Tag Archives: living with disability

Backwards and forwards

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Yesterday was Noah’s birthday. He should have been 49. It will be really bad for me when I turn 49. That’s going to be savage. We spent the day cleaning the house and getting ready for my impending surgery. One day till my friend arrives to help. She wants a few days of settling in with the kids first. She is smart. Surgery is in four days. Due to the stress and vagaries of train travel I’m going the night before. I feel less resilient with Noah coming along. I think the surgery will be fine. It’s going to hurt like last time.

Unlike last time I won’t have to give a police interview 3 weeks into recovery so I’m less likely to have a sudden massive bleed out.

I’m having a hard time with my feelings. I realize that isn’t a huge shock or anything. I wish I could only remember good things about Noah. Instead my brain is going through all the memories–good and bad. Our marriage was extreme in a lot of ways I can’t nail down without feeling shame. We constructed a marriage that wouldn’t work for anyone else. Were we wrong to do so? Sometimes I can’t tell.

The part that matters to me is: I wouldn’t leave for anything. I would never have left. I would have dealt with being in pain or having to be smaller. He was worth it. He was worth everything. I loved him so much I feel I could explode. He was a very good husband for me.

I am behind on emails again. I haven’t caught up on neurotic tracking in a while. If I’m not sharing the data with Noah it feels so much less purposeful. I created data, in part so I could show Noah trends and patterns and he would decide when I had to go in and seek help for a problem. He was my designated grown up and care giver. Now I feel like I will drift in the wind because there is no one to care.

I feel so achingly lonely. I want him all the time. I miss his smile, his intense way of looking at me, how he touched me, and how made me believe I always had a place: beside him.

I feel like I will never belong anywhere again.

I am highly conscious, as I move forward as a human being who will never agree to monogamy again, that I will never feel like I belong to someone again. People will always keep a space between us for their own safety. I can’t blame them. I would too. I don’t think it safe or wise to get too close to me.

The person I am seeing keeps asking why I hard selling the benefits of being around me. Do I expect him to do the same? I don’t. I really don’t. It was one of the dominant behaviour patterns of my marriage. Noah and I both did it constantly. “See, I do x for you. It is better to have me around than to kick me out.” As if that is a healthy way to run a marriage. I am having a hard time stopping. I still feel like I am trying to beg people to not throw me away. I think part of me agrees that if I am not monogamous nothing else I do will make up for that. I am a poisoned pill.

It’s been sitting heavily in my craw that between 3 men, I have not had control over my sex life or my sexual development for about 33 years. The middle one had the least time with me, but he did a lot of the early hypnosis work that Noah built on for almost 20 years. It’s not that I lost control of my body at 10. It’s that I gained it briefly at 13. I gave it away at 19/20 (that was a muddy line). It was given back when I was 23. I regained *nothing* at 33. I did have a rebellion at 34. Now I’m getting it back permanently at 43. I pay a lot of attention to patterns. Numbers give me comfort.

As I contemplate what I need from dating, as my son likes to say, the bar is a tripping hazard in hell.

Going forward I am going to need to spend time around people who make me feel cared about. I’m going to need to spend time with people who act like I am a fascinating puzzle. I am going to need to be around people who are cautious with physical boundaries and who recoil like an electric fence when they are told no. I cannot be around people who body shame because I cannot ever be vulnerable with them. That is a sign that I am going to be attacked and I will feel deep shame. I don’t need more shame factories in my life. I really don’t.

What I need (and the reason it is worth my while to seek out) is to feel seen and appreciated.

Most people don’t make me feel like this. Very few people make me feel like this. I go through most of my life feeling intensely alienated because I can’t ask most of the people I spend the most time with to see very much about me. It creates an overwhelming deficit.

Noah used to fill that. I don’t know what to do now.

I fee sad and isolated a lot of the time. More than I deserve to, in my opinion. It will change when and if it changes. I want so much. I feel entitled to so little. Noah gave me so much. My whole life is going to be less full obsessive love after this. I will never be someone’s autistic special interest like that again. I don’t even know that I would like it again. It came with a lot of constraints. They were worth it. I miss him.

The kids are clearly well on their way to deifying him. I just nod. I don’t talk about his down sides. It’s too soon. Someday when they are bemoaning how they will never be as good as their super human father I will cackle and tell them about all the stuff they didn’t see. He was a man. He had his good parts and his bad parts. He was deeply and achingly human. He was frail in a good many ways. He was aggressive in ways he shouldn’t have been. At times he was violent. Yes, he did lose his shit. Only with me. I was his safe person, as he was mine. For people like us, part of feeling safe is being able to be all the parts we can’t use with other people. Some of those weren’t very nice.

I have intensely positive feelings about my marriage.

As I move into the next stage of my life, where I don’t have Noah to meet my needs, I have to consider other ways to meet them. It feels cold as fuck but also what else am I supposed to do? I’m not my mom to simply never date again. She had a threshold of abuse and was done forever.

I have data. I understand how low the rate of violence has been for me in terms of broader exploration. I see the fireworks of good. I can’t act like one very small part of the data set defines the whole. That’s silly. That is numerically unsupportable.

Thanks to having data I can see the positive changes in my trajectory. The kinds of people I could find at different stages of my life are very different.

I am grateful I am about to have help with the kids for a while. I need it. There are tasks I’m falling behind on because I can’t brain after this many hours on duty. I feel like my job shouldn’t be exhausting after all these years–I should be inured. I’m not. I still like my day job but I need to simplify aspects of it. I can’t be as much of a three ring circus without Noah present for support.

I am so much less capable without him papering over the cracks and finishing the last 20% of so many things. And on top of that I’m doing all the stuff he usually did entirely off-screen from me. This is hard. My brain is very overwhelmed all the time. I need to find a way to get Shortie more of a social life without me having to physically facilitate it. She needs it really badly. I’m having a hard time. The surgery recovery time is looking so brutal. Oh well.

Keep moving. Only for the first wee while it’ll be shooting for 1,000 steps a day level of “moving”. The point isn’t to keep a consistent speed the whole time. We are humans, not machines. The point is to be patient and loving and kind to myself on the far side as I struggle to regain fitness. It will be another journey. I will have to go slowly or I will hurt myself.

This process is going to be harder without Noah to fuss over me and force me to rest. He was literally looking at retiring early to be my full time carer. I’m scared. I get sick a lot. I have a compromised immune system. I don’t have a specific name for it. I just get everything and I’m down for long periods. My life doesn’t stop though. I stay sick longer because I don’t rest enough. If I don’t do too much, not enough gets done.

And now Noah won’t be here to help so there is even more work that I am responsible for. Fuck. Not all of it. His family is stepping forward to build more intense relationships to start the process of transferring intergenerational wealth. Noah turned it down throughout his life. The offer was always on the table. I’m going to say yes. I would be a fool not to. I’m going to need to pay attention to this education they are offering. I am now responsible for managing all of my money. I don’t get to wave at it and call it “Noah’s money”. I have made reasonably good choices so far. I like where I’ve gotten.

A very terrible part of me can’t help but notice that the severance payment for my first marriage is alright. Sure, the relationship was terminated but I am going to be safe forever if I manage it carefully. I can’t be profligate but I can still buy whatever groceries we want. I will never live like a tech bro again. Somehow this is karmically a place I can live with.

I have incredibly mixed feelings about the wealth transfer. I also know that I have two kids with noticeable physical disabilities and one kid where it’s too young to know. It’s connected to genetic issues in both kids. The NHS is finally starting to evaluate/track them.

I may have brought people into the world who are not well suited to the capitalist hellscape. Remains to be seen, of course. I’m not offering them a fully independent amount of help. They could have enough to live at home comfortably. I can’t promise a lot more than that. I don’t have more.

Noah doesn’t have 6 more years on his arc towards saving for retirement. There was a fair bit of input expected to get to what he wanted to hit. Oh well. Deep breath. I can turn a dime into a dollar. I will be ok. I am very good at denying Current Me things so that Future Me can have more options. I’ve been playing that game for a very long time. I can take a lot of denial in some ways and not so much in others. I will build in giving lots to other people, don’t worry. I’m still me. I am thinking really hard on the structure of that giving. I am going to have to have that firm in my head. I need guard rails and limits. I need to understand what I have to give. That’s a hard thing to figure out sometimes.

