Category Archives: creepy shut in

No social skills

Today I went and talked to a man who does things. I feel like a lazy slacker when I hear about what he gets done. He’s running a little farm. He works a computer job 80 miles away from his farm and deals with that commute. He is high up in management for a variety of different annual events like historical re-enactment events and Burning Man. He has an intense life. I’m not going to bother to talk about his 15 active hobbies.

Just the thought of having to deal with that many people gives me the shivers. I can do a fairly heroic amount alone but having to work with people is hard. I don’t trust people. I never believe that any one else will deliver on what they promise so I can only plan for what I can accomplish alone. It’s rather limiting.

I will never have a family the way I picture in my head. I have Noah and Shanna and Calli and that’s it. And I’m god damn lucky to have them. There are people who love me. There are people who care about me a great deal. There are people who will try hard to help me. But they all go back to their families. I am not part of their families. I am a spoke person they can have a one on one relationship with occasionally but I’m not a big part of any one’s life. Except for Noah and Shanna and Calli.

I’ve been calling K every day because otherwise I can’t get through the afternoon without crying. I’m glad she lets me do that. I miss days occasionally because I don’t hear the alarm on my phone. I go through periods of talking to people daily or nearly daily on IM. They never seem to last very long.

I don’t really have people to share my life with outside of this house. I have people who want to see me once a year and get an update on how I am living my life. I’m impressed by the people who slog through this blog. I write because I am shouting into the void. I don’t know who or if anyone other than Noah is actually going to read any of it. The fact that people catch what I say bewilders me. I say so much because I have to see the words outside of my head but I know so little about the people who read. Even the people I “know” I don’t really understand. I rarely spend enough time with people to see past my projections onto them. I am not good at meeting people and treating them like a blank slate. I am always looking for patterns.

Patterns are important for my survival. At least they have been in the past. Patterns are causing me problems now because Noah doesn’t follow many patterns. He’s kind of weird. But he understands when I talk about the people in my life like characters in a story. He understands why I look for clues for how to react. Many of my assumptions are wrong. Why do I assume that people who come over to my house dislike me? Why do I physically react to them as if they were threatening? I can like someone and enjoy their company and still not know how to have a positive conversation with them. I always feel like I am being mean and they must think I am bad. (If you are thinking, even me? Yeah, probably.) I feel like I talk too much. I am rude. I dominate conversations. I take up too much space and I should shut up and sit in the back. My turn is over.

Ok you know how people talk about how homeschoolers “won’t be socialized”? Well. I went to public school so I got my socialization there. I think I had five or six teachers over my educational career tell me point blank in class to stop raising my hand because other people needed to have a turn. Teachers and people who are older than me and people in “authority” trigger me heavily. I have very strong internal meters that tell me that pretty much any talking is disrespectful. And I always say weird or wrong things.

I was at a party this weekend and two women were talking. They were doing that “build you up” sort of thing. Life is hard and we must be brave. You can never be too brave. You can never be too balanced. You can never be too strong.

I interrupted there and said, “Actually you have to be careful how you get stronger. Like right now I’m running and I’m learning a lot about how the muscles around the knee work and…” I went on for a while. I felt like a party pooper. “Oh hey, you know how you are trying to build her up and convince her to reach for the stars? Well here’s a cup of ice water in your face. You’re welcome.” I don’t mean to do it. I feel like such an asshole.

I don’t think it was actually that bad. I’m really not good at the art of conversation. It’s a skill and I’m sorely lacking in practice. The real problem is, Noah doesn’t mind if I’m an asshole and I point out things about him that sound rude as long as they are true. I think I grow more unfit for human companionship by the day.

I’m not sure why I have had such an upsurge of pervasive negative thought for the past few days. Is this my brain’s horrible reaction to Noah saying that I was out of the emergency phase?

Anxiety is energy that wants to be put to use but is instead being held in. What energy do I want to expend? Why do I feel so bad? I feel like talking about Sarah would be horribly disrespectful and rude. I’m having a lot of big feelings. I’m not sure why I think it would be disrespectful and rude, but I do. I’m not processing my emotions and it’s not working for me.

It’s not about a list of done-me-wrongs. We tipped the bucket. Lots of water came out. The drip isn’t starting back up again. I’m scared. I don’t get to control what happens in life. That’s hard. I feel sad. I miss my Sarah. Am I emailing her? No. Does that make me a passive aggressive bitch? Maybe. Things were said. Not all by me.

I’m scared and I’m sad. I hurt people.

I have had so many people tell me they were my “family” until I said or did something they didn’t like. I don’t see those people any more. They broke off contact. That’s just how life works. Some, many, of them resurface every few years for a phone call or dinner.

I got really good at lying to myself that I would have what I see in my head as how a family works. I’m too mean and I drive people away. I sit here and wonder why I am so broken. Why don’t I deserve what I see other people having? I missed that life path. It’s just not really an option for me. Pity party: table of one.

In my head I hear this rough amalgamation voice saying, “Don’t you realize that no one gives a shit that your mother didn’t love you? Get over yourself.” I should forget my shit and go out and join something. Subsume my identity into a group identity and stop thinking about my shit. Because my shit isn’t important. But when I get to the meeting or social event or class or or or or or or or I don’t know how to talk to people. I don’t know how to form relationships that go beyond a surface level. Because NOT BEING TAUGHT THOSE SKILLS IS PART OF MY SHIT.

It isn’t any one else’s problem. Well, that’s not true. What am I going to teach my children? Fuck. Who knows. We’ll see. I should go in. I should stop crying again.

I’m not resting my arms.

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I have so much going on in my head and I am alone a lot. If I don’t type then I just don’t express anything. My friend who was supposed to come over yesterday was sick so he cancelled. (Good! Take care of yourself!) That was going to be my first sit down and really talk to an adult other than Noah this month. Today another friend wants to come over but I don’t think she should because Noah, Shanna, and Calli are all pretty sick and she’s 29 weeks pregnant. Don’t come over and get sick.

So I released the book and then… sat at home. Alone. Thinking. I’m really grateful that a number of people have called or messaged me to tell me that they read the book. There are a few different pieces of this that I’m focusing on. First: it was readable, right? I’m kind of insecure about my writing style. I’m worried it is difficult to follow. I’m rather abrupt. Second: I really am curious which parts of the story bother people the most or stick with them. Third: I am curious what people think about their own lives as a result. I’ve had two conversations in particular where people used the book as a springboard to talk about a lot of stuff from their childhoods. I felt my heart soar. I made them think.

I had a good therapy session this week. I’m glad I got to go this week. We spent a lot of time talking about how becoming an adult involves a lot of shitty work no one wants to do. You are an adult once you learn the systems involved in surviving and you can do them without thinking or complaining. Because as long as you still don’t know what you are doing, you are a child. And if you are complaining? You still aren’t an adult. These things simply have to be done and complaining about them is pretty ridiculous. Who am I going to bitch at because I have to dust? Really?

We talked about how I have areas of my life where I have strong beliefs about what makes a good person and they make it kind of hard to actually be a good person. I give other people more slack than I give myself. I have these really strong beliefs because of the circumstances of my life. I would have different strong beliefs if I had different circumstances.

I have had a hard time learning the tasks of being a house wife. The repetitive nature is daunting. How do you actually get to the point of having a system? Of knowing how and when all these tasks should be done? Once upon a time girls were trained in how to do these things, I wasn’t. I just have to kind of guess. I am happier in a tidy house because then I spend less of my time hunting for things. Less time tripping and hurting myself. Less time breaking things because it is impossible to be careful in a mess. It’s not a moral judgment, exactly. I have a lot of anger built up around people being able to say, “Well I can’t find it so I don’t have to deal with it.”

Last night Noah tactfully didn’t point out that I want him to do more and more work while being cheerful. Maybe I shouldn’t be so fussy that I have to do more and more work while being cheerful. That’s what being a grown up means in this house. It means that there is a lot of work to be done, and you do it, and you need to be a pleasant person while you do it. None of this work is a personal affront. None of it qualifies as an indignity or imposition. At this point the house is really forking tidy. It’s not much work to keep clean.

I care a lot about tone and attitude. My kids are going to learn their entire approach to life from me. I am keeping them home from preschool and elementary school. I am teaching them what it means to be a mother and an adult and a citizen. I don’t want to teach them to stuff their feelings or hide their emotions and pretend to be happy. I want to model what it looks like to build a life where you are genuinely content. No, not everything is ever perfect. But I’ve picked my burdens in life, it seems like even a bit more so than most people. I really went out hunting for what I wanted. And I have it. It’s a good life.

My beautiful Shanna is on my lap right now. She is engaging and fun. She’s trying to talk me into letting her put the NaNoWriMo bumper sticker on the wall. I think I’m going to decline. She makes me smile. I have begun to notice that the lines on my face do not easily settle into smiling. That feels sad. I want to work on that. I have so much to smile about.

I grew up going between living in truly isolated circumstances and Auntie’s house. Auntie’s house was always busy. There were a lot of people coming and going. I miss people. I miss feeling like part of a hive. I live a very quiet life. I hang out with my kids and that is pretty much it. It’s hard figuring out what conversations are appropriate for Shanna.

Yesterday she asked me if my mother is dead. I told her no. She asked why we don’t see my mother. I told her I would explain more when she gets older. I don’t know how to have this conversation yet. My mother lives thirty minutes away and you can never see her because she will tell you that small stupid things are your fault because you deserve to suffer. I don’t want Shanna to grow up thinking she is bad or to blame for adult matters.

Part of the reason I am alone so much is because I allow other people to have inappropriate influence over me. I try and try and try to do what they want, long after it is bad for me to try. I’m not actually good at boundaries, no matter what I try to claim. I keep my boundaries by keeping my front door shut. I only have to worry about the people and things inside this house. I don’t have to bend to anyone else’s needs or whims.

One of my high school boyfriends told me yesterday that I was always good at boundaries. Ha. The reason I stopped talking to you was because I continued to feel like I had to have sex with you because you wanted to have sex and it’s not very nice to tell people they can’t have what they want.

Noah doesn’t really want to talk about monogamy anymore. He agreed to it under duress and he’ll do it, fine. But he doesn’t want to talk about it. I feel scared. I feel like at some point in my life someone is going to tell me that they want to and I won’t feel like I get to really say no. People like me don’t get to say no. I rehearse in my head, “I’m in a monogamous marriage. I don’t have sex with people any more.” I pray to god I never get in a situation where saying that is ignored. I’m afraid it will. I’m afraid to ever be in a situation where I might be vulnerable to someone asking. I’m so scared. Because I’m afraid that I will say no once and it will be ignored and I will do what I do and I’ll put my head down and shut up and try not to cry and just get through it. And afterwards I will talk about it like it was consensual and I deserve all the damage done. Because I do. Because I always deserve what I get, right?

I’m afraid that part of the reason I stay home so much is because I can’t control what happens to me when I leave home. Bad things happen and there is nothing I can do about it. Even stupid shit like losing my wallet. I feel like being out in the world is dangerous. Maybe it is for everyone. Maybe I’m just stupid and I deserve what happens to me. This is part of what I worry about passing on. Other people don’t seem to be terrified that if they go out they are likely to be hurt. I feel like I don’t have a lot of resiliency left.

The cease and desist letter feels kind of like a punch to my stomach. It didn’t come from someone I outed as abusive in any way. He’s more of a neutral-to-positive sort of character. And he still wants to silence me. I should just shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up.

How you spend your days is how you spend your years. I keep a tidy house. I garden. I run. I play with my beautiful daughters. I’m teaching them about the world. I’m teaching them about how all of life is a process. There are steps you can skip and steps you can’t, the trick is finding out which is which. I read about twenty pages out of The White Trash Mom’s Handbook yesterday. From the title it seems like the perfect book for me. It’s not. It’s all about how to stay within the system and look successful while taking short cuts. I suppose for someone who wants their kids to be “successful” in public school it is full of valid points. I don’t want children who are successful at public school. I want children who are successful at life. Very few of the really successful people in our country went to public school. Think about that. It’s a broken system. It manages to turn out most of the cogs in the machine but it doesn’t turn out people who know how to run the system by and large.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with people putting their kids into preschool and public school. I think it is the norm in our world. I’m not very good at fitting in with norms. I would not be able to “pass” enough for my kids to have a successful public school experience. As I read that book I noticed over and over how the author keeps saying that you have to “play the game” or your “kids will suffer”. It’s true. My kids would suffer because I am their mom in public school. I would do things wrong. They would be punished. They would almost certainly be weird and different and public school is not kind to such children. My children will most likely never appear normal. They are wonderful and great and awesome, but they will always be quirky.

For all that I whine about being alone, I have found a life and a space that fits me. When I am feeling self-confident I have places to go. I have friends. Lots of people like me. I stay home because *I* have issues. And because I’m shitty at managing my kids and doing anything else at the same time. At home I can be all “free range” and not feel guilty. My kids and I are working hard at learning how to coexist. How do I get my work done while they have their own work to do? How do we all get along?

From my daughter I learn that it is better to say, “Hey, will you please help me find the ipad?” rather than “You didn’t put the ipad on the table.” Because I sit here and listen to her talk all day long I am learning where my manners are disgusting. I’m learning where I am very rude. I’m working on it because I don’t want to hear it from her. I think it is good for me. It’s the least judgmental feedback I have ever received. I just have to sit around and listen to her ape my tone of voice and attitude. It’s humbling. There is no one in the whole world I can blame anything on but myself in this house. My daughters have me for an influence. And Netflix. Thank goodness for Netflix. Shanna is learning how conversations go. It’s dramatic to see how this is working for her.

I’m trying to understand better what my social needs actually are. I’m looking forward to the Storytelling at the end of the month. So far I have had one person tell me absolutely yes (yay!) and several others are strong maybes. I’ll take it.

We are also going to a sex party at the end of the month. I’m intimidated. I don’t think anyone will inappropriately push me (the host would kick anyone out who tried) but I think I will feel awkward and weird. What am I there for anyway? What business do monogamous people have being out in the sex communities? What is the point of going? Because that is my community, for better or worse. Even if I never have sex again in my life the alternative sex communities are mine. I belong in them. I am sexually deviant. But am I? I don’t know.

I feel like I don’t know who I am or what I want. I feel scared. I feel isolated. I feel like I should never do anything other than garden, hang out with my kids, run, and clean again. This is my life now. I chose it. I should stick with what is safe. I have never been this safe before in my life. What is wrong with me that I want to shake things up? What is wrong with me that I get bored?

I still don’t feel safe. I feel like this could all be taken away from me if people knew how disgusting and broken I am.

Do you know why I keep my house as clean as I do? Because I live in terror of a CPS visit. I kicked cabinet doors, obviously I am an unfit mother. I have kicked holes in drywall (years and years ago). I yell. I get so very angry. Obviously I am unfit. I do not deserve the goodness and safety I have.

I should go somewhere sleazy and unsafe and become inebriated and unable to say no coherently and forcefully because that is what girls like me do, right? Is it even possible to hang out with people and do anything else? I don’t know. I feel like I don’t know anything at all.

I am never going to fit in. I am never going to be “normal”. And I mourn that. I mourn that I can’t give my kids that because I don’t know what it looks like. Instead what I’m giving them is a very structured environment where we work all day long on communicating with one another in polite tones. How do you ask people to meet your needs in a civil tone of voice? We’re working on it. We do a lot of “try again”. Because here I get a lot of chances. Once I walk out of the front door I give up my right to be able to try things over and over till I get it right. I’m not practicing anymore. That’s the real world. I’m not ready.

I have approximately fifteen more years to learn how to be a functional, polite grown up. Now that I’m thirty that doesn’t sound like nearly enough time. I haven’t managed yet, what hubris do I have to think I can learn in the next fifteen years? I have fifteen years to focus on how to teach my kids what they need to know in order to move off into the world. It doesn’t feel like enough time.

So far I have made ~$140 on the book. That’s about half of what I spent on ISBN and it doesn’t even begin to pay for the editor. I have to figure out how to promote the book or I won’t be allowed to leave the house to do anything fun until November. All of my spending money is pre-spent. I’m not sad though. Even though this is an expensive hobby it is one I needed. And I have eight more spiffy ISBN numbers. (You can buy one or ten and print vs. ebook needs two separate numbers.) I guess that means I should keep writing. I can’t decide what to work on next.

I’m supposed to be resting my arms. But I’m so lonely.

Broken promises

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My mom likes to make promises she can’t keep. Oh she always intends to do it when she says it. She just isn’t very good at taking stock of what things are realistic and possible in life. And she rarely has the willpower to deny herself something in favor of a later pay off. It’s all stupid shit, right? She promised she would take me to Magic Mountain every year from when I was eight on. My siblings grew up with season passes and I heard the stories and I felt envious. I went by myself when I was twenty-one.

One of the talents my mom has is sewing. She’s a fairly talented seamstress. I still have things she made from me and I wear them when I get the chance. I have a Snow White costume and an Ariel (from The Little Mermaid) dress–you know the one when she comes down to dinner and brushes her hair with a fork? That one. My dress is awesome. And my mommy made it for me which makes it extra special. She made my Dickens costume. I wish she hadn’t told me to buy the pattern and material for three separate Dickens costumes because then in the long run I feel bitter that (as usual) she doesn’t follow through completely on what she says. I should just be grateful she did one. Usually she doesn’t get through one.

I focus on the fact that in everything she said to me there was always a lie. I always had to be careful not to get my hopes up when she said anything. I would say I had less than a 50/50 chance of her following through. That wears on you decade after decade. I wish she had promised less.

