Tag Archives: mood tracking

I’m told that the obsessive self reflection at the end of the year is very American.

Not to toot my own horn or anything, but my hindsight is amazing.

One of the many things hindsight has taught me is that I have used therapy as support for my autistic inability to understand the social rules people expect me to be following. I’m not working on my 36th year of therapy. I was diagnosed with autism in year 32. I had a 5 year break 3 years after diagnosis because I moved countries and therapy didn’t feel super essential. I was doing ok. Then Noah died. I’m not doing as ok. I need the support. I don’t think this is exactly what therapy is supposed to be for but just like I can occasionally hammer something in with the end of a screwdriver, therapy can be what you need it to be.

This is a weird year to look back on. My goals for myself were really limited: don’t burn down the house, keep the kids alive, don’t fuck up friendships, have enough sex that life feels worth living, and do whatever I can to make sure my kids feel like they still have a fun future. I’ve done pretty well! The house is still standing and I still have all the children I started the year with. Check.

It’s an odd set of thoughts because in this next year the first child is fully a legal adult and the second enters into quasi-adulthood. I won’t have the same number of children. Scotland is kind of weird on this topic.

I fucked up a few friendships and I feel deep regret about that. One of them I feel like most of the fuck up was because two mentally ill people can’t always be support for one another; I’m sad she felt the need to leave my house and punish me by making ostentatiously false claims about me to child protection services. That sucked a lot. I am relieved that social services very rapidly identified that it was a malicious, false call. The assertion that I can’t feed my children is pretty dramatic and extreme given that food is our big thing all day every day. One friendship is not over (not by any stretch) but I needed a lot of time to sit with it. I needed to think really hard about how the relationship can look going forward. Have the relationship you can have, not the one you wish you could have. I have no shortage of love for my friend. We will figure it out. I am glad I hit pause and did not try to force myself to handle things faster. I would have fucked up. I don’t want to end this relationship even though I felt pain within it. This whole year was painful. I don’t want to act like any of my friends deserve to feel like the extent of that pain was their fault. It’s not. I was drowning and couldn’t do better.

I will be able to do better in the future. I am in less pain.

Sex has been really good this year. I had fun with the hiring and firing of lovers early on. Hunting makes me feel alive in ways very little can. Gentleman has ended up in a much bigger container than I expected. He is a much better person than I expected. My expectations were a tripping hazard in hell and then he turned out to be great. It’s been lovely discovering in layers all the ways in which he is a delight to be around. I want more time with him. It has been particularly rewarding for me to see the ways in which he embodies healthy/positive masculinity far from the encroachment of feminist speech I encountered in the US. He has healthy male friendships and they support each other emotionally. He is incredibly respectful and he reacts to boundaries like they are electric fences. They never have to be defended again. He does all this without using any feminist language around it. He’s not doing any of it because he wants to jump over hoops and prove he is a “Good Man”™️. I don’t feel manipulated; I feel like he is living his life regardless of me and I get to see small pieces of it. I feel like I hit another lottery. He makes me feel so much joy.

This year will be more balanced with time between the kids. Shortie got big things this year to help her feel like there is a fun future. Next year I’m not taking her on a big trip alone. It’s going to be back to pod-adventures in the time I have before Eldest Child is big enough to declare that he can get out of them by dint of being a full legal adult.

I am dreading the return to a more rigid schedule. We restart in 7 days. This whole year has been a dream state. Our hours have been whacked. We have drifted off in various directions and we’ve lost a lot of the structure I normally enforce. I literally couldn’t do it all. Not with how much brain fog and executive dysfunction has been ruling my life. I’m doing a lot better than I was and the estate stuff is mostly done. I’m going to have to pay a fine for it being late, but hey ho. It will be done correctly and I won’t get in trouble down the line. Getting this many stupid fucking businesses to cough up information was really hard. I have mixed feelings about my habit of keeping my eggs in a dozen different baskets. In one way: yay for monetary protection. In another way: oh my poor kids. Going through this as an executor was a nightmare. It would be easier for them if I consolidated and only had maybe three baskets. That scares me for a lot of reasons. It may be the better choice anyway. I don’t have to decide today. I have meetings coming up with people I pay exorbitant fees to and they will help me figure out my plan. Then they will execute the plan while I go back to my day job because this is their shit to do, not mine.

My life is fucking wild, yo.

I tend to go back and forth between thinking about the year aligning with the US tax year (Jan-Dec) or a school year (autumn-summer). I’m thinking about these differences because I have different goals for them. My 2026 plans straddle two school years. That’s really high in my consciousness for me this year in particular because I’m heading into my last term as my son’s teacher. That’s a super wild feeling. I set out to learn what I needed to learn to enable me to homeschool my future children when I was 17. No, I’m not a tradwife. I am an autistic weirdo who never fit into the school system. I was a good classroom teacher in that phase of my life. I feel I have been an intermittently good homeschooling parent.

There are times I’m not proud of. Times when my anxiety about failing my kids got the better of me and I went well into Tiger Mom territory. I think I stepped over the line into abusive too many times. This is a hard thing to evaluate and cope with while it is happening because of course I knew people who were doing far more extreme things. It’s hard to see where you are on the scale while it is happening. Looking back, every single time I was shaking and ranting was over the line. I didn’t know how to feel secure in those moments. I had no ability to trust the long term would work out. I was operating on faith and my faith was a shaky thing.

I have not punished my younger two kids the way I did EC and I believe that is to the good. He and I have talked about it a lot over the years. In a way I feel like part of what Noah got from being his father was seeing a child live with a mother who was working on PTSD triggers so that they would no longer be present in daily life. Noah never forgave his mother for how her untreated PTSD that made his childhood very hard. My son gets to point out how his childhood had some hard points but he spoke up for himself and demanded that things get better and they did. I did not come into parenthood a fully healed human being.

This is why having a mentally ill parent is an ACE point. My kids have had to live with me as I have struggled to get to better places over and over again. As they change and age up I have to grow through a different level of being fucked up. Part of the reason I am rereading the shitty romance novels from my childhood right now is because my life arc now overlaps and intersects with things from my mother’s story. I’m no longer living out Noah’s mother’s story. It’s really weird to wrap my brain around. Noah married someone who was frighteningly like his mother. Now I get to turn into my mother instead. This sucks because Noah’s mom’s life has gotten a lot better and she’s in a better place. I have no idea where my mother is or how her life is going. I’m not open to finding out. That scares me when I start to think of my kids. Will I maintain the good relationships with the first two because they imprinted on our happy family? Will I lose the relationship with my daughter because it will go how it did with my mother and I? That scares me a lot.

I can’t make the same mistakes with my baby that I made with my oldest because the safety net isn’t present. Having Noah in the house to be an alternative source of affection meant that our kids felt and knew they were overwhelmingly loved every minute of every day even when a parent was upset with them. I no longer have that on offer and it breaks my heart.

I don’t feel like I am going to be able to push a full schedule yet. It takes a lot of push in my house of AuDHD barely contained chaos. We get a lot done. We also don’t lead lives that align all that well with “normal” lives. That feels a lot harder to defend when I don’t have Noah in the house as the wage earner proving that keeping an abnormal schedule is no big deal. People can do that for their whole lives and still be part of society. Now I have to do it with my own chutzpah and I feel decidedly lacking.

I feel really scared and I hate that. I don’t want to feel really scared right now. I want to feel calm and like I know how to do my job. I started preparing for this job 27 years ago. Surely I deserve to feel confident now. In less than a year I have my first homeschool graduate. In a way it is unfair though, he is the literal poster child for why unschooling is a fabulous concept that can be magically successful for self-motivated people. He had to go to school to learn that people believed his dyslexia +ADHD+autism means that he was supposed to be stupid. He was never told that at home. It was never part of the conversation. He had to learn tricks and ways to work around his issues, but his brilliance was absolutely never in question. It took two years after I dragged him back out of school to unlearn the awful beliefs he picked up in two years at school. Fuck school.

I definitely believe all the way to my bones that I am the best educational opportunity on offer for my children. This has been my great passionate vocation for my life and every single person who is qualified to judge me has been impressed by my knowledge and impact. I should be able to get over my anxiety about failing my children. There is literally no chance I can do a worse job with them than sticking them in school would do and that’s the standard offer. I’m fine. Really.

The anxiety is still very hard. The anxiety is what stands between me giving a mediocre performance and me being my absolute best Mary Poppins self. Sometimes people tell me not to worry and not to track how many hours we spend on various aspects of life like social life vs academics vs house chores.

My dude, you don’t understand that the tracking is how I allow myself to worry less. I never get to “don’t worry”. I don’t think that is on offer for my brain in this lifetime. It’s ok. The tracking lets me put down like 80% of it so I can use the bandwidth for other things. It’s useful.

I think about life in terms of hours spent. I’m watching the clock right now and feeling the last bit of joy that I get to keep writing right now. Starting in 7 days my time will be up by now. We have completely fallen off of the habit of doing family morning walks. It’s bad for us. We need to restart this way to begin our days. It’s important for so many reasons. We live 1/4 of the way up a really big hill. Going to the top of it every morning is the absolute most important thing we can do to ensure that we will be together for many, many years. Our hearts need it. Our circadian rhythm needs it. Our intestines need it. Our spirits need it. It’s time to get back to it. I love all of us enough to insist that we need to do this. Sure, exercise killed your father. Whatever. We still have to exercise.

This is a hard thing to carry. I feel like my bullying is a lot of why he died and I’m really struggling with that. I absolutely am a bully when it comes to exercise. There are reasons my kids can usually sprint up hills. I chase them up the hill over and over and over again. The faster you go the less I can talk and that means I’ll do less bugging you to go faster. It’s a really great self reinforcing cycle. The person who runs the fastest spends the least time listening to me push. They all get mad when I get high into marathon training and I can keep talking while they are panting and wanting to die.

