the new expansion, Wrath of the Lich King. I had also started a new job and several people I knew there played, including one of my supervisors. I was working 2 jobs at the time of launch and was at work the night Wrath dropped. I was able to snag a Collector's Edition and purchased it the next day.
After installing, I made my new Orc Death Knight and started my way back into Mannoroth. I contacted some real life friends as well as some former guild mates, none of whom seemed interested that I had came back. At first I shrugged it off, happy to be back under my own terms. I started playing less and less, while my supervisor at work started prodding me towards transfering to the server he and others at work played on, Zul'jin. Finally, I had enough with Mannoroth. I barely had contact with anyone I used to play with, some friends had left the game, others had left the server. I figured why not and rerolled on Zul'jin, forming myself as a Human Death Knight. I named him Valoren.
At first I had no real desire in tanking at all. I was way excited in just doing massive DPS in Blood spec. I tooled around with different specs and found that I enjoyed Blood the most but did level briefly in Unholy. While I was leveling, my supervisor (an officer in our guild) introduced me to several of the other officers that we worked with, including our Guild Leader. Still, no interest in tanking and had never really thought about it.
One day, my supervisor approached me in our office instant messaging system and asked me what I thought about tanking. I said that I had never given it much thought, as I was happy just being DPS and that tanking was a big responsibility I wasn't sure I was skilled enough for, had the time for, patience for, etc. He explained to me that the guild had just lost our off-tank to another guild. He said he was a Death Knight as well and he knew that we were capable tanks, if not awesome. I agreed with this as I had been reading about our tank capabilities. He asked me if I would consider being our new off-tank for raids.
I thought about it and decided to give it a shot, I didn't have much to lose. If I sucked, I sold off my gear and went along my merry way as a melee DPS. I was getting close to 80 and knew that I could pick up some gear on my way to 80 through quests. I told him that I would give it a shot.
I started gathering up gear as I went along, where ever I could. After hitting 80, my fellow guildies started dragging me through heroics while I continued to quest, building rep with factions that I could get more tank gear through. Within a month or so, I had enough gear that I was able to tank a heroic. My guild members helped me through it, giving me pointers where they could. I started reading a lot about tanking, the basic mechanics of it and the mechanics of Death Knight tanking. Soon I had forged myself into a capable heroic tank and not long after, had been entrusted to off-tank our Naxxramas 10 runs.
Today, I have become the Death Knight class leader and an officer in the guild. I am also the main tank, as our former Paladin main tank had grown burnt out on tanking and wanted to play his warlock or mage before taking a brief hiatus from the game entirely. Unfortunately, our jaunts into Naxx10 or any raids for that matter have stopped. We have begun a rebuilding process, spearheaded by myself and my supervisor. Since Patch 3.3, and the new cross-realm dungeon finder system, I have been able to upgrade several pieces of my gear. I have replaced all blues that I had lingering around in my standard tanking gear and am working actively towards Tier 9 quality gear and with proper buffs, am hitting over 63% avoidance and nearly 40k health.
I couldn't imagine not being a tank now.

As always, questions and comments are welcome!