Category Archives: mental illness is a liar

This too shall pass

6 Replies

One of the problems with blogging the way I do is I don’t edit or proofread or “final draft” anything. So I walk away from the computer and spend the rest of the day thinking, “I wish I hadn’t said ____.” or “I wish I had changed the phrasing of _______.” or “I sure hope so-and-so doesn’t think I am talking about him/her….”

I was reading about famous people I don’t care about and one was loudly pissed off that another person made it seem like she currently has mental illness issues. That was a long time ago. How dare you bring it up. That could hurt my ability to work.

With the whole live-blogging of mental illness thing people have a pretty up-to-the-day progress on my mental health. People who have known me for a long time (*wave*) know that things come and go. I don’t have the same issues all the time. I don’t focus on the exact same problems… they drift.

I spend a lot of time feeling rather ashamed of the exhibitionism involved in being this open. I try to justify it to myself by moving platforms every few years. People have to consciously try to keep up with me. I make it difficult. I am not broadcasting my freak on the side of the road with a billboard… I just write about it.

Apparently something like 40% of my country believes that End Times are coming any day now and they are voting with this belief in mind.

But I worry about how weird I am?

Think about the word “normal”. What does it mean? Within the range of expected behaviors/performance/whatever? Common? Average? Oh man. What does “average” mean?! (Math majors–I’m not really asking.)

Does it really take all kinds? Are people allowed to want to be hit? Are people allowed to want to keep their kids out of the mainstream because the mainstream is not where you want them to be? Are people allowed to dress in little more than pasties and panties and run around in public?

Why not? What is your actual objection? It makes you think about sex? I think that is your problem and not someone else’s.

People who are raped don’t cause rape. Rapists cause rape. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time doesn’t make it your fault. If the correct way to avoid being raped is to be in a locked room your entire life then that is not ok. Or have a chaperone. Some of us aren’t well-liked enough to get a chaperone this lifetime.

It is hard knowing intellectually that people love me but not feeling emotional connection. I think I feel connection more sometimes than others. And I often feel emotion in the moment when I see someone. When I can see their face and hear their tone of voice and think, “Oh of course this person still likes me (s)he is just completely overwhelmed by life and coming to me is a high barrier and… ok. I can trust this for a bit.” Then I leave the room. I don’t feel it any more. It feels like it never was and I only imagined it and really they think I am a piece of shit.

No, it’s not “rational”.

I’m play acting my emotions–why shouldn’t I believe every one else is too?

Do you know what is the worst fucking advice ever in the history of ever? “Just be yourself.” That is the fucking shittiest god damn thing you can say to someone. What it means is “If you are someone who deserves to have good things happen to you they will happen. If good things don’t happen… well… I guess you weren’t good enough-huh?”

What it means is “I the person giving advice have no fucking idea how you are going to do this so I am going to say something meaningless and pointless and hope to fuck that you figure it out.”

They say that the personality is pretty solidly set by five or six. That explains why I still think about sex all the fucking time. Oh wait. Or maybe it is just natural for my species and I have a sex drive on the high side. Maybe everything isn’t bad. Did you know that most men who define themselves as politically conservative stop having sex in their 60’s and men who define themselves as liberal tend to have sex into their 80’s?

What does it mean to be perverted anyway? I haven’t done anything that is outside the range of human exploration. I am not the only one to have done anything on my long list of things I’ve done. Given what I read on the internet the main thing that is weird about my list is just that I’ve tried such a variety. Most people tend toward niches. I don’t have strong preferences and I had a long partner list. I tried whatever they were into because I wanted to figure out what they liked and why. It isn’t how other people make friends but I have made some really good friends this way.

Why are the friendships I’ve made through sexual exploration supposed to be “bad”? Sometimes I read about spouses demanding that their partner NEVER speak to a former lover again. This goes for all gender combinations. If Noah wanted to ban everyone he or I have had sex with from our house we would be down to about four friends. Well… he might have a few more because he has some guy friends from college and they weren’t bi. I would only still know my good Christian friends. (I have them! I try to not be too big of an asshole.) That would sure change the scope of my life.

I haven’t slept much tonight. Just… awake. Anxious. Home school event at my house today. So I really should be sleeping. It will be fine. Gardening. And I’m babysitting at the same time for a different kid. Just another day in paradise.

I don’t feel that I am grateful enough for the blessings in my life. I feel like I take people and things and security for granted. Only I don’t feel secure so am I taking it for granted or do I just not believe I have it?

I spend a lot of time feeling like people tolerate me out of pity. I don’t want pity. I don’t want to be that despicable asshole you tolerate because “Oh she doesn’t mean it. She has had a hard life.” I’m afraid I am that person.

I don’t want to make people feel smaller. I don’t want to make people feel bad. A smart lady I know is probably already saying, “You can’t make people feel anything.” I’ve listened to you say it enough times…

I know that being aware of how much turmoil is in my head hurts people sometimes. They feel like I am denigrating them. They feel attacked. They feel that I disapprove. Sometimes I do disapprove of something but if pressed the fullness of my disapproval would probably be something to the effect of, “I wouldn’t do it. I would find something different. I know that you are not me and you are doing your best.” I am fully and vibrantly aware that most of the things I “approve” or “disapprove” of have nothing to do with actual merit or worth it is just my opinion. It is just my preference.

I do think you are doing the best you can. You have to get through every day for you. That will be a different road than I walk. I really and truly don’t believe that anyone “should” copy my methods or opinions. I tell my children so just about every day.

“I say things in strong ways because I have strong opinions. You are allowed to have your own opinions that are equally as strong–even if they directly oppose my opinions. That is just a right.”

Even if it makes them challenging to live with now. It will make them strong in the future. I care more about the future when I will not be there to watch over them than I care about today when I’m feeling frazzled and annoyed and just want to be obeyed.

Apparently a taste for uhhh colorful women runs in the family. I was looking at youtube videos of my sister-in-law tonight. (She married Noah’s younger brother.) Oh man. Her favorite person ever is Freddie Mercury and she is a singer for punk bands (ok, their current effort isn’t exactly “punk” it is more 50’s rock). I feel a little weird about how much of her ass I have seen before meeting her but it will all work out. Listening to the lyrics she writes makes me happy. Here is a woman who cusses way more than me.

Something that I probably want to bring up with my therapist is this out of sight/out of mind abrupt emotional thing. As soon as someone is out of my sight I believe they hate me. I believe that they aren’t contacting me and asking for a visit because I am so bad. It couldn’t be because they are busy.

I have one friend in particular who takes visiting even more seriously than I do. I’ve been seeing him every month (sometimes twice a month) for nearly all the years I have been a parent. At one point early on in our relationship I said, “I feel we are more ‘friendly acquaintances’ than ‘friends'” and he decided that he didn’t want to be seen that way. So he has made enormous effort to visit consistently. Because he wants me to think of him as my friend.

There is no earthly reason for me to feel like nobody likes me everybody hates me I guess I’ll go eat worms. Well, there is that whole family estrangement thing. Lately that is feeling in my head like all-my-fault. The holidays are coming. Oh shit. I wonder if my mother misses me. I wonder if my sister thinks of me. I wonder if Auntie feels any compassion at all for me or if she thinks I am just a big crazy liar. It doesn’t really matter. No one in my family will rape my kids.

If you want to stop being hard you have to figure out how to laugh at life. Do you know that an inability to laugh at life is why I consciously decided to not pursue sex work? It wasn’t for other scruples. I’m over-sensitive and pissy and I get my feelings hurt by things that aren’t personal. Thus I am not suitable for sex work or a wide variety of other professions. That’s ok! I’m keeping busy.

I know that there are people who can go through life in safety without growing hard. I don’t really understand that mechanism. Why is it that when you hang out with friends nothing happens but when I hang out with friends… they rape me. I’m sure it is the people I pick for friendship. Obviously. But not everyone I know is a rapist. I think. How the hell would I know? I don’t follow everyone around all the time…

I should probably go back to bed. The kids have been sleeping till seven lately and more sleep would help my day.

The thing I keep coming back to is: it has to genuinely not matter to me what other people think of me. I need to not consider that. That’s hard. I care a lot about what other people think. I feel constantly overwhelmed by how hard it is that I have no control over what other people think. The only thing I can do is hide and not subject them to my presence. I could probably do with having fewer people tell me that they hear all about the shit-talking about me. Ok, fine. People want to say nasty things about me. Well, opinions are like assholes. Everyone has one.

When people dislike me it feels like they agree that my life should have happened. I deserve what I got. That may or may not be what they think but it is my reaction. The only part of that I can control is my reaction. If I can get my reaction under control.

I have to not care. I have to think I am a decent-enough person. I have to think I am kind-enough. I have to think I am doing good-enough things. I have to think I am doing my best and if that isn’t good enough… that’s life. I hope you have other people in your life who can help fill your needs because I will never be enough.

I’ve been thinking that with the kids lately. I will never be enough to meet their needs. I’m getting a lot more time with them just lately. This constant feeling of not being enough is hard. I feel so tired.

Just a morning whinge

Leave a reply

I feel like living in one place is giving me the experience of seasons in a way I find odd year after year. Wait… this really happens? The changing of the seasons surprised the hell out of me for the first twenty-five years. I had nothing to anchor me to the changing of the year other than the start of the school year. This is different.

I am working on acquiring huge bags of mulch from a friend. I have brought five bags home so far and I think I should go back for more since she has a lot more. It will cover a lot of my yard–for free! Whoo! I’m going to start with putting it around the play structure. Mulch is at least slightly more absorbing of impact than plain dirt. I’ve already layered a lot of sand around the base.

I paid someone to fix my washing machine problem (it was flooding the garage) and now I have a different problem–the water won’t drain from the washing machine. I have a growing puddle in the machine. The internet tells me I need to call a Maytag repairman because a bunch of things can cause this and they are all internal.

This is a thing because the last time I tried to fix washing machine issues (the washing machine before this) I called a Maytag employee… they sorta fixed it but said mostly it was a plumbing problem. Then I called a plumber and the person said it wasn’t a him problem. Then I called someone else and they still couldn’t fix it. I had to pay all three service people for their time and I didn’t get the problem fixed. So I ended up getting a new one.

So the idea of escalating washing machine problems is kind of nervous making. Oh man. Not again. Owning a house is a pain in the ass.

Today I need to do some preparation work. Tomorrow is a home school gardening day. I invited folks from the group over to help plant tulip and daffodil bulbs. I plan to talk to the kids about soil enrichment and planting and plant biology and such. It should be fun. And now I get to extensively talk about mulch.

I’m killing the celosia. I love them but apparently I water too hard? I should do more research on these flowers because they are whiny, picky little bastards. Five minutes of internet research tells me the blooms usually last ten weeks and then they are annuals. So I’m not doing something terrible to them. Oh. Well that’s nice to hear. Now I can feel less guilty about them dying off. They are also known as cockscomb; now that makes me happy.

Yesterday I medicated less than usual and had a stomach ache that was distracting and harsh all day. I spend a lot of time trying to figure out why I use pot. At this point a lot of it is masking the constant stomach pain. That might be something to think about. I know that part of the stomach pain is anxiety. My body doesn’t like me very much.

I can tell I’m feeling lonely. The ways I use forums/social media changes a lot as I cycle through different levels of feeling lonely/sad/unwanted.

I’m trying really hard to continue seeing people and continue socializing. I continue to ask people for time. But fewer people. I’m scared of rejection. I’ve been asking a lot less. This article tells me I should keep asking. But what I want isn’t a casual favor from a stranger. I want people to like me.

I’m afraid that the more time people spend with me the more they dislike me. The more carefully they have to put up a lot of boundaries. So I stop asking people to come over. I feel sad. I feel like it is too much work to put up with me so I should stop making people feel like they have to acknowledge me. I should let them ignore me. I should make it absolutely non-effortful to pretend I am not in the world.

I’ve been reading about the Four F’s. Fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Survival methods. Things that animals do when they are confronted with stimuli that feels dangerous. I am absolutely an isolator. That’s a big standard PTSD thing. We like being alone in a room because then we know we won’t unconsciously lash out at our invisible demons and hit someone else on accident.

Noah says I want him to be obsessed with me. That’s probably true. But I also want him to work and play with our kids. I think I do a good job of making sure I am not so demanding that I cut into his work time or his time with our kids. I make sure I get the scraps. I make sure I get what is left over after he has done ALL THE THINGS because they are all more important than me. How obsessed does that make him? If I am what he gets to when he has magical “spare time”?

I’m having a hard time managing my feelings around being sad. I feel so pervasively sad and unwanted and like I will never really be part of anything.

When I was a kid we moved a lot. When we were living with bio-family my experience was that I was always in my room listening to everyone else talk and spend time together and laugh. They always sounded like they were having fun. If I walked into the room I would be yelled at within minutes and told to just go away because I was bothering them.

Sometimes when I experience the intensity of Shanna talking over me… I understand why I was sent to my room. I think most of the people in my family have PTSD and I can understand why my intensity was too much for them.

But I still can’t be in a room with people without feeling like at any second I will be told to leave because I am annoying and unpleasant. I’m bad. I’m wrong.

Right now it feels like the most important thing I will do with my life to not pass on this feeling. My children will not feel like me. They will not feel like them walking in the door ruins the party for everyone else.

But I don’t really get to decide how they feel. I only get to decide how I treat them.

I keep thinking about hosting a party because I miss people. Then I think about the fact that people mostly only come over when I invite them to a party. And I spend the party feeling like I should be quiet and not ruin it for everyone else. I’m not actually sure I can handle it.

I feel like I should hide for a while. I spend too much energy wishing people liked me more. I spend too much energy wishing that people wanted to spend more time with me. I need to only need me.

I have a lot of reading, a lot of painting, and a lot of writing I want to finish before December 31st. Maybe that should be enough.

I have to somehow work on this frantic feeling. It isn’t attractive to look or act desperate. I feel desperate. I feel like I want to fall to my knees in front of people and beg them to please like me. Please. Please be my friend. Please see me. Please choose to spend time with me just because you want to and not because I asked and you feel sorry for me.

Recently I read a very sad story about someone else’s incest experience. From when she was very tiny her abusive grandfather taught her to beg him to do it to her. She had to say, “Please love me” and encourage the sexual abuse or he hurt her.

I don’t want to ask people to love me any more. Either they do and they will show up or they don’t and I should walk away. I can’t influence how other people feel about me. I just need to accept it and move on.

They will either be here or they won’t.

I can’t ask right now. Even if that means I’m alone. Luckily I’m never alone any more. Not really. I can ask for visual privacy but I am almost never alone. This is my shot. I understand that they won’t have to be with me forever. Someday they will run off to chase their dreams and I will have to be ok with that. I will have to act like they aren’t abandoning me–because they aren’t. They are just following the progression of life.

I don’t really like to think about that day very much. It feels like looking forward to my obsolescence. Not that I think I will run out of things to do. I think I kind of hope that my reward for a life well lived is that Noah will get around to being obsessed with me and we can spend a ridiculous amount of time staring at each other.

The longer I live with Noah the weirder I feel about this whole “never feel liked” thing because he has it and he doesn’t have the same kind of trauma background. Ok, he was never liked by his family or his small hick town… but it wasn’t like my childhood. I feel deeply comforted by the fact that he feels no more liked by people than I do. Maybe this isn’t a broken thing. Maybe this is a common and semi-normal thing. Sometimes when I spontaneously do something nice to him, even as small as touching his hair, I can see him shudder. He isn’t used to people wanting to touch him.

It isn’t a sex thing. He looks so young. He looks so scared and relieved at the same time. Someone likes him. I really like living in a house that is a full-time mutual admiration society. It feels so good to be around three other people who are so constantly affirming. I don’t know why Noah is like this with us. My kids are largely because I model it.

I’m not one to be stinting with my criticism. But after years of research I understand what criticism and put-downs do to peoples self-esteem. I understand that for every negative thing you tell a person it takes ten positive statements to balance it out.

So given that I am unstinting in my criticism I have to be significantly more free with my praise. My children can point out where something is done wrong but they are way more likely to be encouraging and friendly and helpful because I am that way with them. I live in this insulated little bubble with them so I can keep calm and be nice.

Why do I feel so lonely if I am never alone? I see people. I’ve been incredibly social lately. But I always feel like I have to be very careful what I say. I never relax. I never feel like people actually like me. I feel like people might, maybe, like a very carefully edited and shaped version of me but they don’t actually like me.

Don’t offend anyone, Krissy.

In the past people used to regularly complain that talking to me was walking on eggshells. I haven’t had anyone say that in a long time. My mom said that to me a lot. “I just can’t say anything to you, Kristine.” She really couldn’t. By the end I hated her so much and I had so much need built up that she really couldn’t say anything. Every single god damn thing she promised me would turn into an argument because I didn’t believe her and I hated her for lying to me.

I heard a lot of complaints about how hard I was to talk to back in my munch days. A lot of the guys would complain that I couldn’t take a joke. Nope. I can’t fucking take a rape joke or a sexist joke and I very rarely tolerate racist jokes from anyone. (Err, I have a friend who is half Japanese (I’m pretty sure it is Japanese but I could be remembering incorrectly for a different Asian nationality) and half Mexican. She has some really funny jokes. They are all about her ethnicities. I giggle when she tells the jokes and don’t repeat them. That’s how you should roll when you are white as snow.)

Noah says that people feel like they are walking on eggshells because I don’t react in any of the ways they have patterns for how to handle. I react differently in one way or another and that difference is hard for people to stand near. I don’t really know.

I should probably reread some of the existentialist crap. That would probably be relevant to this ennui shit I’ve got going on. Not till I get through my list of books for the year. I helpfully borrowed a bunch from a friend yesterday. She happened to own a bunch of books on my “to read” list. How useful and kind of her to share.

See, it isn’t as if I am not seeing people. I clearly have friends. They aren’t telling me to go away. But we see each other mostly at my initiation. That’s how it works with almost all of my friends. We see one another when I go solicit their company. Sometimes that gets to me. It feels too much like forcing people to put up with my unpleasant company just because telling me “no” feels too socially complicated. Over my lifetime I’ve been aware that a few people let me come over just because they didn’t have the cojones to tell me to go away. I don’t want that any more.

I am no longer a kid who needs to get out of my house. I don’t want to force people to put up with my presence. It’s why I just can’t be a “regular” anywhere. I will never be someone who hangs out Cheers-style at a public gathering place. I’m too convinced that people wish I would leave.

I don’t know how to change this feeling. Whatever the answer is, it has to come from me. It can’t be about what other people do or don’t do. I can’t care. I can’t read peoples minds. I can’t be responsible for what is going on with them.

I ask when I can. I should stop asking when I feel too emotionally impacted by the process of asking. That’s “boundaries” right? I differentiate between asking I am doing “for me” and asking I am doing “for the kids” because they are in a different place with regards to friendship formation. But then I need to keep my god damn mouth shut when people are here for the kids.

I’m trying not to drive off the home school families. We’ll see how this goes. It is a help/hurt thing that everyone lives so far apart. I can always pretend that the literal physical distance is enough of a stumbling block and that is why we aren’t closer.

But I have no idea how close or not close anyone feels to me. I don’t know if this void is just in me.

Did you know that NIN’s “Head Like A Hole” can be played over the top of “Call Me Maybe”? That kind of broke my brain. I’m not sure if it is a good thing or not.

Enough navel gazing for one morning. I hear a kid stirring.

post-therapy

Leave a reply

I spent the first half of my session today processing my inappropriate feelings towards someone else’s marriage. But he does things! And she does things! And I can see his point of view! And her point of view! OH MAN THE FEELINGS!!! It was good to sit down and process them. She asked if I was struggling partially because neither of these people fit in easy boxes for me. No one is the bad guy. No one is the victim. I told her that certainly escalates my intensity of emotion but it isn’t the reason. She asked me point blank who I identify more with in the marriage and I said hands-down the husband. That’s why he scares me more.

Then we went through a lot of topics. This was a bits and pieces visit. I told her about the depersonalization stuff this week. She pointed out that when someone is hypervigilant to the degree I am depersonalization becomes a healthy coping method because it is my body trying to keep me from having a stroke or a heart attack or any of those other things people like me die from. She said that her DID patients she tries hard to work with them on not depersonalizing because they already have too much of it. For me, not such a problem.

I asked her about the eye contact/flirting thing. She said that it certainly has some merit as a thing to think about but in her opinion eye contact is probably not the REASON people are attracted to me. Lots of men want boisterous, exciting women. I excel in that department and I broadcast it from across the room. That can be enough.

We talked a lot about the whole “energetic” thing. My shrink is pretty woo woo. She said that I have probably experienced far more trauma than anyone she has ever met (that is saying something given that she helped start one of the big trauma centers in this country and she worked with international refugees abroad) and I really do just radiate the tension. I can be sitting still and I still vibrate with intensity. My comment was, “Yeah I always shake.”

I don’t know what to do about this intensity thing. I am really intense. I just am. I can sit completely silent in a room and people will still make comments about my intensity. I glower.

She told me to start researching Buddhist deities. She said that Eastern faiths understand that everyone has a dark side and that righteous wrath thing can be incredibly useful. Western spirituality pretty much focuses on “Be happy! All the time!” Well and the idea that some invisible sky friend will solve all of your problems. Good luck with that.

I believe in the core of my soul that there is no one out there looking out for me. If I am going to be saved I have to do it myself. Noah is the closest I have ever experienced to a savior and that’s kinda mixed and all.

Sometimes I feel very sad about relinquishing any hope that there is a God. I just can’t sign on to believing that someone was “there with me” but chose to not stop anything. I can’t believe in that. If such a God existed (s)he would be so vile I would want to set them on fire. So there must be no God.

It isn’t exactly “logical” but it is what I’ve got.

What do I want to be different about how my life experience works? What is not working for me right now?

The anxiety and hypervigilance are probably the biggest on-going hurdles. Sometimes I feel a little weird when I talk to people about the hypervigilance stuff. People regularly say, “Oh me too.” Then I keep talking about my physical experience, because I am so glad someone understands, and their eyes go wide and they say, “Oh not like that.”

I don’t especially want to spend my time playing the oppression Olympics. However I spend a lot of time feeling very upset about how often I feel like someone is going to understand and then they physically withdraw with what looks like horror because no… they don’t understand.

I want so badly to meet someone who has really recovered from trauma like my life. I haven’t met anyone yet. I meet people who have experienced less trauma who are more functional and they sneer at my inability to control my symptoms. I meet people who have experienced a somewhat similar level of trauma and they are shocked by how functional I am. They ask me to tell them how to do it. But I don’t know how. I just do it.

Sometimes I feel like an attention grabbing whore for talking about what goes on in my head. I should shut up because no one cares.

