Monthly Archives: November 2011

Hypocrisy

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Last night I told Noah that I am willing to have sex every day, even on days I’m not into it, in exchange for him giving me the courtesy of the public lie that I am interesting enough to be enough for him when we are out together.  That’s the kind of thing that makes him furrow his brow and take a long deep breath.  It always looks like I’ve kicked him.  I probably did.

Everyone makes a different kind of peace with nonmonogamy.  Mine is tattered and barely existant.  I wish I didn’t have this deep compulsion to sleep with other people so that I could declare it off limits for Noah.  But I do.  This really sucks.  He wouldn’t be happy about me trying to require monogamy, but he’d deal.  He took his marriage vows seriously.  I don’t think I can give monogamy.  I think I would become obsessed with cheating.  I think that my periodic times when I am driven to obsessively check okcupid (even though it’s just about a dead end at this point) would be a problem if I was monogamous.  It would feel different.

As a nonmonogamous person I’m allowed the freedom to think about looking pretty much any time.  That’s fun.  That lets me think about myself as a sexually available person and that is linked to all kinds of fun energy.  I like that part of me a lot.  NRE just isn’t available in long term batches.  I think Noah and I have a more affectionate than average marriage… it’s not NRE.  It’s not new-person-hot-sex.  It’s different.  There is a kind of being seen I get from making sex work with new people.  It’s important to me.

It’s important to Noah too.  Fuck him.  Jerk.  Meaniehead.  He doesn’t want me.  I am not enough.  This is tinged because I can see him raising his eyebrow at me.  NO IT DOESN’T MEAN THAT ABOUT YOU, JUST ME I AM THE ONLY INFERIOR ONE IN THIS RELATIONSHIP.  ahem.  Emotions are really stupid.

All of this comes down to a horrible hypocrisy on my part.  One I’m not sure how to resolve in myself.  I feel like part of my current issue is that I don’t like seeing Noah play with other people unless I was actively involved from the get go and never walk away.  I can’t walk up on Noah playing.  It makes my stomach flip flop and I want to cry.  I hate it.  He’s mine.  He’s the only person on the whole fucking planet who is mine and how dare someone else touch him.

And I hate that my awesome, wonderful husband wants to make other women fall in love with him.  Because he does.  I really kind of hate him for that.  It hurts.  He’s not as into the fuck and run as I am.  He can do it when I’m putting that requirement on him, but it’s not his preference.

I am going to fall apart when he finds someone.  This is going to be awful.  I don’t know how I will handle this.  I really kind of hate nonmonogamy.  I feel bad for the women who have to deal with me in order to get Noah.  I feel like a horrible partner.  I feel like a bitch.  Like I just suck at doing this.  I don’t know that I can be nice to someone Noah falls for and that’s not ok.

I’m borrowing trouble.  I have a little less than four years till he’s allowed to go after that kind of thing.  In the mean time I think he should start going to parties to hunt alone.  It’s not don’t ask don’t tell.  I just don’t want to watch.

Queer

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Sometimes I wonder if my fanatical devotion to this word springs in part from my former therapist, Traci.  She was probably the most queer person I talked to about myself.  That sounds weird.  She was visibly part of queer culture in a way I have never been.  I’m cis-gendered and I primarily partner with men.  I pass.  I loathe the word bisexual because of the gender binary it mandates.  Early on in my dating I met someone who was transitioning.  If I’m honest it was always something I felt in the pit of my stomach that she was different from the other girls I dated.  She was not less than, just other.  A whole different kind of person.  She told me that fucking her made me queer.

Traci told me that it doesn’t matter who I fuck.  It matters how I see the world.  How I love people.  She said I was queer and laughed.  She thought it was funny that I treated queer like a merit badge to be won and I hadn’t worked hard enough yet. I feel like marrying a man forever revokes any authenticity I have in using that word.

Just like I don’t say I’m a dancer any more.  I love to dance.  But I’m not a dancer.

I’m thinking back over my laundry list of lovers.  I’m naming a lot of them and making references to the people I can’t name any more.  I’m thinking a lot about why I engaged in this sexual behavior.  Did I want it?  Do I want it now?  It’s hard to say.  I did and I didn’t.  I do and I don’t.  I was conditioned.  I am supposed to behave this way.  I don’t know any other way to be.

What way?  Promiscuity is never as easy as it looks on first blush.  People have sex for so many reasons and if you want to have sex with a lot of people you have to accept that there will be a lot of reasons.  I don’t always get to decide what kind of sex I am going to have if I am going to have it at all.  I think the sex I enjoy the most is when I know that someone is getting off in my presence because I am so hot.  I have a hard time with partners who don’t orgasm.  It’s part of the reason I don’t go after women any more.  They are so hard.  I have a lot of gratitude that guys are continually willing to put up with women despite the fact that we are such a pain in the ass.  It’s hard getting women off.  It takes commitment.  It takes not just finding out what scares them, but finding out what makes them feel safe.

I can deal with the scary stuff, I’m not so good at safe during sex.  Safe during sex means that it’s glorified cuddling, not sex.  There isn’t much to get me off.  I have to have that edge of fear, pain, despair, objectification…  I have not run into a woman who wants to treat me that way.  Thus, I haven’t had sex with a woman in a while.  When I have had sex with women in the past few years it has been very safe friends who feel like they are there for a game of racquet ball.  Sex is awesome, but it’s better with friends.  I don’t know if I got them off, I think so?  I hope so?  I tried?  But I wasn’t able to get that emotionally invested in the outcome because we were in a party situation and I wasn’t going to be able to pay that much attention to them anyway.

