Tag Archives: friends

How do we define ourselves?

I have a yoga class in two hours. Does that make me a “yoga person”? I like it when I get punched. Does that make me the cause of my own abuse? My husband can punch me for hours and all I will do in retaliation is suck his cock and thank him. But some random dude stopped his car to yell at me while I was out cycling and he slapped my hand and I called the police and he was spoken to about assault. My tiny neighbour is exploring boundaries and when you tell her no she is apt to slap you–your face or your hand, whichever she can reach. I picked her up and gently set her outside my studio and said, “No ma’am. You can’t hit me. That’s not ok. I know it is hard to be told no. You feel frustrated and sad and you probably think I’m being mean. I am sorry I have to say no but I don’t have time to pick up all the things in that drawer from the floor today. Another day I will say yes.” She gave me a suspicious look but stopped crying and ran off to play again.

When we try to figure out if we are a good person or not how do we decide which moment to judge?

My best friend, many years ago, was absolutely determined to get into med school. She accepted horrifyingly unsafe living conditions so that she “had time to study” for her exams to get in. She lived with her parents, who were a master class on unsafe and shitty parents. She studied for 8 years as of when I last knew her. Her university GPA was really nothing impressive and she needed a perfect score. I don’t remember what the scale is, I’m going to pretend it is out of 1,000. She needed 900+ to qualify for admission. 8 years in she had never gotten above a 500. The tests are expensive. The study materials are expensive. She ate poorly because she took no time to cook and she had almost no money because she worked the absolute minimum to devote her time to studying. She was sleeping on an RV mattress on concrete blocks. Her back was doing so poorly that she had a gallon size plastic bag full of meds. She was high as a fucking kite at all times and her doctor thought she is heading for surgery as the very best outcome and probably a wheelchair. She would not in any way consider doing anything with her life other than being a doctor.

She came to visit me. She was supposed to help me with my wedding reception (she offered, I did not ask). She couldn’t. She couldn’t stand or sit or focus long enough to actually complete a task. She ended up spending all the prep time hounding me about how I was supposed to take her to a fucking release party for whatever Harry Potter book was coming out. I still had not read any and I was completely uninterested in spending the weekend of my wedding reception hanging out in line to get a fucking children’s book at midnight. Sounded like hell.

These sorts of non-communications passed back and forth for a while. Then I exploded after she told me that she was saving up all her extra money because she wants really fancy earphones for her 2 hour each way commute. I asked her why she isn’t saving money for a decent mattress since she is looking at surgery and a wheelchair because of the damage she is causing to herself. I asked her why she won’t get a reasonable, attainable dream for her since she is killing herself chasing a star she isn’t going to reach. (I am paraphrasing. I don’t actually remember the words I said. I know I told her that she needs a new dream.)

I was a horrible fucking person. Whether or not I was “right” about any of that I shouldn’t have said it. I had no right to pass judgment. It was cruel. It was unkind. I made someone I love deeply cry.

I mean, there are my scene fuck ups too. Once I was overly defensive on the local public mailing list when someone said that I had made their fingers numb during a bondage scene. (Not long-term numb, there was no permanent damage.) I shouldn’t have been a twerp and I was. I was kind of right as well, slight numbness in fingers is not a reason to flip out though it does mean you should probably modify your tie so that it doesn’t continue. Meh.

You say that you are not your trauma (fiiiiiiiiiiiiine Alebeard I will argue with your fucking assertion since you CAME AND TAUNTED ME AS SOON AS I WOKE UP THIS MORNING~) which I can kind of accept, because I think a person is defined more by what they do than what they have done to them. How do you measure the trauma you cause other people? How do you figure out if you are being in the world who you want to be?

I had a dear friend–I’ve lost contact with her. I should look her up. Anyway, I had a dear friend. She was sweet and kind and gentle and one of the more scary bad ass masochists I have ever witnessed in person and that’s saying a lot. I have seen many thousands of people play and I know a lot of extreme edge players. She was special. She was able to recover from levels of physical abuse and say “more please” in a way that is pushing way past the edge of self harm. She also had an eating disorder and she self harmed, so.

We were talking about calling red. I have stopped scenes that crossed explicit boundaries; she had never done so. I asked her how she felt about that. She said it scared her. She said she was afraid that she was going to let someone kill her because she genuinely didn’t care if she walked away from scenes. I asked her if she thought that if she got to red once if she could do it again. She said she thinks so and that’s why she is afraid to do it. Doing it even once is telling herself that she deserves to live. She couldn’t do that.

I asked her if she wanted to red.

She started crying and she looked down for a while but eventually she nodded. We had played together quite a bit and we had long since negotiated physical limits and toy stuff so I could simply ask if she wanted me to make her red. She said she did.

I beat the shit out of her. The whole time I hit her I talked to her about why she is worthy of love. Why she deserves to protect herself. Why she is special and wonderful and strong and pretty and kind without being injured at the same time and why can’t she hear that? Why can’t she believe that she deserves to live?

I don’t know how long it went on. I remember it as being one of those “forever” scenes where you lose time completely and you can go for 3 or 4 hours before dropping in exhaustion. It stopped because at some point I was sitting on her and slapping her in the face over and over telling her that she has to tell me to stop. She has to live. She has to love herself enough to live. She has to say stop. She has to say red.

She broke.

Why is making one friend cry because I said unkind words enough to mean that I am a horrible person but beating someone for hours until she cries and tells me to stop is ok.

She made positive steps in her life after that. The rest of that is not my story to tell.

Sometimes forcing your will on someone is a service and it is desired and welcome and a healthy thing to do. It is negotiated and desired and created and facilitated through an agreement. Sometimes you are a fucking dick.

I have fucked up a lot in this life. If I am not the trauma I experienced in childhood, cool ok, am I the trauma I inflicted in my adulthood? Even you understand that there is a difference between the trauma you inflict with consent and the trauma you inflict without consent. I understand that you (particular, singular you) differentiate hard between people inside your sphere of care and people outside your sphere of care. Think about accidental trauma you inflict on me, or E or the kids. That has happened. All humans fuck up and hurt people. It is part of the process of learning how to exist in this life. We learn a lot more from mistakes than from always doing it right; at least that is what I tell myself to justify how much I have fucked up. I definitely have a bone deep understanding of why I will never speak to someone like that again.

But the real question is: will I ever beat someone like that again? Quite possibly not. I might get beaten like that again. It’s different. There is a very specific experience that comes from giving someone intense catharsis that is absolutely intoxicating. You know it well. Now the freaking yoga class is coming up sooner and I need to eat before I leave.

Was that a good enough argument?

~P.S. I love you, @Alebeard. You are weird as fuck and a troll and kind of mean and you still delight me. I’m not ok with your time on this world ending soon so knock off that line of talk. Too many people have died recently. I am not at all ready to lose more. Go for a fucking walk. I hope you are eating your hippy vegetables. Live long, my friend.

I miss sharing every thought with him.

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My son shares his dating exploits with me the way I write mine online. I find this touching. I have not modeled this with him as I have been dating. I have been incredibly moderate in what I have shared for lots of good reasons. He had no notion of how many people I uhh auditioned last year. I have always treated my friend reports to his dad like this, though. He watched me do it. It’s like he is live-tweeting at me now. I get little blurbs from him through the day.

It’s funny how since Noah died EC and I both notice that he is a lot more like me than he used to think. One of the things I wanted (and got) in having a third child was to break the “teams” shit we had going before Shortie came along. For a long time Eldest Child was Noah’s Gemini and Middle Child was my Virgo. In many temperamental ways the patterns are remarkable true and consistent. Noah and EC were both oldest kids. For a long time MC was the baby like me. Noah and EC tend in the stoic direction. MC and I struggle with our explosiveness. There are distinct and dramatic patterns.

MC is discovering ways that they had a lot more in common with their dad than they knew. Puberty and social isolation are combining to teach them a lot of the overwhelming anxiety that Noah struggled with despite growing up in a stable home. MC doesn’t have the bone deep sensation of being adored. I failed there. I didn’t manage to inculcate that a second time. I mean, they know I love and adore them. They have a lot more awareness of the world rejecting them. They feel more isolated and different. They didn’t spend as many years in the welcoming bosom of my queerkin in the Bay. They lost that and then went into lock down in a new country. They have a lot more anxiety than EC does. EC had a big bounce of anxiety when he went to school. With MC it is feeling like something where they will have to settle into long term management of chronic mental health struggle in this area.

EC wants to share every thought in his head. I am still his favourite audience. I choose shouting into the void. It is the only place I have ever felt comfortable. If people opt in to reading my words here, it isn’t my fault if they have feelings. I didn’t make you come here.

I am struggling really hard. I over extended myself. I should not have reached out to Pretty Lady yet. I needed her to have far more patience than was considerate. I wanted her to invest in me in the long run. She needed me to invest in her more upfront. I can understand not finding that deal appealing when I can’t match the energy she has right now. I can’t though.

Some days I pause long enough to feel in my bones how deep my burn out is. I was intensely burned out before he died. He wasn’t looking for a job because he wanted to be able to genuinely give me long periods of rest. I wanted to stop homeschooling when we moved to Scotland. I am tired. I have some friends who spend time with Shortie so I can be off duty for a bit. They all say that when they go home they are exhausted. Most of the time they fall asleep. Hell, my cleaning lady is here for two hours and she says she goes home and can’t do anything for the rest of the day because being in my house is so overwhelming. We are just talking around her. We aren’t being intense at her.

As I hide in my room because I am banished from the kitchen I have to take a moment to feel in my heart that I got here. I have one adult child. I have a quasi-adult child in 7 more weeks. (Scotland is weird.) I have one more small one to get through puberty. This is what I set out to get. I have always felt deep shame that “find a partner” was not my #1 life goal. I talked to Noah about this. He knew he was, in large part, a means to an end. He helped me have children. That was my goal. To make people of my bloodline who were ok and who made it to adulthood with as little trauma as possible. That level is higher than I would have preferred. I have my babies. They are magnificent to me. Including in the way that gets me banished from the kitchen from 10pm-12am every night. That is when I have a choice. I can let a magical fairy clean up my kitchen in complete privacy or I can incur the wrath of the furies if I enter the kitchen.

Really, is it even a choice?

All of my children have a lot in common with me. I find it affirming that we get along well. We can all set boundaries and make demands. Oh boy is my youngest making a lot of demands. This is tricky. MC, Shortie and I are all very PDA flavoured and that makes the fact that we are all demanding motherfuckers pretty complicated. It was easier to give them both the space they need when I had Noah giving me the space I need. I don’t feel like I can find Mary Poppins anymore. I am too tired. I don’t have the ability to be practically perfect and attentive to their every need. My battery has been empty for a long time.

In my mind I carry a picture of my grandmother in law. I have always considered her as a there but for the grace of God go I sort of character. She was a brilliant woman. She was also deeply hard and selfish and unable to consider the needs of her children. She was violent and cruel and abusive. She kicked my mother in law out, literally kicked, when she got married. She said her daughter had become a whore. That’s a fascinating view to have of someone getting married as an adult while not pregnant in the 1970’s. Hardly harlot behaviour.

Like Auntie was a martyr I don’t want to be. Like my mother was a perpetual victim and childlike in her inability to care for herself. Like my sister passed on the legacy of destructive behaviour we were taught. Like my mother in law didn’t get her PTSD under control in time to save her relationship with her oldest child.

I have so many examples I want to do at least slightly better than. Not because I think I am better than any of them. I’m not. I’m equally as damaged and distraught and overwhelmed and out of cope. I am better resourced than all of them put together, though. I don’t share their justifications for needing to lose their shit. My therapist keeps trying to convince me that my life is super hard. They would like me to give myself a lot more slack. They worry a lot about my nervous system. I appreciate that. I am definitely feeling the HPA axis dysfunction lately. My body is not doing well. I’m brittle. I’m cranky in ways I don’t mean to be. Stupid shit sets me off. I don’t like being this low in reserves. I keep feeling like I just need a little rest. Then I am interrupted by one of a million things.

I need to have more capacity. The only way to increase my capacity is to do less. I can’t do more with my capacity if I am doing less. I’m kinda fucked here. I feel terribly selfish for missing Noah because he gave me rest. He did a lot of taking work away from me and sending me off to be alone. He and I were very interchangeable in the house. It was amazing. He was doing more and more with every year. I really appreciate the way that we never stopped turning towards one another. We were both doing intense stuff to bring focus back to us as a dyad all the way through the end.

I feel like I will permanently have less than 40% of the capacity I used to have. I can’t manage to finagle that level of support in time before Shortie has outgrown the really intense period. I am in this death march until she hits increased independence. My coparent is gone. He was amazing. I can’t imagine having anyone try harder to support me in raising a family. I don’t seek another coparent. That is not a fair role to ask of anyone. Noah casts a big shadow.

