Author Archives: Krissy Gibbs

About Krissy Gibbs

Just your average hippy white trash incest survivor stay at home mom. Is there an average for us? No? Oh well.

working and sexual assault

2 Replies

On bart. Yesterday was a whole series of adventures. I didn’t sleep much on Thursday night. Lots of anxiety and fuss and such. But Friday morning Noah let me sleep on the couch for a few hours because I wasn’t scheduled till the afternoon.
Working is such an odd experience for me. Noah told me to enjoy my busman’s holiday. (There is an old joke about how bus drivers go on vacation and drive around the countryside.) I washed a lot of dishes yesterday. I made a lot of ice cream sandwiches and two quiches. It doesn’t really feel like I’m doing something important or useful only this is all work that has to be done for this business to succeed. I think that the fact that I won’t benefit from the business at any point no matter how hard I work is part of why I’m just… flat.
But being there was useful because one of my internet fans came in and gave me a fancy-pants keyboard. Whoo! We had a really nice chat. I figured out who he was and we are a lot closer than two degrees of separation. It’s always funny to meet those people and go, “Oh wait! I know stories about you! And I have questions!”
When I talk to people in the kink/freak communities the whole topic of monogamy/nonmonogamy comes up. I think partially because when people make different choices there is the natural response to consider how those choices would work for you. It’s hard to explain why I want Noah to never sleep with anyone again and yet that’s the important bit. It’s not that Iwant to be monogamous. It’s that I want Noah to be and I know I can’t ask him to be without doing it myself. I’m grudgingly willing to accept that what is good for the goose is good for the gander.
Noah sleeping with other people bothers me. It makes me feel unwanted and unloved. Sure those are feelings I could work on but don’t I have enough to freak out about having to work on? For the love of toast why do I have to work on that specific bit of awful? No thanks. So we are monogamous.
But then I go out in public. For the first while I was there and working there was this hoooooooootguy. I looked up and saw him and I started salivating and I flushed and uhm more moisture appeared. Not in my mouth. Ahem. He was really gorgeous. God he was my type. Nerdy—this guy had to be a geek. Any other profession would kick him out. He had dark hair that was on the shortish side and a white streak and dark framed glasses. He looked like he could would smile when making someone cry.
It’s kind of weird to react like that. To want like that out of the blue given that I’m not allowed to follow my pecker through life any more. Why is it more important for me to say that Noah can’t have extra sex than for either of us to be allowed to do things we enjoy? Because seriously I enjoy anonymous sex.
I’ve been trying to come up with the whole list of people who have sexually assaulted me since I turned 18. It feels like I should get to the point where at least I know who I have to worry about. Dan. Paul. Kevin. That coast guard guy.
With Dan I wanted to have sex with him but I told him no unprotected sex. He got me drunk and had unprotected sex with me while I was unconscious. With Paul I wanted to have sex but I told him no unprotected sex. I was on drugs and unable to physically force him off of me. GHB makes it really hard to fight back. That’s kind of the point. Kevin was one of the few friends I had during a time when I was scared and lonely. He likes giving massages and I have always been in a lot of pain. I knew fairly quickly that I would have to say no to sexual contact every single time I saw him no matter how clear I made it that I was not interested, ever. I would often have to reach down and remove his fingers from my vulva or vagina while he was giving me a massage. I had to tell him over and over that surpriseoral sex isn’t ok. The coast guard guy spiked my drink but at least he used a condom.
That is my adult sexual assault history. I have done a lot of very heavy play with people that falls into the ambiguous land of consensual nonconsent but I would not accuse any of those people of being out of bounds. They did what I negotiated. There were others, like Matthew, who was so brutal and nasty that I felt physically bad and emotionally bad about myself afterwards but I don’t think it was sexual assault. I negotiated and agreed. It just turned out to be much heavier play than I wanted. And I never have the balls to say in the middle of a scene, “Whoa—slow down.” I don’t safeword. I take what people feel like doing to me.
Last night Kevin came into the coffee shop. I asked the other owners who were on shift if I was allowed to kick someone out if he sexually assaulted me years ago. They offered to do it for me so I wouldn’t have to. I took several minutes to think about it and process and decide. Then I squared my shoulders and marched over to Kevin. I said, “I feel really uncomfortable doing this but…”
He broke into my sentence and said, “I have to go.”
I said, “Yes. What you did to me wasn’t ok. No one should have to tell you no over and over. It’s sexual assault. Get out.”
He started to argue but I turned on my heel and kind of ran back behind the counter. I ran all the way to the end where I could duck down behind the coffee machine and cash register. I hyperventilated for a while and felt like I was going to puke on the floor. I pretty much kept my crying under control. It took more than half an hour before I stopped shaking.
This was one of the few times in my life where I was in a position of having to deal with someone who hurt me and I had multiple men offer to rescue me and solve the problem. I told them no. It’s hard to understand why it has to be. Why do I have to be the one to do everything? They wanted to help. They would have done fine. They would have solved the problem and I could have quaked with fear on the far side of the room.
But that’s just the thing. I am no longer 23 and alone and scared. A lot has happened. I have had enough experiences that I know the difference between things I have agreed to and things I have refused. I have gotten to find out what that is like. I didn’t know before. It has always been true that I have to just do what I’m told and accept unwanted, painful sexual contact. That has just been life for me. But not any more. Now I can say “Get out.” I feel like no one will believe me. Who cares if a whore is raped any way. Heck, a lot of it wasn’t “rape rape” any way.
I may not get to actually feel safe this lifetime but I do get to say that people who have already hurt me have to get the fuck away from me.
Today is going to be another very long day. I ran ten miles this morning instead of twelve because I am going to have to walk across the city later and I think it will be ok. I’m going to go make food and food and food. I should eat before I start working. Yesterday I ate lunch at 11:30a and dinner at 9:30p. I can’t do that again.
I’m really weirded out by how much running is an appetite suppressant. Not what I expected. I have two offers of couch crash space tonight. I may go out after working. I brought one of those frightening 5 hour energy drink things Noah gets from work. I’m going to be going to bed at like 6pm on Sunday. I hope I have fun. I hope I don’t feel too anxious. I hope I feel like I am still interesting to talk to even if I won’t be sucking anyone off.
It’s hard to believe sometimes.
And after working all day Saturday I’m tired. Holy moly. Lots of working. Tired. But I want to go out!

Calling people names isn’t very nice.

Leave a reply

Or maybe I will yell at Noah then stomp out of our bedroom after calling him an asshole. That’s an alternative to sleep and cuddling. I’m still very upset about my birthday. Through my whole childhood I told myself that it wouldn’t always be this way. I wouldn’t always feel rejected and unloved and shitty on my birthdays. I told myself it would get better. I lied. Or I was just wrong. Either way.

I should probably stop doing things for Noah’s birthday. It increases my bitterness that I don’t matter as much to him. But that makes me feel really sad. I think I will need to go away for my birthday so that I don’t spend the day crying and calling him names. I’m so tired of not mattering.

He wanted to know what he could do to make me feel important. I ranted about how he could read the fucking book I already fucking wrote that tells him step by fucking step what will make me feel important you fucking asshole. I hear it isn’t ok to call people names. I should be more polite and civilized. More kind. More understanding.

It’s my fucking birthday. I work so hard. I try so hard. Naw. It’s not my birthday. My birthday was ten days ago. I need to stop bringing up old stuff.

You’re never fully dressed without a smile.

5 Replies

Noah is awake but playing a video game so I should probably shut up. But he’s so good to talk to… Really we should be sleeping. It is 3:26am. Oh well.

When I’m out running I write these eloquent blog posts in my head. Then I get home and sit in front of the computer and think, “hunh my wrists are tingling. Maybe another day.”