This leaves me with men.  Or folks somewhere off the gender binary.  I don’t even know how to meet them.  I don’t know how to find people who want what I want.  If I knew what I wanted it would help.

I want to be special.  I want to be important.  I want to be worth winning.  I want to feel like the prize.

My issues with our house.

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Alternatively titled “Noah’s House of Whores” but I thought it would be pretty fucked up to have that be the URL.  I have a lot of deep seated issues around my sexuality.  I am increasingly comfortable referring to myself as a whore.  I can’t tell if this is a sign of my lowering or raising self esteem.  Well, at least if I’m a whore I’m a damn good one.  I picked a very specific flavor of being a whore.  Yes, yes, he married me.  That “sanctifies” the sex and justifies him supporting me forever just because.  Only that’s not true.  There has to be a balance or relationships don’t work.

I think Noah would be capable of turning off his voracious need for sex if I required him to.  I think he would become a shadow of himself.  I don’t want to break him.  That’s not why I married him.  I want to see what he can do.  I knew that it was going to be an E ticket ride.  Noah married me because he likes my extremes.  My willingness to communicate.

I chose this relationship because it felt right.  Because this meets my needs.  It bothers me that I need to have a partner I can think about the way I think about Noah sometimes.  To back up, I never wanted to live in this house.  To me places kind of absorb the energy of the people in them.  Noah has dated a lot of women here.  I saw a fair bit of it.  I know even more of the women who came and went.  I’m actually on good terms with the majority of them.  (Uhm, apologies for referring all of you as whores–it’s about me, not about you.)

When I am out with someone I tend to feel enormously bad if they pay attention to someone else.  If I come back from the bathroom and Noah is cuddling someone else?  I feel like I’m about to vomit.  It’s instant and visceral.  I have this flash of terror I knew he would stop wanting me soon.  He was just waiting until I stepped away to show it.  It’s even worse if he keeps his arm casually around said other woman and beckons me closer.  Because then it’s not that he doesn’t want me.  It’s that I’m not special enough to be interesting by myself.  I’m better with a friend.  Anyone improves the experience.  The writing over the past few days has been about my dad and how he treated me when I was five and under.

I don’t like the parallels about how I picked a partner who wants me to be an enthusiastic whore with no ability to say no to sex.  Very uncomfortable feeling.  I’m supposed to be available to anyone and everyone at a whim.

This is not true of course.  This isn’t how Noah feels.  But it’s how I feel.  This is my internal dialogue.  This is the pressure I put on myself.  I feel like it is my duty to be sexually available, even if I don’t want to.  Even if I’m not enjoying the sex.  Especially if the person wants to hurt me.  I don’t like the fact that pain makes me orgasm when gentle touching does not.  I don’t appreciate the fact that my husband doing any amount of vanilla foreplay can’t do much of anything for me.  But pain does.  That’s part of why I feel like a whore.  My sexuality has to involve degradation and pain or it doesn’t count as sex.  It really sucks.

That’s hyperbole.  But it’s more true than not.  I have to be objectified.  I have to be used to get someone else off or I feel like I have failed at what I am obligated to do during sex.  Thing is, my husband doesn’t really like that I need to feel that way.  For all that Noah has done some heinous shit to me, he doesn’t want to be that person full time.  He doesn’t want to make me feel bad about myself daily.

So how do we handle sex?  Gingerly.  In ways that feel fairly unsatisfying sometimes.  I feel dirty and used.  He feels sad and like he is hurting me.  But he isn’t.  It would be much worse if he stopped having sex with me.  I get most of my touch needs met through sex and massage.  I can only afford to pay for so much massage.  I can’t handle having people touch me non-sexually most of the time.  I don’t know how to react.  I panic.  I feel scared.  I don’t know what they want from me and my impulse is to run as far and as fast as I can.

Nonmonogamy makes this all more complicated.  Noah sleeping with other people reminds me that my hooha is not glittery.  I have to be honest and say I’m bitter.  I feel let down.  Me sleeping with other people reminds me that I’m not good at following rules or bonding or doing the things people are supposed to do in relationships.  Like be faithful.  I suck at that.  I get antsy and then I feel absolutely compulsive about finding a new partner.  There is some gaping need I have and I know no other way to fill it.  I need that attention.

God I resent the shit out of Noah needing it too.  Then I feel like an asshole hypocrite.  He’s supposed to just know that me being nonmonogamous is because I am defective and icki and kind of ignore it and be above such base needs.  Or something.  I’m so emotionally raw we shouldn’t make any long-term decisions.  I don’t know what I want.

I know it has been true for a long time that sex always feels taboo and like I’m doing something bad.  I wish that would change.