I don’t know that I will ever do another marathon. At the start of the year I felt like I couldn’t possibly. Now I feel like it would take years because the amount of training time away from my daughter is hard to cover. Maybe I could make her cycle it with me. That’s a thought. I’m definitely mean enough to insist on her learning to cycle that far. We are bike people. It is our form of transport. If you can’t go out and do a lot of it you can’t go out and have a day and have enough energy for all the things. We have to treat cycling training like a mandatory part of life.

I have degenerative physical issues. I hold them back with a wall of exercise and good diet. Will I ever get better? No. Will I ever stop hurting? No. Will I maintain independence as long as possible? You bet your fucking buttons I will. I build muscular strength to make up for the weakness of my joints. It is the only productive solution I know of. I often have to wear braces or supports. I’m never fast. I’m never “fit” meaning skinny and well toned. But I am able to drag my meat sack through days of getting shit done. That is what I care about.

I have said repeatedly that I expect it to take 18 months for me to get back to something more like my normal speed. That means I am assuming the whole first half of 2026 is not going to be a banger year. It is my last term as my son’s teacher. I don’t want to go out with a whimper but I also can’t push hard enough that my anxiety spikes and I act like a bitch. It’s a hard balancing act on my own. I will have to bring enough joy into my life that I can stay stable. That’s hard. I have never been the best at stability. I have always lurched from highs to lows.

I find myself using a lot of the specific somatic techniques to regulate my nervous system. I am catching my anxiety spikes and solving them on my own. This can be very awkward for people in public so I try not to do it when out of the house. You can see the inherent problem there, right? Going out is when I feel the most anxiety while also feeling the least ability to self soothe. People really look at the weirdo rocking and tapping on themself while humming a really high tone for a long time.

I fucking love that I go to therapy to learn ways to be autistic more purposefully. Worth every £90 session. They help me strategise how and when to exit upcoming social situations so I can calm down. Do I need to fully leave? Can I just step out for a few minutes? It’s an adventure. I’m definitely the one crying.

It’s easy and natural to do around my kids though.

It’s making me think long and hard about what I perceive as “the social contract” and NT behaviours that I am required to mimic in public. I believe the social contract is largely not something that can be negotiated because it is about interacting with strangers and they can never be expected to give one grace. Will some of them ultimately be friends who will give lots of grace? Absolutely. You don’t test that right off the bat. You follow the social contract.

I was very delighted to spend Christmas day with a family of other ND people who struggle with masking enough to look normal. I felt so very comfortable. When someone else had a tic I could feel my body relax. I’m allowed to be here. My soul needs this feeling. I need other weirdos. It’s really important for me on a physiological level. I need the co-regulation. We all exist and we all should exist and it is ok that we have the needs we have.

How do I carry this forward being the only parent? Noah cast a big shadow and a lot of the reason we all felt so comfortable being weird together was because he was very weird and could make being intensely off-putting somehow charming. He was a marvel to behold. I do not have his ability to make things charming. I’m a lot more of a 2×4 to the head. The pressure of trying to be all the things has been giving me literal migraines. My body is overwhelmed and sad. More exercise is the answer, right? If it isn’t then I’m fucked because I don’t have a lot more on offer.

I am too tired to hunt. My relationship with Gentleman is going to be delightful and sweet and soft. I worry about the black hole I have of need for stimulation and connection. I am going to try spending more time with non-sexual friends. I’m not committing to monogamy. I’m just tired. I need joy. I need a lot of it. I need buckets of it.

I miss Noah. I have to keep moving anyway. It’s not time for me to stop. He promised I could die first. I’m really sad that I have to live with that broken promise. Oh well. Today I go get my new glasses. Hopefully that will help with the headaches. If not, time to see the GP.

The day must begin. There are foreheads to kiss. I need to tell them that I am so glad to see them again. Rituals are important. They bind you to who you are.

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.

I started doing this so long ago

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I’m sitting here making spreadsheets. I vastly prefer making my own in a bullet journal to typing all of it. I like having the scratch work spread around like a web of supporting numbers. It eases my thinking process.

I want to figure out how I can financially manage to stay in this house for the sake of the kids. This is the last home they shared with their father. I need to plan around this being our home. They want me to. I want to. I want us to be secure in this home base. I want that to be Plan A. I think I can do it.

I will never have tech bro money again so I need to make conservative choices. I need to cobble a little here and a little there and cut a lot there. The next three years will be the hardest as I pay off the mortgage. After that I think I can manage ok.

I remember doing this when I was very young, definitely by the time I was 12 though I’m not sure how long before that I started. I would sneak into my mother’s files and I would find the copy of the paperwork for my dog bite settlement. What am I guaranteed to get? How can I make it work on that amount of money? How can I make it to the future I want to have with only these resources? Of course I haven’t followed the plans I made when I was that young. How could I have dreamed how much larger my life would end up? I couldn’t. This is still just a starting point. My life won’t be as rigid as this table indicates.

If the US government doesn’t fall, if Social Security keeps paying out to dependents, I think I see a path forward that won’t be particularly painful but also won’t be lavish and what we have come to expect. Travel is not going to be a part of my life for the rest of the time I have young children. I won’t have extra money. I’m going to be house poor because keeping this thing in good nick is expensive. I will have to ask my inlaws for help, but not nearly as much as I feared when the thought first occurred to me. I’m basically asking them for child support until the kids are grown and then I will figure it out.

It will be around when I turn 55. That will be a whole new chapter of my life. I will shift my income sources entirely that year. I have a plan. Until then I think I can ignore all the investment stuff and let it grow. So far I have exceeded my plans, in most ways, by a great margin. At least financially.

There are so many pieces of this that are out of my hands. I am scared of the future that I don’t control. I know so little about what is coming.

I was trying to write emails to my inlaws and I was crying. Then my sweetie came over and cuddled me and sang to me.

“You don’t need to cry, you are with your family. You don’t need to cry. Cause you’re with your family and that’s never a case to cry. Don’t cry, no matter what struck you. Cause you’re always with your family. Cause you’re always with your friends. Oooooooooh ooooooooh oooooooh.” It repeated a bit more in places, but this is what Shortie sang me this morning.

I know that I am sad and that I will walk in a stilted way for the rest of my life. But she is right that I can’t spend all my time crying. I have to smile because I am with my family and they need to see that being near them makes me smile. They have to see that. They need it. They need to believe that they have that power. Even if I am lying to them. Other people won’t be. Down the line having these kinds of co-regulating and connecting skills will make a big difference for their adult lives. It isn’t their fault that I am so broken.

They are the glue that has put the shards of me back together. Noah may have done a lot of the work of helping me assemble pieces and organise the mosaic but the kids were the glue.

I have a different feeling in my chest. It’s been there for a few days. I usually feel like I have pop rocks in my chest. My anxiety is a vinegar/baking soda volcano that never ceases. Now it is different. It is a steady and insistent pulling. I must go forward. I must continue. I do not look for happiness or to be loved, I am loved. That’s sorted. Move forward. I have people to care for. I don’t feel capable of providing that care–I feel half dead. I feel like I cannot think or act at all but I look at my crossed off to do list and think that I’ve actually gotten a fair bit done. A lot more will happen in this new month.

I did not finish the paperwork. Fuck. I tried. A lot of this takes a ton of time for each turn around. Some of these emails say they will get back to me in 10-15 business days. That’s quite a lag. I did my end about as fast as I could. Now I wait. I still have some stuff to do. I also have a birthday party to get ready for. A little girl is turning 7 and that doesn’t happen every day. She needs to know she is special and loved. A lot of the paperwork will be put to the side for about a week around her birthday. She will be the whole focus.

Today is Imbolc. I want to start seeds. I have assembled all the materials. I just need to bring it inside and do it. These are hot-needing seeds. Some will hide in my dark, warm boiler room. Or the bathroom with the always-on radiator.

It’s hard to commit to the work of starting seeds right now. It sounds way too much like hope and it’s not that I have hope. It’s that I would seriously like to A) stop filling the bird feeders because avian flu is such a bad thing right now and B) have enough flowers and other edibles that I’m taking care of the local wildlife anyway C) start supplementing our diet more seriously with stuff we grow. I think it’s going to matter. I think the US going haywire and the UK leaning towards nationalist grossness means food chain stuff will be impacted.

I’m scared in so many ways on so many levels.

I’m also doing a lot of stretching. My body is unhappy about the change in activity levels. I miss running with Noah. I miss going to yoga with Noah. I miss going on bike rides with Noah. I miss everything. I miss him showing up to join me at 9:30 as a reminder to be ready for bed by 10. I loved the smile he had every night. He was excited to see me. He was delighted. It was the highlight of his day. The kids were in bed and I was all his for a while.

I miss being someone’s favourite part of the day every single day.

I want to feel alive. Instead I am frozen into inaction. I feel like I have nowhere to go and nowhere to grow. I know that is a feeling and not a fact. Someday I will grow again but it won’t be like it was. It will never be like it was. I will never have Noah pushing me, driving me, caring for me, encouraging me, supporting me. He was the scaffolding around me that allowed me to be fixed safely.

Noah gave me the only safety I ever had. The only stability. The only consistency. Now I have to be the only source of that for the kids. It scares me so much I feel like I can’t breathe. It’s funny. I was running one of my freak out worries past EC and he said “The last problem we will ever have is making friends. We show up and work. We listen to people. We show up and give support when people need help. We will be fine in this life.”

I like the self identity my kids have.

I need to stop running my worries past him. This is not cool.

There are a lot that I don’t want to write on the internet. And now it is time to sleep.

