Between the cracker crumbs, specific reminder to mop the bathroom because we had some accidents, and the window crayons I will be leaving a nice tip for housekeeping. I feel guilty.
We have had such a good time. I am very grateful we get to do this many times. Thank you, Noah.
I am on the iPad. This won’t be my normal length.
If you add up the past two nights I’ve gotten 13 hours of sleep. But I got 9 of them last night. That was a very caffeinated drive. We had a great day in California Adventure. I think that next year I will have to have check in times and let Shanna run. Keeping her close is getting hard. (like within the Wilderness Camp Explorer area-not the park at large).
Thank you D for the stroller. They are alternating and fighting over who gets to ride. That is a first. Usually they scream and kick when I ask them to ride in strollers or wagons. I think they are tired.
We were in the park for hella longer than usual because we got there early and had a long wait till check in. I think we were in the park for 5 hours. The whole last hour Calli kept saying “hotel?” “bed?” she was tired too.
I turned the lights out at six because play was getting meaner and meaner. No, you cannot play a game where you pin your sister down and slam stuffed animals into her face as hard as you can. That is not a good game.
We went for lunch at a fancy restaurant because we were on that end of the pier and I didn’t check how expensive it was before we sat down. Whoops. Luckily that $78 lunch came with enough food for dinner and breakfast too so I boxed it up. Yay for having a fridge and a microwave. Next time I will have to bring my own dishes. They provide a couple paper bowls and a few glasses. Most unsuitable. Makes sense. There isn’t a dishwasher and most people seem to act like it would break their hands to do dishes and the maid staff can’t time efficiently take care of it in the studios.
The sixth is my moms birthday. She turned 64. My dad would have been 64 yesterday. I didn’t cry over them this year. My dad has been dead for 14 years. In three years he will have been dead for me as long as he was alive for me. On my next birthday I turn the age they were when I was born.
I don’t think I am much like them. I hope not.
It is so awesome to deal with Shannas”gimmees” by saying that everything is too expensive. She didn’t hoard her allowance this time. She is quite pissed that everything is too much money. Ha.
I went outside and smoked yesterday afternoon because I ate approximately four bites of breakfast and maybe seven bites of lunch. My stomach hurts so much. I am going to need to this morning if I want to eat. I am clearly hungry but I want to curl up into a ball and sob because of my stomach. This is awful. I could suffer through this. But I can’t eat. Going longer and longer without food makes me dizzy and nauseated. I didn’t smoke much yesterday. I didn’t want to spend much time. I’m on the first floor and my balcony is next to a public walkway. Awkward.
So we will see how today goes. Right now I want to puke on the floor and my throat feels like it is closing and I would rate my stomach pain at a six. It is hard to think. Maybe I will go freeze my ass off outside for a bit. Then maybe I could sleep a bit more too. That would be excellent.
My kids then my bowels then my racing thoughts have other plans for me. Screw you, body. I should have taken a sleeping pill. I meant to take a sleeping pill. Getting less than five hours tonight will be inconvenient. I can’t take a sleeping pill tomorrow (tonight?) because I have to wake up and drive so I can’t be groggy. Weeeeeeee.
It’ll be ok. It’ll all work out.
Some folks posted full medical studies about cannabis on the ptsd forum that I read. Apparently there are a fair number of psychiatrists in the world who believe that cannabis is the go to medication for PTSD. I don’t think I was aware of that. Nice to hear though.
PTSD slowly wears your body down. You can’t eat or sleep properly and losing those two functions is a sure fire way to lose your mind. You will die if you cannot eat or sleep. That’s just part of being an animal. Cannabis is particularly good at encouraging people to eat (I generally smoke before breakfast and before dinner or I can’t eat because my stomach is in knots and I want to vomit from the pain) and I have some right before bed because it increases the likelihood I will sleep through the night.
I certainly get far more sleep stoned than I get sober. Stoned I usually get 5-7 hours. Sober usually 2-3 hours.
“My body forgot how to feel not-scared.”
There are a hand full of men and women on the forum with early childhood sexual assault. We have distinct similarities in our adult lives. Honestly the part that fascinates me is the people who developed PTSD from like medical trauma. Those folks have an interestingly overlapping but very different journey. When I read the other CSA (childhood sexual assault) people I feel like my experience might be relevant. When I read about people losing their lives because of fear of medical procedures…
Wow. I don’t know what to say. I have issues with doctors–but not like that. I feel utterly useless. How do you get over that much terror around the idea of your body betraying you? That sounds ridiculously hard. The combat folks I get and I don’t know what to tell them either. It’s just different.
Extreme early child abuse prevents a person from learning normal life coping mechanisms. Someone who has a good life but who undergoes horrifying medical procedures and treatments has coping methods for most things but then their body is entirely out of their control. That’s different. It is really interesting for me to try to wrap my head around the idea of having these coping methods for life and having them gradually either lose effectiveness or just blow up in your face.
For most of my life in my head I was sexually abused but not physically abused. I wasn’t covered in bruises and I didn’t get broken bones in the family (though my brother telling someone to throw me off the monkey bars is a bit sketchy) so I wasn’t physically abused. Being slapped constantly didn’t count. I wasn’t slapped daily but I was slapped at least a couple of times a week until I was thirteen and I slapped my mom back. I was taller than her and heavier than her. I was fucking done.
I need to change my techniques with Calli. Last night bedtime was late (we went on a walk to see a light show at a church a mile from our house–it was pretty nice) and Calli was overtired and worn out. She did not want to put her jammies on. I told her that she had to pick or I would. I think that is going to be the last time this lifetime I force her into clothing. Oh man the screaming.
Then once she was in the jammies she hit me over and over. Fair enough. She didn’t want to wear them. In order to contain the screaming and the hitting we put her in her playroom for a minute. Her response was to strip naked and stretch out on the floor crying. I didn’t yell at her. I said, “You feel that strongly, huh? Then you really do need to pick out a different pair. It’s too cold to go to bed naked.”
She sobbed and picked out different jammies and let me help her put them on. I need to not do that again. She’s too big and her will is too strongly developed. It’s not worth it. If it was less cold (or if she didn’t run cold all the time) I wouldn’t even fight her for jammies. I don’t with Shanna. If Shanna wants to sleep naked she can. She wakes up in the middle of the night and takes her jammies off if I force her to put them on. I remember doing that. I did it all through my childhood. I went to bed with jammies on and woke up naked.
I’m about done with this battle. I don’t have babies any more. I don’t need to care that much about their temperature. They are good at determining for themselves. Time to let go of feeling control over this. It’s going to be weird.
While I was lying in bed trying to sleep I counted my blessings.
I feel ridiculously lucky to have Noah. He talks to me and listens to me and supports me absolutely to the best of his ability. He gives me more support and love than I ever believed I would have. I didn’t know that a man could respect me and be nice to me the way he is.
I feel so blessed in having Shanna. Our personalities are so very compatible. We get along so well. Even her difficult days are more delightful than not. I feel so lucky that I get to spend all day every day around someone who makes me so happy. I know things will change and I hope that I give her enough space through adolescence that we manage to continue having a good relationship. I try not to bank on it, but I hope for it. I’m trying to give her a respectful relationship she will want to continue.
