Tag Archives: body stuff

The roller coaster of emotions continues

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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.

If I don’t do too much not enough gets done.

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My body is not happy with me. I am not doing enough cross training. The kids have been grumpy with each other. This means I am not asking for babysitting much. These periods are rough. Disequilibrium comes for us all. Mostly my children get along ridiculously well. Sometimes people are cranky. This too, shall pass.

Instead of being at lots of yoga classes and running I have been gardening a lot more. Things are really coming along. I’m going to get a lot more food this year and that’ pretty exciting for me. It’s definitely time to be picking greens every single day. This is good because I’ve been having an unpleasant IBS flare. The kids have been opting into cooking instead of other chores. They haven’t been wanting to bother with making vegetables a part of meals. I’ve been eating a lot of starch and cheese with occasional fatty meat. My body hurts. This is not sustainable for me. I’m feeling incredibly ill from it. I miss Noah.

This time is not forever. At some point I will have less overwhelming need to be present in the house. Then I will be able to go back to running on a schedule. Really, I should be doing it in the wee hours of the morning since I’m not sleeping anyway. It’s too bright (yes I have blackout curtains) and too warm (it’s 11C/51F at night). I am ridiculous. Maybe. Or maybe it is my body trying to shift with this season. During the winter time I sleep a lot more. I have actual data on this for almost the whole time I’ve lived here. I sleep around 6 hours a night in the summer and 9 hours a night in the winter.

I’m struggling with task initiation. I’m being hella productive in a revenge procrastination kind of way. I have so many things to do in every day that I wake up behind even though I have more hours a day to do stuff. This is highly annoying. Noah isn’t here to prompt me towards doing the “correct” task. I really hate being the designated adult. I have a lot of meetings that freak me out. I have to do a lot of paperwork. Holy crap did I under-appreciate him while he was alive. He did all the previous rounds of immigration paperwork. Ugh.

My nerve pain is terrible. It feels like no one in my house is fully able bodied. Every day is a triage between who is most able to function doing more work than is strictly ideal. We are still learning. We are still interacting with humans out of the house. We are still cos-playing as functional people but the cost is really high. We do too much borrowing from the future and having to pay back our functionality with extra painful levels of non-functioning. It happens for literally all of us. A lot of it is hormonal and cyclical. Given how synced up we are that means there’s about 18 days a month when everyone is doing well at the same time. Then there is the rest of the time.

The coil has seriously helped with my PMDD and painful periods. At this point I’m spotting a little bit when I have sex and otherwise I don’t bleed. I still have times when I feel a bit sad but that feels reasonable. I’m not having the hyperbolic suicidal jags. My brain has accepted that it’s not an option and I don’t experience the frantic keening need for it.

I feel both like I deeply and desperately need to integrate more people deeply into my life and I am feeling afraid and like I need to reject any offer of anyone getting close to me. I keep feeling trapped in the loop of feeling like I “know” that I will be rejected anyway so why bother trying. I have to try because I can’t get a yes without going through a lot of no’s. It’s the process. It hurts. I don’t want to go through the process.

Viktor Frankl teaches that humans can get through horrifying trauma if they have a why that drives them. My why for a long time has been modeling how to be a healthier human for my kids. That means I don’t get to stop. It is hard giving them what I did not get. It doesn’t matter that it is hard I have to do it anyway. That means I have to work harder not that I get to quit.

I’m tired though. Ugh. Oh well. Get up. Go shower and get dressed. Today I do need babysitting. I need to move and I need to see my friends. Part of modeling being a healthy human is having relationships. I make them tend to their friendships. Friends are the waves that carry you through life. They are very important.

He is a gift to me/Raise your standards

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Noah liked to say that even when I couldn’t articulate the reason why I did something I usually had an intensely accurate perception of my needs. I am going to spend the rest of my life recycling Noah’s words to me and reinterpreting them in different circumstances. I will see his beautiful benevolent face in my mind as I try to forgive myself for not dying with him.

I was right that I needed to lock down sex. That has been the main thing that has improved my mood over the past 17 months. First the thrill of the hunt (which I get a lot out of) and then the gradual experience of someone growing past the box I wanted to put him in. When I met Gentleman it’s not unfair to say I was looking for a human dildo. I needed someone to get me off and it is less scary for me to approach cis men for casual sex.

Then the months went by and he kept doing more and offering more and he learned my bizarre maze of rules and regulations. He doesn’t have to be told things twice. When I say that something is out of bounds he may ask clarifying questions so he can be as respectful as possible but he never needs to be told twice.

I have a shitty memory. Noah was an asshole who took boundary assertions as dares. It’s fucking amazing to date someone who only needs to be told no once. No kidding, this feels shocking and confusing to me on a regular basis.

I stayed home from yoga and the munch today. I couldn’t. I am trying to be ok with my vast limitations. Gentleman came over afterwards and we had a really lovely date. He played with my daughter in the garden while I did some weeding. We picked up new wheels for my wheelbarrows. We had really lovely sex. I’m definitely less frantic than I was this morning. I am very much an addict when it comes to sex. Withdrawals aren’t pretty. It’s been an awkward last whole week and change so sex has been challenging to arrange. Today he laid me out like a pillow princess. He made me flood a small village. It was a good time.

Mostly though he listened to me talk/cry for a couple of hours. He held me while I cried. He gives me space to have feelings. I’m still so terribly unable to let loose like this with most of my friends here. I am scared to stress test the relationship like that. I need these friends very much. They are important to me. I won’t always be this hard and I need them to still be around later. I don’t have a massive pond of people to burn through here. I have to carefully cultivate the only options available.

I’m not sad about the friends I have made here. I have met some really neato people and I feel lucky to know them. I’m not saying that they are the bottom of the barrel or anything. I found some really great candidates of open minded folks who have a big Krissy shaped hole in their lives.

Gentleman is one of them. He unfolds like a flower in my life, slowly and carefully. I was pessimistic about our chances starting in week two. I kept expecting him to blow up at me or judge me or be nasty to me and so far… no sign of any of the above. Instead he shows up and listens to me cry about how overwhelmed I feel and he responds with, “What I’m getting from this is I need to not wait to be asked. I will come over and do things.”

And they say men don’t listen.

I feel like a lot of what is making this relationship go so well is that we aren’t super stress testing it. We haven’t jumped into the deep end with both feet. We have not had that many overnights yet. We both arrived at this relationship believing we didn’t want to live with a partner again. We both want freedom and companionship. It’s a great match. He appreciates that I’m not the only one in my house who has long term plans around him sticking around. We like him. We’d like to keep him. Not because he sweeps the floors (though that is fucking awesome) but mostly because he comes in and he asks all of us questions. He treats us as interesting people with stories to tell. He contributes and doesn’t expect us to be serfs while he lounges.

It took over a year for the first serious scene. I think that was so smart. We got to know each other first. We waited to see how we got along outside of the chemical storm of play. Also he is pretty dang good at topping. I am excited about the play we will do down the line. I feel like we are going to have fun discovering what we like together.

I needed to lock down sex. I did not expect to find someone so remarkably compatible and kind that quickly and easily on a swinger site. I did not expect to find someone who would slowly drift further into my life a little more with every month. Someday we will probably find the “just right” amount. I don’t think we have hit it yet. We are still building. That feels right. That feels appropriate. It feels safe and respectful. I feel like it continues to be the right path for me to set the hurdles high for entry into my life. People who want me have to put effort into it. I will not push myself on anyone. I am too horrified about the implications of that. People have to actively choose me. I am going to do my best to not let anyone accidentally opt into something that is outside their ability to cope with. I’m a lot.

I don’t think I’m too much. That’s a different thing. That’s a value judgment. I’m not making a value judgment in this moment. I’m simply acknowledging the shape and size of personality I have. It’s a lot. Like Alaska joined up with Russia a lot. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Space isn’t all bad. Maintaining a bond with something that huge is work and people should be allowed to choose it knowingly or opt out.

I like that he wants to be my sustenance. He wants to be my food, not my candy.

That makes me feel really happy because I desperately need a lot of vegetables and not much candy. I can’t take the inflammation.

I feel so incredibly lucky that he is in my life. He is being incredibly kind and thoughtful about slowly building a very conscious relationship. I feel like everyone in my house is being given a chance to slowly get to know him and develop affection on their own time scale. This feels so healthy and positive.

I have been a rusher for most of my life. Now that feels terrifying in an existential way. I can’t survive a lot of extra turbulence right now. I am skating on very thin ice. All the fucking metaphors.

He makes my body feel better. He makes me feel like I have good things to look forward to. I have fun short, medium, and long term plans with him. I like that he lets me take care of him and I like that he takes care of me.

I feel sort of guilty that he will calm me down enough to go talk to Pretty Lady. That’s a squidgy thing. People who are already poly can appreciate that desire sparks desire. It can feel harder when you are first leaving monogamy. I am so worried about all of the things I want from my future.

I want them so much I feel like my hands are seething flames of need. I need violence so very much. I need to give it. I need to receive it. I need to be able to love and adore a woman as much as I want without getting in trouble for it. I need to be able to be selfish.

It really feels like asking for all this is too much. It’s not fair. Surely someone wouldn’t put up with me when this is the deal.

I’m pretty sure I’m going to see him again tomorrow, even if only for a little while. If we don’t see each other we will still talk.

I believe him. I am finding him to be a consistent person who cares a lot about maintaining things and keeping them in good trim. He does the relationship maintenance work. He’s been briefed to a degree that seems reasonably fair. I haven’t told him every detail because we will probably never have those conversations. It doesn’t feel necessary.

Do you know how weird that feels to me? In my in person life I may never again have a relationship where I talk in gritty details about my past. Most of what I needed to talk through… I talked to Noah. If Noah was here we would have talked about that stuff forever. He would have dug ever deeper into my earliest trauma. He wanted to be able to shove knives into my trauma with ever greater precision. When he hypnotised me and told me to react like I was 3 or 4 or 5 he wanted to know what stage of trauma I was physically experiencing again.

I don’t think I want anyone else to know those things. I think, maybe, it is time for me to stop being reharmed in the same few spots. I’m allowed to close the door on that trauma and leave it alone. Maybe, just maybe, the scab will heal if I stop picking at it.

Maybe it is ok for me to do the kind of bdsm that Vicki loved. Maybe I don’t have to keep contorting myself into being Noah’s victim.

Maybe it is ok for me to have higher standards. Maybe I don’t have to buy acceptance and love with my willingness to let someone hurt me as much as they want. Maybe I am good enough without that.

Maybe.

I really like him. He’s a great boyfriend.

(I want you to know that I flinched over each usage of “just” but they felt necessary.)

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.

Users Guide 4.1

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Users Guide 4.0

Holy shit. I’m heading into the 4th chapter of my whore life. That’s pretty intense. Time for a total rewrite.

Decades ago I copied the idea of a users guide from Lee Harrington because I know that I have a different approach to sex than other people. Therefore it seems like a lovely idea to have some sort of cheat sheet about how to handle me in general. Some of these things I have figured out on my own, some of these things I have had pointed out to me by friends and/or lovers/husband, some of these things are constantly in flux and will no longer be true in just a few months. Of course this is a living document and therefore subject to change and revision without notice. Just because something is in here doesn’t mean you should assume that for now and all times this is the only thing I like/want/don’t like etc. After the roller coaster that is pregnancy/giving birth/having chronic health issues, I promise you things change in my body over time.

It’s fairly cis-het centric, but I tried to not lock myself in a ghetto I don’t want to live in.

