Category Archives: adult-only

Published in the adult-only category

Today isn’t starting well.

I would call this morning a comedy of errors but that would imply that I thought some of it was funny. I’m not laughing. I hate how one fuck up has long-reaching consequences.

So my washing machine broke. I ended up having to bring clothes to a laundromat. I lost a load, apparently. I don’t fucking know how. So I don’t have the blanket for my bed or a few pieces of other random clothes and a bunch of towels. One of the pieces of clothing were my best pair of running pants. By “best pair” I mean the most comfortable. They had many holes in the seems. The only reason they stayed up was because of a sturdy draw string. BUT THEY HAD POCKETS.

So today I need to run eight miles. Noah is having a hard time in a variety of ways so I stayed in bed with him until past my normal running time which means the kids came in with us. One thing lead to another and I wasn’t starting out to run until I had been awake for more than three hours. I haven’t eaten anything. I’m starting to get jittery and psycho.

And the only god damn pair of clean fucking pants are my painting pants. They are yoga pants that are about seven years old, a size too big, and they’ve been through two full pregnancies with me. By the fourth step they are completely down around my hips. By the sixth step they are starting to try to be below my bottom.

And I forgot to charge my phone last night because the kids were on a roll. It was a very long and busy day. So I wasn’t going to be able to listen to any music on this pity party death march. But I brought my phone anyway to see if the mapping program would work. I had to wear the water backpack in order to have a place to carry the phone.

I uhhh apparently didn’t seal the bag properly. So me and my phone got completely soaked within the first block. I walked back to my house threw the bag violently against the house and gently set my phone down on the kitchen counter to try again. I got a mile before I sat down on a neighbors driveway to cry. No. I can’t run like this.

My phone is becoming a frequent problem on runs. The battery won’t last through a four hour run. It goes completely dead just after three hours. Not to mention that my Android phone has decided it no longer needs to load Google mail or Google talk.

All of these are stupid, small problems that can be solved with a little bit of time and/or money. Neither of which I have before going running this morning. So I’m not going running this morning. Hopefully I will find time later today to run. I am not up for this fucking death march of sobbing this morning. God damn ridiculous. With pants that won’t fucking stay up. I’m about to just start running in jeans. At least they fucking fit.

My penultimate pair of running shoes (I had to replace the Stem’s. Apparently that company changed names. I don’t like them as much now) were a switch from the strictly “running” Vibrams to “multi-sport” because they were $40 less. They tore my feet to shreds. I have horrible burst open blisters and these deep weirdly ridged callouses. After two weeks.

Running is getting harder and harder. 45 days. I’m not very good at shoving myself out of bed in the still-dark to go run in the mornings. I feel bitter and angry and pissy. I want to hit things and scream. I don’t. fucking. want. to. But Noah’s work schedule has been harder lately. And when push comes to shove I have to be the flexible one. Which means I have to god damn suck it up and I should probably be out running at 5:30 so that I get it done before I am shaking with hunger and hating everyone in the whole fucking world.

I feel really resentful right now. I was supposed to have till the youngest kid was three. Well, fuck me. That was too long to ask for.

I’m grateful someone asked me if she could take my kids to the zoo today. Yes. Yes. Yes. I need a fucking break. I need to do laundry. And clean the disgusting bathroom. And cry without having to be polite about it.

Fuck everything.

Sex.

3 Replies

I feel like a cheater when I let my kids watch the iPad while I take a break. I can hear it through the garage door: an episode of Bo, an episode of Busytown. Then mom has to get off her ass. Usually it happens once a day. Sometimes twice.

Our schedule is out of whack. I’m feeling discombobulated. I’m not used to going out on Mondays. That is almost always a stay at home and rest day for me. I do chores. When I leave the house at 8:15 and don’t come home until 5:30 I feel like I want to lay down and die. Holy crap that wears me out. Don’t wanna.

It’s weird being a pet. Only I’m not. I think that is the part of being a kept woman I never really understood properly. You are not supposed to have to do heavy manual labor along with your sex work. Kept women are not maids. Why do I confuse the two?

Because I don’t know who I want to be when I grow up. I’ve never been sure if I wanted to be a whore or not. It’s a family tradition. Both my father and my brother told me to. Literally. Before I even hit puberty. My mother told me that if you get married you have to be prepared to be a whore for that man. I was verrrrrry careful to check out the sexual abilities of people before I decided if I wanted to get emotionally involved with them. Boring sex forever would be a deal breaker.

Which is part of why I am so confused by the not-orgasming thing. I really like sex with Noah. We have a lot of it. It’s part of the deal. Deliberately and clearly stated. That’s the deal: lots of sex. If I am truly uninterested I am getting better about saying no. It’s still hard for me. In the core of my being I have a hard time believing it is ok to say no. I grew up reading The Clan of the Cave Bear. That was one of my first exposures to a more adult idea of sex. Clearly it was not the civilized view of adult behavior.

But I am Other. In ways large and small. Hell I even have type O blood. I am a bloody Neanderthal. It’s not that no woman gets to say no to sex. It’s that people like me don’t get to say no to sex. I know the other women when I meet them. We have a way of sizing people up. “Would I fuck you?” It’s hard to miss.

I’m kind of hoping that a lot of my response change is due to still breastfeeding. I think I am dry though. I’ve never been able to tell when I am ovulating. I cycle but it is getting farther and father apart with the running so if nothing else the running is probably suppressing ovulation. My body doesn’t think it’s a good idea to make a baby right now. It is so fucking right.

It is weird to discover what other people must get from sex. Most of the sex I have had has not been what you might call loving and bonding. When I hunt I look specifically for highly aggressive men. To wit: I look for rapists. I try to hurry up and say yes in the first few minutes. Then even if I ever change my mind I will keep my stupid mouth shut. Because I’m not entitled to say no.

I have tried to say no a few times. I don’t drink or do heavy drugs like that around people any more. I am terrified of getting drunk around anyone unsafe ever again. Dan handed me drinks and told me to drink drink drink long after I said, “I think I’m drunk enough.” But I wanted him to like me. So I woke up with a sticky wet cunt and an empty bed at 2am. I had told him in advance that I didn’t have unprotected sex with new partners. Oh well, right?

I’m fighting the idea of getting involved with communities again. There are too many Dan’s. I’m afraid to go if Noah isn’t with me and Noah doesn’t share pretty much any of my interests. And soon he will have far less time for me. My eighteen months aren’t going to happen. He wants to get started in January. He has someone to work with. They are both very fired up and eager. I’m god damn requiring that I get through Christmas this year. I have been a work widow. I’m very sad about doing it with a two and a four year old. Calli is just… not… quite… old enough. It’s going to be hard. And I’m not supposed to spend money. I feel like I am seeing all of the ways to get my needs met ripped away from me. The only way I will be able to live through that and be a nice person is if I reduce my needs. That is going to be very hard.

I’m not sure if I am being a martyr–I don’t think so. I’m making a conscious choice to invest in our future together. If it works then I will be very glad I did it. If it doesn’t, well… that happens. I’m scared though.

I’m not sure how to come out of this without being bitter. I have to. For all of us. Because this is all I have. I can’t fuck this up. I truly can’t. This is the highest stakes task I will have this lifetime. Will I do a good job raising my kids? Will they want to have relationships with me when they are adults? Will they make it through to adulthood happy and healthy and ready to be adults?

My crystal ball is busted. Do you have one?

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of telling myself, “I want to be here. I want this.” It’s complicated. I’m really looking forward to the marathon. Forty six days to go. Then things can settle down with my body. I can stop looking ahead to something and fussing over that and giving a lot of myself over to it.

I need to not look forward for a while. I need to just be. I’m not particularly good at that. I think that will help me with feeling frustrated all the time. I have a few more house project things to do. I finally went and bought a damn ceiling fan and light replacement for the play room. It’s been broken for over a year. With one thing and another it has just never made it to the top of the list. It is currently at the top of the list. Now I need to find spare energy. I also need to do dishes, pack lunch, and hurry my sorry ass up because park day is going to start in an hour in Alameda. Gotta go.

(Although before I do I will say that it worked today when I let Noah fuck me for a while then I pushed him off and got myself off with a vibrator. Then I let him fuck me again and I came during the sex. I’ll be doing that again.)

I don’t think that getting over my anger is the point.

Leave a reply

“Get busy living or get busy dying.”- Shawshank Redemption.

Sometimes it feels like life is about learning how to come to grips with your wasted potential. I could do _______ if only ___________. It’s a long series of conversations with yourself as you narrow down possibilities in life until the only path you could possibly take is completely obvious. Look, you’ve been working towards this all along. You did ______ and then you did _____ so obviously ______.

But believing that requires some underlying belief in a greater plan. Things are not inevitable. Things are changeable right up until the second they happen. It’s random. It has to be.

It has to be for me because otherwise there would have to be some specific reason I was picked out of a hat to suffer far more than other people. I’m sorry, there is no Kushiel looking out for my well being. I’ve read the Bible. I’ve read big parts of the Book of Mormon. I’ve read books by Martin Buber and St. Thomas (Aquinas, of course) and Sr. Thomas More and and. I did all the classes required for a masters degree in English. I got good grades. I read. I studied. I didn’t know I was supposed to be practicing handwriting. Whoops. Anyway.

I am educated. I have read what the masters think of the world. Sometimes I agree with them but often I don’t. I have had significant personal experience that disagrees with their beliefs.

I have two ways I can handle that. I can decide that they are right or I can decide that I am right.

Now, I like to hedge my bets. I have strong opinions but I’m willing to reconsider them given reason. It’s very rare that I bother to try, I am human after all. But when something challenges my belief structure I have to think about it very hard. I know I am not always right (really, D).

I kind of feel like I should stay off social networking sites for a while. I am feeling too many “shoulds”. I need to do what I am going to do and not worry about whether other people approve or not. Of course there are lots of people who don’t. Will I let that stop me? No. Then why let it bother me?

Because when people I love reject me in harsh ways it bothers me. When people I love tell people they think I am dangerous it bothers me.

Are they right?

I’m told I need to get over my anger. I’m not sure that it is anger I need to get over. I need to get over wanting things from other people. I need to really and truly not give a shit if a given person likes me or not. I know who my friends are.

As the legal next-of-kin I think I feel very reasonable about treating the God-Mamas as family. They take the kids every month. They have a very serious on-going relationship. They are invested and serious about it. That’s the last time I am going to do that to my kids. My family unit is closed. I can care about me. I can care about Noah. I can care about Shanna. I can care about Calli. I should not try to make sure there is stuff left for other people. Maybe there will be and maybe there won’t. My friends understand. They really don’t have high expectations of me–which should be depressing only it isn’t. They like me anyway.

