Category Archives: people hacking

I don’t think that getting over my anger is the point.

“Get busy living or get busy dying.”- Shawshank Redemption.

Sometimes it feels like life is about learning how to come to grips with your wasted potential. I could do _______ if only ___________. It’s a long series of conversations with yourself as you narrow down possibilities in life until the only path you could possibly take is completely obvious. Look, you’ve been working towards this all along. You did ______ and then you did _____ so obviously ______.

But believing that requires some underlying belief in a greater plan. Things are not inevitable. Things are changeable right up until the second they happen. It’s random. It has to be.

It has to be for me because otherwise there would have to be some specific reason I was picked out of a hat to suffer far more than other people. I’m sorry, there is no Kushiel looking out for my well being. I’ve read the Bible. I’ve read big parts of the Book of Mormon. I’ve read books by Martin Buber and St. Thomas (Aquinas, of course) and Sr. Thomas More and and. I did all the classes required for a masters degree in English. I got good grades. I read. I studied. I didn’t know I was supposed to be practicing handwriting. Whoops. Anyway.

I am educated. I have read what the masters think of the world. Sometimes I agree with them but often I don’t. I have had significant personal experience that disagrees with their beliefs.

I have two ways I can handle that. I can decide that they are right or I can decide that I am right.

Now, I like to hedge my bets. I have strong opinions but I’m willing to reconsider them given reason. It’s very rare that I bother to try, I am human after all. But when something challenges my belief structure I have to think about it very hard. I know I am not always right (really, D).

I kind of feel like I should stay off social networking sites for a while. I am feeling too many “shoulds”. I need to do what I am going to do and not worry about whether other people approve or not. Of course there are lots of people who don’t. Will I let that stop me? No. Then why let it bother me?

Because when people I love reject me in harsh ways it bothers me. When people I love tell people they think I am dangerous it bothers me.

Are they right?

I’m told I need to get over my anger. I’m not sure that it is anger I need to get over. I need to get over wanting things from other people. I need to really and truly not give a shit if a given person likes me or not. I know who my friends are.

As the legal next-of-kin I think I feel very reasonable about treating the God-Mamas as family. They take the kids every month. They have a very serious on-going relationship. They are invested and serious about it. That’s the last time I am going to do that to my kids. My family unit is closed. I can care about me. I can care about Noah. I can care about Shanna. I can care about Calli. I should not try to make sure there is stuff left for other people. Maybe there will be and maybe there won’t. My friends understand. They really don’t have high expectations of me–which should be depressing only it isn’t. They like me anyway.

Anger and anxiety are both emotions that are about energy flow. (In my opinion. I’m going to babble even more whacko than usual tonight. Sorry. It’s been a very long and very sober day and I’ve had time to sit with my anger more than I usually do.) I have a lot of energy. I have spent my entire life feeling like I am sitting with a burning wire of energy in the middle of my body. It churns my stomach. It constricts my throat and my lungs.

People are monolithic for me in a way that I don’t think most people understand. My life has always changed a lot. Every so often I up and move either geographically or in social sphere. As I age there is more and more overlap in communities. I’m having a harder and harder time going out. It’s scarier than I like admitting.

If I had been funneling my whole life towards what I am doing now the path would have looked different, don’t you think? It all depends on how you frame it. I’m a stay at home mom. I used to be a high school teacher. I’ve been married for nearly six years (anniversary is in a couple of weeks). I live less than twenty-eight miles away from my elementary school (well, one of them). My middle and high schools (at least five of them) are slightly closer to me than that. I’m a hippie. I dress very conservatively most of the time. I don’t have a television or watch anything approximating television programming on a computer. I garden a lot. I homeschool. I do building projects.

I am angry. I stay home a lot because I am afraid and I am fucking angry that I am afraid. Today we went to the post office. It went fine. The kids started to get into things but were easily distracted. Nevertheless I spent the whole time feeling very anxious. I was afraid my kids would get yelled at. I was afraid I would get yelled at. I was afraid the woman helping me would be mean. Good freakin grief. It’s ridiculous. I started crying and hyperventilating and the woman helping me told me it would be ok. That’s god damn embarrassing. I’m a fucking adult.

You want to tell me I should just get over it again? Oh fuck off. But the whole episode was under a minute. It’s not like it is a big deal. Only it hurts. It hurts my stomach. It hurts my heart. It hurts my throat. It hurts my head. It hurts my lungs. I feel like I am dying. If I could just stop it I would. There is no magic drug for me. The only thing I can do is dope myself to get the panic to stop. Look at any psych drug on the market. That’s what they do. They do it in different ways, but whatever.

I don’t really see a point in trying to live a long life if I am going to spend a lot of time every day in pain because my brain doesn’t understand that I am not in danger. It’s not like she had the power to prevent me from sending my packages. If she was really bitchy I could have gone to UPS. (But I’ll say: the gruffness from the ladies in the Mountain View USPS is just a front. They are softies.) She had no power to hurt me. Someone feeling irritated by my kids in the fifteen minutes we are in the post office is really not my problem. Why do I care?

Oh wait. That’s called trauma. Sort of. Kind of. I’m not sure. At some point I have to get it through my fool head that there are assholes in the world who are going to be rude to me and mine. It’s not about anything I’ve done. Well, not necessarily. For an awful lot of people I just have to exist. I have to have the god damn audacity to open my white trash mouth. I am offensive.

People like it when you are afraid of them. It makes them feel protective. It makes them feel big. It makes them feel powerful. People like it. I have spent a lot of time afraid and I can see how people react.

I feel like I am searching, always searching, for what I supposed to be doing. How am I wasting my potential? I don’t know. I look for seeds in my life to help me tell the future but unfortunately the future hasn’t been written yet. I have to write it.

It means I’m not looking at right now. It means I’m scared. I’m angry because a lot of people want to tell me things that all boil down to being raped is a womans own fault because the only logical conclusion I can come to is those people believe I deserve to be raped. I cannot put my mind around that. No. I can’t. It’s not possible. No one is born to be raped. Just because I have a cunt that does not decide my destiny.

I am a stay at home mom. I am a stay-at-home-a-lot mom. Well, I like taking BART on outings. Then we can take the bus and I can be stoned all day. I can be calm. I can let the children go at their pace. I don’t feel anxious about being in other peoples way. I don’t feel guilty that I am sitting when obviously this more deserving person (like a guy in his 50’s) should be sitting. No. I have two squirming kids. I should be fucking sitting. Otherwise they will fall and hurt themselves. That’s just stupid.

But I worry. I worry about offending people. I worry about making other people feel annoyed by my physical presence. You’d never guess by how I write, would you? In the privacy of a room by myself I have the biggest cojones of them all. Please join me in a derisive snicker, right?

I have nothing to offer the world to justify the worth of my opinions. I am fairly unlikely to pursue further academic studies. At this moment in time that sounds like hell on earth. Which unfortunately may mean I do it some day. I’m stupid like that. Next time I will practice my handwriting. And it won’t be English. Fuck English.

I don’t think that I need to get over my anger. I need to find a way to use it. I have a lot of energy. When I decide to get going on a project I work like a demon. I get a very large amount done in a short period of time. But I’m a woman. It’s fairly unlikely to ever be noticed. It helps that I pick lame menial jobs because I think that is what someone like me should be doing. I think I never noticed that I stopped working at Boston Market. I still think I am an ignorant fool who cannot be right. Look, all these people tell me I am wrong.

Well, fuck them. I don’t like their system. There is no way for me to win in their system; I was born damned.

Before you tell me to stop being angry let me hit you as many times as I have been hit. Let me rape you as many times as I have been raped. Then I will put you into a culture that tells you it is all your fucking fault that it happened. Then we can talk about anger.

What else did you expect to have happen? Do you know how many people in uniform I’ve had sneer that at me when something inappropriate and illegal happens to me? I can’t really remember. For a while there I was put on drugs against my will when I was a teenager and I can’t remember that period so an exact number is truly beyond me.

I have been told to sit down and shut up and don’t get angry all my life. I don’t think that is a message I should listen to. I think that is a message that seals my doom. I’m not saying that everyone has to be angry with me. I’m saying that once you are marked as prey–once you are truly afraid they smell you. If I am angry enough I can drive them away. I no longer look like easy prey even though they know what I am. I finally got close enough to the herd to not be the weakest link.

And now that I am closer to the herd the mother fuckers around me are going, “Oh shit, who let her show up?” It’s interesting to watch. I just piss people off. I don’t even have to try. I just have to say what I think. I make people angry. Even if I wasn’t angry to start with. It’s interesting.

I make people angry when I speak to them. Maybe I should just stop speaking to them. I don’t mean become selectively mute, that’s a bit extreme. I mean that maybe I should stop setting the bar so god damn low on who I try to become friends with. I should act like I’m worth jumping through some hoops. People do it. They really do. It’s kind of weird.

I think I should stay of social networking sites for a while. Outside of my house there is nothing but bad. Inside my house I live in Wonderland. It’s really nice here. We sing and play games. We dance and should and run around. We paint and cook and garden. We grow up together. We learn how to do things together. We learn how to gently coexist with another human being. When someone slaps you in the face while you are sleeping it is perfectly acceptable to yell, “What the hell are you doing?!” before you are actually awake. (I am very articulate while mostly asleep.) It’s not ok to yell such a thing while fully conscious. We have Rules. No name calling. No hitting. You can’t put anyone down. Everyone deserves to have space but we need to be careful how our space effects other people. Every day involves “I love you” and “I am really glad I know you” and hugs and kisses.

But I know with every day that marches forward that two of these relationships are going to change. They are going to go off into the world. They are not going to stay with me and meet my needs. I have to do that for myself.

Some people can wait until the kids are teenagers to worry about it. My kid is about to turn two. Oh shit. I only have sixteen years to plan. I’m not sure that is long enough. I’m not sure that is long enough for me to finish growing up. I feel guilty because Noah is my provider. Because we have decided that his salary is good for both of. We don’t want another thing pulling from the available energy in our lives–probably ever. I feel like I am wasting my potential. I feel like I am letting down my feminism. I feel like I am setting myself up for a fall. I feel like…

I feel like I am waiting for the inevitable conclusion of the life of a girl like me. What terrible thing will happen next? How will Noah turn on me? Will he wait until a year or two after the kids are gone and say, “I just stayed for the kids.” I don’t think so. I don’t think he could fake that facial expression. He’s a good liar, don’t get me wrong, but not that good. Not with me. I know when that face happens. It isn’t in company. I’ve been watching this man for a while now. I intend to keep watching him. My very survival depends on him.

That’s the bit that is weird and hard to swallow. Basically because it is a crock of shit. Whatever. I wouldn’t necessarily like everything I had to do, but if I had to do it I would.

It’s not that I need to stop being angry. Anger happens. It stops when it stops. But I do really need to stop looking for it. I investigate the candidates before every election and beyond that I need to just live in my little bubble. I feel like we exist outside the modern world with the glaring exception of the glowing box I am staring at. Ok, not really outside the modern world–give me a break. But we do live with a shocking lack of popular culture. Of any kind, really. I suppose we listen to some music but certainly not every day. I would say not every week. Ok, that’s not true for me right now. I listen to music while I run. That’s a new hobby this year. I’m not sure how that will go long term. And my phone battery can’t play music through a whole long run so my phone is now annoying useless on runs. Bummer.

People are going to think I’m a trainwreck. To that I cock my head to the side and say, “Have you ever seen a train wreck?” Things have settled down in my life remarkably over the last few years. Cutting off my family was hard and caused a big bump, yes. I was abused as a child, yes. I haven’t been raped in more than five years? Something like that. That’s the longest stretch of my life. I’m waiting for the next thing that will hurt me. It is very confusing to my brain that I have this nice man in the house.

I would have been fine today if I was able to cut before going to the post office. Because when I start to feel panic I press on the fresh wounds and that keeps me level. It’s more reliable than any drug I’ve ever tried. But people get quite upset with me, so I stopped. I think that really I just don’t want to teach my children to do it. I don’t want them to learn my panic and fear and need for pain.

It’s not that those monolithic “them” are actually all bad. But I have no reason to go fishing to find out. It’s kind of freeing, really. I don’t have to care if people will want to do me ill or not if I don’t give them an opportunity.

What does it feel like to have distant community? I only sort of know. I get it somewhat in the Leather community. I really need some place I can belong with my kids. I’m trying to build places. We are consistent (mostly, barring various events like a washing machine flooding my garage). We have patterns. We have friends. We have relationships.

What is it I am supposed to get over my anger for? What is it that I am supposed to do? Ahhh grasshopper–what I should do is not make people feel uncomfortable. Sorry mate, that ship sailed. I’m going to make you uncomfortable.

I make plans. And I make plans. And I make plans. When you call the suicide hotline one of the first thing they ask you is if you have “a plan”. I laugh. I have plans. I have worked out so many ways to die that I can’t casually list them all. First I do this and then I do that and then I have to look at this and then… I know the dozens of steps involved in any number of ways to die. How accidental can I make it look? Where should I leave the consolidated list of passwords so Noah isn’t screwed? Where… etc.

But the point isn’t to stop being angry. Or really even to stop being afraid. That can’t be the point. If that is the point I will always fail. You can’t decide to stop something. You have to decide to do something else instead. I decide every day over and over. It’s exhausting. It’s hard. I have to sit here all day every day thinking carefully about what I say and what I do. You have read this far in my blog. Surely you think I am a psycho about to fly off the handle any moment now. I’m truly not. I’m pretty quiet. Sometimes I speak unexpectedly sharply. Sometimes my tone of voice is more harsh than seems appropriate to the topic. If I am alone with my family I instantly say, “Oh I’m sorry that came out harsher than I meant it. I’ll try again.” I expect my kids to do the same thing. I say, “Try again.” Shanna says it to me now. It’s interesting to negotiate.

My children are not in charge of me. My children are not responsible for me and they never will be. But they get to have preferences to. How do I sit back and very slowly learn someone like this? I don’t know. I’ve never done very well at close intimate relationships. I just know how to spend a lot of time alone in a room. But I’m trying. I get a couple of hours of sitting alone in a room every day or I feel like I am going to lose my mind.

