The Journey Begins (Woo)

Source: https://365witch.com
Used with permission

[Please remember my disclaimers and rules (linked here) if you'd like to engage this post here or in any of my spaces.]

About two and a half years ago (June of 2020) The Morrigan called me. 

This is not a sentence I write lightly. It is a sentence that has taken me every moment of those two and a half years to truly understand (not that I TRULY understand even now), accept, and be able to say without melting into a puddle of my own skepticism. It is one thing to have an open mind to the world that has renamed many known and understood physiological and psychological phenomenon and given them supernatural explanations (and to be open to the possibility that we may yet measurably discover the reason for a few of the phenomenon that currently exist within parascience). It is something else altogether to believe that a prehistoric Irish deity of war and death has taken a personal interest in an atheist living on the west coast of North America at the height of an isolating pandemic.

These days I work with Her. I train in martial arts and with weapons. I work out. I do shadow work into the deepest and most murky parts of my psyche. I study the lore that exists (and try to separate Her ancient identity from her modern neopagan and Wiccan appropriation so popular in alternative circles…to say nothing of Her deliberate misrepresentation by Christianity as "evil" or wicked). I struggle for social justice. I make offerings. I have an altar in my room. I speak of Her presence in my life without paragraphs of disclaimers about how I don't know for sure what is "really really REALLY" happening or that I know I might be somehow…still…in some way…talking to myself. I do daily devotionals—some as simple as drinking a sufficient amount of water, other as difficult (for me) as holding a regimen of meditation. Working with a deity in the pagan sense is not exactly "worship" in a way that a more mainstream (particularly a monotheistic) religion might recognize, but The Morrigan is an intense and pervasive influence within my life. I do things for Her, and in return She does things for me. This arrangement has served me well enough to agree to a lifetime of service.

I need you to understand some things about me. In June of 2020, I would have identified myself as an atheist. I wrote articles to help launch a group of atheist parent bloggers. You don't have to look around very far in my own writing to find my highly skeptical responses to religious dillholes telling me I'm damned and shit. The entirety of my "woo" practices involved things I could comfortably explain in skeptical language. (I use this charm for mental focus, and meditate for the psychological benefits.) I wasn't at ALL familiar with the Irish pantheon, having grown up an atheist in the U.S. And I'd never EVER heard of The Morrigan. (I'd heard that name in various media references, but it was applied to a fighting game succubus or from Lost Girl or something.) I was barely alternative beyond what mapped easily over a more personal spiritual quest for inner peace, mostly a skeptic when it came to extraordinary claims, respectful—but highly dubious—of religion, in no way pagan or polytheist, unaware of Irish mythology, and completely ignorant of a specific deity called The Morrigan.

Then the dreams started—night after night after night. Sometimes they were nightmarish, and I woke, with my hands in a vice grip around sweat-soaked sheets. The sense of being hunted (or haunted?) filled my nights. The inexplicable and vivid experiences that became increasingly difficult to explain away as somehow not actually supernatural. The shifts in my physical body. The warnings of danger that kept me from harm and at least a couple of times from probably dying. And the crows. A name echoed in my head ("Anu") and sometimes on my lips as I woke up, and every day I scoured the internet trying to make sense of it all.

But…I'm getting ahead of myself. There's a whole narrative here, and if being called by The Morrigan is the beginning, there is at the very least an opening scene. The first thing that happened was a death in my social circles that changed the way I see and interact with the world. I had a spiritual awakening, and if you are inclined to believe such things, I had a magical one as well. And to REALLY tell this story, I have to go all the way back to 2015 to tell you a prologue: personal and vulnerable prologue about addiction to ADHD meds.

I'm starting to write down this journey now, but I'm already years into it and there's a lot of ground to cover to catch up to the present. There will be many posts in this saga; this is only the introduction. 

Yesterday, on the last day of the (solstice-to-solstice) year—in the form of a phone call that my CT scan looked absolutely wonderful—my year of work with The Morrigan to simply survive cancer ended and the new shape of my work and service began. I must train harder. I must work out more. I must be better about my devotionals. I must renew my fight for body autonomy and social justice. But perhaps most importantly, I am to tell my story. To those who believe and those who don't. 

