Longtime blogger and author Andrew Sullivan said Wednesday he is retiring his personal blog, The Dish, saying in a note to his readers that he needs time to “decompress and get healthy for a while.”
“[A]lthough it has been the most rewarding experience in my writing career, I’ve now been blogging daily for 15 years straight,” he wrote. “That’s long enough to do any single job. In some ways, it’s as simple as that. There comes a time when you have to move on to new things, shake your world up, or recognize before you crash that burn-out does happen.”
He added: “I want to return to the actual world again. I’m a human being before I am a writer; and a writer before I am a blogger, and, although it’s been a joy and a privilege to have helped pioneer a genuinely new form of writing, I yearn for other, older forms. I want to read again, slowly, carefully.”
Sullivan, who has in the past written on topics ranging from the war on terrorism to the constitutionality of gay marriage to conspiracies involving former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s special needs son, Trig, said the rigors of running a personal blog have become too much to handle.
“I want to spend some real time with my parents, while I still have them, with my husband, who is too often a ‘blog-widow,’ my sister and brother, my niece and nephews, and rekindle the friendships that I have simply had to let wither because I’m always tied to the blog,” he said.
“And I want to stay healthy,” he added. “I’ve had increasing health challenges these past few years. They’re not HIV-related; my doctor tells me they’re simply a result of 15 years of daily, hourly, always-on-deadline stress. These past few weeks were particularly rough — and finally forced me to get real.
“When I write again, it will be for you, I hope — just in a different form. I need to decompress and get healthy for a while; but I won’t disappear as a writer,” he added.
This isn’t the first time that Sullivan has announced sudden life changes to his readers. In 2005, Sullivan put his blog on temporary “hiatus.”
“I want to take a breather, to write a long-overdue book, to read some more, travel to Europe and the Middle East, and work on some longer projects,” he wrote at the time.
Sullivan’s most recent announcement, however, appears to differ from his 2005 hiatus in that it sounds more permanent than a mere break.
