Tag Archives: self-analyzing

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.

There is always a cost

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I am so worn out and I am trying to both rest and catch up and it strikes me that they are diametrically opposed. My growing zone has an annual last frost date somewhere between the last 4 days of April and the first 5 days of May. There was snow on the ground last week. Because of the world-wide problems with insect die off it is widely considered wise to wait until the average temperature is 10C or above. This is slightly hilarious to me because only July and August have night time averages above 10C… the average is 11C. Does that mean we shouldn’t ever disturb gardens here? It’s a thought to ponder. (Waiting until the temperature rises is because bugs hibernate when it is cold and if you go out and tidy up your garden you may well kill off a generation of wee beasties unintentionally.)

Tasks I need to perform:

  • install bike pulleys
  • install trailer pulleys
  • build a better compost unit (my pallets are all rotting and sagging)
  • sift my compost pile and distribute the lovely material around my garden
  • get some fertilizer on my hydrangeas and all the food plants
  • finish taking apart the old shed for boards
  • build the potting benches for my poly tunnel and the raised beds I want to have in there
  • weed, always weeding around the fence borders because the ground elder is fierce
  • get more wood chips and cover more grass with it because by golly in about 4 years I will have subdued it enough to make a serious start on alternative ground covering plants
  • get more seeds because I only had like 5 packets of veg seeds left, and they were mostly gone in any case, and I need to get cracking on starting this year’s plants
  • figure out storage for the mountain of costumes I brought home from Texas
  • respond to cafe owner about holding meet ups for the youth group
  • schedule a walking munch and the 101 workshops
  • clean my dang bathroom
  • tidy up my room because right now it is a royal mess
  • restart the subscription orders from the grocery service
  • do a bit more pushing with the mum bike group to get some activities scheduled
  • figure out when the group camping trip is happening and get myself organized for that
  • install the trailer hitch on the new bike so that I can have towing capacity when I have extra passengers
  • get YC more time out on the balance bike because she has nearly outgrown it and I don’t really want to buy a bigger one I want her to progress to pedals, dangit
  • schedule with a freakin roofer
  • schedule with a plumber for the apartment bathroom (the sink is leaking)
  • schedule getting the retaining walls repaired around the property because it is past time
  • I really should be reading books because, dude
  • don’t forget the damn skin care routine
  • oh yeah I should eventually have sex with my husband
  • all of my kids could do with some one on one time because they are all feeling super needy and emotional
  • I really need to organize group bicycle skill training for my family because my instructions are not adequate to help all of them know what they need to know
  • I need to organize specific training in bike maintenance because this is causing a lot of fighting and fussing and it is driving me insane
  • I should submit data to the national database about when my fucking fruit trees are in flower because tracking this stuff is important
  • the XR people would really appreciate it if I took on more duties, as would the allotment people
  • oh yeah, I also need to schedule some physics experiments because my kids really don’t understand some basic elements that would make cycling go better
  • I need to sit on my kids more industriously about working on their school work because that is literally one of my main jobs
  • I haven’t touched up the sloppy paint areas in my room I was going to come back to
  • I want to move the white board from the kitchen into my bedroom so I can use it to track forking lists like this
  • I also want to change a bunch of how I store things in the kitchen/dining room/laundry room because the current set up is inefficient, sloppy, and difficult to keep tidy
  • I should also be more industrious about exercising and eating vegetables and going to fucking sleep at a reasonable time

Yeah. Fuck me. I still have almost constant headaches and neck aches from the concussion. The sensitivity to light is really bothering me but I have to push through it anyway. I am still feeling stupid and like I am not retaining new information. I feel unmotivated and weary and frustrated at basically every moment of every day.

Visiting Noah’s family was intense. I feel like I understand the dynamics a bit better. I have much stronger opinions about what I would guess for various folks’ diagnostic labels but I try not to say those out loud too much because I am not an expert and I am not seeing any of these people in any kind of professional capacity so it’s a dick thing for me to call out. However, it helps me decide how I should respond in terms of my own behavior and as long as it is my opinion and judgment and it exists in my head and I’m not trying to influence other people I think it is ok. It’s funny to me how much I can now go, “Oh yeah. I’m trying to place a rules system around this topic because that helps me understand it.” I don’t want to make other people agree with me or change… heck I don’t plan to see any of those people again for 3-5 years. I will barely communicate with them through rare letters.

I believe it is important for me to think about things in this way because I have to think in a long term way if I am going to manage the historical trauma my children have inherited. I happen to be a big believer in the epigenetic nature of trauma. The things that happened to their parents impact them. The things that happened to their grandparents impact them. The things that happened to their great grandparents impact them. That said, neuroplasticity and resilience count for so very much. And let’s not discount the benefit of various levels of privilege.

