Category Archives: being seen

Just life

Leave a reply

Yesterday I had a weird realization.  I read back a bit in my blog and I noticed that for all I discuss my mental state (obsessively, constantly) I say very little about my life.  This was interesting to me to note as I also got to a place where I had to talk to Sarah about my plans for the yard.  They are connected, bear with me.

I get up every morning and I look at the stats page here on blogger.  I feel lame admitting that.  I can tell which traffic sources are probably just spam and I sigh.  But I look at the other ones.  The numbers are growing.  Every day I close my eyes and I smile and say thank you.  Even though these people are not talking to me, even though they feel no motivation to contact me in any way… someone sees me.  I’m not invisible.  It’s hard to admit how visceral and important that is to me.

How often do you call your mother?  How much do you resent talking to her?  I think about my mother every day.  I think of the things I would like to tell her.  I think of the off-hand comments I would like to make about my daughters because my mom would understand them.  Most of the time I just bite my lip.  I know that her responses would vary from completely on the same page to shaming and horrified.  She has always reacted like that to me.  I last spoke to my mother in May.  It had been many months since the previous contact.  I have barely spoken with her at all in twelve years.

What is my life actually like?  I clean a lot.  It’s a lot of how I deal with my compulsive tendencies right now and given the ever-present terror of losing my children for being an unfit mother.  I think I read MDC too long.  I worry that if I have a basket of laundry sitting out I’m screwed.  I read books to the kids.  I play a lot of Lego’s and blocks and Play Doh and I draw and I dig in sand.  I haven’t been gardening recently.  Running has been taking most of my physical strength.  I’m doing more of it than I post on facebook. I always want to put a smiley when I am being defensive and I have a firm commitment to myself that this journal will be smiley free.  It’s awkward relinquishing that desire to appear friendly.

I don’t mean to be as harsh as I sound most of the time.  I spend a lot of time apologizing for my tone and I worry about that, actually.  I hate that I apologize for speaking so much.  I speak quickly and directly, why is that so bad?  I’m not attacking.  I’m really not.  I’m left feeling like there is nothing I can say that will be taken well so I should just shut up.  It’s not my favorite.

I’m glad that Sarah is here now.  I’m not alone.  I have had people ask me, when I’m discussing issues I have with Sarah, if Noah would allow me to make Sarah leave.  I thought that was hilarious.  Sarah is mine, not Noah’s.  I don’t know what Sarah is to me, but she’s mine.  And that’s that.  I don’t know what that is going to mean going forward.  She has an awful lot of needs I can’t and won’t meet.  Life is complicated.  Right now we are just trying to raise these babies.  We’ll see what the future holds.

It is interesting that for me “closeness” is out of sight and out of mind with some people and not with others.  I feel betrayed by the fact that people didn’t make an effort to see me when I was a child.  That I went all those lonely years without continual on-going relationships.  I would meet people once or twice and then maybe never see them again.  I barely saw my brother Jimmy.  I rarely saw my father.  Aunt Vonnie and Uncle Bob were weirdly intermittent, hell–so was my mom.

I have been sitting here working on my running schedule for two days.  I am going to be ready for a marathon in October.  Damnit.  It’s just a matter of making the schedule and then doing it.  Once the schedule in place it’s just fill-in-the-blank.  This was part of teaching that I loved.  I love knowing what I am going to do on so many days in the next year.  I love that I don’t have to wake up and decide.  I’m going to make up another hidden calendar for housework.  I’m going to start tracking it and schedule it more.  If I have a schedule and I’m just keeping my schedule I don’t feel resentful.  If I have to look around the house and think, “Well what’s a mess now?” I feel pissy.  I feel angry.  I feel god damn sick of cleaning up after these fucking people.  When I’m just keeping my schedule and doing the job-of-being-me I don’t mind.  It’s a mind-trick.  It mostly works.  Until I slack on my schedule and then I resent the schedule and then I stop following it and instead I am resentful of the housework.  Cheers.

Life is what happens when you are killing time on your way to dying.  Being suicidal means not wanting to kill the time anymore because it is so unpleasant.  If you have something to do instead of killing time you are building something you feel proud of.  I really did pay attention Mr. Frankl.  Thank you for giving the world your insights.  It’s not just about building something like a building.  What are you living for?  What is your purpose?  “The meaning of life is to find your gift.  The purpose of life is to give it away.”  That’s from a picture on facebook.  I don’t know who actually made it and it’s been reposted so many times I’m going to admit that I’m a lazy fuck and I don’t know who started it.

There is such a high burden in conversation these days.  Every single fucking thing you reference must have a citation.  I don’t think that we would have ended up with T.S. Eliot this way.  Maybe that’s a good thing.  Maybe I’ll start a revolution.  When I’m not trying to prove a specific point and instead I’m babbling I’m allowed to just say what is in my head without worrying about who said it first.  Maybe I’ll just start adding little things at the bottom of all posts: I plagiarize at will but since I make no money or fame off it I don’t care.  I won’t bother.  But I should.

What is my life like?  Noah makes me breakfast most days.  It feels really sweet.  My kids climb on me and love me and scream at me (volume control is a few years away) and run around in circles around me.  My life is quiet.  My life is slow.  I feel like I alternate between getting very little done in the greater-good-sense and periods of intense productivity where I remodel the house or do a bunch of yard work.

Now I have scheduled running into forever.  It’s time to start thinking about how I will balance my energy load.  I am going to build a playhouse for She-Ra (we have capitulated to her requests) and Calli this month.  It will be cute and little and very rough and rustic.  Simple plans mean I can follow through.  Excellent.  It’s time to break ground outside and start prepping for this year.  I need to talk to Sarah.  She is going to be doing starts in the house.  I have no idea how much work I’m signing on for.  But given that we can’t spend any money, why the heck not?  We can’t go elsewhere and do stuff this year.

This is going to be a save money year.  Even stuff like gas really is significant when we go anywhere.  So it’s time to stay closer to home for a while.  We’ve been gallivanting a fair bit.  I’m thinking about my financial goals for the year.  I should say “our” and pretend this decision involves Noah and/or Sarah but I suppose that just means that this is my opinion and our actual household decision may or may not look like this.

Right now I have the budget set such that we can save $1470/month.  It’s not a very friendly budget but it does have perks and fun money in it.  It’s not oppressive by any measure.  I would like for us to get to $2,000/month in saving.  But that’s where it starts feeling oppressive.

And it feels like every single day just involves more things we “should” buy.  Why do I want to save this much money every month?  Because it is stupid not to if we can.  Because we didn’t fund the college savings last year and that’s really not ok.  Because I didn’t pay off DVC with the annuity fund and it needs to go away.  Because we own a house and eventually we will have to do major repair work again and we have almost no buffer.

Really, if I save $24,000 next year this year it will be not even close to as much as I should have saved/paid off last year.  I’m behind in my long-term goal reaching.  Damnit.  And it’s because we had a really fabulous trip to Scotland, I gave away a lot of money, etc.  It was a really expensive year.  If I want to do the things I say I want to do long-term I need to stop bullshitting around and start doing them.  The first step is to stop spending so much money.  That means that we don’t get to have everything we want.  Far from.  It means doing without things that might be convenient or nice because we don’t need them.  I will say as diplomatically as I can that Sarah and Noah tend towards “Let’s throw money at this problem” in ways that give me hives.  I love them both.  We can’t keep spending money and that means choosing to simply not think about the wide variety of under-$5-things that “could” make our life better.  What makes our life better is not spending money.  Really.

We want to have $100,000 per kid for college.  We need to be saving a lot faster if we want to get there.  We have fifteen years until we need to have most of that ready.

We want to travel the world for a year in less than ten years.  We have to get ready.

We want to pay off a $19,000 loan this year so that we don’t have to pay more interest on it.

We want to remodel this house some day, maybe.  We have to do prodigious maintenance whether we like it or not.  That’s really expensive, every year.

We really need to save money.

But I was writing about my life, not future goals.

Right now my life is about going in and playing with the kids.  Bye.

Part of the road to Noah

Leave a reply

This fine morning a friend asked me about a link on Facebook about Mansplaining.  It lead to an interesting conversation about whether men or women (sexist language abounds.  I’m going to do an aside to say that there is a really odd mixture of statistics on whether rape is a female problem or a problem that is closer to equal than anyone can handle admitting.  I am defaulting to standard sexist language because that is my experience base.  I do not mean to say that my experiences are universal–they are not.  Carry on.) bear responsibility for rape.

I’m going to call myself out for being an asshole, because I was, but I was a persuasive asshole.  I said, more or less, “Oh reeeeeeeeeeeeeeally?  How much responsibility do I bear for being raped?”  I then proceeded to go through a list of the times I have been arguably raped as an adult when I should be responsible for my ability to pick “safe” people.  I decided it was time to tell the story of Dan Morgan.  I haven’t before.  Not really.

On December 18th, 2005 I posted this in my livejournal:
I am about to climb out of my head with wanting sex. But I still don’t want casual sex. I feel kind of lame. It has been just over three weeks and I am already going batty? Damn the time is going to pass slow… This is longer than I have gone without sex in… oh god… uhhhhh… two years. For the record: I have really enjoyed how much sex I have had in the last two years. *sigh* Thank you to all the lovely people who have made the last two years so much fun. 🙂 I was asked on Friday if going back to casual sex would be better than waiting for more meaningful sex. I told the person that I am coming out of a relationship where I have had the best sex of my life and going back to more mediocre sex would be a serious let down and I am not quite ready to do that yet. I think a lot/most of what made that sex so awesome was I was more present for it than I usually am. I asked Puppy for what I wanted in ways that I have never been comfortable asking before. Other than the actual technical amount of time spent having sex I got exactly what I wanted pretty much when I wanted. There was also a variety that blew my mind. I kind of feel like I rediscovered vanilla sex. And it can be GOOD. 

I miss every part of sex. I miss having his body over mine. I miss the scary intensity of having him slide into my ass. I miss feeling a cock in my throat. I miss feeling his tongue on my clit. I really miss having a cock in my pussy. The discerning reader will notice the change in possessive pronouns in the previous statements. There are some sex acts that were very specific to him that I miss him for. There are some that I am just missing in general right now. He is the only sex partner I have ever received regular anal or oral from. 

I didn’t mention this part to the person who asked, but I actually don’t really want to go back to casual sex because I don’t want to go back to the fanaticism I have when I am being a slut. I don’t particularly like getting STD tested every three months. I don’t particularly like condoms. I really really really like unprotected sex–which is a scary and dangerous thing. I can’t have it casually because I am not willing to risk my life. I am still on the pill. The first time he tried to break up with me I asked him if I could maintain booty call rights. I think I have it in the back of my mind that waiting a couple of months until I am less emotionally attached is a good thing, but eventually having him as a booty call would be a good thing. Although this is just mental masturbation. I really think that in order to not hurt myself emotionally it would have to be 4-6 months before I would be able to have sex with him and not cry through the entire event. And yeah. I am well aware that I technically can wait that long to have sex but I really don’t have to and I won’t go back to unprotected sex with him if I sleep with someone else. Ethics are annoying.

Right now, all I know is that I have a stronger desire right now for being beaten, for being held down and fucked unmercilessly than I have had in a very long time. I want to be slapped and taunted with how very horny I am right now. I want to have someone revel in my lustiness and appreciate the fact that I can wear someone out right now. I want to have someone fuck me until I beg them to stop because I am so sore. I want to be restrained and hurt and threatened. I want… sex.

The person I had been talking to on Friday was Dan Morgan.  I don’t know how we started talking.  I’m sure we met through Dickens Fair.  No!  Tribe?  Was it Tribe?  I don’t remember for sure.  That sounds right, though.  We were having these really awesome long conversations over IM about fun kinky sex stuff we were interested in doing.  I was adamant about casual sex meaning condoms.  He didn’t like that bit.  He told me quite a bit about how condoms were annoying.  My response: tough.  No cover, no entry.

Our first date was on Christmas Day in Disneyland.  I uhhh kind of bought his ticket in.  He was really broke and said he couldn’t afford the trip if he had to pay for theme park tickets, though he had friends he could go crash with who would go with him to the park if I got him in.  I didn’t have a problem with this.

We had a really fun date.  Involving upsetting his friends when Dan fingered me in the Tiki Room.  We were shit-faced drunk from the bar in downtown Disney.  Disneyland as an adult is very different. Other people go and treat it very differently than I do.  Anyway.

