Category Archives: anxiety

Chemical states and relationship transitions

Something that probably isn’t obvious is: the frequency I write is largely dictated by how much shame I feel about what is swirling around in my head. I haven’t been writing as much. I feel too much shame. I feel ashamed of who I am and how I experience the world. I shouldn’t talk about how I am experiencing things because that is drama. Which means I am running in little hamster circles in my head. It’s almost fun only it isn’t.

I think I am depressed. If I look at my physical activity lately and my attitude I have (for me) almost stopped moving. For normal people this means I am still fairly productive. I do this by sitting down in the morning and drawing up a schedule for the whole day and marking by the half hour what I should be doing. I put in a lot of reading on days when I have to do this. I can follow a schedule and “do what I am supposed to do” if I am just following a set of instructions. I no longer have to think during the day. I check the posted schedule at least five times an hour because I can’t remember what I should be doing.

I feel very sad and disconnected. On one hand I am seeing friends and trying to deepen relationships. On the other hand I spend all of my time with people experiencing a lot of physical distress because I believe in the core of my being that people actually think I am a piece of shit and they are just tolerating me because that is what you do in life. It’s what I do with the pieces of shit in my life. I don’t tell them I think that about them. But I think it. So I firmly believe I am not the only one in the world.

I’m trying. I’m trying to ignore the irrationality in my head but it comes at a fairly high cost. My stomach hurts right now. It has been hurting for quite a while. My throat hurts. My arms even hurt from clenching. My jaw hurts. I can taste the bitter metal of fear and adrenaline a lot of the time. I can’t help but feel like living with this much stress will kill me whether I commit suicide or not. My body is simply working too hard. And I won’t give myself much of a break on the other activities in my life.

It is my job to show my kids how to be productive, sensible, functional adults. That means I can’t really model getting depressed and sitting around with my books and movies for months. Even though I know I used to do exactly that for long stretches. I’d go to roost and avoid people. I can’t any more. My kids can’t deal with that kind of isolation. They actually need people.

I suspect that part of my issue is around money. I use money to fill in the cracks on what I have to do versus what I want to do–I expect that is standard. Right now and for a while I can’t do that. I have to stay home and not spend money. That’s hard because it means I am making today and yesterday and tomorrow a lot harder than they “have” to be so that some day off in the distant future we can do as ok as we are right now while we have a dip in income. Self discipline is hard. It wears through my willpower. I get physically tired. And knowing that I can’t do much of anything with money to make my life better triggers a lot of feeling hopeless about situations in my life. Either I can figure out how to do everything by magic with no money or I can deal with them just not happening. Things won’t get fixed. It makes me feel bad.

I don’t like feeling thwarted. It makes me want to stop trying. But I can’t. It’s not fair for me to stop trying. It’s not fair for me to stop hoping. I provide the structure of everything for my kids. They need to understand that frugality is not a death sentence. They shouldn’t view it with abject horror as making their lives terrible. You need to live within your means. It’s not a harsh sentence. It’s life.

My tomato harvest will once again be epic. I anticipate begging access to a pressure canner this year. I have frozen enough fruit to get us through the winter. I feel good about that. We will need more meat before the end of the year. Ok, I just set up a beef pickup in September. I believe the internet is Magic. This means I can save up the $600 for the meat over more than one month. Woo. I am starting to build my stockpile again. I cleaned out all the food in the house for Sarah so we could build a stockpile of foods we both like to cook with together. That didn’t really happen and I haven’t had a full larder in a year. I have a fair bit of stuff in the freezer I will probably never use because it’s not stuff I like and I have otherwise been just trying to make up the deficit in the food budget for a long time. We’ve been buying week to week until last month. I would like to spend the summer/fall stocking up so that over the winter I can lower the food budget and eat out of stores. We’ll see. Temporarily I raised the food budget by taking it out of other places. Money is not infinite.

I think it is kind of weird that I feel bad for feeling frustrated about money. I have access to far more money than anyone in my family. By far. My mother broke $30k/year for the first time the year she turned fifty. My sister I think got up above $60k/year. Noah makes more than twice that by himself.

When people tell me that they don’t see any relevance for feminism in the current era I think: “Why is everything that women do esteemed so little and why is the stuff men do esteemed so highly?” If you think it is because the men stuff is more important I might kick you in the shins. If the poorly-esteemed work that women do stopped happening then all of a sudden you would have MUCH BIGGER PROBLEMS than if your god damn magical phone stopped working. Or if you didn’t have a computer oh no what would you do?! What your fucking ancestors did for millenium. Stop whining.

We have an interesting way of deciding what is important and what is worth money here. I’m grateful that I get to be on the receiving end of that money but I feel pretty ashamed of the fact that I would never have had a life this comfortable without Noah. No chance. Comparatively I am worthless. That feels bad to me. If I didn’t have Noah I would probably have to go on welfare for a while. I can’t just go get a teaching job. I would have to go back to school because my credential lapsed.

I know that all of my status is worthless if I stop having this man stand next to me. I feel thin. I feel unimportant. I feel permeable and insignificant. So of course I’m binge eating and I’ve gained weight.

I am only worthy of low status occupations and activities. It’s certainly all I do with my time. I garden and clean. I play with my kids. Shouldn’t I pay a gardner and a housekeeper and a nanny so I don’t have to sully my hands with those activities? Ugh. Yet more evidence of my class issues; I suppose. I feel strongly pressured to be idle. That should be the point of all this status I inherited from Noah. Only I physically cannot handle idleness. It makes me feel terrible emotionally and physically.

If I am not working to make my home nicer then I sit here and stare dejectedly at all the things I can’t fix right now and I cry. It’s not better.

I feel really bad because I can’t handle dealing with new people right now. I am slowly moving around the people I’ve known for many many years deepening relationships but I’m terrified of new people. I don’t know how to act around them. I feel so physically bad that the experience is really unpleasant. I feel guilty about this. I don’t believe I am done finding the people I will be close to this lifetime. I’m just really scared right now and I can’t do it.

Well I know one thing I’m doing today. I’m getting rid of the spider web right above where I write that is currently home to a spider the size of the tip of my pinky finger up to the joint. That’s rather disturbing. Awesome.

I feel bad because Noah takes my fussing over money as sign that he is not providing well enough. I’m having trouble convincing him that I believe he is a good provider. I think that is kind of funny. He is supporting me with a degree of luxury I have never consistently experienced in my entire life. Yes, it’s adequate. Really. When my petty cash runs in the tens of thousands no one should feel guilty. Holy fucking shit. We have a high burn rate. In order to ensure that we will actually be ok in case of a temporary set-back we need a very large cushion. It’s simple mathematics. Why does it feel so emotionally complicated?

But he grew up with parents who didn’t work at all and dealt with family investments. It’s a whole different world. He grew up with parents who didn’t have jobs and still paid people to clean their house and work on their property. It’s a whole different world.

I think I don’t want to have an outside job partially because I don’t want my kids to believe that cleaning up after themselves is beneath them and should be done by a menial laborer who cannot aspire to better for complex reasons of race, class, shame, and bigotry. I don’t want to get a job so I can have enough money to pay someone to be beneath me. I never get what I want from those relationships and then I hate people. It’s not a good system. You can’t pay someone enough to care about doing their job. People are either interested in their work or they aren’t. I’m interested in the work of maintaining my house. No one else is. I have to live here. I don’t want to live in a piece of shit house that is falling down around my ears. Maintenance is god damn mandatory.

Part of what I am struggling with right now is the fact that I want my kids to have relationships with people. That means they are going to have to deal with the fact that people are not reliable. They can’t be trusted to tell the truth. You have to be very careful how you partition out trust. Look at what people do and not what they say if you want to know the truth of a person.

This is what I tell myself because I try so hard to do the right thing even though I feel my speech is often offensive and wrong. I say inappropriate things. But at least I am physically doing all the right things at the right times of the day. Sometimes it feels like all that I have to prop up my self worth. Of course I value it highly.

I have been thinking about storyboarding for the book but I haven’t picked up a pen. I’m afraid. I have ideas and I’m afraid I’m not good enough to complete them. I think the best thing about NaNoWriMo is the structured pressure of it. Produce, motherfucker. I am really looking forward to being post-marathon and in a writing phase again. I need a better ergonomic system before November or I am going to damage myself. My arms are tingling as I type. Shit.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the structure and nature of my compulsive sexuality. When do I do it? Why do I do it? What are the lead-up events? It’s a group coping activity. I don’t do it one on one in the same way–even with prey. I do it as a way of finding a position in a group of people. I know how to be the slut. It’s pretty much the only group role I feel comfortable in. As an aging woman it is one I need to get out of before I look more desperate and pathetic than I already do.

I slept. I swear I did. I still feel tired. I feel exhausted in the marrow of my bones. I’m going out tonight. Sigh. Like, after bed time tonight. I leave at dinner time. Lately I have been finding it very important to financially prioritize supporting the endeavors of long time friends. I’ve paid to attend several shows/events recently just because I wanted to be in the same physical space as specific people. I don’t care much about the activity. I never really have. I want the people. I want to stand in close physical proximity to people who know a lot about me and like me. I ache for it. Being an audience is a fairly comfortable role right now. Little is expected of me but I get to make someone else feel good by being present. Nearly half of the fun money I have had for the whole year has been spent on going out to see two people in particular. I like them. I need them. If you add in this one other friend you get to more than half of the money I have spent other than the book. That’s been my money for the year. I don’t go to Starbuck’s. I don’t treat myself to books or music. I did take Shanna to see Brave. That is our movie for the year. We go to the park and to the kid places we have memberships to. We pack lunch. I severely limit my driving. Yesterday we drove to Oakland then Oakley then Vacaville to see people and I don’t think I can drive much the rest of the month. I’ve used more than half of my monthly gas allotment on one day. Well, ok. It was worth it. I only see them two or three times a year. I only drive up once. It’s worth it. That is how I am setting my priorities.

I like relationships that have a lot of hurdles to existence. If they continue then I feel like someone truly loves me. It is hard for someone to prove they love me. I get into trouble with expectations. I try to keep them low but once in a while I am foolish and I expect more from people than they are going to do. I recover from that with ill grace. I’m never thrilled when someone shows themselves to be not worthy of trust I have given them. It causes me to feel a lot of self-doubt about my general worth. I thought I could trust this person to do what they say and I can’t. It must be because I am not worth telling the truth to. It must be because I am not worthy of even thinking about long enough to follow through on commitments. That must be it. I am so fucking pathetic.

At this point I can’t talk about my anger and frustrations about these situations because I can’t express it in front of my kids. My kids get to have their own reactions. They don’t need to learn my anger. So I am doing a lot of stuffing. That means it creeps out in little insidious ways. I’m snippier and shorter of temper. It feels so unfair to my kids. I’m not mad at them. I’m just out of patience because I wasted it on adults.

I feel like I should hide in my house with my kids and not deal with people because that is the only way I can ensure I am just reacting to my kids and not the other people in the world. Only it only kind of works. Because then I bring the trouble home. The kids need relationships too.

This too shall pass. One of the greatest gifts of getting older is I trust that this phase will end. I won’t always feel this way. It’s a cycle. I still don’t think I have bipolar disorder. This is why I put myself on a schedule when I feel like this. If I haven’t gotten anything done by nine in the morning I have to write up a schedule or it will be a couch day. I know it. I have occasional couch days when I believe that physically the rest is probably a good idea. I try to keep those to once or twice a month. I don’t want to teach my kids that a great big part of life is just sitting around not being productive in any way. You need rest, sure. But find a way to get your rest in while still doing something. Reading does count as an activity. It’s a great excuse to rest. Watching movies… well, sometimes. When you are sick, sure why not. Otherwise you need to move your body more than that. We don’t stay in one position while we read.

I love seeing my kids develop my physical mannerisms. I feel affirmed and loved and seen. They read like me. We like to change positions a lot. Sitting still is quite hard. We squirm and wiggle and roll over and over. We stretch at the same time. They get books and do yoga with me. I get to set normal for them. They will grow up believing that what I do is right and good. It makes me cry. I have always been different from everyone around me and I was viewed as bad and a threat to be stomped down. I was supposed to be more like them. My kids think I am great. They don’t know that I have never fit in any of the molds I have been shoved towards. They don’t care. We fit.

I strongly encourage my kids to be different from me. I support them having different opinions. I talk to them (mostly Shanna still) about how I have control over them for a very short period and then they get to make all of their own decisions. I talk about how I don’t want to have control over them because they will have different ideas and opinions than me and they should do what will make them happy. I also talk about how to coexist peacefully. I talk about having respect for people around you. I model what that means. I really love my kids. I get to be good and kind and respectful towards people who absolutely deserve it and have no ability to let me down. My expectations of them are that they are helpless little amoebas at this point who will flail and be random. I’m pretty much right. But they will become adults who understand in the marrow of their bones what it means that Mom does what she says.

That freaks me the fuck out. That pressure. That is what gets me out of bed every morning. That is why I make schedules and get shit done no matter how I feel physically. I god damn need to have more people in the world who believe that I am trustworthy and good and kind. I say some very harsh things and as a result a fair number of people think I am an asshole. I can’t really say they are wrong. But that is such a small part of me. I feel defined by the negativity in me. With my kids I have a perfect chance to have a different experience.

I must say it is going well. This is one of the hard phases. I can objectively understand that my emotional cycles and their behavior cycles are being wonky and I’m being patient with all of us. That is what a good mother does. Well, I’m not patient with the screaming. I will put my hand over a screaming mouth because otherwise I get horrible headaches to the point where I can’t really see straight. If I have to drive I cannot allow them to hurt me in that way. I just can’t. Why do I feel so guilty about covering their mouths? I don’t make it hard to breathe. I am not cruel. I don’t do it for an extended period of time. I don’t shake them. I don’t hurt them. I don’t yell at them. I try to calmly say, “That’s an outside voice. Inside you have to be more quiet.” “No really, that hurts me so you cannot scream in my ear.” I have to teach them boundaries, right?

I don’t feel worthy of defending and my kids are pushing boundaries all over the place. It’s a hard combination. I’m trying to live up to my end of the bargain. I have to teach them how to be respectful of other people. It’s my fucking job. One for which I have managed to trade having a very cushy life. I have an easy job. I shouldn’t bitch about it.

It’s weird to think about how I would handle these emotional cycles if I had a job. I think I never would have found time and space to really write. I think that would be one of the things I had to drop. I would be more volatile. When Noah showed up and asked me to marry him I was trying to work up the courage to ask him to raise a child with me but I thought I had no right to ask him for what I have now. I planned to work and raise one kid by myself. That would have been a very different life. I’m really glad Noah actually wanted me.

It’s really odd to me when I think about how to write about the journey from eighteen to now. My different phases seem extreme. When I was eighteen I was engaged to Stephen and supporting myself by working in the library and the theatre. I planned to make theatre my life. I really wanted to run a spotlight for Cirque du Soleil someday. I knew I wanted kids but I had things to do first. I thought college was a good idea but I was nervous. I really wanted to go to CMU for technical theatre.

Then I left Stephen and found Tom and the bdsm community. I transferred to the English department. I went to college but I did not have the immersive college experience; I was a commuter student on campus two days a week and I took classes straight through from ten in the morning till ten at night. When I finished my BA I had a choice to make. If I wanted to be active in the bdsm community and be an Adult all the time then I should probably go through graduate school and try to work at the college level. Then I don’t have to be as paranoid about being outed. Or I could decide that I wanted children and go for a degree that will give me a schedule more potentially compatible with theirs. Tom was not open to me being a stay at home mom. I went through some graduate school. I decided that kids were more important than Tom. I broke up with him and started the credential program. In order to transition out of that relationship and emotionally distance myself from him I started having sex with a lot of people. It worked.

I dated Noah for the last six months of my relationship with Tom. I think that Noah was probably a lot of the reason I finally had the nerve to end things with Tom. Noah doesn’t permit me to be unaware of why I am doing what I am doing. He’s kind of annoying. I broke up with him for a lot of reasons. I can’t sum that up.

I went through the credential hunting hard for someone to have kids with. I wanted to start soon and I knew it. I was very frank about it when I talked to people I was having sex with. There are some men who ping hard for the idea of having kids and there are some who are repulsed. I needed to know who was potential prey. I was hunting.

Puppy was a mistake. I thought he was like Tom only younger and wanted kids. I was quite wrong. I should have never tried to date someone who thought it was funny that I was an actual Californian and would mock me and my vapidness for living here. And he thought I was fat even though I was at my lowest adult weight. He was very harsh about my body. He was very bitter because of his ex-wife and has a lot of mommy-issues. That relationship didn’t stand a chance.

After that I had a few months where I stopped hunting. Then I met Spot. I knew he wasn’t The One to have kids with. I made up my mind to ask Noah about having kids with me even though I didn’t think he was interested in the kind of relationship I wanted. He wanted the kind of relationship he wanted and I was not going to fucking be the Other Significant Other. Hell Fucking No. I’m not going to make someone my priority as long as I am their option.

But out of the blue he asked me to marry him. Just like that. Five months later we eloped. I moved into this house more than six years ago. Our sixth wedding anniversary is in September. I have to say that it is going well. I have the wonderful four year old and two year old of my dreams. My two year old is currently yelling “baby! high!” because she wants to be pushed on the swing. I should go before she slams the laptop screen on my fingers.

But I’ll come back to edit and tag and add that it is because my life is so good that I feel so bad about feeling bad. I need to stop feeling like someone who has had my life. It’s really hard.

relationships

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Sometimes it seems kind of funny to me how well suited Noah and I are for one another. I think about this mostly in comparison to the other men I have lived with: Uncle Bob, Tom, Puppy, Steve. No other man had an appreciable day-to-day influence at any point. It’s kind of interesting to think about how I have gone about trying out different lives. I tried to be who they wanted.

Uncle Bob wanted a meekness I never displayed. I was supposed to be grateful and I wasn’t. I was never grateful for anything throughout my later childhood and teenage years. Well, that’s not true. I was quite nice about presents and such. But I didn’t act like a beneficiary of charity. I worked hard for Auntie. I did my best to ensure that my presence impacted them negatively as little as possible. I started working at fifteen, as soon as someone would hire me. I paid my room and board. Didn’t I owe them for taking me in when I was a pitiful little girl? Fuck off and die. Oh wait. He did die. And I didn’t get to say goodbye. They didn’t tell me it was time. He died with a wedge between us. I’m sorry, Uncle Bob. I am grateful. I am. You did your best. I’m sorry that your best was so far from what I needed that I could never have the relationship you wanted. I could never look up to you. I could never treat you like my protector. You didn’t protect me. Not even a little bit. Not even at all. I suppose you prevented me from living in a car. You prevented me from going hungry. I am grateful that you helped me when I was otherwise helpless.