I don’t need to try hard to control other people. I need to know what I need to think about when it comes to my own behavior and what I am modeling for my children. That’s what I am doing here.

I mean, I can worry about the gardening and the social life and the academics and the house maintenance… but what I am actually fucking doing here is figuring out how to raise people who can come from a fairly intense amount of ancestral trauma and thrive. Their mental health, their resilience, their ability to grow and change and find a better path is what I am fucking doing with my life.

I lose sight of that. I get mired in the weeds (literal and figurative) because it is easier to put my head down and just do whatever is in front of me. When I do that I invite inconsistency and acting out unconscious patterns. I invite the repetition of behaviors that have already damaged their bodies through their inherited genetics and what the fuck am I doing; I know better. I don’t need to shove them through survival. I don’t need to create lists of tasks so long that no lifetime can contain them all and then convince my children that they are inadequate if they aren’t working their bodies into dust.

Life is not about grinding yourself in a mortar and pestle. It’s just not. There are costs to those behaviors and attitudes: impatience, lack of understanding, lack of dignity, unkindness, addictive behaviors, unhealthy bodies and minds.

Noah’s grandmother survived, but the costs her children paid were so severe that they cannot bear her presence. There is duty there, some of them still serve that duty, but there is no love. Her grandchildren can barely tolerate her. Her great grandchildren are split on despising her or on not knowing her. She accomplished fairly impressive things. What was the cost? She lies on a bed alone in a room day after day. Most of the people who have ever known her have no interest in her company. Was what she accomplished worth the cost?

Noah’s mother mostly has good relationships with her children. Noah fleeing the nest as early as he did and with such intensity seems to have made a lasting impression. She worked on her behavior. She came to therapy late in life but she did get there. That’s something. Is she perfect or healed or a person I would want to spend much time with? Oh goodness no. But the difference between how she acts now and how she acted when I met her over 15 years ago is dramatic. Not different enough for me to leave my children alone with her, even though she did ask politely.

I have stopped looking at the long run. I no longer weigh and measure how I behave based on the relationships I want to have with my 30 and 40 year old children. I am sloppy. I am messy. I am inconsistent. I am pursuing short term goals at long term cost. That is stupid. I am not modeling what I think should be modeled. I am not showing how to make better choices with a joyful heart. I am dragging myself through a series of tasks and I am short tempered and impatient. I don’t think I am being vicious but that should not be the bar. Frankly I am not happy with how I have behaved for a while. I’m distracted. I’m snippy. I am not performing the behaviors I believe are necessary because I am wearing myself to the bone on things that matter so much less.

This is not what I want my children to remember. Do I think they need to have some challenges and some difficulties in life in order to build resiliency? Of course. That doesn’t change the fact that I don’t want to be outward focused. I want to be focused in on the people I made commitments to.

Krissy, you know who you are supposed to be. Go fucking act like it. Or you will pay the cost.

Limitations

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What does it mean to live in a place? For most of my life I lived more in a general geographic area than in a place. Then I had my time in Fremont–nearly 13 years. I spent a lot of time in Fremont but I still spent a lot of time leaving Fremont. I traveled around the world while living there. I probably missed well over a year of being in the city in that time with all the trips added up. When I was there, depending on the year, I spent a lot of time driving south or north or west to spend most of my waking hours with other people. I was not content in my skin or in my place in the community.

I feel a bit like a ping pong ball here in this small town. I want to pop out and learn more about the community. I want to get to know people. I am someone who likes to know everyone and so far I know precious few. But I also want to spend an awful lot of time at home. I want to paint and garden and learn how to sew and cook and bake and take care of chickens. An awful lot of my push to go out into the community stems from feeling like I have to create a network for the kids. I don’t know how much I want it for myself. I can’t even tell because it is all mixed up.

I am afraid of looking for community for me. I know that the self I am allowed to bring with me here is a carefully edited version. I know that I have to mask my difficulties and challenges as much as possible and when I can’t mask I need to go home. I have challenges and they have to be utterly invisible. I really suck at that and things leak out. Then people feel uncomfortable and it is my fault.

I am afraid of trying to making friends. I know I have Jenny. We are figuring out how the size and shape of boundaries needs to work between us so we can maintain this relationship that is very important to both of us. I love her so much and I don’t want to wreck everything.

I feel like I always wreck everything.

Do I fear abandonment? Enh… not exactly. The funny thing is: you can do a fearsome amount of damage to a person and a relationship and they still won’t abandon you. They will keep coming around year after year because there is something they get there that they feel they need. People submit to being hurt long after they should just walk away because their fear of being alone is far greater than their sense of indignation in putting up with someone who wrecks everything.

