3/18/2023, 9:29 a.m.

Last night I decided to start writing the story ... the one I've been holding on to for years, wondering when I would have enough of the pieces that I could start putting them together. There is a lot to say, and I think it's going to take a long time to write it. It's autobiographical, magical, mythological, and maybe aspirationally philosophical. It's sure to get bad reviews from a certain ilk, so I'll lean into the things that will make them squirm. Several of my ex partners may end up not looking the greatest ... but then I might also come out looking like a dummy or a villain. It is what it is. I will tell my story how I lived it.

The reason I'm suddenly motivated to write it? Well, it's about reclaiming my life, I guess. You see, when I moved to Louisiana from Maryland, I was running away from the giant chaotic mess that my life had become. Literally over night, my entire world was destroyed. Accusations flew in every direction, and I had reasons to doubt the trustworthiness of everyone in my inner circle. I know this is all very vague, but I promise I'll flesh out all the details in time. What was very clear to me at the beginning of 2022 was that I had been lied to and manpiulated by someone, and possibly by several people. It was clear that I needed to prioritize my wellbeing and get the fuck out, so I moved to New Orleans where I could be close to my family while I figured out what was going to become of my future.

Since landing in New Orleans on March 9, 2022, I have experienced extreme depression, some financial stress, serious episodes of suicidal ideation, and deep loneliness. I've also made new friends, had a tummultuous romance, became training manager of my local derby league and team captain of the state derby team, and finally fully dedicated myself to the pursuit of art and writing.

Then, on the anniversary of my arrival here, I received an email from an anonymous source claiming to have evidence that would clarify everything that happened last year: Text logs. Really incriminating ones. The messages were between two people I loved, who both said they loved me. I'm not ready to name them, but I hope they read this. I hope they know I know.

This is all very hard to prove because text logs just look like notepad files. There's a string of numbers, a time and date stamp, etc. Anyone who knows the format could easily type up something like this and pass it off as evidence. The content of the messages is not incontrovertible evidence, either. It's not a complete conversation, just excerpts. But the excerpts include a small number of subtley convincing details, bits of information that others would not casually have. And I have an idea as to who would be willing to take the risk of sending me this information -- someone with a particular history with the folks involved, perhaps, someone who hates them and wants them to hurt. I know someone who fits that description. Or ... maybe just some curious hacker type who I may have crossed paths with in my years of working in IT and being friends with nerds.

The other thing that has me finally ready to write is that several other aspects of the story finally wrapped up in a way that feels like closure, the way a good book should end. For example, at one point I thought I was going to write the story of my roller derby career. I was skating with a highly ranked WFTDA team, and I thought that would make a great story, but the way it all played out was anti-climactic. However, I've now reached a very different place in my derby carreer and my relationship with the sport, and I feel that the way it fits in to the bigger picture of this story is much more relevant and enjoyable (from a literary craft perspective). At the same time, major developments have happened in my professional life. My partner and I went through a long and shitty negotiation process with a larger company that wanted to buy ours, and I don't wanna spoil the story but I do kinda want to hurt their feelings, so I'll say for now: Fuck that guy.

That brings me to something else that changed over the past few years. I'm not as nice as I used to be. I'm not mean, exactly ... I don't go out looking to hurt people, but I'm no longer polite to people who hurt me. Especially in the negotiating process, but really throughout my life, I've been told that I need to shut up and keep my opinions to myself because they are inconvenient and unpopular with the people whose favor and approval I am supposed to want. But one of the weird gifts of trauma is that as we work through it we realize how much other people's opinions of us don't matter. I mean, sure if I hadn't told that one guy to fuck off, maybe he would've bought my business for several million dollars rather than offering a thinly disguised handfull of jack shit. But most likely, he was going to be a shitty person whether or not I tried to cater to his ego, and in this one instance, being unlikeable may have saved me from the worst financial decision of my life.

In other words, for years and years, keeping silent and being polite was what I did to try and protect myself from any potential backlash, but the result was only that people felt empowered to take advantage of me, knowing I'd be too unsure of myself to fight them. So I'm not doing that anymore. The story is coming out. It will be imperfect. I might never have all the details. I will probably look like an asshole more than once, and so will everyone else. But there will be good parts, too. There will be love, passion, self-discovery, and growth. No lies, no secrets, no holds barred. It's gonna be good.

