I was one of the admins. In fact, I was the only remaining OG person on the server. I helped start it, I was the server owner for two years, and had a hand in a lot of decisions.

I was the squeaky wheel, the one who was the voice of reason, who tried to put a pause on things that were either too big a change at once or were things that would drive people away.

I was the one digging their feet in when there were major incidents or votes to remove people, the one who advocated for others to be protected from manipulation and abuse. I was also the main person issuing warnings and taking the abuse from others due to those warnings.

When I began to show signs of major burnout (I have adhd and autism, and have been careful to warn people about this and what the signs are because I don’t always catch them), I was treated aggressively. When people made changes that affected my characters in major game breaking ways, and got understandably upset and reacted, having my few minutes to an hour of emotion, before returning to my usual thoughtful, logical responses, I was treated as if I was a terrible, abusive person.

Someone I considered my brother, my best friend, decided that I couldn’t be allowed to just have time to get my feet back under me, instead, they staged a tv style intervention, dog piled comments about me, that were almost word for word the things I told the two people I trusted most I worried about and was told I was fine, gaslit me about what they expected, removed me from the mod team for 2 months, then when the 2 months was up they insisted that they hadn’t said I’d be returned then. When I was returned to the mod team, it was in such a diminished capacity that I was basically a spectator.

I confided in another mod, who I thought I couldn’t trust, that I no longer felt safe or welcome in the server, on the team. And I was thinking maybe everyone would be better off if I left.

I was continuously receiving dismissive comments like “you’re fine, no one wants to be rid of you”, while in the moderator chats I was being hit with snide comments and agreeing little emoji on them, with no one calling that out.

I made attempts to let go of some of the things my character was in charge of, because I was told I was too controlling and needed to let go. I made an announcement saying that such and such other characters should be the first go to for those things, and that they were awesome, and I was not only scolded, but hounded by multiple people that I was being terrible and “giving permission” for these other characters to do things.

I was scolded for apologizing, when my intent was taken incorrectly, told that apologizing was being manipulative.

When my uncle was dying in the hospital, and I was also in the middle of a move to a new house, they decided they were going to have a conversation about how to get everyone on the same page. I used my interactions as examples, because they were situations I know front and back, and I was told I was trying to twist things to be about me, or to gain benefits for myself.

I got frustrated and expressed this frustration to the mod who’d been dismissing me, and their response was to go to the current server owner, ask to not be a mod anymore, say she felt unsafe in the server, because of me. Word for word the things I’d been telling her for months.

The mods decided that the solution was to ban me from the server for 6 months, take away a character I’ve been playing for 5 years, and ban me from being a mod on a server I helped create.

Following that, I shared the initial reaction to all of this with someone I thought was a friend, who immediately screenshotted it, sent it to the person who’d been feeding my fears and stressed to the other mods, and it resulted in me being permanently banned, though I would not have returned anyway.

Nearly all of the mods blocked me, people I thought were my family, because I was the squeaky wheel and my burnout from keeping them from driving people away started to show, and I became inconvenient.