People are weird.

I don’t fear being alone. I fear being the source of pain. I fear being the one that someone hears in their head when they feel bad about themself. The trouble with being a highly reflective mirror that shows people who they are is… reflected sunlight can burn. It can burn all the way to the bone.

I fear causing damage that cannot be fixed while creating a bond that means someone will never want to walk away from me. I don’t leave because I’m running away before you do. I leave because I know you won’t and someone has to think you don’t deserve to be treated that way.

Which is ego, right?

I always come back to Karen laughing when I said I had low self esteem. It wasn’t a chuckle or a soft laugh, no it was a full belly guffaw. “You have the highest self esteem of anyone I have ever met.” Damn. That doesn’t sound like a compliment. I do have an incredibly high sense of what I will accept from people. It’s not even that I feel like “I deserve better” so much as I am not going to put myself into a position where I am going to explode and I know what makes me explode.

I’m tired of exploding. I want a smaller life.

I wrote a letter today; my first one in a long time. This wonderful lady has written me so many letters since I moved she outpaces all other mail from everyone else. I talked about my garden because it is clearly very important to me. I am stunned by the sheer variety of plants in my yard and I have not yet catalogued them nor grown to understand them fully. (Apparently one fucker is connected to tics with Lyme disease?! Ok I don’t like the poky thorns that much anyway.)

What do I want to share of myself going forward? I am not defined by where I was nor what happened to me. I am what I do. I cultivate a garden. I work hard at reducing my impact on the earth. I try hard to be creative and possibly even inspiring. I invite people into my little world as much as I can. I have to share what I have to share.

I want to be a positive force in people’s lives. Maybe it will happen and maybe it won’t. All I can do is try. I have to work within my own limitations.

I want to be done painting by November. If I could be done with all the indoor painting by then it would be absolutely fantastic. That’s 17 weeks. If I could manage 20 hours a week on average that would give me 340 hours of work.

All I’ve got to say is thank fucking goodness I am mostly done with the evil ladder work. A little bit is still to go high up but it’ll pass quickly. I have faith. I hope that all the evil high stuff will be done in another 10 hours. I think I’m 48 hours into the hallway. That totally discounts the time I put into the kid doors during the last big round of painting. But hey. Gotta just count from somewhere.

I’m running into the limits of my body and the patience of my little Shortie. She is so damn done. But on we press.

There is no way out except for through. If I get the painting done this year then I can just… leave it be. I won’t have more of that project hanging over my head. That sounds so absolutely lovely. Then gardening and baking and cooking and sewing can become my projects. Chickens. I want to sit around and read in the yard.

And lots of fully functional bathrooms. Woo.

{my shit} Thinking about depression

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I have been told all of my life that I am a negative person. I can’t count how many people have told me that. At this point I realize that the label doesn’t actually fit. I am not negative; in fact, I am very positive. The reason I have so many mood swings is because I have always had very good reasons to be upset and sad but I try to bounce back. If I weren’t fighting to be positive I wouldn’t have nearly so many mood swings.

Everytown has brought up some really heavy duty processing for me. Last night Noah and I were talking and I told him more of the pieces. I told him things I have literally never said out loud in my life. I feel raw and exposed and scared. I also recognize that I am very deeply depressed and if I am honest with myself I have been since the scary scene in late December. If I really stop and look at what has been happening I can see big patterns: I’ve significantly changed my eating habits for the worse, I’ve all but stopped moving let alone exercising, and I am hiding from people unless I have no choice. This has resulted in me gaining weight and losing muscle so I am progressively more unhappy about how I feel in my body. Ok, so I can see this happening. Now I need to figure out what to do about it.

I have been trying so hard to not acknowledge that I am falling into this pit because it feels like I am letting Noah down. But I’m here. And I need to deal with it. For the record: we are still in that “don’t give me advice” week. I don’t need meds; I have crawled out of this before by myself and I will do it again. The first big step in dealing with a problem is admitting you have it. Ok, I’m depressed. Time to start working on fixing it.

{my shit} Therapy homework.

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It is interesting to me as I sit here dispassionately looking at the many escapist ways I have of not getting to thinking about what I don’t want to think about. I hyper-notice the cleaning that NEEDS to happen (emphasis added to explain degree of obsession), and I need to go eat. Cleaning house was always one of the few things I could do to make my mother happy. I am also back to a feeling I haven’t had in a long while. When I am completely overwhelmed by my emotional state I cannot eat enough food to make me feel food. My stomach aches with hunger even after consuming a decent sized meal. Given how much of my life I have spent feeling this way I must stop and realize that I actually have a decently quick metabolism. Hm. But I am babbling because I want to procrastinate. I need to stop, but I really don’t want to do this.