Calli astounds me more by the day. I think that her facial expressions are harder for me to read and she often looks kind of grumpy even when she is in a perfectly fine mood so we have a less steady relationship. We are both kind of anxious about trying to please one another. It feels amazing to me that progression into language seems to be mostly about being able to say, “Actually mom you have to sit right next to me” rather than asking for other things. I had no idea she liked me this much. I think I mistook her willingness to tolerate being put down for a preference for it. She was not a limpet as a tiny baby but she is turning into one now. I try very hard to meet her needs for touching me. She is getting more specific about it by the day. It isn’t even just lots of asking to be picked up. She comes and gets me and asks me to do what she is doing. That’s new for her. She helps with all kinds of work because she wants to be close to me. Because it is happening simultaneously with her losing most of the difficult “baby work” it feels like such a blessing. I feel so happy to have her company. She is funny and smart. I’m really enjoying getting to know her.
I am very lucky in my friends. In my experience most people are good. They want to help. They do want the world to be a better place. I am very lucky that I have people in my life who love and support me. I’m going through my mental list. I don’t really understand why you all try so hard. I am not easy to love. I make it just about impossible. Some of you have probably had to tolerate far more shit than you should. I’m very grateful.
I have done a lot of really interesting things with good people as an adult. Since I turned 18 I can probably number the worst things that have happened on my fingers.
Dan raping me.
Paul raping me.
Kevin sexually assaulting me.
Noah raping me.
Miscarriage.
Miscarriage.
Almost dying during childbirth.
Uncle Bob dying.
Family divorces, romantic breakups and losing friends just aren’t on that list. It’s different.
Dan, Paul, and Kevin all assaulted me in the short period of time I lived alone in San Jose in between breaking up with Puppy and Noah asking me to marry him. So between December and March. They all were men who knew about my childhood issues in vague handwavey ways and had been “supportive”. They all went through long conversations in which I was ridiculously explicit about what I wanted. This was at the height of my slut period. I fucking negotiated hard. But Dan got me drunk and Paul knew I was on GHB and Kevin did it during a massage.
So as long as I am never around anyone other than Noah while I drink or do do drugs I should be ok and my current massage therapist is the most professional person possible. And my kids are in the room. That makes me feel way more secure, honestly.
I have had the good fortune to have security. Noah makes me feel safe. Noah is working himself like a dog trying to provide me with a home I own free and clear because that is so important to me. Things happen. He may not always be able to work. Right now I could not support our family. I just can’t make enough money. That feels humiliating and degrading. I have in the past. In the first year of our marriage we lived on my salary and his whole salary went to paying off debt. I wouldn’t be a stay at home mom with extraneous debt. I would be too scared the whole time.
I want to be able to take care of my family. In about seven years I will be able to meet our financial needs without a problem regardless of what happens to Noah. If everything goes according to plan. This is when you cue the laugh track.
I want to denigrate this plan because then I don’t look like I’m taking it seriously. If I don’t look like I’m taking it seriously no one else will bother to take the time to explain in a friendly way how I shouldn’t try because it is too hard or not a good idea because your mortgage is a tax write off. My priority is very specific: lower monthly expenses. Telling me that my minimum of $25,000/year mortgage is a tax write off doesn’t get me nearer my goal of lower monthly expenses. That’s a god damn substantial chunk of change. (I say minimum because we overpay by a lot because I am trying to pay it off early.)
This is money that would probably otherwise go towards fairly “lifestyle” upgrades that are just not requirements. They aren’t things that would make me happier.
Noah gets what this means for me. He has goals of his own that do not include working a shitty job at a shitty company for the rest of his life because he has to earn a ridiculous salary to support our lifestyle. Things may become more volatile in a few years.
Six more years. Then our financial needs will be much lower. Like, less than half of what they are now. If I put my head down and follow my plan six years will feel like nothing. A blink.
I only have about seven more years until I need to be full speed ahead preparing for the trip abroad. This is the time to get ready. I am working on Spanish. I need to figure out how I want to tackle French. We are also working on ASL. In seven years I would like to be able to have a conversation in all three of these languages.
Oh shit. I need to start working.
I feel so lucky that I get to have this life. I get to have this life because of Noah. He’s my backer. Sometimes it is a little weird to me that he is frank about his ardent support of my artistic endeavors/writing/travel. I’m not entirely sure I believe that anyone is entitled to the kind of freedom I have let alone me.
Hm. Given how late the kids went to bed I bet they will sleep in. I should go have sex with him. Bye.
I spend a fair bit of time trying to figure out how to appropriately talk about mental illness with children. I also feel compelled to figure out how to explain stuff to friend’s kids some day. I will get questions. Recently I was relaying the story of shooting my mom in the face with the kitchen faucet (one of those neat ones with a tube so you can rinse off the whole sink) because she was being nasty and a kid asked me what she said to me. I told him I would tell him when he is older. He didn’t like that.
My kids need to understand why I medicate. They need to understand why I keep them away from it. Bodies are different. People have different needs. I assume that diabetics explain to their children why they must never play with insulin.
Right now the explanation that in my head feels “age appropriate” is “I had a lot of very unusual life experiences. I felt scared a lot. My body forgot how to feel not-scared. The medication I take lets my body understand oh yeah–nothing bad is happening because my body gets confused. It’s very annoying and inconvenient. This is why we ensure that you don’t spend much time feeling scared. I don’t want you to need medications to correct problems in your body so we are going to try to avoid creating them. Medicines are extracted or created in a wide variety of ways. This plant releases its medicine best by burning. But any kind of smoke at all is very bad for your body–it’s an irritant. It is hurting me. Right now the balance of my life is such that I need the help in my brain enough to deal with the fact that I am hurting my body. It’s not forever. Your body is perfect still. Let’s keep it that way as long as possible. All medications should be prescribed by a doctor.”
That feels kid-appropriate to me.
Yesterday was nice. I had several moments of reflection throughout the day where I managed to shut off the hand-wringing-oh-no-I-can’t-do-this voice that lives in the back of my head. The voice that occasionally rises to a panicked frenzy and it is all I can do to not find a dark closet and hide in it and beat my head till I drown it out. I used to do that, before I had kids. Now I don’t really have time for that.
Now mostly I mutter “shut up” every so often and try to ignore it. But it is a loud voice. It counts as background noise in my hearing and makes it harder to follow conversations.
Shanna climbed in bed with us in the middle of the night. The thing I am looking forward to the most about our trip to Disneyland next week is sleeping with the girls in a large and comfortable bed. I really like sleeping with them. They make me feel good about myself because they love me so much. And they do not fear me.
Looking into Shanna’s face in the middle of the night is one of the only times the I can’t do it voice is silent. When I look at my sleeping daughter I think I’m doing it. She is so wonderful she takes my breath away. I do not understand how I was blessed this much. We have such a pleasant relationship. We are really nice to each other.
My kids want to be near me because being near me is a pleasant experience. That feels so good. My children do not flinch. We are all yellers–they don’t take it as threatening. We just happen to express ourselves with force.
