Category Archives: cutting

The social mask

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In the past three weeks I have had three people comment on the difference between what I write and what they see when we are together. That makes it something worth writing about.

Of course there is a difference in how I act in public and the crazy shit I write about. If I acted in public the way I write about on my journal I would be in a lot of danger. If I was unable to mask my craziness it would be extremely unsafe for me to go out in public. I would risk being 5150’ed again. I never want to go to a hospital again. I can’t lose it where anyone can see.

If you look at the whiteboard in my room there is a lot written down but if you notice very little of it is outside my house and even less than that is any kind of social activity. I generally keep my “socializing” to under twenty hours in a week and most weeks I’m under eight hours.

That is how much “playing the game” I can do right now.

On the occasional week when I try to push it and do more because that week just happens to be busy I am usually sorry. I will have to spend a lot of time in the bathroom crying for all the hours over my “maximum” I am actually out. It is embarrassing and humiliating and I feel ashamed of myself the whole time.

Being around people involves a lot of active and conscious thinking about “what I am allowed to say”. The consequences for getting it wrong include being asked to leave, being asked to never come back, or if I genuinely lose it and start freaking out I may lose my kids or get arrested.

I’m not exaggerating and I’m not wrong.

I’m aware of how “hysterical” women have been treated throughout history. I have done a lot of specific research. In olden times I may have had to walk around with my tongue in a heavy vice for days or had to wear a collar with spikes on the inside while tied to a post in public so other people could remind me how bad I was.

The consequences in the modern area are downright soft and fuzzy in comparison–I get that. Nevertheless I don’t want them.

I don’t want them. I don’t want them. I don’t want them.

I’m awake in the middle of the night because my stomach is hurting because I didn’t smoke before bed. By 2:30 my stomach hurts and I can’t sleep through it. Then I start having racing thoughts because that is just what I do when I am in pain. Then I risk being a mess tomorrow. Lots of breakthrough crying.

My kids know I cry. I can’t hide it from them. I try my best to present it as, “Everyone is different. I cry a lot–most people don’t. That’s ok. People vary.” They are still young enough that they don’t really ask questions about why.

Noah deals with/occasionally sees me crying as I’m going about my day. I wander around working and crying at the same time. That’s just life for me.

Yes, I believe this is something that I have to carefully keep people from seeing. This is probably, by hour, the biggest part of my life and I have to make sure no one else sees it happening. Or I will get in trouble for being bad again.

The fact that I wander through life feeling very sad and crying for many hours of most days is something I have to carefully hide and prevent people from seeing or I get in trouble. Over and over and over.

It’s not hyperbole. I can tell stories all day and all night long.

I’m at a very low ebb on my ability to “play the game” with other people because I require so much of myself for my interactions with my kids.

My kids know I cry. They know that I have wonky chemicals in my brain that make me prone to have my eyes just start watering and it’s not a big deal and they know that sometimes I think about things that happened long ago and it was bad and I’m really glad that my life is different now and I’m so glad that I know my kids. They know that they are nicer to me than anyone has ever been and that I am grateful.

Well, so far Shanna parrots these things back. I say “them” but I am still working on brainwashing Calli but Shanna is pretty ingrained at this point.

I feel really stupid sometimes but when I am saying in a calm and clear voice, “It’s ok to be mad at me. I do things you don’t like. You are totally allowed to have those feelings but it is not ok to call me names and it is not ok to scream at me. Try again.” I still have tears running down my face. I can keep control of my voice at this point–it is great effort but I can prevent myself from descending into the ragged sobbing sort of breathing that makes talking hard. I sound “like a teacher should” but my eyes are watering.

I feel weird knowing that my children are going to grow up thinking that your mom crying all the time is normal and something to ignore. I feel very ashamed of myself. I feel like I am proving those people right who told me that I should not be a mother because someone like me isn’t capable of being a good mother.

I’m not selfless enough? I don’t have enough self control? For the past couple of years of “bad cycle” which probably actually started as postpartum depression after Calli was born combined with Shanna hitting the age I was when my abuse started so I started having daily intrusive flashbacks.

That was not long after Traci–my therapist of seven years–OD’ed on heroin and I ended up finding Sharon who totally sucked and tried to talk me into believing that I had Disassociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personalities) because of how I segment my behavior when I am around people.

I don’t think I really took the placenta pills as long with Calli. I stopped taking fish oil. I haven’t started again even though I know it is a mood stabilizer. I have other supplements my therapist wants me to start and when I think of the act of swallowing pills I start to gag and my stomach aches just thinking about it.

By the end of the time I was taking all the god damn supplements my midwife wanted me on (15 fucking pills a day) I was frequently spontaneously vomiting them up.

My body knows that when I take a lot of pills it is because I want to die. That is what my body thinks is happening because I was dumb enough to treat my body disrespectfully enough that it doesn’t trust my intentions anymore. Smart body.

I really am not so good at taking pills. And the idea that I should take a handful or so every day for the rest of my life is something that I don’t think I can get my gag reflex to move past.

Even though everyone keeps telling me that if I only swallow this pill my life will be magically better. It hasn’t worked any other fucking time I’ve tried some fucking magic pill. I’m still me. I’m still completely broken. I still don’t have a family or very much consistent support–I am building it. I’m trying. But it is dependent on having people in my life who actually show up to do it. I don’t have many people volunteering for that role and of the people volunteering I have to evaluate for them if they really have enough spoons to be dependable *for me* because I am a god damn special snowflake with standards through the roof.

If I know I will have an out of proportion negative reaction to someone acting how they typically act I need to be very careful how much time I spend around them. It is not their fucking problem I’m crazy and that I have had “bad life experiences” that cause me to want to yell at them. If I can’t be tactful (otherwise known as keep my fucking mouth shut or on trivial topics) then I can’t be around people. I silently back away from most relationships because I don’t think I have the right to hurt people by being mad at them for being them.

I don’t know how to reconcile the fact that it isn’t that I actually think they are wrong it’s that it is very hard for me to keep straight in my head what kind of commentary is appropriate in which settings. I’ve been introduced to a much larger number of social situations than most people. I have moved somewhere between 60 and 70 times in my life. Each of those times involved meeting somewhere between five and hundreds of new people all in a big rush. I have lived at every socio-economic level from the projects to multi-million dollar homes and I went to school with Steve Wozniac’s kid. His son was best friends with the brother of the girl I was best friends with. Many of my friends had server space hosted by Woz because that’s just how things worked. That’s where I lived.

I could pull out my sock puppet prime minister (it’s a long story–maybe I will tell it some day) and name drop all the long list of two degrees of separation I have with “important” people.

So uhm yeah. I walk through life feeling like I am the lowest status person in every single room I walk into. I assume that if I say the wrong thing and offend the wrong person (and I have no god damn idea who the “important” people are–I constantly fuck that up) I will be told to leave and all of a sudden there will be a tidal wave of nasty gossip about me behind my back.

How many illustrative stories do I need to have? I could start with less than two years ago and move backwards over thirty years and have many dozens.

Being the scapegoat is hard. I have a lot of behavior patterns that get me into trouble. I don’t understand exactly how they work. I don’t understand why I am so god damn offensive to people but I am.

I tend to go through life believing that people who are still here are the ones around whom I have been most successful at wearing the right mask. I look for signs that I am breaking their social contract and I try very hard to apologize for fucking up before they have to call me on it because I don’t want to be rejected just because I said or did something that was inappropriate for someone in that kind of relationship.

I hyperventilate over this and hyper-analyze every thing I say or do after the fact and try to look for reasons I might have crossed a line and pro-actively send an apology. I really can’t handle losing many more friends. It devastates me so much.

Oh for the love of toast of course I hide “what I am really like”. I am unpleasant and needy. No one likes people like that. I really can’t handle having more people decide they don’t like me en masse. So I need to be god damn careful about everything I say and do.

After smoking for half an hour I think that the stomach pain has changed enough that I can try eating and see if that will help.

I have been trying to track my marijuana usage more. Why am I using it. When. What, specifically, is it doing for me that I need? Mostly it is the end of the year and I am freaking out about how much I spent (I used edibles basically exclusively for about two months while I was training for the marathon to clear some of the lung funk–yes smoking is disgusting and I would like to stop–and those two months cost as much as the whole rest of the year combined and gosh it sounds like way too much money for any medication and… accompanying shame cycle.) thus I am beating myself up about how much I need to stop using it.

If I’m going to damn myself it will at least be with accurate data.

I go through ~ 1/8 of pot/week. I wake up earlier than everyone in my family and I have some then. It calms my stomach pain enough for me to eat. On days when I don’t smoke before breakfast (often out of impulses of shame because I am a disgusting person for needing a “drug” I should just “willpower” my way through after all) I generally am unable to eat because the stomach pain is such that I have constant nausea and I have a ridiculously strong gag reflex. If I try to eat I have a lot of violent stomach pain because my stomach is not fucking interested in accepting food.

