He was timid at first but friendly, and came right up to us when we approached. We took him home and fed him. I was reading a lot of Salinger then, so I named him Holden.

Over the years, he and I grew up together — me through the rest of my 20s, and him into old age.

We traveled up and down the east coast, hiking cities and waterfalls; camping among canyon coyotes or highway trucks.

We developed our own language — I knew his wants and needs, and he knew where we were going and (of course) when we'd eat.

He'd snuggle close and keep watch in our tent. I'd pet his nose until he fell asleep. He'd be my morning alarm clock. I'd make sure he never got separated from the pack.

Throughout it all, he had many other humans raising and caring for him over the years, through friendships and relationships. They all gave him the love he deserved, and helped make him into the wonderful companion he came to be.

From Florida to New York City, he experienced so much, and was a part of so many lives.

Last night, a friend said Holden was lucky I stole him from the woods that late October day — and that I've served him well.

But he did just the same for me in our 10 years together, right until his last breath. We were both lucky to have found each other, and I'm so thankful for all the time I had with my sweet boy.

A growing collection of photos on Snap.as: Adventures with Holden.

The Musing Studio Suite

It was always my grand vision to have a set of standalone, but interconnected, tools for publishing on the web. There’s Write.as for words, Snap.as for photos, Submit.as for submissions, and Remark.as for socializing.

While I’m going to continue building in this direction as it makes sense for our hosted tools, I’m more focused on a new approach, particularly for WriteFreely as a product: having a unified platform.

The WriteFreely Platform

It’s become clear over time that in order to make WriteFreely (and Write.as) as useful as it can be, it needs to have a much more unified experience.

As a user, you shouldn’t need to go to a completely separate photo-hosting app just to add a photo to your blog post — you should be able to seamlessly upload it as you write. You shouldn’t need to switch to another site to interact with readers — their comments and discussions should be shown directly on your post.

This is especially true for our self-hosted, open source tool, WriteFreely. Today, it’s extremely easy for a sysadmin to spin up a single WriteFreely blog or multi-user community. All you need is a VPS and a domain name — there really isn’t much more to configure.

Until now, I’ve left complementing features like photo hosting out of WriteFreely entirely, as I figured out what the best approach is product-wise — e.g. do we want SnapFreely, SubmitFreely, etc? Or have it all in WriteFreely?

At this point, I don’t think it makes sense for our self-hosted product to be chopped up into multiple components like our hosted tools are. Instead, I want to bring all those tools into a single application in WriteFreely.

Design

On one side, the WriteFreely / Write.as UX has been long-due for an overhaul. It’s still built around anonymous posts as the default product that results from using this tool. The UI assumes you’re mostly just hammering out an essay and sharing it as an anonymous post — not as a blog post, not to repeat readers, and not for the purpose of hearing feedback.

While that still works for many people, and we’re one of the few products out there that stick to this “less is more” idea, we also enable so many other things — and we need to support them as well.

New and Improved

To get there, I’ll need to develop some important and long-requested features. These are some of the ones that are top of my mind.

Drafts

One part of this will involve full support for private drafts. Today, “drafts” are just anonymous posts — a hacky solution to a real problem. First-class support for drafts will help writers build up work over time and across devices, compose multiple posts at once, safely preview posts, schedule them for publishing, collaborate with their team before publishing, and ensure their writing is truly private throughout the process.

As a very far-off aside, this may evolve into another simple tool like Draft.as. But first and foremost, it’ll be baked into WriteFreely and Write.as.

Post Management

Along with drafts will come better post management. Right now, you have to fumble through all the blog posts you’ve ever written, in their full form, just to manage them. There’s no way to search old posts on the platform itself, making it difficult to build up an interconnected archive over time. Instead of richly growing over the years, your blog becomes more difficult to manage, and ultimately less useful. This will be one of my first priorities to fix.

It’ll probably involve a dedicated section for managing posts.