I like to let Shanna run and run and run and run in a field until I can barely see her and then I scream, “Come back now” and she does. She turns on a dime. It is miraculous to me the way she knows how and when to push the boundaries with me. She only rarely is impulsive in inappropriate places. Mostly, because I over-explain everything, she knows what I want from her behavior in different environments.
“In Disneyland you don’t have to hold my hand the whole time–I know that irritates you–but you do need to be able to reach out your hand and touch me the whole time. That’s how you know how far away to be. It’s a big crowd and you could get pushed away from me easily.”
I’m starting to feel excited about the trip. We plan to spend most of the days in the pool at the water slide. Ha.
I like being forced to look at them. I probably won’t really carry my phone around. Unschooling is a way of life. I try really hard to not distract myself during the day. My job for the next fifteen years is to be available to them for help with learning.
I feel the most joy I have ever felt. I confess that I partially feel a bit cocky that I’m not trying to actively teach Shanna anything “academic” at this point but she’s learning it anyway. Oh wow! It works! She has mostly taught herself to read. I will give 2-5 minutes of feedback at her request once in a while and I think that’s only happened three or so times.
I want to find out who she will be. I’m really interested.
It’s really kind of funny how “gendered” behavior is working in my house. They both have “intensely male” interests and attitudes right along side their uberfemme girly stuff. I really like that the princesses are exploring outer space. With a sword. That pretty much exactly seems right to me. We aren’t so big on the guns. Hand to hand combat is much more fun.
Today I’m packing. And cleaning. I have to get the whole house picked up and prepared because Noah is going to steam clean the carpets while we are gone. I feel very weird that my instant impulsive follow to that statement is, “I’m a lucky bitch” What in the hell has happened to me? Ok. Yeah. I’m kind of a freak now.
If you aren’t a parent–strongly consider whether you want to be deeply grateful for carpet cleaning. If that seems icki–don’t have kids. Heh.
Calli is past potty training. We haven’t had an accident on the floor in months. Oh man.
I’m going to have a more difficult relationship with Calli because she resents the fuck out of sharing me with Shanna. She doesn’t ever seem to feel like she gets enough of me. I do give her one on one time every day but I can’t get rid of my older child. There has been a rough bump around language acquisition. She gets so frustrated with having Shanna nearby and when she is trying to talk and Shanna talks over her… woo boy. I remember being the baby.
The dynamics here are interesting. We have specific dogma around behaviors in order to smooth things out. I hear lots of screaming recitals of “Moms rules” when I’m not in the room. Uhm, well it’s a process.
Shanna’s favorite is, “We are a sharing family.” She has a hard time with the fact that this doesn’t mean she gets to eat her share and my share and Noah’s share and Calli’s share. We should share with her after she finishes eating the fastest–right?
The flip side is she will hand her bowl over to someone if they ask before she has bolted the food down. She isn’t attached. She’s just ravenous. It is really interesting to watch them share. They share food with joy. I like it.
Toys… well they will have a long life of working out conflicts. We are working on doing so without hitting, biting, kicking, screaming, pinching, spitting, pushing, or intimidating someone. You have to be persuasive. Make your case. Oh, and no whining. Or pestering. Asking more than three times is pestering and then you get an automatic no for the day.
I’m firm but not mean. I think. I am really controlling. I feel very weird about that. But I’m very controlling about how they treat me. I have to believe this is healthy. You can’t hit me. You can’t kick me. You can’t spit on me. You can’t scream in my ear because it causes blinding headaches that last for days. etc and so on.
I believe with every part of me that if I want my kids to be nice to me I have to show them what it is like. I have to let them know that I feel frustrated with them sometimes and that’s ok and they will frustrated with me sometimes and that’s ok too. Even when we feel frustrated that is no cause to go being mean to someone you like as much as we like each other.
I’ve had several what I think of as Zen moments lately. All the bad tapes stopped playing for a few minutes. I felt really good about what I was doing. The kids and I were working on something together and I felt actively instructive in the good ways and they were thrilled I was paying attention to them and teaching them and I felt so fucking lucky that I get to have this life. I get to find out what a happy childhood looks like. That is not lost to me. I don’t get to have it–that is past. But I can see it. I was told that people like me couldn’t create one.
I’m doing it.
Yesterday Shanna told me she wants to no longer go to swim classes at the place we are at right now. The teacher is too bossy and forceful. He wants her to learn the skills quickly. She wants to play. He keeps telling her she “has” to do things. She said, “I told him, ‘Actually I don’t have to’ and then I went back to the step.”
That’s my girl.
I told her that she is right and wrong. She looked startled. I told her that he is correct that if she wants to get good at swimming she will eventually have to learn the things he is showing her–but she is right that she doesn’t have to do it right now today. I said that a better response might be, “Thank you for trying to teach me but I’m not ready to do that today.”
She told me I will have to repeat that wording a few times so she can learn it. My heart exploded with joy.
We are going to go back to the other swim school place in town. They are more relaxed and mellow. Dude, it’s called “Happy Fish”. The other place is a Swim Academy. We only switched because of a Groupon.
It’s neat learning how this goes.
Last night was a slight change in how we have been doing therapy. I told her I needed to take a break from history because I am struggling with boundaries in a few places in my life and I need help.
About the doctor–she says that I should carefully rehearse exactly what I need to say about this specific stomach pain, “It started right after my second daughter was born about two and a half years ago. It is a very specific sore spot that often feels like it is pulsing. It is usually in the 1-3 range of pain with it being more intense while I lie down. It isn’t majorly painful but it is tender and prevents movement in some directions and it causes me to be stiff and awkward so I don’t twist which is hurting my back. So yes, this spot riiiiiiiiiight here probably needs an ultrasound.”
She said to very consciously and deliberately decide for myself that all of the other parts of my medical history are a distraction to dealing with this problem and I don’t need to mention them until and unless I want that doctors help. She said if they try to shunt me off to psychiatry give them her number and she will deal with them.
I will feel like a deceitful liar but that is the least anxiety-producing way to get through this. I will actively feel like a lying liar but oh well. It will be ok. I can probably live with being a lying liar with people in the medical community.
We talked about friendships and how those are working for me. How I feel very obliged to offer help and assistance and compensation–essentially–in order to beg people to be my friend. I have a bad habit of “giving till it hurts” because I don’t tell people on day one that I can’t do what they really want to have someone do. Everyone needs support. I am not in a good place to support people. Not really in any way. I have to be ok with the cycle of life I am in and not beat myself up for how little I can do for people.
We talked about how when I think about people in my head and I kind of do the weighing and measuring sort of shit that I do I can think I am “higher” on 99 different topics but I will always be able to find some specific thing that makes this person is “better” than me. More essentially valuable or useful. More lovable. More worthy of help and assistance.
If I can’t handle driving I need to not feel like a pathetic person who is unworthy of relationships just because I can’t drive to people. I need to just deal with where I am.
We went through people in my life and made specific lists for her records of “I react to this friend like my sister. I react to this friend like my mother. This friend reminds me of my brother (now deceased). Etc. I did that because I feel like I put people in categories and then I just react to them without examining what I am doing. It’s not positive.
