I built my website to help me reach my audience — for speaking, coaching, and writing. I hope the site conveys that.

Here’s the thing: I’m not doing that any more.

I have surrendered wanting to be a professional speaker. Having valuable information to share is absolutely no assurance of success.

I am not pursuing coaching clients, and for today, would probably not take one on.

Check the date stamps on my blog, and you can see how much I’ve been writing.

So why does my website still say that stuff?

One, it’ll cost more money than I want to spend to revamp the site, especially since for now, I don’t have a new shingle to hang. I could take the whole thing down, but still want the platform to opine into the ether, whether anyone’s reading or not.

Second, it took me just about a year to face changing just my LinkedIn page, which I finally have done. Failing at these pursuits has brought substantial emotional loss that still hurts. Yes, I know that casting it as failure is a bad idea. I might tell — or, before this happened, might have told — others what I’m being told now. "It wasn’t failure. You felt you had something to share, and bless you, you did your best.”

The way I receive that now is just “blah, blah, blah.” I concede that my stance reflects poorly on me. I agree that I’m deriving some “benefit” from holding onto the hurt. I accept that I’ll be better off when it’s just something I tried, without emotional ballast and harsh self-judgment. That would be better, and is what I would want for a dear loved one. But I ain’t there yet, and to say otherwise would add to the shame I feel.

I consider it a milestone to be discussing this. I stopped pursuing the work in December 2016, and 2017 was a pretty hard year, emotionally. I feel like I’m making progress.

What am I doing now? I’m seeking jobs that would exploit my highly honed writing abilities (no shame there!), and driving for Lyft and Uber. No need for a website for that.