I only ran five miles instead of six and I did it at the gym going 4 mph pretty much the entire time. It is raining cats and dogs and it was pitch black when I left the house. I started my period last night and my lower back aches something fierce. I'm tired. I feel really bad. But I went. That's what I've got to give today.
Monthly Archives: February 2012
running
I think the long runs are starting to impact my endurance. today I did three miles in 33:32. that’s pretty good. just about 5.5 mph woo!
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Just to let you know
I’m going to go off-line for a bit. I’m going to post the book release and then I’m going to stay off-line but for a five minute email check in the morning. If you want to talk to me you will need to call.
I need to work on my house and think and not obsess.
And the beat goes on.
la di da da.
I’m hungry and whiny and stuck in the car.
I’m not very good at being hungry. When I am hungry it is a lot easier to tap into messages about how undeserving I am. I have some weird messages about food. I definitely feel like I am bad for a lot of the food I like.
Wanting food is also tied up with money stuff. Invariably what I can make at home feels like a shitty substitute for real food. I’m not even sure what real food is. Something that doesn’t feel like crappy ingredients dumped on a plate.
I’m hungry and that feeling is just about the only kind of hurting myself I can still get away with. It’s invisible if I keep my mouth shut. The trouble is keeping my mouth shut. Today I feel like I am bad and terrible. I will be left out from now on because of that damn anger I can’t get rid of.
And it is all tied up with food. Food is love, right? And I’m not very deserving of love.
that was a nice long run.
10.46 miles in 2:13. ave: 4.77 mph
for every other run in Fremont I have stayed on the flat side. but I live near the bottom of a noticeable hill (ok not Santa Cruz mts noticeable) but way the heck more than I have been doing. I maintained 4.99 mph as my average for the first 5 miles then I started getting tired.
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Integrity
My therapist asks me just about every session how I built such a strong sense of integrity. Just for shits and giggles:
in·teg·ri·ty/inˈtegritē/
Noun: |
|
I fuck up. I try to be very clear with myself about how and where I fucked up. My problem is more on the end of taking too much responsibility. I am brutally honest, even with myself; I hope. One of my biggest character flaws this lifetime is the degree of anger I feel when someone else is dishonest. It is very hard for me to maintain respect for someone who is dishonest. If I can’t trust what you say to me I have very little use for you. Contempt. That is really the word. I am contemptuous of people who are dishonest. Also for shits and giggles:
con·tempt/kənˈtem(p)t/
Noun: |
|
Hm. That’s a rather strong word. Scorn, sure. Disregard, sure. If I am not going to get an honest answer to a question I shouldn’t waste my time asking questions. If I am going to be told something that is fairly obviously your interpretation of what you think I want to hear and not what you will do? Oh, yes. Contempt is the word.
I feel like this is a flaw in me. Liars are lying for a reason. They feel they have to. They are compulsive. They grew up with addicts and they know no other way. That is the best explanation I can come up with for my sister. She knows no other way. She lies constantly. She lies about everything. And I think she is a piece of shit for it. I wouldn’t trust my sister if she described the weather. This contempt is hard. It wears me down. I feel torn between this desire to blow up with anger because otherwise I won’t have the strength and energy to shove her away hard enough before she hurts me again and this intensely cold feeling. In order to not waste energy on you I need to think you are beneath my notice.
But that hurts my heart. I don’t want to feel that way about anyone, not even my sister. Then it comes back to integrity again. Integrity is not just about honesty, it is about moral uprightness. I do not feel upright. I am letting my anger dominate the conversation. That’s not very useful. I can’t think of anything I want that is going to be achieved this way.
Moral uprightness. What does that even mean? I suppose it is strongly tied to whether or not I feel I can look myself in the mirror. What am I doing and why? I can’t let liars set the terms of truth. If I do that then I have no ability to be morally upright because the system is screwed from the get-go. I know my truth. I will be far more likely to be able to communicate my truth if I feel like I actually get to have it. The only one who can grant (or not) my right to set terms of truth is me. I keep forgetting that. I keep thinking that other people get to set the rules. I need to stop doing that. I need to stop letting anyone decide reality for me.
I have been. I have been taking on the crazy role. The unstable role. The angry role. I am certainly comfortable here. I am angry pretty frequently.
I want to learn how to master this. Part of the reason I get so angry is I come up against my truth being contradicted by someone else’s truth. I have a hard time not taking that personally. My tendency is to assume that I am wrong and bad because that is what I was told over and over again. I cried in therapy last night as I repeated the ranting in my head. My therapist asked me who I was hearing in my head; I told her my mother. If there is a difference in the reality I am experiencing and the reality someone else is experiencing that must be because I am a crazy bitch. I’m being ridiculous or lying or or or.
