One of the things I feel the worst about is the level of my hypocrisy. I react more or less with violence when people give me advice but I give unsolicited advice all day long.

I try very hard to always say, “In your situation I would do _____ but I don’t know that it is the right thing for you. That is what I would do.” I don’t always but I try.

I have quite a few friends from whom I solicit advice. Under those circumstances I really and truly welcome people saying, “I think you should” because I asked them what they thought. But I’m fucking nasty to people who give me unsolicited bad advice.

I specifically wish I was better at handling this. I get why I react the way that I do. During my lifetime it has been exceptionally important that I am willing to march to the beat of my own drummer. But I could be more civil on the way.

I think this is part of the reason I don’t get along all that well with people who prioritize “nice” over “the full nasty truth” because I’m not a good enough liar. If you are giving me bad advice I don’t want I’m not so good at saying, “Well thank you for your advice I will take it under consideration” while just ignoring them. That smacks of lying or at least consciously misleading people.

I don’t have to want the same things as other people and I don’t have to care about what they want. Only I do if I want to have ongoing relationships. So I hear. My relationships seem to have a maximum lifespan so maybe this crucial failing isn’t that important. I need to maintain a relationship with exactly three people: my two kids and my husband. Past that if I’m not interested I suck at feigning interest.

I feel bad for being self-absorbed until I realize everyone is equally self-absorbed and other people aren’t thinking about me the way I feel I should think about them. I hate shoulds.

Today somewhere between zero and five families might drop by to play in the yard with Shanna. I’m pessimistic but willing to offer when I see people. I want to finish building the playhouse and probably make a raised bed in my back yard. I doubt I will have time for anything else. Tomorrow I want to go through and do all the inside “starts” on vegetables. This year will be another tomato-madness year if I have my say.

I feel a little weird about how different I am from my friends. My friends are not nearly as concerned as I am about having a place to live that is as close to free as is possible in this era. (I’ll always have property taxes and homeowners insurance–but that’s under $4,000 annually.) I planted trees on purpose. I’m building more ways to grow food. I have more ideas for the future.

By the time I am an old woman I will have chickens in the back and probably rabbits. The chickens will get to live long enough to make eggs then I will be non-squeemish and kill them for food. I suspect that the rabbits will be a lot of our meat. I hope to produce more than 50% of what we eat by the time Noah can retire. That’s not something that I can arrange if I move.

I am working very hard on my plan for life. My “plan” for safety. Is it neurotic? Yes. My friends are instead investing in “marketable skills” and making money. That seems like a more sure bet to them.

I don’t think I have ever really “gotten” the American monetary climate. I think first I was too poor and then I had too much guilt about using money I didn’t fucking earn. It’s not that we don’t spend an outrageous amount of money–I totally manage that. (I gotta say: first class trains up and down the UK is going to be one of the things I am happiest about having spent a lot of money on for the rest of my life.)

I want to not have to pay for my home because then I will have more money for travel.

What is funny about me is that I have no interest in going full-on and trying to do the homesteader thing. That sounds like work. I’m fucking lazy. I need to have a good twenty years to set up a yard for what I want.

I’m not afraid of the future. I’m trying to make it so the future will be easier no matter what happens. Given Noah’s model for life I’m reasonably certain that he will not leave me, cheat on me, or abuse me. We do have a consensual bdsm relationship. He has never tried to intimidate me outside of pre-arranged sexual situations. Seems like a win to me. When I first met him and I was trying to explain what kind of relationship I wanted I said, “I want an abusive relationship with an off-switch.” I want to be able to control exactly when and how I am abused.

It’s really funny how life goes. Our play at this point is what I once would have mockingly called sensual play. I don’t really want to be hurt anymore. So I’m not hurt. But we mess around.

Once upon a time I seriously chased pain. I’ve had grown men kick the shit out of me with heavy boots many times. I like to find guys who are specifically not attracted to me and ask them about playing. They are a lot more brutal. Like when they successfully manage to kick me enough that I am wounded and collapsed on the floor and then they grind my face into the floor with the boot… brutal.

I used to like that a lot. Being able to continue having the shit kicked out of me like I had it happen my entire life gave me a sense of mastering my experience of the world. I was tough. I could take it. I could take more than other people. I wanted more pain and pain and pain like a river to fill this aching hole of need.

It didn’t work. And regardless of what gets me off I know what I am not fucking modeling for my kids so that’s kind of that. “My Life As a Former Masochist”

My experience of life is such that I want, pretty desperately, to have a very cheap, easy to maintain and clean, food-producing house. Where I can hide when I can’t be tough. When I have nothing to give. I can stay here and meet my own needs. I don’t need to fake being all nice and shit and figure out the fucking political situation in some company.

