We all have one voice in a very, very crowded room.

Time flies. We know this, we live with this, we are occasionally appalled by this, we note the ability for time to stop when its passage is tied to some sort of temporal desire: get through a line, a pending holiday, a pending life milestone, and so forth. I am sitting in a meeting. It will end, just not at the moment I am longing for it to. My daughter has grown to nearly my height during the fastest decade of my life. So it goes.

I started writing Field Notes as a newsletter six and a half years ago. It still feels new to me, as opposed to some established habit. I had been writing blogs for years, even back to my teenage LiveJournal. I went to Tiny Letter as a way to spend some time in the proverbial shade. It’s like the blog form of having your Instagram locked – the only people who could read it were those who subscribed and those whose emails you didn’t delete from the subscription list. And this worked, until it didn’t: Tiny Letter is being closed by MailChimp. And truth be told, I was a freeloader anyway. I get it.

So if I wanted to continue to litter the internet with long-form thoughts and strings of sentences, I needed to find an new venue to put words out there. Here I am, back to where I started, on WordPress. I’m relearning it. There is a newsletter function, which requires upgrading this. I do not know if I will do that. Part of me is taking this transition to re-discern how I want to exist on the Internet. Creating a WordPress blog, in an internet where there’s so many pre-built networks, makes building an audience difficult. People are gathering in other spaces and they are making content on those platforms, all which have their own norms of communication. LinkedIn, to my amusement has seemed to acquired this firm, yelling voice. Instagram seeks the least voice, just post photos and hash yourself to death, please. I’m only nominally on Twitter. BlueSky is… fine? There’s a local discord that meets my internet connection needs. And then there is here, where I want to string some long-form thoughts together but I’ll no longer have the reassurance that a newsletter provided that there are people out there actually reading it.

We’ll see.

A continuing challenge of my writing is that I took a job where most of the things consuming my heart are situations I must hold in confidence. I cannot tell you all of what is happening in my world. My role is one of trust and therefore, that is the way it should be.

I still long to tell the stories that I can. I plan to.

I’m glad that you’re here.