Category Archives: the shame factory

They are just mouth noises

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I asked in my online support group about “How are you” and why my child was told that she was rude when she said “terrible”. I was told it is just a substitute for “hello” and being negative in response is indeed rude. People don’t mean it, they are just going through social niceties and answering as if it is a real question is rude and will make people uncomfortable.

I hate the world. That makes me incredibly sad. That feels alienating and awful and it makes me feel like I should stop talking at all. Yes, I’m over reacting. But I’m in a new place with new mores and I just had people from three countries tell me that I am totally inappropriate if I take something as a real question that I have always answered honestly.

I feel horrible. I feel sick to my stomach. I feel like I should not try to make friends. I feel like I should maintain my video chats with people who actually want to talk to me and stop talking to anyone else and I feel so bad for my poor children who are going to have to learn how to navigate this minefield of lies and lack of caring.

If I ask how are you, I want to know the answer. That’s why I really knew my car mechanic and the lady at the dry cleaners and most of my neighbors and and and and.

But I’m wrong. And my behavior is rude, inappropriate, and alienating.

I cried myself to sleep and I am probably going to spend more time crying about this. I feel sick.

As usual I am doing everything wrong.

My brain hates me

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One of the best parts of using medical marijuana, for me, is that I don’t dream. Which means I don’t have nightmares. I went about ten years without nightmares because of pot and those were some of the happiest years of my life because I didn’t wake up panicked and distressed all the time.

My brain was really awful last night. The baby kept waking up to nurse. I need to nightwean again. I usually give her a week or so of adjusting to a new time zone before I cut her off at night again. Today is our 7th day here.

So I was drifting in and out of sleep into this horrible nightmare that just wouldn’t stop. I notice that over the past couple of years most of my nightmares involve Noah being horrible to me. Noah isn’t horrible to me in real life. I often wonder if these nightmares are my brain playing through what I think I actually deserve from him. He should abase me. He should lie to me and risk my life through disease exposure. He should treat me like I am nothing.

Well, “should” is a funny word. But that’s what I fear I deserve. My brain likes to torture me with what could be if other people hated me the way I hate myself. If other people held my inadequacies against me the way I hold them against myself.

Today is our seventh day in Scotland. I am not feeling as panicked and overwhelmed as I did for the first four or five days. I had an entirely irrational reaction upon arrival. I didn’t sleep for two nights in a row as we traveled (maybe two hours total in little pieces) and I showed up feeling like I was “already behind” on a bunch of work and I just… kind of freaked out. I did that thing where I feel like I am not allowed to stop working until I am caught up. So I worked from 4am till 9pm for many days in a row with broken sleep in between.

I have a hard time with feeling like I am going to be punished if things aren’t “caught up” to a certain level. Clearly my dreams think Noah will punish me if I am not good enough. I am not sure who else I am afraid of.

Someone in one of my online support groups is dealing with a family member being institutionalized because the family member is completely delusional and hurting their children. I feel abject fear when I hear about them sassing members of staff and refusing to cooperate. They do not understand what can be done to them.

I think I have this abject fear that if I do not have a “nice enough” environment for my kids to live in then I will have them taken away and I will be put in a psych ward again. So I spend a few days not able to control the volume of my voice and being really irrational about working until I hurt myself.

Also: trying to get established here has been kind of rough. I can’t order things through most websites because my credit cards are not registered to a UK address. Mostly they can’t be. US and UK credit systems don’t overlap. Well, American Express cheerfully updated our address and they will just move seamlessly into a UK credit card but a lot of places won’t accept them.

I have had a really rough time with trying to use credit cards only to get them shut off for fraud. I have been on the phone with my credit cards almost every day since we got here because I am getting so many denied purchases. I have put flags on all of my cards that we are making enormous purchases in the UK because we have moved here and we are trying to set up house… but fraud protection. I mean, it’s good–right? But it’s also really frustrating. I am just starting to get to the point where I am catching up on sleep from having such a deeply inadequate amount. My running 7 day total went from about 4 hours a night to 6.5 hours of sleep a night. That’s a massive improvement, but sleep deprivation is torture and it makes the brain do a lot of really nasty things to you.

I still haven’t gotten an amount of sleep that counts as restorative. The air mattress I am sleeping on (that I am deeply grateful to have) is really hard on my back and shoulders. And the baby is waking up a lot so my sleep is still massively disrupted. This will end, but it won’t end for a while longer and I feel brittle and bitchy and short tempered. Which means I feel like I am a bad person. Being cranky makes me feel like I don’t deserve to have anyone love me or do anything nice for me.

I am not being nice enough to any of the kids in my life. I feel really bad about myself because I don’t have more patience. But I have no slack to give myself this minute so I don’t know how to find it for other people.

I know things are coming together. I know this sprint cycle is heading for completion. We have a fair bit of furniture in the house (most of it from charity shops so we didn’t spend a lot of money–awesome) and most of what we still need has finally been ordered. (If I walk to a store my credit card goes through pretty easily; I just can’t order online for delivery.) The two really big things I still need to purchase are a full sized washer and dryer. Everything else we must have has been either ordered for delivery or is already in the house. I would like a few other pieces of furniture (like a bigger kitchen table with real chairs instead of folding chairs that Her Sweetness is going to hurt herself on) but what we have could be good enough for quite a long time.

Unfortunately all of the stuff won’t finish being delivered until October 4th. But it’s ordered and on its way. We get a rental van tomorrow for 48 hours and I will be able to zip around town and order the washer/dryer and get the last bits of stuff I want to buy for the kitchen and we can finish filling in the gaps in our wardrobes. I am a bit cranky with myself for putting almost 100% of my warm things on the boat so that I am wearing Jenny’s generously provided hand-me-downs 24/7 because I don’t have much of my own to keep me warm. I have one pair of warm bottoms and one warm top and one sweater. I am stealing Eldest Child’s warm socks with absolutely no shame because she thinks they pinch her toes anyway.

The kids need to have a lot of shoes for school. They will need to have more shoes for school than they have ever owned at once before. 1) Indoor PE shoes 2) Indoor class shoes 3) Outdoor PE shoes 4) Rain boots and possibly 5) Nice shoes for walking to school so they make a good impression? I am not certain about the fifth pair.

Usually they have sandals, a pair of shoes adequate for running, and rarely one pair of nice shoes if we have a wedding to go to in a given size.

I am just grateful that shoes are super cheap here.

They also need more jackets/layers than they have ever owned in their entire lives. It’s feeling like a lot. Noah has almost no weather appropriate clothing because he has been able to dress down exclusively in a hot climate for decades. I don’t think it will be considered as acceptable to dress badly here. Silicon Valley is just… special. You can dress like shit and people still have to be nice to you because you might be a tech CEO worth millions of dollars.

This is an adjustment. I am feeling incredibly self conscious about how all of our hair looks as we are growing it out. We look messy. And I don’t think I can do much about it.

I would need more hand spoons and time to be braiding my hair nicely right now. I am working too hard to manage. Buns it is.

Today Noah and Middle Child are heading out to try and acquire necessary clothing. This is the last good day for them to try for a few days and we are all chilly enough that we don’t want to keep putting it off. I am not letting the children turn the heat up in the house so they can just wear underwear. For one thing, it’s hella expensive. For a second thing, we would have to have lights on in every room with the blinds closed because our house is not private. People have a clear view into most rooms of our house and folks go by frequently. Wear clothes. You are not in California with a huge privacy hedge and most windows facing the backyard anymore, Toto. Adapt.

For the next two and a half weeks someone has to be home at all times because we have a delivery scheduled for every day between now and October 4th. This is good.

I am really tired. But this cycle of work will end. I think that starting on October 5th I am “going on vacation” where I do the absolute minimum for several weeks and binge watch movies and don’t type and just rest. I need it quite badly. That feels really far away right now. Just keep plodding along.

We are also walking 4-9 miles a day. I wish that were helping me sleep more. It’s not. It just increases how sore I am. Pushing the stroller makes my elbows pop out of socket in a really heinous way. Wearing the baby makes my shoulders and back hurt.

I can’t wait for the boat stuff to arrive. I have a different (much larger for carrying groceries) stroller in there. The new stroller is so easy to push. It feels like sliding a knife through warm butter. With 50 lbs of gear in it I feel like I am pushing a feather. I want that stroller. (It’s also a bike trailer.) We have up to six more weeks of waiting for the boat stuff. Then I get to figure out what to do with all of that. At this point I feel like I barely remember what we own that we put in storage. I know there is no furniture… Clothes. Books. Christmas decorations. My giant fuzzy blanket that T made years ago. The set of silverware that my ex gave me for a birthday present after I broke up with him. (He ordered it long before we broke up and it was back ordered. Awkward.) I don’t even know what else.