“I’ll pick you up from school” was one of those ones I wish she had promised less of. I would not be able to add up all the hours I sat around waiting to be picked up. I understand. She always had a reason. It’s not her fault. Ever. It is always someone or something else’s fault. Always. Always. Always.

I hold the people in my life to a higher standard of truth telling because of this. Approximations are not good things. Over-promising is the worst thing you can possibly do. I try very hard to keep my expectations and hopes very low. Too many people are fucking liars who are too self absorbed to even admit to themselves that what they are doing is lying.

There are sins I forgive easily and barely notice; there are sins that cause me to feel like I have to smite someone from the earth because they are hurting me. The real solution isn’t to smite anyone. I’m terrified that the solution is simply to never trust a word that people say unless they prove over years that they aren’t a liar. Unfortunately I tend to trust more than I should. I get lied to a lot. Oh of course it is never a lie it’s just that people don’t think they need to have a lot of integrity in what they say. They feel no need to be impeccable with their words. Close enough is good enough. And I die of a thousand paper cuts.

I don’t want my children to have this hostility and rigidness around promises. I know it isn’t healthy. It is isolating. I certainly can’t hang out with people much. I’m trying to figure out how much I can handle really having steadily in my life. I want there to be a predictable pattern. I want to have a pattern, damnit. I’m really struggling because nothing else in the world wants me to. Stupid life just keeps happening. I really do want to see people and so far that has to be a flexible thing.

It is hard to be this lonely and angry at the same time. I know that I have to be careful not to get too angry when other people are around. I manage this with the kids by not talking at all. It’s hard to do that with adult visitors. Then they become discomfited and I have to try to knock it off. I can see the visible discomfort spread over people and I feel a wash of shame. Yup. That’s me. The angry one. Then I feel so much self loathing that I am always the angry one that I just feel more anger. I’ve been told a lot of times that feeling that angry around people is basically abusive. I’m a monster no matter what. I just am. It doesn’t matter what I do.

Ok, I kicked the cabinet door off the wall. I suppose that is something terrible and horrible. Because more shame really makes everything better.

I have had trouble running since the grief ritual. I feel so overwhelmed with anger that I can barely see straight and it makes me stumble so I am running more slowly and carefully. I don’t want to injure myself; I truly don’t. I don’t want running to become my latest method of self-injury. I want to find joy in my body. It’s hard to do in the dark and cold. I miss the afternoons.

I feel stuck in this anger. I am so frustrated and anxious. I need to go proofread six more chapters back from my editor and that’s scaring the crap out of me. I am so tired of reading this story. I want to avoid it and I want to get this done and over with.

When I say I follow the scorched earth path I mean that I will forever say anything I want about someone and shun that person from my life. I will be as harsh as I feel the need to be. I can be a very harsh person. It is obvious when I am truly done.

I am struggling with some things in my close personal relationships. I don’t want to regret the things I write, ever. I want to always know that I am writing a truth I feel comfortable standing behind. Right now I am having a lot of very strong irrational emotions. I don’t know how to deal with them. I am already saying things that are impossible to take back. Dear sweet Jesus at least I will keep them off of my blog. I’m struggling.

How can I talk about what I am experiencing without giving any information or judgment. hm.

I feel unappreciated and used. I feel like I am getting the realistic version of an impossible situation. I feel tightness in my throat. My neck aches. My shoulders ache. My lower back aches and I can feel how bad my posture is right now. All right, I made a few chair adjustments and that is slightly better. I feel empty and drained. I feel abandoned and untrusting. I feel exhausted in a way that isn’t going away with more sleep.

Recently I heard someone describe it as being “pregnant” with her book and I kind of feel like that. I’m getting a lot of harsh physical symptoms and emotionally I feel like I am living on the memory of fumes because I ran out of gas long ago. I am at a time and place in my life where I feel like I need an endless stream of support but I am too ashamed to ask for it. I don’t have a family and people like me have to just figure it the fuck out because we are too unpleasant to be around. I feel so pathetic and needy. I feel so very lonely. But I don’t feel like I get to talk about that because it is my own damn fault that I am so fucking unpleasant to be around and that’s why I am alone.

Sometimes I wonder what it is like to be part of an extended family. Thinking about it makes me cry. What would it be like to have people who know me and want to spend time with me? I have friends, yes. But my friends go see their families on holidays. I notice. I tend to feel like it isn’t possible for me to stop being angry so I should stop attempting to spend time with people at all because no one should have to deal with my fucking mouth.

It’s probably a good thing I see my therapist tonight.

If you build it, they will come?

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I have one of those cats who are fairly stand-offish. Yet for the past month or so she has started demanding the right to sit on my lap while I type. She hasn’t been on my lap much, ever. She prefers to sit next to me but I’m on a chair where she can’t. I feel like we had a multiple year hiatus where we just didn’t cuddle; now all of a sudden she is massively affectionate. She is fourteen so I am humoring her as much as I can. I won’t get to have her forever and I won’t forgive myself if I shun her last wave of affection. Even though it is a pain to type around her it is a sacrifice I’m willing to make.

There is a lot of work to do and I’m not getting it done and I am struggling emotionally with that. Finishing the book is like pulling teeth. I’m on the last page but the kids are up and I can’t concentrate. I have to leave the house in two hours and I won’t be home until after bed time. I really do treat my kids as my first priority. Shanna cuddled up next to me watching a movie on her iPad and Calli is having fun banging things together. I can blog with less than half a brain.

I’m tired and empty feeling. I’m struggling with feeling avoidant. I wish I could hide in a cave for a month or three. If I am supposed to feel happier after the relief of grief I’m not there. I feel so tired. I feel like I have seen the beginning of a long journey. The ritual is being held at a small college in San Francisco. Most of the people there are students who will write an academic paper about this experience. Uhm. Wow. That’s actually fairly cool but it means that they are all building a community together because they are all students together. I’m an outsider, as usual. Above and beyond that I live an hour away; I’m just not going to come to an event in San Francisco that starts after 7pm on a regular basis. I don’t handle lack of sleep well and I can’t sleep in. I have a really strong internal clock and I’m going to be awake by 5am. It hurts. The running takes too much out of me. I can’t go without sleep.

I think I want to start hosting a survivor discussion group at my house. I’m thinking once a month at first because weekly hosting would freak me out. No one else wants to meet early in the day and the only way I can handle being at an event that starts at 7:30 or 8 is if it is in my garage. It’s a sad fact of my life but a fact never-the-less. I’d be thrilled to hear input on what day of the week people could make it here. If I want to be able to talk about my experiences maybe I should start with the people who are willing to come to me and are already broken in by knowing me. If you already know me in real life you will probably be able to handle me saying what I’m going to say because I already do. Ha.

I’m never going to be able to go find a community to join. I’m not that kind of girl. I may have to make my own. That’s what Sobonfu told me. I feel very tired thinking about how much work that sounds like. I am not good at being the work horse any more. I feel far too resentful and I have no energy to spare. I want to live my life and invite people to join me in it in a way that doesn’t actively drain me. The things I have been trying… well… holy crap. I need to get past feeling weird about inviting people over for dinner. I need to be brave enough to just do it. It’s frightening. I expect that people always have something more interesting to be doing.

The big parties are hard. Having a housemate was too hard. Hosting family dinner was too hard. Why does it work out better when someone comes randomly on a night? I don’t seem to feel resentful about the fact that one more body on a given night doesn’t mean much extra work. I tried too hard for family dinners. That was a lot of the problem. I wanted it to be a “nice meal”. It was stupid. I have a very bad habit of making things too hard for myself and then feeling overwhelmed and unable to enjoy the result.

I don’t really do that when one person comes over for dinner in the middle of the week. I’m distracted and distant because I don’t talk much while cooking but I work on my attitude while the kids are around. I will just not speak if I am feeling testy. My bad attitude is not because of my children and I try to keep it away from them as much as possible. This means that if I am in a terrible mood and I am thinking horrible and nasty thoughts I smile and nod and listen really carefully because I need to keep the conversation off of me. It is a mixed bag because I really enjoy the way I am getting to know people. But I need venting space. I’m curious how it will work to have a specific “Hey! Let’s Support Each Other!” night. I’m wondering if that will be a format I can formally recognize as support and stop feeling so lonely.

I’m not alone. I have a ridiculously widespread community of people who love me intensely. I just feel like I can’t see them.

frustrated

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I feel like I haven’t been blogging much lately. There are a bunch of things happening I feel like I can’t talk about. I’m really bad about that. If I have to censor what I say and speak carefully I don’t see much point in talking at all. If I have to do those things then my point of view isn’t actually desired and I’ll just shut up. It’s part of why I don’t follow social conventions much on “appropriate topics”.

Life involves an awful lot of work. I can only do so much and feel good in my body. There needs to be a balance of different kinds of work: mental, physical, emotional. Without balance it all falls over.

I’m trying to edit the book. I have 13-14 pages left. I’m struggling. I’m feeling a lot of tremendous anxiety about the end of the book. How do I ensure that all the right elements are in place to honestly lead to the rest of my life?

I’m thinking hard about the foreward. Ok fine, I wanted to write this. Reasonable, fine. Why do I want to publish it? Why do I want other people to know this story with me? Because I’m tired of being alone with it. I’m tired of having people giving me entirely inappropriate advice because they assume my life was like theirs.

Other people grow up with families who pass their stories on. People know what “Bob” acts like; you can tell because they say things like, “Well you know how Bob is.” No, I don’t know. I have never been around long enough to find out. And people haven’t really been around me long enough to understand me either.

No one can ever know these things about me unless I tell them. I have spent my entire life feeling isolated and alone and scared. Once this story has been set down there is no fucking way I wouldn’t publish. I want to be known. I want to be seen so much it makes me ache. I’m publishing because I want to. Because it is an interesting story and I want to share it. Because people will finally understand my vague allusions. When someone wants to give me advice I can ask them if they’ve read the book and then let them say what they want. I don’t have to follow the advice. But I get to know that this isn’t some random passerby who doesn’t know shit about me. This is someone who cares enough to go read the backstory so that (s)he can be part of my life.

That feels really different. Most of my family will be shocked if they ever read the book. They have no idea about most of it. They don’t know me and I savagely resent them for this. I savagely resent that god damn everyone in my family will get to say, “But we never knew!” and be telling the truth. I think that is what I can’t forgive them for in the end. They managed to silence me such that I was never able to get proper help from all that psychiatric care for fifteen years. They can’t silence me forever. I want to tell my story. I want to get very clear about what happened to me and I can’t do that in private.

That’s strongly related to why I am upset about some other things in my life. I’m not happy about how I am being treated and I feel like I can’t talk about it in public and I don’t have anywhere else to talk. I am talking in therapy and to Noah about this situation but that’s the limit of my talking to people. I literally just don’t do much else of it lately. All of my IM buddies have disappeared. Fuck you all. (I’m kidding. I love you and miss you intensely while you are having Real Lives.)

It’s time to go parent.

Long-term friendships.

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I was talking to a chick I met when I was fifteen yesterday. She’s one of my closer friends. We met while we were each hot for the same guy. She initiated the conversation yesterday because she wanted to tell me the results of some personality test thing she did in a grad school class. It ranked her best attribute as the ability to *be* loved and to inspire love. It was kind of funny to explain to her that it really is a skill and one I am singularly bad at. When people love me I tend to be quite hard on them and not permit them to love me. I will hold up your faults to a mirror as often as I can and tell you, “Can you really love me while doing _________.” The results are mixed. I expect people to put a lot of thought and energy into making sure their words match up with their actions. So I’m pretty hard to love. I’m effort. And not an especially fun kind.

I told her that she is easy to love. We still know each other because she is easy to love. Not because I am so worth loving. She is blessed with a thick skin, short memory, and the rock solid belief that people only say harsh self-improvement things with the best of intentions. Yeah, we can stay friends. Because you believe that when I point out bad things I’m doing it because I love you.

Yesterday I was talking to her about a different conflict in my life. One I’ve written about. One I very carefully write about. I was telling her a different side to the story. Being the girl she is her response was, “Whoa. That’s a much bigger thing to feel ________ about than everything you have written. The fact that this is going on makes me think this is the real issue. And the fact that you won’t write about it… that’s big. Yeah, this is probably the real crux of the issue.” My jaw actually dropped. I’m not completely sure she’s right, but she’s mostly right. That was interesting for me to note for several reasons. First and most importantly, holy shit she can play me. I have deep respect for that in my friends. That means they have paid attention.

I have had several big issues with my “chosen family” in the past year and a while. I found the breaking point. I have an increasingly interesting thought process around the things I used to put up with and things I am willing to model putting up with in front of my kids. I’m having a hard time with those differences. I don’t want my kids growing up with the idea that its ok to use me, everyone else does. I’m not a fan of being the one who does all the work for a bunch of semi-grateful people. I don’t get off on that. I get nothing but exhaustion and anger that no one fucking helped. Again. But I want to see people. Apparently if you want to see people it requires doing a lot of work. Fuck that. I’d rather not see people. Attempting to put my foot down on this issue is not going well.

Most of my best friends are hoarders who need people to sit around and tell them how awesome they are. I could go down a list. It’s actually pretty funny. If someone is not a hoarder who wants me to come clean their house for them we probably won’t build a friendship. What can our friendship be based on if not my work? Or there are the guys I fuck. I have one or two fierce women friends I pretty much exclusively talk to online and I don’t clean for them. But I don’t see them either. Maybe once a year.

If people are hoarders who need me to clean up after them I have a pattern for that. I have a whole broken dynamic I picked up in my family of origin around this issue and I moved it forward. It’s interesting to think about. I’m not sure if I’m an enabler or what if I come over and force them to get rid of a bunch of shit so it can’t be as big of a mess for a while. My organization systems usually last at least months if not years. They just put new shit around what I organize. It’s hilarious to watch.

All of them remind me of my family. If I speak of the hoarders as a collective I can come up with: charming, manipulative, lying, alcoholism, drug addiction, severe avoidance issues, agoraphobia, racist, sexist, cheating, everything is always someone else’s fault.

Once we had some former students over (that’s actually happened a bunch–they are great people) and we were all drunk and Noah got a bit overly intense when he was explaining to one of them how she was helping to create abusive relationships over and over. He was outlining how her behavior correlated with stuff that is known to be a problem. She was visibly uncomfortable and I made him stop. But I do that. I’m ridiculously codependent. I don’t have the energy to care for more people and I have no desire to do so in the first place, but I really wish I had people in my life. I only seem to make friends with people who want me to do a lot of work for them. I am having a hard time changing this pattern. And in the process I seem to have to put some dynamite in my chosen family and find out if anyone is still around in a few years.

So far it looks like unless I call and make invitations I won’t see some of them. I’m sad but not surprised. That is the pattern. Others have changed the dynamic. We are trying to find a balance. I need support and have none to give. They are trying to work with me. It’s hard to accept help. It’s very uncomfortable. Times up. Gotta go start kid time.

D– don’t you admire how I still avoided that one issue?

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I don’t feel like I have a good grasp on normal. I’m a freak and I’m going to raise little freaks. I’m sorry for that only I’m not. My demographic doesn’t need to fade out of existence. We aren’t bad. We are just weird. On the internet when people bandy about numbers I have seen the figure 1 in 17 men are rapists. I usually see that put right next to the figure that 1 in 6 women/girls will be sexually assaulted.

You know at least one rapist. No matter who you are. No matter what you think you know. Unless you know fewer than twenty men, you probably know a rapist. How do you live with that? How do you account for that? Do you think you are safe? I never understand why other women have the hubris to feel safe. I hope that I am never raped again. I’m not going to put money on it. I understand that part of the human condition is the need to play power games and at some point I may have the misfortune to be in the room with someone more powerful than me. Or maybe I will be attacked while running some day. Who knows.

Short of staying in my house and never associating with anyone again, what choice do I have? I can do all of the little “avoid being raped” tricks that they pass around but in that last vital moment… really… there isn’t all that much I can do. Some day I will have to depend on the kindness of a man to not rape me. Really I will have to depend on it over and over.

Recently I was spending time with a good friend/former lover. He suggested Watercourse Way, which is a hot tub place. From the minute he suggested going there till when we left there was a part of my brain and body that was on high alert. I was really afraid he was going to push physical boundaries. He didn’t. He has proven to me before that when he’s told to not touch me he is likely to stay 12′ away from me so there is no muddy area. But I was taking a risk. A fairly big risk. He’s a big man and if he wanted to over power me it wouldn’t be hard. I’ve known him for twelve years. When I spend time with him I worry and I keep escape routes in my mind.

The guy who came over for dinner? I don’t worry about that kind of thing as much. When someone is going to be with me and my kids I’m far less worried about what they will try to pull. Shanna’s speech is prodigious. She speaks like a nine or ten year old. If someone came over and tried to do something sleazy with me and Shanna in the room I am very aware that we will be one anothers witnesses. It would be hard to over-power both of us at the same time and we could both speak to police later. Right there it becomes a less powerful situation for anyone. There is more than one person on my side. It’s interesting to me that other women don’t see their children as a resource in the same way.

Sexual assault primarily happens among people who know one another. Stranger assault is somewhat uncommon. Most of the reason for this, in my only-slightly-educated-opinion, is because rape is about power and it is very difficult to assess the power of a stranger. You pick victims you know because you know how to get past their boundaries. A guy I barely know isn’t going to push his luck to hard because he will come up against my massive social hostility. I do not appear weak on first blush. You have to get to know me a little before you see the chinks in my armor. From what I hear, on first blush I am often terrifying. I’m really not concerned about shy gamer geeks coming over for dinner.

