Tag Archives: mood tracking

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.

Don’t make changes when things are bad.

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My brain is a fucking asshole right now. I’m isolating a lot so I don’t take it out on people. I’m coming out periodically to do work for people and announcing loudly, “This is my love language. I love you. I am not avoiding you out of dislike. I am keeping my shitty brain to myself until it stops being so shitty. I don’t want to wreck a relationship saying something I don’t mean in the long run.”

This is how I feel deeply privileged in this life. I get to do this. Golly this is amazing. I don’t have to shut up and keep it together at work. That feels like such a luxury.

I hate being depressed. I hate how every single thing comes out harder and more sad and feeling pointless and I feel worthless. It’s stupid. It doesn’t allow me to have reasonable or rational conversations.

Today we hop on a train and go south for immigration stuff. I’m tired and overwhelmed already and I’m not even required to be up for an hour. Another day, another step towards permanent settlement. Holy shit. I might never have to go back to Gunlandia! If y’all somehow get your shit together and oust the fascists and pass serious gun reform I may consider coming back. Those two things seem absolutely impossible. So even though the UK is far from perfect, I’ll stay in the place where my children won’t get shot.

It is actually a clear and pressing and overwhelming worry in my mind. I’m scared of bringing my three loud mouthed trans teenagers (one is a Bonus Kid) to the US if Harris loses in 4 days. I’m freaking scared. This seems stupid and unwise. I may not be able to handle doing this. I may feel like I can’t depending on what happens in the next month or two in the US. If there is more violence in January? How can I justify that?

I don’t know. But I’m pretty scared. Life is hard and a lot and I feel deeply out of control of it. I feel like I won’t be able to get my feet under me till after the trial. I am going to feel entirely out of control until then.

Hey, I started this then walked away for a few days and didn’t hit post. It was an eventful few days! Yesterday was the best day I’ve had in a long time. There were ups and downs and stress points but we had some genuine fun together and we laughed. That was so nice. We have now submitted our biometric information to the UK to help with the process of permanent settlement. All of our paperwork is in. Now we wait for the wheels of bureaucracy to turn.

Then we walked to the train station past racial discord as crowds were outside yelling about fireworks and bonfires. Apparently we were walking on a part of a street we weren’t supposed to be on. Folks were very unhappy seeing white people there. I just held tight to a hand and kept going. If you pass through quickly enough you can get through almost any territory without a problem, at least that has been my experience. As long as you are not staying it’s ok to hurry through while obviously not from around here.

It is hilarious that people really clock me as an American without me having to say a word. It happens constantly. I continue to have weird public shaming experiences in public toilets. This time someone was going off about how disgusting I was for pooping outside of my home. I should only pee in public toilets. She was almost apologetic for being nasty, but then she saw me and said, “Oh an American.” Then her friends cackled about how it is fine to be rude to Americans.

Every single conversation I have starts with “how long are you here”? Folks don’t warm up much when I say the rest of my life. Xenophobia is awesome.

I am at the point where I am watching the US election with frozen horror. It was wild going past all the bonfires, most of which did not look government approved. Only one involved a tense racial situation with the Black folk on one end of the road clustered around their firework display in the park and the white folk just outside the park on a patch of grass with a fucking giant fire that included pieces of furniture. That was a rowdy group and I didn’t feel safe. I got out fast.

I’m having difficult feelings about a lot of the racial tension I see online and that I feel in interpersonal dynamics. I feel like at some point I stopped believing the myth that only white people are racist. The genocides that are occurring in the world right now are not all white people killing other folk. It’s more complex than that. People are deeply xenophobic and racism is an intense part of that and I think it is in every person and in every culture.

Yes, the US and the UK have structural racism problems that need to be addressed in concrete and specific ways. I am 100% behind ancestry-driven reparations. I think there is a legacy of cultural debt that colonialist powers have that we deserve to pay back in ways big and small. Yes. But there are other debts.

It is feeling weirder and weirder to me to act like the US and the UK are a substantial portion of the people in the world and what is true in those countries is The Truth. It is really bothering me. It is making me feel more and more revolted. It’s like how I didn’t vote in the US election this year. First time in my life. Do you know why I didn’t? Because I never want to live there again and it is morally questionable for me to exert influence in two countries because I am just more important and people deserve to have to live under the effects of my choices even if I never have to live under those effects. Why in the fuck should I help pick a mayor for Fremont? Do I know how good of a job someone is or isn’t doing? No and I’m not fucking going to know. Why should I be making choices about who is the board for BART. It’s not my damn business.

I need to be looking to the Highland Council and learning what is going on in the place I live and be a part of that. I no longer believe it is ethical for me to try to control the destiny of a place I have abdicated. I am still required to pay taxes and I’ll do it, but golly. At this point voting in both places feels like trying to be an absentee landlord. It feels like being a colonialist. It feels like trying to have my cake and eat it too.

I do not want to be in the US. I do not want to be tied to its fate. Hell, the main reason I’d ever work in politics is because that is one of the easiest ways to renounce citizenship. I feel sorrow for what my ancestral line came and did to the North American continent. We hurt a lot of people and we participated in a lot of violence.

It’s funny that we started as Europeans who came and hurt the Native Americans/Indians/Indigenous/whichever word fits the preferences of the group and now we are Americans who have to try not to hurt the Europeans. I’m watching the UK go through a different set of issues around racism. Here, the average non-white immigrant came here themself, or their parents did, or their grandparents did because they wanted access to opportunities. They chose this. That is not such a neat and tidy story in the US though we desperately wish it was. We wish we were “a nation of immigrants”. Instead the US is a nation of immigrants, the survivors of the genocide we perpetrated, and people who were kidnapped and enslaved. Like, that’s a fucking different set of issues to have around racism.

It is interesting walking through very different cities in a variety of countries and experiencing very different crowds. The undercurrents are strange to me. I don’t know the history. Almost every single one of these people thinks of their life story as “normal” and “just life” and “just how things go” and they can’t imagine people having an entirely different set of experiences beyond fantasising about being rich. That’s a thing most people try to imagine. It’s not what I imagined when I was young.

Having enough money to fix the roof and put food on the table doesn’t remove stress from your life. It doesn’t remove trauma. It doesn’t mean that things always go well or easily, it just means that you have the privilege of being able to fix some things before they become grindingly painful. I can’t fix everything. And I can’t avoid grinding pain. I’m out in the studio right now medicating because my whole body hurts like a motherfucker after the last 36ish hours. We did a lot! I didn’t sleep much. I don’t think I got an hour of sleep last night. I did make good progress in my book and I am really enjoying it.

Those are positive emotions. This is good. I am not out of the woods and I expect to have some shitty days as a rebound. I still have a lot of underlying disordered thinking going on. I can see pieces of it. I’m fucked up around a lot of food stuff right now. I’m having a lot of alienated feelings about my body and desire to hurt it. I am struggling between wanting to fast/starve myself and wanting to eat as much as possible so that men are less likely to be sexually attracted to me. Neither is healthy at all but my brain is flip flopping like a fish between them.

I had a few really positive exchanges with all of the kids. It was a good trip. We got along and had fun together. We went to the Science and Technology Museum and then we found an international food court and got one or two entrees at a time and ate our way around the globe for three hours. We waited a while in between orders to see if anyone was actually hungry enough for more. It was amazing and also expensive. That’s our eating out for November.

It sucks having my brain be a dickhead. I am very lucky that for this rodeo I live with people who love me very much and who are willing to do a lot to show me. I wish that meant that my brain wasn’t a dickhead. That would be so awesome.

Thank cheese for a good day

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I’m really grateful that Noah and I had some good talking yesterday. I am glad that we hugged and touched each other in mellow and non-scary ways. We are both going through a ridiculously hard thing. It is really important to remember that this is a terrible thing that is happening to both of us. More to me, but he’s getting whacked hard too.

My brain is being a giant asshole right now and it means that mostly I’m only remembering the hard and scary parts of my marriage and my relationship with Noah. I did go very far out of my way to find a Big Bad Wolf.

He’s really not a terrible person. All of the shitty things he has done have come with the halo of consent. It’s been a fucking trip. When I say I deserve things that he does to me… well… he and I discussed doing it and then we did it so I guess in the most literal sense of the phrase, I do deserve things that we say we want to do together. It’s a complicated thing. No person arrives at the decision to do a thing completely unshaped by the life experiences they have had.

Noah observed that what we are expecting of ourselves and of each other is quite literally inhuman. People don’t do these things. What we want to be to each other is not standard. I get that. Like, that was not really enough sleep last night because sex after a while of no sex was a lot more important. It was good sex.

I wish that means that I woke up today full of resilience and definitely over my depression. I didn’t though. I still feel shitty and stupid and it takes a very small comment from a teenager to set me off. Teenagers are assholes. Teenagers are trying to create a reality in which they don’t need their mother anymore and that’s pretty fraught for me. The point of my job is to work myself out of a job. I am working towards my sole future occupation: Noah’s companion.

There’s this way his cock gets right before he nearly comes. I notice it best when we stop having vaginal sex and switch to oral. The head feels really tight and swollen and like it is about to explode but most of the shaft is actually fairly soft, it’s nothing close to his most erect. Details like that are going to be most of what I think about in the future. Savouring that feel and texture difference in my mouth and in my hands.

I used to tell my mom that I wasn’t going to be able to be successful as an adult because the only thing I was good at doing was reading fast. I’m really good at making Noah’s dick happy.

It is hard for him and it is hard for me that it doesn’t feel like enough. I’m not saying that I have to suck other dicks. I am saying that I don’t do well when I feel disconnected and unwanted.

My day job is in a complicated place where 2/3 of my primary charges now resent and scorn me. I’m just counting the days till number 3 joins in. I know that Noah sees this with impending glee: soon he will have me all to himself.

Given what happens to me when I try to make friends it is a mixed bag from my view at the moment. I am really upset and sad that I am scared to make friends now with the idea of sex being entirely off the table. That is feeling dramatically unsafe. It also makes me question the sex and friendships of my youth.

I don’t think I am going to stop feeling depressed and frozen and scared until the trial happens and that feels dramatically unfair to my family. I go to sleep every night angry with myself for not getting more done and I wake up every morning feeling frozen and stuck and unable to move because I will be wrong. It was really hard to eat this morning.

Today will be less perfect. That’s ok. There are brighter days to come. My local garden store had plants 50% off because they are going out of business. I have some holes to dig. Let’s see if I can get off my backside. Ugh.

I fired my counselor today

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I feel kind of bad because she’s a really nice lady who is trying super hard but she’s a student, with only a small amount of training, and I am way the fuck out of her league. I would be training her, not getting support from her. Also: I’m not allowed to talk to anyone else while I’m talking to her. She fully understands that she is there to be generically supportive and she doesn’t have a lot of therapeutic value to add to my life. So this was my last meeting with her.

I don’t get a lot from telling a tiny shard of my story, heavily edited for their sensibilities of course, to a stranger I will see 6 times then never again. There’s not a lot of value in that for me. She said that a lot of her clients have literally never felt heard in their lives and they have no opportunity whatsoever to explain what is going on with them to another person. I said I write thousands of words and have loyal friends who have been keeping up for going on 25 years. Many of my friends are more educated about psychiatry than she is.