Breakfast is almost ready. I feel like I can stop crying now. I need true sleep. I need rest so bad. But there is no rest for the wicked.

Well that sucked.

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Yesterday was the kind of day where everything went sideways. I am still dramatically underslept and as a result my reaction was rage. I was not nice. I didn’t name call, but I did tell Noah mean things. I did have trouble controlling the volume of my voice with the kids. In short: I was an asshole.

Things break. Things go wrong. I know it is life. I know that in two months I will barely remember this. It will be a blip in the rear view mirror. But getting through yesterday was hard. I did a lot of damage to my hand trying to fix things when Plan A went wrong and then Plan B utterly failed and all of that pain was for nothing.

So I flipped out. That was one of the worst melt downs I have had in many many many years. I didn’t punch a wall but it was a near thing. I feel really embarrassed. Nobody in my family deserved to deal with my temper like that.

The interesting bit was: when we got out and started walking, trying to salvage a Plan C, I calmed right down. I wans’t in a good mood but I wasn’t raging anymore. When I am flipping out I need to start taking a walk, literally. Being outside is a balm to my soul. Even when it feels like. I can’t do anything right, I still feel better. Being inside a building makes me feel trapped like a rat; even a building I like as much as this one. We are still working on getting objects to soften the echoing sounds of loud noises. The house hurts my ears still. It will improve, but we literally haven’t had a chance to do the work yet.

There were good parts of the day. We did get the deliveries from the charity shops and we did get the council tax bill. Today Noah can get a bank account; it can’t be a joint account because my name isn’t on the council bill. So I’m seriously just a dependent right now with no rights to a bank account. That doesn’t feel so good.

I think we can fix it but it will take some time. We need a bank account ASAP so we won’t bother to fix it before we get a bank account and credit card; I will just need to be added later. But once we have a local bank/credit card things get so much easier. Noah already has a local phone number. I think he got electricity sorted and he’s working on WiFi and a home phone number.

He’s getting so much done. It is incredibly unfair for me to feel rage when he can’t complete a task in the time frame I would prefer. It’s not fair up one side and down the other.

Didn’t help that every credit card in my wallet was frozen for fraud protection yesterday and everything I tried to get done… failed. It wasn’t just Noah who was hitting road blocks.

I am sorry. But you can’t unsay mean things and sorry bakes no bread. My behavior was shit and Noah was completely patient with me. It really doesn’t help that I am down two full nights of sleep in the last five nights, but that’s not a good enough reason to freak out at him.

I need to do better. I can’t keep asking for passes for being upset. Noah deserves better than that from me.

That’s how I feel about you.

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My kids and I were talking about negative moods yesterday. I spent a lot of the day crying and when I wasn’t crying I was mostly grumpy. I’m depressed. I fucking hate Mother’s Day. I am over extended as a lifestyle and there are consequences. This is normal cycle for my shitty brain. Negative moods are part of life.

They said that they have each had thoughts wondering if life would be better if they were dead. I said, “Well–do you feel like your life would be better if I were dead?” “NO NO NO NO NO” “Well, that’s how I feel about you. I feel like the world would turn dark and grey and I would never be fully happy again. I made you because I wanted to see you have a different childhood than mine and I wanted to see you grow up and I wanted to be part of your life events. Losing out on that would basically mean the end of hope for me. So no, it would never ever be better if you were dead.”

They both got that deep thinking slightly pained face.

Life is hard. Life hurts.

I talked to them about us having a family history of suicide and how that means we have brains that are oriented towards hopelessness and depression and we have to find bulwarks against those feelings. We have to find ways of coping on our dark days. We are not in the same position our relatives were in when they gave up hope. They asked me questions about the people who died and I told them about the lives of the family members who suicided. We don’t really know for sure if my grandmother suicided or if it was an accidental over dose the way it was for Grandpa’s wife, the lady Eldest Child is named after. We know that those two women were in tremendous pain and they felt empty and lonely and like nobody cared very much about them.

I asked my kids if they feel like nobody cares about them and if they spend their days alone and hurting? They said sometimes they hurt, but they know they are liked and they can barely find a few minutes to be alone. We talked about how I effectively ended my pre-kid life to ensure that they didn’t feel alone or abandoned. That got a little smile of acknowledgment.

I am there for them in a way I have never experienced and will never experience. They know I struggle with needing a few hours a week away from them and not feeling like that is an ok thing to need.

I told Middle Child that part of the reason I am so militantly supportive of his trans stuff is because I don’t want that to be part of why he gives up hope on life and I know it can work that way for a lot of trans folk. I accept you. I love you. I approve of you being whoever you are in this life.

I can’t make everything easy for you. I wouldn’t if I could because someday despite my best efforts I will die and you will need to be ok without me and I need to prepare you for the fact that life is hard. Life involves a lot of suffering. That’s just… life.

But for every single day that I am alive there is at least one person who desperately hopes you will cling to the tendrils of hope and keep trying.

They said they feel that way about me too.

So I’m still here.

They asked me how my mother responded to me having bad days as a kid. I told them she would say terrible things about what a burden I was. They said I have never told them that they are a burden; I say they are a lot of work and I am tired… but they don’t feel like it is the same thing. I said I agree. I don’t think they are a burden. I think they are a gift.

I can change how this story ends.

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Yesterday my children got a tiny taste of what I dealt with as a kid. The babysitters mother told me she would take the kids… but only if it was for pay because they are so hard. Ok, that part was fine with me. We agreed on $20/hour. I suggested three hours, she pushed for four. Hm. Ok. She sent me a long list of stuff she wanted me to pack and have ready for the kids (snacks, water bottles, clothing for the baby, all the stuff). It would have been a great list for a trip to the park. (She didn’t use any of the things she asked me to pack. The kids came back hungry and the baby was absolutely filthy. So why insist on having the supplies if you won’t use them?)

When she got here she said she was so excited. She was going to take the kids to Chuck E Cheese!! Isn’t that great! That way the kids will each have a hand stamp so they can’t get out of the building and she doesn’t have to stress herself out watching them! I was a bit dubious about that. The last CEC birthday party we went to a few years ago didn’t go that well because my kids have aged out already. But uhm… she didn’t really want to hear that when I tried mentioning it gently.

(She has told me over and over on this trip that she is not interested in hearing blunt truths. Either sugar coat it or don’t tell her at all. Uhm. That’s a point of view.)

When the kids came home they had stories. All of the stories are in line with behavior I have witnessed in milder form or they match up with stories that the babysitter has told so I believe my kids.

I sent the kids with $20 each to use for food or tokens. The food ended up being comped because the babysitters mother threw a tantrum about them not having gluten free pizza. She wouldn’t let the kids have that money for tokens. She made them spend their own money and she was very proud of herself when she handed me the money when they got back.

Apparently Eldest Child’s shoe broke in the first few minutes of them being there. She walked around on it for the whole time at CEC but as they were leaving the woman decided that it wasn’t acceptable and she made EC buy a new pair of shoes with her allowance. (The lady did contribute some, but… EC hated the shoes and they are physically uncomfortable and now she’s out her allowance money on shoes she will never wear again.)

But that’s the petty shit.

I don’t know what the fucking phrasing was, but she told Middle Child that he got more tokens than Eldest Child because EC wasn’t demonstrating enough gratitude. When there were an uneven number of pieces of pizza she told my kids that the child who behaved the best got the extra piece.

OH FUCK YOU AND THE FUCKING HORSE YOU RODE IN ON YOU GOD DAMN BITCH.

That’s the kind of shit she used to do to the foster kid she tried to adopt; he ended up punching holes in her walls because he couldn’t handle how controlling and manipulative she was. He was rehoused for his own safety. You have to be pretty fucking bad to have your foster kid taken away.

But my kids have never had stories like this before.

No wonder her daughter won’t talk to her anymore! She was telling me that she is very disappointed because her daughter won’t share any real feelings with her, she only presents a facade and she (the mother) wants to know the truth. I said, “Maybe telling you the truth isn’t safe.” “How dare you say that. Now you have upset me. You have to tell me something nice about myself now.”

I feel like letting her babysit was a desperation move. It was like letting fucking Kira watch my kids.

But I canceled dinner. And we aren’t seeing them again.

