Category Archives: body stuff

Feelings

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This week I read an essay by a female writer in which she mentions that she “never writes personal essays because she doesn’t want them to take away from her reputation”. She writes about “real stuff” don’tchaknow?

Well, I write personal essays. And bugger off if you have a problem with that.

So, that said, lots of feelings lately. Jenny and her wonderful baby visited us over the weekend. (Another mom friend came with her baby on Friday. It was baby central. Having the three of us together with our kids felt like a dream come true. I’ve been hanging out with those ladies (all of us have birthdays within four months of one another) for over ten years. Watching us grow up has been so neat.

Jenny (but mostly her baby) is used to a quieter life than we lead. My kids are *very* overwhelming for people who are used to quiet. My kids are shitty at respecting personal space. We are working on it, but this isn’t a skill that will come naturally to them. They want to be close to people. Like, on top of them close ALL THE TIME.

It is always an adjustment for us to try to tone down for other people. It is good for us but it is hard. If you throw in the whole fact that Jenny is one of the most important people in the world to me and losing her friendship would be devastating it makes for some tension.

I was too worried about the kids. So I started out sounding pretty nasty. Jenny heard my way of speaking and copied some phrasing and then my kids freaked out. That is not Jenny’s fault. But it made for a rocky first day. Jenny asked if they should leave early. I felt so sad that we are so hard to put up with.

So Jenny and I had a talk and then I had a long talk with the kids. Things went way better after that.

Shanna was inclined to get her back up. “This is my house and I shouldn’t have to change.” I said, “But Jenny is my best friend and I only get to see her every few years and I miss her so much it hurts and can we please try hard to make everyone feel comfortable?” Shanna agreed after that.

And the rest of the visit was great. But I had lots of leftover anxiety/stomach pain.

I feel pretty proud of all of us that we managed to have a good rest of the visit. It was really wonderful to see Jenny mother. I have known her for about twenty years now. It was like seeing, “Ohhhhhh this is what you have been building towards all these years. This is who you wanted to be.” It was really beautiful. She’s a very good mother. My friends inspire me to try harder for my kids. Jenny’s daughter is very shy. Jenny makes sure the world is appropriate for her kid and she does not back down. I have so much respect for that.

I have twinges of sad because, why didn’t anyone love me like that? but mostly I stomp on them and I’m just really glad to see that my friends are such good people.

I am so blessed in my friendships. I don’t know how I managed to meet such good people. I feel honored and unworthy at the same time.

I think that if Jenny lived closer we would adjust better and my kids would get used to the different rules. They have adjusted to K’s house (my friend who baby-sits while I have therapy) even though they really didn’t want to do so. (Shanna in particular is really stubborn about not wanting to adapt. It takes me explaining the consequences for not adapting before she is willing to try.)

Then yesterday after Jenny and her wonderful daughter left a different mom and kids came over. And we had a different friend planned for dinner last night.

Jenny was the last person added to the schedule and I was going to shoehorn her in no matter what. But if I had known Jenny’s schedule further in advance I wouldn’t have booked two social engagements the day she left. Holy crap I am tired.

The dinner was easy-peasy. He’s non-stressful.

The mom and kids… whoa. All the anxiety of the weekend multiplied by ten shoved into a 2.5 hour period.

When I get to the point of snapping, “I’m kind of tired of being wrong in my own house so can we just change the topic?” it’s not going well. (She apologized later for jumping all over me, but holy shit it was a stress monkey visit.) I feel like things must be kind of rocky for her, because she had a lot of anxious energy (shoot me now before I go all woo woo on you) and she probably wasn’t so much reacting to me as just in a room with me.

But the weekend with Jenny used up a lot of my ability to sit still even though I felt anxious. And there is the little fact that fucking up my relationship with Jenny would do a lot to ruin my life and fucking up almost any other friendship I have would have lower impact. Yeah, even though I don’t see Jenny very often.

The older I get the more I look at the pillars of self. The things that make someone “Them”.

Brittney was my oldest friend. But Brittney never did a god damn thing to help me. She wasn’t there after trauma. She didn’t want to know about my life. She wanted me to visit her upper middle class valley lifestyle and act like I fit in. I don’t.

Jenny, at this point in time, is the person standing the longest. Twenty years of friendship is an accomplishment for someone as unstable as I am. Especially because Jenny and I have never been the most obvious of friends. We have very different personalities.

But when I can’t function and I need help Jenny has shown up. The emotional support is as important (or more so) than other kinds of support. Jenny held me when my brother killed himself and when my father killed himself. Jenny has been there through boyfriends and friends groups and hobbies.

I am so glad the rest of the visit went well. I felt really happy about seeing her. I probably won’t see her again for two years. I feel like I already want to count the days.

They are going on a Disney Cruise with us in 2016. Because Jenny loves me.

I really don’t understand why. I don’t feel like I deserve her friendship and loyalty. I recognize that I have it, but I don’t understand. I hope I was as nice to her as I was trying to be. It’s always a bummer when I am an asshole on accident.

When I’m an asshole on purpose I don’t feel so bad.

I remain grateful that I get to have the lifestyle I want. I am so grateful that I get to home school my kids. I am so grateful that I can stay home and play and learn with my kids in a non-stressful environment for me most of the time.

The occasional stressy weekend reminds me that my life is so blessed. All of the Jenny stress was worthwhile. I feel anxiety about being nice enough. That is something I have to work on and be aware of. I understand it to be a legitimate issue for me.

It’s not like having to be in a stressful environment for no good reason. It’s not like dealing with school. It’s not like dealing with jobs. It’s not like dealing with extended social groups.

Jenny is one of the few people on the planet whose judgment I actually care about. I mean, yeah, I have issues around wanting people to like me but in general… I don’t actually feel it matters enough for me to change myself for other people.

Jenny is worth any amount of adapting I have to do no matter how hard it is for me. That feels hard. Over longer periods of time I can adjust and change more slowly and that feels easier and more manageable. Just having a weekend feels like “Be good or lose friends” and that is so hard.

I fuck up so much. I feel so ashamed of how bad I am at controlling my behavior. I’m too loud. I’m too aggressive. I say things people really don’t want to hear.

I feel ashamed that I live on the sufferance of people being willing to tolerate someone who is not very nice. I wish I were more worthy.

My stomach hurts so much.

I’m tired of feeling afraid all the time.

Hey, today is a therapy day. Maybe EMDR will help. Ha.

Editing continues

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I have finished section one. It is 13,908 words. It is exactly 1/3 of the chapters I wrote for the book. (The middle section has more chapters than either other section.)

Roughly the sections are: Introduction/history/definitions, General life skills/sex/friends/social media/etc, Scary Shit.

Now that I’ve finished the easy section I’m feeling nervous.

If you are an early reader be aware that the Google Doc folder now has updated chapters that are titled as chapters and everything. All fancy and official like.

I’m still open to all feedback. (Pam, I haven’t integrated the feedback you gave me on the Google Doc folder, but I have it in physical writing. It will be up in the next day or two.)

My editor is out of town a fair bit in early June. I may fudge a bit and do the bibliography then and not stress about doing it before June.

Coming along.

I did something brave about a boundary. But I feel like I did it in the most chicken shit way possible. I’m trying to decide if tomorrow I want to go deal with another hard thing that is hanging over my head. Just get it the fuck over with. I don’t like limbo.

I think that the other hard situations are things that can only be solved with time. I don’t think there is another resolution available.

In other news, I was told this weekend that I may not get a chance to go to the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival next year. This year, the 40th, may be the last given the push-back the organization is getting on their transphobic policies.

I… I have mixed feelings. I would really love to be in an all woman environment for a week with the kids. But I don’t need them to be women-born-women. I just need them to be people who identify with the more female end of the spectrum. I’m even cool with the event involving people who are androgynous/non-gendered.

I’m sorry I want so badly to get away from men. But I really do. Not forever. I like you all an awful lot and I’m not actually ready for my radical lesbian separatist commune.

Other than my mother, my aunt, my sister, and my niece I haven’t ever spent a lot of time in an all-female environment. My uncle was often blessedly absent. He did show up every day though.

I never did summer camp. I didn’t go to a private school. Hell, when I do go to events I usually ensure I’m plastered to someone with a dick because it’s safer.

“I have a boyfriend” is the only line that has ever kept me safe. Fuck everyone. I have never been raped while in a serious relationship.

So I feel a little weird about wanting to go to a transphobic event. I don’t feel good about that aspect of my desire to participate in the event.

I don’t feel threatened by the transwomen in my life. They are some of the most supportive people.

Yeah, I do feel threatened by the men. More than I “should” feel threatened. Whatever.

Deep breaths. No one is attacking me. None of this is personal. People aren’t reacting to me, they are reacting to things in their own lives. They aren’t talking to me. I’m observing things. I’m… over reacting. I’m sure.

I’m making progress on the book. I feel proud of that. My entire body hurts. I’m not sure why. I’m not sleeping well. Too much anxiety.

Deep breaths.

Anxiety is energy you want to spend that doesn’t have anywhere to go.

Nothing to do but sit and wait for time to pass. I fucking hate this. Things to do, but at a later time, simmer in my brain. I can’t stop thinking about them. They use up so many cycles.

I think I am going to go to sleep early. I’ll wake up and finish the second section before therapy.

Boy do I have a lot to talk to my shrink about. Shit I’m not telling the internet. Yeah, I do have some gosh-darned tact.

SEE!

And this weekend I demonstrated that tact when I discovered that the help my friend wanted from me was different than the help I envisioned in my head. I didn’t ever offer up advice. I was good. Be supportive how people want you to be supportive, damnit.

Otherwise you aren’t helping you are being a jack ass.

It’s probably actually a good thing it went the way it did. It was rather restful in terms of helping-friends-clean days go. That was awesome given that I feel like ass.

Deep breaths. Whatever will be will be. The future is not ours to see.

No, I’m not a monster. Not everyone hates me. I don’t need to go eat worms. I am not hurting anyone by writing the book I’m writing. It isn’t terrible. I’m not bad. I’m just saying the things I wish I had known.

I’m not telling them what to do. I’m giving them information and I’m tying it in with morality and ethics and long-term planning. I’m talking about diversity and privilege money and shame.

I’m not doing something bad.

I wish it didn’t hurt my heart to write these things down.

I’m sorry boys–no one likes young men. It’s true. I talk about why. I talk about how unfair it is.

I don’t think that men have it all good and women have it all bad.

It’s not that kind of book.

I talk about how to find adult allies in different living environments. How do you figure out who is a predator? How do you learn to ask the right questions to get the help you need?

I’m talking about food, bodies, exercise, and dealing with people who have mental illness.

I don’t think I’m being scary. These are things that exist in the world. Here is some matter-of-fact information about how to interact with increased safety. But I feel a lot of anxiety. I’m going to have to be brave to get the book published. This will be hard.

Criticism sucks. Have I mentioned that my editor is apparently notorious for fairly harsh criticism. I look forward to bathing in the stormy glow.

It’ll be rad. Yeah. Sure. Oh man.

I’m scared. But move forward or shut the fuck up, right?

I’m trying. Shrink down. Maybe that’s easier. Maybe I can carry that. Drop some balls. Move on. Just keep swimmin’.

 

Marking time

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Yesterday as we were driving a song came on the stereo. Travis Tritt singing Great Day to be Alive. I have so many layers of association with that song. When I was twelve and I dated the twenty-five year old DJ from KRTY Travis Tritt was his favorite singer. “The only fan club he will ever join.”

One of the lines is “It’s been fifteen years since I left home.” Holy crap. In October it will be fifteen years since I left home. In October it will be ten years since I left my Owner. My brother Tommy has been dead for sixteen years next month–officially half of my life. October is sixteen years since my father killed himself. Not quite half my life yet because of that annoying birthday in September.

Wow things change. It was hard leaving home. It was hard leaving my Owner. Both times I was afraid that I was leaving looking for something better and I didn’t know that I would find it.

I’ve always been fond of the devil I don’t know.

It has seemed to me throughout most of my life that I have no recourse for moving backwards. The resiliency books told me that people who succeed are people who have no real back up plans. They must succeed.

Fifteen years ago I knew that I would have to get out of my family’s home and stay out. There was no going back for me. I knew I would not be able to take support from my family as an adult. That support is a poisoned pill.

My Owner said he wanted to remain friends. By which he meant that if I showed up at the events he liked to go to he would be happy to continue to objectify me and talk about me like I was slightly stupid furniture forever more. (I spent a lot of that relationship tied up being used as actual furniture. I didn’t think he would suddenly start respecting my brain post-dumping.)

I can’t go back. Every step in my life has been a step towards being less abused. Less objectified. Less taken for granted.

Why does my stomach hurt so much? Why am I so afraid? At this stage I’ve pretty much done it. No one is hurting me any more. Sure, sometimes I deal with assholes, but it’s never ongoing persecution any more.

I haven’t been hit nonconsensually in a long long time. Part of it is that I’m getting older so I just look less like a target (being a kid is so shitty) and part of it is the confidence that financial security brings. I’m not a good target any more. Not only am I happy to viciously physically attack someone who is physically aggressive but I have the money sitting around to pay a lawyer–which is a privilege. That’s a big fucking deal.

I will probably never be helpless again. Sure, I will always have to deal with assholes once in a while. That’s just part of life. I’m an asshole so I can’t really act like I deserve better or anything.

My stomach hurts because I’m in one of those phases where the chemicals in my brain tell me that the people who tell me they love me are lying. It doesn’t count. It isn’t real. It… it will change. They won’t love me for very long. I’m not good enough. Everything changes for me. Over and over again. I have not had a life with consistency.

The great part about being the age I am now is that I have enough experience to know it is a lie. Not everyone who tells me they love me is lying. Noah is not lying. Jenny isn’t lying. Hell, Sarah isn’t lying. Several people have emailed me lately to let me know they are thinking about me–even people who don’t read my blog so they aren’t on the roller coaster of whine with me.

I am *not* trying to say that I want people to jump through hoops to prove anything to me. If I can’t see something that is already there… other people can’t help me much.

I don’t actually think those people would bother to lie to me. Lying to me about loving me would take will and effort. They have to go out of their way to talk to me. I don’t suspect anyone of having a lot of energy for willfully deceiving me. Come on, I’m not that important.

But I’m scared. I’m so scared.

Deep breaths.

Reality and illusion are harder to separate than you might think.

It is hard to go through the motions of acting like I believe people when I don’t. That takes a lot of energy. It takes a lot of conscious act of willpower. I’m kind of afraid I’m in a chemical depression right now. Every single fucking thing I’m doing right now feels so physically hard. My entire body hurts a lot of the time. Maybe I’m sick. But I don’t know. This has been going on for a bit and I don’t have a lot of concrete symptoms beyond “feeling like shit”.

Moving feels like walking uphill through a river of molasses. It is a huge act of will to move my legs at all, then I can barely make progress.

(Yes, I know I went running last night and maintained a decent pace. It hurt. I have learned that something hurting me is irrelevant to whether or not I do it. Lots of years of training behind that bit of logic.)

My chest hurts. My throat hurts. My back hurts (upper and lower). My sides hurt. My hips hurt. My arms hurt. My shoulders hurt. My knees are feeling kind of whiny. I may be ready to switch to shoes with more support.

Today is a field trip to the beach. Weeeee. A field trip where I had to set the boundaries and tell several people, “Actually if there is a waiting list and people are being denied access to the event it’s not cool that you just “bring along a friend”–sorry.”

I’m struggling with that aspect of the home school community. Frequently the group events have a limit of number of bodies, for a wide variety of reasons, and people regularly think those rules shouldn’t apply to them. Then they want to come ask me for an exception. This has happened with a bunch of different events. I’m kind of bitch-tastic. “Uhm, no. I told other people they weren’t allowed to come because we were full so you don’t get to queue jump because you are fucking special.”

We are home schoolers! We are all special snowflakes!

Yeah, that’s nice. Sometimes there are still limits to the number of bodies we can accommodate for a lot of reasons. Today the limit has nothing to do with me or my preferences–someone else set the limit but I’m going to bleepin’ enforce it.

