OOC: Announcement - Essay - There and Back Again

Posted on Mon Jul 6th, 2026 @ 1:45pm by Captain Samuel Woolheater
Edited on on Mon Jul 6th, 2026 @ 1:45pm

Mission: MISSION 0 - History Speaks
4043 words - 8.1 OF Standard Post Measure

Dear friends,

For quite some time now, I have wanted to share an experience that has remained with me. It has taken years of reflection before I felt ready to put these thoughts into words. What happened changed not only how I view online roleplaying communities, but also how I understand myself, the kind of leadership I value, and the kind of community I want to help build.

What follows is a testament to my own experiences and to the lessons they taught me. These are my memories, my reflections, and the conclusions I have reached after giving them a great deal of thought.

I will not identify individuals, ships, or stations. They all belonged to the same larger fleet, one with an established structure for onboarding, mentoring, and managing its members. My purpose is not to criticize specific people. Rather, it is to examine the culture I experienced, how it affected me, and what I learned from it.

That experience ultimately taught me something invaluable: what I am willing to accept from a community, what I am no longer willing to tolerate, and what kind of future I hope we continue building together.



There and Back Again – Why I Came Back to Elysium
When I joined Star Trek roleplaying, I wasn't looking for another game. I was looking for a place to belong.

In 1997, I was so lucky to have joined a group of talented, wonderful, loving writers who banded together and formed Tango Fleet. There I learned what I now recognize as my foundation for playing Star Trek RPG. I can summarize three years of playing like this: Tango Fleet was a community that imagined a future where we all wanted to live. A place where everyone had a place at the table. Everyone has a story to share through their character and together we told our stories and made our journey together.

Tango Fleet disbanded and I joined Bravo Fleet. Took a break from the drama that became Starbase 400. Joined Obsidian Fleet with the Illustrious, the Nimitz and met Wild Bill along the way. Tried my hand at a stand-alone sim, the Galileo and got kicked out after six months for questioning a decision.

That landed me here when Bill mentioned the Elysium and Jill was daring enough to take on a “mutineer” from the Galileo. I joined here abouts 2015. So, I have some RPG experiences under my belt. And would like to think I have a pretty good track record on how to play and how to be a good player/writer.

Like most organized groups, there are always challenges. But I learned and have tried to share that the story matters, writers matter. The future isn’t written yet. We can imagine the future and work towards it. Most of all I learned that online friendships can be genuine and real. But those took a lot of work. I learned from a dear friend that and I will emphasize this:

We are all…mysteries…to one another.

We are all mysteries.

We are mysteries to each other because, much of the time, all we get of the other person is text. And so, I feel and have come to know that we need to allow much more latitude with one another. We do not know how your day went. What challenges you had or what victories you had. We do not know your past. And we barely know your present. And you barely know mine. Assume the best. And if there is a charitable way to interpret an encounter; go with the charitable one. Because we are all explorers. And exploration takes time. Even if I have known you for years – I still do not know you as well as I could.

We are all mysteries to each other.

In 2024, I forgot this lesson and became frustrated that the effort I was putting into the game here was not being returned at the same level of investment. I felt like I was more engaged and active and that became exhausting after a time.

So, I sought out more active games with a larger player base and a more active sim. I wanted to belong to an active company of Starfleet Marines, and I did my homework to find them.

Star Trek had always represented something larger than starships and phasers. It imagined a future in which people from wildly different backgrounds could work together, argue honestly, forgive mistakes, and become something greater than they could alone. For someone who had spent much of his life feeling like he never quite fit anywhere, that vision mattered.

I wanted to write stories. I wanted to more fully realize a Marine officer whose courage exceeded my own. I wanted to meet other writers who loved this universe as much as I did. More than anything, I wanted to become part of a community that believed people were worth investing in.

I found a community with players that were both former and active-duty USMC Marines and I thought that this was the best I could do. I wanted to belong.

I arrived believing that if I worked hard, listened well, and treated others with respect, I would eventually find my place among them.

For a time, I believed I had.


Finding a Home
Those early months of October 2024 were filled with excitement.

Every notification was an invitation to another adventure. I learned how collaborative writing worked in their unique “script style” system. I met talented writers who challenged me to improve.

I felt like my game was improving across my skillsets. The fleet I had just joined had strangely forbidden the Marine character role. They had a string of poor players that badly misrepresented that character class. Their solution was to forbid any new Marine characters and turned an entire role into a problem that didn’t need to exist.