He went off with his friends and I went off with mine.  On December 27th I posted:
Disneyland is still cool.
First dates… are interesting.
Still not up for sex even though I am crawling the walls.
I went to the gym and I am proud of myself.
I haven’t made one itty bitty movement towards cleaning my apartment.
I have food now.
Tomorrow I have three netflix movies to send back.
My cat is hella clingy.
My family sucks even more than usual.
I am really drunk.
I told Puppy that he is an elitist piece of shit tonight.
I am tired of planes.
I am really tired and uninterested in sleeping for some strange reason… I think I am going to lose that battle in the next 10 minutes though.
I missed country music.
Zzzzzzzzz
sleep. 
I love my friends.

And then on December 29th I posted:
Tiki Bar TV

London Fogcutter, episode 8. That is the reason for my hangover.

I didn’t bother to mention that the real reason for my hangover was because Dan came over.  We had a pleasant afternoon together.  We dealt with a motorcycle gear acquisition for him.  There was a good store near me.  We tried to get to know one another.  By evening he said we should start watching the show.  He started making drinks.  He made more and more.  Dan is a really serious alcoholic.  I don’t drink much and never have.  Alcohol makes my stomach hurt.  He kept topping up my glass.  “Oh come on.  You don’t want to get behind now, do you?”  He was very antagonistic towards me trying to get me to drink more.

I wanted him to like me.  I will freely say that.  I thought he was shiny.  I’m sure there was an element of star-fucking in it.  He seemed well-liked.  Maybe if I stood next to him I would feel like not-poison for a while.

I woke up at about 3am in my bed confused.  I couldn’t remember anything past Tiki Bar TV.  And I don’t know that I remember more than two episodes of it.  I reached down between my legs and felt a lot of wet.  I rolled out of bed (because I had no other way of getting to the floor) and crawled into the bathroom.  There I proceeded to vomit until I thought I would die.  It was awesome.  This was when I was living in San Jose by myself for the only time in my life.

Puppy dumped me on Thanksgiving day.  Noah asked me to marry him in March.  Dan was right in the middle.  Of-fucking-course I said yes to Noah.

Anyway.  When I stopped puking I looked for my phone.  I sent Dan a text message asking where he was, when he left, and uhm, did we have sex?  He said he was at home.  He had left at 2.  Yes, we had sex.  I sent back another message saying: …unprotected sex?  He said, “Well you are on the pill so it doesn’t matter, right?”

I said basically nothing about this event to anyone who knew me.  It wasn’t exactly rape, right?  Only legally it was.  Regardless of whether I intended to have sex or not, once I was passed out drunk it wasn’t ok.  I had text evidence that I wasn’t interested in unprotected sex.  And I bloody well thought about the fact that I could go in for a rape kit and it would be bloody obvious that we had unprotected sex.

I was afraid of people saying that I was having second thoughts.  I was afraid of people saying that I was stupid or that I deserved it.  I believe that unprotected sex is a disease vector.  At that point in my life I was still really focused on the fact that I wanted to have children.  I didn’t risk any more disease than I had to.  I already have herpes and I’ve already had an hpv outbreak.  That damage was done long before.  I did the best I could with the information that I had.

Do you know why I was so afraid of going to the police?  Well.  That’s another story.  I can’t give you a name because I honestly don’t remember it.  I don’t really want to.  I wouldn’t remember Dan’s if he wasn’t a trusted member of my extended community I thought was safe.

The summer I was 18 I was drunk with the sexual power of being a woman.  Finally, for the first time in my life what I was doing and mine to decide about.  I finally had the legal right to consent.  It did actually matter to me.  It has always bothered me that my early partners could have gone to jail for what we did.  It feels like an unfair balance of responsibility.  Anyway.

So when I was 18 I was on match.com.  Don’t judge.  I was hanging out in the chat rooms a lot.  I met up with several people.  The first was a guy who was in the Coast Guard.  He lived in Alameda.  Anna was housesitting for a family way the heck up Summit Road.  The other side, not the same side as Redwood Estates.  Way up in the fancy-pants part of the mountains.  The house was beautiful.  I can’t remember if there were three or four stories.  Elaborate wine cellar (like a huge vault that was about 1/3 the size of the bottom floor of the house), sauna, steam room, exercise room, pool, hot tub… everything.  The family was having a lot of work done on the house.  They gave Anna permission to have me stay up there with her.

I know they regretted that.  It was all my fault.  Anna had worked for them successfully for years at that point.  I ruined a very profitable relationship for her and I still feel bad about that.  That is part of what I mean when I say I am poison.  Anna bore a lot of the brunt of the backlash for this.  But I’m getting ahead of myself again.

We invited a couple of my theater friends and this random guy from match.com up to the house for a party.  It wasn’t that wild because my theater friends were young and sweet and inexperienced.  I think back on them with this really nostalgic color.  They were really awesome and I didn’t know how to stay one of them.

Of course there was drinking.  Unless I snuck off behind Anna’s back she said I had three shots of tequila and then I begged off because my stomach hurt.  Everyone else kept drinking.  I don’t remember much after the second shot.  I woke up in the morning feeling fierce and disgusting.  I couldn’t remember any sex and I was kind of sad.  I was confused though because I couldn’t remember much of anything, really.  But I had to hurry up and get moving.  I was working at Pride in San Francisco.  I was working a booth for the Same Sex Marriage organization.  It was awesome.  I met people and did things I’m really glad I did.  In between doing all of them I had to run to Port-A-Potties to vomit.  I did that all day long.  When I went back up to the house in the mountains I took another shower and curled up on the bed.  I happened to lean over and look in the trash can.  There were three used condoms.

Funny.  I didn’t remember having sex.  I asked Anna what happened.  She told me about the party and said that eventually I stumbled back up to the room with the help of this guy.  I asked her how I looked and she said, “You looked really out of it.”  I nodded.  I told her that I think that what happened technically qualifies as rape.  I called the Sheriff.  She was dubious.  She was right.

The particular officer who showed up is one I have met before.  When I was 11 Al Smith, my next door neighbor at the time, asked me if I would have sex with him.  Our other neighbor overheard the whole exchange and reported it.  That’s why the officer came to my house when I was 11.  When I was 11 he told my family I was crazy and that I needed help.  He wouldn’t prosecute Al.

When I was 18 he told me, “What did you expect when you bring a boy up to a house to drink?”  He took the (outrageously expensive) sheets as “evidence” and then told me he was not going to fuck up the life of some nice Coast Guard boy for a girl like me who gets cold feet after the fact.

The fall out was really bad.  The family had to be told why we disappeared their sheets.  We would have been better off lying.  Given the response of the sheriff it looked really bad and hysterical.  It was even worse because I had gone skinny dipping in the pool and flirted with the guy painting the house. I was obviously horrible.  The family was really angry with Anna for bringing someone like me into their house.  They told her if she wanted to know people like me they didn’t want to know her.

Years later I was behind their car on the freeway.  The license plate has their last name on it.  I felt such a sickening wave of shame.

Why didn’t I call the police after Dan fucked me without a condom?  Uhm…. good pattern recognition skills?  Every time someone tells me that women bear some of the responsibility for being raped I want to scream.  I HAVEN’T EVEN BEEN ALLOWED TO GIVE CONSENT WHEN I WANTED TO SO SHUT THE FUCK UP.  Rape is an abuse of power.  Rape is putting a body part into someone else when they have not consented.  That is not something that is about mutual responsibility.

That asshole when I was 18 raped me.  I could not consent by the time he had sex with me, but at least he used condoms.  When I was 24 I was raped because having unprotected sex with me after I had it in writing many times that I don’t do that is illegal.  And I was too chicken shit to say anything because I am well aware that no one in power gives a shit what happens to white trash whores like me.

And then Noah showed up.  I would have been manifestly stupid and crazy to continue the life path I was on without him.

Shorter and shorter.

Leave a reply

I’ve been pulling at my hair for an hour in that way that means I will cut it again today.  I have Hair on repeat.  Really if you think about it, Lady Gaga singing about hair is somewhat ironic.  She wears wigs.  As she says over and over, “I am my hair” she is saying that she is something that is external.  She has so much control over who she is that she decides differently on a daily basis.  Does that mean that people who have abrupt changes in their appearance are changing who they are?

This is all too angsty; I know.  I love semi-colons.  Damn you, commas.  Jenny likes to remind me that the “rules of writing” were just randomly invented by some twat one day.  Ok, that’s not exactly what she says.  But it is what I hear.  It makes me smile every single time.  Because if some twat just made it up one day I don’t need to feel bound to it.  I can do whatever I want.  It’s a fun kind of rebellion–normally invisible.

Along with my hair getting shorter I notice how my field of vision is shortening.  I’m not responding to emails or text messages unless I have seen the person recently.  Recently as in seeing them within the last month.  People I haven’t seen in many months… I don’t know.  I just never seem to remember when I am at the computer.  Or it is something like right now where I am actively avoiding.  I don’t know why I am actively avoiding.  I do.  I don’t want to say why I am actively avoiding.

I’m not at ease in my skin right now.  I feel not-ok in a way that I can’t ignore.  I feel like a thousand monkeys are jumping on my chest.  It hurts just behind my breastbone.  Right now I don’t feel like I can look people in the eye.  I feel dirty.  Small.  Less than.  It’s not anyone else’s fault.  At this point in time I don’t think there are very many people who know me even casually who think that of me.  Not really.  Sure, there are people who dislike me.

Outside of my family I don’t actually believe that people wish me ill.  And they all feel very guilty for wishing me ill.

I am trying to see my shaman on Thursday.  Since our babysitter quit I’m not 100% sure that is going to happen.  And I may have to reschedule with him because of a meeting in the city anyway.  It feels kind of like the universe doesn’t want me to see him.  I want to see him.

I’ve got my bangs too high that I don’t stand a chance.  I think I need to ask my shaman to shave my head.  There.  That is the compulsive.  Why don’t I ask Noah?  Why do I want to keep this away from him?  Why is my shaman more appropriate?

Well didn’t I just fucking load that question.  What does ownership mean?  I don’t know.  I really don’t.  I am very much like a wild animal.  I run off and do things by myself sometimes.  I can’t accept having everything in my life have to come from Noah.  Right now there is so very little in my life that isn’t for him.  That plays a part in why I was dating too, I think.

Noah doesn’t have the same wounds in identity because of his appearance.  I don’t see the deep fractures in his soul from feeling bad about how he looks.  My shaman has spent a fair bit of time being upset with his physical body.  Even my use of male pronouns is part of that fight.  I feel like it is a failure in me that I cannot default to gender neutral pronouns.  They all feel wrong, false, not grammatical.  Not allowed.

Does that mean that people who are not easily labeled by one of those correct pronouns do not exist?  It certainly feels that way.  I suppose that since the dominant name and label is generally male it is close enough.  That is awkward to say and write about.  I feel like I am jumping on the crazy train, but who am I kidding?  I was already here.

I want to see my shaman.  I want to talk to him about my shifting sense of self.  I want to talk to him about feeling so very bad about existing.  I don’t have a church.  I don’t have a congregation.  But I do have a shaman.  I’m not sure how these things happen.  How does a life get built, anyway?

The part of me that is fighting with my compulsion admits that I want to use sex to get close to my shaman.  I want to feel connected with him.  Given our history I know it wouldn’t work in the way I wanted it to, anyway.  We have an odd time connecting that way because we go at very different speeds.  We are not a match or it never would have fallen off.  But I feel like I should do it anyway.  I love him so much.  I feel like I have to earn the honor of his regard.  I have to prove to him that I do want him.  I do love him.  There is nothing else I have to give that has any value or worth at all.  Absolutely never is the pleasure of my company a possible exchange.  I know there is no pleasure in my company.  I am too mean.  Too sharp.  Too vicious and unpleasant.

I take comfort in getting to explain to him that I am not allowed to have sex with anyone else anymore.  It’s not my fault.  I’m sorry I am changing the deal.  I’m sorry.  I’m so sorry that I will never meet that need again.  Please, please don’t reject me now.  He won’t.  But I feel absolutely terrified anyway.  Hell, he doesn’t remember the last time we had sex.  I was not pleased when I figured that out.  Butthead.  Apparently he doesn’t value me based on the things I think he does.  He doesn’t even remember the parts that I think are the most important thing I have to give.

What the fuck is it that he is getting then?  I need to ask.  I need to go to him and talk to him about starting to dye my hair when I first started pulling away from my mom.  The colors have gotten increasingly bolder and more odd and aggressive as I have felt angrier and angrier with my mother.  The bleach is kind of a bitch though.  I had a temper tantrum while trying to comb my hair one day because I couldn’t get the knot out.  I cut it out.  I did a bad job.  It was fun for several days to try to even it out and giggle because with the curls and the weird dye job (I think five colors in splotches) it really doesn’t matter much if it is “even”.

