Tag Archives: insecurity

*tap tap tap* Is this thing on?

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Hi there, whoever you are. I haven’t felt ok about writing here for quite some time now. I’ve had a lot of self doubt and anxiety going on. For a little while now I’ve been blogging elsewhere behind a fence but that’s not feeling appropriate anymore. I’ve been trying hard to be in the closet because it felt safer. It no longer feels safe. Now it feels like a risk.

If you are in the closet people can try to use information to threaten you. My best source of safety is having no secrets. It has been my approach for most of my life. Sometimes I am scared for a while and I shut down. When I feel under threat or if something happens, once again I bust wide open.

I can’t get into details but I am dealing with prosecuting a sexual assault. It means that things are going to come out about my life. People will look me up and I have not tried hard to hide my life. I am not enjoying the fact that I get to come out to folks whether I want to or not. Not that being in the closet has been awesome for my mental health. It isn’t.

I’ve been really depressed for a long while. A lot of the time I’ve been in Scotland. A year or so ago I started getting past the post-partum hump and I have had a renewed sex drive. That’s been complicated with the restrictions and limits of my life. Noah has been pretty awesome about trying to ramp back up after years of me not being up for almost anything.

I don’t want to rehash everything I’ve been writing else-net but a lot has been happening. Noah and I are doing a lot of renegotiating our sex/bdsm dynamic. If you happen to be new here, bdsm is an acronym that means bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadism and masochism. Basically it is part of the human norm to like adventure during sex and this is the path that works for us. If it seems crazy, keep in mind that I went through what is essentially sexual torture as a small child. Yes I am weird and I have weird impulses, preferences, and needs around my sex life.

I’m feeling like I am drowning in shame. I am really hard into avoidance. The short version is I’m having a lot of PTSD symptoms. It’s been a minute since I have crashed this hard. I managed to get through the first couple of weeks post-assault just pushing through. In that process I did some good stuff and some stuff I feel really ashamed of and I feel gross and bad and like I deserve every bad thing that could ever happen to me. I feel like my reaction to the assault retroactively means it was fine because I am such a fucked up person.

I feel low key nauseous basically all the time. My stomach is hurting in a way it hasn’t in many many years. I’m having more nightmares. I’m having flashbacks. I feel trapped and helpless and like many many more bad things are coming. I’m sweaty a lot of the time from my level of anxiety. I am deep in hyperarousal. I’m irritable and cranky and I can’t sleep and I’m having memory problems. I am really emotionally struggling because of how bad my memory is right now. I am just not able to access a lot of memories stored in non-traumatised parts of my brain right now. I am deep in always/never and I just can’t access anything else.

I use the term “always/never” to refer to a really extreme version of state dependent memory. When I feel good I cannot remember how bad I feel sometimes. When I feel bad I cannot remember ever having any good feelings of any kind. My brain simply won’t acknowledge that the other side of the fence exists. This is not good.

It’s kind of funny that the standard wisdom for PTSD is that these symptoms appearing in the month after a trauma isn’t the end of the world, for most people this fades. It didn’t really get going for me until more than 4 weeks after this last assault. I was in “make everyone else ok” mode for the first 4 weeks. Then stuff started feeling completely out of my control. Now I’m freaking the fuck out. It’s been 6 weeks and it feels like the last week has been the start of a really shitty slide. I’m worried. I’m not ok. My desire to self harm or suicide is ridiculously high. I’m being careful and I’m not doing anything over the line. I’m careful to limit my drinking. I am no longer able to withstand the physical trauma of most of my long-ago preferred self harms. I can’t do anything that might create marks because that would be a cluster fuck of issues while I’m going through an assault trial.

I feel incredibly helpless and trapped and worthless and like there will never actually be an end to me being raped. I’m really fucking angry that I now have over 40 years of rape experience. I was really happy about only having 23 years of rape experience. Those 17 years where I didn’t get raped where pretty dang cool. I almost got to have a whole normal childhood span of time free of rape. It makes me feel really sick.

