Tag Archives: friends

Commonalities and Threats

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I had an interesting time yesterday. I escorted EC to meet a friend he has made over the internet. The lads got along really well. I’m very happy for them both. I spent 6-7ish hours talking with the mom. I was apprehensive going in because one of the bigger things I know about her is that she is very much a gun enthusiast. Given my life experiences I’m a bit of a pansy ass in that department.

I was surprised by just how much I like her. Of course she lives a 3 hour train ride away. She’s raw and honest. We did not have any small talk. I know a lot about her life, her story arc, and about her family. I am not going to claim I am anything like an authority on her but I got a very strong impression. Unflinching. That was the most significant thought I walked away with. She has been up and she has been down but she carries on with dignity and grace. She has struggles but she is willing to push herself through to meet obligations she has created with other people.

Without getting into details a lot of tragedies have occurred. She knows she is still alive and that she is not promised forever and she is trying to make the most of it.

I appreciated her way of bringing up the mitigations she enacts in her life to prevent herself from accidentally harming people. That’s the kind of thing I usually have to gently and slowly tease out of people. She has a really strong innate sense of boundaries. I say innate but of course I don’t know. She might have learned it the hard way. It was an incredibly relaxing day for me. I was careful with my word choices to start with but by the end I was more free with stories than I usually am. I felt vulnerable. I felt like I was matching her vulnerability. It was really nice. Late in the day she bought my book. As soon as she did that I felt like I had complete freedom to talk about anything that is discussed in the book. I can maintain exactly the same level of disclosure in multiple settings. I like those levels of awareness so much. What am I allowed to talk about with the people who are in this space? There are so many factors.

She told me a bit more about how Scottish gun control works and I think it is fantastic. There is a 7 month long process (and she thinks it should be longer) where the police interview lots of different folks in your life. After you have it your gun licence is attached to your car license and you will be stopped occasionally for random checks to see if you are complying to every letter of regulation. Any kind of infraction can result in loss of your gun license. You had better come correct 100% of the time or you can’t be trusted with a gun.

Yes motherfucking 2A psychos, I do want to come for your guns. I do. I mean… I do but I moved to a country not populated by people like you so I’m not in the US to do it so really don’t bother worrying about me coming for you. I really fucking hope someone else does soon though. My youngest has a magical vision of what living in the US is like. She keeps threatening to move over there once she is a grown up. I tell her I will miss her very much. I sure hope that by the time she is considering this question she won’t have to include videos like this in her preparation for moving there.

I don’t think guns should be illegal. I think they should be regulated and controlled because angry people should not be allowed to hold crowds hostage and kill people. I think that this needs to be part of a disarmament pact with the police.

Yes. I want to come for the guns. From both sides. I really really really do. I don’t flinch when I see police here; they don’t have guns (outside of airports). Not even in all airports. The police here are chatty and helpful and eager to insure that everyone is safe and doing ok. They spend a lot more time pursuing stolen bikes than they do harassing people on the street.

I mean, American cops do need to be a bit more tolerant of “fuck you” than a Scottish police officer and I’m sure that will feel dramatically unfair. Here such language is always kind of a risk. Every single person here has to participate in the social agreement that screaming profanity at people isn’t acceptable. I don’t think there is a snowball’s chance in hell of such standards ever becoming mandatory in the US again. The US is pro-weirdo in a way Scotland isn’t.

I am meeting more and more weirdos here. I am introducing myself to strangers in public when they wear pins that indicate they are part of my extended community. This is a small country. The whole country has fewer people than San Francisco. The entire council area I live in has fewer than 15,000 more people than Fremont.

With how I feel about community basically all of Scotland is my neighbourhood. I’m looking for the people who feel like they don’t fit in. I’m looking for people who share my hobbies and pastimes and values. I’m used to hunting in a much larger ocean. I gathered my people far and wide. Scotland sometimes sorta feels much bigger because a 95 mile distance takes three hours on the train. Doing that twice in a day is a high cost.

Enh. I will figure it out. I always have figured out how to keep people who were GU (geographically undesireable). I started with the people on my road. I moved out to the neighbourhoods that are nearest to my house. I swear I am beating the bushes looking closer! I have met a couple so far and I am trying to meet more. I also know that I need to make friends in this country.

It is a complicated thing needing to feel seen by other people who have suffered. There is something in that specific dynamic that is important to me. I need to have people in my life who know how hard it is for me to do the things I do. People who understand that some days you do an hour of work and hide in bed afterwards because that day is just not happening. I had one of those this week. My period is fucking rough. It’s getting much more dramatically worse. I have been convinced I need to get registered with the menopause clinic.

Why do I keep GU people? Most of them have been highly individual people who have gone through some significant struggles. We bop in and out of each other’s lives very occasionally to be a sounding board and a supportive ear and a cheerleader. They are people who end up having very specific, loud voices in my head. In many ways this is not a fair process. I know that there was a period of time where I was dramatically over-using Blacksheep’s voice in my head as I twisted her words into the absolute worst possible, most vague, reaching interpretation of whatever she said.

I didn’t know how to translate her words into a meaning that sounded like she liked me. It was mostly because I was using those mean words for myself and I was scared she felt like that towards me and I projected all the hell over her. That was very shitty of me.

I want to learn from my mistakes and do better. Even though it may be fun to use this new person’s voice in my head when I’m saying things I can’t do much of it. I need to strictly keep her voice for things she has actually said. I cannot create impressions.

That’s one of the ways I plant ticking time bombs that end relationships. I’m almost 42 fucking years old. Get it together, Krissy.

And now, we run 7 miles. Bye.

You can’t get to yes without risking no.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who am I kidding. I’d die.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These are very messy things.

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

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

I mean, I don’t know shit.

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

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

Growing up with transition

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I have long wondered if the concentration of folks who are trans in my life is as high as it is because I am autistic and many of them are autistic so we are drawn to one another like magnets. I am not sure. But hoo boy there has been glorious wave after wave after wave of their arrivals in my life.

It started when I was a young teenager. There were people in my middle school who asked for social transition. It was the 90’s. Not as many people knew as much and the “correct language” of that era would get me punched now. Ok, cool. I will use whatever words you tell me to use until you tell me to stop using them. If someone else wants different words I will do my absolute best to accommodate that as smoothly as I am able.

I mean, I had to learn how to be tolerant of friends who were joining churches and who wanted my language around them to shift. Changing words for gender description is really less invasive in terms of my vocabulary. Not a problem.

Over and over I look at my gender and think it would be an awful lot of work to do anything to shift it and I am very tired. Cool. I’m cis.

That doesn’t mean I align with behavior expected of people in my assigned gender. I regularly get told off for being too bold, aggressive, assertive, domineering, insistent on my right to set the terms of my fucking reality, thank you very much. Sometimes when men have called me a bitch in an argument I ask them if they would call a man who was arguing as passionately as I am a bitch or an asshole. They have grudgingly admitted that they wouldn’t–they would just think I was passionate about a topic. And these were “friends”.

