Category Archives: self-love

Now that it’s done…

I’ll talk about it. But posting “I’m about to go do something basically illegal” is silly. Instead, write about it after the fact. Ahem.

Err, this is why I wanted three days of complete sobriety. To make it so the experience was more intense. No pot, alcohol, or caffeine. Wheeeeeeee.

So I managed to turn up a therapist who does guided MDMA journeys. It’s one of those things that is talked about in PTSD circles. You can do years of processing work in an afternoon. After 33 fucking years of therapy I could use some god damn short cuts.

It was… much less intense than I’m used to. I think he gave me a low dose.

It was good though. I stepped out of my box and talked about a lot of developmental trauma stuff. (It helped that I’ve been rereading the Healing Developmental Trauma book…) We talked a lot about some of my core wounding stuff. The shit that just doesn’t heal. We talked about volition, consent, responsibility, shame, and all those other awesome things.

I talked a lot about the rape I committed when I was a kid. I talked a lot about my brother and my dad’s suicides. I talked about my internal core lack of worth. Recent studies show that the fact that I was the product of rape, my mother seriously contemplated aborting me, and I wasn’t loved much once I arrived… that’s really enough to create that worthless feeling forever.

But! Brains are plastic! They can change.

You just have to work both hard and smart to figure out how the fuck to change it. It’s complicated as fuck.

I feel… like maybe some of it budged today. We talked a lot about my children in context of my experiences. I literally can’t imagine my children forcing oral sex on other children at five. That’s a taught behavior.

My father taught me. I was doing my best to be good. I’m not evil because I had an evil father who taught me things I shouldn’t have been taught. I have been fucking scrupulous about consent for a lot of years now and that is unlikely to change.

I am not a serial rapist. My father was. I am not.

I may be a monster, but I have my limits. I do not want to destroy another person’s soul.

Yes I fucked up really really bad and there were consequences. A little boy was hurt. But I was five. Five year olds… can’t be held to the same standard as an adult. I say that as someone who has been privileged to see a number of five year olds over the last few years. None of them, even if they did something so horrible, would be to blame. The person who taught them to do that would be to blame.

If I had done it again at 15 or worse yet at 25 this would be a different conversation.

I was five.

It isn’t my fault I was born. I did not choose to punish my mother with my birth. That’s not how it works. I did not rape my mother. My father did.

Maybe it’s ok that I was born. I was the only person who was willing to stop my father from raping more people. Not a single other person was going to step up and do that.

Maybe I’m not so bad.

I did the right thing. Even though it hurt. Even though there were consequences. I had to do it. I really did.

We talked about how there is no such thing as “the best mom” because every child has different needs… but I’m a good mom. I’m responsive to my children. I have put a lot of my mental health problems into cabinets and drawers and I god damn show up for my kids. Even when it hurts and I want to dissociate and hide. Even when I feel depressed. Even when I feel anxious. I stomp my shit, explain that my tone of voice will suck because I’m having a rough day, and I fucking show up.

I’m too privileged not to. In my opinion. I have so much support. I can’t let my support down by being a bad mom. I need to be worthy of this life I find myself in the middle of. My children and my husband act like I am good. I am blessed beyond measure.

I have the kind of family that many people dream about and never get. That has to count for something. It didn’t happen by accident. I made this. I made this home. Noah supplied the house. I made it a home for my family. I made these little people and I’ve managed to care about their needs for years and years and  years. Eight years and counting of doing the work.

Pieces of shit don’t do that.

I’m not 100% down yet (halo is niiiiiiice) but we’ll see how I feel over the next few days. We’ll see how this sticks.

I just feel slow, not hungry, and kind of at a distance still. I don’t hear any of the voices in my head that hate me.

I’ll take any break I can get.

What’s next?

There are things I don’t write about.

And then my brain jumps to yet another topic I’m just… not going to write about.

You know what? My body hurts. I can say that. Pretty much all of me. I’m exhausted.

But! I have the most awesome support network I can imagine having. Do you know how it feels that when I am feeling shitty I can reach out to 28 god damn people and all of them have a few minutes to text with me?

The specific quote from the day that I kinda want to have printed on something where I can read it a lot is, “You are very vulnerable to accepting being wrong. Sometimes you’re just NOT WRONG.”

That was succinct. And this person has one of the stronger voices in my inside voice loop. I want to continue to be someone who is ok accepting that they are wrong. I want to continue to be someone who can apologize. I want to continue to be someone who knows that I do wrong things and I fuck up and I need to god damn say I’m sorry.

I like that about myself.

Do you know what else I like about myself? I like that I’m a control freak. Know why? Because it allows me to get so much done.

That’s a pretty core part of my identity. I get shit done. I do it by being a fucking control freak. It is true. And my kids have adapted to the Krissy-show with gusto. But I get that we move through life really fast. We are all intense motherfuckers in this house.

I really like that about us.

Noah and I had a long chat about the Quiet One and the fact that I’m not being a friend to the marriage. I’m not. Getting called on it makes sense. It’s appropriate.

I like giving permission. I don’t really like controlling people by negating behaviors I like controlling people by giving permission. Because I like the results so much more.

It is a conscious choice of ways to interact. I’m not embarrassed about this. I mean, is it “controlling” people to tell them that they really and truly should follow what they want to do instead of listening to the negating voices in the world? Is it influencing? Is it inspiring? Is it just fucking talking?

It depends on who is judging, don’t it?

I’m kinda glad I ended up with some extra days free this week. I get to go visit one of my former students who is dealing with cancer. I’m not going to be shy: please contribute money if you can. I’m not going to give you her life story because I don’t have permission. But this girl has had a ridiculously hard and stressful journey in life. If you can, please help her. She needs to live. Her life has just finally gotten to the point where it is not shitty. Now this. Please help if you can. If you can’t, please share the link with people who can help.

I think a lot about my place in the world. What it means to have an open heart. What will make me hard? What will make me turn mean?

I think that will have to be a choice I make. Because I could get mean. I really could. I could be violent.

But it wouldn’t get me what I want.

Do you know what will get me what I want? Admitting when I fuck up and apologizing. Using my words. Learning how to observe boundaries without being a disrespectful asshole. I will never do what I want to do in life if I double down on my right to stay the same.

That’s just not going to work.

I know I have to change. I know that I have to adapt.

Do you know how much freedom there is in that? I do not have to try and stay the same in a rapidly altering world. I have to try and figure out how to race with the current and pick up speed.

Yes. I play life on the easy level. It is true.

But I also pay forward what has been given to me.

I will keep opening my home. I learn things I need to know.

Helping people can’t ever be about what I get back from doing so. That can’t be the point. You help because you have extra. So much extra. And it is shameful to hoard it. I help in ways big and small, monetary and energetic, near and far.

I like that about me.

I tell my children that they are literally some of the luckiest people who have ever been alive. They in particular have access to more information, freedom, and privilege than like 99.99% of human beings who have ever been alive.

Now what do you want to do with that?

So far draw Minecraft pictures. But they are quite good.

I have a kitchen to finish painting. My heart overflows with joy and creative energy.

My neighbor is going to come over for a chat about her health. She has a bunch of questions she wants to ask me. I’m delighted we were finally able to schedule that.

/me throws out gravity net

Come to me…..

Ahem.

Dude, why am I being such an asshole to Noah? I keep saying shit I shouldn’t say. My shrink says she thinks that he has kept me safe long enough that I’m acting like a rebellious teenager. She might be… closer to accurate than I like.

I am very interested in what medication could do for my reading ability. I haven’t been able to read much in a year. My brain is just too distracted and all over the place. I can’t focus very well. I think I’ve read five new books? That were on intensely important-to-me topics. So I could hyperfocus because shit I need this.

But otherwise I can’t read right now. Quite frankly I think I need to go through and start doing more suicide/trauma reading. I’m flailing and not managing my impulsivity at all well.

I am not being long term selfish I am being short term stupid selfish.

That’s a problem. That creates wounds that don’t heal.

Shit. Shit. Motherfucking Shit.

Ok. Can’t undo what is done. Can only move forward. Apologize. Make a different mistake next time. Hopefully… a much smaller one. In an entirely different area of life. Maybe not make a mistake near that boundary for a few years.

This dance we do.

Given where we are starting from and where we want to get… the only comfort is we have already come so far.

Noah was sweet talking me yesterday. He told me he thinks I may actually be smarter than him I just don’t have as broad of an education as him. That made my elitist smug bastard heart melt. It uhhh made sense in context of the conversation. You don’t get to know the context.

It probably isn’t what you think. And that’s all I’m saying.

I could have come up with many dozens more people yesterday if I had wanted to. Because I am one of the luckiest people alive.

As long as I don’t ask for too much… I can get a few minutes of contact from a whole lot of people all in a burst if I have to.

Thank you.

I love you so much.

Noah does share well. He really fucking does. But I’m not respecting the important parts of not sharing. I’m treating him like an obstacle and that fucking sucks.

Stop being such an asshole, Krissy. He isn’t blocking you from getting what you want. He is what you want. I mean… I can come up with lots of things/people/situations I want too.

But Noah has limits. He shares me so much. He is so patient.

I like to push my luck until I see where I run into a brick wall head first. And that sucks. I always have. I find boundaries from the other side of them.

Noah’s patience should be legendary in my opinion… but he’s running out. It is… interesting to watch. I’m learning a lot.

I feel like I have been feeling around the boundaries. What are the breaking points. What does breaking mean.

What a fucking asshole.

Stop it. You know what being good here means. If you want to earn back trust do the work. For five years. And no bitching. That’s the deal.

My words come at a high cost sometimes.

Sometimes even gods have to atone. I think a limited sentence like five years is kinda generous.

Hunh. I sorta wonder if this is somehow what I was aiming for. Noah came down on me. Like a box of fucking hammers. I’m not saying he was abusive or mean. He wasn’t. He was clear and specific.

Yup. I done did that.

Motherfucker.

