Category Archives: fighting demons

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inadequate to the task

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I feel like a failure.  I feel like I have harmed my best friend.  It’s true.  I have.  I told Sarah that I can’t continue to live with this level of unreliability.  I don’t think there is any chance that I can get my anger under control while I do.  I really and truly cannot handle having to ask another adult to do their chores. I can’t.  I know that is a failing on my part.  I know I should be able to learn to communicate better.  There are some battles to improve I can win and there are some I am going to lose.  I will never be able to handle micromanaging someone else in my house.  I’m trying to do less and less of it with the kids.  I’m sure I’m failing, but they are quite young.  I have time to figure out how to do that as it is necessary.

I cannot unlearn a lifetime of bad habits fast enough to be a civil person for Sarah to live with.  It’s not fair to her to put up with my temper tantrums and nastiness.  She is doing the best she can.  She really is.  I feel like this isn’t working because I don’t care enough.  Because I’m not trying hard enough.

The truth is, I’m out of support to give.  Sarah needs a lot of it.  And she needs to be able to drop in and get it how and where she wants while giving the support she can when she can.  I can’t do this.  I don’t have enough of me.

I think that more than the work I was depending on Sarah to be someone I could hand off being reliable on a schedule.  It’s not working because Sarah’s health is difficult to predict.  Sarah’s body is not mine.  When Sarah is sick she has to rest.  She really and truly does have to or she will pay for a long time.  When I am sick I have to keep going or I get so far behind that catching up is a problem and I’m even nastier and more bitter.  It’s very hard for me to give Sarah the space she needs.  I don’t get it.  I feel very bitter that I am supposed to be providing this privileged space to someone else and I don’t get it.  I am very petty and I’m sorry.

The thing is, I am this petty.  I do feel used.  I do feel like I am working as hard as I can with all of the hours of the day I am physically able to work.  I don’t work more because I haven’t gotten enough sleep in years and my body hurts and I’m exhausted most of the time.  I have nothing more to give.

When I have Sarah here I plan as if there is another adult to take the hand off.  This means I have too many days where I burn through all of my energy by 1pm and then I’m done.  I’m tired.  I hurt.  I’m impatient.  I’m exhausted and frustrated.  Then I have to deal with wondering if Sarah is going to do her “chores” on time or if I’m going to have to go ask her to do them.  No one woke up this morning and gave me a list of chores to do.  I know what they are and I have to just do them.  I can’t turn around and delegate.  I’m not the boss.

That was the problem with the domestic help, too.  I don’t really want to be the boss.  I want to one time sit down and negotiate with you what you want to be responsible for and have you just do it.  I can’t keep telling you.  You volunteered.  I asked for your input from the beginning and this is what you said you would do.  I can’t keep asking.  I can’t.  I don’t know why that is broken in me but it is.

Which is to say, Sarah is asking for reasonable prompting.  But I can’t give it.  That is a failure in me, not her.  This is an incompatibility, not a grave personal sin.  But it becomes harder and bigger while living together.

I don’t know if this will wreck our friendship.  I hope not.  I love Sarah so much.  I just can’t keep doing this much work.  I can’t keep depending on help that only mostly appears.  That’s not something I can live with any more.  It’s not her fault.  I don’t want to be angry with her all the time because she has health issues she can’t control.  It’s not her fault.  But I still have to do the work.  And that’s hard.

I feel like this is proof that I don’t deserve relationships.  They take work and I don’t have enough to give to do it.  So I don’t deserve relationships.  I can’t earn them.  I can’t do what they take.  I failed.  Again.  Because I am inadequate to meet the needs of my partner.  As usual.

I went to see my psychiatrist yesterday and she told me that I don’t need a pill I need a reduction in stress.  She told me that I need to ask my friend to leave and spend several months of staying home and actually getting my stress under control.  I’m trying too hard to do too many things.  I’m spread too thin.  That’s not what you expect from a psychiatrist, you know?  If anyone wants the recommendation for a psychiatrist in San Francisco I would recommend Ann Barnes.  Just sayin’.  It’s really nice when a pill-doctor says, “There is no pill that can fix this.  You need rest.”

I’m going to try.  I’m afraid of the loneliness.  I’m so afraid of having Sarah move out.  I don’t want her to go.  But I can’t keep doing what I’m doing.  I’m breaking.

The specific incident

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So that’s the problem.  That other post.  Then there is trying to figure out why I want Sarah here so much.  After she explained to me yesterday that she can’t live with my explosive anger because it is too much like her mother I went over to my friend Wikipedia.  Borderline personality disorder.  Oh that is so me.  Yeah.

Thing is, I have been absolutely over my stress point for a long time.  I don’t know how possible it is for me to get my anger issues under control without getting my stress levels under control.

So what happened is once we got home and I saw the kitchen in that state I walked into Sarah’s room and she was asleep.  I stomped into the kitchen and started cleaning.  I did so with a lot of banging and slamming.  I basically threw the asparagus pot into the cabinet and in the process I broke a glass pan.  Sarah says she cleaned that up for me.  I then slammed open the other cabinet door and clipped Calli’s fingers because she was closer than I thought.  It barely touched her, but it scared the crap out of her.

I honestly can’t remember the next sequence of events very well but I exchanged words with Sarah and she responded with hostility because she didn’t feel she deserved my anger and I kicked the cabinet doors off the wall.

Full stop that isn’t acceptable behavior.  I need to never do anything of the kind again or I should probably not be alone with my children.  I don’t believe in pie crust promises.  You don’t say you are going to do something and then just carry along with your life.

I have to lower the stress in my life.  One of the things that Sarah provides for me is that she has lived with an emotionally unstable mother and I feel very uncertain about the amount of time that Noah is gone.  I feel worried about how I will be later.  And yet having Sarah here makes everything harder and makes me feel constantly closer to the edge than I did before she got here.  There is so much more volatility with her here.  Because either I have to nitpick and remind her of everything or I have to do it or it doesn’t get done.

Is it getting better?  Is she noticing more and doing more?  Well… yes… but she is about to go from being home pretty much all the time to having two days a week where she is voluntarily on campus for 12 hours.  And she’ll still have a meds day.  I anticipate a sudden and dramatic drop in what she does around the house.  And I’m going to either have to nitpick her or roll with it.  I’m feeling very trapped.

It doesn’t help that part of the reason I feel ok doing Noah’s share of the work is because we have specifically negotiated things around the fact that he bloody well supports me in a life of lavish luxury by my standards.  I feel a lot of gratitude for that.  I’m fairly happy to do extra work for someone who provides me with a life this good.  I don’t have such an attitude towards Sarah.  I feel like I am working myself this hard for nothing.  So that she doesn’t even have to send me a text message saying that she isn’t feeling well or ask when should dinner be ready.

And yet, I kicked the cabinet door off.  No one should live with that.  My children should not be exposed to that.  I’m going to buy a punching bag.  I have a powerful need to hit and there are appropriate ways to deal with it.  I need to just do it.

It was interesting reading the BPD article.  This part near the end was interesting to me:

The features of BPD include emotional instability, intense unstable interpersonal relationships, a need for relatedness and a fear of rejection. As a result, people with BPD often evoke intense emotions in those around them. Pejorative terms to describe persons with BPD such as “difficult,” “treatment resistant,” “manipulative,” “demanding” and “attention seeking” are often used, and may become a self-fulfilling prophecy as the clinician’s negative response triggers further self-destructive behaviour.[102] In psychoanalytic theory, this stigmatization may be thought to reflect countertransference (when a therapist projects their own feelings on to a client), as people with BPD are prone to use defense mechanisms such as splitting and projective identification. Thus the diagnosis “often says more about the clinician’s negative reaction to the patient than it does about the patient … as an expression of counter transference hate, borderline explains away the breakdown in empathy between the therapist and the patient and becomes an institutional epithet in the guise of pseudoscientific jargon” (Aronson, p 217).[84]
This inadvertent counter transference can give rise to inappropriate clinical responses including excessive use of medication, inappropriate mothering and punitive use of limit setting and interpretation.[103] People with BPD are seen as among the most challenging groups of patients, requiring a high degree of skill and training in the psychiatrists, therapists and nurses involved in their treatment.[104] While some clinicians agree with the diagnosis under the name “borderline personality disorder”, some would like the name to be changed.[105] One critique says that some who are labeled “Borderline Personality Disorder” feel this name is unhelpful, stigmatizing, and/or inaccurate.[105]

Sarah and I are each working through our mother-issues.  I don’t know how to work through mine without writing.  And that’s not always a fun experience for people standing near me.  My mother denies all blame or responsibility for everything that happened during my childhood.  She was always quick to blame other people for what happened.  I have inappropriate coping mechanisms around that. Because if I got angry as a child I could get people to do what I needed them to do for a while.  Yeah, it was the whole walking on egg shells thing.

That’s not very useful as an adult and it isn’t what I want to teach my kids.  What do I want to teach my kids?

I don’t know.  But not what I am doing.  And before people provide me with a list of “stop ____” admonishments… the problem is you have these coping methods for a reason.  You need to find a different way of coping, not just stop what you are doing.  My methods have been steadily increasing in intensity for a while here.  I need to express a whole lot of limits and see how that lands.  I have to stop hurting myself so that I can let people encroach on me in ways they don’t even know they are doing.

It’s really easy to feel like the whole problem is my fault.  If I only did _____ everything would be fine.  But that’s not true either.  I really can’t fix everything.

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.

"Go see a therapist"

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You go see a therapist when you are stuck in some way and you can’t change by yourself.  Otherwise you just change by yourself and save the money.  Therapy is expensive, yo.

Who do I want to be when I grow up?  What patterns am I actually stuck in and which patterns can I change if I think about them?  What is a happy life?  What do I want to do with my time and my life?  That really is the crux of it, isn’t it?  The way you spend your hours is the way you spend your years.  I think I am saying it wrong but someone had something like that as a sig line on MDC.  Where is my Zen place?  What is it that I should be doing for my spirit to be in alignment with my body?  (By the way I don’t use the word Zen in a way that is associated with any actual definition or official usage.  I am a co-opting piece of shit.)

I told Noah this morning that I don’t feel like I am having sex for me and I don’t like that feeling any more.  I am having sex so that I can continue to be this construct in my head.  I am not really getting off much these days.  That’s a big change.  Sorta?  It started with pregnancy.  It kind of came back and then it seems to be gone again.  I can get close and I have all these nifty hypnosis tricks in place so I can trigger muscle spasms in the appropriate way such that I suppose it feels like an orgasm, kinda.  It’s like eating soft serve.  It’s just not ice cream even if it looks like and is presented as the same thing.  Even with sprinkles.  It’s not ice cream.

You aren’t supposed to say that on the internet, right?  The way we are having sex isn’t working for me.  I don’t want to be this right now.  I’m not saying never again.  I am saying I need something other than what I have right now.  This is hard to write about because I am trying very hard to not represent what Noah wants.  I don’t think I really know or understand what Noah wants.  It’s not his fault, but I think we are operating with a lot of unspoken assumptions and I should only speak for me.

I’m sitting here thinking and thinking and thinking.  In these arguments I always get stuck with this huge load of rage and I scream that I don’t want to spend the rest of my life doing laundry.  Dude.  The rest of my life will involve laundry.  Shut the fuck up already.  Why does this become such a sticking point?  I could dissect it.  I could start having the other adults in the house do the laundry; they would if I required it.  Really and truly, they would.  But it would require reminding and fussing and then I would never be satisfied with the results.  They would fold the damn shirts wrong.

This isn’t about laundry.

I don’t have very many pictures of my mother.  But in several she’s doing laundry.  I remember the sighs.  The long tirades about how much she hated having to clean up after me.  I remember her bitterness at having to go out and earn money and come home to the messes I made  It’s honestly one reason I don’t want to have a job.  If I had a job I would resent the ever loving shit out of my children for having the audacity to live in the house and make a mess when I wasn’t there.  It offends my dignity.  Oh God help someone who breaks a dish when I’m not home.  I’m completely unreasonable.  But if I’m standing in the room and not the one who does it?  My reaction is, “Thank God it wasn’t me!”  And I’m not mad.  Mistakes happen.

