When I was in my early twenties, I expected the universe of myself and wouldn’t be happy unless I met those expectations. I was going to be a world renowned author, one who would innovate on storytelling in a manner which would heighten people’s ability to understand other perspectives and potentially lead to world peace!
I wish I was kidding.
I would also only be happy if I was in a loving relationship with another human being, who would of course provide validation for my existence and solve me. One needs only a swift glance at my track record to see that I have inevitably had to make do. Oh, that old life lesson about needing to love yourself before you can love another? Entirely true. I took the long road to that little realisation.
These last few years, I’ve come to realise that success and happiness aren’t mutually exclusive. I’ve probably even talked about it a few times. Writing about life like some learned hermit is something of a habit of mine, I’m sure you’ve noticed. Today, I’d like to just lay out a few of the things which bring happiness to my quiant little life.
Hyperfixations! Usually geeky. Say, Spider-Man has sixty years worth of comics, what does that even look like from beginning to end? What MMO have I not tried yet? I never cared about Star Trek, shall I binge the entire franchise? Hey, how did England start, anyway? The Wheel of Time is an insanely long read, that’d take me years – better get started! What were the Romans like? Ooh, this one YouTuber decided to play OldSchool RuneScape without leaving a single path in the game, I’m going to binge that entire series. Wait, every Final Fantasy is its own universe? What are ALL of them like?
And so on and so forth. On and on it goes. The endless cycle of curiosity, discovery, and distraction repeats ad infinitum. And you know what? It’s bloody brilliant. It’s also likely a product of some neurodivergent trait or another, what with the single-minded obsession with which I dive down these rabbitholes, but if that ain’t normal I’m happy to be weird. If this is the trade-off for being unable to form meaningful human relationships (capital R), I’ll just find happiness in my fourth rewatch of Doctor Who and the subsequent rewatch podcast I make alongside it, thanks.
(Yes okay I’ll also try the human relationships thing, I’m WORKING ON THAT.)
Speaking of creating – CREATING! Christ. For a time after uni, I stopped pretty much all creative endeavours in what can only be described as a loss of meaning in life. No, not in a dangerous mental health kind of a way, but in a… forgetting who I am kind of a way. It wasn’t until my Nan passed, and I was inspired when hearing about her life that I took up the crafts once again. And blimey, I haven’t stopped since. Let me tell you, nothing quite hits like pouring your being into a creative endeavour and seeing it resonate with someone. I mean, I have a little trouble accepting praise for my written works, we have some stuff to work through there, but when my YouTube videos get big views or lovely comments, that’s a metric my brain can apparently convert into tingly sensations.
Speaking of my YouTube content, with yet another smooth-as-butter transition, making people laugh! I grew up with a severe lack of confidence, but even then I loved making my friends laugh. As I’ve grown and gained more self confidence, humour has become my foot-in-the-door for making new connections. And it’s not like I stand in front of a mirror and practice making jokes. It’s more of a subconscious effort of establishing shared ground with someone and knowing what makes them laugh. Is it weird to analyse that as a skill? Everyone does it. I’m just chuffed that I can do it too. I made an entire Discord server laugh the other day and it made me feel like a proper capable and loveable human being.
Obviously, family and friends. I say obviously, but I am extremely lucky in this department. I won’t go on about it for too long because they’ll all just get big heads and everyone else will skip this section. Love makes people happy? WOW HE’S SOLVED THE HUMAN CONDITION!
And, not to beat on this drum at every opportunity, but being bisexual and being out about it and just knowing that part of my identity. Before I fully realised I was bi I assumed being queer would be difficult, would make me somehow “other”, would make me unlike myself etc etc. Turns out that accepting who you are is a pretty euphoric process, and helps the self confidence thing too. Hurrah!
