Sometimes in order to move forward, you have to go back to where you began.
Among my ghoulfriends, that seems to be a common thread we pull on. For me, the last five years have been the ultimate 'self-help' project and it's ongoing. In the words of Mother, Kacey Musgraves, "Healing doesn't happen in a straight line."
At the start, there was a struggle to let go of the person I once was; stepping away from communities I was most familiar with, rewiring myself to not care about the trivial things, dissolving a style I felt was cemented to my identity. Y'all, I'm a third culture kid (biracial Filipino, born and raised in Japan now living stateside) so the identity crisis was already there. This added another layer to the nuance.
After a big career change and severing my attachments to social media, I found myself slipping into a version of myself that was new yet not new. I eventually recognized that I was putting in the work to re-parent myself and heal my inner child, and there were a few major boosters here:
- I made the decision to quit drinking on April 24, 2021, one day after the streaming premiere of the Mortal Kombat movie. Three years alcohol-free! And that's a story I can save for another blog.
- I've given myself the gift of privacy (space) and removed the noise that made me anxious to the point I couldn't function. I came to accept that the current state of internet and social media spaces is completely different from the experience I grew up with. Everybody uses Facebook, but rewind to 2003, not everyone at my school was using Xanga so they didn't have a scope on my life.
When my last site at this domain was hacked and I had difficulties with my domain, that was oddly closure for the person I once was; an anchor I needed to free myself of. While I've let go of things in order to heal, there are ways I feel I've regressed but it feels right in that.. it's given me strength to move forward.
TheSuperghoul.com used to be a horror review and content site, but now... this is my home base for everything. This is my corner. No more pigeonholing myself by segmenting parts of me into something packaged for social media. I wouldn't even call this a "relaunch". It's the start of my newfound creative freedom (I may expand on this in another blog post when I'm feeling up to it).
Thanks for reading and visiting!
