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The NHS is going to be a mixed bag for me

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

Well, shit.

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

Oh. It’s like that, is it?

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

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

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

That’s what I get.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All that is left is a haze of inefficient malice.

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

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

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.

cross-post Problematic People

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from fet

Oh man my RSD is on turbo lately. (That’s Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria if you aren’t familiar with the acronym.) I learned about this facet of neurodiversity in later years and it was like “Huh. Ok so that’s been most of my life. I just thought I had low self esteem.” Which is why I often feel weirdly haunted by the memory of a therapist who laughed so hard she almost fell off her chair when I said I had low self esteem. She said I had the highest self esteem of any client she had worked with in over 20 years.

Right.

What does self esteem mean then? I don’t think I really understand. I have aspects of my self-hood that I have confidence in: I can giggle off aspersions about my intellect because I am ridiculously confident in my intelligence and I laugh about people implying that no one would ever fuck me because holy hell is that inaccurate.

But I doubt whether I am actually doing enough good in the world to justify how many resources are needed to keep me functional. I have a shitty, high maintenance body. I doubt whether people will really accept me with all of my fierce outbursts and intensity.

So as a result I really like a lot of folks who are publicly derided as “problematic people”. I prefer assholes because they will tell me off and compliment me in equal measure and I can lean in and rest my head on their chest and hear the authenticity of their love in their level heartbeat.

“What’s Wrong With Krissy” is, after all, one of my most frequent games.

This ties in strongly with why I pursue friendships with folks in the scene with such intensity. There are an awful lot of assholes around here. YAY!!!!

Hell, even the people I know who have mostly done the right things in life and followed all the choices they were expected to make are still people who get in trouble regularly for being overly direct. I think of them as assholes with extra class. They will still tell you off but they will do it in a way that no one is allowed to tell them to stop because it all just sounds so true and reasonable.

It is harder to find assholes around here (physical here not fetlife-here; I come to fetlife so much these days because I can smile and watch assholes). A lot more “taking the piss” and a lot less “I am going to tell you why every single thing you have done in the last 15 years is wrong. I have citations.” One of my old buddies had to leave the bay because of health issues. Now the trouble is that they are used to friendships that are super intense where folks act like mutual coaches to one another. This is a really common dynamic I have had in many of my friendships in California as everyone is striving super hard to learn new skills and hobbies and interests all the damn time. My buddy is really struggling because no one in small town New Mexico wants to do that with her. People A) don’t want to spend that much time together and B) are not interested in that dynamic because they aren’t relentlessly focused on learning new stuff and C) find it more than a little creepy that my buddy is so intense.

I feel that in my bones.

I feel overwhelmed almost every single minute that I am with folks that I need to be trying as absolutely hard as I can to hold back and not be too intense. My entire selfhood is wrong at full strength and I need to be letting it out 3%-5% at a time or I am a monster. It is additionally challenging that many of the ways I have traditionally talked people into having more tolerance for me are prohibited by agreements I have made. Also: I don’t think they would work so well at this point.

I am a Problematic Person. What do I do that is problematic? Talk too much. Not moderate eye contact sufficiently (holy shit this is a whole thing here and I’ve had immigrants bring it up with me and tell me that I need to knock it off because they get in trouble for staring too). That one is really hilarious because I had to be taught to make/keep eye contact and now I’m in trouble for doing too much of it because PEOPLE ARE NOT CONSISTENT FROM CULTURE TO CULTURE.

So, when you are instructing that autistic person on how to act to “not be offensive” what culture are you acclimating them to and how did you develop the fucking audacity to decide that whichever one you are enforcing is The Right One? Anyway.

How close am I supposed to stand to someone to look friendly but not be creepy? How do I manage the fact that my fucking tinnitus is so bad that half the time I am trying to understand people with about 70% of the words making it through to my brain? It is why I love to type. How much follow up when they are not responding is persistent and appropriate friend making behavior but when do I become a stalker? I have no fucking social credit here. I have not earned forbearance because of my long usefulness. I am a difficult outsider with a lot of demands in order to facilitate my entry.