If I am in a restaurant this is when I have to get up and leave the table. I either go to the restroom or I go outside because I need to cry. I need to cry because it hurts and because I am ashamed of myself for crying in public just for something stupid that someone else would be able to hide. I know I am not exhibiting the proper social behavior and if I keep that shit up in public I will be fucking sorry.

At home that is when I say in a small voice, “Excuse me” and I go smoke enough to relax my nausea and deal with my gag reflex. I usually feel better after eating. But I am also still stoned after eating. So who the heck knows exactly where the better comes from. But on days when I don’t smoke I probably don’t consume a full meal worth of food in a day. I physically can’t. It hurts too much.

So a year ago when I went to the doctor I layed out all my issues and I was told she wouldn’t deal with my stomach until I dealt with psychiatry and psychiatry told me to take a pill I didn’t want to take, stop breastfeeding instantly (because this new magic pill is extremely toxic to me and the baby), and stop pot instantly or psychiatry would not work with me.

Uhm. No. Fuck you. I know what those side effects will do to my life. They will make it so I can no longer play the game when I have to because I will be debilitated by the side effects. I have watched this effect cascade with person after person in my life. No. No. No.

I will not work with a fucking doctor who spends five minutes talking to me and then wants to prescribe a medication that will destroy every coping method I have and tell me that I just have to “deal with it” while smirking at me. That is demeaning. You have studied what trauma does to the brain? Well so have I, motherfucker. You have not done a single fucking blood test. You have not done a brain scan. You have not taken a full medical history to find out how bad the side effects have been every time I have been forced onto a drug “for my own good” and how often that has lead to significant public blow ups and more trauma.

You don’t give a shit. It shows on the fucking smirk on your face. I don’t fit into your mold of a good person so you want to drug me into a stupor so that I stop doing what I am doing and blindly do what you say. No. You don’t know what I have to react to or why.

Fuck you. You want me dead. I can’t come to any other conclusion and continue to survive.

It took twenty-five minutes (I’m uhm babbling paragraphs in between random distractions else-net Oooh shiny! That’s a lot of why it sounds so incoherent and random-ha.) but I finished a piece of string cheese. Minimal gagging but I haven’t been able to eat any nuts yet. And my graham cracker is untouched.

We will have new insurance cards soon. I promise that as soon as I can log into the new insurance system I will make an appointment. I promise me.

An awful lot of why I am smoking the pot is to deal with my massive stomach pain. I feel very scared because if I reveal that there is an anxiety portion to the pain I risk not being treated again but if I don’t tell the doctor that I may not get appropriate treatment.

I feel like I am in a bind and there is no way for me to get out of it. I have to just throw a dart at a dart board and pray that I get a doctor who will want to help me without requiring that I instantly trust them enough to send my entire life headlong. No one deserves that kind of trust from me. Give me a fucking break.

I know that my intense fear of having to deal with a doctor for this is making the pain escalate unbearably. I understand that link. I understand that for most of the year the pain has stayed at a consistent 1-3 with spikes up to 5 or so when I try to eat without smoking but since I have been actively been thinking about the fact that I have to deal with this soon the pain has been spiking to 8 and 9 and causing me to nearly vomit spontaneously in public–which is kind of embarrassing. And shame producing. Knowing that my body may betray me at any moment and make me a public spectacle makes me feel constantly ashamed of existing. I should just fucking die so that I don’t have to go around inconveniencing people all the time.

When I vomited on the floor of the hospital when I was twelve, when I was waiting in the lobby to get a cast on my broken arm, my mom grabbed me, hit me and hissed: “You just did that to get attention.”

Over and over I sobbed “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.“

The nurse tried to tell me it would be ok but I couldn’t stop crying.

When I go out in public I generally did not smoke because I don’t do so before driving. Which means I have to get through breakfast without smoking if I want to go to the park. I generally don’t eat much or sleep properly the night before with anxiety about the spike in stomach pain and the increased difficulty in being patient with the kids.

That’s a lot of why I limit excursions out of the house. Those days are ridiculously hard on my body. When people come to me I evaluate how offended they will be if I am stoned and I try to uhm match expected tolerance because generally what I think other people will be ok with is lower than what I actually usually use.

This is the big problem with using any medication so sporadically. The effects are needed when dosage isn’t present. I have many days where I wake up and I let the negative thoughts get too entrenched before I start smoking (it is an unpleasant process and I don’t enjoy it and I don’t like being “the kind of person who smokes pot” and and and) so often I have to kind of psyche myself up first and bribe myself with the idea of being in a more pleasant mood.

The amount of conscious dealing with shame I do every day is really hard. I have to consciously deal with it or I will not eat and not sleep and get weak to the point where I am not physically able to complete my chores without slowly dragging chairs all over the house so that I can move from chair to chair to finish my cleaning.

Because I am that compulsive and crazy. I have to “appear” functional. I “have to” maintain certain appearances or I risk terrible consequences. I don’t know exactly what they will be or from whom. Sure as the sun will rise I will have someone else in my life whom I trust a great deal turn around and tell me that I am abusive and terrible and they are disgusted by me. It is going to happen again and again because that is something that people just feel free to say to me.

That is part of what I mean when I say that I am the lowest status person in every room I walk into. I am a white trash whore and I can never undo that. In any room I walk in to someone may decide to go off on me. It happens when I happen to say something I shouldn’t say.

Usually that means I answer a question honestly. People ask a wide variety of questions in the casual chit chat process that if I answer honestly the person will respond with horror and disgust and move away from me exhibiting great hostility. I have to guess which lies to tell and when.

When my mask is slipping, like it was this weekend, I went to a friends baby shower. Want to know my connection to the group? I knew the host from working together (where deliberately obscured) and the party was at the house of someone she has known since middle school–they were both around our mutual place of employment. I went out with both of them like twice. I uhh begged to eat out my friend’s friend. She let me. Then never talked to me again.

Till I walked into her house this weekend and she didn’t remember me even slightly (or at least gave no sign of remembering me–she certainly didn’t know my name).

This uhm, happens to me pretty regularly. I’m very careful what questions I answer when I talk to people in general. I uhm was kind of stupid.

So the father of the host (he has known the mom-to-be since she was a kid, remember) was chatting me up and he told me that his wife wrote a book but she is afraid to publish it. I uhm wasn’t thinking so I said, “I actually wrote a book and self published. If you look at places like Amazon publishing or there is a wide variety of competing models you can be e-published for practically nothing and you can get books in print and deal with hawking them at book stores yourself for fairly little money. That is how publishing often works, actually.”

So then he asked me about my book. He had to prod me more than once. “Oh you wrote a book? I bet it’s a lovey dovey romance isn’t it? I bet it’s all cutesy schmoopsy and adorable right?” heh heh.

Cue my not amused face.

“No, actually it’s a memoir about the first eighteen years of my life.”

*snicker* “No eighteen year old has done anything worth writing about.”

By that point in the conversation my heart was racing and I was breathing fast and I could feel the flush rising. I had been kind of avoiding eye contact. Then I looked straight at him and said, “Well I I was moved more than fifty times, I was homeless, I stole to eat, I went to twenty-five schools in diverse combinations of socio-economic levels and race: everything from the projects to graduating high school in Los Gatos after only going to that school for my sophomore year and only three semesters of high school total. (said to someone whose kid went to one of the worst schools in the east side of San Jose [these two places are right next to each other and Los Gatos is where all the rich people live]) I was raped or sexually assaulted dozens of times over more than twenty years, including my father and my brother extensively abusing me, along with a bunch of random neighbors. I self-mutilated for decades as part of how I dealt with what was going on with me and every mental health professional I have worked with has been freaked out by the variety and range of trauma I have been through.

I had enough happen to me to justify a book.”

At this point picture him kind of mouth agape blinking kind of fast. “Oh uhm. Wow. Yes. You would have enough to write about.”

We didn’t really talk after that.

I let my mask slip. I did not tightly contain my answer enough. I wasn’t appropriate enough. Mostly because I didn’t give a shit. I will probably never see this man again. My connection to him is tenuous enough that I just don’t have to fucking care if he thinks I am awful for unloading on him like that. (You wouldn’t fucking believe how often people screamed at me for uttering even four sentences of the above paragraph in a challenging voice. I should not be speaking. Shut up. I don’t have the right to make people think about unpleasant things.)

The conclusion I draw from this is I shouldn’t exist. Or I should simper and play stupid and lie and answer questions in evasive ways and for the love of crisco stop writing and talking about this shit.

So I do my very best to force my lips to be literally closed for as much of the time I am with other people as I can. I end every social interaction with sores on the inside of my mouth from chewing it so hard to keep from saying anything that might be inappropriate.

Yes. It is enormous physical strain.

I can’t tell how these descriptive/prescriptive things work about labels. People tell me that I should eschew thinking of myself as bad and stop thinking about my behavior as bad. But I regularly get into trouble I don’t want to be in because I don’t have appropriate filters. Bullshit I’m not bad. I’m punished for being bad often enough that it seems imprudent for me to stop trying to filter.