These little conflicts set me off. I don’t notice my boundaries until someone has crossed me and I want to take their fucking head off. The only way I can avoid getting this angry at someone who is dishonest is to stop considering what they say. I can’t listen to a liar and not get angry. I don’t know how to have active compassion in the moment that this person is telling me what they hope will happen if everything works out and the planets are perfectly in alignment.
My set of reactions give people the right to put me in a nice, neat, easy to dismiss box. I am so unstable that there must not be validity to my claims. I cling to excessive honesty because otherwise I have no leg to stand on. Why would anyone believe a piece of shit like me? I am not an upstanding member of a community, never have been and probably never will be. I’d have to show up for longer than I have the nerve to be near people. I am a coward. I am just waiting for the next witch hunt. I am angry because the best defense is a good offense. If people are treating me badly my only hope is to hurt them bad enough that they can’t keep hurting me.
This does not make for stable relationships. Or moral uprightness. This is no longer working for me. When I look forward I don’t want to see how disrupted my life will be through continual blow ups. How can I get to the point of having enough regard for myself to defend my boundaries long before I need to blow up? I’m not sure. I think this will be one of my lifelong tasks. I want to feel like my boundaries are where they are for well considered reasons and it really doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks or feels. I know I am right. Be sure you’re right and go ahead.
This is not going to be easy.
It’s not just about honesty. Honesty is the easy part. Moral uprightness. How many excuses do I allow myself on this path? The people I had sex with before I was ten… I get a pass on being the aggressor, right? It’s not like this moral uprightness thing is something where you have a black mark and you are done. Everyone fails. Everyone falls. I absolutely have to believe that moral uprightness is about always striving forward. It’s not about what I have done long ago. It is about what I did yesterday and what I am doing today and what I will do tomorrow.
I worry so about being good. Lately it haunts me that speaking my truth invites pain. I am inviting people to argue with me and tell me that my life story is unrealistic. Dear god. Not that line again. It’ll be fine. I’m a big scary mean nasty person. People are afraid of me. What do I have to be afraid of? What do the monsters fear? I dare you to go tell a monster that (s)he is a bad person; I double dog dare you. They will all protest their innocence! They are just trying to live!
I have no high horse to sit on. How could anyone or anything be beneath a child of the gutter? It feels like I don’t even have the right to disregard someone. It is disrespectful and girls like musn’t be disrespectful. No no no. We must always pretend to be nice.
Love my shrink.
My shrink told me I shouldn't try to give up pot right now. She said there is no benefit right this minute. Yes, it's bad for my lungs. It is better in the long run to have a while longer of this and not beat my children. I think she is god damn smart.
She also told me to stop trying to be 'not angry'. It'll pass when the things that are a problem for me end. I should focus on that end of things. I'm not so good at this "patience" thing.
Broken promises
My mom likes to make promises she can’t keep. Oh she always intends to do it when she says it. She just isn’t very good at taking stock of what things are realistic and possible in life. And she rarely has the willpower to deny herself something in favor of a later pay off. It’s all stupid shit, right? She promised she would take me to Magic Mountain every year from when I was eight on. My siblings grew up with season passes and I heard the stories and I felt envious. I went by myself when I was twenty-one.
One of the talents my mom has is sewing. She’s a fairly talented seamstress. I still have things she made from me and I wear them when I get the chance. I have a Snow White costume and an Ariel (from The Little Mermaid) dress–you know the one when she comes down to dinner and brushes her hair with a fork? That one. My dress is awesome. And my mommy made it for me which makes it extra special. She made my Dickens costume. I wish she hadn’t told me to buy the pattern and material for three separate Dickens costumes because then in the long run I feel bitter that (as usual) she doesn’t follow through completely on what she says. I should just be grateful she did one. Usually she doesn’t get through one.
I focus on the fact that in everything she said to me there was always a lie. I always had to be careful not to get my hopes up when she said anything. I would say I had less than a 50/50 chance of her following through. That wears on you decade after decade. I wish she had promised less.
“I’ll pick you up from school” was one of those ones I wish she had promised less of. I would not be able to add up all the hours I sat around waiting to be picked up. I understand. She always had a reason. It’s not her fault. Ever. It is always someone or something else’s fault. Always. Always. Always.
