Category Archives: the shame factory

Trying to steel myself for a let down

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I think that the okcupid boy is going to decide I’m not worth the fuss.  Which is fair, I don’t think I am either.  Uhm, yay for confirmation?  I am asking for a ridiculously specific thing that isn’t very fair.  I feel weird saying it, but I’m kind of sad.  I think I added him to my mental script of November a bit fast.  It would have been a very exciting month.  It was a nice dream.

Instead I will work a lot harder on getting ready for the 5k and I’ll write the book and I’ll try to settle into more peacefulness in the house instead of trying so hard to get out of it.  Apparently right now I’m not meant to be getting out.  That’s ok.

That means that some of my friends will say, “Hey come to Friday Night Waltz!” or (insert event here).  You guys don’t understand the energetic cost to me of getting out of my house right now.  Large group events suck.  They aren’t worth the price of admission.  When I went dancing with my friend, ok that was worth it.  He was a good friend-date.  That was nice.  Those still don’t give me that big jolt of energy that I want.  They make me tired.  Those are work.  They aren’t building me up in the same way.  They are a much more pleasant diversion than most of my life, I’ll say that.  But they are a physical cost. I can’t do very much of that.  I can’t get consistent enough child care and I don’t want to be away from the kids every night.

I am really sad that I don’t get to have an affair.  I honestly think it would cause a few unfun conversations with Noah because I would neglect him.  Only I wouldn’t.  Because I would come home every night and he would wake up with my mouth on his cock.  He would miss me a lot.  Heck, I think the fucker could stand with a little missing me.  It might increase his enthusiasm during the time he has me.  We are so tired.  Uhm, I say “the fucker” with great love and affection.  Just so it’s clear.

Noah has made great strides in his career during our marriage.  I have given him a lot of time and space for that.  That is something that builds him up and makes him cocky.  I like that in him.  He likes me to be built up and cocky.  I haven’t felt that way in a very long time.  I feel beat down and exhausted.  I feel worn out.  I feel fucking boring.  I feel awkward.  I feel unpleasant.  I feel like no one will ever want to pay a lot of attention to me again.  It’s existential angst.  I know.  It’s pathetic.

That’s the problem.  That dismissal right there.  I have a lot of this because of the repercussions of trauma.  And when a doctor prescribes a drug intended to cure mania, what that means for me is the medical profession thinks I need to stop working so hard.  Because I don’t think there is a reasonable way to describe me as truly manic.  In times of crisis I work a lot harder than most people have any interest in working.  I’m not manic.  I don’t fit the diagnostic criteria.  Unless of course, you count my promiscuity.  Which uhm, yeah.  Or the fact that I did have that lovely drug experimentation period.  Uhm, only I’ve never done anything that has harmed my life.

That’s the crux.  I like my life.  I think I have made mistakes, yes.  But I wouldn’t take any of them back. In my opinion mania is reserved for when you impetuously do a whole bunch of things that are really bad for you.  When I was a small child I engaged in a lot of sex play because I was surrounded by sex and I was acting out what I had been programmed to act out.  It wasn’t mania.  As I got older it got more complex and emotional, but I don’t allow my sex to negatively impact my life.  I’m not riddled with disease or unwanted children.  I have *also* had a lot of really fun sex with some interesting people.  I’m glad I’ve done that.  I’ve gotten the affair thing right a couple of times and it’s been life changing.  I have fucked up in looking for what I want and I’ve had a lot of bad days dealing with feeling bad about how I didn’t negotiate properly.

This is why the doctor says I have an omniscience problem.  Because I believe it is possible for me to negotiate well enough to get exactly what I want.  And I’m ok with fucking up along the way as I learn how to do it.  She seems to think this isn’t a good plan and she was constantly trying to figure out how my “sexual acting out”, seriously–she brought this up at least three different times during the hour we were together, “And did you act out sexually during that time too?” whenever I talked about other major symptoms of anxiety.  She’s trying to figure out if I go fuck people every time I get upset.  No, I really don’t.  Bitch.  That kind of judgment pisses me right the fuck off.  I’m friends with the vast majority of people I have had sexual contact with.  Of the people I no longer know, only one is actively acrimonious and that’s a joint issue.  I have been very safe in terms of disease risk and pregnancy… what’s the problem?  Oh wait, I forgot.  I’m just not supposed to do those things because they are amorphously bad.  Well fuck you too.

