I’ve abandoned writing on this blog for nearly five years now. Surprisingly, I still get a few hundreds of unique visitors daily (?!) for posts on here that I’d have thought are entirely irrelevant by now.
In a classic case of procrastination I had told myself that I can’t blog until I had fixed a few things…
- I wanted to move off my current hosting service – a shared GoDaddy service – over to my own servers on DigitalOcean. It’d be cheaper, more customisable service for me. It’s an item that has been sitting in my todo list with a due date of “next week” for all of these years. The hosting service restrictions (on the version of PHP installed on the server) were preventing me from upgrading my version of WordPress and I wanted to resolve this.
- I also told myself that running my own server means I’d need to get it up and running securely. This was partly for intellectual curiosity in doing all the things I’ve normally been doing as security and hardening best practice at work for cloud deployments. A simple switch seemed long. (Did I really need a high availability Kubernetes cluster with media offloaded to a CDN? Probably not.)
- I wanted to shift my domain name away from the ankurb.info domain to something new, without breaking any links. That takes a bit of database work and loads of re-checking.
- I really wanted to change the design template for the blog. I didn’t feel “at home” with the old design, and yes I know it’s a simple task to switch out. I didn’t feel like it made sense without doing everything else in terms of housekeeping above.
- Whenever I did feel like writing, such as this blog post, I ended up using Medium. I loved the writing experience on Medium, which was distraction-free in comparison to the old version of WordPress I was stuck to.
More than anything to do with the technology though, I felt as if I didn’t have the headspace between personal and work life to write any more. I was already writing loads for work. I didn’t feel like I had the energy to do that during weekends.
And to be honest, the immediate but empty gratification of rolling into a hunched ball on my bed and watching another round of whatever was the latest obsession du jour on Netflix. I also felt guilty that these binge-watching sessions were often accompanied by binge-eating for me
Weirdly enough, living in lockdown during Covid-19 gave me the space to get back into therapy, ramp down on my antidepressants, build better habits in terms of making routines.
What I also realised through that process of taking time and space away is that there was one post in particular that always made me sad to come back here whenever I wanted to write: the time I went to Bhutan.
Here’s to a reset.