When my children were born I developed the ability to change the words of a book at full speed. All of our “get to know your body” books suddenly had things like “Most boys have a penis, but not all. Every boy has a good enough body. Most girls have a vulva, but not all. Every girl has a good enough body. Enbies can have any kind of body and they are always a good enough body.” I do that at absolute full speed with no pauses or hesitations. That is the party line. End of story in my house.

As the kids get older we talk about how everyone’s body is always good enough but sometimes people want to change things just because they do. When a person decides that they need changes then doctors should help them because that is what should happen when a person needs help. Only the person living in the body knows if it is working well enough in the right ways for them and from the outside we don’t get to have an opinion if we agree that they need it or not. That’s not our job. We love and support people getting where they need to go. Period.

My kids have known people at various stages of transition as long as they have been alive. There has never been a time when we haven’t had newly transitioning folks in our community. We have watched together as people talk about and reason through their own desire for change.

What is the party line in my house? If you need surgery to feel ok then you need surgery. Cool. If you don’t need surgery to feel ok then that is equally as fine because having surgery isn’t what makes you trans. It may be something that you want as part of your journey with gender but people don’t have to need surgery.

It’s kinda like how everyone doesn’t need to have a nose job but some people elect to. If someone feels very strongly about having a nose job we will support them and help them how we can and then they will go on with their life. All other changes to the body are equally as case by case and not needed for every single person.

When I have to talk about health care needs that some people think of as gendered I tend to say, “If you are inflicted with a uterus then there are things you need to know how to manage. There are choices to make. If you are not inflicted with a uterus your choices are different. Let’s talk about the two sets of choices.”

Having a uterus does not make someone a gender. The uterus is not the magic key that unlocks the gender. It’s just one more squishy thing in the middle of a meat sack. Meat sack shape ≠ gender.

And as a result so far 2/3 of my children are not cis and I have a lot of wonder as I deal with youngest. There are some mixed signals at this point. I make a guess at birth (I don’t raise children “genderless”.) I tell them from when they are tiny children that I am guessing about their gender but I am not the authority–only they are. Hoo boy they have some strong damn feelings by 2/3.

Amusingly my son tells me often that he wants to be like me when he grows up. He wants to be strong and intense and independent and willing to go do things that other people tell him he can’t. He does not associate being like me with sharing my gender. He does not think about most manifestations of behavior as being gendered. He thinks people just are what they are and then they go do what they do.

I feel sad when I see so many people in the world insisting that people be shoved into preconceived holes based on their assigned gender. You are allowing yourself to be hobbled. You are allowing yourself to view the world as small and limited and constrained by stupid rules.

When you could just go live. You could be free of most of the expectations of you based on your gender. Behaviors, body shapes, adornment, hair length… all of these things are gender neutral. You can do whatever you want with any of them. You have the body you have and you can use this gift in whatever way you want going forward.

Of course, if you were inflicted with a uterus there are some choices to make about managing that. There are some processes you need to manage. During your life you will have a variety of ways of managing. If you want help researching the options I am a damn good researcher.

But the decision will not be mine. It isn’t my body. It isn’t my life. You are the only person who has to wake up every day and face you in a mirror. Do what you have to do to be ok with what you see looking back at you. Fuck other peoples’ feelings about your body.

You have to be ok with you.

So this is what is going on with me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am not fucking interested in disabling my children.

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

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

Cheezits mother trucker.

So I’m sorta categorising my community efforts as:

  • bike
  • queer
  • kink
  • maker
  • community resource sharing
  • gardening
  • political
  • proximity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s not about you, David.

cross-post Problematic People

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from fet

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

Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I feel that in my bones.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why did I even leave the fucking house.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Problematic people

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

Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I feel that in my bones.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why did I even leave the fucking house.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I never have to worry again about looking for that.

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One of the things that I have always found myself doing is latching onto a certain song and repeating it in my head for weeks. Sometimes it is surprising that I casually catch just a phrase from a song and then I am completely obsessed. Right now it is Taylor Swift’s [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KpKc3C9V3w](The Archer). My maiden name was Archer so that adds a layer to me, but I only started listening to this song in the past couple of weeks even though the album came out a few years ago.

I’ve been thinking about jaye saying he doesn’t like the capitalist association with “success” when it comes to evaluating the value of a life. It has really lodged in my mind. My story arc is sometimes hard for me to keep perspective on. So like, when I was a kid I played with household budgeting as a hobby. I knew I was going to get an accident settlement monthly starting when I turned 18 and I’d have it till I was 30 to get done what I could. I wanted to go to college. I wanted to not live with my family. I wanted to not need to have anyone say that I owed them for the support they gave me.

I wrote out millions of possible life plans. How I was going to get a teaching degree and buy a house and by the time I hit 65 I would have a paid off house and $250,000 in investments outside my teaching pension. That was my plan. That was what “success” was going to look like for me financially. Well, that and I had to have kids by the time I was 30 or I wasn’t going to bother with the rest of the story arc. My life was rather unpleasant by any measure and if I didn’t find a way to completely change the focus and mandate that I have no choice but to stay so I’d better learn how to be a stable provider.

I know that a lot of people who deal with wanting to die do not manage to make deals with themselves that allow them to stay. I’m not judging that. Everyone writes their own deals with themselves. I could not live up to the deals that other people make–I don’t have their internal resources. I’m different.

I knew what I wanted my arc to look like very young. It was find a way to be part of a family or quit.

Noah and I were talking the other day in our morbid way about the various signs of our mortality that pop up. We’ve had this conversation in an ongoing way for the last 18 years. Oh, and he has this browser extension that shows him the current expected lifespan left for a man who has lived to his current age in a countdown. So every fucking time he opens a new tab he sees that number. We really focus on time.

We have spoken for years about what we would do if we lost one another sometime soon, meaning in five-ish years or less. Obviously it changes as time goes by, as we have different experiences and levels of development together. Do you know why he got his first vasectomy? Because he decided that he was done creating children and I said flat out that if he died in the next five years I would probably see if I could find a different partner and have one more child.

The funny thing is, by the time he had the vasectomy reversal I would not have been willing to add a third child with a different partner at that point. I was too old. I wouldn’t have wanted that kind of gap with a half-sibling. The reality of dating as a single parent is step-kids would probably have been part of the story and I didn’t want yours-mine-ours. I would not want to make anyone feel “left” for a “new family”.

And one of my very deepest core kinks is forced impregnation. So him changing his mind and deciding to have a third kid once I had already accepted it as an impossibility and I’d mostly moved my life onward… he put a choke chain on me. And that’s fucking hot. I could be five years away from being an independent adult instead of taking care of children. Instead it’s thirteen years.