Index:
A. Before sex (including courtship/getting to know one another)

B. During sex (including bdsm play)

C. After sex (including relationship level interactions)

A. Before Sex

a. General

Never assume that you are going to get to go to bed with me. Yes, I go to bed with quite a few people—that doesn’t mean I will choose you. The phrase is cautious optimism. I expect and require that people treat me as an equal, and more importantly as an intelligent, thoughtful, responsible human being until otherwise negotiated. Please don’t act like I ought to be honored to teach you whatever it is you want to know about play/sex/whatever. I have taught classes, thrown parties, run a conference, and initiated both virgins and newbies alike. I’ve put in my time to the community. I can coast on doing what pleases me and only what pleases me.

b. Specifics in a Having-Kids-Lifestyle

I don’t have a lot of free time. I have even less time for dating. What little free time I have during the day is mostly spent alone exercising because I have a very high intensity life that requires me to be well regulated emotionally. I can’t focus on getting to know new adults in a really concentrated/intense way. It’s not that I am flakey, I don’t have much availability. Well, to be honest I’m a little flakey. My priority at this stage of my life is being nice to my kids. I have to keep the rest of my life quiet enough for that to happen or I have to drop other stuff. That is the deal until 2036.

c. Kissing

This gets a whole section. Way before sex because it often happens long before sex happens. I like to kiss. Kissing is a big thing for me. I think kissing is one of the most intimate activities and if I am going to bed or playing with you I am seeking intimacy. Intimacy doesn’t mean you’ll be my one twue love or that we will settle down. It just means I want to know you. If I want intimate contact with you, I probably want kissing to be part of that. (See below section on STI’s.) I do not like to kiss tobacco smokers.

a. Hair

Once upon a time I said that I prefer clean shaven men, but that has radically changed during my adulthood. My opinion now varies tremendously based on personal attitude, grooming standards, and just plain what suits each face. As for the hair on other peoples heads: I don’t care anymore. I barely notice. I’m interested in your mind. I like body hair on anyone of any gender. Pubic hair doesn’t affect me one way or the other; suit yourself. I sometimes shave or epilate large portions of my body. I sometimes skip shaving for over a year at a go. You have to be totally ok with either or go away.

b. Weight/height

My weight usually goes up and down in a 40 pound range like a yo yo, semi-annually. Over the past three years I have lost 75 pounds from my lifetime high after my second round of cancer followed by lock downs. (I’m sorry that I’m a fucking American, ok. I’ll translate a lot but the body weight one is hard.) You can’t be attracted to me for a specific look of my body. It might be different next month. My health is variable and my body shifts with my ability to exercise. I like people with bodies. I like fat bodies. I am more appreciative of slender/”fit” bodies than I used to be, but I still prefer some heft. I used to be a bit hung up on height (not that into anyone over 5’11”) and now I don’t care. I like people.

c. Gender

I am a cis-gender woman. If you haven’t picked up on the fact that I am queer then you haven’t been reading closely. I have had strong attractions to people at every point on the gender spectrum. I am completely comfortable having sexual contact that begins with, “What words do you want me to use for your body parts and how do you want me to touch you?” because I can’t guess. Everyone is unique.

d. Cocks (What the hell—since I am listing my preferences…)

Everyone should remember that the vagina is all about potential space. Yes, it can technically stretch, but in a normal resting spot it isn’t particularly large. My body doesn’t stretch terribly well or willingly (even after giving birth to three children) so I am not a fan of overly large cocks. If it is going to cause my jaw to be sore within five minutes of oral sex I will probably experience a lot of pain during vaginal sex and that isn’t good for me. I will not even attempt anal if you are large, are you insane? I am not a size queen. I do not have lower limits on the size of cocks I can figure out how to enjoy. Not all sex is about penis in vagina sex. But I do have upper limits. Ow. No thank you. It’s not personal.

e. Race/marginalization

This is complicated. I am aware that I am most comfortable treating heterosexual white men like pieces of meat. If I fuck them and don’t call later I don’t feel that bad. I clearly negotiate and label the deal I am offering. I have major hang ups around using people of color and women and folk of ambiguous gender in the same way. I feel tremendous shame and guilt around hurting already marginalized people and I don’t have a lot to give. Which is to say, I really like having sex with people who are not het white men. I have a hard time approaching them. I don’t want to hurt them and I am less clear on the boundaries. I err on the side of not being a user asshole. But if you are interested, let me know.

f. Oral Hygiene

YES. Bad breath/teeth that look unclean is really really really repellent to me. I generally won’t kiss someone with bad breath. I will elect not to even if you are a nice person. Just no. I smoke pot and that has impact on my mouth. I do not mind kissing other people who smoke pot. I still really am not fond of kissing tobacco smokers. I don’t like the taste at all. Notice how it is mentioned twice? Really not into tobacco smokers.

B. During Sex

I will say clearly and plainly that I want to have sex with you. Consent will be clear. Once consent has been established, game on. If I say no later, I mean no. I am not looking for resistance/rape play at this time. I don’t intend to pretend I don’t want to be there. I want to be there, probably quite badly.

The first thing that ought to happen before foreplay is a discussion of STI testing patterns and safer sex expectations. I don’t have habits at the moment because I’m just starting. I’m still adjusting. Depending on my rate of whoring I will go back to either every 3 months or every 6 months.

I have had HPV. I tested positive in 2003. I had cryosurgery. I have tested negative since.

I also test positive for HSV1, commonly known as oral herpes. I have had a few cold sores as an adult but they are rare and I feel them coming. If you think that HSV1 is a deal breaker for you for oral sex or for kissing, we are probably better sticking to being friends.

I am a big proponent of the idea that we are having “safer” sex. The only safe sex is with your hand. There is risk involved in the play I do and I acknowledge it and try to minimize it. I do not have a desire to play with people who are in denial about said risk. I like the current acronym: RASH. Risk aware, shit happens. We’ll all do our best but at some point something will happen to someone. Let’s cope like adults. Test often, use barriers.

I have gloves with me in my whore bag. I will be using them and asking partners to use them. I also have dental dams and flavoured condoms and lube.

Condoms are not negotiable for vaginal penetration with new partners. I have chosen to fluid bond with my boyfriend. I take it very seriously that I am responsible for his health. I will be operating like everyone is positive for multiple bugs and I will use the appropriate barriers. Safety is important, y’all. Luckily I’ve taken a bunch of classes on making sex fun while using barriers. San Francisco was a great place to become a pervert in the 00’s.

Blood play requires extensive blood testing in advance and long-term negotiation. I do not do it casually. It would require a long-term serious relationship and given the limits of my life I can’t imagine being able to get there any year soon.

a. Breasts

This has morphed so much over my life. Dang. What I like can vary dramatically over the course of my menstrual cycle. I like everything from mild sensation to extreme pain but all pain play requires a warm up. If you act like you can just yank super hard at my boob out of nowhere I may elbow you as hard as I can. However, if you do it right, hurting my nipples gets me off a lot. But you have to do it right. On the right day of the moon. It’s a moving target. Always a fun adventure of discovery no matter where the journey takes you.

b. Ways to turn me on

First and foremost: talk to me. Tell me how hot you think I am. Tell me what you want to do to me. Tell me what you are doing while you are doing it. Just hearing you narrate how wet I am when you slide your finger into my cunt will increase the quantity of wetness. Read me porn. Have me read you porn. My brain is the most potent sexual organ in my body. Pay attention to it. Do you know why I like having sex with my friends? Because the ones I have sex with are the ones who have spent years buttering me up talking about what they like from sex.

Stroke my legs, particularly behind my knees. It is very easy to turn me on when I am lying on my stomach and my legs and back are stroked lightly. This is by far the most sensuous activity for me. I love having my neck and head stroked gently. It’s not a massage–it’s a waking up to sensual contact type of touch.

Receiving biting is hard. I like it when it is gentle but if it hurts too much it can cause me to go to dark mental place and I am prone to dissociation. To be fully clear: I haven’t done any experiments with biting in over a decade. I have done a lot of work on dissociation in other areas of my life but I haven’t done the work on biting specifically. It never hit the top of the triage list for fixing between Noah and I. It isn’t off the table but it’s complicated. Be really careful. Watch me. Make sure I am still “there”. Probably don’t try this on a first or second date because we should have some established trust first. I fucking love biting other people.

Tell me how to please you. I love having someone tell me how to get them off—it will usually be enough to get me off. An awful lot of what I get out of sex with people is that thrilling feeling of, “Yay!” We are feeling alive together!” So lots of instructions about what you want and how you want things to be done to you turn me into butter. (Once you have permission to talk to me like this. If I indicate a boundary you had better back off like you hit an electric fence or you’ll get the full force of my fury and I promise you won’t like it.)

Orgasm control is a complex part of my life. I tried to eliminate it from my body before and had poor success. I am going to continue to try to make progress on this but for now it is what it is. Guess what folks, long term M/s relationships have side effects. If we have sex you need to give me permission to come. You need to do it every time. “Yes” is a good enough answer. “Please?” “Yes.” is a great way to manage this with the least amount of embarrassment for me. Having to give the full freaking explanation every time because you forgot gets embarrassing. If you tell me to wait that is a D/s interaction. If we have not negotiated that you are jumping a fence. If you tell me that you won’t give me permission, I just have to come when I feel like it you are telling me that I don’t get to come. What happens is my body shuts down that part of me. I become a hole for use but I won’t feel almost any of it. I have a really extreme trauma history and dissociation was once a nearly full time survival tactic.

It’s not a fucking casual scene for me.

I like giving oral sex. A lot a lot a lot. I like it the most if there is some degree of being strongly encouraged involved. I’m not talking about serious forcing, but pushing my head down toward your cunt is going to get me all wet. Telling me to suck your cock will get me all wet. Asking me politely is a complicated thing now that I live in the UK. The level of manners is just different and I am having to find a new normal. I have no idea how this will shake out down the line. Given that my vanilla shagging skills are on the rise I expect I will find a way to cope.

For the record: if I have given you oral sex I consider you one of my sexual partners. None of this “oral sex doesn’t count as sex” crap. Don’t bloody ever tell me that we haven’t really had sex. You have fucked my body or I have fucked yours and probably (hopefully) you have come inside or on me. We have had sex. Sure, it was a different hole. Whoopie. It was still penetrative sex. Don’t worry about asking me if it is ok to come in my mouth. If I like you enough to let your dick in my mouth, I’m happy to have you come. I do prefer being told when it is happening so I can sync my breathing, but it is just a preference.

I do have a strong gag reflex and if I seriously fight to bring my head back after you have forcibly shoved my head down on your cock, for the love of Cheese let me go. I may be on my way to run to the bathroom and vomit. It has happened. It will probably happen again. I accept this. Please don’t let the possibility of this happening prevent you from fucking my mouth with enthusiasm. It is great for me. This being said, I’m not terribly thrilled with having a relationship centered solely around me giving blow jobs. I will feel used in a way that isn’t fun for me.

Since I’m talking about dicks so much. I haven’t played with someone who has a cunt in many years. I remember them fondly. I would like to believe I will figure it out with gusto if given the opportunity but there is the chance I am lying to myself. I could totally fail to be fun.

Also: I really like getting oral sex while wearing a strap on. That is fucktastically hot. The grinding is good for me.

Receiving oral on my pussy is a thing I do because I like you. You kind of have to have a magic wand to get me off that way. Some of you have one. I like you. It starts with the thighs. Stay on the thighs for a very long time. You think you’ve done long enough and you are ready to go for the little man in the boat? You are wrong. Stay on the thighs. How long? Three times that long. And then you touch the lower labia. You stay the fuck away from the little man in the boat. Am I making myself clear? You go back and forth between the labia and the thighs for a whole lot longer. Eventually I will indicate, yeah, go for it. Then and only then do you go for the little man in the boat. Being impatient will only make it suck in a not fun way for me. I guess we’ll see whether you are doing it for me or for yourself. Fingers are a very important part of this process.

I am old, cranky, and I have chronic pain. There are times when I am up for acrobatic porn-star sex. There are days when it is, “I am here. What more do you want from me?” I can be fun enough whatever my range for the day. But you will have to respect where my body is on a given day. Your fantasies take a back seat to my physical limitations. I have disabilities. Such is life.

Holy moly this section is changing. I might have vibrators in my whore bag. If you want them to come out, ok. I am unlikely to bother. I would prefer you. I am there because I want you.

This needs a whole section. Slut and whore are both words I have intensely positive associations with and they do not feel like degradation for me. They mean I embrace pleasure in this life and feel a sense of responsibility around sharing that with people. That’s not something that makes me bad. I’m very good because I do this. They are both affirmations of parts of myself that I am proud of. They do not belittle me. They do not mean I am bad or unclean or gross or shameful. Being both a slut and a whore is connected to how I am good.

However, I am not a bitch. I am not being mean. I am not gross or dirty or bad. I am a very nice woman who has come over to make your life a more fun place for a little while. I need you to pay me respect for doing so.

In short: “Slut and whore: good. Bitch: bad.”

Complicated. Once upon a time I spent a lot of time tying people up and being tied up. I miss it fiercely. I really like being tied up. I really like being suspended. I really really like being suspended and fucked. Oh the good old days.

I’m in a weird spot with group sex. I am theoretically open to it but I would need to feel like everyone involved was there as a completely autonomous adult to have fun. I am not ok with ever feeling pimped out again. Don’t fucking ask me to bring you women or I will want to burn you to the ground.

We need to be equals.

a. Choking

Choking is completely off the table. I have a long and storied history of head trauma and pre-stroke symptoms that are very concerning. I have children who need me. I cannot risk my life for your orgasm.

b. Impact play

I like punching and kicking. Those are basically my favorite things.

I thought being hit with a giant rubber mallet was absolutely awesome. Single tails are harder than they used to be, but I am open to learning how to process them again. I have a long-term love/hate affair with canes. Sting from a broad hand slap is really hard for me. I like thud. I dislike floggers because they impact too much skin at once.

c. Pinching

Don’t pinch me. Don’t pinch me. Don’t pinch me. I will fucking hate you. (Other than nipples. Do that slowly.) Grabbing a whole big handful of muscle/fat is different though. It can be really nice sometimes.

