Yesterday I said that I have “never” had positive group identification. I’ve never felt like I belonged and knew everyone and they knew me. Then I spent the rest of the day rolling that around in my head. Is it true or is just how I feel right now?

The two big “what about …” that popped up were our wedding reception and my 30th birthday. Those were both large events at my house where the main draw was that people like me and/or Noah and they wanted to be there to show their love. Our wedding reception had more than one hundred people.

What the fuck can anyone expect?

The problem is the wedding reception overlapped with the last time I ever saw Anna. She came to visit me from out of state. Ostensibly to help get ready for the reception. We hadn’t seen one another for a few years. Then she got here and I found out she was a drug addict (all legal prescriptions) who was barely verbally aware of what was happening around her and her back problems (the reason for the prescriptions) made it so she couldn’t do much of any help. And she was the only help I had. And she spent 90% of her time talking about how important it was for her to be at the Harry Potter release party that weekend.

I was completely freaking out before the reception even started. It was hard getting all the work done. It was two or three people worth of work and it was 1.24 people available to work. I never relaxed during the party. I didn’t enjoy it. I spent most of the party trying not to cry.

I did enjoy when Noah and I got to read our vows in front of our friends. That felt like witnessing. But I did not have the feeling of being supported and loved and seen. It was, kinda like what I want, only not so much.

Anna and I had a horrible fight the next day and I haven’t spoken to her since. Almost seven years. I was a complete dick to her. The fight was my fault.

I told her that priorities were completely fucked. She was obsessed with buying a new iPod but she don’t have a real bed and she has had multiple back surgeries over the last few years and she was on so many pain meds that she couldn’t function. I said, “What the fuck is wrong with you that you prioritize a music player.” No one likes being told stuff like that. She couldn’t hold down a job because of pain and mental confusion from medications. She was living with her psychotic, evil, very abusive parents and all she cared about was the new Harry Potter and getting a new iPod.

I was not nice. I think it was probably a very healthy decision on her part to be done listening to me. Even if she is making bad choices, that’s not really my business and I shouldn’t be such a raging cunt.

So I didn’t walk away from my wedding reception feeling seen and important. I spent the morning beating my head on concrete and the evening crying. It was hard and draining and not a lot of fun.

Same with my 30th birthday. It was a huge party. So many people came. People do like me. I don’t know how to get past this feeling that people only like me if I perform just right because that trashes the parties for me. I was so scared I would do the wrong thing, say the wrong thing, and then there would be a mass walk out because people are only here for the free food anyway.

I don’t like me very much. It is very hard for me to wrap my head around other people liking me.

So when I have this horrible feeling of alienation… I literally don’t know what someone else might do to get past this feeling. I’m trying.

Running with Blacksheep had the feeling. That was really wonderful. I do get the feeling of bonding and mattering on a one-to-one basis.

When I’m running and feeling bad about myself and I’m crying and I feel disgusting and I want to hurt myself, I think of Blacksheep singing silly songs and encouraging me. She was so fucking nice even though I was whiny and difficult and kind of a problem. She dragged me through that race.

I struggle really hard with the difference between “knowing” that people love me and feeling that people love me. The gap between those levels of existence create my problem. It is that gap that can kill me.

I went and looked for blog entries. I didn’t write about the blow up with Anna. I’m not surprised. That’s the kind of thing I can’t write about too soon after it happens. I didn’t write that much about my birthday party.

For my 30th birthday I wanted a two part party. The first part was all the lovely vanilla friends for a tea party and the second part was for a drug fueled orgy. I spent the morning before the first party began beating my head on concrete. I plastered a fake smile on my face for the tea party. I did a lot of drugs and freaked out all night anyway. Because even on heavy drugs designed to increase bonding feelings I feel like everyone standing near me is lying about liking me.

They really hate me. I’m disgusting. They are just being polite.

I keep trying because I keep hoping that this feeling will go away. There has to be some way of feeling connected with multiple people at once.

Sometimes I struggle with feeling connection with all three members of my household at once. This really is a deficient system in me. I have this hyper-focus for my feelings of attachment. I hyper-attach to one, maybe two people at once and I can’t really see or feel or experience attachment to other people. I have had to grow quite a bit. There have been periods where I’m all bond-y with the kids and I’m not nice to Noah for a while. Then things shift and Noah is on the inside and I kind of push one of the kids away for a bit (sometimes both).

How much “go play” is healthy? Unschoolers have very different tolerances on such things.

With my kids I’m pretty good (I think) at maintaining the professional engagement even if my emotional attachment comes and goes. There are days when I frankly dislike my children. Sometimes they can be raging assholes. Sometimes on those days I feel genuine empathy and I help them through the emotional bumps of life that must occur. Sometimes I hate their living breathing guts and I have to monitor my hands and my tone of voice and my facial expressions with great precision.

Just because I’m having a feeling that doesn’t mean I get to act on it. No matter how angry I am with them (for reasons or no reasons) I must control myself. My hands have to be gentle. I must not look too scary. I must project loving even when I feel none. Or at least more patience than I feel. I have to be patient. I have to be loving. I fucking picked my job. Don’t be a dick.

When I am in that space of being careful is when I feel the least attached. I don’t feel real. I don’t feel like my feelings matter. I am just there to be a support for other people having the experience they want to have.

This is the problem with group identity. I create this problem within my self as more and more people walk through the door.