If you asked me at any given moment in time what was going on in head I would be able to describe different movie screens. When I am not suicidal I think primarily in text. It is like looking at many computer screens right next to one another. I’m tracking all of these different tabs.

I’m thinking about my behavior, my tone of voice, my physical mannerisms, do I have the shaking under control? Am I behaving in a way that will keep me out of trouble?

I’m thinking about what my children are doing. I have one maybe two tracks devoted to them. Usually one track is monitoring their current activities and another tab is constantly tabulating how they are doing developmentally. I think every single day about what things they should be learning or should be working on and how I can facilitate access. I go between all of the different “subject” I think they should learn and I’m constantly playing around with planning schedules in my head as to which order to introduce things.

Another track is thinking about food. Don’t you always think about food? What have we eaten today? What are we going to eat later? How much preparation will that take? When do I need to go to the store? What am I going to make tomorrow? If I don’t think about tomorrow today then I don’t take meat out of the freezer.

I have a track devoted to books I am reading. That one is seriously hard to “read” in my head because I have phrases from completely different books going through my head fairly randomly. I read history, leadership, historical romance, parenting, bdsm, food stuff, gardening stuff, and I don’t even know what all. Lots of other fiction. These phrases drift into and out of my consciousness. I have a book that I’ve read dozens if not a hundred times. I think about it all the time. Tiana. What does it mean to be a Pretty Woman? (In the Cherokee woman-of-high-rank way.)

There is always a sex track. It kind of baffles me when people occasionally tell me they don’t think about sex much. Oh man. I think about sex all the time. All day I’ve been wiggling because we had kind of a missed-weird thing last night. I’m getting laid tonight I can tell you that.

I have another track that is composing books I want to write. I always have 2-6 pages I am working on in my head.

I have another track solely devoted to processing all the random background noise I hear. Everything I read tells me that my hypervigilance is somewhat extreme. I have to think about what I am hearing consciously or the sound of the tree rustling in the background makes me tense, anxious, and unable to focus. I can’t let it be background noise. If I hear it and think about it I don’t freak out. But if I am not concentrating on processing what the sound means (if I am trying to listen to someone else) I can feel my shoulders come up. My neck muscles bunch and start to ache unbearably. I have a permanent headache.

I don’t think I am as observant about my surroundings as people who were trained in the military but I seem to have an unusual degree of knowledge about what is happening near me. It shocks me when other people don’t notice security cameras or security guards or where the exits are. I make internal lists of exit strategies for every room I walk in.

And I’m thinking about all of these things while I’m trying to have casual conversations. I don’t think I actually pay attention to people very well. No–it isn’t that I don’t pay attention. I have incredible recall. I am listening. I am processing. I’m making connections between what you say and the things I know but I’m not there. I can phone it in and be a better listener than most people can be while thinking about nothing else.

All of this would be easier if I didn’t give a shit what people thought of me. Before I had kids I didn’t care as much. Most of my anxiety symptoms were easier when I was younger. I didn’t have to think about my kids. I didn’t think about food the way I do now. For most of my early life food was not something I spent a lot of time thinking about. Food was something to submit to because otherwise you would die but it is an unpleasant process from start to finish.

It is kind of weird understanding that I am healthier now but I don’t feel better. Part of it is that I am just older. The years of constant panic wear on a body.

Today Shanna asked me what “health” means. I told her there are a lot of different kinds of health. Physical health pretty much means that every part of your body is working right. Your internal organs are happy, your skin is happy, things just work right and feel ok. Physical health comes from eating foods that strengthen your body and give it the nutrition it needs and exercising. Sitting is one of the fastest routes to ill health. Mental health is about what is going on in your brain. Healthy people experience lots of emotions. Sometimes they are sad, sometimes they are happy, sometimes they feel angry, sometimes they feel calm. It is the balance that matters. If you try to keep yourself from feeling a particular emotion you will never be healthy. If you feel just one emotion too strongly then you are not healthy.

I broke at that time to say, “That is more or less my problem. I am not mentally healthy because I still feel scared even though nothing is happening in my life to make me afraid. I am safe. Nothing bad is going to happen to me for a very long time if ever again. But I can’t stop being scared. Something in my brain kind of broke. I’m trying to figure out how to fix it because I would like to get back to a place where I can feel other emotions more easily.”

I told her that some people focus on spiritual health–which means a really lot of different things to different people. Spiritual health is more about feeling right about your place in the universe and about your purpose.

I told Shanna, “I’m fairly physically healthy and I feel ok about my spiritual health but my mental health is a bit iffy. So I see people who specialize in helping people deal with this kind of imbalance. That’s what you do when you have a problem. You go find a solution. Luckily we live in a time when people have access to lots of solutions they couldn’t have had a hundred years ago.”

I struggle with going back and forth between wanting people to like me and not giving a shit. I want the safety and security of position that comes with being liked. I don’t want the behavioral constraints. Cry me a river.

I don’t know how (yet) to feel ok about people disliking me. I need to learn how to sit with that. I need to stop feeling like being disliked will be followed by rocks. We’re grown ups now. They only do that to women like me in other countries.

If I walked into an area controlled by the Taliban and I talked about my life they would kill me. Good thing I live here.

I think that some of the depersonalization stuff comes from feeling like I am a larger-than-life person and even I don’t believe half the shit I’ve done. I mean… I was there… kinda… but I don’t feel attached to it. It all feels so unreal.

Someone I met when I was 19 mocked me gently recently for how “worldly wise” I thought I was at 19. I told her I didn’t think I was wise. I thought I was experienced. I was right. She slightly conceded.

I’m not very good at limbo. I don’t wait very well. And to me life feels like a series of stages. During any period of transition I start freaking out and I go do things to self-soothe. These usually involved other people and my cunt. (Wow. Spell check doesn’t like cunt.)

A friend told me that he would give anything to be able to walk out of his house and just decide to find sex. It has never happened. Almost all of the sex he has ever had has been after prolonged friendships that lead to courtships. (I said, “Hey! I wasn’t a prolonged courtship! I fucked you on the second date.” He said, “You are the one and only exception in my life.” I said, “Yeah it was kind of weird waiting till the second date. You seemed shy.”)

I’ve had at least sixty one night stands. I can’t imagine not being able to walk out of my house and get laid.

With that said, the reason I know I can go find someone for sex at any point I want is because I play the law of averages. For those 60 one night stands I probably asked 500 people. I’ve been told no a lot. I promise it didn’t kill me. I think being told no for sex is character building. Ha. (DA-That’s why I ask men. I know that not every man is just waiting to fuck me. Hundreds have told me so to my face.)

My shrink told me to think harder about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. She asked me if I would actually like to stop being scary. I told her not really. It took a long time before I learned the value of the violence I know and I earned every drop of hostility I feel.

But it is very tiring. And it’s lonely. If I feel hostile instead of malicious then I can’t lash out at anyone just because I have these feelings. So I’m not sure that I want to stop being scary but I do want to figure out how to have more control over when and how other people are impacted.

I don’t really want to accidentally hurt people. If I am going to hurt someone I really want it to be about having the conscious desire to hurt them. That should be my goal. I’m ok with being the kind of person who hurts people. I earned those stripes a long time ago. I have learned enough self control that I only hit people who have asked very nicely and people who hit me first.

But where does that leave me with my nasty mouth? Just don’t open it? Carefully rehearse every single word I say in advance so that it isn’t inappropriate? It’s really tiring.

I have to believe that I will find a middle road. I have to. It is the only way. As a wise man once said: I will find a way or I will make a way. And don’t forget: If you see Buddha on the road… kill him.

My road is not your road. That’s ok. It only has to be mine. It takes all kinds, right?

When I think about why I write I know that it is so I can figure myself out and so I can be a known person. Without writing people will never know much about me. Even if they dislike me that is better than being unknown.

I feel weird about wanting to exist in this way. It feels like chasing fame and I’m not really doing that. I sure as shit have no intention of jumping hurdles.

A wise woman once told me that if a woman wants to continue to be relevant as she ages she must continue to become more interesting. Otherwise she will be ignored once she passes a certain age. (I don’t know what that age is.)

I have only my mind to offer. I have to decide really and truly inside my soul that what I have to offer this planet is really and truly worth the resources that are spent on me. I have to believe I am worth something.

I can’t just be here as Calli and Shanna’s maid or teacher. That really isn’t ever going to be enough for me. That will not quiet the demons raging in my head.

“Just don’t think about it.”

One day. Spend one god damn day with me as I narrate my thoughts full speed ahead. You try to ignore this shit.

What is worth doing? What is right in front of you. Just do it. Do your best. Try. You will fail sometimes. The more times you try the more times you will eventually get it right. You will figure out what is right for you.

Somehow I must find a way. I really want to be a source of support for my adult children and not a burden. I want to be a healthy partner for Noah.

What do I want for me? I can’t base everything on being for other people. I’ll fail. I’ll never get the parameters right. And man if I calibrate for Noah I will gradually be so weird I may not be fit for public. (I kid.)

My shrink told me to hurry up and finish writing the book I’m working on. She has clients who need to read it.

Will that be enough?

Good day

4 Replies

I write because when I am all done writing I feel empty and soothed and more calm. It is like taking an ice cold bath when you have a fever. I have a better day when I write. Maybe it is like taking a hose to the dirty screen.

Yesterday I cleaned the house. The older I get the weirder I feel about how much I love cleaning the house. At the end of the day when I walk through the house and everything is all orderly and sorted I feel so much better about myself. I feel like I am now free to start any project I want because I AM CAUGHT UP, MOTHERFUCKER!

I like the feeling of being done with what I was doing. I’m an asshole towards Noah about cleaning the kitchen. He has particular parts of cleaning the kitchen he cares about (mostly the dishes). So sometimes he will come to me and say, “I cleaned the kitchen” and I get snarky and snotty and say, “Then why do I need to spend an hour cleaning the kitchen?” We clean differently. We are bothered by different things. (Ok, I don’t actually say much about the kitchen any more beyond thank you. It’s nice when he does things and I appreciate the help and I try to not be an ungrateful bastard.)

The kids didn’t help much and I did not act like an asshole. That’s important to me. If cleaning is my thing then I need to be nice to other people while I do it.

Some day my wonderful children will be all grown up and off. My house will be clean. I don’t need to be an asshole to my kids right now as they are also living in the space. I’m glad they are here. I’m glad they are making a mess. I’m glad they are taking up space. I want them to take up space.

Shanna is always going to be a chaos muppet. There is merit in her style of creativity. I just hope I can teach her the balance and usefulness of order. You don’t have to always be ordered, not everyone cares. But it is important to be able to create order.

I understand that my need for order is about me. I don’t think it is morally right. I think I feel out of control and scared and having a neat house makes me feel less out-of-control. That doesn’t mean it is “right”. It just is.

Today the girls and I will work on painting their play structure. The kids feel really proud of doing the work. It is wonderful to watch. They are very studious and careful and yet still so uncoordinated. I think they are adorable. I like working with them. They force me to carefully consider whether I care about the process or the result of a given task.

That’s really important to how you teach something. Do you care about the process or the result? It makes such an impact.

It is fun to talk to the kids about painting. “Ok, where is your drop cloth? You must stand on the drop cloth. You can’t step off of it while you are wielding your paint brush or you will drip on the dirt. Look for drips as you spread the paint around. See how it is much thicker right here than anywhere else? Can you smooth that out? Yes! Just like that.”

I like talking to them about how to pick what colors they want. I like talking to them about what they want to see. I like finding out what they like and what they don’t like. They are so distinct from me–we don’t have similar impulses. I like having to stop and wait while they do what they want to do. I feel surprised by what they pick. Oh. You like… that? Well… ok.

I like moving slowly with the kids through tasks. I like talking about what I’m doing and why. I appreciate that they want to talk about everything. I am so glad that I did not end up with taciturn children. That would have been a real struggle for me. Thank goodness they are talkers.

After spending seven hours cleaning I took the kids out to dinner. (We got coupons in the mail. Whoo hoo.) We went to Home Town Buffet. The kids were quite excited. They like getting to pick from a wide variety of things. Hilariously the biggest hit is always the jello.

While we were there one of our neighbors came in. One of the elderly people who walk around and stop to talk to us. We haven’t seen him in a bit. It turns out he doesn’t live in our neighborhood anymore. His girlfriend of 34 years had to move into hospice care due to Alzheimer’s. She owned the house and emphatically did not want to get married because she had a previous messy divorce. So now he is living in an apartment on his own. He lived in the house for 21 years.

I didn’t tell that man anything even remotely sad about myself. I didn’t tell him one negative detail. Well, he asked why I moved around so much as a kid. (He was talking about moving a lot.) I said, “Enh sometimes it happens when you are poor.”

I spent the conversation trying to figure out if he is taking advantage of support systems because he isn’t doing very well emotionally or spiritually right now. He’s feeling very hopeless and sad. His son is sixty so he feels well past any point of usefulness. He spends one hour a day with his girlfriend in hospice and he said he is just waiting till she doesn’t remember him because he knows the day is coming and he doesn’t know how he will keep living when the most important person of his life can’t remember him any more.

I didn’t need to play poor-me with him.

It was kind of weird that he spent a lot of the time telling me about how wonderful it was to have someone like me move to the neighborhood. He said that walking by my house and seeing how it changed and progressed made him feel inspired. He said that seeing me with my kids gives him hope for the future. He’s glad to see people like me who exist loudly in creative ways because they inspire everyone to think bigger. (He hasn’t even seen the mural because he moved out of the neighborhood just before I painted it. I told him to come check it out.)

I didn’t go fishing for compliments. He just walked by every day and saw us outside. Shanna shared fruit with them as they walked around.

I’ve started asking the senior citizens in my neighborhood point blank questions about food security. I feel kind of anxious and like I am over-stepping but I know that a few of them don’t have kids nearby checking on them. I think that in the next few months the kids and I should figure out some kind of way to get involved in helping provide food. I know there is a local service who brings food to folks fighting cancer. That might be a good first starting place.

I was talking to the kids about classes–what they want to take next, what they are enjoying about the classes they are in right now. I don’t think I will end up with dancers. They get to take two PE classes at a time. Right now they have creative dance and gymnastics. They both say that at the end of this session they want to drop dance and go back to swimming but gymnastics can stay because it is awesome. So I hear. Near as I can tell they both want to be in swimming until they can just head out into the ocean. I told them that is still a bit off. You need to be able to swim in a pool without a life vest.

Shanna emphatically wants to start music of some kind in January. I haven’t been finding a lot in our area for five year olds so I’m not sure what she will start with. We own two ukeleles (thanks to Noah’s family) but I can’t find a local teacher who will teach a five year old. The local ukelele teachers are all unwilling to work with kids under eight. We’ll see. Hunt harder.

I wanted to start martial arts with the kids next year but I don’t know that Shanna will be willing to give up gymnastics or swimming. So I may start on my own. I haven’t decided yet.

I’m watching Walk the Line for the second time in two days. I will be sending it back to Netflix today. It is interesting thinking about what it takes to create a specific image that you must maintain under pressure. What kinds of ambient stress does that create? How do people break down when they have to be able to pretend upon demand that they are happy and cheerful?

What does it mean to find someone who is a good partner for you?

What kind of support do you need? What kind of support do you want?

Noah wants me to encourage him to do new things. He wants me to listen to him talk through his subject material in order to help him figure out how to teach it better. I may not be good at programming but I understand what it means to teach someone a new subject. I know how the brain learns. I know how to get peoples attention and hold it for at least an hour. I know what tends to make people remember things. I’m not good at everything. I’m good at sticking in peoples minds. People remember things I say. I’m not even entirely sure why but it is something that people comment on regularly so I think it is true.

Noah likes that I organize him so he doesn’t have to think about it. Noah likes that I do a lot of background work so he can do the last-fill-in-the-gaps with his subject matter knowledge.

I don’t think Noah would be pursuing teaching the way he is if he didn’t have someone at home to bounce ideas off. I get the impression that he is scared. I help him deal with that feeling. I believe in him enough to fill in the gaps where he doesn’t believe in himself enough.

I hope that living with me is nice. I hope that it is nice to live with someone who thinks you can accomplish just about anything provided you have a detailed enough plan, enough sleep, and enough rest.

If Noah had a different partner he would probably be more focused on the money. Long-term I don’t care if we are rich. I want a specific pre-planned level of safety and then I don’t need a lot. Money for travel. That will be the big long-term expense. Even having enough money to be safe is something that not everyone manages. What does it even mean to be safe? What is safe enough? I know that Noah has the potential to make a lot more money than he does but it would involve even more working than he does. I don’t want that trade.

I feel guilty that I don’t lighten his load enough. I feel like the burden of my financial need is unfair and unbalanced. Surely it doesn’t even out in terms of effort even if I do fold his fucking underwear. (I think folding underwear is stupid. He wants his folded. I fold it.)

I think life is about trade offs and choosing to be happy with what you have. If you defer happiness “I will be happy when I get _____” you will find that mostly you never reach happiness.

I am not a happy person but it isn’t about my life circumstances. I am trying to be a happy person. I believe with all my heart and soul that I have every reason in the world to be ok right now if not very happy.

I know a lot of people who can’t count three people who love them. I have three people who love me and hug me and tell me I am wonderful every day. We are really big on words of affirmation in this house.

We wake up to, “I am so glad to see you again.” We go to sleep saying, “I had a great day. I was glad to be with you today. I am so glad I know you.”

I smile as much as I can make myself smile. I know I am lucky. I know that not everyone gets to have people who are as nice. I get to have this mostly because I am creating it. My kids are nice to me because I am nice to them. I have to be consistent. I have to make this environment. If I don’t make the environment it won’t exist.

Speaking of environment, Calli has been bringing me books and saying, “Can you read this to me? I LOVE reading books. I think books are the best thing ever!” My kids see me read all day long. I talk to them about what I am reading on the computer. “I am reading a blog article. It is talking about ______.” They see me pick up a variety of books. I’m reading several non-fiction and a couple of fiction books at the same time. Every so often I sit down for a few minutes and plug away. Then I talk to them about the chapter I just read.

Right now one of the books I am reading is A History of the World in 100 Objects and the kids are really enjoying hearing me talk about the history. They ask a lot of questions. “Who were those people? Where did they live? How were they different from us?”

I like that my kids believe the world is to be questioned. Everything is worthy of a question. Sure it makes them less than convenient sometimes but I don’t want convenient children.

I feel proud of myself when I look at my kids. I have nothing else in my life I want to point at and say, “This is what I want to be judged by.” I fuck up everything else too much. But I haven’t fucked up my kids. My kids are happy, healthy, sure of themselves, and smart as can be. Not that I think that children must be “smart” in order to induce pride. But my kids are my kids and Noah’s kids. They are really smart. They figure things out. I like standing near them.

I want kids who are infuriating because they take everything apart. I want kids who want to understand the world so much that they have trouble containing their curiosity and destructive urges. Even though it is hard to live with. My kids now come to me and say, “Hey mom! I want to do an experiment so I’m going to make a mess in the kitchen. Is that ok?”

Sometimes I say, “No problem.” Sometimes I say, “Well… let me come check your set up and make sure everything will be easy to clean up; this might be an outside experiment.”

I feel sad that I am not better able to be a nice person under pressure. If you can only be nice if everything works out exactly right and you are in total control then you aren’t really a nice person, now are you?

But it isn’t true that I make everything about me. I talk to people without saying anything about myself often. I feel scared that I will screw up other peoples day so I try to pretend I am mostly just an audience.

I think that most people feel alone. I manage to find the vein of sadness that pretty much everyone is trying to hide. I can find that and I can tap into it. I wish to be seen. I wish for support. I wish for love. I think that most people have things they are hiding. Ways they need support. I think that hardly anyone gets enough love.

I like looking at people. I like seeing them. Seeing other people makes me feel like I am actually doing something. It makes me feel like I have value and purpose and a reason. I am good at doing something that people desperately need and most people suck at doing. Ok. That’s a reason. That can be enough.

Shanna expresses frustration sometimes for being where she is. “Why am I not better?” “Well, have you noticed how you started doing this two weeks ago and you are comparing yourself to someone who has been here for years? Uhm… yeah. Things happen in stages. You have to practice. You have to suck. You have to be frustrated or you won’t learn and you won’t get better.” “But this is frustrating.” “Yup. Life is. Keep plugging.”

I like that I can point out which things they can do now that they couldn’t do a week ago. I like that I can detail how they are growing and changing. I like that this is allowed to fill up so much of the space in my head. I like that I don’t have to things that matter to other people. I’m glad I don’t have to care about the priorities of a company. I am so grateful that I don’t have to fret about money.

I feel so unworthy of the life I have. This kind of safety should belong to people who can properly appreciate it and relax into it. I am wasting the security. Only I’m not. My kids will not be like me. My kids will not shake with fear for the majority of their lives. My children are able to move between many different environments comfortably and pull off “appropriate” behavior in nearly any context because they believe that they can do it. That is the main hurdle that people have to get past in life. You have to believe you can do what you want to do.

I believe that my daughters are capable of adjusting to any circumstance because some human being has done so at some point in time. I tell them so. Thus they believe it too. I coach them, “This is going to be different from most of the places we go. In this space I need you to _____.”

I’m very specific. Why will it be different? How will it be different? What do you need to do? What will other people be doing? How should you react? How do you tell which people want to talk and which ones don’t? How do you figure out what body language means ‘I want to socialize’ and which body language means ‘Go away’?

Most people in the world want love. They may not want it at this second from you but they want it. How do you convince them that maybe… just maybe… you might be a good person to be loved by.

Lately we are working on the fact that you don’t get to touch people just because you want to. Hell fucking no. Everyone gets to decide for themselves if they will be touched or not. Your body had better be respected. You have the right to defend yourself when someone touches you in a way you don’t like even if they think the touch is “mild”. It is always best to start defending yourself with your words but if you have to then escalate. Defend yourself. You matter. You matter so much.

How would I be different if I had thought I mattered?

I will never know what might have been for me. I feel so lucky that I get to watch my kids. I’m so glad that they just know that they are worthy of defense and love.

I am here. There is no right. There is no deserve. I am loved. Today will be another good day. My children and I will work together. Hopefully we will finish painting the play structure today. I’m ready to take a break until the new year. I need to finish Outrunning and that is going to be all my brain power for the next few months outside the daily rush.

So much to do and so little time.

I’m making Noah slow down his rate of work in late November and December. I think that both of us should have a few weeks of not doing extra projects near the end of the year. We are both tired. We both need to spend some time together. I love touching him. I like the cuddling we do. I like that we can touch one another a lot without it having to be sex all the time.

