Tag Archives: autism

The roller coaster of emotions continues

One of the most intense parts of my marriage was the way that Noah made space for me to have every feeling. I didn’t have to only have the ones he wanted. He didn’t like it when I was in a bad mood. He didn’t like it when I fell in love with people. He didn’t want me to feel sadistic. He did try to control me such that I only had the feelings he wanted, but when I went off the rails he would build a protected site around the crash zone like he was defending evidence. He didn’t have to like everything I felt. He had to protect the space for it to exist.

I looked at one of my tracking things. Ah. This is going to be an exceptionally vicious PMDD cycle. It’s kind of a terrible thing the way bodies change each other. I’ve been talking to my children about our cycles. I’m real worried one of them has endometriosis. Their aunt recently had a hysterectomy and is having to go back in for a second surgery because they couldn’t get all the endometrial cells in one go. She’s in her 20’s. It is fascinating watching how people use my DNA and Noah’s to have experiences that are hauntingly similar to me and yet dramatically different as well.

Before I had kids I usually had my period 9-10 times in a year. That’s not awesome. Folks who are inflicted with a uterus are “supposed” to have more like 12-13 in a year. I had never had sufficiently good nutrition to bleed as often as I was supposed to. In a way this was protective because the depths of my suicidality were hard to bear 10 times in a year. I’m grateful there weren’t an extra 3 cycles.

My children bleed 12-13 times a year. It’s fucking wild. I now bleed 12-13 times a year. What the absolute fuck. Most of the time it’s moderately inconvenient but my PMDD cycles have improved dramatically over the years. At this point I have a really extreme PMDD cycle 2-4 times in a year. It has gotten lighter and lighter with the birth control I’ve been on since Noah died. I no longer hemorrhage every month! It feels super good for me.

When I am this kind of depressed and low and sad and self hating Noah would take the opportunity to poke me really hard. In this state, when I’m tetchy and crotchety and oversensitive like fuck, he could get me to say true things that I won’t say the rest of the time because I’m too inhibited. I would complain about things that I usually suck up. He savored having access to my brain in this weakened state. I couldn’t defend myself by hiding all the things that bother me. They come tumbling out like a waterfall.

I barely snapped at Gentleman on Sunday. I was a hair bitchy. I immediately walked away to calm down and I came back and apologised. He let it go. There was no drama.

I have barely spoken to him since. This is not a space I can inhabit with people anymore. When I feel like this I need to avoid people.

I am always the third to bleed. There’s an order with the kids. The severity of the first person often indicates how the wind is blowing. All of us are having an extremely low month. Not one person in my house has hope in their heart right now. Instead what we have is the ability to sit together and commiserate about how awful it is to have your brain do this. We bitch loudly about how much our bodily functions are ridiculous and impossible and stupid and mean.

We talk about a lot of what is making us sad. I am leaving big pieces of my sad out. I share the things that feel appropriate. I am careful. I am moderate. I think about their needs before I speak my troubles.

I miss Noah. I miss being married to a tremendous asshole who gave me permission to be an asshole because we matched. I could say any rude thing to him and I didn’t have to apologise.

I will certainly never feel ok being a raging asshole at my carefully polite English boyfriend.

It’s definitely a day to hide and scream all the things I will never feel ok speaking to another human being again.

Enh, except for all the hours I have to do my day job. And I’m meeting friends. Parts of the schedule have to go on even if I feel like shit. It doesn’t matter how I feel; it matters what I do. I need to see friends and not be an asshole. There is no space for me to be an asshole anywhere in my life. I don’t think I will ever deliberately bring an asshole into my life again. At this point I don’t have the time and space to smash the rough edges off before bringing them around my kids. I had years to work on Noah. He was allowed to be an asshole the way I was allowed to be an asshole: in a room alone together. Not at our kids. Not at our friends. Not at people we loved. Not at coworkers.

If people in public react to me being visibly distressed I can say “I miss Noah/my husband” and they will nod and stop asking me questions and that’s neatly handled. I don’t have to tell a very big piece of the truth. I am not allowed to word vomit my pain on anyone outside of my house. That’s private. It’s not a secret (obviously) but it’s the kind of thing people don’t want to see in public. There are rules to the social contract. The rules here are far more strict than where I am from. Publicly weeping and sobbing is not acceptable. Get your shit together.

I am definitely definitely definitely not allowed to say mean but very true things.

The only person who ever wanted that from me is gone.

It is a relief that what I am left with is people who weep with me and say things like, “I’m very glad that even on my worst days I am incapable of believing ‘no one likes me’ because I have you.” There is so much I have done wrong in this life, and so many people I have hurt with mean but true things. I feel the weight of it all the time. I am so conscious of how I have failed people. I have not failed these three people. I’m doing really well.

We live in each other’s pockets in a way that is far outside the norm for most humans. When Noah was here it was so intense. Since he died the older kids have started leaving the nest more as they gain adulthood. Pretty much the main time I am not in a room with my baby is when I am smoking pot. When I get access to pills I will have an unholy number of hours a day with her. Frankly, she needs them. She needs to be around other humans and she needs a lot of assistance interacting with the world.

I knew I would have high needs children when I was 17 based on my lived experiences. I wanted to have them and meet their fucking needs so I could find out what people like that were like.

My children tell me regularly that they appreciate all that I have done for them. Well, they don’t tell me that at all until they are about 15. At 15 they start having gratitude. It’s been terrific to experience. I thought it would take till their late 20’s if we ever got to this point at all. They know that I have pretty much given up having independence for this indenture. I have given it my whole fucking soul and almost all of my time for 18 years with another 9 years 5 months and 17 days to go on my term of indenture. I am a walking, talking, world interpreting edutainment experience. I am a fucking 3 ring circus. I help my autistic weirdos understand the gulf between their life and what everyone else is experiencing.

It is hard as my kids develop their own alphabet soup collection. We walk into assessments prepared with our fucking data. We talk about all the things we do actively on a daily/weekly/monthly basis to manage our complications and symptoms. I have to admit it is tremendously fucking awesome that in every case the specialists have said, “You are already doing everything we try desperately to get people to do. You are the embodiment of best practices.” I like validation as much as the next insecure nitwit.

I am struggling with the ways my internalised ableism rubs up against the reality I live with. I want us to make tremendous ambitious plans. I have always made ambitious plans. It’s different now that Noah isn’t here to catch me when I crash and burn. When I got home from the road trip in 2015 I was in so much pain that I had lost most of my peripheral vision. I didn’t move for about a month. I let him do everything for the kids and the house and unpacking from the trip. I was completely numb from pain. I shut down entirely. I pushed way past where I should have stopped because I couldn’t let myself fail.

Do you know how cool it is that my kids make prudent choices when facing risk? They understand the difference between pushing through something being hard and doing something stupid. I think back to the choices I made at their age and I marvel. These people are going to do fine in life. They are bold and they do cool stuff. They also make conscious space in their life for the need to collapse. They create room where it’s not failure, it is accepting that they can’t do something on a given day. They can get back to stuff later. They don’t feel the same drive I feel to push through no matter how much damage they are inflicting on themselves. They talk about the recovery costs and why something isn’t worth it. They actually believe the shit I say. I’m over here saying it hoping that someday I will believe it. They have arrived. It’s wild.

Living with them is really cool. It scares me though. I don’t like receiving help from them when I’m the one doing the worst. They are kinda insistent. We are so alike. We do a lot of staying out of each other’s personal business on stuff. Privacy is a very big deal in our house. Rooms are not to be entered without permission. I don’t like going through people’s stuff. It makes me feel like shit. I do it as little as I can. My plan here is to earn a relationship with my adult children. I have to respect them as autonomous humas to get that. I have to start early and practice what I preach the whole damn way through. It’s not easy. I have as big of an ego as anyone else. There are times I want to shine/shape them around making me look good. I breathe deeply and let it go. I need to look good or not based on whether I am acting right. Not whether I can make someone else act right. Which is complicated. I don’t believe I should control how my children dress/wear their hair/enjoy appropriate media. (Of fucking course I keep the inappropriate media away from them. My kids are sheltered little bastards. They will give you long lectures on the harms of watching pornography before you have your own sex life.)

I am feeling tremendously insecure. I never feel like I have done enough. I haven’t gone far enough to push my kids into learning/proving they know/earning some award. It’s an awkward thing to carry. I offer my children the chance to opt in to proving what they know in ways that will be more seen to the outside world. They shrug and move on with doing things how they like to do it. I have to cross my fingers and pray. At some point they will want to earn more money than I want to pay them. They will figure it out. I have faith.

It is a fascinating thing having almost all of my attention turn to Shortie. I’ve not had this one on one experience with a learning child before. My older kids are just over two years apart. They have been a pair for a long time, even though they were always learning at different levels. They had to share activities and time. My youngest has been baggage for most of her life as she was dragged to their stuff. Now my days are focused around her in a really dramatic way. This is the amount of time/attention my oldest is grateful he never experienced. He is quite certain that he is glad he is not an only child because I would have crushed him under the weight of being my sole project child. He is probably right. Shortie won’t be crushed because I am a lot more burned out than I used to be. I don’t have as much force to give. I am tired down to the marrow of my bones. I am with her. I answer questions and interact with her a lot of the time. I am also lying still while reading a book a lot of the time.

I am being very careful not to become my mother. A lot of what I struggle to forgive my mother for revolves around the ways her extreme neglect allowed me to experience really vile things. I was lonely and isolated and she had no way to try to ameliorate that. She didn’t have any money and she didn’t know how to do it while we were shifted from room to room in city after city. I have spent my entire parenting life afraid of the knock on the door from CPS/social workers checking up on the welfare of my family. It’s kinda funny. I’m really racking up points on that front. I’ve been reported in two countries. In both cases the social worker ended telling me that they have great confidence I am doing all that can be done in a difficult circumstance and they wish me the best. Authority tends to approve of me when it shows up to spot check my work.

People who don’t like me and who judge me stay trying the system though. They are certain that their dislike of my methods is proof that I am doing awful things. The first time the bad thing was entirely outside my control and I was managing it as well as a thing can be managed. The second time it was for absolutely fictitious and malicious bullshit. Something that was demonstrably untrue as soon as you walk into the house.

There are a lot of ways that I am a failure as a human being. I have never tried to deny that. I am a really good mother. I am an excellent teacher. I am as much of a saint in the patience department as Noah ever was and maybe even more. I am masterful at coregulating people who are distressed. For these three humans I am a gifted interpreter for the world. I can see the gaps in the schema they have experienced and the schemas of the people around them. I can talk about cultural/social differences and why other people are going to start every conversation with a completely different point of view. I talk very concretely about the water we swim in with our little pod. I talk about the rules and the structures that have shaped it. I talk about how their father and I came to the set of agreements we did about how to live in our little glass bowl together.

As young adults they tell me how grateful they are that they have completely missed that most of the world is obsessed with dieting. I fucking love that my child can boldly assert in their medical appointments which symptoms started long before they were obese and adult sized; they happened when they were a skinny little fuck of a young kid. The obesity came afterwards and was caused by the symptoms. When we talk about how active we are despite our demonstrative disabilities doctors express great surprise and delight. They wish they could get other patients to do even a small fraction of all the adapting we have done.

My kids have come with me on my journey towards taking care of my body. They watched the elimination diets and nutrition work. They understand why I exercise like it is a job. We are all as active as we can be and that means sometimes we drop out of everything for six or more weeks because we are simply unwell. Sometimes it is six months. Acceptance of this variability is embedded in the walls of our family home like a placenta embeds itself in the uterus. We carry this shell that permits us to be weak and not well without being impacted by the larger world. We have our own experience of being alive. It feels intensely privileged. I also know that I was sick like this when I was poor as fuck. It’s not always been like it is now. I have not always been safe. I have always been sick.

If I had a full diagnosis list before I had children, would I have had children? I don’t know. I know that two of my children are on a path to try to have their uteruses removed ASAP. They have no interest in 40-50 years of this. They watch what my body goes through and they don’t want it. They are each having their own painful and terrible journeys that are complicated for a lot of reasons.

I’ve been chewed out for using the language “inflicted with a uterus” because it sounded “derogatory to cis women”. Obviously I took that on and complied instantly, no? Obviously the feelings of cis women on the internet need to drive my language evolution. I should definitely not direct my language at the nonbinary person and the man who both happen to be inflicted with a uterus who are under my care. I should not care about their feelings at all. I should not at all casually refer to the fact that having this organ is fucking brutal when it doesn’t function easily and well. Some cis women have dandy experiences with their uteri and that’s not my damn problem.

We are humans having a collectively miserable experience with this organ that was inflicted upon us by fate. We didn’t choose it. There is camaraderie at many levels that are good for my soul. It’s also awkward sometimes complicated that I will probably have different conversations with my daughter. I don’t push her towards being cis anymore than I pushed her siblings towards being trans. I ask my children to confirm their identities and pronouns with me on a semi-regular basis. I want to respect status updates and I know that sometimes telling me is a little hard for a lot of complicated reasons outside of my control.

It’s kinda annoying that I am a fucking saint when it comes to accepting their various difficulties and they still sometimes go through paroxysms of terror that if they tell me a thing about them that I will suddenly reject them. It stays not happening. They have to have their feelings anyway. It’s kinda nice that the older they get the faster it is ok to slap a quick “Feelings are not facts” in their direction so they can mostly snap out of it. It’s really neat to have such a relationship with people who have been trained all their lives how to have feelings but not be controlled by them. They have all their damn feelings. They know how to walk out of rooms before the meltdown starts. They know what kinds of questions to ask to get the exact information they need. They understand themselves and how they fit into the world.

Yeah. There’s a lot of shit I have been repeating on loop in my head for days. True things. Mean things. I am not saying any of them. I’m not writing them down either. Instead I am letting myself be aware of how lucky I am that my baseline is hiding at home with these people. These people who understand that when they ask me who I am meeting and I say “I think you would be happier not knowing” they need to nod and change the subject. I offer information freely on demand. If they actually want to know something I will tell them even though sometimes knowing things can be a burden. I will tell the age appropriate version of that story.

There’s a lot I suck at. There’s a lot of areas of life where I feel like a giant failure. I will be grateful every day of my life that I got to make a family with Noah. I like our children very much. It is an honour to serve them. It is the blessing of my life that I get to raise people of my blood the way I see fit. I couldn’t make “perfect” children by the measures that other people use. My children will not validate me by graduating from top schools. They will have eclectic lives shaped by the disabilities they inherited. There was no way for them to avoid some of the poor hands they have received in this game of poker. The deck was stacked against them. It would have been awesome if Noah and I had understood our genetics better before we had kids. Instead we looked at each other and said you are shiny I wonder what the babies you make will be like? They are fucking rad and I love them so much and I am so proud.

Tomorrow my kid turns 16. One more official milestone without Noah. It is now hard that their birthday triggers the quick two week period with our wedding anniversary and my birthday. I think this is going to be a brutal run this year. It should be our 20th anniversary. We weren’t sure what we were going to do for it, yet. He was going to tattoo me for our 30th anniversary. It felt like a safe time to go so far.

I have a hard time every year with this span of time. Noah was not good at big days. It was a thing we agreed to mostly not have because he was excellent for 358 days per year. I couldn’t hold those particular failures against him. I used to go off and spend my birthday alone because I didn’t want to have to take care of anyone on that day. I also needed to move through the world in a set and a setting where of course no one said happy birthday. It’s a complicated thing.

Now I can’t go. I will go again someday. Not the now. I’m taking all of my time off from the kids to go have sex. I don’t have a very deep well to draw from in terms of child care for Shortie on a longer scale. Overnights are not small asks. It’s not worth it to me to be alone on my birthday this year. Also, my kids will be very nice to me. They will treat me how I treat them on their birthdays. They know no other way. They are excited that I won’t be gone. They haven’t spent that many of my birthdays with me because most of the ones they did involved me crying and I don’t like doing that to people. I don’t want to cry at them on my birthday. I have not had good birthdays, by and large. It is sad thinking that my birthdays are likely to improve with Noah gone. He really sucked at big days. No one else can deliver his intensity 358 days a year. They can manifest a handful of big days. It is weird sitting in my belly with how little that feels like it matters.

