Monthly Archives: June 2025

This is harder than it used to be.

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I’m still feeling comfortable in the walled garden. I think it is partly because my range of topics is limited and that guide is comfortable. I’m having a hard time writing here. I am more afraid of the consequences, partly because I will weave all the different categories together.

I’m really deep in my feelings, partly because there is a lot I shouldn’t do yet. Today is day 22 post-surgery. Tomorrow is week 27 without Noah. Six months and a week.

I keep thinking about Travel Boyfriend. That is a man who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. I haven’t explained what happened here. Some day, not too far in the future, I will start cross-posting all the stuff I wrote while hiding in the walled garden. It will be intense. My apologies to the email receivers.

I will probably do statuses in batches else it would be truly unhinged. There are over 500 journal entries. A great many of them are 10+ minute reads. As always, read what you want to and skip what you don’t. Me writing is never a mandate that anyone needs to read it or respond to it.

I feel like I need to move the whole story here and I need to figure out more about making back ups. I suspect at some point I will want to wade in and steal chunks for books. They are coming. That’s probably going to be my post-kid career. I will have to figure out how to sell books. Ew.

What am I having a hard time saying here?

Noah and I were having a rocky phase because I needed to go back to being poly. I am not by nature a monogamous person. I have a lot of personality/self to go around. Absolutely no one wants all of me. Not even Noah. Noah thought he could command me to change and have me no longer have the parts he didn’t care for. I say “command” as if it was simple. We did close to 20 years of hypnosis play and NLP. We did thousands of hours of work. He tried very hard to change me to get rid of the parts he didn’t want.

I’m always going to fall in love with people. I have been hiding from that by staying home and not letting myself develop intense friendships since I moved here.

It takes around 400 hours of shared time to establish a friendship; it works best if this happens over a short time. It takes around 2 years to get into a secure bond in a relationship.

(I’m thinking about Gentleman, the man I am seeing.) To make the math easier I am going to assume 15 hours a week. Many weeks it has been more than that, a few it was less. We just passed 15 weeks. 225 hours. If I include the fact that there have been a few weeks with way extra because of helping me with surgery, 250 hours.

We very often have differences of opinions. We give each other funny looks, shrug, and move on. It is an easy relationship. He doesn’t irritate me much. Everyone irritates me.

I catch myself asking questions about how he interacted with the children of his ex’s. He has mostly dated single mothers and that has been a fraught experience in a few ways. Mostly in the sense of making him afraid to attach. That worries me a little.

I have to be honest that as I think about dating it is important to me that my children see me do so in a way that I would feel good about modeling. I need to only bring people around my children if they are good enough to be role models.

Why date? Why not just mourn?

I’m seeking sources of energy. My life takes a lot out of me. I can’t crumble into nothingness and go join the mushrooms in the forest. That option is not open to me. I have to move forward. That means I need to have energy. The big way I get a lot of energy is sex. I promise that I’ve tried a lot of other ways. Yeah, I need to do all the body maintenance stuff too like diet, exercise (I cross train like it is my job), time alone, and rest. I know.

I need the energy. I need it. I need to not feel like I am stumbling forward in a blind haze. If I stumble forward I am going to trip and fall and hurt myself. I need to step forward confidently, even when I am not confident.

So far Gentleman is willing to figure out what polyamory means. He has a shockingly open mind and easy going mannerisms. Part of me feels like I should test that in a meaningful way before he meets my kids. I say that because I know who I want to explore dating from my friend-group.

I actually told Noah a few years ago that I suspected that I would eventually want to date this exact woman. I want to get to know her better first, but she is deeply intriguing to me. I have worked with her on community stuff. I see her around. She always flirts, just a bit. It got slightly more obvious this weekend. Not overt. Not a demand. A very subtle offer.

I no longer want to pretend I don’t see these things. I don’t want to retreat and run away because that is what I am required to do. I want to show up, say yes, and see what happens. I’m going to court slow and steady. I might have a lot of vocabulary to teach. That’s fine. I’ve been training for that for my whole dang life.

There was excitement in casting a wide net for my first hunt. I can’t deny that. Coming out of it with someone I like as much as I like Gentleman makes such a wide net less attractive. Instead of putting that much energy into necessary failure I’d rather rest or talk to him.

That doesn’t mean I want to hop into monogamy and start shaping my life around him. I specifically don’t want that. I don’t want him trying to fill Noah’s shoes. That’s a really bad set up for all concerned.

I am the head of my household and that is going to stay true. I want to have good friends who are good role models for my kids. There will be a diverse array of role models because I want my kids to see that I really do believe that it takes all kinds. I’m not going out with a shopping list of “types”. That’s not my point at all.

I feel a spark with lots of people, historically. I have not allowed myself to feel this much since I moved here. I think I’m going to allow myself to flirt. I will see what happens. I don’t think I’m going to do frequent drift net fishing. And when I do, it will come with writing requirements.

Do you know part of what is hot about this woman? She’s written a lot down. I can go find out what it looks like in her brain. I like that a lot. I’m in for such a glorious ride. It’s going to be more awkward to navigate flirting because I don’t do that in front of my kids.

In order to keep it from being obvious who I am fucking I’m going to have to start spending time with a lot more people. That’s going to be fascinating to manage. It means that for all of the people I date, there will need to be a non-flirty friendship core. We will have to have a comfortable mode that involves no amount of sexual tension. I’m going to go back to acting like I did when the older kids were young. Very prudish in front of the children. No hand holding, no kissing, no longing looks. Nada. What I have been doing since I moved here.

I am going to have to grow more comfortable with that kind of dichotomy. I need to have a public face that has no sexuality involved at all. That’s going to be a change. The last 8-ish years, Noah and I were a lot more flirty and grabby and we did kiss. It felt like a reasonable thing? We always landed in no more festive than PG-13 territory.

