Category Archives: other peoples writing

Research I should pay for

https://business.highbeam.com/435395/article-1G1-171858947/impact-sexual-coercion-psychological-physical-and-sexual

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0886260513506052 (slightly summarized/interpreted here: http://www.medicaldaily.com/repetitive-sexual-assault-affects-psyche-more-we-ever-thought-284542)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3777339/     from this one:

The latest amendment of the Indian Penal Code concerning rape laws in 2013 claims to be not only gender neutral, but also worded broadly. However, regarding the definition of force and consent, it continues to be ambiguous and fails to address many issues. An example is the exemption from marital rape which assumes marriage to be a generalized sort of consent for a man to have sexual intercourse with a woman whenever he wants. Problems in interpretation of consent also exist in cases in which the defendant and complainant are non-married acquaintances.

https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1471-2458-11-29

http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/violence/global_campaign/en/chap6.pdf

from a book

I’m reading Bessel Van Der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score and he says, “Social support is not the same as merely being in the presence of others. The critical issue is reciprocity(emphasis original): being truly heard and seen by the people around us, feeling that we are held in someone else’s mind and heart. For our physiology to calm down, heal, and grow we need a visceral feeling of safety. No doctor can write a prescription for friendship and love: These are complex and hard-earned capacities. {…} Many traumatized people find themselves chronically out of sync with the people around them. Some find comfort in groups where they can replay their (trauma). Focusing on a shared history of trauma and victimization alleviates their searing sense of isolation, but usually at the price of having to deny their individual differences: Members can belong only if they conform to the common code. Isolating oneself into a narrowly defined victim group promotes a view of others as irrelevant at best and dangerous at worst, which eventually only leads to further alienation.”

He goes on, of course. I’m quoting from page 81.

That seems real relevant to some of my shit.

Sleeping is for when Noah is home.

I really should sleep. Instead I’m…. uhh… reading Reddit. It’s a fascinating thread about poverty.

But this other one is one is a super neat thing about educating students who come from a variety of kinds of poverty. This is good stuff for anyone who provides direct instruction. How do you help your kids overcome deficits?

Blatantly stealing without consent.

Noah said this:

“Another thing I said, and should say again: I know you feel like you’ve been restricted to being just a wife and mother. But between writing two books and running a marathon, you have done several bucket-list-level things that other people usually never manage, while being a world-class wife and mother. You’re amazing. (And the road trip! Which I didn’t mention, but is also bucket-list-level, though less distinct from the “mother” role the way you did it.)”

oooooooh

“I’ve said before — hey, here’s video of me saying it — that one of the unexpected costs of being female is that people keep holding you accountable for other people’s behavior. You thought you were just a person, but it turns out that you are a wizard. You control the actions of others by the way you choose to dress and walk and talk and live your life.”

 

Maybe it isn’t just a child of crazy alcoholics thing?

Peripheral

I asked my current longest running friend how she experiences my emotional ups and downs. She said “Peripherally because mostly I’m focused on me.” It was… humbling in exactly the right way. It was a reminder that the people who love me don’t have to come on the emotional roller coaster with me. They can love me and hear about my life and support me without being traumatized. My experiences are peripheral to their lives. It’s… kind of a freeing way of looking at it.

I don’t know how much to center myself. I don’t know how much impact I have on other people. I don’t know how much they can withstand from me. I don’t know this partially because people are all so different. I have been blessed with friends who can hear about some severe traumas without being damaged. But lots of people can’t even handle mildly upsetting things without freaking out, let alone trauma. So calibration is a bitch.

On the way home from the grief ritual on Saturday I got news that I didn’t like. If I was under the delusion that talking about a road trip for multiple years before I did it would result in people making sure they were home when I come to their city….uhm I am now back in tune with reality. The folks I know make their plans without consulting with me. Lots of folks I wanted to see (I’m up to like 8 different people across the country) aren’t going to be home when I come through town. The… ironic part is how many of them will be in the bay area when I am in their home states. I am having a hard time not feeling specifically avoided. I live in the bay area and you don’t come when I’m there to see me. You come when I am in your city. It… it is hard to not take personally. I’ve been planning this road trip for years. People could have asked me about conflicts. They didn’t. Now I can either change my plans (to make a long trip even longer) to see them or give up the idea of seeing them.

Which is why it is good to be reminded that I am peripheral to other peoples lives and I shouldn’t act like I am at the center. I’m really not. Folks don’t schedule around me. Hoo boy folks don’t schedule around me.

I think this would be easier if it were one person I was having this experience with. Then I could decide how much I prioritize that specific person and make a decision and move on. But once you start stacking that many people and that many conflicts… it gets exponentially more complicated.

