Hello all. I was not sure where to post this so I opted for the Plaza.
I want to preface this by stating this holds no further intent than the thread title states: to apologise. This by no means preface any attempt to bother you all with my presence in The East Pacific beyond this. With that said;
I first want to apologise for the way I conducted myself in the period leading up to my departure from TEP.
In particular, the intensity and tone I brought to discussions surrounding endotarting, manual recruitment, the endorsement cap, the activity of the Viziers, and the treatment of JoWhatup were not appropriate. I still believe in many of the underlying positions I held at the time, but I do not believe the way I argued for them was warranted, especially given that I was a former Delegate and, at the time, still serving as a Minister. My public attacks on the Praesidium, particularly on the RMB, crossed a line, and I am sorry for that.
That culminated in behaviour such as my outburst in the government plaza or RMB. Whatever disagreements I had with the Praesidium, and whatever frustrations or grievances I felt at the time, those did not justify the way I expressed them, whether it was the namecalling on Discord or my standofishness on the RMB.
Here I apologise for allowing the disagreements I’ve had to turn into the hostile behaviour I was displaying, for speaking about the Praesidium and others in ways that were needlessly confrontational, and for failing to conduct myself with the standards that should have been expected of me at the time.
Beginning around December 2025, I became increasingly involved in the regional-affairs side of government, particularly recruitment and integration. I spent a great deal of time on that work and became very invested in the results it was producing. JoWhatup worked closely alongside me on much of it, sharing a significant amount of the manual workload. Jo was also someone I had been close to in an OOC manner since 2022, and someone whose eventual move toward TEP was partly motivated by my election as Delegate in 2023. After my Delegacy and his retirement from the LWU Khanship, he gradually became more active in TEP, and by late 2024 and early 2025 we were working together extensively on recruitment, WA participation, endorsements, the Hussars, and related regional-affairs projects. All of this primarily shaped how I approached the endorsement-cap discussions that began popping up. Both Jo and I opposed lowering the cap because, from our perspective, we had been putting substantial effort into increasing TEP’s WA population, building endorsements on the Delegate and Viziers, and encouraging more residents to participate as Hussars. At the same time, I had already developed frustrations with the Praesidium over issues such as Viziers CTEing and, in some cases, their lack of endotarting.
Those frustrations became more personal during the endocap debate. Some of the arguments being made about the possibility of a raid or coup succeeding struck me as dismissive of work I had been doing in both regional and foreign affairs. In particular, I felt that arguments questioning whether our allies would defend us undermined the diplomatic network I had spent time maintaining as Minister of Foreign Affairs. Whether or not that was the intention, I increasingly interpreted the discussion as meaning that the work I and others had been doing simply did not count for very much.
Over the course of January this all hardened into frustration. I felt as though I was repeatedly arguing against the same concerns without the work being done in recruitment, integration, foreign affairs, or encouraging the general population into becoming Hussars (and thus rising beyond the proposed endocap) being meaningfully acknowledged as mitigating factors. I also came to believe that I was being treated more harshly in those discussions than people arguing from the opposing position, particularly Aivintis.
By early January, I was already speaking with Aurora about the possibility of retiring in Alstroemeria because of how alienated I was beginning to feel. As the arguments continued, that sense of isolation grew, particularly after I was told that I was also being criticised in private spaces I could nor see, nor know who took part in it, nor respond to. In response to all this I became increasingly emotionally invested in the regional-affairs work I was doing because its numerical results gave me something tangible to point to at a time when I otherwise felt that my contributions were being discounted. The coming of Jo’s trial and me being discharged from my Minister of Foreign Affairs position (even though I was generously offered a regional affairs ministry by I’m Dead) intensified that reaction. By that point, I had become enough emotionally attached to my work to view the discharging the same way I viewed the Viziers’ behaviours towards me, and Jo had become one of the few people in the region I still trusted especially as we both kept working on regional affairs in efforts to further disprove the arguments being made by Viziers by showing them we could grow our WA count, which we were doing. In the trial I viewed the arguments and evidence being used against him as questionable, and because I was already deeply frustrated with the Praesidium, I responded to the situation from a position of anger and distrust rather than with the restraint I should have shown.
Regardless by the end of February I had lost all will to remain active in the region, and by early March I had resigned most of my remaining positions. Looking back I believe this was the correct step for both myself and the region even if the ways in which I reached so were not acceptable.
I also want to apologise for how I conducted myself after leaving TEP and during my former time as member of the NPO.
The clearest example, and the one I am most ashamed of, was leaking material from a resident-only TEP channel for the purpose of mocking Aivintis. I took something from a private space I should have respected and shared it outside the region because I wanted to make a joke at somebody else’s expense. Worse, the joke I chose was to compare Aivintis, a queer person like myself, to Jordan Peterson, a figure widely associated with hostility toward queer and particularly trans people. And to be clear this was not my intent, I meant to compare the leaked situation to the sensationalist “debates” Jubilee regularly hosted without understanding who I was comparing with who. But regardless of what I intended the comparison to mean in the moment, invoking someone associated with that kind of bigotry as a way to ridicule a queer person was especially thoughtless and ugly. None of those things made it acceptable, and for that I am sorry to Aivintis specifically. He has blocked me on Discord and is to my knowledge no longer active on NationStates, so this is unfortunately the only space I am able to share this.
Beyond the personal, this was wrong on several levels. It was a breach of trust toward TEP and the people who participated in that private space, when I was denouncing the same behaviour done by third parties to third parties during my Delegacy. More broadly, I regret the posture I adopted toward TEP after leaving. I had spent years caring about the region and contributing a great deal of my time to it, yet in the immediate aftermath of my departure I behaved as though bitterness entitled me to belittle the community and people I had left behind.
When I arrived there, I was still carrying much of the resentment and sense of rejection that had built up during the final weeks before my departure. At the same time, I had grown closer to a few people from the NPO, thus felt the region like a place where I could simply exist around people I was comfortable with without having to constantly revisit the conflicts I had just left behind. However instead of using that distance to cool down and gain perspective I immediately began using their private fa spaces there to speak badly about TEP and people within it.
There is a difference between privately processing a painful departure with a region I spent years in and turning that frustration into mockery and contempt. I crossed that line. Whatever grievances I still had with TEP, I allowed myself to reduce people and disagreements that had once mattered deeply to me into things to laugh at with others. In doing so, I reinforced the worst parts of the mindset I had left TEP with rather than allowing myself to move beyond them and also possibly affected the views of a then-treaty-ally of TEP’s leaders for the negative.
I can recognise now that much of that came from hurt and from wanting affirmation from people I had unfortunately grown close to at a time when I felt rejected elsewhere. But understanding why I behaved that way does not absolve me of choosing to behave that way.
I particularly regret that, rather than giving myself enough distance to separate legitimate disagreements from personal resentment, I carried the latter with me into another community and made it part of how I talked about TEP. Whatever criticisms I may still believe were justified, the mockery, leaking, and personal attacks were not.
For those actions, and particularly to Aivintis for the way I treated and spoke about them, I am sorry.
I wish all the best for TEP going forward.