In the past 49 hours I’ve slept 11 hours. I also wrote a four page whiny screed today about my feeeeeeeelings. I’m not posting it. I’m tired.
Thanks to the folks who were patient with me today. I uhhh will be over this soon. I’m sorry. I… should have just not talked at all on a day when I got this little sleep.
I am medicating and going to bed. That seems wise. Tomorrow will be another day fresh with patience.
Do you know why I’m so happy to be married to Noah? Because when I got home from my date we went out to the garage to medicate and talk. (I medicate. He doesn’t.) I told him everything I could remember and be coherent about with regards to the date. What felt best. Why it was wonderful. (Ok I did take a shower first.)
When I ran out of ways to say, “Oh my god the deity is incredible” Noah transitioned into telling me stories of women he has dated. I have… traditionally not wanted to hear as much as Noah wants to hear about my stories. This time it went better than normal. It was very few minutes of him telling me things he has done before I really wanted his cock in my mouth.
So he kept telling me stories of getting his wicked way with women while I sucked him off for a while. That was hot. Wicked, incredibly hot. He can be a mean man and it is really hot.
He took me to bed and grinned over how raw and sore I was as he fucked me. He likes it when he doesn’t have to put in much effort to hurt me and make me come all at the same time. He says “Thanks, deity.”
I… I need to not have sex again before my Sunday date. That’s gonna hurt too and I need to heal a little. Not that I want to take 30 seconds off from fucking right now.
I’m in one of those phases. They’ve always ended in the past. For a while though… there will be no such thing as feeling like enough.
And today I get to go to Dark Garden for a fitting, then have lunch with Sarah, then see my submissive.
I feel so gloriously lucky. I feel so adored.
Between the fact that Noah has always been the head of the Krissy admiration society, and the fact that my submissive has been… feeling more ok being admiring, and how the deity talked to me last night?
This is why new people are less appealing. New people don’t love me this much. New people don’t spend excessive amounts of time narrating why I’m the best thing ever. Oh I love my handpicked list right now.
Well done, Krissy. You have gotten to the point of being ridiculously good at picking. Good job.
I no longer spend time with people who neg me. I don’t listen to insults, put downs, or people who want to denigrate me. I want to spend time with people who think I am the best damn thing since sliced bread.
And I get to. Pretty much every day of the week and some days of the week I get to stack wonderful people one right after another.
I feel so lucky. I feel so loved. I feel so well fucked.
Good grief I love my life. Thank you Noah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I couldn’t be who I am right now without you. I was never able to let people be this nice to me before you.
I feel like I owe you everything. Thank you. Oh this is so fun.
There is a lot of stuff about Noah I won’t write. It’s complicated why. He says that he feels like he shouldn’t write it if I have chosen not to write it and I think that’s silly.
There are ways I don’t write about Noah because doing so would make him a supporting character in my story who was failing to live up to expectations. That’s not who or what he is though. He is a main character who is choosing to live with me. I don’t know how to write his story as it deserves to be written.
Part of the reason I don’t write more about him is because I would misattribute his actions all the time and I don’t want to do that.
I would paraphrase and misremember and go in a whole different direction and create a character for me to be at odds with.
I don’t want to do that. I do not want to take away Noah’s right to define himself and I think if I did substantially more writing about him… I would kinda do that to him. That would be wrong.
I asked him if he feels he knows everything about me. He shook his head emphatically–no. I asked him if he feels I know everything about him. He said not quite everything… but basically.
I have to believe he is wrong. That is very important. I have to believe I don’t know everything.
Because whatever it is I know so far… he’s going to change. People do. He will make new stories and if I file him away as a supportive character and I already know his backstory so whatever…
No. That’s just not going to work.
Our conversations hurt right now. In that way that growth and change hurt. I’m trying to see which words from this conversation are going to stick in my head. I’m not going to write down the one I’m trying to not remember.
Boundaries have shifted all over the place. That means things feel very unpredictable and that’s scary. Yes. That’s true.
I have two very busy weekends in a row. Which was rather rude of me to schedule. But I really and truly cannot express how deep this hunger goes.
Let’s see how I feel after that. I’ll probably have a better idea of what I need. I know that this is not sustainable.
But I’m going to explode.
I am very not sure I am going to be able to talk any one person into hitting me the way I want to be hit right now. These are all newish play experiences. They don’t know me as a bottom so they don’t really trust what they can do. I have to respect that tops have their own limits. (I’m not sure I could deliver a first time scene to someone at the intensity level I want so I’m not mad at anyone. It’s fucking hard to trust someone like that. Topping is risky in a way bottoming isn’t.) So I’m kinda hanging my hopes on a culmination of pain. Please oh please let me get hurt enough.
I saw a doctor yesterday for std checking. She was adorable. I love Planned Parenthood doctors. She was very curious about the bruises on my breasts (of course starting with worried) and I said, “Don’t worry. I had to ask nicely to get that bruise.” She looked startled. “Wait, what?”
“I’m a masochist. I had to ask one of my slutty friends very very very very nicely to get that bruise.”
She laughed. “I can’t believe you call them your slutty friends.”
“Well, at some point it is truth in advertising.”
She laughed more.
She’s thrilled I come in often for checks when I’m active. Come on back. She agreed that sterilization sounds wise but they don’t do that. I’m looking into options near me.
It would be somewhat hilarious to do a gofundme “Do you want to ensure that Krissy never gets pregnant again so that she can be alive long enough to fuck *you*?”
I’m kidding. I’ll pay for it. But it’s funny in my head.
I feel really mean. I feel like I should just go back to monogamy and decide that it is good enough.
But I can’t. I hit a wall. This isn’t enough and it is making me crazy. It’s not enough. I feel like a selfish fucking asshole.
Noah is not enough.
I’m feeling almost giddy at all the possibilities that are available to me right now. All of the things I love to do that Noah… doesn’t even know I’ve done. That isn’t part of who he sees me as.
He sees me as someone to be available for the things he likes.
But I have so many other likes.
Noah is relatively simple and I am fucktastically complex. That’s hard. Well he wanted a crazy girl for excitement.
I made a tiny bit of progress on tile yesterday. I’ll do more today.
Oh! Tile is here. I should email the folks who said they could help. Not 100% of it arrived, but most of it. Enough that I could finish the tree if they were taken of the backing.
Right now I’m working on spring. It’s perty. Grass and flowers.
I’m sorry Noah. I wish I could be just the supportive character of your dreams. I really can’t. I am so many things. Just you wait and see. I don’t want to leave. I mean… I want to go play. But I want to come back. I want you to see these parts of me. I want you to know me. I want you to want me. I like how you want me. I like how you snuggle me to sleep night after night, year after year.
It isn’t that being with you is bad. It is that you don’t hunger to hurt me. I’m not actually angry about that. I have been seriously partnered with people who had that hunger. Notice how I’m here? I don’t want to live with that. I don’t want to live with someone who wants to hurt me that much on a regular basis. Not really.
But I do want to beard the lion in his den. Why?
Because losing is so fucking hot.
Today’s date was more of a processing session and less of a fun date. We were supposed to have some time practicing bondage but I got to the room and couldn’t do it. My experience of bondage with Noah is that it lasts as short a time as possible and then he wants to fuck me and he’s done.
My Renaissance Faire Guild Mistress has a funny story of listening to a couple have sex and at some point the woman yells, “ what do you mean you are done?”
I told Noah I feel like that a lot. Sex and BDSM aren’t to me what they are to other people. Not because I’m special, because everyone has their own journey. Promiscuous sex has been a part of my life for the truly all of my life. BDSM has been part of my life for my entire adult life. Starting when I was 20 years old I was in an M/s relationship for two years.
These things are a really big deal to me. It isn’t casual. I know I like sex more than a lot of the people I knew in the community, but I have very strong needs around power exchange and sex. I really do need to be hit in order to be happy. That’s not true, but it is.
Obviously I don’t need my kids to hit me. I don’t want random people to hit me. I want to be hit by somebody who knows me, who likes me, and who really wants to help me go on the emotional/hormonal journey that is intense BDSM.
I keep feeling scared that I don’t have much to offer in return. Am I trying to use my friends as life-support devices for whips?
There is a lot of bitterness in the community about people who are selfish as bottoms. I know that nobody has complained about me so far; I’m nervous.
I feel nervous partly because I’m being really selfish and I am tired of trying to drag Noah towards wanting what I want and I don’t know what I really have to offer in exchange. I know what my submissive has to offer me, but for some reason it feels different compared to what I’m offering the people I am approaching about play. I do want to use people. But only in fun ways. I want to get them off too. I do want to give energy back, I don’t think I am a vampire.
Really, I think that in exchange for the kind of beating I really want to get, I’d be willing to do a whole hell of a lot that isn’t really my thing just because God dang it you earned it. Hell yeah, what do you want from me? I have a wide variety of skills.
I spent a while crying in our bedroom. Wedged into the spot I like between the bed and the wall. I am so frustrated.
After a while I came out to the garage and decided it was a good idea to medicate. Noah came out and we talked some more. I don’t really want to try and represent what he said.
I am at the end of what I can do. I cannot change more, I cannot make do with less ( sexually), and I can no longer patiently try to create a situation where Noah just has to follow steps on what to do to play with me. After 10 years I have entirely run out of steam. I want to be hit by people who want to hit me not by someone who is doing what I say. I want someone to hit me for a long time because they want to. I’m tired of setting timers only to get angry that they are never respected. I want to be hit. Yes, sex is important too, but I fucking get you off already.
I need something different.
Thank God for friends. I don’t wants to leave. I don’t want to go back to what I had. I have no desire to give up my life. I just want to be hit. I want to be hit so that I can scream and cry and get out all of the big feelings that are such a problem in my day-to-day life. I am so tired of having to behave and having to be proper and having to be a good example and having to manage my feelings correctly instantly when I don’t even know what my feelings are. I want to be beaten until I forget who I am. I want to be beaten until the only thing I can think about is wanting to please the person who is hurting me.
I have not been hit like that in more years than I care to think about. The drug dealer scene kinda got there but only kinda.
When Daddy was hitting me the other night… that was a good scene. We probably played for almost two hours and didn’t get to sex. I have an impressive bruise on my breast still. I feel like the most fierce hits got up to maybe a 6. I could have handled way more but once someone says out loud, “I’m hitting as hard as I can” I shut the fuck up. Cause don’t be rude.
He could have picked meaner toys. I don’t like those as much. God I love being punched.
Two hours of that and I felt like maybe if he stopped in two weeks I might be satisfied. Maybe. But I doubt it.
I feel like I am drowning in a river of want and I don’t know how to be patient with Noah around this any more and I feel like a horrible asshole.
We do rough sex great. We don’t do scenes. And I miss them. I want it so much.
Noah says he recognizes that things need to change. I’m not otherwise going to try and paraphrase his words.
We’ll see what the next ten years look like.
The scene was quite lovely. It was shorter than I was hoping for but I hear that’s my fault for being inspiring.
No, that’s not what he said. I’m being an asshole. But it is why I’m soliciting people who will beat me until I actually cry instead of barely stop mewing in resistance. It’s a very different experience. Noah is great at mean sex.
I want to get beaten.
The spanking and the punching was really awesome. I felt like I could have rocked back and forth on that for hours. Ok the stomach punching was like fucking woah I almost puked. But you know… shit happens. I didn’t come close to ending the scene. The punching on my shoulders was holy shit intense because I have a bunch of adhesions up there from injuries I’ve sustained over the years. I don’t think he was hitting me that hard but holy crap.
I’m not saying no. It felt positive. But it was really sensitive.
During the scene I had this thought, “I have this vague memory of something called a ‘warm up’. Maybe? What is that? Hmmmm….” Because I am that much of a smart ass. I didn’t tell him that I thought it till the scene was all the way over because I’m barely polite.
I did tell him I was going to write it. He laughed.
I’m so glad Noah thinks I’m funny instead of gross or offensive.
Like that. But more. Longer. Harder.
I think the problem came up because once he started caning me… yeah… that’s it. I want to fuck. I want want want want to fuck.
BUT YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO TELL ME NO FOR A WHILE!!!!
I mean, really.
Denial is not in Noah’s vocabulary. I don’t want to be denied denied. I want to be teased for a little while.
Oy.
It’s uhm, a subtle distinction.
Noah’s like, “You’re ready? Ok!”
I love you so much. Thank you for liking me this much. I do like it. The reality is my cunt can’t handle hours of wear and tear on a regular basis so you are perfect.
But variety.
The clothespins were fantastic. Oh please more of that.
I hated them and hated them and hated them and hated them until I was begging for more and fuck I love that.
I was asked recently if I liked anal sex and separately why I like anal sex. Because anal sex makes me come so hard that I get muscle cramps through most of my body. Yeah. I like it. Not cause it’s dirty. Because nothing else makes me feel like that. The fact that it is dirty just means you take a shower right after. Not a big deal.
Ok, we did great today with the anal. Full marks. Slow, patient, lots of lube. Well done.
Oh I’m so well done.
The role play started out vicious. Midway I really needed him to switch from telling me that I was worthless to telling me I was good because, see I had been following your rules I just didn’t understand you thought I should be doing that with you.
So I made that switch work well in the scene and I got the cosseting and good girls I needed. That was really nice.
Yay. Happy dance. Now I get to… go pick up a kid for a picnic in the park and a very different kind of play date.
Snicker.
I think this is the best I’ve felt in my body in a very long time. Thank you Noah. I know I’m teasing you a little. I don’t mean to be a jerk. It was really good. Like that. But more.
At bed time last night I got dressed up (like up) and went to a munch. The kind of munch that happens at a bar so people play quite a bit. Less like the munches I grew up at where play was inappropriate. But I can adapt!
I asked my other Daddy (I have one in Oakland–the one who told me he doesn’t really have time but maybe; my other Daddy lives in San Jose and is currently slightly less occupied.) what he was doing and he pretty much responded, “Going to the munch with you” so I decided that was a sign and I drove south.
My back tells me today that I was dumb for that bit. But I had so much fun.
I spent two and a half hours kinda egging my friends on to hit me. This was fascinating because I did it differently than I’ve ever done before. I’m a negotiator. Usually I want to negotiate so much that I bore people before the scene starts. I just… didn’t negotiate much last night. After Daddy was dragging me back and forth by my hair for a while I finally interrupted and said, “I should warn you that enough hair pulling leads to a migraine and my head is getting tender.” He switched to holding me forcefully by the throat.
My boobs are gorgeous. I don’t mean because I have nice breasts (although I do) I mean that they are colors and colors and colors.
Thank you Daddy for all the slaps, punches, and pinches. I was grateful to beat off in the middle of you doing it, then I beat off at home, then I begged Noah to fuck me.
Life is so good right this minute.
It wasn’t just Daddy fucking with me! I’m not sure how it turned into a 3 on 1 without any negotiating but some nights are just awesome? Folks missed me? Well I missed them too…
My former Owner and another long-term friend thought it was hilarious to stand there (at different times) and say, “Hit her harder” so I kicked both of them in the shins.
I saw so many people I met right at 18/19. I feel I have come a long way. I feel like I am not very much the same. Even the way I like to be hurt is different.
Ok, I kept saying I am a wuss and you need to be gentle with me… but then Daddy would wind up and hit my breasts about as hard as he can hit. My response was to moan and lean in. The police baton on my ass was quite… motivational. I’m told there is a bruise there too.
Fucking a I had fun.
Ok, this is 0-60. AT LEAST I DIDN’T FUCK ANYONE. I coulda. I saw some invitations on peoples faces. But they would have been strangers. I just… I am not up for that dynamic right now. Anonymous people at a party where my husband is, that’s a small risk. Anonymous people when I’m hunting solo are dangerous at this point. I should stick with the known quantity folks so I know beyond the shadow of a doubt I will be sent home in good shape for doing my job because my friends care about my children.
This Daddy is one my kids spend more time around. He’s a very relaxed, mellow sort of dude.
Until he gets that look on his face and he winds up just to watch me lean into the blow. It’s nice watching how he shudders in satisfaction after a particularly nasty hit.
He says I taught him how to punch and kick. Oh sweetie, really? I’m so glad you’ve been practicing those lessons in the last 10 years because you’ve gotten pretty damn good. I am impressed. Do it again.
One of the tops I was playing with–frankly I didn’t know he was a top. He and I didn’t play more in the past because I didn’t think he topped and I’m not that motivated to top men. I make very few very special exceptions. (Pretty much I have to be wicked in love with you to want to do that to a man on an extended basis. It takes a fuck ton of energy and I don’t have much desire to pour that into people who won’t properly appreciate what it takes out of me.)
So this top… oh baby he just about made my night. He leaned in and whispered in my ear, “All those years ago I told you ‘no’. I regret it. I’ll never tell you ‘no’ again.” Swoon dead away. Well I’m glad you’ve learned your lesson.
Now you’re going to have to ask me. Because I’m that kind of shithead.
And the third friend who ended up hurting me for a while…. also someone I think of as a bottom who just felt motivated to jump the fenceline. What the hay!?
It worked. He’s learned a lot about pressure points. He thought it was funny to pick two different spots on my body and apply pressure and ask, “Does spot 1 or spot 2 hurt more?” As I answered he counter balanced by upping the ante on the opposite one over and over till I was screaming.
Oh what a lovely night.
And all without having to ask or be asked or negotiate. God damn it’s good to be experienced.
I did stop the scene once to yank my dress up and show off my underwear and say, “Ok that last hit landed up here (point). I need the rest of them to land lower than here (point).”
Daddy said, “Ok Princess. That’s a good point.” Then he slammed my face back down on the table so he could hit my ass again.
Oh my life is so wonderful. Happy Sigh.
On that note. I need to go masturbate again. Today is going to be a beat off ten times kinda day.
I have chores to do this morning. Then I get to go find a bra with the Professor.
I hope it’ll be another good day.
At the conclusion of Cranky Day I went up to Wicked Grounds and had dinner with two wonderful women. We had a great conversation. I felt seen. I felt like I had friends. I felt like I know these peoples stories and they know mine and they want to know more. I know I want to know more about them.
