Tag Archives: community

Social anxiety at 11.

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I’m not doing well with people. I am grateful I have an excuse to hide in my house. Being around people feels like a horrible thing I’m doing to people. I feel deeply inadequate. I am upset that I managed to wreck one of the friendships I put the most effort into over the past five years. I am really sad that I managed to make myself unwelcome in the first vanilla community I tried to join. It is making me feel intensely more alienated and wrong.

This kind of thing is what comes up in my head when I think about myself as being bad all the time. I’m in my mid 40’s and I still don’t know how to act well enough to not get chased out of communities. That sucks.

I have a deep need for community and friendship that Noah doesn’t fill. He’s great but he’s one person. I do have a few friends here but I don’t feel welcome in the community. I am not assimilating that well. Shocking, I know. I don’t feel very likeable and it means I’m not feeling like I can or should go to things when I know the host would like me to come. I worry about inflicting myself on the other guests. I don’t want people to feel like they have to interact with me when they don’t want to.

I’m scared of the event in October. I’m going to have to manufacture a giant pretense of self esteem and confidence and right now that is sounding terrifying. I am not feeling very good about myself in ways that are hard to ignore. I’m feeling deeply unworthy. I am too high in cost and too little in return. I am a net loss.

This feeling makes me want to hide in a closet under a pile of blankets. I take extreme comfort from the knowledge that Noah thinks I am absolutely worth all the effort he puts into looking after me.

I can’t need anyone else. Just Noah. So when I feel like I do right now, where I am just a bottomless pit of need and fair I sit in a room by myself because I have nothing to give. If I have nothing to give then I need to be alone. I am a net loss when I am at full capacity. How in the fuck do I justify all that cost when I have so little value to anyone outside of my house?

I will get over feeling like this. I have felt this way before and then I stopped. I know that will happen again. It’s just going to take some time of being alone and trying to regenerate any sense in myself that anything I am or do has any value at all of any kind to anyone other than myself. I wish I had more of a sense that I just deserve to exist because of me because that is enough but I don’t.

I am deeply driven by collectivist and friend network building urges to amass a feeling of family. The trouble is, I am always too high in cost for that. It is what it is. I just don’t know how to shave off enough parts of me to cost less for people.

Commonalities and Threats

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I had an interesting time yesterday. I escorted EC to meet a friend he has made over the internet. The lads got along really well. I’m very happy for them both. I spent 6-7ish hours talking with the mom. I was apprehensive going in because one of the bigger things I know about her is that she is very much a gun enthusiast. Given my life experiences I’m a bit of a pansy ass in that department.

I was surprised by just how much I like her. Of course she lives a 3 hour train ride away. She’s raw and honest. We did not have any small talk. I know a lot about her life, her story arc, and about her family. I am not going to claim I am anything like an authority on her but I got a very strong impression. Unflinching. That was the most significant thought I walked away with. She has been up and she has been down but she carries on with dignity and grace. She has struggles but she is willing to push herself through to meet obligations she has created with other people.

Without getting into details a lot of tragedies have occurred. She knows she is still alive and that she is not promised forever and she is trying to make the most of it.

I appreciated her way of bringing up the mitigations she enacts in her life to prevent herself from accidentally harming people. That’s the kind of thing I usually have to gently and slowly tease out of people. She has a really strong innate sense of boundaries. I say innate but of course I don’t know. She might have learned it the hard way. It was an incredibly relaxing day for me. I was careful with my word choices to start with but by the end I was more free with stories than I usually am. I felt vulnerable. I felt like I was matching her vulnerability. It was really nice. Late in the day she bought my book. As soon as she did that I felt like I had complete freedom to talk about anything that is discussed in the book. I can maintain exactly the same level of disclosure in multiple settings. I like those levels of awareness so much. What am I allowed to talk about with the people who are in this space? There are so many factors.

She told me a bit more about how Scottish gun control works and I think it is fantastic. There is a 7 month long process (and she thinks it should be longer) where the police interview lots of different folks in your life. After you have it your gun licence is attached to your car license and you will be stopped occasionally for random checks to see if you are complying to every letter of regulation. Any kind of infraction can result in loss of your gun license. You had better come correct 100% of the time or you can’t be trusted with a gun.

Yes motherfucking 2A psychos, I do want to come for your guns. I do. I mean… I do but I moved to a country not populated by people like you so I’m not in the US to do it so really don’t bother worrying about me coming for you. I really fucking hope someone else does soon though. My youngest has a magical vision of what living in the US is like. She keeps threatening to move over there once she is a grown up. I tell her I will miss her very much. I sure hope that by the time she is considering this question she won’t have to include videos like this in her preparation for moving there.

