Author Archives: Krissy Gibbs

About Krissy Gibbs

Just your average hippy white trash incest survivor stay at home mom. Is there an average for us? No? Oh well.

I feel like I could blow away

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I feel thin and wispy and insubstantial. It’s a bit on the wild side recognising oooooh this is depression. The past few months have been burn out. Ah, hey, I can feel the difference. A lot of the time my burn out feels a lot like depression so sometimes I really struggle to tell the difference. I always feel weird about the fact that I feel depressed but I can keep moving forward and working. Do you know what I’m not doing right now? Getting much done. I feel like I could sit under a tree long enough to grow moss and fungi. I do not feel like I am going to be effective today.

I just want to fade into nothingness. I have no ability to create or repair or clean or help. I feel empty. I feel like I am never going to be able to do anything right. I feel like I will never be able to be good.

I feel like I am full of badness. I feel like I am bad. I’m supposed to interact but I don’t know how to.

I’ve been in bed for almost as many hours a day as I am out of it. Despite me usually needing around 7.5 hours. I just can’t get up. I’m too tired. I feel tired to the marrow of my bones. I feel stupid and unable to be coherent. I just can’t think well. I am not looking forward to having this drag on until the trial.

I’m trying to exercise more, I’ve got to pick that up. It’s hard. I feel like my lungs are compressed in a vice while I’m moving. It’s hard to breathe. I’m sad. I don’t even want to get up and get dressed. It seems like a truly unreasonable amount of effort.

The NHS is going to be a mixed bag for me

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I am experiencing some frustration. This week I learned that the NHS would have denied me the vast majority of the care I received in California because a lot of it ran concurrently. In Scotland one is not allowed to work with multiple therapists and on varying parts of mental and physical health at the same time. It is medical malpractice in this country.

Well, shit.

It was kind of fun recognising that I will have to route around the NHS while in an appointment with a psychiatrist. She got to try and talk me into not giving up on myself. If I come back and beg enough times maybe the NHS will agree to me having more than one form of care over a long period of time where they control all the aspects of deciding what and when.

Oh. It’s like that, is it?

I am going to learn a lot more about private health care in this country and I’m going to get better about lying and denying the care I am receiving. That sucks. I’m not really into lying as a lifestyle.

The NHS will not allow me to have EMDR before the trial. Thing is, I’m not sleeping so good. Flashbacks/abreactions are really bringing me down. My PTSD responses are really dramatic compared to where they have been for years.

The NHS won’t allow me to talk to anyone else while I’m talking to the nice counsellour lady in town. The nice lady who is a student. The nice lady who works for an agency that is supposed to get me help as an overwhelmed mom supporting disabled kids.

That’s what I get.

She’s a nice gal and maybe I am underestimating where I am going to get in the 6 sessions I have with her before I maybe get another 6 sessions through a different charity agency.

Yeah. That’s going to dramatically alter my life trajectory. I’ve been through 34 years of trauma therapy. I’m sure this student will dramatically make progress with my usually “treatment resistant” PTSD in 6 hours. It’s going to miraculous.

I feel very much like I need to settle down and become a wraith. This country favours passivity and non-action in a way that is going to be a problem for me. I am not a person who sits and waits doing nothing. That leads to deep depression and self harming behaviour that I can no longer sustain physically. I can’t. I can’t go back to hurting myself to cope. Too many pieces of me are broken in ways that could be life ending if I keep it up. Too many head injuries.

Is it weird that I am not fucking ok with the idea of accidentally killing myself in a panic attack in a form of self harm that I intend to be a momentary relief of pain going too far?

If I am going to kill myself it is going to be in some way that is absolutely unmistakable. I don’t want to accidentally cause a stroke. Fuck that shit. If I swim out into the North Sea or go to a supervised euthanasia clinic so you fucking know I picked that. I desperately hope that the people who love me will find a piece of comfort in knowing that I waited as long as I possibly could. I know that probably something is just to break on its own and it won’t be my choice and that’s ok too. Then it really isn’t my fault in the same way and it won’t hurt the people who love me in the same way.

I can’t accidentally kill myself by going too far with cutting. That’s not ok. That kind of thing is messy and dramatic and traumatic in a way I don’t want.

Today is not as bad as a lot of days have been this week but I’m still not feeling strongly attached to the idea of being alive. I can’t hasten my death, and in fact I am required to act in ways that will push it away to further in the distance. It’s feeling really hard.

Like most people I don’t love being in pain. It is hard knowing there isn’t a way out. I sure as shit am not going to be asking for much of the NHS. As much as I don’t love being in pain I’d rather just go through my life in pain instead of hearing over and over that I am not good enough for the thing I know will help me. I don’t qualify. I haven’t jumped enough hoops. Why don’t I jump a little higher and wait a little longer?

These are the people who think I shouldn’t be allowed to have the sex life I want or the marriage I want and they probably think I shouldn’t have been allowed to have children. I should have waited until I was all better to go have these normal things. I haven’t done enough time waiting to deserve the things that other people get as table stakes. I’ve heard this story my whole life.

I am allowed to have what those people need. Fuck my needs.

This is where I am an absolute rubbish example of living consent culture. I was told no, I couldn’t have what I asked for. So I went out and found a way to fucking steal it anyway.

Not exactly but it sure feels like it standing where I am in this moment. Really I just found a way to pay for it and I hunted high and low before I found people who would help me on my journey. I’ve done a lot of things to try and be more ok. I’ve been doing really well for a lot of years now with only a fairly normal person amount of range of volatility.

But hey, it doesn’t even count as rape in this country. It shouldn’t bother me so much.

In a major way I feel like I am far more wounded by how this affecting Noah than I am by the assault. My life is different than it was 4 months ago in ways that feel savagely unfair and painful.

I’m not working hard at chasing down Vicki interviews. I can’t focus. I can barely think. My productivity is somewhere between 25% and 50% of my normal and it feels like an enormous stretch goal.

I feel like a wraith who should fade away to mist. The fire and energy that usually propel my survival have abandoned me. I don’t feel like I have enough faith in what I am going to do moving forward to just charge forward blindly with great force. I don’t have the energy for a bunch of false starts. I don’t. I want to curl up under a bush and never come out and let my body go back into the earth.

I feel ineffective. I feel useless. I feel like there is no point to how hard I work because it will always come back to how fucking worthless I am.

It’s hard home educating three autistic kids. They need a lot from me. Most of it I have to repeat many times. It’s exhausting. I feel like depression is covering me like a weighted blanket on top of the burn out I’ve been feeling for a long time.

One of the hardest things about the way we home educate is we don’t have the neat and tidy ways to check and see if you are doing it right. We don’t have marking periods and standardised tests. We are just living and no matter how much I do for them I never feel like I have done enough. I always feel like I am failing to teach them a lot of the things they are going to need to know. I felt like that as a classroom teacher too, even though my students went up by more than one grade level on average after a year with me. Many of my students caught up on four or six years of learning with me because I could tune in to where they needed to be reached. I worked with kids who had a lot of emotional struggles.

My adult life has been spent trying to give children the things I never got and I am feeling like a very empty bucket. I have been doing this work for 24 years now. Hell, I was a nanny and a babysitter before then. Normally I’m pretty ok with taking it in stride that young people need a lot of reminders. Right now it is hurting me desperately.

I don’t think anyone is doing anything wrong in my house. It’s hard when I’m off my game. Noah does a lot of consistency management for our family but I’m usually the motor. I feel like I lost some integral part of my mechanism and the gears are just not going and I don’t know what to do.

No, I don’t want psych meds. They are not going to clear the cobwebs they are going to make my body start feeling like I am trying to kill it. No. I have walked that road. I’ve tried so many drugs that doctors pushed on me.

EMDR would be very helpful. I’m going to look for private. I think that’s a thing I can make happen. Holy shit. Maybe I really fucking should not. I am not a good liar. I’d really like to sleep better.

It’s been hurting so much that this overlapped with getting kicked out of bike stuff. The woman who had invited me into things in the first place no longer wants me there. She asked me to stop coming because I make her uncomfortable. It’s not that “everyone” there dislikes me–she was the person I was there to get to know because I liked her. I never tried hard to get to know anyone else because my assumption was that I would be too weird. I hope they do well in the future. I think it is important work.

It is not the fault of Highland Pride that I was sexually assaulted in any way shape or form. I am going to be scared to step forward with that community in the future anyway. I feel like I am trying to back out of a lot of kink stuff locally because I am obviously making so many people feel uncomfortable.

Hey look, the bitch who was “too much” in California is also too much in small town Scotland. Duh.

Maybe if I hide for a while before coming back some of my spiky edges will be forgotten. Maybe I will figure out some piece of work to do that will buy me a place even though I am so awful.

I don’t really have hope for things feeling better right now. I know they will at some point but in this moment that seems ridiculously impossible. This always/never place is really dark. I feel scared and empty. I don’t know how to keep giving right now without a lot of very bitter and sharp detritus coming out instead of water.

I’m in a bad place. It is what it is. There is no way out other than going through it.

I know Noah is trying to walk it back because this is hurting me, but I am deeply wounded by him saying that I betrayed him in this situation. I feel wrecked by this. I wasn’t a little bit bad I was so bad.

Right now I feel like I don’t know how to be good enough to deserve anything good. All I deserve is pain until I die. I’m not working enough to be a good tool. I do bad things that hurt people. I speak too sharply because my entire consciousness is permeated with pain and it leaks out and then I am even more bad.

I feel like no one should have to deal with someone as awful as me. I feel empty of goodness. If I ever had any it is gone.

All that is left is a haze of inefficient malice.

See, I’m being good. This is not social media where I will have lots of people yell at me that I am bad for saying any of this because it is not fair that I am “triggering them”.

Fuck me. Why don’t I just shut up or die already?

Everything feels raw like a cheese grater has been at me

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I’m rereading Noah’s email to me for his equivalent check in for the week. I wrote the last piece after skimming it on my phone. On a bigger screen I see more nuance but I’m still wildly hurt.

He didn’t say that M/s isn’t working for him he said it isn’t working for me. Which is probably partly fair. I should be accepting that he has the right to treat me any way he sees fit. That’s my role here. If I don’t like it I can leave. Only I can’t leave. Of all the options on the table that’s not one. Not because it is logistically impossible (it’s not) because I would never be ok again. Yeah, people try to tell me I’d be fine and I’d move on. They are wrong. I would never be ok again. This is my only shot at a family. If I don’t get to stay in a family then I’m not staying.

This is what I get.

I am struggling with layers of stuff around sex tremendously. The pagan book about consent I’m reading is actually really evocative and useful as I’m trying to figure out how to put into words why I’m not ok.

Historical actual slavery sucks because humans are not given a choice about being treated as objects to use until they wear out. They aren’t people. BDSM and consensual slavery is not the same thing. It’s about devoting your life to serving someone else’s life by choice. There are manipulative, evil, psychotic people in the scene who try to pretend that if you do M/s then you are genuinely becoming chattel. I’ve made my feelings plain.

Noah, the bits I’m freaking out about around you forcing me to do stuff, hurting me, orgasm control, and disapproval are all coming up around sex. Not elsewhere in our relationship though you are abandoning a fair bit of that consistency to instead be freaked out by me flirting. Last I heard you weren’t upset about how I’m washing your underwear. You don’t object to how I am raising your kids or how I manage your money.

