It’s 3:40. I’d love to be asleep. I got 2.5 hours of sleep. I went to bed at fucking 8pm. It’s been a long night.

I didn’t manage to talk to my family about the phone call yesterday. I will when they wake up. I heard back from the therapist we met with last week. This person seems to ‘get’ how I do therapy. They are encouraging us to set up relationships with therapists for most of my family members and a family therapist. In their opinion it would be good to have an intensive 2-3 months for “getting to know one another” then back burnering the relationships until a crisis hits.

I love this therapist. I think that is precisely the correct way for someone with my problems to do therapy. I need help sometimes. I can’t figure out what to do on my own. But if you try to meet someone during a crises… that doesn’t work well. You need to establish contact during a time of relative calm and get to know one another and establish trust. I can’t establish trust if I’m hysterical. I don’t trust anyone then.

This is going to be expensive. But it will help me get where I want to be in 20 years.

The family therapist will work with all four of us sometimes and hopefully sometimes just me and Noah.

All four of us get to spaces in an argument where we have trouble listening and hearing someone else’s point of view. Outside intervention helps that process.

I’m happy that this therapist is very concerned that Eldest Child not is acting like Future Middle Child is The Problem. That’s not true. Ok, so FMC (how’s that for a new nickname?) is very explosive and has anger issues that need to be worked on so they stop hitting their sister… but that’s not the same thing as being The Problem.

It’s more complicated than that. It always is.

They are recommending somatic work for me. I’ve done primarily talk therapy my entire life. I have never worked with a somatic therapist. I think that it is a good suggestion to focus on what is going on in my body with my emotions in the moment instead of always trying to talk/process old trauma. That seems like it might have some genuine value. Especially while I’m pregnant and having ALL THE EMOTIONS right now. This embryo, soon to be fetus, needs me to calm the fuck down.

I’m thinking a lot about my brother Tommy. My mom cautioned me against a third child because… look at my brother. Tommy was born after 45 minutes of labor and he didn’t stop running until he was hit by a car at 12. He was an alcoholic and drug addict. Yes, by 12. He was sensory seeking to a degree that my mother truly could not cope with. Given how I’m physically feeling since this pregnancy started (I mean for fuck’s sake… it’s been like 2 weeks and my body has EXPLODED with energy) I am already thinking ahead to a highly sensory seeking child. Given that I’m god damn tired already from dealing with children for 9 years… oh goody. I see why Tommy threw my mom for a loop. She was tired too. Tommy and Sissy are about as far apart as EC and Lightning will be. And my mom started at 19, not 27.

I keep feeling like we should move away from a city. I feel constant anxiety about all the things I could/maybe should be doing. I should find a way to fit in more cultural experiences. More activities. More socializing.

But I’d kinda like to be boring as fuck and live my life as a home body in the woods. I went back and forth from cities to the woods as a kid. I always liked the woods better. I like people in cities… but I get so overwhelmed. Too many options. Too many decisions to make. I’m too exhausted to face my social calendar by the time I’ve made all the decisions I have to make in order to decide what things to do.

Wouldn’t it be nice to come “into town” a few times a year and have a lot of experiences then and go home and… just live.

I really like being outside and exercising with the kids. We are getting seriously into our bike rides. Yesterday the kids and I did 6.3 miles. We are prepping for this summer when we will ride our bikes 3 miles each way to the water park. (I love our tiny, dinky little water park. Two big slides. One circular/lazy river thing. One pool. One toddler splash zone. It’s small and usually not crowded.) In order to handle the 6 mile ride round trip, plus swimming, plus their daily PE classes… we have to work up to that before we get started. That’s going to be a lot of damn work.

But it feels so good.

I’d love to take my kids hiking in the woods more. But the drive to get to woods kills me.

I like how when you live in the woods it is a lot easier to get up and just do your thing. There are fewer bright, shiny distractions. I’m a reader. I like making shit. I never run out of things I want to do. I don’t get bored.

Only boring people get bored.

Sometimes I get restless and that’s a cue I need to switch activities… but that isn’t truly boredom. Boredom is forcing yourself to not pursue change.

I’m never going to stop having friends. No matter where I live. I spend most of my time with my friends on the internet anyway. This week I had a Skype date with my Sarah and we both cooked dinner at the same time. It felt *wonderful*. It felt loving and tender and fun. We got to talk about what we were separately making and everything else in life. It felt validating and inspiring. I love my Sarah so much. I’m so glad she likes talking to me and helping me puzzle through life.