I tried to be what Tom wanted. I looked at his picture files and I dressed how he wanted and I wore shoes how he wanted and I mostly kept my mouth shut like he wanted. He was quite into gags. I have a lot of pictures of me tied up with a variety of gags in my mouth. I don’t look at the pictures much. Mostly what I see when I look at them is how sad my eyes seem. I wanted to be what he wanted. I tried hard. The dream of children was far more important to me than making him happy. That was the right choice. Thank goodness it worked out.

Puppy was a mistake. On paper he had similar attributes to Tom and I thought he was close enough that I could make it work. He wasn’t Tom. He wasn’t at all as close to wanted as I thought. I will never know for sure but I think he was lying to me from fairly early on. He told me what I wanted to hear. I’m not sure why. Oh well. He was always very jealous of Noah. Oh dear me. Now iTunes has provided me with the Heart classic “Alone” and it’s kind of funny timing.

Steve wasn’t the right fit for me. He was very submissive and vanilla sexually. He was repulsed by most of the “crazy” things I wanted to talk about during sex. Leaving that relationship was smart. I wish I hadn’t pushed it as far as I did. I thought he was my only way out. He wasn’t. But he was my first step.

Noah makes me feel comfortable. Noah makes me feel right. The way I want to do things is fine and should be mostly catered to. Occasionally he has a different preference and he’s willing to negotiate. I don’t feel like my voice is onerous. I don’t feel annoying. It is such a sharp contrast to how I feel when I am in the room with anyone else that it hurts. Why can’t I believe that anyone else really likes me? Given that most of the people who spend time with me go through great efforts to do so I know it is completely illogical to act like they don’t like me. Yet here I go. Every time.

I fucked up this weekend. We were invited to a brunch. I read that email at least four times. I put it on the calendar for the wrong day. Uhm. That’s embarrassing. These are people that Noah knows and I don’t really know them well. I have enjoyed all of the interactions I have had. The wife in question was quite pleasant and welcomed us into the house and we had a pleasant visit. Except for me wandering off to “find the bathroom” when I couldn’t control my crying because I felt so bad and stupid and wrong because I came on the wrong day and inconvenienced her. She didn’t seem inconvenienced terribly. It seemed like a nice surprise. Yet I couldn’t enjoy it. I felt horrible anxiety and stomach pain. I felt like I was on the verge of puking on the floor for most of the hour or so we sat there and talked.

I get really irrational about food at times like that. I don’t (can’t) eat a lot but I get very fussy about only wanting to eat real food and not snack food. I get bitey and pissy and fierce. All of a sudden what I eat is something where I get an idea in the back of my head and I latch on to it and I am like a starving dog defending my bowl.

Today I felt like I was vibrating with anxiety pretty much all day. Thankfully the neighbor and I seem to be passing the kids back and forth now. They tend to spend two or so hours at one place then trade off all day. Sometimes both girls go over there and play. It’s useful. It means that I can sit very still and stare at one point and calm down without the kids present in between volleys of screaming.

I keep telling myself that I am not working this hard on my tone of voice and attitude all the time because I am worried about her liking me today. I’m worried about how she will talk to me and remember me in twenty years. I can correct her, and I should–I am her mother, but I don’t need to be a bitch. Ever. I don’t know very many happy people. I feel like a liar.

I feel like Noah knows more about me than anyone. He understands a lot of my moods. He helps me figure out what triggers my mood swings because he stares at me so hard he knows when I have subtle shifts. It’s kind of weird to live with. But it makes me feel good. I feel important. I feel special.

I think I still participate on MDC (mothering.com) because hearing other women talk about the shitty things their husbands do makes me feel so much better about my marriage. I am reminded to be grateful. I feel fairly uncomfortable with how grateful I feel sometimes. I feel rather awkward about the fact that the intensity of emotion I feel for Noah is what I associate with the same feeling of thinking about G-d. It’s not an all the time thing. I couldn’t function that way. But when I stop to think about how grateful I am for what he has done for my life–yeah. I cry. I choke. How could anyone want me enough to change my life the way Noah has? How could I possibly be worth how much effort he has put into me? What have I done to deserve this?

I feel guilty that I am being supported. I feel like I must be taking advantage of him. Using him. What I offer in return is so meager, so little. I cannot possibly be earning my keep. But I’m so tired from working as hard as I can. I can never be enough. I can never do enough.

I try to figure out what it is that Noah wants me to be. To do. He’s a cagey fucker and he won’t give me any instructions at this juncture in time. Probably for the best. I don’t think children should have to deal with a power imbalanced relationship. I have to be responsible for me. It’s quite frustrating. I’d kind of like to relax into being chattel right about now. Then at least I wouldn’t have to wonder if I was doing enough. If I wasn’t told to do more I’m fine. It’s a system.

It’s hard to talk to Noah about my perception of isolation and loneliness. He works in an office and is required to talk to people quite a bit during the day. He’s just having an entirely different experience of life. It’s hard to make him understand how I see things. I don’t explain very well and I get frustrated and irrational quite easily. Luckily he’s patient and lets me control the flow of conversation a lot of the time. I can be testy and stop talking for a while and he doesn’t react much. Stoic. That’s really the word for him.

I worry about what I do to Noah. I worry about how I have changed him. Will change him. I feel guilty for my mercurial lashing out. He seems to think it is tolerable.

I’ve been reading a very long winded book series. Outlander by Diana Gabaldon. I haven’t read it since before I had kids. I think the last time was when I was on bed rest when I was pregnant with Shanna. I reread everything.

I have a different perspective on the comfort of a partner now. In a couple of months Noah and I will have been married for six years. That is far longer than I have consecutively lived with anyone else in my life. I think I only lost about a year and a half of time with my mom over the eighteen years of my childhood. But it was splotchy in pieces. It will be a while before Noah is the person I have lived with absolutely the longest. I think I have lived with him for more time than any of my siblings.

I live with people who like me. It fucking freaks me out. It must be because I am playing the right role right now. I had better not fuck this up. I hope they don’t find out I am bad.

When I was pregnant with Shanna a close friend told me that someone like me (meaning with my mental health issues) had no business becoming a parent. I couldn’t do a good job. I feel haunted by that prediction. Is it a prophecy? I’m aware that the baby shit is convenient for people to focus on. It’s this weird, isolated, obsessive part of life. Everything Feels So Important! Until it’s your third kid. Then you need to move on with your fucking life and things are more relaxed. Anyway.

I have felt very actively depressed all day. I am swimming through molasses. This week is action packed for us. I should probably go to bed. I have to get up and run as early as possible. Taylor is coming tomorrow night and I would like Noah to come home from work early-ish. But I procrastinate. Because I’m too busy singing along with The Verve Pipe and those stupid “Freshman”.

D- I think of you. And that stupid boy we dated. Scott. We can’t be held responsible. We fell in love in the first place. It’s kind of funny that the boy turned out to not be worth it at all but I kept you. I’m glad I have you.

Perspective

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I’m thinking quite hard about about the different kinds of bdsm play I have engaged in. It seems somehow important. Who did I play with and how? Was heavier play a sign of greater trust or greater stupidity? I’m not sure.

It feels weird to talk about being a masochist. Mostly it hasn’t been part of my life since having kids so I haven’t thought about it much in years. Except that I’m starting to feel that itch. Part of why I picked Noah as a partner is the way he reacts to that itch. I like the way his reactions make me feel. When I want him to hurt me he gets excited. Visibly excited. Nearly trembling with excitement. I like that I can make him feel that way just by saying yes. Ok, I usually say a lot more than that. I’m kind of a talker.

I don’t think I would be able to come up with an accurate list of “everyone I have played with”. I think of different event spaces as my way of trying to come up with memories and it isn’t a fool-proof system. It’s easy for me to forget. I remember some more than others.

The night before Dore Alley in 2000. I hadn’t “met” anyone from the scene yet. I hadn’t been to a munch yet. An old guy from match.com sent me to the Power Exchange. He gave me an address and told me to go. He didn’t explain what I would find. Technically he sent me two weeks before Dore Alley. I was a towel girl with my sister. I was afraid to go alone. She was freaked out. I came back the next week by myself. A gorgeous trans woman picked me out of the crowd and beat me. It was my first flogging. I don’t really like being flogged. But it was intense. It was my first experience. I’m grateful. I had to top it off by finding one of the PE employees and expressing my interest bluntly. He pulled me into the laundry room and fucked me there. He wasn’t supposed to have sex during his shift. Oh well.

It wasn’t my favorite scene ever, but it was my first. It broke the ice. It taught me that there were indeed people who wanted to hit me. It wasn’t my imagination. If I found one person I could find more. The next day I went to Dore Alley and spent time with two lovely queer men I knew through campaigning for Californians for Same Sex Marriage. They took delighted half naked pictures of me at the street fair. I had just pierced my nipples. They wanted to see. Sure, why not?

It isn’t enough for me that I have done these things. That in the privacy of my own mind I can think back on these events. I like talking about them. I don’t like being the only one who knows. When I feel like these stories are only in my head I feel like I should be actively trying to hide them. If people know this about me they won’t respect me any more. They won’t like me.

When I was eighteen I ran to the sex communities as fast as I could. I had sex with just about everyone who was willing to say “yes”. It was awesome. There is power in being a young woman who is willing to say yes. It’s a power I have watched slowly slip through my fingers as the years go by. I appeal to different people now. I don’t know how to approach them. And now it doesn’t matter. I will never go hunting again.

I learned hunting as a skill. I learned how to smell for people who would be interested in me. It’s not just that I break the Embargo left and right it is that the kind of sex I want is not standard issue. And for the love of shiny green apples I wish we could dispel this myth that men want to have a lot of sex and women don’t. It’s horse shit. Some men want a lot of sex. Some women want a lot of sex. And vice versa. Move on. I have ended up with a shockingly high number of partners who were completely uninterested in trying to keep up with my libido. I’m really tired of this myth that men want tons of sex and women turn it down.

When I am thinking about my compulsions fairly clearly I can direct them. I know how to ask for kinds of pain (spankings, canings) that really aren’t going to damage me long term–they don’t carry the inherent risk that cutting has. Cutting myself with a scalpel is far more potentially dangerous. People do slip and cause too much bleeding. Hit the wrong blood line and you are in trouble. I’ve looked into that a bit and I avoid those areas but that isn’t the point.

Somehow using spanking as a means of controlling my paralyzing anxiety seems nearly benign. I asked Noah for a spanking this morning. I don’t feel the strong urge to start the day by smoking pot. My stomach isn’t churning. It relieves a lot of that ache. Forcing myself to go through and experience negative/painful feelings causes a relief from the miasma of crazy that rules my life. I can feel a lot more control over how much I hurt when I decide the causes of pain. When my pain comes from the fact that I’m just plain crazy–it’s been a rough life–I can’t do a lot about that. I feel helpless and scared and trapped. When I am being hurt by a partner as a conscious decision it takes up the same space as my normal crazy and my normal crazy kind of has to back off into a corner and take up less space.

It’s going to be interesting to describe my relationship with Tom. I used him. He didn’t want to understand what I was doing but I had a pretty clear picture of what I was doing. He didn’t want details. I filled my life with externally supplied pain because that allowed me to be much closer to functioning. It couldn’t do all the work. I’m still me.

I would like to move through the world without fear. That sounds trite. I would like to move through the world without feeling heart-pounding-terror that people will hate me. Soon more people will come who hate me. They will hurt me. I am different. I am bad. People like me end up in jail. When will I go there? What will I have done? I don’t know. I feel like I haven’t done anything that bad. That doesn’t always seem to matter.

If I lived in the wrong time and place I would absolutely be locked up for being a sexual deviant. That’s scary. It is weird knowing that I exist at this intersection of privilege and experience. I don’t know what the future will bring. I don’t know what experiences I have yet to come.

I’ll tell you though, I look at Noah and I’m a lot less scared. He is my bulwark. I feel guilty when I think about my history of partnership because I was desperately searching for someone who was not close to their family. I can’t be all that close to someone who has a close relationship with their parents. Steve’s parents hated me and openly attacked me at Christmas dinner. Tom’s parents didn’t like me but weren’t loud or rude about it. Puppy’s parents and siblings openly ridiculed me and laughed.

Noah’s mom hated me when I met her. The first time I met his parents his mom sneered at me that she wanted to have a private conversation with her son and pulled Noah off for a three hour tirade about how awful I was. Noah’s response to this was to stop coming home for holidays. He has only gone back to Texas for his brother’s wedding. He only did that because I pushed him to do it.

I don’t understand why people hate me so much. I know it must be my fault if it happens so often. If the only consistent force in your relationships is you then you must bring the problems, right? Why do so many people feel the urge to berate and belittle me? Why do so many parents feel like they have to tell me how disgusting and bad I am? Steve’s parents told me I was going to ruin his life. That was part of why I ran. I couldn’t live with that. I couldn’t take on the position of whipping girl in a new family. I couldn’t once again be the person whose fault every bad thing was. I just couldn’t.

Noah picked me. Noah didn’t like his family much to start with and he was quite ok with the idea that his path would diverge from theirs. He says their dislike of me isn’t my fault or my problem and I don’t have to deal with it. I feel so guilty about being the reason he doesn’t see his family. To be fair he saw them aout as little as he could get away with before we were together. But now that tolerance has dropped to once every five years. His family has met Shanna once. They haven’t met Calli.

I can’t be in the closet. I can’t keep my mouth shut about who and what I am, about the things I have done. I just can’t. I can’t act like I am ashamed. Silence is consent to the larger social order. I don’t agree with it. I break the rules. I do it loudly and consciously.

For years I have known someone who refers to herself as a sexual outlaw. She did a lot of actual sex work: stripping, phone sex, escorting, being a prodom. I don’t do things for money. I do them because I want to. It’s confusing. I don’t do these things because I need to earn money and I don’t mind doing them. I do them because I can’t not do them. I need them. I want them.

I like stripping. I’ve done it in clubs a few times. I always let the people who are on shift have the money. I like having sex with lots of people. I like cybersex and phone sex. I’ve done them with a myriad of people over the years most of whom I can’t really remember.

What does it mean to be a sexual outlaw? I think I have avoided money partially because I don’t want to deal with the potential legal ramifications. It’s one more thin line I don’t have to skate. My income has been small and traceable my entire life. Well, until marrying Noah. Now “my” income isn’t small. It’s still highly traceable.

I have slept with a number of very inexperienced boys/men. I have done the whole, “I’ll teach you how to do this” thing. It’s quite fun to take very well endowed boys condom shopping. When they discover that there is a variety of sizes and brands to try so that maybe condoms won’t hurt anymore… they light up like a roman candle. You just gave them a present beyond measure.

Sex is a skill like any other. I found out a lot about the variation possible. It was fun. How can I talk about it without sounding like I am still hunting for it?

I’ve been thinking about my Top Five. Why they are there. How I feel about them. How I feel about the fact that there are four men walking around in the world I will have a difficult but not impossible time saying no to. They are the ones who have earned privileges over many years. They are the ones who understand the compulsive hypersexual part of me. They are all compulsively hypersexual as well. That is a lot of why I bonded with them so fiercely. Not very many men understand the degree to which sex has shaped my life. Very few men have enough sex to understand it. Very few men run across women who are willing to have the kind and quantity of sex I have had.

The internet is not providing me the data I want. Stupid internet. All I can find is that most extremely promiscuous women max out around twenty lifetime partners. That makes me giggle. I love how websites say: “Then you find out your 23 year old girlfriend has slept with 17 men and you feel kind of repulsed.” Ha. By 23 I hit triple digits. I’m repulsive. Awesome.

Why does this make me repulsive? I don’t understand. It’s a taboo. I rigorously get STD testing. When I was being rampantly slutty I got tested every three months and I used condoms religiously and I even used dental dams a few times. I never got good at them, but during the really risk-taking stage I tried to figure it out.

I feel defensive and sad. No one is actively judging me this minute (I can believe this because it is early in the morning and normal people are sleeping) so I don’t need to feel these feelings. Sometimes life just works that way.

A Tuesday morning ramble.

2 Replies

I’ve had several nearly-fully-formed posts running around in my head for days. Now that I am at the computer? Nada. Typical.

I have been increasing the amount I socialize lately. That is a mixed bag. It means more dealing with people. That’s hard. Being around large crowds of people who are questionably friendly to me is exhausting. The funny part is, one of my default “I’m hiding how I feel” mannerisms is to smile and nervously giggle a great deal. It seems like other people can’t tell the giggling is nervous. So they think I am having a fabulous time. It’s a great cover and I have been working on it for a long time.

I went out dancing on Saturday night. I explicitly told the two friends I was meeting there, “I am here because you two will keep me from hiding in the bathroom and crying.” They were shocked to find out that was a possibility. I don’t have the heart to really explain that without them doing that it isn’t a possibility it is an inevitability. Getting to the dance event is hard. Once I’m there it’s not like I’m out of danger.

I asked two men who were strangers-to-me to dance. Both of them looked at me, kind of twitched, then said they were sitting this dance out and walked away from me quickly. After the second one I didn’t ask again. I danced with my two girl-friends, and three male friends who remember me and generally try to get in a dance with me when they see me. I was grateful for dancing at all. When I come alone, I don’t always get in 1/2 of the dances I did on Saturday.

Sometimes I picture that seem from The Cutting Edge (a cheesy partner ice skating movie) where the coach says about the bitch woman, “We should have been making her a singles skater.” I wish I liked more solo dancing styles. I kind of hate that I like partner dancing and thus I have to deal with other people. It doesn’t help that I will probably never get Noah past his innate feeling that dancing is horrible. A long time ago he tried the dance community and discovered that they are all liars. I’m not going to argue with him, not really. Dancers say that they are happy to see new people and dance with them. In practice this is not so much. They want to dance with the good dancers–the ones they see all the time. Their friends. It’s ok. I just wish they wouldn’t lie about it.

I’ve become cautious over the years. I no longer can act like my actions will have no long-term effects. I want to raise my children in this area. I really can’t continue to just act however I please. It has consequences. I’m left in this place where I don’t know how to behave. I’m afraid. I don’t know what I am or am not allowed to be without the consequences for my children being terrible.

