Tag Archives: adult-only

I need to change my mindset.

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“I’m not rejecting you” he said. Enh, it depends on your perspective. Are you rejecting an offer that would give you small pieces of what you want in exchange for not being willing to give up on finding the whole package? Yes, you are. It’s not a bad thing to do. I walked out on a partner when I was 23 because he didn’t want to be a parent and I did. I am not offended that I am being rejected but I am. It seems pretty logical to me, reasonable even. I just hope it works out how you want it to.

I feel rejected because I was offering a way that I would try to change myself to fit around someone in a way I usually won’t offer. I’m not a vanilla girl. Trying to figure out how I would exist in that kind of long-term relationship is quite an interesting mental exercise but it doesn’t matter. It’s not going to happen.

I feel bad because I am probably not going to be open to that kind of option in the future. I think that he thinks I will kind of wait around to be a Plan B if he fails to get what he wants in the next 10 years. I won’t. That would destroy my self esteem and I am not going to do or be that for anyone. Fuck no. I am not a fucking option you can pick up and set down when you feel like it. I am not a fucking doll. I am not the sort to wait and pine.

I will never stop loving him. I have loved him for most of my life and that won’t change. I have *intense* love for my friends. I will jump through flaming hoops to support my friends. I am devoted and adoring and full of encouragement. The thing is, I put most of me in a box in order to be respectful to my friends. I am so much and I don’t want to be inappropriate or overwhelm people. I leave most of me in a box and only offer a very small portion to each friend. I support this partition by not talking to people all that often. When I talk to someone too often I start wanting and needing them to accept more of me. My friends are friends instead of partners because more of me is not welcome in that relationship.

I’m not complaining. I’m observing. This is part of why I will sort of disappear from the Scottish social scene for a bit. I brought too much of myself in June and July and now I feel like I want and need to be accepted more fully as myself and that is not actually on offer. I am not going to reach a deep and meaningful level with most people here and it’s going to go quite poorly if I try. I don’t have the ability to absorb that level of failure over and over without flinching and I can’t flinch right now. I can’t look weak because that is when people attack the hardest.

I’m really scared and I feel desperately insecure. In a way this summer has been quite an adventure through what Noah and I moving back towards being polyamorous might bring up. Travel Boyfriend is a dear friend who entertained the idea of a walk on the wild side before figuring out it isn’t for him. Bad Timing is a selfish jerk who did not care that he was putting me in a bad position where my life would incur harm. I feel like acknowledging these extreme differences of what dating might bring up is important.

Noah and I are continuing to talk and negotiate because this is going to be a long and slow process for us. Luckily we are both starting from a truly advantageous position: we are wildly compatible and our relationship is really fun. It means that when considering the possibility of dating someone else we have to pass up on time together for it. That means the person has to be really special and not many people are going to land in that zone for us. We are intense weirdos and we freak out most people–that’s step 1. Neither of us can date someone who acts in destructive ways towards our marriage–that’s step 2. That’s not ok. If we tell someone about a relationship boundary and they are disrespectful that needs to be an immediate no. My life is a very carefully constructed creation and I’m not blowing it up for anyone.

I’m not confident that I will be as open to someone else as I was with TB. He coasted through showing up with a lot of history. He didn’t have to actively earn trust. He started out fully trusted and could only lose trust from there. That was maybe not fair? I’m not sure. It’s definitely not my default approach to new people. Usually people earn trust in painstaking increments. I suppose TB did, but he did it while running in the background and I wasn’t expecting it or demanding it of him.

Noah and I are talking very frankly about the fact that I shouldn’t have someone be more than a friend unless they have the capacity to be obsessed with me the way I need people to be.

A friend recently broke up with a partner because she felt like she was being used like a fleshlight. He said, “You feel better than a fleshlight.” He thought it was a compliment.

I live with someone who thinks my existence is magical and sparkly and worth devoting his entire life to supporting. Why in the fuck should I devote a lot of time to someone who doesn’t think about me much and who doesn’t care about me and my story and my skills and my life? That sounds pretty stupid to me.

I am not a person with whom one passes time.

Either you are devoted to me like your life depends on it or we are just friends who spend time together once in a while. I have traditionally enjoyed having sex with friends; I see nothing wrong with it. Not everyone I have sex with becomes a boy/girl/theyfriend. I have expectations of people I date. I don’t have many expectations of my friends. I take people as they are and I don’t spend a lot of time requiring that they care about me intensely. I accept the relationship they offer. I rarely ask for more.

I go out in to the world and I exist loudly and I see who reaches out to me. That’s how I find friends. I love my friends. My friends are people who appreciate me and love me very deeply. They carry me through life on a wave of devotion. The thing is, I have to accept that each person will give what they have to spare when they have anything going spare. It has to be the aggregate that carries me forward because I cannot depend on a single friend to be there to catch me. I have to just hope someone shows up. I get lucky a lot.

Jenny is amazing.

A lot of my friends are amazing. I have been caught and then passed hand to hand over and over. I trust that I will figure out how to build it again, it just takes time. It takes time and vulnerability and right now I don’t feel like I have a lot of resiliency to offer. I’m really scared and I’m really sad.

I have good reasons for both feelings. I am also full of joy. I am really and truly living the life I set out to live.

The funny thing about not gardening almost at all this year: literally my point is that I want to build a regenerating food forest that will thrive with neglect. I am trying to build something self reinforcing. In a way taking a year off is a great idea because I see more of what is trying to happen without my interference. That’s an important lesson.

Things with the kids are at a better place than they have been for a while, it’s super nice.

