Introduction
It’s been a long time since I’ve written a blog post. There are lots of reasons it’s been a while, and I think the primary reason is that life has just been non-stop. My last post was towards the end of June, and shortly after that, things at work got insanely busy. Because work has been so busy, I haven’t had the energy outside of work to do something like write a blog post.
Or, well, I guess that’s the reason I’d like to say is the primary reason I haven’t written.
I think the reality is that the events of mid-June really knocked me on my ass. It’s now 2.5 months later, and I feel like I’m only now pulling my head out of the water. The things that happened while we were in Ireland made me want to hibernate from the world, go inward, and take the time to recover. Obviously there was one pretty huge relationship that ended because of what happened, but it seems like what happened also resulted in me pulling away from a lot of other relationships. My circle got a lot smaller, and I don’t know if that’s a permanent change or a temporary change, but I - without really intending to - pulled away from most of my close relationships as a response to what happened in Ireland.
A selfie of me with Kelly Sue DeConnick, one of my all time favorite creators
Kelly Sue DeConnick
In July, I found out one of my all-time favorite creators - Kelly Sue DeConnick - was going to be doing an appearance at a comic shop in Lakewood, OH. I was scheduled to be away from home that weekend, but I decided I still needed to go meet Kelly Sue, despite the fact that it would take over an hour to get to the shop. It was one of the best decisions I ever made. I could go into the details of the whole exchange, but the most important parts are that I showed her my Non-Compliant tattoo from her comic Bitch Planet, and she hugged me when she saw the tattoo on my wrist, and then we had such a great conversation for almost 10 minutes. She was so kind, and she signed the book I brought with a message that I really needed to see at the time.
The signature from Kelly Sue DeConnick, that says, “For Daniel - Take up SPACE. Fuck! Shit! Up! XO - Kelly Sue DeConnick”
After meeting Kelly Sue, I decided to re-read Bitch Planet, the book that motivated me to get the Non-Compliant tattoo. I had forgotten so much of the book between the last time I read it and now. It resonated with me even more now than I remember it resonating with me in the past. This time I feel like I really “got it”. It has stirred up a lot of feelings in me about … really everything. Identity, my place in society, my role as a citizen, the construct of gender, how prevalent misogyny still is … there are just a lot of feelings about lots of big things that have come up after meeting Kelly Sue and rereading Bitch Planet, especially in light of what just happened in June.
After finishing my re-read of Bitch Planet, I decided to read Kelly Sue DeConnick’s current book, FML, which I don’t know why I wasn’t reading all along. The book is so different from Bitch Planet, but it has so much heart and is also just incredible, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.
A close-up of Superman on my Justice League tattoo
Superman
Another thing that happened since the last time I wrote is that the Superman movie came out, and I’ve seen it twice now. I thought the movie was good the first time I saw it, then I thought a lot more about it and fell in love with it while thinking about what I had seen, and then watched it again and was obsessed. I thought the movie perfectly captured who Superman is, and I thought the liberties the filmmakers took with the character and his origin were all great choices that did a lot to help us understand even more who Superman is. This was the first time I watched a comic book movie and felt like watching the movie gave me the exact same feeling that reading a comic book did.
What I think is … interesting … is that the Non-Compliant, punk-rock way of being that Bitch Planet inspired in me upon rereading it is also the Non-Compliant, punk rock way that watching Superman made me feel. Superman is about as mainstream and universally loved a character as you could possibly imagine, and yet the way he was so kind, the way he stood by his internal sense of justice, the way he was portrayed as simultaneously so “alien” and so human - it felt about as anti-establishment as anything could, especially in this country right now. There’s even a line in the movie about how Superman being the way he is might be the “real punk rock”. Watching the Superman movie was as affirming to who I feel I am as reading Bitch Planet was and is.
40
I turn 40 in September. I started planning a “party” for my 40th in February of this year when I was going through a really hard time and needed a distraction. I don’t actually care very much about entering my 40’s, but birthdays were a huge deal to my dad, and I knew he would have made a huge deal out of my turning 40, so I kind of felt that making a big deal out of it was a way to honor him.
The plan for my 40th involves spending time with a very small group of very close friends. This group of friends has had a group chat going for several months now, and I was very active in that chat for a long time. But in the past few weeks, I have been disengaging from the chat, and have been pondering cancelling the gathering. I recently told someone that I don’t feel like I’m “worth celebrating”, and I am convinced that what happened in Ireland is the direct cause of that feeling several months later. I am trying to be aware of that (the impact of Ireland on my current feelings of worth), and am not actually going to cancel the gathering, but I am hoping that I can restore myself to the place of wanting to celebrate and be celebrated in the next few weeks.
A photo of me wearing a pin that says “1 Year Sober”
Addiction/Sobriety
August 10th - which would have been my dad’s 69th birthday - marked one year of being sober from alcohol. This was a thing that I really wanted to celebrate, but didn’t quite know how to celebrate. I bought myself the pin you see in the picture above, and asked Russ to give it to me, which he did while saying incredibly wonderful things about how proud of me he is. Still, I wanted something else to happen to mark the occasion. So I decided to quit nicotine.
I’ve been a nicotine addict since 2003. I had tried to quit many, many times. But something about knowing that I was able to achieve a year of sobriety from alcohol felt like motivation enough to stop using nicotine. I’ve been implementing several tools - some more helpful than others - to stick to abstinence from nicotine. Tonight at 8:08pm, it will officially be 3 weeks without nicotine. And I feel really good about that.
However, it hasn’t been a cake walk. I was using Chantix to help me quit, which ended up causing me to have a very scary depressive episode. I got off the Chantix when I scared myself, and I have bounced back significantly in terms of my mental health compared to where I was, but I still think that the difference between the amount of dopamine I was getting from using nicotine and where I am now is enough to be making me have a constant state of depression. By all accounts, this nicotine-withdrawal-induced depression is normal and is temporary. And I wonder how much my having stepped back from the birthday chat and the normal interaction with people in my life is due to the nicotine withdrawal and accompanying depression (and how much of it is still from the Ireland debacle). I’m really hoping the nicotine-withdrawal-induced depression is over soon, if only to have one less thing impacting my mental and emotional state.
All that said, it feels pretty damn cool to be free of nicotine after 22 years. And it feels like an achievement I needed.
Conclusion
The relationship that ended in Ireland was one in which that person and I did a lot of talking about identity. That friendship helped me to come to understand the complexities of my neurodivergence and my gender identity. Without that friendship and the conversations that happened in that friendship around autism and gender identity, I feel like I’ve been a bit adrift in terms of my journey to better know myself. I think the self-reflection that was happening in that friendship was really important, and I think - in the past couple of months - I’ve been associating self-reflection about neurodivergence and gender with that friendship, which is now associated with emotional distress. So I feel like I have been abandoning the work I had been doing, and I think I need to pick it back up. It’s just a matter of finding a new avenue to do that exploration.
That said, I think the identity work has continued, if not as consciously. Meeting Kelly Sue DeConnick; rereading Bitch Planet and reading FML; watching Superman and reflecting on who that character is and how I relate to him; focusing on sobriety from alcohol and now from nicotine - these have all been things that have been important in understanding who I am and doing the work of continuing to grow. And I think it’s probably pretty understandable that what happened in Ireland made me extremely wary of the other relationships I have, made me (not-so-consciously) choose to isolate a bit, and is still having impacts on me now.
So … that’s what life has been like. And I’m glad I wrote this right before my therapy appointment today. Thanks as always for reading, and for sticking around, especially if you’re one of the people I’ve been pushing away.