Those same two girl-friends ran a 5k with me on Sunday morning. All three of us kept up a nice steady 5 mph pace the entire way without walking at all. I’ve never run that far without walking. It felt really good. Maybe I should pay more attention to pacing, eh? It seems to work fairly well. Normally I mix in sprints randomly and I have to walk after them to get my breath back. This felt really good. I felt like I could run forever.

And there was a handfasting this week. I got to see all the people who chat with me during the day (*wave*) as well as a lot of People I Kind Of Know. Which is to say, people I have seen around in communities for about a decade but I don’t really know them. I’m fairly certain people think I’m snotty but most of the time I don’t talk to people because I’m not interested in being criticized or told I am wrong. I’d really rather stare at the wallpaper, thanks. It feels like I already, long ago, figured out who would tolerate me and I just don’t talk to new people much.

I have to say that Sarah moving in renewed a bunch of tentative distant connections and they have greatly increased in intensity. I finally had a reason to get over the hump with a few people. That’s good. I’m trying.

It’s kind of weird how much time I spend around former lovers when I go out in public. That’s what happens when you fuck your way through every community. It’s harder to deal with them now. Monogamy is… different. I was “monogamous” with Tom. But girls didn’t “count” and he didn’t care about anything shy of a penis in my vagina. That’s not what Noah and I are doing. I’m no longer really supposed to sit on laps and wiggle. Kissing is out. It’s different. It’s a whole different way of thinking about relationships. I feel terribly uncomfortable. For the love of Christ what else do I really have to offer?

That’s the crux. I offer sex because I believe I have nothing else. That I am nothing else. The reality is I don’t have the time or space in my life to be that any more. I consciously chose to stop offering that. To stop being that. I’m left with not knowing what to do. I have been having sex by choice (rather promiscuously) for my entire life. I go out and find it. When I am not looking for sex and I try to deflect it I usually get raped. So I stopped deflecting. Going out in public is terrifying. I don’t know what to do now. It’s hard and scary telling men to desist in doing things that I used to tolerate. They protest–I like it don’t I? That means they should do it. Even though I said “no”. They know more about what I want than I do, right?

Poly gatherings feel like a meat market even when one isn’t at a sex party. There is a lot of frank appraisal in the gaze. People are hunting. They act available. It’s an undercurrent. When people are interested in sex I can tell. I used to feel like those people were looking for someone like me. Now I don’t. I don’t know how to relate to them any more other than to avoid them. There is no good to come of having to point out that they don’t want me. How could that help anything? Just don’t talk to them.

It doesn’t help that I like talking about sex. It’s one of my favorite topics. I know a lot about it and I like broadening what I already know. It makes life awkward. I have consciously sought out knowledge and experiences my whole life. I fell like sex is one of the strongest biological impulses I have and I like thinking about it and talking about it. I like talking about food, too. Why is one shameful and the other isn’t?

I feel like I am badly adjusting to the concept of having a private sex life. That must sound odd to people. Isn’t sex usually private? Well, not for me. Not really. I don’t want anything I do to be a secret. I used to write scene reports and send them in to mailing lists. (I should probably ask Marcie if I can access those archives and find the scene reports. I lost them many hard drives ago.)

I do not yet have a mental picture on what kind of person I will be in ten years. It’s kind of scary. I know that I will still be a lot like me. I hope I will be better. I hope I will have made progress I can feel proud of. Ending a sentence with a preposition is wrong. I want to feel pride in myself. I don’t want to be an asshole. I don’t want to brag. But I want to know that I can look around my life and see frequent signs that I am a competent human being.

Change topics. Food. I didn’t grow up around people who cooked. In my house dinner was taken out of the freezer and unwrapped before it was microwaved. That’s food. Or you just open a bag and eat. Sometimes you have to boil water first and then let the noodles “cook” for three minutes. No shit dude, top ramen was cooking compared to everything else I ate.

When my mom occasionally felt like she should do more it generally involved one step meat in the oven and opening a few cans of vegetables and microwaving them in bowls. No really, we didn’t cook. I don’t understand what that even means until I try to cook for my family. Yesterday was a great day. In the morning I put another trellis in the ground and yanked the blackberry shoots over so that they can start growing how I want. I spent a while trimming the rose bush. I’m not done because that sucker is huge. (Thanks, former housemates!) It’s an ongoing project. Then it started raining and I came in.

I took the bones out of the fridge and made stock. I put a whole bunch of spices and other vegetable remnants in the pot. I had to think really hard about what I was doing. I had to recreate in my head what I have seen other people do. I let that cook for hours. I started making cupcakes. It took me about two hours because the butter was cold and creaming cold butter by hand is kind of a nightmare. I kept covering the bowl and scooting it closer and closer to the simmering stock pot. Melt! Damn you! Eventually it worked out well. The cupcakes are awesome. I know because I ate four last night. I just couldn’t stop. Holy cow those are good. I don’t make cupcakes very often because four in one day seems a bit excessive. But on the first day, oh man. Have to.

Then I had to do a whole bunch of dishes. Then I immediately started the next few steps on making soup. I was in the kitchen processing food and dishes for at least six hours yesterday. To make cupcakes, stock, and soup. I did sit down in the middle and eat lunch. But that’s a full freakin job right there. No fucking wonder my family didn’t cook. They didn’t have that kind of time and energy to spare.

Cooking is so weird. It feels like an act that is either done from desperation because one is poor and can’t do anything else or it is an act of privilege. Only people have had to cook for a very long time. I don’t know why it feels this way. Why does it feel optional? Why does it feel non-mandatory if you can find a way out? I used to eat out a lot. Other people did my cooking. Cooking is low status unless you do ridiculous over the top stuff.

I feel so weird about food. It feels strongly related to class. It doesn’t help that I visit the kinds of playgrounds where people have to agonize for an hour over what they brought. “I know this isn’t good enough for ________ reasons but this other thing I brought is far superior to what that other woman brought. Can you believe she is letting her kids eat __________?” I don’t talk to other moms much. I read my phone or play with the kids. It seems for the best. They don’t want to god damn hear me tell them what I think.

It’s not that I never have those thoughts. I frequently have the thought, “Holy shit, that woman is letting her kid eat what?!” I’m ok with that. I don’t say it out loud where someone can hear me and feel scorned. I suppose that saying it on the internet isn’t really better. Doesn’t that make me two faced as well?

Women talk about that shit at the park so they can shame other women into getting into line. I talk about it because I want to decide what I want to do. Sometimes I think, “Holy shit, that woman is letting her kid eat what?!” and I decide that maybe I’ve been hyperventilating over something I can relax about. I don’t need to shame people into sharing my values. They might have perfectly fucking good reasons for what they are doing. My values tend to be so at odds with everyone around me that I don’t really want to talk about non-involved people. I can’t judge someone I’m not even in a conversation with. I will talk about my opinions with people, sure. I will share what I do and why. But I’m not going to evaluate a stranger and give them some kind of “score” to a third party. I see no benefit.

Today is park day. I’m feeling nervous. It will be fine. I doubt anyone will even know that I told that woman to take a hike. Lots of people show up once and never come back. I don’t think I am going to get into trouble. We’ll see.

Hm. I just had a thought that should be it’s own separate post. I’ll do that.

You have no power over me.

1 Reply

Noah asked me why I am letting this woman have so much power over me. She responded to my first email with a short thing basically saying, “I was nine months pregnant when I sent this to you. Maybe I could have had more compassion. Can’t you forgive me?” I ranted back. I explained that I am going to spend every minute I am near her terrified that I am going to have another panic attack in front of her. I’m afraid of how nasty she will be next time because apparently I go through “chances” without ever having any idea I am doing something wrong. I told her I don’t really want to deal with that given that it took me a year to have the courage to leave the house because I was afraid of running into her.

Why am I so afraid of her? What does she represent to me? Noah pointed out that I’m creating my own self-fulfilling prophecies here. I say that people hate me and reject me foreverrrrrrr I will be aloooooooooooooone foreverrrrrrrrrrr. Ahem. Or something like that. She apologized, why don’t I accept the apology?

If she had sent some kind of an apology spontaneously instead of because she couldn’t ignore me any longer I would have had a different reaction. She didn’t want to apologize. She doesn’t think she did anything wrong.

Why does she have so much power? Why does her disapproval matter? Because I spent about a year telling her intimate things. It didn’t feel like the break up of a “friendship”. This was as emotionally intense as a romantic relationship. Since I had kids I have been bonding a lot more strongly with women. I am getting too attached too quickly, apparently. I told this woman extensively about my mental health issues and more specifically about my life. Then she shamed me.

I don’t like someone deliberately shaming me. I shouldn’t care what she thinks. I don’t have anything invested in her opinion. She is not going to be part of my life again if I can help. She responded to my last rant saying she left the Meet Up group.

She’s right that it will be hard to avoid one another given that she lives twenty minutes away. I get to ask her for space once. Past that she really doesn’t have to give me any room. She gets to live her life as well. She lives around here and there is a finite number of kid things. I can’t keep her out of all of them. That’s not cool to her kids. But I can ask her to stop showing up at my gosh darn park day, once.

There were four of us. We spent over a year hanging out together at least once and up to four times a week. When we got together we would spend at least five hours, sometimes up to nine hours. We did a lot of long-term talking about things that our kids would do. We spent holidays together. Then I got told that I was out of chances completely out of the blue after I had a panic attack.

I was punished by the removal of two peoples love because I was bad. Because I am crazy.

So what happened was I was on edge to start with. I was at the beginning of the unravel I had last year. Shanna was in a brief hitting phase (it lasted less than a month). She hit this other little boy twice and I pulled her into the bedroom and told her that if she did it again we would have to go. It was not nice to repeatedly hit someone in their own house. That’s just really over the line for me. She was two. No she didn’t “get it” but if children never have consequences for their actions they will never “get it”. Of course she hit him again. And right as I was telling her in a ranty voice that if she hits people we have to leave Calli had a dirty diaper. I tried to get Shanna to sit still while I changed it because she lost the privilege of playing. We walked out with me repeatedly saying in a louder-than-necessary voice something to the effect of “It’s not ok to hit people. When you hit people there are consequences. Get your butt out to the van. No, don’t play. You are in trouble. It’s not ok to hit people.” I never called her a name. I wasn’t demeaning. I wasn’t insulting or nasty. My tone of voice was really harsh and loud. I couldn’t breath and my heart was racing. Dealing with both kids in that moment was hard and over whelming.

That night I received an email telling me that she didn’t want to know me any more because my behavior is over the top and I am mean to Shanna. I don’t have age appropriate expectations.

Uhm, I expect my two year old to hit people. I think it is then my job to enforce consequences so she can have some idea that it’s not a great plan. I don’t hit my kids. I don’t call them names. I don’t put them down. But I do separate them from their friends when they can’t play nicely. I guess that’s not “age appropriate”.

I feel defensive and angry. I feel like for some reason she has the power to cause other people to share her opinions. I’m scared that she would join this play group and people who currently tolerate me would no longer want to because she would sit there and gossip about my faults. I’m worried because the “Attachment Parenting” community is very harsh and dogmatic. They absolutely encourage shunning people who do not completely follow the party line.

I have mixed feelings because I wonder if her nastygram was a good thing. I wonder if I really am a mean nasty person. Shanna really is a strange mini-adult. I don’t tolerate a lot of “age appropriate” behaviors most of the time. I set really firm boundaries around them. Am I somehow robbing them because I expect manners? Obviously I am insecure.

I believe deep in my heart that I am nice to my kids. I get angry, yes. My anger is bigger than a lot of peoples, yes. My kids are going to have to deal with being my kids. I have mental illness. That’s just a fact. I may always experience panic attacks. I don’t know. I have no crystal ball. My kids have to be near me. It isn’t possible for me to make my panic attacks completely invisible and silent to them. I talk to them a lot about how they aren’t responsible for my emotions and my behavior.

Awhile ago I was having a panic attack and angry with Shanna over something. She started crying. I looked at her and asked her if she was afraid. She told me yes. I sunk down to the floor and put my head down. I told her that I was doing something wrong then. Kids shouldn’t be afraid of their mothers. Mothers are never supposed to hurt kids. I sat up and pulled her into my lap. I asked her to explain what she understood about why I was upset. She did a good job. I explained the rest of the back story on why I don’t want her doing _______. I told her that I was sorry I scared her. I didn’t mean to. She hugged me and said that she would try not to do _________ again. I thanked her.

But I’m a terrible person, right? It’s not ok to ever raise your voice. It’s not ok to ever be angry.

Wait, what? Oh good grief. Why do I give this idiocy so much power over me? Partially because it feels like the drumbeat for my stage of life. It’s not as if this woman is the only one presenting that image. I spent way too much time on Mothering.com.

She was just an echo chamber for what I feel society as a whole wants from me. The vast majority of the time if I express any anger near anyone there is some comment on it. “Don’t hold back, tell me how you really feel.” “My son is an empath so you can’t get angry near him.” “You get angry really quickly.” I suppose that depends on how you look at it.

Why does she have so much power over me. Because she is able to smile and spew poison. Because I am very susceptible to girl games. Because I was taken down many many pegs. And now she has come and joined my new hierarchy. Those kinds of status things feel extremely transitory. I don’t really want to get a sudden demotion.

When I transferred to Leigh High School during my freshman year of high school I started going by a nickname derived from my middle name. After I was there for a month or so someone leaved over a teacher’s shoulder and said, “Wait. Your name is Kristine? Like Krissy? Are you Krissy Archer? That Krissy Archer?” I had sex with multiple people at my previous school. It was part of the reason I ran. I didn’t want to deal with that reputation when I moved. Abruptly I had someone calling me a whore in every class.

And women are vicious in a way that is far more hurtful. They don’t just insult you and call it a day. They get close to you and then use withdrawal of love as a weapon. They talk to your friends. They lower the general opinion people have of you. Often by repeating half-true stories. The more they smile at you while they are doing this the more problems you will have later.

My kids need a fucking stable group of friends. I really don’t want to play the social status game. I only kind of interact with the other parents. I really need for my behavior and relationship with my children to be judged based on the things we actually do. Not the things people speculate that we might do because they witness some of our worst interactions. Everyone has their worst interactions. If mine involve my tone of voice being ranty and harsh while I say things that are otherwise fairly reasonable I will live with that and consider it a life well lived. I don’t rant very often. It’s quite rare. And Shanna is quick to tell me that my tone of voice isn’t ok and I need to change it. I don’t think she is a beat down child.

Why have I set her up as a judge and jury I have to defend myself from? Because most other people don’t pay enough attention to me for me to feel like they would bother judging me? And yet mob mentality is very real. I am weird. I am reminded over and over again in a variety of ways (parenting books like this try to make it a joke) that for me to be weird is a problem for my kids. They will suffer for it. It will be my fault and that’s bad. I should be trying to blend into the crowd. That book in particular stressed how it is ok that you know you don’t fit in but you have to learn how to fake it so your kid isn’t punished. It’s true if you are in a public school. I don’t want it to be true at our home school group.

It’s kind of like playing Plants Vs. Zombies. She’s a double pea shooter walking towards me. She’s going to kill me. She feels like she can poison my environment. She was certainly good at having me like her and think well of her. Until she turned on me abruptly and was really nasty. Oh shit I don’t want that kind of poison in the well. It’s just a bad idea.

Why does she have so much power over me? Her brand of poison is pretty powerful. I believe she mostly liked being friends with me. But I’m one of those polarizing figures. She liked me a lot but the things she didn’t like she disliked a lot. I don’t need to have someone who is good at making me like them but who occasionally tells me I am a terrible person in my life. That’s kind of my crack. What’s our favorite game, Noah?

I don’t want her in the group because all of a sudden park day becomes a whole different beast for me. I no longer have to think of whether I’m up for all of the basic things. I have to think about how secure I feel that I can sit off to the side quietly and not get into a conversation that might trigger a panic attack. Because it absolutely not ok to have a panic attack with that woman nearby. Oh God. Poor Shanna might lose more friends. And it would be All My Fault.

I’m not planning to move. Shanna is stuck here. She has to make friends here. I have to not fuck this up.

Why does she have power over me? Because I’m not good at taking it back once I give it to someone. Why the fuck do I care what Tom thinks? Why in the fuck do I care what my mother thinks? Because I do. Because I love them. Because I wish with every part of me that they thought I was good. Because I am very used to people who profess to love me telling me that I am horrible. I have a magnetic attraction to this cycle. I like people who have more control than I have who tell me I am bad for not having it. It’s really pretty fucked up and self-loathing of me.

Why does she have power over me? Because in my experience, other than the people I live with, people don’t give other people second chances. Not really. She has a bad opinion of me. I’m supposed to try and prove that I am worthy of a second chance. Now she has told me that I am going through chances so I can be held to it.

Noah thinks I should just think of her as a stupid person and move on with my life not caring how she feels about me. He has a point.

Even though I feel wicked uncomfortable about having done so I created a socially safe place for me. I hope. I don’t think I will have a perfect experience without her there. But I’m not going to be judged on something half remembered from a long time ago.

I’m not at this group to make friends. I am cordial. I participate in conversations enough that I sort of look like part of the group. Mostly I play with the kids or run. People probably either think I am aloof or shy. I’m ok with either. I have told more than one person that I have horrible social anxiety. That’s as personal as I have gotten.

Where is this space in our life for acquaintances? For community? For people who are around but with whom you don’t have a personal connection? If I keep people out at arms length then they can be out at arms length forever. What they do has very little effect on me. If I let someone in closer they have to be shoved much much further than just arms length away when they hurt me. It’s not a very forgiving system. My problem is I assign too much intent to behaviors. People aren’t trying to hurt me. They are trying to express their emotions.

She felt intimidated by me. So she attacked. Normal. The person who sent the recent accusatory letter? He’s not really upset because of my actions. He’s upset about things in his life and I’m a good target. He at least thinks he is doing a good thing.

It’s not about me. Don’t make excuses. Don’t apologize. She apologized to me. Shouldn’t I take that at face value? What I should do is get off my butt and go eat a banana. Then get dressed. Then go run. Today my wonderful friend Taylor is coming over. That guarantees a good day. I’m going to stop thinking about her. I asked her to leave the group and she did. I may run into her again some day and then I will have to revisit this emotional experience. That time I won’t get to ask her to leave a group. She lives here too. It’s not ok to make her pay for the rest of her life. That’s really not cool. Hell, in a few years I may suddenly grow up and decide I don’t give a shit. Folks either like me or they don’t and I will have been part of the group long enough that it really won’t matter.

