Tag Archives: mental health

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.