Tag Archives: processing

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.

So this is what is going on with me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am not fucking interested in disabling my children.

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

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

Cheezits mother trucker.

So I’m sorta categorising my community efforts as:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s not about you, David.

Compartmentalize, look for your contributions

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I am not being fair. I am conflating my feelings about a lot of different people and situations and I am bordering on cruelty. I don’t mean in the “everything is all my fault because I suck” way.

When I rant ad nauseum about chosen family letting me down that is taken in very general ways and implies things about people who are not in the group I mean to be speaking about.

I have so many conflicting feelings about the Godmamas. I did not behave entirely, totally honorably there. I liked one of them and I grudgingly, barely tolerated the other. I judged their relationship in ways that were none of my business. As a result the one I didn’t like very much quite deliberately got in between me and my friend. I asked to support M after the head injury and her wife told me she would let me know when that was ok. Then when I contacted M after a while she was very upset I had left her alone. But I did behave in less than supportive ways towards their marriage and it was fair that M’s wife didn’t like me very much. She wanted me to treat her like an authority and respect her despite her having beliefs that were very counter to mine and her being a lot younger than me with very little relevant life experience or education on the topics she wanted to tell me how to manage. I was a dick about it. I don’t think I am blameless. But other than accepting direction that really didn’t work for me or pushing past boundaries that were put up I’m not sure I could have done more.

When I’m ranting about chosen family I am talking about the various people who told me that they wanted to be my mothers or fathers. There were more than a few of them. For a while I collected Daddys. My leather mom wanted me to do things for her and show up for her events and make her feel special. On holidays or in times of crisis she had real children to take care of and I was supposed to go manage my own life. Dad explicitly told me that he wanted to be in my life but I couldn’t ever expect him to do anything to help me because he has biological children to support. When he needs money he comes knocking on my door. To the tune of tens of thousands of dollars and many requests.

I’m talking about people in the poly community who told me I was family and then when I stopped fucking them they never called me again.

I’m talking about Sarah. So. So. So. So much about Sarah. My baggage around Sarah could fill several jumbo jets. I feel like an exploited resource. I feel like my help came with strings of expecting something back from her and that is fucked up of me.

I can’t even begin to parse the ways my expectations of Pam have been inappropriate. I just can’t right now.

I showed up in Scotland with so much pain. I feel full of rage and disappointment and distrust. It’s not a good head space for dealing with Jenny. She has tried to help in the ways she perceives me asking for help while not fully understanding the intricacies of what that means. She has misspoken. She has apologized.

I have not been able to accept that apology nor have I been able to be there for her. I feel like I have been a user. I have felt judged and I have done a fair bit of being vicious in my head. I have mostly contained that viciousness in my head, but not perfectly. I can be so mean.

I am upset about a lot of people and I am taking it all out on Jenny. That is horribly unfair on a lot of levels.

I can go through our history and point out times when I felt belittled by things she said. Did she intend to belittle me? Did she intend to insult me? Did she feel negatively in her head?

Didn’t matter. I felt it. I reacted as if that was her point. I am assigning her motive and intent when I have no way of knowing what is going on with her. I know that she fairly regularly puts her foot in her mouth and says things in ways she doesn’t mean. When she does this in my direction I act like it is a vicious attack and totally intentional even though I see it as a pattern in her entire life so it clearly can’t be about me.

But I make everything about me. I act like everyone is mean to me so that I can be a victim of everything and everyone.

That’s…. really shitty and unfair.

I think I project my dislike of myself onto other people and then get angry with them and act like I should cut them off for being mean to me. I want to get chances from other people but I very much act like other people don’t deserve grace or forgiveness. I am selfish and cruel to people who have done quite a bit to show love for me.

For all that Jenny’s words sometimes… definitely lack grace and can feel very hurtful her actions aren’t vicious. When I hurt myself trying to help Sarah years ago she showed up to help me. When I needed support after the suicides in my family she showed up. When I have directly asked her for help with almost anything… she showed up. She did start out judging me when she didn’t know me and over the years she has learned about alternative lifestyles and she has been supportive of my behavior. She offered to throw me a party in celebration of me hitting a three digit body count. That’s… not exactly the action of someone who thinks I am bad for doing that.