Yeah… basically I don’t see much reason to assume that dealing with me is worth peoples time so I minimise how much I interact with people because I do not want to unfairly drain them. I have been told for years that it is not ok to give any kind of social or energetic labor with any expectation of getting anything in return. You need to just give because you have extra and probably nothing will come back to you and that needs to be ok. I have to be ok if I never get anything from anyone.

And so I sit at home and I make detailed calendars and lists of tasks for maintaining my body and whatever shred of mental health I clutch to and I pray that no one asks me for too much because I am running a surplus… barely. I am after scraping and working and hoarding and conserving and doing without. And there is this knot of worry in my stomach all the time because I am trying to put small amounts of effort into different places and people because I have to be ok if this person/group does not want to know me in three years.

There will always be people who don’t want to know me. No matter how much of my personality I saw off. They will see the mistakes I so profligately make in my haphazard pursuit of new understandings and they will not know about any of the previous history of doing exactly that before succeeding at very hard things that many people said I was not going to be able to do.

I am nobody. I am a stranger. I have no value. I have no perceived social status.

I mean, I did pick this on purpose. I made the conscious choice to pick up and move very far away to be a small fish in a small pond because I did not enjoy being a small fish in the great big ocean. They were going to eat me.

I chose to move very far away to a place where I have exactly one embedded social contact and her world has been fairly limited in her time here. I have to try and find a new place in the community. I have to find a way to have people see me as worthy of their time and effort and accommodation because you would have to fucking lobotomize me to make me easy to be around.

So mostly I just don’t go. (I am loving the fuck out of the fact that someone ranted about starting sentences with “so” and I absolutely know I am doing it extra right now just to be EXTRA.) I am a problematic person. I am an asshole. I am high effort and what I have to give is very small so it isn’t worth much. Which ends in feeling like I am not worth very much. Then I talk to people less and less. I hide and stay home and keep myself busy trying to add to any surplus of energy I might have so maybe I can have more to give and be less of a waste.

That cycle rarely goes well. It doesn’t work. The ball of tension in my stomach eats away at the surplus making it smaller and smaller until I make myself sick and then spoon deficit is days away.

So yeah. If you are ever wondering if I dislike you and that is why I don’t initiate more conversations… probably not. I’m too busy contorting myself into awkward positions around the pain in my belly to notice enough to dislike. When I dislike someone it is pretty dramatic. You won’t wonder. It’ll be public. It is part and parcel of a thing that has been repeated at me for almost 30 years now in a wide variety of settings: “You know it wouldn’t kill you to try to be friendly with (person I dislike). “But it might. Best not to try it.” Mostly I don’t bother to dislike people that much. I have conflicting feelings about people. Sometimes I detect signs of patterns that freak me out but it’s usually combined with other random positive traits and I have no idea if my gut feelings are real or if I’m just a dick. In that case I will be consistent in public and private. I will tell you how I feel about you. Often even when you don’t want to know.

Yup. A problematic person. Hard to know. I know how many thousands of hours I put into my extended community in California. In the next 20 years of my life I will not be able to come close to matching any of the similar time spans in California. I’m older. I don’t have a job. I don’t go to school. The social community up here is very different and my ability to access what exists is almost nil. I don’t drive here and I drove all the forking time in California maintaining a network of relationship that spanned thousands of miles on a regular basis. Now I very seldom get more than 5 miles from my house. I don’t go farther than 5 miles from my house in every month. I had very few days in California where I didn’t go farther than 10 miles from my house throughout my entire 38 years living there. We were car people. That’s life.

I can’t anymore. My thumbs are jacked. I can’t grip a steering wheel without overwhelmingly agonising pain. I swear I am not just a pussy. I can’t do it. I know people are surprised that I can do all of the other things I do with my hands, but I have no more connective tissue left at the base of one thumb and very little left in the other hand. It’s bone on bone. Gripping things in different ways doesn’t use my thumb and the rest of my hand is fine. When I say I can carry something I’m not usually doing so at risk of strain to my existing problems. I am strong in many ways. But I can’t drive. I can’t create a wider social community by visiting people. The train takes a whole day. It’s hard to take whole days away on a regular basis. That is not how my life is shaped.

So I am putting drips and drabs and tiny bits of effort towards trying to exist in the wider water network around me but mostly I am in my tiny pond swimming around. The little tributaries that occasionally erupt that might allow me to move around are a little scary.