Noah feels a little weird about the fact that I am still thinking about why nonmonogamy is a bad idea for me. He thinks we have made the monogamy decision, ok those reasons are done–move on. I don’t do that. Monogamy is going to be a behavioral choice for me. It’s not really a relationship choice. I need to stop picking up sleazy men. Some of my former lovers may read this. I love you dearly. You scare the shit out of me. I am far more afraid of my former lovers than I am random men I don’t know.

If someone I don’t know touches me physically in an even barely intimate way, say stroking my arm, I am extremely likely to haul off and hit them. I’m rather reactionary with such things. If someone starts touching me in a way I don’t like but I’m worried about preserving the relationship… I’m in trouble. Because there is a battle in my head between, “Do I mind this boundary incursion enough to risk fucking up my relationship?” Part of the problem with my anger issues is I don’t have softball defenses. If you put a toe over my boundary line I can’t drop a beanbag on the toe. I’m going to throw an anvil at your head. It’s hard to survive being in my inner circle. People don’t seem to make it much longer than a decade. I’m glad Jenny is in another country. Maybe she will manage to stay one of my intimate friends for life that way.

There are a lot of ways I am deeply broken. I don’t ask for help well. And I don’t defend minor boundary incursions well. I don’t ask for help until I am in serious trouble and I should have had help an hour or a week ago. For someone to waffle or hesitate or decide slowly what part of it they want to help with… I can’t stay and watch that. I laid bare my need to you and you didn’t say, “Oh let me help” fine. Fuck you. I’ll fucking figure it out by myself. That’s not very useful. And minor boundary incursions are ignored until there are a bunch of them and then I explode. Because I decided along the way that the relationship was more important than pointing out all those nit-picky things… and then by the time I build a list the relationship isn’t more important any more. I feel bad saying that. But it’s true. Avoiding saying it doesn’t make the situation better.

Near as I can tell a rather large percentage of “rape” is sex that is coerced and unwanted but the woman never says no or actively resists. We just shut up and take it. I wish that I had another word for sex I don’t want but I never said no to. I often or usually said no or resisted during many of the times I was raped. How wishy-washy can I be. I know that right now I don’t want to go through my list of rapes in my head but when I casually think, “Did I resist or say no?” I can think of multiple times I know I did. I’m only seeing a few though. And I’m tired and fuzzy headed and I don’t want to try and examine if that is close to the full list. That hurts my heart.

I have a lot of shame around my sexuality. I have a lot of shame around the fact that I have used fantasies of my father to fuel most of my masturbatory life for most of my life. I don’t do that any more. My orgasm response is nearly entirely gone. I can’t help but feel that I put a graduate-degree level of work into learning my body only to decide that everything I knew was bad and I shouldn’t have ever wanted it and I’m disgusting for having ever done any of it.

Learning to feel horrified by that part of me feels inextricably tied to being a parent. I am one of those loathsome people who shouldn’t be allowed near children. Oh my god. The idea that someone would allow a person from a sex community to meet their children is horrifying and disgusting. What about when the parents are from that sex community? Why do I have any morally superior ground? Because I dropped some crotch fruit? Oh give me a break. I am the youngest child in an incestuous family. It went on for generations. I do not believe that being a parent means you are more likely to be safe.

Do you know what I like the best about the sex community? The gossip. Your reputation will make you or break you. Having deviant sex requires finding deviant people who are willing to trust you. Folks like to talk. If you step out of line in the community, often word gets around. It’s not infallible. But it’s fairly effective. I depend on that network for a lot of my baseline assumptions about people. Like: should I let them in my house or not. Past that I tend to rely on the fact that I am twitchy and aggressive to get rid of most people. Only people who are willing to deal with me loudly and aggressively dealing with them come multiple times. It’s interesting to see how it shakes out.

But I’m not stupid. I am well aware that the danger isn’t in the first few times someone comes over. Who might pick me as a target? Lots of people. But going forward I have the hard and fast line in my head. I’m monogamous. It’s a behavior choice. It changes a lot of how I talk to people. When I am hunting people often mistake me wanting them. I’m a chick and breathing and willing to fuck anyone–that means them, right?

Lately I spend a lot of time examining my behavior choices. I don’t want to send mixed signals. How do I physically hold myself when I am hunting versus when I when I am not looking for prey? That kind of “being nice” is bad for me system wide because it fucks up my boundary defenses everywhere. I’m having a very hard time with keeping my boundaries so active with everyone else and not with Noah. It feels all or nothing for me. Either I don’t get to say no to sex, with anyone, or I’m just not interested. I think it is a lot more useful and productive for me to work through this than to try and deal with the issues around nonmonogamy.

I want to be with Noah for the rest of my life. Some day I will probably have to deal with him dying. I have some attachment issues. I’m worried about being flighty and scared and unable to commit. I’m worried about breaking us. Nonmonogamy brings a whole series of big rocks into our lives for us to throw ourselves against. Monogamy brings much smaller rocks.

The past few weeks since writing the book I have had some fairly frank conversations with myself about the level of trauma I went through. I understand more of why people say, “I don’t understand how you survived.” Because I did. Because I got back up every day and I kept moving. I don’t know how many of those I have left in me.

There is a song out on country radio right now, by Martina McBride. It’s about surviving cancer. I’m fairly terrified of the future. I’m well aware that life has no obligation to be kind. I need a partner. I know people tell me that I am strong enough to be alone if I need to. Yes, I suppose I could survive that. But I wouldn’t really live through it. Noah has the biggest piece of me of any one on this planet. It’s only going to grow by the year. I can’t do this and keep my awareness up for big rocks. Things will happen that are unavoidable. Things we can’t ignore. Things we have to deal with. They have to be things that I can completely and totally have the right to be surprised by. I can’t keep my expectations of life low enough for nonmonogamy. I can’t expect to be kicked that hard on a regular basis. I won’t be able to keep surviving.

It feels like a melodramatic asshole thing to say. Other people do just fine with the fact that their partner wants to give part of themself to someone else. I’m not as fine with that. Noah is a bonder. I only kind of am. I’m just fine with the scorched earth policy in life. There are always people still standing. There are always people standing because there will always be people who are genuinely innocents in this life. They haven’t done anything to me or anyone else. I try my hardest to be nice to them. They seem to be able to forgive me for a lot of temper.

My approach of scorching earth when someone has transgressed enough on a close relationship is problematic. A lot of the reason I blog the way I do is because I am releasing these words onto the open internet. I can’t really come back later and deny doing it, now can I? I need to have that accountability. I need to have it so that I can’t become a liar. I was pushed hard towards sociopathic behaviors. I don’t come close to being a sociopath, but I certainly know how to manipulate. I certainly know how to lie. I don’t want to. I want to tell the truth. I want to be consistent. If I make a record of my real and true beliefs I can’t end up being a liar, right?

I don’t know how to communicate about the small things in a useful way with most people. Luckily Noah seems to be able to handle the conversational equivalent of an anvil to the head. When I am upset with Noah I can write about it as much as I want and he doesn’t feel slighted. With other people I worry about discretion. I don’t know how to handle that. When I can’t write abou things I feel like I shouldn’t even be thinking them because they aren’t nice. Then in order to feel justified in defending my original boundaries I have to over-defend them. Because not am I dealing with whatever the original boundary is, but it was hard for me to buck myself up enough to say, “Hey! I deserve better.” Because I feel like someone treating me like shit is pretty normal and par for the course. It’s hard to believe otherwise.

And that leads neatly into something I’ve been observing in my social circle lately. Has anyone else noticed how many of the geek boys who grew up being taunted and abused have gone on to be nasty bullies? Some of the girls too, but I see a lot of the worst nastiness from guys. I don’t get out much so I don’t pretend my experiences are the only ones. I think about it because I know that by the time I try to defend my boundaries I sound and look a lot like a bully. I’m trying to figure out how I want to deal with that.

Being a parent is teaching me who I want to be. Shanna’s facial expressions lately are always angry. She’s patterning off of me. I don’t get to decide who she becomes. But I get to decide who she has to put up with today. I want my children to remember a stable, happy life. I want my kids to remember parents who were enthusiastic about life–not people who put their head down to sludge through the misery. I don’t want to show my kids that I am strong enough to survive any misery dumped on me. I want to show my kids how to change your life so that you have fewer problems. That means making different choices. That means learning how to say that something isn’t working for me without having to scorch earth.

Parenting is really complicated. I’m having a hard time being the person I think I should be. Given the people I know and how they parent I don’t think anyone else has it easier. My mother did her best for me. It wasn’t good enough. I am trying to figure out what my best would be for my kids. I don’t have the assumption that I can muddle through and whatever I do will be good enough. I know that the economists tell me it is. But I can’t. I have to have to actually change in order to be my best. Otherwise I don’t know what will happen. I don’t know how I will pass the cycles on. The children of Adult Children of Alcoholics act like they grew up with a drinker in the house. It’s about behavior patterns. I don’t want to recreate the family that I had.

Who do I want to be when I grow up? Well, I will be someone who invites people from sex communities over to my house for dinner. Because I know how to keep the conversation G rated. People who have sex are regular people too. I do a lot of gardening. It’s getting to the point where I am starting the beginnings of plans that are going to take me twenty years to finish. I guess this is my forever house. It’s a good thing it will be paid off in ten or so years. Some day it will have more light.

Who do I want to be when I grow up? I think that deserves ten minutes of writing on its own. I want to be the gentled version of me. I want to be someone who feels safe. I want to be someone who experiences joy in my body. I want to feel like I am a decent person to know, even if you met me at a sex party. I want to feel like I am not a dirty little secret. I want to be someone who is allowed to be complicated because there is far more good than bad. I want to be someone who has a company-ready house every day. I like making last minute plans with people and I have a lot of shame issues around house cleaning stuff. I keep my house neat-enough. Lots of people see it covered in toys and I barely shrug. But I did mop and vacuum that day so it was perfectly neat at some point. I clean a lot. I think that is going to be part of who I am as a grown up. I like things to be shiny and I need to just put that into my morning routine as something I do for me.

Oh that’s pathetic. Who do I want to be when I grow up? I know I would like to talk about sex stuff again. I don’t know in what capacity. SFSI already turned me down. I’m not very good at round table discussions.

I will always be a person who likes to teach and who likes working with groups of people who are learning. I don’t know what shape that will take when I grow up. When I grow up I will feel a lot more comfortable with living in the town I live in. I will have been here longer than anywhere else. I am training for a marathon here. I am learning these streets intimately. I am meeting my neighbors. I will be a person who knows a lot of people here. I’m going to be that crazy lady down the street with the weird yard. The one who used to dye her hair funny colors but then she shaved it. They do recognize me and take double takes. It’s pretty funny.

When I grow up I won’t seem weird. I’ll just seem like Krissy. I will be comfortable in my skin and I will make people near me feel comfortable in their skin. Because it’s just as ok for them to be them as for me to be me. Yeah, I’m not much like other people. But that’s not actually weird. Once you know me it makes sense that I am how I am. It works really well for me.

That’s who I will be when I grow up. I will have fucked up over and over and changed as a result. I will learn how to actually live instead of just surviving. That is who I want to be when I grow up. I want to be someone who travels and meets people and has stories to tell. I don’t want to be overwhelmed by how hard it is just to do the basics to survive. I want to thrive. I want to know that I have extra energy lying around for random people phoning and telling me they have to drive past my house, can they stop for dinner.

I want to be someone who lives. I want to be someone who loves. I want to be someone who is safe and knows it. I want to know that if some day I am raped again in a chance encounter it will be something that does not make me want to jump off a bridge. I want to be someone who is actually attached to the people standing near me and they can actually give me support. That is going to be a big change. I don’t think I can be alone with such things any more.

I think that’s the line. I’m strong enough to just survive and put my head down and get through everything that happens to me, no matter what. I am a dumb animal and I have a strong will to live. But I can’t do that and really live. I will be so bitter. So angry. The hurting has to stop in order for this to change. I know that happiness is a state of mind and not a circumstance. I know. I know I could just change it. But I don’t know that I can by myself. It’s too hard. I need to stop hitting rocks for a while. I can’t change my response pattern if I am constantly in flux. It’s too hard for me. I’m sorry.

Mostly parenting babbling

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I’m trying something different this morning, my wonderful daughter Shanna is cuddled up next to me on the couch watching Fraggle Rock. I’m going to see if I can usefully write with her in the room. I’m not sure. I feel very self-conscious about how often I cry in the process of writing. Often I’m sobbing the whole time. I’m kind of weird about crying around my kids. I do it sometimes, but I go to great lengths to avoid it because I feel so terrible about my moodiness. I wish I could manage consistency. I think the only baseline I could have would be anger.

That is what I am having so much trouble with. I feel guilty that I will never be able to be a placid, mellow, just happy mom. That’s not an option this lifetime. I am often happy. I am sometimes mellow. But I am also quick to anger. My anger burns hot. I get very sad. I may be one of the only women I know who isn’t bothered by the term “hysterical”. Even though I know it has nothing to do with my uterus, I really do get a kind of freaked out that men don’t get. At least not in places I can see. Sometimes it seems like I am the example of what is wrong with women. I should try to be more stable. More like the men in my life and all. Because the women in my life are more stable than me, but not by much. I’m sure that’s not a nice thing to say.

I’ve been really enjoying reading Austen novels lately. That’s funny because I avoided them like the plague when I was in college for that English degree. I’m enjoying seeing how very slow their lives are. It feels like it is giving me permission to strive for less. If I want to be a developed and accomplished person I need to have a lot of time spent in my house just improving myself. If I am running around with too many things I am obliged to get done in a day I will spin my wheels in place and not improve much. I’ll be too angry and frustrated to get the lessons from things I want to get.

Writing with Shanna here is different. I’m being vague and that’s funny because she can’t read yet. I’m not trying to spare her. If I want Shanna to grow up reading I need to read in front of her. If I want her to grow up being curious and interested in everything she can reach her hands out and touch I have to be free to walk with her and talk about the things she sees. I have to be non-distracted enough to focus on her questions. If I’m busy then I snap at her to leave me alone. I don’t want that to be our relationship.

I want my daughter to be one of the blessed few. I’m not striving for a “normal” childhood. I don’t think I could create one if I wanted. But she will grow up in this cocoon of love and acceptance and constant education. That’s why I am drawn to Unschooling. We really do sit and talk about things happening all day long. I’m learning how much I know as I talk to her. I know a great deal more about biology than I would have guessed. I am thinking about getting a few books so I can learn more.

Now I am in the garage. Calli called for me after that last paragraph and I spent an hour nursing and cuddling. I got to sit and think about how weird and defensive I feel right now. I’m often not sure what I am writing about until I am done. Randomly: last night I was thanked for writing the post about admiring women. I was weird and awkward and I almost cried. But I didn’t. Self control! I have it!

I don’t think I know how to be a mother, exactly. I’m not sure I know what that means. But I do know how to talk to my children as if they are humans-in-progress and someday, not that long from now, they will know everything I know and more. I tell Shanna every day that my job is to teach her everything I can so that she can be any kind of grown up she wants, regardless of my preferences. I talk to her constantly about how different people have different things they like and she gets to decide how much she will agree with my opinions. I feel weird about how often she wants to be like me. It feels like a lot of pressure for me to think hard about why I have the opinions I have. I don’t want her to have opinions based on my ignorance and bigotry. I don’t want her to become an angry person because I am angry.

I feel like there is a certain level of anger that is normal and occasional and everyone gets to have. I have no idea what that line is because I am often derided for any show of anger about any subject. There doesn’t seem to be a consistent scale. Or, whatever the scale is, it is also combined with the rule “And you are never to express any anger where any one else can hear you.” I missed the rule if it exists.

I often feel like it is perfectly appropriate for me to be angry, but I should probably max out at seven when I express it and I seem to read to other people as much higher than that. What am I teaching? The funny thing is, I don’t have much desire to change this behavior pattern of mine for the sake of the relationships I’m missing out on because people are uncomfortable with my anger. At this stage of my life I really and truly have to just be ok with making people uncomfortable, period. I don’t want to teach my children to do the same thing though. Or, rather, I want them to be able to make a decision for themselves. I want them to have an understanding that I may get intensely angry but most people don’t and most people dislike it. They get to have their own lives and figure out if they are angry or not.

Calli is at a different stage of development. She has grown increasingly cuddly and desirous of physical contact with me. She is starting to imprint pretty rapidly. She is absolutely copying my physical movements, facial expressions, and tone of voice. I have to stop yelling. I don’t actually want to live in a house where yelling happens so quickly and constantly. That places it on my head.

I’m dealing with a lot of my sources of anger. I am going to decide by the end of today if I think I am willing to do the books for the business. The answer is probably. I would like to have a way to be involved with the community. The owners and managers would become people I communicated with more. I would be able to go visit when I wanted. I was told that it isn’t reasonable for me to spend my only off-time doing more dishes. I feel valued. Thanks D.

