Category Archives: the shame factory

sick = suicidal, apparently.

I hate being sick. At this point I am well past “too weak and dizzy to stand” but eating is still a problem. I ate ground beef and vegetable matter last night for dinner. I had to go to the restroom three times last night and cry as I paid for the hubris of believing I am able to digest roughage. Noah made oatmeal for breakfast. I ate five bites before my stomach is cramping and horribly painful. I’ve been crying a bunch.

I feel like crying just because my body is functioning in annoying ways means I am weak and pathetic. Just shut up Krissy. Everyone gets sick. Quit being such a fucking pussy.

I don’t talk to anyone else the way I talk to me. This is probably a good thing.

Yesterday I managed to end up in a conversation with a woman who has been raped by the same people. Awkward. I feel terrible guilt for not supporting her more when she pressed charges against one of the guys. I was post-Puppy depressed and not functioning. I had not yet been sexually assaulted by that guy. At that point my basic understanding of the situation was, “Oh man signals got horribly crossed and she feels very hurt.” Then he did the same thing to me. I tried to “fix it” and make sure my signals weren’t coming across wrong. Actually, he just didn’t care whether we were clear or not. He wanted what he wanted.

But what were we drinking. What were we wearing. How did we lead him on? She said she had depositions from ten other women he has raped but a woman in the bdsm community went to the police and discredited her by telling them that the rape-victim was a slut who must have asked for it.

That’s what happens when you are stupid enough to go to the police after being raped in my community. The other women will ensure that you can’t have justice because involving the police will create drama.

I spend so much time believing that the only thing I can do to prevent myself or my daughters from being raped is to drive off a cliff with them in the car. I don’t actually intend to do it. But it breaks my heart that my girls will almost certainly be raped at some point. That just happens. And there is nothing I can do about it.

I feel terrible that I made little girls for this world. I could have created boys who were not rapists. But instead I bore little victims-to-be. I am going to put them in martial arts and have them learn how to operate every weapon we can get our hands on. I want them to be able to severely harm any guy who tries something.

Yes, yes women rape too. I know this. With a woman it is usually more about coercion. I think I can train girls who can resist coercion. I worry about them being small and delicate. They are so thin and frail seeming to me.

I keep them safe because I ensure that they have no contact with the world that does not involve me standing there and watching. Ok, sometimes I delegate to Noah and the Godmamas. And we’ve had other babysitters. Not in a long time. Not since the Godmamas stepped up. I figure if I get one weekend a month that has to be good enough. I don’t really have anyone else dependable and trustworthy enough. I don’t want them to get used to a string of random babysitters. The people who claimed they would be here are liars. I need to stop listening to what people say at all. Actions speak quite loudly.

My kids will bloody be kept safe. If I have to kill someone to do it. I hope it never comes to that. We stay home a lot in order to lower the chances it will happen soon.

When I am sick I feel pathetic and helpless and weak. I am reminded that I can do so little. I can’t keep people safe. I can’t protect anyone–not even me.

Someone I haven’t talked to in years asked me how I have been. I said, “Well most of the past three years has been a series of mental breakdowns as I deal with being raped a lot. I wasn’t allowed to deal with it when it happened and I’ve stuffed it for decades and now it is completely overwhelming me. If I didn’t have kids I would be dead. If I didn’t have kids it would not be worth dealing with any of this.”

My male friends alternate between telling me that “it doesn’t matter if it is illegal it will never be prosecuted” and “I won’t take your rape seriously unless you prosecute.” I want to jump off a very tall bridge. I want to jump off a building. Since I matter so little I want to cease to be.

Better that ten guilty men go free than one innocent man go to prison. Better that tens of thousands of worthless whores be raped than one innocent man suffer.

I want to die. I want to die so much I feel like I am drowning. I don’t matter. I am a worthless whore. My government tells me so. My community tells me so.

“I’m not going to ruin that nice boy’s career for you.” “You must have wanted it.” “Well what position were you in that made these boys think it was ok?”

I existed. I’m sorry I was so stupid. I would like to change it.

But I have these kids. These little rape-victims to be. I hope not. I hope that they will inherit the status of their father and be safe. I inherited my father’s status. I am nothing. I have no worth. No value. There is nothing about me that is worth defending.

No one wants to defend me. They just think I deserve what I get.

I want to die so much.

Don’t make someone a priority while you are their option.

4 Replies

I’m really upset about these no-shows. I was already heading in the direction of feeling depressed and having two women who loudly and adamantly have told me they are my “family” behave this way convinces me that I must be a worthless piece of shit. Even my god damn chosen family just won’t bother to think of me. I’m feeling bitter. I try really hard for my friends. I go to great lengths and deal with inconvenience to spend time with them.

I’m feeling bitter and thin and unimportant. I don’t know if this obsession with BFFs is an American thing alone or if it is normal and natural to ache for people who value you this way. I think that is what the BFF thing is about. The longing for someone to really understand you and value you and love you and think you are important. I wish I had that. Instead I get to be an audience member. I get to be an adoring fan. Friendships aren’t based on me supporting your art while you sleep through visits where you might find out something real about my life. Obviously my life isn’t that interesting to you. I understand.

I wish people would stop lying to me. I wish people would stop telling me I am important when I am obviously and demonstrably not. The continual let down hurts so much. Just be honest. You will spend time with me if you can’t find anything better to do. You will spend time with me if you have managed to successfully straighten your stereo wires in time so you are truly bored so why not.

I have Noah. I have the girls. Those are the people I can count on. That’s the list. And I shouldn’t expect too much from my kids. I can’t talk to them about being upset. That’s inappropriate. They don’t need to know why I am crying today. “Because my “friends” are assholes who don’t actually care about me and it hurts my feelings.” I can’t say that to her. So instead I think I’ll just not leave the house this week. Bad things tend to go in threes. I just won’t make more plans. I don’t really want to be ditched again. I am so god damn tired of this being ditched shit. Echoes of my childhood go through my head.

Stupid girl. Why would anyone want to be your friend. Go away. No one likes you anyway. Pissy Krissy always whining about how people aren’t nice to you. Who would want to be nice to you anyway.

I was angry. I was angry because people hit me and raped me and called me names. So I don’t deserve friends because I am too angry and difficult. It doesn’t end at adulthood.

I have spent some time in the last few days on the friend with a close friend’s wife. I don’t know her that well but she is suicidal and I have time during the day to be on the phone and a fairly deep understanding of what it means to want to kill yourself. I have been trying to help her get through the worst of the impulses. Today will end. The intensity of this desire will fade. Let’s just trust the process. You feel this way sometimes. These feelings will end. The only constant part of life is change.

It feels kind of odd to be trying so hard to convince someone else of her worth when I don’t believe much about my own worth. I want her to have what I can’t have. I can’t feel good about myself. What the fuck is there to feel good about? I feel so very unimportant and stupid and stagnant and worthless.

I had kids because I needed to have someone who actually needed me in order to give myself a pass on suicide. I’m fucking needed. I don’t know what to tell a childless person. I don’t know what to tell someone who wanted kids and couldn’t have them. I thank the G-d I barely believe in for my children every day because I’m not sure I would be here without them. How can someone go find the same kind of meaning in another way? People do it. Not everyone has to breed in order to be important. But I wasn’t clever enough to find a way to feel like I mattered.

I survived because I used a long list of bad coping methods that got me through that day. I have spent most of my life worried about getting through today. I have plans, sure. The long-term plans help me find a way to structure my day.

In between conversations with her I am trying to figure out how I am going to explain this in the group. How am I going to talk about all the Craigslist Casual Encounter people I found just because I needed to not be alone. If I was alone I felt like I wouldn’t make it through that night. So I found people however I could. Most of society tells me I should be ashamed of myself. I am a disgusting whore for having sex with so many people. I have had a lot of sex with people I have never seen again. I don’t need to be in love with someone to have sex. I just need to feel desperate.

I will admit it is a bit awkward to me how many people Noah has worked with over the years who are part of my body count. I have gotten to know the men in this valley. The Christmas party last year was festive. Body Count Person’s wife was introduced to me and told euphemistically that I was uhhh someone he uhhh knew. She put it together and made some comment about his wild days. It wasn’t entirely approving so I did my best to become invisible. Good women don’t generally want to have their noses rubbed in the behavior of the filthy whores.

Today I feel convinced that the only use I have is child minder. I’m glad I have that. It’s something. I won’t always feel this way. But I think I’m going to stay home for a week or two. I don’t need to open myself up to more rejection right now. If you can’t handle dealing with what you might get, don’t ask for anything. If you can’t handle being told no or having people just not show up out of the blue don’t make plans. I don’t need anything else making me cry right now. It’s kind of embarrassing. It’s awkward to explain to the kids.

I should rest. I’m sick and I have to run twenty four miles this week. Maybe I can tell myself that my lack of social life is me preparing properly for the marathon. I keep doing things with friends that make training harder.

Like staying out very late with that friend who no-showed on me. That fucked up my running for the weekend quite a bit. I’m three miles down with some nasty blisters because I accommodated her schedule. Oh well! Apparently I am giving people too much of myself because I am doing it with the belief that I will get something back. When the something back fails I feel this enormous cavern of need. Because I was doing a trade not a gift. I don’t have enough spare to gift right now. So I should stay home and stop dealing with people for a while. I don’t have enough going spare to give without expectations so I shouldn’t give at all.

It hurts. I feel humiliated that at this point in time I should stay home and focus on the kids because otherwise the kids have to deal with me crying for hours during the day. They have to deal with me being impatient and inflexible. They have to deal with me not wanting them to help. They have to deal with me being upset.

Those people who are upsetting me don’t have to deal with my upset. They get to go back to their lives and not give a shit. My kids are the losers. That strikes me as unfair. I feel guilty because I want to do the Slow Fade out of most peoples lives because I just can’t handle the losing-trade of our friendship anymore. I don’t have anything left to give them. I’m out. That bucket is fucking empty and is currently being used to beat me on the head as folks look for more water. There is no more god damn water.

I keep thinking about a character sketch about a woman who isn’t much like me but whom I can understand. I have spent most of my life worried about inconveniencing or hurting other people. What would it be like to truly not care?

I have three people in this world I need to worry about. No one else is interested in a truly reciprocal relationship about needs. That’s ok. But I shouldn’t act like anyone else is a priority. They aren’t. I need to not be supportive and not feel guilty. You betcha. I’m not going to support you any more. You don’t fucking support me and I don’t have shit to give any more.

I think this is what self-care is?

There are a couple of people who come to my house to see me. I need to stop trying to expand the circle. It’s not worth it. I have exactly two people who make an effort to see me every month. That’s a lot better than zero, right? They don’t bullshit me or call me family. They don’t ask much of me. They just come hang out and watch my life for a few hours. They don’t add work or effort. It’s not an intense kind of support. But it’s nice. It feels settled and appropriate. They aren’t trying to be my BFF. They are trying to be part of a community. It is a relationship with more distance because they only give me what they have going spare and it’s not a lot. It’s ok that I don’t give them much.

I feel sad and scared and alone. I feel unimportant and invisible.

The thing is, a lot of people have affectionate feelings toward me. They just don’t have any way of meeting my needs. It’s not their fault. It’s not my fault. But it is. It’s real. I have no choice but to figure out how to get by without those supposed needs being met or I need to meet them myself. What is a true need?

I need to eat. I seriously need to knock it off with the sugar. I need sleep. I need to start going to bed at a consistent time again. I need to be kind to my family because they are kind to me. That means I need to limit stress.

I think today will move very slowly.

Perspective

1 Reply

I’m thinking quite hard about about the different kinds of bdsm play I have engaged in. It seems somehow important. Who did I play with and how? Was heavier play a sign of greater trust or greater stupidity? I’m not sure.

It feels weird to talk about being a masochist. Mostly it hasn’t been part of my life since having kids so I haven’t thought about it much in years. Except that I’m starting to feel that itch. Part of why I picked Noah as a partner is the way he reacts to that itch. I like the way his reactions make me feel. When I want him to hurt me he gets excited. Visibly excited. Nearly trembling with excitement. I like that I can make him feel that way just by saying yes. Ok, I usually say a lot more than that. I’m kind of a talker.

I don’t think I would be able to come up with an accurate list of “everyone I have played with”. I think of different event spaces as my way of trying to come up with memories and it isn’t a fool-proof system. It’s easy for me to forget. I remember some more than others.

The night before Dore Alley in 2000. I hadn’t “met” anyone from the scene yet. I hadn’t been to a munch yet. An old guy from match.com sent me to the Power Exchange. He gave me an address and told me to go. He didn’t explain what I would find. Technically he sent me two weeks before Dore Alley. I was a towel girl with my sister. I was afraid to go alone. She was freaked out. I came back the next week by myself. A gorgeous trans woman picked me out of the crowd and beat me. It was my first flogging. I don’t really like being flogged. But it was intense. It was my first experience. I’m grateful. I had to top it off by finding one of the PE employees and expressing my interest bluntly. He pulled me into the laundry room and fucked me there. He wasn’t supposed to have sex during his shift. Oh well.

It wasn’t my favorite scene ever, but it was my first. It broke the ice. It taught me that there were indeed people who wanted to hit me. It wasn’t my imagination. If I found one person I could find more. The next day I went to Dore Alley and spent time with two lovely queer men I knew through campaigning for Californians for Same Sex Marriage. They took delighted half naked pictures of me at the street fair. I had just pierced my nipples. They wanted to see. Sure, why not?

It isn’t enough for me that I have done these things. That in the privacy of my own mind I can think back on these events. I like talking about them. I don’t like being the only one who knows. When I feel like these stories are only in my head I feel like I should be actively trying to hide them. If people know this about me they won’t respect me any more. They won’t like me.

When I was eighteen I ran to the sex communities as fast as I could. I had sex with just about everyone who was willing to say “yes”. It was awesome. There is power in being a young woman who is willing to say yes. It’s a power I have watched slowly slip through my fingers as the years go by. I appeal to different people now. I don’t know how to approach them. And now it doesn’t matter. I will never go hunting again.

I learned hunting as a skill. I learned how to smell for people who would be interested in me. It’s not just that I break the Embargo left and right it is that the kind of sex I want is not standard issue. And for the love of shiny green apples I wish we could dispel this myth that men want to have a lot of sex and women don’t. It’s horse shit. Some men want a lot of sex. Some women want a lot of sex. And vice versa. Move on. I have ended up with a shockingly high number of partners who were completely uninterested in trying to keep up with my libido. I’m really tired of this myth that men want tons of sex and women turn it down.

When I am thinking about my compulsions fairly clearly I can direct them. I know how to ask for kinds of pain (spankings, canings) that really aren’t going to damage me long term–they don’t carry the inherent risk that cutting has. Cutting myself with a scalpel is far more potentially dangerous. People do slip and cause too much bleeding. Hit the wrong blood line and you are in trouble. I’ve looked into that a bit and I avoid those areas but that isn’t the point.

Somehow using spanking as a means of controlling my paralyzing anxiety seems nearly benign. I asked Noah for a spanking this morning. I don’t feel the strong urge to start the day by smoking pot. My stomach isn’t churning. It relieves a lot of that ache. Forcing myself to go through and experience negative/painful feelings causes a relief from the miasma of crazy that rules my life. I can feel a lot more control over how much I hurt when I decide the causes of pain. When my pain comes from the fact that I’m just plain crazy–it’s been a rough life–I can’t do a lot about that. I feel helpless and scared and trapped. When I am being hurt by a partner as a conscious decision it takes up the same space as my normal crazy and my normal crazy kind of has to back off into a corner and take up less space.

It’s going to be interesting to describe my relationship with Tom. I used him. He didn’t want to understand what I was doing but I had a pretty clear picture of what I was doing. He didn’t want details. I filled my life with externally supplied pain because that allowed me to be much closer to functioning. It couldn’t do all the work. I’m still me.

I would like to move through the world without fear. That sounds trite. I would like to move through the world without feeling heart-pounding-terror that people will hate me. Soon more people will come who hate me. They will hurt me. I am different. I am bad. People like me end up in jail. When will I go there? What will I have done? I don’t know. I feel like I haven’t done anything that bad. That doesn’t always seem to matter.

If I lived in the wrong time and place I would absolutely be locked up for being a sexual deviant. That’s scary. It is weird knowing that I exist at this intersection of privilege and experience. I don’t know what the future will bring. I don’t know what experiences I have yet to come.

I’ll tell you though, I look at Noah and I’m a lot less scared. He is my bulwark. I feel guilty when I think about my history of partnership because I was desperately searching for someone who was not close to their family. I can’t be all that close to someone who has a close relationship with their parents. Steve’s parents hated me and openly attacked me at Christmas dinner. Tom’s parents didn’t like me but weren’t loud or rude about it. Puppy’s parents and siblings openly ridiculed me and laughed.

Noah’s mom hated me when I met her. The first time I met his parents his mom sneered at me that she wanted to have a private conversation with her son and pulled Noah off for a three hour tirade about how awful I was. Noah’s response to this was to stop coming home for holidays. He has only gone back to Texas for his brother’s wedding. He only did that because I pushed him to do it.

I don’t understand why people hate me so much. I know it must be my fault if it happens so often. If the only consistent force in your relationships is you then you must bring the problems, right? Why do so many people feel the urge to berate and belittle me? Why do so many parents feel like they have to tell me how disgusting and bad I am? Steve’s parents told me I was going to ruin his life. That was part of why I ran. I couldn’t live with that. I couldn’t take on the position of whipping girl in a new family. I couldn’t once again be the person whose fault every bad thing was. I just couldn’t.

Noah picked me. Noah didn’t like his family much to start with and he was quite ok with the idea that his path would diverge from theirs. He says their dislike of me isn’t my fault or my problem and I don’t have to deal with it. I feel so guilty about being the reason he doesn’t see his family. To be fair he saw them aout as little as he could get away with before we were together. But now that tolerance has dropped to once every five years. His family has met Shanna once. They haven’t met Calli.

I can’t be in the closet. I can’t keep my mouth shut about who and what I am, about the things I have done. I just can’t. I can’t act like I am ashamed. Silence is consent to the larger social order. I don’t agree with it. I break the rules. I do it loudly and consciously.

For years I have known someone who refers to herself as a sexual outlaw. She did a lot of actual sex work: stripping, phone sex, escorting, being a prodom. I don’t do things for money. I do them because I want to. It’s confusing. I don’t do these things because I need to earn money and I don’t mind doing them. I do them because I can’t not do them. I need them. I want them.

I like stripping. I’ve done it in clubs a few times. I always let the people who are on shift have the money. I like having sex with lots of people. I like cybersex and phone sex. I’ve done them with a myriad of people over the years most of whom I can’t really remember.

What does it mean to be a sexual outlaw? I think I have avoided money partially because I don’t want to deal with the potential legal ramifications. It’s one more thin line I don’t have to skate. My income has been small and traceable my entire life. Well, until marrying Noah. Now “my” income isn’t small. It’s still highly traceable.

I have slept with a number of very inexperienced boys/men. I have done the whole, “I’ll teach you how to do this” thing. It’s quite fun to take very well endowed boys condom shopping. When they discover that there is a variety of sizes and brands to try so that maybe condoms won’t hurt anymore… they light up like a roman candle. You just gave them a present beyond measure.