It’s weird to me the ways things intersect. I keep seeing people bringing up the whole “Don’t tell women to smile at you” thing on the internet. I don’t appreciate it when random people tell me to smile like I don’t appreciate random people telling me anything. But I put a lot of energy into trying to smile at people. It almost feels like I shouldn’t.

I feel like a bad feminist pretty much all the time. I very consciously try to smile at people and cheerfully say, “Hello” when I pass them. I’m fairly religious about this when I run. Seriously–this is my church. I go out into my community, likely the only community I will have for the rest of my life, and I smile at people and I tell them to have a good day. It lights peoples’ faces up. The small shriveled old Asian ladies look suspicious at first sometimes. If they look suspicious in English I try “Ni how” (I know I am spelling that wrong. I probably pronounce it wrong but they don’t yell at me.) or “Chao” because I was told that was ok. (That’s Chinese and Vietnamese for those who don’t automatically recognize my poor battered phonetic spellings.) I do try to guess which one is appropriate in advance. I have a high success rate but not perfect. When I get it wrong they look startled for a moment then laugh. When I switch languages again then they get very happy with me.

People want to feel important. People want to feel like they are worth seeing and speaking to for who they are. Not everyone wants to be told they should be like me and expecting everyone in the world to be happy about hearing English is expecting everyone in the world to be like me. I try to say hello to people because whether they like me or not they are my neighbors. If they need help I will stop and try to help.

Once when I was out running I came across a Vietnamese woman who had tripped and hurt herself. She was probably in her 60’s or 70’s. She was quite frail. I helped her up and I walked her home. I half carried her. She spoke very little English. Just enough to apologize for living. I was very happy to help her. She’s my neighbor. When I was running in SF I went passed an older woman who was carrying heavy bags. She would walk a block then put them down to rest. I happened to go around that block three times (don’t ask why–it wasn’t about her) so I stopped and asked her if I could help. She was so happy. (I can also usefully offer help in Spanish. I’m starting to feel less like I am a pathetic linguist.)

I feel like being part of a community will be the closest I have to a church. I live in Fremont. I am likely to live here forever. I don’t want to treat this like a commuter town or one of my brief stops. I don’t want to sleep here and “live” somewhere else I drive to every day. Ugh. No. I want to meet the people who live near me. I want to get to know faces. I want to have people grow to expect that weird cheerful woman at the park. I want to have a role and a place. I want to belong.

No one wants more tragedy. They don’t go looking for it. One of my favorite things I did as a teacher was when I was doing a unit on tragedy. We were having a huge argument on whether tragedy as a genre was obsolete. My little bastards were campaigning hard to say tragedy was just over. Except one kid. My little gang banger. She dropped out in the middle of my second year with her. I loved her. She told me that she was my Brown Eyes. That was her special name and she wanted me to know it. I think it was the equivalent of being a biker and it being her “ride” name. I could be wrong. Anyway, she came in after school one day and said,

“Gibbs. So. You keep saying that this tragedy shit isn’t dead. I have a song I want you to listen to. I think it might count.” She brought in her ipod and played me a song.

It would be fair to say that the song was impactful on me. It made me cry the first time I heard it and every time thereafter. Yes. That is modern tragedy. Thank you for sharing. So I took that song that my wonderful Brown Eyes brought me and I played in every section I taught. I had them write a response and talk about it. We tore the song apart in terms of figurative language, metaphor, simile, exposition, climax, denoument, blah blah blah. All The Stuff English Teachers Do.

A parent called me (on my cell phone which was hilarious because I forgot I put it on the syllabus and I kind of freaked out at first) to ask about it. She said her son came home saying his English teacher played him a song about a rapper who rapes his mom and she can’t see how that is relavent to English literature thankyouverymuch. I went off for half an hour about music and poetry and literature and how they intertwine and how genres morph and in order to get kids to understand the full scope and power of the language you have to examine different ways of using it and and and. I had a good argument at the time. I don’t remember it well this bright and early morning. The mom thanked me for caring so much about helping her son understand the world and we hung up.

I bring the tragedy with me everywhere I go. I’m kind of Debbie Downer and I deliver. I also smile. Even though I tell the worst stories and make people cry I also make people smile. I’m very good at making people smile.

I am not a graceful runner by any measure. I look pretty funny. That’s ok. I am grinning fit to split my face and I call out a cheerful and ebullient hello to everyone I pass. The only people who don’t smile back are Middle Eastern guys with specific patterns of hair cuts and facial hair. It’s kind of weird. I can predict which three people will scowl at me before they do. There are always three people who scowl at me. Some days there are up to a hundred people who smile at me.

There are the half-smilers who are doing it for social compulsion reasons. I barely count them. Ok, they are part of the crowd but they are kind of tuning me out.

You can’t tell for sure who will light up. That’s a wonderful surprise every time. Often it is the people I have to try multiple languages before they “wake up” and notice I am talking to them. (This all happens fast because I am reasonably speedy.) If someone totally tunes me out in English and I try a second language with no response and I try a third language and they look up sometimes there are tears in their eyes. There was one woman in particular yesterday. She looked up shocked. Then her face transformed. She was beautiful. She looked very sad. I doubt she has had an easy life. She looked so happy to be noticed. I feel kind of bad that I try Chinese before Vietnamese sometimes because I can’t tell Asian races apart very well. I feel like a tremendous asshole. I’m trying. I swear.

If this is the only community I am going to have I need to find a way to fit. I need to find things that I can do that are useful and good. I can’t do a lot for most people in most ways. I can take care of myself and smile at people though.

Which brings me back to people being really fierce about how women don’t owe anyone smiles. No, they don’t. No one owes anyone anything. I don’t owe anyone anything.

I smile and say hello in between crying jags. I do it because it lets me feel like I have some way of interacting with people that is ok. It lets me feel like I am not alone. I greet the people who live near me because that is the civilized thing to do. We share this space. Let’s act like it. Let’s act like we are both real people here and I’m the kind of person who likes to smile at people. I don’t think that everyone has to do it. I don’t get mad at the three people each day who scowl at me. But I keep smiling at everyone. Regardless of the fact that some people won’t smile back.

I don’t smile because anyone owes me anything in response. I smile because I am doing the fake-it-till-you-make-it thing. It does elevate my mood. I like provoking smiles. I like the little half smiles of, “Oh you are one of those people” as much as I like the earnest grins. I like being recognized (with an eye roll) as one of those cheerful people. It’s kind of a relieving experience. It’s nice to be pigeonholed like that instead of as the tragedy girl for a little while. It’s nice when people look at me without flinching.

I smile at people because first impressions are a big thing. People decide a lot about you by what they see first. I try not to be sobbing or a screaming harpy when people first see me. Smiling seems like a better plan.

Ah, and I haven’t done my full confession. At this point I bring before the confessional the unhappy fact that I have now hit Shanna for the second time. I was sitting on the floor with Calli working on something (I can’t even remember what) and Shanna kicked me in the head. The first kick was only like a three or a four (out of a ten pain scale) so I looked up and said, “Please don’t kick me. I don’t like being kicked.” She giggled and kicked me in the head again much much harder. My hand was up smacking her foot away from me before I had time to register a thought. See, this is why I don’t sit around sober. I was waiting for park day so I was fully sober (Have to drive, yo) and I didn’t have that second of pause. With the pause I can grab the foot and prevent it from kicking me again without doing the random arm wave of “Pain! Do not want!” All this to say: I’m not losing sleep and I don’t think I am an abuser.

Thus I have hit my kid twice. Both times she was kicking me quite painfully and I swatted her foot. No guilt. But I did apologize to Shanna immediately. Hitting isn’t the right answer. I’m sorry my impulses aren’t properly under my control.

I want to write about money. I had three, THREE separate friends all say, “I’m having a hard time with money” within a six day period. I feel like I should write about money. Not in this entry. It’s coming.

