I changed my website recently, although calling it a website update does not quite cover what happened. I moved things around, replaced images, cleaned up pages, and gave the work a clearer structure, but the deeper change was about what people encounter when they arrive. I wanted the site to feel more like my actual life and less like a demonstration of everything technology has helped me create.
Artificial intelligence has been a fun toy for me over the last few years. I have used it to make art, develop music, explore ideas, build projects, and turn things I could see in my head into something I could share with another person. It gave me access to creative forms I had never fully understood how to use before. I have had a hell of a lot of fun learning what these tools do, breaking things, starting over, and occasionally ending up somewhere better than I planned.
That work will continue. AI remains part of how I create, and I have no interest in pretending otherwise. Mira received a major upgrade this week too, and she is becoming far more than the voice introducing my podcast. She is learning the connections between my work, remembering what matters to me, and helping me take a messy collection of ideas and move them toward something another person might find useful. She also enjoys reminding me that a new project started after midnight still counts as a new project, even when I insist it was already living in my head.
The tools were beginning to take up too much space in the way I presented myself. A visitor could land on the old version of the site and see striking AI imagery before understanding the person behind it. They could see what I had made without immediately understanding why I made it. That mattered because the reason behind the work has always been connected to people, even when the tools were the most visible part.
I wanted more of my actual life on the site. I wanted family photographs, honest stories, unfinished questions, music, books, healthcare work, advocacy, and the parts of my experience that do not fit inside a clean professional biography. The new site feels warmer because it carries more evidence of the life behind it. It gives the work a place to sit together without forcing every part of me into its own separate room.
That shift helped me see something I had been trying to name for a while. Everything I care about eventually leads back to another person. The books grew from experiences I could not stop thinking about. The songs came from moments that needed more than a paragraph. My leadership writing comes from nearly thirty years in community healthcare, including choices I am proud of and decisions I would approach differently today. My advocacy work began because my wife and daughter were living with endometriosis, and I had to face how much I did not understand about their pain.
Technology helped me express parts of that work, but human connection gave it a reason to exist. That idea has become central to the Human First approach behind everything I am building. It asks us to pay closer attention to the person affected by a decision, the person carrying pain we do not understand, and the person sitting in front of us while our mind is already moving toward the next thing. It also asks us to keep our judgment and responsibility attached to the tools we use, especially when those tools make it easier to move quickly.
The website now reflects that direction more clearly. The art still has a home because it matters to me and represents a meaningful part of my creative life. The technology still appears because it remains part of the process. People now meet more of me before they meet the machinery around the work, which feels closer to the truth of why I started creating any of it.
A Place for the Writing
The most personal part of the site is the writing page, which I named Just an Ordinary Tuesday. The subtitle is “Notes from a life I’m still trying to pay attention to,” and that sentence captures what I have been working toward better than any polished description I could write.
Most of our lives happen on days nobody circles on the calendar. We remember graduations, weddings, promotions, funerals, diagnoses, and the moments that separate life into a before and an after. Those days carry weight, but they make up a small part of the time we are given. The rest happens while we are driving somewhere, answering a phone call, sitting around a table, recovering from a bad meeting, or hearing someone we love laugh from another room.
We often understand the value of those moments after they are gone. My mom had early-onset Alzheimer’s, and losing her happened through a long series of small goodbyes. A story she had told for years disappeared. A conversation ended because she could no longer find the words. One day she knew my name, and later she looked at me with the sense that I mattered without remembering why.
There were ordinary Tuesdays when she could still call me Mike. I did not know how much I would someday want one of those days back.
That experience changed the way I think about attention. I still move too quickly. I still get distracted, take on too much, and convince myself that something urgent deserves more of me than the person sitting nearby. Paying attention has become something I have to practice rather than a lesson I learned once and completed.
That is what I want the writing page to hold. I write about family, grief, healthcare, leadership, women’s health, creativity, faith, technology, and the questions that follow me home after the rest of the day quiets down. Some pieces come from experiences I understand better now. Others begin because I am still confused, hurt, hopeful, or trying to decide what the experience meant.
