Category Archives: personal time

You need to get the chip off of your shoulder

I have gotten this same advice periodically throughout my life. I need to not be hostile. I always have mixed feelings when someone tells me this. It feels like “I don’t like this personality trait so you shouldn’t have it.” Because it sure isn’t true that having this chip on my shoulder will prevent me from having a happy life or friends or a very positive set of relationships. It may absolutely true that I will not be capable of having a positive relationship with you while I have a chip on my shoulder but that’s the price of doing business. Or being alive. You can’t please everyone.

But I am going to have to change. I have absolutely no idea how my personality will need to change to fit in where we are going. I mean, I know that. I know I can’t say “I am who I am and you have to just put up with me.” I also don’t activate the chip on my shoulder quite as readily as I used to for all kinds of good reasons.

But I feel absolutely sick at the idea that I should give up all of my sharpness because I have a partner and that’s going to protect me. First: I don’t wear a ring (my god damn hands hurt) so when I am not with my children and obviously part of a family unit I lose the Mantle of White Motherhood that protects me most of the time now. I know it’s a thing. I know that it is a privilege rarely afforded to mothers who are not white. Second: I don’t want to be dependent on someone thinking a man is going to come after them if they hurt me. Noah has long been clear that we are not in that kind of relationship. If I am going to be protected I need to do it for myself.

Why the hell do you think I went and took classes to learn how to beat the hell out of people? It wasn’t because I thought it was fun. It was because next time I am going to ensure someone crawls away from trying to hurt me.

But if no one starts nothing won’t be nothing and that’s what I hope for. I don’t initiate violence. I really don’t. Sometimes I am quite shocked by how gentle I am in most of my life. I expected to have a more violent life. If I had stayed living with my family or in the communities I grew up in… there would be more violence. Money is my escape path.

No one wants to hit someone who can afford a lawyer. Honestly that is more protection at this point than being married.

But I don’t want to depend on either factor for being safe. Frankly I rely on Glamour. Not in the sense of being pretty or beautiful and dressed up. More in the sense of being able to go from seeming very inviting and non-threatening to being overwhelmingly intimidating and terrifying with just a switch of my emotional state. I haven’t had problems in a long time. I believe this is part of why. The Mantle of White Motherhood has been the rest of it.

Also, I stay home a lot.

We spent this morning talking about how we are going to approach independence for the kids in Scotland. We talked about schema and navigation and trust and mental maps and exploration and time management and money and safety and strengths and gradually increasing competency.

Middle Child asked if the kids will have to buy their own bikes. I said that I believe that transportation should be a parent’s responsibility when possible until a child is grown. However, if they want a new bike because they want a new style instead of needing a new size that’s on you. I think that is fair. So far kids are in agreement.

It was neat trying to explain schema. Noah tried to talk about it in terms of video games and I could tell that it was going over MCs head. I switched to makeup. Kiddo perked right up. What you need to know to put on eye makeup is different from what you need to know for putting on lipstick. Those are both little subtopics, little schemas inside the big schema of putting on makeup. That clicked. Of course we had to have a detour to get a mini-lesson on the differences between eye makeup and lipstick and why it matters (I did not give the lecture). Just to prove concept and all.

I had an interesting night the other night. I tried to wait until late enough that the kids wouldn’t really hear me but Eldest Child is really enjoying Twilight right now so she was up till like 11:30 reading. I was ranting at Noah about my feelings about a whole bunch of things. I don’t have a therapist right now. I haven’t been writing. I haven’t had a Skype call with a friend in a while where I could talk/process/organize my thoughts… I needed to talk.

EC heard me. She of course thought that when I said “fucking brat” I was talking about her. She said she went to sleep with her stomach hurting. We talked about it at breakfast the next morning. I explained very very loose outlines of about 19 different situations that I am coping with and why I am upset with some people and why I need to be able to talk about it sometimes. It is not healthy to shove all of your emotions into a box and put it in a closet and never deal with them. I waited until late at night and I was in my bedroom with my partner. It has to be ok for me to have feelings and to talk about them without hurting anyone.

She relaxed and said she understands. I asked if she has ever heard me talk about her like that. She said not like that, no. I told her that if I ever feel that strongly about her she will hear about it. She relaxed a bit more.

It’s nice being trusted.

We are all talking a lot about how hard it is going through this many transitions at once. We are all struggling through our feelings about relationships changing and our lives being different and what it will mean.

We keep coming back to why we are doing this: we want to be there. We felt better there. We think we have more potential to be healthy and happy there. We want to feel safe. We want to feel like there are not people with guns potentially all over the place.

We want to be in a place where people think that the best way to protect children is not to inflict PTSD on a generation.

Also, we are really over heat. We want water. So much water. I’m sure I’ll get waterlogged at some point but it is going to take years.

I want to live in a city that was designed to be at scale for walking, not a car. We believe that we can create absolutely no end of stuff to do without having to have it provided by other people. We don’t need to pay for entertainment. We like to make and we like to do. We like to walk.

We are so excited.

I am having mixed feelings about all the doors that are closing. They need to close for a million good reasons. But good things can hurt.

Growth hurts. I tell my children that we go through periods of disequilibrium where everything hurts because that is how we brace ourselves for how hard it is to change. It has to become more painful to stay the same before you really want to change.

I’m turning 38 in two weeks and one day. I am a grown ass woman, but I am still becoming who I want to be. I am still turning all of the different skills and traits I have into the person I wish I was instead of being a reaction to things that have happened to me. I’m a lot farther along the path than I thought I would be.

I am reacting to things more in line with my values. I like that. It’s not that I never mess up an interaction, I do. But it’s more rare and the infractions tend to be smaller.

I am happy about that.

I really appreciate the advice that goes “What I would do is….” then I can decide how much I want to be like this person and how much I like how their life is going so I want to try to emulate it. There is so much respect in such a suggestion. It in no way places any sort of assumption that the logistics of one person’s life applies to anyone else.

I told my kids that we should not expect to feel like we have *friends* in the first year. (Outside of Jenny’s family and my kids have been clear with me that they do not yet feel like they know Jenny’s family… it’s still a growing connection for them.)

I am friends with Jenny. That connection is solid. Everything else is still growing. We know that. If you are honest about your starting place it is a lot easier to figure out what to do to change it. We will put our roots into place slowly and carefully.

Some of my roots will have big chips. That’s ok.

I get to go home in fifteen days. Even though it is a very Christian city I am literally moving into a place where my address includes the word Druidh. I feel like we will grow more witchy.

Do no harm but take no shit. Give all respect and show no fear. Find a way or make one. Only boring people stay bored. We are workers, not shirkers.

We will be fine.

Homework (what do I need to work on)

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This morning I am waking up feeling gooey, schmoopy, overwhelming love for my family. Ok. Time to think about the stuff I need to work on about myself.

What are the whack a mole problems that come up? Many of them are problems in me and related to my thinking as much or more as they are rooted in anyone else’s behavior. Like: I really struggle with feeling like I want/need my kids to be more self motivated than they are. Then I get these reminders that they are actually really doing exceptionally well for their ages and developmental levels and my expectations are almost certainly out of whack. My kids have different things they struggle with: my son tends towards passive aggression and my daughter tends towards executive function failures. Ok. That’s not out of line with fairly normal stuff for kids. What I need to work on in myself is feeling more patience with the fact that they struggle in these areas and I have chosen to not put them into school where there would be teams of other adults teaching them how to manage these issues. I choose to be the one who must solve these problems or it is my fault they still exist. Sometimes I struggle with feeling overwhelmed about the magnitude of difficulty of work I have assigned myself. But it isn’t my children’s fault that I assigned myself this role.

The thing is, even though I struggle with some of their behaviors sometimes… I truly like my children and I feel like I have done well turning them into little people to be proud of. It has been the result of massive, overwhelming work on my part. I watch my children night and day and give them little course corrections, assistance, reminders, and help. NO FUCKING WONDER THEY TREAT ME LIKE THEIR EXTERNALIZED BRAIN. I can look at my Eldest Child and tell what she is thinking about with a greater than 90% accuracy rate. “You are having x feeling about y thing. Do you think maybe you should do z?” Her response is always “HOW CAN YOU DO THAT?!?!?! That’s a good suggestion…..”

I only guess my Middle Child’s thoughts and feelings with a more like 40% accuracy rate and he and I both feel a sting because of that. He consciously and deliberately shields his thoughts more. He works on having a blank facial expression. He works on projecting feelings he is not having. He got that from me. I feel like I am letting him down by not being able to read him better. He feels misunderstood and less appreciated. But he works on making it hard. He wants me to find a way to work harder and still read him so that he can feel as understood as EC. That’s complicated.

He got in trouble this week. He set his assignments on Monday. I didn’t add extra shit. He picked what he wanted to do for the week. He needed to get his work done on Thursday so we could go have a visit with the cousins. He didn’t get his work done. I was pissy and impatient because he really didn’t come close and he spent the whole day dawdling and I lost out on a visit too. (I can’t just leave him home and go without him for a list of reasons.) So I told him that since he wanted to just sit around and not get his work done during work time that he could just sit around and do nothing during play time and he could do it in his room without toys. He didn’t have a fun day.

The next morning when he woke up he had a fire in his belly because he didn’t want to miss out on any of his plans or on EC’s birthday fun. He got up super motivated. He got a bunch of his chores done before I even saw him in the morning. The first time I saw him in the morning was when I was waking up and still sitting in bed. He came in timidly and I smiled at him and invited him into the bed for morning snuggle. (We have much better days as a family when we start out with everyone snuggling for at least a few minutes.) He talked about his plan for getting everything done early so that he had a buffer in case he planned poorly and it took longer than he intended.

He got everything done with time to spare.

We walked over to Jenny’s instead of going on a family walk and taking a taxi. On the way we had an hour to talk to each other. The conversation was wide ranging and interesting. I asked him what he thought about the day before when he was in trouble. He said he spent most of the time trying not to think. I said, “So kind of an extended meditation practice?” He said yeah. He didn’t use the word, but he was trying to not catastrophize. He said (barely paraphrased), “I was so grateful that the first thing you did when you saw me this morning was smile at me. It showed me for sure that I was right to try not to think all the super bad thoughts. I made a mistake and I’m going to be able to get over it and you will get over it and we will move on.” I told him that yeah we will move on. He’s a great kid and I love him very much and I need him to trust me. So when I say “Do x so you can have y” if he doesn’t do x he can’t have y.

He said, “I know. It’s part of why I respect you a lot. I know you work really hard at being someone who is honest with me every day.”

I have a lot of fear that part of his passive aggression is an attempt to get back some control from just how controlling I am. It’s not a healthy way to try to get back some of that control. He has a lot more control over his schooling now, but I think he needs to have just a little bit more. I think that when we get a house again he and EC are going to be allowed to shut me out of their rooms for a full year so they can figure out their own tidying habits without me needing to be so fucking controlling because we are packing over and over.

I truly literally have to be this controlling right now or we won’t be able to get packing done with the travel. It’s rough.

When this is no longer necessary I need to give them a bunch of space to try things for themselves and fail.

I really struggle with the fact that they don’t have much in the way of long-term planning skills… but that’s my problem because they are age appropriate or a bit above. I need to control *myself* more, not them in this area.

We have done a lot of work on getting them to see me as an independent person. Frankly, having Her Sweetness has helped. They can see when I need to not take care of them because I have other obligations and both of the big kids are super mature about understanding that they got to be the whole center of my universe for many years and it is wildly uncool for them to not let Her Sweetness have a similar amount of time and energy. We are still struggling on getting them to let me rest without interruption, but they are better than they used to be and if I were willing to set more boundaries I think they would fall into line.

The struggle is I hate setting boundaries with them because that feels like I am doing a mean/punishing thing. I’m not. I’m valuing myself.

I really struggle with valuing myself. I really struggle with saying, “I need to not do anything for anyone because I have to take care of myself.” I think I went to so many doctor visits because every time I walked into an office the medical practitioner would freak out about how badly my body was doing and give me a tiny little bit of support so I could go back and do more work than I am truly physically capable of doing. I’m not going to have that medical team keeping me on life support here.

I have to value myself enough to say no way more and that’s hard. I get so much of my self esteem from doing things for people. From doing work and supporting people I gain the sense that it’s ok for me to keep taking resources for myself because I am sharing as much as I get or more. But this isn’t sustainable.

I don’t actually think the problem is with my kids behaving badly. They are really amazing children. I think the problem is me valuing myself and my need for rest. I absolutely literally require more down time than I give myself. I have to exercise in a fairly regimented way and I haven’t been doing it because I am exhausting myself providing emotional care for other people. That’s not healthy or a good way to be a role model.

