Category Archives: the shame factory

high anxiety

It is interesting to try and track the progress of anxiety. It starts out as irritation, just knowing that something is making me feel nervous. I don’t have to know what. It doesn’t have to be major. At that point I have butterflies in my stomach all of the time and my throat is tight and I have a mild headache.

If things get more intense–if I feel I have New and Exciting reasons to feel anxious the first thing that happens is I feel like someone shot me in the stomach with a water cannon. My stomach acid production goes into over drive. My entire torso feels like it is on flames. And I know that this moment, awful as it is, isn’t going to last so I try to hold on to it and pretend that nothing else is going to happen.

But inevitably, sure as rain, after the water cannon to the stomach the diarrhea starts. I have made jokes for many years that constipation would be a nice change. Ok, they aren’t actually jokes. I think constipation would be really novel. I’m really tired of the diarrhea. It burns. It burns so much that sometimes I sit in the bathroom and cry for upwards of an hour because it just keeps coming and it hurts so much and there is nothing I can do to stop it. The poison has to leave my body some how.

After a couple of days of that then I usually progress into some kind of other illness. Right now I am coughing (very productively. Very very very productively–ew.) and my eyes hurt and my head hurts. My neck muscles are on fire and feel locked down so tight I do not quite have 180 degrees of motion.

My legs hurt. My legs hurt like I have been practicing sprinting up a hill. It’s a combination of throbbing and burning.

Luckily the water cannon to the stomach phase does end. Eventually I do poop out all the extra stomach acid. (OMFG it hurts)

Then I am left feeling numb and shaky. I feel stupid and thick and slow. I feel like I am unable to think clearly. I feel unable to be productive. I feel empty. I feel worthless. I feel like I wouldn’t have so many problems if I could keep my stupid, piece of shit mouth shut. My problems are all my fault for being such a complete bitch. If only I could SHUT UP maybe people wouldn’t be so mad at me all of the time.

I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to hurt people. I’m not trying to. I swear to a god I don’t believe in. I talk because otherwise I cut. I have to let it out somehow. I am so sorry I offend you. I’m sorry.

I don’t want to be bad. I just don’t think it is possible to stop being bad once you are as bad as I am. There is no longer any redemption for someone like me. It is too late.

People really should get away from me as fast as they can. I am not in control. I am not a nice person. You should protect yourself. Goodness knows I can’t do it.

Then I want to die so much. I don’t know why I was born bad. People have been reacting to me in the same way for my whole life. “Everything is fine. Everything is fine. I’m not mad. I just never want to see you again.”

I get that a lot. If you have the same problem over and over with lots of people… it probably isn’t about them. It’s me. I am bad and people need to stay away from me to protect themselves. It is perfectly logical.

I’m still freaking out about Iain dying. He was good. He was worthy. He was beloved by many hundreds, probably thousands of people. Why did he die and a worthless piece of shit like me lives on? There is truly no justice in the universe.

I’ve been thinking about my mom like crazy. Calli looks more and more like her as she ages. Sometimes when I catch her giving me an expression of my mother’s I have to leave the room and cry. I miss my mommy. It is all my fault I can’t have a relationship with my mother. I’m a stupid pathetic whiny bitch. I made my own bed. No cause to blame anyone else for the results.

On the days when the pain in my body hits over 7 I start thinking about why am I doing this? Why do I continue to inhabit this body, this loathed object. Because I don’t have a choice. Because there is no other option if I want to remain conscious.

Pam asked me why I believe the bad things about myself so much more than the good things when she tells me good things all the time. Honey, my reading has shown me that you need ~10 positive or neutral statements about yourself to balance out one negative statement. That is more or less how it works in creation of self.

I was told I was a worthless, stupid, annoying whore for almost twenty years. In the almost fourteen years since I got out I have had some positive messages mixed in with a lot of people yelling at me and dumping me as a friend and sending me nasty letters through the mail explaining everything I am doing wrong.

I don’t have enough reason to believe positive things about myself. I would have to significantly fly in the face of public opinion in order to believe I have much worth at all. I’m not really confident enough for that.

The best I can do is hide in my house so I don’t bother people. I’m sad that looking out my back window will remind me for the rest of my life that I can fuck absolutely anything up. It is all my fault. I should have shut my stupid, piece of shit mouth.

I am so sorry.

Today is a Godmama weekend. That is probably for the best. I anticipate a lot of hiding and crying. I will make sure no one else has to see it. It is no ones problem but mine. I am not guilting anyone. This is not “because of you”. This is because of me. This is just my life. This is just what it has always been. I have never known different. Not for longer than two-three months at a time.

It is hard being this bad. I don’t really know how it happened to start wtih. But once it is there you can’t lose it.

Coughing up big wads of nasty while you are crying and dealing with a nose running down the back of your throat is truly disgusting. This kind of idiocy usually leads to vomiting. The chunks coming up and the slime mix right at the back of my throat and good grief my gag reflex is sensitive.

I don’t blame other people for my problems. I know that if I were not such a problem I would not have so many problems. If I knew what part of me to cut off: my tongue? My fingers? Maybe I could figure out a way to not make people mad all the time. Maybe I could find a way to not alienate people.

As is, I don’t have a lot of hope.

I feel bad for Noah. I’m sorry he has to live with someone like me. It isn’t his fault I am like this. I am so sorry.

When I talk about being too pathetic to hold down a job this is what I mean. I lose days when my body completely shuts down from stress. I don’t get up much. I just sit and cry because everything hurts so much.

Piercing the veil.

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I do not write as a passive aggressive way of controlling the people around me. I write because otherwise I have trouble noticing patterns of behavior in myself. If what I write makes you think hard about your life and consider some issue, great.

If you ever feel that I am saying too much about you or your family or your pet you are free to ask me to stop.

Otherwise I’m getting kind of tired of the fact that I’ve spent the last fucking month bouncing between people who are upset with me for things I write. They feel attacked.

Uhm, no one is forcing you to read. If you feel upset by what I am writing feel free to take a break. I am not feeling ok with the pressure to stop writing. I am feeling more angry by the day about how many people have gotten really angry with me in the last month as I try to deal with my anxiety.

My anxiety is not your problem. No matter who you are. I am not writing this post to one person. I have had intense exchanges of one sort or another with at least seven people in the last month.

I have to stop being responsible for other people having feelings. If my writing triggers big feelings in you that bother you and make you unhappy, stop reading it. This is an opt-in space. I do not think it is appropriate that I should have to stop and feel anxious every fucking day about the fact that me processing my shit is going to make someone else feel attacked.

I’m not attacking you. I’m sitting in my fucking garage trying to figure out how to not blow up when I am with people in person. I do this because I know in my gut that no one deserves me blowing up. I do it for environmental reasons–not usually for actual provocation. If you don’t like knowing how I go through that process, opt-out. We can have a cordial in person relationship where I can tailor what I say to your personal preferences. I can not fucking handle the stress of trying to please everyone when I write.

I am not responsible for your feelings. No matter who you are.

I have to say this.

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The older I get the more I learn about my own introvert nature. I always thought I was an extrovert. I needed people. I had to take what I could get in terms of company. I need time where I get to write. I have to empty my head.

Notice those days where I bop around from social media tool to social media tool? I feel lonely. I want to feel like I am seen and part of the world.

I don’t use social media more because I am afraid. I am afraid of being yelled at. I am afraid of being told I am bad and stupid. I am afraid that if I actually said more of what is in my head that people would not want to know me any more. As lonely as I feel at this stage of my life I know this is the absolute best I have ever had it. I try very hard to understand what this might mean in the scope of my life. If I blow this… I know how that goes.

I am ok with someone getting to know me and disliking something that I do. That’s fine with me. No matter who you are you do things that I don’t like. I’m fine with you feeling the same way about me.

But I desperately want people to believe that I am allowed to exist. Without having to offer sex. I want to have some kind of value in the world. I want to be needed. I want who and what I am to be useful. And without having to change so that I can be more like other people.

It is kind of funny to me when people tell me that me making the choices I make reflects negatively on them. Well, funny in a horrified kind of way. I can tell you in great detail exactly why I am bad for every single choice that I make. I know all of the arguments down the last specific. I don’t think that my choices are “good”. I don’t think that other people are bad for not being like me. I think I am bad for not being like other people.

I think I am rather pathetic for not being able to work while having children. I know a lot of women who do it and everything is working out great. I would be an abusive monster. I cannot handle that stress. I feel very ashamed of my limits.

I think it is rather pathetic that I can’t deal with hiring childcare on a daily basis so I can go get work done. I think it is extremely pathetic that I would use that time to hide and cry. But I would.

I worry a lot about isolating my children. I think there are HUGE benefits to public school. I am not sure I am doing them favors by encouraging non-conformity and inability to follow institutional rules. I’m not sure I am doing them favors by showing them that they should be very angry with any one who tries to tell them when and where they can use a bathroom. My kids think they have the god damn right to decide when and where. If you pester them to “just try” so that you don’t have to be inconvenienced later they will lash out at you. I’m ok with this. I feel the same fucking way. I don’t act like accidents are that big of a deal. I’ve had too many because of problems I have in my body due to a lifetime of malnutrition and control issues in institutional settings.

I worry a lot about being a parent with mental illness. What am I teaching my children about “normal”?

No. I don’t look down on people for making different choices.

I believe with everything I am that no one can judge what is the right choice for another person. I don’t believe I ever have enough information to judge what a different person is capable of accomplishing. For good or for ill. I under estimate and over estimate. I just can not judge. I don’t feel that other people judge me very well.

I’m going to be semi-egotistical and say that I am an extremely competent person. I know how to do a wide variety of skills at a better than average level. I have had to learn how to do things for myself and by myself. I am a ridiculously hard task master.

But I don’t think I am capable of much. Notice how I actively avoid anything in life that might lead me to having power? I don’t want to have a powerful job. I don’t want to associate with “powerful” people. I don’t especially want to have a rich lifestyle regardless of how much money I ever have. I would feel wildly uncomfortable.

When I picture my old age I would be just fine with living on a trailer on a piece of property in Oregon where I am legally allowed to decide when I die. Sure. That would be fine.

I don’t think that most people uhhh set their aspirations at such a level. I want to have enough money to never need to work again. I’m trying to use this ridiculous income of my husband’s to ensure that it happens without him having to work for many more years. I don’t want him working himself to the bone for decades to support my sloth. That’s not the deal.

I want both of us to be able to do things we want with the hours of our days. Luckily for him, the shit he likes to do for fun will probably generate a modest income. Eventually I will do something for some pay. I don’t want much. I really fucking don’t. I already have more than I need.

I feel like I have grown up in a weird space of intersection. Boy howdy have I seen the American Dream up close and personal. I see the stress. I see the trade offs. I see the A/B decisions that started with your parents decisions and I know that I will never be able to be competitive. It was done before my birth.

Oh man does that make me want to opt out of the system. I want to have my private, isolated life where I don’t have to try to step on anyone else’s neck in order to inch my way up.

I don’t have that in me. That fight was lost too long ago.

So what am I teaching my children? I worry. I worry all the fucking time.

What kind of adults will my children be? They will never experience deprivation of any kind. They will grow up with a mother who responds to any and all signs of entitlement with the nastiness of a viper. You are not fucking entitled to the labor of my body. Do for yourself. (I try to tone things down because they are kids and all but I am getting less patient by the year and by the time they are adults I won’t feel any desire to tone it down.)

You have to care about how the actions of your body effect the people around you. You have to. Period. If you are not willing to care about that, well you can bloody well stay in a room by yourself. (For an age appropriate number of minutes on a timer. Then you come out to kisses and hugs and talk about how much you are loved.)

I don’t know that I am doing anything right. I don’t really feel like I am in a position to look down on what anyone else is doing.

My life is such a bizarre mix of trauma and privilege that it is hard to tease out what is positive and what is negative. What parts of my behavior and character are positive or negative depends entirely on your point of view.

Recently (this year) a lot of my reading has been about what personality traits enable people to thrive despite adversity. I may be a whiny bitch because most of my current adversity is all in my head but other people in the world deal with real adversity. It is still relevant reading and all. (See that denigration about the mental illness bit. IT’S ALL IN MY HEAD! Well, what isn’t?)

Apparently one of the most important aspects of character is the ability to live with having conflicting traits in yourself. Be ok with the fact that you are patient AND impatient. Be ok with the fact that you are trusting and suspicious. I really am quick to judge people. I give people a lot of fucking rope. Then I hang them hard and fast and walk away.

I don’t like being alone. I find being alone significantly preferable to being in social environments where I have to try very hard to be “good” or I might be expelled. I think of basically every social space that way. I’m not invited to that many parties any more. Part of it is the kid thing. Part of it is that I make people feel fucking uncomfortable. C’est la vie.

I feel intense guilt for not being able to unschool the way I see some people doing it. I can’t have my kids involved in activities six days a week to meet social needs. I just can’t. I am not capable.

When I was a kid it was a joke in most of the schools I was enrolled in that I shouldn’t bother enrolling because I missed so much school. I have never been a consistent part of anything. I can manage a few months, maybe. I taught for 2.5 years at S.T. That is the longest I have ever consistently done anything in my life. I was technically in the graduate program at SJSU for seven years… but I attended one class a week for most of that and I had years off in the middle.

I lived with my Owner for three years and dated him for four. Outside of my mother he is the person I have lived with the longest consecutively by far. I’m not sure my mother beats him by much and after I was four years old I never lived with her for four years in a row again.

I have lived with Noah and Shanna longer than I have ever lived with my mother in a go. When I write it down it becomes a thing I can look at. Holy shit. That’s really pretty sad. When I just feel anxiety and frustration because I am having a horrible time with the pressure that comes from trying to provide stability for children I don’t think of it in such terms. Of course this is hard for me. Of course I am struggling. I’m swinging without a net. So I pursue relentless competence at a wide variety of skills. Most of which are utterly without value to anyone beyond me. I can’t care about that. People like me die if they worry too much about which skills to pick up because they will invariably make the wrong decisions.

I’m trying really hard to make my 10,000 mistakes. I’m not sure what I will be a “master” of but I think I will be much more calm. What is another mistake at that point? I can do anything and it doesn’t matter.

I want neither the path of complete disconnection from other people of Zen nor the immersion in community behavioral norms I have always known. I don’t know what my path will be.

I can neither lead nor follow. If I am making other people feel like they are wrong then I need to work on my communication skills.

I haven’t figured anything out. I just keep walking because I don’t know what else to do. I try new things because I don’t know how to do the same thing for a long time.

I want to raise children the way I am doing this because my children are going to be the only people I ever have this kind of intensity with. I have absolutely no other window into such an experience. I am a selfish piece of shit and I want it. I want it. I want it. I want to find out what it means to live with someone 24/7 for 18 years. I understand that other people get enough out of that experience with their kids being gone for school and I’m totally cool with that and I think it represents a healthy approach to life.

I can’t. I can’t miss this. I have no other way to find out what a normal childhood looks like. I want to watch this so fucking much. I am so scared that I will miss part of it and I won’t be able to understand why something later is happening. I need to fucking know what is happening to them. I NEED to know. I can’t just trust a daycare provider. I can’t. This is a failure in me.

I need to know in my bones that when they are eighteen I have kept them safe. I can’t pass the buck on responsibility. I don’t trust anyone enough. I am not saying that you don’t love your children. I am saying that I am broken.

I worry so much about what I am doing to my children. They have never had a daily relationship with anyone but me and their dad. Even when we had a housemate she did not appear during their awake hours every day. They have literally never had a relationship with anyone else where they saw them every day for two months. Not even five days a week. And I take them on trips away from their dad, sometimes for weeks.

I worry a lot. Is this ok? Is this basically broken? It makes me feel hellza better that Laura Ingalls Wilder was way more isolated than my kids. I mean… isn’t that part of the American story? We are all alone. Even when we live in suburbs shoved cheek and jowl. Most of my friends talk about a loneliness of the soul they felt because even though they went to school… they never had friends. I collect self-identified “rejects”.

This is a lot of why I am trying so hard to get to know the people who live in our neighborhood. We actually see people and have conversations with them pretty consistently.

But I’m not providing little friends. I’m not sure school would anyway. And man it would waste their time. And teach lessons I don’t like.

It all comes down to control. Do I think the American government is doing a good job in how it is raising kids? No. Ok. I’m super glad I have the privilege to opt-out then. Not everyone does. Everyone has different privileges.

My choices are about what I can bear. I know that what I am capable of is pretty pathetic in some core ways. If you go spend some time studying brain developmental stuff you might cut me a little more slack. Not a lot. I don’t need a lot. I do very well all things considered. But there is a cost to all things considered. My kids have to bear that. I can’t understand what that cost will be in advance. I am fucking worried.

Did you know that rape is down 58% since the 1970’s? (http://prospect.org/article/should-rape-porn-be-banned)

Complicated stuff, yo.

Back in my day (*cough* choke*cough) I wanted to “play act” things that are much more extreme than average. I have had the last several years of being a parent where I have done the “trapped under a baby” thing and I was alone all the time. I’ve had a lot of time to think about why I have done the things I have done. How many of them are things I will ever do again?

I will never again allow someone to put a noose around my neck and lift me off the ground because he wants to be able to look at the picture later and masturbate. The risk/reward ratio will never be tipped in that direction again. I’m really willing to go pretty far to be “good enough” for someone who wants to hurt me.

My daughters will not believe that anyone has the right to hurt them. What they go do in their sex lives will not be my problem. My children will not believe it is ok for an adult to grab them by the arm and drag them along. It is fucking assault. You see it in schools all the time.

I am not strong enough to teach my daughters how to be strong in that world. I don’t have any appropriate coping skills. My coping skills got me raped and beaten over and over again.

I worry so much. What do I have to give? Is anything about me worthy of learning about? Should I just shut the fuck up so there is never any reason for them to have to know how very self absorbed and bad and stupid I am.

I’m teaching my kids that adulthood is very free form. No one is your boss. You get to decide what to do with your time. If you need money (and everyone does in one way or another) then you need to figure out how to get it. All career paths involve training of some kind even if you are working retail or cutting hair (holy moly the training for hair dressing is intense). Lots of careers involve college. If you think you are heading down that route we will have some serious conversations in five, seven, and nine years from now about what you want to do to prepare for that experience because it will be up to you to pull it off. I won’t be part of that.