I don’t forgive slights that are done when I’m out of sight.  I’m not sure what is up with that.  Hunh.  Ok, that’s actually a big one.  I’m going to have to think about that one for a long time.  I resent having to be a support network for a life and for happiness I won’t get to share.  It really bothers me.  It makes me feel angry that I spend ‘x’ hours of week doing extra work so that Noah gets to have ‘y’ hours of time completely alone.  Because the hours aren’t equal.  Not in my head.

There is a tally.  He doesn’t understand it or track it.  It is totally invisible to him if I do it right.  Sex is part of the tally.  Part of the things I “have to do”.  The tally that “should be” invisible to him.  Which means the cost should be invisible as well.  I’m having trouble writing a coherent sentence about this.  If I don’t explain the tally system he can’t change his behavior based on the different costs.

For the whole rest of my life Noah will have more effect on me than anyone.  Dealing with him is effort because he is a human being and that’s just life.  That’s ok.  That’s more than ok.  I want to put a lot of effort into him because I like him sooooooooooo much.  If he doesn’t understand where I am putting effort and why… it’s kind of silly, you know?  I don’t know that I am using my effort to good effect.  I don’t know where I am spinning my wheels and trying to do things to please dead people.

Who do I want to be when I grow up?  What would I be like if I had grown up believing that my body is mine and people should only do things to me that I want them to do?  I wonder if she is more or less fierce than I am?

Obedience.  What is it?  Obedience to what?  To blind ideals?  To stupid short-sighted goals?  To instant gratification with a high opportunity cost?  What cost can I bear?  Honestly–a high cost.  I really can.  But where should the cost be spent?  I don’t think that decision should be made in a vacuum.  Years ago Noah offered me an abusive relationship with off-switch.  What does it mean to be off?  What does it mean when it is turned on?  I’m not afraid of Noah, not really.  Noah told me flat out this morning that he doesn’t believe me when I say I won’t leave.  He’s a smartie, that one.  The part that I don’t think he understands is I wouldn’t be able to stay gone.  I can never actually walk away from him.  He is the father of my children.  Until his death he will be in my life.  That is complicated.  Noah doesn’t actually know what it means to talk about a broken home.  I do.  I want a home.

Even if it is soft serve, it’s home.  That sounds terrible.  Even if I am nothing exciting you will still stay.  Even if I am a poor imitation of what a wife should be.  Even if I am not anything like advertised.  I feel like I am ruining Noah’s life by being so conflicted about sex.  I don’t think Noah’s sexual performance has suddenly gone down hill.

Who do I want to be when I grow up?  I don’t think a therapist can just fix me.  I need to figure out who I want to be.  No one else can tell me that.  What would I be like if I could move through the world without the sure knowledge that if someone asked me for sex I am essentially required to say yes, or at least only say no to a very small number of people in specific categories.  Anyone in category A should be good enough.

People are not interchangeable.  They really aren’t.  And I don’t fucking owe anyone anything.  The Embargo is not my fault.  It really doesn’t matter what my father told me.  I don’t have a cunt so that I can get as many dicks as possible.

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.

training

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When I was 18 I started dating a man who was 11.5 years my senior.  His friends made a lot of jokes about how it was important to catch them young so you can train them right.  It’s far truer than I like admitting.  At 18 I started dating someone who has a fairly low appetite for intercourse and a very high appetite for watching women suffer.

That partner has a very hard time orgasming.  In my opinionated opinion there are several factors at play there.  The first and most important thing contributing to that is too many years of extremely rough masturbation.  Boys, please be gentle with your junk.  But nearly as important is the fact that he was kind of freakishly huge and I think his circumcision was made too tight.  Just my opinion.  He had issues and I think they were related.  All the pro-circ people in the world can tell me there is no relationship and I won’t believe them.  That’s fine.

But when I was 18 I hooked up with this guy who was freakishly endowed who was almost impossible to get off.  I made it my life’s mission to get him off.  It really didn’t matter what I had to do.  45 minutes of intensely elaborate oral sex, sure no problem.  Hours and hours of intercourse, sure no problem.  You want to tie me up, sure.  You want to hang me from my neck, sure.  You want to break my arm, sure (ok, that was an accident–but it happened in the first six weeks we were dating and it didn’t slow me down).  We egged each other on.  No matter what he could come up with that was embarrassing, humiliating, or painful… I could suggest worse and beg him to do it.

It’s fairly unusual for me to ask someone to stop what they are doing to me.  I whine and I complain and I give suggestions and I cry and I scream.  I don’t ask people to stop.  Ok, I did “safeword” when someone used a cattle prod on my genitals when I was 19.  I honestly can’t remember if I have tapped out any other time.  People tend to not push me hard.  I don’t have to ask people to stop, they stop because they are afraid of my crying.  They stop because they don’t feel comfortable ignoring my less-than-subtle suggestions.  Not very many people notice that I don’t ask people to stop.  Most people take it as written that suggestions mean stop.  But sometimes people notice.  Then I’m in trouble.

I didn’t take much responsibility for my needs in my relationship with my Owner.  Instead I elaborately wrote contracts with him and tried to get them met that way and it didn’t work.  I think that a fair bit of the problem was, I needed far more sex than him and being pestered for sex, especially sex where you have to put a lot of energy into hurting someone… that’s hard.  My Owner didn’t actually want to hurt me as much as I wanted to be hurt.  He wanted to do some of that, sometimes.  But not the way I wanted.  He couldn’t keep up the steady stream.

But I did learn how to make him orgasm.  I did gain enough trust to have that with him.  Not every time, of course.  But I learned how to go about putting in enough effort to get that result.  It took a long time.  In some ways he was kind of the ideal partner for me–he represented a real challenge that I had to work on my skills for; but in other ways he was rather a nightmare because he represented nearly-constant failure at the thing I work hardest at in life.  It’s kind of embarrassing to admit that I work harder on being good at sex than I do at being good at anything else.  I think about it harder.  I think about it more.

I think that is a lot of why I think I can not be a good person.  Good people aren’t this obsessed with sex. Good people don’t think this hard about being used and hurt.  Good people don’t orgasm on command after being called a whore.

I’m thinking really hard about the forward to the book.  This story requires one.  Why did I write it?  What tone do I want to set?  Needless to say I’m feeling kind of mixed on what I want to say.

Earlier this year I woke up and realized that if I got hit by a bus there is no one to tell my children about my life.  No one who knows the pieces.  No one they will know even can.  They don’t know the people who populated my childhood, and that’s something they will need to know some day.  Some day they will want to know why I have no family.  Why they have no family.  They will want to know why I am so harsh sometimes.  Why I cry sometimes.  They don’t need to know the specifics of my life when they are young.  It’s totally irrelevant to their life at this point.  But some day they deserve to know.  I will do things during their lives I will have to apologize for.  I hope that I always apologize immediately and in the ways that they need.

I have it in me to do irreparable damage.  Damage that can never be apologized for.  I know that edge.  I know why I could do such damage.  I know that I walk a tight line.  You wouldn’t know it if you met my children.

I surround myself carefully with people who were wounded by too-harsh mothers.  They give me feedback.  My children are joyous examples of the species.  They have not been hurt by my too-harshness.  I have successfully balanced giving them far more positives than I give negatives.  Even if I do feel too dirty to touch them.  Even if I do feel undeserving.  I know it isn’t about me or what I deserve.  I give to them all the love I wish I was given.  I tell them over and over that they are good.  They are wonderful.  They are sweet.  They are kind.  They are thoughtful.  They are strong.  They are brave.  They are allowed to ask for help.  They are children and not yet responsible for themselves, but some day they will be ready.  I hope in telling them all of these things I hear them about myself.

Sex is a good and wonderful thing between people who care about each other.  It is affirming.  It is bonding.  It is loving.  It is friendly.  It is compassionate.  But it can be twisted.  I was taught that my only value was in getting men off.  I was told I am responsible for getting anyone off who wants to get off, no matter how I feel about it.  I never really believed it.  I always knew there were limits.  I knew I wasn’t supposed to be getting my brothers off.  I knew I wasn’t supposed to be getting my father off.  But I sure listened and believed that it was true of any other man who was willing to agree that I should.

My daughters will not grow up believing that promiscuity is a required part of life.  They will not be taught how to get men off before they hit puberty.  They will not believe that it is their job to dress like whores.  I don’t care if we have to be weird creepy shut-ins who are not part of normal society.  I “slipped through the cracks” and got this message over and over in so many different places.  It won’t happen to my children.  I will god damn prevent it.  My children will not be brought up to be like me.  My children will be brought up to believe that their body is theirs and they can use it as they choose.  I hope that my children never feel like they owe sex to any one.  I want them to feel like they can say yes and I want them to feel like they can say no.

I don’t want my children to move through this world with the sure knowledge that any man at pretty much any time might rape them.  I do.  If I am going to be alone with a man I very carefully weigh how I will respond if/when they initiate sex.  Normally I simply avoid being alone with people if I don’t want to have sex.  I know that I am not really able to say no in the moment.

It’s hard admitting to my friends that if they pressed me for sex in person there is an extremely low chance I can say no.  Unless they approach me as a submissive man expecting me to do the work.  That I can say no to.  Laziness trumps everything.  If someone is willing to just show up and fuck me?  Yeah.  I don’t say no.

That’s a lot of why I think I should stop sleeping with people.  I do it compulsively.  I do it because I feel this really strong internal push to do it regardless of dithering or reasons I shouldn’t.  I feel compelled.  Not absolutely all the time, obviously I don’t go out fucking people constantly or the internet would hear more of it, but every few years I go through a phase.  And my sprees can be prodigious.  I think it is safer that I just try to wear out Noah.

It is dangerous liking rough, harsh, use-me-like-a-whore sex.  Not very many people can do that and still treat you like a perfectly nice individual later.  Things bleed.  It’s hard to have boundaries.  In order for people to think about you and treat you like that… they have to cross some line in themselves.  I like to do things that people are normally told not to do.  That makes it really hard to understand that there are still boundaries.  It’s even harder to guess where they are or what they might be around.  That’s a lot of why I tell people not to worry about my triggers.  They aren’t where you think they are any way.

What is a “healthy relationship” anyway?  My emotions in my day-to-day life are far more stable when I get the extremes out during sex.  Ridiculous amounts of sex.  Painful sex.  Degrading sex.  Noah is very polite to me outside of sex.  That sounds underwhelming.  Noah is a truly amazing husband.  And he does nasty terrible things to me so that I feel safe with him.  I have a lot of conflict around that.  I kind of wish that all of the healing-from-sexual-abuse books stopped telling me that as a compulsively sexual person I really should be celibate.  Maybe not forever, but at least for a while.  I am not going to do that for a wide variety of reasons.  Whether or not I should.

I’m just about out of pot.  I don’t think anyone would be able to live with me if I also stopped having sex.  I would not be a nice person to live with.  It’s time to make running just about daily.  It’s time to edit the book.  I’m scared.  I’m going to go through and do another pass to see if I’ve left out any glaring omissions.  Then I will send it off to my editor.  I can’t do the paring down.  I really can’t.  Oh gosh.  This is frightening.

Life just keeps happening.  Sometimes whether I like it or not.

aftermath

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I told Noah that I would be fairly ashamed to tell people how we are moving forward.  According to my personal religion that means I am committing a sin.  It’s mixed.  Mostly I would say we are getting along very well.  I’m not starting fights or insulting him or picking on him.  Noah is his usual polite and adoring self.  It’s like nothing happened except we have massively increased how much sex we are having and how degrading our sex is.

We have spent a lot of time talking about how compulsive I am about sex.  About how that works in my head.  We have spent a lot of time talking about how impulsive Noah is about sex.  So far we seem to be at the point where we are both acknowledging that we qualify as “sex addicts” by any reasonable definition but maybe if we stick with each other we won’t cause too big of problems?

Apparently the task of the week is to see how much sex we have to have before Noah can’t handle any more.  So far we have managed three times a day every day.  Then I fall asleep.  I feel mixed about this.  He knows I feel mixed about this.  Hell, I’m writing about feeling mixed about this–everyone will know.    It’s hard talking about the actual needs that casual sex meets for me.  I can meet some pretty fucked up needs without telling anyone what I am doing.  I never have to tell my partners what my internal dialogue is.  I don’t have a very high opinion of myself and my voracious need for sex.