The problem is sex.

I fucked up in 2016. I said shit that hurt you to the core of your being. I did that. I’m not claiming to be better than I am. I’m not delineating all of it because doing so doesn’t help. Not because it is a “dirty secret” but because I have fucking groveled for 9 years.

I fucked up in 2016 because I couldn’t handle the way my body was being disrespected sexually.

I fucked up in 2024 when someone sexually assaulted me.

Have I ever gone off the rails sexually at other times during our 18 year relationship? Not at all to the best of my knowledge. You have a fuck ton of trauma you need to work out Noah and you do need to go do that part with someone other than me. You yelling at me that I’m about to cheat on you again is not ok when I am literally giggling with a stranger whose name I don’t know.

Do I deserve your suspicion since I have already cheated? Hell, now you can say I’ve cheated twice. Both times quite soon after being raped. If you are going to treat me with this kind of suspicion and shame at all times then you need to stop pretending you want me to have a good opinion of myself. You think I am an untrustworthy piece of shit and I need to understand that or I will be incapable of understanding the parameters within which I must operate to be “good”.

The amount of “Carry the trauma and act like it has no impact on you” that is expected of me is quite literally inhuman. I can’t be fun and upbeat and harangued for hours about how inappropriate I am. Those are two states I can’t carry at the same time. I’m not that good. If the tirades are going to be part of every single time I am near a human male because I am not trustworthy then I need to cut my fucking life down.

I feel like fucking garbage because I feel like you expect me to do what I did the first time you raped me in 2006. I didn’t fight back and try to hurt you too; I put my head down and got on with expecting this to be the rest of my life. After that I had a fuck ton more therapy which lead to more self esteem and self respect and then I fought back. I will be punished for the rest of my life for it. If I die in the year 2050 I expect that sometime in the 3 months before I die you will bitterly scream “2016” at me.

I was talking to my new counsellor today and describing how I feel about my sex life. She said it sounds incredibly dehumanising. I’ve noticed that too.

I need to be owned. I am not good enough to own the way I come out of the box. I’ve been altered a lot over a lot of years by a shocking number of people. I feel like shit. I have never and will never be good enough as I am as a human being. I will never deserve to be accepted for who I am naturally inclined to be. I am bad. I hurt Noah quite badly if I stop centering him as the only actual human in my life. If I act like I am a person whose sexuality deserves to be treated as a thing of its own then I am saying I do not want Noah to own me. That is what I got from his email today.

What I am hearing is that if I want Noah to stop yelling at me I need to absolutely go back into the Choke Chain and never rattle it again. He wouldn’t be yelling at me if he didn’t have to because my behaviour is so bad and so out of line that if he told anyone about it to try and get emotional support their only response would be to tell him to divorce me.

I am the problem.

If I want to not get screamed at I know what to do.

I guess it is back to the Choke Chain. I’ve loved these last 9 years of being afraid to say what I’m thinking or feeling. It’s been really rewarding trying hard not to think about sex at all because it is not a thing I am supposed to want. It’s a thing that is done to me when other people want to. I am a bad person if I do not hurt myself fighting off a rapist other than my husband. I am a bad person if I fight back in any way when my husband rapes me. I have consented to that once and now the conversation is over.

I am a bad person because I went and sucked my rapist’s cock two weeks after he raped me. Why did I do it? Because it felt like the only thing I could do.

Noah is right. I am a disgusting piece of filth who should not be around humans.

I’m not going to reread that email again right now even though there are many many many paragraphs I’m not responding to.

If I want ownership the price is getting to have any kind of individual sexual autonomy in this life.

ok

Do I even serve?

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For the past few months I’ve been writing weekly about my feelings about the M/s part of my marriage on a social media site. I am currently completely fucking melting down and I shut down my social media because I will do something I find embarrassing in the long run if I don’t. I can tell. I’m in that kind of place. I want to run my mouth. That’s not safe.

I should give a tiny bit of explanation about what I mean when I say M/s because out here on the open internet I could run into absolutely anyone. Y’all may not have any idea what I am talking about.

M/s refers to a Master/slave relationship. It is a formalised way of having power or authority transfer inside a romantic/sexual/maybe not either but still super intense emotional relationship. Noah has been questioning what we should be calling it.

I should stop referring to M/s then.

He is currently saying that the closest thing is like owning a feral cat, which isn’t actual ownership. I guess that means I won’t be doing a lot of these updates going forward because what I am doing with my life does not count.

I feel like the ways I serve are mostly devalued lately and Noah doesn’t acknowledge them existing outside sexual monogamy. That’s the only service he seems to value these days.

If I am not naturally, instinctively monogamous I am betraying him. I am not serving. I don’t count as property or as a slave.

Cats don’t capitalise titles.

Social media is a bad place for a break down

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I feel like one is starting and that scares me a lot. Alebeard is talking me down. This is a strange universe.

Ok, next day. This is good. Noah and I talked a lot. This is a hard space. A lot of what is going wrong right now is not about one of us being malicious. We are both feeling highly traumatised and that’s not a great thing. Noah doesn’t feel like he can get support from anyone because when someone hears about how I acted after being raped they will tell him to divorce me.

I can’t publish the transcript between the rapist and myself before the trial. I will afterwards. It will be in the public record how horribly I acted because then Noah won’t feel like I have a dirty secret. I’m a dirty whorish piece of trash. I never advertised otherwise.

After being raped I proceeded to do a really good surface demonstration of falling madly in love and being willing to toss my whole life aside for this man. I gave every sign of whole-heartedly embracing my new destiny as his partner. I was cruel and dismissive towards Noah and him knowing that I said those things is causing him a lot of intense pain. He’s sharing that pain with me. Fair enough. Maybe I do deserve this part.

I deserve to have everyone who hears about my behaviour tell Noah that he should get away from me because I am disgusting. I know I am.

I feel like this stupid rapist is the natural and inevitable follow up for what I did in kindergarten. I have been chasing people to give questionably appropriate blow jobs since I was 5 years old because my lizard brain is deeply aware that I exist for this purpose.

That hurts and scares Noah a lot. It is existentially threatening and terrifying to him that I have this programming in my brain.

Most of the time in most circumstances I have it well under control. I’m not handing out blowjobs for a fiver in a parking lot. But it feels like an overarching threat. I could. That feels like a threat inside of me to me. I assume it feels worse for Noah.

Compulsion. The fact that this stuff is compulsive and difficult to control if there are specific triggering events. Knowing that I have this cascade of behaviours living in me is a mixed bag. This makes me feel dangerous, like a gun. Like I am the threat.

This is part of why it feels like I am the problem. I am the threat. I am the one who is going to cause the pain. I am inappropriate and reactive to things Noah wishes I didn’t react to in any way shape or form. “Things” she says as if men are things. Noah’s not afraid of me leaving him for a woman, which is a bit funny, but holy heck any guy is a potential threat. I suppose it is flattering that he perceives me as being so desirable but I’m pretty sure I’m never going to be successful enough as a slut to be able to have every man.

Dale Estey’s gentle 1989 novella The Elephant Talks to God takes a whimsical jab at such a thought experiment. Immanent in nature, God appears as a cloud or rock to converse with the inquisitive elephant. The elephant wants to know: How is it that nature, which is so giving, can also be so rude? What does it mean to be an elephant, and not an ant, for instance, or a tree? Is there one truth about the world, which presents itself to all of them so differently, and how would someone find it out? Why is there fear, and what’s the deal with love? What happens in death? Why is there such a thing as “if” — that is, choices and possibilities? How tragic is it that a butterfly, so beautiful, lives only through the summer?

“Butterflies don’t live a season,” answers God. “They live a life.” The elephant protests. “They’re gone when it’s their time,” replies the cloud. “To a butterfly the season is their life, they expect nothing more and fulfill their existence. To the trees, your life is brief…. Seconds or hours, long shadows or short, it’s all the same kind of time. The butterfly feels he has as long a life as you.” Then pondering how such limits could be more gift than theft, “God spoke to the elephant, and called him by his name, and filled his heart full of his beloved butterflies, and they soared through his blood, wingtip to wingtip, until he understood the power of their life.”

www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/do-elephants-have-souls

What is the value of a life? What is the purpose of life? My purpose has been tied to sex in ways that are challenging and difficult. Noah’s fear of my sexuality is a big issue for us. Noah has terror about my sexuality.

If I were better able to be monogamous this would be no problem at all. I could lock it up in a box only he gets to open and everything would be fine. The trouble is my sex drive tends to be mostly “on” or mostly “off”. I can channel it when it is on but most of the time if monogamy is the requirement it is better for it to be turned off. I wish I could perfectly wish away/turn off my sex drive. I’m sorry for every time I can’t. It is turned off most of the time I am around my kids. That’s been part of why I don’t have a lot of spontaneous desire sitting around the house with my family and why Noah feels so threatened when I have it outside the house. If I’m not feeling it sitting in a room with Noah and my kids I must not want Noah very much.

I wonder on and off through the years if I shouldn’t go back on something like an SSRI because it will eliminate my sex drive.

Me wanting sex is a problem. I don’t want polite, legal, appropriate, monogamous sex. So it’s better that I don’t want it at all ever and I simply endure it. I am a big problem when I want it.

Time is a thief

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Rosanne Cash wrote a touching essay about Kris Kristofferson. (https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/kris-kristofferson-tribute-rosanne-cash-essay-1235129095/)

Write about it.

I deactivated social media accounts today. I’m not ok.

There’s a lot going on and it’s hitting me in waves. I’m struggling intensely with my overwhelming sense of inadequacy and badness. I am not dealing with the way I feel like badness is what my soul has in it and it is what I am and I can’t be anything else.

I thought I wanted the Choke Chain to end but I’m not really sure that it can. I’m not sure we will stay married if I change my behaviour.

When you are so bad that your husband goes to the police to document your horrible self harming sexual behaviour maybe I should go on drugs that eliminate my sex drive. Maybe that would be for the best. I should definitely stop trying to talk to people. I fuck it up over and over and over in ways big and small.

Right this minute I cannot perceive a future in which I am anything other than bad. I cannot perceive a future with less pain. I don’t see value in me or my existence.

I don’t understand why anyone wants me to stay when they don’t particularly like me or what I do very much. It’s deeply confusing to me.

Noah brought up the birthday book this morning. See–people wanted to demonstrate how much they care for me! Would you like me to go through page by page and list off all the people who don’t talk to me anymore? It’s almost everyone in the book. Some of them are dead. Some we’ve just drifted apart with distance… like me moving out of the country because those relationships were not working for me. Several they specifically divorced me in loud and messy ways. The ones who wrote the most about how I am the most amazing–those are the ones who read me for the most filth when they were done with me.

I am feeling intensely done with me so I’m not judging.

Write it down. Be bigger. Take up more space. But I feel like when I do that what I am actually doing is spreading toxic sludge all over innocent victims who don’t deserve that.

When I take up more space and put myself out there I am raped again. Then my husband is going to spend months or years analysing every interaction I have with men for more proof that he has to lock me down to prevent me reacting poorly to a rapist.

No. No I should not take up more space and put myself out there in the world. No. Stop fucking lying. It is bad when I do.