I don’t know what you will be when you grow up. Do you have ideas? What do you want to prepare for being able to do?

I’m trying to learn what I will do when I grow up too. I’m not ready. I’m sorry. I know that is a sign of my basic immaturity. I get it. But I am where I am. I am sorry that my development is so retarded. It isn’t my fault. I’m trying. I’m trying so hard. I can’t be anything other than what I am.

Life is in medias res. We are all part of the continuing story of humanity. We are part of the story of our individual families. We are bearing the body load of their deprivations, excesses, tendencies, and flat bad choices. Or you can be one of those people who is happy and healthy and your family has been for…. Well as long as any one can remember. Great. Thanks. I’m happy for you. Sigh.

Ok, well so what does this all mean for my kids? In order for me to change the narrative of my family I need to change the narrative of my family. Which I have done in some major ways of which I am proud. I continue to examine my behavior and attempt to make progress on doing course corrections.

I can’t do anything but what I am doing. Oh, that’s bullshit. If Noah died I would cope. Well, I still wouldn’t work. He made sure of that before I quit. But shit happens. I could still have to get a job. I reiterate that I would cope. I think I would not be a very nice mother any more. I think my children would effectively lose both parents and it would be horrible. I would not be able to be present for even 1/10 of what they expect. Good grief they are entitled little things.

They think they are entitled to my love and attention at absolutely every fucking hour of the day and night. Whoa. It is over whelming. After five years I have pulled back my boundaries like mad. When Shanna was born I did it twenty-ish hours a day (Noah had the other four). Calli has never had quite what Shanna had. It just isn’t possible. But they sleep together.

The three of us are a little self contained unit of affirmation and approval. We love each other and only sort of need anyone else. I feel bad about the ways in which we leave Noah out. He’s just not around enough to make as much impact on them. (I say as I hide in the garage away from them. But geez I’ve been low on personal time lately.)

I have to militantly believe that it takes all kinds or there is no chance that it is ok for me to exist. Sometimes that is hard to live with.

We all live in the middle. I come from hard core religious zealots and prostitutes–and that’s just on my mom’s side. How about you?

end of the day

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I think I am getting sick. All day long I have been alternating between feeling feverish and shaking with chills. My neck and head ache unbearably. I did not paint.

I did some minor housework but mostly I’ve been trying to rest. I don’t think I’ve had a rest day in a few weeks. I really should be trying to schedule these more. My body doesn’t keep up.

I have plans tomorrow to meet up with the guy who made the inappropriate comment at the wedding. I don’t know how this will go. After my experience with talking to the guy in the scene and him promising an apology and then never following through… I don’t have high hopes.

I dislike the fact that when I am going into a situation where a man has the potential to say, “I didn’t mean to hurt you” I assume that he doesn’t give a shit. I think that men in general don’t give a flying fuck about me unless they are desperate for sex and I am the only hole around.

Well, not you Tay.

Ok, I could probably pull a few other names off the top of my head. But I’m pretty sure I would not get past my fingers. I don’t think men give a shit about me. I really don’t.

But I have to keep hoping I’m wrong. That’s why I talk to these bozos. That’s why I try to explain what it is that they are doing in the full context of my life. But they don’t give a shit.

No one gives a shit about the stupid white trash whores.

I’ve been saying “stupid” over and over in my head since last night. Apparently the last 24 hours has been a complete removal of my respect for my intelligence.

I wouldn’t get kicked so often if I didn’t bring it on myself.

I wouldn’t get raped so often if I didn’t bring it on myself.

I wouldn’t get the inappropriate comments so often if I didn’t bring it on myself.

How come I am so powerful that I can “make” all these men do these things but I can’t make them apologize? Why can’t I make them treat me approximately as they would a fellow heterosexual man.

Why do they have to comment on my cunt? Why do they have to presuppose that they have access to it? That it is a topic for casual conversation.

My body hurts. I feel worthless and empty. I feel like the only thing that is within my control as a means of influencing how people treat me is dying. Otherwise I have to shut the fuck up and take what they feel like dishing out. Or just stay home you stupid cunt.

I haven’t felt safe recently. I hate these cycles. Is anyone doing anything terrible to me? No. Am I being victimized or persecuted? No. I’m just a stupid whiny bitch. I just watch patterns. I have seen these patterns go so very badly before. Am I stupid for seeing patterns after those patterns have existed so strongly for me before?

Am I stupid for being afraid of being raped when someone says something like that?

So I had a friend pull me off to a different room during a party and no one could hear me over the music. I didn’t think anyone would believe me afterwards that it was non-consensual. Stupid whores aren’t allowed to say no. Anything is allowable with them.

Am I stupid for being afraid when men talk to me like this? Or am I an animal trying not to die? I can’t tell. I don’t want to ever be raped again.

Sometimes, on the internet, I read these articles by women who say they were raped and it really wasn’t so bad and that they think other rape victims need to stop whining.

Yup. I need to stop whining. I think the only way to stop it is to cut off my fingers and my tongue or I could die. I don’t think I can be stoic. I’m sorry I’m so weak. I’m sorry I’m such a selfish person that I cannot keep my pain inside my head all of the time where it is no one else’s problem. I am sorry I am so self-absorbed that I need to talk about myself.

I’m sorry I exist.

And then I look at my kids. Can I really be that bad? Am I beyond redemption? I see myself in them. I think they are so wonderful. They are kind and compassionate and thoughtful. But I don’t think I am kind or compassionate or thoughtful. I think I am selfish and spiteful.

I decide that people don’t like me very much and then I put up a brick wall. I don’t want them to be able to hurt me more. So I need to pretend this person is a non-entity. Otherwise I know they will hurt me. I *know* it.

And the whole time I am avoiding someone I know in the marrow of my bones that it is my responsibility to be silent so I do not offend them. So that I don’t bother people. It is my responsibility to keep my stupid piece of shit mouth shut. No one wants to fucking hear it.

Sometimes Noah manages to say something in a way that lands wrong. He pointed out yesterday how much better he is at remembering all the things I do wrong. I don’t know why he wants to be with someone who is so wrong. Why didn’t he pick someone better?

Because he wanted an elite private tutor for his kids who is compulsively sexual and doesn’t believe she has the right to say no.

I’m sure that is uncharitable. I get the distinct impression I am nicer to Noah than anyone ever has been. I don’t think many people respect him the way I do. That respect is a double edged sword. I think he is better than me. I think he married down. Sometimes I hate him a lot for that.

I don’t really see a way that someone could want someone like me without it being a bad thing. Sometimes I wonder if I make him feel comfortable because almost no one else in his current world understands hard scrabble white trash culture. That is what he grew up with. Not many people in his current world look up to the guys in his position. He was never poor. But the people he knew during his childhood mostly were.

Noah makes me feel better about myself than anyone else. He doesn’t make me feel very good about myself. I know that says a lot more about me than anyone else. I wish I could stop thinking about my father. “Do you deserve to live?” No. I don’t think I do. But I’m alive anyway. And you are dead.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how convenient Christianity must be. What would it be like if there was some magic invisible sky friend who loved you and protected you and cared about you? I don’t have one. There is no one protecting or loving or caring about me. I am alone. If I want to not be beaten and raped it is my responsibility to protect me because no one else will.

When it happens over and over, like it did with me, how can it not be my fault? How can I just randomly find that many bad people? Is it just that I draw the evil out of otherwise neutral people?

Let me tell you, most people who knew me and my rapists greatly preferred the company of my rapists. They don’t want to “take sides” so that means they pick the rapist.

Tonight I am glad I don’t have a scalpel in the house. I would find a way to hide the marks. I don’t have an endless amount of self control.

My next door neighbor had to call an ambulance tonight. A three week old baby stopped breathing.

Given how fragile life is, what business do I have wishing for death? What hubris? What idiocy? What masochism?

It isn’t masochism. I am sorry that I hurt this much. I don’t want to hurt any more. I don’t know how to make it stop. I don’t know how to stop being a bad person that people want to avoid out of self-preservation. I know they are right to avoid me. I am not criticizing.

My head hurts so much.

Probably time for a sleeping pill. I don’t think I will sleep much without it. I think this would be an all night hysteria sort of night. I haven’t hit my head on the floor! I am exercising self control. I want to treat my body how everyone else thinks my body should be treated. I want to feel that. I know it is right. I am not supposed to be whole.

I am just a hole.

Text has no tone.

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No really, I worry about making my friends feel attacked. I don’t really need to alienate people I care about at this stage.

I need you to work and put your daughters in day care because I think my daughters will do that. They will need to ask you questions. They will need to ask you how you did with the mixed emotions you had–because they are really common and I can’t speak to them.

I need you to work and put your daughters in day care because without doing so YOU wouldn’t feel happy or fulfilled. I need you to be who you are. I need to see you in contrast to me so that I can understand where my edges are.

I don’t think you are doing it wrong. I don’t think you are making bad choices. I’m trying to get better about saying that you are doing something that wouldn’t work for me. That’s not because it is problematic.

Have you noticed this whole, “Krissy is crazy” thing? Maybe me not being able to do something isn’t a negative statement about the thing?

I know there is an Attachment Parenting movement and if you read about the Continuum Concept people—whoo boy. There are some extremely “attached”people.

I’m pretty honest with myself that I want this much time and intensity because I am making up for the deficit of being loved and touched that exists inside of me. Every child naturally wants to hug and cuddle and kiss. That is just normal. I wasn’t allowed to do those things as a child without being hurt for the impulse.

I want to stay home with my children because I want hundreds of hours of sitting on the couch with them sleeping on me. I want to be able to stroke their face and watch them exist. I need that time. I need to be able to sit very still and very quiet and just watch them exist and think about the fact that they like me.

When I made the crack about the mothers at the wedding wanting to stick forks in their eyes, that was their words–not mine. I can sort of grok how it would work. I don’t like doing all the physical work for my kids all the time. I get how it can feel annoying, demeaning, mind-numbing, etc.

I have something to prove to me, here. I have to prove that I can stay in one place and take care of someone without neglecting or abusing them. It is very hard sometimes. I feel like a jack ass for saying that.

I got a book on parents who have PTSD for kids. It sounds like it was written to be used by a therapist talking to kids who have parents who manage their symptoms less than I do.

Stopping and being actually aware of the fact that my children have needs is hard for me. I naturally dissociate. I am very depressed a lot of the time. Having to get up and care for my children is difficult for me. But I have to prove to myself that I can do that.

I do not have the self-discipline to schedule a two hour block in the middle of the day to do specific work. I just don’t. I have to have a full day of going from thing to thing or I never get the rhythm. I often miss afternoon engagements because if something starts after I’ve gone mid-way through my day then I can’t handle breaking my flow to go do something else.

I am limited. Everyone is–I’m not acting like I’m the only one with limits. Other people have different limits though.

I don’t think that mothers should have this freakish need to earn their childrens love. I don’t think it is psychologically healthy or anything. I’m just willing to be honest that it is where I am. I think people who are secure enough in being loved to share the care of their children have nothing to be ashamed about. I think that is probably what people should be shooting for in terms of mental health.

When Shanna asks me questions about her mothering in the future I don’t in any way shape or form tell her that she should expect to take care of her kids. I have told her that when you have kids you need to make sure that your kids will be safe and loved. If that means their mom stays home, ok. (Shanna pretty regularly says she would rather have a wife over a husband–she’d rather earn the money and have her wife stay home, ok.) If that means their dad stays home, ok. If that means both parents work and the children need alternative day care, ok. They are perfectly valid paths through life. But you will need to ask working moms for advice because I won’t be able to tell you how to manage that. Good thing we know lots of them!

I can’t teach my kids how to be everything. They have to know people who are different from me. That means people need to make choices that have no resemblance to mine.

I know that when I talk about myself I do not always use qualifiers. I don’t always say “This would be bad FOR ME” sometimes I just say, “This would be a bad choice.” I know that I sound rabid and hateful.

It is hard sometimes to make choices that seem very different from my friends. It feels like I am doing something bad and wrong. So when I talk to myself about it I am very emphatic about why it is not a good choice for me. I don’t mean to hurt anyone else. I don’t really know how else to talk to me. I can’t always evaluate whether something is in abstract a good and worthy thing I can only evaluate whether it is appropriate for me. And I sound harsh as I do so.

There is a big difference between how I evaluate things for me and how I evaluate things for other people. For me I am quick, decisive, snotty and harsh. I have to have a really firm grasp on my limits. Or I will be unable to function. If I try things that work for other people just because it works so well for them I will fuck myself over. Because I do not have that persons situation and resources.

That doesn’t mean that other people need to care or change based on my limits.

I have a husband who is able to go out and make obscene amounts of money. He is very cheerful about supporting me. That is a rather unusual privilege. Not that many people are capable of earning as much money as Noah does. That changes my whole buffet of choices right there.

But I am not an income earning person. I may never be. That means when my working women friends tell me that I deserve time off every day… well… I might agree in the abstract…

There is no right. There is no deserve. There is no should. There just is.

I know I am all melodramatic in writing and such. I know that I have bad days and I have gotten much more explicit in writing about them as the years have gone by. That isn’t because they have gotten worse–it is because I have developed the language.

I like my life. I like the choices I am making. I feel like I will be proud of myself as an old woman. I will feel like I did good things with my life. I did not waste very much of the time I had all things considered.

When you have chronic, severe mental illness you waste a lot of time. You spend a lot of time staring at the wall feeling bad and being unable to do… anything.

I work in weird spurts and starts all day with the kids. We get a lot done but not in a predictable way. We work then sit down to snuggle. Then work then break to play. Then work then go to the water park. Then work then read. What kind of work we do and how much time it takes varies a lot. I am not good at saying, “From 12-2 we will do ______”.

I have constant anxiety about the long list of projects I’m not making enough forward progress on. But getting me out of my anxiety is not as simple as providing childcare. That just means I don’t have to pull myself up by my bootstraps and look functional in front of my kids.

I think I am afraid that if no one is watching I am a clock that winds to a stop.

I wouldn’t have offered to paint the fence if I didn’t have little kids who need to meet everyone in the neighborhood. So the fucking kids need to figure out how to behave so I can finish painting. Ahem. (They aren’t actually being a problem. That was a random hyperbole sort of expletive.)

I know that a body needs rest. I understand that people who tell me that it would be ok if I paid someone for two hours a day of watching reruns mean to be supportive of the health of my body.

That doesn’t mean I am in a space psychologically to make the same priority list. Does that mean I am wrong and I should change to be more like other people? Maybe. I don’t know. But I know that what I am doing right now is putting my head down and just getting through. And it is working.

I have never met a mother who is without hard days. They happen. They are part of life. I don’t think I should be trying to get out of having them. I need to learn how to manage them. I manage them differently than other people for a lot of reasons. Is what I am doing ok? I don’t know. I honestly don’t. I just know that it is what I am doing.

Please continue telling me when you feel I am attacking you. I am not trying to. I want to know if I do so in my ridiculous self-obsessed rambling. You are not my enemy. I have no reason to attack you. I do not want to do so blindly.

I don’t want you to feel bad about what you are doing. You are making the choices that are right for you. Even if I individually might second guess some choices I wouldn’t overall presume to think that I know what is right for your life. I don’t actually have that much hubris.

I get too much wrong for me.

That was so nice.

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We went to a wedding yesterday. It was a gathering of people I have known through the bdsm community for most of my adult life. Many of the people there I met when I was eighteen or nineteen.

These were the people who were the honored elders when I arrived in the first place. These were my Old Guard people in the leather community. These are the people who set the parameters of my world. These are the people who taught me about communication and negotiation and doing what you WANT to do.

These are the people who taught me how to manage life as a masochist–how do you find people to beat the shit out of you without sending you to a hospital? These are the people who taught me how to be ethical in my sluttery. I stopped sleeping with people who were cheating because of people in the room yesterday.

It wasn’t the entire Who’s Who of my cultural indoctrination but it was a lot of the main people. A lot of the biggest influences were there.

Do you know how they responded to me changing so much? I was told over and over what a good mother I am.

I nearly cried. I care so much about their opinion. I shouldn’t–I know I am not supposed to care about what anyone thinks of me. But these are the people who taught me my first lessons towards being a grown up. And they think I am doing well.

These kind of random moments are the closest I will have to having the feeling that parents or authority or whatever else feels like I am good.

I want so badly to feel like I am a good mother. I’m kind of banking on it this lifetime. That is my only path to the kind of relationship intensity I want.

I talked to a variety of mothers yesterday all of whom said, “Oh my God I couldn’t wait to get back to work. I love my kids but spending all day with them made me want to stick forks in my eyes.”

I don’t feel that. When I think of how many days I am going to be able to just be with my kids I feel this intense joy. This feeling of thank goodness I won’t have to be alone.

Having a job is different. Being a teacher was lonely. I had horrible loneliness as a teacher. I always know how much of myself I had to hide as a teacher.

I don’t tell my kids details about myself as a child because at this stage they don’t care and wouldn’t be able to process those details and it wouldn’t do good things for their lives. But I feel in me a sense of waiting. Someday they will be adults. They will be allowed to read books about my life. They will be able to know me for good or for ill.

My children will have the experience of me they have and then they will get to find out the back story. I have to wait for an appropriate time–which is hard–but I don’t feel invisible. I don’t feel unimportant. I don’t feel like what happened to me didn’t matter I feel like this isn’t the time to talk about it. With teaching it would never have been appropriate. That was much harder.

I don’t do very well with handling the fact that a large segment of the population likes to just pretend that “people like me” don’t exist.

Validation is one of the most potent drugs in the world. I have spent my entire life feeling unredeemably bad. I was bad so early that there is no way to change. All of the kids were told all of my life that they couldn’t play with me because I wasn’t a good influence. I wasn’t good to be around.

I was beaten and raped if I didn’t have sex willingly whenever I was told to. When I did have sex willingly there was a huge backlash and many people would shun me and punish me.

I really like this monogamy business. I feel like it is my armor against those expectations.

