A Needed Pivot

It’s been a while since I last wrote an essay. My absence was due to one thing: writer’s block. Or something adjacent to it.

Let me explain.

As a lesbian writer, there are only so many things I could write about before everything becomes stale and boring. I wanted to expand my work to more comics and pop culture related things, but I felt a sense of guilt. I was a marginalized writer during a time of chaos for people like me so I figured why not write blog posts to have a record of who I was and where I was in case everything falls apart?

My last post was about classism and a girl I liked for months before sliding into her DMs. After that post, I felt overexposed. I felt like there was a part of me that should remain hidden, especially when life doesn’t act like the stories I write.

She left me on read. Soon after, she posted a picture with a girl who smoked, drank, partied and seemed so much more her type than me. She had long hair and long legs. I’m happy for both of them at this point.

However, I wasn’t always. I cried quite a bit after being rejected. In the midst of self-pity and tears, I had the realization that it would make for a good story. A story about how being rejected by a professional athlete ripped open insecurities that I have held for 10–15 years. About how me, a plus-sized dark-skinned black girl with a lifelong battle with neurodivergence, had believed that since I chose to love myself that it meant no other person I liked would like me back because I didn’t straighten my hair or lose 60 pounds or stop asking questions about any and everything or being upset that I lost my 46 day Wordle streak.

There was another essay topic that came up in the midst of those dark thoughts about me unpacking my attractions and why I couldn’t like someone more similar to me when it came to my traits. But again, I felt overexposed. My essays began to feel like an abusive exercise, serving my trauma and pain on a platter to a public forum to inspect and interrogate as they wished.

This is all a long way to say, that I want to pivot to broader topics with my essays here. I have a long list of comics I have read in the indie space that I have yet to see written about on Medium. I want to write about my creative process. I want to express my love and devotion to the things I love and keep the most tender parts to myself.

I will always address the intersections of comics and nerd culture as they come up. I may even write another deeply personal essay or two. But in the meantime, I want to just have fun. In the midst of so much chaos, sometimes it’s just great to have a bit of fun.