I hold the people in my life to a higher standard of truth telling because of this. Approximations are not good things. Over-promising is the worst thing you can possibly do. I try very hard to keep my expectations and hopes very low. Too many people are fucking liars who are too self absorbed to even admit to themselves that what they are doing is lying.
There are sins I forgive easily and barely notice; there are sins that cause me to feel like I have to smite someone from the earth because they are hurting me. The real solution isn’t to smite anyone. I’m terrified that the solution is simply to never trust a word that people say unless they prove over years that they aren’t a liar. Unfortunately I tend to trust more than I should. I get lied to a lot. Oh of course it is never a lie it’s just that people don’t think they need to have a lot of integrity in what they say. They feel no need to be impeccable with their words. Close enough is good enough. And I die of a thousand paper cuts.
I don’t want my children to have this hostility and rigidness around promises. I know it isn’t healthy. It is isolating. I certainly can’t hang out with people much. I’m trying to figure out how much I can handle really having steadily in my life. I want there to be a predictable pattern. I want to have a pattern, damnit. I’m really struggling because nothing else in the world wants me to. Stupid life just keeps happening. I really do want to see people and so far that has to be a flexible thing.
It is hard to be this lonely and angry at the same time. I know that I have to be careful not to get too angry when other people are around. I manage this with the kids by not talking at all. It’s hard to do that with adult visitors. Then they become discomfited and I have to try to knock it off. I can see the visible discomfort spread over people and I feel a wash of shame. Yup. That’s me. The angry one. Then I feel so much self loathing that I am always the angry one that I just feel more anger. I’ve been told a lot of times that feeling that angry around people is basically abusive. I’m a monster no matter what. I just am. It doesn’t matter what I do.
Ok, I kicked the cabinet door off the wall. I suppose that is something terrible and horrible. Because more shame really makes everything better.
I have had trouble running since the grief ritual. I feel so overwhelmed with anger that I can barely see straight and it makes me stumble so I am running more slowly and carefully. I don’t want to injure myself; I truly don’t. I don’t want running to become my latest method of self-injury. I want to find joy in my body. It’s hard to do in the dark and cold. I miss the afternoons.
I feel stuck in this anger. I am so frustrated and anxious. I need to go proofread six more chapters back from my editor and that’s scaring the crap out of me. I am so tired of reading this story. I want to avoid it and I want to get this done and over with.
When I say I follow the scorched earth path I mean that I will forever say anything I want about someone and shun that person from my life. I will be as harsh as I feel the need to be. I can be a very harsh person. It is obvious when I am truly done.
I am struggling with some things in my close personal relationships. I don’t want to regret the things I write, ever. I want to always know that I am writing a truth I feel comfortable standing behind. Right now I am having a lot of very strong irrational emotions. I don’t know how to deal with them. I am already saying things that are impossible to take back. Dear sweet Jesus at least I will keep them off of my blog. I’m struggling.
How can I talk about what I am experiencing without giving any information or judgment. hm.
I feel unappreciated and used. I feel like I am getting the realistic version of an impossible situation. I feel tightness in my throat. My neck aches. My shoulders ache. My lower back aches and I can feel how bad my posture is right now. All right, I made a few chair adjustments and that is slightly better. I feel empty and drained. I feel abandoned and untrusting. I feel exhausted in a way that isn’t going away with more sleep.
Recently I heard someone describe it as being “pregnant” with her book and I kind of feel like that. I’m getting a lot of harsh physical symptoms and emotionally I feel like I am living on the memory of fumes because I ran out of gas long ago. I am at a time and place in my life where I feel like I need an endless stream of support but I am too ashamed to ask for it. I don’t have a family and people like me have to just figure it the fuck out because we are too unpleasant to be around. I feel so pathetic and needy. I feel so very lonely. But I don’t feel like I get to talk about that because it is my own damn fault that I am so fucking unpleasant to be around and that’s why I am alone.
Sometimes I wonder what it is like to be part of an extended family. Thinking about it makes me cry. What would it be like to have people who know me and want to spend time with me? I have friends, yes. But my friends go see their families on holidays. I notice. I tend to feel like it isn’t possible for me to stop being angry so I should stop attempting to spend time with people at all because no one should have to deal with my fucking mouth.
It’s probably a good thing I see my therapist tonight.
I am running this week…
On Monday I walked 4.5 miles with a friend while he dumped the contents of his soul on me. I didn't worry about speed.
