Tag Archives: depressed

Everything feels raw like a cheese grater has been at me

I’m rereading Noah’s email to me for his equivalent check in for the week. I wrote the last piece after skimming it on my phone. On a bigger screen I see more nuance but I’m still wildly hurt.

He didn’t say that M/s isn’t working for him he said it isn’t working for me. Which is probably partly fair. I should be accepting that he has the right to treat me any way he sees fit. That’s my role here. If I don’t like it I can leave. Only I can’t leave. Of all the options on the table that’s not one. Not because it is logistically impossible (it’s not) because I would never be ok again. Yeah, people try to tell me I’d be fine and I’d move on. They are wrong. I would never be ok again. This is my only shot at a family. If I don’t get to stay in a family then I’m not staying.

This is what I get.

I am struggling with layers of stuff around sex tremendously. The pagan book about consent I’m reading is actually really evocative and useful as I’m trying to figure out how to put into words why I’m not ok.

Historical actual slavery sucks because humans are not given a choice about being treated as objects to use until they wear out. They aren’t people. BDSM and consensual slavery is not the same thing. It’s about devoting your life to serving someone else’s life by choice. There are manipulative, evil, psychotic people in the scene who try to pretend that if you do M/s then you are genuinely becoming chattel. I’ve made my feelings plain.

Noah, the bits I’m freaking out about around you forcing me to do stuff, hurting me, orgasm control, and disapproval are all coming up around sex. Not elsewhere in our relationship though you are abandoning a fair bit of that consistency to instead be freaked out by me flirting. Last I heard you weren’t upset about how I’m washing your underwear. You don’t object to how I am raising your kids or how I manage your money.

The problem is sex.

I fucked up in 2016. I said shit that hurt you to the core of your being. I did that. I’m not claiming to be better than I am. I’m not delineating all of it because doing so doesn’t help. Not because it is a “dirty secret” but because I have fucking groveled for 9 years.

I fucked up in 2016 because I couldn’t handle the way my body was being disrespected sexually.

I fucked up in 2024 when someone sexually assaulted me.

Have I ever gone off the rails sexually at other times during our 18 year relationship? Not at all to the best of my knowledge. You have a fuck ton of trauma you need to work out Noah and you do need to go do that part with someone other than me. You yelling at me that I’m about to cheat on you again is not ok when I am literally giggling with a stranger whose name I don’t know.

Do I deserve your suspicion since I have already cheated? Hell, now you can say I’ve cheated twice. Both times quite soon after being raped. If you are going to treat me with this kind of suspicion and shame at all times then you need to stop pretending you want me to have a good opinion of myself. You think I am an untrustworthy piece of shit and I need to understand that or I will be incapable of understanding the parameters within which I must operate to be “good”.

The amount of “Carry the trauma and act like it has no impact on you” that is expected of me is quite literally inhuman. I can’t be fun and upbeat and harangued for hours about how inappropriate I am. Those are two states I can’t carry at the same time. I’m not that good. If the tirades are going to be part of every single time I am near a human male because I am not trustworthy then I need to cut my fucking life down.

I feel like fucking garbage because I feel like you expect me to do what I did the first time you raped me in 2006. I didn’t fight back and try to hurt you too; I put my head down and got on with expecting this to be the rest of my life. After that I had a fuck ton more therapy which lead to more self esteem and self respect and then I fought back. I will be punished for the rest of my life for it. If I die in the year 2050 I expect that sometime in the 3 months before I die you will bitterly scream “2016” at me.

I was talking to my new counsellor today and describing how I feel about my sex life. She said it sounds incredibly dehumanising. I’ve noticed that too.

I need to be owned. I am not good enough to own the way I come out of the box. I’ve been altered a lot over a lot of years by a shocking number of people. I feel like shit. I have never and will never be good enough as I am as a human being. I will never deserve to be accepted for who I am naturally inclined to be. I am bad. I hurt Noah quite badly if I stop centering him as the only actual human in my life. If I act like I am a person whose sexuality deserves to be treated as a thing of its own then I am saying I do not want Noah to own me. That is what I got from his email today.

What I am hearing is that if I want Noah to stop yelling at me I need to absolutely go back into the Choke Chain and never rattle it again. He wouldn’t be yelling at me if he didn’t have to because my behaviour is so bad and so out of line that if he told anyone about it to try and get emotional support their only response would be to tell him to divorce me.

I am the problem.

If I want to not get screamed at I know what to do.

I guess it is back to the Choke Chain. I’ve loved these last 9 years of being afraid to say what I’m thinking or feeling. It’s been really rewarding trying hard not to think about sex at all because it is not a thing I am supposed to want. It’s a thing that is done to me when other people want to. I am a bad person if I do not hurt myself fighting off a rapist other than my husband. I am a bad person if I fight back in any way when my husband rapes me. I have consented to that once and now the conversation is over.

I am a bad person because I went and sucked my rapist’s cock two weeks after he raped me. Why did I do it? Because it felt like the only thing I could do.

Noah is right. I am a disgusting piece of filth who should not be around humans.

I’m not going to reread that email again right now even though there are many many many paragraphs I’m not responding to.

If I want ownership the price is getting to have any kind of individual sexual autonomy in this life.

ok

I’m about to fucking explode, y’all.

I am not ok and it is perseverating in my head and if I don’t set it down somewhere I am going to continue to freak out in my house with my kids and that’s not cool. So let’s start there, shall we?