I’ve been talking to my Jenny weekly on Skype. I’m getting to see my newest niece a lot, granted slightly pixelated but whatever. That feels really nice too. We are so different in personality but we like each other. It feels like family. This relationship feels like, “Even though you get on my nerves I still love you.” Specifically I usually feel like I get on every nerve Jenny has. I’m way too fucking argumentative. But she loves me anyway. Even though I’m difficult and irritating. She’s loved me for almost 24 years and counting. Only 6 years to go before she is the longest relationship of my life.

My Pam is checking in on Skype as she can. I find it funny that one of the things Pam believes is most true about her is that she’s a bad listener. But she’s one of the best listeners I know. She is so curious. She is so interested in finding out about why things work the way they do. She is absolutely determined to be part of change in this lifetime. I respect her so much. I love her. I love how she laughs and the stories she tells. I am endlessly grateful that she shares her family with me. Her sister is a delight and a joy and I’m glad I get to adopt her too. Pam’s mom is really awesome too. She used to bring my kids over to hang out with her grandmother before her grandmother moved back to Taiwan.

My children are very blessed.

Many other people are checking in on IM services. I’m having long conversations with many people who love me and whom I love.

My existential loneliness shit is… not because I’m actually unloved or abandoned or ignored. It is about brain chemistry.

I miss Twitter. But I’m going to get over it.

I think that if I moved to the woods, where it was cheaper, I’d fly to visit friends a few times a year and otherwise be ok.

I don’t know about my family for sure, but I think they’d adapt.

Do I want to leave my bathroom? No. But if I could sell this house for serious bank I could move somewhere else and build an entire house to my specifications. I have ideas. I have stuff in my head. I should start sketching just because.

Since I won’t be traveling the world with my family… what should we do instead?

My real dream is to buy a piece of land that is zoned for multiple houses and build a main house and a bunch of smaller houses so my friends could follow me if they wanted to. Or I could find people who are local to whatever area and make connections. I’m adaptable as fuck.

I would seriously love to be responsible for essentially a whole housing development of weird houses. Because you know that my designs are going to be wacky.

And by housing development I’m thinking 5-10 houses.

But that was yesterday’s random fantasy. Who knows what will happen.

I feel less self hating today than I did for several days. That’s good.

In an attempt to deal with my racing thoughts I’m going to leave this page up for the day. I’m going to try and never write more than a few sentences at a time for arm strain.

Do you know why I keep seeing the woo doctor? Because when I go in and stick my hand on the silly metal plate she comes back with, “By far the biggest thing to handle this time is emotional instability. The emotion that is coming up as dominant is alienation.” Shit. Ok fine. I’ll take the pills and drops. They do help.

I need to catch up on Mint. I’m freaking the fuck out. I feel like I try to get a handle on money and then, “Hey, wanna spend $6,000 repairing your kitchen?”

Do you know what I love about Mint? It is mostly a game I play with myself. Does whether I stay “in budget” in a certain random area really matter? No. At the end of the day the only part that matters is whether all of my bills are paid and there is still money in the bank. The distribution… isn’t ultimately that important.

I finally had that conversation with my trainer about boundaries. As I expected he spent a lot of the conversation looking like he was in pain. He was nice about it. He said thank you for telling him about my issues and he will work on treating me more appropriately. Can’t really get a better reaction. (He’s the sort to lecture me extensively about how it is Never Ok To Eat SubOptimal Food. Dude… there are days when I eat crap or I don’t eat. You are not the boss of my body. Don’t do that. You don’t know my story.)

I walked out in my back yard and I picked cauliflower and now I am turning it into soup. This feels mighty. Ok, I burned it a little. It was a very small quantity and took less time to cook than the standard recipe. It was… ok. Not amazing. Even with lots of asiago and pancetta.

Two friends said I should read this essay yesterday. It’s like my friends know me.

That’s yesterday

Man. My feelings of alienation are on turbo. I don’t know what is contributing to what.