On Wednesday I ran 5.11 miles in 1:05. average: 4.7mph
On Thursday I ran 4.12 miles in 53 minutes. average: 4.61 mph
My heart is very heavy this week. I'm angry and frustrated. I spent most of my running time cussing and venting my anger and frustration. It makes me slow. I notice that I run a lot faster on days when I have a lighter heart. There are a bunch of things supposedly coming to a head in six days. I'm apprehensive and frustrated. I'm also very tired of lying.
Grief ritual
I cried because my father must have felt a great deal of pain otherwise he wouldn’t have hurt so many people. I had all these thoughts about his parents, whom I never knew. What did they do to him as a child? How did he come to believe that female family members were fair game for raping? What I was told this weekend is each person has to deal with his/her family’s grief going back seven generations and what you incur in this life is going to be passed on for another seven generations. Nieces/nephews count as the next generation. Even if you don’t have children your karma can still be sent on for many many years.
I cried because my sister is so buried under her grief that she turned around and hurt her children.
Anger is healing and inspirational but if you don’t do something with the strength it gives you then you risk burning up in the flames. Today I found a place in my heart for forgiveness for Denise. I didn’t know I could do that. It took me emotionally hitting a place where I realized just how young she was when she had different experiences.
According to the Burkina Faso traditions when someone in your life dies they hand you their spirit and life so that you can accomplish more. They had you, essentially, a golden ticket. Suicides are viewed as a very powerful way to grant someone else your spirit (my understanding is) because the person escaped great torment and brought that with them. They learned a lot in the process and once they are on the other side of death they can help you better.
My maternal grandmother committed suicide when my mother was pregnant with me. My paternal grandmother (whom I am named after) died a year or two before my mother had me. My paternal grandfather died days before my brother Tommy was born. If Orlando gave Tommy his spirit, maybe that is part of why Tommy was so fucked up. My maternal grandfather died right before I saw my father for the last time at Jimmy’s wedding. Right before I told my mother that she had to take my father back to court in order to get him to stop touching me.
When I was pregnant with Shanna I lost both my adopted step-mom and my beloved therapist to heroin overdoses. Two of the women who were among my strongest bulwarks against the dark. They both suffered terribly from their internal wounds. They were not strong enough to fight back their demons.
Unsurprisingly I arrived at a place of deep anger. I raged and screamed and started beating my fists on the floor. The wonderful facilitator had someone put a thick cushion in front of me. I would have cheerfully broken my hands to pieces and enjoyed the pain manifestation. Later in the day I told her, “I have a habit of beating my hands and head against concrete floors. I really appreciate that you put a pillow in front of me.”
Apparently the concept of “personal problems” simply doesn’t exist there. All problems are problems of the community because if the community was functioning appropriately the problems wouldn’t exist. That made me ache with loneliness for someone who would give a shit about me enough to want to actually help me with my problems. Not just one person at a time. I wish all of Lakeside School would gather to hold me in their arms and let me sob out my grief. I wish they had stepped in and helped me instead of saying that people like me don’t exist.
It was interesting to think through the level of responsibility I bear for my niece and nephew being sexually assaulted. My brother thinks it is enough for our generation to shut up and not talk about the incest. He thinks that will solve everything. Thus our grief has already passed on to the next generation. We did not take responsibility for speaking the truth about our family. Silence is consent. If my understanding of the situation is correct I was twenty-one when my sister assaulted her children and taught them how to give one another oral sex. I was living with Tom. I had almost no contact with my family because I was not ready to have boundaries with them. I never stepped in on behalf of the kids. I didn’t tell my story to a CPS agent and get a case opened on my sister early enough. There were already many HUGE issues at the time that would have been enough to open a case. Maybe if Denise was being watched more closely it never would have happened.
I don’t know. I will never know.
This is where the twelve step programs tell me to trust God. Well fuck God. No. I need to let go of responsibility for my family. I can’t save them. I don’t have enough of me to give to fill their malicious black hole of need and pain. They have to find a way out of that on their own. If they come find me I don’t know what I will do. I know one thing I will avoid doing: letting them develop a relationship with my kids. My family doesn’t get to know my kids until my kids are adults. If they want to go meet my family then I will drive them over. I probably won’t get out of the car… but I’ll drive.
I grieved for my mother. I thought about the smell of her and the comfort of her body against mine as we slept together. I thought about how very much I love my mother. I idealize my mother. It always felt like she was so talented and wonderful and beautiful. I will never compare favorably to my mother. Only at the same time I think she was a weak monster. I think she was shaped by ignorance and pain. You don’t know what you don’t know, right? I don’t think I can remain angry with my mother much longer. I need to treat her as already dead. I need to move forward in my heart to a place where I no longer desire vengeance. She is my mother. She carried me in her body. She nursed me. When I think of what my daughters mean to me I know that my mother is already in enough pain. She has lost three of her children, two to desertion. I’m sure she has already had enough pain this lifetime.
