so, okay, I meant to do some looking back/looking ahead posts a week ago, but one of the things I’m trying to do this year is spend way less time self-flagellating about things that genuinely don’t matter, so I’ll just say that years and decades are basically human constructs and move on.
it’s been a weird decade, in general. in 2009, depending on the time of year you’re looking at, I was either finishing undergrad or starting grad school. I hadn’t really gotten into the MCU fandom because it basically didn’t exist yet, and the Loki aspect definitely didn’t. I was still living in a nice house and I don’t think my dad had moved out yet; at that point I had some idea that my parents could get their shit together. I got Scully about halfway through that year. I was just starting to get into video games, but I wouldn’t start learning console games for another year. I had just barely begun to question my conservative, evangelical upbringing, because in college I learned that gays and liberals weren’t just Bad People and then that feminism was maybe, actually, a reasonable point of view describing the world as it really was, instead of perpetual victims looking for things to take offense at. (when I say I was raised conservative…) I think I was identifying as a “conservative feminist,” at that point. I still basically didn’t swear, even if I’d at least gotten more okay with hearing it. I can’t remember exactly when I first encountered the idea of asexuality, but I think I was tentatively identifying as “demisexual but still basically straight” when I finished grad school two years later, and it took even longer to realize how Not Straight I am and to start identifying as queer in general.
in 2009, if someone asked me to imagine where I’d be in 10 years, I probably would’ve assumed I’d be married to a dude and I might even have kids, so like…there’s that.
there are other things I assumed/hoped I’d do that still disappoint me, mostly in relation to finishing and publishing some original fiction, but…honestly, I did do a lot. I graduated from college and then grad school (and wrote a thesis for both, plus a paper I’m still proud of about Tess of the D’urbervilles that represented my early understanding of rape culture), and I learned from teaching freshman English as a TA that I absolutely do not ever want to teach. I spent a long time trying to get a decent job and finally ended up with one that actually makes use of my education, and I’ve had it for five years. I did some freelance editing and I was pretty damn good at it, even if it was also kind of miserable. I got majorly into a new fandom and met a lot of great people because of it (and wrote a decent amount of fic). I went to several conventions and got into cosplay. I did some more international traveling, some of it completely by myself. I played a whole bunch of video games, which was a great new hobby. I got into customizing action figures and opened a little Etsy shop. I started collecting Loki stuff. I got a tattoo. I had a seizure and was in a car accident (unrelated and several years apart, but they were both…alarming). I dealt with my parents’ protracted divorce, which is also the biggest thing that made me recognize the fundamental hypocrisy of what I’d always been taught. I loved Scully with all my heart for almost the entire decade, and when he finally got really sick, I made an incredibly hard decision because I wanted to do right by him and said goodbye to my furry little boy. I adopted Hazy probably too soon after, so the transition was a little tough, but pretty quickly I discovered I loved her with all my heart too. I did a lot of work to manage my depression and anxiety; I also spent several months feeling much more actively suicidal than I ever had before, and I survived it. I gradually made an 180° shift in my convictions about–well, politics, but really everything else too, and I got a lot more politically engaged because of it. I woke up to a whole lot of realities about the world, basically. I started regularly calling my representatives, wrote at least a couple hundred postcards to voters, and volunteered with a couple local campaigns (one was unsuccessful, but I also spent some time working to defeat a nasty bathroom bill, and we won that one). I gradually realized I was super asexual, and then that I was also aromantic, and then that I was hella queer in general. I went to Pride for the first time. I started realizing I probably have ADHD and trying to get help for it (no luck so far, but…I’m working on it).
aside from not publishing anything, the one really negative thing about the past decade is…I feel like I’ve lost a lot friends. nothing dramatic happened, but it was easy to drift apart from people I knew in college and grad school after I graduated and I wasn’t with them all the time. the part that bothers me more is the friends I originally met online. a few of them stopped talking to me entirely and I never knew why; others have just kind of drifted even though I’ve tried my best to keep them, and I miss them, and I really…don’t know what to do about that. (I mean, is there any possible way a conversation that boils down to “why don’t you talk to me much anymore” or “do you still care about me in general” is going to go well? because I figure there isn’t.)
in general, though–it’s been a weird, long decade. waking up to the realities of injustice has been tough because it means I spend a lot of time trying not to despair about those realities, and in some ways it was a lot easier when my views were more black and white and I didn’t realize just how ugly life could be. I’m a lot angrier, to be honest (and a lot more existentially exhausted). but…between recognizing my own queerness and gradually shedding the toxic beliefs that informed the first 2/3 of my life, I feel like…I have a much better idea of who I am as a person. I am far, far more fully myself than I was when I just believed what I’d always been taught about the world and about the supposedly default states of being, and I like that person a lot more. I’m really, really proud of myself for how much I’ve changed over the past decade, because frankly that was a lot of work and it’s hard just getting to a point where you can realize that maybe everything you’d always taken for granted was wrong, especially when nearly everyone else in your life still believed it and didn’t understand why you’d reject what they’d always taught you. so that’s really not bad, in terms of things I accomplished, and that’s something I need to remember.