Category Archives: happiness

Perspective is everything.

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Jenny’s father is dying.  It’s at a somewhat unexpected time because he isn’t that old but he had a weird injury and it wasn’t treated and… that’s how life works.  There is nothing I can do to help her with this.  This is her own journey of grief.  I imagine what it would be like to lose a father at this age after having had a relationship with him, having lived with him, for so many years.  I can’t imagine that.  Not really.  It’s going to be bad when my mom dies.  I will feel so much guilt.  I don’t even know if I will be told.  For all that Jenny isn’t close with her family she has never broken contact.  She has always treated them appropriately and with respect.

Everyone has a complicated relationship with their parents.  It’s a difficult relationship.  I understand it more from the side I am on now.  It seems to me that parenthood is a relationship based on temporary, stored power.  Right now I have incredible power over my children.  I get to decide pretty much everything about their lives.  In fifteen years Shanna will be an adult.  My power over her will be limited to the amount of influence she chooses to allow me.  It will depend on how well I have earned that respect.

Yesterday I spent my off hour reading/watching videos about Steve Jobs again.  I like his Stanford commencement speech and his sister’s eulogy is gut wrenching.  I also watched a few random videos about happiness because D sent them to me.  What does it mean to live?

When we were up in Portland I broke a large relationship rule.  This is part of why I say I am not good at monogamy.  Noah was right next to me and handed me the implement so he’s not as angry as he could be.  What happened is we were at Dad’s birthday party (non-bio dad) and I got to talking to one of my sisters-in-perversity.  Dad has a whole harem of daughters you see.  The one in question is the youngest in terms of being newest to the family but she is a year older than me and thus technically the oldest of us.  I refer to myself as the senior daughter for clarity.  He adopted me first.  We like to ignore the one he adopted second.  She’s not my favorite sister.

I don’t keep in close contact with this sister most of the time.  Her life is in a very different place than mine and we are both busy.  It’s not a slam or a negative judgment.  It’s nice to catch up when we can.  At this party I heard a lot about this guy she had fairly recently broken up with–see, there he is.  She spent a lot of time watching his scene with another woman.  Her heart was on her sleeve.  One of the things that breaks my heart faster than anything is seeing a woman I love pining over a piece of shit man.  And from what I saw of this guy… yeah… he’s a piece of shit.

I don’t like men who pursue mastery to be degrading to women.  If you only want to own women you can insult then I have a low opinion of you.  I don’t mind that you want to use those names sometimes, but if that is what you think of your partners I think you have a personality disorder you fucking piece of shit.  You are not better than women.

My sister managed to kind of get involved in the scene.  She really wanted to play with him.  The girl he was playing with was slightly less extreme of a bottom than my sister and my sister pretty obviously wanted to show off.  The guy demurred.  He had been using his belt as a whip.  He gave it to his slave/submissive/bottom/partner/whatever her chosen identity label thing is.  He then taunted and forced her to hit my sister.  She did, but it was lackluster and obviously not that intense.  It was a giggly good time.  The guy started encouraging fairly random other people to hit my sister.  One got her in the eye because he didn’t know what he was doing.  I felt like I was watching a train wreck.

I nudged Noah and told him to give me his belt.  He did.  See how it feels kind of fuzzy for him to get mad at me for doing it?  But I’m not supposed to play with people any more.  It didn’t feel like a scene, exactly.  I sure didn’t do it for my sexual gratification.  I did it because I didn’t want to listen to those asshole men tell her that she was a dirty whore.  They didn’t mean anything nice by it.

My sister has had times in her life when she needed to feed her kid and she didn’t have a job.  She has sold her body to put food on the table.  I felt such an explosion of anger when he was picking on her for it.  They dated.  He knows her history.  He was explicitly picking on something that is a mixed circumstance in her life.

I changed the intensity of the scene.  I only used the belt and I stayed on her thighs: the fronts, backs, and sides.  I hit her hard and I hit her fast and I forced her emotional reaction towards panic as hard and fast as I could.  And while I did it I started a litany to her.  You are not bad.  You are good.  You are strong.  You are brave.  You are fierce.  You have survived things that would take down lesser people.  You are strong.  You are good.  She tried to interrupt me and tell me that she was a whore.  I paused long enough to hold her face in both of my hands and tell her that even if she has had to prostitute her body to survive she isn’t a whore.  You are not defined by what you do.  She is a bad ass mother fucker.  She sobbed and clung to me.

Bdsm is rarely about sex for me.  That is not how I grew up in the scene.  I made every top who was kind of sort of leaning in to get in on the hot available action flinch and back off.  I was not going to be one more person starting a pile up on a poor girl.  I was nastier and meaner and harsher.  I kind of like being the visiting bad ass.  This wasn’t a game.  It was very serious business.

I do bdsm because it is one of the best ways I know to force the body to get rid of the excess energy that poisons people.  There is atonement and release and a journey to find the core of yourself.  When you are in the middle of a very intense scene you can’t hide who you are.  You react from the animal core of yourself.  I am a vicious animal who will strip you down to the bone and show you what it looks like.  I will tear the flesh from your body so that you know that I can see all the way through you.  I see exactly who and what you are.

And you are beautiful.  Your strength amazes me.  That you can allow me to do this to you amazes me.  I worship you.  I adore you.  I love you.  Thank you for showing me this fierce core of strength and intensity that other people simply don’t have.  It takes a warrior to experience pain like that over and over and over.  We don’t have a good place in our current world for people who have to suffer.  Even being a soldier is more about being a cog in the machine.

I see in my sisters-in-perversity a desire to be made clean through suffering.  Not all people in the bdsm world are after the same thing.  But I know my sisters when I meet them.  I see the same need in men, but I am less able to address it.  It has long felt like a flaw in me.  I can’t offer the same experience to men.  I am too locked in being afraid of men.  I can’t look at them the way I can look at a woman.  I can’t identify in the same ways.  I have always believed that is a grave failure.  I’m sorry for it.  There is a part of me that understands men as other and I don’t know how to change that.  I see a specific wildness in women.  I see women in bear traps thrashing about.  I understand their feelings.  I don’t have to know all their feelings.  I don’t have to really know everything about their lives.  I know that trapped.  I know that desperate need for release.

