I achieved tenure and promotion. Then I converted my role from bipartite (teaching professor) to tripartite (research professor).

I got pregnant, finally stayed pregnant for an appropriate amount of time, and had a second baby. I went on maternity leave. I have kept this new human alive for over a year.

I applied for and was awarded a sabbatical, which will begin 1 January. My first peer-reviewed podcast made it to the world.

The government changed in the US, and then in Canada. It feels like things are pretty much worse everywhere.

Covid is still happening, though we’re mostly pretending it’s not.

There’s a genocide in Gaza, though we’re mostly pretending there isn’t.

I quit Twitter and Instagram and (mostly) Facebook — like so many of us, I have a blank profile for keeping up with school news and community events — and joined Bluesky.

I spend a lot of time thinking about how if I invested in this blog (or any previous incarnation of my blogs) the way I invested in Twitter and Instagram and (sort of) Facebook and now Bluesky, I would have a record of all my thoughts and a lot more control over my web presence.

Which is sort of what prompted me back here.

I’m also here because my postpartum brain is so slow, and I have so many loose ends I would like to wrap up before my sabbatical starts. I have a co-written article to finish, a conference paper to write, and I need to finish the book manuscript I have been plugging away at in fits and starts while I have been on leave (it’s a textbook, and it’s very fun to work on). I get about 30-60 minutes a day to write, and I have been telling myself that means I don’t have time for blogging, but maybe the opposite is true. Maybe little bits of writing here would make big bits of writing elsewhere feel more possible.

I have a to-do list around here, too. I kind of hate this theme now, which felt so edgy and analogue a couple of years ago and now feels unreadable and tired. I also want to do some work on my website itself, which also kind of feels bleh to me. I want to set up a space for journalling my sabbatical, too. I want to do a better job of cataloguing my writing elsewhere. And maybe I want to start another podcast, who knows.

And posts! I have so many draft posts. About grief. About AI. About talking to my kiddo about edtech.

Cognitive completionism is one of my absolutely most unhelpful traits and the more I want to do with this space, the less time I spend here. The number of times I have thought to myself that I will definitely write again as soon as I find a theme I like. As soon as my main site is redesigned. As soon as I finish my book manuscript. And in the meantime I don’t write anything at all.

But what if I wrote something anyway?

Even if just to ask: is this thing still on?

The short answer to why I haven’t written is grief. Obviously, I guess. Lately, grief has felt a bit like a large box in the middle of the room that I keep meaning to move but never get around to addressing, so instead I stub my toes on it ten times a day. It’s there, it’s lurking, it’s present. But it’s also my own lack of direct address that makes it so.

In some ways, the last month has been the easy mode of grief. When my dad died, I was on a plane within twelve hours of receiving the news, child in tow. We spent a month at home, and I looked after my mum as best I could and parented my kiddo as best I could and tried to knock things off the enormous post-death checklist as best I could and checked in occasionally at work as best I could. In short, I distracted myself.

After an epic 25-hour travel day (thanks, global pandemic), I got home to this home — do other adult humans refer to more than one space as home, or is that just me? — and I handed off kiddo to my husband and they went off for an afternoon adventure of haircuts and dance class and suddenly I was faced with the horrifying reality that, no longer distracted, I would have to feel my feelings.

Absolute bullshit.

I can feel myself beginning to unravel, and I think the truth of the last week is that I am not so emotionally stunted that I didn’t know this was eventually coming. I’ve been tired, and I’ve been intentionally tiring myself out to keep from having to grieve too profoundly, too deeply. And writing taps into all the same introspective parts of the self. So too tired to grieve was also too tired to write. And here we are.

I am back at my desk today in a formal capacity; back to writing and thinking and trying to do brain work. But I also recognize that I need to not use that as another form of distraction and escape. What is the balance?

I’ve recently apparently become a Person Who Orders Books About Grief after a lifetime of eschewing self-help as a genre (I once quit a book club because they made us read Untamed by Glennon Doyle and everyone loved it and I hated its story of wealthy white lady problems so profoundly that I knew these could never be my people), so I guess it’s new frontiers all around. I am currently reading It’s Ok That You’re Not Ok: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn’t Understand by Megan Devine and The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss by George A. Bonanno. Will report back.

