Hey everyone, Gremlin here with a long overdue announcement.

I am stepping down as chair of the GRA.

I'm not leaving the club completely, I'll still be around as a critic if the next chair still wants me.

But I just can't do this anymore.

Let's take this story back to the beginning and find out where it all went wrong and why I'm stepping down.

It was around November that Maple told me she was stepping away completely from the GRA. We'd already had quite a few discussions regarding the future of the club given that she had already announced plans to leave Wattpad. We decided to kind of co-run the club, with Maple doing a GRA blog off Wattpad, and me handling the Wattpad side of things. I basically wouldn't have to do anything, so I was completely fine with this new level of responsibility.

Then Maple decided to leave completely and, as I was Vice President of the club, she asked me to take over. If I'm being honest, I never wanted that to happen. I knew deep down that I wasn't the right person to run the club. In fact, it wasn't deep down that I knew that, it was pretty surface level. Running a club requires leadership, responsibility and organisation; all things I am very bad with.

But I'm no quitter, and I love a challenge. Maple had asked me to do it, and my god I was gonna give it my best go. I also started to get new ideas about how to run the club, how to change things up and some fresh new things we could do. Very quickly the idea turned from a daunting one to an exciting one.

So then it came time for me to actually take over the club. And it was right in the middle of my exams. If you've never done university exams before, just know that they suck. Like, they really suck. With my horribly bad time management, running the GRA during this time was never going to happen, but that was fine since exams don't last forever. In a month or so, I would be available and the GRA would be thriving under my leadership, right?

So February ends up being a really busy month for me. Not so much in terms of work, although that was still pretty bad, but in terms of my actual life outside of university. And frankly, those things were just more important to me than Wattpad and the GRA. That's the honest truth of it. Those pesky January exams had really taken it out of me, mentally and physically and all the things I was doing in February were a tremendous help to my mental health.

It wasn't the case that I didn't think about the GRA at all during that time. I thought about it a lot. But it always gave me the same feeling as university work. "Urgh, it's that thing I have to do." And when you feel like that regarding something you don't actually have to do, surprise, surprise, you don't end up doing it. 

And I would still tell myself that I was going to do all the things I had wanted to do with the GRA. I just had a busy February, but March would surely be better, right? Right?

Well, I couldn't have known back then just how bad March would be, for me and the rest of the world. The pandemic situation escalated so quickly in March we didn't know what hit us. We went from no cases, to 1 case, to university is shut please go home, to the whole country is fully locked down in the space of about 2 weeks. It was mad.

Now, you might think that lockdown would give me more time and would make running the GRA very easy. But that couldn't be further from the truth.

You see, before campus was closed, I was reaching the end of my final year project, worth a whopping third of the year. And the thing is, I needed campus facilities to carry out the end of my work. When campus shut, I was stressed out beyond belief. That week was probably the worst week for my mental health ever. I felt so stressed, so panicked. I was drained and exhausted. I was lonely and tired. All the good things that happened in February seemed a long, long time ago, and the all the exciting things in the future were quickly being taken away.

Obviously a lot of people were in the same position. This was not exclusively my problem. But that doesn't make it any better.

The next few months were an absolute blur. I struggled for motivation for literally everything. Writing my final project report was horrendous. Revising for my final exams was awful. But even things I liked doing just felt tiring and difficult. And once again, the GRA fell away as that thing I didn't really want to do and the thing I didn't have motivation for anyway.

After my exams finished in June, I knew I had to quit the GRA. I'd known for much longer than that in all honesty. But that was the moment when I knew for sure I wasn't the right person for the job. And it's taken me 2 months to find the motivation to actually make this announcement.

I'm genuinely furious with myself that I didn't do this sooner. Even just writing this announcement has felt like lifting an enormous weight off my shoulders, like a burden has finally lifted. It's honestly cathartic.

I'm so sorry to everyone who I let down with my dismal, non-existent running of this club. I have singlehandedly let the club die and if I stayed in charge any longer it would only get worse. I'm no quitter, but this is the right thing to do.

So, what's in store for the future of the GRA? Who knows. Maybe a new leader will emerge and revitalise the club and it will once again become an awesome community for Pokemon fans on Wattpad. We'll just have to wait and see.

Thanks for reading this announcement, I'm sorry it had to end like this.