Err, anyway.  This is my long rant about why I’m not interested in an affair because I’m manic.  I’m interested in an affair because I’m really bored and I don’t know another way to get that really intense bonding and attention I want.  I’m doing it in a way that is entirely on the up and up with everyone in my life.  Why is this a problem?  Who will be harmed?  Why do I need to be medicated away from this?  No.  This is not the approach I want.  I learned a lot about what I need to say on the next visit.  That’s good.

But what I really want is a month of sneaking out after hours to be the crazy super hot girlfriend.  I want it so bad.  I want someone to be obsessed with me.  I do I do I do.  AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH  He’s not going to want me.  *beat head on floor* (I’m kidding Ali!  I won’t do it.  I’ll just shake my fists in fury.  It’s… not the same.)

that kind of girl

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I talked to my friend.  Fairly extensively.  He apologizes for my clavicle/sternum.  At this point it no longer hurts to turn my head and it’s only painful if the kids bang on it really hard, which is true all the time anyway so I’m going to stop being angry about that.  I told him I don’t want him doing that again.

We also talked about the pressuring for unprotected sex.  He says, “I wasn’t really going to do it, I was just fucking with your head.”  And rubbing your uncovered penis against my vulva.  When I say that’s not cool, you shouldn’t need me to ask over and over and yell.  That should be taken seriously the first time.

I told him that I was not up for sex with him again in a short period of time because the shop is closed for repairs.  He said that was sad.  Instead he wants to go out to sushi with Noah and I.  He would love to meet the kids.  I’m having those second thoughts I have.

I have never had a conversation with him where he has not dropped in the middle randomly that he would like to put his dick in my pussy.  It just comes up.  Constantly.  I’m honestly concerned about his ability to self-regulate sufficiently for my kids.  But if he drops one thing and I handle it, that’s not a problem for the kids.  They won’t be seeing him regularly.  He leaves the country in less than a week.

On one hand I feel bad that I worry about my kids meeting so many of my friends.  On the other hand, I know what I “picked up” from the adult friends who were hanging around the house.  When my kids are older it will be different.  Right now if Shanna heard someone say that he wanted to put his cock in a pussy she would think he was talking about roosters and cats.  That’s awesome.  Let’s keep it that way for a few more years.

I’m still feeling mixed about my friend.  We talked about how this truly was the kind of sex I used to hunt for.  I’m just not physically up for it any more.  That’s not his fault.  It’s not even my fault.  Life happens.  I’m no longer interested in being battered and choked and stretched past my limits.

I told him that I’m not bitching about the fact that walking is awkward because he overstretched my legs and my hips hurt.  I consider that reasonable.  I told him that I’m not bitching about how much my vagina hurts (I kept asking him for more lube and his comment was, “But then I don’t get as much friction”) because that many orgasms really makes up for that pain.  I’ll deal with that and smile.

I’m not cool with someone ignoring me when I say, “Put a condom on or get your dick away from me.”  That bothers me.

It’s hard that it feels like either like what you get, no matter what it is, or don’t hunt.  Really?  Is it possible to hunt and have standards?  I suppose I do have standards.  My standards are, “Who is aggressive enough to come sit next to me without me having to initiate anything.”  I’m such a coward.

I went to a birthday party yesterday.  I talked to people I already knew.  Barely.  In between wandering off to the side of the house to sob.  Because I so strongly felt that most of the people in the house hated me.  I’m really tired of having these feelings.  I know they aren’t rational.  I don’t know how to make them stop.

And it all feels mixed up.  The only reason someone would want to fuck me is if they were desperate.  They have to be forceful enough to just expect that any woman would be honored to fuck them.  Which means they are assholes.  (The funny thing is, every single one of the guys I affectionately think of as “My Assholes” gets really offended when I tell them I think they are an asshole.  Ironic, I think.)  Which means they violate my boundaries.

This is why I find it so weird that sex with Noah doesn’t hurt all the time.  How is it possible for someone to have sex with me without hurting me?  Wow.  You mean someone can like me and be nice to me?  It’s honestly weird.  I’m not that kind of girl.  I’m the kind of girl that people hurt.

When I read the Kushiel books I think I had a different reaction than my friends.  They all thought exclusively about how hot it would be.  My thought was, “Shit.  My family trained me for that.”  Shit rolls down hill and I was at the bottom.  If there was nastiness to be spread around it hit me.  I think about the need for balancing pain.  My father and brothers and sister needed to hurt someone.  They need, for some reason, to be abusers.  Wasn’t I just born to be a victim?  Isn’t that why I’m here?

