Tag Archives: marriage

I don’t feel ready for this.

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I feel like I stopped being an adult when I got married. I feel like I was overly parentified as a child and then I barely survived for 7 years as a quasi-adult. Then I turned over a lot of the adulting to Noah. He was our public face in a lot of ways. He did all the hard parts. I may live here forever on Leave to Remain because taking the next step is probably beyond me. He was the adult.

As I look at the future I understand that paying other people to grown up for me is expensive and I don’t have an actual income. I am not a brilliant writer who can suddenly come up with a new book that will change lives and motivate people to be kinder in a whole industry. I am a useless person. I wanted to say bitch. I’m not really a bitch anymore, though. Well, maybe with special people.

I think the list of people I will go off on can be counted on my fingers and none of them live in this country. I don’t think I have been a bitch in my Scottish time.

Who knows what glory the future might bring? I’m going to be scared. That means I will be more reactive and tense and anxious. The whole time I have lived here I have stayed home when my anxiety was high. I hide. I let Noah be the grown up. I let him do the hard things. As my disability level has increased he has done ever more. He really was taking care of me.

I took care of him, too. His body was frail. It had a lot of surgeries and illnesses. When he went down he went down hard for weeks or months. We cooked for each other. I gave him a lot of foot care because he had a weird skin condition.

At some point when we had tiny babies I mildly observed that I looked forward to the future when I would have the time to properly care for his gross feet. He scoffed at me. He laughed. He said he knew that would never happen.

I am really glad I did that for the last 8 years. I am so grateful it has been this long. I started doing it in the new bathroom in California. It was lovely. It was a way to pay attention to him when I was pregnant and sex was awful. In so many ways, our third child has been placed to the side so I can spend more time with Noah. She has never been the centre of my world. Noah has been home her whole life. My life revolved around Noah. I spend time with her. I have a good relationship with her. Noah replaced a lot of my time with her so that I could do independent things. He was more involved with this child. The one that he decided to have because I was getting too uppity. The one that meant our house there was going to be too small in the long run.

Oh this was a fantastic house for lock down. I’m just saying. For a bunch of sensory sensitive autistics lock down wasn’t all bad. Noah was around 24/7. He functioned as a working mother. He was involved in meal making and cleaning and parenting and schooling. I’ve been treating this like a period of time where I was training Noah, MC, and EC to work with me as a semi-commercial kitchen. The times we all got together and really worked we have created magic. It was wonderful. Those were amazing feasts. We love food.

Noah taught me how to eat. He did so much work to broaden and expand my diet. He inventively prepared any weird vegetable I brought into the house. If I didn’t like how it came out, he would research how to fix the problem. I just had to go back and correct verb tense over and over. Now I can’t see because of crying. It’s fine. Noah always loved that I can type without looking at the keyboard. That was his favourite form of flirting. He would make his eyes all smouldery in an ostentatious way. He was never going to let me pretend there was any amount of subtlety to his approach.

Two years ago in my journal I wrote, “The ceilidh was so very fun! I had a lovely time. Today I ran 5.5 miles, biked 5 miles, and danced for hours. I feel fit and strong and free.”

If I could turn back time I would.

Noah, I miss you so much. This is going to suck really hard. But you made sure I will never be desperately poor again. You made sure I have resources to use as I recover. You made sure I have people who love me in my house for the next few decades if not forever. We’ll see. You helped me be a parent they can respect and love. Noah I am so grateful for you. You made me feel like I am indispensable instead of trash. You made me feel valuable and smart and funny and wise.

I spend a lot of time feeling really stupid because I struggle to follow kinds of nuance or jumps in conversation. I don’t have the same context as other people. It is hard for me to understand how other people see the world. It’s a lot of why my pattern matching skills have been such a focus over my life. I’m trying to figure out how and where I can understand things that people are saying based on patterns from my life. I’m lucky that I have a whole lot of different times and periods and people to think about when it comes to understanding behaviour. I just don’t always understand the connection between what I am hearing/seeing compared to what I already know. Noah would translate for me. I was so much smarter when Noah was in the room. Frankly, he was too. He wanted the same translation from me but for different things.

I think of the ballroom dance lessons we took together. He really loved that I interrupted the instructor and gave the teacher really explicit feedback on how to talk about Noah. “No. You cannot say ‘Feel the music’ to him because he will get angry and shut down his ability to listen. Never ever say that to him.” I shielded him in his tender places too. I was happy to be the one who handled being the authority on what happened to all of the bodies in our house medically, including his. I went with him to appointments and he would look to me to answer questions. He didn’t know what was going on with him. He hadn’t been paying attention. I did though. I knew him like he was my obsessive fandom.