I didn’t used to be this way. It feels like the anger is the war between my need for people and my terror of them. I don’t want to have any of the feelings I have about people and I can’t make them go away just by wishing and I am fucking angry about it. I hate that I cry over stupid things. I couldn’t figure out a form. It wasn’t a big deal.

The last time it was truly a big deal was when Denise said, “Have you ever had anyone close to you die.” I didn’t let her set the terms of my reality then–she doesn’t get to tell my my father and brother were not close to me–and I don’t think I should let random assholes on the internet. That seems kind of stupid and weak minded, don’t you think?

There is a lot of “you” tonight. I don’t think I do that very often. I don’t even know who I am writing to. I periodically rotate through various people in my head and no one fits. I’m not ranting at anyone. I’m ranting at the unseen you. The one who hurts me. The one whose plan it is. The one I don’t believe in.

I’m very angry at God because I can’t be an atheist. I have known things. I have to believe in my own experiences or I’m fucked. But I don’t think there is a plan. I don’t think it’s the Christian God. I don’t know what it is. But something knows I am here. I’m not sure it cares much one way or another. But it knows something more than me. I don’t know how much more. And it’s probably fallible. Isn’t everything?

I feel like I have no culture to retreat to. I am not Christian. I am currently upper middle class according to my bank balance. In attitude and behavior I am white trash. I don’t know how else to be. I offend people. I have always offended people. I have the audacity to be raped and complain about it. Don’t I know I should shut up?

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I’m afraid. That means I have to go do whatever is scaring me, doesn’t it? In this case I have been thinking about PTSD stuff. I’m trying to have patience with myself. I tell other people to be patient with themselves. Life is a process. But I’m impatient.

I was asked today how long I have been suicidal. More than twenty years. I can’t remember not wanting to die. I have good days when I don’t make active plans but I think about how nice it would be to stop. I think about it a lot. Everything is so hard. It has always felt so hard. I am broken. This life is too much.

So I read up on treatment for PTSD in my spare time. It’s comforting and terrifying. Yup my life sucks and it’s gonna. Settle in and figure out how to cope with it. It’s kind of weird reading that whereas some people do successfully “get over” all of their symptoms I am a complex case. The probability I will ever be “normal” is virtually zero.

When I close my eyes and I feel my body and I feel my soul I am not much different from when I was three years old. I’m just me. It’s weird trying to figure out who I am if I am not defined by what I do or what happens to me. I’m just Krissy. I don’t know what that means.

Today I ran sixteen miles. I’m not sure how long it took me because my phone battery died. I’m feeling cranky with my phone. I think it took me ~4:20. Which is ironic and fitting.

I don’t feel like I know who I am. But I know that what I am is bad. I’m waiting for the next round of punishment. I’m waiting for the next big nasty rejection. The next friendship that ends in acrimonious words. I’m a fucking asshole. If the only common element in your problems is you then maybe you are the problem. It’s hard to know how to live as the problem. It’s hard to be silent enough. Invisible enough. It’s hard to ever stop being bad.

If I am the same me as I was then how much of what has happened to me has been my fault because I was bad? Because I was stupid? I don’t honestly feel like my father raping me was my fault. But I feel like I am drowning in wild grief because my family hates me for talking about it.

How can I just “get over it” when watching my children grow up reminds me over and over that I have no idea what I am doing. When I think about what I did at every age my blood goes cold. I hate myself. I hate what I have done. I am a disgusting little piece of shit. How can I teach anyone to be anything other than that?

People don’t give a shit about me. Ok, there are some people who care about me. And there are a lot more people who are willing to profess to caring about me on the internet. But when push comes to shove and it is my needs vs. someone else’s needs… people don’t give a shit about me. I don’t rank that highly. It’s not a pity party. It’s not about whining for attention. It’s a blunt statement of fact. People are serving their needs through our interactions, not mine. I need to remember that more. I certainly mostly interact with people when it serves my needs instead of theirs. When they bring me their needs I hide under the desk and cry because I just can’t bloody do another thing.

Does that mean I don’t give a shit about anyone? It’s a good question. Let’s just say that I limit how much I can let myself care about other people. If I want to be alive tomorrow I have to.

Running is this weird experience for me. On one hand I spend a lot of time crying because I feel undeserving of the people in my life (I really like you, Noah) and on the other hand I am moving relatively slowly through space. I have time to notice my body that I don’t normally have. So I have these weird little, “Oh, I’ll stop with the self-inflicted tirade and do a check. Ok, bottoms of the feet, how are you doing? Toes? Ankles? Give me more information than that, Knees” etc. I haven’t spent a lot of time really feeling my body in a long time. I feel more alive than I usually do.

And as I run along I list the ways of killing myself. I notice which vehicles I could step into. I notice the low height on the freeway overpass railing. I catalog poisonous plants. I look for places with just enough privacy to get the job done. I see appropriate branches and beams on houses and think of hanging. I notice carbon monoxide. I want to die.

Sometimes it almost feels like a fetish. Like something that has been a part of me for so long and now I can’t let it go. I don’t know how to change the habit of hating myself and wanting to die. I’m sure that some of my nerdy friends will lecture me on how I should go about doing so. To put it bluntly, unless you have a lot of training in working with complex PTSD or you are one of the handful of people I have met who have genuinely pulled their lives together after serious trauma I don’t want to hear it. That sounds more hostile than I mean it. Don’t be surprised if I don’t take your advice too seriously. It’s not personal.

I have lived with brain damage before. If I think about the years of extreme stress and trauma as damaging my brain through excessive fight/flight hormones… well… You don’t tell someone who is a paraplegic to go change all the lightbulbs. Unless you have special adaptive equipment, otherwise you are an asshole. If someone gives me well meaning advice that would get someone like me in a lot of trouble then I can’t take it. Even though it makes people feel all ignored and butt hurt.

I don’t tell battered women what to do. I don’t know their situation. Every situation is so complex.

Lately I feel like I should hurry up and change several big parts of my life. I’m feeling dissatisfied. Some of those things are actually changes for Noah and not me. But I have fifty days until I run a marathon. Surely it can wait until I am done driving my body into the ground.

I have limits. I can only do so much.

Where are my limits problematic? I do leave the house. I do socialize occasionally. Just not much. Just a very low amount compared to most of the people I know. Is that actually a problem? Why am I always on the edge of the bell curve? Why do I feel so in danger of being culled from the herd if I am the slightest bit different?

I try to remind myself that I don’t want to die for a long time. Even though it is hard to not die, that’s worth a lot of effort from me. If that takes a lot out of me and I don’t have enough space for other things then that is life. Every choice has a cost.

I think really hard about my choice to be so dependent on Noah. It’s not just about job security stuff. I actually think I would transition back to work and do fine. I’d make it work. I would have to. If I’m pragmatic I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have to work while my kids were little. It would be tight, but there is a lot of insurance coming. I’d be able to last many years on that money. I’m not scared because of money. Regardless of death, desertion, or divorce Noah has insured that I am provided for. I don’t think I have ever had a personal relationship with a man who is that kind of practical and honorable. It’s not just that he can make me that safe. It’s that he wants to. It’s a huge priority for him. Noah chose to be responsible for me.

I struggle with how emotionally dependent on him I am. I feel like it’s not fair. No one should have to carry the burden of being my sole support. That’s unjust and excessive. But there is no one else. I can’t ask my kids to meet my needs. If I can’t do it for myself I can ask him or do without. It’s scary. I’m so scared of what it will mean long-term that I am so wrapped up in him. I lose a lot of sleep worrying about him dying. I know that isn’t healthy either. I sincerely doubt I would try again for something like this. I don’t know how capable I would be of going through a period of intense vulnerability in front of someone.

My suffering is private. I may whine about it on the internet but by and large no one gets to fucking see it. It’s none of your god damn business. It’s not going to alter the course of your life one iota so why should I show you my pathetic gaping maw of need? No. I don’t want to deal with knowing that you know what I need… and you won’t do anything about it. No one will do anything about it.

It doesn’t help that when people offer to do things for me at this stage of my life I snarl at them. I won’t let people do things for me. I would much rather sit here and fester, thanks. I’m tired of being disappointed. I have to not care about the result in order to let someone help me. I usually do care. It’s not worth feeling upset with people who are doing their best. Just do it alone. Just be alone.

For some reason Noah puts up with me. I don’t understand it, but I’m grateful. I’m not alone. The important bit is I’m not alone. Not really. Not actually. Except when he’s at work. That sucks.

neeeeeeedy

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I wanted to write about fifteen miles while it was fresh in my mind. I didn’t. It was euphoric and triumphant. Tomorrow morning I am going to do sixteen miles. I’m changing directions slightly for the early part and adding hill. I’m a little nervous. I’m hoping to once again make it in four hours. That’s cocky. That’s really cocky. We are meeting at the same place. Mmmm rewarding noodles.

It’s hard knowing that it is probably smart for people to keep me out at arms length. If you keep me out at arms length I never start to have expectations of you. I won’t let myself feel like I need something from you. For me to have needs in the direction of people is usually the kiss of death. Noah is the last man standing.

Does that make me straight?

I think about that a lot lately. I think about self-identity. What is the point? The point is that if someone wants to know what the difference is between having sex with someone who is transgendered, transvestite, or a butch dyke I can describe it in great detail from personal experience. It was all fun.

Sometimes I look at Noah and feel kind of weird. It’s sort of ironic that I married someone from a small Texas town who had some kind of semi-status from inherited position there. Given my history I mean. And together we are very cis-gendered.

What does being queer mean, anyway?

What does being a “runner” mean? If I walk sixteen miles tomorrow because I am tired am I a “runner”?

I have endurance. I am persistant to the limits I can achieve with my body. I’m not naturally athletic or gifted. I’m stubborn. I’m angry. I’m sad. I have so much grief. I want to prove to myself that I am as good as my brother. No, I’m not as fast as him. I hope he has matured to the point where he wouldn’t be an asshole about that. I think so.

I’m scared to see him and I’m scared not to see him. He despises me. He despises what I have done and who I am and that I had the utter gall to talk about it in public. But I’m going to drive my husband nuts with having to accomodate me as I train for a marathon on my brother’s turf.

Fuck you. You can’t tell me that I am weak. I am here. And at the end I will still be standing.

Lately I feel very weak. I have a lot of needs that are going unmet. I’m getting brittle. It’s hard because I can only handle asking someone to meet a need of mine if I am very ok with the answer being “no”. If I can’t take a no then I can’t ask. If I ask when I can’t afford to be told no and I don’t get help I will turn my frustration and rage on my unsuspecting friend. That’s not fair. I don’t do that.

Right now there is a towering avalanche of need. But I am so afraid of saying the wrong thing or offending people or being disappointed that I don’t know how to deal with any of it. There are a lot of different things going on right now I can’t talk about in writing. That’s hard for me. That feels silencing. That makes me feel angry on top of whatever I’m feeling anyway.

I’m sure some rational person would say, “Well why don’t you just write it and keep it private then”.

I don’t know. I learned a long time ago that I don’t write for me, exactly. I can only write if I believe someone is reading it. I have never been able to consistently maintain a paper journal but if someone speaks up and says, “By the way I read your blog every day. I care about you.” Motherfucker I’ll write every day. I’ll find the time. I will conjure it out of thin air.

It feels sick. This need in me to be seen. I started crying earlier when I realized I treat that ridiculous random validation as the closest thing I will ever have to a mother checking in on me. I feel so alone in the world. Multiple people asked me if I was ok.

It’s kind of hard for me when people notice me. I feel like Eeyore. I used to play games with not posting on my blog for months at a stretch and people didn’t notice. I took that as validation that people wouldn’t notice or be particularly impacted if I died. It actually made me feel better. Because suicide was an option that would be far less selfish for me than most people. Before I got married. Before I had kids.

I don’t have anyone in my life other than Noah with whom I have an intense on-going relationship. Ok, Shanna and Calli. Every other person in my life spends very few hours with me during the course of a year.

If I don’t write on the internet, do I exist?

If I don’t write on the internet I am surely invisible. My pragmatic self says that if I don’t write on the internet people only know the handful of sentences we exchange in person. That isn’t knowing me even slightly. From that I will decide I should be invisible. I will always believe that is just and right and the natural order of things. People like me are born bad. We should suffer in silence. If we talk about what is going on in our minds then we are traumatizing people and we don’t have the right to do that.

I’m scared of the hunt for a new therapist. During my last search I had a few one time only visits. Including with someone who told me point blank that I should never participate in group therapy or write about my experiences in a public way because that is abusive and traumatizing to the people who hear or read about my life. I don’t have the right to do that.

I have to be very careful who I allow to be an authority in my life. I have done too many things that make me already damned in the eyes of many. For a great many people I am already beyond redemption. If you think I am exaggerating then you have lead a very privileged life. I have to be careful who I allow to judge me. Well, I have to be careful if I am going to care about that judgment.

So when people tell me to just “get over” my experiences. Well, despite the fact that it makes me feel pathetic I may well be in therapy the rest of my life. They are going to always be the longest running relationships in my life outside of Noah and the kids. I need to have something. It’s very easy to deem this need pathetic if you have ways of getting your needs met that are simply not available to me.

I don’t know who are what I am defending myself against. The voices in my head. The reasons my throat feels choked all the time. I should be silent. Just shut up. Just listen. Nothing you have to say is interesting any way. Stop. Fucking. Whining.

I go to bed and wake up thinking that I want to die. I want to stop feeling this way. It hurts to move. It hurts all the time. And I don’t know what to do other than wait it out. That’s what I’ve always done. But this time I can’t do any of the impulsive things I have always done. It’s really hard. I feel like I am vibrating with tension. My muscles radiate.

I need to stretch more. I need to sleep more. I need to rest more. I need.. I need a mommy I can call and say, “Come love my babies for me so I can sleep.” But I don’t have one. And that’s just life.

I have to believe that my grief matters. Whether any one else does or not. I have to. I miss my mother. The price I pay for being allowed to go about my life without being abused is that aching hole inside me. There is a cost to everything. I miss my mother. I miss my mother like I would miss an amputated limb. I reach for her. I smell her. I see her in the mirror and in my children.

