circling back

 So i've been thinking of starting up some sort of blog again.

Social media seems to be deteriorating to the point it's not very usable. Facebook and instagram are getting steadily worse and twitter is already a lost cause. I do use bluesky, but haven't really taken off with it. Even iNaturalist has a lot of problems making it hard for me to want to use any more.

My last post here was over 12 years ago. True, after that i had some posts on the coyot.es network, but those posts are gone now. not long after that, social media took off and people just kind of stopped blogging. I have heard people talking about blogging again recently, so maybe it's worth restarting this, or looking into other options, like substack. I don't want to try to monetize it, i just want a place to write about things.

It's been an eventful 12 years. When i was shoveling out those cars in my last post, i was living in a little place by the North Branch in Montpelier. After that, we bought a house up the hill, where i discovered and started restoring a small seasonal spring and wetland i named 'mystery spring'. I got a new job as a wetland ecologist. I got married and had two kids. Things got really hard around the time of covid and i didn't know why. I finally decided to try to face down a bunch of childhood stuff i used to completely ignore. I found out i'd totally misunderstood what was going on with me as a kid and actually, most of the things going on there happened because, as it turns out, i am autistic. That led to a sort of revival in my life when i went on a wonderful journey of self discovery. I spent a lot of time in the autistic community on twitter. But then things started getting hard again, even worse than before. My issues now weren't because of autism or solvable by understanding autism. I ended up having a divorce and losing mystery spring. Things got even worse and i ended up in a state called autistic burnout where i could only do essential things i needed to for kids or work. Things were really hard for a while, but now i am again in a place down along the North Branch, slowly rebuilding my life, trying to (re) learn how healthy relationships work, and trying to sort yet more issues. That's all i will say about this because i don't want to post a ton more personal information here. But, that is a summary i guess.

What's next? I don't know. I might try to change the name of this or create a new job because the things i want to talk about aren't all about slowing water down. I also want to talk about the California fires and additional aspect of the Vermont floods, about climate change, about neurodiversity, and a bunch of other stuff. So, i'm not sure what i'll do.