You know, now that we’re approaching the end of this blog post I realise it’s been a pretty shit guide on how to be happy. All I’ve done is tell you what makes me happy. That might not make you happy at all! But to recap, I’ve found happiness in unabashedly pursuing my passions, being creative without requiring success from myself, developing the confidence to make people laugh and form connections with them in doing so, and… you know what? Sometimes it’s just spending your day off doing absolutely nothing but eating comfort food and doing comfort things.
Does this mean Kristian is super happy and all his problems are solved forever? NO! I call into question whether anyone has ever just been completely happy and fulfilled. There’s always some unsolved problem. For me, there’s quite a few of them. But I wanted to write this blog post in response to a younger Kristian’s demands from life. I had impossible expectations from myself and was incredibly hard on myself for falling short of them. But had I demanded what I wanted for myself from anyone else I’d have been considered cruel and outright insane.
This has been an excercise in self-affirmation, but hopefully the message has gotten across to someone, somewhere, who needs it. You’ve heard it before, but try hearing it again: You are enough. Embrace the things which make you happy. Surround yourself with love. And laugh hard.
Author: Kristian Richmond
No, You Don’t Want AI To Write For You
You know what genuinely flummoxes me? Regular, ordinary, content-consuming human beings advocating for AI automation in writing.
I was watching a YouTube video just now, and the creator mentioned that people sometimes asked him why he didn’t use an AI to write his videos for him. And of course he had his own response as to why not, but it all went over my head because I was too flummoxed by the question to think of anything else.
Producers, publishers, people who don’t care about the art, I can see them advocating for AI because for them, it’s more efficient and less hassle. They have to pay one less person, they get their product made more quickly, they get to overlook people who question the quality of the writing or the originality of the ideas. In the short term, anyway. I don’t know why anyone thinks they can get away with this in the long term, but that’s a slightly different conversation.
But, Christ. “Why don’t you just get an AI to write your videos for you?” What do people think writing is? Why do people think anyone makes anything? Writing scripts for videos sure sounds like a lot of work, why don’t you just use an AI to do it for you and focus on the other parts of the video? Why? Because then it wouldn’t be worth making! It wouldn’t be your own ideas, your own opinions, it wouldn’t be anything of substance. Is anyone actually doing this? Is anyone soulless enough to be in it purely for efficiency and money? (Don’t answer that.) Why would anyone be interested in the opinion of an AI in place of a real human being? That’s not someone’s opinion, that’s a Reddit feed restructured into a video. And that’s a truly horrific prospect, let me tell you.
Of course, this is about AI within the context of YouTube content, but it’s an equally stupid idea across the board. I’ve always wondered why writers take such a backseat in movie and television show credits, and it’s starting to look like that’s because of how they’re valued in the creative process overall. I can guarantee you there are executives at the heads of some of the most successful story-telling companies right now throwing their weight around to get AI to replace writers for the obvious reasons, because they do not consider real human writers to be important in the creative process of their movies or shows. Which is so intensely absurd. Without writers, what the hell is a story? Special effects and actors parroting stolen dialogue?
AI might be able to create a facsimile of a story, but unless it achieves some level of actual sentience, it will never come up with any new ideas of its own. Why do we bother to enjoy stories? If you can’t answer that question, maybe you should look into automating that, too. We can have AI making movies and AI watching them, then AI reviewing them and AI making YouTube videos about the reviews. It’ll be a perfect world, and we can all get back to doing labour. Wouldn’t want to go automating that now, would we?
I don’t often make blog posts like this, because I feel like all of the above has already been said, and my take isn’t necessarily contributing anything new to the noise. But sometimes, something comes along which is so earth-shiftingly ignorant that I have to say something about it, just to know that I’m not going mad. Let’s take the story-tellers out of story-telling, let’s automate art! Why? So we can make more money!
Isn’t the pursuit of technology supposed to improve our lives?!
I’m Jealous Of Another Part Of My Brain
One of the other hobbies I have is creating YouTube videos out of videogame clips and various discussions based around nerd culture, and I’ve always done that for fun with very minimal success. In recent months, however, the channel has been gaining thousands of views and steadily climbing in subscribers, which has brought me no small amount of joy. I can do it! I can do the video thing. I can make people laugh.
