I feel like living in one place is giving me the experience of seasons in a way I find odd year after year. Wait… this really happens? The changing of the seasons surprised the hell out of me for the first twenty-five years. I had nothing to anchor me to the changing of the year other than the start of the school year. This is different.

I am working on acquiring huge bags of mulch from a friend. I have brought five bags home so far and I think I should go back for more since she has a lot more. It will cover a lot of my yard–for free! Whoo! I’m going to start with putting it around the play structure. Mulch is at least slightly more absorbing of impact than plain dirt. I’ve already layered a lot of sand around the base.

I paid someone to fix my washing machine problem (it was flooding the garage) and now I have a different problem–the water won’t drain from the washing machine. I have a growing puddle in the machine. The internet tells me I need to call a Maytag repairman because a bunch of things can cause this and they are all internal.

This is a thing because the last time I tried to fix washing machine issues (the washing machine before this) I called a Maytag employee… they sorta fixed it but said mostly it was a plumbing problem. Then I called a plumber and the person said it wasn’t a him problem. Then I called someone else and they still couldn’t fix it. I had to pay all three service people for their time and I didn’t get the problem fixed. So I ended up getting a new one.

So the idea of escalating washing machine problems is kind of nervous making. Oh man. Not again. Owning a house is a pain in the ass.

Today I need to do some preparation work. Tomorrow is a home school gardening day. I invited folks from the group over to help plant tulip and daffodil bulbs. I plan to talk to the kids about soil enrichment and planting and plant biology and such. It should be fun. And now I get to extensively talk about mulch.

I’m killing the celosia. I love them but apparently I water too hard? I should do more research on these flowers because they are whiny, picky little bastards. Five minutes of internet research tells me the blooms usually last ten weeks and then they are annuals. So I’m not doing something terrible to them. Oh. Well that’s nice to hear. Now I can feel less guilty about them dying off. They are also known as cockscomb; now that makes me happy.

Yesterday I medicated less than usual and had a stomach ache that was distracting and harsh all day. I spend a lot of time trying to figure out why I use pot. At this point a lot of it is masking the constant stomach pain. That might be something to think about. I know that part of the stomach pain is anxiety. My body doesn’t like me very much.

I can tell I’m feeling lonely. The ways I use forums/social media changes a lot as I cycle through different levels of feeling lonely/sad/unwanted.

I’m trying really hard to continue seeing people and continue socializing. I continue to ask people for time. But fewer people. I’m scared of rejection. I’ve been asking a lot less. This article tells me I should keep asking. But what I want isn’t a casual favor from a stranger. I want people to like me.

I’m afraid that the more time people spend with me the more they dislike me. The more carefully they have to put up a lot of boundaries. So I stop asking people to come over. I feel sad. I feel like it is too much work to put up with me so I should stop making people feel like they have to acknowledge me. I should let them ignore me. I should make it absolutely non-effortful to pretend I am not in the world.

I’ve been reading about the Four F’s. Fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Survival methods. Things that animals do when they are confronted with stimuli that feels dangerous. I am absolutely an isolator. That’s a big standard PTSD thing. We like being alone in a room because then we know we won’t unconsciously lash out at our invisible demons and hit someone else on accident.

Noah says I want him to be obsessed with me. That’s probably true. But I also want him to work and play with our kids. I think I do a good job of making sure I am not so demanding that I cut into his work time or his time with our kids. I make sure I get the scraps. I make sure I get what is left over after he has done ALL THE THINGS because they are all more important than me. How obsessed does that make him? If I am what he gets to when he has magical “spare time”?

I’m having a hard time managing my feelings around being sad. I feel so pervasively sad and unwanted and like I will never really be part of anything.

When I was a kid we moved a lot. When we were living with bio-family my experience was that I was always in my room listening to everyone else talk and spend time together and laugh. They always sounded like they were having fun. If I walked into the room I would be yelled at within minutes and told to just go away because I was bothering them.

Sometimes when I experience the intensity of Shanna talking over me… I understand why I was sent to my room. I think most of the people in my family have PTSD and I can understand why my intensity was too much for them.

But I still can’t be in a room with people without feeling like at any second I will be told to leave because I am annoying and unpleasant. I’m bad. I’m wrong.

Right now it feels like the most important thing I will do with my life to not pass on this feeling. My children will not feel like me. They will not feel like them walking in the door ruins the party for everyone else.

But I don’t really get to decide how they feel. I only get to decide how I treat them.

I keep thinking about hosting a party because I miss people. Then I think about the fact that people mostly only come over when I invite them to a party. And I spend the party feeling like I should be quiet and not ruin it for everyone else. I’m not actually sure I can handle it.

I feel like I should hide for a while. I spend too much energy wishing people liked me more. I spend too much energy wishing that people wanted to spend more time with me. I need to only need me.

I have a lot of reading, a lot of painting, and a lot of writing I want to finish before December 31st. Maybe that should be enough.

I have to somehow work on this frantic feeling. It isn’t attractive to look or act desperate. I feel desperate. I feel like I want to fall to my knees in front of people and beg them to please like me. Please. Please be my friend. Please see me. Please choose to spend time with me just because you want to and not because I asked and you feel sorry for me.

Recently I read a very sad story about someone else’s incest experience. From when she was very tiny her abusive grandfather taught her to beg him to do it to her. She had to say, “Please love me” and encourage the sexual abuse or he hurt her.