Naturally, I signed up for the task to rehab the role and share my vision of what a Starfleet Marine could be. I was allowed to be a Security Officer and if I did that well, they would allow me to be a Marine if the CO of that ship approved it. I celebrated awards, completed missions, and eventually found my way into the Marine Corps, where Samuel Woolheater, who has been a Marine since 1997, was finally allowed to wear the green uniform.

Some of my favorite memories still come from that time. It was the happiest of days. In my journal, it was 01AUG25 when I was approved. I wrote in my journal that day the title, “Dies Maximi Gaudii” (Day of greatest joy)

During this time, I had some writing that I am especially proud of. These particular posts reminded me of how collaborative storytelling can be such a remarkable art form. When several writers trust one another enough to build something together, the result can be greater than anything one person could have imagined alone.

Those experiences are real. They deserve to be remembered alongside everything that followed.

Without them, this story would have no tragedy, because you cannot lose a home you never loved.



When Belonging Became Conditional
I cannot point to a single conversation or one decisive moment when everything changed.

Instead, it happened the way many difficult things do: slowly.

My memory of that change isn't one dramatic confrontation. It is a collection of smaller moments that, over time, reshaped how I approached writing in that place. I remember noticing what seemed to me to be different standards being applied to different players. I remember encountering new expectations that appeared only after specific situations arose. I remember feeling as though the standards for success kept moving just beyond reach.

I found myself weighing every post before I submitted it. Emails that once brought anticipation began to bring apprehension. I became increasingly concerned with whether I had followed every expectation correctly rather than whether I had written something meaningful.

The joy of creation gradually gave way to the anxiety of performance.

Whether others intended it or not, that was the effect the environment had on me. The more cautious I became, the smaller my voice became. Instead of writing freely, I began writing defensively. Instead of feeling known, I increasingly felt evaluated. My character spent months unable to become the person I had envisioned because I found myself in a role I neither wanted nor felt suited to play (Security). Sam Woolheater was never Security. They made him wear that costume because they would not let him be the Marine they had in front of them. It was nine months of inauthentic acting. But I found a way to survive it.

That change did not happen overnight.

But by the time I recognized it, I no longer looked forward to opening my inbox.

Over time, I came to believe that advancement and opportunity depended largely on whether the command staff approved of your approach. Whether or not everyone shared that perception, it shaped how I wrote. I found myself trying to anticipate what leadership wanted rather than asking what my character would naturally do.

I also began noticing scenes that, to me, seemed increasingly directed toward gaining approval from leadership rather than telling authentic stories. I cannot know the motivations of the writers involved. I can only describe how those scenes came to feel to me.

The effect was subtle but profound.

People became hesitant to act without direction. Initiative seemed to diminish. Stories increasingly revolved around waiting for the next instruction rather than allowing characters to exercise judgment and agency.

For someone like me, that was especially difficult.

I have always believed that writers know their own characters better than anyone else. Waiting days for permission to act on something my character already knew slowly separated me from the character I had created. Samuel stopped feeling like my character and began feeling like someone I was temporarily borrowing.

I still have an email warning me never to repeat one particular action after my character responded during a crisis in a way I believed was appropriate. The specific scene no longer matters to me. What matters is what it represented: I experienced a level of control over small creative decisions that eventually became intolerable.

The lesson I gradually took away was that compliance appeared to be rewarded more consistently than initiative. Following established expectations felt safer than proposing new ideas. Over time, I stopped asking myself, "What would my character do?" and started asking, "What response will avoid creating a problem?"

That was the moment I realized something had fundamentally changed.

I no longer felt like the steward of my own character.

I felt like I was borrowing him from the system.



Staying and Belonging Have a Cost
The people that I most admired and wanted them to be my friends. The ones I wanted so badly to write with me these stories of inclusion, acceptance, togetherness and victory. Thos became my evaluators. They withdrew and excluded. They isolated and criticized. One was never good enough. The standard could never be met and all the while the goalposts kept moving.

The greatest loss was not a rank, a position, or even a character. The greatest loss was my confidence.

Writing, which had once been a source of excitement, gradually became something I approached with caution. Every scene became another opportunity to wonder whether I had misunderstood an expectation or overlooked an unwritten rule. Instead of asking, "Is this a good story?" I found myself asking, "Will this get me into trouble?"

Those are very different questions.

The first invites creativity.
The second breeds fear.

I also noticed something changing within myself.

I became quieter. Less willing to take initiative. Less willing to trust my own instincts as a writer.
The irony was not lost on me. Star Trek has always celebrated exploration, curiosity, and thoughtful risk-taking. Yet I increasingly found myself becoming cautious, hesitant, and afraid to make decisions without first wondering how they would be received.

