Megan Lavey-Heaton

“Midway along the journey of our life I woke to find myself in a dark wood, for I had wandered off from the straight path." ― Dante Alighieri

I stood at the kitchen sink the other day, gazing into my back yard, and I yearned to write.

A lot of people would think that strange, because I make my living by writing. I am an editor for one of the top newspapers in Pennsylvania. I am the co-writer of a long-running webcomic and assist behind the scenes with a second one. To most people, I am always writing. But seven years ago, I stopped being a writer.

In the span between July 2019 and December 2020, my husband and I went through a series of losses: both of his parents and his job. I was diagnosed with diabetes. The pandemic, which is self-explanatory. Prior to that point, every time life turned difficult, I always had some sort of outlet of writing that was outside of work. For years, that was LiveJournal. It petered out around 2015 for the obvious reasons. That was entangled with fandom writing, something I once hid but now proudly embrace. I always had a knack of capturing a character’s voice, and I was proud of the voices in my head.

But then in 2020, the voices stopped. Not just fiction writing, but non-fiction writing like this.

I tried to nurturing that writing back to life and was picking my way back when cutting words from an acquaintance shut that right back down in 2022. The desire to write was gone. It felt like a limb had been severed from me. Writing for myself, for the fandoms that I loved, had been a part of me for 25 years at that point. Having that creative side of me disappear was as big of a loss as losing my in-laws. I turned my desire for storytelling to my journalism and my photography.

Last spring, walking through the streets of downtown Montreal with camera in hand and surrounded by comics, I started feeling that urge to truly be a creator beyond my photography for the first time in years.

Maybe, I told my creative partner, Isa, and a friend of ours, I could start doing annotated photo posts on Instagram. You could use our Patreon, Isa told me. But that felt dishonest. While we are a creative team, people joined for her work and the stories we created together. While some writing would be good for Patreon, this was different.

Our friend, Gisele, has throughly embraced indie website building and blogging, along with newsletters. It is a space that has given them freedom from corporate social media and the freedom to be themselves without catering an algorithm or being exposed to an increasing toxic timeline from different platforms. I admire the hell out of them.

Blue Sky had an audience I no longer wished to associate with, and I haven’t gotten around to finding new people to follow. Threads kept pushing dead and dying kids and cats along with influencer shill. We won’t touch Facebook. I made a few attempts on Medium back in 2016-17 and wasn’t in love with the site. I had fallen in love with video editing, but I was aware that I am a middle-aged woman and anything coming out of my mouth was likely to (and has) resulted in me being called a Karen on platforms like Instagram or TikTok.

Plus, nothing had the feel of LiveJournal in the good days - a mix of fandom and personal, where a post could be just six cat photos, another could be a rant, a third could be a recipe, a fourth could be fanfic. LiveJournal changed my life in my mid-20s, leading me to my husband, to Isa, to friends I still cherish.

I looked at platforms, starting with the usual suspects. But I didn’t want to monetize my writing. I just wanted to write and hopefully other people would enjoy my writing. There are things that I can’t write about, not without putting a job I love very much at risk. Then tonight, I finally put the question to Blue Sky and Threads.

My friend Kevin, who also embraces indie websites and newsletters, gave me a list of suggestions ending with Micro.blog. The blurb that pulled through was enough to have me clicking through. A short comparison later, and here we are. 1:36 a.m. when I should be functional in seven hours, writing my first true blog post in years.

I’m 46 years old. I am midway through the journey of my life. After spending the better part of this decade of my life discovering who I truly am for the first time in my life, I’m ready to write about that journey without expectations from other people or internal shame that I am not enough. Last year, my therapist told me that I have the right to exist the space that I occupy, whether I am rambling like this or I found a really cool recipe. This is the space that I choose to occupy.

Don’t worry. There will be cat photos.