Optional: write a lede — not necessarily a WP:LEAD. Interesting > encyclopedic.

This is a re-adapted version of user Fathoms Below's own reflections – published with their permission – about their Request for Adminship, which passed in February 2024, when they were known as The Night Watch. Enjoy!

A year on from my RfA, I have some thoughts that I'm willing to share. While I won't go into heavy detail regarding what occurred there and what led to it becoming probably the closest RfA of 2024, I suggest that anyone who reads this essay just look into what happened and come to their own conclusions what I could have done differently. What I do know is that there isn't any response that will satisfy everybody, and so I'm just going to leave the matter to itself. If you were looking for an overview of my week at RfA, there isn't much to talk about and this essay won't focus much on it. But I do want to push back against the idea that "RfA can be fun", because that's not true at all, and frankly, it makes me upset to hear that. Usually, I'd give more restraint to that line of thinking, but I've also remembered someone saying that one of the worst RfAs in several years was just a rare fluke, as if its occurrence was akin to "in order to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs". So, this essay is focused towards those people, and although there is a likelihood that there really isn't another RfA as toxic as mine with the advent of Administrator elections, and that there's probably people out there that just dismisses this essay as the ramblings of a temperamentally unfit admin, but I really don't want some up-and-coming but clueless newbie like me to go down my path.

The week of my RfA was busy for me in real life, though it was six straight days of stress from the very start. Waking up early in the morning and seeing who !voted, pacing around the streets near me to try and relax, listening to music to help cope with the intensity... it wasn't a good ride. But I didn't expect that things would be so hard, and newbie me thought in 2022 that the process wasn't nearly as traumatizing. I think they thought that it might have been "fun" in a way. In the Summer of that year, after I helped promote the article Elden Ring to good article status, I read about the RfA that the GA reviewer, Vami IV, had experienced. Now, say and think what you will about Vami, but I try to remind myself that we're all humans here. We do good and bad things, and while Vami did bad things, he also did good. A lot of good that was shared. And newbie me was clueless about how to discuss the RfA with Vami in private. I realized what I had said then by the time it was too late, and it kind of created a "cloud" between us that I thought had gone away about a year or so later.

Fast forward to February 11, 2024, and I speak to him for the last time. That tension hadn't really gone away, and by that point I was dazed about how my RfA went that I could not concentrate on Vami, and I tried recovering from the damage to my esteem. It's weird how traumatic events get burned into your mind and phase in at odd moments. I reread my RfA many, many times over the next few months that it had hurt my mental health. I felt guilty that I passed while my friend was left with more baggage and nothing gained. I really can't describe the feeling, and I don't expect to be able to communicate it here. After all, Wikipedia articles are written in a dispassionate tone that bleeds over into our processes. And when you can't see the human on the other end, the average person doesn't care enough.

But for all of that drama and pushback, I still continued as a relatively unremarkable admin for a few months, resigned as I tried to process a difficult period in my real life, and returned last November. It seems that it's typical of Wikipedia's processes that so much volunteer time is spent on discussions and things that don't objectively matter so much. This article comes to mind immediately. But someone was hurt in real life, and the people around them were hurt too by RfA. That's why I'm upset to hear that RfA can be "fun". So yeah, I'm writing this to all the people out there that see RfA as cluelessly as I did in the Summer of 2022. Maybe some newbie down the line will find this essay and be a bit wiser, à-la The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Or, perhaps, the lessons of the debriefs written by Moneytrees, Tamzin, and Vami IV will fall on deaf ears.

I'd like to acknowledge the following people:

• Ingenuity and Moneytrees, for being amazing nominators. If either of you are reading this, I really don't feel like I deserved your support and advice. A part of me feels ashamed that you had to watch all of that unfold, and I feel like I let you all both down in a way. I'm not a ScottishFinnishRadish, or GorillaWarfare, or... a Moneytrees, but I suppose I've done some good work in a way and I hope that work gives back to you both somehow. You guys are both awesome.

• Panini, Shushugah, and the others who reached out to me on my talk page, and Maliner and a few others who reached out to me privately. I was in a really hard point of my life and everything you all said helped give some endurance I needed to reach the end. If you gave me both reasonable and constructive criticism, I really appreciate it, too. Hopefully among you all will be the people who lead Wikipedia to a better future, even in the days that I may no longer be as active as I used to be.

• Vami IV's sister, for her support and compassion. We miss your brother so much.

• An anonymous editor. Hopefully I was a source of goodness in your life as you were in mine.

• And Clovermoss, for her encouragement for me to publish this essay. I doubt my debrief would be as good as your debrief, and I still don't think it's on a comparable level, but I hope it means something to some reader out there. You had my back throughout a lot of last year, and I see how you demonstrated that big things have small beginnings. It's all because of the butterfly effect, y'know? You're an amazing friend, and I would not have gotten this far without you.

• See more RfA debriefs here