The Long Year
Since 2025 is shaping up to be the longest year on record, I don’t feel too bad about not writing anything here until what my calendar says is the end of February.
But we all know what a shitshow the United States is at the moment, so let’s move along.
I have not been reading a ton of fiction. But since I started the book journal (which I need to update), I’ve finished two of the books in my non-fiction pile, but not until I got new glasses. Last year, when I got new glasses, my optometrist;s office got the focal point wrong to the extent that it was very difficult to read print, so I stuck to my Kindle, where I could adjust the font size. I have since gotten new glasses from Costco with a correct focal point and all of a sudden, the words are no longer faintly fuzzy. So I’ve finished Mary Beard’s SPQR and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass so of course I get to add five new non-fiction books to the pile. It’s not my fault that politics is happening and I want to understand the underlying mechanisms more.
I actually got four new pairs of glasses: two pairs of everyday progressives, a pair of middle distance for computer use, and some rock star sunglasses (which make me miss meoskop because when I got my very first pair of prescription sunglasses she was adamant that I get them with polarized lenses).
I’ve been doing a fair bit of dissociating via Lego. It’s very soothing to just follow an instruction book and end up with something really cool at the end of the process. It’s also expensive and I am not allowed to buy any more Lego until the Milky Way set is complete and hung up on a wall in my house.
Other things I’ve been doing to ease my mind: reading Rebecca Solnit’s Meditations in an Emergency, Dan Rather’s Steady (on Substack, alas), and subscribing to WIRED magazine, because they’ve been doing some outstanding reporting. I’m also re-learning algebra so I can teach myself calculus. And watching Father Brown, in which the titular character is less concerned with worldly justice than with moral justice.
Last night, I posted what I thought was a fairly innocuous thought to Bluesky:
I wish that people in mainstream culture had listened to us nerds when GamerGate was happening and when the Sad/Rabid Puppy situation was going on with the Hugos. They were movements, writ small, of what is now eating my country.
As of right now, it has gotten more engagement than anything else I’ve posted there and it’s attracted my first troll. The troll is unimportant–they were barely coherent but kind of fun to play with until they weren’t–but the number of people who may have seen my post sort of freaks me out.
And this is why: I’ve been dealing with terrible writer’s block since the 2021 Hugo Finalists were announced. Going on four years. Those 10 months or so were among the worst in my online life, to see people I respected call my nomination the worst Hugo nomination ever–worse than the Puppies–and to see a website which purports to be SFF’s news site allow a 700+ comment thread about me that was entirely filled with hate and with people admitting that they followed me on social media to “keep an eye” on me. It was awful and vile and yes, they’re still in my head.
That’s the problem. I see something I want to write about and then think about it through the lens of people who either dislike or hate me and are unwilling to give me the benefit of the doubt. And then I don’t write, I just excoriate my desire to write inside my head and they’ve effectively silenced me.
There’s a lot of trauma from my childhood mixed in there, too–my mother wanting me to socialize and expecting me to pick up conversational cues by osmosis, my occasional fear of speaking to strangers to the point that I once hid under an afghan for the entire time my mom’s friend was visiting with her mother (who I didn’t know), being scolded for talking too much, and my personal favorite, being told that I was an embarrassment for talking too much at a gathering of adults.
And since I had no personal privacy, I couldn’t keep a diary. I deliberately kept my room messy so it would make it more difficult for my mom to find things, but she still managed to find things–so there was no way I could write things down. At best, it would disappear without a trace and at worst, I’d be interrogated about it. So I kept everything in my head, which is mostly still what I do. Just the act of writing down what I think is difficult and it’s been made more difficult due to the events of 2021.
I’m working on figuring out what I want to share here and what I don’t–what I’m comfortable putting out in the world for people to judge. Because I can’t quite get to where I know that people want to read what I’m writing, I just can’t. Not now. Maybe someday.