I am bad when I do.

Sometimes I stop and think really hard about how terrified I am of the ocean. Of how deeply convinced I am that the ocean is going to kill me. Then I think about being a counter phobic 6. That which scares me the most is that which I need to run at the hardest.

I know one way to make sure I only do one bad thing ever again and then no more bad things. I know one way. Every other way I will be more bad. I will fail more. I will hurt people more. Every other path is more fraught with more pain for me and everyone I inflict myself on.

I am not going to kill myself. I have a 6 year old. That’s not an option. There is not an amount of pain great enough that I deserve to have it stop in favour of her hurting more.

I hurt and I feel empty and unlovable and worthless. I feel defective and disgusting.

I feel like the single most heinous thing I do every single day is wake up and force the world to endure one more day of me being here.

Keep resting

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It’s weird having a 16 year old. In many ways it feels like I should have this person basically cooked and ready to be an adult. Yet sometimes it is glaringly obvious that he still *needs* me. I’ve been antsy during this surgery recovery. I really *want* to get up and work/exercise more. I am struggling with the bullet train inner monologue of “If you sit around all the time you don’t deserve sympathy/help for your health problems. You aren’t looking after yourself so you deserve every bad thing that happens.”

He’s been talking a lot about how scared he was when he watched me have massive life threatening bleeds after surgeries. He’s kinda fucked up about it.

I am currently in the period of time where a normal person *should* return to exercising.

I am still experiencing pain. I am now in the window of time where I normally start to push myself.

Then either my skin opens or a blood vessel bursts. It’s part of a genetic condition. It’s predictable. Especially since it’s happened *in my body* several times. It’s not paranoia. It’s awareness of risk.

This is where “invisible disability” stuff is hard. It’s hard to predict and make general statements about. It’s hard to exist in a way that allows people to understand when you do and don’t need help that is friendly and kind and gentle enough that they don’t get mad at you.

Social anxiety at 11.

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I’m not doing well with people. I am grateful I have an excuse to hide in my house. Being around people feels like a horrible thing I’m doing to people. I feel deeply inadequate. I am upset that I managed to wreck one of the friendships I put the most effort into over the past five years. I am really sad that I managed to make myself unwelcome in the first vanilla community I tried to join. It is making me feel intensely more alienated and wrong.

This kind of thing is what comes up in my head when I think about myself as being bad all the time. I’m in my mid 40’s and I still don’t know how to act well enough to not get chased out of communities. That sucks.

I have a deep need for community and friendship that Noah doesn’t fill. He’s great but he’s one person. I do have a few friends here but I don’t feel welcome in the community. I am not assimilating that well. Shocking, I know. I don’t feel very likeable and it means I’m not feeling like I can or should go to things when I know the host would like me to come. I worry about inflicting myself on the other guests. I don’t want people to feel like they have to interact with me when they don’t want to.

I’m scared of the event in October. I’m going to have to manufacture a giant pretense of self esteem and confidence and right now that is sounding terrifying. I am not feeling very good about myself in ways that are hard to ignore. I’m feeling deeply unworthy. I am too high in cost and too little in return. I am a net loss.

This feeling makes me want to hide in a closet under a pile of blankets. I take extreme comfort from the knowledge that Noah thinks I am absolutely worth all the effort he puts into looking after me.

I can’t need anyone else. Just Noah. So when I feel like I do right now, where I am just a bottomless pit of need and fair I sit in a room by myself because I have nothing to give. If I have nothing to give then I need to be alone. I am a net loss when I am at full capacity. How in the fuck do I justify all that cost when I have so little value to anyone outside of my house?

I will get over feeling like this. I have felt this way before and then I stopped. I know that will happen again. It’s just going to take some time of being alone and trying to regenerate any sense in myself that anything I am or do has any value at all of any kind to anyone other than myself. I wish I had more of a sense that I just deserve to exist because of me because that is enough but I don’t.

I am deeply driven by collectivist and friend network building urges to amass a feeling of family. The trouble is, I am always too high in cost for that. It is what it is. I just don’t know how to shave off enough parts of me to cost less for people.

There is a void in my day.

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I’ve been talking to TB all day every day for four months now. It’s been really amazing. I have enjoyed climbing into his brain so much. Now I understand that doing so is going to block him from finding the future he wants and I have to stop. That’s hard. I feel like I am punishing myself.

I don’t say good morning and good night every day to anyone I don’t live with. That’s a lot of pressure for me. I’m a forgetful person. I have a lot of friends. I haven’t had a “we talk every day” friend since the Bonus Mama. I think I lost her in 2017? I feel absolutely allergic to the idea of having a friend I talk to that much ever again. I don’t trust the dynamic at all. If I talk to someone everyday for a couple of years then it is agonisingly painful when I am rejected because they don’t want to anymore or they found someone they want to talk to more. I don’t handle that detransition very well so I need to ensure that I don’t start that expectation within myself.

I have more abandonment issues than there are grains of sand in the Mojave. I maintain long-term friendships by making sure I never ask for or expect too much. I have to keep my needs to myself. I can share wants with friends easily, needs are harder. I have to be truly desperate before I will ask for help with a need. I would far rather do without or hurt myself doing it alone.

It’s why Noah works so hard at under promising and over delivering. He makes sure his actual promises to me are very conservative and easy to follow. He’s kind like that. He has learned how to be kind to me in this way.

I rarely worry about being too much for Noah. Today I was standing about 100m away from him; I was waiting for him and the kiddos to come in my vague direction. He ran over to me so that I didn’t have to stand alone. There was no reason to run. The kids were playing and having fun. He just wanted to. He didn’t want to be away from me for a second longer than he had to. He’s set the bar so high that other people can’t match it and maybe that’s ok. It sure makes the prospect of poly kind of weird. Someone has to treat me at least as well as Noah does or I am *choosing* to be less well treated every moment I spend with them.

I still believe with my entire soul that there was the potential for a life changing relationship with TB, it’s just not what he wants for his life. That’s ok. I really understand choosing hypothetical children over certain not quite enough. It’s a little funny because I don’t get told I’m the one who is not enough very often. It is fitting at its core though because I never pursued TB in the first place because I assumed I wouldn’t be good enough. Also, he’s nothing like Noah and I need Noah like I need oxygen and water.

TB fills needs I normally don’t even see in myself because they are so buried. I will go back to burying them because they are not things I can fill in my life with my current set up. It won’t kill me. These aren’t food and water and shelter kinds of needs. These are emotional needs around stability and being loved without being hurt. Noah is absolutely amazing and he loves me madly and deeply, but there’s a lot of hurt. I’m not complaining I am acknowledging.

I almost got to find out what it is like to be loved and cherished by a partner without having to endure pain to deserve it. I came really close but this is neither horseshoes nor hand grenades. It was weird seeing the possibility of finding out what that is like. It seemed alienating and impossible and improbable. Turns out I was right. That is not for me in this life.

It is breaking my heart. I wish I had never considered the possibility.

The fucking worst part is I had a hideous thought that makes me feel sick. “Since I am not a suitable partner on my own, maybe I should abort an accidental pregnancy.” I have never tied anyone to me through negligence and I will not start at this stage of my life. Elsenet I have recently done a copious amount of writing about how absolutely not ok I am with the possibility of aborting a child. Especially a fourth child. Especially an unwanted fourth child. I am the fourth unwanted child and I should have been aborted. I will be very careful and not get pregnant. I’m good at being slutty without accidental pregnancies. I feel bad inside myself about myself that I would have such a thought. I would never force someone to be with me. He’s made it clear that I am not enough. That would be true with an oops child in the picture. God that would be so unfair. This particular bit of calculus is why I’m going to have one sex filled trip with him and then not see him again. Apparently there is a hyperfertility uptick during perimenopause. My chance of getting pregnant is higher than it used to be.

Naw. Not playing with that fire a bunch over the next few years. That would be looking for pain.

Why one sex filled trip since this is not going to turn into what I wanted?

I feel like I will think about this and decide over and over and over for a long time. All the way till January. 18 weeks and 2 days. As long as we courted. As long I poured energy to trying to figure out if we could be good for each other as more than friends. That’s a good thing. That gives me time to get over feeling butthurt and go back to being excited.

I get to bang someone I have wanted to bang for 25 fucking years. That’s awesome. I’m looking forward to it. I think it is still going to be tender and sweet and loving. He is my very dear friend and we have both nursed a simmering crush all this time. Being incompatible isn’t something that either of us have done to the other. We are still good people having a good friendship with deep admiration and respect on both sides. It just so happens that I also like having sex with friends. At least I used to a long time ago in another life. I’m not so big on it here in Scotland. I am freaked out by the idea and I can’t consider it.

I feel scared about the amount of fall out that is going to be the result of this failed courtship. I would still like to do some fun travel things with him as just a friend. Maybe I am hoping that the sex is unimpressive so I can get over wanting him. That is the result after sex with quite a lot of people. Most people are not that skilled at sex and sometimes I am not up for the amount of work involved with ensuring I have good sex with someone who isn’t all that good at sex. I can do it. I can push just about anyone through having sex with me in a way that will get me off acceptably; I am both easy to get off and very skilled at directing sex.

I have very strong feelings at this point about the trip. I am not ok with “let’s see what happens”. I am going to direct this very much. I am going to go in knowing what I am trying to get out of each separate encounter. I feel bad, but I’m basically setting up how I can ensure a just and equitable transaction of emotional and physical energy. I’m not going to give more than I get. Oh fuck that.

Nope. That ship sailed away on de Nile and it ain’t ever coming back. I can’t get back on that river again. I will not put pennies in a piggy bank I will never be able to withdraw from. I’m a selfish cunt and I am not running at a surplus in my life. I now need to be a lot more fucking honest with myself about the cost I pay compared to what I am getting back. Is it enough? What do I need to do to make sure that I’m not bleeding out? I can’t have any fucking holes in my bucket and pouring energy into someone who is that actively encouraging me to invest, while planning to walk away suddenly at any point, would put a giant hole into my bucket.

The amount of hurt I feel today is 1/1,000 of what I would feel in two years. I might have started to trust that I was going to be kept come what may. I would never try to keep TB from finding a different primary if keeping me as a comet/distant secondary was a priority. It isn’t a priority for him. I can’t invest more emotionally in someone who will drop me like a hot potato for monogamy. That’s acting like it’s ok to treat me like a resource to use until something better pops up. I will not let my friend treat me so shabbily because then he would have to carry the shame for doing so.

I think at some point along the way this sounded more ok to me? I think there have been too many statements about “for the rest of your/my life”. I can no longer put any trust in the words that are being said. They are not at all reflective of reality. They are things you sorta hope might come true but it’s not a serious priority or demand upon any future partners.

Maybe if I didn’t have that Mojave Desert sand depth of abandonment issues. I’m not securely attached enough in my own self to withstand the level of pain I would feel at being discarded later. That would totally fuck up my ability to parent/teach well. I can’t set my life up for that crashing pain to come down on my kids. That’s fucked up and unfair. I can’t compartmentalise well enough for them to be totally unaffected by my mental state. I have to take steps to increase stability, not make choices that make instability more likely.

“You can depend on me. I will always be there for you.”

