Tag Archives: immigrant life

The future is vast and terrifying

I’m trying to figure out which parts of my future are still options. I don’t know which parts are me and which pieces were entirely created so I could live up to Noah’s expectations.

I’m still interested in the gardening. I’m not managing to get as much of it done as I would hope. That’s complicated. Gardening, much like writing, tends to need to be done in a flow state or I find it incredibly agitating and annoying. I need to get better at darting outside over and over for a little bit during the day. I’m still in the last throes of requirement to directly supervise a child ALL DAY. It’s a dramatic thing when they get old enough to run off and manage their own time for a big chunk of the day. Shortie won’t be fully out of the need for supervision for a few more years. She’s an impulsive one. We have so much in common.

I feel deeply lucky that my children are happy to be like me. They feel supported in their challenges and understood in their struggles. They feel validated and seen and appreciated. They tell me so, often We have our moments of strife but we are deeply aware of the need to repair and make reparations. Everyone in this house makes mistakes and we all cop to them immediately and fairly casually. We don’t feel bad about having flaws. We don’t feel like making mistakes is any kind of permanent statement about our value as a human. To err is human. You learn more from mistakes than you do from doing it right the first time.

I love that my babies move through the world with such confidence in themselves. They can describe their needs for assistance. They have been able to set the terms for how much sensory seeking or avoiding they needed to do. There have been wild swings over the years. Noah had been giving me steady breaks for about the last 6 years of his life. That’s when he got really hands-on with the kids. I have a lot of sensory avoiding behaviours too. I like a room alone very much. I’m a writer. It’s been going way better for me.

That’s what my future will include, but what will writing mean when I don’t have Noah around as a corroborator? I’m a lot more afraid of being called a liar without him around. I do not believe I am a reliable enough narrator. That scares me. I feel very mixed about the stories I can’t tell because I don’t own them. They involve other people who wouldn’t be able to give consent if they wanted to. Someday they can give consent but that time is a long way in the future. I find it strange that I act like I have less authority to tell my story without Noah around to give his stamp of approval. He validated my existence. He wanted me and that justified the resources it took to maintain me.

It’s wild having that structure drop out of my life. I feel this vast emptiness in my soul. If Noah doesn’t want me, then why I am I still alive? The answer is because he gave me three children. What I have told each of them separately and together is that I will fight to stay alive as long as there is at least one of them. I am not saying I need the full set in order to survive. I am committed to each of them as individuals until the absolute end of the road for me. I will work hard to take it seriously that I need to extend that road as long as possible. Even when it isn’t very fun.

Being in my body isn’t feeling fun lately. I’m building back after surgery and everything hurts. I no longer get massages almost daily. Noah has been massaging me constantly for almost 20 years and it’s just gone. I hurt a lot. It takes a really high level of exercise, and specifically cross training, for me to not hurt in a fairly overwhelming way. I have to make up for all the joint instability by building up the muscle support. Yoga, rock climbing, cycling, running, swimming, and hopefully dance on a regular basis. I want to do all those sports every week.

I have to go limp and decondition after surgery or I have big bleed outs. It’s happened a bunch. So this is a cycle I will probably have to go through a few different times. It’s scary for the kids and for me. This means that I am weighing my options for birth control very carefully. I have an appointment to talk to a GP coming up. I don’t want to ever get pregnant again. This is something that is very important to me. This is something I need to have control over. My older kids have made it very fucking clear that they are not open to having another younger sibling. I respect that. It was a group decision to have Shortie and I respect them assessing their own abilities to provide support for another baby and toddler.

My life is going to revolve around my kids in a really big way for all of my life. That’s for me. That is going to stay true. We are going to have a stable home together. A home where we all get to have space and come together if and when we want to. Over time the other two bedrooms are going to be more seriously set up for people who come over regularly.

It’s interesting watching the evolution of this house. I thought this house was going to be much more static than the house in California, which I pulled apart and rebuilt and repainted and constantly moved the furniture to change how I used every room. I lived in an Ikea ever changing set. It was pretty rad. I like how I used that house. It wasn’t a house set up I would have chosen but I made it work. I changed it a lot starting when I moved in. Basically that was never Noah’s house again. And then this house is a huge lemon. It’s been insanely expensive to repair all the long term neglect from all the previous owners. When I’m completely caught up it will be baller.

I love the bones of this house. I love what we are doing with it. I love the way we morph and grow inside of it. I love that it is a house, like Wonderland, that inspires people to dream. Noah is why I had time to paint this house. He had Shortie. I have so many feelings about how I am going to be a good enough mother to her without his support.

I have spent a lot of time this year thinking about how I don’t get to have as many projects. I won’t be doing volunteer work any year soon. Well, I can if I can bring Shortie. She’s my buddy for the next 4-5 years. It won’t be as intense as it is right now for that whole time. Which is good or I would be a husk of a human on the far side. I love my babies and I am grateful to the marrow of my bones for getting to have this experience of being alive with them. I don’t wish this life away. I’m just looking forward to when Shortie is old enough to cycle to and from classes without me, you know?

The gardening was always the thing I was doing with/for/inflicting on the kids. Noah was never part of it. In a way, I think that is good. I was looking forward to long years tinkering in the garden and listening to him play piano. Now it feels different to live in this walled garden. I feel more vulnerable and yet competitive. Like, my house and garden are going to look a lot nicer because I’m going to worry more about judgment. I was allowed to get away with more of it being part of a whole heathen family. Single mothers are judged differently.

I have a lot of new social rules to learn and I am not looking forward to any of it. I am scared and anxious and cranky. It sucks because I have so little patience for caring about anyone else’s needs. If you are not my crotch fruit I only have a few hours a week to give spread between every social interaction I have. I feel bad that I need this so strongly right now. It’s a lot of why I am not asking for more babysitting to go be social with friends. It doesn’t seem like something I have the spoons for. I’m too tired and grumpy. I don’t want to care more about everyone else’s feelings than I do my own because that means being very careful about my speech. It’s a lot of work. I have to think about what everyone else needs me to pretend isn’t going on for me.

Sometimes it is a little challenging coming up against Scottish or English reserve. In a way, they are the result of many centuries of programming in a way I can’t understand. I am the freakish end result of the most progressive loop holes and policies of the people who went ever searching for more answers until they ran out of land and had to stay in California.

Matisse said I had the energy of a star being born. I don’t feel like I have that flame right now. I can feel a memory of it. I don’t know that I will ever have it to give again, though. I don’t know that I’m going to have that kind of focus and freedom. Maybe after the indenture is over.

I sold my services very specifically. I wanted to get married and have kids and homeschool them. I knew they were going to be weird and have special needs and I didn’t want them to be beaten down by the system. I take this very seriously. This is what Noah bought when he married me. We had an agreement. If he supported me for the whole of the indenture I would take care of him for the rest of our lives. The words feel like bitter ash in my mouth.

I find it fascinating that I have always only had a relationship with my mother in law. I’ve barely spoken a few sentences to my father in law. We have a nearly religious separation of gender relations. We have so much in common and it’s a funny thing that she now loves me and wants to make sure I’m taken care of for the rest of my life. She wants to make sure that her grandkids don’t have to go through the kind of single mom experience she grew up with when her father died.

She wants me to have the spoons to be nice.

I really appreciate that. I see that for the gift it is. I see what my mother in law was fighting with her marriage and her mother and I see how she got to where she is. I think she’s done really darn well with the hand life dealt her. I can see how she is trying to give me the freedom to be who I want to be in this life.

I have told my children their entire lives that I am preparing them to not need me. I am also auditioning for a role as an adult peer relationship way down the line. I am not trying to be your friend right now. I am not trying to win your approval right now. I want 30 year old you to respect me. Sometimes I have to be the brick wall, that’s the size of our life. It’s not personal baby. Everyone else hits the wall in school. I am your school.

