Category Archives: writing

I did make schedules!

I sat down yesterday with a pen and paper and tried to figure out how I’m going to get everything done in the next month that I want to get done. Holy crap for Krisco. I won’t be blogging very much. But I am working on part two.

It’s hard to figure out how to tell this story. I still know a lot of these people and I like them. I think the most important thing for me to do with this is not try to tell exactly what happened because memories differ and get a piss off an awful lot of people but if I make it just different enough that obviously it’s not precisely what happened then maybe people won’t hate me. Part of how I am doing this is amalgamating people. It’s kind of funny to look around in my mind and who are the people who were really important to me when I was 18 in 19. How can I combine them into useful characters without making everyone hate my guts. How can I tell the truth?

I don’t need to write exactly what happened to day by day because that is the point. The point is that I was a very damaged person and I managed to find a very safe environment in very specific ways. It was only safe because I consciously and deliberately needed safe. It was also an area of great risk.

My experience of the sex community was that these were not the beautiful people. I want to write about them honestly because I don’t think the world needs another book about how pretty everyone is while they have sex. I’m not pretty. Yet when I showed up at the public BDSM community I was thinner and a lot prettier than most of the other women there. I want to honestly describe the people I knew without making them feel bad about themselves. I want to write about people of lots of different sizes and colors without being an asshole.

Well, time to go run.

Feeling happy and full of gratitude.

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I dislike how much of my mood cycling is attached to people paying attention to me. When I feel generally unlikable I am overall much less able to rebound from emotions. Weekends are often kind of hard because even though Noah is around I don’t talk to K (my daily support person–holy crap she is awesome) and by Monday I often feel panicked and like she doesn’t like me any more. When she isn’t home on Mondays I feel like it is a deliberate statement that she is done with me. I try hard to not make this her problem.

But I got to talk to her yesterday and she was cheerful and upbeat and I detected no sign of her hating my guts so I felt relieved. And a friend came over to help me garden. She sent me an email a while ago asking if she could come over. It was lovely.

I like having people come over because then I can ask them lots of questions about their lives. This person is different from a lot of people I know so asking her questions gives me different answers than I am used to. I really appreciate the perspective shift.

For one thing, she likes her parents. When I hear about people liking their parents I feel an explosion of emotion in my heart. I miss my mom. I hope that my kids want a relationship with me some day. I feel so scared that I won’t deserve it.

I listen very carefully when people describe parents they like. That is what worthy people behave like–ok. I can fake that. Maybe? I’m trying.

And six hours of writing followed by four hours of gardening makes me feel like a person who WORKS! It’s good for my self esteem. Gardening usually makes me feel better about myself. It helps that my yard has improved so much over the years.

I believe that if I had a lawn I would consider gardening to be torture and horrible. What I am doing is fun. I’m making my environment prettier and more enticing by the year. I have a great yard for playing in even though it isn’t very big.

Noah has been kind of extra-nice for a bit. I officially took him off-leash. He is starting on a project months early because I can’t deal with trying to force him to be unproductive. It makes us both miserable. So now that he feels free to spend a lot of his brain cycles on things he wants to build and make he is a lot happier.

I didn’t get till September. But it’s ok. Calli isn’t as hard as Shanna was at this age. I will manage.

I feel disappointed and like I am caving on boundaries. I feel ok and like I am adapting to life as it actually happens instead of sticking to decisions that were made when we didn’t understand the parameters of what we were deciding.

I’m having fun writing about my Owner but it will be slow. This book may take the rest of the year. I’m writing a few hundred to a thousand words a day on it. That’s my goal. I’m also starting to babble in a notebook about suicide. Two separate books at the same time because I am feeling so unable to only think about one at a time. I go back and forth between phrasing in my head for both books.

I can’t separate self-mutilation and suicidal ideation from my M/s relationship but I can’t write about them in the same book. They are different stories. Two at once seems reasonable as a solution.

Today is supposed to be 8 degrees cooler than yesterday and by Friday it will be another 9 degrees cooler than today. I play to sharpen pencils and work on the fence for the next three days for at least two hours a day, maybe longer because Noah will be home.

I forgot to mention yoga yesterday as one of the things I should be scheduling every day. Ugh. I really should make schedules and see how they overlap.

I feel resentful of having too many daily tasks. Then I start bailing on everything.

Life will just have to keep plugging along. I wrote on the book for a while. I blogged. I wrote emails. My kid woke up. (Yay for morning snuggles.)

I really should get dressed and go run.

Not sleeping well.

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I don’t sleep much while it is hot. My err internals are unhappy. I worked on a book for a while this morning. *pat self on back* Now if I can just keep this up I might be more than a one hit wonder. Not that my book was a hit. You know what I mean.

I’m kind of tired and mellow feeling. It is actually nice. Noah is going to take Shanna to camp today (she said please and all) so I will be at the nursery at 8:30 when it opens. A friend asked to come over and garden with me today. I can barely contain my squee. We will be weeding and mulching and such. (Yes, Pam I saw your note about “just use cardboard.” All of the cardboard on my property is still in good shape and the kids play with the boxes.)

I absolutely HAVE to work on the fence today. No excuses! I was productive all of yesterday… just not on the fence. This is going to be difficult to force myself to do. I can tell. I’m terrified of fucking up and having people make fun of me or hate me. Oh well. Keep working.

This morning I was foolish and I read some of that nasty anti-home schooling stuff. Oh boy are some people pissed off about even the *idea* of home schooling. Has someone tried to force you into something? Is there a reason you are SO ANGRY with people who make this choice? No? Ok then.

I get the logic that putting my kids in school would be better for the other kids in the school because then I would be forced to be involved with the school and I would make it better for not just my kids. I absolutely agree with every step in that process.

I just can’t get onboard with the part where I am supposed to throw my kids under a bus because it would be better for someone else. My experiences of public school have been bad. Not just for me as a student, but as a teacher and as a person in the credential program.

I won’t force my kids to be part of that system. I don’t believe it is healthy for our species to be forced to sit in chairs for 6+ hours/day while quietly listening to someone else. Nope. Not what we are meant to do this lifetime.

I understand that this is a privileged position. I believe that I am stinking with privilege. I have choices that many people can’t even dream of. I think that is positive and I am not going to give up my choices just because they aren’t available to everyone.

I don’t see 5 star restaurants going to a McDonald’s level of pricing (and food quality) just so that it is faaaaaaiiiiiiiiirrrrrrrr to everyone involved.

Life isn’t fair. At all. Ever. There is no fair.

That said, I am pretty happy that Noah’s obscene raise came with a much lower than expected amount of money. Ahhh skipping tax brackets. That’s ok. We don’t actually need all of the money. It’s ok that it is being used for services for people who need them. I feel pretty good about that.

I can give some things in some ways. I can’t necessarily give what someone wants or needs. I don’t want to be responsible. I am too selfish. I will donate money and food. I will assist with my labor when I have extra spoons and not when I don’t. I am not going to be forced to sign up for working all the god damn time for someone else’s benefit. I don’t care enough about other people.

I can say that out loud. I don’t care enough about other people to give them the time and energy I want to use on my own selfish pursuits.

Could I donate more time so that I am making other peoples lives at least slightly less awful if not better? Probably. Almost certainly. There is no shortage of suffering in the world.

Some people feel motivated to help a lot a lot of the time. That’s awesome. I’m glad you have so much to give. I don’t have it. If I try to do that I end up spending a lot of time cutting my body to remind me that I don’t matter so I don’t forget who I am supposed to be focusing on.

Cutting really is a useful tool. I think about it a lot. I think about what it does and why it is useful in the ways it is useful. Self-control is both under rated and under valued by most people. Very few people have the self-control to abruptly shift large chunks of their behavior. It is the same thing as not that many people are truly good actors. Same mechanism.

Cutting influences a lot of brain chemicals. Cutting is a dramatic shift to the body chemistry makeup. It induces calmness and a feeling of focus–tunnel vision, really. When your body is in shock it tends to shut down a lot of your nerve endings. You stop getting a lot of distracting messages from your body.

Cutting allows me to borrow spoons of self-control. I don’t really have that kind of calmness in my body without something to trigger a much-larger-than-usual grab of chemicals. Yay drugs! Due to experimentation I have learned a lot more about what my base level is vs. what is my elevated mood vs. what is my depressed mood. It’s a process.

Sometimes it is very powerful to stop and really concentrate on how powerful my brain is (your brain too; just sayin’). The brain scans they are doing these days feel like magic to me. You can see what is happening. The most magical part is you can see how people have the sheer willpower to change things.

I believe that my brain was altered by trauma. What I mean by that is I believe my brain adapted to living in an environment with a freakishly high level of stress. That is the level of stress my brain believes is necessary/appropriate to common life.

If my brain adapted to stress, how can I consciously choose to change the adaptation again? Studies show that mostly people don’t change much. It is hard. It takes will and effort and work and misery.

Being inside my brain sucks bowling balls through a hose. It isn’t fun. The difficulty of changing things is really hard to notice when stacked up to how shitty it is to live here.

I believe in magic. I believe that people make things happen when everyone else believes that it can’t. It happens all the time.

I have had the good/bad privilege of spending a lot of time with people who have experienced severe traumatic brain injuries. I have seen people survive the most horrifying accidents with terrible injuries. Their lives are forever altered. They can’t get back to being who they were.

I have no before picture I am struggling towards. That isn’t part of my story. I don’t have a base line to return to. All I have is the absolute all encompassing belief that I can change the story. I can learn how to be a good parent and I can be present through a healthy and happy childhood. This is not about a return to anything. This is about consciously choosing something different from my life.

Last night we read the part in the Little House in the Big Woods where Pa teases Laura about the kids getting only a switch in their Christmas stocking if they are bad. Shanna’s eyes went wide.

“Those parents hit those kids?”

“Yup. A long time ago people believed that if a kid did something bad the parents were required to hit the kid to teach the kid a lesson. It never worked very well.”