I don’t have a very high opinion of the fact that my preference is for most of the sex I have to be quasi-consensual.  Noah is well aware that a large percentage, possibly “most”, of our sex involves me not being in the mood at all.  It doesn’t really matter if I am interested in sex.  I am interested in being a good whore.  That means I will do what I am supposed to do.  I feel manifestly uncomfortable admitting that.  A large percentage of the sex I have I only have because I feel like I am required to do so.  That is what someone like me is good for.  That is what I am supposed to do.  And I’m really good at it.  And I fucking live for the post-sex adulation.  People I fuck tend to be willing to tell me at great length how good I am at sex.  I try very hard to make sure I work far harder at sex than most women.  I really really want the approval I get after sex.

I feel like something is broken in me.  That I chase this so hard.  Noah and I have been talking a lot lately.  I don’t think I am going to sleep with other people any more.  Regardless of what Noah ends up doing for the rest of his life, I need to stop buying affection with sex.  I need to stop begging my friends to like me by proving that I am better at sex than anyone they’ve ever slept with.  It’s not really a strategy that is working for me.

I like to pick other sex addicts and go have multiple hours of sex with them.  Most of the time they are so shocked by finding a woman who is also as motivated by sex that they are willing to tell me pretty much anything I want.  It’s broken.  I have a partner at home who is willing to do the Jekyll/Hyde thing with me.  He will degrade me and talk about me being a whore during sex.  He will tell me that if I am so motivated by cock I am required to show up at 5am every day and wake him up with my mouth.  And he’s pretty nice to me the rest of the time.

I feel worried by the duality of our relationship.  Most of the time in most ways he really is an amazing partner.  He is a good, stable provider.  He is kind.  He is great with our children.  I have been able to push him towards mutually agreed upon improvements in behavior over the years.  He’s very willing to accommodate me in just about every part of life.  He bends over backwards for me in nearly every way.  He will even call me names and hurt me tremendously during sex if I tell him I want him to.

There is this mythos in my head that slaves and masochists should experience no internal conflict over what they do.  I have massive internal conflict.  I am still upset that Noah lied to me.  And my response is to tell him more and more complex stories that I am terribly ashamed of.  Things that hurt me very much.  And I ask him to use them against me.  I want him to agree that I am just a dirty whore.  There isn’t much else that someone like me is good for.  But I want him to gift wrap it in a package where I don’t have to be at risk going forward.

For me to keep having the kind of casual sex that I like is for me to risk my life.  It really won’t be much longer before I go back for hunting for rough, dangerous sex.  Sure I’m being all loud and snotty this round of hunting because I want vanilla sex right now.  That would fade.  I would go back to wanting people to do dangerous things to me.  I’ve already had a broken bone in the pursuit of good sex, what else will happen?

It is a lot safer to stick with Noah.  He will be able to hurt me as much or more than anyone else.  He doesn’t flinch from doing so.  Noah has not yet inflicted as much pain on me as a small handful of other people, but he has every intention of doing so.  I get the impression that some day he will be the one I have done my most intense play with.  That kind of terrifies me.  Because he has a high bar to reach.  I have already done things that were a really bad idea.  I’m sure I will do more.

If I do this instead of cutting or sleeping around or drugs or whatever other self-harming behavior I can dream up… is that better?  I don’t know.  I don’t know how this life thing is supposed to work.  I hear I am just supposed to magically decide that I shouldn’t be harmed any more, not by anyone.  Not by me, and not by random guys, and not by my husband.  But I need this.  I am so used to feeling shit on.  I require it so much.

Noah has been nice and patient for a long time.  We haven’t done intense or painful or degrading sex in a long time.  He’s been more respectful than that.  So I got bored and went out and slept with other people.  And the thing is, it’s not enough that he does these things to me.  I need people to know that these things are part of my life.  I need for people to know that I am this person.  I can’t have this done in secret.  I can’t keep secrets.

It would be a sin if I did these things and kept them private and secret.  I believe that.  That is something that I have to hold on to in life.  Something is only a sin if I am ashamed to talk about it.  If I am talking about this now, does that mean I am released from the power of it being a sin?  I don’t know.  I worry about needing what I need.  It’s mixed.

I can point in a straight line from events in my early childhood to what I do now.  Come March, other people will be able to do so as well.  Noah already can.  And he stomps all over me with that knowledge.  Only in ways I find hot, of course.  Is that the difference?  Is that the line between what we do and some amorphous “abuse”?  If I tell Noah to stop doing something on a given day he does.  Except by prior arrangement.  Except that I know that I just don’t bother to say no when I’m not in the mood.  I figure out how to let it happen.  I figure out how to permit him the access he wants whether I want it or not.  I don’t generally bother to communicate whether I am in the mood or not.  If he tells me to do something, I do it.

It’s interesting when people talk to me about how self-assured I am.  How self-possessed.  How willing to stand up for myself.  Ha.  Only sometimes.  Only in some ways.  If a sexual partner is telling me to do things I frankly don’t want to do I have limited ability to communicate my wants.  It depends on how I am doing emotionally and it depends on how much I am invested in the partner.  I have casual sex because I can have boundaries with strangers.  I have repeat sex with long-term friends because I have beaten them down in non-sexual settings and they don’t push real hard out of fear of a backlash that will never come.  I don’t have boundaries with my long-term partners.  I barely communicate anything about my limits beyond telling them what buttons will get them the biggest reaction today.  “Today is ____ anniversary so why don’t you hurt me by doing _________.”

It’s not a sin if I talk about it.  I don’t know what it is, but it’s not a sin.  I have decided this for my own personal pantheon of beliefs.

These needs all predate Noah.  They are not because of him.  Most of them are not really about him at all.  These are things that were broken in me as a child.  But he frankly enjoys many of the ways I am broken.  He feels no shame whatsoever in enjoying what I became as the direct result of years of sexual assault.  Well, maybe he feels a little shame.  But not much.  Not enough to prevent him from trying to behave in ways that will keep me from getting bored in the future.  Not enough to lessen his enjoyment of what this deep feeling of shame causes me to do during sex.  His favorite part lately seems to be that I’m really ok with him fucking my throat until he causes me to vomit.  I have a fairly reactive gag reflex.  I consider vomiting to be just part of serious blow jobs.  I don’t think that is normal.  It never feels like it is really a good time to say, “Could you back off on the deep throating?”  I don’t get to set terms like that.  I get to accept.

In about ten minutes I have to get up and close the computer.  I will walk across the house and I will do what I was told to do.  Do I want to?  Enh.  Not really.  My throat and cunt are sore.  I could use about a week off from sex to recover at this point.  But I draw comfort from the fact that I have confessed so I go forth without sin.  I will smile.  I will encourage him.  I will beg him for more, in fact.  It doesn’t really matter that I’m sore.  That’s beside the point.  I don’t think I should go have sex with other people any more.  I don’t think that is a good decision for me.  He says he is going to be monogamous as well.  No, let me be clear.  He will be as monogamous as I am.

I fell compelled by my shame.  I told him he would be allowed to sleep with whomever he wanted, forever.  I promised him that.  At no point did I tell him I would like it or feel happy about it.  I feel like I did a bait and switch.  I feel like I owe him for all the sex he will never get to have because he was stupid enough to marry someone as insecure and selfish and possessive as me.  I feel guilty that I seem to have tricked him into monogamy.  In turn I fell compelled to say, “Ok fine, I guess I can’t be monogamous either–go have fun.”

I sincerely believe I should stop having sex with other people.  I should not act on feeling compelled to earn love and affection with sex outside my marriage.  It’s bad enough that I do it with Noah.  I don’t actually think I should go out and find a harem of men who will cheerfully call me a whore during sex.  I don’t need that.  I do enough of that all by myself.

I feel so broken.  I seem to have absolutely internalized that anyone who fucks this many people is kind of disgusting.  And all I want to do is increase the number so I can increase just how many people will think I am disgusting.

But Noah doesn’t care.  He doesn’t care at all what I’ve done or what I might do in the future.  He wants me.  He takes great pride in me.  He loves me and adores me.  He bends over backwards from me in pretty much every part of life.  Except when he’s being impulsive.  Oops.  His friend told him, “The problem with your situation is it’s hard to know when you are cheating.”  Maybe if the rules are clearer then it will be easier to figure out what to do?

I feel like I have taken something away from him.  He was poly when I met him.  How dare I take that away.  I seem to be the epitome of what Dan Savage and Mistress Matisse warn about.  That evil double crosser who promises poly and can’t hack it.  I’m sorry I am so broken.  I really am.  I wish that I could encourage Noah to do anything he wants with anyone he wants.  Hell, I do encourage him.  But it hurts me when he does it.  I’m sorry that is true.  I really am.

Time to move on

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Saturday night we held a surprise dinner party for a friend’s birthday.  She seemed pretty excited about being the center of attention finally.  I think everyone should get the limelight on their birthday.  It was one of the best parties I’ve ever hosted.  I think it was a raging success.  An awful lot of the reason for that is I didn’t feel any pressure to be “on”.  People weren’t there to see me.  Maybe the secret is to invite other peoples’ friends over.
It was neat partially because this was a bdsm crowd of type I don’t hang out with much.  This was a Master/slave sort of gathering.  And Daddy energy.  Lots of Daddy energy.  I got to talk about my opinions about those sorts of relationships.  I got to talk about my experiences with people I have seen around in the scene for over a decade but never before have they noticed me.  It was a weird kind of arriving moment.  It was interesting.  
I really enjoyed getting to explain some of my opinions.  I don’t get asked about these topics much any more.  I have a lot of opinions.  The M/s portion of my relationship with Tom was the middle two years out of four.  So we had a year to ramp up and a year to ramp down.  I have a lot of perspective on that situation at this point. 
And after they left Noah and I had crazy hot sex where he explained what he would like from our relationship in the future.  I’m considering his words very carefully.  It’s a lot more complicated for me to change the nature of my relationships now that I have young children and a marriage and a mortgage to consider.  I’m not just thinking about what I want and what will feel good.  I have to seriously stop and think about whether or not any given set of choices is sustainable for me.  Without sustainability there is no future for any set of behaviors.
Last night in the middle of that crazy hot sex we had to stop for a while because I was crying too hard.  I was crying because it has cost me a lot to maintain training that Tom gave me.  It is humiliating to have to explain to random pick up partners that they have to give me permission to orgasm.  Not only do they have to give me permission they have to kind of do it in a certain way.  Most people guess close enough, but some people say things that make it so that I can’t.  Or they think it is funny to tell me no.  I feel like I don’t get the final say on what happens to my body and that really bothers me.  I am tired of having no choice but to submit this ownership of my body to anyone who touches me.  I’m tired of being unable to have a private sexual experience inside my brain.  I’m tired of constantly having to offer up my desire to someone else.  Someone who doesn’t even understand what this gift costs me.
I am a slave without an Owner.  I’m kind of tired of it.  It is starting to feel demeaning.  It is starting to make me feel like this enormous pearl is being cast before swine.  They do not understand or appreciate and I feel cheapened by the experience.  I want to figure out how to not need permission any more.
I’m 30 years old.  I have not had control of my right to orgasm since I was 19.  Maybe it’s time.  I had a brief period where I started to figure out how to turn this off.  It lasted a couple of months.  Then Noah came back.  It’s one of his favorite party tricks.  It’s hard to tell him I don’t want to give this to him any more.  I am tired of having to feel subjugated to new partners.  It makes the barrier of sex very different.  It’s a lot of why I sleep with assholes.
Assholes know how to use this.  They don’t need me to stop and give an explanation of how I became so broken.  They just want to play with it as a toy.  Let’s press the button and see what happens!  I’m tired of having my right to pleasure be out of my control.  It feels like part of the larger patterns of me doing sex constantly for some perceived exterior motivation. 
I want to have some idea of what sex is like for other women. 
I told Noah last night that I can’t tell if part of me is breaking or mending.  I don’t know what it means that I feel so strongly about getting rid of this now.  I want my freedom, damn it.  I’m tired of having to explain to every vanilla person about my former Owner training.  I can never tell the story right in the moment.  It always feels rushed and I’m trying to change gears and be a different person and it doesn’t feel like a good conversation to have. 
How many other people have to stop and tell the story of their sex life going back to when they were 19 forever?  I wonder how much this feeds my inability to get over Tom.  I’m reminded of him every single time I have sex.  I know this was done for him.  I could never forget it.  This is such a huge part of my body and my life.  He caused this change in me.  What am I like without Tom’s training?  I don’t know.  I’ve never been able to find out.  It’s time.

I love country music.