Now that is a harder thing. My children will not see a revolving door of bodies through my bed. I was really fucked up by watching my sister cycle through terrible men. She only felt seen by people who would punch her when she was antagonistic and mean enough.

I want better patterns and trends than that. I see a woman way out in front of me. The Future Me that I’m going to be some day. That woman is one who makes Vicki proud. Noah will be proud of me too. I don’t think my parents would be proud of me. It’s ok, I have a very proud Dad in my life.

There are a lot of patterns and events in my past that I know to look for. I have seen people be poly in a lot of crappy ways. Also, good ways.

It is time to get started on the day. I want to feel less ashamed. I think that means I should be doing my talking to myself the way I used to. People who shame me for it are not good people for me to bond to. That’s ok. There are millions of reasons for people to not be compatible with me. Billions, probably. That’s ok.

I don’t need thousands of people. I don’t even need significant relationships with hundreds of people. I need dozens. This is lucky because I already have a good two or three dozen depending on how you evaluate. I need a few more because I need them to be local. I don’t need to date all of them. But I need a vibrant community.

Sobonfu told me I would never fit in anywhere–I need to build my own community. I don’t think I am going to do that in the walled garden. It means being vulnerable. I am not a fiction writer. I write because I am creating myself. I write because letting people know who I am, to as deep a degree as they choose to opt-in to, is a way of letting them know me that doesn’t involve me having to open my big fat mouth. I worry a lot about getting into one of those modes where I blurt out way more than I mean to because I am so desperate to feel connected. Writing is a way to cope with that. Writing means that I am able to be more present for just listening.

It is a way to siphon off pieces of myself so that I don’t have a bursting pressure to share them with the person in the room. I am really struggling with not having Noah to talk to about everything. It makes me wonder if there will ever again be someone who gets to see behind the curtain. It certainly isn’t the people in this house. They don’t want to read my writing. We are all very clear about that. Maybe when I die.

I’m sad and I’m scared. I’m going to like people. I’m going to spend time with them. I will always be aware of the full ocean of self I am keeping away from them with a dam I am constantly repairing. Noah didn’t like all of me and I learned ways to manage that. I will do that with more people. I will do more compartmentalising and less self-editing. I can leave parts of me out of a container. I won’t ever try to eliminate them again. I’m going to need to find ways to walk forward ethically.

I’m going to need to talk to myself. Fuck.

I need to make breakfast.

I’m not ok.

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Widows keep telling me that I shouldn’t expect too much from myself in the first year. This year is a brutal nightmare. The governments of two countries expect a lot from me this year. My kids expect a lot from me. The trouble is, I’m running out of give. For reasons I am not going to get into the person who came for surgery support isn’t working out. She is leaving. I’m feeling pretty terrified. I had surgery 11 days ago. I have 10 weeks of recovery in front of me before I am supposed to resume anything like a normal schedule.

I’m grateful for the help she was able to provide. Now I need to keep rolling along.

I miss Noah so much it feels like I am going to die from my heart exploding. He spent a lot of years learning what he had to do to get me to rest. What specific subset of chores has to happen so that I can go to bed and relax? He knew. He could scan a room and see what would bother me and what I can ignore. I miss my love. I miss my husband. I miss being special and important. I miss having someone worry about my pain and discomfort. I miss having someone to talk to for as many hours a day as I wanted to talk.

There are things I’m struggling with that I can’t write about. Our family culture is not an easy one to join. We talk about things in ways that are, sometimes, deeply alienating and uncomfortable for people who are not part of it. I always regret this mismatch but I also have no desire to change. I do not want to give up this part of my culture and I can feel an insistent wall of decisiveness between me and anyone who tells me not to keep this part. It happens at times. They mean well; I see that. This came after many years of hard work. I’m keeping it.

I’m feeling incredibly insecure. It seems kinda reasonable right now. I am not going to try to guilt trip myself out of this. Being disabled and having three kids is fun load to carry. I should feel insecure. I have to figure out how to carry forward on my own. It doesn’t help that this is a Biblical plague year for me. I am hoping less will go wrong in the months to come. I have fun travel and adventures stacked from August to October. One reason I need to be careful about recovery is I have incentive to not drag things out. If I want anything to go well later then I need to nail this pacing on the first try. No setbacks.

No pressure.

I had a good hard cry with my son yesterday. I don’t feel good about leaning on him for support. He said, “We waited until I was basically an adult and I am offering you are not demanding it. This doesn’t count as parentification.”

Thing is, I’m in a hard spot. I either get help from the kids or I hurt myself in a way that might hurt them in the long run. I am not handling the level of helpless I am very well. This feels demeaning and degrading. This was hard enough with Noah around to pet me and tell me that I was a good, brave girl. I’m feeling neither good nor brave this time.

It’s interesting going through the process of getting to know someone new right now. I am an insecure nitwit, that’s for fucking sure. I was asked if anything about a body horrifies/bothers/something me. My brain is barely operational right now. I’m having to rewrite half of my sentences due to complete incoherence. I am dropping words and I’m having to route around gaps. It’s weird being in my brain today. It’s not a good place.

Anyway, he asked me if bodies bother me. I responded with a list of all the horrifying body situations I’ve been through. He said I am basically a nurse.

I have a knee jerk response to that. No, I’m not that cool. What I am is someone who grew up poor in the US. We have to develop a wide range of skills and no one is coming to take care of us when we get most ouchies. I come from a family of people prone to getting in major accidents. There’s not much about a body that can upset me. People have bodies. Bodies need care. I care about people. No, bodies aren’t an issue for me.

I don’t have as early a response to body odor as many do. If anything I smell hard working mammal and enjoy it. I’m not upset by farting though I may make jokes sometimes. I don’t care if someone shaves or lets hair grow.