I am so weird about rules. On one hand I am a contrary bastard and if you tell me a rule I will probably immediately break it unless you can convince me not to. (The kids and I had a long, earnest conversation in the car yesterday about why I am fanatical about following the correct rules for driving [Helloooooo…. people die if you fuck that up. It’s not a god damn game.] but other rules are almost always negotiable or flexible.)

So I’m not saying that the people who ask for exceptions are terrible people. Just that they are breaking a rule I don’t want broken. Which is random and arbitrary and I’m a major rule breaker most of the time. I don’t understand my priorities sometimes.

I suspect that part of it is, as a teacher: I know my limits. There are times when I can only handle teaching x bodies. If someone wants me to do x + 1 it will make the whole thing unravel and I will be unable to do what I wanted to do. Which fucking pisses me off. Is it lame that sometimes I just can’t absorb another body? Maybe. Oh well. It’s where I am.

People are allowed to ask for special exceptions. I’m allowed to think they are kind of assholes in that moment. Just like I’m an asshole every time I ask for special exceptions. Which I do all the time. Because I’m a self-involved asshole. Just like every one else.

So when you say there is no harm in asking… well… sometimes it harms peoples opinion of you. I understand how that can suck. I deal with similar backlash for my own asshole behavior.

Hey, I’m not saying I dislike assholes or that I don’t want to know them or anything like that. I’m just saying that I’m capable of seeing more than one side of a person. We all have a potential asshole inside us. Not just cause we sit on one. Sometimes advocating for yourself can’t be done without being an asshole.

Go ahead and advocate for yourself. I’m serious. Be ok with being an asshole sometimes.

If people can’t handle you being an asshole sometimes they probably are too high maintenance to be worth a relationship anyway. Man I can’t take that kind of pressure.

I like complex people. I like having years and years to study people and figure out why they do what they do. People are mostly internally consistent. They have justifications and reasons for what they do if you sit down and listen. I find the stories endlessly fascinating.

So when I say I’m struggling with boundaries around these things it isn’t that I think other people suck and should die in a fire for making me enforce boundaries. That is very much not what I mean.

I just mean that sometimes enforcing boundaries makes my stomach hurt. Which makes me glare in grumpy fashion at the person who needs a boundary enforced. I don’t begrudge them. I try not to complain in the moment. But I get to bitch in my journal. This would be why it exists.

I really hate these periods of irrational thinking. Where everything feels weighed down with “No one could possibly actually like me.”

All of those small boundary incursions feel like massive disrespect and dislike. They feel like people are assholes because I am a piece of shit who deserves to be walked all over. I understand that it isn’t personal. They aren’t asking for an exception because they want to be annoying for me they are asking for an exception because they want to be part of a group event and not feel left out.

That’s kind of the opposite of hating me if the event is at my house. Yet these feelings persist.

Sometimes it feels like I am looking at my friends through a glass wall. I can feel the affection I have for them. I can’t feel any affection from them. It feels like all I can see is a masquerade of affection. I know I am the problem and not them–but I don’t know how to change it when I am in it.

Mostly I try to not blow up my relationships and keep my mouth shut till this phase passes. It always has before.

Fifteen years since I’ve been gone. I never would have imagined that I could accomplish all I have done. When I was eighteen it was not a goal to be a writer. Isn’t that kind of funny? I knew I wanted to train as a teacher as a back up career but what I wanted was to home school my kids. That was what I wanted to do with my life.

It isn’t enough now.

I will start getting editorial feedback on my second book in a few weeks. Then I get to start hunting for a publisher. I have to be brave. Even though it is scary.

Too many scary things lately. Maybe that’s why my stomach hurts and I feel so paranoid. Or I’m just in a cycle, like I do. Noah says these cycles are not very predictable in terms of timing. Bummer.

I’m aware it will be a good day. I will forking force it to be a good day.

Yesterday had peaks and valleys but mostly it was a good day. We went to the mall after the park and looked for a present for Shanna. We stayed in Claire’s. She was very clear what she wanted. Good grief.

I feel weird about raising little girls who are coding girl so hard. How did I get ultra femmes? Then again I obsessively played with makeup when I was little. I don’t care about it now. Most of the people I know who are obsessed as adults weren’t allowed to play with it as very small children. Maybe there is a motive to my madness in supplying them with makeup.

Things that are taboo hold a lot of allure. Things that are matter of fact parts of your life are less obsessive. I just don’t see the need to fight my kids on things that don’t matter.

Well, why do the limits matter so much on home school events? Depends why that event has a limit. For home schooling events we are often depending on moms to supply lots of other children with education/entertainment. Everyone has the limit of size of crowd they can effectively reach. That varies from person to person and event to event.

I can only run a sit-down event for about 20 people. That’s the limit of my space. I can handle open-ended parties of 150 people. I feel very comfortable directing large groups through actions when I am out in public. Like, I have no problem trying to corral 30 or 50 kids in a park or museum or something like that. I can do that kind of crowd management.

Not everyone shares my limits. Some people can handle talking to a maximum of a dozen people before they start kind of freaking out. Some people can handle crowds of thousands before they feel panic. Everyone is different.

When you are going to an event… you need to be nice to the person who is kindly providing you an experience. Don’t demand something they can’t provide. That’s all I’m saying.

Ok, I stop typing now.

Need a rest day.

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So on Thursday the girls and I decided to go to the plant nursery. Like addicts. We spent $100 on plants. Because addicts. But I now have a whole bunch of fun hanging plants in baskets out the back window like I’ve been imagining for years. (Mostly because I put hundreds of seeds in the ground and diligently watered and… nada. Stupid seeds. I hate seeds.)

I am tired and weary. Friday we painted the fence some more. It was fun but exhausting. My hands are very tired and sore. Lots of pain.

My back hurts like mad. Calli had nightmares all night long where she was begging for me so I was in their room. Oh man. Ow.

But it is going to be a nice day. Friends are coming over for Girl Genius. They will have to see a messy house cause I clean on Mondays. Damnit.

Oh man my back hurts. But I’m rereading The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and I have a nice huge mug of tea. Life is good.

The pictures of the fence are uploading right now but later today you can follow this link and see them.

Drips, drabs, ups, and downs.

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We went up to San Pablo yesterday to see some friends. This is after that specific friend coming to my house monthly for ohhh four years now? I am starting to try and do some trips up there in exchange for all the trips to my house. The distance between us is not shorter just because he is a guy with no kids. I can do effort too.

And when I drive up there I get to spend time with his lovely wife. I find the visits to be highly educational in diverse arenas. For one thing: she knows way the fuck more about gardening than I do and she’s happy to talk about plants. Lately getting near someone with lots of plant knowledge who does not eschew my children is somewhat tricky. I’ve tried to sign up for gardening classes THAT ARE BEING ADVERTISED ON AN UNSCHOOLING MAILING LIST and I was told I would have to get babysitting. Stop fucking advertising in this space if my fucking kids aren’t welcome you fucking fuckers. I didn’t say fuck to the people in question. I just dropped it.

Beyond the gardening stuff, I am having a bit of trouble with Callidora. Well, phrasing it that way sounds more extreme than it is. Many of my parenting approaches work really well for Shanna and don’t work at all with Calli. Luckily my friends’ wife seems to identify really strongly with Calli. They are very similar temperamentally and she is giving me a lot of feedback for how to tweak our interactions so they work better.

I feel so much gratitude I don’t have words. Someone is willing to look at me and look at my daughter and look at our relationship and say, “You are doing ok, but you both might be happier if you did……”

Err, in defense of my hubris more than once I have said, “I’m afraid I am going to have to do ____” and her response was “Yes. That is exactly what you have to do.” So she isn’t entirely telling me new information. But she is very good at skimming out the bullshit and getting to the heart of the matter. “This is failing because of x.”

I don’t trust many people to give me feedback. I’m not sure why I trust her feedback as much as I do. For one thing she doesn’t use the word “should” and I’m not sure if that has become a specific trigger. Maybe I explode at people for that word rather than because I am completely unwilling to accept advice? It’s hard to tease out.

Also, she tends to say “Calli seems to be a lot like me. When I was a kid I had x and y and z experiences and this is how it went well and this is how it went badly. If Calli is as much like me as she seems right now, you are going to have to deal with a and b and c. It’s not a good idea to do d.”

I guess there is an implied “should” in that but she doesn’t say it.

It also occurs to me that I push Calli in a way I have never pushed Shanna. When Shanna was three I had a one year old. We did not spend a lot of time pushing the absolute physical limits of what she could accomplish until she collapsed in frustrated tears.

I’m having a hard time understanding fully that Calli wants to be able to do things she isn’t ready to do yet and I need to find a tactful way of bailing her out even as I push Shanna to try. Differentiated instruction is a bitch.

(Err, the bicycle riding project is coming along. We’ve hit a few hiccups. As my wise new running mate commented, “Dude. You’ve been out with them four times? Relax and do more low pressured practice.”

Yeah yeah. You may have a point. But we bought the bikes because we want to ride to the park. I need to decide in my adult brain that even if that is the eventual goal… we sure as shit can’t start by doing that. I should probably not try to leave our housing development again until June. We need more low-stakes practice than we have had. Hours and hours and hours and hours.

It is not just a form of transportation. It is about entertainment. It has to be about entertainment at first or they won’t gain enough proficiency to use it as transportation later. The transportation part doesn’t have to be worked out at three, instantly. Relax you bitch.

Medication has been spotty this week. I (re?)noticed a pattern. Whenever I get to the point of using sufficient medication that I actually feel good instead of having just the edge of the pain taken away I punish myself for days with under medicating so I feel a lot more pain. I’m not supposed to be using pot like a pot head. I’m not supposed to be trying to get high. I’m supposed to be just managing the pain.

I think I am too much of a Puritan. My sister told me I had ancestors on the Mayflower (Not her–different fathers.). Maybe it is too deeply buried within my DNA? I can’t stop believing that I must suffer. Anything that feels good MUST BE BAD.

I have been very consistent lately about giving up my morning “off time” to wake up with the kids. I’m not sure if this is good or bad. On one hand I’m more frazzled and I’m not taking a compensatory amount of time later. On the other hand… we are getting along better. When the kids open their eyes in the morning to me in their bed smiling at them… the whole day is easier. The first thing they hear every day is, “Good morning. I’m so glad to see you again. I’m looking forward to our wonderful day together.”

They smile back and say, “Me too!” then grab my neck and pull me close. Then I get a sleepy “Good morning.”

Sometimes it feels weird knowing that I do this as a parenting gesture in large part to make up for the hole in my heart. No one was ever happy to see me during my childhood. I was a terrible, unwanted burden.

I completely support mothers who need to abort children born of rape. I wish my mother hadn’t allowed her religion to force her to keep me. I was not wanted. And they made my life hell.

Now I have something different. It is so very nice. But it’s a lot of emotional and mental and physical work. And I get really tired.

When I’m tired it is harder to be consistent. When I’m scared I start screaming. That’s consistent.

Calli has asked me to stop raising my voice at her when I’m repeating orders/requests/whatever you want to call them. Demands? She told me (while making eye contact so this is serious as a fucking heart attack) “I will be able to listen to you better if you get close to me and whisper in my ear that it is important.”

If a three year old can so clearly ask for the kind of interaction she needs then I am a fucking asshole if I ignore the request. This is how I teach them ownership of their body and consent and boundaries.

I’ve been working on it. I kind of feel that I should create some accountability tool for myself. Maybe another sheet of paper on the wall. I can ask Calli to help me decide whether I approached her correctly or not and we can decide if I get a mark in the “right behavior” column or the “not so right” column. It will also help her clarify which aspects of the raised voice stuff are a problem for her.

My kids are not going to grow up thinking adults are perfect and kids need to bend to the adults around them. Ha. Ha. Ha. No. We want to live together. We need to adapt to one another.

I’m happy about the upcoming social stuff. I’m feeling a little overwhelmed that people are agreeing so delightedly to come to my events. My RSVPs fill up fast. (Err, RSVP for Easter if you are coming… not many spaces left.)

I have had something like six people in the last two weeks get really excited when I confirm that I’m hosting Easter again. “OH! You throw the best parties!”

I do?

Oh.

Well that’s awesome. How do I do that? What makes them “the best” for you? Because I spend my parties in kind of an anxious hell hoping I don’t offend everyone and run them off such that they never want to come back.

And yet I keep hosting. Irony.

I don’t seem to be running people off. I mean… I do… but I don’t. I run some people off.

I feel very guilty when I admit to myself that I run off people who need things from me that I can’t give. My anxiety and shame around not being able to meet their needs makes me angry and cruel. It isn’t my fault I can’t meet their needs. It isn’t their fault I can’t meet their needs. It isn’t their fault they have needs. I have needs they can’t meet either. But I get mean. This is a major character flaw of mine.

I don’t do this with people who have small needs I can easily meet. If people need something from me that is going to be an up to five hour commitment one time… I love doing that. That helps me feel like I am part of a community and I’m useful and all kinds of good feelings. When someone starts to need 3-10 hours of work from me every fucking week in order to have a relationship with them…

I get mean. I am awful. I am not a nice person. I don’t know how to have healthy limits without being an asshole. I’m not making excuses or justifying my behavior. It’s wrong.

I have been talking to a friend a lot about how different it is in America versus other more crowded countries. Americans apologize for bumping into someone. In China you would never say any word other than “sorry”. So they don’t bother.

I spend a lot of time apologizing for taking up space. I spend a lot of time apologizing for being inconvenient. I spend a lot of time apologizing for not being able to do/be what someone else wants/needs.

I am sorry I am so inadequate. I clearly see that I am.

Right now I’m having anxiety attacks because some folks are mad at me. Folks I don’t really need to “care” about per se. They aren’t my friends. They are the close friends of one of my friends. They are mad at me because my vomiting on Friday caused them some inconvenience. I have apologized profusely for inconveniencing them. I’m sorry they were brought into the situation by our mutual friend. But yeah. I’m the bitch.

And I feel consumed with shame and I have for days. I inconvenienced them. I stole hours of their life and made them about me when they already kind of hate me. I’m really sorry. I did apologize. I have not been acknowledged and that is what I assumed would happen.

I get into these situations. I’m sorry I inconvenienced you. I have very little control over when I vomit. I’m just glad I didn’t make a mess on my floor.

But it impacted your life. And you wish I didn’t impact your life. So you are angry with me because I popped up and existed in a way you couldn’t tune out.

I’m really sorry.

This is more or less why I avoid that whole segment of the “community”. I don’t really like feeling like I am doing something wrong by breathing in a way they can hear.

So yeah. I don’t think I will teach with my friend again. There is a bunch of stress in the lead up and if I get sick there is lots of acrimony, blame, and anger. Not from my friend. He was mellow about the situation. But he didn’t feel qualified to handle the class alone and those are the other people he has in his life to turn to for support.

Yeah well, me hanging around near them feels like an abusive family reunion where they all wish I would drop dead. The sooner the better.

More one of them than the other but… well that’s not a story I’ll write down yet. Maybe a few more decades. It being thirteen years ago still isn’t long enough. Some day.

It’s not all her fault. I was a bitch. But man. Oh man. Ok. Shiny change of topic.

I’ve been having a lot of feelings all week over that. I was doing great last week until I started vomiting on Friday.

I associate vomiting with letting people down and being a bad and weak person. When I get sick my association is that I will also be in trouble for some reason. I am inconvenient when I’m sick.

Noah is working hard to change some of these patterns. He’s nice when I’m sick. He does a lot of telling me that it isn’t my fault and I didn’t do anything bad. I feel really pathetic for needing it. But I do. And he does it. I am so grateful for him as a partner.

I like teaching though. I will look for more opportunities to teach. Just no co-teaching in a situation potentially wrapped in shame-inducing trauma. When I had to cancel a class as a professional teacher… no one made me write a formal apology. I’d like to go back to that kind of treatment. Thanks.

My running mate wants me to stop thinking of writing as a hobby and start thinking of it as a business. I’ve sold enough forking copies of my book that I can stop pretending I’m not a real writer. I shouldn’t have to pay for my book editing and publishing stuff out of my “fun money”. It’s not my hobby. Noah doesn’t take his business expenses out of his fun money. It’s a separate category in the budget. It’s not very healthy for me to demean myself in this fashion.

