It's strange how difficult it is to give up something that, in many ways, has been a burden and distraction for me for the past year and a half. I'm stepping down from NUP and from the PNC more broadly.
It is surprisingly hard to let NUP go, now that I'm in the last stages of transferring the administration of the blog and all its social media integration to the new admin. I am so immensely proud of the work I've done on NUP, and the work that so many others have put into it through their writing and their guest posts and photographs. I've also been devoting a couple hours a week to trying to manage and promote NUP since it got rolling back in April 2011.... It's become a habit of mind to always be brainstorming, somewhere in my subconscious, what my next NUP post would be.
Deciding to pursue NUP as a project of the PNC was the first time that my work as a Pagan and Druid truly crystallized in my mind. As Plotkin describes in his books on the cycling stages of life, many people go through a "Wander in the Cocoon" phase, when they withdraw from society and go wandering in the wilds to find their truest calling. Sometimes this wandering is literal -- visiting strange, exotic locations -- and sometimes it's more figurative or psychological or spiritual. For me, it was a little bit of both, and it seemed to last forever. But, Plotkin says, if we commit to the work of every stage of life and try to live most fully in the present, that is the only way we are ever able to eventually move on. I was the Wanderer for a long time before things fell into place. And when they fell into place, I found that I was suddenly no longer wandering. I was the Apprentice at the Wellspring.
NUP was my first apprenticeship. I had become a student of ecology and deep ecology almost without realizing it, and it suddenly clicked into place that in all my wanderings, what I'd discovered was that more than anything, I wanted to talk and write about nature spirituality. I thought perhaps others wanted to read and talk about that, too, and so I approached Jason with the idea of pursuing the concept as a part of the Pagan Newswire Collective. I was turned loose to do my worst... and the result was a group blog with some of the most amazing people I've ever had the pleasure to work with. Together, we managed to make NUP the most popular and well-read blog of the PNC collective.
So it's hard to step away from that. My pieces on NUP have more than double the readers that blog posts on my personal blog get. That's the nature of the internet beast these days -- with a glut of information out there, aggregate news sites and group blogs attract a lot more readers, they know they can get all that they need in one place. So it's really, really hard to step away from that, to give up the chance to reach more readers.
On the other hand, NUP has been a bit of a thankless job. I got no support from the national staff, who eagerly gave themselves impressive titles and then settled back on their heels and asked everyone else to take the initiative as part of the "autonomy" of the blogs and bureaus. So instead of making good on the clout earned through celebrity in order to promote and spread good, thoughtful, engaging writing... that clout was squandered.
I know full well that I don't get to sit at the popular kids' table in the Pagan Cafeteria. At best, I was for a time a bit like the yearbook editor, with the popular kids relying on my hard work to make them look good and feature their photographs most prominently in the collages (okay, the metaphor is stretched, bear with me). But trespass on the popular kids' table at lunch, and you get smacked down and reminded that hard work doesn't mean you're not still a geek and a loser. And I was tired of getting smacked down. I was tired of having to hang around people who clearly didn't like or respect me, even if I did love the work I was doing. I was tired of fending off personal attacks thrown at me in the public arena by the very people who were supposed to promote and support my work as part of NUP. I was especially tired of the attitude that my hard work on NUP somehow was something to feel embarrassed about, as though I didn't have something better to do, as if the disorganization and incompetence of the people at the top was a mark of their superiority. Diana's response especially, that the concerns of the PNC were "narrow" and not a big part of her life.... as if to say that the care and energy of the volunteers who make NUP and the other blogs possible was something beneath her, that she couldn't be bothered to handle the responsibilities that she chose to take on....
Well, anyway. There were a lot of reasons to leave.
But it's going to be a challenge to change my mental habits. To realize that I no longer have the NUP project as something that needs to be nursed and looked after. That's someone else's job now. In a lot of ways, it feels like an anchor has finally been cut, a deadweight released. In other ways, it feels odd to relinquish control over something you've put so much time and energy into... to give up on that vision of what you thought it might become and let someone else take on that responsibility and make something of it instead.
I have FF&C to think about, and that work has been so amazingly rewarding and fruitful already. I go into that work guided by a vision and a direction. Rather than feeling like I'm always scrambling to grab the attention of the popular people so maybe they'll throw me a bone, I have a deep sense of integrity about the work I do for FF&C. Maybe it's just that, for now, we're skirting under the radar of the trolls and the haters.... But all of the listeners and readers and fans have been so full of support and enthusiasm. It's a joy to do this work.
I read an article analyzing Obama's strategy in the presidential debate this week. There is a technique in debating where you bombard your opponent with a slew of falsehoods, half-truths and strawman arguments, in the hopes that he'll spend all his time trying to debunk you and never have a chance to get out his own message.
In a lot of ways, I felt like the work I did for NUP was constantly at risk of getting pulled off track by that kind of tactic, especially when it came to behind the scenes. Not so with FF&C. With FF&C, I feel like I am finally staying "on message" and really having the chance to explore and share the things I truly care about, the things that most fascinate and inspire me.
The internet is a weird place. Bad press can be addictive. You feel like you have to defend yourself against idiocy. I know for a long time I've worried that my work would be remembered according to the false characterizations of the trolls and haters who were way more popular than me, had tons more readers. Every time I came across someone judging me (especially judging me as a person) without having even bothered to read my work, it really hurt. But at the same time, damn did it drive traffic.
But I don't want to deal with that stress anymore. I'm sick of trying to placate the Bitchy Popular Girls in the Pagan online community. I much prefer to go off with the other nerds and enjoy their company.
It's like the surface tension of water, I told Jeff earlier. When you've been drowning in bullshit so long, sometimes it takes a lot of effort to break through, to scramble to the surface and leave the bullshit behind. But when you do eventually make it back to dry land, and you can stand upright again and feel proud of your work and hold your head high and take a deep breath without worrying what kind of stench is going to invade you from every direction......
......Damn, it feels good.