Being problematic is a complicated thing. Why don’t people just act right. Why can’t you just give more. Why can’t you just complain less. Why can’t you just need less. Why can’t you act happier.

Because because because….. because of the wonderful things I does. (Leave it alone. I did it on purpose. Don’t point it out. Requiring verb agreement in order to “understand” is elitist. Don’t be a brat.)

It’s all about rhetorical effect, isn’t it? There are times and places to insist on really precise language and phrasing. It’s taught when you go to school for that thing. I mean, I did teach English grammar as an English teacher. I was also correcting the other more senior teachers on staff because apparently I actually learned what was drilled into my head at university and when I am writing an MLA standard paper I will trot that shit right out.

This is not a space governed by the MLA. I am looking to communicate. I am looking to communicate with the kind of people who like and appreciate who and what I am and my native language is typing. It is the only one that taps into what I am really thinking and feeling and I have never found a way that works in anything like an equivalent manner with my voice. I feel stupid all the fucking time because I just cannot word. I am trying to analyse all the time whether or not I am doing something “right” for the setting I am in and I feel like I am going to hyperventilate because of course I am fucking wrong and that’s why people don’t like me and fuck.

Why did I even leave the fucking house.

Because that little do-si-do around the fucking topic of grammar is exactly the kind of tiny little thing I feel in my head all day long. HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO BE FUCKING CONFORMING TO SOME STUPID BULLSHIT RULE THAT I HAVE NEVER FUCKING HEARD OF NOW.

WOULD YOU LIKE SOME MORE FULL STOPS WITH THAT………???????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Phew. I think I have been having some feelings. As stupid and immature as it sounds I feel strangely better. I didn’t go start a stupid argument and dump my feelings on someone. I did stand in my sandbox and I had a stupid feeling. I’m not hurting anyone.

This stupid calculus is involved in everything I say and do all day long. With my kids. With my spouse. With my neighbors. With people in the scene. With people on fetlife. With my actual blog I write with a slightly different “ideal listener” focus in my mind… it’s hard to explain. Well, not really. On my blog everyone is expected to know what Noah knows and here I don’t do that. Writing there is joining the stream full force and I have been feeling incredibly unconfident about doing that for a while. It’s a much larger thing to walk that deep into my brain.

Here I do try to keep the word count down. I swear to cheese. I try to pick a topic. I try to bring it full circle and actually find a little closure with it. It’s an essay, kinda, not just me thinking and planning and existing into the ether the way I do in my longer form writing.

The point of this essay was to demonstrate a fairly small fraction of just how much can go into being a problematic person. Maybe 5% landed here? So much censoring and picking careful examples that won’t repel the target audience by maybe sounding too close to home and thus like a preconceived dislike thus they should avoid me.

My personal ad was something like 15 pages long and I didn’t respond unless it was fucking clear you read the whole thing. I think my standards are getting more reasonable with time…

Working up to the letter

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Cross posted from FB where my MIL can see it.

I feel deeply conflicted about the type of writing I have traditionally done now that I live in a place that has far less encouragement of navel gazing and public introspection. Yet, here I am. Continuing to exist and needing to type out my feelings in order to make progress. This is how I have made all of my progress in this life.

When it comes to “stop sniveling and go work” very few people have me beat. I do a lot of manual labor and I go hard. It delights me to no end when a large man says “Oh let me take that for you; it looks heavy” then they stagger under the weight of the load I was carrying with only a little visible strain. But there is a cost. I do not have a body that is built for hard labor. What I have is a soul with a little extra energy from all the stardust so I push through long past when I should stop.

I understand to the tips of my toes that a lot of what I self-assign is not “necessary” in the sense of it being part of the base levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy. I’m an educated bitch. Instead what I have is a tremendous sense of obligation and purpose. The work I self assign is part of self actualisation. Is it “necessary”? Well… it depends on how well your other needs are being met…

This is what having privilege means to me. I have the space in my life to care about making and creating things because I do not have to worry about having food or shelter or safety ever again. And thus it moves up the triage list. It becomes urgent. It becomes intense and drowning and necessary for being able to cope with other aspects of being alive.