One guy yesterday rained on my parade. Really he is one of the people who makes me feel unsafe a lot at those parties. I don’t think he would rape me. But I do think he would do things before I could react and say no. Things like hold a knife to my throat because he thinks it is hot.

Yesterday he leaned over my chair and whispered into my ear, “You are so hot I should drag you off to the coat closet.”

I completely froze. I stared at the floor and did not respond again until he walked away. I didn’t want to make a scene. I didn’t want to be a problem.

I am so fucking tired of this shit. I have kind-of-sorta played with that man in the past. When I was younger and I believed that a bottom has to bottom to all the tops in the room and I practiced a puppy-pile approach towards bdsm he and I played. It has been many many many years. A minimum of eight years. I think longer than that.

Ok, I just emailed the bride and asked about dude’s email address. I need to talk to him. I need to tell him to back the fuck off. I don’t seem to be able to do it in the moment.

Did I think he was actually going to drag me off and do things I didn’t want him to do? No. The consequences are too high. He’s not stupid. He is a former police officer. He knows how to only do things when he won’t get caught.

That doesn’t actually make me feel safer. It makes me feel sick to my stomach. I’m aware “he meant it as a compliment.”

A FUCKING COMPLIMENT IS “THAT’S A NICE DRESS” NOT “YOU LOOK HOT ENOUGH TO DRAG OFF.”

The fact that he is a former police officer actually makes me feel significantly less safe. I don’t see how police officers usually follow the rules. And LAPD has a serious rape problem. Being a police officer doesn’t imply that someone has a higher set of moral values. It may just mean you are a fucking bully who likes to pick on people.

He said that less than half an hour before I left. I didn’t really want to stay after that.

If wearing the dress I had made for Jenny’s wedding and red lipstick makes me someone who all of a sudden should be dragged off to a coat closet and raped maybe I should never dress that way again. Maybe it was stupid. Maybe it would be all my fault if something bad had happened. See–I was dressed in a way that encouraged it.

(I had a very modest dress made. Give me a break.) I may be done with wearing red lipstick outside the house.

Sometimes I think it is very funny that I study Muslim guidelines for women and I try to somewhat follow them. Maybe if I were more hidden I would be left alone. Don’t attract attention in public. It’s dangerous. If I didn’t think it would confuse the shit out of people I would just start covering my hair full time. I don’t want to have to talk about why I want to do it.

I am tired of men looking at me and evaluating whether or not they want to fuck me right now and then TELLING ME AS IF I SHOULD FUCKING CARE.

So most of the wedding was lovely. And then there was this asshole. Story of my fucking life.

I’m happy that people have sex drives. I’m ok with talking with them in the abstract about stuff they like (I’ve been in sex communities for a long time) but I’m really past the point of feeling personally responsible for other peoples sex drives and I want to be left out of it.

Why is that so much to ask?

Just a whiny night I guess.

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Having a lot of trouble sleeping tonight. I feel like my head will explode. I feel like I’m sitting in the middle of a room and on every wall there is a different movie playing. I feel like I’ve been failing Noah a lot lately. As a result, of course, I cleaned the kitchen last night. Sometimes it feels like that’s the only thing I really have to give. I can clean up.

I feel really upset about the letter from my therapist. She wrote it so that I can bring it to the prescribing medical marijuana doctor. It is a clinical and accurate description of me. My life is shitty. Not all of it. I like the three people I live with now.

They have them thinking a lot about the various people I have lived with. Family members and non-. It is a lot easier for me to see what I have done wrong than what other people have done. It is a lot easier to blame myself.

A while back I had a conversation with my former owner I asked him if he ever thought about the past. He said there is no point in thinking about the past. To that I say “those who will not study the past are doomed to repeat it.” I would like to believe that even though I continue to make a ridiculous number of mistakes I am making different mistakes over time. Not sure if I’m lying to myself or not.

I have a lot of control issues and I do not deal with mess well. I grew up with the idea that promiscuity was linked to bad housekeeping and low status. The idea of this the slattern. You have a messy house because you keep yourself too busy with chasing sex to bother with such mundane burdens.

Let me tell you now that I keep a house clean I understand why there is a link between being very slutty and having a messy house. I have trouble having sex when I do this much work.

When I was 12 I lived in a place where they did year-round schooling. During my school vacations I stayed home by myself. I broke my arm one day and had to call my mom at work. She didn’t believe me and she was very angry with me. She did drive home and take me to the hospital but the entire drive she berated me and screamed and told me that if I was making it up she would make me sorry I was ever born.

I think that going to the doctors and having the doctor say “Oh I guess there’s nothing wrong with you” is a bone chilling experience. It means that I’m hypochondriac. It means I deserve to be beaten. It means I wasted resources. It means that I’m very bad. I am very afraid of talking to doctors.

I feel like there is nothing good that can come from seeing a doctor. Either you find out something terrible is wrong with you and you will probably die anyway or you will be told there is nothing wrong with you and then you are terrible person for having gone to the doctor at all. I don’t have a way to win.

I think a lot about the idea of setting people up to win or setting them up to fail. I think about this a lot because of my kids but also because of other relationships. Like I can’t expect things from people that they can’t deliver on. You have to understand people’s limitations. It’s just part of the process of life. If you look carefully at the people around you they all have different strengths and weaknesses. Basically everyone has some kind of value it just may not be value that does what you need.

I feel deeply ashamed of needing so many resources. Pretty much the only way that I kind of justify it to myself is to play all the movie reels of all the days of my life and recognize just how much of that could fill endless years of therapy and I was never allowed to talk about it. I wasn’t allowed to talk as a child. I kind of tried to talk to my former fiancé. My owner explicitly didn’t want to hear it. Not till Noah.

I have gone a long way towards wearing Noah out. And I still have this endless cavern of need. I’m having a lot of trouble sleeping. I feel very overwhelmed. It isn’t that I believe that no one loves me. I am not really that idiotic.

I keep thinking about my mom. On my next birthday I will turn the age she was when I was born. In some weird way it feels like I’m merging streams. I am now how old she was when I joined her life, well almost. It feels weird. I am now getting to the part of adulthood I have seen modeled. Before now I was making it up as I went. Now am I acting like my mother?

I feel like my constant need to process, because it is a need, is going to be the death of me. Sometimes I wonder if it has all of the unspoken words I feel choked down inside of me that cause me pain. Which is funny, because I talk so much. I talk and talk and talk but I never say the things I’m supposed to say the things that actually need to be said because as much as I need to say them no one else needs to hear them.

Run, you fools.

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I am watching The Lord of the Rings because Noah is reading me the books. I’m interested in the differences. Thus the title.

I’m awake. I woke up at 3:30. My stomach hurts and I want to cry. I have a doctors appointment at 8:30. Before I bug Noah in the middle of the night with my stupid anxiety crap (which is way more frequent than he thinks) I check the history on his computer to see when he went to bed. 1am. I can’t bother him. Shit. He has to sleep. When he goes to bed at a reasonable hour I will sometimes wake him up because he can stroke my hair and talk to me until my body stops being afraid and I can sleep again. Sometimes I have to put my big girl panties on and just deal by myself.

I had to put my big girl panties on yesterday any way. Shanna said, “I would like to see _____ because she hasn’t come to dinner in a while. Can you invite her over?” I didn’t respond in the moment. I waited until I asked a friend for advice. Then I waited until Noah was home because I want a witness because I am afraid of saying the wrong thing and if he is there he will correct me if I slip. “She doesn’t want to come over and visit us any more. No, I don’t know why exactly. Sometimes people decide they don’t really want to visit any more. I know it is hard. I miss her too.” I hate being the bearer of bad news.

What I want to tell her is, “I’m very sorry you were born to me so that you have to deal with the backlash of standing near me. I’m so sorry you don’t have a better mother. You deserve one. None of this is your fault. I am so sorry.”

I didn’t say that. A different friend said that wouldn’t be appropriate. Ahem.

I’ve been gardening a lot. It’s a good way to kind of hide. I don’t need to go places. I have a yard to weed.

I had a really neat set of moments over the weekend. We were at our local breakfast restaurant and I now have a French tutor coming over on Wednesday. She’s connected to the restaurant in a weird way–she is a French woman trying to get into university here. She is young and likes little kids and thinks the idea of coming to my house to play in the garden and teach us French sounds great.

Then I noticed that one of the two primary servers (the dude who isn’t my buddy) kind of rolled his eyes in that “See them asking an incompetent person for help when I am STANDING RIGHT HERE AND I AM WAY MORE COMPETENT” sort of way. I know that eye roll. I can spot it from thirty feet away. So I sidled over and said, “So! When am I going to start Spanish lessons with you? Yo hablo un poco de espñol pero no mucho.” He looked at me totally dead pan and said, “I speak five languages fluently. I can speak Portuguese, French, Arabic, English, and Spanish. I know how to break down the grammar of each language into adverbs, adjectives, gerunds, and everything.” I got pretty excited. We had a nice conversation. He will be starting to poke us for language stuff while we are there. He told me a lot about his life and why he knows those languages. It was a great conversation. Now I feel like I have been wasting years of not getting to know him. He has had a fascinating life.

See what I get for being an asshole? Ok I was never an asshole to him. Thus he is still willing to talk to me. But I wasn’t out to be his buddy. I kind of regret not trying harder earlier. C’est la vie.

I’m learning gardening as fast as I physically can. I’m learning Hindi. (We practice every day.) I’m learning French. I can’t forking believe I’m learning French. After all of these decades of being a really big asshole. It’s kind of ironic.

Shanna has two new “swear” phrases that I am adopting whole heartedly: “What in the hay is going on in here?!” and “What in the wide world of Equestria happened here?!” I didn’t believe I would stop swearing in front of my kids. I thought I would do it no matter what. Now I believe that swearing in front of my kids does them a disservice. I don’t want that to be the primary language they learn. Children learn what they hear a lot. I censor way more than I thought I would. It’s pretty hilarious. Mocking me on this is totally reasonable.

It is hard to really remember that it is ok for one person or even a lot of people to dislike you. It has to be ok. People are allowed to not want to be my friend. That isn’t supposed to be a good enough reason to stop walking.

Tragedy and insult are grown up words. I need to care about my effect on my kids. My kids like me. My kids think I am very nice to them (because I am). Three people like me. I’m good enough for them. For now.

I lose so much sleep worrying about the future it isn’t funny. I do a lot of practicing rehearsing to the full range of “options” Shanna may pursue in terms of later work and schooling. I need to react enthusiastically and supportively no matter what direction she heads in. My bias needs to be mostly invisible. If she wants to be a scientist–great. If she wants to be a hairdresser–great. She often tells me she will buy the house two doors down because she wants to stay near me but she wants her own garden.

I’ve been running. Holy tomato I’m slow lately. I can rarely average better than 13 minutes/mile. Sometimes I wonder if part of the reason my body resists going quickly is because if I ran faster then I might feel more like I could join some of the runners I know in their endeavors. As it is I consciously don’t do much running with people because I feel ashamed of how slow I am. I’ve tried to start doing things with the home schooling group but that hasn’t worked out well and I’m about done trying. (On this exact topic. I’m not done with the home schooling group. I just accept that I won’t be running with them.)

I will be re-upping my Ativan prescription since I am going to Kaiser any way. I haven’t gotten a refill yet this year. I got the original scrip in January. I feel like that is a fairly good thing. My pot consumption is pretty high lately. I got edibles because the vaporizer isn’t a lot less expensive than edibles and it is way less consistent. So I’m stoned on a regular basis. It’s awesome. And the horrible coughing and lung nastiness has subsided. Whee! Being stoned and gardening is just flat awesome. This is probably my favorite hobby this lifetime. Get stoned and garden. It feels really nice. I feel peaceful and happy and calm while I’m doing it. That’s unusual in my life.

Plants are forgiving yet picky little creatures. You can mess up in some ways and they don’t care and if you mess up in other ways it’s all over. You have to figure out what kind of fucking up you can do with a specific plant. Rather like people. Only people are harder to figure out.

I like staying home. When I stay home I don’t feel as bitter. I don’t feel as worthless and rejected and unwanted. I hate that being around people feels so bad. I am so jealous and mean spirited. Other people get to just casually say, “Oh I was talking to my mom and…” It is my own fucking fault I don’t have a relationship with my mother. I rejected her–right? I hate how it feels like I am the bad one. I am the one who did terrible things and harmed our relationship.

I pretty much always feel like the bad one. If someone is hurt it must be my fault. I just don’t know how to treat people right. If I could stop being such an asshole everything would be fine.

Just stop being such an asshole, Krissy.

A friend pointed out that most of the ways in which I am rejected for being an asshole are things that are tolerated in men. I somewhat agree with her but I think I get credit for other kinds of being an asshole that would result in much stiffer penalties for a man. I don’t think I am rejected because of misogyny, exactly. I’m rejected because I make people uncomfortable.

I don’t know how to make other people feel comfortable given that I feel wildly uncomfortable basically all the time. I think I am even selfish enough to not care about trying that hard as long as I am literally unable to feel comfortable.

I genuinely like people. I like being around them. I like hearing their stories. I need to stop feeling like people are mine. It is way easier to listen to stories and not feel shitty when I am rejected if I never feel any actual attachment to anyone. The trouble is, that carries over. I’m not good at being attached to my kids and Noah and no one else. I’m finding that it is more on/off than that. I feel a lot of wavelengths of lovey feelings towards people who are associated with my kids. People who bond with my kids cause a lot of positive feelings.

Then they don’t like me any more and I have to tell my kids why. This is so fucking shitty. Well, no I don’t have to tell my kids why. I don’t even really understand why. All I understand is some amorphous “I am bad so people don’t like me.” That’s not even really completely true. It’s an evasion of some kind but I don’t know what I am evading. It’s not like the people who dump me are particularly honest with me about why.

I’m not sure most of them can be honest about why they are dumping me beyond “You make me feel uncomfortable. You are an asshole.”

Ok. I make you feel uncomfortable and I am an asshole. That has suddenly changed in the last week? What about all the previous years? Why was I fine then and all of a sudden I am not fine? SOMETHING triggered you and I don’t understand what and you probably don’t understand what and you don’t care that much. You feel uncomfortable and it is my fault so I am bad. Ok. Yeah, I get it.

Maybe I am terrible. But I have kids to take care of. I’m having lunch with friends at the tea shop. I’m seeing a doctor, finally. If I died soon my garden would be tragically undone forever. No one else will look at this crappy dirt and imagine it being beautiful.

My house is no more perfect than I am. Perfection doesn’t really exist. We just pick the fucked up we can tolerate.

Oh, and if you think I am angsting about you then you might be right. But the last five years have involved me getting loudly dumped by at least four people and a number of others quietly withdrawing. I may not be thinking about you.

This rejection business is part of why I make people come to me now. If people decide to stop visiting it hurts but it doesn’t cause a major break in my routine. I still have to have the same basic shape-of-day that I had before. When I go to someone and I get into the habit of driving to them then it feels much worse to be rejected. And every time I drive near their house I feel keening grief. Much better to make people come to me.

I often feel reminded that the world doesn’t care about any one. It isn’t that I am unique or anything. You have to go out and do something in order to matter. You have to create. You have to change things in order to matter. You won’t matter unless you create something good and then you have to stay alive in order to maintain it. Until that point the planet kind of looks at you as a waste of resources.

This isn’t personal. It isn’t that I am unlovable. It is that I have not yet earned love. I have not jumped through the right hoops. I have not done whatever it was that I was supposed to do.

Maybe I can sleep for a bit.

Good fear bad fear

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I was standing in line at the grocery store. The snooty-ass Whole Foods down the street from my friend’s house. I was there for ice cream and to kill time as I waited for my friend to finish something at the house.

I’m standing there be-bopping in my little world while I waited in line. It was a very slow line. I don’t even remember what song it was but my “under my breath” singing became uhm not so under my breath and the guy in front of me turned around.

I turned bright red and looked down and started fumbling awkwardly with my back pack so that I could avoid eye contact.

“Ah, so what flavor is for tonight?”

I jumped a few inches. I didn’t think he would actually talk to me.

“Vanilla! Always vanilla. Uhm, err and Sea Salt Caramel.”

“My friends swear by that brand, what do you think of it?”

“I don’t have an opinion. I usually buy from my local ice cream shop in Fremont, Loard’s. I’m visiting friends tonight. This is within walking distance of their house.”

“Oh. Do you get up to Oakland often?”

At this point I shifted my arms to place my big fat wedding ring on top of my pile of stuff. “Naw I usually stay close to home and family.”

“Oh.” He turned around and finished his transaction. He stopped to rebag his groceries into his personal carrying sack because he had been busy talking to me and had forgotten to give the cashier his bags.

I paid in cash, pocketed the money and left the building about as fast as I could. I went up the street walking at a rapid pace. He outdistanced me. He stopped just in front of me and looked like he was about to verbally engage me again.

I kind of shrank away. He looked sad. He turned and started walking up the hill significantly more quickly than I could–he was more than a foot taller than me and I am pretty ambling.

He didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t do anything wrong. It was an awkward mix of flattering and scary. I don’t want to be pursued ever again. I don’t want anyone to look at me as prey any more. It scares the ever loving shit out of me.

But I do want it. I do want people to think I am pretty. I do want to be desired. I do want to go sit on my Daddy’s lap and have him stroke my hair and call me Princess and grind me on his crotch. (I have this friend. He’s absolutely old enough to be my father. Really I have these three male friends and it’s very confusing and just go with it ok–my biological father is dead.)

I want these things. It is very confusing to read things about “rape recovery” because man it really presents a dim view of the idea of consensual bdsm. I feel like I don’t agree with the idea that just because I was raped there are whole classes of behavior I am now too tainted to engage in. There is a large and loud contingent in the bdsm community in general that wants people like me (crazy for short-hand PTSD and GAD for longer hand) to just opt-out.

Go be invisible. Fall out of the herd. Die.

That is the Darwinian message whether they intend it or not. That is what happens when fringe communities drift toward the mainstream.

It’s cool. I’m used to it.

I am gosh darn delighted to report that I’m starting to experience an uptick in libido. Last month was quite drought-like. Ha. I’m not actually entirely sure that directing my compulsive sexual outbursts into a monogamous relationship is entirely healthy either.