More Comments

After launching Remark.as early last year, I got some great feedback on what people want from a “social” side to the platform. Now, especially with the fediverse growing so rapidly after Twitter changed ownership, I’d like to help people socialize through their Write.as / WriteFreely publication on the open web.

For anyone using our hosted tools, this will start with Remark.as getting full support for replies directly from the fediverse. This will help more people interact with your writing from outside of Write.as.

Then WriteFreely will get the same ability, especially once adequate moderation tools are built out.

What do you think? What have I missed? Discuss...

#WriteFreely #WriteAs #MusingStudio #product #fediverse

Usually I'll work, write, or read on a long trip like this, but this time I just put on some music and watched the swamps, small towns, and Spanish moss-covered oaks pass me by. I took some pictures out the dirt-covered window of my sleeping car room. I gladly helped the lady across the hall connect to the wifi (she asked because “All young people know how to do it”).

After a nice dinner in the dining car, I sipped a beer that I'd packed, and eventually climbed into my top bunk, comforted by a bedside net that would catch me if the train ever tried to roll me off.

In the morning, the gentle swaying that had rocked me to sleep had somehow ceased, and the long stillness woke me. We were stopped south of Richmond, VA as the engineer hit their 12-hour driving limit, and we waited for a new one to come on board.

The lady across the hall asked our car attendant, Sonny, how late we'd be getting into Philadelphia — her husband would be waiting there. I poured some coffee from a pot at the end of the car, and watched the sun peek out over the hills from back in my room.

We eventually lurched forward, coasting into the Richmond station. I stepped off to stretch and get some air. Birds were chirping from rafters above the platform; it was warmer than I expected.

Embarking again, I went to the dining car for breakfast — an omelette, muffin, yogurt, and orange juice. The server echoed my feelings about sleeping better on a moving train. Outside the window, marsh slowly turned into concrete and commuter train stations; the suburbs I grew up in; the towns I used to drive to.

Past DC, the world sped by faster after they had swapped our diesel engine for electric. It was smoother now, on some of this country's only “higher-speed rail” tracks — we were going 108 mph.

It was nice to end a long trip this way, with a 1,000-mile interlude of calm. When I stepped off and into the crowds of midtown Manhattan, the calm stayed. Cars revved and honked, someone yelled, and a pigeon asked me for food. It was good to be home.

Shot on a Leica M10 Monochrom.

Discuss...

#trains #photos #photography #blackAndWhite

I went to Founder Summit in Asheville, NC after my last micropost in October. It was a great trip. I met a ton of new people and reconnected with many I met last time. Being in NYC now, I've been able to keep those connections in person with people who live here or pass through, which has been really nice.

After a year of shooting film again, at the end of the month I got a new digital camera, just so I can shoot more and reserve film for when I really want it. I think it's helping with my technical intuition; the rest needs to happen behind the camera.

November was a good month for business and the open web, as Elon Musk dispelled our social media illusions and set Twitter on fire. Write.as revenue tripled that month. I released the next version of WriteFreely, after a year-plus development hiatus. Our Mastodon instance, Writing Exchange, tripled in size and saw magnitudes more activity before I closed it to new registrations. It's now fully community-funded, thanks to the wonderful bunch of people gathered there.

Offline, I had some writing published in my friend Becka's zine, alongside many wonderful writers and friends from my weekly writing group in Bushwick.

My photography group continued doing bi-weekly photowalks, even through some bitterly cold days going into December. Inspired by the people around us and the work we've been absorbing this year, we thought it'd be nice to publish a zine as well, featuring pictures from all of our photowalks.

We spent November putting that together. Different members of the group built custom submission software, picked photos, did the layout, found printers and venues — and it came out beautifully. We had a small launch party in Williamsburg last week to celebrate and pass around these photos we could finally hold, ready to be signed like a yearbook. In 2023, we plan to keep publishing every season / quarterly.

