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a life's work resurrected! revisiting SYNCHRONIZED SWIM.

I have done a lot of writing in my lifetime, some worth revisiting, some not. Keeping an archive of that writing is important to me, though. I want to know all my labor is safe somewhere, even if it doesn’t really matter. So, imagine my stress when I realized that the blog a friend and I very devotedly wrote from 2017-2020 was actively extremely broken, so much so that it couldn’t be accessed anymore to archive any of the writing it contained. Extreme stress!

That time in our lives when we were writing this blog was so particular. My friend

Jessie Epstein

and I were both in our mid-twenties, both somewhat adrift but slowly finding our ways into careers that actually suited us, and both willing to spend so much of our time and energy pouring our hearts into a blog that we certainly did not get paid for and that only a small but dedicated group of readers paid any attention to. The blog was called Synchronized Swim, and each of us published an essay there EVERY WEEK FOR LIKE THREE YEARS. That’s, frankly, crazy! We were just lamenting that we were sadly ahead of our time, because if this same publication had begun in the early days of Substack it would have slayed hard. But, alas. Commercial or popular success wasn’t the point, and still isn’t the point of either of our writing practices. We just wanted to write, and be in conversation with each other in that writing. We just loved it! And what we made together was really beautiful and contained so much of our very souls from that time in our lives. For me, this was the season directly before I became a mom — the last gasps of my girlhood. It was a season when my faith was very devout, and when I was starting my sewing pattern business, and when I was beginning to read and write poetry. The beginning of so many of the things that are now givens in my life, and so many other things that have changed drastically. So many seeds were planted in this Synchronized Swim years, and ironed out in the essays I published each week. I know Jessie feels the same. I’m so glad we did this together. Jessie will always be one of my favorite writers in the world, and to have done so much writing in a sort of call-and-response fashion is an enduring gift in our friendship.

(I believe this is a photo of the literal moment we launched the website! In our friend Margaret’s perfect little Berwyn apartment. Wow, what a time, I’m literally dying of nostalgia looking at this.)

And then I thought it was all lost forever. I tried so hard to get it back! Reader, I TRIED. I did my very best hacking. I was deep in the code, I was scouring wordpress reddit and random message boards, editing very scary file databases. Let me be clear, I don’t have time for this! But I was desperate to not let it slip away. At one point, I think I was misdirected into actually deleting all of the content of our essay posts, thinking I was deleting the files of the faulty plugin that caused the fatal error?! (Wordfence, it was Wordfence.) It was so grim! Like, try to untangle this error log without a PHD in computer, I dare you:

PHP Fatal error:  Uncaught Error: Failed opening required '/home2/synchrs3/public_html/wp-includes/version.php' (include_path='.:/opt/cpanel/ea-php82/root/usr/share/pear') in /home2/synchrs3/public_html/wp-settings.php:33

Stack trace:
#0 /home2/synchrs3/public_html/wp-config.php(94): require_once()
#1 /home2/synchrs3/public_html/wp-load.php(37): require_once('/home2/synchrs3...')
#2 /home2/synchrs3/public_html/wp-blog-header.php(13): require_once('/home2/synchrs3...')
#3 /home2/synchrs3/public_html/index.php(17): require('/home2/synchrs3...')
#4 {main} thrown in /home2/synchrs3/public_html/wp-settings.php on line 33

This is the stuff of my nightmares. I felt really sad about it. So sad, that I spent hours trying to figure it out, and ultimately making it worse. I wasted all of my meager hours of childcare tweaking the stupid code. Our broken site got more broken by my messing with it. I forgot to back it up before I broke it more. A real train wreck. Texting Jessie, I compared the feeling to when Amy burns Jo’s novel in Little Women. Except I burned it myself, accidentally. The faulty plugin started the fire. Either way, I had that horrible feeling of your true work going up in flames, with nothing you can do about it. The only next thing is to move on.

UNTIL, my husband suggested that I search the Internet Archive, aka the Way Back Machine, and SO MUCH OF THE WEBSITE IS THERE! Friends, I felt such wild relief to see it again! I can’t express the feeling strongly enough. Like a physical experience of relief. I wrote in an instagram story earlier today, reading our words felt like hugging someone I thought was dead. I’ve spent hours last night and this morning benignly neglecting my children and reading old essays from Synchronized Swim. And I keep feeling so floored by what we made. It’s so beautiful! And so much of it feels helpful to read now?! I read what was essentially a very well researched sermon (should’ve gone to seminary!) I wrote about climate change five years ago and actually felt helped?! That’s wild.

(You can use the little slider at the top to jump to different snapshots from different timestamps to read more content. It’s not everything, but so much is preserved!)