I feel guilty for this, but I’ve read through his old letters and emails and daily reports and conversations with friends in DMs. I’m a horrible person. I have always wanted to consume him whole. I wanted everything in his brain to be in my brain. It’s really fucking cool getting this context from other relationships. I’m seeing things I couldn’t 43 days ago because I was giving him privacy so I lacked context. Now I feel sad that I didn’t do more of this before he died. I could have been a better wife.

It is humbling seeing him describe our problem periods to other people. I am so glad he had these people in his life for support. That is wonderful. He had really good friends who strongly advocated in his defense. That makes my heart feel less pain for a moment because I see the ways he was getting what he needed even though I wasn’t giving it to him. He was being seen. I am glad. I wanted him to be seen. I didn’t want him to be all mine. I wanted to share him broadly and diversely with the world because he was so cool he could change peoples lives.

He wanted me to be a cave troll with him. He wanted me to only look at him and he would only look at me. I see how my push for poly was forcing him to come to grips with things from his past that were not about me and I am trying to forgive myself for making him go through that. It’s hollow comfort now to say “It was for his own good.” Was it? I don’t know. We never actually dated anyone. There was the rape. Otherwise we had 8 years of monogamy. He wanted it to be for the rest of our lives.

I feel really really bad about being me. I don’t know if I would have been naturally monogamous without all the rapes but my body is obnoxious. I like people. I like them more than Noah wanted me to like them. It made him sad.

If I could have made a deal with the devil: monogamy or Noah dies I would have picked monogamy. I didn’t know. I didn’t know.

If I could trade my life for his I would.

I can’t. I can’t get him back and it hurts so much. I know what loss feels like. I know I will keep moving. My life is going to be really small though. I can’t sustain a big life without Noah. I am a fraction of a person. I am not who I was. I have no idea who I will grow to be but I will never take up as much space as I did when I was Noah’s wife. I never wanted that much anyway. The trajectory of our life freaked me the fuck out. I had a hard time in Noah’s circles. I had a hard time with Noah’s friends. I felt less than them and that’s complicated. Less educated, less intelligent, less motivated, less driven, less talented, less competent, less capable, less able, less worthy of respect.

It’s why I had to get out of the Valley. It was increasingly overwhelmed with people who were newly arrived and convinced of their superiority. Part of it is my bullshit. Part of it is that tech people are quite often fucking dickheads. I don’t see that being true here–people here who do tech stuff are paid like normal people so they aren’t arrogant fucks. Well, there are arrogant people here. It’s just different. The social culture is so different I really don’t understand what is going on most of the time.

I want to follow Scottish people around and see what their lives look like from the inside because I have no feckin clue.

Today is a climbing day. That will be good. We can all use the exercise. The future is coming whether we want it to or not. We have to be ready.

I want to stay in Inverness. I am scared here, but I am not as scared as I would be in the US. Scale is a very important thing. I am grateful to be in a place with gun control laws. It’s not that there are no guns. There are guns. People shoot. I know people who own and sell guns. But they are sane. They are tracked. If they engage in any antisocial behaviour they entirely lose the right to own the guns. People who have gun licenses are tracked by their car license plate and they are stopped randomly sometimes to make sure they are following every rule to the letter. If they aren’t, bam there goes their gun license. You have to be a model citizen to have the right to own a gun.

I can live with this.

I am afraid of violence because my life has been violent. I have to admit that the amount of violence I’ve experienced here has not been nearly so bad as what happened in the States. Life is not perfect anywhere. I pick this. I pick here.

My bloodline ran West until they reached the far side of the North American continent. They started in the original colonies. 3/4 of my grandparents have ancestry that arrived in first 20 years of North American settlement by British Isles folk. My people were then in California for a while. Not the 8 generations my mother claimed. We were not people who settled and put down roots very well. The way my people jumped then jumped then jumped again speaks to them not thriving in the places they picked. I have to wonder about that.

I want to thrive. I don’t want to barely survive. I am going to struggle with my guilt around that. I definitely have a piece of me that is struggling with how disloyal I will feel as I take step towards embracing being alive. He needs me to go on for the kids. I can’t do that if I feel I must demonstrate frozen horror out of loyalty.

People come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime and you don’t know which until you die. What fucking bitter words those are now. I wanted him for my whole life. We don’t get to choose. Life decides for us. I loved Noah. I will always love Noah. I owe him continuing. I have children to lead. I can’t do that if I am wallowing in my pain. I have to stuff that pain into a backpack I carry around with me. I can let it out in brief moments to gasp and sob and curl around the core of myself. Then I’ll nod and put it back in the pack and I’ll keep fucking moving. I don’t really have a choice. I have less choice now than ever before.

My survival has gone from “optimal” to “mandatory”. Now Mama wants to talk. That’s nice.

Click bait says, “Are you scared of saying the wrong thing?”