Side note–P, of course you are grandmotherly. You are extremely grandmotherly and wonderful. You are part of a small pool of women who kind of interchangeably provide similar sorts of interactions with my kids. You do it when you have time and space and energy–not when I need it per se. WHICH IS OK! This is what I am trying to figure out how to accept emotionally. My kids don’t have a “grandmother” who is specifically invested in their welfare. They have wonderful and kind women who for whatever reason love me and by extension are nice to my kids–absolutely. We have good and kind people.
There is a difference in actual family and people who are good friends who visit once or a couple of times a year. For one thing, I can’t talk about most of my friends with my kids. I don’t know stories about my friends lives that are appropriate to share with my kids.
My adopted Dad sent me an sms asking what stuff he should send to the kids. I called him back and left him a voicemail saying he isn’t getting the easy way out of this. He needs to talk to me. I’m not sending an sms list.
We had a lovely phone call over the weekend. I told him the best thing he could do for his relationship with my kids is to send them pictures of himself and his life along with little stories explaining the pictures.
The only stories I know about my Dad are stories I can’t tell my kids. They don’t want to hear about how hilarious it was that Dad went to a leather con in Denver Colorado and his biological brother ended up at the same event and found him while he was doing a labial inflation. And his wife was on stage (with me) screaming her fucking head off while I beat on her like a piñata and tried to all but rip her nipples off. It was a heavy scene.
Those are the kinds of things I know about my Dad. I can tell you his entire Leather history start to finish. I can describe who he has played with and what he specifically did. I know his partners and their partners and and and.
Not things I’m telling my kids.
Most of my friends come from sex communities. I have pretty much the same situation with most of them.
P–when I talk about the lack of grandmother I am not trying to demean our friendship nor how kind you are to my children. I am trying to explain that there is still a hole for me. You are good. You are wonderful. I am so grateful that I have you in my life that I would quite cheerfully kiss your feet. Please for the love of shiny green apples don’t decide that I am an ungrateful bastard who is unworthy. It may be so but I hope our relationship is little enough work for you that you can overlook that flaw.
I desperately need what you have to spare in your life. But beyond that I still have this cavern of need. You aren’t available to fill it. That is appropriate. I try very hard not to be bitter or demanding or difficult about the fact that my friends are clearly giving me the limit of what they have to give.
I am at a place where I don’t think any friendship can give me what I need. Having a mother is simply different from having a friend. That does not mean my friends are not doing their jobs. They are wonderful and kind and supportive.
You are still supposed to have a mom. And I don’t. And it hurts a lot. I know my whining gets old. I know that I am over thirty and I’m not supposed to still be whining about how much I miss my mommy. But I do. I started missing my mom when I was three and have never stopped.
I can only do what I can do. I have no one to catch the ball if I drop it. Thus I need to decide for myself what I can and can’t be responsible for. I can’t feel like I owe people things. Not reassurance, not comfort, not support. I don’t have enough reassurance or comfort or support for me. If I turn around and hand off what I have that is actively self-sabotaging myself and that’s not ok for me to do to my kids.
Even though my inability to follow through on relationships feels to me like absolute proof that I am a piece of shit I need to ignore that. I have to leave a lot of run-off room for my kids’ needs. They spike unexpectedly sometimes. I have to just have slack sitting around. I can’t run near capacity all the time. I just can’t.
My therapist and I talked a fair bit about how I value other people for having knowledge but I devalue everything I know. She asked me if I think a professor is a low status position. I laughed and said that I try to give occasional professors respect but mostly I’m not real flattering in their direction.
I read a lot and I know a fairly ridiculous array of things. Sometimes, like yesterday in my kitchen, I get to show off. I am perceptive. I can listen to under two minutes of a conversation other people are having and then go through and fill in the blanks on a whole bunch of behavior patterns in the life of someone I have never met before. That’s kind of cool.
That’s why I talk so much and so loudly about rape and incest and ptsd and all the other things I talk about as loudly as I can. Because I am not actually a special snowflake (Even though Lisa made me a very nice special snowflake ornament to argue with my premise.) because the things I experience are textbook and happen to other people too. And those people rarely have spent as much time reading about it as I have. Not very many people are as dedicated to studying their body as I am without getting into a profession where you settle in to one specialty and become a specialist in how you deal with people and their issues. You narrow down what it is you know.
I’m not a specialist. I can’t dive deep into one subject and immerse myself in the way that true professionals do. I’m not a doctor. I don’t have the memory or attention to detail. I will frankly say that when there are two things that have perhaps vastly different functions but nearly identical names… I’m almost certainly mixing a lot of those up. I’m sure I have mistakes in my brain. I am sure I read so fast that I kinda skim sections and miss important details.
I am not a doctor. I am not a psychologist. I am not any kind of specialist. But I’m good at recognizing my tribe. I can recognize our behavior and smell. I think it kind of weirds people out that I meet them and talk to them for a few minutes and decide, “Ah. You are my tribe. Ok.” because then I speak very familiarly. I make predictions. I talk as if I know things about them. I’m usually right.
I do get it wrong. Not everyone is my tribe. I have shitty luck predicting people who are not my tribe.
I obviously derive a lot of feelings of positive self-esteem from this knowledge. I obviously feel an elevation in worth or value or status because I really and truly can, occasionally, make peoples life better just by talking about things that I like to talk about.
Tell me there isn’t a career somewhere in that.
Bucket List (first draft in this journal)
run a marathonhave kids
travel for a year outside the country
live for one year in one place in a foreign country
hike a substantial portion of the Appalachian trail
drive cross country with my kids studying historical sites
do the training to be a first responder
reach at least the penultimate belt in a martial art
someday I want to read a whole new book every day for a year. this will have to be fluffy shorter books, obviously–yay for libraries.
I want to write a novel–like… fiction.
I want to write a graphic novel series. No, I’m not trying to be Neil Gaimon. I see pictures in my head and I want other people to see them and that is probably the best format.
I want to write a childrens book.
stop smoking or needing any anxiety medication–I will fucking shrink my life.
go to the Michigan Womyns Music Festival with my kids
go to all of the Disney parks in one year, err… maybe not Paris again.
go to all 50 states (I have seen 27 so far)
Those are all things I have already told Noah about. Well, I’m not sure he has been told about the hiking part. He has this magnificent coworker who did that after college. She has no idea how much she inspired me. As much as I overall am not in love with Noah’s current employer I have to admit that his coworkers here are way cooler than average.
On the train yesterday I was at the part of The Moral Animal where he talks about low self esteem as a survival trait. Ha. It is very probable that this pervasive belief that I am worthless is my way of trying to convince people that they no longer have to kick me to knock me down any pegs. I’m at the bottom. It’s cool. I know. Just leave me alone.
Then I came home from therapy and talked to Noah. I asked him to explain what kind of intimidating I am. Once a student (who was a large football player who dwarfed me) slowly backed away from me and told me that I looked like I was about to rip his head off and piss on his neck. What in the hell do I do that causes people to say things like that to me?!