I think it is interesting how there are discrete mood phases of depression for me. I’m not actively suicidal at the moment and I haven’t had any vivid ideation in at least two days (woo!) so instead I’m in kind of a hazy place where I have slightly more energy and I want to be interacting and I want to be giving more to people (I hate the fact that I need so much help right now–I feel like a using piece of shit.) but I can clearly see how I don’t really have it to spare. So it’s like I’m wandering around my kitchen with a big box and I’m slowly trying to decide which things to give to the food pantry but… uhm… all that food is in my kitchen because I’m supposed to feed my family with it. It isn’t “extra”. But I still want to give it away. I will feel better about myself if I give it away. My family will just figure it out, right? We’ll just do without.  But I can’t. I can’t do that to my kids all the time.

Once I asked my mom about her childhood. She said she was never important. When she was little her parents cared about her older siblings. When her older siblings started moving out her mother started fostering and the foster kids were way more important than her. The foster kids would show up with clothes and toys from their home of origin and my mother wasn’t allowed to touch their things. But they would steal my moms stuff and break it. She got in trouble if she complained because she wasn’t being properly charitable. My mom said that sometimes her mother would buy a special doll for a foster kid so the kid felt loved while she didn’t have one at all. Her mom would say, “But you have other blessings. God isn’t equal to everyone. You need to be grateful for what you have.”

I think about my mom a lot. I think about how badly she was treated by her parents and her siblings and her husband. She was at the bottom of the shit hill until I was born. My sister kind of took a turn there but not really. My mom protected her the way I protect Shanna. My sister was never really at the bottom of the hill. I think about what it did to my mom. I think about what she grew up to be.

I plot in advance what things I should or should not say to people in order to increase the likelihood that they will like me. I’m confident this is normal. Noah appears to be done with his internetting. That was like 45 minutes of writing. I’ll stop now.

If there is a predator in the room I’ll find him.

Leave a reply

I just had an important realization. If someone sends me a message out of the blue saying, “Hey I was talking to _____ about you! It was great hearing how highly they think of you! It made me miss you. I hope you are well.” and my response is to go talk to _________ and say, “Stay the fuck away from him he is a predator” then I should probably not be “friends” with this person on social networks.

That’s a boundary. I like finding boundaries.

I told him no more than once. I don’t call it rape because tongues and fingers don’t count, right? But I said no. But I kept going back. I was lonely. I didn’t really have other options. I kept saying no.

I don’t want to have to keep saying no over and over. Once really should be enough.

Brezsny seemed like a good thing to look at.

139 Replies

Virgo Horoscope for week of September 20, 2012
Virgo (August 23-September 22)
Want to submit a letter to the editor of a major newspaper? The odds of you getting published in the influential Washington Post are almost three times as great as in the super-influential New York Times. The Post has a much smaller circulation, so your thoughts there won't have as wide an impact. But you will still be read by many people. According to my reading of the astrological omens, you're in a phase when you should be quite content to shoot for a spot in the Post. Please apply that same principle to everything you do. 

How are you going to change what needs to be changed and accept what needs to be accepted? 

* 

SACRED ADVERTISEMENT 
Visualize yourself being able to recognize the raw truth about the people you care about. Imagine that you can see how they already embody the beauty their souls' codes have promised as well as how they still fall short of embodying that beauty. 

Picture yourself being able to make them feel appreciated even as you inspire them to risk changes that will activate more of their souls' codes.

don’t be mad

Leave a reply

So I found a ptsd sufferers support forum. Want to know what they recommend? That I get more obsessive about house cleaning. Yes!

I feel weird and bad about my depression. It feels quite shameful to be this depressed. I am one of the most fortunate people to ever live, how fucking dare I get depressed. When friends in the mental health field start openly worry I feel quite bad. I shouldn’t be worrying people. It’s not very kind. I’m fairly sure I will manage to avoid killing myself for another fifteen years at minimum.  Even though I’m depressed. It feels more polite to just shut up about how I am feeling. If I don’t think I am actually likely to do something suicidal I should shut up about feeling like I want to. It’s a “cry for help” and that’s lame. It’s not actually. I don’t expect any one to do anything. I don’t expect anything to change because I am talking about how I feel. I don’t think I do it because I want help. Well, I do.

When I explained to my friend K how I was feeling she said, “How about if I take the girls for Saturday. You have enough on your plate.” I don’t particularly feel like I want people freaking out and panicking over the idea that I might kill myself presently (really I’ve been suicidal for decades there is no sense in getting extra nervous about it now) but it feels nice that people think, “Gosh you feel stress. Here is a bit less stress.” It feels like a gift.

I feel less helpless today. I don’t feel like an animal caught in a steel trap today. I think my body is too exhausted to manufacture those chemicals. I’m pretty fucking tired. And when I was exhausted and past capacity yesterday I didn’t have to also dig deep and find a way to kindly and gently meet the needs of my children. I got to be a selfish bitch just kind of wandering through the world.

Holy shit it feels good. I’ve been doing more of it just lately. Consciously putting myself in the mindset where “I am just a person existing and I only have to care for myself.” It’s weird. Do you know what I do when I only have myself to care for? I clean the house. OF COURSE I WOULD.

It honestly felt good that I got to greet Noah and the girls in a house that was clean and ready for anything. I could react to any request without having to do a bunch of prerequisite steps. That is what drives me crazy. “No, we can’t bake because I have to do dishes and clean off the counters and go to the store first.” Those beginning steps are doozies. If you don’t have anywhere to work you can’t work. If you don’t have ingredients it’s a non-starter. I’m having a hard time with adjusting to what “prepared to work” really means.

Abrupt topic shift: I’ve been told that I should be mad at Noah. Which feels pretty funny given how much time people spend telling me I shouldn’t be an angry person. The thing is: getting angry with Noah serves none of my goals.

I am absolutely willing and able to see that Noah goes above and beyond for me. No one is perfect. Somehow I feel like we fit together so well because no one else understands our shortcomings and properly appreciates us. Noah told me he was over committed. Noah told me that he can’t keep up what we are doing. I have to believe him when he says that. Immediately. Instantly. With love and support. I can’t get mad at him for telling me in a small little boy voice that he can’t do everything he would dearly love to be able to do. When he takes his courage in his hands and tells me that he is going to fail me… he already feels bad. He doesn’t need more shit from me.

Noah works like a demon for me. For us. For our family. When he hits a wall that is because he is cruising along at 80 trying to be everything and do everything for me.

Noah has a full time job that requires more than 40 hours a week and between 5 and 10 hours in commute. Then he has this book he is writing (I’m mildly shocked and appalled by how much money that has earned so quickly) and he is an adjunct professor for CMU on the side. And he does a lot of solo kid care (around 20 hours a week). And he wakes up every day and makes breakfast. He does a fair number of dishes. When I am fussy and whiny and the house is a big mess he cleans up. He comes home from work and makes dinner several nights a week.

When Noah comes to me and tells me in a very sad, very small voice that he can’t keep up what he is doing… I can’t come down on him. I can’t get mad at him. He is working at an unsustainable pace. I know that. When he falters it is normal and natural–not shameful.

It’s still very disappointing. And it’s hard that I have these expectations in my head he can’t meet. It’s not really his fault that he is so busy working on my other expectations that he doesn’t have the time or energy to get through all of my expectations. I have a lot of them. I need to be responsible for most of them. He truly can’t bear any more weight.

I feel lucky. When I met Noah he was kind of a slacker. Not really, but he wasn’t exactly motivated. He worked because he liked what he was doing but he wasn’t goal oriented. In the almost eight years I have known him he has changed. It’s hard for me to reconcile the boy he was with the man he is. I need to not act like he is a boy anymore. He truly isn’t.

When my man runs as hard and as long as he can to take care of me it isn’t right for me to sneer and call him a boy who isn’t living up to expectations. Near as I can tell that won’t lead to a happy marriage. I would honestly really like to have a happy marriage.

