Is anyone reading this? I made another blog recently to put one of my domains to use and try out Pagecord (which I don't use anymore, whoops). I decorated it all in rainbow and Comic Sans but it feels like some sorta facade almost. I call it my "sillyblog" and the original idea was to replace my Tumblr shitposting with it but it inevitably, like all things in my life, ended up just being another vessel for venting/vomit/violence. I still call it my sillyblog. I still am trying to embody that stupid fucking Comic Sans rainbow gradient checkerboard shit we love so much, where I'm not afraid of shifting through colors or what will happen if I am a little bit too much myself. A lot of the time I feel like the one live action character left in the episode where everyone else gets turned into a puppet. Like, I don't even get to be SILLY!! I made this blog to be. My first email was [myname][email protected]. I name my projects silly-$SOFTWARE_NAME(likeSillywordz, Sillyforum, Sillymuseum...) because I want to be carefree and young again, or maybe for the first time ever. I made this blog and this new life to be silly on, and instead I'm just posting bug parasite metaphors and sadthings. That's so very very like me.

I don't know how 2 be silly. I am too self conscious and these days I won't even dance around anyone besides my bird even though I love dancing; sometimes I think if I didn't have ehlers danlos syndrome I'd be a dancer and good at it too, jumping through fiery hoops and running laps around the skies and twirling my limbs to the beat and push until I balloon up like the rainbow gym class parachute I died under. I'd move my body well and I'd be silly and I try to dance around myself now but my body says no, because the reality is I have a genetic disorder and each movement I make gives off a dry, rustling creak (you ever watch Salad Fingers?). Despite all of this I do still have music in my essence and I don't care what it sounds like. I have only heard my song in the voice of one other person and I wish I could bundle up all of my silly remnants and all of the support in my life and send it to them via carrier pigeon envelope because I love them so much. I think love is the closest I've gotten to silly so far.

Well, I still can't answer it: how to be silly? I don't know. I don't know man. I want to let myself be free to do something bad and cringe and embarrassing but it might kill me for realsies. I want to do something that isn't serious. Not even poetic jokey, like Slate's work. I want to just do something and float with it. I want to. Is it possible? Can I just do something for the sake of it, without wanting to leave some legacy? Can I just noodle arm and flop a round and sing fish heads, fish heads, roly poly fish heads, fish heads, fish heads, eat them up, yum! I loved singing that song when I was a kid. I was silly back then which is weird because nothing was. I remember asking my mom when I was a kid, can I have some spaghettios and maybe one of those disgusting pink playdoh sugar cookies for breakfast? Do we have any of me left in the fridge or do I need to buy some more?

I want to remember what it's like to enjoy sweets. I can barely stomach anything now. I didn't go to the dentist for eleven years and when I finally did I had no cavities; six months later I went back and they found three. I dissociated even more after my diagnosis, it's common. It's funny how naming a thing is given so much importance in every little dirtcrumb of land across the planet. When you acknowledge something it's cursed and damned and real and you can't look back. Not silly enough and your teeth rot and you have more holes in your body than you can be used for.

I'm still trying 2 figure out how to be silly on the blog I call my sillyblog. I don't really know what that means. I'm trying to be here more than other places; my blogs are blanket forts, the kind you cry under though, the kind that become stained. Why call it a sillyblog? Maybe to tell myself some story, like: I can be silly someday. Maybe as some sort of manifestation or prayer. God wants a sillier me! I know they do. I know God is out there and UP! ^^^^ THERE ^^^^ !!! and all around and also within, and perhaps through that Light I can find silliness again. They speak to you still ya know. You just have to listen, if you want to listen. I understand if you don't. But what I know to be true is that I have heard the light within joking around with me. If They can be funny why can't I? They know all the shit, man. All of it. And the light inside of me, that thick presence of God Themselves, laughs so hard They can't breathe and slaps Their knee and it's so infectious sometimes I start to think I can be a different beast when viewed under different light. But hey, this isn't supposed to be a post about Them, it's supposed 2 be a post where I'm silly.

I can't remember what it felt like to embody silliness but I did as a child sometimes. I made a video talking about my favorite kinds of cheese. In MS paint and Movie Maker I made a short animation about a living blueberry muffin superhero falling to his gruesome death. I uploaded it to my kid-friendly forum community of choice, so proud. [135 VIEWS 0 REPLIES.] On second thought I don't really know if that counts as silly.

So now I'm trying to think about ways I can be sillier going forward and gosh I just don't know. Maybe I can say gosh more. Things like golly gee and all. Sometimes being in love just makes me do that, and then I flutter and feel silly to my core. I feel like I can dance around the one that I love. I hope one day I can and then I will be silly! In the meantime I hope to make a positive impact on those I love and maybe give my bird a lot of scritches. I am starting school in one week and then I might not have time to be silly but we'll see.

We'll see, you know, the kind of person I end up as, because I am going to live. There is no doubt about it; I am going to live and I will scratch-n'-sniff the medicinal grape scent off the surface of silly and well that will be that; maybe I'll even knock down the adobe walls they forced the second grade class to make in lieu of recess and shatter the shells of silly, biting down on the seed meat inside the husk, and then I'm eating silly to become it. I hated Waldorf education - remind me to tell you about that later - because at my campus they had what they called the Big Tree, a tall tree with a structure built into the top for students to eat lunch in, socialize in, do extracurricular activities in, etc. Except every end was just open and unprotected and the scorching AZ ground below was just waiting with an open mouth to reap the life of any unsuspecting - or unliked - third grader who takes a wrong step.

I always wanted to go up there but I never allowed myself to do so. I knew, like how I knew my father was going to die months in advance, deep in my innerguts against all explanation, that they would have pushed me off if I had made the silly choice. I really don't know how they got away with that kind of thing - it seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen.

Oh no!!!!! I'm STILL not being silly.

Um, okay. I will try to let silliness envelop me. I will try to be a wiry, spiraling thing, slithering in every direction doing the worm, slithering in every direction trying to inch toward silly. Here we go! Wish me luck! So on and so forth!

I got a new kitty cat recently! He is very young and he loves to play with felt mice and automated robotic cat toys (how lazy, mom!) and pretty much anything he isn't supposed to have, which is most things. He loves to climb into my arms and force me to cradle him like a little baby, and he makes this face of pure bliss when he does that, his eyes folding to little gray sheathed slits, his tongue drooping low from his mouth. He purrs in my arms, purrs and purrs and purrs.

Then there's my other cat, Athena. I got her when I was 15 so she's ten this year, and she was so weak when we got her that we had to keep her isolated from everyone else for the first few months, in a giant birdcage we were originally going to use for decor, as we nursed her back to health. Even with her thrashing sneezes and her goopy eyes and the complete lack of fur on her tail or stomach, she was still silly, rubbed up against my hands the very moment she came out of the carrier at home, played with my childhood service dog's tail when she was allowed out, pranced and purred and lovedlovedloved.

They make me feel so silly! Yet in a way I find myself jealous of their innocence, which is like, probably some Hannibal Darth Vader Patrick Bateman shit - I haven't seen any of those things and I'm embarrassing myself. There's that embarrassment again, the cluster that spreads across my flesh like a virus of blushing, like I am allergic to the mere act of being seen and now I have a real gnarly rash - the kind they warn you about when you start mood stabilizers - and the wounds just keep forming across my body each view upvote like hit kudos boost, scattering across me like crushed glass scars. I literally just don't know how to be silly. And I'm glad I cannot exist in a physical sense around others - that I am too ill to be silly almost - because I'd just bring the whole house down, figuratively and literally.

I crave silly, is the thing. I think I'm addicted to stimulants and I don't know what to do about that but really what I want when I down my tenth iced coffee of the day is to speed my heart into something Fun and Calm and SILLY! I want to make myself flutter so I feel like I understand how to be a person but tbh it doesn't really work. I'm just drinking coffee, thousands of milligrams of it, trying to simulate a more whimsical self. I can be whimsical - I am open wholly with one person - somehow despite the fact that I don't give a shit enough to have a verbal filter anymore I still can't let anyone else in. People beg and I don't like it when I'm made to feel like I hold some sort of leash or ownership. I AM NOT WHAT YOU THINK I AM, PEOPLE! I'm uncool and inhuman and I'm not silly. Hide your faces now and run! Please don't leave me!