I would rather have shitty birthdays with Noah that great birthdays without him. What a terrible bind I have created. It doesn’t matter what I would prefer. I will get what I get. I don’t think they will all be great. I think I am going to spend my birthdays crying in my room now. I don’t think it is better.

My son writes fiction stories about people who endure terrible trauma and how they cope afterwards. People ask him if he has had a deeply traumatic life on a regular basis. He says that he didn’t have much of any significant trauma in his life, obviously now except his father dying suddenly. He says that he grew up with people who had were highly traumatised and he translates what he has seen to new characters. It’s a little creepy at times. He is writing translations of me and Noah. I can see it in the layers of complexity he puts into different perspectives. It’s never a blatant thing but if you understand the pattern you can see it super clearly. He’s a really good writer. I think he is going to be a much better writer than I am in the long run. That’s nice.

Even when I want to feel like there is no hope and everything is dreadful and I will never be fully accepted again I have to go have breakfast with these three people every day. It’s a fairly absurd claim. We are a massive mutual admiration society. We all have our areas to shine and we hand the spotlight around as much as possible. We are a fully fleshed out comedic/dramatic ensemble cast. It is fun to live with these people. No, we will never be a reality show. Ew.

We accept each other. We also understand that boundaries are great and everyone should be private about the things that family members would be happier not knowing about each other. We’ve been specific about what sorts of things go on that list. It’s not an ambiguous set up. When they were way the fuck too young to actually have such a thought about a given person we talked about how we can let them have personal space for privacy once they are adults who date. It is baked into the assumption of our household that someday most of the adult members of the house will probably have sex. Here’s how to do it politely.

It’s time to stop typing before I get more explicit on that topic because now it’s not my business to share more about that. I can face the day now. I can go do the thing that is my big success in life. I can kiss people awake and say I am so glad to see them again. They will believe me because I will mean it with my entire soul.

Yes, I do have their consent to talk about the stuff I do talk about. We have talked about the lines on a number of occasions and we will do so again. I don’t own their stories.

Tactical errors, failures, and belonging

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The younger kids and I tried to finish The Great Glen Way over the weekend. We are not managing. Both my feet and Shortie’s feet were A) not properly conditioned for this much exercise and B) improperly shod in shoes that did little to hold out the wet. We could not finish walking 29 miles in wet socks. So we bugged out and came home again. This is the end of the world but we had to cancel hotel reservations at the last second and I’m out a few hundred pounds. I feel upset about wasting the money. (It won’t cause a hardship but I will have less to spend on fun for the rest of the year.) I feel upset about not properly training. (I have been so tired I couldn’t demand that everyone prep with me.) I feel upset that when I asked for help from a pal the response was, “I knew this would happen.” I feel like I am going to spend the rest of my life failing at everything I try.

The upside was that the kids and I had a lot of fun together. We bond really well when we are being active outside. That’s really lovely. I appreciate how much MC still likes hanging out with me. They are going through a lot lately. They are nearly 16 and they are hurting pretty badly about the fact that they have not managed to make any close friends while living here. There was a boy they chased hard for a few years but eventually his complete lack of reciprocation was a turn off. They need friends and no one in this town seems to have any interest in spending time with them one on one. I can understand why that is making them feel so depressed and desolate. The other day we were talking about their despair and I said I hoped they know that I always love and want them. They gave me a long, level stare. “Mom, I know you want me and you love me. I also inherited my dad’s overwhelming anxiety that no one can really accept me and there is the rest of the whole damn world that is treating me like shit. It’s hard.” They have so much wisdom. It broke my heart. I have tried really hard to make up for the rest of the world but they are right–I can’t. I am just their mom. That’s all I have to offer. I can’t also be their peer. I’ve been super good about making that clear all their life.

Shortie and I need proper waterproof shoes and then we need to break them in and then we need to try again. One of these days we will do the whole trail again in one go. We can train and get to that point. I’m not sure which year it’ll happen in, but it will be great when it happens. In the meantime both kids are excited about the possibility of going camping with Gentleman and doing day hikes to build towards that. They like his company.

I think it was a bit of a tactical error moving to an island where the national pastime is taking the piss. Gentleman doesn’t mean to hurt my feelings. Logically I can tell that he is being playful in his way. The trouble is, I’m still me. I have always been painfully earnest and credulous and gullible. It’s connected in big ways to moving so much as a kid. I went from one school and culture and home life to another and people would be sarcastic about me not already getting how things are as if their way of being is the singular experience people have. It took a lot of testing and experts to convince me that I was smart at all. Eventually I developed a strained rigid kind of self esteem around my intelligence but mostly I feel stupid a lot. I miss details. I fail to finish things. I misunderstand how much preparation is necessary for things. I believe people when they say things to me and when it turns out they were “playing” I feel like a stupid piece of shit again.

I came home yesterday feeling really on the edge of losing it because I failed. It was hard that my ride said plainly that my failure was expected. That cut to the heart for me.

This is when I miss Noah super hard. Even when my failures were kind of predictable he was always surprised. He thought I was overwhelmingly competent. He didn’t tease me because he didn’t want to make me feel stupid. He wanted me to feel smart. He believed I was one of the smartest people he ever met and he wanted to keep me on a high pedestal, he never wanted to knock me down pegs. He was so careful not to be sarcastic with me unless he used a silly ostentatious voice. As a family we have developed specific verbal habits around only using sarcasm in an over the top distinguishable voice. We have an environment in our house where intensely literal autistics are set up for success when it comes to understanding verbal playfulness. My children chorus delightedly “That’s your sarcastic voice!” There is no ambiguity between our normal speech and our sarcastic speech. We might as well be turning on a bright blinking neon light every time.

I like my boyfriend. I’m not trying to be nasty about him at all. He has a super intense and dark deadpan sarcasm as his natural approach to surviving a life that hasn’t been full of fun and ease. Even when he’s being cheerful and upbeat there’s still a lot of sarcasm and insincere statements. I am struggling with it a lot in general. Yesterday I lost it and ugly cried for a really long time. I had invited him over hoping to get a bit high and a little tipsy and then have fun exploratory sex to distract me from feeling like a failure. Then he came over and made a series of small, individually insignificant sarcastic statements. By like the 5th one I was done.

Reader, no fun sex happened. I couldn’t even cuddle he spent the night in my bed. I was pulled into myself hard. I feel bad for it. I wasn’t doing it to punish him. I can’t reach out when I feel like this. I feel stupid. I feel worthless. I feel unworthy of kindness or understanding. I feel alienated from connection. I feel othered and unwanted. In local parlance I feel like a daftie. I want to stare at the floor and not engage in conversation because I’m going to be too stupid to follow it anyway. I definitely don’t want to increase my offer of vulnerability. I feel kicked in a way that I want to curl around myself and protect my sensitive bits. I feel like I am never going to have a relationship where someone thinks I’m smart again.

It was a big part of my relationship with Noah that a lot of the permission he gave me to have control and be an authority was based on my supposed towering intellect and ability to know the right things.

Now I feel like a fucking moron who can’t get anything right. I keep running into all the ways that Noah smoothed out the edges of my diagnosed disabilities and made me superhuman.

I know that Gentleman had no intention to make me feel bad. I am sorry that I am reacting like this. It doesn’t seem fair to him to have to deal with my over the top hours of sobbing over stupid small sarcastic statements. He wasn’t trying to be mean. I’m ridiculous. And also I’m up to maybe hour three of crying in the last 13 hours. It’s not his fault that I am such a broken piece of shit. He should be allowed to relax and play in his relationship.

It’s not his fault that I am a fucking retard who breaks down crying at the drop of a hat. I have to admit that it’s a bit nice this morning that he is still asleep and I can scream/cry and walk around flapping without him seeing. I don’t like demonstrating this behaviour. I don’t like being visible as a pathetic baby who still feels like I will never be loved or appreciated.

I have mixed feelings about having my kids these days. I feel a lot of guilt for how bad ECs health is. I gave him these problems. I am very conscious that if Noah hadn’t stepped forward to offer me my dreams on a platter I probably would have suicided. Maybe that would have been better for all concerned. He promised he would let me die first so that I didn’t have to be alone and unsupported any more. But he fucking left me. Now I get to spend the rest of my life feeling stupid and unwanted even when people like me fine. I can’t read the signals. Being kind to me takes too much effort. I can’t expect people to bother. I have to take what I get and deal with it.

Well hey, at least I get to have a whole separate building in which I can scream and cry and rant? That’s lucky at least. Thank you, Noah.

I did try to have a conversation with Gentleman in between sobbing bursts. He didn’t mean to make me feel bad. I know that. I feel like my reaction is so far out of proportion that I can’t justify it at all. He wasn’t trying to make me feel sad. I’m over reacting. I am the problem. I should learn how to take a joke.

I’m almost 45. I kind of think the ship has sailed on me getting over being gullible. Instead I choose being alone a lot. That is how I can make sure I don’t have to take jokes. I miss being married to someone who believed I have a tenuous grasp on staying attached to life. I miss the ways that Noah bent over backwards to make me feel seen and important. I don’t think I will have much of that going forward. I think most of my future is going to involve a lot of sneaking off to cry in private because I opted in to a culture where making someone like me the butt of the joke is most people’s reason for living. This is my future now. I miss Noah. I miss the way we soothed each other’s anxiety. I miss being known. I miss having someone believe in me obsessively. I miss having my house be a place where no one said things to make me feel stupid. My home was in Noah’s arms and he thought I was a fucking genius.

Now I’m just a fucking daftie.

Priorities and patience

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I haven’t responded to the last email yet but I will. I find myself torn in a lot of different directions. For one thing: I know how hard it sucks to date a breeder. We are selfish fucks who put our kids above other people. That’s hard to deal with. It feels invalidating. It can lead to all kinds of weird jealousy over time spent (that was an issue early in my parenting experience even inside my marriage) and I know people end up feeling left out. It sucks that when a short person has a need that comes over all the wants and needs of the grown ups. I can really understand not feeling ok with that kind of sacrifice when they aren’t even your crotch droppings. I can even more fully being over that kind of limitation when your own children are grown and gone. You are ready to be selfish about your time. Fair!

I am not ready for that. I am not going to be ready for that for a long time. In American terms my kids are level 2 autistic. It means they need quite a lot of support. If I were in California I would know exactly what levers to push to get exactly the appropriate support for my kids to go to school so I could get a break from them. Here in Scotland that support doesn’t exist and I would be laughed at in a meeting if I requested it. I would be told “That’s not how it works here”. I opted out of the schooling system in California because the live shooter drills were a bridge too far. I watched that fuck kids up. I couldn’t let the system do that to my kids. I can’t let my kids fall through the cracks in Scotland even though there aren’t any guns. This means that people who would normally spend many hours a day with specialists are stuck with only having me and I’m not really enough. This is why we go to classes and activities and have regular events at our house so we can build a community. My kids need more than me and I give them as much as I can within a structure where I supply all the extra support they need beyond what “average” kids need.

That means I don’t get a lot of time off and my brain is deeply overwhelmed pretty much all the time.

If you need me to lavish attention on you every day I am going to be a failure for your expectations. I’m not saying you don’t deserve that. You totally deserve that. You are wonderful and shiny and fun and you have earned all the good things you want to get. That doesn’t mean I am in a place to give them to you right now.

When I chose to give birth I was signing myself up to a contract that I take very seriously. I have seen with my own eyes what happens to people when their parents don’t take that contract seriously. It wasn’t pretty. I am going to take this very seriously. I have 9 years 8 months and 2 years to go. Until then all the fun I want to have has to fit in the cracks around my duty to these humans.

That’s going to make me hard to date. It’s going to mean that someone needs to have a lot of patience if they are to survive a relationship with me. I know it is a big ask. I don’t feel owed that patience. I don’t really feel like I deserve it. There is a big part of me that feels like I should listen to the people who tell me to abandon my kids more because “I deserve a life too.”

Thing is: I had a really fantastic single life before I had kids. I fucked all the people. I traveled. I did the fun drugs. I did all the crazy bdsm most people put on their bucket list.

I am not in that season right now. If someone is impatient with me being in the season I am in then we are not a match. It’s ok. No hard feelings about that bit.

I am struggling with having some hard feelings about you deciding that you being upset with me was somehow a proxy indicating that all of my friends are upset with me. That feels manipulative in a way I can’t abide. That feels deeply cruel. I have struggled so hard with feeling like anyone might ever be able to like me at all that attempting to pull that scaffolding out from beneath me is unacceptable. I think that is an awful thing to do. It is hard for me to leave my house sometimes because I am so overwhelmed with anxiety because I feel like exposing people to knowing that I exist is morally questionable. People shouldn’t have to know about me if they don’t want to. People definitely don’t owe me anything. Nobody has to be my friend. No one has to like me.

I know. It’s hard for me to understand how anyone could like me at all most days. I don’t feel worth it.

Coming for my support scaffold like that is cruel. Trying to shake my faith in my friends is pretty abusive. I’m already more socially isolated than is good for me. Don’t tell me that my friends are going to have no compassion for my social issues. That is so mean.

The backlog of email basically started when the last rape happened. I have lost a lot of functionality over the last two years. I have withdrawn from society a lot. My life is 1/5 the size it was 2 years ago.

Don’t tell me that no one will like me on the far side of being in this much pain. Don’t try to take hope away from me. That’s not ok. I started trying to kill myself when I was 7 because I didn’t think there was any point in carrying on because no one could love me. I had already been kicked out of 6 foster homes. I was on my 8th school. I started after the first non-family member rape. I’ve been institutionalised for suicide attempts a few times.

Don’t ever tell me that my friends are going to stop loving me because I’m not good enough.

It’s a good thing I have all these cards from Bailey sitting out. I couldn’t believe that everyone will give up on me if I tried. I wear your backpack every day and I know that even though we can’t be in a close relationship you haven’t stopped loving me. Even though I am so hard and I was awful to you, you still love me.

There are people I can’t date. If you are going to fight dirty the first time you feel a little butthurt we can’t be in a relationship. If you are going to diagnose me with personality disorders when you are mad at me then we can’t be in a relationship. I have worked really hard on my shit. I am fair in arguments. When I start to go too far I back it off real fast. I deescalate. I accept lots of responsibility for my failures.

Yes. I should have tried harder to email more often. That wasn’t very kind of me. It’s true. I told you I wanted to build the relationship in the room. I wasn’t clear enough about what that meant. I wasn’t clear enough about a bunch of things and you were completely not ok with that. Fair enough. I was waiting to talk on our next date. That wasn’t cool of me in this modern world where I am expected to respond to everything instantly no matter what else I’m fucking doing.

I leave my phone in the house while I garden. If you can’t handle waiting that long then it’s a you problem, not a me problem.

I am online a lot. It’s how I cope with how fucking lonely I feel. But I can’t always be in one to one chats with people online. I find them draining and exhausting. I’m constantly trying to gauge tone and what I should or shouldn’t say. It’s super high cognitive load. I think it is fucking great that my boyfriend has a job that makes it hard to chat all day. It’s tiring.

I am in this 24/7 dance of trying to find the balance between being understimulated and being overstimulated by my life. There is no happy medium.

Dealing with me requires a lot of patience. Not everyone has a lot of patience. That’s ok. Dating me means accepting that I already have a really full life. Someone has to be ok with something that has no resemblance to het-monogamy expectations. I’m a free bitch. I’m focused on my life. I want to be in the moment. If you are scheduled to be in this moment with me then I will give you my full attention. If you are not scheduled to be in this moment with me then it is fairly presumptuous to decide I should give up my this moment to write to you alone because you are so special. If you want to fucking learn about me I have written millions of fucking words and it is entitled as shit to expect me to duplicate them for you.

Really. Have you fucking considered as you lecture me about how I should be explaining myself to you in greater detail that you can search by fucking tags on the blog you are reading so that you can learn all fucking about me? I have fucking books about me. You can download them online.

