I think it is funny that my kids have “early riser” as part of their self identity. We think sleeping till 7am is sleeping in and my kids refer to themselves as slug-a-beds on days they sleep that late. “Whoo. I was so tired. Maybe I’m not feeling well or I’m growing.” It’s funny because so many of our friends are night owls.

I feel so much gratitude for getting to have three kids. I don’t have to sit around waiting on other people wanting to pay attention to me anymore. I have a lot of work and attention I have to provide every day. I go to bed tired and I wake up knowing that even if I don’t talk to other people I have a full day. I mean, I still desperately want connection with my friends… but it’s different.

Today we are not going ice skating with Jenny’s family because my kids don’t enjoy it and that’s ok. I don’t feel anxious or bad or like I am missing out on time with my friend. We will see each other a bunch and it’s ok to skip events that won’t be much fun for us. When I was younger I would go do things I hated (I don’t hate ice skating, for the record) just because I didn’t want to be alone. Now I can fill a day with my family and have fun without extra people.

Eldest Child asked if we could please go out to breakfast as a treat. Then we will go grocery shopping. Then we will go to the park because it’s their last day of spring break before academics start up again.

That sounds fun to me.

The park down the hill from us is awesome. It’s huge and set up for running and there’s lots to climb and spin on. Parks in the US look so boring compared to this. There are trampolines in the ground and a bunch of merry go round stuff and huge climbing walls and standard bars (like for gymnastics) for spinning and a zip line and good swings and…. It’s a really great park. It’s like all the best part of all the parks in the bay area put in one huge place where all the kids were yelling and being loud.

That’s so fucking cool.

Not to mention that we are loving the food in Scotland so far. I’m cooking a bunch and every meal I make the kids are like “Oh my goodness this is so good.”

But I hear that Brexit is going to fuck the food situation because the UK hasn’t been able to grow enough food for their folk in 100 years. Maybe we should be building a Brexit box too… there is the possibility that food will become a problem starting two weeks before we plan to leave this country. Cheers. I would donate my storage stuff to Jenny’s family upon leaving.

I really hope that Scotland votes to leave the UK. But, it’s none of my nevermind. My country is fucking itself.

Keeping this apartment tidy is feeling easy. There aren’t enough dishes or space in the washing machine to put things off, I have to keep on top of it. But that also means there is never that much work at a time. It’s feeling like a nice sweet spot. With how much cooking I’m doing it is constant small scale tidying, but the kids are helping and it’s going well.

I have some of that white-guy anxiety here. I can feel it. But I feel enough like an outsider that I don’t feel like much of a potential target. I have that whole veil-of-white-motherhood thing. Nobody is going to touch me. I have such mixed feelings about that. I feel comforted and upset that this isn’t available to everyone.

It is weird only seeing white faces at the park. After Japan where we saw something like 20 white people the whole time… this is odd.

Heh. We barely feel like we are visiting an English speaking country. We can’t understand a lot of the talk here. That’s hilarious.They speak Scottish and we speak US-English. Then there is English-English that is divided into like eight accents.

Night weaning has not regressed this time. I’m just flippin done. Both younger kids are sleeping with me. Middle Child loves this. He wishes that we could have two queen mattresses on the floor so that I could have him in bed with me once Noah comes back. It’s a little frustrating that he likes to get a leg out of the blanket by ripping the blanket off of me and throwing it on the floor. Luckily that mostly feels funny.

I’m feeling really happy. The only thing missing is Noah.

Oh gloriousness. Yesterday Jenny brought over the last box I shipped to Scotland. We have so many books now! A bunch of things we set aside for school. Mostly religion study, but also Spanish and math. The math… we may or may not do. But the religion study books we enjoy and my kids are feeling motivated to study Spanish more after the night in Bar Corazon. Maybe I can catch them up to where I am. That would be really fun.

I am having a lot of mixed feeling about my hair. It is solidly to my waist now; it’s as long as it was when I shaved my hair when MC was a baby. I can understand why I did that then out of frustration. It’s gorgeous but so much work. I also don’t know what to do about my wispy fly-aways. I always have a halo of frizzy hair around my face. I could do Regency hairstyles so easily with my new-growth. Mostly I just let the hairs stick straight up and move on with my life. I feel almost Helena Bonham Carter with the wild hairs.

Speaking of which, I should start braiding my hair for the day. Toodles.

So I told the big kids I needed to not do much for a day and they needed to play with their sister all day long. They did! It was great! I was paged when I was needed and I cooked some vegetables for supper because otherwise we wouldn’t have had any all day (cauliflower, broccoli, and Brussels sprout roasted). I added goat cheese to mine. Mmmmmm

I sat in bed and played travel agent. So many flights and hotels and AirBnBs and travel are booked up through January 3rd. Then I’m staring off the edge of a cliff. I partially did this because a lot of countries are pissy about you entering without an exit date. So I don’t have to feel anxious about people glaring at me for “not going home” at the end. I was grilled like fuck coming into the UK. “When are you leaving? Why are you staying so long? Do you even have a job?”

I am not here for the dole, yo.

I spent $13,000 yesterday. But, my rent is paid up through January.

I feel like this is part of why I am feeling phobic about looking at Mint lately. How do I know how in budget I am when I am paying for stuff so far in advance?!

By the end of this calendar year I may have 300,000 frequent flier points. Not bad. If I add in the points my family is earning, definitely.

That’s going to pay for a lot of trips in 2020.

I miss Noah. Kid touch isn’t the same. I went and counted. Noah will be separated from us for 48 days this year. That’s a lot. We will cope, obviously, but it’s a lot.

Today we are going to meet Jenny and kids at a park. It will be fun. 🙂 We will get rained on in the lovely Scottish weather. Ha. Luckily we all have jackets to spare now.

I am feeling so blessed by all the food in my house right now. Japan and Hawaii were emotionally hard on me because I couldn’t stock up. But we keep talking about how much we already miss Japan. No one misses Hawaii. It’s not our paradise.

We only went to Hawaii because we wanted to see people. Who were then shitty and selfish. Oh well. That’s life.

My kids are having an interesting time watching what happens when you pull taut the threads of friendship. They see who is reaching back still despite the distance. They see that there are definitely *friends* in the world for them. They wish they had more, and local friends, of course… but they are feeling better about themselves just lately. They also struggled in the bay with not being able to tell who was really their friend and who was willing to come over and let us pay for entertainment.

We do have people who care about us very deeply. It’s nice. We continue to reach back. And our door will always be open to folks who want a spot on their own wanderings. We love you very much. California just wasn’t working anymore.

It’s not your fault and it isn’t my fault either.

I worry a lot about the future. There is no peace anywhere. There is no ease anywhere. We are heading for a cataclysmic event on a global scale.

Hold on to your tits.

Why do we have children when we are just damning them to a planet on the brink of collapse. Well, hope.

We have breakfasted (goodness it was good), had a morning snack, bathed, dressed, brushed hair, watched some Anne with an E, and now… blessed rest. Today will be easy.

My kids have actually adapted to being quieter more than I expected they would be able to. They need occasional gentle reminders but they are so much quieter than they were in California that it kind of feels like they had personality transplants.

They are both talking about how much they miss about Japan already. With a bigger kitchen we would have been very happy there for a lot longer. Good to know.

We are all excited about cooking again. Even with no salt everyone was very happy about our breakfast eggs. The beans were fabulous–less sweet than in the US but super tomato-y and lovely.

Also, scones for the win.

Both kids are being incredibly helpful and wonderful. They feel a renewed sense of purpose for maintaining a house. Japan was too much. This feels like the right amount of work. They asked if we could draw up a chore chart and figure out how to rotate the chores between us because that’s fun.

They both absolutely squeed with glee at getting to download more library books and they have both reread the kids books we sent to Scotland already. They are visiting old friends.

I now understand why Japanese nappies have such a great reputation. Scottish nappies… oh these blow chunks. (Which isn’t entirely positive, but it shows me how good I had it there.)

It was fun waking up to a boy in my bed because he wanted to be close to us.

My big kids have already done many hours of playing together after tidying their stuff. They are enjoying each other a lot.

Eldest Child heard from an old friend on Scratch (a website that teaches how to program and build video games). She had been talking about how much she misses him and she was super happy to hear from him. I told her she should write him a letter and her eyes lit up. She has known this boy since she was three. I told her she really doesn’t have to lose him just because we moved and she’s feeling thrilled. He clearly wants to keep in touch with her.

Both kids are feeling fairly connected to their friends even with the distance. That’s beautiful to see.

Her Sweetness painted her entire face and head with her breakfast beans while cackling madly. It was glorious.

I keep hearing from Dad’s girlfriend. I am feeling a lot of hope about the visit to Portland. I have touched base with several friends there already and we have all expressed desire to get together 1-3 times in the span I am there. If I am not setting aside 90% of my kid-free time for Sarah I get to actually see my other friends.

People do love me, even if I don’t always love myself. I continue to read the CPTSD book. I can only handle a few pages at a time because it is incredibly distressing and activating while also making me feel better about myself. I’m weird. But I was going to be weird. It’s interesting how this book is confirming something I have wondered for a while: the neglect/lack of love was probably far more damaging long-term than the sexual abuse or being hit. When your mother hates you from birth and teaches you that your existence is an unwanted burden… that’s hard to shake off. It’s not appropriate for later relationships to be unconditional and people who are neglected really hard in their first few years spend their whole life desperately wanting people to love them unconditionally and that fails because it’s not how adult relationships work.