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I was feeling mopey thinking about my early childhood and I had the Dixie Chick’s song So Hard on in the background.  It’s nominally about fertility problems.  It’s not hard to ignore about three lines and generalize it to other topics.  I’m just saying.  I’m having a hard time with this whole parenting gig sometimes.  I know my reactions are wrong.  I know when I sound like my mother.  I don’t know who else to sound like.  I don’t have very many people I feel comfortable around.  People make me feel tense.  I get edgy.  And bitchy.  And shit still rolls down hill.  I’m minor compared to everything I knew.  I know that.  But this isn’t who I wanted to be when I grew up.

If I’m not satisfied with my behavior I need to change it.  It’s hard right now because Calli is in the last throes of babyhood before becoming a talking person.  I’m having a very hard time waiting for that jump.  It came so early with Shanna.  I’m not a fan of the pre-verbal phase.  I still think Arwyn said it best.  I feel triggered when I spend a lot of time with my kids if I have to do anything else at the same time.  As long as I can be idle and just focused on them I can handle them.  They are not too much stimulus under those circumstances.  The problem comes when I am trying to get something done (like making breakfast) and it isn’t happening fast enough for Calli.  She starts screeching and it hurts my ears.  I start feeling anger.  It’s hard to tamp it down.  I have so much anger rolling around in me right now.

Reading through the whole story yesterday made me see spots where I have new perspective on why my mom and sister acted the ways they did.  Being a parent changes my point of view.  Funny, that.  But writing my story down means I can’t retreat to the sanctity of the parents point of view, either.  I stand there feeling bad for Calli that life is so hard.  She really and truly can’t have what she wants very much of the time.  She wants to be able to touch me any time she wants any way she wants.  She feels like she needs that from me.  But I can’t take how rough she is.  Oh gosh she is rough with me.  I get really angry.  I’m tired of being hurt.  I’m so. fucking. tired. of. being. hurt.  It’s so hard.

But she’s in the last throes of babyhood.  Soon it will be gone forever.  I don’t want my kids to remember me being angry all the time.  That is not what I want them to have as their story.  I don’t want them to remember me retreating with dramatic explosions.  Even though I’m not insulting any one.  Even though I’m just stomping my feet and huffing.  I don’t want to be that person.  How do you just decide to be someone else?  I was someone else with Shanna.  I narrowed my world to just her.  I gave her every single scrap and ounce of patience I had for any and everything in the whole world.  It was a nice year.  I couldn’t do that with Calli.  It’s so hard being a younger child.  You never ever get your needs fully met. You are short changed from birth.  Says the self-pitying youngest of four.

But then the song changed.  Best Days of Your Life by Kellie Pickler.  And I got a very nice email.  Right that minute.  My chest exploded with this moment of Oh My Fucking God.  When I’m feeling upbeat and I think about my life once I became an adult… well.  I’m pretty fucking cool.  I’ve done a lot of really neat things.  And I’m going to do a lot more.  As much as I possibly can.  And part of that is going to involve me figuring out how to be the person I want to be.  I will make mistakes and I will have bitchy days.  But when I do I tell my kids, “God I know my tone of voice sucks.  I’m really sorry.  It’s not you honey, I’m fussy about other things.”  I don’t think I was ever once told that.  Every bad mood that happened within a three block radius was my.fucking.fault.

Maybe I have already changed.  It’s hard on days when the kids want to test to see if I love them.  I do.  But I also have limited patience these days.  It’s time for the pendulum to swing back to them.  I think we should go out and play today.  And I’ll play the upbeat country songs.  The ones that make me feel like hot shit.  Because I rock like that.

I finished

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I finished around 2pm.  58,048 words.  That means it’s not epic.  Good.  It’s too intense to be epic.  It’s too long as it is.  It’s hard to read.  I read through the whole thing yesterday and it is really brutal and nasty.  My life was shit.  It’s going to be interesting to hear peoples reactions.  I let Noah have it already because I couldn’t not let Noah have it.  I need him to know this story.  He got up to the beginning of 1988.  He has a long way to go yet.

I spent most of yesterday angry.  Reading the book through in a day reminds me that I have very good reasons to be angry.  So angry that flames come out the top of my head.  But I don’t want to be angry.  Being angry doesn’t feel good.  That book is closed now.  Those chapters are over.  Noah will finish reading the book by this weekend.  Probably Sarah, too.  They are quick like that.

Then I’m going to wait till next year to do anything else.  But I want them to know.  I’m not writing this book because I want to make money on the story.  I’m writing this because I cannot continue to live with people not knowing this story.  I can’t even handle waiting until I get a final draft before showing it to the people who claim they want to build a life with me.  They claim they want to know me.  Well here the fuck I am.  It hurts my soul that this is my story.  This should be fiction.  No one should have a life like that.  But I did.

And I’m pretty awesome.  No, I’m not always tactful.  That’s a small sin in the scheme of things.  Really. It is.

I have this weird feeling in my chest.  I feel empty and hollow.  I did my very best to bring up all the major threads that wove through my childhood.  I didn’t give any of them a lot of individual face time.  There were too many.  I don’t think people could handle a book that explicated all of them intensely.  It’s too sad and painful.  Yes, yes, a few people could.  But I’m not trying to write a book that is only for the biggest bad asses.  I’m just trying to be seen.

I wrote this as simply and directly as I could.  I tried to do it without excessive anger.  I tried to present people in a balanced way.  I tried to just tell the truth.  As simply and plainly as I can.  I used simple words and simple sentences.  I used almost no dialogue.  This is something I had to just say and get off my chest.  And now it’s off my chest and on my hard drive.  I have emailed copies to two people.  I am saving it on Google Docs.  I might put it in Noah’s Drop Box just so that I don’t lose it.  I want back ups.  I’m half tempted to sit here and print it right now just so that I have it.  So that I can see what this looks like on a page.

I want to be seen.  And that means I have to deal with the fact that people are going to have very different reactions.  Be sure that you’re right, then go ahead.  I’m just telling the truth.  This is my story.  I didn’t embellish it.  I didn’t make it more melodramatic than it is.  It is a hard story to read.  I don’t think that certain people understand what they meant to me.  What their place was in my life.

In three months I am going to publish it as an e-book.  Noah is going to help me figure that out.  I’m not going to deal with shopping around for a publisher right now.  That’s not the point.  The point is to get it out.  I’m not doing this because I want to make money off this story.  I just want to be seen.

I don’t want anyone to try to edit it before Christmas because this is already an emotionally intense time of year.  Old trauma can sit on a shelf and wait for a bit.

It’s time to shift gears.  I have to get my house ready.  I’m doing something really fun this weekend.

I had a lovely meet-up-for-coffee yesterday.  I like being able to sit down and talk with an attractive man about statistical analysis.  It means he thinks I can understand it.  It means he thinks I’m smart.  Oh that’s hot.  That made me want to sit on his lap.  I didn’t.  But I thought about it and smiled.  I really like intelligent men.

Irrational feelings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These irrational feelings are hard.

One of the problems with polyamory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Different facets.

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Today is hard because I have already been a friend, a lover, and a therapy client.  Any second now I need to be a mother.  I need to be a partner.  I need to be a wife.  I need to be a boss.

It’s hard to be these different parts of me.  They feel like they don’t add up to a person.  I’m not sure if they are less or more than a person, but not really a person.  A host with many guests.  I hurt.  I hurt inside my heart.  I am all these things and more and it feels like a terrible thing I am doing.  I am supposed to pick.  Ok, probably not one.  But just two or three.  Fine, I can be a mother and a therapy client and a wife.  Those are supposed to be my priorities, right?

But I really enjoyed being a lover today.  Today I felt beautiful.  Noah tolerates a lot of my derogatory self-talk.  Well, he ignores me.  He tells me I’m beautiful.  He tells me he likes me.  Today my Daddy made me stand in front of a mirror and he touched me and made me look and told me that I am beautiful.  I feel like I can still barely lift my head.  I can’t look up at someone saying that about me.  I’m not.  I’m so ugly and mean and bad.  You don’t know how bad.

Maybe.  There are parts of me that are ugly and mean and bad.  I have done things I am ashamed of.  I have hurt people.  But maybe this isn’t an ‘or’ situation.  Maybe I’m ugly and I’m beautiful.  Maybe the most beautiful thing I have done in my whole life was standing up to my family and prosecuting my father and preventing him from ever victimizing another person.  I did that.  All by myself.  My father was a serial rapist.  He had molested many people from childhood to adulthood.  I. Got. Rid. Of. Him.  As sure as if I put a gun to his head.  I made sure he could never hurt anyone again.  Ok, so I didn’t expect him to kill himself, not really.  I was surprised.  I was devastated.  I knew it was a risk.  Everyone thought he would put a gun in his mouth.  But he didn’t.  He sat, like a chicken shit, in his garage and ran his truck.  While he sat there he wrote notes of hate to me and my mother.  I burned that note many years ago after Tom urged me to.  It ate at me.  He told me, essentially, that he was committing suicide because I was an evil liar and he didn’t want to go to hell for the sin of murdering me because I murdered my brother.  Did you follow that?  His grammar (and spelling) was worse.  But the hate was god damn obvious.  What a piece of shit.  He sent that note to his daughter.

It’s not like he could tell himself that he was innocent.  Give me a break.  He didn’t want to go to prison.  He was too fucking chicken shit to accept the consequences of his actions.  I’m not.  My father is dead.  I’m glad.  I made the world a more beautiful place by effectively killing him.

But I am still what he made me.  I still thrill to the touch of my Daddy.  Maybe I can find a way for that to be ok.  Maybe that’s just one way that my friends can love me and touch me and heal parts of me I can’t reach by myself.  Every man I call Daddy has been in my life for a long time.  Specifically, Dad has been active in my life for nearly as many years as my biological father.  I stopped seeing my biological father when I was thirteen.  I have known Dad for eleven years.  I have spent considerably more time in Dad’s company than I did with my father in my entire life.  Dad is also a really good grandpa to my kids.  He loves them.

And Daddy?  Well, he sure knows how to make me come.  And he is ok with me waking him up in the middle of the night when I need to talk.  He has been for more than seven years.  I have done so, whenever I needed to, for over seven years.  And I’m crazy and bossy and difficult and he loves me.  It was really nice to come home to my Daddy today.  I am feeling pretty shocked by how this feels.

Maybe the only kind of love I have ever known how to get from a dad will be met.  And it will be met in a way that allows me to be healthy and whole.  I’m not a hole.  My Daddy may be a big slut, but I’m special.  I always have been.  And Dad?  I’m his first daughter.  He introduces me that way, which is funny because he has a biological daughter.  He’s had several girlfriends after me who are also “daughters”.  But everyone knows it’s different with me.  I’m not a girlfriend and I never was and I never will be.  He just takes care of me when I don’t know how to do it for myself.

I feel very little.  And happy and sad at the same time.  I feel like I am holding the hand of my best friend at the funeral of a very bad person.  I am safe now.  I will never be hurt by my dad again.  I may be single tailed by my Dad.  I may be fucked by my Daddy.  But my dad will never hurt me again.

Maybe I’m not over the incest thing.

broken

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The last two days have been writing about my life up till the age of four.  I don’t like thinking about my family.  I don’t like thinking about how I was treated.  It’s weird to talk about systematic abuse.  Why did I believe that everything bad in the world was my fault?  Partially because little kids are dumb.  Mostly because I was actively told it was.  Over and over and over.  It was my fault things happened before I was born.

I don’t know how to shed this feeling of guilt.  This feeling that existing poisons the people around me.  Things with muse are a lot less smooth.  Welcome to crazy girl territory.  I feel like I should go home and lock myself in the garage for a few years.  Maybe Sarah can pass me food through the cat door.  I feel so dirty and polluted.  Like there is no redemption for someone like me.  Too much poison was put in me before I was even verbal.

I am just a hole.  I am nothing.  I have no worth.  No merit.  There is nothing in me worth acknowledging.  But I had better be willing to lie still and open my legs.  And shut up.  Just lie there.  Don’t move.  Because I am nothing.  Nothing.

I have had the Dixie Chicks song “Top of the World” on repeat for two days.  I can sing along with it in the background while I type and cry.  The last two days have been a lot of crying.  I feel like I won’t ever stop crying.  I feel like there is no end to this pain.  The pain of being absolutely worthless.

