A lot of posts about the myth of mass “detransitioning” have been popping up for me in the last two days. And the memory I keep revisiting is about the only person I ever met who transitioned and had regrets. Their particular regret was that they transitioned to male, because at that time, there were only two options offered: male or female. And really, they would probaby just been happiest as being a non-binary person with a successful mastectomy. Living as male was a joy for a time, but then they wanted to move to the “center” as it were, to be fluid and non-identified one way or the other. And back 25 years ago, that proved a difficult path to live.
I have lost track of this old friend, but my hope has always been that they would find their sweet spot and be allowed to live it.
[cross posted at Substack, which I just typoed as “substuck” and that’s… a thing]
I’ll preface this post by noting that it went a lot longer than I thought it would. This isn’t really a rant, but like a rant, it’s me venting my head a little.
I usually have some back-burner project on my laptop that I chip away at as I sit around the living room in the evening. The current one is bringing my disparate collections of writing together into one place.
I recently secured this website after years of using the freebie WordPress sites. Hey, $58 bucks a year to secure sisterartemis dot com? I’m in!. I forked over the annual fee, upgraded my freebie WordPress blog, and starting moving a bunch of material from other blogs and backups over here. I’ve already made little linkies to Wonkette stuff, my own projects, some old projects, for my self or anyone visits. It’s a handy way to consolidate all this stuff.
I’ve kept a few blogs over the last 20 years; in 2009 I started this blog, because the other’s I’d done had a more narrow focus. I wanted something more generic. I tend to post in bursts, then let it lay fallow for a while. My focus changes over time.
Sadly, I haven’t added anything new in the last year; my last post was about the wealth of writing, podcasts, and videos on the Andor series. Writing just hasn’t been my thing. Lately I’ve been building the website up – not by writing, but by using it to learn about the Gutenberg block system for building websites. I’ll get back to writing down the road.
Though occasionally it’s been a convenient way to share my thoughts with someone (as in “here’s a link…”) I’ve never cared much about building an audience for my blogs. The point is the writing, not the getting-read part. I’m not a great writer, but I like it as a medium. Back in 2009 I wrote about how using a blog shapes my writing in a different way than keeping a diary does, and that has stayed consistent for me, and why I’ve explored a lot of issues that way.
Before my current venture at WordPress, there was “The Election Collection,” a handful of posts from the 2008 election. And before that there was “Sister Artemis Blathers on About Books,” a larger collection about what I was reading in 2006 and 2007. The book one was originally a Yahoo360 blog, till Yahoo killed off the 360 platform. I then exported the contents for safe keeping on my hard drive. Something similar happened with the “election collection” and I can’t even remember what abandoned platform that one started out on – charter dot net, maybe? Google-something? Whatever, long gone, but using the backups I’d made, eventually restored the original posts to freebie WordPress sites, more as my personal library than any active kind of blog.
In 2009, I started a more generic blog, “Sister Artemis: Journal,” which I’ve attended to in a series of short-lived bursts; that was another freebie WordPress site, but at least I periodically shared my thoughts. And that’s the one I transformed into sisterartemis dot com, so that no one else could steal my name for their website. What a selfish bastard I am!
And of course I don’t have to write. I’m under no obligation to any one but myself on that score. I have to say that the ongoing depression about Trump et al has generated more draft posts than I like to think about, but I can never seem to finish them, and eventually they lose currency. Whatcha gonna do? Still, even writing the drafts is cathartic, and I do post when I can – since the whole blog project is primarily for me, that works.
Anyway, just recently, it made sense to consolidate the posts from the three different blogs into one. One Blog To Rule Them All, as it were. Make that $58 bucks a year earn its keep! There’s probably some much more automated way to do this, but basically I’ve been copy-pasting posts from the old blogs, skimming as I go along. It’s been a trip down memory lane. It’s good to do some reflecting as I glance through the old posts: the hope of the 2008 election season; the ponderings and inspirations from books that might new to me or might be familiar re-reads. It’s good to revisit those moments.
I should note that it’s somewhat disturbing to see how much of what I was thinking about in the mid-2000s is still in play. So much of what was bothering me back then is unchanged, or worse. But I suppose this is one of the benefit of retaining these old pieces – it’s harder to fool myself about the past. I should, of course, have expected it; I’d seen it before. In college I studied women’s history in the US, largely diaries and letters, it being that publishing wasn’t considered proper for the womenfolk in the 1800s. It was so depressing to see the same issues for women – poverty, violence at the hands of husbands, not being allowed agency, or a voice. My studies sent me into a serious depression spiral (thanks, Prof. Margaret Gribskov, for leading me out of that one). The more things change …
But back to my project itself. As I’ve added the old posts to the current blog, I’ve been able to use the original publication dates, which puts all those really old posts in the correct date order. I wrote it in May of 2006? It gets “published” in May of 2006. WordPress, fortunately, does not mind going back in time. The other trick that will help me know which posts originated in which blogs/projects was to create a simple icon as the “featured image” which shows next to my list of posts (the same icon is in the header of each post). It’s a good visual cue when I scroll the posts, going from project to project during the mid-to-late 2000s. I seem to be mapping out some segments, chapters, partitions to my life. Weird, but it feels right.
But why go to all this bother? Why consolidate? I suspect it might be something about my advancing age: I don’t necessarily want to purge or lose these ephemeral, digital, in-the-clouds artifacts of my sporadic life as a writer. But I don’t need them scattered here there and everywhere, either.
And so it goes. Copy-paste is my friend, and writing is a periodic solace for my spaghetti-tangled brain.
this post originated from my post a few days ago at Wonkette, in the non-comments
You must be logged in to post a comment.