> THROUGHLINE:

If there is a throughline to all of it, it is this: problem-solving is how I interact with the world. Everything is either a problem in front of me or a problem I have already solved and can apply the solution to. Technical systems, social systems, personal ones: curiosity makes me pull them apart, the need to understand keeps me there, and the pleasure of a difficult solution keeps me coming back. Every chapter below is the same project pointed at a different target, and the last target turned out to be me.

> EARLY_LIFE:

On paper I was a country boy. In practice the "farm" was two acres outside town, and the horses in the back pasture belonged to someone else. My father was a network technician and an Australian immigrant; my mother was a journalist who traded the byline for full-time motherhood. I was born stateside, so the immigrant part skipped me in every way but trivia. I just know a bit more about Australia than anyone expects.

Money was the middle kind. The lights stayed on and the table stayed set, but when things got tight you could taste it in the groceries. We made it work.

> HOMESCHOOLING_AND_FAMILY:

The diagnosis came at six years old: autism and ADHD, together. The paperwork technically says PDD-NOS, which was the language of the era for a kid too developmentally stunted to be filed under Asperger's and not stunted enough for classical autism. The ADHD half came with stimulants I stayed on for most of my childhood; Vyvanse is the reason I weighed 160 pounds at 6'7" in my teens. The whole package produced a child who was intellectually years ahead and socially unreadable, and school responded by filing me under "bad kid." My mother refused to let that label set. She pulled me out and homeschooled me herself, and my sister soon after.

She taught the way a former journalist would, which is to say the red pen showed no mercy, English least of all. Spelling came by quiz, arithmetic by skip-counting rhymes and Math-U-See lessons, and history sometimes followed us to dinner, where the meal came from whatever culture we were studying. My AuDHD made arithmetic a running battle, but she worked with me until I sat a grade ahead in nearly everything, and in English she took me all the way to a high school level before I left the elementary grades. I have not had to learn anything new about writing a paper since the 5th grade; that part of my education was simply finished early. It is also the inheritance I use most. My love of literature, of writing, of poetry, comes straight from her, and every word on this site, blog included, is downstream of her teaching. Writing is fun for me because she taught me well enough for it to be.

For entertainment I read encyclopedias. Fantasy novels went down too fast to hold me for long; the exceptions were David Eddings' Belgariad and its sequel series the Malloreon, and later Patrick Rothfuss's Kingkiller Chronicle, all of which I fucking love to this day. But a novel lasted me days, and an encyclopedia, memorized front to back, lasted months. I became a walking archive of whatever volume I had read most recently, and picked up a startling amount about nearly everything in the process.

My father's work took him on the road often, so our time together was rationed by the schedule. I spent much of it watching him work. From him I got my love of technology, and the example of a man who arrived in this country with a GED and built a comfortable life for his family out of sheer work ethic. He is the American Dream with an Australian accent. I hold very few people in deeper respect, and I honestly don't know if I will ever live up to the legacy.

> SCHOOL_REENTRY_AND_ONLINE_LIFE:

By 5th grade the homeschool had hit its ceiling. Tweenage rebellion was running high, my AuDHD had my mother at a standstill, and my father tipped the scales: I would go to public middle school, so that I wouldn't arrive at adulthood hopelessly socially inept. I begrudged the decision and I understood it, and both of those are still true. With me back in a classroom my mother went back to work, making us a dual income household. She never left my life; she just stopped being its daily center of gravity.

Reentry was trivial. An IQ test, a placement test, some general knowledge, and a verdict: qualified to skip a grade. My mother declined on my behalf, reasoning that I shouldn't be younger than every peer I was already struggling to relate to. I think she got that one wrong, and I understand exactly why she chose it. The practical result was a kid who already knew all the material, seated in 6th grade, with zero social filter about saying so. I earned precisely the reputation you would expect. Nobody wanted my corrections, and I made them anyway, because it feels good to be right. 7th grade went a little better; the material finally made me work for it, and I was beginning to grasp that being right had a price. But the tempering came too late, and the reputation was permanent.

