it's strange-- I'm kind of at peace with the fact that cohost is ending. I'm bummed about it obviously, there's no other place like it out here; but at the same time I'm not... devastated, as many others seem to be. as I assumed I would be when the news dropped.
cohost has felt like such an incredible lightning-in-a-bottle moment, and I feel really incredibly lucky that I got to be here for it. I've made some really great connections and friendships, and I really hope that we can all find each other again in other places. at the same time, I'm sort of excited to see where I go from here-- I'm starting a new job, I'm getting a lot of my health concerns figured out, and I'm repairing my interpersonal relationships, and like... it's actually kind of exciting now, to have so much to keep track of that's not social media. it's not overwhelming anymore; I'm coping and living and THRIVING, and I haven't felt this in tune with my own life since before the internet was even widely available.
I think there's much to be said for the fact that I got on cohost not long after my mental breakdown, and cohost has been here for me during my entire recovery period. I came to cohost in the middle of one of the hardest times of my entire life, when I was making a concerted effort to completely change my unhealthy relationship with social media. and I am speaking with full honesty when I say that it was this website's calming atmosphere and complete abandonment of algorithmic bullshit that helped me heal from the compulsion to seek numbers and validation from strangers. now that I'm in a much healthier place than I was 2 years ago, I feel like I'm that much more capable of letting go.
I'm gonna miss it here a lot. no other website has ever been like cohost, and I doubt there will ever be another place quite like it. but I'm also finding that as I develop my life skills, I have less and less time for scrolling through memes anyway-- and less motivation to, now that I've found so much in my offline life that's worth living for. I'm not afraid of what will happen to me next month when the site goes read-only, or at the end of the year when everything goes to archive. I think I'm going to keep on living, bigger and better than ever. I really hope that everyone I've met here does the same.