4 hours of sleep feels awful

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I didn’t sleep last night and as a result I feel awful today. I feel sick. I mean, I did also puke night before last. I feel bad. I feel like I want to freak out and scream and rage and throw things and break things and…

Ugh. I’m not doing that. I’m carping to Noah about how cranky I feel. I’m not taking it out on the kids. I just feel bad and I feel like I can’t get away from it because it is my whole body. I can’t tell how much of it is related to leaving California and all of my feelings there. I did not see any family members. I didn’t even see many friends. Just a couple. We saw a whole bunch of neighbors and people in the community we know–that part was nice. We know a lot of business owners and they will miss us. We are good customers.

But my mother. My nephew. My niece. Auntie. I don’t even know how to wrap my mind around the feelings I’m having.

I just know that in 18 days I will arrive at my home far far far away and I will never have to worry about seeing them again. It’s over. My anxiety can plummet, I hope.

I love my extended family. But I brought my children into the world and it is my responsibility to protect them from being abused.

I will run away. I will take my children with me. We will go somewhere new. Somewhere my children can go to school without fear of being shot in school.

The gun stuff is really getting to me. I have come to realize that several of the people I associate with probably have guns in their homes and I feel completely freaked out that I let my children go to their homes. I wish I hadn’t.

I don’t think I believe in “good people” with guns anymore. And that’s so dogmatic and absolute and a complete 180 from what I used to feel. I know people who have good reasons for guns. They have been stalked. Someone threatens their life.

But I don’t know. People deal with stuff like that in other places without having to have loosey goosey gun laws that result in more than 3,000 children dying from gun violence every year. Almost twice as many children die from being shot than die from cancer.

We choose this. We want to live in this system. We want these results. If we didn’t want this we would change our actions and we are absolutely unwilling to… which means we as a nation are totally ok with thousands of children dying every year so adults can play with their violent toys.

I feel sick. You want to feel super powerful. You want to feel like the “good guy/gal with the gun”. Only you are more likely to kill yourself or a kid than to ever effectively use the gun for protection.

Oh well.

I need to leave. I really do. This didn’t use to bother me the way it does now. But when I look at my children…

I can’t subject them to this.

Golly. So much.

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Noah is driving up to San Francisco to pick up our passports and hopefully our visas. My stomach is going to hurt for the next hour until he tells me the results. My stomach hurt so much from anxiety last night that I vomited.

My body sucks.

I’m probably only 95% packed, but we are tossing everything in the car so it feels less important to be at 100%? Also: my family has learned how to pack! I don’t have to pack for everyone anymore! THAT’S SO COOL! Of course they finally figure it all out when we have less than three weeks of travel left. It’s ok. They will take these skills forward in life and I will feel good about myself.

30 minutes till Noah calls me with results. I feel like I may puke between now and then again. Ugh.

It’s a great day!

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We got an email telling us to come get our passports because the decision is made. Did they tell us the decision? No they did not. Our solicitor says that the way they are giving us the results is promising but we won’t find out until we can make it to the office during business hours tomorrow.

Today is full of appointments: my last massage ever with awesome/racist/she is trying to be less shitty massage therapist lady, kid dentist, dry cleaning pick up, and a manicure because the manicures suck in the UK. Tomorrow I have a follow up appointment with my GP. She removed a mole a week ago and she will give me the results of the toxicology tomorrow. I assume I am fine because I genuinely have no other signs of anything like cancer. It’ll be no big deal.

Tomorrow we will drive back to Portland. We will find out if Dad wants to see us this weekend or not. He ignored my last email. I don’t blame him. He thought we would be spending the whole summer with him and… yeah no. For lots of good reasons. It’s ok if he feels rejected or upset. But I am not going to change my behavior.

We have 9 days till we get on a plane for Bangkok. We will hopefully spend 8 days in Bangkok. Then we will go home.

Fremont is not home anymore. It’s kind of interesting how being here for a week solidifies that for me in my heart. This is not my home. It’s brown. It’s dry. I heard on the radio that California is 40/50 among the states for being friendly. That was slightly worse than I expected after driving all over the country… but not much? I think Alaska is one of the friendliest states. Alaska really is amazing.

I am moving somewhere where I don’t have to feel like my presence is a colonization. I have spent my entire life being aware that I am the descendant of colonizers and that’s a problem. Well, maybe not my entire life but certainly a very high percentage of it.

What will it be like to be white in a place where that doesn’t make me evil? Frankly it’s fucking awesome.