But I still have these expectations. And sometimes I am disappointed. Right now I feel like I should think of some more creative solutions beyond “be mad at Noah” to solve this problem. I don’t feel like that would actually help.

I can be honest and say that I try to avoid getting mad at Noah. I will pay a very high cost to avoid being mad at Noah. It is far easier and more comfortable to be mad at me for wanting too much. That’s an old reason to despise myself. My mom spent two decades telling me that I want too much. I’m selfish. I’m self-absorbed. I’m too needy. No one will ever give a shit about me. I know. It’s a lot easier being mad at me than him. It’s comfortable and familiar.

I use Noah up. I wear him out. I wring him dry. I feel like it is my fault he has nothing left by my birthday. Maybe if I wasn’t so fucking needy the other 364 days he might have some “want to” left by my birthday. I doubt I am going to be less needy any year soon. Actually, I think I will. I am far less needy than I was two years ago. I’m going to need less support from Noah fairly soon, actually. Shanna already does for herself. Calli is trying.

Sometimes it feels like running is a lot easier than standing still. I ran 23 miles yesterday (I actually ran for a surprising amount of it) and that was easier to do than filling the hours until Noah and the kids came home. I didn’t know what to do with myself. So I sat down for a bit and I ate and I smoked and then I cleaned. I spent hours cleaning. I don’t feel like I am capable of sitting down much any more. No matter how tired I am. I have to keep moving. Keep doing. I’m not sure why I have ever thought of myself as a low energy person. That was part of my story “I have to have my kids early because I’m a low energy person and it will be much harder when I’m older.” On crack.

Yesterday morning when I was about to head out the door (I was quite decadent and lazy and I didn’t leave the house till 6:30 because I didn’t feel like running in the pitch black) both little girls woke up just as I was leaving. Calli hugged me and kissed me several times and said, “Bye mama. Mama happy.” That’s her way of saying, “Goodbye and have fun.” Shanna said, “Do you have any food with you? It’s going to be a very long run today and you can’t get through a run like that without food. Have you packed food yet?” Yes I packed food, thank you for checking on me. I really appreciate it. I started crying. I told her that I appreciate her thinking about the needs of my body. Sometimes I’m bad at that and I’m glad she cares.

Ironically, I gave my huge bag of trail mix to a homeless guy. I stopped and took the pot edibles out first because I’m not that nice. But he was there. And he had a dog. And he looked so much like Stephan that my heart broke. When I see homeless guys who look like him I feel my heart jump into my throat. (He just looked like a homeless guy in the making. I think he’s gotten a hair cut since then.)

As a result when I was ~4 miles from home I stopped at KFC. I think that I could have gotten home noticeably faster if I hadn’t stopped and bought a mashed potato bowl on the way. Mmmmm. There is something about walking and eating at the same time that I like. I always have. From when I was a little kid walking and eating at the same time feels like a decadent treat. It feels like proof that I am more highly evolved and AWESOME than other species. Squirrels can’t do what I can do with food while moving with the same kind of speed and agility. Maybe monkeys but I’m pretty sure they don’t.

For some reason just knowing how many processes are going on at once in my body excites me. I am breathing. My blood is flowing. I am walking quickly so many muscle groups are responding quickly. I am eating. I am coordinating my hands and my mouth. My stomach is working. My throat is working. AND WHILE I’M AT IT MOTHER FUCKER I WILL SING. I’m not sure why I like it so much but I do. It’s this weird feeling of satisfaction. I am one of the most complex organisms ever. THAT IS SO FUCKING COOL. Let’s feel a little gratitude we weren’t brought into this life as an amoeba, ok? This is better.

It’s hard to feel like a depressed loser when you are sauntering up your street telling every neighbor, “I haven’t finished mapping it yet but I’m quite certain I covered twenty two miles today!” I feel a lot of pride. It’s weird feeling how the pride lives in my chest with the shame. It’s like they are next door neighbors in a condo complex. They take turns who is leaning over the back fence shouting.

Yesterday I talked to one of the neighbors for a while. Little M who isn’t allowed to come over anymore was apparently throwing rocks and dirt at her house. She told me she was thinking about calling the police over the vandalism. She threatened M to her face. Apparently M broke down sobbing hysterically and begged to not be sent away. I had a long talk with her about how she needs to never threaten that kid again because she has a hard enough life and for an adult to keep picking on her is cruel and unacceptable. Every fucking five year old throws rocks and dirt. It’s not vandalism. It is being a kid. Give her a fucking break. The neighbor seemed very inclined to listen to me once I started talking about the abusive alcoholic father. I think she will be nicer to M. I’m not saying let the kid get away with shit–but you don’t need to call the cops.

When did we become a society that wants to call the police because a five year old throws dirt? I feel so sad. I feel like there is no way for people to grow up and try things and see what happens in the world.

The other day Shanna got her hands on the last rogue bag of cookies and brought it into her room. I yelled at her, of course, because crumbs in your room attract ants ohmyfreakinggoodness how many times do I have to say this? When I finished dealing with the cookies I came back into her room and sat next to her. I said, “I have been so busy yelling at you for making messes lately that I haven’t stopped to say that it is really cool how much you have grown. You are very good at taking care of yourself. You are very good at figuring out what you need and how to get it. Most of the time you make very good choices both for your body and for being polite to me. Thank you. I do see it. I appreciate you a lot. I think it is wonderful watching you grow up. You surprise me every day by learning new things and I’m so glad I get to watch you.” She told me, “Thank you for noticing. I’ll learn about the crumbs one of these days.” I laughed and hugged her. I told her I believe so.

It feels like depression is this binary switch in my brain. It goes on and off many times a day. There are many things that bring me joy and when I feel those things I am distracted and the depression switch goes off for a bit. But I can’t do this on purpose. I’m not a rat and it isn’t a food pellet button. I can’t just decide to keep myself distracted. I can’t decide to feel joy. It just happens. Often in connection with my kids.

I feel like the most prideful person on earth when I look at my children. I feel like I will explode with good feelings when I look at them. How did something so wonderful come out of me? I am so grateful that I get to know them. Even though they make my life harder (and holy shit they do) I wouldn’t have it any other way. Without them I don’t have this joy on tap.

So I spend my days walking between depression and shame and anxiety and anger and joy. I can’t just sit down and decide how many minutes of a given day will be spent on which emotion. I can stack the deck in my favor. There are stress relieving choices I can make. But the stress relieving choices are unfortunately often choices that lessen my joy. It’s a weird balancing act. Less bad might mean less good too. More good might well mean a lot more bad.

Today I feel quite confident “not today”. Today is a day of rest. I will spend today with Noah and the kids. Noah will rub my feet because he is nice. We will cuddle and read together. I will get to touch Noah. This morning I am typing from bed instead of the garage because I haven’t been touching Noah much lately and I feel this aching emptiness without him. I like keeping my foot on him. He’s there. He’s real. He’s mine. I’m not alone. No matter how I feel, no matter how I think–he is here. I can touch him.

Noah has spent years trying to get me to understand that I shouldn’t have put up with things from Tom that I did. It wasn’t a “good” relationship it was just a lot better than what I had previously known. I don’t know if I put up with things from Noah that I shouldn’t. I know that, unlike Tom, Noah is working on things that benefit both of us. Noah is very serious about everything he has being for me. It’s a weird feeling. Someone wants me to have as much as can be given to me. I feel constantly unworthy.

I have been diagnosable as “mentally ill” for a long time. It’s not Noah’s fault. I don’t really want to come down on him for the results.

