Family stuff

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I feel so jealous of my friend Pam that sometimes I feel like the top of my head will explode. Why does she get a HUGE, supportive, loving family? Why is she better? She tells me that you get out of life what you give to life.

My father was a rapist. He raped my mother. I’m what he got out of life. I have raped people–not recently–but I have. It was just what my family did.

Pam has both grandmothers still alive in their 90’s. Vibrant, bossy, sassy women. Pam has more cousins than she can count on her fingers. She draws diagrams of her family tree so she can keep them straight. And she visits ALL OF THEM. Even the distant cousins. She’s teaching all of the kids Chinese.

Just thinking about her family makes me cry and cry. I will never have that. I *can’t* have that. Not unless I want to sacrifice my children and no no no no no no.

I think this year is going to be a rough holiday season. I miss my mom. I feel like missing my mom is like having a phantom limb. I keep reaching for it because I can feel it… but there is nothing there.

Sometimes people try to tell me that I am too relational in my self-concept. If I am not relational I shut down. I have no reason to keep trying. I’m not terribly motivated by anything just being in existence for me.

I do just about everything I do because I am trying to be something in relationship to other people. I want my kids to grow up in a bright, colorful world where it is ok to just try things. So I have to model it. Even though I feel shitty and upset and like I would rather just hide under my bed and cry. It’s not about me. Shut the fuck up and get off your lazy ass.

I hate painting. I have hated painting since I was seventeen. I used to be very vocally nasty when the scene shop director told me I had to paint. I *did it*. But I didn’t like it and I didn’t want to. I always felt like what I was doing wasn’t good enough and I was ruining whatever thing I was painting on. From his point of view: enh it’s a prop that will be painted over in six months. It’s a junior college play. Your best *is* good enough.

Often my internal track is screaming of one kind or another. Sometimes spewing vitriolic words about how stupid, pathetic, and generally unworthy I am. Everyone should get away from me before I hurt them. Don’t they know that I am dangerous?

Lately I hear a lot of laughter. It’s not better. Mostly I haven’t thought about this since I moved out. Throughout my childhood whenever we landed at Auntie’s house things were different.

My mom and I moved a lot. Sometimes I was alone sometimes I was with her. When I was with her and going through the random homes one after another I felt ok enough. My mommy wants me and loves me and she is doing her best to take care of me. I knew it then.

Then we would end up back at Auntie’s house. I was always in trouble. I had to stay in my room because I bothered everyone. But I could hear the laughing. It always sounded like a party was happening right outside my door and I wasn’t invited. My mom and sister and aunt were friends as well as relatives. They had a lot of fun together. Then there was me.

I was never wanted. Even beyond the whole rape thing I wasn’t wanted. From when I was a tiny girl my father conditioned me to make any and all touch sexualized. I made people feel creeped out. “Normal” people didn’t want to be near me because the way I touched them was inappropriate. I think my mom and sister didn’t want to be near me because they didn’t want to have to acknowledge how inappropriate my behavior was.

I think I go years without thinking about the laughing. I’m not sure what is triggering it now. But this is really hard.

I am so grateful that I found Noah. He laughs at my bad jokes and doesn’t laugh at me any other time. He doesn’t find joy in my misfortune.

If I tripped walking in those horrible shoes my Owner wanted me to wear he would laugh at me. It was hilarious that I was such a klutz.

Noah is nice and kind to me. And he gave me two beautiful children who are really nice to me in between occasional spurts of being kid-like. (The balance is fine. Every kid has moments of being an asshole.)

I feel really guilty for feeling the way I do. I know I have a lot of friends. I know that people love me. I can watch their behavior year after year and see that it is demonstrably true. I don’t have the right to feel like nobody loves me.

But my mommy doesn’t love me. That kind of taints the whole world.

Shanna heard me crying and is now lying next to me on the couch. Her whole body is pressed against my leg. I don’t deserve this. I don’t deserve having someone this loving and this pure like me.

I feel so bad about myself when I yell at her. I’ve had a good week and some on that front. It’s not long enough for a good streak but you can only build a good streak one day at a time.

I have no right to feel like people who are in my life right now hate me. They get mad at me sometimes but I feel that is quite a healthy reaction to some of my behavior and I in no way want to talk them out of it. Getting mad at me is appropriate at times.

I feel like a black hole. Like there is no point in anyone ever bothering to try and love me. I am so broken I will never be able to feel it any way.

But I feel Shanna. She walked out here and said, “I missed you and I heard you crying so I thought I would come cuddle you.” It has to be enough. It is what I have.

I’m beginning to think that it doesn’t matter if I feel loved. Maybe that piece just broke off. I can look at peoples behavior and figure out if they are acting like they like and/or respect me. I don’t understand this “love” thing. Throughout my life I have learned that people will only be there for me if I can ask in exactly the right way at exactly the right time. Otherwise they are mid-stream on their life and I am just too far away from their stream. It isn’t about love.

I kind of hate the word love. People use it all the time. What does it mean? Does it mean I want to fuck you? Does it mean I want to gently stroke your beautiful hair while you sleep next to me on the couch? Does it mean I will find a way to gently ask you to stop hitting me even though this is the 23,302,283,844 time I’ve asked? (Kids need repetition. And kindness.)

With Noah I treat love like a choice. I’m not sure I always have warm fuzzy feelings towards him–he can be a righteous asshole at times. But I *choose* to stand near him. I *choose* to do things to make his life better because when his life is better he’s more patient with me. See–it’s all self-serving. We have a great virtuous cycle of being nice to one another going. I feel so grateful for his kindness.

It’s a lot harder to cry with Shanna this close to me. I don’t want to wake her up again.

I feel so guilty when I look at my children. I hope I am not forcing them to meet my needs in inappropriate ways. I don’t know. I really can’t tell. I don’t tell them about my mental health stuff. Shanna has directly asked enough times that she knows “When bad stuff happens to you as a kid it kind of changes the way your brain works. It often means that you get too scared or too angry. Your brain didn’t learn how to tell the right time for being scared or angry. Then it gets confused and it is hard to keep it on the right track when you grow up.”

I don’t make my children clean up after me. I don’t expose them to sexually advanced material of any kind. At this point the limit of our sex education is the correct anatomical name for everything along with the phrase, “Masturbation is awesome!… in your room.” (I really and truly believe that a healthy masturbatory life is one of the frameworks for being a happy and sexually healthy individual.)

(Answer to question I have gotten in the past “How much masturbation is too much?” Well… are you missing school, work, church, outings with your friends/family/significant other? Are you refusing sex with your spouse in order to beat off for hours? That might be a problem. As long as your masturbation fits neatly into what would be your “personal time” anyway… wank on. It’s ok. Really.)

But I look at my beautiful, oh-so-sheltered, little girls and think, “I’m going to have to teach you how to keep your body safe.”

Am *I* someone who is even capable of understanding what that means?

As a test dummy (not that she’s a dummy!) I have a kid from the home school group as my “test audience” when I am writing. She’s nine, so a bit before puberty. She is incredibly sheltered. She is incredibly sensitive to scary things. I *can’t* be too graphic or scary or intense or it will be a bad book for her to read. I don’t want to write a book that will hurt the children I know. I want to write a book that will feel safe and comfortable and like every little kid just happened to get a smart and caring big sister.

Pam is kind of my model on this. Her rule is that she doesn’t tell her younger sister (big age gap) anything about her behavior until her sister is the age she was when she did it. That is part of how she appropriately censored.

(Now that I have discussed drugs and three-ways with Pam’s sister I think that Pam can stop acting like her sister needs sheltering but I understand that sister dynamics are complex.)

I want the little boys and girls in my group to be ready to handle a very complex part of their life. Sexuality is part of every individuals global self identity. I don’t mean global like international like other countries. I mean that your sexuality effects what you think of yourself. It effects how worthy and pretty and fun and interesting people think they are.

Sex is one of the most natural things we do. It may come right in line after pooping. It just happens. (Err, not that pooping and sex should be combined–bacterial mess.)

How do I teach people to think that sex is something that nearly everyone is hard-wired to want and that’s ok. (There are some people who genuinely feel no sexual desire… they are unusual [but still awesome!]) How you handle that want is what makes you a good person or not.

Consent is sexy.

Sometimes I find it funny that the sex workers I know are some of the most conservative people about introduction to sex stuff. Most of the sex workers I know think that people under 21 shouldn’t do sex work. Most of the sex workers I know think that you shouldn’t lose your virginity until very close to 18 if not after that.

When you are a teenager everything feels so immediate and intense and important. You must do everything NOW! I certainly had a lot of that. But not everyone has that. Man.

What the hell do I know? I think I am going to curl up around my baby now. She’s so big. It shocks me every day that she started out as a teeny tiny piece of me. Now she is almost to my armpit. Scary.

reality, unreality, how to make progress

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I feel like my perspective changes a lot as I get older. I can no longer pretend that I am a low-status, powerless individual. That would require a level of irrationality that I have not mastered. Thank goodness.

When I look at people now I feel like I am seeing two selves kind of blurrily moving back and forth in front of one another, even though they are adjoined at the feet. Like two people trying to stand in exactly the same spot–they have to kind of wobble to keep balance.

In most cases I primarily see the “adult” version of them. I get all the impressions I get. I see them as grown ups. I see them as interesting, smart, powerful. But then I look again and I see them as little kids. I see why they doubt their own effectiveness. I see why they think they “can’t” do things. They were told that over and over and over. You “can’t” do this! Go away.

I feel like it started happening with Noah first. Then when I had a good friend who is autistic sit down and explain how badly I scare the shit out of him it morphed into being something I see more often.

I have the inherent talent for being intimidating. Partially it is just kind of innate but mostly I worked really hard on being and looking scary. It was a conscious goal for a long time. Now I have arrived at adulthood and I find that the coping method of my childhood has some consequences.

I used to teach high school. By my second year they gave me alllllll the problem children. There were only two junior English teachers in my school. Me and the lady who threw away any work that was not in blue or black ink and legible enough for her to easily read it. Obviously a lot of students decided she wasn’t worth working with so she had a lot of in-class conflicts with the problem children. By my second year there the guidance counselors were SO HAPPY I was there. It meant they could split junior year into suck-ups and problem children and give each kind the teacher they needed.

The vast majority of my students told me I was very intimidating. Including the big guys. The football players and gang bangers quaked before me. It’s kind of a weird experience.

But my students all made huge progress. They all learned. Many of them more or less caught up to grade level after being considered stupid most of their lives. Because I told them over and over, “If you haven’t gotten this yet it is because I am too stupid to figure out how to teach it right. It isn’t your fault.” That gave them courage to try. They didn’t want me to feel bad about myself and they saw how I cried in frustration when I was trying to come up with a new and novel way of explaining something.

And I kept everyone in academic detention forever if they struggled so that everyone ended up getting the individual level of attention they needed.

I know I am intimidating sometimes, well… I know it abstractly. I’ve been told enough times that I no longer say, “Yeah right” because it isn’t very nice to the people who are giving me their honest opinion.

Stepping back to autistic friend. He is willing to tell me boundaries more clearly and specifically than anyone else in my life. Oh thank goodness. It means that we can play back and forth with how boundaries work. Because we are both over-sensitive and prone to feeling victimized we can take turns figuring out how to not appear scary. He’s working with me on eye contact. He has to make more. I have to make less. The in-between lesson is good for both of us.

The whole seeing-a-younger-self thing is about understanding that everyone is vulnerable. Everyone has old stuff that they carry around. Maybe most of their baggage is fairly positive and maybe it isn’t. Having a mostly positive childhood is not always easy either. Being controlled all the time is hard on people. And what if you only ever spent your time around very soft spoken, slow moving people? I will be a complete assault on your senses.

There has to be a balance. Not all harsh people can get soft enough to not scare people at all. Not all soft people can live in a bubble where they are only with people of their kind. We will have to figure out some kind of way of interacting. What will that mean?

Maybe soft people have to learn how to accept that some people have disruptive energy and it isn’t about them? Maybe hard people need to learn how to be aware of how they talk and what they say and to whom.

But there will always be faux pas. Always. Either you choose to forgive or you choose to end relationships. You can ask for modifications… but you can’t give an ultimatum.

How you deal with the fuck ups kind of decides everything, right?

I feel like my whole life is a series of fuck-ups followed by my frantic efforts to repair the damage I am creating. I don’t even understand why or how I break everything… I just do.

One important feature of my personality: I LOVE to argue. In the actual argument it is not always easy to get me to admit that I am wrong and the other person is right but there is generally some part of my brain that notices. At some point I will no longer argue because I’m thinking about what was said to me. Maybe a week or so later I will decide the other person was right. Then I have a wash of shame for arguing.

I like hearing different points of view. I think almost everything in the whole wide world is relative (I mean shit, lets start with the weather. Is it hot? Warm? Warmish? Cool? Coolish? Cold? Freezing? Stand in one room and you can all those answers from different people.) If you move on from there you will find that most subjects are two people talking at one another. Unless you are trying to build consensus so you can create something it generally works just fine for everyone to walk away from an argument with their own conclusion.

Living with Noah has been very good for me. Noah can argue fiercely about a topic and never denigrate my intelligence in the process. He can say “I think you are wrong” without any hint of implication that “I think you are stupid.” Not many people manage that. I think I am not nearly as good at it as he is. I’m trying to be better.

The more research I do on mental health (I look at a lot of different disorders out of curiosity-there is the non-zero possibility grad school might be in my future, if I can stop hating school.) the more I see that connections between people creates the vast majority of what we think of as “mental health”. Ok, there are some people who are complete loners and who have no support network in any way and they are fine with that… it’s not the “norm”.

Humans are social animals. We want to be liked. We want to feel approved of. We want to feel like our presence is desirable and positive. Pretty much everyone wants that. Arguments seem like they take away those feelings don’t they? Maybe. Depends on who is arguing and how.

I have enormous respect for my husband’s brain. He is good at learning complicated systems at a speed that baffles me. I don’t see the patterns he latches right onto. He learns languages very quickly because he is good at finding ways to link new knowledge to old knowledge and then it is just easier to remember. When I look at him I feel very insecure because I am not smart like him.

My smart is different. When I was eight or so years old the school district I was in tested my IQ to see if I would be allowed into the GATE program. (Gifted and Talented Education for those who did not suffer through California public schools.) He told me that if I wasn’t so smart I wouldn’t be able to learn because my life was so disruptive.

I learn best by playing with things and making mistakes. I think it works that way for a lot of people but the public education system is not set up for such exploration. The public education is just eager to give you a big check mark next to whether you did it right or wrong and if you have too many wrong check boxes you must not be very smart.

I am so insecure about my intelligence. That is a huge tender spot for me. That’s part of my phantom child-self I drag around. I’m scared I’m actually stupid and I won’t be able to do the things I need to do.

Everyone seems to have that phantom self. They work differently for everyone. Some people are afraid they are unlovable. Some people are afraid they aren’t smart. Some people are afraid that others will continue to hurt them… even though they are now one of the biggest people in the room and it isn’t likely.

What we are taught to expect during our childhood maps our entire future.

Well, we can choose to change. But part of changing is honestly assessing where you are and deciding where you want to be and figuring out how to get there. You can’t change if you are in denial. It doesn’t work.

I get what DSH means about “people don’t like fake. They like authentic” but people don’t like things that are authentic but scary or different from them. The Hindu temple in my neighborhood is very authentic. There is a lot of neighborhood hostility towards the temple and many of the residents hate the temple and want it to go away. “They are ruining our neighborhood.” Fuck you. The temple has been here a lot longer than I’ve lived here. They pay their taxes. They are all polite when you talk to them. You don’t get to say that this is your sandbox and everyone has to stay out. Not unless you are so rich you can buy all the land and keep alllllllll the people off.

Which none of my neighbors can do. All they can do is bitch. I feel very conflicted about hearing this. When will they learn that I am not a good recipient for these diatribes? I go off on them. They still babble at me. It’s hard to trump that whole “white people are safe and on my side” instinct they have.

I’m struggling between my inner demons. On one hand I don’t want to give up all the harshness that is part of my personality. I feel proud of myself for never hesitating to argue with someone I know who is expounding on racist, sexist, ableist, whatever crap. I do not solely defend the groups I am part of–this is what being an ally means. You should hear me go off on sex worker rights. It isn’t my battle. But it matters and very few groups ever defend themselves alone. They need allies.

And yet I wish I was more comfortable for people to be around. Sometimes I observe that some people are just so awesome that when they walk into a room everyone nearby relaxes. Just being near them feels so nice.

That’s not me.

I feel a lot of jealousy. I wish that I knew how to help people feel soothed instead of disrupted.

Well, I help the extreme incest cases and rape cases. I can help them feel better sometimes. I’m just too much for non-traumatized people.

No one can please everyone. I’m not sure I want to please everyone.

But I’m trying like fuck to write a book that your average self-involved, selfish twelve year old boy can read and find interesting and learn how to not be a rapist. It won’t be explicit “Hey! ALL BOYS!?!?! Did you know I think you are a potential rapist?! DON’T DO THAT!” Err, that won’t be my approach.

I have spent a lot of time over the past two years trying to figure out how to talk to adult men about rape. It is complicated and I am grateful for the friends who have been tolerant enough to engage in these exercises with me. It is different talking to men than to women. Talking about responsibility and victim blaming and shame and power…. all of these conversations are shaped differently for men and women. Even though men get raped too. Even though women rape too. The overall tone of the conversation is different.

If you want to teach people, if you want to really change them you have to start by understanding where they are starting from and you have to have some idea how the road will work for them. Not always–sometimes you can help someone just get started on their own path… but then you don’t know what they will change into. If you want to teach a specific skill or lesson the process is different.

Learning comes from trust. Learning comes from opening your mind to new thoughts and entertaining them without guilt or shame or resistance.

Which means I need to find a way to phrase all this shit in a way that will not offend any particular religious groups. I can’t piss off the Christians and I can’t piss off the Muslims. (Other religions strike me as caring less what random white American women think…)

Sex. Oh man sex. It all comes back to sex for me. What do I want to say about it and what do I think I can get past the censors?

Religion, in pretty much any form, is a combination of stories and rules about how to live a good life. People in different parts of the world were isolated for a long time so many different religions were created to fill the needs of the people then living. Over time which stories feel “more real” change. Why do we consider Jesus more believable than Zeus?

I don’t care which stories you listen to and I don’t care which set of rules-to-be-a-good-person you follow as long as you just go out and do your best. You don’t have to be a Good Christian. You don’t have to be a Good Buddhist. You don’t have to be a Good Atheist.

Just be good. Not capitol letter good–that has too much force and pressure behind it.

Think about yourself and the people around you. Think about how your behavior impacts other people. Think about how you wish people felt about you. What sort of behavior on your part would be most likely to motivate such feeling on their part? It isn’t a guarantee, but you can do your best.