I’m having conflict with my plans from five separate people in Portland. That’s… that seems to be a sign I shouldn’t go to Portland. If 5/8 of the people I go there to see won’t be available and one of the people I do want to see has been coming to the bay area without talking to me over the last year so I’m all butt hurt… Maybe Portland wasn’t meant to be part of the road trip? I could take it as a sign to save myself a thousand or so miles of travel. But then I feel like I’m not proving my love to the 3/8 people who are still there.

I’m having internal conflict over my adopted dad coming to the bay area multiple times without bothering to have dinner with us. Why the fuck should I keep trying to create a relationship with you when you come to my area without even the smallest of effort in my direction? It’s not a relationship if I am carrying all of it. But you know what? He didn’t ask me to be my dad. He didn’t ask to adopt my kids. I asked him. And I have to take what he feels like giving. I don’t get to demand more.

But I spent this weekend at a grief ritual. And I spent this weekend reading The Art of Asking by Amanda Fucking Palmer. So I’m in a funny place with regards to my feelings about “just stop asking people for love.”

That’s what cutting Portland out of the road trip would mean for me. It would mean that I am not able to go to that city with my heart in my hands saying, “Please love me.” I feel pathetic about it, but that’s a lot of what I do with my traveling and my life experiences. I go about and meet people I’ve known for a long time and people I have just met and I energetically ask them to love me. Please think I am worthy of humanity and decency and love. I’m scared that I am not deserving. And I need it affirmed over and over.

You need ten positive things to balance out every negative thing you hear about yourself. I spent the first 25 years of my life hearing 1,000 bad things for every good thing I heard. I am spending my adulthood trying to convince myself I am not what I was told I am.

But asking people to love you this way means risking rejection.

Part of my problem is that I have too many expectations of people. I really do. If I were actually content with five minutes of attention from the people I love I wouldn’t feel so disappointed. They can eke out five minutes. They can’t eke out two days. I’m not saying anything bad about them for that. They are where they are. And I am where I am.

I have spent most of my life using physical pain to remind me that I can’t ask for help because people don’t actually care very much. Now everyone in my life really wants me to stop hurting myself. And things are better than they were–more people are willing to demonstrate caring than I have ever experienced. It is getting better year by year. But I am not good at keeping my needs in check. I’m not good at ensuring that I don’t overwhelm people.

I am trying to learn the skills to deal with rejection without feeling like I should die. My hyperbole is not because of anyone in my life right now. It is because I have felt like I should die since early childhood. I’m looking for signs that I should or shouldn’t die. As soon as I feel like there is more weight on the side of no really I shouldn’t be here any more I try to leave. I haven’t tried to leave in 18 years. I was taught that the penalty for trying to leave and failing is really bad. Unless I’m willing to go swim out into the ocean until I can’t come back… I probably won’t attempt suicide again. My gestures are used up. Next time it has to be effective and no take backs.

I’m still weighing every rejection. I’m still tossing evidence into a sack towards the inevitability that I should die today because some day that day will come. Some day it will be the day I should die. It is not avoidable.

I notice something in the cycles of asking for support that I go through. If I ask a lot of people at once for something I don’t want very much… it usually works out. If I ask one person for something I want very much… it rarely works out. One example that is shallow and petty but small and easy to describe is the leather dress. I lived with my Owner for three years. We had a very intense relationship. I did not ask him to buy me things. He bought food for me in restaurants and that was it. I bought all groceries for the house. We were both incredibly sensitive to the idea that he was my Sugar Daddy and he was therefore careful to not pay me.

Isn’t that kind of funny? He wanted to make sure our relationship was “clean” so he would safely not provide very much support. Ha.

Anyway after being together for just shy of 4 years we were at a leather conference. I found a leather ball gown I was simply in love with. It was gorgeous. It was way out of my budget. I had never before asked him to pay for any of the ridiculously large fetish wardrobe I bought because he wanted me to wear those clothes. I didn’t ask him to pay for the 20+ pairs of shoes I bought because he wanted me to wear them. I didn’t own any of those shoes two years after I left him. Most of them were gone in three months. I hated those shoes. But I had to buy them to make him happy. I lived on $14,400/year and he made over $250,000. Anyway.

So I wanted this dress and I asked him to buy it for me. I said it could be my birthday and Christmas and everything put together. He said no. He said it wasn’t worth it to him to buy it for him. This happened in July. We broke up in August. Want to know what is funny? Noah organized my other-lovers and bought the dress for my birthday in September. I didn’t ask my other-lovers for the dress. I just cried on my blog.