I'm also finding I don't know how to end this bullshit post. I think! Maybe! In some way I have succeeded at being silly, just because I am myself a total fucking joke. But hey, I think I'm the spark of the standing ovation, at least - I think I'm the funniest joke, the one that elicits an earthquake of an audience roar, the one that goes viral on Tumblr and Twitter and Instagram, the one that everyone quotes, so I guess that's something.

Menopause saved my life.

I'm kind of tired of writing about my suicidal ideation, but even when I have moved past it, it still feels like shelter. Like without being suicidal, I am exposed to the cold and the elements and the wildlife, and it is wanting to extinguish myself that lights the warming fire and fills the belly and shrouds me in safety. I am trying to figure out who I am without that cushion to fall back on--the idea that nothing matters because I'm going to kill myself eventually anyways. I'm trying to figure out who I am without suicidal ideation wrapped around the brainstem like holiday lights. It's really fucking hard.

Because for so long suicide was another membrane, the greatest of barriers, enveloping my body in thick gross jelly, encasing me in sacs of stinging liquid and lurching thorns and only letting the horrors pass through. When we first moved to our house in Michigan there was a hornet's nest in the front pine, hanging down over weeping emerald, gray hard matter spitting out buzzing creatures the color of worst degree burns & the sun when viewed at too close a distance; my nana is allergic to bees so we had to get it removed. Just took their home away. I guess they die in winter anyway and it was late October so it probably made no real difference, but I didn't know that back then. I still pitied the colony when we had to call the guy in. I felt then that the hornets, even with the danger they posed, probably deserved a space on that lot more than I did. In a way I view eliminating my suicidal ideation similarly to the nest; removing it was only beneficial, but I still missed the bad thing anyway. Isn't that silly? It's like kissing your cancer. But suicide was also the nest I resided in and the queen I served. It is what hatched the me that exists now. It was the purpose of the honeyart I produced, the nectarcreativity I engorged myself on in order to keep the colony growing. Suicide was all of my purposes. I was in love with suicide.

But now I’m not. It’s all due to menopause.

I got my period when I was about to turn eleven, and my mom was at a doctor’s appointment with my grandmother, so the only person home to guide me was my father, and my father was clueless and selfish and and and and. His only advice was to shove a pad at me, give vague directions as to how to put it on, and tell me to talk to my mom when she got home. Then he went back to playing BZ Flag. I was angry at his lack of effort at the time and I am even angrier now. But my life changed at the beginning of my menstrual cycle—-and not in the way people typically mean when they say that.

I’ve dealt with severe depression and anger my entire life, but it got significantly worse after my period began. That very next year was my first suicide attempt. I went from neutralsad all the time with occasional fits of fury to being suicidal and furious at all times for half of the month, then better when my period began and shortly after it stopped, then it would repeat the next month, and so on. My body began to shuffle itself around. My body caved in on itself.

They tried every medication they could for me. Max dose lithium at the age of 12. Every damn SSRI on the market in the US. Trintellix. Cymbalta. I responded to none of it, the lithium killed my thyroid dead, and I kept coming close to attempting suicide (or actually attempting suicide) every month. I’ve attempted for real about ten times, but I’ve been close to attempting countless, countless times. I don’t remember a time before this past month where I wasn’t having a situationship with suicide. Paradoxically the only thing that kept me going was the idea that I could tap out at any moment, but I found a way to stop myself most of the time.

The barrier? My love for my mother. The knowledge that she had suffered so much and my death would only create more suffering. The specter-strong, omnipotent knowledge that no one in my family has ever, without exaggeration, had freedom. We just get abused and we get abused and then our abusers die and leave us as little husks of people and then we ourselves die too, still little and huskish. We just get abused and die. But my living family’s abusers are all dead now. We survived. We made it. It doesn’t feel like we made it. It doesn’t feel like we made anything. We’re still anchored there; how can we not be? So, as long as my mother was still reliant on me, I would try my best to keep my head above water. Sometimes I went under but the Light reached Their callused palms into the muck and ripped me right back out, like placing a board game piece two steps backward, two steps forward, one hop this time. Spin the wheel and see what it lands on. I have always been determined to break the cycle but mostly I have just been determined to die and I haven’t actually spun the big divination card wheel of fortune yet. I have moved past the determination and now I’m trying to get rid of the dying. I had to learn about PMDD through a Tumblr post, and that's the big medicinal cherry on top; the very site that ruined my life also, in a way, saved it.

I was 20 when I got diagnosed. At first they put me on Yaz to stop my periods, but every person in my dad's family died from a blood clot and, though I tested negative for clotting disorders, I did not want to end up the same way. I also identified as a transgender man at the time; the person that inhabited my body back then was a man, but the person that inhabits this body now is not. I don't remember what the reason was for the change other than maybe the part of me that was a man decided to pack all its shit up in a bindle and take a hike into the mountainside of my inner world. Maybe he even died out there. I don't know. But the reasons to have a hysterectomy felt clear: I was a man, I suffered from severe PMDD, and birth control was too dangerous for me. I had always, always wanted children, and even planned to have some very young when I was in a particularly bad bout of psychosis and thought I wasn't mentally ill at all whatsoever and could handle it, but I was unaware that my uterus was severely underdeveloped; I only found that out during pre-surgery ultrasounds. If I had gone through with my plan of turkey bastering myself and it had worked, only God knows what would've happened. I don't think it would have been good.

Though the surgery was supposed to be for PMDD, they gave me the option to keep one ovary in, explaining to me that recent science indicated removal of both ovaries shortened the lifespan. They did not explain that the production of estrogen in the ovary is what causes PMDD, and that the only surgical way to treat it is by removing the entire reproductive system. I went through invasive surgery, my guts and vagina sliced open by an icy mechanical arm and sucked out, my other innards shifting around their new gape and hollowness —I imagined them getting a dog now that they had the space for it, always joked I’d put a DVD player in there. I was forced to waddle around the house with a pillow pressed over my stomach for a month, unable to help my disabled family with their daily tasks. I stopped breathing on the operating table for a few minutes and I only found out this year on MyChart. I was still contemplating suicide on a near constant basis.

My gynecologist told me I should look into electroconvulsive therapy, but I think she should have realized that the reason for my continued suicidal ideation was the fact that the surgery she told me would cure my PMDD actually did jack shit. I started ketamine therapy and I started taking Auvelity, a newer fast acting antidepressant that is literally just Wellbutrin and the active ingredient in cough syrup. These combined reduced the intensity of my depression only somewhat; during the luteal phase (the part of the menstrual cycle when PMDD is active) my depression went from a consistent 9/10 at baseline to a consistent 6.5/10 at baseline. But any time I made progress with my trauma and abandonment fears, it would revert entirely when the next luteal phase came around. I was trapped in a time loop and there was no action I could take to stop the day from repeating. I was caged in a school fair dunk tank on the playground of the preschool I got sold at, my ovaries like big pink rocks cuffed to my bones inside, strapping me to the water with their colossal weight. Got crucified on a cross made of my own damn fallopian tubes, extracted, enlarged, taxidermied and sewed into a big T. Nowhere was safe from me. My aunt’s appendix was gangrenous and wrapped around each surrounding organ when they took it out; my uterus felt like that, a diseased thing that had grown beyond what was natural, infecting every other part of me until I was reduced to cremation ash. My uterus was a collar double-bow-tied to the circumference of my throat, you know the ones with the barbs that dig into your neck and deliver a shock if you get a little bit angry, or beg for too much food, too much love, too much freedom. It made me sick in every sense of the word.

I came across another post about PMDD earlier this year. It described how PMDD actually worked, where it began in the body, and everything sort of fell into place, and I do believe this was a touch from the Light and the love of the divine, a little pinch of the cheek and an aren’t you just the cutest thing from God, because I was ready to propose electroconvulsive therapy to my psychiatrist the next time I saw her. I always believed it was inhumane, but I was desperate and I have always been easily manipulated, a pathetic gullible thing with a big fish mouth. I watched videos made by ECT patients where they discussed the memory loss caused by the treatment, and it terrified me—-I already have a memory loss disorder—-but I knew if I didn’t do something I would end up in prison and then killed in prison. I was ready to give up my functional mind because I was so ashamed of my inability to get better, so afraid of hurting someone I loved while in luteal or saying something I could never take back. PMDD had already ruined so many relationships for me, and it was getting exhausting. There was no way I could keep going.