Sex is a skill like any other. I found out a lot about the variation possible. It was fun. How can I talk about it without sounding like I am still hunting for it?

I’ve been thinking about my Top Five. Why they are there. How I feel about them. How I feel about the fact that there are four men walking around in the world I will have a difficult but not impossible time saying no to. They are the ones who have earned privileges over many years. They are the ones who understand the compulsive hypersexual part of me. They are all compulsively hypersexual as well. That is a lot of why I bonded with them so fiercely. Not very many men understand the degree to which sex has shaped my life. Very few men have enough sex to understand it. Very few men run across women who are willing to have the kind and quantity of sex I have had.

The internet is not providing me the data I want. Stupid internet. All I can find is that most extremely promiscuous women max out around twenty lifetime partners. That makes me giggle. I love how websites say: “Then you find out your 23 year old girlfriend has slept with 17 men and you feel kind of repulsed.” Ha. By 23 I hit triple digits. I’m repulsive. Awesome.

Why does this make me repulsive? I don’t understand. It’s a taboo. I rigorously get STD testing. When I was being rampantly slutty I got tested every three months and I used condoms religiously and I even used dental dams a few times. I never got good at them, but during the really risk-taking stage I tried to figure it out.

I feel defensive and sad. No one is actively judging me this minute (I can believe this because it is early in the morning and normal people are sleeping) so I don’t need to feel these feelings. Sometimes life just works that way.

Compulsions

2 Replies

I’m obsessively staring at my training schedule. I’m scared. This week I run twenty miles for the first time this round. Woof. The peak of training gives me forty miles in a week. I am lovingly and loathingly (yes I know that isn’t a word) noticing that hell week is my birthday week. I turn thirty-one and then immediately have to run forty miles in the five days following. I don’t fuck around.

I’m scared and elated. I’m going to do this. It can be done by a human being therefore it is god damn going to be done by me. I will. I won’t fuck this up. Perseverance is one of my more admirable attributes. Tenacious as a honey badger. I tell myself while running in my “Badass as a Honey Badger” tshirt. I’m the exact opposite of sexy.

I don’t know how to be this person in the world. I don’t know how to be open to people and yet not available. I have committed my life and all that I am elsewhere. How do I have time for other people? You just do. You have to. You have to be part of something bigger. At least I do. I need to have friendships. I’m having trouble keeping my panties on. I have a hard time not sitting on peoples laps. That is how I break the ice. But that’s ice I don’t need to be breaking ever again. Awkward.

There is this reserve developing. Now there are parts of me I will defend with a machete. Off limits. It is scary for me to think about having to say no at some point. I am nervous because I like to stand in places where asking is significantly more friendly than not asking. Most folks go out to hunt. I don’t even know what I’m hunting for.

I want people who want to know my kids. Who want to part of my familial dynamic. Who want to have a real space in my life. Most people fill these roles with family. Most people think of friendships as low stakes. I will always be a low stakes relationship. I will always be who they see when people are “avoiding their family”.

Part of what I have been thinking about while running lately is how it isn’t my fault I don’t have a family. It’s not like I am less deserving than other people. But you roll the dice and you take what you get. There is no deserving in life. I am not physically capable of keeping the silence my family of origin required of me. That just can’t be asked of me. Too late. I’m an evil liar, blah blah, whatever. It doesn’t matter what I deserve. It matters what I can create with my hands and my mind. It matters what effect I have on the world.

When I ask former students what I taught them they say that I taught them to like themselves. That’s a fuck load more than my family did for me. My family taught me that when the men and boys in my family couldn’t find a willing pussy it was my job to lie down and provide.

What can I create? What can I be? What matters? If you can’t be a good example be a horrible warning?

I don’t know. I’m afraid to take pride in anything. I don’t want to develop a weak spot where I can be attacked. I don’t want to feel insecure about someone letting me know that I actually really suck at that thing I think I am good at. I am terrified to build myself up.

I’m well into training for a marathon. I don’t talk about it much in person. I don’t think anyone gives a shit. I think they listen with glazed eyes so I should just shut up and let them tell me what they are doing. That’s all they care about anyway. Why don’t I brag about this? I’m fucking doing it. I’m out running four days a week and stretching and doing strength training. I’m doing it. I’m not going to win speed records and that’s ok! Doing this is a fairly big deal. Why do I minimize this to myself? Why do I act like I’m not doing this good enough? Why do I feel like if I am doing it then it must not be that hard. I’m nothing special. If I can do it then it must not be a big deal. Talking about it is rather fraught, so I don’t.

It’s kind of weird, this being a writer. I have been blogging fairly consistently for nearly nine years. A number of people have read basically all of it. That’s a large body of knowledge about my life. But it was acquired in a room without me in it. There was no shared intimacy. This is very similar to the sexual exhibitionism. I feel like a freak because I can’t talk about a period of my life without talking about how and why my sexuality went through a massive change. And for me that has meant a lot of different partners and different approaches to sex. I understand why my former therapist asked me pointed questions about multiple personalities.

If I make sure people only see me in a certain set of circumstances with a certain environment I can tailor my behavior. I can be appropriate with great effort. If I keep people out at arms length. That’s kind of awkward with this whole out thing. Now I don’t really know what people are thinking about when they look at me. Oh holy fucking shit. For most of my writing life I’ve known the dozen or so people who seriously followed my writing. We had dinner so that I could fill in the bits on the stories I won’t tell in public. I tailor what I share with the world. I feel odd wondering what that actually looks like. How close is it to me?

What is more real, after all? The image that I carefully construct in writing (or rather the image that free form spews out of my brain never to be looked at or thought about again–I couldn’t reread the volume I produce; there isn’t enough time in the day) or how I behave? I’m never really sure. If you are judging me by how I behave then which group of friends will you judge by? I’m very different in different settings.

Compulsive hypersexuality is kind of a funny thing. If I think back I can see parallel lines between when I started smoking pot and when I stopped sleeping around. I guess I traded addictions. I am a very compulsive person. Right now I’m having a hard time with food. I’m having trouble respecting my body’s “full” signal. I’m making myself hurt. And I’m gaining weight… while training for a marathon. I’m eating a lot.

I’m scared because I think I’m getting closer to one of those periods where I feel the need to experience pain. That was how it worked with Tom. That was what our relationship did for me. I stayed with Tom instead of cutting. He was a reliable source of discomfort. He provided the hogties that fueled his masturbatory life and he was willing to play a lot harder to meet my needs. I think I came up with most of our heaviest play. In no way shape or form was I a victim. But I’m very compulsive. And I have a strong disinterest in my continued physical safety. Or had, anyway.

It is weird looking over at Noah. He’s biting his finger nail. He’s the only person I will ever have sex with again. Well, barring early death. If he kicks the bucket I’m not staying celibate for his memory. I’m not that devoted. He wouldn’t either and fair is fair. It’s weird looking at him. I get to sit here and have this intense feeling of power and ownership. He is mine. I don’t have to check his google calendar so I can schedule a date with my husband. I don’t have to know when he is out dating and fill that time carefully in a way I can handle without crying or freaking out. He does go out and do things occasionally, but it is rare. What he is doing with his time is hanging out with his kids and his wife. I feel really special. This really amazing person wants me. He does have kind of a funny hunch back. I guess we truly are perfect for each other. I’m not quite Beauty and he’s not quite the Beast. He’s not all the way to Quasimodo either so he still works for me. Definitely cute enough to be the hero.

While I’m running I’m playing over the years in my head. What am I going to write about? Which relationships are the most important? How can I show the pivotal times and places and people? How am I going to set the different tones of the different parts of my life? How am I going to make it obvious in text that my behavior radically changes based on where I am standing? How do I make an image of me that is real and true?

The first book was what happened to me. A lot of it I couldn’t change. I could have made different decisions, maybe. Whatever. It’s over. What happened when I was an adult is different. I had agency. I made choices. I acted. I wanted. I was compulsive. I learned to manage my compulsions in a variety of ways. What did that trial and error process look like? What bridges did I burn and when and how and why in the process? I’m trying to get my head around the whole story arc and it feels so large. So complex. I feel like a freak as I carefully compare the continuing evolution of my behavior in separate, non-adjacent parts of my life. What did I learn? How did I learn it?

I don’t know. I can’t find an object lesson in my life. I survived. I just did. That was all I did. I can’t make a lesson out of it. Maybe it is closer to a horrible warning. I feel bad about that though. I’m not. I have had a fairly decent adulthood. I want to explain why rape is just such a casual part of my life. I want to really work through all the connections between different parts of myself growing up.

Tom gave me a safe space to grow up. He hurt me when I asked nicely so that I could deal with my urge to self mutilate. After Tom I went on to drugs and a rather indecent amount of casual sex. And graduate school. And teaching. And dancing. More travel.

I’ve done a lot of things. Not all of it has been sex. Yet when I think of myself I see nothing of potential interest outside of sex. That says a lot about my priorities.

I am trying to figure out how to be proud of myself without sounding like I am bragging. I’m not bragging. I’m telling the truth. Sometimes the truth sounds cool and sometimes it sounds fucking embarrassing. Bah humbug. It’s time to go to sleep.

anxiety purge

Leave a reply

Living with Noah has changed how I think about computers. I don’t think of them as magic anymore. I think about them as the result of a large set of mathematical equations. I’m getting closer and closer to being interested in thinking about that. Right now my brain is pretty full.

I’ve been thinking about what the gardening represents for me. It’s a combination of learning biology, which feels like an intimidating “science” thing for me, and learning how to do manual labor. I haven’t done this sort of physical movement much in my life. Uhm. It’s hard. I feel like a tremendous loser because it is so hard. A lot of the time I feel frustrated and scared because I don’t even know how I should begin. I feel like I am doing it all wrong. I lost two plants this year. Well, I wanted a place to put yellow roses any way. Noah’s mother sent me $75 as a congratulations for finishing my book. I want to buy yellow roses with that money. It will make me happy. It will make me think of her gratefully when I am outside of my house. It will give me a reason to think of her positively.

I’m not going to have a relationship with Noah’s mother. Not really. Noah totally has an Oedipal Complex because he went off and married his mother. When he talks about his childhood it sounds like something I could easily do if I didn’t deal with my mental health issues. It sounds like it is hard to be his mom. Being in her head must hurt. She feels a powerful fear all of the time. I can understand that. I can’t have a relationship with that. I have too much fear as well. Neither of us has the ability to make the connection.

The one time I went out to meet his family his mother spent three hours telling Noah how inappropriate I was. We were already married. I am poor white trash and his mama knows it. We will never have a relationship. I was out fucking every kid in the trailer park when I was young. They don’t like my kind where his family comes from. Really, what mother wants a girl like that for her son?

So his mother and I will never have a relationship. There is too much fear between us. Too much judgment. Too much crazy. We are both wounded animals. I don’t know what wounded her and I really can’t care. I’m too busy tending my own wounds. But I want to plant yellow roses in my yard and think of my mother in law in Texas sending me a very lovely gift.

I hate the color yellow. I have since I was a kid. I had a yellow dress and yellow earrings and a yellow headband and my mama told me, “Oh God. You’re just like your father. You like yellow. Ew. That’s his favorite color.” I have had a hard time with yellow since. Occasionally I get yellow clothing as hand-me-downs.

I stopped dressing in hand-me-downs when I had kids. No one gave me adult sized clothes any more. Now I buy them. It’s weird. I feel like I am supposed to develop “taste” and I don’t know what that even means. I still want to dress like Punky Brewster. I want to go shopping each time and buy something weird and colorful and end up just… not… owning neutrals. I’ll look weird. That will be ok.

But it isn’t. Because I’m ugly and my mama dresses me funny. I was told that over and over and over and over.

Today isn’t shaping up so good. I have a lot of insecurities. It’s hard to access them one at a time. They are all interconnected. Why am I so afraid of rejection? Why can’t I let that woman be part of the park group? Because I can’t be near someone who is going to send of pot shots. I just fucking can’t. I don’t want positive comments from an insincere person. I want to be invisible. I’m really not invisible. I don’t want to become invisible so that I avoid comments.

I know how to dress in ways that will not attract attention. I’ve been doing it for a while. I wasn’t ok with that whole “I can touch you because you are pregnant” thing. So I can dress in ways that don’t attract notice. Why should I have to? Because I don’t want people to comment on me. But I like it. Oh fuck.

I don’t want to have to think about how my actions are going to effect someone else. I want to just do what I like. When I know I am going to be around someone who is quite happy to be vicious and spiteful in my direction I am immediately hypervigilant and I have to think about every fucking aspect of this interaction from what I wear to what I say. I pick my kids clothes out. They are neutral and subdued. Gender neutral, even.

My kids pick their own clothes out 99% of the time. They are not remotely subdued or gender neutral. They both like dresses in neon shades of pink. I think it is hilarious given that Shanna didn’t have them when she was smaller. I only had boy hand me downs for a long time.

I always liked wearing bright colors. I’ve always liked the casual, easy, positive interactions I get with value neutral people in public when I dress the way I like. I don’t like comments from people I know. I don’t want to have to store up in my head that they said something nice to me now I am expected to return the favor and next time I should probably start the nice exchange and. No. Just no. I can’t. I have no fucking interest in getting on the manners bandwagon at this stage of my life. I have to stay here. My kids get to grow up in one place.

It is challenging to manage my emotional needs as my relationships get longer and longer. I have to not expect anything from people in order to continue to know them over time. It’s a very hard line for me. If we are doing an activity together and have no outside connection it is easy. I have no expectations of people I see at an event. They don’t owe me a smile or a conversation. Friends are hard for me.

It is hard having people visit my house. Part of the reason I stress about housework is because I want to have a house that is “company ready” all the time. Not for them, exactly. My friends don’t give a shit. I’ve seen their houses. When my house is “messy” it’s really not bad.

My friends are busy. They have shit to do. They hold down jobs. They have vibrant social lives. I uhhh hang out in my house with my kids. We do go places. But it goes in waves and it’s rarely for more than four or five hours. We are here a lot. If I leave the house messy then I have to live in that mess. I have to work and think in that mess. I find it horribly distracting. I don’t go to Noah’s job and pick up all the stuff on peoples’ desks and throw it in the air. That would make doing actual work hard.

So I sit here and think. What is my job here? To educate my children. Basically. What do I want to educate them in? I want them to have the ability to have any kind of life they want to have. That means they need to start off in a whole lot of directions at once. Sure, we can do frilly princess and makeup. Her best (girl) friend is always the prince. They think role is about personal preference not about gender identity. That’s fucking awesome. But I’m not trying to bring up a little gender queer so I can have street cred in those communities. I need to not be invested in any results.

I’m teaching the kids that your body has to be active if you want to engage in a lot of activities. I want us to go work on farms for a year. It would not be a kindness to bring the average kid around here to a rural farm where they don’t speak the language. We have to be ready. We have to think about this in advance. What will that mean for our bodies? We should probably find a way to actually get ready. Which means that step one is for me to learn a whole lot more about gardening. Which is intimidating.

If you hadn’t noticed I’m flooded with a lot of stress chemicals. Being in that state makes it harder to learn. This is a lot of how I live my life. But I really want to do this. I don’t want to fail. I want to be able to be a productive and useful person on a farm. It’s important to me. When people talk about their “roots” well, working on a farm is part of most of our roots. You may have to go back a bit, but really. People have to eat. Food has to be provided.

I didn’t think about it very much until I had kids. I didn’t think hard about where my food came from. When I look at their bodies I want to give them food that will help them grow up as strong as possible. I want them to be able to handle anything that life gives them. I won’t be able to protect them forever. I have to do what I can now.

I don’t understand how blasé other people seem to feel about parenting. When I talk about feeling insecure or doubting myself people quickly tell me they don’t feel insecure. They must be lying. I can’t be the only insecure person. Give me a break.

I talked about feeling kind of insecure about unschooling the kids. I’m going to spend a lot of time revisiting that concept. I’m going to think hard about what that means to me. “Back in the day” people raised their children to be just like them. Uhm. I don’t want to raise my kids to be just like me, thanks. I want my children to live with fear like I do. Bad things happen. Then you move on. Normal people don’t get caught in these loop tapes. Normal people have some normal to fall back on. Some sense of themselves that was formed during the long stretches of their lives without trauma. Depending on how you think about consensual bdsm I haven’t had a period of my life without traumatic events. Hell, even having my second kid almost killed me. Woo.

I live in stress chemicals. They are all I know. I’m trying very hard not to teach that. The problem is, living in stress chemicals makes it hard to learn. All I am doing with my life right now is helping my kids prepare for life.

So I was looking at the California Content Standards for grade K. If I’m going to prepare her for being part of this society part of that includes having a vaguely similar knowledge base with her peers so that if anything happens she can transition back into a schooling environment. Things happen. I could have to work some day. Within the next two years (because she isn’t old enough for kindergarten anyway) she has to learn hygiene and how to stand in line. She’s otherwise pretty much there on the kindergarten standards for my subject. She has letters, morphemes, basic introduction to syntax, grammar… Math she isn’t quite there yet on all of it. She’s halfway there with two years to go. Obviously I have not failed her horribly so far.

Part of my weird social anxiety is that I really like being a teacher. That feels good to me. I don’t like being didactic with peers so I feel like I have nothing to say. I don’t know how to have conversations among peers. I can be a student or a teacher. That was, really, the primary positive relationships I had. That was my “normal” period that could be good. I had a lot of teachers who liked me. I had a lot of teachers who hated me.

There is a feeling I have when teaching. I am allowed to have intense bonding conversations within that format. I know there is a time limit on it. I know that the exchange is limited to what we are doing. I have no further expectations.

I get into a lot of trouble when I have expectations of people. I have to keep them further out at arms length. I can’t handle being told “no”. So I just can’t ask. I think the intensity with which I feel this is somewhat higher than average but there is a constant component of it in my head. I have to keep in mind that I can’t ask people for things. If they freely want to give me something I can take it, but I can’t ask. It’s hard to ask people to come over for this reason. I wouldn’t want to insult something I have worked so hard for by having a messy house. I have no idea why I have picked this standard of measurement because I am otherwise a specifically crappy host.

I don’t want my house to broadcast my social class. I want people to be continually surprised when I talk about how bad it was. That means I am living right. In my head I can’t separate out the messy house from the overall neglect and abuse and poverty. In my experience my friends who have decidedly messy houses have issues with their mental health and/or control. That’s not a nasty statement. *wave hand in friendly way* Whether people want to admit it or not, your perceived social class has distinct influence on your life. I am a stay at home mom. If I didn’t clean my house that would have social class implications. There is still a very strong element of “What the hell do stay at home moms do anyway?”

The point here is to teach them to be functional adult. If you have your house so messy that you constantly have to buy new things to replace things you have lying around somewhere and you don’t have the money to really support this behavior then you aren’t functional. That’s broken. It’s not a huge broken in the scheme of things but it’s a behavior I specifically don’t want to model or teach. We don’t have the money to be callous with our things. We can’t just go out and replace things right now. I mean we have money in savings but we don’t have any spare money in our set budget. It is not a responsible or mature decision to be callous with our things. We don’t have extra any more.

When you live in a messy house you break things and lose things. Ask me how I know. I don’t want to teach that. I really don’t. That means modeling doing things differently and not being a preachy asshole about it.