Anger and anxiety are both emotions that are about energy flow. (In my opinion. I’m going to babble even more whacko than usual tonight. Sorry. It’s been a very long and very sober day and I’ve had time to sit with my anger more than I usually do.) I have a lot of energy. I have spent my entire life feeling like I am sitting with a burning wire of energy in the middle of my body. It churns my stomach. It constricts my throat and my lungs.

People are monolithic for me in a way that I don’t think most people understand. My life has always changed a lot. Every so often I up and move either geographically or in social sphere. As I age there is more and more overlap in communities. I’m having a harder and harder time going out. It’s scarier than I like admitting.

If I had been funneling my whole life towards what I am doing now the path would have looked different, don’t you think? It all depends on how you frame it. I’m a stay at home mom. I used to be a high school teacher. I’ve been married for nearly six years (anniversary is in a couple of weeks). I live less than twenty-eight miles away from my elementary school (well, one of them). My middle and high schools (at least five of them) are slightly closer to me than that. I’m a hippie. I dress very conservatively most of the time. I don’t have a television or watch anything approximating television programming on a computer. I garden a lot. I homeschool. I do building projects.

I am angry. I stay home a lot because I am afraid and I am fucking angry that I am afraid. Today we went to the post office. It went fine. The kids started to get into things but were easily distracted. Nevertheless I spent the whole time feeling very anxious. I was afraid my kids would get yelled at. I was afraid I would get yelled at. I was afraid the woman helping me would be mean. Good freakin grief. It’s ridiculous. I started crying and hyperventilating and the woman helping me told me it would be ok. That’s god damn embarrassing. I’m a fucking adult.

You want to tell me I should just get over it again? Oh fuck off. But the whole episode was under a minute. It’s not like it is a big deal. Only it hurts. It hurts my stomach. It hurts my heart. It hurts my throat. It hurts my head. It hurts my lungs. I feel like I am dying. If I could just stop it I would. There is no magic drug for me. The only thing I can do is dope myself to get the panic to stop. Look at any psych drug on the market. That’s what they do. They do it in different ways, but whatever.

I don’t really see a point in trying to live a long life if I am going to spend a lot of time every day in pain because my brain doesn’t understand that I am not in danger. It’s not like she had the power to prevent me from sending my packages. If she was really bitchy I could have gone to UPS. (But I’ll say: the gruffness from the ladies in the Mountain View USPS is just a front. They are softies.) She had no power to hurt me. Someone feeling irritated by my kids in the fifteen minutes we are in the post office is really not my problem. Why do I care?

Oh wait. That’s called trauma. Sort of. Kind of. I’m not sure. At some point I have to get it through my fool head that there are assholes in the world who are going to be rude to me and mine. It’s not about anything I’ve done. Well, not necessarily. For an awful lot of people I just have to exist. I have to have the god damn audacity to open my white trash mouth. I am offensive.

People like it when you are afraid of them. It makes them feel protective. It makes them feel big. It makes them feel powerful. People like it. I have spent a lot of time afraid and I can see how people react.

I feel like I am searching, always searching, for what I supposed to be doing. How am I wasting my potential? I don’t know. I look for seeds in my life to help me tell the future but unfortunately the future hasn’t been written yet. I have to write it.

It means I’m not looking at right now. It means I’m scared. I’m angry because a lot of people want to tell me things that all boil down to being raped is a womans own fault because the only logical conclusion I can come to is those people believe I deserve to be raped. I cannot put my mind around that. No. I can’t. It’s not possible. No one is born to be raped. Just because I have a cunt that does not decide my destiny.

I am a stay at home mom. I am a stay-at-home-a-lot mom. Well, I like taking BART on outings. Then we can take the bus and I can be stoned all day. I can be calm. I can let the children go at their pace. I don’t feel anxious about being in other peoples way. I don’t feel guilty that I am sitting when obviously this more deserving person (like a guy in his 50’s) should be sitting. No. I have two squirming kids. I should be fucking sitting. Otherwise they will fall and hurt themselves. That’s just stupid.

But I worry. I worry about offending people. I worry about making other people feel annoyed by my physical presence. You’d never guess by how I write, would you? In the privacy of a room by myself I have the biggest cojones of them all. Please join me in a derisive snicker, right?

I have nothing to offer the world to justify the worth of my opinions. I am fairly unlikely to pursue further academic studies. At this moment in time that sounds like hell on earth. Which unfortunately may mean I do it some day. I’m stupid like that. Next time I will practice my handwriting. And it won’t be English. Fuck English.

I don’t think that I need to get over my anger. I need to find a way to use it. I have a lot of energy. When I decide to get going on a project I work like a demon. I get a very large amount done in a short period of time. But I’m a woman. It’s fairly unlikely to ever be noticed. It helps that I pick lame menial jobs because I think that is what someone like me should be doing. I think I never noticed that I stopped working at Boston Market. I still think I am an ignorant fool who cannot be right. Look, all these people tell me I am wrong.

Well, fuck them. I don’t like their system. There is no way for me to win in their system; I was born damned.

Before you tell me to stop being angry let me hit you as many times as I have been hit. Let me rape you as many times as I have been raped. Then I will put you into a culture that tells you it is all your fucking fault that it happened. Then we can talk about anger.

What else did you expect to have happen? Do you know how many people in uniform I’ve had sneer that at me when something inappropriate and illegal happens to me? I can’t really remember. For a while there I was put on drugs against my will when I was a teenager and I can’t remember that period so an exact number is truly beyond me.

I have been told to sit down and shut up and don’t get angry all my life. I don’t think that is a message I should listen to. I think that is a message that seals my doom. I’m not saying that everyone has to be angry with me. I’m saying that once you are marked as prey–once you are truly afraid they smell you. If I am angry enough I can drive them away. I no longer look like easy prey even though they know what I am. I finally got close enough to the herd to not be the weakest link.

And now that I am closer to the herd the mother fuckers around me are going, “Oh shit, who let her show up?” It’s interesting to watch. I just piss people off. I don’t even have to try. I just have to say what I think. I make people angry. Even if I wasn’t angry to start with. It’s interesting.

I make people angry when I speak to them. Maybe I should just stop speaking to them. I don’t mean become selectively mute, that’s a bit extreme. I mean that maybe I should stop setting the bar so god damn low on who I try to become friends with. I should act like I’m worth jumping through some hoops. People do it. They really do. It’s kind of weird.

I think I should stay of social networking sites for a while. Outside of my house there is nothing but bad. Inside my house I live in Wonderland. It’s really nice here. We sing and play games. We dance and should and run around. We paint and cook and garden. We grow up together. We learn how to do things together. We learn how to gently coexist with another human being. When someone slaps you in the face while you are sleeping it is perfectly acceptable to yell, “What the hell are you doing?!” before you are actually awake. (I am very articulate while mostly asleep.) It’s not ok to yell such a thing while fully conscious. We have Rules. No name calling. No hitting. You can’t put anyone down. Everyone deserves to have space but we need to be careful how our space effects other people. Every day involves “I love you” and “I am really glad I know you” and hugs and kisses.

But I know with every day that marches forward that two of these relationships are going to change. They are going to go off into the world. They are not going to stay with me and meet my needs. I have to do that for myself.

Some people can wait until the kids are teenagers to worry about it. My kid is about to turn two. Oh shit. I only have sixteen years to plan. I’m not sure that is long enough. I’m not sure that is long enough for me to finish growing up. I feel guilty because Noah is my provider. Because we have decided that his salary is good for both of. We don’t want another thing pulling from the available energy in our lives–probably ever. I feel like I am wasting my potential. I feel like I am letting down my feminism. I feel like I am setting myself up for a fall. I feel like…

I feel like I am waiting for the inevitable conclusion of the life of a girl like me. What terrible thing will happen next? How will Noah turn on me? Will he wait until a year or two after the kids are gone and say, “I just stayed for the kids.” I don’t think so. I don’t think he could fake that facial expression. He’s a good liar, don’t get me wrong, but not that good. Not with me. I know when that face happens. It isn’t in company. I’ve been watching this man for a while now. I intend to keep watching him. My very survival depends on him.

That’s the bit that is weird and hard to swallow. Basically because it is a crock of shit. Whatever. I wouldn’t necessarily like everything I had to do, but if I had to do it I would.

It’s not that I need to stop being angry. Anger happens. It stops when it stops. But I do really need to stop looking for it. I investigate the candidates before every election and beyond that I need to just live in my little bubble. I feel like we exist outside the modern world with the glaring exception of the glowing box I am staring at. Ok, not really outside the modern world–give me a break. But we do live with a shocking lack of popular culture. Of any kind, really. I suppose we listen to some music but certainly not every day. I would say not every week. Ok, that’s not true for me right now. I listen to music while I run. That’s a new hobby this year. I’m not sure how that will go long term. And my phone battery can’t play music through a whole long run so my phone is now annoying useless on runs. Bummer.

People are going to think I’m a trainwreck. To that I cock my head to the side and say, “Have you ever seen a train wreck?” Things have settled down in my life remarkably over the last few years. Cutting off my family was hard and caused a big bump, yes. I was abused as a child, yes. I haven’t been raped in more than five years? Something like that. That’s the longest stretch of my life. I’m waiting for the next thing that will hurt me. It is very confusing to my brain that I have this nice man in the house.

I would have been fine today if I was able to cut before going to the post office. Because when I start to feel panic I press on the fresh wounds and that keeps me level. It’s more reliable than any drug I’ve ever tried. But people get quite upset with me, so I stopped. I think that really I just don’t want to teach my children to do it. I don’t want them to learn my panic and fear and need for pain.

It’s not that those monolithic “them” are actually all bad. But I have no reason to go fishing to find out. It’s kind of freeing, really. I don’t have to care if people will want to do me ill or not if I don’t give them an opportunity.

What does it feel like to have distant community? I only sort of know. I get it somewhat in the Leather community. I really need some place I can belong with my kids. I’m trying to build places. We are consistent (mostly, barring various events like a washing machine flooding my garage). We have patterns. We have friends. We have relationships.

What is it I am supposed to get over my anger for? What is it that I am supposed to do? Ahhh grasshopper–what I should do is not make people feel uncomfortable. Sorry mate, that ship sailed. I’m going to make you uncomfortable.

I make plans. And I make plans. And I make plans. When you call the suicide hotline one of the first thing they ask you is if you have “a plan”. I laugh. I have plans. I have worked out so many ways to die that I can’t casually list them all. First I do this and then I do that and then I have to look at this and then… I know the dozens of steps involved in any number of ways to die. How accidental can I make it look? Where should I leave the consolidated list of passwords so Noah isn’t screwed? Where… etc.