I appreciate and value the arguments I have with my friends (autistic and otherwise) because my friends know things I don’t. My friends often know things I have had no access to learn. My friends are wonderful and they share the gift of their knowledge without even feeling like they are giving me a gift. I know it is. That’s enough.

Come December it will be seven years post-rape. This has been the most stable period of my life and it shows every sign of continuing. I try not to trust it too much.

Sometimes I think it is pretty ridiculous that I have all of the “everyone hates me” stuff still in my head all the time. Whereas I have pissed a few people off spectacularly in the last few years… only a few. In very specific ways. In general… I don’t believe that anyone in my life hates me. I am pretty sure that everyone who knows me ranges from ecstatic love to apathy to mild dislike. I don’t think I have behaved in such a way as to provoke hate in a while. I could be wrong though.

I enjoyed some Cracked.com yesterday. This one was about OCD. The part that is sticking in my head the hardest, “If you have OCD you know that your behavior is crazy… but you can’t stop.”

That’s what I struggle with. When I am most mired in feelings that everyone hates me… I know it isn’t “true” but fuck all if I can stop sobbing hysterically because it could be true and I have no way of knowing and people could be lying to me left and right and….

It isn’t rational. I’m not pretending it is rational. I’m not saying, “All of my friends should bend over backwards supporting me. Everyone should get on a rotating schedule so I NEVER HAVE TO DOUBT YOUR AFFECTION AGAIN.” No, that would be an irrational reaction to an irrational feeling. That’s not exactly a good merry-go-round.

What is rational?

Well, the simple fact is that given how geographically diverse the bay area is I need to always just understand that most friendships will be about occasional visits and not continual company.

I listen to Pam too much. Pam has the family I want. I mean, not really… they are super controlling. But that’s part of the deal. (Pam is Taiwanese and sends me HUGE documents with her family tree explained in great detail so I can understand wtf she is talking about. Her family is hard to track without visual guides.) There are a lot of people. Pam could choose to spend all of her time (like 15 hours a day every day) with family members and not have to get bored of the same people. She has so many people who love her and want to be with her. She has a sister who looks up to her and loves her and wants to see her at least once a week when they are in similar locations.

On one hand I view Pam as inspirational. I want my kids to love me like she loves her parents. I would give anything in the world for that. But the funny thing is… I can’t act like Pam’s parents in order to get it.

Pam was hit. Pam was shamed. Pam was forced to sit and do hours of homework.

Err… wait. Why in the fuck is it that being close to your family as an adult doesn’t seem to be about how you were treated as a kid necessarily? It doesn’t seem to be the deciding factor.

Most of the people I know who were treated “ok” or better don’t talk to their parents much.

I think it isn’t about the treatment. I think it is about the expectation. It doesn’t enter into Pam’s mind that she might dislike her parents. Whatever. They are your parents.

But throughout Pam’s adult life her parents have been supportive, kind, and kind of ridiculously non-judgmental given their cultural background. They got a fucking weird kid by their way of measuring. And they deal with that with grace.

I feel blessed because I get to sit here day by day telling my kids that I don’t know what they will be like when they are grown ups but I’m sure that I will be happy to help them reach their dreams. Whatever that means for them.

I feel very guilty when I talk about the out-of-face-out-of-mind feelings I have about love. I think that is all the “attachment” stuff. I have never been diagnosed officially as having an attachment disorder. I just… have attachment issues. I think that if I walked in and explained to a therapist how my emotional attachment issues goes I could have such a diagnosis if I asked for it. I don’t think that is good though at this point. Let’s stick with GAD and PTSD. That’s enough. That’s hard enough.

PTSD can cause attachment problems.

It isn’t that I “stop caring” about people when they aren’t in front of me. It is that I feel like one of those little wind up dolls with a key in the back. I can’t find a good easy link. You have to just know what I mean. When I am standing in front of someone I am wound up. I can access emotions that are simply not present for me when I am alone.

It just occurred to me to wonder if part of this problem is my extreme lack of self-love. Maybe those feelings don’t exist in side of me when I am alone because I don’t feel any love for me. It is hard to feel any love at all in a vacuum of feeling evil. Everything feels tainted and distant. Dirty screens. Dirty cage walls. It’s like someone hasn’t been cleaning the bird cage and the birds managed to shit all over the walls.

When I see my children I feel an over flowing of love. It is part of the reason I am a stay at home mom. This is the longest and most consistent access I have ever had to the feeling of love. When I’m away from them it goes away.

I don’t think I “don’t love” my kids when I sit in the living room typing and they sleep in their room. But I don’t feel love. I feel like an empty vessel waiting to contain something. I feel like I am waiting to exist. I am not really existing without them.

I am relational in a way that is deeply unhealthy. I feel like I don’t exist outside of the roles I play in other peoples lives. I fade out of a lot of friendships because I can’t see an easy role for me to fill so I just… stop showing up. If someone has no need of me then I don’t feel secure. I don’t feel like there is a reason for me to be there. So I leave.

“If there is work to do, Lenora won’t stand still until it is done.” Damn skippy. (Err, Lenora is my middle name. A long time ago I worried about being “out” about being a pervert because I was heading into my teaching career. Now I am at a point in my life where I can never slam the closet door shut and I’m comfortable with that. So I don’t bother using my middle name in some contexts and my first name in other contexts.)

When I was in high school people would tell me to my face that they wanted me to come to their (wild, all-night) parties because they knew I would fall asleep early and not bug them all night long and I would wake up and start cleaning before anyone else was up. I would destroy the evidence so they didn’t get in trouble with their parents.

Some habits die hard.

I like taking care of people. I like feeling useful. I like feeling like I have something specific to offer that someone needs–even if that only means telling them my wildly different perspective. The truth is probably somewhere between our perspectives anyway. It’s good to understand the whole range of opinions.

I feel like most of what I need from people is just the opportunity to listen to them talk. I only know what I know. What I know is so twisted and fucked up that I am not good at figuring out where other people really are. I don’t know what people know. I don’t know what will surprise people.

Just talk to me. I’m working really hard on not needing anything from anyone. I understand that some people have to be basically self-contained units. I mean, I depend on Noah. I am so grateful for Noah there are not enough words in our language to express it.

When Noah looks at me with his patented-creepy-guy-I-like-what-I-see-stare I know that he isn’t judging me based on whether or not my breasts or my ass are the right size or shape for his adolescent fantasies.

Noah appreciates me in all of my complexity. He can only take so much sometimes–he has limits too–but he doesn’t want me to stop being intense. He just wants to be along in a room sometimes too. I get that.

I told my shaman that sometimes I feel kind of guilty because I think my marriage is a white knight situation and I wish I hadn’t shoved Noah into that role.

My shaman turned and cocked his head and said, “Wait… who is the knight here? Because if you think there is just one possibility you are deluded in a special way.”

I sure pick tactful friends. <3

It is hard for me to see what Noah “really” gets from our marriage. It is hard for me to see our situation as being good for him. But when I’m talking to someone who is much older than Noah who really kind of wishes that he had found someone like me (or that I had said  yes to him) it is a lot easier to see the advantages.

I have a lot of friends who are heading towards old age and they are single. They don’t have a lot of patience with my self-denigration. They clearly see how Noah’s life did improve and continues to improve with my presence. For some reason my married friends just get my whine more and they don’t argue in the same way.

Marriage is a really interesting relationship. Different people treat marriage very differently. I think that marriage is where you go find someone who is a good partner–someone who can balance your weaknesses and strengths. I probably actually wouldn’t do well with a live-in partner who did construction type work. We would fight a lot about how to do things. Noah just lets me do whatever I want. Even if it is wrong.

And I let Noah mostly do what he wants, even if it is wrong. I can’t save him from his fuck ups and mostly I don’t try. (Ok, I do save him from a lot. I handle ALL THE PAPERWORK.)

Noah wasn’t so good at managing money. Well, not the real day-to-day kind. He cam manage investments. I can’t. People like me don’t invest. (Statistically a fairly small percentage of the country is seriously “invested” in companies. During childhood and early adult hood I was in the bottom 10% of the country for wealth. In my first year of teaching full time I jumped up to the 40%. I’m not the kind of person who invests.)

But holy moly I can pinch a penny till it cries. I just put their whiny snively little selves into a jar under my bed instead of in an investment house.

I feel uncomfortable every time I look at our bank balance. Surely this isn’t mine. I comfort myself with the knowledge that I didn’t earn it. I probably couldn’t earn it. That doesn’t feel very good. Kind of cold comfort. Like holding an ice pack on a bruise for three hours. Maybe not so much help after a while.

My therapist regularly comments on how surprising it is that the cast of characters in my life is so large and so diverse. I know a lot of people. In the modern facebook/raver climate knowing so many people doesn’t seem like a big deal.

But I don’t just have a lot of acquaintances. I have a lot of people I can call in the middle of the night. I have a lot of people I can ask for help in emergencies. Would I feel uncomfortable asking? Sure. But in a true emergency I have a rather long list of people to call. I might have to go through 20 or 30 names to get my needs truly met… but I know hundreds of people and many of them are very ok with being woken up in the middle of the night.

When I was younger I consciously worked on being a nexus point between many very diverse groups. I’m not the only one, of course. But I went through a lot of kinds of groups. I didn’t alienate everyone.

I feel like a spider sitting in a web. Do you know that most job leads do *not* come from people you know directly? Most job leads come from the friend of a friend. How you make your network of people work decides a lot about how successful and happy your life will be. At least so some books claim.

I know a lot of people. I don’t know what that will mean some day. Maybe nothing. Maybe something useful. I keep hoping.

Sometimes a friend calls me up to say, “So I was in a situation today and someone started doing (thing Krissy writes about disapproving of) and I recognized it as a problem… so I spoke up.” That makes my fucking day. It has come from multiple people. It’s been about sexist stuff, racist stuff, queer bashing…

I believe that intersectionality is the way to the future. People who can be bridges between communities are going to become ever more important.

Human beings have always functioned heavily in an Us vs Them manner. It is how we rally up our energy to get things done. But as long as you think of people as Them you can’t figure out how to live peacefully.

I begin to understand pacifism.

And now my family is awake. Calli is lying on my arm. It makes it harder to type. But I’m so happy she is here that I can’t tell her to go away. Today we are having leftover pancakes and french toast along with fresh fried potatoes and sausage and eggs. It’s a good life.

This too shall pass

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One of the problems with blogging the way I do is I don’t edit or proofread or “final draft” anything. So I walk away from the computer and spend the rest of the day thinking, “I wish I hadn’t said ____.” or “I wish I had changed the phrasing of _______.” or “I sure hope so-and-so doesn’t think I am talking about him/her….”

I was reading about famous people I don’t care about and one was loudly pissed off that another person made it seem like she currently has mental illness issues. That was a long time ago. How dare you bring it up. That could hurt my ability to work.

With the whole live-blogging of mental illness thing people have a pretty up-to-the-day progress on my mental health. People who have known me for a long time (*wave*) know that things come and go. I don’t have the same issues all the time. I don’t focus on the exact same problems… they drift.

I spend a lot of time feeling rather ashamed of the exhibitionism involved in being this open. I try to justify it to myself by moving platforms every few years. People have to consciously try to keep up with me. I make it difficult. I am not broadcasting my freak on the side of the road with a billboard… I just write about it.

Apparently something like 40% of my country believes that End Times are coming any day now and they are voting with this belief in mind.

But I worry about how weird I am?

Think about the word “normal”. What does it mean? Within the range of expected behaviors/performance/whatever? Common? Average? Oh man. What does “average” mean?! (Math majors–I’m not really asking.)

Does it really take all kinds? Are people allowed to want to be hit? Are people allowed to want to keep their kids out of the mainstream because the mainstream is not where you want them to be? Are people allowed to dress in little more than pasties and panties and run around in public?

Why not? What is your actual objection? It makes you think about sex? I think that is your problem and not someone else’s.

People who are raped don’t cause rape. Rapists cause rape. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time doesn’t make it your fault. If the correct way to avoid being raped is to be in a locked room your entire life then that is not ok. Or have a chaperone. Some of us aren’t well-liked enough to get a chaperone this lifetime.

It is hard knowing intellectually that people love me but not feeling emotional connection. I think I feel connection more sometimes than others. And I often feel emotion in the moment when I see someone. When I can see their face and hear their tone of voice and think, “Oh of course this person still likes me (s)he is just completely overwhelmed by life and coming to me is a high barrier and… ok. I can trust this for a bit.” Then I leave the room. I don’t feel it any more. It feels like it never was and I only imagined it and really they think I am a piece of shit.

No, it’s not “rational”.

I’m play acting my emotions–why shouldn’t I believe every one else is too?

Do you know what is the worst fucking advice ever in the history of ever? “Just be yourself.” That is the fucking shittiest god damn thing you can say to someone. What it means is “If you are someone who deserves to have good things happen to you they will happen. If good things don’t happen… well… I guess you weren’t good enough-huh?”

What it means is “I the person giving advice have no fucking idea how you are going to do this so I am going to say something meaningless and pointless and hope to fuck that you figure it out.”

They say that the personality is pretty solidly set by five or six. That explains why I still think about sex all the fucking time. Oh wait. Or maybe it is just natural for my species and I have a sex drive on the high side. Maybe everything isn’t bad. Did you know that most men who define themselves as politically conservative stop having sex in their 60’s and men who define themselves as liberal tend to have sex into their 80’s?

What does it mean to be perverted anyway? I haven’t done anything that is outside the range of human exploration. I am not the only one to have done anything on my long list of things I’ve done. Given what I read on the internet the main thing that is weird about my list is just that I’ve tried such a variety. Most people tend toward niches. I don’t have strong preferences and I had a long partner list. I tried whatever they were into because I wanted to figure out what they liked and why. It isn’t how other people make friends but I have made some really good friends this way.

Why are the friendships I’ve made through sexual exploration supposed to be “bad”? Sometimes I read about spouses demanding that their partner NEVER speak to a former lover again. This goes for all gender combinations. If Noah wanted to ban everyone he or I have had sex with from our house we would be down to about four friends. Well… he might have a few more because he has some guy friends from college and they weren’t bi. I would only still know my good Christian friends. (I have them! I try to not be too big of an asshole.) That would sure change the scope of my life.

I haven’t slept much tonight. Just… awake. Anxious. Home school event at my house today. So I really should be sleeping. It will be fine. Gardening. And I’m babysitting at the same time for a different kid. Just another day in paradise.

I don’t feel that I am grateful enough for the blessings in my life. I feel like I take people and things and security for granted. Only I don’t feel secure so am I taking it for granted or do I just not believe I have it?

I spend a lot of time feeling like people tolerate me out of pity. I don’t want pity. I don’t want to be that despicable asshole you tolerate because “Oh she doesn’t mean it. She has had a hard life.” I’m afraid I am that person.

I don’t want to make people feel smaller. I don’t want to make people feel bad. A smart lady I know is probably already saying, “You can’t make people feel anything.” I’ve listened to you say it enough times…

I know that being aware of how much turmoil is in my head hurts people sometimes. They feel like I am denigrating them. They feel attacked. They feel that I disapprove. Sometimes I do disapprove of something but if pressed the fullness of my disapproval would probably be something to the effect of, “I wouldn’t do it. I would find something different. I know that you are not me and you are doing your best.” I am fully and vibrantly aware that most of the things I “approve” or “disapprove” of have nothing to do with actual merit or worth it is just my opinion. It is just my preference.

I do think you are doing the best you can. You have to get through every day for you. That will be a different road than I walk. I really and truly don’t believe that anyone “should” copy my methods or opinions. I tell my children so just about every day.

“I say things in strong ways because I have strong opinions. You are allowed to have your own opinions that are equally as strong–even if they directly oppose my opinions. That is just a right.”

Even if it makes them challenging to live with now. It will make them strong in the future. I care more about the future when I will not be there to watch over them than I care about today when I’m feeling frazzled and annoyed and just want to be obeyed.

Apparently a taste for uhhh colorful women runs in the family. I was looking at youtube videos of my sister-in-law tonight. (She married Noah’s younger brother.) Oh man. Her favorite person ever is Freddie Mercury and she is a singer for punk bands (ok, their current effort isn’t exactly “punk” it is more 50’s rock). I feel a little weird about how much of her ass I have seen before meeting her but it will all work out. Listening to the lyrics she writes makes me happy. Here is a woman who cusses way more than me.

Something that I probably want to bring up with my therapist is this out of sight/out of mind abrupt emotional thing. As soon as someone is out of my sight I believe they hate me. I believe that they aren’t contacting me and asking for a visit because I am so bad. It couldn’t be because they are busy.

I have one friend in particular who takes visiting even more seriously than I do. I’ve been seeing him every month (sometimes twice a month) for nearly all the years I have been a parent. At one point early on in our relationship I said, “I feel we are more ‘friendly acquaintances’ than ‘friends'” and he decided that he didn’t want to be seen that way. So he has made enormous effort to visit consistently. Because he wants me to think of him as my friend.

There is no earthly reason for me to feel like nobody likes me everybody hates me I guess I’ll go eat worms. Well, there is that whole family estrangement thing. Lately that is feeling in my head like all-my-fault. The holidays are coming. Oh shit. I wonder if my mother misses me. I wonder if my sister thinks of me. I wonder if Auntie feels any compassion at all for me or if she thinks I am just a big crazy liar. It doesn’t really matter. No one in my family will rape my kids.

If you want to stop being hard you have to figure out how to laugh at life. Do you know that an inability to laugh at life is why I consciously decided to not pursue sex work? It wasn’t for other scruples. I’m over-sensitive and pissy and I get my feelings hurt by things that aren’t personal. Thus I am not suitable for sex work or a wide variety of other professions. That’s ok! I’m keeping busy.

I know that there are people who can go through life in safety without growing hard. I don’t really understand that mechanism. Why is it that when you hang out with friends nothing happens but when I hang out with friends… they rape me. I’m sure it is the people I pick for friendship. Obviously. But not everyone I know is a rapist. I think. How the hell would I know? I don’t follow everyone around all the time…

I should probably go back to bed. The kids have been sleeping till seven lately and more sleep would help my day.

The thing I keep coming back to is: it has to genuinely not matter to me what other people think of me. I need to not consider that. That’s hard. I care a lot about what other people think. I feel constantly overwhelmed by how hard it is that I have no control over what other people think. The only thing I can do is hide and not subject them to my presence. I could probably do with having fewer people tell me that they hear all about the shit-talking about me. Ok, fine. People want to say nasty things about me. Well, opinions are like assholes. Everyone has one.

When people dislike me it feels like they agree that my life should have happened. I deserve what I got. That may or may not be what they think but it is my reaction. The only part of that I can control is my reaction. If I can get my reaction under control.