It’s really hard to say during sex that something is hurting me or bothering me.  I just dissociate instead.  I treat that pain as just what sex is like for me.  And when I think about that objectively it bothers me.  Why in the hell should I have to feel pain like that just so that someone else can get off?  Why is it so mandatory for other people that I hurt?

This is only so complicated still because of Noah.  If I wasn’t married to a sadist the right answer would be, “Ok dumbass then stop dating sadists.”  Well, I can still stop going out with sadists.  I no longer have any interest in proving how much pain I can take.

What will I do with Noah, though?  Eventually, whatever he wants.  For now, we will pause.  It’s hard taking turns.  He’s been very patient with me.  Often it feels like more patience than I deserve.

I need an off switch

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You know, if I change the song that is playing I get to change my mood.  It’s a handy trick.  Do you know why I’m willing… no… why I want to do the really scary painful things?

Noah is nicer to me than anyone has ever been.  He goes really far out of his way to make me happy.  I can’t believe how willing he is to go through a lot of effort for me.  I’m important to him.  He’s a complicated man.  When we do intense play I have to trust him.  I have to communicate about the physical limits of my body.  And I have to trust him.  The thing is there is a lot of gray area in between when it stops feeling good and when I actually can’t handle more pain.  I genuinely don’t understand why pushing someone to that place is erotic.  It doesn’t get me wet to top.

But oh man it turns Noah on.  I don’t have to understand why.  I don’t have to be able to feel the same feeling in my body to understand that it is important to him.  There is some part of him, something scary, that wants that.  I don’t think it is a need.  But he wants it.  He wants it a really lot.  He likes how I react.  When I’m in that kind of mood.  I don’t think he would enjoy how I would react today, so he isn’t going to hurt me today.

But when my body isn’t aching like this from going too far, sometimes I do want it.  There are brain chemicals attached to being hurt.  But I like being hurt a little.  Mostly Noah is happy to cater to that.  Mostly what I want is for someone to touch me fairly gently and tell me evil stories about hurting me far past what I can handle.  I like knowing that he wants to.  That he can.  That he has.  That he will.  But right now he’s being nice to me because he likes me a lot and he wants me to be a happy, healthy person and right now hurting me isn’t a good idea.

I like that he’s stared at me for a long time.  He hasn’t fucked up in a long time.  He reads my signals so well.  He knows what I want before I know.  All he has to do is grin at me and I want.  Maybe the problem is that when I go back through my roster I have the whole thought process over again about how they so aren’t Noah.  Maybe I need to stop reminding myself of why I stopped sleeping with these people in the first place.

I like the idea of poly.  Of sexual relationships that continue on casually through  time and get revisited.  Other people don’t evolve with me fast enough.  I feel angry at them for being exactly who they were the last time I slept with them because it wasn’t right then either.  That sounds weird.  I have sex with people to audition them in my head.  It decides a lot about how much weight I put on someones opinions later as a friend.  Like Chris.  (The awesome thing is, I have slept with quite a few Chris’ of both genders so using the name is totally meaningless.  Yay!)  I am really attached to Chris.  When I talk to Chris I listen harder than I do with other people.  I care a lot about his opinion.  When I’m really worried… I call him and ask him to weigh in on a topic.  Because when we had sex he looked at me and he actually played within my boundaries while finding out where they were.  Not very many people have ever done that.  They either blow right past what I can handle and enjoy or they never come close to pushing me.

Mostly though people don’t do that.  Mostly people are imperfect in one way or another.  At the end of an encounter I always have the thought, “Man I would work on ____”.  How long the list is decides how many times I come back.  If there are too many things, I can’t handle it and I move on.  I don’t discuss sexual incompatibility with people.  My issues are mine.  It’s inevitably something about the way someone is touching me.  The way it makes me feel.

Noah is the only person I have ever dated who has been able to have dramatically different “modes” of touch.  I don’t even know how to codify how he does it.  He reads me.  He learned me.  He studied me.  He studied me like a religion.  He learned how to coax things out of me.  When I feel like shit I want to stop feeling that way because it makes Noah sad.

Finding people to sleep with in a reasonably healthy way is hard.  I need to learn new screening procedures because mine are broken for my current set of needs.  That sounds like work.  But maybe the kind of work Noah would find fun.  Really, isn’t all of this for him anyway?  No.  But it sounds more fun to say it that way.

