Keep things in perspective. in The Book of Public Entries

DO NOT OFFER THIS SITE ANY OF YOUR MONEY.

Look - all due respect to Simple Mind, everyone here needs to take his words seriously: he never took this site seriously. This site, to him, was a hobby. A toy. And that’s okay! That’s totally okay - he never intended for people to hang their emotional happiness on being able to post here anonymously, or at least semi-anonymously.

That being said…folks…look - I know you don’t want to hear this, but it’s important:

don’t ever, ever hang your emotional stability on someone else’s shoulders.

For nearly twenty years, I wrote in a semi-anonymous site. First I wrote in Open Diary. Then, I wrote here in ProseBox.

When I wrote in OD, I let myself become so deeply emotionally dependent on that website that when the site went down, I suffered. In “the real world”, I mourned. It felt like I’d been gutted, like the guy who ran Open Diary literally took a buck knife and carved a chunk out of my chest, chucked it into the nearest dumpster, turned his back and walked away while I was crying and bleeding in the street.

It was a terrible feeling.

But, it was also a sobering feeling.

I was skeptical when I showed up at ProseBox. Bitter from being gutted by the end of Open Diary. When I first started writing here in ProseBox, I was just in the beginning stages of what was an extremely harsh, bitter, and all around horrible realization: I cannot hang my emotional well being on a website. I can’t trust some anonymous fucker who stars up a blogging site on a whim to not cower, cave and just randomly decide that the site is “TOO MUCH WORK”, and “Aw, oh, SO hard!!!!” to maintain.

You know what really happened here, right?

What happened is exactly this:

Simple Mind made a commitment. He made a promise. He saw how many people were wrecked when Open Diary shut down, and he wanted to dive in and help. He wanted to give people a safe haven, a place where they could continue to write in diaries anonymously, or at least semi-anonymously.

A few years later, Simple Mind realized that - ohmygosh - these sites take work! Like, they’re a SERIOUS time-suck. ProseBox isn’t a house plant. You can’t just show ProseBox attention once or twice a week and expect it to do well.

When the going got tough - Simple Mind decided to leave.

Simple Mind made a commitment that he isn’t interested in keeping. Much like ol’ Brucey-poo, the Diary Master from Open Diary....

.....you’d think one would learn from another’s past mistakes, huh?

Anyway, look - lets be real, folks: we have all over-committed to things in our lives. Those of you who have never experienced what it’s like to over commit will surely experience that in your future. We all do it. We leap before we look. We say yes, then we regret saying yes.

When people over commit, and they finally realize that they just can’t take it anymore and they have to quit, inevitably, they’re going to let people down.

Simple Mind: you’re letting us down. You’re letting ALL of us down. You’re backing out on a commitment. And that’s a terrible thing.

However....

…it’s something that we all do, and/or will do. You’re a human being. You bit off way, way more than you were prepared to chew.

I accept this.

And I’ll be honest with you, Simple Mind and whomever else is reading this: I’ve been preparing for you to let us all down. I’ve been bracing myself for ProseBox to come to an end. When I first started writing in Open Diary I felt so free and so validated: I’d finally found a place to write my inner most thoughts, to vent freely without judgment from the people in my real life. When Open Diary shut down, I was crushed. It took a scrap of my heart with me. And when I started writing in ProseBox I was cautious. Once bitten, twice shy. Simple Mind made grand promises, but I knew that he couldn’t keep them. Not forever.

And that’s okay. It’s important to keep a website in perspective: it’s finite. No one can really be certain as to how long a site will run, but the truth is that it will run for as long as the person running the site wants to keep at it.

And so, Prose Box is over. And that’s okay. It was a great site for a very short time. But it’s time to move on now, folks.

And that’s okay. Whether you want it to be or not: it’s okay.