I don’t remember what I did after that. I think my mother sent a message to my doctor on MyChart and I met back up with my gynecologist, who apologized to me for not appropriately educating me on my illness and offered to put me on Lupron Depot for a few months, which would shut down the production of estrogen in my body, essentially a kill switch for my right ovary. I think I cried on the exam table right then and there. I think my mom did too. It took a while for my insurance to improve it, because it’s not widely used for PMDD, but when I finally got the shot…

I don’t know. They say when you get the shot, estrogen production (and therefore PMDD symptoms) will surge before it stops. I was prepared for my ovary to throw its hands up like a defeated cartoon villain and go, “Nooooo!!! I’ll die before I go to jail!!!” or like in Babylon 5 when President Clark went Scorched Earth on Earth before dying. They also say when you get the shot, you lose a reincarnation or two, but I’ve never really trusted any of the They Says, or the They, or the sayings; I have only ever relied on myself. I had one day of unbearable emotion and the next day the clouds parted.

I became a different creature entirely. My ovary’s wickedness melted away when spritzed with the anti-ovary juice and good prevailed. My ovary Phoenix’d itself, Miss Congeniality’d itself, died to become beautiful. They put the needle in the flesh of my ass, angled it upward, and shoved it into my ovary from behind; it popped like a balloon, squirting infected pus all across the office, my depression disgusting and grotesque and unsightly but dead, still dead. And I got better. I feel lighter now.

Somehow, besides an unbearable insomnia, I am having very few negative symptoms; somehow menopause has only been a positive for me. I am having my ovary removed on September 11th, 2026, if you can believe the date. When I told my doctor how Lupron helped me she held my hand and we cried together.

I don't think I'm blogging correctly.

I know. I see it a ton of places on the small web - there's no wrong way to blog except to blog with hate, write what you know and what makes you happy, your website is for You, your website is your own, and these are all things I very very heavily agree with. But, well..

I'm just gonna get this out of the way now: this post is written by the shameful me. This post is the broken tooth I am spitting out of my mouth. This post is the wrong kind of vulnerability, the kind that comes out more as a complaint than a baring. It's not going to be a pleasant read, though as someone who has primarily written about PTSD in its short time blogging, I don't know if you can call anything I write pleasant to read, nor do I want the emotion my work elicits to be pleasant, necessarily (due to the topic). This post is just, to put it bluntly, going to sound like a long dog whine, except it won't even be pitifully cute like it is when dogs whine. As if all of my other posts somehow don't.

The thing is though that despite my internet pseudonym (Agnes the Alien), I am a human being physically, and I think human beings deserve to be a little bit obnoxious. Everyone is sometimes. It's natural. And most importantly, like I said, the sentiment I often see is "there's no wrong way to blog except to blog with hate, write what you know and what makes you happy, your website is for You, your website is your own", and like I said, I agree with that sentiment, so I have to take my own advice and post whatever the fuck I want to. So, yeah. No. I don't feel like I'm blogging correctly.

I have to wonder if part of this is being autistic? Like, I struggle to understand most nebulous concepts to their very core. I have been getting much better at seeing the gray recently, but I still think largely in black and white contrasts, either this Or that. I have always rejected “vague” labels such as queer for personal usage because I need specifics to survive, I’ve always hated what we now call “situationships”, and overall I just really really cannot handle it when I struggle to see a clearer path forward with anything, but especially hobbies of mine.

I know, I know, it's something I have to keep working on, and I am continually working on it. But when I hear these sentiments from others about how to run a blog, I always find myself swelling with confusion. Write what you know...

So I write about what I know, which is, largely, my own pain. For the past twenty two years I have been trapped in a cycle of endless suffering. I recently broke free from some of it, which I'll probably write about in the future, but overall I still ache to my very core over my past experiences, so this is what I write about. It is, admittedly, most of what I have written about since I started writing, also twenty two years ago. I've written a lot in my journal about how sometimes, for me, writing can be a form of self-harm in a way, because when I write I send myself back there. Back to the Phoenix scorch, the mesquite trees, the tiny shoes. Back and back and back. I try to invert myself entirely, reverse up the birth canal and get a do-over. I just keep forcing myself back there and I come running out of the suicide mission with pretty words every time. And honestly, it's not worth it?

I also struggle with psychosis, so I experience the world differently. When I think, I am either catching each thought like a snowflake on my tongue and letting it melt inward, herding the thoughts up like a sheepdog, or excavating them - I do not think in linear words like most others do, I approach thoughts as clusters of actions, like I have to collect or chew on or swallow or do Some Action To my thoughts before I can properly think them. I remember things like going up and down a hotel elevator; each year is a floor, each door a memory. I yearn like a scooping out. So, of course, my writing ends up just as abstract as my thoughts are. Most of my blog posts on here are also living a double life as creative personal essays. But it's not really intentional—it's just how I think. I think in metaphors like this:

I'm not the dog we had to put to sleep because it didn't know how to keep itself safe. I'm not elderly, even if I feel like it at all times, and you can teach me new tricks, I'll even throw in a rolling over and a handshake for a buck fifty extra if you look away from the fact that I'm rambling. I don't know how to slow down but I can learn. I will try to imagine slowing down. I imagine it; I spread Slowing Down out across the table like it is a deck of divination cards and I read Slowing Down like it is prophecy or farce (take your pick). I take Slowing Down on that table, lovingly and romantically and, yes, slowly. I kiss Slowing Down underneath the moonlight. I give Slowing Down the final rose. I wait for Slowing Down to set in, to become real for me, but it takes just a little bit too long, so I start imagining what Slowing Down would look like in a kinder world. "How To slow down"



Or like this: I believe that God's tears trickle down Their face and sprinkle miracles across Earth as they run, fertilizing the ground so that something greater can grow, and rapidly; I believe God cries revivals-from-death and successful rescue missions and found dog posters so that everything bad meets a beautiful, peaceful transformation instead of an end. "All Caps GOD"

These paragraphs are less of an attempt at me being creative and more of an attempt at being honest, baring my true soul, writing what I know. It's me vomiting all over the place. It's me refusing to censor myself or clean up the blood for others. I am the realest, most tangible version of myself when I write this way. Abstract is the only state I know how to exist in. But I find myself struggling to fit in with other bloggers when I am consistently only writing about the same horrific things in the same incomprehensible ways, over and over and over again.

There's the sad reality, though, that it circles back to the topic—that most of my writing is about the abuse I experienced. I struggle to see other people enjoying my work, even if some people have told me they do. I think in a way I'm chasing something I shouldn't be, but I don't know how to describe what it is I want. It's probably triggering for a lot of people, especially when I don't wrap it in sugar. I include the nasty, grotesque reality of child trafficking and the trauma it causes, making harsh comparisons, violent metaphors: I - me in my all, me to my core, my damn essence and genetic composition and energysoul - personally doomed all of men just by being a bit too tall for my age back then…

And I overshare, admittedly:

You ever see Torchwood: Children of Earth, the Doctor Who spinoff where aliens demand 10% of Earth's children because prepubescent children produced a chemical that got them high? Yeah, I watched that when I was about 9. My dad told me he wished he could send me with them, and I had nightmares for weeks after he turned off the first episode.

I wish I didn't care, but I always wonder how this makes me look as a blogger. Another thing I often see from different areas of the blogging sphere is that you should find a niche (and stick to it). A niche implies a readership, however eventual. And what I want is not readership for attention's sake; I want to impact others! I know I just need to wait, but as I dream of my writing reaching another trafficking victim and making them feel seen, I also realize that my psychosis and the way it affects my writing may be a huge obstacle in that. I don't think I've seen many writers who write like I do. I don't know how you make it in the world enough to touch someone if your writing is so abstract it's purple, because the way you experience the world is, well, purple. And I don't know if what I do can even be considered blogging? There's that vagueness again.

Merriam-Webster defines blogging in two ways:

"1: computers : a website that contains online personal reflections, comments, and often hyperlinks, videos, and photographs provided by the writer

also : the contents of such a site

2: a regular feature appearing as part of an online publication that typically relates to a particular topic and consists of articles and personal commentary by one or more authors"

Personal reflections, check. Comments, yep. Hyperlinks, I could do more of them. No photos or videos… I do relate most of my posts to a particular topic, but unwillingly so, and most of my posts, as I said earlier, could be considered articles, and are definitely personal commentary (and sadly, because of what happened, I am one and more authors.) Am I a hybrid of these categories? I don't know where I fit. I don't know what my particular topic is, or how to find personal reflections that aren't utterly depressing. I don't really know how to blog in a way that feels true to myself and feels like actual blogging at the same time.