I want to be a nice person. I really fucking do. I am tired of being told I am not wanted and being abandoned. I am tired of people kicking me really hard and feeling free to tell me that I am a disgusting piece of shit but they still love me and if I start jumping through x, y, and z hoops then they might be able to have a relationship with me or help me. But not until I jump through all those hoops without support. If I don’t do that first I won’t be able to prove that I deserve them bothering to waste time and energy on me.

I uhm can’t bend to whims like that. I have to live in my body 24/7 and deal with the consequences. I have a very tightly controlled life that I can manage because I limit it so severely.

But when I say, “I stay home” I don’t mean that I hide in bed crying all day. I mean that my kids and I play in the yards and garden and walk for miles around our neighborhood when I stay regularly medicated thus I can sleep and eat in a way that allows me to be physically able to.

Since the marathon I have been fucking around with almost not using pot to see how this works for me. It’s going really badly. I need to see a doctor.

The reason I don’t just “get a vaporizer” to try it is because when I spend money on something believing that it is unlikely to solve my problem and it is money I don’t want to spend… it’s kind of doomed before I start. I can’t be on marijuana forever. I do have to figure out how to live life without it in order to do the things I want to do.

But what does that even mean? Part of it is that my stomach god damn hurts and I have to heavily medicate in order to deal with the pain and nausea in order to eat and sleep like a “normal” person and have any appearance of functionality.

Being in pain actively triggers my PTSD symptoms and causes flashbacks because I have such a long history of being in pain and that being something I am not allowed to talk about or deal with because “You aren’t really in pain–you are just a whiny hypochondriac.”

My mother screamed at me and threatened me that “my arm had better fucking be broken or she would break it herself” because I asked her to leave work early and come home (I was 12 and alone all day every day because I was on year round school and had no friends or family) to take me to the hospital. It was broken.

Something is wrong in my body. Something that I can’t fix. Something that I am self medicating (said with substantial scorn and derision) to deal with because doctors have actively told me they will not provide service until I jump through hoops I can’t jump through.

I can’t abruptly switch psych meds right now because I have no reliable help with my children. When I go through med rounds the side effects make me extremely unpredictable and historically very violent and my self-harming goes through the roof and my ability to function completely disintegrates and I spend hours every day literally hiding either in closets or under beds because I want to kill myself so much.

I literally cannot do that to my kids. There are reasons I’m not on psych meds. If someone bothered to ask me what those reasons were I would be happy to explain and I am willing to bet a compassionate doctor would hear my history and agree that it probably isn’t the best idea to try to force me to take a psych med as step one of any and all physical care.

That is not a way to establish trust because my behavior will abruptly be destroyed and out of control and erratic and I will completely associate it with my relationship with that doctor and have to stop association because I can’t continue to listen to the advice of someone who is going to force me to go through that given that I don’t have the fucking resources to deal with dropping the ball on the ways I am currently functional.

It feels humiliating. But that is the reality of my life right now. I stay home so that I can always handle talking to my kids in the tone of voice I want them to talk to me. I have to keep my physical stress levels down enough to not freak out when we are in an environment where I have less control.

Watch me at parties. If I stay seated the whole time I have a much better chance of being able to have conversations because being there makes me physically weak because of the strain on my body of having to be hyperaware to such a level. If it is a stand-and-mingle sort of party I am going to spend a lot of time walking in and out of the room because I have to go find somewhere to sit down and sob hysterically because standing in that room and trying to talk to people hurts my body so much.

No, this isn’t something that is obvious to people around me. If I was visibly contorting with pain people wouldn’t talk to me. If I said anything other than “Oh I’m fine” “Great!” when people ask me “How are you?” then they won’t ask me any more. And they won’t talk to me about anything else either. They try to keep a wide distance between them and me because I have revealed that I have needs and they are very fucking sure that isn’t their problem and they don’t want to get involved. That’s a direct quote. I get told that a lot. “I’m sorry. You have a lot of needs and I don’t want to get involved.”

Uhm, I didn’t ask you to do anything. I don’t fucking ask people to meet my needs. I can ask for help with wants–I have to be very ok with hearing “no” or with the fact that there is a better than 50/50 chance that I will be stood up because that is just my historical percentage. Because if I ask someone for help with a need all hell breaks loose when they let me down. My relationships don’t last through me asking things of people other than the pleasure of their company on sporadic occasions. I am doing my very best to ensure that I understand my place and stop fucking up this boundary.

Having this sort of level of need as a background thead in my life why won’t anyone help me means that I don’t understand how hard it is for people to meet my needs. I am not good at understanding the limits of how I should ask for things. When I ask for actual needs to be met I have to understand that the person may just not show up or may not feel like it any more once the time comes or have some emergency in their life that is more important than me so I have to suddenly scramble for how to figure things out at the last second without the normal planning time I give myself. It feels very unfair at the time I’ll tell you.

I go through life knowing that I am “not rational” and I am “over-sensitive” thus pretty much no one needs to give a shit what I think or feel because I’m a piece of shit.

No, I do not act in public like I have the thoughts I have. It would be incredibly dangerous. It’s not hyperbole; it is simply true.

Can’t sleep. Captain Hook will get me.

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I can’t sleep. I should have brought sleeping pills. I read somewhere that if you take sleeping pills you are five times more likely to die. I’ve been trying to not take them. See, I didn’t even pack any. Obviously I don’t want to take them. But I fell asleep at nine and I woke up at midnight and I’ve been awake for an hour fretting and I don’t feel the least bit tired. I feel amped and anxious. I feel like my heart is about to jump out of my chest.

I’m thinking about self-mutilation. I think I am writing the intro for that chapter in my head right now instead of sleeping. (I honestly don’t want to really write it tonight–sleeeeeeeeeep.) Self-mutilation is a big topic. It’s cutting and burning and banging your head and all sorts of other fun ways to spend an afternoon. Everyone self-mutilates in slightly different ways for slightly different reasons.

Personally I like cutting the best because I like seeing blood. I think I don’t have scars from cutting because of my “personal style”. I like to do tiny cuts that are just barely deep enough to break blood vessels and then I will do dozens or hundreds of those until I have enough visual sensation of blood. Other people like going deeper because they like the pain of cutting muscle. That kind of pain doesn’t give me the focus or control I want. It makes me feel triggered and frantic. Everyone is different.

Bad coping methods. They truly are better than nothing. If nothing will get you dead do something bad instead.

I don’t carry sleeping pills with me because I am always afraid I will have a bad day and be done. It feels like having them with me is too big of a risk. In my house I can handle having A Dose but I don’t trust myself outside of my house. I have worked up a ritual and an approach and a way of managing myself at home. It’s different everywhere else. My resources are spread differently. It’s harder to have the self control to take a dose. I’m just so freaked out that I want to sleep and I’ll do anything. Including taking way too many pills. Because today it feels like nothing could possibly be strong enough to make me sleep. My brain is cycling around too fast and all I want to do is sleep. I don’t think I would be able to take one dose. I would take one and five minutes later another and five minutes later another until I fell asleep.

That’s kind of bad. So I don’t do that.

Instead I write an email to an old friend telling him that even though I am generally speaking a judgmental asshole and I’m really mean I don’t think I clearly told him that I think he could be a good parent. I need to say that. I need to say it without other things right next to it so the message isn’t lost.

I think about Jimmy. I think about Tommy. I think about that little fucker at Lakeside who broke my arm because Tommy wanted him to.

I may end up finding a dispensary down here. If I am going to go buy drugs to help me calm down it is probably a better idea to prioritize being more stoned over taking more sleeping pills. I don’t want to smoke at Disneyland so I’m limited to the other methods I had on hand. It’s a very scant week’s supply. I certainly don’t have enough to also take it to help me sleep. That’s probably a bad choice right this minute. In fact as I am sitting here typing it occurs to me: I do have medication that will make me sleep tonight. I’m not taking it because I’m trying to ration it. But I can buy more. I’m one of those asshole privileged people. I don’t have to deal with this feeling all night long so that I am a nightmare tomorrow.

Thinking! I can do it! The awesome part is how fast that is to implement. Done.

The funny part is I won’t feel it for a really long time. So I’m still going to be up for a while. Just knowing that I’ve already started solving the problem is relaxing. I won’t be awake all night. Ok, so I’ll probably be awake for 2-3 hours in the middle of the night. I hear that it is fairly normal for my species. It’s only going to be 2-3 hours because I medicated. Otherwise I would watch the sun come up.

I can’t do everything. Sometimes it feels like I can do very little. I can not-die today. I will touch people who love me and let them touch me–even when it is hard. When I read about attachment theory it makes me very sad. I can’t let people touch me very often. I don’t feel very “attached”. I feel like I am free floating. Only G-d knows where I will land.

I don’t think that getting over my anger is the point.

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“Get busy living or get busy dying.”- Shawshank Redemption.

Sometimes it feels like life is about learning how to come to grips with your wasted potential. I could do _______ if only ___________. It’s a long series of conversations with yourself as you narrow down possibilities in life until the only path you could possibly take is completely obvious. Look, you’ve been working towards this all along. You did ______ and then you did _____ so obviously ______.

