I feel like my perspective changes a lot as I get older. I can no longer pretend that I am a low-status, powerless individual. That would require a level of irrationality that I have not mastered. Thank goodness.

When I look at people now I feel like I am seeing two selves kind of blurrily moving back and forth in front of one another, even though they are adjoined at the feet. Like two people trying to stand in exactly the same spot–they have to kind of wobble to keep balance.

In most cases I primarily see the “adult” version of them. I get all the impressions I get. I see them as grown ups. I see them as interesting, smart, powerful. But then I look again and I see them as little kids. I see why they doubt their own effectiveness. I see why they think they “can’t” do things. They were told that over and over and over. You “can’t” do this! Go away.

I feel like it started happening with Noah first. Then when I had a good friend who is autistic sit down and explain how badly I scare the shit out of him it morphed into being something I see more often.

I have the inherent talent for being intimidating. Partially it is just kind of innate but mostly I worked really hard on being and looking scary. It was a conscious goal for a long time. Now I have arrived at adulthood and I find that the coping method of my childhood has some consequences.

I used to teach high school. By my second year they gave me alllllll the problem children. There were only two junior English teachers in my school. Me and the lady who threw away any work that was not in blue or black ink and legible enough for her to easily read it. Obviously a lot of students decided she wasn’t worth working with so she had a lot of in-class conflicts with the problem children. By my second year there the guidance counselors were SO HAPPY I was there. It meant they could split junior year into suck-ups and problem children and give each kind the teacher they needed.

The vast majority of my students told me I was very intimidating. Including the big guys. The football players and gang bangers quaked before me. It’s kind of a weird experience.

But my students all made huge progress. They all learned. Many of them more or less caught up to grade level after being considered stupid most of their lives. Because I told them over and over, “If you haven’t gotten this yet it is because I am too stupid to figure out how to teach it right. It isn’t your fault.” That gave them courage to try. They didn’t want me to feel bad about myself and they saw how I cried in frustration when I was trying to come up with a new and novel way of explaining something.

And I kept everyone in academic detention forever if they struggled so that everyone ended up getting the individual level of attention they needed.

I know I am intimidating sometimes, well… I know it abstractly. I’ve been told enough times that I no longer say, “Yeah right” because it isn’t very nice to the people who are giving me their honest opinion.

Stepping back to autistic friend. He is willing to tell me boundaries more clearly and specifically than anyone else in my life. Oh thank goodness. It means that we can play back and forth with how boundaries work. Because we are both over-sensitive and prone to feeling victimized we can take turns figuring out how to not appear scary. He’s working with me on eye contact. He has to make more. I have to make less. The in-between lesson is good for both of us.

The whole seeing-a-younger-self thing is about understanding that everyone is vulnerable. Everyone has old stuff that they carry around. Maybe most of their baggage is fairly positive and maybe it isn’t. Having a mostly positive childhood is not always easy either. Being controlled all the time is hard on people. And what if you only ever spent your time around very soft spoken, slow moving people? I will be a complete assault on your senses.

There has to be a balance. Not all harsh people can get soft enough to not scare people at all. Not all soft people can live in a bubble where they are only with people of their kind. We will have to figure out some kind of way of interacting. What will that mean?

Maybe soft people have to learn how to accept that some people have disruptive energy and it isn’t about them? Maybe hard people need to learn how to be aware of how they talk and what they say and to whom.

But there will always be faux pas. Always. Either you choose to forgive or you choose to end relationships. You can ask for modifications… but you can’t give an ultimatum.

How you deal with the fuck ups kind of decides everything, right?

I feel like my whole life is a series of fuck-ups followed by my frantic efforts to repair the damage I am creating. I don’t even understand why or how I break everything… I just do.

One important feature of my personality: I LOVE to argue. In the actual argument it is not always easy to get me to admit that I am wrong and the other person is right but there is generally some part of my brain that notices. At some point I will no longer argue because I’m thinking about what was said to me. Maybe a week or so later I will decide the other person was right. Then I have a wash of shame for arguing.