I actually planned out this whole month of blogging ages ago and so I have lots of topics that aren’t my dead dad to talk about. I really hope to get to them. But I’m also grateful for this space to process and reflect. And grieve. It’s so hard to grieve. No one tells you that part: just the feeling of feelings, the space for sadness, is so hard to allow yourself to undertake. I think, for me, this part starts now.

Honestly, I already do. I haven’t seen a lot of follower haemorrhaging thus far, but I am feeling the tweaks to the algorithm. I have a small but very engaged community on Twitter, but since sometime late Friday I’m lucky to get a single like on any tweet, and the analytics data seems to show a big drop in how many people are seeing my content. Turns out, shouting into the void is actually no fun; people have got to shout alongside you. I have to assume this is related to the changes to prioritize verified users in everyone’s feeds, and since that man would have to pry my last eight dollars out of my cold, dead hands, I guess it just rolls this way.

I’m sad about losing Twitter because it has been a big part of my professional life ever since I joined as a graduate student in the late-2000s; when I ended up in a department where there wasn’t a lot of support for the work I wanted to do, my handful of pals in my department helped me see Twitter as a place to build a larger community. When I started blogging, I found an audience for my ideas on Twitter and found challenges to those same ideas there, too. And when I found myself in a brand new discipline as an educational technologist, I found the professional network that would see me through the challenges of the first year of the pandemic. Among those folks, I would find good friends.

Twitter as it once was was a social media that made sense to me; I’m not cool enough for TikTok, not hot enough for Instagram, not patient (or maybe just angry) enough for Facebook. I never really used MySpace and I don’t know what Friendster was and I remember thinking FourSquare was cool until the internet reminded me that it’s a harrowing place to share personal data. But Twitter and I always clicked well: the text-based medium, the tonal balance of hope and cynicism, the general preference for sharing failings and grievances over successes. These are things that speak to me.

I became confident in my public scholarship on Twitter; I was invited to publish in collections because of Twitter; and almost all of my keynote invitations have come first as Twitter DMs. It’s a critical space for my career. Or at least it was. It’s hard to get external links and non-retweets seen right now if you’re an unverified user, and that’s sad, because I don’t know who I would be as a scholar without the critical conversations and corrections that helped me find my voice. I did really silly things on Twitter like a live-blogging of the reading experience of Ian McEwan’s terrible novel about a sentient fetus or a multi-day debate with Norm MacDonald about the state of Canadian Literature or the weird time I was on the BBC because of a viral tweet about Jon Stewart’s retirement.

The weirdness of Twitter was always in the possibility of this kind of thing happening. That doesn’t seem possible to me under a regime where anyone can pay $8 / month to have their voice amplified and everyone else can get buried by them. But what do I know.

The think about Twitter that I find hard to replicate elsewhere is the happenstance of a space shared collectively by so many people who, once upon a time, anyway, were often flattened to share equal weight. This obviously (1) is shaped by subject position, because for some marginalized folks Twitter has always been a hellscape and (2) turned out to be a flattening that from about 2016 on pretty much ruined the world. And I get that, I do. But the pre-2015 days, when Twitter really did feel (to me, anyway) like a Town Square? No other existing tool comes close to tapping into that feeling. Because it was never an echo chamber to me — it was always a place where I could find scholars and writers and experts with all kinds of different perspectives and read them alongside each other. That had a great deal of value to me.

Maybe Twitter will survive all of this. Seems unlikely, but who expected Facebook to still be around after we abandoned it to our parents? But even if it does, it’s hard to imagine it gets back to the silly, strange place it was when we were all a little sillier and more naive, and before the presence of misinformation and flattened expertise was so obviously deadly.

I guess that’s the question: will I miss Twitter, or do I already miss the person I was in those years, before grief and pandemic life and disappointment and existential dread reframed how I understand the world? I can’t really know that, I suppose.

But I can keep hoping I make it to the end of Twitter without ever being the main character. So far, so good.