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It’s
going on three years since badfaggot.net was last
updated. A staggering amount has
happened in that time, much of it documented on my blog.
A farewell to post-secondary education.
Emancipation from my parents. Hobnobbery
with minor celebrities. A brush with minor
celebrity in my own
right. A cross-country move.
My thirtieth birthday.
At
the time I conceived of the site, permanence was a
paramount concern in my life. I thought
I’d reached a plateau of contentment, and was defensive and rather
humorless in
my fortification of it. The recent past
had been so demoralizing that I figured any future turn would have to
be one
for the worse.
And
yet I kept goading myself into embracing change. Change
was what had brought a little peace
and a lot of texture into my life, after all. I
grabbed hold of the things that unsettled me most and
swallowed them
whole, one after another, until I learned not to dread them, but to
revere
them. Honoring your fears is no
guarantee of happiness, but it does have the happy effect of throwing
light
onto otherwise obscure possibilities.
One
of those fears which I managed to devour, instead of simply
letting its latent violence gnaw at me, was my sexuality.
This site, along with much of my public life
in recent years, was built as a monument to the dread and the
possibility which
inhere in that. I feared I was
unlovable; once I opened myself to the idea that I might be loveable
after all,
no other fear could have the same hold on me. And
I began to wrestle with them all. I
haven’t stopped yet.
But
combating that array of inhibitions and challenges means
that I can no longer live a life entirely circumscribed by the shadow
of what I’ve
built in the past. So the site comes
down, even if I have nothing yet to offer in its stead.
Historians
and artists know just how quickly revolution can
calcify into orthodoxy. I used to be
paralyzed by that knowledge – if decay into stasis is inevitable, why
bother
trying to set anything in motion? Lately,
though, I’ve learned a lot about the
advantages to be had in making peace with change and living through it. Every plateau has vistas all its own, and
even when they no longer encompass the extent of our thinking, we are
never
without the vantages each one offers.
Thanks
to all of you who love me and care for me no
matter what. I know you’re looking
forward to what comes next as much as I am.
-
Matt
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