But the point isn’t to stop being angry. Or really even to stop being afraid. That can’t be the point. If that is the point I will always fail. You can’t decide to stop something. You have to decide to do something else instead. I decide every day over and over. It’s exhausting. It’s hard. I have to sit here all day every day thinking carefully about what I say and what I do. You have read this far in my blog. Surely you think I am a psycho about to fly off the handle any moment now. I’m truly not. I’m pretty quiet. Sometimes I speak unexpectedly sharply. Sometimes my tone of voice is more harsh than seems appropriate to the topic. If I am alone with my family I instantly say, “Oh I’m sorry that came out harsher than I meant it. I’ll try again.” I expect my kids to do the same thing. I say, “Try again.” Shanna says it to me now. It’s interesting to negotiate.

My children are not in charge of me. My children are not responsible for me and they never will be. But they get to have preferences to. How do I sit back and very slowly learn someone like this? I don’t know. I’ve never done very well at close intimate relationships. I just know how to spend a lot of time alone in a room. But I’m trying. I get a couple of hours of sitting alone in a room every day or I feel like I am going to lose my mind.

I didn’t used to be this way. It feels like the anger is the war between my need for people and my terror of them. I don’t want to have any of the feelings I have about people and I can’t make them go away just by wishing and I am fucking angry about it. I hate that I cry over stupid things. I couldn’t figure out a form. It wasn’t a big deal.

The last time it was truly a big deal was when Denise said, “Have you ever had anyone close to you die.” I didn’t let her set the terms of my reality then–she doesn’t get to tell my my father and brother were not close to me–and I don’t think I should let random assholes on the internet. That seems kind of stupid and weak minded, don’t you think?

There is a lot of “you” tonight. I don’t think I do that very often. I don’t even know who I am writing to. I periodically rotate through various people in my head and no one fits. I’m not ranting at anyone. I’m ranting at the unseen you. The one who hurts me. The one whose plan it is. The one I don’t believe in.

I’m very angry at God because I can’t be an atheist. I have known things. I have to believe in my own experiences or I’m fucked. But I don’t think there is a plan. I don’t think it’s the Christian God. I don’t know what it is. But something knows I am here. I’m not sure it cares much one way or another. But it knows something more than me. I don’t know how much more. And it’s probably fallible. Isn’t everything?

I feel like I have no culture to retreat to. I am not Christian. I am currently upper middle class according to my bank balance. In attitude and behavior I am white trash. I don’t know how else to be. I offend people. I have always offended people. I have the audacity to be raped and complain about it. Don’t I know I should shut up?

I live for Sundays.

1 Reply

On Sundays Noah doesn’t have to work. Ok, that’s not true. But he doesn’t have to leave the house and he doesn’t get as cranky with me wanting to be in the same room distracting him.

I like the way he looks at me. When he looks at me I feel washed clean. I feel like I must be ok or he wouldn’t look at me that way. I feel like I do good in the world. I feel like I am good. I feel loved. I feel important. You don’t look at a pretty flower the way Noah looks at me. You look at things that change your life the way Noah looks at me.

I can feel the panic and the fear quiet down when he looks at me like that. That smile shouts louder than all the evil little voices in my brain. I can’t hear them over him. It’s hard that he doesn’t spend very much time looking at me. He’s busy. He has a lot of things he has to spend his time looking at. I live for those moments when I get his full attention.

Noah holds me together and tells me I am worth knowing. He thinks I should take up more space in the world. He likes being married to a writer. He tells people about it eagerly. He admires me. I inspired him to go write a book. (Then he promptly made far more money than me in far less time. I feel slightly huffy. But my writing isn’t stuff people will pay a lot for.)

It’s hard that I constantly feel reminded of how I am less than him. My labor is worth nothing compared to him. He has value. He is appreciated. He is high status.

I’m that freak crying at home.

I don’t understand why he likes me. Well, I do. He feels distinctly alienated from society as well. Last night he told me, “I never have to worry about you turning to me and saying, ‘Why can’t you be normal?'” I laughed. No. I don’t need you to be normal. If you were normal I’d be waiting for you to fetch a pitch fork and come after me. Normal people all seem to hate me after a while. I do things wrong. I make them feel bad.

When I am with Noah I feel safe. It’s not that he is protective–he isn’t. But he is my provider. He is my helpmate. He cleaned the house while I napped on the couch yesterday because he knows I try to go through and do it every evening and I was too tired. That kind of thing makes me cry. He knows it is important to me to clean up right before bed otherwise I trip in the morning because I walk around in the dark. Technically he trips more often than I do. So it was kind of selfish. But not really.

Noah could scorn the household tasks. He is supporting me in a lavish lifestyle. Noah could look down on me so easily. Noah could think that I owe him. And he doesn’t. Near as I can tell it doesn’t cross his mind. Sure we make jokes about trading sex for heavy lifting and every so often I find something so unpleasant I tell him, “I’ll give you a blow job if you do that.” I feel slightly mixed about it but only slightly. I’d give him a blow job if he hinted he wanted it so it’s not like it is a big bar.

In other news I found my leather ball gown yesterday. The one Noah gave me for my 23rd birthday. I played for a bit with him. He was very excited. I am glad I get to wear it for him.

Shanna woke up. Time to go.

This is why I don’t have friends.

1 Reply

So someone decided to tell me that I am “too smart” to believe a fairly extreme interpretation of the opinion of the laws of my country. Specifically, that lawmakers who push through anti-abortion laws have more interest in preserving the parental rights of rapists than in protecting me.

I feel so much rage. I would like to punch that man in the face. I don’t think I should be in a room with him for a while. I’m fucking tired of the condescension. This is why I don’t have more friends. I have a hard time suffering fools.

When I was eighteen years old I met a guy online and brought him to a party. He drugged me and raped me. I called the police the next day and told them that I would like to press charges. I had physical evidence. It was soon enough that I probably could have gone to the hospital for a rape kit and to be tested for the drugs he gave me. But I was stupid and I didn’t think of it. I called the police and asked them to help me.

I was told “What did you expect?” The officer refused to press charges. It might harm my rapist’s career in the Coast Guard. There is no doubt in my mind that the Sheriff who told me that I got what I deserved would be on the side of that guy getting to know his kid. I’m really grateful that most of my rapists decided to wear condoms. That bit of magnanimous action is probably the only reason I have not had to have an abortion or be a severely abusive mother. I promise you that if I had a child because someone raped me I wouldn’t be a good mother. It’s not the kid’s fault–of course. But shit rolls down hill.

“Too smart” how condescending, rude, and arrogant. Ah, so I must be smart enough to agree with a man. I see. Well I suppose that means you are giving me undue credit.

I live in a world that goes back and forth between how it treats me. On one hand women should be pure and innocent until they meet the right man. On the other hand men have needs and there should be trashy women they don’t have to care about who are required to meet those needs whenever desired. Try to tell me I am wrong.

I have been the whore no one had to give a shit about for most of my life. I am self-sufficient. My needs are my problem and no one else’s. That has been made very clear to me.

Noah is different. The only reason I understand that not everyone is treated as a hole who is required to serve whom ever when ever is because I read books and I finally found someone who is nice to me. I am so grateful that he is nice to me. He really is. He’s gentle. He tries to be considerate. When he is self-absorbed for a while and I break down crying he doesn’t get mad at me. He apologizes for ignoring me and loves on me. (Not sex.) It’s so weird. Someone cares about me. Someone thinks that me feeling good and safe and loved is important. How very different from the rest of the world.

People are happy to say that they think I should feel good, even that I deserve to feel good and safe and loved. But they won’t do anything about their behavior to help me feel that way. I’m just supposed to magically start feeling that way. I don’t know about other people, but it doesn’t work that way for me.

In order for me to feel safe I have to avoid people who are going to denigrate my intelligence if I have the audacity to have different life experiences. When a man is arguing with me about rape rhetoric it’s not exactly a level playing field. They are trying to argue the ideals and the best possible case scenario so they can look reasonable and logical. I’m telling you what has happened to me. Fuck you. Don’t fucking tell me how our system should work and look down on me because it doesn’t fucking work that way.

The last guy who raped me before Noah showed up to rescue me didn’t use a condom. He got me so drunk I passed out and had unprotected sex with me. I would have been thrilled to have sex with him–with a condom. He didn’t want that so he stacked the deck and had the kind of sex he wanted to have. It’s a good thing I was on birth control. How do you think the Dickens Fair community would have reacted if I had shown up pregnant claiming that one of the popular actors raped me? No one would believe it. I got what I was asking for anyway. And I would have had to share custody.

Don’t fucking tell me I am “too smart” to believe that politicians want to actively hurt me. Life has taught me that slowly and painfully. I think I should do some unfriending. It’s really not worth the aggravation.

I think every so often about the fact that if I hadn’t been white I don’t think there is any chance in the world I would be where I am. I would not be safe. I would still be suffering. It feels wildly unfair. I have a lot of survivors guilt.

If I wasn’t white then the lawyer who defended me when I was five wouldn’t have allowed his daughter to be friends with me. I doubt he would have worked for me for cheap. That annuity changed my life. If I wasn’t white I wouldn’t have been interesting to someone like Tom. He helped support me for years and gave me a safe, stable place to attend college from. I doubt I would have finished college without his help. Noah probably wouldn’t have recognized me as being like him if I wasn’t white.

It all feels like an accident. I feel like I got lucky over and over. I only got the help I needed because my outside appearance was pleasing enough. Because men with money want to fuck me and in this country the men with money are mainly white.

I’m not supposed to say that, right?

In this country you have rights if you have enough power and money to fight for them. Poor women of color are rarely in that category. When white men tell me that I am being melodramatic when I interpret laws in the ways that I do I feel so much rage and anger I want to physically attack them. How god damn dare you try to interpret the experiences of people who will never have your advantages. Never have your opportunities. Never have the protection you enjoy under the law.

And when my “friends” start lecturing about how taxes are theft and the government is stealing their money to give it away to unfit people I want to go on a shooting spree. I’m not sure I qualify as a Libertarian any more.

You have enough. You have so much that you have a lot of needless fluff in your life. You have extra money and food and everything else. Why are you such a selfish piece of shit that you think that other people should suffer because you don’t want to share? Welcome to America. If you can get it for yourself then you can have it, no matter how many people you have to step on and hurt in the way. If you want to live a reasonably decent life with dignity you had got damn better pick the right kind of white family to be born into.

I am so angry.

