Alright, here's the message. Allow me to specify that I've also posted this message elsewhere, and simply copy-pasted all of it from the other location.
(The following post was originally intended as a personal profile post, but let's just say that this is very clearly longer than 420 characters. Feel free to PM me for more details. -bdt2002)
Hello, everyone. It's me again. This is my first time posting on the forums in any way since I announced my leave of absence, so to speak. It's hard to say when I'll fully be back to my usual self just yet, but I've figured for a few days now that some updates are needed.
First and foremost, I want to address why I left. The month of April was, to put it lightly, a very stressful time for me this year. During the week leading up my announcement on the 14th, I was going through what I'd best describe as "an intense mood shift where I wasn't feeling like myself". Among other issues, my grades in a particular class or two were starting to slip, and I was also starting to show signs of mild aggression towards other people. Normally, this alone would not have warranted my decision to leave these forums altogether. On paper, I could just talk about it once or twice, take a break from the Internet until I'm in a better spot, and then come back later. Things were not that straight forward, unfortunately. I needed more than just a break from everything that was going on. I also needed to isolate myself from the sources of this strange behavior. It eventually came to my attention that my increasingly sad feelings towards the Pokémon franchise were but one of the many things I was irrationally dwelling about all the time, something I've been guilty of to this day. In other words, I cut myself off of more than just these forums for a good portion of the month of April, in some cases even going as far back as the second half of March if you want took at it the way I did.
Second, I'd like to address why I'm still hesitant about coming back to this community. The issues are nothing any of you did wrong, not by any stretch of the imagination. I hate to sound so cliché at a time like this, but it really is just me this time who needs personal improvement. Ever since my later-then-usual introduction to Generation 4 in 2010, all the way back in the third grade, Pokémon has shaped my ways of thinking- and even my ways of life- in more ways than I could have ever imagined. It's been a childhood dream of mine to feel like I have my place of belonging in this fanbase. Feeling welcomed was one thing, but at the time, I wanted nothing more than for a group of people, literally anyone, to acknowledge that I could be- and was- a part of their community. Almost a dozen years have passed since then, and all I've felt in the past five years or so is the opposite feeling. Instead, I found that my interest in the series was dropping much faster than other childhood hobbies.
I'll end this post off by saying this. We're all very different people than who we choose to be online, and not a single one of us will ever achieve perfection. For a while now, I feel as if I've been trying too hard as a Pokémon fan to feel that sense of belonging I described earlier. If that's the kind of fan- let alone the kind of person- that I'm going to become in real life, I would rather not be a Pokémon fan at all. This, in turn, is why I feel more hesitant than ever before both about my time in the Smogon Forums and as a Pokémon fan in general.
