Pre-Launch Blog Goals & Intentions
Disorient is a living and growing resource for intersectional feminist thought, education, and activism. I believe it has the potential to become a community for all those committed to dismantling interlocking systems of oppression in the world around us.
On a deeper level, I created Disorient as a resistive act of hope. My years as an academic has been marked by brutal experiences of overwork, burnout, exclusion, and violence.
This blog is how I seek to recultivate joy in my life.
Why I’ll Be Tracking My Blog Goals
Creating and growing this blog is very important to me.
To document my journey through inspiration, bewilderment, and learning, I’ll be tracking my progress through concrete blog goals and reports every month as long as I find it useful to do so. I’ll strive to sustain it for as long as Disorient lives.
I hope that being transparent about my progress also inspires other intersectional feminists to start your own blogs. To see blogs as powerful platforms for speaking your truth and living in line with your values.
Where Disorient Began
Winter has always been my most generative season. While nature is barren, my creative mind is in full bloom.
I first began dreaming about Disorient around June 2020 on a chilly night in Sydney, Australia. The name came to me first and the rest branched out from there.
The day after I did a simple four-card tarot reading about this idea. The deck I used for the reading is The Goddess Tarot by Kris Waldherr, which draws on goddess mythology to balance the traditionally masculine symbolism in the tarot. (I’ve included the traditional names for the cards in my notes below.)
This was my reading:
Sunday 28th June 2020
Half Moon Waxing
1. Foundation — Power/Freyja (The Emperor)
This card represents wisdom, leadership, and authority. It signals that my idea to create Disorient rests on a solid foundation of my knowledge and expertise as an anti-racist feminist scholar. The theme of this blog draws on my experience and will be a valuable opportunity to showcase (as well as deepen) my skills and competency.
In my Goddess deck, the patriarchal figure of the Emperor is replaced by the Norse goddess Freyja. I love this association because this time last year (29th June 2019 to be exact), my friend Angela Martinez Dy took us to a speakeasy in Nottingham called Boilermaker where I ordered a cocktail called Freyja’s Tears.
I keep a picture of this tarot card in my blog’s project file as a reminder of this reading.
2. Present — Six of Coins (Pentacles)
This card represents material and spiritual prosperity. From my position of abundance, I’m able to be generous towards others by sharing the wealth of knowledge I have gained. There is some darkness in this card that serves as a reminder for me to remain true with my intentions and integrity.
3. Future — Ace of Staves (Wands)
This card is about inspiration, growth, and action. It symbolizes budding creativity at the start of a new project. There is excitement around my ideas and an opportunity to build the necessary commitment to see this ambition through.
4. Overall Message — Three of Swords
This card represents anguish and heartache. Its appearance here in the position of the overall message signals the ways that my blog will be a path through the pain I have endured. Over the last dark months of my life, I lost my voice and began to question my ability and right to speak as a scholar-activist. The blog is a way out of that darkness.
I also take this card to mean that I can’t be afraid to own my suffering. My struggles towards healing and wholeness need to be shared honestly in this project in order to better help those to survive the same.
Launch Goals
I devised these blog goals on the same day as my tarot reading:
Goal 1: Write 10 blog posts before blog launch
I want to write 10 blog posts before launch.
I aim to reach this goal by blocking out 90 minutes of writing every evening from 7th July and hold myself to this responsibility to show up and treat blogging like a job.
From 6th August, I’ll begin teaching a graduate class every Thursday evening, but I’ll commit to working on my blog on Thursday mornings until the end of the teaching session.
Allowing one week for each post, I should be able to achieve this goal by 13th September, which will give me the rest of September and October to set up my blog platform and design.
Every blogging course I’ve done encourages aspiring bloggers to “START NOW!”, but I’ve decided my launch date will be 31st October 2020.
One reason why I’m delaying my launch is that over the years, I’ve started a lot of blogs that burned me out after just a few months. Extending the launch timeline will allow me to practice blogging for four whole months and figure out if it’s even something I want to do. I can also see if it’s sustainable for my health alongside a demanding job that already has me writing all day at a computer. I can quit before I launch with no harm done.
The launch date is special to me because it will be Samhain (the start of the witch’s year) in the Northern Hemisphere and Beltane in the Southern.
It’ll also be a full moon and the eve of my 35th birthday.
Goal 2: Create one lead magnet for Moon Rites
Before my blog launch, I’ll create a PDF checklist on self-care and set it up along with the signup form for my newsletter, Moon Rites.
I also aim to learn more about writing email welcome sequences and draft a series of emails to engage my subscribers after they signup for the lead magnet.
Where To From Here?
When this blog launches on October 31, 2020, I’ll report back on the two goals above and set my goals for the next month.
I’ve decided that while I set and reflect on my goals monthly for the life of this blog, I won’t be sharing these posts publicly beyond the launch.
For now, I’ll be keeping them to hold myself accountable through the progress. If in the future I think they may be informative and insightful for other scholars and activists hoping to start a blog, I may allow some readers special access to these reports.
Thank you for sharing this journey with me and lending your kind support as I work on bringing this project to fruition.
Featured image by Vino Li