My friends have to tell me no. My friends have to say “I can’t do that for you.” My friends have to say “If you do x I can’t be around you.” That is not an attack or a withdrawal of friendship that is appropriate boundary setting. But in my brain it doesn’t always read that way and I need to learn how to love myself enough to make up for those boundaries feeling like a statement that I do not deserve love and I should die.

That’s not what people are trying to say. But my brain was programmed to read things that way.

It’s inspiring reading a book by someone much older than me who says “Yeah this is shit work that we will never be finished with. It’s ok. You are worth doing all this work for.” I have to think I am worth putting in the effort to reprogram my brain. I have to try to interpret my friends behavior as healthy boundary setting because they are awesome autonomous people with their own lives.

That’s my work.

It is going to take me a while though.

Half an hour till the grocery store opens. Woo. Tomorrow I will figure out delivery. Today I just need to get food. Setting up internet accounts is hard when I’m this tired, I don’t have patience to spare. It is all going to my children. I’m doing well with that though. I’m talking about *why* we have to learn skills for our benefit and their future. I’m trying very hard to frame things as “We do this so we will be healthy/have strength/feel good” instead of “Stop doing x because you suck.” (I don’t tell my kids they suck.) I do sometimes tell them that I don’t have more patience to absorb inconvenience and still be nice. That’s true. Ok, baby requires entertainment now.

I don’t think we’ve had bad food here. I mean, even the spicy ramen that burned my asshole for three days tasted fantastic. Last night we went to the cat restaurant. We call it that because there is a picture of a cat on the door. What is the actual name of the restaurant? Fuck if I know, it’s only written in Japanese. But they actually have a resident cat who came out to greet us so I will lodge it in memory as the cat restaurant. The beef was dreamy. But let me back up.

It started with a fantastic soup that had a bunch of root vegetables, some beef, and some fish. Luckily Noah ate the soup the fastest so he found the fish and volunteered to take it from my bowl. Such a good husband. Then Noah and I got lovely large salads that were super delicious. Very well dressed and everything. Then came rice and miso soup. The kids also got the intro soup. Then the kids got plates of chicken. We found the word chicken on the menu with the app and the word beef and pointed at two random things. We had no real idea what we ordered.

The kids got a salt and pepper chicken and a basil chicken with a nice salad on the side, no rice. Noah and I got sizzling beef platter piled upon a bed of sprouts and cabbage with chunks of well cooked potatoes and carrots.

We shared this glorious bounty with no particular respect to who got what. It was great. I loved the food. That was some of the most glorious beef I’ve ever eaten in my entire life. It was also one of the most expensive meals we’ve had in this country, clocking in at $90. Worth every penny. But I can understand why the restaurant was empty when there are other restaurants right near by where we can feed our family to being stuffed on a mere $25.

Yesterday Noah had his first day of his conference. We woke up fairly early (we are waking up at about 5) and I nursed the baby so that she would go back to sleep for a while. I primped Noah. For Christmas he got a bunch of beard care fancy schtuff and I used most of it on him and I hand trimmed his beard because there is not a single plug in this apartment near a mirror. I also rubbed a bunch of lotion into him so that he smelled nice. Mmm pineapple. I applied deodorant because I am a nice person and he had a 45 minute walk ahead of him on his way to the conference. I have met my smelly mammal.

The kids and I had a pretty chill day. I went to the grocery store as usual. Her Sweetness is now demanding that we hold her hands and walk her around for large stretches of the day. Luckily the big kids like to help so we were tapping in and out of that job. We did that while watching a show together. It was fun.

The kids are doing writing stuff for academics and occasional loosey goosey math. We are finishing up notebooks so we have less to carry. I love that Eldest Child is mostly writing fanfic about Warriors (It’s about cat clans) and Middle Child is writing opinion pieces on where he thinks Girl Genius is going. He thinks Zeetha will win over Bangladesh Dupree and he had a lot of specific reasons in his essay. That was really fun to read.

He also drew a comic illustrating his most recent argument with his sister. I found it pretty funny.

I spent a bunch of time sitting with myself and trying to process how much I am over reacting vs how much I am having necessary feelings about different situations in my life. I am feeling a lot better about myself reading this CPTSD book. He stresses that the goal isn’t to feel joy all of the tme because that is unrealistic, unattainable, and a really stressful thing to put on yourself. The goal is to stop beating yourself up for existing and having a range of feelings.

He also talks a lot about regressing (he calls it emotional flashbacks) to emotional states from childhood as being something that can go on for months or years. That dovetails into what I am observing about myself during the early parts of my children’s lives. He talks about how doing the things you need to do the most will often trigger overwhelming shame and anxiety because you were trained as a child that you should not take care of yourself.

It’s like Sarah telling me that I can’t talk about the ways I felt bad about our relationship because I was publicly shaming her. That’s exactly like my mom telling me that I can’t talk about the shit in our family because it is airing dirty laundry.

Sunshine is the best disinfectant.

I don’t think Sarah is a bad person. I don’t think she intended to hurt me. She was protecting herself. We all need to do that, right?

But it’s kind of like how I need to stop treating other people like they are more important than me. They aren’t. I don’t need to keep showing up to help people who will drive past me to help someone else. I don’t need to keep hosting events so that other people can have a sense of community but people won’t show up to hang out with me one on one because really… they are just at my events so they can have the other people in the group.

I can’t do that any more.

I can’t keep contributing to the home schooling groups that are absolutely rigidly controlled by the leader, but everyone is welcome to work for her benefit as much as they want.

Nope. Nope. Nope.

I’m not anti-work. I’m against people expecting me to always give for the joy of giving while not getting anything back because I am supposed to not need support. I’m a fucked up person with a lot of problems of my own. Most of my support comes from people I pay… but I’m expected to help other people for free.

I can’t do this anymore. I’m not a “Fuck you, pay me” person. But I wanted exchanges not being bled dry.

My shrink asked me to think about what I want to get from people in Portland and I have not been able to respond to her because thinking about that makes me want to throw up. I am not allowed to want anything. If I want something it won’t happen and I will be disappointed and then I will be a bad person because I will act disappointed. My expectations get me in trouble all over the place. I want to leave Portland with my friendships intact and not feeling bad about myself.

And I can’t write anymore because my kids won’t leave the room. ok.

Noah is walking to the store. I have a sleeping baby on my lap. Big kids are in their apartment folding their clean laundry.

It’s been a tiring day. We walked a bit over 5 miles today. We went to thrift stores but no one wanted some of the stuff I wanted to donate. Shit. I was able to get rid of clothing at H&M. That did help but some of this stuff is going to end up in the garbage and that makes me sad.

I’m getting a lot out of this book (Complex PTSD: From Surviving to Thriving: A GUIDE AND MAP FOR RECOVERING FROM CHILDHOOD TRAUMA). A few friends have commented that they felt I was regressing since Her Sweetness was born. I think that is true. I think I have done so with each of my kids. I think that my early life (like the first 2 years) was probably a lot more traumatic than I even understand. I think that’s part of why I am such a basket case when I have tiny children. I feel like their needs matter and mine don’t and I drive myself to utter exhaustion and depletion trying to be there for them around the clock with inadequate support. 

I definitely perceive some of the lack of support as being my fault. Noah and I have shoved our parents away and that’s who helps most people.

I’ve been thinking about something in context of the online therapy and reading this book: why does being alone feel like such punishment? Well, I suspect that is related to a lot of my foster homes. A lot of the places where I was sent to live would tell me that I had to stay alone in a room for all of the hours I was in the house because I was bad. So being alone makes me feel like I am still in that place. Like I don’t deserve to be around people. Because I am bad and bad and bad.

The online shrink asked how I handle tasks like going to get massage or brushing my teeth as self-care. Can I handle them? Well, I have had to mostly learn to perceive these activities as saving Noah money in the long run. I feel a lot of shame over how much money he has already spent fixing my shitty body. (God my mouth is expensive.) I don’t want to cost him any more than I absolutely have to and that means I have to do maintenance work. I can’t be penny wise and pound foolish on him. That’s not fair. I have to do this stuff or I am going to be way more expensive in the future. I’m disabled and it is getting worse. It will get a lot worse in the future if I don’t do everything I can to fight against the flow now.

But if I don’t have time alone I go crazy and get really fucking mean. So this balance of not wanting to be alone is a problem.

It’s useful to be reminded that I am basically in a large scale flash back and that’s why I am not coping as well as I was before I got pregnant again. It’s neat having Eldest Child remember that I was a lot more calm and patient and good at dealing with problems before I got pregnant. She said it was like a switch flipped.

Oh baby. And it was easier this time.

It’s nice that I can at least see that for myself. This time was easier and it was still hard. It was easier mostly because of the big kids and that feels complicated. I’ve tried hard not to lean on them too much, but I definitely have times when I say things like “Hold your baby I have to grab x”. (Like I did today when I was carrying stuff up and down stairs.)

I don’t feel possessive of her. We all wanted her to be made. She is our baby. Which is neat and complicated. I don’t feel like the kids are sub-parents. But we take the family pod thing pretty seriously. We belong to each other. They are only mine in as much as I am theirs. My kids talk pretty regularly about how lucky they feel to have each other as friends. “I’m so glad I like you so much.” We have periods where they struggle with each other, of course, but overall the balance for us is so heavily weighed towards finding solutions and nobody being More Important that I feel really happy.

I wanted this with my “chosen family” and that didn’t work out.

I am struggling with trying to view the chosen family stuff not working out the same way that I view my previous romantic relationships not working out. It’s not that I failed at those relationships: they ran their course and I learned a lot and they were good. I wouldn’t have been able to have as healthy of a relationship with Noah if I had not had those experiences and I am glad I am this level of healthy for him. I would not be able to be as good for/with my kids as I am if not for the relationships I had with my chosen family people.