She said I am going to find a very hard time finding a therapist in this city who is as educated as me. That was hilariously awesome to hear. She sent me a list of all the links for support organisations in the city. There is an EDS support group!! Only for people who are 18-30 years old. That is… so Scottish.

I didn’t make my step goal today but I did back to back yoga classes and rode my bike 6 miles. I will choose not to be mad at myself.

I feel like I really should take my friend up on the long distance EMDR. That is the most stabalising option I have on the table. Separately I think I might even have found a friend who might be able to help with more active brain rewiring. I will not be more explicit. That will be good if it works out.

I’m scared. I feel helpless and out of control. I feel like I don’t have the ability to reach for hope right now. I am trying. I really am. I’m trying for positive moments with people. I feel unable to believe that anything could be better. I feel sad. We haven’t had sex in a while. That’s probably contributing.

I’m reading a fun book (I’m finally getting around to Go Tell the Bees), I’m binging Madam Secretary (again), I’m exercising, I’m sleeping an average of 9 hours every night over the past week and some. I’m eating vegetables and fruit and enough protein and fiber. I’m making concrete plans for the future in the near and short-term far future. I am still doing things to solve problems for other people. I am just at much lower capacity and speed. And today was fucking exhausting. Being around humans and having casual conversation was weird and awkward and uncomfortable. I didn’t know what to say and I felt stupid.

Wednesday and Friday will be days with lots of people around and loudness and awkward feeling alienated fun. I will have a hankie for when I escape to the loo to cry. Fuck.

I want to say “I just want to stop feeling like this” but I already fucking know you can’t “just stop” feeling something. You have to move towards feeling something else instead. I am really scared.

Most of the things I instinctively move towards feeling are the things that make me bad.

I should go to sleep. I’ve had a sufficient amount of evil for today.

I don’t really think I need a therapist. I need friends I can feel comfortable believing they know about the scope of my humanity and they are ok with it. I don’t have many of those friends here yet. I get limited amounts of time where I feel mostly accepted. I mean, Bestie and I will walk through fire for one another, we also have health problems and autistic, high needs kids. We share what we have left over and say thank you for what we get.

What I need is people I feel safe being in a room with where I can say whatever comes up in my brain without having to be afraid that I am going to be punished or ostracised or seen as other forever. I mean, I am ‘other’ in a great many senses–I’ve got the whole immigrant thing going on. That’s fine. I’m not ridiculous about this. It’s complicated and late at night and not important right now.

I feel deeply lied to. That buzzer is going off really hard in my head. I feel like I was told that it was ok to do things. That it was explicitly fine and I was still punished for them. I feel set up to fail. I feel like there will always be a way to spin my behaviour as disloyal mainly through inadequately narrow interests. I’m twitchy as fuck. I feel angry and ragey and like I want to beat something until I break it. I want to destroy something. I have kept every fucking man in Scotland at arms length. I have not seriously flirted. I have not issued a come on. I have not tried to get someone to want to have sex with me. I have been so good.

Burn it all down.

The only time I’ve ever heard a Scottish person come it was my rapist. Fucking cheers for me.

But that part wasn’t the rape. That part was me. That part was me feeling like I needed to be in control and I needed to decide what would and wouldn’t happen and I dictated exactly what I would take from him. And I took it.

And I put him in prison.

So, I look like I’m setting up a torrid affair? He doesn’t strike me as the type to actually write letters and I’m not sure how much email access they have. Anyway I’m not planning to visit him.

There are magics you don’t understand. There are things that compel me and I don’t know where they come from. Was it training from my dad? Was it me trying to get to know him and having a fucked up view of how “mentorship” works since almost every single one of my mentors fucked me at some point? I will edit out long the rant about stuff related to the court case. I can’t say any of that. (Hell, should I say any of this?)

Fuck. Uh, if the trial goes well I want to go to karaoke and sing You Should Be Sad. I will make that happen. Where in the fuck near here can I do that? I will find out. Yes, sirree.

Surviving rape

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Surviving rape doesn’t happen in one day. You don’t survive by getting the fucker into a taxi and out of your home. Out of my studio. Out of the place that is supposed to be my sanctuary. That is the first step, not the last. It isn’t like surviving a car crash where you wake up and the crash is over.

Surviving rape means being able to look myself in the mirror every morning afterwards. Surviving rape is about thinking that whatever you did to get to the next screen was harm reduction. Every single shitty thing that kept you alive was better than dying. Surviving rape is binge drinking and binge eating and screaming and crying and falling to the pavement when out on a walk because the panic attack made my vision go black. Surviving rape is believing that you do not deserve to be punished and harmed more because you were defiled and made dirty by someone touching you or you touching someone else because you felt like you had to.

Surviving rape means opening yourself up to lots of judgment, scorn, derision, and contempt. Good people wouldn’t survive the shit I have. They die.

My very survival is what marks me as a monster. Good people don’t do the things I do, the shitty, dirty, disgusting things that people like me do. Good people would rather die.

I am still alive. I feel like I owe the universe endless apologies for not having the decency to just fucking die already.

I have screamed so much today that my throat hurts enough that I don’t really want to eat this lentil soup that is the first food I’ve had today. I’d rather not eat. I also haven’t been drinking. I don’t want to.

I want my body to stop.

I want to be good. Good people don’t live through the things I do. That means the only thing I can do to be good is die. That hurts so much. I have tried so hard to be good. It doesn’t matter. When it counted, when I was supposed to display my loyalty I was only loyal to myself and my survival. And that is why I should die. If I will not pick death over disloyalty I am nothing.

I betrayed my family. I betrayed my husband and made myself the lowest of the low. I feel like I want to use a scalpel to flay myself alive. Maybe if I make myself hurt a lot lot lot lot lot more Noah won’t be so mad.

Mama told me I don’t need to stay and let Noah make me feel so bad about myself. I don’t think Noah is making me feel bad about myself. I think Noah is reacting reasonably to the consequences of being married to a nightmare. I’m in this pickle where I can’t act good enough to not hurt him and I can’t leave without hurting him more. I can’t see a path forward that doesn’t involve me wrecking his life even more than I have.

I’ve betrayed him a lot. It’s not like this is a one off. It’s who I am. I am shit. I am worthless and faithless.

But fuck me, definitely no EMDR before the trial. Couldn’t be having that. Fuck the NHS. I can’t believe I had the ovaries to say, “I’d like EMDR. If not that then Ketamine, MDMA, or LSD assisted therapy. If none of that then I want nothing from you.“

That was pretty intense. I was freaking out and shaking and clearly not ok and I just blew off one of the higher up doctors at the psych hospital. That was maybe unwise. That smart mouth comment is now in my permanent record. I mean, I started with wanting EMDR? It’s not a controversial treatment? It’s not a drug? It’s not a wacky thing to ask for. That was not inappropriate. I just can’t have it.

I can. I just can’t through the NHS. Curse my internal hierarchy structure. It is fucking inconsistent and I hate it so much. One of the harem actually does remote EMDR already. It’s just a trick in his tool bag. I could probably have a session today or tomorrow if I could just ask him. Hell, I don’t need to ask, I need to say yes to his offer. He wants so badly to be able to help me in some way and I have not been able to let myself receive anything from him.

Someone who has been in love with me for almost 20 years wants to help me because my health care system is letting me down and I can’t let him. I have also basically stopped talking to Travel Boyfriend. I am deep in not-fun-land and I just can’t accept help in this place from people I am emotionally close to. I can pay for it. I can’t get it for free. I don’t deserve it. I do not allow myself to be someone who has consistent support from specific people. Well, not beyond Noah. The few other attempts I made as an adult went pretty sideways.

I am feeling incredibly burned. I miss the God Mama. I miss my mother. I miss Sarah. I miss the Bonus Mama. All these women. Hey look, Katy Perry’s song The One Who Got Away just came on. I’ve been calling Sarah The One Who Got Away on Fetlife. I failed to sustain that relationship.

It’s kinda funny that I don’t miss my sister. Fuck that bitch. I hope she suffers terribly for every day that she is alive and that her death is slow and painful as she fucking deserves for being a child raping piece of shit. She had a chance in this life to break the chain. Instead she forged new links. I wish her nothing but pain. Given her romantic choices I’m pretty sure she’s been punched a lot since then. I wish I could feel bad for her but I really can’t.

My brother is single and whining about how women use men up and take everything from them. My brother, who never worked full time or even managed to fully pay for his own vices let alone support his three children. Yeah. Poor guy. Fuck the golden boy too. I don’t wish him as much pain. He is suffering a lot from being who our father loved. He will suffer for all of his days. He refuses to believe that our father was evil. He tells people that our dad committed suicide because he was depressed. lol. Yeah, scared of a life of prison rape depressed.

Surviving rape is not pretty. I would argue that my sister’s soul has not survived. When she chose to justify her pain by normalising it and passing it to her children her soul died. What is left is a soulless monster.

I have not raped a child since I was a child. I’m not saying I get a pass. But my children have not been raped by family members. That’s something, I guess.

It’s really hard to eat this bowl of soup. My body does not want to. Why do I keep insisting on eating healthy food and exercising? Don’t I know that this is going to get me lots of years of more pain? 9.821 steps for the day. Even if I did have a panic attack.

I can’t keep getting punished for surviving. I don’t know exactly what that means, but I think maybe punishment is not something I can accept for something like this. I was ok with it when it happened. I consented. I consented, what, days after surgery? I kind of wonder how much I hope that you would hurt me enough to cause those complications I otherwise worked so hard to avoid. Could you have lived with that? Was it worth it? Sure. You think it was necessary to break the fawn.

Fawning is a survival tactic.

What I am doing now is not upping the chances of me surviving. I did that walking on the first day of my period without eating or drinking anything. Am I making good choices? I don’t know. I am flailing blindly. I’m trying not to talk to people more than I absolutely have to because I know that vile bilge will stream from my mouth. I’ve probably cut 80%-90% of my social chatter for the past I don’t know how many days.

Right now the random reinforcement of punishment (sometimes physical with consent in the context of our M/s dynamic and more often verbal in the form of lengthy diatribes about the crimes I’m about to commit) I have received in the past 4 months means I can’t risk talking to someone in a tone of voice Noah doesn’t like or I don’t know what will happen. I am afraid he will think I am fawning. He’s not ok and I’m not ok and I don’t know what will need to happen before either of us are ok.

I guess my sister and I both antagonise our partners to hit us. She does it by yelling insults and degrading their manhood. I cheat.

We both deserve what we get.

I say I won’t do things and then I go do them. Every time. Apparently.

It’s the first day of bleeding. With good luck part of this furious screaming in my brain will stop soon but I am not feeling like I’ve had a lot of luck lately. I feel like if it weren’t for bad luck I’d have no luck at all.