“Gosh I’m glad that no one has to be hit in this house.”

Me too. She cuddled up really close after that and told me that she would never hit me because I have been hit enough. I didn’t really know how to respond. I kept reading.

I’m reading my friend’s book. It is a rather fun read so far. I’m about 20% into it. He combines irreverence and history in his fabulous manner. (He intersperses national/international news events on the time lines to let people get a scope on what is happening. He said which year (I’ve already forgotten–1800’s, I think the last number is a 4 or a 6 but the decade escapes me and that is pretty important.) that Beethoven began de-composing. Similar gems are liberally sprinkled. I’ve always liked his writing. That’s why I know him in the first place. Yay for internet friends.

Why is it that I feel like I am standing still and free falling at the same time? I feel like I am not doing enough and I am terribly bored and I feel like I am doing too much and I am so overwhelmed I cannot possibly keep functioning at this rate.

I’m not balancing the marathon vs. sprint timing thing very well. I’m not actually talking about running–it’s one of those metaphor things.

Gardening has a rhythm and I am struggling to learn it. Some months of the year I need to spend 40 hours/week in the garden. Some months I spend more like 1-2 hours/week. I don’t yet feel this rhythm in my bones but it is coming. Spring is like a drug for me these days. Must move. Must plant. It is weird and primitive.

Summer is feeling different. I am a delicate and trembling flower and I wilt in the heat. More accurately I have attacks of horrifying bowel pain. I HATE SUMMER. I spend hours a day not sure if I am on the verge of spontaneously vomiting or shitting my pants because I won’t make it to the bathroom in time. It is hard to keep a schedule when I feel like this. (For the record I have only had one bathroom accident since childhood. The first day Noah went back to work after Shanna was born I had not yet learned that post-children the urgent signals are uhhh less timely and more actually urgent. Eww. Eww. Eww.)

But I have managed to go to the water park at least one day a week since it opened for week days. *pat self on back* That is a summer routine that I want to start. We only stay for an hour to an hour and a half. We might stay longer if the kids could do more swimming on their own and I had to do less work. As is I don’t have the physical ability to manage entertaining them in water for four hours. I take this as a sign that I am out of shape.

I feel like what I should do is make up a variety of different schedules–the way I did when I was teaching. Year planning was my favorite step. <3 It is like a puzzle! What do you want to do and when? How does it all fit together to make a cohesive picture of education? How do I fit in all of the standards and methods of teaching I want to hit?

I used to list: poetry, grammar, writing, reading boring analytical non-fiction, reading novels, reading short stories all as separate units. How many weeks to spend on each? How many hours in those weeks? How do I pre-test to figure out what people already know so I don’t bore the shit out of people? How do I evaluate people accurately to find out what they really learned?

If I had a dick this process would give me a hard on. It is a control thing. I like feeling like I am dotting all of my i’s and crossing all of my t’s. (I understand that in that case the apostrophe isn’t strictly appropriate but it looks bad any other way of writing it. See, this is what many years of obsessively worrying about grammar gives you. You know the rules and don’t follow them any way because the rules suck. Go English?)

I probably should get out some paper. It is easier without typing.

What are my categories now? Gardening, schooling, social activities, making food, cleaning house, money (there are a lot of once a year payments, for example, so budgeting is kind of weird), kid-separate-from-adult-time (my kids are *not* actually attached to me at the hip very consciously), reading, writing, running, hygiene (this takes time! Every Damn Day!), and I could come up with more if I tried.

They are all on slightly different schedules. Some things are scheduled and balanced on a month to month basis, some things are scheduled and balanced weekly or even daily. How do you balance all of the daily obligations against the weekly and monthly and annual?

Near as I can tell most people do more or less what their parents did because that is what they know of life. Thus I do a lot of robbing Peter to pay Paul because that is what I learned. I do it while squirreling away a lot of money which is, strangely, also what I learned.

I don’t usually mention that my father was rather well off throughout my childhood. I lived in poverty. I ate nothing but ramen and free lunch. I moved every three months because we were couch surfing and my mom couldn’t pay rent. He would tell my mom he was too poor to pay for things but he had a lot of savings. My mom just flat never had enough money to live.

Shanna sees me play with Mint a lot. She asks what it is. I talk to her about the balance of wants and needs and future savings. I tell her, “If you save money and you have a buffer then you don’t have to feel afraid when unexpected things happen. You can just shrug and move on with your life. Not having savings is one of the scariest things in life. It means you can not go out and solve the problems that come up and that is really hard.”

When I lived on $1200/month I had $3,000 in the bank at (almost) all times in a savings account I otherwise didn’t touch. My theory was that I might have to leave suddenly at some point in time and I needed a buffer. I burned through the buffer when I left my Owner. I got down to the point of my bank account only having four digits.

My friend offered me $100. He said that was his friends-need-help emergency fund. I wouldn’t let him give me money. I told him that I would make it come out ok in the end. I was right.

It is harder to deny yourself things you can afford to buy than it is to not buy things when you have no money. That has been my experience. It is harder and harder for me to save money. (In my defense the largest chunk of my spending is going to paying the mortgage off faster. I shouldn’t feel so upset with myself for not “saving” when I am spending the money on debt pay off instead of consumer spending but there you go.)

A while back I read a book, Raising the Perfect Child Through Guilt and Manipulation and whereas I am not up for adopting most of her methods or practices (I’m not taking up Catholicism nor sports) I really latched on to a few important points in the book. If you are really nice to your kids and you are interested in them and you share things with them then they will want you to like them. If they want you to like them then they will make choices that are in line with your values.

Oh man.

What are my values then? I want my kids to be interested in life and in people. Most people are good. Most people are pretty kind when given the opportunity. If someone is not kind to you, pull back first but be able to attack to defend yourself. You are worth defending. Read as much as you can–as many different kinds of things as you can. I believe that there are more things to learn than there is time in the day to learn it. I want my children to believe that their body is theirs to do with as they please–not as someone else pleases (unless it is fun and then I just don’t want details–m’kay?). I want my children to believe that work is necessary and fun. I want them to understand that different people are good at different kinds of work and that is no judgment one way or another on the people or the work. Do what you like.

I want my children to understand that they have privilege. That their ancestors have been privileged for quite some time. What does that mean about our place in the world and in history?

I check a lot of books out of the library that deal with African American issues. Seeing my little Aryan baby read, “A long time ago before you or I were born our people were enslaved” makes me wince. I told her that actually her ancestors were the slave owners. She asked if my ancestors owned slaves and I got to say no. (Yankees, more-recent-immigrants, and prostitutes for the win.) There goes white guilt in full form! But it’s true. Noah’s family owned slaves.

I find that as I get older and as I read more feminist writing I realize that if I were to fall into the most obvious trope presented to me I should hate Noah. I should hate everything he stands for and everything about him.

That is really hard to live with. I’m sure that is as hard to live with as the trope that women are just meant to be props for a man’s life.

I don’t hate Noah. I like Noah. Having the life of privilege he has had has made him one of the kindest and most considerate people I have ever had in my life. But maybe he just treats me that way because I put out. I’m only sort of kidding.

I am nice to Noah and he is nice to me and we have a whole virtuous cycle thing going on. Different people care about different kinds of “being nice”. Different people want different kinds of support.

In the past three days I have talked to four different women who have all been extremely upset with their (male) partners because of a lack of support. In most of these cases the woman can’t even put her finger on what more support would look like but they know they aren’t getting it. (Mothers of many children can come up with a list of what they want without having to pause for breath.)

When I think about how upset these women are I stop and think about how tired Noah is. Then I cycle through my male friends who are working as hard as they physically can to support their partners.

Yes, yes I know that the “love languages” crap plays in with it but it feels bigger than that. I think that evolution wants us to feel like what this person is giving us isn’t enough so that we will go shopping for someone who provides us with more. I think that it is just a good bet in terms of producing prosperous off-spring.

Only it doesn’t work. Because splitting up families is hella complicated. I think about the interweaving needs that exist in a family. I think about how children learn to care for themselves and for one another earlier when there are more of them around.

Then I come back to the fact that Noah started off in this world no bigger or stronger than me but he is now in some ways. He may or may not have a higher IQ. I definitely have a higher EQ. He has a higher earning potential at this stage. I can run farther. We are different. We are not equal.

How does one measure worth? I can hate him as a symbol of oppression or I can recognize that he personally isn’t oppressing anyone and he hasn’t spent a lot of time actively doing any oppressing. Living with me has dramatically changed how feminist he is at work. (I feel damn proud of that.)

He is moving in the direction of having power and influence. And I stand behind him filling his ear with my opinions. Does that make me a prop? Is he a prop? Is he just a paycheque to support my lavish lifestyle?

We are good at very different things. We like very different things. We complement one another. And because we are white that means that we have what is sometimes presented as the widest array of options in life.

My demographic is mocked up one side and down the other in the media. I am an upper middle class rich white liberal. I am a stay at home mom and I home school my kids. I am a punch line and a punching bag. Waa waa poor me.

Do I want to be a caricature? Do I want to treat Noah like he is a caricature? Noah is an upper middle class rich white liberal gamer geek. Doesn’t that make him kind of icki by definition? And don’t let that sicko watch My Little Ponies!! Ahem. Sorry.

What does being anything mean? I never identified as trailer trash despite living in trailers off and on and despite white trash being so much less “ok”. I am not defined by the box in which I sleep. Or in which I fuck random men I just picked up.

What am I?

I told Noah the other day that most of the people in my family would describe themselves as good people who sometimes do bad things. They are rapists and pedophiles. Ok, most of them aren’t rapists. But even the non-rapists adamantly defend the rapists.

I think of myself as a bad person who doesn’t really do bad things very often. I believe I am inherently unworthy of any relationship. It is inevitable that I will kick the cabinet off the wall. Duh. Being the kind of person who can, has, and may do so again means that I am just bad.