But I’m tired of going out in public and hearing the comments.  I smile at the children who ask.  I frown at the boys who snicker “clown”.  It’s like fucking junior high all over again.  I’m done.  I’m not hunting. I’m done.  I feel like that part of me is gone.  I miss my hair.  I miss being able to turn my head and get a curtain to hide behind.  It was part of how I dealt with my vast discomfort in public.  I lost my veil.  I feel exposed in a way that feels deeply uncomfortable.  I have nothing to hide behind except my eyelids.  They do not feel like adequate cover.

I feel like me shaving my head will happen like all the cutting.  In the bathroom by myself.  I know my shaman doesn’t keep up with my blog.  He frankly tells me he doesn’t have the time to read my ever-increasing flood.  That’s ok.  It means I can talk about him all I want.

I feel like part of what is going on with the less-than is I feel so very weird about my place in the social hierarchy lately.  I don’t feel like I am behaving.  I fit nowhere.  It was a true thing I said when I told my therapist that the only way I will ever fit into a group is if I leave Noah and am a poor single mother.  They just don’t make groups for me any more.

What does that mean?  I guess that means this is the American Dream then.  Solitude.  More of it.  I don’t understand why.  I’m not sure where I got broke and I don’t know how to fix it.  I don’t fit.  I feel wrong. I feel like everything in me is wrong.  I still feel bewildered by my lack of anger.  I don’t have that energy right now.  Anger is normally a big spur to me getting off my fucking ass and getting shit done.  It’s one of the things I use to fuel my productivity and I don’t care if that’s healthy or not.  Everyone dies, right?  I could very carefully never ever use my body harshly.  I don’t think I would be very proud of my life.

What am I proud of?  I kind of want to go ask my shaman to bait it out of me.  He drives me insane.  He says irritatingly true things.  One right after another.  It’s hard to not hate him sometimes.  I would ask him to take the last of this shame from me when he shaved my head.  But I don’t think I am going to ask.  Because this is one of those things I have to do alone.  He can’t take shame from me.  Not really.

Shame is something that I own all by myself.  I have to learn to wear it or I have to take it off.  I don’t know how to take it off right now.  I feel stuck.  I feel too little and small.  I haven’t done anything to really be proud of.  I have done things that other people do and I expect far more support for it.  I am small and selfish and petty.  I am weak.  Really?  Am I?  Maybe.  Yes?  Of course?

I recently saw this picture, one of the canonical “starving children in Africa” pictures.  I feel terrible describing it that way.  But these pictures are used as bludgeoning tools.  You can’t ignore the fact that seriously, right this minute a small child is starving to death in another part of the world.  While you wear big fur boots and lots of makeup and talk about how pathetic they are.  It’s kind of an American trope, this guilt.

If I ever feel bad for myself I am supposed to remind myself that I am at least not a starving child in Africa and go on about my life.  Well doesn’t that just support the status quo.  I don’t much like the status quo.

The thing about guilt and shame is they aren’t useful.  They are paralyzing.  They rarely spur people to much action beyond denial.

When the children hiss hostile words at me I hear my mother telling me that all the people in the world think I look stupid.  Everyone thinks I am ridiculous.  Why?  What have I done?  Why is it ridiculous to play with your appearance?  Why is it expected to be a set thing that doesn’t modify as time goes by?  Why can’t I change?  Why am I to be mocked?

But you know what?  I’m a fucking grown up.  My triggers are mine to manage.  I am not going to get all the children in the world to stop making fun of me.  They are little assholes.  They can’t help it.  So are their parents.

I have a lot of interesting feelings emerging as my hair gets shorter and shorter.  My mother liked my hair short.  She wanted me to look like a boy.  She commented openly on it.  I’m really intrigued by how harsh my face appears with short hair.  I’m not sure how I feel about that as a lifestyle choice going forward.  I am going to have an interesting time as it grows out.  I want my veil back.  It’s interesting knowing that if I want long hair going forward in my life I have to stop doing anything to it.  I’m stuck with baking soda and vinegar for the rest of my life.  I will have gorgeous hair again.

It’s weird learning what self-care means.  It’s weird thinking about learning to take care of my body.  It’s weird learning what it means to be gentle with myself.  It’s happening in unexpected ways.  I don’t feel bad about the cutting.  I hope I don’t do it again because the marks aren’t fading fast and I don’t want my daughters to learn it as an appropriate coping mechanism.  It means I need to figure out what to do.  I don’t know right now.  So far the answer seems to be, “Don’t hate yourself.”  I’m not sure what that actually means as something to teach my kids.  How do I do that?  For the love of shiny green apples, how can someone like me teach anything other than hating yourself?

I’m going to a homeschooling meet-up tomorrow with the kids.  We will be doing Sharpie tie-dye.  I won’t shave my head before then.  They deserve to know what they are getting into with our family.  We are weird.  Get used to it.

monogamy

Leave a reply

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.

"Go see a therapist"

Leave a reply

You go see a therapist when you are stuck in some way and you can’t change by yourself.  Otherwise you just change by yourself and save the money.  Therapy is expensive, yo.

Who do I want to be when I grow up?  What patterns am I actually stuck in and which patterns can I change if I think about them?  What is a happy life?  What do I want to do with my time and my life?  That really is the crux of it, isn’t it?  The way you spend your hours is the way you spend your years.  I think I am saying it wrong but someone had something like that as a sig line on MDC.  Where is my Zen place?  What is it that I should be doing for my spirit to be in alignment with my body?  (By the way I don’t use the word Zen in a way that is associated with any actual definition or official usage.  I am a co-opting piece of shit.)

I told Noah this morning that I don’t feel like I am having sex for me and I don’t like that feeling any more.  I am having sex so that I can continue to be this construct in my head.  I am not really getting off much these days.  That’s a big change.  Sorta?  It started with pregnancy.  It kind of came back and then it seems to be gone again.  I can get close and I have all these nifty hypnosis tricks in place so I can trigger muscle spasms in the appropriate way such that I suppose it feels like an orgasm, kinda.  It’s like eating soft serve.  It’s just not ice cream even if it looks like and is presented as the same thing.  Even with sprinkles.  It’s not ice cream.

You aren’t supposed to say that on the internet, right?  The way we are having sex isn’t working for me.  I don’t want to be this right now.  I’m not saying never again.  I am saying I need something other than what I have right now.  This is hard to write about because I am trying very hard to not represent what Noah wants.  I don’t think I really know or understand what Noah wants.  It’s not his fault, but I think we are operating with a lot of unspoken assumptions and I should only speak for me.

I’m sitting here thinking and thinking and thinking.  In these arguments I always get stuck with this huge load of rage and I scream that I don’t want to spend the rest of my life doing laundry.  Dude.  The rest of my life will involve laundry.  Shut the fuck up already.  Why does this become such a sticking point?  I could dissect it.  I could start having the other adults in the house do the laundry; they would if I required it.  Really and truly, they would.  But it would require reminding and fussing and then I would never be satisfied with the results.  They would fold the damn shirts wrong.

This isn’t about laundry.

I don’t have very many pictures of my mother.  But in several she’s doing laundry.  I remember the sighs.  The long tirades about how much she hated having to clean up after me.  I remember her bitterness at having to go out and earn money and come home to the messes I made  It’s honestly one reason I don’t want to have a job.  If I had a job I would resent the ever loving shit out of my children for having the audacity to live in the house and make a mess when I wasn’t there.  It offends my dignity.  Oh God help someone who breaks a dish when I’m not home.  I’m completely unreasonable.  But if I’m standing in the room and not the one who does it?  My reaction is, “Thank God it wasn’t me!”  And I’m not mad.  Mistakes happen.

I don’t forgive slights that are done when I’m out of sight.  I’m not sure what is up with that.  Hunh.  Ok, that’s actually a big one.  I’m going to have to think about that one for a long time.  I resent having to be a support network for a life and for happiness I won’t get to share.  It really bothers me.  It makes me feel angry that I spend ‘x’ hours of week doing extra work so that Noah gets to have ‘y’ hours of time completely alone.  Because the hours aren’t equal.  Not in my head.

There is a tally.  He doesn’t understand it or track it.  It is totally invisible to him if I do it right.  Sex is part of the tally.  Part of the things I “have to do”.  The tally that “should be” invisible to him.  Which means the cost should be invisible as well.  I’m having trouble writing a coherent sentence about this.  If I don’t explain the tally system he can’t change his behavior based on the different costs.

For the whole rest of my life Noah will have more effect on me than anyone.  Dealing with him is effort because he is a human being and that’s just life.  That’s ok.  That’s more than ok.  I want to put a lot of effort into him because I like him sooooooooooo much.  If he doesn’t understand where I am putting effort and why… it’s kind of silly, you know?  I don’t know that I am using my effort to good effect.  I don’t know where I am spinning my wheels and trying to do things to please dead people.

Who do I want to be when I grow up?  What would I be like if I had grown up believing that my body is mine and people should only do things to me that I want them to do?  I wonder if she is more or less fierce than I am?

Obedience.  What is it?  Obedience to what?  To blind ideals?  To stupid short-sighted goals?  To instant gratification with a high opportunity cost?  What cost can I bear?  Honestly–a high cost.  I really can.  But where should the cost be spent?  I don’t think that decision should be made in a vacuum.  Years ago Noah offered me an abusive relationship with off-switch.  What does it mean to be off?  What does it mean when it is turned on?  I’m not afraid of Noah, not really.  Noah told me flat out this morning that he doesn’t believe me when I say I won’t leave.  He’s a smartie, that one.  The part that I don’t think he understands is I wouldn’t be able to stay gone.  I can never actually walk away from him.  He is the father of my children.  Until his death he will be in my life.  That is complicated.  Noah doesn’t actually know what it means to talk about a broken home.  I do.  I want a home.

Even if it is soft serve, it’s home.  That sounds terrible.  Even if I am nothing exciting you will still stay.  Even if I am a poor imitation of what a wife should be.  Even if I am not anything like advertised.  I feel like I am ruining Noah’s life by being so conflicted about sex.  I don’t think Noah’s sexual performance has suddenly gone down hill.

Who do I want to be when I grow up?  I don’t think a therapist can just fix me.  I need to figure out who I want to be.  No one else can tell me that.  What would I be like if I could move through the world without the sure knowledge that if someone asked me for sex I am essentially required to say yes, or at least only say no to a very small number of people in specific categories.  Anyone in category A should be good enough.

People are not interchangeable.  They really aren’t.  And I don’t fucking owe anyone anything.  The Embargo is not my fault.  It really doesn’t matter what my father told me.  I don’t have a cunt so that I can get as many dicks as possible.

aftermath

3 Replies

I told Noah that I would be fairly ashamed to tell people how we are moving forward.  According to my personal religion that means I am committing a sin.  It’s mixed.  Mostly I would say we are getting along very well.  I’m not starting fights or insulting him or picking on him.  Noah is his usual polite and adoring self.  It’s like nothing happened except we have massively increased how much sex we are having and how degrading our sex is.

We have spent a lot of time talking about how compulsive I am about sex.  About how that works in my head.  We have spent a lot of time talking about how impulsive Noah is about sex.  So far we seem to be at the point where we are both acknowledging that we qualify as “sex addicts” by any reasonable definition but maybe if we stick with each other we won’t cause too big of problems?

Apparently the task of the week is to see how much sex we have to have before Noah can’t handle any more.  So far we have managed three times a day every day.  Then I fall asleep.  I feel mixed about this.  He knows I feel mixed about this.  Hell, I’m writing about feeling mixed about this–everyone will know.    It’s hard talking about the actual needs that casual sex meets for me.  I can meet some pretty fucked up needs without telling anyone what I am doing.  I never have to tell my partners what my internal dialogue is.  I don’t have a very high opinion of myself and my voracious need for sex.

I don’t have a very high opinion of the fact that my preference is for most of the sex I have to be quasi-consensual.  Noah is well aware that a large percentage, possibly “most”, of our sex involves me not being in the mood at all.  It doesn’t really matter if I am interested in sex.  I am interested in being a good whore.  That means I will do what I am supposed to do.  I feel manifestly uncomfortable admitting that.  A large percentage of the sex I have I only have because I feel like I am required to do so.  That is what someone like me is good for.  That is what I am supposed to do.  And I’m really good at it.  And I fucking live for the post-sex adulation.  People I fuck tend to be willing to tell me at great length how good I am at sex.  I try very hard to make sure I work far harder at sex than most women.  I really really want the approval I get after sex.