It isn’t just about hunting. It is about needing something bigger than a four person nucleus family with a babysitter.
My submissive walked in, surprised to see me, on a date. I was tactful I think. Barely grabby enough to remind him that I can but not stepping on the toes of his date. I think. I hope. *cross fingers* (No complaints from him.)
I think it is funny how I’m kinda putting people in boxes they didn’t ask to be put in. I don’t know if those are boxes they want to be in.
I am sorta doing with my submissive an intensified, deeper, adult, more intimate version of what I barely hinted at with my best friend in junior high. My poor best friend. I spent so much time hitting him. He told me that it didn’t hurt that much and clearly I needed to be hitting someone so it was ok. But I never kissed him. I never got even close to being sexual with him. That was completely off the table. (I actually went and stayed with this friend on the road trip. His wife is awesome and he has a darling baby boy. I’m so happy for him.)
I’ve never really soaked in wanting without hurrying up to sex. I don’t even really know how to do that. I feel like I’m signing up for the most torturous science project of my life. How does one sit with desire and coax it without indulging it completely?
I don’t know and I want to find out.
When I am grinding on your crotch and you can smell me the thing isn’t that I lack desire to fuck you.
I want to fuck you. But much more than that I want the power to decide not to fuck you. The first power like that I’ve ever really had in my life.
That’s a kind of intoxication I don’t know how to describe.
I love that I can lay on you and kiss you as much as I want to and you will gasp and moan and pant and start crying… but you won’t grab me and force me to do more than I am ready to do.
This is an utterly novel experience for me.
It is gross and creepy and yucky but I feel like the seeds of wanting this came from being a parent. I kiss my kids without escalating. But it isn’t passionate. It is loving and tender without being remotely sexual.
It really taught me a lot about the variety of love I can feel. I am curious about the extent of that variety in a way I was not before having children. How many ways can I love?
Am I physically capable of passion without hurrying to get it over with?
And it will be complicated to figure out the dynamic of pain and tenderness. When I say that I haven’t really dominated you in the past, the tenderness is a huge chunk of what I mean. I have tried very hard to give you the kind of pain I thought you wanted. I wasn’t there just being selfish. I like that kind of play and I thought you only wanted a specific thing from me.
If what you want is to do what I want, then this is going to be a whole lot more gentle. Because you don’t understand what I want as much as you think you do. Yes, I want to hurt you. I’m going to fuck you up severely. But that will be like 10% of our relationship.
I’ve watched you for a decade and a half. I’ve watched you be a man of integrity, honesty, character, and dedication.
Why in the world would I want to spend the majority of our time together degrading you?
Just got off the phone with my shrink. That was a lovely phone call. I gave her an update on the folks I’m pursuing. She said, “Oh I know these names.” That makes me happy. She thinks it is a good thing that I am taking my sexual satisfaction this seriously. “If this is what it takes and you can do it… do it.”
She also said that the thing I was cranky about is something we’ve discussed in therapy many many many many many many many times and yup I’ve been cranky about it for a long time. That is an accurate perception on my part. I’m not being hysterical. This is an issue.
I described my April and said, “Ok that is 0-60.”
I said, “IT IS ONLY ON 3 DAYS!!!!”
“Oh. But it is so much emotional intensity… it feels like a lot more than three days…”
Deep sigh.
You don’t understand. I used to do this 5-6 nights/week.
Three nights in a month doesn’t feel like 0-60 for me. And two of those nights I’ll be with the kids for most of the day anyway.
So it doesn’t represent that much time away from my normal life except in the form of lost sleep.
So it feels different to me.
I’m being real careful to catch up on sleep first.
My shrink said yeah, just use Lorazepam every night for a while. Catch up on lost sleep. Just doooo eeeet.
None of this, “But I’m overmedicated” bullshit. I’m not.
I think I have decided to try the Gabapentin. I’m scared shitless. But I seriously need a break from smoking. This is killing my lungs. Edibles are so expensive.
I would much rather give my money away than hemorrhage it on pot. Realistically: I’d rather pay chiropractors.
I’m not sure I will ever stop completely. I like it. But I don’t want to need this much of it. At this point it is hurting me.
My lungs are so pissed.
I won’t be on the computer today. K is bringing the Bonus Kids over. We haven’t had a visit in a while. I’m really happy about it.
Last night two wonderful women decided to come talk to me just because I said in a public way that I would be out of the house.
I feel so lucky.
Thank you for seeing me. Thank you for loving me.
Arms hurt. Love you so much. Bye.
Years ago I went to this tolerance building experience when I was a teacher. It was meant to show the kids that they don’t know who among them has it rough. It turned out I spent the weekend outing myself as having had the shittiest life any of them had ever heard of. It sucked. But one of my students told me that I am like a rubber ball. It doesn’t matter how hard life knocks me down I will get up again.
I still have the card where the kids wrote their impressions of me.
I’m thinking about that rubber ball thing cause I have big feelings this second. Good feelings. Impatient feelings. Frustrated feelings. Sad feelings.
It just depends on who I think about. I could list hundreds of feelings but my arms hurt.
Do I have the right to try and climb into peoples heads without an express invitation? Do I have the right to be pissed off about the metrics of my life? Does it matter if I have the right?
Is it really more about what one can get away with? But hey–here in California without enthusiastic consent it is rape.
What if it isn’t sex and you are just mind fucking them? Then we get into ethics which is harder to really define.
What if what you want to do is change how people see themselves? Maybe if I can get better at understanding the mechanism of helping other people like themselves I can figure out how to actually like myself?
I hope.
I’m really angry about something I can’t write about.
I want. I feel like I’m drowning. I’m tired of waiting. I’m tired of caring more about other peoples needs than mine.
You think this is 0-60?! The weekend I left my Owner I fucked six new people. That month? I can’t begin to remember how much sex and SM I did. I literally can’t. I have had two SM scenes and I fucked one stranger in a period of two months.
That is not 0-60.
Have you met me?!
Ok, April is looking more fun with 3 SM scenes planned and a hookup.
I still don’t think this is 0-60. No, it’s not conservative compared to normal people and yeah I am being an asshole.
I’m feeling really fucking selfish after seven years of being on duty nearly 24/7.
I actually think I get more breaks than many of the mothers I know. I’m more selfish than you. I know.
I used to get weekends off once a month. Now we have babysitting. I’m not really with them 24/7. It’s more like 20/7 and I let Noah answer their demands a lot when he’s home.
I know Noah is tired too. I know.
Fuck.
Right this second I feel petty, mean, scared and like a complete asshole.
I’ve been watching TED talks about sex, cheating, monogamy, relationships… it’s funny how this discourse has changed in my lifetime.
Three separate drives: sex, attachment, love. Yeah.
Jenny, I’m not actually that pissy about the cruise thing. I’m pissy about something else that I can’t talk about and I kinda sorta can talk about the cruise thing.
I do like me some transference.
I feel so angry with myself for being angry instead of still soaking in how nice it was to be with my submissive yesterday.
Complicated.
Why am I so angry? I can’t talk about it.
My hands hurt so much and I have so much tiling to do today that I shouldn’t be typing at all. But here I am, tracking the fucking bounces.
Kellianne tells me I should write 750 words today so I don’t lose practice as a writer. I hear that being good at things takes practice.
Fuck everything. If I just write fuck until I hit 750 does that count?
I don’t want to follow rules and I don’t want to be good and I don’t want to have to think about anyone else’s feelings.
But if I act like that this whole god damn house of cards could come tumbling down.
Is there a happy medium? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.
I’m so angry.
I’m not “blow up a relationship” angry. I’m just angry. It happens. My phone says it is angry day. And something happened. Not a big thing. A small thing. A thing that doesn’t deserve any kind of blow up.
But I’m so. Fucking. Angry.
I feel ashamed. I feel small. I feel like I am going to hurt people because I do not respect their boundaries and needs.
Someone smart told me that all parents are kinda fuck ups.
I don’t know if my mom gave me her best or what she had to spare. I don’t know what I give other people. I feel like I’m short changing absolutely everyone.
I’d like to spend today in my closet crying. Instead: tile. 817 words.
I spend a lot of time worrying that what I want isn’t fair. Not to Noah, not to the people I am propositioning, not to my kids, maybe even not to me.
What is “fair”?
Noah is having some feelings about how much time I’m spending thinking about the folks I’m chasing. That is logical and reasonable. I haven’t spent much time with anyone yet. It’s mostly in my head and some IMing and letters and emails. It’s almost entirely emotional energy at this point. But he notices.
I feel like it isn’t fair that I forcefully reject the label of polyamorous because I just can’t take on being responsible for someone’s needs that way. This article reminds me that I don’t have much to offer.
The thing is… I actually do talk to my prey quite a bit. I think there is a big difference between one-offs I pick up at parties (where I usually will not even write down my email address or phone number or name: if you can remember my name to google me you can find me) and the people I…
am attached to.
Because this is love. I don’t want to call it polyamory because I have issues of my own. But this is love.
Why do I love my submissive? Because he is smart, funny, he’s a great father. I have barely met one of his children one time many many years ago in a waving from the car sort of thing (I think but I might be remembering wrong) so I’m judging from his self-descriptions.
But I know how much time he spends. I know what activities he engages in. I know how he encourages his kids to try and fail and get up again. I respect him.
Even though I disagree with some of the decisions that his personal beliefs lead him to make… I actually have respect for the fact that he has his faith and he is going to god damn act it out. It matters to him and I really respect that. I respect it when people take their faith (whatever that is) seriously.
My faith is it takes all kinds. And if we are going to all make it that will take money and help.
I love the way he has taken care of his slave. He has one of the longest term M/s relationships I know. They are so loving and considerate and caring. Being around them always makes me feel just a little bit happier that such people are in the world. I respect that they model how to talk to one another and be loving while having boundaries.
I even really respect the fact that even with ownership between them they get to do what they each need to do for their lives.
Because we are all different. We are all complicated. We all have such different needs. They show me one way of working out those different needs. They don’t switch together because that’s a complicated thing in a dynamic. But other people are different.
I can understand to some degree. I can’t switch with Noah. Sometimes that is hard. Sometimes I think it simplifies things and improves my life. I appreciate that Noah doesn’t have a strong need for me to turn on dominance with him when I’m totally not in the mood. That was hard with my Owner. He’s a very switchy person. He wanted to have ultimate control of what kind of stimulation he was getting when, but sometimes he wanted to be dominated on demand and that was serious work for me.
I have a deep, burning inner sadist but this dominance thing is different. No matter what my submissive is saying. He doesn’t know. Picture me sticking my tongue out but this is a smiley free zone.
Today I took youngest child to the penultimate ballet class of the series and I used the hour to exercise. I ran for 40 minutes then I did a bunch of crunches/push ups/planks/leg lifts/etc until I needed to get the kidlet.
I have an increasingly weird opinion of my body. Why can’t I get stronger and stay fat this isn’t fair. I do drop weight pretty fast when I start heavily exercising. I feel this awful feeling of “See. If you only cared about your looks you could be thin” and I want to scream back WATCH ME BUY 15 GALLONS OF ICE CREAM AND EAT IT ALL THIS WEEK MOTHERFUCKER I’LL SHOW YOU ‘CARES ABOUT LOOKS!”
Ahem. But I’m not sure that is actually good for my health. So I don’t know what I’m doing.
I want to be better able to ride Noah (or anyone else). So I want to get better at running. Because right now I want to do that. I’ve been having a lot of fun on top lately with Noah even though that is historically not much my thing.
Really lots has been changing about my sexual interests over the last few years. On one hand Noah is so ideal because he is up for trying anything with the merest suggestion. On the other hand I’ve kind of exhausted the things he really wants to try.
Even though people are constantly surprised that I’m not the top in the relationship… no… I like being a sexual follower. I like doing what you want to do err, but let’s be clear that is if you are in the mood to do what I like doing. Cause I’m a selfish shithead. I like being told what to do and how to do it. Even if what you like isn’t perfectly my favorite I really like that you want to tell me to do it.
So I’m in an interesting place with my submissive. He thinks I’ve been so dominant with him and I think I’ve been an incredibly perceptive service top. I say the things to you I wish someone was saying to me.
Sigh
I’m actually looking forward to Noah watching me top in a few weeks. He’s never seen me top Sarah. He’s never seen me seriously beat on anyone. I feel like… after ten years he gets to meet a whole new me.
This is terrifying and exciting at the same time.
I hope it doesn’t change how he sees me too much.
I need to review some anatomy lessons. Especially the bone structure of the face.
God I’m mean.
No marks anyone can see when you go to work. I’ll be good.
I may draw these lines with a bright red marker to remind me. And cross out the no-no areas on the body with bright red. Because I’m still learning new boundaries and it’s important I don’t fuck this up.
The amount of trust that is being placed in me, quite frankly, scares the shit out of me. Why would anyone put their physical safety in my hands like this? Why would anyone give me permission to do this much damage to their body?
Shit, why am I just about begging the Professor on my knees to be just as rough or worse with me?
Because I’m a masochist.
Because I’m a sadist.
Because I have wonderful, complimentary friends who can help take me to heights of ecstasy completely impossible in vanilla sex. I know. I’ve tried and tried and tried.
I want someone completely and totally pedantic to crawl inside my head and whisper pretty much whatever he wants because I have faith that he sees me better than I see myself and I think he will say things I should hear.
I hope my submissive trusts me for fairly similar reasons.
I know Sarah trusts me for that reason. Lots of history proving that I will tell you what you really need to get programmed into your inside voice as I cause your body to absolutely flood with chemicals so that these lessons can be beaten as deeply into your unconscious existence as possible.
You are good. You are worthy. You are strong. You are beautiful. You are so very necessary. You are wonderful. I see you. I am so happy you are here. Thank you for being here with me. Thank you for loving me. I love you. I love you. I love you.
The script varies and has different components but that’s kind of the basis of what I like to beat into people.
I don’t hit people because I want them to feel small or bad or wicked. I hit people because it is fucking hot and you are so fucking nice for letting me do this. Extra bonus points if it gets you off. I’m completely satisfied with you just enjoying it.
For me, and for some other perverts I know, bdsm is sex of the mind and the body but not necessarily of the genitals. It can involve the genitals but it doesn’t have to. It’s about the chemical experience of strong sensations in your body. It’s about the power dynamic of doing that to someone or letting someone do that to you. Submitting your body to someone else’s desires is hotter than the sun.
I mean, I think. But I’m highly sexually submissive. I just don’t do that without serious negotiation. I think those kinds of roles are things that must be highly explicitly stated. I think the expectations must be verbally agreed on or (preferably) written down so that can be reviewed as necessary.
Power exchange means permission to have expectations about how you will be treated. Without some serious verbal negotiation (or written for an ongoing relationship) it is inappropriate to get into a situation where you have serious expectations of how you will be treated.
Folks just don’t actually generally sign on for that. Not when it comes to pain play and power imbalanced relationships. Not anymore. Once upon a time such things were normal and expected but things have changed.
Now it’s abuse. If someone tries to control you or hurt you without extensively asking your permission they are an abuser and you need help.
Things change.
We have to adapt. Even if our wiring doesn’t want to. Even if we would be much more successful predators if we were more up front about our hunting.
Side note. There are many women in this world I’d like to meet and talk to. How does it feel to live in your world and have this many partners? I’m kinda a freak in my world.
I’m not sure they want to talk to me. Maybe I’ll find out some day.
You never know what might happen. Life is long.
It is weird how with every passing year I feel like I have more and more I want to do before I die. I feel so much more urgency to be busy and active and accomplish things. Shit. I might live to be as old as 80. That’s a lot of fucking time to fill. I’d better make lists. Or I’m going to be old and be pissed I wasted so much time.
Sometimes I’m quite angry with myself for how I spent my childhood. Then I try to find compassion. If I had been out trying to exercise by myself as I moved around as a child the horror stories I experienced would have been much more frequent.
It’s ok that I hid. I had good reasons. I need to stop hating myself for everything I had to do to get through hell.
It’s over. I can change now. I can do something different.
I feel guilty, Noah. I feel like I’m letting you down. I also feel like I’ve been dragging and dragging and dragging for a long time. I think you are filling my bucket with everything you have going spare.
I need a deluge from somewhere. So I have a nice safe deity lined up who will fuck me senseless and maybe eventually get around to hurting me; a nice safe Professor who will beat the shit out of me and (we’ll see); Sarah who wants me to gleefully beat on her while telling stupid jokes; and a nice submissive who wants me to make him bleed and bleed.
That’s a deluge if ever I’ve produced one. That’s a lot of energetic stuff going on.
I’ve never managed a line up that felt this intense this… instantly… before. April is going to be god damn intense.
Oh yeah, and I’ll be playing with Noah and our normal sex life will continue. Cause that’s not going to change.
I have a very hard time feeling like this is ok. But whether it is ok or not I am going to do it. Because Noah is the only person who could stop me (other than my proposed partners losing interest) and he’s… ok with it.
Maybe that’s over stating. He’s nervous right now.
I get it. I’m being a selfish bitch.
I feel like I am about to god damn explode out of this little box that my life is allowed to be. This is not all of who I am. I am big. I am so many things. I am so many people. I want so many experiences at so many intensity levels. I want all of it. I want all of you.
I’m a little surprised I managed to damn this for four years. That’s my longest stretch of monogamy in my life.
Watch the riverbanks flood. Just wait. Soon there will be so much green.
Speaking of which: I’m very happy with how the tile mosaics are coming along. As long as these people I already dislike manage to install this well… I will live in a gorgeous house. I’m a lot more talented than I thought, which is kind of funny.
I can make beautiful things. No, not perfect. No I don’t make pictures that look like photographs. But I help people feel feelings.
That’s all I’m trying to do.
Different people encourage me to look at myself in different ways. Yes, they may call me filthy names, but they also concretely say, “Let’s look at x, y, and z and talk about it objectively.”
Because the filthy names are at uhm, my request. It’s ok. It gets me off.
So the whore thing is so complicated. On one hand I want to stop having this negative thing in my head where I keep coming back to this awful place of feeling bad about who I am. On the other hand if someone is hurting me and fucking me and whispers that I’m a whore and I should come…
I will. Over. And over. And over.