I’ve dated a lot of people who wouldn’t let me touch them unless it was leading to sex. They wanted their space. Noah doesn’t have a lot of interpersonal boundaries with me. If I want to flop on top of him and just lay there for an hour he’s ok with that–provided of course he has no specific reason to get up. He likes touching me too. I don’t think I have ever been around someone who makes me feel like they like looking at me the way he does.

It was really weird with my Owner. He wanted a fetish item. He liked the shoes and the clothes and the production of being the current woman in his fetish items. He passes the clothes and shoes from woman to woman. He picks us because we fit into what he already owns. Of course he does make/get new stuff for each new girl too. He took thousands of pictures of me. I should have felt like he wanted to look at me.

In a lot of the pictures I made sure my face was averted. I was aware he was taking a picture of the shoes and not me.

He wanted the pictures because he wanted the reminder that he had seen someone in those shoes. It wasn’t about him liking me. I mean, I think he did like me. I’m not hard to look at. I’m not ugly. I’m just… I just wasn’t very important to him. He didn’t care about me. He didn’t want to know me.

Noah wants to look at me. Noah asks me questions and listens to my answers and demonstrates that my answers impact his behavior.

I have never felt this important in my life. I try to appear happy because I know I should be. I know that I would be if I wasn’t broken. I have every reason to be happy. If only I could stop feeling scared.

defensive

Leave a reply

I need to climb out of this cycle. I’m having a hard time. Generally the more I focus on a cycle, the more I feel the desperate need to control my emotions the harder it is. I can only walk out of the main room into a different room to get control over my face and tone of voice so many times before I’m not actually in the main room I’m just hiding in my bedroom so I can cry.

We had a milestone this week. Someone described Shanna as a bitch. It was inevitable and all. She is female and she has strong opinions. I still feel sad. It wasn’t said in an attacking way. Calli keeps biting Shanna. The proposed reason is that it is because Shanna is a bitch to Calli. I…

I compare Shanna to my big sister and I have a hard time with using the word for her. Shanna *is* pushy. She *is* bossy. But when Calli turns around and yells, “You are not the boss of me” Shanna backs off and says, “Oh, you’re right.” Given the interactions I had with my sister I can’t think of Shanna as a bitch. She will have to get a lot more malicious before I will think that fits.

That is like 3% of my fuss today. Maybe only 2%. But it’s there. And it’s a milestone. I like to write those down.

Mostly my fuss isn’t about anything happening. That’s the point. I haven’t had anything really bad happen in a while. Which means that every part of my body is starting to vibrate with anxiety because surely something terrible is going to happen any fucking second.

Who is going to decide that I am too much trouble?

I am looking at the calendar and thinking that I should hibernate through most of November and December. Maybe if I hibernate then people will forget how unpleasant I am and when I come back in the spring people will be bored and lonely and less likely to reject me just because they are tired of my shit.

Sometimes it is very hard knowing that I have to consciously parcel out really small doses of me or people don’t set their own boundaries well until they tell me they don’t want to know me any more.

I tried to explain this to some of the homeschooling moms and I think I upset them. Shit.

I have to keep people on the third tier at a distance or they decide they don’t like me any more. If I try to get too close to people then they don’t want to know me anymore. I have to monitor how annoying or difficult or over-sharing I am being. I have to make sure I don’t overwhelm people because it is all my fault don’t you know. If only I would shut my stupid mouth people wouldn’t have to be so mad at me.

I’m sorry that I’m bad. I’m sorry I hurt people just by talking.

I am really fucking antagonistic when I feel this way. I was at someones house and she said that the kids couldn’t go outside because they were sick. I uhhh challenged that.

I didn’t challenge it because I think she isn’t allowed to set those boundaries. I asked because I have been working really hard on telling my kids the difference between, “I don’t want you to do this for health reasons” and “I don’t want you to do this for various grown up reasons that you don’t care about and I do.” Which is to say that I’m trying to not lie.

I have read a lot that the sick/cold connection is a myth. She clarified that once you are already sick being cold lowers your immune system and makes it harder to get well. Oh. Ok. I don’t think I have read about that part but it seems more or less logical.

People don’t like it when you question what they are saying to their kids like that. But I don’t like feeling lied to. I didn’t like it as a kid and I hate it with the fury of a thousand suns now that I am an adult and I am not subject to the random fucking whims of an adult.

Which isn’t to say that I thought this other mom was lying. But what she said contradicted what I had in my head. I know I am not always right so I asked. My tone of voice was shitty though. I think there must be a nicer way of asking for more information.

I don’t think it helps when I say, “I’m totally ok with telling my kids that I have made an arbitrary decision that them doing ________ would be a lot of work for me so no you are not allowed to do it right now.” Because then it sounds like I think that what other people are saying isn’t acceptable or correct and that isn’t what I mean at all.

Other people are allowed to parent however they see fit. Lots of parents lie to their kids all the fucking time. Sometimes they are just passing on their own inaccurate beliefs so the parent doesn’t feel like they are “lying”. Sometimes the parent knows and doesn’t give a shit.

I don’t think I will ever be good at just shutting up and letting other adults say things without asking questions. I am just that fucking annoying.

So I should stay home, right? I think other people are allowed to do whatever it is that they do. But I ask questions. And I have a really annoying tone of voice. It is way sharper and more confrontational that usual lately. All the self-hatred and denigration I hear in my head all day wears off the closest I have to soft edges. I should be able to ask my questions in polite and neutral ways. I often can’t. I can either sit there silently or I will sound like a fucking bitch.

I’m sorry. It isn’t your fault. It isn’t because I actually think you are a liar. If I were having a more socially suave day I could ask and not piss anyone off. But I’m not socially suave right now. Right now I feel like a mean and hateful monster.

Today we go to a camping wedding. Oh god.

Clearly a lot of people like me. In order to hibernate I have to turn down invitations. I turn down invitations nearly every week because I am fully booked. I can’t go to ____ because someone is coming over in the mid-morning and someone else is coming over in the evening.

But I don’t like me. That kind of trumps everything. I don’t like me much at all. I don’t think I am kind enough. I think I am a hateful, nasty person. I think that even when I haven’t said anything other than “Good morning” and “Good to see you.” I think that someone as unpleasant as me should not be allowed to freely inflict such fucking misery on every one in the world. I should die and make the world a better place.

But clearly other people do not agree with my assessment. Thus the invitations to weddings and birthday parties and other such festivities.

At some point this cycle will shift. I will stop hating myself with such vigor. I will stop hearing a cacophony of screaming voices telling me that I am a stupid bitch and no one likes me and why don’t I just go play with the cars on the freeway already because no one wants me to stay. I hear my mom and my sister and my brothers and my uncle and I don’t know how to make the voices stop.

I don’t have multiple personalities. I have overly strong memory abilities. I am too smart for my own good. I don’t forget things. I remember things so strongly and so clearly that other people are shocked. I can sit down and concentrate hard and tell you about the sequence of events on days that happened when I was two, three, four… I can’t remember every single day of my life with perfect recall but I can remember most of it. Almost all of it. It is all stored somewhere in my database and if I rattle it back and forth I can find what I need.

The problem is when I don’t get to control what is actively replaying. I have all those screens in my head. Luckily when I get into the place of hearing all the screaming this is sans-video. This is just an audio track. Thank goodness for small mercies.

I go back and forth between ringing my hands with “I don’t know what triggers these cycles” and “I’m just like this”. When I feel this way it is hard to understand or believe that I ever feel differently. I have lots of good days though–I objectively know it is true that I go through many days of my life without all the noise and hatred. I know it happens because I can pull out a reel of tape of some other day and replay it and know that the day was fine.

But I can’t find the mute button. I can’t find a volume control. I can’t just decide I want this to stop today. It has to stop on its own.

I used to ask my Owner to beat me when I felt like this. Noah and I have a different relationship. He does give me the occasional spanking (only when I ask very nicely and then wiggle my ass just right) but it isn’t extreme. I think that at this phase of my life I have completely moved the “edge” that I am willing to play at. I no longer need to be the most psychotic bottom in the room. I’m good. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.

I feel this way because of chemicals in my brain. I could take more drugs. Ha. I could do other things to disrupt the chemical levels in my brain. I have found few things in life that are more system-wide influential on my hormones than pain.

I believe I am supposed to be in pain. I believe it is the natural result of existing when you are such a piece of shit.

For the record, not all masochists feel like me. Most don’t. I have only met a couple of other people who talk about using bdsm the same way I do to deal with a pervasive sense of low self-esteem. People are masochists for a lot of reasons usually totally unrelated to being abused. The mean voices in your head thing is very non-standard.

Cutting would quiet the voices in my head. It would start other rounds of self-shaming but it would get rid of these voices. These voices want me to be punished. They don’t really care how. They just know that I am bad and should be hurting.

There is a very large part of me that wants to violently fight back. Fuck you. No more hurting me.

I think that is part of the reason that this is so hard to ignore. It makes me so angry that I feel this way about myself all the time. I feel so mad that the people who were supposed to love me and teach me to love myself were instead nasty, hateful people who taught me that I deserve suffering and death.

I don’t feel capable of being a nice person. I feel like that is a ship that has sailed. I am just a mean, nasty bitch. That is just how it works. But I want to be a nice person. I want to be someone who deserves relationships. But I don’t know how to earn them. I don’t know how to be good enough.

I need to just understand that if I am stupid enough to spend a lot of time with someone that there will be problems and eventually the person will want to go away and never talk to me again because I am terrible and mean and bad and annoying. It is appropriate for people to have these boundaries with me. It wouldn’t keep happening if I didn’t deserve it.

I have to keep people at a distance because people have relationships with me to meet needs of their own. I need to not think that relationships are about meeting my needs. My needs are cavernous and beyond the scope of anyone. I need to shut up. Shut up. Shut up you stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid bitch.

I’m not very good at that part.

I really liked that my Owner liked to keep me in a muzzle and hit me a lot. That just seemed appropriate. It was pretty hard for me to be bad in that circumstance. Near as I can tell that was the only period of my life where I didn’t feel like I was on the verge of being punished for being bad.

I was good. I was doing the right things. I was silent when and how he wanted me to be silent. He kept gags in my mouth a lot of the time. He thought it was “hot”. I still have jaw pain. I can’t do it any more. I feel like a failure.

I liked feeling like even if the inner core of my personhood was rotten and disgusting my outer shell could still please someone. Even though I deserve to die I was still amusing and worth keeping around for a bit longer.

No wonder my Owner didn’t want to talk to me about my mental health at all. That was Not His Problem.

Really my mental health isn’t any ones problem but mine. Shut the fuck up already you self-absorbed twat.

I’m afraid that if I stop paying attention and I stop arguing with the voices and I stop trying to figure out how this works that everything will get worse. I’m afraid that if I stop trying to track this that I will lose the ability to tell what is real and what isn’t. I’m afraid that if I stop trying to keep track of the fact that these are irrational voices–unrelated memories just jumping out–that I will believe that this is all that is true in the world. I’m not sure how long I will live if I give in and allow these thoughts to just be “true”.

That antagonistic, “Why did you say that?” That’s why I’m still alive. I know my tone of voice is shitty. I know I “should be” more gentle in my tone. I know. There is no excuse for me treating people badly just because I have mean things in my head. I know. I know. I know.

Do you tell someone with diabetes that everyone else wants donuts for breakfast and if they can’t eat it that is their own fucking problem?

My tone of voice is antagonistic because I am always speaking over hateful voices in my head. I sound so difficult not because I think you are doing something wrong but because I think I am bad. I am so very sorry that there is collateral damage.

Just hide. Don’t talk to any one. But I can’t. There is a wedding to go to. Life just keeps happening whether I am ready or not. And people tell me they want me there. I want to believe them. I want to believe them so much I shake with longing.

I want to not be hated. I want to believe that I am worthy of something other than being hated. But I’m such a bitch. Bitches deserve hatred, right?

Not proud.

4 Replies

In my continual efforts to not have secrets about which I feel shame, yesterday we had kind of an incident.

I had to dismantle the slide. An adult friend who was far above the weight limit decided to take a ride. It broke. No fucking shit. It ripped some of the bolts through the plastic and fucked up the wooden support under the slide. So it had to be taken apart. I could fix it with much larger washers, but it was a pain in my ass.

The entire time I was working on the slide, ok that isn’t fair–the first half of the time, the kids were not very happy with me. I tried to patiently explain what I was doing and why. I explained every tool and piece of equipment I was using. I showed them the damage and told them why I had to dismantle it in order to fix it.

The kids stood there and YELLED at me that I was mean for breaking their slide as I took it apart. Even though I had explained why and showed them how I would put it back together.

I fucking lost it. They have been yelling at me that I am mean a lot lately. Basically every time I do not instantly comply with their demands.

I turned around and started screaming at them that if I am so fucking mean go in the fucking house and leave me the fuck alone while I do this fucking work for your fucking play structure.

I don’t feel proud of myself.

I am not sure what the right thing to do there would be but I wasn’t capable of turning around and being nice. I just couldn’t. I am so fucking tired of being yelled at that I am mean while I am in the middle of doing demanding physical labor for someone else’s benefit. I just can’t sit there and tolerate that. I fucking can’t.

But I should figure out how to handle it without yelling “fuck” at children. On one hand I feel bad. On the other hand, wow have I never yelled fuck at my kids like that before. That was special. I’ve been remarkably good for me about swearing over the past few years.

I called K to calm me down. These days it feels like she is the only stress relief I have. The Godmamas are overwhelmed by familial need (that happens) and Noah is working a lot. A lot. A really really lot. He works his primary job, comes home for an hour or so then goes in the garage to do different work. This weekend he’s at a conference.

I used to get 3-5 hours of not-parenting every day. These days I’m under two hours. I do all of my work while managing the kids. Which isn’t something I deserve pity for. I wanted this and all. But it is hard to have enough patience for everything.

We did another hour or so of painting on the play structure. Calli has painted most of the stairs by herself. I was very impressed. I “helped” by doing a last few smoothing strokes on each board but she put the paint down and mostly spread it around by herself. Her paint clothes are now solidly covered in paint because she sat in it while she was painting. It was totally adorable.

Shanna painted the kid-side hand rail mostly on her own. I came along and did a little edging of the parts she had trouble seeing. That’s ok. There were a lot of little corners. Those are easy to miss.

I’m working on the rainbow. It’s a pain in my ass. But it’s coming along. I have used three fucking ladders in order to reach everything. I could have gotten away with two ladders if the thing was about three inches shorter. But it isn’t. So I needed a third ladder. C’est la vie.

I’m starting to have trouble sleeping again. Once I get six or so hours of sleep I feel like my sleep gets lighter–I come up to a lighter sleep cycle and then I just can’t really rest more. I get up to use the bathroom and then I fret. And fret. And fret.

Do you know what makes me feel worst about yelling at Shanna like I did? She came back to me and apologized for yelling at me about an hour after I yelled at them. I apologized to her too. I told her that I was sorry for yelling “fuck” at her because that isn’t very nice or respectful or loving. She said, “Well, we weren’t being very nice to you.”

I said, “No you weren’t. But you are kids. Kids push grown ups. It is my job to be the grown up and hold boundaries. It isn’t very cool of me to scream at you for being a kid.”

She told me she forgives me.

I don’t know how to be a better mother than I am. But I feel she deserves better. She is such a wonderful kid. It is kind of funny that I feel like I am mean to them. But never for the things they yell at me about. Those things are never the mean things. They yell at me that I am mean when I am doing nice things. If they yelled at me while I was actually being mean I think I would just nod and agree.

I think that when they start yelling at me I need to immediately separate us whenever possible. Not because they are “getting in trouble”. If you have feelings like that go express them somewhere else. You are allowed to have them. You aren’t allowed to yell at me like that. Hell, I barely yell at them the way they feel free to yell at me.

My kids are so fucking not abused. The cocky little… oh man. Clearly not abused. Abused children aren’t this god damned demanding.

I haven’t made progress on the book this week. I am thinking about it a lot. I know what I want to say. I just haven’t sat down to write. The minute I sit down the kids jump on top of me and demand that I do _________. (The list is long.)

I feel like we have phases where I can do independent work (like the mural on the fence) and then I just can’t for a while because they feel clingy and upset about being ignored and they won’t allow me to focus on anything. Right now I can’t do the dishes without them bugging the shit out of me to entertain them in some way.

I spend a lot of time saying, “It is not my job to entertain you. Go entertain yourself.” Sometimes it works. Sometimes not so much. That’s the process.

This is hard. I absolutely understand the impulse to just “put them in school”. I feel like there is stuff here to learn. There are lessons in this learning-to-put-up-with-people that I have to learn. I need it. NEED.

When I am an old woman I hope I will be proud of myself for doing the things that I knew were things *I* needed to do. I don’t in any way think that other people should mirror my path. I need to figure out how to be with kids.

When I lose it, which doesn’t happen very often–I do record pretty much all of them–I feel like I am proving that my children deserve to be removed from my care and given to someone who could treat them better. Only when I talk to so-called-“normal” (not diagnosed as crazy from a young age) mothers most of them spend a lot more time screaming at and/or punishing their kids. There is no way in hell I could treat my kids the way I hear/see other mothers doing it. I would not be able to look at myself in the mirror.

But I don’t think they are abusive. I don’t think their kids are damaged or fucked up in any way. So why do I feel so strongly that if *I* behaved that way I would be an abusive monster?

Is it the slippery slope argument? I can’t scream at my kids frequently because screaming just makes me more and more angry (being the one to scream means I am the one to escalate) and I have a really hard time controlling my urge to hit when I get too angry. And when I start screaming I am more or less incapable of screaming without cursing every other word. That is just part of the whole dynamic for me. I see other mothers who are able to scream or discipline and they don’t have to chant fuck fuck fuck over and over.

Right now my kids are sleeping in the cutest way possible. Shanna is “normal” direction but curled up in child’s pose. (Now I get why that is named that way.) Her nightgown is rucked up around her waist and she didn’t wear panties to bed. So she’s mooning the hallway. Calli is also in child’s pose but her head is firmly up against Shanna’s side so they are at a 90 degree angle to one another. They make a T.

I love how connected they are. They fight more now. But holy tomato they are attached to one another. They want to be near one another. Even when they are mad they don’t like separating. They do play in different rooms sometimes (Calli is very willing to run her own games when Shanna is being too bossy) but mostly they don’t like being away from one another.

Shanna keeps telling me that when she is a grown up she is going to go find my big sister and teach her how a big sister should act.

I tell my kids a lot, “How you treat your sister teaches her how to treat you. If you hit, pinch, kick, or shove you are saying that it is ok to do to you. I will not intervene until you get to the point of serious injury. You need to learn how to be nice.”

It is really interesting how Shanna is starting to take responsibility for “I am older and have more self control so I have to teach my sister how to act.” She frequently tells Calli, “Oh Calli! Please stop pinching me. It is hard to not pinch you back when you do that.” Once in a while she does pinch back. Then Calli wants to cry foul. I play at being deaf.

Today is a weeding day. The front yard is really bothering me. I haven’t weeded all summer. My pansies are getting choked out and fuck that noise.

The asparagus are growing like mad. I had no idea they looked like that. They kind of look like fennel as they grow up. It’s really neat. No one believes me that they are asparagus.

Tomato season is (thank goodness) nearly over. I will probably get another 5-10 lbs this year. One more batch of sauce. I’m ready to stop processing.

I am learning a lot about how I feel about food preservation and eating from my yard. I don’t know where I am going to put more raised beds in the future (maybe my roof?) but I think that long-term I will mostly want to figure out how to eat what is in season and do staggered planting. Like putting lettuce out to start every three weeks. Eat it as it comes ripe. We tend to not preserve a whole lot of fruit from the yard so far. Partially this is just current production size but partially it is that we gorge when things are in season. It feels nice. Then we have a break and that feels nice too. Preserving and eating the same things all the time causes me to get really bored and not want to eat at home.

I am sorta keeping to the schedule I drew up. That makes me feel good. I haven’t worked on Outrunning this week but that is the most serious deviation.

I’m having a hard time writing. I think that I’m actually feeling writers block about the book. I’m scared. I’m scared of really and truly committing to what I think a 12 year old should know. That feels like a heavy responsibility. I don’t want to do it wrong. I don’t want to give too much information and push kids towards making bad decisions.

Something I’ve been thinking about a lot is that no one wants to seriously think about how much power they have. People don’t like acknowledging to themselves who and what they really are in the scope of things. People either under or over rate themselves. It’s hard to be accurate.

I don’t know how much influence I might potentially have and that is really scary. If Torque (the guy who publicly apologized to me and who gave me specific permission to use his handle whenever I talk about him) had understood how much it meant that he publicly say, “I screwed up and I am sorry” he would have done it ten years ago. If he had been willing to actually deal with me, what difference might that have made in my life?

Sure, he was a softball sized trauma. He violated my consent in a painful way. But he didn’t have sex with me. He didn’t rape me. He did beat me… but I had asked him to so it is a really weird thing to figure out how upset I am allowed to get about the whole situation.

I asked him to do a scene. Scenes are potentially fraught. Everyone has to be responsible for themselves or they SHOULD NOT ENGAGE IN BDSM. If you need to be taken care of then you are not someone who should engage in bdsm. Period.

But he did stuff I told him not to do. And when I screamed “no” and “stop” he ignored me until I said “red” even though I had negotiated not using safewords. But I did have a safeword. I did make it stop.

Recently I was thinking about the last rape. What I really really really hope will be the last rape.

I gave permission in advance for a rape scene. I didn’t understand the difference between compliant rape and a rape I would actually fight against. I never fought before that. I was trained to not fight from when I was a toddler. I was literally physically taught to not fight against being raped from when I was a toddler. When I was twenty-five I finally fought back.

I still lost.

I still got raped. Even though that time I didn’t want it and I was upset enough to fight and I fought as fucking hard as I was physically capable of fighting.

I haven’t ever done that before. I always give. I always know that it is right that I lose. I know I deserve to be raped. I know I deserve to service the needs of people around me because I am a whore and that is what whores are for.

But that last rape was different from all the others. That is the only time I can look at and really believe in my heart, “I was not able to stop that.”

Every other time I acted like it was like the scene with Torque. If I knew the safeword I could stop it but I don’t play with safewords so mostly I will eventually go limp and try to not die.

I don’t say “no” to sex. Well, I do now. Rarely. Barely. I started in pregnancy. I made Noah promise in advance that if I decided to not have sex from the date of conception to three months after delivery that he wouldn’t divorce me. I knew there was the non-zero possibility. I know that happens for some people. I was really scared. I made him promise because clearly he picked me because I am sexually compulsive and at that point we were still non-monogamous and I was pretty scared that he would wander off and not come back if I cut him off.

He didn’t.

