<p>Hello, dear readers—I hope you're all hanging in there. It is a wild time to be alive and living...anywhere, really, but it's felt particularly wild here in the Twin Cities.</p><p>Never in my life have I been so proud to be a Minnesotan (which is saying something, because I have always had a deep affection for my home state). As you've doubtless seen in the news, ICE has been terrorizing Minneapolis, St. Paul, and the surrounding suburbs for several weeks now. It's clear they thought they could come in, do horrible things, and scare us into compliance. They were clearly unprepared for how people have come together to look out for each other and stand against their heinous operations of killing and kidnapping people. We're not standing for it. And as I saw someone post on Bluesky earlier this week: they made the classic Nazi mistake of invading a winter people in winter. We will outlast them, and we'll do it by giving a damn about our neighbors.</p><p>I have so many thoughts about the resistance and the reasons it's working here, but I will be able to articulate none of them half as well as what Margaret Killjoy captured in her <a href="https://margaretkilljoy.substack.com/p/our-neighbors-in-minneapolis" rel="noreferrer">latest newsletter</a> detailing her experience of coming to Minneapolis as a journalist seeking to understand and document what's been happening. It's a long post, but please read it.</p><p>I released <a href="https://alyxanderjames.bandcamp.com/track/a-prayer-for-the-rest-of-us-demo" rel="noreferrer">this song</a> a couple of weeks ago. I wrote it back in October, but wasn't sure how I felt about it at the time. And then ICE showed up in my city and started kidnapping children and murdering people in cold blood, and I started asking myself what it was that I needed to hear to keep myself from faltering, and this song came back to me. May it be a balm and an encouragement to those who need it.</p><p>If you are outside of Minnesota, watching what's happening, and looking for ways to help, <a href="https://www.standwithminnesota.com/" rel="noreferrer">this</a> is one of the best gatherings of links to people/places/organizations that are doing good work on the ground (note that, weirdly, if you use a VPN, you'll need to turn it off for the URL to resolve). Most of what's been most successful here has been hyper-local, just people helping their immediate neighbors, so the direct mutual aid funds are a great place to start.</p>

Hello, dear readers, and welcome, somehow, impossibly, to 2026. If you're reading this, you made it, and I'm proud of you. 2025 was a wild year for most everyone I know, with some towering highs and terrible lows, and I thought I'd take a little time to reflect on my own version of that here at the start of the new year. Much like last year, I'm still feeling out exactly how personal I want to get with this blog, but today I'm feeling compelled to write a bit, so we're going to go with it. While 2024 was objectively one of the hardest years of my life, 2025 may have been one of the fullest: * It started out in January with the quiet but devastating end of a long-standing friendship that forced me to reckon with some hard realities I'd been ignoring. I also put many hours into my capstone project for my degree, writing and editing and soliciting playtests of the games from friends. * February found me participating in FAWM for the 8th time, and I wrote 18 songs over the course of the month. My dearest friend came to visit while my partner traveled to help our kiddo and their spouse out after the kiddo had surgery. I presented at my seminary's symposium and ran games for (mostly) strangers for the first time. * In March, my husband had surgery, I sold my first tarot readings, and we kicked off discussions with my best friend from undergrad, a realtor, about buying a house. * April brought my first experience of running a spiritual companionship group session, we started talking with a friend about perhaps buying a duplex together, I walked at my seminary graduation, and then took my first real vacation in ages—a trip to Chicago where I had at most one concrete thing on the calendar each day. If you can give yourself the gift of a weekend with zero obligations, I highly recommend it. * In May, we thought we'd found a duplex to buy with our friend. We walked away from that after learning there was about $100,000 of structural work needed to make it safely habitable, and decided to look for a single family home instead. This meant some hard conversations with our friend, but we all worked through it together. At the end of the month, we put in an offer on a house we'd fallen in love with. * June saw me traveling to NYC on my birthday for work, which I was cranky about, but ended up being a pretty nice trip overall. A few friends came to visit throughout the month, and I got a flash tattoo of a unicorn rampant for Pride. Inspection on the house revealed no major structural issues. * In July, we closed on our house. We spent a couple of weeks painting and prepping, and finally moved in toward the end of the month. The day after we moved, I accompanied a friend to his hysterectomy. My partner and I celebrated our 5th wedding anniversary. * August was when I finally finished my last class work at United, bringing my seminary journey to a close. We met many of our new neighbors at National Night Out, and went to the Renaissance Festival with some friends (my husband's first time going). * In September, I embraced my newfound freedom post-grad-school by spontaneously road tripped to Wisconsin to meet up with some dear friends who were traveling up from Chicago for a cousin's wedding. And I released music into the world for the first time, starting with a song I'd been sitting on for over a decade. * October saw us taking a day trip to Duluth (an annual tradition); I reconnected with an old friend over coffee and started taking a songwriting class at the music school in our neighborhood. * In November, I made a new friend. I played at an open mic for the first time since moving back to Minnesota (my first time playing out anywhere in well over a year). My husband and I celebrated 15 years as a couple. I went to Chicago twice, once alone to help a friend, and then again with my partner to celebrate Thanksgiving with dear friends. We spun out on the highway on the way home, and I wound up with a mild concussion. I ended the month with the showcase performance for my songwriting class, where my parents saw me perform live for the first time. * December saw me back in Chicago for the third time in six weeks for a work holiday party and a lovely weekend with friends. I ran a game for the first time for some of my favorite people to play games with. I had my first paid session as a spiritual companion. And we hosted my family's Christmas celebrations at our house—our first time ever hosting a holiday. So many things happened last year, some of which were terribly painful, and some of which were among the most joyous moments of my life. And some have been both—I love our house so much, and, as is to be expected, home ownership has been incredibly stressful in some ways. I made new friends and deepened existing relationships while having to let go of others than I had previously believed would be around more or less forever. Overall, I'm not sorry to say goodbye to the wild ride that was 2025. I'm not quite sure I'm ready for 2026, but it's here, and I'm choosing to approach this new chapter with curiosity and an open heart. For the last few years I've chosen a word as a sort of yearly theme, a touch point to check in with as the months pass. My word for 2026 is Stability. After all of the ups and downs and changes and completed cycles of 2025, I'm feeling ready to really put down roots. I don't know how it's going to play out, but I am tentatively optimistic that this _will_ prove to be the theme of the year. And that, dear readers, is where I'll leave you for now. I am hoping to write more this year, as well, but we'll see how and where that happens as time progresses. Until next time, I am wishing you all a gentle start to 2026, and hope that the year brings you what you need.