I like hearing different points of view. I think almost everything in the whole wide world is relative (I mean shit, lets start with the weather. Is it hot? Warm? Warmish? Cool? Coolish? Cold? Freezing? Stand in one room and you can all those answers from different people.) If you move on from there you will find that most subjects are two people talking at one another. Unless you are trying to build consensus so you can create something it generally works just fine for everyone to walk away from an argument with their own conclusion.

Living with Noah has been very good for me. Noah can argue fiercely about a topic and never denigrate my intelligence in the process. He can say “I think you are wrong” without any hint of implication that “I think you are stupid.” Not many people manage that. I think I am not nearly as good at it as he is. I’m trying to be better.

The more research I do on mental health (I look at a lot of different disorders out of curiosity-there is the non-zero possibility grad school might be in my future, if I can stop hating school.) the more I see that connections between people creates the vast majority of what we think of as “mental health”. Ok, there are some people who are complete loners and who have no support network in any way and they are fine with that… it’s not the “norm”.

Humans are social animals. We want to be liked. We want to feel approved of. We want to feel like our presence is desirable and positive. Pretty much everyone wants that. Arguments seem like they take away those feelings don’t they? Maybe. Depends on who is arguing and how.

I have enormous respect for my husband’s brain. He is good at learning complicated systems at a speed that baffles me. I don’t see the patterns he latches right onto. He learns languages very quickly because he is good at finding ways to link new knowledge to old knowledge and then it is just easier to remember. When I look at him I feel very insecure because I am not smart like him.

My smart is different. When I was eight or so years old the school district I was in tested my IQ to see if I would be allowed into the GATE program. (Gifted and Talented Education for those who did not suffer through California public schools.) He told me that if I wasn’t so smart I wouldn’t be able to learn because my life was so disruptive.

I learn best by playing with things and making mistakes. I think it works that way for a lot of people but the public education system is not set up for such exploration. The public education is just eager to give you a big check mark next to whether you did it right or wrong and if you have too many wrong check boxes you must not be very smart.

I am so insecure about my intelligence. That is a huge tender spot for me. That’s part of my phantom child-self I drag around. I’m scared I’m actually stupid and I won’t be able to do the things I need to do.

Everyone seems to have that phantom self. They work differently for everyone. Some people are afraid they are unlovable. Some people are afraid they aren’t smart. Some people are afraid that others will continue to hurt them… even though they are now one of the biggest people in the room and it isn’t likely.

What we are taught to expect during our childhood maps our entire future.

Well, we can choose to change. But part of changing is honestly assessing where you are and deciding where you want to be and figuring out how to get there. You can’t change if you are in denial. It doesn’t work.

I get what DSH means about “people don’t like fake. They like authentic” but people don’t like things that are authentic but scary or different from them. The Hindu temple in my neighborhood is very authentic. There is a lot of neighborhood hostility towards the temple and many of the residents hate the temple and want it to go away. “They are ruining our neighborhood.” Fuck you. The temple has been here a lot longer than I’ve lived here. They pay their taxes. They are all polite when you talk to them. You don’t get to say that this is your sandbox and everyone has to stay out. Not unless you are so rich you can buy all the land and keep alllllllll the people off.

Which none of my neighbors can do. All they can do is bitch. I feel very conflicted about hearing this. When will they learn that I am not a good recipient for these diatribes? I go off on them. They still babble at me. It’s hard to trump that whole “white people are safe and on my side” instinct they have.

I’m struggling between my inner demons. On one hand I don’t want to give up all the harshness that is part of my personality. I feel proud of myself for never hesitating to argue with someone I know who is expounding on racist, sexist, ableist, whatever crap. I do not solely defend the groups I am part of–this is what being an ally means. You should hear me go off on sex worker rights. It isn’t my battle. But it matters and very few groups ever defend themselves alone. They need allies.

And yet I wish I was more comfortable for people to be around. Sometimes I observe that some people are just so awesome that when they walk into a room everyone nearby relaxes. Just being near them feels so nice.

That’s not me.

I feel a lot of jealousy. I wish that I knew how to help people feel soothed instead of disrupted.

Well, I help the extreme incest cases and rape cases. I can help them feel better sometimes. I’m just too much for non-traumatized people.

No one can please everyone. I’m not sure I want to please everyone.