Now I'm packing up my tiny apartment to move two blocks away, to a slightly bigger place. I needed office space, and room to paint and write and have friends over. This year has been a meandering one — moving to an entirely new city, knowing no one, then finding friends and building new communities; exploring creative, physical work again; stepping back from software and digital networks.

This next year will be a little more focused for me, creatively, socially, and professionally. Write.as and Musing Studio will have my attention again, especially with the current social media moment (and the higher rent). As I recently tweeted (archived), I'm actually excited about the web right now — enough to sit down and code again (lol). The prevailing winds are finally to our back, as far as everything I've been yammering on about and building for the last 8 years — and everyone who has been doing the same.

Otherwise I'll keep gradually taking on paid creative work, photography and writing. I'll keep growing and crossing the real-life communities I'm in. Money has been tight since moving here, but I'll keep trying to make it work. Life is good, and the future is bright.

Happy holidays, happy new year 🎊

Discuss...

On that day, after tapping the ad, I dug in to their website and realized there were more apps — and you can pretty easily write new ones yourself. I thought about it for a day or two. Then I went back and bought it from my computer.

After a small wait, mine finally arrived yesterday. I set it up within minutes via the accompanying smartphone app, and added all the screens I wanted to it. It was an incredibly smooth process. Then, of course, I started writing some code for it.

I knew this device would be perfect for passively displaying information that I’d otherwise have to go out of my way to find. The fact that it can update over the course of the day and doesn’t demand my attention is absolutely perfect for me — even if I still find myself glancing at it, just because it looks so good.

Write.as monitoring app

Naturally, the first use case I thought of was for viewing overall activity on Write.as. With this, I could get a general pulse on how many people were using the platform at any given time, and make an otherwise remote and hidden website come alive more for me.

So I wrote a small service that returns some stats on current usage: recent posts, users, and photos. Then I switched to my computer to work on the code for the Tidbyt app. Here’s what it looks like on my computer, using Tidbyt’s pixlet tool.

The layout system they have in place is really easy to grasp — and the examples perfectly cover everything I’ve needed to do: adding images, base64-encoding them, and then pulling in data over HTTP.

It’s incredibly interesting to work with a display that’s only 64x32 pixels. For example when making this app, I’d started by resizing our standard “w.” logo, which turned out fine. But eventually I just redrew it, pixel by pixel, to make it more crisp.

The biggest hurdle was learning the workflow, which didn’t immediately match my expectations. First you write the app, use it to render a screen, and then push that image to the device. Since these apps don’t actually run on the device, I just set up a cronjob and a bash script on my computer to repeat this process for me every so often.

Website hit counter

Next, I thought about my personal site, baer.works. I have a hit counter on that site — a little program I wrote with a simple API. It took just a few minutes to pull in that number and turn it that into a screen I could display on my bookshelf. For a little extra style, I accompanied it with that site’s browser icon.

I’m also using that hit counter on another site, for the photography meetup / community I organize. So I combined both of those into a single screen, with colors from the Photo Stroll site added in. Here’s what it looks like in real life.

Future

Two other ideas came to me while playing around with this device: an app to see revenue from Stripe — one I’d probably develop for the community — and one that displays headlines from an RSS feed. I was honestly surprised to find neither of these developed already.

The trouble with the RSS feed app is that Tidbyt doesn’t allow community apps with fully user-configurable URLs, to prevent abuse from their servers (since that’s where published apps run from). Of course this is reasonable, though unfortunate since more people might find this app useful. But I plan to build it for myself and share the source code anyway. Naturally, I want this app so I can see latest headlines from Read Write.as.

My last thought, since I have a few of these personal apps running now, is to make a desktop program that can manage and update multiple Tidbyt apps. It would (I assume) replicate what the Tidbyt backend does, and what my local cronjobs are doing, but make it easy to self-host and configure. All of this I’d plan to open source and share with the community.