I don’t think guns should be illegal. I think they should be regulated and controlled because angry people should not be allowed to hold crowds hostage and kill people. I think that this needs to be part of a disarmament pact with the police.

Yes. I want to come for the guns. From both sides. I really really really do. I don’t flinch when I see police here; they don’t have guns (outside of airports). Not even in all airports. The police here are chatty and helpful and eager to insure that everyone is safe and doing ok. They spend a lot more time pursuing stolen bikes than they do harassing people on the street.

I mean, American cops do need to be a bit more tolerant of “fuck you” than a Scottish police officer and I’m sure that will feel dramatically unfair. Here such language is always kind of a risk. Every single person here has to participate in the social agreement that screaming profanity at people isn’t acceptable. I don’t think there is a snowball’s chance in hell of such standards ever becoming mandatory in the US again. The US is pro-weirdo in a way Scotland isn’t.

I am meeting more and more weirdos here. I am introducing myself to strangers in public when they wear pins that indicate they are part of my extended community. This is a small country. The whole country has fewer people than San Francisco. The entire council area I live in has fewer than 15,000 more people than Fremont.

With how I feel about community basically all of Scotland is my neighbourhood. I’m looking for the people who feel like they don’t fit in. I’m looking for people who share my hobbies and pastimes and values. I’m used to hunting in a much larger ocean. I gathered my people far and wide. Scotland sometimes sorta feels much bigger because a 95 mile distance takes three hours on the train. Doing that twice in a day is a high cost.

Enh. I will figure it out. I always have figured out how to keep people who were GU (geographically undesireable). I started with the people on my road. I moved out to the neighbourhoods that are nearest to my house. I swear I am beating the bushes looking closer! I have met a couple so far and I am trying to meet more. I also know that I need to make friends in this country.

It is a complicated thing needing to feel seen by other people who have suffered. There is something in that specific dynamic that is important to me. I need to have people in my life who know how hard it is for me to do the things I do. People who understand that some days you do an hour of work and hide in bed afterwards because that day is just not happening. I had one of those this week. My period is fucking rough. It’s getting much more dramatically worse. I have been convinced I need to get registered with the menopause clinic.

Why do I keep GU people? Most of them have been highly individual people who have gone through some significant struggles. We bop in and out of each other’s lives very occasionally to be a sounding board and a supportive ear and a cheerleader. They are people who end up having very specific, loud voices in my head. In many ways this is not a fair process. I know that there was a period of time where I was dramatically over-using Blacksheep’s voice in my head as I twisted her words into the absolute worst possible, most vague, reaching interpretation of whatever she said.

I didn’t know how to translate her words into a meaning that sounded like she liked me. It was mostly because I was using those mean words for myself and I was scared she felt like that towards me and I projected all the hell over her. That was very shitty of me.

I want to learn from my mistakes and do better. Even though it may be fun to use this new person’s voice in my head when I’m saying things I can’t do much of it. I need to strictly keep her voice for things she has actually said. I cannot create impressions.

That’s one of the ways I plant ticking time bombs that end relationships. I’m almost 42 fucking years old. Get it together, Krissy.

And now, we run 7 miles. Bye.

So this is what is going on with me.

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Right now I am on a brief rest break before I either decide if this is a longer break so I can go to the queer social night or if I am going to go outside to work in the garden. Right now I am trying to get the house/garden set up for an open house with the home ed folks so I feel a lot of get up and go for the work. I’m trying to figure out how I can lay out walkways that let people understand clearly where I don’t want them stepping in my chaotic garden full of plants and different kinds of mulch all over the place.

So that is one piece. I have various irons in the fire with the home education community. I’m trying to figure out which relationships I should cultivate harder and which ones are unlikely to be a good usage of my time. I am feeling incredibly scheduled again. Time is, as it will be for the rest of my life, the biggest limiting factor for everything I do.

Exercise is going to be really over-represented in my schedule for the next five months. I am increasingly conscious of just how much cross training I need to build supportive muscles that are not used in running and to relieve tightness. I’m old. I need so much more effort to get to baseline and it fucking sucks. I’m tired.

Which means that if I am going to effectively absorb and use this exercise to actually get stronger I must sleep. Like, a lot. Even though it looks like daytime until almost midnight and then it is dusk for a little while again before it is daytime again. I’ve never been a great daytime sleeper. Which means I have to get up pretty dang early every single day and get in bed before 10 every single night. I don’t do well with adding in a run later in the day. As my runs get longer and longer I need to mostly just start earlier.