I don’t want to teach my kids to be how I am. Which means I need to change.

I need to spend more time resting. I need to spend more time with just adults not taking care of children. I need to turn down opportunities to do labor (emotional and physical) for people. Not because I hate anybody. Not because I am angry and throwing a tantrum. Because I need rest. Because I need to love on me the way I love on my children. Because I need to spend as much time paying attention to my needs as I do to my children’s needs.

I learn a lot from my kids. They work to set boundaries for themselves. They understand that limits exist in their lives for their benefit. They do better and feel better if they exercise and eat healthy food and turn off the screens at night and get good rest.

I need to learn from my children.

Quiet week

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I have been withdrawing a fair bit this week. Noah had the kids for 7 hours on Tuesday. He took the kids down to the shop for necessary stuff on Wednesday and was gone close to 2 hours. I stayed up late last night watching Outlander because I wanted space away from other people’s bodies.

I think it is funny that a cumulative 10.5ish hours of not interacting in a week feels like oh my god I am rejecting everyone and being awful.

Well I’m going out on Sunday for about 5 hours too.

That means that this week I will have less time off from my kids than I used to get when we had a steady babysitter. And I feel like I am being horribly extravagant and selfish.

I need this. I need this a lot. I’m feeling guilty that I’m ignoring everyone so much… but I literally haven’t had this much time off in a week in over a year. It’s a need not a want and I wish I weren’t beating myself up internally for taking the time.

I can’t take so much time off mid-week every week because… Noah needs protected work time. But I should probably be taking a bunch of weekend time off every weekend until we go to Portland. That’s going to be a rough three week stretch alone if I don’t do something to put some spoons back in my drawer.

Growing pains and mistakes

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Many of my friends are traumatized people. When they respond to me or give me feedback… they are not taking careful stock of what I am doing and reacting to my actions. They are responding from a place of wounding. That’s not wrong and it’s not bad and it’s not always irrelevant… but it’s important for me to keep in mind so I don’t flagellate myself to death because they are upset at what I am doing. Their reaction is more about them than me. But I take it hard.

I try hard to ask a lot of different kinds of people about my behavior for that reason. I try to ask people with a wide range of backgrounds and experience. I try hard to regulate myself more strongly off of people who have actual relevant experience in whatever issue I am trying to deal with at the moment.

Sometimes I really fail at that and I spend days raging at myself and feeling like there is absolutely no hope of me ever being better because I have triggered a traumatized person. That’s not very useful for me, my husband, my kids, or even my friends.

I’ve been reading more psych books. Because I’m trying to find the middle path.

No, offering my children a variety of not-so-comfortable inducements that they can try and reject at will is not the same thing as spanking them for being bad. It just isn’t. We are trying things because I am out of cope and some of the things we try are going to be less than optimal and they will fail.

That’s fucking life and it isn’t the same thing as child abuse.

We tried it. The first day they thought it was very useful to them and they wanted to try again. The second day they didn’t like it and they felt kind of bad about it and they said they didn’t want to do that again.

Ok. We won’t do that again. My goal was not to inflict pain or punishment on them. It was to create a less comfortable environment.

The fact that folks would be totally ok with me drugging the shit out of my kids to have a similar kind of behavioral impact is utterly bizarre to me.

I am trying to figure out what lines need to be held. I am going to mess that up sometimes. We renegotiated academic goals about a month ago. We halved the work load. I tried to hold the kids to what they agreed to because that is my job. But it may be that once again the goals we set are not the right ones and we will have to adapt.

I am freaking out partially because I have not stood next to people who did this well. I am faking it. I don’t know what the hell I am doing. All my classroom experience did not prepare me for this part. In a classroom, the standards are arbitrarily set by the state and the students measure up or they fail. I am not setting arbitrary standards for my kids. I don’t have “You must be x proficient” goals for them and thus we are flailing really hard as we figure out what our goals should be and how hard I should insist on meeting the goals the kids claim they want to reach.

This is a process.

But I need to stop screaming.

I don’t have rest. I don’t get much support. Almost everyone who says, “I will help you by doing x” has turned out to be fucking lying and I need to stop allowing anyone to claim they will help me with my kids. It just results in me hating my friends with the fire of a thousand suns because almost no one follows up on what they say they will do.

The people who have absolutely rigorously met the standards they set for me are rare. I can pretty much count them on my fingers. I think that the fact that they go off of one hand is something that I should be celebrating instead of being so upset that the number of people doesn’t reach my toes.

But people keep making promises and not keeping them and that hurts me.

I don’t feel entitled to that hurt and that’s part of the problem. I don’t let myself admit to myself just how much these people are hurting me until I am exploding with rage all over the place because I can’t suppress my feelings anymore. I try hard not to get angry about people saying “I will do x with the kids” and then never doing it because I want to honor that people mean well. They want to be helping me. But the reality is that most of the time they want to feel helpful not be helpful and I need to stop looking to those people. Really almost any people.

We need to find a way to balance this so we can be self sufficient. That is not what I have been trying for…. ever.

The psych book I’m reading right now Born To Be Good talks about how in the US people define themselves as individuals (I’m an artist, a runner, a dancer, a writer) and people in other countries tend to define themselves through their relationships (I’m a daughter, a mother, a wife, a friend, a cousin) and a lot of my problem has been that I have been trying as hard as I can all of my life to define myself through my friendships because the daughter/sister/niece roles failed so abjectly for me.

But my friends have not been able to turn and be stable for me the way that family relationships do for other people and that’s been really destructive to my entire mental health.

Leaning this hard on my friendships for my identity and my self worth has resulted in decades of feeling worthless and like I should kill myself because no one is ever going to prioritize me like I do them. I hurt myself showing up for friendships when I should be selfish and care for myself and that’s stupid.

For the last couple of days I have been trying to process for myself that 50% of all people who hit grade 12 in school are below proficiency. My 5th grader is already writing essays that rival many of the 17 year olds I taught.

Maybe I don’t need to be so worried about them being “at grade level” and doing all the busy work of going through school. My kids have a very solid grasp of grammar and math. They are approximately at grade level. They would probably be B students if they went straight into school right now for the last few months of this school year.

Why am I so freaked out every moment of every day about failing them as a teacher and not preparing them for what they need to know? Because nothing I did was ever good enough to make my friends show up for me in the ways they constantly claimed they would so how can I know if what I am giving my kids will be enough for their future so they can show up and do what they want to do?

Maybe that isn’t entirely my battle to fight.

My kids have been digging in their heels and doing less and less. They were told weeks ago when we reset the metrics that they had to be current in order to go hang out with the babysitter. They then messed around on the boat and did nothing and got a week behind. They have not been interested in catching up since they got here.

Why am I wearing myself out trying to force them through the work necessary to earn the free time they want to have? This is so stupid.

I know that they can get all of their work done in 2 hours a day with time to spare. Maybe I need to give them two hours to do it then kick them out to play outside by themselves while I have down time. If you don’t get your stuff done so you can go with your friend, sucks to be you. Play by yourself and get out of my face. I act like I owe them constant stimulation and entertainment and so do they. And it is turning me into a psycho harpy. This is not working. I can’t be 24/7 stimulation for 3 kids and have anything left for my own health.

I don’t think we should lower the standards to nothing and completely unschool. But I also think that if they want to fail and not earn rewards…. I should let them. I have not been letting them. I have been hurting myself dragging them to their rewards.

Why. What am I teaching them?

That I care way more about their happiness than they have to. I care more about their happiness than my happiness or Noah’s happiness or my health.

Why.

Because I am afraid that if I don’t they will treat me like my friends.

You know what? I am leaving the fucking country because I am so angry about how my friends treat me. I have chased people for years begging for their love. I’m doing the same thing with my kids.

This is stupid.

Maybe if I write it down I can put it down.

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I heard the end. I kind of recognized it as it happened and I kind of recognize it in the rear view mirror.

I like doing things for people. I like feeling useful and valuable and like I am of service. It’s a pretty overly core part of my identity. Many of my relationships involve a lot of me doing work for benefit of other peoples lives. I like being a supporting character in your story. I love you and I want you to have a glorious story arc that has nothing to do with me. So I’ll show up and clean your house.

I’ll drive across state lines to unpack and repack you while you are too depressed and in pain to do it for yourself.

I’ll take you with me on major vacations, even to other countries.

I’ll buy a fucking time share so you can have the vacations you want that you can’t afford.

But when you spend a week ignoring me on the week that was supposed to make up for you ignoring me for a year and you turn to me and casually say, “Oh by the way I need to talk to you about using next years points for a trip with my family” that I am clearly not invited on….

I just because an ATM to you.

No. Done. Stop. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No. No.

Nobody gets to treat me like an ATM. Especially not a rich white person. I don’t think so.

That right there is my line. I can see it very clearly. You stopped seeing this as a relationship where you have to give back. I’m supposed to keep giving to you no matter how shittily you treat me. No matter how much you cancel plans with me because everyone and everything else is more important.

It was a solid year of you canceling 80%. You wanted me holding time open for you so that you could cancel at the last minute. That makes you feel wanted and loved and connected. You could show up if you felt like it. I feel like you very rarely fucking prioritize me while expecting me to prioritize you greatly physically, spiritually, and financially.

Never make someone your priority when you are their option.

I wanted to be as important to you as you are to me. I was an important source of labor and money. You didn’t show up to be support for me.

You promised me that you would have strong relationships with my kids. I can count how many times you’ve seriously spent time with them in the last three years on my fingers.

Stop acting like I can’t track things and notice patterns. I’m not stupid. You make promises you won’t deliver on and you broke my fucking heart.

And you told me that you dropping me was all my fault because I got too angry. A lot of why I was angry is because you make promises and don’t keep them. So this cycle is all my fault.

Ok. I will step out of it. I don’t need to be in it. Then it won’t continue. Then it won’t be my fault. That is the power I have.

I know. It is never your fault you cancel. You are disabled. Hi. According to the very expensive team of people I pay I am disabled. And I am hurting myself by trying to show up for people who have no regard for me or my limits.

When will I decide that I am worth treating like a person of value? Because as long as I keep getting myself into situations where I believe I must stay in the relationship because I have known them for X time and I need them to stay in my life or it means I am bad and unworthy of having relationships…. that’s not a good dynamic. I should keep people in my life if I feel better about myself with the relationship instead of worse.

I turned hard to her when the cheating debacle went sideways. I was not allowed to pour myself into romantic relationships. I tried to have a major non romantic relationship.

It was never as major on the other end. I am very optional. That’s healthy! I need to… understand that this is very optional.

And stop picking the option that makes me cry. Cause hey dumbass, if you keep doing the same thing over and over hoping that someday someone will finally treat you well… fuck it. Move on with your life. There are 7 billion people. Don’t chase people who are going to treat you like an ATM. That’s not psychologically healthy.

Random art/bdsm cross over.

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B is the publicly acceptable way to refer to my friend’s wife so I’m going to say that. I haven’t asked my friend how he feels about being mentioned by name so I’ll still refrain. This is only a bdsm crossover because I know these folks through that community.

B is a HUGE patron of the arts. In her house and in her office there is a ton of art. Her office has a bunch of fancily painted walls by a variety of artists she knows. There are multiple murals or small pieces in different rooms.

She offered me space to paint, if I want. On one hand… I want to say no. I’m tired and that would be work. On the other hand… this beautiful, talented, interesting woman who works with a demographic I target heavily for influencing with my life has invited me to have space to influence how people feel.

She told me that if it would make me happier to do the work they could chain me while I work. I said that is not permitted within the current boundaries of my relationship but thank you for the offer.

That’s… that’s a really cool offer. I have art installations in California. Would I like to also have an art installation in Alaska?

Oh gosh. When I phrase it like that….

My friend who invited me up here to stay… he has a voice. He influences lives all over the world and he has done so for going on twenty years now. He has spent years encouraging me to share my voice with the world because he thinks I have lessons to teach.

I feel really validated here.

These people who are doing the real work are validating that even though I am hiding at home for a few years so I can learn the things I want to learn… I still have a lot to offer. They invite me back into the wide world.

But I’m afraid of the wide world. The wide world is big. The wide world doesn’t want to do shit for me. The wide world wants to know what I’m going to do for them.

That’s how it works with everyone. I don’t think I’m persecuted or anything.

I like my bubble.

I like having a family.