I had a hemorrhoidectomy and the recovery sucks. With all my health complications I’m supposed to not exercise for 8-10 weeks. Part of the reason I need to move back to blogging instead of using the other social media sites is that posting about my frustration about not being able to exercise leads to people pushing me to exercise. Yeah. That’s not ok.

The big change that is a greater deal of positive mixed in with the negative is Noah and I have restarted discussions oriented around polyamory. I have a boyfriend (whom I’ve never had sex with) and Noah is waiting a while because we have a lot to process. He will date. Hell, what I’m doing barely counts as dating. I’ll have sex with someone outside the marriage 8 months after we started negotiating. We are not rushing by any measure. The person I’m talking to is one of my oldest friends. We worked in theatre together right out of high school. We had a lot of interest in one another way back when and no skills for being able to have a relationship together. I still don’t know what’s going to happen or how this will all go but it is mostly a better experience than everything else this year so it’s the upside I get to have. I’m referring to him as my Travel Boyfriend.

I feel numb and empty. I feel like the only way for me to stop being in pain is to die. I mean, it’s true with my physical conditions. That doesn’t mean I get to die anytime soon. It just means I get to endure an unlimited and endless amount of pain for the rest of my life.

Today that is feeling very hard.

{heavily filtered} Triggers

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Can I say that I'm getting fucking sick to death of how the word triggers is used?  Mostly I hear it mean: 'So this person is crazy and reacting to ghosts… it's not my problem that they are over-sensitive but I guess I can give a lame-ass "I'll try to respect your 'triggers'" line.'  Fuck you all.  No really.

I'm kind of tired of having people throw it in my face that they are trying to be "sensitive" to my "triggers".  Bitch you don't even know what the fuck that means.  By the way, I'm kind of angry.  Apparently having a trigger means that someone does the same asshole thing to you that someone else has already done.  Or at least caused you to think hard about the previous time and consider how you want to react this time.  People are so dismissive of "triggers" because it is a good way of saying, "You were already hurt here so it's not my fault you are hurting now."

Actually, an asshole act is an asshole act.  Lying is lying.  When you negotiate extensively for activity A and you instead engage in activity B… that's not a miscommunication and that's not about me being triggered.  

You want to know the "trigger" part?  My gut-level response to this behavior is to go sleep in a different bed and cry and assume there is nothing in the world that will change it.  Because that kind of lying is something that people just do.  I should stop listening to what people tell me.  There isn't a point.

Things that were effective coping mechanisms during your childhood are hard to abandon as an adult.  When someone lies to me, I have to withdraw trust.  Fast.  I have to shut down affection towards that person.  I have to stop being vulnerable because if they smell blood… I'm dead.

I suppose that triggering me means acting like my family.  So that I have to act like I do with my family.  It's not about a set word or phrase or experience.  If you act like my family… I have nothing for you.  

My family would set terms on who you can know.  If you had the audacity to want to be friends with someone they didn't like… well… that's going to result in nastiness, name calling, threats of abandonment (that aren't followed up on because the piece of shit bully is dependent on having you around to kick), and of course threats of suicide.  

Wow.  That all sounds like what I say and do when I tell Noah that I don't like him dating.  Ironic.  No wonder I feel like I shouldn't be saying no, no matter what.  Because I have this gut reaction of not wanting to be like them.  It's bad to say, "Actually this behavior is toxic to our marriage for 'x, y, and z reasons.'"  Because then I'm trying to control him inappropriately.  My adult spin on not wanting to be this person is to think that I should start shutting my mouth and putting my head down.

My family would rewrite history.  Oh, it's not that anyone lied.  We just miscommunicated, that's all.  No one ever has to be accountable for their actions.  That's why I have a scorched earth policy.  Someone who is going to lie to my face and then go behind my back and do something else all the while maintaining a dialogue with someone else that perpetuates a lie… wow.  I need to run, not walk away from that.  You want to know what a trigger is?