Those two sentences really should get me running in the opposite direction as fast as I can run. Usually when someone says that I stop hearing from them soon after and then I never speak to them again. It’s a fucking death curse for my relationships. No, I can’t depend on people. No one will always be there for me. Not even Noah. Not because Noah is shitty or because he doesn’t try hard; life is fucking brutal, dude.

I had very large problems before I ever met Noah. They haven’t all completely gone away despite all the work that we’ve done. Some of these are chronic and permanent. I don’t have a choice. I am always going to fucking struggle. I do stuff for myself long past the point when someone else would complacently accept help. I will fucking cry the whole time I hold a fork but I will not allow myself to be fed. I will eat the food like a fucking dog before I will allow someone to feed me when my hands aren’t working.

I have a lot of big feelings about the increasing disability I am experiencing. I wonder if part of my freak out about TB is I’m well aware I’m going to have slim pickings for folks who want to date me as I get older and more disabled and a lot less rich. Given the reading requirement involved in dating me I might be deciding that I am theoretically poly but I never get around to it. I am fucking difficult. Lowering the admission bar would not improve the success rate, it would make it worse.

95% chance of flaming out before 6 months. I’ve got statistics based on a significant enough sample size that I can use percentages. Yup.

I am difficult and demanding and exacting and way happier being alone over putting up with bullshit. I also have a husband who acts like I hung the fucking moon. I am not in any way deficient in sexual attention.

I spent four months helping a friend learn how to have a variety of adult relationship conversations that he otherwise would have had difficulty with down the line. I can’t call it mentoring because I sure as shit did it with the plan to fuck him. I made sure this vanilla monogamous person was going to be making a well informed decision with regard to the risk involved in being in a relationship with me. There are lot of implications to joining my life. It exists in a lot of layers and either you are in it or you are someone I talk to sometimes.

I’m not being mean. I have to keep walking. No matter what I feel or what happens to me I have to keep walking until I can’t walk anymore and then I will fucking crawl. I will fucking horrify the NHS because I’m not going to ask for help until it’s pretty ridiculous. They will scold me for not calling them in sooner to help. After all I am entitled.

I don’t really believe I am entitled to much in this life. I have acquired much. I am doing what I can to make this house into a place that will survive for a generation after me before needing more significant repair work. Sure, someone will probably paint over my art. I know. Deep sigh. My kids will have a secure home from which to figure out their lives. I’m not promising to make them rich enough to not need jobs but they will be able to survive without assistance from the government and without needing a job like Noah’s. I am planning as hard as I can for a future where we don’t need that kind of money anymore to be ok. I have been paying Future Us hand over fist in a variety of ways that will outlast me.

I think our days of regular, unplanned, expensive travel are over. I don’t think we can come to the weddings. If Noah hadn’t lost the last big tech job, sure we could have done all of them without a problem. We would have been on track even with the bulge of unexpected financial loss. Now he hasn’t worked in six months and it looks like his next job will be pretty much exactly how much we need to live on and we will no longer be contributing towards retirement. Awesome. That’s with a lot of cutting out expenses in terms of “what we need to live on”. I’ll need to cut expenses by 50%. I’m going to be fixing less on the house and at a much slower rate. Good thing I already got most of the biggest ones done.

Was I so intrigued by TB because I am an asshole and I wanted help fixing my house? It’s not a 0% chance. That takes the air out of my balloon in terms of being indignant about him not wanting me. Am I mad about the benefits I won’t get? Don’t get all self righteous here, Krissy. Sure he wants to keep getting the emotional support benefits without the commitment. Are my motives actually only pure and altruistic or some bullshit like that?

Probably not. I’m a selfish cunt. Yo, brutal honesty dictates I say that I was frankly concerned about the mismatch in physical size for intimate matters. That was going to be a difficult thing for me. Combining that mismatch with the other disparities in sexual preferences I wouldn’t be getting so much out of the sex that it would fill up my end of need for emotional support.

I have a high opinion of the value of the support I offer as a partner. Demanding high return support in exchange has historically resulted in my life steadily improving and me having increasingly healthy and positive relationships.

I feel weird about that kind of a statement right now. It feels like a pie crust promise. It feels like a big claim without evidence. I don’t jump into bed with everyone I want to be friends with because it’s the primary way I know to get people to like me. It’s been more than 8 years since I’ve had sex with a friend. Holy moly it is the longest stretch of monogamy in my life. I think twice as long as previous stints? Why do I want it to end so much?

I have a narrow window. For one week I will have a travel boyfriend that I will have a lot of fun with. I have negotiated it painstakingly with my husband so that I can be as respectful as possible of his feelings through this whole experience. I think Noah will fall in love again some day. I think he will have friends he wants to have sex with. I have some hope about my ability to send him off for adventures with a big smile on my face. It will be a lot easier to do when I am not feeling constant anxiety about when TB will be dumping me. Noah and I will keep negotiating and talking. We will make friends slowly and not go out hunting for strangers/near-strangers here.

I have a husband who will give the full measure of devotion in service to my safety, health, and longevity. I don’t get to feel actual bitterness about not being so sparkly and shiny that I get to have another serious partner who is nearly so devoted. That’s a big fucking ego you have there, Krissy. Really think a lot of yourself, do you?

I guess I do. I think I need to be honest with myself and with anyone who ever tries to date me that I don’t accept inconsistency. Do not make pie crust promises while asking me to trust you. That’s not something I can work with. Know your own mind. Think about your shit. Figure out what you want. If it isn’t me then don’t waste my fucking time. I have a short life. Trying to prevent me from spending my time in ways that will build towards my long-term future is absofuckinglutely disrespectful. As I will try hard not to waste your time. It’s about respect.

I’m disabled. What I can get done in a day is distinctly finite. I have bursts of time where I overextend on a project and get an unhealthy amount done. I always pay in big and small ways.

What I do with my time is a big McFlippin Deal. Time is my most scarce resource in this life. I will be spending the vast majority of my time with my family. If a person does not particularly have any desire to integrate with that unit then they need to be a person I talk to sometimes.

I don’t have enough self to give to be doling out big chunks to a bunch of off-stage people who are not actually part of my life. It’s just math. It’s pragmatism. It’s reality. I need to treat people as not good matches for me when they are happy to use a lot of my time with no regard to the effect that has on my ability to live the life I want to lead. If someone does not notice or care about the holistic reality of my life then I need to keep them in a small box away from my life where I limit how far down the rabbit hole I go.

I need to believe that I deserve a good match. There is a void in my day right now because I want to be poking TB. I don’t want to though. I want to be poking in the direction of a fantasy I had, which isn’t at all the same thing as poking him. I want to be poking at a partner who is doing work to making themself better actively like I am to remind one another that there is fun in trade for the hard and the boring. “Hey asshole, poke your husband.”

I do. I poke and prod and talk to him all day long. I have a lot of RAM in my brain. Once he gets a job I won’t be able to take up all his time like I have been doing. Holy cheese I’m looking forward to retirement. I could keep more people busy. God I am a bottomless pit of need. I don’t want to do it for someone where I don’t get the long run benefit of nipping at their heels to get them to run just a little faster. It’s a lot of fucking energy.

The trade value for my time as a girlfriend experience is quite high. It’s not your soul but it’s pretty close.That is probably a highly inappropriate amount of hubris. Oh well. The down side is less time spent with people who don’t want to put much energy into me. That doesn’t sound like a down side when I say it like that. It kind of sounds like healthy self regard.

I don’t have a lot of unrequited loves left to come knocking. I think the ties of the past are finally fraying. I think that going forward it’s going to be a very weird process. Good thing I am primarily interested in making friends. That is a worthy endeavour and I strive to not have a lot of standards and demands for friends. Friends are free to be whatever kinds of fuck offs they want to be. It doesn’t impact my life too badly because of boundaries. I keep people in small boxes.

My standards for Noah are shockingly high at this point in a lot of ways. Very low in other ways. I don’t ever get to expect my birthday to be a good day for me. The most peaceful birthdays I spend alone. I don’t have expectations of anyone that way. I don’t have to take care of anyone. I don’t have to carefully monitor my tone to ensure that I am being respectful even when I feel shitty. My birthday is not a day that is good for me. TB has long since proposed me spending my birthdays with him.

He offered to be the one who made sure my birthdays are special while planning to dump me if someone better comes along.

I’m 10 days out from my birthday. I am glad I am downgrading my expectations in my mind from “boyfriend” to “friend with benefits”. That means I can stringently avoid getting myself into a situation where yet another person makes my birthdays feel full of memories of not being wanted or good enough. Fuck. That really fucking hurts. That’s not a small thing to offer. I refused it instantly. No. I couldn’t do that to Noah or the kids. They would take that very personally. I can go away with Aunt Jenny and everyone wishes me well with a smile.

If I am going to get back to interviews then I need to get my sleep schedule under better control. Good night.

I need to change my mindset.

2 Replies

“I’m not rejecting you” he said. Enh, it depends on your perspective. Are you rejecting an offer that would give you small pieces of what you want in exchange for not being willing to give up on finding the whole package? Yes, you are. It’s not a bad thing to do. I walked out on a partner when I was 23 because he didn’t want to be a parent and I did. I am not offended that I am being rejected but I am. It seems pretty logical to me, reasonable even. I just hope it works out how you want it to.

I feel rejected because I was offering a way that I would try to change myself to fit around someone in a way I usually won’t offer. I’m not a vanilla girl. Trying to figure out how I would exist in that kind of long-term relationship is quite an interesting mental exercise but it doesn’t matter. It’s not going to happen.

I feel bad because I am probably not going to be open to that kind of option in the future. I think that he thinks I will kind of wait around to be a Plan B if he fails to get what he wants in the next 10 years. I won’t. That would destroy my self esteem and I am not going to do or be that for anyone. Fuck no. I am not a fucking option you can pick up and set down when you feel like it. I am not a fucking doll. I am not the sort to wait and pine.

I will never stop loving him. I have loved him for most of my life and that won’t change. I have *intense* love for my friends. I will jump through flaming hoops to support my friends. I am devoted and adoring and full of encouragement. The thing is, I put most of me in a box in order to be respectful to my friends. I am so much and I don’t want to be inappropriate or overwhelm people. I leave most of me in a box and only offer a very small portion to each friend. I support this partition by not talking to people all that often. When I talk to someone too often I start wanting and needing them to accept more of me. My friends are friends instead of partners because more of me is not welcome in that relationship.

I’m not complaining. I’m observing. This is part of why I will sort of disappear from the Scottish social scene for a bit. I brought too much of myself in June and July and now I feel like I want and need to be accepted more fully as myself and that is not actually on offer. I am not going to reach a deep and meaningful level with most people here and it’s going to go quite poorly if I try. I don’t have the ability to absorb that level of failure over and over without flinching and I can’t flinch right now. I can’t look weak because that is when people attack the hardest.

I’m really scared and I feel desperately insecure. In a way this summer has been quite an adventure through what Noah and I moving back towards being polyamorous might bring up. Travel Boyfriend is a dear friend who entertained the idea of a walk on the wild side before figuring out it isn’t for him. Bad Timing is a selfish jerk who did not care that he was putting me in a bad position where my life would incur harm. I feel like acknowledging these extreme differences of what dating might bring up is important.