We are reading a book called Philosophy for Kids and it presents a bunch of philosophical arguments and then prompts discussion. There was a question about what makes a friend. It was an Aristotelian sort of lens. It was interesting to me how my definition of friendship culls a lot of people and yet… it doesn’t? I maintain a lot of relationships because people are important to me. I can be in my blog screaming “Fuck you” because I have big feelings and then write you a long letter about what I appreciate about you. Because both feelings are true and present.

The fuck yous are mostly about me trying to come to grips with my expectations for you being out of whack with reality.

My expectations really fuck me over.

They ruin friendships. They ruin situations that should be good for me. Because I have this picture in my head of what I want things to be like and other people… don’t share those pictures.

It’s part of why I ask my kids so many questions about what they want from me and what they want in relationships. I can’t guess. I will fuck it up. I can’t try to force our relationship to be what I want… I will fuck it up. I hurt Noah so much with my bullshit expectations.

I can’t figure it out and manage to get it right with every friend I have. But I need to get it right with these four people. My friendships will have to morph or die and that has to be ok and healthy and appropriate.

Today I read something about how when you have CPTSD sometimes the most correct actions in a given moment make you feel ashamed and terrified because those behaviors were not acceptable during your childhood.

I feel like Sarah and I traumatized each other. We were neither of us the most healthy of people with the best boundaries and we used our individual neediness as a weapon against the other. That completely sucks because we really do love each other. Sometimes love is not enough. If I don’t feel like breaking up with my Owner was a failure because we needed different things from a partnership, why do I feel like a failure because my relationship with Sarah ended? Why do I use that feeling of failure as a bludgeon on myself to “prove” that I am pathetic and bad at relationships and incapable of being a good friend?

Fucking brains, yo.

I mean, I keep talking about how I will only focus on my family. But I’m running to Jenny. When I leave Jenny I go to see a whole bunch of people I love very much in the PNW. I have folks I will be seeing in Portland and Seattle and Eugene. Because they are important. Because when I have that physical distance most of the time it is easier for me to feel grateful about 3 hours of talking every few years being enough. I don’t have bigger expectations of people when we don’t live near each other on the regular.

Ok, that’s a lie too. It hurts that Dad only invites me to leather events when I bloody well don’t have childcare and that’s just not an option for me. He doesn’t invite me into his family where my children would be appropriate.

But I cope with that by putting him in a little box and not ever asking for anything from him. I get what I get and I shouldn’t be upset.

Fuck should.

But I love him. I want what I get so I am not allowed to complain about not getting more. I fucked things up with Sarah wanting more and I don’t want to do that with everyone. So I will smile and hug him and enjoy the moments I get to have and that’ll be that.

Life is so complicated. I have so much good going for me. I really don’t get to feel like my life is unfairly bad at this stage. But I’m a selfish twat waffle and I want ALL THE GOOD. Geez woman. There isn’t enough time in the day for all the good. You get a lot.

Really, I do get a lot.

Life doesn’t always bring this much good to a person.

Show some damn gratitude.

Breathe deep. Things will be ok.

We will find a forever home. We have friends and we will make more. We do that. Now I have a family. If I can make a family this awesome…. I can do anything.

I am enjoying the book on CPTSD I’m reading. It’s very useful framing for a lot of what is going on in my brain. I will always struggle with this shit. Every time I struggle I will feel like I have made no progress at all and I am a failure.

This is part of the norm for people like me.

I feel like night weaning is going well-ish again. She is still waking up a ton but I am far more patient with it when I’m not in pain. Her ever increasing number of teeth are brutal.

We had an accident today on the rug. A marker broke. I was hungry and I worried about exploding so I went and ate something before I talked to a kid about it. Mistakes happen. We all break things. We all have times when we mess up. I am creating my children’s inside voice when I react to things like this. I said, “Hey! Know how you have a whole bunch of short term savings in case you need to fix a mistake? You have literally prepared for this happening. Because life is hard and things happen. It’s ok. It’s just a thing. Nobody died.”

*pat self on back*

I feel like I was a complete basket case for the first 18 months of having the two big kids. As much as I am still struggling (fucking nightmares) things are better than they were at the same age with the big kids. Her Sweetness is only 14 months old and I can eat something and respond calmly to an issue. I don’t think I was capable of that 8 years ago.

As much as I feel like I will never be anything other than a monster… I am improving with age. I just have to be willing to look at things in perspective. I am still not who I want to be.

I think often of what Jenny put in my birthday book. I look at myself and see how far I still want to get. She looks at me and sees how far I have come.

I get to see Jenny in a week. I’m so excited.

I am working hard on trying to get my emotions under control. I need to absorb the tranquility of Japan even with the frustrations of the limitations of this space. I have to. I want to make a good impression on Jenny’s kids. If I fuck up the first impression this time… I won’t be able to get that back. The older girl will remember me this time. I don’t want to be “that bitch” in her memory.

Come on Krissy, get it together.

Not to mention that I’m thinking really hard about how my behavior impacts Noah and I’m thinking about how I want to be impacting Noah. I actually got fairly lucky in my dating life. I was treated pretty darn well by most of the people I dated. Noah is a shining star above all of them. Noah has given me consistency (even though that is super hard for him) and kindness (that the world has never given him) and love (that no one ever gave him).

I want to be the partner he deserves. Because he tells me that he is the partner I deserve and he is so great.

I am really frustrated. This apartment size is getting to me. There is literally no where to be out of the way unless you shove into a corner of the room. Most of those corners mean you can’t eat because the god damn rug is electric and we all spill our food so we have to stand/sit/crouch around the tiny bit of bare floor. And then if anyone wants to get up and get something else everyone has to god damn shift over. I am losing my mind.

Eldest Child’s knee is almost better. She has cabin fever. But we are up three flights of stairs and she was irritating it a lot and I need her to be all the way better before we go through another airport so we have to sit around and wait until it is FULLY healed, not almost healed. I am so bored.

I am tired of my entire days being laundry, cleaning, go get food, clean, interspersed with constant nursing and diaper changes.

I went out on a self date the other night. I got 2 whole hours away. The restaurant I picked had great food and shitty attitude. The host and another customer asked where I was from then had a loud sneering conversation in Japanese about “California” and “English only”. Given that they have a Japanese word that doesn’t sound like English they were pretty clearly making sure I understood they were talking shit. It wasn’t peaceful or fun.

I don’t get to go explore the city. Even if I did go I would have to take the two younger kids and Middle Child would loudly complain the whole time if I did anything other than go to a children’s play area.

I don’t get to have down time.

I don’t get to sleep.

Dealing with food is a nightmare. I am so frustrated. We have to walk to the store every day to get preprepared food that varies day by day and my kids are being really snotty about anything being weird and I am fucking out of patience. YES. THEY EAT FUCKING CHICKEN SKIN HERE. SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT IT AND GOD DAMN EAT BECAUSE I AM NOT WALKING ANOTHER TWO MILES TO TRY TO FIND SOMETHING OTHER THAN THESE GOD DAMN SKEWERS. THIS WAS THE NON SEAFOOD OPTION. WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT FROM ME?!!?!?!?!

Obviously I have not said that. But I am gritting my teeth a lot and I’m getting really short with their complaints. At first I told them they didn’t have to eat anything they didn’t like. Then that turned into living on fruit and sugary bread. Guess what, you have to eat the fucking protein I can find. I am sorry they don’t exclusively have chicken breasts for you. Suck. It. Up.

I have had to eat more than one thing that probably had seafood in it because that’s what there was. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.

We can’t only have familiar food. And no you can’t live on cream buns. That’s not ok.

I am really glad the kids told me they only wanted to be here for three weeks instead of longer. They show great wisdom.

Every other apartment for the next few months will have an easier kitchen. That’s turning out to be an even bigger deal than I could have imagined. We need a table. We need a place where we can sit down and eat together. It’s important. We need a way to cook so that we are not dependent on whatever the store puts together that day from mostly seafood.

This country is both more polite than my experience of Paris and less polite. It’s fascinating. I don’t want to “go home” but I don’t want to be here anymore.

Thank you, next.

I miss scrambles. Eating raw fruit and vegetables every day for breakfast probably isn’t helping. I’m hungry. The meals in restaurants here usually leave me feeling hungry and I need to go supplement. The people here are smaller and their calorie needs are lower. But I also kind of feel like a pig when I buy 5-6 preprepared “meals” for our family of 4 adult sized people and a baby. But we eat them.

And the baby is sick. I am frustrated. I am probably getting sick too. But I sucked a looooooot of snot out of her nose. The nose Frida is simultaneously awesome and truly disgusting.

I just want to rest. I want a bed day. I want to not have to clean for a day. I want to not have to go take care of anyone or anything.

That won’t be happening any year soon and today I feel super bitter and angry about it.

I get really stuck on the negative. So here’s some of the positive stuff I’m noticing about my kids:

Middle Child has been working on himself in a variety of ways. Even though I can still find frustration with his volume and stomping, he has gone from screaming all the time to talking loudly. That’s absolutely amazing. He’s doing great in context of how far he has come over the past few years. I told him that I am no longer upset about him hitting a 9 out of 10 in terms of volume I’m trying to get him to go from a 6 to a 4. That’s a big accomplishment already.

He has been very good about managing the size of his body in relationship to other kids lately. We went to the park yesterday and he was super careful of all the tiny little children running around. He took turns and looked carefully before going down slides or throwing things. I could visibly see him putting effort into caring about the people around him. He has also been much more gentle with both of his sisters since we got to Japan. I can see him pulling himself back and refraining from roughness. I am really proud of him. He was really rough in Hawaii and he’s put a lot of effort into chilling out over the past two weeks.