I can see my daughter casting about for father figures to bond with, though. I am glad that she has a few different ones. I am glad that she gets to have a bunch of men who are being loving and considerate and careful of her as she goes through this period. I’m lucky. I laid the groundwork for this in advance and friends have stepped forward when I asked. She is clearly pretty interested in having a relationship with Gentleman. I keep thinking how much Noah would approve of Gentleman. Noah was always afraid of me choosing to date people who were disrespectful of me. He was very concerned that I not subject myself to any more substandard treatment. Adoring me is step one. If they don’t, off they fuck.

Noah both did and didn’t set me up well for losing him. In many ways I am struggling because I lost my main emotional support person on top of my main physical support person on top of my coparent and exercise buddy and there is the tiny little matter that he was the only real witness to my life. It’s overwhelming how hard it is keeping all of my shit off stage from the kids. I feel like such a liar all the time. I don’t share every thought with my kids.

They definitely think I exist to be an external hard drive for their brains though. Holy shit.

I am struggling with getting us to all the appointments. All of our fucking bodies are high maintenance and I don’t know how much it is ADHD and how much it is perimenopause and how much it is grief and how much it is cumulative brain injuries but fuck I can’t remember anything. I listen to my friend cite to the penny how much money she has in her bank account and I feel deep shame. I couldn’t keep numbers in my head right now if I was paid for it. I’ve always struggled with dyscalculia. It feels worse than ever. It’s a good thing I have people who are actually watching my finances. I can’t fuck anything up too much. The money is out of my direct control. That is both terrifying and quite a relief. I am scared of being this person. I am scared of having this kind of responsibility.

How in the fuck did I manage to end up the fucking heiress for some generational wealth bullshit?! This was not something I fucking planned for. It will allow me to keep my babies safe. It reminds me of the story Peter wrote about me. He depicted me as quite a savage creature, covered in scars and wounds. I crouch over my sleeping babies with a knife prepared to end any creature who accosts them. I don’t actually think the knife will be necessary. This is good. I’m not a particularly violent human as they go. No matter what my father would have wanted for me. No matter what my blood thirsty ancestors would have done.

I feel alone. I feel like I must be alone for all the hours of the night and day. I feel like this is a terribly heavy burden to carry forward.

I feel terrible because I should be soaking in how awesome my boyfriend is. He really is. Instead I ruminate on the story in progress from a holistic point of view. There are so many moving pieces. I feel like I am drowning. On I swim anyway. No time to stop.

Tactical errors, failures, and belonging

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now I’m just a fucking daftie.

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.

“That’s not poly, it’s sequential monogamy”

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So here’s the thing. Poly doesn’t mean that you are fucking multiple people every day. It doesn’t mean that you decide “I have 15 hours to spend with people I’m fucking so I will give 7.5 hours to Person A and I will give 7.5 hours to Person B.” Well, I guess someone could do it that way if they really want to. It would be highly unusual though. We aren’t Mormons with sister-wives fighting over a shared husband.

Particularly I am in favour of the flavour of polyamory that is referred to as Relationship Anarchy. What it means is that each relationship has the ability to filter into my life as far as is fitting for that relationship. It means I take my non-sexual relationships as seriously as I take dating. I will pick platonic friends over lovers to share key moments of my life because they are the ones I want to be in that moment with.

I’ve spent a lot of my life deferring joy. “I will be able to go do a fun thing in 6 months and that will let me eat a shit sandwich every day between now and then,” I was negotiating for poly with Noah before he died. I was negotiating for being able to be allowed to pursue someone in ten years–now 8 years away. I was looking for the ability to upset the apple cart a lot when I have my last quasi-adult in the house. That was when I thought I’d be able to seriously go nuts having fun playing with lots of people. I didn’t think it would happen before then.

As I look at my life right now I am fairly convinced that timeline is still going to be a big deal. That’s when my kids start pulling away really hard. That’s when they want only a few hours a week of intense time with me. I won’t have an empty nest (I’m not sure if that will ever happen) but my time will be my own. That’s when I think I’ll be able to escalate seeing new people a lot.

Before then every change in my life is going to happen at a glacial pace. We have a really good thing going in our house. We like each other tremendously and we have a fairly well oiled machine.

We have our ways of coping. Like, MC started out bitching massively about how they aren’t “allowed to have boundaries” and then we talked a lot about the difference between a boundary and having control over other people. In the end there is a ban on anyone walking into the kitchen between 10pm and 12am. That’s when they want to be cleaning and they can’t cope with people being in there while they clean. I have to walk through the apartment patio door and go through the hallway to go between the studio and my bedroom instead of taking the straight path. When they want to do a cooking project in the middle of the day they will use the apartment kitchen and no one is allowed to enter the room. I feel so much relief in my heart that we have enough privilege to have these things be possible. This house is a really good set up for us given our challenges around interruptions and noise. We have ways to adapt the space so we are all capable of sharing our best selves.

That’s something I can work with. No one is allowed to be in the room when I assemble Ikea furniture for the same reason. I will scream. I will yell profanities. I will be entirely out of chill. I can’t control it. I can keep people away from it. MC has lived with me all their life. Sometimes when they are working they are letting out all their ambient frustration. It’s cathartic for us. When we can’t verbally express love to each other (because we are having Big Feelings) we can know that we are showing through work a demonstration of taking care of each other because we love each other. We accept that we are all people who have to go off and have our tantrums. We don’t mean anything by them. We don’t want anything to change. We don’t want people to walk on egg shells. We don’t want to upset anyone. We need to let big feelings out of our bodies. We have found ways that work well for us–as long as people stay the heck out of the room. If you come into the room when we are storming you aren’t a victim you are a volunteer. You were warned.

We always give warnings about this. We know it is happening. If a stranger walks by we can break character and apologise profusely for our manner of dealing with frustration–we thought we were alone.

If someone cannot see the benefit of something we do that’s fine. I assume most people think we are crazy. It’s going to go rough if instead of asking questions with curiosity you attack and denigrate us. We don’t respond to that. All of us can fight but we work really at making sure we don’t do that within our house any more than necessary. We have very passionate discussions and arguments at times. If someone is about too go far and say stuff that might have consequences any one of us will call a time out so that we can retreat and clear our thoughts and feel our feelings before we come back and try it again. We all know how to watch for signs of someone is about to cross a line because they are too upset. I love my housemates so much. I love the way we have decided together how we want to feel in this set of relationships. I love that we all feel we have the right to be demanding because we know people will compromise to the degree we are able. We won’t get everything we ask for. That makes it safe to ask for the stuff that is hard to ask for. Sometimes we get it because it turns out we are not able to evaluate what is easy or hard to give for someone else.

I was thinking about this last night as I was going to sleep. People are only compatible with my life if they are deeply curious as a reflex. If someone is instantly judgy I don’t have the time or energy to deal with the fall out of that. I cannot have patience for someone projecting onto me and assuming the worst. Naw. If you don’t see my desire to be there as evidence of my interest then I should walk on. I can have patience for all the respectful questions in the world when I’m in a room with you. I can’t answer pages of questions for you in writing. Mostly because my hands hurt. Also because I don’t have time. Also because I’ve already answered that and 9,127 other questions in the Archive. Go spelunking by topic in the tag list over to the right side of your screen.

My friend who is going to help with catching up old entries has had a few things come up but eventually she will get started. I’m looking forward to that. I have lots of patience for “You can earn money whenever you can squeeze it in.” She has a busy life. She will do a few hours of this when she needs a bit of extra cash. Happy to be a steady side gig for a couple of months/years/however long it takes.

I decided to ask her for help because she was already the local friend who asks me the most invasively insightful questions about myself. She’s really intelligent and keen on what I think about social dynamics. We have amazing conversations. She tells me equally intense stories about herself. We’ve been chatting for years now and we see each other when she comes to town.

I truly am finding my people in Scotland. I don’t think I will ever have a network like I had in the US. I don’t have enough spare time to build the relationships. I keep trying though.

I will keep trying because I am poly. Being poly doesn’t mean I will be fucking everyone I have an intense relationship with. I fall in love with people and they filter into my life to the degree that is suitable. One of the five folks I think of as my Kids around here comes over the most and helps me the most. He is filtering into my life to the level that is right for him and the other Kids see me in the ways that are right for them. I don’t duplicate time or ways of communicating. I’m not weighing and measuring things so everyone gets their “fair” share of me. Everyone gets what feels like a stable level between us.

The first year of someone filtering in is slow on purpose. I used to be a very hasty person. I made big commitments and then 3 months later the relationship fizzled out. Of people I have gone on a first date with 91% end in the first 3 months, 4% make it to 9 months/1 year, and 5% make it past 2 years. If there is too much intensity in the first few months it can burn out the relationship. Those are counting all the friendships that involve sex. If you look at people with whom I was seriously trying for a Relationship instead of a friendship + whatever it’s only 3 people who have ever made it to 2 years or longer. I see no good to making big changes or promises early on. Most people won’t be able to handle putting up with me.

I won’t be having an intense amount of sex with new people any year soon. I can’t see a way for that to happen. I’d have to feel safe and I’m not sure I have it in me right now. I feel so fragile. I feel so scared of getting hurt in a way that would make me a bad mother.

The fact that I’m not rushing into intensity with a new person is a conscious choice. When I’m in a really bad mood and I think I won’t be able to keep my tone of voice nice I tell Gentleman not to come over. I am not stress testing this relationship. I am terrified of the very idea of that. No. He can help me with tasks that I can do in a good mood. I’m still keeping my awful side away from him because I don’t want it to be his problem. Noah got used to ignoring stuff I said on bad days because I was reacting from pain and stress. He said that on those days I admitted to problems I wouldn’t admit any other day so he paid closer attention to what I said then compared to every other day. The stuff I can easily and casually complain about is not what is making my heart bleed.

That is part of what I don’t want to have with anyone anymore. That is going to be a major barrier to intimacy. This is a place where I am broken right now. I don’t want to hurt people like that. I want to be more gentle than that. I can’t always be a nice or gentle person though. It’s part of why I like being alone so much. Then I’m not hurting people by existing.

I wish I liked me more. I wish I didn’t feel like the problem. I wish I wanted less. I wish I had less to do. I am drowning in paperwork and phone calls and responding to people I really have to respond to or there are legal consequences. The emails that get sifted out for immediate response before my brain stops being able to focus as I look down the rest of the list. How to do this triage. I don’t know. I need less on my to do list.

I really appreciate the friend who takes Shortie out for a few hours on Monday so I can work without interruption. I get more done in those 5 hours than I do in three weeks of constant presence. I know because I just went more than 3 weeks without the respite and my to do list is still very long. Maybe I’ll be able to get it all finished next Monday.

Why don’t I write more fun emails? I am being selfish and cruel and unkind. I am abandoning people. Yes. Clearly. My friends all hate me because I don’t write them enough emails. Right. Sure. Ok, turns out I am actually quite salty about that. I want to not be thinking about this anymore. It was an attack on a core wounding. Is my behaviour so poor that people can’t love me?

I am torn between feeling a wild amount of justification and security in how I live my life and this pernicious anxiety that people are going to have a lot of bad things to say about me. They aren’t going to like my results. I am not creating children with a lust to work themselves to death earning money. I am failing at capitalism. Instead I am having them read small business books about how to market and sell things they make because they are crafty little fuckers. An awful lot of the income around here comes from tourists. If we have to put up with the fuckers making the roads clogged, at least they can give back more money.

I did not raise people to succeed in big tech or high finance. I didn’t want to. I know people in those worlds and they are miserable motherfuckers. I raised people to feel like they have a lot of ability to learn new things and give back to their community. I don’t know where they will go with it. They get to choose their own adventure. Their stories aren’t really about me. I’m the spawn point. I’m part of the origin story. That’s complicated.

It’s weird hearing EC describe his childhood in stories. He gets feedback on body language. People ask him if he was abused a fair bit. He says he wasn’t but both of his parents were and he learned how to exist in the world watching us. Sometimes I wonder though. There were times I crossed lines. It happened way more often in the beginning. I haven’t been long term or large scale abusive. I think there have been moments I crossed lines. Not enough that he feels the need to hold me accountable for them. We’ll see if that evaluation changes over time.

I always tell my kids to leave space in their mind where they know that everyone opinion they currently hold very strongly might change. That doesn’t mean they were wrong in this moment. It means they learn new things and develop new context.

I have a lot of abandonment issues. No one is going to enter my life quickly. It’s going to take a long time before I build intense trust with anyone. I’ll keep trying though. You never know when serendipity will arrive. I simply sigh and nod knowing that I have an over 90% chance of striking out.

I fully understand that the level of harm I have experienced wasn’t intended. I know that. I’m not angry at her. I am processing what happened in my body when that thoughtless bit of communication was lobbed my way. It’s fine. I won’t be butthurt forever.