I feel so very sad for my mother. She was abused and abandoned over and over. Her father was a nightmare and he loathed her for the divorce. Vernon treated my mother like a cockroach because she had committed the sin of leaving her husband. Who cares what he does to the kids, right? My mother was feisty and mouthy; her Mennonite family thought she should be taken down a few pegs! See how it starts? My mother used to come home from school as a child and have to clean up from her mother attempting suicide. Again. My grandparents fostered and my mother was never allowed to have any special toys because it “just wouldn’t be fair” to the transient kids. My mother was never given a Christmas stocking until I was sixteen and I did it.
And I abandoned her too. Even though I was supposed to be her comfort. Even though I was the good and affectionate child. I was so fucking devoted to my mother. I can’t allow her to teach my children that they are small and bad and dirty and they deserve to be tortured. I just can’t. I was given a sacred trust by the God I don’t believe in to guard these people. My only job is to raise them in safety and love. I’m not about to fuck up my job. Not even for someone I have loved more than life.
I think the oddest part of today was the random older woman who came to join us. She likes to just sit in on these rituals. She was probably in her seventies with broken, missing, and severely discolored teeth. Her hair was a mixture of grey and white and tied into a braid that went down past her waist. She had these interestingly bright blue eyes. She mostly looked like she was in a stupor, honestly. But if you sat down next to her and looked at her with respect she came alive.
I don’t want to give her name because that seems like a violation. We talked about anger. She looked at me and she said, “Oh you are vibrating with anger.” It was less obvious than usual, in my opinion, so it was both startling and not. I felt calm and like I was in a decent mood. Given how much time I do spend vibrating with anger I just said, “Yes.” I can’t possibly remember the exact wording, today has been intense and full of new impressions, but she looked at me hard and didn’t ask any questions. She volunteered these…I don’t want to say fortune cookie comments. It’s kind of like reading the Horoscope. Any of them can fit, right? Only it wasn’t really that. It felt more like she was getting something from me. God I feel stupid talking about this woo woo shit. She asked me if I was selected for suffering every time. It’s not unreasonable for me to feel like that. It’s not true any more, but it was. She told me very clearly that I escaped because of my anger but now I have to be careful. She said that there are two emotional experiences that come up completely unprompted: anger and laughter. She said that I have gotten what I needed from the anger and now I need to laugh.
I cried. I cried and screamed and ranted about how much I fucking hate them and I am glad they are dead. I told him that if he wasn’t dead I would kill him myself. I beat the floor until my arm muscles spasmed too hard for me to lift them. I beat my head against the floor until I could no longer lift it from the pillow. I lay there and cried and cried and cried for hours lying on my side because I could no longer hold my neck up because I was in so much pain. People took turns sitting with me to share my grief. Mostly I could not allow them to touch me. There were a few specific women who felt safe. Two. I let them hug me.
I feel humiliated admitting that in this room full of people having this emotionally bonding experience I could let two of them (three including the instructor) touch me. I feel like this distance that I keep is part of my problem. I feel so deeply unable to allow people to love me. I don’t know how. That is not a skill I possess.
I understood more about my mother today. I understand her scars and wounds in ways I didn’t before. I love my mother so much. I understand her frustrations and anger and thinly veiled violence. I understand why she was so frantic when I misbehaved where anyone could see. She told me constantly that people would judge her by my behavior so I had to not fuck up. I understand now why she reacted the way she did to my unpredictability. Now I have children. Now I can think about her father and what kind of man he was. Now I can think about Aunt Vonnie’s dark references to terrible beatings.
Sobonfu’s tradition believes that diabetes exists in the body because of an inability to truly accept love. Vernon, my mom’s father, is the oldest example of that in my family I know. And I know he treated his daughters like shit. He never wanted their love; he wanted their silence and obedience. Sound familiar? I was actually rarely hit as a child and my mother took flack from fucking everyone over that. The whole family was ready to line up and beat me with sticks. I have never been popular. My mother defended me. My mother defended me in so many ways. She saw me as being like her. We were both the youngest girl in families of four. We were both raised very separately from our siblings. We both felt like the black sheep.
