As well as being Pride Month, June is also my birth month. With the confluence of the two, you may have to forgive a little bit of self-reflection. If you can’t forgive me, then I’m not totally sure why you’re reading this.
While I had come out to my close friends, family, and my co-workers before that point, it was almost two years ago in July that I fully came out on social media and the internet in general and announced my name change. It was 2020, still fairly early in the pandemic (although contemporary optimism suggested that we were already through the worst of it). I was technically on furlough from my retail management job at a bookstore after I declined the offer to work face-to-face with the public when the store (and the state) refused to insist upon mask-wearing requirements.
In September, that furlough turned into unemployment. It was no secret among my friends that I had been looking to get out of retail for a while anyway. While retail had started as part-time work to cover the bills while I focused on my writing, it had quickly become full-time to subsist and the writing had been sadly neglected. I wanted to find a job that could help me pay my bills while also allowing me to actually work with words in a more direct way.
When I first announced my new name to people, particularly those who were aware I was looking for a career change, a look of concern came over their faces. “That name might make it harder to get a job…” was a trailed-off statement-cum-question that more than a couple of well-meaning people posed to me. I had prepared for this and it was delightfully freeing to have a response ready, at least to my own creeping sense of self-doubt.
For the longest time, I had resisted talking about delicate political matters too publicly or in places like this website. The lurking question had always been “what if a prospective employer sees those comments, prominently tied to my name, and it costs me a job?” It took some larger problems in the world coming to full boil for me to realize that that rationale was not who I was. If someone wouldn’t hire me because I spoke my mind about politics and civil rights, then I didn’t want to work for that person anyway.
This became my response to doubts about whether changing my name might lead to job difficulties, both the doubts that arose externally and those that came internally. If someone didn’t want to hire me because I had a strange non-binary name, then I didn’t want to work for them. I started adding my pronouns to my email signatures and social media as well, just to be safe. Almost 2 years ago, I managed to start presenting myself as openly and unapologetically queer. I recognize that I live in a state of privilege to be able to do that. It’s oftentimes easier to do that on social media and in work-from-home environments and if I was still in retail then it would pose new problems. I’m reminded of that every time I plan to leave the house and have to think about what level of safety I need to build into my presentation that day. But I hope that things will keep getting better.
As far as ‘Faefyx’ as a professional name goes, I became unemployed in September of 2020 and took some time to consider what I wanted to be doing. Settling (eventually) on trying to get into writing articles as a freelancer while working on my fiction in my spare time, I set out to do just that. I still sent out the occasional job application (which were invariably rejected). However, in April 2021, I started to get the first bites of interest in my writing as a freelancer. By May I was writing my first pieces for Into and was joining the ranks of Screen Rant’s contributing writers. That summer, I had my first pieces published on Polygon, and in August, Screen Rant raised me to the rank of senior writer.
All of this was a lot of work, but I was finally vaguely financially stable through my writing, and that made all the difference to me. The demands on my time to keep up with the writing to pay the bills, watch the shows necessary to create coverage, handle issues with my mental health, and deal with a period of intractable migraines meant that some of my other work fell by the wayside. This site has not seen a lot of new posts to it directly because I’ve been writing the pieces I would have put here for other sites and have had less time for self-indulgent pieces like this. Similarly, my fiction Patreon and the Unramblings podcast have been woefully neglected.
However, in March 2022, less than a year after my first freelance piece was published, I was made an editor at Screen Rant and I reached somewhat of a plateau in my battle with my mental health. Since then, I’ve been finding more time to devote to my other projects. In May, a new chapter went up on my Patreon for the first time in too long and a raft of new creative writing has been in the works with new Patreon pieces coming up monthly. Charlyn and I are working on brand-new Unramblings content after a hiatus and content is being actively recorded and edited with plenty more planned to release in the coming weeks and months. And I’ve started a Discord server working to provide a space for queer writers and editors of fiction and non-fiction alike where we can support each other’s voices – the Queer Writers’ Block. As strange as it seems, this isn’t even an exhaustive list, and there is plenty that I’m not mentioning here because it would get tedious to read or because it’s one of my super-secret projects that you’ll just have to wait to hear more about.
While I might have a queer name now, and it might make me unemployable by certain people or in certain fields, I find it hard to care. I get to be me now. And as it turns out, it seems increasingly likely that being “me” means being an open, creative, and fulfilled professional queer.
If you enjoyed this article, please check out the other non-fiction pieces and Faefyx’s short stories, and consider backing the Faefyx fiction Patreon for regular new stories, or supporting Faefyx in other ways.
The flag in the featured image is the Progress Pride flag designed by Daniel Quasar. This flag was purchased from Flags For Good (not a sponsor, just cool).