But I’m trying like fuck to write a book that your average self-involved, selfish twelve year old boy can read and find interesting and learn how to not be a rapist. It won’t be explicit “Hey! ALL BOYS!?!?! Did you know I think you are a potential rapist?! DON’T DO THAT!” Err, that won’t be my approach.

I have spent a lot of time over the past two years trying to figure out how to talk to adult men about rape. It is complicated and I am grateful for the friends who have been tolerant enough to engage in these exercises with me. It is different talking to men than to women. Talking about responsibility and victim blaming and shame and power…. all of these conversations are shaped differently for men and women. Even though men get raped too. Even though women rape too. The overall tone of the conversation is different.

If you want to teach people, if you want to really change them you have to start by understanding where they are starting from and you have to have some idea how the road will work for them. Not always–sometimes you can help someone just get started on their own path… but then you don’t know what they will change into. If you want to teach a specific skill or lesson the process is different.

Learning comes from trust. Learning comes from opening your mind to new thoughts and entertaining them without guilt or shame or resistance.

Which means I need to find a way to phrase all this shit in a way that will not offend any particular religious groups. I can’t piss off the Christians and I can’t piss off the Muslims. (Other religions strike me as caring less what random white American women think…)

Sex. Oh man sex. It all comes back to sex for me. What do I want to say about it and what do I think I can get past the censors?

Religion, in pretty much any form, is a combination of stories and rules about how to live a good life. People in different parts of the world were isolated for a long time so many different religions were created to fill the needs of the people then living. Over time which stories feel “more real” change. Why do we consider Jesus more believable than Zeus?

I don’t care which stories you listen to and I don’t care which set of rules-to-be-a-good-person you follow as long as you just go out and do your best. You don’t have to be a Good Christian. You don’t have to be a Good Buddhist. You don’t have to be a Good Atheist.

Just be good. Not capitol letter good–that has too much force and pressure behind it.

Think about yourself and the people around you. Think about how your behavior impacts other people. Think about how you wish people felt about you. What sort of behavior on your part would be most likely to motivate such feeling on their part? It isn’t a guarantee, but you can do your best.

I appreciate and value the arguments I have with my friends (autistic and otherwise) because my friends know things I don’t. My friends often know things I have had no access to learn. My friends are wonderful and they share the gift of their knowledge without even feeling like they are giving me a gift. I know it is. That’s enough.

Come December it will be seven years post-rape. This has been the most stable period of my life and it shows every sign of continuing. I try not to trust it too much.

Sometimes I think it is pretty ridiculous that I have all of the “everyone hates me” stuff still in my head all the time. Whereas I have pissed a few people off spectacularly in the last few years… only a few. In very specific ways. In general… I don’t believe that anyone in my life hates me. I am pretty sure that everyone who knows me ranges from ecstatic love to apathy to mild dislike. I don’t think I have behaved in such a way as to provoke hate in a while. I could be wrong though.

I enjoyed some Cracked.com yesterday. This one was about OCD. The part that is sticking in my head the hardest, “If you have OCD you know that your behavior is crazy… but you can’t stop.”

That’s what I struggle with. When I am most mired in feelings that everyone hates me… I know it isn’t “true” but fuck all if I can stop sobbing hysterically because it could be true and I have no way of knowing and people could be lying to me left and right and….

It isn’t rational. I’m not pretending it is rational. I’m not saying, “All of my friends should bend over backwards supporting me. Everyone should get on a rotating schedule so I NEVER HAVE TO DOUBT YOUR AFFECTION AGAIN.” No, that would be an irrational reaction to an irrational feeling. That’s not exactly a good merry-go-round.

What is rational?

Well, the simple fact is that given how geographically diverse the bay area is I need to always just understand that most friendships will be about occasional visits and not continual company.

I listen to Pam too much. Pam has the family I want. I mean, not really… they are super controlling. But that’s part of the deal. (Pam is Taiwanese and sends me HUGE documents with her family tree explained in great detail so I can understand wtf she is talking about. Her family is hard to track without visual guides.) There are a lot of people. Pam could choose to spend all of her time (like 15 hours a day every day) with family members and not have to get bored of the same people. She has so many people who love her and want to be with her. She has a sister who looks up to her and loves her and wants to see her at least once a week when they are in similar locations.