Are you shitting me? You are going to throw a tantrum because I’m not writing you enough emails about myself so you can understand me better?

It’s kind of funny. I like dating people who are older than me because they tend to have a higher maturity level. Apparently 65 isn’t high enough. 65 and still bitching that it isn’t fair you have to go read the source material instead of having it explained to you one tiny bit at a time.

I am livid. Telling me that my friends will abandon me if I don’t get better at email is a real fucking problem. Every single one of the people sitting in my inbox read my fucking blog when I post there. They write me letters and emails in response to the stuff they read. The fact that I don’t get a lot of comments on my blog is because I am a salty bitch who is talking to myself. I don’t want advice and people really can’t help themselves. The long time people all understand this. Don’t fucking throw me pity because I don’t get comments.

I use cool tracking software on my blog. I can see the ISP of people who log in. Over time I have mapped a whole bunch of my friends. I see them checking in. I don’t need comments.

Trying to make me feel insecure about my friends’ love is hitting me super hard the next day.

There is no fair and there is no deserve. Even so, I am not going to put more energy into someone who tells me that my friends are going to stop loving me. That is putting a scorpion on my back and giving it a ride. I feel no call to be that kind of “nice” anymore.

I am worth better treatment than that. I am glad I know that now.

Shards and training

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It is funny to me how the ravenous cavern of emptiness inside of me feels different now. I notice that there has been a qualitative change in me in this AN time period. (After Noah, of course.) I’m at 15 months AN. It’s such a short time, really. Progress when measured in reverse is pretty shocking. We are doing ok. I am doing ok. No, I don’t feel “all better” but I can see where I am headed. I can see that I am doing what I need to be doing. More importantly, I can see that I really do need to chill on some pieces of impulsive joy even though I want to say yes to all of it.

I keep dating people who want to go to loud places with me. Why do I do this? Why am I picking loud musicians right now? Where are my Cheese damned priorities? I can’t hear. No, this is not a venue for deep conversation. So we will look at each for a few hours in an overwhelmingly loud space. Ok. This is happening. Also, I am too fucking old to make out in a pub.

It is really funny watching these layers of inhibition unfold within me. I can feel in my body how a younger me would have acted. No, I can’t do that anymore. No, I can’t ignore the whole audience and do whatever I want. No. The audience is desperately important. This is why I want to go to sex inclusive bdsm parties the most. That is literally the only environment where I don’t have to feel fucking paranoid about squelching shit I acted out for 25 years. I know how inappropriate I used to be. I have learned. It took a lot of researching child development for me to fully understand why I was so horrifying as a foster child. Right. That’s why they kicked me out. I was uhm, acting out in age inappropriate ways. I didn’t have much internal inhibition about sexual behaviour of any kind.

I’m 6 weeks away from having seen a whole healthy childhood. That’s been fucking wild. I have learned a lot of inhibition in service to being able to provide this to someone else.

My kids asked who I was going on a date with. I appreciated the wide eyes and big gasp before “Niiiiiiiiiiiiice.”

The show we attended involved a lot of the performers being there with their whole families in attendance. No, I was not going to make out. No matter how much that clearly would have been fine with Pretty Lady. She’s past caring. I am not. If I want to be useful as an ambassador for weird I am going to have to keep a lot of it behind closed doors.

When I was 21 I would have had my fingers up her skirt. When I was 23 I had been teaching long enough that I would have limited myself to making out with hands only around her waist. Now I could feel a shock in my body and I recoiled from her intense kissing. It felt out of place and wrong. That’s interesting and I should pay attention to that. It’s not that I’m opposed to the idea of kissing her, not even a little bit.

There are an interesting large number of power dynamic differences in this relationship. I am trying to pay attention to where I need to manage shit with a tight hand or it isn’t going to be sustainable to me. She has more ability to function on less sleep than I do. I suffer physically for days when I fuck up my sleep schedule. It’s why my pain levels are as bad as they are right now. My sleep keeps getting fucked up. I’m having too many late nights.

As much as I want to be all “Say yes!” I think I am hurting myself in stupid and predictable ways and it’s becoming a choice. I don’t love this form of self harm. It is really uhh crappy. Like, if I could cut and get a jolt of energy and power through my life with good cheer that would be a very small cost to me. Sleep deprivation makes every single aspect of being alive hard.

While the musicians were nice and all I need to say no next time. I need to be having one or two late nights in a whole month not one a week. This is getting really stupid. I am hurting myself and the amount of backlash in my body is exceeding coping methods. I’m struggling with exercise over the last few days. I’m having patches of numbness. Normal tasks are taking longer because I’m physically depleted and I’m dropping important bits of information out of my head.

I can’t keep impulsively adding late night joy. I am doing lots of planning around my body being able to handle specific events. I need to stick to those long term plans if I don’t want to get sick. I’m being stupid.

Saying no is hard. Saying yes is far harder on me.

My therapist asked me who is feeding me yesterday. They noted that I opt in to a lot of mentor type relationships, I offer help for parents who are overwhelmed, and I deliver food to neighbours who are going through tough times. All of this has pretty much resumed a close to normal pace on my calendar. I have a lot of relationships with people who need me to give. It was really nice that I could immediately rattle off a lot of people who are there for me near and far.

I want to get my sleep schedule back on track because it being fucked up means I miss the monthly check in call with my Elders. I don’t like doing that. It means that I don’t get to nurture that connection and it is important to me. It’s important to me that these people love me and believe in me and really want to continue being support to me throughout my life. They have been there through a lot of things.

I think I am messing up the balance and it’s not sustainable. New is good. Old is also very important. The thing about the long term friendships is the way we are witnesses to the arcs of our lives. Being impressed is not based on glamour it is based on experience and earned esteem. It’s like time with Bestie. The people who have known me the longest give me constant verbal affirmation about how far I have come. They saw the story happen. I don’t have to say anything or ask for anything from them. We talk about what has been happening for us each month and they stare at me with overwhelming intensity because I can see them playing the story arc out in their heads. They tell me I am doing so good and I can believe them because they saw how fucking hard I had to work to get to this moment.

I don’t have any scale for evaluating the evaluations of new people. When they give me compliments mostly I shrug. I don’t know how to hear them and understand them. I don’t accept any compliment without thinking really hard about it. I mean, in the moment I say, “Thank you” or if I’m feeling saucy, “I know.” The thing is, I know that each of these opinions is subjective and people vary in how they assign value.

I’m sorry to be so blunt about it, but compliments are part of positive behaviour modification. It’s a really common way that people train the folk around them. It’s usually utterly unconscious. I don’t think most people are trying really hard to be manipulative with a plan. I mean, I do but it’s because I’m super fucking autistic and I have learned that I need a detailed plan or I just don’t leave the fucking house. I have to know what is expected and what will be acceptable from me in a given environment. I no longer like places with fuzzy attitudes about behaviour. I have fucking learned the Social Contract like I want to stay out of jail. I will always err on the side of not drawing attention.

Wow. I really am scared in a way I’m not paying enough attention to. I think it is funny that three different woo fuckers have observed that I have a lot of blocked root chakra energy in the last two weeks. My life is hilarious. Yeah. Sure. Why not? Frankly, is that a worse thing to say than Generalised Anxiety Disorder? Enh? It’s funny how much more explanatory root chakra descriptions are than the DSM ones. It talks about where in my body I am experiencing different forms of stress around existing in the world. These things are often common among people. It’s kinda like how I can clock ECSA people by their bathroom habits. If you are raped a lot as a little kid you often have bathroom issues for the whole of your life. “Fun” fact.

I think that this kind of fucking around with my schedule because I want to please people is why I’m going to need to stick really hard with solo poly shit. I need to give people appointment slots. I can perform the kind of behaviour you want from me between these hours. During these other hours, should we be in the same space, I will be fucking sleeping. You can enjoy listening to live music without me. Oh fuck, fuck, fuck.

I’m torn because I want to support local artists. Also I feel like starting at 8pm is fucking insane and painful and cruel. Who the fuck are you people? How in the world are you fucking moving around and trying to be engaging at bedtime? What is wrong with you?

This is why I stopped doing theatre at 19. That was not a good career match for my body. I prefer jobs that start between 5 and 7am. I think this is partly because early afternoon is my preferred time for sex. Always has been. Noah and I literally built our life around making sure we spent as much of that time having sex as possible. Nights and mornings were more chancy because of vagaries of the day.

I’m going to have to be better about asserting my limits if I am going to date this woman. It’s on me. It’s fine that she asked. I should have said no. I made a bad choice. I’m not entirely sorry. It was nice to be asked. It was fun to dress up and catch at least 15 of the words she said all night. It was a high cost activity though and I am finding myself starting Saturday in spoon deficit. This was not smart. I am going to be limited in what I accomplish today. That’s not what I wanted for the day.

It’s my day to go make the big sweet breakfast for Saturday. I really don’t want to. That sounds vaguely like torture. It’s going to be the kind of day where I either get a burn or cut myself. Woo. I love days when I feel this bad and have no adult in the house to take over. Woo.

I miss Noah. Also, I see what I did to him by over-extending myself a lot more clearly. I see why he got increasingly picky about what I was allowed to do as our life went on. He had to pick up the pieces. I get it. Literally he was devoting his whole life to figuring out how to get me to rest more for the last 4 or so years. He was trying so hard to be a container the size and shape that would force me into healthier patterns. Of course that means there was behaviour other people interpret as abusive, duh. We were weirdos. We needed things other people don’t and we negotiated about them very directly.

Now I have to be an adult and carefully negotiate tiny pieces of interdependence over very long term periods. Itty bitty. Absolutely nothing is mandatory ever. Every step has to be explicitly agreed to. Every breech of decorum and assertion of an aberrant need must be explicit.

I am going to need to write a letter to talk to her. I need it to not sound like a rebuke because it isn’t. I am going to have to find a tone of explaining my needs that doesn’t sound like negative judgment about her. She is in an exciting period of her life. I get that she is going to be impulsive like a teenager. My whole life is dealing with what it means to live with impulsive teenagers. I feel really lucky that the main big impulsive things in my house are cooking, baking, writing, making or otherwise creating something.

Ack. I am summoned.

Your first sexual relationship should be with yourself.

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I’ve gone through phases where I didn’t masturbate much in my lifetime. Given that my sexual experience with other people are such that there aren’t many 6 month stretches in my life where I haven’t had partnered sexual contact of one kind or another, that feels significant somehow. The times when I stop masturbating are when I feel out of control of my ability to seek sex. Most of those periods of not-masturbating happened when I was in monogamous relationships. It’s almost like I had the religious vocation that all my orgasms belonged to partners. It’s not linked to my actual orgasm training, though. The relationships I had that lasted longer than 6 months before I did that training also contained this pattern. It goes back a long way.

“Don’t discuss underage sexuality.” Why is me documenting patterns that have existed during periods of abuse and then carried on into arguably non-abusive pieces of my life as well so fucking scary to you? I am not advocating for the abuse of children. I am reckoning with the cost of it. Why are you so upset by the idea of actually figuring out how the damage plays out in the long run?

I don’t mean to be making other people feel shushed out of self expression. When I comment and bring stuff up I am trying to encourage such expression. I feel bad when my uhh habit of giving unsolicited constructive feedback is not appreciated. This kind of bullshit is one of my love languages. People who voluntarily tell me ways I could do something better are people who are trying to tell me they love me.

Oh boy, how is this different from the fuckers who want to silence people and enforce a brutal form of conformity?

Well, I’m trying to give more information so that when you continue speaking you will be able to consider additional factors. It doesn’t mean I want you to stop. Oh please, don’t stop. Your voice is needed in the world. Your differences are important. You have to push through the parts of you that tell you that you aren’t important enough to bother looking at. You have to be your own main character. I’m sorry. I know that second person shit like this can be terribly grating.

I am saying you but of course I am writing what I need to read, right?

I don’t want to be the main character of your life. That would be fucked up. I want to be a bright constellation in your sky helping to guide you home. You have to take the journey though. You have to decide where home is in relationship to me. I don’t get to play any part in that.

I wish I could map my sexual awakening in terms that were more sanitary but I can’t. That’s not an option I have unless I lie or never speak at all. I’m not alone. For all that I am a statistical outlier there are billions of fucking people. I am incredibly like the other people who are on the edge of the bell curve with me.

I can find ways to be like just about anyone. We have a shared axis of humanity. I am usually open to find it if I have the time to sit and look at someone. I am really overwhelmed in some moments by my desire to be open to people even when they inhabit some aspect of humanity I already know I dislike. I am not perfect so I cannot demand perfection from anyone else.

I was looking over my last couple of writings (fucking typos are hard to catch in one go through so I edit over the first couple of days when people respond to it). I noticed an interesting pattern. I am coding “man behaviour” as inherently submissive in some interesting ways. The “man” in the relationship might be the one who is acting, who is asserting what to do, who is dancing attendance upon the “woman”. It’s not the same thing as the man/woman dichotomy.

I am assuming that doing things for someone is what “men” do and they should do so without end. I am treating this labour as service.

I’ve had some interesting conversations with my son recently about my marriage and how he experienced being in the house with it. He said he is baffled by the vast majority of gendered stereotypes and he gets into constant arguments on Tumblr because his lived experience of gendered behaviour is so inconsistent with stereotypes of men and women.

Ok, now I’ll switch the context. Men have to bring the shiny and win the pretty lady. They perform service out of gratitude for being allowed to be in the same room.

I promise, this is all related to my masturbatory life.

When I feel like I am not allowed to experience being in my body as a predatory animal seeking out animal lust encounters I stop masturbating. It feels frustrating and agonising. I don’t want to be teased. If I’m limited to what I can have with/from/for one person this part of me dies. The wanting stills. The ache to chase and demand and assert goes away.

The more I have to inhabit a submissive amount of desire I am locked into this weird state where I don’t feel able to inhabit all the layers of self I contain. It’s not that I exclusively seek dominant contact when I am escaping from the trap of submission. It’s not that I want one separate thing.

I feel like this is clear as mud. It certainly is murky in my brain right now. This variance between gender implications of various ways that I step into dominance and submission is feeling important for the next step but I don’t know how to take it apart. I will always be a system that is fronted by a cis woman and that’s fine. There are still parts of me that take their inspiration 100% from the male side of spectrumed behaviours.

When I was running the other day I had to acknowledge to myself that a lot of the ways that I am utterly relentless and demanding of being seen as an individual is very male coded. Women are supposed to be content to be in the background. Like, I’m full on annoying male autistic coded. It was weird balancing Noah’s resentment for the ways I had communities where I was more interesting than him. His communities thought I was pretty shit and that hurt him too. He wanted to figure out how to make his community value me. He had ideas for how I could be of service to them so they could grow to understand that I did actually have value.

It was exhausting.

I am really excited that my Hedge Witch says that my parties are the best ones she has been to and she will definitely be back. Normally she hates parties. She hasn’t been to one in 15+ years. She likes my friends.

It will be a very different centre of gravity in our house than it was when Noah was here. The people who tolerated me won’t keep coming around. Instead you know that if someone is here they have to have an appreciation of me. Make of that what you will.

A lot of what made Noah and I able to find a stability between our polarities was to swap up different gendered approaches a lot of the time. He was very in touch with retreating into feminine submission, which is not the same as the way male submission involves slaying dragons for your lady. He was pretty typically male in how he expressed dominance most of the time. When he expected us to step really far into cis normal pattern behaviours my desire went away. I am not great at performing the gendered behaviours that are expected of women*. Yeah, I’m empathetic but I have to work like a maniac every minute of the day to throttle my inherent aggression and desire for everything to move along faster already. I do not embody the feminine pining at home for the masculine to come back from providing. I go on adventures. I don’t sit home.

I don’t wait for someone else to come up with a plan. I try things. They stick as long as they work. I am a force for change. I always will be.

It’s funny how having the feminine urge to rip Pretty Lady’s soul out is making me feel more in touch with being a woman than I have felt in a long time. Women are monstrously powerful when they choose to step into it.

I am a monster. I am a deeply powerful one when I step into it.