A long time ago a wonderful sex worker told me that I couldn’t be a sex worker because I took myself too seriously and I couldn’t laugh at myself. I still think she is right. I am not cut out to be in that casual of a role.

I believe that if one wants to be a slut then one must get over being butthurt at fast as possible. Not every swing connects with the ball. It is sad. Keep moving. The fact that I do not have another partner equally in a place in my life as Gentleman is not “proof I’m not really poly”. That is reductionist. I am going to hunting events. I am meeting people. I am working on putting tiny drops of comfort into buckets with new people. I am trying to build a community of people I can feel safe connecting with like that. I think it’s going to take me a while. I need more meat life time. I need to feel in my bones that I am not ever disappointing Noah again because he is gone.

I think he really believed that he had the strength of will to ensure he lived longer than me so that I would not suffer from the loss of the things he took away. He thought he would always be here to meet my needs.

Even when people are saying things they believe that doesn’t mean I can lean in to sharing that belief. The more intensely someone promises “forever” in the first couple of dates the more likely they are to flounce away when I don’t match the pretty picture in their head. I am a deeply flawed motherfucker. I am weak. I am over-committed. I have only tiny shards to share. If that shard is good enough then maybe we can have some fun. If it is not, no hard feelings. I know that what I have to share is not very big. It’s ok if it isn’t enough for you.

I wish you happy hunting. May you find what you seek. May the Slut Gods smile upon us all.

Good information to have, and why dating me is not a lot of fun.

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Shortie was not grounded for 4 days. Only 4 days. Then she took a packet of ramen noodles and a couple of packets of instant oatmeal and decorated the lounge. Sigh. I was talking to her about this today and she said that she feels like she got grounded on purpose. Even though it sucks to be limited in what she is allowed to do, I stay within a meter of her the whole dang day. She wants that kind of contact with me so much that being grounded is better than not being grounded.

You know what? I can work with that. If she is aware that this acting out is a cry for attention then I can handle that. I’m proud of her. That’s intense emotional work for an 8 year old.

Our life is hard because she used to spend 4-6 hours a day intensely interacting with Noah and now the other three of us are having trouble with increasing our hours. I have her in activities! Don’t tell me to add more fucking activities, ok? I am ferrying her around to as much stuff as my crappy crippled body can manage. I have no ability to do more. Would it be better for her to go to school? It would be if A) the kids wouldn’t beat her and if B) the school didn’t punish her for getting beaten and reporting it. We’ve tried school here with the older kids. I don’t need to put my last kid through that delightful formative experience.

Instead she has asked to be stapled to my butt going forward. She doesn’t want to be grounded but she doesn’t completely want to be not-grounded either. She wants more attention and connection and being in the same room even when that is slightly annoying. Ok. I will find a way to manage this even though it is hard.

I am reflecting a lot on the ways in which my most recent attempt to onboard a new person failed. I assume that a huge part of the failure is on me. What can I control next time to make things go better? I can’t control everything.

It is going to be hard for people that I genuinely need to have 12 months of building a relationship with you before you get to integrate with my life. I know that other people want that stuff to happen faster and I really don’t give a shit. If you aren’t willing to invest a year into getting to know me one on one then I don’t think you have the patience or ability to integrate with my life. Dealing with my actual children is far more difficult than dealing with a courting period. I promise. My children are not easy people to build a relationship with but we are likely to remain closer than average as time goes on. My 18 year old is not in a hurry to move out. He likes our life. He wants to keep doing this with us. He had about two weeks when he was 14 where he tearfully talked about “Maybe I will move out when I am 16 since YOU DON’T LIKE ME ANYWAY.” Noah and I spent a lot of time very submissively talking about how much we liked him and we didn’t want him to go and that passed quickly. Otherwise he is as convinced at 18 as he was at 8 that he is probably going to live with me forever, or at worst move out in his 30’s. My 15 year old kid is somewhat interested in pursuing jobs that travel and using our house as a home base to come back to. They want to explore but they don’t want to go.

Dating me means understanding how polysaturated I am from the beginning. My children occupy a huge piece of my heart and mind. They are my vocational focus for this life. They are my reason for staying alive. Having a happy family is the single thing I care about most in this life. Noah and I both sacrificed a lot to build this. And we are very happy together. My kids think I’m amazing. I think my kids are amazing. We are all very defensive of each other. We understand that we are all intense, challenging humans and not everyone is going to respond well to us. None of us are willing to listen to people badmouth the folk in our family. If you try you quickly get an icy reception. My son hates a few people in town for talking about how domineering I am. I think my earnestness can easily sound domineering and I can’t appeal to everyone. It’s not a big deal to me. He is fucking furious that they stated those opinions out loud. It’s fine to have them, but sharing them at a group social event went over his line. Ok.

We are a unit. We are a pod. We come as a package deal in a way I have never experienced as a person dating. I think it must be intimidating as hell to try to find a place in our tight knit little crew. You have to come in with curiosity, an open heart, and very few demands. You can’t date me if you are not exceedingly patient. I am difficult and my kids are difficult and combined we are orders of magnitude more difficult than someone else would be.

When I was young I believed people who instantly told me they loved me and would be there for me “forever”. I now know that when people say that in the first few weeks it is wise to carefully not invest too much in the dynamic because it probably isn’t going to last. Anyone who instantly professes how much they will do for me is going to have expectations I can’t meet. This happens over and over and over again. They aren’t in love with me. They are in love with an uncomplicated, undemanding, totally unrelated to me projection they have made up.

I think my kids show a really extreme amount of maturity and wisdom when they say “Spend a year figuring out the relationship, then you can begin integration.”

Yes, I prefer talking into the void over sending anyone emails. Even though I don’t get comments. I wonder if you know how scathing you sounded when you asked me why I prefer this. I prefer this because then I don’t have to wonder if someone is going to respond in a positive way or a negative way. I don’t have to carefully anticipate what kind of topics this person can handle. I don’t have to try and proactively deal with insecurity. I am kind of brutal and harsh while I talk to myself. I try not to soften the edges much. I feel how I feel and I don’t need to apologise for it.

I will not consent to having a relationship where someone expects me to write a bunch of messages to them. I don’t want to. It hurts my hands. I don’t get as much out of it as you do. It drains me. It makes me feel like I can’t handle doing the things I’m supposed to be doing with my time.

Two years ago Noah and I were talking about poly. We were doing so because I was infatuated with a guy I’ve known since I was a teenager. We had a holiday together. On the other social media site I called him Travel Boyfriend. We never kissed or had sex but it was emotionally intense. Right before Noah died I decided it wasn’t a good thing to pursue and I ended the courtship.

With Travel Boyfriend, Pretty Lady, and Good Trouble (a random pick up from a swinger website), all of them were pushy about meeting my kids. They wanted to integrate faster than I was comfortable with. In all three cases pushiness about the kids was a big factor in why I ultimately broke it off. If you can’t respect that my kids asked for a year I don’t trust you to ever treat my kids with respect. I don’t believe you care about them as humans. You are thinking of them as pieces to move around the board to suit your whims. Every single one of them was pushy because “they wanted to help me”. It doesn’t help me to make me feel anxious and like people aren’t respecting boundaries. That’s a hindrance to good mental health. That isn’t help; that is interference.

My son made the comment that he doesn’t care how many people I go have relationships with, he cares that only people who have both staying power and respect get to come into our house.

Personally I think I need to make it much more clear way faster that if people want to read about me, the Archive exists. I will not be typing my history to people in emails. No. I don’t want to. I find it distressing. I will talk about stuff in a room with you but I won’t write it down for you in an email. I find that specific framing of inflicting my writing on an individual to be highly distressing. Part of how I make peace with writing things down is people have to opt in to reading it. Emailing people isn’t the same opt in experience.

It doesn’t have to be rational. It doesn’t have to be what would make other people comfortable. I’m not existing the way I have for over a quarter of a century because of you. I am like this because it works for me. If it doesn’t work for you that is completely ok. I won’t hate you because we aren’t compatible. I am not compatible with nearly everyone. I am compatible with very rare souls.

I am having a bit of a hard time here. I know a lot of people. I feel emotionally connected to 6, maybe 7 adults in this town if you squint and include EC in that total. That’s a low rate of connection vs how many I know for me. In the past I was used to feeling emotionally close to a much higher number of people. I can tell that I feel deeply bothered by my inability to spend the kind of time with people that would lead to such closeness.

I wanted it with Pretty Lady but I wanted to wait and develop it in the room and that made her feel abandoned and ignored. I feel so flat most of the time. I’m really struggling with the amount of cheer and patience my day job requires. I don’t have good cheer most of the time when I’m alone in a room. I just have apathy and ennui and burn out. Writing emails when I feel like this is fucking exhausting. It makes me feel like I’d rather carve on my legs with scalpel for entertainment.

That’s not a standard way for humans to feel. I’m the aberration. This being true about me is going to make me hard to date. I don’t have to want to make people feel bad to effectively do it.

I need to have relationships build in the room. I can’t have these long torrid email things these days. I genuinely can’t. I want to build stable interactions. I want to choose people over and over because being in a room with them is better than being in a room alone. The thing is, I really like being in a room alone. I am fucking awesome.

I want to date people. I want to have serious, long-term, interesting relationships with lots of room for growth. I’m willing to wait and be picky and see who comes along. I’m not in a rush. If someone is in a rush they are not for me. I’m not offended by that or upset. It is what it is. We all have to be free to go our own speed. I move at a glacial pace. I have to. I have a lot going on. I can’t inflict sudden drastic change on my life. Nothing is stable enough for that.

I keep feeling surprised that Gentleman keeps hanging on. I keep expecting him to get sick of my bullshit and stop coming over. Instead he leans in a little more. He waited 12 fucking months to meet my kids. He had to go through the process. No one else is going to be so fucking special they get to leap from the process. If you want to believe that you deserve better than to go through our process then you won’t fit with my family. Sorry.

My life has been full of people coming and going. It has hurt my kids. They have learned how to protect themselves from my endless searching for new connections. They know that most people flame out in the first year. Hell, most people flame out in the first three months. I have stats. Sometimes people make it to several years of friendship before things go south. I’ve had a few long term intense friendships end with fireworks. I try not to do that anymore. It hasn’t happened in a long time. I’m a lot more cautious about not stress testing relationships anymore. I keep my messy bits more private. Now that I don’t have Noah to talk to about any of it I don’t know that I will ever talk to anyone about my harshest pieces. I don’t think it will ever feel appropriate. I don’t think I will ever feel safe enough.

If you feel entitled to know stuff about me, you can read the Archive. Otherwise I’ll say what I say in the room and no you don’t get to be pissy about expecting me to write you emails. I can’t be doing that. I am not able. If you think you are more inconvenienced than I am by the ways I am disabled let me fucking set you straight.

I am grateful that Gentleman spent the night last night. I managed to get almost 10 hours of sleep. That’s a miracle. I’ve been struggling with insufficient sleep for weeks.

I feel deeply inadequate and unworthy of love today. Which is funny because I went to the park for a birthday party of a little person in our community. Many of the folks there like me just fine. We aren’t close friends but we are community and that’s great. We’ve been doing stuff together for years now. I behaved. I was good. I did what I was supposed to do. I interacted how I was supposed to.

I did it while feeling like I barely know these people and I’m scared of all the things I can’t/shouldn’t say to them. I did it while feeling physically weary to the point I needed to sit down almost the whole time I was there. I did it while feeling exhausted by the knowledge that I choose actively to live in this place as an alien invader and that’s complicated.

I got cursed out by some guy on the way home. He wishes all the fuckers like me would leave and not come back. I don’t look like a local. They can tell at a distance. Fair enough. In a field of gorse I sprout up like a redwood tree. I take up wayyy too much energetic space. This is true.

It is weird feeling exhausted by the strain of trying to integrate more fully into this life in town. I need to do more with my kids around people here and it sounds so terribly exhausting. People are so loud and pushy and difficult. Being out is hard and draining. It’s supposed to be “good for me” but it leaves me feeling wrecked.

I wish I felt less like an invasive species that no one ever wanted to have planted here.

Priorities and patience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fragments, shards, tools, and usefulness

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I am struggling right now. Writing this feels like an invitation to conflict but that’s not what I’m trying to do. I don’t have any intention of putting anyone down, making them feel bad, or blaming them for my current state. I’m probably going to have to negotiate some folks feeling bad anyway if I keep writing.

I love that people trust me to support them. It’s a big theme in my relationships, all of them. With adult peer friends, with Kids, with Elders, and with children I am usually someone that people come to when they have big feelings they need help understanding/sorting. I have no answers. I’m not going to tell you what to do or how to feel or how to fix your life. I’m not omniscient. What I can do is ask questions and share a different perspective. I like that I am good at this. I like that so many people trust me and love me in this way.