On one hand I view Pam as inspirational. I want my kids to love me like she loves her parents. I would give anything in the world for that. But the funny thing is… I can’t act like Pam’s parents in order to get it.

Pam was hit. Pam was shamed. Pam was forced to sit and do hours of homework.

Err… wait. Why in the fuck is it that being close to your family as an adult doesn’t seem to be about how you were treated as a kid necessarily? It doesn’t seem to be the deciding factor.

Most of the people I know who were treated “ok” or better don’t talk to their parents much.

I think it isn’t about the treatment. I think it is about the expectation. It doesn’t enter into Pam’s mind that she might dislike her parents. Whatever. They are your parents.

But throughout Pam’s adult life her parents have been supportive, kind, and kind of ridiculously non-judgmental given their cultural background. They got a fucking weird kid by their way of measuring. And they deal with that with grace.

I feel blessed because I get to sit here day by day telling my kids that I don’t know what they will be like when they are grown ups but I’m sure that I will be happy to help them reach their dreams. Whatever that means for them.

I feel very guilty when I talk about the out-of-face-out-of-mind feelings I have about love. I think that is all the “attachment” stuff. I have never been diagnosed officially as having an attachment disorder. I just… have attachment issues. I think that if I walked in and explained to a therapist how my emotional attachment issues goes I could have such a diagnosis if I asked for it. I don’t think that is good though at this point. Let’s stick with GAD and PTSD. That’s enough. That’s hard enough.

PTSD can cause attachment problems.

It isn’t that I “stop caring” about people when they aren’t in front of me. It is that I feel like one of those little wind up dolls with a key in the back. I can’t find a good easy link. You have to just know what I mean. When I am standing in front of someone I am wound up. I can access emotions that are simply not present for me when I am alone.

It just occurred to me to wonder if part of this problem is my extreme lack of self-love. Maybe those feelings don’t exist in side of me when I am alone because I don’t feel any love for me. It is hard to feel any love at all in a vacuum of feeling evil. Everything feels tainted and distant. Dirty screens. Dirty cage walls. It’s like someone hasn’t been cleaning the bird cage and the birds managed to shit all over the walls.

When I see my children I feel an over flowing of love. It is part of the reason I am a stay at home mom. This is the longest and most consistent access I have ever had to the feeling of love. When I’m away from them it goes away.

I don’t think I “don’t love” my kids when I sit in the living room typing and they sleep in their room. But I don’t feel love. I feel like an empty vessel waiting to contain something. I feel like I am waiting to exist. I am not really existing without them.

I am relational in a way that is deeply unhealthy. I feel like I don’t exist outside of the roles I play in other peoples lives. I fade out of a lot of friendships because I can’t see an easy role for me to fill so I just… stop showing up. If someone has no need of me then I don’t feel secure. I don’t feel like there is a reason for me to be there. So I leave.

“If there is work to do, Lenora won’t stand still until it is done.” Damn skippy. (Err, Lenora is my middle name. A long time ago I worried about being “out” about being a pervert because I was heading into my teaching career. Now I am at a point in my life where I can never slam the closet door shut and I’m comfortable with that. So I don’t bother using my middle name in some contexts and my first name in other contexts.)

When I was in high school people would tell me to my face that they wanted me to come to their (wild, all-night) parties because they knew I would fall asleep early and not bug them all night long and I would wake up and start cleaning before anyone else was up. I would destroy the evidence so they didn’t get in trouble with their parents.

Some habits die hard.

I like taking care of people. I like feeling useful. I like feeling like I have something specific to offer that someone needs–even if that only means telling them my wildly different perspective. The truth is probably somewhere between our perspectives anyway. It’s good to understand the whole range of opinions.

I feel like most of what I need from people is just the opportunity to listen to them talk. I only know what I know. What I know is so twisted and fucked up that I am not good at figuring out where other people really are. I don’t know what people know. I don’t know what will surprise people.

Just talk to me. I’m working really hard on not needing anything from anyone. I understand that some people have to be basically self-contained units. I mean, I depend on Noah. I am so grateful for Noah there are not enough words in our language to express it.

When Noah looks at me with his patented-creepy-guy-I-like-what-I-see-stare I know that he isn’t judging me based on whether or not my breasts or my ass are the right size or shape for his adolescent fantasies.