I can’t figure out if I’m being unreasonable with myself about how I’m dealing with the sexual assault trial. I want to stop feeling active anxiety in my body. I feel like I’m simmering in a low level panic attack a lot of the time right now. It is a lot of why I am consciously choosing to be anhedonic most of the time because it is that or feel too much of everything and be overly volatile and inappropriate. I need to be chill and calm and gentle and patient. Do you know what is hard to do when you feel existential dread and terror? Be chill and calm and gentle and patient.

It’s hard to learn when your brain is exploding with fear and anger. It’s interesting feeling this now after so many years of having my PTSD symptoms under control.

And I can’t exercise until October because of surgery recovery. Woo. Awesome to have all these feelings and nowhere to put them. Noah takes as much as he can. I write the ones I can. There’s still a lot left.

One of the ways I manage my expectations of friends is to not talk to them very often and always show up and act like no time at all has passed. I don’t bring a lot of my burdens to the relationship. I usually literally monitor time and make sure I don’t talk more than 50% and I usually try hard to not even get to filling half the time. I know other people need a place to express themselves and they don’t write. I do. I leave the pieces of myself on the internet that I wish I had enough intimacy in my life to share with real people face to face but that isn’t a reality in my life. It never has been. I think that is part of why I have such intense need to write. If I plop pieces of myself on the internet then no one can say I “forced” them to listen to me talk.

The difference between trauma dumping and being a writer is: you are not forced to read/listen to any of this. If you decide to spend your time reading what someone has to say about trauma that’s on you, buddy. That’s consent, which makes it not trauma dumping by definition.

I’ve been feeling really ashamed to write about myself publicly since I moved. I have a lot of weird sex stuff in my life. I have traditionally written it down because I’m trying to figure out how to practice harm reduction in my life. I think that is causing me harm. It is going to be far more scandalous here than it was in California.

Other folks would tell me to just be anonymous. No. That is acting like I have something to be ashamed of. It is acting like I am committing a sin. I’m weird but I’m not evil. I’m not doing anything that is wrong. A lot of it is non-standard and broadly disapproved of, maybe even for good reasons. Every rule has exceptions. I have been exceptional all my life. I don’t plan to change.

Not really feeling ok.

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I would like to delete social media. I would like to stop trying to make friends here. I feel lonely and alienated and unwanted and bad. I feel pointless, stupid, disconnected, and deeply sad. My big “going right” social connection for this year is something that I can have for a short time then I need to let it go. Past that my new connections are going pretty poorly. Hell, he’s not a new connection just a change. A short change before we go back to normal because no actually more is not a good thing.

I feel painfully lonely and like I am deeply uncomfortable with the idea of being in a room with anyone. I would like to rip my skin off. It’s not about any one thing or another. I’ve had to give a police interview about my sexual assault history. That was really deeply fucked up for me. There was being assaulted. There was being asked to leave a vanilla community group. There was a warm and wonderful possibility that floated by on the stream for a little while before moving off. Parenting is always hard.

Being married is always hard. Being me is always hard. It’s not one thing. It’s all of it. I would like a vacation from being in my brain.

What does the future hold?

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The last few months have dramatically not gone to plan on many levels. Everything has ended up being way harder. In a way that makes me feel sad. In a way it almost feels like a relief. I’ve been waiting for the results of the last round of “My efforts towards the first wave of people have either flamed out or settled into a secure relationship”. I now feel more secure and confident about where I should and shouldn’t be putting energy. I learned who actually likes me and who likes me if I can lie really well all the time and care about their feelings instead of my own.

It’s ok. That’s normal human stuff. I’m not angry about it, just resigned. I’ve been saying since I moved here that some attempts at relationships would work out but most would not. It’s turning out to be true. I’m not shocked or upset.

I am in need of resting and regrouping. I am desperately in need of a chance to refocus on the parts that matter the most. The only people who are likely to show up for me in my old age live in this house. It’s simply, literally, true. I’ve been looking outside my house a lot over the past few years in ways that have put me in a tough spot.

Heck, even reopening the conversation about polyamory. I am patting Past Me on the back for saying, “Let’s start talking about this when we have no chance of either of us going out on a date with someone anytime soon.” Yes, I have a lover-in-waiting but from the very first day there has been the understanding that if it turns out this would be a bad thing for my marriage we won’t do it at all. I’m pretty certain it won’t harm my marriage. What might it turn into?

I think I am going to have an old friend I love very much I see sometimes. It’s difficult trying to figure out what is the best path forward for all concerned. I would respond more to stated wishes of the folks involved if they were more willing to state them. Instead I am just flying blind.

I’m thinking about the series of steps relationships usually have for me: getting past the first date, 3 weeks, 3 months, 6 months, 9 months, and a handful have morphed and changed over much longer periods. In terms of roughly the number of people I have dated: 78% only get one date, 10% made it to 3 weeks, 5% made it to 3 months, 2% made it to 6 months, 2% made it to 9 months, 2-3% make it more than a year. I’m counting the ending point only. I break up with ~95% of the people I date by 6 months. That’s fucking dramatic.

I’m 3.5 months into courting Travel Boyfriend and I’m having a lot of feelings. I wouldn’t say we are dating yet, not really. But we are courting to see if there is the possibility of a relationship there that could be good for both of us. Noah is being patient and understanding and supportive.

Most humans take on jobs, tasks, and relationships without really understanding how hard they will turn out to be in advance. This is the human “normal” as a way to approach the future. If we knew how bad it would be we wouldn’t try. So in a way this hubris is important and great and absolutely necessary for the species. The trouble is, when you sign on for something not knowing how hard it will be you sometimes get yourself into a situation where you can’t finish something and other people suffer. That is part of life. That failure is part of life. I feel like it is the kind of thing where people learn their own limits through trial and error, mostly.

