Is this TCK TOWN's last birthday?
Today at TCK TOWN:
It’s 7 pm and I’m balancing my laptop on my couch on a Sunday night, wondering how I’m going to get through my last article for TCK TOWN this year. Trying to summarise what our team has achieved and experienced together over 5 years feels mammoth, heavy, and insurmountable. Whenever I have written for TCK TOWN, the articles have always flown out of tapping fingers - like I was simply unraveling stories that were already formed and just needed to be released from some deep place within my ribcage. Even now, as the sentences start to flow, I realize that writing is not the problem, it’s the pain of leaving TCK TOWN behind for a little while that is thick and difficult to work through.
While tcktown.com will still remain online, we’ve decided to take a breather for 12 months. A lot of us have had and are still having some tough times (to put it lightly) during this pandemic too. As a whole, I think all of us really need to focus on ourselves first before we can put more work into this beautiful publication. Our most important internal team rule is that “real life and mental health come first”, especially since all of us are volunteers, and now more than ever, we need to put this into practice. We’re keeping in touch on a Whatsapp group, and planning our next move together. The team has been wonderful and is supporting me completely in this decision, which I am beyond grateful for.
We’re still going to keep the website online. As of today, we have 5 years’ worth of TCK stories and advice that are as relevant as when they were first published, so I encourage you to keep reading, using the CATEGORIES link and the search function to find specific topics. Every article of ours is unique, from the heart, raw, vulnerable, and true - written by TCKs like you who want to share their lives in the hope it will make a difference to your own TCK journey.
What running TCK TOWN has meant to me:
I started TCK TOWN at the most challenging point in my life. It centered me in a period of seismic shifts. These 5 years, it’s provided an opportunity for me to reflect on my identity, my history, and my relationships when I didn’t have much stability. It was also a chance for me to live a dream: to create and run a publication, to produce high-quality work that was helping people, and to run a purposeful team with people I trust, admire, and deeply respect. It’s unfathomable that such beauty, wonder, creativity, and connection existed in my life at a time of great confusion and pain. It’s unreal how lucky I’ve been when I didn’t think I was doing very well at all.
Why I deeply adore our team:
Our team at TCK TOWN is one I have been the proudest to work with in my creative career. We’re an incredibly diverse team, where women and most importantly, women of colour, hold the majority of our leadership positions. We were working remotely before it was cool or a necessity, coordinating social media content, contributing to Slack, and meeting a grueling schedule of 2 articles per week, month after month, from multiple continents. Having no prior experience in publishing, I had no idea this was an insane feat until I told a magazine designer who crowed “two articles A WEEK? Jesus, Ava, just do an annual magazine instead!”
What’s astounded me is how brave our writers are. We do not write fluffy articles here, and our authors have embraced this challenge with great courage. Many of our stories have been shared here before they’ve even been spoken aloud. Most of our stories are deeply personal because our editors have pushed the evolution of an article and the writers have trusted their judgment and advice. I don’t know that I’ll have many more opportunities like this to experience this level of trust, truth, and collaboration. It’s been truly astonishing to be among people and creatives like this. It’s been a gift. It’s been the experience of a lifetime.
What has made this experience rewarding for every single one of us on the team has been your continued support. Thank you for the DMs, where you’ve shared your own stories. Thank you for submitting articles with us. Thank you for getting your friends and your family on board. Thank you for the donations that have kept us online for so long. Thank you, especially, to our long-time readers who’ve been here since the beginning. Thank you, thank you, thank you. We’re proud to identify as being part of this TCK community with you. Let’s keep sharing, connecting, and raising each other up.
What’s next for TCK TOWN?
Keep visiting TCK TOWN and reading our work! We’ll stay online at tcktown.com. We’re not likely to be posting new articles or content on our social channels, but we’d still love to hear from you and will be checking them - so please continue to comment on our content and comment on our articles on this site - we want to know what you think!
After our one-year break, we would like to evolve this platform into a novel, a series, or a podcast. With all these hundreds of stunning stories, the possibilities are limitless, and we are certainly not ready to close TCK TOWN completely. So please, continue to support us, and now, more than ever, we’d love your support in sharing our stories. Around June 2022, the next stage of our adventure will begin and you’ll certainly be hearing from us then.
Until we meet again on our next adventure xxx
Always yours,
Ava Senaratne
Editor-in-Chief at TCK TOWN