Because other than being in pain this much later, and having to tell him no that vehemently to unprotected sex (seriously? I have to yell at you that it’s not ok to fuck me without a condom? When neither of us have another form of birth control? Fuck no.  That’s not. Fucking. Ok.) it was hot.

And I think that the only reason he was able to fuck like that is because he’s the kind of asshole that really wants to push past all my boundaries.  I like that aggression.  This feels so dangerous.  I’m not attracted to passive men.  I don’t know how to flirt with people in a socially acceptable ways.  Do you know how I set up this tryst?  He posted on facebook that he was in town for two weeks and if anyone wanted tattoo work they need to get in touch quickly.  I responded and said, “So you’re saying that if I want to fuck you I have to hurry?”  He responded at midnight when he got off work with a voicemail.  We arranged getting together the next morning.  He’s staying with his mom.  Hotel room it is!

I loved the excitement.  I feel so bad that my response afterwards is so ungrateful.  There is that word.  Oh man.  That’s what this is.  I feel bad because I feel ungrateful.  He really went to a lot of trouble for me, and I enjoyed it.  And here I am bitching.  You see how I don’t fucking appreciate anything.

I want to cry, but it hurts.  It hurts to exist in my body.  I’m not grateful for this.  Sex does not have to be this.  Noah taught me that sex doesn’t have to feel like this.  I wasn’t raped.  Not in any way.  But I was brutalized.  And I feel like it is my fault because I somehow advertise that I want that.  Is it really so unreasonable to want aggression without being injured?  Does every sexual encounter truly have to involve people choking me until I get terrible headaches that last for days?  Is this really normal?  I have never been in an abusive relationship because I brag on the internet that I love to be choked so everyone does it and I never tell them to stop.

Even though I get these terrible headaches.  Even though when they lean on my chest choking me they bruise my bones and I hurt for weeks.  Even though I kind of wish that people would stop telling me so explicitly by their actions that they think it would be hot to watch me die.

I don’t want to be that kind of hot any more.  I am not expendable.  I am not an object.  It is not ok to risk my death just because you like how my cunt contracts when you choke me.  I am not actually a fucktoy, no matter what you call me.

And back the fuck off with acting like my hips are just supposed to get out of the way.

Shit.  Changing the music didn’t work, did it?  Well.  It’s a different flavor of whining.  I don’t understand why I am incapable of talking about this kind of thing in the moment.  Well, part of it is that I don’t know just how far past my fun-pain level things are at until later.  And very few people have ever had to deal with the consequences of hurting me this way.  Mostly I dealt with it in silence.  Noah has had to deal with it extensively and as a result he figured out how to have pseudo-rough sex with me.

I really like Noah.  I think I persist in sleeping with other people because I start taking him for granted.  I forget just how very exceptional he is.  Noah has made reading me his hobby.  It’s not that he’s made such a master study of sex, although he is far more experienced than most.  First he went after sex.  Then he went after me.  Because I’m enough.

Yeah.  I’ll heal and stop feeling angry.  Then I’ll let Noah hurt me again.  Because Noah will do it right.  And I want to see him smile.  Because I want to feel him vibrating with tension as he pushes himself and me right to the edge of me panicking.  Because he thinks it is funny.  Because he thinks it is hot.  It’s sometimes an abusive relationship.  But it has an off switch.  I think that makes it ok.

Why I want to be a stay at home mom

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So I was watching the Steve Jobs speech at Stanford and it occurred to me that I should spend some serious time thinking about why I am a stay at home mom.  I’ve been having internal pushback towards my decision making process lately and I think I need more clarity.

I view parenting as accompanying your child through an apprenticeship to adulthood.  One that my mother failed at.  My mother gave me adult responsibilities when I was very young.  I had to be responsible for myself in a way that was not appropriate or fair.  And I failed often.  The result was that I got hurt often.  I don’t instinctively know what skills a child would have to avoid problematic people.  I don’t want to teach my children to be just like me.

I don’t think my aggression is an ideal life attitude.  And I want my kids to be allowed to be them.  I don’t know how to do that without looking at them all day long.  I don’t know how to bond in a shorter time span than that.  I believe that working mothers love their children just as much as I do.  I don’t know how they find time in the day to deal with that much emotion.  I can’t.  It overloads me.  Having to be patient and interactive with them is incredibly difficult.  If I had other things adding stress to my life (like a job) I would be nasty and mean and vicious pretty much all the time.  It is hard for me to be nice and I find that embarrassing.

