In which I reveal the extent of my ego.

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I wrote just over 5,000 words on the book in two hours.  During that time I also did major reorganizing on the whole book.  And ate breakfast.  And wrote a few posts in a few places.  Last night Noah and I had a very intense conversation about what being a slave was like.  I’m getting closer to being able to write about it.  It won’t happen until after this book is done.  I’m getting so close.  45,000 words.  It’s not done.  It’s far from perfect.  It needs a lot of editing.  I want to hit at least 60,000.  8 more days.  15,000 more words.

I want to be the kind of person who gets things done.  I want to be the kind of person who really can sit down and write a book in a month.  I want to be the kind of person who completes a marathon.  I didn’t say run.  Pay attention to that word.  I may be the last person over the finish line.  I’m ok with that.  I will do it. As one step on that journey on Thursday I’m walking a 10k with a friend.  I get to start seriously running in December.  So far I’ve been half-ass running but mostly just working on being able to walk farther and farther.  I’m trying to build up to running slowly.  My knees are not used to this shit.  I don’t want to push it.

I don’t want to be famous because my father held a gun to my head and raped me.  I want that to be a small footnote in my life.  Right now that takes up too much space in my brain.  I need to find other things I want to do and talk about.  Sex is always going to be a prime topic.  But I need other tracks.  I need other roles.  Why not running?

And if I’m going to run I’m not running to get out of the house.  I’m doing it to accomplish something.  I need to have a goal.  Something big enough and hard enough that people will be impressed.  Or I won’t bother.  Because that’s just how I work.  I have to be fighting to do something uncomfortable.

That was part of why I had to leave the bdsm community the way I did.  I always have this compulsion to be the biggest bad ass.  Even if only this one small secret way I don’t tell anyone about.  I want to be the edge of the bell curve in intensity.  That’s frankly dangerous in some communities.  So after I broke up with Tom I knew I had to get the fuck out of that community.  I wouldn’t survive more intense than what I did with Tom.  I would have wanted someone who was a cocky asshole who had something to prove.  If you’ve been hanged by the neck once you don’t need to do it again.  I feel fairly certain that some day someone will fuck me with a gun.  I don’t know who or when.  That’s why I’m not in the bdsm community.  I don’t need to find that person any year soon.  I don’t need that temptation any year soon.

It’s hard knowing that I just don’t have the same attitude towards the sanctity of my life that other people have.  I want to know what else I can survive.  What else will get me off?

And I want to serve.  It will happen again some day.  I will find a way.  I will figure out what I mean when I say I am a slave.  And I will find a way to make it real in my life.  I want to be part of building something.  I want to subsume myself.  I want to make a King.

Clarification.

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So uhm I said casually that I was glad that my affair fizzled out.  I just realized that.  Uhm, I’m glad that I am not giving up more sleep than I am giving up.  I’m sad that muse wasn’t up for more of what we had at the beginning.  It was really hot and fun.  I’m sad I’m not writing the torrid IMs planning for sex.  But my wrists are thanking me that I’m doing less typing.

Life is about finding the balance.  I’m sad about not having the affair work out because I was enjoying it.  But I was really operating past my body capacity and it’s a good thing I stopped.  Uhm.  Just to be clear.  Some day he won’t be celibate anymore.  I hope he’ll call me.

Email to middle school core teacher.

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Dear Mr. S-,

Hi, my name was Krissy Archer.  I’ve been married for five years at this point and that doesn’t even feel like who I am any more.  I’m Krissy Gibbs.  I’m a much happier person than I was.  This year for NaNoWriMo I am finally getting around to writing about my childhood.  I’m a survivor of incest and rape.  Some of that was happening while I was your student.  Right now I’m writing about when I was in Fisher and I was looking through the year book.  You signed it: Krissy– Hope you enjoyed my class a little.  Your hard work is appreciated.  Keep it up.  Have fun.
I’m sure that was a fairly standard thing for you to write.  I think I was in your first year of teaching.  You were a good teacher.  You let me spend a lot of time in your room.  Teachers like you gave me a haven from a pretty horrifying life.  I taught high school for three years before I had kids.  Reading your inscription in the yearbook made me think of all the times I wrote similar things on the yearbooks of students when I had other things I wanted to say.  The professional boundary is an interesting one.
I’m curious if you remember anything about me.  I no longer have any contact with anyone in my biological family.  I am trying to write down everything I possibly can about my life.  I feel horrified by the idea that if I died there is no one in the world who can tell my children anything about my life before I met their dad.  So I’m trying to write it all down.  But my memories are all bad.  It’s hard for me to remember anything positive.  I was wondering if you did.
Krissy Gibbs

—
I’m a big fan of people wanting something different.

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Last night I once again went to a sex party and didn’t have sex with anyone.  This time I did play though.  It’s a subtle distinction.  I also noticed a few interesting things about my anxiety.  I’m really glad I’m not allowed to really date anyone right now.  I’m glad that the affair kind of trailed off.  I’m not hunting for a partner.  I’m looking for friends.  And I’m not hard up for sex.  Why am I acting desperate?  In November we’ve been having sex more or less daily. Before that we were having sex three to five times a week.  Why am I out hunting so hard?

Part of it is that I’m lonely still.  There isn’t much to compare to NRE and I’ve been in a stable relationship for a long time.  Mostly I want friends.  But I want friends I can have sex with because that is how I get my touch needs met.  Yeah yeah I “should” get over my issues and be able to handle getting my touch needs met non-sexually.  Whatever.  I don’t wanna.  I want to figure out how to get them met without doing damage to my life.  Whatever that means.  What does it mean to be stable?  To be consistent?  I’m not sure I know.

What do I want to be doing in five years?  In ten years?  In twenty years?  What parts of my life will be the same?  What parts will be different?  How much leeway do I want to leave in my plotting?  By which I mean: which things are non-negotiable if I am going to qualify as “stable”?

I don’t think that most people think about that in advance much.  Not really.  Not what that might mean.  They don’t think about how hard it might be.  I do not like that Noah wants to sleep with other people.  Only I do.  Only I like that he is the kind of person who likes that.  Only I like that he loves that I’m the kind of person who likes to sleep with other people.

I feel bad that Noah wants to sleep with other people because I’m afraid to trust him.  More than most people, he’s all I have.  I have spent more time talking to him than any other human being.  By far.  And I’ve known him for almost eight years.  He knows me.  If I risk him getting to know other people I risk him deciding they are better than me.  Letting him fall in love with someone else means that I have yet more lonely hours to fill as the people that I want to be with have something better to do.

Only it doesn’t have to mean that.  Even when I choose to be alone in the garage, why does this have to be a banishment?  Why does it have to be some terrible thing?  I have massive social anxiety and I am the mother of two young children and I have the weirdest damn sleep cycle in the world.  Of course I’m socially isolated.  This is not a statement about my character.  This is a natural part of my life cycle.

It’s all tied together.  It’s hard to believe that I still exist.  It’s hard to hope that this hard cycle will end.  It’s hard to believe that this much hard is worth it.  This much hard meaning dealing with my intense abandonment fears, parenting, being a partner to a disabled person, and having to support Noah in his career aspirations.  I picked these roles.  They are all hard.  They all take a lot of physical effort and emotional effort.  No wonder I want to hide in a dark room.  At least it’s quiet.

I have some weird ideas about who I am and what I should be doing.  I don’t think I understand them all yet.  I’m not sure I need to because I need to change a lot of them.  I really only look at myself in the most negative ways possible.

Today Shanna was resisting putting her underwear on after taking a shower.  She put her face in her hands and started rocking back and forth.  She was chanting, “I can’t.  I can’t.”  I stopped.  I asked her, “Are you doing this because you see me do this when I’m upset?”  She perked right up, jumped out of role and said, “Yup!” I told her that we try to reserve that kind of display for something slightly more life impacting than being cold after a shower.

I need to stop saying I can’t.  I’ll make it true.  I can.  I’m just shy of 39,000 words.  I am trying to decide if I should try to push through to 40,000 tonight.  I kind of think it would be better to rest.  Right now I’m writing about 1994-1995.  Fisher Middle School.  Oh boy.  This is when I start to introduce people who are in the current cast of characters.  People I don’t want to piss off.  But no pressure, right?