Do I rape people? Well, I’m pretty confident that I have not raped anyone since I was eighteen. I am pretty sure that I did commit rape before then. I am so sorry. I didn’t understand what I was doing. I didn’t understand power differentials. I didn’t understand that I was ever capable of having power.

Sometimes I look at Noah and I understand on a gut level that he doesn’t see himself as someone who has or has ever had power. He is still in that timeless place with the little boy who wasn’t treated all that well.

I mean, not that he’s immature or anything–that’s not what I’m trying to say. I’m saying that ones internal perspective doesn’t much resemble other peoples view of one. See how that non-gendering thing is awkward?

I do not believe I am a good person. It is, frankly, freeing. I get to make selfish and self-interested choices without caring that much about the effect. I generally do take the effect into consideration because I will have to live with it and all. That is one of the best parts of getting older. You have had a chance to learn from more mistakes.

Every time someone tells me not to dwell on the past I wonder what they mean by that. The people I know who tell me, “I don’t think about the past” are people who have the same little cycle of life over and over with people who are practically paper dolls. People who are roles.

I don’t hate Noah. I don’t feel I can. The longer I know him the older and more grizzled he becomes. (He’s got quite the beard these days.) But I see him as younger and softer as time goes by. I see more of his innocence and his desire for simple connection. I see more of him wanting to be liked and feeling sad because he knows most of the world doesn’t like him very much. (I mean, he’s charismatic and has friends and all–but he’s a symbol to be hated.)

What does any of it mean? Nothing? Everything? Who knows. I like him. I like the life I get to share with him more than I have ever liked anything in my whole life. I feel grateful for the peace and joy in my life. I have stability, safety, and privilege. I can write for six hours straight (in various places on differing projects) when I have insomnia (or intestinal pain–let’s be clear here) after getting almost six hours of sleep because my husband helps so much.

I can invite two kids over for the weekend and trust that my husband will just be around making food and cleaning up messes and playing with kids as much or more than I do.

Sex. That is the thing to schedule that didn’t make the list. I’m sorta interested in my cycles around that as well. Obviously I am more interested in sex around ovulation. We often have most of our ten times a month sex in a four day period. It’s awesome. But he would prefer other spacing. I struggle internally with treating sex like a chore to cross off the list like brushing my teeth.

And yet.

Why am I having sex ten times a month? (Ok, I’ve actually had at least two months in the past year where I didn’t put out ten times and I’ve had paroxysms of guilt. I try to compensate by some months getting up to more like fifteen. Noah agrees that it balances and all is copacetic.) Because sex is a lot of where Noah gets positive energy. He is drained and tired all of the time. If I put out more he would have more energy. This is a pretty trackable situation in our life.

But it is different for me. Sex is different than it has ever been. HA! I’ve been trying to think for days what base lines I have in my life. People revert to base line when they are under stress. I finally came up with one: picking up strangers for sex. That is probably the primary base line behavior I have had in life. I did it for 27 years.

Monogamy is weird. I’m not even going to call it boring because it isn’t that it is boring. It is consistent, but not boring. It feels different in a lot of ways I don’t feel up to putting into words right now. I hear breakfast finishing up and my arms hurt.

And then I’ll just abruptly stop. Because I can’t end for shit.

Now I understand “fuck cancer”

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For most of my life I have been kind of confused by the “fuck cancer” emphasis people have. They seem to be more upset by it than other kinds of death. I’m a death-is-death-how-doesn’t-matter person. Only in the past couple of weeks Kate Bornstein (who is one of the most important voices in gender deconstruction) has had a crowd source fundraising effort because she has cancer–we need her. She has the courage to speak about things that must be spoken about. She is really important.

And another person I know has 6, 4, and 2 year old children. Kate is very likely to survive. She has a very survivable kind of cancer and now the outpouring of love and money she will need to fight for life. His survival chances are in the single digits.

I can’t stop weeping. I “know” my grandmother died from cancer. I don’t know what kind–not breast cancer. I know that much.

The kind of knowing I want my children to have for me is something that cannot come until they are adults and putting it all together in retrospect. I think that I all of a sudden just received a catapulted stone of fear in my belly. How will his children know him?

He told me just before he found the lump that I had inspired him to start marathon training. That process was more or less how the lump started bothering him. That’s why they found this. I told him to start making videos for his kids. One for each birthday up until they are 25 or 30. They need to know you and get the advice you would give them.

Shanna was asking me about parents yesterday. Kind of the standard kid question kinds of things: do only Mommies take care of babies? Oh dear goodness I hope not or a lot of kids would starve to death. I told her that some babies have only one mommy or only one daddy and some babies have a mommy and a mommy (or mama) and some babies have two daddies and some babies have more than two parents of any possible gender consideration. What matters to a baby is that consistent grown ups hold and care for and love the baby. That is all that is needed to make a parent. Not biology. Not anything else. I said that babies are designed to fall in love with the grown ups who care for them because that is how the baby will ensure survival. Mutual love with a grown up means the grown up becomes invested and puts a lot of time and energy towards the baby.

She said, “So it doesn’t matter if it is a boy or a girl?” I asked her how many times it has mattered whether I have a penis or a vulva while I change diapers. I asked her if she thinks our female friend K is too stupid to figure out how to clean her son’s penis. Shanna laughed. I asked her if her father has ever had trouble wiping her butt. She confirmed that he is a poop wiping expert. I said, “Anuses are universal.”

She asked if girls are supposed to stay home with their babies. The timing on this conversation was just hilarious considering what I have been reading on the internet lately. I said girls are supposed to do the things that make them happy. By being happy in front of their kids they are teaching their kids the right way to live. For some mothers this means staying home and for some mothers this means working outside the home for a company. All mothers work. All mothers do a back breaking amount of work. If a mother has an outside job then the children can either stay with dad (I cited families we know) or if both parents work day care of some kind can be arranged (I explained several different examples we know).

Every family looks different because every family is made up of different people. Different people are made happy by different things. That is what makes life beautiful. If everyone was exactly the same life would be really crappy. Every person is on a completely individualized path through life.

I said that different people have different advantages. I talked to her about money. I talked to her about how some people have large extensive families and that is a different very important kind of support. It gives different life options. For example: single parenting is a very different experience if you are rich than if you are poor. Single parenting is a very different experience if you have a large and involved family than if you have no family support. I went on and on. She asked more questions. It kept going.

I tell my children frequently that while they are children they have a few specific jobs they have to work on. Their primary job is to play with the world. The process of play and exploration is the primary thing that children should be focused on. After that you have to learn how to have relationships with people; you have to learn how to be considerate. But the third thing is: with great privilege comes great responsibility. I tell my children explicitly that they are part of the most privileged cohort that has ever been born. They have more access to information and the ability to learn than any person has ever had at any point in history. And my kids have free access to it all day every day because they are not locked in an institutionalized setting following some bullshit agenda that is the resort of so much compromise nothing real is taught. I expect them to take learning seriously.

I talk about how the world is changing and there are a lot of people in the world who do not have access to information. There are a lot of big problems to be solved. People will have to be exceptionally able to synthesize large amounts of data in order to solve these problems. People will have to learn a bunch of cross-disciplines in order to solve these problems. The only way is to start young and take it seriously. Learn.

I tell my kids that I want them to grow up and be fierce and sure of their opinions. They should not believe they are “always right” because that is hubris–no one is always right. But listen to Davey Crockett: Be sure you’re right and go ahead. Plan at leisure; act with haste. If you hesitate then some someone less qualified will speak first and set the plan. That’s really not a great situation. If you can’t find a way; make a way. You will make mistakes or you will never learn and grow. You must make big mistakes. That is part of life.

Even if I get upset with you over a mistake I will get over it. I love you more than I love breathing. More than I love any thing in the whole world. I will get angry with you. I will shout at you. I will never hit you. I will always love you.

Thinking about cancer makes me feel so very afraid of my children not knowing me. Shanna proudly informed me that she was going to grow up and be a bad ass just like me. I laughed. I told her that would make me very happy. I want to see that. I want to see what she is going to be like. I want to know her. I want that so fucking much.

Getting to see what Shanna will do in the world will be my entertainment and reward for still being alive.

And that’s before I even get to Calli. Calli is a born engineer. She is going to need to have a woman behind her saying, “You can do it” for a great many steps in her life. She is going to live in a “man’s world”. Hell she already wants to be Diego–not Dora. Not Alicia. She’s Diego. She’s the god damn main character who rescues everyone.

They need me. It is so clear. Like my friend’s children need him. And I start weeping again and I understand fuck cancer.

There is no right. There is no should. There is no deserve in this life. There just is.

On April 1st it will be the birthday of one of the awesomest women I know. I’m sorry I won’t be in Portland with her. That would have been wonderful.

In other news I am exchanging books with a friend who is also a writer on April 1st. We are essentially work-shopping one another’s books. You know, a real forking editing job. I’m ridiculously excited. I want No Secrets to be finished and I have stalled. It has been almost a year and a half since I wrote it and it still isn’t in paper. Erf.

In September Noah is officially off the leash and he gets to start being a mostly absentee father/husband while he works on whatever he wants to work on. I’m thinking about treating July like my own personal NaNoWriMo. I want to write Outrunning Suicide before I have a hard time negotiating for time. A lot of the shape of it is working itself out in my head. Stylistically it will not resemble No Secrets. That’s for the best. I’ve been reading reviews of writers differently lately. “What will they bitch about with my content–repetitiveness. I can’t just tell the same stories. Hm. Interesting.”

Sometimes it is kind of convenient that I have been through such a ridiculous variety of kinds of extreme trauma. I always have another fucking story. Ha.

A few times lately I have thought about my mother. I’ve thought about what will happen when Shanna is eighteen. Shanna might want to meet my family. She will be allowed to. I’ll drive her to the house and wait at the bottom of the hill for her. She doesn’t have to share my views on them. She didn’t make my bed; I did.

