Tag Archives: mental health

Letter from the NHS

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I’m copying this shit because it’s so fucking epic.

I’m writing to you as (deleted), Consultant Psychiatrist, referred you to Psychological Services. As you are currently engaged in counseling with Connecting Carers and are due to continue this through RASASH, we are not able to offer you assessment or therapy within our service. I would agree that RASASH would be the most appropriate form of intervention at this time to address your current difficulties and circumstances. As you have previously engaged in extensive psychological therapy I would hope that once this acute period of distress has settled, and with input from RASASH, that you feel more able to implement the learning and coping skills from previous therapies.

Connecting Carers and RASASH offered me someone to sit in the room with me while I cry. They said they would give me tea and cake. They are community support workers, not therapists.

Well. I don’t think I will bother asking for mental health support in this country again. I am saving this letter. If I ever commit suicide I am using the back of this letter for my note.

You are on your own, kid

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I hope tomorrow is better.

The more I learn about mental health care in the UK

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The more I believe I will probably be on my own for figuring out my shit going forward. I am eligible for supportive counseling, which is not therapy. Before the trial it is unclear as to whether or not I can or should have any kind of therapy and in any case my notes have to be shared with the defense team. So uhhh, no I guess I don’t need therapy.

I’m in that rough spot where I would benefit from being able to talk about the ways my mental health is not going well. I can’t say more to Noah though because too much of it feels like I am threatening him. I need to just not talk about it at all. I’m feeling a lot of feelings about this. I don’t want to dump on my friends so most of what I am saying about my mental health is that it is not great. I don’t have anyone I feel comfortable talking to.

I don’t have a single person I’m willing to freely talk with about what I am thinking. I feel like every thought in my head is proof of why I deserve more punishment. Why I should allow my life to be smaller and smaller. Why I should shut up forever.

Between the fact that everything I say can be used against me in court and the fact that everything I say upsets the people I live with it feels like I should stop speaking entirely. I will be punished if I don’t.

It’s weird

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I like dropping bits from my brain like leaves on the stream of data that is the internet. It feels very alienating when I stop myself. I feel my personality, my sense of self constrict. If I am not sharing thoughts, did I have them? I need to be witnessed in a way that is awful and overwhelming and makes me feel empty. In it I see the way my children yell, “Look at me!”

Do we all want that so much it feels like a burning knife in our bellies?

I finally did something today. I cleaned the kitchen. It was pretty gross. Well, I cleaned most of the kitchen. As much as I could make myself do. I feel in myself this urge to go through and whip the house and garden into shape for the winter–it would take me 3-4 days of solid work if I felt whole enough to do it. Instead I think most of it won’t happen at all and I will stare at walls and wait to die instead.

Nothing expeditious will happen. I’ll just wait. Death is coming for us all. Every day we are always waiting for death. This is a morbid thing more than a suicidal thing. I am feeling morbidly obsessed with death. I feel like I can think about very little else and that’s really annoying.

I was listening to my “hope” playlist earlier trying to have some feeling in my body that isn’t negative and pessimistic and despairing. Fat fucking fail. I can’t.

I cuddled my baby and talked about how she is doing the best she can and no her mistakes do not mean that she is naughty. Sometimes she does do stuff that we aren’t very happy about. She isn’t trying to be mean. She isn’t trying to hurt anyone. She isn’t trying to destroy anything so no, she is not bad.

Why can’t I feel like that applies to me at all?

I’m freaking out about how much I want to see my mom and Auntie. I think I actually want to stop going back to California because I don’t want to feel like I could see them. I can’t. I have no idea how they would feel about seeing me. It’s been almost 14 years. It still hurts like a stab to the heart every single time.

Mama says I could leave Noah and move in with her if he is hurting me beyond what I can bear. I don’t think he is. Also: how in the fuck could I handle moving back to Santa Cruz? Drive past Auntie’s house every time I go to the Valley? Nah. Nah I can’t do that. I can’t. That’s a bridge too far. I really can’t.

Hell, I can’t go back to driving. Moving back to California is a non-starter.

Besides the fact that I don’t want away from Noah. That is the scariest thought. I am so much more afraid of losing Noah than I am of dying. I need Noah for what he gives me spiritually. Noah is the rock around which my life is built. I do not know what I would do without Noah. My life is built around serving Noah and that’s not something I feel motivated to change.

I would not be happier as a slutty single mom. I would probably turn into my mother and never have sex again because I don’t trust anyone. I would be terrified that I would expose my kids to a predator because I have famously shitty taste in people to trust. I like monstrous predators. Apparently. Or they like me. Or something.

I would not leave Noah. This is a hard phase. I’m not going to leave because he delivered on the “worse” he said he would give me during the vows. I knew it was coming. It was foretold and promised and everything. He’s hurting and not being gentle with it.

Noah tells a sad, pretty story about an orphan boy and his escaped, wounded rhinoceros. We trade back and forth who is the boy and who is the rhinoceros. I don’t expect him to always be gentle. I don’t know what I do expect. I don’t know what would be better. I have no idea what I would ask for. Right this exact minute I can’t imagine ever feeling happiness or joy again.