He has been pressuring me about sugar far less. He is eating fruits and vegetables and plain yogurt without complaint. (He’s is having some itching issues. Plain yogurt is the best way to encourage your body to stop itching that I know.) He has been noticing how good he feels emotionally when he exercises and he has been asking to go on long walks. That’s a big deal!

He is also doing way better with academics since we got here. Having the expectation of doing some sort of reading or writing or talking about academic subjects for an hour a day instead of trying for 3-4 hours a day of doing specific assigned work has really helped him. He feels more successful so he is more willing to try. I think that a lot of his abject refusal to try for a while was because he felt like he was going to fall short, so why bother starting?

He’s even doing better with hygiene stuff. There is still room for improvement… but he’s doing a lot better with fewer reminders.

Eldest Child has been really doing super well on hygiene stuff. She has a lot more body stuff to take care of these days since puberty is inching into her life. Her dandruff has been intense since we got to the cold/dry weather. We found her some shampoo and she’s using it religiously. She has also had a massive acne breakout and she is doing multiple steps of skin care a day. She is still keeping her ear piercings very clean and I feel really glad to see her taking so much responsibility for her body. She’s doing great on teeth care and everything. This has been a real struggle for us in her lifetime and I feel like she has grown up a lot over the last couple of months in this department. She has a lot more to do and she feels a lot more motivated to do it for herself. It’s neat to see.

Her art work continues to really impress me. She has made progress with some of her digital drawing stuff as well as her continual progress on paper. She still prefers pencils to other mediums and that’s cool. Her flowers are really neat. She gets texture and shading stuff that I am not good at reproducing. I love watching her talent grow.

She has been taking responsibility for reaching out to her friends and good golly Miss Molly I am so excited to see that. She is emailing some folks. She is reaching out to try to set up Skype dates (these have only sorta worked so far, she’s figuring out how to schedule with kids) and she is trying to write letters. I am really impressed to see her try to grow like this. She is becoming much more adult.

She is pushing back on some of my behavior that is a problem for her. That’s a big forking deal. I am really proud of her for saying that I am hurting her and I need to stop. I want her to have these kinds of skills and abilities for life. I mean, yes of course it would be best if I never hurt her… but let’s be realistic. People are going to fuck up and hurt her. I am glad she is learning how to say “That isn’t ok and it needs to stop.” Important life skill training.

I continue to be shocked by how drawn to fruits and vegetables she is. She is also really grooving on the rice here. She has never been all that into meat but she is trying to eat more nuts and tofu to make up for it. She also asked us to get some miso, tofu, and seaweed. We are going to break out the burner later today and try to cook for her in her apartment. She’s excited to get to learn more about cooking in a new environment.

Her writing has come so far. I am absolutely stunned by how legible and well spelled her writing is these days. She has put a lot of effort into improving and I think that’s amazing. I don’t harp on her and I don’t force her to do spelling practice. She learned more about spelling because the kids in the chat rooms made fun of her. heh.

Both of the big kids are doing super well on regulating their sleep. That’s great.

Her Sweetness has hit another growth spurt. The 18 month clothing that fit well in Hawaii is starting to be high waters and super tight. I am going to be donating a whole bunch of it here and not replacing it till we get to Scotland. I am trying to see how I can bring this high chair with us because it is so dang handy and replacing it would be annoying. I think it will fit into our biggest suitcase if I get rid of a bunch of other stuff. Ok, I can do that. It weighs less than 7 lbs. The other things that MUST go in that bag is the giant pad of art paper and the laundry basket. So that bag may end up being less than 30 lbs because the stuff in it is so bulky. That would be kind of amusing.

Baby girl is signing more and she is trying to speak more. She is standing on her own a lot but she still isn’t quite ready to walk. I’m starting to think she won’t hit that milestone in Japan even though I kind of thought she might when we arrived. That’s dandy. She has clearly gained some weight and carrying her around is a struggle. She’s a good eater. Whoof.

Noah is being so kind. I think that the lack of cooking time/effort is feeling a little bit break like for him. We both spend some time food prepping and we spend a lot more time on set up and clean up but it’s still less time than he spent on food planning and prep in California. Way less cooking time than in Hawaii when he was trying to dance around using the minimally adequate kitchen. Here we are just buying prepared foods and raw fruit/veg and calling it a day.

Noah has a big presentation in less than a week and he hasn’t snapped at us once. Even though we are in his face 24 hours a day and he has to work with enormous distraction. He is plowing through his work and doing his best to be pleasant even though we can be quite frustrating. I continue to be overwhelmed by how much effort this man thinks we are worth. I could not have earned what he gives me and my children. He does it because he wants to. I am so glad I get to have him as a partner.

We have managed to have sex here and it was really nice. Sex has changed so much for us over the past 15 years. I feel grateful that he keeps trying to grow and change and figure out how to be good for me.

I am very blessed.

And golly that email from Pam this morning was like a ray of sunshine. Thank you for taking time out of your day to tell me what I do right. It is really hard for me to feel like those things happen. I am grateful that you tell me that you see it.

I’m reading a book about CPTSD. The author says that it is important to be in touch with all of your feelings, but it’s not ok to display anger in unhealthy ways. Just reading that sentence makes me cry because I don’t think I understand what an “acceptable” way to display anger is. I mean, I know I can’t call names. I know I can’t scream and shout and break things. But mostly my experience is that when I try to set boundaries without flipping out… either someone else flips out to try and stop me from expressing what I’m expressing or they just ignore me.

Many months before Sarah and I broke up I told her in a face to face conversation that I thought it would be a good idea to walk back many of the promises she was making because she seemed to be having trouble keeping them. She assured me that she was going to keep them thank you for reminding her.

That didn’t increase how reliable she was at all. It didn’t increase the attention she paid to my kids. She did tell me that when I wrote about her failures it made her not want to try at all since I was publicly shaming her. So I stopped writing about her as much. That didn’t help either. I am fucked no matter how I try to fix it.

My needs suck. My needs make me hate myself and hate other people. Because if I have a need I can’t fix on my own it just won’t get met and I can go fuck myself.

A bunch of former neighbors keep emailing me. On one hand that’s really nice. On the other hand, they are emailing me because they want me to tell them how to fix problems in their life because I am no longer wandering the neighborhood being helpful. “Where do I buy this?” “How can I fix x problem with the DMV?” “That thing you made for me–how do I make it?”

I mean… it’s nice that they think I’m so competent? But I feel absolutely terrible. I’m in a new very constrained environment trying to figure out how to meet basic needs for my family. All food acquisition happens with me walking a fair distance. Eldest Child hasn’t been up for our normal walking because she bloody keeps falling down and hurting herself. (I think she is growing and her center of balance is off. She does this every so often. But I can’t just drive her around until this is fixed again like I could in California.)

I am struggling to meet my own needs. Why don’t I just take time out of my day to fix all y’alls problems too…

People on the internet keep telling me that I shouldn’t give to people if I have any expectation of getting anything back. I should only give when I can do so from a spirit of generosity not needing anything back from the person.

Then I should never have bought DVC. Then I shouldn’t ever respond to any of these emails. Then quite a few of my “friends” are people I should stop contacting ever again.

Because I do want things back from them. And that makes me bad.

Having unmet needs that I can’t fix for myself makes me bad.

I had a good chat with Eldest Child today about feelings and protecting each other. We talked about how sometimes I am too hard on her and she feels like she can’t tell me that I am hurting her. I said that is a major problem that we need to fix because it’s not ok for my child to be absorbing my pain. She said she doesn’t want to upset me. I told her that if I am hurting her then I need to be upset with myself and I need to change. She said she feels really bad upsetting me. I suggested writing me letters so she doesn’t need to see my reaction. She said she will try it.

I don’t need people to treat me like I never do anything wrong. But I am so bad at setting boundaries without being angry. I am just ignored.

It’s like with Noah and the sex stuff. I tried to talk about it for a long time. I couldn’t make him understand until I started acting out in hurtful ways. I don’t feel proud of myself. I feel like I am a shitty person who never deserves to be trusted or treated well again. But I needed it to stop and I will accept the consequences for doing what I had to do. That’s the deal.

I spent my third pregnancy sitting at home and crying because I wanted to kill myself. I had less ability to drive than usual so less therapy. I didn’t really see friends. I feel incredibly wounded by that experience after I spent so many years driving to help people. To clean up the hoarders houses because they couldn’t do it emotionally. To help people post-surgery. To bring food and companionship to new mothers or elderly folk.

But fuck me.

Yeah the bay area was “perfect”. Perfectly happy to use me up until I kill myself.

“Everyone would be much happier if people just stopped perceiving microaggressions.” Well that sounds about white.

Some people will be happier, that’s true.

I bought fucking DVC so I could have a way of financing spending time with Sarah. She wanted me to give her my points so she could have trips with her friends and family and not deal with my needs.

I looked into selling the points. It looks like they are almost 3x’s as expensive now as when I bought them. At least I will make back the money I spent on those trips. In the long run I will probably effectively make back all the money I ever spent on park admissions and food.

I don’t think I can come back to California to live and I don’t think I care enough to fly back to Disneyland. I feel like the whole place is poisoned for me.

She took money I gave her for groceries and bought a plane ticket to go see her sister. It’s not like it was a one time thing that she took resources from me so that she got to feel like she was the one taking care of her family.

I don’t even know if I feel bitter. Just sad. Rejected. Worthless.

