Feeling Small

I am, as Paul Simon wrote, weary and feeling small.  When I look at this vast edifice of a website I’ve created, stone by stone, day by day, over the past seven years, it sometimes overwhelms me; I almost ask myself, “How the Hell did I do all that?”  And then I remember: it was through countless hours spent at the keyboard, typing literally millions of words (almost 2600 posts x an average of 1000 words each = 2,600,000 words).  And that doesn’t even count all the tweets, articles, and other content.  For the past five years, and especially the last two, I’ve been slowly decreasing the amount of work I have to do to maintain it; I’ve relaxed my length requirements, instituted features (like diaries, links columns and back issues) which take less work, brought in more guests, eliminated some time-and-labor intensive regular features, split the weekly news column into two parts and otherwise stretched my labor while lessening the amount of it required to give myself more free time.  And now I need to do that again.  When I first started The Honest Courtesan, I was releasing a decade of pent-up self-expression and trying to distract myself from a disintegrating marriage by burying myself in work (which is pretty much what I always did back before I realized what a tremendously stupid idea absolute sobriety was); now I’m older, wiser, sadder and wearier, and I just can’t maintain the pace I could then (which, to be honest, wasn’t really healthy back then either).  I’m worn thin and threadbare, and I need to devote more time and energy to paying work and to self-care (which includes spending quality time with people who love me).  So I’m making another small adjustment to my procedures:  since Friday is the day sacred to Aphrodite, I’m going to start taking some Fridays off.  That doesn’t mean you won’t get content on Fridays; I’m absolutely committed to providing my readers with new material every day as long as it’s physically possible for me to do so.  What it means is that a lot of Friday columns are going to be light and very low-effort, like the collection of pictures from Ireland I gave you two weeks ago.  That will reduce my stress levels, decrease my energy output by almost one-seventh (fitting, since I’ve been doing this now for almost a seventh of my life), and make more time for travel (both for business and pleasure). And since a lot of you have been urging me to do something like this for years, I’m sure most of you are glad to hear it.