But believing that requires some underlying belief in a greater plan. Things are not inevitable. Things are changeable right up until the second they happen. It’s random. It has to be.

It has to be for me because otherwise there would have to be some specific reason I was picked out of a hat to suffer far more than other people. I’m sorry, there is no Kushiel looking out for my well being. I’ve read the Bible. I’ve read big parts of the Book of Mormon. I’ve read books by Martin Buber and St. Thomas (Aquinas, of course) and Sr. Thomas More and and. I did all the classes required for a masters degree in English. I got good grades. I read. I studied. I didn’t know I was supposed to be practicing handwriting. Whoops. Anyway.

I am educated. I have read what the masters think of the world. Sometimes I agree with them but often I don’t. I have had significant personal experience that disagrees with their beliefs.

I have two ways I can handle that. I can decide that they are right or I can decide that I am right.

Now, I like to hedge my bets. I have strong opinions but I’m willing to reconsider them given reason. It’s very rare that I bother to try, I am human after all. But when something challenges my belief structure I have to think about it very hard. I know I am not always right (really, D).

I kind of feel like I should stay off social networking sites for a while. I am feeling too many “shoulds”. I need to do what I am going to do and not worry about whether other people approve or not. Of course there are lots of people who don’t. Will I let that stop me? No. Then why let it bother me?

Because when people I love reject me in harsh ways it bothers me. When people I love tell people they think I am dangerous it bothers me.

Are they right?

I’m told I need to get over my anger. I’m not sure that it is anger I need to get over. I need to get over wanting things from other people. I need to really and truly not give a shit if a given person likes me or not. I know who my friends are.

As the legal next-of-kin I think I feel very reasonable about treating the God-Mamas as family. They take the kids every month. They have a very serious on-going relationship. They are invested and serious about it. That’s the last time I am going to do that to my kids. My family unit is closed. I can care about me. I can care about Noah. I can care about Shanna. I can care about Calli. I should not try to make sure there is stuff left for other people. Maybe there will be and maybe there won’t. My friends understand. They really don’t have high expectations of me–which should be depressing only it isn’t. They like me anyway.

Anger and anxiety are both emotions that are about energy flow. (In my opinion. I’m going to babble even more whacko than usual tonight. Sorry. It’s been a very long and very sober day and I’ve had time to sit with my anger more than I usually do.) I have a lot of energy. I have spent my entire life feeling like I am sitting with a burning wire of energy in the middle of my body. It churns my stomach. It constricts my throat and my lungs.

People are monolithic for me in a way that I don’t think most people understand. My life has always changed a lot. Every so often I up and move either geographically or in social sphere. As I age there is more and more overlap in communities. I’m having a harder and harder time going out. It’s scarier than I like admitting.

If I had been funneling my whole life towards what I am doing now the path would have looked different, don’t you think? It all depends on how you frame it. I’m a stay at home mom. I used to be a high school teacher. I’ve been married for nearly six years (anniversary is in a couple of weeks). I live less than twenty-eight miles away from my elementary school (well, one of them).  My middle and high schools (at least five of them) are slightly closer to me than that. I’m a hippie. I dress very conservatively most of the time. I don’t have a television or watch anything approximating television programming on a computer. I garden a lot. I homeschool. I do building projects.

I am angry. I stay home a lot because I am afraid and I am fucking angry that I am afraid. Today we went to the post office. It went fine. The kids started to get into things but were easily distracted. Nevertheless I spent the whole time feeling very anxious. I was afraid my kids would get yelled at. I was afraid I would get yelled at. I was afraid the woman helping me would be mean. Good freakin grief. It’s ridiculous. I started crying and hyperventilating and the woman helping me told me it would be ok. That’s god damn embarrassing. I’m a fucking adult.

You want to tell me I should just get over it again? Oh fuck off. But the whole episode was under a minute. It’s not like it is a big deal. Only it hurts. It hurts my stomach. It hurts my heart. It hurts my throat. It hurts my head. It hurts my lungs. I feel like I am dying. If I could just stop it I would. There is no magic drug for me. The only thing I can do is dope myself to get the panic to stop. Look at any psych drug on the market. That’s what they do. They do it in different ways, but whatever.

I don’t really see a point in trying to live a long life if I am going to spend a lot of time every day in pain because my brain doesn’t understand that I am not in danger. It’s not like she had the power to prevent me from sending my packages. If she was really bitchy I could have gone to UPS. (But I’ll say: the gruffness from the ladies in the Mountain View USPS is just a front. They are softies.) She had no power to hurt me. Someone feeling irritated by my kids in the fifteen minutes we are in the post office is really not my problem. Why do I care?

Oh wait. That’s called trauma. Sort of. Kind of. I’m not sure. At some point I have to get it through my fool head that there are assholes in the world who are going to be rude to me and mine. It’s not about anything I’ve done. Well, not necessarily. For an awful lot of people I just have to exist. I have to have the god damn audacity to open my white trash mouth. I am offensive.

People like it when you are afraid of them. It makes them feel protective. It makes them feel big. It makes them feel powerful. People like it. I have spent a lot of time afraid and I can see how people react.

I feel like I am searching, always searching, for what I supposed to be doing. How am I wasting my potential? I don’t know. I look for seeds in my life to help me tell the future but unfortunately the future hasn’t been written yet. I have to write it.

It means I’m not looking at right now. It means I’m scared. I’m angry because a lot of people want to tell me things that all boil down to being raped is a womans own fault because the only logical conclusion I can come to is those people believe I deserve to be raped. I cannot put my mind around that. No. I can’t. It’s not possible. No one is born to be raped. Just because I have a cunt that does not decide my destiny.

I am a stay at home mom. I am a stay-at-home-a-lot mom. Well, I like taking BART on outings. Then we can take the bus and I can be stoned all day. I can be calm. I can let the children go at their pace. I don’t feel anxious about being in other peoples way. I don’t feel guilty that I am sitting when obviously this more deserving person (like a guy in his 50’s) should be sitting. No. I have two squirming kids. I should be fucking sitting. Otherwise they will fall and hurt themselves. That’s just stupid.

But I worry. I worry about offending people. I worry about making other people feel annoyed by my physical presence. You’d never guess by how I write, would you? In the privacy of a room by myself I have the biggest cojones of them all. Please join me in a derisive snicker, right?

I have nothing to offer the world to justify the worth of my opinions. I am fairly unlikely to pursue further academic studies. At this moment in time that sounds like hell on earth. Which unfortunately may mean I do it some day. I’m stupid like that. Next time I will practice my handwriting. And it won’t be English. Fuck English.

I don’t think that I need to get over my anger. I need to find a way to use it. I have a lot of energy. When I decide to get going on a project I work like a demon. I get a very large amount done in a short period of time. But I’m a woman. It’s fairly unlikely to ever be noticed. It helps that I pick lame menial jobs because I think that is what someone like me should be doing. I think I never noticed that I stopped working at Boston Market. I still think I am an ignorant fool who cannot be right. Look, all these people tell me I am wrong.

Well, fuck them. I don’t like their system. There is no way for me to win in their system; I was born damned.

Before you tell me to stop being angry let me hit you as many times as I have been hit. Let me rape you as many times as I have been raped. Then I will put you into a culture that tells you it is all your fucking fault that it happened. Then we can talk about anger.

What else did you expect to have happen? Do you know how many people in uniform I’ve had sneer that at me when something inappropriate and illegal happens to me? I can’t really remember. For a while there I was put on drugs against my will when I was a teenager and I can’t remember that period so an exact number is truly beyond me.

I have been told to sit down and shut up and don’t get angry all my life. I don’t think that is a message I should listen to. I think that is a message that seals my doom. I’m not saying that everyone has to be angry with me. I’m saying that once you are marked as prey–once you are truly afraid they smell you. If I am angry enough I can drive them away. I no longer look like easy prey even though they know what I am. I finally got close enough to the herd to not be the weakest link.

And now that I am closer to the herd the mother fuckers around me are going, “Oh shit, who let her show up?” It’s interesting to watch. I just piss people off. I don’t even have to try. I just have to say what I think. I make people angry. Even if I wasn’t angry to start with. It’s interesting.

I make people angry when I speak to them. Maybe I should just stop speaking to them. I don’t mean become selectively mute, that’s a bit extreme. I mean that maybe I should stop setting the bar so god damn low on who I try to become friends with. I should act like I’m worth jumping through some hoops. People do it. They really do. It’s kind of weird.

I think I should stay of social networking sites for a while. Outside of my house there is nothing but bad. Inside my house I live in Wonderland. It’s really nice here. We sing and play games. We dance and should and run around. We paint and cook and garden. We grow up together. We learn how to do things together. We learn how to gently coexist with another human being. When someone slaps you in the face while you are sleeping it is perfectly acceptable to yell, “What the hell are you doing?!” before you are actually awake. (I am very articulate while mostly asleep.) It’s not ok to yell such a thing while fully conscious. We have Rules. No name calling. No hitting. You can’t put anyone down. Everyone deserves to have space but we need to be careful how our space effects other people. Every day involves “I love you” and “I am really glad I know you” and hugs and kisses.