Not long ago a Black woman I am blessed to learn with said she only travels to places where people want to see a face like hers. I understand why she said that. I am not saying that all of Scotland wants me. But… I get why she said that.

Silicon Valley is like the ocean.

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Silicon Valley is vast and engulfing.

Silicon Valley is a place where you can die of thirst floating in water.

Silicon Valley is a place where you must work constantly to stay alive.

Silicon Valley will crush your bones into fine sand.

Silicon Valley contains multitudes and varieties not yet understood.

Silicon Valley produces both great wealth and great devastation.

Silicon Valley does not have a heart of its own despite containing many.

chrysalis

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Sometimes you need to withdraw in order to change. We are approaching a new life. A new approach to almost everything.

You can either change or you can wither and die.

One of my friends told me that having children right now seems stupid because the future is so bleak. I said that having children is one of the greatest acts of hope that a person can engage in. Will the future have big problems? Yes. But I think that I can help make people who can help solve problems.

Hubris? Maybe.

Defiance? Absolutely.

Splash page text

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If you are a sensitive person, the whole rest of my website is probably not a good place for you to poke around. Consider this your trigger warning.

I have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Attention-Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) and recently I was told I am Autistic and my adult-only blog is my attempt to document as much as I can about what it means to try and live in a brain like mine. I have had an unusual life and my blog tends to reflect a lot of extreme changes in emotions. I write stream of conscious and only rarely edit which means that it isn’t the highest writing quality I am capable of producing. I write such quantity at such speed that I do not have time to edit my blog given the other time constraints of my life. Sorry about that.

Since I was a little girl I have been aware that the things I felt compelled to write down did not really resemble what I was told I should write. Telling me how I should be is pretty much a guarantee I will run in the opposite direction. I have been told to be less abrasive, less hostile, less jolting. Well I decided it was time for me to have a space where I really don’t have to give a shit what other people think about what I am writing. If they don’t like it they don’t have to come read it.  I don’t tend to get along well with forum moderators.

Hello to the people who have never heard of me before. I’m not as mean as that paragraph indicates. But I talk about rape and incest as casually as other people talk about sports or computers. If that is something that you have a problem with then you might not like reading anything I write. If you are under the age of 18 you probably shouldn’t read my writing. Legally I am supposed to tell you to go somewhere else. This is a great place! Or, go read my kid-friendly writing!

I talk about extremely graphic sexuality regularly and I don’t give ongoing trigger warnings. I’m a walking trigger warning. You should assume that I might say something upsetting in my writing at any point and read only when you are up to dealing with the fact that there are people like me in the world. My existence and my words about my life are not actually about you even if you suspect I might be writing about you. I probably am not.

I write because I have a lot of things in my head that need to get out. I need them to exist and be real in the universe somehow and the only real outlet I have is to write them down. I want it to be known that I am here. That I am thinking. That I have been. Not everyone needs that in the same way. But incest and rape will come up constantly. I write about being white trash. I write about being suicidal. I write about depression and anxiety and PTSD. And parenting. I write graphically about sex and sexuality and bdsm. I write about being queer but appearing entirely heteronormative. I try to consciously examine my privilege as a (currently) upper middle class white woman. I try to look at the weird behaviors I developed as a child living in extreme poverty.

My husband wooed me by telling me that if you can’t look back on yourself eighteen months ago and say, “Man I really sucked then you aren’t trying hard enough.” I have been homeless and starving. I have been to graduate school. I taught high school. I was a stage manager and theatre rigger. I ran a marathon. I spent 5.5 months traveling around the US with my kids.

I don’t know what I’ll do next. But there is a lot left to learn. I have two kids. We are home schooling. I have a husband. He’s really nice to me. I kind of do the dirty hippy thing; so weird eco-focused stuff randomly comes up.

I have written two books so far. I’m absolutely convinced there will be more.

So welcome to my sandbox. Be civil or go away. Avoid using the word “should” if you want me to listen to your advice. Just sayin’. I like hearing stories from other people about what they have done. Blogging is a strange beast. I do like comments. I understand that my writing is very hard to comment on in a neutral fashion. I get butt hurt over the smallest things and that makes people feel like they should walk on egg shells. I get it. But I like knowing you are out there.

Last quicky practice.

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When I was a high school teacher I had a phrase written above the top of my white board. “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” The kids thought I did that to inspire them and they were only partly right. Mostly I wanted to remind myself that no one in that room had previous knowledge of me. I was allowed to reinvent myself over and over to fit any shape I needed to fit.