I don’t feel like it would be smart to talk about all the alienation stuff. I feel unliked. I feel unwanted. I feel rejected. But I don’t think my feelings are based on other people’s behaviors. I’m seeing folks about as often as I’ve been seeing people for years. Only one person has clearly said “Go the fuck away” this year and that was just. No one else has divorced me. So it isn’t that these feelings are based on the actions of anyone in my life. (I’m not blaming y’all for my shit.)

All day long I’ve been telling people that I’m “having all of the emotions at once turned up to 11.” I’m sad. I’m ecstatic. I’m depressed. I’m anxious. I’m tired. I’m energetic. I’m frustrated. I’m patient. I’m laughing. I’m crying. I don’t settle into one emotion before the next one comes up. My thoughts are racing like a speeding train.

I can think about something like 70 topics in a minute.

Many of them about how I feel so weird and stupid and bad and like I don’t fit anywhere and it is my fucking fault I will never be part of a group.

I have tried for group membership over the years. I can manage to feel like I’m allowed to be in a group for a little while… then I have to leave. Often there is no real, specific conflict. I just feel restless and like I don’t belong.

This is me. I’m not blaming anyone for this. But it’s hella bad right now.

My dental hygienist thinks my teeth are in the best shape they have been in, probably in my life. She said I’m not doing my normal instant pregnancy degradation and that’s wonderful. I let the newbie dentist in the practice look in my mouth. After I warned him that I have extreme dental anxiety and I don’t know him and this is gonna be rough… he put down the pick and decided he would just look around with the mirror. I like him more already. My main dentist is a wonderful old Jewish/bear man. He’s heading in the direction of retirement. He can’t work on me forever. I have to transition.

Why do I love Jewish people so much? If I go through my personal history of people I’ve had super intense relationships… almost half of them are Jewish. Given how few people are Jewish in the scheme of things… that seems interesting to me. It’s kinda like autistics. The people I get along with best are very very frequently autistic.

I always wonder about patterns.

Speaking of autism. We saw a somatic therapist today as a family. I think this was a great idea. (Thanks L!!) They are gender nonconforming and can help YC out with stuff. They have a lot of feedback about how I live in my body and ways they can help me that other therapy models do not offer. I am really excited. We went through an autism screening and they seemed to think that yeah… that seems like you.

I freak out about a lot of things. I freak out about a lot of changes. It isn’t all trauma based. My mood swings are not just hormonal or random or cyclical. I do not have bipolar disorder. I react to stimuli. I react to things that make my body feel bad.

It’s really fascinating how my 30’s are changing how I feel about a lot of the stuff that is going on with me. I’m not “just crazy”. I’m finding people who will look at me in different ways and say, “Oh yeah that makes sense. There are ways to help you handle some of these issues so you feel more comfortable.”

NOT SO I MAKE OTHER PEOPLE MORE COMFORTABLE BY NOT HAVING EMOTIONS IN FRONT OF THEM BECAUSE FUCK EVERYONE WHO THINKS THAT IS WHAT I SHOULD BE STRIVING FOR.

I want to feel more comfortable in my body. I want to feel less out of control and scared and helpless.

So yeah. My list of diagnoses are now up to: PTSD, GAD, PMDD, autism, ADHD, Fibromyalgia, golf elbow, tennis elbow, TMJ, and IBS.

Want to know what’s fascinating to me about my growing list of labels?

I feel less like I’m wrong. Even with the extreme alienation I’m currently feeling.

Oh. That’s a common thing for people with both autism and ADHD to feel. That’s something that people like me often feel.

That’s not crazy at all.

That’s a kind of comfort to me that I don’t know how to explain. I mean, I still plan to work on making progress on the symptoms that bother me. But if I am broken I am broken in ways that have names. I am broken in ways that are understandable with effort. I am broken in ways that folks are right this fucking minute pioneering ways to help folks.

I live in a magical time.

I am so lucky.

It is hard knowing that people demonstrate love and it is irrational to doubt them but my body still doesn’t know how to process feeling loved. My body still wants to deny that I am loved. My brain? I don’t know. There are 53 god damn people on our mailing list for events. That’s not including their spouses/kids. I have absolutely no justification for believing that EVERYONE hates me. That’s utter bullshit.

Surely this is something I can hack one of these years. This can’t be a permanent unassailable attribute. This must be something I can alter. Neuroplasticity for the win.

It was lovely talking to one of the pioneers studying neurodiversity today. I feel so lucky to live where I live.

I walked 1.85 miles today. I’m trying to keep moving.