I am jealous.
Of myself.
Which is so stupid and absurd, but ultimately nobody is just one person and two things can be true. On the one hand, something I’ve wanted since I was a teenager is finally coming to pass, and I legitimately could not be happier about it. On the other hand, I can’t help but recontextualise my writing efforts and compare it against the channel. While I may pour a lot of effort and time into one project, I pour equal measures of deep thought and vulnerability into the other on top of a similar amount of effort and time. Like yeah, I can make people laugh, but can I make people think? Can I make people read a life experience and relate it to their own and have a humdinger of a brain poking session?
I am an idiot because I see people read my stuff and I am as thankful for it as I have always been, and now I am comparing it to an entirely different medium with an entirely different tone and having a crisis because it doesn’t get as much attention.
I think the thing I struggle with, even still, is having attended university to find a bunch of likeminded deep thinking writey-folk to bounce ideas off and feel validated existing alongside, only to leave university and be thrust back into the isolated void that is writing for oneself in an uncaring universe. A writer’s journey is often a lonely one, as it’s just me and this sheet of virtual paper, hashing it out until I arbitrarily come to a stop. I’m my own editor, so I have no idea if my garbled thoughts make sense to the outside world or if I’m just amusing my own tangle of nerves in the meat soup inside my skull. And then when I do hit publish, having absolutely no idea how many people these words reach. There are analytics, sure, but what is a view? A cursory glance or a fully comprehended ten-minute sit-down with a coffee and an open mind?
Actually, I don’t really check the analytics because I’m sure I won’t like what I see. So that probably doesn’t help.
Whinging about views is cringe, I know! But the goal of this blog is to be as open and honest as possible about my journey through life, and in my continuing attempts to portray myself with accuracy I have to acknowledge the parts of me that you’re not supposed to have. Like being jealous of the other part of your brain that can make people laugh, and comparing yourself against more successful people who are doing what you want to be doing but better.
“Making things is like deciding to spend your life playing a rigged demented slot machine, except instead of quarters you’re gambling everything that’s ever made you feel something and like, your childhood trauma.” – Savannah Brown
For those of you that do read what I have to say, thank you so much. I hope you don’t feel overlooked by my self-obsessive neuroticism in this post. If you’re fellow writers then maybe you can simply relate.
Words Once Unspoken
Content Warning: This post contains extensive discussion about grief, depression, and contains mentions of suicide.
So, as has been mentioned on this blog before, my mother died when I was ten years old. It’s a bit of an abrupt gut-punch of a start to this blog post, but as I’ve found many times throughout life, there’s never really a painless way to bring it up. But bring it up I shall, because today I want to talk about my journey from that moment onward, throughout my teenage years, and how that affected me going forward.
Why? Because I’m a chronic oversharer? Maybe. But I’ve found myself thinking about my early teenage years a lot over the past few weeks, and applying what I know now to my mental state back then. And maybe in sharing my journey here, someone may find some use out of it. Plus, looking back on the completed post now, I realise that I’m not sure many people understand what I went through as a teenager. I’m not sure I truly did!
So, I’m ten years old, and my mum has just died. Life changing stuff. But it’s not really information that’s possible to absorb right now. It’s something I’m dreadfully aware of, but I feel guilty for taking time out of school because for the most part, I feel strangely normal. It may sound brutal, but at the time I’m telling myself that the only change to my life is that I never get to see my mum ever again, right? That’s sad, that sucks, I loved my mum to pieces. But I’ve turned a complex four dimensional traumatic loss into a 2D problem. My most immediate concerns are the bleak atmosphere which now surrounds us as a family. Oh, and for a good year I’m on standby to give anyone who badmouths my mother a black eye. Nobody did, of course, but that defensive aggression was there.