If I had to lose Noah, I’d better make what I do next count. I get one life. Then how have I had so many lives? How am I going to find the time to live all the ones I feel called to? I can’t. Every choice is a shut door to other opportunities.

I will always choose to sometimes spend days in my house without company because I want to rest. I don’t always want to entertain and that is hard. I do a lot of sprints in life. I need recovery time. I should have built in more right after the party. I need to get more deliberate about these things.

Trying to build an in person community with people who are mainly united by how much they rarely feel like they “belong” takes a lot of energy. This is my target demographic though. It always has been. It’s funny how much it has been consistent at every stage of my life no matter where I am.

“So, how are you deeply unacceptable to everyone present?” It’s good that it is now easy for me to find ways to share that axis without even revealing intense trauma or inappropriate sexual content. Yay for growing up and developing hobbies.

It’s interesting that this recent round of furious masturbation has taken a lot of forms. I feel access to a lot of parts of myself. I don’t do well with imagining doing specific new/untried things with anyone specific. There’s a lot of I want to feel in my body and vague suggestive implications from book scenes. I don’t like to project fantasies onto people who wouldn’t like them, even when I masturbate. It feels incredibly disrespectful.

I don’t want to think about drinking a cup of man tears because I have antagonised random men in immature and hostile ways. I want to find a particular man who gets something emotionally out of the experience of catharsis and relief. I want access to a dyad in which this behaviour can be healing instead of a source of pain.

Somehow, wanting to inflict that violence wavers in me between feeling male or feeling female. The physical brutality feels male and the emotional violence feels female. Which is fun to embody all in one package. I feel entitled to that male violence within specific and deliberate containers.

I have fought with men and I have fought with women. Given that I think all of us are on weird spectrums inhabiting different aspects all at the same time, how can I make generalised statements of any kind? I have expereinced differences between sadistic women and “fighting like a girl”. Girls can be intensely violent. They come at your face with razor blades. Don’t underestimate them.

The violence I inhabit when I feel male about it

Bragging

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It’s hard that I don’t get to share these little happy moments with Noah anymore. I want to talk about how much our children delight me. We are on our way out of the disequilbrium cycle that made 2025 as rough as it was. It was going to be a rough year even if Noah was alive. Instead it was extra special challenging in a lot of ways. I started perusing a book on helping people learn resilience after trauma and the opening pages said that children who lose a caregiver often turn to theft. Ah. Yeah. That was festive. Shortie had a time last year. She hasn’t swiped anything or tried to sneak out in a while. I am holding my breath and pretending I don’t notice that things have improved. I’m afraid of it reverting. Sort of. Maybe?

I love that we have figured out a bedtime routine that works for the pair of it. We struggled through a lot of last year. Noah has been her nighttime parent for almost all of her life. In a great many ways, she lost her primary parent, not her secondary parent. I feel like Noah’s death was harder on her in a lot of ways than it was for the older kids. When Noah and I agreed to have her it was with the understanding that I was deeply burnt out and she was going to be the baby he had to do the most for. He showed up. He spent as much time with her in her 6 years as he probably spent one on one with my son in his whole life despite a 10 year lead. Noah really did a lot of time with Shortie. She played in his office while he worked. He didn’t work for a few years of her life because he was trying to figure out other stuff.

Now for bed we start a YouTube video of “boring history” and she listens to explanations about different history periods. We brush our teeth, put on jammies and cuddle. She stays awake later than me but she stays in bed listening to the story. We’ve had fewer issues with nighttime shenanigans. I think we’ve had more than a month of peace. Shhhhhhhh, don’t ruin it.

I love that in the middle of the night when I come back to the bed after needing the toilet we have a little mutual admiration society conversation before going back to sleep. “I love you.” “I love you!” “I am so glad you are here with me.” “I am so glad you are here with me.” We cuddle fiercely and it’s nice. I feel like we have had to do a lot of specific attachment work this year. It’s been a very serious thing. She has had a lot of need to come and touch me since Noah died. I am super welcoming of this behaviour. For years when I hid in the studio it wasn’t ok to interrupt. Now, she comes out and tells me her hug bucket is empty and I drop what I am doing to hug her. This feels really important. The first while after his death she was coming every few minutes even when people tried to distract her. Now it’s if I stay out here for an hour she checks in. I don’t get a full hour out here much once the day begins.

My life is a lot more work than it used to be. I’m adjusting but it’s hard. I am being very careful to not overload myself on a given day because I can’t have a meltdown. I’m doing so much better than I used to at regulating my mood. I feel more capable of doing so. I see the signs coming. I am blocking off rest time and using it instead of doing extra work in that window. I have to. I have to be calm.

I am putting aside date time for the big kids now. I realised that I was doing everyone a disservice by only treating date time with Shortie as a priority. I wasn’t modeling that everyone needs time and that was creating part of the problem. Shortie wasn’t seeing the evidence with her eyes that all the needs will be tended to. That was my failure last year. We are doing better.

Eldest Child and I were out yesterday. I love listening to him talk. I can see where he uses some of Noah’s rhetorical devices when telling stories. He is such a good storyteller. He’s currently freaking out because his latest fanfiction story has been read 10,000+ times. I’ve been telling him he was a fantastic writer for a while. I’m glad he is now finding external validation to back me up. He is so sweet and gentle and loving. He is moving forward and trying to figure out who he can be as a grown up. It’s full of frustration and starts that go nowhere. Yup. He’s trying though, and that’s what I care about.

I appreciate that when people ask him how he knows so much he says, “My parents were both teachers and they considered it their life mission to make sure I knew everything they knew plus instilling the value that learning is as essential as breathing.” This is how he sees himself and his life. That’s really nice. I like that a lot.

Middle Child READ TOM JONES. It took them less than two weeks. I am fucking thrilled. They want to earn English qualifications for getting into Drama programs. They are practicing handwriting and going over grammar lessons and spelling lessons. They are super motivated and in each week they are covering many months of school curriculum. I haven’t bothered demanding that they cover any of this. They had functional communication but they didn’t care much about developing it. When this child doesn’t care they will not learn. They have a lot in common with me. I lived in Silicon Valley for 30 years and I spent most of that time dating programmers. I can’t code at all. I refused to learn. That was not for me. My kid is so much like me that I ache for them. I see some of the ways they struggle and I grimace. Ah. Yeah, it’s going to take you a while to get past that bit. It took me till my 30’s.

My kid is the one I worry about the most for a lot of reasons. They are both the most like me and also different from me in very crucial ways. They are incredibly bright–don’t get me wrong, but they don’t have that quickness of thought that has saved me over and over in my life. Their way of thinking is a lot more methodical and reasoned than mine. I leap from connection to connection without fully understanding why the jump happened. They don’t follow a thought unless they know why. In a way, they got that from Noah, but they aren’t quick the way he was either. It is hard being the slowest processor in the house. Sometimes I can watch the frustration they feel, it is so palpable. They are jumping as fast as they can intellectually but sometimes they get really upset when people are making connections too fast for them.

It’s kind of funny. I watch Middle Child get frustrated by how “slow they think” the same way I watch Eldest Child get frustrated by how “bad they are at math” and I watch Youngest Child complain about how “they read so slowly.”

Babies. The reason you think you are slow is because you are in a Petri dish with folks who have brains that are basically on speed. You are above average. Being slower than someone who is absurdly fast is not the same thing as being “slow”.

It’s like how EC complains that he doesn’t have anyone he can learn cooking stuff from/with. Dude. You want an Asian grandparent to teach you cooking and you ignore everyone below that in competence and knowledge. Yeah, you will struggle to find people like that to learn from if you move to fucking Scotland. No shit. You will need to learn to consider the people around you peers. They do know things you don’t. Don’t be a pretentious ass.

EC thought he was bad at math till he showed up at school 5 grades ahead of his peers. MC feels slow at responding in our house but lightning fast during improv exercises with peers. YC feels slow at reading compared to me but has to bring a whole ass chapter book per day of a trip because she can blow through them at 7.

I had a funny chat with Gentleman. I told him I think it is funny that he keeps referring to himself as neurotypical. I don’t think he particularly is. He 100% shares “infodumping about my special interest is my love language.” He also has a dramatic spiky profile in his traits. Stuff where he’s really exceptionally high and areas where he massively struggles. He talks about school the same way I do. He had very similar experiences as me. Tremendously gifted in some areas does not mean gifted in all areas, thank you very much. He asked why I thought he and I had a lot in common and I laughed. I told him that the big difference is that I found a lucky lottery ticket.

He isn’t Noah and I am not going to try to put him in Noah’s place. He is a really nice friend though and I think he is going to be kind to my children. We will see. I am afraid to hope. I am afraid to trust.

I like the results I have gotten so far. Every new adult is a possible bump in the road. It’s scary to involve more people in our life but it’s necessary. We need more contact with folks.

I like that when Shortie is trying to psych herself up I can hear her telling herself, “Being brave doesn’t mean you stop feeling scared. Being brave means doing it while being scared. I am a brave girl. I am smart. I figure out hard things all the time. I can do this.”

She doesn’t rant and express self contempt or self doubt. She’s turning 8 soon. Her personality is pretty darn set for where it is going to be for her adult life. She is sunny, optimistic, hard working, focused, and intense.

My kid knows how to set up a learning/study plan for themself. They looked up the resources necessary. They didn’t need me to guide their plan. HOLY CRAP THAT IS SO NICE. They didn’t want me to look up all the texts for them. They went and grabbed the novels from the list that we own and started reading without any kind of prompting. This is literally the point of unschooling. I taught them the skills for learning and they go do it. They have some mood swings at this point but they have learned an intense array of self soothing skills. They are a funny, thoughtful, kind, inventive person. Watching them grow up has been amazing. They have come so far and I know that they will do so much more in the future.

My son still needs a lot more assistance with setting up plans and with following through. He, unlike MC, has a lot more than just autism going on. He’s also dyslexic and he has ADHD. For all that he is a walking encyclopedia he also struggles with executive functioning in ways that are rough for him at times. Thing is: he knows this and he knows how to ask for help with the parts he can’t do alone. He knows how to self advocate. He is bright, personable, hard working, sweet, assertive, and able to rest. This is a combination that bodes well for his life. He needs rest. His body suffers.

With Noah’s help I learned how to carve out time for rest. I modeled that as a priority. My kids believe that when they are unwell they need to rest.

I did that.

Go me.

Life isn’t fair

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It’s not a stretch to say that my mother in law and I didn’t get along well for the first 15 years of my marriage. At that point she decided I was staying and our relationship transformed to a large degree. She’s been very nice and accepting over the past nearly 4 years. I suspect part of that had to do with me supporting her through her mother’s end of life stuff. Her mother was a hard woman.

Since Noah died I have been talking with MIL a lot more often. When I want to feel that moment of shared pride in my spawn, she is the only person who feels available for sharing it with. I used to not send her an email a month. Now I send one or more most weeks, just sharing a picture of the kids.

She is due to go into surgery a few days after me. Her surgery is much more difficult and mandatory for survival. I’m worried. There’s nothing I can do to help. I’m talking to her more. I’m sharing more of myself and my life and my kids. Maybe it will be incentive. I don’t know though. I’m not feeling particularly able to keep people alive right now.

I’m scared to get to close to anyone because I feel like it will be my fault they die. I am so bad that I deserve to be alone and anyone who gets close to me will get lost in that mess. I’m not actually this powerful but paranoia doesn’t care about reality or logic. It feels true.

I wake up almost every morning and cry because he’s not there with me. I’ll be honest and say that the overnights I’ve had don’t have as much crying. That’s part of what I like about them. I get to have the experience of looking towards the future instead of crying about the past. I can’t change the past. Maybe I can change the future? Will I be responsible for a lot more deaths? I’m not over my brother or my dad. If I could endure more pain maybe they wouldn’t be dead. I know that Noah died from a freak accident but it feels like my fault. If he hadn’t wanted to come with me to help me feel better, he might still be alive. I don’t think that will feel easier anytime soon.

I feel so much shame. I failed to protect Noah. I feel like I don’t deserve to ever have a real relationship again. I am not good enough at looking after people. This feeling is making my day job really complicated.

My children take up the vast majority of my life and I’m not feeling like I am good enough, strong enough to take care of them. This hurts so much. I need Noah. I need him to be the backstop. I didn’t fuck up a lot but when I did he was there to prevent it from going too far. What am I going to do now? Just be perfect? I don’t think that is in the cards. I am so very far from perfect.

Yesterday was a good day though. The kids and I spent the day going through house stuff working towards a purge. We own too much. We cannot take care of it all. A lot of it has to go. We managed to do it without being super upset. We have a long way to go before our house is manageable though. Now we have 27 days till my surgery. We need to get a lot of this done so that maintaining the house is easier when I am incapacitated.

I have to make the future easier.

Mostly I am gobsmacked because my income (thanks to Social Security) is about the same as it was as a teacher before I married Noah. Time stopped for me in an uncanny way.

Past me deserves 9,000 gold stars for saying no to all the friends who invited us on expensive holidays or who wanted us to get a reverse mortgage so we could own a much larger house. I made financial choices that will keep me safe for the rest of my life. This is something I learned by watching my mother fail to do it. You have to pay Future You first.

Noah wanted me to play lottery tickets with him (metaphorically) to try and get rich. We did a round of Angel investing with Paul Graham’s company. I told Noah that the guys he wanted to support would not last 6 months. They were sloppy, unmotivated, and had a crappy idea but he insisted he trusted them. I was right. We lost that money. He let me handle investing the rest. I did well. Looking at the long term money freaks me out. I need a bridge over the next 20 years. 10 will be covered by Social Security. Then I get to levitate for a while. I think it’ll be ok.

I think I will save so well that it won’t be a problem. It’s time to teach my kids how to live like we won’t have money for a good long while. I know how. I’ve done it before and I can do it again. It will be good life skills. Life below your means. Scrimp. Save. Do without wherever reasonable. We have plenty of stuff for the next few years.

Time to hold my breath and see if I can turn this one year of savings into ten over the next ten years. That’s not so hard. I can do that. Just take a little off the top every month.

It’s not so hard when you have the privilege of earning enough to cover your bills plus having discretionary funds. I used to skip eating to do this and I will never be in that position again. I will never have to skimp on food again.

That’s what being rich means to me. It means I don’t have to worry how much food costs. I just buy it. It feels scandalous and cheeky.

I get overnights because Aunt Jenny is taking Shortie one night a month. The older kids ignore me in the evenings anyway. They are online talking to folks. So I go out. Of course I’m seeing more than one person. That will be true for the rest of my life. My kids aren’t going to meet people quickly. I have a horror of that dynamic.

I’m going to be shy for a while before I get around to writing about my love life with great explicitness in this space. It’s feeling scary. I’m already going full speed elsewhere. Here it feels scary in a different way. Not everyone here is a giant weirdo who would love to opt in to explicit details about my sex life.

The last few years have been a wild ride of self discovery inside my marriage, outside my marriage, and now in this post-marriage time. I have never been one to sit in stasis. I am meant to grow wildly in all directions. I am meant to explode with energy. This has been true for my whole life. This is a thing that people have commented on explicitly for my whole life. Now I need to figure out how to manage that without Noah shaping and directing my growth.

I’m pretty scared.

In the past few days my son said, “I always thought we were your epilogue. Now I see that we were your intermission.”

Whoa.

Noah’s goal and plan was for all of us to be alone in this house together as much as humanly possible forever. He liked the Pod. We all liked the Pod. We have so much acceptance and love and support inside of it. We take care of each other. We are careful with our words and gestures and physical movements and expressions of anger. We know that we will deal forever with the consequences of strife within the Pod. We have all created this bubble together and people coming into it are a big deal. We treat that like a whole family negotiation.

That’s going to be complicated going forward.

Things are going to be a lot more complicated going forward.

Things are going to be a lot simpler going forward. An awful lot of everything revolved around Noah. We stayed home as much as we did because he wanted all of us to do that. He wanted to be at home and he wanted us with him so he wanted us at home. It was striking. He genuinely wanted us around existing all the time. We validated and motivated him. His life was a shrine of us. It has been fascinating living in a family this deeply enmeshed and wrapped about each other. This was not something I had background training for. This ended up being a whole different thing than I had planned for a bunch of reasons.