But I judge her so harshly. I assume so many negative things about her intentions and her motivations and that sucks so bad.

I can think of years of times when I have over reacted to things she has said and I have been nasty in response to feeling hurt. In the vast majority of the times I can remember being hurt by her words she has apologized.

She’s spent a lot of fucking time apologizing to me and I don’t act like that matters very much compared to my towering feelings of rage because how dare she offend me.

I feel like such an asshole.

I am not great at setting boundaries with her. That’s a fact. I have been thinking that it is kind of like sexual boundaries with Noah. I don’t set them until I explode with rage and act out in ways that hurt him very badly. I mean, I tried to set them but I wasn’t very clear and I wasn’t direct and I hurt him.

Given how much time I spent talking about wanting and needing a break from my kids it doesn’t seem like a cruel and vicious attack that Jenny pushes me to send them to school. I absolutely act like I need to martyr myself to my children and she pushes back on that idea with force. I act like I need to martyr myself to bullshit repetitive tasks that get on my nerves and she pushes me to consider that I don’t have to do that. And I get really angry with her.

Because being a martyr to my children and boring tasks is part of my core identity? Then I get mad at people who don’t affirm that view. That fucking sucks.

That was where I got to on day one of trying to process this. Now it is the start of day two. I spent yesterday arguing with people I used to respect about UBI and how to survive the pandemic and I got told how stupid and ignorant I am. I’m waking up in a bad fucking mood.

How can I be both a martyr to my children and a big fat meanie pants who expects so much work out of them that other people gasp and tell me that it borders on cruelty? (Uhhhh I have cleared my chores expectations with experts because I am a fucking coward.) Other people think it isn’t worth their time or effort to teach kids how to do things because it is easier to just do it themselves and therefore they think that how I raise my kids sounds super high effort and not worth it.

But my Middle Child (9 years old) made dinner last night. She made a green salad, fried potatoes with leeks, and venison with spring onions. Then she thought it would be good with a wine sauce so Noah talked her through how to do that.

I think the effort I put into teaching my children skills is paying off very much!

Sure, an adult stood nearby the whole time to say things like “this is when you should seasoning, what herbs and spices do you think would go well with this?” and “you need to scrape the bottom of the pan pretty hard or you will end up with a burned layer that will taste bad” and “let’s talk about how to make a sauce…”. But she did the work. We are still around for supervision and advice. My nearly 12 year old Eldest Child does not need such advice or supervision anymore. Sometimes I feel nervous and I stay in the room anyway and keep my mouth shut… but that kid is more competent at cooking than I was at 21. I didn’t have anyone around to teach me.

My kids know with surprising sensitivity the difference between a well swept floor and a crappily swept floor. They know what a good mop job looks like and they can critique the hell out of someone who does a bad job (i.e. their sibling).

They can go through whole maths curriculum books and ask the occasional question and otherwise do the work correctly 90% of the time.

They can go to foreign countries and plop down and talk to people and have interesting conversations. They are getting better and better at asking questions instead of treating themselves as a traveling monologue show. They are curious about people and they are learning how that goes.

They are currently doing a grid layout of the yard for science and looking up what plants we have so that they know what to weed in the future. They are digging a pond (sometimes with whining) because they want our yard to have one. (This was their project suggestion!)

Their unit project is coming along nicely. We are working on it fewer hours a week at this point because with the pandemic anxiety, frankly we are all super exhausted and we needed to trim our academic hours a lot and that’s ok. They have made sample meal plans–checked what that means against the jobs they gave their families, checked it against the dietary needs of the families (they really like giving the people in their families disabilities and food allergies?) and had to start over from scratch with an entirely new understanding of how calories and carbohydrates play in people’s lives. They understand what insurance is and how to use it. They have learned a lot about mortgages. They are having to talk through interpersonal dynamics around family layout in order to explain/justify how things would work in their house.

In short, they are learning what it means to be a grown up and they are doing it at fairly high speed. I am really impressed with how much they have learned in a short period of time. This project covers maths and nutrition and handwriting and typing and internet research as a skill. Hell, one kid is having to learn the layout of a town in the middle of Australia because that’s where she wanted to put her family and that means she’s learning about central Australia’s supply chain and what it means for people who live there and where the kids in the family are likely to go to college.