This is why people don’t write this shit.  It’s a lot of fucking pressure.  Do you want to know why I am chickening out about making the book about more than just the first 18 years of my life?  Because I’m almost 40,000 words in and I’m not even close to done and I still have a few years I haven’t even started writing about yet.  Because I think Jenny will forgive me for things I say about then, but I’m not so confident about the other people in my life.  Time to write.

I’m going to talk about triggers.

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I've spent the past few weeks reminding myself that my early life was a festering shithole of despair the likes of which very few people survive. I'm running low on empathy for other people. So that seems like the perfect time for me to talk about my expectations of how other people will manage their shit. We all have it. That's fine. If you feel upset by things you are reading on the internet, close the window. If you feel upset by things you are hearing said in person you have two choices, you can try to tactfully change the subject; this is done by hearing a conversation segue and going full steam ahead towards that Shiny Change Of Topic!. Heck, you can even announce, "Look! It's A Shiny Change Of Topic!" as you do it. That's ok. That's a way of trying to be comfortable in conversation.

Or you can get off your ass and walk away. At no point it is it ok for you to start ranting about how people have triggered you and they are all bad bad bad bad people for daring to say something that Hurt Your Feelings.

Wow. Do you think you are the only important person in the world? Do you really believe that in order to be in your life people have to spent 100% of their time doing only activities you approve of? You have issues. Big issues. The kind that can be manipulated by fucked up professionals with lots of training on how to manipulate peoples emotions.

I have a lot of triggers. I could not begin to enumerate them all. They change over time. When I am in a period where I am heavily triggered, I stop participating in the world. I go home. I stop reading other peoples blogs. I stop participating in forums. I still post, because I do so compulsively and I could not stop if I wanted to. But I'm not reading. I don't have the emotional energy to risk looking at other peoples lives. I might get upset. If I get upset I will have days of back lash. I will feel this constant internal struggle between rage and despair because dear god why do people always do this to me?  The truth is, they don't always do that to me.  It happens sometimes.  But when your brain is in whatever chemical state it is in right now sometimes… that's the only state you can remember being in.  That's not a rational feeling.  That's not a true statement.  You have other moods and other ways you feel. Maybe not recently.  But life is long.

Deciding that who and what you are right now is so important to preserve that everyone around must change in substantial ways to make you more comfortable uhm, well… that's fucked up.  I'll be flat with you.  That's disordered thinking.  That's having omniscience problem.  Get over yourself.

People need to go live their lives and have the experiences they have, for good and bad.  The more you try to step in between other people having their lives the farther you are away from having an actual relationship.  People are not puppets.  The kind of person who will only do what you say is generally kind of icki and I don't want to be near them.  People who want to "call the shots" on how I talk about my life makes my skin crawl.  That's my fucking trigger.  And guess what, I'm a grown up.  I go back to my fucking sandbox and I deal with my emotions.  In an appropriate way.  In a limited way.  I'm going to rant through this post and then I am going to roll my eyes and go back to my life.  Because I don't need to deal with other people being passive aggressive and control freaks.  I have better things to do with my life.  

I modify my behavior willingly for the people I live with.  They have a right to ask me for concessions.  At the same time, I push for time to write because I need it for my mental health.  I have to push back there.  I have to push back about that universally, across the board.  I need to not only say that was an epic party, but holy shit I got to play with two hot girls.  One I made smile and one I made cry.  I felt honored by both.  They both teach me different things about life.  And I need to honor the lessons I am learned.  That is something that I need for me.  I need to figure out how to navigate my triggers in life.  Because I have a lot of them.  I'm trying to figure out what that means.  What can my life look like.

I'll tell you that declaring subjects or locations off-limits for other people… that's not part of the agenda.  If it is on your agenda then you should stop dicking around and commit yourself for a while because you are obviously in a place where you are not able to have healthy relationships and you need some intensive therapy for you to figure out that you are not God.

One of the problems with polyamory

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I don’t know if other people sit around in their off-time listening to songs and trying to place them onto various relationships.  Particularly, today I am listening to Adele’s Someone Like You.  The way she talks about the song in this video is striking.  It has dramatically altered my hearing of the song.

I miss Steve and Tom.  I think I would be able to be the kind of person Steve could be friends now.  I think I have changed my reactions to some of our patterns.  I didn’t like how I treated Steve, but I liked Steve.  I would have broken him if I had stayed with him.  Instead I ran away.  I didn’t just break off dating him.  I stopped going any place he might be.  I avoided his friends like the plague.  Anyone who knew us both lost me after the break up.

I walked away from my life.  I broke all ties.  I changed my major in college.  I dropped out of college.  I broke up with Steve just a few months before our wedding and then I evaporated like a drop of water.  But there were a lot of reasons I wanted to marry him, you know?  He was a really amazing person.  I miss him.  I miss the things he brought into my life.  I don’t want to have sex with him, that part didn’t work well for me.  But I miss him being my close friend.  I dated him before I had ever told anyone the full story of my abuse.  Before I was out publicly as a rape survivor.  I could still name every single person I had ever had sexual contact with.  I had two lists.  One of girls, which was very long.  I didn’t tell people about that list.  And the boys, which was long but not frightening because I don’t count my rapists.  Oh wait, there was a third list in my head–the rapists.  I could still count my positive boy-sex experiences on my fingers with Steve.  Steve was the first boy who ever gave me an actual orgasm. I faked it before that.  Uhm, sorry people from high school.

I miss Steve a lot.  He was passionate about things the way Noah is.  I love basking in that kind of joy in the simple act of attaining knowledge.  Steve liked to learn.  He was inspiring to be around.  He isn’t book smart, and it was by choice.  He came from a highly educated family.  He was a self-didact though.  He knew how to do an amazing array of things.  And if he didn’t know how to do something he would figure out how to learn.  Nothing daunted him.  I miss that.  I didn’t know how to deal with it when I was 18.  I didn’t know how to explain to him that things were harder for me than him because I didn’t have this loving background telling me I could accomplish things, I had to move slower than him sometimes.

Enh, I don’t remember the particulars well enough to analyze it.  Whatever.  That’s not the point.  I would really like to know what kind of man he has become.  I’m pretty sure I was right back then when I knew that I wouldn’t enjoy living with him long-term.  But I think I could be his friend now.  I think I would know how to listen to his interests without bashing him over the head with my issues.

I ran from Steve to Tom.  In a straight line.  Jumping on a few nice people along the way.  I was 18 and living with a lonely old lady who wanted company and I wanted to be surfing the internet looking for sex.  As soon as I became involved with him I started using his house as a base.  I was there a lot when he was at work because I didn’t have anywhere else to be.  His internet was paid for, he didn’t seem to care.

I’m not sure he understood how much time I was there.  How much time I spent auditioning a life in that house before our relationship got all that serious.  I picked him.  I wanted him.  I didn’t have to look around the local community for more than three months before I was damn sure he was the only person in that lot I wanted to seriously pursue.  And I did.  And on our first date he told me that he was looking for the One.  The One he would marry and have children with.

I am not going to get into it much right now.  That’s too big of a story.  I can’t do that today.  I can’t write it down today.  But I can sit here and listen to Adele sing.  And I cry.  Because I can’t write that story yet.  I am in the middle of another one.

I date Puppy because I was trying to replace Tom.  Puppy was the most abusive relationship I have had as an adult.  If he had not ended it when he did I think he would have hit me.  He was escalating in his violent displays when I didn’t react how he wanted.  I wasn’t good enough for him.  His family hated me and picking me would have meant ostracizing his family.  Or having to have relationships with them that involved no discussion of his life with me.  He didn’t think I was worth it.  He was a nasty piece of shit to me trying to get me to break up with him.  When my response was to cry for a while then try to problem solve he freaked out.  He wanted me to do something nasty so he had justification for his behavior.  I feel like my relationship with Puppy absolves me of my guilt for treating Steve so badly.  I learned how to control that anger.  I’m really sorry I fucked up like that at 18.  But I learned.  I changed.  Some people never do.  I’m proud of myself.

I am too angry with Noah.  Almost none of it is directed at him.  I’m not angry because of anything related to Noah.  I’m just angry.  At so many stupid things I remember and can’t let go of.  So many things that I’m trying to write down and be done with.  Puppy left me with a nasty email about how I will end up bitter and alone.  Just. Like. His. Mother.  Yeah, that’s about me?  I think not.