I don’t have a lot of memories from that period (I’d say due to time but I remember this part of my life being a little hazy in the years immediately after.) I have vague memories of mum’s funeral, where I was too numb to cry. This’ll be important later on. My throat got real tight and my mouth got real dry, but I felt a deep disconnect between these physical reactions and my numb emotional state. If I were to take a guess at psychology I’d say this was either the cause or beginning of a lifelong (so far) problem. I’m still surprised by the physical emotional reactions my body has to this day. But for the next ten years at least, I very rarely cry, that’s the point here.
Something I don’t really talk about too much is the misfortune we had with pets in the immediate years afterwards. I cried when our dog Tiffany died, and my dad told me that was probably everything coming out then, but I wasn’t convinced, and to be honest, I’m still not. If anything, this caused me more concern over my inability to cry for my mum. I’d cry over the dog but not her? What did that say about me? Anyway, we also adopted rabbits and guinea pigs which didn’t last long for various health reasons or other misfortunes. We treated them perfectly well, but it began to feel like death had cursed our family.
Again, I really don’t remember too much about the immediate two or so years after my mum died, but I should probably add that it wouldn’t have been all doom and gloom. My numbness came paired with the ability to compartmentalise the grieving part of myself with the usual ten year old kid part of myself, and only when looking back now can I understand that this duality of self contributed to a lot of my developing worldview and mindstate going forwards. Hell, one of my mum’s friends later told me that at her very wake, I spent a lot of it enthusiastically telling her all about the Nintendo Wii, which must have just been announced. I was a kid who was getting by convincing himself that the world was still normal, and acting accordingly.
I remember having a lot of anxiety about starting secondary school. Probably the normal stuff, but as I suffer so much with anxiety now I do wonder. Those thoughts patterns feel awfully familiar. Catastrophising about change, fearing the unknown. What if nobody likes me, what if I’m bullied, what if I get lost between lessons? But hey, I survived. I remember being sapient enough about time and change that I tried to commit much of my first day to memory, as I knew it’d be something I looked back on and reminisced on later in life. I’d become highly aware of how time could erode memory and transform normality.
Anyway, new school, new friends. I spent a lot of time feeling like I had some sort of other knowledge. That mostly manifested as me feeling “wiser” than the other kids, which would be absurd to anyone who knew me at the time because I was outwardly very immature and hyperactive, like many other twelve year olds. I didn’t spend school moping; not yet, anyway. I spent it forming a group of friends who’d mostly go on to leave by the end of the school year.
Inwardly, I’d dramatise my “duality”, though I wouldn’t think about it in quite that sense yet. I’d replay in my head ordinary conversations with a different tone. Phrases of happenstance could become moments of deep importance. And here’s the thing: I still have no idea how much of this behaviour was normal for a kid my age, and how much of it was influenced by my “unique” worldview. This is important, I realise now. I had no idea what normal was. I had no idea how much of me would have been me if my mum was still alive. I still don’t.
(I would eventually gain enough self awareness to realise that any other kid in school could be hiding just as much trauma as I was, but it took a bit.)
To add to my emotional plate, I’d developed quite a crush, one which would end up in us going out for two weeks before she moved away at the start of the summer holidays. We’re still friends, so there’s a chance she’s reading this, and if she is I’d like to say that whatever came next wasn’t your fault!
I mention it here because for the first time, I’m correlating these two very different types of loss under one word. My then-girlfriend moving away just as we finally got together did have a profound effect on my mental health. This type of loss was one I could digest, and so for the first time I fully felt the sting of missing someone. This wasn’t a pain I was too numb to recognise. It was a “normal” growing experience, perhaps twisted a little out of shape by my past experiences.
I fell into what I would now consider to be undiagnosed depression. I maintained that aforementioned “duality”, but for the first time my friends saw the cracks. Some days I’d be almost completely unresponsive, spending lessons with my head in my arms (when allowed), wandering off at lunch breaks. It wasn’t all about the girlfriend moving away, which I of course got over in time; I became obsessed with the intangibility of this generalised awful feeling I was having. I never became suicidal, thankfully, but I would dedicate many thoughts to what my funeral would look like, how I could die in an accident, what music would play at the service, that sort of thing.