Also I have maintained the stability to be good at this over the last 20 years because Noah took care of my needs. He listened to me when I was dysregulated. He helped me tease apart where I was feeling bad about old stuff vs having a negative feeling about current actions. He helped me find my place in time. He could look at my face and have a good idea of about which age/trauma I was experiencing as an abreaction. He just knew.

Now I am helping other people untangle the threads of their lives. I feel ever more ensnarled in my own threads and incapable of pulling them apart. I need Noah. I will never have Noah again.

I talk about the hard parts of our marriage rather freely. My body is still ramping down from paying the costs of being his wife. I feel afraid to talk about the good. Thinking about how much I lost is much more painful. He was a very good husband. He was a flawed human being and he knew that meant he had to work on getting better all the time. That made me feel very safe. He was an asshole and I was an asshole and we wanted each other and it was ok that we weren’t perfect.

I am back in that place where I feel dirty and polluted and toxic for other humans. My only value is in being a tool to help. I need to do work or I don’t deserve any of the good parts of being in a relationship.

Yesterday I sat in my kitchen for 5 hours talking to a friend who is going through some stuff. It started to really kick off in their life before Noah died and they’ve been holding their breath and levitating, waiting until now to start feeling like they seriously need to change big parts of their life. They needed to talk it through with someone who isn’t going to think they are bad for having needs that their life isn’t currently meeting.

I am happy to be that for them. I really am.

Several Kids are going through rough stuff and they need to spend a lot of time processing. None of them have mothers they can really go to for processing and support. They have friends like me. Most friends aren’t like me.

My children know that they can come to me and say, “I need you to listen to me and support me like a therapist. I need you to be on my side and not advocate for or defend yourself.” It takes a few seconds for me to do the compartmentalisation necessary but I can do that for brief periods of time. I can’t live there but I can bring up a container where I am not for other people to visit when they need that from me.

Make the self into a vessel where the self is not.

I have not been able to have the rupture-repair conversations with folks from last year yet and it is eating at me. I feel ashamed. When I think about trying my insides explode with acid and pain.

I shouldn’t have approached Pretty Lady yet. I’m not ready. I am being avoidant in some shitty ways. She is in a great place in her life and she just got great news–a woman she is attracted to is also attracted to her. I am freaking out about my complete inability to close and do shit I want to do. I feel really sad that I have no container for this joy. I’m too busy feeling shame for betraying Noah. I’m too busy feeling like I am drowning in my day job. I’m too busy not being able to sort out getting my body to hurt less. I feel incapable of reducing pain at this point. It makes me feel scared and tense and angry. It reduces my capacity.

Rodent therapist says I am sitting in the intersection between resilience, tolerance, and capacity. I am not doing so great. My resilience feels almost nonexistent. My tolerance is not where I would like it to be. My capacity feels like it is nonexistent. All I have are knives.

The last few therapy sessions have involved a lot of time where my therapist is basically pleading with me to see that my life is very hard and I am genuinely dealing with more complicating factors than average people. I am not pathetic for struggling. Everyone would struggle with what I have going on. I am not a failure of a tool if I can’t work harder right now.

My inability to do more than I am doing is not proof that I am worthless. They would really like me to be able to hold on to this in my brain. Mostly I’m failing.

I can’t be there for everybody the way I wish I could. Failing to be there for people means they internalise that they aren’t worth having anyone be there for them. It is evidence that they are disposable, right?

If I can’t meet everyone’s needs why should they bother to have a relationship with me? I’m just going to disappoint them and fail them. Why bother?

I’m really not worth it. I have very little bandwidth going spare. My life is exhausting and depleting in ways I can barely wrap my brain around.

Years ago I was working with my then youngest child on anger management stuff. They are an apple that landed with their skin touching the trunk of the tree they fell from. I love them so much and I have tried hard to teach them all the stuff I was taught about how to manage living in a body that gets overwhelmed that easily. They asked, “Why is the answer to every problem ‘Get stronger’?”

I don’t know baby, but it is. That is the only thing I have seen in this life. Over and over it doesn’t matter how weak or incompetent I am. Sure, I’m going to fail a lot. I will also get back up and keep moving, working the whole time on getting stronger. I don’t know another way to experience being human.

“If you can’t look back on yourself 18 months ago and say ‘Wow I really sucked‘ you aren’t trying hard enough.”

I know, Noah, but 18 months ago I still had you. I don’t think I will ever really be able to look back on that time and think I sucked. I had you. I had a Daddy. I had a home. I was loved in this crazy, impossible, overwhelming, thoroughly engulfing way and I fucking loved it. I felt safe in my terrorised home. I felt abused, squashed, despised, and like I explosively needed to grow in ways he didn’t want to allow, sure. Mostly though, I felt loved and accepted. I knew that man was going to take care of me until one of us dropped dead.

Then he did drop dead.

I know other people love me. I am not trying to demean the gift of their love in any way. They are the flickering candles that light my path. My friends love me and carry me when I can not love myself. They keep me going.

Noah’s love wasn’t a flickering candle it was an explosive volcano that was going to permanently alter the landscape of everything he touched. I wanted him to burn me.

I feel so completely devastated that he isn’t my last rapist. I am so angry that a fucking loser stole that title from Noah. It breaks my heart. He wanted so badly to be that.

It was ok for Noah to break me. He always built me back better.

I don’t have that certainty in any other relationship and I shouldn’t look for it. I would hurt people and I don’t want to. I want to have relationships that are free from abuse moving forward and that’s going to be very hard given that I surround myself with people who are all suffering intensely from feeling abandoned and rejected as a core aspect of their selfhood. We are spiky folk.

What I offer is that I can sit with that pain and not be damaged by it. I can’t take it away. I can’t make you feel better. Your pain isn’t going to make my pain worse. My pain is about me and the journey I have been on. Well, sometimes your pain is going to make my pain worse. This is harshest when our Mother Wounds don’t align.

That potentially explosive conflict is a lot of why I am frozen when it comes to repairing some ruptures right now. Dancing around my Mother Wound is hard when I am feeling strong and stable. I am neither feeling strong nor stable. I feel weak. I feel pathetic. I feel incapable and sad and desolate. I feel like I got in over my head. I feel like I am failing at everything and there is no way to ever have anything be ok again without Noah.

Not everything was ok with Noah. There were big problems. Don’t bring reality into this relationship.

The ways I felt electrically uncomfortable with Noah were never going to fully go away. I felt a high level of nervous system activation around him. It felt comfortable. It felt normal. It felt like a shot of really strong espresso to keep me moving and energetic.

I don’t have that now. It’s weird. I have less nervous system activation than I’ve had basically ever in my life. I’m told this was supposed to be the goal or something? Why do I feel dead inside then? If this is the gold star point of all the work I did that strikes me as a problem.

I do have less nervous system activation. I feel locked into receive mode. I don’t have containers where it is safe to let out all of my crazy. I know people say they could handle more from me and it’s ok for me to talk too. I can’t. I can’t risk stress testing anyone or anything. I have to be in control of myself. I have to only bring out the tiniest of shards or I will hurt someone.

It’s going to be all my fault someone feels desolate and lonely and like there is no point in continuing to try to have relationships since everyone lets them down.

I have a lot of people who tell me that I am the safe person in their life for them to talk to. I am grateful every time. It is meaningful. I feel like something is broken in me that I don’t feel equally safe in these containers.

I felt safe in the container with Noah. I was allowed to be the most psycho extra bitch in the world and he thought I was fucking great. In tearing my soul out to splay it on his workbench like a butterfly he was examining he made me whole. The parts of me that he hated and he wanted to change were meticulously examined and understood. He took them apart down to the smallest molecules. He may have felt angry with me but he never felt repulsed. He was always drawn further in.

There has been a lot of scream/crying this week. My throat hurts. I’m getting that weird eye twitchy thing. I hate that.

I was disgusting and bad and a failure and he still loved me and wanted me. He would never have left me. Until he died suddenly in a freak way. It’s not fair. There is no fair. Someone wanted me. It was too good to be true.

He wasn’t even my Daddy for 18 years. That didn’t start until after I wrote the first book. I wrote that book 5 years in. He couldn’t be my Daddy until he saw the full context of how my father abused me. That’s objectively kind of fucked up. Also wonderful. He contorted himself as hard as he could to be the partner I needed. He put more pressure on himself to change than he did on me.

No one is perfect. No one is always good.

I don’t feel like I know how to be good enough for people going forward. A lot of how I was so good for Noah was because I was so intense and my nervous system was so activated. We matched. We spurred one another on. We combined into rocket fuel. We could try audacious things because when we fucked up the other cushioned the blow.

Noah was the person on this earth who thought it was worth night and day effort for the rest of his life to make sure I felt like someone wanted me enough that it didn’t matter if anyone else liked me. I could be bold. All the times I was rejected were tolerable because I could come home to this bubble, our whale pod of acceptance.

Now I don’t have that. I am trying desperately to create this feeling for other people. My source of it for myself is gone and I feel so very empty. How do I keep pouring water from my bucket when all that I have in there is sand. I need to water the souls of other people so they can grow. I need to live pretty much all the time in that container where I am not. It’s the only way to not be swamped by how much pain I am in.

It would be very hard to use text to talk when I am sobbing and screaming like this. I’m just saying.

I like my housemates

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It’s blowing my mind that my oldest child is 12 days away from being an adult. This feels absolutely impossible and bizarre. Yet, here we are. My second child is 3 months away from being a quasi-adult in this country. (Scotland is strange. There are many ways in which you gain admittance to a softer version of being an adult: you vote (in some elections), can join the military, can leave school, and you can get married without permission. You may not buy a plastic picnic knife or a pair of scissors.) In our house one of the things that turning 16 gets you is that I no longer micromanage school/screen stuff. I go hands off and allow them to fuck with their schedule. I figure that making mistakes with running your body between 16 and 18 is one of the lowest stakes time in ones entire life. Might as well make as many as possible.

I feel like I have spent the last 18 years training housemates not raising children. They communicate so well, both of them. When one of my children is struggling with doing one of their chores they initiate a group conversation so we can re-divide chores. It’s miraculous and glorious. I feel so much pride I want to explode. MC (Middle Child) has figured out that they are happiest if they can do their contributions to the household when no one else is around. They clean the kitchen after everyone else goes to bed. They are now choosing to opt in to getting up early enough to make breakfast. These wrap around chores will make sleep slightly more of a specific issue but they want this combination because it produces the lowest amount of distraction while working.

It is really cool living with people who know who they are and what they want. I feel really proud of them. I watch them self advocate and I struggle with not crying. It never enters into their psyche that maybe they should just shut up and suffer. Their life hasn’t gone that way. When they are suffering they speak up about it and demand change. That said, we also talk through the things that must be endured because they cannot be changed DBT style. I love Dialectic Behavioural Therapy. It really works for me. The framing of it helps me a lot. I have been super active in teaching it specifically to the kids. There are things that must be endured: challenging developmental stages, security in airports, recovery from surgery. These things can’t be changed when you want to. Most things can be changed though and having the strength to make it happen is the obstacle. My children are so strong. That feels mystifying to me as they balance the contradiction of being very strong and also disabled.

MC had an adenoidectomy last week. They are really enjoying the way they can already breathe through their nose somewhat. It’s hard because they haven’t been capable in many years. I am overjoyed with the impending running schedule. They are going to be coming out with me several days a week and that thrills me. Up to age 24 is when you build all the fast twitch muscle mass you will ever have in your life. We have 8 years left to push hard together to make them stronger and capable for the whole rest of their life. That’s fun.

EC (Eldest Child) is frankly suffering a lot more. His body is crap and he is not getting a lot of help from the NHS. To be fair, I don’t know what they would be able to do for him. He eats in supportive ways. He does supportive work for his body. He is doing everything that someone with our alphabet soup of labels can do. He’s going to have a rough road. He’s going to lose a lot of time to feeling like crap and being unable to force his body through coordination. There is no avoiding this. So he takes on chores around the house that have a bit of wiggle room and he can do them in batches on days that he feels well.

YC (You are catching on with the naming convention, yes?–Youngest Child) is not so good at these things right now mostly because she has zero self initiatory drive absent an immediate reward and that’s a complicated thing. Her motivation isn’t present and I’m struggling with being consistent enough to make demands every day. It’s a negotiation and a production every day still and I’m really tired. It’s hard to be as consistent without Noah around filling in the gaps.