He told me it isn’t that I am that intimidating looking. But I am very unpredictable and startling. I don’t fall into any of the obvious patterns for people who look like me and I very carefully mask how far off from the norm I am until I explode because I have carefully learned how to mask all the small distress signs. There is no sign whatsoever that I am feeling even slightly off until I am hysterical or screaming or something.
He said it is kind of like if a big guy was kind of vaguely menacing in the direction of a little bitty old lady and she turned around and snarled like a tiger and pulled out a large knife.
Clearly the guy is no longer in control here despite outward appearances of being more intimidating. Now there is no obvious script to follow. Oh shit. He says I’m like that old lady.
I didn’t say thank you.
I am so difficult to predict and when I explode it is so intense that people can’t handle it. They have no coping methods for people like me other than avoidance. And by the time the old lady pulls the knife–should you have been running thirty seconds ago? oh shit.
When I was a child I was literally taught that there is no such thing as a fair fight. If you fight you fight to win. You fight to cause as much injury as possible. You have to escalate with as much force as you are capable of instantly because otherwise someone will want to slowly escalate and walk up the ladder to find out what you are capable of and they will eventually find the ceiling. If you come back with an overwhelming show of force they don’t try again.
I want to learn a martial art because I have been practicing my physical approximation of the movements I will need since I was a child. Stomp their toes. Everyone has weak feet. If you are close enough and the need is dire enough pull your fingers in to make a hard line on your hand and you have to hit really hard to break their nose and hurt them enough to let you get away. Knees are weak.
When I used to walk through the mountains past kids who gave me shit I carried a stout stick. I took out several much bigger kids by hitting their knees.
I’m not trying to make it sound like I won most of the time. I didn’t. I lost. I got the shit beat out of me because there were almost always more of them and they were bigger. But I made sure they fucking hurt.
Now, as an adult, if someone attacked me I would find a way to rake them with my fingernails. That’s DNA. Even if it does result in a more severe beating. No one is getting away with it again. I will have evidence.
Sometimes I don’t like where the rabbit hole goes.
The home schooling group got rained out of the park. So I posted on the meetup, “Why doesn’t everyone come over here?” There were 8? 9? families most of them with two kids. Some with three and some with one kid so it balanced out to about two kids each.
It was loud. It was insane. It was hella messy. It was so fun. The kids were running back and forth as fast as they could. There was so much laughing.
And the moms sat around and talked about how they are dealing with PTSD. (Ok, not all the moms–but there was a conversation in the kitchen with a couple of us.) And when I swore people expressed shock and horror but uhm mostly ignored it.
That’s the best it is going to get, right?
I kind of had trouble focusing on any conversation for more than a couple of minutes–but there was a lot going on.
It was really nice. No major injuries. No one got seriously in trouble.
Having a whole pack of kids over feels so nice. They were here for 4.5 hours. I’m so tired. And I have to hurry up and get ready for therapy tonight. At least I’m not as morose as I was yesterday.
In the past three weeks I have had three people comment on the difference between what I write and what they see when we are together. That makes it something worth writing about.
Of course there is a difference in how I act in public and the crazy shit I write about. If I acted in public the way I write about on my journal I would be in a lot of danger. If I was unable to mask my craziness it would be extremely unsafe for me to go out in public. I would risk being 5150’ed again. I never want to go to a hospital again. I can’t lose it where anyone can see.
If you look at the whiteboard in my room there is a lot written down but if you notice very little of it is outside my house and even less than that is any kind of social activity. I generally keep my “socializing” to under twenty hours in a week and most weeks I’m under eight hours.
That is how much “playing the game” I can do right now.
On the occasional week when I try to push it and do more because that week just happens to be busy I am usually sorry. I will have to spend a lot of time in the bathroom crying for all the hours over my “maximum” I am actually out. It is embarrassing and humiliating and I feel ashamed of myself the whole time.
Being around people involves a lot of active and conscious thinking about “what I am allowed to say”. The consequences for getting it wrong include being asked to leave, being asked to never come back, or if I genuinely lose it and start freaking out I may lose my kids or get arrested.
I’m not exaggerating and I’m not wrong.
I’m aware of how “hysterical” women have been treated throughout history. I have done a lot of specific research. In olden times I may have had to walk around with my tongue in a heavy vice for days or had to wear a collar with spikes on the inside while tied to a post in public so other people could remind me how bad I was.
The consequences in the modern area are downright soft and fuzzy in comparison–I get that. Nevertheless I don’t want them.
I don’t want them. I don’t want them. I don’t want them.
I’m awake in the middle of the night because my stomach is hurting because I didn’t smoke before bed. By 2:30 my stomach hurts and I can’t sleep through it. Then I start having racing thoughts because that is just what I do when I am in pain. Then I risk being a mess tomorrow. Lots of breakthrough crying.
My kids know I cry. I can’t hide it from them. I try my best to present it as, “Everyone is different. I cry a lot–most people don’t. That’s ok. People vary.” They are still young enough that they don’t really ask questions about why.
Noah deals with/occasionally sees me crying as I’m going about my day. I wander around working and crying at the same time. That’s just life for me.
Yes, I believe this is something that I have to carefully keep people from seeing. This is probably, by hour, the biggest part of my life and I have to make sure no one else sees it happening. Or I will get in trouble for being bad again.
The fact that I wander through life feeling very sad and crying for many hours of most days is something I have to carefully hide and prevent people from seeing or I get in trouble. Over and over and over.
It’s not hyperbole. I can tell stories all day and all night long.
I’m at a very low ebb on my ability to “play the game” with other people because I require so much of myself for my interactions with my kids.
My kids know I cry. They know that I have wonky chemicals in my brain that make me prone to have my eyes just start watering and it’s not a big deal and they know that sometimes I think about things that happened long ago and it was bad and I’m really glad that my life is different now and I’m so glad that I know my kids. They know that they are nicer to me than anyone has ever been and that I am grateful.
Well, so far Shanna parrots these things back. I say “them” but I am still working on brainwashing Calli but Shanna is pretty ingrained at this point.
I feel really stupid sometimes but when I am saying in a calm and clear voice, “It’s ok to be mad at me. I do things you don’t like. You are totally allowed to have those feelings but it is not ok to call me names and it is not ok to scream at me. Try again.” I still have tears running down my face. I can keep control of my voice at this point–it is great effort but I can prevent myself from descending into the ragged sobbing sort of breathing that makes talking hard. I sound “like a teacher should” but my eyes are watering.
I feel weird knowing that my children are going to grow up thinking that your mom crying all the time is normal and something to ignore. I feel very ashamed of myself. I feel like I am proving those people right who told me that I should not be a mother because someone like me isn’t capable of being a good mother.
I’m not selfless enough? I don’t have enough self control? For the past couple of years of “bad cycle” which probably actually started as postpartum depression after Calli was born combined with Shanna hitting the age I was when my abuse started so I started having daily intrusive flashbacks.
That was not long after Traci–my therapist of seven years–OD’ed on heroin and I ended up finding Sharon who totally sucked and tried to talk me into believing that I had Disassociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personalities) because of how I segment my behavior when I am around people.