I went and did a lot of bdsm because I wanted to find out what it felt like to believe you were allowed to say “stop” and have it work. When that mechanism failed me…

I don’t say “no” much. I learned how to say “stop”. Barely. It took a lot of effort and work. It took really consciously trying to do it. My Owner worked with me. He did a lot of very dangerous things where I HAD to say stop or he might end up in jail for manslaughter and we don’t want that now, do we?

It is kind of funny because outside of sex I say “no” more easily than almost anyone I’ve ever met. I’m pretty happy to add a “and go fuck yourself while you are at it!” But that sex button thing is old.

Lately I’ve been waking up in the morning and looking in the mirror and saying repeatedly, “You will not be held accountable for your feelings; you will only be held accountable for your actions.”

I have big feelings. I have mean feelings. I have sad feelings. I have hateful feelings. I have painful feelings.

I’m not hurting anyone else by having these things inside of me. If I control my temper and manage to not lash out (screaming that I am not fucking mean for fixing the fucking slide aside) then I am not hurting people. If I am not hitting anyone I am not hurting anyone. If I control my tone of voice such that I do not sound mean or hateful then I am doing fine. It’s ok that I am playing a game.

That’s the point. It is all a game.

No one is against you. They are for themselves. Don’t take it personally.

You will only be held accountable for how you act. I don’t know how you feel. I can’t know. That is forever a shut door. I just know how you act. I care about how you act.

That is comforting and very disturbing.

Identity crisis

6 Replies

I went to a wake on Sunday. I would say the day was euphoric. I went up to San Francisco dressed in full leathers. I wore a black leather strapless ballgown that reaches the floor. Over it I wore a white and black leather corset. Apparently I looked good enough to stop traffic because I did.

I went to a munch first (because it was happening when I happened to walk into the coffee shop). The erotic hypnosis munch–the particular topic was on edge play. How do you hypnotize someone so that you can make them think you are doing something more dangerous than you are doing. Like if you hypnotize someone then fuck them with a butter knife but the bottom believes you are using a sharp knife.

I made everyone in the room startle when I said, “Err, why don’t you just use a sharp knife?” “But that would be dangerous!” “Errr, I’ve done it. Well…. more accurately I’ve had it done to me and my pussy isn’t cut in half.”

It kept going from there. When I went to the wake I saw a lot of people I haven’t seen in almost ten years. I was flat shocked by how fondly I am remembered. But apparently I am remembered as a big scary edge player.

“Don’t dare Lenora to do something. She will do it. And you will be sorry.”

“If there is work to be done Lenora will not stand around waiting.”

“Uhhh I wouldn’t keep pushing with her. She’ll win.”

That was just a few of the comments that kind of stand out in my head. Wait… what? Oh. Ok. At least one of those was said by a big scary man who has used his big scary boots to stomp my skull into concrete. More than once. And *I’m* the one who will make people sorry?!

People who knew me introduced me to new people and told them in detail why the new people should listen to me because I know what I am talking about. I repeatedly said, “(S)He’s lying. I don’t do anything interesting any more. I just stay home. I know nothing.” I got some looks for that.

Of course I ran into play partners and former lovers. I was uhm remembered fondly. “Do you remember that weekend before Pride? Ohmyfuckinggod that was the hottest thing ever.” Err, yes. Yes I am that hot.

I left feeling built up. I worked very hard for my standing in that community. I submitted to brutality that literally shocks people because I wanted that standing in that community. I wanted to be one of the most intense people in any room. Now I find out that most of the people I was sort of “competing with” in my head think I am past them. That’s… oh. Really?

It was kind of weird to be at the wake. I know there was way over 100 people there, probably more than 200 people. There were representations of EVERY leather organization within reasonable driving distance. Every gay male only, every lesbian only every every every leather group was there. Because Iain touched all of them and made their lives better.

I was one of the few people to speak (Angela asked for people to talk and share memories) who did not enter the scene through Iain and Angela’s classes. Only a few of us knew them “before”. It was wonderful seeing how many lives they have made better.

I really felt like part of a community. The man who wrote the apology for putting a cattle prod on my cunt was there. I cried with him for almost ten minutes. He apologized a few more times and told me that if he had understood what this meant to me he would have done it ten years ago. That was intense.

People who knew me exclusively as a masochist had a lot of questions about my being a parent. They were shocked that I like it so much. Why do I want to home school? Oh wow. You care so much? Yes. Yes I do care so much.

Then by mid-way through Monday I kind of recognized that all of these things that are part of my “standing” in that community are things that if people find out about them I could end up with a lot of punishment.

The park on Tuesday with the home schoolers was really hard. I sobbed the whole way there and had trouble not bursting into tears the whole time I was there. I know I am dirty and disgusting and not the kind person that people want around their kids. Shut up you stupid nasty bitch. Don’t talk about what you’ve done. Shut up shut up shut up.

I am very afraid of my children being ostracized because of who their mother is. I’m not very good at being in the closet. I’m not very good at keeping my mouth shut. I’m not very good at being appropriate. I’m not very good at keeping only to topics that other people like.

This morning one of my closest friends was trying to be loving and supportive. In the context of a larger conversation she said, “You get back what you give to the world.” I said, “Fuck you. Who did I rape first?”

She wants me to think about how to be happy. She wants my life to improve. She wants me to think I have the power to change how my life goes. She wants to believe that I can adopt privilege from people who love me and no longer be a person at the bottom of the ladder.

I say that the kids who were born the sixth child of alcoholic and drug addicted parents in a trailer park are probably not getting from the world what they have given. And it is not a very nice thing to imply that they are.

Some people have good lives. Lucky them. It isn’t about getting what you deserve. There is no deserve. Fuck you to anyone who says there is.

I feel scared as I write Outrunning. I know that a lot of people are going to be extremely angry with me for consciously trying to talk to 11/12 year old kids the way I am. They will think it is all my fault if their kids go out and do drugs and have sex. No, it isn’t my fault. It really isn’t. But hopefully I can help your kids understand the risks they are taking so they can make conscious choices. It isn’t my fault your kids want to do what they want to do. I swear to god I am not responsible for people being interested in drugs and sex.

I made everyone at the park bug their eyes out. One mom is interested in me doing sex ed with her kids. I said, “Do you understand that I will tell your kids that masturbation is awesome and phone sex and cyber sex are the safest kinds of sex in the world?” “But what about older men?!” “That’s a different part of the conversation.”

I feel scared. I feel bad. I know I believe things that are “wrong”. I know that lots of other people seem to think that sex should be some special magic potion you only get once you are married. I think it is my birthright. I get to have sex. As much of it as I want. Just because I bloody well can. I don’t think that anyones mother (not even my own) gets to decide where and when and what kind of sex is right for me. I have to decide for myself.

Just like all these other people need to decide for themselves. I believe my kids will have sex some day. I think they will more than likely start as teenagers given where and when they live. (I’m praying for the far side of 16 with a partner who is within two years of their age.)

Until you are READY for sex… masturbation is AWESOME. Do it by yourself. Do it with a “friend” in the room. Don’t let them touch you. This is about watching and handling yourself and learning what you like.

And boy howdy will I talk about birth control. Much easier to prevent a child than raise one.

I feel scared that my existing and having the opinions I have is going to go very badly for my children. I feel so scared.

I was asked why I care so much about what other people think of me. Uhm because I have had to deal with people throwing a lot of literal rocks at me because disgusting people like me deserve to be stoned. I’m afraid for my children. If I don’t think about what people think of me my children my pay the price.

Just another whinging Friday

Leave a reply

It isn’t that I think my kids are bad or anything. They are just excellent boundary pushers. I want them to push boundaries. I flat encourage them in that direction. I want children who are tenacious, stubborn, and sure that their idea is A Good One. But. But sometimes I wish I could say, “I know I’m willing to argue/negotiate with you all day every day but can I please have a friggin break on my birthday.” They just aren’t old enough to understand.

We did have good moments. I feel really bad that it seems like all I do is complain. Doesn’t anything make me happy? Am I ever satisfied? Is there any point in reaching for satisfied or is that just not something I can feel? I feel really guilty for not being able to turn this into a fun trip. It should have been a fun trip. I hate that I am such a downer all the fucking time.

But it felt really bad getting yelled at for what I wanted to order for lunch. I fucking told them four days in advance, “On my birthday I want us to have gumbo and papas fritas and beignets for lunch. That’s what I want.” They were enthusiastic and supportive until we got to the park. Then I was a mean and terrible person for not letting them have popcorn for lunch. Or ice cream. Or a Dole Whip. Or…

My kids rarely have extreme cases of the gimme’s. I don’t buy them things all that often on our outings and I’m kind of nasty about being pestered to buy stuff. Holy.Fucking.Shit. This trip was the most gimme-gimme-gimme I think Shanna has ever been. She actually sat on her ass in the middle of the store and started yelling at me because I wouldn’t buy her a FUCKING SECOND MUSIC BOX. SHE HAS ONE AT HOME THAT SHE BOUGHT WITH HER ALLOWANCE ON OUR LAST TRIP.

I almost lost my shit. If we had been within an hour of home I would have left the park fifteen minutes into the day.

The really funny thing is the DMV portion of the trip was the best natured and happiest all three of us were on the whole trip. We played games and met people and it was a really enjoyable 3.5 hours. Hell, I’m talking to a lady via email after that. She’s nice.

I think it is that whole kicked puppy thing. I was acting like a kicked puppy. I was begging them to please let me have a turn. When you act like a low status person you get kicked like a low status person. So my kids kicked me (only literally a few times figuratively much more often) all day.

It all feels like my fault. If things go badly it is because I planned wrong or anticipated wrong or… something.

Having them both scream at the top of their lungs that I was mean and nasty multiple times before 10am felt really hard. I know this is a current tick. I know that the best way to handle it is to not engage. At this point in time I am having trouble not bursting into hysterical tears or hitting them. I have strong impulses to do both. I’m not doing either but I want to.

Just breathe. This moment will pass.

I have spent ~15 hours over the past week and some working on scheduling. I’m getting close to knowing the shape of my days all the way through the end of the year. If I stick with my schedule. Ha.

In order to make it so that I can potentially accomplish what I want to accomplish I need a schedule with a lot of rest time scheduled. I need to not be booked all day every day. I have to have multiple days in a week where what I do is hang around the house and putter. I need to have scheduled “sit on the couch and read books and snuggle” time with the kids just about every day.

I have to run more. I just have to. Not running is feeling a lot worse than running. Which is hella funny. We have gone out all four of us a couple of mornings in a row. We hope to get the kids used to going for a morning jog. Noah and I take turns doing sprints up the block and back to the family because the kids are a lot slower.

Outrunning Suicide is starting to take shape. I have mostly written several chapters. I have a skeleton. This one is very different than No Secrets. The entire writing process feels different. This will feel more like a collection of essays than a story, but there needs to be some sense of story in it as well. I am trying as hard as I can to be conscious of the fact that I want this book to be appropriate for twelve year olds. Even though the mothers of twelve year olds will say that it is too mature. The mothers are wrong.

I need to start working on painting in the back yard. All of the stuff that was built this year needs to be painted so it doesn’t rot quickly. Oh man.

I don’t want to go out very much over the next few months. I want to get work done. I want to home school my kids. I need to stop looking outward for a while. We will go to park days. I will continue to try to make time for Noah’s friends who have all had kids and the few people I have hanging on who had kids.

I need to stop looking for new people. I don’t have the bandwidth. My monkey spheres are full.

I like having a lot of… I’ll call them third tier friendships. People generally don’t want to think of themselves as third tier, but oh well. At this point the only person I have near daily contact with who I don’t live with is K. Thank goodness for her. That is the first tier. Second tier are all of the people who have kept contact with me for long-stretches of time and they know real things about me and I know real things about them. These are people who very consciously schedule with me and make sure that I know that they think about me. The third tier are the people I don’t see a lot of and they know very little that is real about me but I want to feel acceptance and love so I try very hard to maintain Appropriate Behavior around them and I know there are consequences if I slip up.

The third tier is where you get into the idea of Community. These are people I want to know. They add value to the world and to my life in particular but I don’t think they actually like very much about me so I have to carefully construct what they see or I will be shunned again.

I can’t overload my second tier. When I overload my second tier then I see the ending of nearly-decade-long relationships and the backlash hurts me for years.

The third tier is where I spend most of my time. I carefully dole out just small bits of my personality to people. It all tends to feel very artificial. I know I need to be careful not to be too real. I need to not saying things that will upset people. Good fucking luck guessing who is sensitive to what.

Why is the third tier so important? Because I have absolutely stressed the first and second tiers to the limits of their ability to support me and if I have free-floating miasma of need and I get it met in bursts of random kindness from the universe. I depend on a lot of Pay It Forward. Mostly this has worked out fairly well. Humans in general are loving, kind, and they want connection.

But then we get to this punishment thing. I think that most people have trouble understanding that they are punishing people. I know that I struggle with understanding how and where I punish people. I do it but it is hard for me to understand the mechanism of it. It is hard for me to understand that I have the power to punish people. I don’t feel like I have such power. I feel weak and powerless.

My second tier has worked very hard to step up since I had kids. As much as I am still in a place of great hostility towards the idea of “chosen family” (given that most of the people who have emphatically told me that I am their family no matter what no longer speak to me I think I get to be hostile to this concept) I… feel conflicted. Clearly I have friends who have moved into family roles.

I feel like I am understanding how other peoples limitations work better as the years go on. Like, I’m not inviting people on trips. It isn’t that anyone wants to hurt me (I don’t think that the desire to hurt me played any part in people not being able to go on the trip–major health concerns came up for everyone) but I am still here hurting. How do I move towards hurting less?

I have been asking for help with things where I can’t handle the answer “no”. That is always where I get into trouble. This is consistent for me. I wait until the lack of support will be crippling then I ask for support then I get told no because other people don’t have the bandwidth and I crumble.

I need my life to require fewer spoons. I need to not need help.

Having children has been humbling and humiliating. The amount of help I have needed has been really hard. Things like going to the doctor for an ultrasound of my abdomen. That turned into a huge long lecture at Kaiser about how I need child care or I can’t get health care. I understand why my dentist pushed me to get the dental implant I needed while I was pregnant even though the pain meds aren’t optimal because “Mothers don’t take care of their teeth when they have children under ten.”

It is kind of weird and hard to talk about but since having children I am more house bound than I was before simply because of how my bathroom habits changed. I have always had a small and urgent bladder (common problem with early childhood sexual abuse) but after the kids my life-long diarrhea problem became urgent and explosive too. And then there is how my periods have changed. Having a body sucks.

Having kids is hard but I did not anticipate the specific ways this would be so hard. I anticipated getting sick of laundry and wiping up poop and being screamed at. I didn’t understand that after having children it would be a rare thing for me to be able to handle three hours between bathroom trips–I get a few freak days once in a while. I normally go to the bathroom every half hour or so. I don’t think I would physically be able to teach right now. I used to have 110 minute class periods. I can’t hold my bladder that long any more. And it is illegal to leave in the middle of a class to use the restroom. I did it anyway but you aren’t supposed to and there are severe potential punishments.

You want to know why I have so much anxiety about neglecting my children when they are playing in another room and I can’t see them but I can hear them? Because I went through teacher training and discovered just how much trouble I can get in if I don’t “properly supervise” other peoples kids. Apparently properly supervise means sit on top of the child and physically prevent them from ever breaking the rules. Good luck.

I swear this all ties together in my head.

I have historically depended heavily on the third tier. Why do I consider them third tier? What I can ask of them is much smaller and more limited and I have to be careful of watching how often I ask. The tiering is how much of my need they have demonstrated an ability to handle. It isn’t about me judging them negatively or thinking they are bad people. I’m intense. I hurt people without trying. I need to be careful to notice when I am hitting stress points for people and withdraw so there can be a next time. If I push third tier people too hard they eject me from their lives.

With children this is different and difficult. At this point I feel like a user if I ask people for anything. I try hard to bully K to let me come do work at her house because I feel like such a user all of the time given how much support she gives me. It isn’t actually a better dynamic.

I have a hard time knowing that at this point in my life I need more support than I give. It has been true for years. Maybe for all of my life. This totally plays into being financially dependent. I feel ashamed of myself. I look at the women in my life who are not dependent and I feel pathetic. This is part of that defining myself by being not-like other people. It isn’t good for me or anyone else.

I don’t feel like the things I do are good or worthy. And yet I really really really want to do the things I am doing. With fervor and intensity I want these things in the world and I don’t think anyone but me will do them. I take that as a sign they probably aren’t worth doing and I am just a waste of resources.

Part of the problem with an extensive third tier is someone always needs help. People are always struggling and I wish I could help more. I wish I had more to offer. I wish I had more energy. I wish I had more time to give them.

But instead I will stay home and weed my garden and write a book and paint. I am selfish and small. My life is limited and unimportant. I totally struggle with that Gen Y thing of, “But I am SPECIAL”. No. I’m really not. I don’t have anything unique and special to offer the world.

But sometimes I feel like I do. Sometimes I feel like I am good at helping people see their own value. Because I think so little of myself I view basically everyone in the world as higher status as me. When I explain to people all that I see about them that is good and wonderful they tend to be surprised. They are not able to see themselves that way. Isn’t that ability good and useful? Is that enough? What is enough? Enough of what? Enough for what?

I don’t know.

But I need to pull back into my little shell. I need to count my spoons and carefully lay them next to tasks. I want to read more books this year. I want to look out my back window on New Years Eve and see a rainbow castle. I want to finish writing the book that I really needed to read when I was twelve. I want to teach my children the daily habits of picking up after themselves. Even though it is hard. Even though you would rather do it later. If you do it now then you are free to go do anything you want on a whim. It takes practice to learn these habits.

I want my children to think that physical activity is just part of life. So I have to model it every day.

I want to not be fucking screamed at. I have already made a lot of progress on my own screaming. I will figure this out. It is going to be hard and it will take patience. We will figure this out. Without anyone getting beaten. There may be a fair bit of time out in our future.

I don’t think that anyone did anything wrong per se on my birthday. But I think that at this point my birthday is such a thing that I’m not sure anyone can do right. I don’t think it is anyone else’s fault at this point.

Rope bridges last a long time but eventually decay. You aren’t doing anything wrong by jumping up and down as you go across a rope bridge. Sometimes a log may break and you could plummet to your death. No one actually did anything “wrong” but there are still end results that suck.

I don’t know how to feel special. I want that feeling so bad. I want to feel loved and appreciated and like people are really really glad I am alive. I don’t feel that way. I feel like people tolerate me so long as I can fill their needs and not be too annoying. I know that people don’t actually feel that way about me. I don’t think I offer enough trade to actually justify that belief.

It isn’t that I believe that Noah and Shanna and Calli secretly hate me. It is clear that they all love me with great intensity. But something inside me is broken. It is like pouring boiling water into a tank of liquid nitrogen so that you can warm it up. That just isn’t going to work how you hope.

I feel raw. I know I am “over sensitive”. I know I “shouldn’t take things so personally”. But I am. I just am. Maybe I shouldn’t be. Maybe I shouldn’t exist. But I do. And this is how I feel. And I can’t make it go away just because it is inconvenient for me or for other people. The only thing I can do is try to stop being in a room with anyone else on my birthday so that it is very very clear that this problem is in me and not because of anyone else.

My birthday is really hard for me. I’m afraid it always will be. I desperately desperately want a kind of feeling loved and cared for and appreciated that I’m not getting. I don’t know what it is or how to get it. Everything I have tried so far has failed miserably. I really and truly have tried to change this pattern.

I wish I could stop feeling like it would be better if I was dead. Then I wouldn’t be so fucking inconvenient.

I know it isn’t “true”. I had kids so that I would know beyond the shadow of a doubt that my labor is necessary for a few decades. Nothing would be better right now if I was dead.

But I don’t know how to feel loved. I feel despised. I feel unappreciated.

Which is ridiculous. Noah couldn’t work harder than he does. And he clearly is doing it for me–he didn’t work like this before me. My Owner was a workaholic. Noah was kinda lazy when I met him. He was certainly unfocused–that is probably a better word than lazy. He works like a dog, largely because he is doing it for me. He wants to make all of my dreams come true.

And I reward him by crying and crying and crying and feeling like a worthless piece of shit. He is very confused. If I knew what to ask him to do he would do it. I don’t know. I don’t know how to stop feeling this way.

I mean, in the abstract I know how to deal with this feeling. Feel it. Cry while you have it. Wait. It will end.

That’s the awesome thing about feelings. They change.

Sometimes I do feel that Noah loves me. Sometimes I do feel that my kids love me. But somehow when it comes to my birthday that is broken. There is this big brick wall. I don’t feel attached. I don’t feel love or loved. I feel worthless and stupid and pathetic and bad and mean and unwanted and like I should just die.

And god I miss my mother. I miss my mother so much I want to curl up into a ball and never eat again. I am not worthy. I dishonor the woman who bore me. I am a piece of shit. I am not protecting her and taking care of her. I know she needs it. She has always needed it. She has always needed to be taken care of more than I need it.

And I think my kids need more taking care of than I need. Except for one day a year. Where I think I am going to need to have different boundaries.

I have started grieving really hard for the apology I was told I would get and I didn’t get. That guy in the scene I went and talked to who said he would write an apology. I’m sorry I made myself vulnerable to that.

I’m even more grateful for talking to the guy who made me uncomfortable at the wedding.

I know that I have to keep trying with people. Every relationship is unique. Every dynamic changes over time. I need people to jump over hoops for me. I need it. I’m pretty clear and direct about how and where I need it. I try not to be too demanding of any one person. But I do ask people to jump through hoops for me.

I want people to show me with their actions that I am actually as important as they verbally claim I am. I want my body to matter. This is a really dangerous kind of validation to want. Because I am not going to get it. People will say they will do ______ and not do it.

Do you know what makes people happy? Giving help to other people. Do you know what makes people feel shitty? Needing help. I hate my neediness as much as other people resent me inflicting it on them.

The kids are slightly sick. Runny nose on elder child, both are coughing. Younger child keeps telling us she needs a bucket but she isn’t vomiting. I’ve been crying so much I don’t know if I am sick or not. I scheduled a potentially light weekend because I am S-M-R-T.

I am looking forward to fall and winter. It will feel really nice after the frantic work pace of spring and summer. It is a puttering kind of day. I will go grocery shopping. I should wash the windows. Then they can color on them again. Ha. Right now they are too full to be fun.

I should stop typing. Annnnnnnny minute here……

Walking on eggshells

Leave a reply

I do a lot of defining myself in negatives. I don’t just mean that I am derogatory towards myself. I mean that I think of myself in terms of, “I am not like _____; I do not do _____” It is one way of making yourself different. Not a useful way. It means that you are constantly placing how other people are as primary. I’m not like you. People take it as a rejection or as a negative statement about them. Going out and creating an identity without negatives is much harder. It takes tremendously more emotional and psychological energy to go create something from scratch rather than just reject everything that walks by as being “not you”.