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Yes, yes I am. Thanks for asking. No I don’t want to hear your advice asshole. I was told that if I talk about my history of abuse I am just as bad as the people who did it to me. I’m scared of saying the wrong thing because apparently I’ve been even more bad than I thought. I’ve been bad since year 5 of my marriage. That’s a bitter pill to swallow. That’s the last time I acted right.

I can barely remember 2011. Apparently since then I’ve changed for the worse and I don’t know how to go back.

My lack of crystal ball is really compromising my ability to be a human being who isn’t a shit stain. I don’t predict myself all that well. I don’t predict what feelings or reactions I will have to people. That means I am bad.

I thought the goal was for me to change over time but apparently now that change means that I am doing a lot of very bad things. I don’t perceive any sign that any part of who I am is good enough. Noah is going to chirp up, “Me too!” Yeah I know. Which is why us doing this is stupid. We make each other feel like shit. The fact that I am not an untraumatised naturally monogamous person is deeply traumatising to you. My existence is a threat and I can’t undo it.

No, I can’t predict in advance where and when I’m going to feel attraction in advance to give you a warning every time. No, I can’t. I am a fucking piece of shit with a broken fucking crystal ball. What I remember about the stupid middle school teacher guy was that after that I was never to ask for any kind of contact or play or even kiss a friend ever again. That’s what I remember. So if you think I did that right and it was treated as me doing a good thing it resulted in the cessation of my right to ever be not monogamous again. I wonder why following that playbook exactly is not that fucking automatically appealing. The thing that locked down our marriage forever is not my boiler plate for opening it up.

Fucking shocking.

I feel like I might spit in your face the next time you say “Being with me is just like death.” Do you really want to keep writing that fucking spell? You are creating your future with your fucking words.

So am I, I know.

I think I am going to have to avoid other people like they have contagious diseases because anything else is me being disloyal. Because yes I will feel attracted to people. I will. I am a disgusting baseless whore. If you want me fucking *you* and getting off then yeah I have to be allowed to just have fucking natural desire in my body. Or you can have a set of holes that doesn’t experience any feelings. Because that is the result of not being allowed to have feelings except under very controlled and specific circumstances. Have you seen the last 13 years? I haven’t wanted a lot of sex when I feel like I am being watched for any sign that I am being disrespectful by feeling desire I should not be feeling. Better to not feel any desire at all.

It feels so extreme and binary and impossible to get out of this all or nothing state. It feels impossible to get to a place where you are not treating me with dripping contempt constantly.

You want your life to be a scratched record, a Groundhog Day of the same thing over and over until you die. You will have your odd night out chatting with the vaguely tech oriented people here and otherwise you are fine with pacing the house doing chores and playing piano and reading. You barely believe you need to leave the house for exercise–It took over a decade of pushing and being annoying about it.

Apparently my track record over the past 13 years of being a parent is such that my family, not even just Noah, thinks I am barely restrained from going and hopping on a bunch of anonymous dicks. It sure is nice being a respected person. I mean, I hear from people who are respected. I wouldn’t know. I feel incredibly degraded, disliked, and disrespected. Because yup, that’s what I do all my time. I go get laid.

Yup.

It’s getting harder to keep going in this Feri book. I remember why I put it down last time. I am not allowed to have a relationship with sex that is about myself. No. That is a lie. I cannot pretend to follow a path that requires me to be a human being with autonomy and self actualisation when it comes to their personal sex life. That’s a fucking lie. I don’t have it and I will never have it.

“Fine, you mean you want no rules.”

I mean it doesn’t matter what you say at this point I’m not the only one who can’t tell the truth to save my life. You say one thing one day and contradict yourself the next. You flip flop and set traps so you can berate me again. This isn’t fun playing. This is fucking abusive. I am not allowed to want anything. It’s like my physical objects: I’m not allowed to care about stuff. I need to expect that it will be taken from me and potentially destroyed or just removed. I need to not take a sense of comfort or joy from anything.

I counted out on the calendar all the 30 day blocks up till 500 days after I notified the police. That’s the median length of time such a case takes moving to verdict from reporting. I shouldn’t really be making plans in that time because I don’t have a lot of control over what I will be required to do or when. And looking at the bank balance that is going to be what we get to live on for as long as I can stretch it… I shouldn’t make plans anyway.

We will sit here. No, Noah, being with you isn’t like death. In death I won’t be in pain any more. I won’t hurt myself by wanting things. I won’t be bad anymore. No, being married to you is not like death.

You tell these elaborate annoying stories about how much I clearly dislike you. Well I fucking clearly dislike how you are god damn acting. I have deleted a lot of name calling in this one.

I have gone to great effort to create a life that revolves around you. I want your time more than I want more money. I do my best to offer up services that you turn down constantly because you’d rather I not wear out my body. It all leaves me feeling like there isn’t a lot of point in me even trying to serve you. You don’t want it. You reject it on a regular basis. The thing I am actually getting from spending more time with you is an increase in suspicion and controlling behaviour. It’s sucking.

