I’m not sure who I’m writing this for. No, that’s not true. I’m writing this for myself.

The past couple of years have been very hard on me. Whether it’s the stress of current events or dealing with mental health struggles, it hasn’t been easy.

I know that this comes from a place of privilege, as many people don’t even have the opportunity to worry about these things. But I think it’s important to recognize that difficulty comes in many forms, and cut myself some slack.

You might have noticed that I disappeared from the internet for a while. I deleted most of my online presence, and I scaled back many of my open source contributions. It was never enough, though. I kept deleting things but never felt like I had deleted enough.

I’m not sure what I was running away from. But to be honest, I think it was mostly my irrational fear of being doxxed, along with a healthy dose of anxiety.

I thought that scaling back my online presence would help me feel more at ease. But instead I felt like I lost a part of myself. It was only over a year later when I was still unhappy that, after lots of self-reflection, I realized what exactly I had lost.

In order to appease my anxiety, I had given up the only creative outlet where I could be vulnerable and work on things I was passionate about. But my anxiety simply shifted to other areas of my life, and I lost touch with one of my favorite and longest-lived pastimes: coding.

I realized that I had spent over a year burying my passions and as a result had lost motivation for coding as well as other areas of my life.

After my long hiatus, I’ve finally decided to come back. To reclaim a semblance of agency in my life. My own personal corner of the internet. Something truly mine. Something I can be proud of.

I’ve given myself permission to be vulnerable again.