I am figuring out my limits with regards to house cleaning and how I will manage that. I can’t live in a big mess and Shanna was born messy. When I make sure that Shanna and Calli are the only ones I’m cleaning up after, it’s a different conversation. This is my job. This is what I am doing with my life. I am caring for my children. That means I do have the entire obligation for the tornado. I’m talking to Shanna about why I clean. I show her how I do it. I am increasingly asking her for help. Often she is told, “I will clean up everything but _________. If you want to go to the park today, you need to help me clean up.” I work hard at encouraging her to play with one thing at a time and clean it up when you are done. But that’s not how Shanna plays. When Shanna plays the whole damn house is part of the game and every item of clothing and block and blanket and item of furniture is part of the story. It’s amazing to me that she really and truly has an explanation of what everything is doing. It’s not that she’s messy. She is highly creative. She needs to interact with a lot of items in order to fill her need to manipulate things. I’m trying very hard to talk to her about cleaning in a neutral tone of voice. I only manage when I’m alone.

When I’m not alone I’m angry that the other adults aren’t helping and it creeps into my voice. When I’m alone with the kids I don’t expect any one else to be doing anything so I don’t have a reason to be upset. I’m just muddling along doing my job. I care about doing my job well. When I worked at Ross Dress for Less as a teenager I was a ridiculously good employee. I kept my areas spotless and I always covered more area than I was technically assigned. I knew they weren’t giving me enough work because they were assigning work based on how much other people could get done. I have never been able to tell if I have much more energy and ability to work than other people or if other people are lazy. I think that most of it is that other people just aren’t as invested in (thing of the moment) as I am. I was told over and over and over, “If you are going to do a job, do it right.” And I consider so many parts of life, and therefore work, not optional. If it’s not optional and you have to do a job right… that means you put 100% of your energy into everything you touch, right?

This is hard to sustain. I feel like I am deficient as a person if I leave a job half done. I do it sometimes but I beat myself up for a long time. I’m learning how to put the housework into categories for myself. Right now the living room is a disaster. It looks like it hasn’t been cleaned in weeks. The entire house was completely spotless and I vacuumed and dusted and swept and mopped yesterday. I just can’t get upset. I have times of the day where I am supposed to get up and clean until the house is clean again. Then I am supposed to stop at a certain time. The house always has areas I could be doing more in. I need to deal with filing again, for example. Right now I am trying to not worry about those things because I have (deleted future stressful event) coming up. Lots of feelings.

But it’s time to get back to where I was before I dropped my basket. My kids are getting easier to care for. Calli is still a baby, but barely. She’s very nearly a kid. I realized this week that I need to get my sign language books out. She’s not going to match Shanna’s early learning curve so I need to teach her more signs. She wants to learn them but I haven’t been modeling them this time. That is something I should do. Calli clearly has opinions and wants to communicate. I haven’t been giving her enough scaffolding for being able to do that. I get the impression that her tantrums would disappear if she could just bloody say what she is thinking. Development is an interesting thing.

I’m developing an increasing appreciation of having two girls. I think I would have been the kind of asshole who thought they had boys and girls figured out because they have one of each. Calli is emerging more by the day and I find her so fascinating. She moves like me. By which I mean, she moves like my mother. I see so much family resemblance in her. I see my brothers. I don’t remember what my father looked like, not really. I don’t see my sister. She strongly resembles her biological father. But Calli has the same skull shape as me. I have a picture of me at thirteen months up on the wall in the hallway. Right next to Calli’s six week pictures. It looks like it could be the same kid.

Part of the reason this feels weird is because Shanna has always felt like a mini-me. But Shanna and Calli don’t share any of the things that make Calli feel so very startlingly like me. It feels like a strange split personality situation. They each took very different things from me. Shanna has a lot more of my personality. Shanna acts like me on my very best days. She is friendly and empathetic and eager to bring joy to people. Calli looks and moves like me but is much more reserved. She is very clearly going to be an introvert. She’s seventeen months old and she needs alone time. It’s funny because I have only started to recognize how clearly I need that as an adult. So Calli then feels like more a reflection of my moody and difficult days. That terrifies me.

I have a friend who has a very troubled relationship with her teenage daughter. I’m terrified. I’m terrified of how I will manage to get through the next two decades of trying to impersonate a stable and good mother so that my adult children will want to know me. I don’t exactly take that as a given. When I talk about my fears it’s funny how people always say, “Your kids obviously know they are loved.” My mommy does love me. She just couldn’t take care of me. And when she didn’t take care of me she told me it was my fault bad things happened to me. I’m not afraid of my kids not knowing that I love them. A lot of the reason that incestuous families are so intense is because there is just so gosh. darn. much. love. I’m not worried about my children knowing that I love them. I’m worried about my children only being exposed to age appropriate things. I’m worried about my children being told that they are to blame for circumstances beyond their control.

My children are bright and curious and indulged in activities that encourage both. That means they are going to fuck up a lot as they figure out how everything works. I get to decide what their experience of fucking up is. Do they grow up learning that perfectionist attitude of: if I ever fail I am a Failure? I think not. Everyone makes mistakes. Kids and grown ups alike. Shanna broke a glass yesterday. I can’t remember the last time she broke a glass. I think it has only happened once before. I didn’t yell. I didn’t shame. I didn’t say anything nasty. I said, “Ah man! Ok, that’s why I ask you not to set your glass on the edge of the table. Can you look around and see how far the glass shards went? Don’t get off your chair! I’ll get the broom.” Then we talked about what it means that we have broken glass on the floor. We talked about safe clean up. We talked about where glasses are supposed to sit on the table. And she got a hug and a kiss and a hope that I got all the glass shards up because I don’t want my sweet girls getting cuts on their feet. I did it right. I don’t do that every time.

But isn’t teaching interactions one of those things I’m supposed to be teaching? Ok. So I don’t do it right every time. How badly do I fuck up? How often? I don’t know. How badly do I fuck up? Not very. Not really. How often? Enh, depends on what you mean. How often do I use a tone of voice I regret? Daily. How often do I say something I regret? That’s hard to measure. It goes in bursts. I’ll have like five of them in two days because I’ll feel guilty and off-kilter after the first one. Then I won’t have one for a long time. How often do I do something I regret? Very rarely. I don’t spank not because of some crunchy ideal but because I don’t think I could use it appropriately as a consistent tool and there are much more effective tools out there. My big punishment is three minutes of time out. I lost my temper and kicked things where the kids could see once. And then I dealt with the consequences. If it happens again then there can be a reevaluation of my monster status. Everyone gets to fuck up once.

Right now I feel like I am drowning in my feelings of obligations. I can’t have interactions with people unless I am working to earn them. I’m not sure exactly what the mechanism of this is for me. But I sure treat it in-my-head like I am required to always work in exchange for someone tolerating my company. I must be paying for the effort of dealing with me. I’ll make dinner. I’ll wash your dishes. I’ll do the driving even though you are a single person and this is going to be a nightmare for me with my two kids.

I have friends who have helped me massively. I now have this huge feeling of guilt. I have been in this needy phase of life for a few years now and I feel terrible that I require so much help and I can give so little. I will never discharge this guilt though. And I don’t want to pass it on. I don’t want to feel it. I feel so much less deserving of help than other people. Other people don’t have to rely on their friends so much. Other people have families. My family wouldn’t really be able to help me even if they wanted to. Sure, they could provide “babysitting” but it would be in a neglectful and abusive environment. No thanks. I feel so much jealousy and rage that other people have families and I don’t. To that end I’m supporting Noah’s fledgling efforts to introduce our kids to his family. They aren’t perfect, but they are something. And they want to love the girls. I don’t want my kids to grow up like me. I don’t want them to grow up knowing that there are all these relatives but none of them have any interest in them.

All these feelings around housework and obligation and love and caring for people and physical limitations and support and abandonment… it’s all one big mess. I’m going to be an asshole for a minute and say that acts of service is probably my primary ‘spoken’ love language. Having someone see that I am tired and offer to carry my load? That is a lot of what lets me feel loved and seen. I’m not invisible. Yes, I am happy to do all this work because I love you. But I need to be coaxed too. I need to be coddled too. I am tired too.

Noah spent a while last night laying out his timeline on burdening me. We talked about how it has gone in the past, how it is currently, and how things will go in the future. Noah went down a long list of reasons explaining why he thinks he needs to just step up and do a bunch of things right now. Noah specifically talked about the things I have done for him and why he wants to turn around and help me. I can’t ask for that help. I can’t direct it. I don’t know why. I know that is a failure on my part. Noah explained in detail that he has learned over time to notice a variety of signs that my difficulty level is much higher than I am expressing. On one hand it feels kind of weird being decoded and on the other hand I didn’t know how much I was apparently hiding or lying about or something.

Yesterday I found out that one person recognizes that I am past my breaking point and I am going to get help. In the past week I have made it such that I am not going to be providing much help to anyone but the kids any more. It feels needlessly extreme, but it seems to be necessary for me. I can’t be one of the modern women who gets everything done for everyone. I don’t want to figure out how to rescue an unproductive day. I want to revel in days where we spend all day lying in the sun talking about all the things I see. I talk about plants and clouds and buildings. I talk about how people behave. I talk about how things are made. I talk about metal and plastic and rubber. I talk about what it means to be responsible. Unproductive days mean I am too busy enjoying what I am doing. I can live with that.

I want my daughters to learn that for everything there is a season. Some day they will work. I will almost certainly work at some point. I’ll get bored without something to do. But for now what we are doing is learning together. I have to spend all the time that I can with my kids learning about the world because there is so much to learn. How will we get it all done?

I have let Shanna have basically unfettered access to the iPad. She watches a lot of Fraggle Rock, Thomas, She-Ra and then she has her movies. She is increasingly playing with games. She is doing the letter tracing. She’s fascinated with youtube and what she can learn there. I uhhh don’t know how she found nail polish and makeup tutorials, but she has had fun playing with those. I don’t let her have access to youtube on the iPad. That has to be used with an adult because bad links pop up. I feel comfortable with this now because she uses it for a variety of things and she is incredibly physically active. She likes to go on multiple mile walks with me. I keep telling Calli that iPads are three year old toys. We’ll see how long that goes.

So much is in my head and so much of it I can’t write about. Life is really complicated. I keep telling myself that everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.

From here on out Noah is the person I have lived with the longest of anyone in my life. With the exception of Jenny and our other housemate, I don’t have contact with anyone I have ever lived with. Ok, sometimes I run into Tom, but our lives have diverged. Noah is the only carrier of my story. Noah is the only one I have to worry about being appropriate for. Wow. That’s actually an interesting thought. When I’m having my ambient feelings of guilt for my behavior, Noah is the only one I will really have to worry about. I have the kids for ~17 more years and then they are adults.

That’s a lot more pressure than it seems like. A specific kind of pressure I don’t do well with. I feel I owe my children a decent childhood. I brought them into a world they didn’t make. I have obligations to them. I have a very different relationship with Noah. I owe him nothing but what I choose to owe him. Yet in every way that matters I would be a fool to not see Noah as “rescuing” me. I feel like he took a chance on a stupid gutter kid, and this is how I repay him? By being needy and whiny and incompetent and angry? I feel like he is getting a bad deal. And that makes me feel savagely angry that all I have to give is a bad deal. I am a bad deal.

I was certainly a bad deal for Sarah. I failed her. I need far more help than she can give and I can’t help feeling angry about it. That’s not her fault. That’s not something she is actually to blame for. She’s not doing anything wrong. But I feel it. And I take it out on her. And that’s wrong. I am wrong. I don’t know why I need so much help. It doesn’t seem like other mothers I know get even as much help as I get. They don’t seem to fail as often. They seem to be able to handle getting things done in a lot of different places. I can’t track it. I need to have my responsibilities all lie pretty close to one source.

There are a lot of things I don’t know or understand. Right now I know that the sun is up and the sky is a beautiful blue. The clouds are all drifting out of sight. It’s been raining for a few days here. For once I don’t hear a bunch of people whining about rain. Almost everyone who has commented on the weather has been grateful for it. I feel like for one storm we are all collectively breathing a sigh of thanks. We need the rain. The drought is ongoing. I hope the clouds come back. We need more rain. Besides, when it rains I don’t have to go outside and water. I’ve made a bunch of progress on the front yard recently. Now that the rain washed all those obnoxious white rocks clean, I should probably take pictures. It’s looking more like a garden. I don’t know when I will get the playhouse made. I screwed up billpay and we had some unexpected expenses. The house part of the budget is overspent for many months. I’m sad about that. Oh well. It just means I have more time to dream about it. My kids are getting the house and yard I would have enjoyed growing up in. I hope they like the experience. I’m trying to not be oppressive about it.

Time to go inside.

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Yesterday we took advantage of our date night to shave my head. First Noah used the clippers, then a straight razor. I discovered that straight razors hurt a lot more than safety razors. This is the second time I shaved my head. The first time was when I was 17. I shaved my head around three weeks after my father killed himself. It was time for a new beginning then. It’s time for a new beginning now. From 17 until now I have made most of my decisions about my appearance based on the opinions of men. I feel kind of ashamed when I write that. It’s not the “me” I’m supposed to be. I’m supposed to only care about pleasing myself. You don’t amass a body count like mine by only trying to please yourself.

I’m taking more comfort from monogamy than anyone but Noah knows. I don’t have to hunt any more. I never have to leave the house wondering if I look good enough for someone. Well, I’ll still dress in stuff Noah likes occasionally. But I’m done trying to find people who are willing to fuck me. It’s a different approach to life. Non-monogamy is fairly all-consuming for me. I don’t have many non-hunting periods. I didn’t hunt during the breeding period. I didn’t hunt much for a couple of the years I was with Tom. Tom had me jumping through enough hurtles that I was content.

Noah is different. Noah is happy to have sex with me at any time. No factors beyond, “Are the kids occupied and safe and fine on their own?” matter. He looks for child care or sleep. Then he’s good. I think he’s enjoyed the various colors and he’s finding something to like about every length of my hair. Today the tiny cuts no longer sting so I bet he’s going to touch it a lot more. It is neat feeling. Last night it still hurt and the pillow was annoying so I didn’t want him to touch much.

I put a body stocking on after we shaved my head so that I could stay warm. The plan was to tie me up and mess with my head being different. That didn’t happen. Instead we talked about the way our sex life is causing me to feel unsafe. The way our sex life is dramatically increasing how much I dissociate. We talked about the fact that every time he rapes me there is serious long-term damage. How much damage am I really expected to bear this lifetime? How many of these does he think I can handle before I jump off a bridge? I have been sexually assaulted over and over for nearly thirty years. I think I need at least a few years off. At the very fucking least.

This is something I struggle with. It seems like most of my appeal is that I am someone you don’t have to care whether I am interested or not. If you want to fuck me, sure go ahead. It seems like that usage is really the only purpose for my life, so why not? That doesn’t increase my ‘bonding’ feeling during sex for some reason. It means that pretty much all sexual contact has to be treated as potentially unpleasant and I have to learn to block out all of those sensations, forever. Because that way I can survive being repeatedly raped. I won’t feel it any way. I can’t work on getting back to the place where I can orgasm. If I do that, how will it be used against me or withheld from me? How will I be hurt in exchange for being stupid enough to present more vulnerability in my body?

It’s time to start new. For the first time in my life I never have to give in to that compulsive feeling again. I never have to earn my social admission with my cunt. I no longer have to advertise that I am there to fulfill sexual needs other people have. It’s not my problem. I am no longer the designated whore. I don’t know what else I could be. What else am I good for? If I’m not going to be that, just generically, I think I am tired of being raped too. I think it’s time to say that my husband should really start to respect the word “No.” I should be allowed to be in control of my body. I deserve it. I have carried this body around for thirty years. No one else has the knowledge of it that would allow them to treat it with respect. Just me. So right now no one treats it with any respect.

I need to change that or I am never going to stop feeling like I am one push from jumping off a bridge. Life is harder than advertised. Life hurts. That doesn’t mean I should accept with resignation the idea that I have to tolerate being raped for my entire god damn life. No. Even though so many people obviously think that is what I am good for, they show my by continuing to rape me, I am done thinking that is all I am good for. I don’t think I am strong enough to keep getting up afterwards. I don’t think I have many more rapes left in me. I think my body is nearing its limits. I have already been taken down all the pegs I can be taken down. If you put me any further down I’m going to fall off the board.

I go through the world in the body of a woman. I don’t think it works like this for men. Every day, whether I put time or energy into my appearance or not, I have to be braced when I am out in public. People feel quite free to comment on how I look and act. Most of the comments are nice. I get told ridiculously often that I have a nice smile. It’s one of the reasons I am completely uninterested in braces. My smile is special and unique to me. It is nice enough that random strangers tell me they are happy to see it when I walk around by myself. I think what God gave me was good enough. Even though my teeth aren’t perfectly straight. Even though they aren’t very white. I didn’t discover teeth brushing until I was twelve and I started noticing that it was really gross when boys didn’t brush their teeth before kissing. I decided that applied to me too and I started brushing my teeth. I have a lot of legacy damage from poor dental care. I have an ass-rapingly-expensive dental implant. Oh wait, did I just make a rape joke?

Of all the people in the world, shouldn’t I take it more seriously! Don’t I know that this topic isn’t funny?! I have been raped far more times than I can count. It is just part of life. I’m going to joke about it. Otherwise I cannot live with the constant effect it has on me. I know that other rape victims feel differently. I’m sorry if what I say offends you. We are all just trying to get through the day.

I am almost out of pot. I will either run out today or tomorrow. We have $29 left for this month in the health budget. I plan to see my therapist one more time and that will be $150. I don’t think I should buy more pot. This is already going to be dinging next month. Budgets suck. I am *only* going to be able to pay for therapy next month. Nothing else. I need to start saving room in that budget because soon I will want to buy another massage package. The massage probably is more important given the current strain my body is under. Intimidating.