This life business is complicated. I’m starting to understand how compassion is part of this story for me. I can have compassion for my mother and her suffering and still refrain from contact because my children deserve a childhood safe from people who are likely to tell them things they shouldn’t be told. My mother likes to blame people for things that aren’t their fault. My children will not learn shaming from their family. They’ll have to figure that out somewhere else.
Part of my ancestral grief is our constant desire to have shit roll down hill. We always pass the blame for our emotions. I wouldn’t feel this way if you hadn’t made me. This is why I cannot be angry with Calli for throwing my wallet out of the wagon. She is a baby. She is not responsible. I should have bloody well put my wallet somewhere secure. When Shanna is doing stuff that drives me nuts I have to ask her why she is doing something before I react. 9/10 times she has a reason that is totally fucking logical from her world view. Her world view and mine have only occasional overlaps, mostly things like “ice cream is good” though we strongly disagree on how often we should eat it.
I don’t want to teach my children that they are to blame for my rage. They aren’t. I have a whole god damn book about why I feel so much rage. I have no ability in any way to blame my emotional reactions on them. That’s kind of annoying, actually. In my family I was the scapegoat. I wonder who is getting it now? Someone is at the bottom, I promise you.
And I spent a long time today thinking about everything I know about my ancestors. I can see why my family culminated in the horror that was my life. I can have compassion for all of our respective victim-hoods. I would kind of like to stop being a victim and they don’t even know enough to understand that it is an option. That’s quite sad. Today I thought hard about the fact that my sister wouldn’t do the things she does if she was in less pain. She was harshly rejected by two fathers. Her birth father rejected her before birth and then again in her thirties. He didn’t want to know her despite the fact that she did 100% of the effort to have a relationship. I pity her.
If the book pays off the editor I’m going to use that personal money to go to another grief ritual. I have many more layers. But I feel like I can perceive the beginnings of a path. I think I am going to find somewhere to put an altar in my house.
It’s time to wash this grief off and go to bed. I need to scrub my entire body with salt first.
Why should anyone read the book?
I’m on the train on my phone so this will probably be choppy.
Why would anyone want to read this book? I’ve been thinking of little else for weeks. I am unable to concentrate on other things while I have this puzzle in my brain. I know why I wrote it. I wrote it for my kids because someday they deserve to know the story of me even if I die and can’t tell them myself. That could be satisfied by hitting print and putting the book in a drawer for a few decades until they hit their majority.
Why should anyone else read this? I’m not sure there is a should. If there is a should involved it revolves around the idea that we are all locked in the perspective of our own narrow experiences. We can’t know what we dont know. My life was not normal by any reasonable measure. Yet I’m not alone. Millions of children suffer like I did: in silence, alone, believing they deserve what happens to them.
My life journey seems to be learning how to find out what I don’t know, specifically how to be a good person. I don’t know now. I don’t know if I am a good person. I have never believed so. I would like to believe that. The first step is forgiving myself for the things I couldn’t control or change as a child. I had to write a whole book before I really understood what happened to me. I had to be thirty years old and have my husband explain to me that I was tortured. It never felt like torture it just felt like life.
You only know what you know.
It is hyperbole to say that I only knew pain until I was eighteen. Barely. I experienced more pain than I should have. Since adulthood I have slowly and carefully tried to learn how to stop bringing more pain into my life. When you have been tortured you go on to bring more pain into your life because it is uncomfortable to be in an unfamiliar state: namely lack of pain. I want to like me enough to stop inviting pain. I have good teachers. My daughters teach me who I want to be. They are full of love and joy. I want to be like them.
Why should anyone read this book? To share my grief and provide me with invisible community so even if I never meet you my grief can be less because you carry a speck for me. Because people need to learn how to look at children and recognise signs of crisis so more children do not suffer like I did. The system failed me spectacularly. I don’t want all the other abused children to go unseen either.
Why should anyone read this book? Because you are part of the community of human beings and we are all responsible for one another a little.
Why should anyone read this book? Because it will probably make you very uncomfortable that things like this happen in the world. Silence is consent. Everyone who chose to remain ignorant and involved when I was a child damned me to living in hell. I don’t want anyone else to have that experience. The silencing of victims, no, of survivors has to stop. It has to.
It has to or we will continue to convince small children that they deserve to be raped and beaten for being bad. I was not bad. I just wasn’t.
If you build it, they will come?