I have to not care. I have to think I am a decent-enough person. I have to think I am kind-enough. I have to think I am doing good-enough things. I have to think I am doing my best and if that isn’t good enough… that’s life. I hope you have other people in your life who can help fill your needs because I will never be enough.

I’ve been thinking that with the kids lately. I will never be enough to meet their needs. I’m getting a lot more time with them just lately. This constant feeling of not being enough is hard. I feel so tired.

Just a morning whinge

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I feel like living in one place is giving me the experience of seasons in a way I find odd year after year. Wait… this really happens? The changing of the seasons surprised the hell out of me for the first twenty-five years. I had nothing to anchor me to the changing of the year other than the start of the school year. This is different.

I am working on acquiring huge bags of mulch from a friend. I have brought five bags home so far and I think I should go back for more since she has a lot more. It will cover a lot of my yard–for free! Whoo! I’m going to start with putting it around the play structure. Mulch is at least slightly more absorbing of impact than plain dirt. I’ve already layered a lot of sand around the base.

I paid someone to fix my washing machine problem (it was flooding the garage) and now I have a different problem–the water won’t drain from the washing machine. I have a growing puddle in the machine. The internet tells me I need to call a Maytag repairman because a bunch of things can cause this and they are all internal.

This is a thing because the last time I tried to fix washing machine issues (the washing machine before this) I called a Maytag employee… they sorta fixed it but said mostly it was a plumbing problem. Then I called a plumber and the person said it wasn’t a him problem. Then I called someone else and they still couldn’t fix it. I had to pay all three service people for their time and I didn’t get the problem fixed. So I ended up getting a new one.

So the idea of escalating washing machine problems is kind of nervous making. Oh man. Not again. Owning a house is a pain in the ass.

Today I need to do some preparation work. Tomorrow is a home school gardening day. I invited folks from the group over to help plant tulip and daffodil bulbs. I plan to talk to the kids about soil enrichment and planting and plant biology and such. It should be fun. And now I get to extensively talk about mulch.

I’m killing the celosia. I love them but apparently I water too hard? I should do more research on these flowers because they are whiny, picky little bastards. Five minutes of internet research tells me the blooms usually last ten weeks and then they are annuals. So I’m not doing something terrible to them. Oh. Well that’s nice to hear. Now I can feel less guilty about them dying off. They are also known as cockscomb; now that makes me happy.

Yesterday I medicated less than usual and had a stomach ache that was distracting and harsh all day. I spend a lot of time trying to figure out why I use pot. At this point a lot of it is masking the constant stomach pain. That might be something to think about. I know that part of the stomach pain is anxiety. My body doesn’t like me very much.

I can tell I’m feeling lonely. The ways I use forums/social media changes a lot as I cycle through different levels of feeling lonely/sad/unwanted.

I’m trying really hard to continue seeing people and continue socializing. I continue to ask people for time. But fewer people. I’m scared of rejection. I’ve been asking a lot less. This article tells me I should keep asking. But what I want isn’t a casual favor from a stranger. I want people to like me.

I’m afraid that the more time people spend with me the more they dislike me. The more carefully they have to put up a lot of boundaries. So I stop asking people to come over. I feel sad. I feel like it is too much work to put up with me so I should stop making people feel like they have to acknowledge me. I should let them ignore me. I should make it absolutely non-effortful to pretend I am not in the world.

I’ve been reading about the Four F’s. Fight, flight, freeze, or fawn. Survival methods. Things that animals do when they are confronted with stimuli that feels dangerous. I am absolutely an isolator. That’s a big standard PTSD thing. We like being alone in a room because then we know we won’t unconsciously lash out at our invisible demons and hit someone else on accident.

Noah says I want him to be obsessed with me. That’s probably true. But I also want him to work and play with our kids. I think I do a good job of making sure I am not so demanding that I cut into his work time or his time with our kids. I make sure I get the scraps. I make sure I get what is left over after he has done ALL THE THINGS because they are all more important than me. How obsessed does that make him? If I am what he gets to when he has magical “spare time”?

I’m having a hard time managing my feelings around being sad. I feel so pervasively sad and unwanted and like I will never really be part of anything.

When I was a kid we moved a lot. When we were living with bio-family my experience was that I was always in my room listening to everyone else talk and spend time together and laugh. They always sounded like they were having fun. If I walked into the room I would be yelled at within minutes and told to just go away because I was bothering them.

Sometimes when I experience the intensity of Shanna talking over me… I understand why I was sent to my room. I think most of the people in my family have PTSD and I can understand why my intensity was too much for them.

But I still can’t be in a room with people without feeling like at any second I will be told to leave because I am annoying and unpleasant. I’m bad. I’m wrong.

Right now it feels like the most important thing I will do with my life to not pass on this feeling. My children will not feel like me. They will not feel like them walking in the door ruins the party for everyone else.

But I don’t really get to decide how they feel. I only get to decide how I treat them.

I keep thinking about hosting a party because I miss people. Then I think about the fact that people mostly only come over when I invite them to a party. And I spend the party feeling like I should be quiet and not ruin it for everyone else. I’m not actually sure I can handle it.

I feel like I should hide for a while. I spend too much energy wishing people liked me more. I spend too much energy wishing that people wanted to spend more time with me. I need to only need me.

I have a lot of reading, a lot of painting, and a lot of writing I want to finish before December 31st. Maybe that should be enough.

I have to somehow work on this frantic feeling. It isn’t attractive to look or act desperate. I feel desperate. I feel like I want to fall to my knees in front of people and beg them to please like me. Please. Please be my friend. Please see me. Please choose to spend time with me just because you want to and not because I asked and you feel sorry for me.

Recently I read a very sad story about someone else’s incest experience. From when she was very tiny her abusive grandfather taught her to beg him to do it to her. She had to say, “Please love me” and encourage the sexual abuse or he hurt her.

I don’t want to ask people to love me any more. Either they do and they will show up or they don’t and I should walk away. I can’t influence how other people feel about me. I just need to accept it and move on.

They will either be here or they won’t.

I can’t ask right now. Even if that means I’m alone. Luckily I’m never alone any more. Not really. I can ask for visual privacy but I am almost never alone. This is my shot. I understand that they won’t have to be with me forever. Someday they will run off to chase their dreams and I will have to be ok with that. I will have to act like they aren’t abandoning me–because they aren’t. They are just following the progression of life.

I don’t really like to think about that day very much. It feels like looking forward to my obsolescence. Not that I think I will run out of things to do. I think I kind of hope that my reward for a life well lived is that Noah will get around to being obsessed with me and we can spend a ridiculous amount of time staring at each other.

The longer I live with Noah the weirder I feel about this whole “never feel liked” thing because he has it and he doesn’t have the same kind of trauma background. Ok, he was never liked by his family or his small hick town… but it wasn’t like my childhood. I feel deeply comforted by the fact that he feels no more liked by people than I do. Maybe this isn’t a broken thing. Maybe this is a common and semi-normal thing. Sometimes when I spontaneously do something nice to him, even as small as touching his hair, I can see him shudder. He isn’t used to people wanting to touch him.

It isn’t a sex thing. He looks so young. He looks so scared and relieved at the same time. Someone likes him. I really like living in a house that is a full-time mutual admiration society. It feels so good to be around three other people who are so constantly affirming. I don’t know why Noah is like this with us. My kids are largely because I model it.

I’m not one to be stinting with my criticism. But after years of research I understand what criticism and put-downs do to peoples self-esteem. I understand that for every negative thing you tell a person it takes ten positive statements to balance it out.

So given that I am unstinting in my criticism I have to be significantly more free with my praise. My children can point out where something is done wrong but they are way more likely to be encouraging and friendly and helpful because I am that way with them. I live in this insulated little bubble with them so I can keep calm and be nice.

Why do I feel so lonely if I am never alone? I see people. I’ve been incredibly social lately. But I always feel like I have to be very careful what I say. I never relax. I never feel like people actually like me. I feel like people might, maybe, like a very carefully edited and shaped version of me but they don’t actually like me.

Don’t offend anyone, Krissy.

In the past people used to regularly complain that talking to me was walking on eggshells. I haven’t had anyone say that in a long time. My mom said that to me a lot. “I just can’t say anything to you, Kristine.” She really couldn’t. By the end I hated her so much and I had so much need built up that she really couldn’t say anything. Every single god damn thing she promised me would turn into an argument because I didn’t believe her and I hated her for lying to me.

I heard a lot of complaints about how hard I was to talk to back in my munch days. A lot of the guys would complain that I couldn’t take a joke. Nope. I can’t fucking take a rape joke or a sexist joke and I very rarely tolerate racist jokes from anyone. (Err, I have a friend who is half Japanese (I’m pretty sure it is Japanese but I could be remembering incorrectly for a different Asian nationality) and half Mexican. She has some really funny jokes. They are all about her ethnicities. I giggle when she tells the jokes and don’t repeat them. That’s how you should roll when you are white as snow.)

Noah says that people feel like they are walking on eggshells because I don’t react in any of the ways they have patterns for how to handle. I react differently in one way or another and that difference is hard for people to stand near. I don’t really know.

I should probably reread some of the existentialist crap. That would probably be relevant to this ennui shit I’ve got going on. Not till I get through my list of books for the year. I helpfully borrowed a bunch from a friend yesterday. She happened to own a bunch of books on my “to read” list. How useful and kind of her to share.

See, it isn’t as if I am not seeing people. I clearly have friends. They aren’t telling me to go away. But we see each other mostly at my initiation. That’s how it works with almost all of my friends. We see one another when I go solicit their company. Sometimes that gets to me. It feels too much like forcing people to put up with my unpleasant company just because telling me “no” feels too socially complicated. Over my lifetime I’ve been aware that a few people let me come over just because they didn’t have the cojones to tell me to go away. I don’t want that any more.

I am no longer a kid who needs to get out of my house. I don’t want to force people to put up with my presence. It’s why I just can’t be a “regular” anywhere. I will never be someone who hangs out Cheers-style at a public gathering place. I’m too convinced that people wish I would leave.

I don’t know how to change this feeling. Whatever the answer is, it has to come from me. It can’t be about what other people do or don’t do. I can’t care. I can’t read peoples minds. I can’t be responsible for what is going on with them.

I ask when I can. I should stop asking when I feel too emotionally impacted by the process of asking. That’s “boundaries” right? I differentiate between asking I am doing “for me” and asking I am doing “for the kids” because they are in a different place with regards to friendship formation. But then I need to keep my god damn mouth shut when people are here for the kids.

I’m trying not to drive off the home school families. We’ll see how this goes. It is a help/hurt thing that everyone lives so far apart. I can always pretend that the literal physical distance is enough of a stumbling block and that is why we aren’t closer.

But I have no idea how close or not close anyone feels to me. I don’t know if this void is just in me.

Did you know that NIN’s “Head Like A Hole” can be played over the top of “Call Me Maybe”? That kind of broke my brain. I’m not sure if it is a good thing or not.

Enough navel gazing for one morning. I hear a kid stirring.

Good to know.

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I updated a whole bunch of WordPress plug-ins recently and now I don’t see notifications for comments unless it is someone who has never commented before. So I’ve been feeling kind of whiny (only in my head) about not getting comments in the last month. Then I went and looked at the blog (for a random other reason) and discovered that I’ve gotten a bunch.

Oh! That’s where my friends are…

Force for good?

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Today was a good day. I didn’t cry at all and not many days go by when I manage to avoid crying entirely. Usually the crying is more about stress relief than grief but it is still kind of hard to deal with. It’s awkward.

Today was a heavy kid-activity day. They have dance class and gymnastics class in one day. It makes scheduling the rest of the week easier if I have only one day of taking them to classes. Their classes this term are through city-rec so they are mostly taster size samples of these activities. The dance class is “creative dance” and is marketed at 3-5 year olds.

Last week two of the crawling-aged younger siblings were on the floor and making a little noise. The teacher had trouble controlling the students as a result. She decided that the best way to handle this was to yell at all of the parents that it isn’t ok for younger siblings to distract students and if it happens again she will have to just ask people to leave the room. She said it all with a smile and a kind of fake “I’m your camp counselor!” kind of bounce. I didn’t even have a disruptive baby and I felt guilty.

So today I talked to the two moms of babies. I talked to one before class and the other after class. The one I talked to before class is a former teacher. She used to do elementary school. She was not pleased with being publicly shamed in front of a group and had firm plans already to talk to the dance teacher about her methods being inappropriate. Her commentary was, “If she can’t keep control of six little kids then it isn’t my baby’s fault it is her fault for lacking classroom management skills.” Right on, sister.

The second mom was a few minutes late to class. I started feeling kind of anxious that she wouldn’t show up. But she did! Phew.

I waited until we were walking out and I kind of ended up near her alone. I told her that I was kind of afraid she wouldn’t come back. She said, “I considered not coming. My son isn’t that interested and I kind of have to encourage him and it was hard for me to do today.” I told her I was glad she did because I wanted to talk to her.

I asked her how she felt about being talked to by the teacher the previous week. She said she felt really bad and ashamed. She said she felt like she should just stop coming. I sighed deeply and told her that I was sorry.

I told her that no one has the right to speak to her, not this teacher and not anyone else. I told her that she has every right to complain to the teacher about her treatment and if the teacher is not polite she really should escalate it on up to the teacher’s boss. It is not ok for the dance teacher to be basically a bully.

Her eyes got wide. She said, “Really? In India we are told to be quiet and submissive and just tolerate how people treat us.”

I said, “With all love and kindness you aren’t in India. Here no one has the right to talk to you the way she did.”

Her face kind of crumbled a little in that “I’m not gonna cry. I’m not gonna cry. I’m not gonna cry” sorta way.

She told me that since she hadn’t addressed the issue the very day it happened that she had lost her window and she no longer had the right to complain. I told her that wasn’t true at all. She has every right to take as much time as she needs to process her emotions and to figure out what she wants to say and how she wants to say it. It is probably best to do it before the class ends entirely but she can say what she wants to say at any point.

I told her that this is a bad teaching method and if she doesn’t tell the teacher how much it bothers her then the teacher doesn’t know and the teacher can’t fix it in the future. She thought that was a good point.

She thanked me over and over. She said she was so glad that I stopped to talk to her because she wasn’t sure what to do because she felt bad.

You are deserving of respect and good treatment. No one gets to yell at you like that. No one.

By the time we were done with our conversation she looked deep in thought but resolved. I hope she talks to the teacher.

I hope to be a force for good in the world.

Successfully navigated weekend-long group event.

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I’m not very good at camping. I haven’t gone that many times in my life. At this point the majority (in a simple numerical sense) of my camping experiences have been with Burning Man people mostly when I was dating Daddy J and he took care of me. I’m not very good at the mechanics of the process. I have no early experiences to lean on.

Over the past few years I’ve tried to go a few times. The first time I tried to go on a group trip it resulted in being told at the end of the trip, “I am never going camping with you again.” Totally fair. I was difficult in a variety of ways. I’m not really eager to have everyone I know repeat the same line so I have to figure out how to be less difficult.

I now am of the opinion that I should just always set up camp and take it down alone. At some point I am going to walk away to a place I can hide for a while and sob. I feel incompetent, I feel stupid, I feel like I am doing everything wrong, I feel like I am about to break ALL THE THINGS. So if I’m alone I can walk away and cry for a while and no one will be mad at me.

I liked that most of the home school families set up their own hearths and mostly stayed there. The kids ran back and forth but other than one three-family hearth everyone else mostly stayed in their own space. I took advantage of this and never set up a hearth. I spent my time going between campsites. I’d spend half an hour or so with each family then wander away again. This way I never pick a team.

If I limit how much time I spend around any given person then I am unlikely to say something rude or offensive. I am much better at censoring what I say if I keep the contact for short duration.

There are a lot of eddies of tension in the group. Luckily none of them involve me near as I can tell. I am working very hard to make sure I am never a central figure in the group. I don’t want to be an organizer. I don’t want to be a figurehead person because all of them end up being treated kind of shitty. That’s universal in every group. So I do my best to be very grateful and helpful when I show up and I walk away frequently with my hands up. I have no responsibility here.

The group didn’t stay together during the day. I went with the “no need to drive” hiking group because I’m a big whiny baby about having to drive. Man I hate driving. The trail we picked was rather steep. It was only a few miles round trip (maybe three or four miles round trip?) but it was straight fucking up a mountain. So I had to carry Calli piggy-back and she won’t sit in a fucking carrier. Heck, at this point I don’t even own one because I gave away the Ergo and that was my last hold out. (She started refusing carriers as soon as she could walk.)

So I had some internal moments of whining when the group took off at the speed of the 6-9 year olds who could all walk by themselves. Waaa. S’ok. We kept up well enough.

Shanna was pretty good about following the boundaries we set for her. This whole “I want to meet everyone in the world” thing is serious for her though. We have to watch her because she wanders off to meet all the neighbors. I’m having a hard time getting it through her head, “It is ok that you want to go meet new people. You need to bring an adult with you when you wander off without your friends.” We were letting them run mostly at-will as long as there were three or more kids from our group together. That was nerve wracking but awesome.

No one told me I wasn’t welcome back. That’s progress for me. I’ll take it.

I also saw these breathtakingly cool tents that have a self-contained pop-up top thing. So one person can put together a six person tent without a problem. I covet. The 3-4 person tent we have at this point was especially picked because I need to be able to put it up and take it down by myself. We managed to sleep ok this weekend (I just brought the cushions from the couch for the sleeping mat–that was awesome) but I don’t think this tent will work for all four of us for more than another two years. The kids will be just too big. It will work just fine for three of us forever-ish… Hrm. REI has a generous return policy. I may be returning the small tent and getting one that I can still put up but will actually hold all of us for a few years.

We live in the future.

post-therapy

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I spent the first half of my session today processing my inappropriate feelings towards someone else’s marriage. But he does things! And she does things! And I can see his point of view! And her point of view! OH MAN THE FEELINGS!!! It was good to sit down and process them. She asked if I was struggling partially because neither of these people fit in easy boxes for me. No one is the bad guy. No one is the victim. I told her that certainly escalates my intensity of emotion but it isn’t the reason. She asked me point blank who I identify more with in the marriage and I said hands-down the husband. That’s why he scares me more.

Then we went through a lot of topics. This was a bits and pieces visit. I told her about the depersonalization stuff this week. She pointed out that when someone is hypervigilant to the degree I am depersonalization becomes a healthy coping method because it is my body trying to keep me from having a stroke or a heart attack or any of those other things people like me die from. She said that her DID patients she tries hard to work with them on not depersonalizing because they already have too much of it. For me, not such a problem.

I asked her about the eye contact/flirting thing. She said that it certainly has some merit as a thing to think about but in her opinion eye contact is probably not the REASON people are attracted to me. Lots of men want boisterous, exciting women. I excel in that department and I broadcast it from across the room. That can be enough.

