Monthly Archives: April 2025

Coping 4 months in

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Hi. I’m not writing a lot here. An awful lot of how I am coping I have mixed feelings about. I’m doing that thing I used to do to access emotional energy. Some day I will feel confident enough to transfer all the writing from that other social media site, not yet. I think I need my baby to be a lot older. I can’t tell. Maybe I will impulsively do it before then. I don’t know yet.

I’m getting stuff done. Maybe enough? I don’t know. I’m exercising a ton. I ran 4 miles this morning. I’ve walked another 5. I’ve cycled over 5 miles with another trip to town ahead of me. I did a yoga class this morning. Thursdays are my ridiculous day.

The kids are coping. We carry on doing stuff and growing and trying to become part of the community. It’s a process. I notice that I get much more positive community interaction at the shopping centre near my house compared to downtown. In town people are hostile about me looking weird. In my neighbourhood everyone smiles and talks to me. That’s interesting.

Life continues. I am participating in life affirming behaviour. It’s the best I can do. The legal process of dealing with the death continues to suck. It is moving slowly and I’m fucking amused that now that it’s not waiting on me it is still going at a turtle’s pace because all the professionals are more lackadaisical about responding to email than I am.

I finally got the safe open (I lost the keys and had to get a locksmith) so I could send the paperwork to SSA. They will back pay me from December. That will be very useful.

I’m going back and forth in my head being wild self recrimination for how I’m coping and rueful knowledge that Noah would both expect this and understand and forgive me. Noah understood me and he would understand this way of surviving. I am a stunted tree and I yet reach for the light. Sometimes I really don’t know what to do about the fact that Noah has been my guiding light for so long. I don’t know if I will like the me I am without him as much. I’m worried.

Life is a struggle

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Things are good with the kids. Watching the collapse of the US government when I’ve been saying “It’s going to happen in my lifetime” means my kids are far more inclined to listen to me and take what I say seriously. Obviously I’m not an oblivious, stupid idiot. I see what is happening. So the big kids are more enthusiastic about gardening than they’ve ever been. Stuff is coming *along* this year. It’s going to be a really fun garden this time. They are going to learn even more skills for surviving the end of the global supply chain. The most important part is making friends and we are struggling on that front.

I’m seeing people at group social gatherings occasionally. I have a few folks I try to see one on one but I don’t see them every month. I’m feeling incredibly isolated. It is hurting so much that I was asked to leave the bike community. I feel like I lost my ability to make friends for exercising with. Because I couldn’t keep my stupid mouth shut. Because I have to make everything hard.

I’m the problem so I need to go away.

It’s feeling hard for me to leave my house. I get a lot of random verbal abuse in town. I *look* like I don’t belong here and people tell me so often. Sometimes with lots of swearing, but most often just through a passionate conversation with their pals about what a complete loser I am and how everyone wishes that people like me would stop coming to their city.

It’s same shit, different day for me. I’ve gotten this push back my entire life no matter where I was. I mostly try to pretend I don’t hear it and I press on with my life. I don’t have a lot of that energy going spare right now. I don’t feel comfortable or entitled to have anything or be anywhere.

People keep asking me if I have support. I don’t have a single person in the country I feel like I can talk to without heavily censoring every concept that comes out of my mouth. When I am around people I’m aware that my job is to listen, not talk. No one fucking wants to deal with me. I’m too fucking much.

I got bitched out at the leisure centre because I came in to take a shower and not use other facilities. My boiler has been broken for 5? 6? weeks now. I’m sorry that I exist so wrong.

I feel empty and worthless and not worth the effort.

I feel scared and bad. I feel desperately unwanted by the community as a whole. No, I don’t feel like I should go back to the US. At least here I don’t have to worry about someone pulling a gun on my kid when they run their fool mouth. Verbal abuse happens everywhere. The ambient level of violence is lower. It’s not like people ever acted like I belonged anywhere in the US either. I have been wrong since I was in preschool. I have been out of place and wrong. This is just the rest of the world agreeing. The problem is me.

I’m not allowed to do any of the things to hurt myself that would let me bleed off bits of the pain. Instead I spend a lot of time in the studio screaming until my head wants to explode. I am so scared. I don’t see a forward path that is not all consuming pain. I lost the only person who could bear my company. I lost the only person who wanted to talk to me and know me. I lost the only person who has ever lived with me for longer than 3 years. My mother never kept me for longer than 3 years at a stretch. She couldn’t bear me.