It isn’t that my friends somehow fail to display the right behaviors. Because Noah has danced backward across a tight rope to demonstrate love and…

I really struggle to feel it.

The only people who I can easily feel their love are my kids. I’m not sure why. I don’t know if that will change as they age. I’m terrified of the future. But hey, I’m stretching out the little-kids-phase as long as possible. I’m going to have a solid 20 years of little kid time because of the spacing. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck that sounds overwhelming. That’s what my mom did. *shudder*

Well. We’re in it. I want this so bad I feel explosive with need. I want this child in my life. I want this child.

And god. We are talking about two more. So that there isn’t a straggler kid who feels alone and like they don’t have a buddy.

Now it’s time for bed time reading. This is going to be our life for… decades.

I’ve blocked social media on my computer so I have less temptation to stand around talking to people with my fingers all day. This is going to feel really isolating and lonely. I use the input of social media to fill a lot of bandwidth in my brain that feels like it wants people-contact. With where my arms are… that’s not sustainable through this pregnancy.

I feel really lonely again, which makes me feel guilty. I don’t have any good reason to feel lonely. I’m surrounded by people all day. People where a lot of what we talk about are chores, learning exercises, video games and comic books.

I had this moment where I realized something: Noah’s fanatical hatred of “spoilers” means we just don’t get to talk about anything he hasn’t read/seen in front of him. And now he’s around a lot.

I’m still failing to make him feel like I like him a lot. Even though I don’t really talk to anyone much any more other than him. Even though I rarely leave the house other than for medical appointments. I’m not focused and gushing about him the way I did when I was 23. So I must not care any more.

I really should learn more about programming even though it is going to cause me pain and I hate it so much it makes me cry. Because we need more to talk about. Because he believes I don’t love him if I’m not obsessed with what he is obsessed about.

I can’t focus more on video games or comics. I just can’t. I’m at my limit.

But apparently I just can’t love him enough.

I blocked facebook (I shoulder surf on Noah’s account–I know a bunch of people who are sick with cancer and facebook is how I find out about them) and twitter on my computer. My memory of pregnancy is that my arms are going to buuuuuuuuuurn like fire. No more social media.

I revamped my pill box again. I took out all of the Tylenol PMs I’ve been using in the absence of genuine sleeping pills. I pray for pregnancy exhaustion.

I’m grateful that I’ve made progress on reducing my pot usage. At this point I feel very comfortable with my level of usage. Is it perfect/ideal? No. But mental illness is rarely ideal.

I’m really thrilled about how exercise is going. We are getting regular again. We are walking many days a week. We bike at least once and often several times a week. Noah and I are trying to do some running. Summer is coming and we have season passes to the water park. It’s a 30 minute bike ride away. We have like 7 more dance classes. I have 4 more sessions with my trainer. I won’t be continuing with dance or training through the rest of the pregnancy.

My massage therapists are on hold until the second trimester. Both of them are completely paranoid about first trimester massage. Given that I miscarried twice after massages… I’m ok with this paranoia. I’ll be careful with anyone touching my ankles or lower back.

Things are going much better with home schooling. I laid down the law with the kids “It will be this way or you will go to school” and all of a sudden they are super fucking compliant. They want to be home with me really bad. That’s wonderful. But I need to not have to baby you all day long if I’m having a baby. I can’t baby big kids any more. Both kids have been showing up and doing their chores and academics with one, maybe two prompts in the morning. We have been doing really well at getting everything done by 11am. I’m excited. They want to be with me; they want to jump through the hoops I’m putting in front of them. As a former public school teacher I find this startling. They want to please me in a way I have rarely ever seen a child want to please adults. It’s surprising every day.

I am not yet to a point where I am keeping my house as clean as I want and it’s bothering me a lot. It isn’t really any one else holding up my work. I’ve been struggling with my own internal motivation. I’ve been feeling sad and withdrawn and like I don’t want to keep pursuing friendships. I feel like I should run away and start again with people who haven’t already proven that they have limits. I mean, my friends are better than I deserve. I know that. But I’m feeling really sad and like the problems I have are all my fault and I should go where people are not already sick of my stupid ass. Almost every time I’ve seen someone lately I’ve felt like I said everything wrong and I was horribly offensive and stupid and rude and judgmental and I should be silenced.