Written yesterday

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             I’ve been at Occupy Oakland for a few hours now.  It’s tense and sad.  I’m watching cops who look exhausted and near emotionally broken.  I have been talking with my fellow protestors.  I’m asking them to please not hurl angry words at the police on the other side of the barricade.  Once or twice that has brought angry words at me.  I’m ok with that.  When I look across this barricade and I see grown men on the verge of tears I can’t help but feel that this entire circus is bad for everyone.  The police are just people.  They are the 99% as well.  When protestors yell that a smiling police officer is a disgusting pig, what they are saying is that joy in another human being is wrong.  Most of the people who crack smiles on the other side of the barricade look very nervous.  Smiling is a nervous reaction. 
            Last night the various police forces of the bay area joined together to slowly, carefully, evict people from Oscar Grant Plaza.  I’m not sure why.  I’m not sure what the goal was.  Does the city really believe this will do anything other than energize the movement?  Persecuted groups fight back.  They have a force to unite against.  I wish the force we were fighting against looked different.
            I don’t want to fight the Oakland PD.  I know about their reputation.  They have earned it after years and years of brutality.  How can it be changed?  How can the people of Oakland work together with the people who are supposed to protect and serve this city?  What kinds of things would build a bridge?  Last night the police were at least more gentle than normal.  I feel very resentful of the fact that I am surprised. 
            I think that every person should have the gut level expectation of civil treatment.  But that isn’t how the world works.  Instead we are cruel and vicious with one another and we have to say thank you when someone refrains from hitting us.  We can rail and complain and be upset about that, or we can say thank you when someone refrains from hitting us.  I feel like that is a lesson I’ve learned a bit too well.  There is no such thing as the “right” to being treated well.  Please God, most people treat one another well out of the kindness of their hearts.  It’s not a right.  I don’t know that I believe in rights much. 
            I’m not sure if I believe in rights, yet here I am.  Sitting with a meditation circle (you can see how well I meditate) and watching city employees clean up the debris of a tent city.  I’m here because my Constitution gives me the right to peacefully assemble.  And I think I should do it.  I think it is my obligation today to assemble here in Oakland in support of the homeless people who were just evicted from this park.  Because let’s be clear here: the encampment is about serving the needs about the homeless population in Oakland.  It’s a small part of the overall Occupy movement.
Mayor Quan, what were you hoping for?

You cannot evict Occupy Oakland

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Right now there are a ridiculous number of cops attacking Oscar Grant Plaza.  I feel sick to my stomach.  The beautiful people I have been getting to know gradually as I have the courage are going to get hurt today.  I feel so sad.  So disappointed in my country.  How dare we treat people this way?  I wonder how many peaceful protestors are going to be shot today?

I am so fucking embarrassed to be an American today.  What a piece of shit country.

You want to know why I am so embarrassed?  Because this is theatre.  The Occupiers will be back.  Mayor Quan is only wasting taxpayers money.  They will just.come.back.

I think talking about money is important.

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So after covering the checks I have already written for Occupy I have ~$32,000 sitting in my bank account.  Do you know how much money I have to pay this month for various expenses?  I owe $17,000 on credit cards.  That will be paid off this month.  I still haven’t paid property taxes or the mortgage or the domestic help or my therapy.  That’s another $9,000.  This is an unusually expensive month.  Our income is settling in to about $8,000 per month.  I am waiting to write checks for $17,650.  That means that on the 30th of this month, if I succeed in giving all the money away, I will only have around $6,000 in cash.  We have months that cost $15,000 on a fairly regular basis.  We pay for a lot of things.

People who know me know that having a large financial cushion is kind of a ridiculous driving force for me.  It’s unhealthy.  I grew up in a kind of poverty I honestly don’t like thinking about.  But holy fucking shit is my life different now.

That money was originally earmarked to pay off the Disney timeshare.  I bought the timeshare when I realized it was only took four trips of the kind Sarah likes for her birthday to pay off the investment and we really do want to be at Disneyland every year…  I bought it for Sarah and me.  Noah wasn’t thrilled.  Noah is not interested in spending that much time at Disneyland, thankyouverymuch.  He’ll go.  But not every year.

I have done Disneyland with Sarah enough times that it is worth it to me to buy the time share.  Do you know why?  Mostly because she is disabled.  It is hard for her to expend the energy to travel long distances, sometimes even with motor devices.  If we are in an apartment that is just a few yards away from an entrance she can afford the spoons to rest in the middle of the day and really enjoy evening stuff.  It feels loving to be at Disneyland with Sarah.  She appreciates it the same way my mom does.  Just sitting on a bench with a book while people walk by makes her happy.  Disneyland is a place to just sit and feel joy.

So I bought a fucking Disney time share and I feel like a privileged asshole.  I feel strangely embarrassed that I bought this stupid thing.  What a dumb fuck am I, right?  Only dumb fucks buy time shares.  It’s a racket.  Geez.  What a fucking waste of money.  A number of people have told me off for this.

Do you know how many weeks of joy this has already brought me?  Sarah and I get to dream about future vacations.  They are paid for.  I will have to pay for park tickets and gas to drive there.  Otherwise we can cook in the apartment and it’s not any more expensive than being at home.  Really.

It’s financed at 10% and I’m pissed off with myself for continuing to carry that debt.  I wanted it paid off in a year.  Err, that hasn’t happened.  Other things keep coming up.  Like getting my heart Occupied.  Why is this so fucking important?  Because people matter.  We need a William Wallace.  We need someone to step up.  This is a Revolution.  Hell, we need everyone to step up.  What can you go do, today, tomorrow, and the next day to make the world a better place?  Stop sitting in your house whining about your problems.

Says the whiny blogger who has barely left the house in months.  Cause Jesus Christ, if anyone should stop whining it’s me.  My life is the fantasy.  My life is the mythical American Dream in all of the particulars.  Oh, except that pesky PTSD shit.  How do I fix me so that I can enjoy the American Dream?

Well, I’m writing.  I think good will come from it.  I think that is one of the gifts that was given to me in this lifetime.  I can give people things to think about.  They won’t always agree with me, probably rarely.  But I want them to get to the point where they say, “Ok, I guess I can see why you feel the way you do.”  That’s what I fucking want.  I don’t need to have other people agree with me.  I need them to understand WHY I am different.  Why my opinion is different.  Because maybe that will ripple.  Maybe other people who have different opinions are ok too.  Can we stop beating the shit out of political parties?  What is the fucking point?  Grow up you stupid babies.