My kids are acting appropriate for their varying ages. All of these stages are hard at this moment in that awesome way that sometimes cycles pop up. My oldest is a fucking teenager with a fucking rude teenager mouth. I feel like he just has to tell me I’m wrong or express exasperation at my stupidity over and over all day long. Often at times when I am not actually wrong or being stupid. I mean… when I am wrong I tolerate a fair bit of sass but it drives me insane when I’m not wrong. Middle child is not wanting to accept responsibility for some areas of forward progress and I’m struggling with that. Youngest is pushing every button and boundary like it is her job… because it is.

So that’s all fun and the background noise of every single day.

I went back and checked my logs (hi, yes I am incredibly obsessive about tracking all kinds of stupid details) and starting in June I went from sleeping 8 hours a night on average over the course of the month to sleeping 6 hours a night on average. The months since then have hovered around 7 hours a night on average. That’s pretty certainly part of why I have been doing much worse. Why did I start sleeping so much less?

Ah, fucking lockdowns are over and I feel incredibly pressured (mostly internally) to get out and Meet People and Volunteer and Be Part of the Community. Also this summer has been quite energetic with gardening tasks as I’m moving towards the permaculture/low key food forest direction. I’m super tired. Also eldest said, “Let’s go ahead and finish the lounge” and I said, “Oh uhhh ok.” I was kinda hoping to procrastinate the work long enough for the paint to go bad. Then I found out my old buddy was coming and I have some projects I said he could help me with. So I started sprinting to get stuff done before he arrived.

Reader, I fucking failed.

I’ve been very much working beyond what I should be. Oh, and late May was my first trip down to England to see A & P then in June I went back down to England to bring Noah and the kids to see A & P. That is seeming like the best decision I made all year.

Oh, and I averaged 6 hours a sleep a night the month I had fucking covid and I slept through 4 days entirely. THAT’S REALLY FUCKING BAD.

I’m not ok, y’all.

July was a sprint of work I was not physically prepared for. I have never taken time to really fully recover from covid, not really. I certainly haven’t carefully increased exercise over time to get back to the fitness I had.

August was a super sprint of work and it was exhausting. September was a lot of work sprinting plus my birthday which was absolutely fucking exhausting to the extreme and I probably made some foolish choices. I was not physically fit enough to do what I did comfortably and I have paid for it. October has been more and more work and then Noah and EC went off to Helsinki then the morning after they got home I ran off to San Francisco in a last ditch effort to say goodbye to A.

In a way there are shadows of my uncle passing. I was too late. I feel like I failed and I am upset with myself. I did get to help P with one of the thornier parts of handling A’s belongings and I am deeply grateful I could perform this service.

Being in San Francisco involved a ton of driving (ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow) and many hours of work and many different social interactions one right after another and very little sleep. I just couldn’t except for a few times when I passed out in awkward scenarios. Three people said they wanted to make plans then cancelled at the very last minute. Woo. That’s always fantastic.

My buddy is a challenge in many ways. I don’t want to say too much about that but I will say that he is very emotionally needy and he wants me to help him process and understand his entire life and that’s a fucking tall order. I am not a therapist. I feel like I am drowning in his feelings. He also can’t remember a lot of our conversations because of how much he drinks so each conversation has to be repeated a few times and that is really frustrating. I don’t begrudge him the needs but my bucket is so fucking empty.

I feel empty. I feel like I can’t take more shit being dumped on me. I feel like I want to scream and scream and scream until I have destroyed my voice from screaming. I want to sleep for several weeks in a row. I want to stop speaking to people at all and I want to go back to lockdown. I am so far into burn out I feel like a pile of ash.

I know that I am a good person to help people process grief but right now I can’t handle the flood of it. It’s not just the one buddy. I feel absolutely surrounded by loss this year. Grandmother in law, A, my buddy’s parents, other friends have lost family members, a different buddy is dealing with her kid self-harming, a somewhat surprising number of pets have passed recently and folks want to talk to me because I give them comfort. Right now it feels so hard.

Oh, yeah, and it’s been an incredibly stressful year on the money front. I think things have settled down now and while we are not fully “on track” we are in a very reasonable place and I’m no longer worried about bouncing payments. But it’s been a fucking lot.

Err, also my roof just got replaced and the scaffolding and construction fuss have been irritating and challenging because to a large degree it has meant that YC has not been able to play outside unsupervised for over a month. That’s not a great situation.

I’m not exercising enough. I stopped my yoga classes because we need to be contributing more to savings. I’m not eating well enough–I am actually not enjoying the kids cooking 4 nights a week because rarely do they put more than 1 vegetable serving in a meal and it’s not doing great things to my body. I’m sleeping for shit.

It goes on and on and on. I’m sure I’m not remembering all the fuss. My head hurts. I am tired of being tired.

PMDD is so awful

I am on day 42 of my cycle. I start running low on hormones around day 26/27/28. I usually start sometime between day 28 and day 35. It’s been pretty consistent since the last kid. I am… not ok this time. I can feel the complete and total lack of energy or happiness or give. My bones feel worn out and terrible. The numbness in my hands is super bad at this point. I know that a lot of that is how much I’m painting but progressively over the last week it has gotten worse and overwhelming and awful.