So here we go…

Next: Death and Awakening

Woo Filter: Disclaimers & Rules

It is no longer possible for me to continue writing about my life without including the dimension of spiritual, sometimes borderline supernatural, experiences. So I'm starting a series about my exploits that are might be classified as "woo."  It's about being an atheist in a growing existential crisis. It's about a goddess I'd never heard of in a pantheon I was unaware of suddenly being in every dream I had. It's about occurrences I can barely explain. It's about the liminal spaces between what is real and what is true. It's about a life inexorably altered for the better. And it's about magic. 

Disclaimers: 

1- I don't know what I capital-B "Believe."

I don't sit around and worry about what is true. 

I sit around and marvel at what is real.

I swim in those previously mentioned liminal spaces, and I've given up trying to pin down exactly where the edges of "belief" exist. I know some things are explainable and probably not supernatural, alternative, mystic, or even spiritual beyond a particular kind of psychologically understood altered state of consciousness. I know I am a mammal with a cerebral cortex that makes me a heat-seeking missile for narrative, and that I will latch on to stories and patterns even in the face of coincidence and chance. I know I will look for explanations with a bias for magical thinking. 

I've given up trying to figure out exactly what I "officially believe officially" and have found much more comfort in channeling my attention and focus on what works and how I feel. Whether I'm really really really interacting with supernatural forces or I'm interacting with a long-dormant aspect of my own psyche brought to life by humanity's capacity for interactive storytelling, magical thinking, and confirmation bias, it makes no difference in what has changed in my life and how I have been perceiving and interacting with the world.

This means you can save your "gotcha"s and your incredulity and your takedowns and debunks. I have beliefs, but I've given up trying to galvanize them into "Beliefs." They are bendy reeds that are as likely to shrug and say, "I don't know if that matters" than shatter.

2- This is my experience.

I am just going to tell you my story. My story has some extraordinary moments. It has some things I can't explain. It has some things I can. It has some things that I increasingly feel like the absurd guy in Men In Black if I try to explain them away. ("Now what you saw was Venus and a lightning flash reflecting off of swamp gas…") Maybe this is all a brilliant cascade of coincidences that, according to the law of large numbers, was going to happen to someone, somewhere, eventually. Regardless, I don't have a way to speak of it other than to tell my story.

My religious experiences are as doubtful as anyone's and as valid as anyone's. A Christian might think they've got it all figured out, but I find that to be extreme hubris. An atheist might think they've got it all figured out, but I find that to be extreme hubris. An alternative practitioner might think they have it all figured out, but I find that to be extreme hubris. Everyone will try to figure out how my adventures fit into THEIR paradigm. I've given up on any attempt to have all the answers. All I can tell you is what I've undergone, how it's landed on me, how it's changed me, and how I've moved forth.

Perhaps I'm talking to myself and kidding myself and in a vast self-deception. If so, I have had the most profound conversations and transcendental moments. Those are real…even if they aren't verifiable truth.

3- I will make no metaphysical claims.

I might navel-gaze conjecture once in a while. (I have this whole idea that the things we pray to might exist outside of time and space in some other kind of dimension like right out of a science fiction novel, and that we lack even the cognitive ability to fully understand the ways they interact with us, so we create these stories as a way of interpreting our perceptions as best as we can. Or I might think that every living thing is interconnected and the "filaments" that bind us to each other have their own sort of awareness and as they become vast webs and networks of people with commonalities, they form a kind of social sentience—and these sentient webs and networks are what we perceive as "deities.") But when I think about this shit, I'm just doing mental masturbation, and I'll say as much. I don't know the true nature of the universe. I wouldn't even know how to figure that out. I certainly don't think that one geographic region somehow nailed the Truth, and the rest are wrong. 

Save me from those people, and save me from ever being one. 

To that end, I also don't claim that beyond the water's edge of human knowledge, nothing can exist that we might be incapable of understanding…or of understanding YET. I'm a reasonably educated layman when it comes to science and logic. I know the flaws in religious thinking. I know that most woo-woo claims (that don't already map over things like the physiological benefits of meditation or the psychological power of altered states of consciousness) have been either debunked or cannot be proven in a double-blind scientific study. But I also know that the exact moment of knowing where a profound, life-altering experience from a clinical point of view ends and a fully supernatural event begins is not exactly clear, and I resist people who deny the (admittedly flawed) language to express those things we can't fully yet understand JUST as much as I do those who simply deny science whole cloth. 