I feel less and less like a cherished part of anything. I feel like an unfortunate obligation that you got stuck with. You tell me that you love me and you show me by devaluing everything I do and who I am.

This is not just my depression twisting everything you say and fuck you if you try to pull that bullshit with me.

If my life is not small enough then I am in a lot of trouble because I genuinely believe that less human contact would be psychologically damaging to our children. If I have to have less then they need to go to school because even being hit is better than literally being stuck with me on a permanent lock down. That’s not ok. That’s fucked up for them. It will damage them. I don’t have it in me to be a fun performing pony 24/7 to make up for all the other relationships.

You did help me out in the garden today for an hour. That was nice. I’m not saying you do nothing nice. You do a lot of nice.

You also let me know that for the vast majority of our marriage you have had a very low opinion of me. I got 5 years of high opinion and its been down hill since then. Well that’s a fucking awesome thing to know.

And these days I don’t perform rape victim well enough so that’s the cherry on top of the I do not deserve any trust or respect ever again for the rest of my life. The hope of being someone who is worthy is gone. 13 fucking years. I am one of those women. I am held in deep contempt and distrusted and devalued but as long as I keep opening my legs and mouth I am worth keeping.

As long as only one person uses the holes.

I feel so dirty. I feel like it wouldn’t be possible to boil me at a hot enough temperature to get rid of the filth.

I also feel like I am starting to feel my eyes close and I am weaving as I stand. Nothing more can be done in this day.

We mostly cleaned off the driveway. I folded laundry, cleaned the kitchen, did dishes, and sucked Noah’s dick before he fucked me. Some days that would feel like a very good day. Today I just feel numb. I don’t want to appreciate anything because then it will be taken away. I do want to criticise even as I know that doing so is only going to make it more likely to continue. I feel unable to stop. I fucking get it, Noah.

Maybe if I can make myself work more I will hate myself less. It’s worth a shot. I’ve also been getting through books at a blistering pace since I’ve been off social media so much over the past couple of months. I’m struggling with when I get offended by a book and I don’t want to continue. But I want these books read, damn it. Not tonight. Tonight I need to sleep.

Yesterday wasn’t great and today is waking up harder

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I’m crying a lot again. I feel bad and dirty and gross and like I don’t deserve any kind of goodness or softness or support of any kind.

My mama beat me because she didn’t like how I acted towards the boys who raped me 36 years ago. My Daddy hurt me 3 months ago because he didn’t like how I acted towards the man who raped me.

It is feeling entirely fitting that soft and gentle support and non-judgmental acceptance is for other people. I will never be good enough for that. Never. Because I can’t bear the thought of my Daddy hurting me again after someone rapes me I will need to not come home the next time. I know exactly what will happen to me and I can’t take it. I can’t keep surviving the punishment that comes after each rape.

I had to get up and leave the table when my son dramatically stated that we all deserve the same thing after something bad happens. I was freaking out.

No. We don’t. When bad things happen to all of you I treat you with gentleness. I baby you. I coddle you. I savagely defend you from being bothered.

We don’t all deserve the same thing when we are hurt.

I feel so bad. Why don’t I jump up and work hard and act all plucky and emotionally giving and loving and kind?

Noah is going to feel invalidated. He massages me! He does other nice things for me! He barely raises his voice at all. Does that all count for nothing?

It would count for fucking nothing and there would be insane amounts of violence if my children were harmed the way that I am.

But I consented! Yes. Absolutely. I consented. Of course I did. Was there a different option? No, not with what we are and what we do and what we choose. I don’t get to decide. That was an agreement made long ago. I am the fucked up, bad, out of control one. You do what you must to keep me in line. If I want to be treated better then I should act better.

No. We don’t all deserve the same thing.

I feel like I could blow away in a stiff breeze.

I have to go meet a different support person. I am not expecting much. I don’t have a way to try to tell my story in 1 hour blobs to strangers that gives me any benefit. Like, I can’t get any good from that. It hurts to drop these tiny pieces of me with these people I will not work with going forward. I don’t usually make a great first impression. So I’m briefly meeting a whole bunch of people who are probably going to think I am a weird freak and no, none of this makes me feel better.

I feel like I am not good enough to deserve kind, gentle support from anyone or in any way. I feel so lonely. I feel empty.

This election is a nightmare. I was trying to find a way to flip the script and try to future trip with the kids about ways to pivot… nope. Just fighting and pissiness and dissatisfaction. So definitely no bounce that direction.

Back to head down in miserable waiting to be judged by strangers. I have that lovely gift of a prophecy from Ted. But what if he is wrong? What if I am such a disgusting whore that these strangers look at me and know I deserved it?

Clearly my reaction in the two weeks following mean that I loved it and I wanted him more than anything. Obviously. There could be no other meaning. I am a disloyal bitch.