I don’t think I really took the placenta pills as long with Calli. I stopped taking fish oil. I haven’t started again even though I know it is a mood stabilizer. I have other supplements my therapist wants me to start and when I think of the act of swallowing pills I start to gag and my stomach aches just thinking about it.
By the end of the time I was taking all the god damn supplements my midwife wanted me on (15 fucking pills a day) I was frequently spontaneously vomiting them up.
My body knows that when I take a lot of pills it is because I want to die. That is what my body thinks is happening because I was dumb enough to treat my body disrespectfully enough that it doesn’t trust my intentions anymore. Smart body.
I really am not so good at taking pills. And the idea that I should take a handful or so every day for the rest of my life is something that I don’t think I can get my gag reflex to move past.
Even though everyone keeps telling me that if I only swallow this pill my life will be magically better. It hasn’t worked any other fucking time I’ve tried some fucking magic pill. I’m still me. I’m still completely broken. I still don’t have a family or very much consistent support–I am building it. I’m trying. But it is dependent on having people in my life who actually show up to do it. I don’t have many people volunteering for that role and of the people volunteering I have to evaluate for them if they really have enough spoons to be dependable *for me* because I am a god damn special snowflake with standards through the roof.
If I know I will have an out of proportion negative reaction to someone acting how they typically act I need to be very careful how much time I spend around them. It is not their fucking problem I’m crazy and that I have had “bad life experiences” that cause me to want to yell at them. If I can’t be tactful (otherwise known as keep my fucking mouth shut or on trivial topics) then I can’t be around people. I silently back away from most relationships because I don’t think I have the right to hurt people by being mad at them for being them.
I don’t know how to reconcile the fact that it isn’t that I actually think they are wrong it’s that it is very hard for me to keep straight in my head what kind of commentary is appropriate in which settings. I’ve been introduced to a much larger number of social situations than most people. I have moved somewhere between 60 and 70 times in my life. Each of those times involved meeting somewhere between five and hundreds of new people all in a big rush. I have lived at every socio-economic level from the projects to multi-million dollar homes and I went to school with Steve Wozniac’s kid. His son was best friends with the brother of the girl I was best friends with. Many of my friends had server space hosted by Woz because that’s just how things worked. That’s where I lived.
I could pull out my sock puppet prime minister (it’s a long story–maybe I will tell it some day) and name drop all the long list of two degrees of separation I have with “important” people.
So uhm yeah. I walk through life feeling like I am the lowest status person in every single room I walk into. I assume that if I say the wrong thing and offend the wrong person (and I have no god damn idea who the “important” people are–I constantly fuck that up) I will be told to leave and all of a sudden there will be a tidal wave of nasty gossip about me behind my back.
How many illustrative stories do I need to have? I could start with less than two years ago and move backwards over thirty years and have many dozens.
Being the scapegoat is hard. I have a lot of behavior patterns that get me into trouble. I don’t understand exactly how they work. I don’t understand why I am so god damn offensive to people but I am.
I tend to go through life believing that people who are still here are the ones around whom I have been most successful at wearing the right mask. I look for signs that I am breaking their social contract and I try very hard to apologize for fucking up before they have to call me on it because I don’t want to be rejected just because I said or did something that was inappropriate for someone in that kind of relationship.
I hyperventilate over this and hyper-analyze every thing I say or do after the fact and try to look for reasons I might have crossed a line and pro-actively send an apology. I really can’t handle losing many more friends. It devastates me so much.
Oh for the love of toast of course I hide “what I am really like”. I am unpleasant and needy. No one likes people like that. I really can’t handle having more people decide they don’t like me en masse. So I need to be god damn careful about everything I say and do.
After smoking for half an hour I think that the stomach pain has changed enough that I can try eating and see if that will help.
I have been trying to track my marijuana usage more. Why am I using it. When. What, specifically, is it doing for me that I need? Mostly it is the end of the year and I am freaking out about how much I spent (I used edibles basically exclusively for about two months while I was training for the marathon to clear some of the lung funk–yes smoking is disgusting and I would like to stop–and those two months cost as much as the whole rest of the year combined and gosh it sounds like way too much money for any medication and… accompanying shame cycle.) thus I am beating myself up about how much I need to stop using it.
If I’m going to damn myself it will at least be with accurate data.
I go through ~ 1/8 of pot/week. I wake up earlier than everyone in my family and I have some then. It calms my stomach pain enough for me to eat. On days when I don’t smoke before breakfast (often out of impulses of shame because I am a disgusting person for needing a “drug” I should just “willpower” my way through after all) I generally am unable to eat because the stomach pain is such that I have constant nausea and I have a ridiculously strong gag reflex. If I try to eat I have a lot of violent stomach pain because my stomach is not fucking interested in accepting food.
If I am in a restaurant this is when I have to get up and leave the table. I either go to the restroom or I go outside because I need to cry. I need to cry because it hurts and because I am ashamed of myself for crying in public just for something stupid that someone else would be able to hide. I know I am not exhibiting the proper social behavior and if I keep that shit up in public I will be fucking sorry.
At home that is when I say in a small voice, “Excuse me” and I go smoke enough to relax my nausea and deal with my gag reflex. I usually feel better after eating. But I am also still stoned after eating. So who the heck knows exactly where the better comes from. But on days when I don’t smoke I probably don’t consume a full meal worth of food in a day. I physically can’t. It hurts too much.
So a year ago when I went to the doctor I layed out all my issues and I was told she wouldn’t deal with my stomach until I dealt with psychiatry and psychiatry told me to take a pill I didn’t want to take, stop breastfeeding instantly (because this new magic pill is extremely toxic to me and the baby), and stop pot instantly or psychiatry would not work with me.
Uhm. No. Fuck you. I know what those side effects will do to my life. They will make it so I can no longer play the game when I have to because I will be debilitated by the side effects. I have watched this effect cascade with person after person in my life. No. No. No.
I will not work with a fucking doctor who spends five minutes talking to me and then wants to prescribe a medication that will destroy every coping method I have and tell me that I just have to “deal with it” while smirking at me. That is demeaning. You have studied what trauma does to the brain? Well so have I, motherfucker. You have not done a single fucking blood test. You have not done a brain scan. You have not taken a full medical history to find out how bad the side effects have been every time I have been forced onto a drug “for my own good” and how often that has lead to significant public blow ups and more trauma.
You don’t give a shit. It shows on the fucking smirk on your face. I don’t fit into your mold of a good person so you want to drug me into a stupor so that I stop doing what I am doing and blindly do what you say. No. You don’t know what I have to react to or why.
Fuck you. You want me dead. I can’t come to any other conclusion and continue to survive.
It took twenty-five minutes (I’m uhm babbling paragraphs in between random distractions else-net Oooh shiny! That’s a lot of why it sounds so incoherent and random-ha.) but I finished a piece of string cheese. Minimal gagging but I haven’t been able to eat any nuts yet. And my graham cracker is untouched.
We will have new insurance cards soon. I promise that as soon as I can log into the new insurance system I will make an appointment. I promise me.
An awful lot of why I am smoking the pot is to deal with my massive stomach pain. I feel very scared because if I reveal that there is an anxiety portion to the pain I risk not being treated again but if I don’t tell the doctor that I may not get appropriate treatment.