I don't know what is true. 

I only know what is real. 

4- I will not proselytize.

I don't care what you do.

If I give you something to think about, great. If you want to know more, I'm happy to be a guidepost (though I am not myself a resource). If you want to ask me personal questions that don't require me to answer as some sort of authority, I'll probably answer them. 

But I'm not here to drum up followers or do outreach. I'm not here to convince you. I'm not here to convert you. I just need to tell my story. 

You do you. 

5- I know how I sound.

I have actually studied the psychology of religious experience. I know how people of all faiths have confirming events and deep emotional verification that they are on the right path—even atheists have them. I know that visions come with altered states of consciousness and dreams are Rorschach inkblot interpretations of random neurons firing. I know that it's probably one of the reasons my skepticism is so hard to shed, much to the frustration of the spiritual, magick, and polytheist practitioners around me. I know how we grasp for meaning from the meaningless. I know about burdens of proof and rational thinking and how poorly many belief systems hold up to that kind of scrutiny. 

I also know how hearing voices and seeing things are viewed by Western medicine. I know how dreams of the same thing night after night fit into a modern psychological landscape. 

I know I sound crazy. 

And sometimes I wonder if I might be. But there are reasons—a lot of reasons—I don't think that I'm mentally ill. Reasons from the commonality of these kinds of experiences among people who are open to them* to the fact that it has only improved my mental health in every other facet of my life. 

*Which isn't to say we're all "right," or even that we're not all deluding ourselves, but it isn't the mark of insanity.

6- I'm not going to use skeptical language.

Aside from the occasional acknowledgement that, AT THE TIME, I had skeptical theories about what might have been happening, this post will be the last time I will make a deep and concerted effort to tip my hat to a skeptical perspective. I'm aware of wish fulfilment, pattern recognition, magical thinking, placebo effect, altered states of consciousness, archetypes, unconscious desires, wanting to believe, confirmation bias, interactive stories, unconscious memories, using foci, meditation, power of positive thinking, and brain hacks into one's own unconscious.

This mode of language is insufficient to the task of describing the full scope of a spiritual experience. I will not tiptoe around it after this. I can say that I talk to an ancient Irish deity in my sleep a lot more easily than I can write an entire paragraph acknowledging all the possible things that could "really" be going on in my head to make me have such a dream.

7- I no longer care.

Of course, I will always wonder if what is happening is really supernatural or not. I will always have some doubt. I will always be skeptical of my own woo-woo explanations. I will never shed that particle that says my unconscious made all this up and religious thinking did the rest.

Always. 

ALWAYS. 

But a little while back, I stopped trying to figure out what the truth was. Like what was really really REALLY™ going on. Not only was it impossible to prove or disprove (and yes, I know it's impossible to prove), but it's not hurting anyone and it's made me a better person in almost every way.

8- I'm still holding back.

I'm willing to share some stories. But some of the things I've lived are just too personal, too "out there," or involve people whose story is not mine to tell. 

Rules:

1- Check the truculent atheism at the door. 

I swear, it's atheists who are the worst about trying to convert people. They are SOFA KING insufferable with their "gotchas" and their "well actulista" moments. Busting in on every thread like the Kool-aid man. Missionaries going door to door got nothing on them.

If it's an explanation for what COULD be going on, I want you to trust that I've already thought it—probably thirty times…yesterday. I welcome your skepticism—I would honestly ask for nothing less in life—but I don't need it in my face every time I post. I don't need you telling me what you think I've misinterpreted as supernatural. I don't need your quashing energy trying to debunk my exploits. 

If that's all you're here to do, save it. Take it into your spaces and point and laugh if you want. That's the price of doing business to write about myself. But I don't need it in my life. 

And if you can't save it, I'll show you the door. 

I'm annoyed by people who think they have everything figured out. That's as true with people who casually say, "you just made that up in your own head" as people who say, "obviously that's your sixth chakra unlocking." I can't even IMAGINE going through this and thinking I understood ten percent of what was happening, much less that I had it all figured out.

2- I do not need your woo-woo dogma.