I deserve all the bad I get.

I could really use EMDR.

Everything feels raw like a cheese grater has been at me

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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

Do I even serve?

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For the past few months I’ve been writing weekly about my feelings about the M/s part of my marriage on a social media site. I am currently completely fucking melting down and I shut down my social media because I will do something I find embarrassing in the long run if I don’t. I can tell. I’m in that kind of place. I want to run my mouth. That’s not safe.

I should give a tiny bit of explanation about what I mean when I say M/s because out here on the open internet I could run into absolutely anyone. Y’all may not have any idea what I am talking about.

M/s refers to a Master/slave relationship. It is a formalised way of having power or authority transfer inside a romantic/sexual/maybe not either but still super intense emotional relationship. Noah has been questioning what we should be calling it.

I should stop referring to M/s then.

He is currently saying that the closest thing is like owning a feral cat, which isn’t actual ownership. I guess that means I won’t be doing a lot of these updates going forward because what I am doing with my life does not count.

I feel like the ways I serve are mostly devalued lately and Noah doesn’t acknowledge them existing outside sexual monogamy. That’s the only service he seems to value these days.

If I am not naturally, instinctively monogamous I am betraying him. I am not serving. I don’t count as property or as a slave.

Cats don’t capitalise titles.

Time is a thief

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Rosanne Cash wrote a touching essay about Kris Kristofferson. (https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/kris-kristofferson-tribute-rosanne-cash-essay-1235129095/)

Write about it.

I deactivated social media accounts today. I’m not ok.

There’s a lot going on and it’s hitting me in waves. I’m struggling intensely with my overwhelming sense of inadequacy and badness. I am not dealing with the way I feel like badness is what my soul has in it and it is what I am and I can’t be anything else.

I thought I wanted the Choke Chain to end but I’m not really sure that it can. I’m not sure we will stay married if I change my behaviour.

When you are so bad that your husband goes to the police to document your horrible self harming sexual behaviour maybe I should go on drugs that eliminate my sex drive. Maybe that would be for the best. I should definitely stop trying to talk to people. I fuck it up over and over and over in ways big and small.

Right this minute I cannot perceive a future in which I am anything other than bad. I cannot perceive a future with less pain. I don’t see value in me or my existence.

I don’t understand why anyone wants me to stay when they don’t particularly like me or what I do very much. It’s deeply confusing to me.

Noah brought up the birthday book this morning. See–people wanted to demonstrate how much they care for me! Would you like me to go through page by page and list off all the people who don’t talk to me anymore? It’s almost everyone in the book. Some of them are dead. Some we’ve just drifted apart with distance… like me moving out of the country because those relationships were not working for me. Several they specifically divorced me in loud and messy ways. The ones who wrote the most about how I am the most amazing–those are the ones who read me for the most filth when they were done with me.

I am feeling intensely done with me so I’m not judging.

Write it down. Be bigger. Take up more space. But I feel like when I do that what I am actually doing is spreading toxic sludge all over innocent victims who don’t deserve that.

When I take up more space and put myself out there I am raped again. Then my husband is going to spend months or years analysing every interaction I have with men for more proof that he has to lock me down to prevent me reacting poorly to a rapist.

No. No I should not take up more space and put myself out there in the world. No. Stop fucking lying. It is bad when I do.

I am bad when I do.

Sometimes I stop and think really hard about how terrified I am of the ocean. Of how deeply convinced I am that the ocean is going to kill me. Then I think about being a counter phobic 6. That which scares me the most is that which I need to run at the hardest.

I know one way to make sure I only do one bad thing ever again and then no more bad things. I know one way. Every other way I will be more bad. I will fail more. I will hurt people more. Every other path is more fraught with more pain for me and everyone I inflict myself on.

I am not going to kill myself. I have a 6 year old. That’s not an option. There is not an amount of pain great enough that I deserve to have it stop in favour of her hurting more.

I hurt and I feel empty and unlovable and worthless. I feel defective and disgusting.

I feel like the single most heinous thing I do every single day is wake up and force the world to endure one more day of me being here.

Time to get back on track.

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I really like it when Noah is on vacation. I will like it when Noah is retired. I know more than a few relationships that have ended after lockdowns because people found out they didn’t like each other as much as they thought. I like Noah more with every passing year. I like alone time too, and time with other people. Every single day I am reminded that I am blessed because Noah is my person. He annoys me. He tells absolutely ridiculous jokes. He squicks me on a regular basis but in a way I apparently find incredibly endearing.

No one else in the whole world wants me to be as big as Noah does. Err, Ironically I do mean that in the feeder sense as well as in the spiritual sense. We were talking about some of the ways in which he is socially deferential, to the point that folks in the local bdsm community are assuming our dynamic is very different than it is. People are complicated. Noah wants me to be complicated and he doesn’t mind that it means my needs keep changing.