Due to some of the stuff that happened when I was very young I have a whole lot of scar tissue throughout my vagina/labia/anus. Scar tissue is like a dotted line in the skin that means, “Please tear here.” Despite my very strong desire for rough, and rougher, and rougher sex… I can’t actually handle all that I would like to handle. (Damnit.) Don’t pull roughly on my labia. Don’t pull my ass cheeks apart with any speed or force. Just DON’T. The skin has the potential to tear open and it will hurt and that might curtail sex for hours if not days. It sucks ass and so I try to avoid massive tearing. Gentle handling of the bits is important. I am delicate in a way you would not expect from someone with my overall temperament. I’m a fragile toy. Treat me with care.

But also finger bang me like you are playing the fastest game of ping pong in your life because I can squirt like a motherfucker and apparently that is amusing/satisfying/something.

Because we will be having sex with condoms lube must be very close by. It is my friend.

My third kid wrecked my asshole. I’ve had multiple surgeries to repair the area. It’s still not perfect. I do like anal stimulation it’s just fraught. I am interested in finding out what I can handle in the future after the last round of surgery but it has to be done with extreme care and deliberation.

C. After sex/play

Immediately after sex/play I will want to breathe and hug for a few minutes. I will probably want to spend an extended period of time talking and making out. I will want a check in email afterwards for any bdsm play–I do not need it for vanilla sex. I like being friends with people but that has to happen around my schedule. It is highly limited. I’m not rejecting you. I’m dealing with the fact that right now my life is about figuring out how to be healthy around my kids and that is much harder for me than you might think. It takes a lot of time and energy. It is very important to me that I do this right because now I am all they have. It will remain my focus for quite some time.

For the foreseeable future I am going into any and all sex or play with the mindset that there are no promises to be made. All encounters are done if they are fun for all involved and they work in that moment. I would like it if things started out with the option of being open ended if we both have enough fun, but no pressure if we don’t. I am not looking for anything that is a conscious one off from the outset. Vetting is laborious. I do not relish doing that much work for only a couple of hours of reward. That’s super low cost to benefit ratio. I want to have consistent and predictable sex with people who are going to be kind to me.

I have a boyfriend. I have a nice lady I am courting. I am solo poly with a hard bent towards relationship anarchy. I want more connection than I am capable of maintaining without giving up sleep. It’s going to be a balancing act for the next few years.

If you are already a part of my vanilla life with my children then I am probably going to decline sex with you for the foreseeable future. I need that community to stay stable for them. Sex is a catalyst for all kinds of change. Those changes can wait for a different season. I need to preserve the stability of my family above all.

Old shit and new shit

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It’s been on my mind a lot lately how much Noah resented me having a lot of friends in the kink community. He acted like them liking me meant he wasn’t really part of the group. He did have his own friends who came to kink events, but he considered them more “visitors” to kink from computerland. He thought of himself and his friends as weekend warriors who “didn’t really count” in the eyes of the Leather people. He wasn’t all wrong.

He didn’t want to put the time in to go sit at munches or go to parties without any hope of play. For him if there was no payoff there wasn’t a point. Then he resented that I had so many friends. He resented that I had so many opportunities to play when he didn’t.

I practically lived at scene events for 5 years. I was at scene events at least 4 days a week and often 7. These events would last anywhere from 2 hours to all weekend. I was spending probably a minimum of 15 hours a week at scene events. Then there were the immersive conferences I went to many times a year that lasted 3 or 4 year. Even more rarely (but ever more precious) were the ones that lasted 7 days.

Of course I had friends in the scene.

If you assume 15 hours a week (totally ignoring conferences) and giving me two weeks off a year for illness, that is 750 hours a year. Given that a weekend event would add at least 50 hours to that and I went to several most years I hit at least 1,000 hours a year at scene events for 5 years running.

No fucking shit I made a lot of friends. That’s not including the time I spent with friends. I was one of those assholes who “only knows scene people” for a few years. I was grateful my vanilla friends forgave me for being a neglectful asshole for a while after I came back. I made a lot of them take minor walks on the wild side and they learned that they were not kinky. Oh well. At least they can say for sure that they didn’t like being tied up all that much. I have some very funny pictures that are on paper and will never be on the internet. I like that. In the old days, privacy was a much easier thing.

Some things are great to remember forever. Some things should be forgotten because they were only meant to live for a moment in a very small container.

I do really wonder about sending my buddy one of the pictures of him tied up and suspended. He is very very very very Catholic with his 7? 8? children. I wonder how old man him would feel about our youthful games. It was good clean fun. Sure, it was sex but it was the kind where everyone stays fully dressed and nobody touches any junk.

It was wholesome, damn it!

I could send other pictures to the dear old friend in Utah doing his best to expand the tolerance level of the Mormon church. He believes God brought me into his life and his heart for a reason. He is militant about advocating for people like me.

A long time ago I was learning and exploring and I was brand new. I didn’t feel responsible for the outcome.

Now I feel really shitty that I bumped into someone at the munch repeatedly in a playful way without ever having a conversation about such things first. I am grateful that he has accepted my apology but I’m too fucking old for this shit.

I feel this overwhelming responsibility to do it “right” all the time and I don’t.

I am having a hard time with the amount of personal space awareness the kink scene requires. I have fucked up several times since I came to Scotland and I am really upset with myself for being so messy about these things. They are small mistake size but there have been a couple and I don’t like it. I am not reticent enough. I am not contained enough.

I struggle, often, with how reticent and wary to act folks are locally. I have the polar opposite problem. I am overly comfortable with the idea of acting. I am the exact kind of asshole who, when someone is passing, will bump into them and say “oops” a couple of times. I don’t do it hard. I don’t try to hurt anyone. I’m playing. But I don’t have the right to be familiar with anyone’s body.

Noah wanted me away from my friends and he got his wish. I have very little time in a room with anyone here. Even the people I’ve spent the most time with I’m still awkward and I feel like I don’t understand the boundaries. I sometimes wonder if Bestie and I like to dance together so much because that is the only way we can manage to be in that kind of proximity to each other. We aren’t snuggly at all. I touch my kids. Gentleman and I have sex.

Noah touched me for hours and hours and hours every day.

I feel desperate for kinesthetic, tactile relationships. Being sober is the fucking worst. I don’t feel sexy and I’m not going to initiate sex. If I look anything other than horny he doesn’t initiate.

My body aches with the desire to be in contact with humans.

It is feeling a little rocky as I start adding stuff back into my life because I desperately need more fucking contact than I am having. Most of the time I’m filling is kid-stuff adjacent so it means very minimal physical contact and only that initiated by short people.

It is the size and shape of life I was allowed to have with Noah. He allowed me to have more than a full time job worth of socialising while he was working because I could justify pretty much all of it for the kids. It is literally my fucking job to socialise these children. That was well done of me to get my whole life set up around filling my particular needs.

As it gets warmer I keep thinking about the fact that I have about 5 months to go until It’s 2 years out from the rape. The last year and a half have been brutal on my sense of community. I am so lonely. I don’t get out enough. We don’t get out enough. Home educating is harder here. The community is spread out so far it’s a real problem since I don’t drive.

Building community here is a much harder path than it was in California. The population density is small. Also: I used to drive. This whole fucking process is a fucking nightmare sometimes. I choose this. I can’t go back, not for a million reasons. This is where I have to bloom. Maybe it’ll be ok. This country does glorify the thistle.

I’m not going to be able to get to scene events very often and when I go I am going to want to be fully present with the people in the room. I’m not going so that I can have a place to do public scenes with my partner. I mean, yes, that’s on the list of things I’m happy to do. It’s not The reason.

I’m having to think about this really hard because both Gentleman and Pretty Lady are making comments about wanting to be part of this. That’s fucking complicated. Because when I go to a party I want to see the people I don’t get to see all the rest of the time. I don’t go to a party to be watched. I go to meet people and talk and play with new people. I need to build a bigger friends network in this country. I need it. I am not saturated in terms of relationships. Nothing of the sort. I don’t know how much more serious dating I have space for at this point. Definitely not with anyone outside the radius.

My life is constrained. I want to get to know people who live on the coasts, and Borders, and central belt. (I am honestly not sure how I should be capitalising that sentence. Feedback? I go back and forth on whether Central Belt should be capitalised. I think “Borders” is a specific region and thus a proper noun? I’m trying to guess based on how people speak and I’m forking confused.) I only have chances to see those people at parties. Like, I’m not going to spend the whole time hanging out with my Kids either.

Mama is going to play. If I can. If not, I want to make new friends. It is less important to me that I find play all the time. I must feel the freedom to be able to get into a really deep, meaningful conversation with someone without checking my watch.

I am tetchy as all fuck about this. I’m being defensive when I don’t have to be. Maybe this is a bad month for a tolerance break. I am going to have to have a lot of control over my tone of voice in ways I’m not doing great at today. My kids don’t tell me to use this medication because I am easy to live with without it. “With your medication you are a very happy mama. Without your medication you are rather a fucking bitch. Go take your medication.” Direct quote.

I feel bad about that.

I don’t know how my relationship with Gentleman is going to survive a tolerance break. Maybe this month is not a good idea. We are going to have to talk through me going to a party on my own and going to a party with him. Maybe I am going to need an amount of control I just literally don’t have available while sober. My choice is not speaking at all because no, I am not going to be able to say it as nice as you need me to. I can’t. I literally fucking can’t. This is why I take medication. So that I fucking can.

Drug dependence is fucking real. But the thing is, I have all these issues without the medication. I’ve had problems my whole damn life. On the medication I am a moderately functional human being.

I remember when I went on the road trip I got into an argument with my Utah pal’s mother in law. She was taking something like 18 different medications. We talked about them a great deal. I went through the research on cannabis and how using it would probably knock her down to 1 or 2 pills. She said, “No. It’s illegal because it’s bad for you. Nothing about it could ever work or be useful.” The conversation went on for a while. She said a lot of things. I found it really amusing. We make ourselves believe so many things.

Literally 8 fucking doctors all signed on that cannabis is the most useful medication that exists for me and I should use it for the rest of my life. That included a fucking pediatrician and ob/gyn who worked with me through multiple pregnancies and I breast fed for 7 fucking years. That’s not good enough for this country though. I have to wait through the waiting lists then get rejected by the NHS for multiple kinds of treatment having no effect before I can get capsules here.

Life does not give a flying fuck about anyone. These things are silly.

I’m feeling oppressed and pieces of it are mildly reasonable even if they aren’t personal.

I feel exhausted to my soul.

One day of break. I don’t think this is the month. I think that’s going to go poorly. I don’t think I have that resolve to give. I think I will be too snippy and bitchy. I don’t think I have enough relationship capital in this relationship to be allowed to have a bad mood. That’s good to know. It is very important for me to respect the limits of a container. When I understand what caliber of self is required I can select the timing of my performance and make sure I don’t exceed my limits.

Noah and I took turns taking tolerance breaks and being grouchy shitheads. We knew to sigh deeply and ignore each other for a while. It will pass. Every feeling passes.

I don’t think I have space in my life for volatility right now. I don’t think that self is acceptable. That’s a hard thing for a bunch of reasons. Physically I do need the break. I don’t do them for fun.

I think this is one of those times when I have to pick what kind of selfish I am going to be. I can either be sexually selfish or I can be selfish about being moody. I don’t think I get to have both right now.

I think I’m getting close to 15 people with whom I’ve had enough conversations to fill more than 24 in person hours of friendship. That’s 6.5 years in.

I’m not popular here. I have an asshole telling people wild stories about me and my dead husband. I’m kind of an abrasive bitch and I’ve already had a messy falling out with one dude and that’s not great. Someone dislikes me for very good cause. I was far too aggressive in questioning them about a rapist. I was really selfish and it was wrong.

No, I don’t have a bunch of fucking friends right now. Well, I do, but my friends are mostly thousands of miles away. I don’t have a community here that I have built with time and shared connection. I have a bunch of strangers and a lot of hope. I have a desperate need for the kind of communion I have found with Leather people.

It’s not the same here, but it’s close enough. I’ll accept kinksters instead of Leather. I’m not snobby.

Now I have more like 12 hours in this month where I get to be around kinky people. Last month, because of the house party, it was like 72 hours of being around kinky people. Most months 10 or 12 hours.

I do not feel like this is all happening super fast. This feels glacial to me. I’m not going to have a lot of time in public kinky gatherings. I am going to talk to people and get to know everyone I can. Even the ones you don’t like. Even the ones I end up not liking. I still want to meet them all. This is a fucking small pond and I want to know who is in the ecosystem.

Why?

Because that makes me feel like a whole person. I don’t want to tell you what to do or boss you or decide who is good or bad or moral or ethical. I want to feel like there are a lot of people who are going to need to come together for my funeral. I want to be part of a lot of stories. I need it. I won’t be a main character for them, don’t be silly. I will be a recurring walk on with a scenery chewing personality. You can’t keep me around too much because I will steal the show. I shove people into building their own lives as hard as I can.