Do you think I shouldn't be doing what I'm doing with the forces I'm doing it with? ("It's dangerous to contact that deity directly—whatever do you think you're doing???") Do you think I can't be having the experience I'm having because I'm not an ordained priest of Globgar or a fifth-circle magus (or whateverthefuck)? Save it.

I don't want the titles of authority or leadership. I am not here to tell you that I'm a Celtic shaman or that I'm a druid or that I'm a priest. I'm not interested in anyone's stamp of approval on my experiences or some official decree. These things are HAPPENING to me. In some cases, I am incapable of making them STOP happening…or at the very least I am a willing passenger in one fucking wild ride that isn't always fun and games. 

I don't want or need authorization.

So if you're in the tradition it seems like I've been thrust into unwittingly, and you want to help me be a better practitioner, I welcome guidance (truly!), but if you want to tell me that I'm not leveled up or sufficiently accoladed or this or that enough to have it happen—especially if you want to tell me that if I took your ($2000) class, I would know that I'm actually talking to a trickster spirit named Quincy, and anyone ordained would know that, you can move along. Call me a heathen. Whatever.

3- I understand the burden of proof. But I'm not here to prove anything. 

Do I make unsubstantiated assertions? Yes. Could I be lying about all of this? Yes. Do I know exactly how my most extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, but then I fail to provide said evidence? 

I absolutely do.

Here's the plot twist: I'm not trying to convince anyone. 

Believe me. Don't. Up to you. Some days I have trouble believing myself. 

This stuff is in my face and disrupting my life. I can't be bothered to try and get people to believe me.

But don't swing by as the supercilious arbiter of "Sufficiently Evidenced Claims™" to tell me that according to your superior grasp of rational thinking, I have failed to convince you. I was never really trying to, so at best that's just going to be annoying.

4- I don't want you to save me.

If you're working out of a monotheistic tradition (and I'm looking at you Christians and Muslims), I do not want your salvation. Period. End of line.

I gave up on that shit 25 years ago, and I had my reasons then. 

5- No decrying Western medicine. 

Don't do it. Not here.

I'm all for certain alternative practices in a holistic approach, and lord knows I think for some people a couple of doses of psychedelics might replace a lifetime of therapeutic psych meds, but Western medicine is going to pull a tumor out of you with laparoscopic surgery and save your fucking life. Your crystals won't no matter how hard you've charged them. If you have an issue with a specific protocol (particularly that is quagmired in scheduled substance laws, insurance bullshit, or litigation-dodging), I'm not going to flip a table if you talk about it, but the type of thinking that people just need kundalini and communing with trees instead of their depression meds or to do yoga instead of take insulin or to align their chakras to beat cancer will be shut down instantly.

Is this a case where I'm woo in one way and intolerant of woo in another? Maybe. But it's my space and I get to be capricious, and in this case, I've watched people die when they didn't have to because they turned down conventional treatments in favor of alternative therapeutics, and I don't consider the misinformation floating around about "Western medicine" to create an atmosphere of informed consent. 

There's a lot to write about, and I've been holding back for about three years, but part of my new phase of devotional is to share my story. I'll be attaching a link to this post to every article I write on the issue. If you can keep the disclaimers in mind, and abide by the rules, I welcome you to join me on a truly incredible journey.

Running Report (Such As It Is): A New Beginning

Back in May, I threatened to start a whole new series of articles about my running goals. My cancer recovery—physically, mentally, and emotionally—was closely tied to running. I was burning off anxiety, processing trauma, and getting my body back into shape. 

Then I injured my hip flexor.

I was trying to do a half marathon. Not an actual official event, but 13.1 miles around the neighborhood. I did it, but not without feeling the last couple of miles really kicking my ass. Naturally, I thought I was just sore from running that far. 

Unfortunately, I didn't know how a hip flexor injury would present. If you've never had one, it feels a lot like you just overdid it a little. For the first few days, I thought I was just a little stiff since running could work out the soreness. A little ibuprofen and a warm-up run and I seemed to be fine. It was like two weeks later when I was feeling the pain from just walking (and after two days of rest) that I realized I was injured and not just sore. I probably did more to injure myself trying to keep running than I did with the half-marathon itself.

Hip flexors are notoriously grumpy muscles and heal on geological time. A really good injury can take a month or more. 