I feel like something is broken in me.  That I chase this so hard.  Noah and I have been talking a lot lately.  I don’t think I am going to sleep with other people any more.  Regardless of what Noah ends up doing for the rest of his life, I need to stop buying affection with sex.  I need to stop begging my friends to like me by proving that I am better at sex than anyone they’ve ever slept with.  It’s not really a strategy that is working for me.

I like to pick other sex addicts and go have multiple hours of sex with them.  Most of the time they are so shocked by finding a woman who is also as motivated by sex that they are willing to tell me pretty much anything I want.  It’s broken.  I have a partner at home who is willing to do the Jekyll/Hyde thing with me.  He will degrade me and talk about me being a whore during sex.  He will tell me that if I am so motivated by cock I am required to show up at 5am every day and wake him up with my mouth.  And he’s pretty nice to me the rest of the time.

I feel worried by the duality of our relationship.  Most of the time in most ways he really is an amazing partner.  He is a good, stable provider.  He is kind.  He is great with our children.  I have been able to push him towards mutually agreed upon improvements in behavior over the years.  He’s very willing to accommodate me in just about every part of life.  He bends over backwards for me in nearly every way.  He will even call me names and hurt me tremendously during sex if I tell him I want him to.

There is this mythos in my head that slaves and masochists should experience no internal conflict over what they do.  I have massive internal conflict.  I am still upset that Noah lied to me.  And my response is to tell him more and more complex stories that I am terribly ashamed of.  Things that hurt me very much.  And I ask him to use them against me.  I want him to agree that I am just a dirty whore.  There isn’t much else that someone like me is good for.  But I want him to gift wrap it in a package where I don’t have to be at risk going forward.

For me to keep having the kind of casual sex that I like is for me to risk my life.  It really won’t be much longer before I go back for hunting for rough, dangerous sex.  Sure I’m being all loud and snotty this round of hunting because I want vanilla sex right now.  That would fade.  I would go back to wanting people to do dangerous things to me.  I’ve already had a broken bone in the pursuit of good sex, what else will happen?

It is a lot safer to stick with Noah.  He will be able to hurt me as much or more than anyone else.  He doesn’t flinch from doing so.  Noah has not yet inflicted as much pain on me as a small handful of other people, but he has every intention of doing so.  I get the impression that some day he will be the one I have done my most intense play with.  That kind of terrifies me.  Because he has a high bar to reach.  I have already done things that were a really bad idea.  I’m sure I will do more.

If I do this instead of cutting or sleeping around or drugs or whatever other self-harming behavior I can dream up… is that better?  I don’t know.  I don’t know how this life thing is supposed to work.  I hear I am just supposed to magically decide that I shouldn’t be harmed any more, not by anyone.  Not by me, and not by random guys, and not by my husband.  But I need this.  I am so used to feeling shit on.  I require it so much.

Noah has been nice and patient for a long time.  We haven’t done intense or painful or degrading sex in a long time.  He’s been more respectful than that.  So I got bored and went out and slept with other people.  And the thing is, it’s not enough that he does these things to me.  I need people to know that these things are part of my life.  I need for people to know that I am this person.  I can’t have this done in secret.  I can’t keep secrets.

It would be a sin if I did these things and kept them private and secret.  I believe that.  That is something that I have to hold on to in life.  Something is only a sin if I am ashamed to talk about it.  If I am talking about this now, does that mean I am released from the power of it being a sin?  I don’t know.  I worry about needing what I need.  It’s mixed.

I can point in a straight line from events in my early childhood to what I do now.  Come March, other people will be able to do so as well.  Noah already can.  And he stomps all over me with that knowledge.  Only in ways I find hot, of course.  Is that the difference?  Is that the line between what we do and some amorphous “abuse”?  If I tell Noah to stop doing something on a given day he does.  Except by prior arrangement.  Except that I know that I just don’t bother to say no when I’m not in the mood.  I figure out how to let it happen.  I figure out how to permit him the access he wants whether I want it or not.  I don’t generally bother to communicate whether I am in the mood or not.  If he tells me to do something, I do it.

It’s interesting when people talk to me about how self-assured I am.  How self-possessed.  How willing to stand up for myself.  Ha.  Only sometimes.  Only in some ways.  If a sexual partner is telling me to do things I frankly don’t want to do I have limited ability to communicate my wants.  It depends on how I am doing emotionally and it depends on how much I am invested in the partner.  I have casual sex because I can have boundaries with strangers.  I have repeat sex with long-term friends because I have beaten them down in non-sexual settings and they don’t push real hard out of fear of a backlash that will never come.  I don’t have boundaries with my long-term partners.  I barely communicate anything about my limits beyond telling them what buttons will get them the biggest reaction today.  “Today is ____ anniversary so why don’t you hurt me by doing _________.”

It’s not a sin if I talk about it.  I don’t know what it is, but it’s not a sin.  I have decided this for my own personal pantheon of beliefs.

These needs all predate Noah.  They are not because of him.  Most of them are not really about him at all.  These are things that were broken in me as a child.  But he frankly enjoys many of the ways I am broken.  He feels no shame whatsoever in enjoying what I became as the direct result of years of sexual assault.  Well, maybe he feels a little shame.  But not much.  Not enough to prevent him from trying to behave in ways that will keep me from getting bored in the future.  Not enough to lessen his enjoyment of what this deep feeling of shame causes me to do during sex.  His favorite part lately seems to be that I’m really ok with him fucking my throat until he causes me to vomit.  I have a fairly reactive gag reflex.  I consider vomiting to be just part of serious blow jobs.  I don’t think that is normal.  It never feels like it is really a good time to say, “Could you back off on the deep throating?”  I don’t get to set terms like that.  I get to accept.

In about ten minutes I have to get up and close the computer.  I will walk across the house and I will do what I was told to do.  Do I want to?  Enh.  Not really.  My throat and cunt are sore.  I could use about a week off from sex to recover at this point.  But I draw comfort from the fact that I have confessed so I go forth without sin.  I will smile.  I will encourage him.  I will beg him for more, in fact.  It doesn’t really matter that I’m sore.  That’s beside the point.  I don’t think I should go have sex with other people any more.  I don’t think that is a good decision for me.  He says he is going to be monogamous as well.  No, let me be clear.  He will be as monogamous as I am.

I fell compelled by my shame.  I told him he would be allowed to sleep with whomever he wanted, forever.  I promised him that.  At no point did I tell him I would like it or feel happy about it.  I feel like I did a bait and switch.  I feel like I owe him for all the sex he will never get to have because he was stupid enough to marry someone as insecure and selfish and possessive as me.  I feel guilty that I seem to have tricked him into monogamy.  In turn I fell compelled to say, “Ok fine, I guess I can’t be monogamous either–go have fun.”

I sincerely believe I should stop having sex with other people.  I should not act on feeling compelled to earn love and affection with sex outside my marriage.  It’s bad enough that I do it with Noah.  I don’t actually think I should go out and find a harem of men who will cheerfully call me a whore during sex.  I don’t need that.  I do enough of that all by myself.

I feel so broken.  I seem to have absolutely internalized that anyone who fucks this many people is kind of disgusting.  And all I want to do is increase the number so I can increase just how many people will think I am disgusting.

But Noah doesn’t care.  He doesn’t care at all what I’ve done or what I might do in the future.  He wants me.  He takes great pride in me.  He loves me and adores me.  He bends over backwards from me in pretty much every part of life.  Except when he’s being impulsive.  Oops.  His friend told him, “The problem with your situation is it’s hard to know when you are cheating.”  Maybe if the rules are clearer then it will be easier to figure out what to do?

I feel like I have taken something away from him.  He was poly when I met him.  How dare I take that away.  I seem to be the epitome of what Dan Savage and Mistress Matisse warn about.  That evil double crosser who promises poly and can’t hack it.  I’m sorry I am so broken.  I really am.  I wish that I could encourage Noah to do anything he wants with anyone he wants.  Hell, I do encourage him.  But it hurts me when he does it.  I’m sorry that is true.  I really am.

I am my hair

Leave a reply

Last night Noah finally talked about his areas of insecurity.  It makes me feel like perhaps I shouldn’t have put the trampoline in the exact location I did.  There is a really lot of “But I thought you wanted…” in my marriage.  That’s not good.

No matter how much I am hurting, I want Noah.  Noah sees me in a way no one else does.  He wants me more than anyone else ever has, and I don’t mean just for sex.  Noah lies to me because he wants to be perfect for me and he’s afraid he’s not.  He’s afraid to tell me he isn’t.  Oversimplifying, but true.  I think that’s never ok.  You have to tell me the truth, for better or worse.

No one promised me more better than worse.  Mostly it has been more better than worse.

I told my therapist yesterday that I don’t fit in groups.  She tried to argue with me until I leaned forward and intently told her, “If I left Noah tomorrow and all of a sudden I was single and poor I would find dozens of groups that would take me with open arms.  As a married, rich, seemingly heterosexual, who looks the way I do and acts the way I do with the trauma history I have… No.  I don’t fit into groups.  She closed her mouth and nodded.  She told me she can see my point.  My therapist also took a new job.  She will only have hours on Thursday or Friday nights.  Thursday’s Sarah is going to be taking a class and it’s Noah’s night off.  Not to mention that I don’t think I want to fight rush hour traffic to Oakland.  And having therapy on Friday night would wreck the whole fucking weekend.  I cry enough.  I guess this means I am going to be between-therapists.  Shit.  Perfect timing.

It feels like petulant whining for me to be upset.  I have such a comfortable, easy life right now I shouldn’t whine so much about anything that is going wrong.  How can it be that bad?  I feel really weird about the fact that I still have loud, messy poor people problems.  The way I throw temper tantrums feels low class to me.  I have only witnessed the “public” faces of homes with more money.  I can’t act like them.  I can’t produce children who act like them.  I can’t even have a middle class attitude about infidelity.  I want to go jump off a bridge.  I’m so melodramatic.  It’s all so very intense.  I can’t have “normal” “acceptable” feelings.  I don’t feel angry and upset.  I feel like (and do) cut up large swaths of my body.

What exactly are people supposed to do with anger?  I’ve never been able to figure this out.  You’re allowed to feel anger you just aren’t allowed to show it.  How the fuck does that work?  I don’t think other people get as angry as me.

Side note: the dry cleaners who got their window broken at the General Strike?  $620.  I feel thrilled that I did that.  The family who owns the business almost cried.  The building management was going to make them pay it.  Do you know why I did it?  Because I really want to break windows and it is only the thinnest veneer of control I have over that urge.  I can’t feel angry with whoever broke the windows.  I understand.

I just honestly think I am smarter and more willing to think about long-term consequences than him.  (I know it was a him because J.P. Massar watched the kid do it.)  I understand ignorance.  I think that people should be working a lot harder to learn about different points of view.  I know it is hard.  I struggle with feeling safe being myself around other points of view.  I start to feel like I meld in and disappear.  Until I do something Wrong and I feel ostracized.

I don’t go dance because there are too many people who won’t look me in the eye.  I feel unwelcome.  I’m not mad about it.  I’m resigned.  This has been my whole life.  I understand.  I’m not someone that people want to look in the eye.  It’s ok.

It’s approaching the end of funny colored hair time.  The bleach is destroying it.  Yesterday I cut off several inches in the front at a funny angle with wisps every which way because I couldn’t comb the knot out.  I should probably straighten my hair cut a bit today.  In front of a mirror this time.  It’s time to stop bleaching and let it grow.  I’m also at the perfect point in my cycle to kind of want to shave my head so I will have a weird reason to hide at home again for a long time.  That’s the kind of thing I want to do and I don’t want to deal with the social consequences of doing.  Boy howdy do you get comments when you shave your head as a girl.  I’m trying to decide how short I am willing to go this time.  I have a lumpy head.  I went down to nothing when I was seventeen.  Not long after my father killed himself.  So
thirteen years ago I shaved my head and like a year ago my hair was nearly to my waist.  If I ever want long hair again it will be a long, slow slog.  Like, when I’m fifty.  We’ll see.

My heart hurts.

Bonding

Leave a reply

I think a lot about why I want to overshare my emotional experience while hunting.  I think that part of it is, I don’t know how these things go for other people.  Does everyone waffle like me?  Noah says he doesn’t.  Does anyone?  I don’t know.

I feel like my whole life has been a weird balancing act.  I have to do enough hard things to balance out the easy things.  I’m not really even sure what that means.  Why do I feel utterly compelled to promise elaborate sex acts to strangers?  I can’t do it with people I know very well because then I feel like I have to live up to that promise all the time.