I also know though: I'm new here. I have been blogging since I was very young, but I never wanted to really stick with it until now. I never had the drive to write anything personal about myself that was both a) regular and b) public. I had a monthly personal zine a few years ago, that showcased all of my creations for each month, but I eventually stopped keeping up with it. I found Blaugust last year and wrote a few posts on my old blog but didn't stick with it. I'm only starting to blog seriously now. I think there is a space for me here, or at least I see the possibility of one, the outline, but I'm not sure because of how different my writing feels from others'.

I am also a serious perfectionist. I was talking to my therapist recently about how I can't write for myself, not really; I always have to publish what I write at least somewhere, or it feels like I didn't write it at all. And I can only write if I feel like I'm in a mood to write something that could be good. Friends of mine talk about how they write without publishing, just keeping it to their documents, and I wish so desperately I could do that, but instead I stress over the placement of each word like a floral arrangement for a royal wedding. I can't write things that are just basic overviews of my days, or random thoughts, or things that don't feel like they have a purpose or poetic quality or any reason to exist—and I rarely feel this way about myself or anything I do. Still, I have standards for what I publish.

I only publish what I feel is exceptionally well written (for me and to me, anyway), and I feel like despite my aforementioned essays being just how my brain works, I do feel proud of what I've written there and view it as creative nonfiction in some marginal way. But I know I could reach more people if I relaxed a bit. If I allowed myself to write something mediocre. Or conversely I might even feel better about blogging and wouldn't even worry about blogging Correctly, if I allowed myself to just write without trying to make it Something—if I just wrote about anything regardless of perceived importance, if I just wrote without trying to make it sound meaningful or trying to make it pristine and articulate and comprehensible. I tried with the post before this one to make it sound less abstract and it took me two hours to edit the first draft; the published version is the third. If I could just find a comfortable way of engaging with my writing and the act of writing in general--if I could just find that balance I need between seeking impact and confidence—I'd be happier, and I'd write more. My therapist gave me the homework of writing one "bad thing" and I had a panic attack when I tried. When I even imagined it.

THEN I wonder: is this the right reason to write? Is writing with the goal of helping others a noble cause, or is it merely performative? Does it sound self-centered to even think I can help others? Do other writers even have a reason for writing, or do they just write? I've been writing since I was four and I write because it's what I have to do in order to survive; otherwise the words just build up in my arteries and threaten to end it all if I'm not careful. But I do consider this to be my main goal with writing, the reason why I keep getting up in the morning. I couldn't stop writing if I tried, and attempting to help others is how I channel that impulse. I just sometimes wonder if my writing being so odd is counterproductive to that goal, but I don't think I can write in any other way.

But with this post I'm trying that homework. This post is just a pathetic ramble and not an attempt at being serious or Making A Change. This post is my one bad thing. Except I don't think other people's writing is bad unless it is born from bigotry—if I see writing I feel is amateur I simply know the writer will evolve with practice as all do and encourage them. I find in the age of AI amateur writing is refreshing and carries its own poetic beauty. So why can't I take my own advice and find the worth and the beauty in what I already create?

I don't know. I might be overthinking this.

But I do have a question:

Since I'm new to the blogosphere, I am putting out a call for recommendations. I have two questions: What blogs do you read that write both as creative nonfiction and blogging? Do any exist? By creative nonfiction I use the term loosely - blogs that utilize heavy metaphor as well as poetic and/or abstract language in many of their posts. Or really any blog you feel is written beautifully, tbh. What blogs do you read about the experience of psychosis, either in general or as a creative person specifically? I'd really, really like to know.

If you know me, you know my story; I’ve talked quite a bit about how I grew up on Tumblr and social media and the Internet In General since single-digit ages, and how I got sucked into internet discourse as a teen. I’ve talked a lot about the person it made me as a child and then a younger adult, and how I am deeply dissatisfied with the person I was when I was in those circles. I have talked and talked and Talked! about how “shipping discourse” affected me, but I don’t know if I’ve discussed it much on this blog. I find it difficult to discuss a lot of the time, because I still have so much shame surrounding my actions and beliefs during that period of my life. But I do think it is important context.

I grew up in fandom- literally. My very first media obsession was the show Psych when I was 6, and I was my own little Psych fandom as a kid. I drew the characters all the time, fell for Juliet as a baby gay, and spent my allowance on any merchandise I could find, but I didn’t find fandom as a community until I was about ten years old and a kid in my class got me to join their Doctor Who obsession. I started watching and I kept watching until I had seen the entire series (up to Eleven’s seasons at that point) and then I watched most of Classic Who and switched to buying Big Finish dramas with my allowance. I was using Tumblr even before I found fandom as a community, but it was my Doctor Who special interest that kickstarted my Decade of Hell and introduced me to “real fandom.”

I quickly became integrated. I have always been ostracized socially due to autism, and any friendships I ever had as a kid either didn’t last long or were born from the other kid pitying me. When I wasn’t being ignored, I was bullied, so I had little interest in peers who were around me physically; I just didn’t trust them. Most of my socialization came from the now-defunct youth magazine forums of New Moon Girls, and I followed my NMG friends to Tumblr when I stopped using NMG. For someone like me—-who socialized better online, where you can backspace and edit and delete—who never felt like it had any interest in the people around them because no one wanted to talk about the Eighth Doctor IRL—who had no peers real life who treated it with respect—Tumblr was a haven. It also ended up ruining me.

I know, I know. That sounds dramatic! But sometimes I do think about the person I would be today if I had joined Tumblr just a little bit later. If I hadn’t been exposed to the suicide baiting and the constant harassment and the callout posts for drawing the wrong anime characters kissing or identifying too much with a fictional character who is a different disability than you, or other arbitrary things like that. I think I would definitely be a much happier person; I’d have less anxiety and I’d have—-yes, I admit this—-less of a kneejerk angry reaction towards others when I am irritated. That's something I'm working on.

So here's the thing—this post was going to be about the things I have learned since becoming an admin of a 500+ user fandom community last year. And I do really, really want to write about that, but in the middle of writing this backstory I found myself wanting to talk more about how much I hate Tumblr instead.

Well, I don't hate Tumblr. I found my partner on there who has transformed my life into something so amazing, and I would be lost if I had never met them through our shared little fandoms. I found most of my friends through there and I cherish them deeply. I do not enjoy using terms like hate for things that have brought me endless comfort and happiness, but at the same time… I don't know. I'm not the same person I was when I joined, or even the same person I was six, five, four months ago.

I think I've outgrown it.

I haven't outgrown being fannish. I am actually extremely passionate about being fannish, because I just can't turn that part of my brain off; I've tried. But what I have outgrown is the way people do fandom. Genuine anti-harassment spaces are dying out. People who demonize others over their favorite fictional characters/ships are even slowly infesting Dreamwidth now—I see more and more of them in the addme communities. I get discomfort with more taboo topics, and I will never shame anyone for being triggered by them, but I draw the line at making concrete moral judgements about another human being just because they, like, ship Sam and Dean or whatever. And when it's not people being pro-harassment, it's people using anti-harassment as a label to hide their bigotry and hatred. I can't seem to find anywhere that draws the "don't harass others over their ships, but Also we shouldn't ignore racism and misogyny under the guise of 'don't like don't read'" line that I feel is logical.

The thing is: Tumblr increasingly feels more and more juvenile, redundant, and meaningless as I get older. Most people in my main fandom do not like me at best, specifically because of my favorite ships and the kind of relationships/topics/themes in fiction I am naturally drawn to. I just don't have time to sort through ship discourse when really all I want is to see posts about my favorite character and their traumas and characterization. Or people being passionate about their favorite things. Or, like, literally anything else besides "I keep seeing this one ship on AO3 and it's so gross, mine is so much better".

I don't get to see posts about my current favorite character though, because he, like almost all Black characters in fandom, gets ignored (at best) by the fanbase despite being the main character (unless of course he can be shipped with a white dude). That brings me into another main gripe I have with fandom—it is fucking bigoted.