I don’t know where this will go

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I don’t know how to get started today. I don’t have a plan or a bunch of sentences I have been rehearsing in my head so I don’t forget them. I’m just sitting here listening to Taylor Swift sing about how she’s alone and always has been. Something bloomed from writing in her room.

I feel almost like I conjured Noah from thin air. I wrote about someone like him. He transformed himself over and over for me over the years. He would accept any feedback seriously and try to become what I needed. He was a fucking unicorn, who happened to be obsessed with The Last Unicorn. Oh gosh I am becoming more like Molly Grue. Noah loved her so deeply. He didn’t cry over much, but sometimes this book could make him cry.

Mostly the only times I saw Noah cry were when he was showing me how afraid he was of losing me. The first time I did not treat it as the gift it was. I was younger and stupid and cruel. I didn’t know what I was seeing. It took a while. When it happened again I was not cruel. I held my love and told him that the idea of losing him hurt me just as much. I didn’t want to lose him.

Oh. I just found the scream. I guess I needed to go to the studio. That’s fantastic to know. That was such a big scream it necessitated a bathroom break. That’s some good screaming. But I’m not coming back in the same headspace.

I still have the same Taylor Swift song because I like a focus I can bounce off of. I have felt alone for most of my life. I also know I was passed hand to hand by people who loved me. Many of them gave me poison with the love but the love was there.

I’ve been reading “Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents”. I feel like I’ve got my shit shockingly together by the metrics of this book–yeah I see my failure modes. I see my parents. I see Noah’s pattern with his patterns. I’m having interesting conversations with his mom about his dad.

Noah had a very different impression of his father than everyone else. He left at 17 and it took years before he understood on return visits that he simply knew a lot more. He imprinted on the child view “My parent is Godlike” and it was a very hard fall for him.

I see it coming with my son. I’ve been warning him for years that it is coming and he shouldn’t get upset when it comes to pass. It’s natural. It’s inevitable and I feel fucking proud that he is going to pass me. I don’t want to slow him down in any way. Out fucking run me, kid. Go. Go. Go.

I don’t think I’ve been as alone as I thought. I have this amazing web of people in my life. I wasn’t always alone. I wasn’t always getting the intensity of connection I needed in order to feel fully accepted but exactly one person has sustained that at great cost. I need to accept the lesser kinds of love and just be grateful for what I get. Noah treated me like a priceless work of art.

The trouble is, I mostly wanted to be that because he was looking at me and I didn’t want to shame him. I didn’t want to bring him down to my level. I tried as hard as I could to climb up to him.

I don’t know if I will ever give a flying fuck what anyone thinks of me ever again. I will put on the correct uniform for the kind of role I have to play to get whatever I need done. Then I will come home and take it off.

I wonder how small of a fraction of me people will see going forward. Without Noah, most of me is useless, extraneous, and a waste of energy and resources.

My old lawyer (who did not and can not give me legal advice due to retirement) told me that I need to learn how to love myself enough to make up for him. She said that was the most important thing she learned after a painful separation. Her situation is quite different but the thinking is sound.

I am not on my own. Not only do I have one semi-dependent/semi-independent kid, I have two fully dependent kids. I have access to family resources that will guarantee my security. I won’t be lavishly wealthy but I will be safe, forever.

I’m not on my own. I pick people up as I go through life. I integrate them into the patterns I build of lives and experiences and time spent. I don’t, in general, tend to spend most of my time alone. I have created a life where that has to be stolen from the wee hours of the morning while other people sleep. When I’m really depressed I withdraw a lot. That’s getting ever less acceptable without major supports in place.

I am going to say yes to the people who are offering help. I am going to believe people when they make an offer. I am not in a position where people do it because they have to. They want to.

I have to say yes even though that is scary. Even though not everyone will turn out to be nice. Even though sometimes I will be disappointed. I have to accept that it’s ok for me to have needs right now. I’m not doing something wrong.

I’m fitting into society in the only way that is available. I never was going to be normal.

I am feeling enormous gratitude that my children don’t have to go into school. I’ve been very afraid of that. I was going to fake my good cheer and be upbeat about it. I am glad I don’t have to. This will be hard, but hard in a way that will cause us to dig deeper in the specific places we were already sending down roots. This is better for us. We can engage at our own level instead of trying to fit into a mold. We are not plastic. We are bespoke.

The thing that hit me like a freight train last week was, “My baby will not know what it means to grow up free.” Well, bollocks to that. My oldest is free in his soul in a way I have rarely encountered in a human being. He has some dings and scars from his brief time in school but by and large he has already matured enough to understand it for what it was. He is like his dad. He is willing to go sparkle and be fun just by existing and people respond to that. The right people. He’s building his community in his ways and I’m thrilled.

Middle Child has found access to several different community activities that are helping them feel confident and like people really value them being there. That’s fantastic. They have learned ways to manage their selective mutism and flooding when they are out in public in stressful situations. They do need a lot of downtime to recharge: their favourite way is very long walks. I have no complaints. It has been wonderful, and a blessing to watch them grow through some of the roughest patches of their life with a bulwark of overwhelming love and support. They are the kind of kid who wouldn’t feel loved in most families. They are hard in ways that specifically challenge parental authority. I would have been beaten for their behaviour. Wait, I was beaten for behaviour just like theirs. As they are cresting over to 14.5 they are a lot more calm and self aware. They know how to deflect and avoid explosions. They know how to take time to prepare their body for the process of dealing with humans. They have a lot of useful to understand that a sudden feeling of anger might mean that they will need to set a boundary, but they should not attack. They know how to breathe and calm down their bodies.

What the fuck else is the goal?

“Qualifications.”

I think they have the whole rest of their lives to earn qualifications and exactly one easy developmental cycle for learning the skill of being secure. It happens most easily and most successfully in childhood when it should happen. It takes a lot extra for some people to feel secure. If that need is met when they are children then they tend to not still need it as adults. People who are brushed off as children are the ones who spend the rest of their lives trying to find it through romance.

I’m having so many feelings. Probably because I finally hit skip on the playlist. Now other feelings come up. Ha. Oh man, Teenage Dream. That was a big favourite for Noah. He felt like that about me. I felt like that about him. We did run away and only looked back for funeral.

His body changed shape a fair bit last year because I was dragging him to exercise with me more. I freaking loved having so much of his time. He was getting really fit and hot and he was wearing a lot of 501 jeans because they uhh grab my attention. One of the only pinchy things I never object to. I’ll use my teeth if I have to.

There was someone in this world who could not get enough of me. There was no such thing as enough. He never wanted me to go away. He never wanted a bunch of space. Sometimes I needed it for my processing. Other than work he would have preferred to have one body part touching me around the clock. (Usually just a hand or foot.)

He loved me with the same fierce clingy need of my first child and that has struck me over and over and over. He really struggled when I was touched out at first and I couldn’t be a sex machine while dealing with a child who wanted to have their mouth on my nipple 24/7. It was really hard.

Knowing what I know about his mother and her mother and the “wisdom of the age”. I bet Noah screamed as a baby and was left in a cot. I just about lost my mind with how much my kid demanded. I paid the price because Noah and I wanted to make children like us and then love them so much, all around the clock, for the whole of their childhood then maybe they would turn into people who didn’t feel like no one could ever love them?

Instead my older two children grin and say, “I’m a niche interest and I’m good with that.”

My baby is still in the jagged years. She is going to need a lot of very bespoke care and experiences to come through this with her sense of self intact and still full of love. It’s going to be hard, mostly on me because I’m going to have to do a lot of it alone when I was really really burnt out on doing most of it. Do you know what Noah did with a solid 4 hours of every day after he got laid off? He played with Shorty. He went wherever she wanted to go with her. He was at her disposal.

I found him so fucking attractive.

Seeing that put a lot in my metaphoric bucket. I got to spend all day watching the Daddy I never got to have. It feels really unfair that I don’t get to see more of this. I had been starting to join sometimes even though a lot of the games are hard for me right now.

I still can’t believe I beat Noah at chess for the first time ever in the last month of his life. That feels really shitty and weird. I wish he had immediately demanded a rematch and smashed me. He didn’t. He grinned like his kid just one first prize in the contest. He was so proud.

There were ways he was petty. He was occasionally cruel or spiteful. With every year that passed he made sure that he only did things in ways that fit how we wanted our relationship to work. I felt really loved and seen. He wanted to help me cultivate a separate part of ourselves behind closed doors away from all the rest of our life. Most of our life was kin keeping.

I feel conflicted about whether or not I am going to treat Noah’s permanent permission as a permanent green flag to do whatever the fuck I want or if I am going to believe that the last person who had the right to say they wanted me to stay and over ride what I wanted is gone.

I am used to getting all day every day constant verbal affirmations. It’s really kind of ridiculous. That was just how we talked to each other. We were silly and upbeat. It made us happy. It made us feel connected and loved. Noah looked at me with great tenderness most of the time. He really was besotted. It never dimmed. I mean, I spent like 15 hours a week coaching him how to handle shit with his job even though I loathe coding and everything about the tech industry. I was of more merit than a rubber duck. I tracked how long something dragged on and told him when to stop wasting effort on a losing thing. I helped him figure out how to handle sticky conversations. I listened to a lot of his big talks and helped him with pieces of them.

That was how I showed my equal dedication and fervor. I don’t fucking care about coding. I cared about Noah getting to be one of the conductors on the information railroad and I’ll helped him get there. He told me that was what he wanted to do with his work life and he really did it. I am proud of him. I am as proud of him as he was of me.

I wish that we had gotten to have a lot more years of that mutual admiration society. No one gets to choose what they get. They can make choices that make it more likely. But there are always the bit where it is just a roll of the dice. We all die.

Yeah, part of my life did die. I am not Noah’s wife anymore. I am Noah’s widow. Mostly I will just be Krissy. I will just be me as a person alone. I will have people in my life because I am a big believer in community. I will have time to fill. Other people will too.