The overwhelming urge to self actualise takes over the same set of energy that used to go into making sure I could earn enough money to have food–a roof wasn’t going to happen on the amount of money I was making so that didn’t even feel like an important worry. I had a car; I was blessed.

I know how crazy it sounds that this set of urges feels equally intense.

But this set of urges is what gives me the deep well of patience to stand there and say for the 8,235,108 time with a level tone and no frustration, “Ok. Let’s talk again about what restaurant manners are and why they matter.” I have a whole house full of neurodiverse kids who do not copy and blend in and conform like a similar group of neurotypical children will. If I want them to learn a thing then me doing it is not even close to enough to influence their behavior. I have to tell them what I want, when I want it, why I want it, and what will happen if I don’t get it.

I can do that because A) I care very much about doing it and B) I have an intensely separate self that is allowed to have goals and plans and things that I make that I can point at and say “See, I am not just boring and shitty and doing something that no one cares about.”

I know I am dancing on a razor’s edge with fucking up my body until it hurts like this. Howdy repetitive stress injuries, howyadoin? I know that upping my exercise substantially is always courting injury. I know that having tremendous social anxiety and not sleeping well for a week and more and continuing to work like I need the money is bad for my health.

I get that. Everyone has to figure out what they need from quality of life vs. quantity of life.

I know that a lot of the work I am doing right now is not going to “work out” in the way that someone else would care about such work lasting in the long run. I am an intensely kinesthetic person and I don’t tend to learn things well until I learn it with my whole body. I like to read and I can absorb a lot from books but I don’t *know* a topic until I have done it with my body enough times to learn the rhythm.

I never really watched a plant go through a full life cycle before I had kids. I mean, I’m sure I did a bean sprouting lesson in class but I didn’t live in a place and have a set routine where I passed by given plants over and over through their life cycle. I then worked hard at learning the California biome I lived in (there are so many others in California that I’m careful with my claim) and now I have a lot more to learn. But I don’t have as many years at the end to enjoy the fruit of my understanding so I want to compact about 15 years of learning (what I did in California) into 5 years.

This year is my fuck around and find out year. I am putting an absolute avalanche of plants into my garden. I’m exploring guild combinations. I’m thinking about ways to intermix perennials and annuals. I’m trying to figure out how I will rotate through the kinds of annuals that have to move from spot to spot.

I feel like menopause is hitting my body with fervor and reminding me that if I want to get to enjoy the Witch Garden of my dreams all the way through my crone years I’d better hurry the fork up because the time in my life where my body is devoted to the Mother phase is counting down with grains of sand that feel like boulders on my head.

I don’t have time to waste. Which is kind of funny because I have so very much time. I am incredibly fortunate. I haven’t had to be afraid of not being able to get food in about 17 years. My cells do not yet really fully understand that I will never be hungry again. And part of how this manifests in my behavior is that I *must* learn how to grow enough food that I can pass on a way to ensure that my children will never have that feeling. Sure, we teach them ways to make money too. Money is a necessary thing and all.

My family had a permanent address when I was born–they had been in that home for a long time. My mom lost the house when I was three and I did not have a second permanent address until I moved in with my spouse. I very much hope that I will never leave this house. I’m building a retirement apartment downstairs. When the tenants move and everything needs fixing I’m setting it up more fully for wheelchair access.

And I’m going to have a garden I can move around and putter at and hire someone to do the individual jobs too big for me. But I’ll spend a lot of time puttering so I won’t need *much* help.

If I don’t build it now I won’t have it then.

If I push myself too hard I will not be able to maintain it as well in the long run.

Basically, this is how I meditate. This is how I sort my thoughts so I can evaluate when to pause, when to stop, when to rest. The more I allow myself to feel electrically uncomfortable and overwhelmed and drowning in the words in my head the harder it is to compartmentalise when pushing too hard on long-term projects. Other short or medium term tasks appear (in person socialising, written communication, dealing with the water company, oh the kid wet the bed) and they feel enormous and out of proportion and impossibly hard.

Unless I take just a bit of time to set things down and look at them and see the shape of all the pieces better. It’s hard to put the puzzle together if you don’t have your glasses on because you can’t see the outlines of the shapes well enough.

