This is the first real post
This is my really messy way of kicking off this blog and trying to distill my thoughts about what it will be and why I am creating it. If you’re curious about my past blogging, you can check that all out at Nerdyfeminist.com
Well. Here I am. Blogging again.
It feels funny to say “again” as if I ever stopped blogging in the first place.
What actually happened was a tad more complicated than that. It was kind of more like a “I felt really inspired to write about my own feminism/media/body acceptance/abuse history/social justice views on a blog prolifically from 2010-2015-ish…it was a key tool for me to process my thoughts, history, and the world around me. I sort of fizzled out there after 2015, writing less frequently, at the same time that writing became a much bigger part of my professional work (nonprofit fundraising…I write a LOT of grant requests) and I got really sucked into Tumblr culture at the same time, which felt like a better place, at that moment, to pour my online activist energy….and the result of these converging factors was a slow petering out of my old blog, which now hasn’t been touched since May of 2017.”
Well, a LOT has transpired in the years since.
Tumblr (while not “dead” and still a part of my life) peaked in popularity and it’s just not as active as it used to be. It’s a very, very hard platform to monetize, for all of the same reasons that I love it (populated w/ a bunch of anti-capitalists.) I also changed my views about the efficacy of call out culture (which is what my main blog was based on.)
Around 2017 when the fizzle at Nerdy Feminist got REAL for me, I was thinking, “maybe I’ve worked through everything I’ve wanted to say about feminism?” because I was having some pretty serious writer’s block. I think that was the wrong question to ask myself……because I really started to believe that line of thinking. I think question I needed to ask myself was, “perhaps the framework of feminism as my writing vehicle is no longer serving me and I need the space to think more broadly?”
Throughout 2019, a lot lot lot of really shitty things happened to me that I will speak to at another time. But as the shitstorm was swirling around me, I didn’t have much time to do anything but get through moment-to-moment. A little voice kept nagging me in the back of my mind that I needed to write; I use the term NEEDED very specifically, because as I was experiencing said shitstorm, I wasn’t always processing it the best that I could. (Thankfully I had started seeing a therapist, so I was able to use that space to scratch an itch, in that I am an external processor. I often don’t understand things until I put them in my own words, written or spoken.) And while 2019 was wild for me personally, March 2020 came busting into all of our lives with COVID-19 and her own unique challenges. As an external processor, I began to realize that I was severely lacking the ability to manage my feelings quite so well without chances to actually TALK to people in person. (I’ve done a good job keeping up with friends and family and my therapy through Zoom and other electronic means, but it’s simply not the same way to gain/exchange energy for this extrovert who is at a slightly elevated risk level for COVID complications and pretty much hasn’t left her home in 5 months.)
So I’ve spent a good part of this summer slowly but surely making a self-discovery. While I have LONG seen myself as “someone who writes” or “an incredible grant writer” or “really good at putting things into words” I had not yet understood that I AM A WRITER.
Like it is part of my identity. It can’t be stopped. It is not simply a thing I enjoy, it is a thing I need.
It feels silly coming to this “revelation.” I’m sure that anyone who has ever received an email from me that I really put time into knows from its length immediately that I need to write…I’ve been writing letters and stories and keeping (multiple simultaneous for different purposes) journals since I could first hold a pencil. Any time I’m asked to do a creative activity at a work meeting or class or training or what have you, I try to find a way to use words instead of pictures. When I need to prepare for a tough conversation, I work it all out on paper or type first. (I don’t read it to them, mind you, it’s simply how i formulate my plan of what I even want and need to say.) In elementary school, I won oratorical competition awards for my original speeches and when the whole 5th grade class had a story writing contest, I won that too. I started a class newspaper with my besties in middle school. In high school, when it was “scene night” (the open show case of student directed short plays) I always opted to write my own scripts instead of using existing materials. I was notorious for a love of paper writing in college and I got so much joy from the act that I started them waaaaay in advance and never once pulled an all nighter through undergrad and grad programs. (That achievement was partially unlocked thanks to ole anxiety brain too, for the the record.) I’ve raised millions of dollars for the organization I work at to impact girls across the state of Texas because of my written word and I ran a blog that gathered over a million page views in its lifetime to date.
I’m proud of all of that shit, but I’m not even trying to brag right now. Because it’s kind of sad. when I lay it all out like that, that I still didn’t feel like I could claim ownership over saying the statement, “I am a writer” until…………….3 weeks ago?
Why?
Sadness or silliness of this revelation arriving in my life 30 years behind schedule aside, it has now been staring me in the face for a few weeks. Once this thought clicked for me, I knew that I had to DO something with it. I had to PUT this energy somewhere.
I stared at my current blog platforms and I felt—those simply aren’t me anymore. They’re not broad enough for what I want to write about now which is whatever-the-fuck-I-want. They feel like “old me’s” or “not quite right me’s.”
So here we are. This blog is born. It’s why she exists.
That is exciting and exhilarating and terrifying and stressful to me. It’s all of those things (and probably more that I will find words for later, too.) I feel simultaneously like I’ve opened a new door of opportunity to myself that I want to run through gleefully AND also like I’ve saddled myself with a big backpack full of new responsibilities. (I’m naming that feeling because I know that no one is putting that backpack on me but myself, but I also have to be honest that myself is putting on that backpack on me. I used to feel so guilty if I’d let a week pass at Nerdy Feminist without a post. I’m trying to stay in the “gleeful running” place if I can, hoping I don’t let THIS backpack feel like THAT backpack again, if I can do anything about it.)
I can’t promise or claim that this space will be anything other an area where I work though what I’m thinking. But I’ve learned enough about myself in my nearly 36 years on the planet that I now understand that I need this space for that purpose. If that means that no one reads a single word here, I’m OK with that, too.
But in an effort to make this feel like a “real blog” I’ve filled out out a little already. The posts that are older than this one are all ported over from Tumblr (either my personal or WhatBigotsPost.) They represent some of the writing that I’ve done since I stopped at Nerdy Feminist, to try to create a through line of some sort. And I’m going to put one more post up over there to send people here, as well. (Just in case anyone is staring at those cobwebs wondering what I’m up to in the current decade.)
WHELP if you read this far, I probably don’t need to say anything else to convince you that I sure love me some word-spinning. Welcome and cheers to my new thing!