I am struggling right now. Writing this feels like an invitation to conflict but that’s not what I’m trying to do. I don’t have any intention of putting anyone down, making them feel bad, or blaming them for my current state. I’m probably going to have to negotiate some folks feeling bad anyway if I keep writing.

I love that people trust me to support them. It’s a big theme in my relationships, all of them. With adult peer friends, with Kids, with Elders, and with children I am usually someone that people come to when they have big feelings they need help understanding/sorting. I have no answers. I’m not going to tell you what to do or how to feel or how to fix your life. I’m not omniscient. What I can do is ask questions and share a different perspective. I like that I am good at this. I like that so many people trust me and love me in this way.

Also I have maintained the stability to be good at this over the last 20 years because Noah took care of my needs. He listened to me when I was dysregulated. He helped me tease apart where I was feeling bad about old stuff vs having a negative feeling about current actions. He helped me find my place in time. He could look at my face and have a good idea of about which age/trauma I was experiencing as an abreaction. He just knew.

Now I am helping other people untangle the threads of their lives. I feel ever more ensnarled in my own threads and incapable of pulling them apart. I need Noah. I will never have Noah again.

I talk about the hard parts of our marriage rather freely. My body is still ramping down from paying the costs of being his wife. I feel afraid to talk about the good. Thinking about how much I lost is much more painful. He was a very good husband. He was a flawed human being and he knew that meant he had to work on getting better all the time. That made me feel very safe. He was an asshole and I was an asshole and we wanted each other and it was ok that we weren’t perfect.

I am back in that place where I feel dirty and polluted and toxic for other humans. My only value is in being a tool to help. I need to do work or I don’t deserve any of the good parts of being in a relationship.

Yesterday I sat in my kitchen for 5 hours talking to a friend who is going through some stuff. It started to really kick off in their life before Noah died and they’ve been holding their breath and levitating, waiting until now to start feeling like they seriously need to change big parts of their life. They needed to talk it through with someone who isn’t going to think they are bad for having needs that their life isn’t currently meeting.

I am happy to be that for them. I really am.

Several Kids are going through rough stuff and they need to spend a lot of time processing. None of them have mothers they can really go to for processing and support. They have friends like me. Most friends aren’t like me.

My children know that they can come to me and say, “I need you to listen to me and support me like a therapist. I need you to be on my side and not advocate for or defend yourself.” It takes a few seconds for me to do the compartmentalisation necessary but I can do that for brief periods of time. I can’t live there but I can bring up a container where I am not for other people to visit when they need that from me.

Make the self into a vessel where the self is not.

I have not been able to have the rupture-repair conversations with folks from last year yet and it is eating at me. I feel ashamed. When I think about trying my insides explode with acid and pain.

I shouldn’t have approached Pretty Lady yet. I’m not ready. I am being avoidant in some shitty ways. She is in a great place in her life and she just got great news–a woman she is attracted to is also attracted to her. I am freaking out about my complete inability to close and do shit I want to do. I feel really sad that I have no container for this joy. I’m too busy feeling shame for betraying Noah. I’m too busy feeling like I am drowning in my day job. I’m too busy not being able to sort out getting my body to hurt less. I feel incapable of reducing pain at this point. It makes me feel scared and tense and angry. It reduces my capacity.

Rodent therapist says I am sitting in the intersection between resilience, tolerance, and capacity. I am not doing so great. My resilience feels almost nonexistent. My tolerance is not where I would like it to be. My capacity feels like it is nonexistent. All I have are knives.

The last few therapy sessions have involved a lot of time where my therapist is basically pleading with me to see that my life is very hard and I am genuinely dealing with more complicating factors than average people. I am not pathetic for struggling. Everyone would struggle with what I have going on. I am not a failure of a tool if I can’t work harder right now.

My inability to do more than I am doing is not proof that I am worthless. They would really like me to be able to hold on to this in my brain. Mostly I’m failing.

I can’t be there for everybody the way I wish I could. Failing to be there for people means they internalise that they aren’t worth having anyone be there for them. It is evidence that they are disposable, right?

If I can’t meet everyone’s needs why should they bother to have a relationship with me? I’m just going to disappoint them and fail them. Why bother?

I’m really not worth it. I have very little bandwidth going spare. My life is exhausting and depleting in ways I can barely wrap my brain around.

Years ago I was working with my then youngest child on anger management stuff. They are an apple that landed with their skin touching the trunk of the tree they fell from. I love them so much and I have tried hard to teach them all the stuff I was taught about how to manage living in a body that gets overwhelmed that easily. They asked, “Why is the answer to every problem ‘Get stronger’?”

I don’t know baby, but it is. That is the only thing I have seen in this life. Over and over it doesn’t matter how weak or incompetent I am. Sure, I’m going to fail a lot. I will also get back up and keep moving, working the whole time on getting stronger. I don’t know another way to experience being human.

“If you can’t look back on yourself 18 months ago and say ‘Wow I really sucked‘ you aren’t trying hard enough.”