It changes a lot of my story arc going forward. I am grateful for his decision. It deepened our bond in a way I can’t fully express. Combine that with the fact that he has put in thousands of hours asking me deep, probing questions about every facet of my life mean that he has seen me go through deep and massive changes. He has pushed me to grow and change and he has not accepted half-hearted attempts. We are fairly brutal with each other in our gentle way.

So this week we were talking about a mutual friend and how things are going in their life. They are going through a breakup and they are sad about feeling like they have to start over again trying to find someone to be their person. Noah nodded when I was telling him. He said that given that neither of us are likely to die anytime soon and there is absolutely no sign of us wanting to split… and even if we did split up… we have that person. If one of us dies that will not change the fact that in this story of our lives we found that person already. It’s not that we would be celibate for the rest of our lives but they would be temporary companions. We would be kind to them. We would probably love them. But it would be different.

I get to be part of a family. I get to live in a house I own. I have more than $250,000 in the bank. I earned my credential and I taught. I live two miles from my best friend from childhood. I regularly speak to dozens of other friends who have known me for well over 20 years.

Where to go for future success?

Oh, there we come back to all that insecurity and the knowledge that good friendships come out of missteps and corrections and second and third and fourth and fifth chances. But I’m so old and tired and I am really out of fucks. I’m listening to this fucking song over and over and I’m thinking about how many relationships have to have tension and sideways nudges as you figure out how to settle in next to each other on the friend-bench.

Something I’ve learned is that people really like it when they get to do you a favor. But I’ve reached such a place in life where accepting favors feels mixed and complicated and bad. I don’t feel like I deserve help. I have money to hire somebody and I should just be fine with that being good enough. But that’s not how you make friends.

Making friends with new people as an adult with children is hard. Mostly it means leaving the kids at home and going out alone. That feels so exhausting and pointless because 80-90% of the effort won’t lead to a friend. That’s just how the numbers work for me. I’ve played this game a long time. Although the pool is smaller here. I might get a much different percentage since I can’t fuck anyone. It’s a very low percentage of my old friend group that I haven’t fucked. Mostly the straight women and gay men.

It’s not that easy learning how to make friends without using sex. I’ve been doing it since I was a small child. Yes, I realize that it was unhealthy and problematic. I’ve had all the therapy on that topic, thanks for your concern. I’ve had a few years to practice making friends without sex through parenting but that’s a mixed bag. I don’t want all of my friends to be the parents of people my kids hang out with.

So when I say that I know that 80-90% of the effort that goes into making friends is waste its because I have always been someone who earns a fair bit of negative feedback. I don’t always agree with the group consensus and I put forth my view and I am more willing to walk away than compromise a whole lot of the time. I know how I create my own problems. But the thing is: I have limited spoons in my drawer. The biggest thing I can’t get back is time. Time I could have been putting into the projects that are closer to my own heart and my own self-actualisation efforts. I’m a vain asshole. I don’t have to earn money so I build the space that I want to live in. Before I die there won’t be a thing on the house that will need replacing in the next 30 years. I listen Sam Vines and I’m careful about what boots I buy.

I don’t remember if I mentioned this here. But I’m planning to have a 60th birthday party. It will be my first party since 30. Some of my friends will be in their 90’s. I hope that there will be a sizeable number of people from around town who want to come. But I have to earn that. I have to figure out how to create relationships with people such that they are interested in coming and meeting the wonderful cast and characters from all of the stories I’ve told. They will be able to say, “So what happened after that?” I want to have relationships with people that are deep enough for them to care about backstory for one another. I want to meet their families and friends too. I will go first!

Because when I introduce the two of you at the party I want to be able to say, “You two are going to get along like a house on fire. Person A you need to tell how ‘x’ happened and Person B you need to tell how ‘y’ happened. You’ll figure it out from there.” In order to get to know people you have to spend time. Knowing that the vast majority of it will turn into a loose, distant tie, or even an enemy–not a friend.

It’s not all bad. Studies say that we get the best referrals from our loose tie network.

It matters to put the time and energy in. It matters to create the opportunities and follow through. That is the absolute bedrock of friendship.

Dude, I slept 11 hours last night. Then this morning I burst into tears because I could not figure out what I could eat fast enough because my brain was moving so slowly. So today I am recognising that I restarted exercise a little fast after the last two weeks of illness. I am resting because otherwise I’ll just bloody hurt myself again and then I’ll fuck up the trip.

Getting older has helped me see these kinds of consequences coming before they punch me in the face.

Life likes to remind me that the countdown is always happening. I don’t know anyone else with my full constellation of physical problems who can be as active as I can. It is a very delicate dance of pushing myself very consistently but with a lot of respect paid to rest.

I have far more than 10 days of reasonable working hours for chores to get done in 5 days. Where do I get this chore list?

Part of it comes from seeing in my mind what I want to look out my windows and doors and see in exactly 18 years, 5 months, and 1 day. I know how long it will take to get a lot of those pieces to look how I want them to look. It is better if I get the manure and compost and munch spread now so I can get back and immediately put out all the seeds right as we hit the average last frost date.

I am not interested in spending a ton of money to have a shiny penny new “thing I bought” to show off. Is it stupid? Sure. Is it not what other people care about? Oh absolutely. I have a whole bunch of other goals tied up with it. Including finding ways to make my not very private garden into a place where kinky motherfuckers can go do fun things outside so long as they are quiet. I will have extra gags if you forgot to bring one.

I live along a public walking path and I am not supposed to build a taller fence but I can grow whatever the fork I want. My neighbors said they wouldn’t mind bamboo (I asked because apparently a lot of lawsuits come up when people plant bamboo and I am a scaredy cat) and I have a bunch of trees already starting that are going to be the perfect height to block view into the garden. I really enjoy playing outside in a bower of flowers. My kids had better fucking move out someday.

I want to have a good spot for 1st of May outdoor fucking even if there is snow on the ground. I want to have completely deniable furniture that can be used for restraining people and times of year when they cannot be seen unless someone comes quite close inside the garden. I have plans.

But it will also be set up so someone can just sit there and find actual quiet away from the steady noise. I want enough of a noise buffer in the physical environment to make it feel actually secluded. This kind of thing takes planning. I will have even more neighbors by then. If I want quiet I have to create it.

If I want relationships I have to create them. I have to spend time. And that’s when I hear FUCKING TAYLOR SWIFT SING “WHO COULD STAY? I’M READY FOR COMBAT” AND JUST UGHGHEW;HADSFK;HSADF;KJSDF;HLDFSjkln;

Kids for 13 years, only 18 years till the party. If I want friends, like people I have an actual deep and complex relationship with, realistically I should be putting in the most effort in the next 8 years. Because to really get to friends it takes 2-5 years of doing things with someone frequently. In my experience.

