I think it’s time to close this extended chapter of my online life.
It’s time, but it’s also weird, and more difficult than I’d imagined. I’ve had this blog for close to a decade. It’s been with me through some shit--much of it good, some of it bad--and it almost doesn’t feel right to just let it go. I’m a sucker for the sentimental, and I often keep nostalgia wrapped around me like a warm blanket. This sometimes translates to hanging onto things--thoughts, feelings, people, blogs--that should be let go with grace when their time, purpose, and role in my life has come to an end. Rilke once wrote of the importance of learning to let go, that “holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.” It’s a lesson I’m always learning, will continue to learn throughout my life.
I started this Tumblr initially looking for an outlet for my intellectual inquiries into Arabic philology, cultural studies, and politics. I quickly found a community of like-minded people here who challenged and changed me. That community slowly grew into almost ten thousand people at the height of the Tumblr era. Within that large community, I encountered a small handful of people who I would meet in person, who would become close friends, colleagues, crushes, lovers. Some of them I still talk to almost daily, see occasionally, and am really thankful to have in my life; others I’ve lost to the vagaries of growth and change and I miss and think about them often.
I haven’t really been active on this blog for years. Lately, I’ve just been hanging onto the dying vestiges of a once-active depository of thoughts and ideas, poems and photographs--a condensary of my life as I moved through the ends and beginnings and ends again of different worlds. I don’t want to stop reflecting and introspecting, writing and documenting and archiving memories and moments. I just want to do those things in a way that’s more meaningful and relevant to where I’m at in life now. I still have my personal website outside of this, and may eventually reintroduce a non-Tumblr, long-format blog to that. But at least for a while, this is it.
As most of my old Tumblr friends, and virtually all of my real-world friends, have migrated over to Instagram (@indianajosh) and Twitter (@indiana_josh), you can find me at both. I’m most active on Instagram, and really only hop onto Twitter occasionally to like a few of Marc’s tweets and tell myself that this is the day I become active on Twitter. And of course it never is.
And look, I know this is just a blog. But it’s also a place where I once posted a video of Bandit leaping and playing in his first heavy snowfall back when he was only two years old with so much of the world before him, so much of our life together to come. That memory and that moment alone makes this archive mean everything to me. I’ll probably just leave all this up until this domain expires and then archive and close it down. For the scant handful of you who are still around: thanks for sticking with me over the years.
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