I want my mother so much I feel like I am going to explode. But contacting her would be the worst thing in the world. For everyone. For me. For my kids. For my mom. Because if I yo-yo back and forth and ask them to make it up to me I am setting myself up in the power position. I’m saying I want to be the next abuser. No. No. No.

There is a lot more I want to say. There isn’t much more I can dance around with anything resembling eloquence. And besides, I have to get up and walk (I will jog!) sixteen miles.

I will be able to call myself a marathoner. I’ll be crafty and specific. I didn’t saying “running”. That way I deal with no assholes and I still make my point.

It feels pathetic to want to figure out who I am. I am nothing. I came from nothing that should be. Nothing I can claim. I am nothing on my own in the world. I exist in relationship to three people.

I’m telling you people, my family had better not die in a freak crash without me. I won’t make it through the day. I’m only a little paranoid about them dying. But I do cry if the word comes through my head. I can’t lose them. They are all I have.

I need sleep. Sleep. Go to sleep. Stop crying. Sleep. Stretch first. It’ll be ok. Really. It’s always ok in the end. If it’s not ok yet, it’s not the end. If you’re going through hell, etc.

Mental illness is a liar.

Get it out of your head.

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None of what I am thinking is all that serious or big. Why are my emotional reactions so out of proportion? I don’t even know. That’s the trouble with brain chemistry. It’s not always reacting to real things in front of you.

I can’t start running yet. It’s too early. Yesterday as I was running I thought a lot about how I should leave my house earlier and run to Lake Elizabeth and swim out to the middle then stop swimming while it is still dark and no one will see me. I can’t start running yet. I can’t go out until people will see me. I can’t go out until I would be traumatizing other people to try and die in front of them–that’s not nice. I’m not allowed to do that.

Why isn’t it more important that I would destroy my children? They would never get over losing me. I know that. They would spend their entire lives wondering why their mother didn’t love them enough. I can’t do that to them. I love them so much. But I hurt. I want to cut. I want to do something that causes me a lot of pain. I didn’t yesterday. I cried. I curled up in the fetal position and sobbed but I didn’t self-harm. I even ate properly at all the appropriate times.

It is very hard to believe that I am worth taking care of. How could I possibly be worth any effort? But every body takes effort. Living in a body is work. You have to feed it and let it rest and treat it at least a little gently. I see how much effort bodies take because I care for two small ones. It’s a lot of forking work. Doing the work for them makes me feel so bad. Why didn’t anyone want to care for me? Why didn’t anyone love me?

I feel taunted every day by the way I lived. I feel angry and jealous of my children. Why didn’t anyone love me? Being nice to my kids makes me feel really bitter. I hate that I have to stop and make up what a good person would do because I don’t know. I see my children do things and what I see in my head are these still-frame pictures of what happened to me when I did the same thing. I know what happened to me was wrong but I don’t know what to do.

I feel over and over all day how bad I must be to deserve how I was treated. I feel like I am choking and drowning in how bad bad bad I am. I deserve to suffer. I deserve to be in pain. I deserve to be told to shut my fucking mouth. I shouldn’t speak at all. I should be seen and not heard.

I don’t want my kids to feel this way.

As an adult I feel so much shame for the things I don’t know how to do well. All those things that other people spent long hours on during childhood. I hid. I didn’t learn things. If I couldn’t get it out of a book by myself it didn’t exist. I had no way of going and learning skills or behaviors or activities.

I feel overwhelmed by how badly living in poverty was. I feel like I’m not over it. I don’t know how to be someone who is safe. I only know what it means to be unsafe and in danger.

I miss my mom. I miss my mom so much that I would like to curl up and die to get away from missing her like this. I love my mommy. I want my mommy. I miss my mommy. But my mommy would hurt me. I think if I let my mommy hurt me again I wouldn’t live through it. That’s a lot of why I don’t have contact with her any more. I was absolutely not going to be able to live through more. I can’t be who she needs me to be.

I feel like I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what possible worth I might have. I don’t feel very useful. But people aren’t worthy or not based on work, are they? I don’t know. I work very hard. It always feels like my work is inadequate. I am inadequate.

I don’t intend to die today. I have stuff to do. I need to finish the box for Jenny. I need to send the care package off to the MDC woman who is leaving her abusive husband. I do things that make other people feel seen and important and loved. Why don’t I feel that way? What would it take?

I have a truly amazing husband. I don’t understand why he loves me so much. He’s so patient and kind. He doesn’t yell at me very often. I think he raises his voice a couple of times a year and it’s only to be heard over ambient noise. Noah is so very nice to me. I feel so undeserving. Every so often I ask him if he is storing up bitterness over the things I make him put up with. I ask him if he wants to get even with me. He gets the most baffled look. He can’t understand why I would think he feels that way. Experience.

I don’t feel like I hold up my end of the bargain. I don’t feel like I really make his life better. Certainly not enough better to justify putting up with me. I am so difficult. So unpleasant.

I wish I could get these voices out of my head. I would I could cut my mother’s voice out of my brain. “Why do you have to be so unpleasant? Why are you so difficult?” I don’t know, maybe because I was being raped and beaten and malnourished and neglected? Maybe that is why I was difficult? It really doesn’t matter why. I shouldn’t be inconveniencing anyone.

I want this panic and hate in my chest to leave. I want it gone. I want to not feel like my heart is racing and any minute terrible things will happen to me. Any minute Noah is going to turn on me and declare that he is well and truly sick of me–get out.

Instead, when I come back from the bathroom at 4:30 in the morning he talks to me for half an hour or so. When he hears me walk in the room he lifts his head from the pillow and smiles as he reaches for me. Having me near him makes him feel happier. I don’t understand. How can I make someone happy?

Mental illness is a liar. My mother is a liar. My sister is a liar. The voices in my head are liars. They tell me I am bad. That I hurt people by existing. Everyone would be better off if I was dead. My sister used to tell me that. Everyone would be better off if you weren’t here. I still believe it. And that’s part of why I walked away from my family. If you are better off without me, fine be without me. That doesn’t mean I have to die.

I’m feeling slightly weird about a few different interactions in my life. I can’t talk about them. Going forward I need to carefully weigh, “Is this person my friend or is this person a relationship with my children” and if someone is more on the kid end I simply can’t bring up issues. When I bring up issues I drive people away. I can’t do that to my kids forever. I have to stop listening and stop caring about people. I need to ignore their behavior and avoid them myself while facilitating Shanna having access. Her boundaries are different from mine.

I can’t keep pushing people away from my kids. The list of casualties in my life is long. And that woman who sent me the nasty Dear Jane letter just popped up again. She wants to reconcile because she misses me and she doesn’t want to have a panic attack for two days every time she runs into me. I’ll try real hard to care about your fucking panic attacks you stupid bitch.

I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have Noah. I would be a lot more sad. I know that part. I don’t feel like I deserve him. I know he is better than me. He tries to convince me that I am more educated but I’m having none of it. I don’t have a degree higher than his. And his degrees are from an actually difficult university. I went to a state school so pathetic it no longer even has pride of place-name. Awesome.

I’m really tired. This week the running is getting to me. I’m sleeping but waking up feeling really bad. Yay depression? It doesn’t matter if I’m depressed or if what I am doing is hard. It has to get done. Life moves on. We go to Disneyland in less than eight weeks. My marathon is in eight weeks and three days. Eep. That’s a lot of fun to talk to Shanna about.

I have a lot of good in my life. I am privileged. I am pampered and kept safe. Why do I feel like I am still in danger? Why doesn’t my brain believe my current circumstances? I don’t know. But it’s fucking annoying.

This process blows.

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I’ve been sitting here thinking about why I need a therapist so much all of a sudden. What is this urge. What does it mean? Why is it happening?

I have this intense need to be seen. I need to feel like I exist in the world and I need to see proof of myself reflected in the eyes of other people. Right now I have Noah and the kids, mostly. I go through my life feeling invisible. I am not someone in the eyes of the people around me. I am furniture. They don’t know me and they don’t particularly care.

I have wonderful friends who give me what they can. They are all busy people. I tried to change the nature of my friendships-called-family and they blew up badly. It’s happened one right after another. I can’t keep risking this. This is too hurtful. My need is just too much for people.

I see a therapist week after week after week after week because otherwise no one gives a fucking shit about the stupid piddly shit of my life. I feel like I only exist in the highlights. No one cares what I am actually struggling with. No one wants the story. No one has time. Some of them kind of wish they could. The problem is that if they wish they could maybe then they feel some shame about not being able to help me. Then they get mad at me. Because it’s my fault they feel ashamed.

I need a therapist because I need to see knowledge of me reflected in someones eyes. I desperately fucking need to have someone know my complex story so that I can make small references to the distant past that is hugely significant. I fucking need that. I can’t handle having to live my life in the Readers Digest Version. I feel like a fake and a liar all the god damn time. I’m constantly feeling my heart race because I’m afraid I’ll slip and talk about the wrong thing at the wrong time and all of a sudden people will hate me and tell me they don’t want to be near me any more.

Don’t call this fucking paranoia. This is my god damn life.

I have to pay someone to be as consistent as I need. And even when I do pay someone to be in this role I can’t get it.

I’m looking for a parent. I’m looking for someone to be an active mentor. I feel so fucking alone. I’m so scared. I think I am pathetic. Isn’t it past time I was the adult already?

But I still hide under the desk and cry because I don’t know what to do when I feel consumed with self-loathing other than to hurt myself in some way and I’m trying not to teach that. I don’t know what to do. Right now I rock and cry. I feel like a blithering idiot but I try to comfort myself. I feel really stupid. I stroke my own hair.

No. No one is ever going to take care of me. I will never have that. When I am sick I have to get up and deal with it by myself. It is never going to be different. I just missed that. These things are stupid and petty and small.

But I haven’t cut myself in over a year. I haven’t cut myself since I stopped trying to meet the needs of my chosen family. I just can’t. I have nothing to give. If I want to keep the self control to not mutilate myself I have to save that energy. It is that hard to not hurt myself. To not beat my head on the floor. To not punch door frames.

Sometimes all I can do is sit under the desk and cry.

I need a therapist because I need someone to watch the seasons of my life. Who can coach me. Who can talk to me about why I am currently struggling and what are the “balls” I have to drop. How I can I figure out how to lower the amount of harm in my life? It’s a process.

When I am actively involved in communities I can sometimes coast without a therapist and do ok. I had a Buddy when I was a teacher. He had the classroom next to mine. We spent a lot of time talking. He got a lot of the story. Not the details of abuse or anything. But he learned a lot about me. A lot more than a therapist given how much time we spent talking.

I had that at the munch when I dated Tom. Losing that in the breakup was hard.

I need a therapist because for me what I am feeling right now is what I have always felt and will always feel. It’s not true. I have a very convenient memory. I need someone that I touch base with who really focuses on me. Where I get to be selfish and self absorbed and no I am not going to keep my mouth shut because I don’t want to “burden you”. Fucker I need some god damn support. And I have to pay for it. And it’s flakey. And it might die. Or tell me to go away because I do something horrible. Or it might stop showing up within an hour of the assigned start time. Or it might… just… need to move on. I’m a client, not a friend.

As inadequate as it is… it’s the only way I can have a relationship with someone where I see them every week. I need that. Even though it makes me feel pathetic and stupid and small. Better to pay a therapist to be my friend than to kill myself because I feel like I don’t fucking matter.

Just seems like money well spent.

relationship blathering

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One of the best things about writing alone in a room is I don’t have to care about “over sharing”. If people want to stop reading they can and it’s really not my problem. Yay! Ok, that is as much of a warning as you are going to get.

I’m sick. I have a low grade fever; I’m coughing; I have post-nasal drip; I have diarrhea; my throat hurts. Yesterday I went running anyway. When I got home blacksheep told me that I don’t have to run when I am sick. This was exactly what I needed to hear. I have a weird attitude towards advice. Long-time readers are hesitant to suggest anything to me because for many years I responded with immediate vicious hostility to any sign of advice. Mostly because people who didn’t know me that well were going off half-cocked. The advice wasn’t always relevant and I’m not a very nice person about handling that. I understand that is basically a character failing on my part. Such is life.

I am extremely careful in my head about hierarchies. I assign people authority and stature in my head and don’t tell them. If you tell the bastards they get a big head and want to take the increased amount of influence for a spin. Bad plan. But I have little weights and measures in my head that tell me about the person who is talking. It carefully decides how much I should give a shit about what they are saying.

I have been told for a long time that I’m a counter phobic six. (Enneagram shit.) I hear they are very hierarchical. Like, for example, I have a hard time arguing in my head with what blacksheep tells me about exercise. I try hard to understand that she doesn’t know everything about my experiences and I have to give her a lot of information before her advice is perfect. But it is very rare at this point for me to think “She’s wrong.” I think, “Ennnnhhhh I think she doesn’t know what I’m dealing with.” I can understand that her advice is right for 95% of people. Today it doesn’t apply to me (or whatever).

I have a lot of authorities in my head. I don’t tell people I am putting them on pedestals. You can’t tell people that.

So a friend was criticizing another friend. She said, “She lets the internet think for her.” I asked for clarification. The other person asks for advice online and then follows it. A fair bit. I could feel the blush creeping up my neck.

I don’t go to the hospital for illness until I have checked with the internet and enough people tell me it is a good idea. I have a basic belief that I am not capable of evaluating my own health state. It’s not a good belief. So I let people on the internet (let’s not fucking kid ourselves I’m not saying these people know me well or have seen my illness state) listen to my list of symptoms and then decide if it is serious or not. I think the internet has a 50/50 rate of getting me to the doctor for major illnesses (bacterial infection, strep throat, mono) and times I’m told “It’s the flu. Go home and rest.” I’ll still listen to the internet because otherwise I wouldn’t care about myself enough to end my suffering when I am seriously ill. The misfires are probably worth it but I can’t bring myself to make the call alone. I just can’t.

