Hi! It’s me! The creator!

And I think today’s post is going to be somewhat of a long one, because I have much to talk about.  It’s about why I created this diary in the first place, who I am, what I wanted to accomplish, and why even though I may have failed, it was ultimately necessary.

Recently a lot has been in the news about gender identity.  I really don’t want to get too much into that specifically, but it’s important to what I want to say.  Some person named Dylan Mulvaney has been running around doing girlish stuff (that’s probably the most neutral way I can put it), and has been getting many different sponsorships, etc., from many different companies, including Nike and Anheuser-Busch.  This has started a major firestorm which could see Anheuser-Busch having, shall we say, some problems with solvency in the future.  There are also some other issues with militant trans people running around assaulting people.

All these things are weighing on my mind, because they tie in some ways directly into what I’m doing here.

I started this diary, built this character, and have been writing it for nearly two years now, for a reason.  Yeah, sure, there are a few reasons, actually.  One reason is that I wanted to set up a second revenue stream in case the worst happens – that was pretty heavy on my mind from the beginning.  I’ve so far failed miserably at that, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.  I have literally not made a single penny on this, and have spent thousands of dollars on making it a reality.  So, while that was a consideration, it’s clearly not the reason I’m doing it.

Actually, I’ve attempted to do something like this a couple of times before.  I wrote a Harry Potter fanfiction – or at least one based in the Harry Potter world, about a girl living in Portland, Oregon who was attending a magic school.  If that story was still up (it isn’t) you’d see some similarities to the Lily story.  So, clearly, this is a story I’ve wanted to tell – or at least explore – for many years now.  So that’s another reason.

The reason I opened this post with an exposition on the current state of gender identity, is that in some ways, I’m struggling with the same kind of thing.  No, I’m not trans.  No, I don’t want to be a girl or woman.  Quite frankly, I have enough trouble being a guy.  Trying to bolt another identity onto that, which I could never fully attain (and I’m serious about that – I don’t even think I could come close) would just be a waste of time.  I’m a guy, and no amount of pretending or surgeries or anything else is ever going to change that, fundamentally.  I did use the word “pretending” – I meant it for the purposes of this post and related to me only.  I have my own opinions on other people, I’m not expressing them here, and deliberately so.

So what is this all about then?

I’m sitting here staring at my cat trying to figure out how to put it into words.  I think maybe the best – and yet incomplete – way I have of putting it into words, is that the feminine is sorely lacking in the lives of many men, including my own.

Women are a – in fact, the, source of the feminine in this world.  They bring into being something that the world – and men – desperately needs, and yet it seems to have been thoroughly squashed out.  There is a lightness, a freedom, a caring, a beauty to the feminine that men, I think, desperately crave in their life.  Sex, in fact, while many like to reduce it to the squishing together of body parts, is, to men, kind of a symbolic enveloping of that femininity.  (And, on the other side, it’s an injection of masculinity into their otherwise feminine world).  But over the past, I dunno, 80 years, that femininity is gone.  Now the women want to be one of the guys, and what the men are seeking more than anything else stops being available to them.

But it doesn’t mean we don’t crave it.

Girls, and women, can be cruel.  They are broken just like everyone else (by which I mean, clearly, men).  Their world is not sunshine, rainbows, skittles, and moonbeams.  There is a reason that girls tend to have severe mental health issues, especially when facing the world as it is now.  Nothing in this post, this story, or anything else can diminish that – it’s objectively true.  But at the same time, the pure aspects of femininity are incredibly appealing and attractive.  They are healing in a way that is not available to men from any other source.  And Lily is, as much as anything, an exploration of those aspects, if only to understand them better myself.

The world is broken.  men are broken, women are broken, everything is broken.  And it is, perhaps, the greatest travesty of all that femininity is withheld from men, and masculinity from women, to the point where they are so desperate for it that they’ll look within themselves for it.  And, perhaps, this story is my (and mostly successful, honestly) attempt to find it without taking that drastic and, for me anyway, supremely unattainable step.

But ultimately, it is to the same end, and ultimately, the ideal outcome is to abandon Lily.  I intend on doing that in a little more than a year.  She will have served her purpose for me, though I hope I can find other purposes for her that also help others.

And that, I suppose, is why Lily exists.