Dang, the other day in the park I met this older lady who told me that she ran her first marathon at 51 and she did it in 4 hours and 45 minutes. Fuck. I can’t even. I am really really really really really really hoping that I will be at least 1 minute less than 6 hours. I am not greedy. My previous shitty time was 6 hours and 45 minutes. I would desperately like it to be shorter than 6 hours. But I’m nervous sending that wish into the universe because I kept saying “I would just like to finish labour in 24 hours” for all three births and I never fucking did. That was a giant failure to manage a prediction/hope/goal for my bodily functioning. I actually went into the first marathon thinking I’d be something in the neighbourhood of 5 hours and 30 minutes. lololololsob

Since I am trying to decide if I am going out tonight: I could go find the giant pride flag and figure out the flagpole situation right *now* and have it up for my ride in since it’s pride month. 🏳️‍🌈 And it is pride month. Seems like a great time to be bonding with my local homies before the big event happens with all the folks who travel in from the villages.

Sometimes I wonder if we really understand people in the past as much as we think we do. Like, if I did not practically tattoo “queer” on my forehead every so often I would be entirely unremarkable and perceived as a normal cis-het mother. I really do believe that queerness is an aspect of my personality that is outside of what other people describe as their normal. It is part of the ravenous predatory streak I have. I sit on myself so hard at this point. Although the funny thing is that I don’t feel it as intensely as I used to. I suppose I would describe it as once upon a time I know I would have gone there. I am not going to speculate if that would have gone well back when. That would not go well now. Ok, bounce eyes.

Sex is complicated in a place this small. Holy crap. The dynamics scare me. Like, honestly. I fucked around so casually for so long. I would not understand how to avoid pissing in other people’s cheerios. No freaking wonder most human beings have low body counts. Yikes it could get really challenging in a place this small. I think I lack the diplomacy to do this tactfully. I am glad I don’t have to find out. It will never matter because Noah is not allowed to die before me. He has been informed.

But good golly I’ll dress as a garish motherfucker and wave a flag sometimes and coyly answer questions about for whom am I advertising. Since it really will never get to anything other than friendship I must fly that kind of outrageously if I am going to find my people and I am going to find them and find ways to integrate them into my life. I believe that queers need each other. Many of us don’t have families of origin we maintain contact with. A very large percentage of us do not have children. That doesn’t mean that any of us deserve to be alone. We have to find each other.

I mean, I can literally say: “Hey if you are one of those queers who feels like they really want a place to go and spend time and make deep community… I am going to be buying a tiny piece of land.” A piece of land small enough that we can do the vast majority of work by hand with folks not feeling exhausted at the end. I know so many people who talk about how much they wish they could build something like that. I want to make community. You’ll be welcome to come hang out in the forest you build anytime. The gates don’t lock.

I don’t wanna be Auntie… but I wanna be Auntie. That woman has had a full house of people she has been helping all of her life. First it was foster kids her mom took in and then it was all the stray people having troubles she knew. She raised her sister… and her sister’s kids… and her sister’s grandkids…

I wanna be Auntie with upgrades. She helped people in a way that resulted in a lot of deeply dependent, incapable people. Not all of them. Some of them just needed a safe place to sleep and eat for a couple of months then they went on their way and did fine. But then there are most of the rest of them. Last I knew she was in her late 70’s and working to pay a mortgage to cover the refinances her husband took out and to pay to take care of all three of her children who live with her.

I am not fucking interested in disabling my children.

I want to help people learn more about how they can teach themselves the things they need to learn in order to move forward. I mean physical skills, intellectual skills, emotional skills, academic skills, and most importantly how to set goals and work towards something they want. They get to figure out what that is. As long as you are not able to pick one I’ll push you through picking something for a while and we will both learn a lot as you learn why you end up disliking it. Over time they gradually pick better and better projects for themselves. They still fuck up… a lot… but that is the point. Fuck up now. Fuck up in ways that won’t matter in 10, 20, 50 years. Hell, most of these fuck ups won’t matter in 5 minutes. Just do it. Fuck up. Learn the lesson. Don’t hold back and wait. Don’t waste time. Think of all the better decisions you will make once you learn this. Doesn’t that sound nice? At some point it will be easier for you to figure out which decision will work for you without having to suffer so much at so many junctions.

BUT THEN YOU MOVE TO ANOTHER FUCKING COUNTRY AND HAVE TO LEARN ANOTHER FUCKING CULTURE AND JUST FUCK YOURSELF ALL THE WAY UP.

Cheezits mother trucker.

So I’m sorta categorising my community efforts as:

  • bike
  • queer
  • kink
  • maker
  • community resource sharing
  • gardening
  • political
  • proximity

That’s why I feel like whoa. That’s why I don’t feel like I’m getting to know people quickly. I’m trying to duplicate the full spread of the type of web I had in California and build all aspects of it at the same rate at the same time. While I’m fucking exercising a lot. I suppose the bike community is sorta good for that but a lot of my time there feels super awkward because I am not able to hear that well.