I have failed a lot of times. I am pretty clear about a lot of the scope of my limits.

I am a human with a lot of limits. I have to respect those.

I am very nervous about aspects of this relationship with Travel Boyfriend. The very best role I can play in his life is to push him through fixing the stuff that stands between him and seeming like someone who would be a really great primary partner for anyone. There are specific aspects of his life that make it pretty impossible for him to find what he says he wants to have. Every single one of those things could be changed with conscious effort. If he actually wants what he says he wants. They are things that would be hard to change completely on his own. They are things that are significant enough that it’s hard to get buy in from a stranger that the payoff off for the work will be worth the effort. Every relationship is a crapshoot. Everyone is operating at a deficit these days. Who has the energy to help other people work through their shit?

Amusingly I’m writing this while listening to the song that played in the strip club the first time he ever saw me with my shirt off. I was 18. It was a friend’s birthday. I was pulled up on stage by the dancers. I had awkward tights and shorts on under my skirt so I didn’t try to remove my bottoms. I was fine with the ladies taking my top off.

I have to stop and think about our old Theatre Director. (That’s now his official nickname.) I don’t think I have written about this much over here. After I moved to Scotland Theatre Director ended up back in Texas providing hospice care to his parents. He helped them die. I knew he was a bad alcoholic. Before either of his parents died he and I talked about how he really didn’t know what he was going to do when his folks died. He’d have to leave the house and go somewhere and that was a big question mark. I told him that when he had to leave he could come stay with me for 6 months on a visitor visa.

Eventually he did come after everything finished years later. He stayed in the studio. He had a lot of identity wrapped up in being “that guy”. That guy you know who you can always call because he knows how to fix the problem. Time and grief and trauma and addiction were all weighing very heavily on him. He felt the weight of the failures in his life very keenly. It went about as well as such an experience is going to go.

I worry a lot about people writing checks they can’t cash. I worry about doing it. It’s not that I only worry about people handing them to me. I worry about the balance I get in return for how much effort I am putting out. There’s no fair here. I have already written a lot of big checks. How much do I really have left in my budget? What is realistic?

I am incredibly lucky that Noah has been unemployed right now. I have needed a lot of support and he’s been able to provide it. That means I haven’t asked local people for help. That’s what makes people feel like neighbours. I really can’t. I don’t feel like I’ve done a great job at making friends. People say that I can ask for help. But I can’t. I would much rather wither clean away than ask for help from people who have not demonstrated a desire for my company.

I do asks things of my Bestie in town. She is carrying a very heavy load though and I don’t do a lot to make hers easier. We are doing the best we can through this phase of life together. She is the sister of my heart and I followed her across the sea and I do not regret that. I am lying when I say that I can only depend on the people under this roof. Bestie has been a fair and foul weather friend for 30+ years.

When Theatre Director was here what he really needed me to do was participate in a facade where he “helped” me do projects that I could do on my own. The trouble was, I can’t do those things alone. He wasn’t actually able to help very much. That got me into some bad spots with my body and he expected me to ignore my pain to assuage his ego. That was not a thing I could do. That really hurt emotionally on top of the physical pain. Theatre Director was not able to assess “This project is too physically difficult for us and we should not do it.” When I said that he did not want to believe me.

The kindest thing I can do is try to understand when other people are trying to write checks they can’t cash and give them the pretense of belief. Meanwhile I must mentally put the claim into the “this is a pie crust promise” bucket in my head. I’m not very good at this. I have to consciously fight my inner fury about being clearly lied to.

It is hard that people don’t know they are lying. They mean it when they say it. They don’t know what they are promising and they don’t mean what they actually express most of the time. So much of the casual discourse people have in life is full of casual half-truth promises that have no intention behind them. That’s hard. I got hard dumped as a friend this week. It is stinging a bit. Ah well. Move on.

It is scary trusting someone enough to put time and energy into them. I don’t know how much this is social anxiety rebound from how much social time I had in June, how much is PTSD avoidance after the sexual assault, how much is surgery recovery, how much is (fill in the blank).

I just know that right now I feel absolutely terrified of risk. I have a lot to lose. If I don’t do the next few years right I will regret it forever. When I hit the end of surgery recovery I have to start doing a level of support work my kids aren’t used to. They are choosing tasks that are frankly obscene and in order to make it possible I am going to support them like they took on something that hard.

The thing is, doing it myself is faster and fucking easier and they have learned the skills. They will be able to get their cleaning deposits back someday. It’s time for them to focus away on other skills. I’ve always said this would come.

Hell, if the kids notice that with proper negotiations and exchanges of kinds of work I can be a lot easier to live with maybe they will do their chores more promptly in the future when we renegotiate? It’s a dream.

If I can understand clearly where someone’s limits are then I can understand with compassion where they are making pie crust promises. My life is going to require a lot of that very specific compassion of me over the next couple of years no matter what I do.

So what do I do? I complicate my life extra with something ambiguous and with a high potential to hurt a lot. I am scared this might end up in the loss of a dear old friend because one or the other of us does something unforgivable. It could happen. It wouldn’t be the first time in my life it went either direction.

The most likely outcome is a few fun holidays and then wishing him well on the rest of his life. Sure, it is having a really melodramatic long lead in and everything. I am too old to make rash decisions based on sex. I can’t withstand a lot more casual damage. I need to act like I am fragile. I need a melodramatically long and involved courting process before it is a good idea for me to give someone the opportunity to hurt me. My body is fragile. Someone needs quite an education before touching me is a good idea. There is a lot to communicate if someone is going to have enough information to make safe choices with me.