I act very differently with different people. Some people think I am quiet and timid (I swear to G-d people say this to me on a regular basis–“Wow you are so quiet and so timid, it’s ok to talk”. I giggle.) No. This isn’t an environment where it is ok for me to talk. But thanks for playing. I think they say this because I stand there with my hand on my mouth to remind myself that I shouldn’t speak.

When I invite lots of people over because I want to be able to feel bonded with them it backfires. I experience horrible anxiety because I don’t know how to behave as the group size increases. I don’t know what will be ok. The things I talk about are on such a huge spectrum from mild to wild that I can’t figure out what to say. I physically hurt the whole time. My stomach is on fire and I want to cry.

I haven’t had a party that big since my 30th birthday. We’ve had much smaller parties and they’ve been a lot easier.

Our Christmas open house last year was unusually successful for my sense of emotional attachment. I had anxiety. I didn’t beat my head before the party. There were fewer people. There were manyfewer people I barely know. There was a higher percentage of people I have known for 10+ years than I usually have at parties. That was really nice. I had many moments of one-to-one bonding feeling. I didn’t ever get rid of the underlying feeling of, “If I fuck up everyone will stomp out and hate me forever” but I had moments of reprieve. I had moments of, “I am so glad to see you. Tell me how you have been.”

I did freak out about the token Asian thing. No party is perfect.

I really appreciate all of the people who continue to show up. Who like me enough to tolerate the fact that I don’t always feel like they like me, or like I physically can like them. When we get into the same room–the liking is there. In between visits it gets stored in a black hole very similar to Mary Poppins’ carpet bag. You can’t see what it is in from the outside. It seems like there is nothing of worth. Then you open it and reach inside and you magically find the feeling you need.

Oh. It’s you. I like you.

And we are off to the race horse.

Why do the group events with the home school group not count? Because they don’t know me very well and I have to be on really careful “work level” behavior at all times. Sure, L reads. I am pretty sure she is the only one in the group. I make other people uncomfortable and being near me is visible work. Being there isn’t about me anyway.

Why didn’t the reception count? It should have. By every criterion I’m an asshole for not thinking that my wedding reception counted as a time when many people demonstrated that they love and see me at the same time.

I don’t know. I don’t know why I feel so dead inside. I don’t know why I can’t feel that lots of people love me. I don’t know why I can only feel love from a small number of people before I default to absolute certainly that now that there is sufficient mass everyone is about to hate me. It’s fucking inconvenient.

I have a bad habit of acting like just because I believe I am unlovable that everyone agrees with me.

The bdsm community seems like it should have presented such a feeling, at least at some point. But I only really talked about myself to a few people. Only a few rare women actually knew much about my life. And my Owner was always clear that he was happier having my background be a closed book. He didn’t want to know what made me who I was or how I got to where I was.

So no, I didn’t feel seen or important or loved for me.

Noah has been such a dramatic force in my life. He was the very first person who ever wanted to know all my stories. Sometimes it feels like he gave me permission to live. My writing has gotten steadily more explicit and focused since I’ve known him. He wants to understand me. That means I have to figure out how to explain me.

When I went to Camp Everytown as a teacher and I had to publicly (though mostly silently) reveal all those details about my life to a large group of people… I ended up getting in a fight because the “bisexual” kids told me I was a disgusting bigot for describing myself as a queer. The other adults just about asked me to leave the event because I wasn’t keeping it together as a supportive adult well enough. I was not welcome to come back in later years so that I could adjust to the experience of having that many details of my life get revealed.

I’m different. Legitimately. Everyone is a special snowflake, yes I know. Even with weird people I’m weird.

I don’t feel seen very often. I feel like people see what they want to see. Someone who is more like them and probably softened. I try to be ok with that. I know that I see other people as being far sharper than they think they are. We like to see ourselves in others.

Yesterday we party hopped. A little kid birthday then a grown up birthday with some kids at the party. At the end of a very long day (the kids and I were out for a little over nine hours) there was a little issue with the baby at the party being grabby.

I happened to walk outside just in time to see the baby grab Calli’s face and pinch really hard. Calli screamed and cried. Then the baby did it again while I was walking over. I was nervous Calli would knock her block off.

I sat down and pulled her into my lap. She told me what happened and she told me how it felt and she told me about her feelings. I repeated all of it back to her and sympathized. Yup. It happened. Yup, it hurt a lot. Yup, you are sad. Would you like a hug?

Calli talked to the baby and asked for an apology. She said she accepted it after it was offered.

Then the baby squeezed Shanna’s arm. And around we go.

At this point I decided that it was time to go home. It was after seven and nearly bedtime and both of my kids are crying and not calming down and… time to go home.

Calli screamed the whole way home and the whole time while getting ready for bed. She didn’t want to go to bed. She didn’t want to do anything. So I went to bed with her. And I sat there and I talked to her about how proud I was of her behavior that day.

She calmed right down. She told me all about how “I showed the baby how to solve a problem. RULE NUMBER ONE: NO HITTING. Rule number two: use your words when you have a problem. Rule number three: tell people how they should touch you. RULE NUMBER FOUR: NO HITTING Rule number sixteen: use your words.” She went on for a bit. Then she calmed down and settled close to cuddle with me and things went better.

I do actually think I am pretty good at my job. I like them so much and they are worth the effort I put into this.

What is it that I need in order to feel connected? I don’t know.