I will severely limit my career as a writer if I can’t employ an editor until I save up enough fun money by denying myself everything. Denial as a full-time lifestyle in a household that otherwise has a lot of privilege… that’s kinda self-hating. It’s being weird. It’s unhealthy.

Why do women do this to themselves? My writing “doesn’t count”. It’s just… something I do. Like the laundry. And when there are expenses for it, well, they are “mine”, right?

I developed a lot of habits over the years of having the annuities and living with men. What I could have was very strictly limited to what I had in that $1200 every month. I didn’t over extend. And now I have no real personal income and… I’m flailing. The $100/month of fun money is… not enough. Not for me to feel like I can track all of “my” spending separately from household stuff.

We just have a clothes budget. It is for all four of us. If someone gets something then the other three have to wait a while. *shrug* But it changes how I think of things. Although… when I bought the pretty clothes in Portland I took a big chunk out of my personal money. I spent more than $500 on two items of clothing. It didn’t seem fair to make my family give up that large a share of the clothes budget on me getting two items. So more than $300 came out of my fun money. That seemed fair to me.

When the kids really get a big clothes splurge… it goes in the “kid” section even though mostly they come out of the main category.

The kids have a big section of the budget that is amorphously used for classes, home school supplies. books, toys, gear of whatever kind (was baby carriers and diapers now it has moved on to bikes), and rarely clothes.

A long time ago I consciously went out and started spending time with older men. They could talk to me about money. How they got it. What they did with it. I made my own judgments about who lived in which kind of house and who had how much money. I’ve always been tactless as fuck. I would point blank ask them how much cash they had in the bank and whether or not they had investments.

I didn’t understand most of what they told me. But I remembered it. It’s kind of funny to have little memories float up now and again as I’m trying new things with investing.

Be sure you are right, then go ahead. I will, Davey. I will research and research and research and I’ll figure out what I think is right. Of course I know I could always be wrong. Some minute change in my life might make all of my careful risk calculations moot and irrelevant.

I have no way of predicting that. So I have to just act and hope for the best.

Save.

Debt is evil.

Make your money work for you.

Pay yourself first.

Sometimes I think I turn to these mantras as the only way I have of blocking out all the voices in my head who want me to think I am stupid and a bitch and I should just stop inconveniencing them by breathing.

I’ve been really stunned by the intensity of my suicidal ideation this week.

I also haven’t been doing my daily check in calls with my friend. She’s really busy on a project. She’ll be back in a week or so. I support and respect her participation in this event and that means she has no time to think about me. I am a big girl and I’ll keep my big girl panties on.

It is interesting how suicidal ideation is not always about depression. I don’t feel like I am feeling depression symptoms. This is more on the anxious/overwhelmed side. Manic is a word people like. But I’m not… doing anything manic.

Just out of the blue driving on the freeway I see a weird opening where it would be possible to turn and be hit by a semi-truck and I want to do it more than I want anything in the world. I want in that moment to feel a lot of pain and then die. I want it as much as my heart wants to beat. It is immediate and visceral and all encompassing.

I have to breathe very lightly and lift my hands so I have a very light guiding pressure on the steering wheel. Sometimes I get off the freeway to breathe and stretch my neck and remind myself, “Not today.”

The reasons I don’t like driving are varied and complicated and… I’m willing to bet that someday I will not be able to drive any more. It is part of the reason I am as strongly motivated to make friends near my house as I am. Walking will always be a good idea. Forever. For my health.

Thanks, Pam, for letting me write this morning.

My head feels better. I feel a lot less shame. Writing it down helps.

I don’t need to feel shame because other people would prefer that their world didn’t overlap with mine. I could reject our mutual friend so that they never have to hear about me again, but given that he values his relationship with me that seems kind of awful.

But I think I should have different boundaries. Still working on where those need to be. Boundaries are tricky things. You only find out you have them when they are transgressed. Ha. THAT WAS THE WHOLE POINT OF THE CLASS. And what I got out of it is: I need to make sure I never have to deal with your extended friends again. Awesome.

That’s a lesson I can learn.

They aren’t going to like me. No matter what. Ever. I need to not care about that. They are allowed to have their experience of the world where I am… something. I don’t know what. I shouldn’t speculate. I would surely overstate my importance. I certainly don’t suspect that either of them while away hours just hating me. I’m not that important.

So I don’t need to feel shame because they are feeling irritation. That’s not something I need to take on. I gave an apology. I offered restitution to the best of my ability. That’s what I’ve got. Move on. I didn’t vomit on purpose.

And when I feel shame for my social behavior I rush home to assure myself that I am managing my money properly. No one is going to be able to force me to move. I’m allowed to stay here. I’m jumping through all the hoops that actually matter for my life. I don’t have to care that they dislike me. There won’t be any consequences.

And then I can stop thinking about it.

Thank you internet. That’s the end of my confession for today. I have some dirt to play with and a fence to sand. Tomorrow a bunch of little kids are going to come paint a few sections. We are adding more year by year. Drips and drabs. It’s really fun.

Saturday is the Girl Genius Volume 1 read aloud. Email me for details if you want to come hear Noah do all the hilarious voices.

Not good.

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This weekend I was supposed to go to the Tartan Fair, then get a massage, then go to a party. On Sunday I was going to teach a class.

I spent last night in the bathroom. In the past six hours I’ve been in the bathroom four separate times and no visit has been short. I didn’t sleep much for the cramping.

I hate when my body betrays me. This is my sad face. I am going to have to cancel everything for today and I’m not sure about the class tomorrow.

Damnit. Damnit. Damnit.

Medication then catching up

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I know I go through periods of fewer posts. Don’t give up on me. I will always come back to writing. My arms were really bothering me. Typing less has brought the pain down to the 1-2 level. Hurray!

Yesterday Shanna asked me about my medication again. It comes up once in a while. She knew I was tapering in December and that I was having trouble with being patient because of it. Now that I am medicating on a more regular question it feels more intrusive to her and so she asked me again why I need it.

I asked her, “Do you think our life together is scary?”

“No.”

“Do you think anyone in this house might hurt you?”

“Well, we have accidents and bump each other. That hurts.”

“Ok, fair enough. Do you fear that your Daddy or I might do something terrible to you?”

She started giggling.

“Ok, so you feel safe and happy and loved, right?”

“Of course I do. I am safe, happy and loved.”

(I swear to God my heart almost exploded.)

“Well I mostly feel that way now too. Our life is pretty wonderful together. But a long time ago before you were born my life was different. I wasn’t very safe. I wasn’t happy. And for a long time I wasn’t loved.”

She leaned in to hug me at that point.

“Thank you for the hug, honey. My point is that what you learn as a little kid is kind of hard to change when you are a grown up. You will probably always feel safe, happy and loved because you are getting used to it as a kid. I have a hard time not feeling scared and angry and unsafe because that is what my life was like when I was a kid. I have no good reason to be scared or angry or unsafe now. My life is awesome. But it’s hard to change what your brain thinks of as “normal” and the medicine helps me with that. The medicine kind of helps my brain ignore the parts that say BUT YOU SHOULD BE SCARED!!!!”

“Ok, so the medicine makes you feel less scared?”

“Sorta. Not exactly. The medicine helps my brain relax enough to really look around me. Is there any reason in my life right now for me to be scared?”

“Uhm, are you scared I will cut my hair again?” (Calli gave herself a haircut this weekend. Sigh. It’ll be fine. Today we will see the hairdresser and she’ll have sassy cute short hair. All’s well that ends well. I laughed when Shanna said this.)

“No I don’t feel scared that you will cut your hair. It’s your hair. If you want to cut it I need to suck it up and deal with that. Ok, let me try again. I don’t have any reason for my brain or body to be scared. But my brain forgets that I should stop being scared because it was scared for so long. The medicine is kind of a way of gently nudging my brain into saying–‘hey dude–look around, your life is awesome‘.”

“So the medicine helps you be less scared?”

“Sure. The medicine lets me be not-scared. Some bodies function differently and need medicine. Your uncle has problems with his blood sugar, right? He talks to you about how that works for him.”

“Yeah. He has diabetes. He has to check his blood sugar with a machine and then he has to be careful what he eats.”

“Right. So some people who have diabetes have to be on a medicine called insulin every single day and some people don’t. It depends on how the persons individual body is working–right? Because not everyone needs insulin.”

“Ok.”

“I need cannabis because my body needs the reminder to look around at how calm and happy my life is. This medicine allows me to do that whereas without the medicine I am too scared to notice how wonderful my life is. And that’s pretty sucky feeling.”

“That makes sense.”

“I think so.”

Then she handed me a book and expected me to shift gears.

I’m making steady progress on Outrunning. I will absolutely be done by June. Many people are bringing up the idea of self-publishing. I think I probably should do that for No Secrets but I’m still afraid that Outrunning will need established distribution networks.

I’m taking a few weeks off of social media. Stop fucking up your arms with lame attempts to connect that don’t really go anywhere, Krissy.

I’m reading, of course. Three books at once. Stealth of Nations by Robert Neuwirth–it’s about System D economies. Piracy, non-registered, street vendors, all kinds of different subeconomies that operate outside the “legal” sphere. I’m also reading Out of the Nightmare: Recovery from Depression and Suicidal Pain by David L. Conroy, Ph.D. It is as fucking cheerful as it sounds. And last but not least: Playing Well With Others by Mollena Williams and Lee Harrington. I feel like an asshole because I’ve owned the book for over a year and I haven’t read it yet. I’m telling newbies to go read the book without prereading it. I recommend it on the basis of, “I’ve known Mollena and Lee for almost a decade and a half and I’ve been to their classes and I’ve played with them and been friends with them so it must be good.” Good to actually read it though. Ahem. So far it is as good as I expected it to be. That is a good sign.

I have more work to do on the garden, of course. That never ends. I didn’t finish putting the last few seeds in the ground. And now it is hella wet which means I won’t have to soak the seeds when I plant them. Maybe I’ll get that done today.

The Prius is in the shop. New auxiliary battery, alignment, and brakes. Ouch. Today I stop and say a prayer of thanksgiving that I am a rich person now and sudden car maintenance is ok. I don’t need to feel scared just because unexpected bills came up. That is such a luxury and I want to be conscious of it for the rest of my life. Relax. I don’t need to be scared. It is only money and we have enough. We have enough. We have enough.

First Sunday in April I am going to co-teach a bdsm class. It will be fun. It will be about boundaries and having them and dealing with people over-stepping them and such. Because that’s how I roll.

Running is going very well. My next race is only 19 days away. Eeep. I still haven’t scheduled the Portland race. I’m dithering for a variety of reasons. I’ll do it though. I have one friend coming over on Tuesday nights to walk five miles with me. That’s pretty exciting. She might make it a regular thing. I want to bully/beg my neighbor into going out with me on Thursday morning runs. His wife says that once my mileage comes down after the race she will shove him out the door for me because he needs the exercise. Saturdays will remain my long days and they might stay solo for a while because post-race I’m thinking I’ll keep to 10+ miles. I feel better physically and I man I like eating like a horse without gaining weight. I seem to have gained ten pounds from all the cookies I ate over the winter. My pants fit better. Yay!

I keep thinking that I should make up a few mailing lists. Shanna is enamoured with the idea of last minute invitations. I’m not so good at making those work. I only know how to get big groups to congregate if I start talking about an event a few months in advance because then I poke people slowly in person over a long period and get them to commit. I’m not good at “Let’s have a spontaneous large get-together tomorrow.” I… I fail. I don’t know who to call. I even feel awkward about individual emails. “If this person isn’t available will they be sad and feel kind of rejected if I bring it up?”

I have been debating with myself how I want to structure this. Do I want one big mailing list that people can sign on to and then they have to ignore the non-relevant emails? That seems like trouble. Do I want a working parents list and a stay at home parent list? That way I am not constantly spamming the working friends with, “Want to go to a museum on Tuesday at 10am?”

I have several friends who actively are trying to run large groups of people already. If I have a mailing list and I want to do things that conflict with their public schedule… am I being rude? Should I have people on a mailing list when I know in advance they will frequently already be asking me to do something else on that day but I don’t want to do what they want to do? That seems… problematic.

But I’m really not willing to drive far enough to just up and join someone else’s group full time. All the folks running active groups are at least thirty minutes from my house and I’m not up for an hour of driving (or more–sometimes two or three hours) of driving for socializing almost every day of the week. I’m just not up for it.

So it goes.

I feel stupid. I want it to be an opt-in thing. But I’m afraid that having it as an opt-in thing will mean that people will feel rejected because I didn’t seek them out and beg them to participate.

I’m being an idiot.

Heck, I’d kind of like to have a mailing list for “Adult friends who do not have children” but who like tagging along sometimes so they want to know what is going on so they can say, ‘That sounds like fun’ without me having to go through my damn Little Black Book thinking of everyone I know before I do stuff.

I like community but I’m shit at organizing it. Anxiety for the win. And I’m a bad joiner. And I want to put a sign in front of my house advertising that I will teach English in exchange for people teaching me their language and I haven’t gotten up the nerve yet.

So many things I want to do and so little time. And so little self-confidence.

Wait! It’s not just lack of self-confidence… it’s uhhh I’m already over scheduled. Yeah. That’s it.

Ok, I should go edit now that I have one more hour of work time left this morning. I miss you, oh blog, when I am not babbling into you constantly. I will always come back. This is an affair I can’t give up on.

find gratitude (body edition)

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Dear body: thank you for waiting until the night after my long run to start bleeding. That is so kind of you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I am  not even going to bitch about you coming on with so much agonizing pain I can’t sleep through it. It’s ok. I love you.

I’m not even going to complain that you woke up so hungry that it hurts a lot. You need what you need. You are doing a good job of asking for your needs lately. Keep it up.

I’m thrilled with your ability to show up and do what I want. I appreciate that you rarely flake on me. Bodies are tricky things. Sometimes the mind says “I want to do ____” and the body laughs. Not today, bio-tech. Mostly my body cooperates. Thank you.

My head and arms hurt. I’m grateful for the reminder that I am alive. I’m grateful for the reminder to rest.

I didn’t have a bad day before I started bleeding and I often do. That’s pretty awesome.

Today is a clothes swap. We’ll see what I find. Maybe some pants without a hole. Who knows.

All the things.

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I finished The Cannabis Health Index. I may need to own a copy of my own. It was incredibly hard to just sit down and read it (I’m pretty sure I’m confusing a lot of cancer information in my head right now because I’m really not a medical expert.)

Mostly what I come away from the book believing is that I need to do the math on how much pills cost and find a way to earn that amount of money for myself so I get over my overwhelming guilt about taking family money for “drugs” (apparently that is the deal my brother had with his wife as a stay at home parent–he had to work enough to pay for pot and alcohol). I have a lot of “risk factors”. I can’t do anything about that. My body is not in great shape. I need to lower my stress and this is the most effective medication I know exists. Ok.

Apparently my shrink knows the author and she’s going to have lunch with him this week. She says she will pass on my opinions on the book. I feel a little weird about that.

I finished the first round of editing Outrunning a week early. That makes me feel happy with myself. I read through the essays and got rid of the worst of the grammatical weirdness and put keywords all over the place. Round two involves matching up key words and eliminating all the duplicate phrasings. Going through it once helped me spot some of the repetition. Key words will help.

It’s still kind of unorganized and there are a few sections I need to hack and write again to be more explicit. I’m pussy-footing and being vague in a few places where I should be more explicit. Kids won’t understand the PC hand-wavey shit. Say it like it is.

I do need to justify why arbitrary rules can be ignored. Don’t worry Pam. I’ll tell them why eating dessert first isn’t a big deal.

This week has been packed. I am very lucky that people ask to spend time with us. Very lucky. Overwhelmingly lucky. Sometimes lots of people ask for the same week. This week had 2-3 social engagements every day. It would have been three on almost every day but we had some blissful cancellations. Sometimes I feel weird about being glad for cancellations. At least it feels emotionally superior to my years-ago feelings of fury and hate. Easier to maintain friendships and be understanding.

People get sick. The parents of our little friends sometimes have to work. We can either be understanding and supportive or we can give up on them as friends.

I’m not really in a jettisoning people from my life stage. I’m trying to build. Tolerance is in my best interests. Enlightened self-interest and all that.

