The world is on fire and I'm trying to write a blog post
I have about a dozen half-finished drafts sitting in my posts folder right now.
Some of them are pretty good, I think. One is about managing devices with GitOps. One is about a book I read that rearranged something in my brain. One is about a conversation I had with a friend that I keep turning over, the way you work a loose tooth with your tongue.
None of them are finished. None of them feel safe enough to publish.
That last word is new. I’ve had drafts feel unfinished, underdeveloped, not quite right. Safe is different.
What happened this winter
I wrote about this already, so I’ll keep it short: I stepped back from the MacAdmins Slack admin team after harassment escalated in ways that reached into my actual life. My email account accessed by an attacker. Police at my door. Mail addressed to my deadname arriving at my house.
The causal chain was short and legible: I was visible, and that made me a target.
So when I sit down to write a blog post now, there’s a new layer in the justification stack. Not just why does this matter, but what does this cost.
The specific weight of right now
That’s the personal layer. But it’s sitting on top of something broader, and I suspect I’m not alone in it.
There is so much happening, so fast, that the idea of carving out a quiet hour to write something thoughtful feels almost absurd. By the time you publish, the thing you were responding to has been buried under seventeen other things. The news cycle is a treadmill set to a speed designed to exhaust you, and it’s working.
When the backdrop includes genuine threats to democracy, to people’s safety, to institutions we depend on - writing a blog post about endpoint management starts to feel embarrassing. This is what I’m spending my finite energy on?
What I know is that the justification layer - the part of my brain that has to answer why are you spending time on this before I’m allowed to proceed - is more hostile than it’s ever been.
What paralysis actually is
Here’s what I’ve noticed, though: the paralysis isn’t really about the writing. The writing is just the surface.
For me right now, it’s two different things wearing the same clothes.
One is guilt about attention - the sense that engaging with my own ideas is indulgent when the world is on fire. When I write about configuration management, I’m not writing about whatever is happening to real people right now. There’s a version of interrogating that which is healthy. There’s a version that becomes a bar so high nothing clears it, and you end up doing nothing, which helps no one, least of all you.
The other is something more like rational caution. I know from direct experience that being visible has a cost. Police at my door, my deadname in my mailbox, months of cleanup. It’s not irrational to pause before making myself visible again. But there’s a point where rational caution tips into letting someone else control what I do and don’t say. Where I’m not protecting myself so much as I’m silencing myself on their behalf.
I’m trying to find the line between those two things. I’m not sure I’ve found it.
The thing I keep coming back to
Visibility was weaponized against me. That’s true. And I still have things to say.
I don’t think those two facts resolve neatly. I’m not going to wrap this up with and that’s why I decided to keep writing, the end. It’s not that clean.
What I can say is this: the goal of harassment like what I experienced is to make the cost of being public feel higher than the value of your own voice. It doesn’t have to erase you, it just has to make you hesitate. Make you second guess. Make you leave the drafts folder full.
I’m aware of that dynamic. I’m trying not to let it win, even when I’m tired of the fight.
And writing from inside all of this - the exhaustion, the wariness, the weird particular grief of having your safety violated - that is saying something true about what it’s like right now. That’s not nothing.
The world is on fire. Someone tried to use that to shut me up.
I still have a dozen drafts I’m struggling to finish.