People are people.  I’m neither a Democrat nor a Republican.  I kind of hate you all equally.  And don’t get me started on how I feel about socialists.  Or the members of my own, Libertarian party.  I feel pretty embarrassed to be associated with them.  Good grief.  But it is the closest to what I believe.

I’m getting away from the point.  When my heart was Occupied my priorities shifted.  Noah is never going to want to stay home with me while working a part time job.  He doesn’t want to.  Ok.  The dramatic need to lower our monthly expenses so that can happen… doesn’t really need to happen.  If it takes longer and I pay more interest in the time share, that will be ok.  Really.  I can deal having to “tighten my belt”.  We are part of the 99%.  In order to maintain all the insurances folks consider necessary we have more than $6,000 of our income promised before it arrives.  It’s $8,000.  We have months where we put $17,000 on the credit card.  You do the math.  No really, that’s going to require some belt tightening.  But I don’t exactly feel like I can complain about that.

And I have the money to spend.  Occupy needs it more than I need to be able to have the lifestyle to which I have become accustomed.  The fact that I can preplan 50 years of vacations means that my life is already as good as it needs to be.

The reason I feel I need to give the money is because people need a spark of hope.  They need to see things being done.  I can’t be the William Wallace for this movement.  I really kind of wish I could.  But that’s not my story.  I’m trying to bait other people.  I’m trying to push them to expand their dreams.  Whoever is going to be the firebrand to lead this Revolution, (s)he will not have much money to start with.  But there will be so much hunger.  So many dreams.  That person will say, “Yes give me your money so I can change the world.”  I hope.  I really hope.

In the meantime I took my family to a park clean up day in Oakland the Occupy folks organized.  I have marched.  I sit in the encampment and eat lunch and talk to the people who live there as I feel I can emotionally.  I think my next clean up day should be in Fremont.  I think that I’m about out of spoons for driving to Oakland.

I think maybe I should just open my front door and walk out it.  I think I should Occupy the space I am in.  Why am I trying so hard to give this money to Oakland?  Why am I beating people over the head asking them to please please please take the money?  Why don’t I start my own fucking occupation.  Hm.  It’s an idea.  What would I do if I occupied Fremont?  Hmm.  I would start putting up notices for neighborhood clean up days.  I’ll be surprised if I’m the only one out there.  This is a small town in the middle of a big urban sprawl.

I’ve been surprised by how many of my neighbors have lived here for more than twenty years and they don’t know any of their neighbors.  There is so much hostility and fear and isolation here.  Why?  I feel sad saying that I sat at the local diner and listened to the waitress be casually racist with the other customers.  Despite the fact that I actually know a fair number of people in Fremont… I don’t see them.  Pretty much ever.  If you live in Fremont and you are “interesting” you spend your life in your car trying to get anywhere but here.

I’m getting tired of this attitude.  Fremont is beneath people.  I’ve done it too.  I spent the first many years of our marriage being fucking pissed off living in this fucking house in fucking Fremont.  This is one of the lowest socio-economic areas.  Not the lowest, by any stretch.  This is more like what I grew up with. My friends keep telling me to move to Alameda.  I really don’t want to.  I’m neither interested in the housing cost increase nor the insularity.  I actually like that my neighborhood is not predominantly white.  But I’m scared here.  This is not really the safe bubble people think of in the bay area.

I’m in the closet.  I can go protest in Oakland and be a radical and a pervert and a queer and whatever.  People here just see me as that nice weird lady.  I’m really polite to people in my neighborhood (uhhh except for the one time I yelled at a guy for wasting water while he was trying to deal with his lawn; long embarrassing story).  I’m getting to know my neighbors very slowly.  Very distantly.  I’m trying to be consistent in my behavior over a long period of time without exposing them to my mood swings.  I can’t afford to piss off my neighbors.  Do you know how much pressure that is for me?

How in the hell can I expect my really diverse neighborhood to be thrilled about having a whore who writes about sex on the internet in their neighborhood?  I’m out with the kids all the time.  Aren’t they going to start looking at me as if I am dirty if they find out?  Don’t I need to hide?

I think it is interesting that my friends think the Occupy movement is about money.  I think it’s about pushing for the right to exist and be different and have a different life.  Whatever the fuck that means.  Our entire culture is set up around streamlining people so they can be more and more similar.  I’m not fucking like the folks who grew up in small town Duluth (love you).  And that’s more than ok.  It’s awesome.  I had different experiences so I got to go off and become a completely different kind of person.  I’m not like the people who grew up in Rotorua, either.  Or London near as I can tell.  I go a lot of places and I meet a lot of people.  I never fit.  Nowhere.

Maybe I need to stop going out into the world trying to find someplace that is right.  I think the Occupy movement is about seeing that something that needs to be changed and doing it.  That will be financial for a lot of people.  But it’s also about recognizing that we have abdicated a lot of responsibility to the system.  Any system.  How’s that going for folks?  Maybe if we want something we have to just go fucking do it.

I want to feel ok in my town.  I have to live here.  But I can’t stay in the closet.  This is horrible.  I’m not much like most of the folks around me.  But I’m not like folks anywhere.  That’s ok.  I may not be the right kind of Fremonter, but I’m the right kind of me.  Yeah, it’s a stupid stupid little thing I say.  I say it because I hope it’s true.  I’m trying to convince myself it is.  It’s very hard to believe that who and what I am is ok.  That feels like a lie.  So so so so so so many people tell me that I’m not ok.  Not directly.  Not to my face.  But in the very air I breathe in this culture.  I am so fucking wrong.