Noah took up most of my time. He wanted me to be here with him.

I carry that part of me forward. The part that was good enough to make someone like him be that fascinated for that long. I guess maybe I am something special.

He spent his life on adoring me. That’s what he wanted to do. He worked to build a secure future where he could spend decades adoring me in retirement. He had always had several monitors and his screen saver was pictures of me and the kids. We were why he was there and if he needed motivation, there we were anytime he stood still for 90 seconds.

It was weird having people stop in town when they saw us. I didn’t know who they were but they explained that they worked with Noah so of course they recognise me and they want to tell me how amazing it is to work with him. They admire him so much. Gosh, tell him they said hi.

It was a weird moment every time it happened. I moved him away from that.

He wanted this. He wanted me. I’m glad we didn’t wait. I’m grateful that he got us the permanent right to not be in the US. He set us up for being safe, then he burnt out. It is horrifying and grotesque and nauseating. I did not want this, not like this. Noah, you were my #1 priority on my list. I wanted a partner so I could have a co-parent. That was my big fucking thing.

You were always so insecure and it’s so weird. Why did you feel like you were easily replaceable? There is fucking no one else like you. Ok, there’s the deep keening. That’s it. That’s what I don’t let myself do when people are around.

White people don’t do that. So I’m told. And told. And told. If they shamefully do it at all they do it behind closed doors where no one has to hear. Get your shit together and stop acting disorganised.

Noah and I had such a weird cross section of background similarities. I will feel like an alien for the rest of my life. I will always be a weird curiosity that is never to be understood because no one will care enough to remember much. That’s the social contract. People don’t want intensity. They want casual. They want light hearted and entertaining. They want fun, not drama or suffering or grief. Don’t be a downer. Or just stay the fuck home.

I won’t create a new Wonderland here. I think that ability came from Noah. The endless wildfire growth was his special magic power. I have a lot, but I don’t think I can burn it like that anymore. Now I need to settle in and focus on what it will take for me to make my life here work for me. It will not be managed if I stay home alone.

I have always liked the quote “If you need to go fast, go alone; if you need to go far, go together.” I will need a community. I will have to make one. And I won’t have childcare so that’s going to shape a lot of it.

Time to go start the day. Editing is a thing of the past.

30 days out

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Tomorrow makes it a month since I lost the person I loved the most in the world. I’m still crying on and off in bursts all day. I can feel a dramatic lessening of tension since the sexual assault trial was cancelled. It’s better for me not to go through it. It’s terrible for me that two governments have informed me that rape doesn’t count when it happens to me.

I wish Noah was here. I wish we were getting on with the fun of retirement and getting ever more intertwined.

Sometimes I write poetic things about how we were two trees too weak to stand alone so we leaned in and became one entwined entity.

Let me fucking tell you it is not god damn poetic feeling torn asunder because my love is gone. My soul hurts so much. I was not this hopeless when I was crouched naked, puking from the alcohol my dad gave me. I was not this hopeless when he held the gun to my head and asked me if I deserved to live and then told me to prove it with my mouth on his cock. I was not this hopeless when I decided that I could figure out how to get people to stop raping me–I’d take several boxes of sleeping pills all in a go and that would solve that. It didn’t. That just brought ever more fascinating levels of humiliation and debasement into my life.

Hopeless is not the water I swim in. I burn with hope intensely. But I had a magic man who made all my dreams come true. Then I lost him. I still want the satisfaction of seeing our science experiment through–will we create people who want to be in relationships with us as adults when they don’t have to? We’ve managed to miss the worst offenders that would make it likely. Now I get to find out how bad my fuck ups feel for the kids when their dad isn’t here to run interference.

Luckily we have practiced that anyway because he wasn’t around all day? I am deeply proud of my kids when they tell me I am speaking in a way that isn’t ok and it needs to change. Fuck yes. A long time ago I saw some sort of meme-thing that said something like, “Speak so well to your children that they will be indignant when someone doesn’t.”

That’s a mixed thing. Obviously as white people with financial stability we don’t need to be spoken to like we are better than anyone else. We fucking aren’t. Everyone should be treated with a base level of civility. When you observe someone giving less than that to someone else, speak up. I had a lot of conversations with Noah, and we did a fair bit of active role play, for him to learn how to make room for the voices of people who were not white men. He learned how to give all credit for ideas to the originators while amplifying their voices and expressing admiration for the excellent solution.

I was surprised when I heard my son rattle off to someone, “Of course I can tell you fifteen different reasons I think you are autistic. My whole family is and social interactions is one of our biggest special interests.” Like, I don’t know that I had really thought about it that way but it’s accurate.

I feel so overwhelmed by the magnitude of the struggle I have in front of me. I got a really great email from our old lawyer (who is now retired and unable to help) where she gave me a lot of advice about loving myself because I have nothing to give if I don’t feel cared for.

I don’t really have hope for any kind of future where I feel loved and cared for by a special person. I think I will get drips and drabs from many people and I will turn them into a glorious kaleidoscope of a quilt. Collectively it will be almost enough.

Noah will never hurry to bed smiling because he needs to metabolise for me so I don’t feel cold when I climb in after brushing my teeth. I will never grin like a fool and giggle with delight because I get to climb back in bed with Noah after my first wake up. The best man in the world picked me. I was so happy. I had so much hope spilling out of me for adventure and learning and growth.

In the widow group some folks were talking about how 9 or 12 months in they are still unable to do basic care stuff for themself and they are really struggling. I am feeling incredibly lucky that even though I don’t have hope I have a whole tanker vessel full of duty.

I am not judging these folks. They have not had giant really bad things happen very often in their lives. They don’t know how to adjust their self perception that quickly. They are struggling with how to evolve. They feel intense guilt about accepting that evolution will be necessary.

It’s been kind of lovely, actually, getting to the point where I see that and I feel a softness in my belly. I’m so glad you have overall had such a good life.

I lost the love of my life. That was just Tuesday. I was declared an unrapeable whore. That was just Tuesday.

It’s fucking amazing and hilarious that it’s true. Both things did happen on Tuesdays. I’m not going to bother looking back in my shit sandwich of a life to see how many of my shit anniversaries started on Tuesdays. I’m not feeling that masochistic.

Terrible things happening to me is simply par for the course of my life. I have had fairly brief periods where nothing bad happened. Even when nothing bad is happening my life is a hamster wheel of constant change in a way that would give most people vertigo. I don’t think people should be more like me. The training grounds are inhumane.

I am realising that I need to look at our calendars and think of them both separately and together because I don’t think the 4 of us can work perfectly in synch anymore. I think we need a lot more of people doing their own. I’ll still track with Shortie most of the time but I need to get some support so I can be an adult outside of parenting.

I am going to have to find ways to fill my own bucket. I don’t think I’ll get it close to full, but even 50% would be a big upgrade. I went climbing on Tuesday. I’m going to yoga today. Both things require cycling. I’m going to add social time with friends. Pam leaves in 7 days and that feels scary.

Luckily, she filled my freezer with dumplings because she wants me to have glorious vegetables to eat. Nom.

I need to get my head together enough to email the folks who are coming. I’m learning more about the shape of what I need. This is good. I feel sick but there’s no way out but through.

I’m afraid I am going to spend every morning for the rest of my life hiding and rocking and saying “I want Noah.” Well, I guess he has replaced longing for my mother. He gave me so much more comfort and love than she did and he knew me less time. I want Noah so much I feel like I will explode. I know it’s only been 30 days. Time will dull the knife edge of this pain.

I’m trying to pawn off my alcohol. I’m keeping some for cooking. Mostly though I am not permitted to do anything to drown my sorrows. I have to focus on health, stability, strength, resilience, and avoiding all things that compromise any of those traits is the first step. Time is all I have to throw at this horrible pain.

I wish I got to live a different story.

Today is the first day of the rest of my life

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Noah’s funeral was yesterday. It went fine. People were kind. Promises of help were made. Offers of commutative friendship were made. Single parents offered help learning the ropes.

Today I am quiet and withdrawn. I’m scared and I feel like I should be able to jump into action. I can’t. I am exhausted. I have gone totally limp. I need to start the process of becoming unpopular at two schools. I’m going to show up with big asks and schools love that in the middle of the year. I have been that kid a lot of times.

I am so scared that my babies are going to have another rough entry. I think that tomorrow I will send an email in the morning to both schools as a follow up. I can’t today. I really literally can’t. I am so overwhelmed.

I am processing the layers of my loss in fresh waves of horror and grief. Oh goodness Noah, what am I going to do without you? You were the sun I revolved around. Now I have to care for myself instead of off-loading that onerous task onto you. I would much rather look after you in trade.

A fucking broken ankle. Like that’s good for my ambient paranoia about injury.

I feel like I am not able to consider other people very well right now. I feel like my entire theory of mind evaporated. I can kind of do it with the kids, as long as its not all day because then I get overwhelmed. I put on a front and I smiled and hugged everyone at the funeral. I thanked everyone for coming.

Now I am empty and hollow and I just want Noah. I want him to hold me and tell me I did a good job. I want him to tell me that he is proud of me. I miss sex. I miss the way he specifically fucked with my head to make me feel like I was a very good person because of our sex. I feel like I have lost the ability to feel good. Now I feel empty. Not just my vagina. I feel empty in my mind. There are clearly still words, but instead of 6 screens going in the drive through there’s one and the picture keeps flickering and the audio is spotty.

I think my weight is at a plateau.

I was happy I could physically wear the fancy wedding rings Noah insisted on buying. He meant these expensive gestures very well. He wanted me to know that I was worth an investment. I think he was silly. I think we could have paid off the house like five years faster. He wouldn’t hear of it. He insisted on the gestures.

