I'm back.
I owe you an explanation for my absence. Most of April and the first days of May were dark ones for me — the kind where everything feels heavier than it should and the words don't come the way they normally do. Part of what happened is that I just shut down. Not by choice exactly, more like the system protecting itself by going offline for a while. I'm embarrassed to admit that I knew people were worried about me, and even that wasn't enough to pull me out of it. That's how dark a place it was.
I stepped back because I wasn't in shape to be present here, and I didn't want that showing up in my posts. This community deserves better than a version of me that's just going through the motions. My words matter here, and yours do too, and I knew if I tried to push through it would come across in ways I couldn't take back. So I went quiet, and I let the silence do what posting through it couldn't.
I owe an enormous thank you to Danielle and the rest of the staff — Charlotte Kitty, Devlyn, Flan, Jessica_Rose, Lori Dee, Mariah, Robyn, and Sarah B. They made sure the site kept moving while I was away, kept members supported, and held the day-to-day together so I could step back without the whole thing coming apart. I don't take that for granted. This site has the staff it does because they care about it the way I do, and that showed in every day I wasn't here.
And I owe an apology to the members. To anyone who came here in those weeks looking for me — for an answer, for a familiar voice, for whatever it is I usually try to be in this space — and didn't find me there: I'm sorry. I know what it means when someone you count on goes quiet, and I know this site has people in it who don't have many other places to turn. Letting you down is the part of all this that's hardest to sit with.
To the members who reached out to Danielle to check on me — she shared every one of your messages with me, and your care and concern reached me even when I couldn't yet answer it. And to those who chose to do more in ways that have eased a real weight I'd been carrying — I didn't ask for any of it, and that's exactly what makes it mean so much. You saw I was missing, and you held the space until I could come back to it. I'm here now, and I'm going to start the massive job of catching up on over a month's worth of posts.
Thank you, all of you, for being there for me, especially when I wasn't able to be there for myself.