I don’t need to feel bad for my part in that any more.  That was a shitty relationship.  I don’t think it escalated to abuse but it wanted to.  It didn’t partially because I learned to control my temper.  That’s pretty cool.  I needed to do that.  It was essential in helping me be a good teacher.  And oh boy is it more important as a mother.  I’m sorry I hurt Steve.  But I forgive myself.  I had good reasons to be angry.  The more of this book I write the more I understand why people in authority positions widen their eyes when I tell my stories.  I should be exploding with anger.  I should be standing on top of a tall building with a machine gun taking my rage out on all of humanity.  That’s what a wounded animal as smart as me would do.

For all that people tell me I’m an angry person, I’m not.  Not really.  I was.  I’m sad.  I’m afraid.  Writing my story down all in one block and thinking about how many years of my life I have spent alone in a room is hard.  I don’t know how to have a real live actual family.  I’m scared.

I dated Tom for more years than I lived with my brother Jimmy after the age of three.  I lived with Tom for almost as many years as I lived with Tommy.  We were very close.  But he could never decide if I was really worth so much effort.  He wasn’t interested in getting married and having kids with me.  I think that given his life priorities, he made the right decision.  I’m not the right kind of girl for him.  And that still hurts.  I wanted to be.  I tried so hard to be what I thought he wanted.  Oh so many things I want to say.  They come over me in waves, these memories.

But I don’t think I can be friends with Tom.  We were too much.  I want too much.  I miss too much.  I want too much of him still.  I don’t know if anything could ever actually work.  I’m not going to let myself think about it.  I can’t.  I ran away.  I slammed the door on that part of my life pretty hard.  It has taken many years for me to figure out that some people in that community can be my friends because they aren’t actually interested in being his friend.  I didn’t have to ask them to pick a side!  They came pre-picked!  I’m a shallow piece of shit.

No, I have problems with boundaries.  I don’t think I would be able to have any if I spent extended time with Tom.  Once again, I don’t know that it is even sex I want.  I want to crawl back into his head.  I want to once again hear him tell me about the most intense parts of himself.  I want to watch him enjoy driving.  I want to be tied up.  I wouldn’t mind it being non-sexual.  I miss being enjoyed for just being there to look at.  That’s something that’s hard to communicate about objectification.  It means that someone doesn’t have to know all of my dirty stupid little secrets, they can enjoy looking at me.  Maybe I am beautiful.

Maybe if I write about what I really miss in enough detail I can find a way to get those specific needs met in other ways.  It’s worth a try.  But not today.  Maybe someday I will find someone like Tom.  Maybe I will be able to figure it out.

Daydreaming is weird.  Because I have these thoughts.  I have them a lot when I’m driving.  Polyamory means that I can have my Bridges of Madison County track in the back of my brain and know that I am not being disloyal to the people in front of me.

I feel sad that Noah does the same thing.  I don’t know that he does it exactly the same way I do.  But he has similar yearnings to not feel like doors are closed.  There is one girl he is kind of bitter about.  I handled it badly.  He really was falling in love.  It felt like watching my chance at stable happiness leave every time he went on a date.  I don’t trust that anyone else can love more than one person at a time.  My family couldn’t do that.  One kid at a time was “special” and whoever wasn’t in the center… well… when my brothers weren’t at the center it was because they weren’t there.  Sometimes when my mother and I lived alone somewhere I was the center.  That was wonderful.  Anytime there was anyone else around I was ignored.  She had missed those kids the whole time she had me.  She had talked about that endlessly.  She didn’t talk about me in glowing terms the way she did them.  She didn’t idealize me.  She lived with me.

I don’t want to be that for Noah.  I’m scared.  It is so hard to trust him.  It is so hard to trust anyone.  There is no one else in the world I would even bother to try to trust like I trust Noah.  I can’t.  I’m not capable.  And that hurts.  Once people have been close to me like that, if they fuck up even slightly then I have to completely and totally evaporate from their lives.  I can’t handle being demoted.  When Noah starts paying attention to someone else I feel demoted.  I go from being the wife to being part of the harem.  Now I’m “one of Noah’s girls”.  I feel disposable.  It’s not true.  I know Noah doesn’t feel that way.  Not even slightly.  But that’s what I feel.

You know.  Once I get the problem nailed down this specifically it’s time to talk to the California Mindfucker.  I like NLP.  It’s a convenient tool.  I keep hitting this same wall.  And it’s not rational.  I can explain it 50 more times and they will all come down to the same thing.  I want to change my irrational feelings and I’m not managing on my own.  There are tricks for that.

Different facets.

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Today is hard because I have already been a friend, a lover, and a therapy client.  Any second now I need to be a mother.  I need to be a partner.  I need to be a wife.  I need to be a boss.

It’s hard to be these different parts of me.  They feel like they don’t add up to a person.  I’m not sure if they are less or more than a person, but not really a person.  A host with many guests.  I hurt.  I hurt inside my heart.  I am all these things and more and it feels like a terrible thing I am doing.  I am supposed to pick.  Ok, probably not one.  But just two or three.  Fine, I can be a mother and a therapy client and a wife.  Those are supposed to be my priorities, right?

But I really enjoyed being a lover today.  Today I felt beautiful.  Noah tolerates a lot of my derogatory self-talk.  Well, he ignores me.  He tells me I’m beautiful.  He tells me he likes me.  Today my Daddy made me stand in front of a mirror and he touched me and made me look and told me that I am beautiful.  I feel like I can still barely lift my head.  I can’t look up at someone saying that about me.  I’m not.  I’m so ugly and mean and bad.  You don’t know how bad.

Maybe.  There are parts of me that are ugly and mean and bad.  I have done things I am ashamed of.  I have hurt people.  But maybe this isn’t an ‘or’ situation.  Maybe I’m ugly and I’m beautiful.  Maybe the most beautiful thing I have done in my whole life was standing up to my family and prosecuting my father and preventing him from ever victimizing another person.  I did that.  All by myself.  My father was a serial rapist.  He had molested many people from childhood to adulthood.  I. Got. Rid. Of. Him.  As sure as if I put a gun to his head.  I made sure he could never hurt anyone again.  Ok, so I didn’t expect him to kill himself, not really.  I was surprised.  I was devastated.  I knew it was a risk.  Everyone thought he would put a gun in his mouth.  But he didn’t.  He sat, like a chicken shit, in his garage and ran his truck.  While he sat there he wrote notes of hate to me and my mother.  I burned that note many years ago after Tom urged me to.  It ate at me.  He told me, essentially, that he was committing suicide because I was an evil liar and he didn’t want to go to hell for the sin of murdering me because I murdered my brother.  Did you follow that?  His grammar (and spelling) was worse.  But the hate was god damn obvious.  What a piece of shit.  He sent that note to his daughter.

It’s not like he could tell himself that he was innocent.  Give me a break.  He didn’t want to go to prison.  He was too fucking chicken shit to accept the consequences of his actions.  I’m not.  My father is dead.  I’m glad.  I made the world a more beautiful place by effectively killing him.

But I am still what he made me.  I still thrill to the touch of my Daddy.  Maybe I can find a way for that to be ok.  Maybe that’s just one way that my friends can love me and touch me and heal parts of me I can’t reach by myself.  Every man I call Daddy has been in my life for a long time.  Specifically, Dad has been active in my life for nearly as many years as my biological father.  I stopped seeing my biological father when I was thirteen.  I have known Dad for eleven years.  I have spent considerably more time in Dad’s company than I did with my father in my entire life.  Dad is also a really good grandpa to my kids.  He loves them.

And Daddy?  Well, he sure knows how to make me come.  And he is ok with me waking him up in the middle of the night when I need to talk.  He has been for more than seven years.  I have done so, whenever I needed to, for over seven years.  And I’m crazy and bossy and difficult and he loves me.  It was really nice to come home to my Daddy today.  I am feeling pretty shocked by how this feels.

Maybe the only kind of love I have ever known how to get from a dad will be met.  And it will be met in a way that allows me to be healthy and whole.  I’m not a hole.  My Daddy may be a big slut, but I’m special.  I always have been.  And Dad?  I’m his first daughter.  He introduces me that way, which is funny because he has a biological daughter.  He’s had several girlfriends after me who are also “daughters”.  But everyone knows it’s different with me.  I’m not a girlfriend and I never was and I never will be.  He just takes care of me when I don’t know how to do it for myself.

