I feel like this part of my life is the grieving. I am giving up the dream of who I was going to be. In order to be reborn you have to die. Your hopes, your dreams–all of them have to be given up if you are going to be something new.

This is why people stay stuck in the same patterns with the same people. They don’t want to die. They don’t want to give up their deepest held beliefs and expectations.

I really have to. The things I have believed about myself are no longer particularly useful to me. Right now I have Lady Gaga’s song “Bad Kids” on repeat. In my head I will never be anything other than the bad kid. I am the person your parents warned you about. You were told to stay away from me.

I have rebuffed more than one request for help recently under widely varying circumstances. I don’t think I was graceful. I feel like I don’t have enough something to be able to be nice to me. If I can’t be kind to myself I have no kindness for anyone else. I’m sorry. It’s not that I don’t want to help. It’s that I have to live with how unpleasant I am and that is really hard. I don’t like feeling exhausted and angry because I never have the ability to even finish a thought.

I don’t know who I want to grow up to be. I can’t get my head around the picture. I keep trying roles on. I keep trying to get to the point where my mind can encompass it. Future me is hiding from me. I never tried to picture what I would do once I had the husband and the kids. Shit.

More than almost anyone I know I have followed the plans I set down rigidly for myself when I was a child. I got married 8 days before turning 25. My daughters were born when I was 27 and 29. Right on my schedule. I decided that years in advance.

I think that an awful lot of partner selection is deciding that you are ready to take your life in a new direction and you grab the person who looks the most likely. I certainly did that. I had a wide variety of options. I examined them carefully. I would visit their houses and sit quietly and try to think of how the life there would look.

I used to freak out at the idea of being stuck in this house forever. When I dated Noah the first time I firmly rejected him as an option. I didn’t want to be part of this life. I’ve changed the house and changed my future and it’s going better. I wasn’t able to believe that my influence would matter. I didn’t fit in the Disaster House. I’m not an open-invite-party-in-my-house person. I want to exclude the rapists. There were a lot of rapists at the DHPs. They didn’t do it at the parties, of course. But I know a lot of bad stories about people who were quite popular there.

I think I am uninterested in being part of any groups because when I go I am hyper aware of the sexual predators and I don’t want to be in the room with them. Everyone else want me to just get along. I’d rather take a baseball bat to their skull and prevent them from hurting another woman. I can’t just get along. I can not be there. That is my gift to society. That is how I keep my mouth shut.

But when I hide at home I don’t get to talk to women. My perspective is silenced. Kevin gets to keep hunting. Paul. Dan. These are popular guys! I’m not popular.

I feel like part of shaving my head was closing the door on hunting. It has been interesting to me over the years how often my hair is a factor in people wanting to fuck me. They comment on it. I don’t understand why looking at curly hair is so interesting while having sex. I never asked for clarification. It was just one of the things I had to work with so I did.

When women tell me that they can’t get laid I blink in shock. I think their standards are too high. Anna used to complain that she couldn’t get laid. The only person she wanted to sleep with was her best friend. He was from a ridiculously well off family so he was spoiled, self absorbed, and entitled. He wouldn’t date a girl who was that heavy. Or who had such a plain face. Anna certainly wasn’t ugly–but she wouldn’t win a beauty contest. She was not especially pretty either. And she only wanted the best looking boy in the room with the best body. No Anna, you can’t have that.

I think that most of the people I have slept with would be vaguely insulted if they understood my evaluation of their status. Hey, you’re sleeping with me you can’t be that high in status. If you were higher in status you would go fuck someone better. Someone prettier. Someone with a better body. Someone nicer. Someone who… God I don’t even know. Someone worth being proud of standing next to. A lot of men have indicated that they didn’t want to be seen in public with me. I am not the kind of girl you want to introduce to your mother.

And Noah fucking married me. What does that say about him? I think he was rebelling against his family. He married the trailer park slut. I don’t think a rich boy from Texas can do a more rebellious thing. Sure, by the time he met me I was living with Tom in a nice townhouse. Does that raise my status? I was able to fuck a higher quality of person by the time I was an adult.