Biotech, you know you are skating on thin ice and you say what?

Can’t even say what were you thinking. Clearly there was no thinking going on.

Analyze your possible actions and make choices before you fucking act. I don’t care if it hurts to think that hard. Do it anyway.

Why does it hurt to think that hard? Because my lizard brain is a short sighted asshole. Over riding that takes a lot of push.

On or off is easier. Moderated on…. fucccccckkkkkkkk

I honestly feel like I hit the wall. But not in a bruised and battered way. In a calm, “Oh. Well ok then” way.

Noah my love, I don’t know why this is a good deal for you. I really don’t. I know you’ve told me hundreds of times. It still just… your math is off.

But the boundaries are uhhh becoming clearer by the day. I don’t want to make Noah small and wounded. That means I need to think before I act. I need to keep my mental model of him in the forefront of my mind. Before I say or do anything I have to think about how he would feel about it.

I have to be a friend to the marriage. I have to only say things that increase the likelihood of longevity. Which isn’t to say that I can’t bitch sometimes to friends. But I have to pick who and what I say with respect.

I feel like this should somehow be more intuitive. I think this is why it is just so much easier to pick on or off than moderated on. I don’t think it is that I am just stupid. I think this is hard.

Noah, I still think * is a good idea.

This marriage is going to be long. We need something to go your way sometimes. I’m uhm. Yeah. I’m getting mine. And do you remember how hard pregnancy was? Breaks are good.

Breaks from how obnoxious and high maintenance I am are good.

So I’m a mixed bag. There are things I like about me and things I need to do some serious work on. Sigh. But, I declare that progress towards the goal and continue on with the work.

I’m looking at my calendar up to the cruise. Holy shit.

Well. I do like to keep busy. I might, uhh want to start thinking about packing. Because if I plan well… I bet I could make some damn smart choices. But I’ll have to think. If I pack at the last minute I’ll bring too much.

I’ve done this dance a few times.

 

Chasing and being ok

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.

What does “dating” mean anyway.

I kinda had this epiphany yesterday.

“Hey Noah. Have you passed up chances to play with Beautiful?”

“Not really.”

“Meaning you take them any time they come up.”

“Yeah.”

“And that’s been happening for eight years. Yeah. You’re dating.”

But not dating in a way that scares the shit out of me and causes me to have panic attacks and freak out. Because it’s very low key.

It was just funny to think about. Because if I’m dating my submissive… I have only had like two more dates with him than Noah has had with Beautiful and I’m definitely dating him.

WHY DO WE HAVE TO USE THESE WORDS. FUCK ALL THE EVERYTHING.

But I don’t think this idea that Noah isn’t going to date is tenable. It’s a nice idea. But yeah. It’s not going to be uhhh accurate. Right now the person he is dating is comfortable with it being at the whim of my mental health (thank you, thank you, thank you) but that’s a messy thing. I don’t want to be the weather vane controlling everyone’s lives as I go up and down the roller coaster.

Oh fuck everything.

The more honest with ourselves we are about what we are doing the less likely it is to blow up.

WE AREN’T DATING WE ARE JUST VERY GOOD FRIENDS WHO HAVE VERY INTIMATE CONTACT. FOR YEARS AND YEARS AND YEARS AND YEARS.

Yeah. You just tell yourself whatever the fuck you need to say to get through today. The truth will still be sitting there.

Dating.

What does dating mean anyway? I used to get so mad at my Owner when he would say he hadn’t dated someone. I was all, “You had a three month period where they were at your house three nights a week. You dated for a brief period.” “Oh but it wasn’t serious dating so it’s not dating.” That conversation made me want to break glass.

Thing is, Beautiful is mostly happy with group dates where they just split off to play for a while and otherwise we are together. I like that. I like that a lot and I’d like to see if anyone could fit into a similar sort of role in my life. If these people want to come hang out with us when I am pregnant and miserable or in the babymoon year…

I wouldn’t be alone this time.

I mean, I’m not going to be alone this time. I have the big kids and Noah works from home. It is going to be different from top to bottom. But the kids aren’t company and… Noah still has to ignore me for a large chunk of the day. That’s fine. I miss talking to more people.

Ironically one of our children said, “We should name the child (Beautiful’s real name) because that is a beautiful name.” I think this person is in our life. Ya’know…

loved working retail. I was good at connecting with people all day long one right after another. Being home is…. hard.

And begging friends for play dates is hard work. Mostly everyone is too busy. Or they only want to get together under some narrow parameters outside the house because they don’t want me in their house so they feel uncomfortable coming to my house. Sigh. I’m totally ok with always hosting. I don’t feel imposed upon. I feel catered to.

I feel really really guilty asking people to drive to me all the time. The road goes both ways and I should offer to reciprocate. But I really don’t want to. So I’m asking people less. Because I’m feeling bad about asking.

What is dating? Dating is an extra layer of “It is ok to inconvenience me as you ask me for something.”

Why do I think things with Beautiful aren’t just casual play partners? Cause when I ask if things will escalate when I’m pregnant and not interested he does that head duck thing where he doesn’t want to admit I’m right.

I guess it is good I haven’t managed to chase off every woman who was interested in Noah. Sigh. I swear I wasn’t trying.

I wonder if ADD meds would help with my urge to self harm. A quick search says it is inconclusive. I’d be happy to give it a go.

I don’t know if I want to continue Abilify. I still am not convinced it is doing enough positive. An inch of improvement isn’t worth it. And the kids say I’m getting crankier.

Ok, here’s some blatant honesty. One reason I have always harshly rejected the label of poly is because I have known some extraordinarily bad parents who happened to be poly. It is more important to me that I nail being a good parent than that I nail any other role. If I’m a bad wife, girlfriend, friend, whatever. I can live with that.

I don’t think I could live with myself if I really believed I was a bad mother. I’m a harsh critic. I work really hard on my behavior for my kids.

I’ve seen people do poly really wrong. I’ve seen it hurt kids a lot. I’m scared of that. I’m really really really scared of that.

I like nonmonogamy. It means that our lives aren’t just sexually exclusive. It doesn’t really make any promises about the size or shape or definition of what anything inside of that means. It can mean a lot of different things and a lot of different levels of friendship and love.

What does love mean anyway?

It means I want Noah to be happy and not depressed. That means that when my body goes completely to shit when I’m pregnant… either I encourage him to see Beautiful more (he slept with a different friend during other pregnancies) or I deal with him getting increasingly depressed. These are the options. We’ve been through this dance. I know what the choices are.

But what about the absolute freaking out I do when he comes home? Meh. Even that is muted when I’m pregnant. I don’t give a shit about much other than how much pain I’m in. Bitch come here and rub my back. And my arms. And my feet. Just don’t stop rubbing till tomorrow, ok?

My shrink said she didn’t know if I could get over my fear of Noah dating in this lifetime. But if it has already been kinda happening for eight years… (I actually have a specific brain hack plan in place for how to deal with moving through some of this fear and we have a phone called scheduled on Friday to find out if we will be able to do it.)

Where is the threat?

What is the threat?

What is there to be afraid of. Other than that he will be too god damn enthusiastic when biting my neck.

OW

When I come out of feeling asleep from the breeding period, I wake up with a vengeance. Noah doesn’t do that. If he falls asleep again… waking up would be hard. He’s going to get very habituated to his depressed habits and that doesn’t suit my lifetime goals.

Where is my enlightened self interest here?

I woke up after 6 hours of sleep, and ended up painting by candle light starting at 3am. I’m tired. But I think well in this kind of tired. I read that is an ADD thing too. Deliberately exhausting yourself before you can focus. If this is a lot of what the problem is… I’m going to be so bitter it hasn’t come up before now.

I’m almost 35 fucking years old. I had problems all the way through school because I was a disruptive little snot. Why didn’t anyone ever suggest this?

Ugh. Anyway.

I’m going to add to the data form for the Stanford folk that I think Eldest Child has it. Both she and I only skip one to two markers per person. Different markers. We both kinda scream it. If you sit and read books about case studies that is. That whole super high needs baby thing? Yeah.

Eldest Child doesn’t look like me but she has a lot of my personality and physical weirdness. A lot of extreme sensitivities and fussiness about needing things to be just so. She gets overwhelmed, but I manage her overwhelm so well that it is practically invisible at this point. I would not want her on medication. She is learning to cope with her body and she’s doing great for the life she has now.

But I bet I could learn some tricks to help both of us.

And you know what? Adding people into our lives will be adding people who might know more about this disorder than I do. People who can help me so that I don’t have to be the expert on everything.

I’d be ok deferring expert status on a whole lot of shit. I don’t need to know everything in the world. Ain’t my job. I have enough jobs. I’m tired.

I’m told it isn’t my job to meet everyone’s needs. Believe me I know. But I still feel like what I have to offer is so very inadequate. I am so high maintenance. What do I offer that is worthy of such effort?

Sadomasochism, mental health, chronic pain and calibration.

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.

This is why I like to schedule things at my house.

When it all goes to pieces, I still have chores to do. One of the difficulties in trying to be someone who organizes get togethers is… you have to deal with other peoples schedules. Whether I schedule in advance or at the last minute this sucks.

Yesterday we were supposed to have a playdate with five families. All bailed at the last minute. I think one is in labor (good reason to skip the park! Good luck!); another has to wait on a bureaucrat who is making her life hell (good golly that sucks. Good luck!); another forgot it was election Tuesday and oops she always works (ok, this one kinda bugs me a bit); another was just running behind and she could have showed up two hours late if we waited (no, I’m not gonna); last but not least one family said they were technically happy to show up… with hand foot and mouth disease–that cancellation is my fault.

But I was on my way to babysit other kids and see another family. Picking up a highly communicable disease on the way seemed rude.

Nobody did anything wrong. But it still feels hard.

Sometimes people ask me why I’m not more willing to drive for park playdates these days. I stop laughing eventually.

Because driving far from my house for a park play date is a variable experience at the end of a hard experience for my body. Nope.