I feel so wrong. I’ve been thinking it was PMDD but now that I’m pregnant… I’m just a self hating mother fucker.

I feel like I’m failing everyone in every way.

I’m barely keeping up with my garden. I feel so weary and useless.

I’m struggling with my cat and her decline. This feels so sad.

I’m kinda freaking out about all the death right now; I feel like I am failing all of these people who need more support and I’m not providing it.

I feel guilty that I’m not supporting my neighbors more because I know they need support and I’m feeling empty.

And at the same time I feel overwhelmed with elation because I’m going to have a baby. I get to meet another little person who isn’t going to hate me and see me as useless. They won’t see me as wrong and bad in the way other people do. They wouldn’t prefer that I die.

Dad arrives today! Tomorrow is my Eldest Child’s birthday. She turns nine. Where did the time go?!

I have less than 6 hours to finish getting ready for Dad. Must hurry.

My body hurts, but in a fairly predictable way. My back is giving me trouble.

For the past few weeks I’ve been trying to use the 15mg capsules 3x’s/day and one time of a 50mg capsule. The days when I’m using 45mg only are going really poorly. When I went to the dispensary this time I just got the 50mg because right now I feel like I’m doing better with one capsule at breakfast and one at dinner. When I try to space them out during the day with less medication at a time I forget to take them and I spend a lot of time bouncing up and down mood wise. I’m pretty good at getting the two doses/day. I screw that up less often which makes the body load more consistent.

100mg is more than I wish I were using, but I’m not managing to find a good in between right now.

I’m wondering if I should have one 50mg pill a day and try to use a little bit of oil or flower. If I prepackage daily amounts of flower I don’t get all excited about “YAY I get to get stoned again.” I pretty much don’t get stoned any other way any more. I’m too acclimated. This might be the best way to get a little bit more than 50mg without going all the way to 100mg. The capsule dosing options aren’t great. The 15mg ones, even when I take two, feel like nothing at all. I need to take four or more before I feel it.

Brands aren’t very consistent.

I feel like I’ve been a grumpy bitch for a few days here because I’m bouncing hard off of Youngest Child. Even the babysitter (who is a short step shy of a saint) has been saying that YC is on a roll of being a pain in the ass. If the babysitter is complaining… that’s some egregious behavior. So I feel vindicated in being frustrated. But I also feel like I need to find a different way of coping with it.

But man if you have advice on how to convince a younger sibling that it’s HELLA STUPID to hit their older sibling every time they walk by… I want to hear it. I’m on the verge of saying, “Hey older sibling–when someone hits you repeatedly… sometimes the best way to make them stop is to make them bleed.” I haven’t said this yet… but if I seriously can’t get my younger child to stop hurting my older child… I don’t know what else to fucking do. We’ve tried all the non-punitive things I know to try. I redirect like crazy. We talk about feelings. We have ways to deal with feelings that are inappropriate.

I have all the books. I’ve tried all the tactics. I kinda wonder if this kid just has to get punched in the god damn face a time or two before they learn that hitting people sucks.

I’m at my wit’s end.

And that’s the news in brief.

Yesterday, as we walked to the farmers market, we talked to a bunch of neighbors. Like we do. One of our neighbors expressed that she wishes she had a time machine so she could go back in time and do everything right the way we have.

*cough* *choke* *sputter*

Do everything right? Bwahahahahahaha

But I can see why it might look that way if you know us as we walk by. Fair enough.

I get the general impression that her two kids have different fathers. I think what she means is “I didn’t manage to figure out a happy family.”

Only she seems pretty happy with her kids. It isn’t a mom/dad/kids dynamic… but they don’t have a bad life. They are stable and secure. She is raising the children in the home she was raised in so her expenses haven’t been too bad in life. She’s had an easier time than most of the single moms I know.

So what does it mean?

It means that she can’t get someone to think about her and prioritize her in the ways she wants. That makes sense. I auditioned a lot of people before I found someone who would treat me how I wanted to be treated. I dated a lot of people for 3-6 weeks. They weren’t willing to jump through hoops for me (reasonable decision) so I moved on. No big deal.

But other people don’t feel like they have the right to date scores of people and break up with them on the path to finding someone they want to stick with. I’m not sure why. We seem to have this myth that everything must work out with the first or second or third person you date. Yeah… I wasn’t going to be able to make that work.