I kinda don’t want to give that up just cause it isn’t pc? It is super hot.
But I want it to stop being part of my negative tape when I am having a bad day. I want to stop randomly feeling bad about myself and calling myself a whore because of it. That’s dumb.
I want to change that.
But eliminating the word whore from my life entirely isn’t it.
That would be easier. Avoiding this powder keg would be easier. But then I wouldn’t get to orgasm like that and I’m not that pc.
I was asked what doors I’m knocking on. I think that being as transparent as a piece of glass will save a whole lot of trouble down the line about misunderstood motives or impulses. Realistically, I figure out my motivations when I write them down and hope that I don’t piss people off too much in the process.
My submissive wants me to write more about him. He also thinks I don’t need to respect his privacy quite so much. Good to know. I went knocking on his door first. He has been in my life for about fifteen years. Primarily he has been my friend and not my submissive. He says I have spent more time dominating him than I think. I think he should wait six months and reevaluate that opinion.
Why him? Why now? I don’t know. Because for the past few years I have had a terrible need to get out kinetic energy in fierce ways and I have never in my life play with someone who swayed into my need to hit with such intensity?
He wants to make me feel better and if hitting him will do that, please oh please. It helps that he is one of the most intense masochists I’ve ever known. We are going to run into my limits as a sadist before we run into his limits as a masochist.
That’s a kind of freedom I don’t know how to describe for me. I spend my whole life being too much. Being too scary and intense and bad. I’m not for him.
He asked what to call me. Well I ain’t a fucking goddess or queen. Get that straight the fuck out of your head. Ugh. And I’m not a domme. I can’t stand that.
What am I?
I’m Krissy. But I want to control the shit out of a very small part of your soul. What does that mean? I don’t know yet. I’m going to get more… invasive over time. My encroachments will be very slow. They will come in inches and millimeters until you notice that I’ve covered a tremendous amount of ground and holy shit how did I get there.
I want to boil you alive.
I want to find out what it means to do that.
Given what he’s writing I’m not sure I am going to be able to be as intense as his fantasies. We’ll see.
Wait, Princess? You want to call me Princess? Ok that’s kind of hilarious. I’ll consider it.
Why do I want this with him so badly right now? Part of it is the fact that he has patiently waited, while indicating interest in the most subtle and non-forceful of ways for over a decade. He’s not a stalker. He’s not entitled. He’s not pushy. He just… lets me know he’s interested. I don’t feel threatened. I don’t feel like I need to be prepared to defend myself. I feel safe and I feel like it is safe to be parts of myself I otherwise have to keep under lock and key. I feel like it is a rare and wonderful thing that I have the talents I have, that I can make people happy the way I can.
Why not any other submissive, ever? Because. Because clearly, he doesn’t need me to take over to fix his problems. His life is fine. He’s doing great. Because he has done a really high amount of Emotional Labor with no promise of ever getting anything back. He gives because he wants to. Because he thinks I deserve it.
Noah does a lot for me. I don’t want to sound ungrateful. It’s a very different kind of care and labor and consideration. Noah will not suffer for me to take away some of my suffering. That’s not our dynamic and I’m happy about that. That’s not what I want with Noah.
Why do I need this relationship to be stone? That is weighing on my soul. I feel really mixed about wanting to play with him and deny him sex. I know he likes having sex with me. We’ve been on/off lovers for a long time.
I just need it. I need to have something really intense and really important… without my cunt. I know I’ve been doing that with friendships over the last few years, but they’ve all been at arms length. They’ve all been carefully chaperoned and supervised and controlled. I need to control myself in this way when I’m engaged in play. I need to. I need to feel that sadism not part of being fucked partially because being fucked is such a different experience.
The second door I went knocking on was one of my Daddy’s. He’s like way Top 5 so if I have a hunting license he’s going to be on the list forever. Unfortunately for me, fortunately for him, his love life is going very well and he doesn’t have much time for me. Maybe someday I’ll be driving by at the right time and I’ll get to bang him but… the chances are slim. I’m happy to just have permission again. He has been in my life for twelve years. Why do I come back to him? Because when I am in his presence he makes sure that he lets me know that he knows me and that he loves me in all my complexity. He was the first person to teach me to eat English muffins and blueberry jam. I have quite a soft spot for him. He was the first man I was ever involved with who cooked for me regularly.
I don’t have permission to write about the third yet. I will ask.
Number four is a sweet french vanilla deity I hunted on okcupid. I strung him along right before I turned off my profile four years ago. He became a friend later. I am… very interested in what I missed. I am interested in large part because he was super enthusiastic about an intense negotiation and lead up and then…. he was nice when I backed out. He never demonstrated even an ounce of entitlement. He’s been sweet and mellow ever since. He pops up to initiate conversations with me more than the vast majority of people I know. He continues to seek me out just because he wants to talk to me.
He’s in between relationships so he seems to find it entertaining to show me what I missed. And he did buy that picnic basket just for seducing me and then we never got around to it. So he’s about four years old. (Uhhh… wait… that sounds wrong.)
I think that is going to be a lot of fun. I haven’t had a new-to-me partner with lots of lead up in a very long time. This is going to be… interesting. Fun. Exciting! I feel like this is appealing for a variety of reasons. For one: new people are always exciting to me. Repeats are good too, but new people have a special spice. For another: he feels safe. I’m not sure I’d be willing to go to the house of a random one-off right now. It feels risky in a way I can’t do right now. But this deity seems fine. He’s been to my house. He isn’t a stranger. He isn’t random.
He isn’t yet in my count but I feel like I know him enough that I have a very good understanding of how this will play out.
Why do I call him French vanilla? Because he’s kinky but not in the way I think of from my Middle Guard training experiences. He’s closer to Noah. There is a difference between people who like having kinky sex when they happen to be in a relationship and people who will go to bdsm and/or sex parties every weekend and munches throughout the week because they just need to be around perverts.
It’s not a bad difference, but there is a big difference.
I… can’t write about number three yet. That’s a story.
Otherwise I plan to go do as much bdsm play with old friends as I can manage at the few parties I get to go to for a while. Noah says I can play freely at parties (with barriers). In my experience of the bdsm community like 99% of my bdsm play will be non-sexual. Noah and I intend to hit up the occasional swingers party which will be no-lead-up-casual-sex.
Uhm. Yeah. That’s my itinerary.
I feel a little…. weird… about the fact that this is in fact kinda reserved for me. God damn. I’m not interested in lining anyone else up because I get a date a month. Why so many? Why so fast? Because there are all these parts of me that are screaming and screaming and screaming for attention and I can’t even look at them in my normal life.
Number three is a story.
I find that people (who want kinky sex at all) tend to fall into two generic camps. People for whom bdsm/etc is foreplay and they are there to get laid. Then the people for whom genital stimulation may be almost entirely optional. They are there for the emotional power trip.
I “grew up” with people who were not genitally focused. I learned a lot of things that way. I learned a lot of associations and behaviors. I am a genitally focused person. I like doing bdsm without sex but if I’m going to pick either bdsm or sex 9/10 times I’ll pick sex. (Which is part of why Noah is so dreamy. He likes kink stuff, but mostly we just fuck like rabbits.)
So French vanilla is anything but an insult. It’s a way of helping myself evaluate what I’m in for. A lot of why I like having promiscuous sex is because I like making other people feel good. I like getting them off. I like having them feel satisfied. French vanilla sex is kinda my sweet spot but I have needs outside that range too. I am closer to a weekend warrior than a Lifestyler.
I choose that.
I have been a Lifestyler. I didn’t get fucked enough and that was a serious problem.
But I feel like I have bdsm needs that aren’t getting met in this new era of raining dick. (Thank you Noah. I am grateful.) I’m not sure what that means. I’m not sure how to do this. I’m not sure what I actually need.
It’s not that Noah and I never do bdsm play. It’s not that I dislike how he plays. It is that there are differences in our styles and preferences and experience levels.Not insurmountable problems. But problems that are hard to solve given the limitations in our lives.
Just for now. I think this will get easier with time.
Despite other flattering offers being floated up to my door in bottles… I think this is going to be a full roster for this year. I don’t know that the deity will be an ongoing thing. I have no idea what Number Three wants yet, not really. I don’t know what I want either. I think it will be ongoing with my submissive. I want to really delve into this.
I think that doing these things is part of loving myself. Even though that is complicated. I’m not one thing or another. I’m not a gentle person. I’m not a harsh person. I’m a little bit of everything, all rolled into one. (Thanks Meredith Brooks.)
I’m scared of wanting these things. I’m scared of wanting these people. I’ve wanted them for a long time. It’s not like any of this desire is new. I’ve just been actively sitting on it for years… mostly to prove that I can.
See. I can pick Noah. I can be Loyal. But it’s…. hard.
I’m not that loyal of a person. Or rather, I’m loyal in ways that might be nonstandard. There are gals who start dating a military guy at 15 (like I did) and stay with him forever. I replaced him within a few months. If I don’t like how I’m being treated… I move on. Bye now.
Every.Single.One of these doors I’m knocking on are guys (why are they always guys? Cause they are easier to approach?) who have demonstrated over literal years that I am worth emotional labor from them. Even though most women complain bitterly that they can never get a guy to perform emotional labor for them. God I feel like an asshole. How did I get so lucky?! Noah says it is because I am finicky and demanding and that draws the kind of people who like to jump through hoops. He says that emotional labor is one of those massively unfair feast or famine things. Either folks find ways to gets tons of it from the people around them or they get almost none.
I get a lot.
The doors I’m knocking on aren’t doors I closed because I didn’t like them or didn’t want them (or maybe I didn’t at the time). The doors I am knocking on are doors where I have experienced intense emotional support without having to earn it. I just… got it. Because they wanted to give it to me.
Why do I always turn that into wanting to have sex with people? I don’t. But sometimes I do. Particularly with men who overlap with my sexual interests oh so neatly. I don’t have women or non-binary people throwing themselves at me in the same way.
Shooting fish in a barrel is way easier than taking a shotgun out on a boat and hoping you hit something. I’m a lazy predator. I like knowing I’m going to succeed. So I ask super bluntly, really early, and only keep around the people who seem like they really deserve it and have an appropriately high level of interest. If you aren’t that into me I need to move on.
It’s not like I have a shortage of people I know. These are people who showed up to do emotional labor, while indicating that I’m hot, and taking no really well.
How could I not fall in love with them?
I don’t know.
I’ll be straight that the French vanilla deity is the one I’m the least in love with. But I still like him a whole awful lot. He’s funny, serious but not in an obnoxious way, so smart, patient, aware…
He’s also the newest. Things do tend to age and mature for me. My submissive has been in my life for the longest. Then Noah. Then Daddy. Then Number Three. Then the French Vanilla deity at a mere four years.
I sure do like to put people through the ringer.
Why are they still interested at all? I really don’t know. I don’t.
I hope it is partially because they show up to perform emotional labor when they feel they have it to give and I am not needy, demanding, or obnoxious about invading their lives? I’m ok with being a ball of need alone in a room. I don’t have to demand that someone fix me, not now. I still like talking to people though.
Despite super intensively interesting awesome offers floating into my inbox…
This is a way full roster. Holy crap Krissy. Uhm. If you’ve been following long enough you know it isn’t that extreme. Picture me slapping my face down into my hands now.
These are all people who have indicated a high degree of agreement with my beliefs around how much my children should know.
I’ve spent a lot of the last few years trying to get my emotional/attention needs met from female friends in platonic relationships. Guess what, this isn’t doing what I want it to do. Most of them aren’t real available. They don’t have much drive to perform a lot of emotional labor for me and as a result… I have mostly stopped calling them. I’m an asshole but it is hard to be the one who calls more than 90% of the time. At some point I will just stop. And Pam is about to leave the state for a few years.
I think I needed to slam this door open so hard because what support network I was building wasn’t working at all and I need to go back to something that has had more success or I can’t keep giving to the kids the way I am. My drawer of spoons is empty. You know what… that’s not true. I actually have a few spoons in my drawer right now. I feel like I have finally started reversing the flow.
I’m sleeping better. I have more energy to be productive when I do work. I’m resting better when I’m supposed to rest. My digestion is still… settling while I do this cleanse nonsense. I’m almost done though and I told the nutritionist I need a break.
I haven’t been seeing chiropractors or acupuncturists in a bit because I’m freaking out about money. It’ll even out…. soon I hope. I skipped my massage this week because I threw up an hour before my appointment.
And yet I still feel so much better than I did. I feel like I have stuff to do. I feel like I’m excited to go to sleep because that will give me energy to wake up and do the things I want to do.
I feel better than I have in many years of sitting in the park all day. Somehow… I didn’t get many emotional needs met that way.
And yeah, hunting is part of this. I like the me I am with Noah. I like all the gifts he has given me in terms of emotional labor, attention, and approval. But he has like, a job and an own self to pay attention to, and kids, and books he writes and… stuff.
Whoo hoo! Number Three woke up and gave me approval to talk about him. Hot.
Ok. I’m now glad this took me long enough. We did take a break to go to breakfast.
Number Three shall henceforth be known as the Professor. He is another person I met on okcupid, but I met him during that freakishly short period of time I lived alone in San Jose. Puppy had just dumped me. I was teaching. I was freaking out because I left my Owner because I wanted to find someone to marry and have kids with and the hunt wasn’t going very well. The Professor wasn’t the Professor then. He was exactly my age and still in college. He was interested in me.
He came over and helped me grade papers. We kissed once and I couldn’t handle kissing a cigarette smoker and I said no.
That was eleven years ago. In that time he has become my friend. (He also quit smoking.) He has had his own life story in that time. Relationships that taught him lessons, painful and otherwise. On this list of doors I’m knocking on he is by far the closest to being a Lifestyler. He has spent most of the last ten years hanging out in the community getting very good at a lot of physical skills. I haven’t seen him play in a while, but the way he talks about himself has changed. More humble and more self assured at the same time.
He is also one of the most pedantic motherfuckers I have ever had the privilege to know.
If you know me you know that sentence is dripping with admiration and affection.
Noah is a pedantic motherfucker. The Professor can give him a run for his money. They mostly don’t overlap in areas of obsessive study and this is better for the whole universe.
I clearly have an intellect fetish thinking about the folks I’m chasing hard.
If you can’t teach me something, why am I here? I have things I need to learn and right now I’m in a very selfish stage. The only people I’m teaching are my kids because they take all that I have to give in that department and then some.
The Professor will take me on a journey. As much as I love that Noah’s bdsm is seriously dominated by his desire to fuck me, the Professor isn’t quite so dick obsessed. (I love you Noah, I’m not complaining.) This will be a long scene. The kind I used to do a few times a week. The kind that take you on a journey of emotional development and leave you wrung out like a dishrag on the floor, spent.
I want it. I want to be hit and hit and hit and hit and hit.
Want to know something funny? I don’t know for sure if he will kiss me. I don’t know if he will have any interest in fucking me. I… I am not 100% sure where my preferences lie. I’m not chasing him because I feel like I haveto haveto haveto get access to his dick. I’m chasing him because I think he has the precision and control to fuck with my mind. Perhaps he will also want to fuck with my cunt and I’m not opposed to that. But it is less the goal. I will be ok with following that journey where it needs to go. I think there is a part of me that thinks I can’t get too interested in sex with him because I want him to decide at the end of the scene and I want to be ok either way. If I get my hopes up and he doesn’t want to fuck me I will feel rejected and bad and really not ok. If I decide I don’t want to fuck him and he does want to fuck me I will probably not want to say no and that’s complicated.
For the record, I’m totally leaning towards wanting to fuck him and I’m trying not to get too focused. I have now seen a picture of his cock (I love my friends) and I’m pretty confident that wouldn’t be scary. Fantastic. Yes. Try not to have expectations. I may not even get to see his cock in person. Just accept. Because that is seriously what I’m looking for that night.
So I’m out here chasing a stone relationship, one where I don’t know if I will get laid or not, one where I was told probably not, and one where sex is a more sure thing at least once but I don’t know if it will continue.
So I’m thinking with my cunt and I’m not.
Noah, thank you for your permission.
Want to know why this is worthwhile for Noah? Today is the 13th of the month and we’ve already hit quota (10 times/month). February was quota and a half. Our sex life explodes when I feel like I have more options.
The kids have been telling me that I’m being more patient and fun. They are noticing an improvement to such a degree that they are spontaneously commenting on it.
I’m not sure I’m doing anything bad here. But I’m scared. I’m scared I will hurt everyone. I’m scared that I’m so selfish I don’t deserve all of this wonderful. I should let more of the decent men go find other women. (Hey–every single one of these dudes is seeing multiple women. I’m not monopolizing anyone but Noah. And he’s hunting.)
Why did I flip from NO to yes?
I’m not feeling honorable.
I want this. I want this. I want this.
Oh golly. This has been quite a month. Changing rules and boundaries and more oh my. I feel like it has been coming for a while. Noah feels like it has been coming for a while. My shrink says, “It’s about damn time!”
I feel like this last four year monogamy stretch was really healthy, useful, and appropriate. I’m not good at narrowing my focus. I like to always be broadening my horizons. Meeting new people. Fucking new people. But if I want the future I want to have, I have to put the time in now.
I know that.
Over the past four years Noah and I have certainly maintained a better-than-average sex life (based on national poll numbers) but it was…. not the kind of sex life we are capable of having. It’s been good but ok. My libido was not ever fully turned on. Fully turning on my libido has consequences. I don’t narrow the focus very well.
I’m not that good at keeping to strict boundaries.
A few years ago during one of our “soft open” periods I asked for permission to have sex with a friend. I really shouldn’t have for a lot of reasons. It was complicated. I feel like (in retrospect) the main reason I really wanted to have sex with him that night was because I felt like I shouldn’t but I knew he had been in love with me for years. This got so achingly complicated. Turns out I had this one night with him right before I had my first miscarriage. I will never know 100% for sure if I lost Noah’s baby or my friend’s and that… that weighs on my heart. Especially because what I know of my friend’s other history. So complicated. He was the guy other than Noah who was on the “If I hit X age without finding a co-partner to marry and have kids with you can knock me up as a known donor friend.” Then Noah asked me to marry him and that list kinda blew up.