The General Strike showed me that I don’t feel that way because of the incest.  I feel that way because I am an American.  In fact, that seems to be our national culture.  Anything different is wrong and bad.  People, you need to lighten the fuck up.  Maybe instead of sitting in an encampment in solidarity with people in Oakland I should be organizing a neighborhood group to figure out a way to meet the needs of the people within walking distance of me.  That’s a significantly better choice for the planet.


But I will have to do that alone.  I won’t be able to throw money at that problem and walk away.  I will have to find the drive and determination to do that.  I will probably mostly be the one doing that, if I think it should happen.  It makes me tired.  I can’t do that yet.  I feel like I am failing my human beings.  I feel like every day that I allow children to walk past my house on the way to school who are going hungry and I ignore that I am just as bad as the people who didn’t help me.  I have so much rage at all of the people who didn’t help me.


Who the fuck am I helping?  I don’t know.  I hope that the RV comes through.  That would be something.  I wish I knew where my life was going.  I feel like I am littering the path with burning ambitions.  Things that hurt me that I am not focusing on them exclusively.  You can’t focus on a dozen things exclusively.  There isn’t enough me for that.


I really hope this movement spreads.  Please people, you can change the world too.  It doesn’t actually take money.  It takes the desire to do good.  You’ll find a way.  Please? 

DBW: 2 Corinthians 1:21-22

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And it is Occupy who establishes us with you in freedom, and has anointed us, and who has also put is seal on us and given us its Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee.

Today I bring my children and my husband with me to the encampment.  I hope that Mayor Quan will allow my family to remain safe.  We will then be going off to: Lincoln Square Recreation Center

250 10th Street (between Alice and Jackson) from 10-1.  I am bringing my family with me to the place that gave me back my faith in the human race.  I’m really hoping no one fucks that up.  I have a lot of reason to believe that a lot of people in power want to stomp on my hope.  They want me to feel small and bad and weak and pitiful.  They think I am nothing.  But they can fuck right off.


My heart was Occupied.  I will be at the encampment today with my husband and children to support the people there who are bravely risking police attack any minute due to an inappropriate eviction.  I hope I can give them moral support as well as physical support.  We will be bringing food.

What I just sent off to my GP

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Dear Dr. S,
            I apologize for the length of this message, I am not good at being brief and your office visits aren’t really long enough for me to come in and talk to you in person. 
            I went in to see Dr. Sastry as you recommended.  I will not be working with her.  I can explain that by telling you her parting line to me: “You have two major ways you deviate from the norm, breastfeeding and smoking pot.  I won’t be working with you until you stop them.”  She expected me to wean my daughter and quit smoking in a week.  Or she wouldn’t work with me.  Well, that week is over.  At no point in that week did I feel like a relationship with Dr. Sastry would improve my life so I cheerfully ignored her recommendations.
            She wanted me on an anti-psychotic, and she encouraged me towards upping the dose quickly.  She told me she was putting that I was bipolar on my medical record.  Even though I very firmly believe I am not bipoloar.  I have GAD and complex PTSD.  They are treated differently.  I don’t believe it is appropriate to medicate me as if I am bipolar.
            Instead I am paying a ridiculous amount of money to a Harm Reduction specialist.  I went in and talked to her for an hour and a half.  At the end I left with a prescription for Ativan.  Six pills for a month.  To be split in half.  I’ve had them almost two weeks and I’ve taken a pill and a half.  I have cut my smoking to almost nothing.
            Dr. Sastry had no interest in finding out what I have legitimately done to deal with my issues.  She wanted to medicate me into a coma to stop my sexual acting out.  I don’t appreciate her agenda.  When I talked about the recent periods of going without sleep for days she refused to believe me that I wasn’t also sexually acting out.  She wanted them to be manic cycles.  She would not accept that I wasn’t manic.  I wasn’t manic.  I was hyper-vigilant and experiencing flashbacks of being raped.  I wouldn’t let my children touch me let alone anyone else.  Yes, I am ethically non monogamous with my husband.  I don’t harm my life.
            I would encourage you to not sent patients to that woman if in any way they “deviate from the norm”.  No one needs to be shamed while they are in the process of receiving medical care.
Secondly, I am worried that some aspects of my health have been badly managed and it’s complicated to explain.  I saw a homebirth midwife through both pregnancies.  My first labor I did 40 hours at home before transferring and I delivered at Valley Med because they are the most friendly to transferring homebirths.  I actually think they did a fabulous job of dealing with me as a person who “deviated from the norm.”  The vast majority of the staff was really kind and effective and I appreciated that.  The delivering doctor asked me out of the blue if I wanted my placenta since I was a transferred homebirth.  When the delivering nurse said I couldn’t have it the doctor said, “We don’t know where it went.”  I will be grateful forever.
Neither of my pregnancies went well.  I was horribly sick.  I lost 18 lbs by the end of the second trimester with Shanna.  I had a lot of really intense long-lasting early labor scares.  I lost two babies in between Shanna and Calli.  I lost the first the day before Shanna turned one.  That pregnancy was about 9 weeks along.  I guesstimate that because I went up to Portland right after that and they have an exhibition showing the size and development of a fetus every 2-3 days through the pregnancy.  I found out I miscarried because I found the baby.  I thought I was just having my first postpartum period.  This was rather traumatizing.
We used condoms for two months and tried again.  We got pregnant immediately.  I lost that baby  at seven weeks.  The reason I knew I was pregnant again is because I have instant full body horror symptoms.  Pregnancy is awful.  My whole body treats it like a toxic experience.  I became pregnant again without a period.  That’s Calli.
I was in labor with her for nine days.  At about day four I started feeling like I was leaking fluid.  I called my midwife to talk to her about it.  She told me I was on a 48 hour clock.  I had to deliver the baby by then or I had to go to the hospital because I risked infection.  Technically she knew she was only supposed to give me 24 hours.  But she knows that I really didn’t want to go to the hospital.  Every home get-it-going-thing we did.  I had contractions every 3-10 minutes for so many days.  I couldn’t get them to stop. 
I ended up at Washington Hospital.  I had a rude on-call doctor and a sanctimonious on-call nurse.  They lectured me horribly and treated my like a recalcitrant child.  At the very end of the visit he swabbed me and said, “It’s not amniotic fluid, go home.”  When my midwife filed out he gave me this long nasty lecture about how I was going to kill myself and my baby if I stayed home.  He was almost right.  I still wasn’t going to go back to him.
I hemorrhaged really badly.  I couldn’t stand at all for days because I lost so much blood.  I had to crawl to the bathroom for weeks.  My midwife told me point blank about 20 minutes after my daughter was born, “If you close your eyes you won’t open them again.”  My midwife didn’t really do much about the hemorrhage.  I was told to eat blood thickening food.  I didn’t move from bed for two weeks because I couldn’t stand.
I have lost 1-2 lbs a week since then.  I often have trouble eating.  My stomach hurts all the time.  A lot of it is my mental health stuff, I’m aware.  But I was on a medication years ago through a different PAMF doctor, Dr. -.  It was for stomach acid.  I don’t remember what it was.  I am curious about pursuing something for my stomach acid again.  I get up in the morning and I smoke pot so that I can settle my stomach enough to handle eating.  If I don’t smoke I can’t eat more than about half a piece of toast before I’m in violent stomach pain.
I wake up every morning to an hour or more of painful burning diarrhea.  I can’t believe this is normal.  This hasn’t happened my whole life but it has been happening for months.  I’m not sure how many months.  I’m working on getting my mental health stuff in order.  I truly am.  I can’t keep waiting forever on dealing with these other aspects of my health.  My thyroid appears to be no longer functioning normally.
I feel like this all should have a lot more attention paid to it, but I don’t know what that will mean.  I’m tired of my body acting like I am in full crisis all the time.  I need to find a way to make the stomach acid stop destroying me from the inside.  I think that will help.  It might actually help me to sleep as well.  I wake up at 4 because I have to go to the bathroom.  Then I spend an hour having burning diarrhea.  Then I can’t sleep again.  Maybe this isn’t just about my mental health, you know?