Before the CEC shit went down, we had been negotiating dinner tonight. She wanted to tell us to come over at 5 and swim and play for a few hours and then cook and then her husband would drive us home when he felt like it. Uhhhh no. If we come over at 5 we will be ready to eat, not play. We will be going home at 7 on the bus, not in your husband’s car because we will not have a car seat and we will not be breaking the law. “Well, you can try to assert your will with him, but people have died walking on that street so he may insist because he wants to protect you.”

Bitch I have taken my family all over the world without your fucking control. You don’t get to decide how or when I go anywhere.

So ok! I learned a lot on this stop in Hawaii.

I sat my kids down and explained that this kind of thing is why I come down on them so hard about lying. If they make a habit of lying to me, when bad things like this happen… I have to hear the other side of the story and try to find the truth that I can act on. If they are reliable narrators about what happens to them, when someone acts like this… ok we aren’t seeing them again and no I don’t need to hear her gaslighting bullshit.

This lady talks about how proud she is of herself because she was a single mother but she NEVER ASKED HER DAUGHTER TO TAKE CARE OF HER. Her daughter (the old babysitter) has stories like, “My mom entered her first depression when I was 5. I have spent my entire life making sure my mom eats, has her medicine, has she taken a shower…. I’m tired.”

I believe the babysitter and I believe my kids. I am not giving this woman a chance to tell her side of the story because I don’t fucking care.

You told my son that if his sister doesn’t demonstrate enough gratitude to adults that he should punish her by withholding the shared resources.

FUCK YOU WITH A FUCKING CHAIN SAW. THAT SOUNDS EXACTLY LIKE YOU.

I had so many foster families treat me like that.

My kids don’t have to go back to that.

I told my kids that I can’t save them from bad things ever happening to them. There are going to be bad situations in the future where we can’t walk away and we will have to learn to cope. But this bitch? We don’t need to learn to cope with her lying and control and bullshit.

And the babysitter dropped off the map after making promises to my kids. Ok. We learned that our perception of these people was clouded by circumstances. If you change circumstances, people change. We don’t need to keep in touch any more.

This woman is constantly complaining to me that she can’t make any friends here because Hawaiians are racist.

You know what, lady? I think the problem is you.

It’s kind of nice to occasionally have clarity that my wrong decision was trusting someone I shouldn’t because they are the bad actor, not me.

I think she doesn’t like how I parent. My kids are free to share when they are bored or unhappy or when a gift was a flop.

I like that. I like that they tell me “Mom I really don’t want to be at Chuck E Cheese’s. The creepy figures bother me and the games aren’t fun.”

Oh, oh… but the pièce de résistance…. Eldest Child kinda got stuck in one of the climbing tubes. Because they are designed for little children and my 10 year old is bigger than most adult Asian women at this point. She’s 100% shopping in the adult department. She’s not over weight, she is going to be a very large person. Her body is perfectly proportioned and she’s fucking fine.

THAT FUCKING BITCH MADE FUN OF HER. “wow. You are so big. Even I could fit in there. hahahaha”

The bitch in question wears about a size 4. Her daughter is a 0 or a 2. My daughter is pretty pear shaped and size small pants are already getting tight–she’ll be in mediums (so probably a size 6 at the moment) in the next year. She is height/weight proportional.

YOU DON’T FUCKING MAKE FUN OF A KID BECAUSE THEY ARE GROWING UP YOU STUPID CUNT. I am so angry that if I saw her I might hit her. She fucking fat shamed my daughter.

You know what… fuck people.

Our plans for the weekend sound pretty fun to me. We are picking up a rental car in 5 days and we will explore the other side of the island and deal with all of our crap on our own.

I am more than capable.

I. do. not. need. you.

Choices.

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“It’s a shame you choose to take it that way. I see people trying to help you.”

When I say, “I should back out of this conversation because I am incapable of hearing feedback in a positive way”… telling me that it’s a shame I am ‘making this choice’ is really harsh.

I’m autistic. I have ADHD. I have PTSD. I have Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I have depression. But sure, if I’m having a bad day I should just buck up and choose to Be Positive! It’s a shame I don’t make that choice!

Thanks for helping me feel like my problems are because I am lazy and bad and I just won’t make the right choice.

Maybe that is one more place I need to stop going to talk to people.

Perspective is hard.

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I struggle with receiving advice from people who have kids in the same age range as my kids. It’s kind of like how I don’t think anyone should write a parenting advice book while their kids are under 18: you don’t know how your methods work out in the long run.

Today a friend who has an adult daughter just a bit younger than me wrote to me about her concern. She didn’t phrase it at all as if she was criticizing me. She said, “This is what I did wrong and these are the long term consequences for me and my child.” I really appreciate that.

I need to have course corrections from outside sources. It’s important. It’s mandatory so that I don’t fuck up entirely.

Some days I am making the best bad decision I can because I do not have the ability to make a good decision.

That is absolutely shitty. My children will pay for that.

“All that I wanted from you was to gimme
Something that I never had
Something that you’ve never seen
Something that you’ve never been
But I wake up and everything’s wrong” – “Work”, Rihanna

My friend says she is afraid I am regressing (because she does) and I’m lashing out at my children (like she did).

I cannot imagine a kinder way to criticize me.

I live in abject terror of ignoring my kids, because my mother was severely depressed and she paid almost no attention to me, positive or negative, for months or years at a time. So I give my children negative attention when it might be healthier to take space from them. Because of my wounding.

There is no fair here.

And most of the people who told me they would help my kids by showing up…. they didn’t. And I don’t feel like it is ok to demonstrate my disappointment to them. I have to assure them that they are fine. Even though I am not fine partially because people keep fucking lying to me. Then I flip the fuck out and my kids bear the brunt of that.

It is not fair.

Today the plan is to do two hours of academics then the kids are going outside to play, whether they are done or not. I need down time. I need to rest. They don’t NEED me to pay attention to them all day. If they get their stuff done they can go spend time with their friend. If they don’t, they can choose being alone.

That is the best bad decision I can make today.

And I feel like this is so much crueler than soap in the mouth or kneeling on rice. Because that is my perspective. But folks are arguing with me. Folks I respect.

I don’t know the right thing to do. I went from one form of abuse to another to another. But I’m supposed to know the right thing to do. Even as people tell me that the right thing is boundless energy and give… and they will support me so I can do that…. then they don’t and I have to keep giving no matter what I am or am not receiving.

Ok.

Growing pains and mistakes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a process.

But I need to stop screaming.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe that isn’t entirely my battle to fight.

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

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

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

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

Why. What am I teaching them?

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

Why.

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

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

This is stupid.

Maybe less hysterical, we’ll see.

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This year… the kids don’t want to do academics. But they have lofty goals. If my kids told me they wanted to grow up and be a hair dresser and a mechanic I would not be so obnoxious with them about academics. They want to be engineers and politicians according to their stated goals and that means you fucking have to do academics.

Why am I freaked out all of the time? Because I’m never doing one thing. I’m taking care of a nursing baby (which is a lot of fucking work), cleaning up, helping with homework, being a travel agent, and I’m supposedly disabled and I should be doing many hours a day of body maintenance. Do you know what I haven’t done in a week? Any of my fucking exercises because there is fucking always three things more important. Dealing with rental cars and shopping. More baby care. Big kids refusing to do academics unless I stand over them and scream. I am back up to 121 emails (like half of them are requests for me to review every stupid company I touch. They don’t want my reviews. Y’all suck.)

I feel like I am always a day late and a dollar short.

Like a month ago we negotiated with the kids to slash their workload massively. Much lower daily goals for work. What happened when we negotiated that? They stopped doing absolutely anything and are now three weeks behind again and I want to put my head through a window.

So they don’t get to see their babysitter until they get their shit together. They have already blown 7 possible days with her and they may not bother to work today and miss more days. We are here for 27 days.

I can’t make them care. If they don’t get it in gear by the time we are in Japan, we will have to shorten the trip to Scotland and come back to the US. Our traveling adventures can’t happen if they refuse to make any forward progress. I’m not asking for up to grade level. I’m not asking for a normal “school” work load. But you must do something. If you refuse to do anything productive at all, we are not fucking doing this. We will move somewhere cheap because I am not going to enjoy anywhere we move and it might as well not cost a lot of money. Which means the schools are going to be rough. I’m sure my kids will get the crap beat out of them for being weirdos as is the standard American experience.

Oh well. I can’t save you from you getting consequences and I am tired of trying.