I am angry with myself that I don’t have more energy to work in social justice now. But I can’t. I would do a lot of damage to my kids if I tried. That feels humiliating. I can’t do much to change the world right now. All I can do is talk about how fucked up it is. I can talk about how it has hurt me. Often when I talk about how it has hurt me other women will come talk to me about their stories. They feel less alone. If that is the only gift I have to give at this point then I had better start curling ribbon to put on top.

I don’t hate all white men. Noah doesn’t condescend to me. He doesn’t denigrate my intelligence. He doesn’t insult me. He is fairly unusual among the white men of my experience. He doesn’t act like it takes an act of Congress to force him to apologize when he is accidentally a douche. I didn’t know that men like him existed.

Noah is my first experience with a man who treats me like an equal. The other men I deal with act like I should look up to them and their experience, their wisdom, and respect them. I’d rather eat worms.

I don’t respect people more or less based on their job or their money. I respect people for how they exist in the world. I know a lot of people who are actively working to make the world better. They do it in a wide variety of ways. No one is perfect. One of the most important things you can do to make the world a better place is to stop treating women like they are less than men. A lot of people do. This is not a guy thing. Misogyny is alive and well among women.

I’m also going to take a moment to say that I hate everyone who says, “Pregnancy is not a disability” whether they are men or women. I’m glad you have had that experience. I was enormously sick and incapable. I guess that makes me inferior, pathetic, and bad. I was disabled. I was on bed rest. I had to not walk around or I puked all over the place. I lost 18 pounds by the end of my second trimester because I was so sick.

But I was supposed to shake it off and “act normal” because men don’t go through this period where an alien parasite invades their bodies so obviously I shouldn’t be effected by the experience. If I have issues it is all my mind. I could function if I just wasn’t so lazy.

I really hate people. Yes, I could have kept teaching. Even though it was technically illegal for me to leave the classroom unsupervised to go vomit several times a day. I guess I should have been puking in the trash can. Geez, these lazy women wanting special treatment while they vomit uncontrollably. What the fuck is their problem.

This is all wrapped up for me. When a man tells me I am “too smart” to believe that lawmakers might push things through in a way that is severely problematic and dangerous to me I reference back to my life experience.

I’m always told things will be easy. That I shouldn’t complain. It’s easy for every one else, why am I whining.

I’m sorry I’m not you. And yet, fuck you. No I’m not. You are a fucking asshole and I don’t want to be like you.

I react the way I react based on a life of experiences. Do not insult me. Do not talk down to me. Those are not the only rapes in my life. When I am trying to decide how I feel about rape I have a wide variety of emotions available to me based on a wide variety of circumstances and occasions. I’m sure they are all my fault. What else did I expect?

I expect that people think I am a worthless piece of shit. I am a hole with no value of my own. The only reason to keep me or people like me around is if you want a hole. I should not get much say so about who goes in or who comes out. It’s not my place. I’m just the hole.

Processing

1 Reply

I’m afraid. That means I have to go do whatever is scaring me, doesn’t it? In this case I have been thinking about PTSD stuff. I’m trying to have patience with myself. I tell other people to be patient with themselves. Life is a process. But I’m impatient.

I was asked today how long I have been suicidal. More than twenty years. I can’t remember not wanting to die. I have good days when I don’t make active plans but I think about how nice it would be to stop. I think about it a lot. Everything is so hard. It has always felt so hard. I am broken. This life is too much.

So I read up on treatment for PTSD in my spare time. It’s comforting and terrifying. Yup my life sucks and it’s gonna. Settle in and figure out how to cope with it. It’s kind of weird reading that whereas some people do successfully “get over” all of their symptoms I am a complex case. The probability I will ever be “normal” is virtually zero.

When I close my eyes and I feel my body and I feel my soul I am not much different from when I was three years old. I’m just me. It’s weird trying to figure out who I am if I am not defined by what I do or what happens to me. I’m just Krissy. I don’t know what that means.

Today I ran sixteen miles. I’m not sure how long it took me because my phone battery died. I’m feeling cranky with my phone. I think it took me ~4:20. Which is ironic and fitting.

I don’t feel like I know who I am. But I know that what I am is bad. I’m waiting for the next round of punishment. I’m waiting for the next big nasty rejection. The next friendship that ends in acrimonious words. I’m a fucking asshole. If the only common element in your problems is you then maybe you are the problem. It’s hard to know how to live as the problem. It’s hard to be silent enough. Invisible enough. It’s hard to ever stop being bad.

If I am the same me as I was then how much of what has happened to me has been my fault because I was bad? Because I was stupid? I don’t honestly feel like my father raping me was my fault. But I feel like I am drowning in wild grief because my family hates me for talking about it.

How can I just “get over it” when watching my children grow up reminds me over and over that I have no idea what I am doing. When I think about what I did at every age my blood goes cold. I hate myself. I hate what I have done. I am a disgusting little piece of shit. How can I teach anyone to be anything other than that?

People don’t give a shit about me. Ok, there are some people who care about me. And there are a lot more people who are willing to profess to caring about me on the internet. But when push comes to shove and it is my needs vs. someone else’s needs… people don’t give a shit about me. I don’t rank that highly. It’s not a pity party. It’s not about whining for attention. It’s a blunt statement of fact. People are serving their needs through our interactions, not mine. I need to remember that more. I certainly mostly interact with people when it serves my needs instead of theirs. When they bring me their needs I hide under the desk and cry because I just can’t bloody do another thing.

Does that mean I don’t give a shit about anyone? It’s a good question. Let’s just say that I limit how much I can let myself care about other people. If I want to be alive tomorrow I have to.

Running is this weird experience for me. On one hand I spend a lot of time crying because I feel undeserving of the people in my life (I really like you, Noah) and on the other hand I am moving relatively slowly through space. I have time to notice my body that I don’t normally have. So I have these weird little, “Oh, I’ll stop with the self-inflicted tirade and do a check. Ok, bottoms of the feet, how are you doing? Toes? Ankles? Give me more information than that, Knees” etc. I haven’t spent a lot of time really feeling my body in a long time. I feel more alive than I usually do.

And as I run along I list the ways of killing myself. I notice which vehicles I could step into. I notice the low height on the freeway overpass railing. I catalog poisonous plants. I look for places with just enough privacy to get the job done. I see appropriate branches and beams on houses and think of hanging. I notice carbon monoxide. I want to die.

Sometimes it almost feels like a fetish. Like something that has been a part of me for so long and now I can’t let it go. I don’t know how to change the habit of hating myself and wanting to die. I’m sure that some of my nerdy friends will lecture me on how I should go about doing so. To put it bluntly, unless you have a lot of training in working with complex PTSD or you are one of the handful of people I have met who have genuinely pulled their lives together after serious trauma I don’t want to hear it. That sounds more hostile than I mean it. Don’t be surprised if I don’t take your advice too seriously. It’s not personal.

I have lived with brain damage before. If I think about the years of extreme stress and trauma as damaging my brain through excessive fight/flight hormones… well… You don’t tell someone who is a paraplegic to go change all the lightbulbs. Unless you have special adaptive equipment, otherwise you are an asshole. If someone gives me well meaning advice that would get someone like me in a lot of trouble then I can’t take it. Even though it makes people feel all ignored and butt hurt.

I don’t tell battered women what to do. I don’t know their situation. Every situation is so complex.

Lately I feel like I should hurry up and change several big parts of my life. I’m feeling dissatisfied. Some of those things are actually changes for Noah and not me. But I have fifty days until I run a marathon. Surely it can wait until I am done driving my body into the ground.

I have limits. I can only do so much.

Where are my limits problematic? I do leave the house. I do socialize occasionally. Just not much. Just a very low amount compared to most of the people I know. Is that actually a problem? Why am I always on the edge of the bell curve? Why do I feel so in danger of being culled from the herd if I am the slightest bit different?

I try to remind myself that I don’t want to die for a long time. Even though it is hard to not die, that’s worth a lot of effort from me. If that takes a lot out of me and I don’t have enough space for other things then that is life. Every choice has a cost.

I think really hard about my choice to be so dependent on Noah. It’s not just about job security stuff. I actually think I would transition back to work and do fine. I’d make it work. I would have to. If I’m pragmatic I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have to work while my kids were little. It would be tight, but there is a lot of insurance coming. I’d be able to last many years on that money. I’m not scared because of money. Regardless of death, desertion, or divorce Noah has insured that I am provided for. I don’t think I have ever had a personal relationship with a man who is that kind of practical and honorable. It’s not just that he can make me that safe. It’s that he wants to. It’s a huge priority for him. Noah chose to be responsible for me.

I struggle with how emotionally dependent on him I am. I feel like it’s not fair. No one should have to carry the burden of being my sole support. That’s unjust and excessive. But there is no one else. I can’t ask my kids to meet my needs. If I can’t do it for myself I can ask him or do without. It’s scary. I’m so scared of what it will mean long-term that I am so wrapped up in him. I lose a lot of sleep worrying about him dying. I know that isn’t healthy either. I sincerely doubt I would try again for something like this. I don’t know how capable I would be of going through a period of intense vulnerability in front of someone.

My suffering is private. I may whine about it on the internet but by and large no one gets to fucking see it. It’s none of your god damn business. It’s not going to alter the course of your life one iota so why should I show you my pathetic gaping maw of need? No. I don’t want to deal with knowing that you know what I need… and you won’t do anything about it. No one will do anything about it.

It doesn’t help that when people offer to do things for me at this stage of my life I snarl at them. I won’t let people do things for me. I would much rather sit here and fester, thanks. I’m tired of being disappointed. I have to not care about the result in order to let someone help me. I usually do care. It’s not worth feeling upset with people who are doing their best. Just do it alone. Just be alone.

For some reason Noah puts up with me. I don’t understand it, but I’m grateful. I’m not alone. The important bit is I’m not alone. Not really. Not actually. Except when he’s at work. That sucks.

found the lost one.

Leave a reply

(I found the post from a few days ago that didn’t post. Woo.)

Drifting. So much time and so little to do. Strike that. Reverse it.

If I had an odometer it would be red lining. Something needs to change. Noah is about to go through a period of intense stress and it’s really important that I support him through this. Supporting him through this will make the next 1-5 years of my life manifestly better. Enough so that it doesn’t matter how tired I am… I have to find it somewhere.

I feel like I spend life going between periods of limbo where I am unsure what direction to start off in.

“Get over it and let your kids be friends.” I wake up and go to sleep thinking, “I would like to die.” I’m really glad for people who can just “get over things” but I can’t. I’m sorry. I have to work through things slowly and sometimes that isn’t a speed other people like. It feels like every thought I have has to slowly bubble up through the lake of depression. “What should I do today? Who should I talk to? How should I spend my time?” People who take a lot of energy from me in order to bear their presence are not a good trade. If I want to make it to tomorrow I have to carry about that energy load even though no one else gives a shit.