Now I’m just ranting. Ugh. My stomach hurts. Time to go look for food.

Sex and consent

8 Replies

I believe there needs to be another word. It’s not “rape” if you never say no. But is the sex actually consensual if you have never said yes? There needs to be another word.

Last night a friend came over. I’m going to call her Popcorn, because I can. She was telling me about a situation with her lover where she said no to something and it happened anyway. While she was talking I could feel my stomach explode with acid. I felt scared and upset. Honey, don’t you know that when someone does things to you after you say “no” that is rape? But I didn’t say anything for a few seconds. When I spoke I very calmly asked if they had a consensual non-consent relationship. She said that the deal is she puts up with what he wants to do or he walks.

We need another word.

We need another word to explain how badly we want to feel that people like us and love us and want to be around us so we tolerate things that make us feel bad. We need another word to explain the intersection of scared-little-girl-who-knows-saying-no-won’t-stop-it and the adult woman who is allowed to make odd choices. I think that people are allowed to choose consensual non-consent relationships. I know people who desperately want to be in no-safeword relationships. Well, ok. If that works for you and you want it very badly, rock on. Not everyone has made that conscious decision. An awful lot of women just think there isn’t a point in saying no. It won’t stop what is happening and if you say no things will get worse, not better. Better to shut up and just take it. The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know.

Last night I masturbated right before going to sleep. I thought about domestic discipline stuff. I thought about what it would be like for Noah and I to come up with “rules” and for me to be held to them. I think that more than anything in the whole world I want concrete proof that someone is watching my behavior and giving me the equivalent of a gold star when I am good. It feels like no one notices or cares. I have a lot of hard days when getting through my basic list of tasks feels harder than running a marathon. I want someone to notice and comment on whether or not I have completed the tasks that make me “good” enough. I try so very hard. When I am not good enough I want someone to care enough to give me a way to earn back my goodness by submitting to correction. I want to be good enough so much it makes me cry. I don’t feel like I am.

I should just tolerate whatever someone wants to do to me. I’m not really good enough to ask for things to be different. I’m not really good. My behavior isn’t good. I think rebellious thoughts all day long. I want someone to know that I am feeling rebellious and tell me that they see that I am still doing the right thing even though I am struggling internally with the process. I want it so much.

Noah told me point blank that he is not willing to discuss “rules” at this stage of our life because right now I have too much pressure on me and he’s not going to be the straw that breaks my back. He’s a very schmott guy, that one.

I struggle with admitting to myself that I do things because I want them. I am so house proud it is kind of silly. I desperately want people to come over to my house and gasp because my garden is so pretty. Wow–I’ve obviously put a lot of work into it and it’s lovely. It’s stupid to work so hard so that phantom people who don’t really care will some day give me a pat on the back. I am doing it for me. Why the lie? I have a powerful need to control the world around me.

It’s all complicated, isn’t it? Wanting love and approval. Yes, Popcorn, being alone is safer. But we are social animals. Being alone isn’t actually safer. So many things can happen while you are alone and there is no one around to help you survive. I want you to survive. I want to survive. We are social creatures. It means different things to different people, yes; I know.

I think about these things so hard because I think about what kind of grown up I want to model being for my kids. I want my gorgeous daughters to believe that it fucking matters when they say no. I want my daughters to believe that no piece of shit man is worth putting up with if he is going to rape them. Complicated. I have some complex feelings about my sexual activity. Do I think Noah is a piece of shit man? Do I think Noah is a rapist? I think about it. I think about what the word rapist really means. Noah has had sex with me while I fought him off–because he had explicit permission in advance to do it once. He doesn’t deserve punishment for doing what I negotiated with him. It was a consensual non-consent scene.

Only that shit fucks you up. That shit fucks up your brain and your body. I consented to it. Did I consent because I think piece of shit girls like me should permit anything and everything to happen to me no matter how much it hurts? I’m not sure it mattered. It was a number of years ago. I went to intensive therapy over that–two or three times a week for a while around that event. It helped me break through a lot of walls around all of the other rapes in my life. I got to find out that I’m not physically all that strong and I can fight as fucking hard as I want to and I still can’t defend myself. I still can’t prevent someone from raping me if they want to.

It’s complicated. At this point in time Noah is very cautious with me. If he senses even mild hesitancy he pulls back and stops touching me and asks for verbal confirmation that I am ok. This man is trying as hard as he can to help me pick up the pieces of my life. This is his life too and he doesn’t want to live with someone who is continually damaged and redamaged. He wanted to have an experience. He wanted to know what something felt like. We found the wall together. We found out what too far felt like. Now he’s careful. I’m not sure he would be able to be careful if he hadn’t found the wall. In the long run I suspect that we will have a better marriage because we shared that experience. We have learned a lot together.

Do I think other women should do it? Well… it doesn’t matter what I think, right? I don’t want my daughters to feel like they need to be violently raped as an adult to prove to themselves that they have no ability to defend themselves. How about if we get them into intense martial arts and self-defense classes at five. Sure, everyone can lose to someone. But let’s improve their odds. Motherfucker. I want my daughters to know how to stand up straight and say, “No I don’t want this” and back it up with leaving because no fucking man is worth putting up with shit that hurts. (Unless they want to consent to SM. I’m not a hypocrite. That’s different.) I want my daughters to feel loved and confident and built up and like they have status and worth and they don’t need a fucking man. Does that mean I want them to be alone and lonely? No. But I want them to communicate about their needs. I want them to believe that their needs are important and I want them to hang out with people who agree that their needs are important.

I like having daughters. It challenges me to think very hard about what kind of woman I want them to see. Do I want them to grow up to be brittle and delicate? I can’t decide who they will be, not really. But I can decide who I want them to see. Who they eventually become is up to them. I can make sure that they do not learn from me that they should tolerate whatever someone wants to do. It’s complicated.

I strongly dislike the idea that people “shouldn’t judge”. Fuck you motherfucker I’m going to fucking judge all I want. I’m going to judge if things are safe or smart. I’m not going to try and control you because you have to make your own choices and live with the results. But I really should judge in my head what is going on. I should evaluate things and decide if that is something I think is a good plan or not and I should think about why. I don’t need to share this process, unless people want to hear it, but I really should judge. Saying that people shouldn’t judge is a good way of saying, “I’m not going to bother thinking about actions in advance and I will be a victim all my life.” No thanks.

If a man tells you he doesn’t care about your needs you need to believe him and get the fuck away from him. He probably won’t wake up every single day and look in the mirror and have to deal with the consequences of your interactions. You will. You have to look at yourself every day for the rest of your life. Do you want to be proud of yourself or ashamed? How do you feel about yourself right now? I’m not real fond of my hair this short, I’ll be honest. Overall it is getting easier to look at myself in the mirror. I know I am actually behaving in a way that is consistent with my values. I am judging the fuck out of myself and using that judgment to change my behavior and mannerisms. I’m changing how I experience my life because I want to model for my children what having a good life means. I tell them actively that people live all kinds of good lives. There isn’t one blue print. But for me, I’m very serious about following a fairly distinct progressive path towards being a better person. I will fuck up along the way, but I’ve already come so far.

Even though I really wish I was I’m not a special snowflake. I’m not ever going to be the best. But I’m ok. Everything will be ok in the end; if it’s not ok it’s not the end. I have to be good enough. I have to keep my kids safe enough. We are an accident prone family and we all get a lot of small injuries. I shouldn’t try to prevent that. But I am careful to ice my injuries now and talk about what things I should change and do differently in the future. I no longer sit around extensively talking about how stupid I am when I get hurt. I turned that tape off. That was a strong tape from my childhood. Only stupid people get injured. Only people who aren’t good at (insert activity) get hurt doing it. Incompetent people. When I had to go see the doctor as a child for injuries I was yelled at.

I think I deserve bad treatment. I have to judge how people talk to one another and decide how I would feel about that treatment being given to me. If I don’t do that I have no perspective whatsoever on what things might be like in the lives of other people. All I know is what I know and what I know is that I deserve bad treatment. I deserve to not be able to say no when someone wants to rape me.

I think we need another word. How can we talk about this rape that is not rape? How do we talk about this lack of sense of self that causes women to not even try to prevent bad things? How do we convince our girls that they should learn these self preservation skills? What does that even mean? It all feels so complicated.

I think that part of it involves learning to tell the difference between fantasy and reality. I think if you really and truly believe that you should be raped over and over again you should probably work on that. I don’t care if it makes me a judgmental asshole or condescending or whatever. If you think you deserve to be raped over and over… you should work on that. If you want to play rape games with your lover but you have a safeword for when things get too intense, that’s fine. In my judgmental asshole opinion. As soon as you lose the ability to say no or use your safeword then you shouldn’t engage in the play. In my opinion. We need a word for that kind of sex. I don’t know what it should be.

Any thoughts?

Learning and shame

2 Replies

Therapy was unusual last night in some awesome ways. I showed up half an hour early because I wasn’t sure about public transit to the new location and the appointment before me cancelled so she was just sitting around. We could have started early but instead she decided to pick my brain. She moonlights as a guidance counselor at a middle school. The school is more than 60% black and over 30% latino. They have some problems. I don’t think I can explain how good it felt to talk to her about how to handle these children. She is the “emergency” therapist who sees the kids who are in serious crisis Right Now. I had a lot to say. It was interesting how the end of the conversation was quite sad. We had to plainly discuss the fact that there ARE things that can be done for these kids, but how much time and energy do you have? What are the things that you can really sustain doing? It’s hard to evaluate. She took notes on the things I said. I felt so respected. She told me that she is going to strongly consider how she can get me up there to talk to her really at risk kids. She thinks it will be good for them to hear a white person with my history because they don’t believe a white person can understand. I used the fuck out of that misperception when I was teaching. You can’t buy tools as handy as that.

I told her about what an asshole I am being to a friend who is having issues with the public education system. I told her I don’t understand why I still have friends. This directly linked into a lot of my attitudes about education and child rearing which ties into a lot of my feelings about having less worth in society because my earning potential is really quite low. Being a stay at home mom is not a very respected position. Oh well.

We talked about my frustration and confusion that Americans don’t seem to be training their children to be adults. They prepare the kid for preschool so the kid can be prepared for kindergarden so the kid can be prepared for the lower grades, then middle school, then high school, then college, then graduate school, then a PhD program, then a postdoctoral… I suppose we should all be college professors? I suppose some people transition into working in industry. Many companies run a lot like schools. It’s odd. Outside of academia I have worked in food service. I worked in the library and the theatre in college. I have taught. Really those have been my jobs. I feed people and help them learn. I like it–mostly.

I feel a lot of uncertainty about the future. I’m sadly aware that many of the people who are alive and making decisions now care very little about the long-term consequences of what we are doing as a society. I feel like it is ridiculously important that my kids understand that we are animals that require food. What are all the steps involved in arranging for adequate, constant food. My children will probably never know food uncertainty. What can they learn and figure out about how to help other people have the same life experience? What problems are going to crop up in our food supply? I’m quite nervous about this. I want my children to be incredibly practical. One of the up-sides of doing all these home improvement projects by myself with the kids is they are seeing how to do these tasks. Very soon they will be learning how to do them.

I also think my children will need to know how to program. I suspect that will be a mandatory skill for people who want serious job prospects in the future. I want my children to have options. I want them to feel like they are prepared to take the world by storm when they are adults. I want them to know so many things that they feel completely competent to go learn whatever they need but don’t yet know. I want them to see themselves as strong and able to assimilate new information.

I struggle with learning a lot of things. I don’t have the best memory. I read extremely quickly and I can synthesize ideas quickly but I forget things. That’s kind of a problem. I hope my kids get Noah’s memory.

My therapist and I talked extensively about how I feel like the next fifteen years are a gift. I have always wanted to go learn things but I didn’t want to go alone. Soon I will be able to go to dance events with my kids. Soon I will be able to do martial arts classes with my kids. I already practice languages with my kids. I’m discovering that I remember more Spanish than I think. I’m not as incompetent as I assume. It’s nice. I have these wonderful companions to learn with.

Shanna and Calli don’t think I am lame for how little skill I have at gardening. I feel really pretty silly for the intensity of my emotions around gardening. I grew up with people who had no respect for farming as a career and as a result they tried hard to never touch anything growing. My family felt they “got off the farm” and they had no interest in looking back. My family hasn’t farmed in at least three generations on all sides. Why is there so much hostility? Such disdain? We don’t garden.

Only I’m going to have this house paid off in another decade or so and I’m going to be stuck looking out that back window for all the remaining years of my life. I’d like it to be pretty. I feel kind of vain and silly about that. I would like to look at a colorful, interesting yard. I want it so bad I ache with wanting. I want to feel like a stupid, incompetent, worthless person still gets to look at something nice because I have the physical ability to create it.

It’s always harder than I think. I forget to water. I don’t have good weeding technique. I would starve to death if I had to take care of a whole field in order to eat. I feel ashamed of that. I feel weirdly pathetic because I can’t figure out the physical motion that will allow me to do this work quickly. It’s hard. I don’t know what I can do without damaging the plants I want to keep. I’m trying things and experimenting. It’s a slow process.

When I can remove my idiotic self-deprecation from this thought process I find it really kind of wonderful that I am learning all of these things and talking them through with my kids. Calli is too young to really understand yet, but Shanna is picking things up. I am really moving at about the right speed for Shanna. I feel ponderously slow and incompetent. Really I’m just moving at four year old speed. If I went faster she would feel left out. I wouldn’t want to outpace my companion.

It’s a lot of how I think about running. How do you find a pace for running with other people? I worry about it. I have several upcoming opportunities for running with friends. Some who are far more experienced runners than me and at least one who runs less than me. I’m fucking thrilled by the idea of running with someone who runs less than me. I won’t feel like I am slowing her down. I won’t have to feel embarrassed when I need to walk. I’m scared of running with people who are honest to dawg athletes. Standing near them makes me feel like my low status in their world is blinking in neon over my head. LOSER WHO CAN BARELY RUN. Physical Education classes were never kind to me.

It was an odd experience to look around the park on Tuesday and realize that whereas the home school kids will have various “coaches” they won’t have a PE teacher. If they do that position will fall to me. What athletic activities do I think my kids should know how to do? I have to figure out how to teach them or arrange to have someone else teach them. I think I should buy a small soccer ball and bring it. I feel odd about that. I want them to love things I don’t love. I want them to have access to ideas and hobbies I am not actually into.

This was one thing that surprised my therapist last night: how focused I am on trying to figure out what I don’t know that I should be teaching my kids. I feel intense pressure to work constantly on dealing with the extent and damage of my ignorance. I feel crippled by the extent and volume of my ignorance. I am not trying to be a know-it-all. I’m trying to be an actual competent person. The problem is that I value an odd combination of competences. I am extremely specific in what I care about and I totally ignore things I don’t understand or see value in. That’s kind of a problem. I simply can’t limit my children due to my biases. I want them to be competent adults. I want to know in twenty-five years that I have loosed two extremely fucking competent women on the world and they are off building and learning things I can’t wrap my mind around. They took the genesis of information I gave them and went off to do things I can’t understand.

I like being a jill of all trades. I don’t really aspire to master many topics. I’m a generalist. I like and highly value generalists. But like many people like me I feel like my lack of mastery means I am low in status. I’m not the best at basically any task. I notice and have a hard time with that emotionally. I don’t do competitive things because I can’t handle the fact that I’m never fucking going to be first. Do you know what second place is? The first fucking loser. I cried watching people pass me during the half marathon. I’m an idiot.

I want my kids to either be such prolific generalists that they terrify people or able to become masters in something. Other than talking to abused kids, which really… I’m awesome at that, I don’t think I will attain mastery of any subjects in this lifetime. That really kind of bothers me. I’m trying to gain peace with the idea that I will never really take anything to eleven. I will never be the best. Not everyone gets to be. lame.

My wonderful daughter just wandered out to sit on my lap. Today we are going to the redwoods to cut down trees so I can build her a play house. I should really take pictures of this process. I have a vision in my head. I know what I am going to do. It’s going to be really neat. You’ll see. I’m good at taking pictures in my head and turning out a decent approximation. Heck, look at my daughters. This looks like my picture in my head of a family. We are kind to each other. Maybe I do have a reality distortion field.

Irrational feelings.

4 Replies

This is ridiculous. I am so angry with Tom I can barely see straight. I feel like I am getting angry with him for all the not-getting-angry I did during our four year relationship. He’s a fucking bully and I let him walk all over me for four years. I remember chanting in my head, “It’s not worth an argument.” That was how I got through most days.

===============================

I love Saturdays. Saturdays are the best days. Today he is going to stay home. I miss him. I’ve missed him all week. This new company takes a lot out of him. Twelve hour workdays are short.

It’s only eight. He won’t be up for hours. I should probably go downstairs and find something to do to amuse myself until ten or eleven when he will start waking up. I’m kind of sick of doing homework, but what the hell. This week I’m working on Taming of the Shrew. It seems apropos. I’m working on a D/s interpretation of the story. How do I convince the teacher that Kate really likes being stomped on. It gives her structure and safety. I understand that. Tom gives me that. He tells me what the rules are. He gives me a frame so I can be safe and know what to do.

“Hey! You’re up! I’m working on an interesting paper right now, do you want to hear about it?”
“Not really. What am I having for breakfast?”
“Oh. Uhm, would you like eggs and toast?”
“Yeah. And a Coke.” He flipped the tv on. Oh look. Blazing Saddles. Again.

I walked into the kitchen and started cooking. He was laughing before the opening scene was finished.

“Man. These guys really know how to act!” He laughed uproariously, again.

“Here is your breakfast.”
“Thanks.”
“So I’m trying to figure out how to explain that Kate, from Taming of the Shrew, really likes the D/s in her relationship. I found a neat article in Skin 2–that latex fetishist magazine–that has a paper written by a professor from Oxford and ”
“Can’t you see I’m watching a movie?”

I lapse back into silence. I miss him so much and he is sitting right in front of me. All I want to do is share with him what I have been thinking about all week. I’m trying to find the words to talk to him about our relationship. I want to understand why I feel happier in this relationship than I felt with my family. But right now I just feel sad.

“I’m going to go upstairs.”
“That’s fine. I’m going to watch my movie.”

I go to our bedroom and open my upper drawer. The piece of cloth is shoved into the corner. Then I pick up the cloth and unroll it. I take a deep breath before grasping the scalpel firmly. I go in the bathroom and shut the door. I put the scalpel inside the bath tub.

It is so hard doing what he wants. I am a bad slave. I am impertinent and needy. I look in the mirror at myself. I stare as hard as I can.

“Shut up, Kristine. Shut up, Kristine. Shut up, Kristine. No one gives a shit what you fucking think. Shut up, Kristine.”

I turn around and climb into the bath tub. I shut the shower door completely. I run the bath water until the tub is completely full. I lean back against the wall and close my eyes. I can feel tears running down my face. It takes me a couple of moments to find the courage.

I make my cuts very carefully. From downstairs I hear the television say, “Mornin’, ma’am. And isn’t it a lovely mornin'” Tom drowned out the television as he roared, “Up yours, nigger!” and laughed. I fucking hate that movie. I’m allowing it to break my concentration so I shook my head quickly and started humming and then singing to myself so that I wouldn’t be distracted by the noise. I like a song I learned with the Seventh Day Adventist youth group.

