Why I Created In The Gray

The internet feels incredibly loud right now.

There is always something pulling for our attention. Another notification. Another opinion. Another tragedy. Another controversy. Another person trying to be seen.

We scroll from one subject to the next, sometimes without even having enough time to process what we just read before something else hits us.

And for a long time, I participated in that world without thinking much about it.

I've spent nearly twenty years using social media to build businesses, share my life, connect with people and, hopefully, have a positive impact along the way. Social media has given me opportunities and relationships that I am incredibly grateful for. It has allowed me to share pieces of myself with people I may have otherwise never met.

But over the last several years, something began to change.

There wasn't one defining moment when I decided I didn't really like the relationship I had with social media anymore. It happened gradually.

As I continued healing internally, calming my nervous system and intentionally creating a more peaceful life, I became increasingly aware of how certain environments made me feel.

And social media started to feel different.

Sometimes I could physically feel the anxiety in my body simply from opening an app. Within seconds, I could be met with anger, tragedy, arguments, advertisements, opinions and countless things competing for my attention.

The more peaceful I became internally, the more aware I became of the noise around me.

And eventually, I couldn't ignore it anymore.

I wanted something slower.

Something quieter.

Something that gave me, and the things I wanted to write about, room to breathe.

That longing eventually became In the Gray.

When Living Becomes Content

For almost twenty years, being visible online was part of my life.

I built businesses through social media. I created a personal brand. I shared my family, my experiences, my thoughts and my struggles.

And somewhere along the way, I began to feel like I always needed to be showing up. There was an underlying fear that if I stopped posting, stopped sharing or stopped being visible, people might forget about me.

Social media always seemed to require more.

More content.

More engagement.

More visibility.

More attention.

And after doing that for long enough, something strange can happen.

You can start forgetting how to simply exist in and experience your own life.

There were times, especially when my children were younger, when we could be on vacation or making a beautiful family memory and part of my brain was already thinking about how I could turn that moment into content.

I wanted the pictures.

I wanted the beautiful lighting.

I wanted the perfect caption.

And none of that means the memories weren't real. They were. I loved those experiences. I loved my family. I was genuinely grateful for the life we were living.

But two things can be true at the same time.

I could be genuinely enjoying my life while also being aware of how that life would appear to the people watching it.

Today, there is an incredible freedom in realizing that not every beautiful moment needs an audience.

Some memories don't need a caption.

Some pictures don't need to be posted.

Some stories don't need to be told.

Some moments get to simply be mine.

I still share parts of my life online. I probably always will. There are people who have followed my family for years who genuinely enjoy watching my children grow and seeing what we're doing.

But now I understand something I didn't always understand before.

There is a difference between being watched and being seen.

People can watch your life for years without ever really knowing you.

They can know where you went on vacation, what your family looks like, what you did last weekend and what you're working on without ever understanding what's happening beneath the surface.

And sometimes someone can read a single essay and understand something about you that twenty years of photographs never could.

Maybe, in some ways, In the Gray will allow me to become a little less visible while finally allowing myself to be more deeply seen.

Giving My Words Room to Breathe

I've never been afraid of vulnerability.

Writing deeply isn't something that suddenly began when I created this website. I've written this way for years.

But I started realizing that the environment where I was placing those words didn't always fit the kind of writing I wanted to create.

Social media is designed for speed and attention.

What can make someone stop scrolling?

What will make them react?

What will generate comments?

What will keep people engaged?

But some conversations deserve more than a few seconds.

Some things require ten minutes of reading.

Some ideas require sitting quietly afterward.

Some subjects shouldn't immediately be followed by a news article, an advertisement, someone's vacation pictures, an argument between strangers and the next tragedy happening somewhere in the world.

Some words need room to breathe.

And so do the people reading them.

That's what I wanted In the Gray to offer.

I wanted to create a quiet little corner of the internet where you don't have to perform.

You don't have to be loud.

You don't have to have an immediate opinion.

You don't have to comment.

You don't have to tell me you were here.

You can simply come in, read something, sit with it and leave.

You can return to it a few days later.

You can question something you once believed.

You can disagree with me.

You can recognize yourself in something I've written.

You can simply be.

There is room for that here.

Learning to Live Before I Write

The interesting thing is that my brain still works similarly to the way it always has.

Something happens in my life and I'll immediately think, There is something here. I want to write about this.

The difference now is that the urgency is gone.

I don't have to immediately turn an experience into content because I'm afraid people's attention will move somewhere else.

I can live it.

I can feel it.

I can sit with it.

I can ask myself what it taught me.

I can decide whether it is mine to keep or mine to share.

And if I choose to write about it, I can take my time figuring out what I actually want to say.

That feels incredibly different.

Because I don't want to become so busy writing about intentional living that I forget to intentionally live.

I don't want In the Gray to become another machine that constantly needs to be fed.

I don't want every conversation, family dinner, struggle or beautiful moment to become inventory for my writing.

I want slow mornings.

I want walks through the woods.