It sounds so melodramatic. I feel like a whiner. I feel like an incompetent piece of shit. In seven weeks I will be an incompetent piece of shit who completes a marathon. I really don’t have the extra energy to burn right now.

Things that are hard for me are easy for other people. Things that are easy for me are hard or even impossible for other people. People are asynchronous.

I have a lot of anger. I have to live with it. I have to control it. I have to. Some days it is easier than others. Some days it takes everything I have and I have nothing left to give to assholes who are rude to me. I have to live with that.

Near as I can tell I don’t owe anyone anything. Not even my husband. Not even my kids. If I truly don’t want to do something then I shouldn’t do it. I don’t actually hate most of the activities I do. I do, however, wish that I had more help and that I had to do slightly less of them. I believe this will change. I believe that my children will learn the pattern of life from me.

I think that every day that I live I am showing my kids what it looks like to live and be a person. This is what being a grown up looks like. You have to put your own oxygen mask on. I tell my kids pretty frankly that sometimes we don’t go to events because I am not up for dealing with the people. I wish I had a larger capacity but I don’t. That’s life. I can be upset with myself for being who I am or we can have fun at home. Which sounds better?

I’ll admit that being almost finished with the garage is a huge weight off my mind. It really and truly looks how I envisioned it in my head a year and a half ago. I’m really excited. I feel so much relief. I think I am glad the washing machine broke.

I have bits and pieces I will change here and there but the structural work is done for many years. Probably most of my childrens’ childhood. I did the work until it was done. Now I can stop. I feel relieved in a way I can’t put words to. I want to cry with relief. Yes. I did what I said I would do. I don’t have to feel driven and anxious and terrible all the time about how pathetic I am for not being done. It’s quite a relief.

Now I can finish the play house. Ha.

There are plans that are sprints and there are things that have to be part of the marathon of life. Gardening stuff has to be done slowly in phases over many years. It is teaching me patience. And science. I didn’t know science was this interesting.

I feel like I have been trying to settle my house down so that it is the appropriate kind of place for the activities I want to do. I want to homeschool my kids. I want to set up a life around learning. I want a “yes” environment. I suck at babyhood. I’ll be honest. This has been a very hard stretch of time but it is almost over. I’m very much looking forward to home schooling. We get to “play school” all day every day. I think that sounds like so much fun that I want to cry. How could I possibly be lucky enough to get to have this life?

Nothing is ever as good or as bad as it seems. My life is very good. My life is very blessed. But I have limitations. I’m very clear about which limitations are mine and which belong to other people. I talk to Shanna about how right now she is limited to having the kind of environment I feel comfortable in and I like staying home. As she gets older she won’t need me for direct supervision as much and she will be allowed to stray further and further from home and she will get to find out what kinds of environments make her most comfortable. Every bit of exploration will happen when it is the appropriate time for it to happen. You don’t have to do everything before you are ten. It’s ok to wait on a few things. Life is long.

I think a lot about rural living situations. I think about historical lives. I think about how bizarre it is that I feel pressured to put my kid into group classes so she can “learn about children her age” when I’m not sure that is historically or evolutionarily necessary. She does hang out with kids. But she does a lot better in mixed age settings. Sometimes she plays with the babies, sometimes the other 3-5 year olds, sometimes the 11 year old. It all depends on which game they want to play that minute. I don’t see how it benefits her to be pushed into being lock-step with people “her age”. It’s such an odd idea to me. I feel resentful about the idea.

I was always highly asynchronous. I am forking thrilled to let Shanna develop a friendship with a girl who is seven years older than her who is quiet and shy and reserved and timid. That’s a lot better than the sexually active, drug-using children I hung out with. Perspective is an interesting experience.

Shanna is mad at me because I am pulling back on screen time. They are both getting grabby and demanding and rude about the ipad and to me that means it’s time for a break. If you bloody scream at me that you want that NOW I am categorically going to deny you whatever it is you wanted. I don’t scream at you like that and I’m not going to god damn let you do it to me. I feel like it is important. I feel like it is mandatory socialization. I don’t know how to do this when other people are around. I tolerate or don’t tolerate different behaviors and it is confusing to me and the kids. It’s stressful and hard to remember.

I should start working. My back is sore. Maybe it’s time for some vitamin I.

I wake up and go to sleep thinking I would like to die. But then I see Noah lying next to me. Not yet.

neeeeeeedy

Leave a reply

I wanted to write about fifteen miles while it was fresh in my mind. I didn’t. It was euphoric and triumphant. Tomorrow morning I am going to do sixteen miles. I’m changing directions slightly for the early part and adding hill. I’m a little nervous. I’m hoping to once again make it in four hours. That’s cocky. That’s really cocky. We are meeting at the same place. Mmmm rewarding noodles.

It’s hard knowing that it is probably smart for people to keep me out at arms length. If you keep me out at arms length I never start to have expectations of you. I won’t let myself feel like I need something from you. For me to have needs in the direction of people is usually the kiss of death. Noah is the last man standing.

Does that make me straight?

I think about that a lot lately. I think about self-identity. What is the point? The point is that if someone wants to know what the difference is between having sex with someone who is transgendered, transvestite, or a butch dyke I can describe it in great detail from personal experience. It was all fun.

Sometimes I look at Noah and feel kind of weird. It’s sort of ironic that I married someone from a small Texas town who had some kind of semi-status from inherited position there. Given my history I mean. And together we are very cis-gendered.

What does being queer mean, anyway?

What does being a “runner” mean? If I walk sixteen miles tomorrow because I am tired am I a “runner”?

I have endurance. I am persistant to the limits I can achieve with my body. I’m not naturally athletic or gifted. I’m stubborn. I’m angry. I’m sad. I have so much grief. I want to prove to myself that I am as good as my brother. No, I’m not as fast as him. I hope he has matured to the point where he wouldn’t be an asshole about that. I think so.

I’m scared to see him and I’m scared not to see him. He despises me. He despises what I have done and who I am and that I had the utter gall to talk about it in public. But I’m going to drive my husband nuts with having to accomodate me as I train for a marathon on my brother’s turf.

Fuck you. You can’t tell me that I am weak. I am here. And at the end I will still be standing.

Lately I feel very weak. I have a lot of needs that are going unmet. I’m getting brittle. It’s hard because I can only handle asking someone to meet a need of mine if I am very ok with the answer being “no”. If I can’t take a no then I can’t ask. If I ask when I can’t afford to be told no and I don’t get help I will turn my frustration and rage on my unsuspecting friend. That’s not fair. I don’t do that.

Right now there is a towering avalanche of need. But I am so afraid of saying the wrong thing or offending people or being disappointed that I don’t know how to deal with any of it. There are a lot of different things going on right now I can’t talk about in writing. That’s hard for me. That feels silencing. That makes me feel angry on top of whatever I’m feeling anyway.

I’m sure some rational person would say, “Well why don’t you just write it and keep it private then”.

I don’t know. I learned a long time ago that I don’t write for me, exactly. I can only write if I believe someone is reading it. I have never been able to consistently maintain a paper journal but if someone speaks up and says, “By the way I read your blog every day. I care about you.” Motherfucker I’ll write every day. I’ll find the time. I will conjure it out of thin air.

It feels sick. This need in me to be seen. I started crying earlier when I realized I treat that ridiculous random validation as the closest thing I will ever have to a mother checking in on me. I feel so alone in the world. Multiple people asked me if I was ok.

It’s kind of hard for me when people notice me. I feel like Eeyore. I used to play games with not posting on my blog for months at a stretch and people didn’t notice. I took that as validation that people wouldn’t notice or be particularly impacted if I died. It actually made me feel better. Because suicide was an option that would be far less selfish for me than most people. Before I got married. Before I had kids.

I don’t have anyone in my life other than Noah with whom I have an intense on-going relationship. Ok, Shanna and Calli. Every other person in my life spends very few hours with me during the course of a year.

If I don’t write on the internet, do I exist?

If I don’t write on the internet I am surely invisible. My pragmatic self says that if I don’t write on the internet people only know the handful of sentences we exchange in person. That isn’t knowing me even slightly. From that I will decide I should be invisible. I will always believe that is just and right and the natural order of things. People like me are born bad. We should suffer in silence. If we talk about what is going on in our minds then we are traumatizing people and we don’t have the right to do that.

I’m scared of the hunt for a new therapist. During my last search I had a few one time only visits. Including with someone who told me point blank that I should never participate in group therapy or write about my experiences in a public way because that is abusive and traumatizing to the people who hear or read about my life. I don’t have the right to do that.

I have to be very careful who I allow to be an authority in my life. I have done too many things that make me already damned in the eyes of many. For a great many people I am already beyond redemption. If you think I am exaggerating then you have lead a very privileged life. I have to be careful who I allow to judge me. Well, I have to be careful if I am going to care about that judgment.

So when people tell me to just “get over” my experiences. Well, despite the fact that it makes me feel pathetic I may well be in therapy the rest of my life. They are going to always be the longest running relationships in my life outside of Noah and the kids. I need to have something. It’s very easy to deem this need pathetic if you have ways of getting your needs met that are simply not available to me.

I don’t know who are what I am defending myself against. The voices in my head. The reasons my throat feels choked all the time. I should be silent. Just shut up. Just listen. Nothing you have to say is interesting any way. Stop. Fucking. Whining.

I go to bed and wake up thinking that I want to die. I want to stop feeling this way. It hurts to move. It hurts all the time. And I don’t know what to do other than wait it out. That’s what I’ve always done. But this time I can’t do any of the impulsive things I have always done. It’s really hard. I feel like I am vibrating with tension. My muscles radiate.

I need to stretch more. I need to sleep more. I need to rest more. I need.. I need a mommy I can call and say, “Come love my babies for me so I can sleep.” But I don’t have one. And that’s just life.

I have to believe that my grief matters. Whether any one else does or not. I have to. I miss my mother. The price I pay for being allowed to go about my life without being abused is that aching hole inside me. There is a cost to everything. I miss my mother. I miss my mother like I would miss an amputated limb. I reach for her. I smell her. I see her in the mirror and in my children.

I want my mother so much I feel like I am going to explode. But contacting her would be the worst thing in the world. For everyone. For me. For my kids. For my mom. Because if I yo-yo back and forth and ask them to make it up to me I am setting myself up in the power position. I’m saying I want to be the next abuser. No. No. No.

There is a lot more I want to say. There isn’t much more I can dance around with anything resembling eloquence. And besides, I have to get up and walk (I will jog!) sixteen miles.