I’ve told Noah about some of the more extreme things I want to do. He is rather terrifyingly interested. The kinds of things you can’t write about in advance or people try to stop you. I’ll wait till my kids are adults–I promise.

I am what I was made. Is it ok for me to be? What is right and what is wrong? When I was sixteen I went to visit my mother’s life-long best friend over New Years. I remember her recounting a conversation she had in her Bible study class, “Oh goodness girl we get racy! You know, the Bible says that what a man and a woman do together within the bounds of Holy Matrimony is alright. It’s all good. You can go ahead. Have fun, sugar. But not until you are married.“ Death glare.

I spent a lot of my childhood thinking I would grow up and marry her son. I would do what he told me. I would obey. I would be his proper wife.

When I was twenty or twenty-one, I can’t remember which, I went to that guy’s wedding. I was with my Owner. We watched a wedding ceremony that was way more hardcore Dominant/submissive than our Owner/property contract. It was really pretty funny.

My Owner took responsibility for me like someone takes responsibility for a stray cat. He kept me safe and fed for a few years and he had some strict rules about behavior. It was all negotiated very specifically.

It managed my anxiety. I knew what I was good for. I knew what he wanted from me. I trolled his favorite hard core fetish pornography website to figure out what he wanted from me. I learned how to be what he wanted.

But it wasn’t me. I’m not an actual fetishist. I just want people to like me. I’m willing to do just about anything to feel like I deserve someone liking me. I have an intense need to feel pain. It is very easy to use bdsm as a reasonable source of satisfaction.

But what does being submissive mean? What does being a masochist mean? What does being a slave mean? Do these acts turn me on? Sometimes. Not a majority of the time. I err enjoy thinking about them a lot. My memories keep me warm alll winter.

When I was training for the marathon I enjoyed my little jaunt down memory lane. I ran past places I’ve had sex and thought about what might be happening with those guys. I have no idea. I hope they are well.

I was reading Wikipedia. Intrusive thoughts. That was what triggered this whole piece of writing. It’s very OCD focused and all sarcasm aside that’s not my set of issues. You know how much the “stereotypical guy” thinks about sex–right? A lot, constantly–something of that nature. It’s not true, but it’s kind of the attitude.

Outside of this whole “being with kids” thing I tend to think about sex obsessively and compulsively. Compartmentalization for the win! If you added up all the hours I have spent masturbating it probably stretches into a couple years of my life at this point. I like me.

It has been really abrupt and challenging to deal with having this split personality thing. I do not think about sex when my kids are around. That means I totally want to shove Noah into a sexless role because that is how I think about him right now. I’m not aggressively interested in sex yet. It’s starting to come back. I’ve had several years of very little sexual interest. This has been a very odd period for me.

But we still have a lot of sex. If we only have sex six times in a month that is drought-like. And I feel guilty and like I am not holding up my end of the bargain. We’ve only had one month where we had sex less than ten times and I felt really angry with myself the whole month that we only had sex six times. I just couldn’t god damn do it. If I had tried I would have hated him.

It is hard knowing that if I grow to hate him it wil be largely because I have not told him about small boundary incursions and then it will escalate into a large problem without him even knowing the storm is about to break. I don’t want to hate him. Hating him serves none of my life goals and would basically prevent most of the rest of them.

Sure, I could find new goals. More humble goals. But man that makes it sound like I like him because of money. It’s not money. Noah pays attention to me and encourages me. I have always written but I needed Noah to give me permission to write about the really dark stuff. I needed an Audience.

My Owner wouldn’t read stuff I wrote. My ex-fiancé wouldn’t read what I wrote. Puppy wouldn’t read anything I wrote. All of them told me, “People should be allowed to have private space to write about their feelings.” It was practically that exact wording from each of them.

I’m not sure I would be able to keep believing I deserve to exist if I didn’t live with someone with an ego the size of Texas. He is brash and self-assured and god damn full of himself and he’s completely sure he wants to spend his time with me. He tells me so over and over. He proves it through actions and patterns of work over long periods of time. He’s consistent. It’s really not about the money. The money is more a side effect.

I will always have a hard time remembering him raping me. He really enjoyed how much I did not enjoy that. He gets one. I agreed to one. I set those boundaries in advance. I didn’t try to say “safeword” or anything hokey like that. I fought him. That was really weird. I knew he wouldn’t stop. I knew that fighting him just antagonized him and made it worse. If I actually wanted a dead fish rape I could have had it. I just would have had to go limp. It was my own fucking fault it was so brutal.

It’s always my fault.

I write this knowing that people in the home school community will read it. People who were in my house today. People who are quite Christian. I’m not like you. Only I am.

I have heard my friends in the Leather community wonder if we should have some kind of “coming out day” like Gay Pride. I think that if I am in the closet to you it is because you have never actually looked at me. You instead chose to see a mirror of you and you ignored the shadowy parts where I was different.

We all have more similarities than differences. Whether you are talking to the prostitute or the investment banker or the gas station attendant or the flight attendant or the programmer or the sys admin or the house wife. It is said that if you look for the good in people you will find it. No, that’s not true. Abe Lincoln says that if you look for the bad you will find it. I’m ignoring him. I don’t like agreeing with people very much.

I think that if you want to get to know people and find commonalities and ways of getting along you can. There are stories about Auschwitz prisoners talking in a friendly manner with guards. I’ve read them in classes. Of course with my Swiss cheese memory I have no idea what the names were.

People can find ways to relate. The things that unite us are greater than the things that divide us. Blah blah.

I don’t believe it but I believe it is true enough in a pinch. I think that as a species we need to have a live and let live philosophy. The problem is how to handle perception of scarcity of resources?

Sex is a resource. There are a lot of people who are sad they aren’t getting any. Did random dude at the grocery store for sure want to get in my pants? Enh, It’s not 100%. But I have an extremely high success rate with this kind of scenario. I can generally get that kind of approach to result in sex within six hours.

Then I probably never speak to them again and eventually cannot remember their name. I have a vague dread of running into them but I’m cheerful and apologetic about not remembering names. They are only sometimes mad at me. Ha.

Guess what? Guys aren’t more ok with being used than girls are. Well, some are. Not mostly though; they get hurt feelings. This is why you can’t date/have sex with too many people in a given social group. You poison the well.

Love and affection and sex are different needs but we often try to meet them in a jumble. What you do when people don’t actually meet all of your needs? Go find someone else?

I get the general impression that if I worked harder on exercise I could sleep with an even more obscene number of people than I have already slept with. Four digits. Five digits. Why the hell not? All it takes is low standards and a willingness to ask–right?

I don’t think I would find any more self-esteem at the bottom of that well. It’s not like I’m doing the equivalent of being a born again virgin declaring fidelity to my man. I’m not made sanctified in my compulsive sexual acting out because of some fucking walrus in Nevada.

I have a lot of sex because it is what I am required to do. Not required by Noah–we don’t have that kind of relationship. This is what I feel I owe him. I somehow have arrived at this being part of the trade he gets for putting up with me.

Lately I have initiated sex because I was actually interested. And I got off. And it was only a little uncomfortable and not even painful. That’s fairly unusual these days. That whole combination doohickey. I have sex because that is the deal.

You get married and you are his whore. That’s the deal. You had better find someone you can handle whoring to.

That is what my mother taught me. Word for word. I bet you money she would deny ever saying it. I can’t forget. I remember and remember and remember and seal my lips. My daughters will not hear that from me. No Sir.

I don’t know the difference between wanting to feel like I am allowed to exist and wanting to have sex. Most of the validation for my existence has come through sex. Kind of pathetic, right?

Now I have these kids. It’s different. This incest shit will not go on to my children. They will be kept away from my whole family and aren’t all women in my position absolutely convinced that their partner would never do such a thing? All I know is my kids show absolutely no signs of abuse. I can cross my fingers and pray. Seriously–isn’t that how life works?

How do I ever trust anyone? How do I ever let go of fear enough to go to sleep at night? I lie in bed sometimes and can’t stop thinking about my father touching me. Intrusive memories. I’ve got ’em.

Just get over it. Just move on. I have increasing neuroscience on my side motherfucker. It’s not that easy. Trauma damages the brain. New instances of trauma layer on top of older layers in difficult to dissect patterns. In the scale of a lifetime I am getting over it; I am moving on. It’s just not as quick or as silent as you would apparently hope.

I’m still existing. I’m still talking and talking and people only have to listen if they want to.

I’m only really writing for my Audience. He’s read everything I have written since the age of twenty. Well, not all of my school papers. Only the ones I put on the internet. I can’t say all of the things I wrote in this post to him. He’ll get all conversational off-roady on me and we’ll talk about something else. I want him to see this. I want him to be part of this struggle. This is his sex life too. I want monogamy because I want a partner who is very invested in helping me figure my shit out. Me not figuring my shit out means big dips in your sex life.

I married someone who thinks nothing of taking NLP, hypnosis, and cooking classes to meet chicks.

What I need most in this lifetime is for someone to love me and believe that it is not only permissible for me to change it is required. I want to be loved by being encouraged to grow. I want to be loved by being taken care of. I have a provider, let’s be clear here. It’s a fairly primitive sort of gratitude.

What trade does anyone make in relationships? The pleasure of one anothers company? What does that mean?

When I am around people I feel uncomfortable, anxious, and like people are going to start screaming at me pretty much all of the time. Apparently I cause other people to feel like this as well because they comment on being afraid I will yell at them regularly. Noah says I don’t yell very often. I suppose it’s all relative.

I still want to be around people. I understand that this is a kind of fear I have to learn to work through.

Rapists don’t make me feel more fear than random groups of people. Hanging out with predators makes me feel more comfortable. I know how to play that game. I know how to get through that scenario.

Learning how to tell the difference between “good” fear and “bad” fear has been the journey of my adulthood. I need companionship and community. I just need it. It’s a species-level need. I don’t need to feel fucking guilt about it. There are six billion fucking people on this planet and precious few of them truly want to be alone. I mean, people need alone time. That’s not what I mean.

I struggle with how to build friendships. There are all these rules about what you can discuss and when. I uhh don’t like following rules. A while back I was a rude fucking asshole with a friend as I pushed her to try and change her sexual boundaries with her husband for me. Not cool.

I think that being monogamous will keep me from shitting where I eat. Sexual monogamy means that I am not a threat. I can be a non-sexualized being to the people I meet. I don’t have to know or care about their sexual interest in me.

Only sometimes it appears whether I like it or not. Good fear. Bad fear. Move towards it. Move away from it.

How the fuck do people figure this out?

Get over yourself.

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So like yesterday when I post something ranty about other people I then have this huge rush of shame and guilt. Who the fuck am I to judge other people? Why in the god damn hell does my fucking judgment matter? Who the hell wants to hear it anyway.

It’s weird writing about what I see in the world. Because a lot of the writing process for me is narrowing down who I want to be. I get the impression that other people can do this narrowing down without being a judgmental asshole out loud.

I don’t think I am better than anyone else. I do think I have a strangely functional marriage–I take very little credit. Noah is amazing and flexible and supportive. That isn’t about me. That’s luck. I found someone who is worried enough about his own future that he will defer a lot of short-term satisfaction in favor of future success. That’s not about me.

No one has to change their behavior to make me happy. No one has to alter the course of their life for me. I am aware of this. I don’t think people need to change because of me. I write because these are the things in my head and if I don’t write them down I feel like I have these fifteen different television stations all playing loudly in my head simultaneously. I can’t hear what I am supposed to be doing over the cacophony.

I hope like hell that I don’t hurt peoples feelings by saying stupid self-absorbed things. I’m afraid I do sometimes. I’m really sorry. I am not trying to hurt anyone.

I want there to be room for me to exist and room for other people to exist. I want it to be ok that I have my opinions (even if my opinion is negative about someone’s behavior) and it isn’t something that people have to take personally.

I don’t think you (generic you) need to give a shit about whether or not I judge you harshly. I truly don’t. I know that I am not the judge nor the jury. If I make you angry I’m sorry.

I want to be allowed to have strong opinions and be a judgmental asshole without actually being an asshole. I really want my writing to be the place where I get to be as loud and offensive as I want.

I promise I will try harder to reign in my mouth when I am in other peoples houses. You did not invite me over to hear my asshole opinions. I hate it when I fail at the basics of civility. It feels like proof that I am a worthless white trash asshole. I am not capable of being nice to decent people.

I swear to god that I walk into some houses and I feel like, “Oh my god these are decent people” and I feel my hackles go up. It isn’t their fault. It is not anyone else’s fault that I walk into their house and feel like I am a lower class than them. It is not their fault that feeling lower class makes me hostile and nasty. I know I have to “get over” this. I really do. I’m better than I used to be. I know that isn’t adequate. I can’t take my class issues out on people and have friends.

I have learned to stop picking on Noah because I developed some enlightened self-interest in that department. I need to understand how other people fit into this. I feel like a complete failure because I am not yet good at understanding in the pit of my stomach how important each different piece of the puzzle is. I still don’t value the contributions that other people give sufficiently. I need to learn how to do that. I need to learn how to stop judging everyone for their ability to meet *my* needs. My needs are not the only important needs in the world.

I’m sorry I am such an asshole. Thank you for tolerating me. I’m really sorry it takes such effort.

Before you speak evaluate if what you want to say is: true, necessary, kind. If it isn’t all three it had better god damn need to be said. It has to be really fucking necessary if it isn’t kind. Mostly saying unkind things is just a way of kicking people. I have to stop kicking people verbally. I have stopped hitting people with my hands. I need to stop kicking them with my words.

Offensive

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I’m having Feelings. Of the variety I can’t really talk about because it turns into Dwama. Sometimes it is hard to predict why people won’t like me. I think I should take this moment to appreciate people self-selecting out of my web. It means I don’t have to feel spread as thin.

I do wish I had more control over what people find offensive. Sometimes when I bother people I feel like it is just a manifestation of how not-ok I am in the universe. Sometimes when I bother people I know it is about shit in their life and it isn’t really about me.

I like the second case better.

Can I get off this roller coaster?

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Remember that guy who said he would apologize for tazoring my vulva? Well it’s been two months. I’m not actually shocked that he didn’t do as he promised. Really it’s much more what I expect of people.

I cried for hours yesterday. Today is a homeschooling event so I have to pretend to be just fine. I have to teach Irish dancing. (Thank goodness for that boyfriend giving me an illegal copy of the instruction manual.) Today will end. I will be able to come home and cry after.

Yesterday during one of my sobbing fits the kids were cuddling me (I explain these as: sometimes people get sad and cry. It happens to everyone. It’s ok to be sad sometimes.) and Shanna was talking about the Valentines she is going to make for next year. (They had a library book out on the subject so Valentines Day is one of her favorite holidays.) I said, “Do you realize that you made Valentines for all of your homeschooling friends and your relatives in Texas and your sister and your dad but you didn’t make one for me?” The look on her face was pure horror. Later in the day when I was in another room she used a ladder to get into the Valentines stuff (it’s supposed to be off-limits) and she made one for me. She told me that this is next years early so that she doesn’t mess up again. She doesn’t want me to feel left out. I didn’t even yell at her for getting into stuff. I actually consciously didn’t give any Valentines because I knew I wouldn’t get any and I didn’t want that slap in the face.

My friend came over yesterday after reading my blog. She was worried about me. On one hand I feel really bad that I make people worry about me. On the other hand I can either be honest about what is happening inside my head or I can let people be totally surprised if I off myself one day. I choose to tell the truth.

I feel really bad for existing right now. Buck up or shut the fuck up. Be inspirational and happy and cheerful or shut up. Be nice. Be good. I can’t be. It’s too late.

Today is bad.

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All I can think about is getting a razor blade and driving to the beach. Several big deal cuts from wrist to elbow and then I would swim out until I couldn’t swim any more. I promised myself I would raise my kids so I’m not going to do it today. I want to. I want to stop hurting.

I have been sobbing and wailing and whining that I miss my mother for almost thirty years. Yesterday during EMDR the thought loop that kept getting stuck was, “Honor thy mother and father” and I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. I am bad. I do not honor my mother or father. I am bad. I can’t even follow G-d’s rules.

During Calli’s nine day labor from hell my doula and midwife were both very irritated with me. They both had children who were under a year old whom they didn’t want to leave. I was inconvenient as a client. So they were snippy and would come and go and didn’t want to be with me more than they “HAD” to. And I almost died. And I lay in bed for weeks because I couldn’t stand. I crawled to the bathroom because I could not walk the four feet. Thankfully Kira brought us food or we would have been in a difficult spot.

I am going to die alone. I am going to die feeling unwanted and unloved and unappreciated. I don’t really see any other ending for my story. Some days I am more sanguine about this than others. Everyone is alone in the end–right?

I have no interest in being alive at the end of today. But I promised I would raise my kids. So I will be anyway. It doesn’t seem to matter what I want in this lifetime. You get what you get. It isn’t about “right”. It isn’t about “fair”. It isn’t about “deserve”.

Noah told me that he is trying to give me freedom. I’ve been free since I was five years old. No one has known what I have done unless I have chosen to tell them. I have done whatever I want. I traveled. I met people. If I didn’t have the money I found a way. I have had more freedom than pretty much anyone I know.

Someone has to care about you before they have expectations of you. No one knew what I was doing.

I want to slit my wrists so bad. I have no interest in completing today. I don’t want this pain. I’m so fucking done. The last few days have actually been pretty good. I was in a great mood this weekend.

Honor thy mother and thy father. Sometimes it comforts/haunts me that because I am an American I am allowed to exist. In other places my disobedience against my parents would probably end my life.

Honor thy rapist. Keep him holy. Do as he says. Keep your mouth shut you stupid whore.

If I could get these things out of my head I would. I just don’t know how. I don’t know how to stop feeling like I should die because I am bad. I am poison. I am going to infect other people with my badness.

In my adult life I’ve had big celebrations for my birthday for 21, 23, and 30. Tom did the 23 birthday party technically after I broke up with him. He loved me but he didn’t know how to show it and a lot of things that I asked him for–a lot of kinds of attention that I needed–came in the month or two after I broke up with him.

