behind the smile and cracked walls

I genuinely didn’t know how to start this post. I sat in front of it thinking: should I even write this? How will it make me look? How will it affect other people?

I’m not going to lie, there was a huge cloud hanging over my head about whether this should ever be written at all.

This is the only personal post behind the paywall. For many reasons.

But then I watched the truth being altered again.

And again. And again.

And somewhere along the way, this perception of me as the villain - the crazy, unstable bitch at the centre of everything - started getting into my own head.

The screenshots attached will be mostly from myself. Not cause i have anything to hide. But the idea of that post is to clear my side of the story. Not to altered other.

And they were never bitchy from the other side. That is one thing i have to admit.  Most of the bitchy and snapping came from me.

So let’s be honest for a moment.

I am not a saint. I have done things I regret and some things I don’t.

I have hurt people along the way too. Sometimes because I snapped after being pushed for too long, and sometimes because I overthought situations, assumed the worst and got things wrong.

The people I hurt without justification? I reached out to them, I apologised. There are no hard feelings between us now, and in some cases we are actually friends despite having very different perspectives on life.

There are also people I will not apologise to.

Because sometimes I snapped after being used as a punching bag over and over again and maybe somebody else would choose to “be the bigger person.” In those situations, I won’t pretend I was or will be.

Apparently there are some fairly wild stories about me being threatening too, but at this point, who knows. 🤷🏼‍♀️

The story on the leaving - my pov.

Some of you vaguely know what happened last year.

A larger group of us had what we’ll politely call a disagreement with someone.

By the time everything properly exploded, my own name had already been dragged through the mud for months.

And every time I wanted to defend myself, I was told:

“Keep receipts.”

“Stay quiet.”

“Don’t create drama.”

So I tried. Sometimes successfully. Sometimes less so.

But when other people’s names appeared on the same list, suddenly staying quiet didn’t seem quite so important anymore.

I was prepared for the conflict itself. What I wasn’t prepared for was people supposedly on my side deciding that half the evidence we had shouldn’t be used.

Or watching people who had previously been very enthusiastic about publicly calling others out suddenly disappear the moment things became uncomfortable.

At one point I was even told I had caused somebody a trauma response because I sent them a message they didn’t want to receive. That same person had previously been very comfortable publicly dragging other people. Surely…that did not caused the being part of the trauma no?

Anyway.

Over time I became snappy. Defensive. Bitchy - if we want to be completely honest.

Especially with the people around me.

Because it started feeling like once again I was the one expected to carry the fight, protect everyone’s reputation, absorb the fallout and somehow pretend nothing had happened.

The tension grew and trust became very thin and eventually I looked at the community I had built and decided the best thing I could do was bring everything back to basics.

No unnecessary titles…No fancy colours…No status symbols. No roles handed out because somebody was popular while technically doing very little.

That was when I received the first:

“We’ve been talking…”

I was told I should step down and instead become “Head of XYZ,” as though a fancy title would compensate for giving up control of something I had spent roughly half a year building - something I had already burned myself out maintaining.

If you know my personality, you can probably imagine I didn’t take that particularly well🤣 But time has passed and i am actually friends with the person who sent me that message. We actually sat down and spent time talking things out.

And there was another feeling I couldn’t quite shake.

You know when a room suddenly goes quiet and you instinctively know the conversation has simply moved somewhere else?

That.

But despite that nagging feeling, I let it go.

We went away together as a group.

The beginning was awkward, but after a few days I genuinely thought things were improving. There were still obvious little groups within the group, but again, I decided not to read too much into it.

The holiday party fell apart in the week for personal reasons people had and had to leave earlier (or so i've been told back then) and in the end only 4 of us left.

One that is actually my best friend...and 3 of us who had to get actual flight to get home.

Then, a little while later and past the holidays I received a message:

“I was thinking about opening my own small server. Would you mind?”

Of course I didn’t mind. Why would I? I had always said different communities could coexist and even work together.

Not long afterwards, a new server tag appeared. Instead of whispering about it privately, I asked openly:

“Is that it?” I even joked that I felt like I was missing out.

