(Blog post from old site provider. Originally published in March 2023)

Today, I re-discovered my own website. 

I had buried it, forgotten about it. I had not even left a headstone so I could find it again (seriously, I couldn't even remember the name of the host site I had used to create it). Then, today on World Book Day, I found it and I dug it up again. There it was, perfectly preserved as if no time at all had passed (of course I had to link this situation to Justified Sinner somehow!)

The month/year of this blog's creation was January 2020. I laughed when I saw it. No wonder I gave it up. The Pandemic in its great divisiveness, put a firm pizza-cutter line between Those Who Thrived Creatively and Those Who Could Not. I fell squarely within the section of the latter. If I'm being honest, which I will be for the sake of anyone who needs to hear this, it was not necessarily because of the Pandemic: it was a hard time mental health-wise for me anyway. The whole year of 2019 was the worst year of my life thus far for reasons I won't share on this blog (I, ever wary of sharing too much on the internet and for whom it took great courage to even admit something that personal publicly). In a strange way the first Lockdown and the subsequent furloughing from my job came as an immense relief - I desperately needed the time to recover. 

Part of that recovery was a conscious decision to bin anything that was causing me stress. At that point not only did stressors include posting on social media, but working on A Justified Sinner or even drawing or writing at all. I can count on one hand the amount of images I produced during the Lockdowns. 

Coaxing myself back into it was hard. Convincing myself that the project was worthwhile was hard. Getting back into the headspace felt like going back in time to 2019/2020. 

Thankfully my life and mental health improved drastically after (and strangely, during) the Pandemic, but knowing where to start or trying to pick up where I left off with A Justified Sinner was nearly impossible. I felt racked with guilt for abandoning it, for letting down the few people who had taken the time to tell me they were interested. A great big sob story and explanation felt necessary and yet simultaneously abhorrent to me. 

Being so public about my intentions to do this project has always been difficult. This blog is a prime example of how I tend to approach it - jump before you're ready to. Foolish probably, but necessary for me. But it's the only way I ever got started doing anything - from creating my first ever social media account for art back in 2015, to actually embarking on this adaptation at all. So although this blog only ever got two posts in three years, I am thankful to past-me for setting it up before I was ready to. Because now I feel much more ready to continue, and here it is, already set up for me.

Thank you to anyone who has persevered with me so far with this project. Reading kind words from strangers is one of the things that really keeps me going with it.

I will try to update more regularly, but I will not promise anything. Certainly more regularly than every three years.

On a cheerier note, it's not as though I have done nothing with A Justified Sinner in the three years since I last posted. In fact, it's all going rather well now. It all began to fall back into place, slowly, starting in January 2021 with an online book launch..

Watch this space for updates and recaps.