I know how to rip someone down until they can no longer stand nor defend themselves.  I know how to make them cry and hurt and wish they could do anything to get away from the pain.  The pain I am giving is just a stand in for all those things they can’t change in their lives.  All the things that hurt and hurt.  All those other things make you feel worse about yourself.  Because it hurts and you can’t stop it.  It weakens you over time because no one can stand up forever under an onslaught.

My beatings are short in duration.  And the whole time you are taking it you are being coaxed and reassured and told that what you are doing is impressive.  You are showing your mettle.  You are proving how very strong you are and I will delight in building you up with it.  By the end you know that you are an intensely strong person and you can go do fucking anything.  Anything in the whole world.  Most people are cowards compared to you.  Not very many people will permit a beating like I give.  I only hit the girls who can’t say no.  They have outrageous pain tolerances.  Other people want warm ups and I’m not here for that shit.  I’m here to prove that I can take you apart but it will be a lot of hard work for both of us because you are so god damn intense.

I always stay in contact with my sisters-in-perversity for a while after a visit.  It seems important.  They see a part of me I don’t reveal much in life.  It’s interesting for me to get perspective on how we are changing over time.  I learn a lot more from brief flashes of my wounded warriors than I do from dozens of conversations with people who have never been hurt.  This is the part I hesitate to say because it sounds so awful.  I learn what mistakes are there for me to make.  When I see my wounded warriors I see There But For The Grace Of God Go I.  In their struggles to perceive themselves as valuable I see what could happen to me if I had a lower opinion of myself.  I know that I was brought up to be one of them.  I was quite literally brought up to be competitive about being able to take more pain during sex.  Thank you, Jim.  You were an inspiring father.

I have been binging on sugar for the past few days.  It’s kind of obscene.  I came home from Portland and both girls are acting out in various ways.  I feel trapped and angry and frustrated.  My life fucking sucks.  But my life only sucks because I have a bad attitude.  I look at my sister-in-perversity and I have to understand that my life is quite cushy in terms of me having everything I want when I want it.  Sure, I have to do it with my kids along.  That just means I need to figure out how to work with my kids.

Someone on facebook linked to an article about why French parents are happier.  Apparently in French they do not have the concept of “discipline” the way we do here.  They constantly think that they are educating their children.  My entire life right now is an education to my children.  What am I teaching them?  Dissatisfaction.  The funny part about sitting in the garage as I write… it’s a constant reminder that I get work done with my children around.  I didn’t have child care when I insulated the walls and put dry wall up.  I didn’t have child care when I painted a mural.  I had help sometimes.  I had friends who did it with me.  But my children were around and under foot and I cared for them.  I had help for all the stuff that was genuinely beyond my ability to do it alone.  I could not have done the drywall without the consistent and reliable help of T.  He saved my ass.  I’m going to owe that man for a few lifetimes.  He doesn’t understand what he is to me.

I have been struggling for a long time with feeling trapped.  It’s been a lot of … well… all of it.  I have a lot more freedom than most.  More than most people for all of history.  I am somewhat unique in being financially secure in a tumultuous period of history.  Yes, we could be hit with disaster.  For now I am going to continue with the fact that I am ridiculously safe.  I have a lot of options.  Even as Noah and I fuss back and forth about the fact that we have to carefully budget… we have a lot of options.  Noah only  gets $600 to spend on a weekend trip with his buddy.  Cry me a river.  We have a really good life.

In every relationship I have in my life there is a mixture of uplifting and wearying.  I need to start thinking a lot harder about the uplifting or I am never going to get out of this muck.  I have a marathon to run.  I can’t be hanging out in the muck.  It’s too tiring.  I will injure myself.  I have to run five miles today.  You know–just get up and do it.  And tomorrow I’ll run three miles.  On Saturday I will run seven miles.  Next Saturday eight miles.  So on.

When I run I feel strong and capable.  What I used to get from getting my ass beaten.  I don’t know how to get it from getting my ass beaten any more.  Now I’m always mad that Noah isn’t doing _______ exactly how I would.  It’s kind of sick.

I don’t know how to be a follower right now.  But we don’t have room for much else in our relationship and I don’t know how to guide us.  I don’t know how to guide Noah.  That’s an interesting thought.  I resent being the guide for more than a couple of minutes.  I’m impatient.  I want to be lead.  There are journeys Noah simply can’t lead me on.  He doesn’t know how to get there.  I’ve had kind of this dawning horror around this topic recently.  I have some ideas.  I’m not ready to spill them yet.

I don’t know what the future will bring.  I hear that if you spent more time focusing on the positive you can change your life.  You can actually make things better.  I am fairly uniquely positioned to do so.  Dr. Frankl taught me that if you have something you are burning to do you can get through any circumstance.  Some dude on a Ted talk yesterday brought up the idea that everyone desperately wants to live.  Then I listened to Steve Jobs talk about how much he wanted to live.

How does one go about finding their own path?  Well, I think by definition I can’t ask anyone else.  Whatever it is they did or would do will be wrong for me.  That’s why I’m not fond of advice.  I do like hearing stories though.  I like finding out what other people have done and why.  I’ve been reading a lot more recently.

When I feel fussy about what I am doing I need to decide what I would rather be doing and do that.  That’s part of the binge eating of sugar.  The kids are pestering me for sugar.  We have a lot in the house that we don’t normally have.  I am tired of fighting the kids off of it.  I’m tired of being whined at for it.  I’m eating it with them them till it is gone.  Then we don’t get dessert unless you can talk me into making some with sweet behavior.  I like doing it when I have a cheerful house to do it for.  I won’t do it for whining.  It has worked for me in the past.  I think we ran out of chocolate last night.  Now the sweet snack in the house is fruit.  When the answer is, “We don’t have any chocolate in the house; would you like an apple?” The response is more positive than you think.  And then we just don’t think to buy it at the store.  It works out.  One of these days she will remember to ask for it at the store.  That will be figured out later.

I’m getting defensive already.  That’s lame.  I felt cheerful through most of the writing.  I’m tensing up as I think about going in.  The family is awake now.  The girls are extra clingy right now.  I will miss these days.  It’s a lot of physical contact for me.  I feel bad about how difficult it is for me to handle physical touch sometimes.  I wish I liked it more.  This is part of my feeling of inadequacy.  I’m not sure why I feel inadequate though.

I’m supposed to think about three things I am grateful for.  I’m always grateful for a white wall in my house.  I like thinking about how I will paint it.  I think I should paint it next month after I get the book edited and up on Amazon.  We’ll see.