It’s time to start again. The only way I know to be a parent is to be the kind of adult you think your kids should respect. I want to be worthy of respect. I want to make choices that are actually good for me instead of being a less bad form of self-harm. Sex is often a form of self-harm for me. That’s one of those things I will only admit on days when the wind is right. I have as much denial around that topic as everyone else. Having to be available to basically anonymous men is a form of self-harm. I’m putting myself at enormous risk. For the thrill of hopefully having judged right and the sex doesn’t hurt this time. Maybe instead of trying to figure out how to write just the right personal ad I should tell my husband I want him to stop choking me and raping me. Please can our sex life not be something that hurts me. I don’t want to perfect the art of asking other people to stop hurting me. I want to just close that book and walk away from it. There is no point in pursuing that story. I don’t want to keep upping my body count. It’s not a goal any more. Whatever there was to get out of that activity I did it long ago.

I know, everyone else who is non-monogamous will now tell me how they want to have connections and I’ll tell you that fucking me is one of the fastest ways to ensure that I am going to avoid you in the future. You want more of those connections in your life? I can have boundaries and keep myself safe if I treat the people as disposable so I don’t have to care what they want. It is excruciatingly hard to tell Noah about the results of his (occasional, rare) actions because I already feel like I am letting him down.

He wanted a poly marriage. He wanted to have a life where he got to be a highly individualized person. He wanted a lot of time to himself to keep having other people and things in his life. He wanted to continue on being a cheerful sadist. He wanted to be allowed to do the things he imagines. And I am not only backing out on being the recipient of his urges but I’m telling him that he shouldn’t do them with anyone else either. I feel like the worst kind of double crosser. I am a piece of shit. I am changing the deal.

I can’t handle being raped anymore. Maybe ever again. This hurts so much. The cost is too high. I cannot live with someone who really likes it when I don’t enjoy our sex in any way. Well, that’s too harshly worded. I can live with him. But I can’t keep doing that. I’m tired of barely being able to feel my vagina. I’m tired of rearranging furniture in my head during sex. I’m tired of feeling scared in my home. I never get to be safe anywhere in the whole wide world.

But Jesus-H-Christ. I am now a partial owner of a bdsm coffee shop. I am going to have to figure out how to negotiate those kinds of worlds knowing that I will never really feel all that much like I belong. I don’t want to be hurt any more. Nor do I want to hurt anyone else. I don’t want to be raped any more. I don’t want to fuck everyone who is kind of hard up. What good am I then? I don’t know. But maybe it is time to find out.

I did’t shave my head to make me ugly. I don’t think it does. But I did do it to remove the distraction of trying to be appealing. I don’t want to actually be pretty right now. It is hard figuring out how to let guys down gently in a way that doesn’t result in me getting nasty treatment. I have to instead figure out how to just not attract them. Because if I am attractive it is my own fucking fault and I’m just an asshole cock tease if I don’t follow through.

I went to a friend’s party on Saturday. I spent my time clinging to the few people who have come to my house. I only had one conversation that was not me clinging to someone who has proven they like me. The one-off was about babies. And someone rapidly left the group when I talked about my labor experience. I felt like I should just get up and leave the party. Everything I have to say is repulsive and depressing. My experiences are things people don’t want to hear about. I’m not pleasant enough. My life isn’t pleasant enough.

I think I need to learn how to just stop speaking at all. Can you pick up selective mutism as an adult? Probably not. But I need to appear happy and perky. I need to smile. I need to be polite (whatever that means). I need to look and act like I had a different life than I had. That is what people like. Those are the people who are liked. I’m not nice. I’m harsh. I’m abrupt. I sound angry. I’m unpleasant and difficult and prickly. I swear a lot. I have no idea what manners most people follow. I am bewildered in every social space because I am inevitably wrong and I don’t know why. I don’t understand and I don’t think I ever will.

I own a business now. I don’t have a choice about going out into the world. I have a specific format that interaction is supposed to revolve around. I have a job and I’m perfectly capable of behaving myself at work. It’s time to try again on leaving my house and interacting with people. Even if I’m not the biggest bad-ass bottom in the room it’s ok. There is no where else in the world I can talk about the intensity of my sex play without people running in horror.

Just because I don’t want to be raped any more that isn’t truly going to send me screaming into the closet. Once your sex life is as weird as mine it just morphs. It doesn’t really contract. There have to be other avenues to pursue. Surely not everyone in the world is hurt constantly during sex. They wouldn’t have so much of it.

Shorter and shorter.

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I’ve been pulling at my hair for an hour in that way that means I will cut it again today. I have Hair on repeat. Really if you think about it, Lady Gaga singing about hair is somewhat ironic. She wears wigs. As she says over and over, “I am my hair” she is saying that she is something that is external. She has so much control over who she is that she decides differently on a daily basis. Does that mean that people who have abrupt changes in their appearance are changing who they are?

This is all too angsty; I know. I love semi-colons. Damn you, commas. Jenny likes to remind me that the “rules of writing” were just randomly invented by some twat one day. Ok, that’s not exactly what she says. But it is what I hear. It makes me smile every single time. Because if some twat just made it up one day I don’t need to feel bound to it. I can do whatever I want. It’s a fun kind of rebellion–normally invisible.

Along with my hair getting shorter I notice how my field of vision is shortening. I’m not responding to emails or text messages unless I have seen the person recently. Recently as in seeing them within the last month. People I haven’t seen in many months… I don’t know. I just never seem to remember when I am at the computer. Or it is something like right now where I am actively avoiding. I don’t know why I am actively avoiding. I do. I don’t want to say why I am actively avoiding.

I’m not at ease in my skin right now. I feel not-ok in a way that I can’t ignore. I feel like a thousand monkeys are jumping on my chest. It hurts just behind my breastbone. Right now I don’t feel like I can look people in the eye. I feel dirty. Small. Less than. It’s not anyone else’s fault. At this point in time I don’t think there are very many people who know me even casually who think that of me. Not really. Sure, there are people who dislike me.

Outside of my family I don’t actually believe that people wish me ill. And they all feel very guilty for wishing me ill.

I am trying to see my shaman on Thursday. Since our babysitter quit I’m not 100% sure that is going to happen. And I may have to reschedule with him because of a meeting in the city anyway. It feels kind of like the universe doesn’t want me to see him. I want to see him.

I’ve got my bangs too high that I don’t stand a chance. I think I need to ask my shaman to shave my head. There. That is the compulsive. Why don’t I ask Noah? Why do I want to keep this away from him? Why is my shaman more appropriate?

Well didn’t I just fucking load that question. What does ownership mean? I don’t know. I really don’t. I am very much like a wild animal. I run off and do things by myself sometimes. I can’t accept having everything in my life have to come from Noah. Right now there is so very little in my life that isn’t for him. That plays a part in why I was dating too, I think.

Noah doesn’t have the same wounds in identity because of his appearance. I don’t see the deep fractures in his soul from feeling bad about how he looks. My shaman has spent a fair bit of time being upset with his physical body. Even my use of male pronouns is part of that fight. I feel like it is a failure in me that I cannot default to gender neutral pronouns. They all feel wrong, false, not grammatical. Not allowed.

Does that mean that people who are not easily labeled by one of those correct pronouns do not exist? It certainly feels that way. I suppose that since the dominant name and label is generally male it is close enough. That is awkward to say and write about. I feel like I am jumping on the crazy train, but who am I kidding? I was already here.

I want to see my shaman. I want to talk to him about my shifting sense of self. I want to talk to him about feeling so very bad about existing. I don’t have a church. I don’t have a congregation. But I do have a shaman. I’m not sure how these things happen. How does a life get built, anyway?

The part of me that is fighting with my compulsion admits that I want to use sex to get close to my shaman. I want to feel connected with him. Given our history I know it wouldn’t work in the way I wanted it to, anyway. We have an odd time connecting that way because we go at very different speeds. We are not a match or it never would have fallen off. But I feel like I should do it anyway. I love him so much. I feel like I have to earn the honor of his regard. I have to prove to him that I do want him. I do love him. There is nothing else I have to give that has any value or worth at all. Absolutely never is the pleasure of my company a possible exchange. I know there is no pleasure in my company. I am too mean. Too sharp. Too vicious and unpleasant.

I take comfort in getting to explain to him that I am not allowed to have sex with anyone else anymore. It’s not my fault. I’m sorry I am changing the deal. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry that I will never meet that need again. Please, please don’t reject me now. He won’t. But I feel absolutely terrified anyway. Hell, he doesn’t remember the last time we had sex. I was not pleased when I figured that out. Butthead. Apparently he doesn’t value me based on the things I think he does. He doesn’t even remember the parts that I think are the most important thing I have to give.

What the fuck is it that he is getting then? I need to ask. I need to go to him and talk to him about starting to dye my hair when I first started pulling away from my mom. The colors have gotten increasingly bolder and more odd and aggressive as I have felt angrier and angrier with my mother. The bleach is kind of a bitch though. I had a temper tantrum while trying to comb my hair one day because I couldn’t get the knot out. I cut it out. I did a bad job. It was fun for several days to try to even it out and giggle because with the curls and the weird dye job (I think five colors in splotches) it really doesn’t matter much if it is “even”.

But I’m tired of going out in public and hearing the comments. I smile at the children who ask. I frown at the boys who snicker “clown”. It’s like fucking junior high all over again. I’m done. I’m not hunting. I’m done. I feel like that part of me is gone. I miss my hair. I miss being able to turn my head and get a curtain to hide behind. It was part of how I dealt with my vast discomfort in public. I lost my veil. I feel exposed in a way that feels deeply uncomfortable. I have nothing to hide behind except my eyelids. They do not feel like adequate cover.

I feel like me shaving my head will happen like all the cutting. In the bathroom by myself. I know my shaman doesn’t keep up with my blog. He frankly tells me he doesn’t have the time to read my ever-increasing flood. That’s ok. It means I can talk about him all I want.

I feel like part of what is going on with the less-than is I feel so very weird about my place in the social hierarchy lately. I don’t feel like I am behaving. I fit nowhere. It was a true thing I said when I told my therapist that the only way I will ever fit into a group is if I leave Noah and am a poor single mother. They just don’t make groups for me any more.

What does that mean? I guess that means this is the American Dream then. Solitude. More of it. I don’t understand why. I’m not sure where I got broke and I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t fit. I feel wrong. I feel like everything in me is wrong. I still feel bewildered by my lack of anger. I don’t have that energy right now. Anger is normally a big spur to me getting off my fucking ass and getting shit done. It’s one of the things I use to fuel my productivity and I don’t care if that’s healthy or not. Everyone dies, right? I could very carefully never ever use my body harshly. I don’t think I would be very proud of my life.

What am I proud of? I kind of want to go ask my shaman to bait it out of me. He drives me insane. He says irritatingly true things. One right after another. It’s hard to not hate him sometimes. I would ask him to take the last of this shame from me when he shaved my head. But I don’t think I am going to ask. Because this is one of those things I have to do alone. He can’t take shame from me. Not really.

Shame is something that I own all by myself. I have to learn to wear it or I have to take it off. I don’t know how to take it off right now. I feel stuck. I feel too little and small. I haven’t done anything to really be proud of. I have done things that other people do and I expect far more support for it. I am small and selfish and petty. I am weak. Really? Am I? Maybe. Yes? Of course?

I recently saw this picture, one of the canonical “starving children in Africa” pictures. I feel terrible describing it that way. But these pictures are used as bludgeoning tools. You can’t ignore the fact that seriously, right this minute a small child is starving to death in another part of the world. While you wear big fur boots and lots of makeup and talk about how pathetic they are. It’s kind of an American trope, this guilt.

If I ever feel bad for myself I am supposed to remind myself that I am at least not a starving child in Africa and go on about my life. Well doesn’t that just support the status quo. I don’t much like the status quo.

The thing about guilt and shame is they aren’t useful. They are paralyzing. They rarely spur people to much action beyond denial.

When the children hiss hostile words at me I hear my mother telling me that all the people in the world think I look stupid. Everyone thinks I am ridiculous. Why? What have I done? Why is it ridiculous to play with your appearance? Why is it expected to be a set thing that doesn’t modify as time goes by? Why can’t I change? Why am I to be mocked?

But you know what? I’m a fucking grown up. My triggers are mine to manage. I am not going to get all the children in the world to stop making fun of me. They are little assholes. They can’t help it. So are their parents.

I have a lot of interesting feelings emerging as my hair gets shorter and shorter. My mother liked my hair short. She wanted me to look like a boy. She commented openly on it. I’m really intrigued by how harsh my face appears with short hair. I’m not sure how I feel about that as a lifestyle choice going forward. I am going to have an interesting time as it grows out. I want my veil back. It’s interesting knowing that if I want long hair going forward in my life I have to stop doing anything to it. I’m stuck with baking soda and vinegar for the rest of my life. I will have gorgeous hair again.

It’s weird learning what self-care means. It’s weird thinking about learning to take care of my body. It’s weird learning what it means to be gentle with myself. It’s happening in unexpected ways. I don’t feel bad about the cutting. I hope I don’t do it again because the marks aren’t fading fast and I don’t want my daughters to learn it as an appropriate coping mechanism. It means I need to figure out what to do. I don’t know right now. So far the answer seems to be, “Don’t hate yourself.” I’m not sure what that actually means as something to teach my kids. How do I do that? For the love of shiny green apples, how can someone like me teach anything other than hating yourself?

I’m going to a homeschooling meet-up tomorrow with the kids. We will be doing Sharpie tie-dye. I won’t shave my head before then. They deserve to know what they are getting into with our family. We are weird. Get used to it.

hair cutting

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No one really knows what the boundaries are for another person. You have to speak for yourself, only, always. I decided to stop hunting and I cut all my hair off. In the bathroom with nail scissors. And now I’m going to feel like a fucking schmuck for years. Something broke. I think if I believed I could get away with wearing a burqa I would. I feel like a melodramatic, stupid, immature moron. Not to put too fine a point on it.

Ok, so what really happened is I was in the process of trying to leave the house one day and I couldn’t comb through the snarls. I lost my temper and badly cut the knot out. I have been compulsively going into the bathroom to fix it ever since. It’s rather short. My hair is not ok with bleach. I have a fairly ridiculous amount of shame around the fact that this is not the first time I have stopped hunting and shaved my head. I should tell that story. I don’t know if it is in the book or not.

I was seventeen and at West Valley. I was hanging out with Praveena. It was towards the end of our time hanging out together. I was on the tail end of one of my whoring-around-phases and feeling really bad about myself. I was getting to the point where I noticed that everyone who fucked me ditched me really soon after. I was at Praveena’s house and we were having a conversation about the fact that it bothered me that people no longer wanted to be my friend after we had sex. She thoughtfully looked at me and said, “Then why don’t you find out if they want to be your friend before you have sex with them?”

I started shaking. You don’t understand. People don’t spend time with me very often. Sex was how I got people to look at me. I moved around so often that I knew that I had to get attention quickly or I wouldn’t get it at all. I know what I’m supposed to act like. I know my “role”. I couldn’t verbalize any of that at the time. I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to be near me. I just sat there shaking. I had been cutting my hair at home compulsively for a while. It was probably three or four inches long. I asked her for shaving supplies. She was kind of confused as to why I wanted to shave my legs right then but she got them.

I went out in the back yard and shaved my head. She watched in wide mouthed horror. She had hair almost to her waist. She was a gorgeous Persian girl with super thick luscious hair. She sputtered and gasped and tried to talk me out of it. I remember the look of squick on her face. I laughed.

My mother didn’t laugh. To put this in larger context, this happened in October of 1998. My father had killed himself a couple of weeks earlier. Tommy had killed himself in June. My mom said a lot of very rude and nasty things to me about my looks. She pointed out that my head was exceedingly lumpy. She pointed out that given how fat I was, my head looked especially small and stupid. I need that big bushy hair to balance out my fat ass.

I was invited to go to a ‘formal’ dinner related to the haunted house event I volunteered at. My hair was only a few millimeters long at that point. I covered my head in glitter and wore a tight black velvet dress. My mom didn’t say anything, but she shook her head and grimaced.

At the time I felt awkward and stupid and barely spoke to anyone. The reality is that people were perfectly nice and civil to me. The people who knew me at all were friendly and strangers went out of their way to be nice. I never went back to that organization. My mother extensively talked about how stupid I looked and how she bets they would be making fun of me behind my back.

I’m not really cutting my hair because I think it makes me look ugly. When I feel ugly I feel compelled to cut my hair. I really do have beautiful hair. My hair is lovely enough that someone who feels and acts the way I do should not have that much camouflage to look “normal”.

I can’t possibly explain my mothers furious disgust at people who dye their hair “funny colors”. Oh my god. Anyone who would do that is disgusting. They are lesser, dirty people. They are not normal. Above all we must be normal, right? I don’t even know what that means.

I really and truly did dye my hair because I thought it was fun. I have enjoyed catching glimpses of myself in reflections and seeing the shock of color. It makes me smile. Unfortunately my hair is quite fine and the bleach destroys it and it gets shorter and shorter and… yeah. It’s time to deal with letting it grow out again.

And that represents so much internal conflict of self-expression and self-identity. It’s ridiculous that it matters so much. As I listen to Lady Gaga sing about her own hair experience I feel trite and ridiculous and like I am such a product of my generation. Of course I dye my hair odd colors and cut it myself in ridiculous ways. I’m Emo, right? I guess I never got over high school.