But I’m not there yet. My skin is not that thick. It’s too raw. It’s too scary. I have a hard time getting out of the house. If I knew she was going to be there I wouldn’t be able to go. I wouldn’t be able to put my kids through the experience of dealing with my panic attacks. That’s not fair.

I’m going to go now.

Parenting, anxiety and me!

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Sometimes I feel like a broken record. My anxiety level for the past couple of days has been unreal. My stomach aches all the time. I feel like I want to vomit fairly regularly. Nothing is going on. My life is smooth, relatively easy, I don’t get a lot of surprises… and yet… here I am. I hate this. I hate that my body is so broken that it is incapable of ramping down my ambient stress level when there isn’t much stress in my life.

I have fairly ruthlessly culled people from my life over the past year and some. I didn’t really do it on purpose but the shape of my days is different than it was a year ago. I don’t talk to as many people. I think I grow ever more isolated. It’s hard but it feels like the right thing. People distract me from the business of my life. I don’t feel good about that. Maybe it would be more accurate to say that wanting people distracts me from the business of my life. If I accept the fact that people are not going to show up and suddenly love me and want to help me I get by.

As always I feel like I don’t explain well. Watching Shanna is how I learn about myself. It’s a slow process. I understand things about myself as I see her doing things. Noah likes to tell me that I picked the high-intensity version of parenting. I feel like an asshole saying that about myself but it is basically true. I am with my kids all the fucking time and when I am with my kids I pour enormous amounts of energy into them.

A friend has an autistic son. I asked her to describe what his therapy looked like because I was curious. I felt kind of weird about the fact that my day-to-day interactions with my kids sounds remarkably like the therapy for autistic children. And I do that for 12+ hours every fucking day. I talk and talk and talk and talk. Shanna is, thank God, a highly verbal kid. So she listens to my explanations and takes them seriously. I can talk her into or out of almost any behavior. I explain in great detail why things are important. Hell, I’m coaching her to require a why so that she feels like she knows why things happen. “If I tell you not to do something and you really want to do it, ask me “Why” and I will explain. Most of the time I have a good reason.” I let my kids destroy the house in the name of creativity day after day. I don’t prevent them from doing things that make my life hard. I try to keep them safe. If it’s not a safety issue I will tell her, “Ok I will feel frustrated if you do that but there is nothing inherently wrong with you doing it so I’m going to leave the room and not watch. Have fun.” Usually I say this when she is about to do something that will cause me to be on my hands and knees for an hour picking something up. It’s going to suck. But I’ll do it because that is my job.

My job is to teach my children how to be functional adults. This is fucking tricky because I’m not sure I qualify every day. Hell, I’m not sure I understand what it means to be a functional adult. I see a wide variety of function out in the world. People get by. What is the base line? Am I shooting for the baseline? Oh god no.

I think a lot about why I want to homeschool. How do I want to do it. Am I doing it because I had a traumatic experience in school and I’m afraid my children will have the same life experiences? They won’t. Full stop. I’ll be frank and say that part of the reason I think about it is because I don’t feel like I am really a fully functional human being as long as I hide at home with my kids. Do we really hide at home? Well, it depends on how you mean it.

I feel like this part of my life seems to be focused on figuring out how my body works so I can turn around and teach my kids how their bodies work. As usual I feel ashamed that I don’t already know. I don’t know because I have spent most of my life dissociated from my body. I don’t know how different movement feels. I’ve never paid enough attention to know. I’ve never moved enough to know. I have hit this weird plateau in running. I can’t go faster for a while. I need to stop trying. When I leave my house hoping for just a few seconds faster I spend the entire run feeling angry at the weakness in my body. I’m at this place where I don’t think I can get much faster without a whole bunch of strength training I’m not really doing.

The pickle is I feel like my entire life works that way right now. Everything I am doing is at this stuck, hard place. What I need to do is just be stronger and everything will be fine. I’m at the stage of gardening where I need to weed like hell. Ugh. It’s not hard for the first hour. After that it hurts. Running isn’t hard for the first fifteen minutes. After that it hurts. Going on walks with the kids is easy for the first 3/4 of every walk. Then it hurts. etc.

It hurts in unexpected ways. Today I stopped at about 2.5 miles in and stretched for several minutes because my back muscles were so horribly tight I felt like they were about to spasm. My skinned knee is still stiff and uncomfortable. Other than that my knees and ankles are doing well so I don’t intend to slow down on the running. But I need to stretch more.

There is nothing in my life I need to do “less” of… other than maybe whining. I could do less whining. But why do I feel like a whiner? I whine at my blog (not even daily) and I do it at random opportunities. It doesn’t happen daily. I feel like I am not allowed to feel like my life is hard because I am sitting on a mountain of privilege and I need to shut the fuck up. So many people have it worse than me. Poor fucking baby. That’s not really a useful attitude to have towards one’s self. (oneself? weird.)

I don’t believe that any of the things I am doing is really all that hard. Hell, even the marathon training doesn’t feel that hard individually. What is hard is that I feel inadequate to the long list of work in my life. I don’t see how I will do it all. I keep hitting this terrible wall of desperately wanting someone to teach me how to do this life thing. Where the fuck is my Mr. Miyagi?! Someone who will just pluck me up and teach me how to survive and work and find discipline? I need help.

That’s nice, dear.

Where is my mommy? Where is the mommy who loves me enough to teach me about life the way I am teaching Shanna and Calli? Why don’t I get that? Well, honestly, it’s because not very many people want to put as much time and attention into another person the way I want to do with my kids. I want my kids to move through the world believing that just about everything has an explanation and if they want to know it we can bloody well figure out what it is. That doesn’t happen in school. In school the reason you have to do something is because some arbitrary asshole somewhere made a draconian rule. Bowing to random arbitrary rules isn’t very functional, in my opinion. In my opinion being functional means staying your course and figuring out how to survive in a terribly rigged system. Not a god damn person in the public education system tried to do anything to help me. I’m an outlier, fine. People can tell me hundreds of stories of them having good experiences. Research says that outliers do not do well in our system. Is there any chance in the whole god damn world that my kids won’t be outliers?

It is an Adverse Childhood Experience growing up with a parent who has diagnosed mental illness. Hi. I’m Krissy. During my life I have been “officially” diagnosed with PTSD, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Major and Minor Depression, Bipolar Disorder, and lots of people have unofficially thrown out a variety of other options for various reasons at various times. My kids are going to grow up with that. I can’t prevent that. I can’t not exist in their lives so they can benefit from not being around a crazy person. That feels bad to say, but it is a fact. My kids wouldn’t be able to go to school and be just like everyone else and fit in and progress at the normal rate in the normal manner. They would always have the horrible reality of coming home to me. I would be highly disruptive to a child who was genuinely normal. I’m not good at that type of existence.

Stupid shit. A friend posted pictures of bringing in goody bags and cupcakes to the classroom for her daughter’s birthday. I would be shittier than shit about stuff like that. I wouldn’t want to spend the money. I would resent putting forth effort to do “expected” things and I would be inconsistent and pissy about it. I wouldn’t encourage my kids to dress normally. I wouldn’t encourage my kids to behave in ways that worked in the classroom. When Shanna says, “Shit. My glass is empty. That sucks.” I just smile and don’t worry about it. When she says “fuck” I completely ignore it in the moment. Later I work into the conversation how some people dislike certain words for totally illogical reasons. If you want those people to like you then you have to play their game. I’m not going to tell my daughter these words are bad because I don’t believe it is true. I believe it is an irrelevant distinction. I think they are impolite in some circumstances just because it is good to treat people how they want to be treated. It is important to me to handle it that way.

My kids will have a profoundly different understanding of the world than most kids because I removed the explicitly sexual content from my view of the world and have otherwise just merged them with my experience. To me that is what life is. You take your children with you for your life. Shanna has some interesting things to say about the police given her experiences participating in the Occupy movement. She was upset about not going to the General Strike yesterday but Calli wasn’t feeling well. Sick kids trump politics in this family.

That is what I am specifically teaching to my kids. Life is about this weird slightly moving hierarchy of importance of needs. You have to triage and decide your priorities over and over and over again. If you don’t think about your life that way you won’t really be able to make long-term planning decisions.

Right now we are trying to find balance on budgeting stuff, money is hard and complicated. I’m trying to figure out how to divide the hours of the day. How much time do I spend on different tasks around the house? The thing is, I’m doing the high intensity version of parenting. I do tasks around the willingness and ability of my kids to handle me working. That makes everything complicated. I’m juggling their attention needs, my need for time when I am not being pestered with 20+ questions every minute, the need to constantly be in the fucking kitchen cooking and cleaning up after the mess, and everything else I want to do in this life: writing, running, gardening, have friends. I keep reminding myself that my children won’t be small forever. I’m crossing my fingers that this ridiculous outpouring of energy will eventually slow down. I have no way of knowing. I can’t plan as if it will. I have to plan as if I am going to be this tired and interrupted forever. That way every improvement will be a blessing and a wonderful gift instead of something grudgingly grasped.

I really struggle with this whole “mental illness” thing. I have a lot of days where my body is in active fight or flight mode for a lot of the day. It is very hard to calm it down. I have terrible ranges of emotions. But I’m at work so I stomp the shit out of most of it. Producing people who can function within society is my goal. That means I can’t cause them to develop the same kind of extreme coping mechanisms. I just can’t. How can I teach something I have never experienced? How can I teach what it is like to move through the world without fear? I feel so much fear I want to vomit sometimes. And nothing bad is happening to me. I think that part of the reason that I have so many friends on the autistic spectrum is because I know my emotions are too extreme for the normal range so I need to hang out with people who just won’t notice or care. Honestly hanging out with my kids is similar. Well, my kids notice. But they give me a kiss and a hug and smile and expect everything to be all better now. As far as they are concerned, it is. Because mommy smiles and hugs them and says, “I am so glad I get to spend my life with you.” They do make me feel better. I had this whole range of emotions before I had kids. Before them I had sex with random people or did drugs or cut to deal with my emotions. Now we are trying to move in the “hugs not drugs” direction. The pot is so complicated. I have, uhm, tried a wide variety of street drugs. The pot is different in how it functions in my life.

What is the difference between drug addiction that is bad and being dependent on a medication for survival? Many diabetics require insulin. Thyroid medication is a big deal. Etc. My brain was damaged by what happened to me as a child. It does not function normally. I feel genuine terror and have the full body experience of being retraumatized some days. It really sucks ass. But I can take that sensation away and relax enough to have a conversation with my kids and be mellow. I feel disgusting for needing help. Why the fuck can’t I just be stronger? Such a fucking loser.

Noah told me last night that he can tell I have been feeling unworthy lately. I’ve been struggling with finding a place in my head and my heart where I am comfortable with who I am and what I am doing with my life. In a variety of different places in the past couple of weeks I keep finding stupid things that all remind me that I don’t have a lot of earning potential. My credential has lapsed. I would have to go back to college before I could usefully work in my field again. I think I would rather eat manure. I feel like I am a bad partner to Noah. I feel like he is giving up too much in being with me. I feel like a failure because I can’t figure out how to settle into the traces and just be happy with my life. I can’t figure out how to stop having panic attacks. I can’t figure out how to be calm and mellow. I don’t know how to be happy. I only know how to be scared and afraid and lonely and angry. What fucking good am I? How functional am I? This is what I don’t understand.

I feel defensive and guilty because I want to keep my kids out of school and I don’t want to try to be a “working” parent. It is stupid and ridiculous. No one who knows me is campaigning against me. I am only arguing with voices in my head. Part of the problem is I have this growing horror as I acknowledge that I am going to have to explain to Shanna that a lot of the ways in which I interact with her will get her into trouble out in the world. People don’t like bossy know-it-alls who narrate what is happening in life. They think it is weird. It makes people uncomfortable. They don’t want to hear that. And people get really upset if they think they are having a “private” conversation (loudly, in public) and someone comments. I have never understood why. I’m a sit-in-the-diner-and-talk-to-each-table sort of person. My older daughter is like me only she doesn’t have any brain damage. She loves talking to people and she feels safe and comfortable in the world. So she has virtually no fear. Watching her makes me feel like I am living a good life. I don’t want to miss even five minutes of the Shanna Show. Unfortunately it’s hard to find balance.

Calli is so different. She is not @#$#@ interested in having me narrate for her the way I do for Shanna. She hits me when I try. This is going to be an interesting journey. I am startled by the things she manages to figure out by herself. This is going to be an interesting journey. Shanna thrives on hands-on directed learning. Calli wants to watch and then figure it out on her own. I’m surprised by the physical dexterity she exhibits. She is trying to keep up with Shanna and she is fearless in her attempts. She lands safely more than she falls so she keeps trying to do things that should be far beyond her development. I think I was quieter when Shanna was this age but I can’t remember. The words blur. I think I was a lot quieter. I was a lot more lost in my thoughts. That is the hardest part about this job. I don’t have a chance to think very often. I have to carve out deliberate silence in my life. I crave it. I need it. The constant talking is hard because it requires so much thinking. She makes a lot of conversational leaps that are hard to follow unless you know her whole little set of life experiences and she needs a lot of repeating of everything. Our daily conversational life does literally look like therapy for autism. I don’t set specific developmental goals, I just conversationally speak that way about pretty much everything. If I introduce a weird or new word I will emphasize it and break in the conversation to explain what it means and use it several times in several ways so that it sticks better in Shanna’s head.

It is really weird for me to sit and think really hard about what my life is going to be like in twenty years. What am going to do when my baby is twenty two? What will I do with all this energy? I’m kind of scared. I have no idea what the future will look like. I have no idea if I will ever get to the point where I stop vibrating with fear all day long for no reason at all other than bad things happened a long long time ago. I think being afraid I will always feel this way is making it exponentially worse. I don’t know how to just accept the feelings and deal with them when they come up and wait them out. I have no trust that they will end. They never have. Well, they pause. I don’t always always feel this way. It’s so complicated.

And I don’t even have time to get into sex. I have so much thinking to do about that. And it’s largely being evaded. I don’t think about sex when I am with my kids. That doesn’t leave me a lot of time to think about it. This shit is complicated.

Food comes from a can

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Today was the kind of “running” day where I mostly walk. I try to consciously go slower when I am crying. I don’t want to trip and injure myself. Today I thought about my mother. I thought about the way Shanna begs me to never leave her. Maybe she will go to college, but she plans to come right back and “take care of me”.

I remember promising my mother that once I was an adult her life would be better. I could help. Things would be better. I suppose that depends on what you mean by “better”. My life is better. I have no idea how her life is going. I have no idea. I wonder if she is proud of me. I wonder if she knows that I grew up into a strong, good person. I wonder if she is glad that I can defend myself now and I can stop being a victim. Somehow I doubt it.

I don’t know how to reconcile in my head that my mother, the person who was responsible for taking care of me when I was helpless, prefers that I not grow up to be strong enough to defend myself. She thinks I should be defenseless. At least within the family. Should I fuck my sister too so she can finish moving through our family? Maybe she isn’t bi. Maybe I should just be fucking my sister’s boyfriends. They all tried. They tried long before I hit adult height. Watching my kids is hard. I’m not sure how to explain this.

I want my kids to travel so much because I want them to actually see how different the world is from their home. I mean the whole bay area. It’s fairly safe here. We have managed to create this little bubble where we are safe from the natural world and even the other humans aren’t that dangerous. The police are far more dangerous to us than our neighbors because I take my kids to protests. Welcome to modern America. My kids are white, upper middle class, and female. Other than sexual assault, which won’t fucking happen on my watch, my kids don’t really have much to fear. Cars. Abstract concepts. Stories. The unknown.

I want my kids to understand what it means to survive. I feel like a privileged asshole. I want to take my kids to other countries so they can play tourist on actual hard lives. I want them to not have to have hard lives but still understand the spectrum. Me telling them stories and showing them pictures isn’t good enough.

I want to know what it feels like, as a rational adult, to have to eat what food is put in front of me or go hungry. I want to change how I feel about this. I’m terrified that it means learning to eat seafood. The texture fucking bothers me. I don’t want to be that American. I don’t want to feel like a snob. I don’t want to deal with that rejection pattern. I don’t want to go to other countries and come home to hide in my house and declare that every one every where in the world dislikes me. I’m too difficult. I shouldn’t bother trying to do anything with my life. Obviously I suck. I can totally see me doing that. I could be that asshole.

The problem is, that means I didn’t really survive. That means I died a long time ago and there is nothing left in me. Because it’s just not true that I am disliked and reviled.

I am thought about.

If that is happening, and a lot of it is positive, that means maybe I’m not too hard. It’s ok to be different. It’s ok to have preferences. But when I am imposing on people I need to learn how to accept with gratitude what people choose to give me. My needs are my own to meet. I need to not act like other people are responsible for meeting them. It’s my problem. If the best I can do is a fish and rice at a given meal I need to eat the fucking fish and smile.

I want that for my kids. I want to show them what that is like. I remember my mother and feel sad and anxious. Food was so hard for me as a kid. It was bad. As an adult I’ll say that my mother was a fairly bad cook but everyone we knew loved her food. That makes me wonder. My family has all gotten to the point of heating up preseasoned food at every meal. We didn’t eat produce, and certainly not good produce.

I feel like my life is consumed with my body lately. I am trying to learn how to meet my needs. I wasn’t taught. I wasn’t taught to check in on my body and see how different parts of me felt. I was taught to ignore my body. My body wasn’t important. Anyone was allowed to do anything they wanted to my body and I was expected to just accept it. Food was what I could control.

I don’t think I’ve ever thought of it that way before.

My food life is unlike any that I have ever experienced before. Since I had kids I have radically changed how I eat. But I’m not interested in getting to a point where I’m supporting my family on my farming efforts in my backyard. Just to put a scope on this. I recently read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and all I have to say is sweet sunny Jesus NO. I felt anxious pressure reading the book. I’m an idiot. She grew up farming and married someone with a similar background. That’s just not something I will ever try.

So that leaves me in a weird position of feeling like I don’t know what I want to accomplish. I swear to G-d this post has a cohesive theme. I have to actively decide which of my behaviors in life are about what I was taught to do by my mama and which things are right for me. I also need to think about what is right for the other people in my family. We all have different needs. I wasn’t taught to think about people that way. I’m training for a marathon. My body is going to have different needs than the other members of my family. Why do I plan to feed us all exactly the same way? Because when I try to do that I end up snacking in the garage.

