What is this?
I needed a space for writing. This is it.
This is a space for thinking carefully about being intentional with my life. I hope that we can have a conversation. Let's carefully explore some topics.
I am an adult male with a beautiful family that I love and am committed to caring for with my whole being for the rest of my life. If I can do this well, it reaches beyond the nuclear to the community, and into the soil of all things for which a person should take responsibility. I was tempted to begin instead like this “This mind is a locus of experience and control, the steward of, for all practical purposes, a cis-gendered appearance/body/identity...”. It is both more accurate and more awkwardly worded. There is so much to unpack. Let's get into it.
Speaking of “getting into it”, my intent with this space is simply thinking-out-loud or learning-out-loud. I may sometimes write statements that sound like firmly held beliefs. Please regard anything of the sort as a kind of shorthand. It is something like the way I started the above paragraph vs. how I was tempted to begin. I'm not going to waste characters on qualifying every statement with “emotion X happened as impetus for thought Y” so that you can be assured of my capacity for paradigm flexibility. I'm just going to say the thought, and explore it.
I promise to do my best to listen to and try to understand diverse perspectives (it's the whole point here, really), and to be respectful in my interactions. I am not easily offended, but I won't tolerate carelessness. Don't engage if you can't be respectful, sincere, careful, and honest. If you are experiencing strong emotions, I want you to know that I deeply honor the legitimacy of your lived and felt experience. Please understand the word “honor” here not as servile, but as regarding the thing most valuable about existence: the fact that we experience it at all. Our felt experience is what is real, which is not the same thing as saying it is factually accurate. Factual accuracy and lived experience are intertwined. Both are legitimate and important. Let's talk about it.
I am not a professional writer. Please be kind. Tell me how I can improve when a change would increase precison, elegance, sensitivity, etc. I believe ignorance is already addressed, but so it's clear, the whole point is to uncover ignorance. I welcome corrections of all of these kinds.
Administrative Horseshit
The reality of a social/web community compels me to spell some things out that one can hope would not need be made explicit. But here we are.
Whatever you can learn about my identity by what's apparent in this profile and by what I write is what I wish you to know. I have other social media accounts, but I choose to use them sparingly to preserve my mental health. My profession is software. I know you can dig and learn more about who I am.
Among other protections, my house has ordinary locks. Those ordinary locks are not really expected to be unbreakable barriers; there are plenty of people who know how to bypass them. They are a convention we use to indicate our intent. Cory Doctorow has written about this in his books or blog, but I couldn't find it. If the topic is interesting, maybe see https://pluralistic.net/tag/privacy/. The point is, I ask for your courtesy with regard to privacy. If you do happen to know or learn something about who I am IRL personally, professionally, or otherwise, I also ask that you don't reveal any such facts in conversation. Thank you, again, for this courtesy.
There are plenty of games one can play to try to increase views of a post. I won't be playing any games like that here. Please don't interact with this space in a way that plays these games. Sharing links to this content is fine, of course, and I may cross-post elsewhere. No attention manipulation, attempts to monetize, taking my words out of context; opinions expressed herein are my thoughts and don't represent those of my employer, etc.
This space is provisional. Maybe I didn't set it up correctly. If the space has to move, and I want you to know where it went, you'll know.
A final bit of necessary horseshit: if you can't be cool, I'll do what is necessary (i.e. just enough action or force to eliminate a threat). Don't fuck with me and don't be a dick. (No bro energy intended, but how does this land for you? It remains while I try to figure out how to create clear boundaries in real-time. Please help me do better.)
I am deeply grateful that you are reading this sentence and that you are here.