I like the friends who seek me out and ask to be part of my life. I like the people who actively invite me into their lives because they perceive me as being someone they want to be near.

The wide world…

Is hard.

But I’m not truly contemplating the wide world. I’m contemplating a wall. Maybe I should go make some sketches. I’m having some ideas. Butterflies and change and growth.

Cause I brought quite a few art supplies…

Looking forward

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Goodness. I feel kind of like a bastard because 2016 has had some serious high points for me. It’s been a dumpster fire of a year, don’t get me wrong… but I had more good than many. I feel pretty good about where 2016 is ending on a variety of levels.

I would say that my marriage needed the strain it experienced this year. I think we both learned a number of things we weren’t really on our way to learning. We decided to have more kids. We decided to stop waiting on M/s stuff. (That’s going. And going pretty well so far… we are going slow.)

Things with the kids are…. well… I’d say that I couldn’t expect better. In pretty much every way I feel like things are going better as a parent than I expected they would. I thought we would have way more problems. Our relationships are pretty good and improving. We are getting better with every year at talking to one another about what we need. They are really excited about the prospect of more kids.

The house remodel… is absolutely driving me bonkers. But every person who walks into my bathroom gasps. It is worth it. Just keep plugging along. Art. Moar Art. I guess at this moment that I have somewhere between 100 and 200 hours of painting ahead of me between now and the finish line. Fuck.

I’m a painter. It’s a thing I do. I do a lot of it. I’m an artist. How will this play into my future?

No clue yet.

We watched Rogue One today. It… it’s a heavy movie. I feel kinda stunned. I think this is the only Star Wars movie I’ve ever really liked. Of course I like the hit-you-in-the-head one.

I’ve said for a long time that I suspect I will live to see some kind of revolution. Then we elected Trump. You know what?

The next four years need to be full of active resistance. The next four years need to involve making concrete actions in the direction of living in the kind of world I want to live in.

It’s kind of funny that I started out vehemently hating the idea of the American Dream. When I studied it in college and grad school I felt so much anger. I did not think it was attainable for me or anyone like me.

Then I arrived.

Holy shit. How do I share this shit.

How can more people have this kind of safety and security? What can I do to help other people have more access to education and choices and medical care?

Revolutions are made by the people who show up. What does showing up mean? It means different things to every person because you can’t make a revolution out of people who are exactly the same. That’s how you create an empire. By wanting people to be all the same so you can use them interchangeably as spokes on a wheel.

I don’t want a well mechanized empire.

I know what that means.

Even if I would be considered one of the “winners”… no. No. No. No. No.

Fuck that. No. But when and where are different levels of aggression worth countering with other levels of aggression?

How do you have a revolution without having a war? How many people have to die to call it a war?

How do we even know what a war means anymore?

There were 10,000 casualties of the war with Kuwait. In the last one hundred years, how many black people has the US government killed when they weren’t doing a damn thing wrong?

What is a war?

I spent my childhood reading books about the Resistance in WWII.

I need to spend a lot more time thinking about what I’m going to do with my life. I know what i want to do with my life in the very long-term. But what am I going to do while I’m growing up? What will I do to shape the person I need to be someday?

Fuck. This will be a lot of work.

Lots of people do lots of things to shape history. Where do I want to stand?

White trash

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I don’t know about you, but I am a social animal. I am so social that for many years I put myself in position after position to be abused because that was the only way I could understand social contact. I expected abuse. I would go so far as to say that I actively sought it out and tried to bring it into my life.

Abuse is… abuse is dramatic and exciting and volatile in a way I expected and needed from life. I went from periods of extreme isolation–the kind that is proven in prisons and mental hospitals and orphanages to cause extreme breaks in the mind–to periods of needing social contact so bad I would seek out the most extreme sorts I could find.

Is it my fault I was abused? Let us say that if abuse is a dance I was not always an unwilling partner.

Most of the men who raped me as an adult were people I wanted to have in my life. They were mostly people with whom I was eager to have sex. But I required a condom for my protection and theirs. I am one of the scariest vectors of potential disease in my community. The other trampiest people usually are around half my numbers. I default to safe choices because I love the people I sleep with and I need to consider their health.

I am thinking about this right now in context of how weird life is.

What does it mean to be treated like trash? It means that your life is not important. You are replaceable. You are just here to (be a hole/fill a role/do a piece of work) and when your usefulness is over you will be replaced.

I have dated more than one person who has shown me a series of photos from their past and all the women look the same and there are pictures of them doing the exact same thing… sometimes in the same clothing.

My family didn’t want me and made that clear. I’ve… been the fill in the blank woman.

I am hard because if I don’t maintain myself to a certain level so that I can find a different position somewhere else where I can be a differently effective tool…. Well this is the closest I have to a survival instinct. I still have work in me. Don’t throw me away yet. I know I’m not that shiny. I know I’m bent and deformed and prickly about how I am used… but I have value. Please need to have me around.

It has been fascinating over the last few weeks to have the din of self hatred in my head be gone. Worthless isn’t coursing through my neurons anymore. See, drugs aren’t all bad. I see much more clearly the various ways in which I am useful.

I did get to grow up and be Mary Poppins. Only they are my children. Children do think their parents are perfect. Mine can now joke about knowing that I mess up and knowing that I’m not perfect… but they still express shock every time they witness a demonstration because in their heart I am perfect.

Holy shit.

I really like being a parent. I am grateful I get to be a parent with time and enough money and a secure place to live. We know a large majority of our neighborhood and they express happiness for our presence in the neighborhood.

I was given a tea plant for my birthday because I am nice to my neighbors. I feel like I have done something with the time I’ve had here.

I know that I was treated like I was disposable because now I have felt what it means to be treated like I have intense value. I know that my ability to have had the life I’ve had has largely been because of the color of my skin because I live in a racist system that will give a second chance to a piece of trash if it can pass into the main group without being visibly different.

I may be a bunch of weird things… but I don’t by and large look it. I look like I have been middle class or higher most of my life. I can code switch my language and sound knowledgable around a freakish variety of people.

I’m not treated like I’m disposable anymore. It is an odd experience.

It is odd knowing that I am raising children who have never had a single moment of feeling disposable. How can more people get to their level of safety? What about the kids who are growing up like me? How can they be seen more? I don’t know. But feeling a quietness inside my head makes me want to work a lot harder to find people who need help dealing with incest.

Once I grow up. Once I can actually have more of an idea what the stages of development feel like. I need to know what they mean for me so that I can hear what they mean for other people without interrupting. If I’m still trying to get to where they are… I will be self focused when I listen. It is part of my ability to be patient with children and not with adults who are older than me. I have a hard time being nice when I think someone “should” be better at something than me because they’ve had more time to practice. I am finally to the point where I am not a total asshole about t his because I’ve noticed that people are always asynchronous in their learning. Not knowing something is more normal than not. Just be glad they are trying to learn now.

But I’m impatient and an asshole so being nice is a challenge. When my friends are being kind they say I don’t suffer fools gladly.

I am feeling grateful for what I get to do with my house. I’m also feeling very narcissistic. Other people don’t demand turning their entire house into a lived art experience. But I am. I have had a kind of luck most people don’t get to have. I did figure out how to stop feeling like I deserved abuse and I have ended every relationship that was hurting me.

I may be impatient and chafe at boundaries in my life but by and large I have chosen them. I may have to figure out how to renegotiate some corners of the boundaries… I have really sucked at doing that this year. I have made a number of mistakes I need to make once.

What will the future look like? I don’t know. But I know it is from a perspective of not being even a little bit disposable. Really I am the linchpin. If I go the whole mechanism will break. Or really it will depend how I go.

I chose to bring children into the world knowing that I come from a whole many generations of intense abuse/mental health problems dna pool. I knew that the brain is malleable. I knew that as much as there are genetic predispositions but nurture matters too.

I’m not perfect. I’m not really supposed to be. I’m trying to show what it means to be good enough given the strictures of the world we live in. How do we go about changing this world? There are processes. Let’s talk about them.

What can we do to help other people know that they are not disposable either?

It’s a big hard topic. It’s going to take a lot of years to unpack. I need to think about it as I grow up. Growing up hurts. But if I want to be able to think about other people properly… I have to.

Quick, quick…

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I have pretty much convinced myself that Abilify is not helping that much and it is not compatible with pregnancy nor breastfeeding. Well. I guess that answers whether I’m staying on that med or not.

Seriously, I think oxytocin is going to be the winner. I think I am going to have to get oxytocin to carry me through.

I didn’t use this much pot when I was pregnant with my youngest child. I didn’t use it until my oldest was approaching a year. I used to go through an eighth every few weeks. Now it is every few days.

I can’t use at this level during a pregnancy. I need to bring it down. There is the very real probability that I should be on some form of medication even with the impact on a child and pot is one of the least damaging ones available. But I want to be using way less. Like, maybe I need to stick to topicals. It is not nearly as effective but I need to close the gap with other things like oxytocin and slowing my life all the way the fuck down.

Being pregnant needs to be the biggest project. After that comes home schooling. Which means other people and other projects will have to happen rarely if at all. Other people can come over and help. But I won’t have much to give. I need to do that this time if I want a better experience. I need to invite people over to help more.

I was too scared and ashamed previously.

I need help. That doesn’t make me pathetic. It makes me human. I give a lot to a lot of people. It’s ok that I need help too. I know I don’t feel like I’ve paid back my childhood yet but oh well. I still will need help.

I can’t pay back the people who helped me when I was a child. I can only pay it forward and how can that be measured?

I need to go in. I should be done medicating.

Chasing and being ok

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I should be sleeping, but I’m awake. I’m thinking about how much I’m shoving on my friend while she’s here. So here’s the sitch. I met this woman on Twitter during my road trip. Towards the end the kids and I realized we were going to have a miserable time camping at the snowy Grand Canyon and decided to detour. I asked the universe (and Twitter) where we should go. This woman popped up and said, “Pick me! Pick Phoenix!” So I did.

We spent a few days together and it was lovely. I think she is great. I think her kids are rad and super smart and really engaged in life. I honestly don’t meet that many public school kids who are that good at asserting themselves. I was seriously impressed with these kids. They are just… there’s a lot of there there.

So I asked my friend to come visit. Thing is, the entire time I’ve known this family they’ve been on my monthly donation list because of disability issues. The mama hasn’t worked in a while and that is indefinite. So this trip is horrifyingly prohibitively expensive.

So I said, “Can I bring you to California. You and your family. You need a break from life.”

We are going all over the bay area and down to Santa Barbara with a stop in Monterey on the way home. We will spend close to a week driving into San Francisco to see the museums.

These kids showed up at my house and with glowing faces they said, “Can we homeschool every day?!” They are so excited they can barely speak. Only they talk just as much as my kids do so this is a hilarious time. Oh so much volume. But fascinating! The opinions! The independent thought going on!

One of the first questions was: “Does your little boy still wear dresses?” Answer: “That question is more complicated than you think. My kid wears dresses sometimes. But I only sometimes have a little boy. Let’s talk about the gender binary and people who do not fall on it at either end.”

It was lovely.

I sat down after dinner and started listing off the cool things to do within an hour of driving… we filled the trip days fast. We have a full itinerary.

I am 100% convinced my friend never would have asked for something like this in her life. I’m spending around $1200-$1500 for them to have this vacation. Folks I don’t know that well that I met through the internet.

Why?

I am ruled by my impulses. Because it breaks my heart that my children get to have the life they have and children this god damn smart and talented don’t get to have as much opportunity. Yes, I’d love to bring you out here for three weeks for as much information as we can pack into your little skulls. It would be an honor.

I do these things to pay back the child I was. The child who felt so bad that everyone else got to go do fun things and take classes and go to museums. I got to move again.

Part of what is helping is that I’m not having to chase this family. I offered and she accepted… but I didn’t have to chase her and keep offering.

Being able to accept a gift this big is hard. Pride is a big deal. Accepting this much love and help from someone is hard to feel ok with. People can only take so much then they need to give. Not necessarily back to the person they received from… paying things forward is more important

I am running into asking rev limiters within myself. I can ask different people and it isn’t scary. I can’t ask a small group of people for things repeatedly. That’s too much hard; I feel too much like I’m hurting people.

Unless I get asked back. I need to be asked for things in exchange. Do you know one of the reasons it is easy for me to help this family have this trip? They are kind of assertive about how things need to work for them. “I need _____. I can’t do _____.” Even if receiving a gift they are directing it to be more useful for them. That melts my butter. I feel like they seriously are trying to get what they need from this gift.