I know, Noah, but 18 months ago I still had you. I don’t think I will ever really be able to look back on that time and think I sucked. I had you. I had a Daddy. I had a home. I was loved in this crazy, impossible, overwhelming, thoroughly engulfing way and I fucking loved it. I felt safe in my terrorised home. I felt abused, squashed, despised, and like I explosively needed to grow in ways he didn’t want to allow, sure. Mostly though, I felt loved and accepted. I knew that man was going to take care of me until one of us dropped dead.

Then he did drop dead.

I know other people love me. I am not trying to demean the gift of their love in any way. They are the flickering candles that light my path. My friends love me and carry me when I can not love myself. They keep me going.

Noah’s love wasn’t a flickering candle it was an explosive volcano that was going to permanently alter the landscape of everything he touched. I wanted him to burn me.

I feel so completely devastated that he isn’t my last rapist. I am so angry that a fucking loser stole that title from Noah. It breaks my heart. He wanted so badly to be that.

It was ok for Noah to break me. He always built me back better.

I don’t have that certainty in any other relationship and I shouldn’t look for it. I would hurt people and I don’t want to. I want to have relationships that are free from abuse moving forward and that’s going to be very hard given that I surround myself with people who are all suffering intensely from feeling abandoned and rejected as a core aspect of their selfhood. We are spiky folk.

What I offer is that I can sit with that pain and not be damaged by it. I can’t take it away. I can’t make you feel better. Your pain isn’t going to make my pain worse. My pain is about me and the journey I have been on. Well, sometimes your pain is going to make my pain worse. This is harshest when our Mother Wounds don’t align.

That potentially explosive conflict is a lot of why I am frozen when it comes to repairing some ruptures right now. Dancing around my Mother Wound is hard when I am feeling strong and stable. I am neither feeling strong nor stable. I feel weak. I feel pathetic. I feel incapable and sad and desolate. I feel like I got in over my head. I feel like I am failing at everything and there is no way to ever have anything be ok again without Noah.

Not everything was ok with Noah. There were big problems. Don’t bring reality into this relationship.

The ways I felt electrically uncomfortable with Noah were never going to fully go away. I felt a high level of nervous system activation around him. It felt comfortable. It felt normal. It felt like a shot of really strong espresso to keep me moving and energetic.

I don’t have that now. It’s weird. I have less nervous system activation than I’ve had basically ever in my life. I’m told this was supposed to be the goal or something? Why do I feel dead inside then? If this is the gold star point of all the work I did that strikes me as a problem.

I do have less nervous system activation. I feel locked into receive mode. I don’t have containers where it is safe to let out all of my crazy. I know people say they could handle more from me and it’s ok for me to talk too. I can’t. I can’t risk stress testing anyone or anything. I have to be in control of myself. I have to only bring out the tiniest of shards or I will hurt someone.

It’s going to be all my fault someone feels desolate and lonely and like there is no point in continuing to try to have relationships since everyone lets them down.

I have a lot of people who tell me that I am the safe person in their life for them to talk to. I am grateful every time. It is meaningful. I feel like something is broken in me that I don’t feel equally safe in these containers.

I felt safe in the container with Noah. I was allowed to be the most psycho extra bitch in the world and he thought I was fucking great. In tearing my soul out to splay it on his workbench like a butterfly he was examining he made me whole. The parts of me that he hated and he wanted to change were meticulously examined and understood. He took them apart down to the smallest molecules. He may have felt angry with me but he never felt repulsed. He was always drawn further in.

There has been a lot of scream/crying this week. My throat hurts. I’m getting that weird eye twitchy thing. I hate that.

I was disgusting and bad and a failure and he still loved me and wanted me. He would never have left me. Until he died suddenly in a freak way. It’s not fair. There is no fair. Someone wanted me. It was too good to be true.

He wasn’t even my Daddy for 18 years. That didn’t start until after I wrote the first book. I wrote that book 5 years in. He couldn’t be my Daddy until he saw the full context of how my father abused me. That’s objectively kind of fucked up. Also wonderful. He contorted himself as hard as he could to be the partner I needed. He put more pressure on himself to change than he did on me.

No one is perfect. No one is always good.

I don’t feel like I know how to be good enough for people going forward. A lot of how I was so good for Noah was because I was so intense and my nervous system was so activated. We matched. We spurred one another on. We combined into rocket fuel. We could try audacious things because when we fucked up the other cushioned the blow.

Noah was the person on this earth who thought it was worth night and day effort for the rest of his life to make sure I felt like someone wanted me enough that it didn’t matter if anyone else liked me. I could be bold. All the times I was rejected were tolerable because I could come home to this bubble, our whale pod of acceptance.

Now I don’t have that. I am trying desperately to create this feeling for other people. My source of it for myself is gone and I feel so very empty. How do I keep pouring water from my bucket when all that I have in there is sand. I need to water the souls of other people so they can grow. I need to live pretty much all the time in that container where I am not. It’s the only way to not be swamped by how much pain I am in.

It would be very hard to use text to talk when I am sobbing and screaming like this. I’m just saying.