Noah and I are continuing to talk and negotiate because this is going to be a long and slow process for us. Luckily we are both starting from a truly advantageous position: we are wildly compatible and our relationship is really fun. It means that when considering the possibility of dating someone else we have to pass up on time together for it. That means the person has to be really special and not many people are going to land in that zone for us. We are intense weirdos and we freak out most people–that’s step 1. Neither of us can date someone who acts in destructive ways towards our marriage–that’s step 2. That’s not ok. If we tell someone about a relationship boundary and they are disrespectful that needs to be an immediate no. My life is a very carefully constructed creation and I’m not blowing it up for anyone.

I’m not confident that I will be as open to someone else as I was with TB. He coasted through showing up with a lot of history. He didn’t have to actively earn trust. He started out fully trusted and could only lose trust from there. That was maybe not fair? I’m not sure. It’s definitely not my default approach to new people. Usually people earn trust in painstaking increments. I suppose TB did, but he did it while running in the background and I wasn’t expecting it or demanding it of him.

Noah and I are talking very frankly about the fact that I shouldn’t have someone be more than a friend unless they have the capacity to be obsessed with me the way I need people to be.

A friend recently broke up with a partner because she felt like she was being used like a fleshlight. He said, “You feel better than a fleshlight.” He thought it was a compliment.

I live with someone who thinks my existence is magical and sparkly and worth devoting his entire life to supporting. Why in the fuck should I devote a lot of time to someone who doesn’t think about me much and who doesn’t care about me and my story and my skills and my life? That sounds pretty stupid to me.

I am not a person with whom one passes time.

Either you are devoted to me like your life depends on it or we are just friends who spend time together once in a while. I have traditionally enjoyed having sex with friends; I see nothing wrong with it. Not everyone I have sex with becomes a boy/girl/theyfriend. I have expectations of people I date. I don’t have many expectations of my friends. I take people as they are and I don’t spend a lot of time requiring that they care about me intensely. I accept the relationship they offer. I rarely ask for more.

I go out in to the world and I exist loudly and I see who reaches out to me. That’s how I find friends. I love my friends. My friends are people who appreciate me and love me very deeply. They carry me through life on a wave of devotion. The thing is, I have to accept that each person will give what they have to spare when they have anything going spare. It has to be the aggregate that carries me forward because I cannot depend on a single friend to be there to catch me. I have to just hope someone shows up. I get lucky a lot.

Jenny is amazing.

A lot of my friends are amazing. I have been caught and then passed hand to hand over and over. I trust that I will figure out how to build it again, it just takes time. It takes time and vulnerability and right now I don’t feel like I have a lot of resiliency to offer. I’m really scared and I’m really sad.

I have good reasons for both feelings. I am also full of joy. I am really and truly living the life I set out to live.

The funny thing about not gardening almost at all this year: literally my point is that I want to build a regenerating food forest that will thrive with neglect. I am trying to build something self reinforcing. In a way taking a year off is a great idea because I see more of what is trying to happen without my interference. That’s an important lesson.

Things with the kids are at a better place than they have been for a while, it’s super nice.

I can’t figure out if I’m being unreasonable with myself about how I’m dealing with the sexual assault trial. I want to stop feeling active anxiety in my body. I feel like I’m simmering in a low level panic attack a lot of the time right now. It is a lot of why I am consciously choosing to be anhedonic most of the time because it is that or feel too much of everything and be overly volatile and inappropriate. I need to be chill and calm and gentle and patient. Do you know what is hard to do when you feel existential dread and terror? Be chill and calm and gentle and patient.

It’s hard to learn when your brain is exploding with fear and anger. It’s interesting feeling this now after so many years of having my PTSD symptoms under control.

And I can’t exercise until October because of surgery recovery. Woo. Awesome to have all these feelings and nowhere to put them. Noah takes as much as he can. I write the ones I can. There’s still a lot left.

One of the ways I manage my expectations of friends is to not talk to them very often and always show up and act like no time at all has passed. I don’t bring a lot of my burdens to the relationship. I usually literally monitor time and make sure I don’t talk more than 50% and I usually try hard to not even get to filling half the time. I know other people need a place to express themselves and they don’t write. I do. I leave the pieces of myself on the internet that I wish I had enough intimacy in my life to share with real people face to face but that isn’t a reality in my life. It never has been. I think that is part of why I have such intense need to write. If I plop pieces of myself on the internet then no one can say I “forced” them to listen to me talk.

The difference between trauma dumping and being a writer is: you are not forced to read/listen to any of this. If you decide to spend your time reading what someone has to say about trauma that’s on you, buddy. That’s consent, which makes it not trauma dumping by definition.

I’ve been feeling really ashamed to write about myself publicly since I moved. I have a lot of weird sex stuff in my life. I have traditionally written it down because I’m trying to figure out how to practice harm reduction in my life. I think that is causing me harm. It is going to be far more scandalous here than it was in California.

Other folks would tell me to just be anonymous. No. That is acting like I have something to be ashamed of. It is acting like I am committing a sin. I’m weird but I’m not evil. I’m not doing anything that is wrong. A lot of it is non-standard and broadly disapproved of, maybe even for good reasons. Every rule has exceptions. I have been exceptional all my life. I don’t plan to change.

Not really feeling ok.

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I would like to delete social media. I would like to stop trying to make friends here. I feel lonely and alienated and unwanted and bad. I feel pointless, stupid, disconnected, and deeply sad. My big “going right” social connection for this year is something that I can have for a short time then I need to let it go. Past that my new connections are going pretty poorly. Hell, he’s not a new connection just a change. A short change before we go back to normal because no actually more is not a good thing.

I feel painfully lonely and like I am deeply uncomfortable with the idea of being in a room with anyone. I would like to rip my skin off. It’s not about any one thing or another. I’ve had to give a police interview about my sexual assault history. That was really deeply fucked up for me. There was being assaulted. There was being asked to leave a vanilla community group. There was a warm and wonderful possibility that floated by on the stream for a little while before moving off. Parenting is always hard.

Being married is always hard. Being me is always hard. It’s not one thing. It’s all of it. I would like a vacation from being in my brain.

What does the future hold?

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The last few months have dramatically not gone to plan on many levels. Everything has ended up being way harder. In a way that makes me feel sad. In a way it almost feels like a relief. I’ve been waiting for the results of the last round of “My efforts towards the first wave of people have either flamed out or settled into a secure relationship”. I now feel more secure and confident about where I should and shouldn’t be putting energy. I learned who actually likes me and who likes me if I can lie really well all the time and care about their feelings instead of my own.

It’s ok. That’s normal human stuff. I’m not angry about it, just resigned. I’ve been saying since I moved here that some attempts at relationships would work out but most would not. It’s turning out to be true. I’m not shocked or upset.

I am in need of resting and regrouping. I am desperately in need of a chance to refocus on the parts that matter the most. The only people who are likely to show up for me in my old age live in this house. It’s simply, literally, true. I’ve been looking outside my house a lot over the past few years in ways that have put me in a tough spot.

Heck, even reopening the conversation about polyamory. I am patting Past Me on the back for saying, “Let’s start talking about this when we have no chance of either of us going out on a date with someone anytime soon.” Yes, I have a lover-in-waiting but from the very first day there has been the understanding that if it turns out this would be a bad thing for my marriage we won’t do it at all. I’m pretty certain it won’t harm my marriage. What might it turn into?

I think I am going to have an old friend I love very much I see sometimes. It’s difficult trying to figure out what is the best path forward for all concerned. I would respond more to stated wishes of the folks involved if they were more willing to state them. Instead I am just flying blind.

I’m thinking about the series of steps relationships usually have for me: getting past the first date, 3 weeks, 3 months, 6 months, 9 months, and a handful have morphed and changed over much longer periods. In terms of roughly the number of people I have dated: 78% only get one date, 10% made it to 3 weeks, 5% made it to 3 months, 2% made it to 6 months, 2% made it to 9 months, 2-3% make it more than a year. I’m counting the ending point only. I break up with ~95% of the people I date by 6 months. That’s fucking dramatic.

I’m 3.5 months into courting Travel Boyfriend and I’m having a lot of feelings. I wouldn’t say we are dating yet, not really. But we are courting to see if there is the possibility of a relationship there that could be good for both of us. Noah is being patient and understanding and supportive.

Most humans take on jobs, tasks, and relationships without really understanding how hard they will turn out to be in advance. This is the human “normal” as a way to approach the future. If we knew how bad it would be we wouldn’t try. So in a way this hubris is important and great and absolutely necessary for the species. The trouble is, when you sign on for something not knowing how hard it will be you sometimes get yourself into a situation where you can’t finish something and other people suffer. That is part of life. That failure is part of life. I feel like it is the kind of thing where people learn their own limits through trial and error, mostly.

I have failed a lot of times. I am pretty clear about a lot of the scope of my limits.

I am a human with a lot of limits. I have to respect those.

I am very nervous about aspects of this relationship with Travel Boyfriend. The very best role I can play in his life is to push him through fixing the stuff that stands between him and seeming like someone who would be a really great primary partner for anyone. There are specific aspects of his life that make it pretty impossible for him to find what he says he wants to have. Every single one of those things could be changed with conscious effort. If he actually wants what he says he wants. They are things that would be hard to change completely on his own. They are things that are significant enough that it’s hard to get buy in from a stranger that the payoff off for the work will be worth the effort. Every relationship is a crapshoot. Everyone is operating at a deficit these days. Who has the energy to help other people work through their shit?

Amusingly I’m writing this while listening to the song that played in the strip club the first time he ever saw me with my shirt off. I was 18. It was a friend’s birthday. I was pulled up on stage by the dancers. I had awkward tights and shorts on under my skirt so I didn’t try to remove my bottoms. I was fine with the ladies taking my top off.

I have to stop and think about our old Theatre Director. (That’s now his official nickname.) I don’t think I have written about this much over here. After I moved to Scotland Theatre Director ended up back in Texas providing hospice care to his parents. He helped them die. I knew he was a bad alcoholic. Before either of his parents died he and I talked about how he really didn’t know what he was going to do when his folks died. He’d have to leave the house and go somewhere and that was a big question mark. I told him that when he had to leave he could come stay with me for 6 months on a visitor visa.

Eventually he did come after everything finished years later. He stayed in the studio. He had a lot of identity wrapped up in being “that guy”. That guy you know who you can always call because he knows how to fix the problem. Time and grief and trauma and addiction were all weighing very heavily on him. He felt the weight of the failures in his life very keenly. It went about as well as such an experience is going to go.

I worry a lot about people writing checks they can’t cash. I worry about doing it. It’s not that I only worry about people handing them to me. I worry about the balance I get in return for how much effort I am putting out. There’s no fair here. I have already written a lot of big checks. How much do I really have left in my budget? What is realistic?

I am incredibly lucky that Noah has been unemployed right now. I have needed a lot of support and he’s been able to provide it. That means I haven’t asked local people for help. That’s what makes people feel like neighbours. I really can’t. I don’t feel like I’ve done a great job at making friends. People say that I can ask for help. But I can’t. I would much rather wither clean away than ask for help from people who have not demonstrated a desire for my company.

I do asks things of my Bestie in town. She is carrying a very heavy load though and I don’t do a lot to make hers easier. We are doing the best we can through this phase of life together. She is the sister of my heart and I followed her across the sea and I do not regret that. I am lying when I say that I can only depend on the people under this roof. Bestie has been a fair and foul weather friend for 30+ years.