It’s not a set of rings I’ve ever enjoyed wearing every day. They are heavy and they hurt my hand even on the best of days. I am still wearing the plain band. I don’t know when I will take it off. I did fulfill the contract: I stayed until death parted us. I wanted so much more time. I’m scared. I’m scared of who I will never be because I don’t believe in me as much as he did. I’m sad about the things I won’t do because he won’t be there to do them with me.

I am sad that he will never be inside of me again. That was such a massive part of our relationship. I didn’t have very many hours in a day where we didn’t touch each other. We were so excited that this amazing person is willing to let me touch them! I need to prove it again. Over and over, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, decade after decade. The magnetic attraction between us never waned.

I long for Noah with every cell in my body. It’s hard to believe that I will ever feel ok again. I’m having a hard time believing that I have a future that is going to feel like it matters to me. What could ever be important after losing Noah?

What was important to me outside of Noah? I can’t remember. There’s got to be a reason that folks are lining up to take care of me for a year. None of them are coming here because they feel they owe it to Noah. I feel pretty fucking good about insisting on maintaining relationships now. I’m not as stupid as I look.

Walking past little old couples wrecks me. I will never have that. I won’t get to fuss at Noah to stop getting distracted and hurry up.

I feel so empty.

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.

Too many feelings.

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I am feeling a lot of pain and isolation. I am struggling with how paranoid I feel. I make the assumption every time I leave my house that someone is going to be hostile or nasty. I get a surprising amount of random verbal abuse. Other people hear it–I am not delusional or paranoid.

I started 2024 with so much hope. I had big plans for working hard and contributing to communities. In the end I am isolated, lonely, and I feel deeply excluded. I feel wounded to my core by being asked to stop coming to cycling events. That was the vanilla community I invested in the most since moving. Now I feel like I am dirty and bad and I hurt people by existing near them.

I’m sorry I made you feel like a bad mother because I was willing to defend your gay kid and you weren’t. That wasn’t my intent. You weren’t in my thoughts at all. Your kid was. And that means I’m not welcome anymore.

I’m scared of the queer community now. The fact that basically no one from the organisation committee is checking on me feels fucking vile. I was raped on the final night of a month long spree of events where I personally produced 28 events. (Some cancelled due to illness so I didn’t hit 30.) That feels like evidence that I did not make any friends this Pride.

The NHS told me that I’ve already gotten so much therapy that I shouldn’t need anymore and if I do I can’t apply until I still have symptoms months after the trial. Fuck if it doesn’t seem like the *plan* is to avoid prosecuting rape/sexual assault cases by being so unsupportive the victims commit suicide. From where I’m sitting that looks like THE PLAN. It’s a lot cheaper that way

Noah fell and broke his ankle. He needed surgery. It was a little bit stressful figuring out when the surgery would happen. The NHS really does act like people are just waiting around at liberty to jump whenever they are called. It’s quite different to interact with.

I feel increasingly certain that I made the right decision in cutting things off with Travel Boyfriend. He was not acting like my friend. I feel less anxious. I feel less like I am supposed to be trying harder to win approval. Instead I am back to exhausted lethargy. Anxiety is a motivating emotion. I don’t want to be running on anxiety all the time though. I’d like to actually feel ok.

I know that EMDR would help a lot. I feel deeply upset that I was told no and that I can wait for years. It makes me feel substantially more out of control, helpless, and like I don’t get to be in control of my body.

I wish I felt like I had energy. I have a lot of things I want to do but no ability to focus my body or my brain. I’m in a lot of pain. I feel overwhelmed waiting for things to land on my head. I feel sad and scared and vulnerable and angry. I hate that I can’t be around people without crying.

I hate being me. I don’t want to walk this road. I don’t want to have to manage these trials and tribulations even though I do have so many wonderful aspects to my life.

I know I am lucky. I know I have a good life. It is hard to feel like I should be in it. I feel wrong from the core of me. I work hard on hiding it but it’s a mixed bag. I wish I could like me the way I like other people.

Noah is at the hospital and I miss him. As much as I think I will be stupid enough to want to sleep with someone else one day I think it is insane that I want to be away from Noah at all. He is the sun I orbit around. When he isn’t here I don’t know what to do. If I don’t have Noah to take care of–what am I even good for? Hell, the kids don’t even need me for cooking anymore. They are all shockingly competent.

I am so glad for Noah. I should go to bed. I’m going to the walk to the hospital in the morning and fetch him home in a taxi. Then I’ll get to baby him for a few weeks. I’m looking forward to having a holiday with him alone. It will be our first time having more than 48 hours alone since before Eldest Child was born. Little twerp is closing in on 17. That’s a lot of years of not having time alone.

I think we’ll manage to have fun even with limitations. Noah is fantastic to be with. I’m glad we get to do this. It is a silver lining on a whole bunch of negotiation that lead to nothing.

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.

This is going to hurt for such a long time.

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Yesterday I was informed that the Crown Prosecution Services has until December 2025 to decide if my case is moving forward. I don’t know anything until I get a notification. I am supposed to sit here in frozen, silent horror for over a year. My therapy options seem to be limited to “community support” of the sort where they will bring tea and cake and listen to me cry. Not very much actual help or support.

It’s funny, a couple of people have offered “me and Noah” support and then it turns out they only want to talk to Noah. Ah. Because I apparently already have so much support and he doesn’t have any. I am not arguing. If that is someone’s perception they can have it. I get so much that I don’t need anymore. Seems legit. I have gotten far more than my fair share of therapy in this life.

I’m struggling really hard with the dynamic where I’m supposed to be overflowing with happiness and sexual energy but also looking at the floor and not attracting any attention.

My stomach hurts really bad. I don’t feel like I have the opportunity to act “right” and not be bad. Whatever I do will be wrong. I don’t feel like there is much about me that is worth liking.

Apparently 2011 was the last time I negotiated honestly, in good faith, about my sex life. Ok.

It’s not ok for me to have experiences or feelings that I don’t predict in advance. I am a bad person if I don’t know I will have a feeling long in advance and warn Noah about it. This is why it is good that I was asked to stop coming to bike stuff. I shouldn’t be making friends here. I might have feelings and that would mean I was betraying Noah again.

I should probably go clean something. It’s what I am good for. I feel like I can’t. I feel like my brain and body are a solid block of wood. I feel stupid and useless and worthless and bad and mean.

Apparently I beat Noah’s sexuality out of him.

I’m scared about seeing TB in January. I feel like I am being set up to fail. I did not predict that we would be attracted to each other. That means I am a lying liar who lies. Everything I don’t know in advance is a way that I am bad. I am a fucking deceitful lying piece of shit because I don’t always know how I will feel in advance.

It hasn’t been ok since 2011 for me to say, “I want to go hunting.” I have been fighting my urges as hard as I can for nearly the whole time since. Doesn’t matter. Lusting in your heart is the full sin.

I’m going to be damned if I do and damned if I don’t in January. Just fucking watch.

My head hurts so bad it feels like it will explode. I wish I felt like there was any point in telling a doctor that I’ve been having overwhelming headaches constantly but it doesn’t feel like a safe thing to do.

Sitting alone in a room means I am bad because I am not working or providing care to someone. Not being alone means I am bad because I am failing to perform human in the way that people want.

If I had more energy I would hate myself. I feel too tired. I can’t do anything right but that doesn’t mean I ever get to stop trying.

Yesterday wasn’t great and today is waking up harder

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I’m crying a lot again. I feel bad and dirty and gross and like I don’t deserve any kind of goodness or softness or support of any kind.

My mama beat me because she didn’t like how I acted towards the boys who raped me 36 years ago. My Daddy hurt me 3 months ago because he didn’t like how I acted towards the man who raped me.

It is feeling entirely fitting that soft and gentle support and non-judgmental acceptance is for other people. I will never be good enough for that. Never. Because I can’t bear the thought of my Daddy hurting me again after someone rapes me I will need to not come home the next time. I know exactly what will happen to me and I can’t take it. I can’t keep surviving the punishment that comes after each rape.

I had to get up and leave the table when my son dramatically stated that we all deserve the same thing after something bad happens. I was freaking out.

No. We don’t. When bad things happen to all of you I treat you with gentleness. I baby you. I coddle you. I savagely defend you from being bothered.

We don’t all deserve the same thing when we are hurt.

I feel so bad. Why don’t I jump up and work hard and act all plucky and emotionally giving and loving and kind?

Noah is going to feel invalidated. He massages me! He does other nice things for me! He barely raises his voice at all. Does that all count for nothing?

It would count for fucking nothing and there would be insane amounts of violence if my children were harmed the way that I am.

But I consented! Yes. Absolutely. I consented. Of course I did. Was there a different option? No, not with what we are and what we do and what we choose. I don’t get to decide. That was an agreement made long ago. I am the fucked up, bad, out of control one. You do what you must to keep me in line. If I want to be treated better then I should act better.

No. We don’t all deserve the same thing.

I feel like I could blow away in a stiff breeze.

I have to go meet a different support person. I am not expecting much. I don’t have a way to try to tell my story in 1 hour blobs to strangers that gives me any benefit. Like, I can’t get any good from that. It hurts to drop these tiny pieces of me with these people I will not work with going forward. I don’t usually make a great first impression. So I’m briefly meeting a whole bunch of people who are probably going to think I am a weird freak and no, none of this makes me feel better.

I feel like I am not good enough to deserve kind, gentle support from anyone or in any way. I feel so lonely. I feel empty.

This election is a nightmare. I was trying to find a way to flip the script and try to future trip with the kids about ways to pivot… nope. Just fighting and pissiness and dissatisfaction. So definitely no bounce that direction.

