Blog migration reflections
I am finally, incredibly, nearly done with moving 10 years of blog posts from WordPress to here in Bear.
It is something I don’t want to do again. It was a lot of work. I’d love Bear to be my forever home. At the same time, migrating has been a powerful process.
My WordPress blog had sat pretty much dormant for a few years. It’s not that I didn’t think about it. I thought about it all the time. It’s that I was very blocked by constraints I was putting on myself. Like that my blog needed to remain a travel blog. Or that I needed to “catch up” on writing about what happened in the years of not blogging. But I think these constraints were probably overshadowed by the big emotions: the grief about how my life was changing. The shame around not writing and creating when I wanted to write and create. And then also just pedestrian difficulties around restarting a writing practice after not having one for a long time.
When I encounter a blog that has no new posts for years and no update explaining why, I feel sad. I feel afraid of that happening. The sadness and fear didn’t prevent it from happening to me.
Bit by bit I have been migrating all my blog posts over to here. They are generally long posts and contain many images. I made a decision that I wanted all posts to contain all the original images. I’ve questioned this decision a lot because it has made the migration so slow! I download all the images from our shared Lightroom catalogue and stick them into the Bear version of the post and write the captions.
But in engaging with each post, I’ve had some valuable exposure therapy to my past writing. I’ve been able to move from grief and avoidance to more gratitude and wonder at the experiences of my life. A recurring thought I have is just how glad I am that past versions of me made the effort to write.
There were a few years (maybe 2020 to 2024?) that I wasn’t able to read old journals or look at pictures from 2014-2019 with an open heart. Having to really dive in and wade through my blog was a factor in moving through the avoidance. The migration didn’t cause me to accept and embrace and love my present life. But it was like, a factor? Maybe it was a positively reinforcing aspect. I’d move in the direction of acceptance, and then take an action aligned directionally acceptance, like reading an old post and feeling gratitude and curiosity and maybe also crying and feeling some cringe. This would help solidify the acceptance that the years captured in my blog were over. What I understand now is that there is a freedom in that.
My hope with the migration was that it would help me get a fresh start with blogging. It has really felt like moving to a new home. The new home is definitely a better environment for me. I just didn’t expect that the process of moving itself would be so powerful. (And so long!)
Moving forward, I might include less images in posts and also try to make posts a bit shorter. I’m wondering how else I can share pictures besides including so many in a given post. Maybe by creating different pages for albums on a particular topic?