I mean look at the size of the fucking social life I’m planning for the next few decades. I’m going to need to be a fit bitch to ride my bike around to all that shit.

Cause that is what I’m aiming for. I’m going to go do shit. I’m go to make things with people. I am going to invite people to help me with the property.

It’s a whole fucking thing. If you ask people to do something for you they will like you more. And co-working is my biggest love language so I will invite people into my bubble and see who self selects in. And that will be a lot of the inner layers of the core of the web. That’s how it tends to work. It won’t be a perfect alignment, sometimes those very first points on the web are smaller but they lead to a giant nexxus.

That’s how your bestie picked by proximity ends up being the one to tell you “You really should go to the Disaster House Party. I think you will have a very good time.” Reader: I married the guy throwing the party. And then she leaves you to marry an admittedly rather cool guy who happened to live almost halfway around the world. So you name your children after each other because you miss each other so much. Then you decide that 10 years is long enough and you move 2 fucking miles away from her.

I mean, some aspects of my story are pretty hilarious. I follow arcs a long way. I know I should write you an email Pam. Hello, this is my social anxiety voice. You write your journals privately and share them selectively in email. You have what normal people might call “boundaries”.

Hello internet I’ve missed you. I miss this part of my inner story. Most of the time since I moved here I shut it off as fast as I can. In any conversation there can only be a couple of paragraphs and I know that I’d better keep my transition points SUPER FUCKING OBVIOUS while not in any way shape or form seeming to put effort into my, inevitably slightly graceless, transition into the next topic. Cheers, mother trucker.

Fuck every person who has ever told me to just be myself. Dude you don’t even know. Cultivated, curated, deeply thought about choice goes into so much of how I hold my body. I fucking pre-game for social events. I specifically think about what attitude I am supposed to exhibit. I think about how I need to hold my body to get the response I want. It varies based on the crowd and reason for the event. I am not natural but I am comfortable with what I am doing. I have worn this personality/skin-suit mechanism for quite some time. I struggle when I know I’m going to spend a lot of time pin-ball whacking against a lot of barriers. That is the natural and normal early stage of a relationship.

That’s where you have to refine your mental image of this person to progressively more specificity as they become more and more of an actual specific ensemble cast member instead of being part of the chorus in setting B. This is an especially graceless stage for me. Because I am shifting through everything I remember about someone as I talk to new people. I’m trying to come up with every detail of every conversation for the first long while. That way I can follow up on specific topics and build a sense of connection. What? You don’t think through this process? You think I just know so much about you because I happened to have that for you? Nah, babe. I am far from perfect but good golly I work hard. It’s hilarious how often whatever that person’s name is doesn’t make the connection. It depends on how often I hear other people talk about them. It depends on how well embedded in the web they are from multiple directions. If I hear their name I place it in a storyline in a way that I don’t from talking to someone and looking at their face. I will remember all the feelings I’ve had with them and I can sometimes, when I’m lucky, get people to also have that glimmer of oh yes. We had fun. I’m fun. Then we go on with our lives without even having to get into it. But goddess that takes time.

I’d really like to figure out how to figure more rhythm around my efforts in various places based on moon stuff just so that I have to synch with it more. I think it would benefit my garden tremendously. There are a lot of gardening tasks that want about a month in between the next thing. I need to build that feeling into my body and associate it with other definitive parts of my routine and that means I need to tie it in with patterns in the house.

I get to play with building a system. The funny thing is that it will go best if I make a plan and organise and make whatever decisions I want to make then I inform the kids what work they will be doing the next day so they’d better make sure they don’t have an emergency project to do tomorrow morning. Planning and making an agreement about what you will do 100% OF THE TIME RESULTS IN SOMEONE BEING EXTREMELY ANGRY AND FURIOUS.

See, I’m teaching them life skills. Muahahaha.

We have a real live group project all around us every day. We are all working on projects big and small all day long. We bounce around talking to one another and then going off to do one on one with someone for a while then we have another most-of the group contact for a while then the whole family again. We do it over and over all day. They are all managing different pieces of it.

Dude. I need to start clearing off one wall at a time in the studio and deep cleaning it. Cause then I can invite other people to scribble on the wall when they come over. I’ll clean it very slowly adding new nice white space only gradually. That way if people ever want to come claim a new place much further around the room their part of the weft will show up brightly.

But right now I feel absolutely knackered. I feel like I have a 20lb sack on my head; I am so tired. I am going to be running 3 miles tomorrow morning. I am going to be running 6 miles on Saturday morning. I uhhh think that I probably ought to stay home tonight and not go out. Ok, one decision made. I need to be in bed by 9, not in a bar in town starting home at 9.