Over the next few years I think my dating opportunities will be few and far between. I think I will have very little to give and a lot of needs that I will be blatantly ignoring because I don’t have the ability to take the risks required to fill those needs. Making friends requires social rejection. I am bound and determined that I am going to know most folks in town before I ever go out on a date. I don’t want to date strangers ever again. I’ve had some success, but look at those numbers.

That’s a lot of fucking failures.

Are they all failures? Were any of them failures? Or did they just run their course and we moved on? I like to say that the great part of dating a lot of different people is you learn a lot about what kinds of things you can and can’t compromise on and that’s very useful.

Noah and I courted for six months then eloped. We weren’t dating when he showed up out of the blue and asked me to marry him. It’s a longer story but not for now.

How to measure time with someone I have loved for 25 years? TB is a very good friend. It feels more important than ever to make sure I don’t hurt someone negligently by being selfish and short sighted. Trying to figure out what is the most good for the least amount of cost is hard. There are so many variables out of my control.

Maybe I should just thank my lucky stars that TB waited this long to start getting his shit together because I get a chance to have a short term positive relationship that ends when it is a natural time to grow past it. It won’t be a failure. If the point going in is that it is going to end fairly soon then I can grab all the good I can for the amount of cost I can bear. I will have to be realistic to myself about my priorities. I am going to have to be realistic about how much rejection I can handle. I am, predictably, feeling it as a wave of rejection right now.

I have a lot of people counting on me and I can’t let them down. That means I need to limit the things I add to my life that hurt me. That’s complicated.

This will be awkward as a transition

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For a while I am not going to know what to say or how to say it. I’ve been carefully limiting my writing for specific social media audiences over the past few years. Now I’m pretty sure some of my hate followers are getting notifications because they are subscribed to my RSS feed. That’s always fun.

It’s hard to figure out how to talk about all the things I need to talk about. I’ve been avoiding talking about parenting for a long time even though that is still the biggest part of my life. I am not feeling like the best parent lately. I’m not the worst but I don’t look at that bar.

I’ve been blow drying Middle Child’s hair when they shower for a while. It’s been one of the best ways for us to have tactile connection that doesn’t involve me being bossy or a controlling. I’m just taking care of them in a way they like that makes them feel special and pretty. (Their hair really is gorgeous after a blow dry. It gets awkwardly tangled when it air dries.) I haven’t really asked if they want me to, I just show up and take over. Maybe I am being an asshole. It’s the only part of their self care I am still involved in. I actually got them a birthday present that is a hair dryer/curling iron set. They might take it in their room and that’s the end of us sharing this. It’s possible. It isn’t my goal. I like playing with their hair. It reminds me so much of my mother’s hair and this feels like the only piece of that relationship I get to keep.

Youngest Child gets the short end of the stick in an awful lot of ways. I haven’t managed to create the same Wonderland for her and I regularly feel pretty bad about her not having the gaggle of friends we had in California. It’s hard to make friends here. I have had good inroads with a few folks but the majority of people I have met are not keen to see us again. I feel like her being my daughter is the worst thing I’ve done to her. How can I create a community around her when I am the problem?

I have some additional worry right this second because I restarted birth control for the first time in 17 years. Ew. But it’s better than having a baby at 43 or 44. I really don’t have it in me to restart the clock again on parenting. I love my kids but I’m running very low on reserves for being patient and giving and understanding around the clock 24/7. I am worried about the hormonal fluctuations that may come. I am not exactly so stable lately that it will be reasonable to tell what is coming from the meds.

I keep having these things happen that make me feel flattened and worthless and empty and then I need to hurry up and recover because there is work to be done. People need support. People need me to be giving and working and listening and supporting and that’s not a thing I do well when I’m flat and feel empty and worthless.

I worked 29 days in June. I had months of intensive work leading up to that. July was supposed to be a recuperation couple of weeks before surgery and instead I was sexually assaulted. Then I had surgery. Then came dealing with the police. I popped a stitch because my blood pressure was so high during the police interview. They rushed us to the hospital at the end.

I didn’t die. Woo. That’s not unexpected event with this surgery. No biggie. Just keep on moving forward. Sometimes there is a sudden massive bleed that stops after a bit in the first two weeks.

I shouldn’t exercise until October according to my surgeon. I’m going to listen to him. This is hard because exercise is the most healthy form of stress relief I have in life. Everything else is harder on my body. I am feeling fairly overwhelmed with stress right now.

I should be restarting interviews for Vicki’s book and I feel overwhelming panic at the thought. I don’t know how to set myself aside to that degree right now. I feel like pieces of me are leaking out all over the place. I feel utterly uncontained. I feel like I have been trying hard to shove all of myself in a box and I just can’t anymore. The closet has not been working well for me.

I am feeling disconnected, like the pieces of me are stored in different rooms all over a hotel and you have to run up and down the stairs a lot to gain access to the different pieces. It’s exhausting. It feels like integration is just too high of a bar to ask for.

I’m struggling with feeling coherence in my brain. I think coming back to my website will ultimately be good because I will get back to feeling comfortable with a full speed brain dump but I’m not there yet. I’m looking forward to it as a contrast with social media.

I like thinking of my writing as a full on stream of consciousness dump. I embrace the inconsistencies and contradictions as part of sharing thought. Part of what is going on for me right now is I am trying to figure out how “in the closet” I am going to try to be going forward. I’ve been pretty closeted, secretive, and evasive since I moved. I’ve tried hard to keep a lid on my history.

Now the lid is lying on the floor somewhere and ooze is streaming out of that hole.

