First, an introduction: My name is Georgia Garvey, and this is my column.

I hope you read it.

Perhaps you'd first like to know a bit about me — about what you'd be in for.

Before I continue, I should probably warn you that I'm Greek. It might explain a lot. I can be argumentative and stubborn, and everything reminds me of a glorious but moldy Greek achievement.

As one example, I've been thinking a lot lately about Diogenes. He was... well, I guess you'd call him a philosopher, though he was more like an ancient Greek Oscar the Grouch: strange, crotchety and opinionated.

Diogenes was nicknamed "The Dog" and aspired to live like one, eating, toileting and sleeping in public. He's said to have criticized powerful figures such as Plato and Alexander the Great and urinated on people who made him mad. (He'd have gotten along famously with my 3-year-old, whose greatest joys in life are peeing outside and pointing out my pimples.)

Diogenes was utterly wild and utterly himself. He was a radical.

Lately I've realized that I, at heart, am a radical.

Because moderating your thoughts and words, believing in the intrinsic, immutable value of humans and trying — though, admittedly, often failing — to default to compassion: These things have become radical.

If you're not on social media much, 1. Congratulations and 2. You may not see the full backlash against moderation. Groupthink pervades the national conversation, and being a "liberal" or a "conservative" defines what's acceptable for someone to think and say.

Violate those terms and it's your own team members who punish you with vicious, dehumanizing or even violent calls for your expulsion.

It's fashionable to call this "cancel culture," though that doesn't come close to describing the full problem. It's not just liberals who respond with rage to opinions with which they disagree. Ask Liz Cheney, for example, how welcoming conservatives can be to differing ideas.

This is all a long way of saying a short thing: I don't write much about politics.

Chiefly because the world is lousy with political opinions but also because I'm just not good at it — living in that icy world, glittery and smooth but full of sharp edges.

I'm better at literature, history, my family and my life.

I'm better when I think and write about being a woman, a mother and a member of my community, and honestly, those things are complicated enough to keep me occupied.

So, if you choose to come along with me on this journey, if you've read this far and read what I will write in the coming months and years, I suspect there will discussions of deep subjects — especially the bizarre deep subjects specific to life in 2021 — but I don't anticipate much discussion of President Joe Biden or Donald Trump or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Josh Hawley.

If there is, I promise to remind myself that politicians are humans, too, and worthy of the respect all humans deserve.

I promise to try to resist the siren song of bitterness. I promise to try to remember that humanity's chains bind us all; to remember that we fall and rise together; that our divisions are both shallow and illusory. I promise to value compassion.

I make these promises not because I aspire to sainthood but because it's the only path to happiness I have. To be happy, I must be fully myself — be radical.

That radicalism is in my blood and has traveled for thousands of years, from the DNA of ancient cranks like Diogenes to my own.

And, like me, it isn't going anywhere.

To learn more about Georgia Garvey, visit GeorgiaGarvey.com.