Category Archives: mirrors

But if you try sometimes you just might find you get what you need.

First and most importantly: meeting him went fantastically well. I told him, “I want to ask you a couple of questions, then tell you a story, then ask for a personal favor.” He agreed and settled in to listen to me.

My first question was, “Do you remember the first time we played?” “Uhhhh we played a few times but wasn’t the first time at that Odyssey event when I screwed up with the taser?”

I felt like a weight tumbled off my chest at that moment. Ok. This will be fine.

I told him that him using the phrase “screwing up” means this is going to be a lot easier than I thought. He repeated all of the concrete memories he has of the night (it was twelve years ago–it’s a bit fuzzy). Then I asked him what he knows about me and my life. He knows there were problems with my family and an estrangement–probably abuse and that’s it.

Ok, now I know what he knows.

I started giving him the readers digest version of my life. I talked about trauma for under ten minutes so it was necessarily only some highlights. “I’m the product of rape. My mother didn’t want me. If she hadn’t been Catholic she would have aborted me. I was told that my whole life. My father started raping me when I was a toddler and he kept at it including festively on one occasion holding a gun on my head right after raping me and asking me if I deserved to live.”

He interrupted and said, “Wait–how old were you when he held a gun on you?”

“Nine, ten. I’m not completely sure. It was within a few month period.”

“Holy shit.”

“Yeah. I prosecuted my father when I was sixteen. Just over two years before I met you. In the time between the start of pressing charges and the court date my brother went behind the local grocery store and doused himself in gasoline and lit himself on fire. He didn’t want to deal with what might happen next. He had been attacking me and trying to rape me for over a decade. Luckily he wasn’t big enough to win. I’m a scrappy fighter. My father sat in the garage with the motor running on the first day of the trial. So my family says “He wasn’t found guilty.” And given that my sister has passed the incest on to her kids for the fourth generation in my family I have no more contact.”

“Then, two months before I met you I picked a guy up for a date and had one shot of tequila and I promptly remember nothing from the night. In the morning I was sick as a dog–I spent the whole day vomiting over and over (in port-a-potties at San Francisco Gay Pride–that was fucking festive) and there were three condom wrappers in the trash. I called the police and tried to report being raped. I was told “We aren’t going to ruin that nice boy’s life for you.”

“Between when I was 2 and 25 I was raped by 12 people. The last straw was Paul Nathan. That one just flat drove me out of the community. Done now.”

“I understand that in the scope of my life what happened between us was maybe a 2 on the trauma scale. I have experienced much worse in my lifetime than someone putting a taser on my vulva for one hit. That’s just honestly not that bad in my life.”

“But I need someone who has violated my boundaries to know and care and feel bad. I need it like I need to breathe. I am coming to you, largely as an elder in my community. The rules of the community are that the difference between WIITWD (what it is that we do) and abuse is CONSENT. I was very clearly not consenting to what happened with you. I told you I wanted to stop at no/stop and not play with safewords and you kept going while I hysterically begged you to stop.”

“What I really want from you is a public discussion about what tops should be doing to fuck up less. You have made mistakes. One more hysterical submissive coming along with a story about consent violation is ignored. I promise you. It doesn’t help anyone really. You have a big name. If you really talk about your mistakes and how you have grown and changed that stands a big chance of helping people who need to be helped.”

“If you do research into trauma you will see that one of the most important factors in recovery is community support and validation. Folks who don’t get any… generally don’t recover. You are an elder and a highly respected member of my community. You hurt me. I believe you that it was an accident but there was still result. I have had nightmares about you for years.”

At about this point he stopped me to apologize over and over.

We went minute by minute through the scene using both sets of memories and talked about why the breakdown. “I said this was a hard limit so you immediately pulled one out of your bag.” “Oh, I knew you liked violet wands and I think of these tools as being on a continuum so I tried to get you to find out if you really disliked it or if you just thought you did.” “So you pressured me like fuck to let you try it on my arm. I felt like I couldn’t say ‘no’ and still have a scene.” “Oh that wasn’t well done. Well, once you let me try it on your arm you said it wasn’t as bad as you thought. I thought that was a green light to use it.” “Oh holy hell no.” “And at that time there was a big push for submissives to use their safewords to protect themselves because working through the fake no/no/no was something a lot of people were doing at once and I was used to trying to get girls to defend themselves by using safewords. I was just wrong to do it with you.”

I have never hated him for this.

He asked why I played with him after that. I told him I played with him three more times because I was trying to see if the first scene was a mistake or if you were that kind of scary asshole. If you were that kind of scary asshole I probably would have found a way to hurt you. But you never again made anything resembling a mistake. You did precisely what we agreed to and it was fine. I felt very confused as to whether you were covering yourself better or what.

He asked me to give him specific details about what I would like him to write about publicly and he offered to let me proof it before he goes public. He said, “I have no ego in this. Everyone makes mistakes and if people can learn from me messing up then I am happy to share how that worked. If it will make you feel better, especially given that I had no idea that you as hurt as you were, then it’s the right thing to do.”

I almost curled up and bawled. That was not what I was expecting. I thought he would be a horrid douchebag. He wasn’t. He was a really nice guy.

The early bits only took about 20 minutes. Then we talked for another 40 minutes about how kids change you (apparently his wife has some background information that is like mine) and what he has learned over the past few years. He asked me why I want to homeschool and was impressed that I’m obviously well informed about all of the weird little decisions I make but man would they not be good choices for him. He was positive and cheerful and encouraging. More than once he said, “I feel like this is an interesting conversation but we have reached the edge of what I can usefully contribute so I’m going to just nod for a few minutes and it’s not because I am ignoring you or bored. I just know less than you.”

This was not what I expected.

I told him that I know I am laying an inappropriate amount of grief at his feet. I was very broken long before I met him. The damage is not his fault. But there is this long pattern in my life of people hurting me and justifying it as things I deserve and I need to get past a place where I agree that I deserve to be hurt and I believe my consent is irrelevant. I have to change that if I am going to teach my daughters anything different. He started talking fast about how of course I don’t deserve any of the abuse I have experienced. He went into specifics and talked about how fucked up it was that someone could do those things to a child. There is no way to deserve such treatment as a child.

We talked about psychologically healthy masochists and psychologically unhealthy masochists. We both have views. We talked about how he keeps himself safe at this point because unhealthy masochists generally have a lot of collateral damage. Not necessarily on purpose–but crazy people need specific support not to be told to shut up and bend over so they can be hit. Just sayin’.

I am so glad I went. I feel a lot more calm. I was cycling through panic attacks really fast for a few days. My heart was starting to hurt.

He gave me several big hugs and very sincerely wished me all the best when we parted. He will write something within the next week and get it up on the internet. (He moved house two days ago so he’s really busy–I’m impressed he’s willing to do it within a week.)

Sometimes people surprise me in wonderful ways.

I believe "brave" is a synonym for "stupid".

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It looks like I have plans for Friday afternoon. I am going to talk to someone who once seriously crossed my boundaries.

So when I was 19, two years after prosecuting my father for rape which resulted in my brother lighting himself on fire and my father sitting in the garage with the motor running, and two months after I was raped and the police told me they wouldn’t “ruin that nice boy’s life for me”, I joined the bdsm community. In my first six weeks I asked someone to play. We met through IRC and we did most of our negotiations online.

That sounds pretty dodgy. Even though I was meeting people online they were all people with serious real-life presence in the scene. All of the people in this particular IRC channel were very active in the real-time bdsm community. Many for a decade or more. So I was new but they all knew one another.

The negotiations were: no scat, no water sports, and no cattle prods. I don’t do safewords. If I say “no” or “stop” I mean it.

Of course that means he saran wrapped me to a table and put a tazer on my genitals. “It’s not a cattle prod.” I was hysterically screaming “no no no no” and “please stop” as fast as I could. He turned the tazer on and told me he wouldn’t stop till I safeworded. I did instantly. I believe my phrasing was, “Then safeword you son of a bitch.”

The San Jose PD were watching. The DMs (Dungeon Monitors–the people who ostensibly make you “safe” in the public community) were quite concerned that I not make a scene because the police were there. Shut up already.

A few times over the years I have made bitter references to this with the person in question but I’ve never really sat down to talk to him about it.

I’m going to see him tomorrow. He doesn’t know why we are meeting. I told him that Patti B put me up to it. I told him that I wanted to talk to him about something too complicated to put in writing (not true but I’m not going to ask him to read 50 pages of text) and he agreed to meet with me.

The funny thing is, his son and Shanna were born three hours apart on the same day. The day before our due date.

The kids will play at the park and he and I will sit on a bench.

Why am I doing this?

I’m bringing an amount of grief to this that isn’t fair considering what happened. I will almost certainly tell him so.

I hope to Christ he apologizes. More than anything in the whole fucking universe I want one man who has hurt me to actually apologize. I have an agenda. That’s why I’m going. I want to tell him a little bit about myself (I’m pretty sure he knows basically nothing) and I am going to ask him to apologize. Frankly I would love it if he would be willing to publicly talk about this mistake and what he has learned from it.

If someone who has violated my boundaries was willing to do that–just fucking one–I think I could be a lot less bitter. I think I could believe that not everyone is shit.

Sorry people, you aren’t enough to convince me. I’m sure that is annoying.

I need to have someone feel bad for hurting me. I need it more than I need food. I need to have one person say, “I didn’t do that because you deserved it. I did it because I’m an asshole/I fucked up/whatever.”

I don’t know that I’m going to get any validation whatsoever. I could leave this meeting more suicidal than I’ve been in a while. Who knows. My friends who know him have said I’m underestimating him. Give him a chance.

Ok, I will. But I’m scared. I don’t know how well I believe this will go.

Other than Noah I no longer have contact with anyone who has raped me. And he had permission. So he doesn’t really feel guilty either. How can you rape someone with permission? Well we negotiated that some day he would get to ignore me when I said no. I didn’t know he would pick such a bad day. I thought it would be an easier rape. Oh well. I’m often stupid and wrong.

Mostly the only thing I can do to protect myself is hide and just not know people. I’m kind of hiding in the home school group now. Maybe if I just don’t talk to men anymore…

My fear is irrational I’m told. I’m really weird when it comes to fear. The more afraid I am the more I want to take action. The more I need to do something. I am not going to yell at the guy I’m meeting on Friday. My goal isn’t to be mean to him or take anything out on him. I’m going to find out if he is the sociopath I assume he is or if he is the person other people believe he is. Maybe he will be willing to apologize. It was twelve years ago. Yes, I should be “over it” but I’m not. I have nightmares. I fucking think about this as a perfect example of why I learned not to bother saying ‘no’. It’s hard to have boundaries with Noah.

Although when I’m thinking about this shit we don’t have sex for days. I can’t handle being touched. This still has a noticeable impact on my life.

We’ll see if he cares. I didn’t press charges. I didn’t make this a big thing. I have never publicly dragged him across the coals–mostly I don’t even mention his name when I talk about this. And that’s a level of discretion I don’t give everyone.

If I have any karmic credit he will tell me he is sorry that he hurt me. If my life continues to be true to form he will give me a dismissive lecture about how I was an adult and I asked to play so I deserved what I got.

We’ll see. I’m told I’m underestimating him. We’ll see.

The social mask

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In the past three weeks I have had three people comment on the difference between what I write and what they see when we are together. That makes it something worth writing about.

Of course there is a difference in how I act in public and the crazy shit I write about. If I acted in public the way I write about on my journal I would be in a lot of danger. If I was unable to mask my craziness it would be extremely unsafe for me to go out in public. I would risk being 5150’ed again. I never want to go to a hospital again. I can’t lose it where anyone can see.

If you look at the whiteboard in my room there is a lot written down but if you notice very little of it is outside my house and even less than that is any kind of social activity. I generally keep my “socializing” to under twenty hours in a week and most weeks I’m under eight hours.

That is how much “playing the game” I can do right now.

On the occasional week when I try to push it and do more because that week just happens to be busy I am usually sorry. I will have to spend a lot of time in the bathroom crying for all the hours over my “maximum” I am actually out. It is embarrassing and humiliating and I feel ashamed of myself the whole time.

Being around people involves a lot of active and conscious thinking about “what I am allowed to say”. The consequences for getting it wrong include being asked to leave, being asked to never come back, or if I genuinely lose it and start freaking out I may lose my kids or get arrested.

I’m not exaggerating and I’m not wrong.

I’m aware of how “hysterical” women have been treated throughout history. I have done a lot of specific research. In olden times I may have had to walk around with my tongue in a heavy vice for days or had to wear a collar with spikes on the inside while tied to a post in public so other people could remind me how bad I was.

The consequences in the modern area are downright soft and fuzzy in comparison–I get that. Nevertheless I don’t want them.

I don’t want them. I don’t want them. I don’t want them.

I’m awake in the middle of the night because my stomach is hurting because I didn’t smoke before bed. By 2:30 my stomach hurts and I can’t sleep through it. Then I start having racing thoughts because that is just what I do when I am in pain. Then I risk being a mess tomorrow. Lots of breakthrough crying.

My kids know I cry. I can’t hide it from them. I try my best to present it as, “Everyone is different. I cry a lot–most people don’t. That’s ok. People vary.” They are still young enough that they don’t really ask questions about why.

Noah deals with/occasionally sees me crying as I’m going about my day. I wander around working and crying at the same time. That’s just life for me.

Yes, I believe this is something that I have to carefully keep people from seeing. This is probably, by hour, the biggest part of my life and I have to make sure no one else sees it happening. Or I will get in trouble for being bad again.

The fact that I wander through life feeling very sad and crying for many hours of most days is something I have to carefully hide and prevent people from seeing or I get in trouble. Over and over and over.

It’s not hyperbole. I can tell stories all day and all night long.

I’m at a very low ebb on my ability to “play the game” with other people because I require so much of myself for my interactions with my kids.

My kids know I cry. They know that I have wonky chemicals in my brain that make me prone to have my eyes just start watering and it’s not a big deal and they know that sometimes I think about things that happened long ago and it was bad and I’m really glad that my life is different now and I’m so glad that I know my kids. They know that they are nicer to me than anyone has ever been and that I am grateful.

Well, so far Shanna parrots these things back. I say “them” but I am still working on brainwashing Calli but Shanna is pretty ingrained at this point.

I feel really stupid sometimes but when I am saying in a calm and clear voice, “It’s ok to be mad at me. I do things you don’t like. You are totally allowed to have those feelings but it is not ok to call me names and it is not ok to scream at me. Try again.” I still have tears running down my face. I can keep control of my voice at this point–it is great effort but I can prevent myself from descending into the ragged sobbing sort of breathing that makes talking hard. I sound “like a teacher should” but my eyes are watering.

I feel weird knowing that my children are going to grow up thinking that your mom crying all the time is normal and something to ignore. I feel very ashamed of myself. I feel like I am proving those people right who told me that I should not be a mother because someone like me isn’t capable of being a good mother.

I’m not selfless enough? I don’t have enough self control? For the past couple of years of “bad cycle” which probably actually started as postpartum depression after Calli was born combined with Shanna hitting the age I was when my abuse started so I started having daily intrusive flashbacks.

That was not long after Traci–my therapist of seven years–OD’ed on heroin and I ended up finding Sharon who totally sucked and tried to talk me into believing that I had Disassociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personalities) because of how I segment my behavior when I am around people.

I don’t think I really took the placenta pills as long with Calli. I stopped taking fish oil. I haven’t started again even though I know it is a mood stabilizer. I have other supplements my therapist wants me to start and when I think of the act of swallowing pills I start to gag and my stomach aches just thinking about it.

By the end of the time I was taking all the god damn supplements my midwife wanted me on (15 fucking pills a day) I was frequently spontaneously vomiting them up.

My body knows that when I take a lot of pills it is because I want to die. That is what my body thinks is happening because I was dumb enough to treat my body disrespectfully enough that it doesn’t trust my intentions anymore. Smart body.

I really am not so good at taking pills. And the idea that I should take a handful or so every day for the rest of my life is something that I don’t think I can get my gag reflex to move past.

Even though everyone keeps telling me that if I only swallow this pill my life will be magically better. It hasn’t worked any other fucking time I’ve tried some fucking magic pill. I’m still me. I’m still completely broken. I still don’t have a family or very much consistent support–I am building it. I’m trying. But it is dependent on having people in my life who actually show up to do it. I don’t have many people volunteering for that role and of the people volunteering I have to evaluate for them if they really have enough spoons to be dependable *for me* because I am a god damn special snowflake with standards through the roof.

If I know I will have an out of proportion negative reaction to someone acting how they typically act I need to be very careful how much time I spend around them. It is not their fucking problem I’m crazy and that I have had “bad life experiences” that cause me to want to yell at them. If I can’t be tactful (otherwise known as keep my fucking mouth shut or on trivial topics) then I can’t be around people. I silently back away from most relationships because I don’t think I have the right to hurt people by being mad at them for being them.