Shanna asked me if I loved my mommy when I was a little girl. I told her that when I was a little girl I thought my mommy was the best thing in the whole universe. I loved her with my whole heart. She was my sun and my moon. Shanna then pointed out that I don’t feel that way now. I said, “No. I don’t. You will have different opinions when you are in your thirties than you have right now too.” She looked thoughtful.

It is really hard giving space for beliefs that are not your own. If I break the incest chain in my family I have absolutely done a measurable good in the world. I just found a biography from someone in the middle of a six generation chain. My stomach hurts too much to read it right now. At some point in the not-too-distant future I will have read everything easily findable on this topic. That’s a little weird to know. It makes me want to create more data.

Life goals:

I want to deepen and broaden the scope of information known about incestuous families. At some point I will figure out a measurable goal around this topic. I don’t have it yet.

I want to live outside my country of origin for a minimum of five years, preferably in one year chunks. I’ll get homesick bad.

I want to see what Noah can do. He has really impressed me so far. I want to see what he and I can do together.

You outrun suicide by giving yourself full permission to do it, but you keep moving the goal posts. “Ok I can do it. But first I have to do…” It’s on the to do list. But a lot of other things are going to happen first.

I want my children to be adults and to be able to say, “Yeah. I agree. It’s time. I love you. Do what is right for you.” Maybe I will have to move to Oregon once I hit 70. When I get there I will get to be near a friend of mine. She is partnered with one of the people who pushed that law through. I feel so grateful that I get to know people who change the world. They give me the courage to keep trying.

Holy fuck. I just had a thought. What age level is Outrunning Suicide aimed at? If I want a lot of people to be able to read it I have to think about that. My writing is rather obtuse most of the time. Well that will take some thought.

When I was a child there were very few periods of time when I didn’t want to die. I stayed alive mostly because I was too depressed to be expeditious. I didn’t know anything other than pain. I was not permitted to act like I was in pain. That was rude.

My life is different now. I didn’t understand what a life free from pain was. It was a myth. I wouldn’t say that I am exactly pain free at this point but I am probably at the lowest level of pain and the highest level of joy I have ever had. These are the best days of my life. And I know it while I am living them.

I keep wandering in my head to a Madeleine L’Engle book A Wind in the Door. The mitochondria are in trouble! The farandolae aren’t deepening! I just read Collapse by Jared Diamond. Help! The planet is in trouble! The humans aren’t deepening!

I don’t know. Lots of feelings. Today I don’t want to die. And I weep at the loss of a great mind. I hope he doesn’t read this. My grief is not his problem. I’m glad his wife has a very supportive family. I’m glad they live near her family and not his. I am so sorry it is happening.

I’ve read tragedies for years. I’ve taught units on tragedy. I never really got it before. I’ve never been deep enough into a community to really understand what the loss of a person means before.

He’s going to fight. He’s that kind of guy. My grief is entirely premature and I need to stfu. But this is where I feel.

I have spent most of my life believing very firmly that for me cancer was one of the goalposts. I wouldn’t fight. I would go quietly into the dark night because I’m not interested in more suffering.

Life is pain, highness. Anyone who tells you different is selling something.

Now I don’t know. When I think about the things I want to do. When I think about not seeing my daughters grow up to be fierce and bad ass? (She-Ra is pretty bad ass is a frequent comment around our house. I said it once. Oy.)

There is no right. There is no should. There is no deserve. There is only what is. And what you go do with it. We live in a time of practically preternatural access to science. If you have money. If you want to fight something bad enough we live in a time of honest-to-goodness miracles.

How much do I want to see my daughters at thirty? Forty? Fifty? Sixty? What will they do with their lives? I want to know so very badly. I am curious. I want to know. I want to see what this being I have unleashed on the world will do.

Somehow I don’t envision her walking onto the family compound at eighteen and not coming back. It’s thirteen years away. She’ll be able to evaluate people on her own at that point. She will have had a lot of practice with a lot of different kinds of people. She will be able to read people well. My family isn’t subtle. Even if she does want to get to know them–and why not, they are interesting people–she won’t want to stay.

She will have shit to do. My family has nothing to do but be unhappy. They will sit in one place doing that until they die. I don’t understand why. It’s like a clock that has run down. Poverty, physical health, mental health, and a kind of apathy I don’t understand. An anger about entitlement and responsibility I don’t understand.

I have had such a ridiculous amount of privilege. I’m only starting to understand the shape of it.

I have had the privilege of being able to set the goal post of “I’ll kill myself if” pretty low but I’ve been healthy enough to always meet a really ableist centric attitude. I have been able to be an asshole about independence. I’ve also had a guaranteed income for most of my adult life. I’ve been financially stable without having to have a job. That’s so fucking ridiculous.

I have no safety net though. I don’t have Bank of Mom and Dad. I don’t have emergency reserves beyond those I create. For most of my adult life I was inches above the poverty line living in one of the most expensive places in the world. I have never come close to bankruptcy and my credit score is ridiculous. I did that with a lot of seed capitol. I feel like an asshole for being glad that pit bull attacked me. It made the whole rest of my life better.

Perspective if everything.

I’ve been thinking about my mom. I have been specifically thinking, “I forgive you. I hope you forgive me.” If my kids ever go and meet her I hope my mom understands why I kept them away. My kids will be different. They will not have broken spirits. I hope she will be able to see that and be glad. I hope she will forgive me. I hope she understands wanting to keep your kids safe.

I hope she will forgive me.

I hope she will still be alive so that she will be able to meet my kids some day. I hope my kids want to talk to her a lot for a while. I bet she won’t live long after that but she will die happier than she has been in a long time. They will be like her. They will be able to ask her questions about things she has had great skill at doing. They will think she is an interesting person.

It’s kind of a weird balance. I have to tell the truth to my children. The truth is that no one is all bad. Everyone has good parts. The thing about life is learning how to find the good that balances the bad and evaluating if the value is high enough. In most families people decide that the kin alliance is worth putting up with the bad. That’s normal and right.

When my kids are adults they will not be children who are easy to mold. They will not be instructed in how sex is natural and fine between family members as long as you don’t breed because it is only in breeding too close to the line that you develop problems.

I hope that when my daughters are eighteen they will have the ovaries to say to a biological family member who solicits sexual contact, “You are a disgusting piece of shit and I hope you rot in hell.” Because yeah. That’s the reaction you should have to incest.

But I don’t think my family would dare at that point. And if everyone keeps their britches on, it’s fine… right? Oh fuck. *beat head on wall* Wait. I’m not supposed to do that any more.

Maybe I should get dressed and run. That would be all healthful and crap.

I want to live. I have stuff to do. I’m scared. Fuck cancer. I can’t be strong enough to outrun it. No one can. It just happens. Am I going to instantly stop smoking so I can lessen my risk of lung cancer? No. I wouldn’t be a nice person. (Vaporizer is still impact on the lungs. My lungs will tell you.)

On the way I will eat more Easter candy. My body says: “Hey, I know-instead of crying: sugar rush and endorphins!” Is this ideal? Nope. We recognize two candy-holidays a year in this house. Otherwise I would get in a long of trouble. I didn’t eat candy like this when I was a kid. It’s kind of weird.

Ok, run.

I feel soft and badass at the same time.

1 Reply

My skin is so nice. Oh man. Of course the woman giving me the treatment turned out to be my tribe. I didn’t press for specifics (uhhh it seemed inappropriate) but she said enough things that I know it to be true. I just know.

The first half hour I spent in the hot tub or sauna. The room was beautiful and huge. I felt small and I don’t very often. Then I moved into the treatment room. That was more to a scale that felt reasonable to me.

First she scrubbed me really forking hard with salt for a while. I rinsed that off. Then she slathered me up in mud and wrapped me up like a burrito. Then she did stuff to my hair and my feet and my face. Then I took another shower. Then she put oils on me. A few stages of this were billed as “massage” and given who I normally get them from it just didn’t rank as obviously meant to be therapeutic. It felt soothing though. Soothing can be nice.

We talked about intentional parenting. We talked about viewing your children as autonomous beings who do not owe you a relationship. We talked about modeling and mirroring and learning and the pressure of being on all the forking time. She is on the fence. She thinks she might want kids but she’s not sure she can handle them. She’s thirty-six. She’s running out of time.

If you don’t wake up in the morning and cry because you wish you were holding your baby then you probably don’t want to be a mom bad enough to go through the process.That’s how I feel about it.

We talked about having children to give yourself a reason to live and the problems and benefits of doing so. The only ethical way to do it is to think of your children’s needs above your own. Yes, they give me a reason to stay alive. That isn’t their problem. All they should see is that they have a wonderful mommy who loves them more than ice cream. In our house the measure of true affection is how it compares to ice cream.

We talked about hiding yourself in travel and needing roots at the same time. We talked about how you have to hide yourself in order to have “relationships” because if you are damaged and angry every problem will be your fault. It cannot be apparent that you are so angry. How do you mask it? How do you get along?

How do you get over hating everyone else who got to have a mother who loved them? How do you not take that hatred out on them?

I told her that I think very hard about how many people I want to have at my fiftieth birthday party. I want to still know these people. I want to still live here. Ok. What am I going to have to do in order to end up with that happening? It’s not a guarantee for people like me. I’m a runner.

And this conversation came in brief bits and spurts. It was never intense. It was a few sentences at a time here and there over two hours.

She asked me how I hurt my arms so I talked about writing my book and destroying my arms and doing it practically in the middle of the night because I didn’t have any other time and I fucking had to do it. She commented on how I seem to be a very driven person in general. I have managed to do a bunch of things–right?

She said, “I guess people like you are the ones who get things done in life. If you have to do it in the middle of the night you will because you want it done and that is just that.”

At the end she told me that she didn’t think she had ever spoken to a client as much as she spoke to me and she thanked me for coming in. She said that I gave her a lot of things to think about that are really important in her life right now and she’s glad that she met me.

That’s a well spent day, no?

