When I am having a lot of generalized anxiety but little specific anxiety (I am currently blissfully conflict-free with regards to other people so far as I know) I always cycle back to feeling very upset with myself for medicating. I have a really bad attitude about people who use medication to deal with their feelings. Addicts are bad. I don’t really care if they are addicted to alcohol, pot, or Prozac. Addicts are bad, right?

But I don’t really believe that. I just feel scared. I feel that other people, those unimportant people I don’t know or care about, think that I’m bad because I’m an addict. Is a diabetic an addict when they use insulin?

The transition between smoking and edibles is kind of weird. Smoking takes a lot more time. I won’t be around the kids when I do it. (Recently I was talking to a mom who smoked a lot of pot with her kids in the room when they were little and she talked about how she started sharing as soon as they hit double digits in age. Uhm. I wouldn’t give my kids my Prozac so I’m not going to hand them my pipe.) I have a lot of anxiety around the amount of time that I spend away from the kids smoking. I feel like it is neglectful.

I don’t actually think it is neglectful. I’m within 50′ of them but I’m through walls. They can come and talk to me and ask questions and I take breaks to come in and help them with things if they need help. They aren’t actually being neglected. I can sort of intellectually understand that my kids aren’t being neglected.

But I’m afraid that someone like me will neglect her kids because of inattention or being so self-absorbed. What is neglect anyway? No one can give me an amount of time. “If your kids have no adults willing to jump up and help them for x time then it qualifies as neglect.” No one will tell me the answer. I can’t find the answer. I’ve read a lot of “experts” and lay people. No one knows.

They know that children who are not cuddled in the first three years have severe problems for the rest of their lives. I would not have been able to cuddle my kids without the pot. I feel really bad for that but it is simple fact.

Without pot I shake a lot of the time. I have severe hypervigilance. You can put me in the room with ten other people who are all diagnosed hypervigilance and I can rattle off tons of things those people didn’t notice because hypervigilance means different things in different bodies. (What do you fucking mean you DIDN’T NOTICE THEY HAD SECURITY CAMERAS?!)

A long time ago I learned that I had to stare really hard at any person who came near me. I had to try to figure out their mood and how I should react to them. If someone touches me by surprise I inflict violence. It was a very consciously learned skill.

When I’m smoking the come down is a lot faster and harder than with edibles. Edibles provide this languor that goes on and on. But the effect is much more dramatic initially and you can only use as much as you need with smoking. With edibles you get how much your body decides to give you from that batch. It is hard to titrate.

Yesterday was a very low use day because I had a dentist appointment in Cupertino in the afternoon. That’s a bunch of driving in heavy traffic. I don’t smoke before such a day.

I had a little bit before bed but not much because I was too eager to just go to bed. So I woke up with a stomach ache so terrible I really want to go in the bathroom and make myself vomit so I can just get it over with. I’m not going to do it. I understand that my body is looking for another bad coping method. I’ve always been very lured by vomiting. I have a quick gag reflex. A lot of things make me puke. At some point I did learn how to make myself vomit because there are times when I really just need to vomit because that will end the pain.

When I’m unmedicated first thing in the morning my stomach hurts and I have a terrible time not clenching my teeth so hard my whole lower jaw aches. My hands  shake. All of the random body pain I always have feels tightened and sharpened.

If I go smoke pot… it’s not exactly miraculous but it’s pretty extreme. All of a sudden I can decide to relax my jaw and it will do it. I notice my body pain in a different way. All of a sudden it feels like, “Ah! I need to stretch!” and I do and I feel better. Well, my back always hurts. My back has hurt since my age was in single digits.

My stomach relaxes and all of a sudden I recognize that I am hungry. It doesn’t feel like nausea any more. Now I can eat. If I try to eat without smoking I can eat about a piece of string cheese and that’s it. I can’t have a meal. It will cause me too much pain and if I really force myself to eat I will end up vomiting.

This has gotten a lot worse since I had kids. I used to be able to eat a little bit of food at a time all day long and keep the pain sort of handled. I can’t do that now. A lot of the food we eat now are vegetables and fruit. I’m used to wheat products as what I eat. I’ve always eaten bread or noodles or something like that. Vegetables and fruit cause me a lot of pain. Malnutrition is like that.