3/13/2023, 2:36 p.m.

Did you know I have a podcast? Yep. I do. It's called Just for Practice, and personally, I think it's a really sweet and fun little show. I just talk about what I'm practicing in my life -- from meditation to roller derby to social skills. I share a lot about my journey as a queer and nonbinary person, how that identity intersects with and shapes my spiritual path, and all the things I'm learning along the way.

I recorded and uploaded episode 7 over the weekend. This one was inspired by the audiobook I'm currently listening to, Sacred Gender by Ariana Serpentine. I highly recommend this book and am thankful for the ways it is inspiring me already.

So yeah -- I hope y'all enjoy that. I guess eventually I should share this blog with people. Maybe I'll post it on social media sometime soon? Idk. All those algorhythm-driving platforms gross me out, but we'll see what happens...

3/11/2023, 1:20 a.m.

I never used to have insomnia. Except on the night before the first day of school. Granted, there were times when I made liberal use of CBD tincture to make me fall asleep when perhaps otherwise I would have spent the whole night lying awake in a rage. But now even that doesn't work. And it's very sudden. Like, within the past week, it's become incredibly hard for me to relax and fall asleep. I think soon, I need to make a trip to the country, where I always find it easy to fall into a rhythm guided by the sun and cadenced by the lapping of the lake on the shore.

I have early morning responsibilities, so I really can't stay here writing all night, but maybe I can take some sort of creative advantage of this weird phase in my life. "This was the writing of the artist's insomnia period," the academics will say, conjecturing about what could have kept me up into the wee hours. "They never shared the root of their anguish, what it was that kept them up at night, instead opting to funnel all their emotion into the most groundbreaking creative work of their career..." What do you think?

I'll try to summarize how insane my life has been. Jan. 6 was the start of Carnival season, and pretty much nothing has been normal since then. Not that I'm particularly well acquainted with normalcy. But it's just been a rolling series of events, visitors, practices, parades ... oh and my team ran a tournament and played in it at the same time, which was a lot. And also my close relationships are continually shifting. And did I mention Mardi Gras itself? Which is like ... not just a day here, y'all. And then after the tournament I got COVID. Then I scrimmaged as soon as I tested negative, which was a terrible idea because I felt like trash the entire next day. Then I just couldn't fall asleep till 2 or 3 a.m. for two nights in a row, and I couldn't figure out why. Then on the third night I just didn't sleep at all. And then once I'd been awake for at least 24 hours, I got a really stressful email that's too personal to share here, and that has basically occupied my thoughts since it happened.

I did eventually get some sleep. And the very stressful email, well ... I'm fine and safe and not in any trouble. But sometimes unexpected information can really fuck with your head, and I just need to digest it.

I really do hope I get to write a book about my life one day. I mean I kinda already have, but it was really just a preamble. I was just practicing, warming up, developing the technical ability. And of course, I was young and inexperienced. And then I got busy living. In the back of my head I was always writing the story at the same time, though. A lot of the things I did started because I thought they would be interesting adventures to write about. But then I'd get so busy living the story that I never felt ready to write about it. I wrote in my journal and on twitter: "The reason I don't write fiction is there's no story I'd like to tell I wouldn't rather live." And it's true. The living part is the most exciting.

And sometimes I think that what I'm really doing is striving to live a life worth writing about. Then I ask myself what that means... And it's the story I would want to read, the one that makes me curious, with the characters that excite and intrigue me. It's the story that would have had me enthralled as a little kid looking to the screen for a model that looked like the life I wanted. Then I realize I'm doing what countless other LGBTQ+ folks have been doing forever: being the adult I needed. I'm living to prove to my inner 12 year old that yes, they are exactly as queer as they were afraid of, but that's great and they're beautiful and we get to have an amazing life. A life so good, you could make a beautiful movie about it. And it doesn't matter if anyone ever does, although they should. If I can write a story with my life that I would read (and I'm a very picky reader), then I'll feel satisfied with my life.

Is that completely myopic? Or is the word I'm looking for narcissistic? Or is it actually a pretty realistic way to judge your own success without using the metrics of capitalism and patriarchy?

Anyway, I figured out that part of why I can't sleep is because I'm hungry, so I had a sandwich and I'm gonna try to get some dreams in now.

Peace.

_______

03/10/2023

Every once in a while, something gives me a reason to step back from my life and realize: When I finally figure out how this story ends, it's going to make a great book. I hope I'm around to write it.