Last night I did well.  I closed.  Three times.  Excellent.  It helps that this was one of the rare times when I have taunted this person in real life previously.  He was ready for some follow through.  I feel giddy that I managed.  It’s like checking a box on a treasure hunt.  w00t.  Inspired hot sex three times in one night.  And he didn’t finish quickly.  Excellent stamina.  I feel like women are judged this way, why shouldn’t men?

Why shouldn’t I talk about sex as if it is a perfectly respectable hobby?  Excepting religious reasons… no really, why should anyone care?  Granted not everyone wants to hear about it, but I don’t want to hear about golf either.  So?  Why are most hobbies morally neutral but sex is bad?  Why am I bad because I like to feel this way?

It’s not like I have devoted my entire life to it.  I’m doing a few other things as well.  Like writing about it.

Sarah is taking Shanna to Arizona tomorrow.  I will miss them.  It’s always hard for me when Shanna visits people without me.

I have a date Thursday night.  I need to go to bed early on Tuesday and Wednesday if I want to be in the mood.  If it was for tonight I would cancel.  I’m burning too hot.  I’m using too much energy and way way too much at night.  I’m so tired.

I feel the kind of tired where I am emotionally raw.  This is how I always came home feeling.  And my mother would pick a fight.  When I feel vulnerable like this I am sensitive and I easily feel shamed and unwanted.  It doesn’t always happen after sex with new people and it can happen with Noah.  When I feel like I am breaking taboos this sometimes hits.

I feel really bad about telling the guy last night “Maybe” when he asked for a second date.  I feel like I made promises I don’t intend to keep.  I kept my mouth shut about things he said or did that were complete relationship deal breakers for me because oh man is that not a battle I’m interested in.  I’m not trying to hurt him.  I think he is a fine individual.  Just not someone I want to be in a relationship with. Oh the sex was hot though.  If we run into one another at a sex party… maybe.  If I’m in the mood.  He certainly did most of it just right.

It feels like as a slut/whore/whatever word you want to use having those kind of preferences is kind of mean.  I’m supposed to just take people as they are and like them.  Mostly I do.  But there’s always one thing… I know it would drive me batty.  I go home and thank God that Noah doesn’t have/do/think/whatever the thing was.

This is why I don’t feel polyamorous.  Not really.  Only I have my boys.  I do feel a connection to them.  It is pretty much always more intense on their side.  I have a date scheduled with my shaman.  We haven’t been on a date in about six or seven years?  And it was a four or five year gap between that and the previous set of dates.

I have a long cycle sometimes, apparently.  It’s interesting to learn that about myself.  I’m glad I didn’t stay with Steve because I would not have had the room to grow to be the person I am now.  I like who and what I am.  He wouldn’t have stood next to me for this journey.  He wasn’t my partner.  Not like this.  Tom didn’t want to have kids with me.  That is why I left him.  Having children was more important to me than being with him.  I made the right choice.

I am strongly dyadic in my bonding.  I do very intense one on one bonding.  And then it scares the piss out of me and I run away.  Noah is the only person I have ever met who can really match my intensity in an on-going way.  We take breaks occasionally when we are escalating, but we always come back to a topic.  We can always finish talking about something no matter how hard it is.

I have never had a person in my life who will do that.  I would follow him off a cliff because no one will ever make me feel seen the way Noah does.  I’m protective of this space.  I feel terrified of it being encroached on.

That’s why I only go on first dates.  I have no interest in finding a new bond right now.  Fuck you all.  You all suck compared to Noah.  I’m not going to go on a second date and start dealing with the fact that you can’t have conversations the way I want to have them.  It feels like a waste of my time.  I’m not interested in sitting through multiple dates where I have to silently roll my eyes and put up with shit that irritates the fuck out of me.  Everyone irritates me.  Everyone.  But I can turn around and tell Noah what he is doing that irritates the fuck out of me.  I can’t do that with anyone else.

It’s very stressful being around people and being polite.  I’m really not very polite in my head.  But I want polite children.  I have gone most of the way towards creating polite children.  When they start behaving in a way that irritates me it is because they are mimicking something I’ve done.  If I want to change their behavior the first thing I need to do is identify where I am behaving in a sub-optimal way and change it.  I put a lot of pressure on myself right now.

But people seriously irritate the fuck out of me and I’d like to yell at them a lot.  I don’t.  It’s not personal.  I’m sorry I feel this way.  But I do.

I don’t go on second date because that one little thing that irritated me?  I left thinking about it.  I constructed a story in my head about that little personality tic becoming part of my life.  Oh god that would require a lot of patience.  Can’t do it.  I’m sorry.

I’ve done a fair bit of recycling old hits in my head, lately.  I’ve gone on dates with several old flames, with mixed success.  I’m interested in seeing how things have changed with my shaman.  I feel weird about the fact that he is ok with being available for me whenever I want him over the course of more than a decade.  That’s… holy shit that’s commitment.  I love him.  But I’m not and I never have been “in love”.  It’s dramatic that I now have Noah to compare everyone to.  He changed the whole scale.

I like inspiring people.  Really good sex can change your world view.  There are so many good chemicals.  The aftermath of goodness can be bittersweet.  I like inspiring people to feel better about themselves.  I want them to feel affirmed for the one gift I am willing to accept from them.

I’m tired.  I’ve had a week of bad sleep.  I feel guilty that I avoided conversation last night by falling asleep.  He woke me up after an hour and a half to put me on bart.  Fucking slick, Krissy.  I feel bad.  It’s not like I did it on purpose.  I’m really tired.  But uhm, that shouldn’t be part of the first date.  Kind of poor form.

Noah is trying to schedule a date for Thursday.  I have extra impetus to not cancel.  Bother.  This is the kind of thing that inevitably happens around him dating.  If I cancel it gets weird.  He’s just as (or more) twitchy than I am at this point.  He acts like he should be kicked.  I have a hard time when Noah puts his head down and looks like he is in pain.  Like I have already been berating him… just because he feels guilty.  I haven’t said anything.  It makes me angry.  And then I’m going to say things.

This is a bad cycle.  Mostly in our life he acts like my ambient anger isn’t about him.  He goes about his life being cheerful and dandy and on his own time.  This is a good thing.  When he feels like he is to blame for my anger the dynamic changes.  I feel like an abusive asshole because he starts flinching.  It’s hard because it feels like my anger isn’t much higher than normal but all of a sudden I am bad for feeling it.  WTF?  Why do I have to be Miss Susie Sunshine on this sacred topic above all others?  I’m a cranky person.  I just am.  Why is it surprising around this topic?

Why am I only not allowed to feel feelings about this.  You are fine with them on every other topic.

I’m going back and sleeping with my friends because I have already been fierce and aggressive and they have proven they really like me.  It’s weird to show up and let them surprise me with how they actually want to touch me.  It’s weird finding out what is on the other side of the brick wall I build around myself.

First date sex has a certain loneliness to it.  That’s the bittersweet part.  You know that this person doesn’t really know you.  When you plan to disappear in the morning you hide behind that knowledge.  You carefully don’t present yourself at certain times.  It’s not worth finding out how this person feels about ‘x’ controversial topic.  For me to carefully censor what I’m saying…

This feeling.  It’s like what I had as a child.  When I was being sent to a new place.  I desperately wanted to please them.  I wanted to be liked.  Not being liked was so bad.  So very bad.  When people don’t like me they tend to loathe me.  They feel free to say the nastiest, meanest things possible.  They do this because I reveal a lot of intense personal feelings quickly and then other people bond to me.  Then when I reject the bond, because it was ephemeral for me, something that was completely true in the moment and not true later, they know personal things.

I’m being vague.  There is no way for me to recount the people and ways I have been told I am disgusting for the kind of sex I like to have.  I had a good night last night.  I don’t want to do it again soon because of my own issues with being patient with people.  He did nothing wrong.  He’s awesome.  My shaman is wonderful.  I feel much more connected to him than I do to most people.  I only want to go out on approximately a dozen dates over a decade.  It’s not because he has done something wrong.

I feel like running away from intimacy this hard is a sign that I am deeply broken.  If people cannot be everything and perfect then I have no space for them in my life.  And I judge everyone against Noah and find them wanting.  I’m lonely.

A lot of the impatience is just that people feel weird to me.  I never feel comfortable.  I always feel fake and like I have to be thinking very hard about not saying “the wrong thing” because inevitably someone will blow up at me.

Talking about sex and relationships feels especially charged and fierce.  People always feel weird to me.  I’m not very adaptable.  I have times where I can do it, but it’s hard.  I’m always poised for inevitable rejection.  Some woman who wrote me a nasty dear Jane letter felt the need to go back and change her RSVP to a no for an event I had in 2010.  Uhm.  Wow.  Thanks for letting me know, again, that you still dislike me.

I feel inadequate to the task of living my life.  I feel like I keep writing checks my body can’t cash.  I haven’t run in a few days.  I’m too physically exhausted.  Shanna and Calli and I did help shut down the port yesterday.  That was a walk.  I was impressed with Shanna’s tenacity.  I gave her multiple opportunities to wuss out when she got tired.  She said, “No!  I can do it!  I’m buff!”  My strong girl.

I feel a vague desire to probe her for why she introduces herself as She-Ra.  But that’s people hacking and she can’t consent.  So instead when she does it I just smile along.  I don’t know what to say.  Why should she feel more attached to the name I picked out?

I’m teaching her to be kind of weird.  I feel bad about that.  I’m very good at talking to strangers… if I initiate it or if they follow a pattern of questions I recognize as “valid”.  I can answer some questions easily.  Other times I freeze up and feel really dumb and walk away muttering about my inadequate social skills… she notices.

Today there is a park day trip to the park where I used to meet the above mentioned Dear Jane woman.  It’s a great park.  The homeschool group is going.  I keep thinking to myself that I’m not there to make friends.  I’m there to let Shanna make friends.  I don’t know that I can do it.  I can’t sleep in, ok fine.  I need to start going to bed earlier at night.  I’m so tired I can’t function.  This is not useful.

This is part of what I mean when I say I can’t date.  I don’t regulate my energy well.  Right now I’m trying to do too many things.  I can’t do everything.  Time to drop some balls.

Hunting is hella awkward (this whole thing is tmi)

2 Replies

We went from having a weekend of lots of planned sluttery to only having sex together.  This is rather hilarious, I think.  But Noah was approached on okcupid.  He’s making a date.

I love masturbating right after sex.  I’m sore and overly sensitive so it kind of hurts and it takes me a long time to have an orgasm.  I have to really make up a story in my head.  I’m just starting to do this again.  I haven’t done this in years.  I don’t masturbate when my kids are in bed with me.  I like to follow the stories that come up.  Often they involve sex with one or more of my friends.  It usually involves me getting to meet some need in their life.

Having sex with your friends is shitting where you eat.  It’s hard because having your needs met feels really good and it’s easy to get upset when you know people in your life can make you feel that good but they choose to schedule their time elsewhere.  That’s a hard thing emotionally.  It’s a lot of the reason that I am gun shy about polyamory.  I have my priorities set where they are set and no I am not fucking adjusting them for someone else.

I don’t think I have ever hunted the way I am hunting now.  I have never gotten to set the terms before.  It’s really hot.  It’s really hot to have people be willing to seduce me by email before we ever show up in person.  I have a great correspondance going right now.  The problem is that people get to the date and then have performance anxiety.  I don’t have performance anxiety.  I’m that good at sex.  As good as I say and better.  Because if you write me a script in advance I will make sure it is a script I can play and then I will play it to the hilt.  It’s really fun.

People who know me have a hard time engaging with this part of me.  They already have so many experiences that have made them gun shy.  I should make people gun shy on a day to day basis.  I’m kind of twitchy.  You don’t know how my moods will flow, it’s true.  Pushing an agenda on me is normally a questionable idea.

Except when it isn’t.  And I don’t know how to figure out the boundaries around this with people I know.  But I am learning how to do it with strangers and it’s really hot.  One hiccup is that I was asked if choking is really a hard limit.  Uhh, yeah.  It is.  No hands around my neck at all.  I don’t care that you like to assert your dominance that way.  Find another way.  Hey, I’m a nice girl.  How about if I tell you that I have been thinking a lot about face slapping?  You’ll believe me because I’ve been so clear about my boundaries in every other place.  Start slow, of course.  I’m sensitive.  But if that is interesting to you… I would feel put in my place.  Just sayin’.

