Announcing a hiatus never feels good. I always think a myriad of things ranging from “you could still manage this,” to “you should have planned better,” amongst a whole plethora of self deprecating thoughts or ideas of shoving aside my mental health needs. I hope you take it from my lived experience that thinking you need a break is a good enough reason to do so. You don’t need to justify your output of work to the world in order to take a break from things. Your mental health is important. In my experience, unmanaged mental health leads to depleted energy wells which lead to poorer health and negative impacts on social relationships. 

I’m going to take my own advice and not go into the details of why I haven’t been able to get back into reviews since February 10th, 2021. I’m not sure yet when I’ll return to reviews or the other things that I had planned for 2021 and The Queerblr. My hope is that I’ll be able to return to the regularly scheduled reviews in a month or so but I’m just not sure at this point between things happening for me at work and things happening in my personal life. 

I’ll still be active on Twitter and you can keep up to date with all the happenings with me and the site there for now. 

Until our next review, lovelies. 

B. 

I wrote the above hiatus announcement back in mid-March. My life has been so busy that I hadn’t even had time to edit the 230 words before posting it, let alone had the time to read anything since February 2021.

My 9-5 job has kept me busy but my brain has also been using a lot of bandwidth on some gender dysphoria I have been experiencing. I made a post about it on my personal Instagram back in February and Twitter sometime afterwards. Although agender is still very much the best description of me and my gender, my name has been the source of my dysphoria. I’ve been wanting to change it since I was a teen and the want and need to change it has slowly been getting louder and louder in my head until lately it is all I could think about. 

I am happy to say that I’ve found it. I’ve found the name that gives me euphoria and makes me smile when I see or hear it, even when someone spells it incorrectly. And it is all thanks to my wonderful, caring, and amazingly kind friend, Logan. Long personal story short, she started calling me bren as a term of endearment and it just stuck in my head as this happy little earworm. Time and some other factors later and I’m happy to say that I’ll officially be changing my first name to Brennan, but will go by Bren. It is such a wonderful feeling to finally have a name that makes me happy and for that name to be found by happy happenstance through an incredibly meaningful friendship. 

My hope is that this will free up my mental bandwidth to start getting back to things. I already feel lighter and excited to dive back into this site and grow it in a few ways, but my day job is still keeping me extremely busy. My hope is to start regular posts again starting July 2nd or 7th (depending if I decide to change weekly posts to Fridays instead of Wednesdays). 

So with all that said – I hope to see y’all in July.

Bren B.