Last time some of these folks missed a playdate I scheduled over near them and they asked if we could come back the next week to see them.

Funny how folks don’t generally say, “Know how we broke our plans? How about if we offer this super convenient for you alternative?” That’s not how it works. I offer to come to them and do a bunch of work and they expect me to just do it again. Because clearly it wasn’t that hard the first time so just keep doing it. But it’s too hard for them to come to me.

Ok.

I would like to take this moment and say “Thank you” to all the people who come visit me on a regular basis. Thank you for helping me feel like maybe I do have some value to someone.

Last night Noah and I had it out a bit more. This is going to be a rough year. I’m not writing them down here but I sure went down my list of done-me-wrongs. I did that after running four miles because I was afraid I would otherwise do something drastic and awful.

That’s like healthy progress, right?

It was only a kiss, it was only a kiss.

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What does it mean?

How do I fill my bucket without hurting Noah? That seems to be where we are stuck. Yesterday a solid 8 people asked me why I was wearing braces. I begin to understand Mitrian’s anger and frustration. I tell people because I type too much. They ask why. I say because it is better than screaming at people. They say, “Yes. Keep typing.”

I’m so glad to hear that more people agree that me harming myself is superior to me impacting other people with negative emotions. Now we just dicker about methods.

This became absolutely crystal clear to me when I was talking to someone about cutting the other day.

Cutting actually heals pretty easily in the scheme of things. I am permanently crippling myself in the name of self harm that is more socially acceptable. Because the only place I’m actually allowed to exist is here. Everywhere else is a compromise.

I’m having huge feelings about my date with Cupid not including any intimacy. I’m not upset that we didn’t play. I’m not even cranky about not having sex. He’s not a life support unit for a dick. But we didn’t hug or kiss. So I feel like I didn’t really fill my bucket. And that’s the date I get this month.

I mean, I feel like an asshole for feeling that way because I came off an excellent group date with Noah and Deity and playing with the Sweet Boy.

But that was my only option for one to one serious adoration this month.

Noah and I do adore each other sometimes, in the middle of being cranky and fussy. Right now it’s hard. I know we aren’t actually usually cranky and fussy but I am today and so it feels like always.

What is it that I need here? What isn’t being met? Why do I feel so empty and fussy and sad?

This is a brutal period. I am soaking through pads and that hasn’t happened since I was postpartum. I’m a light bleeder.

I feel like…

I feel like that stone that was sitting heavily in my breast got too heavy and burst through the lining of my body and fell through my organs and out my cunt.

I cannot give that gift away. It is not mine to give. I cannot make that promise. Probably not ever. I wanted to. I can’t. That is not a promise I know I can keep and not being a liar is more important than making anyone feel better for a moment. Even for many moments. Not if it comes at the cost of a lie.

I have been trying to see if I could find a way to promise that I would not end my life early by choice. I have been trying to see if I could find a way to make it bearable to carry this pain no matter what because it would be too selfish to leave the people who love me.

I cannot make that promise. I am selfish. And I hurt. I have hurt all my life. I have never been free from pain.

Some day I will have a bad day. That day will be too much for me. Yeah, there probably could have been more good days on the other side of that bad day. Probably. But I don’t know where my limit of carrying bad days is. That has to matter.

Do you have to be ok with it? No. Do you have to like it? No.

All that matters is that on the bad days I am alone. I will carry what I can carry until I can’t carry it any more and then I will set it down.

I need to not give a shit that it might hurt you.

Very briefly

Today I wake up feeling happier than I have in a bit. From a mood tracking point of view this is significant.

I was feeling some feelings of potential rejection and I processed them with a nice friend who was all, “Let’s talk context” and then I got full circle to “Shit. I’m acting like a spoiled baby who isn’t being aware of the limitations of the people I like a lot. Knock that crap off.”

Thank you for your patience with my selfishness and self-absorption.

I worry a lot about whether or not I am using my time in the most useful or effective or fun ways.

Sometimes life isn’t about that. Sometimes life is about being with someone when neither of you feel exciting. Sometimes life isn’t about maximizing “Make me have fun today or I’m kicking you to the curb.”

Sometimes life is just sitting together and having dinner and being tired. Because that is where you are. That has to be ok too.

If you like someone, you have to like them all the time. Even when they are tired and don’t have a lot to give. Or you are an asshole.

Ok, I know I’m an asshole… but I try hard to not be that flavor of asshole.

As I sit here mooning over the Sweet Boy Noah is making fun of the fact that I’m not really ready to stop expanding the roster.

But I want to spend the time everyone on the roster already deserves and time is limited. Sometimes the right kind of time to be spent isn’t what you think you want, and it is bonding anyway.

What is the difference between being someone’s friend and using them for sex/play?

I want to be your friend. I like you. I’ve liked you for such a long time.

Ok, but next time it is a date can I ask for at least more kissing and hugging? I’m ok with no sex and play. We are all human animals and we get tired. But I feel like, for me, to call it a date I’d like at least some more kissing and hugging.

I want to be your friend too. But I also want to mack on you because yeah, that’s totally why I’m there. Because I want to be your friend who macks on you. It’s a thing.

The funniest part of chasing so many people right now is how insecure every person is. None of us feel worthy of being liked this much. None of us feel like forsooth someone will like us.

But I like you and you and you and you and you. Near as I can tell you like me back.

How can we work on some of this mythical “self esteem” bullshit I hear so much about? How can your love for me help me love myself and how can my love for you help you love yourself? Can we help one another feel worthy? I don’t know. I want to find out.

It helps with Noah. It really does. Being with Noah has changed me. As much as it hurts my fucking finger, wearing the rock he gave me (err, that I picked out and bought for myself on his dime) has changed how I feel about myself in the world. Because it changes how I’m treated by random people.

Do you know how weird it is for a dirty street kid to have people genuflect because you must be important to be wearing a rock like that? Blows my fucking mind.

Worth is all about games of perception.

I think I’m going to try to have a week off pot. I’m just going to have Abilify in the morning and Klonopin at night.

Wish me luck.

Re-enter the world

That was different. I’ve been to two grief rituals held on a university campus where you have to go home in the evenings. This was deeper, more intense, and more valuable. I’ll be back. I’m bringing my kids. Noah can come if he chooses.

There is stuff that is worthy of learning from this woman. Sobonfu has perspective on life. It isn’t that she has “all the answers” because there is no such thing. But she’ll help you look at your life. She doesn’t need to hear all of your grief. She can talk to you about how to shape a container for carrying it anyway.

She talks about many different kinds of grief and gives you opportunities to feel communion and support for people who have grief that is nothing like yours. This world needs more of that.

As usual, lots of us white folk were all, “Oh shit are we appropriating assholes?” (Phrased with more tact.) She said that her village (in Burkina Faso–specifically from the Dagora tribe) has sent her out into the world to share this knowledge and they are glad we are listening.

So.

I thought about a lot. I thought about things I didn’t expect to think about, exactly, because that is how grief flows.

When I carved forgive onto my arm I wasn’t sure what or who I needed to forgive. There is this theme in my life. Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. Who? For what? Why? How?

I need to forgive myself for being born. For being an unwanted burden from the moment of conception.

That is a wound on my soul. Knowing that I wasn’t wanted from the moment of conception eats at me. It lives under all of the other feelings of worthlessness and despair. I shouldn’t be here.

Forgive me for not being good enough to die when I should have.

Noah and I talked last night about my suicide attempt. I don’t feel I need forgiveness for that. I was trying to get out of a nightmarishly hard situation. I tried suicide before I tried prosecuting my father and I don’t feel bad. I don’t feel bad about hurting my mother or sister or brother or Auntie or uncle Bob with that suicide. If y’all were hurt by how badly I wanted out of life that is at least partially your fault and I don’t care.

Am I sorry I survived?

I wouldn’t have Noah. I wouldn’t have my kids. I think the world would be ok without this family unit. But since I didn’t die I’m really grateful I get to be here.

This is the best thing that has ever happened to me.

But I don’t believe in “It Gets Better.” Sometimes. For some people. Don’t count on it.

I thought a lot about the deals I have made with my cunt. I thought about the core belief I have that unless I am servicing someone else’s sexual needs… I have no value. I thought about the core belief that if someone wants to hurt me with sex… maybe that is just how it is supposed to feel for me.

Shouldn’t sex be burning pain? Isn’t that what sex is?

Forgive who for what?

I don’t know how to forgive myself. Sobonfu told me that when I forgive myself I will feel free. I feel like I am bowed under the weight of a huge burden. I cannot even stand up straight let alone feel free. I am buried under the weight of expectations and woundings I can barely name, let alone untangle, let alone set down.

I feel so sad.

I feel ashamed of the things I can’t be supportive of.

I feel ashamed that I am so small and so needy.

I am not generous. I am not giving. I am stingy and paranoid and selfish.

Noah and I are probably getting closer to rules we can live with. I wish I felt good about them. They are highly asynchronous and that feels terrible. I shouldn’t have bits of freedom he doesn’t have. Even though he has bits of freedom I don’t have. Even though he doesn’t experience the same burdens and problems I feel.

I shouldn’t ever have anything better than anyone else. I’m not worthy.

I appreciate very much that the Dagora tradition talks about how you need to forgive yourself. You need to grieve. You need to commune with your ancestors. And you need to forgive yourself. Forgiving other people is… less the point.

I have feelings.

Sometimes I feel like I am swimming in an ocean of grief and the waves keep swamping me. I will go down soon and there will be no recovery.

Going to these grief rituals shows me that there are currents in the ocean. There are other creatures being moved by these same currents. Even though it feels so overwhelming and so terrifying and so overpowering… I’m not alone. I can see them. Sometimes I can even stretch out my hand and feel the strands of their hair as they slip past.

I don’t know that we can help each other… but we aren’t alone.

Is that enough?