I resist eating the food in the house. I don’t actually like the crap I make my kids eat. I really honestly think vegetables and fruit are pretty gross. I only like the heavily processed with corn syrup version of fruit because that is what my mama likes. I don’t really want to teach my kids to be like my mother. Her version of surviving looks a lot like death to me.

I have less than eight years to really get my shit together so that I can take my kids around the world to find out how other people live. My kids will find out what it means to have to work in order to eat. I will find out what it is like to have to work in order to eat. I want to show up and not feel ignorant as a pig. I don’t want to show up ashamed of myself for my ignorance. But neither do I want to show up and act like all they need is a honky.

I want to feel like the labor of my body and the work of my mind has some value. I can accomplish things. I can work. I am not fucking useless. I try not to bullshit myself. I am not going to learn what it is like to have to do manual labor to survive. That is the understanding of a lifetime of work I have not had and won’t have. I feel weird about that. It is hard to keep in mind. I can’t keep my yard weeded–yet. I think that is probably what I have eight years to build towards. I need to be able to physically do all of the labor in my yard. I probably should get a bit more ambitious in that department. I want to be able to do farm labor. At the moment I would be annoying and useless.

In eight years I will still be very ignorant. I will be moving to different climates. I will be moving to different plants. I will know nothing. All I will be able to do is go out and try over and over and be publicly bad and I will probably be laughed at. I need to have that experience as a rational adult. I need to learn to not break down in tears just because people are laughing at me.

For my mother food comes from the freezer and cans. I was not taught how to cook food. I have a hard time eating seasonally. For many seasons of the year there aren’t very many products I recognize as food. I’ve learned to shut up about this and eat what is put in front of me.

I need to learn how to eat more food. I want my kids to have more options than me. I want them to develop a broad palate so that we can be polite guests who do farm work in exchange for being allowed to learn about people. We can be company for a while. We should be polite, grateful guests. That is hard to think about.

I have to believe my labor is such that it is worth putting up with my company. I want to have something to talk about other than what a sad terrible life I have had. I want to have something to talk about other than what a devoted slave I was. I want to have something to talk about how much I enjoyed that short stint of teaching. I want to talk about something other than just being a mother.

What else am I? Food is going to be a big part of this journey. I want to find out where food comes from. I want to teach my daughters where food comes from and I feel ashamed of myself for knowing so little. I think food comes from cans.

We should be learning languages. I suppose that means picking areas already. Oh goodness.

I cry when I run because I wonder if my mother will feel proud when she hears about me some day. This valley isn’t that big. I tremble in fear when I am in San Jose. I’m terrified of seeing her. Will I pass her in silence like somebody that I used to know? Will I introduce my kids? Will I introduce her as Vivian? I have trouble saying her name without crying. I haven’t said it much in my life. She’s my Mommy.

I do have to think about things like this. I have to decide in advance what I will do. I have to play it in my mind so that I don’t freak out. I have to decide in my head and in my heart what an appropriate adult reaction is to my children. What is it going to be like to move through the world for a whole year that I don’t have to check over my shoulder for my mother?

My mother knows where I live. I wouldn’t put it past her to show up some day. How do I want to behave? Do I want her to show up? No. Not really.

If I showed up she would pretend to be nice for a while. Then she would feel comfortable. Then she would proceed to talk about how disgusting the food is.

Learning this is too hard. I have to take feedback if I want to improve but not from her. She can never again be allowed to weigh in on any part of me. What she thinks of me is not my business. Never the less when I run I cry so hard I can barely see because I want her to be proud of me. I hope she is proud that she did manage to raise kids who can survive even if she couldn’t keep them safe.

My mother drove adult men to my house when I was a young teenager because those men wanted to have sex with me. My mother manifestly didn’t care for me. She did not teach me survival skills. She taught me skills that will kill me.

Why? Why did she do that? Is that all she knows? Was I really so hard to teach? I can’t know. I expect I was nearly as high needs as Shanna, maybe more given the abuse. Do I really want to model how my mother dealt with it? Now I understand it more. It’s complicated.

All of this is so complicated. How do I stop looking at all of life as one big mass of things that I don’t know yet and therefore I can’t know and I am trapped? When do I learn how to fail in front of other people? When will it be safe to try things in front of people without being told I am pathetic for being bad on my first try? I don’t have a safer audience than my kids. I feel bad that I don’t get to teach them very many things that I am already good at. I feel kind of sad that their entire lives will be a journey through my learning experiences.

I wish I had “become” a bit more before having kids. I wish I had been less resistant to learning. I wish I didn’t feel humiliated when I don’t know the answer. Maybe that is how my mother felt. How do I want to feel?

This is all so very complicated. And I should go in because Noah has to go to work.

No social skills

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Today I went and talked to a man who does things. I feel like a lazy slacker when I hear about what he gets done. He’s running a little farm. He works a computer job 80 miles away from his farm and deals with that commute. He is high up in management for a variety of different annual events like historical re-enactment events and Burning Man. He has an intense life. I’m not going to bother to talk about his 15 active hobbies.

Just the thought of having to deal with that many people gives me the shivers. I can do a fairly heroic amount alone but having to work with people is hard. I don’t trust people. I never believe that any one else will deliver on what they promise so I can only plan for what I can accomplish alone. It’s rather limiting.

I will never have a family the way I picture in my head. I have Noah and Shanna and Calli and that’s it. And I’m god damn lucky to have them. There are people who love me. There are people who care about me a great deal. There are people who will try hard to help me. But they all go back to their families. I am not part of their families. I am a spoke person they can have a one on one relationship with occasionally but I’m not a big part of any one’s life. Except for Noah and Shanna and Calli.

I’ve been calling K every day because otherwise I can’t get through the afternoon without crying. I’m glad she lets me do that. I miss days occasionally because I don’t hear the alarm on my phone. I go through periods of talking to people daily or nearly daily on IM. They never seem to last very long.

I don’t really have people to share my life with outside of this house. I have people who want to see me once a year and get an update on how I am living my life. I’m impressed by the people who slog through this blog. I write because I am shouting into the void. I don’t know who or if anyone other than Noah is actually going to read any of it. The fact that people catch what I say bewilders me. I say so much because I have to see the words outside of my head but I know so little about the people who read. Even the people I “know” I don’t really understand. I rarely spend enough time with people to see past my projections onto them. I am not good at meeting people and treating them like a blank slate. I am always looking for patterns.

Patterns are important for my survival. At least they have been in the past. Patterns are causing me problems now because Noah doesn’t follow many patterns. He’s kind of weird. But he understands when I talk about the people in my life like characters in a story. He understands why I look for clues for how to react. Many of my assumptions are wrong. Why do I assume that people who come over to my house dislike me? Why do I physically react to them as if they were threatening? I can like someone and enjoy their company and still not know how to have a positive conversation with them. I always feel like I am being mean and they must think I am bad. (If you are thinking, even me? Yeah, probably.) I feel like I talk too much. I am rude. I dominate conversations. I take up too much space and I should shut up and sit in the back. My turn is over.

Ok you know how people talk about how homeschoolers “won’t be socialized”? Well. I went to public school so I got my socialization there. I think I had five or six teachers over my educational career tell me point blank in class to stop raising my hand because other people needed to have a turn. Teachers and people who are older than me and people in “authority” trigger me heavily. I have very strong internal meters that tell me that pretty much any talking is disrespectful. And I always say weird or wrong things.

I was at a party this weekend and two women were talking. They were doing that “build you up” sort of thing. Life is hard and we must be brave. You can never be too brave. You can never be too balanced. You can never be too strong.

I interrupted there and said, “Actually you have to be careful how you get stronger. Like right now I’m running and I’m learning a lot about how the muscles around the knee work and…” I went on for a while. I felt like a party pooper. “Oh hey, you know how you are trying to build her up and convince her to reach for the stars? Well here’s a cup of ice water in your face. You’re welcome.” I don’t mean to do it. I feel like such an asshole.

I don’t think it was actually that bad. I’m really not good at the art of conversation. It’s a skill and I’m sorely lacking in practice. The real problem is, Noah doesn’t mind if I’m an asshole and I point out things about him that sound rude as long as they are true. I think I grow more unfit for human companionship by the day.

I’m not sure why I have had such an upsurge of pervasive negative thought for the past few days. Is this my brain’s horrible reaction to Noah saying that I was out of the emergency phase?

Anxiety is energy that wants to be put to use but is instead being held in. What energy do I want to expend? Why do I feel so bad? I feel like talking about Sarah would be horribly disrespectful and rude. I’m having a lot of big feelings. I’m not sure why I think it would be disrespectful and rude, but I do. I’m not processing my emotions and it’s not working for me.

It’s not about a list of done-me-wrongs. We tipped the bucket. Lots of water came out. The drip isn’t starting back up again. I’m scared. I don’t get to control what happens in life. That’s hard. I feel sad. I miss my Sarah. Am I emailing her? No. Does that make me a passive aggressive bitch? Maybe. Things were said. Not all by me.

I’m scared and I’m sad. I hurt people.

I have had so many people tell me they were my “family” until I said or did something they didn’t like. I don’t see those people any more. They broke off contact. That’s just how life works. Some, many, of them resurface every few years for a phone call or dinner.

I got really good at lying to myself that I would have what I see in my head as how a family works. I’m too mean and I drive people away. I sit here and wonder why I am so broken. Why don’t I deserve what I see other people having? I missed that life path. It’s just not really an option for me. Pity party: table of one.

In my head I hear this rough amalgamation voice saying, “Don’t you realize that no one gives a shit that your mother didn’t love you? Get over yourself.” I should forget my shit and go out and join something. Subsume my identity into a group identity and stop thinking about my shit. Because my shit isn’t important. But when I get to the meeting or social event or class or or or or or or or I don’t know how to talk to people. I don’t know how to form relationships that go beyond a surface level. Because NOT BEING TAUGHT THOSE SKILLS IS PART OF MY SHIT.

It isn’t any one else’s problem. Well, that’s not true. What am I going to teach my children? Fuck. Who knows. We’ll see. I should go in. I should stop crying again.

The half-marathon.

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Three hours and eight minutes. I only went over three hours because I had to stop and wait in a huge line for a bathroom break. That took quite a while, it was ridiculous. I did not enjoy yesterday. It was definitely one of my shittiest running days ever. I felt like I was at the wall the whole time. My body just felt off the whole time. I felt sad and lonely. I resented the hell out of the fact that most people (that’s pretty much a lie, but I’m going to ignore reality for a bit) were in groups and had supporters. I felt isolated and alone. I don’t feel alone when I go running most of the time. I feel like I am running and no one in my life can do that with me so ok, I happen to be alone right now. Thank god I don’t have to listen to their chatter.

When I am running in a big group of people it feels different. I feel like there is a glass wall between me and other people. I feel like they are on the other side, where people are loved and supported. Then there is me. Alone. Again. It’s really idiotic and self absorbed. There were a lot of other people there alone. A few of them talked to me!

My feelings seem out of place with my reality. Ok, I was alone at the race. I felt sad that no one came to watch me run. I mean, dude. It was in Oakland. It’s not like it is inconvenient to a large percentage of people I know. Someone could have. It’s always complicated, you know? Yesterday I felt like this running thing is a bad idea.

I like how I feel when I run by myself. When I run by myself I feel like I’m not trying to compete with anyone else. I’m just doing my thing. When I run with other people I see how our paces match up and as I drop back and back and back in the crowd… that makes me feel lame. Then I start feeling shame. This is pretty ridiculous. I have been running for less than four months. I don’t need to feel bad that I am not a better runner. It would not be particularly good for my body to try and insist that I be a faster runner right now.

I think I want to run the marathon because I am hoping I get to see my brother one more time. I’m not going to continue training so I can do it again. I saw my mother and my sister and my nephew and my aunt and my cousins once more before I broke ties. I haven’t seen Jimmy in a long time. I know that he looks like my father. I feel like I am already losing the picture in my mind that I have of what that part of my family looks like. I feel unspeakably sad. I feel like there is a weight on my chest. I’m still grieving.

I’m told that grief is kept in your lungs. Shallow breaths keep the grief inside you. Running certainly makes me breathe more deeply. I cried as I ran. I missed my family and I longed for them so much it hurt. My family is the kind of family that is intensely good and intensely bad. I miss the good. I can’t stay because of the bad. I’m really struggling with continuing to believe it is the right decision. I feel so much guilt. I feel so bad that I am keeping my kids away from my family. My mother lives in downtown San Jose. And she has never seen Calli. I feel so bad. I am a terrible person who is hurting my mother.

And I thought about that as I ran past all the cheering people on the sidelines. They were there to support someone they loved. I have driven off the people who would do that for me. And then I have a pity party about it. How pathetic. So I cried a lot while I ran. It was a very hard run.

I felt weird because I didn’t see anyone else eat. I start eating between mile three and four. I take two or three handfuls of trail mix every other mile after that. I run hanging on to my little baggy. Sometimes I feel lazy and I put it in my pocket for a while. In the race environment I felt like the country bumpkin come to town and I’m doing it all wrong. I don’t have sleek running gear. I’m not sure I’ve ever been that close to so much spandex in my life. And I ran in a cotton sweatshirt. I was given a lot of funny looks. What? It’s what I own. Everyone else was advertising a cause or showing off former marathon shirts. This is also, not true; I wasn’t “the only one” but there really did seem to be a uniform and we were weird. Those of us who weren’t wearing the uniform were quite odd. Oh, and then there were the ladies who ran in tulle skirts. They were cute.

I feel weird running next to people for long periods and not talking to them. It feels awkward and uncomfortable. It feels like a lot of pressure to come up with something to talk about. If I don’t I feel gauche. And that distracted me from running, and them. I think that it is because people train at different paces. When you are in the group of people who are collectively running around fourteen minute miles that means there is a lot of walking. But people mix in their walking in different ways. It also felt like some people ran at a slow jog without really having to pause to walk. But they never went very fast. I’m a very impulsive runner. I run at the speed of the song on my headset. I have a lot of slow songs on purpose so I don’t try to sprint forever, but I do sprint. Mostly the songs are the latest albums from Lady Gaga, Adele, and Katy Perry with a few older songs I like mixed in. It’s a whole bunch of songs that cause me to sit and think about different relationships in my life. I like how I wander through different topics as time goes on. I’m not stuck thinking about the same person in the same way every time I hear any particular song. It’s a slow journey through different situations.

If I try to run without the music I can’t do it. I can only kind of stumble along. I don’t have anything telling my body it is time to move. I don’t want to run. Not really. I rather hate how it feels some days. But I don’t have another way of seeing Jimmy. I don’t really care if that is pathetic. I’m not magnanimous. I’m not sure that is a healthy reason. I need to see what Jimmy looks like. It won’t be true, but I will reconstruct a memory for myself of my father. It will be the only picture I will have.

I’ve been watching more movies than usual and recently I heard the line, “You never stop needing your parents.” As I was running part of the reason I was crying was because I realized how far ahead of me Jimmy will be. I realized he will probably leave the race grounds long before I finish. Unless I spot him in the vast zoo of five thousand people right before the race I don’t really have a chance of seeing him. And I will spend that whole race hoping to see him at the finish line. I’m going to cry a lot. I kind of wonder why I do this to myself.

Why does every activity have to be viewed in the most self harming way possible? Why do I always have to have a tale of loss and woe? When will something I am doing be about something, anything other than grieving? My therapist, God bless her, heard that line and looked straight at me and told me that I will never stop grieving. When you were hurt like I was as a child you never stop feeling pain for very long. It feels like a cross between a harsh sentence and great comfort.

I don’t perceive reality very well. I feel isolated and alone when I stand near people. The fact that people are apathetic towards me hurts my feelings because I feel constantly reminded of the apathy I experienced as a child. It caused me a lot of damage when I was a child. The fact that people are apathetic towards me makes me not want to stand physically close to them. Running through the crowd was occasionally terrifying. I don’t like being near large crowds. I consider them dangerous and I’m not even sure why. I feel like I could all of a sudden have some need and people would run past and not care and I would feel devastated. The impending loss of trust feels overwhelming. Like if I fell and was injured. I feel like people wouldn’t stop for me. I feel like this mass movement of uniformed lemmings all run in pursuit of a time goal and that is what they are there for and please get out of the way. It’s not even slightly true. I look around at people and judge faces and there were a lot of people who looked like they would probably be the sort who stop. For someone else. Someone who deserved help. It’s not that I think that other people are deficient in being willing to help good people. It’s that I think I am the kind of person you step around on the side walk because of course this loser is on the ground again.

I don’t know how to change this feeling that I am a terrible person who does not deserve any human compassion and people are going to know that and treat me accordingly. I don’t know how to stop feeling dirty.

I’m glad I get to look forward to six months of running by myself. I need the time alone again to apologize to my knee for running according to trying to keep up with people. I wasn’t listening properly and that was rude. We’ll work it out. I need to figure out how to stop trying to run with anyone else. How do I have blinders on and ignore the people around me. I was seriously spooked by the crowd. I spent a lot of time looking at the spectators and feeling sad that I never saw people I knew. At least I won’t have that distraction in Long Beach. I will be just running to the finish line. I know the spectators aren’t for me and I can ignore them more comfortably.

I’m still not sure how to deal with pacing off of other people. That didn’t work out. And I think I should look up what “interval training” is. People kept asking me about it. I don’t understand why. Google is so cool. Hm. Five minutes on Google tells me I don’t think I will ever answer those questions. That’s not a kind of runner I want to be. Excellent!

I feel like I am feeling like I must run a fast marathon and I shouldn’t have that as a goal. If it takes me six hours that is ok. If I seriously feel compelled to go too fast I will hurt myself. I’ve never run long distances before. I don’t want to injure myself and prevent going to the race. That would be stupid. And I don’t want to find out about how much help my fellow runners would be willing to provide if I injure myself at the race. Both of those sound like Bad Plans.

It’s hard to actually stay on my pace but I need to learn how to do it. That is a lot of what I learned from this race. I am too distractible. I need to not feel hurt by the apathy around me. People aren’t mean, they are concentrating. I should be concentrating too. I did start singing along by mile ten. People smiled at me. It’s a lot of how I measure my running speed–how well I can sing along. I measure my heart and lung workload that way. I don’t have a good silent method. I suppose I have six months to practice, if I want. Or I can just sing along and let people smile. It’s not like I’m doing something terrible. I’m not singing loudly.