Yeah. I think I am out of typing. That’s all I can be semi-coherent about and I doubt any of that was coherent. But I feel better. And that is good enough.

It’s not about you, David.

cross-post Problematic People

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from fet

Oh man my RSD is on turbo lately. (That’s Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria if you aren’t familiar with the acronym.) I learned about this facet of neurodiversity in later years and it was like “Huh. Ok so that’s been most of my life. I just thought I had low self esteem.” Which is why I often feel weirdly haunted by the memory of a therapist who laughed so hard she almost fell off her chair when I said I had low self esteem. She said I had the highest self esteem of any client she had worked with in over 20 years.

Right.

What does self esteem mean then? I don’t think I really understand. I have aspects of my self-hood that I have confidence in: I can giggle off aspersions about my intellect because I am ridiculously confident in my intelligence and I laugh about people implying that no one would ever fuck me because holy hell is that inaccurate.

But I doubt whether I am actually doing enough good in the world to justify how many resources are needed to keep me functional. I have a shitty, high maintenance body. I doubt whether people will really accept me with all of my fierce outbursts and intensity.

So as a result I really like a lot of folks who are publicly derided as “problematic people”. I prefer assholes because they will tell me off and compliment me in equal measure and I can lean in and rest my head on their chest and hear the authenticity of their love in their level heartbeat.

“What’s Wrong With Krissy” is, after all, one of my most frequent games.

This ties in strongly with why I pursue friendships with folks in the scene with such intensity. There are an awful lot of assholes around here. YAY!!!!

Hell, even the people I know who have mostly done the right things in life and followed all the choices they were expected to make are still people who get in trouble regularly for being overly direct. I think of them as assholes with extra class. They will still tell you off but they will do it in a way that no one is allowed to tell them to stop because it all just sounds so true and reasonable.

It is harder to find assholes around here (physical here not fetlife-here; I come to fetlife so much these days because I can smile and watch assholes). A lot more “taking the piss” and a lot less “I am going to tell you why every single thing you have done in the last 15 years is wrong. I have citations.” One of my old buddies had to leave the bay because of health issues. Now the trouble is that they are used to friendships that are super intense where folks act like mutual coaches to one another. This is a really common dynamic I have had in many of my friendships in California as everyone is striving super hard to learn new skills and hobbies and interests all the damn time. My buddy is really struggling because no one in small town New Mexico wants to do that with her. People A) don’t want to spend that much time together and B) are not interested in that dynamic because they aren’t relentlessly focused on learning new stuff and C) find it more than a little creepy that my buddy is so intense.

I feel that in my bones.

I feel overwhelmed almost every single minute that I am with folks that I need to be trying as absolutely hard as I can to hold back and not be too intense. My entire selfhood is wrong at full strength and I need to be letting it out 3%-5% at a time or I am a monster. It is additionally challenging that many of the ways I have traditionally talked people into having more tolerance for me are prohibited by agreements I have made. Also: I don’t think they would work so well at this point.

I am a Problematic Person. What do I do that is problematic? Talk too much. Not moderate eye contact sufficiently (holy shit this is a whole thing here and I’ve had immigrants bring it up with me and tell me that I need to knock it off because they get in trouble for staring too). That one is really hilarious because I had to be taught to make/keep eye contact and now I’m in trouble for doing too much of it because PEOPLE ARE NOT CONSISTENT FROM CULTURE TO CULTURE.

So, when you are instructing that autistic person on how to act to “not be offensive” what culture are you acclimating them to and how did you develop the fucking audacity to decide that whichever one you are enforcing is The Right One? Anyway.

How close am I supposed to stand to someone to look friendly but not be creepy? How do I manage the fact that my fucking tinnitus is so bad that half the time I am trying to understand people with about 70% of the words making it through to my brain? It is why I love to type. How much follow up when they are not responding is persistent and appropriate friend making behavior but when do I become a stalker? I have no fucking social credit here. I have not earned forbearance because of my long usefulness. I am a difficult outsider with a lot of demands in order to facilitate my entry.

Yeah… basically I don’t see much reason to assume that dealing with me is worth peoples time so I minimise how much I interact with people because I do not want to unfairly drain them. I have been told for years that it is not ok to give any kind of social or energetic labor with any expectation of getting anything in return. You need to just give because you have extra and probably nothing will come back to you and that needs to be ok. I have to be ok if I never get anything from anyone.