Suicidal ideation

4 Replies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I should probably go start breakfast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shrink your world

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One of the problems with living your life through the internet is there is this constant reminder that there is someone awesome in the world… only you don’t get to see them. They are far away. Sometimes they feel “only” thirty-five miles away. In the bay area that’s no big deal for dinner.

But all of this travel has a cost. The cost isn’t as obvious as it used to be. One upon a time thirty-five miles was probably multiple days of travel. Now… why are you being so lazy? Why don’t you join a group that has a one hour meeting once a week forty miles away from your house. I go to therapy in Oakland because I can’t find a compatible therapist closer. I spend four and a half hours and $10.50 on the trip. That’s a cost.

Life is about a series of choices. You can deny that you are making them and whine about the results but you can’t change the fact that it is happening. Most of the time people do nothing. They watch tv or play a video game or whine on mothering.com. Not a one is more moral than any other. What would people do if they were doing? How would they live if they didn’t center their lives around “making money”? The vast majority of software that gets written is thrown away without being used. The vast majority of my work is thrown away. Laundry and dishes are eternal. They are just life. Everyone must deal with them. They take so much time.

What do we do when we go do something? Do we go watch a movie? Do we build something? Do we go somewhere interesting? What is interesting about it? Why is it interesting? Everyone has a set of decisions they make that satisfy their priorities.

I spend a lot of time at home. More than anything I want my home to be beautiful. It is kind of becoming the thing I care about. I don’t care about cars. I don’t care about my clothes overmuch. I still wear clothes I bought when I was fourteen. (polyester cotton blend dress–I may have it till I am fifty–it fits from 135 lbs to 205 lbs miraculously) I’m not going to focus much on fashion.

I can’t control Noah and I can’t control my kids and I can’t control very much of how my life goes over the next few years. I have made long-term choices that require frugal living. No whining.

I want my house to be pretty. I want to feel proud of it. This is going to be an interesting journey. I’m going to have to learn how to do most of this by myself. When the kids get older they will probably help but I can’t reliably count on anyone else. I don’t know how much money I will have for these projects. All signs point to less than $100/month. I love freecycle like nobodies business. I feel guilty sometimes because I kind of feel like I am stealing from genuine poor people. I am making the choice to not spend money and someone else may not have a choice. I don’t feel like I should let that worry cause me to sit in a depressive rut in my house. If the only way I can get stuff is freecycle, I have as much right as anyone else to ask. Sometimes I win; sometimes I don’t.

I crossed two things off my to do list today. I finally got the van maintenance done (I’ve been putting it off for over a month) and I signed the kids back up for swim class. They have their own section of the budget so they get to do activities. I don’t feel like it is reasonable to throw them into a life of poverty in favor of some someday when things will happen. Their lives will be better if they know how to swim. I’m not signing them up for fifteen classes, but we’ll manage some things. I think that is fair.

My neighbor is pressuring me to put Shanna into a private (religious) school with her son next year. Hell no with a side of biscuits. Shanna keeps asking about kindergarden. I may sign her up for the online charter just to shut her up. I feel like my mantra in life right now is “We’ll see”. Whenever the kids ask me when something is happening or if something is happening I say, “I don’t know! We’ll see…” like a tv announcer. This would be more effective if they had ever heard/seen this schtick before. I think it is hilarious that when they see pop culture they will think it is imitating me long before they know I didn’t make this stuff up. I really like being cool.

The biggest limitation is how much work can I do while still being nice. Gosh it varies. But if I do manage to get a lot done I am more likely to feel good about myself than in any other set of variables. Of course.

I’m obsessively thinking about money. Some time in the next month I’m going to lay out the year, talk about my problem areas and why I’m being stupid in the ways I’m being stupid (cause we go for the honesty here). Sometimes I’m stupid. Unfortunately my family has to live with that. And I’m the kind of freak who is going to explain to the internet how so and why. For no reason beyond I want to. Then I stop freaking out about it. It’s a coping mechanism. It’s better than most of my traditional ones. Just go with me here.

And I want to write out why I have the attitude I do about Christmas. I have been feeling really weird about writing lately. I’m not making any progress. I’m not able to work on editing. It’s too god damn depressing. I think I need to explore some non-typing, spoken word technology for the next book. I’m kind of worried about my arms. Luckily I have friends to ask about this.

I need to go get ready for a tea party. We invited the nice waitress from the local breakfast restaurant. She often brings small gifts for my daughters and we have gotten to know one another over a period of about six years. I’m scared. I want her to like me. I will be crushed if she decides I am bad. I’ll keep my mouth shut and the door to the bedroom with the pornographic pictures closed. No actually I don’t care if my kids see them. One is a really gorgeous artistic shot done by a friend of mine and the others are all me naked while pregnant. So not “pornographic” but people have expressed shock. Bite me. I think they are cool.

I need to stop wasting time. But I don’t want to work. Of course not, Krissy–you are depressed. Never the less the work waits. Here I sit. Yup, still here. Suck.

Dear internet:

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I am feeling evasive. Can you tell? If you have questions I’ll answer them. If not I may be on vacation from writing. I’m thinking.

Brain dump + Bonus question.

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Occasionally someone will say something to me along the lines of them being worried about Noah being supportive enough.

I just yelled at Noah for almost two hours straight about how mad I am at all men and how angry I am about the current ways of dealing with rape in larger society and I said a lot of thinly veiled mildly implicating things that were quite harsh about all men. One time he slapped the arms of his chair and had a sharp intake of breath and he stood up and took two steps around in a circle then set his face in stern lines and settled in for more listening.

And over and over he patiently explained all the flawed results of my incoherent half-plans. He wasn’t dismissive but he was insistent. I’m just not looking at the whole picture. He’s right. He wasn’t even slightly demeaning. He was measured and careful in his tone. His facial expression was carefully monitored.

And when I cried in frustration and said I don’t know what to do he shook his head and sadly said he doesn’t either.

Noah has limited capacity to support me because he is a human being. I can consciously see how he is working as hard as he can to be supportive. It’s not his fault I have this hole in my life that is supposed to be filled by other people. I can’t do anything about that either.

Shanna told me yesterday that she wants to see the Eiffel Tower some day and she doesn’t care that I don’t like Paris I will have to go with her and she will make sure I have fun. I bet you she would be right.

I don’t run in Fremont again before the marathon. I am supposed to walk nine miles in the next five days. We leave for Disneyland Tuesday morning. Piece of cake. The marathon is pretty much exactly seven days away. Nearly to the minute.

I feel disembodied and empty. Drained.

One thing Noah promised to do for me (we’ll see) is set up a website and a mailing list. I’m going to start writing again soon. I have two very specific book ideas I’m playing with and I’m having trouble deciding which to write next.

My relationship with Tom will be a book by itself. It will be incredibly graphic and highly sexual.

The other book is one that Noah is encouraging me towards: Outrunning Suicide: A Harm Reduction Approach to Life. I already have the starts of the table of contents and multiple chapters partially written. I’ll be going through and examining all the ways I distract myself from killing myself. I think it is an interesting topic and so does Noah.

What do other people think?

If I treat this like a writing exercise…

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Dear J-

You emailed at a bad time. For no particular reason I woke up yesterday feeling much more suicidal than usual. I went on my seven mile run and had to deal with my knees shaking through most of the run because I was crying so hard my body was buckling. I got to Lake Elizabeth and felt a rush of anger at myself that I was so lazy that I stayed in bed till it was light. If it was still dark I could go down to the edge and swim out to the middle and drown myself and no one would be able to see me to rescue me in time.

Then I came home to your email. You want me to worry about you having a panic attack.

I’ll be honest and say that I laughed out loud. I did lol. I laughed. It bubbled up. I bent over laughing. I thought it was that fucking hilarious.

You know what, I’m not interested in a reconciliation. That sounds like work I don’t want to do. I’m kind of busy. I got a lot from our friendship, I’ll be honest. I cared about you a lot. I was looking forward to many years together. But between how you treated me and how you treated K, no thank you. K is one of three people my nearly two year old wants at her birthday party. I am not interested in a relationship with someone who treats me and mine how you do.

I can’t stop you from joining the homeschooling group. That’s not something that is in my authority or power to do. Shanna has asked me if she will ever be allowed to play with R again. I told her that when she is five if she is able to handle the phone and do the arranging I will drive her to and from play dates. If you show up at homeschool events I am certainly not going to be actively rude. I will never attack you physically or verbally. I do not plan to speak to you.

You see, I don’t have time for you. In order to have a relationship with you I would have to worry about you. You have proven yourself to not be someone who is worthy of how much effort that is for me. No thank you.

Krissy

I haven’t decided if I will send this. I love the internet. Thank you for listening to me babble.

Editing is part of the creative process.

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I’m editing No Secrets again.

If you have read it, did you have any burning questions? Any parts you really didn’t understand and you wish you did? That was really what I was hoping to get from working with an editor, finding out where the holes in the story are. I didn’t get that feedback. Oh well.

It’s hard to read this story. It’s really annoying finding dozens of typographical errors in each chapter. I thought I fucking paid an editor. Oh well. :-\

I’m also working on another book. I feel like I have to be doing something. I feel so trapped and stuck and boring and… Oh man.

Since I’m not sleeping I might as well write.

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For the last day or so Noah and I have been talking about how he thinks the next book shouldn’t just be part two of the autobiographical series. He thinks the next book should be about suicide. So far this morning I’ve written about 2,000 words. I think there is a part of me that wants to hurry up and write about suicide now because I want to work on part two during NaNoWriMo. This isn’t the same kind of story telling. I want to tell stories! But he’s right. This is weighing heavily on my mind.

He keeps asking me who I want to talk to and why. Who do I want to talk to? People who think they have it so bad that there is no point in continuing to try. It couldn’t possibly ever stop hurting. Life is pain. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

But how do you bear it? How do you keep going? How do you get through yet another shitty day? A big part of it for me is this obsessive, tenacious belief I have that I am not alone and there are people in the world who understand me, at least a little, and more importantly there are people who love me and need me. I don’t just mean the kids.

