Somehow I managed to let the fifteenth anniversary of my launching this blog go unremarked. So now, a few months late, let me remark upon it.
Just over fifteen years ago, my then-girlfriend L suggested that I should write this. “You have an interesting sex life,” she said, “an interesting history, and you write good. People would be interested.”
I wasn’t sure about the “people would be interested” part, but I had the sense that there might be something for me in a somewhat exhibitionistic/navel-gazing retelling of various aspects of my story, past and present. Boy was I right, boy was she right, boy am I grateful. This blog has been pretty radically transformative for me, an essential transformative and liberating feature of my forties and fifties.
When I began, I was very focused on my audience, on my readers. ‘How many people came to the blog today?” “How many people commented?” “How many people read which posts?” All that was of manic fascination to me. And I worked assiduously to grow my readership, my reader engagement. I even tailored what I wrote, both to people’s interests and to maximize traffic. I used various analytic tools and engagement tools, and there were months when I spent as much time on the project of maximizing readership as I did on the project of writing.
Over the years, my relationship to all that shifted a bit. My narcissistic hunger for recognition and appreciation has ebbed and flowed over the years, but in general, it has receded substantially, to the point that today, my sense is I’m a little bit of a vox clamantis in deserto, a voice crying out into the wilderness, speaking my truth, or at least parts of it, without reference to the question of whether anyone is listening. And my sense is that for the most part, no one is. And honestly, that’s just fine.
Where the project began as an exhibitionistic and therapeutic, cathartic exposure of that about which I previously had felt tremendous shame, it’s morphed into something more of a memoir, a record, less and less as the years pass, of my sexual partners and activities, and more and more of the goings-on in my head as I march through my fifties.
Today, the end of my fifties is, if not in sight, just around the bend. My libido is considerably less urgent than it was fifteen years ago. My hunger for recognition, considerably less. My appetite for disclosure, even, considerably less.
I want to nod, though, in the direction of some of the things about which I have not written over the last fifteen years. When I began this blog, I was at the tail end of a career. A career that ended somewhat prematurely, in part because of realizations to which I came in the wake of my addictive relationship to sex, and in part because of involuntary changes in my ability to attend to much of what was required me in my previous career. For the first four years or so of this blog, I effectuated a major personal and professional transition. First, being a stay-at-home dad for two years, and then completing a second master’s degree in a completely unrelated field to anything I had pursued previously. And then, subsequent to that, depending on how you count, I spent either four or ten years, or both, pursuing this new career, becoming a professional in a new field in which today I’ve established myself as a somewhat respected and accomplished participant.
All that has happened without my really characterizing it here. But that’s kind of interesting, because it’s unusual for someone to reinvent themselves in their forties in the way that I did.
And that’s a whole other interesting story that I just haven’t told very much. Nonetheless, it’s true, lurking in the background. In addition to that, T and I have had a kid, obviously, all this time. A kid who was five or so, or six, when I started this, and who, today, is twenty-one. I’ve worked hard to protect T and our kid’s privacy. T, of course, has known about this blog all along, and our kid, though she hasn’t known of it directly, explicitly, certainly is aware of it in a variety of ways. (Close readers might notice that the pronoun by which I refer to our kid is not the same pronoun I’ve used in the past. And maybe in the coming days, I’ll write a bit about that. Both about the intellectual aspects of having a trans kid, and about some of the emotional elements of it. It’s a little hard to do in a way that feels respectful, but I might take a crack at it.)
Anyway, I’m writing this without really having a fundamental point beyond one of gratitude for the role this blog has played in my becoming the man in the late fifties I am, in traveling the journey that I began as a man in his early forties, when this blog began. I’m grateful for the role that the blog has played, and to the extent that you’ve been reading along, that you have played in my journey.
I couldn’t have done it, I wouldn’t have done it, without your help.