I haven’t responded to the last email yet but I will. I find myself torn in a lot of different directions. For one thing: I know how hard it sucks to date a breeder. We are selfish fucks who put our kids above other people. That’s hard to deal with. It feels invalidating. It can lead to all kinds of weird jealousy over time spent (that was an issue early in my parenting experience even inside my marriage) and I know people end up feeling left out. It sucks that when a short person has a need that comes over all the wants and needs of the grown ups. I can really understand not feeling ok with that kind of sacrifice when they aren’t even your crotch droppings. I can even more fully being over that kind of limitation when your own children are grown and gone. You are ready to be selfish about your time. Fair!

I am not ready for that. I am not going to be ready for that for a long time. In American terms my kids are level 2 autistic. It means they need quite a lot of support. If I were in California I would know exactly what levers to push to get exactly the appropriate support for my kids to go to school so I could get a break from them. Here in Scotland that support doesn’t exist and I would be laughed at in a meeting if I requested it. I would be told “That’s not how it works here”. I opted out of the schooling system in California because the live shooter drills were a bridge too far. I watched that fuck kids up. I couldn’t let the system do that to my kids. I can’t let my kids fall through the cracks in Scotland even though there aren’t any guns. This means that people who would normally spend many hours a day with specialists are stuck with only having me and I’m not really enough. This is why we go to classes and activities and have regular events at our house so we can build a community. My kids need more than me and I give them as much as I can within a structure where I supply all the extra support they need beyond what “average” kids need.

That means I don’t get a lot of time off and my brain is deeply overwhelmed pretty much all the time.

If you need me to lavish attention on you every day I am going to be a failure for your expectations. I’m not saying you don’t deserve that. You totally deserve that. You are wonderful and shiny and fun and you have earned all the good things you want to get. That doesn’t mean I am in a place to give them to you right now.

When I chose to give birth I was signing myself up to a contract that I take very seriously. I have seen with my own eyes what happens to people when their parents don’t take that contract seriously. It wasn’t pretty. I am going to take this very seriously. I have 9 years 8 months and 2 years to go. Until then all the fun I want to have has to fit in the cracks around my duty to these humans.

That’s going to make me hard to date. It’s going to mean that someone needs to have a lot of patience if they are to survive a relationship with me. I know it is a big ask. I don’t feel owed that patience. I don’t really feel like I deserve it. There is a big part of me that feels like I should listen to the people who tell me to abandon my kids more because “I deserve a life too.”

Thing is: I had a really fantastic single life before I had kids. I fucked all the people. I traveled. I did the fun drugs. I did all the crazy bdsm most people put on their bucket list.

I am not in that season right now. If someone is impatient with me being in the season I am in then we are not a match. It’s ok. No hard feelings about that bit.

I am struggling with having some hard feelings about you deciding that you being upset with me was somehow a proxy indicating that all of my friends are upset with me. That feels manipulative in a way I can’t abide. That feels deeply cruel. I have struggled so hard with feeling like anyone might ever be able to like me at all that attempting to pull that scaffolding out from beneath me is unacceptable. I think that is an awful thing to do. It is hard for me to leave my house sometimes because I am so overwhelmed with anxiety because I feel like exposing people to knowing that I exist is morally questionable. People shouldn’t have to know about me if they don’t want to. People definitely don’t owe me anything. Nobody has to be my friend. No one has to like me.

I know. It’s hard for me to understand how anyone could like me at all most days. I don’t feel worth it.

Coming for my support scaffold like that is cruel. Trying to shake my faith in my friends is pretty abusive. I’m already more socially isolated than is good for me. Don’t tell me that my friends are going to have no compassion for my social issues. That is so mean.

The backlog of email basically started when the last rape happened. I have lost a lot of functionality over the last two years. I have withdrawn from society a lot. My life is 1/5 the size it was 2 years ago.