Why do I want to give away so much money?  I’m trying to find a way to do something in the world.  Something real that no one can take away from me.  Something I can point at and say: See!  I am not a dirty, worthless, bad kid.  I am good.  I do good.  I am good.

How do I teach my daughters to love themselves when I loathe myself with such intensity?  How do I teach anyone how to feel joy when I feel such despair?  I don’t know.  “Everyone is singing, we just want to be heard.  Disappearing every day without so much as a word, somehow.”  I feel like every day that I do not write, that I do not say what I believe to be true is a day that my family has effectively silenced me.  I feel like any time I do not stand up and scream at the top of my lungs that I am NOT FUCKING BAD, DAMNIT I am agreeing with them.  If I am not actively arguing I am agreeing.

I don’t know how to resolve that.  I don’t know how to just take up space and just be.  I have to aggressively take up my space and batter the people standing near me or I feel invisible.  There is no middle ground.  I am invisible and toxic or I am screaming and hostile.  I don’t want either extreme.  I want to feel like I am just ok.  That life is just ok.  That it is ok that things happened.  They are over.

Other than glimpses out my window when he was stalking me, I haven’t seen my father since I was 13.  17 years have gone by.  That’s most of my lifetime.  He’s been dead for 13 years, one month, and five days.  Not that I’m counting.

This hurts so much.  I wanted a daddy.  Why am I not allowed to have a daddy?  Why do I not get to have a mommy either?  The last time I saw my mother was when Uncle Bob died.  I don’t know if I will see her again.  “I wish I had showed you all the things I was on the inside.”  My family doesn’t know me.  Not really.  They know this construction of misery and pain.  It’s not me.

I am not this angry and bitter person.  But I am sad. I am so sad.  I am so sad for the little girl I was.  It was not my fault my father raped my sister.  It’s ok that I was born.  I did not cause my sister to be raped for three more years.  My father did that.  FYI: yesterday’s shirt makes a great hankie.  Squeamishness is for people who waste paper.

Sometimes I wonder why I am writing this down.  Why in the fuck does anyone need to know what a piece of shit my family thinks I am.  How is this making the world a better place?  Why do I need to write another 20,000 words about what a fucking piece of shit I am?  Why?  Technically another 24,000.  But that’s ok.  It’s only the 11th.

Speaking of which: thank you Veterans.  I was too chicken shit to do what you did even though I thought about it.

It’s interesting looking at the differing word counts for different years.  Some years I started and got 600 words in and just… ran out of things to say.  Some years I’ve produced 4,000 words in a day because there was so much to say.  This hurts a lot.  It hurts so much to look at all of this so fast and so hard.  I feel battered.  I feel weak.  I feel fragile.

I’m struggling right now.  I feel like I am beating the shit out of myself with how worthless my family thinks I am.  It’s so hard to be reminded over and over that my childhood was so miserable.  I feel like a ghost of a person.  I feel so thin I could blow away.

Why do I travel so much?  Because I’m running away from myself.  Why do I read so many books?  Because I want to be in anyone’s head but mine.  Why do I have sex with random people?  Because then I don’t have to deal with any of my emotional issues–I can keep them in a box.  When people start getting closer and they see the box I want to run.  I don’t want to even tell you how big this box is.

I don’t want you to know just how big of a box I need for my issues because I don’t want anyone to see how very small I am standing next to that box.  I am too much effort.  I’m not worth it.  Hell, Tom taught me that.  It’s not worth it to meet my needs.  The balance isn’t good enough.  I’m so glad I found Noah.  I didn’t know I was getting a knight in shining armor.  It was hard to notice through the tacky dry humping.

I have lived with Noah for five and a half years.  Longer than I have ever lived with another human being consecutively in my life.  Noah is my family.  It’s terrifying to even consider trusting someone beyond him.  It is so hard to trust him.  And he comes through so very very well.  I don’t deserve Noah, but I’m keeping him.

Soon I will have lived with my children significantly longer than my parents.  Shanna is 3.5.  That’s how old I was when my parents divorced.  When she turns four I will have lived with Shanna more than I lived with my father in my entire life.  And it won’t be much longer before I have lived with her longer than I lived with my mother in a stretch.  Calli will be my third longest live-in relationship.  Depending on how things go with Sarah, she will be the fourth.  That hurts a lot.  I’m 30.  This should not be my story.  This shouldn’t be anyones story.

But it’s mine.  And I can’t change it.  I can just tell it.

Daily Bible Writing: John 5:51

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John 6:51 I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.

I’m not enjoying the experience of writing about what it was like to grow up in an incestuous family so I’m going to take a break to think about something more pleasant since I did 2,000 words today.  So I’m going to write about Occupy.

The only thing we have to give in this world is our energy.  Our devotion.  Our time.  Our resources.  Something that people don’t understand is that time has nearly as much utility as money.  If you go and perform labor that makes someone else’s life better… you have done a better thing than just handing them money.  I don’t mean Volunteer!  I mean, what the fuck are you doing with your life.  How are you working towards being part of a better system?  How are you speaking up when you feel compelled?  How are you putting your direct democratic self forward?  What the fuck are you doing with your time?

Surviving.  That’s what people are doing.  Because we have a weird closed system where everyone is struggling to meet their own needs.  It’s nearly impossible to do.  How do we find more to give…give..give.  Everyone is on empty.  I’m at a stage of my life I have to ask for help a lot.  It feels really humiliating.  My children require adult companionship 24 hours a day.  That’s honestly kind of intense pressure.  We don’t have families.  Well, we don’t have anyone local.  I have nothing.  I don’t know what Noah has.  That’s kind of between them.

It’s between them because I don’t seem to be able to do the family thing on any terms other than my own.  That’s sad for everyone involved.  I’m sorry for it.  But I really can’t.  So much for an intensity break.  This writing is hard.  I don’t want to talk about the earliest reasons I am so very fucked up.  It hurts.  I don’t want people to know how I was treated because then they will look at me differently.  I feel so very dirty.  I feel like that monster ripped out my soul and filled the cavity with tar.  I will forever tarnish everything I touch.

Fuck him.  I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.  I have things to give.  I have resources.  I have myself.  I have my time.  I have my energy.  I share it in many different ways.  I want to make other peoples lives better.  I want to be 80 and know that millions of people have been made better by my existence.  Maybe then I will believe that my soul is not black.  

Why I want to be a stay at home mom

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So I was watching the Steve Jobs speech at Stanford and it occurred to me that I should spend some serious time thinking about why I am a stay at home mom.  I’ve been having internal pushback towards my decision making process lately and I think I need more clarity.

I view parenting as accompanying your child through an apprenticeship to adulthood.  One that my mother failed at.  My mother gave me adult responsibilities when I was very young.  I had to be responsible for myself in a way that was not appropriate or fair.  And I failed often.  The result was that I got hurt often.  I don’t instinctively know what skills a child would have to avoid problematic people.  I don’t want to teach my children to be just like me.

I don’t think my aggression is an ideal life attitude.  And I want my kids to be allowed to be them.  I don’t know how to do that without looking at them all day long.  I don’t know how to bond in a shorter time span than that.  I believe that working mothers love their children just as much as I do.  I don’t know how they find time in the day to deal with that much emotion.  I can’t.  It overloads me.  Having to be patient and interactive with them is incredibly difficult.  If I had other things adding stress to my life (like a job) I would be nasty and mean and vicious pretty much all the time.  It is hard for me to be nice and I find that embarrassing.

I only know how to get through the bad days by having a lot of control over every single solitary thing I say and do all day.  You can’t do that and have a job.  So really, I just don’t want to have a job.  No.  That’s not true.  I do not believe I am capable of managing the stress of a job and the stress of children.  I would not be pleasant, ever.  Dealing with my mental health takes up too much time, honestly.

And I am getting to discover what it is like to unfold in a safe, gradually expanding environment.  I am watching how Shanna changes.  It’s amazing to me to look at her in all of her grumpy glory and think, “That is in absence of any external stress whatsoever.  Hunh.  How does that jive with what I remember doing/being/saying?”  I’m learning what it means that someone else can’t “make” you feel something.  My children get on my nerves.  That is kind of their job.  When I lose my temper and start yelling at them I have this huge hammer in my brain hitting me as hard as possible saying, “She’s a fucking three year old!  She doesn’t know this is an annoying thing to do!  You are supposed to be helping her learn not berating her for her inadequacies!!”  I feel like my anger is not supposed to be part of the equation.

Do you know why I feel that way?  Because in my family you weren’t allowed to address small injustices or issues.  You were required to stay silent through small problems and big problems alike.  I was supposed to just smile and “be pleasant”.  “Why is your tone of voice so nasty all the time” was the favored thing to tell me.  I learned that I was simply an unpleasant person because I wanted them to stop “playing” with me in ways that hurt me.  I was a whiner.  At least according to them.  And looking at Shanna… I can understand why people around me didn’t notice that anything wrong was happening.

If I put my hand around Shanna’s hand to hold it when she’s not in the mood it doesn’t matter if I am holding her with so little pressure I barely encircle her hand.  “It huuuuuuuuuuuurts.”  I feel like I’m going to lose my mind.  She is constantly whining about how much I am hurting her, when I am not even touching her body.  When I am walking towards her with the hair brush she starts crying and clutching her head and rolling around the floor sobbing because I have hurt her.  When I haven’t touched her yet.  I did that too.

Do you know what my mom did?  She probably thought she was just trying to get it over with as fast as possible.  Oh how I screamed.  I have done the same thing to Shanna.  You pull them over to the couch, hold them between your knees, and as fast as possible you get the knots out no matter how they squirm.  But my would start with a fine tooth comb at the top of my head and yank.  I have a baby brush with soft bristles and I start at the ends and I pull knots apart with my fingers.  I don’t think Shanna is reacting to what I am doing less than I reacted to my mother.  I sincerely believe that Shanna experiences actual physical pain for less than 10% of the time I am brushing her hair.  My mother could be gentle but when she was in a hurry… well… that was that.  And she was in a hurry a lot.  I was the youngest of four.  She worked most of my life.

If I had to hurry and get Shanna ready for daycare before I got ready for work we would not have a pleasant relationship.  She wakes up slow.  We generally sit in a chair for half an hour cuddling before we do anything at the beginning of each day.  Calli is joining us now.  Then Noah makes breakfast and the kids go back and forth between us.  If I also had to get ready for work then, that would be the end of my writing and relaxing.  That is when I have that time.  The other tasks would get managed somehow by someone else.  I would just lose writing.

It’s hard for me to actually admit that I need this writing.  It feels so banal, so unimportant.  Why would anyone ever care about anything I have to say?  Who the fuck am I?  Because if I’m telling you the truth I want people to read this.  I want people to give a shit what I say.  But I’m not sure anyone should.  Have I thought anything useful?  Have I taught anything?  I don’t know.  Not enough, I’m sure.  What is teaching anyway?  When I worked as a high school teacher my goal was to have the kids be able to argue with me more by the end of the year.  I want them to be ever increasingly sure of their own opinions.  I want them to be able to talk in finer and finer detail about what they believe.  Because only once they can talk about it can they really be a fully integrated person and deal with their little hypocrisies.

I actively want to avoid being a hypocrite.  That means being very sure what my priorities are and changing my behavior when it’s not in alignment.  It’s hard.  It means I don’t get to coast for long.  What are my priorities.

Me.
Noah, Shanna, Calli, Sarah.  Not necessarily in that order.  Spending time with them.
Writing
Learning/Reading
Socializing with other people
Gardening
Housecleaning
Cooking

It’s a short and broad list to start with. That means that when I sit down to read a book to Shanna I am not evading my housekeeping duties.  I’m following my priority list.  I want to stick my tongue out at an imaginary person now.  I feel like there is some judge and jury out there who is going to tell me I am a bad mother because I want to sit in the garage and smoke pot instead of clean my house.  Seriously.  Who the fuck wouldn’t agree with me?  I’m writing, damnit.  Why am I writing.  Why does writing matter.

Writing lets me get out the stupid shit I am thinking about into a format where I can see it, understand it, and recognize that it is idiotic.  If it is just running around and around and around in my brain… I don’t know how to get off the train.  The writing changes it from a train on a circular trap to a traffic loop.  Yes, it is possible to get caught in the center if you are being dumb, but there are exits all fucking over the place.  Just pick one.  Are any of them really worthwhile?  I don’t know.  I don’t know if anyone will read my writing one day and feel like I made their life better.  I gave them an idea they didn’t have before and it made their life just a little easier.  I feel like it is so hard for me to “act normal” that certainly some other people are also just acting and they might like a trick.