Hard is hard, duh

1 Reply

I don’t actually think Noah will change. That’s not a stinging indictment. Noah does a lot for me all the time. I think I read MDC to remind me that Noah helps more than average. He does a lot of solo time with the kids. He has gotten a lot better over the years about helping with house work. He cooks breakfast every morning. He cooks dinner three or so nights a week. He does bedtime at least three nights a week and some weeks almost every night.
Noah is trying. Noah is doing the best he knows how. Noah isn’t trying to be cruel by ignoring my birthday he is simply treating me like I am him. I’m not. But he feels pretty comfortable around me.
What I want from Noah is something that can’t be ordered. It can’t be asked for. It can’t be requested. It can’t even be properly explained. I want him to want to. He doesn’t. Ok. That’s that.
Noah is the most exciting person to have an affair with I have ever found. He likes paying a lot of attention to me. He likes having intense conversations. He has spent more hours than I want to think about helping me crawl around in my brain. He works hard on supporting me. He really does.
He’s done. He’s tired. He is over extended. And no matter how much I sit here and cry he has to be able to function and go support our family. I can’t really keep pushing him. I can’t get mad at him for not coming up with more want to. If he is out of it then he is out of it and it makes sense. Marriage to me isn’t easy. I can see how it would wear a person down.
I called Pam this morning because I didn’t want to cry by myself and she is on the east coast so I didn’t feel too bad about calling. It was still early by her standards but it wasn’t completely obscene. She told me that she knew me for years before she knew I was depressed and suicidal. I hide it well. I’m moody, sure, but so what?
I am doing better socially in the home school group. I can talk to them about kids. That’s easy. I don’t know how to socialize with more generic people. I feel terror and anxiety when I try to talk to people I know in other ways. Who is going to send the next nasty letter telling me how bad I am? I’m afraid to open my mouth. I already know that I am bad. I don’t need to be told any more. So talking to people is hard. When will this person decide they hate me?
We went to a party when the girls were at the Godmamas’ house.  I compulsively bring up sex (no one wants to hear about my kids—right?) and then feel awkward and weird because I shouldn’t talk about sex any more. If you are not interested in fucking people you shouldn’t talk about sex. It’s just not a good idea. That’s my life experience.
I don’t know why anyone would bother to talk to me. I don’t feel like I have anything to offer. I can hear Taylor and Kira ranting in my head already. Ok, I know why you tell me. It doesn’t feel like enough.
Once upon a time a father had to come up with money to give a man in order to marry off his daughter. She would be an imposition on her new husband so here is a gift to ease the burden. I have no dowry. I have nothing of value to trade for the burden of knowing me.
I try to tell myself it doesn’t matter. I know some pathetic people who keep right on trucking. But I tell you, as I sit here and watch the sun dance on Shanna’s golden hair I think that I don’t want to be poison. It would be bad to have poison in this house. She is so wonderful. I don’t want to hurt her. Don’t I hurt her by living? By being this person?
I think a lot about what I am teaching my kids. For some strange reason I haven’t been talking to them much in the past couple of weeks. Shanna has even commented on me being quiet and she asks me what I’m thinking about.  I told her I am thinking about things that provoke really strong emotion in me and I’m trying to figure out how to resolve the issues in a more logical fashion—which is hard to do while feeling strong emotion. So it’s taking me a long time and I find that frustrating. But the only way to solve a hard problem is to keep trying no matter how frustrated you are.
I’m still not talking much.
Several of my friends have been posting about their kids reading. I’m so glad Shanna isn’t reading yet because she is looking over my shoulder right now. That will be inconvenient very soon.
My friend Kira listened to my pity party and offered to take the girls for a full day tomorrow. Another friend has borrowed them for a few hours here and there. Calli prefers to stay with me but Shanna is enjoying going out.
It’s weird and hard that I have more support than I think and less support than other people think. There are people in my life who are willing to babysit. But they are all very busy and have a lot of things going on and no one is available consistently and I don’t have particularly close relationships with most of the people who are willing to babysit.
I’ll be honest and say I don’t like using babysitting services from people I otherwise don’t know very much. I do it because I don’t have a choice. I try to do it as little as possible. I try to get to know people. Given the degree of social anxiety I feel it’s challenging.
I don’t have a close personal relationship with someone where I can say, “I’m in a bind can you watch the kids for three days in a row.” Yeah, no. If I was in labor again something could be found. If I were involuntarily committed I’m sure the community would rally to support Noah. Given that we don’t really want to do anything that drastic no we just don’t have consistent help.
It makes things complicated. When I talk to people about this they always suggest this long list of options that require a)money to burn or b)relationships I don’t have. I wouldn’t take my kids to a church group I’m unfamiliar with and leave them there even though it can be had for basically nothing because I don’t want my kids indoctrinated in pretty much any faith. I’ll take burn out.
So it’s all my fault and I need to shut the fuck up. Beggars can’t be choosers.
The kids asked if we can walk to dinner. Out of time. I didn’t get to tell you about the Ideal Most Perfect Suburban Night Ever we had last night.

this is all the typing my wrists can manage today

2 Replies

I was asked if I wasn’t writing to punish Noah. No, you pita I am not punishing Noah. My arms hurt and I haven’t figured out typing with the braces yet (I’m not sure I will be able to type at speed on this keyboard–it’s really slow and hard) and I haven’t had much time alone in a room. Using edibles instead of smoking means that all of my alone time is running. I can’t type while running.

I miss my mom really hard.When I think about her lately I remember the things she got right. My mom was very good at Christmas and birthdays. She was good at them because she was raised Mennonite (so no Christmas) and her father’s birthday was the same day as hers and he was more important during her childhood. So she paid a lot of attention to her kids on special days. She was absolutely in the the gift love language camp.

I gave my mom her first Christmas stocking when I was sixteen. She cried. No one had ever thought of her. I don’t want to become her.

Noah isn’t big on birthdays. Not his own or anyone else’s. I feel like that makes me a worthless piece of shit. I work how hard all year long on our life and I prioritize other people above me all the god damn time. I treat me like I’m not very important pretty much every day. I look forward to my birthday as the day when I’m special. Only I’m not. I’m stupid to think I am.

It’s not that I’ve had good birthdays ever–I’m not saying my mom managed that. But she gave me a lot of presents. Well, when I was going into middle school my birthday presents were a trapper keeper, lined notebook paper, and pencils. My birthday is the second week of school in a lot of districts. I didn’t even get fucking erasers. I got in a lot of trouble for crying and making my mother feel bad. It was rude of me.

I’m in a bad spot. The suicidal ideation is really pervasive, dominant, and overwhelming. I keep showing up to work every day hoping that if I ignore it then it will go away. I’m angry and sad. I feel worthless. I feel like outside of Calli and Shanna no I don’t actually care if it would hurt people for me to die. I don’t care if you people get to hurt more than me one day. Fuck you for thinking you should be more important than me forever.

But I really don’t want to do that to my children. So I don’t. Today I feel very certain that if I didn’t have kids I wouldn’t be here any more. Nothing else is worth this.

Noah and I have talked about his worry about what happens when the kids are grown ups. Will they still be enough? Will he be enough? I don’t know. Given that I just got told fuck you for the fourth year out of six years of marriage on my birthday probably not. Probably not. I feel like a selfish piece of shit but no I don’t think I have another thirty years of this in me. I’m tired of feeling worthless and unimportant. I’m not sure how much longer I can handle this.

I feel humiliated and embarrassed. I shouldn’t care. It should be no big deal. I shouldn’t even blink at this point. I know I’m not important. I don’t know why I keep being stupid enough to be disappointed by reality over and over.

Penises are weird.

1 Reply

http://www.sexasnatureintendedit.com/

Ok, I’m not actually posting this because I want to get into the “is it right to circumcise or not” conversation. I’m posting it because looking at the pictures on this website (it’s extremely graphic and nsfw) explains a lot of why I have probably historically had a lot of the pain I have had during sex. I don’t have that pain with Noah. It’s just not there.

not good

Leave a reply

Terrible running day. I didn’t finish. Noah has to leave. I have to smoke first. I can’t take care of my kids when I am crying as hard as I have been crying for two hours. I can’t take care of my kids when the only thing going through my mind is wondering what would actually kill me if I jumped off an overpass in front of a semi. Head trauma? Crushing my lungs? Blood loss slowly on the side of the road?