I can’t help being loud and sometimes difficult. I can make sure that people don’t have to put up with me when I am feeling like that. There are reasons I wanted a detached house so no one has to hear how obnoxiously loud and American we are.

I am feeling intensely harsh and imperfect. Feelings. Feelings I can’t word. Feelings that I would regret wording.

There is no fair to the fact that I am still over reacting to the repression Noah enforced. It’s not nice for Gentleman that I’ve had a lot of years of the same damn argument and I react like it’s the thousandth time instead of the sixth.

I think one of the big differences in my mind is that kink is for individuals more than couples. It’s not like swinging where there is the priority on enforcing the outside dyad dynamic. There are couples who are intensely together and monogamous entirely who are active in the kink community. That’s a fine and dandy thing. Most people are at least play poly even if they are otherwise monogamous. We come to make friends and share time exploring a mind bending hobby. It’s better than drugs.

My order of safer sex supplies arrived. I had been missing a few things. This is good. I sincerely doubt any of them will get used this weekend. I would put it below a 5% chance. It’s not a sex party. I like serendipity though. Chance favours the prepared mind. Those who fail to plan, plan to fail. Or plan to get cock/cunt blocked by their own stupidity and laziness.

Realistically I’m going to be lucky if I can get past feeling anxious as fuck and even talk to people much. I am opening a door Noah didn’t want opened. This feels existentially terrifying and hard and painful.

The thing is, I’m on the other side. I want to be fully me again and I am feeling inhibited. I am feeling like it isn’t ok.

The fun thing is, I won’t be going as a piece of meat. I’m too old and picky and bitchy for that shit. I’m a bitch who expects people to jump over hurdles for me. I can’t expect to find that at a random party. One can always maintain hope though. There are a lot of ways I can think that through to find some fun.

It all depends on who is in the room and I don’t know yet. I don’t know if I might as well rock up in my stretchy leggings and a prairie dress because comfort is over fashion while I’m chatting and getting no action. I’ll dress up if I have to. I am very lazy though. I like being comfortable so I’m not sure the kind of dressing up I’m up for will even count these days. I’m old and in pain and I don’t give a shit if I look like a fetish model.

If I run a lot more and maybe uhhh cut back a tiny bit on the cake I might be able to fake that shit for a couple of nights. I have some really cool leather dresses. Amusingly, Noah bought them both. He never wanted to go anywhere with me where I could wear them. That was always so strange to me. He knew that wearing these made me feel like a fancy bitch. He thought that owning them was the same as wearing them. He was so smart and also really stupid.

This is one of the things I am going to have to get used to and react like a grown up. I will never have a Daddy again. Daddy’s have to tolerate their children being moody and petulant sometimes. It’s part of the deal. I don’t have a Daddy anymore. I should be in bed. This is when Noah had an alarm. He’d come and get me and give me a stern look.

He took care of me in so many ways. He made me believe that I was worth an awful lot of effort and then he left me alone.

I think solo poly is awesome because I can appreciate a relationship without needing to be upset about all the things a relationship is not. In my home I will always be safe to have all the feelings without having to constrain them to what people want them to be. Come over when you can handle me. Go home when you are done with my bullshit for the day. It seems quite reasonable to me.

Oh shitballs.

Tonight has been a lot of screaming and sobbing. I don’t think I can do a month off right now. It doesn’t matter how much I hate this cough. No, I don’t have better options. Don’t bring them up. You can’t fix everyone’s situation. Your resources are different. We all have to figure out our own shit and it fucking sucks.

I am so tired of curling inward with shame because existing as what I am hurt Noah so much. I did. That’s a fact. I also made him beam with love and go out and do really cool things with his life because he wanted to fund our adventures as a family. He wanted to support us doing cool shit.

He’s gone now. I don’t expect anyone to be patient with my bullshit. When I am given grace it is a gift. I need to work very hard to make fewer mistakes. I need to practice more. It’s really hard finding the time. Typing at people doesn’t actually count, not really. Not for what I need.

I need to know which people in the room I can walk up to with great enthusiasm and throw myself at them because they enjoy that kind of thing. I need to know which people I should smile and wave at, maybe we will chat a little while snacking. I need to know who is going to light up when they see me.

I won’t find out if I am looking at the floor and bouncing my eyes. I hate that I feel like I am fighting against intense pressure. Oh wait, there were literal hundreds of hours of hypnosis about this topic. I’m not supposed to do this.

I’m going to have some feelings as I do it. It’s going to be fucking gnarly. I will be torn between crying and grinning like my life depends on it. Like I will get hit if I don’t.

I don’t believe anyone in this environment would strike me if I had resting bitch face. This is not rational. I am fully aware, thank you very much. The thing is, what I need is to be a positive force for folks. I have to show up when I can show up.

I have seen a lot of people live life to the fullest and I have seen a lot of people squander their precious time. The older I get the more blessed I feel that I had to move so many times. It’s funny how I don’t want to give that to my kids. It was a trauma, sure, but it gave me insights into the similarities of humans that not everyone sees.

I want all of you. Even the ones I don’t like. I need you. I need you to need me too. That means I need to show up and be open to serendipity.

I have to go meaning to say “yes”.

Energy

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I am going to be pesty to one of my pals because they do not like the term energy because it is excessively woo. I have no idea if this essay will get published because the last few days I have been dropping posts into drafts without posting.

Let me start by saying that I am not an initiate witch. I am not real into being told what to do and while I love working with teachers who share what they know/experience I don’t deal with being told what I have to do/experience. So I figure shit out as best as I can on my own. I learn from a lot of different sources. I am probably one of those shitty Americans who are appropriating from everything under the sun. Guilty as charged. I think every faith contains elements of truth and I want to follow truth wherever I can find it.

I was noticing this today while I was running. Your moue of distaste at the contemplation of woo was on my mind while I was noting a paradox in how I’m experiencing running this year. For a bunch of good reasons I want to mostly focus on a 5k. I don’t really have it in me to be going a lot further than 3 miles because it takes too long and my childcare is being pushed to the limit. The thing is, I don’t really turn on and fully engage for the first two miles. I can feel it. There is a difference in my pelvis.

For the first two miles I can feel my pelvis being cranky and critical of my efforts. It sends many strongly worded letters of complaint about what a horrible bitch I am. It’s not a lot of fun. I call it “running” but I start going up a really fucking big hill for the first 3/4 of a mile. Right now I am super fucking happy with myself if I can beat 16 minutes for the first mile. Like, 15:55 means I give myself literal pats on the back. Maybe I am less of a “runner” and more of an enthusiastically lurching jogger. The second mile I can usually knock down to 13 minutes, even though it’s still a bitchy amount of uphill. By the third mile, which alternates a lot of down and bits of uphill I feel different.

I can feel heat and openness in my pelvis between the cradle of the bones. It’s when I feel like I could climb up a telephone pole then sit on the top and take the whole damn thing. It’s an amazing feeling. It’s where I feel the forever place get started and I can drop to 12 minute miles and keep going for another 10 miles without feeling much of a problem.

I don’t have the kind of time it takes to be running half marathons on a regular basis this year. It’s just not on the table. So even though I know that this magical sensation of wanting to take the entire world in through my vagina is living there, curled up and waiting to be accessed I don’t have much time to explore it this year. Not really. I get like 12 minutes of this glory then I stop and have to go on with my day. It honestly kind of sucks.

This specific feeling inside me is different from most of the other kinds of feelings I have. There is no anxiety in it. There is only intense ravening need to be filled. Is this just a “I want something in my vagina”? No, not even a little bit. I don’t actually need to put something inside my vagina after this to find satisfaction. The wanting is deeply satisfying. It makes me want to create, deeply connect with people, and it makes me want to run forever. It’s energy. It’s a connection to the energy that shivers under the top layers of the planet. You want science words for these things but I’m just some California woo whack job. I cannot give you that explanation. Bark up a different tree.

I can only tell you that there is a feeling of being connected to the earth, to the soil, to the magma at the core of the planet. It burns in a chain up through the ground into my legs and up into I’M GOING TO JUST SAY IT, OK the root chakra. Go ahead and be mad at me. I don’t have better language for this. Do I feel a bit like a person who should shut the fuck up? Yes and no. You have asked me how to understand this and I feel a lot of responsibility for answering questions long past when the asker is satisfied. This is one of my fatal flaws.

Running is one of the best ways I know to raise this energy outside of sex, for me. I can get there with meditation stuff and breath work with enough work. The best/fastest/quickest way to get there is ritualistic sex.

I feel like a giant dipshit. I went and saw a neighbour recently. She is a Reiki practitioner and she’s mentioned before that she’d be happy to do work for me since she knows what has happened. I demurred for a long time but eventually it seems like a good shout seeing as we share a fence and all.

I’m really amused by two specific comments, one was just telling me that my solar plexus is incredibly hot (linked to chronic pain and historical trauma, naturally), and that she was shocked by how open my entire channel was. She doesn’t usually see something like that.

I really do feel like I am mostly living at the self actualisation level of Maslow’s Hierarchy so that makes sense to me? I do speak my truth. I do take action to be the person I want to be in the world. I have a level of safety that feels utterly impossible to me.

This feels connected to me.

That energy I feel in my pelvis, it’s hotness, it’s both a new kind of tension and a release from the old/standard unpleasant painful knotting. It’s the difference between activating your core muscles and sucking your stomach in but it’s happening lower down in my pelvic girdle. I can feel it in the viscera. My body feels like it is all of a sudden slightly less weighed down by gravity. It just turned down by .5% or 1%. Not a lot, just enough to make everything feel able to twist and wiggle and undulate in ways I usually couldn’t quite manage.

It feels like freedom and strength and savage need to stay alive. It’s different than the kinds of energy feelings that I get in my chest. Amusingly, a lot of my drive towards being a whore comes from the heart chakra. I don’t feel drawn to hurrying out to find new people to connect with when I’m running. It’s not the same kind of energy. They feel differently.

I don’t want to whore because I want to acquire numbers. I am out of that game. For me (I don’t apply this to anyone else!) if I were to feel like I really wanted to go out and start hitting swingers parties a lot because I wanted a lot of variety that would feel like being slutty. I’m enjoying rereading The Ethical Slut because they are very clear that it’s ok for someone to be slutty while only masturbating. They are not saying that slutting is chasing numbers. This is about me and my body and how I feel when I use words.

I love being slutty, don’t get me wrong. That season of my life was pretty fucking epic and I’m glad I have all the stories in the hopper. I haven’t felt slutty in a long time. I should feel like last year when I was hunting on Fab was being slutty but I don’t. In retrospect I can say that in a way I was less looking for pleasure in all the slutting than I was speed running looking for someone to give me enough sex to not lose my shit in my life. I wasn’t looking to explore and enjoy variety for the sake of variety. I was a woman on a mission. I have a quota of fucking to fill or I am hard to live with.

Just getting up to functionality doesn’t feel like being slutty. Even though it meant auditioning more folks than many have sex with in ten years.

This energy that I get in my pelvis, this intensity, this feeling of heat and force towards life allows me to get a lot more done. It improves my ability to perform work for my life. It makes me feel alive and ready to show off how awesome my big mammal meat sack is as it does ALL THE THINGS. Can I enjoy it through fucking? Enh? It’s always worked better in theory than in practice. When this energy comes from ritualistic sex it still isn’t about fucking, it is more related to intense bdsm energy–I can be sadistic or masochistic either is fine. It’s about creating an energy loop with another person and the genitals are slightly a distraction.

The urge to connect emotionally, the need to whore comes from my heart. It comes from the centre of my being. I feel it as heat and also I see savagely bright white light radiating out from the core of me. I know this sounds fucking insane. I’m sorry. You want to know what it feels like. This feeling makes me want to meet every person I come across during my entire life with my entire full self spread open. They can take the parts that are appropriate and move along. I will never run out of self. The more they take the more I grow. Sometimes this is about sex but it doesn’t have to be. I really do walk up to strangers in public and start conversations. It’s how I make a lot of my friends.

“Hello. My name is Krissy. I am sorry to be so forward but I’m still working really hard on meeting people. Even from across the room something about you strikes me as interesting. I had to come say something to you or I wouldn’t forgive myself.“

That’s actually how I met Bike Lady, and the Coyote, and Vicki and… a lot of people. All through my whole life. I’m a forward motherfucker. At some point in my life my social feed got turned to permanently at full blast. I want far more connection than I can actually sustain. The way I do this is to make very careful tiny deposits in lots of buckets with deep apologies for being unable to promise when or if I will return. We will see how the wind takes us. I will turn to you with joy whenever I see you again.

I can’t promise much more.

This energy fuels me through a social life that looks more like a full time job. We are still getting back up to speed after Noah’s death but it is looking a lot like by the time we hit the 18 month mark we will be back to full schedules. It’s feeling kind of intense lately. We’ve added a lot.

