On Letting Go, Moving On (and Starting Over).

Yes, I am on Substack proper. What?

If there’s one thing I pride myself on, it is admitting when I’m wrong. I mean, it’s never easy, and it is usually accompanied with a hefty side-dish of cope about how I was wrong for the right reasons (more on that next week), but still, I get there in the end.

I’ll write about why I quit tech in the coming weeks in more detail, and this post is mostly for those stragglers who make their way over, so they have something current to look at - not the same year-old article (on an incredibly over-designed website in proportion to the content) about how I was leaving Twitter that has aged like fine milk.

This week marks 30 years since I uploaded my first HTML file to a web server. I’ve done that many times since then. I did it for rock stars, Fortune 500 companies, sole traders and everything in-between since then. It’s a wild ride that I won’t bore you with right now, but Founding Members will get to finally work on that book about the Internet that I have been writing for a decade - like every other damn writing and creative project that stalls because I’m afraid to move on from making websites perfect so that then I can write.

I quit that in 2019 when I realised what my beloved industry had become, and despite my efforts to try and fix it, it became untenable. I have been in a grieving process since then, which has mostly unfolded on my YouTube channel.

I also went to law school.

Obviously, I write thousands of words a day. It just never gets published. I bleed words. I write first drafts with an ease that makes people think I put more thought and care than I did. but it never gets past that, and that’s because I get to tinker with the back-end of my Wordpress site till it’s done. There’s always an update, a bug, a change that can be made and it has become a source of procrastination to the point where I have written 5 articles in 3 years. I bleed words and a backlog of hundreds of articles that never get published.

I will be a lawyer soon. That is, assuming I pass the “fit and proper persons” process with the digital footprint I have painted myself into a corner with. There is no guarantee of that. But, I was wrong for the right reasons and I can’t go back, or round. I have to go through, like I always have.

I go round and round and struggle to get to the fucking point, though.

I have been mouthy about Substack over the years, mostly because I don’t understand why people would think - after all we’ve been through with tech - that there wouldn’t be another bait-and-switch. But also, fuck it. It’s a good product. This is where people are. Matt Mullenweg has completely lost the plot (I will write about this too) and honestly… it’s just time to move on from that phase of my life.

I was having trouble letting go of being in tech. It was such a big part of my identity, and my story, and I’ve been grieving and somewhat in denial about what has happened… and desperately clinging onto something that isn’t coming back.

And the real kicker is that I haven’t even been writing about any of it publicly, so others have beaten me to the punch when I could have positioned myself to be a leading voice in this space. All because I was too busy tinkering with my fucking website.

So, it’s time to move on. It’s hard to move on. But I need somewhere to write stuff down without fucking about. I may even write more about why thatis actually a symptom, and why I am so afraid to post things publicly anymore, because I have about 5 pieces on how my 00s blog ruined my life. That’s for the book, I think.

Anyway, Substack is fine.

Come what may.

I’m moving the domain over soon (I just need to do some housekeeping with my old list), and will be tinkering with aesthetic and branding for a little bit, but this will be the place from now on.

Thanks for reading, Like and Subscribe, blah blah blah. You know the drill. If you’ve been reading me for 30 years… that’s just fucking wild. We’re old now. I love you.

x T