blogging

03/16/2026

Hellie is napping on my couch while I lie on the floor and write this. Earlier today when we were sitting at opposite ends of her couch she told me I should start a blog, and then told me she already knew what I would write about, which made me feel contrary (just a little), and then I read every post on Loren’s blog and Annabelle’s and the one post on hers. I have been feeling very unwilling to have anyone read anything I write recently— I drafted a whole essay for Kylie’s anthology on Lake Michigan in winter and refused to type it up to submit because I felt like it was too honest about how I’ve been feeling and I would probably be embarrassed by it later. For similar reasons I wonder if I will post this and then never send the link to anyone.

For a long time I was frequently making myself extremely vulnerable online (“posting through it”) and I stopped because it was making me feel small and mean and like I was caricaturing myself to very little end. I can feel myself wanting to go in the opposite direction, and never writing down anything I feel anywhere someone might see it in case I accidentally write to an audience and start making fun of myself. This is a problem. I liked writing papers because I was always writing to an audience of one attentive reader who was very different from me. Any other type of writing makes me feel a little like I’ve entered a conversation at the wrong time and can’t figure out how everyone else knows each other.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the last few months of high school, in part because I’ve been spending a lot of time with my mother and in part because I was on the edge of a big move from a city to western Massachusetts, which I am again. I was at the tail end of my years of compulsively filming myself. I have around 200 videos archived from my YouTube channel, all made between 2015 and 2017. The last one is of my last day in Beijing. I remember packing a day early so I could go to the first neighborhood we lived in for the last time. Every clip is a little too short and very shaky. You can tell I was nervous to be filming outside of my room. I don’t appear in it at all. I had recently learned that my classmates had been sending each other my videos to make fun of me, but I hadn’t archived them all yet. I still thought I might continue.

My mom and I have talked a lot in the last couple months about how I was as a teenager— she has a sense that I was very sure of myself, which I felt confused about. I have a hard time sitting and watching this video all the way through, but I remember that empty field next to the train with the ground covered in bright green plastic, and I remember thinking it was beautiful, and I remember wanting to remember it, and I had forgotten all of that.

currently reading (in order of how actively):

Summer Fun, Jeanne Thornton, 2021 (Leo says it’s the great American transsexual novel)

The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Janet Malcom, 1993 (in this book she says young people write letters that are “marmoreally cool and smooth,” which she meant negatively but is a good description of her own writing, which is why I can’t stop reading it when I intend to be reading something else)

Meanwhile, Elsewhere: Science Fiction and Fantasy from Transgender Writers, eds. Cat Fitzpatrick & Casey Plett, 2017 [Topside] (despite Leo’s best efforts I can’t register more feeling about genre fiction than mild annoyance. she’s going to say that this isn’t fair to say about this book, which is mostly bad writing, and she is right)

listening to:

Wuthering Heights, Charli xcx, 2026 (like every new Charli album I initially thought it was just fine and now am unable to listen closely to anything else)

watching:

ZOOTSPACE, Oliver Hoblitzville, 2021 (just like everyone else in this city)

***