First post

I am beginning the process of shutting down my other accounts across the internet and shuffling everything over here, sans personal identifying information. For a period of my life, I was obsessed with finding everybody I ever vaguely knew from my past. I found them, got divorced, and now I am entering a period in my life in which I don’t think I want to speak to most people from my past. It wasn’t a great past, and they weren’t great people. But I liked blogging, I liked writing, and I’m going to keep that going here, anonymous-like.

The title of this blog is Fugitivus. The Romans would brand this word, usually shortened to FUG, on the foreheads of slaves who had run away from their masters. I can’t think of a better collection of personal qualities than those that would exist in a slave who has run from their master. The term “fugitivus” has personal meaning to me; I ran away from an abusive home as a child, and I left an abusive marriage as an adult. Since then, there have been various smaller escapes; from friends who can’t cope with their own pain or my freedom from abuse, from ingrained concepts of worthlessness and self-hate, from the idea of a future I never really wanted, from a country whose ideology is as abusive as anything my husband or family could dish out. I view my life as one long jailbreak, day by day attempting to shed one chain or another, until eventually, inevitably, I shed the concept of fugitivus as well. Because who wants to be a fugitive all their lives?

My username is Harriet Jacobs, an homage to the author of an autobiography of a life in and escape from slavery. Harriet Jacobs was a helluva woman, and I don’t mean to insinuate that I have experienced a tenth of what she did, or have a tenth of the steel trap balls. But she’s worth admiring, as a slave who ran away from her master, as a woman who escaped sexual exploitation, who fought even being purchased by friends who would free her, because that would be admitting her life was a good to be bought and sold. I’m not trying to build up a comparison, even metaphorically. I’m just trying to tell you that Harriet Jacobs is the shit.

There’s my intro post. I am going to slowly begin copying and pasting my favorite blog entries from my other social networking sites, then shut everything down and move here permanently.

Welcome to Fugitivus.