Back to head down in miserable waiting to be judged by strangers. I have that lovely gift of a prophecy from Ted. But what if he is wrong? What if I am such a disgusting whore that these strangers look at me and know I deserved it?

Clearly my reaction in the two weeks following mean that I loved it and I wanted him more than anything. Obviously. There could be no other meaning. I am a disloyal bitch.

I deserve all the bad I get.

I could really use EMDR.

Don’t make changes when things are bad.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank cheese for a good day

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I’m really grateful that Noah and I had some good talking yesterday. I am glad that we hugged and touched each other in mellow and non-scary ways. We are both going through a ridiculously hard thing. It is really important to remember that this is a terrible thing that is happening to both of us. More to me, but he’s getting whacked hard too.

My brain is being a giant asshole right now and it means that mostly I’m only remembering the hard and scary parts of my marriage and my relationship with Noah. I did go very far out of my way to find a Big Bad Wolf.

He’s really not a terrible person. All of the shitty things he has done have come with the halo of consent. It’s been a fucking trip. When I say I deserve things that he does to me… well… he and I discussed doing it and then we did it so I guess in the most literal sense of the phrase, I do deserve things that we say we want to do together. It’s a complicated thing. No person arrives at the decision to do a thing completely unshaped by the life experiences they have had.

Noah observed that what we are expecting of ourselves and of each other is quite literally inhuman. People don’t do these things. What we want to be to each other is not standard. I get that. Like, that was not really enough sleep last night because sex after a while of no sex was a lot more important. It was good sex.

I wish that means that I woke up today full of resilience and definitely over my depression. I didn’t though. I still feel shitty and stupid and it takes a very small comment from a teenager to set me off. Teenagers are assholes. Teenagers are trying to create a reality in which they don’t need their mother anymore and that’s pretty fraught for me. The point of my job is to work myself out of a job. I am working towards my sole future occupation: Noah’s companion.

There’s this way his cock gets right before he nearly comes. I notice it best when we stop having vaginal sex and switch to oral. The head feels really tight and swollen and like it is about to explode but most of the shaft is actually fairly soft, it’s nothing close to his most erect. Details like that are going to be most of what I think about in the future. Savouring that feel and texture difference in my mouth and in my hands.

I used to tell my mom that I wasn’t going to be able to be successful as an adult because the only thing I was good at doing was reading fast. I’m really good at making Noah’s dick happy.

It is hard for him and it is hard for me that it doesn’t feel like enough. I’m not saying that I have to suck other dicks. I am saying that I don’t do well when I feel disconnected and unwanted.

My day job is in a complicated place where 2/3 of my primary charges now resent and scorn me. I’m just counting the days till number 3 joins in. I know that Noah sees this with impending glee: soon he will have me all to himself.

Given what happens to me when I try to make friends it is a mixed bag from my view at the moment. I am really upset and sad that I am scared to make friends now with the idea of sex being entirely off the table. That is feeling dramatically unsafe. It also makes me question the sex and friendships of my youth.

I don’t think I am going to stop feeling depressed and frozen and scared until the trial happens and that feels dramatically unfair to my family. I go to sleep every night angry with myself for not getting more done and I wake up every morning feeling frozen and stuck and unable to move because I will be wrong. It was really hard to eat this morning.

Today will be less perfect. That’s ok. There are brighter days to come. My local garden store had plants 50% off because they are going out of business. I have some holes to dig. Let’s see if I can get off my backside. Ugh.

I fired my counselor today

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I feel kind of bad because she’s a really nice lady who is trying super hard but she’s a student, with only a small amount of training, and I am way the fuck out of her league. I would be training her, not getting support from her. Also: I’m not allowed to talk to anyone else while I’m talking to her. She fully understands that she is there to be generically supportive and she doesn’t have a lot of therapeutic value to add to my life. So this was my last meeting with her.

I don’t get a lot from telling a tiny shard of my story, heavily edited for their sensibilities of course, to a stranger I will see 6 times then never again. There’s not a lot of value in that for me. She said that a lot of her clients have literally never felt heard in their lives and they have no opportunity whatsoever to explain what is going on with them to another person. I said I write thousands of words and have loyal friends who have been keeping up for going on 25 years. Many of my friends are more educated about psychiatry than she is.

She said I am going to find a very hard time finding a therapist in this city who is as educated as me. That was hilariously awesome to hear. She sent me a list of all the links for support organisations in the city. There is an EDS support group!! Only for people who are 18-30 years old. That is… so Scottish.

I didn’t make my step goal today but I did back to back yoga classes and rode my bike 6 miles. I will choose not to be mad at myself.

I feel like I really should take my friend up on the long distance EMDR. That is the most stabalising option I have on the table. Separately I think I might even have found a friend who might be able to help with more active brain rewiring. I will not be more explicit. That will be good if it works out.

I’m scared. I feel helpless and out of control. I feel like I don’t have the ability to reach for hope right now. I am trying. I really am. I’m trying for positive moments with people. I feel unable to believe that anything could be better. I feel sad. We haven’t had sex in a while. That’s probably contributing.

I’m reading a fun book (I’m finally getting around to Go Tell the Bees), I’m binging Madam Secretary (again), I’m exercising, I’m sleeping an average of 9 hours every night over the past week and some. I’m eating vegetables and fruit and enough protein and fiber. I’m making concrete plans for the future in the near and short-term far future. I am still doing things to solve problems for other people. I am just at much lower capacity and speed. And today was fucking exhausting. Being around humans and having casual conversation was weird and awkward and uncomfortable. I didn’t know what to say and I felt stupid.

Wednesday and Friday will be days with lots of people around and loudness and awkward feeling alienated fun. I will have a hankie for when I escape to the loo to cry. Fuck.

I want to say “I just want to stop feeling like this” but I already fucking know you can’t “just stop” feeling something. You have to move towards feeling something else instead. I am really scared.

Most of the things I instinctively move towards feeling are the things that make me bad.

I should go to sleep. I’ve had a sufficient amount of evil for today.

I don’t really think I need a therapist. I need friends I can feel comfortable believing they know about the scope of my humanity and they are ok with it. I don’t have many of those friends here yet. I get limited amounts of time where I feel mostly accepted. I mean, Bestie and I will walk through fire for one another, we also have health problems and autistic, high needs kids. We share what we have left over and say thank you for what we get.

What I need is people I feel safe being in a room with where I can say whatever comes up in my brain without having to be afraid that I am going to be punished or ostracised or seen as other forever. I mean, I am ‘other’ in a great many senses–I’ve got the whole immigrant thing going on. That’s fine. I’m not ridiculous about this. It’s complicated and late at night and not important right now.

I feel deeply lied to. That buzzer is going off really hard in my head. I feel like I was told that it was ok to do things. That it was explicitly fine and I was still punished for them. I feel set up to fail. I feel like there will always be a way to spin my behaviour as disloyal mainly through inadequately narrow interests. I’m twitchy as fuck. I feel angry and ragey and like I want to beat something until I break it. I want to destroy something. I have kept every fucking man in Scotland at arms length. I have not seriously flirted. I have not issued a come on. I have not tried to get someone to want to have sex with me. I have been so good.

Burn it all down.

The only time I’ve ever heard a Scottish person come it was my rapist. Fucking cheers for me.

But that part wasn’t the rape. That part was me. That part was me feeling like I needed to be in control and I needed to decide what would and wouldn’t happen and I dictated exactly what I would take from him. And I took it.

And I put him in prison.

So, I look like I’m setting up a torrid affair? He doesn’t strike me as the type to actually write letters and I’m not sure how much email access they have. Anyway I’m not planning to visit him.

There are magics you don’t understand. There are things that compel me and I don’t know where they come from. Was it training from my dad? Was it me trying to get to know him and having a fucked up view of how “mentorship” works since almost every single one of my mentors fucked me at some point? I will edit out long the rant about stuff related to the court case. I can’t say any of that. (Hell, should I say any of this?)

Fuck. Uh, if the trial goes well I want to go to karaoke and sing You Should Be Sad. I will make that happen. Where in the fuck near here can I do that? I will find out. Yes, sirree.

Surviving rape

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Surviving rape doesn’t happen in one day. You don’t survive by getting the fucker into a taxi and out of your home. Out of my studio. Out of the place that is supposed to be my sanctuary. That is the first step, not the last. It isn’t like surviving a car crash where you wake up and the crash is over.

Surviving rape means being able to look myself in the mirror every morning afterwards. Surviving rape is about thinking that whatever you did to get to the next screen was harm reduction. Every single shitty thing that kept you alive was better than dying. Surviving rape is binge drinking and binge eating and screaming and crying and falling to the pavement when out on a walk because the panic attack made my vision go black. Surviving rape is believing that you do not deserve to be punished and harmed more because you were defiled and made dirty by someone touching you or you touching someone else because you felt like you had to.

Surviving rape means opening yourself up to lots of judgment, scorn, derision, and contempt. Good people wouldn’t survive the shit I have. They die.

My very survival is what marks me as a monster. Good people don’t do the things I do, the shitty, dirty, disgusting things that people like me do. Good people would rather die.

I am still alive. I feel like I owe the universe endless apologies for not having the decency to just fucking die already.

I have screamed so much today that my throat hurts enough that I don’t really want to eat this lentil soup that is the first food I’ve had today. I’d rather not eat. I also haven’t been drinking. I don’t want to.

I want my body to stop.

I want to be good. Good people don’t live through the things I do. That means the only thing I can do to be good is die. That hurts so much. I have tried so hard to be good. It doesn’t matter. When it counted, when I was supposed to display my loyalty I was only loyal to myself and my survival. And that is why I should die. If I will not pick death over disloyalty I am nothing.

I betrayed my family. I betrayed my husband and made myself the lowest of the low. I feel like I want to use a scalpel to flay myself alive. Maybe if I make myself hurt a lot lot lot lot lot more Noah won’t be so mad.