And so I sit at home and I make detailed calendars and lists of tasks for maintaining my body and whatever shred of mental health I clutch to and I pray that no one asks me for too much because I am running a surplus… barely. I am after scraping and working and hoarding and conserving and doing without. And there is this knot of worry in my stomach all the time because I am trying to put small amounts of effort into different places and people because I have to be ok if this person/group does not want to know me in three years.

There will always be people who don’t want to know me. No matter how much of my personality I saw off. They will see the mistakes I so profligately make in my haphazard pursuit of new understandings and they will not know about any of the previous history of doing exactly that before succeeding at very hard things that many people said I was not going to be able to do.

I am nobody. I am a stranger. I have no value. I have no perceived social status.

I mean, I did pick this on purpose. I made the conscious choice to pick up and move very far away to be a small fish in a small pond because I did not enjoy being a small fish in the great big ocean. They were going to eat me.

I chose to move very far away to a place where I have exactly one embedded social contact and her world has been fairly limited in her time here. I have to try and find a new place in the community. I have to find a way to have people see me as worthy of their time and effort and accommodation because you would have to fucking lobotomize me to make me easy to be around.

So mostly I just don’t go. (I am loving the fuck out of the fact that someone ranted about starting sentences with “so” and I absolutely know I am doing it extra right now just to be EXTRA.) I am a problematic person. I am an asshole. I am high effort and what I have to give is very small so it isn’t worth much. Which ends in feeling like I am not worth very much. Then I talk to people less and less. I hide and stay home and keep myself busy trying to add to any surplus of energy I might have so maybe I can have more to give and be less of a waste.

That cycle rarely goes well. It doesn’t work. The ball of tension in my stomach eats away at the surplus making it smaller and smaller until I make myself sick and then spoon deficit is days away.

So yeah. If you are ever wondering if I dislike you and that is why I don’t initiate more conversations… probably not. I’m too busy contorting myself into awkward positions around the pain in my belly to notice enough to dislike. When I dislike someone it is pretty dramatic. You won’t wonder. It’ll be public. It is part and parcel of a thing that has been repeated at me for almost 30 years now in a wide variety of settings: “You know it wouldn’t kill you to try to be friendly with (person I dislike). “But it might. Best not to try it.” Mostly I don’t bother to dislike people that much. I have conflicting feelings about people. Sometimes I detect signs of patterns that freak me out but it’s usually combined with other random positive traits and I have no idea if my gut feelings are real or if I’m just a dick. In that case I will be consistent in public and private. I will tell you how I feel about you. Often even when you don’t want to know.

Yup. A problematic person. Hard to know. I know how many thousands of hours I put into my extended community in California. In the next 20 years of my life I will not be able to come close to matching any of the similar time spans in California. I’m older. I don’t have a job. I don’t go to school. The social community up here is very different and my ability to access what exists is almost nil. I don’t drive here and I drove all the forking time in California maintaining a network of relationship that spanned thousands of miles on a regular basis. Now I very seldom get more than 5 miles from my house. I don’t go farther than 5 miles from my house in every month. I had very few days in California where I didn’t go farther than 10 miles from my house throughout my entire 38 years living there. We were car people. That’s life.

I can’t anymore. My thumbs are jacked. I can’t grip a steering wheel without overwhelmingly agonising pain. I swear I am not just a pussy. I can’t do it. I know people are surprised that I can do all of the other things I do with my hands, but I have no more connective tissue left at the base of one thumb and very little left in the other hand. It’s bone on bone. Gripping things in different ways doesn’t use my thumb and the rest of my hand is fine. When I say I can carry something I’m not usually doing so at risk of strain to my existing problems. I am strong in many ways. But I can’t drive. I can’t create a wider social community by visiting people. The train takes a whole day. It’s hard to take whole days away on a regular basis. That is not how my life is shaped.

So I am putting drips and drabs and tiny bits of effort towards trying to exist in the wider water network around me but mostly I am in my tiny pond swimming around. The little tributaries that occasionally erupt that might allow me to move around are a little scary.

Being problematic is a complicated thing. Why don’t people just act right. Why can’t you just give more. Why can’t you just complain less. Why can’t you just need less. Why can’t you act happier.

Because because because….. because of the wonderful things I does. (Leave it alone. I did it on purpose. Don’t point it out. Requiring verb agreement in order to “understand” is elitist. Don’t be a brat.)

It’s all about rhetorical effect, isn’t it? There are times and places to insist on really precise language and phrasing. It’s taught when you go to school for that thing. I mean, I did teach English grammar as an English teacher. I was also correcting the other more senior teachers on staff because apparently I actually learned what was drilled into my head at university and when I am writing an MLA standard paper I will trot that shit right out.