Time to stop whining and go inside.

Two short things.

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Recently I was asked, “You do understand that you were tortured, right?” Not really. It feels like maybe my life was harder than average but what does “torture” mean anyway?

And I realized yesterday that my dream of traveling with the kids when Calli is over is a bit… not realistic right now. Unless I can get to the point where I can handle travel without having a nervous break down or crying I can’t do that. I want to go to countries that are far less friendly to hyperventilating women. I can’t do that right now. It’s just not safe.

Lots to think about.

First world problems

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Life is what you do while you are killing time until you die. Really, that’s all it is. Maybe you’ll die soon, maybe it will take a long time. Maybe you will know lots of people. Maybe you will spend all of those years alone; lonely is strictly optional. Happiness is a state of mind, not a circumstance. And yet, we expect people who are financially secure and stable and married and _______ to be happy.

Seeing my shaman was a good choice. I have a lot of oppositional defiance response to people. To him, in particular. Oh man he triggers all of my, “No no no no no no no” buttons. And no matter how frustrated I get with him I will always go back for more because I learn so much about me being with him. I learn more about the shape and size of me. I learn where I need to push back because I really truly believe something. I know something is true no matter what his opinion is.

He tried to tell me that I have previously been just fine with Noah dating. Uhm… no. I have written records. See, this is why I write. I was fine with Noah dating other people during the first six months we were dating and I was living with someone else. That’s true. But I was poly and Tom was monogamous because I couldn’t stand him being intimate with anyone else. He wasn’t real motivated to go find another sexual partner either. He wanted companionship more than sex and I still provided that.

Noah has different needs. No, I’ve never been happy about him seeing other people. I’m not shy with that information. I have tried to accept it as part of him. But I measure his dates in cuts on my legs. I don’t actually think it is good for our marriage for us to do nonmonogamy. If something hurts me that much, he really shouldn’t be doing it. I am totally fine with it in theory. I don’t have a problem with other people doing it. But knowing that my partner would rather be doing that with someone else rather than me? Yeah. That bothers me. I don’t say no. Ok, I do. But it’s pretty rare.

My shaman contends that the real solution is for me to just work on being bothered until I’m not bothered anymore so that Noah can keep doing what Noah wants to do. To be fair, he thinks that I should work on it because I also have trouble with monogamy.

I think it is more useful this lifetime for me to work on other parts of my life that are causing me strife. I only have so much time to spend beating my head against walls of shame and terror and anger and hatred. It’s going to come up around other issues whether I like it or not. Nonmonogamy is complicated. It takes a ridiculous amount of time and energy. I don’t have it to spare. And I won’t invest in this relationship fully if I know that I am just waiting for when he is going to pull away from me so that he can give a big chunk of himself to someone else. Fuck that shit. I guess I’m a selfish piece of shit but I think I deserve better than that.

The thing about first world problems is: they still hurt. And you still have to live with them day in and day out. No one expects anyone to be cheerful about third world problems. But you are god damn expected to just suck it up for first world problems. I certainly expect people to. I will probably die like my grandfather having a heart attack out in the yard while working. He was in his 80’s.

Ok, I’m going to take the first world/third world out of this for the next part because it sounds dismissive and snotty and I don’t mean to be. I’m talking about my perception of the difference between rich problems and poor problems. I’m using the phrases first world/third world reflexively because it is a common dismissive thought process. But I should be better than that.

When I was a kid surviving was different. The life I lead with my mother was different. Being alive day by day was different. Now that I am an adult I have a completely different situation in life but I am still the same person. Surviving my childhood took a very different skillset than … what am I supposed to say about adulthood? I won’t survive adulthood. Ha. What am I going to do with my adulthood. How is the pattern of my days going to look in comparison to all I know.

What I know is a disjointed life. What I know is work that comes and goes. Unending sorrow and bitterness. Trauma. That’s not all I know though. I know how to work with my hands. I know how to build things. I know how to build people. Shit dude, I made two of them. That’s pretty fucking cool if you ask me. I’m defensive about being a good parent because that is my primary job. I feel like I have to be judged on something and apparently that means I will some day be judged on whether or not my children are… I don’t know. Appropriate? Kind enough? Successful enough? Smart enough? Uhm. Yeah. I have no control over those things.

How do you talk about these subjects without blame? Happiness is a state of mind, not a circumstance. Uhm, yes. But if I had been happy during my childhood I wouldn’t have gotten out. My niece is as smart as me. I’m worried she won’t be able to get out. And my nephew won’t get out. At this point simple economics will bind them all together.

I feel I have satisfied any debt I owed my mother for the care she gave me as a child. I have given her thousands and thousands of dollars, often to my own detriment because she was stealing my pay checks. I don’t owe her anything.

I am angry this morning. So angry. I woke up so angry I feel like the top of my head might come off. I am still just me. But I cancelled my therapy appointment. I feel very defensive about that. I know I need to continue therapy but I don’t have anything I want to talk about in therapy today and is that relationship about meeting my needs or is it something I am doing so that I can check of check lists of what crazy people like me have to do on a set schedule for the rest of my life?

Today the opportunity cost of having to drive for two hours and spend about $18 in gas on top of $150 for the privilege of talking to my therapist… that’s too high of a bar for what I will get out of it. On many days it is the right choice and I shut up and just do it. But today what I will get out of the session will not be worth the opportunity cost. Why is that something I feel guilty about? Because I feel like I have to be accountable to other people in order to ever be right. I don’t feel like talking to my therapist today. So I’m not going to do it. And I feel angry about having to defend that. I really feel like I have to go down a long list of justifications about why. Because I don’t want to isn’t good enough because I am crazy and bad and I need to go talk to a therapist. Uhm, yeah. That’s fucking useful.

Do you know what I’m mad about right now? The price of juice. I don’t need to go talk to my therapist to find my way down the rabbit hole of why that pisses me off. I am even tactful enough to not write the story on the internet because such things actions are kind of tacky given why I am mad about the price of juice. But I am going to go inside and tell my family the story. And then I can stop being angry. I don’t need to pay someone else $150 to listen to the story so I can stop feeling angry. Once I explain it to my family we will figure out what we can change so that I can have help changing the feeling of anger. I can do something about my problems. That’s what makes it a first world problem? My problems are all things that I can solve or out wait and they will go away. I have short-term temporal problems right now. Life is harder than advertised and all that.

Right this minute Calli is crying. I have no idea why. Noah is on duty. I feel like I should stop what I am doing and go try to solve whatever is happening. She would probably settle down more with me. But she would demand to nurse. I’ve already nursed her once today. When she is upset like this she is especially rough.

These are problems that will go away. Calli is already done crying. I can hear her playing. Maybe I don’t have to fix everything. Having Sarah here feels different than I thought it would. I didn’t know I could have another adult in the house so much and still feel so lonely. Sarah has a lot of health issues and keeps a very different sleep schedule. To be fair she has made remarkable progress towards being more in-synch with the kids. We keep very different schedules. And she has spent a lot of time by herself. She’s used to being silent in her room all the time. It’s different. Sometimes it feels like we talked more when we were both on IM a lot.

I had a really exciting November. I went out a lot. I got to have a lot of really intense conversations. It was wonderful. I had a lot of interesting experiences I can sit and think about for a while. That’s not my life though. My life is quiet, mostly. There is a lot going on–don’t get me wrong. But it’s house work. And laundry. And gardening. And taking She-Ra to swimming. And being home from the zoo/park/museum in time for nap or all hell breaks loose. And laundry. And trying to make sure Calli doesn’t nap too early in the day or we will all pay. And more house work. And laundry.

I only make breakfast occasionally if I feel the desire to. Like, a couple of times a month. I make maybe four lunches a week. I have to come with dinner three or so nights a week. It doesn’t get to be take out any more.

I don’t get to be bitter about my problems because they are of my own choosing. Why am I choosing to be bitter about the life I am choosing that no one else is forcing me to have? Let’s be clear here. Noah is not pushing us towards saving. He pays no attention and I could financially ruin us and he wouldn’t notice for years. Instead he is tolerating me forcing him into an ascetic life ridiculously cheerfully. I am choosing every part of my life. From how much I clean to how often I have friends over. Why am I bitter?

I feel like I am not really choosing it. I feel like it is forced on me because no one else wants it. That’s true and not true. Sarah and Noah are both willing to do more when asked. And when I stop working hard things keep going the house just isn’t as clean. I’m cleaning to please myself. Ok, I feel upset that I have to work as hard as I do to have a house that looks the way I see my house in my head. That’s an interesting entitlement.

I was never really allowed to play. I was a reader because I wasn’t really allowed to have toys. My mom always gave my toys away because she didn’t want to clean them up. She went through my room with trash bags several times and just got rid of everything. I don’t build attachments to things very easily. I can’t. Things are easy come easy go. I’ll forget about it eventually, except those weird pangs some day. When I realize that there is very little evidence of my life. Only my sketchy memory and the random shit my mother chose to save. Items that are essentially meaningless to me because I will never know the story attached to them. I am invisible to myself because I have no reflection. I have no one to tell me what they saw.

I have a lot of guilt around the fact that I make Noah and Sarah and the kids get rid of things. I don’t let them keep all of the things they have sentimental attachment to. I can’t. We don’t have room. And really should not have a storage unit with stuff we will never use again that was important or fit or was relevant a long time ago. No. That’s money that needs to go elsewhere. It’s not rational. But the push back is that I require the house to be easy to clean. That means we really have to limit how much stuff we have in our house and everything must have a clearly defined home or it must not live here any more because the clutter builds and builds and then my life is a nightmare. I won’t let anyone else make my working environment hostile. I don’t go take a shit on your desk at work, thanks.

But then you have to figure out how much space should belong to each person. It’s hard to define. I feel like my day and life will be better if I stay home and save money and instead talk to Noah and Sarah about the stuff we can have some effect on. I can figure out actual compromises and do actual work instead of just telling more stories about my mom. Today, maybe just for today, I don’t really want to talk about my mom. I hate that most of my stories about her are so awful. She’s my mom. I love my mother. Irrationally. Completely. Intensely. Why was my mama so mean to me?

Because my mother had problems. She didn’t choose to handle them well and the collateral damage was massive. That happens sometimes. At this point my actual problems are all fairly small and easy to isolate. I have a lot of lasting damage, but I feel like it’s maybe time to start leaving the scab alone. Maybe just for today. That’s good enough.

Why am I choosing to be monogamous? If I reach down in the pit of my stomach it is because I don’t want to be a free person off living my life. I want to be part of an intense dyad. I want to be one with Noah. I don’t want him to be a free person off living his life either. I want us to be sharing this life. That’s why I married him. I have an easier time collaborating with him to do elaborate role play situations about pretending to sleep with other people than I do finding extra curricular sex that doesn’t make me feel like shit in some way. The opportunity cost is so very high.

I don’t think I want monogamy because of ideals, necessarily. I want to be able to stop thinking about this part of my broken. I don’t want to have to deal with keeping a tight leash on my compulsive behavior and only meting it out in small carefully considered not-quite-destructive doses. God it’s a lot of work. I’m tired of doing it. I am so very conflicted about sex.

My shaman told me that broken is a component of whether or not you have a range of emotions and a range of intensity within different emotions. Like if you always go from 2/3 to 9/10 and you stay in only two or three emotions you are probably in a broken place. If you have a range of emotions and a range of intensities… sure. That’s how you feel. Why not. It’s not broken it’s just where you are. I like how he alternates challenging me and affirming that I am already fine just how I am. It means I get to pick how I grow. Well, that’s part of why it didn’t work as a closer romantic relationship. I couldn’t deal with how much I would have to push back. It’s very hard for me.

Sometimes I wonder if my shaman has consciously created a personality for me. He speaks about his multiples fairly frequently. Fairly casually. I know that he alternates between very distinctive approaches in how he talks to me. It’s part of why I like him less around other people. He is so very different. He really is a different person, one I don’t know or like as much. He can listen to me and not challenge me and go down a laundry list of points to affirm that who I am and how I am is working well in every way. At the same time he can absolutely force me to speak in detail about all the specifics of why I am doing any of the things I am doing. It’s hard to be honest enough to be worthy of the conversation. I can’t do it very often. It is too hard to be present with him as intensely as I am present with him. Maybe that is why I don’t like him around other people. I am also attuning to the other person instead of him. Hm. Interesting.

It’s probably time to go in and start working on my first world problems. It makes me really happy that I know I can walk in the door and explain what I am upset about and talk about the root of why I am upset about it and have people be sympathetic and give a shit. Then we can figure out how to solve it. Because we will. This life thing will happen. Today will end and tomorrow might be anything. Some of my first wold problems won’t be solved yet, but they will. All I’ve got is time.

monogamy

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Monogamy. It’s a weird concept for me. I need to spend the rest of my life learning how to have relationships with people without having sex with them. I think that will be good for me. Weird and awkward, but good. What does that mean though?

I hesitate to talk about this. I don’t want to eat crow later. Mmmmm crow. Never say never. I remember a friend of mine, years ago, telling me, “Of course I don’t like that he plays with other women. But I want to play with other men so I shut up and put up with it.” I think I’d rather not play with other people than feel like I have to bite back my actual opinion. I don’t want to have to learn masking behavior that I use only at certain times. That feels like lying.

Noah playing with other people makes me cry. It reminds me that I don’t ever get to be special. Which is stupid, right? He married me. He didn’t marry anyone else and he is not going to leave me. Why isn’t that enough to convince me? Sex is so mixed up for me. Near as I can tell most people have enormous sexual hang ups without having to be abused starting in toddlerhood.

I don’t want to feel like I have to have sex with people in order to be interesting and I do. I really do. I don’t like that part of myself very much. I feel rather disgusting, really. This is bordering on a lot of things I’m deeply conflicted about. I am an exhibitionist. No one reading this is surprised. I’m not sure how that ties in with a lot of my need-to-feel-available.

I think I want to find out how forever feels. I want to realize that I’ve probably kissed someone else for the last time. Really. He’s it. Forever. I’m kind of excited. I should decide that I deserve to be touched only by someone who wants me enough to actually want all of me. Not just that piece of me.

How am I going to connect with all the people I want to connect with? It’s kind of terrifying, really. What do I have to offer? I don’t know. I have spent my adulthood with people who believe that monogamy is terrible and limiting and to be avoided at all costs. I feel kind of ashamed that I want to keep Noah all to myself.

I feel like I am doing something wrong by joining the Embargo and refusing to sleep with anyone ever again. It’s not fair that all these guys want sex and I won’t sleep with them. This is not a guilt I should carry. It should never enter into my mind that it isn’t fair that this nice guy isn’t getting _____ need met. Life isn’t fair. I bear no obligation to anyone but Noah for sexual needs.

That’s complicated too. I think in some ways monogamy is terrifying because it means that we will both have to be a lot more honest about what we want. If we want to get our needs met, really met we have to talk about them even when it is hard. Even when he’s afraid to say it to me. Even when I’m afraid to say it to him. I do not need to agree to do more than I do in order to be GGG. I need to say “no” a lot more and have more ownership of my body. We need to find a way to meet our mutual needs without me biting my lip and doing things that feel bad. I can’t hold Noah accountable for the consequences of his actions if I withhold information. I can’t decide it is proof that he doesn’t care when he doesn’t notice.

I can’t relax and enjoy this relationship while I feel like I am constantly preparing to be paranoid about Noah running off to fuck someone else. And that is how I feel in an open marriage. It feels like every day is just a count down until he gets to do that again. I feel like I am always doing something wrong by wanting to spend time with him. I should be giving him lots of time away from me to go do and be lots of things away from me because obviously he wants to reserve a lot of himself away from me. He is waiting for someone better than me to give that part of himself to. I don’t blame him. I constantly feel like I am waiting for him to go find someone more understanding than me to go talk to. Someone who is entirely on his side.

I have signed on to be completely dependent on Noah for the next twenty years. No, I am not going to relax my hypervigilance as long as I know that is coming some day. It means I have to steal myself that whole period until that day comes because I will not be able to bear the loss otherwise. I have to create a big hole in my heart and leave it that way and never let you touch it or come near it. Because that is where I will have to go when you are fucking someone else. It’s the same place I go when I sleep with other people. It is a space outside of me, outside of my life. I don’t really bond with casual sex. I have an experience. It is outside of me.

I’m afraid of monogamy because Noah really likes to take it to 11. If I have clamped down so hard on him that he isn’t allowed to go play with other people, how much will I egg him on to do because I feel guilty? I don’t know how to do this in a way that is good for me. Nonmonogamy gives me the eternal out that I can say, “Fine you have this part of you that I can’t deal with… take it somewhere else.” I never have to deal with my own actual limits that way. I never have to deal with telling him, “Fine but no really you have to stop at 8 because my jaw hurts.” That’s harder. Telling him no is a lot easier than having to figure out what I can do.

I’m afraid because I think we are going to have some difficult periods and a lot of crying over sex. I think this is going to be hard. I think we will both have to do a lot of forgiving one another for mistakes and that’s hard to think about. It’s weird to be discussing monogamy after five years of marriage. We really know what we are getting into, you know? Only we don’t. Because things will be very different in twenty years. We will be very different people. Can I really require that he never again touch anyone else intimately? I’m not going to do poly-anything. If he is going to follow my boundaries well, I feel weird about that.

I feel very pressured as the gate keeper. It’s weird to feel so conflicted about this. On one hand I feel uncomfortable with the idea of keeping him from having sex and other hand I’m not thrilled about feeling required to have sex absolutely as much as he wants forever. I don’t have any idea what my limits are.

I don’t like the way I dissociate rather than deal with feeling uncomfortable during sex. I have a hard time dealing with my anxious feelings in the moment. It’s hard to say when I really don’t want to be pushed. He likes pushing so much. It’s so weird to me that he worries about me wanting him. I worry about wanting him so much that I break myself trying to meet needs I can’t meet.

Because the thing is, I don’t actually think there are needs of his I can’t meet. Because I think that if he picks the right days, I probably can actually meet all of his needs. I like to go to 11 too. I feel scared that he isn’t going to be willing to walk around the cracks. I really do like the image of myself as a mosaic. My picture was broken so long ago and put back together so clumsily that it is an entirely new picture. On even median days I like me.