I have been told recently that I like “folky” country music. I like stories, not hard rock anthems. Guilty as charged. It’s funny. I never thought of myself as such because I had never had the slider start in that position before. Usually I’m considered not very folky. I know a handful of artists and otherwise I can’t it through it. I’m too pop.

I have been listening to a lot of old albums lately. I don’t want to watch shows. I am reading more. I like having music on. I know I should embrace silence more. I do know. I like the way I get to ride my emotions like crashing waves when I have music on while I type. It is my companion through all the highs and lows and flashes of memory.

I love the way I get to re-sort my past memories that come up. I see each circumstance differently. Noah and I ran out of arc. It is really hard to feel like I am having to go in and put a manual end on each piece of the thread. “This is over now.” I am pruning off parts of myself that grew there because I had to accommodate Noah. I have absolutely no idea what this is going to mean in the long run.

It scares me a lot.

I am going to have to be mercenary with myself about my limits going forward. I need to catch up on budget work. I need to stop allowing myself this sloppiness. I’ve been scared to look. I can’t do that anymore. I’ve been watching the overall balance and keeping an eye on that. I need to look at how things are shaking out.

Then I need to hand a number to my in laws and that’s awkward. They don’t want me to stop having all fun. They want the kids to have big lives, still.

I have the option to choose a soft life.

Globally speaking this is righteously unfair. I’m aware. I’m having feelings about that. I also don’t see any global value in grinding myself to dust. Who knows what good I will do if I have the ability to learn how to thrive instead of barely surviving in “solidarity”.

I have always done my best to pay forward the help I have received. I either have credibility or not. I am not assuring private jet lifestyles. I am making sure we won’t lose the house and we never have to worry about food.

Our life together has been a mash between what he wanted and what I wanted. Now what? What about the parts that were only there because he wanted them? I’m having a lot of feelings about that. I’m having a lot of feelings about everything right now.

This is the path. I get to traverse it, not question it. All the feelings. I’ll have all the feelings.

Even though I feel weird, I’m going to talk about him.

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I have been writing about this so prolifically in the walled garden that it is weird to figure out where to start but I feel like I should. Only talking about this on a password protected site feels too close to dishonesty.

I only managed 2 months of abstinence after Noah died. I’ve only had one period of abstinence that was longer that wasn’t medically necessary since I was 16. I don’t do so hot with abstinence. It ramps up all of my mood difficulties. It makes me very physically jittery and my anxiety spikes through the roof. I don’t feel ok physically if I am not having sex more often than most people consider normal. I’ve gotten very comfortable with the language of hypersexuality for myself.

I went looking on a swinger website, which seems to be the hopping place for casual sexual encounters for the local area. A pal from the munch recommended it. One fella made it to almost three months before his personal life shifted and he can’t have sex with me anymore. I wish him and his girlfriend many happy years of monogamy now that they have gotten to that level together. I have had a few people last a handful of times but I ended things with all of them for one reason or another. There is another one I’ve seen a few times and I need to officially end it. I’m not one for ghosting. I like clear openings and endings.

There is someone approaching three months. Due to a whole cascade of events he’s actually going to be the person staying with me after my surgery on the 8th. I have to stay overnight near the hospital in case of issues. For various reasons the surgery is happening a hundred miles away from where I live. A friend is staying with me for 5.5 weeks to help with the kids. Then I have arranged local people helping with the kids after that.

I have been calling this person Gentleman because he has an incredibly proper way about him. Some of it is me misreading his accent as being more posh than it is. A lot more of it is because of the knee jerk intensity he has towards a lot of behaviours I would consider improper. He’s intensely respectful. Every time I have expected him to be unpleasant or rude or cutting he has instead startled with shock and been incredibly kind and supportive instead. He probably doesn’t think of himself as a proper gentleman by the standards of his country. He is what I was brought up to think of as a gentleman.

He has achingly polite manners a lot of the time. He is deeply considerate. He accepts things about me that I’ve had to fight over all my life. Not in a “go limp with resignation” sort of way, he accepts me calmly and without fuss. It’s just true. I feel guilty every time I assume something negative and he comes back entirely positive or neutral.

I feel safe and comfortable with him. I’m scared he is going to turn and run every time I cry. I’m not always managing to be a fun toy. He doesn’t have a lot of expectations about me. I feel bad that I flinch as much as I do. It feels unfair. I am sad every time I know I am tense because Noah would have been upset.

I love Noah and I will until the day I die. It is also true that we were both intensely traumatised people. We had massive gangrenous wounds that had to be accounted for all day every day. We were together all day every day. I see all the ways he accommodated me and I see all the ways I accommodated him. I see the ways we were fairly abusive with each other at various points in our marriage. I’m not rewriting my marriage in the rear view. I saw all of this and wrote about it as it was happening. I talked about us screaming at each other. I talked about name calling when it happened. I talked about hitting when it happened.

I am not rewriting the story. I am seeing it come to a close and I am trying to assess the physical damage I will get to live with in the cells of my body because I shaped myself around Noah in ways that were not always healthy. I loved my marriage and I would have stayed forever. I thought he was worth the cost I paid. I would have been willing to pay twice what he cost me. He was good for me in so many ways. I don’t think I would be ok right now if I hadn’t had him. Noah gave me a home.

We both wrote quite a bit over the years about how we both believed that I would not have been capable of accepting anyone less abusive. I needed who and what Noah was.

If I had known how short our timeline was I may have made some different choices. If I had known what the timeline was then I made bad choices. I didn’t though. I was planning around 30 or 40 or 50 years together. I don’t think I made bad choices considering what I expected to have to carry. I would be ok with being a lot more burnt out in trade for giving Noah a better last year of his life. 2024 sucked. There were high points but mostly it was a brutal year from start to close.

I would have made different choices if I knew that was the last time I would have with Noah. I miss him so much that I feel like I will explode with pain. It’s been five months and I wouldn’t say I feel better. I am having more positive emotions. The lows are still pretty terrible and they are happening most days.

This is part of what I am scared to share with a new partner. I cry a lot. I always have, that’s been true for 40 years. I have always had a lot of reason to cry. This feels like it wants to swamp me the way Uncle Bob’s death did but I don’t have the structure in my life to support that much going off the rails. So I am not. I’m holding my shit together. I sneak off and I cry for some time almost every day. Some days are too busy and by the end of it I am jittery like I’ve just downed a six pack of Jolt. I cry to let the stress out of my body because it is better than almost every other way of coping.

I am having big feelings about the way I am crying with Gentleman. I have cried with him a number of times now. That’s not normal for me. Usually I hide. It is not safe to cry in front of people most of the time. I hate that I mostly could not let Noah touch me when I cried because I was really overwhelmed. It didn’t feel safe. There were too many times when I was hurting very badly and he hurt me more. He wanted to be my safe person. He would work at it really hard. Then something would happen and I would make him mad and he would hurt me again. He was always really upset that I couldn’t drop the flinch response. He didn’t want me to act like he hurt me.

I didn’t want him to flinch away from me either. Sometimes he did when I was angry and my tongue ran away with me.

He was the least bad bad guy I could find and we spent decades being deeply and overwhelmingly obsessed with each other. Sure, there were issues. It’s weird calling any of it abuse because so much of it was explicitly consented to. Even though he was allowed to treat me any way he saw fit he had to live with the consequences. Even if I said I would never leave and he could do anything he wanted to me that didn’t change the fact that I flinched really hard sometimes.

He was my white trash prince with all the violence and anger that indicates. He was also one of the kindest people I’ve ever known in my whole life. With every passing year his violence towards me was more calculated and surgical. He wanted to hurt me to shape me to be more pleasing to him. I was willing to follow anywhere he lead.

I don’t think I can have a relationship with a bad guy again. I’ve had a few encounters since I started dating. A few of these men have been deeply problematic. I’m not going to recount the wild stories right now. That’s not the point.

