If you’ve spent any time on this blog, you know two things: 1. I’ve been through an ordeal, and 2. I write like someone who wants you to feel it.

Indulging my psychological torment isn’t really how I prefer to pass the time, though. I like to think I’m more than the craziest thing that’s ever happened to me. Maybe you can relate.

Today’s post is an attempt to show more of me as I see me, something I acknowledge feels like working out for the first time in years — I am not in shape for it.

So, how do I see me? I have asked that of myself a lot these days. My writing used to be powered by wit and sarcasm as a means to air my grievances, in a tightrope act to ensure I also stayed genuine. Is that what I aspire to return to? I think the answer is partly ‘yes,’ and it will point toward the future of this blog.

I took the Ancestry DNA test that set this blog in motion in the early days of 2017. I was a bachelor with a day job, living out of a small apartment on Miami Beach. Nearly 7 years later, I am a married man with a 2.5 year old son, a small business, and a mortgage I wish would disappear.

In other words, despite my best efforts, I’m now a full-fledged adult.

Writing has always been the way I make sense of, well, everything. It takes herculean effort to bend my A.D.D. to my will, and I’ve done that with the most success when I’m writing. About my worldviews. My humor, my snark. And certainly my experiences of the ‘take-a-DNA-test-get-the-shock-of-your-life-do-some-more-digging-oh-you-have-no-idea-what’s-shocking’ variety.

This event is not the center of my world, and it only ever held that position as I attempted to make sense of it. Through writing (and thousands of dollars in therapy), I have done that. But that work is mostly done, and having said everything I could possibly say about it, I no longer remember who I was as a writer before this story. In part because I am not the person I was before this story.

Okay, I’ll just come out and say it, I have gray hair in my beard and I use Just For Men to keep it at bay.

Jokes aside, writing about fertility fraud and primetime-worthy drama has become exhausting. Trying to do so is akin to tapping into a dry well. And, being a literalist, I have boxed myself into thinking that’s all I’m ‘allowed’ to write here.

Well, having cranked out just two blog posts until this point in 2023 are proof enough that I can’t even produce what I ‘allowed’ myself to write in the first place. Even writing about writing, in this way, feels unfamiliar. But it’s something. And it’s already a step away from what you, and I, first came here for.

So, this is my informal, anticlimactic announcement — I am no longer forcing myself to write exclusively about DNA drama or fertility fraud. Those topics won’t go away, and in fact, I hope to have meaningful updates to share on legislative progress in the coming year.

But I want to write about how these events and others that have happened in parallel are shaping my life and worldview today. A big theme is being a father. It changes everything, and fatherhood already played a huge role in these pages before I became one.

My perspective is undoubtedly shaped by what has happened to me.

Which is why I have joyfully embraced the inane programming of Cocomelon, and also decided I never want my son to believe in Santa Claus because it would mean lying to him.

I think that’s what I came here to say today. I am rusty as a writer, and even more so as the writer I remember myself as. But I have felt too disconnected from myself to justify accepting ‘rust’ as a reason to not write at all, even if it means not writing well for a while.

There are other themes I plan to explore. The intersection of politics and parenthood, for example. Things my son has taught me about life, such as how idealism has no place at a child’s meal time. Stuff like that.

Will you join me? I hope so.

Thanks for sticking by.