The more contact I have with people, the more this energy in my chest grows. It’s really not all about sex. I get a lot out of teaching children. I get a lot out of being a good neighbour and I sure as shit am not hunting on my block for sex. That would be unthinkable. Boundaries, bitches.

Different kinds of energy in my body grow from different sources. These are the two, for me, that feel both life giving and related to sexuality even when no sex actually happens. I don’t have another way to describe the way these manifestations feel beyond energy. It feels like the raw energy of life. It feels like the heat that comes from a compost pile while it breaks down. It feels like raw potential energy that drives me through life. It feels like energy the same way lava streaming down a mountain feels like energy. Energy is about potential.

When I run I feel full of potential. I feel strong and capable and full of drive to succeed. When I allow my heart to be at the forefront of what I do every day I feel embiggened. I feel increased in space and time and potential. I feel like I am manifesting everything in myself.

I need to feel allowed to love. I need it or this energy hurts me. Trying to contain the force of an exploding volcano is incredibly painful. It is energy. It is energy that has to go somewhere or it breaks the container.

I don’t know what to call it if not energy.

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

Here’s a problem: feeling sexy

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Gentleman and I were discussing the subject of party clothes earlier today. I have a handful of legacy fetish items but mostly I can’t wear them right now. Maybe in a few hundred miles. We’ll see.

We were looking at various items of clothing and I kept pulling faces. It’s hard for me to imagine myself dressing in a way to encourage a lot of sexual attention at this point. It freaks me the fuck out. I’ve been dressing as unsexy as possible for a long time. My wardrobe is childishly fun more than it is sexy. I do have a handful of pieces because of hunting last year. See previous reference to maybe I’ll wear them again after a few hundred miles.

Very little of what I own makes me feel sexy. I like wearing split crotch bloomers under layers of skirts and knowing that I can have sex without bothering to get undressed. That’s fun for me. It’s a very specifically coded kind of sexy that most people won’t be able to read at any kind of distance. Mostly I just look very modest and conservative. I like to wear my hair long but braided up. I look like a religious conservative.

I now have less than two weeks until I am going to a party. I don’t have much on between now and then. I have time to think about clothing. I keep wistfully thinking that I want to feel sexy. I don’t know what that means though.

I can’t help that growing up I heard over and over “If you go out dressed like a street walker you’d better come home with money.” I believe if I dress in overtly sexually suggestive clothing I’d better expect to be harassed. I expect to have to be ready to fight if I go out wearing slutty clothing. Amusingly I would not be very tolerant of a man stepping in front of me to fight for me. I might knock over the earnest would be knight in my zest to get to whoever was fucking with me.

Dressing slutty is inviting fighting. It takes a very specific kind of mood before that feels sexy for me. I have to feel strong and DTF with pretty much everyone and anyone.

I don’t think I have that kind of boldness in me right now. I wish for it. I miss it. I don’t know that I will have that again.

What makes the me I am right now feel sexy? Mostly I feel desire in my body and clothes are fairly irrelevant and we simply rip them off. That’s been true for a long time. There has been no point in trying to appear sexy because it made absolutely no difference in any way shape or form. Gentleman is like Noah in this regard. They just don’t care that much about clothing or appearance. Which is great! It’s very convenient having relationships with people who are fine with me being the low maintenance bitch I am in terms of frippery and hygiene. I can (and do) dress up but mostly I wear a few basic outfits with high practical value and little to distinguish them.

I don’t feel sexy. I feel like I want to have sex. I feel like I have been absolutely blessed in this life with partners who are as antsy to have sex with me as I am with them. Hallelujah and thank Cheese.

I haven’t been in a relationship with someone who felt meh about having sex with me since I was 22. I feel good about the trajectory of sex in my life. The orgasm gap in my relationship is (apparently) more like a cricket score. This was a new idiomatic thought process for me. Now I know there are wickets (10) and runs (however many you get away with). Ah. Sure. I can get away with hundreds.

Pretty much all of that sex happened without me feeling particularly sexy. I felt horny. I feel an unholy amount of spontaneous sexual desire. Feeling desire is not the same thing as feeling sexy.

Years ago I was up at one of the house parties in Seattle and this woman walked through the room. Her hair was long and super dark black and it shimmered in waves. I thought, “she has actual fucking flowing raven locks”. Her hair seemed like the sexiest thing on the entire planet to me. I don’t think I have ever felt as sexy as her hair looked to me.

My hair is going grey and I can’t be arsed to do anything about it. Besides, my hair was always just a dark brown. My curls are neither completely proper spirals nor fun waves. I’m a tangled mess most of the time if my hair isn’t in a braid.

I don’t think the route to sexiness comes through my hair. I really miss the braiding that used to happen when I worked fair/faire. (Different weird reenactment shit. One was a Victorian Dickensian Christmas fair and there were a bunch of Renaissance faires. The dancing was so much fun.)

Dancing makes me feel sexy.

I feel deeply amused and powerful when I observe how intimidated people are by the bog witch shit I wear. I feel like “ha ha ha I am scaring you”. It’s silly. It’s also perversely sexual. I’m not wearing anything revealing in any way shape or form. This is desexualised clothing for the world. Yet I feel sexy in it.

I feel sexy when I feel like Mrs. Whatsit. I feel powerful when I feel like I am toying with someone’s perception of the world. Amusingly, I got a lot of this with Engineer. I’m glad that I am still talking to him. It feels weird to say it, but I feel like he treats me the way I treated my Shaman. He comes to me with ethical dilemmas and I force him to talk it through on his own. I have only questions, no answers. I don’t have to live with the results of any of his decisions so i should have no voice in what they are.

He treats me a lot like I treated Vicki. Well, sort of. Vicki kept her clothes on 100% of the time. I feel this weight over my shoulder. I have this responsibility to perform the behaviour I was antagonised into articulating as correct. I don’t have the right to tell other people what is right or wrong. I can only ask questions and decide how close I want to stand to them.

Vicki was sexy even when she frankly needed a shower and to change her dang clothes. I wish I could channel power the way she did. She lived so securely in her sadomasochism that there was never a doubt that she had power in a given scene. It didn’t matter if she was submitting or dominating. It didn’t matter if she was displaying masochism or sadism she had power. In that way I wish I could be more like her. I wish I felt entitled to embody my full power no matter what I am doing.

I don’t want to be exactly like any of my mentors though, not really. I don’t want what they lived. Not because they are/were wrong, but because my path is different. It’s not a repudiation. I like different things. We were always only going to be holding hands for a little while.

What makes me feel sexy?

The way Noah looked at me made me feel sexy. It had nothing to do with what I wore. It had to do with his perception of my soul. Noah looked at me as if I had all the terrifying power of a God. He believed that as much as I had the power to give love and life and nurturance I was even more capable of destroying and harming. He looked at me with awe.

It’s fun that Gentleman is currently working on how to send the right kind of signals for me to understand he is feeling interested in me. He’s getting way more grabby and assertive and verbally silly and it’s really great. I feel besotted. He is such a kind and wonderful man. I love that he puts himself out there in the world even when he doesn’t feel fully confident. He does it scared. His bravery and willingness to try new things make me feel really tender and loving towards him. I want to keep coaxing this bravery. Explore! Have fun! You only get one life. Get every morsel of joy out of it.

If I were a monogamous human being this would be the time when my brain would start to filter out other humans. It would alter my attraction pattern. However, I am not a monogamous person. My brain creates a big sturdy container that looks promising and like it has potential for a great deal of awesome over a long term. Then my brain looks a fraction of a degree to the left and sees vast amounts of self that is not in any kind of container and then there is some vertigo and oh holy shit balls no. No.

I don’t want to leave those parts of me in the dark. I miss them. I love them. I love them enough to not let go of them even though it would be deeply convenient for people who love me if I did. I love these pieces so much that I held on to them through over a decade of hypnosis and NLP work trying to force my brain into only desiring one man.

I’m not saying any of this as a criticism of Gentleman. The man sat very still and waited for me to complete a house chore before he left. He knew if he stood up to go I would get distracted and not finish the task. That shit is pretty magical. He made sure he kept me company so I could get a little bit more accomplished and head into the week with a lighter load. He is a super rad boyfriend and I’d like to keep him.

I’m really happy with this relationship. I feel pretty fucking seen in a lot of really deep and profound ways.

I also feel like the parts of me that fit inside this relationship represent a very small fraction of who I am. I feel guilty and ashamed of this knowledge. I wish that I had come factory standard instead of being so fucking extra.

I think the parts Gentleman puts into this relationship are a very small fraction of who he is, too. I am not trying to be self centred here. We are middle aged fuckers. We both have history and stories and complexity.

This is all tied up.

Throwing bait in the water is a complicated thing. I have inched my personality out in person here in the kink community while Noah was alive. Luckily most of the hyper local people don’t really read my writing (phew!) so they have gotten to know me in tiny pieces. In person I am a lot more reserved than you might expect. I wait to be approached. I ask a lot of questions and deflect questions I receive with non-answers or partial answers because my stories are all so complicated. Pull one tiny thread and who knows what fucking thing will fall on your lap. I endeavour to avoid trauma dumping so that means I have to be careful what stories I tell. I am genuinely afraid of being the reason someone else’s nervous system gets dysregulated so they can’t participate in fun.

I want to feel sexy. So much of feeling sexy is in being looked at and desired. I confess that even though it is great that this fella responds as if I am equally sexy in my comfy jammies and a bathrobe as I am when I dress up sometimes I want to feel like someone appreciated the effort. I write about the mixed feelings I had in relationships with fetishists. It was difficult being simply an object and not a person. I didn’t like the way I was appreciated more in latex and high heels. I find both fairly fucking uncomfortable. They are both challenging on a sensory level for me. But gosh I appreciated one lover I had very briefly who took like two hours to undress me every time. Sex took, like, four hours. It was amazing. Undressing was part of the show.

I think about wearing lots of layers for seducing Pretty Lady. My cunt will not be easily accessible. Oh holy shit no. My cunt will be the very last thing on the menu. It will be earned with thousands of words. I don’t need to take any clothes off at all to rub one out. I am a miracle of orgasming ability. There had to be some fucking benefit to all my weird health shit. Woo.

This party coming up on the east coast is uhm, not like a date with someone who already finds me thrilling. Let’s be clear that I assume that the most likely outcome is some awkward conversations that don’t really go anywhere and no play. I don’t know people well and I have very consciously held myself back for most of the years I’ve known them.

I don’t think I have it in me to strut in like I am hot shit and you should try hard to get me. I think that requires a level of security and being known that I currently lack.

The thing is, I haven’t earned regard here. I have not been in anyone’s life all that much. I don’t go to anything bigger than our Thursday munch every month. I know the two men who are the regulars at that munch very well. I’d be ok strutting in front of them because they would grin and tell me to have a good time. They wouldn’t act like it was for them. They would simply be my friends. Mostly I do not have the right to act like I am someone anyone should like. I have no idea how I am going to fit in with the social community in larger Scotland over time. I assume I will be disliked by a lot of people. There are already a couple of people who significantly dislike me and I’m ok with that. It feels inhibiting though.

How do I feel sexy walking into a room full of mostly strangers by myself when I don’t have any particular faith in this moment that I can be sure if any of them will like me in 10 years? I could strut into a Second Saturday party in the Bay without hesitation even though I don’t know most of the people. I don’t need to know everyone. I need the anchor people. I need my friends. I have not put in the time to have many friends over on the east coast. I’m not there for an event every year.

I have very particular metrics in my mind right now with regard to short/medium/long term goals. Yes, I am absolutely interested in Mx/Ms/Mr Right Now. Mostly I am looking for who is going to become a bigger part of my life. I don’t have a deep and broad network of friends yet. I haven’t put in the time. I haven’t shown up and been witnessed. I haven’t been the witness of other people’s stories. People will think I am hot shit based on whether or not they observe me to be. I don’t get to dictate that. I don’t get to act like me earning that off screen has any value whatsoever. Social capital is not transitive like that.

Frankly, I’m so out of practice at all of the skills of topping that I should not be trusted more than any other newbie. My muscle memory has gone to shit in the time I was married. Any amount of raising my arm was met with extreme hostility and force. I didn’t have to actually hit anyone. Any kind of threat was absolutely the same. No, hitting my friends in a consensual bdsm scene wasn’t permitted; if anything that was even more forbidden. Noah probably would have been more forgiving of me spanking the kids than he would of me spanking a friend. It would have seemed like a mistake, not a choice.

How do I feel sexy when I feel so insecure? I feel the lack of connection to the community here. I was not allowed to join in more than I did; I was allowed the Kids. What I got was somewhat grudging. Noah resented me wanting kinky friends because I want to flirt with them if they are old enough.

I am sad that one of the people I had hoped to hide behind will not be at the party. I haven’t made many friends on that coast yet but I count this person among them. We’ve talked a lot over the years. This is most unfortunate for me on an entirely selfish level. Such is life. I will go anyway. I have to start somewhere.