Boundaries on and off screen

I am somewhat hyperaware that someday my kids may grow up and read this. It could happen. That means I actually… edit… maybe more than you might think of my life here. I’m nervous about how I present Noah. I talk about him in terrible ways sometimes. I also very carefully avoid saying a lot of terrible things about him.

I do not want sides taken. I do not want back and forth bickering in public. I do not want my children seeing the depths to which we sink when we are being fucking petty. Why not? It’s complicated.

We haven’t fought like this since we closed our relationship. Fighting like this is why we closed our relationship. Because we didn’t think we could stay married through fighting like this.

But that was when we had babies and it just wasn’t ok at all for me to have emotional variance because of my relationship with Noah. I had to be regulated because I was teaching emotional regulation just about 24/7.

That was kind of a difficult thing for someone who is as dysregulated as I have been all my life. I look at my children and feel that I succeeded. Clearly they got the lessons they needed developmentally when they were needed. I did it. I stayed calm. I taught them how to handle conflict and big feelings without flipping out.

I did it.

Which means I can have more things in my life that cause my feelings to fluctuate. Which is fucking tricky.

Nonmonogamy is going to be hard. There are a lot more insecurities here than either of us are really having fun talking about.

What does safety mean? What does connection mean? What are we working towards? What do we want? What is the purpose of sex in our relationship? What do we do for one another versus for ourselves?

I sure wish that these conversations could come with a little more sleep for me. Out of the past three nights I’m now only down about one night of sleep. That’s improving…

But we talk all night long because we can’t talk in front of the kids.

I am not sure either of us are being fair. Yeah, I’m being an asshole. I’m not in denial. I’m not trying to say that I’m being fine and he’s the asshole. I’m really not saying that.

I cheated and broke his heart. He thought he was going to get to be my one and only forever and ever amen.

He’s allowed to be absolutely furious about that.

I know.

I’m trying very very hard to not get into done-me-wrongs. I will talk about what I know I have done wrong. I don’t need to get into done-me-wrongs.

It won’t help. I hiss those often enough in person. It’s not like I’ve forgotten the list. I just don’t need to write it down.

How do you fight in civilized fashion when you are a compulsive over-sharer? Like this. You say what you did wrong and talk about being angry without placing blame. I’m not saying that Noah is to blame for my feelings. He isn’t. I mean… a couple of his particular phrase choices were infuriating… but whatever. I’m being a right bitch in this fight.

How do you build towards a vision of self that may not be what your partner wants? How big do you want your partner to be? How small so you can feel bigger? I don’t know.

Who is pulling whom around on a chain.

I don’t want to leave. That’s part of the reason I have no particular reason to bad mouth Noah up one side and down the other. I don’t want to leave. Even though I’m angry about some stuff right now… that’s life. I flipped the canoe of our life over. There are going to be some feelings we have to deal with. I’m ok with that. I’m not enjoying this process but I see it as necessary.

I’m not afraid of conflict.

I’m afraid of not getting my needs met.

I’m afraid of not being who I want to be because I am afraid that someone else doesn’t want me to be.

I’m afraid of making myself small and unthreatening and never doing anything with my life again because I have decided I don’t deserve to ask for what I really want.

What does necessary even mean?

I’m sure I don’t know.

Am I fucking everything up permanently? Well. I guess we will find out. There is the non-zero possibility.

It is hard when I feel like I’m absolutely the bad guy here. I’m the one insisting on change because the status quo wasn’t working. I feel like a fucking asshole for not making it work. For not deciding that it was just good enough because that was all I agreed to this life.

I did not promise sexual fidelity in my marriage vows. Yeah. I slammed the door four years ago when we were having screaming fights about lying and … shit don’t rehash it. It wasn’t well done.

I feel like everything bad must be all my fault. I feel like I am a monster. A selfish, disgusting monster.

Day 38. Still no bleeding. PMDD means that right before I start bleeding I tend to have intense spikes of depression and anxiety. My suicidal urges go through the roof. This is a well documented phenomena.

I need to be something other than a cum dumpster who can’t cum. This just… isn’t working any more.

I wish I didn’t feel so fucking bad about that.

Sometimes people ask why I write such whiny melodramatic stuff. Aren’t I embarrassed? I’m documenting what living with an acute stress disorder is like. The kind that results from brain damage. If you think I should be embarrassed that says more about you than it does about me. No, it’s not fucking smooth. Yeah I’m a lot of fucking drama. Lots of ups and downs.

That’s what brain damage does. Pieces of it are absolutely my fault in an ongoing way I really don’t deny that. But I’m also trying to deal with my problems. That means I’m going to flail and do things that don’t work sometimes and I will document those fuck ups so I don’t forget and have to make the same mistake over and over.

I’m not writing for you.

I’m writing for me.

Masochism

Maybe I can’t sleep. I woke Noah up for sex (like a nice girl) and that wasn’t enough to make me sleep again.

Masochism has been a very central pillar of my life. The degree to which I submit my will to someone else’s will is much more variable but if you include emotional masochism… I’m always a masochist.

I’m going to sound a little snotty. I don’t mean it that way. I’m trying to figure something out.

Last night it was fascinating being in a triangle between Noah, Deity, and Cupid. I say this because Noah is somewhere between Cupid and Deity in interactions at this point. Realistically I shouldn’t judge Deity’s sadism because I get the impression I’ve just seen the first hints of teeth and I haven’t seen the real thing yet.

But I went from sitting in front of two mean boys who wanted to hurt me to being hit by a sadist.

In the past few months since I’ve shown up at the bar I’ve gotten to relearn I fucking hate pinching. I am having a hard time not slamming my skull into peoples noses as they pinch the shit out of me. It makes me angry. I want to fight back. I’m trying really hard to go along with it because clearly other people are enjoying it.

But it makes me feel hateful and angry.

Sometimes some grabs with a full hand aren’t as irritating… but the small grabs… fuck I feel mean.

It feels like I’m dealing with mean boys again.

This is a weird thing. Because I sure do like mean men. But I feel differently about mean boys.

This is hilarious because I am the youngest of all of these people. So what. It’s an energy thing not a statement about age.

I don’t know why the pinching makes me so mad. I try not to get angry. I try really hard to be pliant. I feel fucking angry.

My brothers pinched me a lot. My father pinched me a lot. You are displeasing. Shut up. No one wants to acknowledge you. Take this reminder that you are not worth actually acknowledging and shut up.

In order to take it I have to go to a fairly dissociated place with regards to feeling it in my body; I have to choose to shut down my fight response and accept.

Noah was asking me questions on the way home. He could read my facial expression during the pinching and backed off. He switched to punching. Yeah, that’s how you can butter my biscuit.

I feel like there is this line between masochism and submission and I’m stumbling on it right now. What is the difference between pain you submit to because it is pleasurable to your partner and pain you submit to because you like it?

I like being punched. I can be punched for hours and I’ll just make appreciative noises. The bruises can be massive. I’ll purr like a cat in between shrieks and bellows and orgasms. I like punching.

Pinching… it takes me right out of headspace. It makes me feel like I need to prepare for a fight. It is intensely triggering to my fight reflex. Which makes submitting to it an interesting challenge.

What bothers me is it never feels like people are challenging me on this incredibly sensitive boundary because they want to have power over me and they want to cause me to work through it. I usually feel like people are pinching me absentmindedly. Like a fiddle toy.

I hate that.

Am I submitting or bottoming? Am I doing this for you or for me?

I don’t know.

It’s like hair pulling. It’s one of those things that people just do because they have this schema around rough sex that it is a mandatory part of things. But if you yank on my hair absentmindedly I will not be able to focus my eyes tomorrow from pain.

My body is in a fair bit of pain under normal operating conditions. I showed up at the bar tonight feeling like I was at a 6. Then I got pinched. Then beaten.

This god damn tile work is killing me. My neck hurts. My back hurts. My arms hurts. And now my ass hurts too. Glorious.

The ass is the only part that’s fun.

How will I be hiding my bruises? Well… I need to develop some habits around dressing in private. Ahem.

I feel like the bruises are coming in harder and faster this time than they did the first time I played with Cupid. Well done.

Noah asked me how I managed to process the hits because they came quick and hard and he’s used to me getting overloaded and shutting everything down.

Instead Cupid hit me hard and quickly and when I collapsed to the floor to squat because it was too much he put his arm around my chest, leaned me back against him, and kept hitting.

My cunt is still throbbing because that was so hot.

I was overloaded but I didn’t feel panicked and I’m not sure why it happened that way. I panicked more and made him back off more at our first date at his house.

I suspect that a hair of it was that I was completely surrounded by people and if it really got out of hand I had help available. It was safer to let it go farther.

I don’t think that was a conscious decision but I think it factors in somewhere.

Where is the line between masochism and submission for me? I felt like part of the reason I could go deeper was because Cupid was managing energy well. He was being aware and barely callous in just the right ways. I’m pretty sure he could tell I was making some noise but not exactly what came from me or what came from the other folks making noise. So he thoughtfully leaned in and let me know that he couldn’t hear very well and he’d be looking for other signals that I couldn’t handle it.

That let him push right through most of my masochist-not-submissive early warning signs. All the “I’m not sure I like this” noise he could just ignore. That’s what I mean by callous. But he did it by being very responsive to physical signals and just… interpreting them how he felt like. He kept going because he read enough yes in my body.

I am so incredibly not upset. I will be spending time in my bunk today thinking about this again. Probably a few times.

It isn’t that I want to distract you with kissing and get you to not beat me. It is that when you intersperse kissing with hurting me I want to give you so much more. Because you are hurting me. Because you are connecting with me.

I was listening to an old episode of the radio show that I’m going on. A woman was expressing her strong preference for not kissing early on.

That was funny to hear just now. I want kissing. I want kissing and kissing and kissing and kissing. Don’t fucking hurt me if you aren’t going to kiss me too. If you aren’t going to kiss it better I don’t fucking like you very much.

But I do sometimes play with people who don’t kiss at all. But that’s because they don’t kiss anyone and they know how to connect anyway. We also don’t go as deep or as hard with the play.