“Not supposed to” is a huge aphrodisiac for me. It’s part of why what I did in Portland was as hot as it was. I wasn’t really supposed to. And I did it anyway. And I almost fucking came even though there was nothing resembling genital contact. Just SM. It was so hot. Partially because I’m not supposed to.
Sometimes I am genuinely surprised that Noah and I manage to keep up a hot legal sex life. I’m surprised that isn’t a problem for me.
I’m struggling right now because I have a huge number of friends I haven’t had sex with yet. For reasons. Lots of reasons. As many reasons as there people on the list. And I’m kinda feeling like I just want to line them all up.
Why?
Because they were so nice and supportive and wonderful for so long without sex, surely it is time. I’m allowed to again. I really should, right?
Oh. My.
It’s not an “I don’t want to but I should.” It’s more “I was not allowed to so they became taboo and now the boundary is fuzzier and it’s still not clear I should but it is less clear that I shouldn’t so oh my goodness I waaaaaaaaaaaant to.”
You, and you, and you, and you. Let’s not forget you.
Like I have the time for that.
I think part of what is making this fuzzier and more confusing and hard is that these people have been so wonderful for so long without sex that I really love them and feel like they have my back and I like rewarding that kind of thing. Primarily with sex.
Because I’m a one trick pony?
Hey, I don’t have time to come clean your room as a thank you for being my friend any more. Besides, sex is just better.
If people love me I want to make them feel good. I really like doing so with sex. I’m grateful for all the 100% vanilla relationships in my life. I think I’m respecting those boundaries.
I’m only feeling consuming lust towards the folks who are poly and who have expressed desire for me in the past.
That’s like having healthy boundaries, right?
I feel like I want to go back to all those chapters where there are unfinished stories. What could happen now? I’m so different. What would it be like now?
But I have no desire to walk away from what I have now. I have no desire to have lots of time away from my kids. So this gets complicated. As much as I’d kind of like to spend the rest of my life on my back… (or front or side or knees or….)
I really don’t. I had that on option. I turned it down. I wanted to be a breeder. I wanted to homeschool. It is going so well. I feel like I am really and truly living in a healthy manner in front of my children.
I have such mixed feelings about these off-screen activities.
My friend asked me why I feel more bad about sex with other people than sex with Noah because my ‘thing’ is I don’t want my kids around sex.
It’s different. It just is. Noah and I only have sex behind locked doors. We are really quiet. I think it *is* healthy that my kids see that their parents are wildly attracted to one another. They see us make out frequently. They see physical affection as being a huge part of a partnership.
But I don’t know how to teach that with a dilute focus.
Only I kind of do, because I am. But I need them to not know how dilute my focus is. I need for them to see fully realized compartmentalization where I am with them when I am with them. I am with their dad when I am with their dad.
They have no idea what I’m like off-stage. That is good.
But it’s not like I’m in the closet. Someday they will know.
I don’t know what this will mean. Nor do I know how it is going to go with all of these wildfires I’d like to set.
Matches. I like playing with matches.
I want to use people. But I don’t want to use people in a way that leaves them feeling bad or unwanted or rejected or hurt. I want to use people gloriously, joyously and have them feel like they are walking on sunshine back to the rest of their life.
Is that ok?
I’ve been a kinky motherfucker all of my life. I officially entered the bdsm community at 18, but I was doing kinky stuff before then. I’ve been giving oral sex for 31 years. I’ve been having PIV (penis in vagina intercourse) by choice for 22 years. This summer marks 16 years of my life in the bdsm community. In two more years I will have been in the bdsm community (to some degree or another) for half of my life. I feel very confident saying that being a pervert is part of my identity. Part of my identity I’m thoroughly comfortable with.
But things shift over time. The kind of pervert I am changes. The kinds of things I like has drifted considerably, especially since having kids.
In all these 16 years I have resolutely shied away from pursuing any kind of ongoing interaction where I was to be Dominant. That’s been a line for me. I like being toppy. I’m sadistic as fuck. But I’m not a Dominant. Nope, that’s not me.
I’m a serious control freak and I manage a lot of that by being the submissive/bottom/slave because then I’m the one who does the vast majority of the work and it goes how I prefer. I date lazy tops. Perfect.
But my life has changed a lot. I feel like I have changed.
There are a lot of people and situations in my life where I could railroad people and control the shit out of them. I’m home schooling my kids. I could micromanage the fuck out of them. I could require them to be submissive to me. Legally I have the right. Yesterday I read this post that reminded me of why I really don’t want my children to be submissive to me in any way.
I don’t know about you, but I fall into being a bully real easy. I have to be careful not to control people inappropriately. I have big opinions and big feelings and people who aren’t rock solid in themselves like being influenced. I could be a serious problem for a lot of people.
I try so hard to not be that. I keep my boundaries fiercely. I don’t boss people beyond very specific, small, limited places where I ask for consent. “Hey we want to organize this event, can I boss people around to get things done quickly?” At this stage of my life 9/10 times when I ask that people gratefully say, “Oh please do.” I’m good at figuring out a plan. I’m good at bossing people.
But I’m scared of it. I avoid it. I don’t seek it out in an ongoing way. I do not want a job where I have that kind of control over people. I am not stable enough. I am not kind enough. I make such bad assumptions.
I act without thinking and I hurt people when I do too much of that.
It isn’t safe nor appropriate for me to be too bossy with any of my friends or family members.
But lately I want to boss. I want to control. I want to have influence in an ongoing control-tastic way.
I got this email from my friend. The one I topped the other night. The one I’ve been thinking about a lot for a while now. The one who likes the really super intense play that I like.
I’m thinking about him way more than is good for my overall balance of life. Holy shit. What do I want from him?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!!?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So much. So little. Such specificity. I don’t want to try to meet all his needs. I want to negotiate a very small slice of his soul and control the ever loving shit out of that. As I hurt him really badly.
Anyone who tells me they really want to see me come up from biting them with blood dripping down from my mouth?
Shit. We need to get tested.
Cause I can’t draw blood until we have both been recently tested. I have kids. I have to care. I have too many friends who have contracted Hep C.
Cause if you have been dreaming for years about having me hurt you like that and I have been dreaming for years about hurting you like that and my husband doesn’t mind and your partner thinks it is hotter than the sun?
Uhm…
Why not?
I have worked very hard to cram all of the “me” that is a pervert into a very small box that I keep in the closet. I take it down for very rare special occasions when my kids are far away and kept safe with someone I trust completely.
I know that many people in the community are ok with somewhat fuzzy boundaries with their children. I am not comfortable with that. I need boundaries between them and my sex life constructed with steel beams and concrete reinforcement. This is a no-information/no-fly zone kiddos. Nope.
No, I won’t swing in the house with the kids.
Just no.
Not because I’m judging you. Because I’m trying to deal with the body and brain I have. I’m trying to deal with the highly traumatized DNA sequence I passed down.
Why does sex with Noah behind a closed door feel fine as long as we are quiet? Because I’m really thrilled that my kids think that sex is a natural part of growing up and finding a partner. I’m ok with modeling that.
I can’t model promiscuity. Not given my background.
You know what? My kids have flat told me they don’t want me to date. They know that we have friends who date outside their marriage. They don’t care about what other families do. They told me flat out that they don’t want to give up more time with me.
They are little for such a short time. I’ve already been a pervert for so long. I have already been a slut for so long. Those things will still be there when my children no longer want me like this. I have one shot in this lifetime to nail the kind of parenting relationship I want to have and that means giving my children far more than I want to give. It means giving up things I want really badly for a while.
Life is always about choices.
Noah could tolerate a lot more promiscuity and boundary pushing and dysfunction. But then I’d be teaching it to my kids.
No.
It isn’t that I think that modeling dating is inherently wrong. I truly don’t. Other people have very different lives.
I think I don’t know how to model long term stable relationships. I like picking up strangers and fucking them once or twice and moving on.
I don’t want to model what I like.
Even if I don’t want to stop liking it. I just don’t want to like it in front of them.
This feels so complicated. I don’t like being in the closet. I don’t like feeling like a liar. I don’t like feeling like I am being anything other than 100% brutally honest.
You know what? I am with my kids. I still have boundaries. They sometimes ask probing questions about my history or my experiences and I will either say something matter of fact like, “Yes I dated lots of people before I got married because I wanted to figure out what things were important to me” or “That’s something private that I will not discuss with you during your childhood. You need to grow up without having that information in your brain. You can find it out later.”
So I’m not… lying… but I only answer selectively.
Part of how I have kept these divisions is “I did a lot of stuff in the past I’m not doing now and I have no shame about any of it” and “Right now I’m doing the mom thing.”
But the “mom thing” isn’t all of who I am. Even the (incredibly hot) sex I have with Noah feels like part of the mom thing and…
It isn’t all of who I am.
I’ve gone through a lot of evolution of perception of self. Especially with regards to the word whore. (Small disclaimer in case anyone is new: I’m not talking about sex work. I’m talking about personal associations from formative abuse. Specifically I have to figure out how to get my brain to work around shit my father did. It’s complicated. I’m not knocking anyone or any careers.)
I’m going to need some way to refer to this person I’m playing with. I will need a code name. I’m not ready to make one up yet so this is awkward. I have blanket permission to write about him, but he values his privacy.
For a long time I genuinely saw myself as a kind of sacred whore. I had sex with a lot of people, many of whom… weren’t getting a lot of other play. I feel like there is a lot of emotional healing that comes through sexual intimacy and you can absolutely experience that with strangers. There is a validation and affirmation that doesn’t exist in other kinds of connections in my experience. But it only happens with a highly, highly experienced partner who knows how to read intricate body signals and ask the right questions.
I’m really good at it. I’m told. By an exceptionally long list of people. So I have to believe it is true.
This person I’m playing with likes a lot of degradation with his submission. He wants to be called a whore and I get that. There isn’t a lot I find hotter during sex than having someone grind into me and call me a whore… so I get it. Better if I’m being hurt while they are calling me a whore and fucking me. I’ll usually come right there.
I’m having big feelings about degrading him. He asked me a lot of specific, leading questions leading to his desire to be degraded. Oh my.
I want control so badly right now. I want to be able to boss someone around a lot. I want to really play with someone’s mind. I want to headfuck someone until I can tell them that down is up and up is down.
I know how.
I’ve taken lots of classes. I’ve practiced with lots of people who are considered experts. I trained for this.
But I’ve never actually gone and done it. I’ve always been terrified of this. I don’t have the right. I was a Wiccan too early in life. What you put out there comes back to you times three. Be very careful what you wish for and make happen in your life.
I want to crawl into someone’s head and change parts of how he feels about himself. Not in bad ways. I don’t want to hurt him. I want to… tweak him. Because it’s hot. Because controlling people is so fucking hot.
I don’t want to hurt his life. I don’t want to interrupt his relationship with his partner or his kids or his job or his other play partners or…
I just want this. This piece of control. That I can’t explain yet. I don’t know what it is I want so god damn badly right now.
Thinking about the fact that he has to wait for a letter in response to his email because I feel like making him wait …. I’m going to masturbate quite a few times today. This is hotter than fuck.
(Yes I have appropriate boundaries around it. Don’t worry, I can come quick. I only need like three minutes of privacy.)
The email he wrote me is earth shatteringly hot and I can’t quite quantify why. The depth of longing. The number of years this longing has been sustained for.
I met him when I was 19. He likes to say that I had him from, “And who the hell are you?” Apparently that was the first thing I said to him and he was done.
You know…
I feel like this is a bad rom com justification for intense longing wearing people down.
In this moment I all of a sudden understand one of my friends much better. She has a marriage in which they do not discuss politics because they are on opposite sides of the fence. This man and I… have very differing views. We are going to need a hard and fast rule that if one of us notices that we want to have an argument because it is veering near politics we will need a Shiny Change Of Topic. Because…. I know his views. I know his views about a lot of things don’t align with mine for very complicated and diverse reasons.
He isn’t someone I could have married and had kids with for a laundry list of reasons. Guess what? That role in my life is filled and I’m fucking thrilled with how it is going.
But there is this stuff that I really fucking like to do that I can’t do with my husband because holy shit is he not interested.
Noah’s ok with some biting and scratching because it indicates enthusiasm and he likes that. But he is not a masochist and he has decided limits and he gets mad if they are crossed. It isn’t hot.
He has offered, over the years, to do some bottoming if I feel like I just absolutely have to do it and I just… can’t hit him. Not like that. He doesn’t like it. I topped him once because he wanted to feel what it was like to go through a hook pull and he needed help from endorphins and it sucked for him.
I can’t ever do that to him again.
But I really really really like hurting people and it is much easier to control that impulse on a regular basis if I have occasional times when I get to feel like, “Yes, This Is The Right Time And Space”. It is easier to understand what boundaries feel like when you get to have lots of them in different places at different times for different reasons.
I’m horrified by the idea of putting mild pornography in front of an unknown vanilla audience. But I will take all my clothes off in a room full of strangers, crook my finger at a person I don’t know and proceed to fuck right there. I will go to Folsom Street Faire and tie up any person who wants to get tied up because I know I am safe and competent and I won’t hurt them and they will get to have a sensual experience.
Boundaries, motherfucker.
Some time ago one of my children was being friendly with a random other child while we were waiting in line somewhere. The kids were going to have to just stand there for an hour or more. After a few minutes of Eldest Child trying the mother looked at me and said, “Your children have no boundaries, do they?”
Whoa.
What a global statement. We are friendly in a way that is highly unusual outside of California. We are enculturated to being part of a place that treats everyone warmly and like we could be best friends and we just don’t know it yet.
This is where we have always lived. This is how we know how to be. It isn’t that we have no boundaries. I’m wary about going into peoples houses. The kids have a lot of boundaries around going into secured spaces with people they don’t know. They are only allowed to be taken in the cars of very specific people and we have passwords around that.
No boundaries, holy fuck.
We like to pass the time in line by being friendly. Some of those random chats have turned into beautiful friendships. You know what? On the road trip we stopped in Michigan to visit with a man I met in a grocery store. Because he was wearing a pervy t-shirt and I needed to ask him to join the Mountain View Perverts Society. (We weren’t a real thing, but there was a shocking density of pervert households in a small area; we knew each other.) At worst it usually means standing in line is less tedious.
No boundaries. Jeeez.
You know what? My husband neither wanted nor asked for sexual fidelity when he married me. Nor did I.
I said I would be faithful to our relationship. That doesn’t mean anything about who I fuck or beat. If I am faithful to what Noah wants from me… You know what? I’m better able to be present with Noah if I have other needs met by other people. It means I spend less time being frustrated with him that he completely fails to be a queer masochist. I mean, what the ever loving fuck did I do wrong in this life to end up married to a hetero top?
But you have to take the hand you are dealt. He wanted me. He wanted to do the kids and home schooling thing. He has been up for everything I want to do in life. He isn’t someone who has as much strong direction as me. He’s thrilled to have someone with a stronger rudder around.
But I can’t control him. I don’t boss him. And I can’t hit him.
I have someone I like, someone I love even, walking into my life and telling me that they want me to hurt them as much and as deeply and as harshly as I want to because they think I deserve to have that release in this lifetime.
Holy fucking shit. God that’s hot.
What do I mean when I say I don’t want to date? Because clearly that means something to me. I think it means: if my children have already known you as the kind of person who comes to one big party a year and maybe one dinner a year… that’s probably where it is going to stay. I don’t take much time away from my kids. I need a lot of alone time and that dominates the time I take away from my kids. If I start seeing someone else on my own time frequently… it would cut into how present I can be with my kids and that’s not ok. But I want to see him so much.
And I’m making him wait for letters before we negotiate more. Oh, he’s probably reading this. But that’s different, you know? There are a lot of things I’m not saying here. A lot of things that are going to be private negotiations and may not ever be written about because I’m not 100% sure I want my kids to be able to find that in the archive.
I want to do some pretty fucking evil things.
And he really wants to let me.
Why is that so bad?
I don’t know.
I’m having a hard time talking myself out of it. I don’t want to talk myself out of it. I want to ………
Oh god.
Yes, when we played last weekend it was not anywhere near what we’ve talked about so far. Yes it was sexier. Yes it was more gentle. I was trying to not squick the vanillas, ok?!
Boundaries, motherfucker.
God. This scene is going to be so hot I should sell tickets.
Hey, maybe it would be a way to get enough money to pay to rent a play space during a time when my babysitter is actually free… Ha.
No pictures though. He has privacy concerns.
Yes. I want to take you. Yes. I want to take you.
God the sex is complicated. I think…
I think that is going to have to be part of what makes this so fucking hot. I think my pussy won’t be involved. I’ve never had a stone relationship before. I have never before in my whole slutty life been interested in having a stone relationship. I don’t know what the fuck this means.
It isn’t that I think I won’t have sex with people other than Noah. He kinda holy-crap enjoyed the swinger thing and… yeah I can do that.
It isn’t “what I want” in the same way. But it is close enough and fun enough and sure.
I want to use you and use you and use you and fuck with your head and build you up and help you feel a whole lot more cocky about how wonderful you are with everything you have to offer. I just want this tiny piece of it. But I’ll talk a lot about how much I enjoy all the other parts of you. I want you to be whole.
I want you to be a whole you. I think I can feed part of you.
I think you have already given me something.
I’m sleeping a lot better.
I told the woo Dr I need a month off from these supplements. I need to figure out how my body is doing after what we have been doing.
A lot of my pain issues are improving. I can feel that most of my current ache is because of current unfamiliar strenuous labor. My hands are getting wrecked. I really ought not be typing.
But I can’t say all of these things to Noah. And I need him to know that I’m thinking them. Because I need to be as absolutely transparent with Noah as I can be and in most of our lives… we just can’t talk about this stuff.
I don’t want to “date” in the next ten years. I want my kids and Noah to take up pretty much all of my time. I need that safety. I need it. I don’t know how much time I can carve away from that in order to come out with the relationship I want to have with my kids.