I feel petty and stupid and immature and like an asshole. I am so selfish. So stupid. And pretty much everything in my head is stuff I have said before with no effect. So I can’t say it again.

I found an extra scalpel blade a while ago. I didn’t throw it away. It is in new packaging and I found it going through stuff. That’s the kind of life I have. “I was going through a box and I found a spare scalpel blade.” I want to cut. I want to cut more than I want to breathe. Significantly more. So much that I am shaking with how much I want it. I want it. I fucking want it. I want to bleed. I want to see it.

I have to take the kids to the park so I can run fourteen laps around the soccer field. I need to be more stoned first. Maybe I don’t actually have to do fourteen laps. Technically the walk to and from the park will be far enough to make up the miles. Maybe we’ll just go to the park and I’ll push Calli on the swing. I’m not sure I can be responsible for anything else today.

Leave a reply

“Why did you leave?”

It’s a simple question, isn’t it? She doesn’t know how to begin though. She doesn’t want to say that she was out doing laundry when a song came on the radio about a girl running away from home while doing the laundry. She didn’t know till then that they didn’t own her the way they said they did.

Why did she leave? Because she wanted to find out if the whole world was just like them. She heard the line, “She left the suds in the bucket and the clothes hanging out of the line” and just like that she knew she was alone. Dad was at work. Mom was grocery shopping.

All of a sudden there was this moment of adrenaline. No one was here to stop her. She felt like she couldn’t breathe. She looked down at the laundry in the basket. She was supposed to be working. If she didn’t finish her chores she would be punished. She could feel herself starting to hunch her back and cringe forward as her breath came faster and faster faster.

She felt surprised as she heard herself say, “No.” Her hands shook but her spine was straight as she turned around and ran to the house. She quickly grabbed her bag and started putting a few portable food items into it. Her mind raced. She had somewhere between thirty and forty five minutes until her mother was due to return home. She had to work fast.

Mellie was good at working fast. She had to be. If she didn’t move fast there was always a hand or a foot waiting to incite her towards speed. She knew she needed food first or she wouldn’t make it through a couple of days.

Wait. No. She needs money. Oh god. She paused for one second and felt her stomach lurch. How serious is she? How badly does she need to get away? If she crosses the line–if she takes money then he will kill her. Mellie knows that the money is far more important than her.

Yes. She’s that serious. The second she decides she races to her bedroom and gets dressed as fast as she can. She needs to take the money last. If she takes it first and then gets caught she is screwed. She doesn’t have thirty minutes she has five minutes. She needs a head start.

She puts on four pairs of pants and two dresses all at the same time with a sweater and a jacket. Warm hat goes in the bag–she can’t wear that and be inconspicuous in early spring. Two pairs of socks shoved into her shoes. She scans her room–no, nothing that matters. She puts the backpack with food on her back and runs to her parents room.

There’s the jar. Her dad very seriously called it his retirement jar. It was a half gallon mason jar. Every day he empties his pocket of change and small bills and puts them in the jar. Every year or two he has me roll up the coins and he takes all of it down to the bank and gets one hundred dollar bills instead because they are easier to store. He leaves all the hundreds in the jar and just dumps new money on top of it. He had many thousands of dollars in the jar that fateful day: $246,237.39 to be exact.

Well, that was what she had left when she sat down to count it in a hotel room the next night in a hotel room in Texas after taking a bus from her small town in Iowa to a big train depot in Chicago. She took the train because she was afraid she would be easier to track if she took a plane.

“Mellie. Mellie! You aren’t saying why. You are saying how. We want to know that too but we need to start at the beginning. Why did you leave? What happened to trigger that? We assume you were abused but we don’t know how or why. We don’t understand you. Can you please tell us from the beginning?”

The beginning. She leans back and coughs in a faux theatrical manner and says in a loud cheery voice,

“Oh it’s the beginning you want! Then lets have it then. The whole bloomin story. Some of it I’ll tell you and some I will write down because I don’t think I can speak the words even now.” As she spoke her voice trailed off in force until she was speaking slowly with care. As if forcing the words with her dying gasps. But she’s not dying today. She is sure of it.

Leave a reply

The good: we went to a party!

The bad: we left after two hours.

The ugly: I could no longer control my crying.

I had fun for most of the time I was there.

These arm braces make it nearly impossible to type. Hm. I think I understand the weird split ergo keyboards now. That would be easier in this position. As it is I can barely get my body far enough away from the keyboard to get my hands low enough to type. Hm.

Awake but too early to run.

6 Replies

Today is only fourteen miles. When did more than a half marathon become “only” fourteen miles? It was a gradual process. In my mind and body I am already looking ahead to running twenty miles in seven days. I want it. I want to run the marathon. I want it. I want to do it. I want it so bad I itch and twitch and nervously sweat thinking about it.  Twenty-nine days and counting.

I can tell that right now my depression is pretty bad. I kind of hate everyone and everything in the world. I hate that I am told over and over that I an only ______ if I have __________ and I never fucking have the prerequisites. I will never have “the support necessary to heal”. I will always be alone. No, I don’t have a higher power to depend on. At this point in my life that isn’t going to work.

Because when I think very hard about it–I am getting it done. But I’m getting it done with a lot of fear and effort and work and crying. But it’s getting done. I’m already 20% through my parenting time. This phase of my life is not going to be forever. I believe in my heart of hearts that once I am done with the baby phase things will be easier.

Babies and toddlers are triggering. Arwyn wrote about that first. Babies and toddlers hit you and scream right into your ear over and over. They hurt you and you can’t do anything to defend yourself. My relationships with Shanna and Calli are the last fucking time in my life I will god damn let any mother fucker hit me. Well, maybe Noah–but that’s different.

If anyone other than my kids treated me the way my kids do I would give them a black eye. I’m fucking serious. If a god damn adult or teenager hurt me casually, fucking constantly, I would deck them. This isn’t ok. But it’s not on purpose. It’s an accident. They don’t mean to be so rough. You can’t get mad at a baby. Thus I stay stoned. So I’m not angry. So I’m not hateful. So that my brain is able to understand, “Oh, you aren’t attacking me. You aren’t a threat.” Plus having my sense of touch deadened by the pot is a great thing for me. Heightened arousal is kind of a nightmare after a while.

I love them so much. I have to believe they are worth the time and energy I put into them. I have to. It means I don’t have much left for myself or any one else.

Shanna keeps asking me about my mom. And about us. “What do I do if when I’m a grown up I dislike you the way you dislike your mommy?” “Well baby, if you decide you feel about me when you grow up the way I feel about my mommy I’m not sure I am the right person to ask. You will need to ask Marcie and Kitten and P and K and those other people who love you very much to help you. You are not going to be alone in this world, ever. There are people who love you and who will help you. And I don’t dislike my mom. I’m just not going to let her hurt me or you and she can’t really help hurting people. I hope I never treat you the way my mom treats me. If I do you will be right to protect yourself. I hope you never need to.”

What else can I say? It’s hard. It’s so very hard. I miss my mom. I miss my mom in ways large and small. I don’t dislike her. How can I explain? My mom told me over and over from when I was tiny that I was bad and that everything was my fault. If there is a fucking tsunami is southeast Asia it is my fault for being disgusting. I am aware that she wouldn’t make Shanna or Calli the scapegoat–I would still be that. I don’t want her to teach my kids that I am to blame for everything bad in the world. I’m not. I’m really not.

I am not doing well with that whole “making friends” part of life lately. Talking to adults is hard. How do you carry on a conversation when all you can see in your head is slow moving pictures of all the gore involved in shoving a head through a window. I know what it does quite well, actually. That’s why Tommy had to start wearing a helmet. He put his head through several windows. I know exactly what it does because I have cleaned up blood and glass and hair matter before. This is not news. I want to hurt. I want to make a big mess. I want to fucking inconvenience people because I am hurting. But I won’t. I’ll just see it in my head a lot. To the point where sometimes it is kind of hard to see the people in front of me, honestly.

