Where I've been and where LTASEX is going

For the first time in over a month, I published a new article on LTASEX a couple days ago. Being able to press save and publish on an article that wasn’t soul draining to write was a refreshing experience. If I hadn’t taken my much-needed vacation, I may never have had that experience again.

I started LTASEX because I was passionate about what I was doing. I really cared about changing the world and the discussion about sex. For the first three years, I was able to keep my eye on the prize. In the fourth year, I lost sight of that abstract goal and let professionalism get in the way of fun.

After graduating college in December 2012, I made the decision to make something out of LTASEX. I wanted to make it into the awesome resource for sex I knew it could become, and I did.

In 2013, LTASEX was a fucking beast. We published new content five days a week, got a gorgeous new website and interviewed some amazing people. Taking it from a dowdy blog to an awesome, content-rich website is one of my greatest accomplishments. It was a ton of work and I was happy to do it – until I wasn’t.

While I was able to figure out most problems that cropped up with LTASEX, I was never able to figure out how to make money from my labor of love. In fact, due to my focus on LTASEX, I ended up making about 3k less in 2013 than I did in 2012 from day-job work. That may not seem like a lot, but it was a 25 percent drop for me.

By the end of 2013, LTASEX was rated the second sexiest sex blog of the year, we’d cracked 250k annual views and I was worn ragged. I was broke as hell, tired, depressed and just unmotivated to continue. I’d done all this work and accomplished so much, but all I had was a Google Analytics graph to show for it.

As we entered into 2014, I knew I had to do something. I had to fix the problems I was having personally and with LTASEX. By the middle of February, the only thing I wanted was to close down the site for good. Knowing how much I love LTASEX and how much sadder my life would be without it, I decided against that route. Instead, I decided it was time for my first break from the site in four years.

Once I’d worked my way through the backlog of scheduled tweets and published the last of that month’s content, I took my hand off the wheel. I closed all my design programs, extra tabs, Google Analytics, stopped checking the site performance obsessively and just lived.

It had been so long since I started LTASEX that it took a full week to stop impulsively checking on the site. It took two weeks before I was certain that LTASEX would continue and for me to start writing at my leisure. By week three, I was excited about LTASEX again. By the end of my month away, I’d written six new articles and reconnected with the passion I had for LTASEX in the beginning.

I’m not a person who tends to take breaks or step back. I’m usually a person charging ahead with single-minded focus toward a goal until I’m out of steam and then hating myself for not having more endurance. While I had to be dragged into my vacation kicking, screaming and shanking bitches, it was the single best decision I could have made for the future of LTASEX and my career as a sex guy. I love this shit far too much to let stress stop me. 

Over the last month, I’ve had to make a lot of hard decisions. I can’t go back to publishing five days a week until I have enough support. I can’t work so hard for no pay that I can barely pay my bills. I can’t let my fear of being mediocre push me to work so hard that I don’t have time for anything else. I love LTASEX and it’s not going anywhere, but I simply can’t allow it to rule my life. That’s simply not healthy, and it definitely isn’t sexy.