Someone else has to think that my suffering is bad enough and has gone on long enough and that person has to tell me to stop the madness. Without that loop I sit here and cry and feel bad and just deal with it. The human condition involves a lot of pain. Don’t be a god damn whiner. Oh but I am a whiner. A big one.

This is something I talked to my therapist a lot about. I am very careful who I let be an influence on me. I’m well aware that the vast majority of people are poison for me. They will tell me that I am bad or wrong for things I can’t change. I am who I am. I don’t need more shame. I really don’t. I don’t hurt anyone. I’ve had a lot of life experiences that permanently taint me, that’s fine. I don’t hurt anyone (who hasn’t asked very nicely). Not even that, now. I will never hurt anyone again. I feel like I have been defanged. I will never again enjoy sadistic pleasure. It’s against the rules.

It’s really weird knowing that on one hand I am absolutely depraved and sick and blah blah blah and on the other hand I’m this really quiet, mellow little suburban mom. Whose advice is relevant to me? How do I pick people to give me advice on different topics?

The older I get and the longer I stay in one place the more I can judge people based on what they do rather than what they say. That has certainly changed the hierarchy of my internal advice pedestal. I pick very carefully who is behaving in ways I want to emulate. I am a copier. That’s what I do. I pattern myself off of people I respect. I do it in ways the people themselves often don’t recognize that way–but I’m just special that way.

I care about who can show up and get the hard shit done, year after year. Who goes through strife and then recovers and moves on? Who has actual coping skills? What are they? How do they work? How did they develop their expertise in a topic? Why should I respect them?

I’m really harsh in my evaluations. If you ever want to know how I evaluate you go ahead and ask. I’ll tell you. I don’t see any point in hiding it or sugar coating it. I’ll tell you the good, the bad, and the ugly about what I see. Only there is this little manipulation hiding in that–the people I have a problem with probably aren’t reading my journal. Ha.

Many of the women I know view their endurance in a shameful light. They do not take pride in their ability to endure. They are in a crappy relationship and they don’t leave so they view that as a sign of their generic weakness. Life is really complicated. Sometimes those crappy relationships are the bedrock of a whole town. If you take away that one relationship it seems like everything else will crumble. You will have to go build a new town. That’s hard. If you haven’t done a lot of big life transitions such a change is terrifying. Noah had better not turn into a shitty husband in ten or fifteen years because I will probably be too chicken to leave him at that point. I will have invested too much of myself in him. I don’t want to leave the parts of me I gave him. I get it.

Up to now leaving has been so easy. I couldn’t understand why people stayed. For me the devil you don’t know is pretty much always safer than the devil you know so jump ship often. You’ll end up in this magical tidal surge that will take you to the right deserted island in the Bahamas. It’ll work out.

I am so harsh in defending myself that I don’t think people understand that I think they are better than me. I’m defending my pitiful right to be less than you. I tell myself often that people disliking me is not a reason to die. Their opinion is not important enough. It’s hard to believe that my right to exist trumps other peoples right to not be bothered by disgusting people like me. These days it seems to me that I only have the ghost of disgusting behavior lying around the house and I should still be sacrificed. It’s for the good of the whole. People who are bad or unruly should be culled for the sake of the herd. One bad apple can spoil a bunch.

I sit here in isolation and think about the threads in my life. The people who touch me at least occasionally. I think about why I know them. I consciously decide over and over if I want to keep knowing them or if I want to just stop making the effort. Not very many people make a lot of effort to keep in contact with me. That’s part of what makes you so unique, D. You have called me every few months for more than ten years no matter where you were in the world. I feel so very special. You want to know what is happening in my life. Even though you drive me nuts sometimes and I can barely understand you because you talk so fast I feel like my life would be empty and sad without you. I wouldn’t have this mirror floating around in the world carrying a positive image of me. Btw- get off the internet and go finish your damn paper.

A lot of people have come and gone in my life. I have to consciously try to not have attachment to people staying. That is how I can end relationships. I know that if I stop trying the other person won’t put effort into it until they want something from me. Sometimes it is years before they look up and around and realize I’m not nearby any more. It is interesting when people still have attachment to me and I have psychologically let them go.

There is a concept called the Monkey Sphere (maybe I’ll add a link when internet comes back on. If I forget you can google it yourself). Basically this theory is that you can only have intimate relationships with ‘x’ number of people and you can only have more distant friend relationships with ‘y’ people and you can only know so many ‘z’ people casually out in the community. As you get higher in the alphabet the numbers generally get higher. People become less of an individual investment.

I consciously think about the inner circle very hard. Who can I allow to be an actual influence on me? It’s a very loaded self-conversation. I think about how much I have hurt people and how much they put up with. I think about how much they have hurt me and how much I can put up with. I think about whether or not this person behaves in a way that will make me safe. Someone can’t be in the inner circle if they will hurt me. I mean, a little bit of occasional hurt is different. Noah isn’t perfect. Neither are my kids. I do have to keep score and be honest about it in my head. If someone develops a long-term pattern of hurting me I can’t ignore that. It would be stupid. It would be self-harming. It would be deciding that this other person is simply more important than my continued safety and health. Err, not a good decision.

People can be part of my distant community and do things that hurt me. That happens. It’s life. You ignore it and move on. That person doesn’t have a lot of influence. The hurt is small and contained.

The inner circle just has too much access. Too much influence. When I notice a bleed out starting I’m better off severing the limb. I have no other options for keeping myself safe. That’s how it feels.

It’s hard for me to decide I am a good person given how callous and self-centered I am. But then I look around the rest of the world and I notice that I’m really not so bad in the scale of things. It is hard for me to be able to feel good about myself while people in the inner circle disapprove of me. Often I decide that it is easier to cut them out of the circle than try to reconcile the situation. I don’t need people who are going to tell me I am bad. What are they basing it on? How much time have they spent with me in person watching my actual behavior? How the fuck do they know?! Because they interpret things from my journal where I focus the vast majority of my writing energy on things I think that are negative and I don’t write about my behavior all that much. Right. Yeah. Don’t need that.

I’m well aware that even my bad days are significantly better than most of the good days I had growing up. I’m doing well at this point in my life. I really am. My behavior is pretty good. Sure I talk about conversational topics that make other people uncomfortable, but that’s not a big sin as things go. I’m not hurting anyone.

I’m not allowing people to pretend that people like me don’t exist. Even though they want to. Even though people would really prefer I shut up and follow the herd. Watch tv. Talk about movies. That’s what I should talk about. Hell, even if I wanted to get back into the academia shit and talk about books that would be ok as long as I only read authors that are approved parts of the Canon. Right?

I’m not like other people. I don’t know why. I don’t understand all of the differences. But I feel a deep hostility towards people who want me to be more like them. It’s kind of funny. I pattern off of people all the time but I pick specific small parts of their behavior. I am not interested in having someone else’s life. I want my life. I may think that someone is better at _____ than me but I can also hand you a long list of ways the person does ______, ____, and ________ worse than me. I’m alright(sic), Jack.

I really like my relationship with Shanna. I’m allowed to be direct with her in ways I’m not allowed to be with anyone else (until Calli can talk more). Why did I want to be a parent? Because I believe that I have a view of the world that does not deserve to be eradicated. Because in the core of my self-serving soul I believe that who and what I am deserves to continue on after I die.

In cutting off my family I am actually showing the things my mom did right. My mother taught me to be strong. My mother taught me that not a god damn person in the world was going to make sure I was safe except for me. That has been an incredibly useful lesson. Is it possible to teach that lesson without damaging someone? I don’t know. I want to find out. In no other relationship in my life do I get to set terms from the beginning. It’s a compromise. I get to just exist in front of my kids and they can’t tell me to change. It’s… startling.

I could abuse the fuck out of them and teach them that the world is hurtful and violent. But I don’t. I teach them how to notice other people. I teach them how to be considerate and polite. I teach them how to ask for things in a way that will make it more likely they will get it. I’m trying to teach the difference between persistance and pestering.

I can go out and interact with the world and seem totally appropriate. I can keep things hidden and just be sunny and delightful and friendly. People don’t know a fucking thing is going on with me. They weren’t able to see the scars I hid. I am a fucking good liar.

I want my kids to have the choice about how people perceive them. I want them to have my versatility without the underlying damage. I’m not sure if it is possible. I don’t want to control what their variations look like, precisely. And I am very well aware that I only get about ten years of setting the terms. Then I have to start handing over control at a quicker and quicker rate. That’s how they become independent.

I don’t beat my kids because I don’t believe in my heart of hearts that what I am asking of them is always reasonable and appropriate. I know that I ask for things they can’t do. It would not be ok for me to beat them for their lack of development. I think that happens more than people want to admit. It truly is my responsibility to put a lock on the side gate so my kids can’t sneak out and play in the front yard unsupervised. Beating them for disobeying won’t help. They will still want to sneak out. They will just try harder to hide it from me. I don’t want them hiding it from me. I want to control the environment and make it safe for where they are now and gradually pull back.

Calli can’t even speak yet. There is no way she should be in the front without adult supervision. A lot of Shanna’s limits are group imposed and we talk about that. I can’t consider individual safety yet because they aren’t ready to do much separate yet. Shanna gets to run five houses down to see her friend. That is the limit of her independent solo movement. She is resentful. I repeat, “I get to make these decisions until you are older. Then I don’t get to control you. Sorry, kid.”

Even though yesterday morning started off rough emotionally I had a good day. I sat on the couch and read. I don’t feel good. Shanna went to her friend’s house and Calli napped on me. It was restful and silent. Oh that was nice. Even when they were both home they seemed to trade off who wanted to interact with me so the day was paced well.

If I think hard about the words I used and my tone it was a pretty good day. My only nasty carping was at Noah about the topic of leftovers. I’m really grateful that he puts up with me. (The kids won’t eat leftovers for lunch and Noah gets food at work. I end up eating the same damn thing over and over and sometimes it makes me cry.) Batch cooking just isn’t for me.

Abrupt topic shift (like you aren’t used to that by now): Sometimes I think it is weird that the sex I have now isn’t much like the sex I trained for. When I was nineteen a sanctimonious bitch told me that no one under twenty-five should be in the bdsm community. People should go explore vanilla sex till their thirties and then start on rougher sex. I was, understandably, unimpressed with her. When I was nineteen I had been having PIV sex for seven years by choice and I had countless oral sex partners. Telling me that I wasn’t ready and I should have more sex was hilarious. Now that I am thirty I am slightly less annoyed with her and I can basically understand why she believes that. I still think she was a sanctimonious bitch and I am still unimpressed by her.

And now the kids are in here.

Don’t make someone a priority while you are their option.

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I’m really upset about these no-shows. I was already heading in the direction of feeling depressed and having two women who loudly and adamantly have told me they are my “family” behave this way convinces me that I must be a worthless piece of shit. Even my god damn chosen family just won’t bother to think of me. I’m feeling bitter. I try really hard for my friends. I go to great lengths and deal with inconvenience to spend time with them.

I’m feeling bitter and thin and unimportant. I don’t know if this obsession with BFFs is an American thing alone or if it is normal and natural to ache for people who value you this way. I think that is what the BFF thing is about. The longing for someone to really understand you and value you and love you and think you are important. I wish I had that. Instead I get to be an audience member. I get to be an adoring fan. Friendships aren’t based on me supporting your art while you sleep through visits where you might find out something real about my life. Obviously my life isn’t that interesting to you. I understand.

I wish people would stop lying to me. I wish people would stop telling me I am important when I am obviously and demonstrably not. The continual let down hurts so much. Just be honest. You will spend time with me if you can’t find anything better to do. You will spend time with me if you have managed to successfully straighten your stereo wires in time so you are truly bored so why not.

I have Noah. I have the girls. Those are the people I can count on. That’s the list. And I shouldn’t expect too much from my kids. I can’t talk to them about being upset. That’s inappropriate. They don’t need to know why I am crying today. “Because my “friends” are assholes who don’t actually care about me and it hurts my feelings.” I can’t say that to her. So instead I think I’ll just not leave the house this week. Bad things tend to go in threes. I just won’t make more plans. I don’t really want to be ditched again. I am so god damn tired of this being ditched shit. Echoes of my childhood go through my head.

Stupid girl. Why would anyone want to be your friend. Go away. No one likes you anyway. Pissy Krissy always whining about how people aren’t nice to you. Who would want to be nice to you anyway.

I was angry. I was angry because people hit me and raped me and called me names. So I don’t deserve friends because I am too angry and difficult. It doesn’t end at adulthood.

I have spent some time in the last few days on the friend with a close friend’s wife. I don’t know her that well but she is suicidal and I have time during the day to be on the phone and a fairly deep understanding of what it means to want to kill yourself. I have been trying to help her get through the worst of the impulses. Today will end. The intensity of this desire will fade. Let’s just trust the process. You feel this way sometimes. These feelings will end. The only constant part of life is change.

It feels kind of odd to be trying so hard to convince someone else of her worth when I don’t believe much about my own worth. I want her to have what I can’t have. I can’t feel good about myself. What the fuck is there to feel good about? I feel so very unimportant and stupid and stagnant and worthless.

I had kids because I needed to have someone who actually needed me in order to give myself a pass on suicide. I’m fucking needed. I don’t know what to tell a childless person. I don’t know what to tell someone who wanted kids and couldn’t have them. I thank the G-d I barely believe in for my children every day because I’m not sure I would be here without them. How can someone go find the same kind of meaning in another way? People do it. Not everyone has to breed in order to be important. But I wasn’t clever enough to find a way to feel like I mattered.

I survived because I used a long list of bad coping methods that got me through that day. I have spent most of my life worried about getting through today. I have plans, sure. The long-term plans help me find a way to structure my day.

In between conversations with her I am trying to figure out how I am going to explain this in the group. How am I going to talk about all the Craigslist Casual Encounter people I found just because I needed to not be alone. If I was alone I felt like I wouldn’t make it through that night. So I found people however I could. Most of society tells me I should be ashamed of myself. I am a disgusting whore for having sex with so many people. I have had a lot of sex with people I have never seen again. I don’t need to be in love with someone to have sex. I just need to feel desperate.