I listen to other people talk about family as if it is a permanent fixture that cannot be undone. I think of Bestie and the brothers she hasn’t spoken to in over a decade and my family I haven’t seen in a few years more than that. Family doesn’t feel very permanent to me, in a general way. I am having a hard time with the war in my brain. I have to serve my indenture. Do I really owe many more decades beyond that? Do I really? Why do I owe anyone this much pain?

I reread the book I bought at the Lakota reservation called Keep Going. Man. That’s not a book to make you expect much cheerful shit in life. I think one of the reasons I have never felt comfortable with most pagan community is because I’m not willing to co-opt an old-world-religion-that-was-and-has-been-reinvented. That’s what I see when I see most pagans. The heathen cultures I grew up around were indigenous cultural ones practiced by descendants. I sure as shit never felt entitled to join any of what I saw, but I feel like my ancestors closed their ears to the Gods. I had a Mayflower fucker in my chart and the most recent arriving branch was a bunch of Mennonites that had been running around Europe trying to be the most repressive dickheads around for a long time.

I do not feel entitled to any Gods.

I do believe that Akhilandeshvari chose me. The Hindu temple on the corner was full of people who were a little confused by the white neighbours who came to Hindi classes and who dropped by to pay respects to the Gods and Goddesses occasionally. I have been given the strong impression by every Indian friend that they are totally cool with a Hindu Goddess picking me. They said she obviously knew I needed her. I think that is most diplomatic of them.

Here I am breaking myself and breaking my husband. We had been at a much better place.

I did not deal with being raped in a way that worked for him at all.

I feel like I failed the exam. I do not deserve to stay in the program. This is not my first time failing and being kicked out because my body could not do what was being asked of it. I’m not being kicked out. Noah won’t kick me out. That’s not something I worry about in any way. Just like I don’t entertain the idea of leaving him. This marriage is till death parts us.

Surviving rape over and over and over and over and over is partly done in stutter steps of eventually asking to be allowed to have some kind of agency and autonomy for my body after more than 4 decades of not being allowed to make all the decisions. No. That’s a no, dog. I’m a set of holes and somebody bought them. How dare someone else touch them.

I feel deeply dehumanised. I suppose that is a natural and obvious outgrowth of some of the kinds of play I choose to do. I suppose it is unsurprising that it is a natural and normal state for me to slip into sideways. You think maybe getting kicked out of a community for being a loud mouth who objects to homophobia, and dealing with denial of service from the NHS has something to do with it?

Hell, I’m even freaked out about how far from what I wanted the prosecution process is going to be. I’m going to have to go to court this time. They won’t let him out so he can suicide the morning of the trial. Phew. I have options about how to do it. I’m going to pick sitting in court and looking at him. That’s the least shielded way. Because why in the fuck would I do it by video in a room alone? That would be even more alienating for me. I would be even less of a fucking person just a figment on a screen.

My life is wildly out of my control right now. I can’t even seriously future trip as a hobby because I don’t know when the fucking UK government will finish our paperwork. We are picking this?

Yup. Better than Gunlandia.

I will take every piece of stress dealing with the NHS and the police and the courts and the cultural mismatch and low-key ostracism because I never have to worry about a cop pointing a gun at one of my children. I’ll take it. Most of my ancestors left this island (or the big one right next to us) almost 400 years ago. Yeah, there’s going to be some friction on reentry. I don’t resent that.

Noah is also unemployed for potentially the entire foreseeable future. It’s coming with a massive drop from where we had planned retirement income because otherwise all of the choices suck. I’d rather have his time than more money.

Yeah. Even though I had my door locked earlier tonight because I was not going to fucking talk to him right now. I feel like I want to kick him in the face and tell him to stop sniveling and get his fucking shit together. It is not your turn to fucking melt down right now and you are being a selfish dickhead. It can be your turn for the next 11 years, buddy. Knock it off until the trial. I guess you are right that it means you should just stop fucking talking for a while.

I just realised why I don’t like playing games. I don’t particularly enjoy feeling like a loser and I don’t have the desire to prove I can beat people. There is nothing for me in the process but bad feelings. I play because other people want me to. I never play enough to get very good.

Surviving rape never stops. The crazy shit I do that seems so inexplicable is maybe about my dad or Paul or Jeremy or Michael or Kevin and whatever the rest of those bitches names are. Fuck those guys. Fuck all of them. Every last fucking one. Right now I can’t remember the exact number and I really don’t want to try hard to figure it out. I think that would be really bad for me right now. I’m really glad I can’t think at all. Yay not eating or drinking.

The weekend that my rapist was arrested I played the song You Should Be Sad several hundred times. Yeah. That was fucking trippy to find out in the rear view mirror. I had no idea it was happening then. This song is going to loom large in my memory of this experience.

I think I am always going to be trying to survive all this. It’s going to be hard forever. I have a lot of physical pain that I can’t make go away with all the good food and exercise in the world. I am struggling on every level right now.

The most life affirming thing would be to throw myself on the net I have created. Instead I hide and scream and rock and cry. I can do very little right enough to trust that I am not going to get in trouble for it. Hell, an awful lot of this post feels like I am skirting the line of “don’t write about it”.

Wait for the trial to write. Wait for the trial to qualify for EMDR.

It’s like fucking no one wants me to survive.

I know you do. You don’t need to say it. Take it as read. I know. That’s not the point. I’m not whining about my friends doing an insufficient amount of reaching out. I’ve had more contact from old friends since I deactivated than I have in a long time all at once. I am not responding much. I can’t.

All I contain is poison. Am I even surviving? Traci said any amount of harm reduction that allowed you to get to another day was good enough. Traci ODed on heroin after getting kicked out by her wife and losing custody of her son. Yeah. I’ve gotten advice from some wacky ass sources in my life.

I have stopped daydreaming about the trip with TB. It is seeming less like a good idea by the day. I am scared that being in a room with me will be bad for him. I am going to fuck him up because I am so fucked up. 70 days from tomorrow. I wonder how I will feel by then? Fuck.

It isn’t feeling like a life affirming activity. It is feeling like proof of why Noah doesn’t trust me and why he should never trust me.

Just stop, Krissy. Stop being so bad.

It’s weird

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I like dropping bits from my brain like leaves on the stream of data that is the internet. It feels very alienating when I stop myself. I feel my personality, my sense of self constrict. If I am not sharing thoughts, did I have them? I need to be witnessed in a way that is awful and overwhelming and makes me feel empty. In it I see the way my children yell, “Look at me!”

Do we all want that so much it feels like a burning knife in our bellies?

I finally did something today. I cleaned the kitchen. It was pretty gross. Well, I cleaned most of the kitchen. As much as I could make myself do. I feel in myself this urge to go through and whip the house and garden into shape for the winter–it would take me 3-4 days of solid work if I felt whole enough to do it. Instead I think most of it won’t happen at all and I will stare at walls and wait to die instead.

Nothing expeditious will happen. I’ll just wait. Death is coming for us all. Every day we are always waiting for death. This is a morbid thing more than a suicidal thing. I am feeling morbidly obsessed with death. I feel like I can think about very little else and that’s really annoying.

I was listening to my “hope” playlist earlier trying to have some feeling in my body that isn’t negative and pessimistic and despairing. Fat fucking fail. I can’t.

I cuddled my baby and talked about how she is doing the best she can and no her mistakes do not mean that she is naughty. Sometimes she does do stuff that we aren’t very happy about. She isn’t trying to be mean. She isn’t trying to hurt anyone. She isn’t trying to destroy anything so no, she is not bad.

Why can’t I feel like that applies to me at all?

I’m freaking out about how much I want to see my mom and Auntie. I think I actually want to stop going back to California because I don’t want to feel like I could see them. I can’t. I have no idea how they would feel about seeing me. It’s been almost 14 years. It still hurts like a stab to the heart every single time.

Mama says I could leave Noah and move in with her if he is hurting me beyond what I can bear. I don’t think he is. Also: how in the fuck could I handle moving back to Santa Cruz? Drive past Auntie’s house every time I go to the Valley? Nah. Nah I can’t do that. I can’t. That’s a bridge too far. I really can’t.

Hell, I can’t go back to driving. Moving back to California is a non-starter.

Besides the fact that I don’t want away from Noah. That is the scariest thought. I am so much more afraid of losing Noah than I am of dying. I need Noah for what he gives me spiritually. Noah is the rock around which my life is built. I do not know what I would do without Noah. My life is built around serving Noah and that’s not something I feel motivated to change.

I would not be happier as a slutty single mom. I would probably turn into my mother and never have sex again because I don’t trust anyone. I would be terrified that I would expose my kids to a predator because I have famously shitty taste in people to trust. I like monstrous predators. Apparently. Or they like me. Or something.

I would not leave Noah. This is a hard phase. I’m not going to leave because he delivered on the “worse” he said he would give me during the vows. I knew it was coming. It was foretold and promised and everything. He’s hurting and not being gentle with it.

Noah tells a sad, pretty story about an orphan boy and his escaped, wounded rhinoceros. We trade back and forth who is the boy and who is the rhinoceros. I don’t expect him to always be gentle. I don’t know what I do expect. I don’t know what would be better. I have no idea what I would ask for. Right this exact minute I can’t imagine ever feeling happiness or joy again.

Right this minute I feel like I should cancel with Travel Boyfriend. There’s no way that I could deliver on the good time some other self who used to live inside me offered. That self is gone. She feels dead. She thought maybe it might be ok to really grow and change but no. I need to calcify and chip off edges. Right now it feels like she was the part of me who wanted to recover from being raped. You know what? Fuck the NHS. Medical malpractice my big toe. You are lazy and ineffective motherfuckers. I know it saves you fucking money. And it HELPS YOU CUT OFF THE EDGE OF THE BELL CURVE YOU MOTHERFUCKERS.

I feel sick and depleted and destroyed. My head hurts. My soul hurts. I hate doctors so much. This entire experience is so degrading.

How would I even be able to tell if I was so upset about Noah? How could I narrow down the sources of stress and distress? Do you know who supplies all of my support? Noah. Leaving Noah would be a form of self harm for me. Noah takes care of me through a great many times and types of incapacity. It’s not even just that he physically cares for me when I’m ill–he cares about my soul. He puts a lot of time and effort into trying to help me be ok. That’s one of the many things I’m really sad about.

Right now I’m not feeling better even though Noah is putting a lot of effort in. That feels like yet another betrayal. It feels like improperly displaying gratitude. That old chestnut.

I need to go to sleep.

I keep coming back to this deep unhappiness. I can’t perform good right.

Do I really deserve to be alive? Or am I far enough out on the bell curve that I really should have died already.

Harsh

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I’m not screaming and frantically wanting to hurt myself. I do feel harsh and angry and sick of being flexible. I feel like I cannot keep jumping through hoops to try and be good when there is no good that is good enough to not keep getting yelled at.

Parenting is a shitty gig in a lot of ways. Kids are feral creatures doing their best and you can’t regulate off of them. It’s not ok. There are predictable stages that are frustrating in their own special ways. It’s not that the kids are being extra hard. I just have so much less to give than usual. I feel depleted and diminished.