Occasionally, because I’m stubborn and hard headed, I would push against that system. Always at a personal cost to me. Fewer crew mates were willing to write with me. Perhaps they were afraid they would get “evaluated” with the same fairness of a $4 bill. The standards changed, the fleet constitution was more for show than for guidance. Power and access to power makers became the game to be played. I was told:

“We are not here to write Star Trek stories. If we did that, we’d be just another fan fiction site.”

”Don’t ever quote the Fleet Constitution to me.”

“You have real social issues. Its no wonder you don’t have any friends.”

“When you question your evaluator you question me, your Captain. And when you question me you question my leadership. And when you quote the Fleet Constitution you question the system. So let me make it clear to you. The system caters to the weakest, lowest interested players. The people who show up for ten minutes one time a week. Without them we don’t have a Fleet to command. Without you, we just lose one more problem player. Feel free to resign or retire. Here are the links to those forms…”

Eventually, I realized I was no longer writing because I loved writing. I was writing because I was trying not to make mistakes. That realization hurt. Perhaps even more painful was recognizing that I had begun questioning my own abilities. Had I become a poor writer? Had I misunderstood collaborative storytelling all these years? Was I simply not suited for this community?

Were they right?

Had I been playing a Marine character for all these years that would never exist?

Looking back now, I think I was asking the wrong questions. The better question was this:

What happens to creativity when trust disappears?

For me, the answer was painfully simple: Creativity became performance. Performance became anxiety. And anxiety slowly crowded out joy.


The decision to Leave
Leaving was not an impulsive decision. It came only after months of reflection, difficult conversations, self-examination, and more than a few sleepless nights. I do not regret trying.

I gave that community everything I knew how to give. I wrote faithfully. I wrote excellent stories. I wrote them honestly and with hope. I wrote a Marine character that the system tried to erase. They tried to trash him. They tried to exclude him, ignore him and isolate him.

And he would not become smaller. I never wrote Sam smaller than the Marine I know him to be.

I volunteered for more work. I fed the system content of high quality and caliber. The goalposts kept moving and the standards were kept out of reach. Just for me. For those players that complied, didn’t question or ask or stand up for themselves; they had an easier time but one that also cost them their self-respect. And agency for their own character.

I accepted criticism. I tried to improve. When I believed I had made mistakes, I owned them. When I disagreed, I usually remained silent because I wanted to believe that things would improve if I simply worked harder.

I wrote to one of my evaluators, “I will acknowledge what you put in front of me — and leave visible the shadow of what you did behind my back.”

Eventually, however, I had to ask myself a difficult question.

If a community consistently requires me to become less authentic in order to remain a member in good standing, what exactly am I preserving by staying?

The answer surprised me. I wasn’t a member of a crew of friends and collaborators. They had stopped being that months earlier. And I just could not see what it was. It was so painful.

I wasn't preserving a community. I was preserving my fear of leaving it. Walking away felt like failure. Walking away for real life service members and USMC veterans who really walked the walk…I felt like they would never just accept me.

For weeks, perhaps months, I questioned whether I had simply given up too soon. Time has given me a different perspective. Sometimes perseverance is staying. Sometimes perseverance is leaving. There comes a point when remaining in an unhealthy environment no longer demonstrates loyalty. It merely prolongs the injury.

For me – it was a grief. And I mourned the loss. I did everything I could as rightly as I could. And in the end, I still lost out.

Leaving did not mean I stopped loving Star Trek. It meant I chose to believe that somewhere, another way of building community was still possible.

The system consistently rewarded compliance over authenticity, placed process ahead of people, and, in my experience, isolated those who struggled instead of helping them. Any system that requires people to become smaller in order to belong has forgotten why it exists.

I no longer believe the measure of a community is how efficiently it enforces its rules. I believe the measure of a community is what happens when one of its own begins to struggle.

Does the circle tighten? Or does it open? Does leadership ask, "How do we protect the process?" Or do they ask, "How do we protect the person?"

I've lived in communities that answered those questions differently. I know now which future I want to help build.

I came to understand something I had heard a long time ago from a Twilight Zone episode, “The Obsolete Man”. And I share it here because it has become strangely apropos:

“Any state, entity, or ideology becomes obsolete when it stockpiles the wrong weapons; when it captures territories but not minds; when it enslaves millions, but convinces nobody. When it is naked, yet puts on armor and calls it faith, while in the Eyes of God it has no faith at all. Any state, any entity, any ideology that fails to recognize the worth, the dignity, the rights of Man...that state is obsolete.”

For me, I would say that any system that puts process over people has lost its way.