Mama told me I don’t need to stay and let Noah make me feel so bad about myself. I don’t think Noah is making me feel bad about myself. I think Noah is reacting reasonably to the consequences of being married to a nightmare. I’m in this pickle where I can’t act good enough to not hurt him and I can’t leave without hurting him more. I can’t see a path forward that doesn’t involve me wrecking his life even more than I have.

I’ve betrayed him a lot. It’s not like this is a one off. It’s who I am. I am shit. I am worthless and faithless.

But fuck me, definitely no EMDR before the trial. Couldn’t be having that. Fuck the NHS. I can’t believe I had the ovaries to say, “I’d like EMDR. If not that then Ketamine, MDMA, or LSD assisted therapy. If none of that then I want nothing from you.“

That was pretty intense. I was freaking out and shaking and clearly not ok and I just blew off one of the higher up doctors at the psych hospital. That was maybe unwise. That smart mouth comment is now in my permanent record. I mean, I started with wanting EMDR? It’s not a controversial treatment? It’s not a drug? It’s not a wacky thing to ask for. That was not inappropriate. I just can’t have it.

I can. I just can’t through the NHS. Curse my internal hierarchy structure. It is fucking inconsistent and I hate it so much. One of the harem actually does remote EMDR already. It’s just a trick in his tool bag. I could probably have a session today or tomorrow if I could just ask him. Hell, I don’t need to ask, I need to say yes to his offer. He wants so badly to be able to help me in some way and I have not been able to let myself receive anything from him.

Someone who has been in love with me for almost 20 years wants to help me because my health care system is letting me down and I can’t let him. I have also basically stopped talking to Travel Boyfriend. I am deep in not-fun-land and I just can’t accept help in this place from people I am emotionally close to. I can pay for it. I can’t get it for free. I don’t deserve it. I do not allow myself to be someone who has consistent support from specific people. Well, not beyond Noah. The few other attempts I made as an adult went pretty sideways.

I am feeling incredibly burned. I miss the God Mama. I miss my mother. I miss Sarah. I miss the Bonus Mama. All these women. Hey look, Katy Perry’s song The One Who Got Away just came on. I’ve been calling Sarah The One Who Got Away on Fetlife. I failed to sustain that relationship.

It’s kinda funny that I don’t miss my sister. Fuck that bitch. I hope she suffers terribly for every day that she is alive and that her death is slow and painful as she fucking deserves for being a child raping piece of shit. She had a chance in this life to break the chain. Instead she forged new links. I wish her nothing but pain. Given her romantic choices I’m pretty sure she’s been punched a lot since then. I wish I could feel bad for her but I really can’t.

My brother is single and whining about how women use men up and take everything from them. My brother, who never worked full time or even managed to fully pay for his own vices let alone support his three children. Yeah. Poor guy. Fuck the golden boy too. I don’t wish him as much pain. He is suffering a lot from being who our father loved. He will suffer for all of his days. He refuses to believe that our father was evil. He tells people that our dad committed suicide because he was depressed. lol. Yeah, scared of a life of prison rape depressed.

Surviving rape is not pretty. I would argue that my sister’s soul has not survived. When she chose to justify her pain by normalising it and passing it to her children her soul died. What is left is a soulless monster.

I have not raped a child since I was a child. I’m not saying I get a pass. But my children have not been raped by family members. That’s something, I guess.

It’s really hard to eat this bowl of soup. My body does not want to. Why do I keep insisting on eating healthy food and exercising? Don’t I know that this is going to get me lots of years of more pain? 9.821 steps for the day. Even if I did have a panic attack.

I can’t keep getting punished for surviving. I don’t know exactly what that means, but I think maybe punishment is not something I can accept for something like this. I was ok with it when it happened. I consented. I consented, what, days after surgery? I kind of wonder how much I hope that you would hurt me enough to cause those complications I otherwise worked so hard to avoid. Could you have lived with that? Was it worth it? Sure. You think it was necessary to break the fawn.

Fawning is a survival tactic.

What I am doing now is not upping the chances of me surviving. I did that walking on the first day of my period without eating or drinking anything. Am I making good choices? I don’t know. I am flailing blindly. I’m trying not to talk to people more than I absolutely have to because I know that vile bilge will stream from my mouth. I’ve probably cut 80%-90% of my social chatter for the past I don’t know how many days.

Right now the random reinforcement of punishment (sometimes physical with consent in the context of our M/s dynamic and more often verbal in the form of lengthy diatribes about the crimes I’m about to commit) I have received in the past 4 months means I can’t risk talking to someone in a tone of voice Noah doesn’t like or I don’t know what will happen. I am afraid he will think I am fawning. He’s not ok and I’m not ok and I don’t know what will need to happen before either of us are ok.

I guess my sister and I both antagonise our partners to hit us. She does it by yelling insults and degrading their manhood. I cheat.

We both deserve what we get.

I say I won’t do things and then I go do them. Every time. Apparently.

It’s the first day of bleeding. With good luck part of this furious screaming in my brain will stop soon but I am not feeling like I’ve had a lot of luck lately. I feel like if it weren’t for bad luck I’d have no luck at all.

I listen to other people talk about family as if it is a permanent fixture that cannot be undone. I think of Bestie and the brothers she hasn’t spoken to in over a decade and my family I haven’t seen in a few years more than that. Family doesn’t feel very permanent to me, in a general way. I am having a hard time with the war in my brain. I have to serve my indenture. Do I really owe many more decades beyond that? Do I really? Why do I owe anyone this much pain?

I reread the book I bought at the Lakota reservation called Keep Going. Man. That’s not a book to make you expect much cheerful shit in life. I think one of the reasons I have never felt comfortable with most pagan community is because I’m not willing to co-opt an old-world-religion-that-was-and-has-been-reinvented. That’s what I see when I see most pagans. The heathen cultures I grew up around were indigenous cultural ones practiced by descendants. I sure as shit never felt entitled to join any of what I saw, but I feel like my ancestors closed their ears to the Gods. I had a Mayflower fucker in my chart and the most recent arriving branch was a bunch of Mennonites that had been running around Europe trying to be the most repressive dickheads around for a long time.

I do not feel entitled to any Gods.

I do believe that Akhilandeshvari chose me. The Hindu temple on the corner was full of people who were a little confused by the white neighbours who came to Hindi classes and who dropped by to pay respects to the Gods and Goddesses occasionally. I have been given the strong impression by every Indian friend that they are totally cool with a Hindu Goddess picking me. They said she obviously knew I needed her. I think that is most diplomatic of them.

Here I am breaking myself and breaking my husband. We had been at a much better place.

I did not deal with being raped in a way that worked for him at all.

I feel like I failed the exam. I do not deserve to stay in the program. This is not my first time failing and being kicked out because my body could not do what was being asked of it. I’m not being kicked out. Noah won’t kick me out. That’s not something I worry about in any way. Just like I don’t entertain the idea of leaving him. This marriage is till death parts us.

Surviving rape over and over and over and over and over is partly done in stutter steps of eventually asking to be allowed to have some kind of agency and autonomy for my body after more than 4 decades of not being allowed to make all the decisions. No. That’s a no, dog. I’m a set of holes and somebody bought them. How dare someone else touch them.

I feel deeply dehumanised. I suppose that is a natural and obvious outgrowth of some of the kinds of play I choose to do. I suppose it is unsurprising that it is a natural and normal state for me to slip into sideways. You think maybe getting kicked out of a community for being a loud mouth who objects to homophobia, and dealing with denial of service from the NHS has something to do with it?

Hell, I’m even freaked out about how far from what I wanted the prosecution process is going to be. I’m going to have to go to court this time. They won’t let him out so he can suicide the morning of the trial. Phew. I have options about how to do it. I’m going to pick sitting in court and looking at him. That’s the least shielded way. Because why in the fuck would I do it by video in a room alone? That would be even more alienating for me. I would be even less of a fucking person just a figment on a screen.

My life is wildly out of my control right now. I can’t even seriously future trip as a hobby because I don’t know when the fucking UK government will finish our paperwork. We are picking this?

Yup. Better than Gunlandia.

I will take every piece of stress dealing with the NHS and the police and the courts and the cultural mismatch and low-key ostracism because I never have to worry about a cop pointing a gun at one of my children. I’ll take it. Most of my ancestors left this island (or the big one right next to us) almost 400 years ago. Yeah, there’s going to be some friction on reentry. I don’t resent that.

Noah is also unemployed for potentially the entire foreseeable future. It’s coming with a massive drop from where we had planned retirement income because otherwise all of the choices suck. I’d rather have his time than more money.

Yeah. Even though I had my door locked earlier tonight because I was not going to fucking talk to him right now. I feel like I want to kick him in the face and tell him to stop sniveling and get his fucking shit together. It is not your turn to fucking melt down right now and you are being a selfish dickhead. It can be your turn for the next 11 years, buddy. Knock it off until the trial. I guess you are right that it means you should just stop fucking talking for a while.

I just realised why I don’t like playing games. I don’t particularly enjoy feeling like a loser and I don’t have the desire to prove I can beat people. There is nothing for me in the process but bad feelings. I play because other people want me to. I never play enough to get very good.

Surviving rape never stops. The crazy shit I do that seems so inexplicable is maybe about my dad or Paul or Jeremy or Michael or Kevin and whatever the rest of those bitches names are. Fuck those guys. Fuck all of them. Every last fucking one. Right now I can’t remember the exact number and I really don’t want to try hard to figure it out. I think that would be really bad for me right now. I’m really glad I can’t think at all. Yay not eating or drinking.