Hiding

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Today was one of the most intense therapy sessions I’ve had in many years.  I don’t cry at therapy much.  Ok, a few tears will flow while I talk.  But I don’t break down sobbing.  I have too much control for that.  Today I sobbed and rocked and felt pain that scared the ever loving shit out of me.  My father raped me from when I was a baby.  He harshly rejected me if I was anything other than an eager whore.  How can any person absorb that?  My father molested me constantly in public and I was not allowed to show signs of it.  I was trained.

I don’t know how to feel that inside me as true and let my daughters touch me.  I feel so disgusting.I feel so soiled and degraded.  So insulted.  My therapist asked if there was anything that would make me feel whole.  I told her I have a broken compass.  I can never save myself.  There is no saving me.  I have to live with that.  My three year old self is gone.  Never to be loved.  Not by anyone.  It hurts so much.  So many years of my life.  My mother and my sister were too far gone by then to really love anyone.  They loved more companionship in shame and misery so they didn’t feel so alone.

It is hard to shake off the shame that was fed into me with the very air I breathed.  It is hard to believe that I could possibly do good.  For anyone.  I feel small and mean and disgusting.  I don’t want to hurt my babies with this evil inside me.  How do I find patience to not pass on cycles of silencing.  How do I show them who I am without making them know things that are wrong for them to know?

I miss my mother.  And I can’t stop crying.

About that muse

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He has decided that he needs to be celibate for a while because he is using sex in unhealthy ways. I think that is a great decision for him given what he has been up to in the last year. It’s hard being the girl who teaches guys what they don’t want. We talked about how awkward things have been on the past few dates. No, he can’t fix me and I’m not ok with him being mad at me because he can’t. I feel like telling people these things about my past puts up a brick wall between us. The phrase “I don’t know what to say” makes me want to break things. I would much prefer that people sit in silence than say that. Noah says, “Wow. That sucked.” As simple as that. It’s why I married him. He gets me.

broken

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The last two days have been writing about my life up till the age of four.  I don’t like thinking about my family.  I don’t like thinking about how I was treated.  It’s weird to talk about systematic abuse.  Why did I believe that everything bad in the world was my fault?  Partially because little kids are dumb.  Mostly because I was actively told it was.  Over and over and over.  It was my fault things happened before I was born.

I don’t know how to shed this feeling of guilt.  This feeling that existing poisons the people around me.  Things with muse are a lot less smooth.  Welcome to crazy girl territory.  I feel like I should go home and lock myself in the garage for a few years.  Maybe Sarah can pass me food through the cat door.  I feel so dirty and polluted.  Like there is no redemption for someone like me.  Too much poison was put in me before I was even verbal.

I am just a hole.  I am nothing.  I have no worth.  No merit.  There is nothing in me worth acknowledging.  But I had better be willing to lie still and open my legs.  And shut up.  Just lie there.  Don’t move.  Because I am nothing.  Nothing.

I have had the Dixie Chicks song “Top of the World” on repeat for two days.  I can sing along with it in the background while I type and cry.  The last two days have been a lot of crying.  I feel like I won’t ever stop crying.  I feel like there is no end to this pain.  The pain of being absolutely worthless.

Why do I want to give away so much money?  I’m trying to find a way to do something in the world.  Something real that no one can take away from me.  Something I can point at and say: See!  I am not a dirty, worthless, bad kid.  I am good.  I do good.  I am good.