This is not a space governed by the MLA. I am looking to communicate. I am looking to communicate with the kind of people who like and appreciate who and what I am and my native language is typing. It is the only one that taps into what I am really thinking and feeling and I have never found a way that works in anything like an equivalent manner with my voice. I feel stupid all the fucking time because I just cannot word. I am trying to analyse all the time whether or not I am doing something “right” for the setting I am in and I feel like I am going to hyperventilate because of course I am fucking wrong and that’s why people don’t like me and fuck.

Why did I even leave the fucking house.

Because that little do-si-do around the fucking topic of grammar is exactly the kind of tiny little thing I feel in my head all day long. HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO BE FUCKING CONFORMING TO SOME STUPID BULLSHIT RULE THAT I HAVE NEVER FUCKING HEARD OF NOW.

WOULD YOU LIKE SOME MORE FULL STOPS WITH THAT………???????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Phew. I think I have been having some feelings. As stupid and immature as it sounds I feel strangely better. I didn’t go start a stupid argument and dump my feelings on someone. I did stand in my sandbox and I had a stupid feeling. I’m not hurting anyone.

This stupid calculus is involved in everything I say and do all day long. With my kids. With my spouse. With my neighbors. With people in the scene. With people on fetlife. With my actual blog I write with a slightly different “ideal listener” focus in my mind… it’s hard to explain. Well, not really. On my blog everyone is expected to know what Noah knows and here I don’t do that. Writing there is joining the stream full force and I have been feeling incredibly unconfident about doing that for a while. It’s a much larger thing to walk that deep into my brain.

Here I do try to keep the word count down. I swear to cheese. I try to pick a topic. I try to bring it full circle and actually find a little closure with it. It’s an essay, kinda, not just me thinking and planning and existing into the ether the way I do in my longer form writing.

The point of this essay was to demonstrate a fairly small fraction of just how much can go into being a problematic person. Maybe 5% landed here? So much censoring and picking careful examples that won’t repel the target audience by maybe sounding too close to home and thus like a preconceived dislike thus they should avoid me.

My personal ad was something like 15 pages long and I didn’t respond unless it was fucking clear you read the whole thing. I think my standards are getting more reasonable with time…

Another day in the ramping up to a race life

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22 miles of bike riding today. It’s my cross training day. That was three trips to town.

I went over first thing for a chiropractic appointment and my neck is much better. It is still fucked up and hurting but I have more like 75% of my normal rotation rather than 30%. I told him that I do not expect miracles from medical providers but rather incremental improvement over what I can do on my own. I am not interested in the sort of aggressive treatment you might expect for someone who has a sudden acute issue. This is all chronic and long-term. I am going to be in pain until I die. Sometimes it is bad/irritating enough I ask for some help. But I can’t be in there all the time looking for relief–I won’t get that much relief. It is not in the cards for me. Chasing that is futile and a waste of energy.

At least the grinding cracking isn’t still happening?

Then I went home to get Shorty and we rode over to Jenny’s and grabbed her and her daughter and we rode back over to the leisure centre and we swam for a while. (I wasn’t actually “swimming” most of the time. I was being active supervision for Shorty as she splashed around in very shallow water. Then we had lunch. Then I lost the key to my bike. I ran back and forth across the parking lot in a panic. Thankfully someone found it in the cafe. Phew. Time to ride home.

Then I went back to town and rode around with Critical Mass then went to the queer gathering for a few hours. I had a really great time. I like a lot of the folks I’m meeting. I feel very comfortable around most of them. It was kind of funny when someone said something about how it would be nice to host gatherings in people’s homes but that means it is always limited to just a couple of people because everyone lives in small houses. I sidled right in and said, “Have I mentioned that I sold a house in California for an obscene amount of money and I moved here and bought a very large house? My lounge is almost as big as the lobby of the hotel we are standing in.” A dude who has been to my house said, “She isn’t lying. I’ve seen her house.” Then the other people in the conversation just about did the Mr. Burns hands thing.

I’ve been talking to one of the organisers of this year’s Highland Pride that will happen in town. I am thinking that it would be really awesome if our family contributed a space. I would like to get a really big tent, bean bags, a whole bunch of noise cancelling head phones, a low table with drawing supplies, probably a big pile of stuffed animals, a small bookshelf with a selection of easy to pick up graphic novels and food and water. It will be the chill zone for people who are overstimulated in the main event. I mean, California hippies have to represent–don’t we?

In those brief periods at home I did two loads of laundry and read lots of books to Shorty. All things considered it is probably good that I am not going anywhere this weekend. I have a bunch of stuff I want to get done. I am going to have a very busy summer. I have three Americans coming over in the summer. In June it will involve me putting together a teaching itinerary for my buddy. I’m grateful the July/August bits will be a lot more hanging out. Pride is happening in July and that’s going to be a big burst of energy. That’s a lot of time distracted from my life. I need to put in the time really paying attention to the kids before then so they don’t feel neglected. Gotta fill those buckets.