The point of this essay is I am having a very hard time accepting the way I am sinking into this relationship with Gentleman because he is so easy to be around. Instead of flinching I keep finding that instead I am softening. I usually start crying because I am trying to communicate about somewhere that I am worried about us developing a problem. Every time he hugs me and waits for me to be done and we move forward without there being a problem.

The fact that I want to trust him as much as I do makes me wary. That feels dangerous. He would like to be more helpful to me. He’s that flavour of man. I like doing homey care taker things for him and he’d like to do pieces of them for me. So far I am flinching away because it would bring about possible contact with the kids and it is too soon. I like arbitrary time lines. Why? Because they give me structure and purpose. Because the first 9 whole months of our relationship will overlap with the first year my kids have had to live without their father.

It feels respectful to wait.

It also feels compassionate to myself to allow someone to comfort me. Of course I only want to accept that from someone I’m having sex with. Duh. That’s my way. I have always bonded to people through sex. That’s been a big pattern. My kinky friends think I am demented because I consciously and deliberately went looking for vanilla sex. I was not looking for a pervert. I don’t need to have my boundaries pushed right now. I need the gap between my boundaries and my partner’s to be vast with me far in the lead. I need it.

I need to stop looking for bad guys.

I have stopped looking for bad guys. When a couple have wandered into my life I turned them around and pushed them right back out. Instead I am picking to double down on the people who make me feel safe. If I don’t feel safe I don’t come back. It’s really weird in my body.

I felt comfortable with Noah. I felt known. I felt accepted. I felt loved. I felt adored. I felt worshiped. Sometimes I felt safe; sometimes I didn’t. He never signed on to being my protector. It was explicit. We did the best we could by one another. In most ways I still feel absolutely convinced that he was better than I deserved.

I’m listening to a lot of songs that have been big parts of my personal soundtrack through this life. The Day Before You. The First Cut is the Deepest. I feel like my brain is trying to resort every part of my memory. There is now an end to the story arc with Noah. The songs that he sang to me with passion and fondness and tenderness cut like a knife. There’s a bunch of Irish songs that fucking wreck me. Shortie keeps asking me to play them. Noah had such a beautiful voice. He sang me to sleep or read me to sleep or talked me to sleep for two decades.

If I include the time we were engaged Noah and I lived together for just under 19 years. I lived with my cat Puff for longer than 19 years. There’s my kids; we’ll see how long they stay. My current cats have been in my house for 5.5 years. My mom’s longest stretch with me was 5 years; she also had a 3 year stretch. All the foster homes were crammed into the 10 years in the middle. I had a boyfriend I lived with for 3 years. I never made it longer than 2 years in Auntie’s house and my mom was there with me. The fostering without mom never lasted longer than a month.

I’m scared. I notice this all the time. I’m pretty terrified of being vulnerable. I am going to be. I’m exhausted all the dang time lately. I do need to start being more careful with my diet again but it’s not mostly that. Mostly I’m deeply burned out and depressed and I’m swimming through an ocean of grief. We are coping but I’m not at the top of my game. A lot more than usual is falling through the cracks. I can’t be more effective or efficient. I don’t have it to give. I’m seriously operating beyond capacity every day. I feel awful. I’m disabled and I’m doing my best to be two parents. I am getting mixed results shall I say.

I don’t feel like I have a choice. I’m aware of all the things I’m not getting done that other people manage. I feel like a loser pretty much every minute. I’m exhausted all the forking time. I feel like I don’t have a brain. I have started avoiding phone calls like they are electrical shocks.

I feel guilty for trying to construct a self that will move forward. I feel guilty because I feel like I am abandoning Noah. I’m not. I’m acting like the internet: I am routing around damage to keep going. I don’t get to stop. Maybe not ever. I am going to have to slow down a lot. I have less to give without Noah coping with all the awful parts of adulting. It’s funny because he thought I coped with the awful parts of adulting for him.

We’ve been doing a lot of talking in my house about the difference between codependence and conscious interdependence.

We’ve been doing a lot of talking in general. All of us are struggling without Noah around to talk at for hours a day. We have spent so much time together as a family and every single day is a reminder that our future looks nothing like our past. It’s really weird when I notice somewhere that I am not being difficult or blowing up in a way I commonly would because I’m not reacting to Noah. I’m not trying to head something off before it bugs him. I’m not trying to manage my emotional range for his benefit.

I didn’t expect that losing Noah means I get to soften. I don’t have to be defensive of the things he wants me to be defensive of. I can relax and not look to him to see how I’m allowed to feel. Our rhetoric was that he was watching me. I watched him too. A lot of the way he learned to control his affect and mannerism was because he was trying to not trigger me. I did the same kind of thing but it didn’t make me softer and kinder. It made me sad and wounded. I don’t want to feel like I am healing from Noah but in some ways I clearly am.

He is very much the best relationship of my life. There were still very hard parts. I’m not sure what my future looks like but it’s not going to look like my past. I won’t be going back to the day before Noah. I am not who I was. I like being Krissy Gibbs so much more than I ever liked being Krissy Archer. I am looking forward to when I will have been Krissy Gibbs longer. 6 years and 3 months to go. I’m so sad Noah won’t be with me.

I would not have accomplished 1/4 of what I did without him. He was always able to believe in me when I couldn’t believe in myself. Including believing that if he insisted hard enough I would somehow become monogamous in my spirit. There is no way to count the hundreds of hours we spent doing hypnosis and NLP actively trying to get me to only think of Noah.

This is how I know I am not a computer. I cannot be programmed. I cannot conform no matter how much I would like to. I am different. I would like to be able to comply and make people happen but I don’t have it to give. I’m feeling really bad about that lately. “Lately”. I have always felt bad about this. At this point I suspect that most of the disappointment for my failure to be shaped like cookie dough is only in my head. Other folks are fairly cheerful about taking me as they find me.

Other people do not look at me the way Noah did. They don’t look at me and see so much potential, if only I would stop doing _______________. For years I have struggled with how much I felt like I had to be the motor for all of us. I had to push people to get up and start chores and fucking leave the house sometimes. Noah was a cave troll. His children enjoy being such as well.

I feel like my motor has come to a stop. For a while I was hunting for sex and that gave me a huge boost of energy. Now I’m too weary to muster the energy to go end things with the last one I added. I am struggling with finding the unmitigated good from the sex with Gentleman because I am so anxious about fucking everything up. It’s pretty ridiculous of me, yet also predictable. He’s really happy to spend time with me. He takes all the opportunities he gets. He would like more. I don’t need to feel anxious. It’s silly. I’m being silly. I’m the one holding the brakes and I’m doing it for really good reasons. I’m doing it to create a safe container for my children to mourn in.

Noah was such a good father. It is going to be important for me to keep my mouth shut about the ways I’m processing Noah as a mixed figure in my life. They need Saint Noah and I need to let them have him that way. I also need to acknowledge for myself that he was a human. He was a human I loved with my whole soul. I would have stayed forever. I was comfortable with the ways we hurt each other. It was home. It was the safest home I have ever had. It was the home in which we both felt the most loved we ever felt in our lives. We were broken together and I’m not sorry.

Noah took in a feral stray and turned me into a pampered and well tended pet. He made me believe I don’t deserve to suffer the maximum amount every day of my life. That counts for a lot. Maybe someday I will even forgive myself for not being monogamous. I’m not. It’s not in my nature.

Maybe someday I will have a life in which I don’t feel like being this thing is the reason that I am irredeemably bad.

Maybe someday.

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.

A low key celebration

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

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

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

I am making sure that I am not the problem.

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

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

I will fail if I continue to try.

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

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

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

This is hard.

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There are things I want to document but privacy and security are different things in my life now.