I was told yes, that was the server.

Apparently it was mostly bots and a handful of close friends, including a couple of people I didn’t particularly get along with.

Fair enough. I shrugged it off. Cause why deliberately make somebody uncomfortable about having their own space?

But then I noticed something.

The server I had supposedly been asked “permission” to create had actually been created well before I was asked about it. Around the same time we had been having problems within our own group.

You can probably imagine where my mind went right? And once again, I told myself I was overthinking.

Not long afterwards I realised I appeared to have been specifically blocked or banned from accessing it.

Again: “Oh well. Maybe I’m being dramatic.”

Unfortunately, around the same time, my mental health began deteriorating very quickly. Work pressure, serious illness affecting somebody close to me, conflict around the community - everything was piling up.

I reached out to somebody I trusted and asked them to help. I couldn’t carry everything anymore. We agreed I would step back temporarily so I could recover. There were no permanent boundaries established. There was no discussion about me disappearing forever. During that period I had also spoken openly with this person about how seeing that other server tag on people involved in our community made me feel. At the time, they understood why it hurt. They were angry about it with me.

While taking a step back, I began working on my own small personal project. It was never intended as a replacement for anything. It was simply something of my own.

Other former team members had created their own projects before and nobody had seen that as betrayal, so I didn’t think much of doing the same.

But when I briefly returned, I started noticing more things.

People commenting on behaviour I had spent months trying to prevent. Policing. Dogpiling.

People becoming uncomfortable speaking.

Because I still believed I could speak openly with certain friends, I reached out and more and more often, I received a cold shoulder.

Eventually I said: Fine. Clearly my opinion is not wanted.

I care, but clearly my involvement is causing more problems than it solves. Maybe the only way I can genuinely step away is to uninstall Discord for a while and disappear completely. I said that openly on one year anniversary post.

And apparently even that became a problem.

While I was away, the website for my personal project launched. I was proud of it and posted it publicly.

What I didn’t know was that some people apparently considered the design or concept too similar to the previous project. That did not sit well with people I had considered friends. People I had expected would support me - especially because similar independent projects had previously been supported without issue.

When I returned to Discord, I discovered that I had lost access to areas I had personally helped design and build. Places used for testing. Places we had used socially as a small group.

And I wasn’t the only person removed.

There was no warning. No conversation. No message. Just access - puff - gone.

And then, in a way I’m not particularly proud of having discovered, I saw some of the conversation happening behind closed doors.

About me. About my project.

So I sent a message and I was very direct. I had always been direct with this particular person and had never believed honesty between us would be a problem. Apparently this time it was.

Desperate to salvage what I still thought was a friendship, I tried contacting them in anyway i could. Blocked everywhere. Eventually I was told I could send an email.

So I did.

I apologised and explained my perspective. I even offered to leave completely if that would make them feel comfortable returning.

The answer was essentially: “No. It wouldn’t change anything.”

The rest of the message accused me of attempting to manipulate decisions despite technically no longer being in a leadership role. And I remember thinking: This is somebody I genuinely believed was my friend.

I would have expected: “Listen. You’re pissing me off. You need to step back.” Something blunt. Something human.

Instead I received something that felt almost procedural, official email back.

And then that same person, after walking away from everything, adopted almost immediately the very server tag I had previously confided to them was painful for me to see.

People can argue with me. People can dislike me. People can tell me I’m wrong. But I would never deliberately take something somebody had privately told me hurt them and use it against them later. That crosses a line for me and It is one thing I have never been able to forgive.

The whole situation broke me. Completely…

In fear of braking things and on top of everything else happening in my life, and during a period where my mental health had become frighteningly bad, I reached a point where I simply could not carry any more.

So I messaged somebody else. Not person i would trust most with my life but i trusted it would be taken care of well

“I want you to take it. All of it. It is causing me more grief right now than I can handle.”

“Who would be the alternative? “

I answered: “I’ll offer it to other people. And if nobody wants it, that’s okay too. I’ll take time away. The server can function without the owner being constantly present.”

That was it. The intention was never to destroy anything. The intention was never: “Take this or I close it.” The intention was to take the weight off my shoulders.