Time is ticking away. If I don’t need someone to be My Person that is a very specific freeing point. I want to know people. I want to be able to see through them. I want them to be able to see through me. I want shenanigans. I want silliness and doing things.

Did I mention that I am so tired I can barely keep my eyes open? Walking around feels like I am wearing a weighted body suit. I usually spend 3 days of my period hanging out horizontally as much as possible because I’m wiped out. I skipped what should have been day one of that. So today on day two I am drowsy and weary and I want to talk to myself. Because I should not try hard to work on reading right now. I love to learn, but if I want to see right through me and do what I want to do in this life it takes having the strength to do it. If I fuck up my body worse I won’t hit my goals and I will hate myself.

Success is walking the tightrope that is my ability to be a fit and active human. If I were willing to spend 40% of my waking hours resting doctors would be happy with me. They have been telling me to for years. Instead I push and I work when I can barely open my eyes. Sometimes I crawl when I’m doing chores because I do not have the ability to walk.

Does it even fucking matter? Probably not most of it. But some of it does and almost all of it is related to me being able to say what I have done in and with my life and I know I did it to my absolute limit as long as I could. Is it petty and stupid? I don’t know. I hear “Who could stay” and she means who could stay in her life because she is always fighting with everyone.

I need to be able to hold my head up high and say that no matter where I started or what has happened to me, this is what I have done. I did it no matter how many people told me I couldn’t or I shouldn’t or they didn’t agree or they thought I was stupid. I did it because I said I would and I keep my word. It doesn’t matter how I feel while I do it, it matters what I do.

When you are trying to make friends you don’t tell all the stories right up front. You need to leave just a smattering, leaving bread crumbs for the next one but not telling it this time. You can’t do all the talking or you don’t get to know them and it’s not a friendship, it’s a performance. There are all these fucking rules. I’ll figure them out. But probably not today. I think it is time to go to bed. Even though I’ve only been up for eight hours. Tomorrow is going to be a busy day.

I need to fertilise the soil so the trees can grow up so I can have privacy fucking out there. It’s a need to activity.

Being challenged is good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Triage, triage, triage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gardening progress

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Yesterday was fun. I feel like I am getting closer every day to the set up I am aiming for.

Yesterday I made tomato cages out of trees cut in my garden. I put some early, hopeful seeds in the beds. I need to add hay to discourage cats. I am set for the next few weeks of starting succession plants before anything can go outside. The ones going in the house are outgrowing my floor and I should get some shelving that I can keep up temporarily then store when I don’t need them.

I am looking forward to this summer so much. Friends are coming in June, July, and August. I want to be able to feed all of them from the garden. So hurry up, Krissy! In plant timing you have to have stuff ready way in advance!

I should be talking to me more.

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

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

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

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

Ok so maybe it is about the same.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dude, just go to bed.

Another day in the ramping up to a race life

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22 miles of bike riding today. It’s my cross training day. That was three trips to town.

I went over first thing for a chiropractic appointment and my neck is much better. It is still fucked up and hurting but I have more like 75% of my normal rotation rather than 30%. I told him that I do not expect miracles from medical providers but rather incremental improvement over what I can do on my own. I am not interested in the sort of aggressive treatment you might expect for someone who has a sudden acute issue. This is all chronic and long-term. I am going to be in pain until I die. Sometimes it is bad/irritating enough I ask for some help. But I can’t be in there all the time looking for relief–I won’t get that much relief. It is not in the cards for me. Chasing that is futile and a waste of energy.

At least the grinding cracking isn’t still happening?

Then I went home to get Shorty and we rode over to Jenny’s and grabbed her and her daughter and we rode back over to the leisure centre and we swam for a while. (I wasn’t actually “swimming” most of the time. I was being active supervision for Shorty as she splashed around in very shallow water. Then we had lunch. Then I lost the key to my bike. I ran back and forth across the parking lot in a panic. Thankfully someone found it in the cafe. Phew. Time to ride home.

Then I went back to town and rode around with Critical Mass then went to the queer gathering for a few hours. I had a really great time. I like a lot of the folks I’m meeting. I feel very comfortable around most of them. It was kind of funny when someone said something about how it would be nice to host gatherings in people’s homes but that means it is always limited to just a couple of people because everyone lives in small houses. I sidled right in and said, “Have I mentioned that I sold a house in California for an obscene amount of money and I moved here and bought a very large house? My lounge is almost as big as the lobby of the hotel we are standing in.” A dude who has been to my house said, “She isn’t lying. I’ve seen her house.” Then the other people in the conversation just about did the Mr. Burns hands thing.

I’ve been talking to one of the organisers of this year’s Highland Pride that will happen in town. I am thinking that it would be really awesome if our family contributed a space. I would like to get a really big tent, bean bags, a whole bunch of noise cancelling head phones, a low table with drawing supplies, probably a big pile of stuffed animals, a small bookshelf with a selection of easy to pick up graphic novels and food and water. It will be the chill zone for people who are overstimulated in the main event. I mean, California hippies have to represent–don’t we?

In those brief periods at home I did two loads of laundry and read lots of books to Shorty. All things considered it is probably good that I am not going anywhere this weekend. I have a bunch of stuff I want to get done. I am going to have a very busy summer. I have three Americans coming over in the summer. In June it will involve me putting together a teaching itinerary for my buddy. I’m grateful the July/August bits will be a lot more hanging out. Pride is happening in July and that’s going to be a big burst of energy. That’s a lot of time distracted from my life. I need to put in the time really paying attention to the kids before then so they don’t feel neglected. Gotta fill those buckets.

Sobonfu told me that I was never going to find a community that I fit into. I was going to have to make my own. I’m trying.

Now I’m finally getting sleepy. Time to go to sleep.

Emotional hangover

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’re All Mad Here

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I was reading an article that included the phrase “Mad Pride” about how mental illness has been perceived by society (mostly the US/Canada/UK) over time. It made me stop and think hard about how much my life has changed. I am in the closet now in a way I was not in California. There were times in my younger years where I would keep some things under wraps (I was militant about limiting sex life conversations with some groups of people) but mostly I didn’t hide any aspect of myself to such a degree that anyone and everyone couldn’t find out if they tried even a tiny bit. 

There is a big difference between “I don’t share personal stories about my sex/romantic life with students or homeschooling parents but I write about it explicitly on my public blog” and “I took my writing private so that someone would need at least a basic understanding of the internet archive in order to find out anything about me, I stopped writing about myself publicly on any topic that might be controversial and I no longer bring up or mention most things about my past and I am actively evasive with every person who does not have connections to my former life.”