Don’t tell me that no one will like me on the far side of being in this much pain. Don’t try to take hope away from me. That’s not ok. I started trying to kill myself when I was 7 because I didn’t think there was any point in carrying on because no one could love me. I had already been kicked out of 6 foster homes. I was on my 8th school. I started after the first non-family member rape. I’ve been institutionalised for suicide attempts a few times.

Don’t ever tell me that my friends are going to stop loving me because I’m not good enough.

It’s a good thing I have all these cards from Bailey sitting out. I couldn’t believe that everyone will give up on me if I tried. I wear your backpack every day and I know that even though we can’t be in a close relationship you haven’t stopped loving me. Even though I am so hard and I was awful to you, you still love me.

There are people I can’t date. If you are going to fight dirty the first time you feel a little butthurt we can’t be in a relationship. If you are going to diagnose me with personality disorders when you are mad at me then we can’t be in a relationship. I have worked really hard on my shit. I am fair in arguments. When I start to go too far I back it off real fast. I deescalate. I accept lots of responsibility for my failures.

Yes. I should have tried harder to email more often. That wasn’t very kind of me. It’s true. I told you I wanted to build the relationship in the room. I wasn’t clear enough about what that meant. I wasn’t clear enough about a bunch of things and you were completely not ok with that. Fair enough. I was waiting to talk on our next date. That wasn’t cool of me in this modern world where I am expected to respond to everything instantly no matter what else I’m fucking doing.

I leave my phone in the house while I garden. If you can’t handle waiting that long then it’s a you problem, not a me problem.

I am online a lot. It’s how I cope with how fucking lonely I feel. But I can’t always be in one to one chats with people online. I find them draining and exhausting. I’m constantly trying to gauge tone and what I should or shouldn’t say. It’s super high cognitive load. I think it is fucking great that my boyfriend has a job that makes it hard to chat all day. It’s tiring.

I am in this 24/7 dance of trying to find the balance between being understimulated and being overstimulated by my life. There is no happy medium.

Dealing with me requires a lot of patience. Not everyone has a lot of patience. That’s ok. Dating me means accepting that I already have a really full life. Someone has to be ok with something that has no resemblance to het-monogamy expectations. I’m a free bitch. I’m focused on my life. I want to be in the moment. If you are scheduled to be in this moment with me then I will give you my full attention. If you are not scheduled to be in this moment with me then it is fairly presumptuous to decide I should give up my this moment to write to you alone because you are so special. If you want to fucking learn about me I have written millions of fucking words and it is entitled as shit to expect me to duplicate them for you.

Really. Have you fucking considered as you lecture me about how I should be explaining myself to you in greater detail that you can search by fucking tags on the blog you are reading so that you can learn all fucking about me? I have fucking books about me. You can download them online.

Are you shitting me? You are going to throw a tantrum because I’m not writing you enough emails about myself so you can understand me better?

It’s kind of funny. I like dating people who are older than me because they tend to have a higher maturity level. Apparently 65 isn’t high enough. 65 and still bitching that it isn’t fair you have to go read the source material instead of having it explained to you one tiny bit at a time.

I am livid. Telling me that my friends will abandon me if I don’t get better at email is a real fucking problem. Every single one of the people sitting in my inbox read my fucking blog when I post there. They write me letters and emails in response to the stuff they read. The fact that I don’t get a lot of comments on my blog is because I am a salty bitch who is talking to myself. I don’t want advice and people really can’t help themselves. The long time people all understand this. Don’t fucking throw me pity because I don’t get comments.

I use cool tracking software on my blog. I can see the ISP of people who log in. Over time I have mapped a whole bunch of my friends. I see them checking in. I don’t need comments.

Trying to make me feel insecure about my friends’ love is hitting me super hard the next day.

There is no fair and there is no deserve. Even so, I am not going to put more energy into someone who tells me that my friends are going to stop loving me. That is putting a scorpion on my back and giving it a ride. I feel no call to be that kind of “nice” anymore.

I am worth better treatment than that. I am glad I know that now.