I’m not going to retell every story, I have an archive for that. Instead how about if I just figure out how to talk about who I am now and why I am doing the things I am doing. It’s all so convoluted and stupid. I feel stupid. I feel like I’ve been in a very stable place and I shouldn’t rock the boat. The thing is, I’ve gotten to the point where loneliness is eating me like a cancer. There is so much that I have been suppressing or hiding or avoiding for years that it is a problem for me to continue doing so. I am hurting myself. I have to put significant effort into growing my community here.

That’s going to be hard due to physical limitations over the next few years. I haven’t talked about it here much (or at all) but I’ve had wicked hemorrhoids over the past few years. The surgeon said he couldn’t understand how I ride a bike like that. I shrugged and said it is my normal. Now that the big grape sized bits are gone I’m left with some much more modest skin flaps. These are going to be removed next May. Each surgery will involve a 10ish week time span afterwards where I cannot exercise at all. I can moderately walk but not too far. (Too far being above ~6 miles in a day.) I did walk more than 10 miles recently. I was flattened for 2 days afterwards and it still kinda hurts extra 5 days later.

I’ve got a lot of rest time ahead of me in the next 12 months. Ugh.

Yes, I want all the hemorrhoids gone because I’m tired of bleeding if I have to use regular toilet paper for a whole day. Also I desperately want anal sex back. It’s just not possible with the damage to my anus as it stands. Having kids is rough thing on a body. EDS means all forms of prolapse are more likely. I am going to try to be assertive about dealing with my prolapse stuff going forward. It’s not cool to have things falling out of my body. It’s sorta weird knowing that I am going to need to push to have anyone care about that.

The leaves are changing colours and falling off the trees. It feels too early. It feels like I have simply missed summer this year.

We have a six week block mapped out with a fairly vigorous schedule ahead of us. I won’t be exercising a ton (I am definitely failing to meet any kind of goal for this year) but I will be keeping the trains going and pushing people through their commitments. The kids are all adding additional classes/activities/tasks in ways that will expand their exposure to people in town. This feels really important. A lot of it has to fall on Noah because I can’t cycle. His legs and ass are looking a lot hotter lately. Let me give myself a little pat on the back for helping to push him in that direction. Oh it’s a joyous sight.

Noah and I have been talking a lot about polyamory. If you don’t know that word, in very short it means having romantic love with more than one partner. When we met we both had other partners. We have opened and closed our marriage a few times for logistical reasons. I refer to our recent, by far longest, span of monogamy as the Choke Chain. It’s capitalised because it’s a formal title for a concept and stage we went through. It was in response to a really bad period where everything around polyamory went shockingly poorly. I’m not rehashing that right now. I don’t have time.

It is hard trying to talk through all of the mistakes we have made and all of the times we have made unkind choices. It feels like a lot of “bringing up old stuff” but it’s important. We are talking about our different sets of reactions and what was spurring us in one direction or another. It allows us to understand more fully why some parts were harder or easier for the other. It gives us a chance to make better decisions going forward. It’s not always as simple as just waving your hands over something and saying “just don’t do that”. Which that? What part? We have been using that to mean having an open marriage but I do not believe that is sustainable.

See, this is where I stop and think “How would I say this to a random stranger in town?”

I believe that human beings are a species with a wide and varied range of sexual appetites. Much like our primate kin we have some who like monogamy and some who like one male and multiple females and some females with a lot of males and some who like to mate through sex with absolutely everyone without regard to sex.

I am no longer physically, emotionally, or mentally suited to having a truly large number of partners at any given time. I just can’t anymore. I don’t think I can continue only having one partner though. I know it is selfish. Literally that’s what makes it such a tremendously good thing. Yes, falling in love with someone who isn’t already part of my family is selfish. It is individuation from the pod. (We refer to ourselves as a whale pod.)

I need more emotional support. Noah is an amazing husband. He gives more support than anyone has the right to expect or demand. People are supposed to have a web of people who support them in ways big and small. I feel ashamed of this, and I shouldn’t, but I do need the emotional intensity in my life of having more than one sexual relationship. Sex does bond people. Well, it can.

This is where it is weird to think about explaining this to a random person in town. Oh golly. Sex creates hormones. It can be done fairly casually to get endorphins and dopamine followed by a high five and a fond farewell. It can also be done to raise oxytocin and fall in love and bond in the way that creates family connections–with or without sharing DNA to create a child.

I am slightly weirded out by the fact that Noah has literally colonised my body and remnants of his DNA and the DNA of our children are now parts of my permanent body. Being a carrying parent is fucking weird. His body wasn’t highjacked. WTF?

I need more intense connection in my life. I need it. I am not managing to create that very well without sex. I am also deeply uninterested in the drama that would come with having sex with someone who lives locally. I just can’t be arsed to care enough about the sex to want to deal with fall out. Nope.

That leaves long distance relationships with people from my past. I have very little interest in being back in the US. That narrows the pool considerably. As it so happens, luck brought someone back into my life. Someone who is quite invested in making sure I maintain my family life.

We are a species that has evolved to handle matters of bonding and creating support networks of very diverse sizes and shapes. Many people are still happy doing pair bonding and having involved grandparents/aunts/uncles/cousins. That is not an option for everyone. It leaves a lot of people out entirely. That’s a complicated situation. I know that in Scotland a lot of the answer is “ask the government for help” but this isn’t that kind of thing. I need community. I need deep emotional connection. I am also a hard nut to crack. For all that I will tell my story to anyone who asks I don’t volunteer it much in person.

I need to be known in an intense and deep way. I don’t trust someone easily. I assume people are not interested in knowing me more deeply because they don’t know what they are signing on for. I always assume that I am going to be too much.

*tap tap tap* Is this thing on?