This is part of what I mean when I say I don’t fit. I don’t really know the rules. Do you want to know the main reason I’m cutting my hair myself? Because it really doesn’t matter if I pay someone to do this. Pretty soon I’m going to just buzz it because it’s time to start fresh. There really isn’t a point in paying someone to do that. I’ve been looking extensively at our budgeting. I’m going to continue paying for Noah’s haircuts because I like them. Enh, I’m just done paying for them for a few years. It makes me twitch to pay that much money on hair care. Curly hair is very forgiving and it’s not like I’m trying to impress anyone. That feels bad to say.

I have fun cutting my hair. I like trying to figure out the shape of my head. I get compliments from random people when I am out so I think I do a reasonable job. I’m not ugly. I don’t really think that having short hair makes me ugly. I don’t think that other people with short hair are ugly. But when I am feeling ugly I compulsively cut my hair. I’m trying to change what I see in the mirror. I want to have more control over what I see. I don’t want to go pay someone else who will try to make me look like some mainstream idea of beauty. Whatever it is that society values and requires of women I am not it. Let’s get the advertising straight.

There are fifty sides to every story. I like cutting my hair. I think it is fun. I think it is weird. I think it is a slightly self-harming behavior but fairly harmless so it’s ok. I think it is an obsessive compulsive tick when I am overwhelmed with my sexuality. I think that other people will judge me badly for being the kind of person who will do this. I don’t know why I care. Thank goodness we are through picture season.

I need to let the roots get a bit longer before I decide how short to get. Until then I get to cut off bits and pieces every time the urge strikes. I think it is kind of funny that I do this during cold weather. I guess I’ll just have to wear my Cheshire Cat hat all the time for a few months. That’s subtle.

I told Noah some truth last night. I wonder how that will work out.

That’s why.

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This morning I had an important thought. If I stop smoking pot now I am going to start cutting frequently. The Ativan is not a choice that works as well. I’m not willing to be on a daily pill, even though I probably should at this point. My mood cycles have been horrible in the last two weeks. Pot levels it all out and makes me cheerful and just barely stupid. I am in a great space to sit and play with Play Doh for hours. I can build with Lego’s all day. I’m noticing what things I didn’t get Shanna that I probably should have.

I’m enjoying how cuddly and affectionate Calli is… when I’m stoned. When I’m sober it bothers me and I want to get up and walk away. There is something wrong with me. When I am sober it hurts. She bangs her head on me, she scratches, she steps on me awkwardly or knees me or or or or… I kind of hate it. When I am stoned I just mumble, “oooph, gentle with Mommy”. I’m so glad to be near her that I don’t mind her rough antics. She doesn’t mean anything by them. She’s just a baby.

My body isn’t a good place to be lately. I have to spend a lot of time dissociated if I want to function at all. It’s hard. Most of my body hurts most of the time. My stomach hurts terribly from stress, pot also levels that out.

Pot allows me to put aside my grown up concerns and worries and just be present and happy in the moment with my kids. Most of the day is really quite pleasant. I only think about things that are relevant to what is in my line of sight, quite deliberately. That’s how I manage to be a good mother. I think only of our immediate house and my kids most of the time. I don’t divide my energy well. I can work on house stuff like cleaning with the kids around, but that’s the limit. Sometimes they let me read. They hate the computer and mostly I have to be in a different room on a break in order to use it. That’s when I smoke pot.

I go think about grown up things for brief periods behind closed doors during the day. That is what having Sarah here gives me. Time to walk away from the kids when my thoughts become intrusive. When I am starting to feel edgy I can ask for a break. I’m trying to have the breaks be as effective sober and they just aren’t. My emotions are too intense.

I have ridiculous self-control and ridiculous patience… within small tight boundaries. My kids will grow up being told frankly that I smoke because I need the medicine in the plant and there isn’t a better way to get it out for me. Why do I need the medicine? Because of something that was broken when I was a little girl. They won’t be broken in that way so they won’t need the medicine. It’s rather unpleasant to do, so I don’t recommend it. Shanna will cheerfully lecture anyone within hearing on how disgusting and unhealthy smoking is. Yay California.

But sober, I’m edgy and raw. I cry a lot. I can’t stand to let anyone touch me and when my kids grab me my entire physical reaction is to want to shake them off like a dog. I loathe being touched. It feels like such a disgusting and horrible incursion into my body. Every touch feels bad right now. Everything hurts. The most gentle of caresses feels like a slap. I can mostly dissociate away when sober, but not enough to smile or pretend I am enjoying it.

I don’t want my children to grow up with a mother who flinches away from them constantly as if they are terrible people for wanting to touch her. I think I should get stoned instead. It doesn’t really matter that I feel bad about doing it. It doesn’t matter that the stupid bitch at PAMF looked at me like dirt because I have a medical card. It allows me to be a good mother. I feel so ashamed of myself for needing it. I guess this makes me an addict? Officially? I don’t know.

It seems to me that most of life is about walking a series of thin lines. I am more ashamed of cutting than I am of smoking pot. The specific reason I think it is worse is because I will be more strongly judged and censured for cutting. I don’t know a lot about tribal cutting, I’ve never bothered to find out. I can imagine there being places in the world where my desire to cut myself to deal with my emotional experience would be viewed differently. If I were to lose my fear of judgment, I would be able to represent myself in a way that would feel more honest. I am a person who has experienced a lot of pain. But I did it in a way that is invisible and hard to ignore. There are scars all through my vagina. I think the scars should be on the outside so that other people can see them. I think that marking yourself in proportion to the pain you feel is a way of identifying yourself so that you can find other people to talk to who can hopefully give you relevant advice beyond, “Just cheer up!” Yeah, fuck you too.

Pot keeps me from feeling suicidal. I’m just not desperate enough. It really pisses me off that I can never really be a martyr for any cause ever in my life because if I go in a way that is not completely fucking random people will assume I killed myself. It’s just got to be the base assumption forever.

I’d really like to kill myself. But in my personal hierarchy of needs it is far far more important that I never give my children the experience of parental suicide. Jimmy thinks that just not talking about things and not doing the same things will break the chains and he’s wrong. The only thing that will break the chains is consciously talking about what we are doing and then choosing to do something else. It is hard to be a different person. It doesn’t happen by sitting back silently and hoping it happens.

Who do I want to be? I want to be someone who doesn’t need to be apathetic all the time in order to function. This stage of processing won’t last forever. What do I need to change about my life in order to not get back to feeling this desperate and hurt? Can I change enough? Is this just something that is part of me because of my previous trauma? Will I always find a new trigger somewhere down the road? I don’t know. I really don’t.

I’m just bitchy and mean and bored and antsy and angry and touchy when I am sober. I feel so dissatisfied with everything in life. I hate that in myself. And when I’m stoned I’m fine. No really. I am doing exactly what I said I would and I do enjoy it when I can focus on it. There must be something wrong with me if I need pot to focus. That’s not very functional, only it is. I’m functional, I really am. I beg the internet to believe me. Why do I care so much? Why do I feel like I constantly have to prove that I have some value. I am not just a worthless piece of shit. Even if I do smoke pot. Even if I am just a disgusting whore.

I think I’m ordering more pot today.

Irrational feelings

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Noah made the comment that our nonmonogamy rules are based on polite fictions. I did not yell or scream or hit or punch or any of the things that went through my impulse queue. He just called me a liar. But he did it in one of those civilized ways you can’t really argue with. He can get away with it.

He’s not calling me a liar. He’s pointing out that my emotional experience and the actual real experience often differ and we planned for my emotional experience. He’s kind of a fucker that way.

We originally said we wouldn’t date until Youngest Child (whoever that would be) was five. We think that little kids need a lot of attention from their parents. I’m starting to realize that I overestimated how much I would be able to give to my kids without getting anything for myself. I planned on seven to ten years of me not getting any attention. Maybe that was poor planning.

Noah points out that I’m being unfair and dishonest about how I’m representing the breakdown of our respective time off. Maybe. I’m not going to say yes to that yet. I have too many years of him having a lot more time and space than me. I’m still dealing with being completely overwhelmed and unable to function. I’m trying to figure out where the happy medium will be.

The class he signed up for? The one we thought was six week? It goes till March. So much for carefully figuring out how our reserves of energy will be spent over the next few months. Not how I have been planning. Ok. I can regroup. That’s fine.

Noah is going to want to go out on a date. I don’t know when. Not this year. It will probably come up some time next year if I’m even vaguely honest with myself. With how much time I have spent on okcupid lately I understand why women will line up to date my husband. I don’t like feeling like part of a group. I have trouble with being out with my family of five sometimes. If I wasn’t so clearly a huge needed constantly necessary part of the group I wouldn’t be comfortable. Parties are hard. I feel like I never fit in. If I go to a party and I feel awkward and uncomfortable from the time I arrive but Noah looks like he fits in I feel like I should leave. I should let him have this space he is comfortable in. It’s his. Not mine.

That’s kind of how I let Tom have the south bay bdsm community. If I am attached to someone and they disengage from me in any way when we are out with a group I feel the instant need to panic and leave. I can’t be there. I’m not wanted any more. I have no place. No identity. I’m nothing. I vanish once the identity I have in the group leaves.

I can’t be one of Noah’s girls. If I am one of Noah’s girls I don’t exist when he is not with me any more. I feel like I am watching someone else live my life. Someone else gets to be Noah’s partner. I guess that means I stop existing as his partner. When he was dating W. I sat at home crying and cutting. I didn’t tell him about the cutting much. Everyone knew about the crying. I wanted to have as much physical pain as emotional pain. I wanted to see how big of a wound I had inside. I couldn’t tell. I couldn’t tell how big, how destructive the pain was until I saw how much of my leg I had to sacrifice to it. I had to know how big it was. Do you know why I stayed? It was never more than a two or three slice date.

I think I’m done with writing about when I started cutting, for the book. I haven’t continued to bring it up because it seems weird to do so. For about seven years I cut more days than I did not. Do I really need to say that over and over through the story? Should I talk about the fact that I learned to measure my emotional pain by how many cuts it took to get me to calm down?

I am nonmonogamous and deal my intense jealousy and emotional break downs around Noah dating because it is only a two or three cut activity. That’s not that bad. I didn’t need to cut every date. I established how much pain it was. There were times when I used to make cross hatches on my thighs that were five or six inches long. I would make hundreds. Two or three cuts that are only an inch or so long? Psh. This really isn’t so bad.

It’s hard when Noah says that are rules are based on fictions. What he is saying is that I was making up a part of me. Or making up what I thought I should say. I was lying. I don’t want to be a liar.

I don’t want to be a liar. But I can’t figure out how to explain what is going on with me. I’m saying the closest thing to the truth I can at any given moment. Sometimes, when I’m dealing with my emotional experiences, the truth is like water. It flows wherever it wants to paying no attention to previous course corrections.

I’m dating. I shouldn’t lie about it. I haven’t found a boyfriend, but I’m dating. Maybe I should stop trying to set rules about how long we have to endure any given state of life. I keep fucking up my guesstimates.

I said five years because I was hoping that by then I would feel secure enough with Noah that I wouldn’t feel so threatened every time he looked at another woman. So scared of losing him any minute. I don’t think time is really going to give me that though. I would feel just as paranoid in twenty years. And I can’t seem to be monogamous. I’m not ok with being a hypocrite. That’s a lot higher in my personal scheme of sins than almost anything. I’m acting like a hypocrite. Shit. I don’t wannnnnnnna stop.

I didn’t ask for monogamy as part of our marriage. I specifically excluded it from our wedding vows. I knew I didn’t want it. I have to let Noah figure out what he wants without dealing with temper tantrums. It’s not fair. It’s not the kind of marriage I want to have. I can’t freak out in front of the kids when he is out, either. Luckily it will be a smooth transition for them because they already don’t see him several nights a week.

Speaking of appropriate topics, I won’t be able to make fresh references to Noah’s whores. That uhh won’t go over well. Maybe I’m going to have to work on that whole thought process a lot over the next few months. I doubt he would try before the end of the class he is working on.

I’m weaning at eighteen months. I’ve decided. That’s the end. I’m gradually working her down. I’m only allowing her to nurse twice a day right now. It will be once a day for the last while. There are things I want to do with my body that I don’t want to do while nursing. It’s time to stop. I want to be able to make choices based on what I want rather than on what I have to do. Do I get tossed out of the crunchy mom club for not doing child lead weaning? I’m not making it to two years either. Calli is fifteen months tomorrow. I feel like I will lose my mind in the next three months. I hate nursing. That’s all I’ve got in me.

I’m going to try stopping the pot in December. I am going to start actually training for running. I need to stop coughing. Eek. I’m nervous. I’m going to talk to my psych about that and using Ativan more than I am. I was given six pills for a month and I still have two left. But I’m still smoking pot every day because of the writing. I’m going to stop writing on the 30th. I’m going to switch to using Ativan instead. With the goal of not needing anything at all in the next few months. I’m already cutting the Ativan in half and I may need to cut them into quarters if I use them more. Right now they make me fall asleep. I really and truly am not safe to drive within four hours of taking one. That limits my life.

So I need to be able to cope if I want to go off and do the things I want to do. It’s time to get off the crutches. That’s going to be explosive for a while and I’m scared. I smoke pot because I have a temper problem. Because it’s hard for me to be calm and patient 24/7. I just don’t have that naturally. I’m going to need to find other ways of dealing with my anger. Running is going to be a lot of it. But I also seem to be using dating to fill a lot of my energy input needs. I feel deeply conflicted about it. But I am.

I fucking need something. I don’t want to just sit here and eat and try to convince my brain that I’m happy that way. It’s a false association. Being fatter doesn’t actually make me happier even though I have this really strong self-belief that it is true. My weight is pretty irrelevant but the other circumstances in my life matter. I have usually been happier while I was fatter. It wasn’t because of the weight though. I need to stop feeling bad about not being fat. Yeah, that convoluted.

I’m bigger than my mother. I’m not fat. I need to let go of her endless lectures about what a cow I am. I’m not. I’m a fairly average sized woman. My mother is extremely petite. Let it go Krissy.

Tonight we are going to spend money we really shouldn’t be spending this month on an over the top luxury meal with my lovely Complication. She’s worth it. I’m going to enjoy every fucking minute of it. Later I will have a panic attack at the AmEx bill. Then I will stop, breathe, think of the sight of my Complication eating good food and pay the bill without complaint.

That’s what you do as a rich person. You facilitate life being good. For yourself. For other people. Because you can. Because why the fuck not. There is no deserve. There is no “right” to these things. I’m not bad for spending this bonus money on an over the top good meal. I’m not wasting it. I’m enjoying it. I’m enjoying every bite. I’m enjoying every minute that I can of a life that is full of a lot of ups and downs.

When you have much greater lows than normal it only seems fair that you get to have better highs, right? I’m about to go to the French Laundry for the second time in two years. I am a lucky bitch. I have a husband who loves me tremendously and is willing to spend most of his spare time on figuring out how to earn more money so he can pamper me more and more. Because he wants to. Because he thinks I deserve it. Because he thinks it is great that he can do that for me. Because wanting to give to me makes him want to go out and conquer the world so that he can give it to me.

I think I will need to be ok with him sleeping with other people once in a while so he can come back and appreciate me more. I really am unique. When I sleep with other people I come back and tell Noah what they did wrong. He does the same. It’s a very bonding experience for us that we match perfectly for pretty much every part of sex. The rhythm is ideal. No one else quite gets there. Those other people are fun and awesome, don’t get me wrong. But Noah is home. And I am that for him.

These irrational feelings are hard.

One of the problems with polyamory

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I don’t know if other people sit around in their off-time listening to songs and trying to place them onto various relationships. Particularly, today I am listening to Adele’s Someone Like You. The way she talks about the song in this video is striking. It has dramatically altered my hearing of the song.

I miss Steve and Tom. I think I would be able to be the kind of person Steve could be friends now. I think I have changed my reactions to some of our patterns. I didn’t like how I treated Steve, but I liked Steve. I would have broken him if I had stayed with him. Instead I ran away. I didn’t just break off dating him. I stopped going any place he might be. I avoided his friends like the plague. Anyone who knew us both lost me after the break up.

I walked away from my life. I broke all ties. I changed my major in college. I dropped out of college. I broke up with Steve just a few months before our wedding and then I evaporated like a drop of water. But there were a lot of reasons I wanted to marry him, you know? He was a really amazing person. I miss him. I miss the things he brought into my life. I don’t want to have sex with him, that part didn’t work well for me. But I miss him being my close friend. I dated him before I had ever told anyone the full story of my abuse. Before I was out publicly as a rape survivor. I could still name every single person I had ever had sexual contact with. I had two lists. One of girls, which was very long. I didn’t tell people about that list. And the boys, which was long but not frightening because I don’t count my rapists. Oh wait, there was a third list in my head–the rapists. I could still count my positive boy-sex experiences on my fingers with Steve. Steve was the first boy who ever gave me an actual orgasm. I faked it before that. Uhm, sorry people from high school.

I miss Steve a lot. He was passionate about things the way Noah is. I love basking in that kind of joy in the simple act of attaining knowledge. Steve liked to learn. He was inspiring to be around. He isn’t book smart, and it was by choice. He came from a highly educated family. He was a self-didact though. He knew how to do an amazing array of things. And if he didn’t know how to do something he would figure out how to learn. Nothing daunted him. I miss that. I didn’t know how to deal with it when I was 18. I didn’t know how to explain to him that things were harder for me than him because I didn’t have this loving background telling me I could accomplish things, I had to move slower than him sometimes.