Home educating continues. We are starting to get back up to speed on doing academics regularly at the table. We are always learning but sometimes we can do it in ways that produce tangible results and sometimes we just learn for the sake of learning for a while. It requires a balance to live in the world. We are drifting through our grief. We talk about it a lot. We are not bottling up our feelings. We cry together. We are all writing separately.

I wonder a lot about their futures. They have a tremendous number of skills and talents and they are broadly and diversely educated but they are not going to fit in to a world of checklists. Their lives have been constructed around their individual needs and the absolute limits of what I am capable of providing. It is fascinating, now, to look at the work I see ahead of me with my youngest. My older two are settling into their own stuff and don’t need much of any input from me. All of my plans for this stage with our daughter revolves around Noah and his needs and his limits.

Balancing a house of five autistic people with weird limits and needs is a lot of fun. It is dancing on the head of a greased pin. You will fail to perfectly accommodate everyone and that is the lesson in that moment. That’s when I get to talk about distress tolerance. That’s when I talk about how to be in control of your nervous system even when you can’t control your environment. That’s when I talk about putting on a mask for social safety. Smile. Appear pleasant and non-threatening. Be curious. Put all of your panic and stomach pain in a box and put it in a closet in the back of your mind. We’ll deal with it later.

We do, in fact, come back together to deal with it. It’s so real. Compartmentalisation is a motherfucker.

I feel a lot of guilt, sometimes, because I am training my children in how to mask. I’ve been told it is similar to ABA therapy. I do know that I am a behaviourist. I actively teach and practice DBT. This is relationship oriented therapy. It is exposure therapy in a non-clinically valid method.

The main way I train my children is to take them on long journeys through many different cultures and settings and I help them learn how to evaluate what they see. What clues exist for how to behave? What patterns do you see? Does one group of people walk a lot faster? Why do you think that might happen? How do people manage walking through crowds? What can you guess about the cultural values based on these actions? What do you think they mean?

We do some searching on the internet to see if any of our guesses were close to correct. Sometimes we pat ourselves on the back for being able to easily spot something that is a major culturally point of pride. Yes. It really is clear.

My son told me that he describes our family as being full of autistic people for whom “social interactions” is our main special interest. I hadn’t thought of it that way but he’s right. We read books and watch shows because we want to talk about the social interactions. We want more representations in our brains. And we analyse what is happening in our own lives over the dinner table. We don’t grill people whether they like it or not. We all like sharing.

“So I was having this chat with someone and I said, _____.”

We then talk it out. “Ah, did you consider the thing from the angle of someone who is (list of various demographic markers)?”

“Oh. Shit. No.”

I love my house so much. We don’t put people down much but we do question everything. We are nosy and invasive and simply present.

It’s fascinating watching the teenagers start to develop their own sense of “What happens off screen is no one else’s business.” People are only entitled to know the things about you that you choose to share when you are in a room together.

Wow. What is up with all this drivel that comes out of my fingertips then? What is up with the whole darn internet? I choose to offer the world cheat sheets. I am a deeply complex person and if I don’t write about it I will never have the ability to share all of it in another form. I would only be able to share in sound bites of sanitised nothing. I do not want that in this life.

I am not an easy person to know but I want to be known. I have always wanted to be known. Being known is what has lead to increasing levels of safety for me in this life. I am a weird motherfucker. I also work hard to give more than I take. I try to conform in the ways I must. I am trying.

I am also a person who has been let out of a cage. I loved my husband and I would have born the price of staying married but I was not made to be monogamous. It was a point of enormous strife between us even when I wasn’t doing anything with anyone. It made him feel abandoned and betrayed.

I have no idea what the future is going to bring. I am betting on more growth and more change. I won’t always like it. A lot of it is going to hurt. That’s ok. I was never promised an easy life and I do not expect to have one. I am going to have a better life than the one I was brought up to expect. I am going to have integrity and honesty that did not exist in that set and setting.

Every individual family has their own vibe. Their own levels of awareness around sex and sexuality. I am struggling with the fact that my levels in California depended on their being enough ambient sex positive, sexuality displays that I could have a lot of theoretical discussions. My sex life never had to come up. Here I am going to be the first example of poly that my daughter really groks. This alarms me. That’s a lot of pressure for figuring out what “sharing information respectfully” means. It will be fine. I’ll navigate this like everything else. We are already the weirdos for a lot of reasons. It’s not going to make that big of a difference in the long run.

It feels like a life affirming thing to do at this stage. I am trying to build deeper connections than I am going to be able to access from my local friends. Boundaries are complicated things. Life is long and I would not be surprised if Noah is not the only partner I watch die. That’s scary. I’m only 43. I might have that happen again. Life isn’t fair. I’m going to experience a lot more loss. It’s really scary. I hate going under general anesthesia. It’s really scary.

And for the first time in 18 years, Noah won’t be the person who takes care of me. He was not good in the emergency crunch moments but he was awesome at babying me during recovery. Well, he got awesome because he did not like watching me crawl around the house doing the chores he hadn’t gotten to.

This time I am doing a big purge of stuff before surgery. I need to have less work to do. I need to have the ability to not fight with my baby over stupid stuff. I need to create a “Yes” environment. It will make a lot of things less stressful for a lot of people. We’ve had too much for a while. It’s time to do it differently.

Do you own your stuff or does your stuff own you? How much do you really need? I’m thinking on this really hard. I keep wanting to say “we” as if the kids somehow share responsibility but no I have too much stuff. Because I now own everything that was Noah’s. I’m having a lot of feelings about that. But it’s really past time to start the day.

Social anxiety at 11.

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I’m not doing well with people. I am grateful I have an excuse to hide in my house. Being around people feels like a horrible thing I’m doing to people. I feel deeply inadequate. I am upset that I managed to wreck one of the friendships I put the most effort into over the past five years. I am really sad that I managed to make myself unwelcome in the first vanilla community I tried to join. It is making me feel intensely more alienated and wrong.

This kind of thing is what comes up in my head when I think about myself as being bad all the time. I’m in my mid 40’s and I still don’t know how to act well enough to not get chased out of communities. That sucks.

I have a deep need for community and friendship that Noah doesn’t fill. He’s great but he’s one person. I do have a few friends here but I don’t feel welcome in the community. I am not assimilating that well. Shocking, I know. I don’t feel very likeable and it means I’m not feeling like I can or should go to things when I know the host would like me to come. I worry about inflicting myself on the other guests. I don’t want people to feel like they have to interact with me when they don’t want to.

I’m scared of the event in October. I’m going to have to manufacture a giant pretense of self esteem and confidence and right now that is sounding terrifying. I am not feeling very good about myself in ways that are hard to ignore. I’m feeling deeply unworthy. I am too high in cost and too little in return. I am a net loss.

This feeling makes me want to hide in a closet under a pile of blankets. I take extreme comfort from the knowledge that Noah thinks I am absolutely worth all the effort he puts into looking after me.

I can’t need anyone else. Just Noah. So when I feel like I do right now, where I am just a bottomless pit of need and fair I sit in a room by myself because I have nothing to give. If I have nothing to give then I need to be alone. I am a net loss when I am at full capacity. How in the fuck do I justify all that cost when I have so little value to anyone outside of my house?

I will get over feeling like this. I have felt this way before and then I stopped. I know that will happen again. It’s just going to take some time of being alone and trying to regenerate any sense in myself that anything I am or do has any value at all of any kind to anyone other than myself. I wish I had more of a sense that I just deserve to exist because of me because that is enough but I don’t.

I am deeply driven by collectivist and friend network building urges to amass a feeling of family. The trouble is, I am always too high in cost for that. It is what it is. I just don’t know how to shave off enough parts of me to cost less for people.

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.

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.

You can’t get to yes without risking no.

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Damn. I don’t even know how I want to start this. I don’t know what the frame is for this. I mean, a dude shared https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/the-state-of-our-unions/202302/why-are-so-many-young-men-single-and-sexless?amp and this article is making it hard to go to sleep.

So this will involve heavy trauma random mentions but I’m not talking about my pain or my victimisation–that really isn’t the point. It’s just for context.

More than 60% of American men under 30 are single and are probably very rarely having sex during their single life. Holy shit. I had more sex than these men before I was 15. I don’t mean the rapes. When you have an exceptionally early introduction to rape it is fairly common to translate that into an exceptionally early introduction to sex. I have spent a lot of time in therapy working through my feelings about whether or not I raped the children who said yes when I asked if they wanted to play. We were the same age. But my play was not age appropriate. Lots of mothers didn’t let their children near me again.

I’m not going to turn this into a dirty story. Lots of kids said no. I refined my approach. Lots of people said no. I refined my approach. Score.

Before I was a freshman in high school I had slept with more people than most people do in their whole lives. In order to get a body count that high I was told no over and over and over and over. This was all made much easier by the fact that I moved approximately 45ish times by that age. I had been to 20 different schools. I had so many prey opportunities and I am a pretty damn good hunter. It helps that I consider gender fairly irrelevant.

I learned the most from the people who told me no. There are some good fucking men in this world who will recoil with horror when a child asks for sex. Good for you, dudes. I wish you were less unusual.

But anyway. The point is that in order to figure out who you are and what you want you need to put effort in to having something to offer. I’m autistic and my special interest was sex through early childhood. I had a really fucked up/healthy boundaries on their part experience of being ostracised over and over and over and over and over.

My kid told me he felt like everyone in the world hated him when a couple of kids bullied him at one school.

God I had to try hard not to giggle. Oh baby. I wish I knew what it felt like to have four people not liking you feel like the whole world. Fuck.

So I really and truly do know how hard it is to ask people for sex and be rejected over and over. The thing is: do you want sex or do you want a relationship? Because if you just want sex then you really should pay a sex worker and be ok with that. It’s a dandy occupation for folks who choose it without any other coercion beyond living in a late capitalist hellscape.

If you want sex in an ongoing way as an adult then you have to make learning how to be a fun person to have sex with a priority. You need to learn how to have skills that make you good to have around. These are broad. Not every man has to have any particular specific skill–you are fully entitled to areas of weakness. I had to focus less on what I needed from someone else and more on what I can offer.

I married the guy who did the most classes. I don’t mean university. He took massage classes. He took dance classes (but holy shit don’t ever ask him to dance unless you want to hear a long rant about how much he hates all dance instructors 😂). He got a motorcycle. He took classes in hypnosis and NLP. He did tantra classes. He went to fucking spirituality weekend retreats all by his own damn self. He constantly reads books on how to be more effective at whatever new task he is about to add at his job. He went to a lot of kink classes. He went to sex classes. We still have all the damn handouts.

He knew that if he wanted to attract attention he needed to differentiate himself. When he arrived in adulthood he did not seem that interesting. He said that his dad told him that he better go learn how to have something to give because no one likes boys and young men.

Ouch. Yeah. I don’t think you could pay me to go through life as a boy. I was treated like shit. I knew beyond the shadow of doubt that I was white trash and every single one of the mother fuckers throwing dog shit at me would be delighted if I were to die. It happened in city after city after city after city. For years.

Fuck no. I don’t want to be a boy. That sounds really rough. How in the hell can people learn how to ask if the question is always wrong? How can there be a way of just magically knowing the right way? ~~You~~ I learn by making mistakes; I’ve made some fucking whoppers. My husband has made big mistakes.

I don’t know how to settle my brain around the limits of this small town. I think it is the best motherfucking thing in the world that I have a choke chain on.

The coping methods that served me well enough to create an extended network of friends and Leather Family really don’t work the same if I am never going to play with or have sex with anyone.

Throughout my life before moving here every single close friend I have had from early childhood has been a sex or bdsm partner. Now I’m just supposed to figure out how to do this thing I really don’t fucking know how to do. It’s terrifying and hard.

I have to go be told no over and over and over. I’m a polarising fucking figure. For every hour I spend trying to develop a friendship relationship with someone I probably get rejected for 15 overtures in a row. That’s not all with the same person. You can’t do that. It’s weird. People don’t like it. But if you wait a few months and try again it’s ok. Three no’s mean you stop asking forever.

Yes I am autistic and I like my fucking rules, ‘kay?

You can’t put all your eggs in one basket. You have to put a small amount of energy in a lot of directions. And it’s exhausting. IT IS FUCKING EXHAUSTING. Then I read about how little effort many men are putting into figuring out how to get laid. SEX IS FUCKING AWESOME AND I DON’T KNOW WHY YOU AREN’T WILLING TO DO THINGS TO GET IT. I mean, I gotta work pretty fucking hard these days for platonic friendships and you won’t put in this much effort for SEX. Buddy, these days I get laid any time I go to bed in a nightgown. He even calls me names and hurts me. He knows exactly where to fuck with my deep seated trauma issues.

He also cooks breakfast 6 days a week. He reads to our family and he does the best voices. Girl Genius comic books are fantastic to read out loud to anyone and I will die on this hill. He was a really tremendously shitty labour partner for our first two kids. So our friend’s mom came with us to the third birth and she told him what to do. You can always go find ways to get support to learn how to do what you need to do to be a better partner.

He doesn’t ask me to teach him how to get better for me. I don’t ask him to teach me how to get better for him. If I can’t tell when my behavior and attitude please him after this many years and this many thousands of hours of conversation then I want my money back this program sucks.

I try to keep a sense of humor about how much it sucks to have to force my face back into that carefully practiced in the mirror face that projects just the right amount of “I would be cheerful if you talked to me.” Fuck this shit. I don’t want to need community. I want to live alone in a box in the woods.

Who am I kidding. I’d die.

I want people in my life so much. I don’t know what shape I want that to take. I have no idea what my relationships with people will look like going forward. I have no internal map for this. Even more fun: I am now going on 4 years out of therapy after being in therapy on and off for my whole life because a lot of shit went down.

I think all these men want people as much as I do. I don’t know what any of them need to do because the penalties for mistakes are so hard.

I know that when I get the same feedback from three people all of whom I already respect that I need to spend some very serious time looking at what larger truth they are seeing that I am not seeing. If I get a bunch of no’s to offers I just need to try again at a different time and get busy living my own life in the meantime.

I do not understand being unwilling to change to get people to like you. I feel like it has been a highly abrasive 30 year process of getting me to anything like socially acceptable behaviour. I have had to learn many things and I have worked really hard.

It is weird feeling all the iterations of personality. All of the mistakes I have made have made an indelible impression.

You never forget the first time someone throws dog shit at you because you were stupid enough to say you liked them. I was 7.

When someone tells me they are too scared to ask for time with someone, a relationship of some sort I marvel. What would it be like to have a place in which it was safe to hide and be safe? I mean. I have it now?

It’s really fucking weird. Sometimes it is almost itchy.

Ah, I know why I am up at 2am writing this when usually I would go to sleep and not think that much about the plight of all these men who aren’t getting laid. Tonight my teenager and I went and took a course out in the vanilla world to possibly learn an activity. Details are unimportant. The point was the man running the presentation spent about 60%-70% of the night talking to me. I know he is roughly 30 years my senior.

That was a man who cheats on his wife anytime he can. It’s like blood in the water. There is a way of really staring. Holy shit have I practiced and practiced and practiced and practiced how to settle my eyes on someone or bounce from person to person to carefully not raise hackles. I got to do it when I was young enough to not earn significant punishments.

I learned it because the kinds of men who will have sex with children are very good at that kind of intense attention.

These are very messy things.

On the ride home we talked about it. He had never seen that happen to me before. The mantle of white motherhood is a fucking thing. Now he’s taller than me so I don’t get as much halo from his presence. He was absolutely incensed. To him this was grotesquely inappropriate.

Oh my god. What would it be like to live in a brain that believes it has the right to say no to the male gaze and have that matter? Whoa. Wait. How are people who like to have affairs supposed to find each other if EVEN LOOKING AT PEOPLE ISN’T OK?!?!?! Like, holy cheesetoast that’s a fucking tight rope to walk. Wait, isn’t the fact that you are someone who will break the rules part of the reason for the intrusive eye contact? Fucking a. Why am I assuming that he would actually end up being successful prey? Maybe the signals aren’t the same and I don’t know shit.

