I Don't Think I Can Do This Anymore

(Content warnings: death, trauma, grooming mention)

I think one of the worst qualities about being a human being is that despite the deep intricacies of emotion, how compelling people find almost any form of emotion, how amazing people are at communicating the most complex of ideas, there is no way to truly put people inside your head and understand your experience. Even in the most perfect of circumstances you'll never quite convey it. Your self-introspection can never enumerate all the edges of the emotional fractal, your audience will always feel drawn towards a specific respective interpretation, your words will be poorly choosen in a way you don't anticipate.

Over the past two years I have been taking breaks from modding Smash increasingly frequently, increasingly longer each time, and I do increasingly little when I'm around. The reasons for this are... complicated. Some of the reasons are wholly external—I'm busier, I have less energy, my mental health has never stopped being a daily struggle. But if I'm being honest, there are a lot which are directly related to modding.

People involved in community organization, for a lack of a less vague term, have been an ongoing issue. The community cultivation has long made me feel uneasy, the handling of situations that arise has been poor, and dealing with subtle targetted passive-aggression towards friends (and occasionally myself) has been tiring.

I am frustrated with the situation involving GameBanana, seeing it return back to being treated as completely normal after the owner was shown to approve of ban evasion by someone they themselves recognized as grooming minors. I'm sorry to those who do care that I couldn't actually accomplish anything with regards to trying to work with others on a replacement.

There are other factors which, if I'm being honest, wouldn't be productive to mention. I think those I will just have to accept and let go. But, admittedly, they are also some of the ones that have affected me the most. Individual thorns don't hurt very much, but nobody gets enthusiastic about walking through a brier patch.

And I'd like to say that I'm sorry to blujay in particular. I don't entirely know what culmination of my mistakes lead to how you feel towards me, but I truly wish they had not been made.

It's hard to explain everything I've been feeling. In some ways it's because I don't entirely know myself. I recently had a discussion with my therapist about how a certain traumatic event has affected me that lead to some realizations about myself. How does one begin to explain how watching someone die creeps its way into an association with your hobby?

I don't really know in what capacity I'm ceasing to be involved with modding. I'm not going to tell people off for asking me questions or to review simple PRs, but I don't think I'm going to finish my private projects or clean them up to release them unfinished or even really bother to do a messy as-is dump. And I don't think I'm going to pretend I'm going to get around to this or that. Honestly, this will barely be a change, staying as involved as I have (which is to say, barely at all) has been strenuous, as silly as that probably seems externally. My contributions are largely irrelevant nowadays anyways, so really the difference here is going to be materially meaningless. I'm really just tired of fighting the apathy, the inability to bring any action to fruition, the small tasks that become impossible. I have enough of those dealing with basic bodily needs and trying to do the same with unpaid open source work that everything gets in the way of my enjoyment nowadays is kidding myself on what I can handle.

I'll still be in adjacent places, but thanks to those who showed me the good times, sorry to those I hurt, and thank you to the few who have really been there in the bad times.