I have:

  • cancelled Noah’s cell phone contract
  • updated the electricity company to my information
  • updated the oil company with my information
  • sent emails to several people in the council because good golly school registration is not going well
  • threw myself on the mercy of several different support organisations around town
  • emailed new accountant to talk through pieces of the hand off
  • got him off my credit card accounts (two of them)
  • exchanged emails with the financial advisors about getting everything consolidated as much as possible and all in my name
  • I made a big fun breakfast for wishing Grandpa goodbye
  • I checked the oil tank level
  • I snapped a couple of times because I am really hitting overwhelm with video games

I need to get the kids in school. What we are doing isn’t healthy or sustainable and I don’t have more to give. It is simply the reality of the situation I find myself in. I’ve been trying to contact people for 14 days now. I send messages regularly and then I either get no response or get fobbed off. It’s sounding like there may well be an inability to get placements due to over crowding. That’s going to be fucking festive.

I will deal with that when we have to.

The kids are safe and being played with and interacted with by a wide variety of humans. They aren’t being neglected, but I can’t teach right now. I can’t make them do things. I have to be entirely unconditional acceptance and I have this god damn trial coming.

It’s a lot to ask of my body.

I feel awful.

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It’s been 16 days and I am plowing through work as fast as I can. Folks are trying really hard to be helpful but I am not good at being helped. It took so many years for Noah to learn how to help me without setting me off into a rage. My friends are wonderful and I am grateful for their presence. Also: it is hard having people here. It is hard accepting help because people don’t do it how I would. It is hard accepting that I am going to be required to accept help for the rest of my life.

I’m feeling overwhelmed by waves of different flavours of grief. I am really struggling with how much I am only allowed tiny moments of feelings before I have to shove that shit in a box or people will start acting towards me in ways I don’t want.

When I am really upset it is hard that people rush to hug me. I want to fling people away from me. I go hard into the fight reflex and I am required to go still and limp and let other people feel better by hugging me even though it makes me feel sick. It took years for Noah to fully understand that when I am freaking out I want someone to sit near me but not to touch me. I want them out of reach. If it feels like they can reach out and touch me I am going to feel threatened and scared.

I hate that I have to perform sad in the right way. I hate that I have to accept “comfort” that makes me feel alienated and uncomfortable and kind of sick. There are times I want to hug when I am upset and I initiate at those times. It’s why I try so hard to ask people if they want to be hugged.

I am not accustomed to touching people outside my family anymore. It’s not natural at this point. It feels weird and uncomfortable. I still feel like I am wearing the Choke Chain and I am going to get in trouble if I even look at someone too long. It doesn’t matter that Noah told me that part of our relationship was over months ago. He said it and we stayed in our house together and didn’t change anything.

I miss you Noah, I’ll stay in the house with just you forever. Just come back. I was wrong when I thought I needed more than you. I need you. I just need you. My chest hurts so much I feel like I have been hit by a truck. I don’t know how to accept that he isn’t coming back.

I am having a really hard time with this whole “being strong” bullshit. I just want to go to bed for months. I don’t want to think for other people. I don’t want to help people feel like they are helping me. I don’t want to ask for help. I don’t want to be touched. I don’t want to be alone. I don’t want any of the things or options or people who are available. There is a reason I moved to the edge of nowhere to live with Noah far from anyone I knew.

I want Noah.

I hate being me so much. Noah made it bearable. I don’t know how to endure being me for lots more years without him. I don’t want to keep walking the shithole road that is my life. Yes, I have good friends. Yes, I love my children.

How many more rapists are going to come knocking at my door? I am so scared I feel like my head will explode from pain. I am not ok at all. I feel like I will never ever feel ok again. How could I be ok? Noah is gone.

I don’t feel like I have the special place in history that he had. He truly changed the course of a lot of lives. I feel pathetic, useless, and like a burden. It’s fucking humiliating filling in forms here for disability recognition. I’m not even trying to get treatment. I want the bitches to admit on paper that I am in intense pain and dramatic emotional stress every fucking day and that way I will have a UK medical record.

It is humbling having to list out all the ways Noah took care of me. I have no idea how I will survive. My life will contract and then contract again and then contract again. Whoever I had the potential to be will shrivel up like a raisin in the sun.

Noah, how could you ever fucking think I wished for your death? I didn’t want to ever live through a day without you in the world.

It’s almost like you knew that I would need a much younger tether because you knew you couldn’t outlive me. There are so many lines to be drawn between his actions in the past and this outcome. It’s like he knew how to trap me into living as long as physically possible. He stole my ability to commit suicide. I can’t ever leave these people on purpose; the cowards route is not open to me.

I am a coward though. And a weakling. And pathetic.

Noah, I am so sorry for the ways I took you for granted. I’m sorry I skipped any days of having sex. I have never before wanted to relive part of my life so I could do it better. I’ve always believed it was hard enough once. I would go back when it comes to you. If I could go back to March of 2006 I would do the whole thing differently. I’m not sure it would be better in the long run. I would have destroyed myself trying to give to you because I would not have paced myself. Maybe we wouldn’t have had kids. Maybe we wouldn’t have stayed married. I don’t know.

I just know that I miss you so much I feel like my soul is crushed under a glacier. Noah I miss you. I want you so much. You are the only one I want to have touch me. It makes other people feel better to hug me so I will accept it anyway. It doesn’t really matter. I don’t think I can feel better so maybe I shouldn’t try. I hurt so much. Time to sleep.

I want to be open.

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So here’s the thing: bad things are going to keep happening. 2024 was not a great year. I had surgery. Noah had surgery. I was sexually assaulted. Noah had a bursitis issue. My body has been well into melt-down/burn out for some time and my physical pain issues are ridiculously high.

When I felt this bad in California I had to keep working and driving. I saw a chiropractor, an acupuncturist, and a massage therapist nearly every single week in order to function. Now, I don’t function very well. I get the absolute basics done but that’s it and there is no way I would be safe to drive. I had a really intense conversation with myself when my California license was expiring. I had a few options. I could ask a friend to let me lie and change my address so I could get a new California license. Some folks have offered in the past. I could work harder to get a UK license, which would be the correct choice of course.

If I had a license I would feel compelled to use it. I would feel required to make other peoples lives better by using cars more. When I think of how much worse it often got in California because of all the driving? I thank my lucky fucking stars that I have reduced the stress on my life enough that I can control a flare this bad with yoga classes and careful pacing of exercise.

I haven’t seen any kind of physical support person since before my surgery and that was almost half a year ago. I am doing so much better physically than I used to do. I could be doing better if I had more support but that will always be true and I will not have the support so get on with it.

I can only do what I can do from this house. I don’t particularly want to move. The medical care in this city will be limited for the rest of my life. So I can’t drive. I can’t bear the strain.

I gave up having a license after 20 years of having a car meaning freedom and independence. I have lived in cars for a couple of years in non-contiguous spread out periods, never longer than 7 months at a stretch. In a real way giving up my license is giving up my normal Plan B for where I can go in an emergency.

I gave up on getting a license here after not trying very hard to start with.

That means my life will be necessarily small as I won’t ask someone else to do all the travel. That closes a lot of doors all by itself. I want to form relationships with people who live within approximately 5 miles of my house. That’s a significant limit.

I want to be open to the universe, to adventure, to opportunities but it feels like I am being closed down in ever increasing steps and it is weighing heavily on me. In a way the issue of increasing disability dovetailing with a reduction in financial status is convenient. I no longer have to consider how to manage all that disposable income. It’s simple: I don’t have it. I think I did well with it when I had it (paid off debts, built long-lasting wealth) and I think it will be ok to get off that train.

I don’t have to keep working like my life depends on it. Is that fair to embrace when everyone else does have to work in unhealthy ways to survive? There is no fair. There is no deserve. Life is unfair in every fucking way. Me working or Noah working to earn money so that we can justify the capitalist machine grinding people to dust is kinda weird. We can survive without giving our life to companies that make us miserable.

Why in the fuck should we try hard to stay in that? We do need to find ways to be part of community here, but why does it have to involve enriching someone else with our time? Because eat the rich. If we are honest about our life then we sure look like targets. Meh. When have I not been a target?

I want to be open to what comes in life. I don’t want to go forward with a specific size and shape and shopping list of what it needs to look like. I have so many limits. Creating more arbitrarily seems like a recipe for failing at life.