I do not worry that I am under socializing my kids. Oy. I don’t worry as much about me being isolated either. I’m starting to see my time alone as strictly self preservation against all the different things I have to think about all the forking time.

I appreciate that I am managing to build a life that mostly exists within ten miles of my house. It is a slow process but it is working. I’m existing in the space I’m in. I’m Occupying my space. I take up room and talk to people and get to know them and ask about their lives. I’m getting to know more home schoolers and better know the ones already in our lives.

I’m in the phase I’m in.

I want community. I want it so bad I can taste it. This is the process and I need to figure out how much of the cost I can bear.

It occurred to me that I should stop thinking of our food budget as an area to constrict. Part of the reason that we spend as much money as we do is that we have extra people at meals at least five days a week. Sometimes just one person but often up to twelve. We have several parties a year. That’s just part of our life.

We’re feeders. Come here hungry. We’re happy to fill that need. There are a lot of problems we can’t fix but you don’t need to leave our house hungry.

But I’m kind of a fascist about what I want my kids to eat. And I read too much about food quality to buy cheaper products full time. I have the luxury of buying food that I prefer. Ok, that still includes Kraft mac’n’cheese and ramen because I have some taste preferences I can’t seem to ditch. Also: when I’m very overwhelmed and I need to stay in emotional control I can’t cook anything more complicated than that. Even making sandwiches stresses me out more than that. Making ten sandwiches will result in my hands shaking by the end. Lame.

So I do what I need to do. I feed people. I have good nuts and fruit and cheese and meat and awesomely shitty starches. Take your pick.

We all make choices and set priorities.

I will continue to hemorrhage money on meat, fruit, and vegetables. I will source them as locally as possible. Dairy is more mixed for me. I’m going to keep buying my fucking ramen and mac’n’cheese.

If I want to be able to keep sharing this quality of food with my family I have to just accept that as the cost of doing business and not feel guilty. It is expensive to eat well. It sucks but it’s true. I need to get over my inclination to feel guilty about high grocery bills. I’m not wasting the money. Yes, we “could” spend less money on food. But I get to buy meat mostly outside the industrial meat complex. I get to support farmers trying to grow organic food for a living wage within 100 miles of where I live. I want that industry to succeed. I like shopping at my farmers market.

I have choices because I have privilege. I’m not doing what I “must” if I force my family to live on rice and beans all the time. I could do it. But I don’t see high moral value in doing it. It’s a perfectly valid choice. It is not, however, a more moral choice. It could be argued that a vegan diet would be more moral but I’m at peace with my status of omnivore. I try to make sure the cows, chickens, pigs, and lambs that make up most of my meals lived decent lives. It’s important to me.

I think that understanding my choices in context helps me appreciate my successes against my metrics.

If I had a different amount of money my metrics would change. Like they do.

Trying to look for some peace with my budget process. Looking for that Zen place.

It’s kind of funny. Today I sit down and feel like I’ve checked almost all the boxes for this month and it’s the 21st. I still have some seeds to get in the ground. Two or three hours of work, not bad.

Next week there are one or two things every day. Swimming counts as a thing. Dentist counts as a thing. It’s not all social. Looking at the number of hours of babysitting I think I should spent all day with the kids in between or they will flip out. Brace yerself, Eppie.

I’ve had a lot of alone time this week. (Thus the productivity.) Next week I need to be done at 6:30 and be more present with them during the day. Ok. That is the main job and all. Noah has been reading to them for hours every night and I either hide in the garage or go to bed.

But when I cycle this way sex gets fewer and farther between. (Last night was great, honey. Thanks.) It seems like the main way we can work it out now is to have me go to bed at 6:30 pm so I can take a three hour nap and wake up for sex when the kids are asleep. Ha. Disco nap.

Keep all the balls in the air. Haven’t had a panic attack in more than two weeks. That’s pretty good. I have been medicating. I haven’t felt the need to cut. It is nice to notice the absence of that wanting. I have other anxieties but it’s not extreme.

Just keep swimming swimming… something.

Ugh. Going in.

post-therapy: medication

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My shrink gave me a very firm talking to this morning. I’m not sure she has ever been this directive before. Maybe she feels she is growing into the role now that I’ve been going for a year? In her opinion if I’m still having one-two panic attacks in a week then I need to medicate more heavily and stop fucking around with it. If I won’t consistently use pot then she wants me on an anti-depressant and an anti-anxiety med. I’m not sure yet how I feel about this upsurge of bossy from her.

Panic attacks, for those who may not know, can include several of the following symptoms:

  • “Racing” heart
  • Feeling weak, faint, or dizzy
  • Tingling or numbness in the hands and fingers
  • Sense of terror, or impending doom or death
  • Feeling sweaty or having chills
  • Chest pains
  • Breathing difficulties
  • Feeling a loss of control

(Thank you Webmd.com.)

For me I tend to have racing heart, dizziness, tingling in my hands and fingers (but that could be just that I type too much), sweaty, chest pain, breathing difficulty, and the horrible overwhelming feeling that I’m about to be punished because I am bad. It sounds kind of mild when I write it down. Most people who have them say they feel rather like a heart attack. They physically hurt your body and wear you down over time.

At this point I’m down to having that happen 1-2 times a week. Most of my panic attacks are in the 5-8 minute time duration window.

My shrink asked me if I liked being this way. In that, “are you keeping yourself sick because you like the attention” sort of way. I told her that I don’t deny that I like a lot of the effects of being hypervigilant. I like how many things I’m able to track at once.

I think there are reasons I need to stop doing it though. I need less multi-tasking. Interesting project opportunities continue to arrive. Hrrrmph. Tired.

And yet there are things I’ve gotta do. I could choose to not do them. It is true. But I would not like the consequences.

She told me to medicate more consistently and figure out how to increase the number of minutes I spend per day on active stress reduction. Yes, ma’am. One more forking thing to track. Goody.

It’s weird dealing with having these urges come up. I’m trying hard to learn that these things aren’t a normal part of life. I mean, I’m not alone in having panic attacks or anything. I’m not claiming I’m a completely unique snowflake or anything. This is just the road I’m on. It is well documented. I read lots of books about it. I am pathetically textbook. Feck.

What does being something different even mean? Do you know what my email handle came from? I wanted to stop using the internet handle that my Owner gave me. It was time to be something different.

So yeah. My therapist has opinions about how my PTSD symptoms are being handled. She agrees with me that I should pat myself on the back for the progress I have made and yet… I’m not where I want to be.

In a timeline: the last seven years has been the longest period of my life where I have lived in one place. Nearly twice as long as the runner up. I’m seven years post-rape. That’s after twenty-three years of being intermittently raped by a total of twelve people.

Why do I keep listing it? Because I want attention for it? *snicker* I don’t get attention for it. I make people not talk to me anymore by talking about it. Talking about it is the main way I make sure people don’t want to know me any more. It’s rather effective.

It is just true. It just is. Everyone else gets to tell me for the twenty-fifth time about their life pattern. I listen. I forking listen until I can recite the stories as well as my friends tell them about themselves.

I can clearly see all the victim blamey reasons I’m less likely to get raped from here on out. I no longer dress slutty in public unless I’m out with Noah and standing next to him the whole time. (I was only rarely dressed inappropriately in the contexts in which I was raped.) I don’t drink in public unless Noah is there. (Only three? of my rape experiences involved alcohol. I think it is awesome that I am so tired I can’t think through the roster and figure out if it is actually three. Writing No Secrets helped me lose a lot of the strings on the memories in mind. My flashbacks have dropped to basically nothing. Haven’t had one in a long time.)

Long story short: I haven’t had anything resembling a “normal life” for very long. It’s ok that I’m not very good at it. I probably deserve a lot more slack than I give myself. Only maybe I deserve a lot less. I’m never sure about these things.

More consistently medicate and spend more minutes every day on stress reduction. Ok. (Not medicate *more* or *more heavily* but more consistently. That means things like paying attention to dosage and timing and blah blah blah.)

I don’t think that I “like being able to say I’m mentally ill”. That’s more about me not being willing to hide it. I write as part of managing it.

I partially track ups and downs here because Noah has a better sense of time than I do. He can see how often I’m posting about what and help me a sense of how long different stages last. He doesn’t see most of the panic attacks.

Close friends know I have a thing about punctuality. It’s important to me. Folks probably don’t know that if I’m late somewhere I frequently have panic attacks. My uhh parenting style results in a *lot* of running late. If my kids don’t want to be at the park when the event is supposed to start, I let it happen. I try to let them set a lot of their schedule. If they dally on the way to a class it is their own darn problem. I’m at the front door ready on time and I give lots of reminders.

But I don’t nag. And I don’t force them out the door on time.

So I sometimes have to go in my room and have a panic attack. I’m down to about once a week. I swear, this is not that high for me in terms of frequency.

I’m feeling very defensive about being told to medicate more. Obviously. I want to think I’ve come a long way and I’m still making progress and isn’t that good enough and… apparently not.

The random outbursts of hyperventilating and crying etc kind of bother my kids.

Calli’s kind of in an important developmental stage. Modeling anger regulation is kinda important. This is really hard.

I feel like I have taken on a role playing gig slated to run for twenty years. I’m still figuring out my role.

Reflections

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Today I took the girls to visit an old friend of mine. I haven’t seen her much since I had kids. She’s older than me and she has a grown daughter. Talking to her is different now than it used to be.

Now she actively tries to tell me not to use her as an example. I don’t know if she was simply unaware of how I tried to pattern match off of her in the past or if it seemed more harmless.

Now she adamantly tells me that I should not make similar choices to her. She is not all that happy with the far side of the parenting road and she thinks that she made a lot of wrong choices.

Given that she is a specialist who works with developmentally delayed children (wow I know a lot of them) I did my normal poke, “Several friends think I should have Calli evaluated as potentially somewhere on the spectrum or possibly a speech delay. What do you think?”

She snickered. She said, “I have a 3.5 year old client who can point and say “unh” when he wants something. She’s really not delayed.”

This was kind of weird because I realized how much I want to brush off the encouraging and/or positive comments I receive about my children. Instead I worry and worry about the outliers who tell me, “I think you should ____”.

I never know how to feel about that. I don’t spend a lot of time talking about it, but lots of strangers stop me to grab my shoulders and stare at me in a really intense way and say, “Do you know how exceptional your child is?”

It happens every few months. I uhhh don’t know how to react. This is usually after ten or so minutes talking to Shanna. Talking about that sounds like bragging but honestly it makes me uncomfortable.

It’s not like it only comes from the sweet old grandmothers. It comes from a wide variety of people in a wide variety of circumstances. They are a lot easier to brush off and not think about much. I worry about the criticisms.

I want to believe that people are seeing the real experience of my life when they see potential areas I’m fucking up and not when it’s going right. The going right must be a fluke, right? I don’t believe compliments or positive statements. Although I’m not looney–I know my oldest child is advanced in speaking. But yeah. Whatever. How’s that going to effect the price of tea in China?

When I first knew a lot of my friends as mothers they were still young-ish mothers. I knew them through the periods they talk of with regret. It’s weird to now hear that side of it because I didn’t know anything at the time. I thought they were so great. Now they tell me not so much.

I’m worried, like I am. What am I fucking up? What am I missing? What am I not catching that a competent professional would catch?

Then I went on to read a thread on a homeschool email list about the idea of seeing a speech pathologist/therapist/getting kids evaluated for autism/etc other labels. The point was made that many, most issues (like speech stuff) would naturally resolve around six but we put kids into therapy earlier than that “so they don’t get used to the stigma of being deficient”. (Not my phrasing–emphasis is mine.)

It was a long thread and I’m quoting a very small part and the person I’m quoting had many interesting ideas so I’m not trying to paint it badly. But it was one of those “howdy there, juxtaposition” moments. (I’m working my way through a book on how people reach insights. It’s fascinating how connections layer.)

Anyway. The point was I think it is kind of interesting that I’m dithering about getting Calli evaluated. I have not been able to make up my mind if I want to pursue it or not. If she has speech delay it is extremely minor and most kids resolve minor issues on their own by six. She doesn’t have a severe speech issue. That is clear. She seems to have some difficulty with some sounds, but we do exercises. I’m not sure speech therapy would have much to offer her. The pediatrician does the basic autism screening and has at every appointment. The pediatrician says Calli is fine. But I worry.

And I hesitate to put my sticky little feet near the waters of the system. Do I really want my local school system building a dossier on my kids so that they can pester me about what I’m doing and whether I’m doing it right?

I go back and forth about how I feel about working with charter schools and it comes down to, ultimately, the fact that if I got the wrong “supervising teacher” to work with I would explode with rage.

That’s not so healthy or functional, I know.

I don’t do well with people who have a small amount of arbitrary power and then are petty. It’s a super common trait though and not a situation I really want to deal with.

But I worry about the idea that I am flying blind with no one to supervise me. The trouble is finding someone I respect who would be in an appropriate position to work with me. Mostly I just ask different people who have different specialties for informal evaluations.

Yeah. I feel mixed about the “methodology” I’m following. It’s uhm. Well. It’s unschooling. I don’t have a rubric of right or wrong. I’m just… doing.

What I’m trying to do is teach me and Shanna and Calli how to be polite to people. We have very good manners together. We can go to a grown-up only house and behave exactly how we should because there are Rules and we gosh darn spend the whole car ride there going over them. There are different rules for different places

I consciously and deliberately always specify why a rule exists.

You know that obnoxious “why” phase parents bitch about? We don’t have much of that here. I explain why before they can ever stop to consider how to react to an arbitrary rule. We don’t have many arbitrary rules.

Even “no food on the carpet” is “except on party days or very rarely with something that has NO CRUMBS”.

I need my children to be able to pick up on subtle behavior clues. I need it like I need water. It is not normal or natural to be as obsessed with it as I am. That means that it is not acceptable for me to expect my children to just be able to do it.

It means I have to explicitly teach my children how to evaluate how to talk to people. It means I have to go through and explain detailed body language stuff. We work on it a lot.

It’s controlling and wacky and crazy. But I tell them a lot, “I’m teaching you what I have learned. I don’t know everything. Sometimes I’m just flat wrong. As you grow up you will have different experiences than I’ve had and you will decide that I’m very wrong about some things. That happens to the best of us. For now, try to get some idea of what I’m looking at. It will take time and practice and you are going to make some mistakes and feel embarrassed. Brush it off and try again. You have to fail a million times before you can be an expert at anything.”

I want my kids to have the self confidence that comes from being allowed to try 30 things that fail before you find something that works.

And that means I frustrate the shit out of them.

I sorta think of myself as aspiring to be a cross of Mary Poppins, Mr. Miyagi, and Professor McGonagall. But more cuddly than that list implies.

I’m very demanding and exacting and I expect that is going to suck to live with long-term. We’ll see.

I don’t like curriculum but we talk about history a lot. I believe that studying history is important because many of the mistakes that we might make were already made by other people–go see how it worked out for them and then decide if you want that kind of result. We talk about historical people and periods and events and we read biographies.

When Shanna makes a grammar error and I correct her she does actually say, “Why was that wrong?” so I guess I get some “Why” questions. Mostly she says “What does ____ mean?”

I set the framework in their heads. We talk about space and biology and evolution and chemistry and physics and botany.

We haven’t been seriously working on language stuff but our play sometimes includes bouncing between using all the words in our collective vocabulary in every language we know to name objects in a space. It’s fun. They teach me words. (I verify things on the internet…) That will only get bigger as they get older. It’s a great way of getting them to sit still and be patient. I start by pointing at something and I will say it’s name/color/some descriptive term and someone will respond with a variation or move to a new object.

Unschooling means we spend our lives learning. The kids have spontaneous jam sessions where they sit down and make up song lyrics for a half hour to an hour. I uhhh look askance from a distance as someone who has always felt excluded from the cliqueish world of playing music. Shanna really likes making music and making up lyrics to go with what she is playing. It is a lot of fun to watch. It’s not “serious learning” but I would argue that it’s also important. She’s only five. Yes, some disciplines believe you can force children to learn even younger than she is. There is also some reason to believe it is better to start at more like seven or eight when the kid will really understand the range of options.

For now I’m comfortable with dithering. Or maybe I just think eight because that is when public schools start music. Who knows.

