I was hacked. Mennotoba was taken over by some random seller of Pokemon cards. I guess it could’ve been a lot worse. But that feeling of losing this blog, has not been lost on me.
Andrew pointed out that I only posted three times in the last year. But the truth is, I’ve written a lot more. Probably one post for every week. Something was just stopping me from posting. And I think that maybe I need to exorcise this demon of hesitation by exposing it.
I’m afraid of the scary things. Such as my writing being fed into an AI machine trained to replace me. I would resist this. I do not want to train a robot to become me. I just want to be me, myself.
I’m also kind of private. So there’s that.
But on the other hand, I want to communicate with others who are interested in these same niche things. I want to talk about what brings me joy and wonder. And this really is the perfect way to do it.
And you know, now that I’m trying to name the reasons why I posted so infrequently, I find the excuses sizzling up and evaporating before the thought filters from my brain to my fingertips. It’s gone.
This past February, Andrew and I co-let a writing workshop at the Mennonite Heritage Village alongside MaryLou Driedger. It was a full workshop, filled with people who knew why they wanted to write. And in light of my own personal hesitations, they made me feel optimistic. And the day also made me feel like I should just do it. Just write while I can.
Because for a day there, my platform had been hijacked. I felt like I had lost everything. But most of all, I felt that I had misspent my entire opportunity to write, share, talk about the niche Mennonite stuff that I find interesting.
I was devastated. And I vowed that if Andrew was able to get the blog back from the hacker and retrieve all the Mennotoba posts, I would go ahead and hit the “publish” button.
So yeah. New posts are incoming!