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Tactical errors, failures, and belonging

The younger kids and I tried to finish The Great Glen Way over the weekend. We are not managing. Both my feet and Shortie’s feet were A) not properly conditioned for this much exercise and B) improperly shod in shoes that did little to hold out the wet. We could not finish walking 29 miles in wet socks. So we bugged out and came home again. This is the end of the world but we had to cancel hotel reservations at the last second and I’m out a few hundred pounds. I feel upset about wasting the money. (It won’t cause a hardship but I will have less to spend on fun for the rest of the year.) I feel upset about not properly training. (I have been so tired I couldn’t demand that everyone prep with me.) I feel upset that when I asked for help from a pal the response was, “I knew this would happen.” I feel like I am going to spend the rest of my life failing at everything I try.

The upside was that the kids and I had a lot of fun together. We bond really well when we are being active outside. That’s really lovely. I appreciate how much MC still likes hanging out with me. They are going through a lot lately. They are nearly 16 and they are hurting pretty badly about the fact that they have not managed to make any close friends while living here. There was a boy they chased hard for a few years but eventually his complete lack of reciprocation was a turn off. They need friends and no one in this town seems to have any interest in spending time with them one on one. I can understand why that is making them feel so depressed and desolate. The other day we were talking about their despair and I said I hoped they know that I always love and want them. They gave me a long, level stare. “Mom, I know you want me and you love me. I also inherited my dad’s overwhelming anxiety that no one can really accept me and there is the rest of the whole damn world that is treating me like shit. It’s hard.” They have so much wisdom. It broke my heart. I have tried really hard to make up for the rest of the world but they are right–I can’t. I am just their mom. That’s all I have to offer. I can’t also be their peer. I’ve been super good about making that clear all their life.

Shortie and I need proper waterproof shoes and then we need to break them in and then we need to try again. One of these days we will do the whole trail again in one go. We can train and get to that point. I’m not sure which year it’ll happen in, but it will be great when it happens. In the meantime both kids are excited about the possibility of going camping with Gentleman and doing day hikes to build towards that. They like his company.

I think it was a bit of a tactical error moving to an island where the national pastime is taking the piss. Gentleman doesn’t mean to hurt my feelings. Logically I can tell that he is being playful in his way. The trouble is, I’m still me. I have always been painfully earnest and credulous and gullible. It’s connected in big ways to moving so much as a kid. I went from one school and culture and home life to another and people would be sarcastic about me not already getting how things are as if their way of being is the singular experience people have. It took a lot of testing and experts to convince me that I was smart at all. Eventually I developed a strained rigid kind of self esteem around my intelligence but mostly I feel stupid a lot. I miss details. I fail to finish things. I misunderstand how much preparation is necessary for things. I believe people when they say things to me and when it turns out they were “playing” I feel like a stupid piece of shit again.

I came home yesterday feeling really on the edge of losing it because I failed. It was hard that my ride said plainly that my failure was expected. That cut to the heart for me.

This is when I miss Noah super hard. Even when my failures were kind of predictable he was always surprised. He thought I was overwhelmingly competent. He didn’t tease me because he didn’t want to make me feel stupid. He wanted me to feel smart. He believed I was one of the smartest people he ever met and he wanted to keep me on a high pedestal, he never wanted to knock me down pegs. He was so careful not to be sarcastic with me unless he used a silly ostentatious voice. As a family we have developed specific verbal habits around only using sarcasm in an over the top distinguishable voice. We have an environment in our house where intensely literal autistics are set up for success when it comes to understanding verbal playfulness. My children chorus delightedly “That’s your sarcastic voice!” There is no ambiguity between our normal speech and our sarcastic speech. We might as well be turning on a bright blinking neon light every time.

I like my boyfriend. I’m not trying to be nasty about him at all. He has a super intense and dark deadpan sarcasm as his natural approach to surviving a life that hasn’t been full of fun and ease. Even when he’s being cheerful and upbeat there’s still a lot of sarcasm and insincere statements. I am struggling with it a lot in general. Yesterday I lost it and ugly cried for a really long time. I had invited him over hoping to get a bit high and a little tipsy and then have fun exploratory sex to distract me from feeling like a failure. Then he came over and made a series of small, individually insignificant sarcastic statements. By like the 5th one I was done.

Reader, no fun sex happened. I couldn’t even cuddle he spent the night in my bed. I was pulled into myself hard. I feel bad for it. I wasn’t doing it to punish him. I can’t reach out when I feel like this. I feel stupid. I feel worthless. I feel unworthy of kindness or understanding. I feel alienated from connection. I feel othered and unwanted. In local parlance I feel like a daftie. I want to stare at the floor and not engage in conversation because I’m going to be too stupid to follow it anyway. I definitely don’t want to increase my offer of vulnerability. I feel kicked in a way that I want to curl around myself and protect my sensitive bits. I feel like I am never going to have a relationship where someone thinks I’m smart again.

It was a big part of my relationship with Noah that a lot of the permission he gave me to have control and be an authority was based on my supposed towering intellect and ability to know the right things.

Now I feel like a fucking moron who can’t get anything right. I keep running into all the ways that Noah smoothed out the edges of my diagnosed disabilities and made me superhuman.