But I only have this because Noah is willing to give it to me. So maybe my friends are a lot smarter than me because they are figuring out how to provide their own long-term safety on their own and I am ensuring eternal dependence. I have to bank pretty much everything on this partnership working out. Or I’m totally fucking screwed.

So when I look at my friend’s lives I understand that my advice probably sucks. I can’t ever walk a mile in someone else’s shoes.

Part of what makes my childhood as weird as it was is the simple fact that I’m white. When I think about what doors were opened to me because I had been admitted to the right homes and seen modeled appropriate behavior so even though I had not conformed in the moment I remembered and practiced in secret and was able to produce it in a different environment.

Everyone figures out behavior through modeling to some degree or another. Usually you adopt the mannerism of a friend unconsciously and usually I do it consciously. That’s part of my weirdness. I have learned that it is best to not actually do this mimicry in front of the person you are mimicking. It freaks people out. Which basically means my entire survival method depends on always being on the move through new friends where I only reveal a small part of myself.

I really feel I will need to have a place where I have to just be because these people are always near me if I want them or not. I want to know my community. I want to live here and talk to the people and have them notice changes. People are nosey bastards. They want to connect. If they see me year after year they will want to ask questions. If I’m nice. If I feign interest in them.

Rats.

I suppose I’m not really feigning interest. I am interested. I like that I am starting to know the stories behind the cars on my street. I am starting to know names and faces and we have conversations that have actual ongoing relevance.

It’s weird. I’ve been in this house for six and a half years. It’s kind of funny that I want to have a block party for the anniversary of the seventh year I’ve lived in this neighborhood. This summer I will have lived in this house twice as long as the longest I have ever lived anywhere in my life.

It is really emotionally intense to plant trees that will feed me in twenty years. That’s a level of commitment that is difficult for me to describe. I have been having oral sex for nearly as long as I have been alive–at least twenty seven years with people outside my family. Twenty years ago I was eleven. That means I have been having intercourse piv sex for nineteen years by choice.  I have just about known Jenny and Grant that long. Brittney is gone. She didn’t appreciate the book.

So those are the only things in my life that approach twenty years of continual mirroring/behavior influencing things. That’s weird. I’m thirty one. I don’t have other people in my life from that long ago. I don’t have parents. I don’t have siblings. I don’t have aunts or uncles.

But I can’t make friends by sleeping with people ever again. And it means I have to get a lot better about saying no early and hard. And it means I really should take self-defense courses. It also means I only spend time with a very few men who are safe for fairly specific reasons.

I wish I had a crystal ball so I could look at the future and see what will happen. Who will I be when I have had relationships for twenty years? When I have had to be consistent with people that long? What am I solidifying towards being?

I am five years post-rape. In a twenty three year period I was raped by twelve people and that’s a deliberately low number because I can’t bear to really number them.

I started using pot to deal with my constant underlying fear three and a half years ago. About when the honeymoon period of mothering ended and the screaming/hitting me part started.

I told a friend that I was interested in taking the girls to the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival some day and she kind of wrinkled her nose. She isn’t interested in women-exclusive space. I laughed and said of course not because she isn’t interested in sex with dykes. But it isn’t really that.

I am very unlikely to ever take my children to a mixed gender event like that alone. I would be too afraid. I want to go to a womens only space (sorry the y bugs the shit out of me) because even if one of those women would otherwise be very interested in pressing her luck I would have a lot of support in defending the space of my children in that environment. I do not place any faith in getting the necessary support in a men inclusive space.

I know that hurts the feelings of some of my friends. My experience is that if there is a problem and I speak up about it women are initially sympathetic but then they have to deal  with their guy so they wander off because he wants to be entertained. It’s the whole clannish thing. I am not part of a clan. So no one gives a shit about me in a conflict–I am the expected loser.

Why didn’t I ever stay involved in a community long enough to try and become a clan? First it wasn’t my choice. Then I didn’t know how. If you make friends by sleeping with people then you only end up with friends who are willing to sleep with people on the first date. It influences how the world works.

Now I’m just not willing to drive the amount required to really belong to any of the communities on offer right now. I’m staying in the homeschool group (of course) but I need to dial back our involvement for a little while. My kids aren’t ready and pushing them to do these things is just ridiculous.

Maybe I can go back to sleep now. I haven’t cried tonight. I suppose that counts as some kind of progress.