We talked a lot about the whole “energetic” thing. My shrink is pretty woo woo. She said that I have probably experienced far more trauma than anyone she has ever met (that is saying something given that she helped start one of the big trauma centers in this country and she worked with international refugees abroad) and I really do just radiate the tension. I can be sitting still and I still vibrate with intensity. My comment was, “Yeah I always shake.”

I don’t know what to do about this intensity thing. I am really intense. I just am. I can sit completely silent in a room and people will still make comments about my intensity. I glower.

She told me to start researching Buddhist deities. She said that Eastern faiths understand that everyone has a dark side and that righteous wrath thing can be incredibly useful. Western spirituality pretty much focuses on “Be happy! All the time!” Well and the idea that some invisible sky friend will solve all of your problems. Good luck with that.

I believe in the core of my soul that there is no one out there looking out for me. If I am going to be saved I have to do it myself. Noah is the closest I have ever experienced to a savior and that’s kinda mixed and all.

Sometimes I feel very sad about relinquishing any hope that there is a God. I just can’t sign on to believing that someone was “there with me” but chose to not stop anything. I can’t believe in that. If such a God existed (s)he would be so vile I would want to set them on fire. So there must be no God.

It isn’t exactly “logical” but it is what I’ve got.

What do I want to be different about how my life experience works? What is not working for me right now?

The anxiety and hypervigilance are probably the biggest on-going hurdles. Sometimes I feel a little weird when I talk to people about the hypervigilance stuff. People regularly say, “Oh me too.” Then I keep talking about my physical experience, because I am so glad someone understands, and their eyes go wide and they say, “Oh not like that.”

I don’t especially want to spend my time playing the oppression Olympics. However I spend a lot of time feeling very upset about how often I feel like someone is going to understand and then they physically withdraw with what looks like horror because no… they don’t understand.

I want so badly to meet someone who has really recovered from trauma like my life. I haven’t met anyone yet. I meet people who have experienced less trauma who are more functional and they sneer at my inability to control my symptoms. I meet people who have experienced a somewhat similar level of trauma and they are shocked by how functional I am. They ask me to tell them how to do it. But I don’t know how. I just do it.

Sometimes I feel like an attention grabbing whore for talking about what goes on in my head. I should shut up because no one cares.

If you asked me at any given moment in time what was going on in head I would be able to describe different movie screens. When I am not suicidal I think primarily in text. It is like looking at many computer screens right next to one another. I’m tracking all of these different tabs.

I’m thinking about my behavior, my tone of voice, my physical mannerisms, do I have the shaking under control? Am I behaving in a way that will keep me out of trouble?

I’m thinking about what my children are doing. I have one maybe two tracks devoted to them. Usually one track is monitoring their current activities and another tab is constantly tabulating how they are doing developmentally. I think every single day about what things they should be learning or should be working on and how I can facilitate access. I go between all of the different “subject” I think they should learn and I’m constantly playing around with planning schedules in my head as to which order to introduce things.

Another track is thinking about food. Don’t you always think about food? What have we eaten today? What are we going to eat later? How much preparation will that take? When do I need to go to the store? What am I going to make tomorrow? If I don’t think about tomorrow today then I don’t take meat out of the freezer.

I have a track devoted to books I am reading. That one is seriously hard to “read” in my head because I have phrases from completely different books going through my head fairly randomly. I read history, leadership, historical romance, parenting, bdsm, food stuff, gardening stuff, and I don’t even know what all. Lots of other fiction. These phrases drift into and out of my consciousness. I have a book that I’ve read dozens if not a hundred times. I think about it all the time. Tiana. What does it mean to be a Pretty Woman? (In the Cherokee woman-of-high-rank way.)

There is always a sex track. It kind of baffles me when people occasionally tell me they don’t think about sex much. Oh man. I think about sex all the time. All day I’ve been wiggling because we had kind of a missed-weird thing last night. I’m getting laid tonight I can tell you that.

I have another track that is composing books I want to write. I always have 2-6 pages I am working on in my head.

I have another track solely devoted to processing all the random background noise I hear. Everything I read tells me that my hypervigilance is somewhat extreme. I have to think about what I am hearing consciously or the sound of the tree rustling in the background makes me tense, anxious, and unable to focus. I can’t let it be background noise. If I hear it and think about it I don’t freak out. But if I am not concentrating on processing what the sound means (if I am trying to listen to someone else) I can feel my shoulders come up. My neck muscles bunch and start to ache unbearably. I have a permanent headache.

I don’t think I am as observant about my surroundings as people who were trained in the military but I seem to have an unusual degree of knowledge about what is happening near me. It shocks me when other people don’t notice security cameras or security guards or where the exits are. I make internal lists of exit strategies for every room I walk in.

And I’m thinking about all of these things while I’m trying to have casual conversations. I don’t think I actually pay attention to people very well. No–it isn’t that I don’t pay attention. I have incredible recall. I am listening. I am processing. I’m making connections between what you say and the things I know but I’m not there. I can phone it in and be a better listener than most people can be while thinking about nothing else.

All of this would be easier if I didn’t give a shit what people thought of me. Before I had kids I didn’t care as much. Most of my anxiety symptoms were easier when I was younger. I didn’t have to think about my kids. I didn’t think about food the way I do now. For most of my early life food was not something I spent a lot of time thinking about. Food was something to submit to because otherwise you would die but it is an unpleasant process from start to finish.

It is kind of weird understanding that I am healthier now but I don’t feel better. Part of it is that I am just older. The years of constant panic wear on a body.

Today Shanna asked me what “health” means. I told her there are a lot of different kinds of health. Physical health pretty much means that every part of your body is working right. Your internal organs are happy, your skin is happy, things just work right and feel ok. Physical health comes from eating foods that strengthen your body and give it the nutrition it needs and exercising. Sitting is one of the fastest routes to ill health. Mental health is about what is going on in your brain. Healthy people experience lots of emotions. Sometimes they are sad, sometimes they are happy, sometimes they feel angry, sometimes they feel calm. It is the balance that matters. If you try to keep yourself from feeling a particular emotion you will never be healthy. If you feel just one emotion too strongly then you are not healthy.

I broke at that time to say, “That is more or less my problem. I am not mentally healthy because I still feel scared even though nothing is happening in my life to make me afraid. I am safe. Nothing bad is going to happen to me for a very long time if ever again. But I can’t stop being scared. Something in my brain kind of broke. I’m trying to figure out how to fix it because I would like to get back to a place where I can feel other emotions more easily.”

I told her that some people focus on spiritual health–which means a really lot of different things to different people. Spiritual health is more about feeling right about your place in the universe and about your purpose.

I told Shanna, “I’m fairly physically healthy and I feel ok about my spiritual health but my mental health is a bit iffy. So I see people who specialize in helping people deal with this kind of imbalance. That’s what you do when you have a problem. You go find a solution. Luckily we live in a time when people have access to lots of solutions they couldn’t have had a hundred years ago.”

I struggle with going back and forth between wanting people to like me and not giving a shit. I want the safety and security of position that comes with being liked. I don’t want the behavioral constraints. Cry me a river.

I don’t know how (yet) to feel ok about people disliking me. I need to learn how to sit with that. I need to stop feeling like being disliked will be followed by rocks. We’re grown ups now. They only do that to women like me in other countries.

If I walked into an area controlled by the Taliban and I talked about my life they would kill me. Good thing I live here.

I think that some of the depersonalization stuff comes from feeling like I am a larger-than-life person and even I don’t believe half the shit I’ve done. I mean… I was there… kinda… but I don’t feel attached to it. It all feels so unreal.

Someone I met when I was 19 mocked me gently recently for how “worldly wise” I thought I was at 19. I told her I didn’t think I was wise. I thought I was experienced. I was right. She slightly conceded.

I’m not very good at limbo. I don’t wait very well. And to me life feels like a series of stages. During any period of transition I start freaking out and I go do things to self-soothe. These usually involved other people and my cunt. (Wow. Spell check doesn’t like cunt.)

A friend told me that he would give anything to be able to walk out of his house and just decide to find sex. It has never happened. Almost all of the sex he has ever had has been after prolonged friendships that lead to courtships. (I said, “Hey! I wasn’t a prolonged courtship! I fucked you on the second date.” He said, “You are the one and only exception in my life.” I said, “Yeah it was kind of weird waiting till the second date. You seemed shy.”)

I’ve had at least sixty one night stands. I can’t imagine not being able to walk out of my house and get laid.

With that said, the reason I know I can go find someone for sex at any point I want is because I play the law of averages. For those 60 one night stands I probably asked 500 people. I’ve been told no a lot. I promise it didn’t kill me. I think being told no for sex is character building. Ha. (DA-That’s why I ask men. I know that not every man is just waiting to fuck me. Hundreds have told me so to my face.)

My shrink told me to think harder about The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. She asked me if I would actually like to stop being scary. I told her not really. It took a long time before I learned the value of the violence I know and I earned every drop of hostility I feel.

But it is very tiring. And it’s lonely. If I feel hostile instead of malicious then I can’t lash out at anyone just because I have these feelings. So I’m not sure that I want to stop being scary but I do want to figure out how to have more control over when and how other people are impacted.

I don’t really want to accidentally hurt people. If I am going to hurt someone I really want it to be about having the conscious desire to hurt them. That should be my goal. I’m ok with being the kind of person who hurts people. I earned those stripes a long time ago. I have learned enough self control that I only hit people who have asked very nicely and people who hit me first.

But where does that leave me with my nasty mouth? Just don’t open it? Carefully rehearse every single word I say in advance so that it isn’t inappropriate? It’s really tiring.

I have to believe that I will find a middle road. I have to. It is the only way. As a wise man once said: I will find a way or I will make a way. And don’t forget: If you see Buddha on the road… kill him.

My road is not your road. That’s ok. It only has to be mine. It takes all kinds, right?

When I think about why I write I know that it is so I can figure myself out and so I can be a known person. Without writing people will never know much about me. Even if they dislike me that is better than being unknown.

I feel weird about wanting to exist in this way. It feels like chasing fame and I’m not really doing that. I sure as shit have no intention of jumping hurdles.

A wise woman once told me that if a woman wants to continue to be relevant as she ages she must continue to become more interesting. Otherwise she will be ignored once she passes a certain age. (I don’t know what that age is.)

I have only my mind to offer. I have to decide really and truly inside my soul that what I have to offer this planet is really and truly worth the resources that are spent on me. I have to believe I am worth something.

I can’t just be here as Calli and Shanna’s maid or teacher. That really isn’t ever going to be enough for me. That will not quiet the demons raging in my head.

“Just don’t think about it.”

One day. Spend one god damn day with me as I narrate my thoughts full speed ahead. You try to ignore this shit.

What is worth doing? What is right in front of you. Just do it. Do your best. Try. You will fail sometimes. The more times you try the more times you will eventually get it right. You will figure out what is right for you.

Somehow I must find a way. I really want to be a source of support for my adult children and not a burden. I want to be a healthy partner for Noah.

What do I want for me? I can’t base everything on being for other people. I’ll fail. I’ll never get the parameters right. And man if I calibrate for Noah I will gradually be so weird I may not be fit for public. (I kid.)

My shrink told me to hurry up and finish writing the book I’m working on. She has clients who need to read it.

Will that be enough?

Parenting babble

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I was reading parenting stuff yesterday. I’m far on the end towards cooperative living/consensual living… the terminology largely depends on who you ask. Unschooling, for me, is about building relationships instead of training a child to be a specific way. I understand that most home educators do a lot to adapt to their children–I’m not trying to imply that school-at-home is shoving kids into a mold.

But I’m really struggling internally with some of the things that go along with the parenting philosophies. I don’t believe in “no punishment”. I think that isn’t how the world works. I think my kids need to understand what happens when you push right past where you are supposed to be. It isn’t fun finding out the consequences from a police officer in the middle of the night on the side of the road as a teenager.

Mostly I think that things like biting/hitting your sister will have self-imposed punishment. I talk to the kids about how “If you are mean to your sister she won’t want to be your friend when you get bigger. As home schoolers that will be pretty lonely.” Mostly these days I separate them when things get hysterical but I’ve been letting them do a lot of fighting things out. They have to learn how to resolve conflict and always having an adult intervene doesn’t help.

I feel err, like I fall away from the unschooling pack/cooperative living pack when we get to the idea of chores. Many people in that camp think that if I chose to have kids I get to clean up after them until they are basically grown or I should just step over the mess because “they live here too and I should not subject them to my need to control.”

I uhm well I’m going to diverge from the pack and not give a shit. My kids get to clean up their own shit. Otherwise they just don’t need to have so much of it. Historically children had 1-5 toys. If we got down to that point I wouldn’t worry so much about the bloody mess. But I’m going to break my neck if they never clean up at all. Or I will never do anything else. And fuck that noise.

I think that my needs have to matter as well or I am not raising functional adults I am raising little entitled assholes. No thanks. I am not under the delusional impression that I am going to be able to create order Muppet’s out of them but my children will bloody well have the experience of picking up after themselves. I’m pretty sure no one will be irredeemably scarred by the experience.

That said! I did take careful note about the bits about tone of voice. I think that I share the opinion that if it would not be ok for Noah to talk to *me* in a given tone of voice I probably shouldn’t use it with my kids. But I’m really an asshole. A big one. Like, mean as fuck. So my tone of voice is… variable. I’ve worked really hard on sounding nice. Years and years and years of practice. I have actually sat down and worked with voice recordings trying to sound perkier.

For me most of the tone of voice arguments come down to the simple fact that the human brain is designed to shut down when you are feeling attacked or scared. It isn’t a choice. It is a protective device. The average child is literally incapable of learning when they are being screamed at. They may be capable of reacting in the moment but they are not learning whatever lesson you are attempting to teach. Instead they are learning that you are a big scary asshole.

Is that what I want to teach?

I believe that human beings are born with incredible potential and it is mostly whittled down as you learn to live in the environment you get stuck with. No one gets to choose their early environments. I try as hard as I can to have an environment with almost no restrictions. I want my kids to think they are allowed to just act upon the world. If they have an impulse it is ok to follow it. Neat things happen!

But this is hard to live with because small children are essentially wild animals. The messes are incredible. The waste is overwhelming.

So I take several deep breaths and I have to stop and think really hard which lessons I really want to teach. What are the best ways of teaching them? I more or less have to start lesson planning in my head, “Ahh. Obviously we have not mastered this skill yet. What do we need to work on over the next few weeks?” I’m constantly going through these check lists in my head.

One friend has told me to get Calli evaluated for potentially being on the spectrum. I don’t see it but I believe that mothers are often the worst people to make such a judgment so I am looking into it. Another friend is concerned about Calli’s speech because she still doesn’t enunciate perfectly. I am aware of the sounds she doesn’t make well and we play sound games but I’m really not worried. Many three year olds are almost entirely incomprehensible to people outside their family. Calli was noticeably later on speech development than Shanna. I think she has a lot more physical trouble with forming sounds. We will work on it… but I’m just not worried at this point.

So this parenting business is a lot to think about. Or some people don’t think about any of it. They put food in front of the kid and provide clothes and they just figure the kid will grow up. We don’t do that here. We are uhhhh over-thinkers.

I think of every single thing as a skill to be learned. I think in terms of schemas and scaffolding. How do I provide the base layers for later learning? What are all the kinds of exposure they should have? How do I eliminate the fewest number of futures for them? What do I do to broaden the path?

I have no idea what kind of adults they will be. I can’t assume they will be like me. Shanna goes from wanting to be a doctor to a firefighter to a jewelry maker to a dressmaker to a rock star. I don’t know what to teach that kid. Calli is even more amoeba-like but I think she will be involved somehow in finer details of making something work. She seems very detail and organization-focused. Who knows.

I tell Shanna frequently, “The main thing standing between you and whatever you want to do is thousands of hours of practice. I don’t know what you want to do. You will have to figure it out and just do it over and over. You have to understand that everything is hard and frustrating sometimes. You have to keep working even when you feel discouraged. Success comes after thousands of failures.”

It is super cool that she can open the peanut butter and jelly jars now. I feel kind of upset with myself for not noticing. She had to tell me. Even though she abruptly stopped yelling at me, “Moooooooooooooooom. I’m making a sandwich! Come open my jars, please?!” How could I have not noticed that change. I didn’t catch it for three days and she had to freakin tell me. “I don’t think you noticed. Not this time and not last time but the time before that I learned how to open the jelly jar and the peanut butter jar all by myself.” That’s my girl.

Calli likes to have a goodnight kiss and cuddle. She will shove the top of her head under my chin and nuzzle into my throat. She always says, “I love you and I will never let you down.”

I usually feel like my throat is about to close. Oh baby. I know. You won’t let me down. You amaze me every single day. I think you are so interesting.

I have a seriously bad attitude about doing all the supporting painting work. I tried to talk myself into heading outside to paint for hours before I managed yesterday. I knew I would have to do all the prep and I felt grumpy and bitchy and I just didn’t feel like fucking doing it again. The kids keep bringing piles of mud up to the second story of the play structure. My phrasing is, “Ladies is there any chance I can persuade you to play this game AFTER I finish painting? Scrubbing the mud off every day we come out to paint is really annoying.” After Shanna spent about half an hour on her hands and knees trying to scrub the mud off the floor she agreed that maybe this game won’t be a good one until we are done painting. I won’t CARE then!

Calli is a really neat painter. Even when she “knows” that she is painting a solid block of color she still invents things she is painting at the time. I say, “Make sure that you put an even coat of paint over this wall. See the drips? This is how you smooth them out.”

She says, “I am making Princess Celestia. And here is her castle. And look at allllll the bushes. And over here there is a cloud.”

But she’s doing it all in flat purple paint. She’s not trying to actually paint shapes. She’s just telling a story as she paints. It is fun to listen to her. I mean, her paint job looks like a three year old did it. It is gloopy and lumpy but it works just great. This is her bloody play structure. Shanna has done a surprising amount of painting so far. She is covering a lot of wood and doing a good job. She can’t handle doing just a single color on a given board. She’s putting stripes and polka dots all over the place.

It is really fun knowing that my children are just growing up with the idea that paint is something you can use at will to change your environment. You get to decide what you want to see in the world.

I like unschooling because we are learning vocabulary words and schemas as we paint. What is a streak? What is a drip? What does “drape” mean? (Dropcloths) Why are we painting? What happens to wood when it gets wet? What does the paint do for the wood? Why does it matter if the paint fully covers the wood? How do you physically learn to move your hand so you can create the images you want to see? How do you understand the scope of a job? How much paint will we use up today? (Important because when you are using several colors at once you don’t really want them all sitting with the tops off for hours and hours. Here’s another vocabulary word: scum!)

We talk about how to take care of your tools. We talk about why all of the supporting work is necessary. We talk about why you have to carefully clean the wood before you paint. We talk about anything and everything we can come up with. And while we work Shanna makes up songs for me.