I feel very little.  And happy and sad at the same time.  I feel like I am holding the hand of my best friend at the funeral of a very bad person.  I am safe now.  I will never be hurt by my dad again.  I may be single tailed by my Dad.  I may be fucked by my Daddy.  But my dad will never hurt me again.

Maybe I’m not over the incest thing.

Someone like you

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Writing about my family makes me think about every romantic relationship I’ve ever had.  How and where was I looking for Daddy?  It’s interesting that I don’t like dating tall men.  If they are over 6′ I’m probably not interested.  My father was 6’7″.  My mom was 5’2″.  I had one date with a guy who was 6’10” and that was too much for me.  I couldn’t deal with that.  It felt really disgusting and inappropriate.  Which is kind of a strong reaction to an otherwise really nice guy.

I forgot something when I went looking for an affair.  I forgot that I want people who give me a lot of slack and a lot of space around my “issues”.  I want people who are already broken in because I don’t know how to tell the story piecemeal any more.  I lost that because of Noah.  Noah can handle such ridiculous intensity from me that I don’t know how to tone it down for other people.  Noah can handle me sobbing and screaming and beating on pillows in the middle of an otherwise normal conversation and transition straight into sex when I want it.  I’m pretty sure I have scared Noah or made him feel put-off at some point, but I’d be damned if I could remember when.  Whatever I throw at that man, he just rolls with it.

I forgot how special that is.  I’ve been alone at home with Noah for years growing ever more entwined.  I can use increasingly terse shorthand and he knows these elaborate stories.  After Noah talking to a new person is hard.  It feels frustrating because I don’t know how to explain things in easily digestible chunks anymore.  Now I want to hurry up and finish the book so I can hand them the whole story in advance and say, “Either you can handle this or you can’t.”  That’s not how normal relationships go though.

Last night I went to sleep with my muse.  When I woke up I came over to Daddy’s house.  I haven’t had sex with Daddy in… six?  seven? years.  It’s been a while.  It was similar to and different from what I remember.  I feel like we make fewer assumptions now.  He has so many years of being a close friend that there isn’t much I can’t say to him.  I can be as stupidly blunt and tactless as I am without feeling like it’s going to alienate him.  If he was going to be alienated, it probably would have happened when I dumped him seven years ago.  Instead he remained one of my close friends.  There have been many times over the years when I have shown up at his house at odd hours and he has held me while I cry.

It’s weird sitting in his house now.  I’m killing time until I go to therapy.  He’s working.  It feels comfortable and uncomfortable.  This isn’t where he lived when we dated.  Somehow that’s a good thing.  I’m kind of sad his housemate hasn’t come out of her room.  She is another former lover.  I haven’t seen her much in years and I miss her.  She is one of the few women I’ve had one on one sex with in the last ten years.  I kind of hope I get to give her a hug before I leave.  She came out!  I got my hug.  Yay.

This feels like visiting a part of me I left behind.  These are people from my old life.  In some ways this is like walking into a weird old movie and in other ways it feels like getting to relax.  I have nothing to prove.  I don’t need to show them who I am.  They know already.  If I start crying in the middle of breakfast fairly randomly I don’t have to worry about that being a deal breaker.  I’m not going to risk rejection in this house.  Not unless I do something extraordinarily egregious, which I can’t imagine doing.  This is nice.

I’ve been sitting here thinking about similarities and differences among the men who have tried to handle me.  I do best with men who are able to be still and silent while my emotions rage.  It’s hard on them.  I know.  It’s hard not to take it personally when I’m freaking out.  Noah handles this better than anyone ever has.  He listens really intently to what I am saying and to what I am not saying.  He’s good at ignoring the hyperbole and figuring out why I am actually upset.  He has spent so much time listening intently to me that he knows before I do when I am avoiding a point to get upset about something standing next to it.

Daddy doesn’t make the same leaps.  But he listens.  He stays present.  He has yet to be scared off by anything I’ve told him.  This is why people are poly.  Because there is more than one person who can be present with me.  It’s hard to have the same reservoir of trust with a “friend”.  It’s a different kind of trust and support.  After more than seven years he has certainly earned my trust.  It’s neat finding out what it is like to evolve in a relationship.  I’m doing it with Noah.  I’m trying to do it with Sarah.  I’m trying to do it with Daddy.  I wonder what my life will look like in five years.

Daddy told me that it’s been neat watching me grow up.  He doesn’t think I would have been able to be a mother when we met.  I was still too hair trigger on leaving.  He’s probably right.  It’s really nice knowing that he can look at me and see that I’m not perfect, but I’m still pretty good.  I’m still worth keeping around.  Because he loves me.  Even though I’ve hurt him.  Even though I feel like an unending river of fucking up.

This is so confusing.

The Daddies

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In my adult life I have picked up a lot of men who love me and call me Princess.  It’s a special breed of man.  I have had sexual contact with all of them though I haven’t ever actually had PiV with one of them.  I got the impression recently that it might change soon.  We’ll see.  Gosh.  How do I differentiate them for this article.  Hm.  Well, there’s Dad–he’s up in Portland.  And the other two are both Daddy J____.  So that’s inconvenient.  Uhhh, one is in San Jose and the other is in Oakland.  That will have to be the detail.

Dad came into my life first.  I met him when I was 18 at the Power Exchange in San Francisco.  He was some skeavy old man and called out to me, “Hey you!  Come here!  We need bottoms.”  Always classy, that’s my Dad.  For the record that night I gave him a dirty look and avoided him.  I warmed up to him as I saw him at events around the bay in the subsequent months.  He spent a lot of time wasting his breath with lectures on how I should respect my elders.  He had no idea that I was innately hostile to any and all authority.  When he told me to respect my elders I would nastily snap back, “Yes, Dad.”  It gradually grew less heated.

At some point I acquired a bacterial infection.  Given my horror of all things medical I did not get it treated right away.  But I did hang out on IRC whining.  Dad spent a lot of time in the channel.  He offerred to meet me at the hospital so I didn’t have to be there alone.  He gave up watching a Sharks game with me.  We had a fun conversation with the orderly.  He made sure I was safe.  Not very many people have ever done that for me in my life.  I always have to go alone.  I would walk through fire for that man.

We’ve been friends for almost 12 years.  I will be going to his 60th birthday party in February.  I was at his 50th.  I will be at his 70th.  He’s my Dad.  I’m really glad I have him.

We have a weird play relationship.  There are specific techniques he has that I appreciate a lot.  Otherwise we aren’t much of a match.  And sex just didn’t work.  I couldn’t handle that.  AHHHH.  It was squicky for me because of the Dad thing.

I have a friend in San Jose who is my Daddy.  He is slightly twisted with it.  We’ve done some bdsm play and a little bit of light sex play, but we haven’t gone all the way.  This is weird because he’s one of the local poly gods.  I’m close enough in that I have a good relationship with him.  I don’t know how I would fuck that up if we had sex.  I do tend to make things more complicated than they need to be.  I actually think it wouldn’t fuck anything up.  I have no expectation that our relationship would change in the slightest if we shagged.  I would giggle more when he makes certain jokes and turn red.  That would be pretty much it.  It’s kind of nice to know that.

And uhm, my other Daddy.  I dated this man back when I dated Noah the first time.  I met him right after breaking up with Tom and I was looking hard for a Daddy.  We didn’t work out because we had different hunting priorities and I couldn’t handle that in a primary.  But we’ve remained close friends.  Recently we started kind of sniffing each other out.  I asked him why he was interested in putting up with something as difficult and complicated as this is going to be.  He said, “I love you.”  Yes.  That was the right answer.  He has proven over many years of me being really irritating that he does love me.  He never stopped.

This is why polyamory is so complicated.  How do these friends who are more than friends fit into life?  How do people build a tribe?  I’m still not dating so it is pretty irrelevant right now.  But it’s nice to fill my idle moments with thoughts about what it will be like when we don’t have babies any more.  What kinds of things will we be doing?

I want to travel and camp and go out into the world in a way Noah doesn’t.  I will take my kids with me most of the time, but I’m going to want to do grown up things too.  That’s going to be complicated to navigate.