I am trying to talk myself into working with a specialist. I know I need to do something about how my body handles food.

But if I smoke pot in the morning I can eat a normal breakfast and then snack of vegetables and fruit with my kids. I don’t experience the same pain.

Am I an “addict”?

I worry most about the startle reflex. I worked so hard on becoming more instinctively and quickly violent. In the scheme of my life the period of time during which it has been rational and safe to respond to random, painful touch with kindness has been very short.

I want to repeat that rational word a few more times. At this point in my life it is not rational to respond to sudden, painful touch with violence. My children aren’t hurting me on purpose they just haven’t learned how to be gentle yet. It is a process. If I want them to learn something I have to slowly and carefully and deliberately model it to them. That is how children learn. You act in front of them how you want them to act.

Reacting with violence was a rational response before I had children. It just was. I don’t give a shit what anyone else thinks. At this point it is completely unacceptable. That’s tough.

Sometimes you develop ways of coping with really bad situations that are necessary at the time. Those skills may not translate well into later parts of your life. It is important to periodically assess how your skills are in relationship to your current life.

November is coming up. I’m going to do NaNoWriMo. I need to get disciplined again about getting up at 4:30 and I need to write until 6:30. I have to if I want to work on Outrunning and I do. I want to finish writing Outrunning in November and I want to spend December working on the resource section. I want a complete first draft by the end of the year.

I have decided that next year I am going to find a better editor for No Secrets and then I am going to take the New & Improved version shopping for a real publisher. I expect at least fifty rejections. Maybe I should be prepared for more like two hundred rejections. The kid who discovered a way to work with pancreatic cancer had to get 199 rejections.  I don’t think I should feel like I deserve an easier road.

I feel that is one of the most damaging messages I received as a child. If something is hard it isn’t worth doing. Not true. Sometimes the most important things are things you have to fight tooth and nail to even be allowed to do.

I’m scared to commit. I’m scared to admit to the grown ups what I say to their children. I’m afraid the grown ups are going to yell at me. I’m afraid the grown ups won’t let their kids read the book.

I have spent a lot of years researching a lot of topics around mental and physical health through adolescence. I’m by no means a PhD style “expert” but I know how to find the expert opinions when I need them. I know a lot about the problems that emerge during adolescence and I pray with all my might that the things I have in my head are things that would be useful if other people knew them.

I feel scared of admitting to myself that this is as close as I have to religion. Let me be enough. Let me be able to help people. I want to help. I want to help so bad. Sometimes it feels like the only way I can make me feel better is if I make other people feel better. I don’t feel less anxiety until I see that I can make them feel less anxiety.

When I am too much for people, when I am too intense, when they have to back away for their own preservation… I feel like I should die. I don’t want anyone to feel guilty about this. It isn’t someone else’s fault that I am so ridiculous. When I feel like I have nothing to give and instead I am a burden I feel like that means I should be culled from the herd.

Does that mean I look at every disabled person and think, “They should be culled”? Err.. no.

I am able to see the value in other people in a way I am not able to see my own value. When I look at other people I can see how dependence is part of creating bonds. Needing help and accepting it from someone is a way of creating a social bond. Giving help feels good. You can only give help if someone needs it. It’s a cycle thing.

I have been told that in Burkina Faso there is no such thing as a personal problem. Every problem is a problem for the community. Depression basically doesn’t exist. People keep you tied to life because they honest to goodness need you. If you are feeling sad you can find a funeral within walking distance and go grieve as much as you want to. No one will think there is anything wrong with crying because you feel bad and there will be people near you who know you and love you and see your value to comfort you when you need it. They know why you are crying. They understand.

I’m sure there are flaws in the system.

It is hard for me that I still need to cry so much and I don’t have space in my life where that is really considered “ok”. I can’t model walking around crying all the time. It will fuck up my kids. I can’t be a miserable son of a bitch. It’s just not ok. But I am a miserable son of a bitch.

I feel sad. I feel scared. I feel like no one has ever liked me or will ever like me. I understand that these are not “rational” things. They just are. I don’t know how to interpret signals of people liking me. I know this is broken. I know that people demonstrate that they like me by continuing to talk to me year after year. I know that I can’t ask anyone to jump through hoops “proving” anything to me. I don’t think I test people much any more.