Shortly after posting the first of what was intended to be an ongoing series of running milestones, I took a six-week hiatus from everything but gentle walking. At the end of those six weeks, it was slow runs of short distances, walks, and easy hikes.

I've been working up my distances slowly. When I am EXCRUCIATINGLY careful to keep distances lamentably slow, warm up and cool down, and stretch out thoroughly before and after a run, I'm able to keep running and, with GLACIAL slowness, add distance and speed. But anytime I step out of this discipline…any time I do an extra mile on the weekend or jump right into a run because I need to take the five-year-old to school in 30 minutes, I end up hurt and taking a few days off to heal. 

So I've had to reevaluate some of my running goals—perhaps most poignantly, my goal to do a marathon this year…or even next year. And all those really cool milestones that I was posting about are basically reset. Now, instead of hoping I can break seventeen miles in a single run, break forty miles in a week, or get under a 9-minute mile on a run over 5 miles, I'm excited about doing three miles without a flare, hoping that I can edge it up to 3.25 next week, and calling it a win if I don't have a flare.

Running is still my salvation. It's still the place where I find a deep moment to myself, and it's a place where my mind starts out chaotic and falls into order—something I can't even accomplish when I sit down to write. I'm just going to have to move on my goals a LOT more slowly than six months ago when I was starting to write goals don't. 

I'm going to keep posting here, but just remember that I've kind of reset and had to reevaluate….well, everything.

Running Report [Mid May 2022]

Achievements Unlocked: 


15 miles

9:05 min/mi pace (on a 3 mile run)

Running 6/7 days per week

Upcoming Goals

17 miles

9:00 min/mi pace (on a 3 mile run)

5+ miles 6 days a week/3 miles on "rest" day

40 miles in one week

I checked out some marathons coming up either late 2022 or early 2023. (I have until Feb 2023 to reach my goal), and I've got a couple that might work and aren't too far away. However, I'm getting into the territory where I'm going to have to think about starting one of the 16 week training regimens to prepare. Most of those take away your "rest" day and replace it with a slow and short run (three or four miles), so that's the next major change coming up. With childcare three days a week, that's going to mean really early runs.

Still the weather is turning here in the East Bay anyway, and 90s (low to mid 30s celsius), and it feels like running in an oven most days. Mornings will pretty much the only time it's not going to be miserably hot anyway.

That fifteen miles really slowed me down for a while.I am not the young man I used to be despite my epic cuteness. I had stiff joints for almost two weeks after every time I started. The last couple of weeks have been a lot of slow and easy runs between three and seven. It'll probably be a while before I get ambitious and try to do the 17. 

I'm so, so, SO close to the 9 minute mile, but of course that was before I ran the 15. I know 9:05 isn't really that much slower than 9:00, but I like round numbers and measurable goals, so it won't "count" until I'm THERE. 

I'm still making a lot of beginner gains all over the place, and learning some of the philosophy of training (who knew easy runs were going to be so much of my total?), but I'm still on good track (get it?) to do that marathon in under five hours.

I Wrote My Way Out (But Actually I Mostly RAN My Way Out)

Recovery from cancer (and the surgery to remove the tumor) has been hard. 

[That journey has been chronicled mostly in my main blog, if you need to get caught up.]

I've been writing. The occasional post. Facebook. Journaling. A little dollop of fiction. But actually writing has been a really difficult thing to return to. 

It's not my desire that has changed—it's my capacity. I actually do love writing more than anything (except maybe reading). Writing is my hobby, my passion, my creative outlet, and my emotional catharsis. The blank page is my confessional, my therapist, my friend, and my creative collaborator. I haven't really stopped writing—I even scrawled out a page in the hospital the day after surgery. What I found I had trouble with was things like concentration, routine, focus, and sometimes even sitting still. I would suddenly have a feeling of anxiety about my health or flashback to a medical procedure. Or I would try to focus and find that I couldn't think about anything other than all the Big Shit™ that's been going on lately (tough kiddo transitions, quasi-loss of a child, miscarriages, cancer, surgery, breakups). So while I could write out a personal journal, freewriting, or just a Facebook splat, I have been having a much more difficult time with deadlines, writing about specific topics, and sitting down for hours at a stretch. 

But running seemed to work for me.