I miss Noah every single day. It’s not every hour at this point, that’s progress. It’s hard accepting all the ways I have less to give now because he is not the backstop. I commit to so much less than I did. I feel like my brain is constantly overwhelmed and I’m drowning in lists of things. Yes, I write them down. I still repeat them in my head because otherwise they will never happen. I feel like barely contained chaos at all times. Noah made order out of the chaos. I feel deeply helpless without him. I’m trying to learn that the maelstrom of words is not something that I can share in the same way. I will never be able to jump topics in a conversation the way I did with him again. No one else will ever have so much context for my thoughts. He could look at my face and know why I was crying. He knew which wrinkles in my face were for which layer of grief. It is hard the degree to which I will not be known going forward.

I don’t mean that no one will get to know me. They will do their best but I have a lot more history now and way less time to talk about it. What Noah and I had took so much time. I don’t have that kind of time to give anymore. It feels like I am not able to promise that depth and intimacy and I feel really mixed about that.

I feel lots of feelings at this point because poly is going to be complicated. I’m looking forward to it and also dreading it. I think that is a fairly normal set of feelings about poly. Poly is great! Also: poly is terrible! I really like my boyfriend. He feels like a really solid human. Our explorations together continue to deepen and broaden. I don’t currently have any idea what we are building towards. I don’t know what the limits of this relationship will be, exactly, yet. I don’t anticipate living together. For sure not any time soon. I am looking forward to when YC is older and I can sleep at his more often. He has a kitty who doesn’t appreciate being abandoned so he shouldn’t sleep here too often. We both have these anchors in our own spaces and that feels really comforting to me. He has been burned by relationship changes in the past. I like that we are both coming into this relationship with our own centres of gravity. (Also, if you are from the UK please give me spelling feedback. I’m trying to adapt but this shit is hard.)

I have started dating a nice woman I know in the queer community. It is still very early days and we can’t get together often. We’ve had two dates. We have not had sex. I feel like it’s going to take a while before I can be capable of having the kind of sex we are interested in having together. I have a lot of issues. My marriage involved a bunch of very conscious programming work that Noah did on my brain to try to change me. He wanted me to be monogamous. He wanted me to never top/dominate/hit someone ever again. He did a lot of hours of work on making it so that my body feels like it can’t access these urges I have. He wanted me to only need or want him. Now I can’t help but feel like I was right to refuse that.

I keep replaying in my head when he burst into tears saying that he was going to turn out to be only one of my great loves when I was absolutely the one big one for him. It feels like an indictment of my character.

The pain I feel right now because I couldn’t give him the single minded focus he needed so bad is part of why I feel like I should never live with someone again. My inability to have only one love hurts people and I don’t want to lead anyone on ever again.

It’s not that I spent my whole marriage cheating on Noah. I didn’t. He was always terrified of it though. He felt like I could at absolutely any moment and he never relaxed. He didn’t trust me. He didn’t believe I would keep choosing him. He was afraid that any amount of not looking at him would invalidate all of the time I spent looking at him.

He was suffocating me. I feel awful about this. I didn’t have the capacity to be satisfied from spending 20 hours a day with him. He was very stingy about how much time I was allowed to be out of the house. I didn’t want to leave. I did only want 10-12 hours a day with him. That hurt him. I couldn’t make that not hurt. For him that was overwhelmingly painful rejection. I talked about getting a crappy retail job to get out of the house and meet people and he was very upset. He could not accept me wanting to spend that much time away from the family. He would scornfully tell me that I would make so little money that it could not possibly justify being away from him. He missed the point.

I was trying as hard as I could to be ok in the small box he wanted me to live in. I wanted to be the wife he wanted. I am really sad I couldn’t be. I was going to keep beating my head against that wall forever. I’m sad that our journey together is over.

I am sad that my need to be alone and to have adventures with new people will continue to hurt people forever. I am selfish. I want myself. I want to be alone. I want to spend time in my brain. I want to form new understandings of humans and that means continuing to meet new people.

Another Kid is entering my life. I am really enjoying having intergenerational friendships with folks. I love that these young adults are drawn to me. I love getting to talk to them about what is going on in their lives. I’m trying to map them out in my brain.

I feel really lucky that these people come and seek me out. I don’t do that great in group situations at this point. I hang out on the outskirts of communities. I am not a central pillar of anything. I hide in my house and garden. These folks come to me and share their hearts and life stories. I rephrase what I hear to make sure I’m understanding properly. This process is a big deal. I don’t have to have solutions or answers to anything. What I do is properly listen and help them frame the topic. That’s enough. Having someone else understand and validate what is going on is already a big deal.

I feel like I should put more effort into friendships with folks my age but they all have kids and the schedule conflicts are impossible.

I have been spending more time with Jenny. That’s really good for my soul. Once again she is pulling me into dancing. Now we go to line dancing classes together. She has been good for me for over 30 years and I cannot overstate how grateful I am. She is such a good friend.

I am not reaching out to most Californians. I feel incapable. I feel overwhelmed. I feel like I am drowning. I am fully present in every moment and I don’t have the ability to reach backwards for all the old ties. I feel like I am barely stumbling through my days. I am so tired.

Today I have a whole bunch of time. I get to weed! This is the big thrill for me right now. Yeah, yeah, “No mow May”. I’m not mowing. I’m removing grass from growing areas. I don’t have the space for a meadow. Luckily my neighbour is letting the patch next to me run wild. I finally acknowledged to myself that I missed the window on starting seeds so I have bought some plant starts. I try not to do this. Oh well. It is what it is. Food will grow. Asparagus (not to be harvested this year of course), a variety of different Asian green vegetables, a bunch of salad green things, some peas, some brassicas. I need to chuck my potatoes in the ground today.

I won’t get everything done today that I “should”. I’m not capable of it. That’s feeling really hard. I should also try to get all the tax documents sent off to the accountant. That should have happened already. Fuck.

Also I want to read more. I want to sleep more. I need more rest. I also need to exercise more. DO EVERYTHING MORE ALL AT THE SAME TIME.

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

Invitation

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I feel like I have found my little livejournalesque bunch here and there are so many amazing ideas floating around in my brain. I find myself drawn deeply into the stories told by dominant women lately. A long time ago I found no draw there at all. I have changed. The funny thing is, I still don’t think I will grow up and be a domme. I don’t think that will ever be my primary identity. Not all that yields is weak. (Thank you Jacqueline Carey.)

I am freaked out by the idea of figuring out what to wear because I feel like I don’t know how to invite anyone into any kind of anything. I feel paralyzed, frozen, unable to assert my longings once I am in the room. It has been a very long time of being punished for identifying these longings too closely. He didn’t hit me or anything but he did talk to me most fiercely. It did redirect the mind control efforts quite a bit.

The worst punishment in the world is knowing that I disappointed Noah. His disappointment was crushing and devastating. He was my Daddy. He was my God. I wasn’t letting down an ordinary man. I was committing heresy.

I was talking with a widow friend in town a bit ago. It was sort of intense when she grabbed my arm intently and leaned in and said, “Don’t get married again. Hold on to your freedom.” Her second husband has been in the mental hospital for quite some time. He only got there after sufficient violence in the home.

Life is terrifying. There is so much risk. So many bad things happen. It’s always funny when some loud feminist tells me that obviously I have the views I have because of my enormous privilege and lack of trauma. I mean, I do have an enormous amount of privilege. That’s a fact. I completely agree with that assertion. My life is staggering. There are a lot of problems I don’t have to have.

I would quibble a tiny bit about “lack of trauma”.

I really like the way my brain works in musical interludes. I intensely walk around with my personal little sound track going in my brain. Right this minute out burst out with Garth Brooks belting [Standing Outside the Fire.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IaTYqFZ4-4) This was one of the songs I listened to for every ~~nitrous trip~~ dentist visit from 12-18. The dentist used to be so fun. Oh well.

I feel absolutely unable to contain the inferno inside of me. I don’t know how to express it. I don’t know how to invite contact with it in a way that feels fair and reasonable and appropriate.

Mostly what I am looking for is friends. People I can egg on into adventure. People who want to laugh and cry and experience life together. I want to have fun on my own terms and not at the direction of anyone else.

I want to search for sadomasochists. I want to find people who will lean in and encourage me to go harder when I hurt them. I want to find people who will be torn between wanting to hurt me and getting distracted by me hurting them. I want to tussle back and forth never certain about who is going to win until one or the other of us collapses from excessive want and someone can’t fight for control anymore. I want to not know going in over and over and over. I want to find people whose desire crashes over them as harshly as mine does. People who feel absolutely driven by the need to experience pain.

What I miss the most is Black Sheets. A long time ago there was a recurring party in a house that was normally closed to women. The entire house was decorated with phallic art from around the world. It was an experience. It remains crystalised in my brain as the epitome of what I wish kink parties were like. It was a queer sex party with heavy bdsm encouraged. It was what I dreamed of in my feverish masturbatory fantasies early in life. I got to participate. It was incredibly fun. All the fucking in all the ways with all the peoples. It was amazing. I loved my friends so much. I went often enough and socialised with folks outside the party so the sex was icing on top of a really great cake. The relationships were deep and complex but had very little to do with what one might think of in terms of a cis het mono “Relationship”. There were people who came to these parties and had no penetration of any kind with anyone but there was still a lot of sex.

I feel like I got through the monotonous torture of early parenthood by remembering that I had a really fun self before they came along. Without Noah here as the bridge sharing before kids and empty nest with me the journey is going to be different. I agree with my therapist on this one. I can’t go back. I wouldn’t go back in a hundred ways, top of the list meaning I won’t go back to the US if I can help it. I do have to move forward.

I appreciate the kind offer of a permission slip. It worked really well when Noah did it.

I am going to have to find this somewhere else. I have to make some kind of peace within myself between feeling like being a white trash whore makes me essentially toxic to humans and feeling like I have a lot to offer. I do have the potential to be toxic to people. I am not in denial about this. There are going to be a lot of people who can’t be near me. Sometimes for reasons I completely agree with and support and sometimes for reasons I am going to hate. It doesn’t matter. Either way my responsibility is to back away as much as I can.

I believe that is the social contract.

When people tell me about the bus that hit them I am probably going to ask why they stepped out into the street and they are going to be incredibly upset with me. They are going to ask why I am victim blaming. They are going to accuse me of minimising their trauma.

I am really not trying to. I am trying to help you find the pattern so that next time you can avoid the next bus if that is very important. If possible I can help you decipher if a given bus is actually very fun to get hit by and maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. Not because I will tell you that you should do it.

I am going to tell you that the sane thing is not opting into getting hit by a bus.

I will do that while consciously and deliberately looking down at the transit map for the perfect timing on stepping in front of certain busses.

I feel like certain other tantalising women do a better job of making this sound poetic.

So much of this desire is brutality and I don’t have the ability to make it sound ethereal and soul elevating right now. I’d better get ready to because book club is in 5 days. Woo!

I am very cheerful about getting to talk about this kind of stuff theoretically with other word people before going to the party. I won’t be actually doing any useful social networking because Americans but it will still feel reassuring. I’m still scared of the ways I will have to proffer my meat sack in order to build what I want to be part of.

I would love to find people in this country for the kinds of parties I think of with so much longing. I want to find the fire that lives in other people and stoke it higher. I want to be kindling. I want to help people feel permitted to desire.

I want Church. I want a river of desire and lust and wanting and permission and pain and transformation. I want to leave bite marks on chests while I use them to gain my pleasure.

Do you know how incredibly fun it was to go to a sex party with a bunch of friends when a verbal order to orgasm was fresh in my programming? I really really really appreciate that my partner went to such trouble when I was 19. That’s been fucking handy in life in all kinds of ways. It has also lead to a really deep and abiding alienation between me and the topic of owning my cunt. It doesn’t matter how dominant I act most of the time, I still need permission to come.

I can get to the point of begging from fairly little stimulation. If I don’t ask when I feel the urge I can make it go away entirely and then I won’t get off at all during the sex. That’s a complicated place to live in.

I cannot actually take my pleasure. Permission must be given. I really am a vampire. I cannot come unless you invite me in. Luckily when no one is in the room I’m fine. Or my life might be a much more miserable place than it otherwise is. I like this part of this timeline.

It complicates inviting anyone in. Needing to bring up that uhm situation fairly immediately creates a lot of tension and dynamic from the get go. Any amount of advertising myself in a sexy way brings with it the mandatory early conversation about orgasm control. It’s not an easy 101 conversation to have on the fly. “Well it’s fine if it’s just an impact scene.” No. No it is not. A lot of things drive orgasm in my body. I take nerve pain medication every day because my nerves shoot off in some troublesome ways no matter I do. Some aspects of this are very fun. I like that a lot of activities make me get off. It’s not that hard to get me off.

I have a sense of alienation from this at times. Needing this permission really triggers a lot of bullshit dominance behaviours from men. It’s a complicated dance at times. I feel like I have spent a lot of my life bouncing around in the manic pixie dream girl trope. Do you know what men want to do when they find their own manic pixie dream girl? Lock that shit down.