Fandom is racist. Fandom hates Black people and women and if you're Black and a woman!?!?!?! Well you must be the devil (according to most). I saw it in the Star Trek AOS fandom with Uhura, DO NOT GET ME STARTED ON MICHAEL BURNHAM. The Pluribus fandom demonizes its characters of color at large. And then in the Academy fandom's dislike/dismissal of Caleb Mir and the Shadowhunters fandom's dismissal of Luke Garroway… Do not fucking get me started on Doctor fucking Who…. on and on and on. Fics where Black characters are kept as slaves are not uncommon. And it's not just that—it's any character of color being ignored for Background White Dude Tree #3. It's characters of color being portrayed as criminals or evil even if it does not work with their canon characterization at all and criticized in ways their white counterparts aren't. It's…

Other bloggers--those who are people of color—have said it with better articulation than I can give at 2AM. So I'll quote this article from Teen Vogue's Stitch:

"However, the second you remind people that you’re also a person of color and that matters to you as much as your queerness does, it becomes a problem for far too many people in queer fandom spaces. Maybe you express unease when queer white Drag Race fans hype up a drag queen that’s done blackface, or pointing out that Billy (so many people’s Stranger Things blorbo) was a racist, or talk out the problems with how some folks write NSFW content with characters of color, or even just write fiction or meta about a character who shares and celebrates your and their ethnic identity. The reaction is often cruel, condescending, or violent. We have to care about one thing at a time and it’s usually not our identity as POC unless it’ll be used to silence some other person of color in fandom.

For Cait, currently locked on Twitter as a result of harassment from people angry about him talking about racism in his main fandom, queer fandom spaces have always been hostile to fans of color. “While I acknowledge they’ve been a place of exploration for myself too, I feel as a POC I’m not granted the freedom and peace to exist in ways white queers get to, and that I must abide to a completely different set of rules,” he shares via DM. Queer fans of color are told to “curate your space” to minimize seeing or experiencing racism, but how can we do that when we’re punished for setting boundaries (like blocking people or locking our accounts) in an attempt to protect ourselves from racists in our own fandoms?"

Rukmini Pande's "“Get out of here you anti”: Historizing the Operation of Structural Racism in Media Fandom": "Another respondent spoke about their experience in the fandom of the Star Wars sequel films on Tumblr, particularly around the erasure of the character of Finn, played by John Boyega. Despite Finn being introduced with great fanfare as a central character in the first film, The Force Awakens (2015), there was a marked difference in the popularity between him and the white characters, and this extended to the creation of fanworks. For further context, John Boyega has also spoken about the consistent harassment he received from large parts of the fanbase throughout his association with the film franchise. This was also reflected in media fandom spaces, extending to targeting of those fans who pointed out the implications of his sidelining from the narrative. The respondent notes pushing back on Finn’s erasure was met with immediate labeling, followed by backlash.

And there’s the whole anti thing, which is, so it was supposed to mean that would put us as the aggressors who were trying to take them down. It was just ridiculous.…I’ve been told that I was responsible for everybody who didn’t like this character. And I’m like, that’s ridiculous. So, I’m the queen, queen of the antis? So that means that they all answer to me?…I’m just writing essays. I’m not leading anybody.

In this case as well, the respondent pointed to their much longer history in Star Wars fandom (since the 1970s), which did not prevent them from being framed as an outsider. They also underlined a further point of the process, in which the term anti is also seen to identify an organized movement whose explicit aim is the policing of fan pleasure. This echoes the claim also made in the Vox article, which shows that it is a belief that has gained some traction in online fandom discourse, despite there being little evidence backing it up. Therefore, when the label is applied to fans who point out recurring racist patterns in fandom spaces, it allows fandom to ignore the systemic nature of those issues, instead deflecting those discussions into the realm of individual taste."

How, then, can I remain in spaces where this kind of bigotry runs rampant? Of course, no space is free of bigotry. But I can certainly surround myself with less bigotry, and with people who I trust to call me on my shit if I ever mess up. It's the mixture of this bigotry and the prominence of harassment on the social media spaces I currently frequent that draws me to this conclusion—

It might be time for me to move on. Nah, I think it is time.

I'm not leaving Tumblr for good, because most of my friends are on there and I want to keep up with them. But I need to titrate down. I need to crumple it all up to maximum one hour of "mainstream/corporate social media" per day. I need to smooth things out. I'm no longer the person I was when I needed Tumblr to survive. I finally cured the medical condition causing most of my suicidality and depression (PMDD), and now I feel like I can exist on my own, without posting on Tumblr 24/7, without scrolling through any For You Pages endlessly just to piss myself off.

I can be fannish in places where people understand me, and agree with my opinions on bigotry—spaces like the ones I have developed, mostly, but still. I can do fandom with my partner who gets me. I can do fandom with my personal Discord server. I can do fandom in places that don't piss me off. I can do fandom in a way that is healthier for me. I didn't discover the term "fannish" (Of or relating to a fan; characteristic of fandom.) until recently, and I like that term a lot—it refers more to the individual than a general community, and I just don't feel like fandom is much of a community. I'm fannish, but I wouldn't necessarily say I'm in fandom anymore. Fandom doesn't want me.

One of my biggest problems is that I have way too much free time. I'm housebound. I leave the house for 2x weekly Spravato treatments, other medical appointments, and that's about it. I'm starting college this month, so I'll have that to fill up my time eventually. I have a billion project ideas too—I want to learn more Python and make Sunset a version of the autoao3app, I want to make my Dreamwidth clone fucking usable, I want to start up a few original universes and an erotica career within them, I want to make a TTRPG—but I admittedly spend most of my time in practice just Thinking About Starfleet Academy, and that's why I spend so much time on Tumblr and other adjacent spaces. So I'm going to make a real plan for going forward.

Places I'll do fandom:

-Pillowfort.social. The best Tumblr replacement I've ever seen and I've been meaning to get more active on here for ages. If you want to follow me, my username is Toothpaste; I need to actually use it. I'm planning on putting most of my Starfleet Academy brainrot on here and…

-Blorbo.social, because I like the "twitter" vibe of the UI and setup without it being Twitter like uh at all. I like being able to toss short shitposts into the void. I just asked for an account; if it gets approved my username will be Holiday. If my account doesn't get approved I'll just make an account for fandom stuff on my personal Fediverse instance.

-Dreamwidth, for longer posts. I love Dreamwidth and its fandom community (...for the most part) and I think being more active on here is going to be a top priority.

-My personal website.

The internet has so many cool things and people to discover outside of Tumblr and Xwitter and Instagram. It's time for me to actually diversify, man. I have accounts on these spaces, but I want to make them the main places I hang out on the web. I don't know what the point of this post is besides that I'm just sort of tired, and most of the things that upset me these days are self-inflicted—I can always choose not to look at the Starfleet Academy Tumblr tag, or, y'know, not use Tumblr at all, and then I won't get upset when I keep seeing the aforementioned ""I keep seeing this one ship on AO3 and it's so gross, mine is so much better". Wish me luck?

GET A MOVE ON

Mr. Scruff was the artist who made the sample music that came with Windows 7 OS. I had a deep interest in technology even back then, it's just how I've always been wired, and I had a specific interest in Microsoft Windows, its previous and upcoming operating systems, and various Microsoft software like Microsoft Agent, Office, Text to Speech, and Media Player. Literally I would spend hours recording videos of various things I forced Microsoft Sam to say, then I would set them to instrumentals of my favorite songs and upload the shitty amalgam to Youtube. When I was 10, I had a mission to read every Microsoft related Wikipedia article in one day. Yes, if you're wondering, I was diagnosed with autism eventually.

When I think of this era of my life, Mr. Scruff sticks out as perhaps one of the most prominent artists of the time. I listened to the Windows 7 sample music on almost a daily basis—I put him on the iPod Classic I still used even then and I took it with me when we visited my grandfather in hospice and, yes, I am ashamed to say it, I listened to Mr Scruff all throughout the funeral too.

SURGEON

If you know me then you may know I have a weird erotic fixation on vivisection. I don't really know why. I can tell you why it appeals to me in an erotic context—it is the most literal form of being inside someone, the intimacy and trust inherent to allowing someone to take you apart piece by piece, the vulnerability involved—but I can't really tell you what caused this kink or why I have it. It's obviously a fantasy-exclusive kink, though if we lived in a Star Trek future where I could survive being vivisected, I would not be disinterested! But this fixation came with so much shame, early on; I've had it since I was very young, and it just grew into something sexual from there.