I have one of those cats who are fairly stand-offish. Yet for the past month or so she has started demanding the right to sit on my lap while I type. She hasn’t been on my lap much, ever. She prefers to sit next to me but I’m on a chair where she can’t. I feel like we had a multiple year hiatus where we just didn’t cuddle; now all of a sudden she is massively affectionate. She is fourteen so I am humoring her as much as I can. I won’t get to have her forever and I won’t forgive myself if I shun her last wave of affection. Even though it is a pain to type around her it is a sacrifice I’m willing to make.
There is a lot of work to do and I’m not getting it done and I am struggling emotionally with that. Finishing the book is like pulling teeth. I’m on the last page but the kids are up and I can’t concentrate. I have to leave the house in two hours and I won’t be home until after bed time. I really do treat my kids as my first priority. Shanna cuddled up next to me watching a movie on her iPad and Calli is having fun banging things together. I can blog with less than half a brain.
I’m tired and empty feeling. I’m struggling with feeling avoidant. I wish I could hide in a cave for a month or three. If I am supposed to feel happier after the relief of grief I’m not there. I feel so tired. I feel like I have seen the beginning of a long journey. The ritual is being held at a small college in San Francisco. Most of the people there are students who will write an academic paper about this experience. Uhm. Wow. That’s actually fairly cool but it means that they are all building a community together because they are all students together. I’m an outsider, as usual. Above and beyond that I live an hour away; I’m just not going to come to an event in San Francisco that starts after 7pm on a regular basis. I don’t handle lack of sleep well and I can’t sleep in. I have a really strong internal clock and I’m going to be awake by 5am. It hurts. The running takes too much out of me. I can’t go without sleep.
I think I want to start hosting a survivor discussion group at my house. I’m thinking once a month at first because weekly hosting would freak me out. No one else wants to meet early in the day and the only way I can handle being at an event that starts at 7:30 or 8 is if it is in my garage. It’s a sad fact of my life but a fact never-the-less. I’d be thrilled to hear input on what day of the week people could make it here. If I want to be able to talk about my experiences maybe I should start with the people who are willing to come to me and are already broken in by knowing me. If you already know me in real life you will probably be able to handle me saying what I’m going to say because I already do. Ha.
I’m never going to be able to go find a community to join. I’m not that kind of girl. I may have to make my own. That’s what Sobonfu told me. I feel very tired thinking about how much work that sounds like. I am not good at being the work horse any more. I feel far too resentful and I have no energy to spare. I want to live my life and invite people to join me in it in a way that doesn’t actively drain me. The things I have been trying… well… holy crap. I need to get past feeling weird about inviting people over for dinner. I need to be brave enough to just do it. It’s frightening. I expect that people always have something more interesting to be doing.
The big parties are hard. Having a housemate was too hard. Hosting family dinner was too hard. Why does it work out better when someone comes randomly on a night? I don’t seem to feel resentful about the fact that one more body on a given night doesn’t mean much extra work. I tried too hard for family dinners. That was a lot of the problem. I wanted it to be a “nice meal”. It was stupid. I have a very bad habit of making things too hard for myself and then feeling overwhelmed and unable to enjoy the result.
I don’t really do that when one person comes over for dinner in the middle of the week. I’m distracted and distant because I don’t talk much while cooking but I work on my attitude while the kids are around. I will just not speak if I am feeling testy. My bad attitude is not because of my children and I try to keep it away from them as much as possible. This means that if I am in a terrible mood and I am thinking horrible and nasty thoughts I smile and nod and listen really carefully because I need to keep the conversation off of me. It is a mixed bag because I really enjoy the way I am getting to know people. But I need venting space. I’m curious how it will work to have a specific “Hey! Let’s Support Each Other!” night. I’m wondering if that will be a format I can formally recognize as support and stop feeling so lonely.
I’m not alone. I have a ridiculously widespread community of people who love me intensely. I just feel like I can’t see them.
running
9.48 mils in 1:51 Ave: 5.12 mph
The longer I live in Fremont the more I learn to love it here. I am really glad that I am learning to run here. Fremont isn't the kind of town that slaps you in the face with beauty. It is slow to show its better side. You don't see it until you spend an hour running around the lake watching the slow change in color over the lake. You don't see it until you have the privilege of running past all the beautiful trees.
Running reminds me that I am alive and they are not. Running through the willow trees reminds me that I can survive anything. I already have.
I really need a new icon.
birthdays are weird
14 years ago my brother walked behind the local supermarket and lit himself on fire. today is his birthday, he would be 35. I’m not sure how to feel about that.