My whole body is hurting. I haven’t had many spells like this since I moved here. This is a California-level of pain. I feel sad and irritable and angry and disappointed in so many people and situations and results that I feel unable to cope. I am not suicidal; which is a blessing–that doesn’t darken my door much anymore. I just feel like I’d like to crawl in my bed and cry for a few days until my period starts because I am completely out of cope. In the overall scheme of things that is a relatively healthy and sane impulse and I feel proud that I am in this place now instead of where my lows took me ten years ago.

It is weird being able to list things that I miss about California and reasons that there were advantages there that I don’t have here… while completely knowing that I am overall doing better here than I ever have. Do I still have pain? Yes; particularly when I am drifting back towards California-style work habits that I know are dramatically not good for my body. Do I still have some anxiety? Yes; my anxiety here is so different. I can’t put a number on this to do like a “rate your pain” scale. Knowing that I will never run into Dan or Paul or my mother or my sister or Auntie or Anna or Brittney or or or or or means that I no longer live with hypervigilance. It’s not that I believe that nothing bad can happen to me I just fully accept that scanning the room for exits is not going to be helpful in any of the bad things that happen to me going forward. I can’t tell with a casual glance who is going to be a problem so I just… don’t.

I mean, when the dude got out of his car to yell at me and smack my hand I didn’t freeze up or start crying or react poorly until after he drove away. I stood my ground (in a suitably gun free manner) and I defended myself verbally and I took his picture. I did what I think I should do. And now I don’t scan looking for him or his car because I am pretty confident that if he ran into me in town and harrassed me again I would simply call the police and tell them we had another problematic interaction and he would get in trouble. They put a mark on his record.

I am living in a small town where the police get upset about that kind of thing between strangers. It is still hard to solve between neighbors… but that’s a whole different dynamic. Stranger assault is prosecuted.

I’m anxious about saying the wrong thing to people I am trying to make friends with. That isn’t gone but it is different from California. I find it intensely healthy for me to be consciously aware that people here don’t owe me anything. I haven’t been doing things for people for years with the hope that someday things would shift and they would support me when I needed it because they love me. That’s very freeing.

Even though typing this is terrifying for me I’m going to do it because this space has to be for me if it is going to work. Even things with Jenny have leveled off and found a comfortable stasis. We are not trying to live in one another’s back pockets because we are both cat-like and we like a lot of space. There are topics we kind of avoid because it feels like those aren’t the best ones for us. It’s feeling really comfortable and happy for me. I can only project and not speak like I really know how she feels but she isn’t expressing any dissatisfaction with our relationship. I feel like I pushed too hard when I moved here and we had to work out how to deal with each of us having our prickly points and it has worked out. She remains one of the people I love most in the world. I would bury bodies for her. If something catastrophic happened I would absolutely rescue her or her kids or her husband. I believe with my whole soul that she would show up for me in an emergency. I am feeling safe and comfortable that we have managed to find a nice place between us. I suspect in 5-10 years when our kids are older we will see each other a tiny bit more than we do right now but we are both people who are very comfortable in our own company and that’s not a bad thing.

I’m slowly working on other relationships in town and that’s slow going and complicated because people are like that. I like living here and I think it is going to be a good space for me in the long run. I worry a little about Noah’s place here because he is a lot more constrained than I am in terms of going out and meeting people. He’s going to need friends in the long run too and having them all be on his computer is mixed.

Kids are a pain in the butt. I’m just saying. This has been a bad week for me in terms of my emotional state and that’s no one’s fault. Also: my kids have been buttheads a few times and we’ve had words. I feel so intensely proud of myself because we had words. I didn’t shout. I didn’t scream. No one was punished or denigrated. “Hey this thing is happening and it’s not ok and we need to talk about why.”

Ok, take a deep breath and really feel that. Even when I am upset and I want to freak out because of hormones… we talk. I say, “Hey let’s explore some of the angles you aren’t seeing on your own right now.” When we are done they understand why I am asking for a change (it may or may not happen–let’s be real) but they aren’t angry with me for bringing it up. I understand more about why it’s going on from their perspective. It’s not ok to just silence people when they are inconvenient. Children aren’t problems they are *having* problems and talking about why is important.

It is so hard that my older kids are very much in a place where many of their problems are now things I cannot fix because it isn’t about me. The main upside of that is they are starting to feel in their bellies that it is true when I say the same thing about my problems. “I’m not upset about you. I’m having a problem.” I can see Little Girl struggling through what the older kids went through and she is directly acting out her stuff with her dolls and it’s interesting. I feel so much more emotionally/mentally distant from the process now than I did when the older kids were that size. I will roleplay with her with her dolls.

So yesterday morning I woke up and I felt awful and I cried some. It’s not because anyone did anything. Then Little Girl came in and joined me for a snuggle and she does this thing where she likes to dig her feet into my legs. Sometimes it is ok and sometimes my body hurts and it is super painful. I was already crying so of course she felt bad and took it on herself. Later she had a whole scene with her dolls where she was talking about them hurting her by poking her legs so she was putting them in time out because it’s not ok to be mean to her. I roleplayed one of the babies and talked about how I wasn’t trying to be mean; I was trying to be close because I love her. Is there a way I can be super close without hurting her? I am scared to go in time out right now because that means I broke a rule and I don’t want to feel like snuggling is breaking a rule. She was so kind and loving and caretaking with her baby. It was really wonderful to watch. “Oh my gosh! You are right! Snuggling is not breaking a rule. Maybe we should change where we are snuggling so that you don’t hit my legs and hurt me.”