When you grow up in an incestuous family you know there is something wrong with you, with your whole family, by the time you are in high school. You know that people aren’t going to react to you the

Or not.

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After a bit more examination the shed construction will require pieces I don’t have and I should have help. The manual and the website say over and over not to try it alone. Ok. I’ll listen for once.

Hm. What to do with today then?

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If you think that having a child will end your loneliness.. unfortunately not so much. You spend a lot of time alone in your head. You spend a lot of time not being able to do anything for yourself but you can’t go anywhere. I watched the movie “17 girls” this morning.

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I was asked a whole bunch of questions else-net. I will put the answer in both places because I think that this person is not the only one who will want this information from me in the future. First and foremost: whereas my experience has been broad I am just one person. Your personal experiences are going to be different from mine in ways I cannot predict in advance. Take everything I say as very gentle guidance and not as an order. I am not the boss of you. Even though I speak in absolutes and I am a HUGE bossypants. How do you find people? Well I started on the internet because I am a lucky duck and I came of age in that era. I went to www.bondage.com, www.alt.com, www.match.com (ironically where I met my first “online dom”–that’s a lame story if ever there was one), and IRC. I was pre-www.fetlife.com. I don’t actually recommend fetlife as a good place to meet people. Go to munches. (Yes, I know people in NJ. Let me get in touch with people and I’ll see what I can find out about your area.) When you go to munches go with the expectation that most people will be really old, very over weight and fairly ugly. Of course that will not be even remotely true of a lot of people you meet. But if you go with that expectation then you will be prepared for the reality of the bdsm community. We are not the beautiful people. But we are real people. We are creepy sometimes. We are overly intense. People who find there way to the bdsm community have almost certainly spent a lot of their lives feeling rejected, wrong, and disliked. Not everyone but a large chunk. Go expecting to be your own entertainment when you get to a munch. Getting to know people sucks. It’s awkward and stiff and terror inducing. These are perverts. Many of these people would cheerfully tie you up and beat you until you scream bloody murder. The good ones will only do so if you say “Pretty pretty please with a cherry on top.” There will be predators around though. You will have to keep you safe. That is one of the hardest parts of coming into the bdsm community as someone with significant mental health issues. Trust. Bdsm is ALL about trust. The physical sensations are nice and all but really what we are playing with is power. The sadomasochists are going to string me up from a tree. I’m not talking about Dominance/submission. Not all people are into specific power differentiated roles. You don’t have to be either. Maybe you are just into the physical sensations. But I tell you that it feels different to be hit by a friend you love and trust than by someone who doesn’t like you very much. That trust and power bit are very important. If you are officially diagnosed with mental health problems I can guess that you have a hard time picking people who are really safe to be around. I may not be right but I probably am. When you have mental health problems your perceptions of the world are always a bit at an odd angle. It is hard to develop the conscious ability to be rational in judging whether someone is safe or not. You can’t necessarily go by the clues other people tell you to use. For one thing the most important book you will ever read is The Gift of Fear by Gavin DeBecker. When you have that small icki uncomfortable feeling in the pit of your stomach get away from that person and that activity. That doesn’t mean that a creepy guy at the munch means you never come back to the munch. But if you feel chased off by someone creepy (could be a woman or a person of non-binary gender) then the right choice is to network online and find a buddy for the next munch. You still should go meet people. Munches aren’t for everyone. I have also had great luck hunting for partners on www.okcupid.com. Ostensibly it is a “vanilla” site but yeah right. If you want to top you need to make sure you never inappropriately hit anyone. If that sentence makes you feel vaguely worried, well then you need to spend more time thinking about it. Enthusiastic consent is the only way to begin a consensual bdsm scene. If someone is saying, “I’m not sure” then you don’t start. You have to both be completely sure that you want to be doing what you are doing. (I know a lot of experienced bdsm people who will reply that they start bdsm scenes with murky consent sometimes under some circumstances. The point of this essay is for people with mental health issues who are just starting. No, 301 play just isn’t a good plan.) As a beginner negotiate for what you will do rather than what you won’t do. Creative sadists will make you very sorry you thought you could limit the things you don’t want to have happen to you. Take my word for it. Negotiate the activities.

Not that kind of girl.

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Sometimes the internet reminds me that other people do not like the sort of girl I am. Whereas I am not embarrassed by my body and I don’t dislike it and I don’t want to change it… I’m not real big on being half dressed and provocative in front of people. I’m a different kind of atten