Don’t worry, I’m going to launch these puppies. Then I’ll have more, ahem free time. But a lot of that will go to Noah as his reward for supporting me and providing for me so well for so long.
I don’t know what is left.
I kinda want to find out.
I feel so alive.
This morning I had a peaceful moment. One of those true, Zen moments of “I am happy and this is where I want to be.” Eldest Child woke up to use the restroom too early. I was awake doing chores, like usual. She asked me if I would climb in bed with her so she could sing me a lullaby. Twinkle Twinkle was the song of choice. Then she spent a while talking to me about why she likes me.
This is kind of a habit I have with the kids. I don’t put them to bed all the time, probably not even half the time these days at home. Maybe a quarter of the time? But we had the road trip and all the years before that of shared bed times. At bed time, what we do is we cuddle up close and spent 15-20 minutes talking about all the reasons we like each other. “You did ____ and I was so impressed with your thoughtfulness. You did ______ and I was shocked to see that you have made that developmental jump. I thought that was a (age inflation) thing and I’m really wow’ed. You said ______ word today and that was surprising because I didn’t know you knew that word!”
We bookend that with waking up to morning snuggles. During morning snuggles we talk about what we need to do today and how the schedule will work.
I can understand why my children insist I’m not an asshole and I just have bad moments. I don’t understand it so much from other people. Sometimes I feel like my children get to have a relationship with someone that no one else even gets to meet.
Sometimes I am capable of seeing myself as kind, giving, and loving.
That doesn’t change the fact that I’m an asshole.
Contradiction is necessary for life. For survival. You can be kind and an asshole.
Why am I so convinced I’m an asshole? Because I lawyer up fast when my contractors give me trouble. Because I find that swearing at men really harshly is one of the best ways to convince strange men I’m not interested in their attention. Because I find that sometimes it is necessary to kick people really hard to get them to let go and I’m willing to do it. Because I’m going to keep talking about why the word whore is eating my brain even though people with sex work careers twitch and feel really upset about it.
Want to hear something wild? Yesterday one of the most famous sex workers of our era gave me permission to use the word whore however I need to in my processing. She says if anyone questions me again I can send them to her.
That is… incredibly validating. Wow. Thanks.
I’m not sure I’m ever going to pull that card. But I may print out that tweet and cut it up small and put it in my wallet next to the permission slip from Noah. Just so that I think about it.
I have permission to look at this however hard I need to in order to get over it. She said so.
I am so fucking weird about permission. I’ve spent my whole life cringing, crying, and hurting myself because I felt that was the only thing I was allowed to do without permission. I need permission to stop. I need permission to feel something else about myself.
Why does that have to be the default? I mean, blame your parents yada yada, why does that have to be my default?
Why do I have to assume, in every moment, that I am the least valuable person present and if someone should die it should be me?
Not that I want to get to the point of wanting to sacrifice other people for myself.
Wait, maybe that is it.
I have never known a white person with really high self esteem who isn’t willing to throw other people under the bus for their own advancement. I have known people of color with high self esteem whom I have never seen sacrifice a friend. I know people of color who are exploitive assholes, too.
I’m trying to think through my white friends… y’all make very self absorbed choices. I do too. I’m not sitting on a high horse. I’m sitting flat on the ground. I’m not high and mighty here. I’m trying to figure out how this works.
I am willing to throw people under a bus if I feel I have to do so in order to be effective.
That’s why I’m an asshole. I need accurate labeling so other people know they have to protect themselves from me.
I want to help you. I will try to help you. But if I feel I have to be effective in some area for Reasons…
I’m a selfish piece of shit. That’s why I’m alive. I’m willing to say that Safeway doesn’t matter as much as me, I’m stealing food. I’m willing to say, “Being around people who make choices like x is so problematic to me that I will bug and bug and bug people who make choices like that until they don’t want to know me any more.”
I’m an asshole because I make a lot of assumptions about people and I don’t check my privilege nearly often enough. I’m trying to get better. This is hard.
My life has been kind of hard to adjust to.
I spent my childhood moving like a ghost through different communities. I never stayed long enough to belong. I lived in a lot of neighborhoods where we were the only white family. I grew up feeling like being white was a bad thing. Know why? White people don’t care about their kids very much. That was how I experienced it as a child. I don’t think that is literally true across the board. That was my experience. In white neighborhoods there were always packs of unsupervised children doing horrifyingly inappropriate things. In neighborhoods of color there might be much older teenagers or 20-somethings causing trouble, but the kids were god damn watched.
I was chased out of so many homes for having bad behavior. I was told I was a bad girl dozens, maybe a hundred times.
It’s funny how my memories of these things change and drift. I remember them very differently as my understanding of the situation changes.
When I was 21ish I honestly didn’t remember all those lectures about being bad. I had kinda blocked them out. I knew I was bad but it was a fog hanging over my life. I didn’t have all those disparate voices going through my head.
As a parent watching my children be children (by which I mean breaking rules and fucking up) I hear those people in my head over and over more and more clearly. Oh. That was why they said that.
Click.
Now I get it.
Shit.
I have always felt like I was living in many ages at once. But I feel like my future selves have changed a lot over my life. My ability to perceive who I could be has changed.
These days I can picture having grandchildren who scornfully tell my children that they should be more patient, like Grammie. I will giggle. My children will say, “YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT SHE WAS LIKE TO GROW UP WITH.” I will giggle.
Do you have any idea what having that vision in my head means to me? I have the belief that I might be able to arrive at having the kind of experience of being in my body that I want to have. I believe that I might get to the point of being actually regulated and calm.
I have hope for something I was not capable of dreaming up 20 years ago.
It’s amazing what ten years of safety can do for a body. I see it in myself. I see it in my children. That is something that home schooling does for me that isn’t necessary for almost anyone else I know.
I require this specific time to be set aside in my adult life where the entire point of my day is to model how to have big emotions, get them under control, deal with them appropriately when they come up, and then keep working.
Not suppressing. Not denying. Not minimizing. Not avoiding until it comes crashing down on you at some inappropriate time in the future. Your feelings matter. They live in you and they serve a purpose. If you ignore them in the moment you will pay a price later. There are times and places where emotional displays are not appropriate, but get that stuff out as fast as possible so it doesn’t become a poison.
I am grateful every day for the life I am leading right now.
I have the safety, the money, the access to care providers, and the education to do something about the trauma in my body.
That is magical. This should be available to everyone who has experienced trauma. We would be a better world.
People deserve to be seen in context and understood. Most people who seem “crazy” to you wouldn’t seem so crazy if you knew more about their story. I tell my children all the time, “Weird just means you aren’t used to it yet; eventually it is just normal.”
My mom used to say, “The only norma people are the ones you don’t know very well.”
One of my neighbors is stepping up the offer of maternal-nature-friendship. I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, Thank You Oh Universe, You Sure Do Like To Hear My Calls, Don’t You?
On the other hand… I’m scared of blowing up what we currently have if she finds out more about me. I’m not exactly the uhhhh conservative type and she is quite shy, scared, and sheltered. I don’t want to hurt her. She will need a lot of boundaries around the kinds of things she can handle hearing and I’m not sure how to find those boundaries without fucking up pretty badly. Once you say something it can never be unsaid.
We have a really solid, positive relationship. Losing it would be brutal. This feels really tricky. Our families are fairly strongly connected at the level we have now. I feel really like this is a big risk. Much bigger than telling all the strangers on the internet about my raunchy sex life and habit of beating people up for fun.
I’m kinda weird.
My superego is fucking developed at this point, ok? I’m growing up.
I’m an asshole and she is not. She wants to mother me. What will she do when she finds out I have approximately 500 x’s as much life experience as her?
There is a thing I think about. When I was in the bdsm community I was really serious about learning all I could as fast as I could. I played a lot with a lot of people. Basically I spent more time on bdsm than I spent on my college education, which I was pursuing simultaneously. Much Much Much more time on bdsm.
I was a serious slut and it was really fun and I have no regrets. I learned what I wanted to learn from that experience. I’m shocked at how often I find ways to apply the lessons I’ve learned, not in ways you’d expect.
I had more life experience at 25 than many people have at 50. It isn’t hyperbole, it is simple fact. I say yes to almost anything that comes up. I know very diverse people in many communities. I’m a moody bastard with a short attention span.
I’ve done a lot of things. It is something I notice when I meet new people these days. I sound like a lying braggart. Nope. I got receipts. I did all that. Why? Because I never felt like I had a better choice than to do what I was doing so I did it all in. As soon as something stops feeling like the best choice in the moment I break down, fall into a deep depression. Go home. Hurt myself until I figure out that the boundaries required in that community are not things I can maintain long-term. Then I heal. Then I try again.
It goes faster and faster as I age and get boundaries carved out of granite. It is harder to change them. I am less tolerant of my internal, “I need to conform by doing x in this environment” sensor and I just flee.
I have a home now. I have less reason to tolerate your bullshit rules. Wanna know why I know they are bullshit rules? Cause this ain’t my first rodeo. Don’t worry, I think the rules in my house are bullshit too. They are all weird and arbitrary. They are made to suit the moods of whichever asshole in the vicinity is loudest.
I know.
I used to know a man who liked to say, “I’m the only psycho in this relationship” or maybe he said he was the only one who gets to be crazy? I may be misremembering. I’ll cop to that.
I need to be the biggest asshole in the space I’m in. So Noah is an asshole, but I know that I’m much more likely to be the one to bulldoze than him.
It works for us. Picture a heart emoji here, but I have technically banned them so this will have to do.
He doesn’t think I’m an asshole. That’s part of why this works. I think we are both assholes and I’m just a bigger one. But he’s all mellow and tolerant so it works out. Do you however you need to, ok?
I’m going to be kinda passive aggressive here and say: if you are one of Noah’s friends… this is a great time to ask him to go out some time. He needs to talk. To more people than just me right now cause life is like that sometimes.
I can’t fill his tank as much as he needs me to right now. Because I’m dealing with the remodel and and and. His job is kinda hard.
I need to go beat the shit out of people. I don’t know what he needs. But right now, he’s wilting like a flower and that’s a serious bummer. I don’t know what it is that is missing right now, but clearly all the right nutrients aren’t in place.
This is the kind of micromanaging, paying attention that I want in my life. It is why I appreciate the people who have stuck with me and really got to know me so much. Because I’m more pushy like this by the year. Because people do it more with me. It’s a careful balance. How much controlling and influencing other people should we do?
I really don’t know where those boundaries ought to be. I’m not pulling up Noah’s email account and making plans for him. That’s over the line.
Where is the line?
Everyone is different. I want you to get to be who you need to be. I want to figure out who I need to be and I want to just do the shit out of it.
This feels like baby steps towards self love, doesn’t it? This morning feels good. I have to say that these piles of tile are inspiring. I may be jaunting off to get more sparkly tiles today. I’m really excited about the snow wall. I want to build that first because I have so much white and it would be nice to get it mostly used up and out of the way so I see how much I need to still buy in terms of tile for the rest of the bathroom. I really can’t tell yet.
It depends on how high up the walls I want to go, right? We’ll see!
Youngest child’s half bathroom is spring. Other half bathroom is summer. The bathing room is going to have autumn and winter. I can’t wait to look at the sparkly snow while I take baths in candle light at night. That will be so beautiful.
I’m serious my friends, if you want to come take a bath… let me know.
I’m thinking hard about how I want to make the tree of life that will climb up the wall over the bath tub. I need to look at more pictures. That will probably be that last bit I design because much of it might be painted, I haven’t decided.
I know that “traditionally speaking” you want flat walls. I’m not going to have flat walls with perfectly level tile. It’s going to be pretty rough and it will be on purpose and structured and artistic. I think it will work.
Oh please God let this work cause this puppy is going to be expensive if I fuck up.
Go big or go home, bitch.
Oh goodness what did I get myself into?!
Have I told you that the floor will have a stone path lined with green tiles to look like grass?
I’m having SOOOOOOOOOO MUCH FUN.
If only the roof weren’t uhm, being tricky. We are still negotiating. I’m blathering on Twitter but I won’t rehash it here. Just… gotta keep walking on. I’m trying to not be angry. At this point all of the guys in the company have apologized for making decisions without me when clearly they made the wrong choice at a critical juncture. I had preferences and they didn’t ask. Even though I’ve told them over and over and over I want to be asked.
Ok. Trying to move on. Have to get this shit finished. If it’s beautiful… I will still write positive reviews with caveats about how I had to be fierce in advocating for myself.
I made it very clear that from here on out the crew was not to dump their lunch garbage all over and leave it here for weeks. Saw blades are all over the ground and that’s not cool. My lawyer was at this meeting. I should stop talking about it for all kinds of reasons.
I wanted to write something down here for documenting purposes. Instead, I hit cut’n’paste and sent it to my lawyer.
That seems smart just now.
Past self, you picked this woman out based on proximity and hope. Well done!
Today will be a good day, I think. I hope. I believe. Oh yeah, a friend asked if she could come over to dinner. I should tell Noah. Ha. Surprise. We have six people coming over for dinner.
Roll with it. Life flows like that. If people ask to come over for dinner the next night and I have no plans…. I’m weak. I have no willpower for that kind of rejection. Because you hit my sweet spot. Basically no output of energy and lots of input of attention. Yeah, you can do that. Sounds awesome. I have to cook anyway. Don’t worry. I always have enough food around.
You never know who might be coming to dinner.
Stuff is creeping in. Today: having lunch with a friend then we are getting tattoos. Tonight I’m having dinner with a lovely friend. Tomorrow is all the massage. The kids also have stuff to get to.
It isn’t that what I’m doing is hard, it is that I’m having to switch gears on what I’m thinking about. I was thinking about that process lately: transitioning. I’ve been staring at the kids all week and thinking about the idea of transitioning from one activity to another and how do we do it?
A friend asked me how I feel about classes that my kids sign up for. Do I insist on attendance? Err… it doesn’t come up much? My kids aren’t very scheduled. Our classes are exciting treats that we are very happy to learn about. There is no dragging. It isn’t hard for us to get out of the house (mostly) because I start getting ready about three hours before we need to leave.
Most days we sit down at breakfast and talk about the structure of the day. What are we doing? Where are we going? I give the kids an idea of what to expect and when I’ll start prompting them to get ready.
Very rarely I run into the room and say, “Oh shoot! I didn’t look at a clock and I forgot _____ and we need to walk out the door RIGHT NOW!!!”
I am shocked that when I do this the kids usually jump up in the air and start rushing to get ready like someone is chasing them with a hot poker. They have bought in to “this is our life and we are obligated to show up when we say we will”.
I talk a lot about respecting teachers because they choose to share what they know with people who want to learn. That’s a gift and an honor. You must respect the efforts of teachers.
Kinda funny given how anti school I am, right? I’m not anti teachers. I’m anti-Industrial-Era-conformity-brainwashing.
That’s not the same thing as learning or education or teachers. In fact I have incredible respect for the process of learning.
Not that every school (public or otherwise) works the same way. I know. But it’s a crapshoot year by year. In “school” you don’t get to pick your teachers, mostly. In life you do. College is a weird hybrid of “school” and life because you have some choice but not that much. You pick your place of education more. (Not that most people research the teaching staff much before picking a university.) You get to drop classes and take a different teacher if you don’t like an approach… sometimes.
I have multiple bad grades (D or F) on my record because of personality conflicts with teachers. Does that mean I know nothing about those subjects? Nope. It means that bitch didn’t like me.
That happens.
School is about measuring how you jump through the random hoops that someone decides to set for you. You think it is even and fair how those hoops are divvied out? Ha. Ha. Ha.
Standardized tests are flat out abusive to most minority populations. Why? Because they say, “Hey, how quickly can you identify all this random shit from White American Culture? Not fast? Then you’re stupid.”
That’s abusive.
And school in America in the year 2016 is about, “How fast can you regurgitate facts about this culture to prove you are ‘smart’.”
Yes there are exceptions. Yes there are good teachers in public schools and there are good private schools.
Are those private schools available to people who are very poor? No? Then school in America is about regurgitating facts. I don’t care that your kid might be getting away with having a good experience. The majority of American children are not.
How do I know this? Why am I so god damn confident of what I know? Because I went to 25 schools. Then 7 universities. Then I substituted in about 8 schools. Then I taught in 4 schools.
It’s not a huge sample size. But it’s big enough to let me see a diversity most people get to pretend doesn’t exist. I went to schools in rural areas, in neighborhoods of a predominate ethnic identity other than white, in rich schools, in poor schools, and many levels in between. I’ve seen Silicon Valley, Compton, and rural Oklahoma.
I can’t speak to the east coast from personal experience. But I read a lot of teachers. I’m pretty sure I’m right from coast to coast. Teachers are talking about the problems in the system. All you have to do is go look a little bit and you’ll find criticism. You’ll never run out of it to read.
I don’t think my way is right or mass actionable. I don’t think the solution to our broken schooling system is everyone opting out to home school. But I don’t know how to force the solutions that are necessary. I don’t know how to force a non-abusive mechanism on top of an abusive system and I just can’t be part of that abusive system any more. Not as a student and not as a parent.
Could I be a teacher in that system? Sure. Why? Because I’m subversive as fuck and I think the kids who are there need people like me whenever possible. Will I sacrifice everything in my life on the altar of helping other peoples kids?
No. I made these two people. I’m responsible for them.
Yesterday I cracked. I stopped asking the kids to help and I sent them outside to play. They had a glorious day and I got the house like 75% of the way to clean. Yes, I know people believe that I clean frantically full time and my house is always spotless so it isn’t that much work (or something). Well, actually…. (I find myself using that more often because it is now a banned phrase in many places. I try to only do it when I’m being a snot and refuting ideas about myself that annoy me.) I don’t clean that much. My house turns into a pit just like everyone else’s house. But I host big parties pretty frequently and I usually spend about a week cleaning before hand. So people think my house is always clean.
It’s a ruse.