It’s hard to do these exchanges with people I know.  I don’t trust very many people to that level.  It’s hard to use your friends as one night stands.  They feel bad.  Friends feel used and abandoned.  It’s important to not spike that oxytocin too high with people who already are more emotionally connected than I am.  That’s shitting on people I like.  Because they get hurt.  I don’t like doing that.

I am really thrilled about how many dates are happening.  I’m having fun.  I’m thrilled that Noah’s response to me hunting is to start talking about going to the gym because now he has to compete.  He totally doesn’t.  But I like it when he is in better shape.  Our sex life improves.  And given where it is… oh my.

I think it is funny that I hunt so hard for sex with other people when I know that Noah will be a better lover.  Every time.  It’s kind of like how Noah won’t eat McDonald’s, so I go without him.  I have these tastes for things that are bad for me.  My vices.  I like McDonald’s, ramen, and dates with new-to-me-men.  I’m going to get to the point where those are it.  (I eat McDonald’s like once a month.  Just sayin’.  Happy Meal joy.)

Noah tried to wake me up for sex on Friday night and I bit his head off.  Thursday I didn’t sleep much so I was cranky.  I made it up to him by waking him up on Saturday morning.  And we went to a party and played together on Saturday and had hot sex.  And we came home and had hot sex.  And Sunday afternoon Sarah took the kids out and he tied me up and did wonderful things to me and we had hot sex. And Sunday before passing out we couldn’t stop pawing at one another… so we had hot sex again.

Sometimes just being near him makes me shake with wanting him.  I have felt this voracious need for sex basically all of my life.  For the first time it’s not only ok it is preferable.  Because Noah actually likes me and appreciates me.  I worry about how other people will perceive me for being this kind of person.  I worry and feel stupid for worrying.  Of course people judge me.  So what?

I am not at risk of being hurt.  It would be very hard for anyone to hurt me just because they disapprove of my behavior.  My kids are far more sheltered than average.  They have a fierce sense of body autonomy and you can’t get that if you are abused.  They shine with good health and love.  I don’t have a job that is at risk.  Noah tells me he doesn’t care what I write.  He’ll take the hit.  Because I’m worth it.  I am financially secure enough that I will never have to play a public game again in my life.

Still I feel this fear.  If I feel this afraid, what is it like for people who have something to lose?  I have hubris on my side.  I can limit my hunting pool ridiculously.  I seem to be only hunting among people who have college degrees, often PhDs.  Not because I care but because those are the ones with the cajones to message me.  They are the only people who are willing to put up with a long list of nitpicky requests and demands from me before they meet me.  People who will write a sex script with me before meeting me and allow me to call a large percentage of the shots.  Am I actually doing risk management this way or am I lying to myself?

Communicating clearly that I am a sure thing gives me this sensation of butterflies in my stomach.  That moment of revelation, when I have to say I am interested in sex feels incredible.  Because I am interested in sex.  Not with anyone.  With people who can talk to me and help me make a script and help me figure out why I am there.

That’s what I’m doing with the pre-writing.  I’m giving myself a chance to create the back story on why the kind of girl he is fantasizing about would show up for the experience he is about to have.  Everyone wants a different why.  I’m very curious about why people think they should have sex.  It’s different from the why they have for love.  The why people have about sex tells me so much about their life.

Most people think they should have sex because they are in love.  It’s kind of a weird thing, to me.  Why do I think I should have sex?  Because it feels good.  Because I like carefully balancing how much of my life is devoted to things that feel good to me.  The specific kind of feel-good I get from sex with new people is apparently worth a lot of effort and angst to me.  I’m trying to get to the point where I can attenuate the effort and get rid of the angst.  I’m not for everyone.  The kind of people who are in the right place to do exactly what I want… that’s serendipity.  I need to be honest about the emotional cost.

I need to stop being messy with my emotions in my house.  Sarah has nightmares and I make them worse.  I’m not yelling or screaming.  But I am huffy.  I do visibly shake with anger.  To someone who grew up in a violent household I look like I am on the verge of hitting.  I need better control.  And that means I need to back off on hunting.  It’s taking a lot of my brain cycles and that makes me short tempered elsewhere.

I need to figure out how much energy I actually have left once I am meeting my obligations at home.  Right now I don’t feel like I understand that balance very well.  This is where I don’t have a map.  I guess I do though.  I painted it on my wall.  I’m going into the cave.  Sometimes.  Or I’m wandering off to have an island retreat.

Have I mentioned that due to plumbing mishaps I have a white wall in my house?  The possibilities are endless.  I still haven’t painted the garage door.  All of these things take energy.  Energy I am currently holding in reserve because later today I am going to go shut down the Port of Oakland with a few friends.  I’m bringing my kids.  And after the Port Shutdown I will be dropped off for a date.

There is only so much of me to go around.  I only have so much energy to give.  It’s really awesome; I have to be pragmatic.  What do I want to have in my life?  What are my actual, actionable priorities?  What am I doing with my time and energy and how is it balancing throughout my life?  I have to think about these things.

I am sad things went the way they did with muse, but I can’t say I’m surprised.  I shouldn’t have tried for a month.  I know better.  I know I don’t have that kind of energy for a relationship.  I should have left it at the first date.  If my one night stand hunting culminated in a night of bath house sex where I don’t have to talk to the person after that… that would have been great.  I was stupid.  I tried to get the short-term boyfriend experience.

Know yourself.  Know your limits.  Noah has different limits.  Hell, near as I can tell everyone has different limits than me.  That’s ok.  It’s tricky trying to figure out where I get to have  rock hard limits around what I can and can’t request from people.

I’m interested in one night stands.  If you aren’t, that’s fine.  We aren’t a match.  Move along.  Don’t get mad at me and I’ll try not to rant about you.  I’ll make that promise to all the future boys.  I’ll try not to rant.  Which is to say that I will rant but try to be balanced.  You did good things too.  We just aren’t a match.  No shame in that.

That’s why.  That’s why I’m hunting.  Because I am continuing the behavior I have done my entire life but not I am trying to do it without shame.  I want to find a way to balance this part of me that feels bad because other people do not value it with the knowledge that it does bring good to my life.  It gives me the energy to go conquer the world.

I’m probably not going to schedule a one night stand attempt in January.  I need a rest from that energy drain.  It’s time to re-evaluate the energy I’m giving to my sex life.  I promised Shanna that I would make her a play house in January.  I can’t be tired from staying up all night for sex and do that.  It’s going to be awesome.  Just wait.  But it will take creativity.  It has to fit into Wonderland.

How can I talk about parenting and being a slut in one post?  Because I’m both.  That has to be ok.  I’m not actually doing anything shameful.  I have an unusual hobby that most people don’t share.  Like people in this valley should fucking judge.  You are all a bunch of weirdos.  What the fuck is this geocaching shit?

I think that if you look at history you will find a lot more people who pursued sex voraciously than people who beat some video game.  Who is the freak?  Ahem.

Road to Noah

Leave a reply

A friend recently told me that he thinks one of my books will be the Road to Noah.  It makes me smile.  Yes.  I would love to write that book.  It’s going to involve a lot of pop culture references.  It will be silly and fun and sweet.  Kind of like our relationship.

The song du jour is Teenage Dream. And it’s pretty darn true.  Noah grew up in a small hick town in Texas.  When we dress up to go to a fun party he wants me to find a blend between the white trash whore and looking expensive.  It’s… interesting.  Noah really appreciates the part of me that feels like a whore.  He specifically finds my experience and my unusually strong desire for sex appealing.  He actually wanted that unicorn.  I have met other guys who were partnered with women like me.  It’s not completely unusual, but it’s rare.

Once you hit a certain number of sexual partners, somewhere around 25, you just phase out of being a romantic possibility for a large segment of the population.  People will feel free to tell you casually, “Even though you are very attractive I couldn’t possibly sleep with someone who has had sex with as many people as you have.”  Uhh.  I wasn’t soliciting you for sex.  But thank you for reminding me that I should assume I am required to be interested in sex with every single man I ever talk to.  I’m going to go home and stop talking now.

Back to Noah.  In contrast.  Noah thinks I am hotter than the sun.  He loves hearing all the whispered stories from my illicit sex.  He wants to hear all about flashing my genital piercings in the back alley in Ireland.  He likes that I wear my sexuality on my sleeve.  He likes the part of me that chases taboo sex. That’s complicated.  Life is really complicated.

Something that I’ve been thinking about a lot for the last few days is how dangerous it is.  Potentially.  I think I’m more than qualified to say that people shouldn’t expect to avoid sexual assault.  How does one narrow the odds?  Is it possible?  Only sometimes.  What happens when a limit is crossed?  What limits do I have?  How will I communicate them?  How will I keep myself safe?  This is going to be flying by the seat of my pants.

Part of how I am trying to ensure that I can do this is by thinking about my right to dictate how this fits into my life.  I do get to place boundaries on my hunting.  I don’t have to bend to the fact that other people want a relationship.  I can’t learn a new person right now.  My heart is full.  I’m having these sensations in other parts of my anatomy.  I realize I’m not supposed to talk about that.

But talking about that is part of the road to Noah.  I want to talk about these things and he told me that it doesn’t matter that I’m not supposed to talk about them.  I can do it any way.  I get to decide that my inner moral compass is more important than anyone else’s discomfort.  That’s a tricky line to walk.  Because I do and I don’t.  But I can define the line and have it be in a different place than other people.  If I am within my legal rights, fair fucking game.  Why not?  Because it makes other people uncomfortable.

I didn’t drag your ass here to read my words.  I’m defensive with no one and every one.  I’m sitting here arguing with ghosts.  I haven’t gotten a negative comment.  I have been flamed once on the internet in many years of posting intense personal information, and that was a prank.  All of these shoulds I am yelling against are just phantoms in my head.  They are what I was told.  I need to stop this bitching in my head.  This litany of shame.

I’m really not doing anything wrong.  And neither is Noah.  And he’s going to go on a date soon.  And I need to smile and kiss him good bye and be nice when he comes home.  I get to have boundaries, sure.  I don’t get to be nasty.  That’s not a right.

Ok.  I’ll accept this step as inevitable.  Shit.  And I’ll be nice… well unless I’m being pissy about something else.  Then all bets are off and I’ll apologize and grovel.  I’m really sorry that will happen.  I’m trying to work on it.  It is better.

I’m trying to be worthy of you, too.

Casual/Casual +

1 Reply

I was curious what the fella’s on a certain community site would say about the topic of casual sex.  I’m mildly surprised that most people don’t consider something casual sex unless it is entirely anonymous and you never speak.  Really?  Ok, I guess I don’t want actual casual sex then.  Wow.  I like to find profiles on the web and exchange a few emails.  Then meet up with a thin pretense of something to do for about an hour.  Then we can go back to your place.  I may or may not ever feel the need to talk to you after that but I will have fond feelings for you.  Some of these turn into friendships, most don’t.  I don’t mind in the slightest.

Really?  That’s not casual?  Wow.  Once again, I need a new word.  Because even saying NSA (no strings attached) isn’t quite what I mean.  And it’s not really friends with benefits because I don’t think we need to be friends.  Fuckbuddy implies we are buddies.  We aren’t.  You are a stranger on the internet.  A perfectly nice one.  One I obviously find attractive (this is usually a combination of looks, intelligence, and ‘feels like tribe’) so what is that?

I like running into former lovers.  I like the smile I get.  I like the soft brush of the arm as they acknowledge that they know how to touch me.  If I don’t litter my lovers all over the valley, how can I have that experience?

