Today I spent the whole day on the website. Fixing, cutting, rewriting. Somewhere in the middle of it I stopped and read the homepage properly. The one I wrote when this started.
And I didn't recognise the writer.
Who was that? Every line was talking to me like I needed convincing. Do it, Wic. Move, Wic. No time to waste. A man standing in front of a mirror, trying to talk himself into the water.
I remember him, of course. The idea for this place lived in my head for years. Not days, not months. Years of knowing I had something to say and finding reasons not to say it. So when I finally built the site, the fear came with me. It got into the text. I was writing like someone scared of the reader's opinion before the reader even arrived.
Today I deleted most of it. Not because it was wrong. Because it wasn't me.
There are two of them, you know. One sits on each shoulder. The one on the left is built from every time I touched something new and it went badly. He keeps records. The one on the right loves the risk. He would sign the contract without reading it. They have been arguing my whole life, and I always thought the job was to pick which one to listen to.
The job is to listen to neither. They can keep arguing. I will be over here, writing.
So I rewrote the whole homepage. The way I feel it. The way I present myself.
Still here. Still building. And tonight, for the first time in a while, it feels like me.