Around then I found a new obsession: getting past my father's increasingly arcane ways of keeping me off the internet after hours. Sleep has never worked right for me. There has never been a consistent schedule, waking up on time has been a lifelong nightmare, and my brain is most awake precisely when the house wants it off. Meanwhile, after six years of saving, I finally had the roughly $600 for my own gaming PC, a modest little prebuilt picked out with my father's help, purchased at the exact peak of Overwatch's reign over YouTube. The FOMO had been agonizing. And so the arms race began. A password on the family computer fell to the old cmd.exe > sethc.exe trick. A bedtime firewall rule against my MAC address fell, in theory at least, to MAC spoofing. It was half a game between us and half a genuine conflict: I stayed up because I wasn't tired, he wanted me in bed, and neither side was ever going to concede.

Overwatch itself I loved and played into the ground, within one hard limit: I'm autistic enough to have fine motor issues, so my aim never rose above below-average and I sat hardstuck in silver. Hence, a Junkrat main. I only really fell off the game once Brigitte arrived.

But the nights the countermeasures actually held were, honestly, some of the best of my life. Music downloaded in advance, Winamp glowing, singleplayer games running (Enter the Gungeon above all), maybe one YouTube video saved for the occasion. My own private slice of the 90's, running a decade late.

By the end of middle school I had talked my parents into letting me do high school online, dodging the incoming social disaster of high school and leaving my reputation where it lay.

Not everything was a screen, though. Through my teenage years I was a heavy competitive swimmer, and the body still carries the receipts: I can hold my breath for an easy three minutes, my BOLT score sits at 50-odd, and I have far more myofibrillar strength than anyone who hasn't seen the inside of a gym in seven years has any right to. The engine got built early. It still idles well.

> NAME_ETYMOLOGY:

Middle school is also where the name comes from. I was in trouble constantly in those years, for a rotating catalog of stupid reasons, and a known know-it-all gets no benefit of the doubt. So I got good, genuinely good, at talking my way out of it. The friends I did have said I was smooth as silk about it. I liked that more than I let on, and I quietly steered the phrase into heavier rotation until it hardened into a nickname: Silk. It did not hurt that Silk was already the name of a favorite character, the Belgariad's Prince Kheldar: spy, thief, and professional charmer.

Here is the honest version of why it fit. Because I'm autistic, neither automatic social inference nor empathy came installed in the form people expect. I don't feel my way through a room; I read it. What other people sense, I compute. Caring is often a deliberate choice I make because it is the objectively moral thing to do, and I can disconnect from it more easily than most people would like. I taught myself to cold read faces and voices the way I taught myself everything else: from the outside, pattern first. Even now the imitation is not perfect. People especially sensitive to emotional states can tell that I do not experience or perform them in the expected way, and the mismatch can unsettle them badly. Masking is a skill, and I got very good at it very young, because I had to. Smooth as silk was never a party trick; it was a coping mechanism with good PR. Which is the deeper reason Kheldar stuck. Funny, wry, and quietly broken underneath, with the surface kept polished precisely so that nobody checks. I recognized the design.

> DISCORD_AND_TECHNICAL_STARTS:

The real social education happened on Discord. I landed there in late 2015 or early 2016, and it quietly did the job public school was supposed to do. I don't blame my parents for not seeing that coming; in their day it was simply impossible to talk with a thousand strangers through a box in the family room. But that became the playground. Reading cues, timing, fitting in, being a decent person: I worked all of it out there, one conversation at a time. It is also where the IT career started.

I gravitated to roleplay communities first. Cringe, yes. Also formative. Every server was a fandom or an original setting, and I fell hard for the collaborative storytelling. Playing characters turned out to be ideal practice for being a person; the stakes were low and mistakes didn't follow you home. Roleplay is where my interest in history comes from, excavated to make characters authentic. It is where the materials science came from, by way of the extremely serious business of powerscaling fantasy weapon steel. It is what eventually grew into a genuine love of TTRPGs. I built myself, in no small part, through the practice of building characters.