I just stay home. And people either visit or they don’t.

Well, I go out to home school events because I owe that to my children. They will be exposed to lots of people. And not just people who are willing to jump through the hoop of coming to my house. That is a very different sort of bubble.

This is part of why we are getting to know our neighbors. There are a lot of people around here who just kind of hang out all day. We are not the only home schoolers (though the kids are high school aged so not really friend material). There are a lot of retired people in our neighborhood. They hang out near their garages. We talk to them. I’m not limiting my kids to people who are weird enough to like me. Ha.

So I’ve been thinking about my policy of screaming at the neighbors (only when they are racist!). I don’t really want to cause them to stop talking to my kids. This is going to be hard.

When I use edibles I stay a lot more consistently stoned a lot more often. There aren’t as many spikes and dips in pain and emotion. But edibles are $400-$500/month. (Depends on what I am able to buy because the prices can vary.) Smoking is more like $100-$150/month. I have a lot of anxiety about that price difference. I feel like I can’t really justify spending as much money on my body every month as I do.

I spend $300 every month (occasionally $450 but rarely) on therapy. I buy pot. I buy massages, though we’ve been fairly stingy with those this year. We’ve spent less than $200/month on massages. I can tell that my ambient pain is a lot higher. I wish I was also paying for acupuncture but man can I just not bring myself to cough it up. Hell, I wish I was regularly seeing a chiropractor and a nutritionist. Let me feel the explosion of stomach acid. Wheeeee.

My body does not function very well. I’m trying to figure out how to make it run better so that I can “just be a nicer person” but I didn’t get enough of this shit taken care of before I had kids. I didn’t feel the damage so much then. Learning how to take care of an animal is a process. Human beings are animals. We need particular kinds of foods in differing quantities. You have to figure out each animal. It’s a process.

No one ever really looked at me or tried to maintain proper care of me. Learning how to do so now is hard. I am only figuring out how to do it because I am reading in books what I should be doing with my children. It feels daunting.

I read that human beings are usually naturally opposed to “going to exercise”. Humans stay fit if they do work in the course of their life. Sitting on your ass doesn’t count as “work” in this sense.

I have struggled all of my life with my visceral disconnect that anything I do while sitting on my ass doesn’t count as “work” but that is the only kind of work people want to pay you to do. Physical work is what counts in my subconscious but it is not socially valued. Look at how class hierarchies work.

I think I should resign my membership in the Libertarian party. I have changed my mind about wealth distribution. Three hundred Americans have as much wealth as eighty-five million Americans. Yeah. That sounds like time for redistribution.

We live in a time when there is no excuse for people not helping others survive at a reasonable level. Food should not be so hard to find. We waste so much food. It is stupid.

But man can I not devise a system that would solve the problem for the whole country. Would I be able to design one that would work for my town? My town is trying really hard to gentrify. How could I figure something out that would help my community? I don’t know yet. That isn’t a problem I’m ready to try to solve. I think I will try some day though. Not while the kids are little.

I have a hard time with the fact that I have ended up being “the woman in the home”. I have chosen it consciously and deliberately every step of the way. Does that mean I am choosing to be silent and inconsequential for the rest of my life?

Luckily Noah plans to keep me steadily in laptops and internet connection. (I have three laptops and an iPad in the house. I have a voice.)

When I look around at feminist dialogue I feel sad because I don’t want to speak because I am a white woman. Does the world really need the opinions of one more white whiny bitch?

Do I spent my life just thinking “poor me”? No. Not really. I understand that whereas my life has contained a lot of specific trauma I have benefited from an enormous amount of help as well. I’m alive and well because of the charity of a lot of people. Many of them are very angry that I am not happy and doing well because of the help they gave. I am very sorry that the help they gave was so inadequate towards meeting my needs. It is very hard on both sides.

I have to deal with the physical damage caused by trauma though. I feel very lucky that I live in a time and a place where if I want to I can spend ten minutes on the proper search engine and come up with lots of documentation of why I have the physical reactions I have to life. I feel validated.

But once I have that validation I need to keep reading and look at the consequences of being someone with those physical reactions. It’s not good socially or physically.

I bless my inordinate ability to go make friends. There is a very large part of me that is still a charming three year old trying to make people love me. But now I understand that I have to do it without sitting on their laps and grinding.