I’m grateful that I get to raise two daughters in an environment where I am not under ridiculous stress all the time.

I’m grateful for stories to think about.  Something is bubbling in my head.  I’ll think about it on the long run today.  I’m going to run to Lake Elizabeth.  It is just over five miles roundtrip.  I hope it warms up soon.  I have to leave by nine.  Noah is having a late start day.  I should probably go see him for the time I can today.

It’s going to be a good day.

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I have stress erupting all over my life right now.  But I finally hit a moment this morning where I realized that I am truly doing everything I can to fix all of the situations I am standing near and all that needs to happen is time passing.  It will all get easier and better.  We really have gotten through most of the worst bits.

I get to choose what kind of day I am going to have.  Today is Sunday.  Today my wonderful Noah is home.  I get to spend time with him and our awesome kids.  Sunday is a rest day.  I don’t clean on Sundays.  (Yes, yes I know that you are supposed to rest on the Sabbath not on Sunday, but I’m a heathen.)  Today my husband is going to shave my head.  Eek.  I need to be in the right mood for that or it would be wasting the experience.  I’m not having him shave my head because I want to be bald.  Clippers would be fine for removing the color.  He wants the experience.  He has a whole constellation of experiences he would like to have around this.  I can either decide to have a good day and get my shit together and go have really good experiences with my husband… or I can be a pissy, whiny bitch.  What a joy.  So it’s probably time to put my big girl panties on.  I sent all the emails I am probably going to send today.  I am thinking about a lot of things.  It’s time to stop thinking about them and think about other stuff.  It’s time to go have flow experiences.  It’s been a while since we have really played.  This is going to be interesting to be challenged right now.  He wants me to give him something of mine.  He wants part of me.  Part of me that I have never shared with anyone in my life.

I kind of have to be present for that.  It wouldn’t be just to be otherwise.  I think my phone will stay in the garage on vibrate.  I will probably check it at some point, but I have a date today.  I’m busy.

I kept myself company while watching a movie.

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I’m thinking about escapism and loneliness.  I’m thinking about destiny and choice.  I’m watching a terrible movie so how could I think about anything less lofty?  King Arthur is the choice of the morning.    I’m watching movies about people who lived long ago and I’m wondering… what did they do with their time?  How did they while away the hours until death?  Did they really work all. the. time?  No, they couldn’t.  No one can.  But I look at the meaningless gestures in movies (dude smashing a pot just out of frustration) and I think, “Holy shit.  Someone would have to remake that by hand.”  I think of the things I have to repair when I break it in frustration.  It’s different.

I live in a small, constrained world.  I don’t have anywhere in my life I can go pick a fight with impunity.  I don’t have anything that wants my aggression.  I am supposed to be pleasant or at least neutral basically all of the time.  The running is one of the better coping mechanisms anyone can come up with and I’m doing what I can at this point.  I’m working on it as fast as I can and be good to my body.  Really.  Probably faster, in fact.  I am impatient.  I really should be stretching more.

Neutral or pleasant requires a lot of concentration and thinking about my demeanor.  It mandates a lot of silence on my part when I cannot be certain what my tone will be.  That’s a lot of concentration.  I think about how much freedom there would be in a place where sudden outbursts of violence were tolerated more because everyones life sucked.  Life was simply brutal.  You had to just expect that one or more of your children would die.  You were lucky if all of your children lived to adulthood.  It meant you were special.  God must have favored you.

Now we think that if your child gets a scraped knee it is because you weren’t working hard enough to protect them at every moment of the day.  And we must also ensure that they are entertained in a suitably educational environment for as many days a week as possible.  And activities!  It is no longer enough that you keep them from starving and keep them warm and clothed.  Now you must also provide for their entertainment and benefit constantly.  I think we make parenting a lot harder than it has to be.

I think of how very little survival is entailed in my life.  Is that why I feel free to create my own torment?  Is that why I start cycles of self-harm?  I believe that I should be hurt, that I deserve to be hurt.  And then I look around at pop culture for escapism from my non-hurts and see these glossy pictures of the only exciting two hours and twenty minutes that happened over a span of decades.  Seriously?  Wow.  Ok.  That’s a lot of shitty time to just gloss over as if it isn’t part of life.  I think that is the part that is missing in the cycle right now.  No one wants to put their head down and do the hard, shitty, brutal parts of life.  Brutal is so relative, you know?

I have been physically safe for the vast majority of my life if you judge by minutes of danger.  That is not true of most people throughout history.  If you look back, not that far, people had a lot more danger in every minute of their life.  Not too long ago you had to worry about a measles epidemic meaning you lost one or more of your kids.  We have gone so far in the other direction that people believe the benefits of survivorship outweigh the costs.  That we have somehow lost something by not culling the herd in that way.

If it was not my responsibility to live as long as possible, how would my actions be different?  If I were more likely to possibly die of starvation?  If I had real fear of disease?  I really and truly laugh at increased cancer risk warnings sometimes.  Because we have to die of something.  I have a pretty lame life if my only risk is increased cancer risk because I am carefully meting out my self-harm in ways that won’t really shorten my life but will make my time here less pleasant.

Anyway.  Kids like me used to be able to get in a lot of fist fights.  By the time you were an adult you had either gotten your shit together or you ended up in relationships where you hit and were hit often.  Honestly if I hadn’t been told and told and told and told that I deserve better I would be able to live that comfortably forever.  It would feel right.  I’m trying to figure out what I can do with the desire to be put in my place.

I feel like I don’t want to be the boss because the only boss I know how to be is an abusive one.  I can’t mete out tasks.  I can’t be in charge of that.  But Noah and I went round and round until I finally got to the point where I was keeping the house as “clean” as he thought that meant.  It was a process.  I am not good at turning around and dictating to other people how much work that means because apparently I do a lot more work than other people are inclined to do in a given period of time.  I can’t give someone the incentive of $30 an hour to work as hard as I work on my house.  That’s an experiment I can’t afford to repeat.

Having children in the house all day means destruction and food spills all day.  One right after another.  Going out is a different set of stressors.  It’s all a balance.  I don’t have time to think right now.  There are too many things I need to actually focus on.  I need to start learning Quickbooks.  Looks like that is going to work out after all.  I don’t know how I am going to make it work.  I’ll find a way.  And maybe if I have more to get done I will discover that I have less time to sit and think about how wretched my life was a long time ago.  That’s the essence of “getting over” PTSD, right?  You have to get on with your life and stop being distracted by things that are no longer happening.

