Welcome

For those that have known me for decades, it may come as no surprise that I was once a writer. Not professionally, of course. I’ve just always been someone who liked to put words to paper. My first core writing memory was in middle school, when I had my first ever creative writing homework assignment. I penned an elaborate, poetic description of a dragon, circling a fantastical landscape and coming in for a landing. The poem ended with the creature gazing into a crystal ball filled with swirling mists. While the exact words of the poem have long been forgotten, what stays with me was the reaction to it. I recall reading the poem out loud for the class, something that caused me a lot of anxiety. When I got to the end of the piece, the classroom was unnaturally quiet. Getting the undivided attention of over twenty pre-teens was not something easily achieved, and their silence unnerved me. They must have hated it. But then something unexpected happened. A voice spoke into the stillness saying, “Read it again.” As I looked around, my classmates and the teacher nodded in agreement. So, I read it again. Knowing that people really liked what I wrote gave me a rush of endorphins, and I’ve been chasing that high in different ways ever since.

In High School, thanks to the encouragement of two English teachers, I continued to write. Our school had a literary publication that came out once or twice a year, and I was fortunate enough to be published in several issues – a few poems and one short story. Then, in the early days of the internet, I found Live Journal. There, I had a small community of friends who were also interested in writing. I became a prolific poster – mostly poems, some half-baked short stories, and generally lots of random musings. Unfortunately, around that same time, I was slowly sinking into a deep depression, which would dig its claws into me for over a decade. I also went through a difficult divorce. My writing became less about telling stories, less playful. Instead, I used it as tool to bleed my painful emotions out onto the page where they could no longer hurt me, with variable results. Sometimes this worked, but other times, it would unintentionally give the emotions more power, trapping me under their control.

All of this was happening around the time that our collective online lives began to evolve away from platforms that encouraged longer content. People were moving to spaces where they could ingest more bite-sized snippets of their friend’s lives. Blog posts got less “likes” and comments than photos and memes. Based on the declining amount of “engagement”, it seemed like my writing was no longer entertaining anyone. There was not one specific day that I can recall saying, “I’m not going to write anymore.” It happened slowly. There was no proclamation to myself or the world that I was taking a break. The inspiration to write, which had once hit me in giant crashing waves, gradually receded, becoming more infrequent, and eventually disappearing altogether.

It had been over a decade since I last felt that ebbing tide of inspiration. I thought that I had forever drained its source by greedily believing every thought and feeling was worthy of being written down. Writing became a distant memory, a former hobby that no longer served me. However, over the past year, ideas have begun to spark as I drift towards sleep; my brain serving as narrator for an ephemeral audio-book that disappears as I fall asleep. The urge is coming back, just as the frontiers of social media appear to be changing again. Politics are causing some to abandon all Meta platforms (Facebook and Instagram, which had been my main ways of keeping in touch with folks) and TikTok’s future currently appears uncertain. BlueSky limits how much I’m allowed to say and their photo-sharing alternative, Flashes, is still in development.

While I want to leave social media, it is clear to me that there are still folks out there who want to hear what I have to say (or see what I have to show.) Therefore, much of the content here will be the same as what I used to share on those other platforms – 1) photos of my adventures trying to hit all fifty states and sixty-three national parks, 2) photos of my varied craft projects, 3) cute pet photos. However, I hope to present those all with a little extra context than I did in other forms of social media. You are certainly free to skim through my posts and simply enjoy the photos, but I hope you’ll take an extra moment along the way and let me tell you the stories that go along with them.

Until next time, my friends. – Alyx