I still have the dress. I wear it sometimes. It is one of the few items of fetish wear I have left. Mostly I’ve passed things on to people who are actually into that kind of thing. I used to have a wardrobe that made fetish models and professional dominatrixes drool. I’m not a fetishist though.

I spent a lot of this grieving ritual thinking about how I need to forgive myself for having needs that are in specific shaped boxes. I am not going to get those boxes filled because friends don’t work that way. I could maybe get the needs met if I was open to the universe supplying some random person–that’s how things work out for me. But as long as I get into this place where I create fantasies of doing x, y, and z with a, b, and c because I love them… I’m mostly going to be disappointed. My friends are not programmable. They don’t have the same interests and impulses as me.

This is what makes things so tricky. I have very specific needs and wants. People aren’t Burger King. You can’t have it your way.

A friend suggested that I negotiate differently. Instead of offering a Thing I’m up for, try to negotiate two or three things that might work for both. Thing is, I’m negotiating with anywhere from 3-25 people in a week. I can’t be that flexible. I run into bandwidth limitations.

I am not physically nor emotionally capable of being that open-endedly flexible with that many people. Maybe other people could… I can’t.

I will lose me. I understand that other people can keep themselves while being very flexible. That is awesome for them. That’s not me.

As I read Amanda Palmer’s book I kept thinking, “I have tried to have similar trust in the universe. That is part of how I got raped by 12 people. Uhm… This doesn’t work equally well for everyone.”

I feel like the term “Survival Sex” is only fairly recently added to my working vocabulary. It is… not exactly sex work because money doesn’t exchange hands. It is having sex with people in trade for food or housing. I’m struggling with not having the right goods to trade for my needs any more. Once upon a time I could trade sex and get most of the immediate needs I had met. Now I can’t trade sex for a variety of reasons and I don’t know what currency I have that is of value. My attention? But I bother people so much.

If you look at history there are people who can ask and have their needs met and it is like magic and then there are people who ask and get spit on. A lot of it depends on who you know. How magical is your safety net? The fact that Amanda Palmer had so many people with extra money to throw at artists is part of why she has done so well. If she had not grown up in that net… it would be a very different story.

It is a lot easier to trust that people will meet your needs when your needs have been basically met your entire life. It is not so easy to believe when there have been brief shining moments when all of your needs were met for brief moments and mostly… not so much.

I don’t know how to stop taking it out on my friends that my needs are too big for any of them. If my friends meticulously did every single thing I wanted from them… I would probably still feel this way. My problems are existential and not logistical. I get a lot of assistance and cooperation from friends. My friends do wonderful things with and for me. I can pinpoint problems in the system but… mostly my friends are ridiculously good to me. No, people don’t schedule their lives around me. I’m peripheral. But what they have to spare they hand me generously. It isn’t their fault that it isn’t enough to meet my needs.

Is it my fault? Is it anyone’s fault? I worry about fault so much partially because when I talk about how people aren’t meeting my needs people are quick to assume I’m blaming them. If they feel blamed for my problems they are more likely to cut me out of their lives and then I will be that much further from having my needs met.

You can’t talk about the fact that what you are getting in inadequate. You will cease getting any help at all.

Watch how people treat people of color who complain about the system. If you say, “This isn’t meeting my needs” people will say, “Fine then I won’t help you at all you ungrateful bastard.”

I don’t know what I want from people. Not really. I can come up with imaginary scenarios that would take 20 years of back story to make possible but beyond that… I don’t really know.

I want to feel seen.

In the class part of the ritual Sobonfu said, “If someone is crying and alone in my village someone will come and sit with them. If they don’t start talking, the listener will go get more people. If a small group isn’t enough to get the person to start talking we will get the whole village together to listen. Some problems are so big they cannot be carried by one person or by a small group. The whole village has to see and hear the problem before it can be resolved.”

I feel like that. I feel like there isn’t much of anything that people can do for me at this point beyond seeing and hearing me. I want to feel like an integral part of the system. I want to feel like my pain is so important that many many people care enough to take time out of their day to just see it. So that it can feel real. So that I can put it down. So that I don’t have to metaphorically spend all day clutching it and screaming “Look! Look Just fucking look.”

I don’t want to be disposable.

I’m afraid of treating my friends like they are disposable. I’m afraid I have no path to being correct and meeting my needs and their needs.

Part of my problem dealing with people comes from scale issues. I have an unusually large net of people. They are all fairly loose connections, but I have them all over the place. Weak connections lead to a safer and happier and more successful life. But how do you decide how much energy to give to weak connections?