It’s interesting how we seek to recreate cycles over and over again.  We want to do the things we are comfortable with.  That’s kind of the definition of insanity, yo.  What does it mean to do something different?  What should I be doing with my mind instead?  That’s what actual “coping” means.  It means successfully using up all of your time on thinking about other things.  It means finding a way to while away the hours until death doing things that bring you joy instead of things that irritate you.  That means you have to look at the things you are doing pretty carefully.

So far my method of parenting seems to be training them by modeling behavior.  I limit my world to things that can include them.  The more of the outside world I have to deal with and the more adult thinking I have to do the harder this is for me.  The shift is not automatic.  And I have to know my chores are done or I can’t relax.  I just can’t.  I recognize that not everyone agrees with my fanaticism.  I try to keep my chores to such that I can do them in two or three hours in the morning and be done for the day.  It seems like a reasonable amount of time.

I think I hide in the garage for three hours a day because I think that Noah needs to have individual time with his kids every day where he is also responsible for life stuff because they have to work out how to be around each other and this is the only time they can.  I just wish it left more hours for us to all be together.  If I go in there then it ends up being “kids are distracted at all times so they never have to entertain themselves”.  No thanks!  I am alone with my children for a very large number of hours a week.  They need to have steady time with people other than me.  It’s important for them to not grow up thinking I am the sole model of adulthood.

But I need to think a lot harder about how I am doing this and how much work I can handle doing in an ongoing way.  I think it will be ok.  I’ll find a way.  And I have to do it in a way that allows me to feel like I am enjoying my life.  What can I do that will help me enjoy my life more?  And it has to be pretty nearly free.  Excellent.  On one hand I feel like the answer is, “I have a whole library here of books I haven’t read.  I should read them.”  There are reasons I haven’t read the books I haven’t read.

Maybe I need to sit in one place and learn to think about things that are not my favorite.  Maybe I need to learn about a few more things.  I’ll have more time later.  The kids won’t need me so much later.  I’m not going to be in a place where my life is genuinely hard, maybe ever again.  I feel like such a whiner.  Isn’t that what mental illness is about?  Being upset by reality is kind of silly.  Perceived risk is such a strange thing to be afraid of.

I am not ever required to do something that is too hard for me again.  I can say stop.  It’s hard to adjust to and I feel ungrateful.  And I suppose that is my freeform response to watching this silly movie.

First world problems

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s why.

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This morning I had an important thought.  If I stop smoking pot now I am going to start cutting frequently.  The Ativan is not a choice that works as well.  I’m not willing to be on a daily pill, even though I probably should at this point.  My mood cycles have been horrible in the last two weeks.  Pot levels it all out and makes me cheerful and just barely stupid.  I am in a great space to sit and play with Play Doh for hours.  I can build with Lego’s all day.  I’m noticing what things I didn’t get Shanna that I probably should have.

I’m enjoying how cuddly and affectionate Calli is… when I’m stoned.  When I’m sober it bothers me and I want to get up and walk away.  There is something wrong with me.  When I am sober it hurts.  She bangs her head on me, she scratches, she steps on me awkwardly or knees me or or or or…  I kind of hate it.  When I am stoned I just mumble, “oooph, gentle with Mommy”.  I’m so glad to be near her that I don’t mind her rough antics.  She doesn’t mean anything by them.  She’s just a baby.

My body isn’t a good place to be lately.  I have to spend a lot of time dissociated if I want to function at all. It’s hard.  Most of my body hurts most of the time.  My stomach hurts terribly from stress, pot also levels that out.

Pot allows me to put aside my grown up concerns and worries and just be present and happy in the moment with my kids.  Most of the day is really quite pleasant.  I only think about things that are relevant to what is in my line of sight, quite deliberately.  That’s how I manage to be a good mother.  I think only of our immediate house and my kids most of the time.  I don’t divide my energy well.  I can work on house stuff like cleaning with the kids around, but that’s the limit.  Sometimes they let me read.  They hate the computer and mostly I have to be in a different room on a break in order to use it.  That’s when I smoke pot.

I go think about grown up things for brief periods behind closed doors during the day.  That is what having Sarah here gives me.  Time to walk away from the kids when my thoughts become intrusive.  When I am starting to feel edgy I can ask for a break.  I’m trying to have the breaks be as effective sober and they just aren’t.  My emotions are too intense.

I have ridiculous self-control and ridiculous patience… within small tight boundaries.  My kids will grow up being told frankly that I smoke because I need the medicine in the plant and there isn’t a better way to get it out for me.  Why do I need the medicine?  Because of something that was broken when I was a little girl.  They won’t be broken in that way so they won’t need the medicine.  It’s rather unpleasant to do, so I don’t recommend it.  Shanna will cheerfully lecture anyone within hearing on how disgusting and unhealthy smoking is.  Yay California.

But sober, I’m edgy and raw.  I cry a lot.  I can’t stand to let anyone touch me and when my kids grab me my entire physical reaction is to want to shake them off like a dog.  I loathe being touched.  It feels like such a disgusting and horrible incursion into my body.  Every touch feels bad right now.  Everything hurts.  The most gentle of caresses feels like a slap.  I can mostly dissociate away when sober, but not enough to smile or pretend I am enjoying it.

I don’t want my children to grow up with a mother who flinches away from them constantly as if they are terrible people for wanting to touch her.  I think I should get stoned instead.  It doesn’t really matter that I feel bad about doing it.  It doesn’t matter that the stupid bitch at PAMF looked at me like dirt because I have a medical card.  It allows me to be a good mother.  I feel so ashamed of myself for needing it.  I guess this makes me an addict?  Officially?  I don’t know.

It seems to me that most of life is about walking a series of thin lines.  I am more ashamed of cutting than I am of smoking pot.  The specific reason I think it is worse is because I will be more strongly judged and censured for cutting.  I don’t know a lot about tribal cutting, I’ve never bothered to find out.  I can imagine there being places in the world where my desire to cut myself to deal with my emotional experience would be viewed differently.  If I were to lose my fear of judgment, I would be able to represent myself in a way that would feel more honest.  I am a person who has experienced a lot of pain. But I did it in a way that is invisible and hard to ignore.  There are scars all through my vagina.  I think the scars should be on the outside so that other people can see them.  I think that marking yourself in proportion to the pain you feel is a way of identifying yourself so that you can find other people to talk to who can hopefully give you relevant advice beyond, “Just cheer up!”  Yeah, fuck you too.