I will admit it is a bit awkward to me how many people Noah has worked with over the years who are part of my body count. I have gotten to know the men in this valley. The Christmas party last year was festive. Body Count Person’s wife was introduced to me and told euphemistically that I was uhhh someone he uhhh knew. She put it together and made some comment about his wild days. It wasn’t entirely approving so I did my best to become invisible. Good women don’t generally want to have their noses rubbed in the behavior of the filthy whores.

Today I feel convinced that the only use I have is child minder. I’m glad I have that. It’s something. I won’t always feel this way. But I think I’m going to stay home for a week or two. I don’t need to open myself up to more rejection right now. If you can’t handle dealing with what you might get, don’t ask for anything. If you can’t handle being told no or having people just not show up out of the blue don’t make plans. I don’t need anything else making me cry right now. It’s kind of embarrassing. It’s awkward to explain to the kids.

I should rest. I’m sick and I have to run twenty four miles this week. Maybe I can tell myself that my lack of social life is me preparing properly for the marathon. I keep doing things with friends that make training harder.

Like staying out very late with that friend who no-showed on me. That fucked up my running for the weekend quite a bit. I’m three miles down with some nasty blisters because I accommodated her schedule. Oh well! Apparently I am giving people too much of myself because I am doing it with the belief that I will get something back. When the something back fails I feel this enormous cavern of need. Because I was doing a trade not a gift. I don’t have enough spare to gift right now. So I should stay home and stop dealing with people for a while. I don’t have enough going spare to give without expectations so I shouldn’t give at all.

It hurts. I feel humiliated that at this point in time I should stay home and focus on the kids because otherwise the kids have to deal with me crying for hours during the day. They have to deal with me being impatient and inflexible. They have to deal with me not wanting them to help. They have to deal with me being upset.

Those people who are upsetting me don’t have to deal with my upset. They get to go back to their lives and not give a shit. My kids are the losers. That strikes me as unfair. I feel guilty because I want to do the Slow Fade out of most peoples lives because I just can’t handle the losing-trade of our friendship anymore. I don’t have anything left to give them. I’m out. That bucket is fucking empty and is currently being used to beat me on the head as folks look for more water. There is no more god damn water.

I keep thinking about a character sketch about a woman who isn’t much like me but whom I can understand. I have spent most of my life worried about inconveniencing or hurting other people. What would it be like to truly not care?

I have three people in this world I need to worry about. No one else is interested in a truly reciprocal relationship about needs. That’s ok. But I shouldn’t act like anyone else is a priority. They aren’t. I need to not be supportive and not feel guilty. You betcha. I’m not going to support you any more. You don’t fucking support me and I don’t have shit to give any more.

I think this is what self-care is?

There are a couple of people who come to my house to see me. I need to stop trying to expand the circle. It’s not worth it. I have exactly two people who make an effort to see me every month. That’s a lot better than zero, right? They don’t bullshit me or call me family. They don’t ask much of me. They just come hang out and watch my life for a few hours. They don’t add work or effort. It’s not an intense kind of support. But it’s nice. It feels settled and appropriate. They aren’t trying to be my BFF. They are trying to be part of a community. It is a relationship with more distance because they only give me what they have going spare and it’s not a lot. It’s ok that I don’t give them much.

I feel sad and scared and alone. I feel unimportant and invisible.

The thing is, a lot of people have affectionate feelings toward me. They just don’t have any way of meeting my needs. It’s not their fault. It’s not my fault. But it is. It’s real. I have no choice but to figure out how to get by without those supposed needs being met or I need to meet them myself. What is a true need?

I need to eat. I seriously need to knock it off with the sugar. I need sleep. I need to start going to bed at a consistent time again. I need to be kind to my family because they are kind to me. That means I need to limit stress.

I think today will move very slowly.

Chemical states and relationship transitions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perspective

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

You have no power over me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m going to go now.

Learning and shame

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Therapy was unusual last night in some awesome ways. I showed up half an hour early because I wasn’t sure about public transit to the new location and the appointment before me cancelled so she was just sitting around. We could have started early but instead she decided to pick my brain. She moonlights as a guidance counselor at a middle school. The school is more than 60% black and over 30% latino. They have some problems. I don’t think I can explain how good it felt to talk to her about how to handle these children. She is the “emergency” therapist who sees the kids who are in serious crisis Right Now. I had a lot to say. It was interesting how the end of the conversation was quite sad. We had to plainly discuss the fact that there ARE things that can be done for these kids, but how much time and energy do you have? What are the things that you can really sustain doing? It’s hard to evaluate. She took notes on the things I said. I felt so respected. She told me that she is going to strongly consider how she can get me up there to talk to her really at risk kids. She thinks it will be good for them to hear a white person with my history because they don’t believe a white person can understand. I used the fuck out of that misperception when I was teaching. You can’t buy tools as handy as that.

I told her about what an asshole I am being to a friend who is having issues with the public education system. I told her I don’t understand why I still have friends. This directly linked into a lot of my attitudes about education and child rearing which ties into a lot of my feelings about having less worth in society because my earning potential is really quite low. Being a stay at home mom is not a very respected position. Oh well.

We talked about my frustration and confusion that Americans don’t seem to be training their children to be adults. They prepare the kid for preschool so the kid can be prepared for kindergarden so the kid can be prepared for the lower grades, then middle school, then high school, then college, then graduate school, then a PhD program, then a postdoctoral… I suppose we should all be college professors? I suppose some people transition into working in industry. Many companies run a lot like schools. It’s odd. Outside of academia I have worked in food service. I worked in the library and the theatre in college. I have taught. Really those have been my jobs. I feed people and help them learn. I like it–mostly.

I feel a lot of uncertainty about the future. I’m sadly aware that many of the people who are alive and making decisions now care very little about the long-term consequences of what we are doing as a society. I feel like it is ridiculously important that my kids understand that we are animals that require food. What are all the steps involved in arranging for adequate, constant food. My children will probably never know food uncertainty. What can they learn and figure out about how to help other people have the same life experience? What problems are going to crop up in our food supply? I’m quite nervous about this. I want my children to be incredibly practical. One of the up-sides of doing all these home improvement projects by myself with the kids is they are seeing how to do these tasks. Very soon they will be learning how to do them.

I also think my children will need to know how to program. I suspect that will be a mandatory skill for people who want serious job prospects in the future. I want my children to have options. I want them to feel like they are prepared to take the world by storm when they are adults. I want them to know so many things that they feel completely competent to go learn whatever they need but don’t yet know. I want them to see themselves as strong and able to assimilate new information.

I struggle with learning a lot of things. I don’t have the best memory. I read extremely quickly and I can synthesize ideas quickly but I forget things. That’s kind of a problem. I hope my kids get Noah’s memory.

My therapist and I talked extensively about how I feel like the next fifteen years are a gift. I have always wanted to go learn things but I didn’t want to go alone. Soon I will be able to go to dance events with my kids. Soon I will be able to do martial arts classes with my kids. I already practice languages with my kids. I’m discovering that I remember more Spanish than I think. I’m not as incompetent as I assume. It’s nice. I have these wonderful companions to learn with.

Shanna and Calli don’t think I am lame for how little skill I have at gardening. I feel really pretty silly for the intensity of my emotions around gardening. I grew up with people who had no respect for farming as a career and as a result they tried hard to never touch anything growing. My family felt they “got off the farm” and they had no interest in looking back. My family hasn’t farmed in at least three generations on all sides. Why is there so much hostility? Such disdain? We don’t garden.

Only I’m going to have this house paid off in another decade or so and I’m going to be stuck looking out that back window for all the remaining years of my life. I’d like it to be pretty. I feel kind of vain and silly about that. I would like to look at a colorful, interesting yard. I want it so bad I ache with wanting. I want to feel like a stupid, incompetent, worthless person still gets to look at something nice because I have the physical ability to create it.

It’s always harder than I think. I forget to water. I don’t have good weeding technique. I would starve to death if I had to take care of a whole field in order to eat. I feel ashamed of that. I feel weirdly pathetic because I can’t figure out the physical motion that will allow me to do this work quickly. It’s hard. I don’t know what I can do without damaging the plants I want to keep. I’m trying things and experimenting. It’s a slow process.

When I can remove my idiotic self-deprecation from this thought process I find it really kind of wonderful that I am learning all of these things and talking them through with my kids. Calli is too young to really understand yet, but Shanna is picking things up. I am really moving at about the right speed for Shanna. I feel ponderously slow and incompetent. Really I’m just moving at four year old speed. If I went faster she would feel left out. I wouldn’t want to outpace my companion.

It’s a lot of how I think about running. How do you find a pace for running with other people? I worry about it. I have several upcoming opportunities for running with friends. Some who are far more experienced runners than me and at least one who runs less than me. I’m fucking thrilled by the idea of running with someone who runs less than me. I won’t feel like I am slowing her down. I won’t have to feel embarrassed when I need to walk. I’m scared of running with people who are honest to dawg athletes. Standing near them makes me feel like my low status in their world is blinking in neon over my head. LOSER WHO CAN BARELY RUN. Physical Education classes were never kind to me.

It was an odd experience to look around the park on Tuesday and realize that whereas the home school kids will have various “coaches” they won’t have a PE teacher. If they do that position will fall to me. What athletic activities do I think my kids should know how to do? I have to figure out how to teach them or arrange to have someone else teach them. I think I should buy a small soccer ball and bring it. I feel odd about that. I want them to love things I don’t love. I want them to have access to ideas and hobbies I am not actually into.

This was one thing that surprised my therapist last night: how focused I am on trying to figure out what I don’t know that I should be teaching my kids. I feel intense pressure to work constantly on dealing with the extent and damage of my ignorance. I feel crippled by the extent and volume of my ignorance. I am not trying to be a know-it-all. I’m trying to be an actual competent person. The problem is that I value an odd combination of competences. I am extremely specific in what I care about and I totally ignore things I don’t understand or see value in. That’s kind of a problem. I simply can’t limit my children due to my biases. I want them to be competent adults. I want to know in twenty-five years that I have loosed two extremely fucking competent women on the world and they are off building and learning things I can’t wrap my mind around. They took the genesis of information I gave them and went off to do things I can’t understand.

I like being a jill of all trades. I don’t really aspire to master many topics. I’m a generalist. I like and highly value generalists. But like many people like me I feel like my lack of mastery means I am low in status. I’m not the best at basically any task. I notice and have a hard time with that emotionally. I don’t do competitive things because I can’t handle the fact that I’m never fucking going to be first. Do you know what second place is? The first fucking loser. I cried watching people pass me during the half marathon. I’m an idiot.

I want my kids to either be such prolific generalists that they terrify people or able to become masters in something. Other than talking to abused kids, which really… I’m awesome at that, I don’t think I will attain mastery of any subjects in this lifetime. That really kind of bothers me. I’m trying to gain peace with the idea that I will never really take anything to eleven. I will never be the best. Not everyone gets to be. lame.

My wonderful daughter just wandered out to sit on my lap. Today we are going to the redwoods to cut down trees so I can build her a play house. I should really take pictures of this process. I have a vision in my head. I know what I am going to do. It’s going to be really neat. You’ll see. I’m good at taking pictures in my head and turning out a decent approximation. Heck, look at my daughters. This looks like my picture in my head of a family. We are kind to each other. Maybe I do have a reality distortion field.

Memory lane

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I had dinner with my ex last night. That was interesting. I asked him a lot of questions and he answered as best he could. I told him point blank that I’m glad the kids thing worked out or I would have kicked myself for the rest of my life for leaving him. I actually kind of wonder if he lost a little bit of his sparkle for me last night. I think I had forgotten a lot of things. His opinion is the only opinion. I remember why we didn’t argue: I bit my tongue a lot. There was no point in discussing controversial topics because he has already made up his mind and he will be condescending, dismissive, and really pretty rude the entire time you talk about something that isn’t his thing. For example: organic farming. He believes it is going to be the destruction of the human race. He won’t talk about the problems from animal feed lots or mono-crops. He thinks there aren’t any problems. Right. I let it go because I don’t care about converting him.

Noah listens to any crack brained thing I bring up in a polite way and when he is doubtful he carefully says, “Can I see some of where you found this information?” If I’m using an idiotic source he lets me down gently. It’s nice to be reminded that for the first time in my life I live with someone who genuinely thinks of me as an intelligent person. I had forgotten. I had forgotten how much everyone before him made me feel like I should shut up and sit down and just let them speak because they are smarter than me. I didn’t always do it but I felt it.

There has been a lot of research lately on how hard it is to change peoples minds. The less smart someone is the more likely they are to be really entrenched in everything they know. Holy crap Tom is narrow minded. He knows what he knows and believes there is no validity in any point of view he disagrees with. It’s fascinating.

He wants to live in a Sci Fi future. He thinks things will be every increasingly technical and people will move to increasingly thinking jobs. I think that is folly. If you look a distribution of intelligence, 50% of people are below average. You really think that everyone in the world should sit on their ass and do a computer job? Really? Not all of us would even enjoy that let alone be capable. I think we should be encouraging people to work more with their bodies if they show the slightest inclination. We are a nation of people who are desperately unfit and unhealthy. The solution is not more sloth.

He wants to have fun. He doesn’t want to create anything in particular. His job is creative enough for him. Every year or so he has a new hardware design project. He is designing things that use basically entirely outside components. He’s figuring out how to assemble the right configuration of after market parts. He doesn’t have much desire to really grow the business. He wants to keep very busy (he’s a work-a-holic in my “I lived with him” opinion) at work and make a lot of money so he can have more and more fun. That means racing his Porsche, tying up and sexually controlling women, and working. I told him to go get a vasectomy so he can make damn sure he never accidentally ends up a parent because he wouldn’t be a good one.

Tom is a just fine person. I think I just got over him romantically. It was sudden. I no longer look up to him. He doesn’t have a talent or a skill I respect any more. That was weird to notice. I am now how old he was when we met. I feel disappointed looking at what he has done with his life in the last twelve years since we met. He doesn’t have to give a shit about my disappointment, in fact he doesn’t. He has enjoyed his life. He wants to keep doing the same shit for another thirty or forty years before he croaks. He is perfectly happy. Another woman will always come along, right? SM is more interesting with new people any way. I don’t want that life and I’m really glad I only stayed for four years. I have now been married for longer than I dated Tom. Noah is a larger influence on my character than Tom was. I’m glad for that.