My grinch heart grew three sizes.

(At this point pretty much the only rule she breaks is screaming in the house and you have to take big voices to your bedroom. This is not California and I can’t insist that all screaming has to be in the yard because of weather.)

I don’t talk about the big kids much anymore because they deserve privacy and walking the line is complex. But I do want to say that it is fascinating to me just how much they still ache for my approval. (They get a lot of it–I’m not saying this is a hollow thing.)

My Oldest Girl is pushing so hard to individuate and good golly hormones have hit her like a freight train and she has so much hostility about injustice and difficulty in the world. Saying good morning at the wrong time is fairly likely to get a stiff middle finger. I go with it. I try hard not to take almost any of it personally. We are dancing around the balancing act of “I’m still your mother so sometimes I am going to be obnoxious and I will want to give you a hug and a kiss. If you truly object in the moment you are allowed to refuse but mostly it’s a good idea to let me do it.” She is doing a lot better in terms of mental health since she stopped going to school. Things were getting really bad for a while there. We come from families that have a lot of depression and anxiety and PTSD and suicide. It would be highly unethical and neglectful for me to not act quickly when I can see my child melting down because of abuse they are receiving. She is starting to blossom again. She is returning to herself and I love seeing it. It’s going to be a process for her to find friends here and school is not going to be the solution. Her art blows my mind. She has so much talent and skill and she practices all the dang time. Her writing is fun and engaging and she is absolutely brilliant at creating pictures in your mind of what is happening to her characters. She still needs a bit more work on exposition but that’s not a terrible lacking–just something to think about and work towards a bit more. She is strong and fit and confident and willing to speak up for herself. And she’s taller than me and built like 30-something Taylor Swift and I cannot even.

My wonderful and delightful Enby is still plugging along. Puberty is happening and it’s a roller coaster. It’s interesting how the acting out is different now from when they were younger. They have so much more self control than they used to have. They still have giant feelings that are hard to manage at times but they know which direction they are growing towards/working on when it comes to expressing those feelings and they are consciously and deliberately learning skills around that. I am so impressed by the effort they put in to being self aware. They are baking and cooking and tweaking recipes and being brave and adventurous. I am sad we didn’t get a better evaluation done at Stanford before we left because they clearly have some specific learning challenge going on and I’m struggling with figuring out what it is. They really have a hard time with some aspects of education and we are trying a few different things because I don’t know what direction is the right one. They are making progress but I think they are always going to be a person who is much better with kinesthetic and active and oral learning rather than on paper learning. It’s really cool watching them learn coping skills around that. They want competence and if they have to route around an area of challenge for that… well just get on with it. They alternate between being this absolutely startlingly compassionate person and being a normal kid. I see them being on this see saw towards adulthood and it is so clearly part of the process they need to follow. They progress intensely then they regress a bit then they leap again. The more patience I show and the more scaffolding I supply the bigger each leap is and the smaller the regression. If I am impatient or difficult about the regression then it intensifies and they can’t leap again for quite a while.

It is fascinating living with these children. The Oldest doesn’t need my approval all the time–once in a while she succeeds in order to spite me. The Middle craves approval like it is heroin. They will beg, borrow, steal, to get it. They do not function well at all if I am anything other than a full throated cheerleader. Rebukes and course corrections have to be delivered with the softest of touches or they wilt and don’t recover for days… sometimes weeks. The Littlest is so small that she still needs tons of redirections towards “Oh hey it would be great if you….” “Oh golly if you do x then y will happen and that’s not good.” I suspect she is going to be more on the spitfire end as she grows. Her threenager year has been so very long.

This post brought to you by the good news that one of my buddies now works in the paint store and he is encouraged to give a friends and family discount to people and basically no one he knows buys paint. I was talking about the sorry shape of my arms right now and how I am pushing myself raising the clock before the paint dies and he told me to take a break. It won’t be nearly as expensive of an issue to fix as I fear. Ok. I will listen.

So I stopped painting a week before my purported end date. I have a ton of other work to do that has been sliding through the cracks. This will be in no way a bad thing. I am exhausted in a way that means I am not sleeping enough because I can’t shut my brain off to sleep. I’m craving alcohol like mad. I think at my next cycle of talking to the GP and psych nurse I will say that I think I am ready to both increase the Amitriptyline and the Lisdexamfetamine.

I am still on very low doses of both and getting closer to a normal dose would be useful at this point. My blood pressure readings are so so so much better on 30mg of Amitriptyline. I’m back in the high 120’s-low 130’s/high 70’s-low 80’s. There is still room for improvement but that’s not dangerous or scary. More Amitriptyline would possibly help with that. Losing weight would probably help with that.

These medications are breaking the stalemate of my weight plateau. I’m still eating whatever I want whenever I want. I am drinking some alcohol (in the range of 4-6 units/week because I know drinking is not recommended on these meds) but not nearly as much as I was. I am not doing tons of exercise because I have been in the house painting all the time but I am still doing the twice weekly yoga and I’m riding in the neighborhood of 20-ish miles a week and even occasionally getting in a decent length walk. I’m not sedentary but I’m not over-exercising in a way that would cause weight loss. So I really believe the drop is as a result of the medications at this point. I didn’t think to weigh myself right when I started the medications. The first data point I have in this year was in February and I was 211. In late August I was at 203. As of this week I saw 199 for the first time in a long time. I repeat: I am not dieting. What I am doing is taking medications that change my brain chemistry and increase my serotonin changes how my brain processes dopamine. That’s making my body not feel like it needs to hold on to fat in the same way. I’m not doing this because I want to lose weight; I am noting physical changes in a way that can be measured. Things like mood are harder.