I’ve been talking to a buddy who is a horse trainer. She tells me their lives are too comfortable and I need to start making it very uncomfortable to not comply. Don’t hit them. Don’t abuse them. But… they have a lot of comforts and they don’t need any of them.

She’s not wrong.

I don’t think they need to get so much choice and freedom for a while. They currently think they are the bosses of me and I don’t fucking think so.

If this shit continues I am absolutely going to kick them out at 18 and say “I don’t talk to people who treat me like shit.” And that would suck all the way around. Maybe some soap in the mouth so they realize that dressing me down all day long isn’t ok is the lesser evil.

So yesterday we talked to the kids about how things are going. The kids know they aren’t doing what they say they will do. Like EC didn’t do 1 day of work out of the 10 days we were on the boat despite spending 6+ hours a day “working on homework”. I am infuriated because this shit fucking sucks. Being stuck in the room doesn’t bother her. She has a lot of fun. My buddy suggested kneeling on rice for 15 minutes to keep her from doodling and having fun the whole time.

Today her math is done by 9:45am because I told her at 10 we would start 15 minutes of rice to help her not be distracted.

I don’t want to enact negative consequences. I want them to just want to do the thing. But they don’t. They set up long term goals, and they ask me to help them reach those goals. Then I have to be the heavy being a butthead to drag them kicking and screaming towards their stated goals. This is not fun for me.

I think we should figure out an online math tutor. Maybe if she had outside accountability and someone else saying they are disappointed in her…. she would care more?

MC has been treating me really badly. When the old babysitter arrived for dinner (I barely let the kids talk to her, she was here to visit me not you) she commented on how shocked she is that their behavior has gone down hill so much. They are incredibly rude to me and it’s not ok. The other day I was eating lunch and grading MCs homework and he sat in a chair in front of me and just started kicking me. For entertainment. This shit is his norm right now and I am about to explode and beat him.

Maybe soap in the mouth isn’t so bad.

He says he wants to be respectful, but currently he is not managing that at all. He is too comfortable in his established routines. Something needs to change.

I desperately hope these negative consequences are not going to be long term strategies. I desperately hope we can do this for a few weeks or months and change our patterns of interacting.

We’ll see. If things aren’t different in 6 weeks I’m picking some town in Oregon or Idaho or Washington and we are just moving there. Not into a fun forever home. Into somewhere cheap so they can attend public school for a year and we’ll spend that year figuring out what to do next.

We wanted to spend 2 years traveling so we could find a forever home that feels good. Maybe we can’t get our poop in a group and we don’t get to do that.

Life is complicated.

I can’t help but feel like part of this is fall out from the fact that if I had tried to hold boundaries with Sarah I would have lost her years earlier. I had to accept whatever shitty treatment she felt like giving me or I would have lost what minimal support she gave and that was too painful.

I don’t feel good about myself. But. Time to do more work.

I feel like I’m going to stop breathing

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If you tell me where this post is linked (and I get to go verify it) I will send you $20. Who in the hell is causing me to get so many damn hits on this post?

Holy. Shit. This is the month. 18 days. 13 days till my baby turns 1. We aren’t having a party. I am definitely depressed. I don’t feel able to reach out to anyone if my life depends on it. I am leaving. I never get to ask for anything again.

I get these people and the folks who voluntarily ask to be part of our life. I don’t have the right to keep begging people to be in my life.

I think back to Eldest Child’s huge first birthday ten years ago. I thought we were going to be part of a big community. Well, when I stopped doing all the driving those people dropped me. Ok.

I feel so incredibly hurt by all of the people in the Bay Area who drove past me to help other people but fuck me I should do everything alone.

I am leaving partially because if you asked me for help I would show up. Even though you treat me like shit and I know it. Because that’s who I am. Thus I am moving to get the fuck away from your using ass.

“Aunties”. Fuck it.

I am so bitter.

There are a lot of days I wish that having kids wouldn’t have worked out so I could be dead already. I am so tired of feeling abandoned and unimportant. When I ask you for help and you tell me no but you drive even farther to help someone else you remind me of my mother. Anyone but me deserves help.

Fuck me. Why am I still here? Why haven’t I died already.

Things like: when I used to try hard to be part of the home school group I would find out that all of the major decisions for when and where to schedule big events were made at private “just a couple of friends” off shoots of the main group so that my schedule was never taken into consideration. “Well this is what works for us. You can either come or not come.” *hair flip*

Yeah. I see you there. Why don’t you go do all of your own work from now on.

You have no idea how much satisfaction I get from having over a dozen people tell me that the group sucked after I left. No shit mother fucker. That’s because you all suck and I tried to rescue you from how shitty you are but it was too much work. Go to hell.

I am not willing to invest in the new group at all. It’s too late. Not even in terms of time. I am angry and bitter and I owe none of you a god damn kind word let alone labor.

I feel sick to my stomach thinking about how much damage I have done to my body helping people. I drove to fucking Arizona and caused pre-term labor problems doing manual labor for someone who didn’t really appreciate me.

Because I’m stupid.

Because I don’t value myself.

Because I treat people allowing me to work for them as the same thing as love.

I mean, she did kind of appreciate me. But not enough to talk to me on a vacation I’m paying for when her more interesting boyfriend is present. Not enough to keep her promises. Hell, not enough for her to bother remembering that she made promises! Fuck me.

I really don’t want to feel bitter like this. It really doesn’t help that a lot of this is so old.

It dates back to when all of my siblings were good enough to stay with our parents and I couldn’t. Because I was too much trouble. I needed too much help. So go stay with people who hate you and talk all day long about how much you are shit.

We will never go camping again because how dare I act like able bodied adults showing up and expecting a disabled adult to do everything for them is rude.

How dare I act like I am anything other than a menial serf here to do your labor for you. You are the good one. The one who grew up with a family and parents. You deserve good things. I should wait on you because that is the natural order of things.

Waste people don’t matter. They should serve the people who matter.

Fuck you. And fuck you. And fuck YOU with a chainsaw.

Fuck you and fuck you and fuck you. I am so mad. I am so bitter. I am so angry.

Fuck Marcie. Fuck Chris. Fuck Laura. Fuck Kira. Fuck Deborah. Fuck Alex. Fuck Desiree. Fuck Jen. Fuck fucking Tamy. Even though it hurts so bad I feel like my chest will implode: fuck Sarah.

You treated me badly and I did not deserve that. I can come up with excuses for all of you. Your feelings are so much more important than mine. I can justify you dropping me or ignoring me or lying to me or not keeping your promises or you thinking that everyone else is more important…

BUT FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU. FUCK YOU.

I get to be mad. I shouldn’t take it out on everyone else in my life but frankly talking about it helps me not do that. It helps me compartmentalize it.

I am angry with these people because they actually did things to hurt me. Maybe if I name them I will stop feeling like I am a monster who is blasting everyone in the world equally even though most people don’t deserve it.

I wanted some people more than others. It wasn’t returned. I feel like the problem came partially from me being stupid and allowing myself to like them so much. I shouldn’t have. They truly weren’t worth it.

That’s the trouble. These people make me feel like I am unworthy of being alive and none of them deserve that power. They aren’t worth me feeling this bad for this many years. I have cried for literal years over every person on that list of names. Because they didn’t love me like I loved them. Maybe the trouble is I pick selfish assholes. Maybe part of the trouble is I know that I have to get very angry with those people; I have to move; I have to create distance or I will be pathetic and crawl back and continue to beg these fuckers to love me.

And they aren’t worth it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I just because an ATM to you.

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

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

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

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

Never make someone your priority when you are their option.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intensity balancing

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There is this thing where I am super intense. I wear people out. So I try hard to limit how much people have to put up with me. I carve out chunks of time or small slices of topics that I think are “acceptable” to share with a given person. Something I am noticing more as I get older though… if I very carefully limit what I share with someone… they don’t reserve space for me. Then when I come back to try and get more…

The spot I used to fill in their time/life has been filled and there isn’t really room for my intensity anymore.

Oh, shit.

So it’s like I shoot myself in the foot.

My kids did stupid shit yesterday and risked getting killed. I’m still trying to regulate my body from that. I took two sleeping pills (7 hours apart) last night because I couldn’t stop crying and shaking.

The first thing I want to do is turn to my friends. That’s complicated.

No Pam, you are right, my friends can’t love me enough to make up for me not loving myself. Because my friends are off finding partners (good for all of you) and my friends have big families they are involved with (I’m so fucking glad) and my friends have jobs/vocations (this is mandatory for survival!) and I don’t begrudge anyone any of that. People do think of me.