How do I teach my daughters to love themselves when I loathe myself with such intensity?  How do I teach anyone how to feel joy when I feel such despair?  I don’t know.  “Everyone is singing, we just want to be heard.  Disappearing every day without so much as a word, somehow.”  I feel like every day that I do not write, that I do not say what I believe to be true is a day that my family has effectively silenced me.  I feel like any time I do not stand up and scream at the top of my lungs that I am NOT FUCKING BAD, DAMNIT I am agreeing with them.  If I am not actively arguing I am agreeing.

I don’t know how to resolve that.  I don’t know how to just take up space and just be.  I have to aggressively take up my space and batter the people standing near me or I feel invisible.  There is no middle ground.  I am invisible and toxic or I am screaming and hostile.  I don’t want either extreme.  I want to feel like I am just ok.  That life is just ok.  That it is ok that things happened.  They are over.

Other than glimpses out my window when he was stalking me, I haven’t seen my father since I was 13.  17 years have gone by.  That’s most of my lifetime.  He’s been dead for 13 years, one month, and five days.  Not that I’m counting.

This hurts so much.  I wanted a daddy.  Why am I not allowed to have a daddy?  Why do I not get to have a mommy either?  The last time I saw my mother was when Uncle Bob died.  I don’t know if I will see her again.  “I wish I had showed you all the things I was on the inside.”  My family doesn’t know me.  Not really.  They know this construction of misery and pain.  It’s not me.

I am not this angry and bitter person.  But I am sad. I am so sad.  I am so sad for the little girl I was.  It was not my fault my father raped my sister.  It’s ok that I was born.  I did not cause my sister to be raped for three more years.  My father did that.  FYI: yesterday’s shirt makes a great hankie.  Squeamishness is for people who waste paper.

Sometimes I wonder why I am writing this down.  Why in the fuck does anyone need to know what a piece of shit my family thinks I am.  How is this making the world a better place?  Why do I need to write another 20,000 words about what a fucking piece of shit I am?  Why?  Technically another 24,000.  But that’s ok.  It’s only the 11th.

Speaking of which: thank you Veterans.  I was too chicken shit to do what you did even though I thought about it.

It’s interesting looking at the differing word counts for different years.  Some years I started and got 600 words in and just… ran out of things to say.  Some years I’ve produced 4,000 words in a day because there was so much to say.  This hurts a lot.  It hurts so much to look at all of this so fast and so hard.  I feel battered.  I feel weak.  I feel fragile.

I’m struggling right now.  I feel like I am beating the shit out of myself with how worthless my family thinks I am.  It’s so hard to be reminded over and over that my childhood was so miserable.  I feel like a ghost of a person.  I feel so thin I could blow away.

Why do I travel so much?  Because I’m running away from myself.  Why do I read so many books?  Because I want to be in anyone’s head but mine.  Why do I have sex with random people?  Because then I don’t have to deal with any of my emotional issues–I can keep them in a box.  When people start getting closer and they see the box I want to run.  I don’t want to even tell you how big this box is.

I don’t want you to know just how big of a box I need for my issues because I don’t want anyone to see how very small I am standing next to that box.  I am too much effort.  I’m not worth it.  Hell, Tom taught me that.  It’s not worth it to meet my needs.  The balance isn’t good enough.  I’m so glad I found Noah.  I didn’t know I was getting a knight in shining armor.  It was hard to notice through the tacky dry humping.

I have lived with Noah for five and a half years.  Longer than I have ever lived with another human being consecutively in my life.  Noah is my family.  It’s terrifying to even consider trusting someone beyond him.  It is so hard to trust him.  And he comes through so very very well.  I don’t deserve Noah, but I’m keeping him.

Soon I will have lived with my children significantly longer than my parents.  Shanna is 3.5.  That’s how old I was when my parents divorced.  When she turns four I will have lived with Shanna more than I lived with my father in my entire life.  And it won’t be much longer before I have lived with her longer than I lived with my mother in a stretch.  Calli will be my third longest live-in relationship.  Depending on how things go with Sarah, she will be the fourth.  That hurts a lot.  I’m 30.  This should not be my story.  This shouldn’t be anyones story.

But it’s mine.  And I can’t change it.  I can just tell it.

Daily Bible Writing: John 5:51

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John 6:51 I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.

I’m not enjoying the experience of writing about what it was like to grow up in an incestuous family so I’m going to take a break to think about something more pleasant since I did 2,000 words today.  So I’m going to write about Occupy.

The only thing we have to give in this world is our energy.  Our devotion.  Our time.  Our resources.  Something that people don’t understand is that time has nearly as much utility as money.  If you go and perform labor that makes someone else’s life better… you have done a better thing than just handing them money.  I don’t mean Volunteer!  I mean, what the fuck are you doing with your life.  How are you working towards being part of a better system?  How are you speaking up when you feel compelled?  How are you putting your direct democratic self forward?  What the fuck are you doing with your time?

Surviving.  That’s what people are doing.  Because we have a weird closed system where everyone is struggling to meet their own needs.  It’s nearly impossible to do.  How do we find more to give…give..give.  Everyone is on empty.  I’m at a stage of my life I have to ask for help a lot.  It feels really humiliating.  My children require adult companionship 24 hours a day.  That’s honestly kind of intense pressure.  We don’t have families.  Well, we don’t have anyone local.  I have nothing.  I don’t know what Noah has.  That’s kind of between them.