I was a teacher for two and a half years. Former students talk to me at least once a week telling me thank you for helping them with something or other. I’ve helped some of them become better educated about their birth choices. A student told me that she avoided a c-section because I gave her the strength and assurance to argue for her rights. I feel like that’s a big deal. She had the brass plated balls to argue with a doctor about her rights because I told her she could. Fuck yeah.

When people are very suicidal they call me. Even if we aren’t close. Even if they barely know me. I wear my heart on my sleeve and I seem safe. I am not going to look down on someone no matter how low they feel because I feel like I’m sitting there in the gutter with them. You can’t look down when your chin is on the ground. Everything is level or up.

I feel pretty ridiculous sometimes because I feel like part of my gift this lifetime is the easing of other peoples pain. Even if I am not that important in and of myself I touch people. Maybe they will be important. Maybe they will be able to do something because they felt seen by me. Maybe I will be able to lend them some of my strength and stubbornness.

How do I make it through another day? By making deals and trades. Over time I have made some bad deals but all that mattered to me was making it through the day. By that metric I’ve been quite successful.

I feel pathetic because I measure my success in “not dead”. Seems like a pathetically low bar. Not so much of a high jump but rather something to trip you up. If you fuck up on “not dying” the consequences are bad. If you hit a trip wire it hurts even though it’s not a high bar. Landing on your face really really hurts.

I think a lot about survival. What does it mean to live? Why are we here? What am I doing? I feel overwhelmed by life. It’s too much and not enough. But I have to stay. I have things to do. There are people who need me. I have to believe in the pit of my stomach that somewhere out there in the world there is someone who needs me quite badly. I can’t die yet because I haven’t met that person. I want to. That’s enough to get me through today. I’ll find a reason to get through tomorrow then.

In one of those festive bad moods.

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Right now I feel like I am being batted back and forth between “shoulds”. I should be working on this part of my life or that. I should be more patient. I should be. I should. I should. It’s hard to be ok with just being. It doesn’t really matter what I should be doing it matters what I am doing. Is what I am doing good enough? Why do I feel like there should be more? Why do I persist in feeling unworthy, bad, inadequate?

I don’t know but I’m kind of sick of it.

Kids go through periods of disequilibrium and then they get back to equilibrium. Both kids are off kilter. There is a lot of screaming in Wonderland. Not very much of it comes from me. I feel like my ears will bleed soon. My patience runs thin. My screaming is usually at the fifteenth time of saying, “I said stop kicking me” in a fierce and slightly escalating objectionable volume. Then I get smart and get up and walk away. Parenting is hard.

I spend a lot of time thinking about perspective. And about the plotline of the book to come. And myself as a character. And about sex. I think about sex with lots of different people in lots of different ways and I wonder about the sex that other people have. What is sex like for most people? When I read pornographic stories I have to wonder. What is this biological urge we have?

I’m thinking about how I feel about projecting my version of the truth on events that other people perceive differently. I have to deal with the potential outcome of people being mad at me. Far easier to not speak.

But I can’t. I really can’t. I finished editing my friend’s book.. I need to do some editing on NS, NS, NS so that it can move towards a paper edition. I also need to start doing the storyline for the book. Because I want to combine people and have a few composite characters it means choosing events from my life and figuring out how to tell them and when and how to integrate all of the supporting people. One of the big difficult-to-understand parts of the first book is the lack of explanation of other characters. They just came and went. That was how life felt. Things were different once I became an adult. I have many relationships that date back to my teenage years. I am experiencing development from my friends. It’s actually kind of weird. People are changing. I’m having to adapt to that. It’s probably all healthy and shit. I’m not sure I believe it.

For the last several days I’ve been simmering in my own bile. I’ve been seething. My jaw aches from clenching. Today when I was running I tried to put it into perspective. I thought about my day. I asked myself what parts of it I would take away and why? I don’t want to change what I am doing. So why do I feel so hateful? Because I can imagine someone else feeling very resentful. Because I know that a great many people feel above the work I do and think of people like me as being beneath them. Oh, but I’m different because I spent more time in college.

The arbitrary reasons people decide that other people are better or worse than other people are interesting to me. On one hand I have a number of traits, skills, attributes, qualifications, whatever of “high class” people. I’m still white trash. It doesn’t matter. I can still offend the shit out of you in five minutes flat if I want to. Just try me. I can find your buttons, motherfucker. I want to get in a fight. I want to be hit. I want to hit back. I don’t think I want to lose this time but I’m ok with it as a risk. I want to hurt someone. I want to damage someone. Luckily I married someone who doesn’t like to be hit so I don’t have to worry about being all “safe” or “sane” as I beat the shit out of someone. I have to just sit on it. I have to just be with this anger and hatred and rage over… nothing.

I’m kind of tired of being told these horrible generalizations that totally include me and then being told, “Well you’re different.” Most homeschooling parents are abusing/neglecting their children because they aren’t qualified to educate their kids but I’m different. Enh. Whatever. Maybe. I don’t know. It depends on what you think people need to grow up and be capable of doing. The whole point of education is to teach children how to be adults. Everyone grows up to be something. Why do we have a meritocracy where we only value people who attain “higher education”? Is that the only kind of life worth having? Really?

I hate that I feel like I am failing strangers by not being all that attractive. I make up for it by being friendly and personable when I’m in the mood to get along with people. I hide behind it and my towering hostility when I’m not in the mood. Regardless people comment.

Sometimes I wonder about the freedom of hijab. I wonder what it would be like to not feel like I have to live up to expectations of my appearance. Noah and I talk about the invisibility, the feeling of completely being unwanted in the world he experienced as a teenage boy. As a teenage girl I didn’t know how to keep them off me. Saying no didn’t matter. Now I avoid people and flash my big shiny wedding ring. Taken. Not looking. Not available. Safe. Really. I am. I believe it. I hope.

Reading Mo’s book made me think a lot about M/s. What I have sought from it. What do I want from it? How does it work?

Today I talked about my feelings about G-d and connection and universality and the purpose of figureheads. I don’t usually have the balls to talk about my way of living in the world.

Lately when I start running I listen to Dolly Parton tell me that I Better Get to Livin’. When she gets to the part about falling on your knees to pray every day I think about the fact that I don’t really kneel before anyone’s idea of the Christian G-d. I like to kneel in front of a mirror. The only person who is going to be with me every day is me. If I feel like I can’t walk then I had better start crawling. I’m it. If I’m not ready to roll over and die then I need to get the fuck up and go. I have to. No one is going to rescue me. I don’t think there is some omnipotent force that is going to save me. If I don’t get up every day and work on my attitude and do what I believe is fucking right then there isn’t much point in anything.

Right now the right thing is getting up with a smile. And doing laundry. And dishes. And playing games. It really is. Learning patience and humility is part of learning to be stronger–it really is. I need this. I need to find it in myself to have the perspective to understand that the people in my life now have never hurt me I need to rely on the safety and certain truth of that statement to learn how to stop acting like a wounded animal.

Running is starting to feel good again because it is starting to feel hard in a way that makes me have to decide many times to put my head down and go. Just don’t stop. That’s what you have to do. Put your head down and go. That’s all I have to do in order to log the miles I need on my body. I don’t have any time goals. I don’t have any other commitments. I just have to move my body over a given distance. That is my only obligation now. I’m doing it slowly and proving to myself that I can. I am strong. I am more capable than I ever dreamed.

Even as my psyche tries like hell to find a way to make me feel bad and hurt myself and feel sick. Noah didn’t tell me to eat the fucking muffin. He just said eat the muffin. But I heard it with more harshness. More negativity. More anger. Because I hate myself for being hungry. Because I hate myself for having needs.

Right now what I need is to go to bed. I need to be up and out the door running in eight hours. I need sleep.

Compulsions

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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.

Going down the rabbit hole is uncomfortable.

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Today is going to be bad. I started my period yesterday, I’m sure that contributes to how emotional I feel, but it’s not all of it. A friend asked me if I wanted to spend brunch with her on Mothers Day. I told her I didn’t want to because it would be too hard for me, can we meet another day. She said that was fine because she was offering for my sake instead of hers. I want to beat my head against the floor and scream, “That’s why I don’t want you here.” That is what I’m hearing in my head this morning. I don’t want you here. I’m only doing this for you. I don’t want anyone to do anything for me. I want people to want to be with me. They don’t.

If she didn’t want to be with me she wouldn’t offer, right? I’m just over reacting, as usual. I feel so stupid and ungrateful and mean and vicious. I feel hateful. Why can’t I let anyone just like me? Right now my needs are so big I can barely see around them. I am so selfish.

I can’t find my sports bra this morning in the dark. I find that incredibly frustrating. It’s enough to make me sink to the floor and just lose my shit crying. I am so stupid and pathetic I can’t even keep track of my things. This morning I feel like I hate pretty much everything about myself. I am forgetful. I am bad. This is a problem because if I wait too long from when I wake up to start running then I have to eat breakfast because my stomach hurts. I can’t run too soon after eating. It fucks up the timing of my whole day.

I get the impression I cry more than average. I cry for several hours every week. I’m sure I have weeks where I don’t cry but it has been a while.

Yesterday I stopped the car while I was driving because I had to cry for a while. I couldn’t see the curves on the road through my tears and I don’t want to have that kind of accidental death. I don’t want Noah to think I killed my kids on purpose. That would be a horrible thing to live with. I can’t stop crying lately. I feel so terrible. I feel like such a terrible person. I feel like I don’t deserve to live. I think it doesn’t help that I’ve been stubborn about being sober. Needing medication makes me bad. If I don’t use the medication I am “less bad” but I feel far worse about myself. It’s complex.