WHY IS THIS SO CONFUSING?!

(I’m totally ok with that person not wanting kissing during first time sex. Whatever floats your boat. It was interesting to feel how I feel about that.)

If you want access to my body it starts with my mouth and my mind. Otherwise go fuck yourself.

I don’t think it is that pinching is a hard limit. I think it is that pinching is a serious kind of play for me. It’s a really big mind fuck and I don’t think people understand that in general. Pinching requires some serious fucking submission from me and playing with that idly is… complicated. Like, I need to talk to Daddy about this. He’s a pinchy motherfucker. (Which I’m not mad about.)

But I need to talk to him about this. Words. I need to find words. I want you to understand that when it comes to my body pinching it is a much more serious activity than hitting me with a mallet.

I like the mallet more.

The mallet doesn’t make me feel like I want to take my finger nails and rake them across your face.

I feel mean when I’m pinched. I don’t feel sexy. I don’t feel wanted. I feel angry. Trying to tamp that down and not explode all the fuck over people is an act of conscious, serious will.

We all come from very particular life experiences. I’ve dealt with a lot of mean boys.

I’m trying to figure out what I feel and why. I don’t figure this stuff out very well unless I’m bouncing off of people. I don’t think about why pinching is such a thing because I’ve just managed to mostly scare Noah out of doing it.

Then I go hunting like a fool.

Fucking pinchy bastards are everywhere.

How do I feel about pinching? I feel like I hate you. Just for a few seconds. Just as long as you are pinching me. I get over it. But I have to decide to. That kind of thing takes a toll. How many times I have to decide to stop hating you in a night adds up.

It is a very different kind of submission than accepting that when I resist someone beating me they will just slam me back down on the table so they can keep hitting me. God that was hot. Ok, I’ll relax and just accept that this is happening now.

Ok.

I’m sitting on a very comfy lawn chair. My ass hurts.

Thank you. I’m grinning.

Why are some kinds of pain enjoyable even when I don’t enjoy it. I promise you that I didn’t enjoy most of what Cupid did to me last night. It fucking hurt. But I really liked that he wanted to do that to me. I liked that he wanted to take that enjoyment from me even when it was really hard for me.

Why doesn’t pinching work that way?

It can. With the right set up and frame and acknowledgement that this is a huge trigger you are pushing on.

That’s not how it usually happens though.

Why don’t you pinchy motherfuckers push on a trigger point or something. Much less effort on your part, more pain on my part, less feeling like I want to rip your fucking face off.

Everybody wins.

Somehow I think that an incredibly small fraction of the pinchy motherfuckers will listen to me. That’s both why I date them and why I hate them.

Fuck.

IT WOULD BE OK IF YOU ACTED LIKE THIS WAS A BIG THING. IT WOULDN’T MAKE YOU LESS DOMLY OR SOME SHIT.

It isn’t that I have a problem with mean people hurting me in this way if it is done right. It is that it is hard to do right and most people won’t bother.

That’s a thing.

Being picky sucks.

And then when we got home Noah put his cock in me and it hurt like I was being fucked with a knife. I stopped the sex. No. Just… no. Actually, I’ve been fucked with a knife and it didn’t hurt that bad. The person wasn’t trying to puncture my uterus.

I have no idea what was going on. I woke him up for sex this morning and it wasn’t orgasmic for me, but it didn’t hurt. I think I was so afraid of it hurting that I wasn’t really going to relax that time. But I wanted sex anyway.

I wanted sex specifically so I could talk to Noah about how much I like him and want him and need him. He is being ridiculously supportive as I’m being kind of a pain in the ass. It makes him happy when I demonstrate my gratitude with frantic, clutching sex where I talk the whole time about why he is important to me.

Noah is kinda my world. I need him to feel that or I’m doing something wrong. His primary way to feel loved is to have sex. Not just have sex, I need you sex.

But who doesn’t want that?

I’m just glad he is amused that I enjoy kissing other people so much. I’m glad he is interested in watching other people hit me because he learns more about me as a creature to be studied. I’m so fucking glad that Noah spends this much time wanting to look at me.

He’s been doing a lot more writing for me lately. I like that. I like that so much. He’s been writing scene reports so he can learn from them. He’s been writing about his insecurities and that’s letting us talk about what we want in the future from an unequal power dynamic. The day he proposed to me he told me he wanted me to be his wife and his slave. I said I could do that but it would take a very long time to get to the slave part.

It… was mixed last time and I don’t want to have to walk away from our relationship because that part crashes and burns.

So Noah appreciates chances to watch me interact with other people because he sees how I react to things without his own internal filtering going on. We can talk about why I leaned in to some things and why I grimaced at other times.

Noah wants to look at me. Noah wants me to do whatever the fuck I want just so he can watch.

I love you Noah. Even if you are a mean boy sometimes.

Thank you thank you thank you everyone. Thank you for giving me these opportunities to learn more about myself. I am grateful.

My arms. My arms. Oh my arms. Must stop.

Promiscuity and permission

I had a thought. And even though I’m trying not to type much this weekend I want to write this down.

The difference between me doing what I’m going to do and feeling good about myself and me doing what i’m going to do and feeling bad about myself… is mostly about how I’m perceived.

I’ve been a big slut chasing sex since I was in preschool. Rampant promiscuity is part of my life.

This time… I’m coming home to a safe home. With a partner who grins at me and who wants to hear every filthy detail. He’s concerned about my safety and my rate of adding partners. He’s concerned about me stepping outside my carefully vetted pool because in the past that has been a mixed bag for me.

He’s not telling me to stop fucking my friends.

He’s not sure what he wants and that is a slow process we are talking about a lot together. He’s not entirely sure what he thinks will be sustainable in terms of my behavior but we are talking.

There is no shame.

I need to say that again because it is so important: There is no shame.

There are uncomfortable feelings. There is a tinge of sadness on both or parts. We wanted the fantasy of monogamy. We liked it. We wanted it to work.

It didn’t work well for us. We are going back to stuff that has worked well for us.

But we are doing it from a framework of a very happy and supportive marriage. We like each other. It is a little weird going back to dating from the point of view that I’m blissfully happy at home and I love my marriage… I just do better with a variety of sex partners in my life. I like bouncing off of people.

It really helps that since I started fucking around Noah is inspired and he’s been fucking me more and better than he has since the first year of marriage. We are getting close to our pre-kids sex life.

Which is fucking awesome.

We are getting back to the sex life we had when I was dating Spot and…. I can’t remember who else. It’s embarrassing how bad I am at remembering who I dated when. I can remember that I dated someone, but I need to really think about it to figure out which period of my life. (Actually… it may have been just Spot and Noah because I was teaching. I was real busy then.)

“Which slut period did you overlap?”

But I remember Spot. He’s one of the few who made it to 9 months. I liked Spot a lot. He was… a nice break from the assholes I had been dating. Ultimately he was too nice for me and that’s ok too. I’m one of those terrible people who likes assholes.

I need you to have brick wall boundaries because I am going to throw myself at them. I don’t want them to collapse. Usually only assholes can do that. Assholes know “I go out this far and this is where I stop. Get the fuck off my wall.”

But this is what I was thinking about this morning. Permission. Noah gives me permission to exist in a way no one else ever has. I’m not sure it would have occurred to anyone else. I’m not sure anyone else would look at me and think, “Oh there’s a person quaking with fear because no one has given her permission to act how she wants to act.”

Snicker.

But it’s true. I do. I do what I’m going to do anyway. The difference is whether I feel ashamed of myself afterwards for acting in a way I think I’m not supposed to act or whether I feel fine because I was told I am fine.

Noah does that.

Noah gives me that.

He tells me I am fine.

Sharing complications

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.

 

 

Still integrating.

I got over 10 hours of sleep. That’s freakishly rare for me. I must have needed it.

I feel peaceful, happy and calm. I feel ok.

I feel like I have a whole day of work ahead of me. A whole day of snuggling and talking and sharing joy. We like productive days. We are workers, not shirkers. We got good hard play in this weekend.

Time to put the work in. We can do that.

This week is not that busy. Folks are coming over most days this week. At least Tuesday/Wednesday/Thursday/Friday. Monday is quieter. Noah has two first dates. Good luck with that. Many of these visits will be only a few hours long. Two days have overnight guests. Pam isn’t quite ready to run away from us yet so we get a little bit of extra time with her. I’m not crying. I didn’t feel ready to let her go anyway. She should come annoy me some more so I’m ready to push her towards her next adventure.

I so rarely have this feeling. I feel like my soul is a placid lake. If you toss a rock on it there will be ripples for a few minutes before it comes to stillness again.

I’m not just allowed to be kind of awful sometimes… I’m encouraged.

This part is… a little embarrassing… but who the fuck am I kidding? Much of my writing is… Noah likes to talk to me about being Krissysexual. He talks about it as being very close to his religion. I really like being the center of cult worship. On Saturday night I was standing and Noah was kneeling in front of me and my submissive uhhh behind me.

Oh the worship.

(This was after I sliced him up.    !!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

I’m feeling very ok about being me right now. Sated. Pleased.

And I still have all the bruises all over the place to make sitting kind of uncomfortable. Every time I hit a sore spot I grin in a goofy way. I think, “Thank you Daddy” and I think “Thank you Cupid” and I think “Thank you Professor”.

I have time coming up with Deity. There’s news on that front I’m not writing about yet cause it is the only hint of wistfulness in the whole set up. But frankly it’s the kind of wistfulness that will churn my butter so let’s go with it.

Main character. Yeah. I can do this. Complicated story. Lots of subplots.

Excellent. Let’s finish this rodeo.

Coming home

When I was 18 years old I showed up in the bdsm community. I had some awkward experiences then I went to a munch. Then I went to my second munch. At my second munch I was invited to a private party. The same group we got together with tonight. They’ve been meeting up monthly for more than 20 years. Many of these folks have been there pretty much the whole time.

