At the same time, there was another layer to all of this that didn't show up on the site, or in the tools, or in the community. It was everything outside of it.
While the project was growing, my life wasn't getting easier. I was still looking for work, still trying to figure out what the next step looked like, still dealing with the reality of not having a steady income. There wasn't a clean transition from one thing to the next. It was uncertainty, day to day, and it started to bleed into everything else.
Time felt different. It wasn't just about building anymore, it was about deciding where that time should go. Every hour spent working on the site, improving tools, or helping someone in the community was an hour I wasn't spending somewhere else. With my family. On something more stable. On something with a clearer return. That tradeoff wasn't theoretical. It was real, and I felt it.
I started noticing it in small ways. Moments where I was present, but not fully there. Thinking about what still needed to be fixed, what I hadn't finished, what I could be doing instead. It wasn't constant, but it was enough to make me question whether I was balancing things the right way.
At the same time, I was trying to make this sustainable. Supporters had started contributing, and I didn't take that lightly. It meant a lot, more than I probably said out loud. But it also came with a different kind of pressure. Not from them, but from myself. If people were willing to support what I was building, then it needed to keep moving forward. It needed to be worth it.
The problem was that support didn't equal stability. It helped, but the uncertainty stayed. It just made it easier to keep going without solving it.
That support wasn't something I could rely on like a job. There was no guarantee, no structure, nothing predictable about it. Just enough to keep going, but not enough to remove the question sitting in the background of whether I should be doing something else entirely.
Around that same time, I started seeing other people move forward. People in the same space, building similar things, getting opportunities I had reached for, or at least thought about reaching for. Jobs, recognition, visibility. Things that felt just close enough to be possible, but not close enough to actually touch.
I paid attention to that, not in a way that made me bitter, but in a way that made me think.
It would have been easy to turn that into frustration, to compare, to question why things didn't line up the same way for me. But I didn't want to build that kind of mindset into something I cared about. So I made a choice early on to step away from it. I stayed supportive, and I meant it. When people did well, I was happy for them.
But that didn't mean it didn't affect me.
There's a difference between being genuinely supportive of someone else and still feeling like you're falling behind. Both can exist at the same time, and for a while, they did.
That's probably the first time I started to feel like I might be failing. Not all at once, not in some dramatic way, just in small moments. When something didn't work out. When an opportunity didn't go anywhere. When I stepped back and realized I still didn't have a clear answer for what came next.
I had built something real. Something people used. Something that kept growing. But I still couldn't say it was enough, and that was hard to reconcile.
I don't think I ever seriously considered stopping. That wasn't really the question.
The question was whether I could keep going like this. Balancing everything. Carrying the uncertainty. Trying to build something meaningful while also needing something stable.
That tension didn't go away.
If anything, it became part of the process.