I loathe when people say, “Be yourself!”  Yourself is a bizarre construct of all the different influences you’ve had in your life + personal taste.  It’s pretty vague.  And let me tell you, when you do things you genuinely like (like making your hair increasingly AWESOME) people are quick to remind you that you are stepping out of the herd and you should stop that.  I think I dyed my hair because it makes me visually a freak but it doesn’t cause any more pain to my body.  I think that is a god damn excellent direction of progress.

I want to be a stay at home mom because some accident of fate handed me a partner with sufficient money to support me all my life in a manner to which I would like to become accustomed.  We’ve been married for five years.  Until now I have contributed enough to pay for my truly unnecessary stuff.  I was self-sufficient enough.  Now I have no form of income.  Now I am completely dependent on someone else for the first time since I was 15.

Of course I’m secretly having a fucking heart attack and hoping that I do a good enough job in November that I can sell the book.  I don’t want to be a god damn dependent.  But I don’t want to do anything that requires me to deal with other people.  Err, well, that kind of limits the options.  And honestly I wouldn’t take a random retail job right now.  For one thing it would be hard to get someone to hire me because I am so overqualified.  I think I could overcome that though.  It’s called lying.  But I would feel guilty for taking that job away from someone who needs it more.  I don’t want an office job.  I don’t want anything where I have to be doing additional work.  Ha.  I feel like being the housefrau maid for my family is enough fucking work this lifetime, thanks.  And I want to write.  And my husband wants me to write.

I have such intense feelings about Noah’s perception of my writing.  He takes it more seriously and gives it more respect than I do.  I think that Noah is the one who convinced me that I am a writer.  That anyone who compulsively feels the need to write 10-20 pages a day is a fucking writer.  That’s just not normal.  Normal. Normal. Normal.  I hate that word so much and I use it constantly.  I think it goes a long way towards wrecking the meaning I am going for.

Why am I so god damn compelled to be just like everyone else?  When I stand near people too long I start acting like them.  I conform.  I do it in subtle ways at first, then loud, then I explode and yell at them and make it seem like I was being oppressed by the ways I was conforming.  Even if the other person was unaware of the whole situation.  They are just standing there confused.  In my family the constant chatter is about telling you what to think, when to think it, how to think it.  So someone sitting there and telling you something about how they handled a situation is fairly explicitly giving you directions on how you are expected to handle it in the future.  You know that whole, “Childhood as apprenticeship for adulthood” thing I have?

Until fairly recently my aunt and uncle were supporting their three adult disabled children.  And a bunch of grandkids and SOs.  Because they reinforce one another’s behaviors.  They will rise or fall as a unit.  They are all so ridiculously similar it isn’t funny.  Like obsessions with collecting useless things.  Everyone has a different animal.  For every holiday under the sun people compete to find you something with that animal on it.  But they are all dirt poor.  So all the stuff is cheap, ugly, and really pointless.  And they have LOTS of it.  That’s one small point, but they do the same thing with everything.

When I walk into a middle class persons house I instantly put on my ‘acting’ face.  I start to imagine, “How would people who live here behave?”  Do you want to know why I paint my house really dark colors?  Because I grew up in houses with dark wood paneling.  They were caves.  I don’t know how to cope with relentlessly white walls.  We had relentlessly white walls in a series of depressing, horrible rental places.  Or ugly paneling that turned the house into a dark cave.

So I painted my house purple and cornflower blue and green and raspberry and navy blue…. among other colors.  They are dark enough to make me feel calm and settled.  Aunt Vonnie’s houses were the home base.  That was as much of a home as I knew.  That feeling is in a dark house… even though it bugs me.  I don’t want to be the kind of person who has a uniformly dark house.  It feels oppressive to me.  But I like darker, more saturated colors.  Who says a house has to look like the materials came that color direct from nature?  I never got that memo.  I guess I ditched that day at school.

This constant attempt to conform to whomever I am standing near creates problems.  Because then I get angry at the person for “making” me feel like I have to conform and be like them.  I have had this problem in particular with a couple of female friends.  We will be having an intense conversation about something and they are giving advice and all of a sudden I go ballistic and start screaming because I don’t want to be like them.

I don’t know how to handle those feelings very well.  That sudden explosion of fear that they are trying to wipe me off the planet.  I know that it was that fear that got me out of my family.  I respect that fear.  I respect the fact that my individuality comes with a rock solid fist to defend it.  But I really wish I wouldn’t hit my friends.  They haven’t done anything.  This is my fuck up.

I am struggling with the fact that my self control runs out.  I have too many things I am trying to control. I don’t know how to relax and let go of the anger in the moment very well.  It cycles so fast out of no where.  When I am at home I take a time out.  It’s not perfect because I’m doing too much stomping away/slamming doors.

The only normal I care about is the one where my kids aren’t afraid of me.  I don’t want my kids to quake with fear from my voice.  That is not a relationship I want.  But I want to be effective.  Three sucks.

I want to be a stay at home mom so that my kids and I can learn how to be nice to each other without outside pressure.  We can learn how to be a family together.  Because really I don’t know much more than them.  Luckily Shanna is an excellent teacher.  She’s having an emotional period, but mostly she can talk about her preferences and make requests and follow directions.  She is in a rough phase (the book told me to expect it! I love that book) and that’s ok.  Hormones are rough.  I try to be gentle and understanding.  For her, this is just a phase because nothing bad has ever really happened to her.  Minor injuries and scrapes.  Losing her friend Rowan was the biggest loss she’s been aware of.  If I am patient and loving, she will come through this and on the other side she will hopefully understand that three year olds are assholes and I was really nice to her.  This is part of the circle of life.  I wish I could apologize to my mother for some pieces of it.

But that is when we jump on the merry go round again.  I don’t think my mother abused me as a small child.  I think she neglected me to such a degree that it becomes criminal.  I think she tried to enculturate with the only thing she knew… and it worked.  I am indeed, white trash.  Even that didn’t go how she planned.  One of the strongest and most defining things about white trash as I understand the concept is the fierce loyalty.  Blood is everything.  How do you think they get away with incest?  If you are related to someone you are obligated to do anything they want… forever.

Excuse me while I pause to vomit on the floor.  I respond to feeling like I should conform with hostility and aggression because it was a very useful tool at one point.  My friends aren’t trying to convert me though.  Gah.

I should stop writing.  It’s already too long.  But I don’t want to.  This is the problem with trying to do shorter entries.  I don’t always see a clear stopping/starting/dividing line.  How do I talk about things in separate posts when it is all one big concept in my head?  But then I ask and people tell me, yes they would prefer shorter posts.  And then I feel like I am failing to deliver something that people want.  I wish I didn’t do this to myself.  Shit.  This is over twelve pages long.  Ok, I’ll stop.  And it took me just over an hour.  That’s actually kind of hot.

The American Dream

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The media is telling me constantly that the American Dream is dead.  That no one can better themselves.  That no one can succeed.  I feel so confused.  Then how did I go from being the kind of kid who stole food to the kind of kid who gives people thousands of dollars when they are in a car accident just because I like them and otherwise they won’t be able to pay rent.  How did that happen?  Noah.  I married up.

I feel weird guilt and shame over having access to Noah’s money.  I feel bad talking about anything related to class because I am no longer poor.  I will never be poor again.  Noah comes from the 1%.  He isn’t there himself… yet.  But from everything I understand about human development and financial success, Noah will probably get back there.  People who grow up with that kind of money learn how to make it.  They learn how to be the kind of person who has it.  And I’m just desperate and needy and I have a broken compass.  I don’t have the ability to tell when something is “enough” sometimes.  Not money, drugs, sex … Even though I’m not an “addict” by the classic definitions I still have a broken compass.  I don’t know how much is enough or too much sometimes.

I don’t have very many friends who are willing to live like Noah and I do.  We live really far away from everything.  We live in a house that is much smaller and crappier than we could technically afford.  We live here and we will continue to live here pretty much forever because I’m not willing to spend more money than the astronomical amount already spent on this house.  Noah mortgaged over a quarter of a million dollars on this house.  I think that’s insane.  But it’s really cheap for a house here.  It will be paid off before I am 40.

I got lucky.  I married Noah.  That was kind of sort of how I reached where I am.  But I also went to college and worked.  It’s not like I would have been this wealthy as a teacher, but I would have done just fine.  I still would have felt like I made the American Dream.  Because my goals would have been smaller.  I got out of poverty.  I became the first one to be educated (high school diploma, BA, teaching credential, and 7 years of MA work).  To me that feels like I am done.  I reached the American Dream.  I went to college and I’m not in debt!  I paid it off within a year of being done with classes.  Because I was married to Noah and when I was working and he was working we had an obscene amount of money.

This is the part that is odd to me.  Noah doesn’t make more money than our friends.  Most of our friends have combined househole incomes that are much higher than ours.  We live in the bay area.  Our friends are the ones who went to fancy schools and became computer people.  But no one else I know thinks they are filthy rich.  People complain about not being able to do everything they want or having to compromise on things.

I feel so confused.  I have to wonder if my compass is the broken one.  What do people think the American Dream means?  Do you think it means everyone gets to retire at 35 to free health care forever?  Permanent jobs with a high chance of retirement?  I don’t consider it part of the American Dream that people have to own a house or make a lot of money.  I consider the American Dream to be the willingness to change your stars.

Everyone is born with a future that looks like it is obviously theirs.  They can take it if they want.  Or they can go make their own future.  They can be whoever they want to be.  They can rise in the world.  It doesn’t mean that everyone will be filthy rich, but people who hustle can improve their lot.  I’m told it doesn’t work that way for everyone.  That I am a fluke.

I get told that a lot.  Everything about me seems to be a fluke.  Why did it work out for me then?  Why do so many things work for me that other people say cannot be made to work ever ever ever ever?  For me this is part of feeling invisible.  I never know how to respond when I read things that say it is not possible for me to have done what I’ve done.  Do you want me to burst into flames?

Whenever I think of the American Dream I think of teaching The Great Gatsby.  Gatsby wanted Daisy.  He wanted to be rich too…. but mostly he just wanted Daisy.  He got rich because he was trying to earn Daisy’s love.  Noah seems to feel the same way about me, which is odd.  It’s weird living with someone who thinks he has to earn me.  I’m shit, aren’t I?  Why would someone want to earn me?  Does that mean you try to coat yourself more heavily in flies?  Of course not.

Noah sees me as high status.  That is the American Dream, really.  It is the ability to change your social status.  I don’t understand for the life of me why anyone would associate me with being high status.  Ok, I have access to a hefty bank account.  I didn’t have that before Noah, though.  Why does that raise my status?  Why do I magically become a better person?

Why will people look at me when I am dressed nicely.  Why will people talk to me more now, even though I look increasingly weird?  Sometimes it seems like there is an aura that comes along with financial safety.  And other people recognize it.  It is a relieving of anxiety.  It’s practically a difference in smell.  As if people who have to worry more have a more acrid body odor.  I don’t think that’s literally  true or real.  But there is some strange wall.

The idea of the American Dream mixed with being white trash is the crux.  It’s about being told that I can’t do things that I already have done so fuck you very much.  It’s about feeling like it’s not ok to be who I am because I am weird.  Because I have done things other people haven’t, for good or bad.  Because I am just plain different and I don’t know why.  It is hard to talk about difference without making it sound like being superior or better or aggrandizement.

Some people like chocolate.  I don’t.  I like vanilla.  For variety, maybe peppermint.  Does that mean that vanilla is truly qualitatively better because I like it more?  Demonstrably not.  I don’t think I am a better person than most other people.  Better than my sister, yes.  Better than mom, probably.  Other people?  Enh, not so much with the comparison.  I don’t know what road they walked.  I don’t know who tried to knock them down or how.  I’m not better.  But I have done different things.

I want to understand why I make different choices.  I want to understand that about myself.  I want to be able to hack the system.  I have big life goals.  If I want to reach them I am going to have to work very hard for a very long time.  I cannot believe the attitude that it is hopeless.  I can’t.  I can’t have the feeling about myself that seems to be common for my generation.  I think I can do fucking anything.  I already have.  I don’t identify with deserving anything.  I don’t think I deserve universal health care.  I think that when I needed insurance I had to find weird jobs that would offer insurance that I didn’t really want to do.  But I had different options.