I feel like I am in a bind and there is no way for me to get out of it. I have to just throw a dart at a dart board and pray that I get a doctor who will want to help me without requiring that I instantly trust them enough to send my entire life headlong. No one deserves that kind of trust from me. Give me a fucking break.
I know that my intense fear of having to deal with a doctor for this is making the pain escalate unbearably. I understand that link. I understand that for most of the year the pain has stayed at a consistent 1-3 with spikes up to 5 or so when I try to eat without smoking but since I have been actively been thinking about the fact that I have to deal with this soon the pain has been spiking to 8 and 9 and causing me to nearly vomit spontaneously in public–which is kind of embarrassing. And shame producing. Knowing that my body may betray me at any moment and make me a public spectacle makes me feel constantly ashamed of existing. I should just fucking die so that I don’t have to go around inconveniencing people all the time.
When I vomited on the floor of the hospital when I was twelve, when I was waiting in the lobby to get a cast on my broken arm, my mom grabbed me, hit me and hissed: “You just did that to get attention.”
Over and over I sobbed “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.“
The nurse tried to tell me it would be ok but I couldn’t stop crying.
When I go out in public I generally did not smoke because I don’t do so before driving. Which means I have to get through breakfast without smoking if I want to go to the park. I generally don’t eat much or sleep properly the night before with anxiety about the spike in stomach pain and the increased difficulty in being patient with the kids.
That’s a lot of why I limit excursions out of the house. Those days are ridiculously hard on my body. When people come to me I evaluate how offended they will be if I am stoned and I try to uhm match expected tolerance because generally what I think other people will be ok with is lower than what I actually usually use.
This is the big problem with using any medication so sporadically. The effects are needed when dosage isn’t present. I have many days where I wake up and I let the negative thoughts get too entrenched before I start smoking (it is an unpleasant process and I don’t enjoy it and I don’t like being “the kind of person who smokes pot” and and and) so often I have to kind of psyche myself up first and bribe myself with the idea of being in a more pleasant mood.
The amount of conscious dealing with shame I do every day is really hard. I have to consciously deal with it or I will not eat and not sleep and get weak to the point where I am not physically able to complete my chores without slowly dragging chairs all over the house so that I can move from chair to chair to finish my cleaning.
Because I am that compulsive and crazy. I have to “appear” functional. I “have to” maintain certain appearances or I risk terrible consequences. I don’t know exactly what they will be or from whom. Sure as the sun will rise I will have someone else in my life whom I trust a great deal turn around and tell me that I am abusive and terrible and they are disgusted by me. It is going to happen again and again because that is something that people just feel free to say to me.
That is part of what I mean when I say that I am the lowest status person in every room I walk into. I am a white trash whore and I can never undo that. In any room I walk in to someone may decide to go off on me. It happens when I happen to say something I shouldn’t say.
Usually that means I answer a question honestly. People ask a wide variety of questions in the casual chit chat process that if I answer honestly the person will respond with horror and disgust and move away from me exhibiting great hostility. I have to guess which lies to tell and when.
When my mask is slipping, like it was this weekend, I went to a friends baby shower. Want to know my connection to the group? I knew the host from working together (where deliberately obscured) and the party was at the house of someone she has known since middle school–they were both around our mutual place of employment. I went out with both of them like twice. I uhh begged to eat out my friend’s friend. She let me. Then never talked to me again.
Till I walked into her house this weekend and she didn’t remember me even slightly (or at least gave no sign of remembering me–she certainly didn’t know my name).
This uhm, happens to me pretty regularly. I’m very careful what questions I answer when I talk to people in general. I uhm was kind of stupid.
So the father of the host (he has known the mom-to-be since she was a kid, remember) was chatting me up and he told me that his wife wrote a book but she is afraid to publish it. I uhm wasn’t thinking so I said, “I actually wrote a book and self published. If you look at places like Amazon publishing or there is a wide variety of competing models you can be e-published for practically nothing and you can get books in print and deal with hawking them at book stores yourself for fairly little money. That is how publishing often works, actually.”
So then he asked me about my book. He had to prod me more than once. “Oh you wrote a book? I bet it’s a lovey dovey romance isn’t it? I bet it’s all cutesy schmoopsy and adorable right?” heh heh.
Cue my not amused face.
“No, actually it’s a memoir about the first eighteen years of my life.”
*snicker* “No eighteen year old has done anything worth writing about.”
By that point in the conversation my heart was racing and I was breathing fast and I could feel the flush rising. I had been kind of avoiding eye contact. Then I looked straight at him and said, “Well I I was moved more than fifty times, I was homeless, I stole to eat, I went to twenty-five schools in diverse combinations of socio-economic levels and race: everything from the projects to graduating high school in Los Gatos after only going to that school for my sophomore year and only three semesters of high school total. (said to someone whose kid went to one of the worst schools in the east side of San Jose [these two places are right next to each other and Los Gatos is where all the rich people live]) I was raped or sexually assaulted dozens of times over more than twenty years, including my father and my brother extensively abusing me, along with a bunch of random neighbors. I self-mutilated for decades as part of how I dealt with what was going on with me and every mental health professional I have worked with has been freaked out by the variety and range of trauma I have been through.
I had enough happen to me to justify a book.”
At this point picture him kind of mouth agape blinking kind of fast. “Oh uhm. Wow. Yes. You would have enough to write about.”
We didn’t really talk after that.
I let my mask slip. I did not tightly contain my answer enough. I wasn’t appropriate enough. Mostly because I didn’t give a shit. I will probably never see this man again. My connection to him is tenuous enough that I just don’t have to fucking care if he thinks I am awful for unloading on him like that. (You wouldn’t fucking believe how often people screamed at me for uttering even four sentences of the above paragraph in a challenging voice. I should not be speaking. Shut up. I don’t have the right to make people think about unpleasant things.)
The conclusion I draw from this is I shouldn’t exist. Or I should simper and play stupid and lie and answer questions in evasive ways and for the love of crisco stop writing and talking about this shit.
So I do my very best to force my lips to be literally closed for as much of the time I am with other people as I can. I end every social interaction with sores on the inside of my mouth from chewing it so hard to keep from saying anything that might be inappropriate.
Yes. It is enormous physical strain.
I can’t tell how these descriptive/prescriptive things work about labels. People tell me that I should eschew thinking of myself as bad and stop thinking about my behavior as bad. But I regularly get into trouble I don’t want to be in because I don’t have appropriate filters. Bullshit I’m not bad. I’m punished for being bad often enough that it seems imprudent for me to stop trying to filter.
I want to be a nice person. I really fucking do. I am tired of being told I am not wanted and being abandoned. I am tired of people kicking me really hard and feeling free to tell me that I am a disgusting piece of shit but they still love me and if I start jumping through x, y, and z hoops then they might be able to have a relationship with me or help me. But not until I jump through all those hoops without support. If I don’t do that first I won’t be able to prove that I deserve them bothering to waste time and energy on me.
I uhm can’t bend to whims like that. I have to live in my body 24/7 and deal with the consequences. I have a very tightly controlled life that I can manage because I limit it so severely.