I asked Tom what it was like living with someone as crazy as me. He said he was unaware of it. I cried alone and he didn’t know it existed. He didn’t know I was unstable.

I cut and was suicidal a great deal while I lived with him. I was still interacting with my family a fair bit. I was quite unstable. He didn’t notice. He didn’t fucking notice. You have got to be fucking kidding me. Seriously? You are that self-involved? You never noticed that your partner of four years was unstable emotionally? It makes me think I should feel a lot more confident in my acting skills. Maybe I am even harder to read than Noah says. I cultivate being hard to read. I practice. Really. I do not want to give away the intensity of my emotions when I am around people. It’s dangerous to be noticed for your strong emotions. I didn’t know I was that good though. Tom remembers that we had a lot of fun and got along well. That’s good.

Tom has never read any of my writing. He doesn’t want to know what goes on in my head. That may be brilliant of him. I didn’t understand how much my writing has always contained a plea for someone to read it and come talk to me about it. Noah does. Noah is the only fucking person who is interested in crawling as deeply into my head as possible. It was really wonderful to be reminded what it is like to be in the room with someone who requires me to have a brick wall between myself and him. Noah is interested in what I am thinking and feeling, pretty much at any point. Sometimes he is distracted with other bits of life but if I write it down and leave it for him he always catches up. He has read my entire archive on every blogging site I have ever used. Multiple times. That makes me cry. Oh my G-d he actually loves me. He thinks I am worth that kind of time and attention. I write a fuck ton and I’ve been blogging for over nine years. I need to poke around old storage disks and see if I can find my g-blog archive. I’m not sure if I still have it and that is sad. I should probably make another LJ book so that I have a copy of it. Other people write in paper journals and keep them.

All of a sudden I feel a little spark of interest in finding out what I actually like about bdsm. I spent a lot of time last night feeling like I’m just not a pervert any more. I have no interest in the kind of stuff Tom is into. I’m not interested in being degraded for someone else’s amusement any more. I think the joke is kind of thin at this point. Yes, yes, I know that I am disgusting and should suffer. Blah blah. I’m tired of the role I had to fill. I’m tired of having to denigrate my own thinking abilities in order to tolerate being bossed around by someone who is so not smarter than me. He knows different things than me and he believes that the only important things to know are the things he knows. He thinks my things aren’t worthy of much respect. That is probably hyperbole. He doesn’t bother to notice that my things are there so he doesn’t have to listen to me on any topic because I’m not very educated. Or something. “Sure I can “listen” to you blather on about something idiotic while I roll my eyes and don’t really listen.” It’s really very similar to how I feel with Alex. To be fair Alex has dramatically improved in this area in one on one conversations, in particular since he started working on it with his therapist. It’s still a thing.

Tom told me he hasn’t done Daddy/daughter play since me and he hasn’t been interested in rape play either. For all of the years I have known Noah he has been staunchly uninterested in Daddy/daughter play–not his kink. After he read the book and he understood the emotional power it has for me he is suddenly interested. Rape play has been a major component of our life. Tom didn’t think I was a fine instrument to be played. He wanted to have fun with a buddy. Noah is consciously working on helping me change because we both want me to. It was weird to understand that at this really deep level last night. Tom knows very little about me. He knows hand wavey bad stuff happened. He knows a few details and will admit knowing them after a lot of pressure. Holy shit. That is actually kind of amazing. I remember Tom’s life. I pieced it together very carefully. I have a whole timeline constructed in my head about his family and school experiences from very young. I wanted to know him so I could serve him better.

We went to McDonald’s a lot, probably every week. Tom wants to rest when he is at home. He wants to eat on the go as he dashes to and from work and parties. It’s a lifestyle. So one time I asked for chicken nuggets and he asked what kind of sauce I wanted. I responded with, “The usual” and he said, “What’s the usual?” and I could feel my face involuntarily fall. We had been dating for multiple years at that point. “Sweet and Sour.” There was some little flick of memory in his face as he recalled my voice saying that over and over for years in his memory. He looked kind of guilty but turned around to the cashier without saying anything.

If I walk into any restaurant with Noah that I have ever been to he can tell me which foods I enjoyed and for what reasons and which drinks I particularly liked or disliked. Sometimes he makes me cry. It’s kind of embarrassing in public. Noah knows what I like. I think that is the most amazing thing in the whole world. He pays so much attention to me. How can a human being be capable of paying so much attention to me? He has a catalog of my smiles. He knows what kinds of memories go with which expressions because he looks at me and asks what I am thinking over and over.

Having dinner with Tom was intense. And then not. And then it was kind of boring. I couldn’t have a conversation with him because he wasn’t interested in my point of view. He was dismissive and cold. He didn’t mean to be. He could speak perfectly politely as long as he could feel it was entirely “fun”. He wanted to have an agreeable conversation and he was perfectly happy to bulldoze and be rude and ensure that I didn’t conversationally disagree with him. I am so happy that I now live with someone who values my opinions even when he doesn’t agree with me. It was really nice to see that I have found someone who suits me far better. I am glad I kept looking.

I have to go run.

Parenting, anxiety and me!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s nice, dear.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No social skills

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Attachment and set patterns

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I’ve been slowly working my way through the Wikipedia article on Attachment Theory for about a week. It’s a beast. It makes me sad for some very specific reasons. I’ll start at the beginning. Attachment theory mostly focuses on what happens during the infant/toddler stage. Babies require stable care givers who respond promptly.

“The set-goal of the attachment behavioural system is to maintain a bond with an accessible and available attachment figure.^[16] “Alarm” is the term used for activation of the attachment behavioural system caused by fear of danger. “Anxiety” is the anticipation or fear of being cut off from the attachment figure. If the figure is unavailable or unresponsive, separation distress occurs.^[17] In infants, physical separation can cause anxiety and anger, followed by sadness and despair. By age three or four, physical separation is no longer such a threat to the child’s bond with the attachment figure. Threats to security in older children and adults arise from prolonged absence, breakdowns in communication, emotional unavailability or signs of rejection or abandonment.^[16]“

We went to our local breakfast place on Easter, partially just to see the waitress. We like her a lot. This time she had an excited story to tell. Her daughter, seven years into a relationship, suddenly called her mom out of the blue and announced she was getting married and would mom like to help with stuff? Obviously this made our waitress’ year. She was so happy. She got to buy her daughter a dress and get her a bouquet and take pictures. I spent the rest of breakfast crying. I’m very glad she got to have that experience. There are a lot of reasons why Noah and I got married in a room with a drive-in-style preacher and no one else. There isn’t a picture of us. We had a wedding pint of Häagen-Dazs. I ask Noah fairly often if he ever feels weird about how alienated he is from his family. He doesn’t have much more of a relationship with his family than I do but he doesn’t have any specific reasons like I do. He just didn’t bond there. It’s weird to me. For me to maintain relationships with my mother or sister would involve me choosing not to see huge problematic behaviors. Noah has a different situation. I don’t really understand it.

My parents divorced when I was three. Supposedly up to that point I should have had a reasonably secure attachment. My mother was a stay at home mom. She breastfed me for more than six months (only partially–I always had bottles too). I believe that she coslept with me early on and moved me to my own bed fairly late by societal standards. She’s a light sleeper and always has been. I can’t imagine her ignoring my needs.

As Ann said, “You were clean, well fed, and well dressed. What was there to report?” But my mom ignored the fact that my father was molesting me. If you go further into the Wikipedia article you find:

“The most concerning pattern is disorganized attachment. About 80% of maltreated infants are likely to be classified as disorganized, as opposed to about 12% found in non-maltreated samples. Only about 15% of maltreated infants are likely to be classified as secure. Children with a disorganized pattern in infancy tend to show markedly disturbed patterns of relationships. Subsequently their relationships with peers can often be characterised by a “fight or flight” pattern of alternate aggression and withdrawal. Affected maltreated children are also more likely to become maltreating parents. A minority of maltreated children do not, instead achieving secure attachments, good relationships with peers and non-abusive parenting styles.^[9] The link between insecure attachment, particularly the disorganized classification, and the emergence of childhood psychopathology is well-established, although it is a non-specific risk factor for future problems, not a pathology or a direct cause of pathology in itself.^[40] “

The specific behaviors in a very young child that indicate disorganized attachment:

“Stereotypies on return such as freezing or rocking. Lack of coherent attachment strategy shown by contradictory, disoriented behaviours such as approaching but with the back turned.”

I’m not sure why it uses the word “stereotypies” but whatever. I can remember rocking; I still do it when I am very upset. And I have always frozen upon return of the person I am most attached to. I hold back. I am terrified of touching them. I need to be approached. Noah comes into the house and comes to me for a hug and a kiss. It’s nice. I know that my mother talked about these kinds of behaviors when I was small. Yes, one shouldn’t self-diagnose. Whatever.

“Over the short term, the stability of attachment classifications is high, but becomes less so over the long term.^[9] It appears that stability of classification is linked to stability in caregiving conditions. Social stressors or negative life events—such as illness, death, abuse or divorce—are associated with instability of attachment patterns from infancy to early adulthood, particularly from secure to insecure.^[46] Conversely, these difficulties sometimes reflect particular upheavals in people’s lives, which may change. Sometimes, parents’ responses change as the child develops, changing classification from insecure to secure. Fundamental changes can and do take place after the critical early period.^[47] Physically abused and neglected children are less likely to develop secure attachments, and their insecure classifications tend to persist through the pre-school years. Neglect alone is associated with insecure attachment organisations, and rates of disorganized attachment are markedly elevated in maltreated infants.^[40]

This situation is complicated by difficulties in assessing attachment classification in older age groups. The Strange Situation procedure is for ages 12 to 18 months only;^[9] adapted versions exist for pre-school children.^[48]“

Since I’m an adult none of this is exactly relevant and I’m just pulling things out of my ass. Awesome.

“Significance of attachment patterns

There is an extensive body of research demonstrating a significant association between attachment organisations and children’s functioning across multiple domains.^[40] Early insecure attachment does not necessarily predict difficulties, but it is a liability for the child, particularly if similar parental behaviours continue throughout childhood.^[47] Compared to that of securely attached children, the adjustment of insecure children in many spheres of life is not as soundly based, putting their future relationships in jeopardy. Although the link is not fully established by research and there are other influences besides attachment, secure infants are more likely to become socially competent than their insecure peers. Relationships formed with peers influence the acquisition of social skills, intellectual development and the formation of social identity. Classification of children’s peer status (popular, neglected or rejected) has been found to predict subsequent adjustment.^[9] Insecure children, particularly avoidant children, are especially vulnerable to family risk. Their social and behavioural problems increase or decline with deterioration or improvement in parenting. However, an early secure attachment appears to have a lasting protective function.^[51] As with attachment to parental figures, subsequent experiences may alter the course of development.^[9]…

One explanation for the effects of early attachment classifications may lie in the internal working model mechanism. Internal models are not just “pictures” but refer to the feelings aroused. They enable a person to anticipate and interpret another’s behaviour and plan a response. If an infant experiences their caregiver as a source of security and support, they are more likely to develop a positive self-image and expect positive reactions from others. Conversely, a child from an abusive relationship with the caregiver may internalise a negative self-image and generalise negative expectations into other relationships. The internal working models on which attachment behaviour is based show a degree of continuity and stability. Children are likely to fall into the same categories as their primary caregivers indicating that the caregivers’ internal working models affect the way they relate to their child. This effect has been observed to continue across three generations. Bowlby believed that the earliest models formed were the most likely to persist because they existed in the subconscious. Such models are not, however, impervious to change given further relationship experiences; a minority of children have different attachment classifications with different caregivers.^[9]

There is some evidence that gender differences in attachment patterns of adaptive significance begin to emerge in middle childhood. Insecure attachment and early psychosocial stress indicate the presence of environmental risk (for example poverty, mental illness, instability, minority status, violence). This can tend to favour the development of strategies for earlier reproduction. However, different patterns have different adaptive values for males and females. Insecure males tend to adopt avoidant strategies, whereas insecure females tend to adopt anxious/ambivalent strategies, unless they are in a very high risk environment. Adrenarche is proposed as the endocrine mechanism underlying the reorganisation of insecure attachment in middle childhood.^[46]“

I describe myself as being “bad at monogamy” not polyamorous. (Not anymore! Just monogamous.) I am not all that familiar with the music of Amy Winehouse (and I didn’t hear about her until well after her death) but I have had people push a few songs at me recently. In particular: You Know I’m No Good just seems relevant to me. When I try to talk about “what kind of girl I am” that’s a lot of what I am talking about: That. She is compulsive sexually and very self-harming. Crying on the kitchen floor because you feel disgusted with yourself for your behavior, check. Sex you don’t even really enjoy, check. But you owe these men. They understand you. If you don’t put out then you are being part of The Embargo and you are bad. It’s just my place in life. He wanted to get off. What was I supposed to do other than get him off? (This is when I wish I had a guest post by Noah explaining the Embargo for me. I would link to it even though I think being self-referential is kind of hilarious.)

Back to this Attachment Theory stuff. Being sexually assaulted by one of my primary caregivers from toddlerhood (or earlier, who knows) means that I was pretty primed for not-perfect-attachment. And things in my household were far more chaotic than they appeared to the neighbors because my father was a raging alcoholic and drug addict. I think it is reasonable to assume that I am on the problematic end of things. I don’t think I have Reactive Attachment Disorder even though it is uncomfortable to read.

I had so much repeated sexual contact with neighbors over the years because I went out looking for some attention and affection anywhere I could get it. It wasn’t safe for me to ask for affection or attention at home. My sister has issues with being touched like I do. If I approached her at the wrong time I would end up in a lot of pain. It would always be phrased as my fault or an accident. I wasn’t supposed to say out loud, “You hurt me on purpose” because then she would actually slap me to “show me the difference.”

