When I made the decision to transition away from my comfortable, taken-care-of, type-and-click blog set-up, I thought I was more than ready for what I anticipated as a marginal increase in time and energy investment. And then, immediately, I reconsidered, when I found myself spending hours tinkering instead of writing, without much to show for it. And then I balked when I realised the implications of giving up the spoon-fed trickle of readers who found me in their feed without me having to do anything. The lost borrowed authority. The gained personal responsibility.
Luckily, it was too late to go back, but I had a much starker choice now, between letting it die, or giving it life. And I thought for a while there I was too cowardly to give it life. I thought that my silence may be heralding its death. That I’d been wrong. That I’d made a mistake. That I should have, in fact, kept playing it safe. That I wasn’t capable of anything more.
But, like I previously mentioned, this blog is often a micro reflection of my macro experience. It took longer than I thought it should, and I’ve been quieter and less productive than I thought I should be during the process, but what I’ve actually been doing is preparing to give life to something new. Because I’m done playing it safe. I’m done borrowing authority and abdicating personal responsibility. I need to try to live for myself. At long fucking last. I don’t know how this precise endeavour fits into that, because I don’t know very much at all about what lies before me. I don’t exactly have a plan. But the most beautiful decisions of my life were never part of a plan.
There will be pain. There will be struggle. There will likely be profound failure and even regret. But I will try not to suffer, and instead embrace the journey. I have to do this. It may look like a sad mistake for a long time yet, but I will try to remind myself that there was only ever really one choice.
So maybe I broke my blog. And maybe I’m about to break everything. But it’s worth breaking.