I was asked how the party went. Well. Where in my stress cycle should I answer that question from? I think that most people had fun. I absent mindedly made a minor social faux pas early on and never stopped hearing in my head how stupid, rude, domineering and offensive I am. When everyone finally left I cried for hours because I felt so guilty for offending someone.

If you are going to move through life being an asshole but you cry every time someone lets you know that you are crossing their boundaries… you aren’t giving people a way to have a relationship with you that is not basically subservient. If I don’t want subservient relationships (I don’t) then I can’t keep doing this bullshit. It’s not ok to cause other people to feel guilty for having boundaries. They need to have them. I need to take my wrist slap and move on. That is the adult way to handle such things. That is how you have relationships.

This is why my therapist wants me to stop socializing for a while. I spend a lot of time examining all of my interactions with people and looking for reasons that person is very likely to walk away from knowing me any minute for a long list of good causes. I know that I push my luck every day and in every way. When will people be sick of my shit? I get that a lot. My paranoia is not baseless. Is it paranoia to watch for tornados in tornado country?

But the paranoia drives people away as surely and as quickly as if I was chasing them away with a fire hose.

On my last day of teaching English at the Hindu temple one of the kids brought up suicide. A kid from their school jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge last year. They are all still thinking about it. I talked to them about how hard it is to get help when you are mentally ill. It wears people out. They want you to hurry up and get better already so that you don’t inconvenience them. What do you do if you can’t just snap out of it and behave the way other people want? Either you can put up with being punished for being how you are or you do what you can do to get away from the pain. Sometimes that is suicide. Not that I know exactly why that girl jumped. There are as many reasons to do it as there are people who do it.

Walking on eggshells means trying to place someone else as the primary character in the story and not being sure what your lines are. “What do I say so that this delicate and sensitive individual is not upset?” Can’t be done. As soon as you are reacting from that place you have already assumed that offense is likely and just assuming that means that the offense is already communicated. Game over. You lose.

Sometimes people snap at my social faux pas because they are not feeling patient today but they feel patient on other days. I am probably similarly obnoxious on both days but the difference is not about me. If people try to pick their behavior towards me based on my mood they will mostly pick wrong. It drives me batshit. You can only act how you feel like acting. Faking it will make neither of us happy. And acting like you have already been kicked makes people want to kick you. Really hard.

Some days I am going to wander off and cry if someone blinks too hard in my direction. It isn’t about someone letting me know that I crossed a boundary. When I have been crying two, three, four hours a day for over a week… my emotional reaction is not about you and I’m sorry that I’m standing near you when it starts such that you will feel responsible. You aren’t. My feelings come from inside me. The kind of shame I feel isn’t something that people I know now put on me. It is about old tapes.

I don’t keep people in an ongoing way if they seriously shame me. I don’t fucking think so–I don’t need that crap.

I think very hard about every person who is in my life. If I invite you to my house (even if you think you are one of the casual people) I have spent many hours thinking about you. I have mulled over every piece of data I have ever acquired and I have carefully weighed it. I know you because I want to know you. I don’t have accidental friends any more. I have people in my life because I choose them out of a long list of ever rotating acquaintances.

I am mercenary. I do not see any benefit to being less than frank about this. I don’t pick my friends based on them being able to wait on me or do work for me or babysit or give me social status. I pick my friends based on them having character traits I desperately admire and want to be able to watch develop more closely. I don’t understand. I want to. Please let me stare at you until I understand.

I don’t think that most people in my life understand this. I want you near me because I want to figure out how and why you do _________. This is something I want to understand in this lifetime and I don’t know another way of accessing this information. I want to know why you want to do the things you want to do. I want access to your motivations. I’m trying to hack my own motivation system. What makes you do the things you do? It isn’t that I will use your motivation to do exactly the same thing as you, but clearly you have learned some neat tricks I don’t know.

I never really understand what I have to offer though. That end of the deal keeps me up at night. I see what I get out of knowing people. I see clear value. I don’t understand what I have to offer. I don’t understand why anyone bothers to know me. I don’t see how the unpleasantness of my company could possibly be balanced by anything I know or do.

I can understand that Shanna and Calli are tied to me. Children need their moms. I get that. I can certainly understand how Noah finds enough value in the trade. Past that… I don’t really get it. I think that is part of the reason I read as mean. I am sad and bitter that I have nothing that is worthy of trade for a relationship. I feel broken and angry about it. I don’t know how to build people up and make them feel happy about being themselves while standing next to me. I know how to make people feel angry and irritated and like they don’t want to stand next to me any more. It is a self-fulfilling prophesy. I do this a lot.

I can’t be perfect in order to not annoy people. I can only be. I have to accept the rebuffs when someone lets me know I am crossing a boundary without turning that into a federal case or people won’t feel comfortable communicating boundary incursions and they will just stop talking to me. No one likes drama. No one wants to feel guilty for having boundaries.

Not everything is about me, yo.

I woke up early because I have to get my crying over early before a busy day. Not many left before I hit “vacation” for a couple of weeks. I’m looking forward to this. I need to get my stress levels down to the point where I am not crying for multiple hours a day as a way of avoiding beating the shit out of people.

I cry partially from frustration. I don’t know how to let the intensity of my emotions defuse without doing something. I used to cut. I like being beaten. I have punched holes in a lot more walls than I should admit. These days I feel like I live in a glass cage. If I hit anything it will break and I will be in a shower of shards. So I cry. And cry. And cry. I don’t know if it is healthier or not but it is certainly less violent. Progress?

See, this kind of thing is actually huge progress. I don’t know that I would give myself much credit for it without writing. I have progressed past hitting other people constantly to deal with my frustration through punching walls to crying. I have progressed past cutting myself into letting other people hit me in consensual and pre-agreed ways into crying. Progress, not perfection? I am moving in a less self-hating direction.

Now I cry over someone pointing out that I said something four times. (Which is annoying. I know.) You know… at least it is much better than my previous coping methods of hitting her or cutting myself would have been much more inappropriate. Both are ways that I would have dealt with that interaction in the past.

Most of my friends have social anxiety to some degree or another, I think this commonality increases their patience for me. But it means that some days my anxiety runs into their anxiety and then things just get worse. Neither can break the cycle. Awkward.

In my life the only thing I have found that really and truly breaks the stale mates and allows relationships to continue is time. If you both continue to spend time together despite acknowledging sometimes feeling awkward… you continue to have a relationship. Not every relationship is comfortable every moment. If you choose to have the relationship then you look for ways to spend time together even if it is kind of weird. Even if you do have some defensive conversations.

I need to get my stress levels down. It is a physical limitations thing. I can only monitor my social behavior so closely if I am doing a lot of major physical work. I have been using my body unusually hard for the past few weeks. The mural and the backyard work have both used a lot of muscles I’m not used to moving. They have both taken a lot of patience I didn’t actually have going spare.

I need to figure out what it means to do projects as a parent. I’m still not handling the energy allotment thing very well.

I feel scared a lot of the time because I can’t control what other people do and I am worried about driving people away from relationships with my children. I do not want to isolate them. But it seems pretty awful for me to expect people to put up with me being an asshole just so they can help take care of my kids when no one but me and Noah owes my kids anything.

My kids are neat. They will be more neat if they know people like you. You are neat. This is all stuff that floats around in my head making me vulnerable and scared all the time. I feel my children deserve relationships that I do not have or know how to create.

I don’t think my kids want to see their grandparents because they want to hurt me. I think that one or both of them will decline to go when they finally understand that I’m not going. I will do my best to not share how I feel about the trip. What they need to know is that they have grandparents who love them and a mom who loves them and their mom is very happy to help them pack and I will kiss them goodbye and tell them to have fun. That is more or less the end of the story in our house.

But I am still going to cry when they are gone. I am still going to be very sad that it has worked out that I just don’t get extended family this lifetime. I’m grateful that I managed to get a nuclear family thing. I get to be sad about this. I get to grieve about that. It doesn’t hurt my kids if I spend my alone time crying.

If I describe visiting their grandparents… I don’t have to sell it or try to make it sound fun in a fake way. When they go see their grandparents they need to remember a bathing suit because they have an indoor pool. They need to remember clothes appropriate for riding a horse because they have horses. Not to mention cows and I don’t know what other animals. There is a whole floor of a house that is just toys. You and your dad and your sister will stay on an apartment by yourselves and you will be able to go play with the toys probably anytime you want while you are visiting.

I mean, shit dude. I don’t talk about the people much or try to predict how the relationships will be. I don’t know these people. I say that her aunts and uncles all play music–maybe she should bring her uke so they can teach her cords.

I think my daughters are very lucky to have connection to a lot of rich, talented people. She should take advantage of the fact that she was born into that family. She should go meet the old Great Aunt who has traveled all over the world doing whatever the fuck she wanted for most of her life. She’s a neat lady. Maybe if she met Shanna and Calli she would be more enthusiastic about coming to California for visits. So far she is kind of lazy. I’ve asked.

My children will not have my story. My children will not grow up without a family. They have connections. My children have people in the world tracking them and caring. I am not going to do anything to make that network smaller than I have to. I cut my family off because I don’t think my family is going to stop passing on the incest without some kind of intervention I don’t know how to do. So I’m keeping my kids the fuck away from them. I feel very sad that this is required but it is. It just fucking is.

Whenever someone tells me that I should forgive my mother because she won’t live forever I see my adult nephew breaking down as he told me about his rape experiences. No. No. No. No. My children will be kept away from them. All of them. I don’t think it is their fault that it happened to them but we haven’t had someone avoid incest in a few generations. I’m keeping my kids away from all of them.

When people tell me to just “get over it” and “stop thinking about it” I think “That shit is why it keeps happening generation after generation.”

I think about my mom a lot. I miss her. It doesn’t help that my Leather Mom is going through a lot of strife and I’m not helping very much (partially because of my limitations partially because she is telling me no). My Leather Mom and my birth mother share a birthday. I find that thinking about one or the other of them brings up a lot of really strong feelings.

Why do I think about my mom so much? Because everyone else gets to talk to me about their moms all the time. It’s just normal conversation. So I think about my mom and try to stay silent. I feel bad. I feel like a dirty terrible person.

One of the last things my mother said to me was that she would kill herself if I took my kids away from her. I keep checking on the internet and she isn’t dead. I guess that is just one more broken promise.

Broken promises are a big thing right now. What does it mean to say, “I will do _____.”

Relationships are about choices. Sometimes they are uncomfortable. Often that discomfort comes from inside me and is about the fact that I am thinking three hundred painful things all while I’m trying to have a relationship. When I can get those three hundred thoughts under control and actually focus on the person in the room I am grateful to have that relationship. I am glad it is still there. But it feels like I’ve been phoning it in from somewhere else for a while. I never understand what benefit there is to other people in putting up with me.

I am scheduled to be at Dad’s for Thanksgiving. How long is this going to continue? I have had him in my life more or less for going on fourteen years. We have a fairly distant relationship but honestly I do better with those. I have a hard time with being good-enough when people are around more often. I am able to behave perfectly appropriately for my target audience when I only see people once or twice a year. I feel ashamed that I can’t keep up the game with people I see more.

It makes me wonder if I have my anxiety as under control as I think with my kids. Some of my recent frustrations have made me realize that I need to start writing names on the white board in our room. I don’t want to discuss my relationship fluctuations in front of the kids any more. Shanna is starting to sorta follow and have her emotions influenced. I’m having to do a lot of backpedaling and defending of people with her and that’s… awkward.

I don’t want my kids to share my emotional experiences of people. My children are having different experiences. My experiences are my problem. My experiences are distinctly shaped by having an anxiety disorder. I do not want my kids learning my emotional dysregulation. If they develop their own later I don’t want it to be clearly my fault.

This is part of what I like about Unschooling. I have to pay attention to what I am doing, all DBT like. I have a bad habit of loving and hating people. My kids don’t need to hear about it. I don’t need to teach them to obsessively over analyze every conversation before and after it happens. So far they seem pretty good at talking to people.

I went to a book club meeting yesterday. I need to update my reading list, I’ve added three or four. Book club always turns into a small scale therapy/support group. I find it interesting how the folks who are consistent are unschoolers who come from abusive backgrounds. Other folks come and go. Not that I’m consistent enough to actually say that. Maybe my few attendance points are flukes. I should probably keep that up. My therapist wants me going out and doing stuff without my family. Book club is not terribly threatening. Most of the places I would choose to go involve fending off sexual advances and I’m not in the mood.

What the hell else do people do?

That gratitude stuff.

Leave a reply

Today I feel lucky to have so many people who love me even though I am so broken and so difficult. High Maintenance they call it.

My husband is going way above and beyond the call of duty lately. He has broken concrete, made breakfast every day, made dinner most days, swept and mopped the house, and moved over 500 lbs of sand so I didn’t have to. These are all things he doesn’t especially like or want to do. But he is helping me. And he did all that outside of his work hours, where he earns enough money to support me in a lifestyle I never previously imagined. (Jenny said she would show she loved me by paying someone to do this labor rather than doing it. It’s a love language thing. I can’t pay someone to do work how I want it done–this is something I learn over and over again. Having Noah just help me do it is really a big thing for me.)

I do not feel like I deserve this. I’m grateful anyway.

Many of my friends are finding ways to hang out and talk to me or be supportive. I am grateful that people stare at me hard enough to say, “You are clearly in a depressive state. I can tell based on ____ and _____ and ____.”

Holy shit. You care. That’s… that’s… whoa. Ok.

It is hard to believe that I am a piece of shit and have people treat me this way. It feels wrong. It feels like I should hurry up and do something awful so they recognize that helping me is the wrong decision. I am not worthy. Self-sabotage is kind of my MO.

That’s part of why my therapist wants me to stop socializing for a bit. When I bounce between lots of people I feel like I am supposed to be trying to figure out how to please all of these people and that takes a lot of thinking and emotional energy. When I am consumed by feelings of worthlessness it is much harder to figure out what is “appropriate” behavior.

Yes. I have to work on my behavior all of the time. You have no idea how much profanity and nastiness lives in my head. I consciously choose what I say or I say things that are really mean and critical. Even if I like something very much I can always tell you 4,920 things that are wrong with it. Whether that is a person, a place, or a thing. Or an idea. Just to cover all the nouns. It doesn’t matter how strongly positive my feelings are there are still more negative things I could say. I have to consciously choose to not be like that. It’s hard.

Right now my friend is reading to my kids. I’m going to have a hard time when she leaves California again. I know she loves me no matter where she is but having her nearby feels like such a blessing. I don’t have to try to please her. I can sit still in a chair and she pays attention to my kids and loves on them and I don’t have to worry about my behavior.

I feel grateful for friends who put up with how loud we are. I know that the volume in our house is very challenging for a few of my friends. (Oh.Forking.Man. The last place we went for a playdate [K-babysitting is different] had hardwood or tile floors throughout with very high ceilings. I no longer think my house is loud. My house is awesomely sound dampening. YAY MY HOUSE. I no longer want hardwood floors or high ceilings. I would lose my fucking mind. I like my house more with every year. <3

I need to go out back and tack down the landscaping fabric. Then I will fill the sandbox. Then I will take a shower and get ready for teaching. After teaching I need to come home and start preparing food for the party tomorrow. Oh man.

I feel very lucky to have the people I have in my life now. I know that I am crazy and all, but not everyone has as many people who love them fiercely as I do. Even if I don’t feel loved I know that I am. I see the actions of the people who show up in my house.

I’m trying to see you for who and what you are instead of the projections from my broken brain. I’m trying. I’m trying.

Tomorrow will be a kick-awesome party. Just sayin’. Not many kids coming, this is the “grown ups who show up to see the kids all the time” party really. Calli listed the people she wanted to invite. Only one person who visits regularly isn’t coming and that is because he doesn’t like the noise much. He and his wife were invited but not pressured to come. They don’t like crowds.

It is really neat finding out who Calli feels attached to. She has a varied and dear family whether I understand it or not. I’m really glad that my daughters feel so loved in this world. I’m doing something right.

This is why I have a therapist.

2 Replies

My therapist told me to cancel everything I can cancel in the next two weeks. I won’t be able to get the crying under control any other way. That’s probably true. I like to keep my crying at under an hour a day. When it creeps up over three hours a day it really cuts into my ability to work.

Atypical depression is normal for PTSD. It doesn’t manifest in the “normal” ways and it can’t be cured by the “normal” drugs. Isn’t that all very helpful to know. If I am depressed, what should that mean in terms of my behavior? How come I can go move over 8,000 pounds of concrete but I’m “depressed”. Psh. I’m not depressed. I don’t get depressed. I just cry and cry and cry while I work. Oh. That’s not normal?

Well I move the concrete but I sometimes go and collapse on the couch and am unable to move for an hour. I’m not exactly asleep–I think I can hear the kids the whole time. I’m just not able to move. That doesn’t usually last more than about 90 minutes. I mean… I can move. When someone shows up and knocks on the door I can stagger to the door.

Really it doesn’t matter how shitty I feel. That’s irrelevant. There is work to be done.

My therapist thinks this might be an unhealthy thought process and one I should work on. She thinks that when I’m spending many hours a day sobbing I should probably change something.

It isn’t that moving the concrete is the problem. Moving concrete doesn’t make me feel depressed. Heavy physical exercise is generally something that is one of my most intense mood elevators. It isn’t that doing the work is a problem. It is that I don’t rest. I don’t drink enough water. I don’t eat enough. My calorie needs are probably much higher than usual right now–I’ve been doing a lot of fairly heavy work for a couple of weeks. But I’m barely eating.

Noah, I leave the breakfast dishes on the table so long because I usually barely finish eating breakfast by lunch. I eat a few bites at a time as I can. My stomach hurts too much to eat faster or larger quantities.

A lot of the day I feel dizzy and nauseated. My neck and hurt have hurt continuously for a few weeks. I’m sure my continual dehydration since I stopped drinking carbonated water isn’t helping. (pause to drink water.)

I’m thinking about my mom wicked hard. I’m trying to figure out how I am patterning off of her right now because I think that I am doing that and it isn’t serving me and I don’t know what I should be doing. I’m having a horrible time figuring out what I should be doing at any given moment.

I stop, literally dozens of times a day for the past few days, and have intense overwhelming panic attacks because I am absolutely sure I am working on the wrong thing and I should be working on something else (I don’t really know what) and I am not doing the right thing and that means I am bad bad bad and I should be punished.

This is really exhausting. I’m also not sleeping well. I wake up and then can’t get back to sleep because I cycle through various memories of times in which I was clearly bad and how it is a good thing that those people have shunned me so that I can never hurt them again and I should just stop fucking hurting everyone all the time already. Will I ever stop being such a fucking cunt?

So… yeah. My therapist told me to figure out a way of having one hour every week of having someone outside my family do something for me. Like, actually do what they say kind of do something for me. She told me to cancel all of my social stuff that I can in the next two weeks and not make more plans for a week or more after that.

I have so far maintained control in all of my social setting obligations. That is not something that I can bank on forever. My stress levels are just too high. If I want to avoid screaming at people for some stupid trivial reason, if I want to avoid having a panic attack in public and having to deal with all the horrible after effects… I need a break.

I can’t be what other people need from me right now. I just don’t have it to give. I’m sorry. I know that this is an inadequacy in me. I am sorry that I am so pathetic. But I am. If I want to still have friends in years to come I need to not blow up at people. They don’t want to hang around and let me abuse them. I agree with that basic premise. No one should hang around and let me abuse them.

I wish I was different. I wish that I wasn’t so god damned mean. But then again I’m pretty glad that I’m alive at this point. I like what I get to do during the day. I like the people in my life.

The kids started in on me this morning. They wanted to go to Fairyland after therapy. I collapsed to the floor crying. I told them that I’m sorry I can’t go do all the fun things they want to do. I’m sorry I’m so tired. I’m sorry I haven’t finished all the work yet. I’m sorry I am not able to be the mommy you want to have. I’m sorry I’m not the fun mommy.

I feel guilty that this resulted in my kids comforting me and telling me that it’s ok–I do lots of fun stuff with them. It’s ok that we can’t do it today. I *am* a fun mommy.

We were later than I intended to be because I sat there and couldn’t stop crying for about ten minutes. After a few minutes Shanna asked me why I was still crying. I told her that I was thinking about the fact that I will never be able to meet all of her needs and I feel very sad about that. I told her we were going to come up against this over and over in her life and I may cry about it a lot. But it’s just true. I can’t.

She hugged me and told me that I do my best and that’s good enough.

My therapist says that my children are “parentalized” but given that I do not allow them to do actual care taking of me and I *am* responsible for getting my shit done this is probably not a problem. I feel conflicted about this. I tell my children all the time that they are not responsible for me. I don’t know if I am in denial about my behavior though.

Every parent has behavioral expectations of some kind. I don’t try to make my kids act in a certain way to control my moods or emotions. If I’m having an off day I tell them that if I am snappish it isn’t personal and I apologize for my tone of voice if I am too harsh.

I feel very guilty for the fact that Shanna is becoming my inside voice. This is happening because I instruct her in whatever it is I’m talking about and she repeats things back to me at moments when I am err in need of similar direction. Like managing feelings. I talk to her about how to manage her feelings and she uses the same words back at me when I am having feelings. I generally thank her for her input and then I step off to go manage my feelings because she is not a grown up. I don’t talk to her about what is in my head. It is just hard to hide all the crying.

So yeah, I worry. I worry if what I am doing is ok all the time. I don’t sleep much at night for worrying if existing in a space with me will create irrevocably fucked up adults and I should not have created these poor innocent children for me to abuse.

I don’t think I abuse them. I don’t think I neglect them. But my starting standards are so fucking low that I never feel like it is possible that I am doing enough. I feel that it isn’t possible for me to do something that is good enough. I am tainted. Both of my daughters have gone without sexual contact longer than I went. Have I already won the parenting contest?

Having absolutely no standard to judge against is freeing and terrifying. I talked to a guy recently who told me that he hopes that American society will not be judged by history based on our popular culture. I said, “Uhm, what else do you think they will have to judge on? Give me a break.”

I can read books and watch movies about so-called “happy families” but the truth is I have never been in the vicinity of a happy family for more than a few hours. Near as I can tell every family becomes less happy the longer I am standing near them so even families who are supposedly just fine the whole god damn rest of the time will manage to have a huge blow up when I’m there.

I’m just that unpleasant.

I know these things aren’t actually “my fault”. It’s all just a bunch of coincidences. But I was talking to an autistic guy about shunning recently.

It doesn’t matter if it is my fault or not. The end result is that I make people uncomfortable so it is better for everyone else if I am not there. That doesn’t feel good. That doesn’t give me a lot of reason to think I should keep breathing. If just existing makes things worse for other people… that’s not good.