I only know how to get through the bad days by having a lot of control over every single solitary thing I say and do all day.  You can’t do that and have a job.  So really, I just don’t want to have a job.  No.  That’s not true.  I do not believe I am capable of managing the stress of a job and the stress of children.  I would not be pleasant, ever.  Dealing with my mental health takes up too much time, honestly.

And I am getting to discover what it is like to unfold in a safe, gradually expanding environment.  I am watching how Shanna changes.  It’s amazing to me to look at her in all of her grumpy glory and think, “That is in absence of any external stress whatsoever.  Hunh.  How does that jive with what I remember doing/being/saying?”  I’m learning what it means that someone else can’t “make” you feel something.  My children get on my nerves.  That is kind of their job.  When I lose my temper and start yelling at them I have this huge hammer in my brain hitting me as hard as possible saying, “She’s a fucking three year old!  She doesn’t know this is an annoying thing to do!  You are supposed to be helping her learn not berating her for her inadequacies!!”  I feel like my anger is not supposed to be part of the equation.

Do you know why I feel that way?  Because in my family you weren’t allowed to address small injustices or issues.  You were required to stay silent through small problems and big problems alike.  I was supposed to just smile and “be pleasant”.  “Why is your tone of voice so nasty all the time” was the favored thing to tell me.  I learned that I was simply an unpleasant person because I wanted them to stop “playing” with me in ways that hurt me.  I was a whiner.  At least according to them.  And looking at Shanna… I can understand why people around me didn’t notice that anything wrong was happening.

If I put my hand around Shanna’s hand to hold it when she’s not in the mood it doesn’t matter if I am holding her with so little pressure I barely encircle her hand.  “It huuuuuuuuuuuurts.”  I feel like I’m going to lose my mind.  She is constantly whining about how much I am hurting her, when I am not even touching her body.  When I am walking towards her with the hair brush she starts crying and clutching her head and rolling around the floor sobbing because I have hurt her.  When I haven’t touched her yet.  I did that too.

Do you know what my mom did?  She probably thought she was just trying to get it over with as fast as possible.  Oh how I screamed.  I have done the same thing to Shanna.  You pull them over to the couch, hold them between your knees, and as fast as possible you get the knots out no matter how they squirm.  But my would start with a fine tooth comb at the top of my head and yank.  I have a baby brush with soft bristles and I start at the ends and I pull knots apart with my fingers.  I don’t think Shanna is reacting to what I am doing less than I reacted to my mother.  I sincerely believe that Shanna experiences actual physical pain for less than 10% of the time I am brushing her hair.  My mother could be gentle but when she was in a hurry… well… that was that.  And she was in a hurry a lot.  I was the youngest of four.  She worked most of my life.

If I had to hurry and get Shanna ready for daycare before I got ready for work we would not have a pleasant relationship.  She wakes up slow.  We generally sit in a chair for half an hour cuddling before we do anything at the beginning of each day.  Calli is joining us now.  Then Noah makes breakfast and the kids go back and forth between us.  If I also had to get ready for work then, that would be the end of my writing and relaxing.  That is when I have that time.  The other tasks would get managed somehow by someone else.  I would just lose writing.

It’s hard for me to actually admit that I need this writing.  It feels so banal, so unimportant.  Why would anyone ever care about anything I have to say?  Who the fuck am I?  Because if I’m telling you the truth I want people to read this.  I want people to give a shit what I say.  But I’m not sure anyone should.  Have I thought anything useful?  Have I taught anything?  I don’t know.  Not enough, I’m sure.  What is teaching anyway?  When I worked as a high school teacher my goal was to have the kids be able to argue with me more by the end of the year.  I want them to be ever increasingly sure of their own opinions.  I want them to be able to talk in finer and finer detail about what they believe.  Because only once they can talk about it can they really be a fully integrated person and deal with their little hypocrisies.

I actively want to avoid being a hypocrite.  That means being very sure what my priorities are and changing my behavior when it’s not in alignment.  It’s hard.  It means I don’t get to coast for long.  What are my priorities.

Me.
Noah, Shanna, Calli, Sarah.  Not necessarily in that order.  Spending time with them.
Writing
Learning/Reading
Socializing with other people
Gardening
Housecleaning
Cooking

It’s a short and broad list to start with. That means that when I sit down to read a book to Shanna I am not evading my housekeeping duties.  I’m following my priority list.  I want to stick my tongue out at an imaginary person now.  I feel like there is some judge and jury out there who is going to tell me I am a bad mother because I want to sit in the garage and smoke pot instead of clean my house.  Seriously.  Who the fuck wouldn’t agree with me?  I’m writing, damnit.  Why am I writing.  Why does writing matter.