I didn’t understand what was happening in my brain so as much as I dramatised my own life in my thoughts, I also beat myself up for being overly dramatic. I called myself an attention seeker for being hyperactive, and developed a very low opinion of myself. And, crucially, I didn’t tell anyone in my life how I was feeling at the time. I’d lose entire evenings to feeling depressed, not that I knew to even think of it that way at the time. And I spent the entire time thinking I was just being overly dramatic, punishing myself for feeling bad.
It’s not until I put those words down that I realise how bleak it sounds, so let me add this: Despite the pervasive depression in my life at the time, some pretty amazing stuff also happened. I met my step family, who I love dearly, and had many fantastic days even with this headspace I’d sink into. And I hid that shit, by the way. If anyone’s wondering, I was ashamed of it. If I was sulking sullenly in my room and somebody knocked, I’d perk up and pretend I was fine before they came in.
Importantly, it doesn’t make any of the joy or happiness I expressed false at all. The thing that confused me so much about how I was feeling is that the smiles weren’t fake, they were genuine. It was possible for me to have a really good day and a really bad night, and both halves of my day were as true as each other.
I hit another pretty rough patch when I was sixteen. An online friend of mine who I didn’t know too well chose to end his own life, and this cut through me in ways I didn’t understand. If I hadn’t known him so well, why did I feel so much grief over his passing? Compounding on this, some of my closest friends were going through their own mental health crises, and in my haste to help them I began obsessing over them following in my online friend’s footsteps. This was just about as much depression and anxiety as I’ve ever felt all at once; my grades slipped, my behaviour became extremely irrational, and after months of masking my pain I finally broke down in front of my parents.
I lay this all bare now because I finally start to see a pattern. Besides just understanding anxiety and depression a lot better now, I can also see how experiencing loss at such a young age formed my response to loss and pain going forwards.
This is all the distant past now. I’d like you to know that while I still deal with anxiety every day, I’m fairly confident in saying I haven’t felt depressed in a decent while. I’ve had amazing support from my family and friends, and I’m actually due for my first therapy session next week. I’m generally in a pretty good place for me! But I wanted to share my adolescent experiences, and how things which all felt so intangible and indefinable back then were actually always linked together and quantifiable.
And to give a clear shining message: I got better. In my darkest moments I convinced myself that I didn’t want to feel better because I didn’t know who I was without the pain. But it turns out that it wasn’t the pain that defined me. And as I learn how to deal with it now, I find that I’m still myself. I just spend less time paralysed by my own brain.
One last thing, although it’s a little personal. I mentioned my mum a lot and how I digested her passing by compartmentalising what it meant. But a few years ago I think I did finally confront the “4D version” of events by recontextualising things from an adult point of view. Instead of just considering my life without her in it, I considered her life and how it ended too early, and the world without her in it. And on the way home from work at 12am, I sat in a bus shelter and had a good cry.
If you made it this far, thanks so much for reading. I hope it helped you in some way, but if not, that’s fine too. This was mostly for me.
A Fateful Discovery
Audio version coming soon (I wrote this late).
Names are funny things. You can grow so used to them that you stop hearing them for what they are and just associate them with who or what they represent.
For instance, my middle name, Tadhg, is representative of my Irish heritage. I’m a quarter Irish on my mother’s side, and until today, it’s only ever come up as an interesting tidbit, and a “guess how you spell it” party game. (It’s pronounced like “tiger” without the r, by the way.) But today, when discussing it with a friend, she said, “I wonder what that means?”
Well, according to my dad, they picked Tadhg because it was listed as an Irish version of Timothy, which as it turns out isn’t strictly true but Wikipedia was harder to come by in the nineties. Anyway, they liked Timothy, they wanted Irish heritage in my name, bish bash bosh there’s your birth ceritifcate.