Enh, I don’t remember the particulars well enough to analyze it. Whatever. That’s not the point. I would really like to know what kind of man he has become. I’m pretty sure I was right back then when I knew that I wouldn’t enjoy living with him long-term. But I think I could be his friend now. I think I would know how to listen to his interests without bashing him over the head with my issues.

I ran from Steve to Tom. In a straight line. Jumping on a few nice people along the way. I was 18 and living with a lonely old lady who wanted company and I wanted to be surfing the internet looking for sex. As soon as I became involved with him I started using his house as a base. I was there a lot when he was at work because I didn’t have anywhere else to be. His internet was paid for, he didn’t seem to care.

I’m not sure he understood how much time I was there. How much time I spent auditioning a life in that house before our relationship got all that serious. I picked him. I wanted him. I didn’t have to look around the local community for more than three months before I was damn sure he was the only person in that lot I wanted to seriously pursue. And I did. And on our first date he told me that he was looking for the One. The One he would marry and have children with.

I am not going to get into it much right now. That’s too big of a story. I can’t do that today. I can’t write it down today. But I can sit here and listen to Adele sing. And I cry. Because I can’t write that story yet. I am in the middle of another one.

I date Puppy because I was trying to replace Tom. Puppy was the most abusive relationship I have had as an adult. If he had not ended it when he did I think he would have hit me. He was escalating in his violent displays when I didn’t react how he wanted. I wasn’t good enough for him. His family hated me and picking me would have meant ostracizing his family. Or having to have relationships with them that involved no discussion of his life with me. He didn’t think I was worth it. He was a nasty piece of shit to me trying to get me to break up with him. When my response was to cry for a while then try to problem solve he freaked out. He wanted me to do something nasty so he had justification for his behavior. I feel like my relationship with Puppy absolves me of my guilt for treating Steve so badly. I learned how to control that anger. I’m really sorry I fucked up like that at 18. But I learned. I changed. Some people never do. I’m proud of myself.

I am too angry with Noah. Almost none of it is directed at him. I’m not angry because of anything related to Noah. I’m just angry. At so many stupid things I remember and can’t let go of. So many things that I’m trying to write down and be done with. Puppy left me with a nasty email about how I will end up bitter and alone. Just. Like. His. Mother. Yeah, that’s about me? I think not.

I don’t need to feel bad for my part in that any more. That was a shitty relationship. I don’t think it escalated to abuse but it wanted to. It didn’t partially because I learned to control my temper. That’s pretty cool. I needed to do that. It was essential in helping me be a good teacher. And oh boy is it more important as a mother. I’m sorry I hurt Steve. But I forgive myself. I had good reasons to be angry. The more of this book I write the more I understand why people in authority positions widen their eyes when I tell my stories. I should be exploding with anger. I should be standing on top of a tall building with a machine gun taking my rage out on all of humanity. That’s what a wounded animal as smart as me would do.

For all that people tell me I’m an angry person, I’m not. Not really. I was. I’m sad. I’m afraid. Writing my story down all in one block and thinking about how many years of my life I have spent alone in a room is hard. I don’t know how to have a real live actual family. I’m scared.

I dated Tom for more years than I lived with my brother Jimmy after the age of three. I lived with Tom for almost as many years as I lived with Tommy. We were very close. But he could never decide if I was really worth so much effort. He wasn’t interested in getting married and having kids with me. I think that given his life priorities, he made the right decision. I’m not the right kind of girl for him. And that still hurts. I wanted to be. I tried so hard to be what I thought he wanted. Oh so many things I want to say. They come over me in waves, these memories.

But I don’t think I can be friends with Tom. We were too much. I want too much. I miss too much. I want too much of him still. I don’t know if anything could ever actually work. I’m not going to let myself think about it. I can’t. I ran away. I slammed the door on that part of my life pretty hard. It has taken many years for me to figure out that some people in that community can be my friends because they aren’t actually interested in being his friend. I didn’t have to ask them to pick a side! They came pre-picked! I’m a shallow piece of shit.

No, I have problems with boundaries. I don’t think I would be able to have any if I spent extended time with Tom. Once again, I don’t know that it is even sex I want. I want to crawl back into his head. I want to once again hear him tell me about the most intense parts of himself. I want to watch him enjoy driving. I want to be tied up. I wouldn’t mind it being non-sexual. I miss being enjoyed for just being there to look at. That’s something that’s hard to communicate about objectification. It means that someone doesn’t have to know all of my dirty stupid little secrets, they can enjoy looking at me. Maybe I am beautiful.

Maybe if I write about what I really miss in enough detail I can find a way to get those specific needs met in other ways. It’s worth a try. But not today. Maybe someday I will find someone like Tom. Maybe I will be able to figure it out.

Daydreaming is weird. Because I have these thoughts. I have them a lot when I’m driving. Polyamory means that I can have my Bridges of Madison County track in the back of my brain and know that I am not being disloyal to the people in front of me.

I feel sad that Noah does the same thing. I don’t know that he does it exactly the same way I do. But he has similar yearnings to not feel like doors are closed. There is one girl he is kind of bitter about. I handled it badly. He really was falling in love. It felt like watching my chance at stable happiness leave every time he went on a date. I don’t trust that anyone else can love more than one person at a time. My family couldn’t do that. One kid at a time was “special” and whoever wasn’t in the center… well… when my brothers weren’t at the center it was because they weren’t there. Sometimes when my mother and I lived alone somewhere I was the center. That was wonderful. Anytime there was anyone else around I was ignored. She had missed those kids the whole time she had me. She had talked about that endlessly. She didn’t talk about me in glowing terms the way she did them. She didn’t idealize me. She lived with me.

I don’t want to be that for Noah. I’m scared. It is so hard to trust him. It is so hard to trust anyone. There is no one else in the world I would even bother to try to trust like I trust Noah. I can’t. I’m not capable. And that hurts. Once people have been close to me like that, if they fuck up even slightly then I have to completely and totally evaporate from their lives. I can’t handle being demoted. When Noah starts paying attention to someone else I feel demoted. I go from being the wife to being part of the harem. Now I’m “one of Noah’s girls”. I feel disposable. It’s not true. I know Noah doesn’t feel that way. Not even slightly. But that’s what I feel.

You know. Once I get the problem nailed down this specifically it’s time to talk to the California Mindfucker. I like NLP. It’s a convenient tool. I keep hitting this same wall. And it’s not rational. I can explain it 50 more times and they will all come down to the same thing. I want to change my irrational feelings and I’m not managing on my own. There are tricks for that.

Trying to steel myself for a let down

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I think that the okcupid boy is going to decide I’m not worth the fuss. Which is fair, I don’t think I am either. Uhm, yay for confirmation? I am asking for a ridiculously specific thing that isn’t very fair. I feel weird saying it, but I’m kind of sad. I think I added him to my mental script of November a bit fast. It would have been a very exciting month. It was a nice dream.

Instead I will work a lot harder on getting ready for the 5k and I’ll write the book and I’ll try to settle into more peacefulness in the house instead of trying so hard to get out of it. Apparently right now I’m not meant to be getting out. That’s ok.

That means that some of my friends will say, “Hey come to Friday Night Waltz!” or (insert event here). You guys don’t understand the energetic cost to me of getting out of my house right now. Large group events suck. They aren’t worth the price of admission. When I went dancing with my friend, ok that was worth it. He was a good friend-date. That was nice. Those still don’t give me that big jolt of energy that I want. They make me tired. Those are work. They aren’t building me up in the same way. They are a much more pleasant diversion than most of my life, I’ll say that. But they are a physical cost. I can’t do very much of that. I can’t get consistent enough child care and I don’t want to be away from the kids every night.

I am really sad that I don’t get to have an affair. I honestly think it would cause a few unfun conversations with Noah because I would neglect him. Only I wouldn’t. Because I would come home every night and he would wake up with my mouth on his cock. He would miss me a lot. Heck, I think the fucker could stand with a little missing me. It might increase his enthusiasm during the time he has me. We are so tired. Uhm, I say “the fucker” with great love and affection. Just so it’s clear.

Noah has made great strides in his career during our marriage. I have given him a lot of time and space for that. That is something that builds him up and makes him cocky. I like that in him. He likes me to be built up and cocky. I haven’t felt that way in a very long time. I feel beat down and exhausted. I feel worn out. I feel fucking boring. I feel awkward. I feel unpleasant. I feel like no one will ever want to pay a lot of attention to me again. It’s existential angst. I know. It’s pathetic.

That’s the problem. That dismissal right there. I have a lot of this because of the repercussions of trauma. And when a doctor prescribes a drug intended to cure mania, what that means for me is the medical profession thinks I need to stop working so hard. Because I don’t think there is a reasonable way to describe me as truly manic. In times of crisis I work a lot harder than most people have any interest in working. I’m not manic. I don’t fit the diagnostic criteria. Unless of course, you count my promiscuity. Which uhm, yeah. Or the fact that I did have that lovely drug experimentation period. Uhm, only I’ve never done anything that has harmed my life.

That’s the crux. I like my life. I think I have made mistakes, yes. But I wouldn’t take any of them back. In my opinion mania is reserved for when you impetuously do a whole bunch of things that are really bad for you. When I was a small child I engaged in a lot of sex play because I was surrounded by sex and I was acting out what I had been programmed to act out. It wasn’t mania. As I got older it got more complex and emotional, but I don’t allow my sex to negatively impact my life. I’m not riddled with disease or unwanted children. I have *also* had a lot of really fun sex with some interesting people. I’m glad I’ve done that. I’ve gotten the affair thing right a couple of times and it’s been life changing. I have fucked up in looking for what I want and I’ve had a lot of bad days dealing with feeling bad about how I didn’t negotiate properly.

This is why the doctor says I have an omniscience problem. Because I believe it is possible for me to negotiate well enough to get exactly what I want. And I’m ok with fucking up along the way as I learn how to do it. She seems to think this isn’t a good plan and she was constantly trying to figure out how my “sexual acting out”, seriously–she brought this up at least three different times during the hour we were together, “And did you act out sexually during that time too?” whenever I talked about other major symptoms of anxiety. She’s trying to figure out if I go fuck people every time I get upset. No, I really don’t. Bitch. That kind of judgment pisses me right the fuck off. I’m friends with the vast majority of people I have had sexual contact with. Of the people I no longer know, only one is actively acrimonious and that’s a joint issue. I have been very safe in terms of disease risk and pregnancy… what’s the problem? Oh wait, I forgot. I’m just not supposed to do those things because they are amorphously bad. Well fuck you too.

Err, anyway. This is my long rant about why I’m not interested in an affair because I’m manic. I’m interested in an affair because I’m really bored and I don’t know another way to get that really intense bonding and attention I want. I’m doing it in a way that is entirely on the up and up with everyone in my life. Why is this a problem? Who will be harmed? Why do I need to be medicated away from this? No. This is not the approach I want. I learned a lot about what I need to say on the next visit. That’s good.

But what I really want is a month of sneaking out after hours to be the crazy super hot girlfriend. I want it so bad. I want someone to be obsessed with me. I do I do I do. AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH He’s not going to want me. *beat head on floor* (I’m kidding Ali! I won’t do it. I’ll just shake my fists in fury. It’s… not the same.)

Anxiety, spike.

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Today I am going to go see a psychiatrist. The medical group I work with made it very difficult to get this appointment. I was interrogated by multiple people and it was very obvious that if I didn’t answer in a way they liked I was going to be locked up whether I like it or not. Self-harming is illegal, you know. It’s pretty terrifying to me that I have to be careful in how I word things or I won’t be coming home today. The terror is enough that I kind of want to cancel the appointment and continue to hide in my house forever smoking pot. At least right now I don’t have to worry about someone else deciding they know what is best for me and forcing my lock-step through their program again.

For me the institution and the group home and public school were all pretty much cut from the same cloth. Obviously there were degrees of seriousness for how they slapped people down for stepping out of line. For the whole god damn rest of my life “help” means people doing things to me against my will. That is what help is. It doesn’t matter if I am crazy or sane, it doesn’t influence how people treat me. Do you know what does influence how people treat me? How much they actually listen to me before they start acting.

I don’t know how to make any part of my life or experiences or needs or whatever into brief little sound bites that keep me out of trouble. That is a lot of what other people seem to have that I don’t. It’s not that no one else had anything shitty happen to them. It’s that no one else seems to have diarrhea of the mouth and the compulsive desire to tell everyone in the world, “My dad raped me and I still can’t sleep at night because of it. It’s not so bad really. I can’t imagine what it would be like to live in a world where I don’t wake up at 3 am unable to go back to sleep because I am no longer stoned and I can’t bear the nightmares. Luckily I went to bed at 7 last night. I got in a lot of sleep. It seems to be the only way to hack the system.

I am afraid that if I tell the truth today I won’t be coming home. I have responsibilities. I have people to care for. An institution isn’t a “break” it is a horrible rending and tearing of not allowing me to have contact with the few people in the world who love me and are nice to me. Please God, I never want to be in an institution again. Never. Never. I am really afraird of talking to a psychiatrist today. I know that if I’m honest about how I have been since April they will talk to me about my “options” by which tell me what they are considering forcing me to do. Because the minute I walk into this doctors care I no longer get to have the final say about my mental health.

I feel like I am about to puke on the floor. I have six hours of terror to get through until I meet this doctor. How this goes depends on the psychiatrist I see. If this is an open minded person who believes there are many roads to an acceptably good life, I might get some actual help. If this person believes that all people must be like _____ or they need “help” I might be walking into an actually dangerous situation for me. And I don’t know in advance what kind of person this is. And dear god the power she will weird. I’m actually more scared because it is a woman. Despite the fact that every sexual assault was perpetuated by men, I still feel much more terrified of women. Women are meaner. Women hurt other women and girls just so they get the rush of feeling bigger. I have some issues with women.

I am aware that the most likely result of today is that I will come home with a prescription of some sleep and/or anxiety medication. I’m willing to bet money that the doctor will be fine. That I will talk about my horror story of a life, say that I self harm in limited ways because of a life of horror and right now the pressure is simply too much for me to cope with “healthy” coping mechanisms on my own and I need help. This doctor would probably be ok with drugging me into a zombie state for the rest of my life if I need that to stop being angry all the time. I don’t want that either.

What do I want? What do I hope for? If I don’t know I can’t ask. I want to sleep better, longer, and in the middle of the night rather than through the evening. I miss Noah on nights I go to bed with Calli. I want to be able to control my anger. I want to not hide at home because I am terrified people will dislike me and be mean to me. I am so afraid of people being mean to me. Sometimes I think I have picked the wrong friends groups.

People I know hurt my feelings a lot. I’m really over sensitive. I try hard to keep it as just my problem because I know I am over sensitive. But that means I don’t go out. Because people hurt me casually without noticing. I notice. I stop going out. This is the flip side of “blunt”. An awful lot of things that people say attached to the phrase, “I’m just being honest” are awful. Awful. Awful. “I don’t think you are a bad person or anything, I just think it is a sign that you have no respect for yourself if you have slept with so many people.” I don’t think that is true. If it was true, thank you for telling me that you think I treat me like a piece of shit because I don’t have the same attitude about sex that you have. Obviously us whores are lower life forms.

I do speak negatively about women who have sex with the guys I sleep with. Not to put them down, but rather I refer to us collectively as whores. I’ve noticed lately that I am inadvertently thinking negative-ish things about women I really have no negative thoughts by. Especially over the past three years, I just don’t have negative thoughts about the women Noah sleeps with. D is not a whore. She’s a very nice lady who sometimes sleeps with my husband when the idea of sex makes me cranky. The only exchange is stress relief. That’s not being a whore. It’s being an unconventionally awesome friend.

I have some mixed feelings about sex. I can’t imagine why.

That last sentence makes me smile. People like to talk about the things that are important to them. Most people seem to find books, movies, their kids, their jobs, and their hobbies to be the extent of what they do with their talking. I’m important to me. Trying to figure out how to hack my system and behave how I want to behave is my hobby. Other people seem to not have the road blocks to existing that I have. I can get things done. I can be productive. I can even seem happy. But I have to rig the game.

I can visit with friends. I can deal with all the stuff that needs to be done to keep two little kids growing like weeds and healthy. I can’t go meet new people by myself. I can’t handle things that feel high pressure. New people are terrifying. New people represent this constant low level risk of nastiness. Either I will be stupid enough to say something about myself and they will be disgusted and not like me or I will be stupid and comment on their life choices in a way that is inappropriate. The internet is not doing wonders for my social skills.

There is a local meet up group for home schoolers. Sarah tried to go to one of their events yesterday and missed them in the crowd. The organizer sent me this email asking if Sarah is…. part of my family? Because then she can just be accepted into the group instead of being a provisional member. They’ve met me and the kids and if she’s attached to us she is obviously not a predator or creepy person. They don’t have to meet her first if she is attached to us.

That honestly makes me feel weird. I told her, “Yes Sarah is part of our family. I’m sorry we don’t get to more events. That is when the baby naps. We are hoping that now that she has crossed into toddlerhood that naps will drift and we will be able to come to a lot more events.” That’s a good way of not sounding like a crazy fuck up. “Actually I usually skip your events because there is this one cunt I am afraid of meeting up with and it keeps me at home shaking with terror.” You know that friend who dumped me with the nasty dear Jane email? She’s active all over the bay area with anything vaguely crunchy and parenting. I don’t really want to run into someone who will tell me that I am such a bad parent she doesn’t want to know me.

