I have always been a blogger, even when I was writing in a locked diary in elementary school. This is how I’ve always written. There were spiral-bound notebooks, and there was Blogspot, then Livejournal, and in 2006, there was Twitter. I joined long before the rest of my internet friends, and I couldn’t quite convince them why the site was so fascinating to me.

I revel in creative restraints. This is also why I love print. Maybe it’s why writing books has been so hard for me. Why write 200 pages when you can get it done in 140 characters?

This is not about why I’m leaving Twitter. Right now, I’m not. I’ve spent a lot of years off social media for the moral reasons, and that didn’t stop billionaires from buying our communities. Instead, my connections suffered. The people I like, love, enjoy—that’s where they are. I have to be there, too. In the third year of ~all this, I have nowhere else to be.

(But this time around I finally signed up to try Mastodon. I'm @jess@xoxo.zone.)

This letter is about finding peace in your online space. Right now, I'm making the choice to stay on these platforms because that's where my people are. I came back last year because I felt lonely. I came back because I have a book coming out. I came back because I never really left.

Because I revel in creative restraints, last month, I made myself a resolution to get my book finished. I've been dragging my feet, afraid of letting it go out into the world, but it needs to be done now. Then March happened, you might remember, and I had to take time off from everything I was doing.

I'm back from LA now, but I don't know that I really feel better. I wanted to feel different. But I'm still tired. I'm still afraid to let this book go.

My imposter syndrome is not about writing. I know I can write. My imposter syndrome is about sewing. How dare I call myself an expert? Who am I to tell you what to do? The answer is simple: I'm a teacher. I've been sewing since I was a kid. I sew my own clothes.

So why is that answer hard for me to accept? It took me about an hour to make the zine this book is based on. I didn't even think about it. My zines are online, but that doesn't mean they travel very far. This book, though, who knows where it'll go?

This book has been hard because it's the first. Because it's not my work alone. Because, somewhere in the back of my head, there's a thought: what if it blows up? Am I ready?

❤️‍🔥 Jess