I shudder to think of the kind of marriage I would have had with any one else I dated. I’m still married and doing well at marriage because this is a task Noah has put his whole heart and soul into.

I don’t have the standard complaints about marriage.

Do you know that my husband has computer programs that externalize most of our household management so he can track it and I don’t have to think about it? I don’t decide how often we need to sweep or mop. He checks the pantry and the fridge against a list of staple food items and he makes the shopping list. Sure, I do most of the grocery shopping but that’s because I like the grocery store. If something isn’t on the list I buy it if I want it and I don’t if I don’t think about it. If we don’t have something we need for a meal… he runs to the store to get it. I already went. It wasn’t on the list.

Noah’s so nice I don’t deserve him.

I suspect that part of the reason he tries this hard is when he was trying a lot less hard and bouncing between me and other obligations… I walked.

That scarred him.

I’m a selfish bitch. Or, more accurately, I am not good at meeting my needs. I have gotten my needs met through most of my life by asking person after person after person after person after person. If you don’t want me to do that… you need to do something about my HUGE and omnipresent needs.

Which is a fuck ton of work. Noah picks doing it because he doesn’t want me to go anywhere.

Noah picked a high maintenance pet. Not everyone wants that. I present to you the trail of broken hearts I left behind me. They all loved me. But mostly… not enough to do back breaking amounts of work.

I get it. That seems sane.

But I need a lot. Noah wants to give it to me instead of having me ask strangers for the rest of my life. I would feel like that was just. What I need is so unfair for an individual. But here we are.

We talk frequently about how this is our one chance in this lifetime for a happy family. We were not lucky enough to grow up in happy families. We can’t make our families of origin less toxic. Our only shot at creating a reality we want to live in is right now.

Every day when we wake up we get to decide: how are we going to approach the day. How are we going to approach each other.

I want Noah to be nice to me. So I’m nice to Noah. No, I’m not just kind enough to do it for its own sake. I need the trade. It’s work to be nice. It’s work to center someone and care about them and to learn what they need.

It’s really hard learning what people need. It’s work.

It’s hard setting boundaries. Often when you are crystal clear and you say “I can’t do this any more” someone will say “Well I don’t accept that. I don’t want that boundary so I will refuse to recognize it.”

You don’t understand how this works. The door will be closed the next time you knock on it.

Because we can’t go back in time and “do things right”. You have to move forward with what is. I’m a big fan of looking at the past to learn lessons from it. But I learn the lessons so I can make different choices in the future. Not so I can pretend I didn’t do what I did.

I did that. I’ll accept the consequences.

I had an interesting conversation with my therapist yesterday. We talked about the kids and my work.

We discussed where Youngest Child is on their gender path and what that is going to mean. We went to UCSF yesterday partially to start the paper trail that my child’s gender expression has been non-standard from very early childhood. No one can ever go back and rewrite this story and say that my kid hasn’t been asking for this. It’s not coming from me. I’d be fine with having two cis children. But that’s not what I got and I’m just as happy having what I have. I just need to help them figure out how to walk this path.

Speaking of which, UCSF was great. Everyone was friendly, helpful, and accepting. The only push back/denials we got were the staff members expressing the current limits of the law and medical science. That seems like a perfectly reasonable place to say “no”. “Medical science can’t give you a body that is half and half. You have to sorta let it go one way or another. Then you can alter within a set of parameters… but you have to kinda have more estrogen or more testosterone. Some way.” They were clear that legally you can’t be nonbinary. I kinda smiled and internalized that we need to go talk to a progressive lawyer because they can’t help and that’s ok.

We talked about Eldest Child. It’s kind of hilarious right now: my therapist and all of the aunties are in full agreement with me that it’s time for this kid to walk off the ledge. It’s time to be responsible for your own education or it’s time to go to school. It’s… weird/neat/wonderful that I’m getting such universal agreement that how I perceive this situation is how other people perceive our current circumstance. It’s time for this shift. JUMP OUT OF THE NEST, LITTLE BIRD. Not in the sense that you have to move out or anything… birds don’t move out the day they leave the nest either. It’s a process. This girl needs to start just… taking responsibility instead of waiting for it to be handed to her.

Or it’s time for school.

The official line is she is on probation. Either she starts taking initiation by July…. as in habitually just doing it through the end of May, all of June, all of July… in August I’m signing her up for school. It’s time.

