I have a couple hard announcements for you today, and you can read about them officially at Style Lush and Food Lush.
Last year was a year of many questions. Some of those were: Was I doing too much? Would I ever find the time to do more? Should I step up? Or step back? Should I just give up sleep altogether or should I give up the things keeping me from sleep?
This year, there have been answers.
Simply (but sadly) put: I don't have the time to manage the Lush sites any longer. It was a painful realization, a painful answer to a few questions, and it's been heartbreaking to set in motion. I know this sounds a little dramatic. They're websites! What little advertising money they brought in dried up a while ago because I stopped having the time to seek out advertising opportunities. The ideas I had for the sites kept piling up but the time to devote to those ideas either never came or came at the expense of my offline life.
Rationally, it makes a lot of sense to shut them down. It's time. It's been time. But, emotionally. Oh, emotionally, I'm a mess. I have made such incredible friends and memories directly because of the sites. I can't tell you how proud they've made me over the years. I really wanted them to take off, to fill the writers' pockets with money, to catch the attention of important people. I believed they could do all that (and would). I still think they could, if only circumstances were different.
Kyle will be four the week after next. It stuns me. He was a baby and now he's a boy, and I've never loved anything more than watching that kid grow, but he's still growing too fast. I can't make time slow down, but I can make me slow down.
When I told Mike my decision, he actually tried to talk me out of it. He might not get blogging but he gets when I'm happy. I told him all my reasons, all my thoughts, and the next night he said to me, "You know, I think this is the right choice for our family." That's all I needed to hear. Any doubt I might have had over these hard goodbyes went poof. Mike would never ask that I walk away from something that's taking time from him, but he still deserves that I walk away anyway.
There will be new posts up through next week, and I hope you'll visit and then go on to continue supporting the team of writers as they move on to new things. They are something else, those women. They are rock stars, stylish role-models, inspiring women, and all-around incredible friends. I love each of them, so much, and I could never say that enough.
I talked to Natalie about this too because I tend to talk to Natalie about a lot and she asked if I thought I would regret this decision. Absolutely, without a doubt, likely every single day. I will regret giving these sites up for a long time to come, I'd be willing to bet.
But something I'm learning as I get older, regret doesn't necessarily mean you made a mistake. It just means you need a little time to be sad that things didn't work out differently.
Thank you to every single one of you who ever visited, who ever commented, who ever told me at a dinner party or in an email that you liked such-and-such post or that you bookmarked the sites or that you shared them with your friends. That never got old. Something we built entertained you. Oh, that was always such a fun feeling. So, thank you a million times over for supporting me, supporting the writers, supporting the sites. I'm so grateful.
It's hard to close doors, but I have great faith there are new ones opening as I hit publish.