My mother was always preoccupied. Always thinking about other things, other people. I’m sure Shanna feels that way about me. I make up for it by spending many hours a day focusing on the kids. I only let my thoughts wander at pre-selected times. It’s hard to control. Back to the Attachment Theory stuff. It has only been applied to adults in terms of their romantic relationships. The basics of adult styles are:

“Securely attached adults tend to have positive views of themselves, their partners and their relationships. They feel comfortable with intimacy and independence, balancing the two. Anxious-preoccupied adults seek high levels of intimacy, approval and responsiveness from partners, becoming overly dependent. They tend to be less trusting, have less positive views about themselves and their partners, and may exhibit high levels of emotional expressiveness, worry and impulsiveness in their relationships. Dismissive-avoidant adults desire a high level of independence, often appearing to avoid attachment altogether. They view themselves as self-sufficient, invulnerable to attachment feelings and not needing close relationships. They tend to suppress their feelings, dealing with rejection by distancing themselves from partners of whom they often have a poor opinion. Fearful-avoidant adults have mixed feelings about close relationships, both desiring and feeling uncomfortable with emotional closeness. They tend to mistrust their partners and view themselves as unworthy. Like dismissive-avoidant adults, fearful-avoidant adults tend to seek less intimacy, suppressing their feelings.^[7]^[52]^[53]^[54]“

I really like to date dismissive-avoidant men. (love) I kind of go back and forth between being anxious-preoccupied and and fearful-avoidant. Which means this isn’t something I can self-diagnose well. Regardless of which of them it’s pretty clear I’m not secure if you know what I mean. There is hope though.

“Some authors have suggested that adults do not hold a single set of working models. Instead, on one level they have a set of rules and assumptions about attachment relationships in general. On another level they hold information about specific relationships or relationship events. Information at different levels need not be consistent. Individuals can therefore hold different internal working models for different relationships.^[56]^[57]“

So even though I am pretty clearly fucked up I could probably, with enough time and effort, learn how to have a secure relationship with Noah. He keeps assuring me that as long as something has the possibility of success, even if it is a low possibility, keep trying. I don’t understand why he picked me. I make it as hard as possible to have a relationship with me. I ask him to do very hard things all the time.

A friend told me a cool analogy: trust is like water dripping into a bucket. When there isn’t much water in the bucket it is hard to spill water out if the bucket tips a little. If the bucket is full it is easy to dump water out.

Every so often Noah and I tip the bucket. I want to say more. But it’s time to go in.

Words have power.

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In the current landscape of my life people talk about the various -isms. Racism, sexism, ableism, etc all have problematic words. You are supposed to just not use those problematic words any more. I can’t sleep at night for wondering when someone is going to call me on my inappropriate words and tell me that I am bad for using them.

One of these days a sex worker is going to be angry with me for referring to myself as a whore because I have never actually been paid. Just wait, it will happen. I will make them feel marginalized. I will be co-opting their language of oppression. At least, this is what I sigh deeply and expect. A long time ago I decided that whereas sex work is a perfectly valid form of employment it would not be healthy for me. I already have issues internally with figuring out where my consent actually is.

When I try to picture in my head what it will be like to talk about the book in public, once I get up the nerve and all, I think of what I might say to scathing people who are upset that I use the expression, “white trash.” I expect to be called a racist at some point. It has happened repeatedly. These days I just start singing, “Everyone is a little bit racist sometimes” and I try to respond to any actual substance. Am I racist because I believe that my cultural background is white trash? I think it depends on who you ask. Given the brutality of my childhood most people I talk to cede that it deserves harsh labeling. I really and truly do not know a better way to describe it.

I am trying to not be white trash any more. I do associate it with racism. And sexism. And homophobia. And and and and. Part of needing that phrase is my overwhelming shame that I would not have gotten help at important times if I was not white. Part of needing to identify myself by that bit of race privilege is to acknowledge that no matter how bad I think it was for me… I still was given a pass in ways I don’t even understand. There are still brutalities that are not mine to endure. I don’t speak for the “trash” experience because people who are not white get an entirely different reception. I don’t know from personal experience what it looks like but I hear it is pretty bad.

Who the fuck am I to think I can speak for a neutered carefully non-racial experience of poverty? I think that would be a far graver sin than acknowledging that my poverty and brutality carried with it an air of people who didn’t believe they were at the bottom of the barrel even though in every measurable way they were?

My nephew used to work at a movie theater. I think he worked there for about two years. He quit because they wouldn’t promote him so he didn’t feel adequately “respected.” Then he went on to just not work for years. The hilarious thing is, he has a bunch of stories about breaking expensive equipment at the theater. He thinks these stories are great. He tells them with pride. Then he honestly can’t understand why they don’t promote him and he thinks it is more dignified for him to sit at home asking for money from his sister–the one who was working fast food while a high school student.

Oh man. There is such a warped perception of the world there. It’s not unique to being white, no. It’s not one story. It’s the whole fabric. My uncle believed he was superior. That was what I grew up hearing. It is subtle. I don’t feel like it is a stretch to say that their culture was actually bad. The funny thing is, not everyone in the family monolithically believes the ad-copy. Auntie is a rather dignified and respectful soul. She treats everyone decently regardless of any part of their “identity.” She just doesn’t care what someones race or sexuality or religion is. She’s doing her thing and she’ll smile at you and ask you about your day regardless of how you differ from her. She doesn’t see it as relevant. Why couldn’t she be the one to create my culture?

That’s the thing, she did. She created a household where she adamantly believed differently from the prevailing loud noise in the house and she kept her mouth shut. Silence is consent. The only reason I know she believes differently from the common speech I heard every is because I have quietly watched her actions for decades. When you are bringing up children that kind of dichotomy doesn’t work. I have her in my head as a contrast to all the hostility and hatred, yes. But I feel like she is also just a random piece of flotsom in the river of that family. She gets pushed back and forth between the currents and she goes along with whatever happens without raising a fuss. She doesn’t see it as her place. That means that when children are repeatedly victimized she isn’t willing to see it or deal with it. She wouldn’t even know how.

I know that my family being white trash is offensive on its face. I know how charged that phrase is. I use it because it is true. I don’t think that carefully avoiding it because it bothers people is the right approach. The right approach is talking about it and figuring out how to stop being that. Silence just enables the ongoing problems.

White trash believe that they are being unfairly persecuted by all the people of other races who want welfare or support even if they have been on the doll for generations. That is my experience of my family. That is why I include that in my personal definition. I was taught hostility with my Pepsi and Snickers. We didn’t do mothers milk.

If I am hopeful I say that I don’t think I am currently white trash. The problem is I don’t know who or what I am. I don’t know who I am becoming. I don’t know what I will be like. I feel like I am at a crossroads. I’m kind of hard to describe.

I had lunch with a friend. She said that she feels like she spends a lot of time with her kids. My eyes kind of went wide–she has a job! She is away from her kids for at least forty hours a week! How is it possible to spend a lot of time with your kids if you have such a commitment! I have been thinking since about why it is so important to me to be not-separate from my kids right now. (It’s not for any moral superiority.) In having two daughters I got to once again experience that feeling of one-ness that exists between mothers and children. I did not get to have the standard slow separation from my mother. The more I read about attachment disorders the more I cry. The idea of being away from Shanna and Calli for consistently more than about twenty hours a week makes me want to cry. I hurt inside thinking about not seeing them for that much time.

I stay with them and I spend my whole life with them right now because this is the only time I will have to repair the damage I have from my mother not being with me. I have one twenty year period to fix these holes in myself. Out of the whole of my eighty-something + year life that means I had twenty years to fuck it up then I get twenty years to fix it before I enter into the next stage of actually being an independent adult. I need every minute I can get now because the wounds are so deep and they are festering and they need a lot of care. I need the feeling of one day at a time separating. I will need that long to be ready for it.

My daughters are not mine. They are on loan for a brief time. It is so complicated to think about the fact that I do not own them. I can’t control them. Once they are adults I have no guarantee of ever seeing them again. I have this time and that is all I am promised. If I miss even one minute of it I will hate myself for losing the most precious time I will have this lifetime. This is the only time when I will be able to keep them safe and build them up to be as strong as I can. It’s hard for me to do. I’m having to figure out how to do it for myself at the same time. I’m not starting from a place of feeling strong and capable and worthy.

My children will not be white trash. It’s not about the poverty. It’s not about the violence. My children will not grow up in an environment of bitterness because they feel the world owes them for some undisclosed worth they just have. For me acknowledging that I am white trash is partially about feeling the overwhelming shame that comes from knowing that as bad as things were it was mitigated by so much racial privilege. It is all tied together.

Calling myself a whore is a similar kind of acknowledgment for me. I was diminished to the point where I was convinced that I should never accept money for sex–I just gave it away for free. I couldn’t even see any value in what I was doing. I was not good enough. I was not pretty enough. I was not stable enough. But I still would go out and have compulsive sex with large numbers of people. I have had six month periods where I slept with nearly fifty people. But I wasn’t ever paid. It’s a false feeling of security. Do I actually know what it is like to sell my body for coin? No. So why do I feel like I get to use the word whore? When you are taught by your family of origin that you are a whore and that your eventual livelihood will come from being used for sex… Maybe I am co-opting. Maybe I don’t deserve to sully the word for actual prostitutes. They aren’t necessarily compulsive sexually. I shouldn’t conflate my psychological issues with a real-world profession. But I do and I always have. Since I was a young child I have believed that it is an accurate word to describe me. Slut just isn’t the same.

Sluts have sex because they want to. Whores have sex because they have to. Sometimes because they need the money. Sometimes because, well, they just have to. Not all whores are adequately paid for their work. Pimps are a common problem. This is not a well run free market economy.

I try really hard to imagine what kind of mother I want to be. I want to show my kids an awesome example of parenting. It’s the most important thing in the world to me. I don’t care about a job or vocation or hobby very much. I care about the people in my life. I care about what kind of person I am going to teach them to be.

I don’t want to present my culture of origin as de facto. I don’t want to teach them compulsive behavior about sexuality. What does it mean to be actively not racist? Does it mean giving up the phrase white trash? But it has so much utility. It has so much purpose. It is so effective at provoking conversations and anger about the layers of filth involved. How can that be used in a productive way rather than just being one more way that another white woman is an asshole?

I don’t know. I know that every time I talk to someone in person about why it is important to me they agree that it is “ok” for me to use it as a self-label. I do talk to people who are not white. I don’t like this feeling of seeking approval from “Representatives From the People of Color” in order to talk about my experience of race. I cringe when I bring up this topic. I feel like the only way for me to talk about race is to sit back and shut up. My experience isn’t important. Only it is to me. How in the world can I create a different experience for my kids if I don’t figure this out? I know that if I try to just not talk or not think about these things that I will never have the ability to really change my behavior. I won’t know what behavior is important to change or why. If I stop using the phrase in writing or in speech I won’t take it out of my head. I will just be censoring myself for select audiences. Silence is consent. I don’t think I can agree with the idea that I shouldn’t talk about my experiences.

I wish I understood more about what knowledge I am really searching for right now. I’m not even sure. There is a conversation I long to have. I am not so good with the almost-there-but-not-quite things I know of. It’s time to run off.

The half-marathon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Time to stop whining and go inside.

I’m not resting my arms.

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I have so much going on in my head and I am alone a lot. If I don’t type then I just don’t express anything. My friend who was supposed to come over yesterday was sick so he cancelled. (Good! Take care of yourself!) That was going to be my first sit down and really talk to an adult other than Noah this month. Today another friend wants to come over but I don’t think she should because Noah, Shanna, and Calli are all pretty sick and she’s 29 weeks pregnant. Don’t come over and get sick.

So I released the book and then… sat at home. Alone. Thinking. I’m really grateful that a number of people have called or messaged me to tell me that they read the book. There are a few different pieces of this that I’m focusing on. First: it was readable, right? I’m kind of insecure about my writing style. I’m worried it is difficult to follow. I’m rather abrupt. Second: I really am curious which parts of the story bother people the most or stick with them. Third: I am curious what people think about their own lives as a result. I’ve had two conversations in particular where people used the book as a springboard to talk about a lot of stuff from their childhoods. I felt my heart soar. I made them think.

I had a good therapy session this week. I’m glad I got to go this week. We spent a lot of time talking about how becoming an adult involves a lot of shitty work no one wants to do. You are an adult once you learn the systems involved in surviving and you can do them without thinking or complaining. Because as long as you still don’t know what you are doing, you are a child. And if you are complaining? You still aren’t an adult. These things simply have to be done and complaining about them is pretty ridiculous. Who am I going to bitch at because I have to dust? Really?

We talked about how I have areas of my life where I have strong beliefs about what makes a good person and they make it kind of hard to actually be a good person. I give other people more slack than I give myself. I have these really strong beliefs because of the circumstances of my life. I would have different strong beliefs if I had different circumstances.

I have had a hard time learning the tasks of being a house wife. The repetitive nature is daunting. How do you actually get to the point of having a system? Of knowing how and when all these tasks should be done? Once upon a time girls were trained in how to do these things, I wasn’t. I just have to kind of guess. I am happier in a tidy house because then I spend less of my time hunting for things. Less time tripping and hurting myself. Less time breaking things because it is impossible to be careful in a mess. It’s not a moral judgment, exactly. I have a lot of anger built up around people being able to say, “Well I can’t find it so I don’t have to deal with it.”

Last night Noah tactfully didn’t point out that I want him to do more and more work while being cheerful. Maybe I shouldn’t be so fussy that I have to do more and more work while being cheerful. That’s what being a grown up means in this house. It means that there is a lot of work to be done, and you do it, and you need to be a pleasant person while you do it. None of this work is a personal affront. None of it qualifies as an indignity or imposition. At this point the house is really forking tidy. It’s not much work to keep clean.

I care a lot about tone and attitude. My kids are going to learn their entire approach to life from me. I am keeping them home from preschool and elementary school. I am teaching them what it means to be a mother and an adult and a citizen. I don’t want to teach them to stuff their feelings or hide their emotions and pretend to be happy. I want to model what it looks like to build a life where you are genuinely content. No, not everything is ever perfect. But I’ve picked my burdens in life, it seems like even a bit more so than most people. I really went out hunting for what I wanted. And I have it. It’s a good life.