I think that part of the relief when the Godmamas dumped me is like when a company fires an employee and gets to wipe their vacation time off the books. It is no longer an outstanding debt the company might have to face at any point. I left space in my heart and mind for them. They didn’t want it. They told me no over and over for years. But I left that space open. I tried to cram other people into gaps and holes around the area I was leaving for them. It’s like doing a computer defrag on my emotional priorities.

Ok, you want to be not important. Ok.

All of the people who have made conflicting plans are people I really like and I don’t want to defrag them out of my life.

I feel like there is no way to win.

Either I absorb all the disappointment and sadness and regret and keep coming back to beg for love another time or I give up on the person as a source of support.

This is that black and white thinking that mentally ill people are supposed to “work on”.

It’s not either/or. But I don’t know what it is.

Why am I doing the road trip? For a whole bunch of reasons. Because I want my kids to meet people all across the country and find out that their social skills need heavy adaptation from environment to environment. Because I want my kids to physically see this country so that when we talk about geography and history they have real schema to match things up with. Because I have wanted to do a trip like this my whole life and I never had anyone who wanted to do it with me and I’m too chicken shit to go alone. Because I can. Because I think we are going to reach a point in history where the carbon cost is going to be too high and people can’t do this any more. I want to do it while I can.

Because my cousin sneered at me while we were preparing for the New Zealand trip, “Why are you going overseas when you haven’t seen all of this great country.” Bitch, I’ve seen more of this country than you. It isn’t that great. Shut up.

That cousin hasn’t ever liked me. It wasn’t my fault she disliked me. She moved to Georgia not long after I moved in with Auntie and Uncle Bob for the first time. She cried telling her father that she was sorry she was taking his grandchildren away from him. He said, “That’s ok. I have Krissy.” My cousin never forgave me.

You know what? Uncle Bob dropped me when a younger and more sycophantic girl came along. He dropped that girl when another younger girl came along. You can get over hating me for stealing his love. I didn’t steal it. It was never really mine. He wanted a role and I couldn’t give him the role he wanted. I’m not grateful enough.

I had too much abuse mixed in with my not-really-good-enough support. Some boxes of Fruity Pebbles didn’t solve my problems and everyone kind of hated me for that.

If I could be blithe and capricious with seeing my friends things would work out much better. If I could accept the gift of their friendship and hold it in my open hand without grabbing and crushing it… things would work out better.

But I’m needy and desperate and sad and lonely. Even when I’m in a house full of people who love me. This is clearly not about the people who are currently in my life. This is not about the deficiency in behavior or planning or whatever from the people I know.

This is about a hole inside of me the size of Alaska.

If I’m going to be kind of an asshole about it I would say, If my friends weren’t so cool I wouldn’t be so upset about only getting a small slice of them. But man that’s a dick move.

I can’t actually handle that big of a slice of most of my friends. I start flipping out. I literally shake and I get nasty and difficult. Which is part of what makes my entitlement and possessiveness such a problem. I want them. I want all of them. Then I’m an asshole.

Like I did with Sarah. I want Sarah. I want to live with her and be with her all day every day. Just because I want it that doesn’t mean I can do it in a way that is healthy for both of us. My needs are too big. Her needs are too big. Our needs conflict in very complicated ways. It isn’t about either of us doing something wrong we just aren’t compatible as house mates. That happens.

I need a degree of rigidness and predictability that is very hard for almost everyone. That isn’t about anyone doing me wrong. It’s a recognition of the fact that people can be very complicated. If I don’t have that rigidness in my life then I have breakdowns in my behavior. That rigidity is how I have learned to compensate for not having the support I needed. I created the structure and support I needed for myself by myself but there is a cost.

That cost comes in how much I can trust other people. I have to be able to pick up the pieces if their best isn’t good enough. I have to be able to recover from feeling rejected. I have to be able to feel like I still have a self who is deserving of life at the end of the day. That is not something that other people are responsible for nor can they have serious impact on how it turns out.

The thing is, if everyone I knew catered their whole lives around me and scheduled around me and constantly pestered me to center me in their lives… I would implode. I could not do that. I would reject everyone, stop answering the phone and email and hide in my closet for months.

My friends really aren’t put in a position to be very successful with me. I’m sorry for that.

What I want is friends who are off doing their things. Their things inspire me. Their things remind me that it takes all kinds and all of these diverse, interesting, busy people are necessary to have the world be this fabulous.

And that means I have to take what is left over and find a way to cobble it into enough.