This process is my glasses.

How do you measure progress?

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“I think I am a better writer than I thought.”
“What leads you to draw this conclusion?”
“The sad story I posted has had over 1,000 hits in two days. It’s the first work I’ve posted!”
“Wait, I thought you had been posting for a long time?”
“Oh, that was back on Wattpad, this is my first AO3 post.”
“Ok, and how does this jump make you feel better about yourself?”
“Well, people on AO3 are more literate and have better grammar and spelling and in general the characters aren’t so simplistic.”
“Ah. You have gone from the middle school board to the high school board?”
“Basically, yes.”

“Congratulations! That’s awesome!”

You only have so much time

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I don’t know how much of my difficulty in regulation/scheduling/consistency is rooted in my neurodiversity but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out it is most of the reason. When I was younger, in order to get stuff done for school/theatre/projects, I would write meticulous schedules like I was gettin a CEO through meetings. People told me that my schedule looked terrifying and nightmarish and they could never do it. I always found that confusing because I was trying to do the same amount of stuff I saw them doing and I couldn’t understand how they managed without tracking it down the 5 minute block.

This becomes a big problem when I have projects that I can’t get done in a reasonable amount of time given all the other schedule considerations (bathroom remodel, painting this house) and I toss my regulation out the window to fall into flow and hyperfocus around work. I could absolutely be a crazy genius who only ran on the spark from my own motor but I would be horrible to live with and I don’t think I’d be a good mother.

Being a good mother is the task I care most about. Over being a good friend. Over being a good tool. Over being a good wife. My kids are neurodiverse and really struggling in a few key ways. Ways that I could fix if I excised most of the filler I’ve added to my schedule and went back to basics.

I’m part of a lot of unschooling support groups and in many ways I deeply respect it. Many of them even focus on neurodiversity and finding ways to help folks allow their quirky little people to focus on being emotionally ok over productivity. I can understand that. But in every conversation around parenting priorities and supporting children there are a lot of factors that are hard to talk about without it being an argument when I really don’t think it should be. I love when folks can feel safe and confident and say, “We’ve tried a bunch of stuff and what works for us is ______.” I’m here for it all day. I may take inspiration from 1% of what you are doing and the rest isn’t for me but that doesn’t mean you should change!

Every family is a mix of personalities, experiences, strengths, skills, challenges, disadvantages, cultural perspective, gendered socialisation, education, and ambition.

People who are neurodiverse need coping skills for living in a world that is not suited to people who are constantly distracted by shiny butterflies. I’m not saying we need to learn how to fit in or how to conform more and stick out less, fuck that. What I am saying is that we need to survive and that means we need to look for ways of adapting information and tasks to our ability to follow through.

So. I have been loosely keeping my life together for decades with paper planners. I will also use white boards and online calendars as supplements but I am a paper girl. I neeeeeeeed to write it down. The act of holding the pen and writing it down creates the picture in my mind I can bring up later. All days of looking at a computer calendar blur together in a mass and I can’t get a clear mental picture of any one day in particular. But paper calendars can’t make my watch harass me. So, both!

Today I begin the indoctrination of usage of a planner. They will live on the table in the kitchen. We will track things. We will write down our to do lists. We will talk about what we need to do during the day and block out how we will get it all done.

Because of my intense habit of overworking or adding in things last minute I am including private down time for all of us. We neeeeed to be able to rest and self soothe sometimes. The cheese falls off my cracker if I don’t have this time. It’s a need. We need to exercise–we have upcoming plans (more on that later) and we need to be fit enough to enjoy that time. If you don’t train and work up gradually you are going to suffer a lot. If you won’t enjoy this trip you have scheduled… why pay for it?

I think that part of this is going to include me needing to get up earlier and come out side to write. The random “I have to say something ok fine Facebook” posting needs to come to an end. I am curating that in such odd ways. I need to go back to writing for me with the whole story attached. I don’t think I’m opening up the archives at this point, but I need this.