Only… looking into it now, the deeper meaning behind the name Tadhg is actually “poet, philosopher, or story-teller.”
In other words, I’ve been a writer for my entire life, and I’m just now learning that story telling is my literal middle name. That’s some prophecy shit right there!
In all seriousness, this discovery does hold a fairly special meaning to me. I know that naming me my future profession was more of a cosmic coincidence than anything, but all the same, it makes me feel that bit closer to my mum. I started writing early enough in life that she got to see my spark for it, and given that Tadhg is an homage to her side of the family and that my love for her and my nan is what inspires me to keep creating, this all feels like a poetically inspired gift from fate.
How’s that for a hug from beyond?
Twitter’s Dead, And That Sucks
Elon Musk, in his infinite wealth I mean wisdom, has decided that non-paying Twitter users are only allowed to view 600 tweets per day. Hell, even paying Twitter users can only see 6000 tweets per day, which is also not nearly enough. This effectively kills Twitter.
We’re supposed to say, good riddance! That solves that! That’s one less distraction for my day! Or some variance of these words. Because that’s sticking it to the man. Good! I didn’t want your stupid website anyway, billionaire! And maybe some people legitimately feel this way. But I don’t. Well, apart from directing ire at the idiot billionaire, that is.
I joined Twitter nearly fifteen years ago, at the age of 13, which means I’ve been using the site for over half of my life. And as an introvert, it’s become my favourite way to keep up with my friends and people I admire. People often talk about what a toxic cesspit Twitter is, but it turns out that if you unfollow news sites and brands and toxic people, mute a bunch of depressing words, and block any assholes you come across, you can – could – make that site a far more pleasant experience. For me, Twitter is not this toxic cesspit which I’m finally free from being chained to. It’s a social media feed full of people I like talking to each other about things we all like. It’s been one of my primary ways of socialising for a good while now.
So for some idiot billionaire to come and take that away for idiot billionaire reasons is actually quite a blow. I’m not going to pretend to celebrate. It sucks! I already feel cut off from people who’s thoughts I enjoy reading on a daily basis. There’s other platforms but the vibe is different with every single one. YouTube and Twitch are less of an open two-way channel. Instagram is less immediate, or thought-focused. Facebook is… Facebook. And there’s no unified Twitter alternative that we’ve all decided to migrate to without incident. Twitter is a legitimate form of communication that an idiot billionaire has just stamped all over, and its absence is going to affect the way I perceive the world moving forwards.
Hopefully this post ages like milk and the change is reverted. But let’s be real, unless he’s even dumber than we all thought, he’s killing Twitter on purpose at this point.
My Late Twenties Confidence
In some aspects, I’ve quite often felt like an older man in a younger person’s body. Perhaps it comes from learning one of the harsher realities of life from an early age. Or maybe it comes from developing an introspective mind. Or perhaps I’m just an idiot who thinks too much. But the fact of the matter is, I often catch myself ruminating on life as if I’m a scant few years from the end of it, rather than a fistful of decades.
On my walk home from work tonight I was thinking about human personality as a spectrum from “thinker” to “doer”. Now, I’m not saying that thinkers don’t do or that doers don’t think. Maybe most people exist in a healthy middle ground of both. But I’m certainly a little too far along the thinker end of this spectrum that I’ve just made up. I think myself in circles until I’m too dizzy to do.
That being said, I came here today to write about self acceptance. My reason for having such an introspective evening is that I was thinking back on my twenties so far, and comparing them against the rest of my life. I’ve still two years to live of this decade, but so far it’s looking like the general theme of this chapter in my life has been self acceptance. I hear a lot about how you spend your twenties figuring yourself out, and I think that comes from leaving education and leaving the established social routine for the first time in life. Who are we outside of school, outside of teenage society, with its hierarchy of popularity established through pre-empathetic judgements?
