Ten years later, ten years older, ten years wiser

My Tuesday has been a proverbial flurry of activity from waking until about five minutes ago, which is why I'm over an hour late to the party: July 3 was my ten-year anniversary on LiveJournal.

I think I need to take a deep breath.

I mean, gods, what is there to say? When I started this damned thing, I was still married to Kristi, living with her parents in Lake George, New York, and working a bat-whack combination of day shifts and overnights at Verizon. Abbey was barely in school; Nik was still a toddler. My quasi-professional career in puzzle construction was still new enough to be a novelty for me, while my music "career" had never even made it as far as open mics since I left Oneonta. Kink was something that happened to other people, and poly was about as a foreign concept as breathing through my ears. My social life was more or less nonexistent. My future, when I bothered to even consider it, looked like my present at the time, only longer.

And then LiveJournal happened. It seems a tad pretentious to say this, but that doesn't make it any less true: LJ changed my life. I started on a lark, mostly as a way of carving a little niche of space online back when that seemed like a specialized challenge. I was a paid member from Day One, coughing up the five bucks because I didn't know anyone who could slip me a start-up code (these being the days when you needed one). I didn't really know what I'd be getting into, or if it'd be something I'd stick with once the novelty wore off. I started adding friends mostly based on shared interests and how much I liked their writing (although my very first LJ friend was Bryan, a friend from college).

I hadn't a clue of what this stupid little blog would give me, which turned out to be my life. It gave me my social life. It gave me just about every friend I have now, be it directly or indirectly, including those who keep me going, and those who I love and have loved and will love for as long as I'm breathing. It gave me a safety net every time my world came crashing down. It gave me every relationship I've started since 2002, no matter how brief or long, or how serious or casual, or how emotional or sexual or both, or how healthy or damaged. It gave me my connection to fandom and the greater geek community, reminding me how alone I'm not. It gave me Boston, gave me a new home when I couldn't tolerate the old one any longer, and then gave me New Hampshire and a place where I can find the silence I'd forgotten I needed. It gave me the knowledge that kink isn't something that only happens over there somewhere, and that monogamy might not be the answer I'd been told it was. It gave me a voice, a creative outlet, a reason to pursue those projects that might have stayed in the back of my head, a way to pursue the music and the writing and all the rest of it. It gave me my better self, and the strength and courage to try to do better, to say out loud that I deserve a good life.

In short, it gave me all of you. I don't have words shimmering enough to let you know how grateful I am for that.

So here I am, age 41, no longer in New York, no longer working for Verizon. I'm married to figmentj, a woman who I'm blessed to lie down with every night and then wake up next to every morning, a woman I can't wait to grow old with. In a matter of hours we'll be welcoming belgatherial to our home, someone who we've come to love from a distance even before we started holding our breaths over the opportunity to love her within our own walls. My novel is nearly done. My music has found an audience. I'm slowly, ever so slowly but ever so surely, learning how to live my life the way I should have been living it from the beginning. My present is amazing, and my future looks nothing like it—it looks better.

And as for LJ, I'm still here. Thank you all for sharing these ten years with me. Stick around, because the best is yet to come.