I really thought this would be a painless process, but between needing to figure out what features to add via community plugins, how to replicate my original blog as closely as possible, and trying to get my domain transferred, it was actually a constant source of stress and a giant pain in my ass for over a week. A week and a half, really. Turns out that getting domains transferred away from WordPress .com sucks because they’ll drag their feet about it, their listed support email doesn’t actually exist, their instructions are wrong, and their actual domain service website seems like a scam since it lacks anything even approaching the level of polish I’m used to seeing on the rest of the WordPress website. It was harrowing, but it is done now. Everything is cleaned up and put where it should be, or will be as soon as I find out that it is out of place. Turns out that it’s kind of hard to do that when you’re doing to be swapping domains around again after you’ve built your website. Especially when you’re writing the “everything is good now, welcome in!” post when the domain transfer has yet to actually go through and you’re still worried you might need to take down and put up your blog again for some reason when it finally does go through. This crap sucks. Thankfully, it’s all done by the time you’re reading this, so at least Present/Editing Me has that going for them, even if Past Me is struggling to feel cool about it.

I have a week off of posting that I’m hoping to use to rebuild my buffer. It’ll be made a bit easier by the fact that I’ve got a small stock of poetry from over the last eight months that I can share, so you can look forward to some of that coming up soon. I’d love to start with some poetry or do a full week of poetry to commemorate the new location, but I’m trying to pace myself and I’m really not sure that this post is going to go up on the day I’ve originally scheduled it to go up. I have very little faith that WordPress .com is going to transfer my domain as simply as their confirmation email suggested, given that the instructions they gave me were wrong and there is no place for me to go to give the transfer the go-ahead like all the instructions say there should be. It’s really dumb and feels like the kind of crap Automattic would pull after Matt Mullenweg landed himself in deep shit thanks to all that running his mouth that he did. I mean, Automattic was fully willing to sell every user’s creations without any kind of compensation or even a chance to opt-out before their scraping policy went into effect, so I am completely unsurprised that it would be difficult and painful to leave their WordPress .com service with my domains intact. I’m honestly surprised my entire blog seems to have transferred over as completely as it did. I just really hope to wrap this all up soon because having it sitting in the back of my mind is exhausting and today, as I’m working on a presentation for work that has the Specter of Human Fragility looming over every part of my mind, I’m already so exhausted that I’m genuinely not sure how I’m going to make it through this week… [don’t worry, I lived].

Nothing is ever easy. You’d think transferring this stuff, from one place that hosts WordPress .org software to another would be easy, but it apparently has a lot of potential pitfalls. I’m also going from the easiest of easy modes to normal difficulty easy-mode and I have so much distrust for everything on the internet right now that I’m having a difficult time finding trustworthy resources for setting up my blog on a new host and an even more difficult time actually trusting anything I’m reading. Not a lot of people that I can find seem to have done what I’m doing: transferring from one place to another as a result of what Automattic is doing. Most people seem content to stay on WordPress .com, with the “let us sell your data and give you nothing in return” box unchecked OR were already hosting their blog somewhere else. If it wasn’t for other people who’d set up blogs after the fall of Cohost, I don’t know what I’d do. I’d probably just give up and stay on WordPress .com for another year. I really can’t emphasize enough how low on spoons I am these days. It’s been getting worse, too, as time goes on, so my whole plan of waiting until I had more time has failed me since now I’ve got time but barely enough energy to rub two brain cells together by the time I’m done with work or over the weekends when I’m trying to recover enough to be ready for whatever crap work is going to throw at me.

I wish my welcome to my new site was warmer. I wish I could be more cheerful. I wish a lot of things, but mostly that I wasn’t this tired. It’s difficult to do anything when I’m constantly exhausted and I’ve had to really dial down my expectations for myself as a result. I’m really hoping that I’ll be done with these meds soon. Or that somehow the physical therapy I’m doing will miraculously cure me once I hit the three-month mark or whatever. I’d also take winning the lottery. Anything, really, that would improve my current well-being. I feel like it’s a struggle just to get through a normal day right now and that’s not a great place to be. I’m really not this miserable all the time, usually. This past year has just been hell in ways I never expected. And as much as I enjoy the fact that my blog is more in my control than ever before, it’s difficult not to see the different UI and all the extra steps I have to take to share each brand new blog post as a sign of just how frustrating and annoying even the good parts of my life has gotten. It’s still worth more to me to have a place to write most days, to maintain a positive writing habit, but the cost of doing it has grown and I’m really not sure how I’m going to balance my checkbook now that I’ve got these new drains. And that’s without even going into the actual monetary costs of this shit. They’re not super high, but it’s still not fun to pay for all this stuff right as Christmas is looming over my bank account.

I will be fine, though. Eventually. I’ve dealt with worse and I’ve been slowly preparing to deal with much, much worse. This is a small thing. An important thing! Of course! But a small thing. I will write regardless of where it lands and even if I wind up giving up this whole thing because I can’t affording the mental and emotional drain of it, I’ll still be creating something. I’m too driven to not create. Hell, I’m sure I could be on the lam, running from federal agents, or fleeing for my life and I’d still find a way to keep writing stuff. It’s like breathing. It just happens even if I try to stop it. I mean, I stopped even trying to write my serial story and wound up starting two ambitious Dungeons and Dragons campaigns without realizing that I was reinvesting my creative energy in a form that would pay off weekly like the serial story used to. It happens even when I’m trying to stop and rest. I mean, I still need to work on actually resting rather than just shifting my creative energy from one thing to another, but I think the process of creation is a part of resting for me when it is unconstrained, not due on a timeline, and free to be abandoned if my attention wanders. Creativity without my usual discipline feels a sort of restful that is as close as I can seem to get to actual rest when I’m not (metaphorically or literally) collapsing in exhaustion. I really hope this place, once I’m fully settled in, can become a home for that kind of work in the future. Whenever I’m unrestrained enough to make it again.