PERSONAL WRITING
Memoirs and personal reflections about queer life, childhood, survival, recovery and the work of becoming more fully myself. Some pieces are difficult and others are joyful; together they trace the experiences behind my fiction and systems writing.
FEATURED · SYSTEMS AND SURVIVAL · 2024
Defying Anti-Life
A personal and political essay about the cost of resisting systems that prize control over compassion, and the need to keep choosing life, community and agency.
Personal recollections
Memories of identity, family, work, happiness and the machines and stories that helped me make sense of the world.
An Early 2000s Coming Out Story
A three-part memoir about coming out, leaving home and surviving the years that followed. Read the parts in order.
Content note: This series discusses abuse of minors, trauma, family violence and mental health crisis.
COMING OUT STORY · PART 1
Part 1: End of Childhood
The beginning of a three-part account of childhood, family instability and coming out in the early 2000s.
COMING OUT STORY · PART 2
Part 2: Run, Survive, Repeat
The story continues through the Freedom Centre, first love, rejection and the realities of trying to find safety at fourteen.
COMING OUT STORY · PART 3
Part 3: Telling Stories
The concluding chapter follows another attempted beginning and the stories that survival taught me to tell.
CHILDHOOD AND IDENTITY · 2023
Crouching Manhood, Hidden Barbie
A childhood encounter with Barbies, computers and the rules placed around masculinity, remembered through the experience of becoming completely lost in play.
POLAND AND MEMORY · 2026
If You Immediately Know the Candlelight Is Fire…
A 1995 school trip through Poland and the moments that taught me there was another layer beneath the surface of the world.
WORK AND HAPPINESS · 2021
My 2020 Retrospective: A Lesson in Happiness
A personal account of freelancing, work and burnout, and the difficult lesson that happiness cannot be built by repeating the conditions that caused the harm.
COMPUTERS AND MEMORY · 2020
A History of My PC GPUs
Twenty-six years of graphics cards, games and personal computers, remembered through the machines that accompanied different stages of my life.
Reflections
The ideas, cultural touchstones and acts of reclamation that connect personal experience to the wider systems around us.
STARGATE AND IMAGINATION · 2021
Reminiscing About the Greatest TV Show of All Time
A personal history with Stargate, from seeing the original film trailer in 1994 to the place the franchise came to occupy throughout my life.
TRAUMA AND RECOVERY · 2025
Final Impact: Reclaiming My Story a Decade Later
A decade later, I reclaim the story of 2015 from the people and institutions that told it for me, tracing how collapse eventually became the beginning of rebuilding.
Content note: Discusses abuse of minors, workplace trauma, drug use and mental health crisis.
QUEER LIFE AND CLASS · 2025
Queer Class Exclusion
A personal examination of how money, status and assimilation have fractured queer solidarity and left people shaped by rejection and class struggle behind.
CRAFT AND PATIENCE · 2025
Gardening Taught Me How to Be a Better Programmer
What trial, observation, feedback loops and working with living constraints taught me about becoming a more patient and adaptive programmer.
STORIES AND SYSTEMS · 2026
Behind the Prologue: Writing About Systems
A companion to the Langenium Prologue about WERP as an allegory for human systems, their recurring failures and our responsibility as stewards.
Keep exploring
These are selected memoirs and reflections. The complete archive includes more personal history, cultural writing and accounts of creative work.