But I know with every day that marches forward that two of these relationships are going to change. They are going to go off into the world. They are not going to stay with me and meet my needs. I have to do that for myself.

Some people can wait until the kids are teenagers to worry about it. My kid is about to turn two. Oh shit. I only have sixteen years to plan. I’m not sure that is long enough. I’m not sure that is long enough for me to finish growing up. I feel guilty because Noah is my provider. Because we have decided that his salary is good for both of. We don’t want another thing pulling from the available energy in our lives–probably ever. I feel like I am wasting my potential. I feel like I am letting down my feminism. I feel like I am setting myself up for a fall. I feel like…

I feel like I am waiting for the inevitable conclusion of the life of a girl like me. What terrible thing will happen next? How will Noah turn on me? Will he wait until a year or two after the kids are gone and say, “I just stayed for the kids.” I don’t think so. I don’t think he could fake that facial expression. He’s a good liar, don’t get me wrong, but not that good. Not with me. I know when that face happens. It isn’t in company. I’ve been watching this man for a while now. I intend to keep watching him. My very survival depends on him.

That’s the bit that is weird and hard to swallow. Basically because it is a crock of shit. Whatever. I wouldn’t necessarily like everything I had to do, but if I had to do it I would.

It’s not that I need to stop being angry. Anger happens. It stops when it stops. But I do really need to stop looking for it. I investigate the candidates before every election and beyond that I need to just live in my little bubble. I feel like we exist outside the modern world with the glaring exception of the glowing box I am staring at. Ok, not really outside the modern world–give me a break. But we do live with a shocking lack of popular culture. Of any kind, really. I suppose we listen to some music but certainly not every day. I would say not every week. Ok, that’s not true for me right now. I listen to music while I run. That’s a new hobby this year. I’m not sure how that will go long term. And my phone battery can’t play music through a whole long run so my phone is now annoying useless on runs. Bummer.

People are going to think I’m a trainwreck. To that I cock my head to the side and say, “Have you ever seen a train wreck?” Things have settled down in my life remarkably over the last few years. Cutting off my family was hard and caused a big bump, yes. I was abused as a child, yes. I haven’t been raped in more than five years? Something like that. That’s the longest stretch of my life. I’m waiting for the next thing that will hurt me. It is very confusing to my brain that I have this nice man in the house.

I would have been fine today if I was able to cut before going to the post office. Because when I start to feel panic I press on the fresh wounds and that keeps me level. It’s more reliable than any drug I’ve ever tried. But people get quite upset with me, so I stopped. I think that really I just don’t want to teach my children to do it. I don’t want them to learn my panic and fear and need for pain.

It’s not that those monolithic “them” are actually all bad. But I have no reason to go fishing to find out. It’s kind of freeing, really. I don’t have to care if people will want to do me ill or not if I don’t give them an opportunity.

What does it feel like to have distant community? I only sort of know. I get it somewhat in the Leather community. I really need some place I can belong with my kids. I’m trying to build places. We are consistent (mostly, barring various events like a washing machine flooding my garage). We have patterns. We have friends. We have relationships.

What is it I am supposed to get over my anger for? What is it that I am supposed to do? Ahhh grasshopper–what I should do is not make people feel uncomfortable. Sorry mate, that ship sailed. I’m going to make you uncomfortable.

I make plans. And I make plans. And I make plans. When you call the suicide hotline one of the first thing they ask you is if you have “a plan”. I laugh. I have plans. I have worked out so many ways to die that I can’t casually list them all. First I do this and then I do that and then I have to look at this and then… I know the dozens of steps involved in any number of ways to die. How accidental can I make it look? Where should I leave the consolidated list of passwords so Noah isn’t screwed? Where… etc.

But the point isn’t to stop being angry. Or really even to stop being afraid. That can’t be the point. If that is the point I will always fail. You can’t decide to stop something. You have to decide to do something else instead. I decide every day over and over. It’s exhausting. It’s hard. I have to sit here all day every day thinking carefully about what I say and what I do. You have read this far in my blog. Surely you think I am a psycho about to fly off the handle any moment now. I’m truly not. I’m pretty quiet. Sometimes I speak unexpectedly sharply. Sometimes my tone of voice is more harsh than seems appropriate to the topic. If I am alone with my family I instantly say, “Oh I’m sorry that came out harsher than I meant it. I’ll try again.” I expect my kids to do the same thing. I say, “Try again.” Shanna says it to me now. It’s interesting to negotiate.

My children are not in charge of me. My children are not responsible for me and they never will be. But they get to have preferences to. How do I sit back and very slowly learn someone like this? I don’t know. I’ve never done very well at close intimate relationships. I just know how to spend a lot of time alone in a room. But I’m trying. I get a couple of hours of sitting alone in a room every day or I feel like I am going to lose my mind.

I didn’t used to be this way. It feels like the anger is the war between my need for people and my terror of them. I don’t want to have any of the feelings I have about people and I can’t make them go away just by wishing and I am fucking angry about it. I hate that I cry over stupid things. I couldn’t figure out a form. It wasn’t a big deal.

The last time it was truly a big deal was when Denise said, “Have you ever had anyone close to you die.” I didn’t let her set the terms of my reality then–she doesn’t get to tell my my father and brother were not close to me–and I don’t think I should let random assholes on the internet. That seems kind of stupid and weak minded, don’t you think?

There is a lot of “you” tonight. I don’t think I do that very often. I don’t even know who I am writing to. I periodically rotate through various people in my head and no one fits. I’m not ranting at anyone. I’m ranting at the unseen you. The one who hurts me. The one whose plan it is. The one I don’t believe in.

I’m very angry at God because I can’t be an atheist. I have known things. I have to believe in my own experiences or I’m fucked. But I don’t think there is a plan. I don’t think it’s the Christian God. I don’t know what it is. But something knows I am here. I’m not sure it cares much one way or another. But it knows something more than me. I don’t know how much more. And it’s probably fallible. Isn’t everything?

I feel like I have no culture to retreat to. I am not Christian. I am currently upper middle class according to my bank balance. In attitude and behavior I am white trash. I don’t know how else to be. I offend people. I have always offended people. I have the audacity to be raped and complain about it. Don’t I know I should shut up?

Get it out of your head.

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None of what I am thinking is all that serious or big. Why are my emotional reactions so out of proportion? I don’t even know. That’s the trouble with brain chemistry. It’s not always reacting to real things in front of you.

I can’t start running yet. It’s too early. Yesterday as I was running I thought a lot about how I should leave my house earlier and run to Lake Elizabeth and swim out to the middle then stop swimming while it is still dark and no one will see me. I can’t start running yet. I can’t go out until people will see me. I can’t go out until I would be traumatizing other people to try and die in front of them–that’s not nice. I’m not allowed to do that.

Why isn’t it more important that I would destroy my children? They would never get over losing me. I know that. They would spend their entire lives wondering why their mother didn’t love them enough. I can’t do that to them. I love them so much. But I hurt. I want to cut. I want to do something that causes me a lot of pain. I didn’t yesterday. I cried. I curled up in the fetal position and sobbed but I didn’t self-harm. I even ate properly at all the appropriate times.

It is very hard to believe that I am worth taking care of. How could I possibly be worth any effort? But every body takes effort. Living in a body is work. You have to feed it and let it rest and treat it at least a little gently. I see how much effort bodies take because I care for two small ones. It’s a lot of forking work. Doing the work for them makes me feel so bad. Why didn’t anyone want to care for me? Why didn’t anyone love me?

I feel taunted every day by the way I lived. I feel angry and jealous of my children. Why didn’t anyone love me? Being nice to my kids makes me feel really bitter. I hate that I have to stop and make up what a good person would do because I don’t know. I see my children do things and what I see in my head are these still-frame pictures of what happened to me when I did the same thing. I know what happened to me was wrong but I don’t know what to do.

I feel over and over all day how bad I must be to deserve how I was treated. I feel like I am choking and drowning in how bad bad bad I am. I deserve to suffer. I deserve to be in pain. I deserve to be told to shut my fucking mouth. I shouldn’t speak at all. I should be seen and not heard.

I don’t want my kids to feel this way.

As an adult I feel so much shame for the things I don’t know how to do well. All those things that other people spent long hours on during childhood. I hid. I didn’t learn things. If I couldn’t get it out of a book by myself it didn’t exist. I had no way of going and learning skills or behaviors or activities.

I feel overwhelmed by how badly living in poverty was. I feel like I’m not over it. I don’t know how to be someone who is safe. I only know what it means to be unsafe and in danger.

I miss my mom. I miss my mom so much that I would like to curl up and die to get away from missing her like this. I love my mommy. I want my mommy. I miss my mommy. But my mommy would hurt me. I think if I let my mommy hurt me again I wouldn’t live through it. That’s a lot of why I don’t have contact with her any more. I was absolutely not going to be able to live through more. I can’t be who she needs me to be.