I mean, I don’t know shit.

I’m really good at finding people to fuck, though. I started with the only standard being “will say yes when I ask”. When you ask people that indiscriminately there is this whole cascade of complications. I doubt I would have gotten laid if everyone had phones. Thank god I’m hella old.

I am praying for you fellas. I hope you figure it out. I don’t think anyone else will do everything just like I did and that’s a good thing. Surely there is a happy medium?

So this is what is going on with me.

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Right now I am on a brief rest break before I either decide if this is a longer break so I can go to the queer social night or if I am going to go outside to work in the garden. Right now I am trying to get the house/garden set up for an open house with the home ed folks so I feel a lot of get up and go for the work. I’m trying to figure out how I can lay out walkways that let people understand clearly where I don’t want them stepping in my chaotic garden full of plants and different kinds of mulch all over the place.

So that is one piece. I have various irons in the fire with the home education community. I’m trying to figure out which relationships I should cultivate harder and which ones are unlikely to be a good usage of my time. I am feeling incredibly scheduled again. Time is, as it will be for the rest of my life, the biggest limiting factor for everything I do.

Exercise is going to be really over-represented in my schedule for the next five months. I am increasingly conscious of just how much cross training I need to build supportive muscles that are not used in running and to relieve tightness. I’m old. I need so much more effort to get to baseline and it fucking sucks. I’m tired.

Which means that if I am going to effectively absorb and use this exercise to actually get stronger I must sleep. Like, a lot. Even though it looks like daytime until almost midnight and then it is dusk for a little while again before it is daytime again. I’ve never been a great daytime sleeper. Which means I have to get up pretty dang early every single day and get in bed before 10 every single night. I don’t do well with adding in a run later in the day. As my runs get longer and longer I need to mostly just start earlier.

Dang, the other day in the park I met this older lady who told me that she ran her first marathon at 51 and she did it in 4 hours and 45 minutes. Fuck. I can’t even. I am really really really really really really hoping that I will be at least 1 minute less than 6 hours. I am not greedy. My previous shitty time was 6 hours and 45 minutes. I would desperately like it to be shorter than 6 hours. But I’m nervous sending that wish into the universe because I kept saying “I would just like to finish labour in 24 hours” for all three births and I never fucking did. That was a giant failure to manage a prediction/hope/goal for my bodily functioning. I actually went into the first marathon thinking I’d be something in the neighbourhood of 5 hours and 30 minutes. lololololsob

Since I am trying to decide if I am going out tonight: I could go find the giant pride flag and figure out the flagpole situation right *now* and have it up for my ride in since it’s pride month. 🏳️‍🌈 And it is pride month. Seems like a great time to be bonding with my local homies before the big event happens with all the folks who travel in from the villages.

Sometimes I wonder if we really understand people in the past as much as we think we do. Like, if I did not practically tattoo “queer” on my forehead every so often I would be entirely unremarkable and perceived as a normal cis-het mother. I really do believe that queerness is an aspect of my personality that is outside of what other people describe as their normal. It is part of the ravenous predatory streak I have. I sit on myself so hard at this point. Although the funny thing is that I don’t feel it as intensely as I used to. I suppose I would describe it as once upon a time I know I would have gone there. I am not going to speculate if that would have gone well back when. That would not go well now. Ok, bounce eyes.

Sex is complicated in a place this small. Holy crap. The dynamics scare me. Like, honestly. I fucked around so casually for so long. I would not understand how to avoid pissing in other people’s cheerios. No freaking wonder most human beings have low body counts. Yikes it could get really challenging in a place this small. I think I lack the diplomacy to do this tactfully. I am glad I don’t have to find out. It will never matter because Noah is not allowed to die before me. He has been informed.

But good golly I’ll dress as a garish motherfucker and wave a flag sometimes and coyly answer questions about for whom am I advertising. Since it really will never get to anything other than friendship I must fly that kind of outrageously if I am going to find my people and I am going to find them and find ways to integrate them into my life. I believe that queers need each other. Many of us don’t have families of origin we maintain contact with. A very large percentage of us do not have children. That doesn’t mean that any of us deserve to be alone. We have to find each other.

I mean, I can literally say: “Hey if you are one of those queers who feels like they really want a place to go and spend time and make deep community… I am going to be buying a tiny piece of land.” A piece of land small enough that we can do the vast majority of work by hand with folks not feeling exhausted at the end. I know so many people who talk about how much they wish they could build something like that. I want to make community. You’ll be welcome to come hang out in the forest you build anytime. The gates don’t lock.

I don’t wanna be Auntie… but I wanna be Auntie. That woman has had a full house of people she has been helping all of her life. First it was foster kids her mom took in and then it was all the stray people having troubles she knew. She raised her sister… and her sister’s kids… and her sister’s grandkids…

I wanna be Auntie with upgrades. She helped people in a way that resulted in a lot of deeply dependent, incapable people. Not all of them. Some of them just needed a safe place to sleep and eat for a couple of months then they went on their way and did fine. But then there are most of the rest of them. Last I knew she was in her late 70’s and working to pay a mortgage to cover the refinances her husband took out and to pay to take care of all three of her children who live with her.

I am not fucking interested in disabling my children.

I want to help people learn more about how they can teach themselves the things they need to learn in order to move forward. I mean physical skills, intellectual skills, emotional skills, academic skills, and most importantly how to set goals and work towards something they want. They get to figure out what that is. As long as you are not able to pick one I’ll push you through picking something for a while and we will both learn a lot as you learn why you end up disliking it. Over time they gradually pick better and better projects for themselves. They still fuck up… a lot… but that is the point. Fuck up now. Fuck up in ways that won’t matter in 10, 20, 50 years. Hell, most of these fuck ups won’t matter in 5 minutes. Just do it. Fuck up. Learn the lesson. Don’t hold back and wait. Don’t waste time. Think of all the better decisions you will make once you learn this. Doesn’t that sound nice? At some point it will be easier for you to figure out which decision will work for you without having to suffer so much at so many junctions.

BUT THEN YOU MOVE TO ANOTHER FUCKING COUNTRY AND HAVE TO LEARN ANOTHER FUCKING CULTURE AND JUST FUCK YOURSELF ALL THE WAY UP.

Cheezits mother trucker.

So I’m sorta categorising my community efforts as:

bike
queer
kink
maker
community resource sharing
gardening
political
proximity

That’s why I feel like whoa. That’s why I don’t feel like I’m getting to know people quickly. I’m trying to duplicate the full spread of the type of web I had in California and build all aspects of it at the same rate at the same time. While I’m fucking exercising a lot. I suppose the bike community is sorta good for that but a lot of my time there feels super awkward because I am not able to hear that well.

I mean look at the size of the fucking social life I’m planning for the next few decades. I’m going to need to be a fit bitch to ride my bike around to all that shit.

Cause that is what I’m aiming for. I’m going to go do shit. I’m go to make things with people. I am going to invite people to help me with the property.

It’s a whole fucking thing. If you ask people to do something for you they will like you more. And co-working is my biggest love language so I will invite people into my bubble and see who self selects in. And that will be a lot of the inner layers of the core of the web. That’s how it tends to work. It won’t be a perfect alignment, sometimes those very first points on the web are smaller but they lead to a giant nexxus.

That’s how your bestie picked by proximity ends up being the one to tell you “You really should go to the Disaster House Party. I think you will have a very good time.” Reader: I married the guy throwing the party. And then she leaves you to marry an admittedly rather cool guy who happened to live almost halfway around the world. So you name your children after each other because you miss each other so much. Then you decide that 10 years is long enough and you move 2 fucking miles away from her.

I mean, some aspects of my story are pretty hilarious. I follow arcs a long way. I know I should write you an email Pam. Hello, this is my social anxiety voice. You write your journals privately and share them selectively in email. You have what normal people might call “boundaries”.

Hello internet I’ve missed you. I miss this part of my inner story. Most of the time since I moved here I shut it off as fast as I can. In any conversation there can only be a couple of paragraphs and I know that I’d better keep my transition points SUPER FUCKING OBVIOUS while not in any way shape or form seeming to put effort into my, inevitably slightly graceless, transition into the next topic. Cheers, mother trucker.

Fuck every person who has ever told me to just be myself. Dude you don’t even know. Cultivated, curated, deeply thought about choice goes into so much of how I hold my body. I fucking pre-game for social events. I specifically think about what attitude I am supposed to exhibit. I think about how I need to hold my body to get the response I want. It varies based on the crowd and reason for the event. I am not natural but I am comfortable with what I am doing. I have worn this personality/skin-suit mechanism for quite some time. I struggle when I know I’m going to spend a lot of time pin-ball whacking against a lot of barriers. That is the natural and normal early stage of a relationship.

That’s where you have to refine your mental image of this person to progressively more specificity as they become more and more of an actual specific ensemble cast member instead of being part of the chorus in setting B. This is an especially graceless stage for me. Because I am shifting through everything I remember about someone as I talk to new people. I’m trying to come up with every detail of every conversation for the first long while. That way I can follow up on specific topics and build a sense of connection. What? You don’t think through this process? You think I just know so much about you because I happened to have that for you? Nah, babe. I am far from perfect but good golly I work hard. It’s hilarious how often whatever that person’s name is doesn’t make the connection. It depends on how often I hear other people talk about them. It depends on how well embedded in the web they are from multiple directions. If I hear their name I place it in a storyline in a way that I don’t from talking to someone and looking at their face. I will remember all the feelings I’ve had with them and I can sometimes, when I’m lucky, get people to also have that glimmer of oh yes. We had fun. I’m fun. Then we go on with our lives without even having to get into it. But goddess that takes time.

I’d really like to figure out how to figure more rhythm around my efforts in various places based on moon stuff just so that I have to synch with it more. I think it would benefit my garden tremendously. There are a lot of gardening tasks that want about a month in between the next thing. I need to build that feeling into my body and associate it with other definitive parts of my routine and that means I need to tie it in with patterns in the house.

I get to play with building a system. The funny thing is that it will go best if I make a plan and organise and make whatever decisions I want to make then I inform the kids what work they will be doing the next day so they’d better make sure they don’t have an emergency project to do tomorrow morning. Planning and making an agreement about what you will do 100% OF THE TIME RESULTS IN SOMEONE BEING EXTREMELY ANGRY AND FURIOUS.

See, I’m teaching them life skills. Muahahaha.

We have a real live group project all around us every day. We are all working on projects big and small all day long. We bounce around talking to one another and then going off to do one on one with someone for a while then we have another most-of the group contact for a while then the whole family again. We do it over and over all day. They are all managing different pieces of it.

Dude. I need to start clearing off one wall at a time in the studio and deep cleaning it. Cause then I can invite other people to scribble on the wall when they come over. I’ll clean it very slowly adding new nice white space only gradually. That way if people ever want to come claim a new place much further around the room their part of the weft will show up brightly.

But right now I feel absolutely knackered. I feel like I have a 20lb sack on my head; I am so tired. I am going to be running 3 miles tomorrow morning. I am going to be running 6 miles on Saturday morning. I uhhh think that I probably ought to stay home tonight and not go out. Ok, one decision made. I need to be in bed by 9, not in a bar in town starting home at 9.

Yeah. I think I am out of typing. That’s all I can be semi-coherent about and I doubt any of that was coherent. But I feel better. And that is good enough.

It’s not about you, David.

Problematic people

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Oh man my RSD is on turbo lately. (That’s Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria if you aren’t familiar with the acronym.) I learned about this facet of neurodiversity in later years and it was like “Huh. Ok so that’s been most of my life. I just thought I had low self esteem.” Which is why I often feel weirdly haunted by the memory of a therapist who laughed so hard she almost fell off her chair when I said I had low self esteem. She said I had the highest self esteem of any client she had worked with in over 20 years.

Right.

What does self esteem mean then? I don’t think I really understand. I have aspects of my self-hood that I have confidence in: I can giggle off aspersions about my intellect because I am ridiculously confident in my intelligence and I laugh about people implying that no one would ever fuck me because holy hell is that inaccurate.

But I doubt whether I am actually doing enough good in the world to justify how many resources are needed to keep me functional. I have a shitty, high maintenance body. I doubt whether people will really accept me with all of my fierce outbursts and intensity.

So as a result I really like a lot of folks who are publicly derided as “problematic people”. I prefer assholes because they will tell me off and compliment me in equal measure and I can lean in and rest my head on their chest and hear the authenticity of their love in their level heartbeat.

“What’s Wrong With Krissy” is, after all, one of my most frequent games.

This ties in strongly with why I pursue friendships with folks in the scene with such intensity. There are an awful lot of assholes around here. YAY!!!!

Hell, even the people I know who have mostly done the right things in life and followed all the choices they were expected to make are still people who get in trouble regularly for being overly direct. I think of them as assholes with extra class. They will still tell you off but they will do it in a way that no one is allowed to tell them to stop because it all just sounds so true and reasonable.

It is harder to find assholes around here (physical here not fetlife-here; I come to fetlife so much these days because I can smile and watch assholes). A lot more “taking the piss” and a lot less “I am going to tell you why every single thing you have done in the last 15 years is wrong. I have citations.” One of my old buddies had to leave the bay because of health issues. Now the trouble is that they are used to friendships that are super intense where folks act like mutual coaches to one another. This is a really common dynamic I have had in many of my friendships in California as everyone is striving super hard to learn new skills and hobbies and interests all the damn time. My buddy is really struggling because no one in small town New Mexico wants to do that with her. People A) don’t want to spend that much time together and B) are not interested in that dynamic because they aren’t relentlessly focused on learning new stuff and C) find it more than a little creepy that my buddy is so intense.

I feel that in my bones.

I feel overwhelmed almost every single minute that I am with folks that I need to be trying as absolutely hard as I can to hold back and not be too intense. My entire selfhood is wrong at full strength and I need to be letting it out 3%-5% at a time or I am a monster. It is additionally challenging that many of the ways I have traditionally talked people into having more tolerance for me are prohibited by agreements I have made. Also: I don’t think they would work so well at this point.

I am a Problematic Person. What do I do that is problematic? Talk too much. Not moderate eye contact sufficiently (holy shit this is a whole thing here and I’ve had immigrants bring it up with me and tell me that I need to knock it off because they get in trouble for staring too). That one is really hilarious because I had to be taught to make/keep eye contact and now I’m in trouble for doing too much of it because PEOPLE ARE NOT CONSISTENT FROM CULTURE TO CULTURE.

So, when you are instructing that autistic person on how to act to “not be offensive” what culture are you acclimating them to and how did you develop the fucking audacity to decide that whichever one you are enforcing is The Right One? Anyway.

How close am I supposed to stand to someone to look friendly but not be creepy? How do I manage the fact that my fucking tinnitus is so bad that half the time I am trying to understand people with about 70% of the words making it through to my brain? It is why I love to type. How much follow up when they are not responding is persistent and appropriate friend making behavior but when do I become a stalker? I have no fucking social credit here. I have not earned forbearance because of my long usefulness. I am a difficult outsider with a lot of demands in order to facilitate my entry.

Yeah… basically I don’t see much reason to assume that dealing with me is worth peoples time so I minimise how much I interact with people because I do not want to unfairly drain them. I have been told for years that it is not ok to give any kind of social or energetic labor with any expectation of getting anything in return. You need to just give because you have extra and probably nothing will come back to you and that needs to be ok. I have to be ok if I never get anything from anyone.

And so I sit at home and I make detailed calendars and lists of tasks for maintaining my body and whatever shred of mental health I clutch to and I pray that no one asks me for too much because I am running a surplus… barely. I am after scraping and working and hoarding and conserving and doing without. And there is this knot of worry in my stomach all the time because I am trying to put small amounts of effort into different places and people because I have to be ok if this person/group does not want to know me in three years.

There will always be people who don’t want to know me. No matter how much of my personality I saw off. They will see the mistakes I so profligately make in my haphazard pursuit of new understandings and they will not know about any of the previous history of doing exactly that before succeeding at very hard things that many people said I was not going to be able to do.

