I've wanted to do this for a couple of years, but the effort always ended up revealing all sorts of complications related to context, migration problems and routine frustration. Every time I approached the effort, I'd quickly give up as the futility of numerous failed attempts felt like a waste of time. It's sorta like trying to convince Jen to move to Florida has been.
The last attempt I walked away from, it turned out, worked. Migration attempts over the past year routinely failed. Yet about a month or so passed after my last failed attempt, and suddenly, to my surprise, when I went into the backend, the data was there after all. I ran a few trials and each one proved successful. I completed the effort, compared the post counts of the three individual sites with the sum of the combined, and confirmed they matched.
There was cleanup to do, and some, particularly an annoying issue with paragraphs, remain in need of refinement, but the end goal was to bring it all together, and here it is.
The introduction of two separate sites came about during a time when I felt hesitant to be fully "Open Kimono" with many of the things I was writing about. I shared a lot of pretty deep stuff during a pretty intense time. Challenging topics and challenging thoughts. I recall when a direct report of mine at work mentioned something related to a relatively personal post, and it felt awkward and inappropriate. In hindsight, it wasn't even a negative or judgmental comment; it was a supportive one from one human being to another. But social conditioning, executive roles and playing the part I was assigned were considerations. So, I split a branch off for public and private visibility. I hid things from others.
In November 2018, I spun up a third site intended to be a daily journal that ultimately became my dominant writing space. That was five years ago last month. That site started as a record of my daily musings, reflections, obsessions, and milestones I wanted to capture in my personal history. Over time, it evolved into a detailed record of some of the most challenging experiences of my life. It became as personal as any of the other two sites. Yet the linear narrative of all of these segregated writings was significantly fractured and fragmented.
Ultimately, if I'm comfortable with somebody reading about my daily interests and experiences, why can't I let them know my faults, dreams, angst, aspirations and everything? In the realm of fostering connections, I'm doing them and myself a disservice by sheltering them from my inner thoughts. I believe it's better for both of us that I be as transparently human as they know they are as well. More guards come down. Less pretending that we have everything managed and nothing can haunt or derail us, and we can share gratitude and insight into the smallest moments that make up the gift of awareness each day we get to share. More often than not, I receive comparison, compassion, and camaraderie in return for being genuine rather than judgment and dismissal.
Moving forward, this will be the one space in which I will continue to chronicle and capture my daily highs and lows, my occasional rants and raves, stories about any failures, accomplishments, intentions and interests. I'm equally proud of having carried the three headers into this one site as random images. My father's fountain pen, a chewed pencil and a Bic ballpoint have meaning and relevance to me as an aspiring author whose writings go all over the place.