I can usually flight of the bumblebee and feel presentable for dinner guests. And my kids have to pick up their toys before they get screens so our house doesn’t get that bad. Only mostly they clean by shoving whichever behind whatever and into wherever. So every so often we have to dump ever drawer, every shelf, every everything in order to find things. Because seriously after a while we can’t find anything and then everyone expects me to be a fucking homing beacon and they ask me 9,032 times a day where “x” is.
I can’t.
They ask me to buy them new shoes because they can’t find any to wear. I clean their room and find four pairs. That kinda thing.
So a few times a year we face overwhelming chaos. For the love of toast I don’t know how families with two working parents ever clean at all. When it gets bad (like me being gone two weekends in a row so things kinda pile up extra hard, and we are remodeling, and school level transitioning) it will take a solid 8-10 days of me cleaning for 4-10 hours/day.
(There’s always a day in the middle where I clean for four hours then collapse in a heap and cry for a while.)
This cleaning is extra epic because Youngest child has to be entirely moved out of that bedroom indefinitely for the remodel. They are currently replacing the wall/window and that room is not sealed to the out doors. (They have built the new bathroom walls/front wall in front of it, but it’s not all done and everything.) Lots of construction debris in there. Kiddo can’t use that room.
So they are sharing again for a bit. Which was ridiculous extra cleaning and sorting. Frankly I think they were god damn awesome.
At one point Eldest Child started crying and said, “I’m just not good at cleaning. I’m not smart at this and I never will be.”
I laughed and laughed and laughed. She looked at me and said, “WHAT?!”
“You act like I fell out of my mother’s womb being able to clean. I couldn’t do it when I was seven. Frankly I think you have more skill than I had at that age.”
She blinked for a bit, dried her eyes, and got up and made tremendous progress all in a big burst. At the end she grinned at me and said, “Ok I am getting better.”
Cocky little thing. Yes, you are. Every day. Every year. You are getting better.
So I think about these things because transitioning eats into progress. The more times I have to transition in a day the less progress I make on all tasks. This is a well documented phenomena. You can spend four years taking a Spanish class, or four months of immersion. And after the immersion experience you will be far more fluent.
Some guys I know were bitching at me that I should really stop what I’m doing with my life and learn all about the influential music from 1968.
I told them I don’t have time and they demanded that I justify what is more important than that. I rattled off what I’m doing with my life. They kinda blinked at me and said, “Ok maybe you don’t have time.”
No shit, Sherlock.
Everyone has different stuff going on in their lives. Everyone has a different comfort level of transitions. I don’t need to judge what other people need in order to feel comfortable. That internal Holy Fucking Shit No reaction needs to be turned off. Ain’t nobody trying to tell me that I need to pick it up. Not really.
My inside voice is changing. I do hear you.
Chill. The. Fuck. Out.
Why do I talk to myself? Because over time I am changing how I react to different stimuli. It was said that a lot of what is interesting about me now is that I do fewer global freak outs. When something is upsetting to me I don’t scream about everyone and everything. I can say exactly what I’m upset about and why and I can usually trace it down to the root. That’s letting me pull the weeds. I can tell which tendrils are a problem.
It’s ok that I failed in the school environment. I mean, I was usually an A/B student (except for personality conflicts) and I’m still a failure in the school environment. It isn’t that I’m unintelligent. But I cannot conform in the ways required to go period to period learning in the teeny chunks that can hopefully be absorbed by a large enough percentage of people to not be a complete waste of time to everyone. Woo.
Do you know why I was a good teacher? Because I met before school, during breaks, after school, and on Saturdays with students who could not understand what I was teaching and I helped them catch up on foundational information they missed along the way.
I can’t give that much of myself to people outside my family right now. My kids need that time from me. Why? Because we have some fucked up brain chemistry and DNA from generations of trauma. We need to do what we are doing right now.
We are learning how to adapt to life. We are learning how to learn. We are learning shit loads of stuff that we will be able to use later. We are planning. We are growing.
And we are doing it slowly. We are doing it by concentrating on one thing at a time for a few weeks.
That way we can spend many hours a day on one task and make substantial progress at it instead of spending 15 minutes here and 15 minutes there.
It is hard. It is physically and mentally and emotionally taxing. But I enjoy it. I feel rewarded. I feel like my reward is the conversation I get to have around the table every meal. My kids fucking think.
I know so much intense analysis of My Little Pony characters that it is ridiculous because I don’t think I’ve ever watched an episode. I know their back stories, motivations, and things that are being foreshadowed. Yeah. My kid told me, “They are seriously foreshadowing something about her in this episode….” Then later I heard, “In this episode they broke the fourth wall to…”
I asked her if she knows what breaking the fourth wall actually means. Nope. So I explained. In great detail. With lots of examples. Afterwards she started rattling off examples.
Yup. Like that.
I treat my children like if they don’t know something yet it is because I have not yet done a good enough job of talking about it. So I’d better get on that.
I really like my life.
I like feeling responsible. Resiliency experts say that people are most likely to be successful if they internalize that they must be responsible. In other words: we must find a way or make a way. So we do.
I feel that way about anti-racist stuff. Incest research. Home schooling. Teaching my kids how to take care of their shit.
I believe I must make this work. Period. So I will.
What does that actually fucking mean? It means that I picked this life. Who the fuck knows why. So I’m going to live it to the absolute fullest. With great privilege comes great responsibility. I’m one of the luckiest mother fuckers born in the history of all time.
How did that happen?
Even with all the trauma. So fucking what. Every level of person experiences trauma. That’s universal. Not every being experiences trauma (lucky bastards) but every level of human experience has trauma.
What traumatizes one person is standard, normal, and appropriate to someone else. So check your fucking judgment, wench. (talking to myself…)
I have an idea for the tattoo. I’m not going to write it out in advance. But I’m going to have a wonderful time talking to my artist today. He’s so wonderful.
And I’m having lunch with a friend first. Then dinner with a different friend.
I don’t in any way want to complain about the fullness of my life. I am blessed. I am loved. People seek out my company on my terms. Because they consider the effort to be worth what they get in return.
I can’t judge that. I need to just say thank you.
I’m trying to slow down. Frankly the remodel is driving me batty. They are banging all day long. So every second all day long I have to process hitting sounds and decide they aren’t a threat.
That wears me out.
But I have to be home. For Reasons.
So I’m doing what I can to destress in the house. My anxiety is spiking like a motherfucker. But! I know it is temporary so I can have something I badly want and I’ll get to have it as long as I live here. Sounds worth putting up with.
But it hurts my body. It’ll end soon.
Every time I transition from thinking, “Is that the door?” back to whatever I’m doing… it takes a penalty spoon.
So I’m thinking about transitions like fuck right now. How many activities can I manage to get done in a day? How much work? How many different kinds of tasks? I think it is funny how different stages of cleaning feel different to me. I can’t declutter a room, organize it, then remove filth all in a go. I just can’t transition like that. I have to declutter the house. Then organize it. Then clean. I can’t go back and forth because I experience distress physically and psychiatrically.
Transitions are that hard for me. I will fall to the floor and sob and not be able to do whatever it is you want of me because I just can’t.
That’s something that has been a pattern in my life for a very long time and I’m just kind of recognizing what that means in my head. Oh. Flooding. Oh. That’s…
Oh.
Yeah. That.
I like intense connections with a lot of fucking bandwidth. So when I need to spread that bandwidth out between 37 different distractions instead of 2-3…
I hurt.
It isn’t anyone else’s fault. But I’m trying to figure out what managing that means. I need this to get better. I need to stop flooding when I walk near someone else’s life because I feel like I should try to conform and I can’t I can’t I can’t.
No one god damn asked you to. Chill. The. Fuck. Out.
I’m trying.
It’s funny to stop and think, “This is actually a huge improvement!”
Good grief.
There are a high number of specific high intensity things I want to get done in this life. I won’t get them done in 15 minutes of prep at a time. That’s ok. I don’t need to schedule my life how other people do. It is working for them. Stop projecting.
We all want different things. Health means something different to every person.
I’m trying to figure out what it means to me. This is proving to be more complicated than expected. Not sure if that is because I was naive to start with or what. Anything is possible.
I’m making a lot of progress with my pain stuff. (The overall refraining from typing is helping. Hey–it’s Friday. I kinda took a few days off… I am trying to moderate…)
I’m making progress on pain stuff. My bowels are… well… I’m told this is progress? I don’t fucking know. But it is weirder than hell. I mostly stopped with the pills for a few days (because obviously my body was freaking out) on the doctors recommendation and the freak out ended right away. This is supposedly a sign that things are working right on schedule. I will resume sloughing the parasites from my liver later today. Oh joy. But! I’m seeing… uhm… something fucking weird that I’m told is results?
Pooooooooooooooooooooop.
We talk about poop while eating all the time.
Muahahahaha
My kids are very comfortable saying, “I’m going to eat lots of vegetables because your body sucks.”
If you can’t be a good example, be a horrible warning. Do one or the other and then do that motherfucker.
I guess?
Yesterday I screwed up. I put in a load of laundry and I didn’t even think about what I was washing. A new dress up clothes thing was put in the basket. It had never been washed. It was bright fucking red. So all the martial arts uniforms were very pink.
Oooooops. Shit. Like rose colored pink. Dark rose. I was all, “NOOOOOOOO!”
Then I thought about my mama and I breathed a prayer of thanks. “Hey kids? Want to learn how to fix a mistake?” I used oxygen brightener and bleach and I boiled it on the stove top and those fuckers are white as snow once again.
Because my mama taught me what to do.
That’s a good memory. Thank you, mama.
Thank you for teaching me how to do my laundry on the stove because that was what we had and you were going to make sure I had the skills to be presentable no matter what happened to me or how bad my life was. You tried. Thank you.
During this process my friend was over and she asked if I wanted her to do the poking/stirring over the fire. I didn’t want her to. I felt entirely Zen in that moment. I am where I want to be doing what I want to do. I’m showing my kids how I fix a mistake. It takes time and effort. But it’ll be ok.
It was one of the most intensely blissful moments I’ve experienced in a while. That’s flow.
If I cared very much about getting out of my house and not being “stuck” with these experiences as the woman… I wouldn’t get to have that. I’m glad I get to have that. I’m glad I get to see the value in my mother.
I miss you, mama.
I miss all the friends I’m not reaching out to because I’m overwhelmed. I’ll come back. I’ll have spoons some day.
In March we have social stuff planned on the first two days. Then… uhm… I don’t know about the Easter party. Wonder how my bathroom will be? Err… I’ll let people know two weeks before?
I think that I need to not schedule anything else in March. Which is intimidating. I’m not resting. I’m working and socializing because I’m so desperate to catch up on the work. I need to rest and I won’t stop working so socializing needs to be back burnered for a few weeks. Just Do Eeeet.
What work do I feel so pressed to do? Well… we are transitioning from preschool to elementary school. Which is a fuck ton of work for me. (I don’t know how you folks who home school with kids in preschool, elementary, middle, & high school do it. How do you find space?! )
The thing I miss the most about teaching in a school is the prep time plus the right to control what everyone was going to be learning. This is much harder. I have to prepare on the fly for a range of topics. It’s brutal some days in terms of cognitive load. It is fucking hard breaking down every little thing into schemas and concepts and repeatable skill training.
This is why other sane people outsource this shit. But we have some genetic stuff to consider that will make us always on the edge of the bell curve. I’m glad the training exists for people in the center of the bell curve. Yay you!
Hi, I’m Krissy. I’m an outlier.
Name the metric.
I just uhm…. like to be difficult?
IT ISN’T PERSONAL, OK!?!
I should stop now. If I get up and start moving now I’ll have all my morning prep done before Noah finishes breakfast and I will be able to eat at the same time as them instead of sitting down as they finish eating. I’m a pain in the ass to take care of. I struggle to think the effort is really merited.
Know something that I find wacky? Youngest child just fucking loves to stand there and hand me pill after pill after pill. Kid says, “You have to fix the problems. You have to get your poop better so you can digest food. I want you to die when you are very very very old. So here.” It varies somewhat, but this entire experience is just…
validating as fuck.
I’m trying to figure out what I need. My issues are complicated, layered, and difficult to solve. I know you are doing what you need to do to solve your issues and it doesn’t look much like what I’m doing.
I need to figure out how to not feel so fucking bad about that. It’s ok that I need stuff other people don’t need. That doesn’t mean I’m bad. That doesn’t mean I should die so I stop stealing resources from more worthy people. It has to be ok that I need what I need.
It isn’t fair that I have the money to pay for it and other people don’t. There is no fair. There is no deserve. There is no way to have things come out even.
I had to believe there is no deserve when it was really bad. I have to believe it about the good stuff too. Or …. or I just can’t. I can’t do this. I can’t get fucking pompous and shitty and “Oh I have a good life because I deserve it. Because I worked harder than other people.”
Gag. Cough. Puke. Bullshit.
No. I really didn’t work harder than other people. Ok, I worked harder than some people. But not harder than everyone. Some people worked ten times as hard as me. They didn’t get where I am.
It’s not because I’m getting what I deserve.
Nothing is fair.
4,050 words. I should stop anyway. Oh my poor wrists. But I feel better. I feel like I’m finding the words to the parts I need to talk about without talking about what I don’t need to talk about.
That feels better.
How do I get to be me without hurting other people?
That’s the journey.
I haz big feelings. My stomach hurts. But I feel like I worked out this awful thing that has been in my neck/shoulder for years. I feel like I did a major trauma release in this class. That’s kinda intense. Exposure therapy for the win.
This is what exposure therapy means. The attackers are safe guys in suits who maintain their distance so they can maintain their aura of scary. But they are monitored by women the whole time. It isn’t some guy deciding to do something to a woman when he feels like it and she should have to react right. That’s not exposure therapy. Exposure therapy means a female coach kneeling with her face next to your face whispering, “Remember to breathe. Stop. Wait for the moment. You can do this.”
Stop calling real life abuse exposure therapy. It isn’t. Ok, digression over.
My second experience at Impact was fairly different from the first. I didn’t have a friend in the class. It felt like the group warmed up slower but then made more genuine connections once we did warm up. Everyone started off tentative and not too chatty but by the final day we were pretty friendly. That felt nice.
I took a risk the morning of the third day. I said that the cheering wasn’t making it through to me during my fights and I really needed the line to get louder and more encouraging because it’s scary to fight in quiet. I feel alone. I have to say, those women came through once I made a specific request. They did great.
I didn’t ask for more than one extended fight this time. I literally just… couldn’t. By the time I got through the one extended fight my body was saying, “Let the men make them easy from here on out.”
The guys… they have to work ridiculously hard to do an extended fight with the people who really want blood. They do extended fights to teach women that even when you feel exhausted (this is as close as they will get to the exhaustion of a fight where you will be dealing with someone hitting you) and tired and worn out you can still defend yourself. I think I have a better understanding of fighting from a place of exhaustion from the get go, so I didn’t need the exercise this weekend.
I chose to leave a few spoons in my drawer. Because today I seriously need to pay attention to the kids and if I had left it all out on the mat I would spend today in bed crying. I just couldn’t. This wasn’t a real fight to the death so it would have been inappropriate to wear myself out that hard so I couldn’t hang with the kids.
I pay attention to these things.
Topic switch. Back to hitting.
Yes, I think (upon further reflection) what I am doing with Noah unconsciously probably would be better termed a tap or a light smack… but that is still putting my hands on someone else’s body in a way I’m not paying attention to. In a way that he chooses to describe as being hit. Because he gets that choice. I need to stop it.
Just like people don’t get to tell me that when the kid kicked me in the throat it wasn’t assault. Yes, actually it was an assault. I’m not going to prosecute because I don’t think the kid had malicious intent. But it was an assault.
It is possible to hit and not be causing (permanent) damage. Not be hurting people. Still be a problem. Still need to stop.
I need to have so much fucking control over my body that I do not put my hands on people at all unless I am doing it in a way that I am highly conscious and in control of exactly what I’m doing. I can’t be muddy. I can’t be like “Close enough is good enough.” Not with what I want to do with my life.
So maybe I’m over reacting and maybe I’m understanding how much work I have left on this problem. I need to stop hitting people. Entirely. 100000% unless someone is directly threatening my physical safety.
I know I spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to live in gray areas but this is a black and white thing. I’ve done too much hitting in my life. I need to get this under control.
I mean, not that I’m going to cancel that nice date with my friend. I’m going to do everything in my power to get to the point where I only hit people (even lightly) when they say, “Pretty please”. Or they start a fight.
I spent a lot of this class thinking about escalation. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. I escalate.
I know it’s all victim blamey and shit, but yeah a lot of the fights, a lot of the rapes kinda happened because I had no ability to deescalate. It hurts seeing that so plainly over time. I am not good at managing peoples emotions in a deescalating way. I’m good at cranking the volume up. I stimulate feelings I don’t settle them. This is a problem.
I think about things like the neighbor who has been sexually harassing me. Did I encourage him? I don’t think so. 90%+ of the time I talk to him my kids are standing right there and I don’t encourage displays of sexuality in front of my children. So I’m inclined to believe this is his desperate fantasy that he isn’t dead yet and he’s still sexually interesting instead of this being about me. But do I deescalate properly when he brings stuff up? Mostly I call the kids and keep walking when he gets rude. What else should I be doing?
Well I think kicking the crap out of him then telling him I cannot be in control if a man grabs me may have been effective. He’s keeping more physical distance these days.
But is he going to creep again? My guess is yes. Because creepers gonna creep. Does it make it all my fault if it happens again because I’m stupid enough to talk to him?
You know what? I get to walk around my god damn neighborhood without having to physically fight off unwanted sexual advances. That’s fucking ridiculous. No this isn’t my fault and I should not have to avoid walking down my own god damn street to avoid being sexually harassed. That’s not reasonable. If he starts shit I’m not the one escalating. He is. I’m just not going to fucking be passive. I’m very friendly and non-threatening with him. I have no desire to hurt him. I’m just not going to let him do shit to me I don’t want to have done.
That has to be ok. No matter how old he is. No matter how much I like him. No matter if I know any man ever again.
I get to say yes to everything that happens to my body. Or I get to fucking hurt you. That’s the deal.