I dropped Shanna off at her Godmamas’ house yesterday. She stays for the weekend frequently. Soon it will be every month. She loves staying there. She loves her Godmamas. So far they are the only people who have a regular, consistent relationship with the kids. I feel like that is my fault. That other people would be present in their lives if I wasn’t a bad person. Shanna has lost friends because of me and my stupid mouth. People no longer spend time around my kids because they dislike me so intensely. They are so angry with me that they don’t want to know my children.

Why shouldn’t I feel like a terrible person? I drive people away. I hurt them. I do bad things. I am too angry. No one should be as angry as I am. It’s apparently horrifying. Whether or not I started out deserving to have bad things happen to me I deserve it now. I have earned it by being such a bitch. I’m not good or kind or gentle or nice. I know. The only thing I can do to stop earning bad things is to never speak again. It sounds like hyperbole but I’m terrified it is true. I am terrified that I am so bad that the only thing I can do to be less bad is to simply stop speaking. My influence is bad. I hurt people. I am bad.

I feel like it was the wrong decision for me to have children. I am not good enough. I can’t change it now. I feel sorry that my children don’t get to find out what it is like to grow up with a good mother. I’m sorry that my children don’t get to find out what it is like to grow up in a family. I bring nothing but myself. There is no one who is attached to me.

Interacting with people is hard. I talked to my friend yesterday. I met her four days before I met Tom. She told me that in her opinion I shouldn’t refer to my situation with Tom as a “relationship” because to him I was a fetish doll, not a person. She said she always disliked the relationship. She explained some of his techniques when we were arguing when I saw him on Monday. He has to discount me as a source of information. My opinion is literally worth less to him. He denies it when challenged directly, but he casually mocks me continually.

I spent my entire childhood being put down. Sarcasm is generally used when someone wants to dig at someone else. To poke them. To take them down a peg. Noah is not sarcastic with me very often. He is quite careful to do it in ways I’m not going to be bothered by.

Tom was very sarcastic with me pretty much all the time. It was hard to live with. If I spoke I was inviting being taunted. He meant it all in great fun. He thinks he is quite the wit. I found it rude and dismissive. I can get him to concede an argument but it gets bloody and nasty and I just don’t want to have that kind of relationship so I get used to not being right. I get used to just closing my eyes and shutting my mouth and trying to make my face go blank while say, “Ok. Fine.” But if he’s laughing while he is saying it then it’s just a joke and I can’t get butthurt, right?

I wonder if I feel so intensely suicidal because I am thinking so hard about my relationship with Tom. I’m not sure I want to admit to myself how bad that was. I did a lot of things I shouldn’t have. It wasn’t rape. It was all fully consensual. But I consented to a lot of things I shouldn’t have. I used Tom as a way of attaining harm that was only marginally less bad than slicing my legs up. I don’t think anyone plays like I did if they aren’t very ok with the idea of possibly dying today. I’m feeling really freaked out as I think about this book. I haven’t even gone through the pictures yet. Tom took thousands of pictures of me. By far my sex life is the most photographed part of my life. I feel weird about that.

I think this book is going to be a lot harder than I thought. I should probably start looking at pictures. It is hard to know that I let someone treat me in ways that weren’t very nice. I don’t have a problem with the beatings. I had to ask for those. I have a problem with the fact that I can go to seven years of graduate school in English and teach the language for several years and he will still tell me that I am stupid for not believing him about a made up grammar rule. I’m really glad I broke up with him. I understand why I have missed him. He does feel comfortable and familiar in a way the rest of my life right now doesn’t.

I don’t think I’m going to go to the rope munch on Monday. I don’t want to see Tom. My triggers are my problem, right? No one else has to care about stupid things that set me off, right? I don’t like being treated like a lower class of person. My response to being treated that way is to feel intensely suicidal and I just can’t deal with that. I can’t deal with being told I should be cheerful about being demeaned and ignored.

I’d rather start a fight. I would rather behave in a way that is bad. I would rather tell you to fuck yourself. And thus I drive more people away. I should stay home.

In writing hell.

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I find it funny that it is far easier to write on the internet and say over and over that my father raped me than it is to say just how much I loved Tom and why. Tom didn’t know my story. I’m pretty sure he still doesn’t. I don’t think he has read the book. Ha. Tom just treated me how he would treat a person from day one. I didn’t have to earn things. I didn’t understand that then.

How different my life would be without Tom. It’s hard to think about. I’m like 2500ish words into part two. This is slow and will be slow. I’m really struggling with how vulnerable I have to reveal myself as. I don’t want to feel that way. I am really struggling with how stupid and ignorant and god damn vulnerable I was. I didn’t feel that way then, of course. I feel vulnerable now.

How do I lay naked in public how disgustingly grateful I am because Tom did really awful things to me but he didn’t have sex with me afterwards. He took the trauma out of sex. He didn’t do it on purpose. He was just acting how he wanted to act. I’m having a hard time explaining in enough detail why things worked the way they did. I’m having trouble teasing out the threads from the weave of my life that were touched by Tom. He did a lot. I don’t think he understands how much. It is hard thinking about laying that bare before him. It’s not like doing so is going to alter anything in my life. I have ensured that I will never play or have sex with anyone but Noah. I have the safety of knowing one part of my future. It gives me a lot of peace. So what is the good in sharing any of this with Tom?

He owned me. Ultimately he didn’t want to. He didn’t want to be responsible for me. That was absolutely the right choice for him. But how do you get over that? This is going to be odd for people who don’t know much about bdsm. We had an intense relationship. I want to tell this story in a way that shows what he did for me. I want this to be a sympathetic love story. I feel like I owe my Owner that. I am struggling with explaining this.

What does it mean that this part of myself is gone? I’m trying to figure that out in the story. I’m having a hard time showing what I want to show. I can’t tell this story. It doesn’t work. I want that pathos. How can I tell the truth and show what happened? Gah. Sensory input. Not just what happened. Ack.

Nooooooooooooooooo

Time for the next step on the book.

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Well this is a banner morning. I sat here trying to come up with something I was angry about. I went through a few of my pet topics in my head. I’m not sure if I feel resignation or sadness or rather I just feel resolute. I think I am at a place where I have satisfied enough Whys for now.

I left stuff out of the book. I left people out of the book. It was an accident. On one hand I feel the need to go back and add those people in. On the other hand, no I need to edit what is there, not add material. I can add a forward and that’s it. I can’t stay mired in that part of my life. If something comes up in a conversation I can say it or I can add stuff to the blog but that book is done. I need to stop thinking about that part of my life so much. It is over. It’s time to close that book.

But what do I do about all the damage? There are often unintended consequences to actions and they can last a lifetime. Who do I want my children to remember? It’s time to stop feeling angry all the time. Not because I have to, because I have actually given that run of my life a good long serious look. I don’t feel like I left anything unsaid I need to feel bad about not saying. It’s ok that people can’t really and truly get the accurate body count number of my sexual partners in the book. It’s really embarrassing how many people I left out of the book. I wasn’t talking about the parts of my life that included them. There was so much to tell. The threads just fell out of the story.

I’m mostly through Bastard Out of Carolina. I read Trash about a week ago. I’m really grateful a friend handed them to me right now. I can stop fretting about this book. No Shame, No Secrets, No Silence is done. I’m thinking about emailing it to my editor right now, in fact. Done.

I finished

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I finished around 2pm. 58,048 words. That means it’s not epic. Good. It’s too intense to be epic. It’s too long as it is. It’s hard to read. I read through the whole thing yesterday and it is really brutal and nasty. My life was shit. It’s going to be interesting to hear peoples reactions. I let Noah have it already because I couldn’t not let Noah have it. I need him to know this story. He got up to the beginning of 1988. He has a long way to go yet.

I spent most of yesterday angry. Reading the book through in a day reminds me that I have very good reasons to be angry. So angry that flames come out the top of my head. But I don’t want to be angry. Being angry doesn’t feel good. That book is closed now. Those chapters are over. Noah will finish reading the book by this weekend. Probably Sarah, too. They are quick like that.

Then I’m going to wait till next year to do anything else. But I want them to know. I’m not writing this book because I want to make money on the story. I’m writing this because I cannot continue to live with people not knowing this story. I can’t even handle waiting until I get a final draft before showing it to the people who claim they want to build a life with me. They claim they want to know me. Well here the fuck I am. It hurts my soul that this is my story. This should be fiction. No one should have a life like that. But I did.

And I’m pretty awesome. No, I’m not always tactful. That’s a small sin in the scheme of things. Really. It is.

I have this weird feeling in my chest. I feel empty and hollow. I did my very best to bring up all the major threads that wove through my childhood. I didn’t give any of them a lot of individual face time. There were too many. I don’t think people could handle a book that explicated all of them intensely. It’s too sad and painful. Yes, yes, a few people could. But I’m not trying to write a book that is only for the biggest bad asses. I’m just trying to be seen.

I wrote this as simply and directly as I could. I tried to do it without excessive anger. I tried to present people in a balanced way. I tried to just tell the truth. As simply and plainly as I can. I used simple words and simple sentences. I used almost no dialogue. This is something I had to just say and get off my chest. And now it’s off my chest and on my hard drive. I have emailed copies to two people. I am saving it on Google Docs. I might put it in Noah’s Drop Box just so that I don’t lose it. I want back ups. I’m half tempted to sit here and print it right now just so that I have it. So that I can see what this looks like on a page.

I want to be seen. And that means I have to deal with the fact that people are going to have very different reactions. Be sure that you’re right, then go ahead. I’m just telling the truth. This is my story. I didn’t embellish it. I didn’t make it more melodramatic than it is. It is a hard story to read. I don’t think that certain people understand what they meant to me. What their place was in my life.

In three months I am going to publish it as an e-book. Noah is going to help me figure that out. I’m not going to deal with shopping around for a publisher right now. That’s not the point. The point is to get it out. I’m not doing this because I want to make money off this story. I just want to be seen.

I don’t want anyone to try to edit it before Christmas because this is already an emotionally intense time of year. Old trauma can sit on a shelf and wait for a bit.