It’s a complicated relationship dynamic for me. I am consciously and deliberately working myself out of a job. I don’t want to be the source of all support or knowledge or control when you are grown. That’s not my job anymore, bitches. I did my service. Past that you need to be responsible for yourself. Anything you want from me past that you have to negotiate case by case. I don’t owe you care taking forever. But, I am happy to share chores and live in a consciously interdependent fashion because being disabled sucks, yo.

It is interesting to negotiate this with the proto-adult. In this country he is already legally an adult in many ways. In my mind I have seven more months to actively parent my oldest child. Oh my fucking Cheese. It’s insane. How could this be happening already? Wasn’t he born five minutes ago? Oh wow. Noah, I am so sad you aren’t here to help him over the finish line. I know this would have been a really epic year for you two. I was so excited about the plans you two had for the last school year. There is no fair. There is no deserve. I’m so sad that Noah won’t get to see our son become an adult. I’m sad he doesn’t get to see where this fascinating person will go in life.

I’m sad for all of our kids. They are all missing out on so much. This is awful and it hurts and I feel like I am going to explode with grief. I wanted that future. I wanted Noah raising this babies with me all the way. It was his fucking indenture too, push comes to shove. He was waiting through it with me because he couldn’t have what he wanted from me as long as it was happening.

It feels like he worked so hard for something he didn’t get to have and that feels really unfair and sad. Having privilege is a mixed bag. He may have gone through life on easy mode (in many ways) but he still felt that black hole of loneliness in his soul. I made it easier to carry. I didn’t need him to pretend that wasn’t part of him.

Near the end he was talking about wanting to do a soul retrieval. I was deeply frustrated by the misunderstanding that he was trying to recover what he killed for me. Noah and I did a lot of really deep exploring around our core woundings. We talked a lot about our families. Noah wanted to find the parts of himself he killed to survive his childhood and his young manhood. He had the space to chase those things because he felt completely safe in our marriage. We could get mad at each other, that was fine. It didn’t mean we were going to leave. If the other got too annoying we would start making their life less comfortable until they knocked it off.

We really liked the comfortable life so mostly we got along. It was a choice. It was a decision every day. We wanted to be part of a happy family. So we made one. We made one after extensive, excruciating, meticulous negotiations and renegotiations. We have no sacred cows. Anything is on the table for discussion. People get seriously called to the carpet, in private with the family, and we talk it through. Everyone gets to be heard. We don’t stop until the message lands and actual understanding happens on each side. There are a lot of rounds of “repeat back what you understood.” Cognitive distortions are not tolerated. There is always a group of people listening who respond, “That’s totally a mischaracterization.” It’s fucking awesome.

I feel like I landed in a Brontë novel or some shit. Making it work on my pension. I’m lucky we can still afford plenty of sugar. Ha, ha, ha. It’s scary to think that every pound I spend today is a pound I am taking away from our collective future. I’m not like Noah. I can’t go write another book and make a long term low key income. I don’t sell my writing, not really.

I don’t know if I will seriously write Vicki’s book and Noah’s book or not. There will have to be a G rated version of Noah’s book for my kids to read. They deserve that. Noah lit up my soul. I don’t want them to just remember me weeping about him. It’s a great fairy tale. Sometimes happily ever after isn’t all that long.

I don’t know what I will be and that worries me. With Noah I knew that I was part of a happy family even if we were fighting. We chose each other over and over and over. I am feeling a decided lack of chosen-ness at this point. It’s appropriate given where I am in my life story. I don’t have a husband anymore. I was picked and now he is gone.

I don’t think I want to be a wife again. I have weird feelings about that. I can’t contort myself like that again. I can’t try to be one person. It was hard. I don’t think I have that to give again in this life.

I need to be a separate person. My story will always be something that is a bit mysterious and foreign. I will never make sense again. All the tropes are different here. I might as well be from another planet. It’s an adventure. And you know what I say about adventure, right? It’s not an adventure until somebody cries.

With my family there is 100% of the time crying on adventures. It makes sense for us. Having the expectation of crying removes the feeling of disappointment when it happens. We laugh instead. We see crying as a stress relief option that our body takes when our stress cups get too full. It’s not a big deal. It doesn’t take someone being horrid. It’s just part of being alive.

I love being part of this family. It’s hard to feel like it is fully a family without Noah. He said everyone revolved around me. The kids and I notice that he was a really big sun in this solar system and we are all bereft without him. I find myself wondering, “How would he be doing at this point?” I don’t know. I hate reality. I hate that I couldn’t play the game out to see who would survive better and then go back and decide that I get to quit much earlier because it changes his outcome. That’s annoying. I want to make the right choice. There is no right choice. There is only stumbling forward and praying.

I am scared. I don’t know what else I will build. I feel so lost. I miss Noah so much. He gave me structure and support and justification. Now I feel like a deflated balloon. I will never soar again.

I have mixed feelings about all the birthdays I spent consciously isolated and unspeaking because I believed I was going to have to sustain myself for the rest of my life. That’s feeling much harder now. I did not think he was good at certain kinds of celebrating me and I shut him out completely for that failure. I am definitely going to be difficult about birthdays and holidays going forward. I am probably going to want to hide for the rest of my life. I don’t want to be seen. I don’t want to try to be part of anything. It doesn’t work for me. I am too jagged and broken. It’s too late.

I don’t feel like I should ever try to be happy again. It doesn’t matter how I feel. It matters what I do.

Keep moving anyway.

“Are you sure you want to ask me that?”

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I’ve had this agreement with most friends and family members in my life. When they ask me a question I give them a second chance to see if they mean it. I will answer. I will answer in so much detail that you may regret your life choices.

I like that Gentleman is around while I’m doing chores more now. We talk while I’m doing stuff. It feels a lot more like an integrated relationship. It’s like how I get to be around while he practices sometimes. I like these overlapping points in the timetable. It feels like life sharing. We are testing the waters during this courting period. We are on no particular escalator with specific end goals.

I’m amused that going back and forth between his place and mine is resulting in me keeping my space more tidy than usual. He is a tidy individual. He takes care of his things and he cleans up after messes really quickly. Sometimes I feel intimidated because I’m going to struggle to match that in this house. I could in my house in California that was 1/3 the size of this house. I am often worried I got myself in over my head. With Noah I was alright. Now the house is a lot to manage alone. Gentleman offers help and I demur each time. Ask again next year. After he has waited through the mandatory window. A long time ago my children asked that there be a year period between when I start dating someone and when that person meets the kids. They asked for that when I was still married. It’s very important to me that I earn their trust in an ongoing way so I take this request very seriously.

I have a love/hate relationship with watching time pass. I hate thinking about the fact that tomorrow Noah has been gone for eight months. I hate thinking about how long it has been since I saw my mother. I love thinking about how much time I have spent doing different things. Like, the number of hours I’ve spent with Gentleman. That’s a fun thing to muse about. We are clocking the hours needed to form attachment. We are talking about things that are hard and scary instead of ignoring them and hoping for the best. We are both earning trust. I think courting is important at the start of a relationship. I bring up as many hard things as I can. I don’t believe in a honeymoon of “hoping for the best”. I am a difficult person to mesh with. Doing so takes time and doesn’t always work.

I often wonder how often Gentleman regrets his choices when he says he truly wants an answer to a question. My answers are so weird.

Yesterday it was interesting talking about the different attitudes among California naturists. He was horrified that my children have spent time in mixed gender naked environments. I’m less worried about the naturists than I would be a member of the clergy. The naturists know they are skating on thin ice on the edge of society. They have reputations to uphold if they want to be permitted in the community. He is adamant that no right thinking person in the UK could possibly agree with my stance. It is wrong, in his view, to allow children to be around naked adults.

I contrast that with my lived experience of my children skating past body dysmorphia because they are comfortable with the full actual range of human presentation and they know that their meat sack is not what defines their importance. My kids arrived at mainstream school contemptuous of the idea they should go on a diet. How stupid. If you cut calories as a growing person you can’t build the healthy muscles and bones and brain you need. Fuck that shit. I attribute a lot of their casual approach to existing to the fact that they have seen people live thousands of ways and it is all part of the range of normal for them.