I have probably asked many hundreds if not over a thousand people to spend time with me in my life. I don’t ask everyone for sexual attention. Unless I feel an energetic push back… I feel like I am hurting people by sticking around.

If I initiate all of our, “Hey let’s hang out” it will get more and more sporadic over time. My give runs out. My ask runs out. I wish I still had it in me to ask you over lots… I don’t. I don’t think you care. I think you’d rather do something else.

I think you’d rather not put your pants on and walk three blocks to see me after I drive multiple thousands of miles. That’s what I’m worth.

That’s from someone who has been publicly calling me “family” for over a decade. Yeah. That’s what I’m worth to my family.

But not Noah. And not my kids. They would do a whole hell of a lot to see me.

Noah crisscrossed the country chasing me. It was glorious.

Even though they live with me every day. If I start getting distracted by life or people they do tricks until I stare at them again. Please look at us. We need your attention. Yes my loves. I will give you my attention too.

Yes, I like pushy. Yes, I want people who say hey I’m here and I want your attention. Yes, that is risking rejection. Welcome to my god damn life.

It occurs to me that I could create a calendar for the house hold and share that with folks who are interested. Dates when people are free to invite themselves over could be clearly marked.

I can’t keep inviting the way I have for years. I’m tired and it hurts.

Noah says I’m just ditching my friends for lovers. I don’t think that is true. I can list off lots of friends talking and visits in the past few months. It is true that I’m putting less effort into my friends.

But I think I was there anyway. I think there was just a brief surge for dating. I think that is going to… change as time moves on anyway. I’ll run out of ask there too. I don’t get the impression that most of the folks I date are going to feel ok being pushy with asking for dates. My submissive. My glorious submissive. Thank you for being so brave so far. I know I’m busy and asking me means risking me being overwhelmed and kind of a twerp on a given day. I’m grateful you ask. Thank you. I’m sorry I’m not always good company but I’m so glad I get to know you. Sometimes when I say I’m not good company it isn’t about me not liking you it is about me wanting to keep my nasty moods away from you. I know you are comfortable with getting the less than sweet parts of me, but I don’t want to take my feelings out on anyone like that. I don’t want to start using you for that kind of thing.

I love you too much.

I’ll hit you; I’ll carve my name into your flesh with a scalpel; I’ll kick you as hard as I can in the testicles. I do not want to hurt you. I want you to feel loved. I can’t be nasty to you when I’m having a bad day. That’s not cool.

I need to be nasty to you on good days when it is a positive, loving choice for both of us.

I’m going to run out of chase on dating for the same reason I always do. Most people… aren’t as into me as I want them to be. They like me ok, but they don’t really seek me out. I seek them out as much as I can… then I can’t anymore.

Usually that’s about three months.

The people who have gone longer than that… my first fiancé, my Owner, Puppy, Spot, Noah… they always act like they are drawn to me. I don’t think my first fiancé would have fallen out of love with me. I think he wanted to marry me and he was going to be ok being that person forever. I think I could have had that. But he needed me to not change very much. He needed me to calm down and not be so crazy. He needed me to be very conservative sexually. I couldn’t do that for him. I think I could still be with my Owner if I hadn’t wanted kids so much. Puppy was the only one who dumped me. He has some serious issues and that was for the best. He would have been very abusive. Spot… that one did run its course. There was no more there for that relationship. But we are still friends.

Noah came back when I shoved him away as hard as I could. He was still my friend even though it hurt because not knowing me was more painful than dealing with me rejecting him as a boyfriend. Then after a while of being my friend he noticed that I was single for five minutes and he took a chance on offering me the best deal of my whole damn life. Would I like to marry my best friend and have the babies I’ve been dreaming of? Yes. Yes I would.

I like sudden intense protestations of devotion that I end up being able to count on. That works for me.

And Noah has chased me ever since. I do not always honor his efforts as I should. But I take breaks to admire just how forking nice to me he is. He chases me. He feels like he would die without me.

It makes it kind of hard to keep chasing people who are not that enthusiastic about seeing me, who do not push for time or attention, who do not make it clear that they want to know me.

I’m spoiled as fuck.

My submissive chases me à la Pepé Le Pew. Slow and patient and just there for my entire adult life.

You know who else chases me? Sarah. That’s why she is My Sarah. Because she has chased me and pushed and offered and grabbed chances to see me for over twelve years.

Lots and lots and lots of people can ask me once or twice a year for a visit. That’s so wonderful and sweet and generous. They give me what they have to spare. They ask for how much of me they want. I’m grateful for every person who gives me a three hour visit a year because they want to know me and that’s all they have spare. That is a gift.

It is so glorious having people in my life who want more and more and more of me. The number of people who feel that way is growing and I can’t help but think that is so wonderful. One of the women I look up to most described knowing me as being like watching the birth of a planet. I’m developing my own gravity.

So this ADD book I’m reading keeps saying, “There is something special about a lot of people with ADD. You can’t put your finger on what it is. It’s just there.” I find that hilarious.

When you look at comorbidity things: ADD is highly correlated with trauma which is highly correlated with being targeted which is highly correlated to being something that attracts notice.

Being special/different/weird is threatening as fuck. Lemme tell you.

Hey, is that a self love moment there? Did I just admit that I know I’m special?

Whoa.

I am. I always have been. I do radiate energy like the sun. Either I freak people out or I draw them in. I pay attention to people. I want to know them and love them. Just looking at people as hard as I do is special. Not many people are even capable of really looking at everyone around them and paying attention the way I do. It is some trick of attention and hypervigilance and empathy.

And where in the hell did I find the well of love I seem to have for people? Despite everything. Recently someone said I didn’t break; I broke open.

I need to be needed or there isn’t a lot of point in me. I think that the majority of creatures who are ever born live and die not having a point. I think that the creature has to make their own point, their own purpose, their own meaning.

Am I doing it?

So far people in ten states and a few different countries have told me that knowing me has changed them for the better. It’s a start.

I can say with great certainty that the three people who live here, my submissive, and My Sarah will chase me just about to the ends of the earth. Jenny has flown out to rescue me when I was in danger even though she isn’t by nature a chaser.

I still call her Jenny because I’m the only damn one who can. To you, she is Jennifer. You do not have leave to address her familiar. I think the only reason I can’t mature into the grown up name is because it was a very young person who first opened her heart to me. It was a very young person with intense wounds of her own who learned how to put up with me. When I cry and think of how very much I miss my friend I am dimly aware that we are grown ups now… but I miss her from that place of being very young. Because that is where she first touched me. I met her when I was twelve. I feel like twelve was for me the absolute last gasping breaths of my childhood. That was right as I started seriously dating.

Jenny managed to catch the last bits of me that could love as a child. And I love her with all the intensity of a child for their best friend still. Thank you.

Despite how not chaste I am… I am still chased. I am deemed worthy of love. And by people I respect and love in return. People who absolutely thrill me to my toes that these people think I am worth enough of their energy to chase me. People who are impacted by my gravity pull and just have to be near me.

Oh I love you I love you I love you.

That’s at least six people who will… chase me pretty fucking far. Blacksheep has jumped enormous hurdles to be my friend. DSH has gone waaaaaaay far past her comfort zone for me even though she isn’t one to chase people like me.

I could keep going.

I am blessed and blessed and blessed. My Bonus Family. It would take a few pages to go through all they have done for me. Even though I’m god damn difficult and sometimes they need some boundaries. That’s healthy.

Most of the people who love me with great intensity have rev limiters of their own. They have lives. Part of the reason I love them so much is because they are intense people with a lot going on. They give me what they can. Even if they can’t chase me the way I like to be chased…

Really, how spoiled can someone be? I get chased. I have three people chasing me 24/7. Quit being so greedy.

And yet I’d still kinda like to set up a calendar that says when folks can invite themselves over and see what happens.

I don’t want to decide who it is and how many people. I just… want to see what happens. I assume not much. I assume a few people sometimes but not much. The key to happiness is low expectations.

I’m really looking forward to the next few weeks. I’m nervous because this is a lot of time to be “on” with folks I don’t know that well. But I know this mama through mental/physical disability support. At least we are both very understanding of our mutual shortcomings. Ha.

I am so grateful that they accepted my invitation. This is going to be a lot of fun for me. I can’t wait to homeschool her kids. I feel like a walking encyclopedia and that is one of my favorite feelings. See how useful I can be. I am a good tool!

One of the things that makes me special is how fast I can access disparate topics in my brain and explain them in simple or complicated ways for just about anyone. I can make connections between things that seem unrelated… until I explain… faster than the vast majority of people I’ve ever met. And I’ve met a lot of people. I am not an expert in almost anything. Instead of going deep I go wide. That allows for a different kind of thinking, a different kind of intensity.

Ok, reading this book on ADD is making me question something about my long term mental health diagnosis: depression. I don’t do the torpor kind of depression. I do the head-down-keep-working-as-you-hate-yourself-and-want-to-die kind. Apparently that is a pretty standard ADD thing. Oh. Huh. That’s supposed to be one of those things they kinda look for. I hate them and their not looking.

If you loathe yourself: you are depressed. Sorta. Maybe.

I made Noah listen to this song. I can’t find it easily on the internet so you get lyrics. The thing is… I need to be loved. And I need it from lots of people because I’m trying to push past a whole lot of not being loved.

There is some interesting research out there on preverbal trauma and early formative trauma. I feel like I still need to be filled with as much love as an infant. I was not wanted. Not from conception. I only exist because a bad thing happened. What do I have to do to make up for that? What do I have to do for the world to make up for the harm I caused by coming into being. For declaring, “I don’t care that this hurts you. I need to be here.”

It’s not like I think I really deserve to be punished for choosing to be born. It was an accident. A surprise.

To be fair, my mom told me over and over I was a surprise. She didn’t know she wanted me till she had me. Sissy is the one who told me over and over that I was an accident. My mom just admitted it was rape. My mom tries to make sense of her life given the stories she has been given. God wanted her to have that child. Me.

I have been crying for my mother for over 31, almost 32 years. My mom was 32 when I was born. I might be 35 or 36 if I have another child.

Am I a grown up yet?

When my mama was 35 years old she had four children. She locked her abusive husband out of the house and sued for divorce. On the grounds that he had been raping their children. He was still given partial custody. He refused to pay alimony or child support so my mom lost the house and we ended up living in the car. Well, he would pay it. In exchange for sex.

Sometimes I think I judge my mother far too harshly for surviving a world of horror.

Sex. Sex. Sex. Is it good? Is it bad? Is it neither? Is it both? Does it depend?

I think that if I don’t have that much pull… I should probably just be ok with that. It is probably healthier that way. Maybe. Who knows.

Yes. Yes, I want pushy.

I think people misunderstand suicide prevention. There is a lot of shaming. “Don’t do it because it is selfish. You hurt people.” I hurt people by living too. I promise. It’s always complicated. It is always about the balance of hurting people vs being hurt.

I think it should be framed as enlightened self interested selfishness. Someday I will get to the point where I am out of good days. I’m not there yet. I’m trying to construct a future so fantastic that I absolutely want to stay alive to see it.

I know we are giving up the WWOOF year I’ve always wanted because of a baby I want more. You know what? I bet I will still go to Africa with Sarah someday. I bet I will still go to Taiwan to see Pam someday. I bet I will still go to South America someday. I don’t know who will go with me or who I will see… but it’s probably going to happen.

I’m like that.

I go do things.

No more travel for a long time though. I need to save money. We don’t really travel cheap.

The kids and Noah have promised to veto all requests for travel in 2017 even if I say, “but we could…”

Ha.

I love my reminders.

My Eldest Child likes to say, “You should listen to yourself more, mom. You are a smart lady.” But I don’t listen to myself. I need to hear it from you. I need to hear it in your voice. I need to have you replace my inside voice. Do you know why? Because when I talk to me I’m so god damn mean. When you remind me of something I just said a few minutes ago… you usually sound so nice.

I know I sounded nice when I said it to you. That’s because it is easy to be nice to you. No, I can’t remind myself in that same nice way. I need you on a tape in my head. Because my tapes are all so bad. Thank you for reminding me.

I never mean that sarcastically.

Well… maybe once in a while but I’ll make it obvious with a funny voice.

Shiny change of topic. I feel like it is wise to restate a thing about voice in my blog. I talk to “you” a lot. That’s a moving target. I often consciously create sentences so I’m addressing multiple situations and multiple people at once and I phrase it as a singular. So if you feel paranoid that I’m talking to you… maybe…. inclusively…

Or maybe you’re the one. Noah gets a lot of direct address. Ok, other people do too and I hide behind the group thing. Let’s be honest. But I do the group address thing too!