I’m really struggling with what it means to get help in this country. I am told I can’t get support from more than one person at a time… until suddenly I am told that if I wait to get help from different services one at a time I am told that I am declining help from one of the services and they won’t help me later if I turn down this offer. I’m deeply confused and overwhelmed. I feel like I’ve been threatened repeatedly by NHS doctors that if I am not properly compliant I will be barred from basic medical care from the NHS. I feel scared. I feel fucked over and abused.

Seeing more than one therapist is medical malpractice… until it isn’t and refusing the second person who is offering assistance means I am not compliant and I don’t deserve future help. I felt like I was going to get help from the ADHD prescribing lady until I talked to her boss and now I feel more hopeless, helpless, scared, and vulnerable than I did before.

I feel like I’m about to be barred from medical care because I can’t perform patient properly.

As we have just hemorrhaged money to be able to live in this country permanently, I’m feeling very scared that I will be unable to access the normal medical treatment that citizens get here because I don’t know how to be good enough. I feel deeply abused that this is getting so much worse because I was foolish enough to report a crime. I feel punished. I feel sick to my stomach every time I think about having to deal with the doctors here.

When I think of that insulting lecture about how people don’t get better because the glacial pace of the NHS is deeply painful and they don’t continue to come back for inadequate, inappropriate care. I can literally tell these people that I have paid for tests that reveal that genetically a drug won’t work for me and they tell me I have to take it anyway or I am being uncooperative and I am not interested in my own mental health.

I am fucking livid.

Mama was asking me if most of my feeling bad-ness is coming from Noah and the way he is melting down. No, he’s not helping overall at the moment but he’s not the reason I feel as bad as I do–certainly not on his own. I do feel really bad that he thinks I betrayed him but he’s entitled to evaluate my behaviour in any way he sees fit.

I mean, 2016. I will never be done being yelled at for my craven and disgusting behaviour. I can’t describe myself in mean enough words to convince Noah that I am sorry. I can’t debase myself enough to satisfy his feeling of being wounded. I don’t think he will ever forgive me.

I feel absolutely overwhelming like the next time I am raped I need to die. I cannot survive any more of this. I can’t. People are so fucking mean about me surviving. I can’t keep doing it. If I were a good person I wouldn’t be able to keep going through so much evil. The fact that I keep walking is part of why I deserve every punishment and insult. If I were a good person I would have been destroyed. I am a monster and I deserve every scrap of bad I receive in this life. The only thing I could do for the smallest ounce of redemption is to just fucking die already.

It doesn’t matter though. I have 11 years, 3 months and 19 days on my indenture. I am not allowed to die. I have to, in fact, work really really hard night and day to stay alive. I have to be careful about every fucking aspect of my life if I am not going to die in my 50’s. Between my 4 grandparents and 2 parents there were 2 suicides preventing folks from hitting their 50’s, and 2 folks who died because they wouldn’t take care of their bodies, and 2 motherfuckers who are too god damn mean to die–my grandfather made it to 86 and my mother is still alive.

My indenture runs out when I’m 54. I am going to have to work at making it that long. This is why I couldn’t have another child. Here is a fucking horrible thing: if I fell pregnant this week I would abort. That’s how not fucking ok I am. The idea of extending the indenture by an additional almost 8 years? Now. Not fucking ok. I am not working for that. FUCK NO.

Every time I do that silly thing where I bring up the 60th birthday party I want to have it is me trying hard to believe that I have that much of a future. That’s a sand castle I am not sure that I believe I will ever live in.

I don’t know how to get my head to be ok with the idea that I can’t survive the next rape. How do I endure the days of fear between now and then? I feel like I can’t get yelled at ever again for surviving. I can’t. If I am bad for keeping this shitty meat sack moving then I need to stop. I don’t want to be bad.

I am unable to perform the behaviour as a mother that lets me feel good in that role. I am not being a shitty abusive mother, but I’m not hitting the metrics I self assign.

I am definitely feeling like a shitty wife. My lack of instinctive monogamy is hurting my husband deeply.

Maybe it won’t matter. Knowing that I really should not survive another rape is going to be a good reason to never be alone in a room with people. Maybe I can cut off enough of myself that I will never be put in that position. I don’t think I would be forgiven for whatever I do so I need to ensure it doesn’t come up again.

The only sure fire way to make it not happen again is to die. The second most effective way is to be alone in a room as much as possible until I die. I feel really scared. I feel really helpless. I do not foresee a path forward where I can be alive and good and that hurts very badly.

The NHS is going to be a mixed bag for me

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I am experiencing some frustration. This week I learned that the NHS would have denied me the vast majority of the care I received in California because a lot of it ran concurrently. In Scotland one is not allowed to work with multiple therapists and on varying parts of mental and physical health at the same time. It is medical malpractice in this country.

Well, shit.

It was kind of fun recognising that I will have to route around the NHS while in an appointment with a psychiatrist. She got to try and talk me into not giving up on myself. If I come back and beg enough times maybe the NHS will agree to me having more than one form of care over a long period of time where they control all the aspects of deciding what and when.

Oh. It’s like that, is it?

I am going to learn a lot more about private health care in this country and I’m going to get better about lying and denying the care I am receiving. That sucks. I’m not really into lying as a lifestyle.

The NHS will not allow me to have EMDR before the trial. Thing is, I’m not sleeping so good. Flashbacks/abreactions are really bringing me down. My PTSD responses are really dramatic compared to where they have been for years.

The NHS won’t allow me to talk to anyone else while I’m talking to the nice counsellour lady in town. The nice lady who is a student. The nice lady who works for an agency that is supposed to get me help as an overwhelmed mom supporting disabled kids.

That’s what I get.

She’s a nice gal and maybe I am underestimating where I am going to get in the 6 sessions I have with her before I maybe get another 6 sessions through a different charity agency.

Yeah. That’s going to dramatically alter my life trajectory. I’ve been through 34 years of trauma therapy. I’m sure this student will dramatically make progress with my usually “treatment resistant” PTSD in 6 hours. It’s going to miraculous.

I feel very much like I need to settle down and become a wraith. This country favours passivity and non-action in a way that is going to be a problem for me. I am not a person who sits and waits doing nothing. That leads to deep depression and self harming behaviour that I can no longer sustain physically. I can’t. I can’t go back to hurting myself to cope. Too many pieces of me are broken in ways that could be life ending if I keep it up. Too many head injuries.

Is it weird that I am not fucking ok with the idea of accidentally killing myself in a panic attack in a form of self harm that I intend to be a momentary relief of pain going too far?

If I am going to kill myself it is going to be in some way that is absolutely unmistakable. I don’t want to accidentally cause a stroke. Fuck that shit. If I swim out into the North Sea or go to a supervised euthanasia clinic so you fucking know I picked that. I desperately hope that the people who love me will find a piece of comfort in knowing that I waited as long as I possibly could. I know that probably something is just to break on its own and it won’t be my choice and that’s ok too. Then it really isn’t my fault in the same way and it won’t hurt the people who love me in the same way.

I can’t accidentally kill myself by going too far with cutting. That’s not ok. That kind of thing is messy and dramatic and traumatic in a way I don’t want.

Today is not as bad as a lot of days have been this week but I’m still not feeling strongly attached to the idea of being alive. I can’t hasten my death, and in fact I am required to act in ways that will push it away to further in the distance. It’s feeling really hard.

Like most people I don’t love being in pain. It is hard knowing there isn’t a way out. I sure as shit am not going to be asking for much of the NHS. As much as I don’t love being in pain I’d rather just go through my life in pain instead of hearing over and over that I am not good enough for the thing I know will help me. I don’t qualify. I haven’t jumped enough hoops. Why don’t I jump a little higher and wait a little longer?

These are the people who think I shouldn’t be allowed to have the sex life I want or the marriage I want and they probably think I shouldn’t have been allowed to have children. I should have waited until I was all better to go have these normal things. I haven’t done enough time waiting to deserve the things that other people get as table stakes. I’ve heard this story my whole life.

I am allowed to have what those people need. Fuck my needs.

This is where I am an absolute rubbish example of living consent culture. I was told no, I couldn’t have what I asked for. So I went out and found a way to fucking steal it anyway.

Not exactly but it sure feels like it standing where I am in this moment. Really I just found a way to pay for it and I hunted high and low before I found people who would help me on my journey. I’ve done a lot of things to try and be more ok. I’ve been doing really well for a lot of years now with only a fairly normal person amount of range of volatility.

But hey, it doesn’t even count as rape in this country. It shouldn’t bother me so much.

In a major way I feel like I am far more wounded by how this affecting Noah than I am by the assault. My life is different than it was 4 months ago in ways that feel savagely unfair and painful.

I’m not working hard at chasing down Vicki interviews. I can’t focus. I can barely think. My productivity is somewhere between 25% and 50% of my normal and it feels like an enormous stretch goal.

I feel like a wraith who should fade away to mist. The fire and energy that usually propel my survival have abandoned me. I don’t feel like I have enough faith in what I am going to do moving forward to just charge forward blindly with great force. I don’t have the energy for a bunch of false starts. I don’t. I want to curl up under a bush and never come out and let my body go back into the earth.

I feel ineffective. I feel useless. I feel like there is no point to how hard I work because it will always come back to how fucking worthless I am.

It’s hard home educating three autistic kids. They need a lot from me. Most of it I have to repeat many times. It’s exhausting. I feel like depression is covering me like a weighted blanket on top of the burn out I’ve been feeling for a long time.

One of the hardest things about the way we home educate is we don’t have the neat and tidy ways to check and see if you are doing it right. We don’t have marking periods and standardised tests. We are just living and no matter how much I do for them I never feel like I have done enough. I always feel like I am failing to teach them a lot of the things they are going to need to know. I felt like that as a classroom teacher too, even though my students went up by more than one grade level on average after a year with me. Many of my students caught up on four or six years of learning with me because I could tune in to where they needed to be reached. I worked with kids who had a lot of emotional struggles.

My adult life has been spent trying to give children the things I never got and I am feeling like a very empty bucket. I have been doing this work for 24 years now. Hell, I was a nanny and a babysitter before then. Normally I’m pretty ok with taking it in stride that young people need a lot of reminders. Right now it is hurting me desperately.

I don’t think anyone is doing anything wrong in my house. It’s hard when I’m off my game. Noah does a lot of consistency management for our family but I’m usually the motor. I feel like I lost some integral part of my mechanism and the gears are just not going and I don’t know what to do.

No, I don’t want psych meds. They are not going to clear the cobwebs they are going to make my body start feeling like I am trying to kill it. No. I have walked that road. I’ve tried so many drugs that doctors pushed on me.

EMDR would be very helpful. I’m going to look for private. I think that’s a thing I can make happen. Holy shit. Maybe I really fucking should not. I am not a good liar. I’d really like to sleep better.

It’s been hurting so much that this overlapped with getting kicked out of bike stuff. The woman who had invited me into things in the first place no longer wants me there. She asked me to stop coming because I make her uncomfortable. It’s not that “everyone” there dislikes me–she was the person I was there to get to know because I liked her. I never tried hard to get to know anyone else because my assumption was that I would be too weird. I hope they do well in the future. I think it is important work.