Time to move on

Leave a reply
Saturday night we held a surprise dinner party for a friend’s birthday.  She seemed pretty excited about being the center of attention finally.  I think everyone should get the limelight on their birthday.  It was one of the best parties I’ve ever hosted.  I think it was a raging success.  An awful lot of the reason for that is I didn’t feel any pressure to be “on”.  People weren’t there to see me.  Maybe the secret is to invite other peoples’ friends over.
It was neat partially because this was a bdsm crowd of type I don’t hang out with much.  This was a Master/slave sort of gathering.  And Daddy energy.  Lots of Daddy energy.  I got to talk about my opinions about those sorts of relationships.  I got to talk about my experiences with people I have seen around in the scene for over a decade but never before have they noticed me.  It was a weird kind of arriving moment.  It was interesting.  
I really enjoyed getting to explain some of my opinions.  I don’t get asked about these topics much any more.  I have a lot of opinions.  The M/s portion of my relationship with Tom was the middle two years out of four.  So we had a year to ramp up and a year to ramp down.  I have a lot of perspective on that situation at this point. 
And after they left Noah and I had crazy hot sex where he explained what he would like from our relationship in the future.  I’m considering his words very carefully.  It’s a lot more complicated for me to change the nature of my relationships now that I have young children and a marriage and a mortgage to consider.  I’m not just thinking about what I want and what will feel good.  I have to seriously stop and think about whether or not any given set of choices is sustainable for me.  Without sustainability there is no future for any set of behaviors.
Last night in the middle of that crazy hot sex we had to stop for a while because I was crying too hard.  I was crying because it has cost me a lot to maintain training that Tom gave me.  It is humiliating to have to explain to random pick up partners that they have to give me permission to orgasm.  Not only do they have to give me permission they have to kind of do it in a certain way.  Most people guess close enough, but some people say things that make it so that I can’t.  Or they think it is funny to tell me no.  I feel like I don’t get the final say on what happens to my body and that really bothers me.  I am tired of having no choice but to submit this ownership of my body to anyone who touches me.  I’m tired of being unable to have a private sexual experience inside my brain.  I’m tired of constantly having to offer up my desire to someone else.  Someone who doesn’t even understand what this gift costs me.
I am a slave without an Owner.  I’m kind of tired of it.  It is starting to feel demeaning.  It is starting to make me feel like this enormous pearl is being cast before swine.  They do not understand or appreciate and I feel cheapened by the experience.  I want to figure out how to not need permission any more.
I’m 30 years old.  I have not had control of my right to orgasm since I was 19.  Maybe it’s time.  I had a brief period where I started to figure out how to turn this off.  It lasted a couple of months.  Then Noah came back.  It’s one of his favorite party tricks.  It’s hard to tell him I don’t want to give this to him any more.  I am tired of having to feel subjugated to new partners.  It makes the barrier of sex very different.  It’s a lot of why I sleep with assholes.
Assholes know how to use this.  They don’t need me to stop and give an explanation of how I became so broken.  They just want to play with it as a toy.  Let’s press the button and see what happens!  I’m tired of having my right to pleasure be out of my control.  It feels like part of the larger patterns of me doing sex constantly for some perceived exterior motivation. 
I want to have some idea of what sex is like for other women. 
I told Noah last night that I can’t tell if part of me is breaking or mending.  I don’t know what it means that I feel so strongly about getting rid of this now.  I want my freedom, damn it.  I’m tired of having to explain to every vanilla person about my former Owner training.  I can never tell the story right in the moment.  It always feels rushed and I’m trying to change gears and be a different person and it doesn’t feel like a good conversation to have. 
How many other people have to stop and tell the story of their sex life going back to when they were 19 forever?  I wonder how much this feeds my inability to get over Tom.  I’m reminded of him every single time I have sex.  I know this was done for him.  I could never forget it.  This is such a huge part of my body and my life.  He caused this change in me.  What am I like without Tom’s training?  I don’t know.  I’ve never been able to find out.  It’s time.

I love country music.

Leave a reply

I was feeling mopey thinking about my early childhood and I had the Dixie Chick’s song So Hard on in the background.  It’s nominally about fertility problems.  It’s not hard to ignore about three lines and generalize it to other topics.  I’m just saying.  I’m having a hard time with this whole parenting gig sometimes.  I know my reactions are wrong.  I know when I sound like my mother.  I don’t know who else to sound like.  I don’t have very many people I feel comfortable around.  People make me feel tense.  I get edgy.  And bitchy.  And shit still rolls down hill.  I’m minor compared to everything I knew.  I know that.  But this isn’t who I wanted to be when I grew up.

If I’m not satisfied with my behavior I need to change it.  It’s hard right now because Calli is in the last throes of babyhood before becoming a talking person.  I’m having a very hard time waiting for that jump.  It came so early with Shanna.  I’m not a fan of the pre-verbal phase.  I still think Arwyn said it best.  I feel triggered when I spend a lot of time with my kids if I have to do anything else at the same time.  As long as I can be idle and just focused on them I can handle them.  They are not too much stimulus under those circumstances.  The problem comes when I am trying to get something done (like making breakfast) and it isn’t happening fast enough for Calli.  She starts screeching and it hurts my ears.  I start feeling anger.  It’s hard to tamp it down.  I have so much anger rolling around in me right now.

Reading through the whole story yesterday made me see spots where I have new perspective on why my mom and sister acted the ways they did.  Being a parent changes my point of view.  Funny, that.  But writing my story down means I can’t retreat to the sanctity of the parents point of view, either.  I stand there feeling bad for Calli that life is so hard.  She really and truly can’t have what she wants very much of the time.  She wants to be able to touch me any time she wants any way she wants.  She feels like she needs that from me.  But I can’t take how rough she is.  Oh gosh she is rough with me.  I get really angry.  I’m tired of being hurt.  I’m so. fucking. tired. of. being. hurt.  It’s so hard.

But she’s in the last throes of babyhood.  Soon it will be gone forever.  I don’t want my kids to remember me being angry all the time.  That is not what I want them to have as their story.  I don’t want them to remember me retreating with dramatic explosions.  Even though I’m not insulting any one.  Even though I’m just stomping my feet and huffing.  I don’t want to be that person.  How do you just decide to be someone else?  I was someone else with Shanna.  I narrowed my world to just her.  I gave her every single scrap and ounce of patience I had for any and everything in the whole world.  It was a nice year.  I couldn’t do that with Calli.  It’s so hard being a younger child.  You never ever get your needs fully met. You are short changed from birth.  Says the self-pitying youngest of four.

But then the song changed.  Best Days of Your Life by Kellie Pickler.  And I got a very nice email.  Right that minute.  My chest exploded with this moment of Oh My Fucking God.  When I’m feeling upbeat and I think about my life once I became an adult… well.  I’m pretty fucking cool.  I’ve done a lot of really neat things.  And I’m going to do a lot more.  As much as I possibly can.  And part of that is going to involve me figuring out how to be the person I want to be.  I will make mistakes and I will have bitchy days.  But when I do I tell my kids, “God I know my tone of voice sucks.  I’m really sorry.  It’s not you honey, I’m fussy about other things.”  I don’t think I was ever once told that.  Every bad mood that happened within a three block radius was my.fucking.fault.

Maybe I have already changed.  It’s hard on days when the kids want to test to see if I love them.  I do.  But I also have limited patience these days.  It’s time for the pendulum to swing back to them.  I think we should go out and play today.  And I’ll play the upbeat country songs.  The ones that make me feel like hot shit.  Because I rock like that.

I finished

Leave a reply

I finished around 2pm.  58,048 words.  That means it’s not epic.  Good.  It’s too intense to be epic.  It’s too long as it is.  It’s hard to read.  I read through the whole thing yesterday and it is really brutal and nasty.  My life was shit.  It’s going to be interesting to hear peoples reactions.  I let Noah have it already because I couldn’t not let Noah have it.  I need him to know this story.  He got up to the beginning of 1988.  He has a long way to go yet.

I spent most of yesterday angry.  Reading the book through in a day reminds me that I have very good reasons to be angry.  So angry that flames come out the top of my head.  But I don’t want to be angry.  Being angry doesn’t feel good.  That book is closed now.  Those chapters are over.  Noah will finish reading the book by this weekend.  Probably Sarah, too.  They are quick like that.

Then I’m going to wait till next year to do anything else.  But I want them to know.  I’m not writing this book because I want to make money on the story.  I’m writing this because I cannot continue to live with people not knowing this story.  I can’t even handle waiting until I get a final draft before showing it to the people who claim they want to build a life with me.  They claim they want to know me.  Well here the fuck I am.  It hurts my soul that this is my story.  This should be fiction.  No one should have a life like that.  But I did.

And I’m pretty awesome.  No, I’m not always tactful.  That’s a small sin in the scheme of things.  Really. It is.

I have this weird feeling in my chest.  I feel empty and hollow.  I did my very best to bring up all the major threads that wove through my childhood.  I didn’t give any of them a lot of individual face time.  There were too many.  I don’t think people could handle a book that explicated all of them intensely.  It’s too sad and painful.  Yes, yes, a few people could.  But I’m not trying to write a book that is only for the biggest bad asses.  I’m just trying to be seen.

I wrote this as simply and directly as I could.  I tried to do it without excessive anger.  I tried to present people in a balanced way.  I tried to just tell the truth.  As simply and plainly as I can.  I used simple words and simple sentences.  I used almost no dialogue.  This is something I had to just say and get off my chest.  And now it’s off my chest and on my hard drive.  I have emailed copies to two people.  I am saving it on Google Docs.  I might put it in Noah’s Drop Box just so that I don’t lose it.  I want back ups.  I’m half tempted to sit here and print it right now just so that I have it.  So that I can see what this looks like on a page.

I want to be seen.  And that means I have to deal with the fact that people are going to have very different reactions.  Be sure that you’re right, then go ahead.  I’m just telling the truth.  This is my story.  I didn’t embellish it.  I didn’t make it more melodramatic than it is.  It is a hard story to read.  I don’t think that certain people understand what they meant to me.  What their place was in my life.

In three months I am going to publish it as an e-book.  Noah is going to help me figure that out.  I’m not going to deal with shopping around for a publisher right now.  That’s not the point.  The point is to get it out.  I’m not doing this because I want to make money off this story.  I just want to be seen.

I don’t want anyone to try to edit it before Christmas because this is already an emotionally intense time of year.  Old trauma can sit on a shelf and wait for a bit.

It’s time to shift gears.  I have to get my house ready.  I’m doing something really fun this weekend.

I had a lovely meet-up-for-coffee yesterday.  I like being able to sit down and talk with an attractive man about statistical analysis.  It means he thinks I can understand it.  It means he thinks I’m smart.  Oh that’s hot.  That made me want to sit on his lap.  I didn’t.  But I thought about it and smiled.  I really like intelligent men.

Sacred cows

1 Reply

I’m trying to decide what mood I want to be in for today’s writing sprint.  My first date yesterday was an only date.  That’s ok.  I’m glad I had the “I want to be chased” thought yesterday.  By the time I got to the date I was real clear that I was uninterested in being the one to do 100% of the physical aggression.  I’m happy to do 50%.  But I’m not running the fuck.  You don’t want me bad enough.  No more pity fucks.

I don’t need to go have pity fucks with strangers.  I had sex with Noah twice.  It was hot.

I was thinking about the fact that a lot of folks have been discussing “appropriate topics” lately.  Over here at Soggy in Milk we are the all-inappropriate-all-the-time channel so I’m going to wax poetic for a few minutes.  Bear with me.  So imagine you had this nice normal life.  You have great parents and a couple of siblings you adore.  As you go through your life you get to spread daisies and sunshine and shit when you mention your euphoric family.  Everyone compliments you and tells you how wonderful you all sound.  Then I want you to stop for thirty seconds and think of what you have read from me here.  Man I really want you to do this again after you read the book, if you want to.

Now.  How the fuck do you think I feel when people talk about their families?  What exactly should I say if in response to questions about my family?  Should I lie?  Evade?  Be as curt as possible so as to minimize the damage I am invariably going to do?  Be honest and watch as people all but run as fast as they can to get away from me?

Seriously.  Where is my good fucking option.  Because you assholes seem to think that the topic of “childhood” and “families” is perfectly appropriate in public.  Oh, people will tell me, “Well you can talk about Noah and the girls!”  How generous of you.  I’m so grateful that I have a pat answer now that will satisfy your need for idle chit chat about things you are uninterested in.  Let. me. make. you. more. comfortable.  I live to serve.

I am angry about the so-called polite conversational topics because they exist to silence people like me.  They exist to make people like me invisible.  And powerless.  They exist to make it impossible for most people to successfully prosecute their attackers because it’s not ok to say what has happened to you.  Ever.  People who say, “Well it’s ok to say it to the police” have obviously never pressed charges for sexual assault.  I have.  Do you know how the police treat you?  They say that you have mental problems and you should be in therapy.  Despite the fact that the next door neighbor heard the whole thing and reported it to the police.  I was still dismissed as crazy.

Fuck appropriate conversation topics.  Do you know what is an appropriate conversational topic?  Police brutality.  Incest.  Rape.  Poverty.  These are things that can and must be talked about as often as necessary.  In any circumstance.  Ok, not in any circumstance.  But in any circumstance where there are only adults present.  I don’t think every five year old needs to hear about incest.  But every child should grow up hearing frank conversations about police brutality and poverty.  They should know that these things exist.  This should be part of their lives too.  Because it is part of being aware of the world around you.

If someone brings up a topic you don’t like you can try to change the conversation and make it all about you, or you can engage in a dialogue.  If you are feeling massively uncomfortable, say that.  Look at why.  If your upset is about your irrational beliefs being challenged… fucking go with it.  Get over yourself.  Seriously.