Oh, this is going to be one of the few times I really ramble on and on as if this is a paper journal just for me. I don’t blame you if you don’t want to follow my ramblings and ickiness. And just to prove how much you really don’t need to read it: Here. It’s not even on your screen.

Continued thoughts

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I had a thought on the way home about why I might be feeling so raw about the Noah stuff.

For the vast majority of our relationship it has been very acknowledged that he was much more into me than I was into him. This doesn’t mean I wasn’t tremendously into him… but there was an imbalance. That imbalance gave me security and power. Not sure when, but sometime recently I realized that I was no longer in such a position cause yeah… I’m pretty freakin obsessed with him. I am crazy about my husband. I think I let myself fall far and hard when he and I actually got married. And we have spent a lot of time lately going over what we want our future plans to look like in terms of me staying home with kidlets for a good many years.

So, what this means is that fairly recently and fairly suddenly I have gone from being rather independent and in a position where I am establishing my own security to needing his cooperation to ensure continued stability in life and in the not too distant future I will be in fact, financially dependent on him.

Cue panic attacks.

Maybe this is why all of a sudden it means the End Of The World if I am not the Best and Prettiest and Most Wonderfulest EVER. I’m scared. If we keep moving forward with current plans, in about 19 or so months I will be more dependent on another human being than I have been since I was 15. I’m terrified. Maybe this is why the idea of poly is causing me to wake up with night sweats. I’m so afraid of not being independent and yet there are things I want that preclude being completely independent.

Luckily, Noah is the most open minded and wonderful of men and he is trying very hard to be supportive as I struggle with this mental shift. So grateful for him.

{close friends}Tracking Mood

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m so scared.

Happy Birthday to me

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Hm. This is one of those times to be reflective like. I’m 25 now. What in the hell am I doing with my life?

I have a brand-spankin-new husband who makes me deliriously happy. I have a great boyfriend who is quite cheerful about my various neuroticisms. I have a job I love and a the best chosen family ever. I have a nifty new car! I have an unfinished but already nifty tattoo.

I have a house. Legally half of this puppy is mine now. It’s an ok house and has potential to be a great house with some labor. I’m ok with that. I have almost no bio-family left to speak of. I have no free time nor extra energy for most anything.

I’m happy with most of my life, but there are big unavoidable things that are making me very sad. I’m not done with my masters yet and that is being hard for me. And as much as I am sad that I don’t get to see all of the nifty people in my life more I kind of feel like I need to cut back on what time I do spend with people if I am going to be as good at my job as I want to be and if I want to have the house I want to have. Being an adult is hard.

I’m not yet as good at managing my stress levels and my emotions as I want to be. I’m worlds better than I used to be, but I’m still not good enough. I still spend far too much time lashing out at Noah and that just isn’t ok. I have to have better control over myself before I have any right to have children or business doing it. I don’t want my kids to deal with the uncertainties of mood that currently run my life. I have some hard work ahead of me to get this into control.

I am not doing enough to be in as good of physical shape as I want to be in. I don’t know when or if I will ever get back to dancing. I am already too swamped with time commitments. It’s kind of hard because I have a very clear picture of where I want to be in life and it seems like it isn’t that far away and yet if I spend my entire life feeling this way I will always be discontent with myself and I will never be particularly happy. I have a hard time seeing the happy making things and instead I focus on the negative too much. This is yet another thing I need to work on.

Oh, and no one in my family knows I am married. I still don’t know how to feel about that.

Oh, and as far as I know–no presents this year. That is kind of an interesting welcome to adulthood. I’m not upset about it. Just… kind of noticing coldly.

Bitches, boundaries, and dirty little secrets.

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When I was a kid my mother was fond of telling me: “We keep our dirty laundry in the closet” meaning that we do not discuss the horrible things that happen behind closed doors. I internalized this message and didn’t tell anyone I was abused for years. When I was 15 and had a series of breakdowns I came to the conclusion that I could not live by her directive. Instead I decided that I would have no secrets. I would do absolutely nothing I was ashamed to talk about generally. And if I ever did find I had something I was ashamed of I would talk about it as publicly as possible because then there would be nothing that could be held over my head. I can never have someone emotionally blackmail me with something I have done. I have accepted a small change in this policy in the past couple of years as I have slightly gone into the closet for my job. This has been incredibly emotionally stressful for me and paved the road for me to start keeping other things private. I recently had to look at myself and my life and what I am doing and I realized that I have a dirty little secret. I have something I am deeply ashamed of and that I am hiding from people. When your behavior is at odds with how you claim your behavior is that means that either your opinion of yourself/your ethics is out of date or you need to change your behavior. Given that I am still proud of my basic code of ethics that means that I need to undertake the very difficult and painful task of living up to it.