Hello, dear readers—it's been a while. Since I last blogged, I've graduated from United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities with my Master of Arts in Leadership in Spiritual Direction. In July, my partner and I bought a house. I finished the last of my classes in August, and have since been decompressing and rediscovering beloved hobbies that had taken a backseat while I was in school—I've been doing a fair bit of knitting and crocheting, and am also getting back to songwriting. In fact, about a month ago, I had the following realizations: 1. I had written over 300 songs since 2012, and had released exactly none of them. 2. Perfect is the enemy of done. 3. If not now (**gestures broadly at the state of the world**)...when? So I decided to start releasing some song demos into the world. I've released 7 songs so far. None of them are perfect; it's such a relief to have shared them. (For the curious: they can be found under Alyxander James on Bandcamp, Spotify, Apple Music, and Tidal.) But that's not exactly why I'm writing today (although writing as a hobby I'm getting back to in general is part of what's brought me here). The point above of "perfect is the enemy of done" is related to what I'd like to take a little time to explore. I wrote a bit in my last post about my tendency toward perfectionism. It's been a lifelong struggle, amplified by trauma and complicated by neurodivergence. Something I see asked a lot by well-meaning people on the internet (and elsewhere), when someone is faced with some sort of challenge, is, "What would your _best self_ do?" And for some people, that may be a genuinely helpful question to ponder. For me, though, what it tends to do is trigger the perfectionist in me: * What would I do if I could do it the _right way_? * What would I do if I was a person who _never made mistakes_? * What would I do if I was a _better person_ than the person I am now? It tends to turn me into a bit of a self-flagellating mess. I realized in therapy a while back (and it came up again in therapy last week, which is probably why I'm thinking about it now) that a more helpful question, for me at least, is, "What would your _truest self_ do?" My _best self_ is a perfectionist who's only goal is to do something the "right" way, a future state that feels always out of reach. My _truest self_ is the me who shows up authentically, fully myself in the present moment, acting from my most closely held values. I'll give you a practical example of how these selves approach situations differently. In therapy last week, I was talking through some frustrations I was feeling around the seemingly endless work that needed to be done to get the house tidy and organized. My therapist asked me how my best self would deal with the situation, which eventually led to me articulating the difference in my head between _best self_ and _truest self_ : * My _best self_ wouldn't complain about the amount of work. They'd just do what needed to be done (as defined by some externally-derived metric of what a house is "supposed" to look like). They'd have the energy to get up early or stay up later to clean when they weren't working. In other words, my _best self_ would be a _different person_. * My _truest self_ actually has an internally-derived reason for wanting to tidy the house, and that's to make their home a welcoming space for anyone who is invited in. They recognize their limitations and know when they need to ask for help—they believe in the importance of community for not only surviving but thriving. When we talked about my _truest self_ , I realized that what I really needed in order to make progress was to call in other resources, rather than trying to do everything alone and then beating myself up when I got overwhelmed. So I invited my parents to come over on Friday night after I was done with work, while my partner was working late, to body double with me while I worked on tidying our living room. I was a little nervous about it going in, but it actually ended up being both effective and enjoyable—my Mom knit and my Dad kept the dog occupied and we chatted while I picked things up and put them away, and I made more progress in two hours than I'd managed in the previous two weeks or more. When I think of how I want to show up in the world, I don't really _want_ to be perfect. I want to be _human_ , in all of the messiness that humanity entails. I want to be able to learn and play and change and grow. _Perfection_ is a sort of stasis, which sounds terribly dull. What I _do_ want is to show up in a way that reflects who I am and what I value most. So I'm trying to lean into that. When I start getting really in my head about doing something the "right" way, I try to stop and ask myself why. What's really the motivation here? And how do I actually want to show up in the world today? * * * Some post-script notes: 1. This past week I moved my website for my spiritual companionship practice over here to Ghost. (Squarespace was fine, but expensive, and it seemed silly to be paying for two websites.) If you're reading this in your browser, take a look around! 2. On that note, now that my brain is starting to recover from grad school, I am looking to add a few more clients to my practice. Much like if I was a therapist, I can't work directly with family or friends, but if you know anyone who might be interested in exploring what spirituality means to them and making meaning out of their own Big Life Stuff, feel free to send them my way! 3. As always, I'd love to hear any thoughts that this post sparked for you, and welcome any comments or replies you might feel like sending my way. I hope you're all hanging in there in this ever-increasingly wild timeline we're living in.