I’m having a very hard time with not mutilating. In my head the things I “should” do are escalating terribly. I want to hurt me so much I can barely breathe. I feel like I am choking on the need to feel pain. I am disgusting. I am bad. I need to stop looking for help. The harder I look for help without finding it the more I believe I am worthless. No one will help because I don’t deserve help. Maybe other people do, but not me. I should just die. It would be better for the entire species.

I’ve sent out a bunch of emails looking for therapists. I’ve left messages. I don’t get calls back. I really am just too much trouble. I really hate me right now. I feel like all I want to do is go through the litany of why I hate me. Why I am disgusting and bad. Why I deserve everything that happens to me. Why I deserve so much more bad than I have gotten lately. Why it is time for someone to brutally hurt me–because I’m a piece of shit and that is what I deserve.

This is when I used to describe really elaborate scenes to Tom. Then he would act them out and hurt me as much as I wanted to be hurt. Noah isn’t Tom. Things work differently between us.

I don’t know what the road looks like. But it’s 4:51 and I would like to be on the road around 5. I should probably stop typing and start getting dressed. I’m giving myself four and a half hours to leisurely stroll down the fourteen miles. I’m hoping I beat people there so I can sit on the ground and stretch for a while first. That makes the food experience more pleasant.

A friend said on facebook that she will meet us at the restaurant. It is still continually surprising to me–I have friends. I don’t really understand this “friend” thing. Friends give you what they have to spare. A different friend gave me arm braces (thank you J!) so I will hopefully not kill my body on the next book. I don’t understand people giving their spare to me. Shouldn’t they give it to someone who is capable of giving them something back? I feel like I have nothing to give. I feel like an empty shell. I try to just decide that I don’t need to decide what other people get from a relationship with me. If they pick a relationship with me they probably know what they are getting. I don’t really do a lot of misleading advertising or anything.

I am a needy piece of shit. I have nothing to offer. I’m hostile and angry and tense. My experience of the world has been pretty unpleasant and it shows. I try to hide it but I can only do so much. I don’t understand why anyone would want to know me. I’m not sure I would want to know someone as angry as I am.

I think this is going to be a very crying filled fourteen miles. Slow. Just walking. It will be fine. Even though I feel sad, even though I am going to move slowly I will still be going towards Noah. Noah wants me. Noah wants me more than he has ever wanted anything or anyone. (Ok, maybe he wants to be a programmer more than he wants to be with me–maybe.)

When people in the recovery world ask about “support” and I say “I have a husband” it’s not really what they mean. It’s not good to be as dependent on a partner as I am on Noah. But he’s all I have. He is the only person on this planet who picked me and wants me. It makes it a lot easier to keep going because I know he will be on the far side. I can’t repay Noah’s support by forcing him to clean up bloody messes as I hurt myself. He deserves better.

waited too long

Leave a reply

I have a lot of shame and guilt around medicating. I “try not to use it” unless I am in crisis. When I am trying to use edibles that means that once I hit the point of crying and shaking and feeling really bad there is no potential relief for 45-90 minutes. Right now my body hurts. No good reason. Nothing happened.

All I want to do is cut. That would take this feeling away in less than a minute. I would feel better. I wouldn’t be crying. I wouldn’t feel frantic and scared and out of control and helpless.

But I would be teaching my daughters something. Instead I am teaching them that sometimes you cry. They don’t know what I am thinking. I kind of hope they never do.

I hate limbo.

Leave a reply

But I love having a plan. I have thirty days left until the marathon. If the kids want to watch the ipad, fine. I’m too tired to be entertaining. I want to be able to stretch without being knocked over. I’m also trying to not smoke. That leaves me dependent on edibles/pills and that’s a different experience for mood control. I think my lungs deserve a break this month. The hacking cough is really gross.

I think I should try not to type much. I need to find arm braces. I need to start icing my arms and stretching more consistently. Otherwise NaNoWriMo will wreck me. I’m looking forward to this book. Smart ass working title: Mary Sue’s Love Story

It’s weird thinking of myself as an animal training for a performance event. It changes how careful I am with myself. I give more respect to an animal than I do to myself. It’s not like I think I am an expensive race horse or anything, but I am being nicer to myself than I was and improvement is the point.

I finally set up the drop keyboard stuff on the desk. Maybe I won’t fuck up my hands by typing at a surface 6″ too high this year.

I gave away all the last of my tomatoes because K likes green ones. She makes a relish with them. I am planning to rip out all the tomato plants today and do a bunch of digging and maybe some planting. I am having a hard time with everything being waiting.

But holy christ do I not have the energy for people. I can barely be nice to Noah. I’m nice to the kids but I’m distracted. I feel far away. I think that is one of the big differences between the edibles and smoking. I get far less of this complete dissociation with smoking. I also get fewer panic attacks this way. I’m kind of looking forward to a few weeks of being this kind of stoned, honestly. It feels really nice for my nervous system–like a vacation from being me. I don’t have the heart pounding and the skin tension and easy startle. I feel really guilty when I am stoned like this. Like it is a cop out. I’m not learning how to really live. I’m not so stoned I am sitting on the couch and staring at the tv. But I am moving slowly and stopping to stretch a lot. I feel able to pay attention to the weird knots in my neck instead of just feeling angry with myself for not being as stretchy/bendy/flexible as I wish I was.

But I feel like I am breathing under water. I feel just a slight heaviness on my chest. It’s still easier than the panic attacks. But I can’t drive this stoned. I know I am reacting a few seconds too slow. I’m not stupid. Which means for a few weeks I can’t drive much. (No, I don’t drive after smoking either, but I can come home and immediately smoke and feel relief from the anxiety and edibles work differently in my system–it’s less of a push-the-button-get-medicine effect. It’s global or nada.)

There is a part of me that looks at the time line of my life and mentally stocks up pot for the crisis points–the anniversaries. The specific new, big traumas. I think I will be able to get to a point where I’m ok for weeks or months in between trigger points. I’m starting to wonder if I should even be trying to “not react” to trigger events. It seems like I spend a lot of time and energy trying to not get upset by things that would make any rational person upset. That’s silly. If I just batten down the hatches at those points, maybe there will be “ok” in between.

Less than seven years. I have to be completely functional without any medication to help within seven years. If I can’t go for a year completely sober here then we can’t travel internationally. Sober sooner would be better.

I’m scared.

We all have things we want to do in this life.

2 Replies

I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of support. I think about it in terms of the idea of being a main character. If you are someone who says, “I want _______ but I can’t have it because ________ won’t help” then you won’t ever have what you want. If you depend on someone else to do work in order for you to go get your dreams then you are dead in the water on the first day.

I want to be a writer. I want it so badly that my fingertips itch. I want people to know my name. I have a lot of book ideas swimming in my brain. I’m working on different story arcs. I know what I want to say. I just have to find time to go say it. That is hard and frustrating. It’s easy for me to say, “I could do it if only I wasn’t stuck with my kids all the time.”

That’s a cop out. That’s saying that I am entitled to not have to do the work I signed up to do now that there is more interesting work available. Sometimes people get away with this trade. If you can go earn a bunch of money then eventually you can say that your time is worth money and it is worth paying someone with fewer skills to do the easy stuff. You can’t say that until your time is worth enough money though. Before your time is worth money you are a whining twat.

That’s more or less how it seems to me. When someone comes to me and complains that they could be more creative if only they had more spare time I blink then want to laugh then want to punch them in the face. Don’t fucking talk to me. I haven’t had spare time in more than four years and I’m unlikely to for another eight or so years. If I sit here and get nothing done I have no one to blame but myself.