Sobonfu told me that I was never going to find a community that I fit into. I was going to have to make my own. I’m trying.

Now I’m finally getting sleepy. Time to go to sleep.

Emotional hangover

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My whole body aches and feels overwhelmed and dizzy and crappy because I’m having so many emotions. Emotions about lots of people and lots of situations.

The kink community up here is getting big enough/active enough that sometimes there are conflicting opinions and desires. That doesn’t mean anyone is a bad guy or that anyone is doing something that is wrong. I am trying to learn how to effectively communicate and so far I’m not great. I can pinpoint exactly where I was trying to communicate and it sails right past people. That feels bad. That feels like discounting when it isn’t.

It isn’t that someone noticed that I was trying to communicate a thing and said no. The way I was communicating was ineffective and it wasn’t understood that I was trying to say a thing so stuff went in a different direction. That’s reasonable.

But I spent like two weeks trying to figure out how to talk about a thing and I had to spin my wheels very hard and by the time I figured out how to say it the response was, “You should have said this earlier.” I tried. I can point at exactly where I tried and you didn’t hear me. Part of the reason the communication failed is because I was trying to speak as if no one has authority and we are trying to start from scratch and you are used to authority and you just went about your business making decisions without consulting.

It’s an overall apathetic group of people and if you want stuff done you need to make decisions. I get that. That is a really common dynamic. This is such a small group that I was hoping for something more leaderless. I’m not specifically gunning for being the boss. I don’t have that to give.

Our water is off and on because the construction up the hill knocked out a water pipe and it’s not going very well. It has made everything annoying and complicated in our house for two days now.

I had a thing where a friend scheduled a thing then couldn’t make it at the last minute and in this post-Sarah life of mine I am absolutely shit at handling this. T and I had a thing I don’t know how many months ago where for a little while his life got super hectic and he started being flakey about our chats and I shut down and couldn’t speak to him about it for weeks because I didn’t want to explode or completely over react and my feelings about last minute cancellation are fucking huge. I try not to have these feelings. Most of the time I can handle the fact that life has unexpected changes but it’s not easy for me. I set expectations around a thing happening and then when it doesn’t I feel a whole bunch of really overwhelming feelings in a rush and I want to go to my room and climb into bed and not come out for days.

I don’t have space for that in my life. I don’t get to check out mentally for days at a time. I don’t get a lot of undisturbed rest. I get a lot more than I used to, but these things are not easy.

It’s Tommy’s birthday this weekend and that’s bothering me more this year than it does some years. I feel really sad. He would be 47 this year. Only he never got older than 22. He’s been dead a fair bit longer than he was alive. His whole story arc is so sad and tragic and unfair.

My ADHD meds ran out and I apparently don’t get a refill until after some medical tests that aren’t scheduled till next month. So I’m going on and off amfetamines and that’s not exactly ideal for emotional regulation and getting chores done.

We tried to reassign chores. Then a few really expensive wool items of clothing got washed. I’m doing the fucking laundry again and forever after because washing my fucking wool is not ok.

I’m spotting on day 14 of my cycle and that’s not normal. It feels bothersome and emotional in a way I don’t like. I assume it is related to the increase in running lately but it’s always emotionally uncomfortable to me. Day 14 is usually way too early for the PMDD cycle of ugh and crappy to be starting but it sorta feels like I am tanking emotionally and I have no resiliency left.

I feel like shit. I feel sad and lonely and incompetent and stupid and bad at everything. I feel empty and hopeless.

I feel really good when I am out running. I feel fully in my body and alive and strong. Then I come down from the euphoria and I want to crawl under a rock.

Scraping the bottom of the spoon drawer

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Well fuck everything. The last two ish weeks have been absolutely horrid. I mean, there’s all the things (*wave arms in the direction of the whole world*) and then my body is being a real nightmare. My PMDD symptoms this month have been utterly unreal. My pain levels have been sky high. My mood is in the toilet. (Or rather in the scalpel drawer–not that I did anything. But I thought about it. Hell I don’t even own a scalpel at this point.)

And then when I did start my period my mood got worse and the pain got worse and I passed some clumps that were the size of golf balls and that’s just not fucking ok.

I’m watching two very different communities go through growing pains. I’m learning a lot about myself as I watch them process. I’m thinking about Sobonfu. I will never find a community; I have to make it. What are my values?

I’m more than a little bit of a dick. So my line can’t be that people can’t be dicks. I can be a bully so that can’t be the line either. Ah shit.

I try so hard to lift people up but right this minute all I can see are my failures.