I’m glad I decided to participate this year. I’ve neglected my writing for far too long, and while the month was overshadowed by some heavy shit (because of course there’s always heavy shit), it made for a lot of good writing exercises.

I didn’t think I’d make it because some days it felt like such a slog and I couldn’t get the thoughts inside my head onto the screen. Though I also don’t stop and give myself enough credit and acknowledge my abilities to get shit done.

I’ve alluded to a bunch of ideas this month, beyond that whole exvangelical deconstruction arc, and some of them will definitely make their way here in the not-so-distant future. I won’t spoil all of it, but I will certainly share more about my home lab, future travel plans, and at least some small fragments of content creation (you know, the content that isn’t my writing).

Showing up daily with something I can’t cheat my way through (well, I could, but I absolutely won’t lmao) has been a really nice change. It’s also been therapeutic, which is great because I know my therapist will want to hear all about it next time we meet.

And sometimes overwhelming, because the heavy shit likes to get in the way. But also because I’ve been so busy between long, jam-packed work days and then evenings of attempting to unwind while avoiding disassociating, and all-out exhaustion and burnout.

This year, Blaugust was about showing up for myself. I set a few goals, and managed to achieve them. Next Blaugust, I’d like to think I’ll be more seasoned in my writing, after dusting off most of the cobwebs, and find my way digging more into the community vibe.

But who am I kidding? I’m a gremlin without a plan.

I don’t know where to begin for this post today. I had plans. I always have plans – including plans that involve no plans.

I didn’t get my mountain of work completed early enough to have an early start to my long weekend yesterday. In fact I ended up working into the evening, too. I didn’t even get everything that I needed to get done, done. But I logged a lot of hours this week, and at some point you have to decide when to log off for the day/the week and get some rest.

I ended up staying up way too late. Which has been an obnoxious recurring theme lately. The whole summer, especially, has seen me stay up way too late. On the weekends, primarily, which then sees me try to catch up on my sleep during the day. But also the week nights. Sometimes those then make for very interesting work days.

I didn’t get a whole heck of a lot of sleep. Then I got up and did some busy work of nothing significant. And then went back to sleep – it amounted to a wee nap. But then I spent the next several hours chilling in bed.

You see, the weather has finally returned to something tolerable. I can leave our top floor windows open 24/7, and except for when people mow their lawns or our neighbours are smoking the plants they’re growing in their basements, it’s a stream of cool and fresh air. Sometimes it’ll be raining, like it was when I woke up on Thursday.

Since it’s a long weekend and we don’t actually have any plans, I had the pleasure of lounging in bed and enjoying the cooler weather. That ended up eating a good chunk of the afternoon.

There’s always tomorrow – you know, the one we’re never guaranteed.

Long weekends are the perfect time to nuke the staring rig in your home lab. Or at least that’s what I’ve decided to tell myself.

I used to be a Windows Insider (I mean, I technically still am) running the latest builds on my primary rig. My bestie would razz me when I’d run into an issue or two and decide to nuke the install and start again. But I loved it.

I learn a lot of the time by doing. I have always approached my love of technology with this in mind. It’s how I discovered Linux and how much I loved Gnome back in the glory days. It’s how I built my first Hackintosh. It’s how I fell in love with Arch. It’s why I decided to expand my homelab beyond a little NAS.

Don’t ask me to compile things myself, cause I haven’t tried to do that since I tried to compile Gentoo without knowing what I was getting into in the early ‘00s. But you can bet I will give it another go on a spare machine one of these days.

So why am I nuking this time around? It’s time. September marks my official return to streaming and content creation in general, and I’ve actually been putting this off for a while. Other parts of the home lab kept eating my spare time. Okay, okay – a few things may have broken in the Windows install, because Microsoft loves to throw janky curveballs. It’s tradition, though.

Tradition, or maybe just gremlin chaos management.

I keep trying to shift away from the heaviness of the past week and the seemingly endless unpacking I’ve been doing. Trying to focus on something else, almost anything else really. But I can’t seem to shake it.

 

Better Than A Hallelujah is still in my head.

 

I want to say I don’t know why, but that’s mostly untrue. I spent a lot of my younger years immersed in CCM.

It’s funny how random lyrics can pop up at the least expected moments, completely without warning. I actually laughed out loud when I realized what my brain had just said. And then again as a reaction to my own reaction.

It’s not actually the first time I’ve had some seemingly random CCM lyric resurface out of nowhere. And the fact that my instant reaction to hearing about the death of that vile man finally happening was that lyric is not lost on me.

This isn’t another breakdown post or a “speak ill of the dead” debate.
It’s just me being vulnerable. Brutally honest. Wholly, authentically myself.