I am really scared that I will have to bail part way through the road trip because I will not have the emotional nor physical stamina to do such a journey alone with the kids. In order to spend quality time with the people we love in Portland I would have to make the trip longer and show up earlier. I don’t think I can bear that cost right now. I think that given that 5/8 of the people we love in Portland will not be available… I should take that as a sign from the universe to come back to Oregon another time. I will not run out of chances.

But I’m scared that if I make that choice I am giving up on those friends. I’m afraid that not putting in the extra effort to force it to work means I am not dedicated enough and I do not deserve those relationships and I will not be given access to them in the future.

I’m afraid that if I decide to not go to Portland during the road trip it will be in large part because I’m saying “Fuck you” to Dad because he didn’t see me when he came to the bay area. He was about 1/3 of the reason I deleted my Fetlife account. I don’t want to see evidence that I’m not that important to you. I don’t want to know. I mean, I know I’m not that important. But I don’t want to read about you talking to your friends about your excitement about visiting them. You don’t visit me. You don’t call me. You don’t email me. I contact you. Or we have no contact.

Yeah, that’s how my relationships with “fathers” go.

Portland is very wrapped up in my feelings about Dad. We usually stay with him when we go up. And right now…

Right now I can’t ask. I can’t ask him for love or support or anything. I can’t ask him to acknowledge that I am alive. I just can’t. He doesn’t want to. If he wanted to be part of my life he knows where I am. He chooses not to.

I…

It isn’t something he has to give.

So when I’m talking about Portland all of my conflicting feelings about all of the wonderful people there crash into each other. And it makes all of the processing ramp up several notches in intensity. I’m not processing how I feel about accommodating Person A. I’m thinking about how I can fit in Person A, Person B, Person C, Person D, Person E, and all of them have conflicting schedule limitations and issues.

Cutting Portland out would mean we had time to get to Missouri. Where one of my online-support-group friends lives. She has twins who are right in the middle of the ages of my kids. I’ve been talking to her about parenting stuff for years. She mailed me artwork for my wall when I was having the break down around Uncle Bob’s death and divorcing my family. She has sent me letters and emails over the years.

So cutting out Portland isn’t just about whether or not I want to say “Fuck you” to Dad or whether I want to try to work around everyone else’s travel schedule. It’s also about whether or not this road trip is about cementing old connections or making new ones.

Portland will still be there in the future. I guarantee that even if this trip doesn’t work out… we’ll get back to Portland. The folks who live there are an intense draw. Even if I get mad at them sometimes. Even if sometimes I feel feelings because I am not the center of their life and THAT TOTALLY SUCKS, YO. I will get back to Portland.

Missouri… maybe. Maybe not. This may be the only or one of two times I will ever go there in my whole damn life.

What is this trip about? Fuck if I know.

But you know what? I walked out of the weekend feeling less upset. I stopped feeling really guilty about how I’m handling the throat kicking incident. If I lose the home school group that’s ok. They were never mine to begin with.

I’m going to be really sad if I lose some of the important Portland people in my life. I can live with not seeing them this year, even if it is disappointing. I don’t want to live with losing them forever. That’s so much harder.

I’m going to close with a quote from Amanda’s book:

We make countless choices every day whether to ask or to turn away from one another. Wondering whether it’s too much to ask the neighbor to feed the cat. The decision to turn away from a partner, to turn off the light instead of asking what’s wrong.

Asking for help requires authenticity, and vulnerability.

Those who ask without fear learn to say two things, with or without words, to those they are facing:

I deserve to ask

and

You are welcome to say no.

Because the ask that is conditional cannot be a gift.

This is what is so hard about me asking my friends for things. I wait to ask until the no hurts me. I have refrained from asking for thousands of small, petty things because I was afraid. Because I don’t want to overwhelm or bother people. So I wait until it is a crises. Then I ask. Then I can’t absorb “no”.

Which means I’m damning everyone from the beginning. I’m not asking for gifts. I’m asking for… investment. I’m asking for responsibility.

You can’t ask your friends to be responsible for you. Then they aren’t your friends any more. They are your wards or your parents or your guardians or something.

I damn myself over and over again. Because I cannot ask when it is just a gift. Because I am so scared. Because my needs have never been very important, even when they really needed to be.

This weekend I had an interaction with a person in which they expressed that part of their goal during the ritual was to not feel pain. I kind of scoffed at that, because I’m an asshole. The person said it at the beginning of the day on Saturday before the ritual proper had started.

I found those words sticking in my head all through the day. I just… couldn’t make myself grieve the way I did last time at the ritual. I didn’t have the hysterical screaming and flailing in me. I didn’t need to beat my head until I couldn’t raise it from the pillow anymore. Instead I found myself just curling up in the fetal position to cry softly.

It was… kind of weird. I’m not really a “let it flow gently over you” kind of person.