I don’t know how to reconcile the fact that it isn’t that I actually think they are wrong it’s that it is very hard for me to keep straight in my head what kind of commentary is appropriate in which settings. I’ve been introduced to a much larger number of social situations than most people. I have moved somewhere between 60 and 70 times in my life. Each of those times involved meeting somewhere between five and hundreds of new people all in a big rush. I have lived at every socio-economic level from the projects to multi-million dollar homes and I went to school with Steve Wozniac’s kid. His son was best friends with the brother of the girl I was best friends with. Many of my friends had server space hosted by Woz because that’s just how things worked. That’s where I lived.

I could pull out my sock puppet prime minister (it’s a long story–maybe I will tell it some day) and name drop all the long list of two degrees of separation I have with “important” people.

So uhm yeah. I walk through life feeling like I am the lowest status person in every single room I walk into. I assume that if I say the wrong thing and offend the wrong person (and I have no god damn idea who the “important” people are–I constantly fuck that up) I will be told to leave and all of a sudden there will be a tidal wave of nasty gossip about me behind my back.

How many illustrative stories do I need to have? I could start with less than two years ago and move backwards over thirty years and have many dozens.

Being the scapegoat is hard. I have a lot of behavior patterns that get me into trouble. I don’t understand exactly how they work. I don’t understand why I am so god damn offensive to people but I am.

I tend to go through life believing that people who are still here are the ones around whom I have been most successful at wearing the right mask. I look for signs that I am breaking their social contract and I try very hard to apologize for fucking up before they have to call me on it because I don’t want to be rejected just because I said or did something that was inappropriate for someone in that kind of relationship.

I hyperventilate over this and hyper-analyze every thing I say or do after the fact and try to look for reasons I might have crossed a line and pro-actively send an apology. I really can’t handle losing many more friends. It devastates me so much.

Oh for the love of toast of course I hide “what I am really like”. I am unpleasant and needy. No one likes people like that. I really can’t handle having more people decide they don’t like me en masse. So I need to be god damn careful about everything I say and do.

After smoking for half an hour I think that the stomach pain has changed enough that I can try eating and see if that will help.

I have been trying to track my marijuana usage more. Why am I using it. When. What, specifically, is it doing for me that I need? Mostly it is the end of the year and I am freaking out about how much I spent (I used edibles basically exclusively for about two months while I was training for the marathon to clear some of the lung funk–yes smoking is disgusting and I would like to stop–and those two months cost as much as the whole rest of the year combined and gosh it sounds like way too much money for any medication and… accompanying shame cycle.) thus I am beating myself up about how much I need to stop using it.

If I’m going to damn myself it will at least be with accurate data.

I go through ~ 1/8 of pot/week. I wake up earlier than everyone in my family and I have some then. It calms my stomach pain enough for me to eat. On days when I don’t smoke before breakfast (often out of impulses of shame because I am a disgusting person for needing a “drug” I should just “willpower” my way through after all) I generally am unable to eat because the stomach pain is such that I have constant nausea and I have a ridiculously strong gag reflex. If I try to eat I have a lot of violent stomach pain because my stomach is not fucking interested in accepting food.

If I am in a restaurant this is when I have to get up and leave the table. I either go to the restroom or I go outside because I need to cry. I need to cry because it hurts and because I am ashamed of myself for crying in public just for something stupid that someone else would be able to hide. I know I am not exhibiting the proper social behavior and if I keep that shit up in public I will be fucking sorry.

At home that is when I say in a small voice, “Excuse me” and I go smoke enough to relax my nausea and deal with my gag reflex. I usually feel better after eating. But I am also still stoned after eating. So who the heck knows exactly where the better comes from. But on days when I don’t smoke I probably don’t consume a full meal worth of food in a day. I physically can’t. It hurts too much.

So a year ago when I went to the doctor I layed out all my issues and I was told she wouldn’t deal with my stomach until I dealt with psychiatry and psychiatry told me to take a pill I didn’t want to take, stop breastfeeding instantly (because this new magic pill is extremely toxic to me and the baby), and stop pot instantly or psychiatry would not work with me.

Uhm. No. Fuck you. I know what those side effects will do to my life. They will make it so I can no longer play the game when I have to because I will be debilitated by the side effects. I have watched this effect cascade with person after person in my life. No. No. No.

I will not work with a fucking doctor who spends five minutes talking to me and then wants to prescribe a medication that will destroy every coping method I have and tell me that I just have to “deal with it” while smirking at me. That is demeaning. You have studied what trauma does to the brain? Well so have I, motherfucker. You have not done a single fucking blood test. You have not done a brain scan. You have not taken a full medical history to find out how bad the side effects have been every time I have been forced onto a drug “for my own good” and how often that has lead to significant public blow ups and more trauma.

You don’t give a shit. It shows on the fucking smirk on your face. I don’t fit into your mold of a good person so you want to drug me into a stupor so that I stop doing what I am doing and blindly do what you say. No. You don’t know what I have to react to or why.

Fuck you. You want me dead. I can’t come to any other conclusion and continue to survive.

It took twenty-five minutes (I’m uhm babbling paragraphs in between random distractions else-net Oooh shiny! That’s a lot of why it sounds so incoherent and random-ha.) but I finished a piece of string cheese. Minimal gagging but I haven’t been able to eat any nuts yet. And my graham cracker is untouched.

We will have new insurance cards soon. I promise that as soon as I can log into the new insurance system I will make an appointment. I promise me.

An awful lot of why I am smoking the pot is to deal with my massive stomach pain. I feel very scared because if I reveal that there is an anxiety portion to the pain I risk not being treated again but if I don’t tell the doctor that I may not get appropriate treatment.

I feel like I am in a bind and there is no way for me to get out of it. I have to just throw a dart at a dart board and pray that I get a doctor who will want to help me without requiring that I instantly trust them enough to send my entire life headlong. No one deserves that kind of trust from me. Give me a fucking break.

I know that my intense fear of having to deal with a doctor for this is making the pain escalate unbearably. I understand that link. I understand that for most of the year the pain has stayed at a consistent 1-3 with spikes up to 5 or so when I try to eat without smoking but since I have been actively been thinking about the fact that I have to deal with this soon the pain has been spiking to 8 and 9 and causing me to nearly vomit spontaneously in public–which is kind of embarrassing. And shame producing. Knowing that my body may betray me at any moment and make me a public spectacle makes me feel constantly ashamed of existing. I should just fucking die so that I don’t have to go around inconveniencing people all the time.

When I vomited on the floor of the hospital when I was twelve, when I was waiting in the lobby to get a cast on my broken arm, my mom grabbed me, hit me and hissed: “You just did that to get attention.”

Over and over I sobbed “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.“

The nurse tried to tell me it would be ok but I couldn’t stop crying.

When I go out in public I generally did not smoke because I don’t do so before driving. Which means I have to get through breakfast without smoking if I want to go to the park. I generally don’t eat much or sleep properly the night before with anxiety about the spike in stomach pain and the increased difficulty in being patient with the kids.

That’s a lot of why I limit excursions out of the house. Those days are ridiculously hard on my body. When people come to me I evaluate how offended they will be if I am stoned and I try to uhm match expected tolerance because generally what I think other people will be ok with is lower than what I actually usually use.

This is the big problem with using any medication so sporadically. The effects are needed when dosage isn’t present. I have many days where I wake up and I let the negative thoughts get too entrenched before I start smoking (it is an unpleasant process and I don’t enjoy it and I don’t like being “the kind of person who smokes pot” and and and) so often I have to kind of psyche myself up first and bribe myself with the idea of being in a more pleasant mood.

The amount of conscious dealing with shame I do every day is really hard. I have to consciously deal with it or I will not eat and not sleep and get weak to the point where I am not physically able to complete my chores without slowly dragging chairs all over the house so that I can move from chair to chair to finish my cleaning.

Because I am that compulsive and crazy. I have to “appear” functional. I “have to” maintain certain appearances or I risk terrible consequences. I don’t know exactly what they will be or from whom. Sure as the sun will rise I will have someone else in my life whom I trust a great deal turn around and tell me that I am abusive and terrible and they are disgusted by me. It is going to happen again and again because that is something that people just feel free to say to me.

That is part of what I mean when I say that I am the lowest status person in every room I walk into. I am a white trash whore and I can never undo that. In any room I walk in to someone may decide to go off on me. It happens when I happen to say something I shouldn’t say.

Usually that means I answer a question honestly. People ask a wide variety of questions in the casual chit chat process that if I answer honestly the person will respond with horror and disgust and move away from me exhibiting great hostility. I have to guess which lies to tell and when.

When my mask is slipping, like it was this weekend, I went to a friends baby shower. Want to know my connection to the group? I knew the host from working together (where deliberately obscured) and the party was at the house of someone she has known since middle school–they were both around our mutual place of employment. I went out with both of them like twice. I uhh begged to eat out my friend’s friend. She let me. Then never talked to me again.

Till I walked into her house this weekend and she didn’t remember me even slightly (or at least gave no sign of remembering me–she certainly didn’t know my name).

This uhm, happens to me pretty regularly. I’m very careful what questions I answer when I talk to people in general. I uhm was kind of stupid.

So the father of the host (he has known the mom-to-be since she was a kid, remember) was chatting me up and he told me that his wife wrote a book but she is afraid to publish it. I uhm wasn’t thinking so I said, “I actually wrote a book and self published. If you look at places like Amazon publishing or there is a wide variety of competing models you can be e-published for practically nothing and you can get books in print and deal with hawking them at book stores yourself for fairly little money. That is how publishing often works, actually.”

So then he asked me about my book. He had to prod me more than once. “Oh you wrote a book? I bet it’s a lovey dovey romance isn’t it? I bet it’s all cutesy schmoopsy and adorable right?” heh heh.

Cue my not amused face.

“No, actually it’s a memoir about the first eighteen years of my life.”

*snicker* “No eighteen year old has done anything worth writing about.”

By that point in the conversation my heart was racing and I was breathing fast and I could feel the flush rising. I had been kind of avoiding eye contact. Then I looked straight at him and said, “Well I I was moved more than fifty times, I was homeless, I stole to eat, I went to twenty-five schools in diverse combinations of socio-economic levels and race: everything from the projects to graduating high school in Los Gatos after only going to that school for my sophomore year and only three semesters of high school total. (said to someone whose kid went to one of the worst schools in the east side of San Jose [these two places are right next to each other and Los Gatos is where all the rich people live]) I was raped or sexually assaulted dozens of times over more than twenty years, including my father and my brother extensively abusing me, along with a bunch of random neighbors. I self-mutilated for decades as part of how I dealt with what was going on with me and every mental health professional I have worked with has been freaked out by the variety and range of trauma I have been through.

I had enough happen to me to justify a book.”

At this point picture him kind of mouth agape blinking kind of fast. “Oh uhm. Wow. Yes. You would have enough to write about.”

We didn’t really talk after that.

I let my mask slip. I did not tightly contain my answer enough. I wasn’t appropriate enough. Mostly because I didn’t give a shit. I will probably never see this man again. My connection to him is tenuous enough that I just don’t have to fucking care if he thinks I am awful for unloading on him like that. (You wouldn’t fucking believe how often people screamed at me for uttering even four sentences of the above paragraph in a challenging voice. I should not be speaking. Shut up. I don’t have the right to make people think about unpleasant things.)

The conclusion I draw from this is I shouldn’t exist. Or I should simper and play stupid and lie and answer questions in evasive ways and for the love of crisco stop writing and talking about this shit.

So I do my very best to force my lips to be literally closed for as much of the time I am with other people as I can. I end every social interaction with sores on the inside of my mouth from chewing it so hard to keep from saying anything that might be inappropriate.

Yes. It is enormous physical strain.

I can’t tell how these descriptive/prescriptive things work about labels. People tell me that I should eschew thinking of myself as bad and stop thinking about my behavior as bad. But I regularly get into trouble I don’t want to be in because I don’t have appropriate filters. Bullshit I’m not bad. I’m punished for being bad often enough that it seems imprudent for me to stop trying to filter.

I want to be a nice person. I really fucking do. I am tired of being told I am not wanted and being abandoned. I am tired of people kicking me really hard and feeling free to tell me that I am a disgusting piece of shit but they still love me and if I start jumping through x, y, and z hoops then they might be able to have a relationship with me or help me. But not until I jump through all those hoops without support. If I don’t do that first I won’t be able to prove that I deserve them bothering to waste time and energy on me.

I uhm can’t bend to whims like that. I have to live in my body 24/7 and deal with the consequences. I have a very tightly controlled life that I can manage because I limit it so severely.

But when I say, “I stay home” I don’t mean that I hide in bed crying all day. I mean that my kids and I play in the yards and garden and walk for miles around our neighborhood when I stay regularly medicated thus I can sleep and eat in a way that allows me to be physically able to.

Since the marathon I have been fucking around with almost not using pot to see how this works for me. It’s going really badly. I need to see a doctor.

The reason I don’t just “get a vaporizer” to try it is because when I spend money on something believing that it is unlikely to solve my problem and it is money I don’t want to spend… it’s kind of doomed before I start. I can’t be on marijuana forever. I do have to figure out how to live life without it in order to do the things I want to do.

But what does that even mean? Part of it is that my stomach god damn hurts and I have to heavily medicate in order to deal with the pain and nausea in order to eat and sleep like a “normal” person and have any appearance of functionality.

Being in pain actively triggers my PTSD symptoms and causes flashbacks because I have such a long history of being in pain and that being something I am not allowed to talk about or deal with because “You aren’t really in pain–you are just a whiny hypochondriac.”

My mother screamed at me and threatened me that “my arm had better fucking be broken or she would break it herself” because I asked her to leave work early and come home (I was 12 and alone all day every day because I was on year round school and had no friends or family) to take me to the hospital. It was broken.

Something is wrong in my body. Something that I can’t fix. Something that I am self medicating (said with substantial scorn and derision) to deal with because doctors have actively told me they will not provide service until I jump through hoops I can’t jump through.

I can’t abruptly switch psych meds right now because I have no reliable help with my children. When I go through med rounds the side effects make me extremely unpredictable and historically very violent and my self-harming goes through the roof and my ability to function completely disintegrates and I spend hours every day literally hiding either in closets or under beds because I want to kill myself so much.

I literally cannot do that to my kids. There are reasons I’m not on psych meds. If someone bothered to ask me what those reasons were I would be happy to explain and I am willing to bet a compassionate doctor would hear my history and agree that it probably isn’t the best idea to try to force me to take a psych med as step one of any and all physical care.

That is not a way to establish trust because my behavior will abruptly be destroyed and out of control and erratic and I will completely associate it with my relationship with that doctor and have to stop association because I can’t continue to listen to the advice of someone who is going to force me to go through that given that I don’t have the fucking resources to deal with dropping the ball on the ways I am currently functional.

It feels humiliating. But that is the reality of my life right now. I stay home so that I can always handle talking to my kids in the tone of voice I want them to talk to me. I have to keep my physical stress levels down enough to not freak out when we are in an environment where I have less control.

Watch me at parties. If I stay seated the whole time I have a much better chance of being able to have conversations because being there makes me physically weak because of the strain on my body of having to be hyperaware to such a level. If it is a stand-and-mingle sort of party I am going to spend a lot of time walking in and out of the room because I have to go find somewhere to sit down and sob hysterically because standing in that room and trying to talk to people hurts my body so much.

No, this isn’t something that is obvious to people around me. If I was visibly contorting with pain people wouldn’t talk to me. If I said anything other than “Oh I’m fine” “Great!” when people ask me “How are you?” then they won’t ask me any more. And they won’t talk to me about anything else either. They try to keep a wide distance between them and me because I have revealed that I have needs and they are very fucking sure that isn’t their problem and they don’t want to get involved. That’s a direct quote. I get told that a lot. “I’m sorry. You have a lot of needs and I don’t want to get involved.”

Uhm, I didn’t ask you to do anything. I don’t fucking ask people to meet my needs. I can ask for help with wants–I have to be very ok with hearing “no” or with the fact that there is a better than 50/50 chance that I will be stood up because that is just my historical percentage. Because if I ask someone for help with a need all hell breaks loose when they let me down. My relationships don’t last through me asking things of people other than the pleasure of their company on sporadic occasions. I am doing my very best to ensure that I understand my place and stop fucking up this boundary.

Having this sort of level of need as a background thead in my life why won’t anyone help me means that I don’t understand how hard it is for people to meet my needs. I am not good at understanding the limits of how I should ask for things. When I ask for actual needs to be met I have to understand that the person may just not show up or may not feel like it any more once the time comes or have some emergency in their life that is more important than me so I have to suddenly scramble for how to figure things out at the last second without the normal planning time I give myself. It feels very unfair at the time I’ll tell you.