Yes, I am intrinsically unbothered by the idea that at some point my children might see you nude. As long as you don’t make it weird I don’t care that much. It’s the making it weird part that is the bad thing.

My kids negotiate boundaries better than 90% of adults. Yes, I think they know how to advocate for themselves in most different environments. We practiced. They aren’t thrown by things that bother most people. They also have meltdowns from not being able to handle things that are considered a mandatory and unavoidable part of life for other people. We avoid them. Life is ever more complex than one can nail down. There are no universal rules, none.

One of the books I just finished, The Social Distance Between Us: How Remote Politics Wrecked Britain, had some interesting bits. The author, Darren McGarvey, talked about interviewing an incredibly successful philanthropist and he noted that he struggled to be as pushy/forward as he intended to be. He was more deferential and gentle than he had intended to be. He noted his own inhibition when it comes to pushing someone of a “higher class”.

There are times when I feel this but mostly I have learned to push through it. Silicon Valley was a trip. I don’t know how I would manage someone in a UK setting where class is less about success in your career and more about who you were born. I’m going to continue to ride the wave of ignoring social hierarchy that I’ve been on most of my life. I was born to be used and abused until I die. Everything else I do is gravy. When you are born as trash you have a choice. You can comply and conform, which most humans are wired to do as instinctively as they breathe. Or you can decide that the hierarchy doesn’t apply to you and you will simply exist entirely outside of it.

I have gone with option B in this life. Noah loved that about me. I don’t conform neatly into any community or set of expectations. He also hated that about me because I couldn’t cut myself down to only what he wanted me to be. He hated that I didn’t think of myself as being better than other people. I can’t do that. Doing that is agreeing to the hierarchy and I can’t do that. I’m not better than anyone. The primary thing I do really well is not die when maybe I should.

Yeah, I’m diversely educated and I know how to do a lot of shit. Everyone else knows stuff I don’t. How can it be compared? I have no idea. I don’t really bother trying.

I play with class expectations, though. I dress up or down to fit in better. I bought a suit to wear in court and ended up not needing it. I am glad I didn’t buy an expensive one. I bought a capsule of rich bitch clothing for world travel. I hold on to the beloved, full of holes old stuff that reminds me where I come from. I make sure my big house is company ready most of the time. I want people to just drop in, and more people are doing so. I know how to do barely-there rich girl makeup and that’s it. I never mastered the art of makeup past that. I’m too lazy. Also I’m not that keen on looking in mirrors.

Which isn’t to say I ever fit in well no matter which direction I move on the slider. I don’t really fit anywhere. That’s ok. I don’t fit in well but I do know how to make a place for myself in most settings. Sort of? I’m not feeling confident lately. I’m isolated and lonely. I need to get over myself. I need to get out more. It’s hard because I’m going to run into more people who react with the same level of vehemence about my opinions being wrong as I got yesterday. He let it go and didn’t continue to press about how he now kinda considers me a low key pedo.

That is a hard thing to carry. I know in my bones what it means to grow up with a pedophile. It was my life. My children have been bubble wrapped to a shocking degree. I have literally witnessed almost their entire lives. Sometimes there were naked people around because we were in a public bathing type environment. I am fine with dying on the hill that public bathing is not inherently a sexual activity and it is not pedophilia for people to inhabit the same physical environment while nude.

But I don’t particularly want to. I understand that this is not the norm where I am right now. I don’t drive and there isn’t an appropriate place nearby. I’m not going to upend my life to seek out these opportunities going forward. Being prudish about nudity is not a morally superior attitude. That said, my house is a clothes on environment at this point. The casual attitude that Noah and many of our friends had of preferring to be naked has not crossed the pond. Here my house is a fucking fish bowl. I face a walking trail and people look in all day. If I want light from the windows I have to be fully visible to everyone who passes. We wear clothes.

I definitely feel like I have let a lot of standards slip over the past while. I notice all the places where things are needing fixed/replaced/cleaned up. In the long run my garden will be build up in height and I will have more visual privacy but it is going to take a few years. I need to learn how to do a lot of this myself because I don’t want to pay for anything I don’t have to. If I can do it then I should. I don’t have Noah breathing down my neck judging how I spend my time. Anything I could farm out so that I paid more attention to him was his preference. I have built a life here where I do so much less than I did in California. I feel like it is showing. I have fallen behind in a lot of maintenance tasks. I’m going to stay behind for at least the next ten months. I have to be realistic about the limits of my body given the shape of my life.

Until the next summer solstice. I have that long to be a mess. I don’t think I will ever have an easy time believing in the hope of the winter solstice again. I lost Noah three days later. Am I going to start losing the ability to sleep between the 21st and 25th of December because I am waiting to see who will die? That’ll suck. I hope not.

Shortie is making it very clear that one year of not celebrating is all she can handle. After that, we go back to celebrating on holidays because she needs them. I agreed that I will. She still needs to have the rest of her happy childhood after the year of sad. I don’t get to stop giving my kids a happy childhood. I still have to do that.

It’s going to be a lot harder now but we will be ok.

Yesterday was pretty great. We spent about four hours in the garden and then the kitchen. The stone fruit trees should have been pruned a month ago to prevent damage in winter storms, but it is what it is. We got it done. We also harvested 8kg of plums along with 700g of blackberries. Then we cleaned it and processed it. Blackberries became cobbler. The plums are in the fridge waiting to become jam. We will be making little gift bags of stuff we made from our harvest for holiday presents this year. That’s about as far as we are going to get with any celebration this time. Fuck. I can’t handle thinking about winter holidays.

I am overwhelmed thinking about more immediate things. I should get more organised. Maybe I’ll get work done today. Maybe.

Finding my way back to me

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Today I was told that someone needs to be cautious about their landlord seeing a book about kink because it could be a problem for their housing. I live in a place that has very different boundaries than what I am accustomed to. I can’t imagine a landlord caring what people getting up to in privacy.

This kind of difference is a lot of why I haven’t written much in the past six years in public. I’ve been afraid of consequences. I will be judged on what I do and on what I don’t do. There is no way to thread this needle and be ok for everyone, people are going to be uncomfortable, if I am going to be true to myself.

When I think about the words of my friends that bounce around in my head like a pinball that will never make it to the bottom of the table I come back to a dramatic theme. Different people in different ways at different times have all told me that the thing that makes knowing me so impactful is the fact that in every single moment I am overwhelmingly, achingly myself. I hold to my values and my truth and I move forward as I have the right. I believe in the core of my being that I have the right to exist as much as anyone else does.

I was not brought into this world as an act of joy or love. That is not my fault. I can’t do anything about the rage, control, pain, and violence that brought me into being.

I am not that powerful.

I can’t do anything about the violence and sadness and unwantedness that permeated my young life. That time is over. That book is closed.

I can’t go back to the marriage where I was cherished and adored and worshiped either.

Do you notice this theme? There is no going back. There is only racing forward. People tell me that seeing me stride forward boldly without reservation makes them feel like they can too. I am not perfect. I am not waiting until I have the perfect body or all the information or I have fulfilled all the prerequisites.

I have all the confidence of a mediocre white man in Silicon Valley. 60% prepared is definitely good enough.

People keep asking me how I am doing. I don’t know. I’m getting things done. I don’t feel like I am doing anything well and I don’t feel like I am getting every ‘t’ crossed or every ‘i’ dotted. I am dropping balls all over the place. It’s frustrating. For many years Noah and I traded tasks based on who could get 90%+ done effectively. We had different strengths and we were an amazing team. Between the pair of us we went from people with deeply spiky profiles of success and failure to being absurd and superhuman. We compensated for and eliminated one another’s failures. We both got to be much more effective human beings.

Now I have to do all of Noah’s tasks too, not just the ones that I am basically competent on. I am responsible for the really hard and scary parts. I now have to be the one who does the tasks where I cry the whole time I am doing it. I feel like I am being bad and I can and should be punished for what I am doing, sometimes just because I am doing such an inadequate job.

