Seven years?!
You guys.
The last time I posted here, my age started with a different digit.
The last time I posted here, I lived in another zip code.
The last time I posted here, nobody had ever heard of COVID.
And yet, every couple of months, I’ll get a comment on AO3 (yes, I do get notifications, and yes, I do read every single one, and yes, it makes my day every single time). The most recent one caught me at just the right moment, and I realized, huh. I should probably give a little update.
All right. Seven-year speed run. Here we go:
Lost a job. Got a better job. Bought a house that is far too old and far too large and far too haunted for one person to live in alone. Lived in it alone for several years anyway. Eventually adopted a dog who turned out to be part dingo.
(Her name is Rigby. She used to be terrified of bowls. Now she is terrified of the cheery little tune our oven plays when the food is done. She has murdered at least two squirrels in cold blood for sport. Children, buses, bicycles, and Toyota Priuses send her into a blind rage. She is a quivering 25-pound Dorito-eared alien who thinks she is a horde of rampaging Visigoths and I would literally, not figuratively, die for her.)
Figured out I'm autistic. Figured out I'm asexual. Figured out I have ADHD. Figured out I had started menopause at age 32 and immediately began referring to myself as a "hot young crone." Figured out I'm genderqueer. Conducted a lengthy and torrid affair with my personal trainer. Engaged in an accidental one-night stand with a colleague on a business trip. Spent six years in a partially unconsummated throuple that went out with a whimper. Rebounded into a nine-person polycule that went out with a bang. Emerged from the schism with a different and infinitely better partner than the one who brought me into it. She moved in with me two years ago. Her boyfriend stays with us on weekends. She is strong and sweet and pretty and funny as hell. She's an artist, and she is wearing off on me.
Last year, I started cutting snippets of conflicting diet advice out of women's magazines from the past 100 years and pasting them onto a six-foot-tall mannequin from the department store where I worked when I developed anorexia in my 20s. That's coagulated prop blood on her fingers, as well as on the glass shards she's standing in. The tape measure hobbling her ankles is the one I used to take my measurements twice a day for several years. If you scan the QR code between her thighs, an animated hand appears on your phone, and it flips you off. She was on display at a juried show last year. Over 10,000 people saw her. She struck a nerve.
For a smaller show early this year, I played around with the mannequin concept a little more. I also developed a new technique for stamping words into leather and filling them in by hand with a quill pen in metallic paint, which led to the first-ever public display of my poetry as visual art.
And I'm still writing. Of course I'm still writing. Most recently, two of my poems and one smutty little short story were recently published in the literary art anthology for the Seattle Erotic Art Festival under the pseudonym Tár Odinsen. This is one of them. If anyone ever tries to tell you asexuality can't be erotic, that's a skill issue, and here's your proof:
I also have a chapbook of poetry waiting in the wings, but I'm not shopping it around to publishers just yet, because I'm...a little busy at the moment.
Here's the thing: I finally, finally know what I want to be when I grow up. As with most monumental things, it's been right in front of me all along. It's not writing and it's not fine art, but it springs from the same part of me, that same obsessive, unreasonable, indefatigable dedication to curating an aesthetic. I'm working quickly and quietly to build something I care about so much it scares me.
This fandom — the culture of it, the astonishing kindness and creativity and intelligence and sheer, radical decency of the people in it — shaped me creatively and personally in ways I'm still discovering to this day. I am inordinately grateful for the home I found here, and I do still pop in every now and again. When it feels like I'm drowning, it means everything to know that the world is still quiet here.
(Portrait of Bea Bickerknife, the City's sixth-most-verbose encyclopedia huffer, and her husband Jerome [not pictured].)