Pot keeps me from feeling suicidal.  I’m just not desperate enough.  It really pisses me off that I can never really be a martyr for any cause ever in my life because if I go in a way that is not completely fucking random people will assume I killed myself.  It’s just got to be the base assumption forever.

I’d really like to kill myself.  But in my personal hierarchy of needs it is far far more important that I never give my children the experience of parental suicide.  Jimmy thinks that just not talking about things and not doing the same things will break the chains and he’s wrong.  The only thing that will break the chains is consciously talking about what we are doing and then choosing to do something else.  It is hard to be a different person.  It doesn’t happen by sitting back silently and hoping it happens.

Who do I want to be?  I want to be someone who doesn’t need to be apathetic all the time in order to function.  This stage of processing won’t last forever.  What do I need to change about my life in order to not get back to feeling this desperate and hurt?  Can I change enough?   Is this just something that is part of me because of my previous trauma?  Will I always find a new trigger somewhere down the road?  I don’t know.  I really don’t.

I’m just bitchy and mean and bored and antsy and angry and touchy when I am sober.  I feel so dissatisfied with everything in life.  I hate that in myself.  And when I’m stoned I’m fine.  No really.  I am doing exactly what I said I would and I do enjoy it when I can focus on it.  There must be something wrong with me if I need pot to focus.  That’s not very functional, only it is.  I’m functional, I really am.  I beg the internet to believe me.  Why do I care so much?  Why do I feel like I constantly have to prove that I have some value.  I am not just a worthless piece of shit.  Even if I do smoke pot.  Even if I am just a disgusting whore.

I think I’m ordering more pot today.

Thinking about forgiveness

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Do you know what not forgiving means?  It means dying alone and angry no matter who is in the room.  I don’t want to die alone.  I don’t want to die afraid.  I don’t want to be angry that after all this misery all I get is death.  I don’t want that.  I want to die knowing that I have honest to fucking god made the world a better place.  I helped other people be happier, better, stronger, wiser.  I want to die smiling.  I want to know that I did exactly what I was supposed to do and I helped as many people as I could.  I want to feel peace.   Some day I want to know peace.

As long as I am angry like this there is no room.  I have nothing to give.  Being angry takes up so much of me.  I don’t want this.  I don’t want this to be my life.  I don’t know the path and I am so afraid.

Every marriage involves different compromises.  Different accommodation of irritations.  Different forgiveness.  Because the human condition is that we bump each other funny sometimes.  Thank you to all the women who wrote me to tell me that you are angry at Noah too.  It actually made me feel better.  I felt like the anger wasn’t just mine.  And that’s complicated too.  Life is long and life is hard.  Noah really fucked up.  But he has never done anything to break my trust like this before.  He has carefully in pre-negotiated ways pushed me right up to the edge of my limits and off a cliff.  But that’s not the same thing as breaking trust.  He has never broken trust before.

That does have to count for something.  He knew he was being a raging dick.  He didn’t mean to do what he did.  I have never seen him cry before.  He says it hasn’t happened since junior high.  He probably already feels bad enough.  Beating him down isn’t a way to have a happy marriage.  It really isn’t.

I will never again bear a child.  That is a decision I have made for myself.  I want to spend my life with the only person I will ever really completely join my body to.  I want to.  And he’s going to fuck up some times.  And I am going to get very very angry with him.  But I keep my promises.  I promised him a lifetime.

What does forgiveness even mean?  It means telling him how I feel about sex with other people and watching him cringe.  It means filling in the dots for him on some of my broken.  It means telling him that I don’t want to have sex with other people any more.  Even though taking that hit on my identity is going to be massive for me.  I am going to feel compulsive.  I am going to want it.  And I think I shouldn’t do it any more.  It’s not actually a good decision for me any more.  Given who I am I don’t think it will actually be a healthy thing for me to do with other people ever again.  I think this broken is too deep.

It’s time to try something else.

I love country music.

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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 think talking about money is important.

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So after covering the checks I have already written for Occupy I have ~$32,000 sitting in my bank account.  Do you know how much money I have to pay this month for various expenses?  I owe $17,000 on credit cards.  That will be paid off this month.  I still haven’t paid property taxes or the mortgage or the domestic help or my therapy.  That’s another $9,000.  This is an unusually expensive month.  Our income is settling in to about $8,000 per month.  I am waiting to write checks for $17,650.  That means that on the 30th of this month, if I succeed in giving all the money away, I will only have around $6,000 in cash.  We have months that cost $15,000 on a fairly regular basis.  We pay for a lot of things.

People who know me know that having a large financial cushion is kind of a ridiculous driving force for me.  It’s unhealthy.  I grew up in a kind of poverty I honestly don’t like thinking about.  But holy fucking shit is my life different now.

That money was originally earmarked to pay off the Disney timeshare.  I bought the timeshare when I realized it was only took four trips of the kind Sarah likes for her birthday to pay off the investment and we really do want to be at Disneyland every year…  I bought it for Sarah and me.  Noah wasn’t thrilled.  Noah is not interested in spending that much time at Disneyland, thankyouverymuch.  He’ll go.  But not every year.

I have done Disneyland with Sarah enough times that it is worth it to me to buy the time share.  Do you know why?  Mostly because she is disabled.  It is hard for her to expend the energy to travel long distances, sometimes even with motor devices.  If we are in an apartment that is just a few yards away from an entrance she can afford the spoons to rest in the middle of the day and really enjoy evening stuff.  It feels loving to be at Disneyland with Sarah.  She appreciates it the same way my mom does.  Just sitting on a bench with a book while people walk by makes her happy.  Disneyland is a place to just sit and feel joy.

So I bought a fucking Disney time share and I feel like a privileged asshole.  I feel strangely embarrassed that I bought this stupid thing.  What a dumb fuck am I, right?  Only dumb fucks buy time shares.  It’s a racket.  Geez.  What a fucking waste of money.  A number of people have told me off for this.