It’s time to shift gears. I have to get my house ready. I’m doing something really fun this weekend.

I had a lovely meet-up-for-coffee yesterday. I like being able to sit down and talk with an attractive man about statistical analysis. It means he thinks I can understand it. It means he thinks I’m smart. Oh that’s hot. That made me want to sit on his lap. I didn’t. But I thought about it and smiled. I really like intelligent men.

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Last night I once again went to a sex party and didn’t have sex with anyone. This time I did play though. It’s a subtle distinction. I also noticed a few interesting things about my anxiety. I’m really glad I’m not allowed to really date anyone right now. I’m glad that the affair kind of trailed off. I’m not hunting for a partner. I’m looking for friends. And I’m not hard up for sex. Why am I acting desperate? In November we’ve been having sex more or less daily. Before that we were having sex three to five times a week. Why am I out hunting so hard?

Part of it is that I’m lonely still. There isn’t much to compare to NRE and I’ve been in a stable relationship for a long time. Mostly I want friends. But I want friends I can have sex with because that is how I get my touch needs met. Yeah yeah I “should” get over my issues and be able to handle getting my touch needs met non-sexually. Whatever. I don’t wanna. I want to figure out how to get them met without doing damage to my life. Whatever that means. What does it mean to be stable? To be consistent? I’m not sure I know.

What do I want to be doing in five years? In ten years? In twenty years? What parts of my life will be the same? What parts will be different? How much leeway do I want to leave in my plotting? By which I mean: which things are non-negotiable if I am going to qualify as “stable”?

I don’t think that most people think about that in advance much. Not really. Not what that might mean. They don’t think about how hard it might be. I do not like that Noah wants to sleep with other people. Only I do. Only I like that he is the kind of person who likes that. Only I like that he loves that I’m the kind of person who likes to sleep with other people.

I feel bad that Noah wants to sleep with other people because I’m afraid to trust him. More than most people, he’s all I have. I have spent more time talking to him than any other human being. By far. And I’ve known him for almost eight years. He knows me. If I risk him getting to know other people I risk him deciding they are better than me. Letting him fall in love with someone else means that I have yet more lonely hours to fill as the people that I want to be with have something better to do.

Only it doesn’t have to mean that. Even when I choose to be alone in the garage, why does this have to be a banishment? Why does it have to be some terrible thing? I have massive social anxiety and I am the mother of two young children and I have the weirdest damn sleep cycle in the world. Of course I’m socially isolated. This is not a statement about my character. This is a natural part of my life cycle.

It’s all tied together. It’s hard to believe that I still exist. It’s hard to hope that this hard cycle will end. It’s hard to believe that this much hard is worth it. This much hard meaning dealing with my intense abandonment fears, parenting, being a partner to a disabled person, and having to support Noah in his career aspirations. I picked these roles. They are all hard. They all take a lot of physical effort and emotional effort. No wonder I want to hide in a dark room. At least it’s quiet.

I have some weird ideas about who I am and what I should be doing. I don’t think I understand them all yet. I’m not sure I need to because I need to change a lot of them. I really only look at myself in the most negative ways possible.

Today Shanna was resisting putting her underwear on after taking a shower. She put her face in her hands and started rocking back and forth. She was chanting, “I can’t. I can’t.” I stopped. I asked her, “Are you doing this because you see me do this when I’m upset?” She perked right up, jumped out of role and said, “Yup!” I told her that we try to reserve that kind of display for something slightly more life impacting than being cold after a shower.

I need to stop saying I can’t. I’ll make it true. I can. I’m just shy of 39,000 words. I am trying to decide if I should try to push through to 40,000 tonight. I kind of think it would be better to rest. Right now I’m writing about 1994-1995. Fisher Middle School. Oh boy. This is when I start to introduce people who are in the current cast of characters. People I don’t want to piss off. But no pressure, right?

This is why people don’t write this shit. It’s a lot of fucking pressure. Do you want to know why I am chickening out about making the book about more than just the first 18 years of my life? Because I’m almost 40,000 words in and I’m not even close to done and I still have a few years I haven’t even started writing about yet. Because I think Jenny will forgive me for things I say about then, but I’m not so confident about the other people in my life. Time to write.

broken

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The last two days have been writing about my life up till the age of four. I don’t like thinking about my family. I don’t like thinking about how I was treated. It’s weird to talk about systematic abuse. Why did I believe that everything bad in the world was my fault? Partially because little kids are dumb. Mostly because I was actively told it was. Over and over and over. It was my fault things happened before I was born.

I don’t know how to shed this feeling of guilt. This feeling that existing poisons the people around me. Things with muse are a lot less smooth. Welcome to crazy girl territory. I feel like I should go home and lock myself in the garage for a few years. Maybe Sarah can pass me food through the cat door. I feel so dirty and polluted. Like there is no redemption for someone like me. Too much poison was put in me before I was even verbal.

I am just a hole. I am nothing. I have no worth. No merit. There is nothing in me worth acknowledging. But I had better be willing to lie still and open my legs. And shut up. Just lie there. Don’t move. Because I am nothing. Nothing.

I have had the Dixie Chicks song “Top of the World” on repeat for two days. I can sing along with it in the background while I type and cry. The last two days have been a lot of crying. I feel like I won’t ever stop crying. I feel like there is no end to this pain. The pain of being absolutely worthless.

Why do I want to give away so much money? I’m trying to find a way to do something in the world. Something real that no one can take away from me. Something I can point at and say: See! I am not a dirty, worthless, bad kid. I am good. I do good. I am good.

How do I teach my daughters to love themselves when I loathe myself with such intensity? How do I teach anyone how to feel joy when I feel such despair? I don’t know. “Everyone is singing, we just want to be heard. Disappearing every day without so much as a word, somehow.” I feel like every day that I do not write, that I do not say what I believe to be true is a day that my family has effectively silenced me. I feel like any time I do not stand up and scream at the top of my lungs that I am NOT FUCKING BAD, DAMNIT I am agreeing with them. If I am not actively arguing I am agreeing.

I don’t know how to resolve that. I don’t know how to just take up space and just be. I have to aggressively take up my space and batter the people standing near me or I feel invisible. There is no middle ground. I am invisible and toxic or I am screaming and hostile. I don’t want either extreme. I want to feel like I am just ok. That life is just ok. That it is ok that things happened. They are over.

Other than glimpses out my window when he was stalking me, I haven’t seen my father since I was 13. 17 years have gone by. That’s most of my lifetime. He’s been dead for 13 years, one month, and five days. Not that I’m counting.

This hurts so much. I wanted a daddy. Why am I not allowed to have a daddy? Why do I not get to have a mommy either? The last time I saw my mother was when Uncle Bob died. I don’t know if I will see her again. “I wish I had showed you all the things I was on the inside.” My family doesn’t know me. Not really. They know this construction of misery and pain. It’s not me.

I am not this angry and bitter person. But I am sad. I am so sad. I am so sad for the little girl I was. It was not my fault my father raped my sister. It’s ok that I was born. I did not cause my sister to be raped for three more years. My father did that. FYI: yesterday’s shirt makes a great hankie. Squeamishness is for people who waste paper.

Sometimes I wonder why I am writing this down. Why in the fuck does anyone need to know what a piece of shit my family thinks I am. How is this making the world a better place? Why do I need to write another 20,000 words about what a fucking piece of shit I am? Why? Technically another 24,000. But that’s ok. It’s only the 11th.

Speaking of which: thank you Veterans. I was too chicken shit to do what you did even though I thought about it.

It’s interesting looking at the differing word counts for different years. Some years I started and got 600 words in and just… ran out of things to say. Some years I’ve produced 4,000 words in a day because there was so much to say. This hurts a lot. It hurts so much to look at all of this so fast and so hard. I feel battered. I feel weak. I feel fragile.

I’m struggling right now. I feel like I am beating the shit out of myself with how worthless my family thinks I am. It’s so hard to be reminded over and over that my childhood was so miserable. I feel like a ghost of a person. I feel so thin I could blow away.

Why do I travel so much? Because I’m running away from myself. Why do I read so many books? Because I want to be in anyone’s head but mine. Why do I have sex with random people? Because then I don’t have to deal with any of my emotional issues–I can keep them in a box. When people start getting closer and they see the box I want to run. I don’t want to even tell you how big this box is.

I don’t want you to know just how big of a box I need for my issues because I don’t want anyone to see how very small I am standing next to that box. I am too much effort. I’m not worth it. Hell, Tom taught me that. It’s not worth it to meet my needs. The balance isn’t good enough. I’m so glad I found Noah. I didn’t know I was getting a knight in shining armor. It was hard to notice through the tacky dry humping.

I have lived with Noah for five and a half years. Longer than I have ever lived with another human being consecutively in my life. Noah is my family. It’s terrifying to even consider trusting someone beyond him. It is so hard to trust him. And he comes through so very very well. I don’t deserve Noah, but I’m keeping him.

Soon I will have lived with my children significantly longer than my parents. Shanna is 3.5. That’s how old I was when my parents divorced. When she turns four I will have lived with Shanna more than I lived with my father in my entire life. And it won’t be much longer before I have lived with her longer than I lived with my mother in a stretch. Calli will be my third longest live-in relationship. Depending on how things go with Sarah, she will be the fourth. That hurts a lot. I’m 30. This should not be my story. This shouldn’t be anyones story.

But it’s mine. And I can’t change it. I can just tell it.

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Category Archives: writing

I did make schedules!

Feeling happy and full of gratitude.

Now I understand “fuck cancer”

I feel soft and badass at the same time.

Suicidal ideation

Shrink your world

Dear internet:

Brain dump + Bonus question.

If I treat this like a writing exercise…

Editing is part of the creative process.

Since I’m not sleeping I might as well write.

In one of those festive bad moods.

Compulsions

Going down the rabbit hole is uncomfortable.

In writing hell.

Time for the next step on the book.

I finished

broken