I go through life knowing that I am “not rational” and I am “over-sensitive” thus pretty much no one needs to give a shit what I think or feel because I’m a piece of shit.

No, I do not act in public like I have the thoughts I have. It would be incredibly dangerous. It’s not hyperbole; it is simply true.

scope

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I told my therapist last night that I feel like what I am struggling with right now is understanding the scope of my life. I want to feel like I really understand kind of “my position” in the realm of trauma.

All of my life I have had people telling me that what happened to me “wasn’t so bad” and I should “quit whining”. First my family and then as an adult people have practically fucking lined up to tell me I am hysterical and I should “just get over” my childhood.

I told my therapist that I feel very self conscious but it feels like the only people who may have some idea of what my childhood was like is people who grew up in war zones. She asked me if I have ever known someone who grew up in a war zone. I said no–that is a lot of my guilt. I’m one of those white American–who in the fuck am I to act like my life has been as bad as someone else.

She said she knows quite a few people personally and professionally who have grown up in war zones. She feels quite confident telling me that any of them would say that hands down my life experiences were out-of-this-world traumatic compared to what they lived through.

How do I assimilate that?

It was hard watching her face as she said it. Like she was breaking bad news to the poor bereavement victim.

She said she knows a Tibetan man who lost his entire family. They were all blown up in one go. She said that she is pretty sure he would feel great compassion and tell me that what he suffered was nothing like what I went through.

He had a community who reached out to him and mourned his loss and grieved with him. He was supported. It was awful but the people around him helped.

I cry alone in a room. I have for my entire life. There is no community support in that. There is no reason for my brain to treat me like someone who should continue living. I am given no data to support the premise that I deserve to live.

It makes a lot of sense that I am suicidal. I am treated like I am disposable in the world I was born into.

Have you ever watched chickens go at each other? I am at the bottom of the pecking order. In almost every other species I would be dead already. It is kind of weird knowing that it is not hyperbole.

I was a high school teacher. I am quite familiar with the depths of despair into which people throw themselves. I hate feeling like that kind of whiner.

No, recovering from trauma is not whining. It is…. wait for it…. recovering from trauma. And sometimes it takes a long time. Sometimes it is impossible to move past. That’s only about 6% of people who end up with PTSD. Only about 20% of people who live through trauma move into PTSD. There is hope.

I have to trick my brain into believing that I should be here despite this many years of evidence that I shouldn’t be.

It is normal for my species to be pack animals. I have to not need that in order to feel worth. It’s kind of weird but I have try and gain a more masculine approach to life. In general (certainly not in all cases across the board) it is more common for men to eschew the societal view of them than women. Women need the herd for safety more than the men.

I feel inadequate to the task of demanding a seat at the banquet of life. I feel like my responsibility is to carry platters so large and heavy that I can’t see past them and accidentally fall down the stairs and break my neck. The big loss will be the meat I’m carrying on the tray. I am more easily replaced.

I think a larger chunk of that feeling than I would prefer to admit comes from my internal misogyny. Especially given that I have now successfully contributed to the gene pool my entire concept of self says that I have no further use. There are people more fit to perform the tasks I perform. Better to cull the herd for the good of the herd.

It’s kind of weird but I have always kind of wished that I felt less comfortable as a girl. This fits. I am absolutely cisgendered. I’m a girl. I’m a chick. I’m a woman. Those fit. Maybe if I were more androgynous, maybe if I wanted to reject this inferior female body and instead I tried to move towards being a man then maybe I would be worthy of respect. Unfortunately that doesn’t seem to work out a lot of the time either. Nothing about me makes sense as a man. I’m just a woman.

I feel actively demeaned by my lack of ambition. It shows how generally low in character I am. I have interest in money only in as much as it is a means to an end. I am pushing my family into excessively frugal living because I prioritize lowering our overall expenses. That is my first, central, and most fiercely held current life beliefs. The only way for us to be safe is to lower our monthly expenses.

We spent over $90k last year. Noah made a lot more than that. (I feel startled by him.) That is not something I can count on forever. In my defense 54% of our spending went towards mortgage/house. I did have to replace the washer/dryer and both heaters this year. If I don’t have as many home repairs I anticipate putting at least $40k towards principal next year. Right now our mortgage is around $230k. About six more years. About two years before we want to go overseas.

For the year we are traveling I want our mandatory unavoidable expenses to be under $1500/month. That’s an amount of money we can just float from savings for a year without it mattering. See, this is why it feels like it is inappropriate for me to talk about any part of my life is hard. Right now I have an easier set up than 99.99999% of all humans for all time. But that wasn’t true when I was a child. How can a person have such completely different life experiences?

I don’t know how to reconcile being at the bottom and at the top. It feels like I am unworthy of being on the top so I should jump off a building and let someone more deserving move into my place.

I feel very weird about so much of my psychological safety coming from Noah providing money. That seems prone to be problematic. I’m trying to play my part and rapidly pay off the mortgage so that the pressure is less extreme. When the mortgage is paid off I can support my family in this home without Noah forever if something bad happens.

I will have reduced my life to a scale appropriate for me. I feel kind of weird about what that means in terms of my life. My status. My right to live and take up space. My right to pursue happiness.

I feel stupid and weird because the things that I want in my life are common things to want. They are common hobbies and past times. But I hold tremendous shame for wanting them because I was told over and over how stupid I was for wanting them.

When I was a kid I would try to get excited about moving. I tried to put plants in a bunch of places we lived. I was mocked and laughed at. My efforts were kicked up or ground into the ground. What the hell did I think I was doing? Stupid bitch go back in the house and shut up.

Why did I read all the time? Because I had to stay in a room silently all the time. If I made noise or a mess or was even seen doing anything other than going to the bathroom or fetching food I was yelled at or mocked or made the butt of some joke.

I’m having a hard time with a lot of my male friends. I don’t particularly like being the butt of the joke. Yes, I’m over-fucking-sensitive. But they want me to know they like me. So they are sure to denigrate me as much as possible as fast as possible.

“Wow! I’m surprised you can get that!”
“Oh I’d better help you. You know how women are.”

No, motherfucker, I don’t know how women are. Why don’t you fucking explain it to me.

But I want to have friends. So I shut my mouth and I bite the insides of my mouth until it bleeds.

I’m really tired of people telling me I have no tact. You have no fucking idea. I want friends. I want friends so badly that I hide for months because I am in a phase where if someone makes me the butt of the joke I am going to hysterically scream at them for an hour straight and possibly have to be pulled off of them as I beat the shit out of them.

I’ll just stay home. I’m over-sensitive and folks are sure to let me know that it is my problem.

But I’m not supposed to talk about having issues with men. It hurts their feelings. All those poor innocent men who have never done anything feel terrible guilt when I talk about this and I am a mean person for hurting them.

I’m sorry I forgot. I wasn’t silent enough. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid me.

Sometimes Noah will lean in and lovingly stroke my face and tell me that he likes that I talk. He likes what I think. No, he isn’t tired of listening to me.

Honestly I think it makes him feel a lot more ok about the level of distrust of men I have because he has raped. He doesn’t get to retreat into the shell of “How dare you say that about me” which makes him a lot more sympathetic to my struggle.

He is at least willing to admit that it happens. Men who have not raped are often not willing to admit that this is even a problem. They point at the fact that they haven’t done anything and that means that people who want to talk about it should shut up because it isn’t their problem and it makes them feel bad.

I think that men who have not raped are aware that the line between having not done so and having done so is not always as clear as one would hope and you don’t always notice when you have done it. Whoops.

So how do you know you are a good person as a man? How do you know you have never raped anyone? I don’t fucking know. I wish I did.

I know that one of my lovers told me this week that I am the only woman who has ever asked for his consent before having sex with him. I feel so sad about that I don’t have the words.

When I was in kindergarden I had a “boyfriend” and I gave him a blowjob–like you do. When we were in sixth grade I moved back to the area to find out he had told all and sundry that I raped him.

I ask for consent before I have sex with people. I need people to tell me that they want to be there. That’s a lot of the reason I haven’t had sex with more women. They aren’t willing to admit they want it. So I don’t fuck them.

I told my friend’s sister this weekend: “You need to go make a lot of mistakes. I get that. But only do the things that you feel drawn to. This 26 year old “Dominant” who is “training you” by making you deep throat him for excessively long periods of time even though you don’t enjoy that activity… he’s not a good person. Ditch him.

These guys who are older than you don’t have the key to the castle. Find out what you like. If you want to have recreational sex it is a lot better to do it with guys near your age. Yes it is annoying to help them through the training wheels stage. But that is how you end up with a good man. The older guys hunting for 18 year olds who won’t tell you anything about themselves but they expect you to show up and enthusiastically suck their dicks? Yeah they aren’t nice men. They never will be. You can have a series of dicks that way and to them you will be just a pussy. Can you live with that?”

I think that people should have the logical results of their actions explained to them in meticulous detail so they can see the pattern emerging and make choices. When I was 18 and I came into the scene and I met up with a 30-something year old woman she introduced me to a series of men (including my shaman) and told me to have sex with them because I would learn. She told me that she appreciated the status bump she gets for bringing them fresh meat.

Can you live with being just a cunt?

There are no take backs. You can never un-live your life.

Last night as I was leaving I walked through the incest support group my therapist runs right after my session. I stopped and told them, “I hear she told you that my book had a nice ending. I don’t know why she lied to you. It has a terrible ending.” Then I laughed. One of the women jumped up and hugged me. She said, “Oh my God! That is you! I can’t write about any of what happened to me. She (pointing) wrote a letter to her abuser and that is the most intense of anyone I have ever heard of. How could you write that book?“

I felt kind of stunned. I write because I can’t not write. For me to not write would be for me to cease to exist. I mean, sometimes I have to give my wrists a break or life gets busy… but writing is how I live. Without writing I do not exist as a whole person. I only exist as fragments because in any given environment such a small part of my life is relevant.

If I look forward into the future, maybe what I really need is a Magic 8 Ball. I would put it on my desk and consult it regularly. Digression!

If I look forward into the future I try to imagine what kind of worth I might have. What good can I do? That is going to play a big part in me not-dying. I will have need to feel like I have work I am unusually well suited for. I need to create a life where I am important. Even though that feels weird and like I shouldn’t say.

I have a very unusual set of life experiences. How can I use them to do good? I don’t know yet. I’m not in the future yet.

It’s kind of weird. When I look at the people I know I don’t resemble any of them much. I don’t have an even vaguely similar life path. How can I find a way to make it safe enough for me to exist even though I break all the norms of the herd?

I think the misogyny is part of it. How do I start valuing myself and other women equally as men even when they do not have the good fortune to be computer geeks. Many years ago a friend (a woman–of course) told me that I should expect to deal with sexism because I wasn’t a geek but she was shocked and appalled that she had it happen to her at work. The strong implication (to me) was that she was obviously so much more on their level…

Yeah. I wonder why I value women less than men. Maybe because I live in silicon valley and even my female friends tell me I should. Unless someone is an engineer they just can’t be all that bright–right. Oh I guess a lawyer would do. Or a doctor. A teacher is a lame person–“Those who can do; those who can’t teach” and a stay at home mom is significantly more of a loser.

Why is the only work worth doing about sitting still and staring at a screen?

I think I want to step outside this hierarchy. I’ve been trying since I was fifteen and fucking the president of the computer club. I SAY AS I STARE AT THE FUCKING SCREEN. My hypocrisy must be lost on no one.

I feel like the path to self-acceptance for me has to be some kind of divorce in my head from the normal rules of status. I need to treat myself as more of a free floating free radical particle. I am potentially destructive to people around me. I just don’t exist inside their system. There isn’t a place for me. I’m just… kinda there.

There is no deserve. There is no should. There is only what is. I’m not dead yet. It feels like there are a lot of good reasons why I should be. But I’m not.

Now what?

I should have seen this coming.

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I have had several men ask me in the past day if they would be on the list of people I pulled into a room to “have a talking to”.

I can’t answer and that is really intense feeling. I want to answer. I desperately want to. I want to be able to absolve of guilt. I want to be able to hand down sentencing.

These aren’t my secrets. If I go about telling men, “You but not you” then I risk revealing what has been told to me in confidence. The women who have confided in me did so with the rock solid belief that I would never betray them. I have to continue to earn that trust even though it is driving me insane.

I can’t answer any of you. I can’t say, “Oh of course I haven’t heard anything about you!” because even if that is true–that just means I haven’t heard anything. I can’t give anyone a gold star that says, “Certifiably not a rapist” unless I go talk to every partner you have ever had.

Unfortunately in my little world the burden of proof isn’t that I haven’t yet heard anything. I have to know it is true or I won’t say it is true. The emotional burden of guilt from being wrong is simply too high. The absolutely strongest recommendation I can give is, “I haven’t been told anything about you.”

And even that reveals the fuzzy outsides of what I have been told. It starts to narrow the field. What if guys start comparing notes to see what I said to whom? That’s completely conceivable. How can I maintain confidentiality that way?

I just can’t respond about this topic. Not really. I will respond to each of you individually (probably after finishing this blog–I haven’t been at a computer since I hit post yesterday) because I appreciate that you are someone who cares about my opinion. But I can’t answer this question. I just can’t.

My honor doesn’t look like the honor everyone else carries around but I will defend it tooth and nail. I gave my word that I was a safe space for these women. I can’t dishonor that.

Even though I want to go beat some people over the head with big sticks because of what I know. I have to keep my fucking mouth shut. I have to smile and give that asshole a hug when he comes up to me at a party because if my behavior radically changes towards him he will probably figure it out.

I can’t out people.

I can tell my secrets. I can tell my secrets all day and all night. I can write or scream them as much as I want. I can’t tell other peoples secrets. That is an individual journey. If someone is forcibly outed that becomes a new trauma. It can’t be a healing process. I don’t get to hurt people like that.

The shape of this community role was actually discussed in my last therapy appointment. She asked me what I take pride in. I told her that I take a lot of pride in the fact that traumatized women find me and feel comforted by me. I wanted and needed someone to go to. I had no one. I have become what I needed. I work very hard at it.

Maintaining confidentiality is part of that. I cannot be trusted if I cannot keep my fucking mouth shut.

Have you noticed how hard it is for me to keep my fucking mouth shut? Oh man.

I was asked several specific questions by a good friend that he felt self-conscious leaving in comments here (totally ok!) about how consent works. He has had a very different set of life experiences than me (women don’t tear my clothes off much–at one point in time I was very upset about that) and he has to cope with things I haven’t imagined yet.

I think it is going to take a couple of days before I can fully answer the questions. I don’t want to give a half-assed reply. I think it deserves serious thought. When men I already love bring me questions about how they can better understand consent in their life I feel a great responsibility to answer in a way that is a)useful b)non-harmful to the man (they do matter too) and c) something that has an actual set of logic behind it.

Thank you for caring about my opinion of consent. I am going to think very carefully and answer you fully. I don’t want to be unclear or unable to explain my thinking. I hate it when I do that.

I have a ridiculously busy day off-line ahead of me. It is going to be a day that combines a wide variety of different high anxiety situations for me. But a kind of anxiety that centers around am I really good enough to be the person in this position in this interaction?

Today I have the opportunity to have a sit down with an eighteen year old girl with borderline personality disorder who is getting into drugs and casual sex via the internet. When she leaves me she is going to stay with her Master overnight.

I can barely stop myself from rubbing my hands together with glee. I have trained for this. I can’t control her. I can’t decide how her life goes. But what I wouldn’t give to have had someone like me when I was that age.

Then I get to go to Dickens Fair and apologize to the friend who kind of catalyzed my leaving Facebook because I deeply value the relationship and I don’t want their to be hurt feelings over my deleting the stupid account. If I can’t keep my emotions in check it is my responsibility to deal with the kinds of input I allow into my life. Facebook, for a variety of reasons, makes me significantly more unstable. I need to eliminate it from my life. I’m sorry she was the one standing closest when I noticed but it is really not her fault.

And she is one of the fucking coolest people I have ever met in my whole life and I don’t want to drive her away because I am crazy and unstable and dramatic. How about if we just have those in person interactions that make us both feel good about ourselves. Facebook is not good for me. It’s not about her. I have those kinds of issues with lots of people online. I don’t read tone well. I hear it with the voices in my head.

Pretty much all the voices in my head hate my guts. Everything I read comes through that filter. It’s very hard to circumvent.

I like in-person interactions. They are real. They aren’t about me fighting with my ghosts while someone else is trying to have a conversation.

I don’t want to detonate that relationship for a laundry list of reasons. In person I don’t freak out about what she says to me because I can hear her voice. I hope that it will be ok that I can’t handle facebook.