Invited Back to Elysium
Coming back to Elysium felt strangely familiar. Not because everything was the same. Because I was different. I returned carrying experiences I had not possessed before. I had become more cautious. More skeptical. Less willing to assume that every community naturally valued its members. What surprised me was not perfection.

I was breathing again. No longer holding my breath.

People invited collaboration. You did. This crew did. Characters asked questions instead of delivering instructions. Senior officers treated my ideas as contributions rather than interruptions. No one expected me to think exactly like them.

They simply expected me to think.

Something unexpected happened. I began looking forward to opening my inbox again. I laughed while writing. I found myself smiling at scenes that took unexpected turns because another writer had built on an idea I hadn't considered. Samuel sounded different. He could breathe again.

During my first week back, Bill, Jools, Jon and Gary took an idea I had introduced and expanded it in a direction I hadn't imagined. Instead of correcting me, they collaborated with me. That tiny interaction reminded me why I had fallen in love with collaborative writing decades earlier.

On Elysium, Sam was always the Marine he was born to be. Here he was accepted “as is”. A fact of the Star Trek universe. Not a problem to be managed. A person.

That is collaborative storytelling at its best. No one surrendered ownership. Everyone shared ownership. For the first time in a long while, Samuel once again felt like my character. Not because I controlled every scene. But because I was trusted to know him.

That trust changed everything.

It reminded me of something I had first learned nearly thirty years earlier.

We are all mysteries to one another.

The other place had no room for that mystery.

Elysium…thrives on the mystery and the unknown.

I see now how rare and precious that is. Communities flourish not because they eliminate mystery, but because they choose to meet it with curiosity instead of suspicion.

The timing could not have been better. It wasn't dramatic. It wasn't planned. It was simply an invitation. Jill remembered me. Jill believed there was still a place for me. That mattered more than I can adequately express. By then, I already knew what I needed to do. The next day, I resigned from the other place. Part of the letter I wrote that morning read:

I wrote to the system:

“After careful reflection, I have decided to step away from the game.

I have always been drawn to Star Trek because of its belief in a future shaped by cooperation, moral courage, and the difficult work of building something better together. I believe there is an important place in that future for Marines, not as instruments of control, but as professionals who act with discipline, judgment, and humanity in service of larger ideals. I saw in Marines what you refuse to see. I came to realize that my understanding of Marines and the role they could play in Star Trek differed fundamentally from the vision embraced by the organization…..

Over time, it has become clear to me that the current structure increasingly prioritizes process certainty, predictability, and compliance over human scale creativity, dialogue, and initiative…..

The cumulative effect of this emphasis, regardless of intent, is an environment in which contributors are implicitly asked to operate from a more limited creative posture and a narrowing of oneself. They are encouraged to think less expansively, create more cautiously, ask fewer questions, and align primarily with predetermined outcomes rather than discovering new ones together…..

This decision is not about any single moment or individual. It reflects a broader misalignment between how this game operates and how it has changed since I joined and how I engage creatively and collaboratively. Therefore, I am choosing to withdraw my consent to participate under these conditions…”

For the first time since August 2025, I felt free again.



The Future I Choose
I have often wondered why this experience stayed with me for so long. I think the answer is simple. It wasn't merely about one fleet or another. It was about the kind of future we choose to build.

Every community eventually reveals what it values most. Some protect procedures above all else. Some protect reputations. Some protect hierarchy. I have come to believe that the healthiest communities protect people. Rules matter. Organization matters. Leadership matters.

But every one of those exists to serve people—not the other way around.

The lesson I carry with me is not that communities should have fewer expectations. It is that expectations should help people grow rather than make them afraid.

I still believe in Star Trek. And I want to keep…loving…that future into being. I still believe in collaborative storytelling. I still believe strangers can become lifelong friends through words on a screen. I still believe that mysteries are worth looking into.

Perhaps I believe those things more deeply now than I did before. Because I have experienced both kinds of communities.

The former community taught me what I could no longer accept. Elysium reminded me why I fell in love with this hobby in the first place.

If there is one thought I hope remains after these pages are finished, it is this:

We are all mysteries to one another.

The person on the other side of the screen carries hopes, fears, burdens, talents, scars, and dreams we cannot see.

If we remember that, if we choose curiosity over certainty, generosity over suspicion, and people over process, we may yet build the kind of future that Star Trek has always invited us to imagine.

That is the future I choose.

And, at long last...there and back again.
It’s good to come home.


-Thomas

Who is privileged and very lucky to portray:

Captain Samuel Woolheater, SFMC
Executive Officer, Marine Detachment
Sniper / Infantry Officer
Precision Fires & Recon Division
62nd Company "Spartans"
=/\= USS Elysium NCC-89000 =/\=