So here I am. This is my confession. This journal entry is not really filtered for a variety of reasons. I need to say these things about myself in a basically public way because that is how I operate when it comes to things that are bad. I cannot hide them. I debated with Noah long and hard the merits of doing this in a public way and essentially this is something that I need for me. So a lot of people who read this journal are not really used to my harsh self-analyzing posts so this one may be really hard for you. I invite you to skip it if you feel that the messy inner workings of my mind are things that do not need to be part of your life. And given the nature of gossip, if anyone chooses to break the basic confidentiality implied by my journal please at least have the respect for me to tell me that you are sharing this entry with other people. I feel I deserve that.

So here we go–a rather unhappy and dark picture of me.

Conflicted

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I’m all weird and angsty right now and there are a bunch of reasons for it. My stomach hurts quite a bit and I’m sure that doesn’t help my emotional wonkyness.

This was a very rough weekend. There were high points that were quite wonderful, but a couple of lows that really blew. Cut in case drugs or my personal angst do not appeal.

The pretty, the spiritual, and the ouchie.

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All in one. Isn’t that convenient. So a while back I started talking about how I thought that I was moving towards being ready to get a tattoo and because I had in my head a picture of what I wanted. Well, here is the start of it: http://people.tribe.net/justsomegirl/photos/0984ce8e-c235-4542-b889-1d77d41e4c57

Ok, the story:
It’s a girl standing in front of a willow tree that happens to be bearing apples. Stay with me for a bit. The willow tree is meant to represent one that grew in front of the house my family lived in when I was about 9. That is when my brother had just been released from the hospital after being in a coma for a long time and going through minimal rehabilitation before he was shunted off to permanent live-in facilities. During this period my brother spent a lot of his time trying to kill me because he hated me for being normal. He had a traumatic brain injury the likes of which rarely manages to survive at all, let alone recover to the degree he did. But he was never “normal”. He had ataxia (spel?) which means that his entire body shook at all times and due to the trachiotamy (spel?) he didn’t speak in anything resembling a normal fashion. He really hated me. So I would climb into that tree and cry. My mother was rarely home because she worked long hours trying her very best to keep a roof over our heads. My sister was about 22 and had a very young child (

So there is a girl standing in front of a tree. A tree that has all the meaning in the world to me. A tree that in many ways saved my soul, and maybe even my life some days as Tommy chased me with knives. The girl in the picture is me, but specifically also not me. She is just a girl. She is someone who is also searching. Around her legs are brambles that have cut her legs. In the brambles are the things she has had to work through: hate, anger, and self-doubt. In the tree, attached to the apples (I actually didn’t 100% intend the Garden of Eden imagery it just kind of happened) are banners that will show what she is working so hard to get to. She is reaching for a fruit that bears the word, “forgive”. Others in the tree are: hope, love, trust, faith, and lust because these are all things I want in my life more than I can say. They aren’t things that are easy to reach for. In fact, I have to work very hard but it is worth all the pain and discomfort the process entails. She is naked because she no longer has shame. There is nothing behind her that she is going to hide herself from in any way.

There is hope ahead.

So that’s the story behind this tattoo. Today while I was getting it I discovered that I had no fucking clue how much such a thing was going to hurt. OHMYGOD. And I process pain in two basic ways, I make noise or I move around a lot. Guess what I can’t do while getting a tattoo? Yeah, no moving. So this left crying and yelling out my agony. This was fine for the first part as my artist had wanted me to come in before shop hours because he is leaving town this afternoon. When people started arriving for their day their hostility and irritation were palpable in the air. They yelled back more than once, “When are you going to be done with this one?” and one woman when walking by stated, “No one else would put up with this crap.” It is my nightmare come true to have people be angry with me for processing pain in the only way I know how. This is something I have some serious baggage about. So I started crying nearly hysterically because I had to be silent and that lead to some really deep emotional pain on top of the physical pain. We stopped early. That is why there is no ink on the top part of my back. I couldn’t work through the pain in such a hostile environment. We have agreed that all of my future work will start hours before the shop opens so that there will be no disapproval in the air. He is a fabulous artist and I am really glad I chose him, but his co-workers kind of suck. When we were done and I was crying and crying he held me close and stroked my hair and told me that it’s ok to cry. It’s ok to let out pain. I really like him. He sees my fight against being honest with my pain. I’m glad that if I am going to have continued agony it will be with him guiding me through it.