I am talking around an issue I’m not explaining. I’m alluding to an insecurity and I’m not stating it. I’m doing a lot of that kind of thing right now. I’m talking around the hole in my brain where Noah belongs. He is supposed to cut through my meandering and simplify my problems and issues so they feel more tractable and fungible.

I want promises I can’t have and wouldn’t believe. I want certainty and my life is completely lacking in it. Instead what I have is bone deep terror of the future. I have a track record of people not being able to handle me very long. I won’t be kicked out of my home when this happens anymore. That’s an improvement. I am going to have to start levitating and not having needs though. I can’t need anyone.

I have to hold everyone in an open hand, ready to release them when they need to go.

I did actually feel pretty secure for a while there. I believed Noah wouldn’t leave me. Such hubris. I mean, he didn’t leave on purpose. He is still gone. I allowed myself to believe I would have a future in which I was cared for. More the fool, me.

I know people love me. That’s not something I doubt.

I feel like dog shit. I should try to sleep a bit more. I hurt so much in my body and in my soul and in my mind. Then I need to get up and make breakfast. It doesn’t matter how I feel. It matters what I do. I have babies to feed. Get on with it.

I’m not ok and it doesn’t matter. I have work to do. I have people who depend on me. I am not the most scheduled person. I get enough done.

I got through the big scary email from the accountant yesterday. I didn’t get almost any other admin work done because I ran out of time to work. I have a very limited number of spoons every day right now. Triage is hard. I hate being vulnerable and weak and needy. I am incompetent. It hurts my soul to be this. Oh fucking well. That doesn’t matter. It’s simply accurate.

I need to hide like a cat while I heal. Asking for support is such a fraught thing. Instead of support maybe nothing beyond food happens for months. Maybe that’s good enough. If I’m not selfish I will hurt myself more. This is feeling absolutely impossible to resolve in a way that has me getting more adult work done any month soon.

I’m not ok. It really doesn’t matter. I don’t get to stop.

Biblical fucking plagues

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My life is absurd. Sometimes I have to laugh about how ridiculous this is. I’m still physically and emotionally recovering from being raped close to a year ago. There are layers to that trauma socially and physically that will take a while to fully integrate. Noah has been gone almost six months. I had surgery nine days ago. Yesterday 4/5 people in my house tested positive for covid. (Luckily the person who was supposed to perform in a play last night was negative.) Fuck my life.

I’m so sad I missed the play. It’s not cool to go out when you know you have covid so I didn’t.

I’m still the one who has to wake up in the morning and get chores done. It doesn’t matter how I feel it matters how I act. I’m moving slowly and gingerly but stuff will get done. I thank my lucky stars all day every day for the amount of ease and grace in my life. I’m struggling but none of what I’m struggling with is going to drown me. I won’t let it. I’m a cockroach. I keep moving no matter what happens. I can’t be stopped.

I have to acknowledge that part of it is the ruthless way I pursue interactions that fill my bucket, so to speak.

I went hunting for NSA sex. Mostly I found it with a series of people who are profoundly incompatible with me on dozens of levels. Mostly I found men who were going to objectify the shit out of me and not see me as a person they should feel lucky to be in a room with. It’s dramatic to me when I can see and understand this massive difference between how much I am seen or not.

Gentleman is trying to see me. I am an alien creature and he struggles at times. He asks clarifying questions and he retains the answers. It’s really funny to me the way he has avoided all of my preferred boundaries to instead sidle closer to me day by day. He’s not being rude or exploitive. He is refusing to objectify me. He is humanising me. He insists on knowing why I have boundaries so he can honour the spirit even when not the letter.

I didn’t want to date because I didn’t want someone to have a lot of expectation of me being able to give them what they want to fulfill their life goals. I can’t show up and be the +1 for someone else because my life is really full. I have very little to offer. I am exhausted and depleted and overwhelmed basically all of the time. So he pushes for dates that fit around my schedule. He shows up and provides a lot of emotional support and he’s surprised he gets anything back at all. He lets me give what I want to give without being bitter that it isn’t suiting his perfect specifications. When I can’t do much he doesn’t treat me like a broken toy he talks to me. He doesn’t have a lot of set agenda for how we will interact or what we will do. He is flexible in ways that surprises me.

Noah cared about me and Noah twisted himself into pretzels around my needs but there was always the intense, constant pressure to change myself to be more pleasing to him. That was one of the biggest overarching elements of our marriage: I was supposed to change to suit him better. I went after that. I wanted that too. It was what Noah and I chose with our eyes wide open.

I can’t ever choose that again. I can’t ever be clay in someone’s hand to mold at will. I have to fulfill my obligations and that means I need to not change too much. I have to stay on the path I was on, for better or worse. Even if I am not still Noah’s wife I am still the mother of Noah’s babies. I owe them a duty of care and provision and I feel the urgency of need to complete this process with my entire soul.

I am both sad and delighted by the ways my relationships with my children are all deepening. Loss can easily break people apart under strain. We are growing closer together in the way we have after every difficulty since this family began. Noah and I began this as a conscious co-creation and now the kids help me carry it along because they know no other way and they don’t particularly want to stop. We have strife that we must overcome together. We have challenges and we overcome them together. When we elected to leave the US we did so knowing that therapists and other forms of support would be thin on the ground and we would need to turn inward to one another for a lot more support. We chose this life.

The other day I was in the kitchen with my son. He was working on baking a cake for some friends in the community. I was packing up a dinner portion for Gentleman. It turned out that my son needed some things from the store. I asked if it was ok to ask Gentleman to pick stuff up on the way over.

We had a long conversation about food culture and snobbery and access to diverse food. It was really good. It was good for me and it was good for him. It was important to talk really explicitly about the fact that we need to work on our scathing attitude towards people who have not had as much access to diverse foods as us. It’s totally unacceptable in this setting. We have had a privilege and it’s not ok to be cunts about other people having less access. We have to be soft and kind as we offer to share our weird food with people. They will often feel challenged by the amount of variety our family seeks out in food. We don’t eat like the British, that’s for sure. We definitely don’t eat like the poorer people on this island. We can’t be cunts about it.