I feel pretty deeply offended by the idea that my way of raising someone will retard them. Do you know what is coolest about all this learning? Less and less of it is hands-on for me. I sit nearby and I answer questions and I give suggestions about where they can go to find their own answers. I critique work and explain why it isn’t the solution to the problem they were trying to solve and I tell them to start over from scratch over and over and over again.

But sure, let’s go with the idea that she just meant that my kids lack the social skills to deal with the school environment because they have been blessed with not having to deal with bullies.

I am sure that there are adults in this world who have to deal with school-yard level bullies. I have had many jobs. Noah has had many jobs. Most of the people we know work. I have not had the experience as an adult that primary-school-type-bullying is a thing that extends beyond that age group. Are there some stilted people in the world who try it? Sure, of course. But you can route around them once you leave school. That’s the important part. In all of life there is one period of time where you are locked in a room with bullies and told to not inconvenience adults with complaining about it. Why is that socialization desireable or something to tell me my children must acquire? Why is that something to bring up in nearly every conversation to say that my kids must learn it? Why? Because it is what you experienced? Because it is what you choose for your child?

I’m not teaching my kids to follow your religion why would I pick teaching my children that an artificial education environment is mandatory?

I mean… I actually support public school quite a bit. And if I had to work I would help my kids work through how to survive in that environment. It’s not that I don’t understand that sometimes it is unavoidable. I don’t think everyone has the correct personality or education to home school! I think schools must exist! I think my kids are privileged (insert vaguely negatively-judgemental word because despite making my kids rich I still have negative feelings about the rich) who get to avoid a major trauma that is inflicted on the vast majority of “normal” people.

There is no fair.

My Middle Child is quick to tell me how unfair it is that she has to do chores because when she went to school almost no one in her class had any chores at all and they mostly got more allowance than her and had almost no limitations on screen time when they got home!

I don’t give a flying fuck.

Everyone gets to parent how they can afford and how they see fit.

I can afford a lot of time and energy spent on my kids. Do I spend a lot of money on them compared to average? Well they have a lot of learning materials. They have gotten to travel a lot. They eat very well per my definition of eating well. Do they have a lot of toys? Not really. More toys = more shit for me to clean up and feel angry about. Do they have fancy clothes? hahahahahahahaha they are still wearing third-hand hand-me-downs from the kid down the street in Fremont along with a few cheap replacement items from when we traveled. Do they have expensive electronics? Well, we did upgrade to a nice desktop unit that is shared by the whole family when the hand-me-down 12 year old laptop stopped being able to upgrade to modern operating systems and could no longer run necessary programs. The other kid is still on one of Noah’s old work laptops from several jobs ago. They do technically have phones, one has an old phone of mine where the battery dies in less than 24 hours and the other kid has a phone that was new about five years ago. Neither kid has turned on one of these phones since we stopped traveling because we have our paper books now and they don’t need them. These phones were always about being reading devices…

So they are definitely part of the modern world but they are not tremendously spoilt in the “having stuff” department. They got mocked at school for how out of date their stuff is. I don’t give a shit. I’m from Silicon Valley. I’m not impressed with trying to keep up with the technical standards of anyone because I deeply understand how messed up that process is.

I don’t think 7 year olds should walk around with phones. I think the city we walk around in is about as safe of an environment as can exist and children need to be able to be away from the control of their parents. My kids go on walks and runs without me. They know when to be home and they bloody well make it back in time.

If the school stuff was being pushed because there was the perception that I need a break… well… there are lots of more creative ways to manage that.

Slowing down to the pace of this place and no longer having a bunch of friends I feel like I “should” be seeing has done a lot to lower my ambient anxiety. That is a break by itself. In exchange for the cats (which apparently belong to the kids and not to me) each older kid does 5 hours of babysitting a week so that I now have a reasonable amount of time kid-free. I did join hook-you-up-with-a-babysitter-sites when I moved here. Guess what I got? The privilege of paying for a matching service and a chance to send emails to lots of people who didn’t respond. Basically my entire experience of searching for childcare was duplicated directly from California. Fucking cheers.