I will be able to call myself a marathoner. I’ll be crafty and specific. I didn’t saying “running”. That way I deal with no assholes and I still make my point.

It feels pathetic to want to figure out who I am. I am nothing. I came from nothing that should be. Nothing I can claim. I am nothing on my own in the world. I exist in relationship to three people.

I’m telling you people, my family had better not die in a freak crash without me. I won’t make it through the day. I’m only a little paranoid about them dying. But I do cry if the word comes through my head. I can’t lose them. They are all I have.

I need sleep. Sleep. Go to sleep. Stop crying. Sleep. Stretch first. It’ll be ok. Really. It’s always ok in the end. If it’s not ok yet, it’s not the end. If you’re going through hell, etc.

Mental illness is a liar.

Leave a reply

The Band wants to hear about what I have to say about teens and mental health.

Sustainable loads

1 Reply

Brain chemistry is unpredictable. I try to stay level but unfortunately my brain is extra hard to predict. I’m trying to go to sleep earlier. The kids have been very disrupted lately. I only need seven or so hours of sleep and it’s a good idea for me to go to sleep at 8pm if I want to get a full night of sleep. That feels lame. Yet I feel like sleep is one of the biggest factors between me and emotional stability lately. I’m very under slept and as a result I am weepy and depressed. It’s lame.

I don’t like that I cry in front of my kids so much. I feel like that is a bad lesson. I try to explain it to Shanna in a fairly value neutral way. “I had life experiences that make it unusually easy for me to cry. It’s kind of weird and annoying. Not everyone does this–in fact most people don’t. But I cry as I’m just going about my daily life. It’s inconvenient but it’s not always a sign that anything is wrong right now. I do like hugs and kisses, thank you. I’m glad you are here. I have a lot more reason to be happy now.” That’s pretty much my schpeal.

I feel humiliated when I have to casually explain how and why I am defective compared to so-called normal people. The more extreme I worry my current sense of symptoms are (I have very little ability to judge this as life goes–I can be retrospective but in the moment evaluation is hard) the more I struggle with being out in public. I don’t want my kids to be tarred with the same crazy brush I am tarred with.

I feel like a whiner. I am in the very safest period of my life right now. I haven’t been raped in eight years. I should stop feeling paranoid and scared, right? The more than two decades when I was raped over and over are done. Get over it.

Yeah. You go do it. If you think it is so fucking easy you do it. Wait, you weren’t raped over and over for two decades so you don’t know what that even means? Oh. Then shut the fuck up already.

It sounds like an excuse. My brain is *wired* to feel fear and distrust. I was brought up in an abusive environment. I volunteered for a PTSD brain scan study at Stanford. I was told that my case is too complicated to be useful for research. I’m pretty damn sure my brain is non-standard. And I have to deal with that. And it sounds like whining to people who do not have similar brain patterns.

“Hey, whiner, stop having your life experiences and start having my life experiences so you can act like me and I can feel comfortable.”

Wait. Yeah. Too late.

I feel like a whiner because I can’t function under the same constraints as a lot of people I know. I simply cannot be as busy as they are. I can’t think. I cry all the time. I’m scared. I can’t follow simple directions because I am shaking and unable to think coherently and learn new information. This isn’t my fault. This is simply how going through the world works for me.

What do I need? I need less going on. I need to not feel guilty because I’m not providing Shanna exactly what some people are having. She’s having a good life even though she isn’t having the same experiences as her peers. She won’t be permanently fucked up by not being in contact with people exactly her age all day every day. Truly. Biologically that is not normal. But I feel guilty. She would love it.

Life is full of a lot of different paths. I did go out yesterday and buy her a bunch of craft supplies that she wanted. She is thrilled. She has doileys and pom poms and glitter and pipe cleaners and glue sticks and popsicle sticks. It’s in the budget. I’m supposed to buy this stuff. She has paint and play-dough substitute. She does play with children. She just doesn’t do it all day in a place where someone else will clean up her mess because they are paid to do so.

I distinctly notice a difference in how the kids play based on how clean the house is. When things are put away and orderly they are capable of cleaning stuff up as they are done with it and putting it away. They won’t do it at all if the house is messy. And when the house is basically tidy they go from one imaginative game to another all day. When the house is messy they whine at me to read to them or for the iPad. It’s interesting to watch. When the house is basically clean I spend an hour or two on chores in the early morning and then spend the rest of the day on stuff where I am “interruptable”. If the house is a huge mess I get bitchy and tense.

I’m not being very nice lately. I have too many projects ongoing. I need to finish things and back off. I’m looking forward to the marathon so much. I need a break from running. I need to move on and do something more approachable for people in my life. Seven weeks.

I really and truly didn’t think she would say yes when I told her, “You know, if you ran 20 miles this weekend you could *totally* handle a marathon in seven weeks. Just sayin’.” Now she has plane tickets. She’s going to run with me. She will pace me. I know that no matter how scared and apprehensive I am in advance she will get me through. That’s this enormous comfort. I’m shit at pacing. It’s just not a skill I have developed yet. She’s really good at it. She has a lot of practice. This will be her first marathon too. I feel extremely weepy at the idea of being part of her “first” experience. That feels special. She’s doing something new and hard with me. Gosh. That feels like a big deal. I feel really loved.

I think about Sarah a lot as I run. It’s been enough months of her not speaking to me that I feel like I can probably call it done and try to move on. It’s hard. I feel like we spent so much time reacting to our phantom issues with our respective mothers that we didn’t really get around to looking at each other. We are both broken in different ways. I feel like the biggest asshole on the planet because a big part of my problem was that I really and truly could not physically handle another adult showing up in my house who needed me to do a bunch of cleaning for her. I thought I could. I really did. I knew she would be hard to clean up after. I thought I could do it. I failed. I feel bad that I couldn’t handle being the support she needs. I think she deserves it. But I can’t do it.

I’m so sorry that I failed her and hurt her. I do that. I do that a lot. I feel like it is inevitable that I will do it with/for everyone. I will fail you. I will hurt you. It feels like it is an unavoidable part of being me. I am a failure. I hurt everyone just by existing. If I could shut my stupid, selfish, self-absorbed mouth maybe I could learn to be a decent person. Naw. That’s a pipe dream.

I feel so guilty for all the things I can’t be. I feel ashamed of myself. Why can’t I just be normal? I’m not even sure I know what that means. Whatever it means it would involve wiping my memory so that I no longer react from the point of view I have always had. I am defective.

Today I am going to can tomatoes. And mail two boxes. One cross country and one internationally. The boxes won’t have tomatoes in them. But those are my tasks for today. That is all I can have on my agenda if I want to be nice to my kids. Because they need some attention today. I’ve been ignoring them a lot lately as I finish the garage. I need to figure out earthquake strapping. I think this is how my house is going to look for the next ten years. It’s time to strap things to the walls. I’ve never done earthquake preparedness with furniture before. If you move your furniture every 3-6 months then it truly isn’t worth the effort to strap it to the wall over and over. You make holes in the walls and landlords hate you. My life is different now.

Every day of my life is blazing a new path. I have never lived in a stable environment for this long. I have never had ongoing daily relationships that have gone on this long. In another two or three years I will have lived with Shanna longer than I ever lived with my brothers at all. Probably about how much time I lived with my sister if you add it all up. Longer than I ever lived with my mother in one go. Far far longer than I lived with my father.

I’m scared of depending on her in inappropriate ways. I’m less scared of it with Calli, which is weird. When I ask Shanna if I can keep her forever she says yes enthusiastically. When I ask Calli if I can keep her she smiles and says no. She says, “Baby bye bye.” I’m just not real worried about having an odd overly dependent codependent relationship with Calli. Kid has boundaries. Shanna is my me-not-me.

Shanna is good at asking me why I am experiencing an emotion. She’s really good at figuring out, “Oh you are frustrated because I did ______ but you weren’t frustrated last time I did it. Why are you frustrated this time?” That seems weirdly complex from a four year old to me. But I explain, “Well last time I was able to focus on only you and I wasn’t in the middle of something else and last time the spill was water instead of juice and juice is sticky. And…” I try to talk about things in a level voice. “Well I find this frustrating because I dislike having to do _________.” It’s not about her. It’s about what I am doing. It’s about how many ways my attention is divided.

I’m trying hard to train her to come and find me and declare, “Mother! I had an idea! I must experiment!” Then when I find a huge mess I don’t get mad at her. I gird my loins and do my deep breathing exercises before I come to see what she did. It works out.

Everyone who parents does so from a self-centered point of view. This little amoeba is in orbit around your life. What does that mean? What kind of support do you need? What do they do all day to facilitate you getting to do what you want to do all day?

I want to can tomatoes. And mail boxes. I assume we will walk to the post office. It will be a multi-hour walk. We will probably come home by way of the park. That’s about a 3.5 mile loop. Shanna needs to get out and exercise. We haven’t done much this week. Let me rephrase: I have been fucking exhausted from the 32 miles I am running this week so I haven’t done as much at Shanna’s speed. It kind of changes the tone, no? It’s not that I am lazy. I’m tired. I’m sore. I think a slow walk will be good today. Stretch out my legs before I run 16 miles tomorrow. Ew.

But I feel like an asshole. Because I am supposed to be facilitating her life. Naw. Children are supposed to orbit around their parents. That is how it works. For the next seven weeks her life is impacted by the fact that I am too physically tired to do what I normally do with her. It won’t kill her. Maybe she will learn something about the physical requirements of taking athletics seriously. Not that I am a serious athlete. But I’m as tired as one.

I feel like my weakness is inexcusable. Suck it up. Get moving. There is a limit to how much I can do that. I can’t be miserable all day every day and function. I can only suck up so many things. I’m terribly sorry so much of my brain cycles are wasted on things that happened long ago. I would give just about anything to change it. My understanding is time will help and pretty much nothing else. I have to be patient and wait for things to get better. Stop fucking rushing me. It takes as long as it takes. Oh wait, I’m not perfectly mentally healthy on the schedule you think I should keep? Let me care about that. I think I have 2.4 seconds free a week from Tuesday.

I was told when I was pregnant with Shanna that people like me shouldn’t have children. It may be true. But it’s too late. They are here. I am here. We have to do the best we can. In the overall scheme of things I think my kids are doing very well. They get the occasional shriek of frustration from me over large messes but I think I am fairly patient. I got the shit beat out of me for things that I barely react to. I feel like I am doing well. The only marker I have for behavior says that I am really awesome and patient and wonderful. I’m not perfectly patient, but I’m not sure that is useful either. My kids will grow up with a slow life because of me.

