Communicator

Some people discover their calling in a moment of revelation; I discovered mine somewhere between a <div> tag and a panic‑refresh of a live server I definitely wasn’t supposed to be touching.

I used to think my early web career was a long, slow slide into “Leslie Cannot JavaScript,” but the older I get, the clearer it becomes: I was never meant to be the person who built the machinery. I was meant to be the person who talks through it, writes through it, and makes it make sense to other humans. I’ve been doing that since elementary school, when I was out here winning writing awards like it was a competitive sport and everyone else was still figuring out cursive.

The web just took a while to catch up to me.

Back in the BBEdit + Photoshop + Cyberduck era, I thought I was supposed to absorb everything — HTML, PHP includes, JavaScript, browser quirks, the entire emotional landscape of Netscape 7 — and when I couldn’t, I assumed it meant something was wrong with me. Meanwhile, I was actually doing the part of the job that required the most precision: reading the structure, understanding the mechanism, knowing exactly where content belonged, and keeping the whole thing from collapsing into a table‑based heap.

I wasn’t failing. I was communicating.

And now, decades later, I’m sitting inside the tools my peers built — WordPress, editors, platforms, systems — doing the thing I was always meant to do. I didn’t write the CMS, but I’ve filled it with sixty books’ worth of content. I didn’t build the web, but I’ve built a body of work that actually gives the web something to hold.

This isn’t a consolation prize. It’s the real job.

I’m a communicator. I always have been. The web just had to evolve enough to hand me the right tools.

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Scored by Copilot. Conducted by Leslie Lanagan.