The next morning I found the person and told them about my experience the day before. Their face lit up. They were so glad to have had that impact on someone. I apologized for scoffing and said, “I think I needed to hear exactly that. Thank you.”

On Sunday, Sobonfu asked everyone to touch one another more. Even if you are normally a non-touching person… let people touch you. You need to feel like you aren’t alone. You need to physically feel that a person is there with you in your grief.

I’m really a no-touching person.

At one point in the day I was grieving and it turns out that the person who had said they didn’t want to experience pain was my supporter. (Part of the purpose of the grief ritual is that when you are grieving you are always supported. There is a person there to help you however you need.) This person decided to do massage work on me while I was crying. Eventually I moved around so I was lying on my belly just letting it happen.

It was almost magical. I get a lot of body work done. I experience a lot of physical pain and I know a lot of ways to manage it. I do a lot of yoga/stretching… All The Things. I’ve been getting somewhat regular massages since I turned 18 because other wise I get back spasms and spend a lot of time lying on the floor crying and unable to deal with my life.

This was a really transformative body work experience. I walked in with multiple places screaming out in intense pain. I walked out having my pain halved. She didn’t work on me for very long and it wasn’t intense work. But she knew where to press. And it was the physical contact in conjunction with the crying.

In that moment it was ok for me to be asking for support. It wasn’t pathetic. It wasn’t inappropriate. It was what we were all there for. It was entirely appropriate.

I feel like part of my problem is that asking for support puts people in the position where they might have to say no to me. People don’t like saying no. I try not to put them in that position. Which means I wait until it is too urgent. Then I can’t hear no.

It’s a problem. It’s a bad cycle. I’m having a hard time climbing out.

Part of the difficulty springs from the fact that there is no right answer. You just do your best. That’s all anyone has to give.

+/- FogCon and health

+ Spending time with Sarah at the conference was lovely.

– Working on all three days meant I spent a lot of time working and very little time enjoying panels. That was poor planning on my part. I only made it to panels on one day.

+ Going on the train with the kids. That was fun.

– Next time I will not pick restaurants that are so far away and make reservations so I feel like we HAVE TO do the whole fucking walk. That was dumb.

+ Took the girls swimming and we had a lot of fun.

– Boo stupid hotel telling us the pool was closed on the website so we had to buy new damn bathing suits.

– Kids taking off from the adult they were supposed to be with and getting in an elevator alone.

+ Didn’t have many hypervigilance symptoms all weekend. I wasn’t scared. I was very relaxed. I even slept fairly well even if I didn’t sleep enough. I did have some anger surges but they were usually… connected to things that kind of deserved some anger. LIKE KIDS RUNNING OFF AND GETTING IN A FUCKING ELEVATOR ALONE. So I don’t feel like it was PTSD symptomatic. And I calmed down and didn’t rant.

-/+ Started bleeding Saturday morning. This is actually a really good thing because my pattern with the PMDD is the day I start bleeding I have pain, but all of a sudden my mood improves. I’m much more tolerant that day. I’m kind of self-absorbed thinking about the physical pain so I don’t react to what other people are doing as much. But it means I am in a lot of pain.

– This gets another negative. This sucks. So much pain. Insane pain. Holy fucking shit can I beat my joints with hammers so that they stop fucking hurting hurting hurting hurting. They would hurt less if I hit them with hammers.

– Naturopath won’t work with insurance even a little bit.

– Not happy about some kid interactions. I intervene faster than some other parents. I have a very hard time with the fact that other people are fine with their kids experimenting with hitting and kicking my children. If it was once I wouldn’t even notice. It’s not once. It has happened almost half a dozen times. I’m not sure how to address this. Yes, kid is very young. That means it should be the parents responsibility to be shadowing the kid at all times to be preventing that behavior in my opinion. That’s how I got my kids through those phases. Yes it was labor intensive. Yes, it kind of sucked for me. I wanted the kids. There is no such thing as “helicopter parenting” with the under 3 set. That’s called “parenting”. That’s not even true. Helicopter parenting is not letting your kid climb the ladder to go down the slide. Helicopter parenting is not letting your ten year old walk to the convenience store. Helicopter parenting is calling to yell at the college professor for not giving your kid an “A”. But if you watch your kid kick someone else and choose to not intervene the first time that’s a problem. It’s not free range parenting either. I think what I’m really doing is hoping that we will come back from the trip and this problem will have evaporated as a “stage”. (No I haven’t talked to the parents. I don’t know them that well and I feel awkward as fuck. It’s never a good time.)