It really doesn’t matter what status I perceive myself as having. When I go off into the world now people do not see who I was or what I have done. Mostly they have no idea. I am a highly educated person. I have worked very hard to learn about the world. I can converse on a wide variety of topics with fluency and ease. People don’t know I’m white trash until I tell them. I pass. Shouldn’t I just take that and run with it? Wouldn’t that be the smart thing?

In order to do that I have to essentially kill the part of me that I don’t want anymore. I have to kill my bad kid. She has to die.

I have a lot of attachment issues. A friend was admonishing me that I should place my faith in the love of Noah rather than wishing for the love of some mythical G-d. Thing is, I don’t have faith in Noah’s love. I wait for when it ends. I consider it unavoidable. Inevitable. I can’t put my faith in Noah. He will leave me. Everyone does. I’m trying to figure out how to build a self that depends on no one and nothing and I’m failing.

I don’t know how to envision my future. I don’t trust that anyone will be in it with me. All I can see is wanting to die. Wanting to be done feeling alone and unwanted like this. Even though Noah is sitting three feet away from me and looking at me with concern because I am crying.

I no longer believe in “forever”. I feel like I will be here until the wind changes. Then I will blow away. Will I still exist then? I don’t know. I don’t see where I fit. I don’t see a place for me anywhere. I can’t see a future for me.

Why is permanent monogamy so important to me? Because if I wasn’t monogamous I would use that hunting time to line up Noah’s replacement. Eventually I would begin believing that Noah was about done with me. Then I would withdraw. I would just end up at someone else’s house more and more. Noah thinks he would be able to get me to take 50% of the proceeds from this marriage. I think he underestimates the willingness of the California court system to listen to someone who says, “I want to walk away with nothing. Like I came with.”

I feel worthless. I feel like all that I do is meaningless. I am just an empty shell. I can totally envision me fucking up my marriage over sex. That’s why I closed the door on that specific flavor of broken. Even when I believe I am a worthless whore I am not going to go act like one. I am going to model appropriate behavior if that is the last thing I do.

It isn’t that I think that children must see monogamy at all costs in all circumstances. Shanna loves her Grandpa J and his wife C and his girlfriend D. That’s fine. I don’t do that. I pick up random men who like to be mean to women. It’s different. I don’t go find people who respect me. Just listen to how they talk to me. The people who want to fuck me don’t have a lot of respect for me. They want a hole. I don’t want my girls growing up seeing men treat me that way. Noah is nice to me. I want them to see that.

I feel guilty about it but a lot of the reason I can’t help people right now is because I can’t afford to feel invested in people when I have no control over the results of my effort. When I sign on to help I will often put in dozens and up to hundreds of invisible hours of work. In order for me to say, “I recommend you do _______” I have to be god damn sure. I don’t think most people operate the way I do. I will not give a half assed opinion in a situation where someone comes to me for help. I will give them the same support and education I would give myself. I just can’t do that for extra people right now.

I would not be able to hold my head up if I knew I was giving substandard advice. I am not that person. I don’t do that.

I say things like that and then I think–what is my image of myself? Am I the pathetic bad kid? I’m one of the most consistently reliable people I know–or I won’t commit. I take my word seriously. I am honest and dependable. I am consistent. I am not always what people want to hear or see, but I am going to just go on existing. Consistently. Fuckers.

Why do I think I am about to blow away? I am all but building a fortress. I am entrenched. I am settled. I have lived in this house longer than I have lived anywhere. I don’t plan to move again.

I have panic attacks if I am lax on dealing with recycling and I develop a stack of boxes. I cannot handle even the idea of moving.

This vision of myself is dying. But I don’t know what to replace it with. I don’t know who I am. I’m afraid this will be a very hard and dark winter. I’m already freezing all the time but I won’t turn the heaters on till November. Stubborn. That’s me.