Sometimes it feels very humiliating dealing with the limitations of my brain. That is what this is. I have to accommodate what I need even though I am having a completely irrational reaction. Whatever. I can’t rational my way out of it. It happens over and over uncontrollably. The only thing I can do is remove the stimulus.

And then enjoy people in person instead of clinging to facebook as a way of holding on to a thread of contact. I can’t weave a tapestry out of those threads. I need the in person. I need to change what I have been doing. I hope this turns out to be a positive step.

And even if that friend decides she can’t handle my drama (reasonable) I will still be at Dickens with someone who has a current higher thresh hold for my shit. I will accept the grace while I receive it. She knows she is chaperoning me so that I feel safe.

That’s a pretty big gift. I need to walk through the day feeling that gift. When I feel really scared I know that I was given a participant pass by one friend and another friend is keeping the dark at bay. I am not the untouchable I believe I am.

These lies will pass.

probably a good decision process

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I am at a weird stage of thinking with regards to bdsm. I feel like I am slowly migrating into thinking that it’s pretty broken and fucked up to be pining for people who will let you hurt them a lot. I mean, I get it as an urge. But it’s broken.

What these people is for there to be more people who are broken inside who want to be hurt. Not every masochist is broken–but honest-to-dawg masochists are rare in my experience. Mostly if you want to be heavily beaten or made to bleed you are pretty broken. Sometimes it isn’t directly related to any specific trauma–many masochists come from reasonably great homes. But they got broken somehow.

I don’t feel equally about all kinds of pain. I’m thinking specifically about the heavy players. The ones who have less of a “let’s play a game together” and more of a “I’m going to put you in your place.” Traditionally I don’t play very well with the “let’s play a game together” people. I’m not playing a game. I think I should be hurt.

I feel very confused when someone “gives me a spanking” that doesn’t even turn my ass red. I feel like, “Well there is an hour I can never get back.” I feel compelled to hunt for the bruises. I’m not a stoic bottom so it takes someone who really wants to make someone cry for me to get there.

I want to digress and give a disclaimer: I use very heteronormative language most of the time. This is because I have had an easier time finding guys to play and/or have sex with. In my experience women and transpersons (going in either direction, with or without surgery) take a lot more energy from me to woo them. They want to be sure I like them before they give it up. I often go hunting with very low energy because I want the hunting to replenish my energy. Guys just need me to show up and not say no. So my language is very heteronormative. I don’t know what to do about that. By the numbers I have slept with ~125 (+/-5ish?) people. I lost my excel spreadsheet years ago so yes it is approximate. I have slept with 5 glorious people who fell somewhere not on the binary and with 40-ish women. If women and people not on the binary were easier for me to pick up I don’t think there is any chance the numbers would skew so high towards men. Anyway!

So when I talk about feelings about predatory people I am talking about my experiences with men and why those experiences bother me.

I wish it didn’t come with a general distrust of men too. I truly do. But whether you like it or not I need to keep me safe. It is a slow and gradual process for me to trust a man. Mostly the harder I try the further away from trusting them I get. Very few men actually strike me as non-threatening. There are very few men I will cheerfully leave alone in a room with my kids.

Want to know the weird thing? I am ok sending my kids on a walk with someone I know to be a tremendous pervert because I know they will never be alone inside a private space and I know my neighbors are watching and I know my kids know their routine and Shanna is not ok with deviating from it. But I feel mixed about the conversations inside.

Every few years I have to drop a lot of balls. I think that is ultimately how I keep from killing myself. I just walk away from relationships and communities. I feel guilty for culling the bdsm community and I’m not sure why. Am I doing it because I think I’m better? I don’t think so. I don’t want my daughters to learn that women should be hurt at home. Including because my friends think it is fucking funny to insinuate all the fucking time.

But I’m too sensitive. Maybe so. Maybe I just can’t accommodate your issues because I have to deal with my own.

I don’t want to do the polarizing thing. I need this specific characterization of women to disappear from my life and that doesn’t mean that all of the people who do it are terrible people who deserve to die or anything dramatic like that. What does rejecting/pulling back from the community even mean?

The vast majority of people involved in the bdsm community like to play games while having sex. Most of them are perfectly normal, happy, well adjusted people. Why am I tarring them all with the same brush? Why am I being like that? Because you still follow the trope that says it is fun and funny to hit people.

My kids don’t hear that shit. In our life you learn how to hit people because you will, unfortunately, at some point need to defend yourself. There are bad people in the world who are not interested in respecting you or your body and you need to be able to handle that.

She can find out if she likes being spanked once she can kick the shit out of somebody who ignores her “no”. And I feel weirdly like I hope she feels ok with talking to me about the experience and like I hope I never hear about any part of her sex life. I think that is a normal dual thought process and I can live with that discomfort.

I am having a hard time with how often conversations come up with some people. I feel like it is “my fault” because I bring it up. I don’t think I always or even usually do. Sometimes I am stupid and I make the joke because I fell into feeling like I was one of them again. I am so institutionalized it’s kind of ridiculous. I think I should be hurt.

Noah describes himself as being calculatedly self-interested. He isn’t like the people who genuinely want to hurt people. I mean, we have done some fucked up shit–don’t get me wrong. (And honey–don’t try to prove you can ok?) You don’t pursue doing that to the point that it drives people from your life over and over. You were overly aggressive and intense for a lot of the people you dated, yeah, but not because you were beating the shit out of them.

It’s different.

I know a large number of men and women who feel they cannot be happy unless they have many people in their life to beat at a moment’s notice. I kind of feel live and let live about it. I mean I don’t think they need to stop wanting what they want because I have issues with it. But I don’t want to stand near it right now. It makes me feel intensely bad about the world and the people in it.

My masochism springs from a very deep self-hatred. This isn’t true of all masochists so my opinions and experiences are far from universal. I want people to hurt me because I believe I should be hurt. I can come up with dozens of people in under a minute who would agree that I should be hurt. Just knowing that makes me want to walk in front of a truck.

I think I hate that they want me to be hurt even more than I hate myself. I am running out of feelings of compassion. I am running out of feelings of trust and friendliness and love. I can’t keep ignoring how much this hurts me.

I don’t think it has always hurt me like this. I think this is part of this whole identity crisis thing. Being a mom is very all encompassing. I can’t model how to be a healthy whole person while nurturing the constant desire to experience pain. In order for me to figure out how to stop hurting myself I need to stop being around people who tell me continually that I should be in more pain. That really my life is not complete unless they get to hurt me. Preferably while I am sucking their dick.

I can’t do this any more. Maybe I would hate men less if they fucking talked to me differently. If I am not supposed to generalize to all men then I do not understand how I am supposed to keep myself safe. How am I supposed to go out and figure out who the problematic people are? How am I supposed to identify danger if I am not allowed to talk about it or address it as an issue?

The bdsm community is very broken. And I can’t fix it. I have other shit to do. That’s not my battle this lifetime. Unfortunately it is a kind of broken that is a specifically delicious poison for me. I want it. I miss it. I am not willing to model this kind of life in front of my children.

What does that mean? Does that mean I will never go to parties? No. I will probably go to parties with Noah. We like to play games. I can’t make much noise in our house because at this point we know all the neighbors and I get embarrassed. It’s hilarious. And I do like having sex in public.

I showed up in the bdsm community looking for sex. I found something different and went with it. I ended up in a relationship with someone who would far prefer to masturbate while thinking about fetish items than have sex. Noah says that one of the reasons he married me is because I instituted a quota for sex in a previous relationship. After my long-term bdsm relationship I told my next serious relationship, “If you want monogamy that is fine. But I need to have a lot of sex. Either you do it or someone else will.” Noah thought he could live with that.

All community, all family is a mixture of good and bad. If you throw out the bad you throw out the good too. But the ratio of good to bad has changed a lot for me. I need to keep my energy and my intentions to people who actually are part of my life. I need to stop waiting for people to care more and find time and… I don’t know.

I am busy enough. I have a full enough life right now. I deleted my facebook account because at least once a week I end up sobbing about something from there. I feel minimized or dismissed and it’s my own fucking problem. I read things wrong. I put half-assed stuff on there and people snap back. If I could shrug it off then it would all be fine. I can’t. That means I need to be a grown up and stop putting myself in that situation.

I want to keep my friends. That means I need to keep them in the size and shape of container I can handle them in. I am over-sensitive to things I read in text. I pretty much always put the most hostile spin conceivable on anything I read. When I listen to someone speak I am not able to overlay their words with the hostility in my head in the same way. It makes me like people much more.

I’m mostly up because I’m basting the turkey soon. Noah has to do the next shift because I need the sleep.

It is not anyone else’s fault that I hear a nasty, hostile track when I read things on the internet. I need to limit what I read on the internet. It’s not about people being mean to me. This is a consistent problem I have.

I already limit my social life a lot. I think that I need to stick with how limited it is. I need to stop listening to the people who believe I should be hurt a lot more. What that means, exactly, I’m not sure. Does that mean severing contact? Ending relationships? I don’t think I need to be dramatic about it. No one has done me wrong. I don’t put a lot of energy in that direction already. I am not sure that anyone will notice if I drop what I still put in that direction.

Noah is the only one who gets explanations about this sort of crap. I don’t tell other people that certain topics are off-limits. I just stop hanging out with them. I can’t change anyone. I can just choose to be around people who are appropriate for my kids.

I don’t want to be a grown up that bad it seems.

I think that when someone’s words and behavior show me that they think my life would be “better” if I was less happy and in more pain then I don’t have space for that any more. Is it mean of me? Maybe. But I need to matter some year.

I’m trying to stop wanting to be hurt. It is hard. I need to not be around people who tell me I should be hurt. If that bothers you, well, uhm, not to be an asshole or anything but go suck an egg.

That’s the line. If people have these urges about other people that’s not really my business. If it is kept away from my kids–whatever. Once you start talking to *me* about what I should do for *you* then I’m done.

I don’t owe any one any more god damn pain.

Pity party, table of one

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Every life is a mixture of blessing and burden. Sometimes when I hear about the blessings that other people have I feel such envy. I dislike myself for feeling that envy. It is petty. I feel like I am going through life having one long series of pity parties for myself. My life is not like other peoples. When I found out I was pregnant with Shanna more than one person sat me down for a long earnest lecture about how someone like me (with mental health issues) has no business having children. I feel like I was essentially told to abort Shanna because I could not possibly be good enough to her.

That is not how other people experience the journey into motherhood. I am very glad that my friends have such different experiences. I feel very guilty that it is hard for me to listen to. I feel terrible about how much self pity I have. Get over it.

I feel kind of like a fraud. My family was fucking thrilled when I got pregnant. I paid for us to go to a conflict mediator. I tried to work things out. Then my sister loudly boasted about being able to kick my ass at my baby shower. Then my mother refused my request to come to Christmas because it “wasn’t worth it for her yet because the baby wasn’t interesting enough” because I am not interesting enough. Then it was “this is a loan not a gift. I will send you $20 every month until it is paid back.” She sent one nasty $100 after I told her not to buy any more cheap shit for my daughter until she pays me back. Then it was my sister telling me that the death of my father and brother were not allowed to count as significant to me.

If I want to know people I have to be very ok with the fact that nearly everyone I speak to is having a much more pleasant experience. I can’t be bitter. They are having troubles I am not having. I do not give proper weight to the difficulty of those struggles. I need to just love people if I am going to have relationships.

It’s ok if I cry about never really having a mother. That’s ok. I didn’t have a mother. I get to cry about that. No one ever really tried to meet my needs. No one volunteered or cared. I can cry about that. I can’t get mad because other people got more love than me. That’s not fair.

I don’t understand why everyone else deserves this love and I do not.

You know how I ate ramen for years? I started cooking it when I was three. All those years I was making the only food I really knew how to make. It felt comforting to have hot cooked food and we couldn’t afford frozen microwave food.

I have not been cared for in the ways that humans expect to be cared for by someone since I was an infant. When I was sick I was left alone to deal with it. I have dealt with post operation care alone. I was five. My mom didn’t want to look at my gross face after the dog attacked me. She told me that looking at that was my punishment for being stupid with the dog. She said I would learn not to stick my face in a dogs face. I had major reconstructive surgery with 117 stitches.

I am very glad that my daughters will have a different experience. And fuck you to the people who said I would be bad at this because it was inevitable.

I’m really glad that I am lucky enough to know people who have had completely different life experiences so they can tell me what it is liked to feel loved by a parent. I want to produce people who feel that way so I need to know what that kind of parenting was like. Thank you for sharing your lives with me.

(PS- I’m aware that I make a lot of weird typos and word substitutions. I don’t really have time to edit. I apologize.)

But then I came home and found out that my in-laws decided to send us a check for $15,000 out of the blue. Well, because a deer jumped on our car and because they still provide financial support to all three of his adult brothers. They feel bad for not helping Noah more. So they sent us money. Because they can.

I feel floored. That is seriously fucking with my world view. I am standing next to someone who benefits from enormous privilege. I get to borrow that privilege in substantial ways. It doesn’t come with a mother–I will never have any kind of relationship with my mother-in-law. We are non-compatibly crazy which is quite unfortunate. I don’t get to have a family but I get money.

I have a family. I have Noah and I have Shanna and I have Calli. Not everyone is so blessed.

Many years ago I had an intense fling with someone who was studying ayurvedic medicine. He did my natal chart. I had not told him much of anything about myself. He said I would always be lucky with money. Any time I needed it somehow it would arrive. I kind of startled. He laughed and said that anyone who challenged me in court would be sorry.

It’s not like I live my life trying to test that out but I have been really weirded out how much that has worked out. When I am not sitting at my pity party I am shocked by how much money just appears for me in a way that it doesn’t appear for other people.

The dog bite set me up for the first big chunk of my adulthood. Completely. I’m not sure it provided the lesson my mother intended. I run towards danger. The payoff is often well worth the damage I incur. I am ok with the results of karma in my favor. I had to deal with horrifying post-operative care when I was five years old and that was fairly traumatic. But it put me through college. And bought me three cars (they were all very good deals). And completely supported me for ten years. In a mercenary sense that was a good fucking deal.

Other people don’t have lives like mine. I don’t understand what it is like to be other people. But I’m very curious.

Maybe if I leave the monsters here I can sleep.

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I can’t sleep. I don’t feel good about keeping Noah awake with my crying. Ok internet, you can keep me company. I have done the best that I can with my ergonomic set up. I hope I don’t regret tonight. My arms hurt.

I can’t sleep because when I lie in bed I acutely notice this spot deep in my belly that has hurt since Calli was born. It hurts when I twist at all from a prone position. I’m kind of worried something is wrong.

I tried seeing a doctor a little over a year ago. I was told by the general doctor that she wouldn’t do anything for me until I dealt with psychiatry. Psychiatry told me they wouldn’t work with me until I stopped nursing and stopped smoking pot and start taking pills that will make my life a living hell.

I need a new doctor.

The problem is that finding a new doctor is kind of a nightmare of humiliation and expense. Doctors like to give me transvaginal ultrasounds despite knowing I am paying out of pocket and don’t want the procedure–I asked to just have a blood test. “Oh I just want to check.”

And I shut down. And I do what I am told. And I have to listen to a nasty lecture about how my previous miscarriage was my fault because I am still nursing Shanna and I will lose the baby I am carrying right now if I don’t stop nursing her immediately.

I didn’t stop nursing Shanna. She didn’t stop nursing until she was three. A full nine months after her sister was born.

Doctors are just people. But they think they are Smarter and Wiser than stupid little me. Even though this is my body.

I was told that my grandmother (father’s mother) died of cancer. It wasn’t found until it was too late for treatment. She was a stubborn woman and even though she was told she would die immediately she held out long enough to gather all of her grandchildren together one last time and then sit down with all of her sisters and do a crossword puzzle. It took a few months to arrange, apparently. Then she died.

I can’t help but wonder if she felt the pain inside her and thought, like me, I hope this kills me. Then at least my kids won’t have to deal with my suicide.

This is not a good approach to health care management. I really hate dealing with doctors. I find the entire process degrading and insulting. I never get adequate treatment and I always end up shutting my stupid mouth and consenting to procedures I initially protest. Not because I am convinced they are necessary–because when a sociopath tells me to shut up I do. I know I am at the bottom of the caste system. I shut up when I am scared. When I get to the point of going to see a doctor I am scared.

I don’t feel I can ask my midwife about it. She badly handled my labor. Really badly. She was burnt out on driving to Fremont. She shouldn’t have taken me on as a client. She didn’t really have the patience for dealing with me. She kept me from dying as I hemorrhaged in my bed so I feel like she fully earned her fee and all. But I don’t trust her any more. I will never ask her for help of any kind again.