It's the sure knowledge that a liar is poison.  Someone who will lie to me… I can't know.  I can't be vulnerable with.  I can't pay attention to them.  I can't worry about what they want.  I know it will be a facade and I'll never know them anyway.  As soon as you lie to me, and then tell someone else that we "miscommunicated" well…  Yeah.  Ok.  The solution to this "miscommunication" is for me to assume you are lying going forward.  Sounds great.

I lie too.  I lie compulsively sometimes.  I say things in the heat of an argument that aren't true no matter how you look at them.  And I hate myself for it.  That makes me want to run too.  Because these topics are things that I can't be honest about.  So I'd rather not discuss them.

At any other point in my life this kind of behavior would be cue for an abrupt turn on my heel and exiting the premises permanently.  I would much rather leave than try to fix something like this.  My life is complicated now.

I understand a lot of things differently as life goes by.  I think about why women stay in domestic violence situations.  I think about why my mother and my sister are the way they are.  Why do they lie compulsively all the time?  They were taught to.  That's what hanging out with liars will do.  It teaches you to lie.  

The problem with being married to a sociopath is I am never sure if his vision of enlightened self-interest lines up with mine.  My best-interest is considered to the extent that he wants to manipulate the correct
behavior out of me, preferably while volunteering as little as possible.  Because the less he volunteers, the more control and power he has.  There are cracks in my Stockholm Syndrome.

It's hard having such extreme opinions about Noah.  Mostly I feel better about/toward/with him than anyone else on the planet.  And then sometimes I don't.

(ETA: the formatting is weird and I don't know why.)

I’m going to talk about triggers.

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I've spent the past few weeks reminding myself that my early life was a festering shithole of despair the likes of which very few people survive. I'm running low on empathy for other people. So that seems like the perfect time for me to talk about my expectations of how other people will manage their shit. We all have it. That's fine. If you feel upset by things you are reading on the internet, close the window. If you feel upset by things you are hearing said in person you have two choices, you can try to tactfully change the subject; this is done by hearing a conversation segue and going full steam ahead towards that Shiny Change Of Topic!. Heck, you can even announce, "Look! It's A Shiny Change Of Topic!" as you do it. That's ok. That's a way of trying to be comfortable in conversation.

Or you can get off your ass and walk away. At no point it is it ok for you to start ranting about how people have triggered you and they are all bad bad bad bad people for daring to say something that Hurt Your Feelings.

Wow. Do you think you are the only important person in the world? Do you really believe that in order to be in your life people have to spent 100% of their time doing only activities you approve of? You have issues. Big issues. The kind that can be manipulated by fucked up professionals with lots of training on how to manipulate peoples emotions.

I have a lot of triggers. I could not begin to enumerate them all. They change over time. When I am in a period where I am heavily triggered, I stop participating in the world. I go home. I stop reading other peoples blogs. I stop participating in forums. I still post, because I do so compulsively and I could not stop if I wanted to. But I'm not reading. I don't have the emotional energy to risk looking at other peoples lives. I might get upset. If I get upset I will have days of back lash. I will feel this constant internal struggle between rage and despair because dear god why do people always do this to me?  The truth is, they don't always do that to me.  It happens sometimes.  But when your brain is in whatever chemical state it is in right now sometimes… that's the only state you can remember being in.  That's not a rational feeling.  That's not a true statement.  You have other moods and other ways you feel. Maybe not recently.  But life is long.

Deciding that who and what you are right now is so important to preserve that everyone around must change in substantial ways to make you more comfortable uhm, well… that's fucked up.  I'll be flat with you.  That's disordered thinking.  That's having omniscience problem.  Get over yourself.

People need to go live their lives and have the experiences they have, for good and bad.  The more you try to step in between other people having their lives the farther you are away from having an actual relationship.  People are not puppets.  The kind of person who will only do what you say is generally kind of icki and I don't want to be near them.  People who want to "call the shots" on how I talk about my life makes my skin crawl.  That's my fucking trigger.  And guess what, I'm a grown up.  I go back to my fucking sandbox and I deal with my emotions.  In an appropriate way.  In a limited way.  I'm going to rant through this post and then I am going to roll my eyes and go back to my life.  Because I don't need to deal with other people being passive aggressive and control freaks.  I have better things to do with my life.  