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just keep running running running
3.38 miles in 46 minutes. I went hella slow because I'm tired. 4.41 mph ave.
frustrated
I feel like I haven’t been blogging much lately. There are a bunch of things happening I feel like I can’t talk about. I’m really bad about that. If I have to censor what I say and speak carefully I don’t see much point in talking at all. If I have to do those things then my point of view isn’t actually desired and I’ll just shut up. It’s part of why I don’t follow social conventions much on “appropriate topics”.
Life involves an awful lot of work. I can only do so much and feel good in my body. There needs to be a balance of different kinds of work: mental, physical, emotional. Without balance it all falls over.
I’m trying to edit the book. I have 13-14 pages left. I’m struggling. I’m feeling a lot of tremendous anxiety about the end of the book. How do I ensure that all the right elements are in place to honestly lead to the rest of my life?
I’m thinking hard about the foreward. Ok fine, I wanted to write this. Reasonable, fine. Why do I want to publish it? Why do I want other people to know this story with me? Because I’m tired of being alone with it. I’m tired of having people giving me entirely inappropriate advice because they assume my life was like theirs.
Other people grow up with families who pass their stories on. People know what “Bob” acts like; you can tell because they say things like, “Well you know how Bob is.” No, I don’t know. I have never been around long enough to find out. And people haven’t really been around me long enough to understand me either.
No one can ever know these things about me unless I tell them. I have spent my entire life feeling isolated and alone and scared. Once this story has been set down there is no fucking way I wouldn’t publish. I want to be known. I want to be seen so much it makes me ache. I’m publishing because I want to. Because it is an interesting story and I want to share it. Because people will finally understand my vague allusions. When someone wants to give me advice I can ask them if they’ve read the book and then let them say what they want. I don’t have to follow the advice. But I get to know that this isn’t some random passerby who doesn’t know shit about me. This is someone who cares enough to go read the backstory so that (s)he can be part of my life.
That feels really different. Most of my family will be shocked if they ever read the book. They have no idea about most of it. They don’t know me and I savagely resent them for this. I savagely resent that god damn everyone in my family will get to say, “But we never knew!” and be telling the truth. I think that is what I can’t forgive them for in the end. They managed to silence me such that I was never able to get proper help from all that psychiatric care for fifteen years. They can’t silence me forever. I want to tell my story. I want to get very clear about what happened to me and I can’t do that in private.
That’s strongly related to why I am upset about some other things in my life. I’m not happy about how I am being treated and I feel like I can’t talk about it in public and I don’t have anywhere else to talk. I am talking in therapy and to Noah about this situation but that’s the limit of my talking to people. I literally just don’t do much else of it lately. All of my IM buddies have disappeared. Fuck you all. (I’m kidding. I love you and miss you intensely while you are having Real Lives.)
It’s time to go parent.
getting faster.
5 miles in 59:45. 5.15 mph ave. I'm to the point where I can run half a mile before walking. I ran the whole last half mile just to be sure.
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This week I will run (with walking!) 20 miles. Next week I have to get through 22. The week after that, 24. I come back down for a few weeks around the half marathon. I have seven months between the half and the full marathons. I'm thinking about spending April working on other parts of running… like trail running and hills and such. I talked to a guy in passing who said that Long Beach Marathon actually has one un-fun hill in it. It may be the flattest full marathon… but that doesn't mean it is completely flat. I'm getting to the point where I am actually enjoying running. I didn't believe I would feel this way. I thought it would be a slog forever. I thought I was just doing this to be stubborn.
I have very little history with being fit. I feel like I should figure out how to make this work in a larger way. Just running through flat Fremont isn't going to give me all that I want. I will need hills. Ew. All of a sudden I saw a glimmer of understanding why someone would do an Ultra Marathon. I don't have that as a goal. I will do one marathon and only maybe ever run again. Or maybe I'll make Noah do half marathons with me. Who knows. Life is long.
I have a different feeling in my body these days. I understand why they recommend running for stress reduction. I'm forking tired. Unfortunately that is kind of a double edged sword because any amount of me being gone right now significantly increases Calli's subsequent clinginess. Running for an hour makes her quite sad. This phase will end.
forward
I'm almost done editing the book. I will need to write some kind of forward because it's not nice to let people head into a story like this without some kind of fore-warning.
I'm curious if a couple of people would like to see an advance copy before it is perfect so you can give me feedback on what it made you think about, how I can direct people in the most useful ways, and any other feedback you would be willing to give me because I am scared shitless of this just appearing in the Amazon marketplace in two weeks.
Two weeks. Holy shit.
did it
3 miles in 32:05. 5.1 mph ave.
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