I am spending far too many brain cycles wondering what I want to wear. I went hunting as a slutty bog witch. It was really fun.

This is not that.

I do not want to walk in as if I assume I will ever have any kind of power over anyone present. I want that genie in a bottle. I am not Vicki to ooze power over anyone who came nearby. People who had their own power met hers as equals and she never played dominant pissing games. Ok, she usually didn’t. Sometimes she did. When she did she won. I don’t think I have arrived at having this kind of personal power. I feel like I forfeited any sense of power by how I handled this last rape. I feel like a failure. I feel like I failed to have any power at all. I feel like a stupid piece of shit. I didn’t handle that in a way Noah was proud of. I made the last 5 months of his life very hard. I feel deeply ashamed of wanting to reach so hard for new connection right now. It feels like I am trying to avoid sitting and home and stewing over what a complete piece of shit I am for failing Noah.

I do not know how to feel sexy walking into this environment right now because I am not sure how to walk in with any kind of feeling of power. I think the two are tied together for me. There is power in being submissive, a slave, and a masochist. The power does not only reside on one side of the slash. Perhaps I will spend a lot more of my life being sadistic in the future. All of these expressions come from personal power. I’m afraid both of attracting the wrong thing and attracting nothing at all. I couldn’t tell you which would be worse. If I go in hoping to make friends that’s really about as optimistic as I should be.

I want to feel sexy. I want to feel seen and appreciated. I don’t want to feel afraid. In order to not be afraid I have to feel safe. I don’t believe scene spaces are ever fully safe spaces. I go there to drift around in the ocean of predators and prey and see who is living in this little ecosystem.

What kind of predator am I?

Oh. Oh that is an interesting question. After thinking for at least 13 seconds I’m going to go with lazy. I am a lazy predator. I like to know the history before I step in old shit. I am a predator who usually hunts predators. This is how my soul is deeply tied to you, Ale. I hunt for people like you. I deeply appreciate and value that you never fucking sugar coat how you feel. I find affirmation of my humanity in the ways we reflect opposite sides of the same coin. You understand my need to be a victim. I hate being a victim. It is a thing I feel unable to escape. I, at times, have learned to embrace being a victim because in its depths I find more about my strength and power than I do in any other way.

This is where I fear I am wrong and Vicki is right but I don’t know that I can follow her good example. Vicki taught me that power emanates from a person like heat from the raging inferno of a soul inside the meat sack. I experience my power coming from relationships. My power doesn’t exist in a vacuum. I have power only in as much as I have the power to help, to harm, to create, and to destroy parts of other people.

I think of you and I feel such shame. I harmed you. I was cruel and inflexible and overly demanding in ways I was not entitled to be. I failed you.

I am so afraid of this power that sparks to life and begins to burn and rage at the tiniest sign of connection. It’s like watching a pilot light go from being barely a flicker to being on full blast. Someone wants me to look at them. How delightful.

I am afraid that it is a terrible thing to be touched by the power within me. I appreciate the way that folks in my in person life are commenting prodigiously on their appreciation of my mothering. That’s nice and all, for people who actually deal with my family to think I’m doing well. I inhabit the power of this role uneasily and with great caution. I am terrified of fucking this up. I am now all they have. Someone else can’t fix what I fuck up. Not really. There used to be someone here watching me, giving me course correction advice. Letting me know when I was getting too heated or loud. Now it is just me. Am I gentle enough?

It is very hard that the relationships in which I have the most sense of power are entirely ones where I am terrified of crushing a delicate soul I love very deeply. It’s part of why I was so hard on Noah. He was the only sturdy soul in my network I could really unleash on. It had to be done in ways he permitted.

He wouldn’t allow me to push him to the edge of his boundaries because him exploding was even less permitted than me exploding. I am not trying to say I had the worst deal in my marriage. Noah was also in a very constraining box.

I am saying that I am stepping into a different environment where I have no sense of my place. I don’t want to come in my mother/auntie vibe. I don’t want to. I want to come as a peer. I want to come as someone who both initiates and receives desire.

For many years I have said, “Anyone who speaks at my funeral is required to start with ‘Krissy was a motherfucking bad ass’ and if they don’t, boo them off the stage.”

I don’t feel like I am truly inhabiting that. I feel weak. I feel vulnerable. I feel deeply unworthy of ever being loved. I failed Noah. How dare I walk on as if I am a whole creature.

I am not a whole creature. I am a sundered being. I am a tree that was twinned for many years before a lightning bolt took my love from me. I miss Noah. I miss the certainty of that container. I miss feeling that secure in being loved like a wildfire. I was ok with being burned if that was the price of that relationship. It was worth it. I miss Noah. I miss Noah but he is gone and I have to carry on. My day job takes a lot out of me. I need to fill my bucket.

I need to make myself happy. This is a pragmatic understanding. Most of my life depends on me being a cheerful, upbeat, optimistic soul. It doesn’t work when I am deeply depressed and buried in anxiety. I start being poor at my job.

I want to feel sexy but I don’t know if I can. I know that it is tied to my sense of power and my happiness but it depends on relationships. I can’t walk into a building and assume anything about anyone. Sure, they are there but they aren’t there for me. They are there for their own story. I am very afraid of finding out there is no story arc overlap potential. I am afraid that I am not walking into the building with any sense of personal connection and anchoring. That means flirting feels like inviting a fight when I don’t know anything about the turf the fight is happening on. That feels so dangerous and stupid.

I want to feel sexy. I am afraid I will only feel afraid.

It’s Ostara.

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Today I finished tidying the garden and planted the bits of colour. I’m trying to add more plants every year that bloom earlier. It’s a process. I started with like 6 plants that flowered by Ostara and I’m up to many dozens. In my defense, I didn’t fully tidy up because I know better. Not before May. But I did clean up all the tripping hazard sticks and I unburied some of the stepping stones so folks can see where to go more easily.

This has always been the season shift I feel the most intensely. It is time to start being outside planting, working, and playing. It’s when I start seeds inside because it’s too early to be doing much outside. After the party I’m chucking all the seeds onto my bathroom floor again; it’s warm enough to get stuff going. It’s awkward in my bathroom for about 2 months but oh well.

It feels like I am trying to co-opt this energy away from gardening into pruning my emotional landscape. That’s probably wise at the moment. Well, not pruning. Examining.

There is a part of me that teeters, on this equinox between the knowledge that having two people I see fairly seriously for different kinds of adventures and limiting myself to them would be less work, less anxiety for all involved, and way easier to schedule and the self awareness that forces me to admit how much I want everyone. I want to go flag down a rugby team. Not because I’m that into rugby. Because they would probably be able to literally hand me around and that sounds absolutely amazing. Sometimes I find myself checking people out at the rock climbing gym in ways that are wildly inappropriate. I have full on movies play out about what they could do with hands that strong. Holy shit for shoe shine I thirst so hard I worry that I will crack teeth.

It’s not because I’m that into fit people aesthetically. Strength is hot. Someone who can hold his body to a wall while dangling fully horizontally is someone who could do magical fucking things with his fingers. If he doesn’t know how yet that’s fine. I’m bossy.

I have to admit. I’m really bummed that Closed Book didn’t work out. He could have been a lot of fun if he had some boundaries. Ah well. This is how the cookie crumbles. Even though he lives exactly .4 miles from my house that does not make him a good person to mess with.

I am managing to say no to bad ideas. Pat myself on the back there. But what about questionable or neutral deals? I mean. There could be a lot of those over the next few years if I play my cards right. I want to be pithy and say “And I am very good at cards” but it would be a giant fib. Sometimes I get very lucky. The rest of the time I suck.

Which is how it goes when you are throwing bait in the water. It’s how I found Portland Boy all those years ago. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. He was the friend of a friend I did random pick up play with. He’s still my friend. I get to be a friend to his life. I get to watch his joy with the right partner and family.

So like, I feel like I would be down to go to a bathhouse and pick people up for sex but maybe they will stick around in my life for 20 years? It could happen. Literally, I know people.

I feel so torn. I know the lower stress route would be easier on all concerned. I feel really bad because it’s not as fun. I’m supposed to be teetering on the balance of equality today. I feel like I want to plunge off into the deep end. Sweetheart, this isn’t all happening all at once. I am moving glacially slowly for me. I’m being careful and mindful. I long but I haven’t made big self destructive choices recently.

What if the play wasn’t self destructive? What if playing with new people is healing and part of bonding and creating a new web of people? What if the play is a necessary step in ensuring that I will survive the next major catastrophe? I’m a fucking anime protagonist. There will be another major catastrophe and then one after that. Mostly they won’t be my fault! Ok, sometimes they will be my fault. This is because I am stupid and make bad decisions. This is one of those phrases I use that bothers people. I’m not actually stupid but sometimes I think with the wrong head. I am impulsive.

I went and saw Sue Perkins tonight. I have seen three comedy shows this year. I’m seriously on a roll. I loved this show. I have to admit it was quite hard to contain myself when she said, “No one wants a 56 year old sex addict.” I really wanted to yell, “I do!!!”

This is a small town. People fucking notice me around town. That would not play well. Sometimes people claim I have no tact. You people can fuck right off, I do too have tact.

I feel bad because it drove Noah insane that the more sex we had the more I craved sex with other people. It’s not that I was unsatisfied. It is that every act of sex feels like fuel for the next couple of times. It feels like bonus energy for existing and working and loving people.

My compost pile is absurdly high and I need to pull it out and sift it. I also need to get my hands on a serious wood chipper and go through my giant pile of logs. I need the wood chips. I keep thinking that if the universe were fair someone would want to do the labour to flip my compost pile for me in exchange for me feeding them and kicking them in the nuts.

Yes, this nut kicking topic is a thing. I’m pretty obsessed. It’s an intense focus that I’ve had for at least 30 years. Kicking people in the testicles is FUCKING HILARIOUS. I derive so much joy from the act that I can barely contain myself. I will always have gratitude in my heart that someone allowed me to have a container where that was a really good part of our relationship. I am sad the rest of the container didn’t work out. This is how life goes. We can’t keep all the containers.

Pavlov made excellent, important, accurate points about how it is broken to think of relationships in terms of transactions. I’m still really broken. I’m very very Silicon Valley about this sort of thing. “Let’s discuss the frank exchange of activities we want to have between us.” I fill your bucket by doing x. You fill my bucket by doing me. It’s very simple. Let me sell you on the services I have to offer. It feels dirty and I’m not sure if it is dirty in a bad way or a fun way. Not all the services are sexual. I am patterning off Auntie more and more as I age. She patterned off her mother who fostered a lot of children. Both Auntie and my grandmother were women who severely neglected their children in favor of the kids/grown ups they took in. My mom was sandwiched in between them, eternally the child needing to be taken care of.

Pete Walker says, in his book on C-PTSD, that every human should receive entirely unconditional love and support for the first two years of their life. After that it is basically a sliding scale as you move towards adulthood where you do have to earn love.

My therapist asked me today if I loved myself. I said I do. I listed off the ways I have earned my love.

I feel really bad for the ways I was not able to be what Noah wanted. Part of it was I was using so much bandwidth on being the mother I need to be. The amount of devotion and sacrifice required by my day job is pretty fucking overwhelming. It is not enough for me to be present. I am active and directive and patient and considerate about developmental levels and constantly adapting our environment to be easier to bear for my kids. They all have really intense sensory challenges. Living is painful. Managing their environment so that they can have optimal functioning requires a massive amount of bandwidth and energy from me. I am deeply relieved to see this work falling off a cliff as the people approach adulthood. I don’t have to do it for my son anymore. He knows how to manage now. It took a while. I know the others will get there too.

This work consumes me. I want to be able to give it my absolute best. My best is pretty freaking great. I’m a walking circus full of know it all monologues on hundreds of topics at the slightest hint of a key word. I trained for this. I watch these people suffer in ways I feel responsible for–my genetics are responsible for these challenges.

The Indenture is feeling long. I won’t have Noah here stepping in to give me breaks. This is me.

I feel really bad that before I wanted “a partner” I wanted children. That was my focus. Ok, yes I wanted a coparent and what I needed was already so long and specific and demanding that requiring them to not have a penis felt like too tall of an order. Now I have the children and nice people I date.

This is a thing I have to think about and be clear about. This shame is not useful. I didn’t use Noah up and throw him away. This was not my fault. I have done a lot of bad shit in my life. I didn’t kill Noah.

My therapist is uhm encouraging me quite a bit in the direction of putting my wings on and exploring as much as I possibly can. They think that me being selfish is a healthy correction from the tight constraint of my marriage. Of course it is convenient when I feel told to do what I want to do. Of course it is deeply problematic that I have a pathological demand avoidance response to being told what to do. My brain is a little bitch.

But I also feel pushed towards monogamy. Pushed is too strong. I am aware that the desire exists. I feel like a constant failure, still. I am really frustrated and tired of this exact specific ache in my chest. Monogamy isn’t on the table. Ok, second preference would be one woman because that’s the easiest to kind of wrap a brain around.