The PMDD window is something that can overcome the positive effect of any medication in my experience. I am seriously dreading the peri-menopause experience of my cycles gradually lengthening. I expect the next ten years to be hard. But it’s not like any decade has been easy so get on with it. I am deeply grateful that I have gotten to the point where when I feel really low that does not increase suicidal ideation or fixation. I am grateful that I don’t struggle with the desire to mutilate my body anymore. It is complicated as fuck dealing with my children as they have times of feeling like they want to hurt themselves. I am grateful to the marrow of my bones that they know they can trust me and talk to me when they feel like that. Yes, you can always come in my bed and snuggle if you feel you are scared and you aren’t safe to be alone. Puberty is a horrible time and we’ll talk and we’ll get you through this.

If therapists were available they would be in therapy. I didn’t understand the depth of privilege we had in California around mental health. My entire life trajectory happened because therapy was plentiful and that would not have been possible in other places. All my kids have is me. That’s fucking daunting. (I mean, they have friends and we are making community connections…) We talk a lot about having thoughts and feeling impulses doesn’t mean anything bad about you. Let’s talk about the possible consequences if you follow through. I’m not saying I will punish you; I’m saying that once you cross the line into these behaviors there are people in the community who are bound by law to intervene so if they find out this is what will happen. It’s out of my hands. Let’s talk about strategies and ways of coping and figuring out what other things could be done instead. Let’s build habits around feeling distressed so that when something even worse happens you have some pre-built ruts in your brain for how to handle bad things. Let’s talk about distorted feelings and projecting and learning how to scan your central nervous system and what tools exist to help you feel grounded and like you can wait to act–this feeling does not require a response RIGHT NOW. For the record no one is actively suicidal, no one has any kind of plan, and people are not engaging in the sort of behavior that would involve mandatory removal from the house.

What is happening is that they both have had to deal with bullying and additionally people have been telling my daughter that she should kill herself. They are both just children and this has been hard for them. They have every predisposition genetically towards mental health struggles. Life was never going to be a walk in the park. There were always going to be dark times. But you can bet your fucking buttons that I am going to teach them how to light a candle in the dark. (I got some LED candles so nobody else tries to burn down my fucking house. Oh good grief.)

They are kids. They are all so different. I like all of them. I am annoyed by all of them. I admire all of them. I enjoy spending time with all of them. I don’t know what their future will bring but I sure hope that I get to be an enthusiastic cheerleader as they go do all the things they will do. I tell them that when they don’t believe in themselves they can borrow some of my faith in them. I will never ever run out.

Sentry

Right now I am sitting sentry duty next to my elder daughter’s bed. Her beloved bed. You see, it is a Big Girl Bed! She even climbs a ladder to get into it. Picture an overly intense cherubic blond haired blue eyed german ploughhorse. She’s stocky and perky and deliciously incongruous. She wants people to love her so much. We shower her with love constantly. I carry her until my arms give out and then I put her in a carrier and keep going even now that she’s my big 30 lb going-on-three-year-old. Even while her baby sister is on my back. I do this because I remember that agony of need of assurance of love. I remember feeling no one in the world would ever love me enough and desperately clinging to my mother. I was so very attached to my mother. On MDC they think that is a good thing but I’m not so sure it was good for us.

I think of my beautiful child. And I think of my mother. And I think of the power she had over me. The power I have over my beloved, adored, forever wanted Shanna. I begged God for her. I named her and wanted her when I was 13 years old. To think that my mother most likely received the exact same blind absolute trust and love. My mother saw that in her child’s face and let a monster violate her. I can feel my whole body quake with hate and fear and rage. Most of the muscles in my body alternately cramp and flex. This hurts so bad. I hate her. I think if I drove to her house right now I would honk the horn until she came outside and run her over. Oh god. I’m trying to calm the panic attack closing my throat. You fucking bitch. I hate you so much. You did this to me. At the end of the day you stupid bitch. This is all on your head. I hate you. I hate you so much.

Why didn’t you love me?

And that question will never be answered. And no matter how much terror I feel. No matter the nightmare I face sitting next to her bed, my baby needs me to be happy. My baby needs me to take in her love and return it to her as joy. It is so hard to appreciate her like she deserves. I wish that my sweet girl didn’t have to show me her remarkable empathy so often. I wish my baby didn’t offer me hugs and kisses to feel better.

And every time one more person tells me more reasons that who I am or what I am doing is bad or wrong it just makes it one little bit harder. Like what I am doing is not hard enough.

Confirmation

Today my oldest friend in the world came to visit with her mom. We were born across the street from one another and we are 4.5 months apart in age. So I asked the mom if she knew what was happening to me when I was my daughter’s age. She said yes. She said that all of the kids’ rooms had locks on the door and she asked my mom about it. My mother told her that the locks were to keep my father from molesting us, but she knew they weren’t terribly effective. I asked her why she never turned my mom in and she said, “You weren’t neglected. You were always clean and well dressed and you didn’t go hungry. There was nothing to turn in.”

