I’m struggling in ways I need to articulate. Right now it is just a lot of bad feeling in my stomach and it’s not doing me any favors. I can’t concentrate. I can’t feel like I am even in the room I am in. It is so hard to stand near other human beings.

I want people to love me. They don’t. I feel very sad about that. Ok–before that sounds like the ridiculous pity party that it is let me clarify. When I am standing in a random store in my town the people who are next to me in line don’t love me. When I am a friend’s party and I know the host and no one else in the room–mostly it is reasonable to feel like the people standing next to me don’t love me.

Those are completely reasonable thoughts. No, it’s not reasonable to expect people near you to just love you. I don’t live in a small town. I have moved so much in my life that if it wasn’t for blogging people would know almost nothing about me. I exist in peoples head as a full and complete construct because I add details off in the background.

Other people don’t provide such insight to me. I find this quite frustrating. I’m stalling.

I’m angry and I’m sad. When I sit down with a new therapist and have to go through the list of things that happened to me as a child I used to have to sit through at least half an hour of someone exclaiming with great vigor, “Oh gracious child! How did you survive?! You should be dead!” I uhh had trouble bonding with most of  them. I learned to prescreen by saying, “I need to have a therapist who can work with very intense trauma without deflecting or derailing. I need a therapist who can listen without interrupting to project onto the story.” I say that or very nearly that during phone screens.

It is hard to believe that it is ever ok to put down anything down on the internet as “your side of the story”. They tell me that the internet is forever. I don’t actually believe them or care very much. This is the only way I can exist right now. There is not enough time in the day for me to talk about the things that are going on for me emotionally and appropriately parent my kids. Right now the default is that I can’t talk.

I’m struggling with how to set the behavior patterns I have to follow in different scenarios. I am acting like a selfish asshole. It’s a step in the right direction but probably an overly large one. I am having a hard time with what it means to exist out in the world. If you tell too much truth it can never be taken back. It hurts peoples feelings.

Men have feelings too. The fact that I feel the things I feel is very offensive to many of them. Well, ok. I’ll uhhh stop talking about it then. No, actually I won’t. What I will do is not be on facebook and if you like my blog: tell your friends. I really can’t be there to read the comments. I read everything through filters you don’t know or care about. The same is true of others. It’s ok.

In order to be a writer of the kind I want then I need to exist only for an opt-in audience. I’m not sure what that will mean exactly. Facebook isn’t an opt-in audience. There are a lot of social conventions I don’t fully understand. I can’t feel like I need to balance as many roles as I currently have.

I have to reduce the number of roles if I want to actually tell the stories I need to tell so I can get on with my life. I want too much. I need to change my attitude about writing and why I am doing it. And I need to change how I am treating the circles of people in my life.

My opinion is often very unwelcome.  It is hard recognizing how hard a brick wall that is.

I want to be able to tell the stories I want to tell. I want to be allowed to continue to exist on the fringes of communities in a way that will allow my children  to have relationships I don’t seem to be able to have.

But my arms hurt. That’s my official evasion. Maybe I will be able to talk to Noah about it tonight. I don’t know.