Greetings, Mudspike!
I hope you are all having a fine day/night/evening/morning! As I write this, many of you in the USA are preparing for Thanksgiving, while those of you elsewhere in the world are preparing for fall (and I suppose those of you in the southern hemisphere are preparing for spring? Is that right?). I’m sure that plenty of places across our little world are at least getting some sunshine compared to my little corner of it.
Many of you have been asking me why my participation has been dwindling within our community; the explanation is that it’s complicated. It’s been a pretty chaotic year for all of us and there has no doubt been much going on in our lives. I’ve noticed that our activity in general has gone down a bit for a variety of reasons, no doubt due to that worldly chaos. I have the most absolute faith that we will persevere and move beyond it, even if we stumble along the way. For the past few months, I have been stumbling, mostly within my own mind, and it has made it difficult to stay on task with what is important to our community here. The gears that make up my little, pathetic brain don’t always work the best, thus my current very personal difficulties I am having with my membership here.
I have not spent much time on this earth, nor do I have an infinite amount of it, the same as most of the rest of you. That was one of the key drivers as to why after 6 years in Club Fed I called it quits; it made no sense to remain in a place where I felt my finite amount of time dwindle away as I descended into madness, even for a prestigious paycheck that many people would kill for. As a result, I never regretted leaving, spending the subsequent year with the last year that my mother would ever have. I’ve had people tell me I shouldn’t have quit, that I should have stayed; I tell them that I wouldn’t trade all the money in the world for that last bit of time I had with my mother. Most of them don’t understand, as they’re so entwined within the system that they cannot fathom a life beyond bureaucratic busy-work, all in pursuit of a retirement check that they may never get to enjoy. This leads to one of my most favorite quotes from The Matrix: “You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.”
This leads to me. I am not one to blame others for my own faults and failings. I’ve seen it happen so many times, where people blame something else for the course of action they chose. My solution has always been rigorous self-analysis, looking within to find the problem. I have spent the past few months doing so, but have yet to come up with an answer. It is for this reason that I must announce my current departure from Mudspike, as much as it pains me to do so.
I do not make this decision lightly, as it is something I have tried to analyze for some time now, but I feel I require much more time to make sense of it. There is a temptation there to participate, yet I hold myself back because that analysis has not completed yet, and I fear doing so may cause unwanted repercussions. As I greatly value all of you, this community and its members, than to risk fragmenting it due to aspects of my own character that I loathe, I must depart to conquer myself so that I hopefully may return divorced of these aspects of my own character.
I will note that this is not the total end of all of my participation outside of Mudspike – those of you who use Discord are still welcome to catch up with me as needed, though I may be delayed in responses – as I have some knowledge I would like to collect and make available, ie DCS mission design and scripting, but it will take some time before any of that is ready and for obvious reasons I cannot put full focus into it.
In closing, I will always see Mudspike as a refuge with a welcoming and open community, filled with many knowledgeable members of many diverse backgrounds. I am proud to call you friends and hope that some day, I can return with a clear conscience.