For me, I spent a lot of time in school being picked on and a lot of time afterwards telling myself I hadn’t had it that bad. But the more I age, the more I consider how I react to certain situations, the more I realise how damaging of an effect it is to be constantly told you’re not funny, not worth listening to, and being spun into the butt of every joke. As an adult, that has manifested in me as social anxiety, and paranoia that people are purposefully ignoring me if they don’t respond to messages. Even when my rational brain is able to assess my feelings as irrational and realise where they come from, it’s still a struggle to deal with.
The further away I get from school, though, the more confident I grow. There’s always that small, nagging part of me that worries about being the whelp of the social group, or gets irrationally defensive about “losing” a snark-off. But slowly over the years, I’ve come to realise that I’m quite universally liked at work. I’m not the weird outcast kid who makes jokes that need vetting from the popular kids before people are allowed to laugh anymore. And with that kind of power, the jerks who do come along hold less sway over me by being jerks. Suddenly, I’m not the weirdo for having my own hobbies and brand of humour, they’re the weirdo for taking exception to it.
Well… most of the time, at least. Turns out I’ve been cursed with a feeble human brain, and lessons learned aren’t always applied, depending on the day. Generally speaking, though, I feel like I’m changing as a person as I approach my thirties, becoming more myself than ever before. I have my limits, but those boundaries are moving and I’m feeling happier for the breathing room.
Before you head off, a quick note. Due to the creation of my writing blog, Excepts From A Multifarious Mind, I have also spun up a YouTube channel named Kritigri Writes. There, I post audio versions of my short stories. I’m now thinking of posting audio versions of these blogs posts there, too, so go subscribe if you haven’t already! There’s no audio version of this blog post at the time of publication as it’s currently 1am, but keep an eye out.
It Took Me 25 Years To Realise I’m Bi
For a quarter of a century, I was fairly convinced that I was squarely in the heterosexual camp. I mean, sure, I’d flirt with my male friends all the time, but that was just jokes. Sometimes I’d give the idea due consideration, but then I’d measure my personality against those of the sterotypically gay men I’d see in media and the like, and that shoe just didn’t fit for me. And whilst I’ve always been accepting of people from all walks of life, some awkward part of me always backed away from the notion of being queer because I was worried it would make me different.
There’s a reason I’ve kept my bisexuality largely to myself since I realised a few years ago. Firstly, I wanted to be certain. And while I’m still figuring out just where on the bisexuality spectrum I personally sit (heterosexual biromantic, heteroromantic bisexual, that kind of thing), I know enough to be comfortable calling myself bi without the risk of doubling back on myself a few years from now. Which is also totally fine. People can change their minds! I grew up in an era of sexuality being a binary absolute that defined your personality, which is a concept I’ve learned to be a societal falsity.
Ooh, societal falsity. We’re throwing out some fancy terms today.
The main thing I want to get across is the genuine euphoria I’ve felt since accepting myself as bi. And I’m talking from an identity standpoint. Once I accepted that I was bi, I felt this weight lifting from me that I didn’t know I was carrying before. I felt liberated from the burden of adhering to a personality I didn’t know I was trying to be. And the funny part is, I don’t think I’ve actually changed as a person since coming out to myself. I’m not suddenly flamboyant or effeminate; there’s absolutely nothing wrong with being so, but that’s just not me. Society had taught me that this was the essence of being queer, but as many of us learn throughout life, the world is much more diverse and nuanced than any amount of portrayal within media would have us believe.
The other thing I didn’t realise about being bi is that it’s not a 50/50 split of attraction, if we’re talking fem and masc. (I mean, firstly, bisexuality is about attraction to all genders; the etymology of the word is a little outdated, and from my understanding pansexuality is a little different.) The best way I could phrase it is that I’m attracted to men in a different way to women, and I’m still kind of figuring out the shape of that. But also, since it took me 25 years to realise I was bi, you won’t be surprised to realise I still fall more on the side of being attracted to women. That’s not something I like to admit too often, because I feel like I’m trying to add some sort of heterosexual-appeasing qualifier to my sexuality, but since we’re talking about this in detail today, I don’t mind stating it. Similarly, I have bisexual friends who are more attracted to genders matching theirs. I’ve yet to meet anyone truly “50/50”.