I would consider this too TMI for this blog, but I also think it is important for people to see others discuss darker kinks and fetishes without shame. When I realized it was erotic for me, I was buried in a friend group that would have skinned me alive for feeling this way about erotic gore. As a young child, my best friend and I had an inside joke where we were cutting open this fake guy we made up called Sthomachs, because we constantly fought over him; the idea was we'd each date our own share of his harvested organs because he just couldn't choose one of us for good. I didn't know that this was abnormal or weird, so we made those jokes around others on Google Buzz (remember Google Buzz?) and our friends' parents ended up very very concerned. Everything around me was telling me to be ashamed of this fantasy, even though it was only a fantasy that I now think may have been caused by an attempt to cope with violent intrusive thoughts, and everything around me made me feel like an abomination, some sort of demonic being that was incapable of good.

Anyway, around this time Apple still did one free song per week on iTunes, and I had recently gotten an iPod Touch for the holidays. One week the free single was one of the songs from St. Vincent's Strange Mercy. I can't remember which one it was, but I was immediately enthralled by her voice, so I took to Youtube to listen to more of her songs… and I found Surgeon.

Best finest surgeon

Come cut me open…

I didn't know it at the time--I actually just found this out now—but this had been a quote from Marilyn Monroe in one of her diary entries:

Best finest surgeon—Strasberg to cut me open which I don’t mind since Dr. H has prepared me—given me anaesthetic and has also diagnosed the case and agrees with what has to be done— an operation—to bring myself back to life and to cure me of this terrible dis-ease whatever the hell it is—and there is absolutely nothing there— Strasberg is deeply disappointed but more even— academically amazed that he had made such a mistake. He thought there was going to be so much—more than he had ever dreamed possible … instead there was absolutely nothing— devoid of every human living feeling thing— the only thing that came out was so finely cut sawdust—like out of a raggedy ann doll—and the sawdust spills all over the floor & table and Dr. H is puzzled because suddenly she realizes that this is a new type case. The patient … existing of complete emptiness Strasberg’s dreams & hopes for theater are fallen. Dr. H’s dreams and hopes for a permanent psychiatric cure is given up—Arthur is disappointed— let down.

In Surgeon I felt the sexual entendre within Clark's voice even if I was too young to understand. For many it was likely metaphorical, penetration being the cutting open, but for me the fascination was very literal; I desired to be dissected, to feel a scalpel sink into my flesh and to feel fingers root around between my organs and to be studied in my all so my alien nature could lead to new scientific discoveries for humanity. I guess even if I hadn't been aware of Monroe's diary entry back then I still lived it in a way.

GOTHIC LOLITA How old are you?

I'm older than you'll ever be

I've been dead a thousand years

And lived only two or three

I don't mind telling you

My life was ended by your hand

The kind of murder where nobody dies

But I don't suppose you'd understand

[Pre-Chorus]

Call off the search, we've found her

[Chorus]

If I am Lolita, then you are a criminal

And you should be killed by an army of little girls

The law won't arrest you

The world won't detest you

You never did anything any man wouldn't do

I'm Gothic Lolita and you are a criminal

I'm not even legal

I'm just a dead little girl

My obsession with this song—the fact that I'd play it on repeat for days, the fact that I felt like I vomited the song out of me, dreamed it up myself—should have been a damn clue.

PLAYLIST 3: DOUBLE DIGITZ SIDE B

Stubborn Love - The Lumineers

Nicotine - Panic! At The Disco

Halo - Bloc Party

STUBBORN LOVE

The first time I had a serious crush, it was on the best friend of my best friend's sister. I met my best friend's sister on a now-defunct online forum/magazine for girls called New Moon Girls Magazine, which was my main social outlet as a homeschooled autistic kid terrified of the world around her. Her name was Car, and she was 15 while I was 11.

Mostly we interacted over Tumblr. I joined Tumblr at 9, but only became active around age 11, when I felt I had outgrown NMG and needed somewhere else to settle. I was very technologically adept for my age, so in my paranoia I added an IP logger and visitor tracker to the main page of my blog. It told me the approximate location of everyone who visited my blog, their IP address, what time they visited my blog, and for how long they visited. Not very long after that, I started getting anonymous crush confession asks from someone in the same city as Car. I did not know anyone else in that city, nor did I have more than twenty followers at the time, so I came to the conclusion that it was her very quickly… I still don't know if it really was, but I think so. They typed like her, they sent me poetry they wrote about me that was written in her style, they sent me songs by artists she liked. Every indication said it was her.

One of the songs that anonymous person sent me was Stubborn Love. The anon told me it reminded them of our interactions and didn't elaborate much beyond that.

She'll lie and steal and cheat

And beg you from her knees

Make you think she means it this time

She'll tear a hole in you, the one you can't repair

But I still love her, I don't really care

When we were young

Oh-oh, we did enough

When it got cold

Ooh-ooh, we bundled up

I can't be told

Ah-ah it can't be done

It's better to feel pain, than nothing at all

To this day I still cannot figure out what that meant, but when I was hospitalized shortly after this, this song's Youtube page was the only website I visited for the half an hour each day we were allowed (supervised) internet access. This song, over and over and over, ruminating on why the person who supposedly liked me thought I was stubborn.

NICOTINE

The best friend I talked about in the previous section came from her own troubles and traumas, and she treated me terribly. I was diagnosed with autism the year I met up with her family in a small Minnesota town, and I did not know it until after our meetup, but her family was staunchly anti-vaccine. I told them it hurt my feelings to say that my autism was a fate worse than death and she laughed at me and doubled down. She had her best friend use his karate moves and flip me to the ground three times during the visit while laughing. Her room was so messy you could not even see the floor and I was forced to sleep on the mess.

Her favorite band was Panic! at the Disco. About a month after we met up, Too Weird To Live was released. She sent me Nicotine over email:

Just one more hit and then we're through

'Cause you could never love me back

Cut every tie I have to you

'Cause your love's a fucking drag

But I need it so bad

Your love's a fucking drag

But I need it so bad

[Chorus]

Yeah, you're worse than nicotine, nicotine

and said that it reminded her of me and my social anxiety. I wish that had been the moment I stopped talking to her, but even as the hatred she felt towards me for my autism diagnosis only got worse, I still remained anchored to her side; I didn't have anyone else.

I think there's been so many patterns in my life, both good and bad; I also think the fabric forming these patterns is made of sheet music, sound and note, lyric and hymn. I think music defines, and defies, more than we think it does.

On queer religion, religion after trafficking, my goals in religious studies, complex relationships with family members, and that unshakeable spark of belief.

I grew up feeling touched by God in ways that, according to others, I did not deserve. I believed in God before I knew what God was. I grew up with a mother who described herself as "spiritual but not religious" and a father that came from a conservative Christian family but who had somehow agreed to keep his faith out of raising me, so I didn't really learn about God until it was too late, but I always felt that pulse in the chest, you know? There was always that ember within me that kept burning on and on, even when I drenched it in ice, even when I forced the big bad wolf to blow it all down, my hands prying his jaw right open. Said he was trying to not be the bad wolf anymore, said he sold insurance, not children, now. Said it was too risky to keep going. Said even wolves can be hunted. But I held him against the embers of my faith and he only reignited the fire, despite being the Greatest of Scorchers himself. .

I still don't get it; I shouldn't breathe like this after all that I have been through. They tell me I am wrong for it, that I am a traitor for my community for feeling God's love. They tell me that the imagery is off in my head and anything that can chomp the serpent of me down is of virtue, even if the chomping thing is that wolf himself. They tell me that I = the serpent = the temptation of my little scrawny self was my own fault = I = eternal and global fault. That I - me in my all, me to my core, my damn essence and genetic composition and energysoul - personally doomed all of men just by being a bit too tall for my age back then. But still to my core, to my damn essence and genetic composition and energysoul, I know that the God they speak of is a portrayal of God that got lost in translation..