All of these things are related and combined in my head. People are terrifying. At any random moment people who are staunchly my “friend” will turn on me and start telling me how bad or gross or wrong or… something. I’m inappropriate. I should be kept away from decent people because I am so bad bad bad. That’s why I am so afraid of the institution. It feels like just one more way that society wants “people like me” to be eliminated. If I can’t control myself well enough to pretend that I am just like everyone else they are going to put me in a place where I will god damn get control.

It’s hard to explain to people what the institution was like for me. You can’t go to the bathroom without permission. You can’t eat without permission. When food is put in front of you, you are required to eat all of it or you get punished. A lot of the girls in psych wards are there for eating disorders. As a result every person there is given the same food and you have to eat every bite whether you like it or not. I was told very clearly that if I refused food I would be strapped to a table and a feeding tube would be inserted. That was what I was told when I said I didn’t want to eat the scrambled eggs because they were too soft and I thought they tasted bad. All of my life I have hated scrambled eggs that were too soft. I like them burned. I like them absolutely hard. The institution made them really runny and slimy in a huge batch. They wouldn’t even microwave the fucking things for me to cook them more. The employee told me that I had to eat all of it or I would be forced to eat through a tube. When I started eating with tears running down my face and I was actively fighting my gag reflex… the employee smiled and called me a good girl.

That’s fucked up. I’m sorry. That is not about helping me be “better”. That is about helping to break my spirit and force me to conform to someone else’s idea of being a good person. Seriously? My mental health is related to me being able to choke down under cooked eggs? Why in the fuck was that important? Why was that a battle? Why did I have to eat or risk more invasive medical procedures? Why should I believe anything other than Western Medicine is Evil. Giving that much power to people is wrong. No one should have been able to do that to me.

I’m sorry, but suicide and self-harming should not be punished the way they are. Do you know why people are punished this way? Because it is disruptive to society for people to be unpredictable. People who commit suicide or self-harm are likely to be different and cause waves. We certainly must stomp that right the fuck out. No disruptions of routine. Everything.Must.Flow.Like.Clockwork. Or you are bad. And we will force you back into line.

You can’t eat when you want to. You can’t go to the bathroom when you want to. You can’t sleep when you want to. You can’t play games when you want to. You can’t listen to music when you want to. You can’t decide who you talk to. You can’t decide what you eat. You can’t decide what clothes you wear. You can’t decide how to treat your body–your decisions are substandard.

That’s what an institution is like. You are expected to slowly shuffle from activity to activity (eating is an activity) exactly how and when they say. You cannot question anything. You cannot have a body that likes to eat every four hours instead of eating at 6:30, 12:30 and 6:30. You cannot have any privacy in your head. If an employee (it probably is only supposed to be the therapists, but the orderlies are assholes too) decides to start interrogating you about what you are thinking you had better have an acceptable answer.

When I was institutionalized the story was that I had a rough life but no one knew what that meant. They knew I moved around a lot. They knew that my brother had been hit by a car. There was some vague talk that maybe some sexual abuse had happened. I hadn’t told anyone about being raped. Not by anyone. I went into the institution and was told to lay out all my secrets on a table for them to judge and decide about. Of course I didn’t tell them shit. They were forcing me to eat runny eggs and walk from room to room under their command. There was no safety. There was no room for me to exist at all. I’m just glad it was only two weeks.

I can play the game if I have to. Of course I can. I wouldn’t be alive and outside of jail if it wasn’t true. But I break the social contract in a lot of ways. A lot of ways that are easy to ignore when I am at home by myself in the garage. No one will hurt me here. No wonder Alex’s therapist said I am like the crazy ass Vietnam vet who stockpiles food and ammunition. I don’t think our larder is especially bursting with stores and I don’t own a gun. But I do very careful limit how much I deal with people. I only invite a few people to my house and I don’t go out often. You never know who is going to be nasty to you.

I remember not caring about the fact that people judged me badly. I mean, I can deal with the random public and I do. I go to the grocery store and have pleasant interactions. I can take my kids to the zoo or museum and we do fine and have fun. I can’t go to a big party with a bunch of “friends”. I can’t go meet a medical practitioner because this person will abruptly have “authority” over me.

I’m tired of feeling like I am wrong or bad just for existing. For saying the things I say. For taking up the space I take up. Even if I do go to an event I feel this constant pressure to sit in a corner and not say anything awkward or uncomfortable. This is hard. If someone says, “So what have you been up to lately?” it’s a huge anxiety bomb. Well I’ve spent most of 2011 having a mental breakdown and I wrote about it on my blog extensively. Want to hear about my long list of rape experiences? No, no one wants to hear that. But it’s what I want to talk about. So I stay home by myself and I write. I can’t offend anyone if I am writing alone in a room.

Cue chorus of snickers. Ok, if people are offended by what I write when I am alone in a room I don’t feel much responsibility for that. Stop reading then you stupid asshole. No one is dragging you to a computer and chaining you there until you read all my inane drivel. My whining. I’m not feeling good about myself today. I’m really afraid of this doctor. I’m really afraid that this doctor has the power to say, “You know how hard you are working on being a stable mother? Well… someone like you shouldn’t have had kids and we are going to protect your kids from you.” I have to be careful what I say in front of this doctor or I risk CPS. I’m afraid that it doesn’t matter that I only self harm behind closed doors away from my children. I’m afraid I am going to be told that someone like me is too toxic to share the same air. It’s for everyones good that I be removed from the home.

I was often taken away from my family as a child “for my own good”. I was always sent back after a while because there aren’t enough tolerance for me anywhere else either. Difficult. That’s me. Always have been. Always thinking I get to have an opinion and preferences. Always thinking that it matters what I want. Stupid me.

There are few things in my life more terrifying than the institution. I know it would be a different one this time. A “better” one. It wouldn’t really be better though. It would just be the system trying to convince me that as long as they don’t force me down on a table we are all doing what we want to do. It’s a lie. Me doing what I want to do involves hiding in my house and beating my head on the concrete floor when I can’t handle the anxiety. Ok, that’s not really what I want to do. But I prefer beating my head at home to beating my head in the institution and I wouldn’t stop just because they told me to.

In fact if a group of doctors told me I had to stop or else… all of a sudden my skull would be covered with scabs because I would do it a lot harder. Or else what? What are you going to do to me that is going to be worse than what has happened to me? Do I really need more people hurting me? Do I really need more people trying to impose their will upon me? That is how to make me a healthy person? For yet more people to try to control me when they don’t know what happened to me?

Coping mechanisms can be good and useful and necessary at one time and become less good over time. Self harming has kept me able to function and go about life. It *is* a stress relief. I have done a lot of good in my life. Why is any of it negated because I had to self harm in order to have the focus to work? Why? I can see telling me that there is a better way and offering me other options. That’s awesome. I want to have other fucking options. I’m tired of my head hurting. But I can’t just find this self control out of thin air. I’m out of will power. There isn’t enough lemonade in the world.

I don’t self harm every day. Unless you count pot, which is kind of a weird thing for me. On days when I am stoned I don’t self harm at all. I haven’t beat my head against the floor in almost a month, actually. Not since the day of the party. That morning I lost it and I haven’t since. Having all those people come over was… challenging. It went well and everyone had fun. I still spent most of the time freaked out waiting for something awful to happen.

Since then I say, “Sarah I need to tap out” and she says, “Ok!” and I go sit down and smoke and think for thirty minutes. Then I’m cheerful again.

I want to work with a psychiatrist because I don’t know much about mood stabilizing drugs. I need to learn.

I need more me in my life.

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Part of the reason I am not posting more is because my computer isn’t working properly. I now live with a Sys Admin and it has been confirmed that I have a hardware issue and I need to take it in to be fixed. So when I get an idea that I want to explore in writing I sit here getting more and more frustrated and angry and I forget the idea and then I am angry when I go back into the house because I feel stifled and silenced by fate. I’ve started to notice that my sentences are getting a bit long. Interesting. Ok. What was that idea again… (I’m now on Noah’s computer.)

The thing about running away is, it doesn’t actually get you out of your life. The problem is that you take your life with you. You just change where you are standing. The only “out” available in life is death. And I believe that when I had my children I gave up my right to choose death as an option for a minimum of 20 years and probably ever. I went through that with a non-custodial parent. There is no way I could slash their souls. I can not ever be that selfish. Especially in the next few years, I am the whole center of their universe right now. I won’t abandon them.

I won’t abandon them. That phrase keeps me trapped. That phrase keeps me feeling like I am not allowed to have hobbies or separate interests. That phrase keeps me from doing things I want to do. I don’t feel like there is a way to meet my needs as well as their needs. This is changing, slowly. Having a nursling is hard. I haven’t been away from Calli for more than about four hours. No… I’ve probably pushed six hours a couple of times. But not more than five times. In her life. She will be a year old in 16 days (!). That’s a lot of fucking contact. That doesn’t leave a lot of time to do the things I like to do.

The problem is, the things I like to do all involve intense socializing. And running. Running needs to start any day now in order to give me time to train for the marathon in a way that is reasonable for my body. I have a plan in place for how I want to approach that. I should talk to Sarah today about how to get that on the schedule. Maybe that is what I should be doing during quiet time? The point being, I don’t have any hobbies I am interested in pursuing at home by myself. That means large blocks of time out socializing in some way. That really is the approach I have to filling those needs in myself. I want a community.

It’s getting better with Sarah here. The kind of “therapy talk” that bothers some of my friends is totally ok in my house all the time now. If we have an interaction and I start having a weird irrational reaction I talk about it. I don’t blame. I say, “Ok I think it is an irrational reaction, but right after you said that I started feeling really scared. I feel like you saying that means… and I need to ask you to clarify a bit more about that statement.” I’m allowed to do it all day long and no one thinks I’m weird. No one tells me that I should stop processing and start living. No one tells me that what I am doing and therefore that part of me is wrong. I’m scared because Sarah is inviting people over to socialize. People coming over is pressure to conform to social rules in my space that I don’t agree with. I’m never sure how much pressure is only from me and how much actually exists in other peoples minds.

I miss me. I miss being confident and strong. I miss feeling like a force to be reckoned with. Someone from MDC described me that way on the trolls site and it absolutely made my year. My presentation of self is fucking working. That is who and what I want to be. I don’t feel like that right now. I feel weak. I feel thin. I feel like my skin is very thin and I don’t know how to keep other people out and me in. I constantly feel this free floating miasma to conform to being more like the people around me. This feels ok in my house because here I have one identity that is firmly separate. Mom is not thin. I do not conform to my children. And that means I feel ok in that role and I don’t know how to even think like the other parts of me any more.

Does that make sense? This is the part that feels like being slightly “multiple”. Right now I do not feel like an integrated person. My memories of things I did at other times in my life largely depends on how close I am to the emotional state I was in when I had the experiences. If I am not feeling joy I cannot remember joy. It is like joy has never existed. If I do not feel lust I feel like I have never wanted sex and all of my partners have actually been rapists because I never truly wanted it. But that’s a lie. I know it is a lie. That is a part of me attacking another part of me and trying to destroy it. I seem to feel like if I am the mom then the part of me that is sexual needs to die. It’s not really surprising that I feel that way. My mother gave up sex and dating when I was 10 because she believed she had a bad picker (I agree) and she wasn’t going to keep fucking up her kids with bad men. That was a good decision. My sister has gone through a string of men so bad I don’t think I could make up stories that would be worse than reality. The last one was decent though. She dumped him for nagging her about cleaning. Excellent choices.

It makes sense that I have this association between sex and unfit parenting. Wanting sex means taking focus away from your children and if you take your focus away from your children then you are neglecting them. I have a hard time with my constant internal pressure to pay more attention to my children. Honestly at this point I have the (I hope more) rational belief that paying attention to my children 24/7 is not actually good for any of us and we all need space to grow. I have work to do to support our family’s life. I have to do the dishes. I have to clean. No really, these things are mandatory parts of life and the children need to learn to accomodate the fact that the whole bleeping world does not revolve around them. Most families wait on that lesson and let school teach their children that lesson. I don’t have that light at the end of the tunnel. There is no school coming.

What does that mean about the patterns of our days? As a stay at home, future home schooling parent I have to integrate my identities in my life while not having outside help to monitor them for most of the day. That kind of sucks. But I really have no interest in the more common approach so I have to make this work. I believe there should be a 100% separation of church and state. I also believe there should be a brick wall between the sex lives of parents and their children. My sex life in particular is simply not fodder for my children’s imaginations. Ew. But I don’t want them to grow up thinking we are celibate either. There is a happy medium in here somewhere that will allow us all to be healthy.

Right now I feel like I need to find a way to start interacting with people more. Baby steps. I am socially awkward and uncomfortable and I have a lot of work to do in the house. It’s hard to pry myself out. Even when I am with someone I have known for almost a decade I feel like they secretly don’t like me. It is an act of will to act like I think we are friends instead of acting like they secretly think I am a loser. It’s awesome. And stressful. Mostly I’m not up for the stress. Slowly it is improving though.

I’m trying to be all the parts of me that I like without judging some of them as bad. No matter what there will be people who disapprove of me being queer or kinky or nonmonogamous. These are unconventional life paths. They are part of my path. How can I figure out how to be a queer, kinky, nonmonogamous parent without fucking up my kids. Hm.

Holy crudmonkeys too much caffeine.

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I AM AWAKE!! Ok. I’m not taking a Foosh mint at 10pm ever again. Oh my god. I thought I would be able to go to sleep by about 2. Hahaha! I am vibrating. Excellent. I didn’t have this experience from caffeine when I was younger. I think perhaps I was just so used to drinking copious amounts of it that I was immune? Is that even the right word? Acclimated? Whatever. I’m feeling downright sprightly. Not too long ago I was told that it would be ok if I couldn’t get everything unpacked in time for my birthday party in five weeks, we could rent a storage unit. Today we unloaded the truck in under an hour and returned it a day early. And I have unpacked about a quarter of the boxes. I expect to be about 75% done by the end of the weekend. So I’m waggling my tail in glee. I think it is kind of sick how much joy I get from working really hard. Do you see what it is? I just found a little sprint! It’s So Freakin Exciting!!! Whoo hoo!

Some wit might say, “What the heck was Scotland?” A grueling, nightmarish trudge. Oh man. Ok yeah, I had fun and I’m glad we went. But it was a buttload of dealing with absolutely nothing but the kids. The only thing I could “get done” was laundry or cleaning up. It sucked. Those are not the parts of being home I enjoy at all. That’s the shit work. (Uhh… taking care of my kids is not shit work. I did not mean to imply that. Carry on.) But I hate laundry and I hate piddly cleaning up! I want to make something! Dangit! I want to noticeably improve my quality of life for ficks sake! I felt so stymied. And we didn’t get in as much sight seeing as one might hope given various anxiety and/or physical issues from being ill and/or me having to deal with Shanna being jet lagged and awful out in public for nightmarishly long stretches at a time so Noah could work. AHHHHH. It was, shall we say, not the best month ever for me traveling around a foreign country. I can’t handle having social engagements on more than three days out of seven or I start to freak out because I can’t keep my company manners in place firmly enough. You should picture me twitching now. Go on. It sucked. But Scotland was really wonderful. I’m so glad that Jenny is there permanently so I have a mandatory reason to go back and explore when I’m not in a crisis state! Yay! Well, that’s almost true. I probably would be a lot happier if she moved back here so I could see her all the time. But that isn’t happening. I’m trying to say that the glass is half full here. So go with me.

Anyway. I have been decompressing from the trip and trying to reconnect socially and I’ve been uhh questionable on that front. I haven’t been feeling good about much of anything. Now that Sarah is here so that I can help instead of just having anxiety from far away (yes Noah, I see the reference to the book–what book was that again?) The only thing I had to do was prep for Sarah to get here and wait. But she’s here now! And I helped! I’ve done things much better and faster than the bar was set to. Oh man. It’s like I just got a shot of heroin. And I had CAFFEINE!! Seriously. I can’t do that again.

Because you see, when I’m up till 4:00am (and counting) no is posting any interesting links. Don’t you guys understand that you are my link to anything interesting in the whole wide world? I read facebook and G+ and that is it. Unless it is sent to my email I don’t know about it. I don’t read any news of any kind. I’ve basically dropped MDC (I’ve had a freakin relapse tonight because people have the audacity to be sleeping) and I don’t go anywhere else. I don’t even know where to go. I used to hang out on IRC but that’s long gone. I don’t really want to read the news. I’m a creepy shut in and I’m sorry for that, but I just can’t pay attention to the news. It’s only focused on the most absolutely disgusting parts of humanity and they distort public perception in really creepy ways. I’m not interested in television. I prefer reading text. Yeah. I can’t follow celebrity gossip because I have no idea who any of them are. I don’t know of any online communities I would maybe feel like I fit. And I really don’t have time to add one if I found it. The last thing I need is another internet time suck.

So y’all posting interesting one-off links, that’s my sole lifeline to the outside world. So don’t be shy with the links ok? Some night I just may need them. Right now I am totally out of tabs and it sucks. In that silly whiny way. I wouldn’t be able to find the book I am reading and I’m done packing. Whinge! Whinge!

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Category Archives: creepy shut in

No social skills

I’m not resting my arms.

Broken promises

If you build it, they will come?

frustrated

Long-term friendships.

Mostly parenting babbling

Shorter and shorter.

hair cutting

That’s why.

Irrational feelings

One of the problems with polyamory

Trying to steel myself for a let down

Anxiety, spike.

I need more me in my life.

Holy crudmonkeys too much caffeine.