Noah appreciates me in all of my complexity. He can only take so much sometimes–he has limits too–but he doesn’t want me to stop being intense. He just wants to be along in a room sometimes too. I get that.

I told my shaman that sometimes I feel kind of guilty because I think my marriage is a white knight situation and I wish I hadn’t shoved Noah into that role.

My shaman turned and cocked his head and said, “Wait… who is the knight here? Because if you think there is just one possibility you are deluded in a special way.”

I sure pick tactful friends. <3

It is hard for me to see what Noah “really” gets from our marriage. It is hard for me to see our situation as being good for him. But when I’m talking to someone who is much older than Noah who really kind of wishes that he had found someone like me (or that I had said  yes to him) it is a lot easier to see the advantages.

I have a lot of friends who are heading towards old age and they are single. They don’t have a lot of patience with my self-denigration. They clearly see how Noah’s life did improve and continues to improve with my presence. For some reason my married friends just get my whine more and they don’t argue in the same way.

Marriage is a really interesting relationship. Different people treat marriage very differently. I think that marriage is where you go find someone who is a good partner–someone who can balance your weaknesses and strengths. I probably actually wouldn’t do well with a live-in partner who did construction type work. We would fight a lot about how to do things. Noah just lets me do whatever I want. Even if it is wrong.

And I let Noah mostly do what he wants, even if it is wrong. I can’t save him from his fuck ups and mostly I don’t try. (Ok, I do save him from a lot. I handle ALL THE PAPERWORK.)

Noah wasn’t so good at managing money. Well, not the real day-to-day kind. He cam manage investments. I can’t. People like me don’t invest. (Statistically a fairly small percentage of the country is seriously “invested” in companies. During childhood and early adult hood I was in the bottom 10% of the country for wealth. In my first year of teaching full time I jumped up to the 40%. I’m not the kind of person who invests.)

But holy moly I can pinch a penny till it cries. I just put their whiny snively little selves into a jar under my bed instead of in an investment house.

I feel uncomfortable every time I look at our bank balance. Surely this isn’t mine. I comfort myself with the knowledge that I didn’t earn it. I probably couldn’t earn it. That doesn’t feel very good. Kind of cold comfort. Like holding an ice pack on a bruise for three hours. Maybe not so much help after a while.

My therapist regularly comments on how surprising it is that the cast of characters in my life is so large and so diverse. I know a lot of people. In the modern facebook/raver climate knowing so many people doesn’t seem like a big deal.

But I don’t just have a lot of acquaintances. I have a lot of people I can call in the middle of the night. I have a lot of people I can ask for help in emergencies. Would I feel uncomfortable asking? Sure. But in a true emergency I have a rather long list of people to call. I might have to go through 20 or 30 names to get my needs truly met… but I know hundreds of people and many of them are very ok with being woken up in the middle of the night.

When I was younger I consciously worked on being a nexus point between many very diverse groups. I’m not the only one, of course. But I went through a lot of kinds of groups. I didn’t alienate everyone.

I feel like a spider sitting in a web. Do you know that most job leads do *not* come from people you know directly? Most job leads come from the friend of a friend. How you make your network of people work decides a lot about how successful and happy your life will be. At least so some books claim.

I know a lot of people. I don’t know what that will mean some day. Maybe nothing. Maybe something useful. I keep hoping.

Sometimes a friend calls me up to say, “So I was in a situation today and someone started doing (thing Krissy writes about disapproving of) and I recognized it as a problem… so I spoke up.” That makes my fucking day. It has come from multiple people. It’s been about sexist stuff, racist stuff, queer bashing…

I believe that intersectionality is the way to the future. People who can be bridges between communities are going to become ever more important.

Human beings have always functioned heavily in an Us vs Them manner. It is how we rally up our energy to get things done. But as long as you think of people as Them you can’t figure out how to live peacefully.

I begin to understand pacifism.

And now my family is awake. Calli is lying on my arm. It makes it harder to type. But I’m so happy she is here that I can’t tell her to go away. Today we are having leftover pancakes and french toast along with fresh fried potatoes and sausage and eggs. It’s a good life.