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Hi there, whoever you are. I haven’t felt ok about writing here for quite some time now. I’ve had a lot of self doubt and anxiety going on. For a little while now I’ve been blogging elsewhere behind a fence but that’s not feeling appropriate anymore. I’ve been trying hard to be in the closet because it felt safer. It no longer feels safe. Now it feels like a risk.

If you are in the closet people can try to use information to threaten you. My best source of safety is having no secrets. It has been my approach for most of my life. Sometimes I am scared for a while and I shut down. When I feel under threat or if something happens, once again I bust wide open.

I can’t get into details but I am dealing with prosecuting a sexual assault. It means that things are going to come out about my life. People will look me up and I have not tried hard to hide my life. I am not enjoying the fact that I get to come out to folks whether I want to or not. Not that being in the closet has been awesome for my mental health. It isn’t.

I’ve been really depressed for a long while. A lot of the time I’ve been in Scotland. A year or so ago I started getting past the post-partum hump and I have had a renewed sex drive. That’s been complicated with the restrictions and limits of my life. Noah has been pretty awesome about trying to ramp back up after years of me not being up for almost anything.

I don’t want to rehash everything I’ve been writing else-net but a lot has been happening. Noah and I are doing a lot of renegotiating our sex/bdsm dynamic. If you happen to be new here, bdsm is an acronym that means bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadism and masochism. Basically it is part of the human norm to like adventure during sex and this is the path that works for us. If it seems crazy, keep in mind that I went through what is essentially sexual torture as a small child. Yes I am weird and I have weird impulses, preferences, and needs around my sex life.

I’m feeling like I am drowning in shame. I am really hard into avoidance. The short version is I’m having a lot of PTSD symptoms. It’s been a minute since I have crashed this hard. I managed to get through the first couple of weeks post-assault just pushing through. In that process I did some good stuff and some stuff I feel really ashamed of and I feel gross and bad and like I deserve every bad thing that could ever happen to me. I feel like my reaction to the assault retroactively means it was fine because I am such a fucked up person.

I feel low key nauseous basically all the time. My stomach is hurting in a way it hasn’t in many many years. I’m having more nightmares. I’m having flashbacks. I feel trapped and helpless and like many many more bad things are coming. I’m sweaty a lot of the time from my level of anxiety. I am deep in hyperarousal. I’m irritable and cranky and I can’t sleep and I’m having memory problems. I am really emotionally struggling because of how bad my memory is right now. I am just not able to access a lot of memories stored in non-traumatised parts of my brain right now. I am deep in always/never and I just can’t access anything else.

I use the term “always/never” to refer to a really extreme version of state dependent memory. When I feel good I cannot remember how bad I feel sometimes. When I feel bad I cannot remember ever having any good feelings of any kind. My brain simply won’t acknowledge that the other side of the fence exists. This is not good.

It’s kind of funny that the standard wisdom for PTSD is that these symptoms appearing in the month after a trauma isn’t the end of the world, for most people this fades. It didn’t really get going for me until more than 4 weeks after this last assault. I was in “make everyone else ok” mode for the first 4 weeks. Then stuff started feeling completely out of my control. Now I’m freaking the fuck out. It’s been 6 weeks and it feels like the last week has been the start of a really shitty slide. I’m worried. I’m not ok. My desire to self harm or suicide is ridiculously high. I’m being careful and I’m not doing anything over the line. I’m careful to limit my drinking. I am no longer able to withstand the physical trauma of most of my long-ago preferred self harms. I can’t do anything that might create marks because that would be a cluster fuck of issues while I’m going through an assault trial.

I feel incredibly helpless and trapped and worthless and like there will never actually be an end to me being raped. I’m really fucking angry that I now have over 40 years of rape experience. I was really happy about only having 23 years of rape experience. Those 17 years where I didn’t get raped where pretty dang cool. I almost got to have a whole normal childhood span of time free of rape. It makes me feel really sick.

I had a hemorrhoidectomy and the recovery sucks. With all my health complications I’m supposed to not exercise for 8-10 weeks. Part of the reason I need to move back to blogging instead of using the other social media sites is that posting about my frustration about not being able to exercise leads to people pushing me to exercise. Yeah. That’s not ok.

The big change that is a greater deal of positive mixed in with the negative is Noah and I have restarted discussions oriented around polyamory. I have a boyfriend (whom I’ve never had sex with) and Noah is waiting a while because we have a lot to process. He will date. Hell, what I’m doing barely counts as dating. I’ll have sex with someone outside the marriage 8 months after we started negotiating. We are not rushing by any measure. The person I’m talking to is one of my oldest friends. We worked in theatre together right out of high school. We had a lot of interest in one another way back when and no skills for being able to have a relationship together. I still don’t know what’s going to happen or how this will all go but it is mostly a better experience than everything else this year so it’s the upside I get to have. I’m referring to him as my Travel Boyfriend.

I feel numb and empty. I feel like the only way for me to stop being in pain is to die. I mean, it’s true with my physical conditions. That doesn’t mean I get to die anytime soon. It just means I get to endure an unlimited and endless amount of pain for the rest of my life.

Today that is feeling very hard.

Hm. Hm.

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I spent yesterday crying. I was worried that I slandered someone and mischaracterized an exchange and was painting someone in an unfair light. I woke up tired of crying so I went back through and read the stuff from 10 years ago.

I didn’t write an unfair characterization. This is why I stopped writing.

Hurry up and don’t start

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I woke up to an alarm this morning. It’s not as traumatizing as it sounds because my alarm plays Juice by Lizzo so it’s a fairly fun way to wake up. I was trying to get ready for Gaelic group but the youngest child decided she was going to pitch a massive fit and refuse to eat because breakfast includes some vegetables. So we didn’t make it out the door in time.

