Well, it’s official. I don’t care about this blog anymore. I’ve had it for three years and that seems to be my upper limit for investing in projects that don’t have external motivation or a tangible return. I never really posted for attention, mainly for my own interest. I’ve gained no more than a handful of subscribers, and I don’t feel like doing the work to get more.
So I guess this is the end.
I don’t know if I ever had a goal with blogging. Just the desire to try. To see what happened. To help me build a routine around writing, but in the last three years I’ve learned that as much as routines help me navigate my daily life, they completely derail my creativity. Being obliged to write is the surest way of rendering me incapable of writing.
And, like…I’m bored of it. I don’t even read blogs with any regularity. I’d rather read a book. And blogs about writing tend to focus on beginner stuff that I’ve heard before, tried before, and either have already integrated into my habits or have discarded because it didn’t work.
Blogging is one of the latter. A habit I want to discard because it’s not bringing me joy. It’s not selling any books, either. And to be perfectly honest, that matters to me almost as much as the joy.
My sixth post of the year and might be my last ever on this blog. I don’t have the time, motivation, or audience to make it worth keeping up, and an abandoned blog seems worse than one that ceases to exist. This won’t be the first site I’ve deleted. This is my content and I don’t want it laying around, training AI without me granting permission.
WordPress is a very good backbone for websites and not much of a vibe otherwise. The whole Meta suite is an exhausting grind (even Threads, which I loved for six months.) X is a toxic wasteland, the other platforms (Bluesky, Mastodon) too convoluted. Social media in general is not the paradise we deserve.
Nothing derails my plans more effectively than making them. For example: I set up my personal brand as author, blogger, and general nuisance and then essentially stopped blogging.
I have a lot going on, and this site was only ever meant to be an exercise in working out my thoughts coherently enough that other people would be able to read them, thereby clarifying these thoughts for me. I don’t know if that happened. As well as several dozen poems, I’ve posted a lot of rambling rants, a lot of mediocre ‘content’ as we’re meant to call everything that arises from the slightest creative human endeavor.
Is this post content? Is it shareable? Do I care?
Most of my parasocial needs are being met on Threads right now. It’s not a perfect platform thanks to Meta, who are either fascists or idiots or both given the way they disable trans and POC accounts via algorithm but won’t take down hate accounts despite hundreds of real users’ reports. They don’t fucking care, but I’m content to work chaos on the margins. I don’t have the energy to get on BlueSky or Mastodon or anything else. I’ll wait for a new exodus, when the process of enshittification has gone too far to tolerate.
Poetry is concealed truth. Poems are true, but they are best when that truth sidles into your understanding without you needing to directly perceive it. When they leave feelings and questions that linger in your mind and in whatever it is we call a soul. Writing poetry has helped me say things about myself that I don’t know how to say, which is why I rarely give context for my poetry. A good poem tells its own story, but sometimes we must defy convention.
After laughing way too hard at too many autism memes, I did a self-assessment.
Well shit….
This hit so much harder than finding out I have ADHD (and before you call me out for self-diagnosis, know that this is a questionnaire that clinicians use.) I haven’t felt grief like this in decades, as if someone died. That someone is the old me.
I am shaking as I write this. My understanding of myself has been radically altered. That’s why all my books are full of desperate, rootless young men dying to be seen, be accepted, be useful. Human behavior has always been opaque to me. I spend inordinate amounts of time thinking about what people think of me. If I can be of service to them, they’ll want to keep me around.
As a consequence I am superb at masking. At shielding myself behind a radical aesthetic that is itself a hyper-fixation, giving the world a curated version of myself. My aesthetic is a form of service, for one of my aims is to be the most interesting thing someone sees that day. But I’m not fully out to everyone close to me, so I am always consciously performing. Why not come out? Because honesty is terrifying.
I need to know that I can be wholly myself with the people I trust. To know this, I have to trust that when I show up as myself they will accept me as I am. To find safety I have to plunge into the abyss. Again.
But I’m tired. Tired of not saying these things, tired of faking it. Sometimes no matter how hard you fake it, you never will make it. But maybe you’re trying to make the wrong thing. Maybe you can just be yourself.
I’ve been with my spouse for almost three decades and I’m still convinced he’s going to decide one day that I’m too damn much for him and leave me. Like, calm down. But expressing this to him seems physically impossible. When I’m emotional, I can’t speak. I can write (I say as I’m crying into my keyboard) which sort of makes sense because speech and writing are controlled by different parts of the brain. Autism impacts the speech centre. If I want to say difficult things to my husband, I have to write them down and read them off a script.
So be it. If that’s what it takes. There’s no shame in it. We make life more difficult than it needs to be. If you think life is unkind, start being kinder to yourself. If you keep falling short of your target, move the target closer. If you don’t know what to do, try writing a poem.