+ I bought so many cool books. I’m terribly excited. Including a new comic book series about a neat sounding re-imagining of Beowulf. Looking forward to sharing it with the kids.

– Books are heavy. I feel like I practically broke my back on the train on the way home carrying the books. Yes, I know that e-reading is a solution to this. It really isn’t a good solution for me for a variety of reasons. Everyone is different!

+ So forking proud of the kids for how they handled carrying their stuff on the trip. They were pretty good about staying on task and focusing and carrying on when they wanted to quit.

+ I had an alcoholic drink on two of the nights of the conference and throughout the whole weekend I HAD SOLID POOP. I don’t understand. Yes, I stuck with whiskey because it is on the IBS approved list, but sometimes it is still problematic. Belly, I give you gentle and loving pats. Good job. Maybe it was all the fucking vegetables and fruit I ate. I tried so hard to be good to you even though we were traveling. I love you. Please be nice to me like this more often.

+ I had a lot of neat conversations with people. I miss those kinds of environments so much. One of the harder things about home schooling is the lack of colleagues. I talk to home schooling parents, but I don’t don’t use curriculum. So we aren’t talking technique all that much. This weekend was really fulfilling in that way. I felt like, Yes I have studied this shit, By Gawd.

+ A writer I have long admired caught me in the hallway alone at a random moment and all but invited herself over to dinner to see what I’ve done with my house after I described the painting. My heart went pitter patter. Oh yes. You did that. You totally just did that. You said, “I want to come over for dinner. Send me an email so we can match up our schedules.” Oh. Oh. *fluttery hands* You did that! It’s my dream come true and she doesn’t even read my blog. *swoon*

+ The panel I was on went so well. I’m really happy it worked out. True to form people came up to me and said, “I got a lot out of it. It was really intense.” That’s me. I may not be able to bring the funny but I’ve got bushels of intense. 

+ Got an email this weekend inviting us to a speaking gig on Tuesday. I found baby sitting. I need to make a resume. Even though this event isn’t a “Stanford” event… it’s at Stanford. I was invited to speak at Stanford. I need a resume. Yeah, I’m a “stay at home parent” but I’m doing shit.

+ It was neat seeing the evolution of people. I saw a lot of people I have known very distantly for my entire adult life. A number of folks I met when I was 18 or 19. They seemed… maybe confused by my lifestyle choices? I couldn’t read the facial expressions that well. The comments were mostly neutral with a hint of snark and that is downright positive for most of them. I feel like I am on the path I want to be on. It was neat feeling very affirmed in that.

+ It is nice feeling like looking around at other people convinces me that I am growing past role models. The things I want to do are not things that other people want to do. So I don’t have role models. I need to just do them and be ok with that. It’s funny to me how I can feel that in some communities and I’m still struggling to be “ok” with my identity in other parts of my life/self.

(Which isn’t to say that I think I am “better” than other people. I’m not. But I’m dealing with very different logistics and that’s ok.)

+ I am so grateful that I live in the time and place I live. And I’m really happy to be home.

The five month trip is going to be hard. I’m thinking hard about how we can bring home with us. It’s coming up soon. 17 weeks until we leave. That doesn’t feel like very long. Four more months. I’m excited. I’m terrified. I have wanted to do this for so long. How are we going to keep up our Adventurous Spirits!?

Time will tell.

Fascinating.

I just read a blog article from a white woman aimed at other white people. It was fascinating how many times she told white people to just stay home and not go to protests because it is none of our business.

Centering black stories, yes. Telling news reporters not to ask for white opinions at said protests, yes. Not acting like you as a white person are an equivalent target as black people, yes.

Just stay home?

Hm. Well, there’s one way to make it seem like white people don’t care about black issues.

post-interview

It was 45 minutes. She ended it because she was worried about overwhelming me. I managed to not giggle. It’s hard to overwhelm me.

“You want to ask me questions about myself? I can talk all day.” I’m kind of self absorbed.

I think maybe the main thing I would have done differently if I got to steer a bit more towards the end is I would have done a bit more on coping methods: the failures and the successes. Lots of failures to talk about. Oy.

She wants pictures of me. Hopefully recent and some as a child. Does anyone have any pictures of me they particularly like? Eeek.

It will be put in UK print media and potentially online but she isn’t completely sure yet. Oh man. I’ll be sent the text in a week or so to approve/tweak before she sends it out. Apparently I will get paid. I was surprised by that bit.

And it begins.

Did I mention that I finally got the speaker information into the mail for RAINN? I don’t like RAINN as much as I might, but I would be willing to let them send me to high schools to talk to kids. The envelope was ready and just needed postage for many months. I mailed it when I sent the games off to Portland.

