My friend and co-blogger David Schraub has placed his blog, The Debate Link, on hiatus for the year while he is clerking. I can relate. I had to do the same, and just recently turned my blog back on.

I mean “hiatus” seriously — this is a required break for the duration of my clerkship, where various rules of judicial ethics effectively prevent me from having a high-profile public platform for launching all my half-formed opinions onto the world. Everyone raves about how wonderful clerking is, and I’m excited about it too, but this is one major sacrifice I’m being asked to make. But it’s only for a year, I hope. The plan is that once that clerkship ends a year from now, the blog will resume as well.

Still, this is a scary thing for me. The Debate Link has been my baby for nearly my entire adult life. I created it from scratch and since then it has become a really important part of me. It’s a space for me to let off steam, incubate new ideas, or just shoot the breeze about random interesting events. It has more or less served as my mind’s external hard-drive for years. And, of course, it has sparked innumerable great conversations with friends and colleagues off-line, all of which I treasure.

It is a huge sacrifice. Stopping my blog was one of the conditions of my employment, made moments after the offer was made. I knew it was coming, and I accepted it willingly. It was worth the sacrifice, but it was tough. Really tough.

Now David has been blogging for eight years, while I was only blogging for two when my blog went offline. I wish you luck David, and I’ll be back waiting when it comes back online.