The last thing I want to address is the people who may be reading this wondering, why should this matter? Hopefully you’ll have picked up on this reading some of what I’ve discussed above, but it’s mostly a personal thing. I want people to know who I am. Being bi isn’t just about who I’m attracted to, it’s part of my identity. It’s a lens through which I see the world. It’s something that may be a little hard to grasp if it’s something you’ve never personally wrestled with. But just being bi and knowing I’m bi has made me much happier as a person! Plus, coming out is exhausting, so if I can tell everyone at once that really lessens some of my workload, if you know what I’m saying.
If you took the time to read this, thank you so much! I’m in a rarely lucky position to be blessed with an amazing family who supports me in this, and some incredible friends who helped me come to terms with it myself from early on. My one request is that this doesn’t change the way you view me as a person. Not radically, anyway. You might be like, oh damn, Kristian’s bi? That’s pretty hot. That’s okay, you can have those thoughts, if you want. I mean, who am I to stop you? ahem what I mean to say is, I’m still me. I just mentioned those stereotypes as damaging things, so let’s not apply those to someone who didn’t fit them before! Haha, okay, catch you in the next one, happy Pride.
My Own Kind Of Magic
To me, there’s nothing that feels quite as satisfying as writing, specifically fiction. I don’t personally believe in predestination, but more than anything else, writing feels like what I was made for. It’s why I get so frustrated at my inability to remain focused on one project long enough to write a novel. It’s the metric by which I measure my worth as a human being, although I probably shouldn’t.
It’s early days, far too early to pat myself on the back just yet, but with this Multifarious Mind project, I feel this innate sensation of reclaimed identity. It began when my friend asked me to go over a script they were writing with them. The simple act of offering a second perspective on their superb work was enough to reignite the creative fire within me, and so I created Excerpts From A Multifarious Mind with the knowledge of everything I’ve learned about myself over the last few years to help keep that fire alive.
I can’t quite explain what it feels like to write stories. When I have an idea that I need to get out, and I’m a thousand words deep with plenty left to tell, I feel like the universe clicks in a way which it rarely does. I’ve heard artists talk the same way about sketching or painting, and I’m sure musicians feel the same about songwriting. It’s the closest thing we’ve got to magic, I suppose.
Whenever I talk about this, people ask me if I’m going to take it further, write a novel, become world famous etc etc. Well last year, I tried to force my mind to remain focused on a novel. Chapter one went great. Chapter two, excellent. Chapter three was okay, but could use some work. Which I’d get back to, of course. Which I never did. (And I know not all novels are written sequentially, but that’s what made sense to me.)
Right now, I’m not writing for any reason other than for the love of it. I hope people read what I make, but even if my blog gets no hits and my videos get no views, I’ll be happy to keep going. Right now, writing just makes me feel alive. I hope I never lose that.
And if I stumble, and lose my grip on this part of my identity yet again, I can feel secure in knowing it’s within reach for when I want another try.
Third Time’s The Charm!
Hey you! Did you know that I’ve been trying to write stories my entire life? I’ve even created two separate blogs aimed at writing short stories in the past and immediately failed to keep up with them!
For the full story on this, as well as my new short story blog which is absolutely going to stick this time, you can check it out right here.
The aim is to write a new short story every single month. I’m not aiming to get myself noticed, or published, or become a worldwide superstar or anything of the sort. I’m writing for the love of it, and to get myself into the habit of doing so. I already have a 4,500 word long first draft of May’s short story in my Drive, which will go up after I’ve donned my editing hat and had a whittle. If short stories of mine are something which interests you, go give the page a follow!
Perpetually Perturbed 