I need this in order to track what I’m doing with the kids. I need this so I can communicate more clearly with Noah. I need this because it makes me happy. I need this because writing is what makes me feel like a whole synthesised system. Most of the time I feel like a collection of separate personalities/actions that barely overlap. But I am whole. I am complete in ways I never anticipated. I think the hibernation of not really talking/writing about my emotions for several years was useful in a way. I had to put everything in a box, tape it up, then stick it in a cupboard. When I have peaked in the box over the years for brief seconds it’s been remarkable how much smaller, less intimidating, less dominating than they used to be. Even the experiment with stimulant medication was not anywhere near as bad as it could have been in the end.

(Lisdexamfetamine situation is in a weird limbo. Won’t be able to talk to a new person till the 19th. 40mg was too high and was becoming a problem. Then scheduling challenges.)

Like that. I am not going to explain all of that right now but I’m allowed to put a pin here. I would feel awkward doing that on Facebook.

It is incredibly dramatic to me the way that none of the Scots use Facebook the way my American friends do. But then again… almost every single person I am friends with from the States are people who are old-school BBS users or people from livejournal or academics and many many many of us are ok with being very public and loud and messy about our ups and downs and our struggles and our neurodiversities.

It’s weird that I am going to have to keep the writing on the downlow-ish. I need to not mention to people that I do it. But if people google me, Hi!. I should change the splash page with trigger warnings.

This is the beginning of our fourth year in this house. Lockdowns have dramatically altered the flow of time. *They say that it takes 7 years to feel like you really belong in a new community. I think that will take more than that to really feel settled I can see glimmers of that forming. When you plant a vine there is an adage that you should expect the vine to sleep the first year and put all of its energy into putting down roots instead of growing up In the second year it will creep a little and you will wonder if you did something wrong or maybe you killed it. Then in the third year it will leap and grow massively.

I am looking at those three time considerations and trying to build a theory for myself of what I am aiming for. Oh, and child development. Ha. I think I started creeping before I was really fully ready. I had more sleeping to do but the children’s needs and the challenges of joining a community meant I didn’t really allow myself to just sleep in my space. I hit the ground running.

I need a schedule. I need to keep it. I need to measure my time and weigh out the importance of the various factors and I need to change what I have been doing in some very big ways. Or I am going to fail on the very most important job at all. The one I have 14 more years on. All the other everything will probably still be around in one form or another. In reality I have about 10 more years before being a mother is not my primary all day role. What do I want to do with it?

I see what is going on with the kids. It’s time to build a new scaffold and then I have to fucking stay in it. They cannot build their scaffold if I am not in place. They aren’t ready for doing it from the ground up. This is the deal.

Time is up for the day. Now, breakfast.

*whoever “they” are

We’re All Mad Here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hiding

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I keep wondering if I want to start over with a blog that is entirely anonymous so I don’t worry so much about hurting people. I wonder how much that is about wanting to feel erased. I wonder how much that is about feeling like it is better for me to run from people as hard and as fast and as far as I can.

I censor so many things. I try to be honest. But I’m afraid of the response or the result or the punishment that might result.

Kind of like writing about the Bonus Family. I have danced around so much of that. I dance around things with so many people. I can’t come out right and say why I ended things permanently with my submissive. I kind of wish it had been out of respect for Noah but instead it was because of the resemblance to an issue from my path and I can’t talk about what because other people’s privacy matters too.

I both do and don’t want to make friends here. I want a writing outlet where I don’t feel like I need to be careful about other people’s feelings. Things have been leaking out too much with this nice young lady I’ve been talking to in town. I’m volunteering things about my feelings when I shouldn’t because I talk to her without my kids around and I get so little of that time so I blurt. I don’t get a lot of time to process with Noah. I don’t have a therapist. I feel like writing down my feelings means I’m a selfish, hurtful, nasty asshole who doesn’t deserve to have anyone love me.

I feel like I should be support and kind and gentle with people. I should not share my anger and frustration and my difficulties.

And for the love of cheese I don’t feel I should ever write about a negative situation with my children where anyone who knows them can read about it ever again. I feel sick to my stomach knowing that people judge them based on the teensy tiny snippets I write about. My children are so much more than what I express in writing. They are glorious creatures. Are they also assholes? Well.. they breathe so that’s kind of a given. You are an asshole. I am an asshole. We are all assholes sometimes.

Anyone who tells you different is selling something.

