I’m back. Well I guess technically I didn’t really go anywhere, but life happened, time passed, and I realized recently that I haven’t written on this page in over a year. Which, thinking about it now, makes me SO sad. For so long, this blog was my creative outlet. A place to document trips, special moments in my life, health and wellness, home decor and fashion finds. But like so many things, once I stopped prioritizing it, it slowly slid out of my routine until it was merely an after thought.
So here’s what’s been going on. A few months back, Ben and I were in the process of packing up our NYC apartment to move back to Austin (I have a LOT to catch you up on)! At the same time, we were saying goodbye to our northeastern friends and family, and navigating my grandma getting sick/coming to terms that she only a little time left with us.
Around that same time, I received an email from BlueHost letting me know that my website hosting was about to expire. I filed the email away with an “I’ll deal with this later” mentality – we just had a lot going on and I naively thought the website would be there when I was ready for it. Just sitting there with a big red “reactivate” button next to it.
Fast forward to when we got settled in Texas, and I logged into BlueHost to press that button, only to find out that my hosting being deleted also meant that my entire website (and every single piece of content) was gone with it. I remember the pit in my stomach the moment I realized the severity of what I had done.
I immediately reached out to BlueHost and talked to a representative via chat. They basically told me that the site was gone because I hadn’t renewed hosting and that there were no backups available. It would have been my responsibility to pay for a backup service (they weren’t wrong) and since I didn’t, I was SOL. They confirmed it was gone-gone, a total wipe, and that there was nothing they could do.
I was upset – more mad at myself than anything – for not understanding that the hosting and WordPress pages were linked and if one was gone, so was the other. I thought about all of the mastectomy content lost (content I knew helped and would continue to help so many), and all of the personal milestones I documented over the years, pieces I poured my heart into from our engagement, to our wedding, to trips we took, to my feelings during covid, moving to NYC, etc.
About a month later and only a few pages recovered via The WayBack Machine, my grandma’s conditioned worsened and she passed just a few weeks after her 98 birthday. She was one of my best friends, an anchor in my life, and we had a bond that I don’t ever think I’ll be able to fully put into words. A few days after her passing, I was going through my texts with her and saw one that said, “Read your blog last night. I cried. It was beautifully written. Thank you so much my darling, Lauren” and I instantly broke down.
In that moment I had a flash back to 2020, just months after the world had stopped, I spent a warm spring night out on our balcony talking to my grandma. I interviewed her for a piece I called Brunch with Bea (because we always used to do Sunday brunch and her name was Beatrice). We talked for hours about her life in her 30’s and the parallels it drew to mine – we laughed, cried, she gave me life advice, relationship advice and I just remember it being such a special 3+ hour long conversation.
In true “me” fashion, when I went to put that blog piece together, I wrote it directly in WordPress (even though Ben has told me a million and 1 times to write things in Word and then copy it over). I just didn’t think this page would ever go anywhere, I mean – why would it? It was a priority for me to maintain and I thought it would always be that way. Retrospect, right?
The moment I realized I lost Brunch with Bea, I panicked. Ben and I checked every single archive site and the page was no where to be found. I cried for days, obsessing over these sites, just hoping one of them would have archived that single page so that I could read it one more time.
I eventually had to leave Austin to head back up to NYC to say goodbye to my grandma. While I was there, I stayed with a friend in the city. One morning we sat on her couch for hours with coffee, sharing memories of my grandma and just catching up on life, and I told her how I lost my site and how upset I was that I lost that article. And let me just say, thank god for this girl.
She works in tech and told me to reach out to BlueHost again – basically that they HAVE to store/be able to recover client data, so if they told me “no” it was probably just someone following a script. While I didn’t formally back up the site, they 100% did – I just needed to find the right person to help me get it back.
So later that day, I reached out to BlueHost again and was connected to someone who was willing to help. I explained the situation and told them I’d pay for hosting that day if I could get it back, and suddenly there were multiple backups for me to choose from. Funny how that works 😉
So I reupped my plan, and within 24 hours my site my live again. The first thing I did was read Brunch with Bea…and the second thing I did was move it into a Word Doc (see, Ben – I listen sometimes) so that if life gets in the way again, I’d still have those words documented forever.
All of that to say that life has been a lot lately. Moving out of NYC was tough, leaving friends and family was tough, losing my website was tough, and then saying goodbye to my grandma was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. “Tough” doesn’t even begin to describe it.
But in the midst of everything, I was reminded of the importance to prioritize your passions. My grandma would have been the very first person to read this blog post and would have wanted me to keep writing and keep creating.
So with her in mind and a new found appreciation for this space – I’m back.