I benefit from enormous privilege.  I’m sure that most of the reason I was able to succeed is just because I am white and slightly above average in attractiveness.  I’m not stunning.  I’m not gorgeous.  But I’m cute.  And I’m bubbly.  And I’m a hard worker and a people person.  I had advantages.

I talk about being white trash because I don’t think it is possible for someone of color to do the same things I did because I see how the deck is stacked against my friends.  They are fighting different wars.  They have to fight at all times covertly because they are watched.  They can’t directly cause fights the way I can get away with.  I feel deeply uncomfortable with this knowledge.  That as I sit here in my smug pretention of “Well I succeeded!” Yeah… I did because of an intersection of lack and privilege.  I don’t know that any part of my life is relevant to anyone else.

Who the fuck am I to talk about succeeding when I had the dog bite settlement that paid for an awful lot of my life.  When I smugly talk about cobbling together insurance I honestly feel kind of sick to my stomach.  I did it.  But I always had $14,400/year to live on.  Ever since I was 18.  Because I was attacked as a kid and half my face was ripped off.  I had a good lawyer.  I think I only had a good lawyer because I am white.

The girl who was born across the street from me.  B.  Her father was my lawyer.  He was my very best friends father.  B wasn’t hanging out with the non-white kids on the street (her New York Jewish parents moved her out of that neighborhood when we were four).  He is an excellent lawyer.  I don’t even think he took his full fee out of my settlement.  It was less than $100k in settlement but he invested it well for me.  I took that money and I changed my whole life.

My brother Jimmy was hit by a car when he was a kid and got a settlement when he was 18.  He spent the money on a raised truck, a killer stereo (that was stolen a couple months later), and a lot of drugs.  It was gone in a few months.

My brother Tommy was hit by a car when he was a kid and got a settlement.  Technically there is $6,000 left of it somewhere.  I’m thinking about claiming it as my father’s dependent.  As an inheritance. Jimmy calls it dirty money and says he doesn’t want it.  I think that money is fucking useful.

I suppose at this point my dream is to stop feeling so angry.  I want to be able to talk and think without being so full of bad feelings.  My stomach hurts.  I’m really tired of my stomach hurting.  I’m not special. I’m not better.  But I did things that other people couldn’t do.  I feel like I should be proud of myself.  And I simultaneously feel like being proud of myself is somehow wrong or bad.  I should be ashamed of myself because I think I have done anything worth noticing.  What kind of self absorbed bitch am I?  Who the fuck am I to look down my fucking nose at anyone else?

I’m not looking down my nose.  I’m trying to figure out why I made different choices.  I wish I understood better when the choice moments were.  I am not responsible for where I ended up entirely.  It’s accident as much as planning.  But if I wasn’t in this house right now having a good life I would be in a different house having a good life.  My teaching job would still be stable financially even if the work was shitty.  I lived in an apartment I could afford on $20k/year and by now I would be making about $60k.  It would have taken a while, but I probably would have bought a house in cash in ten years.  About when I’m going to pay this one off instead.

Because somewhere, at some point I crossed a line.  I will never be poor again.  I have lost the habits.  I make different choices.  I can be broke.  It feels like a difference in attitude.  Do you know why I am not worried about my ability to succeed?  Because I walked into my first real job interview and said, “I know I am the first person you are interviewing and you have three days of interviews to go but if you don’t hire me today I am not available.  Sorry.”  I was offered the job an hour later.  I take a lot of pride in that.

Because the only time in my life I have ever failed at something I wanted to do was passing the MA final exam.  And really I probably psyched myself out so bad that I’m not surprised I failed.  Ugh.  It’s obvious I know the material but I can’t write enough for academia.  I never wanted to be part of academia, not really.  Having an MA would change my life.  I didn’t want it bad enough to make that change.  That is how I feel about it.  Almost like the lit MA was wrong for me.  It would have changed my life choices in a way that would have been ultimately less helpful.

I’m starting to wonder if someday there is social work in my future.  That would be a different MA.  Ugh.  I’m not sure I can handle more school.  Ever.

I feel weird because I am alive during a Revolution.  These are interesting times.  And I don’t feel like I have much to say as part of the Revolution.  That’s weird and uncomfortable.  It’s not like I’m watching Fox news or agreeing with them.  But I don’t agree with a lot of the politics I’m hearing lately.  My opinions are just different.

I want to stop being so narcissistic and notice that other people aren’t as similar to one another as I project.  I’m not a special snowflake.  I’m not more different.  But I think I am.  This is where the hubris comes in.  How can you believe with intensity that you are different without believing it is superior?  Do I think that other people should try to be like me?  No.  Things that work for me won’t work for most other people.  I don’t think other people would be ok with the amount of intense emotion my life contains.  I get the impression other people are more calm.

I feel like the American Dream was always a sham.  Look at Death of a Salesman.  Right there.  He believed that who you know and charisma will get you where you need to know.  It won’t.  I only occasionally have charisma, mostly I alienate the shit out of people.  But I work fucking hard.  I work hard and I know how to game the system.  I wish I could teach other people the rules of the system so they could game it as well.  I don’t think this should be a unique ability.

As crazy, as unstable, as difficult, as confrontational as I am… I do know how to shut up when necessary.  I just don’t think it is necessary nearly so often as other people do.  I, in fact, think that everyone should make a lot more waves than they do.

I don’t think I have “figured things out” or done things in some magical right way that other people don’t do.  I think there is a way of developing your intuition so that you learn which choices are really not safe.  I avoid the unsafe twinges.  I kind of wonder if that is how I survived.  I was afraid at the right times.

I don’t think that people necessarily understand that rage is often, at least for me, the flip side of terror.  I spend my life horribly terrified that something bad is going to happen to me again.  I am genuinely scared.  I shake.  It makes me angry that I feel this way.  That I am so scared of everyone and everything in the world.  I don’t like that when people say things that make me feel invisible I want to hit them.  Obviously I don’t do so.  That would be problematic in a whole new exciting way.  But I’m often not nice.

Nice.  There is that word again.  I wish I was unoffensive.  I wish I was nice.  Somehow it is magically better to be nice.  There is that American Dream again.  You are supposed to be a nice, quiet, middle class person.  But I’m not.  I’m loud.  I’m brashy.  I’m aggressive.  I’m trashy.  I like loud upbeat country music.  And Lady Gaga and Pink.  I like Steel Magnolias unapologetically.  I grew up rural and don’t know city manners.  I really don’t understand why my city gives a shit if I grow vegetables in my front yard and I think they can fucking sue me if they want me to stop.

Being nice feels like lying.  It feels like constant low level lying.  It means you never tell the full truth because the full truth is often uncomfortable.  You always leave stuff out so that other people never have to feel bad.  I FEEL BAD MOST OF THE TIME.  Why shouldn’t I tell people the truth about how I feel?  Why should bad feelings be hidden?  Should they?  Is that what people want?

Let me tell you, if there is a time and a place where it is appropriate to sit around and tell stories about incest I’ve never found it.  Even therapy is only kind of sort of the place.  Because just sitting around and telling the stories seems to be un-useful.  But I sit around and drop those mentions into casual conversations.  Because that is what is in my head.  And it alienates people.  It’s my truth.  It’s my story.  I’m not actually hurting anyone by letting people know it exists.  But it feels not nice.

It is because I think my mental health is more important than other people feeling comfortable that I describe myself as white trash.  There is a self absorption that I witnessed in my family.  A way of seeing yourself as the central figure in this terrible tragedy.  A way of acting like everyone in the whole world is out to get you and everything bad that happens to you is part of this giant conspiracy.  Everyone is out to get us!  They all hate us!  They think they are better than us just because they have money!  Well fuck them!  We at least have pride!

It’s weird and kind of sick.  There is an abnegation of responsibility for everything that happens to you that I don’t understand.  Sometimes I want to slap my sister and say, “Ok so our dad raped you.  Time to stop dating men who are drug addicts because you are trying to get daddy to love you.”  That.  That is a lot of what this comes down to.

Do you know how I survived?  Do you know how I attained the American Dream?  Because people told me that I was shit and I didn’t deserve it.  And my response was to fight back.  It’s not that I think I deserve anything.  I don’t think I have stuff because I deserve it.  I have stuff (college education, money, no car loan) because I made them my top priorities and I didn’t let anything stop me.  I want to say that nothing catastrophic happened to prevent it, but that’s a lie.  Tommy’s accident.  All the rapes.  Going to 25 schools before dropping out of high school at 16.  I did have catastrophic things happen to try and stop me as a kid.  But you just keep getting up and doing things.

And then some day you are 18.  And you leave.  And you never look back.  And with every choice I make I think, “What would my sister do?”  Then I do the opposite.  That’s not actually true, but it’s kind of funny to think about.  I did get out.  Do you know what my family gave me for high school graduation?  Pots, pans, a crock pot, towels.  They wanted me the fuck out.  They wanted me to go.  Because I was different.  Because I caused problems.

I don’t even really feel like my family is white trash, per se.  When I’m being an asshole I include them in the collateral damage.  Mostly they don’t want to be like me though.  They have other dreams.  They are hick and redneck and poor.  But they aren’t white trash.  Mostly they don’t have my aggression.  My sister does.  I would say without reservation that she is also white trash.  Not my aunt or my cousins.  They are just standing too close to evil, manipulative people.

So maybe being white trash is relegated to being an incest survivor?  That’s not really it, but it factors in. It’s so many things all at once.  It’s not one thing.  When people feel defensive and try to tell me that my qualifiers aren’t the right ones because they also fit those qualifications… Oh gosh.  I’m not trying to make you feel defensive.  I’m not trying to be not nice.  I don’t know that at the end my definition of white trash will ever be useful for anyone but me.  I’m not sure it is applicable.  Ok, for my sister too.  But past us?  I can’t know enough of someones story to judge.

I say I am white trash because I am always going to say things about myself that offend the shit out of the people around me.  They will always feel hostile about me saying the stuff I’m saying.  I can only control whether I say it or not.  And sometimes I can’t control whether I say it or not.  I don’t really understand why trauma has affected me in these ways.

I listen to Adele singing Someone Like You a lot lately.  I’m scared that some day my mom will show up on my doorstep.  I’m afraid she won’t.

“I hate to turn up out of the blue uninvited
But I couldn’t stay away, I couldn’t fight it.
I had hoped you’d see my face and that you’d be reminded
That for me it isn’t over.”

The problem with having PTSD is that it is never over.  I have to deal with what happened to me forever.  It will never be over.  I will never be over being a survivor of incest.  I will never get over being a dirty little street kid.  I will never be over being moved around constantly as a child and being prevented from properly bonding with people.  I will never be able to have that stop being true.  I will always have this part of me that feels empty and bad and like I am shit.

It’s not over for me.  And it spurs me.  It makes me angry.  It gives me wings.  And I flew away.  For all that it isn’t over, it is.  I have this husband who thinks I hung the moon.  I have wonderful children who love me and adore me.  I have already made other peoples lives better.

But as I watch the sun come up I question what this American Dream was meant to be anyway.  It’s not the house that matters.  It’s not the money.  The freedom I have is the freedom to say, “No.  You cannot invalidate me.  I exist.  I am different from you.  My life experiences have shaped me.  And I’m ok.  I do not need to change.”  I’m white trash and I’m proud of it.  I’m proud of my ability to fight and over come adversity.  I’m fucking proud of myself.  I think I’m bad ass.  Noah thinks so too.  Does it really matter if anyone else does?

No.  But that’s my American Dream.  I don’t abandon my self label with my change in financial status because that would be too convenient for everyone around me.  They would like to pretend that people like me don’t exist.  I feel like most of the people who are big parts of my life are fairly sheltered people.  Even the ones who were abused tended to grow up in mostly safe, stable places.  They had dads who were emotionally abusive assholes.  That kind of thing.  But they had consistency.  They still only know people who are mostly like them.  Except for me.

I still have to say that I am white trash because people try to excuse my behavior as being some sort of byproduct of unavoidable trauma, the poor dear.  People love me and want to comfort me and tell me that things that happen to me aren’t my fault.  I’m a victim.  Well, sometimes.  But an awful lot of my current problems are my fault.  They are my fault because I choose to be aggressive and hostile.  Because I choose to remain white trash instead of catapulting to being middle class.  It’s kind of a choice and kind of not a choice.  I’m not middle class anyway, I’m nouveau riche.  I skipped the middle class.  That is kind of weird in and of itself, isn’t it?

