how I spent my 30s.

& the lessons I'm leaving with.

Hello! For paid subscribers, I’m offering a much more personal, informal, blog-style essay. This is more experimental —(I chose to do the bulk of this in third person which will no doubt be annoying to some of you, and that’s fair!)—and less edited than what I normally send out. I’m not sure how often I’ll do this, but it felt fun and free to write the way I used to in my LiveJournal days when I’m pretty sure 11 people read my work. We’ll see how it goes! <3

photo from 2018. age 33. a relevant card for then & today.

She began her thirties in Montreal. It was a frozen weekend, and a birthday trip gone wrong. She had been behaving erratically for over a year at that point. Some witches would say it was evidence of a particularly rocky Saturn Return. At 28, she got her PhD, left a four-year relationship, took a new job, moved to a new city, lived alone for the first time in her life, lost two of her grandparents, and was simultaneously falling in love with someone states away. She was re-discovering the joys of a queer relationship, with a butch-identified transman who affirmed her femmeness in ways no one had before. New queer romance can make one act a little crazy, but she was acting crazy-crazy. Once she called this new love, like, fourteen times in a row? She screamed and cried on his voicemail. She hadn’t really ever been that girl, so this was….unnerving. Still, they were trying to be together, long distance, meeting up for trips like these, this trip to Montreal for her 30th birthday. But these impulses in her to fucking lose it didn’t subside on this special birthday trip. Instead, she, for the first time ever, lost it in public. Screaming on a sidewalk, a memory of her past, and then a blackout.