The weekend that my rapist was arrested I played the song You Should Be Sad several hundred times. Yeah. That was fucking trippy to find out in the rear view mirror. I had no idea it was happening then. This song is going to loom large in my memory of this experience.

I think I am always going to be trying to survive all this. It’s going to be hard forever. I have a lot of physical pain that I can’t make go away with all the good food and exercise in the world. I am struggling on every level right now.

The most life affirming thing would be to throw myself on the net I have created. Instead I hide and scream and rock and cry. I can do very little right enough to trust that I am not going to get in trouble for it. Hell, an awful lot of this post feels like I am skirting the line of “don’t write about it”.

Wait for the trial to write. Wait for the trial to qualify for EMDR.

It’s like fucking no one wants me to survive.

I know you do. You don’t need to say it. Take it as read. I know. That’s not the point. I’m not whining about my friends doing an insufficient amount of reaching out. I’ve had more contact from old friends since I deactivated than I have in a long time all at once. I am not responding much. I can’t.

All I contain is poison. Am I even surviving? Traci said any amount of harm reduction that allowed you to get to another day was good enough. Traci ODed on heroin after getting kicked out by her wife and losing custody of her son. Yeah. I’ve gotten advice from some wacky ass sources in my life.

I have stopped daydreaming about the trip with TB. It is seeming less like a good idea by the day. I am scared that being in a room with me will be bad for him. I am going to fuck him up because I am so fucked up. 70 days from tomorrow. I wonder how I will feel by then? Fuck.

It isn’t feeling like a life affirming activity. It is feeling like proof of why Noah doesn’t trust me and why he should never trust me.

Just stop, Krissy. Stop being so bad.

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?

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.

I need to change my mindset.

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“I’m not rejecting you” he said. Enh, it depends on your perspective. Are you rejecting an offer that would give you small pieces of what you want in exchange for not being willing to give up on finding the whole package? Yes, you are. It’s not a bad thing to do. I walked out on a partner when I was 23 because he didn’t want to be a parent and I did. I am not offended that I am being rejected but I am. It seems pretty logical to me, reasonable even. I just hope it works out how you want it to.

I feel rejected because I was offering a way that I would try to change myself to fit around someone in a way I usually won’t offer. I’m not a vanilla girl. Trying to figure out how I would exist in that kind of long-term relationship is quite an interesting mental exercise but it doesn’t matter. It’s not going to happen.

I feel bad because I am probably not going to be open to that kind of option in the future. I think that he thinks I will kind of wait around to be a Plan B if he fails to get what he wants in the next 10 years. I won’t. That would destroy my self esteem and I am not going to do or be that for anyone. Fuck no. I am not a fucking option you can pick up and set down when you feel like it. I am not a fucking doll. I am not the sort to wait and pine.

I will never stop loving him. I have loved him for most of my life and that won’t change. I have *intense* love for my friends. I will jump through flaming hoops to support my friends. I am devoted and adoring and full of encouragement. The thing is, I put most of me in a box in order to be respectful to my friends. I am so much and I don’t want to be inappropriate or overwhelm people. I leave most of me in a box and only offer a very small portion to each friend. I support this partition by not talking to people all that often. When I talk to someone too often I start wanting and needing them to accept more of me. My friends are friends instead of partners because more of me is not welcome in that relationship.

I’m not complaining. I’m observing. This is part of why I will sort of disappear from the Scottish social scene for a bit. I brought too much of myself in June and July and now I feel like I want and need to be accepted more fully as myself and that is not actually on offer. I am not going to reach a deep and meaningful level with most people here and it’s going to go quite poorly if I try. I don’t have the ability to absorb that level of failure over and over without flinching and I can’t flinch right now. I can’t look weak because that is when people attack the hardest.

I’m really scared and I feel desperately insecure. In a way this summer has been quite an adventure through what Noah and I moving back towards being polyamorous might bring up. Travel Boyfriend is a dear friend who entertained the idea of a walk on the wild side before figuring out it isn’t for him. Bad Timing is a selfish jerk who did not care that he was putting me in a bad position where my life would incur harm. I feel like acknowledging these extreme differences of what dating might bring up is important.

Noah and I are continuing to talk and negotiate because this is going to be a long and slow process for us. Luckily we are both starting from a truly advantageous position: we are wildly compatible and our relationship is really fun. It means that when considering the possibility of dating someone else we have to pass up on time together for it. That means the person has to be really special and not many people are going to land in that zone for us. We are intense weirdos and we freak out most people–that’s step 1. Neither of us can date someone who acts in destructive ways towards our marriage–that’s step 2. That’s not ok. If we tell someone about a relationship boundary and they are disrespectful that needs to be an immediate no. My life is a very carefully constructed creation and I’m not blowing it up for anyone.

I’m not confident that I will be as open to someone else as I was with TB. He coasted through showing up with a lot of history. He didn’t have to actively earn trust. He started out fully trusted and could only lose trust from there. That was maybe not fair? I’m not sure. It’s definitely not my default approach to new people. Usually people earn trust in painstaking increments. I suppose TB did, but he did it while running in the background and I wasn’t expecting it or demanding it of him.

Noah and I are talking very frankly about the fact that I shouldn’t have someone be more than a friend unless they have the capacity to be obsessed with me the way I need people to be.

A friend recently broke up with a partner because she felt like she was being used like a fleshlight. He said, “You feel better than a fleshlight.” He thought it was a compliment.

I live with someone who thinks my existence is magical and sparkly and worth devoting his entire life to supporting. Why in the fuck should I devote a lot of time to someone who doesn’t think about me much and who doesn’t care about me and my story and my skills and my life? That sounds pretty stupid to me.

I am not a person with whom one passes time.

Either you are devoted to me like your life depends on it or we are just friends who spend time together once in a while. I have traditionally enjoyed having sex with friends; I see nothing wrong with it. Not everyone I have sex with becomes a boy/girl/theyfriend. I have expectations of people I date. I don’t have many expectations of my friends. I take people as they are and I don’t spend a lot of time requiring that they care about me intensely. I accept the relationship they offer. I rarely ask for more.

I go out in to the world and I exist loudly and I see who reaches out to me. That’s how I find friends. I love my friends. My friends are people who appreciate me and love me very deeply. They carry me through life on a wave of devotion. The thing is, I have to accept that each person will give what they have to spare when they have anything going spare. It has to be the aggregate that carries me forward because I cannot depend on a single friend to be there to catch me. I have to just hope someone shows up. I get lucky a lot.

Jenny is amazing.

A lot of my friends are amazing. I have been caught and then passed hand to hand over and over. I trust that I will figure out how to build it again, it just takes time. It takes time and vulnerability and right now I don’t feel like I have a lot of resiliency to offer. I’m really scared and I’m really sad.

I have good reasons for both feelings. I am also full of joy. I am really and truly living the life I set out to live.

The funny thing about not gardening almost at all this year: literally my point is that I want to build a regenerating food forest that will thrive with neglect. I am trying to build something self reinforcing. In a way taking a year off is a great idea because I see more of what is trying to happen without my interference. That’s an important lesson.

Things with the kids are at a better place than they have been for a while, it’s super nice.

I can’t figure out if I’m being unreasonable with myself about how I’m dealing with the sexual assault trial. I want to stop feeling active anxiety in my body. I feel like I’m simmering in a low level panic attack a lot of the time right now. It is a lot of why I am consciously choosing to be anhedonic most of the time because it is that or feel too much of everything and be overly volatile and inappropriate. I need to be chill and calm and gentle and patient. Do you know what is hard to do when you feel existential dread and terror? Be chill and calm and gentle and patient.

It’s hard to learn when your brain is exploding with fear and anger. It’s interesting feeling this now after so many years of having my PTSD symptoms under control.

And I can’t exercise until October because of surgery recovery. Woo. Awesome to have all these feelings and nowhere to put them. Noah takes as much as he can. I write the ones I can. There’s still a lot left.

One of the ways I manage my expectations of friends is to not talk to them very often and always show up and act like no time at all has passed. I don’t bring a lot of my burdens to the relationship. I usually literally monitor time and make sure I don’t talk more than 50% and I usually try hard to not even get to filling half the time. I know other people need a place to express themselves and they don’t write. I do. I leave the pieces of myself on the internet that I wish I had enough intimacy in my life to share with real people face to face but that isn’t a reality in my life. It never has been. I think that is part of why I have such intense need to write. If I plop pieces of myself on the internet then no one can say I “forced” them to listen to me talk.

The difference between trauma dumping and being a writer is: you are not forced to read/listen to any of this. If you decide to spend your time reading what someone has to say about trauma that’s on you, buddy. That’s consent, which makes it not trauma dumping by definition.

I’ve been feeling really ashamed to write about myself publicly since I moved. I have a lot of weird sex stuff in my life. I have traditionally written it down because I’m trying to figure out how to practice harm reduction in my life. I think that is causing me harm. It is going to be far more scandalous here than it was in California.

Other folks would tell me to just be anonymous. No. That is acting like I have something to be ashamed of. It is acting like I am committing a sin. I’m weird but I’m not evil. I’m not doing anything that is wrong. A lot of it is non-standard and broadly disapproved of, maybe even for good reasons. Every rule has exceptions. I have been exceptional all my life. I don’t plan to change.

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Tag Archives: mood tracking

I’m told that the obsessive self reflection at the end of the year is very American.

Finding my way back to me

I started doing this so long ago

I don’t know where this will go

30 days out

Today is the first day of the rest of my life

I feel awful.

Too many feelings.

You are on your own, kid

This is going to hurt for such a long time.

Yesterday wasn’t great and today is waking up harder

Don’t make changes when things are bad.

Thank cheese for a good day

I fired my counselor today

Surviving rape

It’s weird

Harsh

The NHS is going to be a mixed bag for me

Social anxiety at 11.

I need to change my mindset.