I do really love hearing about how other people pick their style. It would be convenient if I didn’t have such a knee jerk reaction to purple, perhaps. You know why and that’s enough. I don’t have to explain it to anyone else. I find this presence that is not present deeply comforting. Thank you for allowing me to talk to you again. I have missed you.

I have missed the me that I was with you. I have missed exploration without specific limits. “Go out; have adventures! Come back; tell stories!” I cannot go back.

How do I move forward inhabiting that kind of space, though? I’m still toying with the idea. Agonising might be a closer fitting term. This doesn’t feel fun. As the wise lady said, it’s a lot easier to gloss over how much suffering happens as you figure things out. Another wise lady was talking about why she stopped talking about her personal life in a public way many years back and she’s very happy about it.

This is how I figure out who I am and what I want and what I need to change to get to where I want to be from here. My life would be much easier if I fit neatly into boxes and didn’t need to explore the pain I feel when I consider exposing other people to the deep core of fire that is inside of me.

I do know that the power comes from me. Permission to exhibit it comes from relationships. Permission to radiate that power comes from active consent.

How in the fuck do I radiate a kind of sexy that contains the conundrum that while I want to rip you apart and savage your body I will still need you to control a pretty essential aspect of my biology. This is more than a little insane.

Honestly this is part of why I want to keep my clothes on with Pretty Lady for a very long time. Touching me changes the dynamic. If it is done in a wide variety of ways there I am begging and pleading for release.

I am not looking for people who want to have a go at the pinball machine. Not at this time. Maybe later. That’s for when someone is a friend and has already paid into the Bank of Krissy and _______’s Relationship. That’s for parties like Black Sheets.

In my mind and in my soul there is an understanding that such parties are not available at this time at any cost for me in this environment. That’s fine. I have less than 10 years left on the indenture. 54 is going to be a really good birthday for me. Halfway through the year after that I am free. Not that I will have an empty nest. But I will be free to pick up and go where I want and do what I want when I want.

Fuck. I want to feel E Ticket Ride sexy. You have to be willing to pay a whole lot of extra costs for me. I’m a lot. I have a lot to give. I have a lot I need to get. You have to jump over hoops to really get me to offer you my time in an ongoing way.

I don’t know how to describe this headspace. I want to open the door to serendipity. I think there is a very important difference between this and the app-driven mindset of “I have to keep looking at my options.” It’s a very serial monogamist way of looking at it. I don’t want to see if I can get an upgrade on the boyfriend unit.

I want to find out what kind of torment I can find with other people. Torment is my love language. How fucked up and awesome would it be if someone had to give me permission to come over and over while I told them no?

I MEAN, HOW COOL DOES THAT SOUND?! I mean, I have mental possibilities of sound tracks but they are all vague because this is potential space.

I have never done what I want to do now. This is a huge amount of moving forward into a kind of power I did not and could not have when I was young.

I don’t know how to radiate this power because I don’t know what it feels like yet. I have not yet been sexy in this way so I have no idea what it looks like or feels like. I took the yielding, perhaps too far when I was young. I didn’t know how to protect my crappy meat sack. I did not know how to limit the checks my mouth wrote by the amount my ass could cash. I was hit by a number of very large busses. I am not sorry.

I want to pick a route with a smaller bus next time.

I want to feel the sparkling electricity that comes from masochists slamming into each other with mutual gasps and squeaks and moans because does it hurt or does it feel good? I don’t know or care just don’t stop.

I feel like a raging volcano. Advertising as if I were just slutty would be underselling the experience by a lot. It would feel really unfair. It would feel like false advertising and trying to draw people into a web of intensity they are not actually prepared for. They would interpret my intensity as drama. I don’t intend to create drama and I work really hard at not disrupting peoples lives in bad ways.

It’s a risk though. If you trigger people to go through transformation sometimes there is some drama. Change is not always appreciated by the other folks in someones life. They liked things as they were.

Chaos agent. Chaotic good, if you will. Mostly? I strive but I fail. I am only mortal. I like to bit off more than I can chew and then I wonder why I choke.

I want so much that I am burning with it. I don’t know how to keep being normal without getting to bleed off this energy. I want to hurt someone so much my fingers itch. My cunt aches and longs for interaction. I want to rake my nails down your back because it makes you lust harder.

I do not know if I want a glamour. I do not know if I want to come naked under a sheer supplicants gown. Please use me. Please allow me to use you.

I actually own the dress I have in mind. I need to run a few hundred miles before wearing it again will happen. I am going to go for a run today.

I want and I want and I want. I do not know what manifesting this in fetching garb looks like yet. How do I attract what I want? I force and interest in leaning in to change. I don’t want to do the same tricks you have done with everyone ever on repeat. I want to find new tricks together. Don’t tell me what was best with other people as if I am supposed to try hard to best someone else’s personal score on the video game of your personal pleasure.

You don’t want to play that game with me. You really don’t. My pinball machine best score list is not something you want to think about. I was married for a long time to a really good lover. The person who instilled the initial programming considered a personal hobby to help me hit 4 digits of orgasms in our relationship. It was an intense experience.

Please, for the love of Cheese, don’t whack the pinball machine like you are desperate to be the high scorer. That’s just not a good look.

I don’t want to just be a pinball machine. Sometimes I refer to this feeling as being treated like a service provider. I’m a vending machine of the experience someone wants to order up.

I am not real big on “spontaneous” but I am huge on serendipity. It’s not an accident I walked into that room. I probably planned it weeks or months in advance. What happens once I get there is not fully under my control. I have to throw the dice and see what happens.

It’s not that “dating” means nothing to me. It is that dating is not the same as marriage and it is not the same as ownership. It means I have not relinquished my autonomy as a single adult head of household. I need to go in. Time to do that head of household bullshit. I want to alternate between typing and masturbating all day. Oh well. Such is not my lot in life. I wanted this Indenture. Time to serve it.

They won’t know that hiding behind my grin and cheerful, “Good morning! Good to see you again” will be a simmering need to savage someone’s body.

I am an excellent liar.

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.

I’m told that the obsessive self reflection at the end of the year is very American.

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Not to toot my own horn or anything, but my hindsight is amazing.

One of the many things hindsight has taught me is that I have used therapy as support for my autistic inability to understand the social rules people expect me to be following. I’m not working on my 36th year of therapy. I was diagnosed with autism in year 32. I had a 5 year break 3 years after diagnosis because I moved countries and therapy didn’t feel super essential. I was doing ok. Then Noah died. I’m not doing as ok. I need the support. I don’t think this is exactly what therapy is supposed to be for but just like I can occasionally hammer something in with the end of a screwdriver, therapy can be what you need it to be.

This is a weird year to look back on. My goals for myself were really limited: don’t burn down the house, keep the kids alive, don’t fuck up friendships, have enough sex that life feels worth living, and do whatever I can to make sure my kids feel like they still have a fun future. I’ve done pretty well! The house is still standing and I still have all the children I started the year with. Check.

It’s an odd set of thoughts because in this next year the first child is fully a legal adult and the second enters into quasi-adulthood. I won’t have the same number of children. Scotland is kind of weird on this topic.

I fucked up a few friendships and I feel deep regret about that. One of them I feel like most of the fuck up was because two mentally ill people can’t always be support for one another; I’m sad she felt the need to leave my house and punish me by making ostentatiously false claims about me to child protection services. That sucked a lot. I am relieved that social services very rapidly identified that it was a malicious, false call. The assertion that I can’t feed my children is pretty dramatic and extreme given that food is our big thing all day every day. One friendship is not over (not by any stretch) but I needed a lot of time to sit with it. I needed to think really hard about how the relationship can look going forward. Have the relationship you can have, not the one you wish you could have. I have no shortage of love for my friend. We will figure it out. I am glad I hit pause and did not try to force myself to handle things faster. I would have fucked up. I don’t want to end this relationship even though I felt pain within it. This whole year was painful. I don’t want to act like any of my friends deserve to feel like the extent of that pain was their fault. It’s not. I was drowning and couldn’t do better.

I will be able to do better in the future. I am in less pain.

Sex has been really good this year. I had fun with the hiring and firing of lovers early on. Hunting makes me feel alive in ways very little can. Gentleman has ended up in a much bigger container than I expected. He is a much better person than I expected. My expectations were a tripping hazard in hell and then he turned out to be great. It’s been lovely discovering in layers all the ways in which he is a delight to be around. I want more time with him. It has been particularly rewarding for me to see the ways in which he embodies healthy/positive masculinity far from the encroachment of feminist speech I encountered in the US. He has healthy male friendships and they support each other emotionally. He is incredibly respectful and he reacts to boundaries like they are electric fences. They never have to be defended again. He does all this without using any feminist language around it. He’s not doing any of it because he wants to jump over hoops and prove he is a “Good Man”™️. I don’t feel manipulated; I feel like he is living his life regardless of me and I get to see small pieces of it. I feel like I hit another lottery. He makes me feel so much joy.

This year will be more balanced with time between the kids. Shortie got big things this year to help her feel like there is a fun future. Next year I’m not taking her on a big trip alone. It’s going to be back to pod-adventures in the time I have before Eldest Child is big enough to declare that he can get out of them by dint of being a full legal adult.

I am dreading the return to a more rigid schedule. We restart in 7 days. This whole year has been a dream state. Our hours have been whacked. We have drifted off in various directions and we’ve lost a lot of the structure I normally enforce. I literally couldn’t do it all. Not with how much brain fog and executive dysfunction has been ruling my life. I’m doing a lot better than I was and the estate stuff is mostly done. I’m going to have to pay a fine for it being late, but hey ho. It will be done correctly and I won’t get in trouble down the line. Getting this many stupid fucking businesses to cough up information was really hard. I have mixed feelings about my habit of keeping my eggs in a dozen different baskets. In one way: yay for monetary protection. In another way: oh my poor kids. Going through this as an executor was a nightmare. It would be easier for them if I consolidated and only had maybe three baskets. That scares me for a lot of reasons. It may be the better choice anyway. I don’t have to decide today. I have meetings coming up with people I pay exorbitant fees to and they will help me figure out my plan. Then they will execute the plan while I go back to my day job because this is their shit to do, not mine.

My life is fucking wild, yo.

I tend to go back and forth between thinking about the year aligning with the US tax year (Jan-Dec) or a school year (autumn-summer). I’m thinking about these differences because I have different goals for them. My 2026 plans straddle two school years. That’s really high in my consciousness for me this year in particular because I’m heading into my last term as my son’s teacher. That’s a super wild feeling. I set out to learn what I needed to learn to enable me to homeschool my future children when I was 17. No, I’m not a tradwife. I am an autistic weirdo who never fit into the school system. I was a good classroom teacher in that phase of my life. I feel I have been an intermittently good homeschooling parent.

There are times I’m not proud of. Times when my anxiety about failing my kids got the better of me and I went well into Tiger Mom territory. I think I stepped over the line into abusive too many times. This is a hard thing to evaluate and cope with while it is happening because of course I knew people who were doing far more extreme things. It’s hard to see where you are on the scale while it is happening. Looking back, every single time I was shaking and ranting was over the line. I didn’t know how to feel secure in those moments. I had no ability to trust the long term would work out. I was operating on faith and my faith was a shaky thing.

I have not punished my younger two kids the way I did EC and I believe that is to the good. He and I have talked about it a lot over the years. In a way I feel like part of what Noah got from being his father was seeing a child live with a mother who was working on PTSD triggers so that they would no longer be present in daily life. Noah never forgave his mother for how her untreated PTSD that made his childhood very hard. My son gets to point out how his childhood had some hard points but he spoke up for himself and demanded that things get better and they did. I did not come into parenthood a fully healed human being.

This is why having a mentally ill parent is an ACE point. My kids have had to live with me as I have struggled to get to better places over and over again. As they change and age up I have to grow through a different level of being fucked up. Part of the reason I am rereading the shitty romance novels from my childhood right now is because my life arc now overlaps and intersects with things from my mother’s story. I’m no longer living out Noah’s mother’s story. It’s really weird to wrap my brain around. Noah married someone who was frighteningly like his mother. Now I get to turn into my mother instead. This sucks because Noah’s mom’s life has gotten a lot better and she’s in a better place. I have no idea where my mother is or how her life is going. I’m not open to finding out. That scares me when I start to think of my kids. Will I maintain the good relationships with the first two because they imprinted on our happy family? Will I lose the relationship with my daughter because it will go how it did with my mother and I? That scares me a lot.

I can’t make the same mistakes with my baby that I made with my oldest because the safety net isn’t present. Having Noah in the house to be an alternative source of affection meant that our kids felt and knew they were overwhelmingly loved every minute of every day even when a parent was upset with them. I no longer have that on offer and it breaks my heart.