I hosted my 30th. I spent the morning before the party beating my head on the concrete floor in the garage. I spent the day feeling like, “Why don’t these people want to see me unless I am offering food and drink and lots of other people to talk to?” I’m not actually sure I should try again.

What I want, the way I want to be seen does happen for some people. It’s not my lot in this life. Somehow I have to stop caring.

Instead I want to die. Then no one will even be bothered by a cursory glance in my direction.

I hate me so much right now. Fucking loser. Really the best thing my body could be used as is fish food.

Post-EMDR: birthday edition

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When I try to think backwards in time about my birthdays mostly I think of crying. I have cried through most of my birthdays. Today I was specifically asked if any of them were good and I can come up with my 21st birthday (400+ perverts sang to me in a sneak preview of The Secretary which is pretty much the perfect movie to release on my birthday) and that’s the absolute highlight. 23 wasn’t bad. Tom threw a party for me three weeks after I broke up with him. The most attention he paid to my birthday in our years together. 30 was pretty good. My party was both good and very weird.

But let me tell you I arranged to go to the movie when I was 21 and I arranged the party when I was 30.

As far back as I can remember my birthday is a reminder of the fact that I’m not particularly likable. People (my “friends” who were invited) have decided that my birthday party is a great time to sit down and tell me everything they dislike about me. It’s happened over and over. I tried to change that with 30. It was such a weird night. And then the creating a household thing exploded. So it’s kind of a mixed bag.

This year I am going to Disneyland with my kids and a friend. I’m not inviting Noah. Like, specifically if he asked to come (which I anticipate snowballs falling in hell before he asks to come with me on a trip) this time I would say no.

If I’m not going to be the special pretty princess at least I don’t want my face rubbed in it. I will never be the special-center-of-attention. That’s not a role I get this lifetime. I understand that most people don’t get it.

For most of my birthdays I remember things like my mom getting me chocolate cakes because no one else wants to get stuck eating vanilla even though that is my favorite flavor. No one else likes it so it isn’t coming into the house.

On other peoples birthdays I try hard to pay attention to them. I want them to know that I am grateful that they exist. I want to buy their love–let’s be frank. I want people to know that I think they are worth buying love from. It’s kind of nice to experience, you know?

My birthdays feel like a reminder that I was never wanted. I am the product of rape. If my mother hadn’t been Catholic she would have aborted me. Happy Fucking Birthday. I don’t know how to feel wanted. Mostly I understand that it isn’t anyone else’s problem to deal with my insecurities so I try to not talk about them.

I’m actually pretty good these days at not actively bribing people to come pay attention to me. I get enough that I no longer value myself and my time so little that I am willing to beg people for their attention. It happens or it doesn’t. I have to consciously stop myself from grilling people about why do you want to talk to me? Don’t you find me unpleasant? I think I’d give just about anything to not have to be with me for a day. I find me incredibly unpleasant.

Sometimes it is kind of weird knowing that I could train myself to be nicer. It’s just behavioral conditioning–no big deal. I have the wrong instincts to get through the world safely as a “nice” person. I gravitate towards people who need boundaries expressed with hurling knives. I like them. I just plain do. And way more than I like them I want them to like me so I have traditionally just not said no.

My therapist, like everyone else who knows me and Noah, after listening to me talk about birthday stuff for a few minutes said, “Wait… isn’t that unusually inconsiderate from him?” “Yup.” “Hunh. Why is this a thing? What kind of trauma does he have around birthdays?” “None that I know of in particular.” “Hunh. Weird.” “Yup.”

That’s how discussing birthdays goes with everyone. Why is Noah really excellent at being considerate about almost everything else but has uhm not prioritized my birthday? How the fuck should I know. I’ve asked and haven’t gotten a great answer.

I think it’s the pressure. He’s nice to me all the time because he wants what it gets him. On my birthday the pressure is kind of insane. Failing to act is at least on a different scale from doing “something” that I find disappointing. I can be honest and say that on occasion I have been disappointed in gifts in my lifetime. He’s probably noticed. I’m sure that’s not his favorite thing to deal with.

I really think that part of it is about him not wanting to feel like he has to jump through hoops. He cooks breakfast every day because logistically it is a really great thing for him to do. My birthday probably has less obvious benefits.

I don’t think that one session of EMDR made this issue resolve in my head. I have a long life of birthdays ahead of me. I’m feeling very frightened by the idea of ending up spending my birthday alone every year once my kids are a bit older. Once I’m no longer so interesting and all.

I’m not going to be willing to wake up on my birthday and have everyone in my house act like it is every other day. I can’t do that any more. I’m tired of not fucking mattering. I’m not going to coax and beg my kids to pay attention to me. The only other adult in their life with such influence is going to teach them that my birthday doesn’t matter. I need to not be here while it happens.

This is the kind of thing that makes me not want a long life. I generally start crying about my birthday in August (my birthday is in September) and do it pretty solidly until November. Noah not doing anything last year hit me harder than normal and I’m still crying about it in March. That feels pathetic.

He married me. He had children with me. He works like a dog for me. He cooks me breakfast every day. He stopped sleeping with other people. What more does he bloody need to do to prove that he likes me? I don’t know.

This ache isn’t about him. I don’t know what could fill it. I don’t know if he would be able to if he wanted to but he doesn’t want to so it doesn’t matter. Every year my birthday feels like a reminder that my mother never wanted me. That my father was a monster. That I was just born to be a worthless whore.

I’m really glad that I never actually did sex work. I think that for me that would have been emotionally problematic. As a sex worker you can be an expensive well treated one or you can be a badly treated poorly treated one. Guess which one I would have headed for?

This whole birthday thing is not about getting stuff. I’m really not looking for more crap in my house. I’m not especially materialistic and I have all of my needs met and then some. I absolutely know the extent of my privilege. I am not acting like my husband is inadequate at providing. He’s a fantastic provider. No complaints there.

I want to feel special. Most every day I feel like my presence is in large part tolerated because I am willing to do enormous amounts of work in exchange for people tolerating my presence. I know I owe people something for putting up with me. They sure as shit aren’t doing it for the pleasure of my company.

People who don’t want anything from me confuse me. So I avoid them. Right now I have nothing to give so I avoid the people who want something from me too. I don’t go out as much as I did in the past.

I feel like a selfish piece of shit. I am seriously only hanging out with people who have something specific they are offering me. They come and find me and ask to hang out with me. And I’m still fucking whining on the internet and crying for more than 1/3 of a year because I feel unwanted and unlikable.

That’s broken. I don’t know how to fix that. I see the parameters of what is broken and where but I don’t know how to fix it yet.

Ok, it’s not true that I only use people. Hyperbole is my friend and all. I have highly reciprocal relationships with some people. Mostly though I’m a using bitch. I feel bad about it. I have never been this friend before and I remain quite confident that once I get through this small children phase I will no longer be a using bitch. I anticipate me doing a lot of kid-care for other people in the future.

I don’t feel like my being here on the planet matters very much. My birthday is kind of the chance to say that I am special and every year I am slapped really hard in the face with the fact that I’m really not very important.

Let me throw into this rant the many odd feelings I’m having because Noah’s parents send us so many gifts. In terms of adding random novelty and beauty to my house really they have me covered for the year. Ok, some of their stuff isn’t a hit. Mostly their taste has improved to the point where I write long gushing thank you letters detailing how I’m using all the presents.

So this weird birthday thing really isn’t about being mad about not getting presents. Presents aren’t the point.

I don’t know how to experience my birthday and think, “It’s a good thing I’m alive”. I go through each one knowing that I shouldn’t be here. It’s kind of like permanently living in It’s a Wonderful Life. I feel like I am always kind of simultaneously viewing both options at the same time: I am alive and I am having this life where clearly people do love me–I did manage to find people vs. I was not wanted from the moment of my conception in every way. How can someone conceived in such hate and rage and violence and anger and humiliation ever be worthy of anything else?

That’s what EMDR helps me put into words. This separation of where the emotion is evolving towards vs. what the trigger is about.

I don’t know what will change how I feel about myself. I don’t know if I will ever stop wanting to hurt myself. I don’t know if I will ever be able to stop hating myself.

I tattooed on my back that the thing I want the most is forgiveness. I think that something more akin to an exorcism would be necessary to get rid of how much hate I feel for myself.

I don’t remember what I was watching but the adult child of an incest survivor was speaking about what it was like growing up with his mother. He said something like, “The thing I remember the most about my mother was that she was always just a little sad. She would stand off to the side in every gathering and watch like she wished she was invited but she never felt she could join.”

I’m scared my kids will say that about me.

I kind of feel like life is a party I wasn’t invited to. I kind of heard by word of mouth that it was happening and some people not connected with hosting have said, “You should come!” but I wasn’t actually invited… you know?

But no one is invited. Well, my kids have been. Holy tomato. I work hard at that. It’s very funny hearing the lectures I give them.

My kids don’t know that I’m roiling in self-hatred. It’s completely outside of their scope of the universe and it’s going to gosh darn stay that way. Well, till they can read at any rate.

I want… I want… I want.

I want to stop hurting like this. I want to know how to actually feel valued and loved given that I have a number of relatively sane non-user people working really hard to ensure that my company is desired. And I’m only having sex with one of them. It’s pretty weird. I don’t really know how to handle this.

It is very weird trying to psychologically get my head around the fact that the internet is permanent. Well, until an energy crisis. But let’s assume it’ll last my lifetime. I think it will. Why is that in this post? I’m starting to think about mortality differently. I have never before seriously entertained the idea of living into my 70’s, 80’s, or beyond. Given my life experiences I am unlikely to make it that long. But I will almost certainly make it into my 60’s.

That’s a lot of birthdays to worry about facing. I try to tell myself that the only thing that stays the same is that everything changes. I won’t always feel how I feel right now. Right now I am very deep in that miasma of shitty feeling. I feel stupid and immature for wanting to talk about these things in public. I feel like I should hit delete and walk away because I am wasting peoples time by writing this inane drivel. And I go on and on and on. Shut the fuck up already.

Geez inside voice, I haven’t even hit 2500 words–what got stuck in your craw? (Have I mentioned that I am in love with WordPress telling me word count as I go?)

I think I am going to stop though. We are going to go out to dinner to celebrate Noah’s last day at his old job. He is starting a shiny new upgraded position at a new company next week. Things are exciting here.

I really have nothing to complain about. My ingratitude is staggering. But there it is.

Suicidal ideation

4 Replies

I love getting eight hours of sleep by 3am. It makes my whole day better. It makes my whole life better. Then I am more cheerful and enthusiastic about what I have to do. I consider it the first thing I must do in a day in order to have a good day. The second thing I must do in order to have a good day is get more than 75% of my chores done by 9am. I have a thing in my head.

I participate in a variety of online support groups–or rather I have over the years, not so much at this second–and it has been a fairly big thing for me over the past ten years “I am more productive by 9am than a great many people are all day.” It’s a thing in my head. I work very hard on it. That way I feel I have the freedom to do with the rest of the day as I please.

Pretty much every online support group has strict rules about talking about suicide. Really, pretty much everyone everywhere believes it isn’t ok to talk about–especially if you are seriously thinking about it.

My furnace dries out the air terribly. I’ve spent all winter coughing and hacking and feeling unhappy about it since I moved into this house. Now my kids join me. So they’ve been waking up a lot at night. It means I have a lot of time in the middle of the night to think about them and to think about suicide and for me to think about what happiness means.

There are a lot of parenting books on the market that will tell you that you are bad bad doomed if you have children because you want to give yourself a reason to live. BAD. DON’T DO THAT! That’s what the books say.

To that I say: becoming a parent is always a selfish decision. Why is my selfish decision worse than yours? I have promised myself and my kids that I will absolutely not kill myself until they are adults because they require care and I am the one who has to give it. I have to say that it gets easier by the year. I’m learning what happiness feels like.

I know a lot of people who work very hard to ensure that they don’t have to “deal with” their kids in the middle of the night. Gosh that is my favorite time. I love feeling like my mere presence keeps the monsters at bay. Because I do. In Calli’s mind and in Shanna’s mind if I am in the room then they are safe and life is good. That’s just the end of the debate.

That feeling is better than every drug I have ever taken and I’ve tried a really lot of drugs. A lot. A really lot. Ha. But I did the vast majority of my drug taking (other than this stoner thing) in under two years after I was a college graduate. Let me get on my pulpit for a second to lecture anyone younger than me about how you should wait until your brain is done forming before you use drugs. Wait until your brain decides which connections it wants before you break sections. Just do. I’m serious. You have a long fucking life in front of you. You don’t need to try everything in the first twenty years. Good grief.

I have never believed that I had a long life ahead of me. I have wanted to die since I was seven years old. For the past twenty-four years I have wanted to be dead more than I have wanted to be alive. Well, I would say that the percentages kind of rock back and forth staying in the 40’s and 50’s. I wanted to die a lot and I didn’t want to live very much but actually killing yourself is harder than it looks sometimes. I did not overdose as a teenager as a cry for help. I simply vomited up the drugs and was found before I could finish dying. Different.

Now I’m really glad I’m not dead. I feel like getting to sleep with my little girls, with their faces pressed to mine as they mumble over and over while falling asleep, “Mommy love you so much. So much. Sooooooooo much” this is the reason that people live. This feeling of love and happiness. This is why people stay alive. The hope of this. The belief that some day they will get to have this feeling. This is the increased joy that parents have that non-parents don’t get. That is one of those things they find in studies. Over a lifetime parents have more joy than non-parents–a shitload more stress too… but it’s worth it.

I never thought I would actually experience having someone love me like this. I believed this would always be for someone else. I’m very concerned that I not alienate my children… ever. I have to behave appropriately in order to deserve a relationship with them. But I’m not very good at acting appropriately.

Sometimes I feel like the biggest fucking hypocrite in the world when I get mad at my kids for breaking rules. Ha.

I told Shanna, about the stealing candy thing, it is my job to teach you the rules of society. I get angry because I feel afraid. If you steal as an adult there are serious consequences. I have to teach you that it is not a good thing to steal or the rest of your life will be harder and you will have a lot of very unpleasant experiences. I don’t want you to suffer. How can we work on you not doing this? I told her that I really don’t know “how this should be taught” because when I was a child the way I was taught was to be hit. I don’t want to hit her and I’m not really sure what the other options are and I feel kind of overwhelmed sometimes as I try to deal with it. I’m sorry I scream so much. I know it is annoying or scary depending on the day.

I asked her if she knew that how much I love her is completely unaffected by whether or not she perfectly follows the rules. I do not perfectly follow the rules and I hope she will always love me. She told me that somewhere else there are kids who always do exactly what their mothers say and they never break rules. I laughed and said those must be the most boring, uncurious children on the planet and how sad for their mothers’. She looked very confused.

I have not thought about killing myself in a bit. Certainly weeks. But I was asked to reaffirm that I understand and will follow the rules of forums and I WILL NEVER POST THAT I AM FEELING SUICIDAL. Thus I am thinking about the concept though I am not experiencing it. I have felt shamed and bad for being suicidal for pretty much my entire life. I’m aware that people are uncomfortable with the fact that I feel this way and their discomfort is the most important thing here.

Talking about it, or not, has not even slightly increased my self-harming behaviors. Over time my self-harming behaviors have kind of melted away. I’m not hurting myself anymore, I’m really not. It was a process I had to go through. I had to be whiny and angsty and I had to really process how much I wanted to die. This process is simply part of being alive for me. I understand that other people don’t like it. I feel very uncomfortable about being told over and over and over and over that because I make other people feel uncomfortable when I talk about it I shouldn’t talk about it.

Well, how much do you enjoy being surprised by someone offing themself? Wouldn’t you have preferred a warning? Dude, seriously.

P!nk has a song on her new album about drinking and doing drugs and running away and I feel suicide is strongly implied. I really appreciate it when people admit in public that this struggle is part of their life. The song is The Great Escape and I listen to it a lot right now. I’ve been thinking about how I understand this whole “creation of something new” thing now that I didn’t understand before. I have a family now. I have never had one before. Oh wow. This is how they are supposed to look? I’ve been thinking about having something to live for.

It’s really interesting watching how the percentages change. Feeling suicidal vs. wanting to live. That’s a ratio I’ve been actively tracking for most of my life. I have visualized it a lot of different ways over time. These days I think wanting to die falls into the teens. I’m very happy about that. That’s a ridiculous amount of progress for me.

But I’m not supposed to talk about it. I’m not supposed to be graphic about my ongoing struggles to not kill myself. Someone else might feel uncomfortable. Welcome to my sandbox, motherfucker. Here the rules are that I get to talk about whatever gets me through the night. If I am sitting here and writing something then I am not cutting. I am not hitting my body against a large blunt object. I am not soliciting some piece of shit to hurt me. I am not offering up sex to people I don’t know just to get through the night without having to be alone.

I’m not alone. I really love that my kids need me in the middle of the night because I need them in the middle of the night. I need to feel love in the middle of the night. I need to feel wanted. I need to feel like it matters that I not die.

The passion and the pain are going to keep you alive someday. I honestly don’t know how someone in my position would work through this without children. I can understand putting off the decision to die because you still have things you want to do–that is more or less the path I was on pre-kids. I made deals with myself, “I want to do ____. ____. and ____ then it doesn’t matter.” I was very selfish and random about the deals over the years and that’s ok. It was a deal with me about how much pain I have to endure.

That’s the plain and simple reality behind my suicidal ideation. Do I or don’t I get to decide how much pain I have to be in? Am I or am I not in charge of this decision? I think this is where I make the jump to atheism entirely.

I want to be the one who decides when my pain ends. I hold that right. I consider it one of my basic rights. Other animals do the same thing. It is natural just like infanticide is natural. It exists in every species. In America there are approximately thirty seven children killed by their parents every week. You don’t see headlines very often. Every fucking week.

Parenting is hard but I fucking guarantee you that no part of this journey has been remotely as difficult as what came before it so I’m still coasting. My second labor was nine days long followed by a blood hemorrhage that left me unable to walk to the bathroom for weeks. I crawled. Otherwise I simply did not leave my bed. But my friend K delivered enough food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for three weeks. It was a calm but peaceful period. I learned my baby. I didn’t mind the work. It was nice.

