04/04/2026
I saw a license plate that said "NIMBY" earlier.
05/08/2026
I think a lot about writing a book but it's hard to pick a single character to base it around, and I don't know if I want it to be realistic or scifi. I just know how I want it to be interpreted, and that it's unlikely it will be interpreted that way. It's not that I don't think I can write well enough, I just know that the themes I want to convey are incomprehensible to people who haven't been through the same experiences as me. I know that if I write the book I want to write, it will be interpreted as glorifying mental illness instead of expressing a non-ill perspective on behavior that is pathologized.
06/06/2026
Sometimes I'll look at media that I was into as a kid or teenager and it makes me think that maybe I wasn't mentally ill because of some internal genetic thing that made me incapable of producing the right chemical combination to be happy. Maybe I was mentally ill because half of the media I consumed as a kid was full of homophobic and transphobic content, and the other half was full of people who share my assigned gender being unable to escape the straight marriage and childbearing pipeline. Before I even knew what to call myself, I saw people like me being portrayed as the punchline and villian in cartoons. When I realized I might be bisexual, I was afraid to come out because I knew that the other kids would start rumors about my sexual activity even though I had no interest in it yet. I was a young adult when I realized I'm nonbinary, but I had already been through a lot of harm because others assumed that I was my AGAB and I had relationships with straight people who saw me through that lens.
Lots of the scifi I read as a kid was basically written by guys who thought they were doing a Fight Club. They may have meant for everyone to hate the main character and think he's a total tool, but I was never going to relate to that guy anyway. I didn't consciously think about it at the time, but the characters I related to most were the 19-21 year old girls who were book smart enough to solve the jerk MC's problems, but naive enough to keep hanging out with him. When I got tired of reading stories where I felt like the sidekick to a 34 year old asshole, I started reading girl-power scifi where tough YA protagonists with skateboards and unique weapons tried to start the revolution. White girl-power books are full of doom, failed missions, and the encroaching inevitability of straight relationships.
I stopped reading fiction in 2012 after reading all 3 Hunger Games books in a single summer. The story of the actual games and revolution was scary enough, but the ending where Katniss ends up married with kids in her hometown gave a sense of doom and futility that made me have a mental breakdown. I didn't really understand it so explicitly at the time, but looking back on it over 10 years later I can see that I felt like the story was telling me that my efforts would never matter. I could be a hero, dedicate my life to fighting back against a corrupt system, risk my own safety to save people, and by the time I turned 40 I would be stuffed into a straight family and have all my previous successes twisted to serve the straight romance narrative. The way the movies focused on the romance angle more than the books only made this worse.
06/07/2026
Ifl I spent my twenties oversharing and now I'm getting back to the secrecy level of a middle schooler. For a while I felt like no information about me could be used to harm me because I didn't feel ashamed of it, and I didn't think any other adult would care enough about my life to harm me based on information they found. I thought that blackmailing could only be done by telling someone "if you don't do what we say, we will tell people your secret" and if I just didn't have secrets and didn't care if everyone knew my business I would be immune to blackmail. Unfortunately I have recently figured out (fortunately not through experience) that blackmail can also be "we found this information about you and we are demanding that other people take action based on it regardless of how you feel about the morality of your own choices" soooo I guess it might be kinda important to keep things secret based on what other people will think instead of just assuming that I could convince anyone to see my side of the story.