Breathing Room
You get emails asking where everyone went. Where’s Ines, where’s Hannah. The easy answer is people change, things end, that’s life. But nobody really wants that answer.
I built this site around people with actual personalities. Types you either loved or hated. When half the team walks in a matter of days, it’s not nothing.
Ines was always stretched thin—full-time work, distance university, everything else. When she got an offer to write her own book, the choice made itself. I would’ve done the same. I’m curious what she makes of it. But it was the first crack.
Hannah left a few days after. We’d been fighting—the kind of friction that builds when you work closely with someone day after day. At some point it stops being worth it. She decided to go. I asked her to stay, a few times. She said no. That was that. Not fired. Not forced. Just over.
The rest unraveled quickly. Asumi got buried by school. Mischa was out doing readings. Raphaela couldn’t find her place. A lot of that was me—I was drowning, trying to hold everything together, and I wasn’t actually there for any of them. Running this site is a full-time blur. Topics to hunt, text to write, images to find, code to fix, design to tweak, feeds to manage. The pile never shrinks. You just get smaller trying to match it. At some point I made the call to pull back and just run it with one person, to breathe again.
I loved those people. They were thoughtful and serious and generous. Most of what went wrong was on me. I couldn’t give them what they needed. You can’t scale attention the way you scale an audience.
Then it started leaking out—personal stuff, hurt feelings, people choosing sides, the narratives that get built around a friendship ending. I get it. But it doesn’t help. And it has no business being out there. Hannah and I shared a lot over five years. More than just a website. It seems wasteful to burn that because we couldn’t figure out how to work together anymore.
I don’t know if it comes back from here. Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. But that conversation, if it happens, won’t be in public. And I’m done explaining it.