Keep resting

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It’s weird having a 16 year old. In many ways it feels like I should have this person basically cooked and ready to be an adult. Yet sometimes it is glaringly obvious that he still *needs* me. I’ve been antsy during this surgery recovery. I really *want* to get up and work/exercise more. I am struggling with the bullet train inner monologue of “If you sit around all the time you don’t deserve sympathy/help for your health problems. You aren’t looking after yourself so you deserve every bad thing that happens.”

He’s been talking a lot about how scared he was when he watched me have massive life threatening bleeds after surgeries. He’s kinda fucked up about it.

I am currently in the period of time where a normal person *should* return to exercising.

I am still experiencing pain. I am now in the window of time where I normally start to push myself.

Then either my skin opens or a blood vessel bursts. It’s part of a genetic condition. It’s predictable. Especially since it’s happened *in my body* several times. It’s not paranoia. It’s awareness of risk.

This is where “invisible disability” stuff is hard. It’s hard to predict and make general statements about. It’s hard to exist in a way that allows people to understand when you do and don’t need help that is friendly and kind and gentle enough that they don’t get mad at you.

Social anxiety at 11.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is a void in my day.

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I’ve been talking to TB all day every day for four months now. It’s been really amazing. I have enjoyed climbing into his brain so much. Now I understand that doing so is going to block him from finding the future he wants and I have to stop. That’s hard. I feel like I am punishing myself.

I don’t say good morning and good night every day to anyone I don’t live with. That’s a lot of pressure for me. I’m a forgetful person. I have a lot of friends. I haven’t had a “we talk every day” friend since the Bonus Mama. I think I lost her in 2017? I feel absolutely allergic to the idea of having a friend I talk to that much ever again. I don’t trust the dynamic at all. If I talk to someone everyday for a couple of years then it is agonisingly painful when I am rejected because they don’t want to anymore or they found someone they want to talk to more. I don’t handle that detransition very well so I need to ensure that I don’t start that expectation within myself.

I have more abandonment issues than there are grains of sand in the Mojave. I maintain long-term friendships by making sure I never ask for or expect too much. I have to keep my needs to myself. I can share wants with friends easily, needs are harder. I have to be truly desperate before I will ask for help with a need. I would far rather do without or hurt myself doing it alone.

It’s why Noah works so hard at under promising and over delivering. He makes sure his actual promises to me are very conservative and easy to follow. He’s kind like that. He has learned how to be kind to me in this way.

I rarely worry about being too much for Noah. Today I was standing about 100m away from him; I was waiting for him and the kiddos to come in my vague direction. He ran over to me so that I didn’t have to stand alone. There was no reason to run. The kids were playing and having fun. He just wanted to. He didn’t want to be away from me for a second longer than he had to. He’s set the bar so high that other people can’t match it and maybe that’s ok. It sure makes the prospect of poly kind of weird. Someone has to treat me at least as well as Noah does or I am *choosing* to be less well treated every moment I spend with them.

I still believe with my entire soul that there was the potential for a life changing relationship with TB, it’s just not what he wants for his life. That’s ok. I really understand choosing hypothetical children over certain not quite enough. It’s a little funny because I don’t get told I’m the one who is not enough very often. It is fitting at its core though because I never pursued TB in the first place because I assumed I wouldn’t be good enough. Also, he’s nothing like Noah and I need Noah like I need oxygen and water.

TB fills needs I normally don’t even see in myself because they are so buried. I will go back to burying them because they are not things I can fill in my life with my current set up. It won’t kill me. These aren’t food and water and shelter kinds of needs. These are emotional needs around stability and being loved without being hurt. Noah is absolutely amazing and he loves me madly and deeply, but there’s a lot of hurt. I’m not complaining I am acknowledging.

I almost got to find out what it is like to be loved and cherished by a partner without having to endure pain to deserve it. I came really close but this is neither horseshoes nor hand grenades. It was weird seeing the possibility of finding out what that is like. It seemed alienating and impossible and improbable. Turns out I was right. That is not for me in this life.

It is breaking my heart. I wish I had never considered the possibility.

The fucking worst part is I had a hideous thought that makes me feel sick. “Since I am not a suitable partner on my own, maybe I should abort an accidental pregnancy.” I have never tied anyone to me through negligence and I will not start at this stage of my life. Elsenet I have recently done a copious amount of writing about how absolutely not ok I am with the possibility of aborting a child. Especially a fourth child. Especially an unwanted fourth child. I am the fourth unwanted child and I should have been aborted. I will be very careful and not get pregnant. I’m good at being slutty without accidental pregnancies. I feel bad inside myself about myself that I would have such a thought. I would never force someone to be with me. He’s made it clear that I am not enough. That would be true with an oops child in the picture. God that would be so unfair. This particular bit of calculus is why I’m going to have one sex filled trip with him and then not see him again. Apparently there is a hyperfertility uptick during perimenopause. My chance of getting pregnant is higher than it used to be.

Naw. Not playing with that fire a bunch over the next few years. That would be looking for pain.

Why one sex filled trip since this is not going to turn into what I wanted?

I feel like I will think about this and decide over and over and over for a long time. All the way till January. 18 weeks and 2 days. As long as we courted. As long I poured energy to trying to figure out if we could be good for each other as more than friends. That’s a good thing. That gives me time to get over feeling butthurt and go back to being excited.

I get to bang someone I have wanted to bang for 25 fucking years. That’s awesome. I’m looking forward to it. I think it is still going to be tender and sweet and loving. He is my very dear friend and we have both nursed a simmering crush all this time. Being incompatible isn’t something that either of us have done to the other. We are still good people having a good friendship with deep admiration and respect on both sides. It just so happens that I also like having sex with friends. At least I used to a long time ago in another life. I’m not so big on it here in Scotland. I am freaked out by the idea and I can’t consider it.

I feel scared about the amount of fall out that is going to be the result of this failed courtship. I would still like to do some fun travel things with him as just a friend. Maybe I am hoping that the sex is unimpressive so I can get over wanting him. That is the result after sex with quite a lot of people. Most people are not that skilled at sex and sometimes I am not up for the amount of work involved with ensuring I have good sex with someone who isn’t all that good at sex. I can do it. I can push just about anyone through having sex with me in a way that will get me off acceptably; I am both easy to get off and very skilled at directing sex.

I have very strong feelings at this point about the trip. I am not ok with “let’s see what happens”. I am going to direct this very much. I am going to go in knowing what I am trying to get out of each separate encounter. I feel bad, but I’m basically setting up how I can ensure a just and equitable transaction of emotional and physical energy. I’m not going to give more than I get. Oh fuck that.

Nope. That ship sailed away on de Nile and it ain’t ever coming back. I can’t get back on that river again. I will not put pennies in a piggy bank I will never be able to withdraw from. I’m a selfish cunt and I am not running at a surplus in my life. I now need to be a lot more fucking honest with myself about the cost I pay compared to what I am getting back. Is it enough? What do I need to do to make sure that I’m not bleeding out? I can’t have any fucking holes in my bucket and pouring energy into someone who is that actively encouraging me to invest, while planning to walk away suddenly at any point, would put a giant hole into my bucket.

The amount of hurt I feel today is 1/1,000 of what I would feel in two years. I might have started to trust that I was going to be kept come what may. I would never try to keep TB from finding a different primary if keeping me as a comet/distant secondary was a priority. It isn’t a priority for him. I can’t invest more emotionally in someone who will drop me like a hot potato for monogamy. That’s acting like it’s ok to treat me like a resource to use until something better pops up. I will not let my friend treat me so shabbily because then he would have to carry the shame for doing so.

I think at some point along the way this sounded more ok to me? I think there have been too many statements about “for the rest of your/my life”. I can no longer put any trust in the words that are being said. They are not at all reflective of reality. They are things you sorta hope might come true but it’s not a serious priority or demand upon any future partners.

Maybe if I didn’t have that Mojave Desert sand depth of abandonment issues. I’m not securely attached enough in my own self to withstand the level of pain I would feel at being discarded later. That would totally fuck up my ability to parent/teach well. I can’t set my life up for that crashing pain to come down on my kids. That’s fucked up and unfair. I can’t compartmentalise well enough for them to be totally unaffected by my mental state. I have to take steps to increase stability, not make choices that make instability more likely.