This is such a weird experience for me. I have gone from being the poor person with the highly restricted food intake to the point of being the rich person who is trying to gently and softly expand the experience range of people who haven’t had as much luck as me. It’s fucking wild. I don’t know who I am through a lot of this. I feel confused and like I am trying to consolidate a self out of tiny little pieces of life experience but none of them are congruent or compatible.

I know that one of the things that is complicated about dating as a single mother is that my children should not go through the ringer being exposed to a series of people. I am wildly aware of this. Continuity, stability, and predictability are all on my mind as I figure out what it means to change pieces of my life or ways I spend my time.

It is hard not to talk to my children about dating as an experience the way I have talked to them about almost every experience I have had since they were born. I don’t have Noah as the person who can take all the overflow emotions and words anymore. I feel deeply stymied. I hope that over time I can learn to not give a shit and put more of it here. I want to stop blogging on social media. It creates a feedback loop I don’t like. People think I write to get attention. Not exactly. I feel deeply uncomfortable with the way people feel free to try to edit my thinking when they get to see pieces of it.

I am having deep discomfort with the fact that my children are going to be the primary Witnesses of my life going forward. No one else will ever stand so close to me. Given that I have doubts about ever living with a partner again they may be the longest and most enduring relationships of my entire life. They are going to know things about me dating. I am not a great liar.

My son and I talked about the fact that one thing I am getting out of dating right now is a place to put excessive “I want to take care of you” energy that I have. I don’t want to smother the shit out of my kids. We are all fairly independent creatures who like to do our own things. They need me to have other outlets in life. I am feeling weird about how intensely I am enjoying my relationship with Gentleman.

It’s highly gendered in many ways and also not. I am not looking for a provider or a protector. I am looking for a companion. I am looking for someone who both likes to give care and receive it. I’m looking for someone who can both accept me plainly as I am and help me figure out how I will adapt to make my life easier. Apparently I have a real thing for the sort of man who tells bad jokes all the time. Jokes. It is my destiny to endure a Biblical plague level of suffering thanks to bad jokes. Bad jokes in the “oh my gosh this is 5 year old humour” kind of way and not in the mean/aggressive/hateful way. Lots of fart jokes. Lots of very silly puns.

I endure a plague of bad jokes. I’m just saying.

They make me feel safe and relaxed. I love silliness. I love the way my horrified negative facial expressions makes people explode with laughter and delight. They are so happy to torment me. Good thing torment is my love language.

I need this silliness and this container for giving care because otherwise I’m not sure I’d be getting the basics done. I’m making sure food is present. I’m making sure people care for their bodies. I’m making sure the kids have some level of educational progress. That’s what I’m getting done and my “to do” list that I need to do when I am not actively care giving keeps getting longer. I don’t have the energy to do it. I don’t have the mental fortitude and I feel really ashamed of that. I can talk to myself on the internet but no I can’t go hunt up all the fucking forms for the accountant.

It is exceedingly hard to brain right now.

I miss Noah all the time. I feel bad about knowing that he would be able to help me be in a lot less pain right now. He knew a lot of tricks and I would have been feeling a lot more comfortable, even while sick, even while recovering from surgery. I feel selfish for how I miss him. I am sad about what I’m not getting. I’m sad about what I can’t give. I’m sad that this huge piece of myself feels like it vanished into thin air. Who I was because of my connection to him doesn’t exist anymore. Part of me died.

There are flickers and remnants of that person in other pieces of me and will exist in amalgamations of personality fragments going forward but the wholeness of that particular self is gone. I’m aware of it all the time. This chasm of pain and fear and loss. I really thought I was going to get to be that part of me for the rest of my life. I had a lot invested in being that self forever.

Now it is over and I stagger forward out of the wreckage. I am wounded in so many fucking ways. I feel absolutely awful physically and emotionally because of so many things. I’m NOT EVEN BRINGING UP OLD STUFF BECAUSE THERE IS BARELY ROOM IN MY BODY FOR AIR. Even though I see the old cycles and patterns and pain influencing the new layers. I can’t acknowledge the impact because I have to keep moving. It’s there. I feel it. I can’t dwell. It is too hard to acclimate at speed the things that are happening in this moment. I will have to wait until I slow down and have time to breathe. Will that time ever come? Are those moments in the past?

No. Someday I will have adult children who don’t need me and all the time in the world. I will come to a stop someday and do absolutely nothing beyond base survival for months. It will be. I am allowed to get to that point. It will be ok when I do.

I look forward to that. Maybe I can go hide on Shetland or Orkney for a year. I can spend my time not giving.

Maybe. Until then, it is past time to be starting breakfast. I should get up and get on it. I have babies to kiss and food to make. It is time to start another day.

Feeling pretty butthurt

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I love the phrase butthurt. It brings me joy. I, however, do not love it when my actual butt hurts. Which it does. Ow. Given that once upon a time I documented gross levels of details about my poop here I feel like this is not a TMI level of disclosure in this space. It hurts having hemorrhoids cut off.

My kids are the light of my life. They are who I have to look to as I move forward. I’m getting awesome help from friends in taking care of them (I feel very lucky). I keep wondering how I am going to be able to pay forward this help in the future. Luckily more stuff will keep on happening whether I like it or not.

I am doing both a good job on resting and also feeling like I could stand to do a bit more. So there is that. I’m trying. I have not had the brain to go through email in over a week. This is suboptimal because I have stuff that needs done. I have tax paperwork to manage and legal stuff and travel stuff that needs sorted. Thinking coherently is beyond me.