Right this minute I feel like I should cancel with Travel Boyfriend. There’s no way that I could deliver on the good time some other self who used to live inside me offered. That self is gone. She feels dead. She thought maybe it might be ok to really grow and change but no. I need to calcify and chip off edges. Right now it feels like she was the part of me who wanted to recover from being raped. You know what? Fuck the NHS. Medical malpractice my big toe. You are lazy and ineffective motherfuckers. I know it saves you fucking money. And it HELPS YOU CUT OFF THE EDGE OF THE BELL CURVE YOU MOTHERFUCKERS.

I feel sick and depleted and destroyed. My head hurts. My soul hurts. I hate doctors so much. This entire experience is so degrading.

How would I even be able to tell if I was so upset about Noah? How could I narrow down the sources of stress and distress? Do you know who supplies all of my support? Noah. Leaving Noah would be a form of self harm for me. Noah takes care of me through a great many times and types of incapacity. It’s not even just that he physically cares for me when I’m ill–he cares about my soul. He puts a lot of time and effort into trying to help me be ok. That’s one of the many things I’m really sad about.

Right now I’m not feeling better even though Noah is putting a lot of effort in. That feels like yet another betrayal. It feels like improperly displaying gratitude. That old chestnut.

I need to go to sleep.

I keep coming back to this deep unhappiness. I can’t perform good right.

Do I really deserve to be alive? Or am I far enough out on the bell curve that I really should have died already.

Harsh

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I’m not screaming and frantically wanting to hurt myself. I do feel harsh and angry and sick of being flexible. I feel like I cannot keep jumping through hoops to try and be good when there is no good that is good enough to not keep getting yelled at.

Parenting is a shitty gig in a lot of ways. Kids are feral creatures doing their best and you can’t regulate off of them. It’s not ok. There are predictable stages that are frustrating in their own special ways. It’s not that the kids are being extra hard. I just have so much less to give than usual. I feel depleted and diminished.

I’m really struggling with what it means to get help in this country. I am told I can’t get support from more than one person at a time… until suddenly I am told that if I wait to get help from different services one at a time I am told that I am declining help from one of the services and they won’t help me later if I turn down this offer. I’m deeply confused and overwhelmed. I feel like I’ve been threatened repeatedly by NHS doctors that if I am not properly compliant I will be barred from basic medical care from the NHS. I feel scared. I feel fucked over and abused.

Seeing more than one therapist is medical malpractice… until it isn’t and refusing the second person who is offering assistance means I am not compliant and I don’t deserve future help. I felt like I was going to get help from the ADHD prescribing lady until I talked to her boss and now I feel more hopeless, helpless, scared, and vulnerable than I did before.

I feel like I’m about to be barred from medical care because I can’t perform patient properly.

As we have just hemorrhaged money to be able to live in this country permanently, I’m feeling very scared that I will be unable to access the normal medical treatment that citizens get here because I don’t know how to be good enough. I feel deeply abused that this is getting so much worse because I was foolish enough to report a crime. I feel punished. I feel sick to my stomach every time I think about having to deal with the doctors here.

When I think of that insulting lecture about how people don’t get better because the glacial pace of the NHS is deeply painful and they don’t continue to come back for inadequate, inappropriate care. I can literally tell these people that I have paid for tests that reveal that genetically a drug won’t work for me and they tell me I have to take it anyway or I am being uncooperative and I am not interested in my own mental health.

I am fucking livid.

Mama was asking me if most of my feeling bad-ness is coming from Noah and the way he is melting down. No, he’s not helping overall at the moment but he’s not the reason I feel as bad as I do–certainly not on his own. I do feel really bad that he thinks I betrayed him but he’s entitled to evaluate my behaviour in any way he sees fit.

I mean, 2016. I will never be done being yelled at for my craven and disgusting behaviour. I can’t describe myself in mean enough words to convince Noah that I am sorry. I can’t debase myself enough to satisfy his feeling of being wounded. I don’t think he will ever forgive me.

I feel absolutely overwhelming like the next time I am raped I need to die. I cannot survive any more of this. I can’t. People are so fucking mean about me surviving. I can’t keep doing it. If I were a good person I wouldn’t be able to keep going through so much evil. The fact that I keep walking is part of why I deserve every punishment and insult. If I were a good person I would have been destroyed. I am a monster and I deserve every scrap of bad I receive in this life. The only thing I could do for the smallest ounce of redemption is to just fucking die already.

It doesn’t matter though. I have 11 years, 3 months and 19 days on my indenture. I am not allowed to die. I have to, in fact, work really really hard night and day to stay alive. I have to be careful about every fucking aspect of my life if I am not going to die in my 50’s. Between my 4 grandparents and 2 parents there were 2 suicides preventing folks from hitting their 50’s, and 2 folks who died because they wouldn’t take care of their bodies, and 2 motherfuckers who are too god damn mean to die–my grandfather made it to 86 and my mother is still alive.

My indenture runs out when I’m 54. I am going to have to work at making it that long. This is why I couldn’t have another child. Here is a fucking horrible thing: if I fell pregnant this week I would abort. That’s how not fucking ok I am. The idea of extending the indenture by an additional almost 8 years? Now. Not fucking ok. I am not working for that. FUCK NO.

Every time I do that silly thing where I bring up the 60th birthday party I want to have it is me trying hard to believe that I have that much of a future. That’s a sand castle I am not sure that I believe I will ever live in.

I don’t know how to get my head to be ok with the idea that I can’t survive the next rape. How do I endure the days of fear between now and then? I feel like I can’t get yelled at ever again for surviving. I can’t. If I am bad for keeping this shitty meat sack moving then I need to stop. I don’t want to be bad.