I felt like I was coming home. I asked for permission to do a heavy scene. The homeowners (one of my leather mom’s and her partner) told me I had complete trust to do whatever I wanted.

That’s a big deal in my little world. Trust is earned slowly in increments. I felt valued and missed from the minute I walked in. Even people I have not traditionally gotten along with that well were really happy to see me.

I’ve noticed that more than once in the community. Since I spent so much time gone folks have forgotten that they disliked me and they just remember that I was part of the good old days. I was. Those were wonderful days. I feel like these days are going to get better.

Socializing was so damn nice. I was so excited to catch up on the news for everyone’s life.

I spent a while chatting with one of Cupid’s other play partners. I was reminded of how much fun it is to share play partners and friends. She was absolutely as sweet as could be. She says she thinks we are alike. I hope so. I would like to be like someone like her.

But the play. Oh the play. This is one of the hottest nights of my life. I have never before done a serious cutting on someone. I… got more enthusiastic as the event continued. It was amazingly fun fucking with his head for a long time with the scalpel. For a long time on his thigh I wasn’t even getting past the top layer of skin. But he thought I was gouging him.  He couldn’t see what I was doing and he was pretty freaked out. So I showed him the tiny little couple of drops of blood. He was like, “Wait. That’s it?”

Ha.

Of course… that was well into the scene. I’m out of order because it was so god damn hot. The scene kinda felt out of order. I forgot to put a collar on him until well into play. But it was fun and exciting when it happened so I’m not that sad.

After cutting his thighs I flipped him over and cut his ass for a while. That was… wicked exciting so I decided it was time for him to fuck me.

Ok, do you know what was so hot about the cutting? I was licking it up like a cat. I’ve always wanted to do that and I’ve never had an appropriate partner. I would take fingers full of blood and smear it on his cock and lick it off.

That was so fucking hot.

While he was fucking me I told him that someday I want to cut open his chest so that he can cover me in blood when we fuck. He… more or less asked why someday. So I grinned, grabbed the scalpel…

I may have been a trifle exuberant.

So on his thighs and ass it took many many slices before I hit blood. I was super careful and slow and delicate.

Uhm… I sliced the shit out of his chest. He started bleeding a fair bit right away. There was no delicate barely reddening line. There was a lot of blood.

I played in it. I finger painted myself and him. I licked it. I took whole handfuls of blood and licked it. By the time I was done I looked like I had ripped the neck out of a wildebeest with my teeth.

That made me come so hard.

Because I’m an exhibitionist slut we went upstairs to show off before we took a shower. We took pictures. Because oh my god.

I mean there was caning and slapping and biting and all that other stuff in there.

The blood the blood the blood the blood. *dance around in circles*

Alright. I’m addicted. I need to do that again.

That scene took 2.5 hours. I only stopped because he looked so high I thought I really should. I kinda sorta felt like I should feed and water him. Prudent to take care of your toys.

Then we proceeded to have the most make-out-fest party I’ve been to for one of these. That was glorious.

Remember what I was saying about my comfort zone? I was glowing and even I could tell.

Then Noah got there. We socialized for a bit more. I looked at my boys, didn’t even bother to bat my eyelashes and said “I could use more fucking.”

I love my life.

We went and spread out a tarp. They took turns playing with/fucking my ass and fucking my mouth. Noah spent a lot of time putting clothespins on my breasts and calling me a whore and telling me to come.  Which I did. A lot. Over and over. They spent a lot of time talking about how the red mark on my chest was moving lower and lower… way more flushed than normal. Lots of time egging me on to make more noise. Well done, gentlemen.

Well that was sooooooooo hot.

A two shower party is a good party.

Then we socialized a lot more. And made out more. And snuggled more.

I feel like the luckiest girl ever.

(For the record… blood testing was involved in the negotiation for this scene.)

I love you. I love you. I love you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Oh god yes. More.

I would write more but my arms hurt.

Punching is so awesome.

Last night was a punching heavy night. I was punching a lot and then I got punched a lot. Life is fair sometimes.

I played with the Professor. He plays with a lot of new people and he is good at helping people explore sensation. I told him I didn’t know what I wanted to be hit with because I genuinely don’t know what I like at this point, but I know I’m on the thud end.

He brought an assortment of toys and hit me for a while with them before switching to punching.

I liked and hated most of the toys. I loved the punching. Loved the punching. Got off on the punching. That was fabulous deep thud. That rocked all the way to the center of me.

Surface pain on my skin is harder. The flogger was a lot of surface area of skin. I feel like I like/enjoy/can tolerate floggers exponentially better now than I could when I was younger (I am apparently getting older and less sensitive) but they are still hard. I feel panic when a large amount of surface area is hit at once.

And holy shit for shoe shine do I dislike any hits on my low back. Mother fucker. That’s always been true.

Once, when I was 19 I was on a date with a friend and he was passing me around a party. I complained so much about specific kinds of hitting that he found a marker and made a big X on my low back and wrote “NOT HERE” and on my ass he wrote “NO STING”. Then he had way more people hit me.

It went better at that party after that.

I feel like things have drifted but those are still fairly accurate warning labels and I should figure out how to explain them better on my own.

My low back has been problematic since early childhood because of a vicious assault. No, I don’t like it when I’m hit there.

It isn’t sexy. It isn’t easy to process. It hurts.

Thank you for the lesson.

The flogger on the upper back wasn’t like that. That was horrible and painful and mean and… hot. I felt like if that came with a story I could really get into suffering like that. As a stand alone sensation it wasn’t my favorite but I could see the appeal. Which is a huge shift for me. Thank you for the lesson.

I felt kind of ridiculous for liking the Nerf thing. I shouldn’t like being hit with a Nerf toy. That’s perverted.

It was a great warm up toy. Oh man. He did a warm up. It was like magic. I remembered correctly! Warm ups are awesome! Yay warm ups!

He was very good at the reassuring-from-the-back-hug. Some tops nail that and some… don’t. He was really good.

Last night was a night of SM like I used to do. Lots of violence and my genitals were not in play at all. It was a stark reminder of how much I have drifted. Oh yeah. That used to be my life.

It isn’t any more.

I have a tremendous quantity of feelings to process. I’m going to put them in this nice neat box I have here and deal with my day. I don’t have any other play scheduled after today and that will stay true for a bit.

I need to process these bits. I need to integrate what I need to say differently. I need to think about what to say about play for it to be more of what I want.

I need to figure out more about what the fuck I want. I have inklings and that’s not good enough. I need to think about this.

Why don’t I feel comfortable talking during play sometimes? I really don’t. I don’t feel like anything I could say would be ok. So I don’t say much. I don’t like that. It isn’t useful. Just making noises isn’t good enough feedback.

I feel like I need to figure out the difference between playing to suffer and playing to have fun and playing to get off. I think they are different. I think I need to figure out the limits on the suffering I can offer at this point.

My low back needs to be off the table. That’s going to need to be a hard limit. Fine, maybe someone else won’t be damaged by light hits there. I can be. It needs to be a hard limit for me. I don’t need to talk about it and I have to figure it out before I bottom again because… someone is going to cripple me.

Words. Words are hard. I like typing. I like typing till my hands cramp and ache and this is so definitely my current favorite form of self harm.

Words are harder. Words are scary. Speaking is hard. I need to work on more scripts. Ugh.

Just being able to make the noises is huge progress for me. I know it doesn’t seem like that to people. I know it just seems like some obnoxious thing I do. It has been hard for me to be in my body enough to connect with what is happening. I have tried hard to do that.

I have spent a lot of my life dissociated. I go back and forth between dissociation and hypervigilance so that I either don’t know what is happening around me and to me or I’m freaking out about everything near me.

It’s fun.

The hypervigilance has improved dramatically over the last few years. I have consciously worked on a number of my tics and they have improved. I still don’t have a comfort zone but I don’t feel crawl-out-of-my-skin-anxious as often. I am also far less dissociated. I can’t be and take care of the kids. I have to be present. I picked the high-intensity version of parenting. I can’t phone it in much. They won’t let me.

Maybe my comfort zone is fucking people. Every other part of interaction is harder and more complicated. It’s why I’m pushing people for fucking with play.

I think. As I look in retrospect at my behavior over the past few weeks. I think that is what is going on. Ok. This is why I talk to myself. Because I’m trying to figure out why the fuck I do what I do.

I think it is healthy for me to sit with the discomfort that comes from people not asking for access to my genitals. But it is hard.

Ok maybe I am lying. Yeah. I do have a comfort zone. I didn’t feel uncomfortable at all when Cupid or Deity or Daddy were fucking me. Not when I fucked my submissive. Not when I picked up a random at a sex party.

That felt comfortable. Other aspects of our interactions are not always comfortable for me and I stick them out anyway. But…

It’s part of why I’m pushing so hard for kissing. Kissing feels kinda like that but more available in public.

Ok. Well. I’m figuring some stuff out. This is kinda fucked up. I need to find some way of feeling comfortable that doesn’t involve soliciting sex. Well… ok, I do feel comfortable around the kids. Most of the time. Except when I’m triggered.

So it isn’t only during sex.

And it is variable with Noah. Sometimes I feel comfortable and sometimes I don’t. We’ve had a lot of sex over a lot of years and we often do it whether I am up for it or not. Because that is our deal. I’m not sorry. But it means that I have had mixed experiences of the sex.

I need to update the users guide again. Hilarious. Well… this is a changing time.

Silence

This is an easy trigger to trace. Many of my earliest memories are of my biological father hurting me sexually. I was required to be silent and still. If I squirmed or whimpered or anything I was punished.

can suffer silently. But it requires that I go away. It requires that I give you a bag of flesh and bones and I will be somewhere over there watching.

Noah points out that this really isn’t just about my father though. There are people littered through my whole life who required me to suffer in silence. My arms are completely not up for the laundry list… but it’s there.

