That’s not entirely unusual. If your email is on the web at all, you probably get any number of strange communiques. But this one crazy email led me to the backend of my website providers, which led me to another site, which led me to discover . . . → Read More: Take two]]> The other day, I got a crazy email.

That’s not entirely unusual. If your email is on the web at all, you probably get any number of strange communiques. But this one crazy email led me to the backend of my website providers, which led me to another site, which led me to discover that I’d been hacked.

My entire lovely site, suddenly replaced by link bait and a perky picture of a smiling student.

Panic! Despair! Oh noes!

And then I did something a little bit stupid

I was so frantic to dehack my site that I reinstalled WordPress, figuring it was better to start again than be hacked one second longer than I needed to be.

But of course, it didn’t work.

Oh, it looked like it did, at first. I had a shiny new WordPress install, I got a theme going, and then … a strange error message, which took over not only my WordPress but my webpage.

Foiled again!

So I emailed the only web ninja I know and trust (the inimitable Nathan Briggs), and he immediately set to getting me cleaned up and all securitized. But that didn’t change the fact that I had voluntarily written over my whole site. Without a backup.

Starting over

There was annoyance. Frustration. More than a smidge of beating myself up. Until it occurred to me that this was just about the best metaphor ever for what happens when we discover that something about our life isn’t working, we can no longer ignore it, and we have to start again.

Because although, on paper, it looks like I’m starting from scratch, we never actually start again from scratch. We’re always bringing with us all of the things we’ve learned, experienced, thought, and tried. It’s less a series of straight lines than a widening gyre, all those spirals bringing us back, over and over, to the places we thought we’d already been. But of course, we’re never in the same place we were before. Ever.

So welcome to the reinvention! The pretties are different. The categories are new. But the intention is the same: to explore what it means to have a well-designed life and to help people craft their own.