Back when I was but a wee lad of, let’s say…20, I spent a while searching around on the internet for blogs of crossdressers, and in particular people whose voices jived with my sensibilities. At the time I found, well, not many, which eventually made me want to add my own voice to that minuscule chorus. But there was one blogger in particular which I liked, and whom I checked up on semi-frequently. Then one day, they were gone.
Some years later, once again casting an eye about aforementioned information-super-highway, I stumbled across a funny crossdresser on youtube with a decent sense of humour and a slew of videos to their name. I followed, liked, subscribed, and paid attention. Then one day, they, too, disappeared off into the ether.
One could be an anomaly, two is the beginnings of a trend, and it certainly never stopped there. There’ve been other crossdressers that I’d gotten reasonably close to on the internet who one day up and vanished like smoke on a mountain.
(For the curious, the first person I mentioned was a British blogger, I believe, who was a programmer, and went by “tv-chix” or something. The second was Jessica-Who, who at some point also owned the now-defunct jessica-who.com. In the off-chance that y’all at some point stumble across this blog, feel free to reach out <3)
I’ve wondered about them lately, particularly as I, myself, have likewise wandered, somewhat accidentally, towards that horizon of invisibility. Whoops. My bad. mea culpa, et cetera.
So why? Why do people disappear? Why have I not written anything for the last 4 months? What in god’s name have I been doing that’s so important?
I suspect that the over-arching answer here is that life gets in the way, and deliberately or otherwise, we need to step back a bit to take care of it.
In some cases, maybe there’s a risk involved: a possibility that your semi-secret life becoming even-less secret will have detrimental effects on your not-at-all-secret-life. Family finding out, employers finding out. Relationships at risk, jobs in jeopardy.
Maybe for some, it’s a matter of making a deliberate life choice: “I am going to stop”, which I frankly believe is impossible/foolhardy, and a dangerous attempt to suppress the insuppressible. For others, that choice might be a realization that they are transgender, and want to not have their accumulated baggage on the public record. I can understand that too, having tucked my old livejournal away so that no one can look upon my woeful late-teen-angst sad-fests and fucking weirdo-writing all borne of loneliness and a fear of being different.
For me, though, my disappearance over the last four months can be mostly whittled down to one root-cause: I’m just busy.
My new role at work has been taking up a big chunk of my mental load, and my two-year-old is taking up the rest of it. I’ve barely had time to dress, let alone write! And not-dressing usually means not-writing, because one feeds into the other in an interesting way.
My blog has in some ways been a journey of discovery, too, and… well, maybe I’m discovering fewer things. I’ve gotten to a point where the road is well-trod, and while I’m happy to go over the same ground myself, I don’t want to bore you all (or myself!) along the way. I absolutely refuse to turn this blog into an “omg I dressed up and I went outside AGAIN ahhhHHHhh” recounting of every single time I do something mundane in a dress.
So… I’m sorry. I’m sorry to the people who’ve wondered where I’ve gone. I’m sorry to the people who’ve emailed me, whom I’ve been bad at replying-to. I’m sorry to myself for not being able to fully commit to writing a post every month, and I’m sorry for not being able to even find something interesting to talk about.
But I’m not going anywhere :) I just might be a bit less prolific than I’d like.
<3