When I think about my Daddies I think about how I ask for love and support from people.  These three men (along with the California Mind-fucker) have been my support for a very long time.  It’s interesting how our interactions change over time.  It’s interesting who we become to one another.

I stopped thinking about incest stuff during masturbation and sex a couple of years ago.  It became unacceptable to me in sex.  Not as a mother of daughters.  Ugh.  Ew.  No.  It helps that I’ve only been sleeping with Noah and I don’t want him thinking sexy incest thoughts.  Ew.  No.  I can’t handle that.  I know it would be a roleplay.  Don’t care.

But uhm, I’m going to be crawling into bed with my Daddy in about 12 hours.  We’re just going to snuggle.  So he says.  We’ll see.  I’m chanting downwards, “Stop bleeding. Stop bleeding.”  He wouldn’t even care.  He has a cold.  I don’t care.  I have a cold sore.  He doesn’t care.  This is the difference between an old lover and a new person.  I don’t have to feel like I am “up” to this.  I can just go as I am.  Because I’m good enough.  Because he loves me.

Hypocrisy

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Last night I told Noah that I am willing to have sex every day, even on days I’m not into it, in exchange for him giving me the courtesy of the public lie that I am interesting enough to be enough for him when we are out together.  That’s the kind of thing that makes him furrow his brow and take a long deep breath.  It always looks like I’ve kicked him.  I probably did.

Everyone makes a different kind of peace with nonmonogamy.  Mine is tattered and barely existant.  I wish I didn’t have this deep compulsion to sleep with other people so that I could declare it off limits for Noah.  But I do.  This really sucks.  He wouldn’t be happy about me trying to require monogamy, but he’d deal.  He took his marriage vows seriously.  I don’t think I can give monogamy.  I think I would become obsessed with cheating.  I think that my periodic times when I am driven to obsessively check okcupid (even though it’s just about a dead end at this point) would be a problem if I was monogamous.  It would feel different.

As a nonmonogamous person I’m allowed the freedom to think about looking pretty much any time.  That’s fun.  That lets me think about myself as a sexually available person and that is linked to all kinds of fun energy.  I like that part of me a lot.  NRE just isn’t available in long term batches.  I think Noah and I have a more affectionate than average marriage… it’s not NRE.  It’s not new-person-hot-sex.  It’s different.  There is a kind of being seen I get from making sex work with new people.  It’s important to me.

It’s important to Noah too.  Fuck him.  Jerk.  Meaniehead.  He doesn’t want me.  I am not enough.  This is tinged because I can see him raising his eyebrow at me.  NO IT DOESN’T MEAN THAT ABOUT YOU, JUST ME I AM THE ONLY INFERIOR ONE IN THIS RELATIONSHIP.  ahem.  Emotions are really stupid.

All of this comes down to a horrible hypocrisy on my part.  One I’m not sure how to resolve in myself.  I feel like part of my current issue is that I don’t like seeing Noah play with other people unless I was actively involved from the get go and never walk away.  I can’t walk up on Noah playing.  It makes my stomach flip flop and I want to cry.  I hate it.  He’s mine.  He’s the only person on the whole fucking planet who is mine and how dare someone else touch him.

And I hate that my awesome, wonderful husband wants to make other women fall in love with him.  Because he does.  I really kind of hate him for that.  It hurts.  He’s not as into the fuck and run as I am.  He can do it when I’m putting that requirement on him, but it’s not his preference.

I am going to fall apart when he finds someone.  This is going to be awful.  I don’t know how I will handle this.  I really kind of hate nonmonogamy.  I feel bad for the women who have to deal with me in order to get Noah.  I feel like a horrible partner.  I feel like a bitch.  Like I just suck at doing this.  I don’t know that I can be nice to someone Noah falls for and that’s not ok.

I’m borrowing trouble.  I have a little less than four years till he’s allowed to go after that kind of thing.  In the mean time I think he should start going to parties to hunt alone.  It’s not don’t ask don’t tell.  I just don’t want to watch.

Queer

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Sometimes I wonder if my fanatical devotion to this word springs in part from my former therapist, Traci.  She was probably the most queer person I talked to about myself.  That sounds weird.  She was visibly part of queer culture in a way I have never been.  I’m cis-gendered and I primarily partner with men.  I pass.  I loathe the word bisexual because of the gender binary it mandates.  Early on in my dating I met someone who was transitioning.  If I’m honest it was always something I felt in the pit of my stomach that she was different from the other girls I dated.  She was not less than, just other.  A whole different kind of person.  She told me that fucking her made me queer.

Traci told me that it doesn’t matter who I fuck.  It matters how I see the world.  How I love people.  She said I was queer and laughed.  She thought it was funny that I treated queer like a merit badge to be won and I hadn’t worked hard enough yet. I feel like marrying a man forever revokes any authenticity I have in using that word.

Just like I don’t say I’m a dancer any more.  I love to dance.  But I’m not a dancer.

I’m thinking back over my laundry list of lovers.  I’m naming a lot of them and making references to the people I can’t name any more.  I’m thinking a lot about why I engaged in this sexual behavior.  Did I want it?  Do I want it now?  It’s hard to say.  I did and I didn’t.  I do and I don’t.  I was conditioned.  I am supposed to behave this way.  I don’t know any other way to be.

What way?  Promiscuity is never as easy as it looks on first blush.  People have sex for so many reasons and if you want to have sex with a lot of people you have to accept that there will be a lot of reasons.  I don’t always get to decide what kind of sex I am going to have if I am going to have it at all.  I think the sex I enjoy the most is when I know that someone is getting off in my presence because I am so hot.  I have a hard time with partners who don’t orgasm.  It’s part of the reason I don’t go after women any more.  They are so hard.  I have a lot of gratitude that guys are continually willing to put up with women despite the fact that we are such a pain in the ass.  It’s hard getting women off.  It takes commitment.  It takes not just finding out what scares them, but finding out what makes them feel safe.

I can deal with the scary stuff, I’m not so good at safe during sex.  Safe during sex means that it’s glorified cuddling, not sex.  There isn’t much to get me off.  I have to have that edge of fear, pain, despair, objectification…  I have not run into a woman who wants to treat me that way.  Thus, I haven’t had sex with a woman in a while.  When I have had sex with women in the past few years it has been very safe friends who feel like they are there for a game of racquet ball.  Sex is awesome, but it’s better with friends.  I don’t know if I got them off, I think so?  I hope so?  I tried?  But I wasn’t able to get that emotionally invested in the outcome because we were in a party situation and I wasn’t going to be able to pay that much attention to them anyway.

This leaves me with men.  Or folks somewhere off the gender binary.  I don’t even know how to meet them.  I don’t know how to find people who want what I want.  If I knew what I wanted it would help.

I want to be special.  I want to be important.  I want to be worth winning.  I want to feel like the prize.

My issues with our house.

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Alternatively titled “Noah’s House of Whores” but I thought it would be pretty fucked up to have that be the URL.  I have a lot of deep seated issues around my sexuality.  I am increasingly comfortable referring to myself as a whore.  I can’t tell if this is a sign of my lowering or raising self esteem.  Well, at least if I’m a whore I’m a damn good one.  I picked a very specific flavor of being a whore.  Yes, yes, he married me.  That “sanctifies” the sex and justifies him supporting me forever just because.  Only that’s not true.  There has to be a balance or relationships don’t work.

I think Noah would be capable of turning off his voracious need for sex if I required him to.  I think he would become a shadow of himself.  I don’t want to break him.  That’s not why I married him.  I want to see what he can do.  I knew that it was going to be an E ticket ride.  Noah married me because he likes my extremes.  My willingness to communicate.

I chose this relationship because it felt right.  Because this meets my needs.  It bothers me that I need to have a partner I can think about the way I think about Noah sometimes.  To back up, I never wanted to live in this house.  To me places kind of absorb the energy of the people in them.  Noah has dated a lot of women here.  I saw a fair bit of it.  I know even more of the women who came and went.  I’m actually on good terms with the majority of them.  (Uhm, apologies for referring all of you as whores–it’s about me, not about you.)

