Please don't take this too seriously.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

One of the advantages of being a moderator.

I envy you being able to see dead people. This is the most haunted place I've ever hung out - nearly half of everyone is in ghost mode. There's one browsing this thread right now. [shivers]

[Lorizael]

I envy you being able to see dead people. This is the most haunted place I've ever hung out - nearly half of everyone is in ghost mode. There's one browsing this thread right now. [shivers]

The curious thing is that I'm only half a moderator. I was a full moderator five years ago, but then I went AWOL for awhile and in a sequence that is not entirely clear to me, Plomp then removed some of my powers. So I can soft delete but not hard delete; I can ban posters but not change their privileges in any other way; I can edit posts and all that jazz but I can't see anything invisible, including posters and special forums. I don't know if I was removed from a particular permission group but not another, or what, but this is the way it's been for about four years now and no administrator has bothered to change it.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

Huh. That's always been pretty much my favorite single thing about staff powers. I'd be sucking up to get that back if it was me.

Actually, it wouldn't hurt a thing to have someone who actually spends time here empowered, if for nothing else but having someone who actually has some vague track kept of what's going on...

[Lorizael]

Yeah, let's have the nihilistic depressive moderating things.

[DaShi]

OMG YES!!!!

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

Why not? I expect you'd do exactly what you do now -nothing- and that strikes me as just right most of the time. -Just, it would be a good idea for someone who shows up in here everyday and has some faint sense of context to be in the mod decision loop...

[Lorizael]

/me shrugs. I've told our gentle overlord Aeson that I'm happy to delete spam threads for him. If he sees fit to grant me the power to see the dead, so be it.

...

I should thank you all for saying nice things and helping me through this. It's hard to measure the precise degree to which this thread and everyone's responses helped me, but my guess is the answer isn't zero. I really appreciate it. I'm still not doing awesome. And I don't know how long I can maintain my positive-ish perspective. But I think I'm through the worst of it for now.

During the last several sessions with my therapist, she's had me write down new core beliefs to help replace my old (destructive) ones. We've been focusing on having realistic beliefs. I don't want to just believe that I'm awesome or that I can do anything I put my mind to or what have you, but just the same I shouldn't believe that I'm a total failure. One of the beliefs we wrote down most recently was, "When I care about what I'm doing, I can be successful at it." This isn't the same as saying I can do anything or achieve anything. The emphasis for me here is on can. That is to say, I have solid proof (my last two years of schooling) that I can in fact accomplish goals if I care enough. When I care, I persevere, and I adapt, and I try. This is in opposition to my very well established belief that I never accomplish anything and I'm doomed to failure.

I think the lesson I should take from this episode of depression is that I can't lose sight of what I care about. I went into this wanting to study astronomy, and I allowed that to change in order to suit more practical concerns. There's a lot to be said for being practical and pragmatic, but there's also a lot to be said for knowing yourself and knowing how to succeed. There's a lot more to this depression than school stuff, but I started to lose hope at pretty much the exact same moment I started to lose motivation. And I think the drop in motivation can be attributed at least in part to me not feeling terribly connected to my goals anymore.

Anyways, again, thanks for being rad, Poly people.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

FWIW, half of why I took an interest wasn't just compassion for a fellow sufferer - I'd been coming by for a look in OT pretty much daily since 'poly came back from the hack, and you'd made a good impression on me.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

Hey mod-boy; what's up with the change in your postbit?

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

Okay, that didn't last long. Our Aoverlord is up to something, I'd guess...

[Lorizael]

Change in my what?

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

It briefly had the "Lifer" button added under Deity...

[Lorizael]

Now Lifer is gone. Ack!

[Lorizael]

And back.

[Buster Crabbe's Uncle]

And gone again.