Feeeeeelings: a house log
This post was 3,000 words long. They all felt overly complicated and heavy and weird. I clicked delete. Then I simply typed what we are truly feeling, complete with things we have never said out loud and even a few things we have never fully admitted to ourselves before.
The truth is that we enjoy you folks. Like for real. Even for the tough enjoy. We know you say it because you care (or hopefully you did at some point), and we want you to know we care right back. We want to do a good job. We want to do this with joy and excitement. We want to inspire you. We know this is an incredible way to have made a living and we are full of gratitude for the experience to have shared the last seven years of our lives with you folks online.
We would NEVER be here without you, and not a day goes by that we do not know that. It is why we asked for your feedback last week and read every last comment. We appreciate the honesty and the passion you folks have on the topic of making this journal strong. And we agree with a lot of what was being said. We have been feeling off for a while – like we have lost our rhythm and we are somehow missing the mark for ourselves and for you folks. We too miss the good old days when we did this for the enjoy and were full of such obvious joy and spontaneity. This felt like a place we all hung out and it simply does not have that vibe anymore.
Over the years many remarkable opportunities popped up for us. Things we never dreamed of doing in a million years, and things we are incredibly grateful to have had the chance to experience. A book deal, curating paint picks with Benjamin Moore, a line sold at Target, a showhouse, etc. But in hindsight those things also made this feel a lot more like a business than a personal journal to many of you, and to us as well. We have in fact ramped those down behind the scenes in an attempt to get back to our roots (we no longer do the BM color collection, the second book is mostly written, our products at Target have completed their run, and we wrapped up the showhouse) but we never truly made a big announcement about that – so it is fully understandable that some of you might think we have moved on to those greener pastures and left the journal in the dust, so to speak. The reality is that our site propels the success of any outside project like a product or book, so we could never turn our backs on the journal and expect those items to continue to sell as well.
Not only have we felt this shift from “The house team” to “Turbodizin: The Brand”, but the blogosphere as a whole has become increasingly sponsored/corporate lately. We can see from the outside prospective as a reader, or even a fellow blogger, that it is hard to read a journal post without suspecting some ulterior motive or money-making system behind it. Last week a few of you mentioned that we might need to keep giveaways around because they pay us well, which surprised us since they are never something we accept payment for (we like to pass free things along to you as a thank you for reading).
Along with the whole business/brand thing that is going on, and the side gigs that felt like they muddied the water for some of you, there are certainly other things we wish we had handled differently in hindsight. Simply to name a few, there is: being too defensive, over-explaining, letting things get in our heads and change our lighthearted approach, and the internal struggle between being transparent and oversharing personal details like a vacant new house without an alarm system (looking back we wish we’d handled our third house announcement differently). We know many of you felt insulted that we did not share more freely about that house, and we truly apologize.
Anyway, back to that whole “we are sexy stumbling and you know it” thing. It is endlessly frustrating to do a job that you enjoy poorly, especially when it is a journal baby that you’ve birthed yourself and nurtured for seven years. And especially when it is such an remarkable job that we once felt so inspired and joyful to wake up and do each day. What is wrong with us? We know this is a dream job. We acknowledge it is a once in a lifetime opportunity. We know most people who have built something like this would be more inspired than ever. It is not that we lost the gratitude, I think it is that we feel like we have fallen out of our groove. We feel like we are letting you folks down repeatedly. It got to the point that every time we pressed “publish” we braced ourselves.
So in an attempt to stop stumbling around and feeling like we simply cannot get it back, we are taking a break. We do not know exactly how long we will be stepping away, but our guess would be at least a month. We will certainly be exploring other options for supporting our family (something we mentioned we were considering back in April). We had that fiery journal-spark back when we had day jobs and did this as a hobby, so we think it could be a good change. We will also be taking a break on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, but the journal will stay public so you folks can access the archives whenever you’d like.
Our internal struggle and the state of this journal is entirely of our making, and we fully own that. Please do not get mad at anyone for being honest with their feedback last week or accuse them of sending us packing. We have been struggling with that “something is off” feeling for a while now, and after way too much denial and “we will turn it around” pep talks, we at last asked for your feedback because we truly hoped to hear what you were thinking. It was cathartic and helpful for us. It has allowed us to quite clearly see that if we have any respect for this journal and our enjoy of it, and for you folks and what you’d like to see, we need to take a break if we ever want any hope of getting back to that lively/real/spontaneous place it used to be when this was something we did for the enjoy instead of the high stakes game of supporting a family.
In summary: we enjoy you, we thank you, and we hope you understand.