How does Noah make me feel better about myself than other people do? He absolutely does not make promises unless he can keep them. He makes me feel like I am worth honesty. He’s quick to tell me that he can’t do something. He doesn’t expect me to give and give and give so he can turn around and pass that effort on and look cool because he has it to give.

I am tired of feeling sad and worthless. I am tired of needing to explode with anger so that I can get people to stop saying, “Well why don’t you give more to me.”

BECAUSE I AM FUCKING EMPTY. FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU.

Dad’s girlfriend has been super kind about our upcoming trip to Portland. I don’t have one bad thing to say about her. But I hate myself for feeling suspicious and tentative because this came after I turned down loaning him $25,000 and I told him that I didn’t ever expect to be welcome in his home again now that it is full.

He said that we could stay there in the guest room but he wouldn’t dismantle his dungeon. He would just throw a blanket over stuff.

Uhm.

I don’t know that the amount I shield my kids from kinky shit is necessary. It doesn’t matter if it is necessary or more than needed. I am going to keep doing it because this is how my fucked up brain knows that there will be no inappropriate sexual conversations with my children. They know about anatomy. They know about birth control. They know that some day when they are ready I will support them doing whatever makes them happy. They don’t ever need to know that I like to be whipped and called a whore.

Do I like it? Do I feel like it is what I deserve?

I can’t separate those things.

I had good dreams last night. I asked Noah to hypnotize me to sleep. This was the first morning in a while where I didn’t wake up crying and/or feeling sick.

I know I hurt my kids and it makes me feel like dogshit. I know I hurt my friends and it makes me feel like I should disappear so I never hurt them again. I have to set boundaries and I seem to be incapable of doing so and having healthy relationships. That means I should be alone. That’s how I should set the boundaries. That way I don’t hurt people. I don’t have the right to hurt people. That’s me being a selfish cunt.

Asking people to please, please, please not make promises they can’t keep… that’s not ok. That’s not enough. They promise because they want to be able to keep the promise. Then I’m the fucking asshole when I notice that they are effectively lying to me.

I’m the asshole. I’m the asshole. I’m the asshole.

But I’m an asshole who got the baby to sleep finally. So I got to type. Wheeeee

I had a realization yesterday about pieces of the anxiety going away: I don’t see white men anymore. I don’t have to be ready to fight at any given moment. When I say that my anxiety is less, that’s what I mean. Violent crime is really low here. As a white person, the police would be very eager to help me deal with any problem I had with a citizen as a matter of national pride. If I showed up visibly assaulted to a police station… they would take it seriously.

In the US they would tell me that they won’t ruin that nice boy’s life over me.

So that’s a huge component of my day to day anxiety. I am afraid of white men for very good reasons. Like with my shitty neighbor: I had to kick him over and over and bruise his ribs to get him to let go of my upper thigh. That’s just life in the US. That won’t happen to me here. I can’t imagine a Japanese man thinking he had the right to do that. Sure, they might try to look up my skirt. I hear about issues of gropings on trains, but walking down the street it isn’t going to happen and I’m avoiding trains.

But I am afraid of my friendships. I am afraid of messing them up more than I do by existing. I am afraid that if I advocate for myself that people won’t want to be in my life anymore. I am afraid that if someone asks me for an overwhelming kind of support I will hurt myself to give it because they are more important than me. I am afraid that it isn’t ok for me to ask for any support. So I am not asking for support.

I haven’t talked to anyone on a video chat in a couple of weeks because I would want to dump my emotional pain and I don’t have the right.

I need to just try to shove this shit in a hole and try to get back to “appearing happy” because that is all people want from me.

If I can’t spend a phone call asking questions about their life and supporting them I don’t have the right to have a phone call at all. Right now I don’t have anything to give so I am not calling anyone. I am having brief internet chats because it is slightly easier for me to shove my crap down and not bring it up as much… but I’m not even doing as well at that as I should be. I feel so much shame for every mention of feeling bad.

How dare I think my feelings are important. Just shut up. You are centering yourself again you stupid white bitch.

Eldest Child hurt her knee the day we arrived in Japan. She spent a few days walking on it and now she is waking up with it swollen. Yesterday it felt better by the afternoon so she wanted to walk to a restaurant. I shouldn’t have allowed it. I won’t allow it today. We are applying ice. She is taking ibuprofen. When she takes the ibuprofen she feels fine and she wants to play. She needs to bloody sit still for a day or three. Clearly nothing is broken. Clearly she doesn’t have a torn tendon or anything. She just won’t let it rest and walking to a restaurant means a good 2 mile walk roundtrip at minimum. Today I will be carrying all of our food home for everybody. I have carried most of it home for the past few days.

Noah is doing less of the food prep here. He has a serious need to spread out and I can cope with neatly preparing things on a tiny counter better than he can. So I’m doing it. It’s not my favorite but it’s important in this space. So I’m doing a lot of fetching and prepping food many times a day on top of my normal workload. He’s doing more baby care while I do the prep but that means she is wandering around his feet while he’s on the computer. (He has a presentation in 9 days that is kinda the entire point of his job and is why he gets paid the big bucks. He needs to be working a lot and I get that. He’s not being lazy nor rude.)

The big kids are frustrating in the extreme because I have to beg, cajole, and push them through even doing the dishes. They truly want to do nothing for anyone. They don’t want to do basic hygiene unless I stand over them glaring. They don’t want to wash dishes (we have a plate, utensils, a bowl, and a cup per person along with a knife and cutting board used per meal–it’s way less than they used to cope with at home) or sweep or do anything unless I am aggressive and kind of mean. They want to play, demand sugar, and say that I should be entertaining them more. As my work load has increased.

I am struggling to keep my temper. I am not yelling or screaming mostly because it would be so abominably shameful to do here. Wheeeeeee.

I feel really bad about myself. I feel like a failure on almost every level. I feel stupid. I feel worthless. I feel like a tool that is nearing its breaking point so I should be thrown away and replaced.

I don’t feel valuable or loved. Noah is trying, but I feel near constant guilt that I’m not pouncing him for sex the minute the baby goes to sleep because don’t I owe him that too? I am really scared I am going to get to Scotland and I will have to avoid Jenny’s family entirely or risk being anything other than perfectly nice so that I deserve them hating me. I can’t lose Jenny right now. Not right on the heels of losing Sarah. So maybe I can’t risk contact with her or her family while I am such a fucking stupid cunt.

I have to cry on the toilet because there is literally no other place for me to be.

I am trying to be light and perky and giving because I know that is what is expected of me.

But I am empty.

Me and the big kids are having a lot of nightmares. Last night for me was about a “Christian Mission” housing orphans and sex workers. The organizers deliberately kept it bare of anything but beds (with no covers for the mattresses) and it was dirty and run down and giant like a maze. There were no corridors. You had to walk through rooms to get to rooms. I was looking for my mother in there and I kept walking through sex workers having to deal with violent clients. The owners were secretly rich. They got government funding to run this shithole and they didn’t see why they should have to share “their” reward.

Eldest Child has been having a lot of nightmares about Paul Hollywood chasing her with bread products. She has brought this up most mornings for weeks. Middle Child has had a continuing dream about all people under 40 being forced to live in one building complex where they are forced to work. (You are let out at 40 because you have no more value.) There is a long list of rules you have to follow and if you break any you are put in jail where you will do everyone else’s laundry by hand.

We are all anxious as fuck.

I am struggling with feeling like I am bad for writing about my feelings. Surely I am only doing so because I want to control people and I am bad. I am trying to force people to act in a certain way; I am being controlling and evil and…

I have a hard time with the way that mental health diagnosis stuff is weaponized. I can’t count how many lay people have told me that I must have Borderline because they don’t like how I am acting. Actually bitch, more than 30 clinicians have come to the conclusion that I definitely don’t so why don’t you go fuck yourself with a rusty spork.

I used to be friends with a woman. When she didn’t like my behavior she would start telling me that I was acting manic and I needed to get that under control. When I politely and calmly asked her to not use diagnosing language for me because she is not someone I am paying to have a medical opinion about me she completely fucking exploded and started screaming at the top of her lungs that she is a terrible person WHO SHOULD JUST DIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIE. I spent a bunch of time trying to calm her down and assuring her that I don’t think she is a terrible person who does nothing right, I just have a problem with this one behavior. It was really awful. How come I have to become your therapist telling you that you are ok because you did something that wasn’t fucking ok?

I am terrified of forcing people to appease me. So I spend a lot of time appeasing others. I don’t want to be appeased. I would rather move away and stop talking to anyone rather than force them to jump through hoops to appease me.

I am also struggling with a dynamic with my kids that has been going on for years. I have many examples going back a long time. I do this thing where I deliberately focus on the kids for a day each in a week then on a different day I say “We did x person’s thing 3 days ago and y person’s thing 2 days ago and z person’s thing yesterday today I want us to do ______.” Every time my kids start badgering me and/or tantruming about how they want _______. Sometimes it is something they want to do (that won’t be fun for me at all–like supervising them in a play area) but often it is demanding that I supply them with sugar. “I want ice cream” repeated for hours.

It makes me feel really really bad. I pay a lot of attention to you. You get your way a lot. Why don’t I get to say I want to spend 3 hours doing this other thing?

Noah always tells me that I can go do the thing by myself and leave him with the kids so that the kids don’t have a chance to do it to me. Then I find a corner to crawl into and I cry.

Why don’t I just be alone. I go through all this effort for all these people and when I want to do something I think is fun… why don’t I just be alone.

I don’t want all day every day to be my fun stuff. I don’t ask for anything even vaguely approaching that.