I’m just tricksy.

I sat here for a while and just went through some visuals of stuff I’d like to have happen in my life. Oh let it be so.

Inclinations

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I’m running into a problem in my sex life. I’m closer to a vanilla bottom a lot of the time and that’s some serious mixed signals in my little world. I like sex. I don’t need it to be that harsh. I don’t need to be hit all the time. I really totally don’t fucking need to get pinched a bunch. My body lives in a lot of pain a lot of the time. I spend a lot of time trying to manage my pain levels. Getting hit is complicated.

But I’m a masochist. I really am. Sometimes it is the best thing ever.

I’m not that much of a sadist either. I have times when I get really super duper in that mood and when I’m in that mood absolutely nothing else will do…

But if you look at the last 15 years… I’m not a serious sadist. Lots of years involve no sadism and only a little bit of missing it.

And I’m heading back into another breeding period. My masochism and my sadism went on walkabout last time. I still like sex. And I want kissing like I want air. I want lots of gentle touch because my whole body is going to fucking hurt for nine months. I am not an easy pregnant person.

I’m even more weepy and sad and isolated feeling. I want my mother and I can’t have her and that hole in my heart eats at me so badly when I’m pregnant.

It has been hard for me my whole life that when I feel worst I am the most isolated. It happens over and over. If I’m sick… I’m usually alone.

I’m looking forward to a pregnancy with a work-at-home partner and older children. I hope it won’t feel so sad. I’m kinda hoping that we can find a way to have people come over that isn’t a problem.

I don’t know what the future will hold and I’m feeling like a huge selfish asshole. I’m worrying about my needs and I’m being really ungracious and fussy about other peoples needs. I’m not being generous or loving. I’m such a fucking asshole.

Part of the problem is I have a very long list of people who want me to consider their needs and feelings. They conflict–I promise you. I have to kinda prioritize and then where in the hell do I fit in?

I don’t know. But I’m sharp and difficult when I say no because I hate saying no. I feel like such an asshole. “Hey you are being brave and wonderful and asking me for this thing that is really important to you. OH MY GOD DO YOU KNOW HOW FUCKING TIRED I AM!?”

I can’t remember the last time I got more than six hours of sleep in a night. It’s been a bit. I’m dealing with 2-4 hours a lot of nights. What can be done about it? Well I see a whole bunch of doctors and I try what they tell me to try and…. here I am.

My shrink wants me tested for ADD because in her opinion it is not fucking normal to go on 2-4 hours of sleep a night, hold together (mostly) my normal life and have sex for an hour or more most days of the week. She says that is an excessive amount of energy. Really outside the range of normal.

I wouldn’t fucking know.

I am not as toppy during sex as some folks would like.

The other night with Sweet Boy he really wanted me to top all the sex. I could for a few minutes then I untied him and said, “No I can’t do this anymore.”

I don’t like running the fuck very much. I really don’t like it much past the first or second time of having sex together. I get it the first time… I’m weird to fuck. Past that, I’m seriously a bottom when it comes to sex. And that passivity goes on turbo when I’m pregnant. I’m receptive but initiating feels so awful.

And if I have to tell you what to do and how to do it? Shit. I’d rather pick my nose.

No offense. It’s not about you. It’s about me.

When I quit my job when I was pregnant with Eldest Child I had severe nausea (I was puking multiple times a day) and I was falling asleep at work, in traffic… everywhere. I could not stay awake. A friend who was a nurse asked me what job I would go get instead because “gestating isn’t a job.”

Many other friends were… happy to share with me their opinion that pregnancy isn’t a disability and I should buck up.

You know what, motherfuckers? If you don’t live in my body…. shuddup. I god damn start out disabled. Pregnancy is a nightmare.

Pregnancy is horrible. And I’m looking at it again. I was kinda thrilled by the idea of never being pregnant again.

But baby.

I want the baby. I want the baby of my body. But I hate pregnancy. I am so sick when I’m pregnant. I am in so much pain. It is such a difficult process. According to natural selection I should already be dead from this.

But fuck natural selection. Science.

When I started looking for people to date I wanted play partners. For very sadomasochistic sex. Then Noah changed his mind about a baby.

That’s seeming like a dumb thing to hunt for at this point. I can’t live up to that. I… will really not be able to live up to that starting in a few months and it will probably be years before I’m back up to speed again. Shit. Shit. Shit.

I feel like I’m jerking people around and being a terrible person.

I went and had lunch with Daddy James. I wanted to touch base with him in a I’m-not-just-in-your-life-to-use-you-for-sex way. He told me it was ok to keep changing what I’m negotiating for because life keeps changing what I have to offer. Thank you Daddy. He also told me it is ok that I am difficult to put up with. People get other things in trade and it is worthwhile for them.

I don’t see how what I have for trade that could possibly be enough to justify putting up with me.

Especially as I’m about to revoke a lot of what makes me a fun toy. I’m not so fun when I’m not up for play. I’m… a lot more boring. Hey, let’s garden or watch Netflix. woo.

Noah wants me to take a month and date as much as I want so that he can experience the full terror and find out just how bad it is going to be. The kids are asking for us to be home 4-5 days/week with no visitors.

How the fuck do I balance that? I’ve got easily dozens of people I’d like to see who’d like to see me. Some of the activities they want to see me for are high energy and some are low energy and I’m kinda flipping out about both kinds equally. “Hey drive to my house and sit around” is just as intimidating as “Let’s do x super high intensity activity.”

OH MY GOD I CAN’T RIGHT NOW.

I want to I want to I want to but I haven’t got it to give.

What I have to give is very narrow and particular and time limited. Like, why in the fuck am I up at this time of night? Because three hours of sleep is enough, apparently. Fuck.

I feel so sad that I am so inadequate to meet the needs of the people I love.

I am inadequate. It’s funny how nonmonogamy is just a chance for me to feel inadequate with more people. Wheeeeeee

I can’t do/be what Noah wants and I can’t for anyone else either. I’m feeling really sad about that right now. I can’t ever be good enough. I can’t ever do enough. I will never be able to satisfy people or make them happy. I will never be enough.

I feel like I’m in a weird transition. I thought I was transitioning out of intensive parenting into more independence and abruptly… I’m in reverse going back into the most restrictive part of this job and lengthening my time of indentured service. What the fuck am I thinking signing up for thirty god damn years of home schooling.

Twenty years sounded awful enough.

Holy shit.

I was really enjoying the expanded freedom of the Bonus Family. That’s not really a thing for a few years again. I hope I will still get my Bonus Kids sometimes. I hope that maybe the older kids can go for a night or two a month still just a way of having “their” time and space away from being in baby-land. But I won’t want or need a couple of weekends. I’m sitting here with a baby anyway. I’d rather have all my babies around more.

Fuck. This is a huge change. This is a massive upheaval. Why are we doing this?

Because I can deal with transitioning back into the world in ten more years. If the IDB (incest data base) takes me a little longer… oh fucking well.

I want this baby. And Noah keeps saying, “Two?” I don’t know. I can’t commit to that till I get through a third pregnancy. But more than likely if Noah asks me in two years if I want another baby he won’t be able to keep me off of him.

Because yeah. I get quiverful. I get wanting more babies. I get it. I get it. I get it.

I’ve already had one person who is not-breeding say it’s ok if I replace them in the population. Anyone else want to volunteer as well to justify my second kid?

I’m not even joking very much.

Parenting is the one thing I genuinely feel like I am excelling at doing. I’m far from perfect but I adapt and I grow quickly. I see problems and I address them.

I think I could handle four kids just fine. I think it would be wonderful. No Pam, I don’t want to hear your negative Nancy shit. I’m aware that you are now a voice of dissent. Ok. Heard. Now don’t bring it up again.

I feel like such an asshole for being mixed when a friend told me she wanted a fourth baby years ago. Fuck. See, the ways in which I am an asshole always come back to bite me in the ass.

I should have said, “I support you.” I’m sorry. I did that wrong.

I know there will be problems. There will be problems with or without another baby. I asked the magic 8 ball and it is never wrong.

There will be problems with or without two more babies. That fucker was consistent in its answers.

Yes.

“Will there be problems if we have a baby?” Yes.

“Will there be problems if we don’t have a baby?” Yes.

“Will there be problems if we have two babies?” Yes.

I’m telling you. The magic 8 ball knows.

I don’t feel confident in the choices I’m making. A lot of what I can see is that each of my choices hurt other people for a cascading list of reasons. I’m not going to be available for what they want…. and I don’t even know how to say what I need.

I don’t know how this is going to work. I don’t know how any of this will balance out. Between the kids, Noah, me, and all the god damn people I care about how is this going to balance?

WHY DO SO MANY OF YOU BASTARDS KEEP LATE HOURS. THIS WOULD BE EASIER IF Y’ALL WERE AVAILABLE AT MORE LIKE 7-10AM!

Ahem.

Why isn’t everything all about me? Because it isn’t and it shouldn’t be. Even if I am the main character in my story… I’m not the center of anyone else’s story. Not even Noah’s. Not really. I’m his wife. That’s an accessory to his life and story not the point of the story.

I gotta be honest with y’all. When I think of what I’d like it’s not that much one on one date time. I’d like more people around and carefully managing people one to one… is a job. Especially within the framework of 4-5 days/week are just not options I wish that there were a bunch of people who said, “X day works for me. Are you free?” And it’s ok for me to say yes to three or four people because… quite frankly… that means that there is a lot of kinds of attention to give and get all at the same time.

That feels like Auntie’s house when I was a kid. Only no one checked if it was ok to come over in advance. They called and said, “You home?” then they came over. Auntie knew a lot of people. I loved my Auntie and of the people in my family she’s the only one I’d want to be even a little bit like.

She’s honorable. She takes care of people. She gets shit done.

She’s enabling as fuck and that’s something I struggle with emulating too much.

I’d like to have open houses on Friday’s. Some people can bring their kids with laptops and sleeping bags and the kids can have a LAN party before going to sleep. The adults can talk or play games. I’d like to not have to be careful about managing invites or treating it like a “party”.

I like to keep the house company-ready just as a matter of course so that having people over isn’t extra work. Then it is less stressful. Cleaning up for people feels bad.

It’s interesting reading this book on ADD my shrink gave me. Driven to Distraction. Reading it is making me cry because it sounds so much like me. Bits and pieces and here and there. But… it would make a lot of sense. My list of flame outs is long and inglorious. My self esteem is shit (at least in part) because I spent my whole life being told I was bad for the ways I deviated from normal.

My shrink is calling my psych to say, “Instead of an SSRI (which has a proven problem history) how about trying a stimulant?”

I’m excited to have someone case managing me like this. She’s known me for years and her feedback feels very useful when dealing with a prescribing person. I’ve always wanted a case manager.

Really I’ve always wanted a knowledgable pushy mother. Kinda like I am. Deep sigh.

Go be what you want to see in the world.

This biology shit is hard core. I want to be a parent. It’s the most important thing I do. I learn the most from it. I grow the most because of it. I have to or I will be a shitty parent.

I don’t want to be one more shitty parent.

I owe them more than that. Because I made them out of pure selfishness. I owe them every ounce of work I can put into being a good parent.

And I have a lot of work in me. How do I focus it more? What do I want to focus it on? My kids. For a lot of years to come they get the lion’s share. They deserve more than I have to give. That’s a lot of why I want to add other adults.

Beautiful tells me she will feel more free to invite herself over. Fuck yes.

I guess I did something right for once.

The Quiet One is an increasing factor. I don’t know what the fuck. But not saying anything here at all feels like lying because this is part of how I keep accountable with Noah. Fuck. I feel like this miraculous available during the week day, local, oriented towards care taking of children person just fell out of the clear blue sky and I don’t know what the fuck.

I really don’t. Because he has some boundaries that are going to make him tricky as heck to negotiate with in particular ways. It is none of the internet’s business because he’s going to be one who doesn’t want to be written about in the same way as a lot of other people I see. Some folks ask for more explicit reports. Some folks believe they deserve privacy. But there is a balance for me.

I don’t want to be a liar about what I’m doing. For good or for bad.

That road is straight to hell.

Kisses. More kisses. More kisses.

I go through waves of needing to not be hit because I need to not think I deserve to be hit. It’s complicated.

If you couldn’t hurt me I wouldn’t be interested. Danger. Danger. Danger.

Sadomasochism, mental health, chronic pain and calibration.