I don’t want to keep Noah up as I cry because when you have mental illness you have to be aware of the cost on the people around you. I have to be careful not to overburden him. I can’t be too dependent on him. It’s not his fault that I don’t really have anyone else.

Noah and I are having a lot of hard conversations. And I’m not going to give details about them on the internet. He doesn’t get a lot of privacy in this lifetime but he gets a little.

Hard shit is hard. And tonight I’m having quite a pity party. I want to say that it feels like my whole fucking life has been hard. On one hand I want to berate myself for my hyperbole. On the other hand… can’t I justifiably say that? I mean, I do have easier periods. I’m drowning. And it’s my fucking problem.

And the lady who actually likes me in the home schooling group is telling me she might stop coming. (btw Lisa–don’t bloody tell anyone about the shit I write here.) That makes my throat close with fear. I wish the universe would stop fucking kicking me.

I feel like I must not be fit for human companionship. Otherwise I wouldn’t manage to drive people away so effectively. No one seems to be able to bear very much of me. They only want small pieces.

I had a hard time at the convention for a variety of reasons. I couldn’t be the performative whore. I am not hunting. I am trying to actively discourage people. I had to turn down multiple requests to play (which shocked the fuck out of me–that is not usual) which is kind of awkward. “Sorry but you don’t get to beat me in pay back for me beating on your (wasn’t then) wife many years ago.” Awww. Sad face. But but… I would look so cute bruised.

Yeah. A lot of people have thought that. A lot of people have wanted me to be in pain.

I feel like I am drowning. A nice bus to the head sounds really good right now. And close by. I think the best part of suicide is you don’t have to deal with the consequences of your actions.

I know someone who jumped in front of a train and survived. He lost the bottom part of a leg. He went on to become a minister. I fucked him in the dorm building of his seminary school. He was one of the most brutal people I have ever had sex with. He had an incredibly strong upper body (duh–he had to walk with crutches most of the time and he was a big man) and he really wanted to bruise me.

I was lying on the bed on my side. I was trying to look tempting. He mocked me and asked if I was playing my whore game. I kind of sputtered. Then he slapped his hands down on my side just below my armpit and my upper thigh really hard and picked me up and threw me against the wall.

I lay there and convulsed until he started hitting me again. He really liked slapping my face.

I chanted in my head, “I’m supposed to like this. I’m supposed to like this.”

After a few minutes of alternating between slapping my face and my breasts and my thighs and my belly he spread my legs open. He started hitting my cunt.

I didn’t really keep track of how long that went on but I just about levitated off the bed. It fucking hurt.

Then he put a condom on. Then he picked me up by the hips and flipped me over to my front. He yanked me up onto my knees and he entered me from behind.

It hurt. I wasn’t particularly well lubricated and condoms tear me internally during the best of times. Legacy of a network of scars that line my vagina. I was raped a little too much a little too early. I’ve seen the scars. A gynecologist used a clear speculum and a light and a mirror to show me why sex hurt me so much when I was 22.

I always thought it was just supposed to feel that way.

Being at the con this weekend was hard in a variety of ways. When I think about the things I have done I feel a wide variety of emotions. I don’t know what my core values are. I don’t know what I am most proud of beyond my children. I feel dead inside. I feel like I am nothing. I have nothing to give. I am a bottomless pit of need and that will always be just my problem. I don’t live in West Africa. We don’t consider stupid bitches like me community problems. (Errr–note to new readers: I participated in a grief ritual facilitated by a West African woman who talked about her tribe. It was a life changing experience. Sobonfu Somé is the name of the woman who presented and if you ever get a chance to work with her do it.)

My community is only interested in me if I want to dress like a whore and be beaten so they can watch and beat off. Or at the very least pawn off my kids on babysitters multiple nights of the week so I can “go out and have fun”. No.

I’m not interesting as myself. I have to play their games. I’m busy. I think my children deserve this span of time. They won’t be with me forever. In the long run, this is absolutely worth the sacrifices.

I hope. I pray to a God I would like to spit on. I think I am kind of officially “agnostic” at this point. I am trying to hope that science is right. Otherwise there is some all knowing “benevolent” person who wants me to suffer a really lot.

See Noah–I’m not just crying because of you.

I keep trying to tell myself that mental illness is a liar. This will pass. I will not always feel this way. I objectively know that I have non-depressed periods. It has been a bad three years.

I’m tired of being lied to. I’m tired of feeling abandoned and unwanted. I’m tired of people telling me how bad I am. I’m tired of being afraid of the next lie. How am I going to be hurt next? I HAVE GOOD FUCKING REASONS FOR BEING PARANOID. GIVE ME A GOD DAMN BREAK. But I hear I need to get over it anyway.

I think the stress is going to eat me alive. There isn’t much of my body that doesn’t hurt.

Noah is about to go through open enrollment at work. Our insurance is probably going to change again. I will probably not see a doctor before that happens.

I don’t think it is serious. But it feels like something pulsing. Like a piece of intestine got stuck between the abdominal muscles when they healed after the pregnancy. It’s a very dull ache. If it was sharp and piercing I would go see a doctor immediately. I tell myself that it could be referred pain. It’s nothing. I’m fine. I’m just a hypochondriac–just like my mama always (and I mean fucking always) said.

I have all the old goodies playing tonight. I hate my mother and I miss my mom so bad I feel like the top of my head is going to explode with pain. I have a blinding headache. I’ve been crying for a long time really hard. I’m probably getting dehydrated. And it’s not like I’m sleeping when I should be sleeping. And I’ve been sleep deprived for years.

Did I mention that the kids are going through a boundary testing phase and it is hard to not scream at them all day every day? I am not doing so. I’m not entirely sure that letting them watch the ipad for many hours a day is a great solution either. I don’t have a better one.

It was really weird being at the con. It’s really weird thinking about the things I have done. I don’t think I regret any of it. I learned from it. I learned what I specifically needed to learn from it.
Today I saw people I have beaten and tied up. People (male, female, other) I have had sex with.

It is so completely removed from my life now. I have done stage performances of bdsm with some of the people I saw this weekend. I didn’t see many classes. I have had contact with the presenters of all of the ones I did see for a decade or so.

In the class on erotic humiliation the presenter asked the audience to insult her core values (her Japanese-Americaness, her worthiness of being loved, her desirability, and her intelligence) in a sentence. After I listened to the audience fumble and lamely half-ass it for a few minutes I yelled, “Who would ever want an ugly, stupid, worthless Chink like you.” Her head whipped over. She told me to stand up and yell it louder. I made my voice get mean. I said it again.

Then I sat down really fast and my face was read and my heart was pounding and I was out of breath. She and I communicated about how much saying that affected me. She talked about how it effected the other people in the audience. Fucking awkward. (She was thrilled. That was exactly what she was fishing for.)

Do I still want to be this person?

Tried something different.

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“Do you know why I usually don’t touch you when I cry?”
“No. Why?”
“Because my mom used to hit me when I cried.”

Last night I cried on Noah’s chest. I’m not 100% sure but I’m pretty sure that you can count how many times I have done that on one hand with fingers left over. We have been married for six years. I cry nearly every day. Often for many hours. I cry alone.

“No one wants to see that Kristine. No one wants to hear it either. Didn’t I tell you to shut up? Fine. I’ll give you something to cry about.”

The fact that I was raped over and over wasn’t good enough. The fact that people chased me home from school throwing rocks at me wasn’t good enough. The fact that I moved constantly and didn’t have friends or toys I could trust owning wasn’t good enough. The fact that I usually didn’t know if we would have a place to live next week or if we would be homeless wasn’t good enough either.

I cry alone. Often (though not always anymore–I kind of glory in being able to make noise when I cry now) I cry completely silently. Even my breathe barely raises in volume. I shared a bed with my mother till I was sixteen. I know how to have tears run down my face and slowly control the sobbing with breath so that I don’t get hit again. Mostly I just prefer to be alone in a room.

I was always told that I wasn’t allowed to cry unless I was hit–that’s the only good reason. Sometimes I wonder if I found the bdsm scene because I knew I needed to cry and I’m just not allowed to cry without being hit.

When other people think of “bdsm” I’m not sure what they think. I think there isn’t a lot of point if someone isn’t crying. A lot. Mostly uncontrollably. As a top I am ridiculously sadistic. Don’t play with me unless what you want from today is to end up curled in the fetal position on the floor sobbing your heart out. That is what I have in me to give. I prefer when my play partners nearly kill me. I want them to hurt me terribly and risk my life. I know I am not important. I know that very sick people exist in the world. I hope that if I can give them a cheap thrill they won’t hurt someone important.

When Noah raised his hand to stroke my face I flinched.

I was kind of randomly curious tonight so I looked it up. I’m pretty sure that I qualify for SSI for disability due to PTSD. If I had to hold down a job right now my life would be pretty nightmarish. I have continual flashbacks. I have a lot of panic attacks. I barely leave my house. I have to talk myself into believing there are “safe” people on the other side who don’t hate me before I manage. Going to the grocery store is hard. I understand that it is for most parents. But when other peoples kids misbehave in public they don’t crumple to the floor crying because it seems so overwhelming to deal with. I feel like a very pathetic person.

In order to figure out how to talk to my kids I sat around reading Jane Austen books. That is the language Shanna learned. That is why she is so excessively polite. I model it all the time. I made sure that for the first few years of her life she rarely heard anyone but me talk and I modeled extreme manners constantly.

I am trying to figure out how to shape the voices in my children’s head. I know I don’t control who they become. But I *do* control the messages they get about themselves right now.

My children believe manners are not optional and the world will crash to a halt with horror if you are rude. So they don’t do it. Except for the one big exception. “If anyone is ever touching any part of your body in a way you don’t like you need to ask them politely to stop once. If they continue, hit them. Scream. Run away. You are allowed to defend you.”Shanna is extremely aware that her vulva is a private space and that no one should touch it until she is full grown and has asked them politely to touch her there. I told her the “whys and whens” around sex are conversations we will probably have in more like ten years. She tried to ask for more information. I said, “At four all you need to know is no one can touch you there. You won’t be grown up for a very long time.” She’s ok with that for now.

It was weird to cry on Noah. I felt really bad about getting him all wet. The snot flows like a river. Mmmm sexy.

One of the things that is hardest for me about being rich is how isolating it is. I feel like I have gotten to know my neighbors to an unusual degree. They are certainly all shocked that I am attempting to do so. My experience of poverty (I understand that my life is not universal and I do not have the “universal poverty experience”) was that people had a lot more time on their hands. There was a lot of time to kill and no one had any money. People had to either fall into a depressive rut in order to survive or they had to get creative.

I am very creative. Unfortunately I hate working alone and I am really struggling with the period of time when my kids are no help and instead a bunch of extra work. I’m willing to bet that in two or three years Shanna will be able to do most of the things I like to do. She helps a little now.

I like building things. I like having a concrete change on the world. I often get very frustrated with myself because I am a perfectionist and I get little practice to practice so I’m not improving at skills at the rate I want to.

Noah not wanting to build with me is hard. He doesn’t want to do any kind of physical labor on the property. I feel like I am having to drag him kicking and screaming (by the god damn hair) towards the idea of doing any help with homeschooling beyond teaching programming. It is feeling very invalidating of the “us” label.

I feel like I subsumed who I was into my family. My life, my time, my work are all spent on things that directly benefit people in my family other than me. It feels like. Because I am self-serving like everyone else and I enjoy lying to myself.

I do home improvement stuff and I cook and I clean.

It is kind of funny because I feel a little competitive because many of my friends have kids in the same age range. Shanna is behind most of the kids we know academically. (I am tracking various kids in my head. It’s interesting.) On one hand I feel like this means I am failing as a homeschooling parent. On the other hand I have the belief that early academic instruction is a bad idea. I am making a conscious decision. It still feels weird that all my friends kids knew their ABCs faster, can count earlier and higher. Blah.

I believe, because research tells me so, that early introduction of these concepts does not improve IQ or overall achievement down the line. I still feel kind of weirdly insecure about my kid and what I am doing. I don’t exactly think my friends are drilling their kids. Why are they picking things up so much faster? I have no idea. But I feel insecure. That is one of the many things I am just going to have to live with being insecure about. I made a decision based on sound principles I still believe.

What I specifically miss about having community was there were always two or three women in the kitchen talking. I thought that was what the future looked like. I’m very sad because my life won’t look like that for another fifteen years. And then they may very well want to go off into the world and spread their wings. I may do all of these years hoping for that and not get it. I have to be ok with it. I can’t spend my life wishing for that. I would be doing something inappropriate. It’s so hard to know that I can never hope for that. I tried to have that with Sarah. She hid from my anger in her room. I don’t blame her.

I don’t share my anger with my children. I share it with the adults in my life. I’m afraid that if I have hopes for what they will do as adults I will get very angry with them for disappointing me. Talk about poisoning the well. I try very hard to not have expectations of them beyond how they are treating me right now. I treat them how I want them to treat me and by and large it works out. When they are having a bad day and they freak out and cry a lot I comfort them even though my head hurts so much I start to cry too. I rock with them. I tell them it is ok to cry.

I tell my kids over and over, “When you feel sad you are allowed to cry.” I will be their inside voice whether they are with me or not. I want them to believe it is ok to exist. I don’t want them to feel like me.

I tell them it is ok to be frustrated. It’s not ok to shout at people. Let’s figure it out. And mostly we do.

I feel like oozing toxic waste. I feel like poison. I am so sad and so angry. I miss my mom. Isn’t that crazy? Shouldn’t I just be glad to be away from her? But she’s my mommy. I ache for her so bad I feel like I can’t breathe. I feel like my organs want to go into failure. I want my mommy. I have been crying for my mother my entire life. Even when I had her I didn’t have her. My mother didn’t take care of me. My mother damaged me.

My mother told me I wasn’t allowed to be angry when I was raped. She told me I wasn’t allowed to yell or scream or cry. I have made my bed and now I have to lie in it. Silently. While men do whatever they want. And I still miss her. Sometimes that feels like the most fucked up part.

I am sad about not having a father. I do not miss James Archer. I didn’t know him. I don’t even remember what he looks like. That part makes me sad. Sometimes I think of writing Jimmy a letter and asking for a picture. I don’t know if he would send me one. I feel very sad about not being allowed to know what my father looks like. My mother gave Jimmy all the pictures of him many years ago. When I was still a child. I don’t even know if he kept them.

I don’t miss my sister. I think a wall came up when I found out about her forcing my niece to give my nephew a blow job. She became the living enemy. Being in a room with her and not spitting in her face is tantamount to supporting her behavior. No thank you. I think she is a piece of shit I stepped on.

I wish I felt like people loved me. I wish I could feel loved. I think part of the reason I cried on Noah last night was because I wanted to feel like he loved me. I didn’t feel that way. I feel dead inside. I feel like I went on an extended vacation to Chernobyl and my insides are radioactive and not quite functioning right.

I feel hollow and empty. I feel already dead. I feel like the cessation of breathing is a mere formality.

I have been here before. I know that how I feel right now is not how I feel all the time. I am dimly aware of that. I did have the chutzpah to up and get married. I felt loved. But mental illness is a liar.

When I was in the teaching credential they told us that a child has to hear ten positive things to cancel out everything negative said to them about themself.

When I think about what my mother said to me I cry. My inside voice is strong and loud and dominating. Shut up Kristine. No one cares, Kristine. Shut up.

I’m very ready for this cycle to change.

What are you afraid of?

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I am asked what I am afraid of. I went to a party last night. I have known those people a long time. Shunning. That’s what I’m afraid of. I sat at the party and I listened to people I didn’t know bicker. I listened to the relationship dynamics. The things they were saying and the frustrations they appeared to be expressing. I listened to the passive aggressive shit.

I didn’t stay in the group after Tom and I broke up because I didn’t want to watch what happened when he started hunting and I didn’t want to hunt in front of him. I know less than half of the people who are there now. Now I don’t have to worry about the crowd knowing my whole history. I didn’t want to parade men through the group. I would have been ashamed of myself. I am ok with people having a theoretical knowledge that I am a slut but I don’t parade my business.

I don’t want to be a parent in an open relationship because I don’t want to parade my business and I don’t want to keep dirty secrets. The only way I see to do that is to create an unchanging set of roles that they primarily interact with. It is a choice to be that kind of person for my kids. Not because I think all polyamorous people are bad–that truly isn’t it.

I’m not polyamorous. I’m a slut. I pick up random people on the internet for sex. I have done a lot of it. I have hit three digits of sex partners but I don’t know for sure. I lost my list in a hard drive crash. I used to keep an excel document with check marks for what sexual activities I did with whom. I did that in case I needed to look people up and say, “I tested positive.” I thought it was the ethical thing to do. I did actually go back and contact everyone when I tested positive for herpes. Even the one night stands I otherwise would never fucking have talked to again. It was hella awkward. I explained that I used to get cold sores as a kid, so I have probably had it all my life. I thought I was getting tested for it when I said, “Test me for everything” but actually they don’t do the herpes test as a standard thing. Whoops.