I modify my behavior willingly for the people I live with.  They have a right to ask me for concessions.  At the same time, I push for time to write because I need it for my mental health.  I have to push back there.  I have to push back about that universally, across the board.  I need to not only say that was an epic party, but holy shit I got to play with two hot girls.  One I made smile and one I made cry.  I felt honored by both.  They both teach me different things about life.  And I need to honor the lessons I am learned.  That is something that I need for me.  I need to figure out how to navigate my triggers in life.  Because I have a lot of them.  I'm trying to figure out what that means.  What can my life look like.

I'll tell you that declaring subjects or locations off-limits for other people… that's not part of the agenda.  If it is on your agenda then you should stop dicking around and commit yourself for a while because you are obviously in a place where you are not able to have healthy relationships and you need some intensive therapy for you to figure out that you are not God.

Intimidated

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Lately I’ve been feeling kind of lame because I don’t feel like I really accomplish all that much. Shanna is basically what I do. I keep house. Uhm… yeah. Not a lot else. When I see people posting about these humongous undertakings they are doing or how many hobbies they have I feel rather lame.

The internet just isn’t my friend anymore.

fuss

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In the past few days I have had several things happen to trigger my insecurity reflexes. I want to write about it and I don’t. I don’t want to be told that I shouldn’t feel this way or that the other person(s) are right or wrong or whatever.

I don’t know what I want really. I’m sad. I feel shitty and stupid. Crying isn’t making it better. Distraction isn’t making it better. Talking to the people in question won’t make it better. This too shall pass, but this too sucks ass.

Finally got an email from my therapist last night. She is coming back from medical leave. Thank god.

{insecurity} Stuff

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I have always been insecure–as long as I can remember anyway. And most of the time I am told to get over it. I am told to just stop. But Noah doesn’t do that.

We cover a lot of the same ground over and over and over again. But he doesn’t lose patience with me. I ask him the same stupid questions over and over. He still reassures me.

I’m getting to the point where I might even believe he is telling the truth.

It’s a crazy idea. Maybe I’m not just the latest. Maybe I am actually special.

Rob is way too damn accurate today.

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He tells Virgos:

It’s the perfect time to kill off old habits that drag you down and to sever bad connections that bring out the worst in you. Therefore, I suggest you make an undercover search-and-destroy visit to the murkiest parts of the underworld. When you get back, invite skeletons to come out of the closet and monsters to crawl out from beneath the bed for a nice long heart-to-heart talk full of tough love. And in general, don’t you dare avert your gaze from any song and dance that might half-scare you and half-inspire you into triumphing over evil. P.S. In every decay there’ll be beauty; in every loss there’ll be a glimmer of future joy.

Given that today I started off being all angsty and insecure and stupid this horoscope is way too timely.
I was asked what I get from my insecurity and how it has kept me safe. It was an interesting thing to think about. As the day has gone on and I have thought about that a few times and each time it really swims to the top of my brain and I think about the very specific things I have gotten from my insecurity I become more ok with the fact that it’s not a terrible thing for me to feel some insecurity in general.

I would like to ask: how do you (every single individual one of you) handle feeling like you are “Not the best”?

{close friends}Tracking Mood

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Boy howdy does my mood vary a great deal. How tired I am has a rather remarkable influence on my mood. I’ve been doing really well and staying upbeat and at least mostly cheerful for a while, but Wednesdays wipe me out. I need to be at work fairly early on Wednesday because there is always some last minute prep to do so I get here at about 7:30. I teach from 8:20 to 2:35 with a fifteen minute break and a 40 minute lunch. After school I have kids in here to serve detention or get help with work/do makeup testing. At 3:30 I have a meeting with my mentor who is doing stuff with me to help me clear my credential. She leaves at about 4:30. Then I need to make sure I have copies done and my board set up for the next day. I also usually have a little bit of cleaning up and organizing to do. I try to get at least a little bit of grading done as well. If I’m lucky I leave at 5:00. Usually 5:30 and yesterday it was 6. I’m not really saying that my job is harder than anyone else’s, cause it isn’t. I’m not saying I work longer hours, because I don’t. But good grief I am wiped out. I have had other jobs, libraries, retail, food service, substituting–they didn’t wear me out like this. I have to be on for almost all of the time I am at work. I am interacting and responding to questions and thinking as hard and fast as I can. I love it and I don’t want to be doing anything else–but I have nothing left at the end of the day.