I am unable to perform the behaviour as a mother that lets me feel good in that role. I am not being a shitty abusive mother, but I’m not hitting the metrics I self assign.

I am definitely feeling like a shitty wife. My lack of instinctive monogamy is hurting my husband deeply.

Maybe it won’t matter. Knowing that I really should not survive another rape is going to be a good reason to never be alone in a room with people. Maybe I can cut off enough of myself that I will never be put in that position. I don’t think I would be forgiven for whatever I do so I need to ensure it doesn’t come up again.

The only sure fire way to make it not happen again is to die. The second most effective way is to be alone in a room as much as possible until I die. I feel really scared. I feel really helpless. I do not foresee a path forward where I can be alive and good and that hurts very badly.

The NHS is going to be a mixed bag for me

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I am experiencing some frustration. This week I learned that the NHS would have denied me the vast majority of the care I received in California because a lot of it ran concurrently. In Scotland one is not allowed to work with multiple therapists and on varying parts of mental and physical health at the same time. It is medical malpractice in this country.

Well, shit.

It was kind of fun recognising that I will have to route around the NHS while in an appointment with a psychiatrist. She got to try and talk me into not giving up on myself. If I come back and beg enough times maybe the NHS will agree to me having more than one form of care over a long period of time where they control all the aspects of deciding what and when.

Oh. It’s like that, is it?

I am going to learn a lot more about private health care in this country and I’m going to get better about lying and denying the care I am receiving. That sucks. I’m not really into lying as a lifestyle.

The NHS will not allow me to have EMDR before the trial. Thing is, I’m not sleeping so good. Flashbacks/abreactions are really bringing me down. My PTSD responses are really dramatic compared to where they have been for years.

The NHS won’t allow me to talk to anyone else while I’m talking to the nice counsellour lady in town. The nice lady who is a student. The nice lady who works for an agency that is supposed to get me help as an overwhelmed mom supporting disabled kids.

That’s what I get.

She’s a nice gal and maybe I am underestimating where I am going to get in the 6 sessions I have with her before I maybe get another 6 sessions through a different charity agency.

Yeah. That’s going to dramatically alter my life trajectory. I’ve been through 34 years of trauma therapy. I’m sure this student will dramatically make progress with my usually “treatment resistant” PTSD in 6 hours. It’s going to miraculous.

I feel very much like I need to settle down and become a wraith. This country favours passivity and non-action in a way that is going to be a problem for me. I am not a person who sits and waits doing nothing. That leads to deep depression and self harming behaviour that I can no longer sustain physically. I can’t. I can’t go back to hurting myself to cope. Too many pieces of me are broken in ways that could be life ending if I keep it up. Too many head injuries.

Is it weird that I am not fucking ok with the idea of accidentally killing myself in a panic attack in a form of self harm that I intend to be a momentary relief of pain going too far?

If I am going to kill myself it is going to be in some way that is absolutely unmistakable. I don’t want to accidentally cause a stroke. Fuck that shit. If I swim out into the North Sea or go to a supervised euthanasia clinic so you fucking know I picked that. I desperately hope that the people who love me will find a piece of comfort in knowing that I waited as long as I possibly could. I know that probably something is just to break on its own and it won’t be my choice and that’s ok too. Then it really isn’t my fault in the same way and it won’t hurt the people who love me in the same way.

I can’t accidentally kill myself by going too far with cutting. That’s not ok. That kind of thing is messy and dramatic and traumatic in a way I don’t want.

Today is not as bad as a lot of days have been this week but I’m still not feeling strongly attached to the idea of being alive. I can’t hasten my death, and in fact I am required to act in ways that will push it away to further in the distance. It’s feeling really hard.

Like most people I don’t love being in pain. It is hard knowing there isn’t a way out. I sure as shit am not going to be asking for much of the NHS. As much as I don’t love being in pain I’d rather just go through my life in pain instead of hearing over and over that I am not good enough for the thing I know will help me. I don’t qualify. I haven’t jumped enough hoops. Why don’t I jump a little higher and wait a little longer?

These are the people who think I shouldn’t be allowed to have the sex life I want or the marriage I want and they probably think I shouldn’t have been allowed to have children. I should have waited until I was all better to go have these normal things. I haven’t done enough time waiting to deserve the things that other people get as table stakes. I’ve heard this story my whole life.

I am allowed to have what those people need. Fuck my needs.

This is where I am an absolute rubbish example of living consent culture. I was told no, I couldn’t have what I asked for. So I went out and found a way to fucking steal it anyway.

Not exactly but it sure feels like it standing where I am in this moment. Really I just found a way to pay for it and I hunted high and low before I found people who would help me on my journey. I’ve done a lot of things to try and be more ok. I’ve been doing really well for a lot of years now with only a fairly normal person amount of range of volatility.

But hey, it doesn’t even count as rape in this country. It shouldn’t bother me so much.

In a major way I feel like I am far more wounded by how this affecting Noah than I am by the assault. My life is different than it was 4 months ago in ways that feel savagely unfair and painful.

I’m not working hard at chasing down Vicki interviews. I can’t focus. I can barely think. My productivity is somewhere between 25% and 50% of my normal and it feels like an enormous stretch goal.