Stress

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After lots of talk about all the crap I have going on in my life I have come to the conclusion that much of my stress is self-imposed. I feel like should be doing something or other. Well, I need to cut it out.

So I have decided that dancing is the first thing to go. I love dancing, but I haven’t been able to go and I am beating myself up over it. I need to stop being upset. I will make it again eventually, but until then I need to not put myself down for it. I don’t think I will actually do faire or fair this year as anything other than a customer. 🙁

I’m not going to Portland in June. Until I leave for New York I will be hanging out at my house reading and swimming and just generally catching up on rest. If you would like to come over, feel free to ask but I’m not really going to be making any social events. Saturday the 10th I have a mellow pool party during the afternoon/evening and Sunday the 11th is a family bbq (please god let my mother be civil) and Saturday the 17th I have some super secret plans and other than that I am free. I don’t really want to go out. I need a break.

The people who have been waiting to pounce on me for a date–I’m sorry but I just don’t think I can do it. If I’m not up for it by now I probably won’t be anytime in the forseeable future. Eventually I will want to go hunting again and I know who is interested. I’m really content with Noah and Spot for the forseeable future. 🙂 Yay. Marcie may have it totally right–two relationships are all that are really sustainable.

Moving is hanging over my head like the sword of Damocles. Must figure that out soon. The idea of moving stresses me out almost more than actually moving does. It’ll be ok though. 🙂 Somehow.

I think that is all that I can let go of right now.

{therapy} Shrink visit and cathartic play

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Yesterday I went to see my therapist and she opened with, “I want to give you the quick and dirty answer to whether I will see your mom first: no. Now let me explain…” We talked about how she wouldn’t exactly be fair with my mom so there isn’t much point in having the session happen. That made me happy. This conversation actually took a little bit. 🙂 Then I said: “I’ve had an eventful two weeks! I found out that my step-mother died and that no one thought I would care so they didn’t tell me. I called my mom for the first time in six months and drama ensued. I had an enormously stressful trip to Chicago which included some huge triggering things and a blow up at the end and such fucked up travel that we left a day late and almost returned a day late. My car blew up. My apartment flooded.” Her response? “Wow. You’ve been busy.” Smartass.

We spent a while talking about the situation with japlady‘s dad. Whether she wants to admit it or not he has a condecending tone of voice and that is hard for me to swallow ever let alone when I haven’t slept well in days, haven’t eaten a meal that agrees with me in days, have been in majorly stressful situations over and over for days, and just generally am away from home so I feel kind of off-balance. In talking about my reaction to him we couldn’t come up with anyone he reminds me of exactly. Yes, the situation japlady lives with is similar to what my father would have been willing to do me but it never actually happened so I don’t know if that is much of it. I know that I hate how he treats her and I hold a lot of anger towards him for that reason. (Yes, japlady doesn’t believe the anger is warranted–but when has that stopped me?) It is huge and complicated and messy. We also got around to the part that the only thing I really dislike about japlady is the name dropping and her father does it more/worse than she does. So I probably resented not only that he was doing it but that he fostered this habit in someone I otherwise think is so totally terrific. I don’t have full resolution on this issue yet in my head so I am going to keep thinking on it. I feel like the conclusions I have reached so far are very superficial and I am not confident that I have hit the meat of the matter.

Then we move on to last night. I played with a good friend on Wednesday knowing that I was going to be playing with her again last night. She has recently gone through a really bad breakup and I have been aware that she is really hurting emotionally. I also know that she is a very heavy masochist. I don’t know how or why I decided to be arrogant enough to try and help her process through some of her stuff, but I did. On Wednesday I tried to take her down hard and fast and get her to cry in a gut wrenching sort of way and it worked. I tested the waters to see how much anger would come up when I started hurting her like that. Oh, I did it by punching her. Punching is a very primal and overwhelming sort of way to be hurt, and I hit rather hard. When she started getting to a really angry place on Wednesday I kept up my litany of telling her that she is a good girl, but other than that I didn’t really get into a dialogue about what was coming up for her. Last night I did. Before we started playing I told her that I was going to be asking her why I was beating her and the answer I wanted her to give is: “Because I’m a good girl.” I gave her a little bit of a warm up with spanking and light punching before switching to canes. Not very far into the scene I asked her why I was doing it and she couldn’t tell me that she was a good girl. She started getting into negative self-talk repeating things that were said to her during her horrible break up. Things about her being bad. I stopped hitting her. I turned her around and held her face up close to mine and told her that I would not hit her again if she believed that I was doing it because she was bad. I told her I would never ever reinforce that idea in her brain. It took a little more talking but eventually she started to be able to say that she was good and I resumed the scene. We went back and forth talking as I beat the living crap out of her about how the negative things he told her were wrong. That she is good and deserving. She was very upset and screamed out a lot of her rage and pain generating from how she was treated. After a while I started ramping up harder and harder. I am not a weak girl and I was hitting her just about as hard as I am capable. Towards the end she was Not Having Fun anymore and that was my goal. I told her that I wanted her to tell me to stop. That I want her to have the power to say that when she isn’t enjoying it anymore that it needs to end. At first she resisted and said she couldn’t but after a few more minutes she finally could ask me to stop.