I miss Noah all day and all night long. I reach for him over and over. I burst into tears several times a day every day. This is terribly painful.

I’m finding dating complicated as a widow. I don’t have the ‘my ex sucks’ attitude that most people have. I don’t have the life experience that there is no point to giving your all to a relationship. I don’t have the view that I should refrain from commitment because no one will stay. I mean, he didn’t stay but he didn’t want to leave. I have a different kind of terror. Mine is rooted in the weakness of the flesh.

As a hypersexual person I’ve had nightmares about someone dying during sex for most of my life. Noah and I weren’t having sex but we were lying together intimately. I was mostly asleep cuddled on his chest. I am freaked out by cuddling. I want comfort but I’m also afraid of more death. I’m afraid of being close to another person and failing to save their life. This haunts me wildly.

I go back and forth between being upset with myself for dating someone semi-seriously so soon and hoping that Noah wouldn’t be upset with me. I hadn’t intended to find someone as nice as I have.

Phew. Is it time to be more honest with y’all? It’s a scary thought. I’ve been pretty closeted since I moved here. I’ve met 13 men this year. I didn’t sleep with all of them. Most of them have been fine but not partners I will keep. That was what I expected. I expected the quickly coming and going and not being compatible with folks. I expected to be told that I am too much trouble and no one will bother for me. Instead he is pretty nice about the ways I’m weird and he listens and asks questions and remembers the answers. Sometimes he is confused about why I am telling him things.

Because I am a difficult person to be with. You have to accept an unusual amount of unpredictability and wildness. Because if I don’t tell you early on I feel like a liar and a deceiver and someone who should be abandoned when you find out the truth.

I should try to sleep again. Sleeping is hard.

Life can’t be smooth, can it?

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The kind friend who is supposed to come help through surgery recovery is currently stuck outside a big city approximately 170 miles away. Her car had trouble. Cars are like this.

I feel overwhelmed and scared right now. I don’t want to close doors. I don’t want to eliminate the chance of potential down the road but that means I will close a lot of doors by not deciding. There is no way to win this game. Today I am going to catch up on laundry and cleaning the kitchen and tidying the garden. That and getting Shortie to martial arts. My body is very sore and tired. I feel worn down. I’ve been trying to sleep. I’m going to bed at a reasonable hour. Unless I take drugs I wake up ungodly early. (The drugs come from my doctor.)

I miss Noah so much I feel like I will explode. I am scared of being alone. I am scared to be with anyone else. I am scared of asking my kids for help. I am scared of not being useful enough. I am scared I will over spend and wreck my childrens’ future. I am scared I will not do enough and our family will fail. I don’t know what that even means at this point but I’m scared of it.

I am scared I am not enough while also being entirely too much.

I wish I could spend a month or three not interacting with any humans at all.

I hate that I need help. I hate that I have to ask my friend to do a long and difficult and now even more expensive journey to help me.

I wish I had made life choices such that I could go lay down the mushrooms and be done. I didn’t though. I have to stay. I have to stay no matter how hard it is. I have to stay no matter how weak I am. I have to stay no matter how sad I feel for the rest of my life. My feelings don’t matter. My actions do.

So yes, I am absolutely using a lover as an antidepressant. Fuck buddies were a mixed bag. They always are. That’s the thing about sex with strangers, it’s like Forest says: it’s a box of chocolates. You never know what you are going to get.

What I will say in this medium at this moment is: I have made much safer choices than I did in the past. I am proud of myself. That feels pathetic. I shouldn’t have to beg and plead with myself for scraps of credit. I set the bar so low yet clearing it is so hard.

I have so much to do and I don’t know how much time I have. That is one of the hardest things about losing Noah suddenly. I always thought I would go first. Now I don’t know how to get everything done to make my kids safe in time. I don’t have him as a backstop. He was supposed to be there to paper over the cracks of what I missed. Now my children only have me.

That feels unfair in so many many ways. They deserve better than me. They deserved Noah.

It’s funny. I’m coming to grips with some of the ways Noah’s behaviour sucked because I need to avoid those patterns in the future. I still think he was a less shitty person than me. He did not have as much to make up for. Yes, he fucked up. Yes, he did abusive things.

I am not better.

I am a shitty, petty, awful person. I mean, my kids don’t think so. Whatever. They don’t see what is inside me. I’m pretty awful.

Noah said it didn’t matter what I thought, only what i did. But now without him I don’t know how to evaluate what I’m doing. I’m stuck in my head going round and round with my thoughts. I feel like I am going to go a lot crazier without Noah to talk to. So much of me feels like it is being forced into a weird impossible silo. I feel like it is much harder to know what is real and what isn’t.

I feel guilty for the way I am using my lover as an antidepressant. Oxytocin is my favourite drug.

I am finding it fascinating that I do not experience the same kinds of chemical surges I did when I was younger. They are different. I no longer believe that “falling in love” is a chemical reaction that happens quickly or not at all. I believe that love is a choice. Love is the act of choosing a person over and over even when it isn’t easy.

I am not having a hard time ending things with fuck buddies in the first two months. When they make me feel icky, when I realise that choosing to spend time with them means I am opting in to a set of behaviours that I have a problem with I bail really quickly. I am explicitly and consciously staying the heck away from friends. I choose to keep my friends despite them having behaviours that bug me. It’s about distance and proximity. I can handle different sized containers for relationships based on whether or not I’m having sex with someone. It changes the calculus.

Gentleman doesn’t fuck me. He makes love to me and I can feel the difference. Being with him is a balm right now. Not a lot is helping me feel better. Time with him does. He makes me smile and feel soft. He will not play “What Is Wrong With Krissy?” I confess that part of the reason I will be scared of integrating him more into my life will be the fear of falling off that pedestal. For now he hasn’t started complaining about me. It’s the honeymoon. We are in a bubble away from our lives. It’s an affair, not a relationship.