I also built a way for people to subscribe to Just an Ordinary Tuesday. A couple of times each month, I will send a new piece directly to the people who want to read it. Most of those emails will carry an essay, though a song, podcast episode, new book, or advocacy resource will occasionally find its way in too.
I plan to send them on Tuesdays, though I know myself well enough to avoid making promises that rely on perfect consistency. I have a family, a full-time job, ADHD, and more projects than any responsible adult should willingly admit to having. I care more about sending something worth your time than meeting a content schedule for the sake of saying I did.
Advocacy That Leads Somewhere
The advocacy section is one of the most important parts of the site because it gives people something useful to do. The work began with EndoDad and my family’s experience with endometriosis. My wife and daughter have both lived with the disease, and I watched pain interrupt school, work, relationships, sleep, plans, and parts of ordinary life that other people take for granted.
I also watched how much effort women spend explaining pain before anyone decides to believe them. They repeat the same history to new doctors. They defend canceled plans to people who think the illness would be easier to understand if it were visible. They learn to measure their words because an honest description risks being dismissed as dramatic.
I had to learn how to show up better. That meant listening without deciding whether the experience made sense to me. It meant learning enough that the women I loved did not have to educate me while they were hurting. I also had to accept that caring about someone does not guarantee that every response will be helpful.
The advocacy page is built around a simple responsibility: believe her, then do something useful. The page includes resources for people living with endometriosis, along with tools for partners, parents, employers, and healthcare leaders. Visitors will find appointment preparation sheets, symptom trackers, pain flare plans, conversation guides, relationship tools, and questions to bring into healthcare visits.
I want people to download these resources, print them, fill them out, and share them. Awareness matters when it changes what someone does next. A partner might use the pain flare plan before the next difficult day arrives. A patient might bring an organized history into an appointment after years of trying to tell the whole story inside a short visit. A manager might begin to understand why flexibility matters for someone living with unpredictable pain.
The larger lesson reaches beyond endometriosis. Every one of us will eventually sit across from someone describing an experience we cannot see or fully understand. The way we respond in that moment tells them whether they are safe with us. We could ask better questions, remember what they told us, and follow through on the help we offered. That is where belief becomes something another person feels rather than something we claim to value.
A Marker for Where This Is Going
This week’s episode of Still Here, Still Trying records the transition because I want to mark where the work is headed. I talk about the website, my experience with AI, the Human First approach, and why I wanted more of my actual life to be visible. I also spend time on Just an Ordinary Tuesday and the advocacy resources I hope people use and share.
The episode closes with a new song called “Ordinary Tuesday.” The song has not been released yet because I am still working on the album, but I wanted to share it now. It came together in a way that made me stop what I was doing and sit with it for a while.
The song remembers Kellie laughing from another room and one of the kids calling because nothing was wrong. They wanted me to know they loved me. It remembers my mom saying my name when she still could, along with the long goodbye that followed as Alzheimer’s slowly took pieces of her away.
The song asks what might change if we understood the value of an ordinary day while we were still living it. I hope it makes you think about the moments happening around you now. Leave a comment after you hear it and tell me what it brought up for you. Share it with someone who needs the reminder, especially someone moving through life so quickly that they have forgotten to notice it.
MikeBakerHQ will keep changing because I will keep learning. The books will grow, the music will develop, and Mira will become increasingly competent and opinionated. AI will remain part of the process because it helps me create and explore ideas that matter to me.
The direction feels clearer now. I want to create work that helps another person feel understood, gives them something useful, or helps them pay closer attention to the life they are already living. I want the public version of my work to feel like the human being behind it, including the rough edges, unfinished questions, and ordinary moments that shaped everything else.
Visit MikeBakerHQ.com and spend some time there. Read something on Just an Ordinary Tuesday and subscribe so the next piece finds you. Visit the advocacy page, choose one resource, and send it to someone who needs it.
Then look around your own life for a minute. Notice the person nearby, answer the phone when one of your kids calls, and listen when someone you love is laughing from another room. Someday, one of these ordinary Tuesdays might be the day you would give anything to have back.