I define myself by my fiction, but I often forget that I blogged almost daily between 2004 and 2011. We all left LiveJournal, but I flounced properly after an ill-advised hostile takeover of a fiction writing community; then I started my Masters, joined tumblr, wrote papers, left tumblr, wrote fiction and a thesis, left twitter, stopped writing fiction, started journalling, became a translator. Crests and lulls often shaped by circumstance, but—hoo-wee!—look at all them forms. Once I discovered writing, I did it constantly.

Blogging—such as I did it, in a locked LiveJournal account intended exclusively to share my thoughts or get some external perspective on them—mainly served the purpose journalling serves for me now: as a record of difficult emotions and exactly why I felt them. Writing can be a problem-solving mechanism. Language is the stuff of meaning, always-available clay.

Lately I have been aware of losing my former identity as a writer, or perhaps better to say I had an understanding of myself as a science fiction writer that I no longer believe is accurate. I am unsure what I want from the genre, from any genre. I have wondered often in the past year whether I am actually a literary fiction writer, because that is what I currently prefer to read; but I’m not that either. In fact I barely write, partially because I am paralyzed by form. I dislike every form I try, and so my writing world gets smaller—less expansive in both imagination and volume. I am trying very hard to write a blog post right now. So far it’s taken me about 50 minutes.

Have you heard of Kaleb Horton? He passed away aged 37 last year. He was a writer; he wrote a good blog. Here’s a post I like. It is sad but it got me off my ass to write, which based on the content of his blog it seems like he would have liked. A blog is a good place to be sad, and I—like the 14-year-old version of me starting a LiveJournal, drowning in adverse brain chemicals—am perennially sad. Just for a while, just right now, but unshakably. Earlier I wrote to my partner, who is across the country, that I am not completely sure I can actually make it through the five-week commitment I made to help my dad through cancer treatments. This is not entirely true; certainly I can make it through. It is just plainly a deleteriously bad idea to persevere. I knew it was a bad idea when I agreed to do it, but I didn’t think it would be this bad of an idea this quickly. I thought maybe I had until Week 4 before I went this crazy. It is, unfortunately, early in Week 2.

Here is what I like about writing: I do not think I can convey in spoken language what I am about to try to write about. One time in 2005 my father was drunk in the basement and my mother was blackout drunk upstairs. I went to consult my dad about something, maybe about dinner; my mistake. He said, come in, come in. This was an unfinished basement: beams, joists, and wiring exposed, concrete floor, exposed lightbulb. He kept his computer down there, a foam mattress with an unzipped sleeping bag, and an old open suitcase with a handful of holey clothes in it. He spent most of his time down there but didn’t sleep there, except when he did. No windows, so the room smelled of the rum he was drinking. I stood in the doorway and he said, I just want you to listen to this. And he cranked the Tom Petty. Won’t back down; stand my ground. He danced, drunk, badly, by himself, sang along, slurring. You can stand me up to the gates of hell—whoops, he said, and covered his mouth. Whoops, you weren’t supposed to hear that. Chuckle chuckle. Okay, maybe another song. He browsed his computer. I, 15 and who’d heard the word “hell” before, turned to leave; another mistake. Okay, guess he’s boring me. Guess I don’t have time to listen to this song with him. He’s trying to show me a great song, one of the greatest songs ever made, and I can’t even spend enough time with him to listen to it?

This is one of the first times I can remember realizing with abundant clarity that there was something deeply unsettling about this. I could not put my finger on what struck me as so damaging. This was a fairly typical evening for me, and it is a harmless request. Some people would find this funny; I learned that many of my stories from home often sounded funny to others. The time my mother, drunk, could not remember the word for sandwich, so kept calling it ham-cheese-ham-cheese-ham-cheese. That’s pretty funny, but it sucked for me at the time. It is very lonely, being the only sober person in a house full of sad and angry alcoholics and not knowing how to explain to anyone what it was like. And for whatever reason, enough chemicals activated on this occasion for me to remember clearly how bad it felt.

Anyone who has spent prolonged periods with manipulative or abusive people can tell you they can hear or see it coming from a mile away. In my case I can hear it, see it, and smell it. My dad is pretending he is not drinking where we are staying during his treatment, but every time I walk in it reeks powerfully of wine. Or I should say that I can smell the wine; its amplification is likely psychosomatic. My brain takes the smell and turns it into a klaxon alarm.

This afternoon I was making lunch around 1pm and Dad, who this week has started drinking shortly after noon, said something completely innocuous that he had already said twice that hour: that he likes onions. Whoof! That such an innocuous remark said with Tom Petty drunkenness can give me a full dump of adrenaline after all these years. There’s nothing menacing about saying you like onions three times because you’re forgetting you keep saying it, but there’s no reasoning with myself through that. Twenty-year-old ghosts in the machine. In a minute I’m going to be castigated, I believe. Something is about to become all my fault.

But it didn’t. Dad still didn’t understand that I was in the middle of a work day, and I had to explain that, because I was making lunch just now, I couldn’t watch television with him after; and it turned out fine. But it takes a bit of courage to speak every single time I open my mouth. I’m receiving a lot of information that I knew in pieces but that is being underscored in the aggregate: why I’m so uncertain about people’s expectations of me, why I prefer not to talk, why I am only at peace on my own. Why the sight of my small town makes me feel like I’m behind enemy lines. The smell of my father’s apartment accosts me when I walk in. There is a threadbare blanket on my foam mattress in the spare room; he still sleeps under an unzipped sleeping bag, wears clothes with holes in them. There’s no reason for it. He has the money to replace all of this; but he doesn’t. Prefers to reproduce the unfinished basement: its condition, and his. I am bound by my workplace’s security protocols to work only from personal wifi networks until my day ends at 3pm; it is January; it is dark by then; everything closes at four. As when I was a child, it feels like there is nowhere else I can go. At least as an adult I have the freedom to walk after dark.

My father was my kinder parent—sometimes even competent, and more manipulative than abusive when he wasn’t. My mother died nearly five years ago, and my mental health recovery since then has been remarkable. But I am, alas, doing much worse than I thought I would just now. Just until spring. With the noontime drinking enters my noontime fight-or-flight, and this state of radar persists until sleep drags me sullenly under sometime after midnight. I keep thinking with some marvel how much better than this I thought I would fare. Voicing the extent of my difficulty to my partner made me feel better, which made me feel more capable again, and so I am more committed to trying to stay the duration; but it never occurred to me I would even consider finding a way to reneg on being here, and certainly not this early. I sincerely thought I was more able to overcome old helplessnesses than this. The old roads take a long time to overgrow. Sometimes they never do. Sometimes they last centuries, can be seen from outer space.

Kaleb Horton wrote a blog post in January 2025 that seems to still apply to this January, if in an understated way: “Walk away from the thing and try out some of those normal things you hear about and if you get bored that’s wonderful because we’re not supposed to get bored anymore. It turns out boredom is the Cadillac of feelings.” Writing a blog post was the only thing that made sense to me today. I write already. I stopped my translation writing and took a break from my journal writing to write a blog post, because I had no idea what it would look like when it was done. That’s my Cadillac just now: being formless, making formless shit. This has taken me two and a half hours to write. Was it worth it? Did you read this? Did I say too much? Have I not said enough? Is someone going, Jesus Christ, all this about your dad saying he likes onions? Who cares? Who gives a fuck? I walked away from the thing. I wrote something without form. Under an old storm, I have found an old refuge. I will be here a while. I could write just about anything.