Just keep swimming swimming swimming just keep swimming.

Nothing else to do.

Today I will finish the puttering around the house chores I didn’t finish yesterday. I will rest. I will go to the water park. I will eat nachos for dinner.

I will be cuddly and lovey with my kids. Noah gets tonight off so he can get stuff done. So I have a looooooong day ahead of me. That’s ok. I can handle it.

Sometimes I surprise myself.

Interview practice part the second

Hello, I’m Krissy. I’ve had a somewhat unusual life. My father started sexually assaulting me when I was between 14 months (when I potty trained) and when I was 3 years old (when my parents divorced). Those early, formative experiences have shaped most of my life.

The father/daughter incest in my family was only the tip of the ice burg in terms of our problems. My father raped 3/4 children so far as I have been told. He was a serious drug addict and alcoholic. Our family dealt with a lot of physical and emotional violence on top of the sexual assault. When my mom found out about the sexual abuse she divorced him. Then things got worse.

Running from domestic violence is not a life I would wish upon my worst enemy. We lived in dire poverty. We were homeless and dependent on charity for much of my childhood. My mother didn’t have job skills nor education. She truly did the best she could with a monster terrorizing her.

I didn’t grow up so well. I went to 25 schools before I dropped out of high school at 16. I did get a high school diploma through a continuation school experience. Then I went to a series of junior colleges culminating in a trip to university. I hold a BA in English Literature and an expired teaching credential. I did not complete the MA in English Literature I spent seven years working towards because the final exam was handwritten.

I learned handwriting in a school where the teacher was allowed to beat me daily for my poor handwriting. Given that I was already a severely traumatized child the teacher hitting me ensured that I would never have reasonable handwriting. And I have paid the price long-term.

My life has been like that over and over. I have learned reactions or aversions that I developed because of severely abusive environments and now I get to be punished for the rest of my life for being the kind of person who has such reactions.

I wish the incest had been the extent of my sexual abuse. It wasn’t. My father told my brother he was allowed to rape me. Due to him having a severe traumatic brain injury (he was hit by a car when he was 12 and I was 8–it was a terrible accident) he was not physically capable of winning the fights. But I spent a lot of my childhood fighting my brother off of me.

Then I was sent out into a series of low-income neighborhoods with no supervision. All in all I have been raped by twelve men and boys. It took a very long time before I was capable of understanding what I was doing that created safe space for rapists in my life. It took a long time before I understood that the secrecy that was part of my innate behavior only protected bad people.

I have been a writer for a long time. I was given my first journal when I was seven. My sister was mean and terrible to me because she read my journal and mocked me for the contents, which is really sad when everyone is being severely sexually abused. I shouldn’t have been mocked. I should have been helped. But that wasn’t how my family worked.

I have had mixed experiences with trying to report things to law enforcement. With the incest and my father I got excellent support. The San Bernardino Sheriff Department was kind and supportive to me. Those men were some  of the best people I’ve dealt with in my whole life around sexual assault. They believed me. When the detectives came back to see me after interrogating my father for 72 hours straight (it took a long time for him to come down from all the drugs he was on) they were physically green. They told me they had never heard anything so horrible in their whole lives.

Yup, that was my childhood.

When I tried to report other sexual assaults I was given a range of responses from, “We won’t ruin that nice boy’s life for you” to “What else did you expect?” to “You clearly have problems and you should be in therapy not making false calls to the police.” I hate the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Department with the fire of a thousand suns. If their office burnt to the ground I would dance on the cinders. I won’t set the fire but I’d dance.

The primary reason I am not dead is because I have been in court ordered therapy for nearly thirty years. I’m 32. I have seen 21 therapists over the course of my life. Only 4 of them have been truly excellent. I have gotten better at picking therapists as time goes by.

I have been suicidal for most of my life, not too surprising. I was institutionalized for suicide attempts twice as a teenager. Both times were before I got up the nerve to prosecute my father.

I prosecuted my father when I was 16. I had called him on the phone to ask him if I could have a computer for school. He told me I could have a computer if I spent a weekend at his house earning it. I slammed the phone down and called 911 and said, “I need to find out how to report my father for sexually molesting me” and I burst into tears.

Part of what made my life as hard was my lack of vocabulary to even talk about what was happening to me. I didn’t learn the word incest until I was a teenager. I didn’t think that what was happening to me was rape. I thought everyone just did those things.

I had to get old enough and read enough books that I understood that my life wasn’t normal.

So like everyone with a lot to figure out I have turned to writing. Writing allows me to gather my thoughts and figure out my overwhelming emotions. Writing is my lifeline.