It’s different. I am feeling more comfortable in the community. I feel like I probably do not have to remain quite this guarded permanently but I feel intense gratitude towards myself that I allowed myself this runway of time to have a place in the community where I am already seen as stable and competent and fairly well educated, especially in topics that are not well understood already here. I am starting to have that boost to the ego experience of having people say, “Oh Krissy I wanted to ask you about something. I don’t understand why ____?” When that something is often related to an aspect of interpersonal communication. I’m also getting more requests than I can take when it comes to organising level responsibility for different community groups or associations. And folks are asking me how I have taught my kids (thing). That’s definitely one of my sweet spots for feeling like I am not an imposter who should shut the fuck up.

It’s not that I think everyone should do what I do… that would go poorly. What I really appreciate is when people are interested in the process of how I figured out what was right for me because understanding that process is the bit that can help other people. They will have a different right answer in the end, but maybe seeing how I made decisions that align with my values will help them crystallise what their own values are so they can feel confident in their own choice. I like talking about parenting philosophy, not parenting choices. Because we are going to make different choices and that’s absolutely great. It’s mandatory. It’s as it should be for there to be the delightful variety of folks that this world needs. But the philosophy behind parenting is a place where you can discuss motivation and intentions and you can learn from each other without getting into a pissing match about technique. 

Technique is hard because it’s a minefield of traps for not understanding your own privilege when you frame what you do. Noah says that society has as much justice as it can afford. It’s complicated because often a family has as much justice as they can afford. And from family to family that is such a complicated and loaded concept that oh goodness just no. Can’t.

Anyway. The article. It goes through who is allowed to be mentally ill in public now. Who benefits from hashtag campaigns and public awareness movements around mental illness? It’s a short article but provocative in a way I agree with. I am so deeply aware of the privilege I enjoy at this point in my life. 

But this privilege comes with costs too. Costs I could not have imagined when I was on the far side of that particular privilege slider. 

I’ve been watching a lot more sci-fi/fantasy shows and movies recently. I am particularly drawn to things that are depicting ways that people live with an understanding of there being completely opposing truths/narrative/existanses existing all at the same time. 

So, I like to talk about money. If you have been here for a while you have seen the arc of that from poverty to (I think) fairly substantial wealth. When you are new to a community you only really exist from the moment they meet you. Your past is invisible and unknowable. Ok fine with google they could look me up but they don’t. I write all over the fucking internet. I have one handle I use on every site and I am so trackable it is definitely what a security expert would frown upon and give me a lecture for. I am consistent in part because that is my absolute only talisman against being called a fraud. My story is too whack-job. But I gots receipts, bitch.

I have suppressed so much of that over the past few years. I have been so very silent. It is taking a toll. 

The pendulum is going back and forth on so many different dynamics in my life. In one way I feel like my kids just got out of a big disequilibrium period (or at least some combination of them) and I am slamming my way into one with full force and fury. There are a whole bunch of things that are not working and I need them to change. 

I say over and over that disequilibrium is a necessary feeling for everyone because without it you probably won’t grow. You will get complacent and comfortable and you won’t want to face the terror and uncertainty and pain that comes with change. I have to get angry to have the force to demand change. I have to feel like I will wreck big things if the change doesn’t happen.

I am doing a med change. Amitriptyline and Lisdexamfetamine are not working for me anymore. There are enough negative symptoms with using them that I just cannot. Sex just hasn’t been happening. I’m not happy. I’ve been intermittently explosively raging for quite a while and it’s just not ok. I don’t like me. I need Patience, and I don’t mean the drink made with a whole lot of bourbon.

It feels silly to say this but I want to drink less. (It’s silly to say because Noah and I both have recently put in MASSIVE orders of alcohol.) I got variety. I got stuff that I want to invite other people over and say “I have x and y for you to taste test.” I want a social gambit, I don’t plan to consume much of it myself. I is making friends. 

I have a teeny tiny bit of regret about buying this house because it is huge and has been really rough to repair but I can’t tell you all about it because a Shorty has just informed me that there are gingerbread pieces waiting to be made into a house and I am all out of time.

On brand

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A very old friend is staying with me. He was my boss from 16-19 and we stayed friends after that. He taught me everything I know about carpentry, electrical work, my theatre rigging skills (which predate my bondage rigging skills), how to paint, and he helped keep my fragile psyche together when a lot of the bigger traumas of my young life were happening. To say I love him is kind of a mild and inadequate way to describe what I feel for him.

He’s been here since July. He will probably stay until his visitor visa expires in January and then he is off to figure out what he wants to do with the next stage of his retirement life. I am providing a bridge between the first stage of retirement where he provided hospice care for his parents into the next part where he has only himself to worry about for the rest of his life and he wants to find a new place to make a community. He can’t afford to go back to California and he doesn’t like most of the rest of the US so he is hoping for somewhere in Europe. Ok.

I am autistic. If you tell me there is a plan… I’m going to be super overly literal about that and bulldoze towards it.

As a result a lot of the time since then has been working on pointing out which behaviors were appropriate in a small shitty Texas town, so you learned them as a child, and they were tolerated in other parts of the US but they will be problematic now. Small example: the first time my youngest kid (not yet primary school aged) pulled off her shirt because she spilled a drink all over herself he melodramatically gasped super loudly and put his hands over his face and exclaimed “Oh my god that is totally inappropriate.” Yeah dude… Europeans are not going to tolerate that obnoxious American/Christian weirdness about bodies. I get it. The first time I saw a kid, who was clearly starting puberty, strip buck naked at the park to play in the wading pool I blinked hard and thought to myself, “We aren’t in Kansas anymore, Toto.”

I feel like I am also providing a low-key “Woke School” experience by pointing out the places where he expresses casual racism/sexism/learned helplessness/passive aggression/toxic masculinity/and of course the perennial favourite: lying about stupid shit because he wants to deny anything that might feel embarrassing. Basically my mantra is: “Ok Boomer, it is past time to get your shit together.”

I’ve gotta say, he has come really far in a short period of time. He is accepting criticism. He thinks about it on his own and comes back to me with refining questions. His behavior is shifting in fairly dramatic ways over time. He is trying. On one hand I have very little patience with explaining this sort of stuff to the vast majority of cis-het white men of his generation but as I told him he put a lot of deposits in the bank of Krissy & G’s relationship and he has a lot of credit to pull from. It’s a little weird feeling like I am making a man in his late 60’s into a malleable lump of clay and shaping him to work better for what he wants in his future. Clearly how he has been working has not resulted in him getting the things he wants in life (since he has not managed to achieve any of his goals in life as per his description of his life) and figuring out how to be more effective going forward.

The other night he said, “I was so grateful when you said I could come here after my parents died. I knew that you would really see me and then pick on me and be mean to me and love me and kick my ass until I was the best version of myself so that I could face what comes next. You are the most incredible friend I’ve had in my entire life.”