Life is about work. Life is about creating and the things you want to do. I freakin love Richard Scarry. Everyone is a worker. All the work must be done. Some of the work is not more honorable than anything else. There is a hierarchy in pay–that tends to exist because some jobs can be done by many people and some jobs can be done by smaller and smaller groups of people and when you have to compete for the talents of a small group… you have to pay a lot of money.

You have to think about those people. The ones who are so selfish. Wait… that’s my husband. He has spent our entire marriage working his ass off to increase his income. Isn’t that selfish? He didn’t do it until he had a reason to. He didn’t care enough to bother. He wasn’t driven by love of acquisition on its own. But now he has this wife with really expensive travel interests and uhm he has decided that he wants to provide for me. He knew that was who I wanted to be before we married.

He doesn’t want me to spend time wanting to die. He wants me to have a list of things I want to do that is really long and complex and it’s ok if it is also expensive–he knows I am overall frugal and I am providing for our long-term safety before I take travel money out. It’s cool. He told me so. Explicitly. He reminds me every few months. It’s weird but really cool. I appreciate how explicitly my husband wants me to be happy.

He wants to keep me. He thinks that the likelihood is higher if I have a sandbox where I can say whatever I want and not get kicked off a support forum for it. He gives me resources I don’t have to have in my head.

I feel like both of us really changed when we got married. We have someone to work for and that is a powerful motivator for both of us. It has been interesting to see as a progression. We get better and better at not hurting one another as we make mistakes and learn how to talk about them. We really don’t keep making the same mistakes over and over. We make new ones! heh

So, to continue on the P!nk trend: Slut Like You is fun. When you are looking to ensure that you don’t have to be alone tonight it dramatically changes how you act. The stakes are different. You’ll worry about tomorrow tomorrow. You have to get through tonight in order to get there.

I’m trying to figure out what mental hurdle I have to working on the books right now. I know I’m overwhelmed by life. I think that I’m just too tired to think. I need to have some reason for a deadline so I can plan around it. I’ll figure it out. I need to decide how much I want to have done by December so I can backwards plan.

I need to feel like I am moving towards what I want to be moving towards. Right now I feel pretty out of control of my schedule. I’m not sure how to change that. Well no. That’s a big fat lie. I know how to change it. I am changing it. This is a process. The schedule will be back to being shaped how I need it to be shaped in about another two weeks. Then we leave town for a week. See how this goes? Oh man.

Portland, we are practically doing a drive-by. March 25th we drive north towards Eugene. We are sleeping there because the kids will be sick of the car. We are aiming to arrive at Dad’s house at 6pm on Tuesday the 26th. We are spending the day with Aunt Cookie, a truly delightful woman. I have an intense interest in hearing stories about Noah’s family. They shape my story now. I don’t have many sources of information.

Wednesday during the day we don’t have plans and we will probably want to go do something fun. Not sure what yet. Wednesday we should hang out with Dad. Thursday and Friday we are hanging out with A. Ha. I haven’t even emailed her to confirm that yet. But she offered it to me. I’m taking it. (pause. email sent.) We will spend Thursday and Friday nights walking around Dad’s neighborhood talking to him and playing with kids. On Saturday we drive allllllll the way home. With four kids who have had a long week and who will not be happy about being in the car. Thank goodness for iPads. Ha.

What we ask of our children is not natural. How we have to deal with the constraints of their lives is not natural. But beating them isn’t a better option. Sometimes you can’t let them have the pace of travel that is appropriate for them. You have to just get there. It is hard but life is that way sometimes.

Once upon a time travel involved physical exertion… even sitting in a wagon is fairly labor intensive compared to a car. We provide these children padded worlds of strapped in boredom. I am not capable of being entertaining for a twelve hour drive. Not even in shifts because then my “off” shift would be driving and I would have a stroke from road rage. That is not in anyone’s best interests. No, my kids can’t entertain themselves for that long. I understand that this is a tragic failing. Never the less… we are going to use them. They can’t use them for the whole trip so there will be other entertainment involved. It’ll work out. It will be one long day of our lives. No big deal. I’m trying to psych myself up for the trip. I’m trying to lay out in advance how much energy I am going to need for various stages. I’m trying to figure out how I will do it without getting punchy about having to teach my kids new situational manners over and over and over for a week solid. It’s a pain but worth it in the long run.

I need my kids to understand how to evaluate for situational manners. I need to consciously talk about how I am evaluating everything around me for clues about how I should behave. I do this every time we travel. It’s a lot easier at Disneyland because there are a lot of “let loose” places. We are going to be moving between environments that will have wildly different “grown up” rules that are going to feel unfair or inappropriately constricting because they aren’t used to those rules. I’m going to be tested over and over. It’s going to be fun.

But this is the whole process of life. I want to teach them how to do this while smiling. I want this trip to be a happy and joyful memory. Shanna is probably going to actually remember this trip for a long time. We will take pictures. She may eventually remember the pictures more than the day but she will have the same kind of connection to these people that I have to Brittney, the little girl who was born four months before me across the street from my family. I was set in my baby carrier next to her in her baby carrier. I have pictures of us when we are two and three and four and seven and and…

I want my kids to have that. I hope they never lose it.

I didn’t think I would lose Brittney. It is hard finding out how unforgivable existing is. Oh, that’s not true I would be told. I am allowed to exist. But I must be silent so no one ever has to actually find out the specifics because oh man that is over the line. The book. The fucking book. I’m having trouble going back through and editing. This is why I paid an editor. Unfortunately after reading the Kindle edition I am entirely unsatisfied with the job she did and I feel fairly back at square one. I thought I was getting an editor but what I got was a copyeditor and that’s a different job.

I wanted technical editing. I wanted someone to give me feedback on flow and let me know where I am being vague and random. I wanted someone to look at it as a work of art to be made better with a few tweaks. Ahhhhh. I get it now. I did get that. That’s what I asked for. She didn’t make many suggestions for changes. She treated it like it was sacrosanct as a poor incest victims story. It was allowed to ramble and be weird.

Ack. But then people don’t want to buy it and it isn’t actually telling the story I want to tell. I can’t always see when I’m doing that without this ridiculous analytical reading that is really hard to do. A page takes me multiple hours. Actually reading something and dealing with the errors is god damn fucking hard work. Why do you think the overall production values of everything in the everything has gone down? (And why I make no promises about my blog entries. These are not polished pieces, yo.)

But the book was supposed to be. And it so clearly isn’t. I feel kind of morally offended by that. In order to motivate that kind of interest you either need a True Fan or someone who is going to make money off the writing. I had neither. Such is life. I’m slowly progressing on editing. It’s hard. I need to set specific goals and plow through it though. Bleh. Yuck. Bleh.

I am running. I’m tired and I’m switching my days for workouts around like crazy but I’m getting through everything. I have a 10k at the end of April. So far my standard for 5ks has been “I pray for under forty minutes”. I’m hoping to do the 10k in eighty minutes.

That means maintaining a standard pace just barely faster than 1km in eight minutes. That means .62 miles in eight minutes. That means I’ll have to run at least 11:50 through the whole damn race. That is way way way faster than I did the marathon. (My marathon average was 15:40/mile. I’m serious when I say I walked a marathon. I’m still hella proud.)

This pace is going to be a huge stretch for me. My race partner may have a different set of goals and staying together is more important than time to me. Additionally: I’m all for wimping out at mile five and crawling the last mile if I feel bad. Flexibility.

What is the goal: the method or the result? Let’s be clear that when it comes to crossing six miles of distance speed vs. just reaching the finish line is a very different set of goals. I no longer fear not reaching the finish line physically… unless I push myself too hard. I am not in amazing physical shape. I’m in good shape. But I’m not an experienced athlete. I have ramped up at a pretty reasonable rate all things considered.

Every body is where it is. You can’t be too hard-lined about “goals” because progress not perfection kind of trumps any stuck on points. It is quite possible I’m not physically capable of running that fast for that long… yet. I may have to work longer before I reach that goal. I sure as fuck would not have been able to do the marathon at that pace. Not given the conditions (high eighties in temperature, high eighties in humidity, really terrible air quality, I started my period at mile thirteen along with horrible cramps). I just couldn’t expect different from myself that day.

I have to still be alive tomorrow to try again. I have to make it to today. If the pace is more important than anything else I might injure myself and then there won’t ever be another try no matter what. And maybe the rest of my life will be a lot harder. Because I was stupid and careless because I don’t care very much if I continue to stay alive.

I really can’t do that any more. Not if I want to be here for more nights of “I love you soooo much”. I want that more than I want anything else. So I will learn how to be good to my body. So I can have as many of those nights as I can.

The passion and the pain are going to keep you alive some day.

I should probably go start breakfast.

No one ever knows the long-term value of what they do. That knowledge is given to no creature. If I want to be a character that has existed then there must be record of that. Only I care to create that record. Noah is invested in supporting this branch of growth on his family tree. He sees it as vital to his long-term success. I’m not sure how I snow balled him.

I think that talking about suicide is something I need to be able to do. My grandmother killed herself. She overdosed. She had been trying for decades. My mother has stories of cleaning up blood after she got home from school because her mother was cutting her wrists again. My brother killed himself. He left the residential care facility where he lived because he had a severe brain injury and would never be able to care for himself again. He walked to a gas station and bought a can of gasoline. He went behind a local grocery store and lit himself on fire. My father sat in the garage with the motor running.

Have I mentioned that I have turned my garage into a really nice room? Ok, technically I have done nothing permanent because city ordinance says it must be able to hold a car at all times and my response would be “give me three minutes and a person to help me move furniture”. That’s not a permanent room. But it’s a really nice place to hang out. There are not likely to be cars in here.

Harm Reduction means being honest about the patterns of behavior in your life. It means setting specific goals and working to reduce the harm you are inflicting on yourself. Usually you are inflicting the harm (hair pulling, cutting, biting your nails, drinking alcohol, picking at scabs, doing most recreational drugs including pot, any obsessive repetitive damage to your body really) because you are trying to relieve stress from some other place in your life.

Noah said he read an article claiming that the first person likely to live over a thousand years is probably alive today. Think about mortality. It’s changing. The brackets are shifting. Where do I want to be on that scale? I don’t want to live a thousand years. That sounds like work. I would rather just live. But I have a rather lot of decades of work in front of me.

What am I going to do when I grow up? I will probably experience an unprecedented to my species amount of freedom after my children are adults. I will still be married to this guy who thinks I am the best thing since sliced bread. I know the deall: there is some travel he wants to do and otherwise I have to do it alone and not be gone too long or too often. Too long is going to be tested a lot over the years as we figure out what that means.

Statistically speaking I am extremely likely to die by my own choice. Sometimes just sitting with that in the pit of my stomach is very hard. You know what they say about statistics? There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.

I believe in self-fulfilling prophesies. I believe the only thing that ever can or has changed the world is someone deciding they want to do it. Yes, of course coalitions are awesome and all… but it takes individuals having a specific vision. A dream, if you will. Otherwise there is no call to exit one’s torpor and do anything. If you are not living up to your vision of yourself… what are you doing instead? Why is there a discrepancy? Are you realistically going to change your life?

Then either change or decide to be happy, right? Happiness isn’t about getting what you want it’s about enjoying what you have. I think I saw that on Pinterest recently.

I want security. I want to have roots. I want a place to come back to. I want community. I want to be allowed to exist without carefully following the rules about what I am or am not allowed to talk about. I like fully informed opt-in relationships.

Now I’m just procrastinating. It was nice to write. I haven’t spent this much time on it in a while. Sometimes it is funny to me the way that writing is one of the most purely satisfying activities I do. I have thought. There. Evidence. Ha. Take that Universe. I have taken up space. In a technological world I have taken up a space smaller than a pin head. Whoop.

But we never know what our impact will be. We have to just exist. And get out of our houses. That’s important whether you like it or not. To be honest I don’t like it very much but I try hard not to take my dislike out on the people who are randomly unlucky and happen to be standing next to me. It isn’t dislike of the people. It is dislike of being out of my house.

It took me a long time to understand that and really fully feel it. I enjoy my work here. I enjoy feeling like I am doing things to work towards my long-term happiness. I am enjoying the physical work and when I am older and less able to work hard I will get to sit in my garden in the shade and enjoy a lifetime of work. Hopefully while babysitting for grandkids who will visit a lot so that I get to know other children deeply.

Now I get it. Now a lot more things make sense to me.

But I have other things I need to do first. Like breakfast. Ugh.

Do something different

3 Replies

I want to cut. I want to cut really a lot. I visualize it. It’s like I have a movie projector running in the background. It overlays everything I see. My thigh. Preferably my right. I think this would be a really long section of horizontal slashes. I like making them all the same length and then trying to make a straight row. Deviation from the uniform length is reason to gauge myself harder as I try to straighten the line.

Yes, I know I am bad. I should not have said a word to my niece. I should have shut my worthless whore mouth. I know. I fucking know. I am mean. I am selfish. How dare I share things with people that are not their problem. I’m bad. I know. It’s all my fault. I know.

Pot really isn’t cutting my anxiety today. Sometimes that happens. It isn’t that I am feeling paranoid–I’m fairly careful about my strains. I want to die. That is the only way to not be bad for not being part of my family. I want to bleed and bleed and bleed.

I know I am not good enough to defend or protect. My niece is. I know. I need to shut the fuck up because I don’t matter and I never have. I know. I know I fucking know.

I’m past my normal coping methods today. I sent an email to a friend who is a therapist. My therapist is on vacation. Merry Fucking Christmas.

I’m not worried about actually cutting. I’ve made that a lot harder to do. The tools are not as readily to hand. I don’t have privacy and I’m not going to fucking do it where my kids could see. I don’t have the body integrity to get away with hiding a large wound. Shanna is absolutely old enough to notice and question.

I’m not worried about going off and killing myself today. I don’t want to give them the satisfaction. Fuck them.

But I am going to have a hard time being calm all day. I am going to have a hard time not crying all day. I am going to have a hard time keeping to appropriate topics all day. I know it is because I am bad. Because I don’t know how to act right. I’m afraid of teaching my children to be bad like me.

I don’t know how to find enough silence to hide in without that magic button on my leg. The other random chronic pain stuff (holy shit my head hurts) is not the same. I have to block that out all the time in order to function. I just do it without thinking about it.

I don’t know how to distract myself today. I need to be able to emotionally connect with my children. But I hurt so much. I don’t know how to keep being good. I’m not. I’m bad. I’m disgusting. I know.

I should never have told anyone anything. I should have just killed myself and spared everyone the discomfort of knowing anything about my life. Why don’t I shut the fuck up.

Because I can’t.

It is my fault my dad and my brother are dead. It should have been me instead of them. All of the problems are my fault anyway. Everything was just fine until I showed up. Right? Isn’t that the story?

I should probably go run. But I’m worried about my balance. I’m very dizzy. Maybe I’ll stretch on the floor.

I don’t know how I am going to stop crying.

Have to think about the quota

4 Replies

If one is going to have a quota for how much sex one has then one should occasionally examine how such a system is working. In my opinion.

The kids were gone for almost 48 hours so we spent more time than usual talking about sex. I feel really grateful that despite how hard I hunted in the bdsm community I ended up with someone basically outside that world. Don’t get me wrong–Noah likes kinky sex. He likes hitting someone who is ok with it. He likes being mean when he has permission. I have yet to know anyone within the community who is actually as good at reigning it in as Noah is. Noah is not driven by his desires. They are small and subtle accents on his overall sexuality. Hurting someone isn’t the point of sex for him.

It is weird when I think about my ex. My Owner. I wasn’t a real person to him. He didn’t know much about me and he actively shushed me because he didn’t want to know. He didn’t want to talk about his life much. He worked 60-80 hours a week. He wanted a slave to take care of details he didn’t like bothering about. He didn’t want to know me. He didn’t even particularly like having sex with me. We didn’t have much sex–he did it because I wanted to and mostly he wasn’t interested in meeting my needs. He liked tying me up and hurting me while fully dressed then he would masturbate. I was more or less live action porn.

Noah doesn’t treat me like that. Noah is quite clear that I am more interesting to him than any other human being has ever been. He likes talking to me. He likes knowing what I am thinking. He appreciates it when I tell him what is going on. He likes having sex with me. He would do it all day every day if we had time and no friction burns.

It’s different. Dealing with them is so different. Everything I learned for my Owner is irrelevant in the course of the rest of my life. I feel like I have gone through life trying on personalities. Who am I allowed to be around this person? What do they want to know about me? Mostly very little.

I started dating Noah for the first time when I was still living with Tom. They overlapped for months. Hell, Noah came over and slept with Tom and I. (I slept with Noah and his girlfriend too.)

I met Noah in February of 2004. I broke up with my Owner in August and moved out the first weekend in October. That first weekend I had my first date with my Daddy J.

Daddy J liked to bring people home with us. Between when I left Tom and when I married Noah in September of 2006 I slept with more than eighty people. Most of them were because Daddy J would bring people over to me and say, “She has an empty hole. You should fill it.”

I didn’t date him very long. I couldn’t handle it. That was so much worse than Tom not wanting to fuck me at all. I felt so very worthless as a person. All he wanted from me was access to my cunt and my ass and my mouth. He could avoid getting to know me by ensuring my mouth was never empty long enough to talk.

Noah feels so very nice to me. Noah was enthusiastic and ok about the idea of me sleeping with other people but he never pushed for it or watched or controlled it. He was ok with me doing that if I wanted to but it wasn’t about him.

I don’t want to any more. I feel so used up and abandoned. I feel like the vast majority of people who have fucked me have ended up not being very nice to me. They certainly don’t feel any kind of bond.

If I’m at all honest I think part of the reason I am going to be thrilled when Noah migrates away from his current company is he works with a lover. One who wasn’t just once. One who was almost a one night stand until I ran into him a few years later and all of a sudden he was so impressed with my sense of boundaries that he wanted to have an occasional thing on the side more often because I was good at not invading his life. I knew I was only supposed to show up for sex then leave and be silent. He wanted more of that.

I am so tired of people wanting access to my genitals while feeling like the right way to handle my mouth is to duct tape it shut.

