The Sites Are Gone
I am at the screen again, hunting Bright Shiny Objects.
A woman I have never met, glowing on a stage. A man with the angle of camera and shoulder that says I have built something. A page that loads, fast and clean, behind a name I learned an hour ago. Each one lands in me like a small bell. That one. Be that one. I am eager to jump to their spot, to their spotlight, and I notice, mid-jump, that I am not fit yet. I might not be fit ever. I sit here and feel the old pain — the pain of a vision against a body.
I notice my mouth wanting food it did not ask for. I notice my eyes wanting sleep I will not give them. I notice the smudge of a heartbeat that is louder than yesterday, and the fear that comes with the noticing: there might not be so much time.
I think this kind of evening will visit me for a while now, until I am settled into my way.
What I learned yesterday
Molly Gordon died in June 2025.
Molly was a coach’s coach. For more than two decades she ran Shaboom Inc., teaching artists and self-employed practitioners how to sell their work without becoming someone they were not — what she called authentic promotion. She was one of the founding-generation Master Certified Coaches of the International Coach Federation, and she held, across all those years, a quiet line on the philosophical depth the rest of the industry kept flattening. I had been reading her for months as a kind of patient lineage — the practitioner-shape I am moving toward, in a voice I trust.
I found this out the day before yesterday, looking for a quote of hers I had remembered wrong. I went to her site. The site was gone. I went to the second site. Also gone. I went to the third. Gone. The slow understanding: she had been dead for almost a year, and the scaffolding she had spent two decades building had folded the way a tent folds when nobody is left to hold the center pole.
Her voice remains, in fragments. A YouTube channel her platform has not yet taken down. A LinkedIn profile the system has not yet pruned. The interviews she gave on other people’s podcasts, hosted on other people’s servers. The pieces she released into other people’s hands and forgot about.
The voice persists. The platform does not. The slow long work of building her own house, which I had been admiring for months as a finished thing, turns out to have been the most fragile part of the whole arrangement. What stayed was what she gave away.
I think this is what I needed to know before I keep looking at the screen.
What the chase actually wanted
I went back to the spiral with this new piece of information sitting beside me, and the spiral changed shape.
The chase had wanted the finished thing. The platform with the metric. The number of subscribers on the page that loads fast. The angle of camera and shoulder. The proof, in pixels, that the work is done and recognized and safe.
Sitting beside the vanished sites, this looks different. The finished thing is the most perishable layer. The metric resets when the server resets. The subscribers are renting a relationship from a platform that can change its terms tomorrow. The page that loads fast is the layer that vanishes first when the holder stops holding.
What I had been envying was the part that decays.
The part that does not decay is the part she gave away into other people’s keeping. The voice on someone else’s podcast. The shape of a thought, lent to a student who carried it into her own life. The sentences that landed in somebody who kept saying them, and saying them, until they had moved through enough mouths to no longer need the original platform at all.
What I had been envying was the wrong layer. The layer that matters cannot be hunted at all.
The floor under the spiral
When I noticed this, the spiral did not stop. The wanting did not stop. The body still wanted the food it did not ask for. The smudge of the heartbeat was still louder than yesterday. But underneath all of it I felt the floor I keep forgetting is there.
The floor is this writing. Not as a future project, not as a thing-that-might-someday-be-noticed, but as the only thing I am doing today that does not depend on anybody else holding the platform.
This is what I have been calling the slow writing. The morning page that has no expectation. The hour at the screen when nothing is supposed to happen. The minute I almost did not begin, because there was no inspiration, and the inspiration arrived only after the first three sentences had been laid down ugly and unsure.
I rarely come to this hour with anything to say. I almost always leave it with more than I came with. A fuller cup, I keep wanting to write, and I let myself write it. The cup is full because the hour was honored. Not because the hour was clever.
I trust this hour more than I trust any of the Bright Shiny Objects I was hunting an hour ago.
What we might be doing perfectly
It is possible, I am beginning to think, that the confusion is the perfect thing.
It is possible that what looks like I do not know what I am doing yet is the precise shape the work has to take in this stretch, and that the only error is the label I keep putting on it — behind, late, lost — when the truer label would be this is what now looks like.
We might be doing a perfect thing and calling it something else.
This is the move I want to keep practicing. Drop the verdict on the pace. Keep the pace. Drop the verdict on the smallness of the thing today. Keep the thing today.
Aspire — and here is what the spiral had wrong — not for the million you want to have, or the next number of clients on the spreadsheet, or the threshold past which the body will let you rest. Aspire for the expression of you that wants to come into the world. The shiny essential thing that is moving in you, that the chase keeps mistaking for the chase’s prize.