Do you know how many weeks of joy this has already brought me?  Sarah and I get to dream about future vacations.  They are paid for.  I will have to pay for park tickets and gas to drive there.  Otherwise we can cook in the apartment and it’s not any more expensive than being at home.  Really.

It’s financed at 10% and I’m pissed off with myself for continuing to carry that debt.  I wanted it paid off in a year.  Err, that hasn’t happened.  Other things keep coming up.  Like getting my heart Occupied.  Why is this so fucking important?  Because people matter.  We need a William Wallace.  We need someone to step up.  This is a Revolution.  Hell, we need everyone to step up.  What can you go do, today, tomorrow, and the next day to make the world a better place?  Stop sitting in your house whining about your problems.

Says the whiny blogger who has barely left the house in months.  Cause Jesus Christ, if anyone should stop whining it’s me.  My life is the fantasy.  My life is the mythical American Dream in all of the particulars.  Oh, except that pesky PTSD shit.  How do I fix me so that I can enjoy the American Dream?

Well, I’m writing.  I think good will come from it.  I think that is one of the gifts that was given to me in this lifetime.  I can give people things to think about.  They won’t always agree with me, probably rarely.  But I want them to get to the point where they say, “Ok, I guess I can see why you feel the way you do.”  That’s what I fucking want.  I don’t need to have other people agree with me.  I need them to understand WHY I am different.  Why my opinion is different.  Because maybe that will ripple.  Maybe other people who have different opinions are ok too.  Can we stop beating the shit out of political parties?  What is the fucking point?  Grow up you stupid babies.

People are people.  I’m neither a Democrat nor a Republican.  I kind of hate you all equally.  And don’t get me started on how I feel about socialists.  Or the members of my own, Libertarian party.  I feel pretty embarrassed to be associated with them.  Good grief.  But it is the closest to what I believe.

I’m getting away from the point.  When my heart was Occupied my priorities shifted.  Noah is never going to want to stay home with me while working a part time job.  He doesn’t want to.  Ok.  The dramatic need to lower our monthly expenses so that can happen… doesn’t really need to happen.  If it takes longer and I pay more interest in the time share, that will be ok.  Really.  I can deal having to “tighten my belt”.  We are part of the 99%.  In order to maintain all the insurances folks consider necessary we have more than $6,000 of our income promised before it arrives.  It’s $8,000.  We have months where we put $17,000 on the credit card.  You do the math.  No really, that’s going to require some belt tightening.  But I don’t exactly feel like I can complain about that.

And I have the money to spend.  Occupy needs it more than I need to be able to have the lifestyle to which I have become accustomed.  The fact that I can preplan 50 years of vacations means that my life is already as good as it needs to be.

The reason I feel I need to give the money is because people need a spark of hope.  They need to see things being done.  I can’t be the William Wallace for this movement.  I really kind of wish I could.  But that’s not my story.  I’m trying to bait other people.  I’m trying to push them to expand their dreams.  Whoever is going to be the firebrand to lead this Revolution, (s)he will not have much money to start with.  But there will be so much hunger.  So many dreams.  That person will say, “Yes give me your money so I can change the world.”  I hope.  I really hope.

In the meantime I took my family to a park clean up day in Oakland the Occupy folks organized.  I have marched.  I sit in the encampment and eat lunch and talk to the people who live there as I feel I can emotionally.  I think my next clean up day should be in Fremont.  I think that I’m about out of spoons for driving to Oakland.

I think maybe I should just open my front door and walk out it.  I think I should Occupy the space I am in.  Why am I trying so hard to give this money to Oakland?  Why am I beating people over the head asking them to please please please take the money?  Why don’t I start my own fucking occupation.  Hm.  It’s an idea.  What would I do if I occupied Fremont?  Hmm.  I would start putting up notices for neighborhood clean up days.  I’ll be surprised if I’m the only one out there.  This is a small town in the middle of a big urban sprawl.

I’ve been surprised by how many of my neighbors have lived here for more than twenty years and they don’t know any of their neighbors.  There is so much hostility and fear and isolation here.  Why?  I feel sad saying that I sat at the local diner and listened to the waitress be casually racist with the other customers.  Despite the fact that I actually know a fair number of people in Fremont… I don’t see them.  Pretty much ever.  If you live in Fremont and you are “interesting” you spend your life in your car trying to get anywhere but here.

I’m getting tired of this attitude.  Fremont is beneath people.  I’ve done it too.  I spent the first many years of our marriage being fucking pissed off living in this fucking house in fucking Fremont.  This is one of the lowest socio-economic areas.  Not the lowest, by any stretch.  This is more like what I grew up with. My friends keep telling me to move to Alameda.  I really don’t want to.  I’m neither interested in the housing cost increase nor the insularity.  I actually like that my neighborhood is not predominantly white.  But I’m scared here.  This is not really the safe bubble people think of in the bay area.

I’m in the closet.  I can go protest in Oakland and be a radical and a pervert and a queer and whatever.  People here just see me as that nice weird lady.  I’m really polite to people in my neighborhood (uhhh except for the one time I yelled at a guy for wasting water while he was trying to deal with his lawn; long embarrassing story).  I’m getting to know my neighbors very slowly.  Very distantly.  I’m trying to be consistent in my behavior over a long period of time without exposing them to my mood swings.  I can’t afford to piss off my neighbors.  Do you know how much pressure that is for me?

How in the hell can I expect my really diverse neighborhood to be thrilled about having a whore who writes about sex on the internet in their neighborhood?  I’m out with the kids all the time.  Aren’t they going to start looking at me as if I am dirty if they find out?  Don’t I need to hide?

I think it is interesting that my friends think the Occupy movement is about money.  I think it’s about pushing for the right to exist and be different and have a different life.  Whatever the fuck that means.  Our entire culture is set up around streamlining people so they can be more and more similar.  I’m not fucking like the folks who grew up in small town Duluth (love you).  And that’s more than ok.  It’s awesome.  I had different experiences so I got to go off and become a completely different kind of person.  I’m not like the people who grew up in Rotorua, either.  Or London near as I can tell.  I go a lot of places and I meet a lot of people.  I never fit.  Nowhere.

Maybe I need to stop going out into the world trying to find someplace that is right.  I think the Occupy movement is about seeing that something that needs to be changed and doing it.  That will be financial for a lot of people.  But it’s also about recognizing that we have abdicated a lot of responsibility to the system.  Any system.  How’s that going for folks?  Maybe if we want something we have to just go fucking do it.

