Originally published January 2, 2019
Last updated June 6, 2019
Posted in Meta
The only thing more boring than blogging about how you haven’t blogged lately is blogging about how boring it is. And yet here I am.
I’ve had a rough few years. Very rough. Finally, in the back half of 2018, it started to turn around. Without the oppressive weight of anxiety and depression I managed to remember what executive function actually looks like. Now, on the brink of 2019, I feel like I can start making plans again. I can look forward to projects and have some hope of seeing them to fruition.
Here I am.
Since the spring, things have been unfurling inside me. A need to speak, to write, to teach. I see gaps in information and want to fill them. At the same time I’m absorbing more of other people’s experience and wisdom, in fields whose surface I’ve barely scratched until now. Ideas are tangling together in my head and I want to unravel them, weave them back together as something new, and show them to people.
I reworked my website the other week, adding the subtitle “Writer, Educator, Community Builder” to my name. That’s what I want to do, who I want to be, this year.
I told my friends, and one asked whether I shouldn’t mention what fields I was going to work in. What fields? That’s a hard question. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about queer sexuality, culture, history; communities both online and off; my local place and how to thrive in it; bodies and embodiment; independence and interconnectedness; climate and economics; past, present and future dystopias.
In the end, the best description of what I want to think and write about is resilience and resistance. I’m still untangling what that means, but it feels like truth to me.
So, here I am. I’m not sure where this will take me in 2019, but I hope you’ll subscribe and read.
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Alex Bayley is a tech industry refugee, independent researcher, writer, educator and community builder. They live in Ballarat, west of Melbourne, Australia.
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“oppressive weight of anxiety and depression” – it crushes, suffocates and deforms us, and perhaps most devastatingly isolates us from our friends, our fellow sufferers and our true selves. So congratulations on being brave, on reaching out, on reconnecting and rediscovering who you are and who you want to be, on your renewed focus on resilience, resistance and community building. You are a beautiful and generous person and the world is lucky to have you in it.