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I am a hard fucking pet to own. Noah and I discuss this in detail. He has spent ten years trying to learn how to properly feed me, exercise me, get me to sleep, and take care of me better than ever before. It’s been hard for both of us.

I am an emotional and physical masochist. Does it turn me on when my back hurts? No. What that means is I have learned how to eroticize kinds of sensation (physical and emotional) that other people don’t experience as sexual. This is good and bad.

Within certain contexts I enjoy being hit fairly hard in the scheme of things. Within certain contexts being degraded will make me orgasm like a geyser. But these are not all the time fun things for me. In the wrong times these sensations can be highly damaging. Only the right people get to tell me I’m a good whore. Preferably after role play when their cock (bio or not) is inside me. Then, it works great. If someone random brings that up… the fur’s gonna fly.

I have been suicidal and self harming for almost thirty years. When I talk about my problems, they are not in reaction to my current life. They did not form in context to what is happening now, but I have to deal with them now. PTSD, for me, means that I have a hard time telling what is past tense and what is current tense and what is future tense a lot of the time. I’m just… trying to be a version of me that won’t be too problematic in all times. That’s rough because what was needed from me as a child is different from now.

I don’t think it is possible to over state the impact of my early childhood sexual abuse on my personality formation. I know I lived with my father until I was three. I know the abuse was frequent before he was kicked out. I know it was every time I saw him after that until about twelve.

My father telling me over and over that I exist to get men off and I don’t have the right to say no…

That has absolutely shaped my life.

Noah and I were talking tonight about “What he can get away with” now vs when we got married. I’ve learned to say no. I used to not say no to anything he wanted no matter how much pain it caused me. It really never seemed important that I was in pain. I was going to hurt anyway. He might as well be getting what he wants.

Fibromyalgia fucks all of this up too. I’m in pain a lot of the time. As I age my joints are on fire more days of the month. PMDD complicates my life. (That’s premenstrual dysphoric disorder for those who don’t know.) It means that for roughly 3-10 days a month my brain would kind of like to kill me. I feel useless, worthless, and like I should die. I feel like I am bad. I feel like I hurt people by existing.

This isn’t about reality or rational thinking. This is pure hormonal/chemical hell. And I’ve done everything that I can do about it. I keep trying new things. It does improve over time. But it is pure shit when it is happening.

I live in a kind of chemical soup that doesn’t want me to be alive very much. I live in a chemical state that doesn’t see much purpose for me.

But then there are the happy chemicals. Oxytocin. Endorphins. Serotonin. I can get them. But it’s hard hard hard hard hard.

Something that is complicated and hard and not fair…

I can do the spike up and down thing pretty easily. Ecstasy and despair are easy for me. It’s being ok I suck at. Noah has helped me make more progress on being ok than anything and everything else in my life. But doing so has worked a lot like a standard antidepressant in that it makes the ecstasy part harder. Not impossible, but more complicated.

Noah and I have very deeply connected sex. There’s a lot of “I see you as a whole person with flaws and merits and I love you for being more than one thing.” It is wonderful and life affirming. It helps me feel like I can climb into a box and be safe. Desafortunadamente (why is this word so much better in Spanish?) that box isn’t able to be everything.

Why do I need more?

Why does a Porsche need more maintenance than a Toyota? It is the result of engineering.

Why am I so complicated? Why am I so hard? Engineering.

I need a lot of connection with people. I need lots of people in a way that is hard for Noah to understand. I think Noah is an actual introvert and I am actual extrovert who behaves like an introvert because of trauma and avoidance.

I fucking need people. I need to talk to them. The kissing and sexing is awesome, but I’d say they are part of less than 1% of my relationships. I need connection. Mostly it isn’t sexual. But good golly the sexual connection is so good at making all of those chemicals I suck at making on my own.

Why do I want to date? Because I want massive injections of oxytocin. Because I want to see you and feel so excited you are alive. Because I want you to look at me the same way. Because I need to see that look on your face because there will probably be minutes between this time and next time I see you when it is very hard for me to remember at all that anyone is ever happy to see me.

What I feel right now is what I have always felt and will always feel. Until it changes. Then that is what I feel and have always felt.

You can see how I might try to stack the deck with experiences that land me squarely in the happy brain chemicals column because when I’m there I don’t have to deal with the depressive and anxious symptoms in the same way. It’s like they went on vacation and forgot to write.

So I had multiple possible kissing opportunities go by without kisses. Internally my narrative around this is melodramatic, stupid, and whiny. “See. They’re done.”

I feel like I should stop bothering them.

I feel like what I am is a bother.

Incidentally: shiny change of topic to drop a cryptic comment at someone from yesterday. When I say that someone is giving me “reminders” I don’t mean that in any kind of negative way. My kids and I give each other reminders. It is a way of noticing someone and saying, “Hey do you remember this thing you want to remember?” Because…. most people suck at that. It is a loving thing to do, in my mind. Let me remind you about who you want to be because that makes it easier to stay on track. Let me remind you that I see you and what you are doing is real and has impact on the world so I remind you of what you need to be thinking about.

I sure didn’t mean it as a complaint or as a criticism or an attack or anything negative. Reminders are intensely positive in my life. But I had two hours of sleep and my ability to explain is uhm compromised at such times.

End of shiny change of topic.

I like to be hit. I crave it like other people crave… whatever the fuck they crave. It’s a powerful force in my life. My absolute favorite is hitting with hands. Punching is such a vicious, visceral, vivacious connection that I feel like it makes me more alive. Punching helps me stop dissociating. Punching helps me feel the muscles and the tendons and the bones in my body. Punching helps me feel alive.

I can enjoy being hit with toys but it is a lot more difficult for me. I don’t process it as connection. It tends to increase my dissociation because mostly it hurts more in a way that I have to escape my body in order to tolerate very much of it. I don’t feel connected that way. I feel like I am a thing that a tool is doing a thing to. Sometimes that is hot too. Sometimes I do want to be beaten until I go away. It is like a vacation from the tyranny of living in a brain that hates me this much.

It feels like atonement for being so bad all the god damn time.

But atonement needs to be a sometimes treat or it means that I am shit and I should spend all my time apologizing for being shit.

Constant atonement means I am constantly bad enough that I need to atone.

That hurts.

That hurts my soul as much as it hurts my body.

I don’t always need to atone. Mostly I need to connect with people who want me to be alive and who aren’t shy about telling me so. Because I’m not so sure I want to be alive. But I don’t want to hurt people in this web more than I want to stop being in pain. Right now the balance is very much on the side that my pain doesn’t matter. I need more reason to believe that. And I need less pain.

The happy chemicals make me feel less pain. Less emotional pain and less physical pain. It’s a virtuous cycle.

I feel so very guilty that even when I’m having sex with Noah basically every day and sometimes several times a day… that isn’t enough chemical in the soup to push me over the rim of the pot and out of the boiling water that wants to kill me.

But adding more people… well… it’s variable… but it does more than anything else.

I have managed to long since get the soup down to a simmer from a hard boil, but I haven’t been able to get out of the pot.

Thank you Noah. That is mostly because of you. It is because of the children you have given me. It is because of the life you have given me.

But yeah. I need more relationships. I need people I can talk to and connect with and feel like I matter to them.

Because being a wife and a mother is not enough for me.

Do you know why I think that sport fucking isn’t going to work out for me the way it used to? Because these days even when I fuck someone at a swing party and intend to not really see them again (and hell they gave me a fake name anyway)…

They end up telling me their real name and coming over for lunch with their whole family so we can talk about life balance and problems and how to deal with different life issues and… we are turning into friends.

Noah I know I kinda wanted to just be fuck buddies with people. I went out looking for that.

FUCK ALL OF YOU FOR BEING SO AWESOME.

But I feel small and scared and ashamed. Because asking for support, asking for connection with these other people feels like it is almost specifically designed to be about hurting Noah. I don’t want to hurt Nah. He is the air I breathe. No, he isn’t every ounce of chemical I need… but he is the basis. He is the start. He is safety. He is the love that reminds me to take care of myself when I am failing at doing so.

I feel ashamed of how much I need him. I would be willing to sacrifice other parts of myself for that safety. But I’ll be down in the simmering soup forever. That’s just… true. One of these days the soup is going to finish boiling me and I will die.

I need more chemicals to raise the water line and get the fuck out of the pot.

I am so sorry I need an amount one person can’t supply. I have no idea what is enough.

I am feeling really scared. I want to reach out and I don’t. I am so weary of being a bother. I feel so much like people “put up with” me.

I’m so sorry that I am so horrible.

I want to be good. I want to be just a source of happiness. But the truth is I’m not. I’m full of sadness I don’t know what to do with. Mostly I try to get enough when I feel it is ok to touch people and can access more of those fucking chemicals I can’t produce on my own.

If I walk in wearing makeup and I walk out with a bare face that means I removed it all because I didn’t want it to be obvious I was crying. Part of the reason I have been wearing more makeup is because I’m trying to control the crying. I know I can’t cry without it being obvious and that’s too public for me. I can cry without people seeing with a bare face. I do it a lot.

I want to stop crying some year. Stop crying. Stop crying. Stop crying you fucking baby.

Why do I want to date? Because I had to marry someone as broken as me. I had to marry someone who has so many pieces chopped out of him that he has huge gaping wounds where we can grow together and meld and heal into a new shape that is one thing instead of two broken things.

But how in the mother fuck do we teach our kids about a happy or healthy or normal childhood? By saying “Be grateful you aren’t getting what we got?” Oh goodness no. So I go date (in very small part) because that way I can find people who aren’t broken in the same ways and ask question after question after question. I get the impression people think I’m weird. Tell me how you turned out the way you did. I like you just fine and if I could manage to interact with a mini human to help them turn out like you… that would be a positive in this world.

I can’t make babies with everyone. But I can take the example of what kind of life experiences someone would bring to parenting and try to bastardize that onto my life. It is variably successful piece by piece. Overall it has been wildly successful.

I learn things from Cupid and Deity about a quieter happiness than I have known. They are very different men but they both come from backgrounds they are basically happy about. Do you know how fucking weird that is in my life? Dating them is almost like getting to have a koala bear accidentally fall out of a tree on your head and so see you’ve proven drop bears exist.

Whoa

My submissive inspires me with his passionate devotion to things. He has picked just a few people in his life to pour devotion into and I admire him. I both love and struggle with the fact that his core kinks are around degradation and “dirty” things. I absolufuckinglutely love that I get to do these things… I wish they weren’t degrading or dirty. I think they are fun. I do them from love. I do them out of service because you want to be treated this way and so ok I’m happy to be in that role for you.

So where does the sadism come into all of this? I am a sadist… but I am more of a service top. I do things because I think the person I am playing with wants/needs to experience them. I like being a guide on a journey. Even more I love being lead on a journey but with every passing year I intimidate people more and I get fewer offers.

The sadists are going to be happier with the people who aren’t physically and emotionally damaged at the beginning. I can’t take what a lot of people like to do on a regular basis. I can take it sometimes. I can take it when I’m doing well. Then I can’t for a while.

And the bubbling of the soup has a huge impact. The more emotionally dysregulated I am the more my entire nervous system flares up.

That’s why I want the kissing so much. It calms my central nervous system down. It distracts it from feeling pain.

And when there are chances to do the kissing and someone doesn’t want to… that feels really super out of proportion huge for me. I’m not saying anyone is obligated to make out with me for hours. Hell. I’m not saying you have to spend fifteen minutes kissing me.

But if you tell me you are romantically interested in me and you have a chance to kiss me and you’d rather not….

I feel that in my body and I feel it for days and I feel so sad.

All of this is complicated by the fact that we can’t kiss in front of my kids. So if we see each other a few times when kisses were possible but didn’t happen and then we see each other around my kids… that’s complicated torture. That’s a complicated thing that feels a lot like how I couldn’t hug or kiss or be affectionate around the kids when they were very small. I could do some but I would freak out if I heard them. It took a long time before I decided it was more appropriate for them to see that folks do those things when they like each other.

I have been good about slowly developing these boundaries and I’m going to keep being good about them. That’s important to me. I came from a place of severe inappropriate connection. I have inched my way towards letting my kids see different actions. But my kids have always seen me hug my friends. That’s just a standard thing. Even long hugs. So whereas kissing feels like it is a big boundary for me… my kids aren’t dumb. They will figure things out.

All of this is also complicated by my general problem with time distortion. I mentioned that in a few ways up-post: living in more than one time at once, feeling like how I feel in this moment is how I feel in all moments… but there is also the problem that when I’m really happy, time flies. I feel like I am getting so much input I can barely take it in. I struggle with feeling like hard packed clay soil. If you dump a deluge on me, it’s mostly going to just run off and not impact the plants. When I am depressed and/or anxious time drags on and on and on and on. It feels like there will never ever be a cessation of pain and god I can’t do this.