Sometimes people say that they won’t sleep with someone who has had more than x number of partners. I have had guys tell me that completely out of the blue so they can explain why they won’t fuck me even though I am hot. Cause obviously I was hot for them, right? The fact that I was not remotely sexually attractive to them was irrelevant.

I had a different point when I started writing. Shunning. Moving as often I did as a child is a constant slow motion enaction of shunning scenes. There were large scale specific instances that stick in my mind. When I was in eighth grade we lived with Seventh Day Adventists. Living with Uncle Bob sucked because he was a verbally abusive asshole. The only people who would take my mom and I in were the religious folk. They were kind as long as you did what they wanted.

I went to church with them. I went a lot. I got very involved. I started following Joey like a puppy and he was very involved in the church life. I went with him everywhere. I tagged along on trips up the the SDA college in Northern California, I found out about the boarding high school in Mountain View. I had fantasies of going before the church elders and telling them about my life and asking for scholarships. Please, please save me. Joey and I did a lot of door to door missionary work. I helped in the production of a series of classes on spiritual matters. I read my fucking Bible. I could quote it chapter and verse.

I had this friend at school, Yvette. She was involved in a different church. She invited me to come with her to a lock-in. That’s where they lock a bunch of kids in a gym all night long. It was a lot of fun. We played games and sang songs and told stories. It was one of the best nights of my childhood.

I came to one of the leaders of the youth group for the SDA church. I asked if we could look into doing something like this at our church. She recoiled from me in horror. She said that she did not condone filth. She told me that I would be better served somewhere else.

If I couldn’t go with Joey to the Seventh Day Adventist church then I didn’t have a way to get to a church at all. I couldn’t get off the mountain.

To punish myself for being unlovable by God I would enact the most horrible things I could think of. Mostly this entailed reenacting scenes from Bertrice Small books. I would dress up in the closest things I could find to corsets. I would wear really tight tights in layers until they caused me a lot of back pain. Then I would put on layers and layers and layers of gauzy skirts. I was very into the peasant skirt thing. I would put on many layers of shirts and dresses. When I was done I would put on a very tight belt. I walked around in the house. I would pretend to encounter strange men.

I would then pretend to be raped over and over. I used a wide variety of different items to penetrate my vagina starting with pencils. Sometimes I would experiment and see how many pencils would fit. I fucked myself with the legs of a Barbie. It kind of skeeves me out to see my kids play with Barbies. (Obviously not the same dolls.)

I would call myself names for hours. I would chant that I was a worthless whore and no one would ever love me. Even God didn’t want me. I was dirty and bad and I wanted bad things to happen to me. I deserved to be hurt. I was disgusting.

Then I started calling the radio dj. He was twenty-five. We went out on several dates. I was twelve. We didn’t have sex but he did ask me for a blow job. I gave it to him. I knew I was supposed to. I tried to be enthusiastic but it was really unpleasant. I tried to smile. I tried to not vomit in his car.

Not long after that my mother and I no longer were as friendly when the neighbors tried to tell us what to do and how to do it. We moved to the old house in the canyon for a while. I couldn’t stand living with my cousin’s girlfriend and her kids. I wasn’t nice to them and they weren’t nice to me. I think there is plenty of blame to go around for that situation sucking. Then Auntie and Uncle Bob bought the new house up in Redwood Estates and my mom and I joined them. It was like a palace. It was huge compared to the old house.

I spent a lot of time angry at God. I felt very directly shunned by God. I wasn’t. I was shunned by a tight-ass ignorant woman. A mean spirited harpy. Unfortunately God wears many faces. It doesn’t matter that she doesn’t speak for God. No one wanted to help me. Police officers told me not to talk about what happened to me after being sexually assaulted. I was isolated and hunted.

I don’t think the dj sexually assaulted me. I think he exploited my low self esteem, but that’s not the same thing. He didn’t force or cajole. He didn’t pressure me. I wanted to. I was enthusiastic. I asked him out on a date. I think he should have been a good enough person to understand that it was pretty bad for me to be doing what I was doing.

My mom didn’t mind me dating the dj. I broke it off. I felt disgusting and dirty when he gave me an opal necklace for Christmas. I knew it was a cheap shitty necklace. It was a gift worthy of my status. I was that bad of a whore.

Which isn’t fair. It was probably what he could afford. He didn’t know me. We didn’t have a real relationship.

But … yeah.

I don’t want to teach my kids to be the kind of promiscuous I am. It hurts me. I am to a point where I am capable of doing nonmonogamy in an ethical and reasonably safe way because I have made a lot of mistakes and I have been hurt in a wide variety of ways.

I have learned lessons that not everyone needs to learn. My kids don’t need to grow up and be like me. It is not important that my legacy be carried on in such a way. But maybe it is still important for my experiences to be talked about. That isn’t the same thing.

My kids aren’t having a life like I had but other kids are.

I really should try to sleep. I was going to try to go to the Renaissance Faire with the kids. Hahahahaha. We’ll see.

Brain dump + Bonus question.

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Occasionally someone will say something to me along the lines of them being worried about Noah being supportive enough.

I just yelled at Noah for almost two hours straight about how mad I am at all men and how angry I am about the current ways of dealing with rape in larger society and I said a lot of thinly veiled mildly implicating things that were quite harsh about all men. One time he slapped the arms of his chair and had a sharp intake of breath and he stood up and took two steps around in a circle then set his face in stern lines and settled in for more listening.

And over and over he patiently explained all the flawed results of my incoherent half-plans. He wasn’t dismissive but he was insistent. I’m just not looking at the whole picture. He’s right. He wasn’t even slightly demeaning. He was measured and careful in his tone. His facial expression was carefully monitored.

And when I cried in frustration and said I don’t know what to do he shook his head and sadly said he doesn’t either.

Noah has limited capacity to support me because he is a human being. I can consciously see how he is working as hard as he can to be supportive. It’s not his fault I have this hole in my life that is supposed to be filled by other people. I can’t do anything about that either.

Shanna told me yesterday that she wants to see the Eiffel Tower some day and she doesn’t care that I don’t like Paris I will have to go with her and she will make sure I have fun. I bet you she would be right.

I don’t run in Fremont again before the marathon. I am supposed to walk nine miles in the next five days. We leave for Disneyland Tuesday morning. Piece of cake. The marathon is pretty much exactly seven days away. Nearly to the minute.

I feel disembodied and empty. Drained.

One thing Noah promised to do for me (we’ll see) is set up a website and a mailing list. I’m going to start writing again soon. I have two very specific book ideas I’m playing with and I’m having trouble deciding which to write next.

My relationship with Tom will be a book by itself. It will be incredibly graphic and highly sexual.

The other book is one that Noah is encouraging me towards: Outrunning Suicide: A Harm Reduction Approach to Life. I already have the starts of the table of contents and multiple chapters partially written. I’ll be going through and examining all the ways I distract myself from killing myself. I think it is an interesting topic and so does Noah.

What do other people think?

In praise

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I don’t know how other people find self-worth. For me part of it involves being liked by people I admire. People I feel are particularly good at _________.

So I have this friend. I met her when I was fifteen. I met her because I was sneaking out of the house to go to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I started chasing a guy, well–several, named Scott. Scott was kind of available. He didn’t technically have a girlfriend or anything. We dated a bit but nothing serious–you see he was hung up on this other chick, P. I was so jealous I couldn’t see straight. I hated her on sight. Who is this slutty bitch?

Because you see, she had a boyfriend who went to a different university (all these people were five years older than me) and she was STILL STRINGING SCOTT ALONG. Obviously she was bad. I helped him out. I have never liked those girl games of promising and denying. I make up for those chicks. I feel like those girls are hurting the poor boys who have needs because I am a deeply damaged individual.

She was prettier than me. She was older than me (which was a big god damn selling point when I was fifteen). She had great breasts. She was really shapely. Dear god she had a nice body. I had some lurid thoughts about telling Scott, “Well why don’t all of us just…” but I didn’t. I was good.

Time went by. Scott didn’t last long in my life. Guys in that slot (ha) rarely last longer than three months. I ditch them quickly.

Years later I turned eighteen. I ran into the girl at one of the theatres in San Jose. I showed up to do low-level volunteer work at a theatre with a friend and she happened to be the stage manager. The show was Hair. That was such a lovely frisky time of life. Lots of hinting at sex but not much doing it. I was dating Steve.

(I have to give you a name. You seem to like Pam. That’s an acceptable pseudonym-right? I still think you are being ridiculous. You are one of like 3.7 million people with your name.)

So Pam was around. I was spending a lot of time with Kristine. (God bless her for spelling our name right.) I uhhh broke up with Steve because I wanted to sleep with a different Steve. I wanted to sleep with that other new Steve because Pam was stringing him along and I am a compulsive whore. So I dumped my boyfriend. I’m awesome. At least I didn’t cheat on him. That’s always been my line.

I started getting to know Pam though. As things that summer shook out in my life (found the bdsm community, drifted away from theatre) for some reason Pam kept calling me.

And calling.

She would come pick me up and we would hang out. I felt… baffled. Why did she want to seek out my company? People don’t really do that very often. I am not pursued. I am avoided. I am abandoned by people I pour many years of hard work and energy into. I don’t get pursued much. It’s a heady experience.

So I spent a lot of time talking to Pam, because she wanted to talk to me.

It’s been a lot of years. She went off and worked on a cruise ship for five years. Then lived in Australia for a few years. Then Taiwan. Now she’s on the east coast having just graduated from an ivy league fancy-pants graduate school. (I’m proud of you for finishing your conclusion. Get started on the last paper.)

She used to traipse around the world being gone for years at a time doing very interesting things. She’s had a fun life. She always makes time and space for me. She calls me. She calls me faithfully though irregularly. Before I had kids I dropped whatever I was doing to answer calls from her. I once answered the phone while teaching because it is that important to me to answer the phone when she calls.

I do it out of respect. This person has spent a lot of money on international phone calls to me over the more than decade of our friendship because she wants to hear my voice. Because she just loves me. Because she wants me to tell her what I am doing and thinking and talking about. She is interested in me and she respects me.

And she is someone I have a lot of respect for. She doesn’t have all that high of an opinion of herself, which I hear is normal. I’ve seen her do things that I want to do but I’m too afraid. She has had the courage to chase a lot of dreams I can’t handle living. I feel like she is my gypsy self. She actually broke free.

And way back in the day when I was dating Tom she wanted to ahem find out more about the ladies so I helped her out with that. Really we’ve had kind of an interestingly sex-related friendship the whole time.

I support her in being parts of herself that the other people in her life wouldn’t respect. She’s kind of slutty, bless her heart. Not a lot. Nothing compared to me, of course. But she hasn’t settled down with one person and she’s kind of nomadic and not inclined towards monogamy.

Before Noah and I got married I was dating this guy I’ll call Spot. I met Spot at BaGG and he was kind of my “club boyfriend” during the time when I did a lot of clubbing. Given that once he had to drive me home because my drink was spiked I feel I was right in believing I needed a protector in that space. Spot overlapped with the early part of my engagement to Noah.

Pam came back to California for one of her periodic visits during that time period complaining long and loud about how she hadn’t been able to get laid in a long time. Given my compulsive bent I said, “Well, which guy do you want to borrow?” She said both. She’s like that. So I called up both boys and told them to come over for a foursome.

I didn’t want to completely run the fuck and that was the problem. For the first bit I assigned Noah to Pam and told Spot I was starting with him. I did announce this out loud. Spot decided it was more interesting to kind of glom onto Pam while she and Noah were playing and ignore me.

Can you guess how this went? Noah realized kind of late into the evening that I was sitting there trying not to cry. He tried to save. Once Pam realized I was upset she tried to save. Spot… well… I didn’t date him much longer and I don’t really talk to him much any more. He did give me the awesome kitty hat for my birthday though. He’s not a bad guy just… not perceptive.

And when Pam was in town while I was pregnant and not interested in sex I had her come over and fuck Noah so that he would be in a better mood. That was very mixed for me emotionally. I’m not sorry I did it–I got the results I wanted. But the cost was high. I don’t like sharing. I’ve decided I’m not going to anymore and both Noah and Pam are very supportive and awesome about it. They were never “dating” they are both just slutty like me. “I like sex. You are here. Ok!” But they are affectionate friends. Only they don’t really talk to one another unless they are both here to see me.

This must be what a V feels like. I don’t mind that they talk and are friendly with one another as long as they are both here to be paying attention to me. I can share that much. I’m generous and all.

I’m not explaining this right. I’m not explaining why she is important. Pam has had a life that is about as different from mine as a life can be in most of the big, obvious ways. And for some reason she latched on to me and fell in love with me and she has created a long term intense relationship for us that freely mutates with my mood swings. If I tell her to do things she says sure. If I tell her to stop doing things she says sure.

When I told her about the smoking she had this interesting reaction. She said, “Hmmmm. If you were anyone else I would start on a long lecture about how irresponsible you are. But you are you. How about if instead I say: I know that you reach conclusions after a lot of careful research, study, and thought. Why don’t you tell me what lead you to decide that was the best option because I know that it must be the best option out there. Or you wouldn’t be doing it.”

I cried. Part of what this relationship gives me is this ongoing feeling of someone feeling that I am important and worth seeking out. Part of what I get is the modeling of what being respected looks like. Not very many people respect me the way Pam does. Not very many people turn to me and say, “Hey I assume you are an authority on this subject. Will you please teach me part of what you know?”

I feel really silly but it feels good to have this person who is nothing like me so she doesn’t understand me at all but that just leads her to ask questions. She wants to understand me–I’m just different from everything she has ever known. She has to ask a lot of questions. I feel like she cares enough to actually want to know me. People don’t ask me very many questions. People don’t want to bother me. So for the majority of my adulthood I have sat alone in rooms not talking to anyone. Except when I’m lucky enough to have Pam call. I prioritize taking those calls over talking to people who show up one off to hang out at my house. I’ve been kind of an asshole about it a couple of times. Pam is very important to me. I drop everything for those calls.

Although having kids has changed this dynamic a lot. Often my phone is on vibrate or silent and I don’t hear it ring. We have a lot more misses now and that is hard for me. I no longer have the space to give our relationship complete seniority at a moments notice like I used to and it is very frustrating for me.

Pam makes me feel like a main character. She wants to hear my stories. She wants me to talk. She wants to know about me. She likes to cuddle me. She’d love more sex’n but is very supportive of that being off the table and thinks it is good that I’m taking care of myself. She wants me to think I am important.

I am fairly honest with myself. She is never going to live near me. She is never going to be anything but occasional phone calls and maybe a visit a year. But she puts a really lot of effort into writing me long emails (I just expect her to read my blog–I don’t have time for all that much long email writing on top of the blathering I do here and I’m a brat and I want it posted.) and she calls. She puts a lot of energy into making me feel important to her. Into reminding me that she thinks about me a lot. When she needs advice she comes to me. When her sister needs advice she tells her sister to come to me. When her friends need advice she relays stuff to/from me.

She has told me that I am her ideal parent. I set the bar for what “doing it right” looks like for her. She makes me cry.

We have occasional long stretches where I get mad at her for some reason or another. Sometimes with semi-cause (things were tense for a good six months after the thing with Spot) but mostly it’s just me having trouble dealing with the ways in which we are very different. I’m not good at that. But she is. And she talks to me actively about compromise and being respectful of one another. And she lives up to her end of it over and over and over and over and over. It’s pretty easy to trust her. She wears her intentions on her face. She is one of the most blessedly honest people I know.

The weird thing is, I’m pretty sure that isn’t the experience that other people in the world have of her. She does a lot of things that are very rebellious by her standards and she spends a lot of time being wracked with guilt for one thing or another.

One of the things Pam gives me is a constant reason to think, “How can someone so obviously tremendous in merit doubt their worth?” When I get an uncomfortable niggle of self-awareness from that thought I immediately stomp on it with great leather boots, of course.

Pam gives me the feeling that if I believe I am important I can go out and be that in the world. Maybe not to absolutely everyone–no one is. Not even everyone likes Santa Claus and if anyone was going to get universal popularity it is that motherfucker. Not me.

But I can be to a few people. And if I can make one life better isn’t that enough? Isn’t that something? Do I really have to be trying to amass a harem? I don’t want or need to be a guru. I want to be respected, not worshiped. I don’t need to be blindly followed. I don’t want or need people to be like me. I really like that there are people who say, “I want to know about _____ and I know you know a lot about it–can we talk?” It makes me feel like my existing in the world is useful. I do have things to give.

