I've been pretty open about the fact that I'm planning on stepping down from my positions once Slam ends, which comes from a number of factors. First, Slam ends right around the time I'll be graduating, so I'll be busy with moving, applying to grad school, finding a job, and other life shit. But the second is that, to be frank, this site has done a fucking number on my mental health.
Being User Safety Lead is good, meaningful work, and I'm happy if anything I did at all helped to make the site even a little bit safer, but it kind of shreds your mental wellbeing. I think talking about a lot of it is probably against some rule since a lot of what I have read in my three(ish) years of user safety work ends with someone on the Noteworthy Banned Users List for "inappropriate sexual conduct," so I'll just say that it gets draining and there's really only so much of that kind of thing you can read before you hit your limit, and I hit mine a long time ago but kept forcing myself through it because I thought I had to.
I wish I could say that being a TD was good, meaningful work, but I can't. No offense to my fellow TDs and especially Merritt who tried so hard for me, but this position absolutely was not worth it and I regret ever asking to do it. This past SPL especially put me at my limit, and I would've stepped down by now if I hadn't already committed to hosting Slam. Ever since becoming a TD, it's been palpable how much more hostilely people view me and how much more hostile of a person I've become and I hate both of these changes. I've made mistakes as a TD and as SS and I'll be the first to admit that but some of the reactions are just uncalled for. I ruled activity against your team, I didn't murder a puppy in front of you.
There's been other, smaller stuff too. For example, I helped with organizing and writing PRs for this SPL, which, if you've never participated in this process, is a lot of fucking work. It's a huge crunch and you're constantly fighting with people to get their rankings in and then you have like three or four days to make sure everyone's shit is written and it gets published before the tour starts and you get it all out on time and then everyone tells you how much they hate them and that they like the unofficial ones better. Or I helped spearhead the effort to get manager feedback for official team tournaments off the ground and did my best to get people to fill them out and then got them communicated to managers only for people (not talking about you @ Ruiners) to not be happy with how the feedback was communicated and upset that stuff was anonymous and that feedback wasn't detailed enough like I'm not just working with what their players gave me and if one of your players decides they want to send you multiple paragraphs of non-anonymized feedback, that's great for them and I'm glad you think that's so much better than the efforts I'm making and you feel the need to tell me that.
A lot of this is TD-centric because that's been the biggest stressor Smogon-side for a while now. SPL manager feedback was actually the thing that made me decide to quit for good (alongside a couple friends encouraging me to look after myself), since I got to read all of that feedback and got to hear about what a great time a lot of people had. How they had amazing managers, their team environment was great, they're so excited to play again next year. And all I got from SPL XV was yelled at. Like a lot. And a few very unsavory accusations that are best not repeated here that you certainly would not see made at a male TD lol. If you ask stours, I deserve to be yelled at because I jerk in a position of power or something, which is obviously infinitely worse than them jerking out of positions of power since I should just be a punching bag for them.
But reading about how much fun everyone else had made me realize how fucking miserable I have been. I thought that if I just tried my hardest to make things better for people, people would appreciate it. I was wrong and stupid to think this. As a close friend put it to me, "if you put all that effort that you do staffing into playing the game, you might be an SPL level player by now" and I can't argue with that. I want to have the same fun and make the same friends and have the same positive experiences everyone else gets to.
My biggest regret is that I've likely alienated most of the community away from me. As my mental health declines, there's a notable shift in how much I lash out at people and how sarcastic and mean I am, not to excuse it but to explain it. I know this has resulted in a lot of people calling me fake, talking shit about me behind my back, I've seen the logs and I know what they've said. I feel like I've effectively ruined my chances of having a normal, enjoyable time as a player since everyone kind of hates me now. That's largely my fault since I wasn't the nicest I could've been during SPL and it's just been getting worse.
Logging in has become a stressor, my anxiety has been manifesting to an insane degree, I'm physically twitching, I'm having a hard time sleeping, I woke up at 3 AM this morning to throw up from the stress. I can't remember the last time it was this bad. Smogon isn't the only stressor in my life, not by far, since I'm in the middle of the semester ending with six classes that means I have multiple major end-of-semester projects and multiple final exams to contend with in the next two weeks and I have a number of other Life Stressors like the impending ending of my schooling this summer meaning I will lose my therapist and my housing. So Smogon isn't the biggest stressor by a long shot, but every time I log in, every time I interact with the community here, it's a reminder of my shortcomings and the person I've become, a person I hate because she's turbulent and angry and prone to lashing out. It's a reminder that my best is never good enough and I've effectively sabotaged myself into the position I am today. To a lot of people, that's probably a lot of weight to assign to an online Pokemon forum, and I'm sure people will read this and laugh, but when you have nothing else in your life because your family hates you and you have no friends, this is what happens to you.