I feel these waves of gratitude while we work together. Thank goodness I have children who want to be near me. Thank goodness I have children who enjoy working with me. Thank goodness I can manage to be patient and loving and introduce things as fun tasks rather than drudging unfortunate work.

I am very aware that I set the tone for our house. If I have a bad attitude I am teaching that as the default way of seeing the world. If I am angry I am teaching anger. I mean, they aren’t just mirrors. They have their own interpretation and experience. But trying to act like the adult doesn’t set the tone is bullshit.

When Calli gets upset with me I try to stop what I am doing and ask why she is upset. Often I have done something unthinking and rude. I wasn’t trying to bother her but I did any way. I have to act like my existing impacts people in ways I intend and in ways I don’t intend.

Recently I told the kids that something wouldn’t be happening and Shanna kept asking. I told her, “If I cave then you will learn that I don’t keep my word. What is more important to you: a mom who bends to your momentary whims or a mom who does what she says she will do?” She thought about that for a few minutes. Then she sighed deeply and said, “Ok. I guess you are right. But I don’t like it.” I managed to restrain my laughing for which I deserve a medal.

And the kids are up. Was that enough kid babble Pam? I’m reading your emails. I love you. I miss you. Outside of food I’m not sure I want anything from Taiwain. 🙂 (Not that they don’t have neat stuff… I’m just not sure that I need anything and it’s not like you can buy me clothes. Ha.)

The tier thing.

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A really nice girl recently told me at the tail end of a conversation, “And I don’t even care what tier I am on.”

I think you are awesome-sauce. I am going to detour hundreds of miles to see you.

The tier thing isn’t about my emotional investment. It isn’t about how much I like you. It is about amount of need I can thrust in a given direction. It is about people being able to handle me suddenly freaking out and needing something fairly intense from them. I don’t in any way think negatively about people who are not up for my random bursts of need. It isn’t anyone else’s problem.

I’m a 32 year old woman. I don’t need a hero. I don’t need to be rescued. I don’t need anyone else to fix me. But I still have a lot of needs. Trying to manage that is *my* problem and not anyone else’s.

People love me. Ok, not everyone or anything, but I have some really excellent friends. I am lucky. I understand that the amount that someone loves me is in no way correlated with how much of my need they can handle. These are just simply different scales and they are in no-way related. I don’t judge other people based on how much of my need they can or can’t handle. It isn’t a negative thing.

But it is a real thing and something I have to manage. The second tier is a lot more stressful. It is a lot more work. It isn’t fair to expect that of people who are not eagerly signing on for being a major source of support for me. I don’t expect it from people. I don’t ask for it.

I carefully eke out how much need I put in any given direction as I learn where the walls are.

I love my third tier with wicked intensity. Remember, strangers are more out at tier five or six. My third tier gives what they can when they can. I appreciate them. I value them. I need them. But I need to not hand them more than they can handle or they will feel bad and I will feel bad.

People feel upset when I hand them a bunch of needs and they can’t meet them. It is hard all the way around. It feels bad having to tell someone, “Sorry I can’t help you.” I try very hard to not push people into having to say that to me. I understand that everyone has limits. I try like fuck to ensure that I always stop asking before I get to the limit of where someone else will have to tell me “no”.

No hurts. It shouldn’t. I know I should brush it off and keep going. Sometimes I can. Sometimes I can’t. “No” from a second tier person hurts a lot more than a “no” from a third tier person because it is about my belief system. I very carefully screen people over years before thinking of them as second tier. “This is someone who consistently goes above and beyond what I think I can expect and shows great eagerness for more closeness.”

It isn’t about me liking them more or less. It is about me understanding their stress load and what they can handle. People frequently move back and forth between tier two and tier three in my mind. I’m trying to manage how stressful being near me is for other people. I know it can be really hard to be around me. I try to make it as pleasant as possible while knowing that it is just hard for people.

A lot of being on the second tier is me trusting that if I freak out about my shit it won’t cause someone else to feel bad about themselves as a person. It isn’t their fault I am freaking out. I need to be able to trust some people to help me without making it personal. I am not actually freaking out about you. Even if you “triggered” me. I am still just freaking out while standing near you. It isn’t you.

Third tier people are not as good at knowing that my shit is my problem and they add their anxiety to my anxiety if I overshare and then I can’t cope any more. I understand it to be my problem. I should not have shared in the first place. It wasn’t something they could deal with. That’s ok. That is part of life. I’m not upset, bitter, pissy, any of those things.

But I am here. I am still breathing. I am still drowning in need and I have to manage that. I try to do so with as little damage to the people around me as I can. The tier system is a lot of how I have learned to reign in my over-sharing. I hurt a lot of people talking about things I shouldn’t be talking about because they can’t handle it. I don’t mean to. It is really hard figuring out what is “ok” and what isn’t.

I don’t want to hurt people. But I do. Sometimes I hurt them by over sharing and sometimes I hurt them by stating that I need to have boundaries around them or I will accidentally hurt them. I just can’t win.

This should all be silent and invisible so that people don’t feel judged or found wanting. I’m not finding you wanting. I’m finding that you are a human person with limits and I need to respect that.

It seems like the only way to be respectful is to figure out how to manage all of this without ever commenting on it. I can’t manage that. I’m doing less collateral damage than I used to but I’m not sure if being near me will ever be a happy or healthy thing for people.

So I use the tier system in my head. Don’t hurt people. Don’t hurt people. Don’t hurt people.

I think that I like autistic people so much because they don’t take me freaking out personally. They are totally clear that my crazy is in my head. Heh. And yet when I say, “Hey when you do _______ I feel _______” and then they can decide if they want to continue doing it or not. (I try not to be a controlling asshole. But I can express preferences.)

I can love you and think you are a fascinating and drop everything for the chance of a visit with you while knowing that I cannot dump a bunch of shit on you. That makes you tier three. Not because I lack feeling for you. Because I want to make sure that you continue to like me and you don’t feel overwhelmed by my needs. They aren’t your responsibility. Not yours. Not yours. And not yours either. But I’m still learning how to be responsible for them.

The tier system is a lot of how I manage that.

And when I get to the point of being absolutely terrified that if I press you for any more support you will walk away entirely… I may abruptly drop away. I don’t want to force people away. I stop asking. I stop pursuing. It isn’t that I don’t care. It is that I care too much. I don’t want to hurt you and I don’t want it to be all my fault that I lost another friend. Better to do a slow fade. At least then I can pretend that you just got busy and it isn’t a pointed rejection.

Stuff to think about.

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I started slow. I didn’t really get moving until eleven. That’s unusual for me. I painted for three hours. It is coming along.

The girls and I got along very well. The painting is a lot of fun for them. They are frustrated with the fact that painting requires work outside of the painting stage.

We went to sushi for dinner with a friend. I ate my standard chicken teriyaki.

After dinner we talked about body language stuff. Clearly if I get hit on as much as I do (and I really do–it is flattering and scary at the same time) there is something I am doing to encourage people in some way. Apparently I should stop making eye contact. I’m told that I do it in a very overly intense and flirtatious way. I’m told that the length of time I hold eye contact is just as intimate to a total stranger as a hug.

I’m dubious.

But if eye contact is part of why people think I want to have sex with them then clearly I should stop making eye contact.

Hrm. Thinking.

Good day

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I write because when I am all done writing I feel empty and soothed and more calm. It is like taking an ice cold bath when you have a fever. I have a better day when I write. Maybe it is like taking a hose to the dirty screen.

Yesterday I cleaned the house. The older I get the weirder I feel about how much I love cleaning the house. At the end of the day when I walk through the house and everything is all orderly and sorted I feel so much better about myself. I feel like I am now free to start any project I want because I AM CAUGHT UP, MOTHERFUCKER!

I like the feeling of being done with what I was doing. I’m an asshole towards Noah about cleaning the kitchen. He has particular parts of cleaning the kitchen he cares about (mostly the dishes). So sometimes he will come to me and say, “I cleaned the kitchen” and I get snarky and snotty and say, “Then why do I need to spend an hour cleaning the kitchen?” We clean differently. We are bothered by different things. (Ok, I don’t actually say much about the kitchen any more beyond thank you. It’s nice when he does things and I appreciate the help and I try to not be an ungrateful bastard.)

The kids didn’t help much and I did not act like an asshole. That’s important to me. If cleaning is my thing then I need to be nice to other people while I do it.

Some day my wonderful children will be all grown up and off. My house will be clean. I don’t need to be an asshole to my kids right now as they are also living in the space. I’m glad they are here. I’m glad they are making a mess. I’m glad they are taking up space. I want them to take up space.

Shanna is always going to be a chaos muppet. There is merit in her style of creativity. I just hope I can teach her the balance and usefulness of order. You don’t have to always be ordered, not everyone cares. But it is important to be able to create order.

I understand that my need for order is about me. I don’t think it is morally right. I think I feel out of control and scared and having a neat house makes me feel less out-of-control. That doesn’t mean it is “right”. It just is.

Today the girls and I will work on painting their play structure. The kids feel really proud of doing the work. It is wonderful to watch. They are very studious and careful and yet still so uncoordinated. I think they are adorable. I like working with them. They force me to carefully consider whether I care about the process or the result of a given task.

That’s really important to how you teach something. Do you care about the process or the result? It makes such an impact.

It is fun to talk to the kids about painting. “Ok, where is your drop cloth? You must stand on the drop cloth. You can’t step off of it while you are wielding your paint brush or you will drip on the dirt. Look for drips as you spread the paint around. See how it is much thicker right here than anywhere else? Can you smooth that out? Yes! Just like that.”

I like talking to them about how to pick what colors they want. I like talking to them about what they want to see. I like finding out what they like and what they don’t like. They are so distinct from me–we don’t have similar impulses. I like having to stop and wait while they do what they want to do. I feel surprised by what they pick. Oh. You like… that? Well… ok.

I like moving slowly with the kids through tasks. I like talking about what I’m doing and why. I appreciate that they want to talk about everything. I am so glad that I did not end up with taciturn children. That would have been a real struggle for me. Thank goodness they are talkers.

After spending seven hours cleaning I took the kids out to dinner. (We got coupons in the mail. Whoo hoo.) We went to Home Town Buffet. The kids were quite excited. They like getting to pick from a wide variety of things. Hilariously the biggest hit is always the jello.

While we were there one of our neighbors came in. One of the elderly people who walk around and stop to talk to us. We haven’t seen him in a bit. It turns out he doesn’t live in our neighborhood anymore. His girlfriend of 34 years had to move into hospice care due to Alzheimer’s. She owned the house and emphatically did not want to get married because she had a previous messy divorce. So now he is living in an apartment on his own. He lived in the house for 21 years.

I didn’t tell that man anything even remotely sad about myself. I didn’t tell him one negative detail. Well, he asked why I moved around so much as a kid. (He was talking about moving a lot.) I said, “Enh sometimes it happens when you are poor.”

I spent the conversation trying to figure out if he is taking advantage of support systems because he isn’t doing very well emotionally or spiritually right now. He’s feeling very hopeless and sad. His son is sixty so he feels well past any point of usefulness. He spends one hour a day with his girlfriend in hospice and he said he is just waiting till she doesn’t remember him because he knows the day is coming and he doesn’t know how he will keep living when the most important person of his life can’t remember him any more.

I didn’t need to play poor-me with him.

It was kind of weird that he spent a lot of the time telling me about how wonderful it was to have someone like me move to the neighborhood. He said that walking by my house and seeing how it changed and progressed made him feel inspired. He said that seeing me with my kids gives him hope for the future. He’s glad to see people like me who exist loudly in creative ways because they inspire everyone to think bigger. (He hasn’t even seen the mural because he moved out of the neighborhood just before I painted it. I told him to come check it out.)

I didn’t go fishing for compliments. He just walked by every day and saw us outside. Shanna shared fruit with them as they walked around.

I’ve started asking the senior citizens in my neighborhood point blank questions about food security. I feel kind of anxious and like I am over-stepping but I know that a few of them don’t have kids nearby checking on them. I think that in the next few months the kids and I should figure out some kind of way to get involved in helping provide food. I know there is a local service who brings food to folks fighting cancer. That might be a good first starting place.

I was talking to the kids about classes–what they want to take next, what they are enjoying about the classes they are in right now. I don’t think I will end up with dancers. They get to take two PE classes at a time. Right now they have creative dance and gymnastics. They both say that at the end of this session they want to drop dance and go back to swimming but gymnastics can stay because it is awesome. So I hear. Near as I can tell they both want to be in swimming until they can just head out into the ocean. I told them that is still a bit off. You need to be able to swim in a pool without a life vest.

Shanna emphatically wants to start music of some kind in January. I haven’t been finding a lot in our area for five year olds so I’m not sure what she will start with. We own two ukeleles (thanks to Noah’s family) but I can’t find a local teacher who will teach a five year old. The local ukelele teachers are all unwilling to work with kids under eight. We’ll see. Hunt harder.

I wanted to start martial arts with the kids next year but I don’t know that Shanna will be willing to give up gymnastics or swimming. So I may start on my own. I haven’t decided yet.

I’m watching Walk the Line for the second time in two days. I will be sending it back to Netflix today. It is interesting thinking about what it takes to create a specific image that you must maintain under pressure. What kinds of ambient stress does that create? How do people break down when they have to be able to pretend upon demand that they are happy and cheerful?

What does it mean to find someone who is a good partner for you?

What kind of support do you need? What kind of support do you want?

Noah wants me to encourage him to do new things. He wants me to listen to him talk through his subject material in order to help him figure out how to teach it better. I may not be good at programming but I understand what it means to teach someone a new subject. I know how the brain learns. I know how to get peoples attention and hold it for at least an hour. I know what tends to make people remember things. I’m not good at everything. I’m good at sticking in peoples minds. People remember things I say. I’m not even entirely sure why but it is something that people comment on regularly so I think it is true.

Noah likes that I organize him so he doesn’t have to think about it. Noah likes that I do a lot of background work so he can do the last-fill-in-the-gaps with his subject matter knowledge.

I don’t think Noah would be pursuing teaching the way he is if he didn’t have someone at home to bounce ideas off. I get the impression that he is scared. I help him deal with that feeling. I believe in him enough to fill in the gaps where he doesn’t believe in himself enough.

I hope that living with me is nice. I hope that it is nice to live with someone who thinks you can accomplish just about anything provided you have a detailed enough plan, enough sleep, and enough rest.

If Noah had a different partner he would probably be more focused on the money. Long-term I don’t care if we are rich. I want a specific pre-planned level of safety and then I don’t need a lot. Money for travel. That will be the big long-term expense. Even having enough money to be safe is something that not everyone manages. What does it even mean to be safe? What is safe enough? I know that Noah has the potential to make a lot more money than he does but it would involve even more working than he does. I don’t want that trade.

I feel guilty that I don’t lighten his load enough. I feel like the burden of my financial need is unfair and unbalanced. Surely it doesn’t even out in terms of effort even if I do fold his fucking underwear. (I think folding underwear is stupid. He wants his folded. I fold it.)

I think life is about trade offs and choosing to be happy with what you have. If you defer happiness “I will be happy when I get _____” you will find that mostly you never reach happiness.

I am not a happy person but it isn’t about my life circumstances. I am trying to be a happy person. I believe with all my heart and soul that I have every reason in the world to be ok right now if not very happy.

I know a lot of people who can’t count three people who love them. I have three people who love me and hug me and tell me I am wonderful every day. We are really big on words of affirmation in this house.

We wake up to, “I am so glad to see you again.” We go to sleep saying, “I had a great day. I was glad to be with you today. I am so glad I know you.”

I smile as much as I can make myself smile. I know I am lucky. I know that not everyone gets to have people who are as nice. I get to have this mostly because I am creating it. My kids are nice to me because I am nice to them. I have to be consistent. I have to make this environment. If I don’t make the environment it won’t exist.

Speaking of environment, Calli has been bringing me books and saying, “Can you read this to me? I LOVE reading books. I think books are the best thing ever!” My kids see me read all day long. I talk to them about what I am reading on the computer. “I am reading a blog article. It is talking about ______.” They see me pick up a variety of books. I’m reading several non-fiction and a couple of fiction books at the same time. Every so often I sit down for a few minutes and plug away. Then I talk to them about the chapter I just read.

Right now one of the books I am reading is A History of the World in 100 Objects and the kids are really enjoying hearing me talk about the history. They ask a lot of questions. “Who were those people? Where did they live? How were they different from us?”

I like that my kids believe the world is to be questioned. Everything is worthy of a question. Sure it makes them less than convenient sometimes but I don’t want convenient children.

I feel proud of myself when I look at my kids. I have nothing else in my life I want to point at and say, “This is what I want to be judged by.” I fuck up everything else too much. But I haven’t fucked up my kids. My kids are happy, healthy, sure of themselves, and smart as can be. Not that I think that children must be “smart” in order to induce pride. But my kids are my kids and Noah’s kids. They are really smart. They figure things out. I like standing near them.

I want kids who are infuriating because they take everything apart. I want kids who want to understand the world so much that they have trouble containing their curiosity and destructive urges. Even though it is hard to live with. My kids now come to me and say, “Hey mom! I want to do an experiment so I’m going to make a mess in the kitchen. Is that ok?”

Sometimes I say, “No problem.” Sometimes I say, “Well… let me come check your set up and make sure everything will be easy to clean up; this might be an outside experiment.”

I feel sad that I am not better able to be a nice person under pressure. If you can only be nice if everything works out exactly right and you are in total control then you aren’t really a nice person, now are you?

But it isn’t true that I make everything about me. I talk to people without saying anything about myself often. I feel scared that I will screw up other peoples day so I try to pretend I am mostly just an audience.

I think that most people feel alone. I manage to find the vein of sadness that pretty much everyone is trying to hide. I can find that and I can tap into it. I wish to be seen. I wish for support. I wish for love. I think that most people have things they are hiding. Ways they need support. I think that hardly anyone gets enough love.

I like looking at people. I like seeing them. Seeing other people makes me feel like I am actually doing something. It makes me feel like I have value and purpose and a reason. I am good at doing something that people desperately need and most people suck at doing. Ok. That’s a reason. That can be enough.

Shanna expresses frustration sometimes for being where she is. “Why am I not better?” “Well, have you noticed how you started doing this two weeks ago and you are comparing yourself to someone who has been here for years? Uhm… yeah. Things happen in stages. You have to practice. You have to suck. You have to be frustrated or you won’t learn and you won’t get better.” “But this is frustrating.” “Yup. Life is. Keep plugging.”

I like that I can point out which things they can do now that they couldn’t do a week ago. I like that I can detail how they are growing and changing. I like that this is allowed to fill up so much of the space in my head. I like that I don’t have to things that matter to other people. I’m glad I don’t have to care about the priorities of a company. I am so grateful that I don’t have to fret about money.