When Theatre Director was here what he really needed me to do was participate in a facade where he “helped” me do projects that I could do on my own. The trouble was, I can’t do those things alone. He wasn’t actually able to help very much. That got me into some bad spots with my body and he expected me to ignore my pain to assuage his ego. That was not a thing I could do. That really hurt emotionally on top of the physical pain. Theatre Director was not able to assess “This project is too physically difficult for us and we should not do it.” When I said that he did not want to believe me.

The kindest thing I can do is try to understand when other people are trying to write checks they can’t cash and give them the pretense of belief. Meanwhile I must mentally put the claim into the “this is a pie crust promise” bucket in my head. I’m not very good at this. I have to consciously fight my inner fury about being clearly lied to.

It is hard that people don’t know they are lying. They mean it when they say it. They don’t know what they are promising and they don’t mean what they actually express most of the time. So much of the casual discourse people have in life is full of casual half-truth promises that have no intention behind them. That’s hard. I got hard dumped as a friend this week. It is stinging a bit. Ah well. Move on.

It is scary trusting someone enough to put time and energy into them. I don’t know how much this is social anxiety rebound from how much social time I had in June, how much is PTSD avoidance after the sexual assault, how much is surgery recovery, how much is (fill in the blank).

I just know that right now I feel absolutely terrified of risk. I have a lot to lose. If I don’t do the next few years right I will regret it forever. When I hit the end of surgery recovery I have to start doing a level of support work my kids aren’t used to. They are choosing tasks that are frankly obscene and in order to make it possible I am going to support them like they took on something that hard.

The thing is, doing it myself is faster and fucking easier and they have learned the skills. They will be able to get their cleaning deposits back someday. It’s time for them to focus away on other skills. I’ve always said this would come.

Hell, if the kids notice that with proper negotiations and exchanges of kinds of work I can be a lot easier to live with maybe they will do their chores more promptly in the future when we renegotiate? It’s a dream.

If I can understand clearly where someone’s limits are then I can understand with compassion where they are making pie crust promises. My life is going to require a lot of that very specific compassion of me over the next couple of years no matter what I do.

So what do I do? I complicate my life extra with something ambiguous and with a high potential to hurt a lot. I am scared this might end up in the loss of a dear old friend because one or the other of us does something unforgivable. It could happen. It wouldn’t be the first time in my life it went either direction.

The most likely outcome is a few fun holidays and then wishing him well on the rest of his life. Sure, it is having a really melodramatic long lead in and everything. I am too old to make rash decisions based on sex. I can’t withstand a lot more casual damage. I need to act like I am fragile. I need a melodramatically long and involved courting process before it is a good idea for me to give someone the opportunity to hurt me. My body is fragile. Someone needs quite an education before touching me is a good idea. There is a lot to communicate if someone is going to have enough information to make safe choices with me.

Over the next few years I think my dating opportunities will be few and far between. I think I will have very little to give and a lot of needs that I will be blatantly ignoring because I don’t have the ability to take the risks required to fill those needs. Making friends requires social rejection. I am bound and determined that I am going to know most folks in town before I ever go out on a date. I don’t want to date strangers ever again. I’ve had some success, but look at those numbers.

That’s a lot of fucking failures.

Are they all failures? Were any of them failures? Or did they just run their course and we moved on? I like to say that the great part of dating a lot of different people is you learn a lot about what kinds of things you can and can’t compromise on and that’s very useful.

Noah and I courted for six months then eloped. We weren’t dating when he showed up out of the blue and asked me to marry him. It’s a longer story but not for now.

How to measure time with someone I have loved for 25 years? TB is a very good friend. It feels more important than ever to make sure I don’t hurt someone negligently by being selfish and short sighted. Trying to figure out what is the most good for the least amount of cost is hard. There are so many variables out of my control.

Maybe I should just thank my lucky stars that TB waited this long to start getting his shit together because I get a chance to have a short term positive relationship that ends when it is a natural time to grow past it. It won’t be a failure. If the point going in is that it is going to end fairly soon then I can grab all the good I can for the amount of cost I can bear. I will have to be realistic to myself about my priorities. I am going to have to be realistic about how much rejection I can handle. I am, predictably, feeling it as a wave of rejection right now.

I have a lot of people counting on me and I can’t let them down. That means I need to limit the things I add to my life that hurt me. That’s complicated.

This will be awkward as a transition

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For a while I am not going to know what to say or how to say it. I’ve been carefully limiting my writing for specific social media audiences over the past few years. Now I’m pretty sure some of my hate followers are getting notifications because they are subscribed to my RSS feed. That’s always fun.

It’s hard to figure out how to talk about all the things I need to talk about. I’ve been avoiding talking about parenting for a long time even though that is still the biggest part of my life. I am not feeling like the best parent lately. I’m not the worst but I don’t look at that bar.

I’ve been blow drying Middle Child’s hair when they shower for a while. It’s been one of the best ways for us to have tactile connection that doesn’t involve me being bossy or a controlling. I’m just taking care of them in a way they like that makes them feel special and pretty. (Their hair really is gorgeous after a blow dry. It gets awkwardly tangled when it air dries.) I haven’t really asked if they want me to, I just show up and take over. Maybe I am being an asshole. It’s the only part of their self care I am still involved in. I actually got them a birthday present that is a hair dryer/curling iron set. They might take it in their room and that’s the end of us sharing this. It’s possible. It isn’t my goal. I like playing with their hair. It reminds me so much of my mother’s hair and this feels like the only piece of that relationship I get to keep.

Youngest Child gets the short end of the stick in an awful lot of ways. I haven’t managed to create the same Wonderland for her and I regularly feel pretty bad about her not having the gaggle of friends we had in California. It’s hard to make friends here. I have had good inroads with a few folks but the majority of people I have met are not keen to see us again. I feel like her being my daughter is the worst thing I’ve done to her. How can I create a community around her when I am the problem?

I have some additional worry right this second because I restarted birth control for the first time in 17 years. Ew. But it’s better than having a baby at 43 or 44. I really don’t have it in me to restart the clock again on parenting. I love my kids but I’m running very low on reserves for being patient and giving and understanding around the clock 24/7. I am worried about the hormonal fluctuations that may come. I am not exactly so stable lately that it will be reasonable to tell what is coming from the meds.

I keep having these things happen that make me feel flattened and worthless and empty and then I need to hurry up and recover because there is work to be done. People need support. People need me to be giving and working and listening and supporting and that’s not a thing I do well when I’m flat and feel empty and worthless.

I worked 29 days in June. I had months of intensive work leading up to that. July was supposed to be a recuperation couple of weeks before surgery and instead I was sexually assaulted. Then I had surgery. Then came dealing with the police. I popped a stitch because my blood pressure was so high during the police interview. They rushed us to the hospital at the end.

I didn’t die. Woo. That’s not unexpected event with this surgery. No biggie. Just keep on moving forward. Sometimes there is a sudden massive bleed that stops after a bit in the first two weeks.

I shouldn’t exercise until October according to my surgeon. I’m going to listen to him. This is hard because exercise is the most healthy form of stress relief I have in life. Everything else is harder on my body. I am feeling fairly overwhelmed with stress right now.

I should be restarting interviews for Vicki’s book and I feel overwhelming panic at the thought. I don’t know how to set myself aside to that degree right now. I feel like pieces of me are leaking out all over the place. I feel utterly uncontained. I feel like I have been trying hard to shove all of myself in a box and I just can’t anymore. The closet has not been working well for me.

I am feeling disconnected, like the pieces of me are stored in different rooms all over a hotel and you have to run up and down the stairs a lot to gain access to the different pieces. It’s exhausting. It feels like integration is just too high of a bar to ask for.

I’m struggling with feeling coherence in my brain. I think coming back to my website will ultimately be good because I will get back to feeling comfortable with a full speed brain dump but I’m not there yet. I’m looking forward to it as a contrast with social media.

I like thinking of my writing as a full on stream of consciousness dump. I embrace the inconsistencies and contradictions as part of sharing thought. Part of what is going on for me right now is I am trying to figure out how “in the closet” I am going to try to be going forward. I’ve been pretty closeted, secretive, and evasive since I moved. I’ve tried hard to keep a lid on my history.

Now the lid is lying on the floor somewhere and ooze is streaming out of that hole.

I’m not going to retell every story, I have an archive for that. Instead how about if I just figure out how to talk about who I am now and why I am doing the things I am doing. It’s all so convoluted and stupid. I feel stupid. I feel like I’ve been in a very stable place and I shouldn’t rock the boat. The thing is, I’ve gotten to the point where loneliness is eating me like a cancer. There is so much that I have been suppressing or hiding or avoiding for years that it is a problem for me to continue doing so. I am hurting myself. I have to put significant effort into growing my community here.

That’s going to be hard due to physical limitations over the next few years. I haven’t talked about it here much (or at all) but I’ve had wicked hemorrhoids over the past few years. The surgeon said he couldn’t understand how I ride a bike like that. I shrugged and said it is my normal. Now that the big grape sized bits are gone I’m left with some much more modest skin flaps. These are going to be removed next May. Each surgery will involve a 10ish week time span afterwards where I cannot exercise at all. I can moderately walk but not too far. (Too far being above ~6 miles in a day.) I did walk more than 10 miles recently. I was flattened for 2 days afterwards and it still kinda hurts extra 5 days later.

I’ve got a lot of rest time ahead of me in the next 12 months. Ugh.

Yes, I want all the hemorrhoids gone because I’m tired of bleeding if I have to use regular toilet paper for a whole day. Also I desperately want anal sex back. It’s just not possible with the damage to my anus as it stands. Having kids is rough thing on a body. EDS means all forms of prolapse are more likely. I am going to try to be assertive about dealing with my prolapse stuff going forward. It’s not cool to have things falling out of my body. It’s sorta weird knowing that I am going to need to push to have anyone care about that.

The leaves are changing colours and falling off the trees. It feels too early. It feels like I have simply missed summer this year.

We have a six week block mapped out with a fairly vigorous schedule ahead of us. I won’t be exercising a ton (I am definitely failing to meet any kind of goal for this year) but I will be keeping the trains going and pushing people through their commitments. The kids are all adding additional classes/activities/tasks in ways that will expand their exposure to people in town. This feels really important. A lot of it has to fall on Noah because I can’t cycle. His legs and ass are looking a lot hotter lately. Let me give myself a little pat on the back for helping to push him in that direction. Oh it’s a joyous sight.

Noah and I have been talking a lot about polyamory. If you don’t know that word, in very short it means having romantic love with more than one partner. When we met we both had other partners. We have opened and closed our marriage a few times for logistical reasons. I refer to our recent, by far longest, span of monogamy as the Choke Chain. It’s capitalised because it’s a formal title for a concept and stage we went through. It was in response to a really bad period where everything around polyamory went shockingly poorly. I’m not rehashing that right now. I don’t have time.