Aa Dollar Tree knockoff God, a Spirit Halloween costume called "Short Green Goblin With Light Sword" that is trying its hardest to both be Yoda and obscure its Yoda status at the same time. It is wearing God clothing. It killed capital-r Real God and buried it in the yard next to the dog and went under the knife to shuffle its appearance around and took over Real God's place in the world. Except silly them, you can't snuff that out so easily; the one who guided evolution into present humanity doesn't just give up, so Real God is gonna come back to defeat the imposter one day, you just watch, even if They have to come back vesseled through me. I believe in a God that hasn't stopped speaking. Actually I believe in a God that does not shut the fuck up. I believe in a religion of entanglement, that God is closer to you than plasma, and I believe God respects the boundaries of people who say no I don't think I'd like any helpings of God thank you, and I believe God weeps when people use Their name to strike and oppress and abandon, and I believe that God's tears trickle down Their face and sprinkle miracles across Earth as they run, fertilizing the ground so that something greater can grow, and rapidly; I believe God cries revivals-from-death and successful rescue missions and found dog posters so that everything bad meets a beautiful, peaceful transformation instead of an end. I believe in a God that says THERE ARE SEVEN BILLION PROPHETS ACTUALLY. MAYBE EIGHT, ACTUALLY. I LOST COUNT OF ALL THE PEOPLE I LOVE BECAUSE I KEEP FINDING MORE PEOPLE TO LOVE EVERY DAY, EVERY MINUTE, INSIDE OF EVERY SECOND'S EVERY FRACTION. .

I grew up with blood in my blood and as such I have always been extremely close with my family. My mother is my best friend now, but her sister, my aunt, was like a second mother to me in childhood. She was a lipstick lesbian, danced around in Ed Hardy knockoffs and black yoga pants and platform flipflops and CAN I SPEAK TO THE MANAGER? YOU'RE DOING A GREAT JOB HONEY haircuts. She had struggled with severe mental illness her whole life, but even at that age, I was in the same boat - no women in my family have ever escaped it unscathed - and we had a sort of connection in that way. I spent nights at her apartment and we'd make grocery store chicken cheese taquitos in the toaster oven and watch movies my mom would never let me watch at that age, like The Craft or Scary Movie. She treated me like a person, and most people in my life treated me like either a problem or a thing that needed to be protected, and I think that's how I knew when she started dating him. Him being her cousin, of course. Adoptive, but raised the same. He'd had a hard struggle with addiction and found falsegod, then bought some land in small town North Carolina, built a church on it, took a six week online course, and declared himself a Pastor. And after this, he reconnected with my aunt, who fluttered around the world searching for someone to take care of her, and seduced her to his God with promises of eternal comfort and life after the life she had tried for so long to end as long as she doesn't end it and salvation and superiority, which I guess I was too young to realize she had always wanted. I could tell you he took away my second mother, but the truth is that he actually just killed her. I don't know, I think Amy's body is buried there next to God and the dog and their cats who died in the God's-wrath-house-fire-of-2015, and the Amy who calls us on Facebook messenger now is some entirely different creature, customized through manipulation entirely to his own wishes, toddling around the church corridors in a zombie walk, arms out and clasped together. .

I knew I was gay when I was ten or so, and she left two years later. I realized when I developed a crush on a girl at my school who had the same birth name as me, a girl who ended up blaming her suicide attempt on me later that year. My cousin - Amy's daughter - grew up knowing she was gay at a very young age too, and she was butch, so it got her targeted significantly; Amy had to watch my pain over that blame and her daughter's pain over the lesbophobia she faced in the 1990s/early 2000s and still she drew herself to the conclusion, eventually, that we deserved all of our pain, that it was God's punishment for us being gay. She told her daughter that they weren't going to the same place after death. She doesn't tell me the same things anymore because she knows if she tries that shit there's a chance an order of live bees will show up at her front door. I feel an absence of myself in myself every time I think about this loss, yet still it does not push me from God, it only transforms how I think about Them. .

I shouldn't think of it this way, but a lot of my love for God is formed in the vein of the idea that spite is the best motivator. I'm planning on getting my Masters of Divinity because then I will have more religious expertise than them by far and it will piss them off that a "heathen" (read: non-Evangelical dyke Quaker me) will be more logically trustworthy on the topic than them. I am mostly getting my mDiv because I want to volunteer in hospice chaplaincy. I want to counsel the sick and the dying and comfort them in their final moments. I am the kind of person who feels intense compassion, but does not feel mirrors of others' emotions when they are suffering, so I am able to take a kind and thoughtful response while remaining detached- - something I think is necessary in that kind of position. I want this because I want to be the kind of spiritual counselor who my uncle never would be. If I can help guide someone's relationship to God into something they find solely comforting - even one person - that is all I want to accomplish with my work. Because I completely understand being non-religious and rejecting religion after religious trauma. I do. But for people who choose to remain of faith in ways that work for them... we deserve to feel confident, supported, and loved in our paths..

Today my country largely preaches the idea that God's love is conditional but fuck that. God didn't help humanity form and love all of us in our entirety during evolution, just to say "actually nvm I'm a lil picky now". God weeps and frustrates only out of love and belief that Their creation can be their best selves. Through this understanding, this knowledge and this connection to GOD (all caps cuz We're both excited), I am able to be my best self in the education and volunteer work I hope to undertake. I don't strive to do good because I want God to love me, I strive to do good because I love humanity just as much and just as deeply as They do.

I have around 3 pages full of blog post ideas in my personal journal (ironically, one of them is to post about my personal journal), and yet, before Blaugust at least, every time I sat down to blog I always found myself forgetting every single world in the English language, all twenty six alphabet soup letters, how to grasp the concept of communication in general. I found myself going through a sort of blogger's ego death where I tried to blog and instead became the world. I tried to blog and it all ran together and then out into the street, SLAM! and say goodbye to any comprehension of the people around you, how to connect to them, or how to integrate yourself into the world at all. I sort of forgot that I was there, that I am here. I just forget what it's like to have lived when I try to blog, that I am always here listening, in the background, to myself.

I can never really figure it out, but as I wrote in my last post, I am trying! I killed my own death and came back to life juuust learning how to talk again, and then as my first word I made a JavaScript random generator of all the blog post ideas in my journal. I asked my friend to pick a number between 1 and 10, and when they gave me a 6 I rolled the randomizer six times. I landed on how to slow down. I thought to myself: fucking hell.

I can't remember why I put that in there, but my first guess is it was to force myself to learn, well, How To Slow Down when I finally had time to write it. I've done that with other things before, like when I had to force myself to stay alive. Maybe I can see the future and I actually predicted this! That is likely, and possible, right? The more plausible explanation though is maybe that, at the time, I foolishly thought that I did know how to slow down. I'm never mature enough to understand myself until the present moment, and of course the present moment is inherently fleeting; there's always another moment. These moments happen in direct succession from one another and just ram their bodies violently into you and if you don't open your mouth to let them out, they crowd around your teeth and start pouring down your throat, and then you're back in the same damn situation I described in the opening paragraph of this post. My hypothesis here is that I thought I understood myself and I didn't. Hey, in other news, water is wet, the sky remains its thick blue, and I am (not) an abomination.

So, like, whatever. Whatever! So I don't know how to slow down; so what? I'm not the dog we had to put to sleep because it didn't know how to keep itself safe. I'm not elderly, even if I feel like it at all times, and you can teach me new tricks, I'll even throw in a rolling over and a handshake for a buck fifty extra if you look away from the fact that I'm rambling. I don't know how to slow down but I can learn. I will try to imagine slowing down.

I imagine it; I spread Slowing Down out across the table like it is a deck of divination cards and I read Slowing Down like it is prophecy or farce (take your pick). I take Slowing Down on that table, lovingly and romantically and, yes, slowly. I kiss Slowing Down underneath the moonlight. I give Slowing Down the final rose. I wait for Slowing Down to set in, to become real for me, but it takes just a little bit too long, so I start imagining what Slowing Down would look like in a kinder world. You know, the kind of downslowing that does come easily to me---the kind that would count and matter to others in a universe where there are no bricks piled on my chest, where God loves me, where people just take a second to consider things from someone else's point of view.

I can slow down, I just cannot Slow Down. I try to pull my brain out of my head and yank my worries right out the cranium but something curls around the wet thing and pulls me back in with it? I try to pull myself out of myself but I only find more ego death. I come to the conclusion that slowing down is going to look different for me than it will for others and maybe that's OK, but no one will accept this conclusion, I know it and it's scratched into the wood of my chest. I don't really know what they're looking for, other than that they're looking for a uniform, rigid normalcy I am simply too large to even squeeze into, like how 00 jeans don't even fit around my calf. I wouldn't even know where to start.