One of my buddies really wants me to call her. She has texted me a few times asking me to. But she wants a free therapist (she has never seen a real therapist). She wants advice on parenting and dealing with her parents and dealing with her legal troubles and dealing with the government. She spends about 5 minutes asking me how my kids are doing then she launches into all the stuff she wants help with. She doesn’t know anything about me. I don’t ever get to talk about how I am doing or what is going on for me. She literally knows nothing about me other than I always seem to have answers to her questions. I haven’t called her. I feel guilty. She begged me to please do so soon, definitely before I leave Japan. Something is probably going on for her and she wants me to tell her how to fix it.

I can’t fix my problems. Why do you want me spending my energy on fixing yours?

I am struggling a lot with feeling invalid. If i have both negative and positive feelings about someone clearly I am vacillating between idealizing and tearing someone down. Uhhhh, no? I am having both sets of feelings at the same time? I am not alternating? Oh. Well I have strong negative and positive feelings about people sometimes. THEN YOU HAVE BORDERLINE. Wait, what?

I feel like a lot of people weaponize mental health discussions to invalidate people having feelings as a reaction to legitimate negative treatment. I am pretty sure Sarah felt like she was supporting me as much as I supported her. If I disagree with that assessment it must be because I have Borderline.

I feel like I have to get enraged before I believe it is ok to defend my boundaries, then I am a bad person because I got so angry. But if I try to defend my boundaries in more mild ways I am walked on. I have no acceptable way to explain what I want or need. Anything I do to try and manifest that something is a problem for me is either ignored or used as a reason to prove I am bad.

I had to be willing to toss my relationship with Sarah overboard before I could say “The way you ask me to devote all of my spare time to you but then you rarely show up because your other friends are more interesting/important isn’t ok”. I am not allowed to object to being treated shoddily until I am willing to say “Fuck you. I am done.”

Then I have Borderline because I end relationships!

So what you are saying is that if I don’t let people treat me like I am disposable I have a personality disorder?

Ok.

I am tired of feeling like my emotions aren’t valid because they aren’t what other people want them to be. I am tired of having people (often strangers, but sometimes those who are closest to me–like Sarah) use weaponized language about my mental health. Either I act like they are perfect and never complain about their behavior or I have a personality disorder or a mental illness I have not been diagnosed with. I have spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to figure out what is actually wrong with me because so many people have been confident telling me there is a lot wrong with me.

Yeah. There is. But I have a pretty complete picture of what that is now. And fuck you for thinking that your stupid, ill informed, ignorant, hateful opinion needs to be added to my mental picture of myself. You are a selfish asshole. How’s that for a diagnostic reference for you?

I am tired of feeling sad. I am tired of feeling less important than other people. Noah tries all he can to mitigate that for me but it is so big.

A talented Black woman I learn from said recently that she won’t engage with white women because white women are violent (verbally but this shit counts) in their pursuit of having the status of white men and they are happy to step on men/women of color in the process. I have not stopped talking to my friends who are not white because of that statement, but it makes me question whether I have the right to ever approach another POC for friendship because I am inherently violent and dangerous.

I don’t want to hurt people. But I absolutely have. I have significant power to do more damage.

The only way I know I can stop hurting people is to die. Which is not saying “Be my friend or I will kill myself.” I am saying that people are hurt in so many ways by so many things that the only way to FOR SURE never cross a boundary is to not be alive. Human beings fuck up. I fuck up. I cross boundaries and say things I shouldn’t and I hurt people. I am not entitled to that right. I shouldn’t be hurting people.

So maybe I shouldn’t be allowed to talk about my feelings at all because I am the problem.

I have been reading 10 Reasons to Delete Your Social Media by Jaron Lanier. He talks about how the algorithms used on Twitter/Facebook (he hates Google too) are specifically designed to increase anxiety, depression, and addictive like behaviors. Which in turn make you irritable and upset.

Noah says he does see such upticks in my behavior.

Maybe part of trying to maintain stability without medication is deleting my account. Again. And never coming back this time. I keep having conversations with people about this book and the constant response is, “But I would lose contact with people I care about because the only way I hear from them is Facebook/Twitter/etc.”

Maybe if you only know people through a broadcast medium that makes you feel upset… you aren’t really hearing from them?

This is literally why I write letters. If I want to stay in touch with you I will fucking stay in touch with you. It takes me a while to circle through everyone… because I stay in touch with a lot of people… but that’s ok! That’s how much I genuinely have to give people instead of putting out broadcasts that people don’t care that much about. I invite people into the postcard circle. If they prefer to hear from me on Twitter…

Maybe they don’t need to hear from me at all.

That’s ok, too.

One reason I like Twitter is because it keeps me in touch with what is happening to other people with chronic pain and other people who have been abused by the system. It’s validating as fuck. The writers from Twitter that make the most difference for me… I already follow on Patreon. I should probably delete my Instagram too. Noah points out that I am giving Facebook pictures of my kids and I feel sick about that.

It’s the whole individualist vs group identity thing. Social media lets me feel validated from people like me… but I often get just as much validation from people who aren’t like me and maybe that is a better way to deal with life.

We have a rental car right now. It doesn’t make my life better. It means I spend a lot of time driving and that hurts my arms and back really badly. We did go to Dole Plantation because my kids love mazes and that’s the biggest one in the world. Well, that’s sort of in dispute. But we stopped on the road trip every time there was a maze. The kids would have been sad to miss out on another opportunity.

It was fascinating exploring how much of this island is still kind of remote. There aren’t many services with a 45 drive and that’s basically rural. We have been staying on the side populated by locals. We are near the homeless camps, away from the wealthy houses. That’s way better for me on every level.

I think some of the homeless folks have been having fun at my expense and I really don’t care. They tell me outrageous stories and I don’t argue with them and they go back to their friends and laugh uproariously. Ok. I don’t care.

I understand why people need to laugh at visible outsiders who appear to be rich. I accept it as part of the price I pay for being wealthy. I spent my childhood doing anything I could to make people at my current level look ridiculous. Turn about is fair play.

I didn’t finish packing yesterday and I feel some distress about that. Today I need to finish packing, do some laundry, drop stuff off at a thrift store, and see if I still have room in the bag to get souvenirs for nieces and nephews. I am not in weekly or even monthly contact with all my nieces and nephews, but I try hard to always get them things from the far off places we go. Sometimes it takes me a while to mail it… (like the packets I sent out last week that included a bunch of stuff I found over the years) but I think of you! You are important! Getting to the post office is a challenge for some reason I don’t understand.

My aunts and uncles never thought of me. I was never important. My nieces and nephews will know all of their lives that I think of them and believe they are worth effort. Maybe it will turn into adult relationships someday and maybe it won’t. But I will have done what I wish adults did for me and that’s the best I can do.

Well, Auntie let me live with her when my mother couldn’t feed or house me. But presents were uhhhh… yeah. Not a big part of our language. When she did give me presents they were often wildly inappropriate in one direction or another. Like she gave me Vanity Fair (the novel, not the magazine) when I was 8. Then she gave me a bunch of middle school level books when I was in high school because she thought my reading was too adult. (I was reading adult romance novels which were seriously pornographic.)

Well my 18th birthday and my graduation from high school were uhhh on the nose present holidays. I was given pots and pans, dishtowels,  and other stuff to get the fuck out.

And they expressed, after I was 18, surprise that I left and didn’t come back. You never wanted me and as soon as it was legal for me to go you told me to get out. What the fuck do you expect from me? That I will waste all my spare time trying to visit you so you can treat me with contempt?

My self esteem isn’t that low.

I’ll stick with social media for depressing me, thanks.

I hate the bed in this apartment. I have slept for shit all month and my back is incredibly sore. I can’t wait to get to Thailand. Massage is $4/hour.

Hey…. there’s Thai massage 10 minutes from where we are staying in PDX. Nice.

But first, Japan and Scotland. In Japan there is a Thai massage place 25 minutes away by train. And in Scotland there is a place 40 minutes away by bus.

Ok. Maybe I will continue to be able to walk. Excellent.

I have already completely stuffed 12 bags and a 13ths is pretty mandatory because that bag is a pain in the ass to pack in another bag. That’s not so bad! Our number of “stuff” bags is going down rapidly.

I need to figure out what to do with the forking car seat. It isn’t even valid in Japan or Scotland due to differences in country regulations so I need to leave it here. Or maybe if no one wants to pick it up from my craigslist ad I will bring it from country to country and then we won’t need to buy one in PDX. I don’t know.

I feel overwhelmed at the moment.

My big kids can only really be expected to handle their two bags. That leaves 8-9 for Noah and I to handle. That’s… a lot.

I have decided that public transit to and from airports is ridiculous and we will take fucking taxis.

Getting to our apartment in Malaysia was incredibly stressful and I don’t need to duplicate that experience. Taxis are usually only about 10% more expensive (for 4 people) than public transit and they are faster, easier, and I don’t have to worry about finding a fucking address in a different country.

I really wish I was sleeping better. I need to take Ativan tonight. I have to sleep before the flight. I’m going to have like 12 hours of babywearing in front of me. I was S_M_R_T and I packed the tens unit in my carry on. Once I am through security I am going to put it on in the bathroom and that will hopefully make the journey less hellish.

Her Sweetness is almost 24 fucking pounds.

I think it is funny how much strangers feel free to talk about how fat my babies are. “Wow. That kid is huge. How old is she? !!!!!! My kids weighed that much when they were 3 years old!!!!”

Ok? What’s your point?

Have you noticed that my 10 year old is the same height as you and outweighs you? We aren’t built like you….