It’s true.

Ok. I am no longer talking behind anyone’s back if I process this because I have expressed it to the people in question.

I plan things with people because I want to soak in people. Because I want to crawl around in their brains and talk to them for hours and hours and hours. Like Disneyland. I spent… I don’t know how many months planning that. More than six. I wanted Sarah’s juicy brain. She wanted to feel special at the center of all of her people (totally valid!) and that means… there wasn’t much time for me. And the other friend who came said out loud that she wasn’t there for me she was there for Sarah and to read a book.

So I spent a lot of the trip feeling like dog shit. I spent that much time and energy planning to be with people I love very much and uhm…

Yeah. I got to wave at the people I love. I got to have a few meals with them where I could barely fucking understand the conversation because my hearing ability in loud restaurants is so shitty. We had few meals in the room together and I felt awkward and uncomfortable during them because I felt like I was forcing my presence on people who just wanted to use an apartment and not be bothered.

That came hard on the heals of having to surprise go to Texas and deal with the fact that one of my brother in laws is dying and my mother in law was a cunt and I did two weeks of work in one week so I was exhausted and….

I can’t keep pushing myself this hard hoping that I will get jolts of energy from my friends. I won’t. I won’t get these glorious long conversations where I feel good about myself and good about my journey and good about my relationships. Because people are busy and people have filled up the intensity spots in their life. I am someone to stand near sometimes and… yeah.

It was kind of like when I went to Alaska and my friend’s partner refused to let my friend pay attention to me.

My friend’s partner had the right to insist on her husband focusing on her. That’s right and just and appropriate and I don’t get to complain about it. But I can feel sad.

Sarah should focus a lot on her boyfriend. (There were some complicating details there that meant he did need some extra attention and I support that.)

But I can feel sad.

I feel very very sad that I waited all year for this and now my chance is gone and I’m not going to get it back. I need to just keep moving with this hole in my heart.

I feel selfish and horrible. I feel like I am so very very very very bad that I want so much from people and I don’t deserve to get it and I should stop fucking asking for it. Because other people are being just fine. I am the problem.

I am always the fucking problem.

I am so overwhelmed with feelings. I am tired and frustrated and sad and sad and sad and sad. There are so many reasons I’m overwhelmed. Those reasons are valid and it’s ok that I’m having giant feelings.

I can’t keep being unmedicated. This is so brutal. Where can I travel with pot.

Canada is sounding better. Uruguay. Ecuador. Portugal. I could find it in Australia but it is supposed to only be for medical patients. Switzerland. Estonia. Germany at some point. 

I am scared right this minute. It is hard to shake the abject terror I feel right now. I showed up here having big feelings about a lot of people and then I feel like I watched my kids risk their lives and I am a volcano of feelings.

I love my friends so much. I feel so bad about wanting them because I feel like I put inappropriate pressure on them. How dare I be so selfish and want so much of their attention. They are sharing with me what they want to share with me and I am an ungrateful piece of shit.

Then I withdraw and ask for less and I hurt more. And then when I do see them the pit of need is even bigger and the amount they have to share with me feels so much smaller in comparison to the void I have in me.

I understand, Pam, why you are afraid to call me. I am sorry that I am like this. I am sorry I am sorry I am sorry.

I feel like I am doing absolutely everything wrong.

I don’t know if I was right.

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My daughter very consciously and deliberately misled me for months. Like, took active steps to pretend she was doing something mandatory… while not doing it.

Because she’s a completely normal kid.

When I discovered this my response was to giggle. Because she’s screwed. She is going to be sitting in our hotel room in Mexico making up what she lied about. Cause that’s how life goes sometimes.

She didn’t appreciate my giggling. She screamed that she was going to punish me. She got in my face and loomed and told me she was going to humiliate me in front of every person I know.

Uhhhh. Well. I put my hand on the back of her head, pushed her to her knees and growled, “I. Don’t. Think. So. Go. Out. Side.”

Was that the right thing to do? God I don’t know. That was so minor compared to everything that happened to me. I didn’t hit. I didn’t yank her hair out. I didn’t spend a lot of time screaming at her.

I remember once I told my mom I was going to make her sorry. She grabbed me by the hair, yanked me through the house to my bedroom, and threw me against a wall.

I pushed my daughter to her knees. Then made her go outside for a little while.

These are dominance challenges. I can’t imagine that letting her win every single one is going to be good for our relationship or her character. But is that too harsh? It’s not abuse according to any statute in my state. But is it wrong? There are so many things that are legal and still wrong.

My friends hit their kids.

I feel despicable for putting my hand on her head and pushing her to her knees.

Perspective, yo.

I went outside to talk to her after I calmed down. I asked her what response would she like from me? Would she like me to scream and rage about her lying? Would she like me to spank her like my friends do their kids? Would she like me to cry and feel guilty because it is all my fault I haven’t taught her to be an honest person?

I giggled. I giggled at your sheer audacity. (She then asked me to define audacity. I said, “Your balls. Your nerve. Your stupid bravery.”)

She apologized for threatening to punish me. I apologized for putting my hand on her. But good grief I don’t know another way to handle someone getting in my face like that.

No. You don’t get to do that to me. Just….. NO.

My kids correct me a lot. They call me on my bullshit. They feel free to criticize me. But there are limits. You don’t shout that you are going to punish me because you got caught doing something wrong. That’s not ok.

I DIDN’T DO ANYTHING TO DESERVE BEING PUNISHED AND THAT IS NOT OK.

The thing is… if I had put my hand on her to begin with and she had told me that she was going to punish me for putting my hand on her? I don’t think I would be so angry. I would feel I deserved it. But I giggled. No. You don’t get to punish me for giggling. That’s not ok.

It is so hard to figure out scale. Everything in my life was so much more violent than that.

According to every statute, it isn’t abuse. No bruises were left. No hairs were removed. She was not harmed at all.

But it was a dominance challenge and I won.

I don’t feel good about that.

I am writing this down because I am not proud of it. If my daughter ever says, “Remember when you…” I need to be able to say, “Yes I remember. And I documented that I was not happy with myself for doing it. But it happened.”

I can’t rewrite this shit. I owe her honesty. Even if she isn’t honest with me. That’s not important. This is a one way road of obligation.

I will never run out of what I owe her.

I wish that I didn’t feel like part of what I owe her is teaching her not to scream at people when she is in trouble.

Do you know what else sucks?

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If I am honest and I talk about the fact that I feel like I am out of healthy coping methods and I want to hurt myself…

someone is going to reach out to tell me that they can’t read my blog anymore because they just can’t with that bullshit.

It’s someone different every year.

Dude. You never have to read this. Ever. Ever. Ever. Ever. Ever. Ever. eVar.

You also don’t have to tell me that you are out of patience with me not having the spoons to cope in ways you want to read about.

Support is amazing.

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There’s a thing going on with my child that I haven’t written much about because it isn’t my story to tell and I’m worried about their boundaries. But I want to express gratitude for part of it in my records so that in the future when I feel like stuff is hopeless I will have to acknowledge that hope does exist.

That thing that happened last summer. Between my big kids. The thing that wasn’t cool and one kid ended up feeling upset but not permanently wounded and another kid ended up feeling like they are a monster in training.

My child isn’t a monster. But a serious mistake was made and learning from it and growing past it are part of life’s difficult process.

We’ve been struggling a lot with the growing past it part. Kiddo is still feeling like they are bad and there is no redemption for them. Dude. There’s so little in this life that cannot be redeemed. Especially something you do as an under ten year old child. That’s just… life… Just about all of us fuck up. How do you internalize that and integrate it and become a better person?

That’s what life is? I think?

But the support I am giving my kid is insufficient. I reached out. I emailed my shrink, the kid shrink, our family shrink and I said, “I don’t know how to help my kid through this. I am failing them and that means we need to find new tools because it is not ok to fail them on this topic.”

I feel so grateful that we have these folks in our life. Hey L, you recommended a great shrink for me! And they have been able to recommend a whole string of useful people! This has been the best therapy rec of my life! Gosh I owe you for this.

So the three therapists talked to one another. They came up with a couple of layers of strategies and they emailed back. They are going to help us as a family create a ritual to release the shame. We are so woo and this absolutely right up our alley.

I feel overwhelmed with gratitude that I found support folks to help my family learn how to grow together towards health and love without shame.

We are so fucking lucky.

Market forces

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There are few phrases that Noah can utter that make me twitch more than “market forces”. I’m not nice to him about this.