It kinda hit me that he essentially described my “brand”. I will look at you and see the good and the bad and think you deserve love no matter what. I will explain what you are doing that is bothering people/preventing you from finding what you want. I will absolutely, MOST DEFINITELY kick your ass if you are doing stupid shit and tell you to knock it off. I will give you a list of skills and behaviors to work on and I will not give undeserved praise… ever. If I give you a compliment you’d better savour that shit because I don’t give them often or for anything undeserved. You’ve gotta work before I praise.

There have been some rocky days since he got here but all in all I am grateful for this time. I’m helping him understand some of the ways that toxic masculinity has fucked him. I’m helping him embrace his soft-boyness and brainstorm ways he can become part of a new community by finding ways to share his many physical and emotional skills and not hide in his room hiding his sadness and pain behind his drinking.

I’m not even trying to work on his alcoholism. I understand when a rock is too big for me to push. Instead I am expressing loving support for the fact that he clearly feels he needs this coping method and his brain is trying to help him survive. Show some compassion for the fact that you have gotten this far with your shoddy, not awesome coping methods and maybe you will feel enough better about yourself over time that you will need it less and it can fade away.

You do not have to be perfect to deserve being loved. You do have to find ways to make sure your jagged edges don’t cut anyone you are trying to get close to, but that’s not the same thing as needing to be perfect.

I have to believe people deserve love even when they aren’t perfect. I am very far from perfect and I will never get closer.

Every couple of days he tells me again that he feels overwhelmed by how generous and loving I am being. That’s a little hard to hear because sometimes I feel like I am being such a bitch by pointing out the shit that sucks. If you point out the problems, that must mean you are the problem. We all have our old, shitty tapes in our heads. I mean… he did offer to pay for my pot the rest of the time he is here because I am so much easier to deal with. That was uhhhh pointed.

Even though I am prickly and difficult I do still show love. I provide food and housing and I make sure no one ever says a negative word about his drinking or smoking even though my whole household is really repulsed by cigarettes. I made him a safe, sheltered place to smoke so he can do what he needs to do. I am not a soft and gentle person but I am caring. I suppose that is what people mean when they say they aren’t nice but they are kind. I am not nice. I do not only say things you want to hear. But I will bend over backwards to provide you with safety and security and space to work through your demons. I will listen to you process all the shit in your life that is holding you back and help you figure out what you need to do to change the arc of your story going forward.

I’m not an easy person to love. But if I love you I will absolutely kick your ass into being the very best version of yourself you can be. You will never be perfect: reaching for perfection means you don’t learn how to be ok with good enough. Good enough is fucking great. I see so much potential in you. I want you to see it too.

I’m about to fucking explode, y’all.

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I am not ok and it is perseverating in my head and if I don’t set it down somewhere I am going to continue to freak out in my house with my kids and that’s not cool. So let’s start there, shall we?

My kids are acting appropriate for their varying ages. All of these stages are hard at this moment in that awesome way that sometimes cycles pop up. My oldest is a fucking teenager with a fucking rude teenager mouth. I feel like he just has to tell me I’m wrong or express exasperation at my stupidity over and over all day long. Often at times when I am not actually wrong or being stupid. I mean… when I am wrong I tolerate a fair bit of sass but it drives me insane when I’m not wrong. Middle child is not wanting to accept responsibility for some areas of forward progress and I’m struggling with that. Youngest is pushing every button and boundary like it is her job… because it is.

So that’s all fun and the background noise of every single day.

I went back and checked my logs (hi, yes I am incredibly obsessive about tracking all kinds of stupid details) and starting in June I went from sleeping 8 hours a night on average over the course of the month to sleeping 6 hours a night on average. The months since then have hovered around 7 hours a night on average. That’s pretty certainly part of why I have been doing much worse. Why did I start sleeping so much less?

Ah, fucking lockdowns are over and I feel incredibly pressured (mostly internally) to get out and Meet People and Volunteer and Be Part of the Community. Also this summer has been quite energetic with gardening tasks as I’m moving towards the permaculture/low key food forest direction. I’m super tired. Also eldest said, “Let’s go ahead and finish the lounge” and I said, “Oh uhhh ok.” I was kinda hoping to procrastinate the work long enough for the paint to go bad. Then I found out my old buddy was coming and I have some projects I said he could help me with. So I started sprinting to get stuff done before he arrived.

Reader, I fucking failed.

I’ve been very much working beyond what I should be. Oh, and late May was my first trip down to England to see A & P then in June I went back down to England to bring Noah and the kids to see A & P. That is seeming like the best decision I made all year.

Oh, and I averaged 6 hours a sleep a night the month I had fucking covid and I slept through 4 days entirely. THAT’S REALLY FUCKING BAD.

I’m not ok, y’all.

July was a sprint of work I was not physically prepared for. I have never taken time to really fully recover from covid, not really. I certainly haven’t carefully increased exercise over time to get back to the fitness I had.

August was a super sprint of work and it was exhausting. September was a lot of work sprinting plus my birthday which was absolutely fucking exhausting to the extreme and I probably made some foolish choices. I was not physically fit enough to do what I did comfortably and I have paid for it. October has been more and more work and then Noah and EC went off to Helsinki then the morning after they got home I ran off to San Francisco in a last ditch effort to say goodbye to A.

In a way there are shadows of my uncle passing. I was too late. I feel like I failed and I am upset with myself. I did get to help P with one of the thornier parts of handling A’s belongings and I am deeply grateful I could perform this service.

Being in San Francisco involved a ton of driving (ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow) and many hours of work and many different social interactions one right after another and very little sleep. I just couldn’t except for a few times when I passed out in awkward scenarios. Three people said they wanted to make plans then cancelled at the very last minute. Woo. That’s always fantastic.

My buddy is a challenge in many ways. I don’t want to say too much about that but I will say that he is very emotionally needy and he wants me to help him process and understand his entire life and that’s a fucking tall order. I am not a therapist. I feel like I am drowning in his feelings. He also can’t remember a lot of our conversations because of how much he drinks so each conversation has to be repeated a few times and that is really frustrating. I don’t begrudge him the needs but my bucket is so fucking empty.

I feel empty. I feel like I can’t take more shit being dumped on me. I feel like I want to scream and scream and scream until I have destroyed my voice from screaming. I want to sleep for several weeks in a row. I want to stop speaking to people at all and I want to go back to lockdown. I am so far into burn out I feel like a pile of ash.

I know that I am a good person to help people process grief but right now I can’t handle the flood of it. It’s not just the one buddy. I feel absolutely surrounded by loss this year. Grandmother in law, A, my buddy’s parents, other friends have lost family members, a different buddy is dealing with her kid self-harming, a somewhat surprising number of pets have passed recently and folks want to talk to me because I give them comfort. Right now it feels so hard.

Oh, yeah, and it’s been an incredibly stressful year on the money front. I think things have settled down now and while we are not fully “on track” we are in a very reasonable place and I’m no longer worried about bouncing payments. But it’s been a fucking lot.