I lived for four years with someone who thought it was great fun to put plastic bags over my head and then wrap my neck with duct tape. He liked watching me cry through the plastic. No, he didn’t want to know what I thought or felt. Eventually when I started freaking out he would poke his fingers through the plastic over my mouth. Usually followed immediately by kissing me so that I couldn’t actually breathe. It was hotter that way.

So now I’m married to this guy who seems practically angelically nice in comparison. He doesn’t pimp me. He doesn’t degrade me. He wants to know about me.

And I’ve got this quota. I kind of tried to explain it on MDC and failed. It isn’t at his initiation. Noah is a simple creature. I can look at his life and judge how much stress he is under. Sex has a specific trade value. It reduces his stress level by x%. If I want him to keep functioning then I have to help him with the stress balance in his life. I know how much sex makes him able to work how hard. I’ve been watching him for six years. Compared to everyone else I have tried to learn he is dead easy.

But that means I’m having sex because it is stress relief for Noah. Not because I want it per se. Post kids sex is just weird. I’m not getting off like I used to. It’s not that I can’t at all (this weekend was awesome we went to a sex party and had lame awkward sex [because I felt uncomfortable] and came home and had ridiculously hot sex and I got off multiple times. That doesn’t happen much anymore. Woo!) it’s that it works differently.

I’m not who I was. Not at all. I am struggling with how much change is permitted in a partner. If he married me because he thought it was hot to be with someone very promiscuous then we have problems. I can’t be that person forever. It is too hard on me.

I don’t think promiscuity is a problem per se I feel that I don’t have enough of a support system in my life for me to pour out my physical energy on something that does nothing for me. I don’t get energy back. It makes it harder to go do my life. I have too much to get done. I have nothing more to give in that department.

So sex doesn’t (usually) feel very sexy any more. It’s stress relief for Noah. That’s what I’m there for. It’s uhm, well… he is quite nice to me. I like that. I really appreciate that in order to feel like he has “the right” he spends a lot of time gently touching my body. I have never really experienced anything like this before. He is so nice to me. I feel like I don’t belong here. He should be giving this treatment to someone who deserves it. I’m the stupid whore. Why is he wasting time being nice to me? I don’t matter.

So things are muddy lately.

When you come out as a survivor of early childhood sexual assault (and ohman INCEST) and especially when you have major adult promiscuity people always want to talk to you about celibacy. Maybe you should try it. The prevalence of this response is annoying. I can’t possibly “work on my issues” unless I stop having compulsory sex.

Ah. I see. All this work I’ve done “doesn’t count” because I haven’t done it how you think I should do it. Right. Tell me again why I should care about your system? Oh, yes. You read an “Expert” so now I have to listen to you. You don’t even know for sure that your “Expert” would react to me how you are reacting so how about if I turn and walk away now.

The day-to-day life I lead now bears absolutely no resemblance to anything I have ever lived before. It is hard to believe that one life can encompass so much change. And I am going to change more. I am going to learn more. I will get better at a lot of things that I currently suck at.

I don’t think that celibacy is going to be part of it. I care too much about that stress relief function. I need to have Noah continue to feel invested in me. He bonds through sex. Oh baby does he bond through sex. And sex is much better when I tell him what I am thinking about. I’m not used to that. I’m used to people wanting to hear a narrative I make up. Usually what I’m “thinking about” is a story deliberately suited to that person–it has very little to do with me.

Noah is different.

It is weird to try to parse out the differences between my compulsive sexuality and my feelings of obligation and trying to earn someone liking me. Noah really likes me. To the point where when the kids are gone he follows me around with large fawn eyes because he is so happy that he can relax into adoring me without the risk of anyone screaming suddenly near our heads. The screaming totally harshes our mellow. Six years. He still follows me around because he wants to listen to what I’m babbling while I walk around doing random things.

I can’t express how overwhelming this is. Why does he care? It feels so good. Part of it is the sex. He wants me to feel loved and wanted all the time, not just when we are having sex, and we have a lot of sex so he feels pretty required to be demonstrative all the time. So I don’t feel bad about him only validating me during sex.

He brings me flowers. Yes, I’m going to keep a quota so this man stays happy. I think that taking sex away from him would be like kicking a puppy. It makes him so very happy. He’s not demanding. He phrases it as, “As always I would be entirely interested in sex. It is totally ok if you would like to just snuggle. I just wanted you to know.” When I say no, he still rubs my back. He still talks to me. He still strokes my hair and soothes me to sleep. There is no punishment. No revoking of love. No lessening of attention. He still likes me.

The only time Noah yells at me is when we are on opposite sides of the house and we just can’t stop talking to each other. We are a loud house. We like talking to one another and we like getting up and doing stuff. So we just raise our voices to carry on the conversation over greater distance. No big deal.

I feel so loved in this house. It is very hard that feeling loved is so alienating. I wish it wasn’t. I don’t always know how to engage.

I told Noah that the quota is a reminder to me that I have to hit the stress relief button a certain number of times every month if I want him at full capacity. I know that when stress is lower in our lives I can dip down a bit if I feel like it (and I do some months) and I know when I have to up the quota. I watch his life. Deliverables at work. The kids hitting a challenging milestone. His additional projects. I watch what he is eating. I adjust his diet as much as I can given that he eats at work.

He is able to be calm and happy and patient with me and the kids if I hit the stress relief button enough times. If I don’t then he gets tired and run down and kind of sad. He doesn’t get angry. He just moves slower. He looks wasted. He looks like he is literally running out of gas. Just add sex. It’s like a miracle drug. I’m going to keep doing that.

It is a pragmatic choice. I don’t feel exploited. I find it kind of happily fitting. I am unusually well suited by my life circumstances to benefit from having a partner who has this much of a connection between sex and well being. And it’s vanilla missionary sex and he’s gentle and nice and it’s really just not a big deal to do a lot of taking one for the team. Honestly it’s sweet. It doesn’t rock my world, but it makes me feel good about myself.

I feel like I have changed the deal on Noah to such a degree that consideration on my part is a good idea. Once upon a time in our marriage we had a set up where I could revoke all sex and that would be something he could live with–he was allowed to fuck other people if he needed to. He can’t do that any more.

It seems to me that marriage has to be good for both parties. I don’t feel used or exploited by Noah. If anything I feel overwhelmed by shame because he married down in pretty much every way. I don’t feel competent enough or smart enough or worthwhile enough for him. BUT I CAN HAVE SEX. I’m not going to strongly consider celibacy any decade soon here.

I feel bad about being this way. I feel like it would probably be a good idea for me to have some kind of idea of my body as a closed system I don’t owe anyone access to. But I don’t anticipate actually feeling that way until or unless Noah was out of the picture. I got married. That changes things. I’m no longer a closed system. I am part of a unit. I’m married.

Whether it is philosophically a good idea to feel like a closed unit or not it is specifically unuseful in my current life. It would be destructive. It would be harmful to my marriage to try hard to close off from him. I don’t want to. I like him. I don’t want to hurt him. I am not being harmed in any way and I like being part of this unit. This is the most positive experience of my life. I don’t see the benefit in trying to close off.

He isn’t harming me and he wants to know how I am doing and he adjusts his behavior based on my requests and he isn’t demanding and he isn’t pushy. I am not going to punish him just so I can have a philosophical conversion at this point in life. It wouldn’t make my life better.

I’m not worried about being forced. When I say, “not tonight” he backs off completely. I know that if I tell him that his needs aren’t important and I am not going to meet them he will put his head down and accept that as natural and right. I don’t need to be another big source of that in life for him. I married him because I wanted to be part of a family where we help one another be bigger and better than we can be while standing alone. I really want the mutual exchange of support. It allows me to do things I simply can’t do alone. I want to be part of a unit. That means consideration. A quota isn’t romantic or sweet but it reminds me that he has needs. He matters. Meeting his needs is a good idea if I want him to be able to continue to meet my needs.

That’s probably enough defensiveness for one day.

The loyalty trap

2 Replies

Recently a friend tactfully and gently pointed out that the way I write about family isn’t exactly standard. The kind of help I think I would get is fairly unusual. I couldn’t name a close friend who has the kind of relationship I write about wanting. No one has family who just shows up to take care of you–that isn’t how things work in America.

To this I reply: Ahh. You think that I have a mental model of a healthy family with boundaries. Hahahahaha. No. I come from a crazy enmeshed codependent family. What I talk about wanting is what I have seen. I get my longing for family from watching how people treated my sister having kids. Quite frankly folks worried about her being incompetent and immature. So they just showed up and helped. My mom did. My aunt did. My brother did. I did. Sometimes cousins helped too.

I’ve been watching a lot of movies lately trying to figure out what I mean when I say “white trash”. I’m trying to figure out how to explain it. Some day I want to have a concise definition that really explains what it means to me. I’m not there yet.

Movies I have streamed on Netflix recently: Winters Bone, The Poker House, The Burning Plain. All featuring the same actor (Jennifer Lawrence) and I feel kind of weird about her going on to be an action star. I probably won’t get around to watching the action movies any year soon. I care about the depictions of violence and family.

If you care about movie spoilers don’t read the rest of this post. That is your warning. That said, I think all three of those movies would be useful for people who want to understand me. Of course none of them is exactly right but there are interesting elements in each.

In Winters Bone she is trying to track down information about her father. She has to ask nosy questions. She lives in the Ozarks and she has to pester extended kin that don’t like to be pestered. She gets beaten by a group of women who do it so that her uncle can’t get mad at the men. There is this strong pressure through the whole movie that the police are the enemy. Drugs. Drugs. Drugs. My family used to do drugs like that. These days everyone has prescription meds.

In The Burning Plain you see seemingly disconnected stories that eventually make sense. It’s about mothers and daughters and feeling invisible and accidents and hating yourself and running away to deal with how much you hate yourself. Charlize Theron manages to look as empty as I feel. The way she self harms, the way she runs away because she is bad… yes. I understand that.

The Poker House is the most recent one. It is based on Lori Petty’s actual life. (The chick from Tank Girl.) Holy shit for shoe shine. My mother never prostituted herself and my mother never did drugs in front of me, so I had a very different set up than this movie. Nevertheless I had similar levels of neglect. Similar kinds of being abandoned in unsafe environments. I thought the rape was extremely well done and non-graphic but accurate. That is the truth. That is how fast and how easy it happens. I actively dislike the fact that Lori Petty’s take away message is “Don’t hold a grudge–forgive people for hurting you because they were hurt too”. To that I say: “Bullshit. I have children to protect.”

When I gave up on my family I gave up a lot. I gave up a support network that hasn’t worked in years and fucking loves hanging out with little kids. My family loves children under about eight. They are still cute and fun. Especially little girls. And my little girls are so angelic and wonderful that they would have done well.

But three people in my family have told me that my sister sexually abused them. I have fairly good reason to think that my kids would be good targets for her. The price of all the support is that you have to keep your mouth shut and understand that “people make mistakes” and ignore horrifying behavior year after year. If you need the support and you cannot survive without it this is the bargain that must be made.

I don’t fucking need the support that bad. I can sit home and cry from being overwhelmed instead. It’ll all work out. They are less overwhelming by the month. Shanna is much better at picking up after herself and my life is getting much easier on a day by day basis. Before too much longer they will actively make my life easier. They want to. They understand that doing so leaves me with more energy to do the things they want to do. Their mama didn’t raise no fools.

My sister hasn’t had a job since around when Shanna was born. She was laid off and lived off unemployment. I have the general impression that they are waiting for my mom’s social security to come in. She’s going to get my dad’s because they were married long enough. I think that is totally fair and it means that her retirement will be the most financial security she has had since divorcing him. I hope she finally settles down. I hope my sister isn’t molesting the kids she baby-sits. That’s what she does with her time. She stays home and takes care of little kids so their teen moms can go to school and/or work.

But I know she is a pedophile. I know how inappropriate she was with me. We didn’t have sex. But she did start telling me when I was four years old what I had to do to relax my anus so anal sex didn’t hurt so much. It was actually a thing for me for years. I didn’t manage to successfully have anal sex until Noah. (Violent sodomy as a small child doesn’t count. No, I didn’t relax enough to make it hurt less then either.) He was the first person who could work through that fear. A number of people tried before then. It always hurt too much and the hysterical crying freaked people out.

I felt specifically bad and like a failure because I was not able to have anal sex with the people who wanted to before Noah. I have had a lot of intense feelings of lack of worth because I was not able to do what people wanted. I was supposed to.

My sister is probably really who taught me this. I think she was the main consistent source of this. She talked about sex all the time and had sex in front of me and consciously and deliberately told me what I should go do.

I can’t play the game any more. She’s not ok. And my children do not deserve to be exposed to her.

But I’m losing out on cousins who fix my cars. And cousins who know how to help with plumbing. And all the free babysitting I want. And holidays full of people. And a niece and nephew who really need my help.

I can’t play the game any more. I’m not at the bottom of the shit hill any more and I won’t allow them to set the terms of reality. I just can’t. But it is hard.

You know how I moved around a lot as a kid? I was often staying with relatives. I didn’t know them well and I didn’t stay long so I never got to know them… but they took me in. Over and over. My family takes care of children. They would have been very happy to know my children.

But it’s a trap. It’s all or nothing. You have to play the game and keep the silence or you are out.

I’m out.

The social mask

7 Replies

In the past three weeks I have had three people comment on the difference between what I write and what they see when we are together. That makes it something worth writing about.

Of course there is a difference in how I act in public and the crazy shit I write about. If I acted in public the way I write about on my journal I would be in a lot of danger. If I was unable to mask my craziness it would be extremely unsafe for me to go out in public. I would risk being 5150’ed again. I never want to go to a hospital again. I can’t lose it where anyone can see.

If you look at the whiteboard in my room there is a lot written down but if you notice very little of it is outside my house and even less than that is any kind of social activity. I generally keep my “socializing” to under twenty hours in a week and most weeks I’m under eight hours.

That is how much “playing the game” I can do right now.

On the occasional week when I try to push it and do more because that week just happens to be busy I am usually sorry. I will have to spend a lot of time in the bathroom crying for all the hours over my “maximum” I am actually out. It is embarrassing and humiliating and I feel ashamed of myself the whole time.

Being around people involves a lot of active and conscious thinking about “what I am allowed to say”. The consequences for getting it wrong include being asked to leave, being asked to never come back, or if I genuinely lose it and start freaking out I may lose my kids or get arrested.

I’m not exaggerating and I’m not wrong.

I’m aware of how “hysterical” women have been treated throughout history. I have done a lot of specific research. In olden times I may have had to walk around with my tongue in a heavy vice for days or had to wear a collar with spikes on the inside while tied to a post in public so other people could remind me how bad I was.

The consequences in the modern area are downright soft and fuzzy in comparison–I get that. Nevertheless I don’t want them.

I don’t want them. I don’t want them. I don’t want them.

I’m awake in the middle of the night because my stomach is hurting because I didn’t smoke before bed. By 2:30 my stomach hurts and I can’t sleep through it. Then I start having racing thoughts because that is just what I do when I am in pain. Then I risk being a mess tomorrow. Lots of breakthrough crying.

My kids know I cry. I can’t hide it from them. I try my best to present it as, “Everyone is different. I cry a lot–most people don’t. That’s ok. People vary.” They are still young enough that they don’t really ask questions about why.

Noah deals with/occasionally sees me crying as I’m going about my day. I wander around working and crying at the same time. That’s just life for me.

Yes, I believe this is something that I have to carefully keep people from seeing. This is probably, by hour, the biggest part of my life and I have to make sure no one else sees it happening. Or I will get in trouble for being bad again.

The fact that I wander through life feeling very sad and crying for many hours of most days is something I have to carefully hide and prevent people from seeing or I get in trouble. Over and over and over.

It’s not hyperbole. I can tell stories all day and all night long.

I’m at a very low ebb on my ability to “play the game” with other people because I require so much of myself for my interactions with my kids.

My kids know I cry. They know that I have wonky chemicals in my brain that make me prone to have my eyes just start watering and it’s not a big deal and they know that sometimes I think about things that happened long ago and it was bad and I’m really glad that my life is different now and I’m so glad that I know my kids. They know that they are nicer to me than anyone has ever been and that I am grateful.

Well, so far Shanna parrots these things back. I say “them” but I am still working on brainwashing Calli but Shanna is pretty ingrained at this point.

I feel really stupid sometimes but when I am saying in a calm and clear voice, “It’s ok to be mad at me. I do things you don’t like. You are totally allowed to have those feelings but it is not ok to call me names and it is not ok to scream at me. Try again.” I still have tears running down my face. I can keep control of my voice at this point–it is great effort but I can prevent myself from descending into the ragged sobbing sort of breathing that makes talking hard. I sound “like a teacher should” but my eyes are watering.

I feel weird knowing that my children are going to grow up thinking that your mom crying all the time is normal and something to ignore. I feel very ashamed of myself. I feel like I am proving those people right who told me that I should not be a mother because someone like me isn’t capable of being a good mother.

I’m not selfless enough? I don’t have enough self control? For the past couple of years of “bad cycle” which probably actually started as postpartum depression after Calli was born combined with Shanna hitting the age I was when my abuse started so I started having daily intrusive flashbacks.

That was not long after Traci–my therapist of seven years–OD’ed on heroin and I ended up finding Sharon who totally sucked and tried to talk me into believing that I had Disassociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personalities) because of how I segment my behavior when I am around people.

I don’t think I really took the placenta pills as long with Calli. I stopped taking fish oil. I haven’t started again even though I know it is a mood stabilizer. I have other supplements my therapist wants me to start and when I think of the act of swallowing pills I start to gag and my stomach aches just thinking about it.

By the end of the time I was taking all the god damn supplements my midwife wanted me on (15 fucking pills a day) I was frequently spontaneously vomiting them up.

My body knows that when I take a lot of pills it is because I want to die. That is what my body thinks is happening because I was dumb enough to treat my body disrespectfully enough that it doesn’t trust my intentions anymore. Smart body.

I really am not so good at taking pills. And the idea that I should take a handful or so every day for the rest of my life is something that I don’t think I can get my gag reflex to move past.