But between the big kids helping with the toddler and Noah not having a full time job… I’m exercising independently more. I have more time to vegetate. I’m getting a lot of stuff done that makes me happy. The big kids are pretty close to where I always wanted them to be on independence for school work. When the big kids faff about and refuse to get their chores done when I ask they get to do fuck tons of extra chores until I’m not annoyed anymore and I get way more down time.

I am taking more of a break. And it didn’t require school. So pushing school as the answer to my problems does not feel like a very honest explanation.

So saying now that you never meant medically retarded you meant school dynamics would be hard and you were just trying to help me get a break… feels like gaslighting.

Breakfast is ready and the day must begin. I will come back to this. I need to figure out what the fuck I am doing with this topic in my brain. I need to fully process this so I can decide how I am moving forward. I need to separate how upset I am about this topic from how upset I am about everything else in the world and I’m totally failing by keeping it in my head.

The boat

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I don’t care if it is a ship instead of a boat. It was an interesting cruise. The highlight was the acupuncturist. She is hands-down the most effective acupuncturist I have ever worked with. I am pretty sure she is the most effective medical provider I have ever worked with. I’m not in pain. I have a few places where I feel a little bit stiff and a little sore, but not pain. I usually have to do fantastically heavy drugs in order to feel this good. I’m really pleased with her work. And she wasn’t expensive for what she did.

I spent a lot of the trip processing stuff with Sarah. There is a lot I have not been willing to admit to myself about how bad that relationship was for a lot of years. I am really struggling with dealing with that emotionally. She used me.

I think this is going to negatively impact my ability to trust people for a long time. I have been very willfully not seeing the problems because I didn’t want to lose her.

I am feeling a little bit nervous about this perpetual travel thing. I have not been as nice to the kids as I should have been. I am struggling. For a long time I used Sarah loving me as proof that I was worthy of love and that allowed me to feel gentle and like I had some love to give. I feel like the bottom opened up beneath me. I feel unworthy of love and like I am bad. And it makes me feel mean and vicious. I don’t like me very much. That’s never good for my behavior.

I wish people wouldn’t tell me that I am inspiring. I talked to a few people on the boat about life and stuff. There was one guy in particular who was born and raised in San Francisco. He had a lot of questions about what being homeless was like. He had a lot of questions about why I hate the rich the way I do. He could not understand why I believe that billionaires are evil. After I talked long enough, he got it. It took some talking though.

I have a sore in the middle of my forehead from the acupuncture needle. It’s kind of funny, the acupuncturist constantly smacked me in the center of the forehead. She told me she was waking up my third eye so that I could accept the blessings of the universe. It’s funny that I am walking away with a scab there. It’s like my third eye really doesn’t want to open.

San Francisco is so cold. We were warm just a few days ago. And we will be warm tomorrow. I used to think that I like the cold more than the heat. But my bones ache.

{heavily filtered} Triggers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m going to talk about triggers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s going on in my head lately.

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I haven’t been posting much of substance lately. This is largely because my laptop screen is dead and I am trapped in the office and Shanna only gives me short periods of time where she is ok with me being in here. Challenging. I can read in short bursts but I can’t write like that. Thus I have been posting lots of banal one or two sentence things on facebook.

What I am mulling over and trying to figure out how to talk/think about is the next step of processing abuse I am working on. I have spent almost the entirety of my adult life dealing with the large scale sexual assaults in my childhood. That took a lot of work. That was a big deal. What I have never really gotten around to is truly examining and processing all of the small scale abuse and day-in-day-out neglect and awful that I experienced. Thing is, now that I am doing this parenting gig that is seeming much more important. When I talk about not wanting to pass on the cycles of abuse I am not worried about sexually assaulting my kids. I’m just not. That’s just not something that will ever be much of a temptation for me. (I’m kind of repulsed by people who are two years younger than me.) What I need to worry about is how to not tear down her sense of self. I need to worry about how to create a positive atmosphere where Shanna (and TBD) are free to become any person they want to become without my baggage being dragged along behind them. As we are getting deeper into toddler-hood I am noticing more and more of my baggage that way and I need to deal with it now. This can’t wait. Part of the problem is, I don’t really have the time or mental space to work through this stuff. I have to create it. I can’t just float through and ignore this. This is mandatory.