I feel like I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what possible worth I might have. I don’t feel very useful. But people aren’t worthy or not based on work, are they? I don’t know. I work very hard. It always feels like my work is inadequate. I am inadequate.

I don’t intend to die today. I have stuff to do. I need to finish the box for Jenny. I need to send the care package off to the MDC woman who is leaving her abusive husband. I do things that make other people feel seen and important and loved. Why don’t I feel that way? What would it take?

I have a truly amazing husband. I don’t understand why he loves me so much. He’s so patient and kind. He doesn’t yell at me very often. I think he raises his voice a couple of times a year and it’s only to be heard over ambient noise. Noah is so very nice to me. I feel so undeserving. Every so often I ask him if he is storing up bitterness over the things I make him put up with. I ask him if he wants to get even with me. He gets the most baffled look. He can’t understand why I would think he feels that way. Experience.

I don’t feel like I hold up my end of the bargain. I don’t feel like I really make his life better. Certainly not enough better to justify putting up with me. I am so difficult. So unpleasant.

I wish I could get these voices out of my head. I would I could cut my mother’s voice out of my brain. “Why do you have to be so unpleasant? Why are you so difficult?” I don’t know, maybe because I was being raped and beaten and malnourished and neglected? Maybe that is why I was difficult? It really doesn’t matter why. I shouldn’t be inconveniencing anyone.

I want this panic and hate in my chest to leave. I want it gone. I want to not feel like my heart is racing and any minute terrible things will happen to me. Any minute Noah is going to turn on me and declare that he is well and truly sick of me–get out.

Instead, when I come back from the bathroom at 4:30 in the morning he talks to me for half an hour or so. When he hears me walk in the room he lifts his head from the pillow and smiles as he reaches for me. Having me near him makes him feel happier. I don’t understand. How can I make someone happy?

Mental illness is a liar. My mother is a liar. My sister is a liar. The voices in my head are liars. They tell me I am bad. That I hurt people by existing. Everyone would be better off if I was dead. My sister used to tell me that. Everyone would be better off if you weren’t here. I still believe it. And that’s part of why I walked away from my family. If you are better off without me, fine be without me. That doesn’t mean I have to die.

I’m feeling slightly weird about a few different interactions in my life. I can’t talk about them. Going forward I need to carefully weigh, “Is this person my friend or is this person a relationship with my children” and if someone is more on the kid end I simply can’t bring up issues. When I bring up issues I drive people away. I can’t do that to my kids forever. I have to stop listening and stop caring about people. I need to ignore their behavior and avoid them myself while facilitating Shanna having access. Her boundaries are different from mine.

I can’t keep pushing people away from my kids. The list of casualties in my life is long. And that woman who sent me the nasty Dear Jane letter just popped up again. She wants to reconcile because she misses me and she doesn’t want to have a panic attack for two days every time she runs into me. I’ll try real hard to care about your fucking panic attacks you stupid bitch.

I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have Noah. I would be a lot more sad. I know that part. I don’t feel like I deserve him. I know he is better than me. He tries to convince me that I am more educated but I’m having none of it. I don’t have a degree higher than his. And his degrees are from an actually difficult university. I went to a state school so pathetic it no longer even has pride of place-name. Awesome.

I’m really tired. This week the running is getting to me. I’m sleeping but waking up feeling really bad. Yay depression? It doesn’t matter if I’m depressed or if what I am doing is hard. It has to get done. Life moves on. We go to Disneyland in less than eight weeks. My marathon is in eight weeks and three days. Eep. That’s a lot of fun to talk to Shanna about.

I have a lot of good in my life. I am privileged. I am pampered and kept safe. Why do I feel like I am still in danger? Why doesn’t my brain believe my current circumstances? I don’t know. But it’s fucking annoying.

Irrational feelings.

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This is ridiculous. I am so angry with Tom I can barely see straight. I feel like I am getting angry with him for all the not-getting-angry I did during our four year relationship. He’s a fucking bully and I let him walk all over me for four years. I remember chanting in my head, “It’s not worth an argument.” That was how I got through most days.

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I love Saturdays. Saturdays are the best days. Today he is going to stay home. I miss him. I’ve missed him all week. This new company takes a lot out of him. Twelve hour workdays are short.

It’s only eight. He won’t be up for hours. I should probably go downstairs and find something to do to amuse myself until ten or eleven when he will start waking up. I’m kind of sick of doing homework, but what the hell. This week I’m working on Taming of the Shrew. It seems apropos. I’m working on a D/s interpretation of the story. How do I convince the teacher that Kate really likes being stomped on. It gives her structure and safety. I understand that. Tom gives me that. He tells me what the rules are. He gives me a frame so I can be safe and know what to do.

“Hey! You’re up! I’m working on an interesting paper right now, do you want to hear about it?”
“Not really. What am I having for breakfast?”
“Oh. Uhm, would you like eggs and toast?”
“Yeah. And a Coke.” He flipped the tv on. Oh look. Blazing Saddles. Again.

I walked into the kitchen and started cooking. He was laughing before the opening scene was finished.

“Man. These guys really know how to act!” He laughed uproariously, again.

“Here is your breakfast.”
“Thanks.”
“So I’m trying to figure out how to explain that Kate, from Taming of the Shrew, really likes the D/s in her relationship. I found a neat article in Skin 2–that latex fetishist magazine–that has a paper written by a professor from Oxford and ”
“Can’t you see I’m watching a movie?”

I lapse back into silence. I miss him so much and he is sitting right in front of me. All I want to do is share with him what I have been thinking about all week. I’m trying to find the words to talk to him about our relationship. I want to understand why I feel happier in this relationship than I felt with my family. But right now I just feel sad.

“I’m going to go upstairs.”
“That’s fine. I’m going to watch my movie.”

I go to our bedroom and open my upper drawer. The piece of cloth is shoved into the corner. Then I pick up the cloth and unroll it. I take a deep breath before grasping the scalpel firmly. I go in the bathroom and shut the door. I put the scalpel inside the bath tub.

It is so hard doing what he wants. I am a bad slave. I am impertinent and needy. I look in the mirror at myself. I stare as hard as I can.

“Shut up, Kristine. Shut up, Kristine. Shut up, Kristine. No one gives a shit what you fucking think. Shut up, Kristine.”

I turn around and climb into the bath tub. I shut the shower door completely. I run the bath water until the tub is completely full. I lean back against the wall and close my eyes. I can feel tears running down my face. It takes me a couple of moments to find the courage.

I make my cuts very carefully. From downstairs I hear the television say, “Mornin’, ma’am. And isn’t it a lovely mornin'” Tom drowned out the television as he roared, “Up yours, nigger!” and laughed. I fucking hate that movie. I’m allowing it to break my concentration so I shook my head quickly and started humming and then singing to myself so that I wouldn’t be distracted by the noise. I like a song I learned with the Seventh Day Adventist youth group.

“Father I adore you. Lay my life before you. How I love you.
Jesus I adore you. Lay my life before you. How I love you.
Spirit I adore you. Lay my life before you. How I love you.”

It is meant to be sung in rounds in a group. I use it to help me focus on the sensation of the cutting. My other senses don’t have to be as engaged. I want to be very careful. I can’t cut too deeply because that would scar and get attention. I need the wounds to heal quickly. I take my clothes off in front of other people at least once a month. I don’t want to draw attention to this so I am very cautious. I just barely break the skin. I cut barely until I get blood. Thin little cuts like these heal quickly and without a mark for me. I start on my upper right thigh. I like to start horizontally. I make cuts around three inches long. I make them slowly and carefully. I breathe deeply the whole time. I keep singing. In the background Tom is still laughing, or laughing again. I don’t know or care which.

When I am done there are usually three or four patches on my legs. They are usually three inches by five or seven inches depending on how hard the week was for me emotionally. I usually judge when to stop by how bloody the water is. I like to take breaks in the middle of cutting to play in the blood. I like the swirls in the water. The more blood I take out the less likely I am to do something stupid. What I mean by “something stupid” is try to flash my marks at someone. I know it is not ok to acknowledge I do this. I will get in trouble again. If I just have a couple of small marks high up on my thighs I might wear a short skirt or get out of the shower and walk around naked for a few minutes. When I make more and more marks I know how to adapt my behavior and I don’t take the risk of being caught. Tom doesn’t mind me wearing tights and long dresses all the time so it is easy to hide. We almost never have sex so it really doesn’t matter what happens to my body in between.

Eventually I stop cutting and lean back and cry. I don’t even know why I am crying. But I hurt so much. The cutting isn’t what hurts, but it gives me an excuse to cry. I’ll take it.

After even longer I stop crying and pull the drain plug. I watch my blood go down the drain. I get up and rinse off quickly. I dry off and get dressed in thick tights and an ankle length dress. I walk down stairs and sit down at the floor near Tom’s feet with my school books. Even though he doesn’t want to talk to me I miss him so much that I can’t bear to be away from him.

It’s not until he says, “Can’t you ever shut up?” that I realize that I’m still singing the song under my breath.