Shanna’s learning enough right now. She really does have a lot she’s trying to do.

We play math games. I don’t start them. I would probably avoid math much more if I could. Ugh. Shanna is very focused on math to my jaundiced view. She probably sits down to spontaneously do math work every week or two. She’s not a prodigy or anything but she’s interested and she feels like she is successful at it and she knows that understanding math is important for many careers. She doesn’t have any opening for bias that might imply she might be potentially bad at math.

We spend our days moving back and forth between subjects all day long. Cooking is chemistry and math. We talk about how much food costs. We talk about why we make the choices we make with the money we spend on food. There are a lot of shoot-off topics from there. Sometimes I do sit down and draw out how something would visually look if I think it would be hard for them to imagine.

But it’s all organic. (I don’t mean the hippy dippy shit.) I mean it just kind of happens. I respond to their questions all day long. I alternate filling their heads with so much information they sometimes look like they might explode with telling them, “I don’t know how to do it. You figure it out.”

We are loud people. We want to be heard. That is the last trait I want to extinguish in my kids. Same with not punishing them for whining. *I* whine. I’m not going to forking punish my kids for doing what I model. That would make me a despicable hypocrite.

I do not punish my kids for doing things I have taught them to do. Iron clad rule.

Does everyone live with rules? This many rules. So many rules. I feel like I am drowning in all the rules, rules, rules. Be this here. Be that there. Be something else someplace else. 

I like the Biblical phrase “a house divided”.

Fall. Fall. Fall.

Only I’m not divided. I promised me I’d never do that. I would never split off my memories so that only certain parts of me existed at a time. Apparently that is one of the main ways folks like me get out of childhood. That’s what the specialists tell me.

I’m not splitting. But I’m learning how to be polite in a wide variety of different cultures and it’s hard. I think I only get to like 70% correct anywhere I try.

I always say too much. I’m too forward. I’m too loud. I’m too inappropriate (although this one has faded now that I only over-share sexually with some of Noah’s random co-workers at Christmas parties. Surely that’s uhm not as bad as I’ve ever been before. That’s been it for the last several years running.

This is big.

And yet I shouldn’t talk about it because it is indiscreet. But controlling hypersexuality doesn’t go away when you are married and monogamous and having moderately good sex with your husband. (I post about bad spells and he goes, “Ahh. An opportunity. So if I put in more effort I get more sex? H’okay then!”) We’re too tired for the earth shattering kind of sex. Some day we’ll get back there. *cross fingers*

I feel like that is the main overwhelming fact of parenthood. Exhaustion. I actually sleep pretty well these days. What, I only miss 2-7 hours in the average week lately? I’ve been sleeping pretty well. I wake up when I want to and not because I have to. That’s doing ok. But I’m still exhausted.

Yes, it’s a running day and I’m tired after eight miles. But it’s not that. I think the running makes me feel better about being this tired because I am whether I run or not. At least when I run I get to have this macho swagger for a while as I feel my rock hard thighs. Holy crap. I didn’t know my legs did that. (They stopped being rock hard when I defrosted and relaxed after the run… but they had like an hour there.. Maybe I need more mid-run stretching breaks… hm.)

I think that the schedule I should keep is either run or edit seven days a week. I only predictably have till 6:30am to work. The whole rest of the day is too overwhelming with kid-need-to-communicate. I love them so much but sometimes I feel like a wrung out sponge.

When I look kind of deflated Noah says, “Well we didn’t pick the low intensity kind of parenting.”

Nope. Not so much.

If I get through this twenty year period and I end up with adult children who want to be my friends and who can go off into the world and have happy lives…

I don’t want a codependent relationship forever. I don’t want two dependents. I want to engage in loud, wild, crazy sex in the middle of my living room. You can move out some day, kiddos. I have plans.

But I hope and pray every day that they will want to be my friend. I want to hear about their lives. I want to know what happens to them. Sure, I hope that they will tell me sometimes that I am a good mom. Mostly I hope that I will look at what they do with their life and think quietly to myself “That was a good choice.” I should keep my mouth shut. It is not my job to judge who they become as adults. Not one way or another.

I don’t judge them much now. I evaluate them. But I describe everything in terms of progress and development. There is no “good” or “bad”. I’m just making sure you are doing what a three year old should be able to do.

I worry that if I decide to have her evaluated she will have a very small delay and I will be told that I “really should pay for therapy so she won’t be more delayed later” (when that is only a faint possibility).

Yeah, I over think things.

If she has a 10% or 20% delay then she is still in the range of normal. She’s just not right at the center line or above it. I don’t believe there is a chance that she is more delayed than that. And her expressive language is advanced. I think she just has to grow into her mouth.

I want to give her time. I think that is all I have to give her. I don’t want to think of her as “behind”. She’s Calli. She’s not the most advanced in every single part of human development but she is certainly not struggling to be understood.

If she starts having problems having conversations with strangers because they can’t understand her then I will take her in for an evaluation. That seems like a good bar. As long as strangers can understand her and have a pick up conversation she is doing well enough for three.

Ok. I think I can stop worrying about that now. (I can dream, can’t I? Actually I can’t because I’ve started having pot at night again. Thank you blissful slumber. Yes, my tolerance is lower.)

I feel like I am so tired I will go fall in my bowl of soup. Maybe time to start getting ready for dinner. I’m so glad it is a leftovers night.

I planned out dinners for February and March. I’m pretty good about sticking to my schedule if I make it. I’m hoping to uhm bring down my food budget a little. It’s hard given some of my food priority stuff. I do my best to buy my meat from actual farmers. I make a big exception for sausage. I’m going to hell for the sausage. I have some very strong feelings about the unsustainability of factory farmed meat. But man I know how expensive it is to be all prissy about “food ethics”. Maybe this year I should be better about tracking food spending. I wonder what I’m putting where. I could look at vendors. on Mint… Hmmm. Now I’m procrastinating. Put down the darn keyboard, Krissy.

Running is so different now.

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That first year I was running I felt like I was being hounded by demons on every step. I spent most runs sobbing and crying and spitting big gobs of mucous out of my mouth so I could breathe. It was a regular occurrence for me to fall to my knees and cry for 10 or 15 or 20 minutes and sob as hard as I could in the middle of a run. I spent a great portion of every run planning how I could kill myself with the handy materials (jump off an over pass, eat poisonous plants, deliberately step in front of a Mac truck among other ideas).

I think that happened because I was training so I could run with my brother. I know my brother hates me and blames me for a lot of things that couldn’t possibly be my fault. So training to run with him was really hard. I’m kind of glad he flaked.

Instead of having a gut wrenching awful experience I had a very hard experience with someone who loves me an awful lot. She must or she wouldn’t have flown from out of state to run an awful marathon with me. It was not convenient for her to do. She went through a lot of trouble.

And all through that difficult race (it was a very hard race for experienced marathoners–the conditions were just awful) she was there with me coaxing and playing and keeping my spirits up. She sang to me. She told me funny jokes. She would gently and lovingly coax me into a minute of running… just a minute… to speed up our pace from the crawling walk I mostly managed. I would not have been an official finisher of that race without her. It was too hard for me alone.

So now when I run I notice that my internal dialogue is different. Instead of hearing what a lazy, fat, stupid, disgusting, waste-of-time bitch I am the whole way I have Blacksheeps gentle voice instead. “You can do it! I have so much faith in you. Small steps, just move ’em quick. Just a minute of running then we can walk again. You can do it. I believe in you.”

I don’t cry when I run any more. Sometimes I’m still pokey and slow and that’s ok. I get a little more of a questioning eyebrow response back now. I don’t get told I’m fucking pathetic for going so slow. I get more of a, “Are you sure you can only move that fast?”

Right now I’m training for my training half marathon. I’m going to do another half marathon later in the year with Blacksheep. I’m doing this one with the mindset of getting into better shape so I can go closer to her pace. I know she will be patient with me no matter how fast I will go–she will not shame me. She will not degrade me or act disappointed. She will be encouraging and enthusiastic about me trying so hard because she knows how long the journey has been.

When I think about reparenting stuff this kind of thing is kind of what I mean. Blacksheep talks to me the way I talk to my kids. Like they will mistakes and get back up and try again because that is what you do.

Making mistakes does not define you. Refusing to correct your mistakes does define you. There are choices in life.

I’m looking forward to both 1/2 marathons this year. And…. I’m thinking that I might go right from the second 1/2 marathon into training for a full marathon again. I like how my body feels when I’m doing the long-distance running. I’d like more of that with tapes of Blacksheep playing in my head. I need that in my life.

It’s not like she’s with me on every run. But I can remember and draw strength from the love that is there.

I do that with cooking and Sarah. When I’m feeling scared and I can feel myself wanting to curl up in a ball and cry because I feel stupid and like I can’t I can’t I can’t. Sarah comes and whispers in my ear, “Yes you can. It’s easy. Here let’s read the recipe together.”

This is how I piece together my reparenting. I’m going to go have my glass of tea now.

Thank you so much for loving me.

Stupid body.

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I suppose I shouldn’t call my body stupid just because I didn’t get pregnant this month. I have proof. And it hurts. It hurts so much it woke me out of a sound sleep in an agony of pain. Yeah, fuck you too uterus.

Today is my sister’s birthday. She is 45. I’m going to cry for a while about that.

Today is park day. I’m not looking forward to it because one of the moms has described me as whiny. I take this as my hint to not come within 20′ of her. I don’t want to go to the park. I want to stay home and cry.

I suppose the only part that matters is I’m not going for my sake any way.

Dr tomorrow

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So I should figure out what to say. This isn’t a Kaiser appointment so I have more than 15 minutes. Hurrah!

I’m thinking I should start at my head and work my way down. I get severe headaches. Usually I think of them as “eye strain” but I got new glasses last year and it didn’t help the way it did in previous years. These headaches center around my temples and mostly streak back towards my ears. That throbs in the 2-5 pain range pretty much daily. The whole muscle group that supports my skull has been unhappy and fairly crampy since I had kids. My entire skull hurts all the time.

I have vertigo off and on. I used to be prone to blacking out but that hasn’t happened in years. I go through periods of extreme tinnitus.

It is difficult for me to breathe through my nose. If I try I end up gasping for breathe through my mouth.

Before I move down from the head it is important to note that a large part of the reason I am going to the doctor is because I have PTSD and GAD and depression and I am having a hard time controlling my behavior when my body is in this much pain all the time. My PTSD symptoms include hypervigilance, flashbacks, avoidance, heightened startle reflex, extreme anger, repetitive intrusive negative thoughts, nightmares (when I’m sober but pot controls these), suicidal urges, self-harm urges, and early wake up time.

In a few months I will be at the point where I have been in therapy on and off for 30 years. It has been court ordered and paid for by the state for a lot of my life because my traumas were considered extreme. Society has an interest in making sure I don’t climb a bell tower with a loaded gun. I have “tried” every school of therapeutic approach I could as I went through 21 therapists. At this point I do cognitive behavior therapy (cbt), acceptance and commitment therapy (act), eye-movement desensitization and reprocessing (emdr), prolonged exposure therapy, and I use cannabis with a medical card. I have tried a wide variety of big-pharma medications including anti-depressants, anti-psychotics, and anti-anxiety meds. I had severe side effects from everything that made it impossible for me to actually live while taking the meds. I am more functional without those medications.

As a result of life experiences I have a great deal of difficulty working with doctors. When I was a child my mother spent a great deal of time telling me I was a “hypochondriac” because my body always had problems but a brief 15 minute visit to a doctor always resulted in them saying “nothing was wrong with me”. Which lead to hours or weeks of being screamed at and berated and sometimes I was beaten if my mother was under enough stress in her life. Later I had other negative experiences with doctors. I have extreme difficulty in learning to trust people who might be able to help me with my help. My experience is they really don’t care about me.

Ok, now to continue down the body. That neck is still a nightmare all the time. I do not have full range of motion through my neck.

My shoulders have been in pain since my first pregnancy. Sleeping on my side for years has caused me to develop a lot of pain all the way through my shoulder muscles. I have several specific big knots that are dull notes of pain all the time with occasional spasms. This pain area stays in the 2-6 area. Mostly down at a 2 with spasms that absolutely hit a 6.

My arms are getting worse by the year because I type too much in bad positions. I’m a writer. I will always type too much. I have muscle pain and tingling up and down my arms and into my hands. I can point at a few specific unhappy spots. I have been specifically diagnosed with tennis and golf elbow.

I have experienced back pain from early childhood. The severe back pain started after a specific trauma at around age 9. I have low grade back pain (4ish) all day every day with times that I have spasms in my lower back that spike up to the 8-9 range. When the spasms happen I have to lie on the floor and cry and wait them out. I get the spasms irregularly. I have fewer spasms when I exercise more so I suspect that it is related to weakness in the muscles but I’m not sure. I have seen a chiropractor in the past and it made the pain less intense but did not eradicate it. I get irregular massages to help with my muscle pain and they can generally bring my entire body down at least one or two levels of pain.

In the front of my body I have a lot of digestion issues. I have had chronic diarrhea for all of my life that I remember. I was probably malnourished through my childhood because I had multiple years where I ate nachos for my free lunch at school and ramen for every meal at home. We were poor and I was alone and unable to cook more advanced food for myself. I was alone most of the time from about four years old. I could boil water for ramen. I didn’t have much more talent than that.

I worry that I have food intolerances or allergies but I am not sure. I know that the diarrhea and abdominal cramping is highly related to stress but I have never managed to detect other true signs of allergies. Wheat and dairy combine to make more than half of my diet and sometimes I have symptoms and sometimes I don’t. So… I’m not sure what that means. If I eat too many raw vegetables I will be in extreme pain. Cooked vegetables are better but I still have pain from them sometimes.

I have had periods of extreme stomach pain for my entire life. That’s where I hold my stress.

I had two hard pregnancies and two rough labors but I don’t intend to have children again. Yay!

I have an area on my lower abdomen where I occasionally get a throbbing feeling. A doctor can verifiably feel the throbbing sometimes but the first test looking for a hernia came back negative and I have not been psychologically able to pursue follow up testing as to why I still have that throb in my belly. My husband suggested aneurism. I don’t know.

I figured out a while back that carbonation causes me extreme pain. I no longer ingest it.

My hips are tight despite me doing a lot of stretching (I do yoga at home by myself–I have a book) but they aren’t what I would consider “painful”.

I used to get a lot more pain in my vagina than I do at this point. I had a lot of internal scar tissue but luckily child birth seems to have dealt with breaking up the scar tissue. At this point I have only occasional pain during sex.

My legs go in and out of pain but that has all been since I started running and it feels like good, healthy muscle soreness. It isn’t like my shoulders or back at all. I get occasional escalation of soreness near my knees but if I try to watch my running form more carefully for a bit that goes away. I am happy to report that my feet only hurt after long distances of running.

That’s all I can think of right now. Have I missed anything I bitch about frequently?

Happy 2014.

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I don’t really want to write a retrospective of the year. It was a better year than most for me. Maybe one of the happiest of my whole life. My PTSD symptoms continue to be challenging but I don’t think I got dumped by a long-term friend. I didn’t have to move. I got to buy anything I wanted. I did get support even if it didn’t feel like “enough” (that’s not really anyone else’s fault–I’m not even sure what “enough” would mean) and that is a big step up from most of my life.

We had dinner last night with my current “bestie” and her family. She’s the only person I talk to almost every day who doesn’t live with me. That person changes over the years. I try at this point to not hold on to attachment to a specific person needing to be there for me forever. I will never have a BFF. Britt decided she didn’t want me and that’s fine. My Jenny loves me and will love me forever but she’s far away and I won’t ever get to spend a lot of time with her again. That’s ok. I still love her with all my heart and soul. It is what it is.

My bestie told me she doesn’t think going cold turkey off pot is a good idea. She watched me cycle emotionally a lot yesterday and she flat told me that she thinks I am doing a self-hating thing. This is why I pick opinionated people as friends. They tell me what they really think. Even though sometimes I’m an asshole in response. I’m way better about the asshole thing than I used to be.

I am trying to let go of feeling sad about all of the relationships that have ended. People come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime and you will never know who is in which category until you die. That’s when you finally have perspective on the story. It will all be ok in the end.