I have a core of perfectionism I try hard to smother with a pillow. Good enough is good enough. Everything doesn’t have to be perfect. Life does not require perfection. Life just needs us to move forward. Me. I have to be thinking about me moving forward.

For many years now I have used Noah frankly as a tool to manage a lot of my physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual needs. Having him drop out of my life is devastating in a way I struggle to wrap my head around.

I’m really sad my son has to share the date of his birth with the date of his father’s death. That’s going to be painful sometimes. I will not bring it up to him. He’ll notice and it will be painful enough. He definitely doesn’t want a huge deal paid this year. No parties. No celebrations. Not this year.

It’s really hard on Shorty. That is part of why I am taking her on a trip after I recover from surgery. She needs to have more going on that give her big learning experiences. I can see how and why she is struggling to get concepts we are explaining at home because she has been so limited in environmental exposure.

I have so much to tell you all. It’s going to be hard to explain all of it in a way that makes sense quickly. I don’t have enough free time for typing. I miss you. I want to seek more integration and that means I am going to have to be more honest with you lot. I’ve been hiding in a walled garden of people who were pre-screened for wanting to talk about sex. You are just here for me and that’s a lot weirder at times.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the past few years writing about what sex means to me. It has been contentious and difficult over the entire past year. Noah and I were struggling on that front in a bunch of ways. We were also having the best sex of our marriage. Noah was laid off last February. The last 10 months of his life he was unemployed. We were trying to figure out how to get him more immediately to retirement because my body is so shitty I could use a full time care giver. We were having a ridiculous amount of sex. It was so good. It was bonding on a soul level. A lot of it was part of active magical and spiritual rituals. We were on fire together.

We worked really hard to build the fire inside me to a raging inferno. For those of you who are not Archivists (old friends who have been reading me since livejournal across many platforms) I need to say that I am a hypersexual. I mean it in a clinical sense and not in a “I like to have sex” way. I have been actively pursuing and chasing sex in a wide variety of inappropriate and then appropriate settings since I was 3. Sex has been an overwhelming driving force in my life in ways it isn’t for normal people. I did not have a time of virginity or ignorance. That is simply not my life path.

Instead I have provided that path for my children. I have been in active trauma therapy for approaching 35 years now. I work very hard on being a person who acts consciously and deliberately. I make choices about where boundaries should be based on an excessive amount of deliberation and waffling between various theories. I overthink my life.

I was raised by people who made incredibly bad choices. I don’t have a lot of strong role models in my head of who I want to be when I grow up. The only person I want to be is me. I see the person I want to be the same way I see the murals I paint in my homes. My homes erupt with plants and water and texture. I see that Future Me bursting out of me. She will know the right thing to do in an absurd number of circumstances and she will never be a twat about it because every new thing I learn unveils a thousand variations I will fail at. The more I know the more I understand I will never understand. I am a tiny drop in a hurricane.

For 18 years Noah was my path to controlling and living with my hypersexuality. He was my safe way to not expose my children to inappropriate behaviour. We were rigid about boundaries between our sex life and our kids.

Theoretical knowledge about sex? Heck yeah! These are some deeply educated mofos. They can deconstruct tropes. They are finding their own pathways into adult relationships in ways that have absolutely nothing to do with my path. I see the edges out of the periphery of my vision and carefully never look more closely. I am a nosy and invasive asshole, only I’m not. If I want my 30 year old children to respect me I have to nail this dynamic now.

What I am doing today is not about today. I am paying Future Me. Future Me will want to have the kind of relationship with her children where EVERYONE CAREFULLY DOESN’T LOOK. Cause no one is hiding or lying or being secretive. They just aren’t flaunting.

So I need to start figuring out what that means from myself as a single adult who is going to be polyamorous.

I am not going to fall into a serial monogamist pattern. Naw. That will be unstable and bad for my kids. People will not integrate with my life quickly.

For the love of Cheese, there will always be a locked door between me and my kids when I have sex. Preferably in a sound proof room. Hey wait, I have one of those.

I’m scared of this though. Not to hurt anyone’s feelings, but I’ve seen poly done in some ways I don’t want to emulate. I have known people who have done things in ways I thought were highly respectful all around. I’ve seen everything in between. I don’t live in the San Francisco Bay Area any more. I will not have the same kind of casual social tolerance for my antics. My neighbours here are probably already noticing. I’m having feelings about that. A lot of people use my road as a daily exercise destination. They comment on my weeding. They are going to notice and raise eyebrows about vehicles. That sits heavy in my belly.

Especially given how many of them stop to talk about how sad it is that Noah is gone. I live in a small town. This is a new thing. I am going to have to figure out how to allow them to have plausible deniability because I think they will want to have it. We already get along. If they can ignore things I think they will want to. I won’t shove it in their faces. I won’t flaunt my wanton lifestyle. I will let everyone only see what they want to see. I have spent a lot of time studying the social contract and I do ok in live tests.

I know how to be neither dominant nor submissive in a social situation. I am simply on a different hierarchy. Don’t worry about whether you are above or below me. We are parallel on different scales. No reason to raise your fur. I am not a threat and you can’t threaten me.

I’m sure I will be judged and there will absolutely be rumors. Since I am me I figure I ought to at least provide some actual facts for them to judge me based on. I like being judged accurately and I’ll take my medicine for what that earns me. I always have. I always accept the consequences for my mistakes as I try to learn.

I know the deal. I am not going to bother to talk back. I’ll take it and move on. I won’t slow down much. I have more mistakes to make. I have more learning I need to do. It doesn’t really matter that I am tired and I feel weary to the marrow of my bones. There is so much to do if I am going to create that Future Me I see in my head. She has been successfully speed running this game of life a lot longer than me and I’m desperate to catch up.

“If you don’t look back on yourself 18 months ago and say ‘Wow I really sucked‘ you aren’t trying hard enough.” I know, Noah. I’m trying. It’s hard to learn while this much of my brain is screaming in agony because how can you be gone? I am a tiny fraction of the person I was. I do not think I am better than I was 18 months ago this time, sweetheart. Please forgive me for this lapse in progress. Maybe in cooking? Mostly I have become less a spiky profile with a few low skills and a whole fucking flat line. I feel like I am barely moving in most areas.

My son said, “I thought we were your epilogue. Turns out we are your intermission” and it freaked me out.

I have never been single long in my whole life and that’s a bigger statement than it is for most humans. In 40 years if you add up all the months of not having sex I think it fills less than 3 or 4 years worth. I’m not sure. It’s around there.

I don’t know what this is going to be like here and I definitely don’t know what this will be like in this set and setting. I’m going to figure it out though. Since I got married I’ve had the privilege to fail upward. I don’t know if that halo will continue but I’m going to do my best to act like that privilege is like everything else I inherited from Noah. It is now mine. Not by birthright, no, I am not one of those good people. I am still shitty little me. But in my time and my place if I outlive my spouse I absorb all that they own. Some of the ways they address the mail are weird.

I am not finding my way back to me. Not really. I cannot go back. There is only forward. I am moving forward towards the me I want to be. I’m going to have a place in a little place. I’m going to know my neighbours and they are going to accept me as an ambassador of weird to varying degrees. Some of them will hate me. I’m sure I will be hassled in some ways but it doesn’t matter. I have the ability to cope.

That is something I have had since the very beginning, a lot of cope. I don’t always make wise or good decisions but good golly I get through.

I have an enormous pile of paperwork to get through because now I am responsible for my own taxes. I kind of want to throw up. I am a head of household with the IRS. I have never been that before.

My mother was my age when I was 11. I think perimenopause is hitting me harder at a younger age. The spotting is awful. I’m spotting for half a month at this point. “How are you doing?” people ask. I don’t usually tell them this. I’m looking forward to being a crone so much. I keep wanting to ask if there is a hormone that would make this happen faster. Then I could go off hormonal birth control. That may be part of the spotting, but it happened without the patch so I doubt it is the cause. I love being a neurotic, tracking, bitch.