It’s between them because I don’t seem to be able to do the family thing on any terms other than my own.  That’s sad for everyone involved.  I’m sorry for it.  But I really can’t.  So much for an intensity break.  This writing is hard.  I don’t want to talk about the earliest reasons I am so very fucked up.  It hurts.  I don’t want people to know how I was treated because then they will look at me differently.  I feel so very dirty.  I feel like that monster ripped out my soul and filled the cavity with tar.  I will forever tarnish everything I touch.

Fuck him.  I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.  I have things to give.  I have resources.  I have myself.  I have my time.  I have my energy.  I share it in many different ways.  I want to make other peoples lives better.  I want to be 80 and know that millions of people have been made better by my existence.  Maybe then I will believe that my soul is not black.  

tomato

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A nice person told me I am inspirational and a nice lady.  I wanted to say, “Actually I’m smug and self-satisfied but I guess you say tomato and I say toe-mah-toe.

And do you want to know why I will never use twitter much?  Because the fucking thing told me the above wasn’t clever enough.  Well fuck twitter.

Cheese factor.

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Laugh at me if you will, but after having my religious conversion at the General Strike I’ve been having daily bible verses sent to my phone.  I’m altering them slightly as I think about them through the day.  I like my version a lot.

Psalm 5:11-12 (almost): But let all who take refuge in you rejoice; let them ever sing for joy, and spread your protection over them, that those who love your name may exult in you, Occupy. 12. For you bless the righteous; you cover him with favor as with a shield.

I’m so glad my heart was Occupied.

Accountability

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Just to keep the time line up to date: offered money as compensation for damages during the General Strike.  Roundly ignored.  Go to morning meeting, mild interest but mostly apprehension about what it means.  Go to General Assembly, get told No!  You start chaos!  Ok.  Post on internet.  Receive emails.  Have phone calls and email discussions and one really exciting in person meeting.

Here is what I am looking at:
“A few friends/local (small mom and pop) business owners and I have come together to put organize a “black friday” event/shopping day.  We are working to put together a map of local shops in the area and making it a fun day of shopping, food and music in Oakland.  I’ve reached out to someone at Occupy so that we can include this day as part of our initiative to boycott corporations and bring Oakland’s local economy in the black.  I can call on Thursday and discuss with you further if you would like.  We are hoping to also get vendors and folks that do not have a store front to join in.  A few business have opened up their doors to adding tables for local vendors to be able to participate in this.

I actually do not need a lot of money for this initiative because our only major cost is printing of flyers and posters.  I have found many people to volunteer their time, as I have, to help support our local economy.  I was trying to figure out who I can get these posters printed by and hoped to find a place that would donate that as well but have had no luck thus far.  Then I saw your email and figured I would send you a note in case you would be interested in supporting this effort.”
  

That is the kind of thing I want to fund.  It’s going to be a few hundred dollars at most.

Another person is in communication with me about a separate fund for repairing damage done to small businesses so they can petition for redress.  I’m willing to contribute to that too.  I’m less sure of the dollar amount.

But the big one?  The individuals who pushed the General Strike through want to buy an RV and make a mobile clinic.  They have doctors and nurses who have already volunteered to staff it.  It’s going to be a logistical nightmare and a fuckton of money beyond what I have.  I’m so excited I could pee my pants.  This is something real.  Medical care for people who can’t afford it?  Yes.  Yes.  Yes.  If my money can provide that, please dear god take it.  My medical care is covered.  Noah spends a fucking insane amount of money on my medical care.  (don’t ask.)  I’m not a special fucking snowflake.  Everyone should be able to have the support I have.  I won’t be able to ensure that everyone gets what I get, but they can get better than they have right now.  They should.

I’m not real enthusiastic about national healthcare, I’ll tell the truth.  But I’m fucking enthusiastic about people in a community saying, “Hey!  We want to help our neighbors get healthcare.”  Washington DC isn’t going to save us.  We have to do it for our selves.

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Everything you choose to learn about as you go through life compiles in a fairly unique way.  No one else has your exact family, socio-economic experience, friend experience, food experience, etc.  People are unique.  There are patterns, but there are always sub groups from the sub groups because it’s hard to generalize.

Why don’t I feel like I can have a community?  Why do I feel like that isn’t available to me?  Why?

NaNoWriMo

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16,408. I’m not done with high school.  Drat.  I got distracted by this hot boy I slept with in sophomore year.  He says it’s ok to write about him.  Yay!

I’m going back and forth on where and when I’m using pseudonyms.  Mostly I just don’t bother.  I’m telling my life story.  I think that’s ok.  I’m trying to not piss in Cheerios, but I’m being blunt about what I experienced.  We’ll see if more people hate me in the end.  Cheers.  Back to writing.

I love planning

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I’m in the middle of 1993.  I hope to finish through high school today (class of ’99).  I haven’t done pre 1988 yet.  The early stuff is slightly speculative because my memories are hazy.  I feel guilt writing something down as true when I have a less than crystal clear memory.  I will do it.  But I’m going to do the first pass through the older stuff first.  I think I should reserve next Monday for the early bits.  It will need to be done in a big burst.

Ok, that’s a good timeline for me.  I want to get up to 2010 this week.  Then I can do the earliest bits on Monday of next week.  That means I will have the first pass of the whole story done by the 15th.  I’m already feeling frustrated with myself for the bits I have missed.  I’ll need the whole last half of the month to reread and add stories in here and there.

The first pass is just giving the skeleton.  Where did I live.  What kinds of schools.  I haven’t gotten into too many awful bits.  I’m saving them.  I don’t want this story to be, “Krissy’s shitty life”.  So much happened and a lot of it was amazing.  It feels important to be true to the scope of the story and not overemphasis the trauma.

We’ll see.