I have seriously been hurting most of my life. It’s hard to keep carrying that load.

But I have so much good that sometimes I am able to just sling all that hurt into a rucksack, toss it on my back and say, “It doesn’t matter how you feel it matters what you do.”

I think it is a problem that I associate not wearing makeup with a need to hide crying.

When I’m riding high in the pot and I feel relatively happy for me, then I want to beg someone to hurt me.

Why was it at such a sharp edge when I started hunting? Because I have been so safe for so long. I need the sharp and the soft. I got so much soft. I know it wasn’t fair that I didn’t know how to talk to Noah about being the sharp.

But it’s getting better pretty quickly, I think.

I need to not do anything melodramatic around this kissing thing. But I need to have some conversations. I need to talk about some pieces of this in real time with people.

The not kissing when the kids are around: kosher. The not kissing when the kids aren’t around? No. Not ok. I can’t think of you as someone I want to be kissing and deal with feeling like you don’t want to kiss me.

I had to turn off thinking about the Professor like that. He feels whatever he feels and I have no window into that but his behavior is that we had opportunities and there were no kisses and I need to treat that like “We are not people who will be kissing” and move on with my life. I have to compartmentalize like that or I get my feelings hurt.

He’s still my friend though. I still like him a lot. I will… poke at him less for a while because I’m still in the sticky he doesn’t like me that much stage.

I’ll get over that bit. I always do. It’s ok for people to like me how much they like me. But sometimes I have some sad that I am only liked as much as I am. I need to deal with that sad. I need to stay friends. Because that’s dealing with your shit. Because good grief I’m dealing with a lot of people and if I got bitter about everyone who doesn’t want to kiss me I’d have a shitty life. It’s ok.

But I’ll poke the Professor at a slower rate for a bit. I’m not going away;I enjoy the conversation too much. I just need to do some self management.

Even if I stop feeling like I have the right to look for kisses… I don’t want to stop being friends. I went hunting for friends with benefits. I want friends. I want benefits. Largely, apparently, in the form of kissing.

Wouldn’t it have been god damn handy if I could have phrased it that way in like March.

I’m going as fast as I can.

I want more hitting and I want more being hurt. But I want it in between kisses from someone who very much likes me. That’s complicated.

And I want to write about Sweet Boy. Because that was awesome. But I’m closing in on four thousand words and my arms need me to stop soon. He’ll be a lengthy story.

In three and a half hours we leave to go see the doctor about Noah’s vasectomy reversal. Holy shit.

How is this all going to work? Fuck if I know. But I guess we’ll figure it out. It’s that or die and I’m not ready. Even if I want to. I’m not ready. There is so much left to do. I’m not one to sit around when there is work to be done.

Do you know what is the part of our family culture that I am proudest of? “We are workers not shirkers.” When my kids say this, when Noah models it and repeats it… oh my soul glows. Yes. I read this hilarious book called How to Raise the Perfect Children Through Guilt and Manipulation and it is as much a memoir about her childhood as it is written by a parent about parenting. I don’t want to do anything how the sports-fanatic-Catholic author does things in her life…. but I do want to set a strong family culture the way she talks about. I do want to indoctrinate with my ideals the way she talks about. Yeah. Like that. Only something different.

Cause that’s what I am. Like you. Only something different.

Today is the 18th anniversary of Tommy’s suicide. I can’t say I miss you. I am glad you don’t have to be hurting any more. Self immolation. What a way to go.

Forward, ho

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I’m moving forward. The remodel stuff is creaking along the lines of “I’m about to fire your ass” and I have support. Today two grown ups are coming over and they will help with yard work and painting tasks.

Yard work tasks:

~~transplant the blue agaves~~
~~transplant YC’s plant~~
~~fill the palettes with dirt and transplant the strawberries~~
~~finish moving the remaining dirt into more planters for YC’s “own bed for growing things”. Sorry it has to be divided up.~~
~~Some weed pulling and moving of yuck to the green waste bin~~
~~Filling all the bird feeders~~
~~Trim the roses and distribute the thorns so I get fewer cats. Fucking neighbor cats~~
~~Water both yards~~

Painting tasks:

~~Remove cupboards & hardware~~
~~Scrub walls with intensive cleanser~~
Sand walls
Rescrub with cleanser

Doesn’t that sound like a full enough damn day?

Regular chores:

~~Laundry~~ ~~(must strip bed) working on this~~
~~Load dishwasher~~
~~Hand wash sink of dishes~~
~~Clear counters and finish finding “during painting” homes for everything~~

Contact peeps chores:

~~Where am I sleeping on the 25th? Must look at options on a map. Thank you generous, kind friends.~~ Decision made. Beginning of the parade route.
~~Write a letter. To whom is yet to be decided but I should do it.~~ Wrote 2
Look at Jenny’s birthday box, see what has to be added and make the shopping list. I should fucking mail it this weekend. I’m already in the next month. I know she forgives me, but I’m feeling like an asshole.
~~Schedule acupuncture~~
~~Schedule pampering w/Sarah~~

To be fair! The kitchen prep is only from my waist up today. Because I’m painting in stages for reasons of not exhausting myself.

Noah told the kids yesterday that surely we were about out of room for plants. The kids both argued. He argued back. I said, “I expect we’ll have 40-80 more plants before I’m done.” Noah said, “Whoa.”

Well, after the house is painted I’m ringing the fucker with plants. There are going to be a lot of indoor plants once we are done painting this time.

I’m going to spend the next year of my life trying to learn how to take proper care of my garden. This is going to take a fuck-ton of time.

I’m looking forward to it.

Sharing complications

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I am… a tremendous asshole. I know this. I know this so terribly well. Noah and I have been talking a lot. I wish I had the spoons to record lots of it but I don’t. Ow.

This is the very first song I ever stripped to. There are things I’m still not going to discuss that have me singing this song to myself lately.

I gotta say, sex with Noah has been off the hook lately. We’ve been playing with erotic hypnosis stuff. As a result he is grinning so widely he looks like he is about to split his face. It’s going well. I am, uhh easily suggestible. I also have lots of experience in my background of what was essentially hypnosis orgasm training. Because my life has been awesome. So I’m physically capable of orgasming repeatedly on command. And we’ve been playing with erotic hypnosis.

*fan self*

It’s going well.

WHY AREN’T WE INSPIRED TO DO THIS SHIT WHEN WE ARE MONOGAMOUS?!

Neither of us know. And we feel sad about it. Because even though the sex has been intermittently good throughout the monogamy…

Sustaining heat like this is hard and it… mostly happens when I’m off fucking other people and I come home ready to sit on fire hydrants.

I want sex.

It isn’t because I’m not getting it at home. I’m getting it at home. I’m getting it fucking awesome at home. But it’s a symbiotic thing. We’ve been together a while now through several cycles.

Heh. This isn’t our first rodeo.

But I’ve clearly changed in what I want and in what I’m looking for and what this is going to mean. I’ve done a flat 180 on a whole bunch of things just about overnight.

WTF?

I don’t know.

I don’t want to miss the fun I could have in my 30’s. Being alive is so awesome.

I could work harder. I could work more.

My body is tired.

I don’t just “relax” very well. I never have. I’ve been working really hard for a really long time. I mean, I build a lot of playfulness into my work so I have fun being a workaholic… but that doesn’t mean I relax well and my body really needs me to relax.

I need to be able to do it without the pot.

No. I want to not need the pot. My lungs hurt. Other methods are so expensive.

I don’t know what I want from the future. I don’t know how much involvement in the bdsm community I want. I feel so conflicted about dragging Noah. He doesn’t feel much need for community around his sex life. He doesn’t feel weird. He doesn’t feel like he needs validation. And he’s less drawn to hunting.

For the rest of my life hunting is going to feel…. different. Now that I have cut someone open as they fuck me so I can suck the blood…

Holy fucking shit.

Cough

Sweet Jesus what is wrong with me? I have no self control lately. Things that have been off the table forever are just… interesting. There was a hot 24 year old. But he deleted his profile so I’m phew not going to get more pushing from there. I was having a hard time saying no.

Thank God he deleted his profile.

I wasn’t that temped only I was. Cause holy shit if you saw the pictures. But he deleted them.

I’ll just keep fucking my delightful old man. No hardship.

Why isn’t it enough?

It depends on what you mean by being enough.

For a long time now sex has been kind of a chore. I had a quota to fill and I put in my time meeting it whether I was interested or not.

Honestly I think it is kind of hot that I really did that for years. Just like I think it is hot that I did a whole lot of things that I genuinely didn’t want to do when I was a slave for years. I specifically like doing sexual things I don’t like to please my partner.

But there’s a cost. And a weird balance to find. Because I have to be pleased too or… I wilt. It is harder and harder not to cut.

I can clearly look back and see how how it is promiscuity or cut. That’s been a huge pattern for me. It is like I can choose to do what I need to do to stay small and shut up or I can go symbolically choose life. (Err, let’s be preventing those babies–shall we?)

This has been true since I was in grade school.

It’s complicated.

Noah told me he doesn’t do more cutting on me because he is worried about it taking the place of me cutting myself.

I wonder what cutting my submissive will mean in a grander scale. So far it makes me feel like a hyena, not like someone who should be small and quiet.

I mean, I’m manifesting this by being nice to little kids and making art in my house. I’m not acting more vicious anywhere else. (Err… I don’t think. I’m getting specific feedback that I’m doing well by a variety of observers. Forking everyone is commenting on me looking so happy.

Goodness gracious I’m getting laid well. You don’t know what it means.

So I’m not getting it everywhere I’m invited. I’ve been saying no. But I’m feeling more able to feel adored. Which sucks. Why can’t I get this from Noah? It’s not like he has changed how he feels.

Daddy and my submissive are both my friends when we aren’t fucking. Why is this so much more validating? It just is.

So much for once a month. So much for once a month per person. I’m having four dates with the deity this month and uhhh I should *cough* admit that.

I can see why my shrink is yelling at me. Yeah. Daddy and my submissive have both stayed in their boxes. I do see them more, but not in a way that is inconsistent with a very long relationship. In consistent settings.

Oh fuck.

Ok Noah Ok Noah Ok Noah. Yeah. That. Nervous. Yeah.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

Yup. That’s what I’m going to go do. Fuck him. Yup.

Not my normal type. Nope. That’s why it is so dangerous. Yup. What the fuck is my type now. I don’t fucking know.

But I’m going to go do some fucking and find out? I’ll report back. I promise.

And then Cupid is writing me dreamy stories about where he is going to put his hand and I just can’t stop squirming.

It is about the expression in their eyes. I pick people for how their eyes come alive. That is what I look for. That connection. I want that. I’m getting it in spades and I feel… so very much. I feel so alive.

I’m not drowning in the river of want. But I’m not sated. I recognize that I’m being shit at boundaries and that can’t continue. Noah’s right that six months of this would be a problem.

What is sustainable?

I want to find out.

What is respectful?

I want to find out.

What is fair?

Oh get the fuck over that shit. Life ain’t fair. There is no fair. Fuck fair with a 2″x4″. (*phew* I did it right that time.)

If I am doing these things in service to loving myself, which I… rather think I am… I need to think about sustainability from the point of healing. I’m working on healing a whole bunch of different things. What does it all mean?

On that note my arms burn and my neck is sore from looking down. Goodbye oh laptop of doom. I love you. Kids are waking up. I get to go be present with the vanilla reality of my life. I choose this. I want this. I have fun with this.

It’s festive dealing with my Bonus Kids as they grow up. We hit speed bumps. They don’t like me every moment. I hold a lot of lines they don’t like but I’m happy to explain why I have the principles I have. “I put these things in front of you and tell you to do them because I have put a lot of work into knowing what is good for you right now. Please cooperate darling.”

They don’t always like me. I make them eat chard. Clearly I am from the devil.

You’ll live, beloved. And you’ll grow up feeling better in your body than I do.

Love is complicated. Sharing traditions and beliefs and desires is complicated. We all want different things. How can we get along? What is fair? Oh don’t even start.

What do we want? Since there is no fair. What do we want? Because there is a we and an I in this. I don’t even mean me and my intestinal parasites. I mean that in order to have what I want I need to have people in my life who want the intensity of connection I want.

I’m really kinda done with casual for the now. I mean… ok I’ll fuck people at a swingers party because that’s fun. But it’s a different kind of intense. First dates with strangers suck.