Final thoughts

I’m a really huge fan of this trend away from multi-purpose computing devices — from this to the Freewrite to the reMarkable. We otherwise swim in do-everything computers daily; many of us own two or more, and marketers love them as places to find us and sell us more shit.

To me, single-purpose devices like this are a welcome respite from the trashpile that is modern, internet-connected computing. While less “capable,” in the salesman’s sense that every device must do everything, they feel more fitting to our finite human capacity for attention and focus. They give us connectivity and electro-powers without abusing us, as smartphone and app makers so often do.

It’s joyfully ironic, then, to discover a device like the Tidbyt through an Instagram ad, after that great advertising machine has successfully stalked me over the years and determined I might fit the audience for this product.

But the Tidbyt is a great device for connecting to the digital world without getting subsumed by it. It is what computing should be: grounded in reality (with its beautiful design), and completely focused on a clear, singular purpose. The fact that it’s easily programmable is what makes this a truly perfect device, and I’m looking forward to building more for it.

Discuss...

To remain human-centric, ideally services wouldn’t bend social interactions to fit a chosen technical design. Instead, you would just publish to the network you choose, freely pick your persona for each place (how you present yourself), and keep control of your content (i.e. you still have it if a network goes offline, and you can move it from place to place). For bonus points, you could also build dynamic new social interactions on the network.

This idea isn’t revolutionary; we’ve seen most of these things in one form or another. But have we ever had it all in one place?

A Social App

From a user perspective, I think this would entail a “Social” client, similar to web browsers or any chat app like Slack or Discord. On a technical level, it would:

• speak several different purpose-made, standardized protocols (e.g. one for private chatting and another for public social networking)
• connect to many communities (not tied to this server or that chat group), and let the user seamlessly switch between them and hang out wherever they want
• store user’s various usernames / handles / profiles / personas (e.g. one for friends, one for family, one for a professional network)

The client is critical here — especially for data ownership and a seamless experience across networks. It brings us closer to the idea that the web itself is the public space, social network, etc. It means you can truly own your content, because it’s not just stored on FaceCorp’s servers or permanently etched into some blockchain, but also kept on your own physical device.

Multiple identities are also crucial. Humans present themselves differently in different social contexts, and our social platforms should reflect that. And as far as I can see, privacy and data consent on social networks depends on the ability to interact with any name you choose — a digital equivalent to the relative anonymity you enjoy on a busy city street.

Abstraction

Basically, this new design is a higher level of abstraction for what we know as social media right now.

You’re no longer logging into Facebook, then logging into Twitter. Instead you’re opening your “Social” app and checking in on family (powered by the Facebook network), then posting a quick thought to friends on the Twitter network. You’re joining a conversation in your weekly book club chat (powered by Slack or Discord). You’re commenting on videos delivered via the YouTube or TikTok network. You’re publishing an essay on your personal website and sending it out to newsletter followers (powered by Substack or Mailchimp).

All along, you never leave the dedicated app. You post from whichever identity you want — even using the same name to interact across different networks. And the work you produce is saved in a standard way that makes it possible to open in other apps you already use (like for photo or video editing), and to take it to any other online service (like a different blogging or newsletter platform).

As a user, you get to pick the “Social” app that fits you best. Maybe one has a nicer design than the rest. One might display ads, while others don’t. One might be made for desktop, and another for mobile. One could be oriented toward a niche like social media marketers, and have the relevant features to assist them.

Business Model

If we’re avoiding the same old advertising business model of today’s platforms, we can find some examples of places where people might pay.

First, there’s the “Social” app. If everyone is speaking common protocols, developers and companies can bring their own ideas to the table in building the interface / gateway app to this new social world. There are opportunities to provide more “premium” experiences on the client-side, or interfaces tailored toward certain niches (e.g. the marketers mentioned above). But outside of that, from an adoption standpoint, most of these apps will probably want to be as free and seamless as possible — just like web browsers are.