It is not the fault of Highland Pride that I was sexually assaulted in any way shape or form. I am going to be scared to step forward with that community in the future anyway. I feel like I am trying to back out of a lot of kink stuff locally because I am obviously making so many people feel uncomfortable.

Hey look, the bitch who was “too much” in California is also too much in small town Scotland. Duh.

Maybe if I hide for a while before coming back some of my spiky edges will be forgotten. Maybe I will figure out some piece of work to do that will buy me a place even though I am so awful.

I don’t really have hope for things feeling better right now. I know they will at some point but in this moment that seems ridiculously impossible. This always/never place is really dark. I feel scared and empty. I don’t know how to keep giving right now without a lot of very bitter and sharp detritus coming out instead of water.

I’m in a bad place. It is what it is. There is no way out other than going through it.

I know Noah is trying to walk it back because this is hurting me, but I am deeply wounded by him saying that I betrayed him in this situation. I feel wrecked by this. I wasn’t a little bit bad I was so bad.

Right now I feel like I don’t know how to be good enough to deserve anything good. All I deserve is pain until I die. I’m not working enough to be a good tool. I do bad things that hurt people. I speak too sharply because my entire consciousness is permeated with pain and it leaks out and then I am even more bad.

I feel like no one should have to deal with someone as awful as me. I feel empty of goodness. If I ever had any it is gone.

All that is left is a haze of inefficient malice.

See, I’m being good. This is not social media where I will have lots of people yell at me that I am bad for saying any of this because it is not fair that I am “triggering them”.

Fuck me. Why don’t I just shut up or die already?

Social anxiety at 11.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I need to change my mindset.

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“I’m not rejecting you” he said. Enh, it depends on your perspective. Are you rejecting an offer that would give you small pieces of what you want in exchange for not being willing to give up on finding the whole package? Yes, you are. It’s not a bad thing to do. I walked out on a partner when I was 23 because he didn’t want to be a parent and I did. I am not offended that I am being rejected but I am. It seems pretty logical to me, reasonable even. I just hope it works out how you want it to.

I feel rejected because I was offering a way that I would try to change myself to fit around someone in a way I usually won’t offer. I’m not a vanilla girl. Trying to figure out how I would exist in that kind of long-term relationship is quite an interesting mental exercise but it doesn’t matter. It’s not going to happen.

I feel bad because I am probably not going to be open to that kind of option in the future. I think that he thinks I will kind of wait around to be a Plan B if he fails to get what he wants in the next 10 years. I won’t. That would destroy my self esteem and I am not going to do or be that for anyone. Fuck no. I am not a fucking option you can pick up and set down when you feel like it. I am not a fucking doll. I am not the sort to wait and pine.

I will never stop loving him. I have loved him for most of my life and that won’t change. I have *intense* love for my friends. I will jump through flaming hoops to support my friends. I am devoted and adoring and full of encouragement. The thing is, I put most of me in a box in order to be respectful to my friends. I am so much and I don’t want to be inappropriate or overwhelm people. I leave most of me in a box and only offer a very small portion to each friend. I support this partition by not talking to people all that often. When I talk to someone too often I start wanting and needing them to accept more of me. My friends are friends instead of partners because more of me is not welcome in that relationship.

I’m not complaining. I’m observing. This is part of why I will sort of disappear from the Scottish social scene for a bit. I brought too much of myself in June and July and now I feel like I want and need to be accepted more fully as myself and that is not actually on offer. I am not going to reach a deep and meaningful level with most people here and it’s going to go quite poorly if I try. I don’t have the ability to absorb that level of failure over and over without flinching and I can’t flinch right now. I can’t look weak because that is when people attack the hardest.

I’m really scared and I feel desperately insecure. In a way this summer has been quite an adventure through what Noah and I moving back towards being polyamorous might bring up. Travel Boyfriend is a dear friend who entertained the idea of a walk on the wild side before figuring out it isn’t for him. Bad Timing is a selfish jerk who did not care that he was putting me in a bad position where my life would incur harm. I feel like acknowledging these extreme differences of what dating might bring up is important.

Noah and I are continuing to talk and negotiate because this is going to be a long and slow process for us. Luckily we are both starting from a truly advantageous position: we are wildly compatible and our relationship is really fun. It means that when considering the possibility of dating someone else we have to pass up on time together for it. That means the person has to be really special and not many people are going to land in that zone for us. We are intense weirdos and we freak out most people–that’s step 1. Neither of us can date someone who acts in destructive ways towards our marriage–that’s step 2. That’s not ok. If we tell someone about a relationship boundary and they are disrespectful that needs to be an immediate no. My life is a very carefully constructed creation and I’m not blowing it up for anyone.

I’m not confident that I will be as open to someone else as I was with TB. He coasted through showing up with a lot of history. He didn’t have to actively earn trust. He started out fully trusted and could only lose trust from there. That was maybe not fair? I’m not sure. It’s definitely not my default approach to new people. Usually people earn trust in painstaking increments. I suppose TB did, but he did it while running in the background and I wasn’t expecting it or demanding it of him.

Noah and I are talking very frankly about the fact that I shouldn’t have someone be more than a friend unless they have the capacity to be obsessed with me the way I need people to be.

A friend recently broke up with a partner because she felt like she was being used like a fleshlight. He said, “You feel better than a fleshlight.” He thought it was a compliment.

I live with someone who thinks my existence is magical and sparkly and worth devoting his entire life to supporting. Why in the fuck should I devote a lot of time to someone who doesn’t think about me much and who doesn’t care about me and my story and my skills and my life? That sounds pretty stupid to me.

I am not a person with whom one passes time.

Either you are devoted to me like your life depends on it or we are just friends who spend time together once in a while. I have traditionally enjoyed having sex with friends; I see nothing wrong with it. Not everyone I have sex with becomes a boy/girl/theyfriend. I have expectations of people I date. I don’t have many expectations of my friends. I take people as they are and I don’t spend a lot of time requiring that they care about me intensely. I accept the relationship they offer. I rarely ask for more.

I go out in to the world and I exist loudly and I see who reaches out to me. That’s how I find friends. I love my friends. My friends are people who appreciate me and love me very deeply. They carry me through life on a wave of devotion. The thing is, I have to accept that each person will give what they have to spare when they have anything going spare. It has to be the aggregate that carries me forward because I cannot depend on a single friend to be there to catch me. I have to just hope someone shows up. I get lucky a lot.

Jenny is amazing.

A lot of my friends are amazing. I have been caught and then passed hand to hand over and over. I trust that I will figure out how to build it again, it just takes time. It takes time and vulnerability and right now I don’t feel like I have a lot of resiliency to offer. I’m really scared and I’m really sad.

I have good reasons for both feelings. I am also full of joy. I am really and truly living the life I set out to live.

The funny thing about not gardening almost at all this year: literally my point is that I want to build a regenerating food forest that will thrive with neglect. I am trying to build something self reinforcing. In a way taking a year off is a great idea because I see more of what is trying to happen without my interference. That’s an important lesson.

Things with the kids are at a better place than they have been for a while, it’s super nice.

I can’t figure out if I’m being unreasonable with myself about how I’m dealing with the sexual assault trial. I want to stop feeling active anxiety in my body. I feel like I’m simmering in a low level panic attack a lot of the time right now. It is a lot of why I am consciously choosing to be anhedonic most of the time because it is that or feel too much of everything and be overly volatile and inappropriate. I need to be chill and calm and gentle and patient. Do you know what is hard to do when you feel existential dread and terror? Be chill and calm and gentle and patient.

It’s hard to learn when your brain is exploding with fear and anger. It’s interesting feeling this now after so many years of having my PTSD symptoms under control.

And I can’t exercise until October because of surgery recovery. Woo. Awesome to have all these feelings and nowhere to put them. Noah takes as much as he can. I write the ones I can. There’s still a lot left.

One of the ways I manage my expectations of friends is to not talk to them very often and always show up and act like no time at all has passed. I don’t bring a lot of my burdens to the relationship. I usually literally monitor time and make sure I don’t talk more than 50% and I usually try hard to not even get to filling half the time. I know other people need a place to express themselves and they don’t write. I do. I leave the pieces of myself on the internet that I wish I had enough intimacy in my life to share with real people face to face but that isn’t a reality in my life. It never has been. I think that is part of why I have such intense need to write. If I plop pieces of myself on the internet then no one can say I “forced” them to listen to me talk.

The difference between trauma dumping and being a writer is: you are not forced to read/listen to any of this. If you decide to spend your time reading what someone has to say about trauma that’s on you, buddy. That’s consent, which makes it not trauma dumping by definition.

I’ve been feeling really ashamed to write about myself publicly since I moved. I have a lot of weird sex stuff in my life. I have traditionally written it down because I’m trying to figure out how to practice harm reduction in my life. I think that is causing me harm. It is going to be far more scandalous here than it was in California.

Other folks would tell me to just be anonymous. No. That is acting like I have something to be ashamed of. It is acting like I am committing a sin. I’m weird but I’m not evil. I’m not doing anything that is wrong. A lot of it is non-standard and broadly disapproved of, maybe even for good reasons. Every rule has exceptions. I have been exceptional all my life. I don’t plan to change.

Not really feeling ok.

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I would like to delete social media. I would like to stop trying to make friends here. I feel lonely and alienated and unwanted and bad. I feel pointless, stupid, disconnected, and deeply sad. My big “going right” social connection for this year is something that I can have for a short time then I need to let it go. Past that my new connections are going pretty poorly. Hell, he’s not a new connection just a change. A short change before we go back to normal because no actually more is not a good thing.

I feel painfully lonely and like I am deeply uncomfortable with the idea of being in a room with anyone. I would like to rip my skin off. It’s not about any one thing or another. I’ve had to give a police interview about my sexual assault history. That was really deeply fucked up for me. There was being assaulted. There was being asked to leave a vanilla community group. There was a warm and wonderful possibility that floated by on the stream for a little while before moving off. Parenting is always hard.

Being married is always hard. Being me is always hard. It’s not one thing. It’s all of it. I would like a vacation from being in my brain.

What does the future hold?

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The last few months have dramatically not gone to plan on many levels. Everything has ended up being way harder. In a way that makes me feel sad. In a way it almost feels like a relief. I’ve been waiting for the results of the last round of “My efforts towards the first wave of people have either flamed out or settled into a secure relationship”. I now feel more secure and confident about where I should and shouldn’t be putting energy. I learned who actually likes me and who likes me if I can lie really well all the time and care about their feelings instead of my own.

It’s ok. That’s normal human stuff. I’m not angry about it, just resigned. I’ve been saying since I moved here that some attempts at relationships would work out but most would not. It’s turning out to be true. I’m not shocked or upset.

I am in need of resting and regrouping. I am desperately in need of a chance to refocus on the parts that matter the most. The only people who are likely to show up for me in my old age live in this house. It’s simply, literally, true. I’ve been looking outside my house a lot over the past few years in ways that have put me in a tough spot.