“Father I adore you. Lay my life before you. How I love you.
Jesus I adore you. Lay my life before you. How I love you.
Spirit I adore you. Lay my life before you. How I love you.”

It is meant to be sung in rounds in a group. I use it to help me focus on the sensation of the cutting. My other senses don’t have to be as engaged. I want to be very careful. I can’t cut too deeply because that would scar and get attention. I need the wounds to heal quickly. I take my clothes off in front of other people at least once a month. I don’t want to draw attention to this so I am very cautious. I just barely break the skin. I cut barely until I get blood. Thin little cuts like these heal quickly and without a mark for me. I start on my upper right thigh. I like to start horizontally. I make cuts around three inches long. I make them slowly and carefully. I breathe deeply the whole time. I keep singing. In the background Tom is still laughing, or laughing again. I don’t know or care which.

When I am done there are usually three or four patches on my legs. They are usually three inches by five or seven inches depending on how hard the week was for me emotionally. I usually judge when to stop by how bloody the water is. I like to take breaks in the middle of cutting to play in the blood. I like the swirls in the water. The more blood I take out the less likely I am to do something stupid. What I mean by “something stupid” is try to flash my marks at someone. I know it is not ok to acknowledge I do this. I will get in trouble again. If I just have a couple of small marks high up on my thighs I might wear a short skirt or get out of the shower and walk around naked for a few minutes. When I make more and more marks I know how to adapt my behavior and I don’t take the risk of being caught. Tom doesn’t mind me wearing tights and long dresses all the time so it is easy to hide. We almost never have sex so it really doesn’t matter what happens to my body in between.

Eventually I stop cutting and lean back and cry. I don’t even know why I am crying. But I hurt so much. The cutting isn’t what hurts, but it gives me an excuse to cry. I’ll take it.

After even longer I stop crying and pull the drain plug. I watch my blood go down the drain. I get up and rinse off quickly. I dry off and get dressed in thick tights and an ankle length dress. I walk down stairs and sit down at the floor near Tom’s feet with my school books. Even though he doesn’t want to talk to me I miss him so much that I can’t bear to be away from him.

It’s not until he says, “Can’t you ever shut up?” that I realize that I’m still singing the song under my breath.

“Father I adore you. Lay my life before you. How I love you. Jesus I adore you. Lay my life before you. How I love you. Spirit I adore you. Lay my life before you. How I love you.”

Always with the defensive, this girl.

Leave a reply

Yesterday was one of those magical running days. The kind where the beat of the music and my grief match up perfectly. It’s hard to describe what I enjoy about running. There are several stretches of blocks in my neighborhood that I use for sprinting. The lines on the sidewalk just require it. When I get to those specific streets I pray for the right fast song. I run until I can barely breathe. I run until I am gasping out sobs and I can barely see anymore because I am crying so hard. There is so very much to cry about.

I have so much grief. I feel like I will never stop grieving. I will never feel like I can move past these feelings. I’m trying to trust the process. I’m trying to believe that even though this cycle of mourning isn’t over it will end some day. I just don’t know when. It’s hard to keep going.

Why was I crying yesterday? It’s hard to remember specifics because I cover so many topics in my head. I spent a lot of time thinking about why I am the sort of person to send nasty judgmental shaming letters to. I get them every so often. I trigger the shit out of people. It’s the same reason my former therapist fired me. I don’t do things how other people think they should be done. In the process I am deeply distressing. People don’t like feeling distressed by how “off from the norm” I am. They want me to fall back in line, damnit. I should do _________ in order to be acceptable to them. I can’t.

I can’t ever be acceptable to everyone in my life. That isn’t an option open to me. I will always bother people in some way on some level. Pretty much everyone. I will always talk about subjects that make you uncomfortable, no matter who you are. I will search for that topic that bothers you the most and then I will harp on it constantly. I do this on an unconscious level. I default to challenging people. A lot of the time I’m not doing it on purpose. I believe with every part of me that I would not have survived if I was willing to let other people set the terms of my reality. I would have crumbled a long time ago. I would have to believe that I was who they say I am.

This time I would have to believe I am an addict. I am bad. I am helpless before these things that control me. My cutting, anger, drug use, and sexual activity are bad. I am bad for being addicted to these things. Bad. Bad. Bad. I know. I’ve always known. I know that you think I am bad. That doesn’t mean that you are right or that I have to agree. That’s an opinion not a provable set of facts. I’m obsessive (even though I hear this kind of pedantry means you lose the argument I am going to do this anyway because it is my fucking blog and I’m only arguing with myself which means there is no such thing as losing) so here’s a definition for you:

Addiction is defined as the continued use of a mood altering substance or behaviour despite adverse consequences.^[1] This can include, but is not limited to, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, exercise abuse, and gambling. Some defining characteristics of addiction include: impaired control over subtances/behaviour, preoccupation with substance/behaviour, continued use despite consequences, and denial.^[2] Habits and patterns associated with addiction are typically characterized by immediate gratification (short-term reward), coupled with delayed deleterious effects (long-term costs).^[3]Physiological dependence occurs when the body has to adjust to the substance by incorporating the substance into its ‘normal’ functioning.^[4] This state creates the conditions of tolerance, and withdrawal. Tolerance is the process by which the body continually adapts to the substance and requires increasingly larger amounts to achieve the original effects. Withdrawal refers to physical and psychological symptoms people experience when reducing or discontinuing a substance the body had become dependent on. Symptoms of withdrawal generally include but are not limited to anxiety, irritability, intense cravings for the substance, nausea, hallucinations, headaches, cold sweats, and tremors.

That’s from Wikipedia. I use marijuana under medical supervision to deal with psychological issues. Yes there are technically adverse side effects because smoking is bad for your lungs. Overall it makes my life so much better it isn’t funny. I repeat that it has fewer side effects than any other drug I could be on.

Cutting, sex, and anger are all in a hand wavey category. I have a problem with the 12 step language of weakness. “I’m not responsible. A higher power has to save me.” Well… I am certainly addicted to harming myself. I do it in a variety of ways. I don’t give any particular method much higher billing than any other. I think that is what he really meant by saying I am addicted to these things. But of course he’s blowing hot air out of his ass so he doesn’t quite see the pattern. I go through long periods without cutting. I have gone many years between periods where I feel bad enough about myself to need that release. I can easily channel that frustration and rage into other areas if given the slightest chance.

Cutting works to put an end to bad emotional states that would otherwise lead to suicide. Is it a great approach? No. It isn’t. But for an awful lot of my life I didn’t have a better choice and I think that cutting was significantly better for me than suicide. No one is going to take that belief away from me. I had to cope. I managed. I survived. The last time I cut I had kind of an epiphany that it wasn’t working any more. I threw away my scalpels. I have moved beyond the utility of that as a coping method. I didn’t stop because someone shamed me or told me I was bad for doing it. That kind of response is only likely to cause me to go do it more and more and more. I stopped because I realized it was insanity to continue. Insanity in the sense that it doesn’t make sense to keep doing the same activity and expecting a different response.

I no longer have a life where I need a physical outlet for my emotional pain. Thank you, Noah. Thank you for being my bulwark against the dark. Thank you for providing me with a safe place to live for the rest of my life. Thank you for supporting me so that I can do work I am better suited for and I don’t have to go out and “get a job” to prove I have worth.

The emotional pain I feel now I can talk about and find solutions for. I think the only place where the language of addiction is particularly useful for me is where it talks about the diminishing returns issue. Or if you talk about the cost being too high for the benefit.

I asked Noah for monogamy partially as a way of providing myself an ‘out’ on dealing with a lot of my problematic behavior. I’m not good at self-regulation when it comes to sex. Now I am safe. Now I will always be able to say, “I’m in a monogamous marriage; I can’t have sex with you” instead of having to be able to say “I don’t want to.” Saying I don’t want to have sex with someone is hard. I feel unworthy of doing so. I feel like if someone is suffering for lack of sex it is my job to fix it. I can be a sacred whore, that’s fine–but I must be a whore. I don’t say no very well. I am going to hide behind monogamy and be grateful for it. I feel guilty that I am dragging Noah behind me kicking and screaming into this change. I feel like I am unfairly punishing him for a problem he doesn’t have. But I asked and he agreed and he doesn’t really want to talk about whether it is fair or not. It is. Move on.

I cried yesterday because I feel terribly bad that in order to protect myself from my own impulsive behavior I have curtailed Noah. It seems selfish and immature and just flat mean. I am such a bitch. And I’m trying to learn how to tell him “no” in general. I no longer close my eyes and go away and let him have sex with me. It’s hard. It’s hard to feel like I am not breaking rules. It is hard because I feel like I am bad for not giving him release when and how he wants it. I am not holding up my end of the deal. He is supporting me–don’t I owe him? I told him that thirty years of being a whore is enough for anyone. It’s time to retire.

Noah isn’t attacking me. Noah doesn’t require that I put out because he wants me to. I project that onto him. I fear that belief. I have it. That’s enough.

Am I an addict? Maybe? Yes? It seems to be an irrelevant question. Unless you believe that someone who takes thyroid medication is also an addict it is simply a innate bias to say that the pot is a problem. It’s not your preferred kind of medication but I’m a hippy and my doctor agrees that it is good for me. Imagine me sticking my tongue out at you. I also see a massage therapist and an acupuncturist (ok, not since pregnancy but I will get back there some day–I believe in the benefits). I think I should see a chiropractor about something going on in the lower right hand side of my back. That has been a problem since Jeremy sodomized me when I was like ten. I have never been able to get it to stop hurting. Running is teaching me a lot about my body. I think I have a better idea of how to deal with the pain.

So! Am I an addict when it comes to pot? Wikipedia says no. I’m going to go with that. Sex? Well… obviously I’m doing as much “recovery” from that as I can do. I am not actually interested in celibacy and trying to be celibate just because someone else might think I should be would result in me not being married any more. Noah wouldn’t tolerate that. He’s dealing with me saying “no” a lot and he’s dealing with not being allowed to have sex with other people. I think he’s a god damned stand up guy. No more can or should be asked of our marriage as I’m figuring out this shit with my relationship to sex. So am I addicted to sex? Maybe? But it doesn’t matter because I’ve figured out how I can have a healthy relationship with it and I’m moving forward. Kind of a useless thing to sit around and go to meetings on at this point. Just sayin’.

I haven’t cut in nearly a year and I no longer have my favored cutting tool. I could some day acquire another one, sure. I don’t think I will though. I don’t want that modeled for my children as an option of coping mechanisms.

It’s interesting to me how this evolution has happened. I cut for many years. When I stopped cutting my body as a teenager I started cutting my hair. It got shorter and shorter till I shaved it when I was seventeen. My mother was so angry with me it wasn’t funny. I felt like the whole world was radiating anger with me for cutting my hair. I was told constantly how ugly I was and how unflattering my “new look” was.

It’s been very weird and uncomfortable that people keep gushing about how good I look with a shaved head/short hair this time. It makes me cry. Because when they say it I hear my mother ranting in my head and I want to hit them and cry that they are lying to me. I feel rage that this person is lying about finding me attractive this way. I try to not do more than clench my fists. I try to not stomp away. I smile. I say thank you. I think that I flinch sometimes and then people simply become more emphatic. Noah certainly tells me that he likes it often. That is one of the things I cried about yesterday. “Hair” was on.

I wonder if my family hated this as a hair cut because of how intense it makes me look. I feel like I have to plaster a fake smile on my face all of the time or I look like I might punch you in the face as soon as say “hello”. It’s weird. I feel like the effects of aging are doing interesting things to my face. I am going to wrinkle like fuck. All the women in my family have deep lines of care from a fairly young age. We live hard lives and it shows. I look at my hands and I see my mothers hands. I see the rope appearing. My hands are the hands of someone who does manual labor. Well, I don’t have deep callouses yet. But I will as soon as I get up the energy to do more gardening. I would have done anything to prevent aging the way I am if I had stayed in a relationship with Tom.

One of the things I cry about when I run is thinking about how resentful Tom would be of the changes in me. It’s strange. I cry because I loved him so much and he wanted such a small piece of who I am. I feel bad that after my family he felt so very good to me but we didn’t know how to be real people together. Tom lives in a world where “pretty” and “sexy” are such a high bar that they become a vocation. I’m naturally pretty lazy. I don’t think I am that pretty and I don’t see much point in dressing up a plow horse to take it to town. I know I am attractive but it’s different. As I age it becomes more dramatic to me. I am intense in a way that precludes pretty. Pretty is about unoffensive and I will never be that. My perception of the world Tom lives in is honestly kind of bleak. I would not be happy in it. I can’t stay dedicated to something I feel like I will never actually attain. It involves a lot of specific activity and specific idleness that I just don’t want. I think back over how I lived my life and I feel glad that I made most of the choices I made. I was always running.

A boyfriend from high school sent me a congratulatory message about the half marathon and sent me a link to a marathon training program that is way more awesome than what I had been doing. By which I mean I am so grateful that this program wants me doing two miles for the first few weeks because it feels like such a wave of relief I can barely stand it. Doing only two miles for the last two days of running has meant I have practiced sprinting. It uses different muscle groups and it feels good to stretch my legs once in a while.

I lost my train of thought a while ago because my cat jumped on the keyboard and then I got mad at her. We had to pause and have a negotiation wherein she glared at me and looked sad that I had thrown her the floor. I sighed deeply and went and got a blanket to prevent her from drawing blood and I moved my computer so she could lay on my lap. Puff’s mother gave her to me when Puff was only a few days old. Her eyes were still closed and I bottle fed her to keep her alive. Puff’s mother brought us the babies to save them from a rain storm that would have drowned them outside. The feral mama wasn’t willing to come inside and care for the babies and she didn’t want anything to do with them later, but she did save them. That feels important. I have had Puff for fourteen years. My niece named her. T said, “She looks like a puff of clouds.” She is white with grey nearly-Siamese markings. For a couple of years after Shanna was born Puff avoided me. I feel like our relationship has deepened a lot over the last year or so. She doesn’t mind Calli the way she minds Shanna. She loves that I sit in the garage alone. I attribute a lot of our relationship growth to the smoking, actually. It keeps me away from the kids and she is quick to remind me that our alone time should be special, darn it!

I feel the need to apologize for my many typos. I stop writing when I am abruptly pulled away to do something else and I really don’t have time to edit. I’m not a professional writer so it feels ok to be sloppy.

I love getting mail. Sometimes.

2 Replies

Yesterday I got a letter. Normally I am thrilled by such instances. In this case I believe the person sent a letter because if he sends a letter I can only respond on his terms. If he sent an email he knows I would just argue with him and refuse to let him set the terms of the conversation. As is, I don’t feel like this letter deserves a letter back of its own so I’m just going to ignore it. Well, maybe “ignore” is a bit strong. I’ll stew about it but I’m not going to respond to him. I hear he has me blocked all over the internet. Hallelujah.

I would like to say in public that I am under the care of a licensed psychologist, psychiatrist, and I do actually have a general doctor as well. The folks who “take care” of me are professionals in good standing in their various professions. They all agree that I should be on some kind of psych med at this stage and if pot is working, why bother replacing it with something that has more side effects. Does that make it an addiction? Is someone who takes thyroid medication an addict? It’s an interesting question.

I certainly need pot. I feel a grotesque amount of shame about that. I’m aware the 12 step folks want me to get off it entirely. Obviously that would make my whole life better. Given the magnitude of my mental health issues I would need to turn to western medicine and pills. Seriously, they make everything worse. But obviously I am a disgusting low life addicts. Obviously.

And because I am obviously I am an addict, that means I am bad and abuse, right? I have anger issues. I’ve had anger issues for a long time. I must be addicted to anger, right? It totally makes sense. I’m comfortable in that emotion so I default to it and if nothing happens for a while to make me angry I’ll go find some moron on the internet to argue with. Since I was eighteen I have kicked holes in drywall twice and punched a hole once. I kicked the cabinet doors off. That is the entire extent of property damage done in my life. That is manifestly an anger problem. I don’t hit people at all any more under any circumstances. I don’t do that “girl” thing of whacking people when they are irritating. I married someone who finds it offensive so I stopped. I’m not going to be doing bdsm play with anyone else again so I don’t think I will ever hit a person again in my life. It’s kind of weird to think about.

But obviously my anger is running my life. I’m angry all day every day, right? No? Wait. What?! You mean the gross assumptions about me might be incorrect? I spend all day every day in a mellow and cheerful mood. I am edgy and anxious when new people come around and I feel uncomfortable. I have this constant fear that people are judging me (but I get a letter ever year or so from someone telling me that I am disgusting and abusive so I think that isn’t a paranoia on my part) and it makes me more prone to fight with people I think don’t like me anyway. The best defense is a good offense. If you strike me as someone who is likely to shame me and put me down I am going to attack you and be on offense from the beginning. It isn’t always perfect. But then I get letters like yesterday and I’m glad I have that approach.

I’m not going to do what people tell me and then they get butt hurt and *I’m* the one with the anger problem. Right. Obviously if I don’t want to do what he says when he says it I am in denial.

I am not at a place in my life where I can start going to a bunch of meetings in San Francisco. Not even to make other people feel better about my “sobriety”. I can’t bring my kids and telling me that I could get childcare from someone who thinks I am disgusting is hilarious. I would rather drop my kids off to play in the park alone. They would be safer.

A lot of the reason I have no contact with my family isn’t because I am paranoid about them sexually assaulting my kids during an Easter Egg Hunt. I don’t allow my children around my family because my children don’t need to sit and listen to people talk shit about me. I’m far from perfect and I deal with that. My 19 month old and my nearly four year old don’t need to be in the house of someone who feels quite free to put me down and talk badly about me. Hell fucking no. That is a hostile environment for me and mine. Calling it “support” is pure hypocrisy and it sickens me. No you don’t want to support me. You want to shame me and insult me. I’ll pass.

Anger is absolutely the monkey on my back. I deal with it by trying to figure out why I am angry and changing the part that feels like an attack so I can stop feeling defensive. There isn’t a chance in hell I am going to go visit the house of someone who has shamed me up one side and down the other and not feel angry. Then he will take that as more confirmation that he is right. No thanks. That is a lose/lose situation for me. Shaming isn’t love or concern.

That’s the part that matters. When people come to me in love and concern to “talk about my behavior” (it happens) I try to meet them where they are and listen. I don’t think I am perfect. I listen to advice when it is given appropriately by people I respect. Someone who sends me a nastygram letter unsolicited where he recommends that I go stay in a residential rehab facility because I smoke pot? Yeah. Kiss my ass. I’m fairly unlikely to smoke for the rest of my life. But it is a drug I need right now. I guess I’m bad for that. I guess I should abandon my children to the mercy of people who think I am bad and head off to a place that will cause me massive panic attacks as soon as I walk in.

