Had dinner with my friend and his brother recently. After the fact the brother said to my friend, “I was quite surprised by how deep that conversation was. I don’t usually talk to people about those things.”

I don’t really know how to have casual, surface conversations. I want to know the details about your childhood. I want to know why you are so violently opposed to having kids given that you are married to someone who wants kids even if it is none of my business. I’m not going to judge your reasons or argue with you. I’m just curious.

I want you to tell me why you think my friend ended up the way he is. You were there during his childhood and I wasn’t. Yes, I totally want to hear about the long-term relationship ups and downs you have had.

I don’t have relationships with my siblings. I don’t know how they work. I want to hear how they work for other people so it can help me guide my kids. I need to hear as many different points of view as possible because I don’t know what the range is. I only know my life. I know the books I have read.

I want to know about real life. I haven’t seen very much of it. Of course I am going to ask you deep and probing questions to find out what causes you to behave the way you do. The why behind people intrigues me.

Thank you for humoring me by telling me your story. I won’t reveal the details in public and I won’t betray the secrets you gave away on accident. I’m kind of like a bottomless well. I hold lots of secrets. The only ones I tell are my own.

That’s not even true. I’ve told secrets that aren’t my own. I do try to limit my confessional spews to my family. And lovers. Err, and I only tell ones that relate to me.

I’ve never gone through my brain and tried to organize my thoughts into lists of rape survivors. I don’t know how many I’ve talked to and I don’t want to. The list is very long.

I’ve never gone through my brain and tried to organize all of the incest survivors I have met. I don’t want to think about them that way.

Instead I think of my friends in more abstract pictures. They kind of swirl in my head in bright colors. Some of them have deep cracks fracturing their section. They aren’t broken but they show a lot of wear. Some of them are pale because I don’t know much about them. Some of them are bright and shining. The cracks don’t decide if the color is strong or weak. That’s on a completely different gradient.

Despite my obsession with lists I try not to list my friends or categorize them much. I do have some groupings. Breeders and non-breeders. Perverts and “I’m not privy to information about their sex life”. In town and out of town. Dancers. Home schoolers.

But I don’t list them. I just try to poke that corner of the web of my brain and see what floats up. I consciously don’t want to try to write them down.

I do think about the whole level thing. Level one, two, three, four, five. It does decide a lot of my behavior with people.

Level one gets to actually see me relax. They see the full variety of my behaviors and hear my thought process. I think out loud as much as I don’t. Level two gets to hear my unedited thoughts when we are together. I don’t use tact. Level three gets a strong dose of tact and an attempt to conform to their culture as much as I am able. My behavior and thoughts are censored but I feel comfortable with the idea that this person likes me. I can talk to them and feel safe but I know I need to be mindful of behaving “appropriately”.

Level four are people I think don’t like me very much. I try to avoid speaking directly to them and I literally keep my head down when I am physically near them. I am trying to stop. This is less pronounced than it used to be. I’ve worked on it pretty hard. I generally have to be near these people for reasons of shared community.

Level five is for strangers. How I treat them partially depends on how embedded in my web they are. I am tentative with people who know a lot of people who know me. I worry like fuck about reputation. With people who are completely unrelated to me I am much more free with casual speech. I babble, to put it frankly.

The more I spend time with Shanna the more validated I feel in my basic approach to strangers.

I wonder how much of our ability to talk to people will work in more diverse settings? I hope to find out. Will we be able to adapt into different settings? I wonder how much of my, and her, ability to talk to people is grounded in looks versus personality. I will never be able to know.

I hope I am not failing them.

Anyway, I don’t write down lists of people I know and sort them into levels. That uhh would take a lot of energy I don’t want to spend. I just notice the physical differences in how I react to people and I need to be honest with myself about that structure. If I settle in to understanding how I work I can figure out how to break patterns.

I suspect a lot of people I slot into level four don’t have a problem with me and it is all in my head. If I recognize my own inability to determine other peoples emotional states perhaps I can figure out some sort of testing protocol over time. Yes, I’m that dorky. But how to float test balloons and all.

It is very useful for me to determine who should be on level three instead of level two. That way I don’t cross lines and offend people. I’m really good at offending people if I’m not careful. When I’m careful I can sit and talk to someone of any religion of any color of any socio-economic class and have a lovely conversation. I can be respectful of other boundaries and social limitations. It just takes a lot of work and it means censoring out a very high percentage of stuff I think.

I can have a lot more time in a week with level two people without feeling physical stress than I can people of lower levels. Lately I feel quite supported. I worry about the eventual shift in life. The last two months have been really nice. I’m working on figuring out how to have more like this level of support when things change.

But if I think I have an “in” with you of any kind–of course I will ask personal questions. I’m not really interested in anything about you that isn’t personal. I’m kind of weird that way.

I’m happy with my forward progress this year in terms of gardening. Next year will be a fallow year because of the road trip. I think I will leave a stick house and come home to a playhouse completely covered in vines. I can’t express how happy that makes me.

I have this deep need to figure out how to live with my kids in a migratory fashion. I don’t know why I need this as bad as I do. I feel weird about it.

Maybe I want to prove that I could do it better than my mom? I don’t know. My mom didn’t have my life circumstances and I can’t blame her for doing the best she could with the meager resources at her disposal.

I have the internet. I can’t judge what she did. That would be a completely asshole move.

So if not a competitive thing, what? A way to figure out how it should be to break my ingrained patterns of panic? It seems unfair to drag my kids through my exposure therapy. Only…

If that is the way that I teach them how to have healthy reactions and they don’t know what I’m doing… is it actually bad? I don’t know.

I want my kids to see as many different kinds of lives as possible. I want them to understand the vast differences that privilege make. I want them to think about what they actually see in terms of generosity, community, and humanity as they meet different people.

I don’t believe I can force them to think the way I do or reach the same conclusions as me. That’s not the point. All I can control is what they see and are exposed to. And only for a short time. After that I don’t get to be the boss any more.

Go now.

My kids express fervent appreciation of fat bodies. They are completely blind to the world of “diets” and “thinspiration”. When I read articles about the prevalence of eating disorders in children under ten I feel so sad. I can’t do anything about all the kids. My kids so far are lucky enough to love their bodies and bodies in general. They have positive associations with people of all body types.

That’s all I can control.

I feel sad when I read about the color coded and gendering of toys that seem to be common now. My kids don’t live in that world. Sure, they have some pink and they play princesses. But they are also fierce knights and doctors and cooks and fire fighters and cupcake girls and super heroes and …

They have no idea that people think girls shouldn’t “do”. They are incredibly assertive instead of passive. They are not aware that some people believe that children should be seen and not heard.

I was told and told and told and told to just shut up. My kids don’t hear it.

Today should be a nice day.