Friday, September 12, 2025
Three years ago, on this very day, I quit my job.
I feel a kind of importance in that timing, almost as if it's a moment for doing some solemn magic; a window for a particularly significant and potent ritual. It feels fitting, to me, as a time to break my silence.
There are times when breaking a silence is akin to breaking a curse.
This particular bit of emancipation has been a long time coming. I've debated a lot, for those three years, about whether or not to even do this. For a long while, it wasn't the right choice. But I think, now, the time has come; to continue to try and guard this story, to hide specifics and details, to only ever speak in vagaries about my own past... it all no longer serves to protect a lingering wound in my heart. It has, instead, become something that feels like a poisonous secret - a toxic reticence that festers inside. And to heal the rest of that heartbreak, I need to tell the whole thing.
This is the truth of my old professional career, what I did there, and why it all ended. It is also some of the background of my own life, and a key part of why things happened the way they did.
Read the rest of This Is My Story...
Monday, June 2, 2025
When I was in the fourth grade - about nine years old - I had a bully.
Now, he was hardly the first, and very certainly not the last. I have memories of being bullied as early as four years old by other kids, and of course stories from Quite Recently about being bullied by adults.
But this one, stood out... like almost no others have. There was something extra vicious, relentless, and intense about the hurt he threw at me. The marks he left are unlike any of the other abuse I've sustained - a mystery I've been deeply curious about for years now, but have never really managed to understand.
Anyways, I'm going to call this kid D, because that was the first letter of his name.
D wasted no time making my life hell, but I honestly only remember a tiny handful of incidents. The most vivid one involved me and my chess board.
Read the rest of When Bullies Play Chess...
Monday, March 24, 2025
There's something fitting about writing this - here, now, in this way.
So much is resonant with the past... it was almost exactly six years ago that I tearfully typed out the first few words of what would become this space. I don't remember what the outside world was like, then, but presumably it was much like today - cold, cloudy, drizzling rain punctuated by brief bits of bird song and stolen glimpses of sunbeams flitting away almost before they were noticed. I was drawn inwards, to a point that felt like an agony beyond any communication or expression; even while being acutely aware of exactly what was going on and why, I retain virtually no actual memory of the experience itself.
I suppose living through hell is often like that.
I would know.
Read the rest of Monday, March 24, 2025...