I am so afraid of still being alive in fifteen years. I kind of hope that my kids won’t read my book until then–the first one anyway. At some point I do actually specifically want my kids to read it. Even though it will be upsetting. Even though it will be terrible. Even if it is “traumatizing” and that makes me a selfish piece of shit.

Just once. I want you to understand your blood and why I am the way I am. You don’t need to change anything about how you treat me. But please. I hope that being nice to you and taking care of you and teaching you that your body and opinion and voice matters entitles me to you reading that one book. I doubt I will force you to read any other book in your life. Please. I need to have someone who is related to me read this book and believe me and take my side. Please. Even if you go on to have a relationship with my mother and my sister and your cousins and whoever else is still alive… please be on my side. Please tell my family that even though you love them it was right to not meet them until adulthood.

Please. I hope I am making the right choice. I don’t have any way of knowing for sure and I am so scared of doing this wrong. I am so scared. I am so fucking scared that I feel like I am going to be beaten because I was bad. Divorcing my family is such a disgusting, terrible, selfish piece of shit thing to do. But it isn’t. It is the only way I know to keep my children safe. Maybe someone else would be able to find a different way but I am limited by my abilities.

I don’t actually think I will force my children to read it. I don’t think I would ever do that to anyone. But I hope. I hope without telling them about that hope.

I don’t tell them what I’m thinking about. I don’t expect them to comfort me. I don’t require them to walk on eggshells in order to not set me off.

I think I am doing all that I can do. I feel so terrible that I cannot do more. But I’m at my limits. I either respect that or I fuck up in a way that will haunt me for years. Ok. Go to ground.

feelings exploding.

Leave a reply

I’m having a lot of intense feelings. Oh well.

Today I will go order cakes. (Multiple birthday girls = multiple cakes. I think people who ask kids to “share a birthday party” and who then make them share a cake aren’t very nice. I mean, I get it from a financial point of view… but I have birthday issues.)

I feel intense anxiety about letting Calli pick the guest lists. She kept stuff very small. She doesn’t like lots of people around. When I asked her do you want to invite ____ she said, “But we have too many people! We can’t play when there are too many people!” Standing her next to my oldest child it is hard to understand that they have the same DNA. Calli likes to interact with about five people at a time and she defends that boundary with very sharp sticks. Shanna wants to invite half the western hemisphere over to hang out.

Part of adapting to them is letting Shanna have big parties and then I have to get over my guilt at not inviting everyone we know to Calli’s parties. She started listing kids to invite on her finger and when I asked about additional grown up names she said no. I have to not feel like I am slighting people. It’s hard.

We will also pick up more lumber. Looks like the playhouse will have all but the final shade covering and paint by the end of today. That is thoroughly exciting. 🙂

Today wonderful people are coming to my house to make the big pile of concrete and debris go away! My yard will be dramatically less dangerous in only 24 hours! YAY! I worry a lot about inviting children to construction zones. My kids get hurt a lot. We’ve had many bloody feet from stepping on screws and nails. Luckily this experience has taught them that when mom says, “This is an important place to wear shoes” they have stopped arguing. The cuts were worth it. Ha. (I am normally very tolerant of being barefoot. I only break out shoes for a reason.) But I don’t need all of our friends-who-are-children going through the same right of passage at my house. 🙂

I wanted to go visit my friend’s baby today. Instead I will fill buckets with tiny little chunks of concrete and carry them from the back yard to the front yard to the big pile. The more I get out of here today the less I have to deal with later.

Today I will hang up the swings for the kids in the back yard. I am unlikely to hang the adult swing today. I am told it involves blocking the original structure and whereas I’m not an idiot and I could cut wood and do the blocking I have only hand saws so I kind of wait for the dude with the power saw to cut all the wood. Lazy woman.

Every year or two I decide to do home improvement projects. I basically always have a party scheduled as a deadline or I just..never…quite… finish… It is effective but stressful. In the future I need to remember that I should be the only one racing a time clock. No one else wants that stress.

I have September and October on the board. Neither are all that scheduled. I think I am going to deliberately not schedule more. I need to regroup. I need to think hard about who is likely to still be in my life in twenty years. Who should I be handing my energy resources to? Where will it have long-term pay off? It is mercenary, selfish, and the only way I will make it to the end of my life without hating everyone in the whole world.

For most of my life I have indiscriminately helped anyone who needed help. If someone I barely knew needed help moving I was there. Things like that. I’m not saying I have a lot of help to offer. I’m saying I have specific resources. When I hand them to people I will not have an ongoing relationship with I get a little boost but mostly a big drain of energy.

Mostly I like doing a lot of anonymous paying-forward of good things. I think that is what makes the world go round.

I’ll get back to it. It is important to me to help people I don’t know. It is a spiritual thing. But I have limited ability to just do that. Right now what I am trying to do is build community. Most people join a mostly-existent community and then try to fit in. I can’t. I am wholesale constructing my own. It is slightly different. It is a more conscious thing. It’s more work.

Taylor asked why I don’t write about him more. Because he is so deeply entrenched in my life at this point that if I accidentally hurt him by processing something in front of him then the repercussions are bigger than I can handle. I have had evolving opinions of his wife. (Never bad–I have certainly not thought DTMFA or anything.) I recognized her as disabled years before he was willing to say so out loud. That means I need to keep my fucking mouth shut because it isn’t my body or my life being impacted. My view of her is irrelevant and may make her or her husband angry.

The lines around who I can talk about and when and why shift dramatically. Mostly I find out the boundaries by no longer having friends. I get fired a lot. I’m used to it. Other people tell me that I should stop writing then if I am so rude and offensive and I want to have friends.

When I stop writing I substitute cutting and other forms of self-mutilation. I write because this is the closest I can come to convincing myself that I am important enough to not be in pain. I can see patterns and understand things when I write. I can also drive off all the people who don’t actually like me any way. It’s a double win?

I am not smart enough, clever enough, fast enough, whatever enough to deal with my emotions without writing. Well… I can. I can force myself to be silent. I can not, however, at this point, actually keep all of my pain to myself. Maybe that makes me whiny, self-absorbed, and stupid. I have to live with that. I have to live with the fact that the only people whose opinion I give a shit about would rather be offended by my writing than count my scars. They don’t need to see the growing evidence of my stoicism.

If I could cope in a different way I would try that. I have tried lots of things over the decades. Cutting and writing are the last bad coping methods still standing. I try to tell myself that my writing isn’t that bad. I worry about the future. I worry about getting to a place where I know that my writing just upsets everyone and it is all my fault for being such a bad stupid bitch. I will stop writing then. At that point I don’t think anyone will ever be allowed to see me naked again. I want to move on from cutting my thighs so much. That was how I hid it as a teenager. Now when I am upset and I think about cutting I flirt with hurting my breasts and my belly over my ribs and my calves and… I’m pretty sure that if I go down that path there is only one way for it to end.

What would it take for me to stop believing that I should die in order to make everyone else’s life better? I don’t know. But I’m not there yet.

do what you can do

Leave a reply

Looks like I won’t be putting together sex ed. *phew* When people ask me to do things I have a hard time saying no. Much like some other people I know. Do I want to be on the hook for teaching other peoples kids sex ed? Maybe? Not sure. I’m glad I don’t need to think about it any year soon. I’m glad I have less work to do.

I’m still coughing but the fever is over. Progress.

Today will be gardening and cleaning. I’m actually really looking forward to it. I get to talk to the kids a lot on this kind of day. I have been flat shocked by how much Shanna has developed the ability to be actual help recently. I know some people start chores at three or four, I didn’t. I started at five. So she’s catching up on progress that could have been made more slowly, I suppose? I just know that I didn’t think she would actually clean up her toys yesterday (she had like six different sets all dumped on the floor at once) and it took her half an hour.

I feel scared a lot of the time that I am doing everything wrong. I am going to ruin their entire lives. I am going to make it so they can’t have normal lives. It will be all my fault.

But I enjoy them so much. I enjoy spending time with them. I want to hang out with them all day talking about why different plants do different things. Huh, what is similar about these kinds of flowers? What is different? Why do you think they are different like that?

I have never had a time in my life where I haven’t been afraid and completely sure that I am bad and wrong. I have learned to kind of ignore that feeling. But sometimes I am bad and wrong. It is hard to figure out where the difference. How can I tell when I am legitimately doing something wrong and when I just feel self-hating? I don’t know very well.

My kids seem happy and like they are making progress. I’m pretty sure if I was doing it “all wrong” that they wouldn’t be blooming quite so well. Which isn’t to say that anyone else’s way is wrong. But if my kids are happy and growing and learning maybe I don’t need to feel like a steaming pile of shit.

No one is perfect. There is no platonic ideal. Not everyone would like my kids as much as I do. I have a number of friends who would probably feel like my children were a curse instead of a blessing because those folks are sensitive to noise and my kids bring as much volume impact as a ten piece brass band.

The volume bugs me and yet I want little girls who think the world needs their voice. The social consideration is an older persons game. I want them to just feel in their bones that they have a right to take up space and make noise with it. I know that isn’t a trait universally preferred among parents. That’s ok with me.

In many ways I let my children cross a lot of “rudeness” boundaries because I have never understood them. I have never agreed with them. So I don’t enforce them.

Pam told me that I was a weird mix of permissive and authoritarian. Yup. I set the boundaries. Within the boundaries I stay out of most things. They have to make mistakes. They have to do things that annoy me. For the love of Crisco I am not trying to raise little people who will “not annoy me”. Ha. If you don’t annoy me you aren’t being enough of a kid. Keep trying.

But they are going to hit the wall of other people. I can’t soften it and I can’t make it easier. The world is what it is. I can prepare them and then I have to just let them bear their own consequences. Other people have different opinions and if you want to deal with other people you have to deal with their opinions.

I don’t want to teach my kids to put people in boxes the way I do. I went to a funeral this weekend. He was a remarkable man. Partially remarkable for the sheer variety of different skill-sets he mastered in different communities. And he compartmentalized everything and very few people knew almost anything about his extensive connections. Everyone there was surprised by how he touched so many other communities. He seemed busy enough in the community I knew him in!

I have levels of trust and like and tolerance. They are all different. I wish that I trusted men more, but I don’t. I trust some men in particular ways. Even a large number of men who totally believe they have already “jumped through hoops” to prove they are safe are people I won’t be in a room alone with.

I don’t care if it hurts your feelings. I can’t. I have my own feelings to worry about. Find someone else to validate you. Someone with a lower rape count.

Women aren’t easier. Women want to nurture. So they bury their own feelings until they can’t any more. Women look trustworthy until they really really really aren’t. Whereas men tend to start out looking untrustworthy and slowly work their way up.

But my past experiences with specific people should not be a good enough reason to damn the other people I meet. Only that is how I ended up having so many problems. I kept trying to trust.

I believe I would be able to trust people more if I weren’t someone who bothered people so much. I believe that a big part of the reason people break trust with me is because I make people feel so wildly uncomfortable.

People won’t remember what you said or what you did. People remember how you made them feel. (Isn’t that Fitzgerald?) If I make people feel uncomfortable every where I go… that is what there is to remember. I am uncomfortable to be near.

Noah doesn’t feel uncomfortable. Shanna doesn’t feel uncomfortable. Calli doesn’t feel uncomfortable. They like me. They have to be enough.

I mean, what am I complaining about anyway? Everyone makes me feel massively uncomfortable. Such is life.

There is a part of me that would like to hide away from all people, basically forever. There is a part of me that wants to start opening my house once a week. But I don’t think people would come. I live in an inconvenient place. It really isn’t worth the effort.

I don’t know how to build community. I am not able to maintain the effort of showing up at a hobby to produce community. I just don’t have it. I feel pathetic, but there it is. I’m not going to get my community through any of the fair(e)s. I am not going to get my community through something I show up at once a week and pay my entrance fee.

I don’t think I am psychologically capable at this point. I get to the door, look around, note that no one here needs me and I turn around and go home.

I’m not a joiner. If I’m going to sit by myself watching other people have fun I can do that in my front yard for free without having to go any where. My neighbors are outside a lot. I don’t need to pay for dance events so that I can go cry in the bathroom.

And yet it isn’t anyone else’s responsibility to show me a good time. It is my responsibility to have a good time or not. So I don’t go. I’m not very good at “having fun”.

So I make progress on my house. It doesn’t effect anyone but me. No one else cares. But I do. I may not feel like I have community, I have friends, but it seems different. I don’t know.

I have at least two people I can call in an emergency. Depending on the emergency I could potentially go down a list of other people who could help. The last time I asked anyone but K for help it didn’t go well.

I worry about asking anyone for help too often. K saves my ass a lot. She has been the reason I can see a therapist, or do other major health stuff if I can’t work around Noah’s schedule. The kids still visit their Godmamas once a month. I hire people to do some work sometimes.

But the last time I called someone who told me “Call if you need anything” I was told no. I won’t call again.

If you can’t handle hearing the answer “no” then you shouldn’t ask. Most of the time I can’t handle being told no. So I don’t ask people for things. Hell, I’m starting to feel like I shouldn’t be inviting people over so much.

I’m afraid of letting my kids get used to having friends in their lives when I know that no one stays in my life very long. I’m afraid that if I invite families over for my kids to get to know that my kids are just going to have to get used to the disappointment that the moms are going to decide they don’t like me after a while and there go their friends.

It is hard believing that if there is a social problem it is probably all my fault. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it maybe isn’t all my fault but man isn’t that the most convenient scapegoat. I’m a great scapegoat. Everything is my fault. If I weren’t such a fucking asshole I wouldn’t have so many problems.

That thought is one that makes me want to swim out into the ocean as far as I can go.

If I weren’t so fucking bad I wouldn’t have all these problems. But it is too late to change that now. So now what?

More gardening. More cleaning. I’m pretty sure I know how to do those bits without fucking up my whole life. No promises on any other topic.

more thinking. less err, tmi

4 Replies

I’ve been sitting here listening to The Coup more. It is nice that youtube has these automatic playlists so you can listen to a whole album. And have a screen open next to it with the lyrics at the same time. A lot easier to understand. Ok, Violet isn’t actually one of the best ones. But it made me think about relationship stuff.

(I’m trying to not think about my bits. Bear with me.)

Well, more accurately it made me think of when and how I have done drugs. I usually have done so because I saw no other way of making that person like me. I want people to like me. Not many people like me. When people talk very nastily about young kids who use drugs… I think education is the path. Not hostility.

I have tried a pretty fair variety of drugs. A lot of them I tried because I was in a situation where I was dependent on a man (I thought) and he said, “Here. Do this.” I’ve only gone after a few drugs for my own reasons.

I was thinking about that because I tried a different intake of medication today and apparently the cheeba chews do a lot more to deal with the stomach pain than smoking, vaporizing, or pills. I’ve tried all in the last two or three days. I tried a different kind this morning and I’m probably down from a 6 or so to maybe 3. But I also wrote at the same time and writing often relaxes me. Column A and Column B?

Anyway. I have been horribly uncomfortable in social situations my entire life. I am very aware that I am bad and that sooner or later people will figure it out and I will be punished/reprimanded. This is just how I go through life. Usually I slink away like a pathetic puppy never to be seen from again. It’s my cycle. I own that.

Is this actually me letting people have boundaries though? When someone puts up boundaries I take that as a sign to just leave. Obviously I am not wanted here.

Well, I don’t know that I always manage to avoid people forever. I don’t. I travel through a variety of communities. I have land-mine people in all of them. So this is about me and my issues.

Only if I try to go through all of the situations in my head… no. It isn’t always my fault. But I am often someone who triggers people to have strong feelings. They will then tell me those feelings are all my fault. They want to alleviate it. So I am told things like I must dedicate my life to a 12 step program (it is permissible for me to pick my own of course–obviously I have a wide variety of different options I could be eligible for–I am pretty crazy and all) or I am bad.

I don’t think that is about me. That is about someone else deciding “A Good (Mother/Person/I don’t fucking know) acts like _____________.” I never signed on for that role. I like to negotiate my own roles. I like to be able to say, “Am I allowed to ask for this, this, and this–it is ok to say no.” I don’t ask unless I am ok with no.

I am not trying to make other peoples lives harder. I do not write about my anxiety in order to create anxiety in other people. I write so that when I am done writing I can have a 2-6 sentence pitch that is calculated to make it sound appealing to my specific audience that I am talking to in person.

Have you ever noticed that I don’t talk nearly as much as I write? I am rehearsing. I am refining. If that process bothers you, well, don’t watch. I need to do this. And I have learned through long experience that I won’t write just for me. I stop. I get depressed. And then I spend a lot of time cutting. I don’t want to cut any more. I really can’t take the risk of not blogging at this stage of my life. This is rather important to my mental health.

I have to be selfish about this. I have to be selfish about my right to process my feelings in a public way. Blah blah me talking about my trauma will traumatize other people blah blah blah. Have you ever learned the variety of tricks for closing a computer screen? Bam. Problem solved.

Don’t silence me to make you feel better.

Yes, I’m making different choices than you. I go through a different thought process than you.

That doesn’t mean yours is bad. It just means that it belongs to you.

Recently someone told me I was weirdly permissive and authoritarian at the same time with my kids. I explained the permissive part by saying, “I am saving up my “no’s” for when they have boyfriends. If I can say yes I do.” But I am very authoritarian too. Mostly I effect this through modeling.

We spend a ridiculous amount of time practicing our “manners” and “nice talk”. “How do you introduce yourself?”

“How do you look for clues about a person that are a good introduction to conversation? What things must you not mention or people feel sensitive?” We look for examples in books and movies and games and take them apart. “How does this make you feel?”

Even when I am depressed and pathetic and lying on the couch my children get a lot of attention. They bring me books and we read endlessly. Well, or until my throat goes out. Then Shanna starts explaining/reading the books to me. Then Calli takes a turn. We talk about all of them.

Because I know that it doesn’t matter what is going on in my mind or my body I need to keep working on educating them. That is my job. That is what I am here to do. I am responsible. There is no one to whom I can pass the buck.

It keeps me honest.

I grew up in a house of people who rarely got up and did anything. They were all massively depressed. I didn’t learn how to do things until I was an adult. I know this is common in my generation. Latch key kids with a microwave don’t know how to actually survive.

My body actively rebels at eating “normal” food. I should not have any vegetables or fresh fruit while I am otherwise dealing with a terrible multi-day diarrhea outbreak but that’s all I have in the fucking house. (Well, I do have rice. But I think we are almost out of white rice. We do have a 50 lb bag of brown rice! Uhm.)

I don’t know what the happy medium will be for “healthy” in my body. I know that following the advice of “eat lots of vegetables and fruit!” is not actually going well for me. This hurts. This hurts. This hurts. It is distracting all the time.

I kind of wonder if ecstasy stopped working for me because I took too much of it (I didn’t have that much I know people who have had twenty or fifty times as much as I had in my whole life.) or because the trips became about pleasing other people. I was supposed to be entertaining. I wasn’t there because I wanted to be having an experience alone in my body. I was there to please someone else. It stopped having the ability to raise my serotonin. I just felt anxious and sad and like I knew I was going to be disappointing no matter what I did.

My birthday party was described by many people as “The weirdeest e trip ever.” Well, I knew going in to it that I was evil and bad for doing it. I had been told so quite explicitly by someone I loved.

I don’t know many people who can take a hit of ecstasy and still feel suicidal. But I’m special. At this point in my life there aren’t really drugs powerful enough to over ride my basic belief that people do not like me and I am bad.

Pot lets me not care. I feel more relaxed about it. It doesn’t take it away. I still know that I am bad. I still know that I am someone who does not deserve to be alive. But I’m apathetic and kind of tired and happy that I get to play with the two kindest and most wonderful people in the whole fucking world all day. Pot lets me stop and appreciate what I am doing this moment.

Even if no one else in the world values me, these two people do. I religiously keep my promises. I am fierce about my boundaries. I am loving and kind and gentle the vast majority of the time and I apologize when I am too rough. My kids are allowed to say, “Don’t glare at me. It makes me feel sad.”

I don’t like how tired edible pot makes me. It is much more extreme than smoking. I feel weak sometimes. I feel like I am swimming instead of walking. I am tense and fluid at the same time. I don’t like that I often don’t feel anything from a pill for over three hours. That means I have to wake up in the middle of the night and take a pill if I want my stomach to not hurt by breakfast time so that I can eat.

An old man in our neighborhood recently commented, “You’ve lived an awful lot of lives for someone so young.” I laughed.

I feel tired sometimes. I feel like I am not worthy. I feel like there is too much here.

I was talking to a mom at the park. She has many more kids than me. I asked if it was rude to ask her questions about how she manages. She laughed and told me it was ok. I asked a few generic ones. Then I said, “Based on what I’ve read it seems that a lot of what it is that you have to just do your best and trust to the grace of God to make up for the rest.” She laughed. Yeah. That. “This is my problem though–as an atheist I’m pretty much screwed.” She laughed at me some more. Yup. That must suck.

I don’t think there is a chance in this lifetime that i could forgive a so called “benevolent” god for what I have experienced.

It is kind of funny. I understand age of consent laws so much more now than I did when I was a child. I used to sit on men’s laps and say, “I know that you really aren’t supposed to fuck someone my age. But I promise I will never tell. No one cares what I do. My mother won’t even know.”

I did it a lot. To their credit most of them told me no. They understood that it was a crime for them to commit. I was lectured quite a bit sometimes. But then the ones who lectured me or yelled at me proceeded to ensure that there was a larger scale public shaming. Everyone should know that I am contemptible.

I can’t say I enjoyed most of the sex I had as a child. It hurt. But I knew I was “supposed” to do it. I thought it was supposed to hurt like that. I didn’t think sex could be comfortable or fun or nice. Well, maybe for someone else. Girls like me don’t work that way. I grew up just a little more and moved into a sub culture that taught me that “vanilla” girls enjoy being touched gently. Girls like me were masochists and that was way cooler anyway and the goal was always supposed to be to learn how to take more and more and more pain. More degradation. Give up more control of yourself. Become less of a self. Be just a servant. Be no more important than a piece of furniture, hell, sometimes you are the furniture.

I can’t isolate to deal with my social anxiety any more. Instead I have to pretend that I know how to be normal and have friends. I don’t know how I will deal with the fact that my life is a rotating cast of characters. People come and go and the only people you can depend on seeing are me and your dad and each other. The Godmamas have been very consistent for years. That is your next best shot. K has been in our lives for three years. Of course this means I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. Same with Tay.

Pam comes and goes. I think that is good. I think she would find that she disagreed with more and more if she spent more time with me. I think she likes me more from far away.