So what happened after that

Afterwards, I messaged another friend: “I want you to know I’ve decided to give it away.”

Their answer was: “Can I call you?”

I don’t know what I expected from that phone call. But it wasn’t what I heard.

I found out about the private server. I found out why it's been created in first place and what had apparently been said there. I found out that people I believed were friends, some more, some less, had been having completely different conversations about me privately.  I found out that during a group holiday, while we were physically sitting in the same spaces together, separate conversations were apparently happening elsewhere.

I learned that people I believed I had repaired relationships with apparently felt very differently.

And that some people who had privately messaged me asking whether I was okay were, according to what I was told, speaking about me very differently elsewhere. (Evil human or something like that?)

It was an enormous amount of information to receive at once. And many of the things I had repeatedly been told I was imagining or overthinking suddenly appeared to have some basis in reality.

After that call I sent a voice message to some friends. At first I laughed. Properly laughed. And then the laughing turned into sobbing.

Despite the decision I had already made, I genuinely didn’t know what to do next.

Not gonna lie….for the next few days I felt physically sick interacting with some of the same people.

I felt trapped between two choices.

1. Remove them and reinforce the existing narrative that I was unstable, controlling and vindictive…

2. ....Or walk away and try to minimise the impact on everybody else.

There was no version where I felt like I won.

Loose it all.

Or loose myself.

So once again, I chose to absorb the hit. I left.

Afterwards, I started seeing different versions of the story being repeated.

That I had said:

“Take over or I’ll close everything.” I didn’t.

That I had always known everything about the other server. I hadn’t.

And various other versions of events that did not match what I had experienced.

When I tried explaining to some people what happened, sometimes the response was simply: “they would never do that.” Sometimes it was simply not caring.

Even when the information I had received came from somebody I personally consider one of the most genuine people I have met in this community.

People who defended me were later removed too, sometimes because them.voicing out their opinions was apparently making others uncomfortable.

The community eventually changed names despite previous assurances that it never would.

People who had previously criticised one another suddenly appeared together again as though nothing had happened.

And something else bothered me deeply.

Another person, some of you know her very well, and I had spent months brainstorming ideas, building things, working on social media, community content and other parts of what the project became.

Later, our contribution was effectively reduced in one announcement to something along the lines of: “Whatever they were doing.” cause surely…place been never built by one person. But they removed months of someone hard work "due to concern with privacy" apparently but that very same privacy was not mentioned about some other former member.

So yeah.

I have stood up for myself and a friend of mine once again. Cause i am not type of person who takes someone elese's bshit.

After various changes were made and people started being removed, several people reached out to me privately. "Activity rule".

And to be clear: I do not agree with many of the decisions that were made afterwards either, so - I eventually requested that my own content be removed.

Not because I wanted to punish anybody. But because once I was no longer involved, and once the place was becoming something I did not necessarily agree with, I did not want my work continuing to represent something I no longer felt connected to.

Meanwhile, different versions of the story continued circulating.

Versions where I was, once again, very often the villain.

So why am I writing this now? Because I’m tired. And because I already know at least some version of this story has travelled.

I know that because I have already had someone come into my own space insisting that I needed to “clarify” things because, according to them, what I was describing "had never happened."

And I am tired of that.

I’m tired of feeling that no matter how much work I put into helping people, how much of myself I burned through trying to keep something running, or how much responsibility I take for the things I genuinely did wrong, there always seems to be another version of events where I somehow grow horns. Some criticisms of me are fair. Some are exaggerated. Some I completely disagree with.

I am not writing this to convince anybody that I am innocent. I’m not. I have done and said a lot of shit past year.

I’m also not writing this to convince anybody to hate somebody else.

And I know perfectly well that for some people, even writing this will be interpreted as manipulation.

That is their choice.

I simply reached a point where allowing everybody else’s version of events to exist while mine remained silent started feeling dishonest.

So this is mine. Not the definitive truth. Not a demand that anybody pick a side. Just my experience of what happened.

What you decide to think about it is entirely up to you. But this is the last time I will speak about it.