“You can depend on me. I will always be there for you.”

Those two sentences really should get me running in the opposite direction as fast as I can run. Usually when someone says that I stop hearing from them soon after and then I never speak to them again. It’s a fucking death curse for my relationships. No, I can’t depend on people. No one will always be there for me. Not even Noah. Not because Noah is shitty or because he doesn’t try hard; life is fucking brutal, dude.

I had very large problems before I ever met Noah. They haven’t all completely gone away despite all the work that we’ve done. Some of these are chronic and permanent. I don’t have a choice. I am always going to fucking struggle. I do stuff for myself long past the point when someone else would complacently accept help. I will fucking cry the whole time I hold a fork but I will not allow myself to be fed. I will eat the food like a fucking dog before I will allow someone to feed me when my hands aren’t working.

I have a lot of big feelings about the increasing disability I am experiencing. I wonder if part of my freak out about TB is I’m well aware I’m going to have slim pickings for folks who want to date me as I get older and more disabled and a lot less rich. Given the reading requirement involved in dating me I might be deciding that I am theoretically poly but I never get around to it. I am fucking difficult. Lowering the admission bar would not improve the success rate, it would make it worse.

95% chance of flaming out before 6 months. I’ve got statistics based on a significant enough sample size that I can use percentages. Yup.

I am difficult and demanding and exacting and way happier being alone over putting up with bullshit. I also have a husband who acts like I hung the fucking moon. I am not in any way deficient in sexual attention.

I spent four months helping a friend learn how to have a variety of adult relationship conversations that he otherwise would have had difficulty with down the line. I can’t call it mentoring because I sure as shit did it with the plan to fuck him. I made sure this vanilla monogamous person was going to be making a well informed decision with regard to the risk involved in being in a relationship with me. There are lot of implications to joining my life. It exists in a lot of layers and either you are in it or you are someone I talk to sometimes.

I’m not being mean. I have to keep walking. No matter what I feel or what happens to me I have to keep walking until I can’t walk anymore and then I will fucking crawl. I will fucking horrify the NHS because I’m not going to ask for help until it’s pretty ridiculous. They will scold me for not calling them in sooner to help. After all I am entitled.

I don’t really believe I am entitled to much in this life. I have acquired much. I am doing what I can to make this house into a place that will survive for a generation after me before needing more significant repair work. Sure, someone will probably paint over my art. I know. Deep sigh. My kids will have a secure home from which to figure out their lives. I’m not promising to make them rich enough to not need jobs but they will be able to survive without assistance from the government and without needing a job like Noah’s. I am planning as hard as I can for a future where we don’t need that kind of money anymore to be ok. I have been paying Future Us hand over fist in a variety of ways that will outlast me.

I think our days of regular, unplanned, expensive travel are over. I don’t think we can come to the weddings. If Noah hadn’t lost the last big tech job, sure we could have done all of them without a problem. We would have been on track even with the bulge of unexpected financial loss. Now he hasn’t worked in six months and it looks like his next job will be pretty much exactly how much we need to live on and we will no longer be contributing towards retirement. Awesome. That’s with a lot of cutting out expenses in terms of “what we need to live on”. I’ll need to cut expenses by 50%. I’m going to be fixing less on the house and at a much slower rate. Good thing I already got most of the biggest ones done.

Was I so intrigued by TB because I am an asshole and I wanted help fixing my house? It’s not a 0% chance. That takes the air out of my balloon in terms of being indignant about him not wanting me. Am I mad about the benefits I won’t get? Don’t get all self righteous here, Krissy. Sure he wants to keep getting the emotional support benefits without the commitment. Are my motives actually only pure and altruistic or some bullshit like that?

Probably not. I’m a selfish cunt. Yo, brutal honesty dictates I say that I was frankly concerned about the mismatch in physical size for intimate matters. That was going to be a difficult thing for me. Combining that mismatch with the other disparities in sexual preferences I wouldn’t be getting so much out of the sex that it would fill up my end of need for emotional support.

I have a high opinion of the value of the support I offer as a partner. Demanding high return support in exchange has historically resulted in my life steadily improving and me having increasingly healthy and positive relationships.

I feel weird about that kind of a statement right now. It feels like a pie crust promise. It feels like a big claim without evidence. I don’t jump into bed with everyone I want to be friends with because it’s the primary way I know to get people to like me. It’s been more than 8 years since I’ve had sex with a friend. Holy moly it is the longest stretch of monogamy in my life. I think twice as long as previous stints? Why do I want it to end so much?

I have a narrow window. For one week I will have a travel boyfriend that I will have a lot of fun with. I have negotiated it painstakingly with my husband so that I can be as respectful as possible of his feelings through this whole experience. I think Noah will fall in love again some day. I think he will have friends he wants to have sex with. I have some hope about my ability to send him off for adventures with a big smile on my face. It will be a lot easier to do when I am not feeling constant anxiety about when TB will be dumping me. Noah and I will keep negotiating and talking. We will make friends slowly and not go out hunting for strangers/near-strangers here.

I have a husband who will give the full measure of devotion in service to my safety, health, and longevity. I don’t get to feel actual bitterness about not being so sparkly and shiny that I get to have another serious partner who is nearly so devoted. That’s a big fucking ego you have there, Krissy. Really think a lot of yourself, do you?

I guess I do. I think I need to be honest with myself and with anyone who ever tries to date me that I don’t accept inconsistency. Do not make pie crust promises while asking me to trust you. That’s not something I can work with. Know your own mind. Think about your shit. Figure out what you want. If it isn’t me then don’t waste my fucking time. I have a short life. Trying to prevent me from spending my time in ways that will build towards my long-term future is absofuckinglutely disrespectful. As I will try hard not to waste your time. It’s about respect.

I’m disabled. What I can get done in a day is distinctly finite. I have bursts of time where I overextend on a project and get an unhealthy amount done. I always pay in big and small ways.

What I do with my time is a big McFlippin Deal. Time is my most scarce resource in this life. I will be spending the vast majority of my time with my family. If a person does not particularly have any desire to integrate with that unit then they need to be a person I talk to sometimes.

I don’t have enough self to give to be doling out big chunks to a bunch of off-stage people who are not actually part of my life. It’s just math. It’s pragmatism. It’s reality. I need to treat people as not good matches for me when they are happy to use a lot of my time with no regard to the effect that has on my ability to live the life I want to lead. If someone does not notice or care about the holistic reality of my life then I need to keep them in a small box away from my life where I limit how far down the rabbit hole I go.

I need to believe that I deserve a good match. There is a void in my day right now because I want to be poking TB. I don’t want to though. I want to be poking in the direction of a fantasy I had, which isn’t at all the same thing as poking him. I want to be poking at a partner who is doing work to making themself better actively like I am to remind one another that there is fun in trade for the hard and the boring. “Hey asshole, poke your husband.”

I do. I poke and prod and talk to him all day long. I have a lot of RAM in my brain. Once he gets a job I won’t be able to take up all his time like I have been doing. Holy cheese I’m looking forward to retirement. I could keep more people busy. God I am a bottomless pit of need. I don’t want to do it for someone where I don’t get the long run benefit of nipping at their heels to get them to run just a little faster. It’s a lot of fucking energy.

The trade value for my time as a girlfriend experience is quite high. It’s not your soul but it’s pretty close.That is probably a highly inappropriate amount of hubris. Oh well. The down side is less time spent with people who don’t want to put much energy into me. That doesn’t sound like a down side when I say it like that. It kind of sounds like healthy self regard.

I don’t have a lot of unrequited loves left to come knocking. I think the ties of the past are finally fraying. I think that going forward it’s going to be a very weird process. Good thing I am primarily interested in making friends. That is a worthy endeavour and I strive to not have a lot of standards and demands for friends. Friends are free to be whatever kinds of fuck offs they want to be. It doesn’t impact my life too badly because of boundaries. I keep people in small boxes.