It’s a trigger. It isn’t that I think someone is terrible for commenting on how loud I am. (Yes. I am very loud when someone is hitting me.) It is that it is a trigger. It is that now I feel ashamed and bad and like I did something wrong and shaking this off is gonna suck.

I’m supposed to go pretend I’m a bad ass tomorrow.

Fuck.

I’m loud. I’m loud when I top. I’m loud when I bottom. I’m loud when I fucking exist in a room.

I’m loud.

I make people cringe and move away from me just because I am offensive. I exist too loudly. I should stop.

I have absolutely no idea how to get to a happy medium from here. I don’t know what a happy medium would be.

Yes. I’m loud. I can scream so loud that a party of hundreds of people comes to a sudden halt. (I’m told people still feel haunted by that night.) I can quieten down auditoriums of thousands of screaming teenagers. Fucking loud.

I feel like that makes me bad. I am inconvenient, intrusive, rude. I force people to acknowledge me. I force people to have to be fully present with the fact that I am in pain.

I’m a fucking asshole.

I’m not here to make you have a more comfy experience.

I need to shake this off and go back to cackling with glee. I have a boy to cut up.

I will not let this be a problem for me. I don’t give a shit that I feel triggered. I have shit to do.

I’m really kinda done feeling so god damn bad for existing.

I don’t think this person meant I should suffer in silence. I’m not saying that. I’m saying that commenting on how very loud I am is complicated. Noah has kinda figured it out. He solves this by saying “More!”

Pretty much everyone else… it’s a mixed thing.

This is a me problem.

Belief

I was asked what I believe in. If I’m not a Christian, what am I? Where do we go? Why are we here?

I believe we are here because of a series of accidents, some terrible and some wonderful.

I believe the only meaning that exists is the relationships we create while we are here. I think we are alive as long as we live in the hearts and minds and souls of whatever we have touched. I think that we die when our last breath leaves our body. I think that we become one with everything that has ever been and will ever be.

I think that connection is enough for me to want to make things better for the other results of accidents. They didn’t choose this either. There is no deserve. There is no plan. But we can try to make it better.

It takes all kinds. I don’t need you to be like me and I don’t need to be like you. But I want you here.

That is what I believe in.

In love with love

Noah and I talked about this yesterday. I am… not your average hunter. I know many predatory hunters. They want to feel powerful. They want to have a long list of prey because it makes them feel successful. I want to fall in love with everyone.

Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the fact that a lot of what I seek in sleeping with people is the ability to love someone like you a bit more. I have a number of hangups around “types of people” that I genuinely want to get over. I want to be able to treat people like individuals and I do that best by learning one story at a time in detail so I can understand how it varies from the “general”.

I want to see the patterns and understand the variations. I don’t know about you… but I’m not as smart as I’d like to be. It takes me a long time to figure these things out about folks.

I learn about people best when I fall in love with them at least a little. Is it infatuation? Is it twitterpation? Is it love?

What is love?

Is love wanting to touch someone? Is love wanting people to be happy even if that doesn’t involve you a little bit? Is love wanting people to take up as much space as possible? Is love hoping that this person will do things both bad and good so long as they act and exist and are.

Yesterday a sarcastic joke was made about all the bodies I want to get under. Noah and Pam sat around and kinda counted on their fingers and we decided it was best not to put a number on the number of bodies I want to get under.

If it had come from someone else I might have felt insulted or judged. They were delighted. I felt loved.

How big is my roster?

Err, how do you count? Previous people I will definitely see again? Previous people I won’t see again for logistical reasons but I might if life changed? People I’m interested in pursuing but I’m not sure how they feel? People who have said they are interested but we haven’t followed up yet?

I don’t have permission to talk about very many people at this point. I wait until there is a bit more established before I ask. Some folks are a little funny about how I talk about people. I try to say nice things about you and admit my fuck ups. I’m tracking me more than I’m tracking you. My mistakes are a much bigger deal to me.

Like not negotiating well on HSV. I do great at random pick up parties. I stop someone before they get close to my face. It is more complicated with people I’ve known for a long time. More complicated still if I think someone has read the users guide. I want that to substitute for negotiating and… that’s wrong. That’s so very wrong of me. I can’t do that. I am too god damn experienced to be making bullshit rookie mistakes like that. This has to be my last fuck up. Fine, I can say “I haven’t been negotiating in a few years so I messed up timing.” Ok. One last fuck up. Period. Then never ever ever again.

Yes, he forgave me and isn’t angry. I’m upset with myself. I can’t do this again. I know better.

Maybe love also means wanting people to be able to make informed, responsible, self aware choices instead of waiting until the heat of the moment when someone will feel less comfortable saying no.

That’s why I’m so pissed at myself.

No pressure, Krissy. Give people choices and you cannot pressure them to decide one way or another. They have to live in their body. They have to live with the results of their decisions…not me.

I am a hunter. I try not to be a predator. I prefer catch and release. I just want… to… borrow some of your time in a way that will hopefully be fun for you. If you indicate distress I want you off the line immediately. You clearly weren’t meant to be my prey if I upset you. I’m so sorry.

I want to love you and make you feel better about yourself. I want you to feel even more hot and sexually accomplished. I want you to feel just a little bit more like you can go out and figure out what you want after you’ve bounced off someone with such strong and particular ideas.

You don’t have to agree with me. You don’t have to be like me. (Please don’t be like me. The world doesn’t need more folks like me…)

Be you. You are so wonderful. I love you so much. I like seeing you in the world. I am glad you are here. I do want to kiss you. I am sorry that I am diseased. I have always been kissy. So I’ve had herpes since I was a toddler. Like kissy toddlers do.

Kissy Krissy. That was one of the nicer nicknames from my childhood.

Ok, knowing what I know now about the sexual abuse it’s a little creepy that everyone liked that I was so kissy as a tiny child. But oh well. Moving along.

Kissy Krissy sure sounds nicer than Pissy Krissy. Are those my choices in life? Be sexually available or be angry? I sure act like it.

No I don’t have to be sexually available. But I… uhh… kinda like sex a whole lot more than average.

Can you be a nice girl and still fuck dozens of people in a short period of time? How about hundreds throughout your lifetime? What if I hit a thousand? When do I stop being ‘nice’?

I’m curious. Depending on how this week goes I’m going to hit 130. I’m pretty sure.

I never did get my party for hitting triple digits.

So take Noah’s body count and put a one in front of it. Yeah. Promiscuous.

And I do have strong feelings for the majority of the people I sleep with. The people I don’t fall in love with are the one offs at parties. It’s why I don’t keep in touch with them. I don’t have bandwidth to fall more in love with them.

I have a deity and a submissive and a cupid and…

I’m feeling more nervous about the degree of pushing my wants I’m doing on other people. I haven’t hit their rev limiters yet.

I think.

Lots of folks I’m not going to name right now for #REASONS. But I’m thinking about you. The folks in-house got to hear your litany last night.

I think about all of you. Sometimes I wonder how one brain can keep such a diverse cast of characters straight. Good thing not all y’all are straight.

I think of it as a web because my people are very interconnected. So and so is fucking me and three other people. Of those three other people one is a good friend of mine, one is someone my other friend is fucking and… so it goes.

“Oh what tangled webs we weave when first we practice to conceive.” Thanks former lover who may not want to be named here. I will never forget you. You taught me things. Thinking about you makes me smile.

I fall in love hard and I fall in love fast and I fall in love forever. My life would be so much easier if I could stop loving my Owner. But I can’t. If my Owner showed up in the middle of the night and said, “I need you” I would need to have a forktastically compelling reason to not just follow him wherever he wanted me to go.

Because he wouldn’t ask unless it were serious and if he came to me… whatever he needed I’d do.

Just like if Jenny got into trouble I would be in Scotland in less than 48 hours no matter the cost or difficulty.

These are my people.

This web is what I have in this life. I like sleeping with my web but it isn’t a mandatory component of loving someone. I’ve never fucked Jenny and I would move mountains for her.

Jenny was there for me after the suicides. Jenny has been with me through some of the most vulnerable, horrible moments of my life. I would do anything for Jenny.

I don’t measure my love in access to someones sticky bits. But if I get to touch your sticky bits I’ll probably fall in love faster. Especially if I get to touch your stick bits and you make a big deal out of respecting my mind.

I’m yours. How and where do you want me?

I want to fall in love with you. I don’t want to marry everyone. I can’t have any more children. (Though co-raising children is the best thing ever.) I don’t…. know what I want.

I want to feel viable and loved. I want to feel like it is ok to be filled to the brim with love. I want to feel like it is ok that at any given point if you press me for who I am in love with I will start rattling off names, run out of fingers, think harder, run out of fingers again… maybe keep going….

I’m not lying about being in love with you. I can’t love myself. So I love you as a proxy. I have so much love to give. Yes, you get some of it.

Is it creepy? I hope not. I try to have boundaries around it. There are some people I pester constantly on IM because I feel comfortable nudging them for attention. There are people I barely contact except to arrange in person time. There are people I want to go show up with them and I don’t because I have trouble not climbing all over them like a jungle gym. It depends on the dynamic and my mental state.

Sometimes I don’t touch people more because I feel gross and polluting and I don’t want to hurt you.

That’s complicated.

It is weird managing the fact that I’d like to crawl into way more beds than I do but I’m afraid of hurting people.

I don’t want to hurt you.

I love you. I am so sorry when I fuck up. I am sorry when I make stupid assumptions because someone else would be ok with x so why are you having your own opinion?

I’m so sorry I ever invalidate your right to be seen as an individual person with an individual experience. I’m working on getting better. I am better than I was. I need to get better still.

I want to be able to walk into a room with you and see you as the sole person there. The only one I need to adjust my energy to, whatever that means. Even when I’m in the room with multiple people. How do I do this? Oh it’s hard.

But I want to try.

You are worth it. You are worth seeing and loving.

I love you.