I don’t want to ask people to love me any more. Either they do and they will show up or they don’t and I should walk away. I can’t influence how other people feel about me. I just need to accept it and move on.

They will either be here or they won’t.

I can’t ask right now. Even if that means I’m alone. Luckily I’m never alone any more. Not really. I can ask for visual privacy but I am almost never alone. This is my shot. I understand that they won’t have to be with me forever. Someday they will run off to chase their dreams and I will have to be ok with that. I will have to act like they aren’t abandoning me–because they aren’t. They are just following the progression of life.

I don’t really like to think about that day very much. It feels like looking forward to my obsolescence. Not that I think I will run out of things to do. I think I kind of hope that my reward for a life well lived is that Noah will get around to being obsessed with me and we can spend a ridiculous amount of time staring at each other.

The longer I live with Noah the weirder I feel about this whole “never feel liked” thing because he has it and he doesn’t have the same kind of trauma background. Ok, he was never liked by his family or his small hick town… but it wasn’t like my childhood. I feel deeply comforted by the fact that he feels no more liked by people than I do. Maybe this isn’t a broken thing. Maybe this is a common and semi-normal thing. Sometimes when I spontaneously do something nice to him, even as small as touching his hair, I can see him shudder. He isn’t used to people wanting to touch him.

It isn’t a sex thing. He looks so young. He looks so scared and relieved at the same time. Someone likes him. I really like living in a house that is a full-time mutual admiration society. It feels so good to be around three other people who are so constantly affirming. I don’t know why Noah is like this with us. My kids are largely because I model it.

I’m not one to be stinting with my criticism. But after years of research I understand what criticism and put-downs do to peoples self-esteem. I understand that for every negative thing you tell a person it takes ten positive statements to balance it out.

So given that I am unstinting in my criticism I have to be significantly more free with my praise. My children can point out where something is done wrong but they are way more likely to be encouraging and friendly and helpful because I am that way with them. I live in this insulated little bubble with them so I can keep calm and be nice.

Why do I feel so lonely if I am never alone? I see people. I’ve been incredibly social lately. But I always feel like I have to be very careful what I say. I never relax. I never feel like people actually like me. I feel like people might, maybe, like a very carefully edited and shaped version of me but they don’t actually like me.

Don’t offend anyone, Krissy.

In the past people used to regularly complain that talking to me was walking on eggshells. I haven’t had anyone say that in a long time. My mom said that to me a lot. “I just can’t say anything to you, Kristine.” She really couldn’t. By the end I hated her so much and I had so much need built up that she really couldn’t say anything. Every single god damn thing she promised me would turn into an argument because I didn’t believe her and I hated her for lying to me.

I heard a lot of complaints about how hard I was to talk to back in my munch days. A lot of the guys would complain that I couldn’t take a joke. Nope. I can’t fucking take a rape joke or a sexist joke and I very rarely tolerate racist jokes from anyone. (Err, I have a friend who is half Japanese (I’m pretty sure it is Japanese but I could be remembering incorrectly for a different Asian nationality) and half Mexican. She has some really funny jokes. They are all about her ethnicities. I giggle when she tells the jokes and don’t repeat them. That’s how you should roll when you are white as snow.)

Noah says that people feel like they are walking on eggshells because I don’t react in any of the ways they have patterns for how to handle. I react differently in one way or another and that difference is hard for people to stand near. I don’t really know.

I should probably reread some of the existentialist crap. That would probably be relevant to this ennui shit I’ve got going on. Not till I get through my list of books for the year. I helpfully borrowed a bunch from a friend yesterday. She happened to own a bunch of books on my “to read” list. How useful and kind of her to share.

See, it isn’t as if I am not seeing people. I clearly have friends. They aren’t telling me to go away. But we see each other mostly at my initiation. That’s how it works with almost all of my friends. We see one another when I go solicit their company. Sometimes that gets to me. It feels too much like forcing people to put up with my unpleasant company just because telling me “no” feels too socially complicated. Over my lifetime I’ve been aware that a few people let me come over just because they didn’t have the cojones to tell me to go away. I don’t want that any more.

I am no longer a kid who needs to get out of my house. I don’t want to force people to put up with my presence. It’s why I just can’t be a “regular” anywhere. I will never be someone who hangs out Cheers-style at a public gathering place. I’m too convinced that people wish I would leave.

I don’t know how to change this feeling. Whatever the answer is, it has to come from me. It can’t be about what other people do or don’t do. I can’t care. I can’t read peoples minds. I can’t be responsible for what is going on with them.

I ask when I can. I should stop asking when I feel too emotionally impacted by the process of asking. That’s “boundaries” right? I differentiate between asking I am doing “for me” and asking I am doing “for the kids” because they are in a different place with regards to friendship formation. But then I need to keep my god damn mouth shut when people are here for the kids.

I’m trying not to drive off the home school families. We’ll see how this goes. It is a help/hurt thing that everyone lives so far apart. I can always pretend that the literal physical distance is enough of a stumbling block and that is why we aren’t closer.

But I have no idea how close or not close anyone feels to me. I don’t know if this void is just in me.

Did you know that NIN’s “Head Like A Hole” can be played over the top of “Call Me Maybe”? That kind of broke my brain. I’m not sure if it is a good thing or not.

Enough navel gazing for one morning. I hear a kid stirring.