I feel like a wraith who should fade away to mist. The fire and energy that usually propel my survival have abandoned me. I don’t feel like I have enough faith in what I am going to do moving forward to just charge forward blindly with great force. I don’t have the energy for a bunch of false starts. I don’t. I want to curl up under a bush and never come out and let my body go back into the earth.

I feel ineffective. I feel useless. I feel like there is no point to how hard I work because it will always come back to how fucking worthless I am.

It’s hard home educating three autistic kids. They need a lot from me. Most of it I have to repeat many times. It’s exhausting. I feel like depression is covering me like a weighted blanket on top of the burn out I’ve been feeling for a long time.

One of the hardest things about the way we home educate is we don’t have the neat and tidy ways to check and see if you are doing it right. We don’t have marking periods and standardised tests. We are just living and no matter how much I do for them I never feel like I have done enough. I always feel like I am failing to teach them a lot of the things they are going to need to know. I felt like that as a classroom teacher too, even though my students went up by more than one grade level on average after a year with me. Many of my students caught up on four or six years of learning with me because I could tune in to where they needed to be reached. I worked with kids who had a lot of emotional struggles.

My adult life has been spent trying to give children the things I never got and I am feeling like a very empty bucket. I have been doing this work for 24 years now. Hell, I was a nanny and a babysitter before then. Normally I’m pretty ok with taking it in stride that young people need a lot of reminders. Right now it is hurting me desperately.

I don’t think anyone is doing anything wrong in my house. It’s hard when I’m off my game. Noah does a lot of consistency management for our family but I’m usually the motor. I feel like I lost some integral part of my mechanism and the gears are just not going and I don’t know what to do.

No, I don’t want psych meds. They are not going to clear the cobwebs they are going to make my body start feeling like I am trying to kill it. No. I have walked that road. I’ve tried so many drugs that doctors pushed on me.

EMDR would be very helpful. I’m going to look for private. I think that’s a thing I can make happen. Holy shit. Maybe I really fucking should not. I am not a good liar. I’d really like to sleep better.

It’s been hurting so much that this overlapped with getting kicked out of bike stuff. The woman who had invited me into things in the first place no longer wants me there. She asked me to stop coming because I make her uncomfortable. It’s not that “everyone” there dislikes me–she was the person I was there to get to know because I liked her. I never tried hard to get to know anyone else because my assumption was that I would be too weird. I hope they do well in the future. I think it is important work.

It is not the fault of Highland Pride that I was sexually assaulted in any way shape or form. I am going to be scared to step forward with that community in the future anyway. I feel like I am trying to back out of a lot of kink stuff locally because I am obviously making so many people feel uncomfortable.

Hey look, the bitch who was “too much” in California is also too much in small town Scotland. Duh.

Maybe if I hide for a while before coming back some of my spiky edges will be forgotten. Maybe I will figure out some piece of work to do that will buy me a place even though I am so awful.

I don’t really have hope for things feeling better right now. I know they will at some point but in this moment that seems ridiculously impossible. This always/never place is really dark. I feel scared and empty. I don’t know how to keep giving right now without a lot of very bitter and sharp detritus coming out instead of water.

I’m in a bad place. It is what it is. There is no way out other than going through it.

I know Noah is trying to walk it back because this is hurting me, but I am deeply wounded by him saying that I betrayed him in this situation. I feel wrecked by this. I wasn’t a little bit bad I was so bad.

Right now I feel like I don’t know how to be good enough to deserve anything good. All I deserve is pain until I die. I’m not working enough to be a good tool. I do bad things that hurt people. I speak too sharply because my entire consciousness is permeated with pain and it leaks out and then I am even more bad.

I feel like no one should have to deal with someone as awful as me. I feel empty of goodness. If I ever had any it is gone.

All that is left is a haze of inefficient malice.

See, I’m being good. This is not social media where I will have lots of people yell at me that I am bad for saying any of this because it is not fair that I am “triggering them”.

Fuck me. Why don’t I just shut up or die already?

Vulnerability

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

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

I am fine right now. With all that entails.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Running in parallel

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I don’t understand the connection between wanting to have sex and writing. I see the connection between writing and medicating way more clearly. It is fascinating feeling like I have my brain back after 3 years of not feeling connected to myself in this way. This narration feels like more of my true self than any amount of being in a room with me can reveal because I will always do my best to mislead you in person.

I know the difference between being allowed to write what I am thinking and feeling and being allowed to act out how I am feeling or what I am thinking. The world doesn’t care how I feel it cares how I act. But I care what I feel. If you want to have the ability to crawl around in my head and fuck with me then you must care. I could just write to Noah, if I were actually more afraid of the consequences I would probably do that. I am getting comfortable and I’m not sure if that is good or not.

It is weird to me that I now live in a country where well actually the police might care what kind of consensual sex I have with my spouse. There are rules here that were not part of the background noise of being a Californian. I am unlikely to change enough to really be what they wish I was. The thing is, if neither I nor my husband ever complain then nobody actually knows what we are doing to one another so it’s kind of a moot point.

Side note: IT IS NOT A MUTE POINT. NOT EVER. FUCKING FORUM PEOPLE.

I do find that I am putting the more explicit stuff over on that site because it feels a little less like courting danger. I just want to gain citizenship so I can sit over here and garden and mind my business. La la la.

