on Chosen Family

chaotic weirdo

Posted on
a person with aluminum foil obscuring their face, with hands on both sides of their face, in multicolored light

cw: politics, mental health

My chosen family (have you read adventures in a chosen family yet? I need to write the next one) has its own substack now, and three of us have now written intro posts. My partner and my other partner and myself.

We are very weird. I’m not sure everyone is ready for how fucking weird we are.

the politics, they are too headache

It’s election day for the midterms here in the US. I voted by mail last week and I am so anxious already and I know it’s too soon to be anxious, so instead I decided to point my anxiety toward this substack, which is why you’re getting this chaotic mess of a post today.

You may have noticed that I’m not capitalizing substack most of the time. I don’t like to be part of a Branded Thing, which is more than a little nonsensical considering that I spent so much time during the past fifteen years trying to work on My Brand. I think my brand now is more like my toxic trait: I want to be in the group chat but nobody is allowed to perceive me until I am ready.

tell me you were raised in a Puritan-inspired culture of work = worth without telling me you were raised in a Puritan-inspired culture of work = worth

On Sunday, my day off — no chores, I can be invisible — I spent all afternoon and evening and most of the night rearranging my room, but in a very careful way so as to keep from disturbing the temporary equilibrium that is my body. I am not suffering from migraines, subluxated arms, or brain fog at the moment, which I chalk up to how extremely careful I was when moving all the furniture around. I do have sore muscles, but I think that means I used them correctly?

My real-life Tetris skills are enviable. I moved a desk, two bookcases, an armchair, and a king sized bed without breaking anything, ruining the wall, or breaking my own self. I think this is the first time I’ve gotten all the way up to exhaustion and then stopped, rather than pushing further and injuring myself. I moved the king sized bed completely around, to the opposite wall, and several times during the sloth-paced rearrangement I thought, maybe I can just have the bed in the middle of the floor like this? Maybe it wouldn’t bother me? (It would bother me)

can’t stop, won’t stop (should probably stop now while I am ahead)

I started another substack specifically for my deathwork. I plan to write resource posts several times a month, and I did set up paid subscriptions for it, because I want people to be able to help me support the dying and their loved ones & chosen family, which will be so much easier with some financial support. The first post is up and there’s always a free subscriber option.

If you’re wondering if I have some sort of requirement to inject some Tolkien into almost everything I do, maybe that’s My Brand.

Or maybe the quotes are just so good and always seem so appropriate to what I do and what I want to be doing.

oops

Rounding out the past week or whatever amount of time it’s been, I decided to post quotes by Ursula K Le Guin on my Mastodon account since I miss seeing them in my twitter timeline which I do not have any more, and apparently the quote I chose five days ago is meaningful because at last count it’s been boosted (like a retweet? a retoot? lol) 81 times and favorited 127 times and if this keeps going I’m going to fall off the internet, which I currently picture as a flat-earth type of concept with all the internet-famous cats pushing things off the edge.

Speaking of Mastodon, the federated network is currently groaning under the weight of so many new people using it, and I have been tempted more than once to start my own private instance but I know better than to put more things on my to-do list so NO, I will not be doing that. I will shuffle around my Patreon pledges to start supporting my server admins, though. And I will set up an account at a smaller instance so that I can take some pressure off the instance I’m currently using. My new account on a smaller instance is @nixkelley@wandering.shop. I love it there.

in conclusion,

I am resting and tired, I have Full Moon Energy, there was a full lunar eclipse early this morning, it’s election day, I want to take a nap, my brain feels itchy, maybe today I will remember to eat more snacks that have protein in them.

Some days are just chaotic. Thank goodness for my mood stabilizer because this is a bouncy day — high energy and overstimulation combined with medium-intensity depressive feelings, which I really really do not like experiencing.

HERE ARE SOME PLACES WHERE I SOMETIMES EXIST

  1. @nixkelley
  2. Nix#1514 on Discord (obviously please tell me who you are)
  3. m.me/phoenixvkelley on the damn FB Messenger
  4. +1 734 386 0537 for good old-fashioned texting
  5. email me nixkelley at proton.me

featured image is a photo by Vinicius “amnx” Amano on Unsplash

on Chosen Family/on Praxis/the Cycle of the Seasons/the Work

I am home

Posted on

I think it’s poignant that my Twitter archive was finally ready to download a little before midnight, which means I could finally deactivate my personal account. Fifteen years of doing the same thing, and now that chapter is closed.

It’s technically November 1st now, but my room is lit by the candles on my ancestor shrine and the light of my two computer screens; and outside my open window it is foggy and smells of autumn.

I practice a form of ancestor veneration that is being taught to me. I have a space that I use for a shrine, and there are various things on it that remind me of who I am and who loves and has loved me in my bloodline. There are things on it that represent the love of my chosen family. There are things that represent the wild part of me that I don’t usually speak about. True things are true even if they aren’t necessarily shared — which is only interesting if you’ve been here for a little while and know that I have a tendency to get really vulnerable.

Tonight I am remembering the ancestors that have already died, the ones I knew in person and the ones I only know from photos and patchy genealogical records. Most of my ancestors were not indigenous to the land where I live, and although I can’t find all their names or know who they were, the land probably remembers them. It is not for me to wash the blood from the hands of my settler ancestors, but it is for me to remember what was done, and is being done, and let it guide my choices.

Tonight I sang some old songs I remember; I can hear my Mamow’s voice singing fragments of them and the sound of her laughter. I remember the songs I sang over my children when they were babies, sitting with them in the darkest part of night, both loving them so hard it hurt, and hoping that when I got up to put them in the crib that they wouldn’t suddenly wake.