I don’t feel like I am going to be able to push a full schedule yet. It takes a lot of push in my house of AuDHD barely contained chaos. We get a lot done. We also don’t lead lives that align all that well with “normal” lives. That feels a lot harder to defend when I don’t have Noah in the house as the wage earner proving that keeping an abnormal schedule is no big deal. People can do that for their whole lives and still be part of society. Now I have to do it with my own chutzpah and I feel decidedly lacking.

I feel really scared and I hate that. I don’t want to feel really scared right now. I want to feel calm and like I know how to do my job. I started preparing for this job 27 years ago. Surely I deserve to feel confident now. In less than a year I have my first homeschool graduate. In a way it is unfair though, he is the literal poster child for why unschooling is a fabulous concept that can be magically successful for self-motivated people. He had to go to school to learn that people believed his dyslexia +ADHD+autism means that he was supposed to be stupid. He was never told that at home. It was never part of the conversation. He had to learn tricks and ways to work around his issues, but his brilliance was absolutely never in question. It took two years after I dragged him back out of school to unlearn the awful beliefs he picked up in two years at school. Fuck school.

I definitely believe all the way to my bones that I am the best educational opportunity on offer for my children. This has been my great passionate vocation for my life and every single person who is qualified to judge me has been impressed by my knowledge and impact. I should be able to get over my anxiety about failing my children. There is literally no chance I can do a worse job with them than sticking them in school would do and that’s the standard offer. I’m fine. Really.

The anxiety is still very hard. The anxiety is what stands between me giving a mediocre performance and me being my absolute best Mary Poppins self. Sometimes people tell me not to worry and not to track how many hours we spend on various aspects of life like social life vs academics vs house chores.

My dude, you don’t understand that the tracking is how I allow myself to worry less. I never get to “don’t worry”. I don’t think that is on offer for my brain in this lifetime. It’s ok. The tracking lets me put down like 80% of it so I can use the bandwidth for other things. It’s useful.

I think about life in terms of hours spent. I’m watching the clock right now and feeling the last bit of joy that I get to keep writing right now. Starting in 7 days my time will be up by now. We have completely fallen off of the habit of doing family morning walks. It’s bad for us. We need to restart this way to begin our days. It’s important for so many reasons. We live 1/4 of the way up a really big hill. Going to the top of it every morning is the absolute most important thing we can do to ensure that we will be together for many, many years. Our hearts need it. Our circadian rhythm needs it. Our intestines need it. Our spirits need it. It’s time to get back to it. I love all of us enough to insist that we need to do this. Sure, exercise killed your father. Whatever. We still have to exercise.

This is a hard thing to carry. I feel like my bullying is a lot of why he died and I’m really struggling with that. I absolutely am a bully when it comes to exercise. There are reasons my kids can usually sprint up hills. I chase them up the hill over and over and over again. The faster you go the less I can talk and that means I’ll do less bugging you to go faster. It’s a really great self reinforcing cycle. The person who runs the fastest spends the least time listening to me push. They all get mad when I get high into marathon training and I can keep talking while they are panting and wanting to die.

I don’t know that I will ever do another marathon. At the start of the year I felt like I couldn’t possibly. Now I feel like it would take years because the amount of training time away from my daughter is hard to cover. Maybe I could make her cycle it with me. That’s a thought. I’m definitely mean enough to insist on her learning to cycle that far. We are bike people. It is our form of transport. If you can’t go out and do a lot of it you can’t go out and have a day and have enough energy for all the things. We have to treat cycling training like a mandatory part of life.

I have degenerative physical issues. I hold them back with a wall of exercise and good diet. Will I ever get better? No. Will I ever stop hurting? No. Will I maintain independence as long as possible? You bet your fucking buttons I will. I build muscular strength to make up for the weakness of my joints. It is the only productive solution I know of. I often have to wear braces or supports. I’m never fast. I’m never “fit” meaning skinny and well toned. But I am able to drag my meat sack through days of getting shit done. That is what I care about.

I have said repeatedly that I expect it to take 18 months for me to get back to something more like my normal speed. That means I am assuming the whole first half of 2026 is not going to be a banger year. It is my last term as my son’s teacher. I don’t want to go out with a whimper but I also can’t push hard enough that my anxiety spikes and I act like a bitch. It’s a hard balancing act on my own. I will have to bring enough joy into my life that I can stay stable. That’s hard. I have never been the best at stability. I have always lurched from highs to lows.

I find myself using a lot of the specific somatic techniques to regulate my nervous system. I am catching my anxiety spikes and solving them on my own. This can be very awkward for people in public so I try not to do it when out of the house. You can see the inherent problem there, right? Going out is when I feel the most anxiety while also feeling the least ability to self soothe. People really look at the weirdo rocking and tapping on themself while humming a really high tone for a long time.

I fucking love that I go to therapy to learn ways to be autistic more purposefully. Worth every £90 session. They help me strategise how and when to exit upcoming social situations so I can calm down. Do I need to fully leave? Can I just step out for a few minutes? It’s an adventure. I’m definitely the one crying.

It’s easy and natural to do around my kids though.

It’s making me think long and hard about what I perceive as “the social contract” and NT behaviours that I am required to mimic in public. I believe the social contract is largely not something that can be negotiated because it is about interacting with strangers and they can never be expected to give one grace. Will some of them ultimately be friends who will give lots of grace? Absolutely. You don’t test that right off the bat. You follow the social contract.

I was very delighted to spend Christmas day with a family of other ND people who struggle with masking enough to look normal. I felt so very comfortable. When someone else had a tic I could feel my body relax. I’m allowed to be here. My soul needs this feeling. I need other weirdos. It’s really important for me on a physiological level. I need the co-regulation. We all exist and we all should exist and it is ok that we have the needs we have.

How do I carry this forward being the only parent? Noah cast a big shadow and a lot of the reason we all felt so comfortable being weird together was because he was very weird and could make being intensely off-putting somehow charming. He was a marvel to behold. I do not have his ability to make things charming. I’m a lot more of a 2×4 to the head. The pressure of trying to be all the things has been giving me literal migraines. My body is overwhelmed and sad. More exercise is the answer, right? If it isn’t then I’m fucked because I don’t have a lot more on offer.

I am too tired to hunt. My relationship with Gentleman is going to be delightful and sweet and soft. I worry about the black hole I have of need for stimulation and connection. I am going to try spending more time with non-sexual friends. I’m not committing to monogamy. I’m just tired. I need joy. I need a lot of it. I need buckets of it.

I miss Noah. I have to keep moving anyway. It’s not time for me to stop. He promised I could die first. I’m really sad that I have to live with that broken promise. Oh well. Today I go get my new glasses. Hopefully that will help with the headaches. If not, time to see the GP.

The day must begin. There are foreheads to kiss. I need to tell them that I am so glad to see them again. Rituals are important. They bind you to who you are.

I am struggling.

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There is so much my kids need right now and I can’t do it. I tried to arrange help but it didn’t work out. Shortie is out of her mind with boredom and I have no more to give. The big kids are really struggling with post covid recovery. We are all so tired. We are taking naps, often together, almost every day. We are all barely limping through each day. I’m feeling bad about all the ways I am not enough. My kids are used to having a second full time parent who is supportive and involved all day every day. I can’t replace that.

Every so often I take time out of the house to try to recharge my batteries. Yesterday was such a day. I went to an event in town that lasted half the day and I wrapped around the event having date time.

Today is the one year anniversary of my most recent rape. I’m looking forward to when I don’t remember the exact date just “after Pride”.

Today is 6.5 months after Noah dying.

Today it is almost 4 months since I started dating this guy. I’m not one to move slowly. Life doesn’t slow down for me. There is always more coming and more to cope with.

I’m feeling guilty about the fact that I think I am partly dating because outside of the intimacy of sex I don’t know how to feel comfortable with people most of the time. Gentleman and I are a funny pair. He asks me if my friends are talking shit about him. I ask him how he is adapting to having to endure me touching him. My friends aren’t talking shit. He is enjoying having someone want to touch him; it’s a novelty.

I think I am as oriented around relationships as I am because I have spent my entire life playing “Pass the parcel” with allowing my interactions with someone else guide my change. I always have to be trying to change. That’s simply mandatory.

I was telling him about Jenny, how she and I have done a lot of copying each other back and forth through our whole lives to the point where people seriously think we are sisters and sometimes the same person. He jokes that I am the bigger copy cat because I moved to Scotland and found an English guy too.

Jenny had another good friend, L, and the three of us were in the same grade at school. We did a fair bit of being friends together. I was the one who dated much older people more often. Then the two of them married men who are 15 years older than us and I married the guy who was only 5 years older. Their husbands are still moving forward and mine is not. I am not working as hard to find someone closer to my age at this point. That was not as much of a protective factor as I thought it would be.

I like Gentleman. He’s not Noah. He doesn’t feel like my home. It’s hard and weird seeing the ways that it is a good thing. I needed the threat of violence and punishment in order to feel like I was at home and having that leave my life is really hard. Noah didn’t want to harm me. He didn’t want me to flinch away from him because I was afraid. Sometimes I did flinch because I was afraid. I tried not to. Nothing makes people feel compelled to hit you like flinching and wincing. I miss him so much. I can also feel the ways that stress is leaving my body because I don’t need to be afraid of displeasing him anymore.

That feels hard to admit.

I miss him. I didn’t mind the tension of being afraid of displeasing him. I wanted to be anxious about pleasing him. I wanted that to be the focus of my life. I wanted to keep soothing his wounds and worries and terror. I wanted to be the one who made him feel safe and loved and accepted. I liked being his person. Being his safe space felt like a worthy accomplishment for my life. Now what?

I keep moving. I have to make new purpose for myself.

I don’t know if I will ever feel like I have a home again. Do I feel safe here? Sitting in this room where that shit man raped me? Sitting in this room where Noah punished me the day after I had surgery because I didn’t react right to being raped? Sitting on this couch, in fact. The rape happened on the other couch.

This room is becoming mostly the place where I am having an affair with Gentleman. I am not sad about that.

I am still sad Noah got so mad at me. I am still sad that he saw my reaction as a betrayal of him. I am still sad that he wanted to manipulate my focus through pain and fear. I am still sad that I upset him and hurt him so much that he had to hurt me back. That anniversary is still two weeks away. It’s all so recent. It is so long ago. I want to go back to the day of the last party for Pride last year. Maybe if I had not wanted to make a friend this whole thing could have been averted. Maybe I wouldn’t have been raped. Maybe Noah wouldn’t be dead. I am so sad.

Even as I try to figure out what a future with Gentleman could potentially look like I know that every cell of my body misses Noah. Noah was shitty and petty and vindictive and mean, just like me. We matched. We validated each other. He gave me purpose and belonging and a place. He made me feel wanted and needed. He made me feel like I was the most important person on the face of the earth. It was a lot of pressure and it was really hard.

It was worth it.

I am not ok and I don’t know if I ever will be again. There are good parts to my life. There are things that make me happy and there are things that bring me joy and connection. I’m doing my best to reach for the light. It’s just really hard right now. I mean, I recognise the amount of luxury and privilege in my life at the moment. I have the ability to dwell and ruminate to my heart’s content. I hate being disabled and stuck idle. At least I am safe. I don’t have to worry about survival.

Even without Noah I still have the bottom layer of Maslow’s hierarchy covered. I have most of the safety level. There is this little problem of being born into my life circumstance with my body. It’s not a safe place. But mostly I’m safe. Mostly I’m almost a person. I’m still working on every level up to self actualisation. Because I can. I know how lucky I am.

I am scared but I won’t slow down. I have to keep moving.

A low key celebration

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Today my last baby turns 7. She wants clafoutis for breakfast and green soup (potato/leek) for dinner.

She is delighted that I won’t ask her to do a single chore today because it is her birthday. That’s the rule. On your birthday: no chores.

I miss Noah. I miss him in every second and it is hard to not freak out all the time. I’m actually being pretty stable. I’m keeping my shit together. I’m not yelling. I’m not being overly harsh. I’ve definitely snapped a few times and been sharp. It’s all about degrees? I am being patient. I am wrapping my babies in cotton wool while they figure out what this damage means.

I am making sure that I am not the problem.

I’m figuring out how to get my needs met and how to get support. I’m having difficult and uncomfortable conversations. They are good and important though. They are necessary. I have to learn how to talk to people other than Noah again. It’s been a lot of years of only turning inward to our pod and I can’t ask my kids for support. No parentifying in this house.

My old lawyer told me that I had to make myself happy. I can not pour from an empty bucket. I have to do stuff to make me happy. I have to make that my priority or I have nothing to give my kids. I don’t have babies anymore. I don’t have to put other peoples immediate demands above my need every minute of the day.

I will fail if I continue to try.

