My place in the community

I’d like to say I’ll make this brief, but that will probably be untrue by the time I’m done writing. The gist of it though is this: I’m pretty much done with smash. I have stepped down from every role I held in the community, including running PM Nexus and serving on the PMRank team, and while I will stay in some discord servers to interact with my friends I have no intention of being a community leader in the way I have been for some time now. However, I made two promises, both of which I intend to keep. I said that CotW would go for at least a year, and that I would once again team with one of my best friends at EBB. I will still be attending EBB, and will continue to make CotW until I meet that milestone in July, at which point I will hand off the series to the eminently qualified Echo Storm.

Over the last three years, I have poured my heart and soul into Project M and its community, and what started as a fun hobby became so much more than that. I had the honor of working closely with people I once considered to be my heroes, learned a ton about myself as a person, made friends I will keep in touch with long after I’ve left the scene, and am proud to say that I genuinely believe I made a difference in this community. However, over the last year smash has become something that is immensely stressful for me. I always want to improve, and do more, in order to give back to the community, and that’s how I’ve remained motivated while working on so many projects and dealing with so much public negativity, but eventually that isn’t enough. The way that I am as a person is that I just want people to be happy, and if I receive negative feedback about something that I do, that really affects me. Despite the numerous amazing people who have made me feel loved and appreciated, I’ve felt more and more pressure on me, and every project that was released would inevitably upset me because of the way people would respond. I should be clear that this was not all brought about by the recent SnS/PMBR announcement, so much as a long-term trend that has been worsening. It recently reached a breaking point, where I suddenly lost my motivation and desire to interact with the community and continue in my role as a community leader. Suddenly, after months of waking up and making a list every morning of what I needed to do for PM, my mental response to anything related to smash that required my attention was “I don’t want to do this, this shouldn’t be my problem, I want to be left alone.” And for as harsh as that may be, it’s accurate still to how I feel. I’m 19, I’m in one of the hardest graduate programs for my field in the country, I don’t need to brace myself every time I open social media because there’s a good chance that I’ll see my own name. A few weeks ago I opened 3 PM streams over the course of a weekend, and all 3 times I was the subject of discussion by complete coincidence, none of the three mentions were positive. After a year, that really gets to you. When it reaches a point where I feel defensive and stressed every time I open social media, that tells me that what I do is no longer healthy for me.

Having said that, I don’t regret in the slightest how open I was to what the community had to say on every platform of social media. In early 2017 my practice partner pointed out to me during all the feedback to PMRank 2016 that I was becoming someone whose opinion people cared about, and I should behave the same way I would have wanted someone to behave towards me when I wasn’t considered “notable”. The people I was lucky enough to be around and look up to when I got into the scene were kind and engaging and helped me get better and they made me feel so welcomed that three years later I still consider this community a big part of my life. I sincerely hope I was able to be that person for someone. If I got someone excited about PM, made them want to record friendlies for CotW, made them want to play Ivy, made them want to make their own combo video, or made them feel comfortable joining this community, then that’s a legacy I can be happy with.

I’m genuinely grateful for the happiness and friends that came from Project M, and can’t thank you enough as a community for being a place where I felt at home (if you cared enough to read this far, you’re probably a part of that). For now I intend to remain in a few discords where I enjoy hanging out, and going to tourneys will just be based on what I want to do or if I want to see my friends. I’m not forcing myself to leave 100%, but whatever involvement I have will be based entirely based on my personal happiness. Right now, what I do in PM makes me unhappy, and that’s why I’m moving on from the role I used to hold in the community.

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