For most of my life, I was content to accept that I’d never really find an answer to the question that is my identity. I mean, I’ve had thoughts and feelings about my identity (gender, sexual, and otherwise) for as long as I’ve been capable of the abstract thought required to understand that the self is separate from the physical being that other people see and interact with. I just didn’t realize that those thoughts and feelings were not the way that other people felt about themselves until I was in high school. I hadn’t really had much of an opportunity to have conversations about the self with other people, after all, given that I was home schooled and didn’t have many close friends. Plus, I was too busy surviving and protecting my younger siblings to really indulge in that kind of reflection and introspection, especially when a core element of that survival was fulfilling the expectations of my parents. They had assigned me an identity based on what they wanted and expected me to be, so I did my best to play my part. I couldn’t afford to openly ask questions that might show that I was not the person my parents demanded I be, nor did I have the language or energy to have a conversation with myself about it. It wasn’t until years later, when I was almost thirty, that I actually started this conversation with myself and then it was another six months before I even mentioned it to anyone else.
Continue readingMusing
Sometimes, There’s A Little Too Much “Cult” in Midwestern “Culture”
There is a strange religiosity applied to the concept of family in US culture. I originally started writing “Midwestern US culture,” but most of the examples that come to mind aren’t confined to the Midwest. There’s an entire line of movies (The Fast and The Furious) that is all about the primacy of the family unit, though they tend to define family a bit more broadly than most. There’s entire cultural background covering the importance of The Family as it relates to organized crime. One of the most popular types of stories these days is about found family or the lengths to which one might go to return to family. Family, regardless of how it is defined, is seen as something worth everything and valuable beyond measure. What makes this somewhat more sinister and unpleasant, though, is the suggestion that anyone lacking family is a bad person. Villains are frequently loners. The philosophy of those we’re supposed to dislike is often depicted as favoring isolation and a lack of attachments. Hell, all you have to do is look at advertising and media around the parent-oriented holidays (Mother’s Day and Father’s Day) to see the subtle suggestion that choosing to ignore your biological parents, or otherwise hold the way they treated you against them, is a moral failing. It’s pervasive.
Continue readingI Spy, With My Little Eye, Something Weighing On My Mind
I started watching Spy x Family recently. It’s a wonderful, warm show that I find positively delightful. I sincerely hope everything works out for everyone in the show. I’m also absolutely terrified that it won’t since I’m only a few episodes from the end of the show and there is still plenty of time for things to go bad. By the time this goes up, I’ll have watched the remainder of the show and had plenty of time to rue my optimism, scoff at my fear [this is the one I wound up doing], or spin my wheels pondering a cliffhanger. Normally, for a show with only one season that is such a joy to watch, I’d have watched my way through it in a few days, staying up later than I should in order to cram in a few extra episodes every day. Instead, I’ve been watching this for over a week because I’ve been careful to only watch a few episodes at a time.
I wish I could say I was savoring it, but the opposite is true. This show is actually emotionally difficult for me to watch, despite being so lovely. Not because I’m lonely and jealous of the budding family depicted on screen (the only thing akin to jealousy I feel is the broad and fun kind that grows from seeing something you like and wishing you were a part of it; a wistful “if only I could be a Pokémon Trainer/Jedi” kind of thing), but because this is a show about “family” and that’s a topic I have a difficult time engaging with these days.
Continue readingGrief Taken Nightmare Form Has Invaded My Dreams Of Late
I’ve had a weird and entirely discomforting thing happen a few times over the last couple months. While having fairly normal dreams (and the word “normal” is doing a lot of work here because I tend to either not remember my dreams, feel them so strongly that the emotions from them color my entire day, or have horrible nightmares), a cast of charactes from a past dream have invaded and changed the very nature of the dream they arrive in. You see, a few months back, in late April, I had a dream about defeating a horrible warlock. It was a pretty typical fantasy story dream, with a cast of adventurers on my team as we did stuff I don’t remember that eventually culminated in taking down an evil spellcaster who was trying to perform some kind of ritual that would give him some kind of ascendant power (I’m pretty sure it was immortality). This warlock had a crew of misfit-type underlings that we were mostly able to bypass as we went in for the kill. As I struck the head from this vile sorcerer, the mooks we’d bypassed swore undying revenge on me, specifically, but I woke up pretty much right after that so I didn’t think much of it.
Continue readingToday Marks Two Years of Updates
Today, when this blog post goes up, is the two-year anniversary of my return to updating this blog on a regular basis. The day I wrote this is the two-year anniversary of my return to writing regular blog posts. I started this period of blogging with a one-week buffer and, with a couple small exceptions, have maintained this lead-time ever since. I am incredibly proud of the work I’ve done over these past two years, the growth I’ve made as a writer (since this project and the one-week buffer was intended to give me a means to practice editing my own work and to improve my drafting abilities), and the discipline I’ve shown by sticking to it as much as possible without damaging my health or well-being. Turns out it is more difficult for me to do something on a limited scale than it is for me to do something more extreme. Updating this blog every day for over a year, like I did when I first started out, was mentally easy. I just had to do a thing every day. It became a daily habit, just like brushing your teeth or showering. Doing this five days a week with a single weekend update if I can manage it is much more difficult, since I actually need to plan my time out. After all, it’s easy to take a day off if you’ve got a buffer before you run out of blog posts. It takes way more work to keep the buffer in place.