I've always been a more kinesthetic person. I was a hyperactive kid. I had more energy than an arc reactor. I walk (sometimes for hours) when I want to clear my head. Even when I write, I take frequent breaks to move around, and one of my best purchases ever was a desk that could be raised and lowered so I could write while standing (and usually bopping to music).

So I started to run.

I walked the block my second day home from surgery. Walked a mile circuit around my neighborhood in the first week. After two weeks, I gently added in some slow jogging. Within a month, I was regularly doing distances of three to five miles. I set a goal to do a marathon in 2022. Recently I did a 12 mile run and I've been hitting distances of 10 miles regularly. I'm gearing up to try to do 15 miles, trying to hit a 9 min/mile on my shorter runs, and trying to keep my pace under 11:30/mile for my longer ones.

I always thought I would "write my way out" of something like this. That I would go to the page and find the words and that would be my climb back to myself. But instead, it's been running. My physical recovery has helped my mental and emotional state. Rather than running being little more than physical therapy and my mental and emotional healing happening due to other things and in other ways, running has been at the center of ALL of my recovery. I feel centered, grounded, and in control while running and that has helped me with my mindset. Focusing on goals has helped me mentally. Taking time with just me and the pavement has helped me do the long and slow work of processing through lots of complicated emotions. It's that perfect balance of quiet enough to order my thoughts but not so quiet that my traumas start to bubble up. Getting physical has helped me with my anxiety. Setting goals and hitting them reminded me of my own ambitions.

Running has been my salvation. Somewhere out there—just me and the pavement and the miles ticking by—I find my words.

So I'm going to start a new "series" here on NWAW. Mostly just reports on how running is going, what goals I've hit, what new goals I'm setting and maybe a thought or five about my philosophy of running.

The Best of Apartments The Worst of Apartments

In February of 2020, I moved out of my old place where I was living in Lafayette with a roommate. I moved into a (very) small one-bedroom apartment in Richmond, and it turned out to be one of the best and worst developments of my life.

While it turned out that a lot of the friction between my roommate and I was being exacerbated by their teenage daughter (who took credit for chores I was doing and blamed their messes on me among other things), I was also just ready to live alone. I couldn't really afford living alone in the Bay Area, though. The rental prices around here (until you get an hour or more from San Francisco) are often around $2000, even for a small one bedroom or a studio.

But then a miracle happened. 

A friend of a friend had a place they could rent out. A tiny two-bedroom, but they could go as low as $1000. Two daughters were taking care of the property that their father in assisted living wasn't ready to give up on, and they needed a long-term subletter. 

To get the space for THAT cheap, I would have to give up some closet space and one of the bedrooms for their storage (and they would need to stop by to add or go through the storage from time to time—with notice of course), and neither bedroom was going to be big enough to hold much more than JUST my bed. But it would be my space. I would live alone. 

Everything seemed perfect. I even went to Ikea and bought some furniture because I'd never really had more than a bedroom in someone else's house before. I didn't need much. The entire apartment wasn't a lot bigger than the bedroom in my last place, but I remember feeling like a genuine adult as I purchased an actual couch for my actual living room.

On the last day of my move, I was so goddamned sick and tired of putting together Ikea furniture that I just hired someone from Taskrabbit to assemble my final piece (that same couch) for me. I remember asking them if it was okay if I stayed in the other room while they worked, and they gave me a relieved "Yes." 

When they were done, I held out their tip as far as my arm would reach. They stretched out and took it from me with a gratified nod at the care I was taking to keep my distance.

You see…..that day and the day before we had been getting lots of scary news about a new disease that had started overseas and was showing up all over the United States. No one really understood how exactly it transmitted, but smart money was on washing your hands and staying well out of anyone's way who you weren't sure about. I didn't know it at the time, but the very next day after my Ikea couch got built by a worker from Taskrabbit and I became "officially" settled into my new place, California would begin to have executive mandates trying to flatten the curve. 

And that's how I moved into a new place, all alone, at ALMOST exactly the same time that shelter in place started.

It was a great apartment. I loved it. I loved being independent. I loved cooking at two in the morning. I loved going out at 4a.m. for a run. I loved how I could watch TV in the living room until my eyes bled and no one would say boo to me. I loved having company without having to check in with anyone. I loved the alone time. 