And after I walk in I won’t be able to go to the bathroom when I want. And if I don’t draw pictures when they tell me to draw pictures all hell can break loose. Oh wait. I’m just being paranoid. That doesn’t happen to people. Oh wait. It happened to me. Uhm, no. No thank you. I don’t think there is a chance in hell that residential treatment would improve my life. I think that would be the thing that sent me over the bend and I would never be released because they would be pumping me full of frightening chemicals just to get me to stop screaming. I will never go back to a treatment facility. I would rather kill myself. My therapists know this. They don’t think I need to go to rehab. My therapist thinks that rehab would be an entirely inappropriate place for me because I am not hurting my life. I am appropriately using a medication that my body apparently needs right now so that I can go on to be a (mostly) happy, highly functioning adult. What is the problem?

The problem is that someone is mad at me. He has shit going on in his own life that he is upset about and he wants to vent his spleen on someone. I’m a convenient target. This is what being the scapegoat means. This is how such patterns continue on and on in life. He acted like the bringer of truth. “You’ve surrounded yourself with friends who don’t see you(sic) addictive behavior as anything unusual, and with a husband who is a hard core enabler.” Yes. I have chosen to surround myself with people who are nice to me and who do not send me nasty letters. You illustrate nicely why I do that. You are not right. You have an opinion.

I’m addicted to anger, cutting, sex, and drugs. Apparently. Sure. Why not. All of these “addictions” spring from the same basic place of feeling unsafe and like I deserve to hurt. I’ve been looking into the treatment for these issues for some time. Guess what the first step is?

Safety. Safety, for me, includes not talking to people who are going to send me long letters about how bad I am. Whether I have issues or not it is not the job of anyone to send me nasty letters about my issues. This isn’t how you help someone. But it is how you contribute to the surrounding feeling of unsafe. I guess I shouldn’t let go of that paranoia of people sitting at home thinking nasty thoughts about me. I have yet more evidence. Shit dude. He felt motivated enough by his hostile judgment to print out a letter, find an envelope and put three stamps on it! That’s commitment! It wasn’t even an off-hand email in a bitchy moment. He put effort into it. He didn’t open a dialogue about, “I’m feeling worried about you. Are you open to talking about some of the stuff that is going on for you?” He has no interest in my consent. He’s just interested in telling me how bad I am.

“A while back you wrote about how outraged you were when you discovered that there were adults who knew that you were being abused as a child and didn’t do anything about it. Another time you wrote something to the effect that at least your kids were not being brought up by totally fucked up addicts, they were being brought up my(sic) a high functioning addict. I like Shanna a lot, and if we ever meet when she is grown up, I don’t want her to be able to say to me, “If everyone knew my mom was an addict, how come nobody did anything about it?”

This is for Shanna.”

Bam! That’s class A perfect color shame. He’s not telling me these things because he is a judgmental asshole! No! He’s doing it for Shanna. He thinks it would be far preferable to be on western meds so that I can sit on the couch and stare at a tv and not do anything self-destructive and recover from my “addictions”.

I feel the love in every line. Don’t you? I was raped over and over. I was moved more than 50 times. I was not allowed to develop any normal attachments in life and I’m bitter about it. Obviously he needs to step in because I am a stoner. It’s the same thing as rescuing me when I was a kid. I’m just as bad.

I’m sure I am not reading this is the best possible light. I hear that 80% of all things read in text are read with the wrong tone. I guess it is too bad that this person didn’t have the respect for me to ask to talk to me in person, you know, if he was serious about wanting to help me. Instead he sent an aggressive and hostile letter (you can’t miss that even if you tone down my paranoia) and I’m supposed to just… what? Smack myself in the forehead and say, “You must be right! How have I lived without such sage advice commanding me how to get my life together!”

Why do I write about these things? Because if I didn’t write about it I would mutter under my breath all day. I would slam cabinets. I would be pissed off as fuck because this fucking asshole just god damn ruined my day. But if I come and write about it I can let it go. I went through all the thoughts. Now I can stop talking about when the kids are around.

There are always going to be people who dislike me and disapprove of me. If I let that ruin my day I can just go kill myself and get it over with. There are enough of those people for every day, forever.

In the best light I can see this letter as him trying to say that he misses having me as a friend and he won’t hang out with me until I get treatment so please hurry because he misses me. There is definitely a way to see it that way if I’m generous.

But this is a whole lot of shaming. I don’t need people in my life who shame me. I don’t need to be made to feel bad. That’s not ok. That’s not an acceptable thing to do to a friend. If he wanted to talk to me about these things he could have. He didn’t. He wanted to sit on high and give me judgments and orders. Well who died and made you the king of anything?

Don’t worry. I’ll tell Shanna you sent me a nasty letter trying to protect her. I’m sure it will make her feel much better.

If someone actually wants to talk to me and offer polite conversation about their concern, I promise I won’t write a hostile blog post about it. If you treat me like a reasonable person I’ll treat you like one. If you send me shaming text, I might print the whole thing verbatim and I might keep it private. You are taking a roll of the dice. I don’t keep secrets very well.

Those sick perverts

1 Reply

“I’ve been following your blog for awhile, I never comment. However I couldn’t not comment on this. I’m not judging you by any means but I couldn’t pass saying this.

How can you bring someone to your house who you admittedly barely know and met through adult sex venues at that, and let him meet your daughters? That is truly scary. I think a mother should be extremely selective who she brings in the house and to top it all off lets meet the kids. Just my 0.02 cents. “

First, I’m not mad at you. It’s your opinion and you are welcome to it. I met this guy probably eight years ago. When I used to attend BaGG he was a regular there and we had a number of nice conversations, but I wouldn’t say I am close to him. He used to be housemates with one of my girlfriends. I’ve known her for 14+ years and she lived with this guy for years. This guy is also good friends with my ex-boyfriend Spot. He’s not exactly a complete stranger though I understand how it sounds that way.

He was in my dining room for less than two hours with my children. We talked about She-Ra and raising kids and the fact that his mom walked out on him when he was a toddler. Both kids kept their clothes on. We talked about our social anxiety. We talked about what things we do to try and talk to people without feeling dirty and gross and bad. I felt quite comforted by his presence. He’s a nice person and I’d like to get to know him more. I feel completely comfortable with the fact that he won’t challenge my monogamy.

But he’s one of those sick perverts. And I shouldn’t let him in my house. I’m really not better. I guarantee you that if I trotted out my kink résumé it is a lot more offensive than this guy’s. But he is suspect and probably gross. Because he’s a man. And kinky.

I feel tainted and like I shouldn’t ever be alone with my kids. You know, I’m one of those sick people too. I’ve done some pretty disgusting things. I have gotten off on some really disgusting things. Obviously I am too dirty to be here.

I wonder when someone is going to figure out that people like me are just inherently bad and shouldn’t be around children. It should probably happen soon before the irreversible damage is done. I’m sure it is inevitable. It’s not like I’m going to ask this guy I don’t know to babysit. But obviously there is something wrong with me if I think it is ok to let a raging pervert in my house to talk to my daughter about cartoons.

I’m not mad. But I do feel like I am going to be wrong forever and ever amen. I should never speak to anyone again. Do you know how many people I am close to who have never been to an adult-only-sex-venue? I can probably count them on my hands. I guess that means I shouldn’t ever let my kids meet anyone at all. You never know what they do on Saturday night.

3 Replies

Yesterday we took advantage of our date night to shave my head. First Noah used the clippers, then a straight razor. I discovered that straight razors hurt a lot more than safety razors. This is the second time I shaved my head. The first time was when I was 17. I shaved my head around three weeks after my father killed himself. It was time for a new beginning then. It’s time for a new beginning now. From 17 until now I have made most of my decisions about my appearance based on the opinions of men. I feel kind of ashamed when I write that. It’s not the “me” I’m supposed to be. I’m supposed to only care about pleasing myself. You don’t amass a body count like mine by only trying to please yourself.

I’m taking more comfort from monogamy than anyone but Noah knows. I don’t have to hunt any more. I never have to leave the house wondering if I look good enough for someone. Well, I’ll still dress in stuff Noah likes occasionally. But I’m done trying to find people who are willing to fuck me. It’s a different approach to life. Non-monogamy is fairly all-consuming for me. I don’t have many non-hunting periods. I didn’t hunt during the breeding period. I didn’t hunt much for a couple of the years I was with Tom. Tom had me jumping through enough hurtles that I was content.

Noah is different. Noah is happy to have sex with me at any time. No factors beyond, “Are the kids occupied and safe and fine on their own?” matter. He looks for child care or sleep. Then he’s good. I think he’s enjoyed the various colors and he’s finding something to like about every length of my hair. Today the tiny cuts no longer sting so I bet he’s going to touch it a lot more. It is neat feeling. Last night it still hurt and the pillow was annoying so I didn’t want him to touch much.

I put a body stocking on after we shaved my head so that I could stay warm. The plan was to tie me up and mess with my head being different. That didn’t happen. Instead we talked about the way our sex life is causing me to feel unsafe. The way our sex life is dramatically increasing how much I dissociate. We talked about the fact that every time he rapes me there is serious long-term damage. How much damage am I really expected to bear this lifetime? How many of these does he think I can handle before I jump off a bridge? I have been sexually assaulted over and over for nearly thirty years. I think I need at least a few years off. At the very fucking least.

This is something I struggle with. It seems like most of my appeal is that I am someone you don’t have to care whether I am interested or not. If you want to fuck me, sure go ahead. It seems like that usage is really the only purpose for my life, so why not? That doesn’t increase my ‘bonding’ feeling during sex for some reason. It means that pretty much all sexual contact has to be treated as potentially unpleasant and I have to learn to block out all of those sensations, forever. Because that way I can survive being repeatedly raped. I won’t feel it any way. I can’t work on getting back to the place where I can orgasm. If I do that, how will it be used against me or withheld from me? How will I be hurt in exchange for being stupid enough to present more vulnerability in my body?

It’s time to start new. For the first time in my life I never have to give in to that compulsive feeling again. I never have to earn my social admission with my cunt. I no longer have to advertise that I am there to fulfill sexual needs other people have. It’s not my problem. I am no longer the designated whore. I don’t know what else I could be. What else am I good for? If I’m not going to be that, just generically, I think I am tired of being raped too. I think it’s time to say that my husband should really start to respect the word “No.” I should be allowed to be in control of my body. I deserve it. I have carried this body around for thirty years. No one else has the knowledge of it that would allow them to treat it with respect. Just me. So right now no one treats it with any respect.

I need to change that or I am never going to stop feeling like I am one push from jumping off a bridge. Life is harder than advertised. Life hurts. That doesn’t mean I should accept with resignation the idea that I have to tolerate being raped for my entire god damn life. No. Even though so many people obviously think that is what I am good for, they show my by continuing to rape me, I am done thinking that is all I am good for. I don’t think I am strong enough to keep getting up afterwards. I don’t think I have many more rapes left in me. I think my body is nearing its limits. I have already been taken down all the pegs I can be taken down. If you put me any further down I’m going to fall off the board.

I go through the world in the body of a woman. I don’t think it works like this for men. Every day, whether I put time or energy into my appearance or not, I have to be braced when I am out in public. People feel quite free to comment on how I look and act. Most of the comments are nice. I get told ridiculously often that I have a nice smile. It’s one of the reasons I am completely uninterested in braces. My smile is special and unique to me. It is nice enough that random strangers tell me they are happy to see it when I walk around by myself. I think what God gave me was good enough. Even though my teeth aren’t perfectly straight. Even though they aren’t very white. I didn’t discover teeth brushing until I was twelve and I started noticing that it was really gross when boys didn’t brush their teeth before kissing. I decided that applied to me too and I started brushing my teeth. I have a lot of legacy damage from poor dental care. I have an ass-rapingly-expensive dental implant. Oh wait, did I just make a rape joke?

Of all the people in the world, shouldn’t I take it more seriously! Don’t I know that this topic isn’t funny?! I have been raped far more times than I can count. It is just part of life. I’m going to joke about it. Otherwise I cannot live with the constant effect it has on me. I know that other rape victims feel differently. I’m sorry if what I say offends you. We are all just trying to get through the day.

I am almost out of pot. I will either run out today or tomorrow. We have $29 left for this month in the health budget. I plan to see my therapist one more time and that will be $150. I don’t think I should buy more pot. This is already going to be dinging next month. Budgets suck. I am *only* going to be able to pay for therapy next month. Nothing else. I need to start saving room in that budget because soon I will want to buy another massage package. The massage probably is more important given the current strain my body is under. Intimidating.

It’s time to start again. The only way I know to be a parent is to be the kind of adult you think your kids should respect. I want to be worthy of respect. I want to make choices that are actually good for me instead of being a less bad form of self-harm. Sex is often a form of self-harm for me. That’s one of those things I will only admit on days when the wind is right. I have as much denial around that topic as everyone else. Having to be available to basically anonymous men is a form of self-harm. I’m putting myself at enormous risk. For the thrill of hopefully having judged right and the sex doesn’t hurt this time. Maybe instead of trying to figure out how to write just the right personal ad I should tell my husband I want him to stop choking me and raping me. Please can our sex life not be something that hurts me. I don’t want to perfect the art of asking other people to stop hurting me. I want to just close that book and walk away from it. There is no point in pursuing that story. I don’t want to keep upping my body count. It’s not a goal any more. Whatever there was to get out of that activity I did it long ago.

I know, everyone else who is non-monogamous will now tell me how they want to have connections and I’ll tell you that fucking me is one of the fastest ways to ensure that I am going to avoid you in the future. You want more of those connections in your life? I can have boundaries and keep myself safe if I treat the people as disposable so I don’t have to care what they want. It is excruciatingly hard to tell Noah about the results of his (occasional, rare) actions because I already feel like I am letting him down.

He wanted a poly marriage. He wanted to have a life where he got to be a highly individualized person. He wanted a lot of time to himself to keep having other people and things in his life. He wanted to continue on being a cheerful sadist. He wanted to be allowed to do the things he imagines. And I am not only backing out on being the recipient of his urges but I’m telling him that he shouldn’t do them with anyone else either. I feel like the worst kind of double crosser. I am a piece of shit. I am changing the deal.

I can’t handle being raped anymore. Maybe ever again. This hurts so much. The cost is too high. I cannot live with someone who really likes it when I don’t enjoy our sex in any way. Well, that’s too harshly worded. I can live with him. But I can’t keep doing that. I’m tired of barely being able to feel my vagina. I’m tired of rearranging furniture in my head during sex. I’m tired of feeling scared in my home. I never get to be safe anywhere in the whole wide world.

But Jesus-H-Christ. I am now a partial owner of a bdsm coffee shop. I am going to have to figure out how to negotiate those kinds of worlds knowing that I will never really feel all that much like I belong. I don’t want to be hurt any more. Nor do I want to hurt anyone else. I don’t want to be raped any more. I don’t want to fuck everyone who is kind of hard up. What good am I then? I don’t know. But maybe it is time to find out.

I did’t shave my head to make me ugly. I don’t think it does. But I did do it to remove the distraction of trying to be appealing. I don’t want to actually be pretty right now. It is hard figuring out how to let guys down gently in a way that doesn’t result in me getting nasty treatment. I have to instead figure out how to just not attract them. Because if I am attractive it is my own fucking fault and I’m just an asshole cock tease if I don’t follow through.

I went to a friend’s party on Saturday. I spent my time clinging to the few people who have come to my house. I only had one conversation that was not me clinging to someone who has proven they like me. The one-off was about babies. And someone rapidly left the group when I talked about my labor experience. I felt like I should just get up and leave the party. Everything I have to say is repulsive and depressing. My experiences are things people don’t want to hear about. I’m not pleasant enough. My life isn’t pleasant enough.

I think I need to learn how to just stop speaking at all. Can you pick up selective mutism as an adult? Probably not. But I need to appear happy and perky. I need to smile. I need to be polite (whatever that means). I need to look and act like I had a different life than I had. That is what people like. Those are the people who are liked. I’m not nice. I’m harsh. I’m abrupt. I sound angry. I’m unpleasant and difficult and prickly. I swear a lot. I have no idea what manners most people follow. I am bewildered in every social space because I am inevitably wrong and I don’t know why. I don’t understand and I don’t think I ever will.

I own a business now. I don’t have a choice about going out into the world. I have a specific format that interaction is supposed to revolve around. I have a job and I’m perfectly capable of behaving myself at work. It’s time to try again on leaving my house and interacting with people. Even if I’m not the biggest bad-ass bottom in the room it’s ok. There is no where else in the world I can talk about the intensity of my sex play without people running in horror.

Just because I don’t want to be raped any more that isn’t truly going to send me screaming into the closet. Once your sex life is as weird as mine it just morphs. It doesn’t really contract. There have to be other avenues to pursue. Surely not everyone in the world is hurt constantly during sex. They wouldn’t have so much of it.

Part of the road to Noah

Leave a reply

This fine morning a friend asked me about a link on Facebook about Mansplaining. It lead to an interesting conversation about whether men or women (sexist language abounds. I’m going to do an aside to say that there is a really odd mixture of statistics on whether rape is a female problem or a problem that is closer to equal than anyone can handle admitting. I am defaulting to standard sexist language because that is my experience base. I do not mean to say that my experiences are universal–they are not. Carry on.) bear responsibility for rape.

I’m going to call myself out for being an asshole, because I was, but I was a persuasive asshole. I said, more or less, “Oh reeeeeeeeeeeeeeally? How much responsibility do I bear for being raped?” I then proceeded to go through a list of the times I have been arguably raped as an adult when I should be responsible for my ability to pick “safe” people. I decided it was time to tell the story of Dan Morgan. I haven’t before. Not really.

On December 18th, 2005 I posted this in my livejournal:
I am about to climb out of my head with wanting sex. But I still don’t want casual sex. I feel kind of lame. It has been just over three weeks and I am already going batty? Damn the time is going to pass slow… This is longer than I have gone without sex in… oh god… uhhhhh… two years. For the record: I have really enjoyed how much sex I have had in the last two years. *sigh* Thank you to all the lovely people who have made the last two years so much fun. 🙂 I was asked on Friday if going back to casual sex would be better than waiting for more meaningful sex. I told the person that I am coming out of a relationship where I have had the best sex of my life and going back to more mediocre sex would be a serious let down and I am not quite ready to do that yet. I think a lot/most of what made that sex so awesome was I was more present for it than I usually am. I asked Puppy for what I wanted in ways that I have never been comfortable asking before. Other than the actual technical amount of time spent having sex I got exactly what I wanted pretty much when I wanted. There was also a variety that blew my mind. I kind of feel like I rediscovered vanilla sex. And it can be GOOD.

I miss every part of sex. I miss having his body over mine. I miss the scary intensity of having him slide into my ass. I miss feeling a cock in my throat. I miss feeling his tongue on my clit. I really miss having a cock in my pussy. The discerning reader will notice the change in possessive pronouns in the previous statements. There are some sex acts that were very specific to him that I miss him for. There are some that I am just missing in general right now. He is the only sex partner I have ever received regular anal or oral from.

I didn’t mention this part to the person who asked, but I actually don’t really want to go back to casual sex because I don’t want to go back to the fanaticism I have when I am being a slut. I don’t particularly like getting STD tested every three months. I don’t particularly like condoms. I really really really like unprotected sex–which is a scary and dangerous thing. I can’t have it casually because I am not willing to risk my life. I am still on the pill. The first time he tried to break up with me I asked him if I could maintain booty call rights. I think I have it in the back of my mind that waiting a couple of months until I am less emotionally attached is a good thing, but eventually having him as a booty call would be a good thing. Although this is just mental masturbation. I really think that in order to not hurt myself emotionally it would have to be 4-6 months before I would be able to have sex with him and not cry through the entire event. And yeah. I am well aware that I technically can wait that long to have sex but I really don’t have to and I won’t go back to unprotected sex with him if I sleep with someone else. Ethics are annoying.