I’m getting closer to the point where I feel I could actually do it in a fight.
It was hard having Noah there. I asked him if he thought I could stop him if he tried to rape me at this point. He isn’t convinced.
I need to take more classes. It is 100% my goal to be able to so deeply scare men that they do not believe they could successfully do that again.
Not because I want to hurt men. Because I’m not going to be raped again. I’m done. The passive has been raped right the fuck out of me. I’ve taken all I can take.
It is quite literally my goal to die before letting someone rape me again. I want to fight to the point where someone has the choice to kill me or leave me alone.
I’m done.
Something broke and it can’t be fixed.
To be fair, Noah didn’t see my extended fight. He saw the easy peasy fights the instructors give you to blow off steam so you walk out of the room feeling strong so you don’t leave feeling like you should walk in front of a bus. They plan this shit. They know the roller coaster they put people on. Noah didn’t see quite how effective I am at kicking peoples skulls in. I practice from a variety of angles. I’m semi-worried that I will actually kill someone because I’m going to be kicking with such incredible force and anger. I may well shove someones face into their brain.
I won’t lose sleep over that. Ok, yes I will. I will be convinced I’m a monster who should be killed. Maybe I’ll go to jail and think that’s fair.
But I won’t be god damn raped that day.
I feel dangerous and horrible. But yes I am prepared to use deadly force to prevent someone from raping me again.
I have to believe I deserve that or I need to die today because I cannot endure another rape. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.
I’m done. I have to believe I am allowed to kill someone to stop them if necessary. I know that in an actual fight I will have to use the minimum amount of force necessary to stop a fight. I know that. The chances I will get to a fight that results in death are incredibly freakishly low. Only I’m going to pursue a career that will make people hate me with the power of the sun.
So maybe my chances aren’t vanishingly small. Maybe they just aren’t that high?
I don’t know that I am yet at a point where I am capable of holding the adrenaline in and just doing the necessary hurting.
During one of my fights the suited instructor literally ran out of the room to get away from me because I was chasing too much.
I mean, I didn’t chase him off the mat. But I did take steps in his direction. I hear that the expression on my face was uhhhhh… terrifying.
I don’t know if that is a regular schtick of theirs to try and break the tension because it’s funny. Or if he felt like that is actually how an attacker would respond because holy shit.
I don’t know.
You never know.
They call the rape prevention moves “reversals”. Because you are reversing the power. Those are the ones where you have to stay still on the floor and use physics and it’s scary and complicated and fairly precise. I find them horrifyingly triggering.
It’s really hard to say, “I tried that and what happened was…” I failed. That’s what happened. I failed when I tried to do that. I didn’t prevent a rape that day.
Ahhh. I tried to move long before I felt weight. There was no physics to help me. Fuck everything. Well, specifically he fucked me. After slamming my head into the ground so hard I saw stars. I stopped fighting.
I don’t know if it would be different today. I don’t actually feel confident. That was just a fucking class. I was chanting to myself the whole time, “There is no chance this man would actually rape you. There are witnesses. He’s wearing very difficult clothing. This isn’t real.” Because I wanted to run screaming I was so fucking freaked out. But… that means it isn’t that real in my body.
Would I be able to access this when I’m scared? I’ve worked so hard for so many years to break the freeze response. I’m tired of going numb. But it is a genuine survival skill. I have worked hard to make it less likely I will survive.
I’m ready to die or assert myself. One or the other. But I do not yet know for sure that I’d win.
It is hard believing that I would kill to defend myself and that is part of why I am a disgusting person. I don’t know that I really believe I have the right. I am bad. I want to hurt people.
Not really. I’m just god damn done letting them hurt me.
That’s not true either. I do want to hurt people. I want to hurt people who like being hurt because it released kinetic energy from my body and it allows me to be more calm and gentle when necessary and appropriate.
Hitting is all of these things. It is tapping Noah when I shouldn’t. Even though it doesn’t hurt I’m touching someone without consent in a way that can be described as hitting. My friend who is inviting me to a lovely session of testicle kicking, that’s hitting too. It is completely consensual. He’s going to have a good time, I’m going to have a good time–it’s going to be fun! And being willing to beat someone unconscious for trying to rape me.
It’s all hitting. It is all violence. But do they mean the same things? Should they be treated the same way legally? Should they be treated like trauma because “hitting”?
Everyone gets to decide for themselves what is traumatizing. I’ve done bdsm scenes that were WAY more intense/painful/fucking out there than my rapes. My rapes traumatized me. My rapes were an action that I did not consent to happening to my body in a way that proved to me that I do not have the right to have agency over myself or my life. My bdsm scenes were done with friends and they were fun. Even if they were painful and scary. I knew what I was signing on for. I did it on purpose. I did it with full force and vigor and choice.
That makes all the difference.
I don’t feel traumatized by the throat kick. I feel like I learned something about boundaries.
If you fuck up and assault someone… that isn’t the end of the world. How you respond afterwards is what matters.
If you fuck up and assault someone on purpose… that’s different.
I genuinely believe there are accidental assaults all the time. Just like there is involuntary manslaughter.
Ok, I have one specific complaint about the class this time: I really didn’t appreciate the “boogeyman homeless guy” thing. That fucking pissed me off. The vast majority of assaults are someone you know. Leave the fucking homeless guys alone. They are doing their fucking best and I’m god damn tired of the nastiness of housed people.
Being homeless does not mean you are a god damn rapist.
That’s the attitude though. Homeless guys are creepy and scary. Do you know why they creep you out? Because you feel like they aren’t like you and that’s gross. I feel like they are like me and they are in a hard place right now.
I don’t need to feel scared of someone who has so little power and authority in life compared to me. Am I prepared to defend myself if someone does start something? Sure. But I’ve been interacting with homeless people for decades. I’ve done so all over the country and in other countries.
I’m not scared of homeless people. They are scared of me.
Why? Because they know I can call the cops and have them put in jail. That’s how the power dynamic works. Can I really? Would the cops do it? Maybe. But it’s pretty likely. If any of you dressed-like-you-live-in-a-house-people called the police on a homeless person there is a high chance the homeless person is getting arrested.
For vagrancy. For loitering. For trespassing. For intimidation. For assault.
Even if that assault was accidental. Who cares? It’s a homeless person. They are creepy and icki. We don’t want them around, prosecute.
Stop. Calling. The. Cops. On. Creepy. Homeless. People.
Unless you see them commit a serious crime, just leave them the fuck alone. Ok? They have enough god damn problems without whiny people harassing them.
(I’m not really talking to a specific person or even the folks in the class. I’m mad at the universe over this one.)
I’M TALKING TO THOSE ASSHOLES ON NEXTDOOR.
“I saw a homeless person on my street so I called the police.” I hope you die slowly in a lot of pain.
Like those assholes who called the cops on me in Virginia. I looked suspicious. I had out of state license plates and camping gear. Clearly I was up to no good.
This is my cranky face.
It is weird trying to find a place where compassion and the right to break your face live right side by side. Because in being able to defend myself like this… I’m trying to have compassion for myself. I’m allowed to say that 12 rapists in one life is enough. I’m allowed to say that I was 25 when I was last raped and that’s god damn when it ended. I’m allowed to absolutely fucking harm anyone who tries again.
That is what compassion for myself means. Maybe another woman could passively permit a rape and not kill her attacker and later prosecute and that would be the most “ethical” choice of all… or something.
I can’t absorb any more.
I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.
How do you get ready to actually be able to kill someone if you have to? I don’t want to. I really don’t want to.
Shit I already feel guilty that people seem to kill themselves after dealing with me.
(Yes, I know I am not “at fault” for any of these suicides. Life is complicated.)
In class someone thought it was funny to make a joke about fire. I sure know how to shut down jokes about fire. It was asked “Does anyone have any trauma around fire? No? Good….” Then I raised my hand. “Yeah, my brother self immolated.”
I bring all the fun jokes to an end.
God I suck.
Hell, I’m not even saying to stop using the joke. It’s ok to jokingly tease a group of people and tell them the final test will involve jumping through a fiery hoop. That’s not a bad joke. That’s not a real threat.
That’s ok.
But god I can kill any joke.
I am so not funny that it is really really funny. It is to the point where my litany of traumas is becoming almost hysterical. I have a trauma for any god damn situation.
It is kinda funny sometimes.
WHEN WILL THE INSANITY END?!?!!? is most of the joke.
Well, I’m still having an extraordinary life… but I’d say it is mostly no longer traumatic. I have boundary violation issues every so often that must be managed.
I don’t think I’ve been traumatized in while. I think the last trauma was severing with my family. (I think I traumatized Sarah after that… but that’s a different discussion.)
Why do I split hairs like this? Because my shrink tells me to break everything down into its smallest compartments and then sort them out.
What is hitting? What is violence? What is trauma? These things are so broad and yet so very specific.
Random defensive pissiness: I read an article yesterday. Don’t remember where or by whom and I don’t care. The person was pretty much saying, “Stop talking about your white privilege because you are just grand standing. If you were really doing anything to dismantle structural racism you would do it silently.” Oh fuck you.
I’m trying to fund the revolution, motherfucker. I am putting my money where my mouth is. I do more with every year and I track it better so that I can know that I am doing more with every year.
Recently Noah told me, “If you don’t feel like you do anything in the world… you are giving more and more money away every year. You are financially impacting the lives of more and more people. That is doing something.”
I don’t do this because I’m a nice person. I don’t do this to be good. I do this because I can never help the child I was. I do this because it needs to be done and other assholes aren’t stepping up.
I’m an asshole. I can live with that. But I want to be an asshole who has specific boundaries around where and how I hit people, how I escalate fights, and when it is appropriate for me to use force.
I think that hitting people to teach them is a shitty way to teach them if you want an ongoing relationship. That style of teaching instill anger, fear, distrust, and the belief in the person you are educating that they deserve to be hit.
Ask me how I’m feeling about Noah right now.
We need something different.
I do not feel traumatized. I feel like I discovered a boundary. I need something different. This isn’t working for me.
I have enough brain damage for one lifetime.
I think that hitting should be used when you are ok with ending the relationship and not before.
If you don’t think I should be packing to leave then we should not be in a physical fight. That needs to be a boundary. And no, that does not mean I should get free hits without retribution. That’s not what I’m saying.
I need to stop hitting casually. I need to be taught through repetition and mostly through words. This behavior will mostly be extinguished through catching the “taps” that “don’t count” because actually they do. They teach muscle memory. They remind me that hitting is ok.
I used to hit ineffectively so I thought it was fine for me to hit people. At this point I’m very effective and that means I need to treat my hands like weapons and be in full control of them.
Things change.
Noah hit back because I hurt him. He has the right. I’m not really mad that he believes he has the right to defend himself.
I’m mad that men start out able to defend themselves with so much force without having to take class after class after class and work and work and work.
I’m not sure that I’m mad at the men. I’m just mad.
I know that I need to get over all the shit that happened to me. But a lot of the places I hurt almost every day are from specific assaults.
Do you think you would be able to forget if you were reminded by your body every day?
Maybe if I can actually heal I stand a chance. Maybe.
Chiropractic appointment in 3.5 hours. I’m going to call and schedule acupuncture for this week. I don’t see a massage therapist for a while but I’ll be ok. Two weeks? I’ll live. Ha.
Cause the next time I see massage therapists I’m uhm seeing two in one day because I didn’t really look at the calendar before booking the second one. That’s ok. One person works on a very small area for the full hour and the other person does a more general massage for an hour and a half. It will feel like magic. I will need to drink so much water that day.
I’m really trying.
Some day I would like to spend less money on health care and spend more money on donating to communities of color. They need the money. I’d rather not need to spend it on my body.
I really don’t think I’m the best place to spend all these resources. But I recognize that it is literally necessary for a time if I am going to heal and be able to do the work I want to do. If I want to stop feeling suicidal because I cannot deal with how much pain I experience on a daily basis… I need to spend the money since I have it. I don’t have a justification for giving it away instead of fixing what is wrong.
Not at this point. Not really. I will be a more effective tool if I stop and do maintenance.
That’s just prudence.
Is that close enough to self love to count?
I’m trying.
Today I am going to spend with the kids. Except for the chiropractic appointment. They’ll do bookwork during that time. We’ll be together the rest of the time. I think we should garden. We’ll read. We’ll snuggle.
I will remind my body that despite these training exercises… I’m safe now. I am safe now.
We need to meditate tonight. During the class I was fucking whigging out for a while. Then I remembered what I’ve been saying to myself when we meditate. “I breathe in nothing that will pollute me; I breathe out the nothingness that has consumed me.” It helped. It helped a lot. The fact that I’ve been practicing at night has helped. I calmed down much faster than I used to be able to.
Jenny tells me that I look at how far I have to go. She looks at how far I have come. I write it down so I can see too.
I’m sick. I feel awful. Like normal when I’m sick I’m beating myself up emotionally. I woke up this morning missing my biological family something fierce. It hit me like a freight train.
I miss them but I can’t be part of the family. I won’t keep secrets. I won’t act like everything is fine.
The generation after mine got raped too. I can’t pretend everything is fine.
But they can. So they get to have a family and I don’t. Because that’s how the cookie crumbles.
How ungrateful. I have a family. I have Noah. I have my kids. I had sure better not fuck it up. This is all I have.
I feel completely and totally certain that if Noah and the kids all died I would not live 24 hours.
I feel like this is the most sad I have been in a while. This feels brutal. I hurt so much. Part of it is weird bitterness over adopted family stuff too.
I walk away from people so they can’t walk away from me. Which makes it my fault relationships don’t last. Which is easier to bear than the fact that people just don’t like me very much.
I’m in a god damn mood. Pity party, table of one.
I feel sad, keening grief. I feel like I want to cut and beat my head on the floor and…
It’s just there this morning. Just because.
Sometimes I think I beat my head on the floor because I’m hoping I will damage my brain enough that I will stop thinking because what I think hurts me so much.
I am really grateful that today is a slow pace. We’ll have some nature time. It’s the first day of my officially reduced schedule. I’m on the day planner. It’s here. I mean, I haven’t done that much for weeks, but it was an unstructured kind of not doing that much. And not doing that much means I did a fair bit. Cause I’m like that.
But I have big blocks of the day marked as rest. In between other “healthful” activities and shit that I’m supposed to build into my life because supposedly I might hate myself less some year if I keep this bullshit up.
With every passing year I feel more and more ashamed of myself for not talking to my mother. I understand her neglect so much more. She was doing her best.
Her best wasn’t good enough. Is that really her fault?
I don’t know. But I can’t have her in my life and I feel like that makes me a piece of shit. It is hard to not feel like that fact is reason enough to deserve death on its own. I hurt my mama. I am bad.
If I wanted to I could crawl in bed with any of three people and they would hug me and love me and I wouldn’t have to be alone right now. The trouble is, I want my mother. I have wanted my mother my whole life.
It never goes away. Sometimes I don’t think about it. But then a quiet moment comes along and I check in with my body and there it is. This ache that never goes away.
Mama.
There was a woman, for a few years, who told me she wanted to be my adopted mom. I haven’t heard from her in a long time. She has a life of her own. She’s busy. She doesn’t actually have room for me in her life. I’m not really worth the effort.
My adopted mom and my biological mom share a birthday. So every year I keen for the two women I don’t deserve to have love me. I could reach out to them. But I’m kind of done chasing love that isn’t really meant for me.
I was never really wanted. Not really.
But Noah wants me. However I got here. And my kids are stuck with me till they aren’t. We’ll see what happens.
I think a lot about what my mother’s life would have been like if she had aborted me like she should have. It would have been better. Maybe she could have saved Tommy and he wouldn’t be dead. Maybe she could have kept the other kids together after the divorce instead of just getting the “girls”.
If I hadn’t been there so many things would have been different. Easier. I have not been worth the trouble to take care of, ever.
I want to cut really badly. I haven’t wanted to like this in a while. It’s been such a nice Christmas.
Mama mama mama mama.
It always comes back to you. I love you. I love you with all of my black soul.
But you don’t get to hurt my babies. My babies live in a state of perfect trust where the unreliable people are outside the family. Inside their family they are safe and they believe that people tell them the truth. If you were considered inside their family bubble that would be shattered.
You can’t tell the truth to save your life. Because lying was necessary to save your life and you don’t seem to be able to stop now.
Now. What do I know. I haven’t talked to you in five years. But you couldn’t tell the truth then. Given your age I doubt it has changed. It’s not like you are ready to go through puberty now and see the error of your ways.
You had to lie all the god damn time and I get that and I can forgive you for the past. I can’t let you lie to my children like that going forward and you are literally not capable of telling the truth. I think it is because you are incapable of perceiving the truth. If you did you wouldn’t be able to get out of bed in the morning.
Can I really judge that?
Yes and no.
I have to do what I have to do to get out of bed in the morning, so yeah I judge. I judge that your way of being is not for me and I have to find something different and do it with a vengeance.
That intensity I have that bothers people so much? A lot of that exists because overcoming inertia is hard. It is a basic physics problem. I don’t like me very much. In order to talk to people I have to first pretend I like myself (because if you don’t formulate your interactions based on the premise of liking yourself you will get abused again) then decide what treatment would be right for me if I liked myself then figure out how to manipulate people around me into behaving in a way that will be comfortable for me. That takes a fuck ton of energy, thought, and consideration.
Yes I think about how to manipulate you. I think about how to cause you to have the set of emotions I want you to have so that you will continue to enjoy my company. I’m going to cause you some set of emotions. Indifference. Irritation. Joy. Love. Contempt. Anxiety. Something. Yes, I think consciously about what I would like to be causing and I work towards it. If I don’t do that… I bother people so much.
I have to think about this if I still want to have friends in the future. Even if manipulate is a dirty word. What-fucking-ever.
I think about which people need me to physically move slowly and which people like that I’m generally a quick darting person.
I think about which people can handle which portions of my range of emotions. Some people can only handle the joy. Some people can only handle my anger.
I think about which people will feel tolerant of which parts of my past experiences and I try to cull my stories carefully these days. I have improved these filters tremendously since having children. I used to uhhhh have fewer appropriate stories for all topics. I’m branching out.
