new year, new site
…whatever version of me currently exists.
It really felt like this was the year that people deeply disavowed resolutions. Maybe that speaks more to the circles of people I run in, but it felt like people around me were really disavowing doing that. I saw some reference somewhere (probably on bluesky) to resolutions as a kind of Foucauldian confession, releasing ourselves to a panoptic eye that surveils our mandated-by-capital self-improvement.
I’ve loved a panoptic eye–that’s how the panopticon works, after all. At its most effective, you take in the panopticon and better yourself without being watched. I’ve really never moved into that moment; I’ve joked before “is everything worthwhile done with other people, or was I just brainwashed at boarding school to only be able to work when the panopticon is in place?” Is it accountability or is it submitting to surveillance? These are questions I don’t know how to answer.
One of my resolutions this year, although unwritten, was this very thing I’m doing right now: to build a website of my very own, one that didn’t rely on twitter or bluesky or even wordpress to function and connect with other people. I wanted an old school blog, and I didn’t want to be beholden to the way that techno-fascists are creeping crawling into every area of the internet, so my friend Jaime Dear set me up and coached me through how to edit the free template I’m using, and sat with me a few late nights at the very end of December watching me slowly remember the limited HTML and CSS I picked up on LiveJournal in the mid-2000s. (I’m on the young end of users of LiveJournal; even most people who were on it as teens are probably 5 years older than me.)
A first post is both everything–the place to set the tone of my new website–and nothing, just a placeholder for me to start to write with a promise of more to come. Another resolution, actually written down in my fancy bullet journal, is to write for me, something that grad school largely took from me and which I hope to take back.
This is of course the moment where I go confessional and say that after eight years of on again off again engagement with the academy, I am not a student, and I am no longer pursuing my PhD. My hope is that by leaving this thing that was beginning to hang over me, I can actually do the good work I want to be doing: writing for fun, for example. Maybe even writing fiction for fun, something I haven’t done in probably five years. Certainly writing here, writing about books again in a way that I hope is enjoyable and which helps me work through things in my life and the world. It also frees me up to spend more time, guilt-free, on the projects I’ve been working on, and to take more on.
We’re a week into the new year, current version of me, and I’m doing fairly well; I sent emails informing those involved of my leaving graduate school, I read poetry in the mornings on Saturday and Sunday, I went to church for the first time since 2019. (Perhaps some day I will write about my return to Catholicism, a very funny place to be for a transgender adult.) I’ve finished two books, including volume one of Karl Marx’s Capital. I wrote two birthday cards to the same person, and mailed them today. I have more to do: go to the library and browse, a practice I haven’t done in years and which I want to do more. More self-reflection more often; the reason I like resolutions, after all, is taking a look at how I want to live my life, how I currently live it, and working to bridge the gap between those ways of being. I’m working on my website, very slowly (I don’t know how to make comments happen yet, I’m still learning, but I know the email button works!) It’s a year of learning and doing, learning and doing, and I hope I can stay true to that this year, and make a habit of both.