Dear lovely readers and commenters:

I’m sorry I haven’t written for so long. I’ve missed writing to you all. I was just going through a dark place these past few months. You know how it is, I started to think things that even I don’t feel comfortable writing about—frightening, masochistic, sadistic, thoughts and feelings.

I told my psychiatrist. I know my warning signs. She wrote me a second prescription. I’m feeling much better now. In fact, I feel better than I did when I was a teenager. I feel strong and confident.

To be honest, I think that’s why I haven’t written as Tom Hardie for awhile. I mean, don’t get me wrong, Tom Hardie is a very real part of me. I imagine him as the gruff, tough wild man of the wilderness, ya know, that part of me that would not be broken when I was a child. The part of me that society caged away, deep in a small dirty closet at the base of my identity. Ursula LeGuin described little Tom Hardie’s reality best.

The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes–the child has no understanding of time or interval–sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come in and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked, the eyes disappear. The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother’s voice.[1]

And yet, somehow, Tom Hardie survived in me. He became a man. He discovered his voice. He discovered he was naturally good with speaking. He loved to perform for people and make them feel things with his words.

But underneath all the partying and sex poems—there was anger. There was an old anger that I was afraid to let out. Do you know how that is?

Have you ever felt so angry that you honestly thought: if I let this out, I will fucking kill people. I lived in that place. I held all of my rage in. When I hit thirty-seven, I exploded. I couldn’t contain so much shit anymore. I needed a place to dump it. Hardhang.com was born.

This website represents the sum total of my linguistic working through, so far. The key to  beginning my recover from the trauma child abuse was so brutally simple. I had to prove to myself, intellectually, that I was not as horrible as I thought I was. The only way to do that, I figured, was to put myself completely out there.

I had to present the worst of my memories to the world—twenty-four hour free access to all of the thoughts and memories that I thought made me a horrible person.

I used doses of medical marijuana to loosen me up, and I just wrote. I wrote everything I could remember. I wrote until I thought I was going to vomit. I wrote for entire days without eating. I posted everything.

I wrote until I felt empty of it. I wrote myself in a deep depression of grieving. I cried every day for several hours. I lost my job. My family was furious with me. My personal relationships were stretched to the breaking point. Many of them broke. But I felt unburdened. I felt relieved. Throw in a little medical tweaking and I feel lighter than ever have as an adult.

The AA people would call this website my Step Four: Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. In retrospect, I would have to agree. This is everything I can remember. Browse around. It’s as close to brutally honest as I could mister.

But don’t misunderstand me, I have a lot more internal baggage to search through. I don’t think my Step Four work is over, by any means. I don’t think the inventory ever ends for a truly ethical person. That’s what makes it so hard to be one, I think.

Anyway, I will still use Tom Hardie  to compile my inventory, but I will probably do some general pissing and moaning about the state of the world, also. Why? Because it’s healthy to vent.

Thank you for all of your time and attention in 2009. I hope to share more of my life with you in 2010.

Happy New Year!

-Tom Hardie