I’m uhm, predictably not doing so hot. So far I have been assuming that the abuse started then because I remember my acting out starting so young. People knew. It wasn’t the secret I thought it was. They just didn’t stop it.

Well howdy

No wonder I’ve had a few people call/IM me to see if I’m ok. I don’t skip a week on lj very often without saying, “HEY I’M GOING OUT OF TOWN”. Uhm… yeah.

So I’m still feeling fairly depressed. It’s not fun. I’m trying to deal with the individual issues as they come up. Lots of crying. But I’m not the kind of depressed where I feel suicidal or like cutting so I consider this pretty manageable. The therapy appointment is for the 28th cause that’s when she gets back from a conference.

I’m exhausted and fussy. My house is a complete and total mess and I’m having a really hard time caring. I have way too much shit to get done and I will only be home for a whole day one day for the rest of the month. I’m really really tired. I feel like my ambition is maybe not at an all time low but it’s pretty pathetic.

I’ve had a great visit with my midwife this week and a really good conversation last night with a friend wherein she basically said, “Yeah we aren’t having issues so it’d be good if you stopped thinking I hate you.” (only minor paraphrasing, I swear.) It’s a really good thing that people are so patient with me. I appreciate it lots. I also appreciate that regardless of my depth of current self loathing my friends continue to whack me in the head and say, “Yeah, well I like you; so shut up.” It’s all useful and shit.

And I have the coolest midwife ever. Completely supportive and awesome. No weight gain but my uterus is now measuring several weeks ahead even though I’ve been exactly on target so far. I’m working on my issues around childbirth and I’m pretty sure I’m hiring a doula. There is a particular chick I’ve known/been talking to for years whom I really like and that seems like a good plan. I really really really need a level of support this time I didn’t get last time. I’m all kinds of emotionally delicate. It’s kind of funny that I was physically fucked during my pregnancy with Shanna but I was 100% confident in how I would handle labor. This time I’m not awesome physically but head and shoulders better than last time and I’m completely freaked about labor. Brains are weird.

I hate this so much.

At some point in the last couple of days I’ve realized that some of my recent flare ups of moodiness are really because I’m depressed. I hate doing this. I hate feeling this way. I hate the complete overwhelming feelings of helplessness and being defeated and useless and worthless. I feel so very alone.

Called the therapist I saw after the miscarriages. I’m waiting for a call back. I’m so tired of being broken.

{short list} Feeling safe

I haven’t been posting filtered stuff. As a result I have ceased to feel safe posting about some of the stuff going through my head and I’m tired of feeling like I can’t post on my journal. So I’m back to filters. This isn’t a particularly broad filter. There are many cases of one person in a partnership being on this filter when the other person isn’t. I’m not asking you to keep secrets from your partner but I would prefer if you didn’t go out of your way to bring this stuff up. I still like all of your respective partners I just don’t want to be argued with right now.

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Dropped my basket

So I’m not really sure how to talk about this here but given that I’m me I feel compelled to try. I have crashed really hard. I now get to experience how difficult it is to take care of a kid while depressed and it really sucks. I’m doing it anyway because life doesn’t wait for me to feel happy or good about myself. There is still a baby to cuddle and read to and feed and change and nurse whether I feel up to it or not.

If you sum up the last year and a half it kind of makes sense that I’m losing it. One of my close friends died after an overdose and then my therapist, whom I saw for years and years and was very close to, did the same thing. And another death in my extended family was kind of the topper even if this one was expected and less tragic. I failed out of the masters program after seven years of work. I’m not sure why my writing was good enough for all those years but it just wasn’t in the end. I didn’t manage to have the home birth I was so set on; I suppose I should just be grateful I escaped the hospital without a c-section. I’ve had a miscarriage of a baby I wanted very much. I’m having an extremely hard time with some stuff with Noah; I’m really feeling very inadequate and pathetic. And on top of all that I had Shanna–which has been wonderful and fulfilling but a lot of work and physically stressful and my system is not recovered yet anyway. Many things about my core identity have been challenged in some pretty difficult ways. I feel like I don’t know who I am.

So I’m lonely and depressed and I desperately want to cut. I’m not doing it only because in some weird way I feel like it would be unfair to Shanna.

{my shit} Interesting feelings observations.

In the interests of fair warning: if you offer unsolicited advice that I don’t want to hear I may simply delete the comment, I may take you off this filter, or I may unfriend you entirely. Sharing similar experiences doesn’t generally feel the same way to me but weigh carefully in your mind how you think I might feel about receiving the comment given that I am getting a really large amount of unsolicited feedback. It isn’t that I despise any all feedback/comments it is just that I don’t need any more messages telling me what to do right now.

