I might start blogging again.
I wrote a blog post a couple of weeks ago about my childhood, something I think a lot about but have written about very little. The poetry I wrote between 2015 and 2018 when I was doing a lot of spoken word was mostly about my life, but my adult life — relationships, mental health, death. Only in the last couple years have I attempted to write about growing up. In 2025 I published an essay with Harpur Palate titled “Two Birds,” which I later edited and republished myself in a zine (available via DM for $5 and my preferred version!), about addiction and various men in my life, starting with my father. In the essay, I write a little about my adolescence when my father’s lifelong battle with drugs hit a low point, and about a boyfriend I had at the time. And while the piece is about other points in my life too — adult ones — it’s the first intentional thing I’ve written about how I grew up.
Wednesday’s blog post feels a bit like a scratch piece of paper, ideas jotted down, a photograph paperclipped. I need to do that. I’ve been going through old diaries, taking notes. (I’ve kept a diary since I was eight and still have all of them from eleven through today.) This year I’ll be working on some final novel revisions before I start querying agents, but I’ve started piecing together a timeline for my next book idea — a fictionalized version of my own teenage years, particularly one central friendship and, for entertainment value, all the trouble we got in.
It’s not about the trouble though. The story is in the friendship, the rise and fall of it, the enormity of it, and the way our chance meeting steered the next two years of our lives. And a little about the trouble. I think the reason it’s hard to write about my upbringing is because there is a lot of trouble in it. I diplomatically describe my upbringing to friends as “unconventional,” but I’ve always felt a disconnect when the conversation turns to childhoods. I just can’t relate to many of the things people describe, especially when it comes to high school, the time in my household when the proverbial roof held up by rubber bands and chopsticks came crashing down. It’s hard to write about for public consumption. There’s a shame in it, a secrecy. “People don’t need to know what goes on in our house,” my mother warned me when, as a child, I told the neighbor girl that my parents slept in separate rooms.
(I will note that in my adulthood, my parents ASK me to write about them and our lives. My father wanted me to write a book about his life story, and my mother recently offered me a stack of letters from her old boyfriend “in case you want to use them for your next book.”)
It took me a long time to learn how to write a book, and I imagine it’s going to take a while to learn how to write one about myself. I dropped out of high school when I sixteen; I spent the two years before that in various county judicial systems, sometimes in one or another juvenile detention center, a period on house arrest, a year on probation. Why? What did I do? Well, that’s sort of what the book is about, and there’s a dodginess to the whole bit that I tried to leave behind when I moved north of the river twenty-five years ago and never turned back.
Like I said, it’s hard to write about for public consumption. But I’m not there yet anyway! I’m collecting all the little pieces, squireling away in my notebooks. I have some downtime while a few friends read the book I just finished, and once I hear their feedback, I’ll launch back into revisions. It’s a good time to revisit my 1990s diaries and start jotting down themes, timelines — start trying to see the things that happened to me as a succession of events in a story and define, impossibly, a beginning, middle, and an end. The blog post from the other day doesn’t really have anything to do with the new book, but it was a helpful exercise in trying to relay to a broad audience some key piece of my personhood, and maybe I’ll do it again.
Thanks for reading, you’re beautiful.