Writing lets me get out the stupid shit I am thinking about into a format where I can see it, understand it, and recognize that it is idiotic.  If it is just running around and around and around in my brain… I don’t know how to get off the train.  The writing changes it from a train on a circular trap to a traffic loop.  Yes, it is possible to get caught in the center if you are being dumb, but there are exits all fucking over the place.  Just pick one.  Are any of them really worthwhile?  I don’t know.  I don’t know if anyone will read my writing one day and feel like I made their life better.  I gave them an idea they didn’t have before and it made their life just a little easier.  I feel like it is so hard for me to “act normal” that certainly some other people are also just acting and they might like a trick.

I loathe when people say, “Be yourself!”  Yourself is a bizarre construct of all the different influences you’ve had in your life + personal taste.  It’s pretty vague.  And let me tell you, when you do things you genuinely like (like making your hair increasingly AWESOME) people are quick to remind you that you are stepping out of the herd and you should stop that.  I think I dyed my hair because it makes me visually a freak but it doesn’t cause any more pain to my body.  I think that is a god damn excellent direction of progress.

I want to be a stay at home mom because some accident of fate handed me a partner with sufficient money to support me all my life in a manner to which I would like to become accustomed.  We’ve been married for five years.  Until now I have contributed enough to pay for my truly unnecessary stuff.  I was self-sufficient enough.  Now I have no form of income.  Now I am completely dependent on someone else for the first time since I was 15.

Of course I’m secretly having a fucking heart attack and hoping that I do a good enough job in November that I can sell the book.  I don’t want to be a god damn dependent.  But I don’t want to do anything that requires me to deal with other people.  Err, well, that kind of limits the options.  And honestly I wouldn’t take a random retail job right now.  For one thing it would be hard to get someone to hire me because I am so overqualified.  I think I could overcome that though.  It’s called lying.  But I would feel guilty for taking that job away from someone who needs it more.  I don’t want an office job.  I don’t want anything where I have to be doing additional work.  Ha.  I feel like being the housefrau maid for my family is enough fucking work this lifetime, thanks.  And I want to write.  And my husband wants me to write.

I have such intense feelings about Noah’s perception of my writing.  He takes it more seriously and gives it more respect than I do.  I think that Noah is the one who convinced me that I am a writer.  That anyone who compulsively feels the need to write 10-20 pages a day is a fucking writer.  That’s just not normal.  Normal. Normal. Normal.  I hate that word so much and I use it constantly.  I think it goes a long way towards wrecking the meaning I am going for.

Why am I so god damn compelled to be just like everyone else?  When I stand near people too long I start acting like them.  I conform.  I do it in subtle ways at first, then loud, then I explode and yell at them and make it seem like I was being oppressed by the ways I was conforming.  Even if the other person was unaware of the whole situation.  They are just standing there confused.  In my family the constant chatter is about telling you what to think, when to think it, how to think it.  So someone sitting there and telling you something about how they handled a situation is fairly explicitly giving you directions on how you are expected to handle it in the future.  You know that whole, “Childhood as apprenticeship for adulthood” thing I have?

Until fairly recently my aunt and uncle were supporting their three adult disabled children.  And a bunch of grandkids and SOs.  Because they reinforce one another’s behaviors.  They will rise or fall as a unit.  They are all so ridiculously similar it isn’t funny.  Like obsessions with collecting useless things.  Everyone has a different animal.  For every holiday under the sun people compete to find you something with that animal on it.  But they are all dirt poor.  So all the stuff is cheap, ugly, and really pointless.  And they have LOTS of it.  That’s one small point, but they do the same thing with everything.

When I walk into a middle class persons house I instantly put on my ‘acting’ face.  I start to imagine, “How would people who live here behave?”  Do you want to know why I paint my house really dark colors?  Because I grew up in houses with dark wood paneling.  They were caves.  I don’t know how to cope with relentlessly white walls.  We had relentlessly white walls in a series of depressing, horrible rental places.  Or ugly paneling that turned the house into a dark cave.

So I painted my house purple and cornflower blue and green and raspberry and navy blue…. among other colors.  They are dark enough to make me feel calm and settled.  Aunt Vonnie’s houses were the home base.  That was as much of a home as I knew.  That feeling is in a dark house… even though it bugs me.  I don’t want to be the kind of person who has a uniformly dark house.  It feels oppressive to me.  But I like darker, more saturated colors.  Who says a house has to look like the materials came that color direct from nature?  I never got that memo.  I guess I ditched that day at school.

