Y’all. It’s now 2021.

I created this blog back in 2017 to address a couple of needs that I had at the time: I needed an online presence that was agnostic to all of my social media accounts, a central hub where I could link to all said social media accounts, a place where I could store my curriculum vitae, and as an outlet to share my photography and other visual art projects.

I always knew that, in the back of my mind, that I wanted to have a blog, like I did when I was younger. Blogging provided me a way to journal my thoughts and feelings that I could never share in the real world.

In 2017, I created the blog as part of this site and left a note to inform potential readers (if any) that I would come back to fill it with content.

But I never thought it would take so long.

……..

To be fair, the last few years have been wrought with…well, everything.

A lot has happened–both in my personal life and in the world.

• I moved out of Texas.
• I went to grad school.
• I came out to my parents.
• I started a PhD.

And despite how academically linear I’m making my life out to seem, there’s very little in the list above that informs my psychological state throughout all this.

To be fair, I loved the idea of each and every one of those milestones: I was ecstatic to move away from home. I was ecstatic to pursue higher education. I was ecstatic at the thought of potentially recovering my broken relationship with my parents.

But I would be lying if I said that none of them were in the least bit traumatic at some point in time.

……..

They say grad school is supposed to challenge you. Academically. How you see the world. And it has. I’m thankful for the professors who have devoted their lives to educating future generations.

But I also wonder if this is what I wanted.

New knowledge has challenged my in-grained belief systems I held from when I was a child. It wasn’t easy to let go of old habits. It was impossible to not analyze everything that I had lived up until that point with this new lens that both school and life had given me.

And I don’t know if I ever wanted that.

I see the toxicity in academia spaces. I see the toxicity in the relationships that I’ve maintained with my family. Like Adam and Eve who realized they were naked after eating the apple, I, too, am aghast at how blind I was to everything that was happening.

……..

I don’t know if there’s a point to this first post.

What I do know is that I’m at the crossroads of multiple paths that I want to explore throughout this journal.

……..

Anyone is welcome to read this

To get some insight

About the inner machinations of my mind.

But, I won’t be broadcasting it.

If you happen to find these entries,

Good job,

You brown-noser, you.

……..

So, hop on in.

Let’s take a drive.