 

I’m ready for this month to be over. For this summer to take a hiatus. And it’s not because I’m in a rush for the last third of the year, or that I hate summer. There’s been too much stuff going on, with not enough time to properly process it and rest, and not enough time for proper productivity.

I’ve got the better part of three work shifts left this month, a mountain of work in front of me, and an early Friday afternoon deadline I’ve set for myself. Think I can make it?

If I somehow manage to get my to-do list completed by the time I log off tomorrow, I’ll be in a better position (in theory!) to plan my week ahead. At least that’s what I’m going to tell myself until everything is done.

If you see me working late into the evening on Friday, at the start of the long weekend? No you didn’t.

I probably read Dobson. I don’t have a clear memory of it, but it wouldn’t surprise me.
Either way, Focus on the Family was everywhere.
And everything they put out was Dobson-coded.

I remember Adventures in Odyssey.
I remember McGee and Me.
I remember the cartoon voices and the little moral lessons.
I don’t remember questioning it.

That was still in the Anglican years.
Before the evangelical stuff really took hold.
Before youth group, and Bible camp, and altar calls.
Before I worked at Circle Square Ranch and became camp friends with the granddaughter of the Crossroads founders.
Before I realised how connected it all was.

Dobson was just there.
Not someone we talked about a lot.
But not someone we didn’t talk about, either.
He was a name you were supposed to know.
A voice people trusted.
One of the people shaping “the Christian worldview,” even if no one around me intentionally said it out loud.

I didn’t think of it as theology.
It was just there. Something safe. Something Christian.
The kind of thing you could play in the car or the Sunday school room and not worry about.

But it was teaching things. Always.
Who to trust.
What families should look like.
What counted as “good.”
And what didn’t.

I absorbed a lot.
Not just the messaging, but the attitude.
The certainty. The quiet superiority.
The idea that being Christian meant being right, and that being right meant spotting what was wrong in everyone else.

I had a bigotry era.
I didn’t call it that at the time.
I thought I was being faithful. Discerning. Protecting truth.
Really, I was parroting the scripts I’d been handed.

Focus on the Family didn’t teach me how to think.
It taught me how to defend.
How to spot danger. How to explain it away.
How to make other people small in the name of protecting something bigger.

I thought I was being a good example.
I thought I was helping.
Sometimes I really believed I was loving people well by correcting them, praying for them, quietly judging them.

It wasn’t cruel. Not in a loud way.
Just steady. Unquestioned. Sanctified.

I cringe at it now.
The way I talked. The things I thought were “inappropriate.”
The lines I drew in my head between “us” and “them.”
All based on what I’d absorbed from voices I was never invited to question.

Eventually, things stopped sitting right.
Not all at once. Not dramatically.
Just little shifts. Questions I couldn’t un-ask.
People I wasn’t supposed to care about who I cared about anyway.

I couldn’t make the math work.
The rules, the hierarchy, the gender roles, the fear.
The way grace was always conditional, but control wasn’t.

I don’t remember the first thread I pulled, but I remember the unravelling.
It wasn’t rebellion. It was dissonance.
And once I heard it, I couldn’t stop hearing it.

I didn’t leave in one big moment.
No dramatic exit. No confrontation.
Just a slow drifting away from the spaces that used to feel like certainty.

I stopped listening.
Stopped reading the books.
Stopped saying the things I used to say to prove I belonged.

But the messages stuck.
They echo in ways I don’t always notice right away.
In how I brace for judgment.
In how I over-explain.
In how I flinch when people call themselves “family.”

I’ve unlearned a lot.
But some days, I still catch myself filtering my life through a lens I didn’t choose.

So much of it tied to control.
Not just behaviour, but identity.
Gender. Sexuality. What love was supposed to look like.
Who was allowed to be whole, and who was supposed to repent.

I didn’t know I was queer.
Not when they talked about “the gay agenda.”
Not when they prayed for deliverance.
Not when they handed out Dobson books like spiritual armour.

I didn’t know that fear was meant for me.

The homophobia was quiet, mostly.
The judgment wasn’t.
Especially for the “Sunday Christians,” the girls who had sex, the friends who swore or stopped going to church.

I thought I was being righteous.
But I was just scared.
I thought I was being faithful.
But I was surviving.

Purity culture gave me a script when I didn’t know who I was.
It gave me rules I could follow.
It didn’t make me good, it made me small.
And I judged others because I didn’t know what else to do with the parts of me I couldn’t name.

They never planned for kids like me to make it out. But I did.

August 21, 2025.

A push notification on my iPhone.
James Dobson is dead.

It’s better than a hallelujah sometimes.