I am super scattered this morning. I can’t get into a flow. I stayed up too late, mostly through inertia. I need to get into the house a little early this morning. Time for Noah to go back to work and I need to be trying harder for fewer things, more consistently. I have been really needing, and taking, a fair bit of time off but if Noah needs to be working then I need to check back in.

Get ready for the day, wake the big kids, help Shorty with the morning chore, do planners with the kids. It’s time to teach backward planning. If you need to get all of these things done, when should you do them and how are you going to remind yourself? Getting too big for me to be the one who decides and reminds. It’s your turn, darlings.

Easier to do it with a smile on my face after yesterday’s delicious date. I like my husband a whoooooole lot.

It’s a lot

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In lieu of proper emails to the people who have expressed concern, here’s a blog entry.

I’m not doing so hot. It’s a whole bunch of things. This PMDD cycle is ridiculously brutal. I’m on day fucking 35 and I wish I would just god damn bleed already. I think I would be doing poorly even if everything else was going well. But everything else is not going well.

The pandemic is not hitting my area hard at all–there haven’t been new cases in a while and we’ve gone a few days without a death in the whole country. There will be a few more deaths as this trickles to an end, but Scotland as a whole has managed this pretty darn well. I am terrified of when tourism opens up again. That’s going to fuck us. But I also recognize that an awful lot of the industry exists around supporting tourism so it’s a double edged sword.

All the stuff in the US. I feel ashamed for not being there to participate. I feel grateful that I am not part of it. I feel fear for all of the people on the ground doing the work. I feel scared for the future. I am watching the revolution on tv because I was a coward and I got out.

Things in my house. Stuff with Noah is at a weird/hard point. We are having some troubles. I don’t know how to fix them and I don’t know what the way forward looks like and I’m really scared. I am really really scared. I feel so hurt. I feel wounded. I feel sad.

My oldest child is truly into puberty now. Woo! In the process of trying to celebrate her having a big milestone (in a way we have been discussing for three god damn years) she told me that I am the most embarrassing thing ever and there was a whole lot of “you are gross” face and body language. I’m totally butt hurt. I know it is normal. I know it is to be expected. I know I shouldn’t let it get to me. But I’ve already been crying for a few days so that was just not something I could shrug off in that moment.

Middle child is… she’s having a hard time with everyone taking care of their own needs right now. She is angry and being difficult because she still wants to be catered to like a little kid and no one has that to give her right now. We are all tired and doing stuff to deal with our own shit. I’m trying to talk her through how to meet her own needs a bit more and it’s just hard. So she’s getting in trouble a lot because bad attention is better than no attention.

Youngest child is an adorable little shit head. She has taken to yelling at us all because she wants to be top dog. YOU. WILL. NOT. SAY. THAT. TO. ME. (When we say something like, please don’t kick me.) She’s starting to get more consequences and she’s learning that when mama says something it fucking stays true. If you get into the fridge and steal multiple pieces of fruit and take one bite and leave them to rot, no you don’t get a slice of cake when the rest of us do. We don’t do that with food in this house. If you take the fruit you eat it before you move on. Sorrynotsorry.

Well, I’m writing behind this password because Jenny promised me that I could write what I needed to write and I didn’t need to password protect it–she would choose not to read it. Then she read it and yelled at me. So awesome. Jenny is trying to rewrite history. “I’ve said one wrong thing.” Oh fuck that. You started out our relationship 26 years ago calling me a stupid slut. There have been incidents like this for over two decades. You don’t get to say that calling my kids retarded was saying one wrong thing. She also clarified that she didn’t spank her daughter for a panic attack she spanked her because she was being defiant and screaming in Jenny’s face. Hello? You have rewarded her for bad behavior and defiance all her life and now all of a sudden it is not ok to the level you have to hit her for it? Yeah I don’t find that more excusable.

I don’t want to end the relationship. But I don’t know how close I want to be either.

I am not doing well at responding to anyone’s emails. I feel trapped inside my head. I feel unable to reach out because I feel wrong and bad and stupid and unwanted all over the place.

There was drama in some online forums. A couple pieces in a couple of places. In one of the womens-support groups there was this one woman who was really fucking antagonistic and when I got sick of being bullied I left. The one person from the group who has remained my friend then wanted me to spend weeks helping her process her feelings about being bullied by the one problematic woman. I’m like, this is not good for me. So she left the group too. Some of the other members came to her and asked about forming a new group without the problematic woman and I feel rejected, unworthy of defense, and really unimportant. I feel fucking bad. I provided a lot of emotional support to those people for over a year and me being chased off was fine but once it is this other gal all of a sudden the bully is a problem. I feel like shit.

