Introduction
December doesn’t feel like a time of growing or creating, but a time where we’re all still and dreaming, waiting for the new year when we can once again become. And yet, here I am, blogging. Here I am, hoping and trying. Here I am, with my hands out to the world wide web of you, humanity, asking if you’ll take what I’m offering. Which, this time, is more than a blog, which is an attempt at record-keeping or an attempt at accountability or an attempt at reminding the universe that I exist. And maybe an attempt at reminding myself that I exist and it can be good, that I can take up space and it can be okay, that I can use my voice and it can be allowed.
I went into hiding for a long time because it was reenforced to me that my feelings are laughable, that my thoughts are worth only the time it takes to tear them apart. I swept the internet clean of my words, at least publicly, because my skin is paper thin and I was exhausted from tearing. I had had enough of being the butt of the joke. I decided that, if you’ll forgive me a Hamilton reference in this the year 2023, the world had no right to my heart.
And it still doesn’t. But I do. I have a right to my heart. I have a right to claim what’s mine, to name the things that make me and break me and to shape my narrative in any way I want to. That’s what this is. I will no longer present myself wounded and raw for the wolves to savage, but I will say what I want to say in the words I want to say it in, and if it resonates clear and sweet like a struck bell to some of those who read it, then it’s worth it.
It seems like people don’t blog anymore and I miss it, is the thing. I don’t thrive in microblogging spaces or video spaces or whatever new horror we dream up to keep ourselves distracted and entertained. I thrive in paragraphs of words spilling over themselves in barely understandable cascades, in overdramatic declarations and desperate pleas and bold calls to action. So that’s where I’m returning. Hello, it’s me, and I would be so glad if you would come along for the ride of whatever this might be. There will be poems and rambles about books and music and attempts at moving my life forward toward something and rhapsodies about life’s small quiet pleasures. And more, and more.