Hey Sporky.
First, thanks for the kindness.
Second... well, second is a little story I told on my blog that I'll retell briefly here. During the Great AW Shutdown, I got my first positive pregnancy test. It was our fifth month trying, and I was on the phone with Birol the day before, saying, "This is the first time I'm not sure I want to see a positive test. I feel like it's a miscarriage waiting to happen." The stress I felt during that period was outrageous. I was very worried that these boards were lost forever, I was watching a few vultures use the opportunity to say really nasty things about me ("kick her while she's down" sort of thing), I was losing my lunch over how I was supposed to pay salaries of my two employees along with the new hosting costs and the cost of a tech help guy when we had no site income at all, etc. I fell apart on my lawyer over the phone while telling him that people here had offered to cover my legal costs.
It was at once an amazing experience and one of the most harrowing experiences I've ever been through. I felt like there were thousands of people behind me, pulling for this site to come back, willing to do whatever they could to help. You ever have something that you care a whole lot about, but no one else around you really gets it? Well, this was the antithesis of that. It was like one of those intense moments on Extreme Home Makeover when the family gets to see how their whole community cared enough to help.
But it also felt like a huge responsibility not to let them down, and a tightrope act knowing what I could and couldn't say in public, and... well, it was just rough. And on about the third day of all that, I got a positive pregnancy test. Two, actually, but both were very light.
Anyway, I went for a blood test to confirm it two days later, and it was negative. And I'm never going to know if that was a very early miscarriage, or faulty tests, but it definitely felt like a wake-up call to me about getting my priorities straight. I haven't felt like a great wife-- too many nights where it's, "Can't talk now, the website is down," or "The storefront is broken," or "I have to get the newsletter out," or whatever other crisis of the moment popped up-- and I sure didn't want to feel like a bad mom. When I got my "real" positive test the following month, I knew I had to make big changes.
I can get very emotionally wrapped up in the people and situations around here, and I'm not great at leaving that stuff behind me when I sign off. And here's an example-- I had no contact whatsoever with this guy before he posted this on my blog yesterday:
I'm apparently not the only struggling author you're trying to destroy. But I just thought I'd warn you: I'm not what you think I am, and if you get in my way, it will be a serious mistake on your part. That's all I have to say. Tell your little neurotic minions to back off!
He got banned here for being nasty (I had nothing to do with it) and wants someone to take it out on, so...
This kind of thing happens a lot. I can handle the lawsuit threats from the people who land on our Bewares Board, but the creepy personal vendettas (mostly from people who got themselves banned from here, or PA authors) don't sit well with me. Takes up a lot of my mental energy, and at least once became a real-life threat.
This part sounds silly, but I never meant to be well-known. The better known I became around the writing world, the more people would look for reasons to knock me down, and I'm just not cut out for that kind of fight. Definitely not while trying to get out of my own head so I can learn to be selfless enough to put my family's needs before my own. After a while, I became so negative that I would even see nice threads like this through the vultures' eyes, imagining how there would be blog comments and posts popping up elsewhere to refute anything nice, and that stuff would literally keep me up at night.
Now compound that with the stress of knowing that stress is really bad for a pregnancy! So I'd stress myself out about not being stressed. ("Stop feeling stressed right this minute or else you could kill your baby!" "Oh. Okay.")
In the back of my mind, I knew this day would come, and I knew it would either be Mac or Amy to take over-- Mac being the person who "gets" these boards and the people on them the best, and Amy being the person who knows the newsletters and the site the best. So now they're working together, along with Charlie, which makes me really happy, because I know it's the right team, and I know they'll love working together.
Mac cares just as much as I do, and she's damn tough. For a lot of other people, handing them the reins to this site would be like, "Here, let me hand you a nervous breakdown." But it's really, really hard to rattle Mac. So that's what let me leave the helm without regret, and know that it would still feel like home.
I bet that was a much longer answer than you actually wanted. Maybe I should have stuck to Tiny Terror's response.