Messy Reinvention
The true version.
Not the inspirational one.
Essays by a Deaf queer man who spent forty years being told to shrink, and got very good at it, and then stopped.
Essays on becoming impossibly, unapologetically yourself. Dark humor, a little side-eye, and the occasional ugly cry you didn’t ask for. New writing most weeks.
Messy Reinvention is where I tell the true version.
I've spent my whole life getting told to shrink.
Queer in a small town that had opinions about it. And then, at thirty-five, deaf. Suddenly, permanently, in a body that had run entirely on sound, in a world that immediately began explaining what I could no longer do.
Two different rooms, one identical instruction: be less. Take up less space. Make this easier for everyone else.
I was, for a while, extremely good at it.
Then I stopped. These essays are what happened after: defiant, funny, and a little unhinged in the specific way you get when you’ve spent thirty years being polite about your own erasure. If you’ve ever been told you were too much, this is the room where
being too much turns out to be the point.
New Here? Start With These.
I Don’t Do Resolutions, I Do Reinvention
Why Reinvention Feels Like Disobedience
Fuck That: Being ‘Easy to Love’
Seventy Percent
What it actually costs to make my deafness easy for everyone else. It is not a personality trait. It is work.
Messy Reinvention runs in series.
Fuck That
The ongoing one. Short, sharp essays on the things we’re quietly expected to keep doing, and permission to stop.
The Things Disability Taught Me
A limited run on passing, access, and making music through the body. The true version of the deaf story, in four parts.
Plus standalone essays most weeks
Identity, reinvention, the body, and the occasional beautifully petty observation.
Who Waymon Is
I’m Waymon Hudson, a Deaf, queer writer, musician, and creator, and a 20-year veteran of the fight for queer and disabled lives.
Before the essays, I built and ran an LGBTQ+ advocacy organization, consulted on political campaigns, and spent years organizing. That foundation is why this work has nerve: I’m not observing these fights from a distance. I’ve been in them.
Messy Reinvention is one room in a larger house. I also write literary horror (Silent Horrors), make music, and am at work on a memoir. Different doors, same preoccupation: stories you feel in your body before you understand them in your head.
This page is the front door.
Wipe your feet, there’s a lot of feeling on the floor.
Get The Essays.
Free most weeks. Paid subscribers get the snarkier companion essays and the full archive.
No inspiration. No pep talks. No one’s journey to root for. Just the true version…
and the occasional side of sass.