It’s a really nice affair. Like, super nice. One of the best of my life. I have mixed feelings about that.

I am having big feelings wondering how much this is a dramatic improvement because I am now willing to allow someone to be nice to me. I have run from it with great speed for most of my life. Noah was the nicest treatment I could tolerate for the longest time.

I haven’t written that much about the rape last summer in vanilla land. Part of that is because I flipped out and being super public about that is mixed. Part of it is how Noah reacted.

I needed to regain power. I didn’t think about it in a logical or wise way. It’s funny that I’m still hesitating. Soon I will be ready to cross post everything. I don’t like having secrets. If you have secrets people can shame you by implying they will expose you.

When I was raped I flipped hard into fawn mode. I basically had an affair with the rapist. I talked to him a lot in text. I went and saw him in town. I gave him a blow job in an inappropriate place. Well, he’d been telling me all about how he didn’t see a point in getting blow jobs because he never came that way. I took that as a personal challenge in my insane way.

Noah learned all this the day I had surgery. The next day when we got home he hurt me fairly badly. He waited until he could be in a soundproof room with me. If you are vanilla that sounds like abuse. It’s funny because, that’s not the part that felt abusive to me. I gave consent long ago allowing him to correct my behaviour or attitude in any way he saw fit. He owned me and I felt I owed him whatever it took to pay him back for being willing to own me.

I was sorry I couldn’t act the way he wanted me to. I was sad he had to punish me.

I couldn’t not freak out after being raped.

I have been talking about my promiscuity with him because it feels grossly unfair not to. I don’t know yet how to properly explain that part of what I mean when I say I can’t be monogamous is there are times when I will react sexually in ways a monogamous person wouldn’t.

There are things in me that are broken. I don’t have a normal person’s reaction to pain or trauma. If I did I would have died a long time ago. I can fall in love with shitty people and find ways to justify continuing to serve them. Sometimes this is something I am only dimly aware of it happening as it occurs.

I don’t want to be punished for being what my father made me any more. I no longer believe that can be beaten out of me.

It is very hard to figure out how to talk about this with normal people. I am not chasing down sadists. I’m not looking for problematic encounters. I am trying to make safer choices. It is complicated figuring out how to be fair about warning off someone who is not fucked up and abusive. No, I’m not going to hit you. No, given how you respond to boundaries I can’t imagine screaming at you.

Noah had to hurt me sexually over many years, while I asked for change, before I got to that point.

I didn’t have the right to say no. My no didn’t matter. It was irrelevant. I could say it all I wanted and he would listen if and when he felt like. He resented the times he did follow them. He held them up like shiny toys “See, I let you have this boundary.”

I opted in and I would have stayed forever. I absolutely believe I would have stayed no matter what he did to me. He was trying as hard as he could to make me not my father’s daughter. He wanted to morph that piece into only serving him.

He was doing so from a place of basic misunderstanding. He thought he could make me monogamous. He thought he could make me into someone who reacted to sexual trauma by withdrawing and taking space.

No. I run into the fire. Over and over. I run all the way to the far side of it. I see what damage I can correct after the fire ends.

Even though the Scottish government finds me to not be a credible witness due to the muddiness of the case I feel good. I got a lot of other people to come forward. He’s in jail and going to stay there. I’ll tell you plain that part of the reason some of them agreed to step forward was because I was able to show them my receipts so they could see the pattern for themselves.

Once you see it you can’t unsee it.

When people feel alone they usually can’t start moving at all. I start moving when I need to find my compatriots. I don’t curl up into myself. I branch out. I put feelers into different communities and locations. I explode into building tiny itty bitty root tendrils. I need data and examples before I can make any of that happen.

Wanting me to curl into myself is saying that I should stop looking for the patterns. I never wanted that. I don’t want to be raped again. That’s not my point. When something shitty happens to me I don’t want it to be the focus of my life. I need to have the experience on as much of a speed run as possible because I don’t have time to do the slow motion thing that most lives see. I don’t have the patience for that. I’ll get bored and wander off without getting enough data. Then I won’t find the pattern.

I like that I explode briefly with each trauma into frenetic community building. I want that aspect of myself. It’s not always pretty though.

After going to the pub with Gentleman I can confirm that I 100% would never hunt in such an environment. It’s not for me. It’s disorienting and people are incoherent and ugly drunk. There’s nothing appealing about hunting for sex under those circumstances. Either I am there with a group of people and I am only going to pay attention to them or I am there alone and that makes me fucking rape bait.

Naw.

I am not courting trouble. Only I am. I had specifically not wanted to have only one partner because feelings and escalators and stuff.

I am going to disappoint someone who expects and wants monogamy. It is hard not to feel like I am bad. I don’t know for sure how I will react to other traumas in life. I wouldn’t put money on me being out of them.

It’s really hard to leave the house a lot of the time. But I do it. In my eye catching bullshit so people get used to seeing me. One way or another they will know I’m around and probably have some kind of opinion. It is harder to be alone in a room with a man.

I need the antidepressant. I feel guilty when I have someone want to make love to me without knowing what kind of crazy they are sticking their dick in.

It feels deeply unfair to let someone fall in love with me before I puncture their bubble about what kind of person I am. I can’t let people project all over me. I will behave erratically. It will be a bad experience. I will hurt them. It feels like if I don’t come with a long list of awful disclaimers it is wildly unfair.

If what you are looking for is loyalty I am a very broken toy. It will not look how you want it to look. Am I loyal? Very. I don’t always demonstrate it in the ways people need me to. They need loyalty to mean a set of behaviours I can’t live up to. I am scared of what this is going to mean for my future. Will I continue to feel willing to take risks on longer relationships even though they mean so much more insecurity?

Fuck buddies eventually fade out from my life for the most part. I don’t know what will happen with lovers going forward. Luckily I have a long time before I need to decide.

