I joined this community eight years ago, to the day, only a bit over a week after I first edited a page on Versus Battles, and I'm stepping down and leaving today. This is completely incidental and an insane coincidence. The world is just beautiful like that, I suppose.
I became staff about a month after joining, which seems absurd to me, but it's what happened. And I've spent a long time on this wiki, as part of this community, watching so many people go. So many friends and people I respected have come and gone, one after the other. I still miss people most of you have never met. My life has also changed more than I can even begin to convey. 2015 was a rough year for me, a contender for the most miserable year of my life, and I came to VSB and FCOC on the tailend of the worst depression I've ever experienced. It helped me recover. For all the horseshit, I have never felt more part of a community and more among friends than I have here.
My pages, though they no longer stand, showed years of change and progress as I grew as a person and a writer. Not just characters, but the central ideas and themes of my stories have transformed in ways that are hard to express. It is legitimately absurd to me how this community has persisted in my life through so much. Multiple relationships, strong ones, have come and gone, but I remained here, chipping away at work and my own writing. I was driven to improve by being here, and came out of my shell, in a lot of ways, to share things I talked about with very few people. I am glad for the time I spent here.
But things have been getting hard for me, and being in this community has grown increasingly difficult and stressful. It's part of why I left VSB last year. A lot of things happened, but I will be completely honest - the shit that happened between myself and Fate in 2021 completely ****** my ability to remain in this community and I've been holding on by a thread since then. And my life continues to go and throw more shit at me regardless, so even when I started to recover from that, I had new shit to deal with. My personal life has been deeply terrible since 2020, and for the sake of my mental health, I need to get the **** out of here and move on.
I know this is going to cause problems, disrupt roleplays, and upset people. It will probably cause problems beyond what you expect. This has been the single greatest thing preventing me from leaving for the past two years, but I can't continue to neglect my own mental health like this. There are other pressures and factors that have cropped up in my life recently that leave me unwilling to stick around. It's been eight years - I was barely an adult when I joined this community, and now I'm close to thirty. I think I have better things to do now. With this said, I am genuinely, deeply sorry to leave and complicate things for you people like this.
I am not perfect. I know I've been increasingly less active and reliable, there are many things in my past judgments and decisions that I regret nowadays, and a lot of work now remains unfinished. I even started writing up a Starcross roleplay at some point, but now that's dead in the water! But I deeply care for this community and the people in it, and I've tried so very hard to make it a nice place to be. This has been such an important part of my life for eight years. It's frankly embarrassing. I care about you people probably more than you understand. Of course, many of you have never really talked to me, so I imagine none of this means anything to you. Continue not particularly caring. Regardless, leaving makes me much sadder than I can convey in words, but sometimes things are just like that. Not only do I need to leave, I want to leave.
This includes moving on, for the most part, from using this account. I may dip in now and then, and maybe I'll hop back on the server now and then in the future. But I'm gone, more or less. Whatever conversations we have after this are likely to be the last time I talk to many of you. I'm sorry.
So long, and thanks for everything.