I feel so unworthy of the life I have. This kind of safety should belong to people who can properly appreciate it and relax into it. I am wasting the security. Only I’m not. My kids will not be like me. My kids will not shake with fear for the majority of their lives. My children are able to move between many different environments comfortably and pull off “appropriate” behavior in nearly any context because they believe that they can do it. That is the main hurdle that people have to get past in life. You have to believe you can do what you want to do.

I believe that my daughters are capable of adjusting to any circumstance because some human being has done so at some point in time. I tell them so. Thus they believe it too. I coach them, “This is going to be different from most of the places we go. In this space I need you to _____.”

I’m very specific. Why will it be different? How will it be different? What do you need to do? What will other people be doing? How should you react? How do you tell which people want to talk and which ones don’t? How do you figure out what body language means ‘I want to socialize’ and which body language means ‘Go away’?

Most people in the world want love. They may not want it at this second from you but they want it. How do you convince them that maybe… just maybe… you might be a good person to be loved by.

Lately we are working on the fact that you don’t get to touch people just because you want to. Hell fucking no. Everyone gets to decide for themselves if they will be touched or not. Your body had better be respected. You have the right to defend yourself when someone touches you in a way you don’t like even if they think the touch is “mild”. It is always best to start defending yourself with your words but if you have to then escalate. Defend yourself. You matter. You matter so much.

How would I be different if I had thought I mattered?

I will never know what might have been for me. I feel so lucky that I get to watch my kids. I’m so glad that they just know that they are worthy of defense and love.

I am here. There is no right. There is no deserve. I am loved. Today will be another good day. My children and I will work together. Hopefully we will finish painting the play structure today. I’m ready to take a break until the new year. I need to finish Outrunning and that is going to be all my brain power for the next few months outside the daily rush.

So much to do and so little time.

I’m making Noah slow down his rate of work in late November and December. I think that both of us should have a few weeks of not doing extra projects near the end of the year. We are both tired. We both need to spend some time together. I love touching him. I like the cuddling we do. I like that we can touch one another a lot without it having to be sex all the time.

I’ve dated a lot of people who wouldn’t let me touch them unless it was leading to sex. They wanted their space. Noah doesn’t have a lot of interpersonal boundaries with me. If I want to flop on top of him and just lay there for an hour he’s ok with that–provided of course he has no specific reason to get up. He likes touching me too. I don’t think I have ever been around someone who makes me feel like they like looking at me the way he does.

It was really weird with my Owner. He wanted a fetish item. He liked the shoes and the clothes and the production of being the current woman in his fetish items. He passes the clothes and shoes from woman to woman. He picks us because we fit into what he already owns. Of course he does make/get new stuff for each new girl too. He took thousands of pictures of me. I should have felt like he wanted to look at me.

In a lot of the pictures I made sure my face was averted. I was aware he was taking a picture of the shoes and not me.

He wanted the pictures because he wanted the reminder that he had seen someone in those shoes. It wasn’t about him liking me. I mean, I think he did like me. I’m not hard to look at. I’m not ugly. I’m just… I just wasn’t very important to him. He didn’t care about me. He didn’t want to know me.

Noah wants to look at me. Noah asks me questions and listens to my answers and demonstrates that my answers impact his behavior.

I have never felt this important in my life. I try to appear happy because I know I should be. I know that I would be if I wasn’t broken. I have every reason to be happy. If only I could stop feeling scared.

Attachment

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Somewhere else on the internet someone asked someone other than me why they are still so angry about being abused as a child. Just get over it, right?

This weekend I spent a while talking to a woman in her 60’s. She told me about the dissolution of her 25 year marriage. They walked away when the kids were old enough to be independent and she said they haven’t spoken since. After 25 years. Her comment was, “I haven’t even missed him. Is there something wrong with me that I never emotionally attached to him?”

I’m not the person to ask. I am trying as hard as I can to feel attached to Noah and my kids. I can never tell if it is working or not. Sometimes I feel these flashes of love so intense that I feel like I can barely breathe. Mostly I know that I would be capable of turning around and walking away if things were bad enough. I know that I could leave. I hope I never become that person.

I think I chose to stop sleeping around because I want to have less pull towards leaving. I’m afraid of what I might do. I’m not a very nice person.

How you act is a choice. How you feel is less under someones control. I understand that meditation seems to be the route forward.

My therapist asked me how I have been getting through the periods of intense anxiety lately. What “coping methods” am I using? I told her that mostly what I do is close my eyes and try to breathe and not think until I am more calm.

It feels pathetic how hard it is to not scream at people. It feels pathetic how hard it is to consciously choose to be nice to people. I don’t want to be nice to anyone. I want to scream explitives at the top of my lungs while breaking everything I see. Sometimes. Not all the time. Not even all that often. But often enough that it feels hard to forget that I feel that way. It hides on the edges of my consciousness, this entirely consuming rage. I feel so much hate that sometimes I feel like I am about to burst into flames.

I “could” say this is my family’s fault. But at this point I am past fault. No one in my life is to blame for my feelings. I think I am past the point of usefully pointing to my family. At this point this is just my brain functionality.

What do I do now that I am this way?

I homeschool. Because obviously I am one of the best people to hang out with children alone all day. Duh.

I appreciate the fact that my five year old (after my last therapy appointment) is reminding me that yelling is not the best way to teach them. If my voice starts coming up she looks up and reminds me, “Mom, do you need a minute?”

My kids believe that they have the right to demand that people talk to them in a respectful tone of voice. They certainly demand it of me. It’s not ok to badger them or shout at them or demean them. And they will bloody well tell you so.

You have the right to be treated well. If people don’t know what that means then you need to tell them. Otherwise they will do it wrong out of ignorance and probably not malice.

It doesn’t matter if I am deep down a nice person. It matters if I can play one on tv. Or on a daily basis, rather. What matters is if my children believe they are well treated or not. So far my kids are very happy with their life.

I asked Shanna one more time how she feels about skipping kindergarten. She said, “If I would have to not be with you all day it sounds pretty awful. I’ll learn here. I’m good.”

I don’t really understand “attachment” in the way that other people feel it. I keep a wide path between me and most of my former lovers. I think that retraining them isn’t worth my effort. I don’t tend to teach people how to treat me. I pay attention and then if I don’t like it I walk away and never talk to them again. I don’t think that people have any interest in being nice to *me* I think people just want to be validated for who they are and how they act. I don’t really do that.

I don’t validate people much. You have to validate yourself. I mean, I can talk about commonalities of experience. I can talk about patterns that are common. I can talk about cycles. I don’t have much ability to say that how someone else exists is the right path. I can’t grant that. I don’t know. I don’t know enough to judge.

So when I feel unsure I leave.

I think I have proven in my life that I am a bad judge of character. I am drawn to problematic people. I’m quite certain it is all “my fault” or something.

But Noah isn’t really much like most of the people who have been interested in me. Most of the people who have dated me wanted me to change. They wanted me to accommodate them and do as they imagined someone would do in my role. Noah seems to not have a lot of expectations. Instead he waits to see what I will do and then expresses pleasure that I would do that.

I’ve never had anyone notice me like this before. Even my friends have never paid attention to me like this. I tell myself he notices me about as much as a good parent would notice their child.

Like the painting shit. I don’t think I would have had the nerve ten years ago to ask to paint a mural on someone else’s property. I would have been completely sure that I could not accomplish such a task. But Noah tells me to do things that I have the impulse to do. He’s quite pushy.

Because I am a realist I have about fifteen plans in place for when Noah dies. Or if he leaves me. I have back up plans and back up plans for my back up plans (depends on how long he lives, yo) because life is scary.

I think that Noah is going to be my window into real attachment this lifetime. I mean, being a parent is different. I am attached to them. I would readily stand in front of them with a full armament and shoot anyone who came near intending harm. Them continuing matters more to me than thousands of other people. I don’t give a shit if that is selfish. That’s the law of the jungle, baby.

But Noah is different. Part of my attachment to the kids is the feeling of obligation. I believe with all my soul that if you choose to have unprotected sex you must do it in full consciousness that you may be entirely responsible for another person for at least ten years and closer to twenty. That is just the deal. If you don’t want that deal use some fucking birth control. We are not in the dark ages where people are blindly a victim of fate.

I think abandoning your kids so you can focus on having fun is one of the most despicable things a human can do. The kids didn’t ask to be born you self-involved piece of shit.

You give your kids their twenty years. Then go do whatever you want. They aren’t a forever obligation. It is a period of time. Either you go all in or don’t go there at all. It does too much damage to be an absent parent.

So this attachment feels different. When My kids are 23 and 25 I am not going to be terribly willing to place their day-by-day happiness above my own. Go figure your shit out.

I haven’t decided how I feel about long-term generational living. Before having kids I was fairly certain I would be holding a broom behind their asses at 18 telling them to get out. Now I’m less sure. I understand the benefits better. I chafe at their presence less than I assumed I would. I just like them more than I thought I would. Now I think that as long as I get a sound-proof room at some point it will all work out. As time goes by I am thinking that I will get back to heavy masochism. I will need somewhere to scream without bothering anyone. You have to not scare people.

I was talking to Noah last night about masochism stuff. I’m not your typical masochist. I’m the opposite of a stoic. Most people who spend a lot of time involved with bdsm as heavy bottoms (people who are hit very hard) are pretty quiet as they process. It is an internal experience. It is a lot easier for a lot of tops to hit them. I’m a screamer. I don’t like being hit very much and I make it plain. If you want to hit me you have to be very sure that you want a sobbing, pathetic mass on the floor.

It takes a much higher degree of willing to live with knowing you are a bad person to want to hit me.

I don’t let people think, “Well this is just intense sensation! We are sharing an intense sensation experience!” When people hit me they have to work through their own emotions about hitting someone who has clearly been hurt a lot in bad ways. Most masochists are without serious abuse histories. Most of them had fairly normal, happy lives. They just happen to thrive on intense sensation.

I’m not like that.

I make both a good and bad demo bottom. Good because I am highly verbal no matter what is happening. I can talk about the relative differences between different strokes of the cane in detail no matter how hard I’m crying. I may have to scream in between sentences but I can go back to talking like nothing happened. Not many people can do that. But I scare newbies. Clearly things happen to me that aren’t so awesome. People worry that they have to be beaten like me. Oh goodness no.

Play where you feel comfortable, happy, and safe. Err, if that’s your thing.

I don’t want to feel comfortable, happy, or safe while I’m playing. That’s part of the point. I don’t think that life is very comfortable, happy, or safe. I think that life is terrible. I think that life is about a series of very painful experiences that you have to learn how to manage.

Having nice people hit me very hard so that I can really get through a period of hysterical sobbing is helpful for me. I feel more calm for days or weeks afterwards. Brain chemistry is an interesting mix. I don’t really do the light fluffy sensual stuff. Not because I think there is something wrong with it–it just give me what other people get from it. I get annoyed and fight back in ways that make it not a fun scene for the top.

I go through periods of feeling empty and like I don’t have a lot of emotional attachment. Not to Noah and not to the kids. I feel like I don’t know how to care about people. I just want to hide in the closet and not talk to anyone. I don’t want to be responsible. I don’t want to fix one more fucking meal. Surely it won’t hurt you that much if I skip a few meals. Most of the world does it on a regular basis.

Err, I don’t hide in the closet and I don’t cause my kids to skip meals because of my mental health. The latest a meal has been has been two hours and that much variation is often just that we had a bigger than usual breakfast and don’t get hungry as quick. That isn’t a problem.

But man I worry. I worry because I know I am going through the motions. I am playing the role of mother. I am pretending that this whole caring for other people thing is something I care about and I am good at. I’m not sure if I am playacting well enough.

I have no one in my head I am trying to copy and that scares me. I don’t head out on the non-beaten path very often. I am always aping people. I don’t know anyone who is parenting how I want to parent.

(Err, in no way is that an insult or a put-down. I know a lot of perfectly dandy parents. But I don’t want to be like you. Not because you are all doing it wrong or anything. We just have very different personalities and tool boxes and such.)

I don’t know anyone who parents really well with my degree of mental illness. This doesn’t make the people in my life defective. It just means I don’t know many people who are like me who are doing what I want to do.

I met a couple of women in the support group I went to for a while who were close but they are making very different life choices.

I’m not even sure what it is I want so bad. I just know that I look at all the parents I know and think not that. I don’t know why. I genuinely don’t think any of the relationships I see are wrong. This is unusual for me. Most things I’m happy to copy people. Not one person entirely–I usually take small elements from lots of people. Not on parenting.

I have a very firm picture in my head. It isn’t what I see other people with. That’s ok. I want it. I want it. I want it and want it and want it.

This is attachment? I think? This feeling of must do this this way! I must treat these people in the way I see in my head. I must give them the things that felt so devastatingly missing for me.

We are always solving yesterday’s problems. And my yesterday was different from your yesterday. So you are solving different problems. That’s why we parent differently. And we have different kids. I would parent differently with different kids too.

You know how the DSM keeps changing? Every so often people vote. What is now bad and what is now ok. They get to just decide.

I feel like that degree of people voting on what constitutes problems in other people… man that makes me think that most psychiatric diagnosis aren’t much more useful than Enneagram or Myers-Brigg.

I spoke with a special ed teacher last weekend. He said he has a hard time dealing with the fact that kids have different diagnosis from year to year. “Autism one year. Bi-polar the next year. Oppositional Defiance Disorder the year after.”

Yeah, that’s because all of the disorders are kind of bullshit. Mostly they mean “This fucker doesn’t do as (s)he’s told. What the fuck.”

Sometimes I wonder about the whole attachment disorder thing. I think about my family. Am I attached to them? If my sister came near my kids I might hit her with my car. It doesn’t matter that I love her. It doesn’t matter that I think about her. It doesn’t matter that maybe in the abstract in the universe I kind of hope she can experience an ending of pain because holy shit she has had a horrifically bad life.

I would still not give a shit. My kids come first you fucking cunt.

Why? What is that about?

And yet sometimes I know that I could walk away from the kids. I think I am capable. I choose not to. I don’t think it would be good for them. On the days when I’m freaking out it comforts me to understand how much this is a choice for me. I am absolutely self-involved enough to be able to leave. Sure. I could do that. I’ve walked away from almost everyone else. I could do that too.

But not yet. Not now. Not while they are helpless. I would never forgive myself for abandoning helpless people.

I don’t know how much attachment I will have to the adult bodies of my children. In my subconscious mind taking care of them while they are helpless is the closest I can come to repairing the damage I experienced through not being cared for when I was helpless. There is nothing else in the whole world I can do to repair this broken.

Yeah, I’m broken. Just because something is broken that doesn’t mean it is beyond repair or usefulness.

I’m broken but I’m not helpless. I’m not hopeless. I don’t think that acknowledging the truth makes me unable to do something. I think that understanding that I am broken is inherently useful because if I stop acknowledging how broken I am then I may well wander off thinking I’m just fine. I see how well that goes for people.

It is too hard for me to get out of bed. If I try to pretend that this should all be fine I wouldn’t be able to muster the strength to do what I want to do. I don’t want to do almost any of what I do with my days. Not really. But I want it done. Thus I operate almost entirely on plans.

If you ask me what I want to do on a given day there is a better than even chance the answer would be hide in bed and cry. But that isn’t an acceptable life for me to look back on. So I don’t spend many days in bed crying.

I don’t feel very attached to people though. I don’t come out of bed because I want to see people. I don’t get up because I like so-and-so and them-and-them. I can’t. I assume that those people either don’t like me or will only like me for a little while so I can’t base whether or not I get up today on seeing them. Because they probably won’t be there in a little while.

I was recently told that folks in the poly world are still actively bitching about me taking Noah’s dick out of circulation. To this I say: move on. If you are attached to him being available in order to be happy then you aren’t going to have a happy life.

Just like I can’t be attached to having any friends. Or even Noah. I don’t know how long I will get him. I have to keep part of me away from him or losing him would be too hard. It is hard knowing that there will always be pieces of me I just don’t share with him for a wide variety of reasons. I become more compartmentalized by the year. I understand better and better what it means when I overload people. It isn’t very nice.

I’m a needy piece of shit. I’m not sure that will ever change. But only I am responsible for meeting my needs. I wish I could know that in the pit of my stomach without feeling sad and kind of bitter. That is probably the normal state for a great many humans. I’m not a special snowflake.

It is weird thinking about how symbiotic my relationship with Noah is.

I have stronger and stronger opinions about marriage as I get older. The point of having a help meet is to have a partner who has the qualities you lack so you can balance one another out. “Eve was not designed to be exactly like Adam. She was designed to be his mirror opposite, possessing the other half of the qualities, responsibilities, and attributes which he lacked.”

Ok, first… I don’t “believe in” the Bible. But it has a lot of fantastic allegories.

In marriage you need to have different kinds of people because there are a lot of different kinds of tasks that need to be done. I don’t think these things need to happen along gender lines. I know a lot of couples where the man is the stay-at-home domestic person and they are very happy. But balance is important.

I feel like part of learning to feel attachment to people is learning to feel more entitled to the help they provide. With Noah I have access to things I just don’t have without him. I don’t even mean the money. I mean that I would feel less confident homeschooling if I did not live with someone who has a maths degree. I would feel less like “We can definitely handle everything that will come up pre-puberty.” Which isn’t to say that his degree is actually going to matter. He has the knowledge I lack so that he can step in if I am doing something wrong.

Noah cooks more than I do. I do the shopping and preparation and planning. I strongly dislike the physical act of cooking. Not entirely sure why.

And it is really important in marriage to find some kind of compromise on physical compatibility. I’m really happy I found someone to marry who is sexually compatible. After my experimentations I know without a doubt that I am a hard person to match sexually. Not because I am so awesome… I’m weird. Everyone is weird.

It has only been recently that I’ve been thinking really hard about what it means to be in a sexually compatible relationships. The lack of pressure for hunting. The excitement of knowing that if I am in the mood for something all I have to do is ask. Given that we have a five year old kid we haven’t had a lot of sexual adventures in a long time. I’m out of practice for asking.

The seven years of our marriage are the most consistent of my life. And each year has been very different from the previous year. I’m doing almost entirely things I did not do previously.

What is attachment? What is love? Is it a feeling? Is it a set of choices?

I feel like I love my mother with an unholy passion that is much greater than what I feel for my children. I feel like my affection for my children is a candle next to the forest fire of how I feel about my mother. But I walked away from her.

I hate this ghost feeling. Disconnected, like I’m looking at the world through a dirty screen.

I think about the people I “love” and I think about what it would mean to lose them. I don’t know that any of them would increase how much I cry. I feel weird about that. I don’t think I am capable of carrying more grief. It is like taking too much vitamin C. Eventually your body just flushes it. I can’t feel more grief. I’m too numb.

