Here's the first of my talks, with transcript for those of you who prefer to read.

Hi, all. Welcome to episode one of The Jaguar’s Heart.

Let me begin with a confession: I built an unsustainable career. I built an unsustainable career and it has crushed my heart. This error is entirely on me. I should have listened to my gut, and now… here I am. Starting from scratch, with honesty.

Talking about this is a lot harder than I thought. Here goes.

For most of my career, I have tried to walk a very narrow line between alienating my audience with unnecessary authorial inserts… and not hiding my beliefs. I chose that path because as a reader, I find it tiresome when authors get too political, even about innocuous things. I think this might be because I don’t want to be mistaken for one of their friends. The relationship between myself and an entertainer is inherently one-sided, and I prefer to observe that boundary. I go to them, then, for entertainment… not the kind of conversation I expect from someone I know personally. And while an entertainer can bring their life experiences into their routines, that’s still shared through a parasocial lens, and should be shared that way.

The kind of conversations you have with friends are not the kind of conversations you have with strangers who are paying you, and I wanted to be the kind of entertainer I liked: someone who was respecting the boundaries. I didn’t think my beliefs made for funny stories—thoughtful ones, sometimes, but not often funny—and I was more interested in sharing my art than I was making statements.

This stance, though, is only possible as long as society allows different belief systems to co-exist. The moment society starts discriminating against a belief system, you have two choices: you can speak up and get people used to the idea that other people exist, or you can be silent, and be silenced.

For a long time, I tried to have it both ways: to speak up, but diffidently, and without fighting about it. Just pop my head up, say something as carefully as possible while still being honest, and then vanish again. This is why at least some people can say, “Yeah, she’s Christian, some kind of Christian.” Or “yeah, she was the only conservative SFWA board member.” I picked my moments and tried to be as non-offensive as possible, while observing that my peers on the opposite side of the debate had no such compunctions… filling their social media with offensive content, or brazenly linking to things that ‘all good people agree with’, or writing actual screeds against people like me.

I hate conflict. And I love people, and casually Othering large swathes of them isn’t in my nature, normally. I usually only spoke out after suffering some discrimination that I felt had to be discussed, but even then I grinned and bore a lot… because I knew from experience that anything I mentioned would result in some small number of people listening… and the majority attacking, mocking, or gaslighting me. So I never pushed it. And I never, ever made my protestations a permanent, visible part of my online presence, because it simply wasn’t safe, and it wasn’t neutral. My liberal friends could afford to be honest about their beliefs. I knew, from experience, that I would be closing doors in the industry if I did the same.

So I was quiet.

It wasn’t until the 2016 election that I realized that my quiet had combined with a lot of other people’s quiet to become a river of quiet: a silenced majority that had either already quit the arena, or were deep in hiding to prevent their own cancellation. And because we’d been quiet, and because we’d never been open about ourselves, we had allowed people unlike us to believe that we didn’t exist. That only evil people believed the things we did. That we didn’t deserve a voice, a platform, a livelihood, our children.

They didn’t realize they knew anyone who had those beliefs. And I had been complicit in that illusion, by silencing myself to avoid upsetting anyone.

And really, that’s what I did. I silenced myself. I shut down my livejournal and retreated behind a paywall, and cut down all my social media, and refused to participate. I couldn’t. I thought… maybe if I pull back, the hysteria will die down. But overwhelmingly, what I wanted was to reduce my vulnerability, because some part of me thought ‘this will get worse.’ Which… it did. Because I now live in a world where the media talks casually of people like me as domestic terrorists, where the publishing industry says we shouldn’t get book deals and big tech thinks we need to be ratioed or suspended or shadowbanned. Where people I thought of as friends agree that everyone on alternate social media platforms should be denied jobs, or who’ve signed onto letters that conservatives who enabled the 45th president should be considered criminals. If I cornered them about it, they would tell me ‘I didn’t mean you.’ (I hope.) But it always starts as ‘we didn’t mean you.’ And then… it is you, and by then it’s too late.

And I have found, now that I feel cornered, that my silence has stuck in my throat, and in my wrists, and in the bones of my fingers and the backs of my eyes, and I can’t draw and I can’t write and everything feels false.

I have built my career on the foundation of a desire to entertain people, people of any kind, any belief, any background. I wanted to make people laugh and smile, feel hope and glee and joy and silliness. I wanted art to be the bridge between my heart and the hearts of my audience, if only for a moment. But I can’t build that bridge in this world. It’s been set on fire from the other side, and I don’t have the heart—or the means, alone—to restore it.

I honestly don’t know what to do.

Some part of me whispers that the only way back is to begin again. With honesty. By no longer trying so hard to make other people comfortable that I erase myself for their sake. If the numbers are correct, half of America shares my ideals; I am not outnumbered. When I speak for myself, I am speaking to those people, who also feel silenced. And I hope, I am speaking to people who are not like me, and saying: “I exist. Now you know someone who isn’t like you, and who isn’t a monster.”

It may be that my honesty will cost me readers. It’s better that I lose them now, as a result of a conscious decision, then that I should live in fear of discovery and cancellation. I can’t make art in that environment, and it’s a miracle I managed it for so long.

So what does this mean going forward? I wish I knew. I know I have some audio rambles like this one planned. None of those are intended as lectures or debates—they’re going to be about my internal experience of being an artistic and literary countercultural voice. I hope if I talk enough of this out, that maybe I can go back to making art again. I guess… we’ll see.

Anyway, thanks for listening to this broken heart. Jaguar out.