I wrote probably over 100k words on this website. I wrote about everything I could think of. The task of writing every single week plumbed my depths over and over. I wrote about sewing, ballet, clothes, cooking, Emily Dickinson, my new puppy, my marriage, house hunting, moving, living in the woods and then my hometown, the minutia of my days, work, reading, so much about God and the Bible, lots and lots of literary criticism that I didn’t realize was literary criticism, and lots of just really thoughtful and deeply felt personal writing. The more I read from this time, the more reverence I feel toward this past version of myself. She was, frankly, on fire. I wrote about female mystics over and over again because I think I was experiencing some wild mysticism myself. It was a gauntlet of experience and emotion, and I moved through it by using my pen as my sword, slaying self-doubt, blazing forward in confidence and possession. That’s amazing. I feel I have something important to learn from the past-self who wrote these essays. The one who was not yet so deeply humbled by motherhood, who had not yet published any of her books, who had not lived through the pandemic, who was still so connected to childhood in so many ways. Still so willing to play, to linger in all the old places, to give weight to feelings I’ve long since shut down. Who is she?

I can know myself again through these essays. My past self calls to me, tells me it is good I have changed, but also don’t forget! I might have forgotten! That’s what’s scary about this whole experience. Reading these essays again, there are so many that I really had completely forgotten. So many things I really did think and feel and declare that lifted straight out of my mind. I have not carried all of this forward to where I am now. It would have been ok if it had all burned. I made my peace with that. But I am so grateful it didn’t. I’m copy-and-pasting these essays like my life depends on it, making a more sturdy archive of all my writing. It’s important! It’s important to me! There’s something here about resurrection. Something about ongoingness. Something about friendship and labor and joy. All of it has mattered. It should be preserved. It should be celebrated. And some of it should be read in the future! If not by others, at least by me.

It makes me think about all of the incredible personal writing on the internet. All of the blogs, all of the substacks, all of the essays and poems and stories we write and share because what else are we going to do with them? There is so much of it, that in some ways anything that isn’t brand new is lost to the void — unless you go looking. But to have an archive is no small thing. For all the woe it has brought, the internet is amazing. I think it has changed writing for the better. I hope at least. I mean, imagine Emily Dickinson’s blog — she would have gone wild on there, right? She would be posting like her life depended on it. The impulse to write, the impulse to share, there is something so beautiful about it to me. I learned writing from people sharing essays on the internet. I learned writing by putting essays on the internet myself. It’s a real tool, a real offering. I still write for free on the internet, that’s what I’m doing now. My substack remains free. I’ve really been considering whether I need to change that soon (or if it’s even a viable option to go paid, if anyone would subscribe). But I feel resistant to that still. It’s because I feel indebted to the reams of excellent writing I’ve read for free on the internet. All my old favorite blogs from the golden days that I read truly “cover to cover” as it were. I’m thinking about

Molly Wizenberg

’s Orangette,

Rachael Ringenberg

’s Erstwhile Dear,

Erin Boyle

’s Reading My Tea Leaves. I was reading those blogs pretty much daily in the early 2010’s, and I still return to them sometimes. They formed me, in so many ways. More than most literature, to be honest. I’ve written books with their writing in the back of my mind. That’s really special.

The state of the writing internet is murky right now. As a published author and semi-professional writer myself now, I really don’t know how to navigate it. Substack seems to be changing the tide in some positive ways, but the way everything is so fractured and less is offered for free is troubling to me. I can’t afford to read everything I would like to now. Ads used to support blogs in the golden days but then that bubble burst when social media got bigger, yada yada, I understand the bind we’re all in. There’s no easy answer, of course writers need to be paid for their labor, but I guess I am still confused about how to participate in the way that feels right to me. All I want to do is write! And share it freely, with that same Synchronized Swim spirit, flinging my best work into the void with so much joy.

I write differently now. I have changed! I don’t know if I am better, I am just different. My mind works differently, I self-edit more. I think about different things. My children take up so much of my bandwidth. Perpetual brain fog, so much less time. But so much expansion within me too, so much acceptance, so much necessary humility that has softened me to the world. Motherhood — a transformation. And poetry, exposure, feedback, career, reticence, confidence. All of this has contributed to whatever writing patterns I have now. I could never write what I wrote for Synchronized Swim again. That’s what’s important about it. Its singularity. Its honesty, calling from a time I will never return to. I honor the person who wrote those essays, now. She was so wise. She was so devoted. She was so willing to tell the truth even if it was a bit out-there. Reading Synchronized Swim has emboldened me. What a beautiful thing we made and shared so freely, without hesitation. I’m so glad it’s not lost forever. Why not keep running after my best work, flinging it to the void, with joy? No reason not to, friends. Your labor is not in vain.

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This essay is dedicated to the Internet Archive which is an actual miracle. I want to kiss whoever started that project because it’s truly amazing.

Also shout out to these amazing blog logos made by our friend Jack, they remain amazing branding, and I still love it so much.

And shout out to Jessie, my true friend. Gosh, I’m so proud of us.

If you’re a reader who was with us back in the Synchronized Swim days, leave a comment to say hi! You’re a real one! You remember all the madness! What beautiful madness it was!

LONG LIVE GENEROUS AND KOOKY INTERNET WRITING!

xoxo, your void-flinging writing friend who will never stop swimming

Amy