If anything the patch has been doing really well at helping smooth out the PMDD symptoms. It’s not all bad to muck with hormones.

There are always two forms of birth control. This has been true since I was 12. I have been pregnant five times and they were all on purpose. If I were to fall pregnant despite heroic measures I would choose an abortion. I am too old and in ill health. I’m about to have the second of three surgeries to repair damage from my third child’s birth. I’m good. Factory is closed. I don’t want to get into a debate about birth control methods. I love you. I’m letting you know how I’m doing since I know you worry.

It’s been hard to talk to you. I tell you everything because you really are a whole cast of varying Ideal Narrators for me. I think of you so often. I love you. I’m so happy when you reach out and tell me how you are. Sometimes I don’t know how to respond. I am so deep in email fuckruptcy it is absurd. I don’t respond, but I read and then leave it there unread for months waiting to have the spoons to answer.

I have not gotten organising sorted. My brain is being a right cunt about admitting this level of vulnerability and opening myself up to hearing “no” when I ask. It makes me want to puke. I don’t like asking specific people for a specific thing. That is exactly my worst failure method. It took so many years before I could ask Noah. He had to actually watch me cry while I crawled around doing things for myself because I could not ask for help. He had to live with how awful that felt. He had to beg me to ask for help. He got increasingly anticipatory as the years went by because I don’t ask for help much.

When I do it falls into one of two modes: it is incredibly low stakes and a no or a yes is equally thrilling OR I am having an emergency and I am going to be in pain if you say no.

I’m not very good at managing that second part. My primary way has been to throw open the doors to the universe and ask for help with stuff of “anyone who can” and then some people throw their hats into the ring. It’s been bloody successful for me. My life has been good thanks to this approach.

I don’t know how it will work here. It’s ok. I don’t have to know yet. Future Me will know. I just have to get to her.

I’m feeling deeply conflicted about dating. I’m not replacing Noah. There is no way. There is no such thing. I am having fun. I am having opportunities for exploration and growth. I smile more than I would without the time. I say dating because I’m still trying to not be scandalous. I’m still scared. I smile more when I have shagging very soon on the calendar. There. I’ve said it. Practically on Facebook.

I have very mixed feelings about the way this feels more me centred around myself than I have been since I got married. I am not spending my days trying to earn someone else’s approval. I am doing what I want to do in service of my own happiness. Apparently my happiness is still bought with really bad jokes.

I can’t play the “you are not funny” game ever again. There are so many layers of me that will have to change. I never need to respond as Noah’s wife again.

I keep going, even when I’m crying and even when I’m scared, because Future Me looks like a really cool lady and I want to meet her. I can’t meet her if I stop.

Don’t make changes when things are bad.

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My brain is a fucking asshole right now. I’m isolating a lot so I don’t take it out on people. I’m coming out periodically to do work for people and announcing loudly, “This is my love language. I love you. I am not avoiding you out of dislike. I am keeping my shitty brain to myself until it stops being so shitty. I don’t want to wreck a relationship saying something I don’t mean in the long run.”

This is how I feel deeply privileged in this life. I get to do this. Golly this is amazing. I don’t have to shut up and keep it together at work. That feels like such a luxury.

I hate being depressed. I hate how every single thing comes out harder and more sad and feeling pointless and I feel worthless. It’s stupid. It doesn’t allow me to have reasonable or rational conversations.

Today we hop on a train and go south for immigration stuff. I’m tired and overwhelmed already and I’m not even required to be up for an hour. Another day, another step towards permanent settlement. Holy shit. I might never have to go back to Gunlandia! If y’all somehow get your shit together and oust the fascists and pass serious gun reform I may consider coming back. Those two things seem absolutely impossible. So even though the UK is far from perfect, I’ll stay in the place where my children won’t get shot.

It is actually a clear and pressing and overwhelming worry in my mind. I’m scared of bringing my three loud mouthed trans teenagers (one is a Bonus Kid) to the US if Harris loses in 4 days. I’m freaking scared. This seems stupid and unwise. I may not be able to handle doing this. I may feel like I can’t depending on what happens in the next month or two in the US. If there is more violence in January? How can I justify that?

I don’t know. But I’m pretty scared. Life is hard and a lot and I feel deeply out of control of it. I feel like I won’t be able to get my feet under me till after the trial. I am going to feel entirely out of control until then.

Hey, I started this then walked away for a few days and didn’t hit post. It was an eventful few days! Yesterday was the best day I’ve had in a long time. There were ups and downs and stress points but we had some genuine fun together and we laughed. That was so nice. We have now submitted our biometric information to the UK to help with the process of permanent settlement. All of our paperwork is in. Now we wait for the wheels of bureaucracy to turn.

Then we walked to the train station past racial discord as crowds were outside yelling about fireworks and bonfires. Apparently we were walking on a part of a street we weren’t supposed to be on. Folks were very unhappy seeing white people there. I just held tight to a hand and kept going. If you pass through quickly enough you can get through almost any territory without a problem, at least that has been my experience. As long as you are not staying it’s ok to hurry through while obviously not from around here.

It is hilarious that people really clock me as an American without me having to say a word. It happens constantly. I continue to have weird public shaming experiences in public toilets. This time someone was going off about how disgusting I was for pooping outside of my home. I should only pee in public toilets. She was almost apologetic for being nasty, but then she saw me and said, “Oh an American.” Then her friends cackled about how it is fine to be rude to Americans.

Every single conversation I have starts with “how long are you here”? Folks don’t warm up much when I say the rest of my life. Xenophobia is awesome.

I am at the point where I am watching the US election with frozen horror. It was wild going past all the bonfires, most of which did not look government approved. Only one involved a tense racial situation with the Black folk on one end of the road clustered around their firework display in the park and the white folk just outside the park on a patch of grass with a fucking giant fire that included pieces of furniture. That was a rowdy group and I didn’t feel safe. I got out fast.

I’m having difficult feelings about a lot of the racial tension I see online and that I feel in interpersonal dynamics. I feel like at some point I stopped believing the myth that only white people are racist. The genocides that are occurring in the world right now are not all white people killing other folk. It’s more complex than that. People are deeply xenophobic and racism is an intense part of that and I think it is in every person and in every culture.

Yes, the US and the UK have structural racism problems that need to be addressed in concrete and specific ways. I am 100% behind ancestry-driven reparations. I think there is a legacy of cultural debt that colonialist powers have that we deserve to pay back in ways big and small. Yes. But there are other debts.

It is feeling weirder and weirder to me to act like the US and the UK are a substantial portion of the people in the world and what is true in those countries is The Truth. It is really bothering me. It is making me feel more and more revolted. It’s like how I didn’t vote in the US election this year. First time in my life. Do you know why I didn’t? Because I never want to live there again and it is morally questionable for me to exert influence in two countries because I am just more important and people deserve to have to live under the effects of my choices even if I never have to live under those effects. Why in the fuck should I help pick a mayor for Fremont? Do I know how good of a job someone is or isn’t doing? No and I’m not fucking going to know. Why should I be making choices about who is the board for BART. It’s not my damn business.

I need to be looking to the Highland Council and learning what is going on in the place I live and be a part of that. I no longer believe it is ethical for me to try to control the destiny of a place I have abdicated. I am still required to pay taxes and I’ll do it, but golly. At this point voting in both places feels like trying to be an absentee landlord. It feels like being a colonialist. It feels like trying to have my cake and eat it too.

I do not want to be in the US. I do not want to be tied to its fate. Hell, the main reason I’d ever work in politics is because that is one of the easiest ways to renounce citizenship. I feel sorrow for what my ancestral line came and did to the North American continent. We hurt a lot of people and we participated in a lot of violence.