I don’t think I am being a bad mother, but I can see bad habits starting to pop up. I am not ok with Shanna crying unless I can see a direct reason for it (that I approve of). That’s not ok. When Shanna expresses an opinion I don’t like (dude, she’s a toddler) I come down really fast and harder than necessary. I need to stop thinking/talking about how I would like to hit her when she is frustrating. That’s completely unacceptable. I’ve smacked her hand a couple of times out of pure reflex and I don’t like it, but I don’t feel like that is a huge problem long-term. What is a problem is that I talk about wanting to hit her pretty frequently. That’s unacceptable. That is using the threat of physical control and it’s not really much better than a judicious spanking occasionally for serious problems. It’s probably actually worse. It’s trying to instill fear. I have to stop. That’s not ok. I don’t want my daughter fearing me. At this point she doesn’t really understand and it’s very clear that she doesn’t fear me. I want it to stay that way.

Having emotions

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Yesterday I had some really intense feelings of anger/frustration. They happened mostly because I was tired.

So, Noah and I did a bunch of running around and errands for most of the day. By about four when we got home all three of us were tired. I wandered back to the bedroom and laid down with the munchkin. She wasn’t ready to admit defeat and sleep though. She has been kicking me a lot when she isn’t in the mood to be in the bed. I started to feel angry and put upon at this. I called to Noah a couple of times and he didn’t answer. So I went out to the living room and he was asleep. Instantly I felt enraged. I wanted to drop the baby on him and tell him to deal with her for a while. I wanted to grab something and throw it at him (not anything that would hurt him…like a pillow…).

But I didn’t. Instead I went back to the bedroom and laid down with Shanna and felt very sorry for myself that I didn’t get to have a break and he did. I decided that I didn’t like how I was feeling so I started trying to reframe. Shanna will only be this young and attached to me for a relatively short period of time. Right now it feels like forever but it really won’t be. At some point in the future she will prefer Noah and that will hurt my feelings too. I thought about how even if I did wake Noah up he probably wouldn’t be able to keep her settled for very long because she just doesn’t with him so I would be woken up again not long after going to sleep anyway.

So I held her in a position that is annoying for me, but she loves. She cuddled up and started nursing and quickly fell asleep. I curled around her and slept pretty well for three hours. I woke up feeling physically better and really happy that I didn’t do anything I would regret. I had my feelings and I moderated my behavior too.

I feel rather disgustingly proud of myself. 🙂

{my shit} Interesting feelings observations.

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

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

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

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

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

Shit

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The last few days have been a serious roller coaster ride. I’ve been forced to look at things and talk about things that I try not to acknowledge. And the end result of so much of it is that I have even more people who feel qualified to tell me what I should do to “be better” in some way.

I would like to take this moment to ask the universe to keep any and all advice away from me for a while. Don’t tell me what I can do to handle ‘x, y or z’ better or what I can do to be happier or be more positive. Fuck you. What I could do to raise my general happiness is punch you in the face. I don’t think it would go well. So, seeing as that is the only option I am interested in, I am better off avoiding the whole thing.

Why does feeling depressed lead to defensive leads to blind rage? Rhetorical question. Really, don’t answer it.

{my shit} roller coaster of therapy

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For a variety of reasons I have had therapy with different people on: Saturday, Monday, Tuesday, and I have an appointment for today. I am feeling very very overwhelmed and I think today is going to consist of me telling this (new) person today that I am not going to be continuing to see her.

Short explanation: I was handed off from one person at the Y to another and I am not happy about it because it happened without my permission or even knowledge. 🙁 We have shopped around for a therapist to see together because we are running into a couple of walls and seeing those new people has resulted in a vast overload of processing and I’m feeling very very burnt out and drained. No more processing. 🙁

{my shit} mommy called

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I called my mother and left her messages yesterday and this morning. She called me back tonight.

My mommy forgives me. My mommy told me that none of it was my fault–I was a little girl and I did nothing that needs to be forgiven. We talked about the things I feel so guilty for and she told me more about what was happening and stressed that none of it was my fault.

My mommy forgives me.