My brain feels so fuzzy. I feel muddled and confused and only sorta mentally aware. I feel like I haven’t slept properly in quite a while. I wonder if any of it has to do with using Sativa during the day for the past two days? I don’t recall this happening in the past but I’ve been off Sativa for a few months. I doubt it is related. But I’m feeling so spacey.

The sleep study was interesting. I had a lot of lucid dreaming. I kept thinking I was the Diva from The Fifth Element because as I flopped back and forth in the bed I had to manage the weird bundle of cords coming off of my head. It felt like her hair or something. I felt like I was awake/aware all night and I also felt like it only lasted about 5 minutes.

The other person who was there for a sleep study arrived after me and left before me. I think he had fewer connections on during the process because if not I don’t understand how the employee had a chance to finish taking all his stuff off before I woke up. Also, his face didn’t have massive weird white blotches. I kept waking up pawing my face because the cords and wires felt awful.

I have a low amount of hope for my ability to get used to a CPAP. But I’ll try!

I don’t get the results for a week.

If I don’t feel better in a few hours I may wuss out and ask Noah to drive FMC to therapy because I’m not sure it’s a great thing for me to drive today. I feel… numb and cobwebby and confused.

The second trimester is kicking my ass up one side and down the other. I think I kind of remember this happening in previous pregnancies too? The first trimester is rough and the second trimester is worse. I’m nauseous all the god damn time. I can barely eat. I’m still not up to pre-pregnancy weight. It amuses me to think that all of the early baby growth comes from the baby and placenta eating me. Any day now every ounce the baby gains is an ounce directly stolen from me because I’m not gaining weight as a system. Really… it’s already true. But it gets way more pronounced as the baby grows faster.

I have rarely had the chance to talk to other pregnant people who lose a bunch of weight. I am curious if other people have weird feelings about their bodies being eaten. Like, it feels weird in my body as it happens. Like I can feel the parasite sucking me away.

I wish I could eat more. I’m not hungry. Food is horrible and I can barely choke it down without feeling ill. I feel really sick.

And the more sick I feel the more anti-social and unworthy of ever having a friendship again I feel. Which is why I’m grateful for the lovely friends who check in with me even as I do a crappy job of reaching out.

Most of my relationships rely on a lot of effort from me. I am ok with this balance in the main. I just have nothing to give right now and instead I am a bottomless pit of need. It feels different this time though, easier. I feel less like a bottomless pit and more like I’m just needier than usual. It helps that in this pregnancy the kids are being so damn nice.

I read on the internet that mothers who need/want help from their children are terrible lazy people. Ok. Sure. I’m terrible and lazy. But I want the fucking help. My daughter made her own damn bed this morning and I am not sorry. (FMC can’t make the top bunk alone yet and that’s ok…)

My kids can clean up their own stuff. I don’t need to do it for them. They can get food for themselves most of the time; they don’t have to but they are capable and I feel good about this. To be fair… food mostly comes from Noah so that’s not my trip anymore.

Noah and I had a really good conversation yesterday. We locked ourselves in my room while the kids played (loudly–we knew they were fine at every moment) for two hours and we talked and had sex because frankly… we need to. We talked more about M/s and bdsm and my cheating. We talked more about my fuck ups and mistakes and Noah’s projections and assumptions. I feel it was a slightly better conversation than we’ve had for most of the last year.

I completely blew up for a few reasons. The biggest one was really that I couldn’t absorb more painful sex “for the team” and I have complicated feelings about that. I feel like I made a mountain out of a molehill. I feel like I tried so hard to ask for that to stop and it didn’t stop. I feel like I have had so many decades of pain in my cunt that there is no way it can be a small thing ever again. I feel like if I am not allowed to cope with that in any of the ways I have usually coped with that… I need god damn something.

Traditionally I coped with being a hole for usage by cutting myself or burning myself or hitting my head on concrete. I am not allowed to do any of those things anymore and I can’t convinced myself that I am small and bad and I should be in pain without them. And that means I can’t deal with my cunt hurting like that.

Casual sex was… really the most gentle potential self harm I could come up with. And I picked people who genuinely care about me and who were united as a front in telling me to go home and get my shit together when they realized I was… not interacting with them in healthy or appropriate ways.

I feel like as far as going off the rails goes…

I made sure I didn’t damage my body in a way that was going to have long-term consequences because I’m supposed to not do that anymore. So I’m upset with myself and I feel like I coped as well as I fucking could.

Which doesn’t mean it is a way of coping Noah can bear.

Which also doesn’t mean that it proves that at my core I don’t want Noah and I’m not excited by Noah.

And that’s a lot of how Noah took it and continues to take it. Which is a real problem for my marriage. I made that bed and now I get to lie in it.

It’s all so complicated. Sometimes it is very hard that I have come so far that people expect me to be able to function like a healthy, whole person and I’m still not. I’m better than I ever was… but I still struggle with all these ways I’m just not ok. I’ve come a long way but that doesn’t mean I have the background other people have to lean on.

When I panic or feel scared… I still want to revert to programming. Even though I know that programming is going to kill me or wreck my life.

Do you know how hard it is that panic or fear has to be the trigger for the most intense lock-down control of my behavior? So I don’t blow up my life.

That’s not normal. That’s not how humans are designed to function. Fear and panic mean you lose control not that you have to be under way more control.

How come black belts still get mugged and raped? Because fear shuts you down. Fear makes it impossible to function in your normal manner.

But for me fear has to mean that I have much finer control than average. Fear means I have to consciously and deliberately slow down how I am thinking and think through the behavioral options much more carefully than normal and I have to triple check every thought I have to see if it is appropriate or if it is fucked up by the programming I experienced.

We are all programmed by our childhoods.

My programming tends to put me in danger over and over.

Realistically… I’m super happy with myself that when I went hunting when I was freaking out because I couldn’t figure out how to change a dynamic in my life… I picked people who weren’t all that likely to hurt me. In terms of the scale of my life… that was actually well done. I didn’t go hunting Craigslist. I met people from okcupid but in a coffee shop and that was it. I didn’t go looking for danger. I stuck with people who would hurt me in very safe ways. I picked people who have demonstrated for a long time that they want me to be happy. That’s… a huge step up for me.

Even when I’m doing something for mixed, probably bad reasons… I’m making better choices. That has to be progress.

I picked people who were kind to me instead of treating me badly. That’s still a sign of improving life choices.

My nods to self harm are less destructive over time. That’s something.

I still did a lot of harm to my life and to my marriage… but I didn’t shorten my life.

But now we are back to the point where I have to figure out how to get Noah to believe that I like him and I’m excited by him. That’s kinda hard when I’m so tired I can barely keep my eyes open. I have poured out my lifeblood for him and that’s fucking exhausting. How do you exhaust yourself utterly and still have room for excitement?

I think we do have exciting moments. But they are mixed in with a lot of not very exciting moments because I’m fucking tired. Yes, I seemed more excited by dates in a minute by minute way… and I also spent very little time with those people.

Scale matters.

I’m so tired I feel like breathing is an effort. I want to spend weeks lying in a bed doing nothing.

How in the fuck am I going to make someone believe I am excited by anything?