It is hard trying to talk through all of the mistakes we have made and all of the times we have made unkind choices. It feels like a lot of “bringing up old stuff” but it’s important. We are talking about our different sets of reactions and what was spurring us in one direction or another. It allows us to understand more fully why some parts were harder or easier for the other. It gives us a chance to make better decisions going forward. It’s not always as simple as just waving your hands over something and saying “just don’t do that”. Which that? What part? We have been using that to mean having an open marriage but I do not believe that is sustainable.

See, this is where I stop and think “How would I say this to a random stranger in town?”

I believe that human beings are a species with a wide and varied range of sexual appetites. Much like our primate kin we have some who like monogamy and some who like one male and multiple females and some females with a lot of males and some who like to mate through sex with absolutely everyone without regard to sex.

I am no longer physically, emotionally, or mentally suited to having a truly large number of partners at any given time. I just can’t anymore. I don’t think I can continue only having one partner though. I know it is selfish. Literally that’s what makes it such a tremendously good thing. Yes, falling in love with someone who isn’t already part of my family is selfish. It is individuation from the pod. (We refer to ourselves as a whale pod.)

I need more emotional support. Noah is an amazing husband. He gives more support than anyone has the right to expect or demand. People are supposed to have a web of people who support them in ways big and small. I feel ashamed of this, and I shouldn’t, but I do need the emotional intensity in my life of having more than one sexual relationship. Sex does bond people. Well, it can.

This is where it is weird to think about explaining this to a random person in town. Oh golly. Sex creates hormones. It can be done fairly casually to get endorphins and dopamine followed by a high five and a fond farewell. It can also be done to raise oxytocin and fall in love and bond in the way that creates family connections–with or without sharing DNA to create a child.

I am slightly weirded out by the fact that Noah has literally colonised my body and remnants of his DNA and the DNA of our children are now parts of my permanent body. Being a carrying parent is fucking weird. His body wasn’t highjacked. WTF?

I need more intense connection in my life. I need it. I am not managing to create that very well without sex. I am also deeply uninterested in the drama that would come with having sex with someone who lives locally. I just can’t be arsed to care enough about the sex to want to deal with fall out. Nope.

That leaves long distance relationships with people from my past. I have very little interest in being back in the US. That narrows the pool considerably. As it so happens, luck brought someone back into my life. Someone who is quite invested in making sure I maintain my family life.

We are a species that has evolved to handle matters of bonding and creating support networks of very diverse sizes and shapes. Many people are still happy doing pair bonding and having involved grandparents/aunts/uncles/cousins. That is not an option for everyone. It leaves a lot of people out entirely. That’s a complicated situation. I know that in Scotland a lot of the answer is “ask the government for help” but this isn’t that kind of thing. I need community. I need deep emotional connection. I am also a hard nut to crack. For all that I will tell my story to anyone who asks I don’t volunteer it much in person.

I need to be known in an intense and deep way. I don’t trust someone easily. I assume people are not interested in knowing me more deeply because they don’t know what they are signing on for. I always assume that I am going to be too much.

*tap tap tap* Is this thing on?

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Hi there, whoever you are. I haven’t felt ok about writing here for quite some time now. I’ve had a lot of self doubt and anxiety going on. For a little while now I’ve been blogging elsewhere behind a fence but that’s not feeling appropriate anymore. I’ve been trying hard to be in the closet because it felt safer. It no longer feels safe. Now it feels like a risk.

If you are in the closet people can try to use information to threaten you. My best source of safety is having no secrets. It has been my approach for most of my life. Sometimes I am scared for a while and I shut down. When I feel under threat or if something happens, once again I bust wide open.

I can’t get into details but I am dealing with prosecuting a sexual assault. It means that things are going to come out about my life. People will look me up and I have not tried hard to hide my life. I am not enjoying the fact that I get to come out to folks whether I want to or not. Not that being in the closet has been awesome for my mental health. It isn’t.

I’ve been really depressed for a long while. A lot of the time I’ve been in Scotland. A year or so ago I started getting past the post-partum hump and I have had a renewed sex drive. That’s been complicated with the restrictions and limits of my life. Noah has been pretty awesome about trying to ramp back up after years of me not being up for almost anything.

I don’t want to rehash everything I’ve been writing else-net but a lot has been happening. Noah and I are doing a lot of renegotiating our sex/bdsm dynamic. If you happen to be new here, bdsm is an acronym that means bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadism and masochism. Basically it is part of the human norm to like adventure during sex and this is the path that works for us. If it seems crazy, keep in mind that I went through what is essentially sexual torture as a small child. Yes I am weird and I have weird impulses, preferences, and needs around my sex life.

I’m feeling like I am drowning in shame. I am really hard into avoidance. The short version is I’m having a lot of PTSD symptoms. It’s been a minute since I have crashed this hard. I managed to get through the first couple of weeks post-assault just pushing through. In that process I did some good stuff and some stuff I feel really ashamed of and I feel gross and bad and like I deserve every bad thing that could ever happen to me. I feel like my reaction to the assault retroactively means it was fine because I am such a fucked up person.

I feel low key nauseous basically all the time. My stomach is hurting in a way it hasn’t in many many years. I’m having more nightmares. I’m having flashbacks. I feel trapped and helpless and like many many more bad things are coming. I’m sweaty a lot of the time from my level of anxiety. I am deep in hyperarousal. I’m irritable and cranky and I can’t sleep and I’m having memory problems. I am really emotionally struggling because of how bad my memory is right now. I am just not able to access a lot of memories stored in non-traumatised parts of my brain right now. I am deep in always/never and I just can’t access anything else.

I use the term “always/never” to refer to a really extreme version of state dependent memory. When I feel good I cannot remember how bad I feel sometimes. When I feel bad I cannot remember ever having any good feelings of any kind. My brain simply won’t acknowledge that the other side of the fence exists. This is not good.

It’s kind of funny that the standard wisdom for PTSD is that these symptoms appearing in the month after a trauma isn’t the end of the world, for most people this fades. It didn’t really get going for me until more than 4 weeks after this last assault. I was in “make everyone else ok” mode for the first 4 weeks. Then stuff started feeling completely out of my control. Now I’m freaking the fuck out. It’s been 6 weeks and it feels like the last week has been the start of a really shitty slide. I’m worried. I’m not ok. My desire to self harm or suicide is ridiculously high. I’m being careful and I’m not doing anything over the line. I’m careful to limit my drinking. I am no longer able to withstand the physical trauma of most of my long-ago preferred self harms. I can’t do anything that might create marks because that would be a cluster fuck of issues while I’m going through an assault trial.

I feel incredibly helpless and trapped and worthless and like there will never actually be an end to me being raped. I’m really fucking angry that I now have over 40 years of rape experience. I was really happy about only having 23 years of rape experience. Those 17 years where I didn’t get raped where pretty dang cool. I almost got to have a whole normal childhood span of time free of rape. It makes me feel really sick.

I had a hemorrhoidectomy and the recovery sucks. With all my health complications I’m supposed to not exercise for 8-10 weeks. Part of the reason I need to move back to blogging instead of using the other social media sites is that posting about my frustration about not being able to exercise leads to people pushing me to exercise. Yeah. That’s not ok.

The big change that is a greater deal of positive mixed in with the negative is Noah and I have restarted discussions oriented around polyamory. I have a boyfriend (whom I’ve never had sex with) and Noah is waiting a while because we have a lot to process. He will date. Hell, what I’m doing barely counts as dating. I’ll have sex with someone outside the marriage 8 months after we started negotiating. We are not rushing by any measure. The person I’m talking to is one of my oldest friends. We worked in theatre together right out of high school. We had a lot of interest in one another way back when and no skills for being able to have a relationship together. I still don’t know what’s going to happen or how this will all go but it is mostly a better experience than everything else this year so it’s the upside I get to have. I’m referring to him as my Travel Boyfriend.

I feel numb and empty. I feel like the only way for me to stop being in pain is to die. I mean, it’s true with my physical conditions. That doesn’t mean I get to die anytime soon. It just means I get to endure an unlimited and endless amount of pain for the rest of my life.

Today that is feeling very hard.

I want to talk about Akhilandeshwari for a minute

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So. I was raped again. I wrote this post as part of a series in a different location. I am not, at this moment, prepared to share the more graphic version of what I have been writing. However I liked this essay very much and I want to make sure I keep it even if I never make that writing part of this journal. I am choosing a restorative justice process, not one of retribution and punishment. It is not up for debate. Folks are struggling to understand why and this my response.

Recently I had a good conversation with a dear lady I like a lot. She was utterly aghast at how I am processing what happened and she cannot understand how I am expecting to move forward sharing community spaces with the person who harmed me. I want to talk about how being broken, assault, and healing work in my mind.

Akhilandeshwari is a Hindu Goddess. She is the Goddess of Never Not Broken. I will be lazy and steal some quotes from a website.

The intensity of emotions, the pain we do not want to feel, all the broken pieces in ourselves that we tend to neglect and try to push away and ignore, this is the very territory of Akhilandeshwari -She says:

‘Look at it. Deal with it. Look at your part in this.

Look at what is broken in you and you will understand what is broken in the world. Look at how you may be contributing to these conflicts in your ignorance, in your destructive tendencies, your addictions and denial, in your fear of anyone different than you.’

One of Her many gifts is to remind us of the power to be found in our brokenness, in the loss, the fear, and the anguish.

How do we contribute to the things that happen to us? Why did my first piece of writing about this rape sound almost like it was a mutual encounter? Because I went hard into the fawn response. Because I have spent decades looking into how I contribute to my own difficult situations. I spent years delving into how I did or did not contribute to the incest I experienced. I am truly unrelenting in my quest to perceive my effect on my life.

I have spoke to the man since. He is not acting like the serial predators from my past. “I don’t remember it that way.” “You are over-reacting.” “Oh so you are going to lie about what happened?”

He is freaking the fuck out and full of overwhelming self doubt. He is apologetic in the extreme and willing to jump over every hoop I put in front of him. He’s on board. He has said that he is stunned by my graciousness and compassion. (Which is not particularly flattering. Yeah. I fucking am. That’s exactly how I’m fucking acting. You fucking noticed. Well I’m glad you aren’t stupid enough to miss that. I dislike compliments.)

It is because I have been you. It is because I have erred as extremely and I have had to do repair work at this level. I have had to tear down my self beliefs and understanding of the world to the smallest shards of glass and reconstruct a mosaic that I can live with. It’s why I am so fucking scared of people not being allowed to atone.

If other people do not deserve to be allowed to atone then I do not either.

I told him that what he is going to do for me is learn how to do better. He is going to embrace every opportunity to study consent and negotiation and he is going to become a fucking community leader in talking to other men about this. He is going to work ceaselessly for the rest of his life to help ensure that his friends and his community do not have to go through more of this. He is going to do that standing in a room with me and the people who know what he has done. If people respect my wishes that circle will stay small.

Of course, as Noah reminds me, three can keep a secret if two are dead. Right now 12 people know who he is. That includes my family, four people from the vanilla queer community, and five from the kink community. No, I’m not listing their names. Perhaps at some point that will be public but not right now.

Right now I am five days out from being raped and I am processing at blistering speed. I am assembling community support and creating structure from scratch for managing an assault. No, I don’t have a pre-created plan in writing. This has always been theoretical and I wasn’t high enough in any formal organisations to feel the need to document this process in my head. I know what I need. I am doing it.