My standards for Noah are shockingly high at this point in a lot of ways. Very low in other ways. I don’t ever get to expect my birthday to be a good day for me. The most peaceful birthdays I spend alone. I don’t have expectations of anyone that way. I don’t have to take care of anyone. I don’t have to carefully monitor my tone to ensure that I am being respectful even when I feel shitty. My birthday is not a day that is good for me. TB has long since proposed me spending my birthdays with him.

He offered to be the one who made sure my birthdays are special while planning to dump me if someone better comes along.

I’m 10 days out from my birthday. I am glad I am downgrading my expectations in my mind from “boyfriend” to “friend with benefits”. That means I can stringently avoid getting myself into a situation where yet another person makes my birthdays feel full of memories of not being wanted or good enough. Fuck. That really fucking hurts. That’s not a small thing to offer. I refused it instantly. No. I couldn’t do that to Noah or the kids. They would take that very personally. I can go away with Aunt Jenny and everyone wishes me well with a smile.

If I am going to get back to interviews then I need to get my sleep schedule under better control. Good night.

Problematic people

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

Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I feel that in my bones.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why did I even leave the fucking house.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I never have to worry again about looking for that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where to go for future success?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Being challenged is good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Triage, triage, triage.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’re All Mad Here

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The monsters under the bed

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

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

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

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

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

You will never, ever forget that pain.

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

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

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

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

Make no mistake, that monster wants you dead.

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

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

It’s everything.

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

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

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

I do like to do things in contrary fashion.

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In the fall I painted spring. Now that it is spring I am painting autumn. I like to buck trends and all that. I have started on the upstairs hall. The upstairs will be sunset and the downstairs will be early dawn–I want to keep a lot of the soft pink that is currently downstairs.

Recently I was doing a video chat with an old friend and he said, “Why do you have a besom on your wall?” Because I am a witch, naturally. I think of my art as being part of how I try to change the world. It is how I try to change people’s perceptions and emotions. I am drawn to witchcraft because I believe that people have power and they should use it. Power manifests in different people in various ways and you need to figure out what your way is. I am blessed with having many ways that I influence people and I take that seriously.

For now: it’s in a hallway. I am going to do this mural with more limits for the sake of my body. I’m trying to respect the fact that I’m growing old. I got in two hours to start with so far. This one is going to take months because I am getting ollllld. I can’t upload pictures without wordpress being bitchy so I guess I won’t post the pictures here.

Drifting

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If I didn’t feel so afraid I would have a lot to document. Life is being quite eventful but I feel like talking about it will cause problems that greatly outweigh how stressful it is. This is the least therapized my life has been… I don’t know, ever? I’ve been pulling back from my US friends. Not because I love them less but because I am utterly exhausted and weary and pursuing them takes enormous energy. I’m not able to put much into creating new friendships here in Scotland. I’m trying, but it feels like swimming uphill through a river of molasses.

My body feels so desperately tired. I’m sleeping a ton–that’s not like me. I’m sleeping 8, 9, 10 hours a night. Historically it is difficult for me to get more than 7 hours of sleep. After these longer stretches I am so weary getting up from a chair feels like a struggle. Is this a deeper manifestation of depression than I am used to? Is this the result of still healing from surgery? Is this trying to actually unwind from the years of anxiety in California/traveling? I don’t know but I feel existentially exhausted. I feel empty.

I don’t know how to fill my bucket. I want to feel more whole. I want to feel like I am thriving instead of treading water to survive.

It’s hard that I am not cleared to go work with plants yet. It’s hard that I feel like I’m not allowed to do much. I’m still in the “spending money to get established” stage (we don’t have enough bed-sized blankets… we have a ton of baby blankets though…). We found some teeny bugs in the food storage area, so protective containers must be acquired or we risk food spoilage. Not stuff we can just not buy. I mean… we could burn more oil keeping the house hotter. That’s penny wise and pound foolish.

There’s a lot I wish I could document for my own sake. But pieces of it aren’t my story to tell and I am deeply afraid of the consequences for other parts.

So I don’t talk much about how I’m feeling with my voice and I write about it even less with my hands.

Is this bone deep discomfort how other people feel? Finding a therapist isn’t really an option for a variety of reasons. Living here may mean that I am permanently out of therapy for a variety of reasons. Well, unless I pursue a degree and it becomes a mandatory part of my job. Wouldn’t that be a funny reason to become a therapist? It’s a way to make sure I have to be in therapy too?

I think a lot about the massive waiting lists in this country for mental health support. I think about what it meant when I was a kid that I had help even though some of it wasn’t the best. It was a lot better than nothing.

Comparing one’s life to other people’s lives is such a complicated and tricky thing. Sure, other people may have X, Y, and Z that you don’t have… but they also have A, B, and C that you don’t have and would you really prefer that balance? This isn’t a fence with one side or the other. It’s a grid with many many many different squares and balances and problems.

I like that often every ends up in my room a bit before bed time to curl up together and read. MC has decided to read Tamora Pierce books. They are a bit above her reading level, but if she sits close to me and asks for occasional help with words she is making her way through. She absolutely loves them. She is stunned that even in a magical temple school there is still bullying. Yeah honey… people jockeying for dominance is absolutely universal. That’s just life.

Today we have our first health visitor experience to check on YC’s growth. I have two doctor appointments next week: a pap smear and a trip to my GP to go over genetic testing results and talk about next steps for EDS assessment. I get the impression that beyond the genetic testing (that’s super fucking expensive to run) Scotland wants to rerun all assessments because they are not interested in foreign medical records. That’s going to be interesting. At least I have the results of 35 years of forcing my way through the US system like a determined train to use as a guide.

My hands hurt really badly. I am trying various handicrafts because I’m bored as fuck. Arthritis is going to be my forever nightmare.

I feel like a fucking whiner. I am definitely in the “but you don’t look sick” camp but my body is degrading really fast. It’s hard feeling like if I don’t talk about how poorly I’m doing I just look like a lazy lump but if I do talk about it I’m a whiner. I’m not lazy; I’m in pain.

I’ve gained weight again. Ha. Good thing I bought my trousers so large.

It’s time for a day.

Anxiety management

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Yesterday I was told that I have three months ahead of me where I am on restriction for arm exercises. That means no yard work until May or June. That means when the bookshelves finally get built I shouldn’t put books on them. That means I really shouldn’t be doing so many house chores.

It’s time to hire a house cleaner and I feel really upset about it. I hit that level of disabled and I can’t expect my family to carry my weight of chores on top of their own for so long. Not in a house this size.

I did a big batch of cooking a week ago and my hand is still swollen. I have to buy and get into the habit of using a food processor. My arthritis is that bad.

I am not feeling good about my body, my self worth, or my general competence. I feel pathetic. I feel like I am seeing my usefulness as a tool slip away.

I was cleared for riding a bike and for going out and doing walks. The doctor was quite firm that I must not pick up my nearly-two year old at all and pushing a pram is… not really wise. I can’t swim but I could supervise my older children swimming.

But I can pull her in the bike trailer and attaching the trailer to the bike is dead simple and no real strain. So that’s something.

I feel absolutely horrid about myself. All of the things that make me like myself are falling away and I am left with the bits I despise.

And that means I want to get into stupid arguments on the internet over paper plates. I didn’t. I walked away. I know it is a stupid control issue. I am anxious as fuck. I want to be stupidly defensive of my choices and there is really no point. It doesn’t matter if this stranger agrees with me or not. I did what I did and… there is no value to arguing. I am not going to live how they live and I don’t need to argue about it.

I feel stupid and useless and I want to not feel so bad about myself. I won’t get that from stupid arguments about consumer choices.

I’m not sure I am going to feel better about myself from anything this morning.

Reevaluate everything

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I don’t really know what I’m doing as a parent. I read things, lots of things. There are so many opposing opinions on literally everything. So I try shit out and then I talk to my kids about how it is going. In the long run their opinion of my parenting is the only metric I care about.

I asked them last night if they think getting paid for chores is motivating them or taking away motivation. EC eloquently said, “Well, on weeks when I don’t need any money I don’t see any reason to do chores.” So that’s not super helpful. I asked if they think paying for their own stuff is helping them feel like they are more responsible with how they use up products. They said that part is working well.