The place was tiny, and my writing desk/office was squished over in the living room within touching distance of the TV/entertainment center, but it was MY space.I barely got all my clothes in the closet upstairs, and my bed was so big in that tiny bedroom that it left little more than a food-wide ribbon of floor around its edge to maneuver, but I walked upstairs every night to go to bed enjoying the feel of having a bedroom separate from where I was always hanging out. I would turn off the TV and go over to the writing desk and do some work. And some days I would wrap up writing and scoot over to the OTHER side of the desk, open my gaming laptop, and play video games for hours. There was no garbage disposal or dishwasher, but the messes were always mine.

It was a little out of the way for the Bay Area, and I couldn't really get ANYWHERE I wanted to go without a twenty- to thirty-minute drive, and technically it was one of the worst neighborhoods in the entire area, although it was tucked into a village that was an oasis of low crime and great neighbors and was blessed with being close enough to the water (albeit on the other side of a train yard one way and an industrial district in another) that gave me marine layer beach weather all year round. 

It was perfect for me, my eclectic lifestyle, my ADHD, and my impulsive nature.

Due to the timing, though, it also became my prison. I couldn't really go anywhere. I couldn't really see anyone. I couldn't really do anything. For eighteen months, I was either taking care of a couple of kids I was in a pod with, or I was in my very perfect apartment, staring at those four walls, quietly and inexorably losing my grip on my mental health. I got a day's visit once every couple of months from a partner when I had a dental or doctor's appointment and had to quarantine anyway, and I clung to online D&D games, and facetime calls of loved ones. I couldn't leave to get a change of scene to write. My clients were so worried that they demanded stringent restrictions from me if I was to keep working—during that surge in late 2020, I even had to forgo going to the store for a couple of months.

Despite my begging for a more spread-out schedule of a few hours a day, my clients really wanted a night off each week and a morning to sleep in (plus a night of good sleep where I could sleep with the baby); therefore, my default schedule became this like 26-hour block that started on Wednesday and didn't end until the next Thursday. Many weeks, that was my only childcare schedule. 

And then I went home…with nothing to do until the next week… Five and a half days of just hanging out in those three rooms. I would cook. I would watch TV. I would play video games. I would read. But…eventually it wasn't enough. I keep pretty good company with myself, and I can introvert for weeks before I start to notice that I'm missing people, but as the months rolled on, I began to get desperately lonely. 

It didn't take too long before I stopped wanting to cook. It didn't bring me joy or pleasure anymore. I stopped being interested in video games. I stopped reading. It would take me hours and later all day just to do thirty minutes worth of writing. I would put the TV on some show I'd seen before (for background noise more than anything) and I would just…be there. I tried to get things done but they wouldn't get done. The TV was on. I was there. But the hours just slid by as I tried to summon the will to do something…to do anything.

For hours. 

For days.

Alone.

So fucking alone.

I would have loved that space to come home to. I would have loved it to bring people to. I would have loved it to host a small gathering or watch Netflix with a friend on my couch. Or bring a date home to enjoy that king-size bed with me. As part of a normal human social life, it would have been less than a few hundred yards from absolutely sublime. But instead I just grew to hate going home, where the quiet would seep into my soul no matter how loudly I turned up the TV.

March 2021, I met someone. We clicked HARD. Our compatibility was impossible not to notice, and our ability to be around each other for prolonged periods without straining our rapport was solid. We both had similar long-term financial goals. We both wanted the same things out of a relationship. We really really REALLY liked each other.

Things moved fast. 

And within only about five months, we were solid on moving in together. The logistics would work. The finances would REALLY work. And we got along SO goddamned well. And while there have been some adjustments going from living alone to living with three people (including two children—one four and one ten), putting that aching, desperate loneliness in the rearview has been a "no regrets" decision. 

I'm back into a little room. I don't cook at two in the morning. The living room TV, with two smols about, is no place to watch Supernatural. I tend to wake up to the pounding feet of the four year old at six in the morning, which means I'm tired as soon as ten these days and my regular schedule of writing deep into the night and sleeping from 3-11 has been replaced with careful time management. My king-size bed had to go, and while I'm planning some kind of alternative, I'm currently sleeping on a twin with a rollaway made for kids.