Heck, even reopening the conversation about polyamory. I am patting Past Me on the back for saying, “Let’s start talking about this when we have no chance of either of us going out on a date with someone anytime soon.” Yes, I have a lover-in-waiting but from the very first day there has been the understanding that if it turns out this would be a bad thing for my marriage we won’t do it at all. I’m pretty certain it won’t harm my marriage. What might it turn into?

I think I am going to have an old friend I love very much I see sometimes. It’s difficult trying to figure out what is the best path forward for all concerned. I would respond more to stated wishes of the folks involved if they were more willing to state them. Instead I am just flying blind.

I’m thinking about the series of steps relationships usually have for me: getting past the first date, 3 weeks, 3 months, 6 months, 9 months, and a handful have morphed and changed over much longer periods. In terms of roughly the number of people I have dated: 78% only get one date, 10% made it to 3 weeks, 5% made it to 3 months, 2% made it to 6 months, 2% made it to 9 months, 2-3% make it more than a year. I’m counting the ending point only. I break up with ~95% of the people I date by 6 months. That’s fucking dramatic.

I’m 3.5 months into courting Travel Boyfriend and I’m having a lot of feelings. I wouldn’t say we are dating yet, not really. But we are courting to see if there is the possibility of a relationship there that could be good for both of us. Noah is being patient and understanding and supportive.

Most humans take on jobs, tasks, and relationships without really understanding how hard they will turn out to be in advance. This is the human “normal” as a way to approach the future. If we knew how bad it would be we wouldn’t try. So in a way this hubris is important and great and absolutely necessary for the species. The trouble is, when you sign on for something not knowing how hard it will be you sometimes get yourself into a situation where you can’t finish something and other people suffer. That is part of life. That failure is part of life. I feel like it is the kind of thing where people learn their own limits through trial and error, mostly.

I have failed a lot of times. I am pretty clear about a lot of the scope of my limits.

I am a human with a lot of limits. I have to respect those.

I am very nervous about aspects of this relationship with Travel Boyfriend. The very best role I can play in his life is to push him through fixing the stuff that stands between him and seeming like someone who would be a really great primary partner for anyone. There are specific aspects of his life that make it pretty impossible for him to find what he says he wants to have. Every single one of those things could be changed with conscious effort. If he actually wants what he says he wants. They are things that would be hard to change completely on his own. They are things that are significant enough that it’s hard to get buy in from a stranger that the payoff off for the work will be worth the effort. Every relationship is a crapshoot. Everyone is operating at a deficit these days. Who has the energy to help other people work through their shit?

Amusingly I’m writing this while listening to the song that played in the strip club the first time he ever saw me with my shirt off. I was 18. It was a friend’s birthday. I was pulled up on stage by the dancers. I had awkward tights and shorts on under my skirt so I didn’t try to remove my bottoms. I was fine with the ladies taking my top off.

I have to stop and think about our old Theatre Director. (That’s now his official nickname.) I don’t think I have written about this much over here. After I moved to Scotland Theatre Director ended up back in Texas providing hospice care to his parents. He helped them die. I knew he was a bad alcoholic. Before either of his parents died he and I talked about how he really didn’t know what he was going to do when his folks died. He’d have to leave the house and go somewhere and that was a big question mark. I told him that when he had to leave he could come stay with me for 6 months on a visitor visa.

Eventually he did come after everything finished years later. He stayed in the studio. He had a lot of identity wrapped up in being “that guy”. That guy you know who you can always call because he knows how to fix the problem. Time and grief and trauma and addiction were all weighing very heavily on him. He felt the weight of the failures in his life very keenly. It went about as well as such an experience is going to go.

I worry a lot about people writing checks they can’t cash. I worry about doing it. It’s not that I only worry about people handing them to me. I worry about the balance I get in return for how much effort I am putting out. There’s no fair here. I have already written a lot of big checks. How much do I really have left in my budget? What is realistic?

I am incredibly lucky that Noah has been unemployed right now. I have needed a lot of support and he’s been able to provide it. That means I haven’t asked local people for help. That’s what makes people feel like neighbours. I really can’t. I don’t feel like I’ve done a great job at making friends. People say that I can ask for help. But I can’t. I would much rather wither clean away than ask for help from people who have not demonstrated a desire for my company.

I do asks things of my Bestie in town. She is carrying a very heavy load though and I don’t do a lot to make hers easier. We are doing the best we can through this phase of life together. She is the sister of my heart and I followed her across the sea and I do not regret that. I am lying when I say that I can only depend on the people under this roof. Bestie has been a fair and foul weather friend for 30+ years.

When Theatre Director was here what he really needed me to do was participate in a facade where he “helped” me do projects that I could do on my own. The trouble was, I can’t do those things alone. He wasn’t actually able to help very much. That got me into some bad spots with my body and he expected me to ignore my pain to assuage his ego. That was not a thing I could do. That really hurt emotionally on top of the physical pain. Theatre Director was not able to assess “This project is too physically difficult for us and we should not do it.” When I said that he did not want to believe me.

The kindest thing I can do is try to understand when other people are trying to write checks they can’t cash and give them the pretense of belief. Meanwhile I must mentally put the claim into the “this is a pie crust promise” bucket in my head. I’m not very good at this. I have to consciously fight my inner fury about being clearly lied to.

It is hard that people don’t know they are lying. They mean it when they say it. They don’t know what they are promising and they don’t mean what they actually express most of the time. So much of the casual discourse people have in life is full of casual half-truth promises that have no intention behind them. That’s hard. I got hard dumped as a friend this week. It is stinging a bit. Ah well. Move on.

It is scary trusting someone enough to put time and energy into them. I don’t know how much this is social anxiety rebound from how much social time I had in June, how much is PTSD avoidance after the sexual assault, how much is surgery recovery, how much is (fill in the blank).

I just know that right now I feel absolutely terrified of risk. I have a lot to lose. If I don’t do the next few years right I will regret it forever. When I hit the end of surgery recovery I have to start doing a level of support work my kids aren’t used to. They are choosing tasks that are frankly obscene and in order to make it possible I am going to support them like they took on something that hard.

The thing is, doing it myself is faster and fucking easier and they have learned the skills. They will be able to get their cleaning deposits back someday. It’s time for them to focus away on other skills. I’ve always said this would come.

Hell, if the kids notice that with proper negotiations and exchanges of kinds of work I can be a lot easier to live with maybe they will do their chores more promptly in the future when we renegotiate? It’s a dream.

If I can understand clearly where someone’s limits are then I can understand with compassion where they are making pie crust promises. My life is going to require a lot of that very specific compassion of me over the next couple of years no matter what I do.

So what do I do? I complicate my life extra with something ambiguous and with a high potential to hurt a lot. I am scared this might end up in the loss of a dear old friend because one or the other of us does something unforgivable. It could happen. It wouldn’t be the first time in my life it went either direction.

The most likely outcome is a few fun holidays and then wishing him well on the rest of his life. Sure, it is having a really melodramatic long lead in and everything. I am too old to make rash decisions based on sex. I can’t withstand a lot more casual damage. I need to act like I am fragile. I need a melodramatically long and involved courting process before it is a good idea for me to give someone the opportunity to hurt me. My body is fragile. Someone needs quite an education before touching me is a good idea. There is a lot to communicate if someone is going to have enough information to make safe choices with me.

Over the next few years I think my dating opportunities will be few and far between. I think I will have very little to give and a lot of needs that I will be blatantly ignoring because I don’t have the ability to take the risks required to fill those needs. Making friends requires social rejection. I am bound and determined that I am going to know most folks in town before I ever go out on a date. I don’t want to date strangers ever again. I’ve had some success, but look at those numbers.

That’s a lot of fucking failures.

Are they all failures? Were any of them failures? Or did they just run their course and we moved on? I like to say that the great part of dating a lot of different people is you learn a lot about what kinds of things you can and can’t compromise on and that’s very useful.

Noah and I courted for six months then eloped. We weren’t dating when he showed up out of the blue and asked me to marry him. It’s a longer story but not for now.

How to measure time with someone I have loved for 25 years? TB is a very good friend. It feels more important than ever to make sure I don’t hurt someone negligently by being selfish and short sighted. Trying to figure out what is the most good for the least amount of cost is hard. There are so many variables out of my control.

Maybe I should just thank my lucky stars that TB waited this long to start getting his shit together because I get a chance to have a short term positive relationship that ends when it is a natural time to grow past it. It won’t be a failure. If the point going in is that it is going to end fairly soon then I can grab all the good I can for the amount of cost I can bear. I will have to be realistic to myself about my priorities. I am going to have to be realistic about how much rejection I can handle. I am, predictably, feeling it as a wave of rejection right now.

I have a lot of people counting on me and I can’t let them down. That means I need to limit the things I add to my life that hurt me. That’s complicated.

*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.

Vulnerability

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It is an unavoidable fact of dealing with me that the more off-kilter, the more threatened, the less secure I feel the less able I am to be demanding. I think it is part of the reason that I end up with friends who are so intensely, demonstrably loyal. Anything short of that and I just walk away.

I feel shitty about the degree of mind reading I need from people. “I am fine” is the first sign that I am not ok. If I am having a medium-challenging time I will say “Oh man. I have so many good and bad feelings.” If I am actually having a good time it will be “This is awesome!” “Fine” means I am doing very very very poorly. If you don’t know that, well, it means that people feel surprised when they find out how badly I am doing.

I am fine right now. With all that entails.

There are times when my choke chain is the thing that makes me very secure. I know I am shiny enough for Noah. So shiny he doesn’t even want me to sparkle at anyone else and he doesn’t want to sparkle at someone else. I am enough.

It is very easy for me to feel slighted, disrespected, and unwanted. I don’t like that about myself. Most of the time I don’t take it very personally or act like it is an affront–it isn’t. Mostly I am fine with the fact that I’m not much of a “real person” in other people’s minds. I keep people out at arm’s length because I need it to be ok that they are slighting me and disrespecting me. I can tell myself that they don’t want me because they don’t particularly know me and I am not going to let them get to know me so it’s fine that it’s out at a distance.

Trusting people takes a lot. Believing that people value me is very hard. Mostly I assume that other people can’t value me more than I value myself and it’s all my own fault I am not loved more.

Not being shiny is so deeply tied to shit with my mother. I wish that I didn’t interpret the slightest whiff of “not that special” as I should disappear and leave. I wish that my brain didn’t fill in that beginning with, “You were born unwanted and unloved and you will die unwanted and unloved.” It is so hard to believe that anyone loves me. Less hard with Noah than with other people. But if his level of devotion is the bar then no, I won’t ever believe that someone else loves me.

Sometimes I wish that I hadn’t decided to have kids. I would be done by now. I wouldn’t have to keep hurting this way. I wouldn’t still feel in the pit of my stomach that of course I am not esteemed or valued–I am a worthless whore.

Establishing yourself in a new place means accepting rejection after rejection after rejection after rejection and I must keep a smile on my face. I must say that I am fine.

Is it a broken coping mechanism or an adaptive, necessary one?

I don’t know. But it is such a basic part of dealing with me that I am pretty stunned when people don’t understand it after a long time of knowing me. I feel like I write about this specific type of deceptiveness a great deal. If someone is close enough to care what I write about (the horrid slog that it often turns into) then how can they say that they had no idea that I would say that I am fine when I’m not fine? It’s a mystery.