2014 needs to be a year of not spending money. I need to take the long term financial planning stuff seriously. I have some expensive goals.

Otherwise I think that mostly I need to work on being more brave. And kind. I need to yell less.

I happen to love a lot of other people who also have psychological challenges of their own. I’m not the only one with anxiety and panic disorder and PTSD and depression. If I want those people in my life I am going to have to consciously and deliberately keep inviting them in or they won’t be in my life. They can’t invite themselves in. Or they won’t. I don’t know which and from where I am sitting it doesn’t matter. It all comes out the same in the wash.

People are never going to be “all I want” from them. I have to manage that. It isn’t anyone else’s fault. It isn’t my fault either. It isn’t anyone’s fault near as I can tell. It just is. I can either be kind and loving or I can be nasty and alone.

I don’t want to be alone. I really don’t.

I’m looking forward to 2014. I have so much to look forward to. I love spending time with my kids so much. I am deeply grateful to the friends in my life. Noah is the source of all my safety and security. I cannot begin to express how much I notice that. I need to treat Noah as well as he treats me. I’m really grateful that I get to have someone who loves me this much in this lifetime.

I won’t keep everyone forever and ever. I need to not feel that it happens because I am a worthless piece of shit. That’s not it. Sometimes the people who can’t be in my life do truly love me… but sometimes love is not enough. I am hard. That will always be true. I need to transfer the bitterness about losing some people into gratitude for the people who can stay. It isn’t anyone’s fault that some people have to go. It’s just life.

Part of the challenge for this year will be to get my body to hurt less. I hope to get my brain to stop chanting that I am a worthless whore. It’s a goal.

I’m really looking forward to my birthday this year. I was talking to Noah about it this morning. It looks like I will take off for nearly a week alone because my birthday is on a Wednesday and I think it may be a good idea to schedule the half marathon in Portland the weekend before or the weekend after. I will check with blacksheep and race schedules and decide for sure. Shanna says she is not interested in going to the Unschooling conference in Washington the weekend of her birthday. She wants to be here with friends.

I’m looking forward to waking up alone on my birthday somewhere far from my home. I will have no one and nothing to take care of except my base bodily needs. That sounds like the best birthday ever right now. Maybe I’ll go dance in the trees all by myself.

Marital Discord

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(Not looking for advice.)

You know how I don’t complain much about Noah? Mostly this is because I don’t have a lot to complain about. I’m a complainer. I like getting things off my chest. I feel better afterwards. So the lack of complaining is noteworthy.

Things are hard lately. My parasympathetic nervous system is shot. Which makes things like sex really hard. I don’t orgasm much at all. We can count how many times I have gotten off (other than masturbating) in the last year on one hand. That sucks. I can masturbate. But partner sex isn’t really doing a lot for me. Partner sex is about gritting my teeth while Noah uses my cunt to masturbate. I’m not feeling very good about myself. I have to grit my teeth because frequently it just flat hurts and I’m trying to bear it. I’m not even really lubricating very much.

Noah periodically says, “We could stop having sex for a while” and that makes me feel worse. I have been very aware from early childhood that marriage meant having sex. That’s why you get married. So you have someone around to fuck whenever you want.

I feel like the biggest asshole ever. Noah married me largely because of my hypersexuality. It’s gone. Well, I bet I could go pick up a casual sex partner and be fine but man I can’t get it up at home. This is hard.

I’m not really sure how to create more space for feeling like sex is a good thing in my life. Right now there just isn’t space. I spend all day being whacked as people whine “Mooooooommmmmmmmmmmy”. No, I don’t feel fucking sexy.

Pretty much every time anyone touches me I flinch. I’m having a hard time. I don’t really know what to do about this other than wait it out and hope it gets better as the kids get older.

At some point I’m going to be able to sit my kids down and beg them to stop hurting me all the time but they still aren’t to a point where they are even capable of understanding what that means. I’m struggling. I feel like the physical experience of the world my body has is the least important priority for everyone in my house. I’m having a hard time.

It doesn’t help that my ambient pain is really high even on pot. Most of my joints hurt a fair bit of the time. My muscles hurt. Pick a random place on my body and poke it and you have like an 80% chance I will say, “Yup that hurts.” Everything hurts. My fucking eyes hurt. I’ve had a headache for months. My arms, legs, and torso fucking hurt. No, I don’t feel very sexy.

In my head I keep praying that maybe if I work with a doctor and change my diet it will help. Maybe. January.

None of this is Noah’s fault and I feel like a ridiculous asshole for withholding sex. I feel like a really bad person.

The part that is bothering me the most is that when I think about sex I think about cutting. But not my normal leg-grid-pattern. When I think about sex and how little it matters how it feels to me I want to cut on my arms. I want to start right at the elbow and pull down to the wrist. Which is more of a suicidal gesture/attempt than just stress relief. I feel very upset with myself for that happening.

Noah is not pressuring me. This is not Noah’s fault. This is just happening. This is just how my brain works.

Sex is one of the primary ways that Noah gets his “cup filled” if you know that whole metaphor. That’s how he feels loved. That’s how he feels wanted. That’s how he gets energy to go out and do the death march that is his life.

We aren’t doing very well right now. We are both tired in this existential way that goes far beyond the sleep deprivation we have had in the past six years (I didn’t sleep much while pregnant).

I think that part of our problem is we keep coming to arguments that center around the fact that we are on very opposite ideological grounds about a great many things.

Noah was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and he deeply identifies with the plight of rich people trying to run companies. When you speak badly about rich people/people with privilege… you’re talking shit about him. I’m the kind of person who has a lot bad to say about rich people and people with privilege.

This gets complicated and hard. We both acknowledge that we are better about this strife than we used to be. But it is wearying and hard. These arguments are extremely depressing for me, I think they are for him too.

It is very hard knowing that I have the life of comfort and privilege I have because of someone who falls into a category I talk a lot of shit about. That doesn’t say nice things about me.

I just can’t get into the mindset of arguing from the point of view of the rich and privileged. Whether I currently have money or not. I will pretty much always take the side of the less advantaged in any fight. No, I can’t get into arguing that corporations are doing great things. And I totally understand the impulse to go burn down the houses of the people who own Wal Mart.

(I’m not advocating arson.)

It means that sometimes I have the active feeling of “sleeping with the enemy”. I’m a fucking sell out.

This isn’t helping our sex life.

I would be less grumpy if my entire body didn’t hurt every minute of the day. Err, I hope.

It is very hard for Noah that I actually hate whole categories he belongs to. That makes him feel pretty bad–which makes sense. I don’t hate him. I love Noah very much. Noah is the only person in my entire life who has ever really wanted to know me. I love Noah. I even like Noah. But man we struggle sometimes.

I feel guilty. I feel like if I could just get the fuck over myself everything would be fine. I really have the ideal set up for me. Just relax. Stop being so fucking hateful. I’m not sure how to let go of this resentment I have. This hatred of everyone everywhere who “has” what I don’t have.

It’s not about the money, not really. I think money is the strawman. Security. Safety. Feelings of belonging.

We had a great party last weekend. Those people were here to see me and Noah. They like both of us. I spent a lot of the party feeling like *I* should leave because I am such an unpleasant stupid bitch.

All of my internal dialogue lately is about how stupid, worthless, and unlovable I am. I keep trying to interrupt it. “If you wouldn’t tell your best friend these things don’t say them to yourself.” It doesn’t help that I totally don’t believe that these things are true of anyone else in my life, just me. Of course I wouldn’t say them to my best friend. Just me.

Christmas will be a lot smaller next year. I’m having waves of feeling really upset that almost everything I got under the tree were things I either sent Noah a specific web link “buy this” or I dragged him to the mall and put things in a bag and told him to pay for them. I’m done. I can’t do this again. I feel so bad. (In his defense he did pick which books off my wish list. I am happy about his choices.)

Noah has too many things to think about. Gift shopping for me doesn’t make it to the top of the priority list unless I force it. So I think I am done receiving gifts. I can’t do this again. I feel like a worthless piece of shit.

I’m going to medicate to get through today. I’ve had several unmedicated days lately. I can’t do today without. I don’t think I would be able to stop crying.

Tell the truth. For the last day or so I have felt very suicidal. Lots of images in my head. I don’t want to admit it out loud because I feel like a pathetic attention whore.

It doesn’t help that someone came on the PTSD forum complaining about how her partner talks about her trauma a lot and this supporter says, “She’s just doing it for attention.”

Why the fuck doesn’t she just shut up. Why the fuck don’t I just shut up. All it would take is a little while with a razor blade. I’d shut the fuck up.

I feel so very worthless and stupid and bad. Why can’t I do anything right? Even when people are very nice to me I turn it into a reason to feel bad. I am so fucking pathetic. I hate myself so much.

None of this is Noah’s fault. But he lives with it. That makes me feel very bad about myself. He deserves better.

Sometimes I think there is no such thing as pleasing me. That I am just an asshole. I could come up with a whole long list of other disparaging things to say. I should probably stop though. I’ve made that point. I suck. Moving on.

I want to cut really badly. I want it so much. But today I wouldn’t actually trust myself to just stay on my leg and that is bad juju. I think that when I can confine myself to my leg and fairly shallow cuts as stress relief it’s not the worst coping method in the world. Today I don’t think I could. Today I want to die. No cutting today. My kids still need me.

It is hard feeling like I only exist as a support unit for other people. I take care of my kids. I’m a hole for Noah to fuck. I don’t feel like there is any me that matters in that equation. It’s not a fair characterization of my relationship with Noah. I “know” that. I just don’t know that.

I feel so sad. I want my mommy. It is all my fault I can never have a relationship with her. I walked away. I have no one to blame but me.

I felt pretty hurt by the 1 star review on Amazon saying that I don’t take responsibility for any of the shit in my life. Oh man. I feel responsible.

It is my fault that I have such negative experiences. If I knew how to act proper things would work out better. If I could stop flinching and freaking out all day long then I could probably enjoy sex. It is my fault I can’t control my body. I feel very guilty for every argument I have where I refuse to concede that all we need is another fucking honky to solve the problem.

I don’t feel like I am fighting the good fight. I’m fighting the stupid, irrelevant, no-one-cares-anyway fights. I’m mostly just fighting myself. I’m losing.

This is post-period so I can’t blame it on PMS. I just feel this way. I just feel like a worthless whore.

I’m sorry Noah. I know you deserve better than this. It seems like telling the truth is still a good policy. I don’t think I can just pretend to be what you want.

Cutting and parties and the parasympathetic nervous system

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My therapist, predictably, doesn’t want me putting a lock on the bathroom door. She is asking me to wait a few weeks. She has a list of things I just need to try before that step is a good idea. She was quite insistent in that way shrinks are which is why we pay them, no?

She mentioned a medication and I didn’t write it down immediately and now I am waiting on a response to an email. Research. She said there is an unusual drug that is not an anti-depressent/anti-psychotic/anti-anxiety that is sometimes used with addicts including severe cutters who can’t get past the “tension release” stage. Supposedly it acts on the mechanism in the brain that requires the brief releases from tension.

I mentioned that I pretty much always freak out like this right before a party and I feel really self-conscious and bad because it seems like inappropriate attention seeking behavior. Her response was, “Your parasympathetic nervous system is trying to get your attention and that’s not a bad thing.” Right before I have lots of people over my body prepares for the fight/flight/freeze thing and I get over loaded. In her opinion I need to figure out some larger structure around stress release particularly right before events–she says cutting isn’t a good option.

Psh. What does she know.

(That was my “I’m funny” voice.)

She says if I’m going off pot this medication may be an appropriate next step. It makes me want to cry. Western meds have completely wrecked my body every time I’ve tried. Name a side effect–I have gotten pretty much every non-fatal one.

I also talked to the home schooled teenager on our street yesterday. We are going to start weekly babysitting. I need more of a break than I’m getting. It is just fucking mandatory. People go insane in circumstances like mine even if they started out basically healthy. I don’t think I have been basically healthy… oh uhm, ever?

I pick my therapists very carefully so she asked me, “How did you and Noah use bdsm to manage these cycles in the past?” Bless her heart. If you have the wrong therapist for you they can be the most worthless excuse for a human being but if you have the right match you can make lots of behavioral progress. (That’s not really fair. They aren’t “worthless” just because they are a bad fit but when you are really upset and hurting it feels that way.)

So the topic of weekly canings came up. Not canning. Not putting food in jars. Being hit with sticks. This time the reference is more on the fun side, kind of like the swinging only this time she meant the other meaning.

I’m not opposed to giving it a shot. I pointed out that Noah and I have never done behavior management this way. I did that with my Owner. We had a very different dynamic.

I continue to have mixed feelings about the idea that it is better for someone else to hit me than for me to cut myself. I understand that a lot of people who generally support the idea of bdsm agree. If you believe that bdsm can be a healthy activity then you probably would side with it being superior to cutting. Probably. I can’t speak for everyone but I’ve been told that a lot.

I watch The West Wing too much so I am starting to explain things to myself in terms of the story arc. Cutting is about dealing with the pressure caused by a nuclear reaction. First the reaction goes into a series of containment devices (my previous/earlier coping methods) then eventually it gets to the point where the containment devices are full and there is more steam coming and either you vent to the atmosphere (causing possible massive damage) or you risk a full scale explosion which will absolutely for certain cause way the fuck more damage. Better to vent a little.

That’s what cutting is. Cutting brings all of my physical stress down to a level where I stop swearing and yelling and freaking out. I’m nice and calm. It’s better than a Valium.

It is hard being told “I know you have this awesome coping method that works better than everything else I am recommending put together… but don’t use it.”

That doesn’t feel like a supportive act. I’m trying to look at the big picture. One of the dominant symptoms of my various forms of mental illness is difficulty with tunnel thinking. When you are in the tunnel you don’t think you will ever be out again. You can only think in the panic of the Right Now. There is no larger picture.

My shrink confidently and manipulatively brings up phrases like “Harm Reduction.” Psh. Like I give a shit about that theory. Psh.

(Once again with the funny… If I didn’t tell you then you wouldn’t know that you are supposed to chuckle. I learn from television shows which tell their audience when to laugh.)

At this stage cutting would dramatically increase the harm I am doing in the process of coping. If there are any less harmful methods left to try I just can’t get to the last method yet.

I’m not really at a point where I’m thrilled about being told “Just be more patient” because that’s what it sounds like.

I’m trying to think about water flowing over obstructions. Sure, it could destroy one path by trying to send all the water one way in a jet or it could try to find another way around. Water is good at getting around whatever you try to block it with. Resourceful.

Last night was Noah’s company holiday party. I did better than I’ve done the last two years. Improvement is good, right? Once again it feels kind of pathetic that I have to struggle so much in order to not be inappropriate.

Last night I swore more than is probably strictly speaking ideal but I didn’t worry about it. I was at an adult party. Noah didn’t care or think I was too extreme. I can live with the other teacher/parent people looking a little shocked when I say “What the fuck?”

I think this party felt lower stress because I didn’t know anyone. For the last few years I had to manage the line between hanging out with people I actually knew and dealing with the amorphous boundaries of “work people”. That’s harder. This time I just go to try to censor appropriately and that’s easier.

When people tried to shock and titillate me by referring to going to a conference that had a leather track I got to cross examine and figure out that it must have been some kind of more general alternative lifestyle convention because I’ve never heard of a 10,000-15,000 person leather conventions in LA in the past few years and I’d be shocked if I missed that. When he tried to allude vaguely to other factors as proof I rattled off the names of all the big cons with their rough head count of attendees and expressed lots of support for my position. That’s always fun. No, I know this stuff. I don’t think you are talking about a just leather con.

In the conversational flow it would have made sense to bring up Debaucherama and I totally didn’t talk about winning Slut of the Year. I was very tactful and appropriate for work people. Ahem.

I turned to Noah and said, “You know which story they just lead me to the door of and here I am not walking through it.” He patted me on the back and all. The coworkers raised their eyebrows and said, “Maybe we can come visit on a different night.” Ha. Like I’ll tell them then.

That was a great party. Sigh.