My limits weigh heavily on me. I’m getting more kinds of support in. I am trying to lurch towards a new normal that has elements of our old normal but with a lot more support. With Noah, we could muddle through ok with just us. I can’t alone. I am trying to find ways to ask for support but it’s hard. Asking makes me vulnerable and that scares me. I am trying to make small adjustments. It’s hard that I am making in-house adjustments and out-of-house adjustments at the same time but it is necessary. It is all necessary. Necessary doesn’t mean fun or exciting.

I’m building in places in my week where I step out to be me. Thursday mornings I am going to yoga classes then I meet some buddies for a cuppa and a blether. It’s fun. I don’t even know where I get all the pieces of language I pick up. They all feel like mine because people have spoken to me using them. They were gifted to me.

I feel Noah’s loss as a stone in my chest. It weighs me down and makes me want to cry and scream. I want to be hiding in a dark room screaming for days. I won’t. I will go take a shower. Then I’ll make a birthday girl a fancy breakfast. Then I’ll go to yoga. Then I’ll talk to my friends and I’ll smile and laugh. I hope I will feel it. I might fake the whole thing. Do the things until the things feel real. Do the things until you can accept that this is your life now. Then learn how to enjoy it.

It’s been a hellish week.

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I can’t believe that a week has passed already. It feels like a day. It feels like 10 years. I feel like there is no sense of time at all. I am in a fog. I am dizzy all the time and I feel like I’m going to hurt myself terribly pretty much any minute. My life is going to get so small. I am going to stay home where I can butt scoot up and down stairs because I don’t feel stable.

I am so scared. Noah has been my bulwark in this life. I don’t want to face the world without him. It sounds horrible and awful and unfair in ways I don’t even know how to wrap my brain around. There are so many tiny what if’s. If he hadn’t broken his ankle. If he hadn’t had surgery. If he hadn’t taken medication. If If If If If If.

There is no fair when it comes to death. Even if someone lives a long time, that doesn’t mean their death is just. Maybe it should have come 50 years earlier and it is no fair that it waited so long.

I have never before noticed how well suited to keening the name “Noah” is.

I have no hope for my future. It will get smaller and more painful with every passing year. I will struggle on to raise my babies. I don’t think I can promise them companionship in their old age. I hope they will forgive me when I need to join their father. I miss Noah. I don’t want to live without him. I will. I have to. I don’t have a choice. I will raise our babies and I will ensure they are as stable and resilient as possible when they become adults but I am broken. This was my chance at a happy family.

I will always know that once I was loved. Once I was loved to distraction and beyond. Once I was everything to one person. He walked through fire for me over and over. In contrast I’m just going to have to keep moving in a frozen hell of pretended normal life. I will never be like everyone else and it doesn’t matter. I will go through the motions of a life but I will be watching through a screen.

I no longer have Noah justifying my existence and writing me permission slips to be in rooms. I no longer have the fact that Noah loves me more than everyone else in the whole world combined to make me feel like I am ok; maybe I am even good. If someone as wonderful as Noah would pick me maybe I am not all bad? If someone like Noah would decide that I was worth working like a demon for to ensure my safety? Maybe I’m not worthless?

Now Noah is gone. The vast majority of our money is tied in up accounts I can’t touch till I’m 67. Once I hit 67, I am set. That’s 24 years in between. I have 11 years, a month, and 14 days until I am done having a minor child. I don’t know yet, but I think we will get child support money from social security in the US. There’s the bank shares money that comes in every year. There is life insurance money. There are Noah’s parents. I’ll bridge the gap; I think.

I never fucking wanted to be a rich widow. This is not why I invested money. I invested money so I could take care of Noah. I was making sure Noah would be safe as he rode out his old age. That’s what I was doing. I am going to keep it and use it to take care of his babies.

We will have fun in the future. We will have adventures. We will explore. We will learn and grow. We aren’t going to stop. Noah would never forgive me if I stopped or if I didn’t push his kids to keep going. We will fucking go. I will be the motor for a long time until they are launched.

Do I want to live that long? 24 years without Noah? Oh my god that makes me shake so hard. Noah. Noah I need you. How could you go? How could you let your body stop? How could something so small stop you?

How could a cockroach like me be the last one standing? I may wobble and look like shit when I walk but I’m mother fucking cruising on like I can’t be stopped.

I wished I believed in Gods so that I could believe that the suffering in my life was because they chose me for punishment for some reason. That I think I could honestly wrap my head around and respect.

Why in the fuck was I so driven to have children? Why wasn’t I happy with just Noah? I am feeling absolutely overwhelmed with grief and I am very upset that suicide is not something I can consider. Every time the thought tries to start “I want to” there is a glitch. No. That is no longer something that is available to me in this life. My children have suffered enough. I can’t want that. Not even in the privacy of my mind, never again. I have to honor Noah.

I have so many regrets right now. I am drowning in them. Did I really serve him as well as he deserved? He never got to be the complete sole focus of my attention and I regret that so much. If I had known that I would have such a short time with him, what choices would I have made?

He died for stupid reasons. He died because everyone has to die. He died because when you read statistics about what could happen if you have surgery or take medication or or or or or or or you never think that one in a million death will be you today. Noah got a higher than average number of lottery ticket wins in this life. His luck ran out.

I don’t particularly want to keep breathing if I won’t have Noah to hold me. I will though. I will keep breathing and eating and sleeping and moving. I will raise my children well. I will earn them sitting by my bedside someday with smiles when I am sick enough that I am allowed to go see their dad. I miss you, Noah.

I know exactly which hangdog expression he would make when I cry, “You weren’t supposed to leave me.” He hangs his head and says, “I know.”

We don’t get to choose what happens to us. There is no deserve. There is no fair in this fuckhole I call life.

I am so angry that a fucking rapist wrecked the last 5 months of my marriage. I have been so fucked up. Noah has been doing work all day almost every day taking care of me and trying to help me calm down. I feel like I let him down by being so weak. I should have been giving to him.

I am trying to think of all the accommodations I am going to need to ask for: like I need Shortie’s teachers to see me write down the things they need me to know in the notebook I am carrying around. If I don’t write it down I cannot be trusted to remember it. Assume I am incapable of forming new memories for the next while. I am going to be in a deeply dissociated state most of the time.

There is a reason I am asking visitors to be spaced out over time. I am worried about my ability to fully stay in the present tense and an outside adult forces me back into reality. This is not a constant problem, but it has been a problem over the last five months and I expect it to get much worse. I am actually literally afraid of being alone right now. I am afraid I will take myself outside in 0 degree weather and stay for hours. Not smoking, just sitting outside until I hurt myself.

I don’t think I’d push it all the way to damage.

I know I won’t if someone is here with me. I am grateful to the friends who are volunteering. I hope this actually works out. I’m scared. The future looks so terribly bleak. For a time I was the most important person in the world to the best man I’ve ever met.

Now I am just a cockroach who won’t fucking die.

You are on your own, kid

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I’m trying to figure out how to wrap my head around the next stage I need to move through. I love talking to crazy hippies. They have useful ways of framing issues.

A lot is happening around me and to me and even within me but I am just me in the middle of it. How do I shove these different layers of experiences into different boxes so that I can walk forward with less dragging me down? I won’t be having help from a therapist for this time down this labyrinth.

Rape is spewing out all over the place in ways that are deeply problematic. There are the historical layers of training, response, and even most of the deep suicidality comes down to trying to escape that pain. There is the physical damage and the emotional damage and the psychological.

The physical damage is still present in the forms of pockets of deep scar tissue around old wounds and injuries. When I am extremely emotionally dysregulated this gets worse. Luckily my cunt has been improved dramatically with the lovely process of pelvic floor physical therapy. My back is fucked for the rest of my life–it can’t be fixed. It must be endured.

The emotional damage is in the ways I have shitty behaviour patterns from my life, I am emotionally abusive because I talk about being suicidal. I talk about raging self hatred and how I deserve really over the top punishments to everything. That is emotional abuse towards the people around me and it’s not fair. That’s been an ongoing battle my whole life and I am a lot better than I was, until something happens and I slip. I don’t know that I will ever fully conquer this hurdle.

Psychologically I would say that that the panic attacks and mental confusion and explosiveness (often due to overwhelm) were in a pretty great place as of the start of this summer. I was a little irritable and deep in burn out, but I wasn’t having PTSD abreactions or panic attacks and I wasn’t suddenly screaming from out of control terror. This is the area that I think has the greatest potential for shifting in a meaningful and timely way. I can actually do something about a lot of this, and I just need to get my plan in place. It would be a lot easier if I didn’t have to triage everyone else’s needs. The last week or two have already been a tiny bit of crawling out of the pit.

I’m not ok. I’m sad. I’m anxious. I’m not looking forward to my parents’ birthdays in a few days. I never do. I feel like I am trying desperately to feel connected and love. It is less of a lie sometimes. I know the love is there but I can’t feel it.

I reach for feelings of love and then my brain gets distracted thinking about someone who doesn’t feel able to have a relationship with me anymore. This year I feel my failures so deeply and painfully: the Bonus Mama, the God Mama, and The One Who Got Away are taking up a lot of space in my brain. How did I wreck those relationships? Will I keep wrecking everything in those ways? I don’t know.

I’m scared and I don’t feel very lovable.

My “on repeat” song today is the grudge by Olivia Rodrigo. I couldn’t tell you who I am thinking about. I just know that it takes strength to forgive but I don’t feel strong.

I actually had several better days before today. I hit another bump. Part of me wants to crawl into a hole and never come out again. It is hard to believe I should keep trying since I suck so much. Yesterday was better.

I hope tomorrow is better.

Time is a thief

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Rosanne Cash wrote a touching essay about Kris Kristofferson. (https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/kris-kristofferson-tribute-rosanne-cash-essay-1235129095/)

Write about it.

I deactivated social media accounts today. I’m not ok.

There’s a lot going on and it’s hitting me in waves. I’m struggling intensely with my overwhelming sense of inadequacy and badness. I am not dealing with the way I feel like badness is what my soul has in it and it is what I am and I can’t be anything else.

I thought I wanted the Choke Chain to end but I’m not really sure that it can. I’m not sure we will stay married if I change my behaviour.

When you are so bad that your husband goes to the police to document your horrible self harming sexual behaviour maybe I should go on drugs that eliminate my sex drive. Maybe that would be for the best. I should definitely stop trying to talk to people. I fuck it up over and over and over in ways big and small.

Right this minute I cannot perceive a future in which I am anything other than bad. I cannot perceive a future with less pain. I don’t see value in me or my existence.

I don’t understand why anyone wants me to stay when they don’t particularly like me or what I do very much. It’s deeply confusing to me.

Noah brought up the birthday book this morning. See–people wanted to demonstrate how much they care for me! Would you like me to go through page by page and list off all the people who don’t talk to me anymore? It’s almost everyone in the book. Some of them are dead. Some we’ve just drifted apart with distance… like me moving out of the country because those relationships were not working for me. Several they specifically divorced me in loud and messy ways. The ones who wrote the most about how I am the most amazing–those are the ones who read me for the most filth when they were done with me.

I am feeling intensely done with me so I’m not judging.

Write it down. Be bigger. Take up more space. But I feel like when I do that what I am actually doing is spreading toxic sludge all over innocent victims who don’t deserve that.

When I take up more space and put myself out there I am raped again. Then my husband is going to spend months or years analysing every interaction I have with men for more proof that he has to lock me down to prevent me reacting poorly to a rapist.

No. No I should not take up more space and put myself out there in the world. No. Stop fucking lying. It is bad when I do.

I am bad when I do.

Sometimes I stop and think really hard about how terrified I am of the ocean. Of how deeply convinced I am that the ocean is going to kill me. Then I think about being a counter phobic 6. That which scares me the most is that which I need to run at the hardest.

I know one way to make sure I only do one bad thing ever again and then no more bad things. I know one way. Every other way I will be more bad. I will fail more. I will hurt people more. Every other path is more fraught with more pain for me and everyone I inflict myself on.

I am not going to kill myself. I have a 6 year old. That’s not an option. There is not an amount of pain great enough that I deserve to have it stop in favour of her hurting more.

I hurt and I feel empty and unlovable and worthless. I feel defective and disgusting.

I feel like the single most heinous thing I do every single day is wake up and force the world to endure one more day of me being here.

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Tag Archives: friends

I miss sharing every thought with him.

Tactical errors, failures, and belonging

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

“That’s not poly, it’s sequential monogamy”

Priorities and patience

Fragments, shards, tools, and usefulness

I like my housemates

Old shit and new shit

Energy

Your first sexual relationship should be with yourself.

Invitation

Here’s a problem: feeling sexy

I’m told that the obsessive self reflection at the end of the year is very American.

I am struggling.

A low key celebration

It’s been a hellish week.

You are on your own, kid

Time is a thief