I am nobody. I am a stranger. I have no value. I have no perceived social status.

I mean, I did pick this on purpose. I made the conscious choice to pick up and move very far away to be a small fish in a small pond because I did not enjoy being a small fish in the great big ocean. They were going to eat me.

I chose to move very far away to a place where I have exactly one embedded social contact and her world has been fairly limited in her time here. I have to try and find a new place in the community. I have to find a way to have people see me as worthy of their time and effort and accommodation because you would have to fucking lobotomize me to make me easy to be around.

So mostly I just don’t go. (I am loving the fuck out of the fact that someone ranted about starting sentences with “so” and I absolutely know I am doing it extra right now just to be EXTRA.) I am a problematic person. I am an asshole. I am high effort and what I have to give is very small so it isn’t worth much. Which ends in feeling like I am not worth very much. Then I talk to people less and less. I hide and stay home and keep myself busy trying to add to any surplus of energy I might have so maybe I can have more to give and be less of a waste.

That cycle rarely goes well. It doesn’t work. The ball of tension in my stomach eats away at the surplus making it smaller and smaller until I make myself sick and then spoon deficit is days away.

So yeah. If you are ever wondering if I dislike you and that is why I don’t initiate more conversations… probably not. I’m too busy contorting myself into awkward positions around the pain in my belly to notice enough to dislike. When I dislike someone it is pretty dramatic. You won’t wonder. It’ll be public. It is part and parcel of a thing that has been repeated at me for almost 30 years now in a wide variety of settings: “You know it wouldn’t kill you to try to be friendly with (person I dislike). “But it might. Best not to try it.” Mostly I don’t bother to dislike people that much. I have conflicting feelings about people. Sometimes I detect signs of patterns that freak me out but it’s usually combined with other random positive traits and I have no idea if my gut feelings are real or if I’m just a dick. In that case I will be consistent in public and private. I will tell you how I feel about you. Often even when you don’t want to know.

Yup. A problematic person. Hard to know. I know how many thousands of hours I put into my extended community in California. In the next 20 years of my life I will not be able to come close to matching any of the similar time spans in California. I’m older. I don’t have a job. I don’t go to school. The social community up here is very different and my ability to access what exists is almost nil. I don’t drive here and I drove all the forking time in California maintaining a network of relationship that spanned thousands of miles on a regular basis. Now I very seldom get more than 5 miles from my house. I don’t go farther than 5 miles from my house in every month. I had very few days in California where I didn’t go farther than 10 miles from my house throughout my entire 38 years living there. We were car people. That’s life.

I can’t anymore. My thumbs are jacked. I can’t grip a steering wheel without overwhelmingly agonising pain. I swear I am not just a pussy. I can’t do it. I know people are surprised that I can do all of the other things I do with my hands, but I have no more connective tissue left at the base of one thumb and very little left in the other hand. It’s bone on bone. Gripping things in different ways doesn’t use my thumb and the rest of my hand is fine. When I say I can carry something I’m not usually doing so at risk of strain to my existing problems. I am strong in many ways. But I can’t drive. I can’t create a wider social community by visiting people. The train takes a whole day. It’s hard to take whole days away on a regular basis. That is not how my life is shaped.

So I am putting drips and drabs and tiny bits of effort towards trying to exist in the wider water network around me but mostly I am in my tiny pond swimming around. The little tributaries that occasionally erupt that might allow me to move around are a little scary.

Being problematic is a complicated thing. Why don’t people just act right. Why can’t you just give more. Why can’t you just complain less. Why can’t you just need less. Why can’t you act happier.

Because because because….. because of the wonderful things I does. (Leave it alone. I did it on purpose. Don’t point it out. Requiring verb agreement in order to “understand” is elitist. Don’t be a brat.)

It’s all about rhetorical effect, isn’t it? There are times and places to insist on really precise language and phrasing. It’s taught when you go to school for that thing. I mean, I did teach English grammar as an English teacher. I was also correcting the other more senior teachers on staff because apparently I actually learned what was drilled into my head at university and when I am writing an MLA standard paper I will trot that shit right out.

This is not a space governed by the MLA. I am looking to communicate. I am looking to communicate with the kind of people who like and appreciate who and what I am and my native language is typing. It is the only one that taps into what I am really thinking and feeling and I have never found a way that works in anything like an equivalent manner with my voice. I feel stupid all the fucking time because I just cannot word. I am trying to analyse all the time whether or not I am doing something “right” for the setting I am in and I feel like I am going to hyperventilate because of course I am fucking wrong and that’s why people don’t like me and fuck.

Why did I even leave the fucking house.

Because that little do-si-do around the fucking topic of grammar is exactly the kind of tiny little thing I feel in my head all day long. HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO BE FUCKING CONFORMING TO SOME STUPID BULLSHIT RULE THAT I HAVE NEVER FUCKING HEARD OF NOW.

WOULD YOU LIKE SOME MORE FULL STOPS WITH THAT………???????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Phew. I think I have been having some feelings. As stupid and immature as it sounds I feel strangely better. I didn’t go start a stupid argument and dump my feelings on someone. I did stand in my sandbox and I had a stupid feeling. I’m not hurting anyone.

This stupid calculus is involved in everything I say and do all day long. With my kids. With my spouse. With my neighbors. With people in the scene. With people on fetlife. With my actual blog I write with a slightly different “ideal listener” focus in my mind… it’s hard to explain. Well, not really. On my blog everyone is expected to know what Noah knows and here I don’t do that. Writing there is joining the stream full force and I have been feeling incredibly unconfident about doing that for a while. It’s a much larger thing to walk that deep into my brain.

Here I do try to keep the word count down. I swear to cheese. I try to pick a topic. I try to bring it full circle and actually find a little closure with it. It’s an essay, kinda, not just me thinking and planning and existing into the ether the way I do in my longer form writing.

The point of this essay was to demonstrate a fairly small fraction of just how much can go into being a problematic person. Maybe 5% landed here? So much censoring and picking careful examples that won’t repel the target audience by maybe sounding too close to home and thus like a preconceived dislike thus they should avoid me.

My personal ad was something like 15 pages long and I didn’t respond unless it was fucking clear you read the whole thing. I think my standards are getting more reasonable with time…

Where is the balance?

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I am having a whole lot of feelings. I am feeling out of sorts and off balance. I feel like I usually struggle with the intensity of spring–that’s a whole thing. But I have additional things weighing in. I am still in my feelings about my mother in law. I need to figure out how to word a deeply emotional appeal to her that is about shaping our relationship going forward. We have been in a much better spot for a while and I want to continue that but I also need some boundaries. The past couple of months have involved a flurry of advice. I’m not great at advice. This is going to be hard. I have to describe myself in a way that has weight and intensity without sounding overly controlling or fierce because this is all stuff I need her to want to do and it is a departure from her normal wants and that’s a big sell.

I am struggling with some friend dynamics. I have put a ton of energy into out of town stuff that has since fallen through and that is causing a major crash emotionally. I have different energy for starting, middling, or ending projects. I used a lot of start energy only to have it fizzle out, which is deeply demoralising. It makes it really hard to push forward on starting energy in other parts of my life. I have so much that I need to be starting that it is creating a really terrible loop in my head. I just don’t want to. It feels pointless and stupid and demoralising and like I can’t force myself–it’s too hard. Hell, I don’t know how much is going to turn into middling energy projects and I don’t know how big the load is going to be.

It makes me feel really timid about agreeing to anything in the medium term. Even more timid about the long term. My energy level for long term projects is very close to capacity. Yet I can’t help but feel like I am missing a really big important track of thought if I don’t think about the long term because most of my long term at this point is less long term than I have truly internalised.

Pam, I just finished watching the entirety of Fresh Off the Boat; I had only watched one and two before this. It appealed to me so deeply I cannot even give it justice. I feel like I had to immigrate because that way I get to have an opportunity to live up to the standards of my parenting role model: Jessica Huang. When white parents think that I am intense/odd/overly forceful I have a whole montage of parenting. To be fair, before the last few weeks it was mostly a combination of the Hispanic and Black mothers I knew as a young child but man I want Jessica’s vanity. I do. I want to love myself with that bone deep conviction. And I am now an immigrant mom so I am allowed a lot of leeway. I win.

But, as Jessica wisely says, you retire when you die so you should master a set of skills then move on to your next big focus. I may have 13 more years of active parenting ahead of me but that’s… not the long term. That’s a lot marathon of endurance but I’ll be 55. It doesn’t give me the lead time on a next thing that finishing at 47 would have given me, but life choices have consequences. I’m really glad to have her.

Five really is my favorite age. I am coming down like a hammer on some behaviors I have problems with. I am having intense internal conflict around the fact that I need to be honest with myself that it is not the same thing as formal ABA therapy… but it’s a similar dynamic. I have some substantial needs around behavior interactions. This is where it gets really fucking tricky living in a house with a bunch of neurodiverse people. It would be really easy for us to have a negative set of interactions a lot of the time because we are all kinda jerks. Five is a magnificent opportunity to work on code switching behaviors. Five year olds think mommy is the most magical, god-like figure on the planet and they are simultaneously food avoidant, intensely individuating, and really fucking sure they are the boss of the universe.

It’s a lot of goddamn work.

In many ways it is much easier this time around because I am living with the product of my hard work. Like Jessica, I feel validated. Sure, my measure of success is very different and I have different goals for my kids but that’s ok! I’m a Californian mother moving to Scotland not a Chinese mother moving to the US; there are going to be differences.

I relish this challenge. It is time to introduce code switching. I did it earlier with the other kids and it was a more gentle on-ramp but the pandemic has changed my timetable. I now get to do in a year what I usually do in four years. Well hey, part of the point of home educating is you get to do things on your own schedule and adapt to life as it happens.

We need a baseline of “this is what it feels like to live and move in a body that is being given what it needs.” We have been in survival mode for a very long time. It’s time to slow that all the way down and teach this five year old what it needs to be like.

And now I am out of time after being interrupted three times. Sigh. I did not complete the thought.

I should be talking to me more.

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I have a whole bunch of broken Wellie boots and broken luggage; I want put them up on the border wall between me and the road with plants inside. (Yes I know I will need to bolt them down if I don’t want them to wander.) Things I want to paint on them:

Not all who wander are lost; some are seeds floating on the wind searching for the right spot to sprout.
These boots were made for walking but then they got tired and put down roots.
With age, comes wisdom. With travel, comes understanding. With good compost, comes happy plants.
I would walk far more than 500 miles to get to Inverness, this lovely place where I get to build my nest.
I have seen 1,000 cities and this I must confess: the only one I want to call my home is Inverness.
When you have more than you need you should build a longer table, not a taller fence. Feel free to take clippings from any plants and if you see a fruit tree/bush heavy with fruit, come knock on the door. I’ll probably give you a bag.

I also want to make signs for all the plants in my garden explaining what they give and add to the soil and why I picked them for this spot. I would really like for people to be able to walk around my garden and get a mini-course on permaculture. By “people” I mean me because I am totally going to forget this shit if I don’t write it down and reread it a bunch of times. This is not a project that is going to get done this year, but eventually. In the meantime I am taking way better notes than I did in California.

It is really nice feeling like the time I spent in California in my garden was an absolutely fantastic beginner course in gardening. I had the time/money/sunshine/city water to make quite an oasis. Gardening here is very different in dramatic ways. I mean… for many months of the year I shouldn’t dig in the ground because the wee beasties are hibernating. I would take December off from gardening (and sometimes January) but really I was outside in the garden 10-11 months a year. There were different seasonal jobs; I didn’t have the same routine week to week. Here I really shouldn’t disturb the earth any more than absolutely necessary from November through May. Well, I’ll be honest and say there is some amount of tidying up I can do in November and December but it’s more clearing off the slippery leaves off the driveway and doing a compost turn. I also begin starting seeds in February.

Ok so maybe it is about the same.

Only it really isn’t! This is gardening on hard mode. I can start seeds in my bedroom and bathroom, which have to be kept shut from the rest of the house the whole time. I don’t have a single other place that could be warm/away from the cats. It’s pretty funny. If I got a thermometer in the polytunnel I could chance leaving some of the seedlings out there for the weeks of Fool’s Spring just to give them a little excitement with extra air movement but mostly I wouldn’t bother because it is too much work.

Mostly here in February and March I can read and research and plan. Planning is a Big McFlippin deal here. In California I could throw tomatoes on the ground and a plant would start growing in any month of the year as long as I watered it. Sometimes there would be a cold snap that would keep a specific plant runty, but I’d get a big tomato haul. Here I have barely been able to get tomatoes to ripen at all because I haven’t figured out how to keep them warm enough. This year I’m going to grow them in the polytunnel and see if that works better.

I can’t help but feel that I am keeping all these records because I have this horrible Cassandra-like feeling that my children are going to need to be able to look through my trials and failures so they can make sure they eat someday. Yes, reading blogs and books are an ideal way to start an education in the general sense but knowing your unique microclimate isn’t available unless you learn from someone who has stood in your garden.

I am sure my weird prepper shit is just a continuation of my same old, same old and yet this feeling is different in a way that is hard to define. I love my children, don’t get me wrong, but at this point I don’t see any sign that any of them are going to be a shooting star. They are bright people who will arrive at adulthood with a better than average emotional education and a lot of ability to learn new things and do jobs that interest them. I have a lot of worry around the ways they want to work earning them much money and in this late-stage-Capitalist-hellscape I have deep fear around them suffering in the future because I entirely failed to instill that motivator.

Somewhere along the way I discovered that my goal was to give them time. Time to figure out what brings them joy. Time to explore things and fail and try again. Time to become their own best friend. Time to do what they want during the day instead of what can earn them money. I recognise deeply that Noah pays for this time. He earns and we invest and maybe someday his children can have an easier burden. In many ways he has sacrificed his life on the altar of me and our children. He has taken the provider role very seriously and combined with all the advantages he started with like picking the right hobby at seven and a family that could pay for a very nice school.

Noah has given me time. Time to think about who I want to be. Time to figure out what I need to learn in order to become that person. I feel awed at the magnitude of gift he has given me in this life. I think often about how my entire life as it is now mostly exists because of Noah. I mean, I have friends I made on my own but I live where I live in the house I live in with the children I wanted so very much because of Noah.

The children who make me feel crazy and hostile and overwhelmed and like I just want to hide in the bathroom for a few years. I would not walk away from this life for all the money in the world. There is literally nothing I would rather be doing, even though I complain like it is my job.

Today I walked around my garden and thought about all the ways I am going to shift things around towards being a food forest and a playground. I started out with beds in the front lawn but most of it doesn’t really get enough sun anyay so I am going to move some plants, change around where the logs are and put playground stuff running through the middle. It’ll work. You’ll see. I measured with conservative edge allowances.

By playground equipment I mean a climbing structure and a slide and a separate swing. Both the swing and the climbing structure will be very amenable to hosting climbing plants for the guilds. It’s going to be fantastic. It’s kind of funny how much of this thought process is shaping up around my birthday party. My friends are going to be old as fuck. I am going to need to have a garden full of places to sit and admire the lovely plants. It will be good to have pretty flowers right at face height because a lot of them aren’t going to see that well anymore.

And some will climb up to hang on the climbing structure because of course they will. I will have swings that my adult friends can use. And they will get to walk through a forest of food to get there.

Trees take time. Building soil takes time. I only have 18 years to go. That means it is bloody important I get as much of the bones in place as possible this year. It takes time to fill in a forest. Buddy, I am already training branches.

How am I going to lay out walking paths so people don’t step on my damn plants? How am I going to create convenient congregation places around the garden where it would be lovely to linger and have a chat? Where will people be able to pick a snack in September? Oh bloody hell. It’s a lot to plan!

After a search it looks like apples are going to be my best and most obvious choice for the whole top side of the garden as it is literally lined in apple trees. Raspberries will hold down the bottom side. There will definitely be runner beans all over the place. Maybe I will have magically figured out tomato ripening. Courgettes, potatoes, and onions are not really snacking foods but I can cook with them. Ok. This will be good.

