I have a hard time summarizing who I am for online “about me” spaces. I don’t want it to be stiff and so professional or mundane that it reads like a beige-flavored resumé. Nor do I want it to be so brutally personal that it leaves a reader with the uncomfortable intimacy one experiences when reading a diary that doesn’t belong to them. So here’s my compromise:

My name is Caroline Ely, I am in my early 30s, I’ve been figuring out life with my partner - that answers to either Sam or Owen - for over a decade, and I’m the mum to 3 husky babes (Luna, Dakota, and Fawkes). I am queer, or, to be more accurate: a late-blooming bisexual mess. I am a feminist with depression and anxiety living in the Bible Belt, attempting to learn how to not be triggered by every not-so-holy ghost of my religious trauma riddled past. 

MY PASSIONS ARE -

• Reading. This is the first one. The one that started with the humdrum understanding of phonics in the shape of “the cat sat on the mat” and has since grown into something deeply vital. Something that has quite literally saved my life. Something that continues to grow me into fuller and truer versions of myself. 

• Writing. This always seemed like the natural next step after reading became one of my cornerstones. I wanted to tell stories that made people feel, made them imagine - I wanted to bridge humanity with magic. What I never anticipated was the relief. How assigning words to my heart and soul, to my grief and my joy, would ground me. Writing is my tether, and whenever I get a little lost or try to float away, I just gently (sometimes desperately) reach out and put words to paper until I feel the ground beneath my feet again. 

• Creating. Creativity is a delightfully broad term and solution for a woman who wants too much. For a woman who can’t live while sitting still (unless an excellent and/or smutty book is involved). Sometimes it’s drawing, or painting, or poetry, or photography. Sometimes it’s music, or recipes, or repurposing thrifted treasures. Creating let’s me ping pong between all my contradictions: designed and unintentional. Public and private. Chaos and order. Guarded and vulnerable. Whimsy and discipline. I used to think that being creative meant I had to choose one lane and become a master of those boundaries - but now I know better. Now I know I don’t have to choose, I don’t have to color between the lines, I don’t need to pursue mastery for validation - I just need to choose to exist and make room to breathe in whatever format best suits me.

• Food. This was a sneaky little b. I want to call my relationship with food a slow burn, but that wouldn’t really be true. It’s more like I willfully ignored my lifelong epicurean dalliance until I simply couldn’t pretend it wasn’t nothing (kinda like my repressed sexuality). Food has been my first teacher in nourishment, pleasure, diversity, culture, scarcity, indulgence, and intentional connection between humanity and nature. 

• Learning. I grew up conservative, Christian, and homeschooled in relatively small isolated towns of rural North Carolina. I am also a white middle class cis woman. In other words: I perceived the world through a very narrow lens for most of my life. Like many (mostly white cishet) millennials in recent years, I was forced to step outside of my ignorance-is-bliss comfort zone and realize that I had to actively care, I had to actively show up, and I needed to listen to marginalized voices. Because Black Lives Matter. Because of the 2016 election. Because of the entirety of 2020 and its aftermath. Because I could no longer identify as a Christian, so what did I believe in anymore? Because I wasn’t just an overzealous ally but was actually queer myself. Because. Because. Because. There will always be something to disrupt the very white heteronormative capitalist Bible-thumping rose-colored world I was planted in. My learning doesn’t stop because I pop one problematic bubble when the system’s roots are still underfoot. My learning is going to be lifelong. It’s going to be imperfect, humbling, and all I can do is try my best and be willing to be wrong. But most importantly: be willing to change.

the “Sam/Owen” of it all

Luna, my soulmate

Fawkes, our fussed goober

Dakota, our anxious lamb