We also renegotiated their pay for babysitting because that’s different from sweeping and tidying. They did some practice on how to state how they have increased their responsibility (closer to babysitting rather than just being a good playmate who distracts YC while I have to do all the ‘work’ stuff) but they still aren’t ready to be fully independent about it. We talked about what adults/older teens get paid and what sorts of qualifications those people have that my kids lack. I did this same sort of process with their former babysitter. How do you negotiate for pay increases, how do you talk about your increasing level of responsibility?

It was interesting listening to how they have no real interest in renegotiating what they get paid for chores because that has an opposite effect on their motivation to do the work, but babysitting is different. If I were to guess about why these things are different (I don’t know for a fact I can only use conjecture) chores are things they are doing in preparation for being an adult and it’s part of being a citizen of the household. Babysitting is different from just playing with their sister and being part of a family. It’s exhausting in a different way and they are doing this training partially so that when they get older they know how to advertise their services to other people. Neither of them anticipate a career in janitorial services, those are skills they are learning for themselves.

That’s my guess. But I could be wrong.

So we are going back to a flat allowance for most chores with the exception of babysitting. The first five hours/week of babysitting is payment for their cats since they don’t want me to feel like I own the cats. They get paid over that threshold. So technically their pay can still be variable, but frankly most weeks I doubt they will do more babysitting time than the basic hours.

It means that each big kid will do a couple of hours on a weekend day with their sister and then an hour most week days. I will get to rest more.

I’ve tried creating this with adults for pay. I signed back up with Care.com and the like here in Scotland. I have ads. I’m looking for support! I’ve sent messages! No bites. I’m not sure what it is about how I advertise that makes people have so little interest in working with us. Ah well.

I might get to actually date my husband again one of these years. Woo.

MC’s “babysitting” is still at the level where I have to be available to provide food and nappy changing services but she’s getting really good at playing with YC for a while if I have chores I want to do. I think EC is at the point where Noah and I could disappear down to the apartment for a few hours. I still wouldn’t feel comfortable leaving them alone in the house as a regular thing.

EC did take care of things when my wound popped open. Getting a taxi for 5 is… hit or miss. Sometimes they send an adequate vehicle and sometimes we have to send back a smaller car and wait for a bigger one. So she stayed here for two hours with YC while I got stitched up. I am grateful that we now have that level of assistance, but I don’t really think EC feels ready to take on that level of babysitting on a regular basis.

Babysitting usually means Noah and I get to be in our bedrooms with the door shut for a little while. So we have half an ear out for stuff we need to mediate, but we get to do something without toddler “help” for an hour or so. It’s a work in progress.

We are all just works in progress.

I do these kinds of negotiations with my kids partially to model for them that relationships are not static. You try something and if it isn’t working you can change it. Just because you agree to try something that doesn’t mean you are stuck doing it forever. You are allowed to grow and change. You really should change over time. And it’s hard to figure out what should change when things aren’t working; sometimes you need to throw stuff at the wall and see what sticks.

We are talking a lot about what we want from home schooling going forward. I’m doing more research because that’s my place of comfort. I’m looking into what the exams are like in secondary school. When do they happen, what do they mean? How do we prepare for them in a home schooling environment?

Well, me screaming about them not working hard enough… that needs to not be part of it. MC is just to the age where I started sitting on EC really hard to force her to “catch up” in a few subjects. Turns out I didn’t make her catch up to grade level I made her get way above grade level but I did it at the cost of both of us being miserable for a long time. I need to learn from that mistake.

Why is it that people who beat the “handwriting is important” drum think they are being the voice of dissent and advocating for The Most Important Life Skill? You aren’t the voice of dissent. You are literally parroting The Man and being as fucking basic as possible.

But the exams here all handwritten. So my kids need to practice for that. I get it. Just, ugh. Don’t act like handwriting is the measure of the anything other than the ability to jump through an arbitrary stupid hoop. It is not the measure of intelligence or knowledge or wisdom.

My mother’s handwriting is exquisite. That hasn’t helped the woman get a good job, ever. My handwriting is shit and the only thing it ever cost me was a masters degree. I still got the pay raise associated with the masters degree in my career of choice. I still have never had difficulty applying for any work I’ve ever wanted to do. I didn’t want the career that a masters would enable. I wanted the knowledge so I could be better at the career I was in without having it at all.

Just… ugh. Why in the fuck do handwriting advocates think they are so… revolutionary? “I’m going to be the voice of dissent that happens to agree with every bureaucrat in existence.”

Like, really? Voice of dissent here? Come on now.

Oh… you were just trying to say that if there are disability related reasons that handwriting is a problem I should not seek out accommodations because who gives a fuck about those disabled kids. Right. How very ableist of you. One of the fucking diagnostic tools for EDS is difficulty/pain in holding a pencil. Our god damn joints don’t stay in place to hold the pencil the way it works for other bodies and we can end up with permanent fucking pain.

That’s not the “voice of dissent”. People have been telling folks with disabilities to suck it up since forever. But sure. Keep feeling superior over there. What was that you said? You don’t have a job and you need to go back for extensive training to get another one because your qualifications lapsed? I guess all that fucking handwriting you did wasn’t enough to save your ass?

Sure. Keep telling me about how handwriting is The Way, The Truth, and The Light.

I’m clearly frustrated with someone. But yes, I know my kids have to work on handwriting. Even if it wrecks ECs hands she has to do it anyway.

THE FUCKING VOICE OF DISSENT HAS SPOKEN.

“It is no sign of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.” – Krishnamurti

Sigh.

If you look up recommended accommodations for children with EDS, “eliminate handwriting grade and substitute grades for content and effort” is on the list.

Sigh.

We’ll figure it out. I’m just frustrated. People are challenging.

Complications

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I had the stitches out yesterday from the surgery I had on the 31st. Then the wound popped open and I had to go see another doctor to have the giant gaping wound restitched. Apparently that’s called suture dehiscence and it’s common for folks with EDS. I’ve been doing research this morning. Apparently EDS means I should have had my sutures left in for twice the normal healing time. I am going to figure out how to get a bunch of research on EDS to my medical team. I mentioned on the operating table that I have it and the surgeon said it wouldn’t matter.

My kids were understandably pretty freaked out. MC told me she had an unhappy tummy when she thinks about the wound.

I said that being afraid of the wound is like being afraid of riding your bike. I am going to die someday–that’s the end result of being alive. You are going to fall off your bike sometimes and the only thing you get if you are afraid of it is that you can’t enjoy the time you are on the seat. I am going to die some day and my body has a lot of complications that I’m trying to manage so that I can stay alive as long as possible. My body has more complications than average and that means I have to do a lot of research and I have to advocate for myself because keeping me alive isn’t the same process as it is for other people. If we waste a lot of time being afraid of my eventual death we won’t get to enjoy the time I am alive.

This research is extra important because EC has the same condition and the more I find out about myself the more I can save her from suffering through similar issues. She can advocate for herself earlier and harder.

Now I need to figure out how to get this research to my medical team. It’s entirely from highly reputable/peer researched locations. I’m not researching on blogs (Even though blogs are often pretty fucking accurate) so I hope this is taken seriously.

I need to assume this will take twice as long to heal as “normal”. I need to have the stitches stay in longer than expected and I need to say that to the doctors involved in my case. I need to be proactive because I am the only person who suffers from these fuck ups. My back hurts a lot again today. There was partially healed skin there that ripped open. It doesn’t hurt as much as it did the day of the surgery but it probably hurts as much as it did on day two or three post surgery.

I almost certainly tried to bounce back faster than I should have. I feel so much shame for “being lazy” when I don’t help and do chores around the house. But here I am with more complications post-surgery because I didn’t let my body have the time it needed. It’s like what happened after the septoplasty when I probably had three or four times as long of a recovery because I didn’t take the twice as long I should have taken.

Ugh.

I should probably sit in this chair for ten days or more this time. That’s hard for me. I must work to feel worthy. But if I don’t rest I will be less able to work in the long run. It’s complicated.