I spent almost as much time crying during this scene as she did. It was tremendously difficult to do, but I feel very good about having done it. After I stopped beating her I pulled her to the ground and started telling her again how much I love her. I asked some of her women friends to join me in telling her so and how strong she is.

I think that a good way to understand just how far I pushed her was encapsulated when Spot said later, “Everything I have read has said you don’t do that.” Yeah. SM play is a very scary beast. When you are experiencing as much physical pain as she was in you are opening up your mind and spirit to be receptive to things that normally just aren’t available to you. It is very rare that I play that heavily and I would only attempt a scene where I knew I was working towards such catharsis with someone I have known as long and as well as I have known this person. If I had not spent so many years seeing how her relationship worked and knowing the kind of self-talk she does I wouldn’t have done this. But I do feel ok with the fact that I did this with her. I actually feel really good about it.

Honey–I love you. Thank you for opening yourself to me this way. I hope I get to continue to know you for a very long time.

And thank you to the girl who stretched herself sooooo much by being there and participating to the level you did. I know how hard it was for you and I have only love and admiration for your courage and strength and giving heart. Thank you.

Pieces of the picture.

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People have pictures of me, of my past. Abuse, poverty, moved a lot, bad family. Here’s another piece of that.

My father had money. A pretty fair amount of money. Part of that was inherited. So why did I grow up in poverty then? Because accepting his money meant playing by his rules. It meant playing those stupid, vapid, bullshit games that rich people play. It is more about who you know than what you know. It is more about sucking up to people you don’t respect than about being honest.

My mother couldn’t psychologically handle my father’s games–she wasn’t brought up in a world where she even knew such things existed. I think that is a lot of why she is so fractured now. I just refused. I won’t kiss anyone’s ass. I won’t play the game your way. I won’t act like your behavior is ok when I believe it isn’t. Does this make me a bitch? I don’t think so but apparently other people do. I call bullshit because I have to call bullshit. Yes, I know I need to work on my tone of voice. I am still reacting with almost two decades of pent up hatred and rage towards all of the things that are so fucked up about my early life. I am trying so hard and it feels like I will never get far enough. I don’t want to stop saying my truth but I hope that someday I don’t sound so angry that the message is lost.

I have a problem with people who think things shouldn’t be said. I don’t respect that attitude or behaviour. I need to work on how I am saying things but I don’t want to ever stop saying them. If that means I am not someone that should be introduced to family, fine. I don’t agree with the hypocracy that my words are fine in one context and not in another but I don’t actually get to decide what all people put up with.

I’m angry and I don’t entirely know what about. I know I am reacting to age old baggage and I need to stop but I don’t know how. I don’t think I was wrong but my tone of voice was.

Something I don’t understand: if my behavior and attitudes are so fucking unacceptable, why do people want me in their life? It isn’t as if I am sitting at home alone because people hate me. There doesn’t seem to be any way that I can really be that bad or wrong. I am tired of being treated like I am though.

I guess I’m not going to wait.

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I had this flash into why I wanted to do the rename. As cute and sassy as rightkindofbrat is, it is also something that I know I would grow weary of. I would get tired of the ‘hehe hehe you’re a brat’ pretty quickly. The point wasn’t that I am just a brat. And as much as the suggestions were well meaning, I have no interest in being identified as a virago or a bitch. Because those things aren’t me either. I’m so many many things. I have fought for years to be ok with who and what I am because people have always told me that I wasn’t right. I wasn’t submissive enough, I wasn’t respectful enough, I wasn’t quiet enough … hell I’ve been told I am the wrong kind of slutty.

But you know what? I am not wrong about any of it. I am exactly the right thing that I am supposed to be. I understand Jaguar’s objection to being the “right kind” of anything, but damnit–I am the right kind of me.

I am the right kind of me.

On being a slut.

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I’m not particularly filtering this one even though normally it would go on my therapy filter. It’s kind of weird and disconcerting to be more open about this but I think there are people who are only more loosely part of my network who might be interested in this and maybe it might spur some thoughts and/or discussions that are positive.