Right now, all I know is that I have a stronger desire right now for being beaten, for being held down and fucked unmercilessly than I have had in a very long time. I want to be slapped and taunted with how very horny I am right now. I want to have someone revel in my lustiness and appreciate the fact that I can wear someone out right now. I want to have someone fuck me until I beg them to stop because I am so sore. I want to be restrained and hurt and threatened. I want… sex.

The person I had been talking to on Friday was Dan Morgan. I don’t know how we started talking. I’m sure we met through Dickens Fair. No! Tribe? Was it Tribe? I don’t remember for sure. That sounds right, though. We were having these really awesome long conversations over IM about fun kinky sex stuff we were interested in doing. I was adamant about casual sex meaning condoms. He didn’t like that bit. He told me quite a bit about how condoms were annoying. My response: tough. No cover, no entry.

Our first date was on Christmas Day in Disneyland. I uhhh kind of bought his ticket in. He was really broke and said he couldn’t afford the trip if he had to pay for theme park tickets, though he had friends he could go crash with who would go with him to the park if I got him in. I didn’t have a problem with this.

We had a really fun date. Involving upsetting his friends when Dan fingered me in the Tiki Room. We were shit-faced drunk from the bar in downtown Disney. Disneyland as an adult is very different. Other people go and treat it very differently than I do. Anyway.

He went off with his friends and I went off with mine. On December 27th I posted:
Disneyland is still cool.
First dates… are interesting.
Still not up for sex even though I am crawling the walls.
I went to the gym and I am proud of myself.
I haven’t made one itty bitty movement towards cleaning my apartment.
I have food now.
Tomorrow I have three netflix movies to send back.
My cat is hella clingy.
My family sucks even more than usual.
I am really drunk.
I told Puppy that he is an elitist piece of shit tonight.
I am tired of planes.
I am really tired and uninterested in sleeping for some strange reason… I think I am going to lose that battle in the next 10 minutes though.
I missed country music.
Zzzzzzzzz
sleep.
I love my friends.

And then on December 29th I posted:
Tiki Bar TV

London Fogcutter, episode 8. That is the reason for my hangover.

I didn’t bother to mention that the real reason for my hangover was because Dan came over. We had a pleasant afternoon together. We dealt with a motorcycle gear acquisition for him. There was a good store near me. We tried to get to know one another. By evening he said we should start watching the show. He started making drinks. He made more and more. Dan is a really serious alcoholic. I don’t drink much and never have. Alcohol makes my stomach hurt. He kept topping up my glass. “Oh come on. You don’t want to get behind now, do you?” He was very antagonistic towards me trying to get me to drink more.

I wanted him to like me. I will freely say that. I thought he was shiny. I’m sure there was an element of star-fucking in it. He seemed well-liked. Maybe if I stood next to him I would feel like not-poison for a while.

I woke up at about 3am in my bed confused. I couldn’t remember anything past Tiki Bar TV. And I don’t know that I remember more than two episodes of it. I reached down between my legs and felt a lot of wet. I rolled out of bed (because I had no other way of getting to the floor) and crawled into the bathroom. There I proceeded to vomit until I thought I would die. It was awesome. This was when I was living in San Jose by myself for the only time in my life.

Puppy dumped me on Thanksgiving day. Noah asked me to marry him in March. Dan was right in the middle. Of-fucking-course I said yes to Noah.

Anyway. When I stopped puking I looked for my phone. I sent Dan a text message asking where he was, when he left, and uhm, did we have sex? He said he was at home. He had left at 2. Yes, we had sex. I sent back another message saying: …unprotected sex? He said, “Well you are on the pill so it doesn’t matter, right?”

I said basically nothing about this event to anyone who knew me. It wasn’t exactly rape, right? Only legally it was. Regardless of whether I intended to have sex or not, once I was passed out drunk it wasn’t ok. I had text evidence that I wasn’t interested in unprotected sex. And I bloody well thought about the fact that I could go in for a rape kit and it would be bloody obvious that we had unprotected sex.

I was afraid of people saying that I was having second thoughts. I was afraid of people saying that I was stupid or that I deserved it. I believe that unprotected sex is a disease vector. At that point in my life I was still really focused on the fact that I wanted to have children. I didn’t risk any more disease than I had to. I already have herpes and I’ve already had an hpv outbreak. That damage was done long before. I did the best I could with the information that I had.

Do you know why I was so afraid of going to the police? Well. That’s another story. I can’t give you a name because I honestly don’t remember it. I don’t really want to. I wouldn’t remember Dan’s if he wasn’t a trusted member of my extended community I thought was safe.

The summer I was 18 I was drunk with the sexual power of being a woman. Finally, for the first time in my life what I was doing and mine to decide about. I finally had the legal right to consent. It did actually matter to me. It has always bothered me that my early partners could have gone to jail for what we did. It feels like an unfair balance of responsibility. Anyway.

So when I was 18 I was on match.com. Don’t judge. I was hanging out in the chat rooms a lot. I met up with several people. The first was a guy who was in the Coast Guard. He lived in Alameda. Anna was housesitting for a family way the heck up Summit Road. The other side, not the same side as Redwood Estates. Way up in the fancy-pants part of the mountains. The house was beautiful. I can’t remember if there were three or four stories. Elaborate wine cellar (like a huge vault that was about 1/3 the size of the bottom floor of the house), sauna, steam room, exercise room, pool, hot tub… everything. The family was having a lot of work done on the house. They gave Anna permission to have me stay up there with her.

I know they regretted that. It was all my fault. Anna had worked for them successfully for years at that point. I ruined a very profitable relationship for her and I still feel bad about that. That is part of what I mean when I say I am poison. Anna bore a lot of the brunt of the backlash for this. But I’m getting ahead of myself again.

We invited a couple of my theater friends and this random guy from match.com up to the house for a party. It wasn’t that wild because my theater friends were young and sweet and inexperienced. I think back on them with this really nostalgic color. They were really awesome and I didn’t know how to stay one of them.

Of course there was drinking. Unless I snuck off behind Anna’s back she said I had three shots of tequila and then I begged off because my stomach hurt. Everyone else kept drinking. I don’t remember much after the second shot. I woke up in the morning feeling fierce and disgusting. I couldn’t remember any sex and I was kind of sad. I was confused though because I couldn’t remember much of anything, really. But I had to hurry up and get moving. I was working at Pride in San Francisco. I was working a booth for the Same Sex Marriage organization. It was awesome. I met people and did things I’m really glad I did. In between doing all of them I had to run to Port-A-Potties to vomit. I did that all day long. When I went back up to the house in the mountains I took another shower and curled up on the bed. I happened to lean over and look in the trash can. There were three used condoms.

Funny. I didn’t remember having sex. I asked Anna what happened. She told me about the party and said that eventually I stumbled back up to the room with the help of this guy. I asked her how I looked and she said, “You looked really out of it.” I nodded. I told her that I think that what happened technically qualifies as rape. I called the Sheriff. She was dubious. She was right.

The particular officer who showed up is one I have met before. When I was 11 Al Smith, my next door neighbor at the time, asked me if I would have sex with him. Our other neighbor overheard the whole exchange and reported it. That’s why the officer came to my house when I was 11. When I was 11 he told my family I was crazy and that I needed help. He wouldn’t prosecute Al.

When I was 18 he told me, “What did you expect when you bring a boy up to a house to drink?” He took the (outrageously expensive) sheets as “evidence” and then told me he was not going to fuck up the life of some nice Coast Guard boy for a girl like me who gets cold feet after the fact.

The fall out was really bad. The family had to be told why we disappeared their sheets. We would have been better off lying. Given the response of the sheriff it looked really bad and hysterical. It was even worse because I had gone skinny dipping in the pool and flirted with the guy painting the house. I was obviously horrible. The family was really angry with Anna for bringing someone like me into their house. They told her if she wanted to know people like me they didn’t want to know her.

Years later I was behind their car on the freeway. The license plate has their last name on it. I felt such a sickening wave of shame.

Why didn’t I call the police after Dan fucked me without a condom? Uhm…. good pattern recognition skills? Every time someone tells me that women bear some of the responsibility for being raped I want to scream. I HAVEN’T EVEN BEEN ALLOWED TO GIVE CONSENT WHEN I WANTED TO SO SHUT THE FUCK UP. Rape is an abuse of power. Rape is putting a body part into someone else when they have not consented. That is not something that is about mutual responsibility.

That asshole when I was 18 raped me. I could not consent by the time he had sex with me, but at least he used condoms. When I was 24 I was raped because having unprotected sex with me after I had it in writing many times that I don’t do that is illegal. And I was too chicken shit to say anything because I am well aware that no one in power gives a shit what happens to white trash whores like me.

And then Noah showed up. I would have been manifestly stupid and crazy to continue the life path I was on without him.

Shorter and shorter.

Leave a reply

I’ve been pulling at my hair for an hour in that way that means I will cut it again today. I have Hair on repeat. Really if you think about it, Lady Gaga singing about hair is somewhat ironic. She wears wigs. As she says over and over, “I am my hair” she is saying that she is something that is external. She has so much control over who she is that she decides differently on a daily basis. Does that mean that people who have abrupt changes in their appearance are changing who they are?

This is all too angsty; I know. I love semi-colons. Damn you, commas. Jenny likes to remind me that the “rules of writing” were just randomly invented by some twat one day. Ok, that’s not exactly what she says. But it is what I hear. It makes me smile every single time. Because if some twat just made it up one day I don’t need to feel bound to it. I can do whatever I want. It’s a fun kind of rebellion–normally invisible.

Along with my hair getting shorter I notice how my field of vision is shortening. I’m not responding to emails or text messages unless I have seen the person recently. Recently as in seeing them within the last month. People I haven’t seen in many months… I don’t know. I just never seem to remember when I am at the computer. Or it is something like right now where I am actively avoiding. I don’t know why I am actively avoiding. I do. I don’t want to say why I am actively avoiding.

I’m not at ease in my skin right now. I feel not-ok in a way that I can’t ignore. I feel like a thousand monkeys are jumping on my chest. It hurts just behind my breastbone. Right now I don’t feel like I can look people in the eye. I feel dirty. Small. Less than. It’s not anyone else’s fault. At this point in time I don’t think there are very many people who know me even casually who think that of me. Not really. Sure, there are people who dislike me.

Outside of my family I don’t actually believe that people wish me ill. And they all feel very guilty for wishing me ill.

I am trying to see my shaman on Thursday. Since our babysitter quit I’m not 100% sure that is going to happen. And I may have to reschedule with him because of a meeting in the city anyway. It feels kind of like the universe doesn’t want me to see him. I want to see him.

I’ve got my bangs too high that I don’t stand a chance. I think I need to ask my shaman to shave my head. There. That is the compulsive. Why don’t I ask Noah? Why do I want to keep this away from him? Why is my shaman more appropriate?

Well didn’t I just fucking load that question. What does ownership mean? I don’t know. I really don’t. I am very much like a wild animal. I run off and do things by myself sometimes. I can’t accept having everything in my life have to come from Noah. Right now there is so very little in my life that isn’t for him. That plays a part in why I was dating too, I think.

Noah doesn’t have the same wounds in identity because of his appearance. I don’t see the deep fractures in his soul from feeling bad about how he looks. My shaman has spent a fair bit of time being upset with his physical body. Even my use of male pronouns is part of that fight. I feel like it is a failure in me that I cannot default to gender neutral pronouns. They all feel wrong, false, not grammatical. Not allowed.

Does that mean that people who are not easily labeled by one of those correct pronouns do not exist? It certainly feels that way. I suppose that since the dominant name and label is generally male it is close enough. That is awkward to say and write about. I feel like I am jumping on the crazy train, but who am I kidding? I was already here.

I want to see my shaman. I want to talk to him about my shifting sense of self. I want to talk to him about feeling so very bad about existing. I don’t have a church. I don’t have a congregation. But I do have a shaman. I’m not sure how these things happen. How does a life get built, anyway?

The part of me that is fighting with my compulsion admits that I want to use sex to get close to my shaman. I want to feel connected with him. Given our history I know it wouldn’t work in the way I wanted it to, anyway. We have an odd time connecting that way because we go at very different speeds. We are not a match or it never would have fallen off. But I feel like I should do it anyway. I love him so much. I feel like I have to earn the honor of his regard. I have to prove to him that I do want him. I do love him. There is nothing else I have to give that has any value or worth at all. Absolutely never is the pleasure of my company a possible exchange. I know there is no pleasure in my company. I am too mean. Too sharp. Too vicious and unpleasant.

I take comfort in getting to explain to him that I am not allowed to have sex with anyone else anymore. It’s not my fault. I’m sorry I am changing the deal. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry that I will never meet that need again. Please, please don’t reject me now. He won’t. But I feel absolutely terrified anyway. Hell, he doesn’t remember the last time we had sex. I was not pleased when I figured that out. Butthead. Apparently he doesn’t value me based on the things I think he does. He doesn’t even remember the parts that I think are the most important thing I have to give.

What the fuck is it that he is getting then? I need to ask. I need to go to him and talk to him about starting to dye my hair when I first started pulling away from my mom. The colors have gotten increasingly bolder and more odd and aggressive as I have felt angrier and angrier with my mother. The bleach is kind of a bitch though. I had a temper tantrum while trying to comb my hair one day because I couldn’t get the knot out. I cut it out. I did a bad job. It was fun for several days to try to even it out and giggle because with the curls and the weird dye job (I think five colors in splotches) it really doesn’t matter much if it is “even”.

But I’m tired of going out in public and hearing the comments. I smile at the children who ask. I frown at the boys who snicker “clown”. It’s like fucking junior high all over again. I’m done. I’m not hunting. I’m done. I feel like that part of me is gone. I miss my hair. I miss being able to turn my head and get a curtain to hide behind. It was part of how I dealt with my vast discomfort in public. I lost my veil. I feel exposed in a way that feels deeply uncomfortable. I have nothing to hide behind except my eyelids. They do not feel like adequate cover.

I feel like me shaving my head will happen like all the cutting. In the bathroom by myself. I know my shaman doesn’t keep up with my blog. He frankly tells me he doesn’t have the time to read my ever-increasing flood. That’s ok. It means I can talk about him all I want.

I feel like part of what is going on with the less-than is I feel so very weird about my place in the social hierarchy lately. I don’t feel like I am behaving. I fit nowhere. It was a true thing I said when I told my therapist that the only way I will ever fit into a group is if I leave Noah and am a poor single mother. They just don’t make groups for me any more.

What does that mean? I guess that means this is the American Dream then. Solitude. More of it. I don’t understand why. I’m not sure where I got broke and I don’t know how to fix it. I don’t fit. I feel wrong. I feel like everything in me is wrong. I still feel bewildered by my lack of anger. I don’t have that energy right now. Anger is normally a big spur to me getting off my fucking ass and getting shit done. It’s one of the things I use to fuel my productivity and I don’t care if that’s healthy or not. Everyone dies, right? I could very carefully never ever use my body harshly. I don’t think I would be very proud of my life.

What am I proud of? I kind of want to go ask my shaman to bait it out of me. He drives me insane. He says irritatingly true things. One right after another. It’s hard to not hate him sometimes. I would ask him to take the last of this shame from me when he shaved my head. But I don’t think I am going to ask. Because this is one of those things I have to do alone. He can’t take shame from me. Not really.

Shame is something that I own all by myself. I have to learn to wear it or I have to take it off. I don’t know how to take it off right now. I feel stuck. I feel too little and small. I haven’t done anything to really be proud of. I have done things that other people do and I expect far more support for it. I am small and selfish and petty. I am weak. Really? Am I? Maybe. Yes? Of course?

I recently saw this picture, one of the canonical “starving children in Africa” pictures. I feel terrible describing it that way. But these pictures are used as bludgeoning tools. You can’t ignore the fact that seriously, right this minute a small child is starving to death in another part of the world. While you wear big fur boots and lots of makeup and talk about how pathetic they are. It’s kind of an American trope, this guilt.

If I ever feel bad for myself I am supposed to remind myself that I am at least not a starving child in Africa and go on about my life. Well doesn’t that just support the status quo. I don’t much like the status quo.

The thing about guilt and shame is they aren’t useful. They are paralyzing. They rarely spur people to much action beyond denial.

When the children hiss hostile words at me I hear my mother telling me that all the people in the world think I look stupid. Everyone thinks I am ridiculous. Why? What have I done? Why is it ridiculous to play with your appearance? Why is it expected to be a set thing that doesn’t modify as time goes by? Why can’t I change? Why am I to be mocked?

But you know what? I’m a fucking grown up. My triggers are mine to manage. I am not going to get all the children in the world to stop making fun of me. They are little assholes. They can’t help it. So are their parents.

I have a lot of interesting feelings emerging as my hair gets shorter and shorter. My mother liked my hair short. She wanted me to look like a boy. She commented openly on it. I’m really intrigued by how harsh my face appears with short hair. I’m not sure how I feel about that as a lifestyle choice going forward. I am going to have an interesting time as it grows out. I want my veil back. It’s interesting knowing that if I want long hair going forward in my life I have to stop doing anything to it. I’m stuck with baking soda and vinegar for the rest of my life. I will have gorgeous hair again.

It’s weird learning what self-care means. It’s weird thinking about learning to take care of my body. It’s weird learning what it means to be gentle with myself. It’s happening in unexpected ways. I don’t feel bad about the cutting. I hope I don’t do it again because the marks aren’t fading fast and I don’t want my daughters to learn it as an appropriate coping mechanism. It means I need to figure out what to do. I don’t know right now. So far the answer seems to be, “Don’t hate yourself.” I’m not sure what that actually means as something to teach my kids. How do I do that? For the love of shiny green apples, how can someone like me teach anything other than hating yourself?

I’m going to a homeschooling meet-up tomorrow with the kids. We will be doing Sharpie tie-dye. I won’t shave my head before then. They deserve to know what they are getting into with our family. We are weird. Get used to it.

monogamy

Leave a reply

Monogamy. It’s a weird concept for me. I need to spend the rest of my life learning how to have relationships with people without having sex with them. I think that will be good for me. Weird and awkward, but good. What does that mean though?

I hesitate to talk about this. I don’t want to eat crow later. Mmmmm crow. Never say never. I remember a friend of mine, years ago, telling me, “Of course I don’t like that he plays with other women. But I want to play with other men so I shut up and put up with it.” I think I’d rather not play with other people than feel like I have to bite back my actual opinion. I don’t want to have to learn masking behavior that I use only at certain times. That feels like lying.

Noah playing with other people makes me cry. It reminds me that I don’t ever get to be special. Which is stupid, right? He married me. He didn’t marry anyone else and he is not going to leave me. Why isn’t that enough to convince me? Sex is so mixed up for me. Near as I can tell most people have enormous sexual hang ups without having to be abused starting in toddlerhood.

