When I wrote “Hello 2026 – and goodbye to this blog” last month, I genuinely believed the next step was deleting this blog entirely. A clean ending. A line drawn. Nearly three decades of writing, archived privately, removed from public view, and put to rest.
But as I began that process, I realised I couldn’t actually do it.
Not because I’ve changed my mind about the risks. If anything, going back through the archive only confirmed them. The cultural climate I described in January hasn’t improved. The appetite for bad-faith interpretation hasn’t diminished. But deleting everything felt like erasing a life.
Not just opinions, but growth. Mistakes. Learning. Love. Grief. Becoming a husband. Becoming a father. Becoming someone different to who I was at 32, or 42, or even 52. This is the only continuous record of how I became who I am.
I couldn’t delete it.
So instead of destroying the whole thing, I chose the harder path.
Over the past few days, I went back through the blog systematically and made deliberate decisions about what stays public and what doesn’t. Post by post. Year by year. The distinction matters to me.
What’s being hidden isn’t “who I am”. It’s the material that no longer survives hostile, context-free reading. Posts where complex issues were explored openly, emotionally, sometimes imperfectly. Writing that assumed good faith, nuance, and readers willing to think. Assumptions that no longer hold.
Posts showing emotional vulnerability that now reads as pathetic weakness are private. Posts where relationship dynamics could be screenshot and framed as controlling or toxic are private. Cultural and political observations that were unremarkable in 2008 but carry serious professional risk in 2026 are private.
But here’s what hurts.
Some of what’s being hidden are posts I’m genuinely proud of. Arguments for peace, understanding, and forgiveness that reflected my best thinking at the time. Posts that engaged difficult geopolitical issues thoughtfully – terrorism, religion, cycles of violence – with nuance and good faith. Posts advocating de-escalation over revenge, empathy over retaliation, understanding systems rather than demonising people.
In 2006, those posts read as reflective and principled. In 2026, they’re weapons waiting to be used against me.
A single sentence about understanding terrorist motivations, stripped of context, becomes “sympathising with terrorists”. An argument for Christian forgiveness becomes “blaming America”. Hypothetical language about violence and retaliation gets stripped of its conditional framing. Nuance doesn’t survive screenshot culture.
So even my most humane writing – posts that should be the safest because they argue for peace – now carries risk simply because they could be misread by someone looking for ammunition rather than understanding.
That’s not a reflection on the writing. It’s a reflection on where we are.
There’s a quiet grief in realising that words written in good faith, sometimes even in service of peace, now represent vulnerability simply because complexity itself has become dangerous. Not because the thinking was wrong. Not because the values were misplaced. But because the world no longer reads generously.
I want to be clear about something.
I’m not ashamed of my past writing. I’m not recanting it. I’m not apologising for having thought deeply, spoken honestly, or changed my mind over time. What I’m doing is acknowledging the reality we live in, where visibility carries consequences that extend beyond the writer to their family, their work, and their future.
This compromise lets me preserve the record without offering it up as a tool for harm. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best outcome I can see.
The blog remains, but quieter. Less complete. More guarded. And yes, that feels like a loss. But it’s a loss I can live with, unlike the alternative.
Nothing’s been deleted. Many posts are now private, but the archive still exists. Just not all of it publicly accessible anymore.
If you’ve been reading this site for years, you know what kind of writer I’ve been. I’ve always valued character over labels, responsibility over slogans, and thinking over conformity. None of that has changed.
What has changed is the cost of saying certain things out loud, in full, under your real name.
This blog now stands as both a record and a boundary. What remains public is what can still stand safely in the open. What’s been hidden isn’t gone, just no longer exposed to a culture that no longer reads generously.
That, unfortunately, is the world we’re in.
And I still don’t like where it’s going.
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