The whole “fake it” thing is accessing part of me. It’s not like I am trying to act like someone else as my model of being happy. I have never found anyone who is the way I want to be. I’m ok with that. I don’t think it means anything bad about anyone else.

No one else has had my life. No one else can understand the dissertation associated with every coping method. Just like I can’t understand theirs. Because everyone else has their own story.

I’m getting better at seeing people in the context of their own story. I’m getting better at seeing my role in their lives. I’m trying to understand what it means to play a supporting role while still getting to be the main character in my story. What does it mean to be part of an ensemble piece? What is my role in the quirky sitcom of life? But my life has really been more of a Greek tragedy, you know?

I no longer have the energy for peppy. I’m just too damn tired. I see the need for other people more. I see the sadness of other people better. I see why they react the way they do and why they must react the way they do. I don’t take it so personally when people can’t handle me. I still feel sad.

I don’t feel as suicidal any more. That’s why I had kids. Never again in my life will it be a good thing that I die. I am required to put it off as long as possible because it will hurt my children terribly. We are very close. I am nice to them. I am gentle with them.

Because I medicate. That gives me the ability to be gentle with them even when they are loud and boisterous and very physical. It allows me to have a pause.

Why do I feel so bad about medicating? I know a wide variety of people who are a wide variety of functioning while using a lot of pot. These are all people who would be more and less functional without the pot. So what?

I feel grateful that I live in a time and in a place where this is a legal medication for me to use. If I lived somewhere else I would not be able to use this medication. If I lived in a different part of my country I would not be able to use this medication. I’m only quasi-legal on a federal level. They rarely persecute users. They prosecute dispensaries instead just so they can steal a lot of money. It is state sanctioned piracy.

In medias res. I think about it all the time. What does it mean to truly live in the time and place where you live? What does it mean to be limited by the culture you were born into? What am I capable of doing? I don’t know yet.

I tell myself that if I learn how to be nicer to my body I could have a good forty years of work left after my children are grown. I think of what I want to do while they are children. I think of what I want to do after they are grown. I need to take better care of my body.

I don’t think that all women should stay home with their kids. I really don’t. Really. I think it would be really traumatic and awful for some families, quite frankly. But I wish that more kids got to be with a parent for the first few years. I wish there were more ways of figuring out how to make that work. Sometimes neither parent is the right one to stay home and be all nurturing. I wish that a grand parent lived nearby who was thrilled to take on the early care-taking role or an aunt who was happy to take a few years off from working. Or an uncle. Or a cousin. Someone who was deeply tied to the long-term well being of the child who would devote lots of love and attention. Preferably this person would live with the family.

That’s what I wish. But I understand that it isn’t the reality for every family. I don’t think that families who do something different are doing something bad. I think they are living within their resources. I get to have a fantasy life. I get to pretend that somewhere out there maybe it could be true that it worked out that way.

It doesn’t mean I think bad things about people who are living in the world they live in. I mean Jimminy Christmas haven’t I demonstrated that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones and I’ve got my own list of sins?

I don’t like Christianity but I grew up entirely within that narrative. It is most of how I view the world whether I like it or not. It is my background culture. It won’t be for my kids and that is really weird.

I feel scared of really putting out what I believe in the form of a book. I will flat encourage people I know to buy it and give it to their kids. What do I feel comfortable saying to my little niece in Scotland when she is twelve? What do I want to say to my little nephew over in Mountain view when he is twelve? What do I really want them to know about the world? What do I want my kids to know?

What do I wish I had known?

What do I think I can get past the censorship of the wonderful sweet Christian ladies in my home school group?

Holy moly.

Talk about a tight rope.

And I want to produce this document within the next two months. No pressure. Luckily I have done a lot of writing already. It will be ok. It has to be a length a twelve year old can handle without feeling freaked out. Even ones who are not the most fluent readers in the world.

Why that age? Why that focus? Mostly because that is when I picked up a string of twenty-five year old men. What do I wish I had known?

Hormones change around then and it is a very scary process. What do I wish I had known?

I feel like this is what I have to give the world. I’m not sure what it is worth. I’m not sure that other people will agree that twelve year olds need to know all this. I do. I believe it with all my might.

And I will have to be ok with the fact that lots of people will disagree.

Ok.