Of course then I find out the group isn’t happening today anyway because it is a bank holiday for Easter Monday. Well then.

Noah’s alarm went off far earlier than mine did today because he had a flight to catch back to London. This time he is going no further so it isn’t as stressful as the previous trip. His work team has flown in from many countries so they can all meet in person for the first time. I hope he manages to have some fun in the process. We are going to have a festive week without him. (Sarcasm intended.)

I really like me

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I feel like the resumption of cannabis has had the primary overarcing effect of causing me to really like myself again. The other meds do not grant me this grace whatsoever. I see my foibles–it’s not like I land in a narcissistic high of thinking I am perfect by any stretch. It’s more that I love myself like I love my kids; erring is human and I love humans so I love you with all your fuck ups.

But I do really cool shit. I’m proud of me. I’m proud of my relationships with people. I’m proud of the things I build with my hands. One thing that starting over in a new house and a new community has given me is increased competence that indeed I am the reason that so many things in my life are so rad. I build them. I am the common denominator.

I’m dying

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I’m sorry, I know that’s a dramatic beginning. I don’t mean all of me. Part of me is dying. The part of me that has the ability to create a new life is dying. I’ve heard that right before ending fertility entirely there is a span of time when many women have a sudden new unplanned for child. I feel like my body is definitely interested in trying that. My interest in sex is through the roof. At least some of the time.

Then there are the more frequent, more painful periods. Yeah. I’m not interested that week.

I am really struggling with how much my hormone cycle is really extreme right now.

Why does it have to be a marathon?

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I need to talk to myself about this. I am the last therapist I get to have. It’s time to think about some of these priorities. I have a whole lot of stuff I want to do in this life. I’m looking at my list of projects coming up and I feel overwhelmed and terrified about how I am going to get it done.

Through a fucking super human level of focus and scheduling. I have a variety of projects that I choose to have in my life. They are all important to me. Things like home educating my kids, growing a food forest, being part of the cycling community, helping people have access to green spaces in the city as developments are built, helping Highland Pride have a space for people who get very overwhelmed in loud and crowded spaces, helping my friend set up a teaching tour, spending time with friends who are coming to see me from very far away, finding ways to strengthen ties with people I won’t see soon but I will see someday, and cycling as far away from my house as I can as often as I can.

Yo, I gotta be fit for all that shit. You can’t make a rusted out jalopy race. You have to take care of every part of the engine from all the individual bolts to the brackets to the really important technical parts I can’t think of right now. Just stay with me here.

Drifting

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I can’t tell how much this malaise is hormonal, other physical stuff, or emotional stuff but I’d like to climb in bed for a few weeks and not come out. I have a lot of demands right now and all of them feel draining and exhausting rather than restorative. Even the stuff I am doing because it is supposedly restorative.

I feel sad, ineffective, helpless, and unworthy. I am tired of feeling taken for granted and used. I have nothing to give and that means I should not be around people at all because I need support and I don’t deserve support. I think I could curl up in a ball on the floor of my bedroom today and not move until I have to use the toilet again.

It’s the kind of day where “I can feel the clot coming” so the toilet is a very necessary part of the day.

I feel empty. I feel like I can’t do anything right so why bother trying. I feel like I just want to hide. I feel like I would like to die because that is the only way out of this avalanche of feeling shitty. I hate fucking everyone. I feel angry and overwhelmed with rage and contempt.

I don’t want to kill myself. But I’m not sure I would move out of the way of an oncoming train. I haven’t felt this low in a while. It’s a bunch of stupid things.

Facing consequences

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I will never make everyone happy and the harder I try the greater the likelihood that I will harm myself. I don’t go looking for enemies but people really dislike it when you say things they want you to shut up about. People really hate it when you describe the crappy things they do.

I am scared. I have to go

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I am feeling really low on hope. It is hard to believe that the efforts I’m putting out are going to lead to meaningful relationships in the long run. I am braced for rejection every time I go anywhere. I expect it long before it happens and the more time I spend around people the higher the chances are that it will come from someone I’ve put a noticeable amount of effort into getting to know. I’m scared.

Vulnerability

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It is an unavoidable fact of dealing with me that the more off-kilter, the more threatened, the less secure I feel the less able I am to be demanding. I think it is part of the reason that I end up with friends who are so intensely, demonstrably loyal. Anything short of that and I just walk away.

I feel shitty about the degree of mind reading I need from people. “I am fine” is the first sign that I am not ok. If I am having a medium-challenging time I will say “Oh man. I have so many good and bad feelings.” If I am actually having a good time it will be “This is awesome!” “Fine” means I am doing very very very poorly. If you don’t know that, well, it means that people feel surprised when they find out how badly I am doing.

I am fine right now. With all that entails.

There are times when my choke chain is the thing that makes me very secure. I know I am shiny enough for Noah. So shiny he doesn’t even want me to sparkle at anyone else and he doesn’t want to sparkle at someone else. I am enough.

It is very easy for me to feel slighted, disrespected, and unwanted. I don’t like that about myself. Most of the time I don’t take it very personally or act like it is an affront–it isn’t. Mostly I am fine with the fact that I’m not much of a “real person” in other people’s minds. I keep people out at arm’s length because I need it to be ok that they are slighting me and disrespecting me. I can tell myself that they don’t want me because they don’t particularly know me and I am not going to let them get to know me so it’s fine that it’s out at a distance.

Trusting people takes a lot. Believing that people value me is very hard. Mostly I assume that other people can’t value me more than I value myself and it’s all my own fault I am not loved more.

