Yay :) Welcome back to health Liz :)
This thread makes me very reminiscent. I came onto the site as a moody early teen. I learned a lot from the site, both positive and negative, and then was able to contribute something back through moderating.
Moderating taught me a lot of incredibly valuable life lessons (in fact, I still bring it up in interviews every so often). It's a thankless task, but you're constantly learning, forced to be hyper-aware and it really challenges you. This site is an odd one for moderating too, because those who are moderators are nearly always also people who have come to site for their own purposes. Being a moderator and being unwell simultaneously are incredibly difficult things to balance. Everybody I've seen and been fortunate enough to work with have been utterly outstanding, and have been a force for good... But that doesn't make you happier, often.
The other thing is, there used to be a fairly high turnover, when there was still excitement in the site and a hope to drive things forward. That's not always a good thing, but I think that having the flexibility to move on with your life knowing that there is a fantastic set of current moderators to fill your space makes it a lot easier to move on. Esther was a good example of this. It's not that positive things aren't happening on the site, but the urgent want to make the website a more productive place seems to have been lost. Which is sad.
Waffle waffle waffle. I don't know what my conclusion is. MODS WE LOVE YOU.
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