Also, DA–because of you I get to tell the best stories at parties. I feel like a dumbass but people always bring up travel at these kinds of parties and getting to talk about going to Alaska in my friend’s private plane is rad. I feel officially cool when I tell those stories. Yup, I’ve done bad ass things. That’s right. Including hiking in the Alaskan wilderness. My life is awesome.

It is interesting trying to figure out how to “spin” stories so I can be appropriate for work parties. I’m not so good at this. I did manage to avoid bringing up sex last night. *pat self on back* The leather con attendance thing doesn’t count.

In preparation for the party I went shopping for a dress. Mostly because it kept me out of the house so I wouldn’t cry. I over-ruled the shop lady. She didn’t think the one I bought was the best idea. I’m a bit too lumpy for it in her opinion. She’s a skinny lady and thinks that style of dress is for more stick-shaped women. Psh. Whatever. It was a skin-tight little number with lots of boob attention. In a size medium. No wonder my clothes don’t fit if I can walk into some boutique shop and come out with a size medium. I haven’t been a size medium much in my life. This is weird. I’ve been a large/extra large (or bigger) for most of my adult life.

Noah was quite happy with my selection. That was the whole point.

Sometimes I feel weird about my mixed feelings around dressing frumpy versus wearing clothes that are sexy. When I’m feeling sad and anxious dressing up either feels soothing or stimulating depending on the context. Some days I do consciously think of the trophy wife thing. In general I’m not such a good trophy. But I try to clean up good once in a great while. In general I look frumpy and boring and that is for the best. Lately I’ve been wearing the skirts from my Renaissance Faire outfit over pants because I just want to be covered that much.

So going out in a dress that accentuated a figure I’m not used to having was kind of weird. Several coworkers stared a lot all night. That is always a little awkward. But if you go out dressed like that while wearing bright red lipstick you invite looking. It is a weird line.

I know that Noah gets a status bump from the Neanderthals he works with if they think his wife is hot. I have mixed feelings about this. But once a year I can dress up. Hell it isn’t even once a year that I dress that way now. But man the dress is hot.

I should take a picture. I look really good. If I had looked like this many years ago I probably would have gotten closer to a four digit number instead of a three digit number. Maybe it is for the best that I was chunky and had to win people over with my awesome personality. Snort.

I think the dress would not look out of place on the show Mad Men. Not that I’ve watched it. But I’ve seen a few references on magazine covers in grocery stores so I know the show exists and a brief google image search supports with my assumption.

Now I have fancy party dresses in size 10, 12, 14, 16, and 18 sitting in my closet. Because who the fuck knows what size I will be next year. I no longer get rid of the fancy party dresses. My body changes dramatically over time.

I’m struggling with the fact that I “know” I am small but when I look in the mirror I don’t think I “look” small only I know I do to other people. I look like me and in my head I’m a fat girl (I have justifiably been for a lot of my adult life) so I still kind of see that. I have always been content and happy with being fat. Now I’m not fat and I miss it. On one hand I know that it is easier for me to find flattering clothing (based on the number of times I saw people do double takes when I walked by my dress was flattering) but I’m not sure if I like that. I am not good at guessing which dresses will be flattering. I have to try fifteen on.

My body is different and in ways that are somewhat more societally “approved” and that bothers me.

I don’t really want more approval in that area. Being thinner sure doesn’t get me more sex with Noah.

And yes, all of this is tied up with the whole parasympathetic nervous system and cutting. It is.

Does dressing up and wearing lipstick change how much I want to cut? I certainly feel less like I am about to blow my stack this morning, but how much is it related? How much is it about just getting five hours off of my kids yesterday between the party and therapy?

Those little thrills of recognition when a man checks me out function in similar soothing ways to the cutting. I feel kind of ashamed admitting it, but in for a penny in for a pound. It is the kid-version of what I used to do with finding promiscuous sex. “Whoo hoo people looked at me.” Less of a lift but a lot safer and lower effort.

(I spotted one last night who totally looked like my prey. It’s about the kind of smile. I miss hunting.)

I feel very conflicted about the whole “attention getting” behavior bit. I console myself with the idea that despite writing about what I am feeling/doing in the moment I don’t actually bring it up with people. When I am cutting I do it in a place on my body I can conceal and the vast majority of people don’t know. I write it down because I want proof that I’m not lying to myself about what I’m doing. I don’t think I get additional attention around self-harming behavior. Other than when I was institutionalized as a teenager because I wouldn’t promise to stop cutting I haven’t gotten a lot of “attention” based on self-harming.

Talking about it alienates people and ends friendships. I don’t think I talk about it for attention. I think I talk about it because the more silent and ashamed I act about my behavior the harder it is to control.

If I talk about wanting to cut sometimes that is enough to get me through that feeling of wanting to cut and maybe tomorrow I won’t feel that way any more. It does work for me. Today I feel less desire to rush to Home Depot and buy a lock. That’s enough of a pause to ensure that I probably won’t be cutting this week and probably not this month.

Is that enough?

It is a lot like how I manage my suicidal ideation. “This is how I feel right now and if I honor it maybe I don’t have to do it.” I don’t live well with secrets. Believing that I have to lie about what is in my head intensifies and strengthens all of my negative self-beliefs. Nice people are allowed to talk about how they exist in the world. Stupid, worthless pieces of shit like me should shut up and stop polluting the airways. Just stop fucking breathing so you don’t contaminate anyone.

I don’t know if everyone’s lives are careful balancing acts. For me I have to manage stimulus and soothing pretty carefully. Lack of either one is dangerous to my ability to function.

I schedule parties once in a while because I know so many people that slowly cycling through them all one on one is kind of impossible. I would have a date every day of the year if anyone at all was on a repeating weekly or monthly cycle. I know a lot of people. I like them all. I want to continue knowing them. Heck, I want my awesome friends to meet one another because networking is very important for a successful life. Everyone needs access to resources.

I told my shrink that I missed a flight to Oakland Airport and got rerouted to SFO and I managed to arrange a pickup at midnight through Twitter. Because I just have friends who can do that. She was surprised. I am beginning to think that her other clients live in caves because she spends a lot of time being surprised that I know so many people and that they do the things they do with me.

I get that my life is a weird and extreme place. It has extreme bad and extreme good. I am very lucky and I am very unlucky. I have a ridiculous amount of privilege and yet I don’t. It all depends on what you are looking at and judging right this minute.

As a child I learned that one of the main things I needed to do to keep myself safe was make sure I know as many people as possible. If one person is mad at me/doesn’t like me/doesn’t want to help me/doesn’t want to spend time with me… find someone else. There are always more fish in the sea. There are billions of god damn people on this planet. Surely I haven’t alienated all of them yet.

I think that moving more than fifty times made it so that I never got to sink in and decide “This is just the way life is.” There is no set way my life is. The circumstances vary so much that they are nearly unrecognizable from day to day or period to period. Folks who knew me primarily as a slave to my Owner are rather shocked by me these days.

Walt Whitman may have thought he contained multitudes. I think I may have lived more lives than him. Sometimes I feel like a cat only I’ve had far more than just nine lives.

Do you know where the cats have nine lives thing comes from? When cats experience injury or illness they hide somewhere while they heal–it is an anti-predator sort of behavior. Then they come out and are fine again. So people used to speculate that they could regenerate.

I hide to lick my wounds then I appear again. Often in very different circumstances with fairly different behavior. Going from theatre to bdsm to teaching to parenting has been pretty dramatic. From stage to stage there is almost no overlap in terms of behavior or activities.

I think that is part of the reason Noah and I don’t do bdsm better together. I compartmentalize and Noah is the partner who has been nice to me and that’s hard to change. Even if bdsm might have other benefits.

tl;dr: I’m mad at my therapist for trying to talk me out of cutting. But that’s pretty much what I pay her to do so it’s a wash. Stupid parasympathetic nervous system. Why the fuck can’t you just act nice?

Oh, and after completely freaking out yesterday morning and feeling like the best thing to do would be to see as much blood as possible… I started bleeding.

Any suggestions on how to manage the monthly depression crash I’m getting? Yay impending blood loss. It is becoming really predictable. Which is strangely comforting. Just because I haven’t hacked the system yet I appreciate that patterns are emerging.

My worst depression days are followed immediately by me bleeding. I feel comforted by the hormonal link. Less like I am just at the mercy of the waves of my insanity.

post-therapy (more) hobbies and yay friends.

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It made me very happy to tell my therapist “My friends and I are in a fierce and loving argument/discussion about hobbies and how I should learn to manage time better.” She thinks it is great that you all interact with me. Heh.

Then when I explained the “I can’t do fiddly shit” she said, “Oh of course not. Your flavor of PTSD should be kept as far away from those kinds of actions as possible. If someone has dissociation issues then often things like knitting can help them be more present. You are so hyperaroused that it will drive you crazy. Don’t do that. Try martial arts.”

See, the knitting is very good and healthy for lots of my friends and not for me. I appreciate my pats on the back. Validation is my friend.

I talked to her a lot about wanting to come off of pot. I’m past the baby stage. I told myself I was using pot to give me the self control I needed to get past the baby stage when the kids really couldn’t help how much they triggered me. I don’t have babies any more. Shit.

I think there is the non-zero possibility that I will stop using pot until my kids are adults and then start again. Being stoned is awesome but I want to teach my kids a different lifestyle.

My shrink says she has known people who have had good luck taking some melatonin during the day while getting off pot. You have to be careful to never take it for more than ten days in a row (I should research why) but it can be useful. I also have to up my B vitamins. I should be taking 1,000-1,500 units per day. Ew. Ew. Ew. I should double the fish oil dose. I should start 5-htp.

The idea is that this will probably take a full year. Not to get off pot. That will take less than a month. I have to get my bodily stress more under control. It is going to be a process and it is going to be hard. I will have to really retrain my body with new habits. New habits can be formed in as little as thirty days. I don’t think my lifelong habits will be undone in a month. Ok, I’ve already worked on a lot of the other big problem areas, but more to handle.

Yesterday Shanna kind of complained about me watching The West Wing. I told her I was watching it because I was frustrated and annoyed and I was trying not to yell at her. She said, “Turn it off and let’s talk about it. You won’t solve anything this way.”

I feel so lucky. I feel like I have so much reason to work on my issues. I finally have iron clad reasons to think that my emotional state matters. It impacts my kids hugely and massively all day every day. I matter.

My therapist continues her stream of being shocked by how many people I know. She has been sorta trying to talk me into working with a writing teacher she knows. He could edit my books. I told her I was saving money to work with my friend Janet. She has a lot of experience with writing and running a publishing company and she told me she wanted to work with me. I really want to try that avenue first.

My shrink said, “Oh, what publishing company?”

“Greenery Press.”

Her jaw dropped and her eyes bugged. “You know her?”

“Oh yeah. I’ve known her for more than ten years.”

“Uhm, yeah. Work with her. That’s amazing. Wow. You know a lot of people.”

I really do. I know some ridiculously cool people. I get out and talk to people a lot. I am constantly out trying to pull more people into my tenuous web of connections. I like people. The more people I know the safer I am.

By contrast she (my shrink) told me it was pretty chicken shit to have relationships with people where I invite them over a lot and then I stop and expect them to invite themselves over. She said that’s not cool and I should stop it. I said, “But I’m scared.” She said, “So are they.”

Damnit.

She wants me to consider working with kinky survivors as one of the hats I put on some day when I’m a grown up. She thinks I would be uniquely well suited to being able to help people in that category. I’m flattered. This comes up because I spend a lot of time on the PTSD forum fielding questions about bdsm. It is hilarious to me that I hand out this long list of book recommendations and I am friends/former play partners with almost all of the authors. Yeah, I vouch for the information in the book and the integrity of the people giving the information.

I told my therapist about Noah’s reaction to me wanting to go to Islamic countries as an old woman as part of my work with incest. (Noah’s response was, “Ok we need to start martial arts. Now.) Her eyes teared up and she said, “You are so lucky to have a partner who is that supportive of you. Do you understand how rare that is?”

I do understand. I’m grateful every single day.

No, Noah doesn’t try to talk me out of things. I say, “I’m thinking about doing _____” and he says, “How can I help!?” (As a bonus he also makes cookies. So far this year: snickerdoodles (three batches [err… I ate a whole one alone…]), chocolate chip, haystacks, and he has made dough for refrigerator cookies, sugar cookies, peanut butter cookies, and molasses crinkles. He’s serious about liking my ass slightly more when it is bigger. Ha.)

I have friends who put up with me being rude, offensive, and foul mouthed.

I am ridiculously lucky in this lifetime. Not very many people receive as much non-family support as I get. It’s all about perspective, right?

Apparently I need to start a structured routine for a (long) while. I need to have “sitting on a swing for an hour” as part of every day. (Rocking motions are soothing to your brain. If you are upset, hug yourself and rock. You may feel lame but it does help.) I need to find a martial arts gym that will let us come in 2-3 days every week. I need to be running almost every day. (Rest days are important too.) I need to start teaching Shanna how to ride a bike and practice with her. (She has one… but she’s a wuss. She won’t try it unless I’m really bugging her. She likes going as fast as she can with her feet thankyouverymuch.)

I tend to have structure for a short period and then go off the rails when I add a big project. I can’t have any big projects for a year. This feels crushing and unfair. Waaa waaa waaa. Should I call the waaaaaaambulance?

I have to train my body to relax. I’m not sure I have ever been relaxed. Yeah, it will probably take a year. If I am fully relaxed at the end of a year it will be a G-d damn miracle. But I have to try. And this is the year. Go.

If I want to be able to do the serious international travel later I have no choice but to do this now. I can’t put it off any more. I don’t want to end up beating my head on concrete again the next time I leave the country. It is really unpleasant. In 2015 I want to travel with my kids for almost six months just to see if I can. I have to do this work in 2014. I’m feeling very annoyed with myself.

Why don’t I just give up on these hard things and have an easier life? What is wrong with me? Well, I don’t think that what I’m doing right now is actually easier. It is a different hard thing that I have slowly juggled towards as being the best I can get with my current coping skills.

I need different coping skills.

I feel like now it is finally safe enough to try. I have two kids who love me to the moon and back and who want to be nice to me. They just need me to teach them how. I need to teach without yelling or being nasty because then I will actually teach yelling and being nasty.

I feel so blessed that I have this time and this space. I don’t feel I have earned it. I don’t deserve it. But here it is. I have time. I have safety. I have money to fill in the gaps for when I can’t do everything for myself.

I have so much privilege that there is no longer any justifiable excuse for me not doing this work. Shit.

(I do believe it was justified earlier in my life. I was not physically or emotionally capable of doing the work before. I was never safe enough.) If you have to spend all day running to stay in one place someone who criticizes you for not finishing a marathon is a fucking asshole. You are doing what you can do.

I am seven years post rape. I have lived in this house for more than twice as long as I have ever lived anywhere else in my life. I have three people I get to live with who all think I am really nice and wonderful.

It’s time to stop being afraid all the time.

Being afraid makes me nasty. Being afraid makes me inclined to fight anyone and anything at any time because I perceive everyone as a threat. I am really sorry that I am so scared.

I’m going to work with a doctor on my body pain. Pam has offered to either go and hold my hand or babysit. I think I would prefer the hand holding. I’ll arrange the appointment on a day when Noah can stay with the kids.

I am very lucky. I am sorry I act so ungrateful so much of the time.

Terrible thought

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So the thing about meditation is that it is learning to sit in the still space.

My whole life requires me to move around and constantly respond to stimuli. I’m used to taking in fantastic amounts of information and consciously thinking about it. (If you are ever curious, ask me what I’m thinking about randomly some day. The firehose may drown you. I can talk faster than I can type. Muahahahaha.) That’s what hypervigilence means in a broad sense.

Meditation means turning off my awareness of ALL THE THINGS.

I think I am struggling with finding space where I really feel safe enough to not pay attention.

I pay a lot of attention to my kids. They still create messes and destroy things at a rate that blows my mind. I don’t clean the house every day. I would lose my mind.

My kids are extremely hands-on and creative with their environment. What that means is a shit-ton of work for me.

I have to maintain a certain level of clean so I don’t freak out. I have to vacuum a few times a month or we get bugs. Noah worries more about clutter than I do.

I think I have more anxiety around trying to please Noah than about keeping the house picked up. If he gets house and their shit is everywhere he sighs deeply and starts stomping around to pick it up. So I try to do that most days. But not every day.