The aspiration is real. The object of the aspiration is what the spiral mishandles.
Tiny steps, early mistakes
The giant step burns the body that takes it.
The giant step is the one that confirms imposter syndrome, because the body knows, in real time, that it cannot sustain the move it has just made. The giant step is the spiral made visible.
The tiny step does not burn. The tiny step lets the mistake arrive small and survivable. The mistake teaches. The mistake reveals where I have not yet put the muscle I will need. The mistake, made early and often, is how the next version of me learns who she is.
This is the part that is hardest for me to honor. The giant step has the romance. The tiny step has the work. The romance feels like aliveness, and the work feels like patience, and I keep mistaking one for the other.
Acknowledge the errors as they come. Acknowledge them with openness. The acknowledgment is the move that lets the watcher of the mistake stay with me through the next mistake, instead of leaving. The unacknowledged mistake is the one that costs.
Be one hundred per cent response-able. Not as a moral demand. As a practice — the practice of staying inside what is mine to answer, and letting the rest belong to whoever it belongs to.
Envy as compass
The envy that ran the spiral is information.
When I notice myself envying someone, the envy is pointing at something I have been refusing to name as a want of mine. The envy is the want, photographed sideways, in someone else’s life. If I can name the want as mine — I want to speak in front of a room, I want a body that carries me lightly, I want the steady ground of a finished thing — the envy stops being a charge against the other person and becomes a small flag stuck into the territory I have not yet given myself permission to enter.
Forgive everyone, including myself, for wanting what I want. The wanting is not the problem. The denial of the wanting is the problem.
The people I envy are teachers. They are the visible front of a direction I am being asked to walk. The walking does not require their permission, and does not require me to become them. It only requires that I stop pretending I do not want what I want.
Whatever I have to forgive is in the past. Forgiveness is the move that lets a story end so a different story can begin. The story I am ending tonight is the one in which other people’s finished sites are the measure of my unfinished one.
Selling is speaking up
I notice that I have been quiet about what I am doing.
Quiet in the sense of not naming, with any directness, what the slow writing is for. Quiet in the sense of leaving it ambiguous whether anyone could ever come to me for the thing I am building. Quiet in the sense of speaking around it, even with people who love me, even with people who would want to know.
Selling, I am starting to think, is speaking up. It is naming the thing I am up to so that the people who are looking for that thing can find me. It is the smallest possible act of visibility, and it is the one I have been hardest on myself about, and the one I have been most afraid of getting wrong.
Show up. Speak up. In service of the aspiration, not in service of the metric. The metric will follow or it will not. The speaking up is the part I owe to the work.
It is not just about me and the passion. It is about the work the world needs done. The work is the subject. I am the holder of it, for this stretch.
What the vanishing leaves
Molly’s sites are gone. The voice is not.
The voice is the part that walked into other mouths and stayed there. The voice is the sentences her students still say to themselves twenty years later when they sit down to write a price into an email and feel the catch in the throat. The voice is the shape of an idea that no platform can take down because it lives in the people who carried it.
I think this is what the slow writing is for. Not the platform. Not the metric. Not the page that loads fast. The slow writing is for the voice that, if I keep at it long enough, will walk into some other mouth and stay there.
If the sites are the perishable layer and the voice is the layer that lasts, then the work tonight is not to build more of the perishable. The work tonight is to keep practicing the voice — in this hour, on this page, with no one watching — so that the voice becomes the kind of thing that walks.
Love yourself for wanting what you want. Love the people whose finished sites you were envying an hour ago. Love the unloved part — the part of you that was hunting, and tired, and afraid — because that part is also the part that, given the floor, comes back to the page.
I am going to be myself. Everyone else is taken (Wilde, attributed).
Bibliography
Gordon, M. (2002–2025). Shaboom Inc. / Authentic Promotion [Coaching practice and writing archive]. Founder of Shaboom Inc.; ICF Master Certified Coach. Selected surviving public sources: YouTube — shaboomincchannel; LinkedIn — shaboom; podcast appearances including STaR Coach Show #126 (“The Coaching Partnership”, 2019) and Make Monday Mine (“Thought Like an Iceberg: Puzzle of Current Times”, April 13, 2020). She announced on her X account (@shaboom) that she had entered hospice in mid-June 2025; she is widely reported to have died later that month. Primary websites (shaboominc.com and related properties) are no longer reachable as of 2026-05-15.
Wilde, O. (attributed). Be yourself; everyone else is already taken. Widely attributed to Oscar Wilde but not located in his verified works; the phrasing circulates as folk-Wilde and may post-date him. Treated here as a saying-of-the-culture rather than a verified Wilde quotation.