Even though everyone keeps telling me that if I only swallow this pill my life will be magically better. It hasn’t worked any other fucking time I’ve tried some fucking magic pill. I’m still me. I’m still completely broken. I still don’t have a family or very much consistent support–I am building it. I’m trying. But it is dependent on having people in my life who actually show up to do it. I don’t have many people volunteering for that role and of the people volunteering I have to evaluate for them if they really have enough spoons to be dependable *for me* because I am a god damn special snowflake with standards through the roof.

If I know I will have an out of proportion negative reaction to someone acting how they typically act I need to be very careful how much time I spend around them. It is not their fucking problem I’m crazy and that I have had “bad life experiences” that cause me to want to yell at them. If I can’t be tactful (otherwise known as keep my fucking mouth shut or on trivial topics) then I can’t be around people. I silently back away from most relationships because I don’t think I have the right to hurt people by being mad at them for being them.

I don’t know how to reconcile the fact that it isn’t that I actually think they are wrong it’s that it is very hard for me to keep straight in my head what kind of commentary is appropriate in which settings. I’ve been introduced to a much larger number of social situations than most people. I have moved somewhere between 60 and 70 times in my life. Each of those times involved meeting somewhere between five and hundreds of new people all in a big rush. I have lived at every socio-economic level from the projects to multi-million dollar homes and I went to school with Steve Wozniac’s kid. His son was best friends with the brother of the girl I was best friends with. Many of my friends had server space hosted by Woz because that’s just how things worked. That’s where I lived.

I could pull out my sock puppet prime minister (it’s a long story–maybe I will tell it some day) and name drop all the long list of two degrees of separation I have with “important” people.

So uhm yeah. I walk through life feeling like I am the lowest status person in every single room I walk into. I assume that if I say the wrong thing and offend the wrong person (and I have no god damn idea who the “important” people are–I constantly fuck that up) I will be told to leave and all of a sudden there will be a tidal wave of nasty gossip about me behind my back.

How many illustrative stories do I need to have? I could start with less than two years ago and move backwards over thirty years and have many dozens.

Being the scapegoat is hard. I have a lot of behavior patterns that get me into trouble. I don’t understand exactly how they work. I don’t understand why I am so god damn offensive to people but I am.

I tend to go through life believing that people who are still here are the ones around whom I have been most successful at wearing the right mask. I look for signs that I am breaking their social contract and I try very hard to apologize for fucking up before they have to call me on it because I don’t want to be rejected just because I said or did something that was inappropriate for someone in that kind of relationship.

I hyperventilate over this and hyper-analyze every thing I say or do after the fact and try to look for reasons I might have crossed a line and pro-actively send an apology. I really can’t handle losing many more friends. It devastates me so much.

Oh for the love of toast of course I hide “what I am really like”. I am unpleasant and needy. No one likes people like that. I really can’t handle having more people decide they don’t like me en masse. So I need to be god damn careful about everything I say and do.

After smoking for half an hour I think that the stomach pain has changed enough that I can try eating and see if that will help.

I have been trying to track my marijuana usage more. Why am I using it. When. What, specifically, is it doing for me that I need? Mostly it is the end of the year and I am freaking out about how much I spent (I used edibles basically exclusively for about two months while I was training for the marathon to clear some of the lung funk–yes smoking is disgusting and I would like to stop–and those two months cost as much as the whole rest of the year combined and gosh it sounds like way too much money for any medication and… accompanying shame cycle.) thus I am beating myself up about how much I need to stop using it.

If I’m going to damn myself it will at least be with accurate data.

I go through ~ 1/8 of pot/week. I wake up earlier than everyone in my family and I have some then. It calms my stomach pain enough for me to eat. On days when I don’t smoke before breakfast (often out of impulses of shame because I am a disgusting person for needing a “drug” I should just “willpower” my way through after all) I generally am unable to eat because the stomach pain is such that I have constant nausea and I have a ridiculously strong gag reflex. If I try to eat I have a lot of violent stomach pain because my stomach is not fucking interested in accepting food.

If I am in a restaurant this is when I have to get up and leave the table. I either go to the restroom or I go outside because I need to cry. I need to cry because it hurts and because I am ashamed of myself for crying in public just for something stupid that someone else would be able to hide. I know I am not exhibiting the proper social behavior and if I keep that shit up in public I will be fucking sorry.

At home that is when I say in a small voice, “Excuse me” and I go smoke enough to relax my nausea and deal with my gag reflex. I usually feel better after eating. But I am also still stoned after eating. So who the heck knows exactly where the better comes from. But on days when I don’t smoke I probably don’t consume a full meal worth of food in a day. I physically can’t. It hurts too much.

So a year ago when I went to the doctor I layed out all my issues and I was told she wouldn’t deal with my stomach until I dealt with psychiatry and psychiatry told me to take a pill I didn’t want to take, stop breastfeeding instantly (because this new magic pill is extremely toxic to me and the baby), and stop pot instantly or psychiatry would not work with me.

Uhm. No. Fuck you. I know what those side effects will do to my life. They will make it so I can no longer play the game when I have to because I will be debilitated by the side effects. I have watched this effect cascade with person after person in my life. No. No. No.

I will not work with a fucking doctor who spends five minutes talking to me and then wants to prescribe a medication that will destroy every coping method I have and tell me that I just have to “deal with it” while smirking at me. That is demeaning. You have studied what trauma does to the brain? Well so have I, motherfucker. You have not done a single fucking blood test. You have not done a brain scan. You have not taken a full medical history to find out how bad the side effects have been every time I have been forced onto a drug “for my own good” and how often that has lead to significant public blow ups and more trauma.

You don’t give a shit. It shows on the fucking smirk on your face. I don’t fit into your mold of a good person so you want to drug me into a stupor so that I stop doing what I am doing and blindly do what you say. No. You don’t know what I have to react to or why.

Fuck you. You want me dead. I can’t come to any other conclusion and continue to survive.

It took twenty-five minutes (I’m uhm babbling paragraphs in between random distractions else-net Oooh shiny! That’s a lot of why it sounds so incoherent and random-ha.) but I finished a piece of string cheese. Minimal gagging but I haven’t been able to eat any nuts yet. And my graham cracker is untouched.

We will have new insurance cards soon. I promise that as soon as I can log into the new insurance system I will make an appointment. I promise me.

An awful lot of why I am smoking the pot is to deal with my massive stomach pain. I feel very scared because if I reveal that there is an anxiety portion to the pain I risk not being treated again but if I don’t tell the doctor that I may not get appropriate treatment.

I feel like I am in a bind and there is no way for me to get out of it. I have to just throw a dart at a dart board and pray that I get a doctor who will want to help me without requiring that I instantly trust them enough to send my entire life headlong. No one deserves that kind of trust from me. Give me a fucking break.

I know that my intense fear of having to deal with a doctor for this is making the pain escalate unbearably. I understand that link. I understand that for most of the year the pain has stayed at a consistent 1-3 with spikes up to 5 or so when I try to eat without smoking but since I have been actively been thinking about the fact that I have to deal with this soon the pain has been spiking to 8 and 9 and causing me to nearly vomit spontaneously in public–which is kind of embarrassing. And shame producing. Knowing that my body may betray me at any moment and make me a public spectacle makes me feel constantly ashamed of existing. I should just fucking die so that I don’t have to go around inconveniencing people all the time.

When I vomited on the floor of the hospital when I was twelve, when I was waiting in the lobby to get a cast on my broken arm, my mom grabbed me, hit me and hissed: “You just did that to get attention.”

Over and over I sobbed “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.“

The nurse tried to tell me it would be ok but I couldn’t stop crying.

When I go out in public I generally did not smoke because I don’t do so before driving. Which means I have to get through breakfast without smoking if I want to go to the park. I generally don’t eat much or sleep properly the night before with anxiety about the spike in stomach pain and the increased difficulty in being patient with the kids.

That’s a lot of why I limit excursions out of the house. Those days are ridiculously hard on my body. When people come to me I evaluate how offended they will be if I am stoned and I try to uhm match expected tolerance because generally what I think other people will be ok with is lower than what I actually usually use.

This is the big problem with using any medication so sporadically. The effects are needed when dosage isn’t present. I have many days where I wake up and I let the negative thoughts get too entrenched before I start smoking (it is an unpleasant process and I don’t enjoy it and I don’t like being “the kind of person who smokes pot” and and and) so often I have to kind of psyche myself up first and bribe myself with the idea of being in a more pleasant mood.

The amount of conscious dealing with shame I do every day is really hard. I have to consciously deal with it or I will not eat and not sleep and get weak to the point where I am not physically able to complete my chores without slowly dragging chairs all over the house so that I can move from chair to chair to finish my cleaning.

Because I am that compulsive and crazy. I have to “appear” functional. I “have to” maintain certain appearances or I risk terrible consequences. I don’t know exactly what they will be or from whom. Sure as the sun will rise I will have someone else in my life whom I trust a great deal turn around and tell me that I am abusive and terrible and they are disgusted by me. It is going to happen again and again because that is something that people just feel free to say to me.

That is part of what I mean when I say that I am the lowest status person in every room I walk into. I am a white trash whore and I can never undo that. In any room I walk in to someone may decide to go off on me. It happens when I happen to say something I shouldn’t say.

Usually that means I answer a question honestly. People ask a wide variety of questions in the casual chit chat process that if I answer honestly the person will respond with horror and disgust and move away from me exhibiting great hostility. I have to guess which lies to tell and when.

When my mask is slipping, like it was this weekend, I went to a friends baby shower. Want to know my connection to the group? I knew the host from working together (where deliberately obscured) and the party was at the house of someone she has known since middle school–they were both around our mutual place of employment. I went out with both of them like twice. I uhh begged to eat out my friend’s friend. She let me. Then never talked to me again.

Till I walked into her house this weekend and she didn’t remember me even slightly (or at least gave no sign of remembering me–she certainly didn’t know my name).

This uhm, happens to me pretty regularly. I’m very careful what questions I answer when I talk to people in general. I uhm was kind of stupid.

So the father of the host (he has known the mom-to-be since she was a kid, remember) was chatting me up and he told me that his wife wrote a book but she is afraid to publish it. I uhm wasn’t thinking so I said, “I actually wrote a book and self published. If you look at places like Amazon publishing or there is a wide variety of competing models you can be e-published for practically nothing and you can get books in print and deal with hawking them at book stores yourself for fairly little money. That is how publishing often works, actually.”

So then he asked me about my book. He had to prod me more than once. “Oh you wrote a book? I bet it’s a lovey dovey romance isn’t it? I bet it’s all cutesy schmoopsy and adorable right?” heh heh.

Cue my not amused face.

“No, actually it’s a memoir about the first eighteen years of my life.”

*snicker* “No eighteen year old has done anything worth writing about.”

By that point in the conversation my heart was racing and I was breathing fast and I could feel the flush rising. I had been kind of avoiding eye contact. Then I looked straight at him and said, “Well I I was moved more than fifty times, I was homeless, I stole to eat, I went to twenty-five schools in diverse combinations of socio-economic levels and race: everything from the projects to graduating high school in Los Gatos after only going to that school for my sophomore year and only three semesters of high school total. (said to someone whose kid went to one of the worst schools in the east side of San Jose [these two places are right next to each other and Los Gatos is where all the rich people live]) I was raped or sexually assaulted dozens of times over more than twenty years, including my father and my brother extensively abusing me, along with a bunch of random neighbors. I self-mutilated for decades as part of how I dealt with what was going on with me and every mental health professional I have worked with has been freaked out by the variety and range of trauma I have been through.

I had enough happen to me to justify a book.”

At this point picture him kind of mouth agape blinking kind of fast. “Oh uhm. Wow. Yes. You would have enough to write about.”

We didn’t really talk after that.

I let my mask slip. I did not tightly contain my answer enough. I wasn’t appropriate enough. Mostly because I didn’t give a shit. I will probably never see this man again. My connection to him is tenuous enough that I just don’t have to fucking care if he thinks I am awful for unloading on him like that. (You wouldn’t fucking believe how often people screamed at me for uttering even four sentences of the above paragraph in a challenging voice. I should not be speaking. Shut up. I don’t have the right to make people think about unpleasant things.)

The conclusion I draw from this is I shouldn’t exist. Or I should simper and play stupid and lie and answer questions in evasive ways and for the love of crisco stop writing and talking about this shit.

So I do my very best to force my lips to be literally closed for as much of the time I am with other people as I can. I end every social interaction with sores on the inside of my mouth from chewing it so hard to keep from saying anything that might be inappropriate.

Yes. It is enormous physical strain.

I can’t tell how these descriptive/prescriptive things work about labels. People tell me that I should eschew thinking of myself as bad and stop thinking about my behavior as bad. But I regularly get into trouble I don’t want to be in because I don’t have appropriate filters. Bullshit I’m not bad. I’m punished for being bad often enough that it seems imprudent for me to stop trying to filter.

I want to be a nice person. I really fucking do. I am tired of being told I am not wanted and being abandoned. I am tired of people kicking me really hard and feeling free to tell me that I am a disgusting piece of shit but they still love me and if I start jumping through x, y, and z hoops then they might be able to have a relationship with me or help me. But not until I jump through all those hoops without support. If I don’t do that first I won’t be able to prove that I deserve them bothering to waste time and energy on me.

I uhm can’t bend to whims like that. I have to live in my body 24/7 and deal with the consequences. I have a very tightly controlled life that I can manage because I limit it so severely.

But when I say, “I stay home” I don’t mean that I hide in bed crying all day. I mean that my kids and I play in the yards and garden and walk for miles around our neighborhood when I stay regularly medicated thus I can sleep and eat in a way that allows me to be physically able to.

Since the marathon I have been fucking around with almost not using pot to see how this works for me. It’s going really badly. I need to see a doctor.

The reason I don’t just “get a vaporizer” to try it is because when I spend money on something believing that it is unlikely to solve my problem and it is money I don’t want to spend… it’s kind of doomed before I start. I can’t be on marijuana forever. I do have to figure out how to live life without it in order to do the things I want to do.

But what does that even mean? Part of it is that my stomach god damn hurts and I have to heavily medicate in order to deal with the pain and nausea in order to eat and sleep like a “normal” person and have any appearance of functionality.

Being in pain actively triggers my PTSD symptoms and causes flashbacks because I have such a long history of being in pain and that being something I am not allowed to talk about or deal with because “You aren’t really in pain–you are just a whiny hypochondriac.”

My mother screamed at me and threatened me that “my arm had better fucking be broken or she would break it herself” because I asked her to leave work early and come home (I was 12 and alone all day every day because I was on year round school and had no friends or family) to take me to the hospital. It was broken.

Something is wrong in my body. Something that I can’t fix. Something that I am self medicating (said with substantial scorn and derision) to deal with because doctors have actively told me they will not provide service until I jump through hoops I can’t jump through.

I can’t abruptly switch psych meds right now because I have no reliable help with my children. When I go through med rounds the side effects make me extremely unpredictable and historically very violent and my self-harming goes through the roof and my ability to function completely disintegrates and I spend hours every day literally hiding either in closets or under beds because I want to kill myself so much.

I literally cannot do that to my kids. There are reasons I’m not on psych meds. If someone bothered to ask me what those reasons were I would be happy to explain and I am willing to bet a compassionate doctor would hear my history and agree that it probably isn’t the best idea to try to force me to take a psych med as step one of any and all physical care.

That is not a way to establish trust because my behavior will abruptly be destroyed and out of control and erratic and I will completely associate it with my relationship with that doctor and have to stop association because I can’t continue to listen to the advice of someone who is going to force me to go through that given that I don’t have the fucking resources to deal with dropping the ball on the ways I am currently functional.

It feels humiliating. But that is the reality of my life right now. I stay home so that I can always handle talking to my kids in the tone of voice I want them to talk to me. I have to keep my physical stress levels down enough to not freak out when we are in an environment where I have less control.

Watch me at parties. If I stay seated the whole time I have a much better chance of being able to have conversations because being there makes me physically weak because of the strain on my body of having to be hyperaware to such a level. If it is a stand-and-mingle sort of party I am going to spend a lot of time walking in and out of the room because I have to go find somewhere to sit down and sob hysterically because standing in that room and trying to talk to people hurts my body so much.

No, this isn’t something that is obvious to people around me. If I was visibly contorting with pain people wouldn’t talk to me. If I said anything other than “Oh I’m fine” “Great!” when people ask me “How are you?” then they won’t ask me any more. And they won’t talk to me about anything else either. They try to keep a wide distance between them and me because I have revealed that I have needs and they are very fucking sure that isn’t their problem and they don’t want to get involved. That’s a direct quote. I get told that a lot. “I’m sorry. You have a lot of needs and I don’t want to get involved.”

Uhm, I didn’t ask you to do anything. I don’t fucking ask people to meet my needs. I can ask for help with wants–I have to be very ok with hearing “no” or with the fact that there is a better than 50/50 chance that I will be stood up because that is just my historical percentage. Because if I ask someone for help with a need all hell breaks loose when they let me down. My relationships don’t last through me asking things of people other than the pleasure of their company on sporadic occasions. I am doing my very best to ensure that I understand my place and stop fucking up this boundary.

Having this sort of level of need as a background thead in my life why won’t anyone help me means that I don’t understand how hard it is for people to meet my needs. I am not good at understanding the limits of how I should ask for things. When I ask for actual needs to be met I have to understand that the person may just not show up or may not feel like it any more once the time comes or have some emergency in their life that is more important than me so I have to suddenly scramble for how to figure things out at the last second without the normal planning time I give myself. It feels very unfair at the time I’ll tell you.

I go through life knowing that I am “not rational” and I am “over-sensitive” thus pretty much no one needs to give a shit what I think or feel because I’m a piece of shit.

No, I do not act in public like I have the thoughts I have. It would be incredibly dangerous. It’s not hyperbole; it is simply true.

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Category Archives: the shame factory

high anxiety

Piercing the veil.

end of the day

Text has no tone.

Just a whiny night I guess.

Run, you fools.

more questions

Get over yourself.

Offensive

Can I get off this roller coaster?

Today is bad.

Post-EMDR: birthday edition

Suicidal ideation

Do something different

Have to think about the quota

The loyalty trap

The social mask