When I am out with someone I tend to feel enormously bad if they pay attention to someone else.  If I come back from the bathroom and Noah is cuddling someone else?  I feel like I’m about to vomit.  It’s instant and visceral.  I have this flash of terror I knew he would stop wanting me soon.  He was just waiting until I stepped away to show it.  It’s even worse if he keeps his arm casually around said other woman and beckons me closer.  Because then it’s not that he doesn’t want me.  It’s that I’m not special enough to be interesting by myself.  I’m better with a friend.  Anyone improves the experience.  The writing over the past few days has been about my dad and how he treated me when I was five and under.

I don’t like the parallels about how I picked a partner who wants me to be an enthusiastic whore with no ability to say no to sex.  Very uncomfortable feeling.  I’m supposed to be available to anyone and everyone at a whim.

This is not true of course.  This isn’t how Noah feels.  But it’s how I feel.  This is my internal dialogue.  This is the pressure I put on myself.  I feel like it is my duty to be sexually available, even if I don’t want to.  Even if I’m not enjoying the sex.  Especially if the person wants to hurt me.  I don’t like the fact that pain makes me orgasm when gentle touching does not.  I don’t appreciate the fact that my husband doing any amount of vanilla foreplay can’t do much of anything for me.  But pain does.  That’s part of why I feel like a whore.  My sexuality has to involve degradation and pain or it doesn’t count as sex.  It really sucks.

That’s hyperbole.  But it’s more true than not.  I have to be objectified.  I have to be used to get someone else off or I feel like I have failed at what I am obligated to do during sex.  Thing is, my husband doesn’t really like that I need to feel that way.  For all that Noah has done some heinous shit to me, he doesn’t want to be that person full time.  He doesn’t want to make me feel bad about myself daily.

So how do we handle sex?  Gingerly.  In ways that feel fairly unsatisfying sometimes.  I feel dirty and used.  He feels sad and like he is hurting me.  But he isn’t.  It would be much worse if he stopped having sex with me.  I get most of my touch needs met through sex and massage.  I can only afford to pay for so much massage.  I can’t handle having people touch me non-sexually most of the time.  I don’t know how to react.  I panic.  I feel scared.  I don’t know what they want from me and my impulse is to run as far and as fast as I can.

Nonmonogamy makes this all more complicated.  Noah sleeping with other people reminds me that my hooha is not glittery.  I have to be honest and say I’m bitter.  I feel let down.  Me sleeping with other people reminds me that I’m not good at following rules or bonding or doing the things people are supposed to do in relationships.  Like be faithful.  I suck at that.  I get antsy and then I feel absolutely compulsive about finding a new partner.  There is some gaping need I have and I know no other way to fill it.  I need that attention.

God I resent the shit out of Noah needing it too.  Then I feel like an asshole hypocrite.  He’s supposed to just know that me being nonmonogamous is because I am defective and icki and kind of ignore it and be above such base needs.  Or something.  I’m so emotionally raw we shouldn’t make any long-term decisions.  I don’t know what I want.

I know it has been true for a long time that sex always feels taboo and like I’m doing something bad.  I wish that would change.

Written yesterday

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             I’ve been at Occupy Oakland for a few hours now.  It’s tense and sad.  I’m watching cops who look exhausted and near emotionally broken.  I have been talking with my fellow protestors.  I’m asking them to please not hurl angry words at the police on the other side of the barricade.  Once or twice that has brought angry words at me.  I’m ok with that.  When I look across this barricade and I see grown men on the verge of tears I can’t help but feel that this entire circus is bad for everyone.  The police are just people.  They are the 99% as well.  When protestors yell that a smiling police officer is a disgusting pig, what they are saying is that joy in another human being is wrong.  Most of the people who crack smiles on the other side of the barricade look very nervous.  Smiling is a nervous reaction. 
            Last night the various police forces of the bay area joined together to slowly, carefully, evict people from Oscar Grant Plaza.  I’m not sure why.  I’m not sure what the goal was.  Does the city really believe this will do anything other than energize the movement?  Persecuted groups fight back.  They have a force to unite against.  I wish the force we were fighting against looked different.
            I don’t want to fight the Oakland PD.  I know about their reputation.  They have earned it after years and years of brutality.  How can it be changed?  How can the people of Oakland work together with the people who are supposed to protect and serve this city?  What kinds of things would build a bridge?  Last night the police were at least more gentle than normal.  I feel very resentful of the fact that I am surprised. 
            I think that every person should have the gut level expectation of civil treatment.  But that isn’t how the world works.  Instead we are cruel and vicious with one another and we have to say thank you when someone refrains from hitting us.  We can rail and complain and be upset about that, or we can say thank you when someone refrains from hitting us.  I feel like that is a lesson I’ve learned a bit too well.  There is no such thing as the “right” to being treated well.  Please God, most people treat one another well out of the kindness of their hearts.  It’s not a right.  I don’t know that I believe in rights much. 
            I’m not sure if I believe in rights, yet here I am.  Sitting with a meditation circle (you can see how well I meditate) and watching city employees clean up the debris of a tent city.  I’m here because my Constitution gives me the right to peacefully assemble.  And I think I should do it.  I think it is my obligation today to assemble here in Oakland in support of the homeless people who were just evicted from this park.  Because let’s be clear here: the encampment is about serving the needs about the homeless population in Oakland.  It’s a small part of the overall Occupy movement.
Mayor Quan, what were you hoping for?

You cannot evict Occupy Oakland

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Right now there are a ridiculous number of cops attacking Oscar Grant Plaza.  I feel sick to my stomach.  The beautiful people I have been getting to know gradually as I have the courage are going to get hurt today.  I feel so sad.  So disappointed in my country.  How dare we treat people this way?  I wonder how many peaceful protestors are going to be shot today?

I am so fucking embarrassed to be an American today.  What a piece of shit country.

You want to know why I am so embarrassed?  Because this is theatre.  The Occupiers will be back.  Mayor Quan is only wasting taxpayers money.  They will just.come.back.

I think talking about money is important.

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So after covering the checks I have already written for Occupy I have ~$32,000 sitting in my bank account.  Do you know how much money I have to pay this month for various expenses?  I owe $17,000 on credit cards.  That will be paid off this month.  I still haven’t paid property taxes or the mortgage or the domestic help or my therapy.  That’s another $9,000.  This is an unusually expensive month.  Our income is settling in to about $8,000 per month.  I am waiting to write checks for $17,650.  That means that on the 30th of this month, if I succeed in giving all the money away, I will only have around $6,000 in cash.  We have months that cost $15,000 on a fairly regular basis.  We pay for a lot of things.

People who know me know that having a large financial cushion is kind of a ridiculous driving force for me.  It’s unhealthy.  I grew up in a kind of poverty I honestly don’t like thinking about.  But holy fucking shit is my life different now.

That money was originally earmarked to pay off the Disney timeshare.  I bought the timeshare when I realized it was only took four trips of the kind Sarah likes for her birthday to pay off the investment and we really do want to be at Disneyland every year…  I bought it for Sarah and me.  Noah wasn’t thrilled.  Noah is not interested in spending that much time at Disneyland, thankyouverymuch.  He’ll go.  But not every year.

I have done Disneyland with Sarah enough times that it is worth it to me to buy the time share.  Do you know why?  Mostly because she is disabled.  It is hard for her to expend the energy to travel long distances, sometimes even with motor devices.  If we are in an apartment that is just a few yards away from an entrance she can afford the spoons to rest in the middle of the day and really enjoy evening stuff.  It feels loving to be at Disneyland with Sarah.  She appreciates it the same way my mom does.  Just sitting on a bench with a book while people walk by makes her happy.  Disneyland is a place to just sit and feel joy.

So I bought a fucking Disney time share and I feel like a privileged asshole.  I feel strangely embarrassed that I bought this stupid thing.  What a dumb fuck am I, right?  Only dumb fucks buy time shares.  It’s a racket.  Geez.  What a fucking waste of money.  A number of people have told me off for this.

Do you know how many weeks of joy this has already brought me?  Sarah and I get to dream about future vacations.  They are paid for.  I will have to pay for park tickets and gas to drive there.  Otherwise we can cook in the apartment and it’s not any more expensive than being at home.  Really.

It’s financed at 10% and I’m pissed off with myself for continuing to carry that debt.  I wanted it paid off in a year.  Err, that hasn’t happened.  Other things keep coming up.  Like getting my heart Occupied.  Why is this so fucking important?  Because people matter.  We need a William Wallace.  We need someone to step up.  This is a Revolution.  Hell, we need everyone to step up.  What can you go do, today, tomorrow, and the next day to make the world a better place?  Stop sitting in your house whining about your problems.