I have noticed that lately I am experiencing far more shame reactions to things. I suspect that a lot of these are springing from indoctrinations about who/what I “should” be as a parent and as a person. Even the fact that lj comments are sometimes bothering me and I don’t know how to handle them is causing some serioius shame reactions. I think mainly because I have been getting angry about a lot of things, often even things that normally wouldn’t set me off. Given that I have a lower than average bar for becoming irritated this is pretty noticeable and significant. Almost every time I get angry I mentally (and often verbally depending on who is around) go through all of the things that my sadistic/mean-spirited mind would really like to say/do in response to whatever stimulus is currently getting to me. I rehearse it and visualize it several times until I feel almost like I *have* done whatever mean thing and then I feel guilty then ashamed that I am the kind of person who does that sort of thing… even though I didn’t actually do it. Even thinking harsh things is enough to set me into a spiral where I am convinced that I am an awful person who deserves every bad thing in the world. This is intensified significantly if I share those mean-spirited vents with someone I think of as close and they tell me they don’t approve or that they express that what I am thinking is awful. Then it just seems to be confirmation that I am indeed a disgusting awful person who deserves whatever thing set me off in the first place.

Example: recently someone IM’ed me to tell me, “OMG you are HUGE” after seeing me at Dickens and being unable to actually talk to me. What I actually said to this person was, “I’m going to do you a favor and explain to you that pregnant chicks don’t like hearing that any more than non-pregnant chicks. You should rethink that comment.” We went on to have a conversation about how he didn’t know I was pregnant and felt excited and wanted to kind of comment on the experience and we worked through a better way of expressing that. This conversation took a while as he was multi-tasking and slow at responding. My immediate mental response started going through various catty ways of responding to this and being that I am big on chatting with several people at once I IM’ed a couple of people and talked through possible responses to this that were far less constructive and my favorite was “So are you. I’m pregnant, what is your excuse?” (Note: person in question isn’t actually huge or particularly fat.) But I had a moment of sadistic glee wanting to be more defensive than I actually was. I shared this mean potential response with a friend who did not find it funny and said that I might cause mental damage to someone if I said this and then proceeded to long-windedly tell me all the ways that I “should” respond. Me being me, I first got pissy because I don’t like being told what I “should” do in a judgmental sort of way. Second I felt upset that this person thought I would actually say that. Third I felt like there was a judgment that I was a bad person for even *thinking* a response like that. This all cycled down really fast. This was a few days ago and I still feel shitty thinking about it.

That’s a really good example of the kind of situation that is leading to feelings of being disgusting/bad/awful/terrible/mean/etc. My reaction is out of proportion. I’m aware that my reaction is out of proportion yet I can’t seem to stop it. Interestingly my therapist thinks that saying something like that when I get those sorts of comments is just fine because I have no need to be polite to someone who was not polite to me. (I picked a great therapist for my personality type.) We also talked about how people are telling me I shouldn’t smack the hands of the belly-touchers and she offered to print up cards saying, “If you touch me my therapist says I get to hit you” and put her business card on the back so I can hand them out as explanation *after* hitting people who touch me. (Have I mentioned I love my therapist?) On one hand I feel like it is entirely justifiable that I want to smack the hands of people who reach out to touch me (and geezus-fucking-christ people it isn’t like I am slapping anyone in the face) because words are too fucking slow. On the other hand I feel the weight of society’s messages telling me that if I were “nice” I wouldn’t do those things and I feel wave after wave of crushing guilt that: Look! One More Example of why I am a horrible bitch and no one should like me.

When I’m really honest I know that at least part of the crushing guilt is coming from the low overall rate of support I’m getting from people I talk to. Most people who bother to comment to me at all about these topics are telling me that my instinctive defensive reactions are inappropriate and people are going to fairly great lengths to convince me that I am wrong. Even Noah is neutral/apathetic about these topics and so doesn’t qualify as much support. So I feel like I am fighting an uphill battle against all the people who think I am horrible and if so many people think I am horrible I must be. (Like Rebecca’s fucking horse analogy.) It doesn’t help that I am having more contact with my family (strangely neutral to positive) which makes me feel more vulnerable to all of the old “you are bad” tapes anyway. I wish that I could actually see my therapist every single week because most of the time it feels like she is the only real consistent serious cheerleader I have in my life but things keep happening that necessitate canceling appointments. I’m feeling very alone and unwilling to talk to people more because when I do talk to people they tend to tell me what I am doing wrong and what I should be doing instead. Thanks, I can sit at home basically silently by myself and feel like shit without any help from anyone else. The internet tells me often enough that I am a bad person–traveling for the privilege seems dumb.

Dying.

My job is always extremely demanding. Teaching an honors class has made that worse.
I’m also the technology “mentor” at this point because my coworkers are fucking morons and can’t figure out how to work basic websites. This means a bunch of people pestering me constantly.
Academic detention is driving me batty. I’m feeling quite tempted to just ignore the Fs for the rest of the year. If you come in and want to make up your grade, fine. But I can’t keep pushing people to do the work. It makes my life suck.
I can’t be the repository of all the problems of all the kids right now. I’m too tired and worn out. I have nothing left to give them.
I’m dropping all involvement with clubs. I need to spend my lunches staring off into space, not going to meetings.
I am going to drop some of the essays I had planned to give the honors class. I simply cannot spend 10 hours grading essays every three weeks. I can’t do it. Not on top of all the rest of the grading and prep.
I am not helping much with the TNG con. I feel horrible for dumping it on Jon, but I can’t do more than I am doing. 🙁
I’m supposed to be doing research on getting the house remodeled. Right now I am kicking myself for not getting this done last summer.
I’m not seeing my friends much. I’m doing a little bit of it because I feel like I *should* but I find myself feeling resentful of the energy output even as I am glad to see people. I am tired of having to leave by 8:30 because I feel like shit. It’s not like I can say, “Hey–let’s hang out during the weekend day” either because I’m always fucking working.
Hormones are kicking in and I want to cry a lot of the time. I feel so overwhelmed that I want to just give up. Why am I doing all this shit again?
I can’t have sex like I want to because I feel shitty all the time and I know that must be having a negative effect on my overall attitude and emotional state.