I’m spoiled as fuck. I’m good.

I have such lovely options available to me.

By the way, Deity and I were really good last night. I don’t think I let myself flood with oh god I like you when the kids were around. We didn’t kiss at all until the kids were asleep and we didn’t do anything even vaguely raunchy. We talked.

I’ve been wanting to talk to him like that for a long while. I uhhh doubt we will talk quite like that when I go over to his house. I think our mouths will be more distracted. And I am interested in these topics. And I need to god damn stop typing.

How can someone feel so lucky and so stupid and so happy and so nervous and so giddy and so relaxed at the same time? Well I kinda think anyone would feel relaxed after how much I came last night.

Holy shit, Noah.

Thanks.

I’m well done.

Hunting lessons

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Exhaustion is a real thing. When I’m over tired I can’t read tone to save my life. I’m whiny, over-sensitive and I’m going to spend a lot of time crying. It’s not about a person saying something… it’s about being tired. I didn’t respect that yesterday. Given how much… pushing it I’ve done on sleep stuff lately I need to build better boundaries around this. Don’t respond to messages when I’m that tired.

I wrote about 7 pages in a word document yesterday. Notice how I’m not posting it? I don’t think I was even a little coherent. I was tired and scared.

I live with a kind of existential dread most people can’t understand. On one hand I’m one of the asking-ist people you’ll ever meet. I ask and ask and ask for things. On the other hand I live in mortal terror that I will rape someone again. That I will ask for something and someone won’t feel comfortable/safe saying no and I will be an evil monster as usual.

This is complicated for me. Because if you can’t say, “Hey do you want to do x?” and get a yes/no answer…how the fuck is life supposed to work?

I don’t know.

Folks tell me that I’m doing a good thing by giving people opportunities to refine their boundaries and decide what they do and don’t want.

I feel scared all the time that I’m on the verge of hurting people. I feel like I should withdraw a lot because I’m pushing too hard. Noah says this may be a bad time to assume that my bad reading of one persons tone means I should stop asking other people for things.

For some reason he seems to think that individual humans should be judged on their own behavior.

Whatever.

So it isn’t going to be a rule (because how the fuck well do I follow rules?!?!) but I think it should be a guideline to not respond to ambiguous messages at all when I’m tired. Once I’m not tired I can say, “Hey I’m not sure I’m getting your tone of voice here. Can you clarify?” Cause wouldn’t that be useful.

I don’t feel like I did yesterday. Glorious 8 hours of sleep. I hate sleep deprivation.

Many folks in the scene have been asking me, “Oh do you remember Mistress ___? She’s coming around more again.”

Goody. She likes to tell me that I’m a bigger bitch than her because I don’t handle sleep deprivation well. Can’t wait to run into her. weeeeeeeeeeee

I’ve gotten off overly lucky this hunting phase. Things have been going too smoothly. I’ve been getting too many ‘yes’ answers. Too many people telling me I’m doing it right. When I hit a bump it feels… big.

It isn’t. I’m going to get over it. But yesterday I couldn’t read tone and I spent a lot of time crying. Like I do.

Sleep. Dear goodness, sleep.

When I was a kid my sister used to tell me, repeatedly, that if I have the same problem over and over it is my fault and not other peoples fault.

I push boundaries. I do it globally. That makes it seem to me like it is all my fault and I’m a bad person. It means that when I feel spooked that I came too near a boundary with one person I want to globalize it and use it as a reason I should stay home and stop hurting people.

I want to use that experience as evidence that I am a monster who is unable to stop hurting people. I want to use the hint of possibility that I pushed too hard as evidence that I should stop asking for anything from anyone because I am not deserving.

I want to tell everyone that I know they don’t really want me and I should stay home.

I kinda got yelled at for that yesterday. Not “YELLED AT” but forcefully reminded that it isn’t my place to tell people what they think or want.

Yeah.

I’m sorry.

I feel bad for wanting you. I feel like I am placing a burden on you that I shouldn’t be placing. It isn’t fair. It isn’t appropriate. Just because I want you that means nothing about what you want and I don’t know what you want.

I don’t know and I’m not sure I’m good at reading people.

Noah makes sure to do over the top physical gestures to highlight how delighted he is by me constantly. Because otherwise I walk through my life feeling like an anvil of disappointment is about to drop on my head because I am not good enough to please anyone.

It isn’t fair to need people to be so demonstrative of their approval. I should just believe.

But I don’t. I’ve had too many years of wanting to die because I am not enough. I do need to feel like people really want me to be there.

Or I should go home and snuggle my kids. Because my kids really want me to be there.

I’m not saying I want to die right now. I don’t. I’m doing alright. I feel… whiny not suicidal. That’s fantastic progress for me. I feel sad and anxious and like I really want to figure out how to do this right some fucking year.

I want to stop messing up negotiating. I feel like there is no valid excuse for fucking up this way at this stage. I’m not a kid messing up out of ignorance. I’m a grown up who fucks up because I’m sloppy and I don’t dot all my i’s and cross all my t’s.

I feel ashamed of that.

But I don’t know how to find a happy medium on the herpes shit. It is… complicated. So many people have it but the few people who don’t know/haven’t been specifically told they are positive… it’s a thing. Should I tattoo “I have herpes” on my forehead so I don’t ever fuck up that bit of negotiating again?

Kissing is a big deal. My Owner didn’t kiss me. I’ve dated other guys who wouldn’t kiss me but who would allow me to provide some kind of service (sometimes sexual and sometimes not) for them. I can’t do that any more. I just can’t. Maybe that section of the users guide should be rewritten.

I like kissing and I know I’m diseased. I’m sorry. I feel bad about existing in this dichotomy but here I am.

Thank you for not caring, Noah.

Kissing feels connecting and bonding. Kissing feels like the difference between just being an object and being a person having an intense shared experience. I need kissing at this point or I really shouldn’t be playing with someone at all.

I’m not negotiating this well and I need to change that.

Lessons hurt. I hate learning lessons. Fuck opportunities for growth. FUCK THEM WITH A POGO STICK.

Do you know what would make all of this easier? If I were less fucking hypersensitive. But if that were true in one area I’d be a lot less sensitive in other areas.

I don’t actually want to stop being who and what I am. I like being sensitive. I like that I react strongly to my perceptions of peoples feelings. That often goes well. But sometimes I’m tired and I read something wrong.

Yeah. That happens.

Uhh… I do better in person. Where I can look at facial expressions and eventually feel comfortable asking millions of questions. I do have to warm up to the questions though. I am actually kind of shy at first.

I don’t want to scare you off. I want you to volunteer stuff. No one ever tells me enough about themselves.

Oh they tell me more than enough about their hobbies. I want to hear about you.

I know it is kind of weird how much I actually like people. But I’m not playing. I do.

I don’t want you to be in a room with me so you can act out my fantasy. I want to be in a room with you so I can see you more fully developed as a character of your own. If you talk fast the whole time I get more of a picture of who you are. (I like turns to talk too. Don’t worry. I know how to talk fast.)

I’m high maintenance. I want understanding and that mandates intense communication. I’m not comfortable. I don’t exist near people to feel comfortable in their presence. That is not how life goes for me. I am not comfortable.

I am with you because I want to understand you. Because I find you compelling. Because I want to know you. Because I want you.

I may not understand what that means. I probably don’t. I will ask for things. I wish you would ask more so that every step of verbal negotiation didn’t come from me.

That is true so much and it scares me because when I am always always always the leader how do I know I am doing what people want instead of dragging them through things they may not be completely on board for doing?

Trust people to be grown ups?

hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha

Sorry, gotta catch my breath.

Phew. Laughing that hard is dangerous. I’m going to bust a rib.

People laugh at me when I say “when I grow up” in reference to my future research. They ask me if I’m grown now. No. I’m not.

I don’t know many grown ups. And I don’t know many people my age or younger. I chase an older crowd and I always have. Guess what. Most of them are not grown up. I mean, they are grown. They are “adults”.

We are all fucking up and growing.

We aren’t done growing up.

I know… a few. They are inspiring and intimidating as fuck to me.

Hands hurt too much to go into that.

Hunting lessons…

Wanting is hard. Wanting is scary. The rejection isn’t the scary part. The scary part is the terror that I will hurt people. I will hurt people. Not because I will hit them (though I will) but because I will say the wrong thing or do the wrong thing or ask for something in a way they don’t feel comfortable refusing and they will feel regret and I will feel shame.

That’s gonna happen.

That is part of hunting.

That fuck up. It is inherent. Other people minimize their risk by looking for one lifetime target and calling it good.

I… like to learn lessons. I have so much to learn. There is so much I want to know. There are so many situations I need to be able to have absolute control over my reaction no matter what physical or emotional stress is going on that I have to perfect this.

I have to. This is going to be necessary for me as a grown up. I am going to need to have 100% control over my reactions. I will need to know “I don’t open my email until I’ve had at least 20 hours of sleep out of 72.”

I need to know myself.

Noah didn’t think the messages sounded the way I read them. It took a lot of explaining and whining and telling back story before he went, “Oooooohhhh… ok. I can see how you read it that way.”

So it was a stretch that was only possible because I’m so awesome.

God I’m ridiculous.

No. I just have a long and complex story and I’m reacting as if all if it is true in every moment of every day and those filters are better and worse based on factors like sleep. Ahem.

Other people can handle sleep deprivation. Great for them.

I can’t.

But there is so much fun to be had in the middle of the night.

I have five solid nights in a row where I’m staying home and getting sleep before our next night out.

But then a different party is the next day.

Fuck. Ok. I need a break after that. I iz at capacity. Ow. I found it. Noah told me he thought I would.

I wanted to see where it was now. I found it. Ow. I’m old.

Why didn’t I want to go to a dark place? I don’t know. It wasn’t that the pain level was beyond my capacity. I never got near an 8. I just…

I don’t know.

It didn’t feel that way. It didn’t feel like that was what was appropriate in the setting? I don’t know.

I need help going on a journey. If I’m going to stand somewhere and just… do what I do… that…. uhhhh… varies.

It is wildly unpredictable.

I also have a really hard time with feeling like I am topping from the bottom. Noah and I have had a hard time figuring this out. I… don’t know how to gracefully lead as a bottom. I suck. So either I shut my fucking mouth and smile as the top decides what is going to happen next or… things get kind of awkward and tense and I spend the rest of the scene feeling bad.

So yes. Sometimes I don’t know what to say.

Even me. I get tongue tied. It is true. I feel like a jukebox waiting for someone to pick a song to play. I don’t know what to say. I don’t have any idea of what would be pleasing. I have such a short window of time in which to try to be pleasing…

I’m afraid of picking wrong.

It isn’t that I’m trying to make up a story to tell. It is that I don’t know which version of myself to start with. There are so many. The order in which I present them matters. It can lead to increased intimacy or it can lead to things like, “I need you to stop telling me about your background. I don’t really want to know.”

This is why Noah and I spend so much time during sex talking about previous sex we have had either with one another or with other people.

I know that I will only learn how to read these things better by running into these walls at full speed so I see all the signals all the way up to long past when I “should” have stopped so that in the future I will understand that danger signals much earlier and have a stronger need to distance myself fast. I know this is “safe” practice.

But I’m so tired of being disappointing. I’m so tired of having people forcefully shove me away because I am wrong.

Asking, wanting, desiring always means risk. It always means possible rejection or unmatched interest or pain.

Always.

Is it worth it?

Even though I’m still tired and even though I still have turbulent feelings…

Yes.

All of it. All of them. Every lesson. Every experience. I’m not sorry I asked. I’m sorry if me asking was done badly. I’m sorry if I asked in a way that did not support people telling me no when they should have or if they really wanted to in the fullness of time. I’m sorry that I will keep making mistakes.

But I’m not sorry enough to stop.

I want to learn this.

I will make mistakes. So will other people. I will get up. I will try again if they are game.

I want.

But first I want more sleep.

Things I learned today.

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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.

Not fair

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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.

Knock, knock knock

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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.

Fuzzy boundaries, longing, and self control.

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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?

Control, sex, identity

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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.

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Category Archives: personal time

You need to get the chip off of your shoulder

Homework (what do I need to work on)

Quiet week

Growing pains and mistakes

Maybe if I write it down I can put it down.

Random art/bdsm cross over.

Looking forward

White trash

Quick, quick…

Chasing and being ok

Inclinations

Sadomasochism, mental health, chronic pain and calibration.

Forward, ho

Knock, knock knock