I’m thinking about this because it was weird camping with people last weekend. And I have another camping trip with a different group next weekend. Being near people for that many hours feels physically uncomfortable. That is a lot of why I nod my head and say, “Yup–broken.” It shouldn’t hurt that much just to stand near people. Especially when a significant number of the people there are expressing approval, love, and affection in my direction to the degree that I permit them. Many would have given more if I had not abruptly turned and walked away.

I don’t feel that I objectively being given messages about how bad or terrible I am. I don’t think that I have had a situation that should effect my self-esteem in a long time. I could even rustle up some righteous indignation to defend myself in some of the more historical issues.

But I still feel like it is better for everyone if I spend very small amount of time around anyone so that I don’t fuck up and do something terrible and unforgivable. It could happen any second.

I can’t want to be around you. I can’t. If I want to be around you a lot them I will feel sad when you aren’t with me. Then I will lose focus and I won’t be able to concentrate on my priorities. Then I will feel empty when you aren’t with me. And I don’t believe you will actually be around me very much or for very long. So I just can’t want you.

Heck, I feel way less attached to my current therapist than I have felt in a long time. I’m starting to view therapists as being not the most stable part of my life. That’s different.

The depersonalization feels a lot more intense since I switched to edible pot. The feeling of being behind a dirty screen. I am not part of reality. I really dislike this part of the edible experience. Smoking is not this intense. Smoking gives me more of the “happy” part of the buzz and less of the numb.

With eating the pot I often feel kind of like a zombie. I feel like lifting my arm off the bed is as hard as moving hundreds of pounds of concrete. Without it I shake and cry randomly and can’t really control my physical actions very well when I get frustrated. My body gets jerkier and harsher. I accidentally knock into people and that’s bad when I’m around small, delicate people all day.

What does living mean?

This is a more disjointed-than-most-post. Neiner.

Depression! That’s maybe the name for this round of blah-enh-meh. But I don’t know that such details matter all that much. I wander up and down such a spectrum.

Do you know that people who are depressed are actually not pessimistic, instead they are more able to accurately predict how things will work? They are realists. Most of life is shitty and bad and doesn’t work out. If you are full of hope that everything will be great you are pretty delusional.

It depends on what you mean by “everything will work out”. Some people will live. Some people will die. Some people will be happy. Some people will be miserable. That will all work out. Well… everyone will die eventually.

But what does it mean to be happy in the meantime? I don’t know.

It would be nice if I thought people liked me.

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I think it went well. I think being there for just shy of 24 hours was the right amount of time. I saw a lot of people I used to know. Some of them expressed intense desire to see me sooner than five or six years from now when I deign to camp with them again. Why do I still walk around feeling like everyone hates me? This irritates the shit out of me.

I ran into five people I have had sex with. Only three remembered my name. I left the party in the evening when a drunk semi-dressed guy came up and said, “I don’t remember your name but I remember you from RWB….” He was standing very close to me. At RWB I used to do a lot of ecstasy and have sex with anyone who asked. So I said, “Oh! Well, hi. I’m Krissy. What’s your name? Oh. Ok. Have a nice night!” Then I fairly abruptly turned and walked back to my camp ground to bed.

It seemed prudent. Do I have any idea if he wanted to have sex with me? No clue. I just know that I am spectacularly bad at managing other peoples expectations.

I have a lunch date with a female friend for a nice long walk though. That will be nice.

Embrace the discomfort

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What does it mean to be broken? To be bent beyond repair? Is that item useless or does it just need to be reshaped and repurposed.

Are you talking to an American or someone living in Africa? I think you would get different answers. I want to find out.

No one lives because they are just so awesome. People live because they were born on accident because two people had sex. That means that none of us are all that special. We all come from exactly the same roots.

At least one person wanted to have sex.

That’s it. Nothing bigger. Nothing more important.

But once you are here what do you do? Do you consume things that other people make or do you make things? Do you pass on the hurt you have experienced or do you stop hurting people?

How do you stop hurting people? How do you change?

I read that the personality is mostly set by age five or six. I also read that there is no such thing as a personality trait you are stuck with–you can change anything if you want to badly enough.

That is one of the amazing things about human beings. More so than any other species I know of we can just decide to be something different and… do it.

I mean, we can’t just decide to be tall or short or fat or skinny or black or white or brown or yellow or red. You can’t change those things so much.

But you can decide if you want to be aggressive, assertive, or passive. You can just decide to change what you started out as. You can pick something. You can design something in your life and move towards it.

We are unique in this ability. Some individual people possess more natural talent in this arena than others.

Resiliency is about deciding that even though bad things have happened you aren’t dead yet so what the fuck are you going to do now? Resiliency means always looking for a new path. A new reason to keep walking.

Delayed gratification. I have a lot of delayed gratification fetish in my life. I am banking everything on future happiness. I have been doing so for as long as I can remember and I can remember almost thirty years now. By and large this has been a good proposition. My life when I was 18 was better than 17 was better than 16 was better than 15 was better than…

There hasn’t been a clear linear progression. There were up and down periods in each year, of course. And post-18 is becoming more and more of my life. I’ve been out for more than 14 years now.

My life is not always improving. Sometimes I get hit hard by something. If you continue to stay alive bad things will continue to happen to you. If you love other people then you will continue to have trauma. That’s just the price. Either pay it or shut the fuck up.

I know I will be hurt again. I know I will love people with great intensity and lose them. People will die on purpose and on accident. People will be hurt. My body is frail and I am clumsy. I will be hurt.

That is just life. Trying to avoid pain is trying to avoid life.

Lean into it. Yes. It hurts. Yes, sometimes you feel like you are insanely trying to climb the walls like a rat trying to escape an electric floor. There is nowhere to go to get away from the pain. It is every where.

So get used to it. Breathe it in. Take it deep within you and decide that this isn’t going to kill you.

Not today. You aren’t dying today. Even if it hurts.

Then all of a sudden it doesn’t hurt quite as much. You still know that injury is there, there is nothing you can do to make it go away.

But you aren’t dead yet. That’s enough. That is all there is, really.

Just keep walking. Keep wanting. Keep hoping. Even though it hurts. Even though it makes you cry.

That crying is part of life too. If you try to keep yourself from crying you are trying to keep yourself from feeling.

That feeling is life too. If you want to be alive, if you want to truly live then you have to feel. All the bad. You can’t have the good without the bad.

Just give me a reason. A little ones enough.

Put on the mask. Today you are going to a big party. Today you show that you are part of a community. Even though you don’t feel like it. Even though you feel like a visiting monster you aren’t.

Go find an outlandish costume. Dress up. You are a time traveler. Who do you want to be today? You can be anyone. You don’t have to be you. I promise.

Why does your three year old bite? Because she knows that she is allowed to get mad and she isn’t sure yet how to deal with it. That is part of the process. She isn’t bad. She’s young. She will learn. It is very hard to deal with the learning process sometimes.

Why is your five year old so bossy? Because children learn through modeling and she has one of the bossiest mothers in five counties. No shit she is bossy. Especially at five children latch on to being like their moms. Apparently this is the most bonded-attached-obsessed age. I’m going to be sad when she grows out of it.

I love that my children give me a chance to love myself. We are always solving yesterday’s problems. I can read child development books that go through the normal physical, emotional, and inter-relational development of children and see that my children are entirely within the normal curve and they are doing exactly what they are supposed to be doing. They are right on schedule. It is what they are supposed to do.

I did what I was supposed to do. I wasn’t a predator. I wasn’t trying to hurt anyone. I did what I was taught to do exactly on schedule. I have books. I could point out the paragraphs that explain that I was a very good girl. I did exactly as I was told.

How do you decide what to tell your kids? Do you tell them what your parents told you?

I can’t. I can’t. I can’t.

Just give me a reason. I will be a good-enough mother. My children will have an age appropriate experience. My children will make it to 18 knowing that their body belongs to them and no one else. If I have any luck at all they will not be sexually assaulted as children. I can’t promise them a whole life of safety–I have no such hubris. I don’t know that I can teach someone how to have that without locking them in a cage.

I don’t want my children to live in a cage. I want my children to feel calm and safe and sure that they can handle themselves. I also want them to have the ability to break several bones if someone attacks them. I want them to understand that this is a world where sometimes you have to seriously hurt someone else in order to love yourself and that is ok.

But don’t bite your sister. She’s not that kind of attacker. Unless she is. Then bite her until she god damn stops.

So my kids are going to have a problem with mixed messages.

“Treat your sister the way you want her to treat you. Do you want her to hit you? No? Then don’t hit her.”

I can’t teach “Don’t hurt anyone”. I can’t. I think that is tantamount to putting a bulls-eye on their foreheads and I can’t do that. Fuck that stupid notion. Sometimes you need to hurt people.

But might doesn’t make right. How do you decide when to hurt people?

You have to be very mercenary about evaluating whether or not someone is hurting you. Whether or not they are doing it on purpose doesn’t matter. That is irrelevant. How much hurt are they causing you? You have to decide. It doesn’t fucking matter if someone else thinks that is a perfectly acceptable amount of hurt. They won’t be the walking wounded.

How much hurt can you bear? How much hurt do you want to bear? Do you want to allow this person to hurt you in this way? Sometimes it is worth putting up with your mom hurting you just a little in an annoying way (like bugging you to go make grand kids) because the over all picture is so good and the hurt is so small. Sometimes the trade just isn’t worth it.

Every relationship involves trade. Every loving relationship between two people involves one person feeling more love than the other. The person who feels more love has less power. They will accept more hurt in trade for the love they feel.

It isn’t nice but it is true. Thinking about this balance in a mercenary fashion allows you to see that you hurt people all the time. You do it casually without paying any attention. You do it with your choice of words, your tone of voice, and how much time you choose to spend with someone. People never take your impact on them impersonally.

I mean, there are people who don’t feel much emotional connection so they don’t take it personally or care. But if they love you a whole lot then they feel more rejection than you notice. That’s just how it works.

I stay home because I don’t want to hurt people with my words and my tone of voice. People take my avoidance as rejection of them and a sign that I do not think they are worthy of my time or attention.

It’s a really nasty double bind.

I carefully manage my third tier. I know that I am only good at managing how I put out my neediness into the world if I manage how I spend my time. I know that most people can handle very little of my neediness. They can handle knowing that it exists and that I need to have people who kind of stand nearby pack-like and lend a supportive presence. They provide interactions for my children. They give me vague hand-wavey reassurance that makes both of us feel a little better. Not a lot better, a little better. But if you get a whole lot of a little better it does add up. It does matter. It is part of the process.

I manage the second tier carefully too. Most everyone on the second tier I only talk to a few times a year. I can say more painful and difficult things to them but I have to carefully limit their exposure to that intensity. No one lasts long if I overload them.

The first tier I just look at with terror because I know that this won’t last forever. I will lose this someday. I don’t know how or when. I know I will fuck up and lose that. I just never keep it very long. I hurt people too much. Brittney, Anna, Alex, Sarah, Grant, Elan. I think those are the ones I hurt the most. Those are all the people who have been first tier who don’t talk to me any more. I don’t know what is happening with Sarah. Life is very confusing.

Most of the first tier people probably fell out because I entirely walked away from those communities after they told me they didn’t want to ever see me again. I will see Sarah.

I very carefully make it so that people never have to think of me as one of those detestable people who are part of a community just because they can’t make me go away. If you hardly ever show up then people never develop that degree of dislike. I’ve watched this cycle a lot. Manipulating it is hard but can be done.

Bouncing between lots of different communities is hard. Pre-kids it was easier because I could maintain my behavior patterns between different communities was easier. I had fewer modes and they were less intense feeling.

Being around my kids takes so much of my attention that I have a very hard time acclimating up and down to other peoples comfort level. My finesse is all used up on people who cannot yet look at my boobs with a straight neck.

I feel like having children is teaching me a lot about rape culture. My kids think they have every right in the world to grab my boobs. Oh my fucking god. I have to teach them differently. It has to be a conscious decision if I am going to teach them that everyone gets to have their own body.

And I have to do it without blowing up or freaking out because then they miss the point of the message. Normal children can’t tune out random explosions of anger in order to learn a point of culture. They learn anger. Anger isn’t something that is learned in a highly specific and focused sort of way.

If I freak out and yell at my kids when they grab my boobs I am not teaching them that breasts are personal and you should ask permission before you touch them. I am teaching that sometimes mom is mean and scary and they really won’t understand what was so bad because they didn’t even do it on purpose.

It is really weird looking at them and knowing what I know about their stage of brain development.

I was punished so often for being “malicious”. I was told specifically that I was malicious all the fucking time. People were always telling me that I did things on purpose when I had no idea what they were talking about.

You don’t have to do something on purpose to do it. No one likes feeling blame though so people want to say, “But I didn’t do anything” whether they did anything or not. Then you can argue about lying. And nothing is solved.

Teach people how to treat you.

Why am I so loud about my boundaries? Because they are big and strong and have barbed wire all the way around them. I had to do that. I understand that you have not had to do so but we have had different life experiences and maybe you could think that I am like me because of my life rather than because of you?

Someone on the PTSD forum asked what people say when they are asked why they have PTSD. Most everyone responded that they are very defensive and private and they tell people that it is none of their business. My response? “As usual I go against the crowd opinion. I’m out. If someone asks me why I have PTSD I tell them that a lot of very bad things happened to me. Then I ask if they want details and 9/10 people back away slowly.”

I learned to be aggressive. I didn’t start out this way. I’m very curious about this whole “personality is set by five” thing. Do I feel such constant anxiety partially because I know that I am not “naturally” as aggressive as I act all the time? I want to hide under my bed. I come out harshly because that is what happens when you have to push so hard to say anything at all.

When people say, “Oh I couldn’t just walk up and talk to someone” I think “Well you could. You choose not to.” But I can’t say that. They think, “But I would be too scared.” I think that I go through a lot of my life shaking with fear. So what. It doesn’t matter that you feel scared. You still have the ability to force your body to move.

Bravery doesn’t mean you don’t feel fear. Bravery means you keep performing to spec even though you are terrified.

You learn how to keep performing to spec by practicing in low-pressure situations over and over and over and over until you have the muscle memory to carry you forward. But you can’t get stuck in feeling like you should hide and practice.

The best practice is to fail. In public. You will learn more. You will learn so much faster if the stakes are higher. Fail in front of people who don’t matter. Go try in public somewhere that you never have to see these people again. Travel. Talk to people you will never have to be responsible for knowing.

Make shit up.

Just try something different. Pretend to be someone you are not. If you were someone who could do ________ how would you act? If you send random emails to people who share your hobbies and interests there is a remarkably high response rate. Well, I’d say somewhere between a 3-7% response rate. Which is remarkably higher than 0! So send a few hundred emails. Personalize them. No form letters. Form letters = doom.

If you want to learn things and know things and grow you need help. You need to see the path. But the problem is you are making up the path as you go along. No one else knows what you need to do. You probably don’t even know until five minutes before you need to do it.

And yet. You have some ideas. The more plans you make, the more habits you work on the better off you will be in the future. Maybe you today will not benefit but tough shit. There is no use crying over spilt milk.

Today is the first day of the rest of your life. Who do you want to be?

It doesn’t matter how many times you have failed. Wait… no… that’s a lie. It does matter how many times you fail. You have to go fail thousands of times or you will never get anywhere. That is one of those things they don’t tell you very often.

Do it wrong. Just do it. Do it. Just… don’t sit in your house crying. Anything is better.

But you have to stop yelling. It isn’t nice. You have to treat people how you want to be treated.

I don’t want people to yell at me any more. Just like I don’t want people to hit me any more. (Husband excluded by pre-arrangement with specific sets of permission.)

I used to hit people a lot. Frequently. Almost every time I felt irritated. I don’t do that any more. I got tired of people flinching reflexively when they saw me. It made me feel bad about myself. I was acting like a bully. When you scream at people you are still acting like a bully.

And you can’t avoid being a bully just by finding a group of yes-men and staying there. That’s not a good answer either.

How do you consciously, always, de-escalate conflict? How do you do that while absolutely being prepared to break the face of someone who attacks you?

I want to live in that place.

And man I don’t think that is ok.

I don’t think it is ok because I am afraid that I am not good enough at knowing which attackers are a problem and which aren’t because my brain is pretty broken. My kids pretty frequently feel like attackers when they jump on me at the wrong moment and they are getting heavier and more triggering by the year.

I have to teach them how to treat me. I have to use my words. I have to do it while being nice and polite and calm or it won’t work.

When I know I have a problem to work on with my behavior I want to hide and practice. I want to stay home.

I can’t stay home. We are going fucking camping. Oh man. I freak the fuck out when I’m in unfamiliar environments where I have very little control. I can admit this. And I’m going to go hang out with Burners. I’m less confident in them being kid-appropriate than some people.

But I’ll stand next to my kids and I’ll smile. I’ll model appropriate group interactions. I won’t let anyone touch me too familiarly. More than likely I will run into someone who will. I have to be prepared with what I am going to say if I don’t want to freak out.

I was talking to Noah about the over-thinking every social interaction thing. I told him I’m not sure where I started that. He said, “You learned it because you were always fighting older and more experienced people. If you follow the default path you will get caught because they know how to manipulate the default path. You have to be able to out-think them and surprise them.”

Yeah, that.

I live in a world and in a place where if you want to be allowed to have body autonomy you need to be able to verbally and sometimes physically defend yourself. I didn’t make the system I just know what I experience over and over.

And it isn’t because I am that hot. Give me a break.

But now that I have kids I feel a lot more like the whole world is just full of people who haven’t been taught yet. And if I want them to know how to treat me I need to teach them. People learn best when you use a calm and civil tone of voice. I understand that

defensive

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I need to climb out of this cycle. I’m having a hard time. Generally the more I focus on a cycle, the more I feel the desperate need to control my emotions the harder it is. I can only walk out of the main room into a different room to get control over my face and tone of voice so many times before I’m not actually in the main room I’m just hiding in my bedroom so I can cry.

We had a milestone this week. Someone described Shanna as a bitch. It was inevitable and all. She is female and she has strong opinions. I still feel sad. It wasn’t said in an attacking way. Calli keeps biting Shanna. The proposed reason is that it is because Shanna is a bitch to Calli. I…

I compare Shanna to my big sister and I have a hard time with using the word for her. Shanna *is* pushy. She *is* bossy. But when Calli turns around and yells, “You are not the boss of me” Shanna backs off and says, “Oh, you’re right.” Given the interactions I had with my sister I can’t think of Shanna as a bitch. She will have to get a lot more malicious before I will think that fits.

That is like 3% of my fuss today. Maybe only 2%. But it’s there. And it’s a milestone. I like to write those down.

Mostly my fuss isn’t about anything happening. That’s the point. I haven’t had anything really bad happen in a while. Which means that every part of my body is starting to vibrate with anxiety because surely something terrible is going to happen any fucking second.

Who is going to decide that I am too much trouble?