It’s funny that we started as Europeans who came and hurt the Native Americans/Indians/Indigenous/whichever word fits the preferences of the group and now we are Americans who have to try not to hurt the Europeans. I’m watching the UK go through a different set of issues around racism. Here, the average non-white immigrant came here themself, or their parents did, or their grandparents did because they wanted access to opportunities. They chose this. That is not such a neat and tidy story in the US though we desperately wish it was. We wish we were “a nation of immigrants”. Instead the US is a nation of immigrants, the survivors of the genocide we perpetrated, and people who were kidnapped and enslaved. Like, that’s a fucking different set of issues to have around racism.

It is interesting walking through very different cities in a variety of countries and experiencing very different crowds. The undercurrents are strange to me. I don’t know the history. Almost every single one of these people thinks of their life story as “normal” and “just life” and “just how things go” and they can’t imagine people having an entirely different set of experiences beyond fantasising about being rich. That’s a thing most people try to imagine. It’s not what I imagined when I was young.

Having enough money to fix the roof and put food on the table doesn’t remove stress from your life. It doesn’t remove trauma. It doesn’t mean that things always go well or easily, it just means that you have the privilege of being able to fix some things before they become grindingly painful. I can’t fix everything. And I can’t avoid grinding pain. I’m out in the studio right now medicating because my whole body hurts like a motherfucker after the last 36ish hours. We did a lot! I didn’t sleep much. I don’t think I got an hour of sleep last night. I did make good progress in my book and I am really enjoying it.

Those are positive emotions. This is good. I am not out of the woods and I expect to have some shitty days as a rebound. I still have a lot of underlying disordered thinking going on. I can see pieces of it. I’m fucked up around a lot of food stuff right now. I’m having a lot of alienated feelings about my body and desire to hurt it. I am struggling between wanting to fast/starve myself and wanting to eat as much as possible so that men are less likely to be sexually attracted to me. Neither is healthy at all but my brain is flip flopping like a fish between them.

I had a few really positive exchanges with all of the kids. It was a good trip. We got along and had fun together. We went to the Science and Technology Museum and then we found an international food court and got one or two entrees at a time and ate our way around the globe for three hours. We waited a while in between orders to see if anyone was actually hungry enough for more. It was amazing and also expensive. That’s our eating out for November.

It sucks having my brain be a dickhead. I am very lucky that for this rodeo I live with people who love me very much and who are willing to do a lot to show me. I wish that meant that my brain wasn’t a dickhead. That would be so awesome.

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.

My safeword is “Long-term trauma’, bitch

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I keep getting comments from complete strangers, which is still slightly surprising to me. I write about myself and I had extensive and varied trauma as a young person. It comes up as I try to figure out how to handle situations in my life as an adult. I function best, as a person who is autistic and has PTSD, by writing out the things that I am having big feelings about rather than trying to talk about these things in real time. My side of the conversation is too big. I like to play in ways that will upset sensitive people. I encourage you to take care of yourself and not read my writing.

Lately we have been having to have the kinds of serious talks that fucked up people need to have before they go wading into the murky morass. Things like: it is ok to harm me if you are doing it on one axis at a time and it isn’t ok to stack traumas because I can’t process my way out of that fast enough to be appropriate with the kids.

My life is still incredibly structured around my ability to be level through my day to day life. I’m homeschooling my kids and I have over a decade to go before I’m done and that requires a high level of emotional regulation from me. (Not debating this choice here.) But this is the rock around which my life is built.

I have a lot of experience with complex trauma. Lucky me? I am a bit of a tight ass and I define trauma in my personal life as circumstances in which my survival has been in question and ongoing issues where my brain is not capable of telling a situation apart from things that might kill me. Being uncomfortable or stressed out is not a trauma in my personal nomenclature. Brains can be difficult. If something was a threat to your survival at a formative time in your life and it continues happening past the point where it can threaten your survival sometimes your brain struggles to turn off the “Oh shit I am going to die” part.

This is relevant because my father liked to tell me that I exist to get men off. I am the product of rape. Like, those fucked up incest stories? That was literally my childhood. He would tell me, from when I was a toddler, that if I am not pleasing there is no point in him continuing to let me be alive. That means that for the rest of my whole life sex is wrapped up in Do I deserve to be alive? Am I going to fail at getting this man off and then he is going to kill me? Or should I kill myself out of shame. That part was a lot less clear.

Noah is getting older. There are biological factors at play that influence when he can come a lot more than I can be the force that decides his orgasm. But if you tell me that I’m not getting you off that I’m just not quite good enough combined with putting your hand on my neck*? That is a singular layer of trauma for me that I can process and internalise and enjoy the mind-fuckery. I know Noah is actually very happy to be married to me and orgasm or not he is absolutely thrilled to fuck me for the rest of his life. He has demonstrated the absolute commitment he has to me not dying–I can deal with that.

But I cannot cope with that if I am already overwhelmingly upset or feeling suicidal for other reasons. This is part of why I cannot play like this if I am not writing. I have to tell you where my brain is so you can make decisions about what is safe.

This is why I don’t play with safewords. It’s not because I’m so bad ass. It’s not because I think someone should read my mind. It’s because either my play is so light that “Hm that’s kinda pinching” is the same as “red” or because I am doing play so intense that “red” isn’t a word I am going to come up with under pressure. I just won’t. My brain isn’t going to go there. I will be unable to use that as a word to help myself.

In the fourth month of our marriage he raped me. I don’t mean we did a rape scene I mean I was hysterically sobbing because I had spent the day talking to CPS about what my sister was doing to her kids and that was an extremely upsetting situation. I was not fucking ok and I felt like I was about to break into a thousand pieces. I have been raped quite a few times in my life. Every other time my brain has coped by freezing. That day with Noah I was completely unhinged and I fought him. I fought him until we were both bleeding. I lost. That had reverberations for years. I was scared of him and I flinched when he tried to touch me. That was before we had children. There was no reason in the world why I should have stayed.

Except I am pretty sure I could not be married to someone if they will not hurt me like that. I am pretty sure I could not maintain interest in a singular person who was not willing to do that to me.

So yeah, we are talking about the role of rape in our life going forward. I am someone who has spent decades teetering on the edge of committing suicide. It is kinda a family tradition: maternal grandmother, father, brother. It’s just there as an option, always.

I am 8 years younger than my father was when he quit. But hey, nobody is going to send me to prison for raping them as a child so I guess I don’t have his good reason to wuss out.

Anyway. When it comes to raping me that’s a topic of some delicacy. We have talked about the fact that what he wants is not a rape scene on a pre-negotiated day… where is the trauma in that? We are discussing ways to upset me/pick a shitty day that isn’t too shitty. As a recent example of oh-god-no: if he had decided to rape me on the day I got the news about Andrew dying I would not have been ok. I would not bounce back from that in a way that would be acceptable for the parameters of my life. The absolute best case scenario is I would get out of bed 10 or so months later and be maybe ok with trying to avoid dying.

So strategy is important.

But like, I’ve started running again. I haven’t paid the fee yet but right now I’m thinking my self-masochistic act of physical pain for my birthday this year is running another marathon. If he were, say, to wait until I am tired and focused and all I want to be thinking about is the race to absolutely insist and piss me off and hurt me so that I have to feel that while I’m running?

Oh yeah I could still behave how I am supposed to behave in my day to day life. That is a reminder that my body isn’t mine. I have accepted that I like having times when my inconsiderate asshole of a husband lets me feel pain and additional physical burden outside of my usual standard chronic pain because I’m a lucky whore.

I know that there are a lot of feminists who would be extremely unhappy about the fact that I need my marriage to involve explicit sexual violence as the trade for my comfy rich bitch life. I would say that I am a lady of leisure if I ever stopped working. The working won’t stop because it is ingrained into my bones that you work until you die and that rest is for other people. But mixed in with that is constant gratitude that I get to choose my work and I get to choose the scale of my projects with almost no limitations.

