Monday, May 20th, 2024, 15:30

Mood: Hot

As of today, I will be retiring this blog.

I will be starting a new blog hopefully soon, which I will include on my Linktree and link here as well. I will leave everything on this blog as-is. It has served me well for nearly two-and-a-half years and has documented some of my family's most significant highs and lows. My reasons for doing so are as follows:

As some of you know, I have recently legally changed my name. While this represents a symbolic detachment from the worst side of my family of origin--most of whom I am not even related to, but the one I am related to is likewise extremely abusive--I've also come to accept it as a sort of renaissance. This wasn't an intended side effect of the name change; I mostly just wanted to not be symbolically tied anymore to that side of my family. To respect privacy for those involved, I don't want to get into details why. But in the process of changing my name, I realized I also had other choices as well. In my family, mental illness and criminal versatility--as it's delightfully referred to in the DSM-V--are rampant. I can choose to recover from that and break cycles.

That's the heady, heavy version of events. There's also just the plain fact of wanting a different writing style on my public domain. I've been writing on Ass and Ammonia in a stream-of-consciousness format, and that's a deviation from nearly every blog I've ever kept, where topics were more common. I think I'd like to get back to the topics format, mostly on account of my consciousness is not very happy or enjoyable, and I want to write happy and enjoyable things for people to read again. I still want to write frankly about my struggle with my mental illness, because somebody has to destigmatize that stuff and I have no shame so it may as well be me, but I want it to be a topic people consent to, rather than something they have to filter out just to get to the other stuff.

So... what's "the other stuff"?

Well, when Siren was an infant, I kept a mothering blog to discuss our new life together as mother and daughter. Sometimes I'd talk about current events, but mostly I talked about my day-to-day life mothering my daughter. I couldn't expect back then that the 20s would bring us something called the "tradwife movement"--no, literally, what the fuck?--nor Trump's rise to power and the global move towards nationalism, nor the violent resurgence of "traditional" gender roles in the West, and so forth. It's therefore become difficult to find content online about domestic labor that isn't either a perfectly reasonable critique of it as compulsory for women, or loaded with tradwife ideology. Now that my child is a tween, and I have entered into careers that enable me to provide her a middle class life and home, I would like to resume documenting our little life here in rural Indiana.

The name of my new blog will be called The Country Bat, after the sweetest nickname given to me by one of my TikTok mutuals. I look very, very forward to beginning it! Yes, there will still be posts about politics, and mental illness, and the hard stuff--but I will take care to separate and intersperse them with my posts about my kid, my plants, and my home, which I have failed to do here.

When I register my new site and domain name, I will edit this page and link it above. Until then, be on the lookout!