I. My parents instilled in me this underlying belief that things would always work out. During periods of depression, I watch this conviction recede from my horizon. The version of myself who stops feeling this, even in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, is a version with something amiss. But it’s not strictly […]

Missing months on the blog kill me. Not because I’m worried that anyone’s wondering what’s happened to me or that anyone is anxiously awaiting my next deeply moving essay on clumsiness or whatever other bullshit I fill this space with. It breaks my heart because of how important it is to me to have this […]

My friend Pham challenged me to do a thing. This is the beginning of that thing.

I love beginnings. I’ve talked about that a lot in the nearly five years that I’ve been writing here. I like rituals surrounding beginnings. However arbitrary the new year might be as a time for that, it’s cathartic. It’s a marker. Reflecting on a year’s worth of partial life-documenting has become one of those rituals […]

When I was leaving for LA I had this grand existential crisis surrounding whether I would go there and stay. When I talked about it then, it was the sort of half-truth I sometimes tell when I’m afraid of who’s listening. I voiced, out loud, that I wasn’t sure if I was ready to settle […]

The drive here was long but mostly uneventful. I’m on this new Adulthood Level Up grind so rather than my usual nap-in-a-rest-area-that-looks-like-prime-horror-movie-material routine, I spent the night in a hotel in Rapid City, South Dakota. Bask in the glow of my adulthood! I crossed into Montana and it almost immediately proved to be both gorgeous […]

November is the first month in over a year that I allowed to go unremarked upon here. It was a crazy month that had a lot of looming questions. They are the kinds of questions I would like to be able to look back on asking myself but were also the kinds of questions that […]

I was tagged by Kirsti to answer a bunch of questions about one of my favorite holidays and it’s possible that I maybe went a tiny bit overboard in accepting this task. It’s possible. Investigation pending. Links and things! Tagging: https://www.youtube.com/spirantizehttps://www.youtube.com/nenalyzed Tagged by The full list of questions: music: Kevin MacLeod — “Bump in the Night”

Recently, YouCoalition launched a campaign called The Safer Community Pledge. This topic is of considerable importance to me — I’ve been blogging about rape culture both here and on Snark Squad for a couple years now — and I think this pledge is an valuable contribution to the discourse. I wanted to practice what I preach by taking the […]

There are a lot of ways to move forward, but I feel both a strong urge and a sense of responsibility to move forward by talking about how I moved forward. That’s how I roll. An alarming percentage of this blog’s content is meta discussion of how I use this blog. (LIKE SO!) As such, […]

Last summer I very seriously planned to kill myself. I spent nearly all of 2013 and the early months of 2014 struggling with depression, but last summer was the worst of it. It feels like I’ve been holding my breath, and when I hit “publish” I will finally start breathing normally again. Over the last […]

I was either going to title my last post “Achievement Unlocked” or “Successful Completion.” I went with the latter because I had the sneaking suspicion I had already used the former title, but was too lazy to verify. (I had not.) In any event, about an hour after I hit publish, the doorbell rang because […]