But I can’t. I have literally had my blog used against me in a legal mediation already. I was not a reliable witness about the things that were happening with my roof because of the swinger parties I went to. Super charming. If that, if the threat of getting in even more trouble isn’t enough to shut me up is that pathological?

I believe with my whole heart that I am not doing anything wrong. I am enjoying my sex life with my legal spouse. Hell, I’m not even poly. I do believe I should have the right to sit over here with my pot and my husband and my kids doing our weird things. Obviously the kids are not involved in the sex weirdness. And that is the point. I have a very strict filter between which people are allowed to see what and when. I mean, my children could find my blog–they know it exists. It’s my legal damn name… I’m not being secretive. I have told my children over and over since they were small children that once they read my blog they can’t unknow the things about me that they will learn and I’m pretty sure it will freak them out. Given the questions that I will answer simply and directly my children are smart enough to know that when I say, “Are you sure you want to know that” that they probably don’t.

I will off-handedly give answers that make them want to rinse their ears out with bleach. If I suggest you don’t want to know something… I’m probably not being over cautious. I am not over cautious about generic information that might influence their lives in some way going forward. I believe in boundaries and privacy. I don’t have secrets because if I will spew them on the public internet it doesn’t count as a secret. I have things that I do not tell all people in all settings. Do you understand how much time and money I spent on therapy to learn how to compartmentalise like this? Decades. Personally I have paid many tens of thousands of dollars for therapy and the state of California has probably paid at least a quarter of a million if you count the times I was in institutions.

My children do not overlap with my sex life.

For some reason I still absolutely compulsively need to write about it. This is the exhibitionist part. I think that is something I dramatically underrated about my life in the bay. A lot of what I did in the bdsm and kink communities was massively spurred on by the fact that people were watching. From when I was 18, from the second time I went to the Power Exchange the energetic interaction with the crowd was absolutely integral to the experience of being kinky.

And yet when I went to Sydney I felt really weird about the fact that the only public play spaces were performance spaces on stage in front of a dance club. That felt different for some reason? Why didn’t it just feel like BaGG? People there referred to their play as performance. At the munch I was asked, “How long have you been performing” and I twitched.

Now it seems to me like the difference between “nae bother” and “all good” and “it’s no trouble”. They are just different colloquialisms. I mean, there are nuances of difference between play and perform but most of them are about structural differences in the locations. People moving between the two locations will mostly seamlessly move between the slight differences in behavior.

When I was younger there was this really sharp divide between sex and bdsm with a lot of my friends. My friends were people who liked public bdsm spaces (I’m including house parties) and most of them do not allow sex either through explicit rules or implicit culture. Having sex is mostly off screen. Although, how do you define sex, right?

It’s all muddy in my head right now. It’s like a dam bursting and things are coming through all at once instead of in a neat stream. I don’t think I like the lisdexamfetamine. I have not been able to access this many streams of thought at once since I have been on it. I mean, I think it is useful. If my new provider (I was switched people and I meet the new one in 2 weeks) is ok with me having a much lower dose and using it as needed then I think it would have a ton of utility. But not all day and not every day. It makes me hate sex. It makes me not want to write. It makes me feel flat emotionally and unable to orgasm. I can work like a demon but that’s not all good.

I can feel in my body how I acted when my big kids were small when I use cannabis. It literally feels like my entire body relaxes and I can access all of the lanes of the superhighway that is my brain to track being a patient mother and a creative teacher and a considerate friend and a person dedicated to fitness and a person who is drawn to eating the foods that actually best fuel physical activity instead of numbing emotional and physical pain and a filthy fucking whore.

More than one thing can be true. I have nothing to be ashamed of so why should I act like what I am doing should be a secret? There is a difference between secrets and boundaries and privacy.

I am talking in circles this morning. I can feel that spiral thing happening but I don’t have time to explore it. Breakfast will be on the table in 10 minutes because that is what Noah does. He does it because I asked him to. I owe him the respect of showing up on time.

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.

Monsters Under the Bed

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

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

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

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

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

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

You will never, ever forget that pain.

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

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

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

You have to make sure that you carefully only ask for help from people who have the right tools in their toolbox. People who have experience with this kind of atrocity. People who will neither flinch nor minimize the severity of the wound. Probably these are people who climb out of their own beds very carefully because they are currently at a 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.

M/s and marriage

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After 11 years of marriage I feel pretty safe saying that I have a fucked up view of matrimony. I came into this with a fairly historical/chattel perception of marriage. I was brought up to believe that wives don’t get to say no. Wives are fairly disposable/replaceable.

I know I keep coming back to this and it’s annoying but you keep coming back to the shit you had indoctrinated into your head as a kid too. I was told that once you get married it doesn’t matter what you want, you are a whore now. I meshed that pervasive belief in with my issues around not feeling like I am a creature worthy of defense and I spent 10 years not expressing boundaries I should have expressed.

To be fair… I’m not sure my husband was ready to hear my boundaries during a fair number of those years. It’s complicated.

But I’ve been around the bdsm community so long that the idea of a “no limits slave” is just… bullshit. Liar. Idiot. No That’s not ok.

So why am I so ok with the idea that wives don’t get to have limits? It’s about presentation and perceived tolerance levels. I’ve been expecting a kind of marriage that has a firm basis in historical fact.

