I set fire to 2025. What an awful year it’s been; from being fired to a summer sinking into my head in unemployment, the struggles with my lungs and the literal need to breathe to accidentally torching in my hands a nourishing love that felt and still feels capable of silencing so much screaming in my head if only I can contain myself, the mental breakdown which arrived on schedule and the perpetual burning down. My life is one of fire. I stay away, wrapped in earth and stone, beds of quiet air, because by the unearthly roar in the distance I hear always fire coming. Sometimes it is my fault and sometimes it’s not. The benefit of fire is blame is only important for the ego; it does the same job no matter who sets it.

The year was not without its joys. I’ve been hard at work on a new novel since last November, a literary fiction novel 8 years in the making. It’s a focusing crystal for me to think about trauma, sexuality, family, forgiveness, grace, the unforgivable, cruelty, love, the legacies of the south both good and bad, process grief I have from losing so many friends to fentanyl and not having a way to talk about it. A lot of things. I want this one to be emotionally legible. This is me showing my heart, not just my ability to turn a line. I also met someone who had an alchemically transformative impact on me and my life. Things there are in repair, slow as love learning to be humble. But the shift they brought in me also answered certain lingering questions. I no longer want an open roaming non-monogamy; I want to honor and find succor in those I love, the same that I want to provide. I do not want to be or be seen as fly by night with the hearts of others. I feel a sense of stillness. I was a lighted bird; now I seek ground.

I’ve spent the year exploring my feelings about Superman, death, gender and the self. These are interconnected for me, even if my longer form writing hasn’t really gotten to those tendrils quite yet. That’s the other thing; this newsletter has been a way for me to witness in myself how much I have to say. I have a rule that I do not write for audiences, per se. It can be disingenuous, that mode of writing, where you are performing for others; writing purely for the self can be much the same in the way being dishonest to a therapist can be, but bringing yourself to the humility of tears so that what you write is a confessional from your heart to your mind is a way to know yourself. Images and memories percolate up, stitch threads and bind themselves together. You learn the subconscious psycho-map of self, the one part of you keeps hidden from the conscious self. This is where you can learn to forgive yourself, take yourself to task, or sit mercifully with the flaws inside your brain. It all begins to gather space, feel separated enough that you can take inventory of yourself. It’s healing.

The crux of those feelings I’ve been exploring are the same ones I’ve been feeling in the throes of love and failure. We are creatures of perpetual differenciation; the stability of self is an illusion some of us, lucky or unlucky, have seen crumble in front of us only to be replaced by something else. We all die within our lives; if you wait long enough, you will be reborn, as something or another. One of the funny benefits of something like mental breakdowns on scheduled yearly intervals is I get to mark generations in my life, see how the me of 37 is different noticeably from the me of 36 just as that me was different from the me of 35. You can either run in fear from this or embrace it. The only thing you can’t do is stop or change it. Life comes roaring, those bold fires, and the body that exits is not the body that sauntered in.

For instance: I want to be more loving, openly, but more conscious of it. I don’t want it to be tidal waves that overwhelm people anymore and I think the way to make that happen is to make it more a part of my daily life rather than this hidden spark I kept nurtured. I want people to experience my affection and doting as a kind of safety and not a destabilizing wrecking current. I want access to that softer self again. Maybe one day I will learn to be angry again. But I bore witness to a gentility in me that brought me to tears, felt like part of my subconscious saving me from the hardnesses of myself, and I want to give that space in my life. But I also want to embrace more my father’s masculine bravery. The kind of an impetuous and youthful knight, fair-haired in gleaming armor, willing to do what is right in the face of risk. I want to be that.

I don’t begrudge or feel shame at my more jocular and libidinous self, but seeing where the roots of some of that came from has removed some of the intense immediating desire toward it. It turns out I wanted to feel close, to be loved and protected, and in an AMAB body riddled with the kind and intensity of autism I deal with, this often means the only access point for it is within romance or sex. It took feeling a romance that rang as fundamentally true in a way that the others didn’t, as well as encountering that gentler loving self, to shake almost instantly that formerly insatiable libidinous urge. It’s been over a month now of it dulled to silence and I don’t feel like I’m missing it; if someone I loved sought to excite me, they could, but otherwise being freed of that cloud in my mind has let me focus on these other things.

That’s a curious aspect I believe to my relationship to sexuality in general. It is so rare for it to be unmarked by my PTSD and CPTSD, to not be a fundamental balm or response to ancient wound. Encountering something quiet and true has been so humbling if painful and difficult that I feel reborn. I still don’t know how to be this newer me. I hope I learn how before the fires come again. There is always the risk that I don’t come back next time, a thing that’s difficult but necessary for me to tell the people I love. My former intensity, one I am working to dull, came from a genuine lack of knowing when I might not be anymore. I wanted to expel every drop of love and joy from my heart while it beat. I still do, but now I want more to be a nourishing garden for those I love. I can sacrifice the artifice of self for that. I can remain a man-shaped thing if that’s what those whom I cherish need me to be.

Because I am not my gender nor my body. Those are real things, but not me. I am the thing that becomes. I am not the flesh I come dressed with after the fires; I am the unnameable thing that becomes dressed. I can be man or woman, or both, or neither, because the only thing that is fundamentally real is me, this burning star. I want my fires to cool. I want to be warm and gentle again. I do not need to worry if a coming gentility will erase my capacity for hardness; I will protect those I love even if I am to protect them from myself.

2026 brings more novels, more work on my own, more stray short stories and flashes of poetry both in verse and prose, more art criticism and more… Hm. I want to find peace. I want to lay my head down in a barn house somewhere in North Carolina and sleep, to dream of amber light dripping like honey and the cherry waves lapping against my silver corded light body. I want to wake in love and tell people I love that I love them. I want to feel the peace that would make me okay to die and thus no longer afraid, no longer driven by that looming specter. I want to be forgiven, even if I don’t always beat recall for what. I want silence and peace and a quiet night with no dreams. I want to disappear into that honey glow and I want to be remembered warmly and without pain. We will see.