Things don’t change until people are upset enough to make them change.  The longer you brush uncomfortable conversations under the rug only to be had at rare, carefully pre-selected, never risky times you are growing at a snails pace.  That’s not something that fuels real personal growth, I’m sorry.  I’m that kind of control freak.  I can do that.  I love doing that.  It means I don’t do any personal growth.  It means I hide in my little freak ghetto and get into a rut.

I’m better than that.  I need to go have the uncomfortable conversations.  I need to be honest.  I need to exist in the world.  I need to demand the right to take up just as much space as everyone else.  I’m not going to evade or give a half-truth when someone asks about my family.  I will answer questions honestly.  I will act like I have nothing to be ashamed of.  “Oh, what’s your family like?”  “Incestuous rapists.”  And I will take the blinking eyes I get.  I will take the look of shock and horror.  And I will try not to flinch.  And I will try not to cry.  And I will try not to run away.  And I will try to answer the following questions graciously without my voice cracking.

I’m not doing something bad by telling my story.  I’m just existing.  Yes, it’s a harsh story.  Sometimes life is harsh.  Sometimes people have harsh lives.  It’s far more common when you live in poverty.  That is a big part of the story.  Why did I move so often?  Because my mother was running away from my dad and from one abusive situation to another.  Because we lived on charity.  Because we had no choice.  Because we were evicted repeatedly for non-payment of rent.

I’m tired of trying to make up a story that will make other people feel comfortable around me.  I have spent my entire life trying to figure out how to lie well enough to be able to talk about myself.  I’m really tired of it.  I’m really tired of trying to invent a me that is good enough to be in public.  If I carefully censor myself enough, maybe I will be a good enough person to deserve to be part of public discourse.  This feels really shitty you know.

This wouldn’t be such a big part of my story if other people didn’t require that I tell elaborate lies in order to appear “normal”.  It’s not lying!  It’s just… not mentioning things.  Uhm.  If you don’t know that my family is full of incestuous rapists then you don’t know anything about them and I shouldn’t bother talking.  Because it affected everything.  It makes a big difference when I talk about my mother hating that I swore if I mention that I was raped about twenty minutes before she beat me for cussing.  It gives a whole new perspective.  That was my life.  I was raped and then I came home to more poison.  Multiple times.  It’s kind of weird that I would come home from being raped and be mean and nasty and full of rage, right?  But that kind of behavior was not to be tolerated and I was to be brought down a few pegs.

It’s time to go start writing on the book for today.  For better or for worse I found my tone.  It’s time to go put a narrative on this bastard.

Be Thankful

2 Replies

I often hear people say: You shouldn’t compare abuse.  There is no use.  Trauma is unique and people react differently.  Today I am going to say: yes you should fucking compare.  You probably have no god damn perspective on your life and you really should go out and compare.  You should find out how good you have it.

I feel deeply uncomfortable with how good my life is now.  I’m aware that my current safety and stability is not about deserve.  This is not the natural results of a lot of hard work.  It’s a fucking fluke.  I managed to marry someone rich.  Whoo hoo.  What. An. Accomplishment.  And yet people want to tell me that my life is awesome because I deserve it.

Does that mean I deserved to be raped?  Does that mean I deserved to live in poverty when I was a kid?  No.  There is. no. deserve.  I’m kind of angry that people use that word ever in conversations about money.    It’s not just the money though.

I think that people should sit down and compare abuse for a few minutes.  My father told me that I was a literally-evil-as-in-descended-from witches-evil and a whore.  That it was all I would ever be.  My father taught me that pain should go with sexual contact.  That I should endure it with a stony face.  From when I was a baby.

Did that happen to you?  No?  Well then maybe you should go thank your father.  Maybe you could take a moment to realize that if your dad is an asshole, but never did anything actually bad maybe that was him showing restraint.  Maybe he is not your cup of tea, but not exactly someone who should die in a fire.  Say fucking thank you.  Because I’m here to tell you that you weren’t treated how you were treated because you deserved it.  You were treated that well because no one wanted to treat you worse.  And for one fucking day I think people should stop and realize that it isn’t a birth right.

When people are kind to you, don’t expect it as your due.  Thank them for it.  It’s a gift.  Maybe grudgingly given, maybe cheerfully given.

Did your mother tell you that you deserved what you got after you were raped?  No?  Maybe you should say thank you to her.  Maybe you actually have a much better mother than you know.  Maybe you don’t know just how good you have it.

Did your brother tell you that the only career you would be good at was being a prostitute?  No?  Maybe you should say thank you to your brother.  He might be an asshole, but he recognizes that there is a line. And he didn’t cross.  He doesn’t degrade your humanity and think you are a piece of shit hole.  I promise you he isn’t doing it because you are so fucking awesome that of course you deserve to be treated well.  He’s doing it because he has made a choice about the kind of person he wants to be and how he wants to treat people.  Even if he doesn’t know it.  Because this is a choice.  Be thankful.

When I called my big sister sobbing, begging her for help she laughed at me and told me I was interrupting her having sex.  Then she hung up on me.  I spent the rest of the night trying to OD on crank.  Because no really, no one gave a shit about me.

I think people should compare abuse.  I really do.  I think these conversations should be explicit.  I think they should be candid.  I think people should stop walking on eggshells around this topic.  Given how many people tell me, “Oh I had a hard childhood too” then backpedal fast when I start talking this is a conversation that needs to be had.  People don’t know what a hard childhood is.  They have nothing to compare their own childhoods to most of the time.  There aren’t many books about genuinely bad childhoods.  So people don’t know what it means.  I think people should.  Most people have a lot more to be thankful for than they think.

It’s hard sometimes when people complain bitterly about their families.  I miss my family.  I’ve spent a month telling all the worst stories I can about my family.  I still miss them.  I still know my place there.  Yesterday was hard.  I spent all day rehearsing negative awful things to say in my head.  Because I know that my role at big holidays is to be the one who starts a fight and then runs off crying.  That way everyone has an opening to say how awesome it is when I’m not there any more.

I used to listen to those conversations as a kid.  They would comment idly once I left, “Oh thank god she finally left.”  I don’t think there were very many days in my childhood where my mother didn’t comment about how nasty and awful I was.  I was too critical, always.

Maybe your family wants you to call on Thanksgiving because they love you and miss you and really wish they got to see you more.  And they don’t know how to effect that.  You ran away from them to have your own life and they miss you.  Is that really so bad?  Is that really so terrible?  Is a five minute or even fifteen minute phone call really so onerous?  Really?

I wasn’t alone yesterday.  I have Noah.  I have Sarah.  I have Shanna.  I have Calli.  My Complication (who has yet to tell me if it is ok to use her name) was here.  A friend named Dave (who doesn’t get to opt-out of using his name because there are 3,000 Daves in my community) also came to dinner.  That was nice.  The food was excellent.  Pre-dinner another couple of friends stopped by for a chat.  We all went to bed really early.

I wasn’t alone.  But I can’t shake the feeling that I’m still the problem.  I’m still the wild card.  I’m still the one who might break out crying and stomp off.  I’m still the one who is difficult to predict and triggery and an asshole.  I’m so fucking self-absorbed.

But I tried really hard to talk about the things I am thankful for.  Because I don’t deserve them.  I didn’t deserve the things that happened to me as a kid and I don’t deserve the things that happen to me know.  It’s not about deserve.  I changed my luck.  I’m excited that my life is different now.  But it’s not about deserve.  It just happened.  Life is like that.  I think that people can work their whole life and never get what they want.  I think that people can work for five minutes and get more than they ever dreamed.  It’s not about deserve.  It just happens.

I have relatively good health.  I have a safe, stable home.  I have friends who are willing to tolerate a torrential flow of shit-talk from me.  I have a husband who thinks I can do or be anything I want in the whole wide world.  Well, maybe not an NBA player.  Or an astronaut.  Oh well.

I am thankful for the privilege and security I have because it is allowing me to be a good mother.  Other women can be good mothers with less support.  I don’t think I would be able to.  My life is set up around babying my mood swings and impatience.  I have created space for dealing with my rage.  Because I have Noah and Sarah and a big pile of money.  I’m not a good mother because my kids deserve it.  I’m a good mother because I am lucky enough to set up my life in a way that allows me to be.  I can play to my strengths and minimize my weaknesses.  That isn’t about deserve.  But it is really nice that my kids get to have that.  I would like to find a way to teach them that it isn’t a right without having to hurt them in the process.

I am really thankful that I get to sit down and think about these things and make decisions about them because of my raging privilege.  I am so fucking lucky.  That makes it harder that I’m still bitter.

I’m bitter when I hear people sit around trading off how onerous it is to have families.  I can’t have a family because I believe that it is unhealthy for me to have ongoing relationships with people who enabled me being raped for more than a decade.  What’s your fucking excuse?  Oh, they aren’t your same chosen culture?  Uh.  Grow some fucking balls and learn to deal with the fact that world isn’t just like you.  I promise you that the world isn’t just like me.  I have to find a way of talking to them anyway or I get to be alone.  I think it is hubris to toss away your family.  You never know when you might want them again.  And some wounds can’t heal.

I think people should catalogue their abuse.  And then actually compare.  No really.  Make a decision for yourself.  Either be ok with it or walk away.  The back and forth is bullshit.  Holding on to bitterness for things that happened decades ago is bullshit.

And I do it.  I know I am hurting my life with this bullshit.  This was one of the best Thanksgivings of my life.  Yeah, I spent some of the day in my room crying.  But less than usual.  Far less than any given year from my childhood.  No one had anything resembling a fight.  I had one explosion where I told people to stop bitching about having to call their families.  That was it.  That’s pretty good for me.

I feel really bad that I know that my pretty good would be unacceptable for most people.  Only one melodramatic meltdown ending in tears.  But if you are going to compare you have to really compare.  I had 18 years of people telling me on Thanksgiving that I was unpleasant to be around and difficult and I should just leave.  Was that the experience of most people?  Probably not.  Maybe it’s ok that I still cry.

But I also try really hard to notice that I have it really good.  My life is exceptionally easy and good right now.  I have the kind of life that people dream about.  Maybe I need to stop crying.  I may have had a bad childhood, but whether I have a bad adulthood is up to me.  I can choose to spend every Thanksgiving crying or I can work on not doing that.  It’s not making my life better.  It is no longer a good thing for me to isolate myself.  Once it was a good and necessary thing.  I need to learn how to deal with the discomfort of being around other people.  Even though it is hard and it hurts.  Because I have these amazing people who have stepped up.  I need to be thankful for them, not bitter about my bio-family.  Because there is no deserve.  I don’t have this now because the universe adjusted from an inappropriate tilt and now I have what I deserve finally.

I’m just really fucking lucky.  And not everyone is as lucky as me.  For me to piss and moan and whine is pretty disrespectful, honestly.  It’s bullshit.  And I should change it.

mopey

1 Reply

I wrote a lot on the book today.  So I’m kind of anxious and fussed.  I went over to Pinterest.  I like not having to read.  But the wedding ones get me.  Mostly the pictures of the happy brides with their fathers.  Why do I have to compulsively talk about being an incest survivor?  Because it impacts every part of my life.  This isn’t something that happened to me one time.  I have not lost the rest of my life because I was raped when I was seven or eight or nine or or or or.

I hide in my house because my father filled my head with poison.  He convinced me that I was a worthless piece of shit.  He convinced me that I should present myself to people as someone who should be raped.  That it was my destiny.  That is what my parent told me to be.  My father wanted me to grow up to be a whore.

You want to know why I don’t follow polite social rules?  Oh good fucking grief.  When in the hell was I going to learn them?  In one of the series of schools where I was brutally beaten because I compulsively talked about sex and made everyone uncomfortable?  Or I was cussing.  Or my handwriting sucked.  There were a lot of reasons for beating me.  At home?  With the rednecks?  My ignorant family?  From my father?  Ha.

I think it is hilarious that people think that American culture is apparent and obvious and easy to follow.  I don’t know what the fuck you people want.  Other than to not be uncomfortable.  Well then don’t talk to me.  I may or may not be able to accommodate you.  I would apologize only I’m not sorry.  I don’t think it is my responsibility to ensure that everyone is comfortable.  My responsibility is to say what I need to say in order to get through the day.  If I don’t say what I need to say then I get bitter and nasty and carping and desperate.  I start breaking things.  I start cutting.  I start doing all kinds of other festive things.

I’m sorry motherfucker but you get to feel uncomfortable for a few minutes.  It’s your fucking turn.

In which I reveal the extent of my ego.

Leave a reply

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leave a reply

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Queer

Leave a reply

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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