Err, also my roof just got replaced and the scaffolding and construction fuss have been irritating and challenging because to a large degree it has meant that YC has not been able to play outside unsupervised for over a month. That’s not a great situation.

I’m not exercising enough. I stopped my yoga classes because we need to be contributing more to savings. I’m not eating well enough–I am actually not enjoying the kids cooking 4 nights a week because rarely do they put more than 1 vegetable serving in a meal and it’s not doing great things to my body. I’m sleeping for shit.

It goes on and on and on. I’m sure I’m not remembering all the fuss. My head hurts. I am tired of being tired.

Share widely! Giving away porn (San Francisco, maybe Scotland)

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Hey folks, it might be easier to share a post.

A very dear member of the San Francisco community has passed away. I was asked to take care of dispersing books and toys. I am working on a Google Sheet with a list of the books.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vDqzyDpkkNp8jLGcTpRL-hi3ztTLKSRxesC-kyAK18M/edit?usp=sharing

I got started yesterday but I am far from done. Yesterday I processed books as fast as I could and snapped photographs of spines of more. I have added what I could get from the photographs this morning. I will be going back today to fill in the information I couldn’t get from the pictures. I will take more pictures and try to get all of the book data entered by Thursday night.

I will try to make time to meet up with people on Friday, Saturday, and early Sunday. I fly out on Sunday evening. Any books that haven’t been picked up in San Francisco or claimed by Scots for me to bring home will be taken to Half Price Books early on Sunday.

Act fast! I will not be able to deliver books all over the place. We will have to meet in/near San Francisco as I am racing the clock and I don’t have much time for driving all over.

I just came to say: goodbye, love.

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The dawn is less bright today. You might think that is because I saw the sun come up over soggy England but, no. This is the first sunrise without Andrew in it.

I first encountered Andrew through Frenzi, a mailing list centred around a group of folks in the bay area who all share a hobby. I met a lot of brilliant, witty, argumentative, wise, and patient people through there. Of course there were a lot of dipshits too.

Andrew was the first person to flame me on the internet. To be fair I had told him that I was surprised that I was never attacked because I felt like I often expressed contrary/unpopular opinions. So he taught me what it felt like to be flamed. Ouch. I learned an important lesson: Andrew was as painfully literal as I am. If you say/imply you want something he will make it happen if he possibly can.

I think I first actually spoke to Andrew and Paula at a birthday party for a friend. I am pretty sure that was my first time ever going to a Thai restaurant and I completely fell in love with the food and the company of the people I was lucky enough to sit next to. Specifically: Paula. She was so kind and gentle. It surprised me that someone as gentle and carefully considered was suited to be married to someone as prickly as Andrew. Later I came to understand how they complemented each other.

When I first moved out of living with Tom things were scary for a while. I was not sure how I was going to pay my bills and still have money for food. Andrew told me that he would absolutely not accept me going without food and if I was that skint I needed to let him know and he would make sure I ate.

With my background of poverty and periodic starving because my mother could not afford food at all he seemed absolutely unbelievable. Why would he care?

I feel like that was one of the overarching story arcs of our relationship. I have never really understood why he cared so much about me. He frequently made offers of support and love and affection and I didn’t know how to accept them. He was also very free with his opinion and he was often insightful and hilarious. One memorable time he found out who I had started dating and he said, “Oh Krissy, dump him. He’s not smart enough for you and you are going to get so bored.” He was right on the money. He loved Noah for me.

Paula helped finish the walls in my garage in Fremont. Andrew helped paint the ceiling. It made me so happy looking at that ceiling for years knowing that Andrew helped. I could feel his (and Paula’s and Taylor’s because T did soooooo much on that project with me) love surrounding me. Co-working has always been my strongest love language.

Andrew introduced me to books and told me about movies I should watch. He was very annoyed he could never get me to juggle.

We had a big falling out around my 30th birthday. We both did things that hurt the other quite badly. One of the things that I am most grateful for in this life was the chance to try once then a second time to repair the damage from that situation.

Andrew forgave me for being selfish and stupid and cruel. That was a gift he did not owe me. I am lucky that I got to have him in my life for decades. I got to have closure on talking through a situation that hurt me deeply and he felt truly contrite and loving and apologetic. He showed me how to repair a deep wound. Not very many people have been able to manifest that complete journey with me in my life. Andrew was *special*.

I am grateful to the marrow of my bones that I went and saw him twice this year. I loved helping him drive the boat and operate the locks on the canal. He told me that I learned how to drive the boat unusually quickly–he felt confident enough to just leave me alone with it after just a couple of hours of supervision. I felt elated through and through. Like me he wasn’t the sort to hand out unwarranted compliments. I had to have a stern chat with him about why I set the boundaries with my neurodiverse children where I do and he took that on and manifestly started following my rules. I felt respected.

I feel like that is the core. That is the core of what Andrew gave me: he saw me and treated me like someone he respected deeply. I met him at a time in my life when I had not experienced very much of that.

No one is perfect. But Andrew was perfectly wonderful and I am so grateful that I got to have him for so long. Here in the end he is even leaving me an extra gift. I may not be able to say goodbye to him, but he asked me to come to the bay and as a result I will get a lot of love and support from other people who have known him and loved him for as long or longer than me.

It is very hard carrying grief alone. Being able to share grief lightens the burden and helps everyone remember that no one fully dies until everyone who knows and loves them is gone. Andrew’s spirit is going to live on for a long, long, long time.

The ties that bind

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This “community” we have as perverts is wide and shallow and yet so deep. The friends we make here are the witnesses to our lives. We see each other through loves and losses. We feed each other and we laugh. We show up for births and parties and holidays and deaths.

If you hang around very long you start seeing the old timers from your youth retiring or moving into care homes or hospitals and eventually they just go back through the process of becoming part of everything again. The spark that animated the very specific soul flickers then goes out.

I watch folks fuss at the problem of how to make swimming in this shark infested sea safe. I don’t think safety exists here.

I think there is transcendence and beauty and honor and horror here. I am here for it. I am here for as much of it as I can get.

I make friends with younger folks while knowing that I am writing the story of what they will remember when my own flame flickers out.

For now I just hurry so I can bloody my fingers rubbing the skin of one of my favorite sharks before he sinks forever. His wisdom will stay in the world. His love and generosity have already kept countless other souls from giving up. He kept me from giving up. He made sure I could eat and get to work and school. He gave me so much.

This blood in the water is really the least he deserves.

I will keep swimming. I will remember what he taught me. I will pass on anything I can. Sharks aren’t hoarders, they take what they need to live and they pass on the rest.

But I must keep swimming. I am a shark and swimming is how we stay alive.