My beautiful Shanna is on my lap right now. She is engaging and fun. She’s trying to talk me into letting her put the NaNoWriMo bumper sticker on the wall. I think I’m going to decline. She makes me smile. I have begun to notice that the lines on my face do not easily settle into smiling. That feels sad. I want to work on that. I have so much to smile about.

I grew up going between living in truly isolated circumstances and Auntie’s house. Auntie’s house was always busy. There were a lot of people coming and going. I miss people. I miss feeling like part of a hive. I live a very quiet life. I hang out with my kids and that is pretty much it. It’s hard figuring out what conversations are appropriate for Shanna.

Yesterday she asked me if my mother is dead. I told her no. She asked why we don’t see my mother. I told her I would explain more when she gets older. I don’t know how to have this conversation yet. My mother lives thirty minutes away and you can never see her because she will tell you that small stupid things are your fault because you deserve to suffer. I don’t want Shanna to grow up thinking she is bad or to blame for adult matters.

Part of the reason I am alone so much is because I allow other people to have inappropriate influence over me. I try and try and try to do what they want, long after it is bad for me to try. I’m not actually good at boundaries, no matter what I try to claim. I keep my boundaries by keeping my front door shut. I only have to worry about the people and things inside this house. I don’t have to bend to anyone else’s needs or whims.

One of my high school boyfriends told me yesterday that I was always good at boundaries. Ha. The reason I stopped talking to you was because I continued to feel like I had to have sex with you because you wanted to have sex and it’s not very nice to tell people they can’t have what they want.

Noah doesn’t really want to talk about monogamy anymore. He agreed to it under duress and he’ll do it, fine. But he doesn’t want to talk about it. I feel scared. I feel like at some point in my life someone is going to tell me that they want to and I won’t feel like I get to really say no. People like me don’t get to say no. I rehearse in my head, “I’m in a monogamous marriage. I don’t have sex with people any more.” I pray to god I never get in a situation where saying that is ignored. I’m afraid it will. I’m afraid to ever be in a situation where I might be vulnerable to someone asking. I’m so scared. Because I’m afraid that I will say no once and it will be ignored and I will do what I do and I’ll put my head down and shut up and try not to cry and just get through it. And afterwards I will talk about it like it was consensual and I deserve all the damage done. Because I do. Because I always deserve what I get, right?

I’m afraid that part of the reason I stay home so much is because I can’t control what happens to me when I leave home. Bad things happen and there is nothing I can do about it. Even stupid shit like losing my wallet. I feel like being out in the world is dangerous. Maybe it is for everyone. Maybe I’m just stupid and I deserve what happens to me. This is part of what I worry about passing on. Other people don’t seem to be terrified that if they go out they are likely to be hurt. I feel like I don’t have a lot of resiliency left.

The cease and desist letter feels kind of like a punch to my stomach. It didn’t come from someone I outed as abusive in any way. He’s more of a neutral-to-positive sort of character. And he still wants to silence me. I should just shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up.

How you spend your days is how you spend your years. I keep a tidy house. I garden. I run. I play with my beautiful daughters. I’m teaching them about the world. I’m teaching them about how all of life is a process. There are steps you can skip and steps you can’t, the trick is finding out which is which. I read about twenty pages out of The White Trash Mom’s Handbook yesterday. From the title it seems like the perfect book for me. It’s not. It’s all about how to stay within the system and look successful while taking short cuts. I suppose for someone who wants their kids to be “successful” in public school it is full of valid points. I don’t want children who are successful at public school. I want children who are successful at life. Very few of the really successful people in our country went to public school. Think about that. It’s a broken system. It manages to turn out most of the cogs in the machine but it doesn’t turn out people who know how to run the system by and large.

I don’t think there is anything wrong with people putting their kids into preschool and public school. I think it is the norm in our world. I’m not very good at fitting in with norms. I would not be able to “pass” enough for my kids to have a successful public school experience. As I read that book I noticed over and over how the author keeps saying that you have to “play the game” or your “kids will suffer”. It’s true. My kids would suffer because I am their mom in public school. I would do things wrong. They would be punished. They would almost certainly be weird and different and public school is not kind to such children. My children will most likely never appear normal. They are wonderful and great and awesome, but they will always be quirky.

For all that I whine about being alone, I have found a life and a space that fits me. When I am feeling self-confident I have places to go. I have friends. Lots of people like me. I stay home because *I* have issues. And because I’m shitty at managing my kids and doing anything else at the same time. At home I can be all “free range” and not feel guilty. My kids and I are working hard at learning how to coexist. How do I get my work done while they have their own work to do? How do we all get along?

From my daughter I learn that it is better to say, “Hey, will you please help me find the ipad?” rather than “You didn’t put the ipad on the table.” Because I sit here and listen to her talk all day long I am learning where my manners are disgusting. I’m learning where I am very rude. I’m working on it because I don’t want to hear it from her. I think it is good for me. It’s the least judgmental feedback I have ever received. I just have to sit around and listen to her ape my tone of voice and attitude. It’s humbling. There is no one in the whole world I can blame anything on but myself in this house. My daughters have me for an influence. And Netflix. Thank goodness for Netflix. Shanna is learning how conversations go. It’s dramatic to see how this is working for her.

I’m trying to understand better what my social needs actually are. I’m looking forward to the Storytelling at the end of the month. So far I have had one person tell me absolutely yes (yay!) and several others are strong maybes. I’ll take it.

We are also going to a sex party at the end of the month. I’m intimidated. I don’t think anyone will inappropriately push me (the host would kick anyone out who tried) but I think I will feel awkward and weird. What am I there for anyway? What business do monogamous people have being out in the sex communities? What is the point of going? Because that is my community, for better or worse. Even if I never have sex again in my life the alternative sex communities are mine. I belong in them. I am sexually deviant. But am I? I don’t know.

I feel like I don’t know who I am or what I want. I feel scared. I feel isolated. I feel like I should never do anything other than garden, hang out with my kids, run, and clean again. This is my life now. I chose it. I should stick with what is safe. I have never been this safe before in my life. What is wrong with me that I want to shake things up? What is wrong with me that I get bored?

I still don’t feel safe. I feel like this could all be taken away from me if people knew how disgusting and broken I am.

Do you know why I keep my house as clean as I do? Because I live in terror of a CPS visit. I kicked cabinet doors, obviously I am an unfit mother. I have kicked holes in drywall (years and years ago). I yell. I get so very angry. Obviously I am unfit. I do not deserve the goodness and safety I have.

I should go somewhere sleazy and unsafe and become inebriated and unable to say no coherently and forcefully because that is what girls like me do, right? Is it even possible to hang out with people and do anything else? I don’t know. I feel like I don’t know anything at all.

I am never going to fit in. I am never going to be “normal”. And I mourn that. I mourn that I can’t give my kids that because I don’t know what it looks like. Instead what I’m giving them is a very structured environment where we work all day long on communicating with one another in polite tones. How do you ask people to meet your needs in a civil tone of voice? We’re working on it. We do a lot of “try again”. Because here I get a lot of chances. Once I walk out of the front door I give up my right to be able to try things over and over till I get it right. I’m not practicing anymore. That’s the real world. I’m not ready.

I have approximately fifteen more years to learn how to be a functional, polite grown up. Now that I’m thirty that doesn’t sound like nearly enough time. I haven’t managed yet, what hubris do I have to think I can learn in the next fifteen years? I have fifteen years to focus on how to teach my kids what they need to know in order to move off into the world. It doesn’t feel like enough time.

So far I have made ~$140 on the book. That’s about half of what I spent on ISBN and it doesn’t even begin to pay for the editor. I have to figure out how to promote the book or I won’t be allowed to leave the house to do anything fun until November. All of my spending money is pre-spent. I’m not sad though. Even though this is an expensive hobby it is one I needed. And I have eight more spiffy ISBN numbers. (You can buy one or ten and print vs. ebook needs two separate numbers.) I guess that means I should keep writing. I can’t decide what to work on next.

I’m supposed to be resting my arms. But I’m so lonely.

Broken promises

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My mom likes to make promises she can’t keep. Oh she always intends to do it when she says it. She just isn’t very good at taking stock of what things are realistic and possible in life. And she rarely has the willpower to deny herself something in favor of a later pay off. It’s all stupid shit, right? She promised she would take me to Magic Mountain every year from when I was eight on. My siblings grew up with season passes and I heard the stories and I felt envious. I went by myself when I was twenty-one.

One of the talents my mom has is sewing. She’s a fairly talented seamstress. I still have things she made from me and I wear them when I get the chance. I have a Snow White costume and an Ariel (from The Little Mermaid) dress–you know the one when she comes down to dinner and brushes her hair with a fork? That one. My dress is awesome. And my mommy made it for me which makes it extra special. She made my Dickens costume. I wish she hadn’t told me to buy the pattern and material for three separate Dickens costumes because then in the long run I feel bitter that (as usual) she doesn’t follow through completely on what she says. I should just be grateful she did one. Usually she doesn’t get through one.

I focus on the fact that in everything she said to me there was always a lie. I always had to be careful not to get my hopes up when she said anything. I would say I had less than a 50/50 chance of her following through. That wears on you decade after decade. I wish she had promised less.

“I’ll pick you up from school” was one of those ones I wish she had promised less of. I would not be able to add up all the hours I sat around waiting to be picked up. I understand. She always had a reason. It’s not her fault. Ever. It is always someone or something else’s fault. Always. Always. Always.

I hold the people in my life to a higher standard of truth telling because of this. Approximations are not good things. Over-promising is the worst thing you can possibly do. I try very hard to keep my expectations and hopes very low. Too many people are fucking liars who are too self absorbed to even admit to themselves that what they are doing is lying.

There are sins I forgive easily and barely notice; there are sins that cause me to feel like I have to smite someone from the earth because they are hurting me. The real solution isn’t to smite anyone. I’m terrified that the solution is simply to never trust a word that people say unless they prove over years that they aren’t a liar. Unfortunately I tend to trust more than I should. I get lied to a lot. Oh of course it is never a lie it’s just that people don’t think they need to have a lot of integrity in what they say. They feel no need to be impeccable with their words. Close enough is good enough. And I die of a thousand paper cuts.

I don’t want my children to have this hostility and rigidness around promises. I know it isn’t healthy. It is isolating. I certainly can’t hang out with people much. I’m trying to figure out how much I can handle really having steadily in my life. I want there to be a predictable pattern. I want to have a pattern, damnit. I’m really struggling because nothing else in the world wants me to. Stupid life just keeps happening. I really do want to see people and so far that has to be a flexible thing.

It is hard to be this lonely and angry at the same time. I know that I have to be careful not to get too angry when other people are around. I manage this with the kids by not talking at all. It’s hard to do that with adult visitors. Then they become discomfited and I have to try to knock it off. I can see the visible discomfort spread over people and I feel a wash of shame. Yup. That’s me. The angry one. Then I feel so much self loathing that I am always the angry one that I just feel more anger. I’ve been told a lot of times that feeling that angry around people is basically abusive. I’m a monster no matter what. I just am. It doesn’t matter what I do.

Ok, I kicked the cabinet door off the wall. I suppose that is something terrible and horrible. Because more shame really makes everything better.

I have had trouble running since the grief ritual. I feel so overwhelmed with anger that I can barely see straight and it makes me stumble so I am running more slowly and carefully. I don’t want to injure myself; I truly don’t. I don’t want running to become my latest method of self-injury. I want to find joy in my body. It’s hard to do in the dark and cold. I miss the afternoons.

I feel stuck in this anger. I am so frustrated and anxious. I need to go proofread six more chapters back from my editor and that’s scaring the crap out of me. I am so tired of reading this story. I want to avoid it and I want to get this done and over with.

When I say I follow the scorched earth path I mean that I will forever say anything I want about someone and shun that person from my life. I will be as harsh as I feel the need to be. I can be a very harsh person. It is obvious when I am truly done.

I am struggling with some things in my close personal relationships. I don’t want to regret the things I write, ever. I want to always know that I am writing a truth I feel comfortable standing behind. Right now I am having a lot of very strong irrational emotions. I don’t know how to deal with them. I am already saying things that are impossible to take back. Dear sweet Jesus at least I will keep them off of my blog. I’m struggling.

How can I talk about what I am experiencing without giving any information or judgment. hm.

I feel unappreciated and used. I feel like I am getting the realistic version of an impossible situation. I feel tightness in my throat. My neck aches. My shoulders ache. My lower back aches and I can feel how bad my posture is right now. All right, I made a few chair adjustments and that is slightly better. I feel empty and drained. I feel abandoned and untrusting. I feel exhausted in a way that isn’t going away with more sleep.

Recently I heard someone describe it as being “pregnant” with her book and I kind of feel like that. I’m getting a lot of harsh physical symptoms and emotionally I feel like I am living on the memory of fumes because I ran out of gas long ago. I am at a time and place in my life where I feel like I need an endless stream of support but I am too ashamed to ask for it. I don’t have a family and people like me have to just figure it the fuck out because we are too unpleasant to be around. I feel so pathetic and needy. I feel so very lonely. But I don’t feel like I get to talk about that because it is my own damn fault that I am so fucking unpleasant to be around and that’s why I am alone.

Sometimes I wonder what it is like to be part of an extended family. Thinking about it makes me cry. What would it be like to have people who know me and want to spend time with me? I have friends, yes. But my friends go see their families on holidays. I notice. I tend to feel like it isn’t possible for me to stop being angry so I should stop attempting to spend time with people at all because no one should have to deal with my fucking mouth.

It’s probably a good thing I see my therapist tonight.

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Category Archives: people hacking

I don’t think that getting over my anger is the point.

Processing

neeeeeeedy

Get it out of your head.

This process blows.

relationship blathering

Don’t make someone a priority while you are their option.

Chemical states and relationship transitions

Perspective

Working is fun.

You have no power over me.

Learning and shame

Memory lane

Parenting, anxiety and me!

No social skills

Attachment and set patterns

“Significance of attachment patterns

Words have power.

The half-marathon.

I’m not resting my arms.

Broken promises