I don’t want to feel like I have to have sex with people in order to be interesting and I do. I really do. I don’t like that part of myself very much. I feel rather disgusting, really. This is bordering on a lot of things I’m deeply conflicted about. I am an exhibitionist. No one reading this is surprised. I’m not sure how that ties in with a lot of my need-to-feel-available.

I think I want to find out how forever feels. I want to realize that I’ve probably kissed someone else for the last time. Really. He’s it. Forever. I’m kind of excited. I should decide that I deserve to be touched only by someone who wants me enough to actually want all of me. Not just that piece of me.

How am I going to connect with all the people I want to connect with? It’s kind of terrifying, really. What do I have to offer? I don’t know. I have spent my adulthood with people who believe that monogamy is terrible and limiting and to be avoided at all costs. I feel kind of ashamed that I want to keep Noah all to myself.

I feel like I am doing something wrong by joining the Embargo and refusing to sleep with anyone ever again. It’s not fair that all these guys want sex and I won’t sleep with them. This is not a guilt I should carry. It should never enter into my mind that it isn’t fair that this nice guy isn’t getting _____ need met. Life isn’t fair. I bear no obligation to anyone but Noah for sexual needs.

That’s complicated too. I think in some ways monogamy is terrifying because it means that we will both have to be a lot more honest about what we want. If we want to get our needs met, really met we have to talk about them even when it is hard. Even when he’s afraid to say it to me. Even when I’m afraid to say it to him. I do not need to agree to do more than I do in order to be GGG. I need to say “no” a lot more and have more ownership of my body. We need to find a way to meet our mutual needs without me biting my lip and doing things that feel bad. I can’t hold Noah accountable for the consequences of his actions if I withhold information. I can’t decide it is proof that he doesn’t care when he doesn’t notice.

I can’t relax and enjoy this relationship while I feel like I am constantly preparing to be paranoid about Noah running off to fuck someone else. And that is how I feel in an open marriage. It feels like every day is just a count down until he gets to do that again. I feel like I am always doing something wrong by wanting to spend time with him. I should be giving him lots of time away from me to go do and be lots of things away from me because obviously he wants to reserve a lot of himself away from me. He is waiting for someone better than me to give that part of himself to. I don’t blame him. I constantly feel like I am waiting for him to go find someone more understanding than me to go talk to. Someone who is entirely on his side.

I have signed on to be completely dependent on Noah for the next twenty years. No, I am not going to relax my hypervigilance as long as I know that is coming some day. It means I have to steal myself that whole period until that day comes because I will not be able to bear the loss otherwise. I have to create a big hole in my heart and leave it that way and never let you touch it or come near it. Because that is where I will have to go when you are fucking someone else. It’s the same place I go when I sleep with other people. It is a space outside of me, outside of my life. I don’t really bond with casual sex. I have an experience. It is outside of me.

I’m afraid of monogamy because Noah really likes to take it to 11. If I have clamped down so hard on him that he isn’t allowed to go play with other people, how much will I egg him on to do because I feel guilty? I don’t know how to do this in a way that is good for me. Nonmonogamy gives me the eternal out that I can say, “Fine you have this part of you that I can’t deal with… take it somewhere else.” I never have to deal with my own actual limits that way. I never have to deal with telling him, “Fine but no really you have to stop at 8 because my jaw hurts.” That’s harder. Telling him no is a lot easier than having to figure out what I can do.

I’m afraid because I think we are going to have some difficult periods and a lot of crying over sex. I think this is going to be hard. I think we will both have to do a lot of forgiving one another for mistakes and that’s hard to think about. It’s weird to be discussing monogamy after five years of marriage. We really know what we are getting into, you know? Only we don’t. Because things will be very different in twenty years. We will be very different people. Can I really require that he never again touch anyone else intimately? I’m not going to do poly-anything. If he is going to follow my boundaries well, I feel weird about that.

I feel very pressured as the gate keeper. It’s weird to feel so conflicted about this. On one hand I feel uncomfortable with the idea of keeping him from having sex and other hand I’m not thrilled about feeling required to have sex absolutely as much as he wants forever. I don’t have any idea what my limits are.

I don’t like the way I dissociate rather than deal with feeling uncomfortable during sex. I have a hard time dealing with my anxious feelings in the moment. It’s hard to say when I really don’t want to be pushed. He likes pushing so much. It’s so weird to me that he worries about me wanting him. I worry about wanting him so much that I break myself trying to meet needs I can’t meet.

Because the thing is, I don’t actually think there are needs of his I can’t meet. Because I think that if he picks the right days, I probably can actually meet all of his needs. I like to go to 11 too. I feel scared that he isn’t going to be willing to walk around the cracks. I really do like the image of myself as a mosaic. My picture was broken so long ago and put back together so clumsily that it is an entirely new picture. On even median days I like me.

I don’t think he can really just learn a “set of triggers” and avoid them. It’s quicksand. And it moves. I want to find out how it moves. I want to be able to try things many times and know that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. I want to be brave enough to not be angry when I say, “Ok not tonight.” I’m not failing if I say that. I’m not failing if my body is not up to something on a given day. I am not failing if sometimes I need to be held instead of hit. It’s hard to admit that I’m not instinctively automatically in the same place as Noah.

It feels like I don’t deserve him. Because I cannot do that. Because I cannot just accept whatever he wants to do whenever he wants to do it. I feel like I cannot require monogamy because I will never be good enough to satisfy him. I will never be enough. I will always fail. I’m scared.

I’m terrified to believe him. I’m so afraid that I will believe him that he wants to be monogamous. Only in twenty years things will be different and I will be expected to just understand. People evolve. Needs change.

I know that I will want to sleep with people. That’s just a fact. I’m not actually in denial about that. I will want to do it a lot. It will feel compulsive for the rest of my life. But I’m going to choose not to do it. I don’t think that I am actually served by following my pointer through life. My compass is broken. I need to think about the long-term and understand that sleeping with other people does not feed any of my needs (ok hyperbole for effect but the problems outweigh gains) and does not meet any of my goals.

Ok, maybe the hookers in Vegas. Because I can get behind you being motivated to attain that salary. Especially because the deal was always that they would be there in case I wore out. You haven’t done it yet. I don’t safeword.

That’s why.

6 Replies

This morning I had an important thought. If I stop smoking pot now I am going to start cutting frequently. The Ativan is not a choice that works as well. I’m not willing to be on a daily pill, even though I probably should at this point. My mood cycles have been horrible in the last two weeks. Pot levels it all out and makes me cheerful and just barely stupid. I am in a great space to sit and play with Play Doh for hours. I can build with Lego’s all day. I’m noticing what things I didn’t get Shanna that I probably should have.

I’m enjoying how cuddly and affectionate Calli is… when I’m stoned. When I’m sober it bothers me and I want to get up and walk away. There is something wrong with me. When I am sober it hurts. She bangs her head on me, she scratches, she steps on me awkwardly or knees me or or or or… I kind of hate it. When I am stoned I just mumble, “oooph, gentle with Mommy”. I’m so glad to be near her that I don’t mind her rough antics. She doesn’t mean anything by them. She’s just a baby.

My body isn’t a good place to be lately. I have to spend a lot of time dissociated if I want to function at all. It’s hard. Most of my body hurts most of the time. My stomach hurts terribly from stress, pot also levels that out.

Pot allows me to put aside my grown up concerns and worries and just be present and happy in the moment with my kids. Most of the day is really quite pleasant. I only think about things that are relevant to what is in my line of sight, quite deliberately. That’s how I manage to be a good mother. I think only of our immediate house and my kids most of the time. I don’t divide my energy well. I can work on house stuff like cleaning with the kids around, but that’s the limit. Sometimes they let me read. They hate the computer and mostly I have to be in a different room on a break in order to use it. That’s when I smoke pot.

I go think about grown up things for brief periods behind closed doors during the day. That is what having Sarah here gives me. Time to walk away from the kids when my thoughts become intrusive. When I am starting to feel edgy I can ask for a break. I’m trying to have the breaks be as effective sober and they just aren’t. My emotions are too intense.

I have ridiculous self-control and ridiculous patience… within small tight boundaries. My kids will grow up being told frankly that I smoke because I need the medicine in the plant and there isn’t a better way to get it out for me. Why do I need the medicine? Because of something that was broken when I was a little girl. They won’t be broken in that way so they won’t need the medicine. It’s rather unpleasant to do, so I don’t recommend it. Shanna will cheerfully lecture anyone within hearing on how disgusting and unhealthy smoking is. Yay California.

But sober, I’m edgy and raw. I cry a lot. I can’t stand to let anyone touch me and when my kids grab me my entire physical reaction is to want to shake them off like a dog. I loathe being touched. It feels like such a disgusting and horrible incursion into my body. Every touch feels bad right now. Everything hurts. The most gentle of caresses feels like a slap. I can mostly dissociate away when sober, but not enough to smile or pretend I am enjoying it.

I don’t want my children to grow up with a mother who flinches away from them constantly as if they are terrible people for wanting to touch her. I think I should get stoned instead. It doesn’t really matter that I feel bad about doing it. It doesn’t matter that the stupid bitch at PAMF looked at me like dirt because I have a medical card. It allows me to be a good mother. I feel so ashamed of myself for needing it. I guess this makes me an addict? Officially? I don’t know.

It seems to me that most of life is about walking a series of thin lines. I am more ashamed of cutting than I am of smoking pot. The specific reason I think it is worse is because I will be more strongly judged and censured for cutting. I don’t know a lot about tribal cutting, I’ve never bothered to find out. I can imagine there being places in the world where my desire to cut myself to deal with my emotional experience would be viewed differently. If I were to lose my fear of judgment, I would be able to represent myself in a way that would feel more honest. I am a person who has experienced a lot of pain. But I did it in a way that is invisible and hard to ignore. There are scars all through my vagina. I think the scars should be on the outside so that other people can see them. I think that marking yourself in proportion to the pain you feel is a way of identifying yourself so that you can find other people to talk to who can hopefully give you relevant advice beyond, “Just cheer up!” Yeah, fuck you too.

Pot keeps me from feeling suicidal. I’m just not desperate enough. It really pisses me off that I can never really be a martyr for any cause ever in my life because if I go in a way that is not completely fucking random people will assume I killed myself. It’s just got to be the base assumption forever.

I’d really like to kill myself. But in my personal hierarchy of needs it is far far more important that I never give my children the experience of parental suicide. Jimmy thinks that just not talking about things and not doing the same things will break the chains and he’s wrong. The only thing that will break the chains is consciously talking about what we are doing and then choosing to do something else. It is hard to be a different person. It doesn’t happen by sitting back silently and hoping it happens.

Who do I want to be? I want to be someone who doesn’t need to be apathetic all the time in order to function. This stage of processing won’t last forever. What do I need to change about my life in order to not get back to feeling this desperate and hurt? Can I change enough? Is this just something that is part of me because of my previous trauma? Will I always find a new trigger somewhere down the road? I don’t know. I really don’t.

I’m just bitchy and mean and bored and antsy and angry and touchy when I am sober. I feel so dissatisfied with everything in life. I hate that in myself. And when I’m stoned I’m fine. No really. I am doing exactly what I said I would and I do enjoy it when I can focus on it. There must be something wrong with me if I need pot to focus. That’s not very functional, only it is. I’m functional, I really am. I beg the internet to believe me. Why do I care so much? Why do I feel like I constantly have to prove that I have some value. I am not just a worthless piece of shit. Even if I do smoke pot. Even if I am just a disgusting whore.

I think I’m ordering more pot today.

aftermath

3 Replies

I told Noah that I would be fairly ashamed to tell people how we are moving forward. According to my personal religion that means I am committing a sin. It’s mixed. Mostly I would say we are getting along very well. I’m not starting fights or insulting him or picking on him. Noah is his usual polite and adoring self. It’s like nothing happened except we have massively increased how much sex we are having and how degrading our sex is.

We have spent a lot of time talking about how compulsive I am about sex. About how that works in my head. We have spent a lot of time talking about how impulsive Noah is about sex. So far we seem to be at the point where we are both acknowledging that we qualify as “sex addicts” by any reasonable definition but maybe if we stick with each other we won’t cause too big of problems?

Apparently the task of the week is to see how much sex we have to have before Noah can’t handle any more. So far we have managed three times a day every day. Then I fall asleep. I feel mixed about this. He knows I feel mixed about this. Hell, I’m writing about feeling mixed about this–everyone will know. It’s hard talking about the actual needs that casual sex meets for me. I can meet some pretty fucked up needs without telling anyone what I am doing. I never have to tell my partners what my internal dialogue is. I don’t have a very high opinion of myself and my voracious need for sex.

I don’t have a very high opinion of the fact that my preference is for most of the sex I have to be quasi-consensual. Noah is well aware that a large percentage, possibly “most”, of our sex involves me not being in the mood at all. It doesn’t really matter if I am interested in sex. I am interested in being a good whore. That means I will do what I am supposed to do. I feel manifestly uncomfortable admitting that. A large percentage of the sex I have I only have because I feel like I am required to do so. That is what someone like me is good for. That is what I am supposed to do. And I’m really good at it. And I fucking live for the post-sex adulation. People I fuck tend to be willing to tell me at great length how good I am at sex. I try very hard to make sure I work far harder at sex than most women. I really really want the approval I get after sex.

I feel like something is broken in me. That I chase this so hard. Noah and I have been talking a lot lately. I don’t think I am going to sleep with other people any more. Regardless of what Noah ends up doing for the rest of his life, I need to stop buying affection with sex. I need to stop begging my friends to like me by proving that I am better at sex than anyone they’ve ever slept with. It’s not really a strategy that is working for me.

I like to pick other sex addicts and go have multiple hours of sex with them. Most of the time they are so shocked by finding a woman who is also as motivated by sex that they are willing to tell me pretty much anything I want. It’s broken. I have a partner at home who is willing to do the Jekyll/Hyde thing with me. He will degrade me and talk about me being a whore during sex. He will tell me that if I am so motivated by cock I am required to show up at 5am every day and wake him up with my mouth. And he’s pretty nice to me the rest of the time.

I feel worried by the duality of our relationship. Most of the time in most ways he really is an amazing partner. He is a good, stable provider. He is kind. He is great with our children. I have been able to push him towards mutually agreed upon improvements in behavior over the years. He’s very willing to accommodate me in just about every part of life. He bends over backwards for me in nearly every way. He will even call me names and hurt me tremendously during sex if I tell him I want him to.

There is this mythos in my head that slaves and masochists should experience no internal conflict over what they do. I have massive internal conflict. I am still upset that Noah lied to me. And my response is to tell him more and more complex stories that I am terribly ashamed of. Things that hurt me very much. And I ask him to use them against me. I want him to agree that I am just a dirty whore. There isn’t much else that someone like me is good for. But I want him to gift wrap it in a package where I don’t have to be at risk going forward.

For me to keep having the kind of casual sex that I like is for me to risk my life. It really won’t be much longer before I go back for hunting for rough, dangerous sex. Sure I’m being all loud and snotty this round of hunting because I want vanilla sex right now. That would fade. I would go back to wanting people to do dangerous things to me. I’ve already had a broken bone in the pursuit of good sex, what else will happen?

It is a lot safer to stick with Noah. He will be able to hurt me as much or more than anyone else. He doesn’t flinch from doing so. Noah has not yet inflicted as much pain on me as a small handful of other people, but he has every intention of doing so. I get the impression that some day he will be the one I have done my most intense play with. That kind of terrifies me. Because he has a high bar to reach. I have already done things that were a really bad idea. I’m sure I will do more.

If I do this instead of cutting or sleeping around or drugs or whatever other self-harming behavior I can dream up… is that better? I don’t know. I don’t know how this life thing is supposed to work. I hear I am just supposed to magically decide that I shouldn’t be harmed any more, not by anyone. Not by me, and not by random guys, and not by my husband. But I need this. I am so used to feeling shit on. I require it so much.

Noah has been nice and patient for a long time. We haven’t done intense or painful or degrading sex in a long time. He’s been more respectful than that. So I got bored and went out and slept with other people. And the thing is, it’s not enough that he does these things to me. I need people to know that these things are part of my life. I need for people to know that I am this person. I can’t have this done in secret. I can’t keep secrets.

It would be a sin if I did these things and kept them private and secret. I believe that. That is something that I have to hold on to in life. Something is only a sin if I am ashamed to talk about it. If I am talking about this now, does that mean I am released from the power of it being a sin? I don’t know. I worry about needing what I need. It’s mixed.

I can point in a straight line from events in my early childhood to what I do now. Come March, other people will be able to do so as well. Noah already can. And he stomps all over me with that knowledge. Only in ways I find hot, of course. Is that the difference? Is that the line between what we do and some amorphous “abuse”? If I tell Noah to stop doing something on a given day he does. Except by prior arrangement. Except that I know that I just don’t bother to say no when I’m not in the mood. I figure out how to let it happen. I figure out how to permit him the access he wants whether I want it or not. I don’t generally bother to communicate whether I am in the mood or not. If he tells me to do something, I do it.

It’s interesting when people talk to me about how self-assured I am. How self-possessed. How willing to stand up for myself. Ha. Only sometimes. Only in some ways. If a sexual partner is telling me to do things I frankly don’t want to do I have limited ability to communicate my wants. It depends on how I am doing emotionally and it depends on how much I am invested in the partner. I have casual sex because I can have boundaries with strangers. I have repeat sex with long-term friends because I have beaten them down in non-sexual settings and they don’t push real hard out of fear of a backlash that will never come. I don’t have boundaries with my long-term partners. I barely communicate anything about my limits beyond telling them what buttons will get them the biggest reaction today. “Today is ____ anniversary so why don’t you hurt me by doing _________.”

It’s not a sin if I talk about it. I don’t know what it is, but it’s not a sin. I have decided this for my own personal pantheon of beliefs.

These needs all predate Noah. They are not because of him. Most of them are not really about him at all. These are things that were broken in me as a child. But he frankly enjoys many of the ways I am broken. He feels no shame whatsoever in enjoying what I became as the direct result of years of sexual assault. Well, maybe he feels a little shame. But not much. Not enough to prevent him from trying to behave in ways that will keep me from getting bored in the future. Not enough to lessen his enjoyment of what this deep feeling of shame causes me to do during sex. His favorite part lately seems to be that I’m really ok with him fucking my throat until he causes me to vomit. I have a fairly reactive gag reflex. I consider vomiting to be just part of serious blow jobs. I don’t think that is normal. It never feels like it is really a good time to say, “Could you back off on the deep throating?” I don’t get to set terms like that. I get to accept.

In about ten minutes I have to get up and close the computer. I will walk across the house and I will do what I was told to do. Do I want to? Enh. Not really. My throat and cunt are sore. I could use about a week off from sex to recover at this point. But I draw comfort from the fact that I have confessed so I go forth without sin. I will smile. I will encourage him. I will beg him for more, in fact. It doesn’t really matter that I’m sore. That’s beside the point. I don’t think I should go have sex with other people any more. I don’t think that is a good decision for me. He says he is going to be monogamous as well. No, let me be clear. He will be as monogamous as I am.

