“If you want to stat your opinion without any opportunity for response or argument or push back or growth, write a blog”
— Celeste Headlee, Writer and Radio Host

Lots has happened the last three months. I had three eye surgeries this summer. My husky Revy passed, and we evicted our mountain acreage tenants because the mess they created and the damage they inflicted required two people, seven days, and a front-end loader to clean up. Turns out if you confine two cows and two pigs for two years in the same spot, things really pile up.

I’ve been volunteering, writing, editing, business coaching, and project managing, which has kept me occupied and content. That work allows me to pay some necessary bills, and some unnecessary ones. Like the boat repairs and upgrades.

But that’s not really what held me back from writing and posting here. If I were to name the fear it would be that I am shouting into the void. That I am not unique, or special, or have anything interesting to say.

I want to tell my story. I want to share my knowledge. The best way I’ve learned to do that is to help other people (not an audience, not a market, actually people I’ve sat down with) tell their own story. Not make it about me, but to be of service to others.

It took me a while to figure that out. But once I did, well, here I am. If I’m going to position myself as an expert, pontificating in the woods with all the other lost souls, trying to find someone to listen, when my real strength, meaning, and energy¹ comes from supporting humans face-to-face, then I wasn’t going to be very happy.

And with the continued enshittification of the internet, it’s been a long time since I trusted any social media platform to do more than try to sell me stuff, or offer me up as a target for marketing. So I’m pulling out the way-back machine, travelling to 1995, and making this blog my own website. I’m going to start treating this space more as my online journal.

I’m still going to write, when I don’t have paying gigs keeping me hoping or a warm afternoon to float on a boat or an orchard to tend to. I don’t know what it’s going to look like yet, but I think it’s still going include practical management “stuff”, plus fictional writing, opinion pieces, promoting worthy causes, book reviews, and other stuff that interests, or has been helpful, to me.

If it’s in some way helpful or entertaining or insightful or inciting to someone else, fantastic. I just know I need to place to put down all the stuff that’s rolling around in my head. So I have more room for new stuff. Kind of like cleaning out the attic.

Welcome to my brain’s garage sale.

¹ Having spent some in the trenches of management coaching and strategic planning, I will do us all but especially myself the mercy of eschewing words such as “mission” and “passion” when possible. You’re welcome.

Celeste Headlee’s TED Talk can be found here: 10 ways to have a better conversation. Highly recommended. Gives an actionable list of then things you can do to be a great listener, but you only have to do one to get better.