This article about Susan from Narnia made my morning.

Yeah… you get no context on the music conversation yesterday. If you are close enough to ask me one to one I’ll tell you. If you are a blog reader you get a mystery.

14 days till we leave for the trip. I’m excited.

Things with Noah are going a lot better. A lot smoother. More gentle. Quieter. Less fighting and fuss. I’m not rocking the boat any more.

I read something a while back, I don’t remember who said it. “If you have a life better than most people can imagine, you don’t get to complain.”

I have a life, right now, that is far better than anything I could have imagined when I was young. Does that mean I don’t get to complain about it?

Does the fact that most of my sex life is good mean I’m not allowed to complain about feeling hurt or degraded sometimes?

I don’t know.

How much pain am I required to shut my mouth about because I have it so good? I don’t know.

I was thinking about this as I watched my whiny-baby-eldest-child do martial arts yesterday. She is in a new/harder class because she bumped up. She must have complained loudly, “OW THAT HURTS” more than a dozen times. Her classmates kept freaking out thinking she was seriously injured. No, that is her, “You want more energy than I feel like expending” voice. When she’s hurt she’s higher pitched.

I talked to her about crying wolf. If you say OW every time you round the corner as you jog around the room because you hit the edge of a pad, no one will notice when you break your arm.

I could barely talk my mom into taking me to the hospital when I broke my arm because I had such a habit of complaining about being in pain (Well, I was in severe pain but now I would say it was caused by trauma/anxiety.) that my mom didn’t believe me.

I believe my kid. But I think there is minor pain and serious pain. How do we learn to tune out minor irritations? My kids haven’t had to. Whatever is happening to them in this moment is all that matters and… oh sweetie. I’m not doing you favors. Some hurts you shrug off and keep moving. A paper cut doesn’t end the morning.

Instead of screaming and freaking out when you stub your toe, you learn to pick it up.

I think I’m sucking at teaching some kinds of resiliency. They are emotionally resilient and physically… not so much.

Hm. We should work on this.

I think keeping them in martial arts is the right first step.

I’m… feeling better? Less anxious. Less frantic. I don’t feel suicidal. I feel a little slow and sad but not overwhelmingly so.

I don’t think I’ve suffered from an intense long lasting depression or period of anxiety in years. I think the worst was after Uncle Bob died. Everything else… I can shake off a lot faster. I have more ability to be upset and then stop.

That’s progress, right?

I don’t know how the sex stuff is going to work out. I really don’t and that is hard and frustrating. But I think it is going to take a long time and I just can’t sustain burning energy on that problem all the time because I think it is going to be handled slowly, case by case over the next ten years.

I have no idea how much play we will do with others in that time period. I think we will play with friends this weekend. How much play? I don’t know. Will sex happen? I don’t know.

We’ll see.

And yes Noah, I’m being very selfish about this. We aren’t searching for people you want to play with while I help. I’m playing with my old friends and partners. I’m being utterly and completely selfish about this.

This Saturday I hope I will get to play with the very first person who ever put me in bondage. I love her with all my heart and I would really like to celebrate the 16th anniversary of that with play. She is a dear and beloved friend. I would not be who I am without her. Knowing her is an honor and a privilege.

I am a ridiculously blessed person.

This weekend is the 16th anniversary of meeting the group of people who changed my life. I’m pretty excited.

I’m probably going to bring my Owner flowers. We started dating a few days after that first meeting of the whole crowd. I ended our relationship on our anniversary. So 16/12 years ago respectively. I’ve sent flowers before.

But this year I’m thinking hard about myself and who built me and whether I am worthy of love or respect or… anything really.

I need to stop hearing in my head that I’m a worthless whore. I need it to go away.

Oh goodness. On the vein of sex work is completely separate from my issues with the word whore, recently a friend noticed that I was in distress and reached out to me. Unfortunately I can’t have dinner with her because she forgot I don’t live in her city/state, but it was lovely anyhow. I am… surprised sometimes that my network of support includes some of the most famous sex workers of my era. I like who I get to be. If these are the sorts of people who are like, “Gosh you look like you need some help” then I’m doing something right. Because I love these people so much. And they love me back.

Holy shit.

That one needs to go on my mental list of “See you can’t be all bad.”

I have friends reaching out to me from an incredibly diverse array of communities. My neighbors represent a rainbow of ethnicities and religions and I’m out about the kind of weirdo I am and they are all checking in on me because I am not being as social as usual and I seem down. They invite me into their homes and tell me all their problems and listen without judgment to mine. Even when mine involve promiscuity and drugs and their eyes bug out. “Wow. I have never… met someone who had any problems like that before. I… I have no advice. What do you think you will do?”

But they’ve already known me for years and years. I didn’t unload about this shit early on. At this point, they have this deep well of trust and affection for me.

It’s trippy as shit.

I’m out about being kinky. I’m out about being non-monogamous. I’m out about my mental health problems.

I get to normalize the fuck out of weird populations for these people. It’s hella cool.

I am trying to find a way forward that honors the totality of support I am getting. It blows my mind. I feel like I am living in a storybook. People don’t get to have this kind of real life.

Something I get told when I’m freaking out and they have no advice, “Krissy… I don’t know what you’ll do but you’ll find something. You’ve already figured out more hard things than I have.”

I get told minor variations on that over and over.

Why in the world do other people have so much faith in me?

Breakfast.