Pam is insatiably curious. If I look at my closest cadre of friends that is probably one of the strongest traits for all of my friends. They want to understand. I think you need to be such a person in order to bear my company for long. I’m what is termed “high needs” in young kids. It’s why Shanna’s questions and thirst for more more more from me doesn’t phase me. I feel the same way a lot of the time. Less now than when I was younger, I’m tired.

Pam I love you for so many reasons. Because your extreme perfectionism gives me a little light on how my own perfectionism is pretty twisted. You are good enough. You are smart enough. You are going to get a good job because you are a god damn amazing speaker and you get people. I think you will do well. You are like a cat. You always land on your feet. No, you don’t make a million dollars. No you didn’t become a famous model. You were thirty and not willing to starve yourself–you knew that wasn’t an option going in. You did fine. I wouldn’t have done as well. Sometimes I kind of hate you in an I love you and you are so awesome it feels painful to stand next to sometimes kind of way. It’s complex.

Pam is challenging to me to spend time with or talk to. I have to really think and process and be on in order to handle her. I’m fucking weird to her so I have to explain a lot of things that feel really tangential to me and it gets kind of hard to stay on a track. That feels frustrating. It feels like she is arguing but she is just pressing for enough information to keep following. I’m glad she has the chutzpuh to interrupt me and ask for clarification–don’t get me wrong. I want her to understand, but it’s been an adventure figuring out tone of voice stuff between us. We have different cultures. Very. Different. Cultures.

I have learned a lot and been challenged in a great many ways over the years as I have been exposed to her culture. She is very happy to introduce me to her other friends and she doesn’t give a shit if I make them feel uncomfortable as long as my subject matter is G rated. As a parent I feel a lot more comfortable with such limitations and impose the shit out of it on everyone around me so that has grown more comfortable. I feel like being a parent has finally given me a bridge into being willing to figure out respectable behavior. Pam is an invaluable resource.

No relationship between mothers and daughters is perfect. Pam tells me about her relationship and the relationships she sees and she teaches me a lot. I don’t really have any other access to such information. When I am in tricky situations with the kids I sometimes think about how Pam would handle something. What do I see her immediately do with my kids? I don’t see many people really walk up to my kids and treat them like people to have relationships with–Pam did from the first minute she met them. They were already people to her in her mind because she asks me about them all the time. She wants to know what they do all day. She wants to know the slightly condensed version of the Collected Works. And she comes back for updates quite frequently so things don’t even have to be condensed all that much. It’s really nice.

I can say, “I’ve been thinking about ____” and she responds with (I can hear her brain whirr) “Wait that is the person who did _______ and ______ and _____, right?” She can cross reference my whole experience with people because she has paid a lot of attention and gotten a lot of details about people over the years.

It’s really nice having this friend who is 100% outside my life so I can tell her what I really think about absolutely everyone I know. I don’t have to worry about polite courtesy. I can be honest. I cherish it.

I’m Pam’s beck and call girl. She doesn’t want a lot of my time and I feel so good about being wanted and appreciated that I’m going to respond as consistently and quickly as I can for the foreseeable future like I have for thirteen years. I like being wanted. Not many people want me.

How can you not understand how important you are?

Doesn’t everyone hear voices?

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Everyone is sleeping. I’m sitting in the living room. It feels really weird. The sun is coming up. It’s 6:34. Where is everyone? I could go wake Noah up–he wouldn’t mind. I figure he needs the sleep. I ate a blueberry muffin. Not exactly a breakfast of champions. I’m going to run twelve miles today.

Someone on the internet told me that if I was being harassed in my neighborhood I should drive to a better neighborhood so I can run there. That made me feel really angry. I felt insulted and disgusted by the suggestion. Noah asked me if I was looking for sympathy or advice. I thought about it really hard. I was pretty sure I wanted advice but not that fucking advice.

Then I got several other pieces of advice. I understand that other people feel comfortable with hand guns, but I’ve had one pointed at my head. I don’t think there are any circumstances under which I could really handle having a gun on my person. I don’t like the options it gives me. I was thrilled when someone suggested changing time of day, wearing a loud whistle, carrying mace, borrowing a dog to run with, or finding running buddies.

Ok. Now that’s a god damn list of suggestions that doesn’t bother me. It was a really strikingly different set of reactions from me. This is why I used to be fanatical that I didn’t want advice. Because I don’t have a lot of control over how strong my emotional reaction will be. When it’s generic people on the internet I will maybe/probably never meet it doesn’t matter. As long as I’m not a dick it doesn’t matter how I feel. That’s convenient.

People react to things based on a long list of complex factors. Everyone has a different life. I have a hard time when people suggest things that aren’t a good fit. I feel enraged by the suggestion that I should be a different kind of person. I do not want to be someone who runs away from difficult situations. If things got worse I might run with a big stick. I’m ok with the consequences of having that taken away from me and used against me. Unless someone is highly trained in martial arts they are unlikely to hit me any harder than my boyfriends.

I think a lot about why “women like me” don’t survive. I feel like my desire to do things in a way different from the herd makes me defective. But I’m doing the best I can. What is an acceptable life?

I’ve been yelling too much lately. Shanna is trying hard to learn to sneak. That’s a process I am struggling with. I used to do it. I feel kind of thrilled by having this mini-me in the house. I get to be so much nicer than I had.

Even though I feel like I am yelling more than I want to be yelling I have these tapes in my head that play over and over. I’m not like that. I don’t go on tirades. I make my point and I move on. I try to. I think I do. Am I ever allowed to be secure about this? Would it ever be ok for me to feel complacent on this subject? I don’t think so. So I am constantly wary. I must not go on tirades at my children. I must not go on tirades at my children.

I hear them in my head. When Shanna does stuff that I have done I hear my mother. I hear her screaming. I hear her choking and crying as she hit me and screamed at me that I was bad and stupid and how dare I and and and.

I’m having a hard time lately. I feel like a big part of the reason I want to block out this period of their childhood and be with them all the time is so I can experience what it is like to have a whole childhood that is safe. I don’t know. I have these terrible voices in my head. I am so afraid of being like my mother.

I am already too critical. I feel harsh lately. Overly judgmental. Really I feel like I should just shut my stupid mouth. When Shanna smarts off at me I smile at her and try to gently lead her tone and words in the direction I want them. In my head I hear, “You stupid little bitch”. Sometimes I honestly wonder about schizophrenia. When I was a teenager one of the meds they put me on caused me to be “borderline schizophrenic” according to the psychiatrist I was working with at Kaiser. I hear a lot of things that are not going on a lot of the time. It is very hard to not have multiple memory tracks going at once in my head. Sometimes it makes it hard to hear what someone is actually saying to me. I know it makes me sound sharp and harsh. Someone is always being nasty to me in my head. But it’s not an excuse.

That’s why I speak gently to my children. They won’t learn how to treat me unless I model it. I want them to be polite and gentle with me. So I am with them. It feels important. I am not going to be a hypocrite in that way. I am not going to yell at them and hit them for “talking smart”.

I hear stirring.

Busy weekend

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I went up to work at Wicked Grounds this weekend. On Saturday I went up after running thirteen miles. I was tired but ebullient. BART was really full so at one point I gave up my seat so that an elderly person could sit. Even though I just ran thirteen miles, I am clearly in a better position to be standing.

When I stood up two elderly Latina women started making comments–ok, so only one of them was loud. They glared at me. The words are already fuzzy in my memory (ahhh blessed medication) but she called me trash. They expressed shock that I was that gross and a woman. Ew. I was wearing jeans, a t-shirt with the words “Rope Slut”, and a zip up hoodie mostly closed over my chest. And a dog choke collar closed with a padlock. I looked at her quite fiercely and asked, “Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?” She turned bright red and looked down.

By contrast I ran around several blocks in San Francisco yesterday wearing a latex cheerleader outfit. It’s made with maroon and clear panels. One of the clear panels on the skirt is right over my ass crack. There is a deep clear vee in the front of the shirt. Now that I have ginormous mom nipples you can clearly see areola but not quite the nipple. It’s uhh festive. I had quite a few gay men tell me that I looked fabulous and they were proud of me for wearing it. It was… different.

Dore Alley is my anniversary. I got beaten by choice for the first time the night before Dore Alley in 2000. I was eighteen. It was my second weekend at the Power Exchange, a bdsm themed sex club in San Francisco. I had brought my sister the previous weekend and I was too afraid to play. I came back dressed in clothes I bought at Hot Topic and I asked a transwoman to beat me. I was afraid of the men, honestly. She flogged me very well.

I feel like Leather as an identity has changed a lot in the twelve years I have been part of the bdsm community. Even though I’m not active these days it still feels like my community. I have been there my entire adult life. I don’t have another community. There is no other grouping of people who will accept me for absolutely all of my fucked-up-interests.

I got to know a new person yesterday as a result of a massive faux pas. I used the wrong gender pronoun. I felt like a total fucking asshole. The woman-born-woman very bravely stayed near the cash register to tell me that I made a mistake when I said “he”. I felt so bad. (In my defense she is a very butch lesbian. Not that it excuses me in the slightest.) After that I ended up having a very long and protracted conversation with her.

It’s not every day I meet someone who says, “I know I am weird but it is because I was tortured as a child.”

Her androgynous gender appearance is the result of her father performing medical experiments on her from birth and trying to change her gender because she was born an identical twin and they wanted a boy.

We had a lot to talk about. We felt very comfortable together. We both found the bdsm scene at eighteen. She’s two years younger than me. I’m not sure how I have missed her for ten years. I do recognize her handle. I think I just have never been a San Francisco person. And City people don’t come south.

I got to sit down and have a surprise conversation with someone who I pretty much couldn’t shock. Do you know how often that happens to me? I’d put it at twice a decade. Normal people want to talk about their lives. From birth to eighteen I lived a traumatic horror show and when I turned eighteen I ran straight into the Leather community. I was embraced and adored. I still am.

I didn’t spend much time with anyone outside the Leather community for the four years I was with Tom. I was still close with Anna but Jenny and I barely spoke. We had very different lives even though we were both college students. I have rarely been like people my age. It was really amazing yesterday to find this person. I hope I can keep in touch with her. She feels like a gift.

The actual Up Your Alley Fair wasn’t very exciting. I felt pretty sad about how much it has changed. I saw far more latex than leather. Most guys were simply wearing underwear if they weren’t wearing pants. It didn’t look like a leather event. It looked like a bath house but outside with very little sex. I only saw three or four guys getting head. There used to be hundreds. I had the very strong impulse to ask the only really slutty guy I saw there (he had a line of boys) if he was willing to see if a mouth is just a mouth. I didn’t! I don’t do that any more! But I wanted to. I wonder if he would have let me. The fair felt uninspiring and if no one else was going to put on a show I might as well.

I really like this part of me. I want Noah to go to Folsom with me. Exhibitionism is big for me. I probably won’t have actual penetrative sex at Folsom but we will have to drive because I won’t be willing to make it home. The car can be put somewhere private.

I really like getting the shit beaten out of me while people watch and freak out. I like it. I really really like it. I like the energy of the crowd. I freak people out in dungeons too. I am on the far extreme edge of what is currently common. I wasn’t when I came into the community.

I found the leather community at the very beginning of the online era. People were still very paranoid about using the internet. It was harder to find parties because they weren’t advertised online. You had to get to know people still. We hung out in IRC talking all day and night together but we arranged the parties at munches. We had dungeons that were basically our community spaces. People spent a lot of time hanging around.

When I showed up as an eighteen year old it was very rare to see another person under thirty. The community was full of people who had already had full lives and then discovered something about themselves. They were people who made very conscious life choices to become the people they were.

Where I was there were a lot of older women who were very heavy masochists. Life has already made their ass hard. They have been getting hit for a very long time and they have leather butt. They can barely bruise any more. Sadists like bruises. If it gets harder and harder to bruise you… well… I guess I’ll just have to hit you with something bigger.

I got to meet someone this weekend who grew up like me. She was intensely abused and ostracized as a child and then found the same Leather community. I know all of the people she was mentored by. I don’t know how in the hell I have missed her.

I really want to write more about sex but I should go in.

Back to hunting, I guess.

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Noah recently discovered that we have money in an HSA we forgot about. Woo. That means I all of a sudden have money in the medical section. I think I am going to call my former therapist and say I am ready for a referral now.

What I am doing right now isn’t working for me. That means I need to figure out how to change it. I’m not very good at doing that by myself. That’s ok. There are professionals for this shit. This is why I have been in therapy for decades and I probably will be for most of my life. Even though I feel ashamed of myself for that. My therapists are the most stable friendships I have. I need mirrors. I don’t seem to be able to construct a mirror with sufficient intensity any other way. I have to pay someone to pay attention to me before I believe that they will actually do so week after week.

I feel really pathetic. I also feel really suicidal. It’s time to call for a referral. I’m not managing on my own right now.

I really hate me.

Random judgey thought.

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When people I am ostensibly “close” with tell me emphatically that they don’t read my blog and they didn’t read the book and they aren’t going to I feel a sudden and distinct cessation of closeness. This person only wants to know about the parts of me that are “nice”.

I don’t think that everyone has to keep up with the blog in order to like me. But I do feel kind of intensely about people not wanting to know about my life. I’d like to turn around and start walking so we can keep it that way. I’m not going to fucking censor so you so that you can avoid being uncomfortable. If you don’t want to know things like that about a person maybe you just shouldn’t know me at all. I will be better off if I avoid people who want me to think that parts of my life are unmentionable.

It isn’t that I think everyone has to read it. It’s that when people feel the need to emphatically tell me they won’t I want to leave. That feels like a door slammed in my face. They won’t allow themselves to find out things that are painful so they don’t want to know about me.

Ok. I’ll take that at face value and leave. There are people in this world who do not flinch when they look at me. I live with them. Maybe I should just stay home.

I’m tired of having to be supportive of people who want to avoid trauma by never knowing that people like me exist. I don’t have energy for this.

relationships

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Working is fun.

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I don’t know what I was thinking. How did I think I would get through over-night without Noah and the kids yesterday? Ha. I came home for bed-time. I called and told Noah to let the kids stay up a bit late and wait for me. When I got home I felt better.

I crawled into the lower bunk between Shanna and Calli. I cuddled both of them. Shanna rapid-fire told me all about her day. I wanted to know. I wanted to know about every second I missed. I was sorry that I missed them. I was sorry she got hurt yesterday and I wasn’t there to kiss it. She survived, of course. Kids get hurt. It’s ok. It sounds like she figured out most of the “class” parts of ballet. No more telling the teacher no one else was present. Ha.

I spent the day working in a coffee shop. That’s tiring work. I worked from the minute I arrived until I left. I took one ten minute break. I was in the shop for seven hours. Then I left to find food because I was starting to feel mean. I can understand why people in the community tell me that they don’t come in because they don’t like the food selection. We don’t have filling food. We have snack food. Hm. And I don’t want to take food from the shop because we need to make money and I’m too stubborn to pay for my food there after working that hard all day. Complicated. Luckily my share of the tip money (which I didn’t expect to get–that was kind) covered dinner. Woo.

At the shop I am working with Noah’s former partner. The one he was dating when he and I originally met. It was quite smooth. She has a very cheerful professional “face”. If she has a problem with me it was totally absent from her training me for the job. I wouldn’t say I felt comfortable but there is no way that I can say that any discomfort I felt was her fault. I was really impressed with watching her as an employee. That woman works like a demon. She takes pride in where she works. (Not this whole Gay Pride weekend stuff.) If something needs to be done she up and does it. She doesn’t wait for anyone else. She certainly doesn’t wait to be told what to do. I’m quite glad the coffee shop has her. I doubt we would have made it this far this year without people who just up and do things like she does.

It was kind of funny. When I got there an employee I don’t know was the only one working. I introduced myself as one of the owners and asked what work needed to be done. She gave me tasks and it worked out. She kind of fished around for how I got involved. I told her I met R many years ago at Shibaricon and then I ran TNG4 with him. D and I knew one another in junior college–we met when I was sixteen. She expressed surprise. Oh! Then you do know these people. Because she has never seen me around it is hard to understand that I existed all that time. Ha.

I like talismans. I like fetishes (in the traditional sense not in the modern “kinky” version). “An inanimate object worshiped for its supposed magical powers or because it is considered to be inhabited by a spirit” Like that. Noah and I do not have a formal all-the-time d/s or m/s relationship. We play with power exchange occasionally but it isn’t a formal all the time part of our life. This means that I have strong feelings about collars.