I don’t write about all the things I like because it feels like bragging and trying to show off why my lifestyle choices are better when… it’s not about me. My children aren’t who they are because of any one thing. It’s not because of me. It’s not because of home schooling. It’s not because of travel. It’s not because of reading. It’s not because of video games. It’s not because of food. It’s not because of…..

They are complex creatures who are on a road to discovering themselves. It is 100% mandatory that the process involves times when we have conflict or strife or me not liking something they need to try.

If I write about any of those specifics people will judge them.

They don’t deserve that. It’s funny how I feel like I need to shield them from the consequence of being related to me over almost anything else. No, you can’t meet my family–they are wretched. No, you don’t need to be brough around the large group events my friends go to–I can’t make it safe enough for you. No, I don’t want you to grow up in the place that shaped me.

Be different than me.

Hell, I was in public school all my life, y’all. It’s not like home schooling is trying to make them just like me.

I’m looking forward to time with Middle Child more one on one without Eldest Child around. I think that will be good for both of us. The speed and pace of education will both slow down and speed up.

I feel like everything about me is bad and judged. That’s part of why I lash out. I know I am judged. Fuck you troll site. Fuck you stupid lady in Missouri who I will never write to again.

Why do I care?

If I write for me, for Noah, and so my kids can see it someday if they are interested but sweet cheese they don’t have to…

Why do I care about anyone else? Because I do. Because I defined myself by your opinions for so long and that is a poisoned pill. I want to be pleasing. But I also have no interest in changing anything about what I’m doing to be pleasing. So that’s kind of a non-starter.

But the bookshelves are starting to fill up now that some of the oil is dry enough.

Half the bathrooms in the house are barely usable.

It fucking snowed in the last few days so I’m super glad I haven’t put out my starts yet. I’ve been procrastinating. Turns out it was wise!

I’m hitting 5 miles. I’m not sleeping enough. I feel inadequate and inefficient and like I “should” find a way to feel connected and loved without talking to anyone because I fuck up words so badly.

I am afraid of making friends. I am afraid of keeping friends. I am afraid of not having friends.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

People are so hard.

I wonder if it will take a full year

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Settling into the house is a process. There are still books in boxes and closets because they can’t be on proper shelves. We are still acquiring things for baking and cooking because we haven’t gotten our full repertoire replaced yet. I’m still getting home schooling supplies because I hadn’t anticipated continuing to home school and so that wasn’t an early priority. I’m having to reimagine pieces of the house/property because we are using it more and differently than I thought we would when we first bought it. This is mixed. I’m glad I haven’t started painting at all.

Given how many things are still breaking in the house I am so glad I haven’t started painting. Looks like the ceiling in the kitchen and the dining room will have to come down because there are so many plumbing problems with the upstairs and we have tried all the second (first?) floor fixes that can be done and we still have massive leaks that are causing damage to the drywall. Plasterboard? Language is hard. So that’s exciting. And expensive. And inconvenient with lockdown.

I’m still in that existential exhaustion phase. It is good and bad that I can’t be making friends at this point. This Sunday is the usual last frost date for my gardening region. I’m going to start some seeds this week. Saturday is supposed to get down to 1 overnight. This week the high is 16. That’s feeling so balmy over here.

I have a lot of dirt to move around. Seedling soil. Top soil to put on top of where the herb garden is going to go. But I’m tired. It is going to take three or four weeks to dig the pond at the rate we are going. It may take all summer for me to finish the stairs I am putting into the hill in the front of the house. I am doing a few hours a week on each project. And by “a few hours” I mean two or three. I am doing so many different things that I am not focusing hard on any one thing.

I am baking a lot. Cooking is taking up a lot of time. Cleaning the kitchen is my largest time sink. Rhubarb crumble is becoming a weekly thing as we get big bunches from the veg box. I had no idea I would like it so much. I’m making cinnamon everything because I don’t like the store bought versions here. I make stuff that tastes more American.

I’m being a pill because one of my friends teased me and said she has never seen me make anything other than macaroni and cheese. She didn’t think I could cook; she thought I had Noah do all of it. This is like when the kids made a comment a few years ago about how only Noah knew how to cook because I was in the middle of a huge project and I hadn’t cooked in months. If you only come over on days when I am working 10-12 hours a day on a project no you don’t see me cook.