“Father I adore you. Lay my life before you. How I love you. Jesus I adore you. Lay my life before you. How I love you. Spirit I adore you. Lay my life before you. How I love you.”

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.

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.

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As life goes, something happened.  I don’t know how to talk about it.  I have never been shy with my overall discomfort with nonmonogamy.  I feel like I bring that up pretty often and pretty honestly.  Doing so apparently created a situation where Noah felt unable to tell me the truth.  So he was evasive.  He minimized.  He said he “didn’t think sex would happen” because it was “just a coffee date.”  When he later got the option for it to be more than a coffee date I got an sms… at the time he was supposed to be arriving home.

I want everyone in the audience to pause for 2.5 seconds and imagine how I would feel about Noah renegotiating sex at the last second by sms after telling me it wouldn’t happen…. everyone got that image in their head now?
What I did was respond with nastiness and passive aggression.  I didn’t even tell him no.  I told him I was angry that he was asking and fuck you and do what you want.  I certainly feel like I earned his behavior.  I feel like I deserve what he went and did because I am such a nasty bitch why would he want to come home to me any way.
He sent the sms at 10.  He came home at 1am.  I have done very little but cry since then.  What the hell am I going to do?  If I didn’t have children I think I would have driven to a bridge and jumped off.  Now that the last person I was going to really trust this life time did this to me… what do I have left?  What do I really get to hope for?  What kind of respect am I ever going to be given?  None?  Barely any?
I don’t know why I thought that someone like me deserved better.  I was lying to myself.  Of course this happened.  How could any thing other than this happen?  I wasn’t enthusiastic enough about Noah’s dates.  I didn’t pat him on the back with a big smile and tell him happy hunting.  I didn’t encourage him to push for the close.  I didn’t expect him to push for sex regardless of all other factors.  What the hell was I thinking?
My trust was shattered.  I had so little left to start with.  I don’t know what to do.  The women on MDC say I need to a) stop cutting and b) make a list of reasons to stay and reasons to go.  I think they may be asking for a bit much.  I don’t quite feel like it is fair and accurate to say I need to learn to feel a range of emotions.  I think I already do.  I feel rage and regret and sadness and depression (love that throat closing feeling); I feel betrayed and unloved and desecrated and violated.  This is horrible.  My best friend.  My lover did this to me.
I suppose I was a little too cocky that my husband would never cheat.  Hell, he would never need to!  All he has to do is tell me in advance.
Oh well.

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.

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.

Bad decisions

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In life there are trade offs.  You only have so many resources at any given point in time.  I feel like an awful lot of the problems in life are because of the fact that there are insufficient resources.  And I don’t mean oil–I’m talking about time and attention.  I’m talking about the fact that I don’t keep up with my friends as well as I wish I could because I cannot handle the fact that I am already touched and pawed at all day long.

A friend else-net got very drunk last night.  She’s at a hard spot in her life and she wanted to drink to forget.  Of course she now believes this has destroyed her value as a person.  On the kind of nights where you drink to forget you tend to believe your value was gone before you started.  I make bad decisions.  I don’t want to add an adverb describing when or how often. Because the reality is I probably make bad decisions about as often as average and maybe less.  Do you want to know why I say that?  Because something being a bad decision or not depends on your perspective.

Getting shit faced drunk and passing out seems like a bad decision.  Until you realize that the alternative may very well be ending your life.  When you realize that choosing to get shit faced drunk so that you can make it through the one bad night is actually a good choice.  At the crisis point, get drunk.  That’s ok.  Really.  It’s not a bad decision.  If that is how you are going to still be alive in the morning it is a good decision.  It’s a bad decision to do it every night.  It is a bad decision to make it a lifestyle.  Anesthetics have their place in life.  I believe it is ok to self-medicate.  But be very careful.

Does that mean it is the safest choice?  Of course not.  Drinking until you pass out is dangerous and I don’t really think people should be doing it.  Much like cutting.  It’s not a great thing to do.  I don’t recommend it as a coping strategy for people who are looking for new tools.  Sometimes people do make mistakes while cutting and accidentally die.  It is not beyond the realm of possibility.

A lot of my friends point out that their lives “weren’t that bad” so they shouldn’t be upset.  I honestly don’t know a lot of people who experienced more abuse than me… and I still don’t feel entitled to be upset.  Not really.  To me that means that it doesn’t matter whether I am entitled to the upset or not.  I am upset.  I need to not worry about whether or not I should be.  I need to not focus on how my being upset affects other people.  I need to look at how being upset affects me.  It’s hard because for all that I have been talking constantly about being narcissistic… I’m truly not.  I have a hard time paying adequate attention to myself.  I worry constantly about the happiness of those around me.  I work extensively to build up other people.  That’s just an insecurity.

It’s just as true for everyone else though.  Ok, there are people who are actually narcissistic.  Most people are just existing though.  You get upset.  It’s ok to deal with being upset.  If that upset goes on for weeks, months, years… you use up your resources.  When you are low on resources sometimes you hit the bottom of the barrel.  It’s ok.  That’s why it is there.  It is still a tool.  The bottom exists for a reason.

Why am I babbling about this.  Because I can say this emphatically when I am speaking with my friend in my head.  When I picture my beautiful, wonderful friend who is going through a very hard time and there is nothing I can do to help… that feels like I am failing in my life.  I don’t want my friends to suffer.  I want to take it away and make everything better.  I want to help build my friends up so big and so strong that they cannot be hurt any more.

I’ve been reading more in TCTH (The Courage to Heal–I’m sick of typing it out.)  I think it is funny that every time I read it I get to a few pages past where I feel emotionally that day.  When I come back and catch up I get to read on the page these testimonies from all these women describing their emotional processes and I could have written them.  It feels really hilarious and predictable.  This experience of going through this book is ensuring that I know I am not a special fucking snow flake.  Ha.  It’s nice though.  I now have this invisible group of women who know what I have been through. Healing from incest is a fairly predictable path.  I’m not lost and wandering and doing it wrong.  I am working the steps.  I really and truly am doing something that is worth doing.  As hard as this is sometimes, as bad as some of my mistakes are… I am improving.

My momentary bad decisions do not negate the fact that I am a good person.  That it is worth getting up every single day and continuing for as long as my body will let me because I add good to the world.  Far, far, far more good than bad.  I haven’t been sleeping enough and my emotions are very close to the surface.  I feel very upset when I see my friends self-flagellating in ways I also do.  It hits home for me what I need to start working on doing and that’s hard.  I kind of don’t need more pressure to work, you know?  I’m very tired.  I feel so flawed.  I feel like I will never be good enough.

And TCTH tells me that is part of the process.  It will pass.  This day will end.  Today I will get good and stoned and I will wander around the house puttering and singing and talking with my babies.  If I just putter around absent mindedly all the rest of the cleaning will magically happen.  But I have to be very stoned.  Or I will be a stress monkey and twitch and be unable to complete tasks and cry and probably scream at both kids.  I have a choice, right this minute.  I can continue to distract myself with the internet because I believe smoking marijuana is a bad choice and I am a bad person for doing it, or… I can shut up and do it.  And have a really nice day.  Bye y’all.

Crossed wires

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I have a thing for difficult people.  I am not an easy person to be friends with and I tend to like people who are also difficult to like.  Sharp people with a lot of edges and defenses.  I understand them.  Unfortunately there are some down sides to hanging out with folks like that.

Last night I invited a good friend over.  The support group I am in is going to involve me sitting down and trying to tell my ‘whole story’ some week soon.  I haven’t spoken these things out loud much.  The majority of my communication about these topics has been through writing.  I feel like I go mute when I want to speak of them.  It is very difficult to overcome a lifetime of taboo and speak the words.  I need practice doing it.  The thing is, I like difficult people.  People with sharp edges and defenses.  It didn’t go so hot.  Basically what happened is that this friend and Noah both have similar geek tendencies and in order to feel optimally comfortable they don’t step outside those patterns when they are in the same room.  But uhm, those geek tendencies make it so I am completely unable to speak about my stuff.

So when things weren’t going particularly well and they were not reacting in the ways I needed I got very frustrated.  And then Calli woke up and I had to go nurse.  We had been sitting in the hot tub.  I was hoping the dark would make it easier for me to talk.  When I got out of the hot tub I realized that I was pretty much done outside anyway.  I tried to communicate that I did not intend to come back and they should follow me in fairly quickly.  I didn’t mean for them to do so instantly because I needed to nurse the baby anyway.  But the wires got crossed.  They didn’t come in for about an hour.

So I sat on the couch and rocked and felt increasingly invalidated.  This isn’t exactly something I do much.  I don’t even say the details out loud to Noah much when we are doing our metaconversations.  No really, I am not able to physically speak about these things well.  As time passed I felt increasingly unsafe and like I had made a bad decision to try.  They came  in and acted like little kids who broke a window and are hoping no one noticed.  I flipped out.  I called them names and ran to the office and sobbed.  Then I got up and I went to the cupboard for a towel and I walked back into the office and I picked up the scalpel.