The first technical project was a Discord bot. There was a product on Steam called Discord Bot Maker, essentially Scratch for bots, and I hit its limits fast. More and more of the bot ended up hand-written until I capitulated and simply learned enough JavaScript to build it myself. High school layered on a Python class, sociology, audio engineering, and whatever other electives looked interesting at the time.

Stack it all together, the encyclopedias, a mother who drilled dictation into me until I could hold long passages in my head, the scattershot electives, and you get why I call myself a jack of all trades, master of none. The online spaces get the remaining credit. They were the first place where knowledge, experimentation, and identity went largely unpunished, and a great deal of who I became was forged there: socially, technically, creatively.

> COLLEGE_AND_COLLAPSE:

Online high school deserves an honest accounting here, because its shape explains everything that came after. My school had no real deadlines. So the system became: coast for months, live on Discord and games, neglect the medication, and then, in the last month of the semester, take all the Vyvanse I had been skipping and compress the entire semester into four weeks. Every semester. Same cycle. It worked, and that was exactly the problem, because a system that always works never teaches you what to do when it stops.

And on paper it looked like brilliance. I finished high school in 2020, in three years, 3rd in a class of roughly 6,400, that class being every student in my state enrolled in the same online school. Technically a valedictorian by way of class size, mercifully spared the speech because only the top two had to give one. Unweighted 3.98, ACT 32, superscored 34. There was no graduation ceremony (because lol 2020), which felt almost fitting for a high school conducted entirely through a screen.

It was in the middle of those years that a friend on Discord, midway through my heated rant about gender roles being bullshit and how much I wished I could simply defy them, asked me one question: "Have you ever considered that you might be non-binary?" It hit me like a truck. I had not considered it. The idea lingered, struck its chord, and settled in, and quite soon after I decided: yes. Quite possibly. Likely non-binary.

Then came Pittsburg State University in Kansas, where I signed up for 19 credit hours on a double major track across two schools of engineering, and where the cram system finally met a load it could not carry. It was the height of COVID. I knew no one there. My roommates kept to themselves and I kept to mine. I lived on ramen, discovered the YouTube Shorts rabbit hole, and slept in a room kept cold and damp all through a wet Kansas winter by a window that would not fully close. The moment I actually remember is arithmetic: sitting down to calculate the scores I would need on every remaining assignment to pass, and finding that in nearly every class the answer was mathematically impossible. Beyond the point of no return. Over. The withdrawal deadline was that week. I spent several days doing almost nothing but lying down and wallowing in it, then called my parents and broke apart over the phone as I told them what the arithmetic had told me. That week I withdrew, and drove home with the entire system of self-worth I had built on academic success in pieces on the floorboard.

I can say now that it needed to happen. When your whole self-concept is "the smart one," finding the true edge of your ability is a demolition. It began teaching me, slowly and incompletely, that intelligence is not discipline and potential is not execution.

The recovery started in a black suit. My first job was as an expo at a top tier steakhouse in my home city, bossing servers around and running the floor to exactly the extent my position allowed, which was more than you might think. A mini-manager, if you will. It was fun. And the next fall I went back to school on deliberately modest terms: an Associate's in IT at OSUIT. Two years, an easy program, most of it material I had already absorbed through years of tinkering. I have the Touch when it comes to IT, if that means anything to you; most systems make sense to me on contact. I won't claim omnicompetence, and genuinely complex algorithmic behavior does not open itself to me by reading. Most sorting algorithms remain a black box. I graduated with a 2.5, which was exactly the GPA required to graduate, a statistic I choose to find funny.

> WORK_AND_ARIZONA:

Work came in steps. A desktop support internship at a bank, acquired through nepotism and kept through competence; I was well liked, and could likely have negotiated a permanent seat if I had pushed for one. A few months as a security camera operator. And then the real one: a year-long contract at a large S&P 500 oil and gas company that will remain unnamed. My title said Network Engineer. My duties said on-site technician, staging hardware against designs drawn by the actual engineers upstairs. I learned a great deal of Cisco, joined a sub-team building a web app of internal networking tools, and collected frameworks and tricks of the trade. I am not a real network engineer. I know exactly enough to be dangerous.