I went to a class on transformational justice in the kink community and it was great for me. I can understand why some people, including a lot of folks who run events in Scotland, are very dubious about how appropriate this is as a way of managing assault.

I am specifically choosing people for this oversight who are not all close friends of mine. These are not people who are deeply invested in me alone as a person. (A couple are close friends, not many.) These are people who have demonstrated through their actions over years that they are deeply invested in creating community. That’s what I need.

The crocodile [one of her guises] also invites us to consider the many illusions in this life – all the appearances of things, people, and places and all of our assumptions. She shows us that things are not what they seem to be. For Akhilandeshwari and her crocodile all the false pretenses and roles we play to appear ‘perfect’ and ‘whole’ are actually bait for Her to come shake things up so we can come back to our essence. She destroys all illusions and delusions. She reminds us of the cyclical nature of Reality that we are experiencing in every given moment. The potential of what we are becoming is ultimately limitless. Within that brokenness there is freedom. Everything is not so neatly ordered, controlled and contained nor does it have to be. She is not stuck in one form nor does She want us to be. She demands that we consciously face our fears and losses, without dismissing them, running away or sugarcoating them. She invites us to cultivate the patience of the crocodile. She invites us to see the limitless potential of being and becoming that brokenness holds. Akhilandeshwari’s intense teachings are not to harm us, but to disorient our egos so that we can drop our attachments and come into our authentic nature.

I am someone who believes that most of us have deep brokenness inside of us. I believe that this process of breaking over and over gives us a chance to grow back stronger. If you do much hanging out in survivor communities you learn a lot about the range of ways people respond to sexual assault. Some people become deeply fragile and unable to withstand life. Some people brush it off as barely a thing. Some people lie to themselves about it happening at all. Some people become demanding and clingy and expect everyone to “make them feel better”.

That is not a power that anyone has. We heal ourselves or we don’t. There is no fair in this. We need support as we heal ourselves, yes. The very best therapists, counselors, and faith leaders understand this.

“There is no such thing as a personal problem. Every problem is a problem for the community.” – Sobonfu Somé

Yes, Sobonfu, I believe you and I agree with you. The part I am struggling with is the methodology of that. I deeply value the grief rituals from your country (Burkina Faso) and I wish that such rites were common practice in the West. They aren’t though. I have to start from where I am and go forward within the limitations of community I have here.

I live in a Western carceral culture. There are nuances to my new one (Scotland) compared to my old one (the United States) but they are incredibly similar. I do not live in an indigenous community where people are committed to staying together to preserve their existence. I live in the world of “Don’t overshare.”

A long time ago I came up with a metaphor. I may not tell it as well this time. When a person is born there is a fairly predictable path their life will probably take. It is etched in glass and it shapes their journey. Sometimes folks lose a few chips here and there, because life is difficult, but the picture remains more or less complete.

My glass picture was shattered. Whatever might have been for me on the day of my birth was utterly ravaged and destroyed before I ever went to school. I have spent the rest of my life crawling through the glass shards trying to glue them back together.

I am always, in some part of me, dragging my bloody knees across shards of glass. This is why I don’t want Noah to wait on processing his feelings when I am hurt. If he waits every time I have something bad happen (like being suicidal, or being raped, or having dear friends die, or having a medical crisis, or… it’s a ridiculously long list) he will never have a life. He will spend all of it waiting.

I don’t want that for him. Honestly part of what I hope for him is that maybe I have helped him heal a lot of his broken bits such that whoever he dates in the future will be less obnoxiously fragile than me. I hope he won’t need that in a partner in order to feel wanted. I hate that he feels he cannot have feelings if I was already doing so. That’s fucked up. I am always fucking having feelings. The world can’t stop.

Not even when I’m raped. I mean, I am taking a break to process a lot of feelings for more hours a day than usual. I am a cat hiding while I heal. In here I can suddenly scream and start crying and freaking out and no one else will be hurt. I won’t make anyone else have to hurt too.

That was not what Sobonfu wanted for me. It is what I am capable of right now.

I will never not be broken. It is not an option for me in this life. I will always be broken then broken again then broken again. Through every shattering and recreation of self I perform I get closer and closer to being the me that lives through and beyond every shard. This is a core of me that is present in every part of me. This is something I have understood for a long time. In the broken 3 year old sobbing and rocking on the floor desperately missing her mother to the 18 year old who was told “We won’t ruin a nice boy’s life for a girl like you” to the 25 year old who chose to double down and commit to the person I hoped would be my last rapist to the 42 year old who will not be told how to handle my assault and every rape and molestation and beating in between.

I am here. I know how to see the part of me that is not damaged by any of these things. The part of me that has been broken and rebuilt so many times that one has no inkling of what the origin was but it is more pure with every transformation.

No one gets to tell me what I will do with my trauma. I will use it to make the community better. I don’t fucking care if you wish I would fall in line with the status quo and get mad and seek revenge.

HOW IS THAT FUCKING WORKING OUT FOR YOU?

I don’t know that I could write down an official policy for an organisation. I don’t think that other people who suffer harm are going to want to go through what I am doing. I never claim that my path is the The Way to absolution for anyone.

I simply describe it as it is. Fine, in a Deterministic Way. Only sorta, not really.

I think through my actions and choices. I research before I decide how to act. I don’t think everything is predetermined. I think I could have chosen different paths. What is happening is not inevitable. The only constant is change.

The problem comes when the way I believe I must act is of such a high cost that I cannot pay it. When are my knees too damaged to keep moving forward on the journey? There are many examples of this. I am not going to list them here. They really aren’t the point.

“Given that there is so much more to be done in life and time is so precious I can’t fathom having been through what you have and still to care enough about someone who could treat you that way.” (A friend who consented to this being shared.)

You haven’t depended on as many terrible people for support. This was nothing close to the worst thing I have experienced in terms of treatment and gone on to be friends with them later. It’s going to be kind of funny. Folks will try to figure out who he is by watching me interact with people.

Good luck with that.

I was handed an opportunity to slam down an assertion on the universe that no matter how many times it breaks me I will always repair back into a shape that is ever more myself and true. This time I spend with him is not really about him.

It is about Vicki. It is about my father. It is about my mother. It is about my family and helping to create the community they will grow up in. It is about ensuring that this man is now a helper in the process of ensuring less harm will happen going forward. It is about being able to look myself in the mirror and say, “I am proud of you.”

I need everyone. I have been saying this exact thing here on Fetlife for a while now. This is genuinely what I believe. I am consistent no matter how you challenge me. Sometimes I may not want to be friends with someone, and that is my right, but I don’t want people kicked out.

Even the people who harm me. Provided they are good for other people.

Akhilandeshwari dwells in the space between who we were and who we are becoming. She breaks our rigidity, our calcified habits and thought patterns. She is a Goddess of Transitions. Sadness, despair, and grief are some of Her fiercest medicines. Her teachings can feel brutal to our egos, but She truly has our best interest at heart. No matter the loss or sense of devastation we feel, Akhilandeshwari presents us with an opportunity to look at the wild kaleidoscopic nature of our Being. She shows us that in the splintered aftermath of any heartbreak, these disowned, disdained, feared, bereft pieces of our self reflect back an essential aspect of who we are. Our experiences shape us.

I shudder to think of the shitty fucking white woman I could have become if I had spent more of my life in my father’s house. If he hadn’t been a pedophile, merely a physically and emotionally abusive alcoholic and drug addict. If I had one abuser and one narrative for why I was broken I would have twisted myself around that wound and I would have stunted. Instead I have harmed and been harmed by many many many many people.

Truly. One more will not cause a full shattering. It will merely remove a small chip. Look, Ma. I’m practically a normal person. I don’t shatter when tiny leaves drift by on the stream.

Am I minimising my rape? Yes and no. It wasn’t fucking ok. It was a literal crime. I didn’t want it and I am very angry it happened. I also know that for my body, this is not going to be something that upends everything I am. When I talk to him he sounds like one of my students. He sounds like a fucking kid who can’t understand how they have gotten themself into a situation they did not intend and now they are trapped.

I remember the day that one of my students came into my class tossing desks to the side and looking for a fist fight. He was 16 and big. It made all of the other boys in class want to get up and fight back. This was a whole class full of those boys. That was a fun class. I yelled “OUTSIDE.”

I told him that he came in angry so it wasn’t about us. I asked him what happened. His cousin was in a gang and had been shot. He was being pressured by all the higher ups in that organisation to get jumped in and be the one who did the return hit.

I called all his other teachers. His work was sent to my room. He stayed with me all day for days. I didn’t give them a justification. Nobody else liked him and they were happy to be rid of him. As of the time I last saw him, several years later, he said he was still not in the gang. I think I did at most 35 hours of extra babysitting him in that time. I am not responsible for his future. He made that. I gave him a safe place to sit and write through what he wanted for himself. I am not his savior. Fuck saviors. He saved himself. For a short time I got to hold his hand on his path. Sometimes we all need someone to hold our hands as we figure out who we are going to be in this life. It is not a smooth path for everyone.

This is a dragon I can ride. This is an opportunity I can use to help make my city better. This is a message from myself that I can’t forget my duty to help strangers be safer ever.

My life was passed hand over hand for many years. Many of those hands tried to break me.

They only made me more myself.

Hm. Hm.

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I spent yesterday crying. I was worried that I slandered someone and mischaracterized an exchange and was painting someone in an unfair light. I woke up tired of crying so I went back through and read the stuff from 10 years ago.

I didn’t write an unfair characterization. This is why I stopped writing.

I really like me

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I feel like the resumption of cannabis has had the primary overarcing effect of causing me to really like myself again. The other meds do not grant me this grace whatsoever. I see my foibles–it’s not like I land in a narcissistic high of thinking I am perfect by any stretch. It’s more that I love myself like I love my kids; erring is human and I love humans so I love you with all your fuck ups.

But I do really cool shit. I’m proud of me. I’m proud of my relationships with people. I’m proud of the things I build with my hands. One thing that starting over in a new house and a new community has given me is increased competence that indeed I am the reason that so many things in my life are so rad. I build them. I am the common denominator.

Hurry up and don’t start

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I woke up to an alarm this morning. It’s not as traumatizing as it sounds because my alarm plays Juice by Lizzo so it’s a fairly fun way to wake up. I was trying to get ready for Gaelic group but the youngest child decided she was going to pitch a massive fit and refuse to eat because breakfast includes some vegetables. So we didn’t make it out the door in time.

Of course then I find out the group isn’t happening today anyway because it is a bank holiday for Easter Monday. Well then.

Noah’s alarm went off far earlier than mine did today because he had a flight to catch back to London. This time he is going no further so it isn’t as stressful as the previous trip. His work team has flown in from many countries so they can all meet in person for the first time. I hope he manages to have some fun in the process. We are going to have a festive week without him. (Sarcasm intended.)

I’m dying

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I’m sorry, I know that’s a dramatic beginning. I don’t mean all of me. Part of me is dying. The part of me that has the ability to create a new life is dying. I’ve heard that right before ending fertility entirely there is a span of time when many women have a sudden new unplanned for child. I feel like my body is definitely interested in trying that. My interest in sex is through the roof. At least some of the time.

Then there are the more frequent, more painful periods. Yeah. I’m not interested that week.

I am really struggling with how much my hormone cycle is really extreme right now.