Some days all we will do is can tomatoes and walk to the post office. That’s ok. I am actually preparing them for the world. Last I checked it wasn’t terribly important for me to sit and do worksheets all day. I guess all those years of preparing I did was kind of useless. I was extensively trained in how to fill out forms. Sure, I do great in the DMV. I’m not sure it needed thirteen years of harping.

Life is complicated. Things that are mandatory parts of life for lots of people are completely absent from the lives of every one else. We feel our priorities are important because they are what we know.

What do I need to do to get through the next seven weeks with as little impact on the kids as possible? I keep feeling like I should schedule. But then I’m depressed and tired and I want too much from myself and I stop doing it again. What is reasonable to expect of myself? I don’t even know. I really don’t.

Leave a reply

What is balance?

Running buddy

1 Reply

I wrote up a long post yesterday. Apparently my computer ate it. Internet in my house is very flakey. I am not impressed. Thank you to the folks who are worried about me. I appreciate people checking in. It makes me feel loved. I was pinged more than once yesterday. It made me smile.

Life is really busy. I’m anxious and fussy and exhausted. I’m thinking a lot. I’m really struggling with the running. In a fit of desperation yesterday I poked a friend and strongly hinted that she would be physically capable of doing the marathon with me. I didn’t think it would go anywhere. I was being a pest. Within an hour or so she had arranged to fly from a different state and stay with her family so she can run with me. She’ll pretty much only be there for the race. So she can hold my hand.

I need to go run and cry about how very unworthy I am right now. I’m really grateful that I have her to look forward to at the end of this training, now. It gives me a lot more impetus to not quit. I’ve been feeling sad and overwhelmed. I can do the running. I am struggling to deal with the fact that this running is making me too tired to really be functional doing a lot of other things. I have seven weeks of training to go. It’s feeling too long. Too hard. But now I can’t quit. Now there is no option in any way shape or form of quitting.

I’m really glad. I was starting to feel like a quitter in my head. Like there isn’t a point in me doing this. There isn’t much point in me doing anything besides wiping other peoples asses and washing dishes.

But someone wants to run with me. I won’t be alone. I’ve been singing various songs about her. Her name rhymes with “don’t have to be alone” if you get the syllables right. I don’t understand why she cares enough about me to just up and do this. But I’m really grateful. I’m really grateful.

Thank you!

51 Replies

The text messages while I was running made me very happy. Thank you everyone. I can't go back through and respond because I don't have time. I feel like I have been either extremely busy or asleep since I stopped running. And my computer won't get on the internet consistently. I have stuff I want to write but I have to finish painting today because the washer/dryer are being delivered between 4:45 and 6:45. Must finish! Then the painting will be done in the garage. That will be a euphoric moment of "holy shit I finished a project".

Fifteen

Leave a reply

In the running community there is a phrase, “hitting the wall”. I’ve read about it. Folks say that at about mile twenty on your way to a marathon there is a place where you want to quit. From there on it is about being stubborn.

Today I felt like the wall was at the front door. I was tired.

If you read this on Saturday morning

240 Replies

Send me a text message saying something nice. 408-202-4083. I have no shame. I have been crying all week. Today's 15 miles are very intimidating. I could use all the encouragement I can get.

If I treat this like a writing exercise…

2 Replies

Dear J-

You emailed at a bad time. For no particular reason I woke up yesterday feeling much more suicidal than usual. I went on my seven mile run and had to deal with my knees shaking through most of the run because I was crying so hard my body was buckling. I got to Lake Elizabeth and felt a rush of anger at myself that I was so lazy that I stayed in bed till it was light. If it was still dark I could go down to the edge and swim out to the middle and drown myself and no one would be able to see me to rescue me in time.

Then I came home to your email. You want me to worry about you having a panic attack.

I’ll be honest and say that I laughed out loud. I did lol. I laughed. It bubbled up. I bent over laughing. I thought it was that fucking hilarious.

You know what, I’m not interested in a reconciliation. That sounds like work I don’t want to do. I’m kind of busy. I got a lot from our friendship, I’ll be honest. I cared about you a lot. I was looking forward to many years together. But between how you treated me and how you treated K, no thank you. K is one of three people my nearly two year old wants at her birthday party. I am not interested in a relationship with someone who treats me and mine how you do.

I can’t stop you from joining the homeschooling group. That’s not something that is in my authority or power to do. Shanna has asked me if she will ever be allowed to play with R again. I told her that when she is five if she is able to handle the phone and do the arranging I will drive her to and from play dates. If you show up at homeschool events I am certainly not going to be actively rude. I will never attack you physically or verbally. I do not plan to speak to you.

You see, I don’t have time for you. In order to have a relationship with you I would have to worry about you. You have proven yourself to not be someone who is worthy of how much effort that is for me. No thank you.

Krissy

I haven’t decided if I will send this. I love the internet. Thank you for listening to me babble.

An email I won’t send.

Leave a reply

“Hi Krissy,

I’d like to attempt to reconcile.

I’ll be completely sincere and give you my reasons;

1) I regret burning my bridges with you. I think you’re a good person and I enjoyed spending time with you.

2) We are undoubtedly going to be a part of the same community and I don’t want to have an anxiety attack for 2 days after everytime I run into you.

I’d be open to meeting in person or chatting through IM or e-mail.

Thanks,
J”

Wait wait… let me get this straight. I am supposed to care about your panic attacks? Really? When I had a panic attack at your house and your response was to send me an email telling me that I am a bad mother and a horrible person and you’ve given me so many chances and you are just done. (I was never told I was given chances. This was a big shock.) You can’t watch someone be as terrible to their children as I am to mine.

And I’m supposed to care about your panic attacks? Really?

The reason we will undoubtedly be part of the same community is because you are telling me that you will join the group I asked you to stay out of. After I didn’t leave my house for a year. Because of the fucking panic attacks you contributed to. I’m not going to say they are all your fault. I’ve had panic attacks for too many years to blame you. But you certainly make them worse. And I have studiously avoided every place I thought you might be.

But I should worry about you. And you feel bad about burning bridges. Well, I believe in natural consequences. Maybe next time you are having a bad day you won’t take it out on someone else and tell them they are bad and disgusting.

Bitch.

Get it out of your head.

Leave a reply

None of what I am thinking is all that serious or big. Why are my emotional reactions so out of proportion? I don’t even know. That’s the trouble with brain chemistry. It’s not always reacting to real things in front of you.

I can’t start running yet. It’s too early. Yesterday as I was running I thought a lot about how I should leave my house earlier and run to Lake Elizabeth and swim out to the middle then stop swimming while it is still dark and no one will see me. I can’t start running yet. I can’t go out until people will see me. I can’t go out until I would be traumatizing other people to try and die in front of them–that’s not nice. I’m not allowed to do that.

Why isn’t it more important that I would destroy my children? They would never get over losing me. I know that. They would spend their entire lives wondering why their mother didn’t love them enough. I can’t do that to them. I love them so much. But I hurt. I want to cut. I want to do something that causes me a lot of pain. I didn’t yesterday. I cried. I curled up in the fetal position and sobbed but I didn’t self-harm. I even ate properly at all the appropriate times.

It is very hard to believe that I am worth taking care of. How could I possibly be worth any effort? But every body takes effort. Living in a body is work. You have to feed it and let it rest and treat it at least a little gently. I see how much effort bodies take because I care for two small ones. It’s a lot of forking work. Doing the work for them makes me feel so bad. Why didn’t anyone want to care for me? Why didn’t anyone love me?

I feel taunted every day by the way I lived. I feel angry and jealous of my children. Why didn’t anyone love me? Being nice to my kids makes me feel really bitter. I hate that I have to stop and make up what a good person would do because I don’t know. I see my children do things and what I see in my head are these still-frame pictures of what happened to me when I did the same thing. I know what happened to me was wrong but I don’t know what to do.

I feel over and over all day how bad I must be to deserve how I was treated. I feel like I am choking and drowning in how bad bad bad I am. I deserve to suffer. I deserve to be in pain. I deserve to be told to shut my fucking mouth. I shouldn’t speak at all. I should be seen and not heard.

I don’t want my kids to feel this way.

As an adult I feel so much shame for the things I don’t know how to do well. All those things that other people spent long hours on during childhood. I hid. I didn’t learn things. If I couldn’t get it out of a book by myself it didn’t exist. I had no way of going and learning skills or behaviors or activities.

I feel overwhelmed by how badly living in poverty was. I feel like I’m not over it. I don’t know how to be someone who is safe. I only know what it means to be unsafe and in danger.

I miss my mom. I miss my mom so much that I would like to curl up and die to get away from missing her like this. I love my mommy. I want my mommy. I miss my mommy. But my mommy would hurt me. I think if I let my mommy hurt me again I wouldn’t live through it. That’s a lot of why I don’t have contact with her any more. I was absolutely not going to be able to live through more. I can’t be who she needs me to be.

I feel like I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what possible worth I might have. I don’t feel very useful. But people aren’t worthy or not based on work, are they? I don’t know. I work very hard. It always feels like my work is inadequate. I am inadequate.

I don’t intend to die today. I have stuff to do. I need to finish the box for Jenny. I need to send the care package off to the MDC woman who is leaving her abusive husband. I do things that make other people feel seen and important and loved. Why don’t I feel that way? What would it take?

I have a truly amazing husband. I don’t understand why he loves me so much. He’s so patient and kind. He doesn’t yell at me very often. I think he raises his voice a couple of times a year and it’s only to be heard over ambient noise. Noah is so very nice to me. I feel so undeserving. Every so often I ask him if he is storing up bitterness over the things I make him put up with. I ask him if he wants to get even with me. He gets the most baffled look. He can’t understand why I would think he feels that way. Experience.

I don’t feel like I hold up my end of the bargain. I don’t feel like I really make his life better. Certainly not enough better to justify putting up with me. I am so difficult. So unpleasant.

I wish I could get these voices out of my head. I would I could cut my mother’s voice out of my brain. “Why do you have to be so unpleasant? Why are you so difficult?” I don’t know, maybe because I was being raped and beaten and malnourished and neglected? Maybe that is why I was difficult? It really doesn’t matter why. I shouldn’t be inconveniencing anyone.

I want this panic and hate in my chest to leave. I want it gone. I want to not feel like my heart is racing and any minute terrible things will happen to me. Any minute Noah is going to turn on me and declare that he is well and truly sick of me–get out.

Instead, when I come back from the bathroom at 4:30 in the morning he talks to me for half an hour or so. When he hears me walk in the room he lifts his head from the pillow and smiles as he reaches for me. Having me near him makes him feel happier. I don’t understand. How can I make someone happy?

