MPAR

As of today I have stepped down from the MPAR mod team. If you're not aware of what MPAR or paper drag is, don't worry too much about it and I'll see you in the next post.

It was a very tough decision. MPAR has taken up three years of my life and that's three years of burdens that have been weighing on me for a very long time. I wanted to write about what finally broke this camel's back but I've tried for the past few hours and I just couldn't put it into words. Maybe later.

The brunt of it is that I feel incredibly underappreciated. I'm tired of pretending it doesn't suck when I don't get credit or recognition for my work. There have been nice gestures of recognition for sure, but there are too many negative experiences of my efforts being discounted and my work being unrecognized that outweigh the positives experiences by far. I was holding on for so long hoping that one day the imbalance would change...but I'm really tired of waiting. Audience negativity, contestant pettiness, my hard work being copied -- it's all causing me a lot of distress and it's not even my project to begin with. 

I understand these are very personal, selfish, maybe irrational feelings. The thing is when people expressed similar feelings to me before, every time I would tell them, "If you feel like you are doing MPAR (or any community project) for personal recognition and not for the love of that project, and you are feeling upset about not getting that recognition, it's time to take a step back." There was a time where I truly loved the community and was willing to give it my all, but now I think it's time to take my own advice.

This is not a goodbye to MPAR, or paper drag, but I need some time to seriously reevaluate my relationship with this community and sort my thoughts out.

But here is one thought I do know: I spent three years helping someone else's project succeed, and it's time I succeed on a project of my own. 

If you enjoyed my work on MPAR, I hope you'll enjoy that project. But no pressure.