Last night, I brought up the idea of hanging out with my close friends after we had all been vaccinated. The most reactive person of the bunch seemed disturbed and slightly offended that I would even ask. However, in a bonus for him, he somewhat managed to explain his feeling about the situation without being directly offensive. By the end of the conversation, it wasn’t clear if he was judging me for having gotten Covid-19 or for continuing to have casual sex since breaking up with my ex.

It frustrated me throughout my run this morning, but upon reflecting on it, this is part of the many reasons why I decided to start a blog. I have thus far led a very homonormative life, not so much out of a desire to fit in but a desire to achieve financial stability. At seventeen, choosing an engineering major seemed the surest way to that goal. I even had a number in mind for what salary I would reach. I let that be the goal that decided so much of my late teens and early to mid-twenties; there were so many options along the way that I just closed myself off to in order to continue along my path toward financial success. And I do want to make it clear, this was not a decision borne out of material desires, but a real necessity.

At the time that I was making these decisions, I had already lived let’s say fifteen or so years with the fear that my parents would be deported and that, being the oldest, I would be left to find a way to take care of my siblings without any sort of money or education of my own. This fear drove me to the shortest and most reliable path to stability. Although my love was writing, I had also read enough of my then favorite authors that, absent some rich patrons and friends, I worried it would take a long time before I could come to rely upon any writing to produce a stable income. So, I, along with many other rather normative peers, picked engineering. I do want to point out that I did have strong math and science scores in grade school, did not want to deal with blood, thus no medical school, and saw law as a path more reliable than writing perhaps but very lengthy.  

I am happy to report that eleven years later I have gotten to a point where I could help take care of my siblings. I have a cute two-bedroom condo in a rather nice city. Although a smaller space than the house they rent now, it would not be the smallest place my parents, three younger siblings and I have lived in. But it is also true that my parents would no longer be deported, as, anchor baby that I am, they already have their citizenship. They’re still horrible with money and I’m told still argue about it, but, with my salary and everyone else pitching in, we’d get by.  Together, the fear that so guided my earlier life has receded, although in this country I’m not sure it’ll ever completely disappear.

To get back to my point, I’m at a point in life where I need to find something else that pushes me forward. My love of writing never left in this time, my countless journals and the short stories therein can attest to that fact. That’s one reason. Second, I also want to create a space to more fully explore my sexuality and identity, without having to make room for the baggage that people close to me bring. Similarly, I want a space where I can recount my experiences growing up, without the discomfort that my family members feel when I recall painful childhood experiences. Finally, before the pandemic, my favorite thing was to sit around a table discussing topics at length, movies, music, politics and family drama. The pandemic has taken away the ability to do so safely with a large group of people but I’m making my own space to do that. Whether anyone reads it or not is less of a concern at this point.

I still haven’t figured out the basics of blogging, SEO, tags, categories, things like that. So, if you somehow stumbled upon this specific post, please drop a line. For posts on specific topics, I am going to make sure I have that correctly set up, but well, this is all a work in progress.