It is also the reason I’ve been crying. I don’t feel seen. I don’t feel valued. I feel like discarded trash. I feel like there is no point in sharing vulnerability slowly, gently over a long time because when the rubber hits the road I am going to be roadkill. Because I am not willing to slap an intimate person hard when they are crossing a boundary. I do that with people who don’t matter.

Instead I will say I am fine. I will go to my room and I will cry as quietly as I am able. Eventually I will come out when the fact that I am being a lazy, worthless, broken tool and I am not doing enough labour to justify anyone continuing to have me in their lives overwhelms me.

In my brain the deal is: work or die. No one has any interest in maintaining a worthless bitch.

Another Day In I Am Too Tired For This Shit

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My bed is 7’x7′. How in the hell does a child turn sideways then fall off the bottom?

Yesterday MC had their first visit for assessment to see what sort of neurological testing will help find the correct diagnostic labels so that I can narrow down my research on how to support them better.

It was a good visit but, I think, not what the lady had planned. She had a sheet of questions to ask. Instead of going through those questions MC went through a prepared list of the things they have a hard time with. She flipped her paper over and scribbled like her life depended on it. She scheduled an appointment for me to come back alone and fill out those questions about developmental history. 😂

I had talked MC through how I handle appointments as an adult who does not have anyone to report on childhood milestones/attainment. I forgot that MC is not having my life. Whoops. It’ll be fine.

MC is automatically getting 3 separate assessments based on clinical presentation in this appointment and the intake lady hinted about others that might be relevant after we can actually go through developmental history with a fine toothed comb.

This is how seriously Stanford took EC. I was deeply worried I would not find a way to access similar granularity of help for MC/YC. Stanford did *not* take MC seriously. Stanford asked MC 20 yes/no questions and told me I had a perfect little boy I didn’t need to fix. That was really frustrating. This time the lady watched MC almost vibrate off the chair and noticed “Do you find that you are ever able to sit still?” Only if the kid is in a severe dissociated state because they are imploding under the weight of their own anxiety and it is combined with mutism. No. They can’t just hold their body still like a “normal person”. It is not possible for them.

I am feeling a lot less nervous about this process now. The lady also took it very seriously when I said I have two other children who are also clearly neurodivergent. I don’t know what will come of her making notes about my other kids as well. YC isn’t even on a waiting list at this point.

YC’s flavour of neurodiversity is pretty easy to accommodate within our already heavily modified for neurodiversity lifestyle. EC is doing really well with the structure we maintain. MC needs… something I’m not doing and I don’t know what. I am grateful that the NHS is trying so hard to help me figure out what I should do.

The lady looked really pained when I talked about my own history of being beaten up in school after school and how I was not even a tiny bit surprised when people beat up my children in school. Autistic people are magnets for bullying behaviour.

Human beings often want to hurt people who are different. It’s a thing. A really sucky and terrible thing. I was glad that she showed absolutely no sign of believing that it would be best for my children to be in school. *phew*

Stanford Child and Adolescent Development was quite adamant that there is not a better learning environment for EC than what I provide. They had tiny tweaks to suggest, but nothing major. I hope that the NHS can help me find the tweaks that will give MC also the best learning environment for them. Right now there are a couple of areas that concern me and I don’t know how to fix them. I do need outside guidance.

It’s kind of funny that EC doesn’t mostly overlap with my learning difficulties. His troubles are out in front of me and I can study them without feeling emotionally connected. I just need to support. MC and I share some of the same struggles. The ways in which I have never managed to overcome some of my own challenges inhibit my ability to figure out how to help them make progress. I need a more objective view.

But first I need to go run 4 miles. I’d rather eat glue.

I hit the wall this week. I think I was lowkey sick over the weekend when the kids were all very sick. I kept exercising and working the whole time. I don’t feel like I’m still dealing with a fever but my body wants to tell me to go take a long walk off a short pier. I can’t even tell how much this overreach is about physical load and how much is emotional load.

I feel like my soul is hurting. I miss the physicality of all of my California friendships.

It is already getting much colder and I am not feeling great about the change. My body is hurting a lot. I felt like the tiny increase of warmth of spring was a huge massive welcome change and I was going around outside in skimpy clothing because I was overheating. Now the same temperature range is making my bones ache.

I am not sleeping enough. I am rarely laughing and that can’t be good for me. I feel somber and like I have a flat affect. I feel numb. How can you feel numb and pain at the same time?

I really need to go run. I feel like that is an absolutely outrageous ask just now. Oh well. What I want is not important. What matters is what I do.

Emotional hangover

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Big goals

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I feel bad sometimes when I read other people with EDS/chronic pain talk about their experiences. There are places on my body where if you came up and poked me fairly gently I would drop to my knees from how overwhelmingly it hurt. If I take even the most casual inventory of how my body feels I am always in pain. I just keep doing shit anyway. I show up feeling half dead from exhaustion and I move through sheer force of will. I feel bad because I do not believe that it is healthy that I can do this, exactly, it just hasn’t been very optional for me. I have been in pain since I was a small child and I had shit to do and I had to just get on with it. I don’t know why I feel like I am fueled by rocket fuel.

I am clearly a bad example for my little zebra. Some days he is clearly in intense pain and he gingerly forces himself to keep doing his chores. I ask him why he doesn’t rest when he is in pain. “Well you don’t.”

They do as you do, not as you say.

There are some big goals this year. My big kids asked if we could go on one-on-one fun trips this year. If I am very very very lucky these will be the only big trips of the year. I’m crossing my fingers. One is soon and one is at the end of the year. Both involve me needing to ramp up my fitness in order to manage them while having any kind of a good experience. I am happy that the trip with middle kid is first because they are not starting off with lots more fitness than I have. Phew. I get to pull them along through training work rather than running and feeling half dead and like I can’t keep up. Eldest walks like his dad–they both walk like they are a half breath away from falling into a full sprint. That’s it: they walk like they are doing a run/walk paced run. I don’t walk like that.

MC and I are heading down to London in late February. They want to shop and see some historical sites and pretty parks and maybe a museum. My expectation is that we have to be Disneyland fit in order to have a good time (expect to walk 10 miles a day). I am trying to pull them in the direction of 4mph but frankly 3mph will be plenty fine for actually doing the time in London. When I walk as slow as they prefer my hips get really stiff and I feel like crud so we do have to pick up the pace a little. Luckily they are super motivated and excited. We have drawn up a slowly progressive plan for increasing our mileage and our speed. I am gratefully referencing the book Blacksheep gave me for running training.

I am thrilled about this experience with them, specifically the training, because we are getting to talk a lot about how what we eat and how we sleep dramatically impacts our ability to manage the long walks. I am introducing tracking and talking about evaluating how we feel on different days after different kinds of choices. I’m not controlling all the choices–just requiring reflection on them. They are starting from a place where 5 miles a day is not a lot or extreme so it’s not as much of a moon shot as it seems. Realistically if I asked MC to walk 10 miles today they could; it would just take almost 5 hours. 5 miles is a 2-ish hour walk right now.

Oh hey, it’s snowing again. This year has been so intense for snow–by far the most snow of any of our years here so far. That’s funny because this is our fourth winter and the snow is getting more common and hanging out longer with every passing year. Jenny said it barely ever snowed here! (In her defense the 10 years before we arrived had fairly low historical snow falls.)

As we are training for these… of course we had a big bike wipe out yesterday and MC got a bruise on their backside they are going to be feeling for a very long time. I rubbed them down 3 different kinds of topical analgesics and said we will be doing a lot more on the treadmill until it heals because they will walk awkwardly on the ice and that’s dangerous. Also: no more bike rides unless it is over 5. That sucked.

I love this whole winter hibernation thing. I feel constitutionally suited to having things just shut down for months out of the year so I can work on stuff internally and in my house.

Have I mentioned that I stopped taking the ADHD medication and I feel like my brain is hopping around like a grasshopper on speed?

So MC and I are going to London for a long weekend in February and EC and I are going to Paris, with probable stops in Antwerp, Amsterdam, and probably some city in Germany but I’m not sure which yet. We will be gone around two weeks. Yes I know that these trips seem unfair in terms of size and balance, but EC and I are going to be spending the entire day every single day going from museum to museum (although I suspect the Louvre will be a whole day on its own). He wants to take pictures and notes on as many kinds of art as possible in that time period. To be fair: he knows a fantastic amount about art history and already knows all the periods and most of the masters and who they worked with. He is going because he can already rattle off the names of hundreds of paintings and he wants to see them in person. This is school.

You can see why the kids do not enjoy traveling together very much. After the trip to Texas last year EC vehemently announced, “Remind me never to take a family vacation with any of you people again.” That hurt my feelings. Dude! IT WASN’T A VACATION!!! It was a trip to see a dying relative in a place that our entire family finds overwhelmingly stressful and difficult. There was no way for that trip to go better than it did and realistically it went about 300% better than I expected even with luggage that didn’t arrive for five days. My mother in law was nice for the whole trip. That was outstanding and I can just express gratitude.

Nevertheless there was no part of that journey that was a vacation. Just no.

Between the trip to London and the trip to Paris I am going to be ramping up speed. I will already be in better shape for distance. I’m going to whisper it here first. I want to run the 2023 Loch Ness Marathon. It’s the 1st of October, over 6 weeks before the trip to Paris so I will be nicely recovered after the race. I’ve been working on the treadmill for a few weeks so far in addition to the outside time with MC. I am doing shorter speed work in a controlled environment because I like my knees very much and walking on ice and snow is one thing, running is another.

It’s January now! I am allowed to pull my garden planning information out and plan out my work for the year. I told myself I had to wait out December and just focus on getting through the days. Woo!

I’ve been saying since I got here give me five years before you judge my garden. This is winter number four. I suspect that this coming year’s work is the last of the bones. Of course the deck around the apartment and the balcony off the lounge are both rotting and getting close to dangerous. This house is nonstop. Now I need to leave enough travel space around the house for whoever eventually replaces our windows (many are broken and in bad shape) in the next few years and I can fill in from the edges. In my head I see Noah’s aunt’s property up in Oregon. She has a gorgeous homestead that could probably feed her year round if she didn’t think preserving food was boring and a waste of time. Ha. Instead she feeds the local wildlife. Ok.

My goal in the long run is to be able to walk out of my house and find something to eat every day of the year. Sure a lot of that will be in the polytunnel during the winter but I’m ok with that!

I’ve already added one hazel this year (two other sub-types of hazel are coming but they haven’t arrived yet), two grapes, and a Cherry Silverberry that I am ridiculously excited about. That on top of scores of canes in previous years, a bunch of rhubarb, strawberries, cherries (5 different kinds!)… It’s going to be absolutely amazing. In 4-ish more years I will be able to tell people what kind of produce from my yard will be in season when so they can pick their visit around what they want to eat. That makes my heart soar. I’m doing this.

I may be creaky, in pain, grouchy, and difficult but I am also lucky, hard working, ambitious, determined, and incredibly successful at reaching my goals. I am the luckiest bitch.