If you look at slavery around the world it functions very differently in different places. It’s kind of rare for slave owners to treat slaves like they are to be worked to death then replaced. Slaves are expensive. Especially well educated highly skilled slaves… you just don’t treat them like they are expendable because replacing them is costly and takes time.

For some reason wives feel so much easier to replace. I’m here to bear the children and clean the house–right? That’s all I am?

This is why my husband made the first line of our M/s contract that I have to prevent him from damaging me. He’s trying to find a work around for my self-destructive instincts. It’s tricky.

This is a lot of why polyamory is not a good choice for us. I believe that as a wife I am highly replaceable. If you start dating I am going to perceive that as it is time for me to exit stage left so you can move on to a different and better stage of your life.

Because surely anything is better if I am not around.

I don’t have the right to perceive my husband that way. He likes me a lot and he tries as hard as he can to demonstrate that he likes my company and he wants to keep me for as many decades as he can.

It really isn’t fair that he has to work uphill against my belief that anything would be better without me.

I think it is kind of cool that he is trying to find a way to hack a route around the damage in my brain. If I am incapable of perceiving myself as having value as a wife… he’ll call me whatever he has to call me to get me to stay.

M/s, sexual dysfunction, and healing

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When I showed up in the bdsm scene as a fresh shiny 18 year old I was still reeling heavily from my childhood. My primary childhood rapist had been dead for less than two years. He and my brother killed themselves in a 3 month span when I was 16-17. I had been out of my abusive home of origin for less than a year.

I spent a lot of time cutting myself and I liked to burn myself and I hit my head on concrete. I engaged in extremely risky promiscuous sex. I would let almost anyone who asked politely hit me even if I didn’t think they would be safe.

I entered into my first M/s contract when I was 20. My Owner had been my boyfriend/Dominant for a while. My Owner wasn’t what I would call an emotionally supportive guy. He was not up for talking about my trauma or mental illness much. That was supposed to be kept off screen. Mostly he wasn’t even aware of my self harming because he didn’t want to be.

There were a few aspects of our relationship that were really important for my life and development. I think I have most of the executive functioning I have because he trained me. He taught me a lot about following through and executing on plans. He taught me a lot about financial solvency. He taught me about boundaries and agreements and ONLY saying you will do exactly what you will follow up and do.

I believe with all my heart and soul that my relationship with him was my first significant non-abusive relationship. Even though he spent a lot of time hitting me and objectifying me. He did it in ways we talked about very carefully and he absolutely never crossed a stated boundary. He’s a really good guy and I’m going to be grateful for the rest of my life that I got to spend the 4 out of the first 5 years of being an adult with him. I’m in a much better place now than I could have been without him.

What he couldn’t help me with in any way shape or form was my enormous dissociation problem nor my extreme sexual dysfunction. Mostly he didn’t have sex with me much… I think in part because he isn’t all that motivated by sex and in part because he damaged me internally almost every time we had sex (he had an absolutely enormous cock) and I think that was something he felt bad about but we didn’t really talk about it.

Fast forward to now. I’ve been married for 11 years. About a year ago my husband and I decided it was time for us to move forward with the M/s part of our relationship. When my husband asked me to marry him he asked me to be his wife and to be his slave. I told him I could be his wife but neither of us were ready for M/s together and we needed to figure out a bunch of shit together before we did that.

So we waited 10 years. I like to pretend this was us being responsible and trying to get to know one another. In reality it’s more complicated than that.

My husband doesn’t have a lot in common with my former Owner. He’s intensely interested in helping me emotionally process. He has training as a hypnotherapist and I would say that in the past 11 years we have spent hundreds of hours talking about my various psych problems and my history. He’s the only person who has ever been all that interested in me or in why I am so fucked up. He makes me feel seen and valid and important in a way I haven’t ever felt in my whole life. My husband is awesome.

But sex has continued to be complicated. I’m still very damaged internally. My cunt was shredded over and over throughout my life starting when I was a baby. My cunt isn’t in great shape. Two vaginal births have… strangely helped and hurt at the same time. A lot of scar tissue was broken up in the process of delivery. But I almost died because my cunt was not real able to function the way it was supposed to and I hemorrhaged very badly.

For a lot of our marriage we have both tried very hard to make one another happy. We are in what psychologists like to call a “repair marriage” where we both showed up intensely fucked up and we are trying to consciously help one another become healthier, more whole people. Mostly this is going pretty well. Except when it blows up like a fucking wild fire because we are both damaged people and that shit happens.

For many years I have operated under the assumption that my husband married me in large part because I spent my childhood with my parents actively telling me that marriage meant you were a permanent whore and you never got to say no to sex again.

I have a hard time believing anyone would want me for anything else.

But my cunt is uhhhhh damaged. Severely. That damage is a constant problem and it always has been. Sex that is barely too rough can cause significant re-tearing and sometimes bleeding. And I don’t mean rough sex. I mean if I am .00001 ounces too low in moisture for lubrication.

I’ve spent the vast majority of my life with my cunt burning like fire every minute of the day and night. Because I chase sex like my life depends on it. Because what else am I good for?

Last year I hit a wall with my husband where I couldn’t continue to do what I had been doing with him to manage. I don’t do most of the forms of self harm I used to engage in. I don’t cut myself, I don’t burn myself, I stopped beating my head… the only drug I use is pot and that’s with many doctors telling me that I MUST KEEP USING IT. It’s the most effective medication for my complicated array of mental and physical issues. I need medication. It’s not optional.