So I’ve been feeling remarkably boring and uninteresting lately. I had people over last Friday and it didn’t turn into what I wanted. I invited about 24 people expecting that almost no one would be available with 48 hours notice. I was wrong. I ended up with 20 freakin people in my house. I was really hoping for about 10 so that we could really sit down and play games and be mellow. Instead I ended up hosting all night long. I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t want to be fixing food and getting drinks and showing people how to do stuff all night long. I wanted quiet mostly cuddly time and instead I felt even more wasted by the end. I was not happy that so many of my friends showed up expecting dinner without bringing much if anything at all. I felt kind of taken advantage of. I hadn’t wanted to host a party. Many of the people there didn’t even have much of an interest in playing games which was very disappointing to me because that was what I advertised. So I really wanted a specific type of interaction, I organized it, and then it still didn’t happen. I feel let down.

The rest of the weekend was really awesome though. Time spent basically one-on-one with Noah is about as good as time can get. And Oh My God HAWT sex.

This week I have been dragging ass all week. I need to get a lot more sleep this weekend, which is going to be a challenge for me. I just don’t sleep well/much. And as a result of being tired I feel incredibly insecure. I have less than no reason for being insecure. I don’t think it would be possible for someone to be more into another person than Noah is into me. Yet… I still fel worried and scared. I mean…. he freakin married me. Why am I so insecure? He hasn’t been dating anyone else because we are so wrapped up in our mutual obsession and happiness and glee to be together. I feel scared though. I feel scared that it isn’t going to be long before he is pushing really hard to be with other people more. Given how much time I spend at work it really isn’t reasonable for me to try to date anyone else at this point. I am only awake and not at work for maybe 5 hours a day and I’m getting ready for work, making dinner, and trying to fall asleep for most of them. I don’t have the energy for another person, that is a very small part of the reason I broke up with Erik. (Ok, so mostly he ignored me and didn’t treat me particularly well–but that’s another story.) I was relieved though when I stopped having to balance time and attention with another person. Noah was feeling cranky that I might be going on dates with Erik and paying lots more attention to him and having lots of sex on those dates when I was exhausted and unable to do the same with Noah. Well… no I wasn’t. I just don’t have the energy for anyone right now. 🙁 I’m doing a little better when it’s just Noah though.

I feel like I’m going to have to deal with him going out and chasing someone else soon. This isn’t true, but I’m still worried. We agreed to not go out looking for new partners for a year. Partially cause I am just insecure and partially because I think if we want to have a marriage that is a full on partnership we need to give that time to develop before we deal with other people and their needs. He agreed to that, but I pushed for it. Just like I pushed for the actual elopement. Just like I’m the one pushing for D/s. He says he wants these things too, and he agrees whenever I push… but I am the one pushing. 🙁 I feel very scared that I am pushing too hard/far and he is going to eventually get upset with me for asking for too much. I am terrified of once again asking for too much, wanting too much, needing too much from a partner. I don’t know how I would handle it to be rejected by Noah the way I have been by my other partners.

I feel like I want to just stop pushing for things but I know that I can’t really manage to stop asking for what I want and I know that I really wouldn’t be happy that way either. And so I’m pushing. And I’m scared. And I’m insecure. And I feel stupid and immature and I often cry when I’m driving in the car. I feel like I have been handed basically everything I have always wanted on a silver platter but I don’t trust this. It’s too new and too fragile.

I’m so scared.