cascading space

Moving In With Bear

I’ve been pretty quiet online these past few months. Besides the whole current events fiasco, the main reason for that has been that my site’s been broken. I wanted to share a major lesson I was forced to learn during that time. (No it’s not “don’t break your site, dingus”, though I definitely learned that one too.)

Mental health has been top of mind for me lately, and I’ve realized that writing is among my major creative outlets. To do this, I’d pull up my website and play around with my drafts or make more. For the past few months, this system was busted.

Back in December I thought to myself, “I’ll rebuild my website, and I’ll make it so I can write posts more easily!” DevOps and back-end stuff is not my forte, so this was going to be a friction-filled project no matter how well I prepared.

Long story short, I burned out, and I wasn’t able to complete the project the way I wanted. And with the burnout and technical issues combined, I couldn’t post for months. Current events and a busy time at my day job didn’t help things at all.

Not having access to a creative outlet took a toll on me, made worse by being burned out. So, I spent the past few months mostly offline. Take it from me, don’t wait to self-care till that's your only option. Unplugging is good for your brain, but it’s best if you make it a part of your routine before you get close to burning out.

When I recovered, I knew what the main problem to tackle was: I had to remove as much friction as possible between me and my healthy outlets.

I scrapped my whole rebuild project. As a front-end designer, maintaining a back-end was always going to be friction for me. I eventually settled on moving things to Bear Blog, and wow, am I glad I did! I’m free now to focus on my favorite parts of a website: the writing and the design.

My drafts folder is recovering nicely, and I’m actually posting again. I might actually figure out what I want on the home page, haha! I originally wanted to host an art gallery here as well, but that’s now a different project. One that won’t turn my online house into a construction zone.

Anyway, let this struggle be a lesson to y’all: don’t put barriers between yourself and your outlets. Even if you don’t use the outlets much (I wasn’t exactly posting on a regular schedule before), just having them available is a huge mental load off. Practice self-care, like for real. It won’t do any good to start exercising once you’re bedridden - exercising when you “don’t need to” protects you from those times.

Love yourself, y’all! ❤️

#blogging #meta #web dev #writing