Overdramatic

 That one word can pretty much sum up my worst moments in my life. I react quite frequently on emotion, and sometimes that can potentially be good, but in my track record it's usually been bad. The more positive emotions may lead to technical overdramatic responses, but those responses are usually well received by the public eye so no one bats an eye at it. They usually pay attention to the more negative emotions and the responses entailed within that. I mean as I've belabored over and over again, but look at how the Batpham dissolved. Had I somehow been super happy over something instead of being hurt and lost and then poorly reacting to it, I'm sure that I'd still be a part of that group chat and that things would be good to go. The vast majority of this year's blog posts wouldn't have existed, and we'd be in a different spot. But in a ways, all of that happening needed to happen so that I could learn from it.

Anyways, on a more recent note, I was once again overdramatic. Remember that discord server I most likely have mentioned? If not basically it's a server I was invited to by a friend and I got to be friends with a lot of the people there. We played games, shared memes, just chatted in voice channels, it was great. But recently I've been having altercations with one of the people there and it was mostly petty stuff. It easily could've just been brushed off as "she's stubborn and will always be like this, just ignore her when she's not being kind or friendly or being arrogant". But I let my pride get in the way. I sought vengeance as soon as I could. To sum it up, there were times that this one person keeps saying things that sound like she's superior to everyone else in mathematics because she "has been in advanced math since 6th grade". And usually this is said when someone says something math related and she has to butt in to say her thoughts. Once or twice would have been "fine whatever, believe what you want to believe", but there was so many times she said it, it got on my nerves (obviously).

One time she brought it up again, and I went to a text channel dedicated for education and academics, and to the subdivision of math, and quoted her saying she needed math help (on an online quiz so technically cheating but that's beside the point). She immediately got flustered and it became a battle.

In this server, I was "promoted" to moderator, and was a member of the staff. Because of that, I was pulled aside by an admin later on and was told that I need to be better because of my moderator status. I thought that while it was true since my position was a privilege, that I need to be on a tighter margin, it was unfair since this one person's words were unkind and also from a certain point of view rule-breaking (one of the 3 rules this server has is to treat others the way you want to be treated, so just general moral guidelines).

Now you may be wondering how she broke that rule? Well between acting superior to others and shutting them down on their math knowledge, she occasionally makes low-blow jokes. And I get it, they're jokes. But the way I see it is if someone doesn't explicitly say you can make a joke about something, and you do it anyways, then don't be mad when they "return fire" and make a low-blow joke back. It's ultimately just a pissing match. Immature, yes, but it is predictable, and you could see it from a mile away. In my eye's when she acts superior or makes these jokes it's like kicking the hornet's nest and getting mad that a hornet came out to attack.

I guess I don't really know if anyone pulled her aside, but I just saw it as unfair because no one communicated that's what they did. They mostly brushed it off as "that's the way she is, she makes jokes but can't take one and gets all mad if you make a joke". Which is unfair because if you want to play dirty (so to speak) and you can't receive it when others play dirty, then how is that fair?

Between that and a lot of vagueness and ambiguity with the upper staff (it felt like that while as a moderator one is part of staff that moderator doesn't really get a say in anything and it's a glorified position), I felt that it was becoming a community that I had come to love and hang out in every day, to a community I didn't even recognize. Now to be fair anyone who wasn't staff didn't do anything that made me dislike the place, it was all within staff walls, but it just wasn't the place I felt I needed to be or should be in.

So I left.

It's coming up on 1 week since I left, and it seems to be (since I have people on the inside so to speak) that my departure caused enough of a ripple effect to make changes on communication between upper staff and moderators begin to happen. I don't know about the making sure everyone follows the rules and knows that jokes are jokes and to get so easily offended is unfair if they make poor jokes (sure I could always choose to ignore the bad jokes and just move on, but like I said I'm immature and I chose vengeance). I've considered rejoining the server and trying to work change from within instead of without. but I'm not sure if I'm convinced the place has changed enough. Between that and it only being a week since I left so is it really anything? It'll come off as me being super dramatic (which it was regardless) but I feel like to leave and rejoin within a week is too soon and it's like "well if he ever does this again, in a week he'll be back" or maybe if it ever happens again I just won't be allowed back in.

I try to justify my action with the quote from Bruce Wayne (here I go again applying Batman quotes to my life) when he says in Batman Begins (2005), "...people need a dramatic example to shake them out of apathy..." (This is in reference to how he cannot save Gotham as Bruce Wayne, that he needs to become more than just a man. To become legend as Ra's al Ghul told him to. It's an early hinting at Batman). It felt to me that upper staff was apathetic in getting in to see if what the moderators had to say was worth looking into and at least talking it over, or if they just looked at it and if they deemed to not like it, to shut it down and end of story, no real reason or rationale behind it. So this was my dramatic example to shake them out of their apathy, or so I'd like to claim.

Anyways, who knows if I'll ever rejoin them, but I just wanted to document it for myself. Details aren't exactly 100% here, but the gist of it is. Finally, I will admit, I was overdramatic and immature once again, but hopefully this time isn't a permanent goodbye to these people as I pretty much excommunicated myself from anything the former Batpham does nowadays. But we shall see. I have a lot of working on to do for myself to stop being so immature and dramatic, as at some point someone won't care about the theatrics and just move on to the next person who can bring what I brought or even do it better since there's always someone better (there's always a bigger fish).