I’m having a lot of body memories collide this morning. My friend have difficulty getting here is ratcheting up my anxiety. I’m not upset with her, of course. She even had the car checked before beginning the trip. Stuff happens. It’s just that everything feels higher stakes now. Every hiccup feels more “oh crap should I be arranging backup?” It is hard to trust that things will fall into place in the ways I need them to.

They probably will. Realistically this is a very surmountable problem.

My body is shaking though. I hate living with layers of memories and feeling like my body doesn’t know where it is in time. I have to shake it off. I have a lot to get done today. I need to function and I need to smile, even though I don’t get to take my antidepressant. He says he is going to observe medical protocol to the letter. This makes me want to weep. Also it makes me feel secure. It makes me feel a lot of things I don’t know how to express.

I don’t know what I’m going to do. I feel like maybe I should be a giant cunt and make him want to leave. That would be the adult and mature thing to do, right? Kidding not kidding. Only I don’t want to.

When he is around most of what I want to do is sit in his lap and kiss him in between talking. I don’t really know a lot of reason to be mean to him. I’d have to stretch really hard.

His biggest flaw to date is that he isn’t big on soup. I’m not sure we can be friends. I really like being his lover though.

It’s time for the day to begin. I have sourdough starter to use up. I’ll start there.

Backwards and forwards

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Yesterday was Noah’s birthday. He should have been 49. It will be really bad for me when I turn 49. That’s going to be savage. We spent the day cleaning the house and getting ready for my impending surgery. One day till my friend arrives to help. She wants a few days of settling in with the kids first. She is smart. Surgery is in four days. Due to the stress and vagaries of train travel I’m going the night before. I feel less resilient with Noah coming along. I think the surgery will be fine. It’s going to hurt like last time.

Unlike last time I won’t have to give a police interview 3 weeks into recovery so I’m less likely to have a sudden massive bleed out.

I’m having a hard time with my feelings. I realize that isn’t a huge shock or anything. I wish I could only remember good things about Noah. Instead my brain is going through all the memories–good and bad. Our marriage was extreme in a lot of ways I can’t nail down without feeling shame. We constructed a marriage that wouldn’t work for anyone else. Were we wrong to do so? Sometimes I can’t tell.

The part that matters to me is: I wouldn’t leave for anything. I would never have left. I would have dealt with being in pain or having to be smaller. He was worth it. He was worth everything. I loved him so much I feel I could explode. He was a very good husband for me.

I am behind on emails again. I haven’t caught up on neurotic tracking in a while. If I’m not sharing the data with Noah it feels so much less purposeful. I created data, in part so I could show Noah trends and patterns and he would decide when I had to go in and seek help for a problem. He was my designated grown up and care giver. Now I feel like I will drift in the wind because there is no one to care.

I feel so achingly lonely. I want him all the time. I miss his smile, his intense way of looking at me, how he touched me, and how made me believe I always had a place: beside him.

I feel like I will never belong anywhere again.

I am highly conscious, as I move forward as a human being who will never agree to monogamy again, that I will never feel like I belong to someone again. People will always keep a space between us for their own safety. I can’t blame them. I would too. I don’t think it safe or wise to get too close to me.

The person I am seeing keeps asking why I hard selling the benefits of being around me. Do I expect him to do the same? I don’t. I really don’t. It was one of the dominant behaviour patterns of my marriage. Noah and I both did it constantly. “See, I do x for you. It is better to have me around than to kick me out.” As if that is a healthy way to run a marriage. I am having a hard time stopping. I still feel like I am trying to beg people to not throw me away. I think part of me agrees that if I am not monogamous nothing else I do will make up for that. I am a poisoned pill.

It’s been sitting heavily in my craw that between 3 men, I have not had control over my sex life or my sexual development for about 33 years. The middle one had the least time with me, but he did a lot of the early hypnosis work that Noah built on for almost 20 years. It’s not that I lost control of my body at 10. It’s that I gained it briefly at 13. I gave it away at 19/20 (that was a muddy line). It was given back when I was 23. I regained *nothing* at 33. I did have a rebellion at 34. Now I’m getting it back permanently at 43. I pay a lot of attention to patterns. Numbers give me comfort.

As I contemplate what I need from dating, as my son likes to say, the bar is a tripping hazard in hell.

Going forward I am going to need to spend time around people who make me feel cared about. I’m going to need to spend time with people who act like I am a fascinating puzzle. I am going to need to be around people who are cautious with physical boundaries and who recoil like an electric fence when they are told no. I cannot be around people who body shame because I cannot ever be vulnerable with them. That is a sign that I am going to be attacked and I will feel deep shame. I don’t need more shame factories in my life. I really don’t.

What I need (and the reason it is worth my while to seek out) is to feel seen and appreciated.

Most people don’t make me feel like this. Very few people make me feel like this. I go through most of my life feeling intensely alienated because I can’t ask most of the people I spend the most time with to see very much about me. It creates an overwhelming deficit.

Noah used to fill that. I don’t know what to do now.

I fee sad and isolated a lot of the time. More than I deserve to, in my opinion. It will change when and if it changes. I want so much. I feel entitled to so little. Noah gave me so much. My whole life is going to be less full obsessive love after this. I will never be someone’s autistic special interest like that again. I don’t even know that I would like it again. It came with a lot of constraints. They were worth it. I miss him.

The kids are clearly well on their way to deifying him. I just nod. I don’t talk about his down sides. It’s too soon. Someday when they are bemoaning how they will never be as good as their super human father I will cackle and tell them about all the stuff they didn’t see. He was a man. He had his good parts and his bad parts. He was deeply and achingly human. He was frail in a good many ways. He was aggressive in ways he shouldn’t have been. At times he was violent. Yes, he did lose his shit. Only with me. I was his safe person, as he was mine. For people like us, part of feeling safe is being able to be all the parts we can’t use with other people. Some of those weren’t very nice.