Try. You are stardust. You have galaxies of time embedded in your every cell, meteorites in your veins. Become what you are. You are infinite.
Modern authorship is a make-your-own-rules kind of game. Self-published, mainstream, hybrid, neither (ask me about subscriptions to The All-Hearts Cabaret) and it’s up to you, the author, to decide how you want to play it.
Me, I’m doing my freaking best under the weight of my neurodivergent, gender-baffled self-awareness. I want to be/do/know/have/eat/encompass everything that exists, and this is a real problem when it comes time to make decisions.
And yet…
On Tuesday I visited one of the very nice nurse practitioners at my doctor’s clinic. No knock to the NP, y’all are keeping Western Medicine functioning, but this poor child doesn’t know me from a hole in the ground. So she went ahead and prescribed me medication that I (and many of you) expect will make me want to unalive myself.
Baby…I don’t do speed.
I just don’t. That class of drugs is Bad For Me. And when the popular literature tells me that no one knows *why* this particular drug works,? No. Just no. I’m not that messed up, TBH. I *like* my neurodivergence for the most part. It’s fun to have this many ideas. Maybe I could do better at keeping appointments and finding my keys, but the last time I tried this class of meds was a nightmare. I made a vast number of bad choices, while totally ignoring the work I needed to do, and ended up sobbing under my desk more days than not.
So…fuck you.
Fuck this.
Please, please don’t take my experiences as advice. You do you, as we say, and decide for yourself. Me? I’m going to just learn how to be this shambolic, well-intended, heartfelt and whole and every now and then problematic neurospicy genderqueer who gives no f’s for ordinary people’s comfort because I’m having too much fun.
I’ve been writing The Fixer as a highly personal blog, and sometimes the personal is horrifying. Poetry is a good medium for saying what is almost impossible to say. Sparse, so targeted, able to express what is unsayable in any other way.
Consider this your content warning for a dirty word and a reference to a violent act. Things have been intense in my world lately, with a lot of big wins but also some really messed up stuff. This is some of that messed up.
What am I doing with these line poems? They say so little, tell so much, but I believe there’s a balance between poetry that is born of long thought, and that which tears through us, that grasps a mere tenth of our feeling yet makes it manifest in a form that others can see.
I want to work harder. I want to burn. I want to push and push and push until I reach a lie, then push beyond. I want you to break when you read them. I want you to be reborn.
My local shopping district, a cute and happily robust cluster of antique shops, fabric stores, and casual dining trends, hosted an event for World Dracula Day, celebrating the anniversary of the first release of Bram Stoker’s novel.
I thought, what better way to take advantage of the fact that I dress like (let’s be honest) Doctor Who on an extended 1889 story arc. Off I went to diligently assemble an appropriately sepulchral ensemble. Aside from lacking long hair and having the wrong shade of top hat, I managed a very satisfactory homage to Gary Oldman in that grey suit (or Lucien Vaudrey if you nasty.)
In other words I looked great. I look good in suits in general, and this outfit was so satisfying that I decided not to wear it to the vampire party. That is to say, I looked just how I like to look on the day to day, and the thought of calling it a costume was…
It was fucking cringe, alright? It felt like I was making a joke about myself. I am very, very aware that I dress differently than almost everyone alive (that’s much of the point) and so maybe I overthink my aesthetic, but there’s so little joy that we’re permitted in this economy that I’ve leaned way in on this thing that persistently brings me joy. It seems to make other people happy too, for the number of compliments I get. Someone dressed in plus-fours and a waistcoat is not an ordinary sight. You’re welcome.
But it’s just my ordinary clothes. It’s not a costume. Or if it is, then every single one of us are wearing costumes every day.
typical me, typical me, typical me
This is the larger truth, that we are all doing drag, every single day. We *choose* how we want to look, even when we’re not aware of it. Every time we get dressed, we are choosing which part of ourselves to present, depending not just on our moods but on the context, and if you don’t think that’s true, go ahead put on sweats and crocs then try talking to the CEO of your company the way you talk to the people you play sports with on the weekend. If that’s the same person, congrats, you’ve won capitalism.
Regarding my excellent self in the mirror last Saturday, the serendipitous collection of grey apparel that when put one with the other seemed to have been made for the sole purpose of becoming this suit. I was too happy to want to stain it with the frivolity of pretending I wouldn’t dress exactly like this every day. I mean, the ultimate cop-out Hallowe’en costume is to just put on what you wear to work, right? Costumes should transport, make fantastic, startle and confound. This outfit was simply too good.
Bloody shame I’m such a snob, though. I hear there were prizes.
thefixer.home.blog 