I have noticed lately that I have two distinctly different somatic experiences of my approaches to people. Sometimes I don’t feel safe …. engaging. So I don’t say much. I look at the floor and I don’t make eye contact with people. I have a permanent fucking crick in my neck.
Then there are times when I’m ok pretending I’m a main character and I look everyone in the eye and I insert myself into peoples way and I seem to be more charming than not.
I don’t know how to get that pretense of comfort sometimes. Like today I couldn’t do it. Today if I had to be in a group of people I would be monosyllabic. I’d probably cross my arms and rock in the corner. Like I do when I’m uhhhh feeling mature.
Today I feel like I’m stuck in an elevator. Wait, let me back up. Know how I talk about feeling present with many selves/ages all at once? Right now I feel like I’m stuck on elevator between selves. If all the various permutations of me are floors on a building, I’m stuck between Neurotically In Control Adult and Weak And Defenseless Child. Neither is true. Both are true. Fuck everything.
I’m sad. My arms hurt like a mother fucker but I couldn’t sit on this today. I have to let it pass through me and move on. Writing it down helps so much.
I try hard not to make it obvious in my day to day life that my literal survival depends on the survival of the people in this house. That’s creepy. You have to go about your life as if that were incidental to your own survival. But I know it.
I have some incredibly dramatic ideas about how I could ensure that I would absolutely not risk being rescued in time this time. It’s not a call for fucking help. I don’t want help any more.
I want my family and that’s it. If I can’t have them then that’s it.
So yeah. I’m not writing this down because I’m very certain that I would follow through and if you forewarn people they feel duty bound to stop you and fuck that.
But, my family is alive and it doesn’t matter. Hopefully they won’t all die and it will absolutely never be necessary. I want to be with them.
I feel incredibly angry with people who call suicide selfish. Fuck you with a pogo stick. People who commit suicide are people who are in pain they cannot bear. Fuck you for being so selfish that you think they should continue to suffer in order to spare you even the slightest discomfort.
I don’t owe you that.
I owe you neither continued suffering nor silence. I owe you nothing. I do not owe you my life. There are things I’d like to do. I’m going to keep busy as long as I’m alive. Not because I owe people. Because I’m having fun. Because I’m finding out what it feels like to be loved. Actually loved. Shows up every day loved.
Yes Noah, I would throw myself against any rock for that. It is true. Yes I would damage myself over and over and over for that. I did so in the search for it. I didn’t think it would come true. I expected to off myself in desolation and despair before now because no one would ever actually love me.
Lots of people like to fuck me. Some people like to talk to me. It’s different to really love and take care of someone.
Sometimes I stop and realize… my body count is bigger than some peoples whole Monkey Sphere. No wonder I’m capable of seeing more people as real people.
I searched high and low for someone who could love me. Then when he started creeping on me I dated him for a bit and dumped him.
The other day in the car Eldest Child wistfully said, “I hope I grow up and meet someone as perfectly suited to me as you two found.” We both kinda went, “Bwuahahaha. No. We were not suited when we met.” She was shocked.
We changed. We became something different for one another. We became our better selves because that is what we agreed to do for one another. Having someone make that promise and then deliver and deliver and deliver and deliver for a decade now…
This is what trust feels like.
It’s so new.
Sometimes I ask my kids if they can trust me. They tell me that they know I’m telling the truth unless I’m using a silly voice then they know I’m lying. I said, “Actually sometimes when I use a silly voice I’m still telling the truth. Just to mess with you.” They glared a little. But I feel ok with this arrangement. Treat pronouncements in silly voices with great caution. Important life lesson.
I tell my kids that we won’t do everything I plan but we will do everything I promise. There’s an important difference there. I always over plan. I’m an ambitious motherfucker. No matter what you are referencing I over plan. It’s a lifestyle. It’s part of how I save money hand over fist. I plan for 60%-80% of our income. Then whatever comes in over that is extra and I invest it. And I have plans and plans and plans for investing stuff.
You don’t do the things I’ve done if you are a meek or under planning sort of person. That intensity that bothers people? It’s a mixed bag. It drove me around the country despite overwhelming pain. It causes me to get up and try again on being nice every single day with my kids. Because I’ve decided I’m all in for this thing.
There are times when I fail. I’m very careful what I promise. An awful lot of what I promise is that I will always try. I will always apologize when I fuck up. I will not promise perfection. That is folly.
I won’t promise and promise and promise for years that I will take you to do X thing and never do it. Even when the money is there because Other People Come First.
I won’t be my mother. It’s not just about the sex abuse. I know that casual readers often think that preventing sexual abuse is kinda my hobby horse to ride with my kids.
I mean, it’s important. Don’t get me wrong. But it’s really just the tip of the ice burg.
Eldest Child just ran in and jumped on my lap. I may be out of steam for the morning. Hard to hold the laptop on my lap while she wiggles. She is staring intently at the screen and trying to read what I’m writing. She’s getting a few words. Ahhhhh. Time to close this window. My time of hiding in plain sight with my feelings is just about over.
I love you kid.
I feel like I am doing better physically. The pinched nerve still hurts but not like it did. Emotionally I am all over the place. I feel both happy and sad. As usual I’m missing my mom so much it hurts. I wonder if this will ever go away, this feeling of aching for her. I’m up to more than 30 years of it so I don’t hold a lot of hope at this point.
Luckily my children continue to inspire me and with every passing year Noah becomes more of a reason to stay alive all by himself. I truly could not have imagined a love this nice.
You know how sometimes when you are tired and you don’t feel all that well you run out of patience for random noises? I hit that point yesterday like a brick wall. I was so forking grateful my friend was over so that I could walk out into the yard instead of going off like a roman candle over and over. I wasn’t sweet and loving… but it wasn’t as bad as it could be.
I have a kid free weekend this weekend. I’m about four hours of work away from feeling really done and happy with the house.
I need to fucking rest.
There are bombings all over the world in the last few days. People are dying from no reason bigger than hatred that some people think differently.
There was an earthquake in Japan.
I’m… at Knott’s Berry Farm. Well, I was.
And now I’m rocking and crying. Today was horribly triggering. But it feels so very selfish and stupid and petty. God, my whole life is pretty fucking ridiculous these days. Yeah, it will take a whole book to figure out why this trip was worth this for me.
We get home in seven days. I’m triggered as all fuck. This place is hurting me.
We had a wonderful day. I completely held it together. I mediated like a god damn champ when they had a hard time.
And now I’m rocking and hurting because keeping it together today was so god damn hard.
That’s where my father used to finger me. I haven’t been there in more than ten years. I actually come to SoCal pretty frequently. I choose to not go there most of the time.
So, the song I’m listening to on repeat is this one.
That’s my mood right now.
I think that I’m going to finally find the motivation to get the money from my father’s money that the state is holding. It has waited a lot of years. I think I’m ready to take my payment for what he put me through.
I don’t think the kids know how upset I was. I think I did well. They both gushed all the way back to the hotel about how absolutely fantastic today went. And I really agree.
But there is that part of me and this part of me and today I realized that I… completely missed the anniversaries this year. I think this is the first year I’ve ever just sailed right the fuck past them without noticing.
Am I who I thought I would be by 33?
Is my daddy still the monkey on my back?
What the fuck did I learn out in the Wild Wild West? Oh. Lots.
Hungry for a life I’m not ready to begin.
But it’s time to start anyway.
What does it mean. How forking shallow is it. I don’t know. I don’t know.
You know, it is fucking awesome that I learned how to cry completely silently a long time ago. Otherwise this crying in the room with the kids thing would be pretty fucking awkward.
I’m sorry James. I had to.
I hurt. I shouldn’t be typing nor looking down. And I should be sleeping.
But crying alone is hard. Thank you for keeping me company, internet. I love you.
Noah. I have so many stories.
My fingers hurt.
Must haz self control. Seven more days.
It was really hard going through layer after layer of memories of my father. I think they have substantially changed the area where he used to sit me on his lap. I want to write more. The basic allusion to this is in the book. But oh.my.god I could give a lot more details. Especially right this moment.
I’m having some really really really really really really really big feelings. And I have to just calm right the fuck back down and go to sleep. Tomorrow I have work to do. It is not yet time for me to rest. Only seven more days.
Almost home
I’ve been talking about rape a lot on Twitter lately. I want to organize my thoughts a bit more, even though my arms burn like fire. So this may be a bit choppier than I normally blog. The Twitter character limit formatting is changing my writing. I hope in a positive way. I know I get too verbose for most people a lot of the time.
Noah spends a lot of time telling me that I spend too much time trying to figure out “who is to blame” for various problems. He’s right and he isn’t.
Thing is, dealing with rape is complicated. It is complicated at a personal level and it is exponentially more complicated at the level of a city and … then try to solve that for a state or a country.
My therapist tells me that it isn’t a good thing that the only way I know how to keep myself safe is to keep actual walls between me and other people. Well, it is the only effective method I’ve ever discovered.
That said, I travel more than the vast majority of people ever do. It’s just too expensive for most people. So I put myself in lots of situations. I put myself in situations where I have to keep, not only myself, but my children safe. Am I willfully putting us into danger just to… I don’t know… prove some macho ass shit to myself?
I genuinely don’t think so. Stranger assault is statistically rare. We don’t invite people into our tent/room. We talk to people in crowded public places then move on. It genuinely doesn’t feel risky.
Do you know what was risky? The way I was taught to walk into bedrooms with people because you wanted “privacy” after just knowing them for a few hours. That was how I spent my childhood. Asking to go into peoples rooms and initiating as much sexual contact as I could get away with and only acknowledging rebuffs grudgingly.
Sometimes it makes my heart beat fast when I enforce boundaries with my kids. They are not allowed to walk up and sit on laps any more. Not with a complete stranger. They can’t jump on strange men. Playing for two minutes doesn’t make them close enough to jump on, nope. You have no idea what is going on with their bodies. You don’t know if they just had surgery on their back. Nope. Don’t jump on strange people.
It is really weird to feel like the biggest god damn hypocrite on the planet. Don’t do anything I did.
This experience is how I understand the neglect I experienced. I completely lacked a frame for it before I was a parent. The awareness comes in stages of dawning horror.
How fucking formative that trauma was. Jesus H. Roosevelt Christ.
I’ve been acting like a bully with the kids. I’m not asking them to do things I’m ranting that I’m sick of them not doing the thing without being asked. We are talking about it.
I feel really guilty that Eldest Child said, “It’s getting to the point where it’s almost 50/50 nice and mean and that has to change. I know you are tired. Maybe we shouldn’t go out of the room much for a few days.”
I feel this horrible mixture of pride and guilt that she has to help manage me. She can be aware of those kinds of needs. That’s amazing. I don’t want her to parent me though. I’m not using emoticons even though I want to put like 75 frowny faces in a row.
I try to tell myself that the feelings of guilt and shame are because I was raised to believe it is not ok for anyone to ever have to pay attention to me and take care of me. It is not ok for me to want anyone to help me.
I try to tell myself that this is ok. It is a kind of enmeshment, yes, but we talk about how this is not her job and she is going to not be responsible for me long term. I thank her for feedback about her perception of being around me. I seem tired. I should rest. Yeah, thanks.
She acts like I am worthy of paying attention to. I wish that didn’t make me cry.
I’m going to jump back to rape. Why am I confident that my children will not have a life like mine? A kid kind of grabbed at my kids crotch. The instantaneous response was, “You do not have my consent! Get your hand off!”
I win.
I couldn’t save my niece nor my nephew. But my kids don’t think that anyone who wants to is allowed to have access to their crotch. They believe their consent is vitally important.
I win.
That doesn’t mean they will never be raped. I understand that. Let me tell you, I’m not done educating them. I’m just going at an age appropriate rate.
A lot of “staying safe” is a complex web of knowing the right words to say at the right time. If you have highly specific technical language you don’t seem like a good victim and any good predator will walk right by you. Obviously you have the support to protect you. You are not going to be easy to intimidate.
People comment, just about daily, that my children are so aware and ….themselves. It is funny how often the wording is almost exactly that. Another friend commented that it is amazing that people don’t think Eldest Child is bossy. She just has a good plan she wants everyone to follow.
I talk to them about what they want to get from life all the time.
Eldest Child and I have been talking a lot about what she wants to do school-wise when we get home. She has specific requests. She wants to work on languages more. She is frustrated by the limitations on who she can play with. She freaking asked if we can look for a Chinese class (I can hear Pam cheering from here) so she can work on that more consistently. She said we all should take Spanish together (I’ll see what I can do, Youngest child wants Spanish and is not up for Chinese). She said maybe on Hindi for a while. She said we should practice the alphabet and such at home but she thinks we don’t need that as a formal class. So I guess that will be some structure in our days.
We all want martial arts. The kids want gymnastics as well. I can’t teach them many skills like that. I’m happy to pay someone who can.
And she wants to play the violin.
I said we would add lessons one a month until we got up to the full load because all of that at once would crush her. She says that is probably smart.
I appreciate how often she tells me I’m smart.
You know… I think that’s why she does it. She’s a perceptive little thing.
My kids are not going to look like good victims. Not ever. They are going to seem like… they have all the support in the world. It’s only sorta true, but I’m going to give it my all.
But you know what? This option isn’t exactly available to most people. My kids get a full life of having a Ladies Illustrated Primer walking around with them. That’s not what most people experience.
Holy tomato I love my job.
My kids are in touch with their bodies. They know what they like and don’t like and they consider their preferences to be absolutely worthy of consideration at all times. Good prey act like it doesn’t matter what happens to them. They often don’t know what their preferences even are. “And as much as we cannot guarantee our own safety in this life, we can build resilience to weather what may come.”
I can never guarantee that my children will be safe. Not truly. Not completely. But I can teach them a variety of skills that will increase their likelihood of not only escaping from a lot of traumas but being able to cope with the inevitable tragedies in life.
My children will experience loss and pain. That is a non-negotiable part of the human condition. I know that. I’m trying to teach them how to ride the waves.
We took a break from the screens. The kids begged me to go back to the beach. It’s supposed to start storming tonight and rain mostly till we leave so I said yes. Even though it scared the absolute shit out of me. The kids kept asking me to go sit with the grown ups and just let them play.
No. No. No.
I sat between them and the ocean. There were four good waves where they started getting dragged out to sea and I grabbed them and bodily pulled them back to shore. They stopped arguing with my presence after the second grab. But they really didn’t want to stop working on the dam they were building.
They are fucking obsessed with building dams this trip. They have built them in little itty bitty creeks, rivers, lakes, and the ocean. It was awesome watching them lecture much older girls about how “We have to find a variety of materials to help provide structural integrity! Just sand won’t hold!”
That was why I had a hard time stopping the play. It was so… intense for them. But that ocean doesn’t fuck around. Lots of places are currently flooded and people die from being swept into the ocean all the time. It’s not a game. There are no take backs. The ocean is bigger than all of us.
After the fourth time when I grabbed them and I felt like I barely pulled out of the wave I said, “Ok! That’s it! I’m done!”
The kids didn’t really argue with me. They spent over an hour saying repetitively after we got back to the hotel room, “I think you just saved my life. Wow. You care that much. You are going to stand right there so you can save my life. I think you just saved my life.”
My response is, “I brought you into this world and I’m not giving up on you yet.”
They snuggled with me and looked a bit stunned.
The ocean is not something to fuck around with.
Want to know something kind of hilarious? I had a similar experience with the kid who kicked me in the throat at a group beach trip.
The ocean is bigger than you. I don’t give a shit how strong you think you are. The ocean is bigger than you. Never fight the ocean. You will lose.
So yeah. I think I’m done. If it is storming I am definitely not going down there with the kids. If we want to swim in between rain bursts they have a pool. That is risk enough with a damn thunderstorm.
You have no idea what you mean to me. No forking duh I am going to keep you out of the ocean when it is dragging you like that and you are screaming out in fear. That is my job.
It is both my job to teach you to respect that power and my job to protect you from it as you gain enough experience to have proper respect. It’s a complicated operation.
I think I am really feeling the need to cross reference all of these experiences because I am trying to understand the scope and effects and structure of rape culture. What does it even mean?
Do you know who really taught me I didn’t deserve rape? Sex workers. Grown ass women who were god damn sure what was and wasn’t ok to do to them. I know women who have been sex workers for decades and members of the kink communities for decades who have never been assaulted. I study them with a more than just friendly interest. I want to understand their instincts.
I want to teach those instincts to my children and people who aren’t sex workers have never been able to break them down in a way I can understand. They specifically can talk about what they do to manage risk. I know vanilla women who have never been assaulted. They don’t understand why that is true. They just got lucky.
So I talk to the people who can actually give me the information I seek. I am shameless and mercenary about it.
I’m not teaching my kids to be sex workers. I’m teaching them to think of their body as belonging only to them and never to anyone else.
I am doing my absolute best to raise people who will react indignantly if someone tries to abuse them. My kids interrupt me if they think my behavior is getting near a line. They are immediate in their ability to say what is or isn’t ok about what is happening to their body. It is stunning to see.
I have labored for so many years to try and develop those skills.
Sometimes I feel so jealous I want to shove my head through a window. Just to get that feeling away from me.
My brother used to put his head through windows. They made him wear a helmet whenever he wasn’t in a building with safety windows.
We have really liked hurting ourselves in my family for a long time. I feel so grateful that my children showed mild inclination and were quickly reassured that it is not the right decision to hurt yourself when you are upset. Ask for help figuring out how to handle your feelings when you feel overwhelmed to that point. Your parents will listen to you no matter what.
You don’t have to feel pain. We can maybe help.
I feel so grateful that I found a sperm donor who had excellent genetics and sincere interest in being a really involved parent. This is a wonderful experience to watch.
But Noah has committed rape. And so have I.
Do I think all rapists belong in jail?
Jimminy Christmas don’t ask me.
This rape culture shit is complicated.
I want my children to be able to do better. I want all the children to have better. Education is the single best route to understanding diverse people and life experiences.
I honestly don’t know what else to do. I need to pick up the kids soon. I’m going to stop.