Last night I found out my old blog was dead as I tried to bring back to life my blog that I was using for the past 5 years.
My energy levels are fragile these days, which I am tempted to justify but will refrain from. So naturally my mind jumped to thinking about all the work I would need to put in to remake some pages I loved sharing with people I love: my Montreal recommendations page, my playlists page…old handwritten essays from COVID I typed up, which were fun to reread on cause it feels like I was a child back then…honestly not much else.
Writing out that list of pages to redo I was worried was gonna be super long and seeing how short it is, the act of putting that onto paper just now, fascinatingly alleviates my proactive exhaustion. I’m feeling pretty good now.
After that initial reaction stemmed from my fatigue, another emotional reaction came up, one of mourning the fun little project of having my thoughts and ideas somewhat consistently documented over the years, disappearing forever.
I let myself to feel sad for a bit, and just as cravings rooted in addiction work, when we fully immerse ourselves into the sensations while satisfying a craving, the satisfied craving no longer dictates my emotional and mental direction. In other words, I got over my sadness pretty quickly, which left bandwidth for a new thought pattern to surface. This idea comes from listening many years ago to Gabor Mate talk about addictions and adverse childhood experiences, back when he was more lucid and made more sense.
Meditating consistently-ish for a decade means I’ve developed a moderate ability to be aware of my thoughts in real-time, and at times, being able to deliberately opt in or opt out of whatever has popped into my mind.
In this case, I had empty mental space after the sadness of losing my personal blog, and my mind stayed empty enough for there to be a gap in my thinking. In this gap, I found myself finding another way to frame this loss in a way that is equally true and is more enabling. This idea comes from my own reflections on choosing what we believe in, and Byron Katie’s The Work.
The belief I thought of that enables me to be in motion and exercise my generative drive, is to see the disappearance of my previous blog as an opening for my current Self to more fully emerge. With a blank slate, I am less bogged down by previous posts and ideas, and subconsiously trying to maintain or fit a narrative or image created by many past Selves of mine.
With this new framing, I’m actually excited with all my old posts no longer existing, while also not lying to myself about it (I think). I’m looking forward to clarifying my thinking by being unapologetically myself here, and writing more often in this quiet little corner of the internet, where you get to opt into my ideas as you wish.
My only ask of you, is that you are also unapologetically yourself when you visit my home. This space is an invitation for you to retreat from whatever limiting constraints your life imposes on you, and inhale the openness and ease that I hope exists here. As such, it will mean the world to me if you reciprocate in the dialogue I open up for us, by commenting whenever the spirit moves you.
Thanks in advance.
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