This constant attempt to conform to whomever I am standing near creates problems.  Because then I get angry at the person for “making” me feel like I have to conform and be like them.  I have had this problem in particular with a couple of female friends.  We will be having an intense conversation about something and they are giving advice and all of a sudden I go ballistic and start screaming because I don’t want to be like them.

I don’t know how to handle those feelings very well.  That sudden explosion of fear that they are trying to wipe me off the planet.  I know that it was that fear that got me out of my family.  I respect that fear.  I respect the fact that my individuality comes with a rock solid fist to defend it.  But I really wish I wouldn’t hit my friends.  They haven’t done anything.  This is my fuck up.

I am struggling with the fact that my self control runs out.  I have too many things I am trying to control. I don’t know how to relax and let go of the anger in the moment very well.  It cycles so fast out of no where.  When I am at home I take a time out.  It’s not perfect because I’m doing too much stomping away/slamming doors.

The only normal I care about is the one where my kids aren’t afraid of me.  I don’t want my kids to quake with fear from my voice.  That is not a relationship I want.  But I want to be effective.  Three sucks.

I want to be a stay at home mom so that my kids and I can learn how to be nice to each other without outside pressure.  We can learn how to be a family together.  Because really I don’t know much more than them.  Luckily Shanna is an excellent teacher.  She’s having an emotional period, but mostly she can talk about her preferences and make requests and follow directions.  She is in a rough phase (the book told me to expect it! I love that book) and that’s ok.  Hormones are rough.  I try to be gentle and understanding.  For her, this is just a phase because nothing bad has ever really happened to her.  Minor injuries and scrapes.  Losing her friend Rowan was the biggest loss she’s been aware of.  If I am patient and loving, she will come through this and on the other side she will hopefully understand that three year olds are assholes and I was really nice to her.  This is part of the circle of life.  I wish I could apologize to my mother for some pieces of it.

But that is when we jump on the merry go round again.  I don’t think my mother abused me as a small child.  I think she neglected me to such a degree that it becomes criminal.  I think she tried to enculturate with the only thing she knew… and it worked.  I am indeed, white trash.  Even that didn’t go how she planned.  One of the strongest and most defining things about white trash as I understand the concept is the fierce loyalty.  Blood is everything.  How do you think they get away with incest?  If you are related to someone you are obligated to do anything they want… forever.

Excuse me while I pause to vomit on the floor.  I respond to feeling like I should conform with hostility and aggression because it was a very useful tool at one point.  My friends aren’t trying to convert me though.  Gah.

I should stop writing.  It’s already too long.  But I don’t want to.  This is the problem with trying to do shorter entries.  I don’t always see a clear stopping/starting/dividing line.  How do I talk about things in separate posts when it is all one big concept in my head?  But then I ask and people tell me, yes they would prefer shorter posts.  And then I feel like I am failing to deliver something that people want.  I wish I didn’t do this to myself.  Shit.  This is over twelve pages long.  Ok, I’ll stop.  And it took me just over an hour.  That’s actually kind of hot.

I feel like a big meanie.

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I spend a lot of time feeling very mixed about what I write here.  I honestly usually forget what I have written almost as soon as I hit post and I don’t reread things very often.  I use this space to dump the thoughts that are intrusive into the rest of my life.  They are the harshest things I think.  I’m aware that I am “mentally ill”.  Whatever that means.

It’s hard to not feel ashamed of myself for putting these things out publicly.  You are supposed to put these kinds of thoughts in private journals you later burn.  You don’t want to taint the world with any of this.  I worry about some of the processing I do here.  People don’t like finding out how deep my rage is.  It makes them uncomfortable.  I am going to, once again, alienate people.  Not everyone.  Not the people who matter.  But I will lose people who are only casual distant social contacts at best.

It’s weird to know that I have to live with the consequences of my words, for better or worse.  I say a lot of very harsh things.  I’m trying to walk a fine line between talking about the emotions I experience and why I have them and blaming other people for upsetting me.  I know I’m crazy.  I know I’m having a reaction that is out of proportion to our exchange.  But I’m still having it and I have to deal with it somehow.

