For me, the idea of a personal home on the internet died a quiet death when MySpace went away.

Like Angelfire, GeoCities, and countless others, MySpace gave anyone a place for creative expression with a low barrier to entry. It wasn’t polished or professional, but it was yours. A corner of the web you could shape and fill with photos, writing, music, and fragments of who you were at that moment in time.

Then the web shifted.

Platforms consolidated. People followed their friends. MySpace faded from relevance, changed hands, and slowly became something else entirely. Many of us drifted away, assuming we could always come back someday and look around.

But years later, after a botched server migration wiped out huge portions of its data, there was nothing left to return to. Photos, writing, friend lists, music—gone. Parents used to warn us that “what you put on the internet lasts forever,” and for a while that felt true. But this time, it didn’t.

That experience stuck with me longer than I realized. I think it’s part of why I’ve always been hesitant to share too much online, or to build much of a web presence at all. It seems most things we post today are designed to be ephemeral—fast, disposable, algorithm-fed, and that kind of carefree impermanence has never really been my style.

When friends started blogging in the years that followed, I wanted to join in, but I felt burned. I didn’t like the idea that a company could decide—at any moment—that my words and work were no longer worth hosting. So I kept reading. I just never started writing on my own.

Inspired by a recent post by Joan Westenberg, I’ve finally decided it’s time to start writing—with intention. This blog lives on a platform designed around independence, portability, and restraint rather than algorithms or engagement metrics. It’s not a walled garden or a feed run by AI, and it’s not trying to capture or exploit my work.

This is about taking back some authority and agency over the things I care about. Lately, I’ve been reminded how quickly circumstances can change—through politics, through violence, through illness, through loss or through luck. None of us really knows how much time we’re given.

I can’t control most of that. But I can choose to speak while I’m here. To make things. To leave some kind of record that I was paying attention.

For humanity, we’re nothing if we don’t make something.

This is my space.