I started my first blog in college in 2001: hosted on Blogger, with a clichéd name like A Life Measured Out in Coffee Spoons, affiliated with webrings dedicated to anime, manga, and video games like X/1999 and Angel Sanctuary and Mega Man X and Final Fantasy VII and Xenogears. I wrote about my personal life, college classes, books, writing projects. In my MFA program in 2006, I started an anonymous WordPress blog to vent about adjuncting and the academic job market. By 2008, I started a “professional” WordPress blog—the kind where the domain includes your full name—which eventually became this site.

I cringe a little to think about the content of those blogs, but I’m impressed by my stamina in maintaining them. Back then, I posted fairly regularly. I blogged on and off during my PhD program, but coursework, dissertation writing, and of course disability slowed me down. And as anyone who follows me can see, while I’m generally good at updating this website with academic materials—like access copies of conference talks or publication announcements and links—I’ve blogged much less in real time since becoming #PhDone in 2022.

Naturally, I decided to redesign this blog in the middle of dealing with a series of health crises and while drowning in work thanks to exploitation by Pace University where I’m currently employed, but my radio silence has less to do with disability or academic overwork and more to do with impostor syndrome. (Who cares what I have to say? Who cares about whatever evidence I have to leave behind?)

That said, the sense of impending doom that’s been shadowing me, coupled with my general belief in giving back to my communities, does have me feeling like I should be documenting some of my academic and medical experiences more publicly. To leave resources behind. To leave evidence behind.

Back in 2001, my blog was aimed at college and online-only friends. My later blogs were aimed at academic audiences. My current audience isn’t that large, but most of my followers use this site for its academic and advocacy resources and disability hacks. I was thrilled to see that, but it did make me feel like I needed to exclusively post “useful” things only, which meant I stopped seeing this site as a place for self-reflection. So I stopped blogging about myself.

Coming up on the end of 2023, and probably encouraged by the constant feeling that I’m going to die any day now, I’m starting to think that this isn’t the best way to approach my blog. I don’t want this to be a space where I feel I have to be perfect and useful. I want to continue to publish academic and medical resources, but I also want the brain-dump space of my early Blogger site. I hope this site remains useful in the ways it has been for folks, and I hope that rethinking this approach to blogging will ultimately liberate me to write about the things that are plaguing me, the things that need to be said, but don’t belong in scholarly or creative forums.

Here’s to a return to imperfection and radical vulnerability and a new direction for this blog.