I don’t think he can really just learn a “set of triggers” and avoid them. It’s quicksand. And it moves. I want to find out how it moves. I want to be able to try things many times and know that sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. I want to be brave enough to not be angry when I say, “Ok not tonight.” I’m not failing if I say that. I’m not failing if my body is not up to something on a given day. I am not failing if sometimes I need to be held instead of hit. It’s hard to admit that I’m not instinctively automatically in the same place as Noah.

It feels like I don’t deserve him. Because I cannot do that. Because I cannot just accept whatever he wants to do whenever he wants to do it. I feel like I cannot require monogamy because I will never be good enough to satisfy him. I will never be enough. I will always fail. I’m scared.

I’m terrified to believe him. I’m so afraid that I will believe him that he wants to be monogamous. Only in twenty years things will be different and I will be expected to just understand. People evolve. Needs change.

I know that I will want to sleep with people. That’s just a fact. I’m not actually in denial about that. I will want to do it a lot. It will feel compulsive for the rest of my life. But I’m going to choose not to do it. I don’t think that I am actually served by following my pointer through life. My compass is broken. I need to think about the long-term and understand that sleeping with other people does not feed any of my needs (ok hyperbole for effect but the problems outweigh gains) and does not meet any of my goals.

Ok, maybe the hookers in Vegas. Because I can get behind you being motivated to attain that salary. Especially because the deal was always that they would be there in case I wore out. You haven’t done it yet. I don’t safeword.

hair cutting

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No one really knows what the boundaries are for another person. You have to speak for yourself, only, always. I decided to stop hunting and I cut all my hair off. In the bathroom with nail scissors. And now I’m going to feel like a fucking schmuck for years. Something broke. I think if I believed I could get away with wearing a burqa I would. I feel like a melodramatic, stupid, immature moron. Not to put too fine a point on it.

Ok, so what really happened is I was in the process of trying to leave the house one day and I couldn’t comb through the snarls. I lost my temper and badly cut the knot out. I have been compulsively going into the bathroom to fix it ever since. It’s rather short. My hair is not ok with bleach. I have a fairly ridiculous amount of shame around the fact that this is not the first time I have stopped hunting and shaved my head. I should tell that story. I don’t know if it is in the book or not.

I was seventeen and at West Valley. I was hanging out with Praveena. It was towards the end of our time hanging out together. I was on the tail end of one of my whoring-around-phases and feeling really bad about myself. I was getting to the point where I noticed that everyone who fucked me ditched me really soon after. I was at Praveena’s house and we were having a conversation about the fact that it bothered me that people no longer wanted to be my friend after we had sex. She thoughtfully looked at me and said, “Then why don’t you find out if they want to be your friend before you have sex with them?”

I started shaking. You don’t understand. People don’t spend time with me very often. Sex was how I got people to look at me. I moved around so often that I knew that I had to get attention quickly or I wouldn’t get it at all. I know what I’m supposed to act like. I know my “role”. I couldn’t verbalize any of that at the time. I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to be near me. I just sat there shaking. I had been cutting my hair at home compulsively for a while. It was probably three or four inches long. I asked her for shaving supplies. She was kind of confused as to why I wanted to shave my legs right then but she got them.

I went out in the back yard and shaved my head. She watched in wide mouthed horror. She had hair almost to her waist. She was a gorgeous Persian girl with super thick luscious hair. She sputtered and gasped and tried to talk me out of it. I remember the look of squick on her face. I laughed.

My mother didn’t laugh. To put this in larger context, this happened in October of 1998. My father had killed himself a couple of weeks earlier. Tommy had killed himself in June. My mom said a lot of very rude and nasty things to me about my looks. She pointed out that my head was exceedingly lumpy. She pointed out that given how fat I was, my head looked especially small and stupid. I need that big bushy hair to balance out my fat ass.

I was invited to go to a ‘formal’ dinner related to the haunted house event I volunteered at. My hair was only a few millimeters long at that point. I covered my head in glitter and wore a tight black velvet dress. My mom didn’t say anything, but she shook her head and grimaced.

At the time I felt awkward and stupid and barely spoke to anyone. The reality is that people were perfectly nice and civil to me. The people who knew me at all were friendly and strangers went out of their way to be nice. I never went back to that organization. My mother extensively talked about how stupid I looked and how she bets they would be making fun of me behind my back.

I’m not really cutting my hair because I think it makes me look ugly. When I feel ugly I feel compelled to cut my hair. I really do have beautiful hair. My hair is lovely enough that someone who feels and acts the way I do should not have that much camouflage to look “normal”.

I can’t possibly explain my mothers furious disgust at people who dye their hair “funny colors”. Oh my god. Anyone who would do that is disgusting. They are lesser, dirty people. They are not normal. Above all we must be normal, right? I don’t even know what that means.

I really and truly did dye my hair because I thought it was fun. I have enjoyed catching glimpses of myself in reflections and seeing the shock of color. It makes me smile. Unfortunately my hair is quite fine and the bleach destroys it and it gets shorter and shorter and… yeah. It’s time to deal with letting it grow out again.

And that represents so much internal conflict of self-expression and self-identity. It’s ridiculous that it matters so much. As I listen to Lady Gaga sing about her own hair experience I feel trite and ridiculous and like I am such a product of my generation. Of course I dye my hair odd colors and cut it myself in ridiculous ways. I’m Emo, right? I guess I never got over high school.

This is part of what I mean when I say I don’t fit. I don’t really know the rules. Do you want to know the main reason I’m cutting my hair myself? Because it really doesn’t matter if I pay someone to do this. Pretty soon I’m going to just buzz it because it’s time to start fresh. There really isn’t a point in paying someone to do that. I’ve been looking extensively at our budgeting. I’m going to continue paying for Noah’s haircuts because I like them. Enh, I’m just done paying for them for a few years. It makes me twitch to pay that much money on hair care. Curly hair is very forgiving and it’s not like I’m trying to impress anyone. That feels bad to say.

I have fun cutting my hair. I like trying to figure out the shape of my head. I get compliments from random people when I am out so I think I do a reasonable job. I’m not ugly. I don’t really think that having short hair makes me ugly. I don’t think that other people with short hair are ugly. But when I am feeling ugly I compulsively cut my hair. I’m trying to change what I see in the mirror. I want to have more control over what I see. I don’t want to go pay someone else who will try to make me look like some mainstream idea of beauty. Whatever it is that society values and requires of women I am not it. Let’s get the advertising straight.

There are fifty sides to every story. I like cutting my hair. I think it is fun. I think it is weird. I think it is a slightly self-harming behavior but fairly harmless so it’s ok. I think it is an obsessive compulsive tick when I am overwhelmed with my sexuality. I think that other people will judge me badly for being the kind of person who will do this. I don’t know why I care. Thank goodness we are through picture season.

I need to let the roots get a bit longer before I decide how short to get. Until then I get to cut off bits and pieces every time the urge strikes. I think it is kind of funny that I do this during cold weather. I guess I’ll just have to wear my Cheshire Cat hat all the time for a few months. That’s subtle.

I told Noah some truth last night. I wonder how that will work out.

non-monogamy has down sides

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I’m feeling highly avoidant. The funny thing is, I wrote that sentence down and went. Hmmm. Am I? Yes, yes I am. This non monogamy stuff is complicated. I feel extreme jealousy. Mostly I try to keep my tone civil and ask for my needs to be met and just deal with the fact that I have strong emotions.

Gah. This is mom stuff. This is her picking kids and liking one at a time. But it’s not just that. Noah has a lot of need for space from me. It’s kind of hard for me that part of why I want to be non monogamous is because I spend a lot of time alone and sad. Because Noah is busy. Noah’s response is to take some of that time that was previously mine and want to go fuck other people. It’s kind of hard not to take it personally. I feel always like I don’t see him enough. Yes, I choose to go out. I choose to go out because I’m going to lose my fucking mind if I don’t. But meeting my needs elsewhere means that he takes away from me. I can never tell if it is a net gain or not in terms of energy.

Why am I doing this? Why is this important to me? I got very emotionally invested in my muse very quickly. Now I’m starting to feel like I should shove him away from me as hard as possible. I hate that I have this constant niggling fear that he won’t really want the month. I’m too much trouble. I’m too annoying. I’m too hateful. I’m too… bad.

I’m pretty sure that’s not his thought process. And I don’t think Noah wants to hurt me by using his rare possible time to play with other people. It’s not like I maximize my time with him. But I’m feeling avoidant. It’s really annoying. I dislike the fluctuations between feeling good about myself and loathing myself. This month is going to be intense. I need to get a better handle on this. I’m having a hard time keeping perspective. Ok. hackhackhack

Noah wants to go off and sleep with someone else because he has been feeling invisible too. He hasn’t gotten to go hunting on his own like that in years. Go him. He’s going to come back and try not to look too happy because he doesn’t want to hurt my feelings. I hate that I do that to him. I don’t like that I have this emotional response. It feels like it is actively nasty to him. But it’s not. It’s just a lot of acid in my stomach. It’s ok that I feel insecure. I don’t need to. I have no reason to. But it is actually ok. Noah is the only person in my life that I can actually count on. Of course it scares me to think of him not wanting me.

But he doesn’t sleep with other people because he doesn’t want me. He sleeps with other people because it lets him feel like he’s impressive again. He’s a show off. It’s not the same with the same person year after year, I know. I want him to have that feeling. I just kinda wish one of his other hobbies supplied it. I’m a lot less dramatic than I used to be. I feel bad saying that. Because I was dramatic. Do you know why I try to deal with it? Because if this is so important to Noah that he is willing to deal with year after year of me being kind of an asshole about it… he can have it. Really. He lets me go off and do my thing and have my tantrum. I come back and apologize. He pats me on the head and we move on. I think he’s earned the right to prove, once again, that he’s coming back.

It wasn’t as intense with muse, but it was there. Mostly I was just freaking out about the Occupy stuff, but I felt kind of weird. I didn’t want to do the cuddly make out thing right before he went off on a date with someone else. I can see the appeal of getting more of that touch at any moment possible. I can. I feel really raw right now though. Our sex feels really personal. A quickie before you go to work is great. A quickie before you go fuck someone else… makes me feel like just one more hole. I want to be special, damnit. I don’t even know what that means.

One of the guys I dated a long time ago had a habit of picking a girl up when we were out on a date. We only dated for three months. That means if this happened a lot… uhh… it was a high percentage of our dates. It’s not that I minded the sex. It’s that I didn’t feel like I was much of a focus any more. I was an accessory to the experience. Hm. That’s about the objectification line. How and where am I willing to lay back and be someone else’s fantasy without complaining about my needs. That’s an important thing to think about. That’s a boundary line I’ve never been good at defining. That’s the difference between doing this in a healthy way and an unhealthy way.

I can’t do spur of the moment objectification all the time. I have to be in the right mood. It’s a sometimes food. I should just go to bed and stop whining. See, avoidant. I probably will feel better tomorrow. It’s hard to be present with the fact that I have these intense emotional states… and they don’t mean much. I don’t think other people should change their behavior based on my moods. I may need to change my behaviors based on my moods though.

So tonight I left the party way earlier than necessary. And I left Noah there. I went home alone because I knew I would rant and rave and cry the whole way home whether anyone was with me or not. I put on my awesome footey pajamas. I made ramen. Now I’m eating ice cream. Comfort foods = awesome. I do feel better. Less intensely self-loathing. Less like, obviously Noah wanted to go have sex with the nice, pretty lady because I’m a terrible person. Right. Heck, I’m even glad that muse had to get off line and go get ready for his date. It means I stopped the whiiiiiiiiiiiine at him as well. I feel less guilty about whining in my blog.

Part of that is I feel like whining in my blog has a higher chance of making me feel like I’ve reached a conclusion. I control the flow of the conversation. I don’t have to stop and listen to someone else talk. I am so ~~terrible~~ awesome. I feel like I have too many things I want to say stored up in my voice box. I feel like I don’t get to speak enough. Sometimes it is hard for me to say the important stuff when someone else is around deflecting the conversation because I never get down to the deeper layers of stuff.

The thing is, I feel just as bad when Noah stays out all night programming. It’s really and truly not about the sex. It’s the time. When people want to see other people it means they don’t want to spend that time with me. I feel like the only way for me to get through Noah having dates is to stay home alone. Because I’m not great company on those nights. Cranky. Hopefully the morning will be better.

I hate nonmonogamy because it proves there is no glitter in my hooha.

Casual sex

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“I’ve got someone who loves me more than words can say
And I’m thankful for that each and every day
And if I count all my blessings, I get a smile on my face
Still it’s hard to find faith…

But if you can look in my eyes
And tell me we’ll be alright
If you promise never to leave

You just might make me believe”

I listen to country music because it makes me cry. Because it is just as sappy as me. It’s kind of a weird balance that the more I think about having sex with someone other than Noah the more I am inclined to cry and feel unworthy of him. It’s a hard balance. I like it, and I want to pursue it. There just seems to be some magical amount of it that is hot for my marriage and more than that starts to feel threatening. I need to keep my priorities straight. Noah is forever.

It’s scary to think about forever. How long does that really mean? I won’t know until it gets here. But I really like thinking that I can plan for 2020 with Noah. What do we want to do with our life? It’s hard to tease out which parts are just for me and which parts are just for him and which parts are actually for both of us. It feels important to me to have some idea in my head so that I can ensure that we are all getting our needs met in the most balanced way we can manage. The funny part about our life is that if Noah didn’t program for a living he would do it anyway. That makes me feel a lot less bad about him spending so much time at work. Just sayin’. From where I’m standing programming looks like programming. I’m only kind of serious.

Why do I fuck other people? Do I do it for me? Do I do it because I think that is the kind of girl Noah wanted to marry? It crosses my mind once in a while that I do feel pressured to be slutty. Noah really likes the trashier the better. I’ve noticed. But oh man it feels comfortable. When I am not actively flirting and/or hunting I feel like part of me is dead. I feel invisible. I feel… like I have no value. Yes, I recognize that it’s fucked up.

You know, I can tell myself that it’s fucked up and I should get over it. Then I could stop going out and flirting. Somehow I don’t think the problem would evaporate. Today I went to the Westboro Baptist Church counter-protests in Cupertino. At the Apple campus that rather charming young man was clearly hitting on me. I uhh mentioned my partner and kids and he sighed deeply. I was just trying to amass the courage to say that didn’t mean I was unavailable! Then his friend pulled on his sleeve and he left. Oh well.

I think that’s a lot of why I don’t mind that I like extracurricular sex so much. Because I don’t actually do almost any of it. I think about it obsessively, but so what? I vacillate between feeling guilty because I think about sex outside my marriage let alone doing it and feeling kind of boring because I have so much trouble scoring. I spend a lot of time laughing at my own stupidity. I like these double binds where I’m wrong no matter what I do.

I say I have trouble scoring because when I finally find someone who is interested in actual NSA sex right now I turn him down. I won’t sleep with someone who is cheating. Ha. I guess I do have standards. Other than that I am batting 1 in 3 for attempts. I’m pretty glad for that one, let me tell you. Otherwise I’d feel a lot more sad. It’s weird to feel almost sad for not finding random sex. Because I want such a specific kind of sex, of course I’m not finding it left and right. Noah has spoiled me.

I think I spend so much time thinking about possible sexual encounters because otherwise I want to start a remodeling project and I really need to spend some time sitting on my ass in between running. Really. My poor body needs a break. I’m kind of bored of reading. I’m not interested in more time watching movies or television. I have cut all my reading filters down so far that they only produce about twenty minutes in a day. I could obsess about my kids, I suppose. Instead I think about sex. It’s more fun.

I think that a lot of the fantasizing about other people is just a way of creating roles for us to play later. We do a lot of roleplay during sex. Honestly that’s a lot of why Noah is so fun. It’s like having a whole harem in one. He’s willing to do absolutely anything I want. It’s pretty miraculous. He uhm lacks some of the technical skills I miss though. I’m trying to figure out which ones I care about the most and why.

I miss being tied up. It’s been a very long time since I’ve had a serious bondage scene like I used to do with Tom. Not since March of 2006. It’s not that I haven’t been tied up since then. I have. But I haven’t done a bondage scene that gave me the D/s aspect that is important to the experience. It’s hard to figure out how to talk about this. There is something missing. It’s probably easier to talk about Max than Tom, there’s less emotion there. So Max is Tom’s best friend. They have been best friends for nearly two decades now. They learned rope at the same time from different sources and then came into the scene at the same time and strongly influenced one another.

Max is one of the nicest guys I have ever met in my life. He’s also one of the nastiest sadists. And he has the best quietly commanding air of anyone I have ever met. There have only been a few men ever who can say, “May I please have a glass of water?” and my response is to jump up and run to get it and return it on my knees saying, “Thank you for the honor of serving you, Sir.” I’ll tell you plainly that I never came anywhere close to having sex with Max but oh god I thought about it. I was always very sad that I didn’t know what a man that powerful needed to get off.

That’s it. I like finding people who are interesting to me and finding out what gets them off. What sexuality goes with that outer shell. It tells me a lot about peoples insecurities. I know how to deal with people once I know how they get off. I know what their needs are. I find out who they need me to be. Because I require that my sex partners talk about what feels good and what they want. What do they want me to do. Please instruct me.

I can’t go to bed with someone who can’t talk during sex. It doesn’t work well. I never feel like I know what to do and it’s awkward and slightly uncomfortable. Those kind of people are the sort who don’t want to have sex on the first date. They want to go on 3-5 dates and then you are supposed to suddenly just “know” without instructions. Bah. Lousy lovers. No talking in bed, no sex for you. (with a nod to Sarah)

Saying lousy lover is a bit strong. But it means we aren’t compatible. So much of what is going on in my head is related to the things that are said more than anything I feel in my body. Ok, I’m trying to use gender neutral language as if sex with men is like sex with women and it’s not. I haven’t slept with very many women in the last few years. I’ll tell you plainly it’s because I’m sick to death of pillow princesses. I have only managed to find a few active women in the last ten years. I pretty much stopped trying because I’m tired of doing all the work with bicurious or heteroflexible women. Ahem. I’m sure the problem is where I am hunting, but I don’t know where to look.

Men are easier for me to relate to. They tend to not bring their emotions into sex. And when a guy starts telling me he is in love with me I’m in trouble. It rarely goes well from there. All of a sudden they have needs outside of sex I am supposed to meet. I tend to feel angry about that because I can’t. So I feel like I am disappointing them. Like I am failing at my responsibilities. That’s frustrating and my response to people adding frustration I don’t need is anger. It’s not optimal. It’s one of the biggest things that keeps me tentative about going to places I know would be more target rich environments for sketchy catches. I’m trying to only hunt in places I have a good chance of running into people who won’t fall in love with me. I’m a good friend and a good lay, but I’m not girlfriend material.