Most business opportunities would probably lie in the same place they do today: with online services, hosting, and networks / memberships. For example, WordPress.com could continue hosting blogs and personal sites, and charging for it — you’d just publish there from your “Social” app. Substack can continue taking a percentage of what newsletter writers make on their platform. Twitter can still offer a free network with a premium tier that unlocks more functionality (albeit on the protocol level now, instead of the application level).

Niche network and community membership — especially paid — is an interesting trend that I think would benefit the most from this new setup. As communities form on these networks, they get more useful — easier for communities to find new members, and easier for people to join new communities. And if the “Social” app integrates payments, it could make it easier for users to join premium communities.

Broadly, end users and community members have the most to gain — they no longer have to keep Slack, Discord, Whatsapp, Telegram, their web browser, etc. open just to keep up with all the different communities they’re already a part of today.

Today

Interestingly enough, all of these ideas are entirely within our reach right now.

None of this requires tearing down the web and building a whole new “web3” around shaky virtual currency. We don’t all need to buy virtual reality goggles to access a phantasmagoric “metaverse.” While there’s always space for these far-fetched ideas, it’s worth paying attention to what we can leverage on the web, as it is today, as billions of people actually use it in the real world.

There are already long-standing, concerted efforts to build some of the protocols and clients that could support this new, decentralized form of “social networking.” For example, Matrix could support private messaging and other real-time communication. ActivityPub could support public social networking — and it already hosts a vibrant ecosystem of platforms with a network of over 5 million people, enabling the exact kind of interactions I outlined above.

Tapping into these, and any other protocols that further this goal, could help us build more humane social spaces on the web. We can build spaces that cultivate social trust instead of offloading to “trustless” systems; ones that lack the surveillance imperative driving the ad platforms of today; ones that are formed more democratically and run more communally.

Thoughts or ideas? Discuss...

#web #community #fediverse

Now that I’m here, I feel like I’m re-orienting — not to my surroundings, which are somehow familiar, but to myself, which is somehow foreign. Now that I’m in a place that feels so right, who am I as a person? I think my sense of self — who I am and where I’m going — has been the biggest casualty of the last 9 years.

I keep coming back to one theme: acting outside my “normal”; doing things I’ve been uncomfortable doing — things I often avoid because of that fact. I feel like I’ve wasted a lot of time over the last few years, without a clear direction or personal purpose I could really put my finger on. Much of life has felt like merely staying the course, even as the will to “suck all the marrow out of life” remained tucked away in a dusty old box in my mind’s basement.

I’m unpacking that box now. I pull out an old notebook — words from when I was 17 years old, learning and striving for something self-evident, without all the pressures of a modern life, cut off from your history and community, expected to make it in the world all on your own.

Our world can be a lonely place, from the car-dominated suburbs where I grew up, to my adult home in the deep South, where neighbors are afraid of speaking truthfully for fear of their gun-toting neighbors.

The city, finally, isn’t lonely. There is energy and humanity all around, often willing to engage if you’re ready to. I’ve never lived somewhere I felt I could be a human until I got here, and I don’t plan to waste the chance.

One thing that’s caught me by surprise over the years has been how my business, started for enjoyment and continued for freedom, eventually turned into staying the course. Eventually duties come with any serious enough activity, and so they’ve arrived with this endeavor. I’m not averse to duty, but I always need to understand how it squares with a duty to myself — the contents of those old boxes in my mental basement, that I carry around no matter where I go.

I recently watched a video about not making New Year’s resolutions, but thinking in terms of a theme, and seasons of life. My current season is one of wanting to stretch myself creatively and socially, and I’m finally in the physical place to do that. But I still need to get there mentally — and that partly means rethinking, or redoing, how I do business. Or rather this venture.

In my mental office, hauled around for 7 years of building this product, I have boxes filled with every request ever asked for me. Every bit of information on how this thing could be useful to someone, and every time I’ve said “yes.”

I need to start chucking those boxes.