Just doing deep breathing exercises is ineffective at managing my rage.  Writing works.  And so I will write about things that make me very angry.  And people will get upset with me.  I’m pretty sure this is an unavoidable fate.  Given what I’ve read today I feel like I should be braced at any moment for a death threat.  On one hand that makes my paranoia sky rocket.  Because do you know who is a credible threat to my life?  Pretty much anyone in my family.  Hello illegal connections.  Not to mention that the whole lot also has serious mental health issues and lots of guns!

Awesome.  I really and truly believe that my brother would never come after me.  I think he wants to believe he is above such things.  And his wife is awesome and balances him really well.  He married a really good woman.  The only credible threat is my sister.  She has threatened to beat me up in public in the last few years.  If I publish there is a very real chance she will show up on my doorstep out of the blue with a shot gun.  She’s pretty insane.  And she has done a lot of very bad for your brain drugs for a very lot of years.

Even though I want to puke on the floor thinking about that… I’m going to keep going on writing.  And internet threats seem so very non-threatening.  So laughable.  Really.  Does some wanker on the internet think that they can hurt me more than my family?  More than my father raping me?  More than my brother beating me, arranging to have other children beat me, and sexually assaulting me repeatedly?

I don’t think I will lose sleep over emails.  I’m already up.  Bah.  That’s a snotty ass thing to say.  I’m in a really bad phase right now in coping with my shit.  Some day I will go back to not dwelling on being less than.  I think.  At those times I will be vulnerable.  And it will make me lose sleep.  But I don’t really think there is much that can be done to cause me to stop writing.  Not anything in writing, anyway.  Not from fear.  I think I am kind of looking forward to that first burst of adrenaline.  I do love a good threat.

I don’t know if it is ok to talk about things that hurt other peoples feelings.  But I’m not sure I can help it.

This is why reading is dangerous.

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I’ve been reading Le Liasons Dangeruses and it’s hot and fun and neat.  I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a short story in that style.  I uhm had the not-so-brilliant idea to start a livejournal flamewar between entirely consensual people about a fictional break up.  See a parallel?  It uhm, didn’t go well.  I feel guilty because I more or less pulled everyone into it and it turned into a whole drama and now people are very upset.  Maybe I should stop reading books.  They give me ideas.

Or maybe I should have paid more attention to the preface.  The author was not well thought of.  In fact, most of society reviled him, rejected him, and treated him like a monster.  By the end of his life he publicly repudiated the book and tried to start converting other people into rejecting the book.  If I think things like an internet flamewar are funny, I am going to be in limited company.  I like the satire involved.  I actually had a fairly long entry mostly done to continue on with the next stage of the drama.  I started getting specific.  Then someone told my friend that this process felt like an assault.  Like a violent airing of dirty laundry.  I panicked and deleted what I had written.  I’m kind of pissed off at myself for deleting it.  It was an interesting entry.  It had potential.  I had many points in my little entry that were wonderful jumping off points for my cohorts.  There were things for Noah, Sarah, and L to play off of.  It was completely over the top.  Truly.  How could anyone have magically been involved in my life in a daily fashion for 18 years without anyone hearing about it?  But I digress.

I was not going to post any of that here.  And that is when I realized that I was filtering the story.  For whatever reason this space is a space where I keep my writing absolutely publicly accessible.  I’m not going to require that anyone keep up with a bunch of other sources to follow this.  And most entries are fairly stand alone, I think.  That other blogging site is different.  It’s a community site.  It’s self-referential.    I think that if I had really wanted to do this right, the thing to do would have been to coordinate more.  Maybe all of us should have created a filter and written the whole thing to completion before publishing the entries at specific times or all at once.  That would have worked and been interesting.

Uhh… what we did was kind of lame and half-ass.  We weren’t writing fast enough.  And the people who had posted were not available all day to monitor the dwama and stomp on the flames.  Jury duty is kind of a bitch like that.  We probably should have thought of that too.  Shit.  My stupid is showing.  Or rather, maybe that I’m not the best planner at all times.  This was ill thought out.  That frustrates the hell out of me.  Now I don’t feel comfortable finishing.  Even if we did make a filter and do the whole thing off in private, I now have this ball of anxiety in my stomach.

You see, my filth rubbed off on my friend.  People are mad at her just because she was stupid enough to come be influenced by my.  The things I want to do are bad.  I triggered an “assault” through “violent airing of dirty laundry”.  Wow.  I’m going to now do everything I can to ensure I don’t run into that woman at a party.  I don’t think I would be able to look her in the face without feeling waves of shame.  I’ll take my shitty white trash taste away from you.  I’m sorry I did something somewhere you could possibly see it that you don’t like.