Hi newish people. I grew up in really deep poverty. I didn’t have a “permanent address” until I got married. I moved every few months–more than 50 times before I was 18 and then 9 more times in the 7 years of being an adult before I got married. I went through more than a dozen different foster homes and when I was with my mom things were often bad enough that I stole food in order to eat. I mostly crawled out of that poverty thanks to a dog bite settlement. It’s why I am fervently in favour of universal basic income. My lawyer set me up so that the settlement could pay for college. Without it I would not have gone; there was no chance.

So marrying a trust fund baby has been weird. It wasn’t a big trustfund by such standards but he was able to buy a house in his mid 20’s in California in an intense housing market. He was able to go to a good school without loans and he has had a really blessed career in tech.

I get to do what I want. I get to focus on what I want. He lets me control a lot of pieces of our life and I get to decide how money is spent and how it is saved and invested. It blows my tiny little mind that I do the things I do on a daily basis. I was not fucking trained for this shit. I feel wildly out of my depth. I feel incompetent in the extreme even as according to all metrics that can be validated by outside professional sources I am doing extremely well. It feels like a farce. It feels like the house of cards will collapse at any minute.

Now that’s kinda a loophole you can drive a truck through. Because that’s not existentialist trauma. Fucking with me around those insecurities? Oh yeah, that’ll be fine.

Fucking me when I’m sick and I feel terrible and I am not going to enjoy any bit of it at all? I mean… not like cancer sick–don’t be ridiculous. (I’ve already had cancer twice so it’s a reasonable part of the conversation.) But a bad cold? The flu? Oh sure. Mock the fuck out of me. Great time to shove my face in a pillow so you don’t catch anything.

I have heard from other people with PMDD that they too have times of the month, every month, when they don’t have any interest in sex and it is very repellant. For the past almost decade and a half of having small children it’s been very questionable fucking with me when I’m on the low end of that cycle. I’m less stable if you do and the level of stable I have needed has been pretty difficult for me. I am not naturally a stable person. I have no useful training in stability.

Things are changing. I don’t have super little kids anymore. I have support in the day for me to duck in and out for a few minutes so I can take breaks and have time alone in my brain–I have literally never had this like it is now before we moved to Scotland. The way our life is set up now feels like an utter fucking miracle. This is beyond my wildest dreams.

Noah is nervous that this is a short uptick and it won’t continue. That’s a reasonable worry. The little kids part of our life has been hard on both of us. It has been hard to trust that there is a far side that will be fun. (If you do not feel in your bones that you must have children or your life will be incomplete don’t fucking do it. This shit is exhausting and frustrating and steals all your fucking time.)

The thing is: I have been in the bdsm community looking for people to do mean things to me from as soon as it was legal. I was desperately masturbating thinking about it and hurting myself before that. I think that being at a low ebb while I am going through the intensity of early parenting is reasonable. I’m just been fucking surviving. I don’t think that having kids is going to turn me vanilla in the long run of my life. I like it when people are crying way too much. I don’t care if it is me or someone else–if we are fucking someone should be crying. And bleeding at the same time is even better.

I miss you D. I will love you forever and I wish you only happiness.

Just like the growing tightness in my legs feels like carving off a layer of shell I don’t need anymore–a return to who I have been. My legs feel like I have been running. My legs feel like I have been bouncing up and down like I am dancing. I miss dancing so much. I used to dance 5 nights a week doing a wide variety of styles–most of which were extremely energetic. I’d go running at lunchtime.

I want that back. I tried to start running not long after we moved but I think it was too close to the more recent cancer and the house repair has been really demanding. I’m just to the point where it feels like I can.

I feel like that with sex. I feel like that with needing Noah to hurt me. I think there were reasons I could never walk away from the scene. I think there are reasons I started making friends before I was even playing again. I am a shark and I like swimming near other scary creatures.

Also: fucking terrified of the ocean. I am completely convinced I am going to be eaten in the ocean. It is not rational. FUCK MY OLDER SIBLINGS.

Anyway. I think I have followed this train of thought far enough. mwah

= Don’t even come for me about breath play. I didn’t say he choked me. He can’t choke me. I have had a significant number of brain injuries and I am at high risk for stroke. He is deeply invested in keeping me for a long time and that means I can’t be choked anymore. I miss it.

Just keep swimming

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Last night Noah was being a sensitive new age guy and he checked in if the current level of increase in meanness/friction on my cunt is a problem. He said he knows it is a lot compared to what had been happening and he just wants to make sure I’m ok.

I said, “Well I did tell you I’d be ok with you fucking me pretty much whenever and I’m still mostly initiating all of our sex. So mostly I’m thinking that you aren’t fucking me enough…. loser.” (We are having sex pretty much every day lately.)

He threw back his head and roared with laughter. “Well! Ok then!” Then he ripped his pajamas off real fast and started poking at my clothes. So I undressed and we, like the fully mature people we are, proceeded to spend about 40 minutes rolling back and forth naked telling stupid jokes and not getting around to having sex.

Finally I said, “This is my downfall. I am too funny. You can’t bear the seriousness of fucking someone as funny as me–it might ruin the mood.”

Really it just felt like we were young again and we had all the time in the world to just enjoy being naked together and of course eventually we will get around to sex.. it’s inevitable. Also inevitable: when we did it was of course very fucked up roleplay about how to manipulate a child into not having the right vocabulary for even reporting sexual abuse. After all, he is just having me pray every night and giving me a relaxing massage.

I met Noah when he was 26, we spent his 27th birthday together. I was 22 when we met. On one hand I felt so very worldly when we met but now I look back on it and I giggle. What does it mean to be worldly anyway? I was in such a rush to gain “experience” as if that would somehow make my life better. In some ways it was a good thing.

I have friends who settled down permanently with the first or second person they ever dated or had sex with. Most of them have told me that they have mixed feelings about the fact that they have little or no sexual experience outside of this primary relationship. They feel like they don’t know as much about what they do or don’t like.

I’m sure there are people who are completely content with their one lifetime partner, but those folks don’t talk to me about it.

I have never had a moment of pause where I have thought “Oh no if only I had more experience with other people.” Sometimes I miss the hunt because I was good at it and it was fun, but that’s not the same thing. Really I’m not even sure if I would hunt the same way going forward in any case. My life is so different and the Jenga tower is somewhat precarious. I don’t have much time to give anyone and the community in Scotland is so small that hunting with my normal voraciousness would very quickly create a challenging situation. Even if you are being honest and up front, not as many people are happy to be part of a truly extensive network as you think.

It’s a rare person who appreciates the sort of woman who can cheerfully pick up 8 new partners in a weekend. Daddy James you are always and forever the best first date of my whole life. I love you so much.

When you are fucking a lot of people you find out very intimately about peoples’ prejudices. I firmly believe that anyone gets to dislike whatever they want. Depending on how you say that people often assume that you end up on the side of disliking something they are on and they freely explain in great detail.

I asked about whether the older people I know remember a time when things were less judgmental because I saw a comment on a buddy’s post from someone I don’t know (who is ironically, younger than me) who said that they are old enough to remember a time when people in the community didn’t judge and they accepted everyone.

People judge whores. People judge women who use the word whore for themself in complicated ways. I remain grateful for the sex workers in my life who were close friends when I was working through some of my really intense trauma who told me that whatever associations other people have with that word are not my problem. My experiences are mine and no one can take them away from me or say that I am not allowed to experience the world as I am. It’s really weird that my biological father gave me that gift. Apparently whore is a title that a man is allowed to gift to a small child and she can keep it absolutely forever no matter what anyone else thinks.

I think about the judgment that people pass because despite the press releases that the bdsm community likes to put out about how people in the bdsm community tend to have slightly higher than average EQ and they are not significantly more traumatized than the normal population…

I am a traumatized motherfucker. Much of what drives me to seek out predatory and vicious partners is not some abstract “I was born this way”; I was shaped by a monster. When I was young and in the scene I would occasionally hear outlandish stories about how the younger you were when you started being inculcated into “slave life” the better you will be for the rest of your life. There was a woman who claimed her family sold her into a bdsm slave family at 14. This was treated like a hot/good thing?

