about

My name is aspen (they/them), and I created this blog to reflect on the world and share my thoughts about the things I’m reading, writing, watching, and pondering. As such, I imagine the posts herein will be a whole mish-mash of topics and themes. I’m currently in grad school for Library & Information Science, so be not surprised if I write about things from a library and archives perspective. I like to watch movies and read books in my free time, so reflecting on the stories and art I interact with will most likely also be represented. In addition to those indoors activities, I enjoy birdwatching and going on runs (when my hips and knees allow) and marveling at the little bugs and winged critters around me. Perhaps one day I’ll even write and share a poem or two here—who knows.

A few other notes about me: I am a white, transgender, nonbinary communist* and atheist (leaning toward Satanic Temple) who is autistic and ADHD. I’m also a former christian (raised in the Evangelical Free Church of America, which is cult-lite) and have C-PTSD stemming from religious trauma and emotional abuse. I have depression, generalized anxiety, and OCD. These aspects all inform the ways I perceive, understand, and interact with the world, and many of them (all of them together, at times) play into what I write about and why and how. I imagine these aspects will surface in various ways throughout different posts I make here.

I say all this in part because I’m a work in progress—I’m going to mess up and write the wrong thing sometimes or think in fallacies or react poorly to critiques out of fear and defensiveness instead of curiosity. However, this is a space of growth and learning and reflection more than it is for doing the “right” thing or being perfect and eloquent every time. I am striving every day to be a better version of myself than I was the day before, but fuck-ups happen.

I will also say that this is not the first blog I’ve ever created, but that doesn’t matter right now. What matters now is that I feel I have things to say, longform things that would do better in a blog instead of a series of long-winded and rambling Instagram posts. And anyways, we all would benefit from taking a few steps back from social media, which pushes generative AI content** and refines algorithms in order to foment outrage and fear.

So here I am, again, with my words, for all to see—or no one to see. Just to have a place to be creative and publish my thoughts is nice, even if only two people read them. I’m also using this space to share and maintain a resource library, wherein I will compile articles, essays, zines, etc. that I think are interesting and want to share, even if I don’t have a lot of thoughts to share alongside them. There are good and thoughtful and thought-provoking writers out there, and things worth dwelling on and thinking about, but I don’t have the time or mental capacity to write follow-ups to every one of them.

All of that to say: Welcome.

*By which I mean I stand for and alongside the everyday people—the working class—and believe in collective liberation (not just for trans people, but Black people, immigrants, Palestinians, the disabled, and various other oppressed groups) through collective action. The United States government is rotten to its core, built on a legacy of violence through slavery, racism, and misogyny, guided by white supremacy, christofascism, and colonization. I long for people—us—to be able to live our lives in peace and happiness and comfort, which requires the complete dismantling (not mere reformation) of the systems that oppress us.

**I do not consent to my work—published on this platform and on any other platforms, future and past—to be scraped by generative AI or used to train generative AI models, also called Large Language Models (LLMs). Generative AI systems are instructed to cease using my writing and materials in their training, and delete my content from their databases.