New year. New us?

Let's do this, is what I guess I'm saying

Hi, folks. Hi.

It’s January 2025! Get excited!

Okay, maybe don’t get excited.

Although truthfully. Like, if you want to get excited, please do, I don’t want to discourage anyone. Like, it’s a free country.

Okay well maybe that’s a bit far, these days. You know.

People used to say that, didn’t they? ‘It’s a free country’? As in, ‘do what you want; I can’t stop you and neither can the government, or that’s what our founding documents say, anyway’? But also always with a little stank on it, like, ‘Sure, do whatever crap you feel like, I honestly do not care and in fact find you slightly tiresome.’

I just don’t want this introduction to come off like one of those speakers at a conference you’ve been required by work to attend, you know? ‘Good morning! I SAID GOOD MORNING, come on, you can do better than that!’ I mean, whence Luigi Mangione for those people, am I right?

Let me start over.

It’s 2025

And I really don’t know how I’m supposed to feel.

That ‘happy new year’ moment, when you kiss or clink your glass or jump into the ocean or blow a little paper horn or pass out in your apartment living room because you drank too much Jack Daniels in a public bathroom during First Night and you fought with your boyfriend over how wonderful a time you were meant to be having instead of actually having a wonderful time. (Y2K vibes.)

It’s many years since I’ve had a disastrous New Years, for which I’m grateful. I reclaimed it from a series of disasters, and for the most part these days I enjoy New Year’s Eve quite a bit. This one was nice: a very good dinner that I ate too much of (curse you, buffets!), a disco nap, and then a rapid dressing-up with my beloved before showing up at a very underwhelming dance party at 15 minutes to midnight (we were promised “Gatsby” and all the staff were dressed up ‘20s style; we got Sweet Caroline and John Cougar Mellancamp), then going outside to enjoy midnight under a clear starry sky, with the waves crashing in front of us. We kissed, shivered, enjoyed the beach for a minute, then went back inside to watch Slings and Arrows and go to sleep. (We are old.)

The ocean at White Point resort, from the restaurant window, New Year’s Eve day. Hashtag blessed, hashtag will this even be here next year or

And it was lovely, and we thought and dreamed and wondered and worried, and it’s hard going into another year, to be honest, with everything that’s happening, that’s about to happen, that everything has been leading up to. I’ve enjoyed a long and quiet Yule; we fasted, then feasted, and spent much of it in quiet, much of it alone with ourselves and our pine boughs and lights and our love. And I’m grateful, so terribly grateful for that, for our home, for Canada (Poilievre notwithstanding), for the little community I’m building here, for our neighbors who had us over along with the whole damn neighborhood on New Year’s Day in some kind of intensely normie block party, for what little peace we’ve been able to find here, for everything, I’m grateful.

And I’m also fuckin’ terrified.

But I’m still here

I’m still here, and I’m still at Patreon, and I’m still on Bluesky, even if the shine has already worn off. I took a week or so off but I’m still looking to write here more regularly, and I still have a plan to update the Patreon regularly with art and cross-post here, and I still want to be an artist, want to show you all what I’m up to, want to keep opening my mouth and hoping my self-expression moves people.

And on further reflection, I think I know what this space needs to be. And…I might even turn on paid subscriptions, especially since I have a couple pledges already. (Where’s that darned peeking-through-your-hands-with-a-mortified-expression emoji?)

What is Write It Out?

When I first started writing in this space, I largely intended it to be a place where I blogged, as that tired term would have it, about therapy and attachment and the body and trauma and so on, all the stuff I used to talk about back at the Wordpress version of same. But a lot of what I ended up writing here was more personal, closer to the core of me as a person, which is basically what always happens when I write online, what has been happening since, oh, the turn of the millennium or so. (Anyone remember Diaryland? Just me? Okay, cool.)

But it’s worth noting that I didn’t call it Power In Your Hands. I didn’t name it something about somatic therapy, or about trauma and attachment, or any of that. I called it Write It Out, because I wanted to do that and I also wanted to talk about doing that, about the process of writing that happens because it’s how you process, how I process. I wanted to leave space for it to be raw enough, real enough, revealing enough, even as I talked about concepts and techniques and the nitty-gritty of what happens in sessions with me.

There’s so little space, it seems to me, between the personal and the political, between the artist and the advisor, the person experiencing life and the person talking to a client about their own experience. The internet, over these years, has shrunk that space even more. As 2025 creeps apace I am working on making some of my online presence more private, less diffuse, less open to whatever corporations or billionaires want to profit from it. But I’m also continuing to follow a philosophy of online life that I’ve had for a long long time now: my story is mine, and if I’m not ashamed about my own story, then nobody can shame me about it, either.

As such, I think 2025 is the year where I tell more stories here, stories that have to do with my own growth, with my experiences around trauma and attachment, with my sense of what is truly healing and what is just the mental-health-industrial-complex blowing smoke up our collective asses. I feel somehow freed, somehow ready to just talk about it, because it’s clear that the whole shithouse is going up in flames, if you’ll forgive the coarse language about it thank you very much.

I know I have clients among my readers, and I love that. I work hard, especially after an early conversation with a careful and astute reader, to make sure the stories I’m telling here are mine to tell. I want to talk about some things I’ve talked to clients about recently, particularly when I’ve been more forthcoming about my own experiences as a way, hopefully, of helping with theirs. But I want to continue striving to keep mum about my clients’ experiences except in the most abstract senses. I want to be more vulnerable, not make them more so.

At the same time, I know that there’s this weird veil of secrecy around the very idea of The Therapist: I capitalize it because it’s such an archetype, this supposedly invulnerable blank mask, this being who is meant only to listen without judgment and reflect and validate, not to heaven forbid have a life or a personality or a trauma history of her own, or to have unusual and sometimes even wild life experience she could bring to bear on helping her clients, especially the queer ones, the trans ones, the polyamorous ones, the kinky ones, the ones who were always afraid to emerge into the world as the people they truly are, and the ones who thought the world was changing for the better but now have found otherwise. The brave and the less brave, the self-aware and the self-discovering, the loud weirdos and the secret weirdos. The lovers, the dreamers, and me, etc.

Write It Out could be where we all meet up and talk about it, yeah?

Please join me

In 2025, however scary the year may be, I hope to write more regularly. I hope to write about what happens when your family seems okay and you don’t think you were abused exactly, but you were kind of extremely unhappy and they did kind of try to control you a lot, and there was that time they left you alone for several months when you were 13 and you had to cook for yourself, and well why is it exactly that it’s so hard to motivate yourself to do anything?

I hope to write about what it’s like when your first romantic relationship is cut off by your mother, about how you keep falling in love with gay men in high school and college, about how relationships through your teens and twenties are all with unsuitable partners because you can’t figure out how to get anyone you really like to date you.

I’m gonna talk about being polyamorous for 20 years then going monogamous for a while because you realize you have a major attachment wound to heal, and here, finally, is the person to do it with. I’m gonna talk about how amazing polyamory can be, and also how amazing it can be at tricking you into believing you don’t deserve love.

I want to talk about what attachment repair is, and how you can do it for three years without really knowing what you’re doing or how, until one day you wake up and realize you feel safe with someone in an intimate relationship, maybe for the first time ever.

And yeah: I want to talk about the ways that the world is fucked, and the fact that all the therapy in the world won’t change that, and that the only thing you can really do is train your body and nervous system to recover more quickly from stress, and then help yourself to have a better life, and then help your loved ones, and then keep going outward in concentric circles from there, as many as you can touch.

Oh and I want to talk about what I mean by a better life, and how little that has to do with having more stuff.

Come with me?