I am to the point where, quite bluntly, someone whining at me that I’m not doing enough for them makes me violent. Very violent. I don’t have an extra five minutes of support to give myself let alone anyone else. But it’s not fair. I haven’t noticed life being very fair.

Is it fair that I have to frequently go pause my day in order to hide in another room because I am completely physically overwhelmed by the physical sensation of being raped again that I can’t really see the people in front of me and I can’t respond to them? Is that fair? It doesn’t matter. It is. I can’t stop it. I’m thirty and I don’t know if my body will ever let me stop feeling like I am being raped. It seems pretty unfair to me. It makes my life pretty hard.

If I don’t do anything it is my own fucking fault and I have no one to blame. I can sit here and be useless and cry about how hard my life is or I can do something. I choose to work. I choose to take home schooling seriously so I spend a lot of time that way. I paint my house a lot. (And painting multiple murals with two little kids is pretty fucking hard work.) I write. My first book has been downloaded well over a thousand times. I have worked on my house to the point where there is a place for everything and if the house is destroyed I can pick it up in about an hour. That was a really hard place to get to in a house this small with this many people and this much shit.

If I give excuses for why I can’t do things I am just giving them to myself. I am just telling me that I can’t do things. Fuck that. I can do things. Not if only I had support I can fucking do things. I am buff. I am strong. I am inventive. I am creative. I am determined and stubborn and very dedicated. If I want something I go fucking do it.

I’m getting a little tired of being told it is my fault other people can’t do what they want. If only I was willing to work a little harder. If only I would float a little more money… No.

No.

I’m not going to be devalued. I put up with Noah needing a lot of time “off” because Noah’s time is quite literally worth a lot of money and the more politely and respectfully I “tolerate” him having extra time to work the better my life is. It’s different. Noah is working himself into the ground in service of communal goals. I can uhhh, not be an asshole about that. I can be enthusiastic support. I can see what we are doing here. He’s not acting entitled. He’s acting like he has a really hard project in front of him and he needs to get it done. Supporting a family is harder than I thought. My naiveté was influenced by never seeing a financially stable house during my childhood.

It is interesting to me to watch entitlement in other people. Which people think they deserve more than they currently have without being willing to do any work for it?

My nephew started working at a movie theater when he was eighteen years old. He broke some expensive equipment because he wasn’t paying attention while he cleaned it. He quit after eighteen months because he wasn’t a manager yet and that proved they didn’t respect him enough. He didn’t have a steady job for the two years after that I knew him. No one would hire him.

If you want to “start a business” in the bay area I believe you should expect a minimum of 80 hours a week of work. I have seen successful business owners and I have seen unsuccessful business owners. I would have to hire a babysitter with money I don’t have in order to go work in an adult-only environment. That makes it financially impossible for me. So I do the stuff I can do at home. I write. I paint. I run. I do the things that are physically possible in my life right now. I can’t add more. I physically can’t. I already rarely get more than six hours of sleep in a night. I can’t cut time with my kids. House remodeling is on pause for a few years.

For someone to act like I am a big meanie for not taking on their burdens right now is really making me feel violent. I’m very angry and feeling very unappreciated and used. For something that will never give me anything beyond a warm fuzzy feeling and an occasional milkshake. I could pay for the milkshakes myself if I didn’t have to pay $10 fucking dollars on public transit every time I have to go to work.

I don’t really think I need people in my life who let me know that my time and energy are worth far less than theirs. With Noah it is literally true and the mother fucker still gets up every day and makes me breakfast. He doesn’t act entitled to my fucking service. He’s nice to me. He’s apologetic about needing so much time. He puts a lot of effort into working efficiently and productively. He acts like him having time “off” from the kids is putting strain on me and he tries to do what he can to minimize that. He’s a god damn nice man. I really like him.

Then there are these other… I’ll stop. All the words I want to fill in with are not nice. Thumper’s father says, “If you can’t say something nice don’t say nothing at all.”

I feel very angry with the world right now. I have a very unusual experience of the world only it isn’t. I’ve been reading more on father/daughter incest. My experience of the world is pretty classic. We really are the victims of more violence. More people rape us. We are more likely to be shouted at as we run down the street. People can smell us. People don’t like us. People blame us. We deserve every god damn bad thing that happens to us.

It’s kind of funny that part of how I build “personal status” in my head is by knowing that I am well educated. I don’t have degrees proving it. I used to have the books I have read as evidence. Not any more. We down sized. Now my library represents books from me, Noah, Shanna, and Calli. I own approximately 10% of what I have owned since I was eighteen–for books at least. I got rid of a lot when I left Puppy. I got rid of a lot more in my relationship with Noah. Then I got rid of more to make room for Sarah. Then Sarah took the things we had duplicates of (it was suggested by me in advance because long-term I will have more means of replacing them even though I don’t right now).

Right now my library is pretty empty. It feels like my knowledge is pretty empty. I no longer have proof that I am well read and that I know things. I no longer have physical reminders, at least to me, that I am pretty fucking smart. I know a remarkable variety of things. I do deserve to be treated like someone worth talking to.

Yesterday at the park two of the moms were talking about opera–mostly they were kind of laughing that they both abstractly thought they should like it but they didn’t know much. I uhhh started talking. The lecture ended about forty minutes later and their mouths were hanging open. “How do you know all that?” I used to be a technical theatre major and I did a lot of reading in my graduate program about traditional plays and I have had season passes to opera companies. That’s how.

But it’s really not a topic someone would think to come talk to me about, right? If I had my fucking library you would.

One of the things that I like and dislike about the minimalist approach to stuff is it forces me to build an additional layer between me and other people. I can’t volunteer things about myself silently. I can’t advertise with stuff. I have to prove stuff by doing. I don’t get an out. I don’t get to fish casually. If I want to be respected on a given topic and not be ignored I have to be willing to verbally, ever-so-casually, slap my dick on the table. It’s pretty rare that I bother but sometimes I do. I have a really big dick.

One of the lasting effects of incest is the daughters always know and believe and carry within themselves the knowledge that their needs are just less important. They simply don’t matter as much as other people. It’s never confined to just the father. There is a whole family, a whole community involved in silencing incest and allowing it to happen. No one wants to be upset. No one wants to have to think about things like that. So they don’t. So we know that we just don’t matter compared to other people.

I’m in this weird position. It is not good enough for me that my kids be with a warm body and ill supervised. It is not good enough for me that my kids be parked in front of a screen all day so I can get work done. My first and most important job is taking care of my kids. And I have some extremely long days. That can’t be helped. There is no one else to do it. I have to be nice to my kids.

I have to be nice to my kids no matter how high my panic levels are. No matter how high my stress levels are. No matter what is happening in the world around me. That is how you break cycles of abuse. My mother wasn’t mean to me because she hated me. My mother simply took out her bad experience of the world on me. That’s not fair.

I can’t invite people into my life who treat me badly and tell me I’m not important. I just can’t. Because I bring that rage and futility and anger into my home with my children. No one is worth that. No one. My kids need me to not be treated badly. It’s a really nice experience, actually. I get to try to find out what it means to have a whole life where I’m not treated badly. Because when I’m being treated badly I get angry and I stay angry. It’s the only way I know to protect myself. I don’t need to protect myself from my kids. If someone is making me feel threatened then that’s just not good and I need to not do that any more. It’s not like I’m deeply enmeshed or anything.

In life you have to make choices. You can’t have everything. You have to decide what you want and go get it. You can’t let people or things get in your way. I want to be a good mother before I want to be anything else. That means that things that make it pretty much impossible to do that job well need to go. That’s just how life works. I will meet my current obligations and be done.

I’m done going to a place where I am expected to care a lot about someone else’s problems and do a lot of physical labor at my own expense in order to be supportive when said person knows jack shit about me and my problems and really doesn’t care.

Done.

Even if no one else does, I have to care about me. I don’t want to do that any more. It’s time to stop. I don’t want a toehold in that community enough to continue being treated like this.