I have spent my children’s entire lives waiting for the point when they would cross the line from having a little pudge for growing into being really overweight and it has never happened. We are really active. This is the way their bodies are supposed to be shaped.

Eldest Child read a book called Our Bodies, Our Bikes (it’s by a lot of different authors) because I am trying to get her to understand more of what it means to have a body and to be active with that body. She has a growing awareness of how weight conscious the world is. She says she is happy I deliberately and consciously kept that fact from her for most of her life. I’m glad you don’t feel betrayed, kiddo. I was worried. A study in 2010 showed that 80% of American girls have dieted by 10 years old.

Fuck. That. Shit.

I spend a lot of time talking about how much I love my fat belly because it is proof I am lucky enough to be a mother. My body wasn’t shaped like this before I had kids and I am really thrilled about having them. I spend a lot of time looking at pictures of severely obese people and talking about how gorgeous and awe inspiring they are. We used to have pictures on the wall of naked fat people because they are fantastic art.

If someone makes a negative comment about my body in front of my kids I respond with, “I love my body–are you crazy?” Which isn’t cool because crazy is an awful word… but it’s a deliberate attempt to shame people for saying my body isn’t as it should be.

Yeah, I will shame you if you tell me to lose weight. If you don’t want to be shamed for fat hating… stop fat hating. Easy problem to solve.

EC has stopped listening to youtube gamers who fat shame because she doesn’t like it. I consider that a massive victory.

Every body is good. Bodies come in a lot of different shapes. There are advantages and disadvantages to every possible body configuration. Play to your strengths, don’t spend time bemoaning the body you wish you had and get on with life. You are good enough just how you are. There might be sports that are harder or easier for you based on your shape, but having the non-ideal shape doesn’t mean you can’t do it at all… it just may take more practice.

There are bodies built for swimming or running really fast. But you can swim or run (well really, walk fast) at just about any body size. Disabilities change all of this and they are normal and natural and it’s great that medical science helps people find ways to do things that would have been hard or impossible 200 years ago.

Yay science!

I talk a lot about the strength involved in being fat. It’s wonderful. I talk about maintaining flexibility and strength no matter what shape you are because health is the goal… not looking any particular way. We can’t all look the same. That’s just fucking life.

Look how you look. And love yourself.

You will get one body. Be nice to it. It took me a long time to learn how to be nice to my body and I pay for that. Let’s figure it out for your kids while you are young and then… maybe you won’t hurt like me in 30 years.

The nightmares. Oh goodness. So last night I spent all night dreaming that Noah has gotten furiously angry with me and he started being nasty and hateful all the time. I read a thread on Twitter yesterday that a disabled woman wrote about her partner being nasty to her because of her disability needs. So of course I dream that Noah has gotten sick of helping me and he became contemptuous of me not doing everything around our house by myself.

Noah has only ever gotten that angry with me when I cheated on him and spent a bunch of time paying attention to lovers instead of him. (And when he was that angry with me he didn’t start insulting my lack of ability to do everything. He was pissed about a certain set of behaviors and he yelled at me over them. We had a really bad few months.)

Ok, I did that because using my words nicely didn’t change what I needed to change and that sucked.

But my subconscious thinks that is what I deserve all the time no matter what.

I don’t do everything for us the way that some women do. I know women who do fucking everything. All the cleaning, cooking, childcare, and they earn an income. I do about half of the cleaning and the kids do the other half. Noah does most of the cooking and I help when I feel like it. I do the vast majority of the childcare but Noah does more than many fathers I know (having them 24/7 means our ratio isn’t very average). I haven’t earned an income in over ten years.

So of course my subconscious thinks Noah is going to lose his shit and get really mean to me. Even though he isn’t like that. Even though he is fantastically kind to me and has been in a sustained way for 15+ years. Fuck my brain.

Traveling from misery to misery. Well, I am deeply concerned about my lack of access to pot. I use it for a reason, well…. many reasons… Not having it is going to make my life harder on every level.

Since I stopped devoting all of my dumping-the-kids-on-Noah scheduled time on Sarah I have been reaching out directly to a lot more friends and that’s been going well.

Part of the reason the bay area was absolutely done working for me is that most of my “social opportunities” involved needing childcare. Most of the places I hung out before having kids: bdsm community, Burner raves/camping events, late night dance events, clubbing…. they all necessitate me going alone or requiring childcare. Neither Noah nor I were all that comfortable with me going alone so…. I just dropped out of social communities basically entirely. I know folks who are comfortable bringing their kid to gatherings of kinky people in non-play settings. I know people who bring their kids to all the Burner events. I know people who bring their kids to the late night dance events.

I won’t.

I spent a lot of time in each of those communities helping my women friends deal with proximity to their rapists because none of those communities would eject predatory men. The bdsm community kind of tries sometimes if someone is bad enough but the bar is really extreme.

I can’t bring my kids to environments where I absolutely know that there are a bunch of predators present. I am not comfortable with my ability to protect my children in such environments because I was not good at protecting myself and I do not want to teach my children my bad habits.

I was friends with a lot of predators.

It isn’t that I am stupid enough to think that there aren’t predators out in the vanilla world. (I associate the Burner events with being kink-adjacent because of the quantity of public sex displayed.) It is that I am a lot more confident dealing with a new-to-me predator through shunning and avoidance than I am trying to teach my kids to do that to people I am clearly comfortable with.

So I stayed home for ten years. Cheers. I went to home schooling events. I hung out with other families.

I want to go find somewhere that treats family inclusion as the norm, not the exception.

It isn’t that I think my friends are wrong for including their kids in events that I won’t bring my kids to. That’s not the point of saying this. *I* can’t do it. *I* don’t trust *my* ability to keep my kids safe.

My kids will get to adulthood feeling like their sex life is personal and not to be exploited by asshole adult men if I have to live in isolation to do it. I just don’t want to live in isolation to do it.

I want to find a place to live where we don’t have to drive all the time. Even if I had moved to San Francisco (The Capitol City) or Oakland so that I could walk more… my friends in the bay were spread from Aptos to San Pablo. I would have had to tell my friends they weren’t worth my time or attention anymore to stop driving in the bay.

I couldn’t do that.

Maybe I can move somewhere else and work on not making so many GU friends. (Geographically Undesirable)

Driving was hurting me. I have the x-rays to show my spinal degeneration. Woo! Speaking of which, today I get to go pick up a rental car. Ha. Haha. Hahaha. *cough* I need to start making these reservations in Noah’s name and sending him to do all the driving. The thing is: I do a lot of the driving to do errands while he works and I don’t feel all that good about saddling him with all the chores in his outside-work hours. (See opening paragraphs about him already doing a lot to support my disabled ass.)

We went walking on the beach last night after dark because it was too fucking hot to move all day. It was a lot of fun. We will probably do it again before we leave.

But I don’t want to live near a beach permanently. Oh cheese toast the grit. The black feet. Ugh.

I am a little agitated this morning because I am anticipating driving… (it fucking hurts) but I’m still doing better. My sleep is intermittent. I am doing the best I can without pot.

I ran out of fancy face lotion. I won’t get more here. I will bring the curly hair leave-in coconut oil treatment because I assume that will be hard to get in Japan. It’s interesting sorting through to find out what things I feel are important and worth carrying from country to country. I am really liking the Function of Beauty shampoo and conditioner and I didn’t expect to. Given the price… I’m glad I love it. I feel my hair looks nicer than it has in a long time. So, I’m glad I kept experimenting.

We watched an episode of Queer Eye last night. I’ve never really watched it before. It was neat and we enjoyed it.

Ok I am out of physical ability to keep my kids off my computer. Guess I’m done for the morning.

I don’t write any of these things because I want to hurt you. I write these things because until I can look at them and get some distance from them swarming in my brain I hurt myself. I do it in a myriad of ways. I do it by literally physically hurting myself. I do it by berating myself constantly for how pathetic and stupid I am for feeling upset when nobody intended to hurt me.

It isn’t that people betray me constantly. It is that I have a serious problem with letting my expectations get out of line and I don’t know how to keep my expectations in check without writing out how much I wanted versus how much I got.

I think a few people betrayed me: my mother, my sister, my brothers, my father. But my friends? Sarah didn’t owe me the devotion I wanted. Dad doesn’t owe me support. Friends who are trying to the best of their ability to support me in being a better mother don’t owe me anything more than they have going spare on a given day; they are not required to give at a certain level/rate.

I don’t say that I need to assume people are lying because I think people are being malicious or hurtful. I think it is absolutely board-standard for people to over rate how much support they are going to be able to provide because they want to provide more support than they can. I do this too. I want to be a major source of support to dozens of people…. and I can’t. People are not bad because they over promise.

But I act like a serious asshole when I develop expectations around the promises people make. I spent literal years asking Sarah not to promise me anything unless she could actually deliver on her promise. It didn’t impact how much she promised. She escalated the intensity of her promises because she wanted to be able to love me the way I wanted to be loved. But she can’t. She doesn’t have that kind of time/energy going spare. That’s not a betrayal. But it does hurt me because I am painfully fucking literal and when you tell me that you are going to talk to me every week and you cancel 3/4 chats because you are tired… I hurt. When you tell me that you are going to take my kids because you want to have weekends with them and that happens like 1/5 times you schedule… I hurt.

I can hurt even if you aren’t doing anything wrong. If people are that bad at estimating what they actually have to give then they can hurt me without ever betraying me. I need to learn how to live in a world where people are always going to be like Sarah. That doesn’t mean I can handle the degree of it that I get from Sarah…. because I hurt myself to keep promises and she is trying to get healthier and stop hurting herself to give to people. It’s a broken dynamic. That doesn’t mean she is betraying me or that she is evil.

