The guilt eats me

I’m having a lot of conflicting emotions. My throat is tight. My abdomen has been hurting. I feel tense and on the verge of yelling. I don’t think I have been, but I feel like I will start. I feel ungrateful.

I’ve had a good few days. I’m just very awake and my throat hurts. Don’t get sick, Krissy. Too much is happening in the next week. Life is going too fast. Maybe that is why I keep getting sick. I feel like I am not doing enough but I feel like I have a pace I can’t sustain.

My therapist keeps asking why I haven’t started another book. Because every time I think about it I cry. When? With what energy?

I feel very glad I have the people I have in my life. I have been very glad that I get to hide behind Noah and Shanna and Calli. It doesn’t really need to matter if anyone else likes me. I have been nice enough to those people to buy their love. That may be all I have in me.

I am less stressed since I stopped reading facebook and mothering.com. I’m lonely. I’m spending too much time on the ptsd forum and fetlife and twitter as a result. Luckily those three places aren’t very welcoming to me so spending too much time there means random browsing and almost no typing. I know before I arrive that mostly my opinion isn’t actually wanted.

It’s kind of funny reading fetlife. I’m not who they want any more. I’m not credulous. I’m not amenable to being pushed or cajoled. I’m not interested in having someone “test my limits”. If you come close to testing my limits you will find out what the back of my fucking hand feels like on your face. I found my limits a long fucking time ago, buddy. I’m good. I get too butt hurt over the periodic “Oh man how dare this woman say she was raped doesn’t she know that ISN’T FAIR TO THE MAN”. I get very upset over the ongoing rhetoric around, “If you don’t report your rape to the police it doesn’t count.”

Do you have no understanding of how the police treat rape victims? Oh man. As much as I have kind of wished that I could drag a few women to the police station by their fucking hair if I had to so they could report… I know what the police do to people. I know how bad it is. I know how terrible it feels to even have them on your side. They still aren’t nice.

Prosecuting rape is horrible. Horrible. Horrible. I have never “successfully” done so. It isn’t my fault the fucker killed himself the day the trial was to begin.

I’m in one of those places where it feels like I spin my wheels really hard and I don’t go anywhere… I just dig the hole deeper. I went up to a friend’s house yesterday to help her clean because usually when I do so we attack a large area and I leave feeling like visual progress happened and I WAS SUCCESSFUL. It’s a weird thing for me. But her house has come a long way in the years I have known her. Now the cleaning sessions are about small targeted areas and it is a lot of shifting around. It isn’t as visually satisfying.

It didn’t give me that addict-satisfaction. I hope I was vaguely skillful at indicating that it wasn’t meeting my addict-satisfaction and I was only there for a few hours.

I kind of wish I could go visit and not feel like I have to clean so that I get antsy and anxious and fussy because WHY WON’T PEOPLE LET ME THROW AWAY MORE OF THEIR STUFF?! Err, because people other than me feel attachment to things. Get the fuck over it. Geez.

I don’t actually think that people should just let me throw their stuff away. And I probably should consciously schedule the next two or three visits as visit only. Not because my friend is asking for help (she didn’t) not because I dislike doing the work (I don’t) but because I am getting overly attached to the outcome. It isn’t my house. I don’t have to live in it. It has to please the people who live there–not me. I don’t feel they are doing anything wrong by being attached to more things than me. I get into a weird hybrid state where I feel anxiously responsible for a mess then I get mad at people for making the mess. No bueno.

I have blown up a lot of relationships this way. Self awareness would be smart. It would be smart for me to back off. It isn’t like my help is being actively solicited in this way any more. At one point in time I was asked, but that was many hours of cleaning ago. I should probably stop acting like it is my responsibility.

But I like acting like things are my responsibility. It lets me feel like I should continue to be involved. If I am not responsible then I am just some irresponsible schmuck who should go away. Or something like that.

I am made happier by owning fewer things. Not everyone is wired like me. I shouldn’t expect it nor require it. It’s a bad litmus test for friendship. I should go visit a few times and remember that I am a guest not a lackluster employee who is going to get in trouble for not taking more initiative. It’s ok.

It is hard to describe why this is such a big part of my personality. Cleaning up after people is the only possible value I have–right? I know I am unpleasant and difficult. I know I get too angry and I know I am overly controlling. But maybe if I work hard enough I am still ok to have around.

I gave up sex as a way of making friends. I don’t feel like I have a lot of other friend-making skills. I want to do work for people. Otherwise what reason is there to tolerate my presence?

I read this article written by a sociopath. I have to say that it sounded good. Lack of remorse sounds awesome from where I am sitting. How can I sign on for that? If I could stop feeling so god damn guilty for breathing I feel like I could do a lot better.

I hate the phrase “triggered”. It pisses me off. I think I hate it the way that my white male friends seem to mostly-universally hate “privileged”.