But when I say, “I stay home” I don’t mean that I hide in bed crying all day. I mean that my kids and I play in the yards and garden and walk for miles around our neighborhood when I stay regularly medicated thus I can sleep and eat in a way that allows me to be physically able to.
Since the marathon I have been fucking around with almost not using pot to see how this works for me. It’s going really badly. I need to see a doctor.
The reason I don’t just “get a vaporizer” to try it is because when I spend money on something believing that it is unlikely to solve my problem and it is money I don’t want to spend… it’s kind of doomed before I start. I can’t be on marijuana forever. I do have to figure out how to live life without it in order to do the things I want to do.
But what does that even mean? Part of it is that my stomach god damn hurts and I have to heavily medicate in order to deal with the pain and nausea in order to eat and sleep like a “normal” person and have any appearance of functionality.
Being in pain actively triggers my PTSD symptoms and causes flashbacks because I have such a long history of being in pain and that being something I am not allowed to talk about or deal with because “You aren’t really in pain–you are just a whiny hypochondriac.”
My mother screamed at me and threatened me that “my arm had better fucking be broken or she would break it herself” because I asked her to leave work early and come home (I was 12 and alone all day every day because I was on year round school and had no friends or family) to take me to the hospital. It was broken.
Something is wrong in my body. Something that I can’t fix. Something that I am self medicating (said with substantial scorn and derision) to deal with because doctors have actively told me they will not provide service until I jump through hoops I can’t jump through.
I can’t abruptly switch psych meds right now because I have no reliable help with my children. When I go through med rounds the side effects make me extremely unpredictable and historically very violent and my self-harming goes through the roof and my ability to function completely disintegrates and I spend hours every day literally hiding either in closets or under beds because I want to kill myself so much.
I literally cannot do that to my kids. There are reasons I’m not on psych meds. If someone bothered to ask me what those reasons were I would be happy to explain and I am willing to bet a compassionate doctor would hear my history and agree that it probably isn’t the best idea to try to force me to take a psych med as step one of any and all physical care.
That is not a way to establish trust because my behavior will abruptly be destroyed and out of control and erratic and I will completely associate it with my relationship with that doctor and have to stop association because I can’t continue to listen to the advice of someone who is going to force me to go through that given that I don’t have the fucking resources to deal with dropping the ball on the ways I am currently functional.
It feels humiliating. But that is the reality of my life right now. I stay home so that I can always handle talking to my kids in the tone of voice I want them to talk to me. I have to keep my physical stress levels down enough to not freak out when we are in an environment where I have less control.
Watch me at parties. If I stay seated the whole time I have a much better chance of being able to have conversations because being there makes me physically weak because of the strain on my body of having to be hyperaware to such a level. If it is a stand-and-mingle sort of party I am going to spend a lot of time walking in and out of the room because I have to go find somewhere to sit down and sob hysterically because standing in that room and trying to talk to people hurts my body so much.
No, this isn’t something that is obvious to people around me. If I was visibly contorting with pain people wouldn’t talk to me. If I said anything other than “Oh I’m fine” “Great!” when people ask me “How are you?” then they won’t ask me any more. And they won’t talk to me about anything else either. They try to keep a wide distance between them and me because I have revealed that I have needs and they are very fucking sure that isn’t their problem and they don’t want to get involved. That’s a direct quote. I get told that a lot. “I’m sorry. You have a lot of needs and I don’t want to get involved.”
Uhm, I didn’t ask you to do anything. I don’t fucking ask people to meet my needs. I can ask for help with wants–I have to be very ok with hearing “no” or with the fact that there is a better than 50/50 chance that I will be stood up because that is just my historical percentage. Because if I ask someone for help with a need all hell breaks loose when they let me down. My relationships don’t last through me asking things of people other than the pleasure of their company on sporadic occasions. I am doing my very best to ensure that I understand my place and stop fucking up this boundary.
Having this sort of level of need as a background thead in my life why won’t anyone help me means that I don’t understand how hard it is for people to meet my needs. I am not good at understanding the limits of how I should ask for things. When I ask for actual needs to be met I have to understand that the person may just not show up or may not feel like it any more once the time comes or have some emergency in their life that is more important than me so I have to suddenly scramble for how to figure things out at the last second without the normal planning time I give myself. It feels very unfair at the time I’ll tell you.
I go through life knowing that I am “not rational” and I am “over-sensitive” thus pretty much no one needs to give a shit what I think or feel because I’m a piece of shit.
No, I do not act in public like I have the thoughts I have. It would be incredibly dangerous. It’s not hyperbole; it is simply true.
I am having a lot of nasty self-hating thoughts. Those are primarily manifesting externally as me snapping at Noah when he asks me how I am doing.
I hadn’t cried in over a week. Yesterday there was a lot of uncontrollable crying and today is pretty rocky too.
I don’t know how to stop wanting. But the wanting is a fresh wound over and over. Wanting is so foolish. Wanting is just the first step in being let down.
I wish I had more positive feelings towards humankind. I understand that there are people who have never let me down. I also have never asked them for anything serious and the people I have asked for serious things have all faded away.
It feels like it is all my fault. I would be able to have more people in my life if only I weren’t so bad. So terrible. Mean. Unforgiving.
I can’t forgive anyone else for anything anymore. I can’t forgive myself for anything and I have the unhappy premonition that has to come first.
I wish I hated me less. I wish that I didn’t want to cut. I wish that I didn’t want to hurt myself at all. I wish that I could stop crying. I wish that my stomach didn’t hurt. I wish my neck and head didn’t hurt. I wish I didn’t spend so much time alone. I wish that my kids “counted” as more company. It feels horribly unfair to them that they don’t.
I feel like everything in my life is draining me and nothing feeds me. I am a riverbed gone dry. I don’t know what else I have to give.
I was told not to isolate myself in giving up on Facebook. I think I am going to do that in fact. It looks like a lot of staying home in December, obviously other than Disneyland. Because in the midst of my pity party I have to feel kind of weird about the fact that I have such a ridiculous amount of privilege.
I am well past the point where money buys more happiness. At this point more money, more things to do don’t make me happier. Going to Disneyland is a nice distraction and it fills several days and it breaks our routine and I will do far less work than usual which is nice. We are staying in a studio this time. That means there is no stove so I can’t cook. This trip will involve a lot of dried cereal. We never eat dry cereal. Gosh it sounds fun.
I am looking forward to taking the kids to see the fancy decorations. I don’t do a lot of them. I am looking forward to being able to do everything on foot. I am looking forward to being able to walk around for distraction all day long. I bet we will spend a lot of the day playing in Downtown Disney on the sidewalk. That’s just as much fun for them.
I don’t like that I keep hurting Noah. I feel like a nasty bitch. I probably am. I’m sure he deserves better. I wish I was better. I wish that I was as good as he deserves. But I’m not.
Today it feels so mean to force people to tolerate my company. I don’t feel like I am capable of being silent enough to not be offensive and mean and bad.
In other news I am due to start my period anytime in the next 72 hours. Could be any second. There is a non-zero possibility that this weekends freak out is entirely related to hormones.