I feel like I’d be pretty happy taking on the task of making sure the average orgasm count for the Highlands increases. That sounds like fun. I know that realistically I can’t schedule it. I probably would get tired of trying very quickly but that doesn’t mean I can’t give it a good old college try. (Is that an idiom on this side of the pond?)

I need to go to bed. People will be here in 10.5 hours.

I want. I feel flooded with this aching burning and want. I am really tired of feeling bad about it. I want to put myself in a room with people who might want to ask me to do things. I want to say yes.

Pick a side

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Yesterday I had the hilarious experience of being told (online, so does it even count?) that I am demanding that all women subject themselves to abuse because I am on the side of men. This was an interesting experience given that I was saying women use sweeping judgments because not doing so is too high in cost.

Bluesky is hard to visit these days. I know the real time documentation of the fall of the US is important. It is also deeply upsetting and there is literally nothing I can do from here.

Once upon a time people did not have political turmoil across an ocean impacting their nervous system all day. It’s not great for us as a species.

My boyfriend is going to meet my kids in 27 days. That’s feeling dramatic. The few days before we go we will be away for a weekend together with friends. I’m looking forward to this weekend and I am also feeling terror. It is a huge cliff to go over.

My sister was fond of a few sayings: “abused children are the most loyal” and “you are on my side or you are against me”. It didn’t work though. I didn’t pick her side. I was not loyal.

I love the relationships I get to have with my kids. They blow me away. They are smart, funny, and deeply thoughtful. When someone blows their top a bit much we ignore it in the moment and come back a day or two later to say, “Hey, when you need to say (thing) it works a lot better if you say (slightly softened thing).” It doesn’t matter who had the bad moment. It applies to every person in our house equally. I love the way we all feel free to correct each other.

I worry about inflicting this sense of rightness in sitting judgment on my kids. They will not bow to authority how others expect. They don’t perceive that whole “adults are in charge” thing the way they would have if they properly attended school for longer. They think they have the right to say that people can’t be rude to them. I love watching them as young people. I can’t wait to see them as adults.

What is the point?

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I’ve been awake for a few hours. I’ve folded laundry, another load is almost done. Did dishes. Tidied up the school supply area. I’m having a hard time. It all feels so silly and stupid. What is the point of my life now? I keep the set tidy so my kids and I can be ghosts moving around on it? I have no future plans beyond “I’m not allowed to die.” I don’t hope for anything.

It’s weird when people tell me that I could have a chapter two relationship. As if Noah wasn’t chapter three of my life.

The only thing that feels vaguely like hope this morning is wanting to grow more of my food. I want to need less from outside my property. I think I have enough clothing and material that if I get into the kinds of sewing that visually interest me I may never need to buy clothes again. Lots of thread and needles though.

I really wonder if I will ever paint again. Will I finish the house? I’m not sure. I’m still feeling paranoid about being kicked out of the country. Why try harder to create something that won’t be permitted to last? Other people would move into my house and paint everything white again like I was never here.

Last night a buddy observed that she has come to believe that I have actually been cursed. It has felt true my whole life. I feel really bad about having three kids right now but I would be dead if I didn’t have them. Noah wasn’t enough. Now I find out that the kids are enough to keep me working, but my heart is dead. I know I do love them somewhere buried under the numb but I have no idea when I will feel it again. I don’t feel love right now. I feel despair and emptiness and agony. I have been in pain my whole life and it’s just getting worse not better. I thought it was getting better. Then I lost Noah. It turns out Noah was the better I’m going to have in this life.

I should be fair: I’m financially secure. He gave me that. I have three wonderful children to take care of but I’m not doing great at that. We are all safe. We are eating. We are exercising. I’m not a lot of fun though. I am absolutely sobbing through a lot of the day.

The escapism I found when I was young to avoid feeling pain like this was to go find a rando for sex. It mostly worked and wasn’t any more dangerous than my dating life. It’s not an option now. I don’t trust anyone and my body is fragile and I can’t expose my kids to risk.

Noah and I have only gone this long without sex three times: the births of our children. Physically this feels awful. It’s like if someone was used to getting up and running 5 miles in 45 minutes every day and then they manage to pull a hip fracture and they cannot even walk. I feel muscles in my body atrophying. It took years of work with a pelvic floor physical therapist to deal with my vaginismus. Right this minute I am afraid that it is going to be a massive problem again and I live at the ass end of nowhere and I won’t get support for this problem.

All of the things I once aspired to do are ash in my mouth. I am so afraid that I will never actually feel loved again. I’m afraid of what this is going to do to me. I feel like I am afraid of everything.

Vulnerability

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

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

I am fine right now. With all that entails.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Body data

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My first tracked 3 mile run with this watch was mid December and it took 49:09 for an average of 16:24/mile.

Today I ran 8 miles in 1:50:10 for an average of 13:46/mile. That’s a pretty awesome improvement.

In January I did a bunch of measurements of my body so that I’d be able to see the changes as they happen. I measured myself this morning.

Since then I have lost .5″ off my upper arm, 1″ off my upper chest, 1″ off my bust, 5″ off my waist, 5″ off my hips, 2.5″ off my thigh, and 1″ off my calf for a grand total of 16″ inches taken away. That seems like a lot.

I have dropped 20.5 lbs in 7 months. Even though I do not follow Weight Watchers anymore I keep in mind that they would not encourage losing weight much faster than that.

I have just under 7 weeks to go. I plan to be the laziest git ever in October. I can do as little as humanly possible. Ugh I’m tired.

Working up to the letter

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Cross posted from FB where my MIL can see it.

I feel deeply conflicted about the type of writing I have traditionally done now that I live in a place that has far less encouragement of navel gazing and public introspection. Yet, here I am. Continuing to exist and needing to type out my feelings in order to make progress. This is how I have made all of my progress in this life.

When it comes to “stop sniveling and go work” very few people have me beat. I do a lot of manual labor and I go hard. It delights me to no end when a large man says “Oh let me take that for you; it looks heavy” then they stagger under the weight of the load I was carrying with only a little visible strain. But there is a cost. I do not have a body that is built for hard labor. What I have is a soul with a little extra energy from all the stardust so I push through long past when I should stop.

I understand to the tips of my toes that a lot of what I self-assign is not “necessary” in the sense of it being part of the base levels of Maslow’s Hierarchy. I’m an educated bitch. Instead what I have is a tremendous sense of obligation and purpose. The work I self assign is part of self actualisation. Is it “necessary”? Well… it depends on how well your other needs are being met…

This is what having privilege means to me. I have the space in my life to care about making and creating things because I do not have to worry about having food or shelter or safety ever again. And thus it moves up the triage list. It becomes urgent. It becomes intense and drowning and necessary for being able to cope with other aspects of being alive.

The overwhelming urge to self actualise takes over the same set of energy that used to go into making sure I could earn enough money to have food–a roof wasn’t going to happen on the amount of money I was making so that didn’t even feel like an important worry. I had a car; I was blessed.

I know how crazy it sounds that this set of urges feels equally intense.

But this set of urges is what gives me the deep well of patience to stand there and say for the 8,235,108 time with a level tone and no frustration, “Ok. Let’s talk again about what restaurant manners are and why they matter.” I have a whole house full of neurodiverse kids who do not copy and blend in and conform like a similar group of neurotypical children will. If I want them to learn a thing then me doing it is not even close to enough to influence their behavior. I have to tell them what I want, when I want it, why I want it, and what will happen if I don’t get it.

I can do that because A) I care very much about doing it and B) I have an intensely separate self that is allowed to have goals and plans and things that I make that I can point at and say “See, I am not just boring and shitty and doing something that no one cares about.”

I know I am dancing on a razor’s edge with fucking up my body until it hurts like this. Howdy repetitive stress injuries, howyadoin? I know that upping my exercise substantially is always courting injury. I know that having tremendous social anxiety and not sleeping well for a week and more and continuing to work like I need the money is bad for my health.

I get that. Everyone has to figure out what they need from quality of life vs. quantity of life.

I know that a lot of the work I am doing right now is not going to “work out” in the way that someone else would care about such work lasting in the long run. I am an intensely kinesthetic person and I don’t tend to learn things well until I learn it with my whole body. I like to read and I can absorb a lot from books but I don’t *know* a topic until I have done it with my body enough times to learn the rhythm.

I never really watched a plant go through a full life cycle before I had kids. I mean, I’m sure I did a bean sprouting lesson in class but I didn’t live in a place and have a set routine where I passed by given plants over and over through their life cycle. I then worked hard at learning the California biome I lived in (there are so many others in California that I’m careful with my claim) and now I have a lot more to learn. But I don’t have as many years at the end to enjoy the fruit of my understanding so I want to compact about 15 years of learning (what I did in California) into 5 years.

This year is my fuck around and find out year. I am putting an absolute avalanche of plants into my garden. I’m exploring guild combinations. I’m thinking about ways to intermix perennials and annuals. I’m trying to figure out how I will rotate through the kinds of annuals that have to move from spot to spot.

I feel like menopause is hitting my body with fervor and reminding me that if I want to get to enjoy the Witch Garden of my dreams all the way through my crone years I’d better hurry the fork up because the time in my life where my body is devoted to the Mother phase is counting down with grains of sand that feel like boulders on my head.

I don’t have time to waste. Which is kind of funny because I have so very much time. I am incredibly fortunate. I haven’t had to be afraid of not being able to get food in about 17 years. My cells do not yet really fully understand that I will never be hungry again. And part of how this manifests in my behavior is that I *must* learn how to grow enough food that I can pass on a way to ensure that my children will never have that feeling. Sure, we teach them ways to make money too. Money is a necessary thing and all.

My family had a permanent address when I was born–they had been in that home for a long time. My mom lost the house when I was three and I did not have a second permanent address until I moved in with my spouse. I very much hope that I will never leave this house. I’m building a retirement apartment downstairs. When the tenants move and everything needs fixing I’m setting it up more fully for wheelchair access.

And I’m going to have a garden I can move around and putter at and hire someone to do the individual jobs too big for me. But I’ll spend a lot of time puttering so I won’t need *much* help.

If I don’t build it now I won’t have it then.

If I push myself too hard I will not be able to maintain it as well in the long run.

Basically, this is how I meditate. This is how I sort my thoughts so I can evaluate when to pause, when to stop, when to rest. The more I allow myself to feel electrically uncomfortable and overwhelmed and drowning in the words in my head the harder it is to compartmentalise when pushing too hard on long-term projects. Other short or medium term tasks appear (in person socialising, written communication, dealing with the water company, oh the kid wet the bed) and they feel enormous and out of proportion and impossibly hard.

Unless I take just a bit of time to set things down and look at them and see the shape of all the pieces better. It’s hard to put the puzzle together if you don’t have your glasses on because you can’t see the outlines of the shapes well enough.

This process is my glasses.

Being challenged is good.

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I’m trying to convince myself so please forgive me for protesting a bit too much right now.

I don’t know how people balance all the roles they play in life. I really struggle with the constant triage of priorities. There is no way for me to have a set list of what order I handle tasks in. My life is too complex.

This week became more complicated because we found out that Noah’s surgery wasn’t just to get the weird screw thing out of his arm it turned out that he had almost completely severed his tendon. Whoops. He can’t use his dominant hand at all for weeks. He is also having a gout outbreak in his left foot and he can barely walk and he can’t stand for long at all. So he literally must be in bed for a lot of the day or in a chair with his foot elevated. The last time he didn’t rest enough the attack went on for four months.

I mean, his job is having to just deal with him going on temporary leave but he also does a fuck ton in the house. Most of it he can’t do… indefinitely. Most of the time he does a lot of covering for my disabled ass. He does a solid half of the cooking. He cleans. He helps with kid-things.

Oh, and I had already scheduled going on a trip with one of my kids through some of the biggest art galleries in Western Europe starting nine days from now. We’ll be gone two weeks. At the end of the trip Noah has to bring our 5 year old to London to meet me because we could not get a passport appointment in Edinburgh in the last 5 months of trying. Yeah. That’s gonna be a fun trip.

My sexy life is really not in my top 10 list of priorities right now. I am tracking so many lists in my brain I feel like I am about to go mad.

I’m also trying to help my friend set up a retreat. She’s had a bunch of health complications and other life frustrations so the process is going slowly and I have to keep circling back around. It is taking up a lot of room in my brain.

The garden work I need to do right now is such a long list that my hands couldn’t sustain the typing. IT’S SPRING, DAMNIT. I can fill absolutely as many hours out there as I am willing to spend. (And all of them make me SO HAPPY.) I think about it so many hours of the day that it is definitely more than a 40 hour/week gig. I have learned so much more about soil biology and now I want to spend all my time figuring out companion groupings for plants. Thinking about other things feels like a serious imposition.

I’m just starting to feel enough better after being sick twice in two weeks that I can re-start running. I haven’t done it yet though. Today has really been the first day when it might have been at all reasonable and I’ve been working since my eyes opened.