But when I can’t process my hurt anymore because her feelings about being humiliated are more important than me dealing with the fact that I need to be changing what I want from her and she doesn’t want me to use the only venue I have for coping with my disappointment…

That’s a problem.

I will love this woman until my dying day. That doesn’t mean I can keep falling into a pattern where I give until I hurt and she only gives what she comfortably can. Not because she is doing something wrong…. because I am entirely failing to have appropriate boundaries. Because I am failing.

I can have better boundaries with other people.

I’m telling you. Fat hoarders are my kryptonite. I love them and want them and I try to enmesh with them so hard… it’s a problem. I have a type. It isn’t ever their fault that I do what I do. But I have to change myself so I stop feeling so dependent on their attention.

Every single minute I spend being upset that a friend can’t give me what I want is a minute I can’t spend noticing how off the fucking charts awesome my current life is. I have 4 people who love me so much they can barely give me a moment of peace or an inch of space around my body.

Last night my son slept on the floor next to my side of the bed because he wanted to go to sleep holding my hand. My baby girl had to check every hour on the hour all night long that I was still RIGHT THERE. At exactly six this morning my big girl came in and joined us on the bed because she wanted snuggles and love.

I felt absolutely flooded with love and joy and peace. I haven’t felt this much goodness in my body for a while. I have been overwhelmed by being upset and feeling not good enough.

This is why I purge these feelings here. So I can get them out and get back to feeling good things.

It does work; it does help. But I have to not care about your feelings more than mine.

That’s hard. I do care about you more than I care about me. But I don’t care about you more than I care about my children. So here we are. I’ve been writing about feeling hurt for a bit here. Because I need to if I am going to get this bile out of my brain so I can focus on just how lovely it is to have my children.

Not having pot is going to be the hardest part of traveling. I use it for so many reasons. It’s an antidepressant, anti-anxiety, appetite stimulant, pain reliever, and it helps with my ADHD symptoms. Pot is the best thing ever.

I haven’t screamed in over a week. I feel pathetic for that being an accomplishment… but I have been an asshole for the last couple of years (OF LIVING IN THE “PERFECT” BAY AREA) and I’m trying to get that under control.

I had separate time with all three kids yesterday. An hour or two of just playing with each kid one on one. That was really nice. I don’t manage that balance very often. I asked EC if she got to change one thing about our life what it would be: she said me yelling. Otherwise she thinks our life is basically perfect for her.

I have finally figured out parental controls on their computers (it is hard to get around to all the things I “should” do) so that I can stop nagging about timers and them not respecting timers and limitations. Now their computers shut off when they are out of time. If I can convince Noah to stop logging them in on his half of the partition this will work out. Noah hates being the heavy even more than I do. That’s not the best part of our parenting dynamic.

Throwing away the workbooks was the right choice. Both kids are writing a lot. They are rushing through books with glee. They have been doing more cooking because we have a math based recipe book and they are really excited about math not being “sit and do variations on the same type of problem for 2 hours”.

Thank you for the chat about unschooling and math, Mr M. I needed all of the information you gave.

We watched Saving Mr. Banks together in the morning and that lead to some really interesting conversations about loyalty and imagination and coping and control. I have to worry about my daughter burying herself in loyalty. My son is trying to figure out how he can have as much control over himself as he wants so he only treats people how he believes is right. It’s wonderful hearing him say, “How can I make sure I never do _____?” Well, wanting to avoid crossing boundaries is the first step. Let’s talk about how to practice with small boundaries in your every day life so that the habit of noticing other peoples’ boundaries is so ingrained that you don’t cross bigger boundaries. He takes it very seriously.

I am a lot better at helping them with interpersonal skills than I am about enforcing an elementary school curriculum. I hated teaching in elementary schools so… that’s not that big of a surprise.

But my kids are writing me emails and I respond with lists of questions for them to expand on and they are really good at that dynamic. Writing isn’t hard. Doing stupid worksheets is hard. Doing math as a grind on boring shit is hard. Will we probably miss some steps? Yes.

I missed so many pieces of school because every district taught things at different speeds. I don’t think I have it in me to be pleasant and gentle as I force them through every stupid step. That sorta makes me feel like I shouldn’t be home schooling and I also feel like school is stupid and pointless a lot of the time so them not having to do it is… better in the long run.

I don’t know. We had a really good day of interacting.

I have had to deal with depression since I was a little kid. I think I was first officially diagnosed with depression 30 years ago. Grief hits me hard. It is hard not feeling like my brain having these patterns is my fault and a sign of my moral weakness. If I tried harder I could be a better, less mentally ill, mother. WITHOUT THE ONLY EFFECTIVE MEDICATION I’VE EVER FOUND, DAMNIT.

But that is one of those lies we tell ourselves and each other. You can’t will yourself out of mental illness.

I know I sound like an absolute asshole when I say that I need to assume that people who say “Oh I’ll do _______ with the kids” is a liar. I’m not saying that because I will be mean to people when they make claims like that. I’ll try to smile and nod. But I need to not believe it. Because when I believe it I develop expectations, then I am disappointed. The people who have relationships with my kids didn’t tell me that they were going to… they just did it. They established their own lines of contact and they talk to the kids as it suits them and the kids. There are people who do that. Then there are the people who tell me that they will… but they don’t.

I’m not trying to recognize these patterns to be mean. I am trying to stop over reacting and feel like I hate my friends. My friends are my friends and they are not obligated to be friends with my kids.

Being diagnosed as autistic makes me feel more kindness towards myself on trying to compartmentalize. Black and white thinking is my natural territory. Trying to figure out where other people are telling social lies to make themselves feel better about themselves is hard. Most people do it. I probably do it sometimes too and I gloss right past my own deficiencies.

I am ridiculously, painfully literal. I always have been and that character trait is not going to go away. Trying to learn how to not get freaked out when other people are not literal is hard. I have to put effort into it because other people are rarely literal.

There have been well over 100 entries in my address book. I need to cull people from my mental roster of “important people” because most of those people don’t reach back much. I put in the effort of carrying the relationship and it’s too much. And that means I spend time analyzing our interactions to see who is worth my time. If that is the same thing as scanning for betrayal…. ok?

I have to be kind of mercenary about this. There is only so much time in the day and I can’t carry friendships with people who don’t treat me very well. They drain me. They contribute to my dysregulation. But I don’t like ending relationships. I tend to have “I will give and give and give because I don’t want to lose you” extinguish bursts with people before the relationship ends. It isn’t healthy and I know that if I want to be more stable in the future I need to do less of this.

I need to stop trying to buy peoples love. But given that my mother stole all the money I earned when I was a teenager and my brother asked me for thousands of dollars the minute I turned 18 and my sister asked me to buy her a house and…

It’s not a big surprise that I end up in that dynamic. But I need to stop. It contributes to my general feelings of worthlessness. It makes me feel like if that is all people want me for I should kill myself. I am not interested in being someones friend if they primarily view me as an ATM.

The thing is… once people notice that you have a boundary weakness they will poke at it. If someone has fallen into that habit… I need to fire them from my life because I won’t be able to get them to stop in a healthy way.

And there is a big difference between someone pushing through a boundary weakness and accidentally triggering me.

The folks who only want to see me if I spend hundreds of dollars on them getting what they want? That’s pushing through a boundary weakness. Mentioning that someone could call CPS on me? That’s accidentally triggering me.

I do understand the difference. But when my central nervous system is exploding with panic and fear… it takes days or weeks or sometimes months to calm down. Because these kinds of triggers always seem to come packaged with something else going wrong and then my reaction to the trigger is 2 or 10 or 100 times bigger than it would be if it happened at a time when I was doing ok. That does not make someone evil for stepping near a trigger, not at all.

All I can say about that is that trauma therapists are impressed I can calm down at all. The last therapist I worked with, a somatic therapist, spent our last few sessions working with me while I had my baby present. They were constantly commenting on how my emotional dysregulation is clearly not causing sheer physical panic because my baby would pick up on that and she is… super placid and happy. That’s not supposed to work like that. Babies respond to the “vibes” of the adults around them. My baby acts like she lives with fully regulated people.

I am the best faker, ever.

Given how much calm I must present to my children sometimes I have none to give my friends and waaaaaaaaaaaaaay less to give to my blog. So I write in hyperbole and extremes and fury. If you take that personally, maybe this isn’t healthy for you to read. These are my thoughts. My thoughts are not the same thing as my actions. If you want me to feel bad about my thoughts then we shouldn’t be friends because you are not a healthy person for me to have in my life.

There is a reason I don’t go write these thoughts in chat rooms or send them as comments to other peoples sand boxes. That would be cruel. That would be actively seeking people out to hurt them. I don’t do that.

But sometimes I freak the fuck out in my journal and I write all the extremes of my thoughts so I can process them. You don’t have to be part of this roller coaster. I can’t get off it. If I don’t write these things down my behavior is dramatically worse and that’s not ok.

I stopped feeling like I could write about how Sarah was treating me. Instead I screamed at my kids.

I’m sorry, none of you are worth that. I am sorry I tried to let Sarah’s feelings be that much more important than mine or my children’s feelings. That was the wrong fucking priority. If she feels “publicly humiliated” by me talking about how she treats me, I can end the relationship or she can change how she fucking treats me. I only have control over one of those options.

People triggering me are not in that camp. That’s differently complicated.

Sigh.

I should schedule some video chats with folks for later this week. There are people in this world who love me and want to see me and talk to me. I shouldn’t focus on the people who don’t show up.