I don’t have enough that is predictable for the kids. We do go to home school stuff. They will know those kids. But I will never be one of the people at every event. I can’t handle the driving. I feel bad about it, but it is what it is. Well, and I’m less willing to pay for things than some people. That’s ok too.

There is a rock climbing place walking distance from our house. I honestly think my kids are too young. But in a few years I bet we will start hanging out there a lot. If you have a kids membership you get a free adult in (one per kid) and I bet we will spend some time there. That would be fun.

I can’t predict the future. I doubt most of the people I know now will be in my life in twenty years. If I look at twenty years ago, when I was eleven, I think the last person standing is K from Lakeside. She occasionally reads my blog and we chat on IM sometimes. She is very busy. That is the only person left. I would not have predicted that she would be the one, let me tell you.

I don’t trust that people will want to know me that long.

Shanna talks about how we will need to add an upstairs apartment some day because she will need the down stairs for her family. I tell her, “We’ll see.” It is funny that when I first thought of having children I knew I would be the kind to boot them out the door at eighteen.

Now Shanna talks about wanting to be a firefighter two days a week and a doctor two days a week and I will be here to home school her kids. She will stay home two days a week because of course her kids need their mom too.

A permanent fucking dependent.

Once upon a time that was not a disgraceful thing. That was not a sign of being worthless. That was life for some people. Why are only some kinds of lives “worthy”?

I am not someone who could survive Wall Street. I couldn’t work there. I would scream and hysterically cry and have a panic attack when someone snapped at me because it would be just one god damn thing too many and it would be bad.

I am not saying that everyone there is bad or that having that kind of life is bad. I am saying I am not suited for it.

I’m also unlikely to ever really understand what it means to be Chinese. Or black. Or a man. I have to imagine. If I am imagining instead of experiencing I don’t get to treat them like they are equivalent experiences. My imagination is just a comfy place inside my mind. I access it in my garage. I’m safe.

I will never understand the feeling of walking down the street and having white women cower and clutch their purses. That would piss me right the fuck off. That would make me want to start a fight. I’m an angry person with a long list of done-me-wrongs.

I always only need one more thing.

This isn’t about anyone else. People cannot walk on egg shells. They have to hold their boundaries. They can step back. They can say, “In this piece of language _______ it sounds like you are kind of attacking. Can I ask for clarification on that?” I will of course say, “Ah. Poor choice of words. Let me attempt to reword. Is this better?”

Ok, maybe not of course. But I’ll try.

I like questions. I like people wanting to understand. I am not dealing well with people saying that I make them feel bad. I’m not trying to. Is there something very specific that you can ask about? No? Yes?

I am not ranting because I am mad at you. I’m ranting because very soon I have to put the mask on and act very polite and very normal and very controlled. For the love of all that is holy I have to stop crying. I need to clean up the four napkins full of snot and go get started on the day.

It doesn’t really matter how I feel. Shit will get done. That is how life works. I do not want to miss life. So I show up for the work.

high anxiety

Leave a reply

It is interesting to try and track the progress of anxiety. It starts out as irritation, just knowing that something is making me feel nervous. I don’t have to know what. It doesn’t have to be major. At that point I have butterflies in my stomach all of the time and my throat is tight and I have a mild headache.

If things get more intense–if I feel I have New and Exciting reasons to feel anxious the first thing that happens is I feel like someone shot me in the stomach with a water cannon. My stomach acid production goes into over drive. My entire torso feels like it is on flames. And I know that this moment, awful as it is, isn’t going to last so I try to hold on to it and pretend that nothing else is going to happen.

But inevitably, sure as rain, after the water cannon to the stomach the diarrhea starts. I have made jokes for many years that constipation would be a nice change. Ok, they aren’t actually jokes. I think constipation would be really novel. I’m really tired of the diarrhea. It burns. It burns so much that sometimes I sit in the bathroom and cry for upwards of an hour because it just keeps coming and it hurts so much and there is nothing I can do to stop it. The poison has to leave my body some how.

After a couple of days of that then I usually progress into some kind of other illness. Right now I am coughing (very productively. Very very very productively–ew.) and my eyes hurt and my head hurts. My neck muscles are on fire and feel locked down so tight I do not quite have 180 degrees of motion.

My legs hurt. My legs hurt like I have been practicing sprinting up a hill. It’s a combination of throbbing and burning.

Luckily the water cannon to the stomach phase does end. Eventually I do poop out all the extra stomach acid. (OMFG it hurts)

Then I am left feeling numb and shaky. I feel stupid and thick and slow. I feel like I am unable to think clearly. I feel unable to be productive. I feel empty. I feel worthless. I feel like I wouldn’t have so many problems if I could keep my stupid, piece of shit mouth shut. My problems are all my fault for being such a complete bitch. If only I could SHUT UP maybe people wouldn’t be so mad at me all of the time.

I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to hurt people. I’m not trying to. I swear to a god I don’t believe in. I talk because otherwise I cut. I have to let it out somehow. I am so sorry I offend you. I’m sorry.

I don’t want to be bad. I just don’t think it is possible to stop being bad once you are as bad as I am. There is no longer any redemption for someone like me. It is too late.

People really should get away from me as fast as they can. I am not in control. I am not a nice person. You should protect yourself. Goodness knows I can’t do it.

Then I want to die so much. I don’t know why I was born bad. People have been reacting to me in the same way for my whole life. “Everything is fine. Everything is fine. I’m not mad. I just never want to see you again.”

I get that a lot. If you have the same problem over and over with lots of people… it probably isn’t about them. It’s me. I am bad and people need to stay away from me to protect themselves. It is perfectly logical.

I’m still freaking out about Iain dying. He was good. He was worthy. He was beloved by many hundreds, probably thousands of people. Why did he die and a worthless piece of shit like me lives on? There is truly no justice in the universe.

I’ve been thinking about my mom like crazy. Calli looks more and more like her as she ages. Sometimes when I catch her giving me an expression of my mother’s I have to leave the room and cry. I miss my mommy. It is all my fault I can’t have a relationship with my mother. I’m a stupid pathetic whiny bitch. I made my own bed. No cause to blame anyone else for the results.

On the days when the pain in my body hits over 7 I start thinking about why am I doing this? Why do I continue to inhabit this body, this loathed object. Because I don’t have a choice. Because there is no other option if I want to remain conscious.

Pam asked me why I believe the bad things about myself so much more than the good things when she tells me good things all the time. Honey, my reading has shown me that you need ~10 positive or neutral statements about yourself to balance out one negative statement. That is more or less how it works in creation of self.

I was told I was a worthless, stupid, annoying whore for almost twenty years. In the almost fourteen years since I got out I have had some positive messages mixed in with a lot of people yelling at me and dumping me as a friend and sending me nasty letters through the mail explaining everything I am doing wrong.

I don’t have enough reason to believe positive things about myself. I would have to significantly fly in the face of public opinion in order to believe I have much worth at all. I’m not really confident enough for that.

The best I can do is hide in my house so I don’t bother people. I’m sad that looking out my back window will remind me for the rest of my life that I can fuck absolutely anything up. It is all my fault. I should have shut my stupid, piece of shit mouth.

I am so sorry.

Today is a Godmama weekend. That is probably for the best. I anticipate a lot of hiding and crying. I will make sure no one else has to see it. It is no ones problem but mine. I am not guilting anyone. This is not “because of you”. This is because of me. This is just my life. This is just what it has always been. I have never known different. Not for longer than two-three months at a time.

It is hard being this bad. I don’t really know how it happened to start wtih. But once it is there you can’t lose it.

Coughing up big wads of nasty while you are crying and dealing with a nose running down the back of your throat is truly disgusting. This kind of idiocy usually leads to vomiting. The chunks coming up and the slime mix right at the back of my throat and good grief my gag reflex is sensitive.

I don’t blame other people for my problems. I know that if I were not such a problem I would not have so many problems. If I knew what part of me to cut off: my tongue? My fingers? Maybe I could figure out a way to not make people mad all the time. Maybe I could find a way to not alienate people.

As is, I don’t have a lot of hope.

I feel bad for Noah. I’m sorry he has to live with someone like me. It isn’t his fault I am like this. I am so sorry.

When I talk about being too pathetic to hold down a job this is what I mean. I lose days when my body completely shuts down from stress. I don’t get up much. I just sit and cry because everything hurts so much.

Leave a reply

The older I get the more I learn about my own introvert nature. I always thought I was an extrovert. I needed people. I had to take what I could get in terms of company. I need time where I get to write. I have to empty my head.

Notice those days where I bop around from social media tool to social media tool? I feel lonely. I want to feel like I am seen and part of the world.

I don’t use social media more because I am afraid. I am afraid of being yelled at. I am afraid of being told I am bad and stupid. I am afraid that if I actually said more of what is in my head that people would not want to know me any more. As lonely as I feel at this stage of my life I know this is the absolute best I have ever had it. I try very hard to understand what this might mean in the scope of my life. If I blow this… I know how that goes.

I am ok with someone getting to know me and disliking something that I do. That’s fine with me. No matter who you are you do things that I don’t like. I’m fine with you feeling the same way about me.

But I desperately want people to believe that I am allowed to exist. Without having to offer sex. I want to have some kind of value in the world. I want to be needed. I want who and what I am to be useful. And without having to change so that I can be more like other people.

It is kind of funny to me when people tell me that me making the choices I make reflects negatively on them.  Well, funny in a horrified kind of way. I can tell you in great detail exactly why I am bad for every single choice that I make. I know all of the arguments down the last specific. I don’t think that my choices are “good”. I don’t think that other people are bad for not being like me. I think I am bad for not being like other people.

I think I am rather pathetic for not being able to work while having children. I know a lot of women who do it and everything is working out great. I would be an abusive monster. I cannot handle that stress. I feel very ashamed of my limits.

I think it is rather pathetic that I can’t deal with hiring childcare on a daily basis so I can go get work done. I think it is extremely pathetic that I would use that time to hide and cry. But I would.

I worry a lot about isolating my children. I think there are HUGE benefits to public school. I am not sure I am doing them favors by encouraging non-conformity and inability to follow institutional rules. I’m not sure I am doing them favors by showing them that they should be very angry with any one who tries to tell them when and where they can use a bathroom. My kids think they have the god damn right to decide when and where. If you pester them to “just try” so that you don’t have to be inconvenienced later they will lash out at you. I’m ok with this. I feel the same fucking way. I don’t act like accidents are that big of a deal. I’ve had too many because of problems I have in my body due to a lifetime of malnutrition and control issues in institutional settings.

I worry a lot about being a parent with mental illness. What am I teaching my children about “normal”?

No. I don’t look down on people for making different choices.

I believe with everything I am that no one can judge what is the right choice for another person. I don’t believe I ever have enough information to judge what a different person is capable of accomplishing. For good or for ill. I under estimate and over estimate. I just can not judge. I don’t feel that other people judge me very well.

I’m going to be semi-egotistical and say that I am an extremely competent person. I know how to do a wide variety of skills at a better than average level. I have had to learn how to do things for myself and by myself. I am a ridiculously hard task master.

But I don’t think I am capable of much. Notice how I actively avoid anything in life that might lead me to having power? I don’t want to have a powerful job. I don’t want to associate with “powerful” people. I don’t especially want to have a rich lifestyle regardless of how much money I ever have. I would feel wildly uncomfortable.

When I picture my old age I would be just fine with living on a trailer on a piece of property in Oregon where I am legally allowed to decide when I die. Sure. That would be fine.

I don’t think that most people uhhh set their aspirations at such a level. I want to have enough money to never need to work again. I’m trying to use this ridiculous income of my husband’s to ensure that it happens without him having to work for many more years. I don’t want him working himself to the bone for decades to support my sloth. That’s not the deal.

I want both of us to be able to do things we want with the hours of our days. Luckily for him, the shit he likes to do for fun will probably generate a modest income. Eventually I will do something for some pay. I don’t want much. I really fucking don’t. I already have more than I need.

I feel like I have grown up in a weird space of intersection. Boy howdy have I seen the American Dream up close and personal. I see the stress. I see the trade offs. I see the A/B decisions that started with your parents decisions and I know that I will never be able to be competitive. It was done before my birth.

Oh man does that make me want to opt out of the system. I want to have my private, isolated life where I don’t have to try to step on anyone else’s neck in order to inch my way up.

I don’t have that in me. That fight was lost too long ago.

So what am I teaching my children? I worry. I worry all the fucking time.

What kind of adults will my children be? They will never experience deprivation of any kind. They will grow up with a mother who responds to any and all signs of entitlement with the nastiness of a viper. You are not fucking entitled to the labor of my body. Do for yourself. (I try to tone things down because they are kids and all but I am getting less patient by the year and by the time they are adults I won’t feel any desire to tone it down.)

You have to care about how the actions of your body effect the people around you. You have to. Period. If you are not willing to care about that, well you can bloody well stay in a room by yourself. (For an age appropriate number of minutes on a timer. Then you come out to kisses and hugs and talk about how much you are loved.)

I don’t know that I am doing anything right.  I don’t really feel like I am in a position to look down on what anyone else is doing.

My life is such a bizarre mix of trauma and privilege that it is hard to tease out what is positive and what is negative. What parts of my behavior and character are positive or negative depends entirely on your point of view.

Recently (this year) a lot of my reading has been about what personality traits enable people to thrive despite adversity. I may be a whiny bitch because most of my current adversity is all in my head but other people in the world deal with real adversity. It is still relevant reading and all. (See that denigration about the mental illness bit. IT’S ALL IN MY HEAD! Well, what isn’t?)

Apparently one of the most important aspects of character is the ability to live with having conflicting traits in yourself. Be ok with the fact that you are patient AND impatient. Be ok with the fact that you are trusting and suspicious. I really am quick to judge people. I give people a lot of fucking rope. Then I hang them hard and fast and walk away.

I don’t like being alone. I find being alone significantly preferable to being in social environments where I have to try very hard to be “good” or I might be expelled. I think of basically every social space that way. I’m not invited to that many parties any more. Part of it is the kid thing. Part of it is that I make people feel fucking uncomfortable. C’est la vie.

I feel intense guilt for not being able to unschool the way I see some people doing it. I can’t have my kids involved in activities six days a week to meet social needs. I just can’t. I am not capable.

When I was a kid it was a joke in most of the schools I was enrolled in that I shouldn’t bother enrolling because I missed so much school. I have never been a consistent part of anything. I can manage a few months, maybe. I taught for 2.5 years at S.T. That is the longest I have ever consistently done anything in my life. I was technically in the graduate program at SJSU for seven years… but I attended one class a week for most of that and I had years off in the middle.

I lived with my Owner for three years and dated him for four. Outside of my mother he is the person I have lived with the longest consecutively by far. I’m not sure my mother beats him by much and after I was four years old I never lived with her for four years in a row again.

I have lived with Noah and Shanna longer than I have ever lived with my mother in a go. When I write it down it becomes a thing I can look at. Holy shit. That’s really pretty sad. When I just feel anxiety and frustration because I am having a horrible time with the pressure that comes from trying to provide stability for children I don’t think of it in such terms. Of course this is hard for me. Of course I am struggling. I’m swinging without a net. So I pursue relentless competence at a wide variety of skills. Most of which are utterly without value to anyone beyond me. I can’t care about that. People like me die if they worry too much about which skills to pick up because they will invariably make the wrong decisions.

I’m trying really hard to make my 10,000 mistakes. I’m not sure what I will be a “master” of but I think I will be much more calm. What is another mistake at that point? I can do anything and it doesn’t matter.

I want neither the path of complete disconnection from other people of Zen nor the immersion in community behavioral norms I have always known. I don’t know what my path will be.

I can neither lead nor follow. If I am making other people feel like they are wrong then I need to work on my communication skills.

I haven’t figured anything out. I just keep walking because I don’t know what else to do. I try new things because I don’t know how to do the same thing for a long time.

I want to raise children the way I am doing this because my children are going to be the only people I ever have this kind of intensity with. I have absolutely no other window into such an experience. I am a selfish piece of shit and I want it. I want it. I want it. I want to find out what it means to live with someone 24/7 for 18 years. I understand that other people get enough out of that experience with their kids being gone for school and I’m totally cool with that and I think it represents a healthy approach to life.

I can’t. I can’t miss this. I have no other way to find out what a normal childhood looks like. I want to watch this so fucking much. I am so scared that I will miss part of it and I won’t be able to understand why something later is happening. I need to fucking know what is happening to them. I NEED to know. I can’t just trust a daycare provider. I can’t. This is a failure in me.

I need to know in my bones that when they are eighteen I have kept them safe. I can’t pass the buck on responsibility. I don’t trust anyone enough. I am not saying that you don’t love your children. I am saying that I am broken.

I worry so much about what I am doing to my children. They have never had a daily relationship with anyone but me and their dad. Even when we had a housemate she did not appear during their awake hours every day. They have literally never had a relationship with anyone else where they saw them every day for two months. Not even five days a week. And I take them on trips away from their dad, sometimes for weeks.

I worry a lot. Is this ok? Is this basically broken? It makes me feel hellza better that Laura Ingalls Wilder was way more isolated than my kids. I mean… isn’t that part of the American story? We are all alone. Even when we live in suburbs shoved cheek and jowl. Most of my friends talk about a loneliness of the soul they felt because even though they went to school… they never had friends. I collect self-identified “rejects”.

This is a lot of why I am trying so hard to get to know the people who live in our neighborhood. We actually see people and have conversations with them pretty consistently.

But I’m not providing little friends. I’m not sure school would anyway. And man it would waste their time. And teach lessons I don’t like.

It all comes down to control. Do I think the American government is doing a good job in how it is raising kids? No. Ok. I’m super glad I have the privilege to opt-out then. Not everyone does. Everyone has different privileges.

My choices are about what I can bear. I know that what I am capable of is pretty pathetic in some core ways. If you go spend some time studying brain developmental stuff you might cut me a little more slack. Not a lot. I don’t need a lot. I do very well all things considered. But there is a cost to all things considered. My kids have to bear that. I can’t understand what that cost will be in advance. I am fucking worried.

Did you know that rape is down 58% since the 1970’s? (http://prospect.org/article/should-rape-porn-be-banned)

Complicated stuff, yo.

Back in my day (*cough* choke*cough) I wanted to “play act” things that are much more extreme than average.  I have had the last several years of being a parent where I have done the “trapped under a baby” thing and I was alone all the time. I’ve had a lot of time to think about why I have done the things I have done. How many of them are things I will ever do again?

I will never again allow someone to put a noose around my neck and lift me off the ground because he wants to be able to look at the picture later and masturbate. The risk/reward ratio will never be tipped in that direction again. I’m really willing to go pretty far to be “good enough” for someone who wants to hurt me.

My daughters will not believe that anyone has the right to hurt them. What they go do in their sex lives will not be my problem. My children will not believe it is ok for an adult to grab them by the arm and drag them along. It is fucking assault. You see it in schools all the time.

I am not strong enough to teach my daughters how to be strong in that world. I don’t have any appropriate coping skills. My coping skills got me raped and beaten over and over again.

I worry so much. What do I have to give? Is anything about me worthy of learning about? Should I just shut the fuck up so there is never any reason for them to have to know how very self absorbed and bad and stupid I am.

I’m teaching my kids that adulthood is very free form. No one is your boss. You get to decide what to do with your time. If you need money (and everyone does in one way or another) then you need to figure out how to get it. All career paths involve training of some kind even if you are working retail or cutting hair (holy moly the training for hair dressing is intense). Lots of careers involve college. If you think you are heading down that route we will have some serious conversations in five, seven, and nine years from now about what you want to do to prepare for that experience because it will be up to you to pull it off. I won’t be part of that.

I don’t know what you will be when you grow up. Do you have ideas? What do you want to prepare for being able to do?

I’m trying to learn what I will do when I grow up too. I’m not ready. I’m sorry. I know that is a sign of my basic immaturity. I get it. But I am where I am. I am sorry that my development is so retarded. It isn’t my fault. I’m trying. I’m trying so hard. I can’t be anything other than what I am.

Life is in medias res. We are all part of the continuing story of humanity. We are part of the story of our individual families. We are bearing the body load of their deprivations, excesses, tendencies, and flat bad choices. Or you can be one of those people who is happy and healthy and your family has been for…. Well as long as any one can remember. Great. Thanks. I’m happy for you. Sigh.

Ok, well so what does this all mean for my kids? In order for me to change the narrative of my family I need to change the narrative of my family. Which I have done in some major ways of  which I am proud. I continue to examine my behavior and attempt to make progress on doing course corrections.

I can’t do anything but what I am doing.  Oh, that’s bullshit. If Noah died I would cope. Well, I still wouldn’t work. He made sure of that before I quit. But shit happens. I could still have to get a job. I reiterate that I would cope. I think I would not be a very nice mother any more. I think my children would effectively lose both parents and it would be horrible. I would not be able to be present for even 1/10 of what they expect.  Good grief they are entitled little things.

They think they are entitled to my love and attention at absolutely every fucking hour of the day and night. Whoa. It is over whelming. After five years I have pulled back my boundaries like mad. When Shanna was born I did it twenty-ish hours a day (Noah had the other four). Calli has never had quite what Shanna had. It just isn’t possible. But they sleep together.

The three of us are a little self contained unit of affirmation and approval. We love each other and only sort of need anyone else. I feel bad about the ways in which we leave Noah out. He’s just not around enough to make as much impact on them. (I say as I hide in the garage away from them. But geez I’ve been low on personal time lately.)

I have to militantly believe that it takes all kinds or there is no chance that it is ok for me to exist. Sometimes that is hard to live with.

We all live in the middle. I come from hard core religious zealots and prostitutes–and that’s just on my mom’s side. How about you?

Empty the brain.

2 Replies

Still to do:

  • blackberry bush
  • clean house (Monday–this weekend is resting)
  • upload pictures (in progress) (http://www.flickr.com/photos/rightkindofme/sets/72157634785800521/with/9426289945/)
  • write descriptions (I don’t actually want to do this)
  • this weekend (or Monday) it is time to make pasta sauce. I have fresh frozen tomatoes, canned whole tomatoes, frozen home made paste–next load of tomatoes is for sauce.
  • take kids to water park
  • get over belief that everyone hates me and go back to park day
  • work on books again
  • start running again (DSH–Blacksheep says she is down for a half marathon in Portland in October 2014. 😀 Am I going to be able to talk you into a road trip? My Dad would probably be happy to help the awesome BlackSmithGuy with kids during the race so he isn’t stuck with all six girls. Man. Don’t we want to get all six girls together?!)
  • Pick up load of beef from K. Mmmm beef.
  • Make mead. It’s August. It’s time. (It doesn’t make my stomach hurt and pretty much ALL OTHER ALCOHOL is poison. I should make more.)
  • Start cleaning/preparing the backyard for birthday parties. I have less than four weeks. We are having two birthday parties for Calli because she is adamant about not wanting a big party (she broke down in tears at the thought) but she has enough “friends” that she can’t figure out how to narrow down the list. That’s ok. Some people are available during the week on your actual birthday and some people are available on Saturday. It’ll be fine. (And most of the party “decoration” stuff is available online for free because apparently Disney is totally happy to support people having Jake and the Neverland Pirates parties without spending money.)
  • Resign self to birthday with just girls.