So I have worked hard on getting rid of most of my dysfunctional coping methods. That’s good! But what do I do now when I feel completely flooded and unable to cope? Well last year I tried to lean more heavily on my excellent dissociation ability and I asked a bunch of my nice friends to hit me and fuck me a bunch. They did. It was fun and I thank y’all for that.

My husband flipped out. That was… not a way he was ok with me coping and we’ve had a rough year since then processing all the damage I did to our relationship. Damage I did in part because I was trying to figure out how to twist myself into pretzels so I could meet needs of his that were hurting me really badly.

Now we’ve had over a year in a row of a lot of screaming matches. It’s been hella festive and hard. Why did we pick this fucking year to be like, “Fine. It’s M/s now or never?”

Because making optimal choices is not my strong suit.

Frankly having the first rule in our M/s contract be that I have to prevent him from damaging me is… quite the head fuck.

It means I am having to talk very explicitly about the extend of the damage I have sustained over 34ish years of harming my cunt. It means that I have to get very loud and aggressive about I CANNOT JUST BE AVAILABLE FOR SEX WHENEVER YOU WANT IT. THAT IS NOT OK.

Because I can’t. I am not physically not emotionally capable of doing that in a way that is even remotely healthy for me.

I have been struggling to carry the amount of pain I feel for my whole life. I have wanted to die for more than 30 years. I try year by year to reduce how much pain I’m in so it is less of a burden, so I can carry it longer. But it’s very hard.

Before some fucking asshole tells me to see a therapist… I’ve been in therapy for 33+ years. I’ve seen more than 35 counselors/psychologists/psychiatrists. I currently have a large and complex medical team who all talk to one another about my shit. My kids are in therapy. We go in and out of marriage counseling. My husband has seen therapists. We see a family therapist. Keep your obvious unhelpful advice to yourself, m’kay?

Suicidality is a coping method. It’s not an ideal one. It sucks. It hurts me and it hurts everyone around me. But I’m coping as absolutely best as I can. My medical team tells me constantly that the amount of progress I have made and continue to make is just about miraculous. People like me usually just die. I’m doing really well for where I started. Even if I do still feel like a festering pile of shit.

My husband wants to keep me for as long as he can. That means helping me figure out how to be ok with being inside this brain and inside this body because that’s the path my life just has to take.

That means we have to figure out how to have sex without hurting me. As a submissive masochist that’s a very hard thing for me to demand. It feels like a very wrong thing to ask for. It feels like I am bad and selfish and cheating him out of what he deserves for putting up with my stupid self.

But I have to change this. No matter how hard it is. Because this right here is a serious problem.

Some day I have to decide that the health of my cunt matters or all the work I’m doing to try and convince my body that I am safe and I should stop the hypervigilance and constant paranoia about who is going to hurt me next is wasted time and energy.

I don’t have so much time and energy that I can afford to waste it at this point. I’m so tired.

Not to mention how fucking expensive this god damn medical care is. I feel like such a waste of resources.

I like to be hit. But there are a lot of limits around what I can bear and still function.

I like sex. But there are a lot of limits around what I can bear and still be functional.

It is very hard to believe I am worth this much consideration and effort.

But he keeps telling me he wants to keep me.

Pieces of dysfunction.

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Mostly I keep my crazy ranting on my blog. I figure the few people who want to know my wackiness follow me over there and writing on a more public site is… I don’t know… forcing my insanity down peoples throats. But the thing is, the stuff I have to work on changing next is stuff that is rooted in my sexuality. That’s a journey that has been highly shaped by folks who hang out here. So once in a while my insanity will leak out a bit here.

I’ve worked pretty hard on changing my perception of myself over the years. I no longer believe I am worthless. I have substituted the belief that I am an incredibly effective tool. I know how to do a lot of different kinds of work and when I show up to do work… I get a lot done. I have developed quite a bit of pride in how effectively I can get work done over a broad swath of types of work. I’m not a one trick pony.

My family wanted me to perceive myself as stupid but all of the GATE testing when I was a kid and grown ups going “Holy crap this kid is SMART” means that their attempts to make me think I was stupid just kind of failed. I’m brilliant and I’m comfortable with acknowledging that. The rate at which I read complicated non-fiction books helps me not ever succumb to the belief that I might be stupid. But I have to keep working consciously on expanding what I know or I would start chanting this at myself. I view smart as something that has to be constantly worked on or it doesn’t count.

I could go through a long list of specifically triggering things I’ve worked on, but the problem that keeps coming up and I just can’t fucking deal with it in a rational way… is what I was born to be.

Let me explain. My father raped my mother when she knew she was fertile and she didn’t want to have more kids. He wanted to make another kid to rape. He was already raping the children they had. Like a true pedophile, gender wasn’t that important to my father.

So from when I was a tiny baby the story I was told about my existence is that I was made so that men would have more holes to use and how I felt about that really didn’t matter.

This is the problem I keep coming back to. This is the core belief I have not been able to shake or move or change in years of trying. This is what I am here for. It doesn’t really matter if it feels good to me or if I like it or if I want it. That’s why I am here. It is literally why I was made.

I don’t know how to alter these wires in my brain so that I stop giving a shit what my father’s intentions were and start feeling like I get to define what I am here for.