Especially since you want me to have a baby… I’m done babying you.

I love you. I believe you can do this. You don’t need my direction all day every day.

hahahahahaha let’s see.

Then we get to the part that is more about me. That is more about moving the needle in life. I care about a lot of shit and there’s a lot of fucked up shit in the world I wish I could have influence on. I wish I could impact homelessness, poverty, racism, sexism…

The simple reality is that moving the needle on one of those topics is a full lifetime of work and most people who pour themselves into them don’t move the needle. It’s fruitless and frustrating. If I continue to bounce around freaking out about tons of things at once… I will waste all the energy of my life.

Many people have described me as having the energy of a star being born. I don’t want to waste that.

Incest. I want to move the needle on incest.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to top caring about all the things I care about, but I need to seriously be focusing my research, reading…. and more of my money on this topic if I’m going to do what I want to do.

When I die I want to be remembered for the work I did on helping people understand incest. That’s my hill to die on. That’s my cause. That’s my thing.

That means not caring about a lot of other things very much.

I told my therapist that I don’t know how I’m going to be a one issue pony because I’m not really a one issue pony. She laughed.

She told me that my worry about needing to learn more about different cultures before I can talk to them about incest is good… but not as necessary as I think. She specializes in incest. She’s seen a looooooooooooooooot of patients with incest backgrounds. She’s white. She has lived in countries where there were almost no white people doing this job. She might know a bit more than me about what it means to work with culturally diverse incest participants.

I’m trying to figure out how to talk about these things. Perpetrator/victim language is very complicated in incest where a lot of the contact isn’t all that exploitive. When there is a huge age difference incest is often predatory and negative, but similar age family members explore sex together all the time and it isn’t the same thing as an adult hurting a child. It just isn’t. Acknowledging one set of experiences often feels like it is erasing the different points of view. I think they all matter.

I don’t think I will ever understand incest if I think of it as all bad.

There are even pieces of what happened to me that aren’t ALLLLLL bad. It’s complicated.

My shrink told me that working on my facial expressions so that I can absorb things more placidly without reacting would help. She told me that when it comes to working with people who don’t look like me… if I treat people like valuable individual human beings…. I’ll be ok. I’ll have problems sometimes… but no work exists without problems.

I’m highly spooked by the experience I had last summer. I keep telling myself if that person has the identical traumatic experience with every white person they talk to no matter how the white person in question behaves… maybe I can’t do anything to be safe enough for all people. There are going to be people who are so traumatized by people who look like me that I can never be a real person in their perception. That doesn’t mean I should decide I can’t talk to anyone in their demographic.

All people deserve to be given a shot at telling their story/presenting who they are. If I have a pattern of making people express that I’m silencing them then I need to change. If it is one person and the other people I talk to tell me that what I’m doing is positive for them… maybe I need to accept that I can’t reach everyone and keep going forward.

I think I am overall pretty good at helping people feel heard and like their story matters. I ask questions. I listen. I don’t assume that people are like me.

I’m going to fuck up. I really will. I will hate myself for every error I make. But I can’t make progress without making mistakes.

Noah points out that at this moment in my life my emotional barriers are still kind of thin. I’m not ready to take on a bunch of new traumatic stories. Not yet. But I want to work on that. That is the next step to master.

I kind of wonder if having my own room will help a bit. My shrink points out that I often create my boundaries with literal walls. I deal with the world when I can handle it and otherwise I stay home. If I have a literal room where I can take all of my big scary feelings and process them… maybe there will be less leakage. I wasn’t ready for such a specific container in the past. I’m not sure if I’m ready now but it seems like a good time to start working on this exercise.

I’m going to make a grief alter in my room. I spend so much of my life faking happiness I don’t feel that I need a concrete, physical representation of the grief I feel all the time. I want to honor the reality of my experience on this planet.

I am absolutely overfull of grief.

Maybe creating a better space for my grief will allow me to be a more healthy conduit for the grief of others.

Sobonfu, this world is a much worse place without you. Thank you so much for being willing to share your knowledge with unworthy, ignorant people such as myself. I am glad you are no longer in pain though. I hope you are resting in love.

Phew. Time to rest my arms. I love the new set up. My neck already feels less pissed off. My shoulder is still tweaking though. My forearms are barely tingling instead of burning. Smart time to stop.