If You're Reading This I'm Free

Why I'm no longer hitting publish every week - and why that's good for the blog

At the beginning of this year I made a public commitment to publishing a blog post every Wednesday during 2026. At the time I was quite high on life. A lot was going well in my move to Seattle and I felt I had a million things to write about. And I had just banged out a powerful end of year update in ~5 hours flat. “That was very rewarding,” I thought, “let’s do that 52 more times.”

As it turns out that commitment has amounted to a massive, massive burden for me. I could get into all the details, but I suppose the short answer is that writing under any circumstances is hard, and forcing oneself to write when one is not excited to do so is excruciating. For me. On many weeks this year I wrecked my sleep schedule, staying up fretting about a draft which I distinctly did not want to share, dissociatively hitting publish at 11:59pm, and then remaining awake in an exhausted state of stress.

The blog has been really good too. Highlights include my post about pushing through fatigue, which inspired multiple strangers to successfully push the boundaries of their own chronic illnesses. Beyond that, every single one of my posts seems to have affected at least some reader in some way. I would always think “this sucks” when I hit publish, and then someone would say that they liked it, and then I would think “alright yeah this rocks. I’m glad I posted it.”

But, 20+ posts in, my hope would be that things would get easier. They haven’t. It’s still just really hard. Hard things aren’t bad, but, I need to be true to my underlying motivations. I wanted to write every week because I wanted a channel to share my personal projects and because I wanted to develop my knowledge and my community in areas of intellectual/career interest. And I would say I’ve been fairly successful in those endeavors, but there’s a better way for me to do it going forward.

What really made me decide that I should end this commitment is that I found myself organizing my whole life around it. Every week I would just think “crap, what do I write about,” and would end up choosing some low-hanging fruit, and then, often, spending days writing about it. And the resulting post would be good, but it would often take away time from the projects that are more intrinsically exciting to me.

Increasingly, as my health improves and certain “life next steps” questions have become more urgent and tractable, I have found the above dynamic to be less and less acceptable. So, on May 11 I wrote this post, and stored it in my drafts, such that I could at any time publish it. It was possible that this post would never be published, or that it would be published very soon. We can now see how that resolved.

I give up my commitment to publish every Wednesday. I will still try and write often, but will do so in a “bottom-up” way - I will write when I have things to write about. I will publish when I’m ready to publish. Because this is America.

Thank you for being a reader of the blog. Stick around for future posts of greater intention, or at least, willingness.

~ Daniel