Tonight I shared some whiskey with my ancestors. Its burn on my tongue helps me remember where I am in time and what today means to me.

Tonight I remember Eldest Ancestor: fire. Fire brings us together, it purifies our water, it cooks our food. It shows us where the boundaries are. It gives us safety. It is a weapon, and a dangerous tool in uncareful hands. Fire lets us see into the darkness, casting light outward to make shadows. Fire is heat. Fire is life. Fire is death.

I cleaned the candle holders and put in new votives. I washed the water bowl and refilled it. I set out a dish for the spent matches and a cigarillo, smelling of sweetness and tobacco. I lit a stick of incense. I hoped that they can see me honoring them and I hope they are proud of the person I am and the person I am becoming.

Tomorrow I will write out the new month in my journal, and make plans for meals when it’s my turn to cook dinner next. I will forget to finish my coffee and it will be cold when I pick it up. I will probably wake up with a pain somewhere, a reminder that I am aging, and will one day be an ancestor. Note to my descendants: strong coffee and filtered water are good choices, although unless you’re asking for something, I don’t need to be especially picky.

Tonight in the dark, smelling the candles and the incense, I remember that no matter how long the night, the day will come. The light will return. There are always things to fear; and there is always hope.

May it be a light to you in dark places when all other lights go out.

Galadriel, from The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien

To be a huge nerd, Galadriel said the above quote about the light of Eärendil — their ‘most beloved star’ — captured in a bottle that she gave to Frodo as they passed through Lothlorien; Galadriel is Elrond’s mother-in-law, and Eärendil is Elrond’s father, which makes the two of them kin by marriage. I suppose Eärendil is immortal in a way, being set above in the sky to shine forever.

Even the longest-lived of immortals can bless each other by being who they were meant to be — who they were lucky enough to be. We are all lucky enough to be who we are as well.

xox, Nix

featured image is my own work

on Hope/on Praxis

a fire sale, if I had things to sell

Posted on
tilt-shift view of feet in sneakers, presumably belonging to people sitting atop a stone wall

do not go gently

Hello! Ahem. Mm. This is awkward.

Now that The Twitter Buying has gone through and a certain person is now in charge that has terrible taste in memes and also politics, I have to delete my Twitter account. That I’ve had for fifteen and a half years. I am going to miss its particular way of bringing me bite sizes of news, near-immediate notification of daily mass shootings (I’m not actually kidding), live captures of racism, and — most of all — I will miss how fucking stressed out it has made me.

If I told you why it’s been so important to me that I keep being there and keep showing up, it’s going to sound ridiculous, so I’ll keep that to myself. But please know that I showed up on purpose. I wanted to be there for myself. I wanted to be there for the culture, for the holes cut in my reality so I could see someone else’s. I wanted to be distraught, wordless, angry, weeping alongside you. I wanted to be happy when we were all happy. I wanted to give to every fundraiser I saw, I wanted to heal every wound, I wished for the ability to fix all that was wrong. But I can’t do that. What I could do, though, was witness it. So that someone was there and you weren’t alone.

I was never perfect, but I did my best.

I know I’ve got an interestingly different kind of family structure than usual, and it’s been fun to write about it, but one of the most valuable things for us, individually and as a family unit, is that we have two security specialists in the house. One is the person I’m married to, who is in a current security position and has in the past done [redacted] for [redacted] because of or on behalf of [redacted]. (I don’t know what’s in the redacted bits either, and I’ve asked.) The other is someone that spends multiple hours a day researching and collating data so that we can be as safe as a family of queer disabled socialist pagan weirdos can be. And we collectively made a decision that we will no longer have individual accounts at twitter dot com.

So I’ve been making lists and reaching out to people and finding some of you at Discord, at Mastodon, at your websites, at your links pages. As I scroll through my timeline, I realize that there is a small group of people that bring me joy each day I log on, and those are the people I want to try to stay connected to.

Losing my Twitter account will mean losing some of my voice, for a time.

I’m so used to the way I’ve learned to use social media from Twitter, Facebook, and all the older versions of things from back in the day, that I have had an initial horrified response of despair. How would I ever be connected again? How could I find all my people again? Will I be cut off now indefinitely? Is this the end of it?

… and then, I realized that it’s just a frame of reference. It’s not reality, or it is, depending on how you look at it, but that’s the trick anyway. It is a way of connecting, of communicating, of sharing information. It is not the only way.

I did join Mastodon (again, and I am embarrassed to reveal that I think I had three or four existing accounts on various servers), I’m on Discord, I still have email, I still have this publishing platform, and even though I barely use it — I do have Facebook, and I kind of hate that I always make sure I have Facebook Messenger installed on any phone I use. It isn’t impossible to find me. It might be a little too easy to find me, but after years of taking that risk I’m not going to try and scrub myself from the internet.

Momentarily, I need to be creepy —trust me when I say menacingly that if I *do* need to disappear, you will never find me. Okay. Done with being creepy.

I’m just leaving Twitter.

My friends, my enemies, those of you that made me laugh and shared great memes and wrote hilarious threads about rice, those of you that posted live video of Ferguson right after Michael Brown was murdered, those of you that I tried to learn from, those of you I wanted to slap, those of you I followed to other places too — I mostly love all of you. I will miss you. And I will figure out a new shape for the Twitter-sized hole in my heart.

the start of one of the funniest threads I ever read on Twitter

But seriously, I’m still here and you’re still here and I think that matters. And if you know there’s someone who’s going to worry when they can’t find me, send them my way.

xox, Nix