Ultimately, I need to start delegating, and giving these ideas away so that someone else might run with them, and the world can still benefit. I have no need to hoard them. They stack toward my ceiling. Their weight is too much to carry on my own; they take up too much space for a single moving truck.

In the future I see now, I’ve abandoned my old ideas of “growing a business.” At this point, I don’t want to utter the word “business” when I wake up. I’m eschewing my personal label as an “entrepreneur” — that’s not what I want to be. I want to liberate myself from this dull pursuit of more money. I have my basic needs met, and it’s enough. Any growth that comes will be nothing but a bonus — but I’m no longer focused on it as my main pursuit.

With this thought, answers come effortlessly. A focus. An idea of what’s actually important, for myself and this venture. I’m ready for it, and open to whatever discoveries might come from a mental downsizing to match the physical one I made when moving here.

I can’t put it all into words yet, but I know it’ll bring together these parts of me longing for life, for freedom, for connection — without effort or force. That’s what feels right.

Discuss...

Seems to me that a space made up of humans is always going to have (very human) lying and deception, and the spread of misinformation in the form of simply not having all the facts straight. It's a fact of life, and one you can never totally design or regulate out of existence.

I think the closest “solution” to misinformation (incidental) and disinformation (intentional) online is always going to be a widespread understanding that, as a user, you should be inherently skeptical of what you see and hear digitally.

Nothing over decades of the internet's development has changed this fact — not even with high-trust activities that now occur there, like shopping and banking, where you still need to be cautious about who you give your banking information to, for example.

On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog, or if you're talking to one on the other end, or if it's a dog publishing a blog about why you should always give your steaks to them, or if it's a social network run by dogs that lets other members of their pack bark endlessly about how cats are ruining the neighborhood, etc.

As long as human interactions are mediated by a screen (or goggles in the coming “metaverse”), there will be a certain loss of truth, social clues, and context in our interactions — clues that otherwise help us determine “truthiness” of information and trustworthiness of actors. There will also be a constant chance for middlemen to meddle in the medium, for better or worse, especially as we get farther from controlling the infrastructure ourselves.

That’s why this is far from absolving platforms for their role in spreading mis- and disinformation. Many of the design decisions they've made help give information its credibility, e.g. via automated curation and popularity metrics, and they could just as deliberately design their software to make this harder to game or weaponize. For example, on social platforms, it could be as simple as removing the number of “upvotes,” “likes,” and “follows” you see — little numbers on a screen that nonetheless signal social legitimacy, both for accounts (whether dog, robot, or human) and their posts, in the low-fidelity social space that is the internet.

Above all, I think it’s important to consider root causes and worldviews not grounded in tech when it comes to “solving” this problem. More technology and more fact-checking won’t solve it, at least without causing brand new problems. Think about the backlash to social media post warning labels, especially throughout the pandemic and 2020 US election, and the ensuing “censorship-free” platforms promising its users an improved monoculture of people and ideas.

We also have to consider the spreading distrust in our institutions, paired with the current media and political landscape (especially in the US) that promises easy answers to a complex world. The tech industry is yet another demagogue playing old tunes on “human progress” and what is or isn’t “the future.” We should openly question it, and build again from the bottom-up, where real progress always starts.

What do you think? Discuss...

#internet #web #misinformation #disinformation #socialMedia

I tweeted this morning about how our current 5-year plan discount turns this month into a bit of a “fundraising” event for our bootstrapped business:

This is the second year we've done this promotion and it's really turned February into a bit of a "fundraising" month for us. https://t.co/Y01gmsYWzu

— matt.baer.works (@ilikebeans) February 14, 2022

It helps because many people are happy to grab this deal — which comes out to $3/month over 5 years, or just 33% of what they’d normally pay month-to-month — and we get a quick influx of cash, and some extra cushion in the bank account.