Yet in reality if the core of your sexuality is formed around extreme trauma and abuse and, frankly, brainwashing you make people fucking uncomfortable. The average person (even in the scene) you want to go play with and fuck is not able to handle even being too aware of the extent of extreme abuse that people like me live through. Because yeah I do want you to act that out with me. Yeah. I do want you to be that fucking evil.

My biological father held a gun to my head while raping me. If Noah wanted to do that we would have to do the scene on top of a Princess and the Pea pile of towels to catch the river of squirting I would do.

Because to be clear if you do to me what I like having done to me… you are going to have to sit real hard with the idea of whether or not you are a bad person. You are going to have to be ok doing fucked up shit to someone who has a documented police record of having incredibly fucked up shit done to them. You have to face it head on. You have to embrace it and really own it and be ok with the fact that other people are absolutely going to judge the fuck out of you if they find out what you do.

I am trickling out stories, yo. I know I have a new audience and I know that is pressure. I know that the Scottish people will get to know what I put out there in writing far faster than they will get to know me in person because I don’t leave the house that often. Nobody sees me week after week at a munch to get used to me slowly over time. I am going to be very much on the fringe for a long time, perhaps forever. Will I ever play publicly here? I don’t know.

I don’t particularly enjoy playing in the safe zone that I used to specifically inhabit in public play spaces. Well, I enjoyed it a lot more in the past but I don’t think I could get back to that headspace. I want to play for me now, not for advertising for the maximum number of potential partners. And I am fucked up.

I watch the age players defend that it isn’t about sex. Oh. Well sometimes it is. And sometimes it is about specifically degrading a little and making it very bad for them.

I watch pet play folks get upset about people bringing up bestiality. Oh. Well… I don’t think I could cross the line with an actual animal for all kinds of very good reasons but the stories are fucking hot. Roleplaying it? Fuck yeah. The more humiliating and disgusting the better.

Rand went down a list of things that most people would reject and it was a challenge for me to find a true hard limit on any of it. Much of it I want to be verbal/roleplay–there are no actual children involved in my sex life and there hasn’t been since I was the child and there never will be again.

I remember saying, “No children, no animals, no dead people other than that let’s talk.” But really if you want to roleplay any of those scenarios… ok.

I don’t find bodies off putting. I don’t find bodily functions to be deal breakers. I don’t have many limits or reasons I will tell someone to stop something in the abstract. There are days when I can’t do a certain thing for a transient reason and there are tons of obstacles to my having space and safety for most of them but that’s not the same thing.

When people get very upset about wanting to get rid of all predators in the scene I can’t help but wonder… but do you really want to? If you do then who are people like me going to play with?

Neither Noah nor I would be as good at crossing social more lines and being degrading and violent and vile as we are if we had never gone too far.

I always say that you learn more from mistakes than you do from always doing things right. I have made a lot of mistakes. A tremendous number of mistakes. I am sure that there are at least a couple of people who think of me and feel really bad sometimes. I know Noah has at least one woman who saw him in her nightmares. She came to me to process it because that is exactly the sort of thing that someone would do, right? I told her that I would support her in any way I could. She was entitled to say or do anything she needed to do to communicate to Noah how badly he fucked up. If she wanted him to pay for her therapy that would be completely legitimate. She wrote some very intense letters. I read them with Noah because he needed to understand fully how he fucked up. I am still friends with her and she says things are much better now. She’s happy.

You learn more from mistakes than you do from always doing it right. I know how badly I can hurt someone. Noah knows how badly he can hurt someone. Hell, he knows how badly he can hurt me. He fucked up really badly in the first six months of being married by the choice of when to rape me. It caused an extra layer of trauma that had to be unpacked.

Do you know how hard it makes me come when he hurts me and tells me that he is so glad that he gets to rape me decade after decade? It is literally completely fucked up. This is vanilla-land “You should run, not walk away from this man.”

Instead I am no longer allowed to say “Jesus Christ” because the only God I am allowed to worship is Noah so it has to be his name I say.

“The difference is consent” except when there is no consent and sometimes that is far better.

“We evaluate the risks to make safe choices” except when we totally fucking don’t and we flail and we hurt people and we traumatize them and then we put our finger on that trauma and push down a little harder because the bruise was starting to fade and we can’t have that.

I don’t do safe things. I do things that any reasonable therapist would tell me is a bad fucking idea and I am totally risking cracking my psyche wide open. Yes. The best orgasms live there.

Bdsm is not therapy. Bdsm is a place where fucked up people can do very fucked up things. I treat the bdsm community like the sea and I am a shark looking for a bigger shark. When I encountered stingrays and eels and angler fish I wished them well and kept looking until I found someone who could appreciate the kind of fucked up I am. Someone with just enough training in mental health to be able to properly enjoy fucking with someone who is as damaged as I am. I found a megalodon; just think of all the nice people I am keeping safe by keeping him off the market.

Noah didn’t pick someone who compulsively cannot say no to sex even when I really should because of physical damage by accident. He is a fucked up person. I mean that in the very best of ways. He is brilliant and he can hold many contradictory truths in his mind at the same time. He deeply respects me and he wants me to be a big person in the world taking up space. He is the reason I have most of the self confidence I have to just go do whatever I want. I used to doubt myself so much. I don’t have time anymore. He also wants to hurt me emotionally in ways I won’t shake off. He wants to specifically drill down on damage created by my father.

I can’t wait until he can go back to cutting on me.

In many ways it is much better for everyone that Noah put the choke chain on me. Scotland is a small sea and we are very big sharks.

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.

16 days…

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16 days and 2 more international trips. First to Bangkok and then on to Inverness. Bangkok is because my partner has a business trip and we are going with him. Inverness is where we get to go home to.

Our visas all came through. We have the legal right to be in the UK for the next 5 years. If we stay in the country for enough days we will have the right to apply for leave to remain (basically a green card). If we stay in the country for enough days during leave to remain we have the right to apply for citizenship.

If Scottish independence succeeds… you bet your buttons that we are applying for citizenship. Hell yeah.

16 days till we get to go home to our big, beautiful house in the Highlands. I am so excited I can barely breathe. Our stuff is on a boat going over there now. (Thanks for the advice about how to label my boxes of porn.)

My wonderful lifelong best friend has been there for 10 years. She is setting aside furniture, dishes, linens, and as many other things as she can spare to help us adjust and find a place.

We are going to be Scottish. I am so excited.

And I have my own bedroom on a separate floor of the house from my kids so I have space for noisy sex. I have a room in the back yard that was sound proofed for a drum kit so I can scream all I want and no one will hear me.

I can’t wait!!

16 days. Just keep swimming. We are in Portland for five more days. I have plans with friends most of those days.

I will miss all the USians. Thank you for the influence you have been on my life. Thank you for your friendship and companionship. Thank you for your teaching and for your love.

Thank you for everything. I will think of you.

Falling in place.

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We got the house we wanted in Scotland. The previous owners are thrilled about how we want to add art to the space. (They cancelled showings with other families to accept our offer.)

And there is a sound proof room at the back of the property. I will finally be able to scream at my house without bothering neighbors or my kids. (They built it for a drum set.)

I am really excited. Next: finishing the visa process. The solicitor we are working with says he has never seen a more likely easy acceptance. Noah’s work history really is staggeringly impressive.

I am meeting nice kinky people so that I have friends other than my life long vanilla best friend.

Before we land in Scotland permanently I am getting to be blessed by touching base with some of the people who have inspired me since I was a teenager. I am in such a fantastic and lucky phase of life.

Did I mention that there is a self contained apartment so people can come visit us and have their own bedroom/living room/kitchen? If I love you and you know it you are always welcome.

We will be in Portland for a while next week. We will need to make a trip to California in August to close accounts and ship our stuff.

This is happening.

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Tag Archives: immigrant life

The future is vast and terrifying

Finding my way back to me

Don’t make changes when things are bad.

Commonalities and Threats

My safeword is “Long-term trauma’, bitch

Just keep swimming

16 days…

Falling in place.