It was during that contract that a very long slope finally reached bottom. The question of whether I was trans had been open since I was around sixteen, and it never resolved with a lightning bolt. It moved by degrees: "I'm thinking about it," then "I'm pretty sure," then "I am this," then simply thinking of myself as a girl, or something very closely adjacent. There was no second revelation. Every time I said it out loud it seemed a little more right, and eventually that accumulation became its own proof. My parents had counseled caution, the phrase "just a phase" was deployed, and I wanted no decisions I would regret, so I gave it years. By the contract, there was nothing left to deliberate. I knew.

At the contract's end I moved to Arizona for my then-girlfriend, and accounting the exact details around that relationship unfortunately matters. We met around the time of Pitt State, and in the wreckage that followed she became my constant companion and, functionally, my reason for living. I had no drive of my own left, so I substituted hers. I lived to keep her okay: her support, her sounding board, her therapist, every single day, at a cost of probably literally thousands of hours of sleep across five years. Out of respect for her privacy, that is all the detail this page will ever hold. "After this contract I will move in with you" had been the standing plan since I scored it, and when the contract ended I kept to that plan. Living together collapsed almost immediately, in a way too catastrophic to responsibly describe here. The shortest true version is complete emotional incompatibility. I do not experience or perform emotion in the expected way, and close proximity to someone exquisitely sensitive to emotional states made every mismatch register at full volume. Neither of us could stop being built the way we were.

So there I was: stranded in Arizona, a thousand miles from anyone I knew, mourning five years of a relationship that had been most of my purpose. I pined for longer than I would like to admit. Eventually I resolved to do something, anything, before the indolence and self-pity finished the job, and when months of job hunting produced nothing, the something was a semester at ASU. It was doomed from the start, cost far more than it taught, and its one bright spot was an Excel course doing a thin impression of a biology lab. But I passed. Not gloriously. Passed. And somewhere in that same stretch I taught myself Astro and built the site you are reading right now.

> IDENTITY_AND_NOW:

Then, this year (2026), the graph finally turned upward. I started HRT on January 7th. I had been complaining in a Discord server about still not having it when someone there realized she lived twenty minutes away. We met at a park that same day, hit it off, and I ended up back at her house, where she gave me my first injection. It was intimate, and it completed a process that had been running in the background for years. The decision took years. The last step took an afternoon.

When the Arizona lease ended in May I moved to North Carolina, where a friend pulled me straight into the local queer scene. It has been wonderful. For the first time my community exists in person instead of through a screen, and I am much, much happier.

There is work again too: technical support specialist for some quite specialized medical imaging equipment. It is a genuinely cool job. They call me by my preferred name.

And the conversation I spent years dreading finally happened. In June I flew home for my sister's wedding (she's a nurse now, and very happy with her new husband), and while I was there I came out to my parents. The response was, to my considerable relief, perfectly fine. My mother was emphatically accepting, as I had expected. My father has not said much; I suspect it is harder for him to absorb, but silence is not rejection, and he has not rejected me. They already knew I had intended to transition. I am not sure either of them expected intention to become fact. They know about the estrogen now. I am more out than I have ever been, and my life, for once, is going very well.

This is also when Silk grew its y. Silky sounded more feminine, so Silky it became, and the site wears the name. I stand by the choice of namesake, too; Kheldar remains a pretty good double for how I see myself. Take that however you like.

The rest is the fun stuff. Music, constantly, though purely as a listener. Ren faires whenever I can reach one, with a custom LARP sword and a proper outfit sitting on the ambition list, neither yet real.

So that is the now, as of this writing: a 23 year old trans woman, chronically online autist with a broad swath of knowledge across many fields, a smattering of deeper education across the poorly defined territory called "IT," an interest in ren faires and music, and an endless drive to figure things out and make them work. I'll update this page when life updates me.

I said at the top that problem-solving is how I interact with the world. The last few years were that same drive turned, at last, on the two problems I had avoided the longest: my own life, and my own self. That is still what I am doing now. Just with more intention than when I started.