Whenever he says this, no matter what the context or conversation, I am instantly in the mindset of “Oh great the rich white man who was set up from birth to be one of the most successful people of his generation is going to lecture the white trash whore on our relative values. Great.”

I don’t think that is what Noah means when he says it. But that’s what my brain does and it makes it very difficult to hear the conversation. I know this is a me problem.

It doesn’t matter how much basic value or truth there might be in the conversation he might be bringing up. It doesn’t matter how neutrally he means it. He might be talking about something 100% removed from me or my life and I’m still… stuck.

This is going to have to move to the “work on it” list but I don’t know how to get past this twitch. I don’t know how to get past the basic fact that I view him as having just about endless value and I am worth nothing.

On busses and hurricanes

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Yesterday I had a visit with the pain management doctor. It was a brief check in. It did not quite go how I expected on a few levels. He’s very interested in the totality of my health so he asks a lot of questions about my mental health. I was blunt in saying that I’ve been very depressed. He got really intense and asked me what is going on?

I told him that my husband and I are in a rough spot in our sex life. That things have been rocky on and off in that department from the beginning because I am so fucked up.

I started crying.

The doctor did this thing where he swelled like a lizard trying to intimidate a predator. He started saying with great emphasis, “YOU ARE NOT TO BLAME FOR ANY OF THIS. THAT’S NOT OK. BAD PEOPLE DID BAD THINGS TO YOU. YOU BEAR NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR THESE RESULTS.”

He tried to present a metaphor to me about who is responsible for sexual health and that kind of failed when I rattled off loudly and emphatically that if you don’t ask someone’s STD status and you choose to not wear a condom… you kind of deserve what you get. He didn’t think I would feel like that at all.

He decided to switch gears and explain this a different way since I wouldn’t go along with his beliefs about sexual responsibility.

He said, “Ok fine. Imagine you are a bus. Your responsibility in this life is to drive the bus and stay on the road. Well guess what? Your bus happens to be going through a hurricane. The hurricane isn’t your fault. The hurricane is what other people have chosen to do to you and there is nothing you can do about it. You just have to stay on the road. That’s your task. You can’t control how hard the winds buffet you and you can’t control how much debris whacks the outside of the bus and you can’t control if pieces fly off the bus because of outside elements attacking your bus. Ok, you with me? Ok. Here’s my point: YOU KEPT THE BUS ON THE FUCKING ROAD NO MATTER WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU.”

He then asked me if I had disclosed about my background before I married Noah, essentially… was I allowing him to have full consent when he married a crazy person. I said oh yes. I told him all about my fucked up history and mental illness and my issues. I mean, as best as I could.

He said, “Then it is your husband’s fucking fault he married you and he NEVER GETS TO BITCH ABOUT YOU HAVING PROBLEMS.”

I felt… completely stunned. I was sobbing at this point. I don’t think I have ever in my life had a doctor explode and swear at me so much. That was fairly shocking. Holy tomato. I mean, I swear… but doctors don’t usually swear back.

He told me that he has trauma in his background… not like mine but really severe trauma of a slightly different kind. He looked rather haunted when he referenced it. He did that brief almost hollowed out looking thing that people do when they think back to the ghosts that haunt them.

He told me that it isn’t ok for people to be angry with us for coping with what was done to us by bad people. If we react in a bad way at some time… it’s not our fault. We are doing our best to cope with what has been thrown at us and no one gets to judge us for this.

I told him that being married to a mentally ill person is very rough even if no one is to blame. He glowered and said that even if it is rough they don’t get to bitch. This is what they signed on for.

I just… kind of stopped arguing and kept crying. Because goodness. I don’t agree that mentally ill people are never to be held responsible for their behavior. That’s fucked up.

But Sarah’s probably right and I’m taking on a bullshit level of responsibility here.

I came home last night and told Noah that I’ve been having the thought process that… I didn’t cause the shame he feels about his sexuality. But I did fail to heal it and that was something he dearly wanted our marriage to accomplish. And I feel like there is some element where he is very upset with me for failing to fix that. But I can’t. That’s not in me to fix. That’s not about me, not really. That’s not even about how often I fuck him. That’s bigger than me. That’s bigger than me having physical problems.

If we could both get past feeling so bad about ourselves… it wouldn’t be a big deal if he wanted to masturbate with/near me when my cunt is not up for sex. I like mutual masturbation a lot. I think it’s a great game. And frankly… when I know I’m really not expected to take my pants off I have a lot of fun playing with a cock. They are neat. That’s not something I react negatively to. When I feel I really don’t have to take my pants off.

But that’s the rub. I self impose this feeling that I’m bad if I don’t escalate the sex as quickly as possible.

The pressure doesn’t come mostly from Noah. It is about what I feel is mandatory.

And given that we have records going back to day one of our marriage… I think we can count on our fingers how many months we have skipped sex in 11 years (including that 6 month road trip). There is no case whatsoever for sexual withholding. That is just literally not happening. We don’t have sex 2-3 times a day like Noah would prefer… but Jesus H Christ on toast.

Most bad months we still have sex 2-4 times.

Noah has genuinely never had to cope with a real drought. The longest periods of celibacy we have experienced are immediately post-partum and if you want to complain about that I get to beat you until you are black and blue because MY GOD DAMN CUNT WAS RIPPED APART AND YOU ARE A STUPID SELFISH PIECE OF SHIT IF YOU DON’T FUCKING CARE.

That’s the one time in my life that I will defend my pussy like a god damn honey badger. You don’t get to complain that my cunt isn’t performing well enough right after I give birth. Fuck you all the way to hell and back. NOT OK.

I know women who were not ok with having their cunt touched for a god damn year. I wait like 3 months.

No bitching about my post partum recovery time. Ever. Ever. Ever. Ever. Ever. Ever. (Not that Noah has ever complained. He was willing to try when the doctor gave us the go ahead with the first kid and I declared it a failed attempt and made him stop and he was patient until I was ready to try again. He did not ask to try so early the second time. Noah actually did just fine in this department. So my ranting is at the generic universe and isn’t about him.)

Yesterday when I was talking to my various medical people (acupuncture, pain doctor, and sleep people in one day) and they asked me about how my marriage is going… I was conscious of how much of a problem it was that my former shrink thought Noah could do no god damn wrong and I needed to always compromise in his favor. I said, “He’s a good husband but he’s a person so he screws up sometimes.” That got nods and acceptance. That’s a much more fucking realistic picture of him.

He is a good husband. But he’s a human being so he fucks up sometimes. That’s not the end of the world. I don’t reject people out of hand for fucking up sometimes. That’s life.

But sometimes I cope very poorly with the set of skills I have within me. I cope in ways that hurt me and people around me because I don’t have a better way of handling what is happening to me. Sometimes all the ways I have to cope seem to fail and I feel like I need the big guns and those are never fucking pleasant to be around.

I don’t always cope in nice ways that make other people feel comfy and happy. Sometimes I just keep the fucking bus on the road and that’s the god damn best I can do.

The doctor got really quiet and intense near the end of the appointment. He looked at me for a long minute or so. He said, “I hope you understand how impressive it is that you are still here. The problems you cause by being here are nothing to compare to the miracle of your presence. Most people would die if they went through the size of hurricane you went through. You may not always be convenient, but it’s not your fault and I’m really glad you are here.”

I don’t know that I’ve ever had a non-psych doctor make me cry like that. That was so intense.

Home. And Petty.

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I’ve spent most of the last week grateful I didn’t have a computer. I would have written some incredibly unkind things. I wanted to stoop to a level of petty that would be darn near epic. Why?

Because people get all twisted up in my head. I’m never responding to one thing at a time.

I’ve spent the last few years in therapy doing a tremendous amount of work around the fact that the Bonus Mama triggered all of my “like my sister” buttons, minus the sexual assaults. She has quite a few of the same problems and in my ridiculous codependency I’ve spent a lot of time and energy trying to fix her problems.

It is a gift from the universe that I am now done with that set of behaviors. I never need go clean her house again. I never need try and help her children emotionally cope with neglect. I never need try and pretend that I am unaffected by the physical violence in her marriage again.

I am free.

I think this is a positive step in my life. I need to stop trying to cover for broken people. It’s a real problem I have.

I need to stop investing my life into trying to make up for people who won’t even admit that I’m doing a back breaking amount of work for them. It’s stupid. It’s self defeating. I have spent a lot of time and energy and money over the past few years trying to do something for the ephemeral child self I still have. Other people helped me so I helped her kids.