I want to feel ok in my town.  I have to live here.  But I can’t stay in the closet.  This is horrible.  I’m not much like most of the folks around me.  But I’m not like folks anywhere.  That’s ok.  I may not be the right kind of Fremonter, but I’m the right kind of me.  Yeah, it’s a stupid stupid little thing I say.  I say it because I hope it’s true.  I’m trying to convince myself it is.  It’s very hard to believe that who and what I am is ok.  That feels like a lie.  So so so so so so many people tell me that I’m not ok.  Not directly.  Not to my face.  But in the very air I breathe in this culture.  I am so fucking wrong.

The General Strike showed me that I don’t feel that way because of the incest.  I feel that way because I am an American.  In fact, that seems to be our national culture.  Anything different is wrong and bad.  People, you need to lighten the fuck up.  Maybe instead of sitting in an encampment in solidarity with people in Oakland I should be organizing a neighborhood group to figure out a way to meet the needs of the people within walking distance of me.  That’s a significantly better choice for the planet.


But I will have to do that alone.  I won’t be able to throw money at that problem and walk away.  I will have to find the drive and determination to do that.  I will probably mostly be the one doing that, if I think it should happen.  It makes me tired.  I can’t do that yet.  I feel like I am failing my human beings.  I feel like every day that I allow children to walk past my house on the way to school who are going hungry and I ignore that I am just as bad as the people who didn’t help me.  I have so much rage at all of the people who didn’t help me.


Who the fuck am I helping?  I don’t know.  I hope that the RV comes through.  That would be something.  I wish I knew where my life was going.  I feel like I am littering the path with burning ambitions.  Things that hurt me that I am not focusing on them exclusively.  You can’t focus on a dozen things exclusively.  There isn’t enough me for that.


I really hope this movement spreads.  Please people, you can change the world too.  It doesn’t actually take money.  It takes the desire to do good.  You’ll find a way.  Please? 

Trying to steel myself for a let down

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I think that the okcupid boy is going to decide I’m not worth the fuss.  Which is fair, I don’t think I am either.  Uhm, yay for confirmation?  I am asking for a ridiculously specific thing that isn’t very fair.  I feel weird saying it, but I’m kind of sad.  I think I added him to my mental script of November a bit fast.  It would have been a very exciting month.  It was a nice dream.

Instead I will work a lot harder on getting ready for the 5k and I’ll write the book and I’ll try to settle into more peacefulness in the house instead of trying so hard to get out of it.  Apparently right now I’m not meant to be getting out.  That’s ok.

That means that some of my friends will say, “Hey come to Friday Night Waltz!” or (insert event here).  You guys don’t understand the energetic cost to me of getting out of my house right now.  Large group events suck.  They aren’t worth the price of admission.  When I went dancing with my friend, ok that was worth it.  He was a good friend-date.  That was nice.  Those still don’t give me that big jolt of energy that I want.  They make me tired.  Those are work.  They aren’t building me up in the same way.  They are a much more pleasant diversion than most of my life, I’ll say that.  But they are a physical cost. I can’t do very much of that.  I can’t get consistent enough child care and I don’t want to be away from the kids every night.

I am really sad that I don’t get to have an affair.  I honestly think it would cause a few unfun conversations with Noah because I would neglect him.  Only I wouldn’t.  Because I would come home every night and he would wake up with my mouth on his cock.  He would miss me a lot.  Heck, I think the fucker could stand with a little missing me.  It might increase his enthusiasm during the time he has me.  We are so tired.  Uhm, I say “the fucker” with great love and affection.  Just so it’s clear.

Noah has made great strides in his career during our marriage.  I have given him a lot of time and space for that.  That is something that builds him up and makes him cocky.  I like that in him.  He likes me to be built up and cocky.  I haven’t felt that way in a very long time.  I feel beat down and exhausted.  I feel worn out.  I feel fucking boring.  I feel awkward.  I feel unpleasant.  I feel like no one will ever want to pay a lot of attention to me again.  It’s existential angst.  I know.  It’s pathetic.

That’s the problem.  That dismissal right there.  I have a lot of this because of the repercussions of trauma.  And when a doctor prescribes a drug intended to cure mania, what that means for me is the medical profession thinks I need to stop working so hard.  Because I don’t think there is a reasonable way to describe me as truly manic.  In times of crisis I work a lot harder than most people have any interest in working.  I’m not manic.  I don’t fit the diagnostic criteria.  Unless of course, you count my promiscuity.  Which uhm, yeah.  Or the fact that I did have that lovely drug experimentation period.  Uhm, only I’ve never done anything that has harmed my life.

That’s the crux.  I like my life.  I think I have made mistakes, yes.  But I wouldn’t take any of them back. In my opinion mania is reserved for when you impetuously do a whole bunch of things that are really bad for you.  When I was a small child I engaged in a lot of sex play because I was surrounded by sex and I was acting out what I had been programmed to act out.  It wasn’t mania.  As I got older it got more complex and emotional, but I don’t allow my sex to negatively impact my life.  I’m not riddled with disease or unwanted children.  I have *also* had a lot of really fun sex with some interesting people.  I’m glad I’ve done that.  I’ve gotten the affair thing right a couple of times and it’s been life changing.  I have fucked up in looking for what I want and I’ve had a lot of bad days dealing with feeling bad about how I didn’t negotiate properly.

This is why the doctor says I have an omniscience problem.  Because I believe it is possible for me to negotiate well enough to get exactly what I want.  And I’m ok with fucking up along the way as I learn how to do it.  She seems to think this isn’t a good plan and she was constantly trying to figure out how my “sexual acting out”, seriously–she brought this up at least three different times during the hour we were together, “And did you act out sexually during that time too?” whenever I talked about other major symptoms of anxiety.  She’s trying to figure out if I go fuck people every time I get upset.  No, I really don’t.  Bitch.  That kind of judgment pisses me right the fuck off.  I’m friends with the vast majority of people I have had sexual contact with.  Of the people I no longer know, only one is actively acrimonious and that’s a joint issue.  I have been very safe in terms of disease risk and pregnancy… what’s the problem?  Oh wait, I forgot.  I’m just not supposed to do those things because they are amorphously bad.  Well fuck you too.