This piece is just sticky as hell and I have not figured out how to change it. This is what brings me to my knees over and over sobbing and feeling like I need to die to get away from the terrible burden of being responsible for taking more and more and more pain inside my body.

Even when my partners (my husband most of all) have tried to figure out how to fuck me without hurting me we always run up against this strong limitation that I can’t really talk in the moment about sex hurting my cunt. I dissociate away from that so fast I am literally physically incapable of talking when it happens. Even though I’ve done decades of work on trying to fix this.

I’ve fixed a lot of pieces of this. But this spot still persists and I have not yet figured out how to rewire this in my brain.

I can write about it when it’s not happening. I can barely speak out loud about this topic without melting down into tears or screaming swear words like FUCK YOU FOR HURTING ME. Which is not all that productive.

I continue to be impressed with my husband’s persistence in wanting to help me deal with my laundry list of problems.

I sabotage efforts to make sex not hurt me. Because I have this internal motivation that I have to be providing a lot of sex, even if it is damaging me and I have to initiate even when I’m in pain and….

I know I create a lot of this problem with my utter unwillingness to act like pain in my cunt is worthy of acknowledgment in the moment. There were a few times when I was very young when I mentioned that it hurt to partners and the response was a solid wall of “So?” and I just completely lost the ability.

The kinds of 25 year olds who like to fuck 12 year olds really don’t care.

This internal belief, that fucking is literally why I exist, is why I push so hard for sex with so many people. I have an internal programming that dictates that I must ask for sex. Because this is why I exist. To give this experience to people who want it.

This has gotten more complicated as my partner has gone through a shift from actively wanting polyamory when we met to very actively wanting mainly monogamy with very rare occasions of group sex.

Fitting into the expectations that are currently held for me takes a lot of work. I’ve adapted as best I can. It’s not always easy. But the good I get from being part of this family is so breathtaking. I get to belong somewhere. People care when I’m crying. People care about me in this house. I am important to them. It’s worth a lot of pain and suffering to try and deal with more layers of my mental illness to try and stay here for more of this.

Recently I went through a multiple month period where I genuinely didn’t want to die. That is the longest I can remember feeling like that in my entire life. I have always wanted to die. That has been the drumbeat chasing me through life for just about 30 years now. “I should die because this hurts too fucking much.” I want more of the not-wanting-to-die feeling. And I have to change this belief to get there.

This is tricky because I partially married my husband because he has the highest sex drive of anyone I ever seriously dated. He’s been the only one who wanted to keep up with what I wanted to initiate.

But a lot of what I initiate hurts me. And then there are waves of consequences.

This is so unfair.

It is desperately unfair to my husband and frankly it isn’t fucking fair to me either. It is fucking shitty being in my head and in my body. It isn’t anyone’s fault at this point that it sucks so much to be inside of me… but it’s a fact.

One of my buddies idly mused that I get a lot of self esteem from my interactions with my children.

Children are the only people I know how to interact with without feeling like I am failing in not offering sex. That’s the only time I feel like it is completely appropriate for me to not be offering sex. It’s safe in a way nothing and no adult ever is.

I don’t ask everyone for sex all the time for a variety of reasons (I’m pretty sure you don’t want to be asked, I’m pretty sure my husband would flip out, etc) but I have had to grow up and work on my boundaries to get to this point. It took a fair bit of maturing before I understood that my father was lying and not everyone wanted that from me.

Thanks to all the folks who have skillfully and tactfully turned me down over the years. I’m glad you didn’t follow that up with refusing to know me because I was so rude/tactless/gross/insert word of choice.

I’ve tried to grow up as fast as I have been able. I’m a lot closer to my goal of “grown upness” than I actually believed I would make it to… but I’m not there yet. I’m hoping I manage around the time my 9 year old makes it to adulthood.

What am I here for?

That’s this huge existential question, right? I’m super partial to the work of Viktor Frankl, a psychotherapist who went through the Holocaust. He wrote the book Man’s Search For Meaning. His general hypothesis is that folks can survive any horror in life if they have something they believe in and it doesn’t matter what it is. It could be “I want to see my wife/husband again”. That kind of belief is enough. If you believe that your love for someone else is your reason for continuing to be alive then you can make it enough to see you through anything.

I can’t control why I was made. I can’t control the intentions behind my makers.

But why do I stay alive?

Maybe that needs to be the focus of the next stage of work. I can’t change what I was made for or whether I did my best to live up to that for the first few decades of my life.

But why now?

I feel really guilty that a lot of why I’m staying alive at this point is a science experiment. Will I be a good enough mother that my children will want to know me when they are adults? Am I capable of treating them in a way that will cause them to want to know me?

I feel guilty about this because I feel like I “should” pick something that is more oriented towards my husband and… that’s different. It’s really complicated that I already feel like I have failed at being a good wife and I feel like there is no walking back from that. He’s not leaving because I’m better than nothing but I will never make it to good. I can’t hang my hat on that in this life.

Ok, so “I am bad” and “I am a monster” are strongly tied in with what is causing me these eternal problems.

It is hard because my husband is having a hard time with how much the shift into being a mother has derailed a lot of the hypersexuality and a lot of my strong need to be hit so much. I’m boring now.

I feel like I am bad for even trying to work towards a future where my cunt will hurt less because that will mean I am not meeting his expectations for how often he wants to get laid.

And the cycle continues.