When I try to think about what I want from my life I’m pretty happy though.  Everything I want is something that I could have.  I want to write and grow.  I want deeper friendships.  I want to have hard conversations with my friends about class.  I love my friends.  I want to find the ability in myself to feel like I have enough.  Like I am not still yearning.  Really, there isn’t much left that I have to do.  Write.  Publish.  Wash.  Repeat.

But first, I have to go cuddle my perfect daughter.

White trash

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Somehow I feel like the definition of white trash is very important to my personal lexicon.  After all, it is my self-identity.  What do I mean by it?  I mean that I startle people.  I mean that I experience sudden rage and lash out at people in socially unacceptable ways.  I mean that many of the things I like are demonstrably low class.

Uncle Bob, when I was a little kid, would spit out the car window when we drove past the house where the black guy lived.  That’s all I knew about “the black guy” who lived in the canyon.  When I was in high school and I lived in Bakersfield I was accosted on the bus by a black girl who yelled at me that I was a racist because I was reading a book and giggling.  I think the only reason she didn’t kick my ass is because my response to her yelling that I was a stupid bitch was to say, “Come on!  You haven’t even met me.  Normally it takes someone at least five minutes to decide I am a bitch.”  Her boyfriend said I was alright and to leave me alone.

I don’t know why that story stays with me so much, but it does.

It’s hard to talk about different things from my childhood happening because I know the stories are confused in my head.  I know they are confused because sometimes I know things happened when I was living in a certain house but I can’t remember when I lived there.  I’m afraid of trying to take the pieces apart.  I’m afraid of trying to make this a real narrative.

I’m afraid of remembering something wrong, writing it down, and being called a liar.  I’m not lying.  I’m just trying to remember things that happened a long time ago.  I’m trying to string together why they are important.  Why is my life worth reading about?  It’s kind of weird as I look at my over crowded bookshelf and think most of them are not better writers than me.  But they are published and I’m not.  I think that’s the biggest difference.

I’m terrified of trying to publish.  I’m terrified that I won’t have the drive to push it through.  I can’t expect to be magically “discovered” and babied through the process.  I will have to make it happen.  I will have to shop around for an agent and a publishing house.  It scares the pants off me.  I am going to have to actually deal with being judged.  I’m not so good at that part.  I have to feel like this is really and truly honest to god worth doing.

It’s hubris.  But I think people would… if not enjoy… then at least appreciate reading this story.  I think that even though a lot of people will hate me and revile me and say nasty things about me… I think somewhere there is a young girl who will get out of an incestuous family because of me.  Some day some girl is going to say, “You saved my life.”

That’s reason enough to do something hard and scary.  One life is enough.  Well, I’ve already saved mine.  I suppose by that metric it’s enough.  But it’s not.  I want to be a hero.  Ok, that made me smile.  I do, I want to be a hero.  I want to learn how to say just the right thing to make people know that no matter how bad you feel about yourself, there is hope.

I kind of hate Elizabeth Wurtzl.  I think Prozac Nation was a horrible book about mental illness.  I spent the entire book wanting to bitch slap her and tell her to stop whining about her cushy life.  For the record, should Elizabeth Wurtzl ever come read this… I wouldn’t ever say that to you in real life.  Pain is pain.  But seriously dude you had an easier life than me and I’m allowed to be pissy in my blog about it.  It’s not personal.

The reason it bothers me so much is because I have a hard time with pampered rich people who get to be depressed and non-functional.  I’ve been depressed most of my life and I’ve been more functional than most people.  Depression makes everything harder.  It doesn’t make it impossible and it bugs the shit out of me when people say it does.  Ok, maybe it does for you.  I can’t know what it is like to be in other peoples heads.  I know that I have not had the luxury of being non-functional while depressed.  I’m too busy surviving.  No, I wasn’t happy, but so what?  Who the fuck was promised happiness or a good life?  Not me.

When people talk about how we should have universal health care I laugh.  It’s not nice of me, but I do.  I feel like universal health care in this country is a pipe dream.  We have too many people.  Unless you, generic person who is espousing universal health care, want to go become a doctor and work pro bono for the rest of your life, how do you think that doctors should be paid for their time?  How should medical equipment be paid for and acquired?  Should everyone in America get to have million dollar surgeries when they get sick?

Money is finite and people die.  I think that even if America managed to get the basics covered, I would be opposed to absolutely across the board health care coverage.  I think we are all living too long.  Honestly.  I think that humans were meant to die a lot earlier than we do now and make room for new people.  I don’t like most life saving operations.

My personal experiences with life saving operations gave me back Uncle Bob and Tommy.  I’m not sure either were good uses of money.  How do you say in the conversation about universal health care, “Actually the reason I oppose universal health care is I think they shouldn’t have brought my brother back to life so he could beat me and attempt to rape me for nine more years.  The piece of shit should have been allowed to die when he was twelve and it was his fucking time.”  How do you say that about your brother?  How do you form a political opinion that endorses other people dying?  Because I endorse my family and me dying in the same way.  I’m ok with it.  I’ve made my peace with death.  It will happen when it happens.  I don’t want to cause my death right now, but I don’t know that I would fight cancer.

Humans are meant to die.  I can’t help but think that I’d rather die of whatever disease strikes me than miserable old age and being lonely.  I only want to live to be 80 if a million people will light a candle for me.  Otherwise, well, whenever it happens is ok.  That’s life.

I think the only part of death that bothers me any more is knowing how devastating that will be for my family.  I cry and smile at the same time thinking about it.  Now there are people who would mourn.  It wouldn’t be like Tommy’s memorial up in Redwood Estates.  By the time he died he only had one friend outside our family because everyone else abandoned him.  People aren’t nice to disabled kids.  He was an asshole too, but people aren’t nice to those who are disabled.

I hear people talking about how things should be “fair”.  To whom?  Why?  What the fuck makes you think that?  What does that even mean?  Does that mean everyone gets the bare minimum?  Does that mean everyone gets what they want?  I don’t know.  I have an easier life than I’ve ever had.  I just went out and bought a bed last night for the garage so we have a more comfortable place to have sex.  That’s fucking spoiled.  I don’t know how to reconcile my unwillingness to share with the fact that I’m very willing to share.

I’m ok with paying high taxes.  I think we should.  I like roads and fire fighters and schools.  They should exist.  I like being the one who can give my friends financial support when they need it.  I feel kind of weird about the word charity but I give a ton of money away.  Only occasionally to organizations.  Mostly to individual people who need help.  It feels related to me.  If I am giving it to an individual person I know if I approve of how they are likely to use it.  I do give or not give based on my judgment.  I will admit that.  It also depends on how close to my monkey sphere someone is.  I can handle that.

It’s kind of hard having a different opinion than most of my friends.  I feel like I should apologize.  When people get all huffy about human rights I want to laugh.  I think that I no longer have the same entitlement as my friends.  I don’t believe I deserve good treatment.  I like it.  I want it.  I don’t think it’s about deserve.  Not really.

That said, if I win the lottery I am starting a domestic violence shelter.  I do believe that people should help people.  I feel weird about the government doing it.

Whenever people tell me that welfare fraud doesn’t exist I laugh and laugh.  Bullshit.  It depends on what you mean by “fraud”.  Are there people who get welfare and buy drugs instead of food.  Yup.  My sister did.  I’m tired of having my liberal, upper class friends talk about the poor as if they are some deserving group on the mist who should be cared for.

The poor are the people on the bus in your town you ignore.  The poor are the people with ill behaved children in the store that you glare at.  You think you are better than poor people.  Well, a lot of people in my social group do.  I am white trash because I am still fucking angry at all the rich people I hang out with.  I resent them.  I resent them for acting like I pass.  It doesn’t matter how much money I have in the bank I will always feel like the dirty little girl you people walked by without meeting my eyes.

I am white trash because white trash take care of their own.  Near as I can tell middle class values are shit.  I have no respect for them.  It involves a lot of “being polite” for the sake of not ruffling feathers and blending in.  No thanks.  I don’t blend in.  Not once I open my mouth.  These days not at all.  I love my hair.

(Err, uhm, disclaimer: I don’t actually hate or resent my friends.  I have emotional issues.  I write about them because I’m trying to work through them not because I am trying to alienate people or say they suck.  I don’t actually hang out with people I don’t like.  I like my friends.  But I have mixed feelings about some of the things they say and do unconsciously.  That doesn’t make them bad.)

I am white trash because I can’t let the little classist and racist and feminist things go in conversation because I believe direct confrontation is preferable to being passive aggressive.  And I’m ok with shouting.  A lot.

I’m white trash because when I speak about myself in public people quickly dart their eyes away.  They can’t look at me.  Not always, not everyone.  But the vast majority of people I meet.  I haven’t met very many people in my life who can hear me talk out loud about incest and look me in the face without flinching.  I’m sure I shouldn’t take that personally.  But I do.  Things that have happened to me mean that sometimes people can’t look at me without flinching away.  I do that.  I can control whether or not that happens.  I can decide what to tell people.  I can decide to pass and be nice and middle class and stop making people flinch.

Only I can’t.  Because I’m white trash.  Because I will always blurt things at uncomfortable times that make people flinch.  Because I will always be just a bit dirtier and worse and more disgusting than everyone around me.  Because who and what I am seems to be an affront to so.many.people.  I am white trash because I think it is sporting to warn people that if I think they are a fucking asshole I just might tell them so.  While I am visiting their house.  In another state.  I’m just kind of awesome that way.  I don’t seem to be able to control my rage after a while.  I have to say that my outbursts have gotten way more socially acceptable over the years.  Yelling at Rebecca’s dad was really rude, but he deserved it.  He was a twat.

Do you know why I blow up at people who are in authority?  Because blowing up at people in authority saved my life.  No.  That’s not hyperbole.  Think about my parents.  Think about being brought into the world to parents who are ok with me being raped by every male member of my family.  I was born fighting.

That is why I am white trash.  Because I’m ok with that fight.  Because I accept that fight as being just life.  Because I don’t think I deserve anything better.  Because I don’t really think anyone else does either and fuck you if you think you deserve better treatment.  I did not god damn deserve being raped over and over and over.  But it happened.  I can’t let it end my life.  I can’t sit around and whine about how not fair life is.  If I had done that as a child I would have died.  There is no fair.  I did not deserve being raped.

How many times was I raped.  I try not to think about it.  I don’t think I’ve had a number in my head for it in a long time.  Michael, Jeremy, I’m blanking on that guys name in high school.  Memories are awesome.  The guy that I met at Lauren’s house.  The one I thought was safe.  The guy from the coast guard.  My dad with the gun.  My dad all those other times I can’t count.  That’s only five.  That’s not so bad, right?  Oh, and Paul.  And countless times when I lay there and cried and didn’t bother saying no.  That’s been a lot of people.

I don’t think that people understand that I take pride in being white trash.  I take pride in my strength.  It’s gotten me a long way.  I will always disconcert people, I have no interest in being a different person.  That’s the hard part.  I don’t want to be anything other than who and what I am.  But people tell me I should.  I shouldn’t call myself trash.  It’s not nice.

Uhh, piss off.  Life isn’t nice.  I can deal with that in the ways that work for me, thank you very much.  Life isn’t nice and life isn’t fair.  See, these are the things I don’t want to say in an actual conversation with a friend.  When they tell me, “Oh don’t call yourself that” I have to bite a hole in my tongue to not respond with, “Who the fuck died and made you the fucking arbiter of what I should mother fucking call myself?!”  It’s not very nice.  And I try to be nice to my friends, mostly.  But I feel these things.  That’s why I call myself white trash.  Because that is my emotional process around people telling me not to call myself white trash.  I want to cuss them out and say I will do so if I please.  And that’s why I’m white trash.

Hm.  I’m not just trash.  I’m not and I know it.  I’m not garbage.  But I am a specific cultural construction that I refer to as white trash.  That’s a useful way to think of it.  Gotta make breakfast.

Trust is hard.

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Today was a rough day for me.  I had a lot of intense emotions.  But I did talk about them.  Badly, at least at first.  I have to trust that the people who love me knew that there were going to be bad days.  It’s this balancing act between not wanting to take advantage of good will and… no really.  I have bad days.

I wish I could get over feeling like I must be nice.  I think my life would be easier.