Not being shiny is so deeply tied to shit with my mother. I wish that I didn’t interpret the slightest whiff of “not that special” as I should disappear and leave. I wish that my brain didn’t fill in that beginning with, “You were born unwanted and unloved and you will die unwanted and unloved.” It is so hard to believe that anyone loves me. Less hard with Noah than with other people. But if his level of devotion is the bar then no, I won’t ever believe that someone else loves me.

Sometimes I wish that I hadn’t decided to have kids. I would be done by now. I wouldn’t have to keep hurting this way. I wouldn’t still feel in the pit of my stomach that of course I am not esteemed or valued–I am a worthless whore.

Establishing yourself in a new place means accepting rejection after rejection after rejection after rejection and I must keep a smile on my face. I must say that I am fine.

Is it a broken coping mechanism or an adaptive, necessary one?

I don’t know. But it is such a basic part of dealing with me that I am pretty stunned when people don’t understand it after a long time of knowing me. I feel like I write about this specific type of deceptiveness a great deal. If someone is close enough to care what I write about (the horrid slog that it often turns into) then how can they say that they had no idea that I would say that I am fine when I’m not fine? It’s a mystery.

It is also the reason I’ve been crying. I don’t feel seen. I don’t feel valued. I feel like discarded trash. I feel like there is no point in sharing vulnerability slowly, gently over a long time because when the rubber hits the road I am going to be roadkill. Because I am not willing to slap an intimate person hard when they are crossing a boundary. I do that with people who don’t matter.

Instead I will say I am fine. I will go to my room and I will cry as quietly as I am able. Eventually I will come out when the fact that I am being a lazy, worthless, broken tool and I am not doing enough labour to justify anyone continuing to have me in their lives overwhelms me.

In my brain the deal is: work or die. No one has any interest in maintaining a worthless bitch.

Another Day In I Am Too Tired For This Shit

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My bed is 7’x7′. How in the hell does a child turn sideways then fall off the bottom?

Yesterday MC had their first visit for assessment to see what sort of neurological testing will help find the correct diagnostic labels so that I can narrow down my research on how to support them better.

It was a good visit but, I think, not what the lady had planned. She had a sheet of questions to ask. Instead of going through those questions MC went through a prepared list of the things they have a hard time with. She flipped her paper over and scribbled like her life depended on it. She scheduled an appointment for me to come back alone and fill out those questions about developmental history. 😂

I had talked MC through how I handle appointments as an adult who does not have anyone to report on childhood milestones/attainment. I forgot that MC is not having my life. Whoops. It’ll be fine.

MC is automatically getting 3 separate assessments based on clinical presentation in this appointment and the intake lady hinted about others that might be relevant after we can actually go through developmental history with a fine toothed comb.

This is how seriously Stanford took EC. I was deeply worried I would not find a way to access similar granularity of help for MC/YC. Stanford did *not* take MC seriously. Stanford asked MC 20 yes/no questions and told me I had a perfect little boy I didn’t need to fix. That was really frustrating. This time the lady watched MC almost vibrate off the chair and noticed “Do you find that you are ever able to sit still?” Only if the kid is in a severe dissociated state because they are imploding under the weight of their own anxiety and it is combined with mutism. No. They can’t just hold their body still like a “normal person”. It is not possible for them.

I am feeling a lot less nervous about this process now. The lady also took it very seriously when I said I have two other children who are also clearly neurodivergent. I don’t know what will come of her making notes about my other kids as well. YC isn’t even on a waiting list at this point.

YC’s flavour of neurodiversity is pretty easy to accommodate within our already heavily modified for neurodiversity lifestyle. EC is doing really well with the structure we maintain. MC needs… something I’m not doing and I don’t know what. I am grateful that the NHS is trying so hard to help me figure out what I should do.

The lady looked really pained when I talked about my own history of being beaten up in school after school and how I was not even a tiny bit surprised when people beat up my children in school. Autistic people are magnets for bullying behaviour.

Human beings often want to hurt people who are different. It’s a thing. A really sucky and terrible thing. I was glad that she showed absolutely no sign of believing that it would be best for my children to be in school. *phew*

Stanford Child and Adolescent Development was quite adamant that there is not a better learning environment for EC than what I provide. They had tiny tweaks to suggest, but nothing major. I hope that the NHS can help me find the tweaks that will give MC also the best learning environment for them. Right now there are a couple of areas that concern me and I don’t know how to fix them. I do need outside guidance.

It’s kind of funny that EC doesn’t mostly overlap with my learning difficulties. His troubles are out in front of me and I can study them without feeling emotionally connected. I just need to support. MC and I share some of the same struggles. The ways in which I have never managed to overcome some of my own challenges inhibit my ability to figure out how to help them make progress. I need a more objective view.

But first I need to go run 4 miles. I’d rather eat glue.

I hit the wall this week. I think I was lowkey sick over the weekend when the kids were all very sick. I kept exercising and working the whole time. I don’t feel like I’m still dealing with a fever but my body wants to tell me to go take a long walk off a short pier. I can’t even tell how much this overreach is about physical load and how much is emotional load.

I feel like my soul is hurting. I miss the physicality of all of my California friendships.

It is already getting much colder and I am not feeling great about the change. My body is hurting a lot. I felt like the tiny increase of warmth of spring was a huge massive welcome change and I was going around outside in skimpy clothing because I was overheating. Now the same temperature range is making my bones ache.

I am not sleeping enough. I am rarely laughing and that can’t be good for me. I feel somber and like I have a flat affect. I feel numb. How can you feel numb and pain at the same time?

I really need to go run. I feel like that is an absolutely outrageous ask just now. Oh well. What I want is not important. What matters is what I do.