But I'm cooking again. And reading and playing video games again. And these days it's taking me about an hour to do an hour's worth of writing again. 

And I'm HAPPY again.

On September 13th I packed up the last box of random shit (that didn't fit in any labeled boxes of anything else), filled the last bag of trash, swiped the mop over the floor once more, and turned out the lights for the last time. 

Good-bye Richmond apartment. You were a perfect little place at the absolutely, perfectly wrong time. 

Debate for Its Own Sake

There's this…thing you see on social media.

Your (often) white dude friend who will endlessly discuss things. No matter how anathema they are because they value being open minded.

Folks (usually cishet white dudes since they are the ones unaffected by bigotry) who pride themselves on being surrounded with lots of diametrically opposed opinions. They don't grudgingly say "Yeah, that's Mike—he's lower key in person." Or "My dad can see my posts. Sorry about that. I'll talk to him."

Nope. They're proud of it. This is the space they curate. Battle royales over every topic from culture war issues to the body autonomy or humanity of certain groups of people.

Because they are always oh so willing to ENGAGE in the marketplace of ideas over and over and over and over. Each day the same topics, the same boiler plate arguments. No matter how much the underlying premise of some of these conversations hurts someone watching said conversation, they ENGAGE on. Like, say, their OTHER friends on social media watching their humanity be the subject of an intellectual debate) should really make an effort to understand how the SQiD (Status Quo Defender™) works. 

See your average SQiD never changes. They begin every "debate" with "Prove to me that is even a problem." They attack expertise. They propose ludicrous narratives in an attempt to explain otherwise clear-as-day statistics. They hit reply with the endurance of Samwise Gamgee when Frodo is in trouble and shout down everyone. They argue from bad faith. They refuse any and all points that would require them to consider that their current world view is anything but utterly unimpeachable. Any counter-argument must be countered with a gush of ceaseless emotional labor. 

And if you should ever incontrovertibly "win" such a debate, you will find they often have to depart suddenly. ("Well I have to go…") If they're NOT losing, they'll just come back later. It's only when they can no longer cling to their views without seeming foolish that their obligations must take them away for good.

And whether they quit or stay and let themselves get trounced in public (rare), in the end they announce that it has been very "stimulating" (or "educational")* and thank you as if you just had a vigorous martial arts sparring match with them. They appreciate the discussion, but must depart. 

Then it happens.

The next time you run into them to discuss that issue again, they have returned to initial positions like it's a new chess match with the pieces reset instead of a growth process.

Which, of course, it is.  It is a GAME to them. It is about winning. They do this because this is exactly what they see "debate" as—an intellectual exercise not to establish truth but to establish who is the better debater (always them).  So they do their favorite opening move: "Prove to me that is even a problem." 

Again.

And since they never move their "square one," those willing to have that conversation with them ad nauseam are engaged in an endless tango. The debate is not a means to an end (finding the truth or the best idea) . The debate is the end itself. The marketplace of ideas cannot reject any idea. All must begin each day on equal footing, for the marketplace of ideas has no value as a crucible to find the best ideas; it is simply valued for its own sake. It is as if each person's individual social media account becomes an example of The Paradox of Tolerance.

(*This of course is only as long as you never got "emotional." If you did anything they took as not absolutely of perfect decorum, they will refuse your point on the principles of civility politics. Because, of course, they are not interested in figuring something out—the debate itself is what they wanted and you sullied that for them like someone who got mad when they were losing at chess.) 

I think some spaces for debate are wonderful, but not every space must reflect the constitutional right one has to espouse harm (in the same way one might decide not to platform someone praising the September 11th attacks); however, in social contexts if you don't learn that actually there are SOME conversations that are absolutely NOT worth having, you will be quagmired there forever as the Status Quo marches on. And those folks who pride themselves having exactly every stripe of friend may quickly find certain of their most marginalized friends unwilling to have the same debates over and over in their spaces. It is uncomfortable and often painful to watch as those one considers a friend happily—PROUDLY— allow one's humanity to casually be questioned over and over like it is a fresh and exciting topic for a rousing intellectual debate (that will never go anywhere). And then, as they leave because there are safer places in the world where they don't have to struggle just to exist, one more place gets overrepresentation by those at the top of social hierarchies.