There is no relaxation for me. I feel like I am expected to relax, or to have relaxing as a goal, but - and I'm not trying to be Mx. Deborah Downer when I say this - I just don't think relaxation is compatible with me. Not in its pure form, anyway. I'm a square void; it is a solid spinning sphere. I'm the dangling arm and it is the sososo hungry shark. I cannot blame sharks; they are just doing what nature directs them to. Similarly relaxation is simply doing what nature commands of it, which is to hide from me and reject me in my all. Well, you get the idea.

I think a lot of people expect too much of those who have been through unimaginable trauma. I cannot be expected to fully evaporate into my surroundings when it wasn't safe enough for me to do so until I was an age where fearing for my safety had already become a second sort of blood; I cannot be expected to relax in the way a non-traumatized person would relax. I failed the test that was being one whole child and instead fragmented into chalk powder, little bits of white you can use to form any picture desired. I am never going to be the same kind of human as you.

Other survivors can get there but I don't know. I'm aware of how depressing this sounds, but that is the opposite of this post's intent; what happened to me transformed me in ways I will never be able to describe, ways I may never have the insight to fully understand, and the thing I am now is not wrong as many claim it to be. I am not unhealed because I am still at baseline afraid of all things; I am healed when I am able to appropriately cope with those fears. Healing is indicated by an ability to "do it scared", for me, I think. I feel like my most desired future will come when I learn how to exist comfortably within my neurotic eccentricities, without despising myself for not being the non-trafficked person's idea of recovered. I just don't think the pain of being used as a commodity ever goes away, but you learn to work through it. I am working through it. I am taking the pain I carry over my back, the pain that exists heavy and dragging within a sack strapped to each shoulder, and redistributing the contents of my pain into different pockets to make the weight of it more bearable. I am fucking getting there.

On blogging, writing about abuse, and growing up as an artist. Also for AugusStory.

I’ve been blogging since I was….

I don’t actually know. It feels like I’ve been blogging since the big bang, and it feels like I’ve never blogged before. Baby’s first blog! Except I’ve been blogging since I don’t remember, except I remember it perfectly and I’ve been blogging since the first breath I took in 2001, except it’s really more like I’ve been blogging since I died on the operating table for a minute and a half, except I actually don’t blog at all whatsoever. I know; I can't keep up with it either.

But the truth is: I don’t. I’m a big girl and I can admit that I can keep any promise as long as it doesn’t involve writing consistently or having faith consistently or doing anything with any damn sort of consistency. I have a good old smoothie blend of disorders that make me struggle with executive functioning and habit building, and I have not been able to find a way out of that yet.

I even wrote about this as my first blog post ever (baby's first blog!), called I Just Have To Start Blogging, but alas, after posting that I did not blog. I wrote down a list of blog post ideas! I did not write those ideas. I thought about blogging! I did not, actually, blog. To be honest, I barely remember what I've done since July 6th, the date of my last post here. All the days flood and melt together until they're a grotesque puddle of muddy paintbrush water. I find that I was able to write more when I was actively being traumatized. We'll unpack that later. I keep writing in my personal diary about some block - I think "block" might be my most used word in the whole thing - where I want to work on so many creative projects but my body just doesn't follow suit. It just sits there, trapped in a silly, sphere-shaped cage that formed around me when I turned about thirteen years old and stopped creating because creating was fun. My body, so pathetic, just rots in a chair.

When you're a kid you need to have art in your life. You need to finger paint, you need to doodle, you need to sing, you need to make shoddy mud sculptures in the yard. When you're a kid, you create because you produce creativity like a chemical, you just can't help it.

You ever see Torchwood: Children of Earth, the Doctor Who spinoff where aliens demand 10% of Earth's children because prepubescent children produced a chemical that got them high? Yeah, I watched that when I was about 9. My dad told me he wished he could send me with them, and I had nightmares for weeks after he turned off the first episode. I think of it like that now: children produce an unburdened creativity _{a freer creativity} that the adults of the word siphon up and swallow up until what remains is some slowly decaying corpse that hasn't caught up to the fact it's dead yet. You know? Imagination, creativity, dress-up, pretend. It's all writing. It's all creating. I use imagination and creativity interchangeably here, because even if you don't express it outwardly, imagining is a form of creation in and of itself. It's like a secret God. I see the deicide of my secret God on the hands of the world around me, and I can't decide if I want to forgive the world for that yet. I can't forgive myself for being a child, either, we'll unpack that later, in a blog post I'll probably never write.

I don't entirely remember what my first blog was, because I've had so many. I used blogspot like a Bible; before that it was Facebook notes (I had my first account at 6). The internet has been my home since I learned to read. One of the first blogs I ever made was called My Secret My World, and I wish I could remember why I chose that name but I have a feeling maybe I don't want to. I had a banner on the header, an MS paint self portrait very clearly drawn by a nine year old that didn't look like me at all. I had blonde hair and blue eyes, the girl in it had mint hair and purple eyes. She had a wide grin on her face and two symmetrical front baby teeth and when I look at the drawing now it makes me almost angry -back then I could smile and show my crooked crowded teeth without feeling ashamed, back then I could imagine myself, back then I could draw self portraits in MS Paint without worrying about whether or not they looked good.

My only readers were my mom and her friends. I didn't really have friends as a kid. But I posted everything I thought, to the point where I imagine my readers were probably rather concerned. News articles about animals, news articles about the environment. I wanted to be a marine biologist and Save The Environment! and Help The Ocean! and I wrote page after page about all the ideas I had to fix the world - ideas that all hinged entirely upon a naive view of humanity where I genuinely thought most of Earth would come together one day to work towards a greater good. I never posted about the abuse I was facing at home or at school, because I thought of my dad screaming at my mother and the boys in my class throwing glass at me the same way one thinks of brushing their teeth or taking a shower; so normal and routine that it fades into the blurry blue background. I blogged like I breathed.

A while after I created My Secret My World, I made another blog called Giant Worm. I posted my photography and writing under Giant Worm, and under this name I briefly helped run a community blog for youth photographers. Blogging felt rewarding because it felt like... to say an exhale would be both too cliche and incorrect, but I feel like that's the expected metaphor. What it actually felt like was when I woke up after my hysterectomy and immediately vomited my brains out all over the floor; I had no choice but to get that shit out. I wrote because I didn't have a choice in the matter and I find that is largely still the case. I write because my brain is holding a gun to my brain. I write because if I don't something will slither up inside me like a bad guy, and I am scared that this something will be the bad guy, that I'll see him again if I stop writing. Which of course is just a very long way of saying that I write because I was abused and now creativity is inextricable from abuse in almost every way. It is like my father. I never blog about anything else; everything I write is about that, even when the topic is arbitrary and inconsequential, even when the topic is something beautiful.

Somewhere along the way I realized I was a real human being, and then I stopped blogging for a while, because I really didn't want to be. It was right around the time I became active on the microblogging site Tumblr, actually, at the age of 11 in 2012. Microblogging was easier than writing longer posts because I could just write anything that was on my mind, throw it into a void, and read the same from my online friends all in one place. Tumblr became my main conduit of self-expression, and if you're familiar with Tumblr in any way you can probably guess what that did to me.

I remember thinking blogging went out of fashion for a while, but now I think I was just under the impression no one blogged anymore because it was "cringe". And oh, what a word! To be "cringe" in your internet presence is one of the worst things that you can be, it is a fate worse than death. Bigotry is understandable, but a kid writing about how much Doctor Who means to them is unforgivable. Did you know that? I didn't, but I learned it very quickly in my early teen years. That was around the time I was diagnosed with autism, and the Doctor made me feel seen in ways that my allistic friends didn't, but even adults belittled me for it. I stopped writing longform entirely after that, because I thought there were other ways I could express myself that would still let me seem palatable to others. Haha, silly kid! Nothing you can ever do will be palatable to others, because as a disabled gay girl-who-isn't-a-girl you are inherently an Othered thing, so why don't you just stop giving a fuck and write what you want? I wasn't mature enough to come to that conclusion until, like, last week. But hey, better late than never.

So I'm here and I'm going to blog. I wish I hadn't deleted My Secret My World or Giant Worm, but there's nothing I can do now. I deleted them out of shame, because I was embarrassed of myself, because I knew I wasn't palatable to others. Fear can become a silent idol if you aren't careful, and well... like I said, I just don't know how to believe in things consistently. I am no longer afraid of blogging. I take the fear now, and I slam it on the counter a few times until it breaks all apart. Goodbye fear. Are we there yet? Am I doing it right?

Am I blogging???