Rape and power discussions are freaking every where. In order to completely opt-out of them and be unaware I would need to be way the heck more stoned than I currently manage on a day-to-day basis. I have strong emotions one right after another all day long. If I log on to the internet or if I talk to most of my friends I hear about these topics.

I can’t stop thinking about consent and what it means. How very little it means.

I don’t feel sad or depressed, exactly. I don’t feel happy, exactly. I have been feeling flashes of that Zen feeling during the day as I work. This is what I want to be doing and where I want to be doing it and who I want to be doing it with. My life is good. My life is what I wanted and hoped for and planned for and worked towards. I am there.

No one tells you when you are a kid that when you “arrive” in the future it is just as hard and confusing as being a kid.

Doesn’t matter. Hard doesn’t matter.

My yard is coming along. My neighbor commented, “Wow. It looks like you finally learned to water.” I told him that it helps to understand that corn must be planted in rows or it doesn’t fertilize. If the fuckers don’t fertilize you can water forever and the corn doesn’t grow properly. Who knew?

I have a lot of projects in mind in the house. I am basically keeping in budget (err, because I am choosing to pull from some normal sections and we are eating out a bit more lately *cough*). If Noah weren’t so good at making money we probably wouldn’t be within budget. Ok, but part of the reason things are close is because I am sending in more than an extra $1,000 every month on the mortgage. It is worth it in the long run. By the end of this year I will have our mortgage under $200k. That means dropping more than $24k in principle this year. I can do it.

I’ve also started funneling off the money necessary for kid college and WWOOF travel. I am doing it. I will accomplish my goals. So I feel like a terrible person but I am saving at a dramatic rate. If I “counted” the extra mortgage payment as savings then we are getting close to saving $30k for this year. That’s pretty rad. It isn’t 50% of our income. It doesn’t exactly feel like a stellar amount given how much money flows through this house. I could be more self-disciplined. But then I would hate my life and I would be bitter and difficult.

I don’t especially like myself for that set of traits. I can only do so much scrimping before I feel sad and bitter. If I genuinely don’t have money I do ok. I don’t feel like I am playing a stupid Machiavellian game of deprivation. Deprivation games suck. I have been actually deprived enough that I don’t have fun with it.

I’m really glad my kids are so cuddly. I’m glad I get to experience this. I’m glad I get to be touched without having to be scared or in pain.

I think I should probably take a vacation from the internet. The internet keeps reminding me that when bad things happen to me it is all my fault for being so stupid. If I hadn’t been stupid nothing bad would have happened to me. Bad things don’t happen to those other people, those good people, those smart people. Those people who can make good decisions unlike stupid, pathetic me.

You can’t undo your life. You can’t change what has happened to you. I will always and forever more have the list of experiences I have had. I guess that knowing it has happened to me feels kind of threatening–it could happen to other people, maybe.

All I know is that my input isn’t very helpful or wanted. Shut up already you stupid, stupid, stupid cunt.

I don’t even know where this is coming from. I’m not sure why I am up at 2 in the morning wanting to cut. It isn’t any one else’s problem. I make sure of that. I am not any one else’s problem. If I cry alone in a room–does it matter? Does anyone have to yell at me and tell me I am wrong if I am alone? Is it like a tree falling in the forest?

If a man speaks in the forest and there is no woman around to hear him… is he still wrong?

I don’t actually believe that joke–Noah is right more often than I am. But it is the gist of what I mean. Am I still bad and wrong if no one is sitting next to me actively telling me so right now? Is it just simple fact at this point?

Sometimes I read people talking about how folks should “just get over” something or other. I don’t even know what to get over or how to get over it. I cry in the middle of the night and want to kill myself because I believe I am dirty and bad and I will poison people by existing.

How do you just “get over” that? How do you change it?

I can’t be a sociopath. I feel too sorry for existing and hurting people just by existing. I’m sorry that me existing hurts people. I am so sorry I hurt people.

sleep. just sleep. enough crying.

2 thoughts on “The guilt eats me

  1. DSH

    ‘No one tells you when you are a kid that when you “arrive” in the future it is just as hard and confusing as being a kid.’

    Yeah.
    I think my parents told in the “you’ll understand when you’re older”, which led me to believe it would be easier as an adult. The challenges change with time/life experience, but there are always challenges.

    The feeling that “people I care about would be better off if I weren’t here” – I resemble that sometimes.

    Reply
  2. Jeff

    DSH>
    “people I care about would be better off if I weren’t here”
    Yeah. I know what you mean. I’m not at the point where I’m making plans to make that happen. Sometimes, though, I think the reason I haven’t is because I realize how painful it would be to people I care about. It’s probably a damned good thing that there isn’t a straightforward way to calculate anguish from pain and time like energy from power and time. I have a pretty strong suspicion that _those_ numbers would argue that I should have removed myself from the lives of the people I love a _long_ time ago.

    Reply

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