But I set boundaries around “You have to have your stuff picked up before you can move on to some other large structured activity”. I’m inconsistent around this though. Like, the house is a mess but we went to Dickens anyway. I had Monday as a scheduled “cleaning day” so I was ok with that. The kids do help when I clean. They are getting really good at that.

The balance on that kind of stuff has improved dramatically. The training is working. Ha. But they need a tremendous amount of energy and direction from me to learn still. I don’t have time to go sit in a quiet space. They bug me every two fucking minutes.

“Quiet time in the garage” doesn’t really exist lately. They come in every fucking two minutes. If I get to the point of yelling at them then sometimes I can get up to ten minutes. (Still differentiating yelling from screaming as about volume/intensity/level of rage. Not sure if it feels that much different to them. They don’t cringe when I yell but they do back off. I’m usually yelling from the far corner of the garage to say “NOT RIGHT NOW.” I’m not feeling guilty but it isn’t effective either.)

I’m doing something wrong or they are testing boundaries or this is a phase or something. Holy fucking shit. Parenting is not usually as hard as it has been for a while.

We were traveling. It’s the holidays. I am probably pretty short compared to normal.

December 6th is my leather mom’s birthday. She’s going through a hard time and I can’t really support her. I feel shitty about that. It is also my biological mother’s birthday. She turned 64. Today is my biological father’s birthday. He would also have been 64. Instead he sat in his garage when he was 49. Stopping time on his maturation process.

I’m flying to Texas but Noah’s mom refuses to meet at a restaurant for a meal. I guess I won’t see them. That’s probably for the best. No I won’t be going to your house for you to yell at me. No thank you. I did not abandon one abusive mother in order to turn around and submit to another one.

I’m sad. I feel like I’m “doing everything wrong” again.

I read these annoying fucking checklists of “habits of mentally healthy people” and I think well no shit I’m not mentally healthy. I know people who don’t remember their lives very well. That would be the only way for me to lose awareness of the anniversary shit in my life. I may love those people but I do not choose to pursue that coping method.

I like my memory very much.

I need to feel safe enough to sit in my quiet space. I resist meditation because it is about sitting around and practicing self control for the fuck of it.

That sounds like hell on earth.

I would much rather multi-task to the point where I will have a stroke. It’s more comfortable.

What does that say about me?

Fuck you still place. Fuck you with a big stick.

“Why don’t you just stop dwelling on the past?”

Why don’t I just stop being sad that I don’t get to have a dad I haven’t had sex with in this lifetime? Really?

Uhm bugger off. I get to have my feelings.

If you haven’t had to buy love with your cunt for most of your life you really can’t understand.

It’s kind of weird now. Now I feel like there really won’t be any reason for people to want to know me. I don’t know how to talk to people. I don’t have anything to offer. I don’t know what to say. Being in public is weird.

What role in society can I fill? I spent most of my life looking for sex partners. I only grudgingly tolerated no’s when people made them explicit (and then they sometimes told me later “I was kinda hoping you would ask again later” WTF!).

Healthy? No. But it’s what I did.

Now what.

I don’t know.

I really did spend my childhood believing I was preparing for a career in sex work. Now that it didn’t work out my back up career is turning out to be way the fuck more work than I thought it would be. Good grief.

But it’s good. I want to be doing what I’m doing. I really do. I want to learn what it is like to be this kind of person. Even if I will never “really” understand because I will always have a brain that is paralyzed with terror because I’m prepared for the next problem.

Yeah yeah, fucking still space. Exercise the self control muscles you have more of them. Have more of the self control muscles have more ability to calm down central nervous system. Fuck you still place. Fuck you you fucking fuck.

My inside voice isn’t so inside today. Apparently.

Sometimes the process isn’t so pretty.

I think I struggle with completely letting go of the white trash stuff as part of my language evolution in general.

I have been yelled at not to curse for nearly three decades. I promise you that someone will yell at me again soon. “How dare you speak that way in front of children.” I get it every so often.

I no longer turn around and say, “Fuck you you ignorant fuck” but I did before I had kids. Ok I only actually did that once. She deserved it. I hadn’t been “cursing” so much as I was being literal and explicitly educational. Then I switched to cursing. Uhm, you had to be there?

There are people who can kill ’em with kindness. There are people who can disarm with humor. Then there’s me. May I introduce you to this trout I am going to smack you in the head with?

But most people who have been in a room with me have no idea. FUCK YOU PEOPLE WHO SAY I DON’T HAVE TACT.

You just say that because my tact falls on a different line than yours.

Why am I so interested in saying fuck you lately? Fuck you universe. Fuck you fucking everything in the fucking everywhere in the whole fucktastic piece of fuck world.

Good day for therapy.

But my kids don’t act like people who live with someone who talks that way. It would show. I am doing the routine. I’m just not good at being nice when I’m challenged. I’m sure this means I’m not nice. As if there was doubt.

Naw, lately the problem is that I’m taking shit personally. They are kids. They aren’t doing much because of me. (Well other than breathing and not being covered in filth all day.)

If they are bothering me I need to respectfully ask for the space I need.

I’ve listened to a god damn lot of victim blaming shit in my lifetime. I can tell you 57 reasons it is all my fault I was raped. O course I can figure out how my over reaction to my kids not being very thoughtful is all my fault. As if it were not completely developmentally normal (I HAVE BOOKS FOR THIS SHIT) and all that.

I can’t take it personally.

But I am. Because I’m like that. I need to stop.

Fuck you still place. Fuck you with a fucking chainsaw.

hobbies (cont…)

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“You fight, fuck and garden… of course you have hobbies.”

First: I love you. Second: I love you.

Maybe if I argue then I can go back to sleep tonight. Ha. Tonight has been rough.

I have a lot of highly physical tasks I engage in. The current argument about hobby activities started from the premise that I needed more rest and not more physical activities. I think the word hobby is maybe not the point.

I have a lot of activities that I engage in that fall under the label “hobby” but they are universally depleting.

I don’t have a lot that “fills my cup” and I have a lot of things that empty my cup.

For most of my life I suppose I have used hobbies to burn off stress but I don’t know how to do the corollary of increasing relaxation. Burning off stress and relaxing are not exactly the same. I recharged by spending a lot of time alone. I don’t have alone time now unless I give up sleep. That’s a rough trade.

At the end of a long day of gardening I don’t feel relaxed. I feel tired and sore and frequently I feel really pissed off at my kids. I usually stop working because I am too angry to continue because the kids want my attention span to be as long as theirs and they will dive bomb me like fucking blue jays defending a bird feeder.

This process is the point for me. How to do things with them without the hate.

I’m struggling because my kids want fifteen minutes of work on a dozen different projects in a day. That involves so much set up and clean up that I don’t do anything but set up and clean up. I act like a god damn public school employee where my life is about putting other people through their paces.

Not what we are doing here, bucko.

I think that if Shanna and Calli want to set up and tear down a dozen projects in a day they are welcome to the work. I choose to work for many hours each on two or three projects in a day.

The problem wasn’t ever that I can’t find enough to do to keep busy. If the idea behind “find a hobby” was “find something to do” then I don’t need to worry about it. I’m busy. The point was “find a way to relax”. That I am not going so good at doing.

Does that make sense? It isn’t actually that I need to “go find a hobby” rather that I need to “find something that relaxes me so I can use fewer drugs”. Different argument.

I did take a bath yesterday when I was feeling pissy. It helped.

I’m not sure that I am “not creative” K and I’ve been fighting that word battle my whole life.

So if what we are looking for is to add more and more activities until I die of a heart attack we are on the right track.

The problem with hobbies-with-people is that whole panic disorder problem.

We went to Dickens Fair yesterday. The kids are on a streak of being the opposite of considerate (it happens occasionally) so it was not a fun outing. I shouldn’t get pissy about some of the stuff that happened (like them throwing a fit insisting on peanut butter sandwiches for the tea party and then not eating any of the pbjs and instead stealing my whole lunch) because it isn’t a big deal. Unfortunately if my whole day goes that way I am pissy by the end. Fuck you. I ask you what you want, I give it to you, then you take mine? Oh this isn’t god damn on.

But it’s all trivial stuff. And the whole point of being a parent is that kids behave badly and you are supposed to still act right and show them how it is done.

By the last half hour I was standing in a corner of every room and shaking. If someone wanted to talk to me I plastered a fake-as-shit smile on my face and tried to be pleasant. I ran into a lot of people I know. People I don’t see much. It isn’t ok in any way shape or form for me to start exploding or being snippy or pissy with them. So instead I shake. After the second time of Calli throwing herself to the floor in the middle of a dance at Fezziwig’s I just picked her up and carried her out before I lost it.

Then the whole walk out to the car was Calli screaming at the top of her lungs about what a terrible time she had and I’m so mean because she didn’t get to see any friends. I asked a lot of people about going with us. No one wanted to. So I guess I should be screamed at for hours because I deserve it.

By the time we got to the car it was all I could do to not break something or someone.

But I didn’t! I didn’t even yell at them beyond, “I said SIT DOWN IN YOUR CAR SEAT.” I listened to loud music on the way home to drown out the bitching then I took a bath. Calgon take me away or some shit.

Ok. I think the argument has gotten past “get a hobby” to “but I have TOO MANY hobbies”. Originally this argument started because I needed to do less work and find something relaxing. None of my hobbies are relaxing. They are all baskets of stress to go.

So maybe the point isn’t to find a hobby but to learn how to just sit still staring at a wall? I’m feeling pissy and nasty about the fact that I think the next step is meditation.

Can I tell you how not open to this idea I am? Yeah, I get that it is the next step. Fuck you too.

Sometimes that is just how I am with the next step. I’m fairly sure that if I look at a calendar of my hour by hour activities (I’m so god damn anal that I do that with my life even though I don’t have a job or anything) the problem isn’t that I need to find something to do. The problem is that I need to replace two to four of my “things I do” with rest. Or meditation or some shit.

But I’m not good at rest. I sit for a few seconds and then I get up and find some shit to do. Because I have tons of hobbies.

And kiss off I’m not creative. You ask me to show up at your house and clean up a huge mess that overwhelms you? That’s creative.

I’m a different kind of creative. I’m trying to learn to appreciate the gift I was given instead of feeling sad that I’m not the kind of creative other people are. If you showed up at my house and said, “Build me a set! I want to perform Hamlet!” I could do that. Sure. No problem. Literally that wouldn’t be a problem for me.

That’s creative.

I just can’t fucking sit still and stare at something fiddly. Does that mean I’m not creative?

No. I refuse to concede.

Wendy does have good points (as usual) about how some people find hobbies with other people to be relaxing. I’m not one of them. Hobbies with other people are a nightmare of anxiety about how at any second I will say the wrong thing and I’ll be told to leave and never come back.

My life would be a lot easier if I believed that people liked me. Even though you nice people leave me comments on my blog I think that if I spent enough time with you in person you would not be able to handle the firehose. I get that you have been patient with text. Text is less invasive–I promise.

Noah is the one and only person in my life who has spent a lot of time with me and kept coming back. Every other friendship when it escalates in time spent blows up. Yeah, I know this is my fault.

If you have the same problem over and over it isn’t other peoples fault. It is your fault.

I stress people the fuck out. Doing hobbies with me isn’t relaxing for other people any more than they are relaxing for me. I’m really sorry.

So I have hobbies. What I don’t have is relaxation. What I don’t have is a way to come down from the anxiety load that is destroying my body.

Go read up on what chronic stress does to your internal organs. It’s not pretty. That’s what I’m trying to combat with the idea of “hobbies” that I’m arguing with up one side and down the other.

The point isn’t “hobbies” the point is stress reduction.

I run, I do yoga, I take baths, I take a lot of anti-anxiety medication, I read, I write, I garden… these are all the “should calm you down” color wheel. I’M NOT CALMED DOWN YET SO I WANT MY FUCKING MONEY BACK.

If I could learn to function just as well while shaking with anxiety my life would be fine.

At some point in the past couple of years of research I hit this point where I realized fairly point blank that if I want to see my kids reach a lot of adult milestones I will have to be alive. I’m not existing in this body in a way that will allow that to happen. That’s why I am nattering about “must find hobby” only the problem is I have too many hobbies not too few. I must find a way to stop destroying my body.

January is coming. I’ll see a doctor again. Last time allowed me to figure out that I don’t have a hernia (good step) which prompted research into IBS which caused me to drop carbonated water. That eliminated a lot of pain. That’s a good first step. I still have periodic throbbing in the same spot which could indicate an aneurism. Hopefully it won’t rupture or anything. I’m going to move forward with the “Hope it is just IBS and food allergies” assumption and pray.

It’s kind of like how I have gotten way nicer to my cat in the past two or so years. I finally realized oh shit you are getting old and you will die. She’s been with me since I was sixteen. It is going to be really hard when she goes. I am the only mother she remembers. I had her before her eyes were open. I bottle fed her and kept her alive when her mother abandoned her. I’m going to miss her a lot.

No, I’m not just going to replace her with some of the many foster kittens I hear about. Over the next eight years I want to be traveling for almost two years worth of time. That’s not cool to do to an animal. Maybe after the WWOOF year we can consider taking responsibility for another animal. Not before then.

I’m going to miss my cat.

It is 3am. I went to bed by 6:30 because I was exhausted and angry. I woke up 1:30 for poop thirty and haven’t been very sleepy or tired feeling since. I laid in bed for almost an hour. Sleep doctors say to not stay in bed forever if you aren’t sleepy. (They also say to not use screens. Piss off.)

I miss having weekends off from the kids. I’m not doing very well without them. I don’t have down time. I have “quick let me juggle a way to entertain you and you will come and interrupt me 75 billion times” experiences instead.

No, it is not normal, natural, or healthy to raise children without a village of support. There isn’t a lot I can do about the circumstances I am in. I “could” go pay someone to watch my kids. I suppose I should get a job to do that. Or stop overpaying my mortgage. Or stop buying books. Or clothes. Or buy cheaper food so I can pay a daycare.

How about if we start living on ramen again so I can pay someone else to hang out with my kids while I have time off. Sounds awesome.

Oh wait. Other physical issues. See, there is always a down side. Not to mention that when the babysitter comes over I get a break only I have to come back and do a shit ton of work to make up for having stepped out for a few minutes. I always feel like I should have “sucker” tattooed on my forehead. Time off that means much more work overall isn’t “time off”. It is robbing Peter to pay Paul.

I don’t think my life circumstances are more difficult than other people. That’s not what I’m trying to say. I don’t think my life circumstances are all that unusual or challenging. I just think I am shitty at dealing with it. Different.

A problem is only as big as your inability to handle it.

I watch The West Wing or Firefly when I want to zone out. Mostly I watch them while I fold laundry or clean the kitchen. It occupies a lot of my brain.

I like rewatching things. When I was a kid we didn’t own many movies. I never watched broadcast tv much. I’m not interested in moving with the wave of culture. I think that watching a new show means submitting to not being sure if I will feel like I wasted my time by the end. I don’t have a lot of time I like to waste.

So I watch my friends. I think about what it means to be a kind of person. I think about what it means to have to interact with the people around you. I think about what it means to lead and inspire people.

Not that I think I will become a mighty leader. But people tell me I am inspirational. What does that mean?

Inspiring means making people think things are possible.

Is it possible for me to learn to relax? We’ll see.

I wish that hanging out with K or Blacksheep or Wendy or or… was just “relaxing”. It’s not. I love you. I am completely freaked out every single second I am in the room with you. When are you going to get sick of my shit? It’s inevitable. People do.

I get to be sure that people get sick of me and move on. My life is littered with such events. Often combined with nasty letters telling me that they are done with me because I’m doing bad things. So… don’t say I’m paranoid.

Does everyone react that way with me? Of course not. Usually I leave first.

I don’t know how to change these patterns and beliefs. They are self created and self reinforced. I’m not denying any of that. Just because that is true that doesn’t make it easy for me to change. I created these systems unconsciously a long time ago. The fact that I can explain it now it doesn’t mean I have exact control over it.

I want to stop typing. Blah. Hungry. Tired but not sleepy. Therapy in nine hours. This is probably good timing.