I don’t know what is going to give, but something has to.

{my shit} anxious

Freakin out. Hard day next to hard day next to hard day. I need for tomorrow to be over already. My stomach hurts. I sometimes think the best thing I could do for myself would be to sew my lips shut, break all of my fingers, and never leave the house again. Then I would never have to deal with people again. I didn’t cry in front of anyone. I got out in time.

When I talk to kids who are really depressed (and I get a lot of them) I tell them: sometimes I get through days just keeping my head down and crying and waiting for today to be over. Tomorrow might be better. If I know tomorrow won’t be better, eventually things will get better because that is how life goes. Sometimes it takes a while and that sucks so bad when it takes a while, but eventually things have to get better.

Today I keep my head down. Today I cry. Today my stomach hurts enough to make me puke. So I just wait for today to end. I know tomorrow won’t be better, but maybe Tuesday will be.

{my shit} Freakin out

Not a good day. Not a good day at all. I’m having anxiety attacks and freaking out. I can point at specific things and say, “See–that’s why I am feeling this way” but it isn’t entirely true. Yes, I feel like this because of those things, but it is my interpretation of those things that creates the problem.

I want to be cryptic and I want to get this shit off my chest before kids get here so I can maybe calm down. I’m sorry baby, I don’t think privacy is going to win this time.

I’m still freaking out because of the scene that went so badly for me in December. I still feel edgy and scared and disturbed. I still don’t want to have sex much. I feel unsafe. But my beloved baby doesn’t feel these same things because he didn’t have the same experience. I don’t say that as a slam or negative statement about him–just as a statement of truth with no judgment. The trouble comes in because I don’t want to have sex. He does. Having ridiculous amounts of sex has been one of the big pillars of our relationship. So uhhhh now we are having a hard time because I don’t feel safe enough to do it and yet he still has the same libido he has always had. I feel pressured and like I am failing to live up to the basics of our relationship. Mostly due to the fact that I am pathetic, insecure, and stupid we aren’t doing the open relationship thing right now so he doesn’t have any other outlet either. This is a problem because I feel like I am not willing to meet his needs and I am keeping him from getting them met elsewhere. This very much feels like the whole situations becomes “all my fault.” It doesn’t help that we have this whole brutal honesty thing. I know he isn’t happy and I feel terribly guilty and awful.

Noah gets upset with me because I can take things he says and twist them just a little bit and use them to beat myself up for a long time. There is a lot right now I am doing that with. I’m having a hard time really believing that he should be with me given that I am failing to a)meet his needs b)allow him to get his needs met elsewhere. I feel like he is suffering because I am crazy and stupid and that isn’t fair to him.

I started thinking at some point this morning that I should just start completely shutting ‘me’ down and just do it. I realized years ago that I am just a hair and a bad day away from being multiple. I am very good at putting on a completely different personality in order to get through various things. I’ve done this since I was a little kid but I have always fought very hard to keep the different personas highly conscious of one another so I am not a real multiple. If I stopped fighting so hard I could easily disassociate completely though. It has certainly happened. I kind of feel like it might be better/easier if I just started doing that. I know that it would be a new and exciting kind of psychological damage and I shouldn’t be seeking new damage in the course of trying to deal with old shit but it feels right now like I am so broken that there is no point in trying to be anything else anyway.

I want to cut. I want to cut so bad I can barely breathe. I would almost like to retreat to the relative comfort/hiding place of being suicidal but I am just functional enough to know that it isn’t an option. I wish it was. Somewhere along the way of fixing my shit I realized that suicide is entirely selfish and I am just functional enough to know how much it would hurt many people for me to do it. I kind of with I didn’t realize it because sometimes I feel like I am drowning under the weight of having to suck it up for the sake of other people.

I don’t know how to be the partner Noah deserves right now. I feel so awful and pathetic and terrible. I hate that I *feel* like he would be better off if I completely disappeared so he could find someone better. I hate that intellectually I know that would destroy him and he would probably never feel safe enough to really look if I did something like that. I would give just about anything to not hurt right now.

The bell rings in three minutes. No more time for me to be stupid and self absorbed.

Breaking

I cried the entire way to school. I cried so hard that technically I shouldn’t have been driving as there were minutes at a time when I couldn’t really see. And I got to school to receive a nasty email from a parent telling me that I have to give her more information. I can’t do everything that is wanted of me right now. I can’t.

All I want to do right now is self-mutilate. But that is one of the things I am not supposed to do. I want to do other various self harming things. I’m not supposed to. So I decided that I wouldn’t eat today. No one has told me I am not allowed to do that. It’ll hurt. It will make me feel physically as shitty as I do emotionally. But if I do that then I can’t do my job at all. And that isn’t allowed.

I’m going to break. I don’t know what is going to completely go, I don’t know how I am going to collapse and fail, but I am going to. I feel it.

It doesn’t seem like I am allowed to have a good day. Right now I feel so overwhelmed and helpless that I really want to do some serious self-harm. I don’t see how this is going to be a good day or a good night.