Oh, wow, I hadn't realized this was going on :)
I first just wish to apologise to the community, both Chem.SE and Physics.SE, for my lack of activity. I'll shortly explain what happened, but I also just feel bad for causing this conflict, and think I could have handled this better. Sorry about that.
So a bit of background: Around 2014 I started getting involved in the Rust community, and my capacity for dealing with stuff online decreased. I also was just busier in college, and balancing my time on Stack Exchange became increasingly harder. I still spent time moderating, though.
I've always had a bit of conflict in picking between a career in software vs a career in physics -- I really like physics and picked it as a major, but I've really enjoyed programming. My opinion eventually shifted from being set on doing physics to doing software (for a complex tangle of reasons), and I eventually got a job doing Rust stuff at Mozilla.
This also meant that Being Online was a part of my job so I didn't have as much of an inclination to participate here as I used to. It also decentered physics from my life, impacting my participation similarly.
But Stack Exchange used to be a big part of my life. It was an online community I truly enjoyed, and I'd learned so much from it, both in terms of actual physics/etc as well as so many things about community dynamics. A bunch of the stuff I've learned here has been applied to the Rust community at a fundamental level, and it's overall been super helpful. So I couldn't bring myself to stop participating. Instead, I felt like I would eventually have time again, and that would be soon. Sometimes I'd drop by and moderate a couple things and check out the meta and overall be really happy that this place exists and is running smoothly. The comm team sends out these check in emails to semi inactive moderators and that would occasionally spur me into participating a bit again, but it never lasted. I recognized that this wasn't sustainable, but it always felt like "eh, I'll have more time next month".
Of course, tomorrow never comes, and I've only gotten busier over time. I still love this place to pieces, but it's just hard to find time to participate.
Honestly, moderation isn't the ideal way for me to participate anyway, as someone who isn't doing physics all the time anymore I should probably spend more time doing q&a for fun, not moderation. The reason I like moderating is that I really care about communities I care about being pleasant spaces, and I care about it enough to consider it my duty to help. But I'm not helping right now, and if I wanted to I can help quite a bit without having the diamond. There's really no reason for me to still have the diamond, it's just taken this nudge to cause the reflection necessary for me to explicitly realize that :)
So yeah, I definitely should step down. Consider this my resignation letter.
It's been fun!
I hope to eventually have time to participate again. I'll definitely be dropping by now and then.