I don’t know what it is like for other cutters, but I love it.  I love the fact that for those seconds the only thing in the world is the hot, terrible burn on my leg.  I can’t think about anything else.  By the time I get to cutting I am no longer capable of finding the words to talk about the monsters.  I can’t.  I am too much absolutely in the present.  I cannot think about the past because I am unrelievedly in the present.  I feel like cutting is a gift.  Cutting allows me to walk away from any situation in my past and not think about it.  No matter how intense my feelings are, I can make them stop.  I can go completely and totally flat line.  It’s not disassociating.  It is forcing my body to have no space for anything other than the pain.  That may sound unpleasant, but I promise you that emotional pain is harder and hurts more.

I yelled at Noah that he said… something.  I don’t even remember what.  Something about them wanting to hurt me.  Noah’s response was, “No.  We didn’t say that.  And you will know it later.”  I thought that was wonderful.  It gave me space to think it then without trying to demand that his reality supplant mine right then.  My friend apologized profusely and genuinely was upset.  He is a wonderful person and he would move mountains for me.  He loves me a lot.  But you see, I like sharp, difficult people.  And they often have a lot of defenses.  He was trying to make himself feel comfortable because the things I was talking about upset him.  He wanted to comfort me, but he didn’t know how.

I spend a lot of time living at that juncture.  That is what living with an Aspie is like.  They can stand near you and really not understand at all that you are having a whole emotional experience in front of them.  I don’t know how to describe what that is like on a day to day basis.  To be fair, Noah has learned my “tells” for when I am having an emotional experience at this point.  Noah is quite good.  It took him years and we’ve had some awful arguments.  But he learned.  My friend hasn’t learned my tells.  And when Noah is distracted by other people he stops staring at me intently looking for tells.  So they both managed to miss almost all of the signals from start to finish.

They didn’t mean to, but they did actually create a space where it was unsafe for me to talk.  And they are big boys and get to put on their big boy panties and deal with feeling bad about that.  And I need to put on my big girl panties and accept the fact that I set them up to fail.  Talking about this stuff is hard for me.  I need very specific kinds of support to do it.  There is not a worse possible two person combination for creating that space amongst my entire network.  Both of my boys can be wonderfully supportive and safe to talk to… one on one.  When I get to dictate 100% of the terms of the conversation.  Heh.  But when they are standing next to one another (or sitting, whatever) they all of a sudden have to take one another into account and I feel like they are both pathologically unable to be safe for me around another alpha male geek.  I’m not sure why.  But they trigger the fuck out of one another.  (Ok, I have suspicions as to why, but that’s not part of this story.)

Thing is… this isn’t news.  At all.  And I invited these two men to be the ones I tried to practice telling my story to?  Awesome way to ensure that absolutely everyone is upset.  That was the wrong decision.  I could have invited just about anyone else.  I could have invited that friend and sat with him in a separate space from Noah.  I could have told them early on in the night that I need them both to take a vow of silence because if they talk over me I will be unable to speak–and they would have done it.  They love me.  They love me so much that they have both been through years of me being nasty and mean to them.  The friend in question?  Uhm, I cracked a few of his ribs years ago when I was overly rough with him.  He wasn’t thrilled, but he has never ever been nasty to me because of it.  (It was an accident.  Really.)  Naw, it is part of this story.  I think this friend would have walked away from whatever else he was doing and married me if I had asked him to.  He loves me.  A lot.  And Noah and he kind of have a low level dick contest when they are together.  And they are both socially clueless all the time anyway.  Yeah.  I really invited the wrong combination.

Why do I do that?  Why when I get to the point of wanting to spill my guts, do I need to talk about my sexual abuse in front of men who feel slightly competitive towards one another and are unwilling to be flexible when the other is present?  Maybe because I don’t want to tell the story and I want reason to be upset and angry instead so I can focus my energy there.  I want to be mad at my boys because they love me so much and I want to hurt them badly for committing the unforgivable sin of loving me.  I want to start getting hyperbolic now because that’s the headspace I am in.  I think that is the underlying reason.  I think I picked them because talking about these things is horribly painful and I would rather derail onto another strong emotion than look at them.  I would rather look for any reason in the world to turn around and start emotionally kicking the people who love me as hard as I can.  I am quite certain my friend didn’t sleep well and he probably feels very bad for hurting me.  At this point he probably is blaming himself for being a terrible friend.

Or not.  Or maybe that is my story and he went home and slept great and he thinks that I am in a place where I am hurting and he is sorry that I am hurting so much and it’s not about him.  I hope that is what happened.  I’m not sure he has boundaries that strong, but I’ll hope for him.

And that leaves me.  In the office.  With a leg I can’t let my kids see for a long time.  Right before our big European vacation.  Awesome.  It won’t blow up my life, but it is going to add a low level of stress for a long time.  I am going to be freaked out about the possibility of Shanna seeing it.  We are kind of a naked house.  I am more of a clothes person, but when it is hot I don’t have a problem with stripping.  I often work in the yard with no clothes on because I’m easier to wash off.  It just seems practical.  But that’s off the table for a while.

It’s really not big as far as patches go, at least not for me.  I was pretty tentative last night.  I haven’t used a scalpel in a long time and I was having trouble figuring out how I wanted to hold the blade.  You see, as much as I may be suicidal, I am a perfectionist.  I am not interested in going in deeper than I intend.  I want to be very particular about going through just one layer of skin at a time.  It makes it a much longer more burning process.  It also requires more self control to move very slowly.  That is what gives me the intense focus that severs my connection to the memories.  My old therapist, Traci, was a Harm Reduction person.  She didn’t think that addicts or cutters, or whatever other self destructive behavior pattern you have, necessarily needed to stop.  Obviously they were filling a need.  You just should be aware and careful of how you use it.  Obviously it is better to find other ways of coping.  But if this is what you got, you use it.

I haven’t needed to cut in a long time.  Last night it didn’t feel optional.  Last night I felt like I was completely unsafe and in danger of being actively hurt or reprimanded or something if I continued to feel those feelings.  It was not ok to be in that part of my brain.  I’m not even sure I understand entirely why.  Ok, yeah… their behavior was sucking.  But I know that about them.  My entire relationship with both of them is predicated around me bullying them into acting how I want them to act.  I’m probably not supposed to admit that out loud, but no… really.  The default expectation when we are together is I decide how they are allowed to behave.  I give them longer and shorter leashes depending on my mood. Really.  That is pretty much the only way I can stand being around them and oh man that sounds horrible.  I’m feeling terribly guilty right now.  But the thing is, I’m setting boundaries.  And it’s ok for me to set boundaries.  The boys don’t notice when I try to set my boundaries in subtle, nuanced ways because that is not part of their language.  They both really appreciate a 2×4 upside the head because otherwise they do not notice what is going on.  They cannot step outside their own stuff to listen to other people unless the other person bullies them into silence.

What an interesting symbiotic relationship.  To be fair, I am describing them while picturing them at the absolute worst of their combined behavior while together.  Both of them are much easier to communicate with one on one and I normally only need a flyswatter and not a 2×4.  Ahem.

Through the writing of this I have gone through feeling hurt, angry, sad, melancholy, amused, and at this point I’m shaking my head with resignation.  My boys were my boys.  The problem is, I wasn’t me.  The little girl who was badly sexually abused and who was badly emotionally abused at home isn’t part of who I am on a regular basis.  I am not a hesitant person.  I am not withdrawn.  I am engaged with the world.  I am strong and assertive.  I have opinions and by Gawd I’ll not hesitate to share them.  But I’m also nice.  I believe in justice and bullying is one of the fastest ways to make me stand up and shout someone down.  My boys are bullies.  Lovable bullies, but bullies.  Normally I am great with that dynamic.  I think it is fun and funny.  It is endearing.

But my little girl doesn’t need a bully.  I shouldn’t have invited that friend.  That was a very hurtful thing for me to do to both of us.  This is the kind of thing that is normally a stumbling block to forward progress.  I know that the friend in question doesn’t know this blog exists let alone read it.  So I could go forward feeling like I made my mea culpa to the world and “oh look how evolved I am for dissecting my feelings” and then I will stop trying for a while because I proved that talking about these things in person is unsafe.  But the thing is, I picked someone who doesn’t know how to talk to a little girl.  That’s not really his fault.  He doesn’t have that life experience and he doesn’t recognize whatsoever that I’m having a massive psychological experience in front of him.  He thinks I’m me.  And I’m just as much of a bully as him and I love him for it and he loves me for it.  We accept and like that part of one another.  In respectful ways.  Our dynamic has gotten much healthier over the years.  I still have to set the terms for our interactions.  And I didn’t last night.  I’m not sure I would have been able to keep it up even if I had tried because the space where I can talk prohibits that kind of strength.

I need to talk to someone else.  And that’s normally the stumbling block to progress.  I need to create space in my life to talk about this more.  It’s hard though.  Calli is uhm, resisting weaning efforts.  I think she is nursing twice as much as she was three weeks ago and I’m ready to put my head through a window.  She is, in fact, in the living room with Noah fussing loudly.  But I have 2 more minutes of personal time.  Damnit.