So because I am an insecure nitwit my cooking is getting elaborate and intense. I cook a lot of vegetables. I am elaborate with my seasoning. I am doing things that take many steps and multiple hours. Why? Because that way I prove that I am not just a user taking advantage of Noah. Also because he and I cook very differently and I appreciate the variety in diet.

Not long ago I heard the term “flexitarian” to refer to people trying to use fewer animal products in food. We are not vegan (or even very close) but it’s a process. Cooking vegetables and making them taste good is harder than just doing meat and starch.

Also baking. Lots of baking. I am doing my part to fatten the curve.

I feel like balancing everyone’s needs will always be a process. Different people change what they need as time goes by and adapting and figuring out what is reasonable and what is possible and what we can actually sustain is ever shifting. As soon as I think we have a pattern we blink and everything changes.

I’m taking this isolation period as a good time to try to remove sources of stress in my life. It’s a process. But I have three children. So I will always have stress. ha.

I’m really struggling with what I can write about going forward. If I write about my difficult moments or issues then people will be cruel. I used to accept that as the cost of doing business. These days… I don’t feel the same way. If people are going to be cruel I can just retreat into the positive family experience I am creating in my house. I no longer have any need to have any desperate need to have people in my life at the price of being put down. I’m not desperate. That’s a nice feeling.

But people are cruel. So what can I write about.

Third time, done.

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50,129. I wrote for 90 minutes today and now I need to stop before my wrists explode into flames.

I’m sure I will add more in the future. But I’m walking away from the higher word count goal for right now. There’s a lot more I want to flesh out in some of these chapters but I am declaring NaNo done for the year and I’m going to take another break.

Maybe it will be another multi-year break like the second break. Blurgh.

I love this part

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Whoa. Holy saucebuckets. The new upgrade of WordPress looks weird.

Today we sat down and divided up the weekend so that everyone gets to have one on one date time with each other. I get two hours to work on the book. I might finish NaNo this weekend, I’m close. Today I get to write the chapter on friendships. I may never publish this book if I want to keep my friends.

I’m starting part 2

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I have decided that it is polite for consenting adults to give other consenting adults pseudonyms. If you have had an ongoing relationship with me where we traveled together, had sex, have spent a lot of time with me, or I worked with you now is the chance for you to name yourself. You can send me a private message on facebook, an sms, an email, whatever. Comments on this post are screened.  At no other time in our lives are you going to get to decide what I call you. Here's your chance. 🙂

Not writing

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I have all this stuff I want to talk about. Moving. Houses. Writing. Evolution of sexuality.

But I don’t seem to have any energy to write about any of it. Even when I have uninterrupted time to sit down with the keyboard (or paper) I just… can’t do it. But I’m thinking about a lot of things. I’m thinking all the time. I just… can’t write.

1st draft of critical response

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I’m writing an essay criticizing a piece of criticism. There’s intellectual wankery for you. I’m not satisfied with it yet, but I’m not sure how I want to fix it. I figure that ye olde intarweb often gives me good feedback, so if you are bored and you want to skim it (about 3 pages) I’m not turning it in until Monday. 🙂 Feedback is appreciated.

Continue reading →

I see you.

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I see how much I scare you and how much you have been hurt.
I don’t know why you are talking to me or if you will continue talking to me.
Are you going to run away and hide?
You said that you can talk to me because it isn’t scary–but I’m about as scary as they come.I see how much you want yet are afraid to ask for.
I don’t know why you have been afraid to ask before and I don’t know if I will understand.
Are you going to hide inside your head and refuse to be part of the world?
You said that you can talk to me because it isn’t serious–but I’m about as serious as they come.

Why are you doing this to me? How do you think you or I will benefit?
I don’t want to be hurt anymore. I’m done.
If you just want to hurt me—go away.
I really don’t need another opportunity for growth right now.
I’m still dealing with the growing pains from the last growth spurt.

I see what you want, but I don’t believe you.
Maybe I am deluding myself–I don’t know.
I see what I want, but I don’t believe in possibilities.
Maybe I am hurting myself by not hoping–I don’t know.

But I see you.