Really a lot of what has been going on for the past couple of days is I am missing my mom. I wish my mother was proud of me so much that it hurts. It is probably in the top three reasons I cry all the fucking time. I wish I could stop caring. I really wish I could. But I don’t want my children to stop caring about me so I don’t really see how I can model not caring about your mother and get anything different.

Part one of the English class I am teaching is over. Hindi class is over. Thank goodness. I am so tired and over scheduled I feel like shit all the time. We will do Hindi class again but I need a break. I have four more weeks of teaching English once a week. I’m having fun with the kids. They say they have picked up some useful stuff. I’m particularly enjoying the one girl who seriously came for a writing workshop. She’s producing 5-8 pages per week and she wants major feedback. I can do that! YES! I feel useful in a way I don’t get to feel very much.

Mostly I think the things inside my head are stupid and pointless and not worth knowing–that’s why I know them instead of people who are smart and who matter. Once in a while I find out that something inside my brain is useful. It’s a very powerful feeling.

“Why do you need to see a therapist?” “You know how I cry all the time. It’s not because of you. You are the best thing that has ever happened in my whole life. But a long time ago my life wasn’t this awesome. Apparently I still need to cry about it.”

I don’t cry every single day but I probably cry more than 75% of days. I have control over the anger these days… not the crying. I used to be able to control the crying and not the anger. I don’t know if this is progress or not. It is certainly different than I was when I was younger.

For the first twenty five years of my life crying was very dangerous, but I had a lot to cry about. I would say that more than half of the times I have been hit in my life it has been as punishment for crying. I’ve been hit a lot. I could not begin to count it all. So many people. So many times.

I have so much to cry about. Why am I so bad that I don’t deserve to have a mom who will protect me? Yesterday I read about a case where an adult woman seduced a 14/15 year old boy (that’s RAPE, my friends) and after she got out of jail (because that’s rape and she’s a rapist) she sued for custody of the baby she had as a result of being a rapist and is not requiring her 15 year old rape victim to pay child support.

Because being a rape victim never fucking stops. And the baby? The child born of rape? That’s the one I pick out of that scenario to identify with. No one wants children born of rape. They are treated like shit for their entire lives. They don’t get to forget that them being here on this planet is the tangible result of something terrible happening.

I feel so insecure and yet so sure that the parenting choices I am making are the only ones I can make. I feel so ashamed of myself that I can not be more like other people. I can’t. It is too late for me to join a herd.

I have caught up on the internet. I should probably leave the screen off today. I haven’t read much in a month.

brain dump

2 Replies

I am on my second night of not sleeping because I am angry about the PTSD forum. Third night? I can’t even remember. This is why I backed away from facebook. Maybe my therapist is right and I shouldn’t be on this website either.

I have a chip on my shoulder the size of Wyoming when it comes to people nastily lecturing me about my behavior. You do not have the ability to foretell the future. Shut the fuck up.

But it’s all my fault if someone chooses to yell at me about how stupid I am… right? I chose to talk in public about something I did. I did not write a 20 page dissertation justifying my decision thus I am just being self-hating. If a man ever says anything sexual to a woman and she continues talking to him it will be all her fault if he later beats her and rapes her. So I’m fucking stupid for talking to this guy and asking for a boundary. Like, duh.

That sounds like a crazy person with PTSD trying to make me act even crazier than I do. Please forgive for being dismissive and nasty after you have derided me multiple times. At least I’m not doing it where she can see and I have not yet typed any of the swirling nasty names for her running about in my head.

I did go back to the thread this morning. *hang head in shame* I said that in the future I would like her to know that I am not interested in her opinion and please never comment on anything I write again. I believe her crystal ball to be out of service and I wish she would quit sharing the hysteria it is stuck on with me.

You notice how I almost never comment on other peoples writing? I probably comment on substantially less than 1% of what I read. I understand that my hysterical opinion is not usually welcome.

P, I do notice that it is a big deal that you are able to get to our house. I just think that at this point you continue to do so because you are being nice to my kids. I’m grateful that you are willing to be nice to my kids. They love and adore you and think you are smart and funny and capable. I want them to look up to women like you. I *do* understand that it is hard. I *do* appreciate it.

I just don’t know how to be unoffensive. And I don’t particularly want to offend you. So I don’t know what to say now.

I spend so much time worrying about how to not offend people. What can I possibly say or do to not offend and piss people off. I seem to piss people off by existing and breathing. (I’m not trying to dismiss the valid complaints of people who get upset with me. Sometimes I do know why people don’t like me any more. Sometimes it is very confusing though.)

I know I am a selfish asshole. I don’t know a different way of staying alive. I am not capable of living for unselfish reasons. All of my forbearance is gone. The closest I have to that left is taking care of my kids and having kids was the single most selfish thing I have ever done. So I’m not sure I can do the unselfish thing. I don’t think I would want to try. Near as I can tell the reason to live unselfishly is because your invisible sky friend told you to. Have fun with that.

I am up to twenty hours on the mural. I am somewhere between 40%-50% done. My neighbor bitched that there weren’t any people on it. My comment was I JUST FINISHED THE BACKGROUND COLORS GIVE ME A BLOODY BREAK. But he also very helpfully went and fetched a flashlight as I worked at dusk yesterday so I screeched that in a more or less pleasant way. Or at least he just laughed at me.

Yesterday he was trying to get a rise out of me (that’s basically all he does) and he was asking me if I knew anything about racing cars. After stating that I don’t watch Nascar it was kind of awesome to be able to say that I went to track school for racing Porsche’s so please don’t lecture me about how racing works. (To be clear I never actually *drove* on a track. My Owner got into that part after I left with the girl after me. Oh well. I still did the track school with him.)

So today, after the cheerful argument about racing cars yesterday, he showed up and asked me a bunch of questions. He said as he was walking up, “So now that I now I have a resident expert….”

I of course made it clear that I don’t consider myself an expert at much of anything. I am at best a dilettante. But we had a lengthy conversation and yeah I can answer a lot of questions.

Yesterday I was blessed with two (ok really four throughout the day–two adults) people coming over. One just stopped long enough to show off her HOLY SHIT DRAMATIC hair cut (she looks great) and the other friend walked around our neighborhood and looked at the fence and shared ice cream with us. The ice cream sharer brought little girls so my kids thought the day was a win.

Every day during dinner we try to go around the table sharing our favorite part of the day. My kids always say that seeing their friends is their favorite part of a day. They are really grateful when they get to see the kids they know. I am too. It is nice to still know people.

I feel really weird about trying to provide my kids steady access to people. I want them to have actual long-term relationships. I didn’t during childhood. I rarely knew people for any consistent period of time.

At this point Jenny is the person who has known me the longest and best. Everyone else comes post-bdsm period.

I went to a party recently and watched two beautiful women top a third beautiful woman. I have known the two tops for more than a third of my life.

A woman I used to date is moving back to the area. I’m having feelings about this. I’m having really intense feelings around the idea that I will never have sex with her again. It is really bothering me. I want to fuck her so bad my hands shake.

When I met my friend at the coffee shop to talk about the boundary incursion one of the things we talked about was inappropriate sexual acting out on the part of parents. That has dramatically played into his and his wife’s emotional issues–their parents not being appropriate.

I don’t think that promiscuity is always wrong. I don’t think that polyamory is wrong. I just think that I am not going to be able to model healthy versions of these. I think that *I* would be incredibly unhealthy. I am obsessive. I tend to forget everyone else in the world when I am thinking about a new (or returning after a long absence) sex partner. I think my children fucking deserve twenty years of my attention.

But good golly Miss Molly I want to fuck her. I want to. I want to. I want to. And I get the distinct impression she would really like me to. Mostly she is stone because she doesn’t trust people. (For the non-queers in the reading audience “stone” means that she does sexual things to people but she doesn’t tend to allow people to touch her genitals.) Given my long history of fucking her six ways from Sunday I’m pretty sure I would still be an exception–I always was.

I think it is that ability to side step peoples normal boundaries that drives a lot of my sex. I solicit people to actively reconsider their boundaries for me. I push them. I ask them to change the rules for me. It’s that whole selfish asshole thing.

I am having a hard time with the idea that I will never again validate someones sexuality and identity. I want to make her feel like she is beautiful and desirous and yet there isn’t a long list of people wanting to date her so she doesn’t believe me. If I’m not there to apply ego stroking… there is no ego stroking. So maybe she is only those things to me. And now I don’t want her either.

It is all very tied up in knots of shame and wanting people to feel loved and important. A lot of the reason I have always picked the partners I have picked is because I go hunting for people who are used to being told “no” and then I undo some of that damage. “Ok, maybe you aren’t a good fit with everyone but let me show you HOW AWESOME it can be to find someone compatible. You aren’t wrong or broken–you just need to find people who mesh.”

And perverts really have a hard time finding people to validate them. I’m just sayin’.

On my last trip to the dispensary I only bought edibles (not any of the sugar enhanced kinds–the variety is breath-taking these days). So I’m trying to eek them out for more than a month. So I’m under dosing for the first potion of time. Given that it is coinciding with doing EMDR again I sort of expected to hit a suicidal ideation period again. I haven’t. That is good. *happy dance* Any month without living in a multi-plex of suicidal horror is a good month. Happiness is about low expectations.

Last night putting the kids to bed was one of those magical experiences. I lay down with them for a few minutes when I got back from painting. I like hearing what they want to say as they empty their heads in preparation for sleep.

“I share my things with my family because I love my family. I share with my mama. I share with my big sister. I share with my daddy. My mommy shares with me. My big sister shares with me. My daddy shares with me. My family loves me!”

Is sharing of stuff how love is decided? I don’t know.

“I am happy! Sometimes I am sad. Sometimes I am mad. Right now I am happy!”

Yes, my beloved, feelings happen. I’m glad you are happy right now. I am too. I almost always feel happy when I get to snuggle between my two favorite girls in the whole wide world. I feel so deeply grateful that I get to have many hours a day every single day of cuddling my children. That is filling my decades old touch deficit.

I get that because Noah wants me to have it. Because I want it. He’s ok with me being selfish. I am very lucky. Not everyone wants what I have (which is more than ok–it’s kind of necessary). I feel lucky.

Ok, now I’m feeling less angry about the hysterical woman on the ptsd forum. I’m sure in her head everything is stuck on hysterical. I have totally had that feeling. I just choose to not take on someone else’s hysteria. I have enough of my own.

I think I can look at patterns and determine what will happen. I get the feeling that you absolutely MUST listen to your own impulses on this topic. Ignoring nigling feelings of worry is part of my problem. It is part of how I have ended up sexually assaulted so many times. I don’t know when to run. I absolutely get why people would want to lecture me “for my own good”.

I just honestly don’t want to hear it. You don’t know much about me. You don’t care to find out. How in the fuck do you presume to know what is good for me?

Not so good at the whole “boundaries” thing.

6 Replies

Intense EMDR therapy session today. My therapist commented, “It sounds like you are having a hard time keeping your boundaries up when other people are having feelings.” Why yes, that is a very accurate description. I feel that other people having feelings automatically trumps anything I might say or do. That’s part of the whole worthless thing. So of course when people start telling me that I am making them feel bad I agree that it is because I am a terrible person who should be driven out of all society. Not really a helpful response.

I think I should back off of the ptsd forum. I’m kind of tired of having people yell at me that they know “all about trauma” and “obviously I am making bad choices” and my problem is that I can’t “stop re-enacting trauma with untrustworthy people”. That whole set of rants in relationship to meeting someone in a coffee shop. Because obviously meeting up with a guy to say, “Hey something you said bothered me” is the same as putting myself in a position to be raped again. Same damn thing. I’m too stupid to be able to evaluate which situations are safe. I should just stay home or only talk to people who never make mistakes.

Oh, and of course anyone who is part of the bdsm community should just be shunned. They are all Bad People.

You know what, lady? I think I am going to take my experiences of the bdsm community over yours. There are decent people who happen to get off on bdsm. There are assholes and predators and rapists who are not in the bdsm community. I don’t really feel that deciding that a demographic of people is terrible is the way to have a happy life.

Of course she wants me to start with all men and move on from there. All men are dogs, don’t you know. (Ok, technically it was a man in the thread who said, “I hate to say this because I am a man… but all men are dogs.”) No, they aren’t. And fuck you while we are at it.

I don’t want to pretend all men are terrible. I don’t want to believe that all _______ whatever are terrible. The reality is that some percentage sucks and a large percentage is neutral and another percentage is great.

Why would I want to talk to men like him? Why in the hell would I want to talk to men who have experiences in the same ball park as me? Oh… maybe because when I talk to men who have known me for more than 1/3 of my life and I tell them some things about my childhood they can say, “That explains so much of your behavior for the entire time I have known you. I wish I had known earlier. Our entire relationship would have been different.”

I want to be seen. I want to matter. I want to be a full person to the people who know me. I want my story to be in the heads of people who look at me.

I don’t want to just be some chick at a party with a lot of secrets. That isn’t what I want.

I don’t think my life is well served by staying home and crying about how terrible all men are. If I do that I will miss out on a lot of joy. Many of my closest and dearest friends are men. I have no plans to abandon them–even if they say things I don’t like sometimes. I look for patterns of behavior and I have no problem with walking away from relationships that don’t work for me. I have done so over and over and over.

No one has a crystal ball. No one knows how things will play out.

My willingness to share my story has meant that I have gotten to find out the life stories of some incredibly complex and amazing people. I sincerely doubt they would have started sharing if I hadn’t brought things up. I have a list of people I can call in the middle of the night. I have a list of people who say, “If you are freaking out call and babble on my voicemail and I will call you back the second I can.” Many of them are men. Some of them are survivors of some really horrifying things.

Why do I trust them? Do I trust them? Well I will be honest and say that there are some of them I don’t plan to be alone in a room with. But I will sure as fuck call them. We have a great phone relationship. Do I actually think anything bad would happen if I was alone in a room with them? No. But I still don’t think I could do it. I don’t trust all men enough for that. I don’t even trust the men I trust enough for that. Well, maybe alone in a room if people were just on the other side of a door and I was able to scream.

I don’t want to give up on the men I have in my life. Even if other women with ptsd are absolutely certain that my talking to men is self-destructive and stupid. I disagree. And my opinion is the only one that matters about my behavior and life.

I went and talked to this guy and that other guy in the scene after fairly carefully weighing the downsides.

When that asshole Paul who raped me offered to meet to talk with me “even though he didn’t remember” I didn’t take him up on it. There was no upside for me. That would have been straight masochism. So I didn’t go.

I *do* actually try to weigh risk. My life will never be risk-free. I’m not that kind of girl. Harm Reduction not Elimination. Life involves both the risk and the certainty of harm.

I read an interesting article on misogyny in activist spaces. I cannot count how many groups I have left because of men who were extremely aggressive. I just assume they are more interesting to know than I am. That’s why they are kept around.

I feel torn between wanting to isolate myself because I don’t seem to be very good at having relationships and wanting to go out a lot and make a bunch of new connections. I offend people. I make them feel like I think they are bad. I’m not trying to but it happens anyway. Maybe they are better off not knowing me. Maybe I shouldn’t be allowed to speak any more. If I went out and made new connections (new connections are easy) then I could just walk away from my current problems.

Only my problems follow me. I am the cause of my problems, not someone else. It’s really hard to get away from being me.

I left therapy feeling pretty positive. I had a nice visit with a friend afterwards. Now I’m starting to crash emotionally again. I know that I have people who say I can call. But I don’t call much. I rarely call anyone. I assume they don’t actually want to hear from me and they are just telling me I can call because it is an empty gesture. I don’t trust that people actually like me, ever. I think I have fairly good reasons to think that people don’t like me.

But some people do. They come here and visit. Maybe I should do more of that hermit-only-talk-to-people-who-will-jump-my-hurdles thing. At least when people get sick of me and stop coming it isn’t as jarring as no longer being welcome in some space.

I like people. I like being around people. I like socializing. I just don’t feel very comfortable going almost anywhere. Some guy will say some thing and I will be “too sensitive”. Some woman won’t like me and I will spend my time there crying because I am so sorry that I am such a bad person and she doesn’t like me.

Gosh I like my house.

end of the day

Leave a reply

I think I am getting sick. All day long I have been alternating between feeling feverish and shaking with chills. My neck and head ache unbearably. I did not paint.

I did some minor housework but mostly I’ve been trying to rest. I don’t think I’ve had a rest day in a few weeks. I really should be trying to schedule these more. My body doesn’t keep up.

I have plans tomorrow to meet up with the guy who made the inappropriate comment at the wedding. I don’t know how this will go. After my experience with talking to the guy in the scene and him promising an apology and then never following through… I don’t have high hopes.

I dislike the fact that when I am going into a situation where a man has the potential to say, “I didn’t mean to hurt you” I assume that he doesn’t give a shit. I think that men in general don’t give a flying fuck about me unless they are desperate for sex and I am the only hole around.

Well, not you Tay.

Ok, I could probably pull a few other names off the top of my head. But I’m pretty sure I would not get past my fingers. I don’t think men give a shit about me. I really don’t.

But I have to keep hoping I’m wrong. That’s why I talk to these bozos. That’s why I try to explain what it is that they are doing in the full context of my life. But they don’t give a shit.

No one gives a shit about the stupid white trash whores.

I’ve been saying “stupid” over and over in my head since last night. Apparently the last 24 hours has been a complete removal of my respect for my intelligence.

I wouldn’t get kicked so often if I didn’t bring it on myself.

I wouldn’t get raped so often if I didn’t bring it on myself.

I wouldn’t get the inappropriate comments so often if I didn’t bring it on myself.

How come I am so powerful that I can “make” all these men do these things but I can’t make them apologize? Why can’t I make them treat me approximately as they would a fellow heterosexual man.

Why do they have to comment on my cunt? Why do they have to presuppose that they have access to it? That it is a topic for casual conversation.

My body hurts. I feel worthless and empty. I feel like the only thing that is within my control as a means of influencing how people treat me is dying. Otherwise I have to shut the fuck up and take what they feel like dishing out. Or just stay home you stupid cunt.

I haven’t felt safe recently. I hate these cycles. Is anyone doing anything terrible to me? No. Am I being victimized or persecuted? No. I’m just a stupid whiny bitch. I just watch patterns. I have seen these patterns go so very badly before. Am I stupid for seeing patterns after those patterns have existed so strongly for me before?

Am I stupid for being afraid of being raped when someone says something like that?

So I had a friend pull me off to a different room during a party and no one could hear me over the music. I didn’t think anyone would believe me afterwards that it was non-consensual. Stupid whores aren’t allowed to say no. Anything is allowable with them.

Am I stupid for being afraid when men talk to me like this? Or am I an animal trying not to die? I can’t tell. I don’t want to ever be raped again.

Sometimes, on the internet, I read these articles by women who say they were raped and it really wasn’t so bad and that they think other rape victims need to stop whining.

Yup. I need to stop whining. I think the only way to stop it is to cut off my fingers and my tongue or I could die. I don’t think I can be stoic. I’m sorry I’m so weak. I’m sorry I’m such a selfish person that I cannot keep my pain inside my head all of the time where it is no one else’s problem. I am sorry I am so self-absorbed that I need to talk about myself.

I’m sorry I exist.

And then I look at my kids. Can I really be that bad? Am I beyond redemption? I see myself in them. I think they are so wonderful. They are kind and compassionate and thoughtful. But I don’t think I am kind or compassionate or thoughtful. I think I am selfish and spiteful.

I decide that people don’t like me very much and then I put up a brick wall. I don’t want them to be able to hurt me more. So I need to pretend this person is a non-entity. Otherwise I know they will hurt me. I *know* it.

And the whole time I am avoiding someone I know in the marrow of my bones that it is my responsibility to be silent so I do not offend them. So that I don’t bother people. It is my responsibility to keep my stupid piece of shit mouth shut. No one wants to fucking hear it.

Sometimes Noah manages to say something in a way that lands wrong. He pointed out yesterday how much better he is at remembering all the things I do wrong. I don’t know why he wants to be with someone who is so wrong. Why didn’t he pick someone better?

Because he wanted an elite private tutor for his kids who is compulsively sexual and doesn’t believe she has the right to say no.

I’m sure that is uncharitable. I get the distinct impression I am nicer to Noah than anyone ever has been. I don’t think many people respect him the way I do. That respect is a double edged sword. I think he is better than me. I think he married down. Sometimes I hate him a lot for that.

I don’t really see a way that someone could want someone like me without it being a bad thing. Sometimes I wonder if I make him feel comfortable because almost no one else in his current world understands hard scrabble white trash culture. That is what he grew up with. Not many people in his current world look up to the guys in his position. He was never poor. But the people he knew during his childhood mostly were.

Noah makes me feel better about myself than anyone else. He doesn’t make me feel very good about myself. I know that says a lot more about me than anyone else. I wish I could stop thinking about my father. “Do you deserve to live?” No. I don’t think I do. But I’m alive anyway. And you are dead.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how convenient Christianity must be. What would it be like if there was some magic invisible sky friend who loved you and protected you and cared about you? I don’t have one. There is no one protecting or loving or caring about me. I am alone. If I want to not be beaten and raped it is my responsibility to protect me because no one else will.

When it happens over and over, like it did with me, how can it not be my fault? How can I just randomly find that many bad people? Is it just that I draw the evil out of otherwise neutral people?

Let me tell you, most people who knew me and my rapists greatly preferred the company of my rapists. They don’t want to “take sides” so that means they pick the rapist.

Tonight I am glad I don’t have a scalpel in the house. I would find a way to hide the marks. I don’t have an endless amount of self control.

My next door neighbor had to call an ambulance tonight. A three week old baby stopped breathing.

Given how fragile life is, what business do I have wishing for death? What hubris? What idiocy? What masochism?

It isn’t masochism. I am sorry that I hurt this much. I don’t want to hurt any more. I don’t know how to make it stop. I don’t know how to stop being a bad person that people want to avoid out of self-preservation. I know they are right to avoid me. I am not criticizing.

My head hurts so much.

Probably time for a sleeping pill. I don’t think I will sleep much without it. I think this would be an all night hysteria sort of night. I haven’t hit my head on the floor! I am exercising self control. I want to treat my body how everyone else thinks my body should be treated. I want to feel that. I know it is right. I am not supposed to be whole.

I am just a hole.