Almost here

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My birthday is coming up. Going to Texas and England this year means I am not running away by myself. (Important note: the woman we went back to Texas to see has now passed away. I have no regrets over prioritising that goodbye trip over other more fun activities for this year.) Noah wants to be thoughtful and asked me what I want. I want to not want anything so I can’t feel let down. I want to have patience for the 973,383 times I will have to remind my children to do basic chores (like brushing teeth). I want to not miss my mother. I want to go back and rewrite my back story so that my impending birthday doesn’t feel like a hand grenade about to land on my head. A buddy suggested that I go camp somewhere for cheap, but I have been working too hard. I couldn’t right now. My hands are trashed.

I have an old friend staying with me. It is complicated in the way that integrating a new person with deep grief, and addiction issues, and learned helplessness will be. To be fair, every time I feel like I am going to freak out about an issue I have to address he is responsive and polite and most of my requests have been acknowledged and respected. But negotiating and setting boundaries is hard. It’s One More Thing on my emotional chore list and I’m tired.

It has been a fucktastically busy year. Busy on so many levels and my exhaustion is, once again, bone deep and completely saturating my soul. I feel numb and on fire and empty and aching. I deeply miss the comfort of tracking things that happen in my blog because I benefit from the space to process but mostly I do not feel I can anymore. I have reached a certain age where I now have to be realistic about the fact that I am not really going to make more very close friendships. Sure I can find new activity partners, but it isn’t the same thing. The people I have met in the last few years I am deeply conscious of this careful distance I keep. They are not allowed to know me. And I cannot talk about my deep relationships anymore because when I do I ruin them and it is absolutely all my fault.

So I do small bits of processing with people but very little in my historical record. I do almost none publicly. I mostly stuff my feelings and feel disconnected. I do not expect or hope for any kind of improvement.

I worry that the adhd medication was effective and useful for a time and it has gotten to the point where it is causing as many problems as it helps and I am starting the process of weaning off (with medical supervision do not fucking criticise me).

I watch the incoming terrifying blend of natural, political, social, and financial disasters hitting the UK with a sense of grim apprehension. I have been waiting all my life for a moment like this. I feel horrible about the fact that a lot of people are going to suffer terribly, some are going to die, but it won’t be my family. I continue my grim plod towards being able to provide a variety of supplemental food because I think famine is coming. I am installing solar panels with a battery system. I am installing rain butts, many and as large as I can manage. A chicken coop is finally being built. Hell, I’m even building a firewood pile because I worry that there will be a cold snap before the solar panels are installed. By the end of fall I will finally have my polytunnel set up for next year’s food growth.

I am working as hard and as fast as I can.

Noah’s job has managed to go most of the way towards fixing the issues that were happening with his salary. This is good. It would be a terrible time to go do a job hunt. I think we only lost a year’s worth of progress towards retirement. I am deeply aware that the fact that he is so insulated from the current global difficulties with regards to fair pay that he is still going to be able to retire before 60 means that I will never really understand the rest of my generation. Marrying him was hitting the lottery. I did not expect this. There is no fair. There is no deserve.

Even in company I feel lonely. I know I am not meeting anyone else’s emotional needs and they are not meeting mine. I do not know what could be done to change this. What I do know is that I am not suicidal and I am financially and physically prepared for more hardship than 90% of the planet. Maybe my expectation that things are going to fucking suck is almost a good thing. I am going to persevere. I will endure. I don’t need to be happy. I need to get the fucking work done.

And right now the next task on my list is to go make Middle Child a birthday cake. They are turning 12. Puberty is arriving and it’s going to be a wild fucking ride.

Monsters Under the Bed

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I wrote this and put it in other places but I think some friends here could use seeing it.

Sometimes you get cocky. You think, “Hey the monsters under my bed haven’t come out for a long time. Maybe I made friends with them and they decided to leave me alone as an act of mercy. Maybe they died of natural causes. Maybe…. one of the many chemical warfare bombs I threw under their killed them. Maybe.”

Then something happens. Maybe you knock a glass off your bedside table and it shatters on the floor. Maybe a support plank in your bed gives way and makes a loud creaking sound when you move. It might be a big sound or it might be a small sound. It really doesn’t matter. There was never much sense behind the monsters coming after you anyway. They have their own agenda.

So you step lightly off your bed expecting to walk peacefully off to the bathroom to brush your teeth.

Even when they came out often you never really learned how to hop off the bed fast enough and far enough away to get away from them. Their arms are so long. They can grab you so hard and pull you so close. Their teeth when they bite you are so sharp–so terribly razor sharp. Their teeth are a bear trap. If you move very much you are going to tear the wound and make yourself bleed out. Instantly your stomach fills with the sharp, acrid, acidic, burning poison of fear.

You are always so terribly terribly afraid that even if the bleeding doesn’t kill you first your body is going to produce so much acid that you will destroy yourself from the inside. You’ve been so close in the past. The acid burned holes in you so that you could barely eat, barely sleep, it burned through the tissues of your body making terrible pain absolutely everywhere.

You will never, ever forget that pain.

So when it starts you have to first go very very still. So still that you calm down all the way to the atoms of your body. So still that it feels like if you are not careful even this paralysis might kill you. You have to slow down enough to figure out how you are going to get help.

You can’t be casual about getting help. If you ask the wrong person they think they can toss you a screwdriver or a metal nail file and tell you to pry it open yourself.

You are stupid. If the only tool that you have to hand is one that will poorly break open the seal and probably slip sideways in the blood and cause you to damage yourself even more terribly… you will use it. You are scared and you are hurting and thinking is almost an impossible task. You are desperate. Thinking requires so much will. So that first decision, “Who can I ask for help?” is maybe the first, last, and only time you will be able to think.

You have to make sure that you carefully only ask for help from people who have the right tools in their toolbox. People who have experience with this kind of atrocity. People who will neither flinch nor minimize the severity of the wound. Probably these are people who climb out of their own beds very carefully because they are currently at a dĂŠtente with the monsters under their own bed. They know deep in their bones what is at stake if they fuck up.

Make no mistake, that monster wants you dead.

If you choose very carefully and you manage to pick wisely and your dear, wonderful, important friend helps you to get the trap open that doesn’t mean you have to cling to them for all of the healing. They can pack up their tools and head back on their own journey. Someone else will probably be along soon and bandages and medicine are so much easier to get help with.

It’s getting the damn trap open that usually sinks a person. That moment is do or die. That moment decides if you will have more moments. That moment when you go quiet and you pull yourself in and you weigh carefully exactly who you can ask…

It’s everything.

You had better hope you made the right friends. You had better hope they have their toolbag with them when they happen to hear your call.

Sometimes you get lucky. You can limp away. You are reminded that you did not actually kill the monsters. The war is not over. You will have to keep fighting.

But for now you can rest. Rest and heal. Be grateful that you made the right friends. Be ready to help them with their own monsters when the need arises. Because as sure as the sun will rise those monsters are going to keep trying to kill you all.