I’ve been chatting with some of the bay area kinky folk. Some dude was making “jokes” that weren’t funny about covid at at ime when one of the members had a mom who was doing quite poorly and she was terrified. A few of us called him out for not being funny and told him he should apologize. He then proceeded to go on this extensive tirade about how pointless it is to apologize to mentally ill fuck ups. He said that the request for an apology was tantamount to him being falsely accused of rape. WTF? Now one of my friends is his new submissive. I’m like, “well. That’s fucking awesome.” I’m trying to just set boundaries with her about how I don’t want to hear about him and it’s only so successful. I may end up having to stop talking to her and that will be sad.

I don’t know why emails feel harder.

House stuff continues……..s…..l…..o…..w…..l….y….. which means I can’t just be done. I am in this constant state of waiting for the next step and it feels awful. This house will be great when everything works. And I just want to cry.

Sleep is not going well. I do get a fair bit sometimes but mostly I don’t get enough sleep and I feel poorly. I’ve had more than a few days lately where I got almost nothing done because I feel so awful. I’m depressed and I’m definitely getting the full-body malaise.

That said, I have been completing my miles. If I feed the kids, get my miles in… that’s enough to count for a day right now. I’m only up to 16 miles/week right now. I’m adding 1 or 2 miles every other week (mostly 1 but there are a couple of jumps) until September of 2021. My birthday week next year will be my peak week: 54 miles in a week. Then I start ramping down again (hopefully for a marathon the first weekend of October, we’ll see) the week of the marathon I only do 35 miles. It’s more in a day than I did during training, but the hope is that my body will be so accustomed to just going and going that it will be fine. Knock on wood for no injuries. I am a little worried about how often I will need to use the treadmill over the winter because it just isn’t the same as running outside, but it’s a lot better than injuring myself on ice or not running.

I am 10lbs below the peak weight I hit a bit ago. I have done pretty well about cutting sugar from my tea (only had one teaspoon one time) and I’ve not 100% eliminated alcohol (it’s not a great coping method and I get that but I don’t *have* a great one) but I’ve gone from drinking 5-6 days a week to having some 3 times in the past two weeks. I am also running out of stuff and I think I will be good about not buying more for a while. I mean, I have a whole bottle of whiskey sitting there I haven’t touched yet so I won’t be out out for a while.

We have some tenants and they are super sweet. I found them through the mosque. A bit ago my heart was moved to reach out to the mosque and tell them that if one of their members ends up in a tough spot because of job-loss in the pandemic and they need emergency housing, I have an empty apartment. The kind doctor who talked to me at first said he didn’t know of anyone at the moment but he’d keep me in mind. Almost a month later I got a call. They are a really sweet couple, she’s pregnant and her cooking is mind bendingly good. They are not paying rent yet (that’s the whole out of work + being an immigrant means you can’t get government support thing) but they are giving us stuff they make and offering help around the yard and being super gracious. The long-term goal is they will pay rent once jobs happen again. I am willing to extend some faith here. These are rough times all over the place. We are having really fun conversations and they love playing with youngest child when she’s outside. The young lady moved here just over three months ago and basically doesn’t know anyone. We are talking as best we can with her emerging English and my bad Hindi which is close enough to Urdu that we can communicate some.

Seriously, just having those smells wafting through my house from her cooking is worth the price of admission. Oh golly. It smells like home.

The yard has come along quite a bit and I feel like I am ready for the growing season. I still have a long way to go before I figure out all of what I need to do and what I need to prune and when. It’s a process. The yard is feeling overgrown and more jungle-like and I love it.

I mean, I’ve been feeling pretty crappy. But instead of feeling suicidal I have self mutilation ideation. It’s still not great (and I’m not doing it) but after so many years of “I should die” being my first impulse it is in fact an improvement. I’m sad. I feel bad about myself. But I have work to do and I need to wait for this wave of sadness to pass so I can get back to it.

I would do anything for love, but I just won’t do that

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I feel like I am trapped in a Meatloaf song. I want to do things to be pleasing. I want to show my love. But I don’t want to do that. What is that? I don’t know. What do I want? I don’t know. I want to not feel how I feel right now.

I keep thinking I didn’t have kids because I wanted a convenient life. If I insist on my kids staying in school it means I am ok with their classmates hitting them, spitting on them, elbowing them, telling them that they are fucking morons–shits–stupid–pathetic. It means I am ok with little girls telling my little girls that when they gain weight in preparation for puberty they should really go on a diet. It means I am ok with the authorities having a bigger problem with my children standing up to bullies than with the bullying behavior. It means I believe that my children should have to put up with low level harassment a lot of the time because it doesn’t rise to the level that a teacher considers worth paying attention to so stop complaining.

“It is preparation for the real world.” Bitch, if someone did that to me in the real motherfucking world I would either punch them or press charges. I wouldn’t shut up, put my head down, and take it.

