Beware of the ants

This website has been online since April of this year. Since then, I've been meaning to publish a post roughly outlining what I intend to write here. I've produced dozens of impassioned manifestos about love and art and the meaning of life, but as is evident, I haven't finished any of them.

I'm never going to write that perfect introductory post. It's about time that I publish something on this website—anything at all—so I can get on with writing what I actually care about writing.

Here goes.

I've been publishing technical writing and personal essays on the internet for over two decades. While I'm still publishing my technical writing elsewhere on the web, recent life events have stopped me from sharing any of my personal essays.

As I enter the tail end of my thirties, I've begun to question parts of myself that have to do with love, desire, and human connection. I'm questioning the ways I form relationships with people, how I maintain those relationships, what friendship, love, and community mean to me, and what role human connection plays in my life. I'm even questioning my sexuality, my gender, and my kinks—and I'm committed to better understanding these parts of myself.

In the last year, I have changed as a person in ways I never could have imagined, and some of those changes affect parts of my life I have hitherto kept private or simply left unexamined. As examine those parts, I'm trying to figure out the best way to share what I learn online.

I process the world through words. For months, I've longed for a space where I can write about this new chapter of my life. But for obvious reasons, I don't want this writing to be linked to my government name. There are parts of my life that I'm comfortable sharing with anonymous strangers but not my employers or family members.

It's not that I'm ashamed of this new direction my life has taken. I just don't want different facets of my life getting mixed up together. In real life, I change how I act and what I share with others based on context. Unlike real life, the internet naturally encourages me to fold all my contexts and identities into one mega identity. With this website—and the new persona it implies—I want to fight back against that natural consolidating force of the internet and try to keep different facets of my life separate.

The unofficial tagline of this website is writing on love, desire, community, and art. Don't hold me to it, though. I may change my mind and turn this into a blog about pickling. We'll see how it goes.

I'm coming into this project with an intention to share as much about my life as I'm comfortable sharing. Radical openness, if I can manage it. This will be scary. I might get squeamish and back off. I want to try anyway.

So: hello! You can call me PicnicGhost. Welcome to my Haunted Picnic! Please enjoy the sandwiches, and beware of the ants.