The class should be able to run without you

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I just thought of something. A long time ago, when I was doing an assistant teaching gig in a middle school, my mentor gave me a book about how one of the most important things you can do as a teacher is to have thoughtful systems for how things will be done throughout the class day that you follow absolutely rigidly. This is so that going through the experience is so rote that you don’t even need to tell them to do whatever the next step is after a short time–they know.

I have been doing very poorly on that lately. As I say often to my oldest when he is trying to solve a problem, you are getting stuck in the weeds instead of looking at the big picture of the forest.

I am not modeling coping skills for living in a neurotypical world as a neurodiverse person in a conscious and deliberate way. I am hiding to do all of my regulation and that is opaque to kids.

It’s kind of interesting because we do talk about other aspects of mental health. Every so often a child (ambiguity there) will start acting out in some way and we will have a chat where I remind them that we don’t have easy access to therapists here so we have to actually talk to each other and figure things out. I acknowledge that I am not their therapist and I never can be because I am not a neutral party who is entirely on their side. I have my own agendas and biases so that means I am not the same thing and I’m not as good… but I am what is here. So far these sorts of conversations have ended with someone feeling like they are a little bit more ok and that’s all I can hope for.

But I’m not showing them how I organise information in my house. I narrate it quickly on rare occasions and that just isn’t the same thing. It’s not fair. I’m not always regulated the way I should be and I have a lot more experience being taught how to regulate myself. We don’t always figure these things out intuitively.

When did I learn these skills? I was always a real sucker for a school planner. I filled those bitches out. That allowed me to information dump like I do in my blog in the most nascent of forms. I blame you, middle school. My kids haven’t really had that experience. We do use Google Calendar but it is not the same. It doesn’t force you to organise your mind every time you look at it. You have to go turn on a computer/phone and check it. Yeah with a paper planner you have to open it and look at it but that part was always the easy step for me. I compulsively had the fucker out. Every hour or two I had new shit.

I am feeling especially pent up on the swearing front. I’ve been feeling so bad about all swearing around the kids that I’m doing way less and feeling weird about it. Also: conservative people in this community will judge. So, hello anxiety.

So yeah. I need to do that. Come on Krissy, get your shit together.

We’re All Mad Here

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I was reading an article that included the phrase “Mad Pride” about how mental illness has been perceived by society (mostly the US/Canada/UK) over time. It made me stop and think hard about how much my life has changed. I am in the closet now in a way I was not in California. There were times in my younger years where I would keep some things under wraps (I was militant about limiting sex life conversations with some groups of people) but mostly I didn’t hide any aspect of myself to such a degree that anyone and everyone couldn’t find out if they tried even a tiny bit. 

There is a big difference between “I don’t share personal stories about my sex/romantic life with students or homeschooling parents but I write about it explicitly on my public blog” and “I took my writing private so that someone would need at least a basic understanding of the internet archive in order to find out anything about me, I stopped writing about myself publicly on any topic that might be controversial and I no longer bring up or mention most things about my past and I am actively evasive with every person who does not have connections to my former life.”

It’s different. I am feeling more comfortable in the community. I feel like I probably do not have to remain quite this guarded permanently but I feel intense gratitude towards myself that I allowed myself this runway of time to have a place in the community where I am already seen as stable and competent and fairly well educated, especially in topics that are not well understood already here. I am starting to have that boost to the ego experience of having people say, “Oh Krissy I wanted to ask you about something. I don’t understand why ____?” When that something is often related to an aspect of interpersonal communication. I’m also getting more requests than I can take when it comes to organising level responsibility for different community groups or associations. And folks are asking me how I have taught my kids (thing). That’s definitely one of my sweet spots for feeling like I am not an imposter who should shut the fuck up.

It’s not that I think everyone should do what I do… that would go poorly. What I really appreciate is when people are interested in the process of how I figured out what was right for me because understanding that process is the bit that can help other people. They will have a different right answer in the end, but maybe seeing how I made decisions that align with my values will help them crystallise what their own values are so they can feel confident in their own choice. I like talking about parenting philosophy, not parenting choices. Because we are going to make different choices and that’s absolutely great. It’s mandatory. It’s as it should be for there to be the delightful variety of folks that this world needs. But the philosophy behind parenting is a place where you can discuss motivation and intentions and you can learn from each other without getting into a pissing match about technique. 

Technique is hard because it’s a minefield of traps for not understanding your own privilege when you frame what you do. Noah says that society has as much justice as it can afford. It’s complicated because often a family has as much justice as they can afford. And from family to family that is such a complicated and loaded concept that oh goodness just no. Can’t.

Anyway. The article. It goes through who is allowed to be mentally ill in public now. Who benefits from hashtag campaigns and public awareness movements around mental illness? It’s a short article but provocative in a way I agree with. I am so deeply aware of the privilege I enjoy at this point in my life. 

But this privilege comes with costs too. Costs I could not have imagined when I was on the far side of that particular privilege slider. 

I’ve been watching a lot more sci-fi/fantasy shows and movies recently. I am particularly drawn to things that are depicting ways that people live with an understanding of there being completely opposing truths/narrative/existanses existing all at the same time. 

So, I like to talk about money. If you have been here for a while you have seen the arc of that from poverty to (I think) fairly substantial wealth. When you are new to a community you only really exist from the moment they meet you. Your past is invisible and unknowable. Ok fine with google they could look me up but they don’t. I write all over the fucking internet. I have one handle I use on every site and I am so trackable it is definitely what a security expert would frown upon and give me a lecture for. I am consistent in part because that is my absolute only talisman against being called a fraud. My story is too whack-job. But I gots receipts, bitch.

I have suppressed so much of that over the past few years. I have been so very silent. It is taking a toll. 

The pendulum is going back and forth on so many different dynamics in my life. In one way I feel like my kids just got out of a big disequilibrium period (or at least some combination of them) and I am slamming my way into one with full force and fury. There are a whole bunch of things that are not working and I need them to change. 

I say over and over that disequilibrium is a necessary feeling for everyone because without it you probably won’t grow. You will get complacent and comfortable and you won’t want to face the terror and uncertainty and pain that comes with change. I have to get angry to have the force to demand change. I have to feel like I will wreck big things if the change doesn’t happen.

I am doing a med change. Amitriptyline and Lisdexamfetamine are not working for me anymore. There are enough negative symptoms with using them that I just cannot. Sex just hasn’t been happening. I’m not happy. I’ve been intermittently explosively raging for quite a while and it’s just not ok. I don’t like me. I need Patience, and I don’t mean the drink made with a whole lot of bourbon.

It feels silly to say this but I want to drink less. (It’s silly to say because Noah and I both have recently put in MASSIVE orders of alcohol.) I got variety. I got stuff that I want to invite other people over and say “I have x and y for you to taste test.” I want a social gambit, I don’t plan to consume much of it myself. I is making friends. 

I have a teeny tiny bit of regret about buying this house because it is huge and has been really rough to repair but I can’t tell you all about it because a Shorty has just informed me that there are gingerbread pieces waiting to be made into a house and I am all out of time.

Repentance and Grace

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We often have to sit down and talk about the fact that we knew therapists were not available here like they were in California so we have to help each other. We talk about the problems with that because a therapist is 100% on your side and a family member has their own agenda. I try hard to consciously and deliberately say out loud when I am saying something that is more from a therapy point of view (this might fuck me over but you need to think about it anyway) and when I am speaking as a parent and a member of the family unit (this will sound like I am not on your side… well… I am in as much as I am part of a system and systems work to preserve themselves).

This morning was such a morning. Puberty is terrible and it destroys your centre of gravity. It changes how you think about yourself, how you perceive other people’s behavior, and how you emotionally respond to things that are upsetting. You get this whole reset and it’s rough. It being rough is in no way shape or form a negative comment on any particular person. It isn’t your fault that this is hard. You are not failing or being bad and you are definitely not crazy even though this process feels so completely out of control. It’s a nightmare and there is no amount of money that could talk me into going through it again…. and I’m a hardy soul.

We talked about how other people remembering things differently is not exactly the same thing as gaslighting. Gaslighting is deliberately and purposefully fucking with someone’s reality as a way of controlling someone. Having a brief conversation that is very important and memorable to one person and easily forgotten by the other person is not gaslighting. It’s sucky! It’s frustrating! It can be super challenging to deal with! It’s not the same thing as gaslighting.

So then we get into: when you feel betrayed/upset/let down how can you ask for a repair attempt in a way that will actually get you what you want? It’s not about “you shouldn’t feel this way” and I’m not tone policing you and saying that you don’t deserve the repair attempt unless you are perfect. I’m saying that we are all human beings. Human beings almost always feel defensive when someone blows up at them. Sometimes the issue is so important that everyone must be held to working it out even if someone was blowing up and that makes the process hard. Sometimes the issue is fairly small and you won’t get what you need unless you play the game. It sucks. It is reality.

Then we came up to the fact that every single one of us messes up and is the person who makes an agreement then fails to keep it sometimes. No one is the bad one and no one is the good one. We all have to learn how to manage each others personalities and it’s a challenging road. We all have to learn how to manifest our frustrations and our difficulties and still live up to our own internal code for who we want to be.

Then of course we did a derail into how many, perhaps most people, are told what their moral code should be. Maybe their parents instill religion as the path to righteousness, maybe someone just imposes secular beliefs but in most families most parents believe they have the right to be the Authority to their children. Noah and I came out of our childhoods believing that each individual person has to be their own Authority and parents do not have all the answers. So we push our children towards figuring out their own beliefs as hard and as often as we can. That’s why you have to figure out how to live up to your own sense of right and wrong.

I said that sin is when you believe in a rule deeply and you break it anyway. People do that. It’s part of the human condition. You don’t have to be religious or have the rule imposed by an outside party in order to sin. All you have to do is betray yourself and everyone does that. That is where the concept of repentance comes in. You repent when you figure out that you fucked up and you need to bear the weight of that and you need to figure out how to move forward with being a better person. It’s a hard and never ending task. The older you get the more you have to repent because that’s just how life goes. No one lives up to their own rules whether they are self imposed or outside imposed. It sucks.

And that is where grace comes in. Grace is when you look at someone who has done something shitty in your direction and you decide to forgive them because you know that you also do shitty things and you believe that this was an error and not malicious. Grace is allowing people to come back from mistakes and sometimes grace involves choosing to overlook the crappy way someone expresses a problem or a solution and just accepting that their heart is in the right place even though they are still a giant turkey butt.

We are all flawed creatures who are trying to cope in a world we didn’t create and we can’t control. It’s hard. It hurts. We will all get wounded and we will all bear scars from our own mistakes and the mistakes of other people. The more grace we give ourselves and the people around us the less we will have to repent. The more love and acceptance we give to the people around us who are doing the best they can the more we will get that same gift back.

To this end I will do everything in my power to speak gently when I want to scream. I will try again when I want to quit. I will repeat myself when I want to never ask again. Because I love you and I want this with everything I am. This is my chance at a happy family. I will not always do the right thing but by golly I will keep trying.