I've surprised myself that I've managed to keep showing up at Rosieland writing and sharing every week.
A couple years ago, life circumstances made me think I had to drop it all to focus on priorities, but somehow I kept going. I dropped a few things, the Slack went quiet, events went away, my desire to connect went away. I had to focus on creating within my limitations. I survived, and I suppose I'm stronger for it.
I showed up in a different way and accepted I could only do what I can.
It's interesting though, because writing almost became easier. And much of my work became longer, often publishing essay style pieces.
Despite taking a slower pace, I also decided to value myself and my expertise. I increased the price, stopped doing most things for free, and refused to give into the tech broligarchy hustle.
I re-discovered my love for building community and realised that I have amazing insights and stories to tell as a result of building our own platform (in the MoTaverse). The fact that I can even say this publicly is personal growth for me, when a woman in tech shows confidence, they get labelled as arrogant, and that's definitely happened to me in the past. I'm so past that now. Whateverz.
I've had many holy shit this is amazing, "why didn't we do this earlier?" and "why is no one else doing this?" moments. Re-building a community with a platform focused mindset has taught me so much, and I'll continue sharing my learnings as they happen via Rosieland.
And I guess it's almost inevitable that it's led to me being even more frustrated and bored with the community industry as a whole, and this is probably the first time I'm saying that publicly. Apparently, I like to ruffle things up and I've been told to do it more, so here I am. 🤷🏻♀️
Rosieland never went away, but I'm ready to do more again. And that feels great.
I once felt like I wanted to build my own community platform to enable communities across the world, but now I'm quite content building a platform for my specific people and niche(s). I get so much joy out of it.
And perhaps my wish these days is that:
- I can inspire others to build beautiful communities on their own terms and tech stack
- other community platforms could learn from me and potentially be inspired by some of the things I'm doing and sharing about
And yes, even if you aren't or can't build your own platform, what I share is still relevant, learnings, inspirations and models can be adapted to your own context. And who knows what the future will hold.
I'll continue to be stubborn and not give away my much hard-earned community knowledge (with literal blood, sweat and tears), but that doesn't mean I won't explore doing some other things more publicly.
Also, I won't be speaking at any community conferences for the foreseeable future in order to leave space for others, but you know where to find me!
🐌
