On blogging, writing about abuse, and growing up as an artist. Also for AugusStory. I’ve been blogging since I was…. I don’t actually know. It feels like I’ve been blogging since the big bang, and it feels like I’ve never blogged before. Baby’s first blog! Except I’ve been blogging since I don’t remember, except I remember it perfectly and I’ve been blogging since the first breath I took in 2001, except it’s really more like I’ve been blogging since I died on the operating table for a minute and a half, except I actually don’t blog at all whatsoever. I know; I can't keep up with it either. But the truth is: I don’t. I’m a big girl and I can admit that I can keep any promise as long as it doesn’t involve writing consistently or having faith consistently or doing anything with any damn sort of consistency. I have a good old smoothie blend of disorders that make me struggle with executive functioning and habit building, and I have not been able to find a way out of that yet. I even wrote about this as my first blog post ever (baby's first blog!), called I Just Have To Start Blogging, but alas, after posting that I did not blog. I wrote down a list of blog post ideas! I did not write those ideas. I thought about blogging! I did not, actually, blog. To be honest, I barely remember what I've done since July 6th, the date of my last post here. All the days flood and melt together until they're a grotesque puddle of muddy paintbrush water. I find that I was able to write more when I was actively being traumatized. We'll unpack that later. I keep writing in my personal diary about some block - I think "block" might be my most used word in the whole thing - where I want to work on so many creative projects but my body just doesn't follow suit. It just sits there, trapped in a silly, sphere-shaped cage that formed around me when I turned about thirteen years old and stopped creating because creating was fun. My body, so pathetic, just rots in a chair. When you're a kid you need to have art in your life. You need to finger paint, you need to doodle, you need to sing, you need to make shoddy mud sculptures in the yard. When you're a kid, you create because you produce creativity like a chemical, you just can't help it. You ever see Torchwood: Children of Earth, the Doctor Who spinoff where aliens demand 10% of Earth's children because prepubescent children produced a chemical that got them high? Yeah, I watched that when I was about 9. My dad told me he wished he could send me with them, and I had nightmares for weeks after he turned off the first episode. I think of it like that now: children produce an unburdened creativity -- a freer creativity -- that the adults of the word siphon up and swallow up until what remains is some slowly decaying corpse that hasn't caught up to the fact it's dead yet. You know? Imagination, creativity, dress-up, pretend. It's all writing. It's all creating. I use imagination and creativity interchangeably here, because even if you don't express it outwardly, imagining is a form of creation in and of itself. It's like a secret God. I see the deicide of my secret God on the hands of the world around me, and I can't decide if I want to forgive the world for that yet. I can't forgive myself for being a child, either, we'll unpack that later, in a blog post I'll probably never write. I don't entirely remember what my first blog was, because I've had so many. I used blogspot like a Bible; before that it was Facebook notes (I had my first account at 6). The internet has been my home since I learned to read. One of the first blogs I ever made was called My Secret My World, and I wish I could remember why I chose that name but I have a feeling maybe I don't want to. I had a banner on the header, an MS paint self portrait very clearly drawn by a nine year old that didn't look like me at all. I had blonde hair and blue eyes, the girl in it had mint hair and purple eyes. She had a wide grin on her face and two symmetrical front baby teeth and when I look at the drawing now it makes me almost angry---back then I could smile and show my crooked crowded teeth without feeling ashamed, back then I could imagine myself, back then I could draw self portraits in MS Paint without worrying about whether or not they looked good. My only readers were my mom and her friends. I didn't really have friends as a kid. But I posted everything I thought, to the point where I imagine my readers were probably rather concerned. News articles about animals, news articles about the environment. I wanted to be a marine biologist and Save The Environment! and Help The Ocean! and I wrote page after page about all the ideas I had to fix the world---ideas that all hinged entirely upon a naive view of humanity where I genuinely thought most of Earth would come together one day to work towards a greater good. I never posted about the abuse I was facing at home or at school, because I thought of my dad screaming at my mother and the boys in my class throwing glass at me the same way one thinks of brushing their teeth or taking a shower; so normal and routine that it fades into the blurry blue background. I blogged like I breathed. A while after I created My Secret My World, I made another blog called Giant Worm. I posted my photography and writing under Giant Worm, and under this name I briefly helped run a community blog for youth photographers. Blogging felt rewarding because it felt like... to say an exhale would be both too cliche and incorrect, but I feel like that's the expected metaphor. What it actually felt like was when I woke up after my hysterectomy and immediately vomited my brains out all over the floor; I had no choice but to get that shit out. I wrote because I didn't have a choice in the matter and I find that is largely still the case. I write because my brain is holding a gun to my brain. I write because if I don't something will slither up inside me like a bad guy, and I am scared that this something will be the bad guy, that I'll see him again if I stop writing. Which of course is just a very long way of saying that I write because I was abused and now creativity is inextricable from abuse in almost every way. It is like my father. I never blog about anything else; everything I write is about that, even when the topic is arbitrary and inconsequential, even when the topic is something beautiful. Somewhere along the way I realized I was a real human being, and then I stopped blogging for a while, because I really didn't want to be. It was right around the time I became active on the microblogging site Tumblr, actually, at the age of 11 in 2012. Microblogging was easier than writing longer posts because I could just write anything that was on my mind, throw it into a void, and read the same from my online friends all in one place. Tumblr became my main conduit of self-expression, and if you're familiar with Tumblr in any way you can probably guess what that did to me. I remember thinking blogging went out of fashion for a while, but now I think I was just under the impression no one blogged anymore because it was "cringe". And oh, what a word! To be "cringe" in your internet presence is one of the worst things that you can be, it is a fate worse than death. Bigotry is understandable, but a kid writing about how much Doctor Who means to them is unforgivable. Did you know that? I didn't, but I learned it very quickly in my early teen years. That was around the time I was diagnosed with autism, and the Doctor made me feel seen in ways that my allistic friends didn't, but even adults belittled me for it. I stopped writing longform entirely after that, because I thought there were other ways I could express myself that would still let me seem palatable to others. Haha, silly kid! Nothing you can ever do will be palatable to others, because as a disabled gay girl-who-isn't-a-girl you are inherently an Othered thing, so why don't you just stop giving a fuck and write what you want? I wasn't mature enough to come to that conclusion until, like, last week. But hey, better late than never. So I'm here and I'm going to blog. I wish I hadn't deleted My Secret My World or Giant Worm, but there's nothing I can do now. I deleted them out of shame, because I was embarrassed of myself, because I knew I wasn't palatable to others. Fear can become a silent idol if you aren't careful, and well... like I said, I just don't know how to believe in things consistently. I am no longer afraid of blogging. I take the fear now, and I slam it on the counter a few times until it breaks all apart. Goodbye fear. Are we there yet? Am I doing it right? Am I blogging???