Things keep happening in my life that I'm not yet free or ready to post about, but in private I am sharing with the people I trust, sorting it all out, figuring out how I feel and what I'm supposed to do next. Yes, this is cryptic. Sorry. That's part of the deal when you don't know how the story ends. Never reveal too much too soon.

It's all coming back to me now ... sortof

Thurs. 3/9/2023 ... a few hours later

Oh, don't mind me. I'm just realizing I still know how to do some of this stuff despite years of not doing it. Plus, there are still a lot of handy dandy free references available online, and rifling through them has brought me some fond memories of long summer days spent reading O'Reilly manuals and WebMonkey.com in my quest to design a web page that worked, which also happened to be a great way to hide from the sweltering summer heat in my Texas days. The design I am most proud of to this day was inspired by those summers when it was too miserable to enjoy doing anything outside all day, but the evening would roll along and my boyfriend and I along with his roommates, their girlfriends, and whoever was in town to visit for whatever LAN party we were hosting would all tromp down to the apartment pool to soak, smoke, and generally annoy the neighbors for a few hours. I loved the cool, soothing colors of the pool water at night with the big lights glowing up from the concrete-walled deep end. I couldn't quite figure out how to make it look exactly the way I wanted, but I tinkered with it for weeks to find a solution I felt good about. I found a photo online of a pool lit up at night that had all the right colors and textures, then I cut it up in a photo editing program (this was before apps) until it looked like an abstract, water-inspired, stained glass (to me at least).

I spent a little while looking on the internet archive hoping to find old copies of my sites. I used to download them and archive them on hard drives I moved with me from computer to computer, apartment to house, and eventually perhaps onto some cloud somewhere. Many digital ghosts of myself live somewhere on the internet, but I can't find them right now. Maybe I should hold a seance?

Oh, hai!

Thurs. 3/9/2023

Good morning, friends! It's 7:33 a.m. on a Thursday morning. I'm just learning about Neocities and remembering how to write HTML, which I haven't done in ages. I'm still recovering from covid and whatever is going on with my sleep schedule, but I'm also bored with being at home and feeling uninspired by my current art projects. So of course, it's a good time to pick up a new casual side project, right?

Anyway, who knows what this space will become, if anything? I find that having multiple creative projects to shift between keeps my brain active and helps me not to feel like I'm entirely stuck in a rut when I need to pause and process on one thing. It's always nice to shift gears and work on something totally different. When I was writing my MFA thesis, I would have dedicated reading days, editing days, writing days, and some times when I would just knit or do something else. Back in college, I alternated between creating new blog designs, writing poems, and building elaborate Sim houses. And now, I can add web design back into my list of hobbies, which I'm pretty excited about.

I mean, just to be super clear: I am not a knowledgable or highly experienced web designer. I stopped building my own site ages ago when the skill required to actually build new designs using Wordpress and Photoshop exceeded the effort I could spare in my free time. So this new trend where people are starting sites similar to those old school proto-blogs is pretty exciting to me. One of my own first web sites was on Geocities, although I think that one didn't last very long. I hopped around to a number of free web communities looking for friends and arguing with trolls before I knew they were called "trolls." I had a lot of dubious friendships with people I never met, some allyships between femmes who dared to exist on the internet, and a few connections that sprouted into lifelong relationships. I wish I'd kept up with more people, maybe not deleted some of the really old stuff, maybe not gotten locked out of some of those ancient pre-Livejournal .txt files... I wish I could even remember the URL of some of those sites.

Well, it's no use searching for lost time. Aside from that, I'm about to jump out of my skin with caffine and weird anxiety. I can't tell if I'm just stir crazy from having covid or if the sativa I've been into lately has too much pinene in it for my delicate nervous system. (Yes, really, too much pinene is really bad for my anxiety. If you're using herbal support for your anxiety, I highly suggest avoiding this terpene. I'm mildly annoyed with myself for not doing so, frankly.) I've been awake for nearly 24 hours now, something I absolutely never do on purpose. Like if going to sleep were a profession, I'd be the big dog in the industry, and over the past week I've been unable to fall asleep at a normal time, and I basically feel like I could scream at any moment. It's not great. So I'm gonna stop here and try to focus all this chaotic energy into creating a web site, and we'll just see what happens next.

Peace,

Themby