Continue readingTurns Out I Have Limits. I Know, I’m Shocked Too.
I’ve been trying to treat my recent period of rest and recovery like every other one I’ve gone through in the past few years. I’ve taken some time to do nothing, found something that interests me to work on, and slowly pushed myself back into doing things the instant I no longer felt exhausted. Unfortunately for me, the last eight months are not like any other period of my life. I don’t think I’ve ever had as much go on in an eight month period of time. I can’t even really call that period good or bad, though I can say that the negative parts of it make it probably the second worst period of my life. The positive parts don’t really make up for that so much as exist alongside it. A lot of really great stuff has also happened in that time, after all, and none of it cancels out the bad stuff. That’s not how life works. I have had a lot going on and it has worn me thin in more ways than anything but the prolonged abuse and neglect of my childhood can compare to. I feel so out of sorts that I’m not even sure how I should be feeling. All of which means that my usual methods of recovery and moving on aren’t going to cut it. Nothing I’ve experienced in the past is really going to help with right now and I’m only just now beginning to realize that treating the last eight months like any normal period of stress in my life is only going to make things worse.
Continue readingTwitter Continues Circling The Digital Drain
Amidst everything else going on in the world, I’ve been watching Twitter continue to circle the drain. It’s nothing new, for the most part, but it’s still depressing to see it happening. More bills left unpaid, the slow degredation of basic features, the shifts in company policy that aren’t really shifts so much as the company’s owner desperately trying anything to keep people worshipping him, and then, mostly recently, the restriction of accounts to viewing a set number of tweets each day. The latest of these, the 600-tweets-viewable-per-day thing, caused a big stir and the biggest drop in Twitter activity I’ve seen. Now, thanks to the number of people using the site less (myself included), there’s fewer posts, less activity on those posts, and a growing desperation to find something new. A lot of people seem to be moving to bluesky, but the recent release of “Threads: an Instagram App” seems to have complicated matters. By which I mean that it seems to have claimed pretty much everyone looking to move with some notable exceptions, though I suppose we’ll see if they stay or move on the next time something new comes out.
Continue readingTalking To An Empty Room: Virtual Meetings with No Cameras
I had to do a presentation at work today. I had time to prepare for it, but I felt a decent amount of resentment that I’d been forced into needing to present at all. The testers at my employer meet once a month (virtually) to watch (or at least listen to) a presentation by representatives from one of the testing teams. The goal is for each team to take turns presenting some aspect of their work in order to foster inter-team communication and provide each other with information that could prove useful in our testing work. While this makes sense for some of the teams, it is pointless for others. It is especially pointless for my team. While a few teams in the Research and Development department work together or work on related products, our company’s diversification means that a lot of us work on entirely unrelated things. Literally no part of my testing work will ever be useful to anyone who isn’t on my team and we already share everything internally, so there’s no point to me going to the meeting. The whole meeting only exists because of a bit of political maneuvering as two people higher up the corporate food chain fought over control of the testers for reasons I can’t fathom. It’s not like either one of them has any actual authority over the rest of us. Neither of them was, is, or ever will be in my management structure. But I still have to go to these meetings and take multiple hours out of my day to prepare a presentation for them, for some reason.
Continue readingModern Existential Despair
Content Warning for discussions of the latest news from the supreme court, modern existential despair, gun violence, and a hefty dose of pessimism mixed with anxiety.
Continue readingMy Greatest Reading Struggle In My New Apartment
I’ve been continuing to chew through books at a steady clip, though my pace has slowed down a bit since I finished moving. I can do other things easily now, so I am spreading my reading time out more and not going through a book every day or two. Now I’m down to a book or two every week. It’s about the same number of pages every week, seven or eight hundred, but sometimes that’s one book, sometimes that’s two books, and I’m sure I’ll find a monstrous book where that will only be a part of a single book. Most of that time is when I finish a game before I’m ready to go to bed, when I’ve got a meal that only takes one hand, when I’m killing time between things, and evenings when I want to avoid screen time. It’s nice, even if I’m mostly rereading books these days rather than digging through anything new, but I’ve been so stressed and tired over the past month that I wanted something familiar and simple rather than anything particularly trying. I did not want to find myself stressed out by not knowing what happens next. Which has definitely made for some mental rest, but it also means I haven’t had anything new to mentally chew on from my reading time. It also means most of my thoughts about my reading experience are a reflection on where I was and how I was sitting rather than the novels I was reading.
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