What’s the Point?

I’m done. That’s it. I’m taking it all down. I’m getting rid of every single link I’ve ever posted online to Working Mental Health Don’t believe me? Try clicking on a link in my heartfelt mental health posts anywhere on social media. Broken? I thought so.

Broken links leading to nowhere instead of to my writing. This path isn’t working, but that doesn’t mean that the masterpiece never happens. Projects almost never go exactly as expected. It may turn out completely different than anyone thought. Getting there might prove difficult. Unexpected obstacles force you to make new plans, then change those plans too. 

Last weekend I was NOT expecting to abruptly move my entire website to a new platform. I knew it would happen at some point, when I had planned for it, made some arrangements, or at least decided where I would move it. And probably most importantly, how I would move it.

If you were online and following my posts on LinkedIn last week, you know already that, that’s not what happened. You could probably see my anxiety from your screens. I could. It looked like a broken website, but this story doesn’t end with me taking it down. The place my website was hosted up until last week kept crashing. It felt like every time I tried to go to the site, it was down. Last week, for a few hours every day, at least. That’s WAY TOO MANY TIMES. I emailed back and forth with the owners, and it was clear they couldn’t help.

I was NOT happy about this. Obviously.

In fairness, their platform was never designed for a site like mine. I was being extremely stubborn even trying to run the site. It took a ton of tweaks to even manage the site. Every time I published an article, I had to create at least 3 separate posts to make it look like a blog. I set up every button and link manually; NOTHING on that site happened automatically.

You guys didn’t see all that fun, behind the scenes part of the project. 

This story doesn’t end with me deleting my website. For me, moving the seemed like a daunting, maybe impossible task. My genius friend made it look easy, but he probably could have charged me a million dollars for his help. Last weekend when this first started, I felt discouraged. I wondered if I should move the site, if it mattered to anyone except me. Was my work worth it? Someone would have helped me by now if it was, I thought. People could see how much I was struggling. 

But could they really? I realized that I hadn’t even ASKED for help. I hadn’t asked anyone. I did all the extra steps on my site because it saved money, but I think I also felt bad asking for help. I felt like I didn’t deserve it. Depression isn’t exactly characterized by high self esteem, but I’m working on it. Last weekend I allowed myself to ask for help. My website was worth saving and I didn’t know how to do it myself. At the beginning of this project, I probably wouldn’t have done that. But now I finally realized that my work WAS worth it.

I have never liked asking for help, but I had to do it if I wanted to continue. I finally mustered up the courage to ask, and if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have ever known how many people were willing to try. My work really mattered. It really does matter, or trust me, it really wouldn’t be here today. I’m going to prove it when I ask for help again, because now I need to fix all of the broken links in my previous posts, because my work matters and I want people to find it. The homepage has the same address, but none of the articles do. I didn’t lose any of the content, so this inconvenience is nothing compared to what this would have looked like if I didn’t save my work.

This project definitely isn’t going according to plan. Last week it was a total mess. But it has come a long way, and so have I. Everyone is a work in progress and every day we can work on ourselves a little bit more. And if we don’t talk about our progress as we go along, then we work alone. This is why discussing mental health is so important. I’m glad I have a new place to do it, and I hope you enjoy Working Mental Health’s new home. Now that it has this awesome new look, it’s time to figure out some action items for the project. But for now, I’m going to enjoy pressing “publish” one time and having the article show up on my website without taking a zillion more steps.