I have intensely positive feelings about my marriage.

As I move into the next stage of my life, where I don’t have Noah to meet my needs, I have to consider other ways to meet them. It feels cold as fuck but also what else am I supposed to do? I’m not my mom to simply never date again. She had a threshold of abuse and was done forever.

I have data. I understand how low the rate of violence has been for me in terms of broader exploration. I see the fireworks of good. I can’t act like one very small part of the data set defines the whole. That’s silly. That is numerically unsupportable.

Thanks to having data I can see the positive changes in my trajectory. The kinds of people I could find at different stages of my life are very different.

I am grateful I am about to have help with the kids for a while. I need it. There are tasks I’m falling behind on because I can’t brain after this many hours on duty. I feel like my job shouldn’t be exhausting after all these years–I should be inured. I’m not. I still like my day job but I need to simplify aspects of it. I can’t be as much of a three ring circus without Noah present for support.

I am so much less capable without him papering over the cracks and finishing the last 20% of so many things. And on top of that I’m doing all the stuff he usually did entirely off-screen from me. This is hard. My brain is very overwhelmed all the time. I need to find a way to get Shortie more of a social life without me having to physically facilitate it. She needs it really badly. I’m having a hard time. The surgery recovery time is looking so brutal. Oh well.

Keep moving. Only for the first wee while it’ll be shooting for 1,000 steps a day level of “moving”. The point isn’t to keep a consistent speed the whole time. We are humans, not machines. The point is to be patient and loving and kind to myself on the far side as I struggle to regain fitness. It will be another journey. I will have to go slowly or I will hurt myself.

This process is going to be harder without Noah to fuss over me and force me to rest. He was literally looking at retiring early to be my full time carer. I’m scared. I get sick a lot. I have a compromised immune system. I don’t have a specific name for it. I just get everything and I’m down for long periods. My life doesn’t stop though. I stay sick longer because I don’t rest enough. If I don’t do too much, not enough gets done.

And now Noah won’t be here to help so there is even more work that I am responsible for. Fuck. Not all of it. His family is stepping forward to build more intense relationships to start the process of transferring intergenerational wealth. Noah turned it down throughout his life. The offer was always on the table. I’m going to say yes. I would be a fool not to. I’m going to need to pay attention to this education they are offering. I am now responsible for managing all of my money. I don’t get to wave at it and call it “Noah’s money”. I have made reasonably good choices so far. I like where I’ve gotten.

A very terrible part of me can’t help but notice that the severance payment for my first marriage is alright. Sure, the relationship was terminated but I am going to be safe forever if I manage it carefully. I can’t be profligate but I can still buy whatever groceries we want. I will never live like a tech bro again. Somehow this is karmically a place I can live with.

I have incredibly mixed feelings about the wealth transfer. I also know that I have two kids with noticeable physical disabilities and one kid where it’s too young to know. It’s connected to genetic issues in both kids. The NHS is finally starting to evaluate/track them.

I may have brought people into the world who are not well suited to the capitalist hellscape. Remains to be seen, of course. I’m not offering them a fully independent amount of help. They could have enough to live at home comfortably. I can’t promise a lot more than that. I don’t have more.

Noah doesn’t have 6 more years on his arc towards saving for retirement. There was a fair bit of input expected to get to what he wanted to hit. Oh well. Deep breath. I can turn a dime into a dollar. I will be ok. I am very good at denying Current Me things so that Future Me can have more options. I’ve been playing that game for a very long time. I can take a lot of denial in some ways and not so much in others. I will build in giving lots to other people, don’t worry. I’m still me. I am thinking really hard on the structure of that giving. I am going to have to have that firm in my head. I need guard rails and limits. I need to understand what I have to give. That’s a hard thing to figure out sometimes.

I have been told recently that I like “folky” country music. I like stories, not hard rock anthems. Guilty as charged. It’s funny. I never thought of myself as such because I had never had the slider start in that position before. Usually I’m considered not very folky. I know a handful of artists and otherwise I can’t it through it. I’m too pop.

I have been listening to a lot of old albums lately. I don’t want to watch shows. I am reading more. I like having music on. I know I should embrace silence more. I do know. I like the way I get to ride my emotions like crashing waves when I have music on while I type. It is my companion through all the highs and lows and flashes of memory.

I love the way I get to re-sort my past memories that come up. I see each circumstance differently. Noah and I ran out of arc. It is really hard to feel like I am having to go in and put a manual end on each piece of the thread. “This is over now.” I am pruning off parts of myself that grew there because I had to accommodate Noah. I have absolutely no idea what this is going to mean in the long run.

It scares me a lot.

I am going to have to be mercenary with myself about my limits going forward. I need to catch up on budget work. I need to stop allowing myself this sloppiness. I’ve been scared to look. I can’t do that anymore. I’ve been watching the overall balance and keeping an eye on that. I need to look at how things are shaking out.

Then I need to hand a number to my in laws and that’s awkward. They don’t want me to stop having all fun. They want the kids to have big lives, still.

I have the option to choose a soft life.

Globally speaking this is righteously unfair. I’m aware. I’m having feelings about that. I also don’t see any global value in grinding myself to dust. Who knows what good I will do if I have the ability to learn how to thrive instead of barely surviving in “solidarity”.

I have always done my best to pay forward the help I have received. I either have credibility or not. I am not assuring private jet lifestyles. I am making sure we won’t lose the house and we never have to worry about food.

Our life together has been a mash between what he wanted and what I wanted. Now what? What about the parts that were only there because he wanted them? I’m having a lot of feelings about that. I’m having a lot of feelings about everything right now.

This is the path. I get to traverse it, not question it. All the feelings. I’ll have all the feelings.