I fell compelled by my shame. I told him he would be allowed to sleep with whomever he wanted, forever. I promised him that. At no point did I tell him I would like it or feel happy about it. I feel like I did a bait and switch. I feel like I owe him for all the sex he will never get to have because he was stupid enough to marry someone as insecure and selfish and possessive as me. I feel guilty that I seem to have tricked him into monogamy. In turn I fell compelled to say, “Ok fine, I guess I can’t be monogamous either–go have fun.”

I sincerely believe I should stop having sex with other people. I should not act on feeling compelled to earn love and affection with sex outside my marriage. It’s bad enough that I do it with Noah. I don’t actually think I should go out and find a harem of men who will cheerfully call me a whore during sex. I don’t need that. I do enough of that all by myself.

I feel so broken. I seem to have absolutely internalized that anyone who fucks this many people is kind of disgusting. And all I want to do is increase the number so I can increase just how many people will think I am disgusting.

But Noah doesn’t care. He doesn’t care at all what I’ve done or what I might do in the future. He wants me. He takes great pride in me. He loves me and adores me. He bends over backwards from me in pretty much every part of life. Except when he’s being impulsive. Oops. His friend told him, “The problem with your situation is it’s hard to know when you are cheating.” Maybe if the rules are clearer then it will be easier to figure out what to do?

I feel like I have taken something away from him. He was poly when I met him. How dare I take that away. I seem to be the epitome of what Dan Savage and Mistress Matisse warn about. That evil double crosser who promises poly and can’t hack it. I’m sorry I am so broken. I really am. I wish that I could encourage Noah to do anything he wants with anyone he wants. Hell, I do encourage him. But it hurts me when he does it. I’m sorry that is true. I really am.

Time to move on

Leave a reply

Saturday night we held a surprise dinner party for a friend’s birthday. She seemed pretty excited about being the center of attention finally. I think everyone should get the limelight on their birthday. It was one of the best parties I’ve ever hosted. I think it was a raging success. An awful lot of the reason for that is I didn’t feel any pressure to be “on”. People weren’t there to see me. Maybe the secret is to invite other peoples’ friends over.

It was neat partially because this was a bdsm crowd of type I don’t hang out with much. This was a Master/slave sort of gathering. And Daddy energy. Lots of Daddy energy. I got to talk about my opinions about those sorts of relationships. I got to talk about my experiences with people I have seen around in the scene for over a decade but never before have they noticed me. It was a weird kind of arriving moment. It was interesting.

I really enjoyed getting to explain some of my opinions. I don’t get asked about these topics much any more. I have a lot of opinions. The M/s portion of my relationship with Tom was the middle two years out of four. So we had a year to ramp up and a year to ramp down. I have a lot of perspective on that situation at this point.

And after they left Noah and I had crazy hot sex where he explained what he would like from our relationship in the future. I’m considering his words very carefully. It’s a lot more complicated for me to change the nature of my relationships now that I have young children and a marriage and a mortgage to consider. I’m not just thinking about what I want and what will feel good. I have to seriously stop and think about whether or not any given set of choices is sustainable for me. Without sustainability there is no future for any set of behaviors.

Last night in the middle of that crazy hot sex we had to stop for a while because I was crying too hard. I was crying because it has cost me a lot to maintain training that Tom gave me. It is humiliating to have to explain to random pick up partners that they have to give me permission to orgasm. Not only do they have to give me permission they have to kind of do it in a certain way. Most people guess close enough, but some people say things that make it so that I can’t. Or they think it is funny to tell me no. I feel like I don’t get the final say on what happens to my body and that really bothers me. I am tired of having no choice but to submit this ownership of my body to anyone who touches me. I’m tired of being unable to have a private sexual experience inside my brain. I’m tired of constantly having to offer up my desire to someone else. Someone who doesn’t even understand what this gift costs me.

I am a slave without an Owner. I’m kind of tired of it. It is starting to feel demeaning. It is starting to make me feel like this enormous pearl is being cast before swine. They do not understand or appreciate and I feel cheapened by the experience. I want to figure out how to not need permission any more.

I’m 30 years old. I have not had control of my right to orgasm since I was 19. Maybe it’s time. I had a brief period where I started to figure out how to turn this off. It lasted a couple of months. Then Noah came back. It’s one of his favorite party tricks. It’s hard to tell him I don’t want to give this to him any more. I am tired of having to feel subjugated to new partners. It makes the barrier of sex very different. It’s a lot of why I sleep with assholes.

Assholes know how to use this. They don’t need me to stop and give an explanation of how I became so broken. They just want to play with it as a toy. Let’s press the button and see what happens! I’m tired of having my right to pleasure be out of my control. It feels like part of the larger patterns of me doing sex constantly for some perceived exterior motivation.

I want to have some idea of what sex is like for other women.

I told Noah last night that I can’t tell if part of me is breaking or mending. I don’t know what it means that I feel so strongly about getting rid of this now. I want my freedom, damn it. I’m tired of having to explain to every vanilla person about my former Owner training. I can never tell the story right in the moment. It always feels rushed and I’m trying to change gears and be a different person and it doesn’t feel like a good conversation to have.

How many other people have to stop and tell the story of their sex life going back to when they were 19 forever? I wonder how much this feeds my inability to get over Tom. I’m reminded of him every single time I have sex. I know this was done for him. I could never forget it. This is such a huge part of my body and my life. He caused this change in me. What am I like without Tom’s training? I don’t know. I’ve never been able to find out. It’s time.

Different facets.

Leave a reply

Today is hard because I have already been a friend, a lover, and a therapy client. Any second now I need to be a mother. I need to be a partner. I need to be a wife. I need to be a boss.

It’s hard to be these different parts of me. They feel like they don’t add up to a person. I’m not sure if they are less or more than a person, but not really a person. A host with many guests. I hurt. I hurt inside my heart. I am all these things and more and it feels like a terrible thing I am doing. I am supposed to pick. Ok, probably not one. But just two or three. Fine, I can be a mother and a therapy client and a wife. Those are supposed to be my priorities, right?

But I really enjoyed being a lover today. Today I felt beautiful. Noah tolerates a lot of my derogatory self-talk. Well, he ignores me. He tells me I’m beautiful. He tells me he likes me. Today my Daddy made me stand in front of a mirror and he touched me and made me look and told me that I am beautiful. I feel like I can still barely lift my head. I can’t look up at someone saying that about me. I’m not. I’m so ugly and mean and bad. You don’t know how bad.

Maybe. There are parts of me that are ugly and mean and bad. I have done things I am ashamed of. I have hurt people. But maybe this isn’t an ‘or’ situation. Maybe I’m ugly and I’m beautiful. Maybe the most beautiful thing I have done in my whole life was standing up to my family and prosecuting my father and preventing him from ever victimizing another person. I did that. All by myself. My father was a serial rapist. He had molested many people from childhood to adulthood. I. Got. Rid. Of. Him. As sure as if I put a gun to his head. I made sure he could never hurt anyone again. Ok, so I didn’t expect him to kill himself, not really. I was surprised. I was devastated. I knew it was a risk. Everyone thought he would put a gun in his mouth. But he didn’t. He sat, like a chicken shit, in his garage and ran his truck. While he sat there he wrote notes of hate to me and my mother. I burned that note many years ago after Tom urged me to. It ate at me. He told me, essentially, that he was committing suicide because I was an evil liar and he didn’t want to go to hell for the sin of murdering me because I murdered my brother. Did you follow that? His grammar (and spelling) was worse. But the hate was god damn obvious. What a piece of shit. He sent that note to his daughter.

It’s not like he could tell himself that he was innocent. Give me a break. He didn’t want to go to prison. He was too fucking chicken shit to accept the consequences of his actions. I’m not. My father is dead. I’m glad. I made the world a more beautiful place by effectively killing him.

But I am still what he made me. I still thrill to the touch of my Daddy. Maybe I can find a way for that to be ok. Maybe that’s just one way that my friends can love me and touch me and heal parts of me I can’t reach by myself. Every man I call Daddy has been in my life for a long time. Specifically, Dad has been active in my life for nearly as many years as my biological father. I stopped seeing my biological father when I was thirteen. I have known Dad for eleven years. I have spent considerably more time in Dad’s company than I did with my father in my entire life. Dad is also a really good grandpa to my kids. He loves them.

And Daddy? Well, he sure knows how to make me come. And he is ok with me waking him up in the middle of the night when I need to talk. He has been for more than seven years. I have done so, whenever I needed to, for over seven years. And I’m crazy and bossy and difficult and he loves me. It was really nice to come home to my Daddy today. I am feeling pretty shocked by how this feels.

Maybe the only kind of love I have ever known how to get from a dad will be met. And it will be met in a way that allows me to be healthy and whole. I’m not a hole. My Daddy may be a big slut, but I’m special. I always have been. And Dad? I’m his first daughter. He introduces me that way, which is funny because he has a biological daughter. He’s had several girlfriends after me who are also “daughters”. But everyone knows it’s different with me. I’m not a girlfriend and I never was and I never will be. He just takes care of me when I don’t know how to do it for myself.

I feel very little. And happy and sad at the same time. I feel like I am holding the hand of my best friend at the funeral of a very bad person. I am safe now. I will never be hurt by my dad again. I may be single tailed by my Dad. I may be fucked by my Daddy. But my dad will never hurt me again.

Maybe I’m not over the incest thing.

I think talking about money is important.

1 Reply

So after covering the checks I have already written for Occupy I have ~$32,000 sitting in my bank account. Do you know how much money I have to pay this month for various expenses? I owe $17,000 on credit cards. That will be paid off this month. I still haven’t paid property taxes or the mortgage or the domestic help or my therapy. That’s another $9,000. This is an unusually expensive month. Our income is settling in to about $8,000 per month. I am waiting to write checks for $17,650. That means that on the 30th of this month, if I succeed in giving all the money away, I will only have around $6,000 in cash. We have months that cost $15,000 on a fairly regular basis. We pay for a lot of things.

People who know me know that having a large financial cushion is kind of a ridiculous driving force for me. It’s unhealthy. I grew up in a kind of poverty I honestly don’t like thinking about. But holy fucking shit is my life different now.

That money was originally earmarked to pay off the Disney timeshare. I bought the timeshare when I realized it was only took four trips of the kind Sarah likes for her birthday to pay off the investment and we really do want to be at Disneyland every year… I bought it for Sarah and me. Noah wasn’t thrilled. Noah is not interested in spending that much time at Disneyland, thankyouverymuch. He’ll go. But not every year.

I have done Disneyland with Sarah enough times that it is worth it to me to buy the time share. Do you know why? Mostly because she is disabled. It is hard for her to expend the energy to travel long distances, sometimes even with motor devices. If we are in an apartment that is just a few yards away from an entrance she can afford the spoons to rest in the middle of the day and really enjoy evening stuff. It feels loving to be at Disneyland with Sarah. She appreciates it the same way my mom does. Just sitting on a bench with a book while people walk by makes her happy. Disneyland is a place to just sit and feel joy.

So I bought a fucking Disney time share and I feel like a privileged asshole. I feel strangely embarrassed that I bought this stupid thing. What a dumb fuck am I, right? Only dumb fucks buy time shares. It’s a racket. Geez. What a fucking waste of money. A number of people have told me off for this.

Do you know how many weeks of joy this has already brought me? Sarah and I get to dream about future vacations. They are paid for. I will have to pay for park tickets and gas to drive there. Otherwise we can cook in the apartment and it’s not any more expensive than being at home. Really.

It’s financed at 10% and I’m pissed off with myself for continuing to carry that debt. I wanted it paid off in a year. Err, that hasn’t happened. Other things keep coming up. Like getting my heart Occupied. Why is this so fucking important? Because people matter. We need a William Wallace. We need someone to step up. This is a Revolution. Hell, we need everyone to step up. What can you go do, today, tomorrow, and the next day to make the world a better place? Stop sitting in your house whining about your problems.

Says the whiny blogger who has barely left the house in months. Cause Jesus Christ, if anyone should stop whining it’s me. My life is the fantasy. My life is the mythical American Dream in all of the particulars. Oh, except that pesky PTSD shit. How do I fix me so that I can enjoy the American Dream?

Well, I’m writing. I think good will come from it. I think that is one of the gifts that was given to me in this lifetime. I can give people things to think about. They won’t always agree with me, probably rarely. But I want them to get to the point where they say, “Ok, I guess I can see why you feel the way you do.” That’s what I fucking want. I don’t need to have other people agree with me. I need them to understand WHY I am different. Why my opinion is different. Because maybe that will ripple. Maybe other people who have different opinions are ok too. Can we stop beating the shit out of political parties? What is the fucking point? Grow up you stupid babies.

People are people. I’m neither a Democrat nor a Republican. I kind of hate you all equally. And don’t get me started on how I feel about socialists. Or the members of my own, Libertarian party. I feel pretty embarrassed to be associated with them. Good grief. But it is the closest to what I believe.

I’m getting away from the point. When my heart was Occupied my priorities shifted. Noah is never going to want to stay home with me while working a part time job. He doesn’t want to. Ok. The dramatic need to lower our monthly expenses so that can happen… doesn’t really need to happen. If it takes longer and I pay more interest in the time share, that will be ok. Really. I can deal having to “tighten my belt”. We are part of the 99%. In order to maintain all the insurances folks consider necessary we have more than $6,000 of our income promised before it arrives. It’s $8,000. We have months where we put $17,000 on the credit card. You do the math. No really, that’s going to require some belt tightening. But I don’t exactly feel like I can complain about that.

And I have the money to spend. Occupy needs it more than I need to be able to have the lifestyle to which I have become accustomed. The fact that I can preplan 50 years of vacations means that my life is already as good as it needs to be.

The reason I feel I need to give the money is because people need a spark of hope. They need to see things being done. I can’t be the William Wallace for this movement. I really kind of wish I could. But that’s not my story. I’m trying to bait other people. I’m trying to push them to expand their dreams. Whoever is going to be the firebrand to lead this Revolution, (s)he will not have much money to start with. But there will be so much hunger. So many dreams. That person will say, “Yes give me your money so I can change the world.” I hope. I really hope.

In the meantime I took my family to a park clean up day in Oakland the Occupy folks organized. I have marched. I sit in the encampment and eat lunch and talk to the people who live there as I feel I can emotionally. I think my next clean up day should be in Fremont. I think that I’m about out of spoons for driving to Oakland.

I think maybe I should just open my front door and walk out it. I think I should Occupy the space I am in. Why am I trying so hard to give this money to Oakland? Why am I beating people over the head asking them to please please please take the money? Why don’t I start my own fucking occupation. Hm. It’s an idea. What would I do if I occupied Fremont? Hmm. I would start putting up notices for neighborhood clean up days. I’ll be surprised if I’m the only one out there. This is a small town in the middle of a big urban sprawl.

I’ve been surprised by how many of my neighbors have lived here for more than twenty years and they don’t know any of their neighbors. There is so much hostility and fear and isolation here. Why? I feel sad saying that I sat at the local diner and listened to the waitress be casually racist with the other customers. Despite the fact that I actually know a fair number of people in Fremont… I don’t see them. Pretty much ever. If you live in Fremont and you are “interesting” you spend your life in your car trying to get anywhere but here.

I’m getting tired of this attitude. Fremont is beneath people. I’ve done it too. I spent the first many years of our marriage being fucking pissed off living in this fucking house in fucking Fremont. This is one of the lowest socio-economic areas. Not the lowest, by any stretch. This is more like what I grew up with. My friends keep telling me to move to Alameda. I really don’t want to. I’m neither interested in the housing cost increase nor the insularity. I actually like that my neighborhood is not predominantly white. But I’m scared here. This is not really the safe bubble people think of in the bay area.

I’m in the closet. I can go protest in Oakland and be a radical and a pervert and a queer and whatever. People here just see me as that nice weird lady. I’m really polite to people in my neighborhood (uhhh except for the one time I yelled at a guy for wasting water while he was trying to deal with his lawn; long embarrassing story). I’m getting to know my neighbors very slowly. Very distantly. I’m trying to be consistent in my behavior over a long period of time without exposing them to my mood swings. I can’t afford to piss off my neighbors. Do you know how much pressure that is for me?

How in the hell can I expect my really diverse neighborhood to be thrilled about having a whore who writes about sex on the internet in their neighborhood? I’m out with the kids all the time. Aren’t they going to start looking at me as if I am dirty if they find out? Don’t I need to hide?

I think it is interesting that my friends think the Occupy movement is about money. I think it’s about pushing for the right to exist and be different and have a different life. Whatever the fuck that means. Our entire culture is set up around streamlining people so they can be more and more similar. I’m not fucking like the folks who grew up in small town Duluth (love you). And that’s more than ok. It’s awesome. I had different experiences so I got to go off and become a completely different kind of person. I’m not like the people who grew up in Rotorua, either. Or London near as I can tell. I go a lot of places and I meet a lot of people. I never fit. Nowhere.

Maybe I need to stop going out into the world trying to find someplace that is right. I think the Occupy movement is about seeing that something that needs to be changed and doing it. That will be financial for a lot of people. But it’s also about recognizing that we have abdicated a lot of responsibility to the system. Any system. How’s that going for folks? Maybe if we want something we have to just go fucking do it.

I want to feel ok in my town. I have to live here. But I can’t stay in the closet. This is horrible. I’m not much like most of the folks around me. But I’m not like folks anywhere. That’s ok. I may not be the right kind of Fremonter, but I’m the right kind of me. Yeah, it’s a stupid stupid little thing I say. I say it because I hope it’s true. I’m trying to convince myself it is. It’s very hard to believe that who and what I am is ok. That feels like a lie. So so so so so so many people tell me that I’m not ok. Not directly. Not to my face. But in the very air I breathe in this culture. I am so fucking wrong.

The General Strike showed me that I don’t feel that way because of the incest. I feel that way because I am an American. In fact, that seems to be our national culture. Anything different is wrong and bad. People, you need to lighten the fuck up. Maybe instead of sitting in an encampment in solidarity with people in Oakland I should be organizing a neighborhood group to figure out a way to meet the needs of the people within walking distance of me. That’s a significantly better choice for the planet.

But I will have to do that alone. I won’t be able to throw money at that problem and walk away. I will have to find the drive and determination to do that. I will probably mostly be the one doing that, if I think it should happen. It makes me tired. I can’t do that yet. I feel like I am failing my human beings. I feel like every day that I allow children to walk past my house on the way to school who are going hungry and I ignore that I am just as bad as the people who didn’t help me. I have so much rage at all of the people who didn’t help me.

Who the fuck am I helping? I don’t know. I hope that the RV comes through. That would be something. I wish I knew where my life was going. I feel like I am littering the path with burning ambitions. Things that hurt me that I am not focusing on them exclusively. You can’t focus on a dozen things exclusively. There isn’t enough me for that.

I really hope this movement spreads. Please people, you can change the world too. It doesn’t actually take money. It takes the desire to do good. You’ll find a way. Please?

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Category Archives: the shame factory

sick = suicidal, apparently.

Don’t make someone a priority while you are their option.

Perspective

Compulsions

anxiety purge

Learning and shame

Irrational feelings.

Always with the defensive, this girl.

I love getting mail. Sometimes.

Those sick perverts

Part of the road to Noah

Shorter and shorter.

monogamy

That’s why.

aftermath

Time to move on

Different facets.

I think talking about money is important.