What is the difference? How is that all tied up (ha) with the bondage I miss? I want an intensity of focus in my interactions that people other than Noah frankly can’t sustain. I think that someday he will be able to do exactly the kind of bondage I want him to do. I just need to get my head out of my ass and teach him. It’s my fault he can’t do it yet. I get really impatient and mean because he’s not perfect yet. He needs practice and I don’t have the patience to give it to him and I don’t encourage/allow him to go practice with anyone else.

I’m aware that this is one of those 10,000 hour skills. Do you know why Tom and Max are so hot? Because when I met them more than ten years ago they had already been each tying people up for over ten years. So they are each at twenty-five or more years of tying people up recreationally. No shit they are better than Noah. They had to start somewhere with a patient girlfriend. I’m so sick of being patient. Dear god. Is there one more fucking thing I can add to my life where I have to be patient? Bah.

Max is so hot because Max is a Master because he knows his will down to the letter and he knows exactly where he wants to delegate and where he doesn’t. He’s not messy. Ever. (Ok, I’m sure he is occasionally because he’s had personal issues just like everyone else, but not in front of me in any capacity.) He mastered his emotions. So when he ties me up every move feels deliberate. For that space of time *I* am being almost an object that he wants to touch and move around. And in the process he slowly adds rope that is tight but not overly painful for the primary purpose of restricting circulation and blood flow so that I get light headed.

I don’t know if that explanation makes sense. But it’s really hot. Being tied up by someone really skillful is nice because it doesn’t have to be overly painful in order to be effective. You can slowly be pulled through neat stretches while nicely light headed. I like particular positions more than others, of course. And being suspended is amazing because fighting gravity is always intense. Not having any part of my body resting on something makes me feel giddy. Even if I’m not far off the ground. It’s intense and scary. Once Tom put me 75′ off the ground. I really like being anywhere off the ground I can. I’ve always liked climbing trees and fences.

For most of my life I have had several recurring dreams about flying. I feel like the suspension fits into that part of my psyche. It’s a way to escape this mortal coil for at least a brief reprieve. I can dissociate without the fuss of someone feeling bad because I can’t feel anything they are doing while they are having sex with them. That upsets people.

Being completely outside my body feels safe and comfortable in a way that very few things do. I can will myself into doing that while stone cold sober just sitting in a chair. But it’s really hard and I lose focus easily. When I’m tied up it’s almost impossible for me to be present in my body after a while. I get to simultaneously become hyper aware of my body and completely feel absent from worrying about it because I feel like I am soaring through the air free from it. It’s wonderful. It’s not all the time food. Well, not for me. Not without Tom. That’s ok. Noah has other perks. It’s weird to miss that so intently; it’s weird to miss Tom. I feel disloyal.

That feels tied up with my current anxiety around not wanting to get attached to anyone other than Noah. As usual, for me, it also feels tied up with the incest. My father told my brothers that they have the right to have sex whenever they want. Rape was specifically fine. It didn’t matter if it was a chick outside the family or inside. If you want sex, you should have it. If you can’t find it outside the family it is the responsibility of someone in the family to provide it, if you can take it. So my mother, sister, and I had to fight Tommy off for years. It’s a good thing he was disabled or I would have lost. I was 4.5 years younger.

If I like people and want to get to know them I feel like I have to be available for sex in order to be interesting. Which is tied up with the fact that when I like people I want to have sex with them. And I really enjoy the kind of getting to know people I get from having sex with them. I find it deeply fulfilling to get someone off. Really. I get this boost that lasts weeks. It’s very similar to the feeling I have when I am serving someone. I can get the same getting-someone-off-high from serving someone in a D/s capacity. It’s a lot of why I miss it so much.

Noah builds me up differently. The biggest difference between Noah and Tom is that Noah could probably tell me my whole life story back to me right now before I write the book. Because he has asked over and over for information and he has bothered to remember. I doubt Tom could ever tell anything about me other than “She had a bad childhood.” He wanted a very different kind of relationship than me. He wanted less of an examined life. Fair enough. This takes a lot of time away from doing other things. But it’s my hobby.

I’m feeling kind of guilty about how antsy I am to find someone to have sex with. So my thoughts keep wandering to how I can start painting the pantry today. I think I should just get laid.

Anxiety, spike.

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Today I am going to go see a psychiatrist. The medical group I work with made it very difficult to get this appointment. I was interrogated by multiple people and it was very obvious that if I didn’t answer in a way they liked I was going to be locked up whether I like it or not. Self-harming is illegal, you know. It’s pretty terrifying to me that I have to be careful in how I word things or I won’t be coming home today. The terror is enough that I kind of want to cancel the appointment and continue to hide in my house forever smoking pot. At least right now I don’t have to worry about someone else deciding they know what is best for me and forcing my lock-step through their program again.

For me the institution and the group home and public school were all pretty much cut from the same cloth. Obviously there were degrees of seriousness for how they slapped people down for stepping out of line. For the whole god damn rest of my life “help” means people doing things to me against my will. That is what help is. It doesn’t matter if I am crazy or sane, it doesn’t influence how people treat me. Do you know what does influence how people treat me? How much they actually listen to me before they start acting.

I don’t know how to make any part of my life or experiences or needs or whatever into brief little sound bites that keep me out of trouble. That is a lot of what other people seem to have that I don’t. It’s not that no one else had anything shitty happen to them. It’s that no one else seems to have diarrhea of the mouth and the compulsive desire to tell everyone in the world, “My dad raped me and I still can’t sleep at night because of it. It’s not so bad really. I can’t imagine what it would be like to live in a world where I don’t wake up at 3 am unable to go back to sleep because I am no longer stoned and I can’t bear the nightmares. Luckily I went to bed at 7 last night. I got in a lot of sleep. It seems to be the only way to hack the system.

I am afraid that if I tell the truth today I won’t be coming home. I have responsibilities. I have people to care for. An institution isn’t a “break” it is a horrible rending and tearing of not allowing me to have contact with the few people in the world who love me and are nice to me. Please God, I never want to be in an institution again. Never. Never. I am really afraird of talking to a psychiatrist today. I know that if I’m honest about how I have been since April they will talk to me about my “options” by which tell me what they are considering forcing me to do. Because the minute I walk into this doctors care I no longer get to have the final say about my mental health.

I feel like I am about to puke on the floor. I have six hours of terror to get through until I meet this doctor. How this goes depends on the psychiatrist I see. If this is an open minded person who believes there are many roads to an acceptably good life, I might get some actual help. If this person believes that all people must be like _____ or they need “help” I might be walking into an actually dangerous situation for me. And I don’t know in advance what kind of person this is. And dear god the power she will weird. I’m actually more scared because it is a woman. Despite the fact that every sexual assault was perpetuated by men, I still feel much more terrified of women. Women are meaner. Women hurt other women and girls just so they get the rush of feeling bigger. I have some issues with women.

I am aware that the most likely result of today is that I will come home with a prescription of some sleep and/or anxiety medication. I’m willing to bet money that the doctor will be fine. That I will talk about my horror story of a life, say that I self harm in limited ways because of a life of horror and right now the pressure is simply too much for me to cope with “healthy” coping mechanisms on my own and I need help. This doctor would probably be ok with drugging me into a zombie state for the rest of my life if I need that to stop being angry all the time. I don’t want that either.

What do I want? What do I hope for? If I don’t know I can’t ask. I want to sleep better, longer, and in the middle of the night rather than through the evening. I miss Noah on nights I go to bed with Calli. I want to be able to control my anger. I want to not hide at home because I am terrified people will dislike me and be mean to me. I am so afraid of people being mean to me. Sometimes I think I have picked the wrong friends groups.

People I know hurt my feelings a lot. I’m really over sensitive. I try hard to keep it as just my problem because I know I am over sensitive. But that means I don’t go out. Because people hurt me casually without noticing. I notice. I stop going out. This is the flip side of “blunt”. An awful lot of things that people say attached to the phrase, “I’m just being honest” are awful. Awful. Awful. “I don’t think you are a bad person or anything, I just think it is a sign that you have no respect for yourself if you have slept with so many people.” I don’t think that is true. If it was true, thank you for telling me that you think I treat me like a piece of shit because I don’t have the same attitude about sex that you have. Obviously us whores are lower life forms.

I do speak negatively about women who have sex with the guys I sleep with. Not to put them down, but rather I refer to us collectively as whores. I’ve noticed lately that I am inadvertently thinking negative-ish things about women I really have no negative thoughts by. Especially over the past three years, I just don’t have negative thoughts about the women Noah sleeps with. D is not a whore. She’s a very nice lady who sometimes sleeps with my husband when the idea of sex makes me cranky. The only exchange is stress relief. That’s not being a whore. It’s being an unconventionally awesome friend.

I have some mixed feelings about sex. I can’t imagine why.

That last sentence makes me smile. People like to talk about the things that are important to them. Most people seem to find books, movies, their kids, their jobs, and their hobbies to be the extent of what they do with their talking. I’m important to me. Trying to figure out how to hack my system and behave how I want to behave is my hobby. Other people seem to not have the road blocks to existing that I have. I can get things done. I can be productive. I can even seem happy. But I have to rig the game.

I can visit with friends. I can deal with all the stuff that needs to be done to keep two little kids growing like weeds and healthy. I can’t go meet new people by myself. I can’t handle things that feel high pressure. New people are terrifying. New people represent this constant low level risk of nastiness. Either I will be stupid enough to say something about myself and they will be disgusted and not like me or I will be stupid and comment on their life choices in a way that is inappropriate. The internet is not doing wonders for my social skills.

There is a local meet up group for home schoolers. Sarah tried to go to one of their events yesterday and missed them in the crowd. The organizer sent me this email asking if Sarah is…. part of my family? Because then she can just be accepted into the group instead of being a provisional member. They’ve met me and the kids and if she’s attached to us she is obviously not a predator or creepy person. They don’t have to meet her first if she is attached to us.

That honestly makes me feel weird. I told her, “Yes Sarah is part of our family. I’m sorry we don’t get to more events. That is when the baby naps. We are hoping that now that she has crossed into toddlerhood that naps will drift and we will be able to come to a lot more events.” That’s a good way of not sounding like a crazy fuck up. “Actually I usually skip your events because there is this one cunt I am afraid of meeting up with and it keeps me at home shaking with terror.” You know that friend who dumped me with the nasty dear Jane email? She’s active all over the bay area with anything vaguely crunchy and parenting. I don’t really want to run into someone who will tell me that I am such a bad parent she doesn’t want to know me.

All of these things are related and combined in my head. People are terrifying. At any random moment people who are staunchly my “friend” will turn on me and start telling me how bad or gross or wrong or… something. I’m inappropriate. I should be kept away from decent people because I am so bad bad bad. That’s why I am so afraid of the institution. It feels like just one more way that society wants “people like me” to be eliminated. If I can’t control myself well enough to pretend that I am just like everyone else they are going to put me in a place where I will god damn get control.

It’s hard to explain to people what the institution was like for me. You can’t go to the bathroom without permission. You can’t eat without permission. When food is put in front of you, you are required to eat all of it or you get punished. A lot of the girls in psych wards are there for eating disorders. As a result every person there is given the same food and you have to eat every bite whether you like it or not. I was told very clearly that if I refused food I would be strapped to a table and a feeding tube would be inserted. That was what I was told when I said I didn’t want to eat the scrambled eggs because they were too soft and I thought they tasted bad. All of my life I have hated scrambled eggs that were too soft. I like them burned. I like them absolutely hard. The institution made them really runny and slimy in a huge batch. They wouldn’t even microwave the fucking things for me to cook them more. The employee told me that I had to eat all of it or I would be forced to eat through a tube. When I started eating with tears running down my face and I was actively fighting my gag reflex… the employee smiled and called me a good girl.

That’s fucked up. I’m sorry. That is not about helping me be “better”. That is about helping to break my spirit and force me to conform to someone else’s idea of being a good person. Seriously? My mental health is related to me being able to choke down under cooked eggs? Why in the fuck was that important? Why was that a battle? Why did I have to eat or risk more invasive medical procedures? Why should I believe anything other than Western Medicine is Evil. Giving that much power to people is wrong. No one should have been able to do that to me.

I’m sorry, but suicide and self-harming should not be punished the way they are. Do you know why people are punished this way? Because it is disruptive to society for people to be unpredictable. People who commit suicide or self-harm are likely to be different and cause waves. We certainly must stomp that right the fuck out. No disruptions of routine. Everything.Must.Flow.Like.Clockwork. Or you are bad. And we will force you back into line.

You can’t eat when you want to. You can’t go to the bathroom when you want to. You can’t sleep when you want to. You can’t play games when you want to. You can’t listen to music when you want to. You can’t decide who you talk to. You can’t decide what you eat. You can’t decide what clothes you wear. You can’t decide how to treat your body–your decisions are substandard.

That’s what an institution is like. You are expected to slowly shuffle from activity to activity (eating is an activity) exactly how and when they say. You cannot question anything. You cannot have a body that likes to eat every four hours instead of eating at 6:30, 12:30 and 6:30. You cannot have any privacy in your head. If an employee (it probably is only supposed to be the therapists, but the orderlies are assholes too) decides to start interrogating you about what you are thinking you had better have an acceptable answer.

When I was institutionalized the story was that I had a rough life but no one knew what that meant. They knew I moved around a lot. They knew that my brother had been hit by a car. There was some vague talk that maybe some sexual abuse had happened. I hadn’t told anyone about being raped. Not by anyone. I went into the institution and was told to lay out all my secrets on a table for them to judge and decide about. Of course I didn’t tell them shit. They were forcing me to eat runny eggs and walk from room to room under their command. There was no safety. There was no room for me to exist at all. I’m just glad it was only two weeks.

I can play the game if I have to. Of course I can. I wouldn’t be alive and outside of jail if it wasn’t true. But I break the social contract in a lot of ways. A lot of ways that are easy to ignore when I am at home by myself in the garage. No one will hurt me here. No wonder Alex’s therapist said I am like the crazy ass Vietnam vet who stockpiles food and ammunition. I don’t think our larder is especially bursting with stores and I don’t own a gun. But I do very careful limit how much I deal with people. I only invite a few people to my house and I don’t go out often. You never know who is going to be nasty to you.

I remember not caring about the fact that people judged me badly. I mean, I can deal with the random public and I do. I go to the grocery store and have pleasant interactions. I can take my kids to the zoo or museum and we do fine and have fun. I can’t go to a big party with a bunch of “friends”. I can’t go meet a medical practitioner because this person will abruptly have “authority” over me.

I’m tired of feeling like I am wrong or bad just for existing. For saying the things I say. For taking up the space I take up. Even if I do go to an event I feel this constant pressure to sit in a corner and not say anything awkward or uncomfortable. This is hard. If someone says, “So what have you been up to lately?” it’s a huge anxiety bomb. Well I’ve spent most of 2011 having a mental breakdown and I wrote about it on my blog extensively. Want to hear about my long list of rape experiences? No, no one wants to hear that. But it’s what I want to talk about. So I stay home by myself and I write. I can’t offend anyone if I am writing alone in a room.

Cue chorus of snickers. Ok, if people are offended by what I write when I am alone in a room I don’t feel much responsibility for that. Stop reading then you stupid asshole. No one is dragging you to a computer and chaining you there until you read all my inane drivel. My whining. I’m not feeling good about myself today. I’m really afraid of this doctor. I’m really afraid that this doctor has the power to say, “You know how hard you are working on being a stable mother? Well… someone like you shouldn’t have had kids and we are going to protect your kids from you.” I have to be careful what I say in front of this doctor or I risk CPS. I’m afraid that it doesn’t matter that I only self harm behind closed doors away from my children. I’m afraid I am going to be told that someone like me is too toxic to share the same air. It’s for everyones good that I be removed from the home.

I was often taken away from my family as a child “for my own good”. I was always sent back after a while because there aren’t enough tolerance for me anywhere else either. Difficult. That’s me. Always have been. Always thinking I get to have an opinion and preferences. Always thinking that it matters what I want. Stupid me.

There are few things in my life more terrifying than the institution. I know it would be a different one this time. A “better” one. It wouldn’t really be better though. It would just be the system trying to convince me that as long as they don’t force me down on a table we are all doing what we want to do. It’s a lie. Me doing what I want to do involves hiding in my house and beating my head on the concrete floor when I can’t handle the anxiety. Ok, that’s not really what I want to do. But I prefer beating my head at home to beating my head in the institution and I wouldn’t stop just because they told me to.

In fact if a group of doctors told me I had to stop or else… all of a sudden my skull would be covered with scabs because I would do it a lot harder. Or else what? What are you going to do to me that is going to be worse than what has happened to me? Do I really need more people hurting me? Do I really need more people trying to impose their will upon me? That is how to make me a healthy person? For yet more people to try to control me when they don’t know what happened to me?

Coping mechanisms can be good and useful and necessary at one time and become less good over time. Self harming has kept me able to function and go about life. It *is* a stress relief. I have done a lot of good in my life. Why is any of it negated because I had to self harm in order to have the focus to work? Why? I can see telling me that there is a better way and offering me other options. That’s awesome. I want to have other fucking options. I’m tired of my head hurting. But I can’t just find this self control out of thin air. I’m out of will power. There isn’t enough lemonade in the world.

I don’t self harm every day. Unless you count pot, which is kind of a weird thing for me. On days when I am stoned I don’t self harm at all. I haven’t beat my head against the floor in almost a month, actually. Not since the day of the party. That morning I lost it and I haven’t since. Having all those people come over was… challenging. It went well and everyone had fun. I still spent most of the time freaked out waiting for something awful to happen.

Since then I say, “Sarah I need to tap out” and she says, “Ok!” and I go sit down and smoke and think for thirty minutes. Then I’m cheerful again.

I want to work with a psychiatrist because I don’t know much about mood stabilizing drugs. I need to learn.

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Category Archives: anxiety

Chemical states and relationship transitions

relationships

Perspective

A Tuesday morning ramble.

You have no power over me.

Parenting, anxiety and me!

Food comes from a can

No social skills

The half-marathon.

Two short things.

First world problems

monogamy

hair cutting

non-monogamy has down sides

Casual sex

Anxiety, spike.