Mental illness is a liar. My mother is a liar. My sister is a liar. The voices in my head are liars. They tell me I am bad. That I hurt people by existing. Everyone would be better off if I was dead. My sister used to tell me that. Everyone would be better off if you weren’t here. I still believe it. And that’s part of why I walked away from my family. If you are better off without me, fine be without me. That doesn’t mean I have to die.

I’m feeling slightly weird about a few different interactions in my life. I can’t talk about them. Going forward I need to carefully weigh, “Is this person my friend or is this person a relationship with my children” and if someone is more on the kid end I simply can’t bring up issues. When I bring up issues I drive people away. I can’t do that to my kids forever. I have to stop listening and stop caring about people. I need to ignore their behavior and avoid them myself while facilitating Shanna having access. Her boundaries are different from mine.

I can’t keep pushing people away from my kids. The list of casualties in my life is long. And that woman who sent me the nasty Dear Jane letter just popped up again. She wants to reconcile because she misses me and she doesn’t want to have a panic attack for two days every time she runs into me. I’ll try real hard to care about your fucking panic attacks you stupid bitch.

I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have Noah. I would be a lot more sad. I know that part. I don’t feel like I deserve him. I know he is better than me. He tries to convince me that I am more educated but I’m having none of it. I don’t have a degree higher than his. And his degrees are from an actually difficult university. I went to a state school so pathetic it no longer even has pride of place-name. Awesome.

I’m really tired. This week the running is getting to me. I’m sleeping but waking up feeling really bad. Yay depression? It doesn’t matter if I’m depressed or if what I am doing is hard. It has to get done. Life moves on. We go to Disneyland in less than eight weeks. My marathon is in eight weeks and three days. Eep. That’s a lot of fun to talk to Shanna about.

I have a lot of good in my life. I am privileged. I am pampered and kept safe. Why do I feel like I am still in danger? Why doesn’t my brain believe my current circumstances? I don’t know. But it’s fucking annoying.

Bad day.

4 Replies

Today is really bad for me. And I can’t talk about it. Talking about it at all would be inappropriate. I have these two small children here, you see. Shanna has a cruddy nose and a sore throat. I will be here all day with them by myself. Noah will be home after bedtime. It’s a very busy day for him.

I’m very suicidal. Not in the sense that I think that people should send someone to watch my children because they are at risk. More that I hate myself a lot today. I feel like I am the sole source of bad for my children. I feel like they would be much better off without a toxic piece of shit like me. Someone less stupid could take care of them. Someone who doesn’t need to curl up in bed with a teddy bear and cry at thirty.

Nothing bad has happened today or yesterday or even the day before. But I find places to hide in my house and I take breaks to cry, silently. I’m not supposed to be crying. It is shameful that I am crying. What an ungrateful piece of shit. But I can’t stop. I can’t stop.

Leave a reply

I have a long day with the kids ahead of me. I’m rethinking some of my discipline attitude this morning. The thought of being stuck in the house makes me want to cry. I’ll figure something out.

There are a lot of things I want to write about but I don’t have time. I feel like I am compiling a mental list of memories I want to flesh out into stories. Why I grew up hating yellow. My relationship with Disneyland (which really I want to send as a letter to someone in Disney customer service because I’m distinctly unhappy with Disneyland Paris). I want to write about M/s and what it means to me. (I know you don’t like that capitalization, Mo, and I can live with that.

Noah and I had a conversation this morning about M/s. It made me happy. I want to write about relationship styles and life approaches because I want to write them for Noah. It’s hard to fully explain myself in a conversation. I spend too much time quietly thinking and feeling unable to speak. I don’t want to do M/s at this stage of our life so the conversation is academic at this point. Theoretical. Hypothetical. Future tense. It’s fun to think about. We’ll see.

There are different kinds of relationships to model. I grew up with people who were highly enmeshed and codependent and as a result largely non-functional in society. It’s possible to be highly enmeshed and codependent and also functional. What’s the difference? I don’t know. But I think that it involves knowing that even though you want to be codependent and enmeshed there are times when no one but you is going to meet your needs and you have to get them fucking met.

I would like to have a lifelong relationship with my kids. We are going to have a very non-standard relationship. We won’t have a standard set of life experiences. My kids will probably be very differently independent than is common at whatever life stage. I am asynchronous with the world and I don’t know how to teach someone else to be. Professional actors are on a different schedule. Olympic level athletes are on a different schedule. Homeless people are on a different schedule. Professional sailors.

I have moved a lot. I have seen a lot of different schedules. I find it endlessly interesting how people decide to spend their time. I can often see how they are working toward goals. Sometimes I don’t understand their motivation. I try like hell to keep my mouth shut.

I don’t feel like I have the luxury of auto pilot. With great privilege comes great responsibility. I see similar threads in many different pieces of writing. If I were a real academic I would carry around a bibliography in my head. I don’t really care if anyone can check my sources though so I’ll just babble.

With great privilege comes great responsibility. What does that even mean? It means that even though I live in a time and a place with a strong focus on being like other people it doesn’t work for me. Trying hurts me. Nevertheless I have great privilege. I’m not filthy rich (I have very little disposable “extra” money if I want to meet specific long-term goals) but I have more than the vast majority of everyone everywhere through all time. I sound like a bragging asshole. It’s simply and literally true. I have the tax returns to prove it.

If that is true then I need to sit with what that means. I have more access to health care. I have more ability to buy things. I don’t have very much support. In order for me to get consistent support I have to pay for it and that is not very reliable and would cost a whole ‘nother job to support. It would mean changing everything about my life. So I make do without support. Noah does what he can (and it’s a lot more than most husbands from what I can tell. That man is very serious about wanting me to have time to do things that are important to me–I am blessed) but he’s not available to me for very many hours. I am functionally alone with my kids for the vasty majority of hours in every day.

Short term gain for long-term loss doesn’t work for me. I have long-term goals. I am going to make sure I can meet them. I am going to save money and plan. I have waited all my life for this. I have always wanted to do these things but I was afraid to do them alone. I feel ashamed of wanting to drag my kids through the life of experiences I want them to have. They won’t be like other people.

I do not want my children to have a bone deep understanding of what it is like to live with abuse. But I want them to meet real people who live very differently from them. I want them to spend time watching how those people live. I want them to understand what they have. I don’t know other ways to really teach that. It is so important to me to have the experiences I want to have with my children that I want to build a whole life around it. Well, or at least these twenty years. These are the years when I get to learn all of the things I want to learn. I get to go places and try things. I get to be silly and experimental.

But life comes with a price tag. How do you learn about money? What is money? How do you get it? How do you choose to spend it? Why do you choose to spend it that way? What experiences are most important to you?

How do you figure out what kind of grown up you want to be? How do you have the life you want to have? I am having the life I want to have. We take risks and find rewards. We are consciously building in buffers so that our risks have limited impact. I won’t gamble if I can’t afford to lose.

I’ve had several times when I’ve felt a bit mixed about my spending over the past year and some. Then I walk through Oakland and I see the window of the dry cleaners and I smile. And I’m really happy that Wicked Grounds is open every day to give people a safe place to exist when they otherwise have nowhere to go.

Even though I kind of wish I had paid off DVC. Not really. I’m a lot more glad that Wicked Grounds is open. I want to be part of it. I feel so glad that I have a way to feel part of something important to me.

Being part of the scene is not important to Noah. What he wants to do with and to me is between him and me. He doesn’t need anyone else’s sanction. He doesn’t need or particularly want community around this part of his identity. I do and I don’t. I don’t feel like it is a good idea to want approval from that community. That’s not a very positive opinion to have. I’m a very funny mixture of sex-positive and protective.

I have a very specific and intense grasp of one possible outcome of early sexual knowledge. I realize I am uncommon.

I feel like people tend to get immersed in the part of their life they are in. They want to immerse their children in that part of life. I have listened to a lot of conversations in which people talk about sex as natural and they don’t want to feel ashamed of it so they are open with their children. This can run the gamut, folks.

For me, in my house with my kids, the current limit of talk about sex is limited to “masturbation is awesome, normal, healthy and good… and private while you are a kid. Sex with other people comes much later.”

Of course the conversation will get a lot more frank in a few years. But dude, they are two and four. That’s where we are. They don’t need to hear that I like to cry during sex. They don’t need to hear a lot of noises at all. Sex is private.

I didn’t understand that properly until I had kids. I have never before wanted to have a brick wall between me and someone else before I have wild and unabashed sex. It’s not about shame. I don’t think–I suppose I could be wrong.

With my children around I must be alert, focused on them, and able to be disturbed at any point. It’s not good for my ability to focus on what is going on with my body. It’s hard to have much of any attention to spare for Noah’s needs at all, let alone sexually.

I feel like part of me is in waiting. And I feel like learning patience with that experience is part of being a grown up. But it’s hard. I don’t think I would be able to balance this kind of attention and emotional load if I was new to exploring bdsm. I don’t think I would be able to experience NRE and focus on my kids how I do. I have limits.

I don’t want to grow complacent. I have been given a ridiculous gift this lifetime. Regardless of what comes in the future Noah has provided me with a wonderful time and space in my life. I have been more safe here than at any other point. In less than a month we will have been married for six years. Which means I have lived here that long. Twice as long as I lived with Tom.

I want an enmeshed, codependent relationship because I want to feel pressured to stay interesting for Noah’s sake. I like the way he looks at me. I want to feel compelled to earn it. I don’t want to get lazy and go looking for that new-spark with someone else. I want this to meet my needs. If he can’t meet a need then I need to bloody meet it for myself. I don’t need to pass it on to someone else. I don’t want that.

I like who Noah wants to be married to. He wants a permanent crazy girlfriend. He likes living with someone artistic and creative who changes the world around him based on weird whims. I’m not sure why he likes that, but he does. He likes that I want the world to be more how I see it in my head. He likes the world I want to live in.

I didn’t know anyone would ever like me like this.

So there is this Katy Perry song. I feel guilty for liking it. I feel like that about Noah. Honestly. I feel like I have made it very hard to be with me. I want a fairly specific life and it’s not cheap. I feel guilty about needing access to so much money. But it’s there. We have an unthinkable amount of money for me. We have tv stars on tv money. That’s wh

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Category Archives: adult-only

Today isn’t starting well.

Sex.

I don’t think that getting over my anger is the point.

I live for Sundays.

This is why I don’t have friends.

Processing

found the lost one.

neeeeeeedy

Sustainable loads

Running buddy

Thank you!

Fifteen

If you read this on Saturday morning

If I treat this like a writing exercise…

An email I won’t send.

Get it out of your head.

Bad day.