I never learned to grieve.
I lived for decades, opened up my heart to countless people and places and things, lost a lot of them—but I never grieved their loss. I was never able to; I never learned how. I felt sad in the moment, and that was that. The rest, I pushed away. I had to, in order to survive. But, like all defense mechanisms born from trauma, that only gets you so far.
It all adds up.
When the pandemic started, I coincidentally began trauma therapy. I'm still at it, over four years later, because that kind of thing takes time. I've grown a lot as a person since then, and I can tell that I've made a lot of progress in a lot of very important places. But just as someone sitting on a rain-soaked curb watching heavy machinery tear their house down to its foundations because what started as moldy wallpaper turned out to be a cascade of issues running deeper than anyone had ever imagined, I am constantly faced with the realization that there's more. There's always more. It feels unending. But I know that if I keep at it, one day, all this exhausting hard work will end.
And then I'll be able to start rebuilding. The part after an ending, that I never got to see.
But the grieving, even once I start feeling it, even once I start understanding it—as I have been recently, having finally gotten around to that part of my therapeutic journey—the grieving will never end. If I've learned anything it's that it comes and goes, becomes more and less powerful over time, but it never truly ends. Maybe that's why I've been so afraid of starting to feel it this whole time.
It's funny, isn't it? By living my entire life in fear of endings, I've kept ignoring the one thing that never does.
But now I'm feeling it, at long last. And it hurts; it really hurts. But at least there's some relief in it, some release, as the weight of innumerable unfelt losses is being lifted from my shoulders, bit by bit. I'm going to miss a lot of people and places and things, but I won't miss the crushing feeling of all their unprocessed grief.
But I'll miss this place. I'm going to miss it so much.
You can get a lot done in a day, if you put your mind to it. If the stars align.
Looking back on the past 24 hours, the last 24 hours and change of a place that has meant the world to me, I can confidently say I did everything I could to live that day to its fullest. I enjoyed what I had while I had it, I participated in a temporary thing that brought me joy without focusing on the end looming closer and closer. I lived in the moment, at long last, in a way that's so difficult for me to do. I did my best.
The thing they don't tell you about doing your best—something I had to learn by myself, the hard way—is that you're not expected to do it all the time. You can't. It's not reasonable or sustainable. You can only do your best some of the time, and even then, the circumstances have to let you. You can't just do your best, you have to get lucky.
As someone who's designed games for decades, I've come to have a particular perspective on luck. It's a bit like spice; you have to use the right amount or else the result is either bland or unpalatable. But get it right, and you get to enjoy the best of both worlds: players feeling that they deserve their wins, and not blaming themselves for their losses.
So, yeah. That's the energy I've been trying to bring into how I approach my day-to-day. When I do my best, fantastic! I get to be proud of myself. But when I can't, I try not to beat myself up over it. Because sometimes it's not up to me.
I really did my best to help this place thrive! But it still ended. And that's okay.
I'm really grateful so many of us got so much time to say our goodbyes. We got really lucky.
Tonight, I say goodbye, and tomorrow, I get to see what happens next. And unlike so many of the other times I've grappled with loss, this time I'm actually feeling hopeful! Because this place changed me. This place change others. And now, we get to bring that change along with us as we go our separate ways.
Here are some of the ways cohost changed me.
cohost made me aware of my toxic relationship with numbers. Specific kinds of numbers: likes, retweets, followers—social media metrics that get fed into the engagement machine. The number next to a person that tells your brain just how quantifiably important they are. It's so messed up that on practically every other website when I get a new follower there's a big bold number right next to their name telling me how much they matter. I'm so glad this place acted as a great big detox process to finally train me to look at people as people again.
It's so hard to put into words. I understand why some of my friends bounced off this place due to it, but I'll always believe in my heart that if they'd given it a chance they, too, would have come out the other side better for it.
I feel repulsed now, when it happens. When I get a new follower notification and I look at it and instantly I'm bombarded with an Importance Stat. "PersonName wants to read more of your stuff! They're worth this many by the way." I'm actively seeking out ways to blot out those numbers elsewhere now. I don't want my brain to work that way ever again. I get worked up over it, I get emotional just writing these words. I want to see people as people. I want to get a new follower and look at the name and the neat little icon they picked for themselves and have my interest piqued; I want to go check out what they wrote about themselves, what kind of stuff they're putting out into the world, and have that determine whether or not I want them to have a bigger part in my day-to-day. You know, more like the way it works in person.
cohost made me want to be more social in person. After years and years of being convinced that if I only did twitter activism harder then I could solve everyone's problems, it's been such a breath of fresh air to finally realize the importance of meaningful connections, of local actions. because everyone on here didn't have an Importance Number next to their name, it made me dig a little deeper, get to understand them more. And that's something that carried into the world around me; the one that's more local, that I can reach out and touch, that I live in every day.
The absence of numbers—I was real quick to disable the notification amount and turn it to badge-only as soon as that option became available—drove home the fact that I didn't really need what I wrote, what I shared to reach a certain level of engagement or reach or whatever to be valid. It was enough that people were reading. I could get off my high horse of having Posts Go Viral and actually focus on what I was doing instead.
Hell, the fact that this place had pages and was full of hard stops meant that I was naturally encouraged to take breaks and do something else, too! For someone like me whose ADHD makes it so easy to get lost in infinite scrolls, that was a different kind of detox, one that I'm going to try to replicate elsewhere from now on.
cohost made me get a website. I have a website now!! I finally did it! And I've wanted one for AGES! And I have this place to thank for it. I liked the experience I got here so much that I wasn't willing to give it up. I wasn't willing to just stop writing longer posts that are meaningful to me, and adding pictures and formatting for readability and just having fun because I liked to. So now I get to keep it in a place all my own, and thanks to really smart friends and a whole bunch of folks from the communities that sprang up here, I still get to share everything elsewhere. It'll be different, sure; it won't be as easy as it was here. But that's okay. I know what makes me happy now, and I can work a little harder to maintain it, and spread it around.
Losing this place has been a real blow to me. I'm still not done feeling it, I'm still not done grieving—I imagine I won't be for a long time. But thanks to this experience, I'm equipped with the tools and the knowledge to ensure that at the very least, next time I won't lose everything; next time the bonds will be stronger, and the individual social networks will be less load-bearing. I can have my home base online be mine, that I can pack up and rebuild elsewhere if I need to. Because what I made has value!
cohost helped me see the value in what I make. Value that doesn't depend on how many people clicked a button. I can see it now, and it's made me more confident, more able to take care of it. So I'm gonna! On my own terms, as much as possible. I'm really excited.
I'm excited to see the new wave of personal websites and RSS feeds and creations owned by their creators. I don't know how widespread it'll be, or how long it'll last, but it's left me feeling hopeful in a way no other loss of an online place ever has. When twitter started crumbling, everyone scrambled to get their data and then tried to establish presences in other places that felt much the same and offered no better promise of stability. Now I'm seeing so many people in charge of their next place, and working together to build bridges between each other.
Because that's what this place was founded on, wasn't it? Working together. The fact that we were able to build so many relationships and communities in this short a time is a testament that there was something special here; I'm excited to see it spread further. I'm gonna do my part; I'm going to give it my best shot.
I'm going to do my best.
Maybe I'll get lucky; maybe not. Either way, I'll meet tomorrow with love and compassion. Either way, I know I won't be alone. So let's keep at it!
Let's keep making wonderful things together.💙
