We Built an App & Never Launched It

We built an app and never launched it.

Sometimes things don’t have to be anything big but they can still serve a purpose. It's hard for me to wrap my head around that concept—that things, choices, and even life can be what is in that moment. That it might be bigger or smaller than expected but it's still pivotal in some way, it's still teachable, it's still a block you are building on another block to get you to a spot or experience that is meaningful. 

I feel that so deeply today because I realized how many things I have started and stopped. Began and left open, tried and failed. 

Even this strain of consciousness is probably never going to see anything more than my drive in my Gmail called “personal” which is full of ideas, half-thoughts, full pages of visions that come to me and I have to jot them down. 

Society and social media make you think that people care about what you are doing or creating and maybe some are but it's fleeting. People care less about you and more about what they can be entertained by, polarized by. 

I found in 2020 that the world, social media, and even my network of friends felt incredibly polarizing and suffocating. Covid, social injustice, the election, layoffs….I mean the list goes on. The world was up in arms and I wanted to create something/anything in a vacuum. Away from everything. Away from everyone. 

So I did. 

So we did.

I worked with my husband, best friend, and sister to create an app. We named it, branded it, and even completed an MVP model (for those not in the dev world, an MVP is where you develop only the core functionalities of the app). Then… nothing. We never made it to launch. Hell, we didn’t even make it to the next phase. We just stopped. 

I wish I could give a long and heart-felt reason why, but I think in retrospect that it served its purpose in that season. It gave us all a sense of purpose, drive, motivation, and vision outside of the mess of worry that surrounded us and it taught us things along the way.

Then we all came up for air and got back to life.

Back to work, back to busy, and back to living in the chaos and not able to make time for the desire to create. 

So we stopped and never started again. 

Some days, I wonder what could have been, what could be, should we start it again…but then I stop and move forward into my back-to-busy state.