I’m going to write about something today that might feel a little technical at first. It involves coding, and website building, and words like Textpattern that won’t mean anything to most people reading this.
But please bear with me, because it’s not really about any of that.
It’s about what it means to build something with your own hands. Something that holds 23 years of your life – your writing, your art, your most vulnerable stories. And about realising that you might be the only person alive who truly knows how to find any of it.
(Note: I wrote this first on my website, as I try to do with everything now. The website is the home. The newsletter is just a way of opening the door and inviting you in. So if this feels like it belongs in either / both – well, it does.)
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I’ve been spending hours recently rebuilding my site. Textpattern, hand-coded, every choice mine. For those who don’t code, think of it like this: instead of renting a furnished apartment (which is what platforms like WordPress or Substack offer), I’m building the rooms themselves. The walls. The windows. The light switches. It’s slower, but the result is exactly mine.
And I’ve been loving it – the creativity, the empowerment, the feeling of not being stuck inside someone else’s templates.
But it’s lonely to realise you’re building something intricate and beautiful and deeply personal, and almost nobody knows what goes into it. Or where anything is. Or how any of it works.
I was hard at it today. That’s been the focus lately – figuring out how to sell things directly from my website, without handing a cut to platforms that don’t care about me. It’s fiddly work. Satisfying. I was thinking about the potential of my site, the things it could do. And I was also thinking about its actual track record: 23 years of writing, artwork, products that sell for real money. Valuable material. Material I’ve created, that others have valued enough to pay for.
And a thought landed that I couldn’t shake: if I got run over tomorrow, nobody would know what’s in here.
Not just the writing and not just the art. Not just the products. But the raw, human stuff too. Drawings I made in hospital during my breakdown – drawings I’ve spoken about publicly, drawings that have found their way into talks and newsletters. Also: the personal stories other people have shared with me about over the years. All of it, sitting here in categories and tags that only make sense to me.
I sat with that thought for a while, fidgeting with the pens on my desk. Then a more specific one came into focus.
My wife and daughter don’t have the faintest idea what the word Textpattern even means.
They know I work on my website. They know (I think?) that it matters to me. But if they had to find anything in here – access the shop, pull down those hospital drawings, or even just log in – they wouldn’t know where to start. And they wouldn’t know who to ask.
Probably only two people in the world could help – fellow Textpattern enthusiasts I’ve collaborated with over the years, who understand this weird, wonderful tool well enough to untangle what I’ve built. Their names are in my head. Not written down anywhere my family would find. Not even mentioned, probably, in any conversation they’d have overheard.
So the thought became heavier: it’s not just that the map would be lost. It’s that the people who could read the map wouldn’t even know they were needed.
There’s no drama in this realisation. No urgency to fix it immediately. Just a quiet weight I’ve been carrying without noticing, and today I noticed.
I think about why I build this way. Why I chose the hard path instead of the easy one. Why I tinker and tweak and refuse to settle for modular, off-the-shelf solutions. It’s the same reason I draw by hand instead of using filters. The same reason I teach by showing the messy process, not just the finished piece. I’m fascinated by the how. The technique behind the thing, the layers underneath it.
But that fascination comes with a cost. The more you build something that is truly yours, the less anyone else instinctively understands it.
I’m not sure what to do with this yet. Maybe I start leaving breadcrumbs: write more openly about what’s here and how it’s put together. Share something, just as I regularly encourage others to do when they talk about creating some kind of legacy, writing some kind of memoir.
At the very least: maybe I write down those two names somewhere my wife and daughter would think to look.
For now, I can start by saying it out loud for the first time:
My website is an extension of my mind. Like my mind, only I know how to navigate it (at least: somewhat). It holds technical stuff but also some of the most personal things I’ve ever made.
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