But I’ve given what I can and it’s time to move on.

People come into your life for a reason, a season or a lifetime. Part of what this relationship came into my life to teach me is that when my children say, “I don’t want to associate with this person because she is mean” I need to never overrule them again. I need to never ignore such a signal again. I feel deeply ashamed of myself for telling my children to cope with behavior that made them feel diminished because I wanted weekend babysitting. That was wrong of me. My behavior was selfish and disgusting.

I was wrong.

I will never deliberately send my children to the home of someone who speaks to them with contempt again. I. Was. Wrong.

Hopefully I have learned the lesson I needed to learn and in the future when someone triggers my “like my sister” buttons I will run like my tampon string is on fire.

No more hoarders. No more people who refuse to acknowledge that they are literally physically, emotionally, and mentally unequipped to take care of their children while they brag about how great they are. No more people who are in a marriage that involves domestic violence, gaslighting, stone walling, and screaming matches that the children can hear only to turn around and tell me that if the marriage is destroyed it’ll be my fault. Sure. Because y’all had none of these problems the day I arrived. Right. Who is the one with the convenient memory? I write down all my bad shit so I can’t claim it didn’t happen. Remember how I’ve begged you to document your DV for 7 years because shit like this comes to a head and you always said, “But I don’t want to remember.”

Sure. If your marriage is destroyed it’ll be my fault. Yup. Right. Because I’m the one sitting there filled with contempt. Yup. That’s me.

Take your guilt trip to someone who is stupid enough to be buying. I’m fresh out of money for such bullshit.

I am free.

Do you know when I freaked out and started demanding that your kids be put in school the fuck away from you? When you took them to Moana and came home crying because you believe your children are incapable of understanding and appreciating the story. Guess what? Your kids are capable of understanding. You are incapable of teaching and your children need to spend time with competent teachers who can teach them. Stop fucking over your children because you are fucking broken and you want your children to be as limited as you are so you feel comfortable. Your children have more potential than you do. Let them go be taught by someone with actual ability to teach and they’ll be ok.

The worst thing that ever happened to you was someone telling you that your IQ is high. You use that number as an excuse for why you are better than people as you cannot fulfill basic life functions. It’s sad and pathetic and your fucking children need to be educated by people who have the humility to say, “I don’t know everything so I’d better study.” You think that if you buy all the books and don’t read them it’s just as good.

Your children deserve better than to be locked in your company all the time.

And after this I need to never ever write about your family again.

I’m done.

Wrong again

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It’s one of those times when my anxiety is on hyperdrive. I’m doing everything wrong, right? Every interaction I have with people seems to be fraught.

One problem is that I’m struggling with how much control and influence and power I have. There are times and places when I don’t agree with how something is being handled and I shut up because there’s nothing I can do. Then there are times and places where I feel like I am a bad person if I shut up because someone is being harmed and if I ignore that… I’m part of the problem.

I’m part of the problem. If I see people being harmed by others in their life and I do nothing… I’m saying I basically agree.

What if I don’t agree that something is being handled right?

Good luck with those feelings.

Because I don’t get to decide. And I’m afraid that by talking about what I see I am going to become the problem and then I won’t be able to help in any way because I was stupid enough to talk about the problem.

Not everyone can do everything. We all have limits. We all have things we can’t do. I can’t teach fussy, fiddly little activities that involve a high amount of fine motor control. Even if I can do it (under protest) I can’t teach it because I get frustrated and angry and explosive. So I outsource that shit. I can’t teach everything. My kids take classes because I can’t teach everything. I am not that cool. That’s why as they get older they will spend more and more time away from me. Because they will have mostly learned what I have to teach.

I don’t think there is one Twue Way that parenting or schooling should happen. Some people like home schooling and it works well for their family. Some people need to have their kids in school. Some people need to have their kids in school and after school care every day for any one of millions of potential reasons.

None of these choices are wrong if they work well for the child and the family. It’s when the solution is clearly not working for either the parent or the child that you need to look at making changes.

It is easy for me to sit on my high horse and see the problems in other peoples systems. I’m afraid I am failing to see the problems in mine. I was honestly hoping for more criticism from Stanford because other than “Do more academics” which was the plan anyway and which we have already caught up on…. What do I change now?

I have no feedback to help direct me. Just… do something. What you are doing seems to work ok.

THAT’S NOT GOOD ENOUGH. Everyone fucks up. Everyone has things they don’t do well and things they do very well. WHAT AM I DOING WRONG?!

I shout more than I should. But professional evaluators tell me I don’t shout as much as other people and it isn’t that big of a deal.

So what does should mean anyway?

I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know.

So anxious. So worried that I’m going to hurt everyone and wreck their lives and make it so they are not ok later.

This is eating me alive. It has been for a couple of days now? Turbo anxiety. How am I hurting everyone?

I want to run away. I want to disappear. I want to go somewhere that no one knows me. (Good luck, motherfucker. Name a continent (other than Antarctica) and I will name countries I need to avoid if I want to make sure I don’t see anyone I know. I run into people I know most times I travel internationally. I know too many fucking people.)

I love you all. It’s just hard to run away from you.

I want to run away from my own self perception. Because I’m afraid I’m doing everything wrong. I’m afraid I’m hurting people. I’m afraid I’m a giant let down. I’m afraid that by trying to help I am going to make things worse. I’m afraid that by trying to help I am going to be hated so much that hating me becomes the problem instead of fixing the problem.

Fuck.

I think I’m going to take a week or so off from reaching out. I feel like I am hurting people by existing. Maybe if I hide in my house and keep my crazy to myself that will feel less true. Don’t interfere with other peoples lives. Even if there are problems.

It isn’t my place.

Moving the needle

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I’m trying to figure out how to get things to improve in my marriage. I’m tired. I’m sad. I’m scared. At this point we are most of the way through arguing about all of our done-me-wrongs over the last ten years. There’s been an absolute fuck ton of arguing this year.

I don’t know about you, but I have let a lot of things slide over ten years because I didn’t want to argue. Then when things kinda hit a boil… everything comes out. We’ve had little and big problems that I’ve bit my tongue and la-la-la ignored. I’m not so sure it was useful.

At some point last night I realized that we have fairly equivalent lists of “you did _____” for one another. So we have hit the point where we have fairly well hashed out the problems and we are getting to… we have to forgive to move on.

Fuck.

I both am and am not a forgiving person. There are lots of things that I don’t really forgive. Lots. Shit dude, I cut off my family. There are things I won’t forgive. But I don’t think Noah has done anything that heinous. Everything that has been hurtful has individually not been over my threshold, but collectively… oh that’s harder.

But I want him to forgive me. Damnit.

I did something, well said, something horribly awful this year. I screamed at Noah that I wished he would die. I didn’t mean it and in less than five minutes I was crying and apologizing and saying I wanted to take it back.

I don’t have a high horse for sitting on here. I don’t think I have been less hurtful than Noah. I have been differently hurtful at different times… but I have been a horrible person. I’m really not denying that.

If we are going to move forward we have to forgive.

Oh fuck.

One of the biggest problems we are dealing with isn’t really Noah’s fault but he’s done some awful things because of it. Me saying no. I don’t really speak up when things make me uncomfortable all that well. My early life taught me that life is uncomfortable. Full stop. Speaking up about it just means people punish you for not complying faster because my comfort is irrelevant.

This is creating problems. I have done a lot of things while feeling wildly uncomfortable because I don’t react to that feeling as if I have any right to be defended. So I put myself in situations where I don’t believe I can say no and I do it over and over.

Sex. Oh sex is a fucking mess. Well, our sex life has been better between us lately than it has been in years. Which is fascinating given how much we are fighting. I feel like everything is my fault. I’m not sure it is but I feel like it.

How are we going to learn to have boundaries around “us” as a collective instead of maintaining individual boundaries and I’m supposed to learn to speak up more, and earlier, when I’m uncomfortable? I really don’t know. Yes, unicorn hunting is hard but both of us completely flip out when the other goes off to play alone.

It is both of us.

I feel really ashamed of how strongly I react to Noah playing separately, which is kind of funny because his reaction isn’t… that much less intense. Not really. It feels like imminent death for both of us. So why do I need to feel ashamed of that feeling?

Because I feel like I’ve been exposed to poly for my entire adult life WHY HAVEN’T I MATURED PAST BEING AN INSECURE TWAT WAFFLE? It isn’t lack of effort or time. I just… I’m just so insecure that it’s ridiculous. It isn’t Noah’s fault, not even a little bit. If anything were going to make me feel secure it is Noah’s behavior in aggregate.