These are a few of my favorite things…

Lest I sound like a one trick pony… My Bonus Kids spent the night! As usual, this is thrilling and wonderful. I’m doing my best to smile pretty at their parents and say, “Wouldn’t split custody be niiiiiiiice?” Not 50/50 custody… but couldn’t I have them like 10% or 20% or 30% of the time?

It’s rather awkward to be all, “Hey I’d like to have more kids but I would die… can I borrow  yours?”

So far they are willing to share somewhat. How much we will find out in the fullness of time. I’m thrilled.

Part of what I love so much about my Bonus Kids is that I am not the mama so problem solving is an entirely different process. I have mad respect for their relationship with their mama and I can see how she is the best mom in the world. She knows them to the marrow of their bones in I way I just can’t. They are foreign to me.

But it makes me think of my kids differently. Oh. That’s why things are so easy. That connection.

I don’t think that having biological children is the be-all/end-all of all of life… but I’m having a lot of fun.

My kids validate my existence in a way nothing else can or will. They needed me for survival. They have a lot of my weird/wacky traits without having lots of complex trauma stories behind them. That’s fascinating to watch.

My kids don’t need me for survival any more. They still need me, but it’s different.

A friend was over helping me with tile on Monday. All four of us got hungry. I asked the kids to make lunch and they did and it was good. (My hands were doing gross things.)

Tile plugs along. I probably have 15-20 more hours of removing backing from tile. I’m working on taping spring down. Then I want to finish winter. Then autumn. Then I have to figure out summer.

Oh goody.

Four more hours of taping spring? I think the mountain will take 4-8 more hours. Autumn is probably 10 hours away from done.

So that’s like eight days of work before I get to summer. No… closer to two weeks with how slow I’m going. Depends on how much help I get unbacking tile. Fudge. Uhm, at least the remodel is stalled and I don’t have to hurry. Ugh. This Friday I’ve been waiting nine weeks for a letter.

Once they move back in to start work they have about three weeks to go. So… I need to get my butt in gear. I need to be only working on summer when they get back started. Or be done with summer.

I think summer is going to need to be a different style of mosaic. I am looking at different techniques and options. It is so much fun to not have any idea what the hell I’m doing and just… make something cool.

Fuck yeah.

My garden is coming right along.

Last night I only got 7 hours of sleep, but I still feel better after two nights of sleep. I felt much better by yesterday afternoon.

I appreciate when I can misunderstand something and get over it in a 24 hour period. That was quite literally not possible 10 years ago. Progress is awesome. Noah patted me on the back and said he was really surprised how well I handled it. That’s nice of him. Thanks Noah.

I really have worked hard on mellowing out. It’s a process. You need to be safe to be mellow.

Thank you, Noah.

Oooh, another sweet point. Two wonderful friends asked me how I would feel about them asking Noah to play. Awwwww aren’t you the sweetest things? I feel charmed and delighted. You asked me first. Nobody is asking Noah first. But my friends ask me first before they go slide on up to my husband.

That was not required but hot damn you managed to slide into my magnanimous zone. Now you were so awesome that I’m going to put a lot of pressure on Noah to handle things right and be deserving. “Do you know how lucky you are to get women like that?! BE NICE.” Or not nice. Whatever y’all negotiate. Have fun!

Slutty women deserve to be treated like the angels of mercy they are. Be grateful. Or I’ll be pissed all the way off.

All hail slutty people of all possible gender configurations. Huzzah!

I love you all.

Not just because you are slutty… but that does make you feel like kin and I like that feeling.

What makes me happy? Noah. Noah is handling me hunting better than I am. When I over react and want to flip out over something he patiently reels me back in and explains why my feelings are out of proportion and I really should be giving people chances.

Maybe the reason I am more calm now is because someone is intimately aware of my thinking process and he helps me manage it. “Ok so you read this in an upsetting way. Let’s talk about that.”

For the record, folks, I don’t have a lot of privacy from Noah. Partially because I just don’t desire that kind of privacy but mostly because I need help managing my disordered thinking and Noah is willing and that requires access. So I give it to him.

If I keep secrets from Noah I will need some way of color coding that information in my brain so I can keep it from Noah. That sounds hard. I have enough hard in my life. I’d rather keep letting information pass through me like a sieve when it comes to Noah. That is the most comfortable part for me.

So that when I screw up and don’t tell him something right in the first place it’ll still come up because I have complete diarrhea of the mouth and I tell him everything so even if I do it in a dick way… everything is coming out and we can process it. Sometimes part of the processing is, “You told me that in a dick way.” Yeah. That’s true. I did.

I remain convinced that no one on this planet could love me like Noah does. Thank you Noah. I am so grateful for you.

Other happy news! We are going to be house-guest central. (Finish the bathroom, damnit!)

In April Dad is coming down to spend a weekend. This will be entertaining because he wants to see his bio-kids a fair bit too and they are having big feelings about me since my kids were born. They can ignore the slutty daughter-girlfriends. I’m… something different. They aren’t so sure they are ok with him adopting an adult child and being a grandparent. That is stepping on their toes. But it also looks somewhat like I may be the only one of the three of us to have kids. So yeah. Complicated. I’m trying to be as nice and accommodating as I can there. I like his bio-kids and I hope that we can long-term get more friendly. I hope. *cross fingers*

In May a friend from the Bay who moved east then moved west (but way the fuck north of here) is going to stay with us for a weekend. I’m excited about that. I haven’t seen her since before the kids were born.

Also in May we have a fun overnight adult-only camping thing I’m wicked excited about. I don’t know how it will go. When I used to go to these events, in the dim recesses of my memory, I remember lots of bdsm and fairly little sex. Some, but not a lot. These days… I’d uhhhh… yeah. I’m no longer content with a weekend of bdsm and no sex. I’ve changed. So yeah. I have no idea how this will go.

I had this really slutty idea about how to handle play at that party. Maybe I’ll write about it separately. Maybe I’m not quite that brave. Ahem.

Ahem.

Then in May I’m going to the grief ritual with Sarah. I’m so grateful she wants to come with me. I anticipate a full weekend sob/hug fest. That’s going to be magical. At the other grief rituals I have attended, I always went alone. The organizer always encourages hugs/physical support and… I’m me. Don’t fucking touch me who the hell are you? Especially when I’m freaked out and feeling vulnerable. Strangers just shouldn’t touch me. That’s not safe for any of us. Don’t do it. Sarah is safe. This is going to be a night and day different experience. It’s a full weekend retreat instead of going to and from a college campus every day on bart.

I’m looking forward to this. We have so much to talk about. So many different levels of wounding. We’ve already looked at a lot of this together over the 12ish years we’ve been doing whatever it is we are doing. But this is going to be super intense and heavy. In a way we both need. Thank you my friend. I am so grateful.

June is blissfully unscheduled and I think it should stay pretty close to that way.

July I get to host my friend and her two sons for three weeks. They are coming in from Arizona. I’m so excited. I met her on the road trip and we’ve talked a whole bunch since then.

I am really proud of how well I’m keeping the house up despite the chaos of the remodel and the amount of work I’m getting done. This is remaining a good work space. It feels accessible and functional. *pat myself on the back* (Let’s be real here: the kids are amazing these days. The road trip was worth it.)

I haven’t been gushing about the kids lately. Mostly cause my arms hurt and I’m obsessed with my sex life. But the kids are knocking my socks off. They are making such tremendous progress.

I’m happy that both kids say, “Can we take a break from classes?” It isn’t just coming from me and financially motivated. *phew* We could all use a break from trying to become something different and just… be for a little while.

August/September is the cruise. Looks like another family might be joining us after all. I am completely fucking thrilled and surprised and happy. I think that all four families might stay in Florida for a week after the cruise to see stuff. 7 grown ups and 6 kids sounds way more like a party.

My life is so ridiculously good I just don’t understand how I got here.

A child is waking up. It is time for the day to begin.

Then I came home

Do you know why I’m so happy to be married to Noah? Because when I got home from my date we went out to the garage to medicate and talk. (I medicate. He doesn’t.) I told him everything I could remember and be coherent about with regards to the date. What felt best. Why it was wonderful. (Ok I did take a shower first.)

When I ran out of ways to say, “Oh my god the deity is incredible” Noah transitioned into telling me stories of women he has dated. I have… traditionally not wanted to hear as much as Noah wants to hear about my stories. This time it went better than normal. It was very few minutes of him telling me things he has done before I really wanted his cock in my mouth.

So he kept telling me stories of getting his wicked way with women while I sucked him off for a while. That was hot. Wicked, incredibly hot. He can be a mean man and it is really hot.

He took me to bed and grinned over how raw and sore I was as he fucked me. He likes it when he doesn’t have to put in much effort to hurt me and make me come all at the same time. He says “Thanks, deity.”

I… I need to not have sex again before my Sunday date. That’s gonna hurt too and I need to heal a little. Not that I want to take 30 seconds off from fucking right now.

I’m in one of those phases. They’ve always ended in the past. For a while though… there will be no such thing as feeling like enough.

And today I get to go to Dark Garden for a fitting, then have lunch with Sarah, then see my submissive.

I feel so gloriously lucky. I feel so adored.

Between the fact that Noah has always been the head of the Krissy admiration society, and the fact that my submissive has been… feeling more ok being admiring, and how the deity talked to me last night?

This is why new people are less appealing. New people don’t love me this much. New people don’t spend excessive amounts of time narrating why I’m the best thing ever. Oh I love my handpicked list right now.

Well done, Krissy. You have gotten to the point of being ridiculously good at picking. Good job.

I no longer spend time with people who neg me. I don’t listen to insults, put downs, or people who want to denigrate me. I want to spend time with people who think I am the best damn thing since sliced bread.

And I get to. Pretty much every day of the week and some days of the week I get to stack wonderful people one right after another.

I feel so lucky. I feel so loved. I feel so well fucked.

Good grief I love my life. Thank you Noah. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I couldn’t be who I am right now without you. I was never able to let people be this nice to me before you.

I feel like I owe you everything. Thank you. Oh this is so fun.