In the bdsm world that I grew up in there are signals. Signs that help people understand how to relate to one another. Different collars are used in different ways. The thing is, this varies by person. I have seen patterns emerge but there are always people who break the pattern. Nevertheless I observe trends. I have given away most of the collars I shared with Tom. He wished that I gave them back so he could reuse them. I said hell would freeze over first. You are a rich guy. Fucking replace it if you care so much. No you may not use my god damn collars on your long-line of women. Just no. Anonymous people with little-to-no-connection can have them with pleasure. Enjoy them. I still have some collars we shared. I don’t think I will ever have them around my neck again.

When I am going out to a bdsm event and I do not want to be hit on I have to think about signaling. I have a Big Shiny Wedding Ring quite on purpose but in the poly world it doesn’t matter much. In the bdsm world many people are at least open to playing with many people even if they won’t have sex with them. If you represent yourself as property then you aren’t approached as much. People have to feel really fucking confident that it’s ok before they ask to play. And they don’t do things that are pushing my boundaries because they want to respect my partner. It’s hilarious. People don’t seem to care if they offend me but if I look like property they want to not offend my owner. Fuck all y’all.

So I wore a shiny padlock on my sternum. It’s a very simple, old fashioned sort of collar. Dog choke chains make a statement. It’s been a long time since I have gone out in public making this sort of statement. I notice that I have a different kind of wariness now. I assume I am invisible now. I feel like I have learned better camouflage as prey. I no longer feel hunted a large percentage of the time. The space I take up in the world has changed.

I have spent a lot of my life moving from place to place. I always meet people easily. Looking friendly and approachable was part of how I had friends at all. People see me from across the room and come over to say, “You look like a good person to talk to.” I can generally talk to just about anyone. I am quick with words. Part of this was because I was in the habit of scoping every room I was in for people to have sex with. It makes you look friendly. Seriously. You smile a lot. I don’t do it any more. I can feel my facial expression. I always look harried an frustrated. Ha. Harried and frustrated looks like it might bite your head off, not give you a pleasant chat.

I spend my life in a very small and secluded sphere. I live in my role of “mom” for the vast majority of my time. Even given how much time I spend on that role I give it a disproportionate amount of energy compared to any and every other thing I have done. I am no longer hunting. It’s quite simple, really. I am not looking for lovers but I’m also not looking for friends. I have a full roster right now and I don’t even feel the need to particularly seek out new acquaintances. People will wander into and out of places I am standing. I don’t feel the need to chase them any more. I don’t need to fill up idle hours of my life. I’d give anything to have more idle hours. Oy.

I have no interest in modeling m/s or d/s while my kids are little. I want them to see a partnership. I want them to think that women are bad ass, not obedient. I want my kids to see an actual long term partnership. Staying together is important to me. People get distracted and unhappy with one another and they turn to other relationships to keep things interesting. I want my kids to think that their parents find one another interesting. I want to spend a lot of time with Noah. I like him. Being near him and talking to him makes me feel far better than I have felt at any point in my life. There is no other person on this planet who is as willing to put a mountain of time and energy into me. I am special to him. If he took that energy and gave it to someone else I would know. It would be an active withdrawal. There is a limited amount of time and energy in this life. I have something really special. I want to nurture it, not ignore it.

I have learned a lot about being gentle from being with Noah. He is the only big-tough-guy I have ever dealt with who will actively tell me I am hurting him. He’s both extremely picky and not picky at all–meaning that he chooses when to talk about when he is feeling. He can endure things stoically like the next big-tough-guy. He just doesn’t do that with me. He thinks I shouldn’t hurt him. He doesn’t want to be hurt by me. So he tells me when and how I hurt him so that I can lean to do better. Mostly we don’t hurt each other any more. It’s rare to have a slip. I don’t even lick his nose.

I feel really glad that I get to model the relationship I have with Noah. Some day we will do more with other power structures because we want to. I really like that it will happen after many years of earning careful trust. In the modern USA “slavery” is kind of an ephemeral concept. It’s not real. It’s not binding. It’s a choice to have a conscious power structure with someone else. It’s just a consciously and specifically chosen relationship style. There are a lot of Father Is In Charge mentality left in this country, I’m not sure why people are surprised that people want to formalize this. The language is charged, yes.

Right now I am using all of the caring-for-other-people energy I have for my children. They will not always need it and some day it will be unhealthy for me to pour this much energy into them all the time. I will still have this energy. I had this before I had kids. Noah spends a lot of time massaging me. He went to massage school as part of his learn-to-pick-up-chicks training. He really did go to school for how to be a better partner for me. I win. He also did hypnotherapy training. I’m totally going to be able to make him sound like a freakishly good fit when I write about him. I’m thinking about dialogue. I think I am hilarious. This will be a very different book to write.

I’m thinking very hard about what slavery meant to me. What did I do with Tom? How did that relationship fill my needs? I was under contract for two years. He ended that part of our relationship in a couples therapy session wherein the counselor told me that our problems were all my fault because I was asking too much of him by saying that he should follow the relationship rules of the contract we both signed. Needless to say, I felt quite good about myself at that point, right? That was when I started hounding him about kids. I was nearing the end of college. I had told him that I had no interest in getting married before I graduated from college. There was the strong implication that I wanted to get married after. He prevaricated for a while and pushed me to consider grad school.

I decided I had two paths for teaching. If I was going to do the get married and have kids thing I should teach K-12 something. If I am going to “be a grown up” forever and build my life around the bdsm scene I should teach college so that I can be out. I decided to start the masters program first. Either way I didn’t feel qualified to teach much yet. I felt like there was some magical level of smart I would feel at some point and then I would be qualified to teach. I would know enough about a topic that I felt comfortable saying, “Yes! I know this!” It’s ironic that I failed the final test after years of getting good grades and being told I was good at this–writing, that is. Oh well.

I asked Tom if we could open our relationship in December of 2003. I didn’t technically have sex with anyone till January. I think I knew from the first person that I was hunting. I started the masters program first but I started the teaching credential the next term. I moved out of living with Tom in October about six weeks after I broke up with him. I started the credential and broke up with him at the same time. He would never answer the marriage and kids thing. So I disengaged. I threw that energy out into the world. I went hunting. I started dating Noah in February.

It’s going to be really fun to write about Noah. Knowing how this story goes it means that I am having an interesting time figuring out how to approach tone. This is going to be so different to write. How do I represent my time as a slave? What did I tell Tom? What kind of relationship was that?

I want to wear a lock on my sternum while I am working at Wicked Grounds because I want to announce that I am protected. I am wanted. Someone has already found me. When I was part of those communities I was always hunting. Always willing to say yes. It changed how I talked to people. In the past I have had issues with men taking liberties. I want to discourage it. Signaling is complicated.

I have been raped at a public sex party. I’m aware that it happens. A coffee shop isn’t a sex party. But I have had people casually touch my breasts. I have had people grab my ass. These actions aren’t “rape” but I’m kind of a ticking time bomb. One of these times I am going to break something on someones body as a result of them grabbing me. And it will probably escalate from there and be “all my fault”, right? I’m scared. I don’t like that I am scared. It is very hard for me to be in places I think of as hunting territory when I am not hunting. I feel physically sick. I feel scared. I am going to bring any fetish of protection I have.

Slavery is a way of acknowledging that someone is that interested in me. Different people do slavery differently. I’ll write more about that later. It’s time to start getting ready. Today will be a long day. I need to bring a water bottle and specifically drain it every so often. I think I was dehydrated yesterday. I know I was hungry. I ran five miles yesterday morning before working on my feet for seven hours making food and washing dishes. I ate a bowl of oatmeal, a thin slice of quiche… and that wall before dinner. By which time I was starving and had a raging headache. I think I should take better care of my body today. Today is supposed to be a “cross training” day. I hope this counts. I hope it will be fun. I had fun yesterday. It was fucking awesome to get to talk to people with a counter between us so they couldn’t touch me. I have serious issues. Whatever. It worked. I felt safe. I felt like I was doing something and I had a place and a purpose. I was using some of my caring-for-other-people energy on that community. Twelve years is a long time. I’m not gone. I’m on sabbatical. I’m training for my next relationship. It will be very different to use more of that energy on Noah. I feel specifically spooked.

And I should go take a shower.

Status

8 Replies

I finally found one of the threads in my brain I’ve been trying to turn into a full tapestry. Let’s see how this goes.

How much do other people think about status? I think about it a lot. I think about who has it and why. Status is far more important than people want to admit in pretty much every area of life. Dancers try to tell me they aren’t status whores but they have spent many thousands of dollars on costumes to be impressive. Really?

I’m status obsessed. I can say it out loud as well as in writing. I think about the potential status repercussions for my actions. I like to toil in isolation and show up with something cool. I don’t like being seen sucking. If I can’t do that, well, I guess I don’t need to come out of isolation.

I’m a weird place socially. I am not present in any community enough to be an Alpha. I know it. I accept it. I don’t really want to be a leader. It’s a lot of pressure. But I’m not really a group member. I suck at that. My experience of being part of the hierarchy is that I have to be on the bottom and shut my fucking mouth about it.

I re-watched the movie Whale Rider recently. The little girl was explicitly told she had to sit in the back and not participate while the boys were trained. Obviously she wasn’t as good as them. They had dicks. They are better.

That was really and truly how my childhood was oriented. If someone had a penis and he wanted to be “right” you had to let him. I certainly went off and lived that experience again with Tom. I don’t do that any more. I argue with Noah. I am kind of an asshole when I am right. I have a lot of years of bitterness around being told I am wrong. It’s not fair to Noah. He thinks it is a small sin in the scheme of things. I have gotten much more polite over the years.

Noah and I have long, complicated conversations about status. In terms of income we are in the top 10% of the country. In the bay area we are fairly median. We consciously choose to live in a smaller, cheaper house than most of our friends want to live in. Noah deals with a long commute so that he doesn’t have to spend way more money on a mortgage. This was what he could afford to buy ten years ago. I’m told we should upgrade now. My thought is, “Nah, I can remodel when the mortgage is paid off.” I won’t be able to buy a house that feels perfect. I’ll have to change it too. Why not just put all the effort into this house? Why leave my garden? I’ve done a lot of work here. This is my piece of dirt. I have changed it.

Because where I live is rather low status.

People snicker occasionally. You live in Fremont? I don’t really understand the sneering. Mother fucker my family is from Bakersfield. This is a step up. I promise. It helps that even my neighbors think we are on the low end of things. We don’t spend money in flashy ways. I think a month-long trip to Europe is a high status thing to do. I’d rather do that than spend more money on rent.

Noah was talking to me about how people want to be able to identify very high status people and very low status people and they don’t really want to think about the bits in the middle. That’s sticky. I’m in the middle these days. I have been on the bottom. I know very well what it feels like to be looked at and judged to be less of a worthy person just because of the things you don’t have. The rest of my family has standard poor-person-values in terms of wanting status symbols. You may live in a roach infested dump but damnit you have expensive shoes. Or a big car. Or something. I don’t want to have. I want to do.

Most of the people who inhabit my world are fairly bright. I know a lot of ivy-league-educated people. I live in that kind of place. I always know I am not one of them. I know that I am a social climber. I know that I really belong on the lower end of societies scale on most things. I spend my time around people who are demonstrably higher status than me wondering when they will look down on me. I didn’t go to CMU or Stanford or MIT or… They still talk about it all the time. Clearly it is a big part of their self-perceived status. If it is such a demonstrably large part of their perceived status it isn’t much of a jump to think that they therefore judge other people on the same criterion. All I have to say is that my university was named for a city when I went there. Now it’s just “East Bay”. Woo. That’s pride to have. Even the school isn’t proud of being in Hayward. Let’s try to pretend we have some relevance compared to places like Berkeley. We’re part of the bay area too! Ugh.

I forget that the ivy league educated people aren’t any smarter than I am. I feel intimidated by them. I never even took trigonometry. Obviously I am as stupid as a rock. At least that is the attitude the geeks have. In their little status hierarchy I am extremely low status.

I think I married Noah because, near as I can tell, he has a higher opinion of my status than anyone else. Even before marrying me. He thought my experiences and strengths add up to a person of considerable value. I think he married me because I look at him and see very high status. I can’t believe someone like him would want someone like me.

I crawled out of the gutter. I come from uneducated people with no work ethic to speak of. I come from drug abuse, alcoholism, and heinous abuse of various flavors. It feels like I am an untouchable. How could a trust fund baby from an ivy league see anything worth having? Status is a complicated thing. If you are sufficiently mobile you can trick people into only seeing your current life situation. If you do that then you can have some degree of social mobility in the middle. You will never be high status that way. Such assignments carry longer term consequences. They are for people who are fairly consistent in their life. You can carry low status with you. I feel like I am trying to outrun mine.

How much do I have to do? How much do I have to accomplish? What do I have to learn? What do I have to do to throw of the stink of being low status? I don’t know. These days it seems like the stench is only in my own mind. I have managed to learn how to pass. People don’t question me about my status unless I tell them I am white trash. Maybe that is why I do. I’m fucking tired of how these middle status people don’t want to honestly talk about what that means.

I’m in the middle. Probably lower than you. And sometimes I can’t help myself but I hate you for it.

Tall Paul

2 Replies

My dad was really tall. He was 6’7″. He was the tallest in a fairly tall family. The one time I was in a room with a bunch of Archer women (they all have different last names now because they married out of the family so I don’t feel too bad about outing their name) I was reminded that I was tainted by lesser blood. “Your father did marry a short woman. I guess we should have expected a midget.” I’m 5’5″. The next shortest woman in the room was 5’8″. They Archers have a nose built for looking down on people. My sister told me when I was a kid, “It’s a good thing you have the Archer nose so that you can look down on people who are taller than you.”

My brothers were really nasty to me about my size when I was growing up. They were four and a half and eight years, respectively, older than me. Of course I was smaller than them. But they were mean about it. Jimmy called me, “Midget” and he didn’t have a smile on his face. He would “accidentally” smack me in the face with his elbows and then say he can’t be held responsible for not seeing a midget.

It’s kind of funny because on my mom’s side of the family I am the tallest woman in a few generations. I grew up around women who are all much smaller than me so they always talked about how unusually large I was. I really don’t have much perspective on myself. I don’t know if I am a big person or not.

Recently I was lucky enough to have two friends come over to see me on the same day. That was kind of an accident but it was nice. They both happen to be quite tall. Of course they got around to telling me that I am a midget.

I blinked. I don’t think my facial expression changed much. I was trying hard to control the urge to do something violent. I felt such a massive over reaction that I knew there was no way I could react at all. I could feel paralysis set in. Just blink. I’m pretty sure I bit my lip. I tried to control the tears.

I have always cried when I am frustrated. Tears just spring into action. I feel so much anger, so much intensity that I want to hurt someone or something. I know there is nothing I can do. I can’t make the feeling go away. I can’t change how anyone is going to treat me. I can’t do anything about anything. So my eyes well up with tears. These days I don’t feel exactly the same way. I can do things. But not when I am flooded. Not when I hear Jimmy in my head sneering “Midget”.

My therapist told me on Thursday that she needs to stop doing private practice because she has ten months left to complete things for her license and she needs to concentrate on that. I enthusiastically told her I support her doing that. I could immediately feel walls come up. I no longer felt like I had things I wanted to tell her. She was no longer going to be a carrier of my story. I feel like I have to pull back all of the energy I store up to give her and conserve it very carefully.

I’m not up for running out and finding a new therapist this month. Therapy is a relationship. I need space between them so I can regroup and really understand what my current need is in a therapist because things change. Sharon was great when I wanted EMDR to help me deal with the miscarriages and two people who were close to me overdosing on heroin in a short period of time. She was not a good long term therapist for me. My needs changed.

I will need to figure out what I should be looking for right now. There is a big part of me that wants to tell my current therapist that I will wait out the year and hope she comes back to private practice. The two former therapists I really bonded with are both dead. I don’t have very many people in the whole world who have listened to me actually tell my stories out loud. Many people have read them. Not many people have been interested in knowing this part of me. Finding a new therapist is hard.

In February I was told, “There are no personal problems they are all problems of the community.” I’m not sure I know what I need right now. I am going to take advantage of the unexpected budget win-fall and go see my acupuncturist. (See, I only used two c’s in the word instead of three. I can be taught. Eventually.) That will be good. I can get new glasses. Woo. These are more than two years old and I have a constant low level headache because they are out of date. No bueno.

It’s hard how much my current life is influenced by people who hated me. It’s decidedly inconvenient at times. I really wish I could get them out of my head.

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Category Archives: mirrors

I believe "brave" is a synonym for "stupid".

The social mask

scope

probably a good decision process

Pity party, table of one

Tried something different.

What are you afraid of?

Brain dump + Bonus question.

In praise

Doesn’t everyone hear voices?

Busy weekend

Back to hunting, I guess.

Random judgey thought.

relationships

Working is fun.

Status

Tall Paul