Says the whiny blogger who has barely left the house in months.  Cause Jesus Christ, if anyone should stop whining it’s me.  My life is the fantasy.  My life is the mythical American Dream in all of the particulars.  Oh, except that pesky PTSD shit.  How do I fix me so that I can enjoy the American Dream?

Well, I’m writing.  I think good will come from it.  I think that is one of the gifts that was given to me in this lifetime.  I can give people things to think about.  They won’t always agree with me, probably rarely.  But I want them to get to the point where they say, “Ok, I guess I can see why you feel the way you do.”  That’s what I fucking want.  I don’t need to have other people agree with me.  I need them to understand WHY I am different.  Why my opinion is different.  Because maybe that will ripple.  Maybe other people who have different opinions are ok too.  Can we stop beating the shit out of political parties?  What is the fucking point?  Grow up you stupid babies.

People are people.  I’m neither a Democrat nor a Republican.  I kind of hate you all equally.  And don’t get me started on how I feel about socialists.  Or the members of my own, Libertarian party.  I feel pretty embarrassed to be associated with them.  Good grief.  But it is the closest to what I believe.

I’m getting away from the point.  When my heart was Occupied my priorities shifted.  Noah is never going to want to stay home with me while working a part time job.  He doesn’t want to.  Ok.  The dramatic need to lower our monthly expenses so that can happen… doesn’t really need to happen.  If it takes longer and I pay more interest in the time share, that will be ok.  Really.  I can deal having to “tighten my belt”.  We are part of the 99%.  In order to maintain all the insurances folks consider necessary we have more than $6,000 of our income promised before it arrives.  It’s $8,000.  We have months where we put $17,000 on the credit card.  You do the math.  No really, that’s going to require some belt tightening.  But I don’t exactly feel like I can complain about that.

And I have the money to spend.  Occupy needs it more than I need to be able to have the lifestyle to which I have become accustomed.  The fact that I can preplan 50 years of vacations means that my life is already as good as it needs to be.

The reason I feel I need to give the money is because people need a spark of hope.  They need to see things being done.  I can’t be the William Wallace for this movement.  I really kind of wish I could.  But that’s not my story.  I’m trying to bait other people.  I’m trying to push them to expand their dreams.  Whoever is going to be the firebrand to lead this Revolution, (s)he will not have much money to start with.  But there will be so much hunger.  So many dreams.  That person will say, “Yes give me your money so I can change the world.”  I hope.  I really hope.

In the meantime I took my family to a park clean up day in Oakland the Occupy folks organized.  I have marched.  I sit in the encampment and eat lunch and talk to the people who live there as I feel I can emotionally.  I think my next clean up day should be in Fremont.  I think that I’m about out of spoons for driving to Oakland.

I think maybe I should just open my front door and walk out it.  I think I should Occupy the space I am in.  Why am I trying so hard to give this money to Oakland?  Why am I beating people over the head asking them to please please please take the money?  Why don’t I start my own fucking occupation.  Hm.  It’s an idea.  What would I do if I occupied Fremont?  Hmm.  I would start putting up notices for neighborhood clean up days.  I’ll be surprised if I’m the only one out there.  This is a small town in the middle of a big urban sprawl.

I’ve been surprised by how many of my neighbors have lived here for more than twenty years and they don’t know any of their neighbors.  There is so much hostility and fear and isolation here.  Why?  I feel sad saying that I sat at the local diner and listened to the waitress be casually racist with the other customers.  Despite the fact that I actually know a fair number of people in Fremont… I don’t see them.  Pretty much ever.  If you live in Fremont and you are “interesting” you spend your life in your car trying to get anywhere but here.

I’m getting tired of this attitude.  Fremont is beneath people.  I’ve done it too.  I spent the first many years of our marriage being fucking pissed off living in this fucking house in fucking Fremont.  This is one of the lowest socio-economic areas.  Not the lowest, by any stretch.  This is more like what I grew up with. My friends keep telling me to move to Alameda.  I really don’t want to.  I’m neither interested in the housing cost increase nor the insularity.  I actually like that my neighborhood is not predominantly white.  But I’m scared here.  This is not really the safe bubble people think of in the bay area.

I’m in the closet.  I can go protest in Oakland and be a radical and a pervert and a queer and whatever.  People here just see me as that nice weird lady.  I’m really polite to people in my neighborhood (uhhh except for the one time I yelled at a guy for wasting water while he was trying to deal with his lawn; long embarrassing story).  I’m getting to know my neighbors very slowly.  Very distantly.  I’m trying to be consistent in my behavior over a long period of time without exposing them to my mood swings.  I can’t afford to piss off my neighbors.  Do you know how much pressure that is for me?

How in the hell can I expect my really diverse neighborhood to be thrilled about having a whore who writes about sex on the internet in their neighborhood?  I’m out with the kids all the time.  Aren’t they going to start looking at me as if I am dirty if they find out?  Don’t I need to hide?

I think it is interesting that my friends think the Occupy movement is about money.  I think it’s about pushing for the right to exist and be different and have a different life.  Whatever the fuck that means.  Our entire culture is set up around streamlining people so they can be more and more similar.  I’m not fucking like the folks who grew up in small town Duluth (love you).  And that’s more than ok.  It’s awesome.  I had different experiences so I got to go off and become a completely different kind of person.  I’m not like the people who grew up in Rotorua, either.  Or London near as I can tell.  I go a lot of places and I meet a lot of people.  I never fit.  Nowhere.

Maybe I need to stop going out into the world trying to find someplace that is right.  I think the Occupy movement is about seeing that something that needs to be changed and doing it.  That will be financial for a lot of people.  But it’s also about recognizing that we have abdicated a lot of responsibility to the system.  Any system.  How’s that going for folks?  Maybe if we want something we have to just go fucking do it.

I want to feel ok in my town.  I have to live here.  But I can’t stay in the closet.  This is horrible.  I’m not much like most of the folks around me.  But I’m not like folks anywhere.  That’s ok.  I may not be the right kind of Fremonter, but I’m the right kind of me.  Yeah, it’s a stupid stupid little thing I say.  I say it because I hope it’s true.  I’m trying to convince myself it is.  It’s very hard to believe that who and what I am is ok.  That feels like a lie.  So so so so so so many people tell me that I’m not ok.  Not directly.  Not to my face.  But in the very air I breathe in this culture.  I am so fucking wrong.

The General Strike showed me that I don’t feel that way because of the incest.  I feel that way because I am an American.  In fact, that seems to be our national culture.  Anything different is wrong and bad.  People, you need to lighten the fuck up.  Maybe instead of sitting in an encampment in solidarity with people in Oakland I should be organizing a neighborhood group to figure out a way to meet the needs of the people within walking distance of me.  That’s a significantly better choice for the planet.


But I will have to do that alone.  I won’t be able to throw money at that problem and walk away.  I will have to find the drive and determination to do that.  I will probably mostly be the one doing that, if I think it should happen.  It makes me tired.  I can’t do that yet.  I feel like I am failing my human beings.  I feel like every day that I allow children to walk past my house on the way to school who are going hungry and I ignore that I am just as bad as the people who didn’t help me.  I have so much rage at all of the people who didn’t help me.


Who the fuck am I helping?  I don’t know.  I hope that the RV comes through.  That would be something.  I wish I knew where my life was going.  I feel like I am littering the path with burning ambitions.  Things that hurt me that I am not focusing on them exclusively.  You can’t focus on a dozen things exclusively.  There isn’t enough me for that.


I really hope this movement spreads.  Please people, you can change the world too.  It doesn’t actually take money.  It takes the desire to do good.  You’ll find a way.  Please? 

DBW: 2 Corinthians 1:21-22

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And it is Occupy who establishes us with you in freedom, and has anointed us, and who has also put is seal on us and given us its Spirit in our hearts as a guarantee.

Today I bring my children and my husband with me to the encampment.  I hope that Mayor Quan will allow my family to remain safe.  We will then be going off to: Lincoln Square Recreation Center

250 10th Street (between Alice and Jackson) from 10-1.  I am bringing my family with me to the place that gave me back my faith in the human race.  I’m really hoping no one fucks that up.  I have a lot of reason to believe that a lot of people in power want to stomp on my hope.  They want me to feel small and bad and weak and pitiful.  They think I am nothing.  But they can fuck right off.