Yet here I am. Feeling like I really should jump off a bridge so that Noah has more space in his life to replace me with someone who is less of a colossal loser. He doesn’t want that. Not even a little. But it is very much how I feel. He… doesn’t feel that differently about me dating.

Why do I feel so ashamed of having the same feelings he has?

Because I believe I am supposed to feel supportive. I believe I am supposed to be willing to support him finding every scrap of happiness he can in this life. That’s what a good wife/partner would do.

I am not a good wife. I am small, selfish, insecure, and so very sad.

Do you know what is incredibly fucking complicated? The fact that… we don’t really have many platonic friends. If we are going to be controlling as fuck about one another, how do we handle the fact that we are mostly only friends with old lovers/play partners? It is hard. We both have a habit of acting like people on our side aren’t as threatening as people on the other persons side.

I was listing off the people I feel closest to… all of them I’ve been intimate with. I haven’t had SEX with all of them. But I’ve been intimate. I like crossing boundaries with people. I like bonding.

After this year I wouldn’t be surprised if none of our friends ever want to play or have sex with us again. Oh the drama.

Noah is right that I can’t ever have sexual contact with someone again without his consent. I ignored his no this year. I can’t do that again.

That’s a mistake I get to make once this lifetime.

Last night’s conversation hurt a lot. But I feel like we got closer to understanding, “I did x because y.”

We really are getting to the point where the only step left is forgiveness. If we want to move forward, and shit we are talking about another god damn kid, we have to forgive. What does that look like? What does that mean?

It means tearing up the tally marks for who has done what wrong to whom. That’s pretty scary.

I know I have behaved abusively in the last ten years. I believe there have been times when Noah has too. Should we be carefully keeping lists of documentation so that we can hurt each other as much as possible with these actions? Is this how abuse is normalized and tolerated and excused on a wide spread basis?

There are lots of kinds and types of abuse. Our marriage has not included the deal breakers I experienced early in my life. We both abuse in the ways we do rarely and only after a lot of pressure builds up that we haven’t figured out healthier ways to manage. Does that excuse it? No. I don’t know what to do.

Noah is right that in order to know what is going on with me, sometimes he has to listen to venom and sort through it for the truth. That really sucks. But there are a lot of things I just can’t talk about until I am so angry I am almost frothing at the mouth.

In arguments Noah keeps saying, “You knew it was hurting me and you wouldn’t stop.” But I have stopped. I stopped months ago. I have not continued leading people on in conversation. I’m not making promises I can’t keep with other people. I certainly haven’t been on a date recently. I did stop. I just didn’t stop on a dime the way he wanted me to. Something is going on currently that I feel will do a lot to decide how we move forward. If boundaries can be expressed in a way that actually supports our marriage going forward… that’s going to be a big deal. If I feel that it isn’t managed well…

I’m scared. I’m bitter. I’m frustrated and angry.

I work all the god damn time and I really don’t have much in my life that is about letting off steam. Most of my work demands that I project happiness and cheer whether I feel it or not. I don’t show my emotional range to my kids much because I don’t think it would be very fair. I’m a god damn roller coaster and they don’t need to be on the trip with me. So I shove my feelings in a box and I smile and I keep my voice pretty calm and level. Are there cracks in my armor? Sure. I’m not perfect. But my kids seem to genuinely not understand how upset I get and how often.

I am a very good liar.

I spend a lot of time hugging and snuggling when I would like to be shoving my head through a window. When I would like to be raging and crying and cutting myself up. I pretend that I enjoy being a loving mother instead.

How in the fuck am I supposed to learn to care about being uncomfortable when pretty much my whole life is set up around, “It doesn’t matter how you feel it matters how you support the people around you.”

I honestly don’t want as much physical contact with my kids as they want with me. It feels alienating and hurtful. Partly because I am so jealous I didn’t get it that I feel like I am going to burst into flames. My needs didn’t matter. Why in the mother fuck are yours so god damn important?

Why is everyone more important than me?

I’m supposed to make other people feel comfortable. It doesn’t matter if I’m sitting there thinking about the various pitfalls of ways to kill myself.

I don’t matter.

But Noah has built a life around how much I matter to him. I am seriously impressed with the amount of work he has put in to being a good partner. It’s a lot of why I feel he deserves someone better. Someone who can meet him halfway honestly instead of with a forced smile.

It isn’t that I don’t love Noah. It is that I spend so much time shoving down how uncomfortable I feel that there is often not room for authentic emotions near the surface. I have to have a layer of pretense over everything in order to cope.

This is how I have survived. This is how I have accomplished as much as I have. I pretend that how I feel doesn’t matter even a little bit, I put my head down, and I work.

A lot of my work is consciously projecting emotions I don’t feel: happiness, comfort, feeling secure. Because I am so good at pretending I feel these things I’m very good at helping other people feel this way. From what I understand from the people I weirdly interrogate: their feelings seem to be more authentic than mine.

Uhm I guess that’s good. I can pretend to be ok and help other people feel actually ok.

It all comes down to how I actually feel is irrelevant.

As a result I hurt and hurt and hurt and hurt.

It’s been a bad year in pretty much every way. Well, the cruise was lovely. We made promises for the next decade of our life that we need to figure out how to keep.

Otherwise 2016 has been overwhelmingly shitty. I’m so god damn over this remodel I could scream and never stop. Today they finish the initial drywall installation in the bathroom. They have finished the stucco outside. They will be here till January at least. We have a hearing in January and doing work communicating with the lawyer saps my will to live. It feels so mentally taxing and draining.

In retrospect… I’ve done an amount of work this year that I probably shouldn’t have been able to get done. I’m so tired.

I’m on the verge of collapse.

And I don’t really know what feeds me at this point. From where am I drawing energy? From the clear blue sky and I don’t god damn know how much longer I can continue.

I miss socializing. I miss my friends. I miss community. I don’t in any way shape or form have the ability to do more of it right now. Because as much as I get something back from that there is also a cost associated and right now I can’t pay.

We haven’t even been inviting people over to dinner much. I just can’t.

I have felt existentially lonely for a long time. The road trip was really hard in this way.

Noah desperately wants to be enough all by himself for me. But Noah has a lot on his plate. I can’t ask for any more of Noah. It isn’t fair or appropriate or ok. So I feel like I have spent a lot of time trying to make myself smaller. So that what Noah has to spare is enough.

I’m hurting so much.

I feel like a real schmuck in our conversations sometimes. I know he has made enormous leaps of progress in the past year since we’ve been back from the road trip. He is organized and efficient and he’s trying so god damn hard. The trouble is I have a back log of hurt and frustration and need and sadness and I don’t know how to deal with it. If I weren’t dealing with years of hurt… would this be enough? I don’t know. It is closer to enough than it ever has been before. But I don’t know how to evaluate it given how much I’m flailing.

I feel like I’m reaching the part where I’m genuinely in a family and I genuinely need to figure out the coping skills for forgiving and staying that other people have. I’ve never developed these skills. They have never been relevant to my life.

I need to stop making Noah cry. I don’t place it as a goal that I will feel happy. But I need to stop making Noah cry. Because Noah having a minimum bar of ok is more important than me being happy.

And this is how things fuck up. This is how I build up backlogs of things that hurt me until I explode. Because I don’t think I am important enough to deserve support on the smaller stuff. There is just so much that makes me uncomfortable that I really don’t believe I have the right to ask for consideration. It would be a job and not a fun one.

I’m not sure how forgiveness ties in to being able to respect or like myself. Can I forgive if I think I deserve the bad treatment? If I think it will never stop because it is just that I receive it?

My heart and my head and my stomach hurt. I feel physically sick and I don’t think it is illness. I think it is sadness. I think it is the feeling that I matter so fucking little. I feel worthless and pointless and stupid. I feel like I should die.

I feel like death is the only route to stop hurting. Life is pain.

Forgive. I have carved forgive on my body in more than one place because I feel like if there is a lesson I am supposed to learn in this lifetime it is how to forgive. But am I forgiving Noah or am I forgiving myself? I sorta feel like I will not ever be able to forgive anyone else, not really, until I forgive myself.

Forgive myself for being petty and weak and insecure and so very damaged by the experiences I’ve had. How do I forgive myself for not being whole when I have never been whole and I don’t really even understand what that might be like?

I feel so very sad. And my arms hurt like a motherfucker. I need to stop.