Err, anyway.  This is my long rant about why I’m not interested in an affair because I’m manic.  I’m interested in an affair because I’m really bored and I don’t know another way to get that really intense bonding and attention I want.  I’m doing it in a way that is entirely on the up and up with everyone in my life.  Why is this a problem?  Who will be harmed?  Why do I need to be medicated away from this?  No.  This is not the approach I want.  I learned a lot about what I need to say on the next visit.  That’s good.

But what I really want is a month of sneaking out after hours to be the crazy super hot girlfriend.  I want it so bad.  I want someone to be obsessed with me.  I do I do I do.  AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH  He’s not going to want me.  *beat head on floor* (I’m kidding Ali!  I won’t do it.  I’ll just shake my fists in fury.  It’s… not the same.)

Bad decisions

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In life there are trade offs.  You only have so many resources at any given point in time.  I feel like an awful lot of the problems in life are because of the fact that there are insufficient resources.  And I don’t mean oil–I’m talking about time and attention.  I’m talking about the fact that I don’t keep up with my friends as well as I wish I could because I cannot handle the fact that I am already touched and pawed at all day long.

A friend else-net got very drunk last night.  She’s at a hard spot in her life and she wanted to drink to forget.  Of course she now believes this has destroyed her value as a person.  On the kind of nights where you drink to forget you tend to believe your value was gone before you started.  I make bad decisions.  I don’t want to add an adverb describing when or how often. Because the reality is I probably make bad decisions about as often as average and maybe less.  Do you want to know why I say that?  Because something being a bad decision or not depends on your perspective.

Getting shit faced drunk and passing out seems like a bad decision.  Until you realize that the alternative may very well be ending your life.  When you realize that choosing to get shit faced drunk so that you can make it through the one bad night is actually a good choice.  At the crisis point, get drunk.  That’s ok.  Really.  It’s not a bad decision.  If that is how you are going to still be alive in the morning it is a good decision.  It’s a bad decision to do it every night.  It is a bad decision to make it a lifestyle.  Anesthetics have their place in life.  I believe it is ok to self-medicate.  But be very careful.

Does that mean it is the safest choice?  Of course not.  Drinking until you pass out is dangerous and I don’t really think people should be doing it.  Much like cutting.  It’s not a great thing to do.  I don’t recommend it as a coping strategy for people who are looking for new tools.  Sometimes people do make mistakes while cutting and accidentally die.  It is not beyond the realm of possibility.

A lot of my friends point out that their lives “weren’t that bad” so they shouldn’t be upset.  I honestly don’t know a lot of people who experienced more abuse than me… and I still don’t feel entitled to be upset.  Not really.  To me that means that it doesn’t matter whether I am entitled to the upset or not.  I am upset.  I need to not worry about whether or not I should be.  I need to not focus on how my being upset affects other people.  I need to look at how being upset affects me.  It’s hard because for all that I have been talking constantly about being narcissistic… I’m truly not.  I have a hard time paying adequate attention to myself.  I worry constantly about the happiness of those around me.  I work extensively to build up other people.  That’s just an insecurity.

It’s just as true for everyone else though.  Ok, there are people who are actually narcissistic.  Most people are just existing though.  You get upset.  It’s ok to deal with being upset.  If that upset goes on for weeks, months, years… you use up your resources.  When you are low on resources sometimes you hit the bottom of the barrel.  It’s ok.  That’s why it is there.  It is still a tool.  The bottom exists for a reason.

Why am I babbling about this.  Because I can say this emphatically when I am speaking with my friend in my head.  When I picture my beautiful, wonderful friend who is going through a very hard time and there is nothing I can do to help… that feels like I am failing in my life.  I don’t want my friends to suffer.  I want to take it away and make everything better.  I want to help build my friends up so big and so strong that they cannot be hurt any more.

I’ve been reading more in TCTH (The Courage to Heal–I’m sick of typing it out.)  I think it is funny that every time I read it I get to a few pages past where I feel emotionally that day.  When I come back and catch up I get to read on the page these testimonies from all these women describing their emotional processes and I could have written them.  It feels really hilarious and predictable.  This experience of going through this book is ensuring that I know I am not a special fucking snow flake.  Ha.  It’s nice though.  I now have this invisible group of women who know what I have been through. Healing from incest is a fairly predictable path.  I’m not lost and wandering and doing it wrong.  I am working the steps.  I really and truly am doing something that is worth doing.  As hard as this is sometimes, as bad as some of my mistakes are… I am improving.

My momentary bad decisions do not negate the fact that I am a good person.  That it is worth getting up every single day and continuing for as long as my body will let me because I add good to the world.  Far, far, far more good than bad.  I haven’t been sleeping enough and my emotions are very close to the surface.  I feel very upset when I see my friends self-flagellating in ways I also do.  It hits home for me what I need to start working on doing and that’s hard.  I kind of don’t need more pressure to work, you know?  I’m very tired.  I feel so flawed.  I feel like I will never be good enough.

And TCTH tells me that is part of the process.  It will pass.  This day will end.  Today I will get good and stoned and I will wander around the house puttering and singing and talking with my babies.  If I just putter around absent mindedly all the rest of the cleaning will magically happen.  But I have to be very stoned.  Or I will be a stress monkey and twitch and be unable to complete tasks and cry and probably scream at both kids.  I have a choice, right this minute.  I can continue to distract myself with the internet because I believe smoking marijuana is a bad choice and I am a bad person for doing it, or… I can shut up and do it.  And have a really nice day.  Bye y’all.

The good bits are really good

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So I’m reading about human pair-bonding habits and the last page made me think of Noah.

Helen Fisher and colleagues (2002:415-17) argued that romantic love includes a consistent suite of traits that cut across cultures. In a sample of Japanese and American respondents, they found thirteen characteristics that were reliably associated with intense romantic love, with few differences between the two samples. A partial list includes:
  • obsessive, ‘intrusive thinking’

  • thinking that the other person is unique
  • prioritizing emotional ‘union’ over sexual desire
  • focusing on positive qualities of the person, while overlooking negative ones
  • increased energy and exhilaration
  • a high sense of empathy and altruism toward the person
  • sleeplessness and loss of appetite
  • feeling greater connection to the person during adversity
  • feeling that intense romantic love is ‘involuntary,’ but also temporary 

Except for that last bit, that is not a bad description for how I feel about Noah this week. Luckily, I don’t have to worry about temporary.