My heart was Occupied.  I will be at the encampment today with my husband and children to support the people there who are bravely risking police attack any minute due to an inappropriate eviction.  I hope I can give them moral support as well as physical support.  We will be bringing food.

What I just sent off to my GP

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Dear Dr. S,
            I apologize for the length of this message, I am not good at being brief and your office visits aren’t really long enough for me to come in and talk to you in person. 
            I went in to see Dr. Sastry as you recommended.  I will not be working with her.  I can explain that by telling you her parting line to me: “You have two major ways you deviate from the norm, breastfeeding and smoking pot.  I won’t be working with you until you stop them.”  She expected me to wean my daughter and quit smoking in a week.  Or she wouldn’t work with me.  Well, that week is over.  At no point in that week did I feel like a relationship with Dr. Sastry would improve my life so I cheerfully ignored her recommendations.
            She wanted me on an anti-psychotic, and she encouraged me towards upping the dose quickly.  She told me she was putting that I was bipolar on my medical record.  Even though I very firmly believe I am not bipoloar.  I have GAD and complex PTSD.  They are treated differently.  I don’t believe it is appropriate to medicate me as if I am bipolar.
            Instead I am paying a ridiculous amount of money to a Harm Reduction specialist.  I went in and talked to her for an hour and a half.  At the end I left with a prescription for Ativan.  Six pills for a month.  To be split in half.  I’ve had them almost two weeks and I’ve taken a pill and a half.  I have cut my smoking to almost nothing.
            Dr. Sastry had no interest in finding out what I have legitimately done to deal with my issues.  She wanted to medicate me into a coma to stop my sexual acting out.  I don’t appreciate her agenda.  When I talked about the recent periods of going without sleep for days she refused to believe me that I wasn’t also sexually acting out.  She wanted them to be manic cycles.  She would not accept that I wasn’t manic.  I wasn’t manic.  I was hyper-vigilant and experiencing flashbacks of being raped.  I wouldn’t let my children touch me let alone anyone else.  Yes, I am ethically non monogamous with my husband.  I don’t harm my life.
            I would encourage you to not sent patients to that woman if in any way they “deviate from the norm”.  No one needs to be shamed while they are in the process of receiving medical care.
Secondly, I am worried that some aspects of my health have been badly managed and it’s complicated to explain.  I saw a homebirth midwife through both pregnancies.  My first labor I did 40 hours at home before transferring and I delivered at Valley Med because they are the most friendly to transferring homebirths.  I actually think they did a fabulous job of dealing with me as a person who “deviated from the norm.”  The vast majority of the staff was really kind and effective and I appreciated that.  The delivering doctor asked me out of the blue if I wanted my placenta since I was a transferred homebirth.  When the delivering nurse said I couldn’t have it the doctor said, “We don’t know where it went.”  I will be grateful forever.
Neither of my pregnancies went well.  I was horribly sick.  I lost 18 lbs by the end of the second trimester with Shanna.  I had a lot of really intense long-lasting early labor scares.  I lost two babies in between Shanna and Calli.  I lost the first the day before Shanna turned one.  That pregnancy was about 9 weeks along.  I guesstimate that because I went up to Portland right after that and they have an exhibition showing the size and development of a fetus every 2-3 days through the pregnancy.  I found out I miscarried because I found the baby.  I thought I was just having my first postpartum period.  This was rather traumatizing.
We used condoms for two months and tried again.  We got pregnant immediately.  I lost that baby  at seven weeks.  The reason I knew I was pregnant again is because I have instant full body horror symptoms.  Pregnancy is awful.  My whole body treats it like a toxic experience.  I became pregnant again without a period.  That’s Calli.
I was in labor with her for nine days.  At about day four I started feeling like I was leaking fluid.  I called my midwife to talk to her about it.  She told me I was on a 48 hour clock.  I had to deliver the baby by then or I had to go to the hospital because I risked infection.  Technically she knew she was only supposed to give me 24 hours.  But she knows that I really didn’t want to go to the hospital.  Every home get-it-going-thing we did.  I had contractions every 3-10 minutes for so many days.  I couldn’t get them to stop. 
I ended up at Washington Hospital.  I had a rude on-call doctor and a sanctimonious on-call nurse.  They lectured me horribly and treated my like a recalcitrant child.  At the very end of the visit he swabbed me and said, “It’s not amniotic fluid, go home.”  When my midwife filed out he gave me this long nasty lecture about how I was going to kill myself and my baby if I stayed home.  He was almost right.  I still wasn’t going to go back to him.
I hemorrhaged really badly.  I couldn’t stand at all for days because I lost so much blood.  I had to crawl to the bathroom for weeks.  My midwife told me point blank about 20 minutes after my daughter was born, “If you close your eyes you won’t open them again.”  My midwife didn’t really do much about the hemorrhage.  I was told to eat blood thickening food.  I didn’t move from bed for two weeks because I couldn’t stand.
I have lost 1-2 lbs a week since then.  I often have trouble eating.  My stomach hurts all the time.  A lot of it is my mental health stuff, I’m aware.  But I was on a medication years ago through a different PAMF doctor, Dr. -.  It was for stomach acid.  I don’t remember what it was.  I am curious about pursuing something for my stomach acid again.  I get up in the morning and I smoke pot so that I can settle my stomach enough to handle eating.  If I don’t smoke I can’t eat more than about half a piece of toast before I’m in violent stomach pain.
I wake up every morning to an hour or more of painful burning diarrhea.  I can’t believe this is normal.  This hasn’t happened my whole life but it has been happening for months.  I’m not sure how many months.  I’m working on getting my mental health stuff in order.  I truly am.  I can’t keep waiting forever on dealing with these other aspects of my health.  My thyroid appears to be no longer functioning normally.
I feel like this all should have a lot more attention paid to it, but I don’t know what that will mean.  I’m tired of my body acting like I am in full crisis all the time.  I need to find a way to make the stomach acid stop destroying me from the inside.  I think that will help.  It might actually help me to sleep as well.  I wake up at 4 because I have to go to the bathroom.  Then I spend an hour having burning diarrhea.  Then I can’t sleep again.  Maybe this isn’t just about my mental health, you know?

Hiding

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Today was one of the most intense therapy sessions I’ve had in many years.  I don’t cry at therapy much.  Ok, a few tears will flow while I talk.  But I don’t break down sobbing.  I have too much control for that.  Today I sobbed and rocked and felt pain that scared the ever loving shit out of me.  My father raped me from when I was a baby.  He harshly rejected me if I was anything other than an eager whore.  How can any person absorb that?  My father molested me constantly in public and I was not allowed to show signs of it.  I was trained.

I don’t know how to feel that inside me as true and let my daughters touch me.  I feel so disgusting.I feel so soiled and degraded.  So insulted.  My therapist asked if there was anything that would make me feel whole.  I told her I have a broken compass.  I can never save myself.  There is no saving me.  I have to live with that.  My three year old self is gone.  Never to be loved.  Not by anyone.  It hurts so much.  So many years of my life.  My mother and my sister were too far gone by then to really love anyone.  They loved more companionship in shame and misery so they didn’t feel so alone.

It is hard to shake off the shame that was fed into me with the very air I breathed.  It is hard to believe that I could possibly do good.  For anyone.  I feel small and mean and disgusting.  I don’t want to hurt my babies with this evil inside me.  How do I find patience to not pass on cycles of silencing.  How do I show them who I am without making them know things that are wrong for them to know?

I miss my mother.  And I can’t stop crying.

About that muse

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He has decided that he needs to be celibate for a while because he is using sex in unhealthy ways. I think that is a great decision for him given what he has been up to in the last year. It’s hard being the girl who teaches guys what they don’t want. We talked about how awkward things have been on the past few dates. No, he can’t fix me and I’m not ok with him being mad at me because he can’t. I feel like telling people these things about my past puts up a brick wall between us. The phrase “I don’t know what to say” makes me want to break things. I would much prefer that people sit in silence than say that. Noah says, “Wow. That sucked.” As simple as that. It’s why I married him. He gets me.