I want time with my husband.

I want time with my children.

I want to experience my own life without constantly wondering how I can neatly package it for someone else to accept it.

And I want my work to exist alongside that life, not consume it.

In many ways, In the Gray is simply the online extension of the life I am trying to create offline.

Calmer.

Slower.

More intentional.

More peaceful.

I Haven't Lost My Ambition

Creating a slower life doesn't mean I've stopped working hard for my dreams.

I am incredibly ambitious.

When something genuinely excites me, I can work on it for hours. There are nights when I can barely sleep because there are so many thoughts running through my mind that I want to write about.

But I'm beginning to recognize that there are different kinds of hustle.

For many years, my hustle was rooted in fear.

I have to show up.

I have to post.

I have to stay visible.

I can't let people forget about me.

That kind of hustle made everything feel like something I had to do.

Writing feels different.

Writing makes me feel like I get to do this.

The work may sometimes look similar from the outside. I may still spend hours sitting at my computer. I may still wake up excited to work on something. I may still have enormous dreams for what In the Gray could become.

But internally, it feels completely different.

I'm not working because I'm afraid of what will happen if I stop.

I'm creating because I genuinely love what I'm doing.

I don't want to abandon ambition.

I want to build something meaningful without abandoning myself in the process.

What Does Success Look Like Now?

This might be one of the hardest things for me to unlearn.

For twenty years, the internet gave me numbers that could tell me whether something was supposedly working.

Likes.

Comments.

Shares.

Followers.

Engagement.

Views.

Numbers are easy to measure.

Meaning isn't.

When I launched In the Gray, my announcement on social media didn't receive an enormous amount of attention.

And for a moment, that old wiring showed up.

Part of my brain looked at the numbers and wondered whether the response was enough.

But then I remembered what I am trying to build.

Because while that announcement may have looked quiet from the outside, people were walking through the door.

They visited the website.

They subscribed.

Some chose to financially support my writing every month.

And some people, on the very first day, chose to subscribe for an entire year.

I can't fully explain what that felt like.

Not because of the number.

Because of what it represented.

Someone found this little space I had dreamed about for so long and essentially said, I want to stay.

And maybe there was something incredibly fitting about the fact that the launch itself felt quiet.

I created a calm, quiet space.

And it arrived calmly and quietly.

Maybe it didn't need to scream or get a lot of attention.

I'm learning that success doesn't have to be visible to everyone else for it to be real.

I can feel it in my heart.

And I am also learning to trust the impact I may never get to see.

There have been countless times in my own life when I've read something that stayed with me without ever telling the person who wrote it.

I didn't comment.

I didn't send them a message.

I didn't click anything.

But their words came with me.

Maybe I thought about them a few weeks later.

Maybe they changed the way I looked at something.

Maybe they helped me understand myself differently.

The person who wrote those words will probably never know.

And I have to trust that the same may be true of mine.

Someone might read something I've written late at night and never tell me about it.

They might give themselves a little more grace the next morning.

They might question an old belief without judging themselves for having it.

They might communicate differently with their spouse.

They might simply set down their phone and sit quietly for a few minutes.

There is no analytics dashboard that can measure that.

But perhaps that is exactly the kind of impact I care about most.

A Different Kind of Internet

I don't believe the internet needs another person shouting loudly enough to be heard.

Maybe some of us are looking for someone willing to speak softly enough that we can slow down and listen.

I don't believe the loudest person in the room necessarily has the most important thing to say.

I don't believe our differences have to divide us.

And I don't believe every complicated question needs an immediate, black-and-white answer.

Sometimes we need room to sit with things.

To question.

To reflect.

To listen.

To change our minds.

To recognize that two seemingly contradictory things can sometimes be true at the same time.

That's why I created In the Gray.

I hope people come here and immediately feel a little sense of ease.

I hope they feel safe enough to explore complicated thoughts and emotions.

I hope they feel loved.

I hope they feel understood.

I hope they remember that they don't have to perform here.

And more than anything, I hope the feeling doesn't end when they close the website.

I hope something they read here follows them back into their own lives.

I hope they become a little more curious.

A little more compassionate.

A little more willing to question an old story.

A little gentler with themselves.

I hope they have deeper conversations with the people they love.

I hope they remember that having complicated emotions doesn't mean there is something wrong with them.

Would I love for In the Gray to grow?

Absolutely.

Would I love for these words to reach thousands of people?

Of course.

But if In the Gray never became enormous, never made me famous, and never produced numbers impressive enough for the rest of the internet to notice, would creating it still have mattered?

Yes.

Without hesitation.

This dream lived inside of me for a long time.

Now it exists.

People can walk through the door.

They can read.

They can reflect.

They can stay awhile.

For twenty years, so much of the internet taught me to ask:

How many people saw me?

Maybe I'm finally learning to ask a different question:

Did someone feel seen because I was willing to share?

I don't need everyone to think this little corner of the internet is amazing.

I just hope one person leaves knowing:

I see you.

And maybe that is enough.