Hm. Unfortunately my birthday falls on a Tuesday the year I turn 60. Well I suppose it will be a week long house party. Oh wow, that’s an interesting thought. I wonder who I will still know.

Longevity in relationships is extremely important to me. I put up with some serious bullshit from my oldest friends. Because if somehow they have decided to have some appalling belief it is now my job to somehow embody a different point of view without sounding like a preachy asshole. It’s a tightrope some moments. I believe that most relationships involve some degree of masking and setting special boundaries for people in ways that create a lot of extra work for yourself. I don’t know how to “just be one thing” all of the time. I can’t. I know that large parts of me are not particularly acceptable in a great many settings. It was true in California and it is far more true here. I have to be mindful of what I say and where.

It is utterly exhausting. Every conversation goes through this at-speed filter of “acceptable topics” and I am glad I have expanded my range of special interests so that I can usually find a couple if I try a few different mannerisms and approaches. I assume it is kind of trippy for the people I go through four or five approaches with. If I feel waved off after the fifth I start treating them like furniture and I will probably never make eye contact again.

I need much more stringent filters here. It’s not that everyone is closed minded it is that the process for sussing people out takes a lot longer and I’m sure I’ve “gone too fast” a couple of times. Mostly I haven’t horrified anyone but I take very calculated risks with self exposure.

I acknowledge to myself that in my mind I need a triad of close friends that I talk to at least somewhat consistently and we have very few filters with one another. There is no such thing as a relationship without filters. Not for me, anyway. It has been three women for most of my life, not always the same three women. Now there is a man, well a demi-boy as he now understands himself and I can understand what he means when he says that. I can feel myself consciously and deliberately allowing myself to be filled in my “imaginary bucket” as I talk to the kids about emotional energy. I feel like a vampire sometimes. I feel ashamed sometimes. But I don’t stop and I know that none of them would like me to stop because the way we take and give to each other is mutually satisfying and not draining.

Sometimes I tell my children that when there are times that they don’t love themselves then they are welcome to borrow some of my regard for them because it is endless. That is really striking because it feels like such a lie. There are ways that I judge and think harsh thoughts and feel impatient in ways that are probably ableist and deeply unfair of me. I am by no means doing my job perfectly.

I’m not getting into that self-flagelation tonight. It’s too late to go down that road.

I just need to think about the fact that sometimes when I can’t love myself I allow myself to be carried forward by the force of the regard of other people. I don’t particularly go for “likes” but I have a deep and intense respect for the people I allow to judge me. For the vast majority of human beings on this planet, I don’t give a flying fuck how you judge me because you are not actually seeing what happens. You are not a reliable narrator. If you actually know me then you can judge me based on the interactions we have had, but not that many people have spent much time with me. There are just a few.

The people I have kept close for a decade and a half, or a quarter of a century are people who have enormous wells of experience with me and my family and they have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly. They get to judge me and when I fuck up they call me to the carpet.

It’s kind of funny how these power dynamics and social dynamics work because it’s not as if this judgment comes without strife. I have simply decided that for whatever reason I am willing to accept that strife as a sign of love in that relationship. They would not bother to say this to me if they did not have deep love for me.

Except when they tell me that I am Borderline during fights.

If I am at all honest I am partially leaning on my triad because it allows me to fill my bucket enough for me to go deal with all of the other places where I am in some sort of position to feel like I need to share the resources I have in ways that benefit folks. A lot of the in-person stuff is hard because my life is not shaped like most folks. My time comes in different shapes and blocks than average in many ways and it makes it hard to get the requisite hours to become a friend at this age.

I do have a few young friends in town but with all of them the level of filters is still pretty high. I have talked about myself more with them than other people around here but I’m not random California neighbour casual yet. Oh my god it’s so different. I find myself struggling to be as reserved as is appropriate here.

Dude, just go to bed.

Food culture

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It is funny to me the ways in which my autistic challenges around food land differently in different spaces. This has been an intense and complicated roller coaster since I was a tiny child. This is relevant to kink mostly in as much as almost all of my earliest strong positive exposure to conscious sharing of food among adults was in kink settings.

I stopped going to church when I was in middle school. Most of my foster placements didn’t take me out into the community because I was an explosive, very difficult child. My mother, during the rare periods that I lived with her, never participated in anything in any community that I can remember. She was isolated and lonely and poor so her life with me involved a lot of stories about how good things had been when she was married. Back then she had friends and community and there were potlucks and all the kids on the blocks wanted her to make their birthday cakes because hers were the best.

She bought me shitty grocery store cakes that made me vomit. But hey, that just happened because I was ungrateful. I couldn’t possibly be having a physical reaction that was entirely out of my control, no I was just being rude to her with my constant ingratitude.

All of my feelings about food are wrapped up in all of my feelings about my mother and the kink community is a very interesting place to be dealing with different personality dynamics around food. For the whole rest of my life I am going to be grateful that I learned food sharing with the people I did it with. I know about the subtle quirks and preferences of almost every person I have ever prepared food for. For all of the years I was super active in the scene before I had kids (when my palate changed like whoa) I was on a pretty restricted diet. The list of things I would eat was much easier to contend with than even trying to list all of the things I wouldn’t eat.

People always made sure there was stuff for me. Even if they weren’t planning to eat it because it didn’t look very appetising to them, devoid of flavour as it was. I have very distinct memories of approaching a food set up with great trepidation and having someone wrap their arms around me and guide me over to exactly what had been made for me. I cried so many times. That right there made me feel more loved than any sexual experience I have ever had. Those people (because gender was not a factor–folks were all over the spectrum) made it very clear to me: *”I see you. I understand you. I’ve got you.”

The recreation events weren’t like that. My other hobbies didn’t do that. The parenting people did a different sort of dance around accommodating all needs because holy shit do homeschoolers have a whole dance around food needs. That shit is Tetris on a level that made me have to develop whole new neural pathways. That was so hard.

In the kink community it wasn’t hard. I had to learn how to talk about my body in order to be a safe person to play with. It was not ok that I had learned to dissociate all the time and I spent most of every single day feeling bad all the time. I had no ability to imagine a time when I did not feel on the verge of death. The sheer vigour of youth was pushing me still but I was very near the cliff where that wasn’t going to help me anymore.

My community members made me feel safe. That was not a feeling I had known in my life up to that point. Now that I am an adult I can describe my IBS troubles with great eloquence and fancy-pants words like “HPA axis disorder”. For a few decades all I could say was that everything burned. Of course people didn’t take this seriously, obviously I was just melodramatic. A whiner. I sat in the bathroom all day because I was lazy, obviously.

It couldn’t possibly be that I was sitting in the bathroom on the toilet rocking and crying because it burned so fucking badly All.The. Time. When all of your hypothalamus, pituitary gland, and your adrenal system develop in your brain from infancy through all of your childhood in settings that are violent physically, sexually, completely unstable in every metric you can imagine then a body is going to have a completely fucked up digestion system. It’s kinda like how I can watch someone pop up to have to run to the toilet every 45 minutes and go, “Ahh, early childhood sexual assault? Yeah.”

You want to know how I can talk about this easily and without shame? Because of the kink community.

I suspect that this happening in the groups with all ages are part of the reason that I never became particularly drawn to TNG groups. I guess I definitely already understand it isn’t universal. I stayed with the people who were 20, 30, 40, 50 years older than me because my experience of those kinky friends were that they genuinely wanted me to be around in the long run and that means I needed to take it seriously that things were done to me and I had to figure out how to fix what was broken. It didn’t matter that it was hard and that it would take a long time, they would be there. And the thing is–it’s not like this was one person who was all shiny and magical. It wasn’t. This built over years and it carried me through more than a decade of my life as the only support network I had.

Noah has done the vast majority of the heavy lifting on expanding my palate. He asked me if I would like to learn to like more food and I said yes. I will flat out admit that a lot of it has been the privilege of being able to spend a lot of discretionary money on food. He has spent 16 years taking me to fascinating restaurants and traveling the world to find out what food really tastes like in other places. I am a lucky fucking bitch and I know it. Now I know how to put things in my mouth without risking a panic attack because a texture is unfamiliar and my body cannot process that this thing is safe. It took years and a very gradual expansion of trust. This was the stage with learning how to make my mouth believe that food wasn’t trying to kill me.

Noah paid for the nutritionists who worked with me over time to slowly acclimatize my body to absorbing nutrients from food instead of flushing it out as fast as possible with as much acid as possible. It took years. People who have been with me for many years probably remember my elimination diet challenges. I still have the Poop Book notebook. Wasn’t that a fun adventure. This was the stage where I learned how to digest food. I struggle with feeling like it is deeply pathetic that I had to spend my late 20’s/most of my 30’s learning how to digest food but such is my fucking life.

The process of digesting didn’t stop with how to stop having agonizing pain that left me writhing on the floor trying not to scream from the pain of having large bulky items move slowly through my scar tissue laced intestine. It was a god damn nightmare. Do you know who emotionally supported me through that? The friends I made in the kink community. Especially the people who were older than me and who wanted me to be alive in this body for a very long time. They knew that the sooner I went through this the more years I’d have with actual quality of life.

It isn’t that things were perfect or that there were no problems in the community. Despite how much of my heart I left behind I had to go. So the good of being in California didn’t outweigh the bad.

I think about these things and I want to write them here because my experiences of food culture were such a big part of what made the bdsm community different from other hobbies I had. That is how bdsm/Leather crossed from being “those people you hang out with sometimes” to being my family. They wanted to know me. Nosey fuckers, I love it. We have to care about how our bodies are doing or we can’t keep doing this. This is a high intensity fucking sport, yo.

So that’s why I ask you so so so many questions about food. That’s why I want to hear all your stories about food. That’s why I want to find out what kind of food culture existed in your life growing up. That’s why I want to know what you prefer to drink and how do you feel about spice? It’s why I am so intense about figuring out how I can get as many servings of vegetables in front of you that you find palatable because I am in this for the long game. I’m only 41, I might know you for 30 or more years past this. I want you to still be alive and feeling good and having fun. So I want to know how I can make you feel like your needs are seen. Like it is important that you attain the best health you can in this life so your body can carry you to all sorts of wonderful debauched adventures.

I want to see you out fucking 3 hot people when you are your 70’s. Oh my god. There was this particular woman in the San Francisco community when I arrived. I was young enough that while we had a few very passing conversations she really didn’t have patience for my bullshit. I would watch her saunter around parties in her black mini-skirt and her black lace bra and her sensible kitten heels with two dudes who were in their 30’s on a leash behind her. The dudes were ripped as fuck. She had the most salacious, glorious smile I have ever seen. When I was 18 I decided I wanted to be her someday.

I’d like you to be there too. So, what kind of vegetables can I serve you today? Food is medicine. Food is magic. Food is what gives us the nutrients to build the cells and the tiny invisible to the eye specks that form the entity that is you. Food matters. Food is part of community.

I would like to be in a community with you. I don’t want you to be a commodity or a notch on a bed post. I want your whole being. I know it is a little weird. I never claimed to be normal.

Goodness, monsters, and shame

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I know that other people view monsters in a solely negative light but I’ve never been good at doing that. Monsters are always creatures with a different point of view. A friend pointed out that perhaps “alien” might be an easier word to use, but I feel like alien and monster are interchangeable. A monster is a creature who is different from you who seems scary. Many monsters don’t hurt anyone at all… but they are scary anyway.

I can’t begin to count how many people have told me that I am scary.

I am amused to read that it is a common thing for autistic people to feel like they “come from a different planet” which fits more in with the word alien than the word monster. (I mention this because I have been diagnosed as autistic not because I am trying to talk about “those people”. I’m reflecting on the similar language used by folks who have the same diagnosis as me.) Only I’ve seen every Aliens movie and I can tell you with authority that those things are monsters.

Are they evil? I don’t think so. They are creatures who are trying to survive and we look like food. That’s not more evil than the bacon I had in my soup tonight.

Before you tell me I should be vegan let me tell you that many health professionals have told me that I absolutely need meat for optimal health given my constellations of issues. Veganism may work great for lots of folks… but not everyone.

Anyway.

So I’ve reached a point in the evolution of my brain where I just can’t see monsters as inherently evil. I see them as creatures with too much strength and too much ability to hurt other creatures without necessarily intending to.

Intent doesn’t matter.

I wrote yesterday that I haven’t done a major boundary violation in many years. By that I mean that I haven’t had someone say “Don’t do x to me” and then I do it. I have broken rules. I have broken agreements about what I might go do with other people. I have hurt people by accidentally doing something that would have been a boundary if we had negotiated. (I’m a clumsy bastard and I absolutely do things unintentionally sometimes.)

If intent doesn’t matter, how do I justify calling some things mistakes and other things violations?

We are all hypocritical bastards.

What I mean is that when I was young I had a few times when someone told me “Don’t do x” and I went and did x as fast as possible. I stopped doing that. It helps me sleep better at night.

But I struggle with whether I ever have the right to decide that my “softer” fuck ups are mistakes instead of monstrous violations that are evidence that I should be shunned from society for the good of people.

I look around the bdsm community and I see a lot of people who have been perceived as dangerous/bad/evil/worthy of shunning. Many of these people are monsters.

Are they worse than me? Are they better than me? What metrics are being used to judge? Why are we being judged–what’s the end goal?

The only part that matters to me in the long run is whether I find a self that is worthy to be a model for my children.

I really don’t give a shit if you like or approve of me. And yet you are my community and I love and value you so much. Many of you have contributed words of wisdom to my inside voice that I replay on a regular basis. So many of you have taught me that just because I’m a monster that doesn’t mean I have to damage people on accident. I can learn to have my damage be inflicted rarely and only with great purpose.

This community is a lot of where I learned to value the darkest and hardest parts of myself. It’s ok that I want to cut people open and lick their blood. There are folks who think that is hotter than the sun. It’s ok that I want to hit people and make them cry. There are folks who have something deep inside them made whole by such a process.

It’s not wrong to be a monster.

But can a monster be good? Do I have to be good to teach my children to do good? Do I want to teach them that they must be good?

Oh bdsm community. Do we want our teachers to be a certain level of good? What is that level? What level of goodness is demanded/expected/required of “community leaders” or educators or presenters?

We talk a lot about consent here. But how much information must be given in advance to qualify as informed consent and how much responsibility do we all bear for our fuck ups?

It’s kind of funny that in the long run of my life, the bdsm fuck ups where someone blatantly hurt me or violated my consent are not the things that weigh me down. (I say this from the hubris of having my biggest injury as a bottom be a broken bone. Broken bones heal.) I worry more about when I damaged someone else. Being a victim is not as big of a driving force to change my behavior as knowing that I have used my strength to do someone else damage.

How do we learn to be powerful and strong and monstrous and good enough?

I know I shouldn’t let the word good be taken away by assholes who want to define it as passive… but this shit is complicated.

Would it really be so bad to be a monster if one can do it without shame and without hurting people extra? Hurting people sometimes is life. But maybe just hold back on the extra?

How much hurting people is tolerable? How much is abuse?

I don’t think you have the answers either. I’m thinking that I’m still at the stage where asking the question is all I can do. The answers will come long after I need them. Like all the most important parts of life.

Government Concedes Vaccine-Autism Case in Federal Court

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Once again, largely without comment here is a link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-kirby/government-concedes-vacci_b_88323.html

Another case: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-f-kennedy-jr-and-david-kirby/vaccine-court-autism-deba_b_169673.html

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You just keep going

Do the best you can

Tag Archives: autism

The roller coaster of emotions continues

Tactical errors, failures, and belonging

Priorities and patience

Shards and training

Your first sexual relationship should be with yourself.

Bragging

Life isn’t fair

Social anxiety at 11.

What does the future hold?

Another Day In I Am Too Tired For This Shit

You can’t get to yes without risking no.

So this is what is going on with me.

Problematic people

Where is the balance?

I should be talking to me more.

Food culture

Goodness, monsters, and shame

Government Concedes Vaccine-Autism Case in Federal Court