The multi-year subscription makes a lot of sense for a product like ours. A personal blog isn’t something most people use every single day, like a TV or music streaming service might be. It isn’t a gym membership you have to dedicate yourself to. You might not even use it every single month.

So when renewal time comes around, this is easily a service people can discard, even if for a bit. And we see this a good bit — times get a little tighter financially, someone hasn’t written anything in the past few months, people leave and come back after a while, etc. But if you just have to make the financial commitment one time, it’s easier to make the decision, incorporate this tool into your life, and then just use it when needed, and leave it when it’s not. Like a hammer or any other tool.

Especially if writing is a hobby and enjoyable pastime, I think the mental load of an automatically-recurring transaction just to conduct that pastime really diminishes it. It adds the rigid processes of scheduling and accounting on top of daydreaming, and eventually turns those processes into a prerequisite for creation.

It might be similar to creating non-digital art — paintings, drawings, film photography, etc. But even then you’re consenting to each financial transaction. Unless it’s your profession, you probably wouldn’t subscribe to recurring deliveries of film, canvases, or paint. You buy them as needed. You paint over old paintings when times are tight and you didn’t quite like that one, anyway. You draw on napkins when you run out of paper.

There aren’t perfect parallels between these “analog” and digital creation processes. But I think it’s crucial to think about how our business motivations and requirements affect the people using this creative tool, and the things they create. All is interconnected.

#business #writeas

I assimilated but never lost youthful yearning. I took my first trip abroad the year I bought the house. I’d have to count how many times I’ve left since; how many times I drove 7 hours north just to hike the closest mountains; how many times I took a train up the coast. Deep down, I always felt better leaving than coming back.

In truth, one I rarely speak here out of courtesy, I’ve never felt like I fully belonged in this place. Even with great friends, partners, lovers, and neighbors along the way. This place never totally fit me, nor I it. But I still tried to love it for what it was — if anything, so time wouldn’t pass me by.

A place on earth isn’t everything, of course, and more often it’s just a reflection of yourself. It can be fresh one day and terrible the next, depending on your mood. It can be so dull that the grass is always greener elsewhere. But over time, it averages out into a more stable feeling you can trust. Over eight years I’ve realized this place isn’t really bad, it’s just not the place I want or need.

There was always a part of me that I resisted letting go of, for some reason. Maybe it was gut instinct, Past Me knowing what Future Me would need, even if I could never express it. At this point, I still can’t explain it, but I have to trust that path I unknowingly laid for myself.

So I’m heading to New York City. I’ve always missed winter and the change of seasons since leaving Virginia. I want culture and diversity. I’ve loved New York since I first visited as an adult 14 years ago, and every time I’ve gone since. I wanted to live there after college, if nothing else came my way. But unlike then, I finally have a plan and the means now. I’m incredibly fortunate for that — and I have this place in the South, and the people here, to thank for it.

Now, after years of accumulating stuff in a house too big for me, I’m reducing my possessions to only what I need — my desk and chair, a bike and stereo, computer and notebooks, some paintings and books. Whatever fits in a rented 4’x8’ trailer can come, and the rest I’ll get rid of. It’s always how I preferred to live — farther from excess, closer to only what I need. All that travel made this clear to me, and gave me a taste of a more centered life whenever I’d leave my home in the South. Now my everyday environment might match that wide-eyed, uncomplicated traveling mind.

It’s sad to leave everyone I’ve come to love here. Many have become family, and took care of me like their own. These past several years have been full of wonderful things I never would’ve expected — starting with the city I found myself in. But sometimes what you need most, for a time, are the things you don’t expect at all. That was this place, and these people, for me.

At the same time, it’s hard to capture what this moment means, now, starting a new year in a place I’ve longed for, for so long. Making a rare decision that’s entirely my own, and can’t be shaken by any doubt around me. I’m looking forward to the challenge; to growing again as a person; to what unexpected things I’ll find.

I haven’t been this excited or hopeful in a long time.

#personal #moving