Only Noah could stand me. Someday my children will have a choice about leaving. I will understand if they go as far from me as possible. I won’t blame them at all. It will make sense to me.

I’m really sad that I’m not allowed to die. I feel like garbage. I feel like dog shit on the bottom of someone’s shoe. No, I don’t want to talk to anyone about how I’m feeling. I’m the problem and I don’t want to spread my pustulent disgustingness to anyone else.

I’m afraid that I shouldn’t try to make friends because I am nothing but a black hole of self hatred. There is nothing good in me to share.

I wish my mom had pushed harder and strangled me with the umbilical cord. I shouldn’t have been saved.

I wish I could die but I can’t. So instead I scream and cry alone in a room. Because this is the only safety I will have for the rest of my life. Other people are a risk every time. I don’t have it in me to nod and accept a lot more rejection right now. So I need to ask for nothing.

I hate my father for forcing me to be here. I hate my mother for not aborting me or strangling me at birth. I shouldn’t be here. I want to accept that it’s never getting better and just stop. I can’t though. People need me. People who weren’t given a choice.

I’m glad I get along with my kids. I sort of expect them to be my only real relationships going forward. Those incredibly curated and limited relationships in which I give and I bite my tongue off trying not to ask for anything in return.

I will never deserve to get anything from anyone again. I wish I could die.

Sick and tired and blessed

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I am sick. It came on in the middle of last night. This is my first time being sick without Noah around since 2015 when I was on the road trip. This is awful.

That said, I have a wonderful son who brought me a banana and toast and home made apple sauce for breakfast. He knows what to do when a great many things go sideways in life. He’s had good home training. I feel an outstanding amount of pride in him.

I am starting to move old Facebook posts over here. There’s going to be an incredibly large amount of backdated postings. I am still trying to decide if I want to move writing from the other social media site. I’m still nervous about spooking vanillas.

I am really struggling with feeling like a liar because I am not publicly and boldly admitting everything that I am doing. I am in a different place with different expectations and I am scared of how I should be adapting to this set and setting. I’m scared to not be open. I am scared to be open in the next 10 years.

I am losing my mind in a lot of ways. Life is feeling really hard in ways that make me feel like a pathetic whiner. My life is not as hard as other peoples lives and I feel enormous shame around that.

I talked to the SSA yesterday. As long as the US government holds we will be find for the next 10 years. I don’t know yet how I am going to bridge the gap between my kids aging out of support and reaching full retirement age but that’s a bridge I can burn later.

Yesterday I had dinner with a new friend. They spent a bunch of time telling me how my writing is overwhelming and they think I should find a different hobby for managing my feelings. I am really struggling with that. I don’t talk about my feelings much when I’m in a room with anyone. I know that I am too much. I know that people don’t actually want to hear it. I feel slapped really hard. I feel like I was told I don’t even deserve to talk about my feelings to myself when I’m alone in a room. That hurts really badly.

I am trying to find my way back to writing with more boldness and self assurance. It’s going to be hard. For so long I depended on Noah or the other Archivists wanting to see my writing to justify me doing it. I don’t have that crutch anymore. Now I need to believe it just by myself and I am struggling.

There are a lot of patterns I want to lay out and pick apart. I can’t though. I’m afraid. I’m afraid of judgment. I’m afraid of punishment. I’m afraid of rejection, mostly for my children. It is not my childrens’ fault that I am their mother.

I am struggling really hard with the expectation that I be fun or I shouldn’t exist.

I’m struggling with my identity and getting my needs met. I’m struggling with feeling like people like me really shouldn’t exist at all.

I’m struggling.

98 days and nothing is well.

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Ok, that’s hyperbole. Things are fine. We plug along. We get chores and academics and gardening and exercise done. But I feel empty and hollow. I yearn for Noah with every cell in my body. I don’t feel safe. I don’t feel loved. I feel abandoned and scared and lonely. I’ve gotten good sleep three nights in a row and I’ve felt emotionally worse with every night. Like I was hiding this pain behind the dullness of sleep deprivation.

I’m trying to fill my bucket so I have a lot to give. Today that feels impossible. I feel scared and inadequate and sad.

No one will ever be my partner like that again. It took so long to trust him and we had to go through so much together. I don’t think I will ever let anyone in. My soul hurts.