I am looking at the calendar and thinking that I should hibernate through most of November and December. Maybe if I hibernate then people will forget how unpleasant I am and when I come back in the spring people will be bored and lonely and less likely to reject me just because they are tired of my shit.

Sometimes it is very hard knowing that I have to consciously parcel out really small doses of me or people don’t set their own boundaries well until they tell me they don’t want to know me any more.

I tried to explain this to some of the homeschooling moms and I think I upset them. Shit.

I have to keep people on the third tier at a distance or they decide they don’t like me any more. If I try to get too close to people then they don’t want to know me anymore. I have to monitor how annoying or difficult or over-sharing I am being. I have to make sure I don’t overwhelm people because it is all my fault don’t you know. If only I would shut my stupid mouth people wouldn’t have to be so mad at me.

I’m sorry that I’m bad. I’m sorry I hurt people just by talking.

I am really fucking antagonistic when I feel this way. I was at someones house and she said that the kids couldn’t go outside because they were sick. I uhhh challenged that.

I didn’t challenge it because I think she isn’t allowed to set those boundaries. I asked because I have been working really hard on telling my kids the difference between, “I don’t want you to do this for health reasons” and “I don’t want you to do this for various grown up reasons that you don’t care about and I do.” Which is to say that I’m trying to not lie.

I have read a lot that the sick/cold connection is a myth. She clarified that once you are already sick being cold lowers your immune system and makes it harder to get well. Oh. Ok. I don’t think I have read about that part but it seems more or less logical.

People don’t like it when you question what they are saying to their kids like that. But I don’t like feeling lied to. I didn’t like it as a kid and I hate it with the fury of a thousand suns now that I am an adult and I am not subject to the random fucking whims of an adult.

Which isn’t to say that I thought this other mom was lying. But what she said contradicted what I had in my head. I know I am not always right so I asked. My tone of voice was shitty though. I think there must be a nicer way of asking for more information.

I don’t think it helps when I say, “I’m totally ok with telling my kids that I have made an arbitrary decision that them doing ________ would be a lot of work for me so no you are not allowed to do it right now.” Because then it sounds like I think that what other people are saying isn’t acceptable or correct and that isn’t what I mean at all.

Other people are allowed to parent however they see fit. Lots of parents lie to their kids all the fucking time. Sometimes they are just passing on their own inaccurate beliefs so the parent doesn’t feel like they are “lying”. Sometimes the parent knows and doesn’t give a shit.

I don’t think I will ever be good at just shutting up and letting other adults say things without asking questions. I am just that fucking annoying.

So I should stay home, right? I think other people are allowed to do whatever it is that they do. But I ask questions. And I have a really annoying tone of voice. It is way sharper and more confrontational that usual lately. All the self-hatred and denigration I hear in my head all day wears off the closest I have to soft edges. I should be able to ask my questions in polite and neutral ways. I often can’t. I can either sit there silently or I will sound like a fucking bitch.

I’m sorry. It isn’t your fault. It isn’t because I actually think you are a liar. If I were having a more socially suave day I could ask and not piss anyone off. But I’m not socially suave right now. Right now I feel like a mean and hateful monster.

Today we go to a camping wedding. Oh god.

Clearly a lot of people like me. In order to hibernate I have to turn down invitations. I turn down invitations nearly every week because I am fully booked. I can’t go to ____ because someone is coming over in the mid-morning and someone else is coming over in the evening.

But I don’t like me. That kind of trumps everything. I don’t like me much at all. I don’t think I am kind enough. I think I am a hateful, nasty person. I think that even when I haven’t said anything other than “Good morning” and “Good to see you.” I think that someone as unpleasant as me should not be allowed to freely inflict such fucking misery on every one in the world. I should die and make the world a better place.

But clearly other people do not agree with my assessment. Thus the invitations to weddings and birthday parties and other such festivities.

At some point this cycle will shift. I will stop hating myself with such vigor. I will stop hearing a cacophony of screaming voices telling me that I am a stupid bitch and no one likes me and why don’t I just go play with the cars on the freeway already because no one wants me to stay. I hear my mom and my sister and my brothers and my uncle and I don’t know how to make the voices stop.

I don’t have multiple personalities. I have overly strong memory abilities. I am too smart for my own good. I don’t forget things. I remember things so strongly and so clearly that other people are shocked. I can sit down and concentrate hard and tell you about the sequence of events on days that happened when I was two, three, four… I can’t remember every single day of my life with perfect recall but I can remember most of it. Almost all of it. It is all stored somewhere in my database and if I rattle it back and forth I can find what I need.

The problem is when I don’t get to control what is actively replaying. I have all those screens in my head. Luckily when I get into the place of hearing all the screaming this is sans-video. This is just an audio track. Thank goodness for small mercies.

I go back and forth between ringing my hands with “I don’t know what triggers these cycles” and “I’m just like this”. When I feel this way it is hard to understand or believe that I ever feel differently. I have lots of good days though–I objectively know it is true that I go through many days of my life without all the noise and hatred. I know it happens because I can pull out a reel of tape of some other day and replay it and know that the day was fine.

But I can’t find the mute button. I can’t find a volume control. I can’t just decide I want this to stop today. It has to stop on its own.

I used to ask my Owner to beat me when I felt like this. Noah and I have a different relationship. He does give me the occasional spanking (only when I ask very nicely and then wiggle my ass just right) but it isn’t extreme. I think that at this phase of my life I have completely moved the “edge” that I am willing to play at. I no longer need to be the most psychotic bottom in the room. I’m good. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.

I feel this way because of chemicals in my brain. I could take more drugs. Ha. I could do other things to disrupt the chemical levels in my brain. I have found few things in life that are more system-wide influential on my hormones than pain.

I believe I am supposed to be in pain. I believe it is the natural result of existing when you are such a piece of shit.

For the record, not all masochists feel like me. Most don’t. I have only met a couple of other people who talk about using bdsm the same way I do to deal with a pervasive sense of low self-esteem. People are masochists for a lot of reasons usually totally unrelated to being abused. The mean voices in your head thing is very non-standard.

Cutting would quiet the voices in my head. It would start other rounds of self-shaming but it would get rid of these voices. These voices want me to be punished. They don’t really care how. They just know that I am bad and should be hurting.

There is a very large part of me that wants to violently fight back. Fuck you. No more hurting me.

I think that is part of the reason that this is so hard to ignore. It makes me so angry that I feel this way about myself all the time. I feel so mad that the people who were supposed to love me and teach me to love myself were instead nasty, hateful people who taught me that I deserve suffering and death.

I don’t feel capable of being a nice person. I feel like that is a ship that has sailed. I am just a mean, nasty bitch. That is just how it works. But I want to be a nice person. I want to be someone who deserves relationships. But I don’t know how to earn them. I don’t know how to be good enough.

I need to just understand that if I am stupid enough to spend a lot of time with someone that there will be problems and eventually the person will want to go away and never talk to me again because I am terrible and mean and bad and annoying. It is appropriate for people to have these boundaries with me. It wouldn’t keep happening if I didn’t deserve it.

I have to keep people at a distance because people have relationships with me to meet needs of their own. I need to not think that relationships are about meeting my needs. My needs are cavernous and beyond the scope of anyone. I need to shut up. Shut up. Shut up you stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid bitch.

I’m not very good at that part.

I really liked that my Owner liked to keep me in a muzzle and hit me a lot. That just seemed appropriate. It was pretty hard for me to be bad in that circumstance. Near as I can tell that was the only period of my life where I didn’t feel like I was on the verge of being punished for being bad.

I was good. I was doing the right things. I was silent when and how he wanted me to be silent. He kept gags in my mouth a lot of the time. He thought it was “hot”. I still have jaw pain. I can’t do it any more. I feel like a failure.

I liked feeling like even if the inner core of my personhood was rotten and disgusting my outer shell could still please someone. Even though I deserve to die I was still amusing and worth keeping around for a bit longer.

No wonder my Owner didn’t want to talk to me about my mental health at all. That was Not His Problem.

Really my mental health isn’t any ones problem but mine. Shut the fuck up already you self-absorbed twat.

I’m afraid that if I stop paying attention and I stop arguing with the voices and I stop trying to figure out how this works that everything will get worse. I’m afraid that if I stop trying to track this that I will lose the ability to tell what is real and what isn’t. I’m afraid that if I stop trying to keep track of the fact that these are irrational voices–unrelated memories just jumping out–that I will believe that this is all that is true in the world. I’m not sure how long I will live if I give in and allow these thoughts to just be “true”.

That antagonistic, “Why did you say that?” That’s why I’m still alive. I know my tone of voice is shitty. I know I “should be” more gentle in my tone. I know. There is no excuse for me treating people badly just because I have mean things in my head. I know. I know. I know.

Do you tell someone with diabetes that everyone else wants donuts for breakfast and if they can’t eat it that is their own fucking problem?

My tone of voice is antagonistic because I am always speaking over hateful voices in my head. I sound so difficult not because I think you are doing something wrong but because I think I am bad. I am so very sorry that there is collateral damage.

Just hide. Don’t talk to any one. But I can’t. There is a wedding to go to. Life just keeps happening whether I am ready or not. And people tell me they want me there. I want to believe them. I want to believe them so much I shake with longing.

I want to not be hated. I want to believe that I am worthy of something other than being hated. But I’m such a bitch. Bitches deserve hatred, right?

Book lists

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Ok Pam here is one list:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkbU6vaLw4dWdHpoU245Y3I5WHROaXRxSWJIMGJKVUE&usp=sharing

The Young Adult books now have a spreadsheet. I’ll get to everything else. This will take a bit. And it’s not like I have any other work to do or anything.

Thank you for bringing books to my house and thank you for wanting a list so you don’t bring me duplicates.

Post-therapy

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Bad. Bad. Bad. Bad. I’m hearing that in my head a lot. It makes my tone of voice sharper and nastier.

In therapy we talked about me yelling at the kids. She pointed out that there have been two incidences in the past month. That means I have to start putting stop-measures in place earlier. That is not an acceptable pattern. I’m probably still not in the “abuse” range but I’m sure not being a nice person. I’m not being a good parent. I’m not modeling the behavior I want to teach. I am teaching my kids to be assholes like me.

I have a lot of internal conflict around “walking away” during a fight. I had a lot of severe neglect issues so being screamed at was 300% better than being ignored. My kids are not me. My kids do not need what I needed.

My therapist wants me to start getting up and walking away as soon as my kids start yelling at me. Put the lid on the paint can and go in my room for a while. She said it probably isn’t a good thing to even try to talk about it right now. *I* am too emotionally volatile.

I’ve been riding the “Krissy is evil and should die” train for a while and that makes it a lot harder to be patient. It makes it a lot harder to be nice. It makes it a lot harder to respond in a loving way when someone screams at me.

But kids scream. Kids don’t have self control. Adults have self control for them.

I was asked how I know that I am mentally ill. Well, a wide variety of sources tell me that it isn’t normal to spend a large portion of the day fighting off tears because you know you are bad and you should be punished. Half the time I have no idea what I could have done wrong recently but I still feel like I should be in trouble right now.

It’s irrational and not anyone else’s problem. Only it is my childrens’ problem because they have to live with me. I’m so sorry.

I have to stop raising my voice at all. I have to start walking away. I think that my terror about walking away (it’s not a very rational sort of reaction–I am completely freaked out about just walking away from them when they are having feelings) makes it so that I am not capable of reacting appropriately.

When they start yelling at me that I am mean I feel like it is right. I feel like I am mean. It’s all true. I am terrible. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.

But that’s not any more useful. And I know I don’t want to teach that either. So in my head I start going through these panicked defenses, “No I’m not mean. I did _____ and ____ and ______. That means I’m not mean.”

But those things actually have nothing to do with being mean. They are tangential at best.

I don’t think I am actually “mean” to my kids in the scheme of things. But I don’t want to compare my parenting to my mother’s parenting and declare anything I do a win. That’s not high enough standards.

I did EMDR this week. Focusing on the panic and the screaming. When I start screaming at my kids it is usually because I feel scared and trapped and like I am being unfairly punished again only I know I deserve to be punished for other things so I have a huge guilt complex and I think the punishment is right and then I just want to crumble. When I feel that way I get really really mean.

This is all a bad cycle.

EMDR, for me, involves a lot of free association. When I did the EMDR this and I was focusing on the somatic (physical) experience of being scared right before I started screaming and then what it felt like to scream at the kids.

The thing that kept surfacing in my head was, “If you do this you will lose Calli.” I think that Shanna would be able to jump right on the destructive merry-go-round with me. I think she would learn to tolerate a honeymoon cycle-scream-forgiveness cycle. I don’t think Calli would. Calli is different. She has a sense of self and a sense of self-worth where that kind of shit just won’t fly. If you yell at her when she doesn’t deserve to be yelled at she will yell right back. Right fucking on.

But it means that yelling at her is the opposite of an effective punishment/behavioral correction device. I have to find a different way of dealing with her.  She won’t be cowed. That’s good. It means I have less leeway to be a bully.

Sometimes I feel like I am drowning in guilt because I do not feel bonded with Calli the way I do with Shanna. I love her. I like her. But it’s different. I dreamed about the Shanna who would more or less be my reason for living from when I was twelve. I dreamed about my son for many years. Calli is a wonderful surprise in every way. She wasn’t part of my original picture of my life but man I like her.

I feel like Calli is going to make me actually earn a relationship. Shanna likes me enough to put up with inappropriate shit. Calli doesn’t. Calli thinks I had better fucking be nice to her. She has really strong boundaries around how she wants to be treated and she doesn’t hesitate to hurt people who are bothering her. (She’s three. It’s not awesome that she is this aggressive but it is age appropriate.)

I will not be held responsible for how I feel. I will be held responsible for how I act. I can’t yell at the kids any more. I just can’t. I am not doing it in a reasonable or appropriate way. I’m being a nasty bitch. They don’t know or care about the cacophony of noise in my head. It isn’t their problem.

It is their problem when I start screaming. I have to stop. It doesn’t matter that I’m feeling thin. That is not the point. That is irrelevant. That is not important. How I feel really doesn’t fucking matter.

How I act matters a lot. Ok, irrational fear of rejecting children must be over ruled in face of less irrational fear of irreparably damaging children with anger.

Well, it’s the only plan I’ve got. Probably time to start working on it.

Discrimination sucks.

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This isn’t about me. As I get older I experience less and less discrimination. But every day I read on the internet someone or other saying that _______ is the last acceptable form of prejudice. “It’s ok to hate fat people.” “It’s ok to discriminate against the mentally ill.” “THE LAST FORM OF TOLERATED BIGOTRY IS AGAINST TRANS* PEOPLE!!!”

Err. The fact that I have read three posts like that in the last hour means there probably isn’t “one remaining form of prejudice.”

The older I get the more privilege I have. I don’t think it works this way for everyone but it does for me.

When I read about how every year a person should expect to not have more money than last year because of the terrible financial position the country is in I think… but my finances have steadily improved every year since I was eighteen. Not always because of my own hard work–let’s be clear.

I no longer think of myself as a boot strapper in the slightest. I’m not and for me to claim such status is disrespectful.

I had a settlement. That provided all of my early financial security (my income went up every year after eighteen because I did part-time work in college and then went into teaching which was much more money than my mother had ever made–I felt filthy rich). Now I have Noah. His ability to earn money blows my mind. He’s just doing it.

I’m trying to figure out how to write to twelve year olds about the fact that every twelve year old has it shitty without sounding like I am propping up the system. Some twelve year olds have it worse than others but almost no twelve year old is capable of understanding that or evaluating what it means or how it works.

All discrimination sucks. There is not “one last” form of discrimination. There are as many kinds of discrimination as there are people with a stick up their ass. You couldn’t possibly list all of the things people are discriminated over.

But I feel kind of cranky about fat white women being very sure that they have it worse than anyone because prejudice against fat is the LAST REMAINING THING IT IS OK TO PICK ON PEOPLE FOR.

Err, haven’t you noticed that there are more black men in prison now than were ever slaves in this country? Maybe you aren’t at the bottom of the barrel when it comes to discrimination. Maybe.

I get that it sucks to be picked on. I really do. I don’t understand why people need to justify that their experience is shitty by saying that it is the shittiest thing ever.

I don’t think my life was the shittiest thing ever. I really don’t. I meet people all the time who are much worse off after their respective lives. I had a lot of bad things happen to me. I also had a lot of good.

I have a lot of privilege. I always have. The older I get, the more cemented it gets the more I can see the tendrils of it stretching back into the beginnings of my life.

I was *always* tolerated for interrupting class when I was a child. I was massively disruptive in almost every single one of the twenty-five schools I went to. It was tolerated. I wasn’t sent to special ed for bad kids the way the black or hispanic boys were. They were *not* more disruptive than me. The biggest difference between me and a lot of the boys I knew over time was that I knew the right answer in class.

I’m brilliant. Now that I’m an adult and I’m not worried about people beating me up if I say it out loud I can accept it. I’m brilliant. I just understand things faster and more easily than other people. It’s a gift. I’m not a better person, but school was a fuck-ton easier for me than it is for people who need slow and careful explanations. I got punished less because I was smart.

I don’t believe there is any “one last” discrimination left. As long as there are billions of people alive there will be way more things to discriminate about than that.

I feel really sad when I see people who are like me (I have been a fat white woman for most of my adult life–I’m not fat at this point but I expect I will eventually be so again) thinking that they have it the worst of the worst. First that makes me sad because the individual person feels that bad about themselves and their life. Second it makes me sad because that person has such a limited view of the world.

Have you read anything about children in Afghanistan lately? No one in America gets to talk about the “last acceptable discrimination”. We just don’t. We can talk about being unhappy about how we are treated–totally reasonable.  That’s ALWAYS OK.

But the hyperbole bothers me. It erases so many people.

The older I get, the longer I stay alive the more I recognize how very lucky and blessed I am. Sure, I’ve had bad things happen to me but most people do. Life is just like that. Bad things happen. It isn’t about deserving. It just happens.

But every morning I wake up in a house that is warm or cool as I see fit to make it. I have a husband who wakes up and makes me breakfast just because he loves me. I have little girls who wake up and the first thing out of their mouth is, “I’m so glad to see you again!” because that is the first thing they have heard every day of their lives (Godmama weekends excepted).

I am lucky. I am safe. I was reading about food insecurity yesterday. I really need to figure out what the hell I want to do with my life. I’m bothered by how many people in my neighborhood are statistically hungry right this minute. I think ignoring those problems is not ok. It makes me feel bad about myself as a person.

I know what it means to not have food. I know what severe malnutrition feels like. I live with a lot of the long term effects and they suck. But I have medical insurance so I can go to the doctor when I have problems now because of what happened to me a long time ago.

I am so very lucky.

(I don’t leave comments on other peoples blogs because they don’t need to know that I am irritated with them. My sandbox, my rules.)