I self identify as a slut.

*smooch* *whisper*

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Ok, so I’m only going to tell some strange little snippets and not give any actual incriminating details.

I am deeply grateful for the people in my life who tolerate that I run hot/cold. Thank you for allowing me to come and go in your lives and continuing to love me even though I am a serious pain in the ass.

I am learning how to go to a party and find play. It is still very hard and very scary, but I am getting better at actualizing what I want.

I miss spending time with my female friends in the bdsm/sex positive communities and I am going to look at my schedule in the next month and make sure that for every two dates I have with boys I have at least one date with a friend so that my life isn’t just about getting laid. I think that is part of why I burnt out so hard a year ago and was ok with running away. Friendships last longer than lovers do usually. I need to go back to my friendships. 🙂

There are some very cool people who have shown up in the scene in the last couple of years and I need to check my assumptions at the door when it comes to talking to them.

I need to have at least one completely vanilla/non-sexual event at least every two weeks. The scene is great, but burn out sucks.

My therapist has recommended that I put some sort of boundaries up around waiting to have sex with people. We discussed the fact that I tend to either think of someone as potentially “serious” and not sleep with them for a while or I think of them more or less as a trick and they don’t last very long (usually three months is around the limit). I don’t know why I do this, but it is how things work out. She asks if I have ever broken this paradigm. Certainly I have not slept with people ever/not had a relationship work out even when I have waited a while but fsvo serious I have not had relationships go on for a long time if I sleep with them immidiately. It kind of seems like starting to deliberately not sleep with people in the first couple of dates would be a good idea. Not sure about this one though.

I have met some remarkably interesting people lately. I am certainly going to enjoy getting to know people more. Yay for flirtations.

In therapy we also discussed that she doesn’t think my behavior is manic at all. She says I’m happy. It’s kind of an odd thought. People who are happy feel this good? This is just “happiness”? Wow. I guess I have always been rather depressed then…

Casual.

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I am such a virgo. I like to categorize things. I like fitting people into neat little packages. It’s my thing. Well, sort of. I don’t want to put them into a box as to who they are as a person, but I like to see how they relate to me pretty clearly. As I am currently in the process of starting to date again (what in the hell am I thinking?!) I am getting to revisit a lot of my views on what I want and what I am looking for.

I think there is basically a spectrum for how to date. It goes from people who would like to only have one relationship in their entire life and will turn down dates with people who are very likely to not be suitable. These people are very conservative especially in who they will have sex with and won’t give it up until marriage. Then there are those of us who are more into the shotgun approach. We shoot off a load and figure it will hit something. People in this camp can be looking for the “one” or looking for any number of partners who fit in some way or another. I’m more towards the end of looking for a particular person. My wants are so complicated and multi-faceted though.

This leads me to all sorts of thoughts about what “casual” means. Many of the people I am thinking about/starting to date are poly. This is true for several reasons, not the least of which is: that is my main hunting pool. The public sex-positive community is not exactly a breeding ground for monogamous types. And I’m skirting that fuzzy edge of monogamy/poly anyway. So I’m getting involved with people in some fashion or another and I’m trying to set up my expectations and theirs in a fair and reasonable manner. However, I will NOT give anyone “the speech”. My ex’s famous line: “I am looking for the one; the one I will settle down with and have kids with and you will never be it.” I am not that big of a bitch. It is a fuzzy and difficult line to walk though.

I’m not sure where the line of “casual” begins and end. Is kissing casual? Is fondling? Is getting spanked? Is tying someone up? Is fucking? Is anal sex? What about blow jobs? What about golden showers? Submission? What about calling someone Daddy? Where is the line? I want all of these things in my life. I don’t know how “casual” I want to be about any of them but I also don’t know how serious I want to be about them.

Long ago I asked the question: can a girl have more than one Daddy? I think that with where I am right now, what matters is that I am mommy and daddy and little girl all to myself. If I choose to call someone else by any of those names it is just an extension of my loving and taking care of myself in those ways. That means that someone can be my Daddy for a night or a week and have that be all that it is. There can be more than one Daddy in my life because ultimately they are just operating as part of what I need and what I am doing for myself.

Where am I? I am to a place where I am hunting for more knowledge about myself. I am hunting for more ways to pleasure myself and figure out what I need. I am an exhibitionist and this hunt for myself involves other people. I don’t know if/when it will include someone who will be my One. I probably am not ready for that jump yet. I think that for me, the need to be “single” is not about staying home or not having sex. I think it is about knowing that I have to be the one taking care of myself and not asking anyone else for those accomodations.