You aren’t preparing them for a healthy adult life. You are preparing them to be victims and you feel quite sanctimonious about how it needs to happen.

I’m not yanking them out immediately. I am going to start emailing the fucking head every day with a report of what bullshit happens. Then when I deregister the kids I will have a paper trail of allllllllll the shit the school doesn’t think is important enough to deal with.

If I had a full time job and I had to work I would tell my kids to start punching people. But I don’t and I don’t and I don’t really want my children to have to toughen up in that manner. I have not put this much time and effort into helping them verbalize problems instead of hitting to give it up now. Sure, they are annoying to authority figures in a school who don’t want to hear it. But fuck the fucking school authorities. Their priorities are shit.

And really, there are a lot of things I miss. I miss not wasting so many hours on “Get up. Do your chores. Eat faster. Get ready to go. Pack your bag. Go. Hurry up and unpack. Do your chores. Eat faster. Go to bed because we have to wake up early and do this all again.”

We can get a lot done home schooling. But we do it at odd hours and when we feel like it. Is it a lot of stress? Absofuckinglutely. I feel less like I need to ride the kids super hard though. They are doing more than fine compared to their peers (Except for hand writing and fuck hand writing. Ok, we will work on it…. but seriously. Fuck hand writing.) and that was what kept me up at night worrying. Yeah, I hate having to push them through work.

But I love having hours a day to read together. I love having time to sit around and draw together. I love watching the neat projects they build with all of the time they have. I love knowing that they get to play with dolls and be imaginative when kids their age in school have already given it up because they are trying so hard to be “big”.

I am making contact with the home education community. I’m finding kids their age who are into Minecraft and Scratch and art and reading. Do you know what they aren’t finding at school? Kids who play Minecraft or who use Scratch or kids who are as obsessed with art and reading as they are. At school kids call them names because they don’t play Fortnight. At school kids mock them for not having an expensive brand new phone. At school the kids make fun of them for not being on social media.

Fuck school.

A mother told me the other day that she is getting her 7 year old an iPhone 6 for Christmas because the kid is getting mocked at school for not having one. What the absolute fuck? She said that she doesn’t want to waste money on toys because her daughter is only interested in perfecting her selfies anyway. Uhhh my 9 year old is getting a doll house and the thing will be played with constantly.

Yeah. Different strokes.

We are working on some fairly big changes in our marriage. It’s complicated. I don’t want to bitch about it here. I just want to write down for myself that this is when the contract ended.

I don’t know how to properly advocate for myself without throwing tantrums. I don’t know how to feel like I am being treated how I want to be treated. I don’t fucking know how I want to be treated.

I keep thinking about that doctor who told me that I just need to focus on keeping the bus on the road. (It’s a long metaphor.) He said Noah knew what he was getting into with marrying me because I was honest about my trauma history so he doesn’t get to bitch about it being hard. I don’t agree. I think Noah gets to bitch.

But sometimes keeping the bus on the road is hard even when I don’t have a good reason to point at. Sometimes just being me is hard. I feel like a whiner. I feel annoying and high maintenance and a whole lot of other rude descriptors. I definitely definitely definitely don’t think I am worth the effort.

But I throw tantrums if the effort isn’t put in because I am a fucking bitch. Apparently I have an incredibly high sense of what I deserve.

I think I am depressed. Noah thinks he is depressed. We aren’t the sorts of depressives who stop working. We put our heads down and plough on feeling little to no joy in anything. I don’t think it is SAD. I think we have been working so hard for so long without resting that our bodies are collapsing. Our spirits are collapsing.

Both of us feel like the other isn’t doing very much for us even as we can rattle off the ridiculously long chore list that we know our partner is doing… it just… feels inadequate. We are productive, just not content or happy or satisfied. We keep waiting for a long enough break to breathe.

I now have definite confirmation that our stuff is in the UK. It’s going to sit in a warehouse till December 30th when a company will go pick it up and a few days after that they will call me to arrange delivery. Our stuff will be in transit for 19 or so weeks. The estimate was 4-12 weeks. I feel glad that I can stop worrying that our stuff is lost. That’s been really bothering me.

I want my socks. And my long johns. And my books. And and and and and. I WANT THE GOD DAMN BIKE TRAILER.

This is my third night in a row of not really sleeping until absurdly late. It’s almost 1. This isn’t helping my mental health. Tomorrow I need to take a sleeping pill.

Fork.

{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.)

What’s in a name?

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I generally won’t put my name on this journal, but some things must be said.

According to the DMV and Social Security my name is Kristine Lenora Gibbs. Wow, this is so real.

It is very odd that I feel like things are still unsettled and yet they are getting so much more comfortable. We bicker and fight more than is strictly speaking a great thing, but it seems like we are making progress. At least we don’t keep bitching about the same things. 🙂

I’m so very happy that I made this decision. Please God, let me keep this.