The more things I have to do the more I want to type at myself to list it all so I can try to figure out what to do first. But not just a to do list. I need to reflect all the way down on why something is more or less important.

I have been maintaining excellent self discipline about continuing to plow through books. I’m really happy about that. I’m managing about two a week and that feels like a good thing right now since I’m mostly reading books about permaculture and I need to finalise my design layout for this year like yesterday. I’m also working on a couple of other non-fiction topics that I’m happy about. And I have a couple of kink books I have never read that I picked up recently cause they sound neat.

Cause I have a lot of time to think about sex. I drift pass this space mostly so I can be happy that at least someone is out there doing the fun stuff.

In the next week I need to do some batch cooking for the time when I am gone since they are going to be on pure survival mode. I need to write down organised lists of all the stuff that needs to happen. Once I write the list I need to put them in the specific order of most important to least important and I need to just hope that the top 3 things happen without being allowed to be cranky about stuff that is missed. I need to leave everyone with a full drawer of clean pants. It’s fine if their other clothes get gross but everyone needs clean pants for the whole two weeks. Hell, I bought Noah a whole extra week worth today because he will not be up for dealing with the laundry.

Triage, triage, triage.

As much as I like to do celebration cooking I absolutely loathe day-to-day home cooking. It’s boring as shit. I feel stabby. I have to just STFU and do it. So much of it.

I also need to finish the tax paperwork he was supposed to finish because that’s due when I’m leaving anyway. Fun. Paying taxes in two countries is kinda annoying but I’m happy to be here so I’ll keep it up.

Oh yeah–do I have friends? I think I have friends. I suppose I should see people sometimes? Luckily T talks to me every week by video call so it helps me feel less isolated. Which is mixed–I might have to work a lot harder at cultivating local relationships if I couldn’t still cling like a limpet to my Californians.

New people are scary. I’m a lot. I am definitely not everyone’s cup of tea. I am neurotically particular about a great many things. I get RSD like whoa. I was a professional new kid (was a student in 33 schools preschool-grad school) so I’ve met a lot of new people. Most of them just don’t have enough bandwidth in their brain for new people. Some will throw rocks. A few will like me. And then every very very small percentage of the time… I make a friend. I am a lucky woman because I have more than two close friends. That is not promised to anyone in this life. I should not be greedy. Maybe my luck is running out. Who knows. New people are scary. But you can’t get to yes without risking no.

It is hard absorbing the opportunity cost in terms of time and energy lost through connections that are briefly explored before I move on.

Even though I don’t live out in the countryside I act like I do. I live and work on my property most of the time. We are homebodies in a way I never expected. My life has not worked like this in the past. In California there were always so many strong ties, higher ranked priorities, and the fact that getting places in a car is just less effort than riding around so we didn’t stay home much.

I was really enjoying the constant fucking we were doing a few weeks ago. Now it seems like just a dream. Ah well. I’m old enough to know that whatever is happening now will not always happen.

Lay out the plan then follow it.

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Today I ran 2 miles to start the day. Noah came with me even though he has been having a gout attack over the past week. So far it seems like he is doing better and he’s not in extra pain from the run and that’s fabulous. I tore open an adhesion between my butt and my thigh and it’s absolutely marvelous. It only hurt for a short time and now I can lift my leg higher and I’m thrilled. This will make it easier to get on and off my bike; it’s been a struggle to raise my leg high enough for quite a while.

I took a shower and washed my hair and did all the greasing for my body head to toe. I fixed my pocket/belt doohickey because it wasn’t done perfectly on the first go-round. That’s going to be ok.

I need to tidy up my room some, do some processing of food that is in deep storage out into the glass jars for usage. It’s important. I might even unload and reload the dishwasher because MC didn’t do it before taking off on their walk and I don’t want them staying up super late to finish dishes later.

I need to catch up on budget stuff. I’ve been not getting that done. I have a whole stack of books I want to get through. I have a lot of seeds that need to be started in the next day or two because it is *time*. This is hilarious because I am running out of floor in my bedroom and bathroom.

I have a meeting at 2 with a construction dude who is going to help with the rotting deck outside the apartment. That’s a good thing. Shorty has badminton at 4 and I have to ride her over there. If I have time I probably should go get some slate tiles before we do badminton so I can bring them home with me. I are tired. Then I eat dinner quickly and head right back out to a yoga class in town. All told I am going to be riding at least 11 miles today but it might be more. I get a little fuzzy on some of the exact distances.

It’s a good day.

I did a lot of seed planting yesterday, my bathroom floor is almost entirely covered in plants and the heat is high. I have about three more weeks of needing that room to be super warm and I am deeply ready for the temperature to go down. I think that next year I am going to try harder to figure out how to have a small enclosed space that I heat without heating that whole room. This is oppressive. Also I could really use a place to start plants where the cats don’t try to sleep on them. The cats are unhappy about their current ban from my room.

I continue to have struggles in many ways as a parent. Figuring out how to teach things, how to model healthy behavior, and how to get a kid to give a shit about something that I find important is… hard. Very hard. I am not feeling good at this. I will keep trying though.

Shorty is spending a lot of time on learn-to-read apps and she’s made a fairly shocking amount of progress. I told her she couldn’t have Roblox till she was 10 because that’s about when my older kids were able to read/write well enough to be safe on the platform. She is absolutely determined to get there sooner. We’ll see!

I am by no measure a perfect person. I will keep reaching for the light even though I am stunted.

Reasons for monogamy x-post

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I had a really funny conversation with my massage therapist. I like her quite a bit. She’s a little more than 10 years older than me and when we get to talking about parenting philosophy or health topics or general views on religion we are like two peas in a pod. I’ve been seeing her for over a year now and she’s quite skilled body worker. She keeps me from locking up too much. She also does a whole bunch of other skills like podiatry and acupuncture because she learns whatever her clients need. She absolutely wants a whole book list from me on Ehlers Danlos treatment. She just needs to finish the 18 month course she has been on the whole time I’ve known her before she can start them. She never stops learning. I really like and admire her. She could be a friend. I have a history of that with my body workers. I like people and if I’m going to spend a lot of time with them professionally I usually start crossing the border to social as well. Or I can’t stay with that professional.

I told her about the classes I am going to help my buddy with because she asked what I’ve been up to and it was a rare child-free visit. I went for it. I explained the types of classes and mostly she just nodded her head and looked mildly scandalized but whatever floats people’s boats. She has been somewhat surprisingly open and frank and detailed about how very much she has enjoyed her marital sex life. I know a lot about their sex life so I’m willing to scandalize her a bit.

She latched on to the word polyamory and she told me that her son’s roommate is like that and she is very confused by it. I told her that I was actually living with a previous partner when I met husband and he had a serious girlfriend. She said, “Ok I guess that is fine for when you are just dating but once you got married surely that all stopped–didn’t it?”

I laughed and laughed. Oh honey, no. I told her about the people we dated while married before we had kids. I told her about the swinger parties. The friends we would occasionally hook up with when it seemed fun.

“But, but, but you were married you are only supposed to want that with your husband!”

I said, “You know how when you get married that doesn’t mean you never want to go see a movie with a friend or play a game of basket ball with friends–right?”

“Yes.”

“Well I don’t really like going to the movies and I suck at basket ball so having sex with them is a lot more fun.” She almost fell over laughing. She asked me if we are doing that since we moved here and I said we are not. I explained what couples privilege is. I asked her if she saw a spot in the life we lead where no one would notice or mind if husband and I started being out the necessary number of hours a week it would take to find quality people to bang.

Once again she laughed hard enough to fall sideways and have to catch herself. I felt like I was on a roll. She asked if I thought we would ever sleep with someone else again and I said we might. Life is long.

Then she told me about one time when she was away at a conference a man tried very hard to pick her up. She was absolutely appalled and horrified that a married man would do that. Then she found out that he usually has a few people on the side at all times because why would anyone want to settle for just one partner for the rest of their lives?

I told her that the horrified feeling she gets at the idea of not being 100% monogamous is entirely absent from my life. I am as naturally monogamous as a cat in heat. I choose monogamy for strategic reasons. She then told me that she learns so very much from our conversations.

Then she asked about the scabs on my arms and I got to explain about the photo shoot we did. Once again she could not work for a bit until she got her laughing under control. She says we are all crazy.

Sure. Why not?

Every time I come in she schedules me extra far out so she can get me in on the pacing I like the best. She says she absolutely cannot wait until our next appointment every time I see her.

I don’t know that it will ever be ok to be as fully out here as I was in California but people who are going to be that close to my body frequently need to be people who can handle going from trauma to injury detail to hilarious sex stories without feeling too freaked out. If you work with my body I’m going to have to talk about my body and it has been through a lot. I can tell you which flinch comes from what thing in the past.

The old friends I would absolutely fuck again if the opportunity arose were there before I knew how to talk about my body. Many of them helped me develop the words because they cared and asked me questions. We put in years of relationship work to get to where “Wanna come over for the weekend to fuck then go home and not see each other for a decade?” feels like the continuing beat of a long ago favorite song. I don’t have the time or ability to go through that process with anyone new and I am not going to any decade soon. And I negotiated away the right to ask for it, anyway. I don’t think I’m going to explain that part to her though. That somehow seems like something that might cross the line from “Aren’t you wacky” to “Are you ok and do you need help getting away from that man?”

Y’all. I used to write about kinky shit on Facebook and my dentist would leave comments. I was out.

Here husband and I had a conversation about the fact that as long as he wants to do the work he does we should not play in public. We are not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

The closet is weird.

Emotional hangover

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My whole body aches and feels overwhelmed and dizzy and crappy because I’m having so many emotions. Emotions about lots of people and lots of situations.

The kink community up here is getting big enough/active enough that sometimes there are conflicting opinions and desires. That doesn’t mean anyone is a bad guy or that anyone is doing something that is wrong. I am trying to learn how to effectively communicate and so far I’m not great. I can pinpoint exactly where I was trying to communicate and it sails right past people. That feels bad. That feels like discounting when it isn’t.

It isn’t that someone noticed that I was trying to communicate a thing and said no. The way I was communicating was ineffective and it wasn’t understood that I was trying to say a thing so stuff went in a different direction. That’s reasonable.

But I spent like two weeks trying to figure out how to talk about a thing and I had to spin my wheels very hard and by the time I figured out how to say it the response was, “You should have said this earlier.” I tried. I can point at exactly where I tried and you didn’t hear me. Part of the reason the communication failed is because I was trying to speak as if no one has authority and we are trying to start from scratch and you are used to authority and you just went about your business making decisions without consulting.

It’s an overall apathetic group of people and if you want stuff done you need to make decisions. I get that. That is a really common dynamic. This is such a small group that I was hoping for something more leaderless. I’m not specifically gunning for being the boss. I don’t have that to give.

Our water is off and on because the construction up the hill knocked out a water pipe and it’s not going very well. It has made everything annoying and complicated in our house for two days now.

I had a thing where a friend scheduled a thing then couldn’t make it at the last minute and in this post-Sarah life of mine I am absolutely shit at handling this. T and I had a thing I don’t know how many months ago where for a little while his life got super hectic and he started being flakey about our chats and I shut down and couldn’t speak to him about it for weeks because I didn’t want to explode or completely over react and my feelings about last minute cancellation are fucking huge. I try not to have these feelings. Most of the time I can handle the fact that life has unexpected changes but it’s not easy for me. I set expectations around a thing happening and then when it doesn’t I feel a whole bunch of really overwhelming feelings in a rush and I want to go to my room and climb into bed and not come out for days.

I don’t have space for that in my life. I don’t get to check out mentally for days at a time. I don’t get a lot of undisturbed rest. I get a lot more than I used to, but these things are not easy.

It’s Tommy’s birthday this weekend and that’s bothering me more this year than it does some years. I feel really sad. He would be 47 this year. Only he never got older than 22. He’s been dead a fair bit longer than he was alive. His whole story arc is so sad and tragic and unfair.

My ADHD meds ran out and I apparently don’t get a refill until after some medical tests that aren’t scheduled till next month. So I’m going on and off amfetamines and that’s not exactly ideal for emotional regulation and getting chores done.

We tried to reassign chores. Then a few really expensive wool items of clothing got washed. I’m doing the fucking laundry again and forever after because washing my fucking wool is not ok.

I’m spotting on day 14 of my cycle and that’s not normal. It feels bothersome and emotional in a way I don’t like. I assume it is related to the increase in running lately but it’s always emotionally uncomfortable to me. Day 14 is usually way too early for the PMDD cycle of ugh and crappy to be starting but it sorta feels like I am tanking emotionally and I have no resiliency left.

I feel like shit. I feel sad and lonely and incompetent and stupid and bad at everything. I feel empty and hopeless.

I feel really good when I am out running. I feel fully in my body and alive and strong. Then I come down from the euphoria and I want to crawl under a rock.

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.