I know that Gentleman had no intention to make me feel bad. I am sorry that I am reacting like this. It doesn’t seem fair to him to have to deal with my over the top hours of sobbing over stupid small sarcastic statements. He wasn’t trying to be mean. I’m ridiculous. And also I’m up to maybe hour three of crying in the last 13 hours. It’s not his fault that I am such a broken piece of shit. He should be allowed to relax and play in his relationship.

It’s not his fault that I am a fucking retard who breaks down crying at the drop of a hat. I have to admit that it’s a bit nice this morning that he is still asleep and I can scream/cry and walk around flapping without him seeing. I don’t like demonstrating this behaviour. I don’t like being visible as a pathetic baby who still feels like I will never be loved or appreciated.

I have mixed feelings about having my kids these days. I feel a lot of guilt for how bad ECs health is. I gave him these problems. I am very conscious that if Noah hadn’t stepped forward to offer me my dreams on a platter I probably would have suicided. Maybe that would have been better for all concerned. He promised he would let me die first so that I didn’t have to be alone and unsupported any more. But he fucking left me. Now I get to spend the rest of my life feeling stupid and unwanted even when people like me fine. I can’t read the signals. Being kind to me takes too much effort. I can’t expect people to bother. I have to take what I get and deal with it.

Well hey, at least I get to have a whole separate building in which I can scream and cry and rant? That’s lucky at least. Thank you, Noah.

I did try to have a conversation with Gentleman in between sobbing bursts. He didn’t mean to make me feel bad. I know that. I feel like my reaction is so far out of proportion that I can’t justify it at all. He wasn’t trying to make me feel sad. I’m over reacting. I am the problem. I should learn how to take a joke.

I’m almost 45. I kind of think the ship has sailed on me getting over being gullible. Instead I choose being alone a lot. That is how I can make sure I don’t have to take jokes. I miss being married to someone who believed I have a tenuous grasp on staying attached to life. I miss the ways that Noah bent over backwards to make me feel seen and important. I don’t think I will have much of that going forward. I think most of my future is going to involve a lot of sneaking off to cry in private because I opted in to a culture where making someone like me the butt of the joke is most people’s reason for living. This is my future now. I miss Noah. I miss the way we soothed each other’s anxiety. I miss being known. I miss having someone believe in me obsessively. I miss having my house be a place where no one said things to make me feel stupid. My home was in Noah’s arms and he thought I was a fucking genius.

Now I’m just a fucking daftie.

“That’s not poly, it’s sequential monogamy”

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So here’s the thing. Poly doesn’t mean that you are fucking multiple people every day. It doesn’t mean that you decide “I have 15 hours to spend with people I’m fucking so I will give 7.5 hours to Person A and I will give 7.5 hours to Person B.” Well, I guess someone could do it that way if they really want to. It would be highly unusual though. We aren’t Mormons with sister-wives fighting over a shared husband.

Particularly I am in favour of the flavour of polyamory that is referred to as Relationship Anarchy. What it means is that each relationship has the ability to filter into my life as far as is fitting for that relationship. It means I take my non-sexual relationships as seriously as I take dating. I will pick platonic friends over lovers to share key moments of my life because they are the ones I want to be in that moment with.

I’ve spent a lot of my life deferring joy. “I will be able to go do a fun thing in 6 months and that will let me eat a shit sandwich every day between now and then,” I was negotiating for poly with Noah before he died. I was negotiating for being able to be allowed to pursue someone in ten years–now 8 years away. I was looking for the ability to upset the apple cart a lot when I have my last quasi-adult in the house. That was when I thought I’d be able to seriously go nuts having fun playing with lots of people. I didn’t think it would happen before then.

As I look at my life right now I am fairly convinced that timeline is still going to be a big deal. That’s when my kids start pulling away really hard. That’s when they want only a few hours a week of intense time with me. I won’t have an empty nest (I’m not sure if that will ever happen) but my time will be my own. That’s when I think I’ll be able to escalate seeing new people a lot.

Before then every change in my life is going to happen at a glacial pace. We have a really good thing going in our house. We like each other tremendously and we have a fairly well oiled machine.

We have our ways of coping. Like, MC started out bitching massively about how they aren’t “allowed to have boundaries” and then we talked a lot about the difference between a boundary and having control over other people. In the end there is a ban on anyone walking into the kitchen between 10pm and 12am. That’s when they want to be cleaning and they can’t cope with people being in there while they clean. I have to walk through the apartment patio door and go through the hallway to go between the studio and my bedroom instead of taking the straight path. When they want to do a cooking project in the middle of the day they will use the apartment kitchen and no one is allowed to enter the room. I feel so much relief in my heart that we have enough privilege to have these things be possible. This house is a really good set up for us given our challenges around interruptions and noise. We have ways to adapt the space so we are all capable of sharing our best selves.

That’s something I can work with. No one is allowed to be in the room when I assemble Ikea furniture for the same reason. I will scream. I will yell profanities. I will be entirely out of chill. I can’t control it. I can keep people away from it. MC has lived with me all their life. Sometimes when they are working they are letting out all their ambient frustration. It’s cathartic for us. When we can’t verbally express love to each other (because we are having Big Feelings) we can know that we are showing through work a demonstration of taking care of each other because we love each other. We accept that we are all people who have to go off and have our tantrums. We don’t mean anything by them. We don’t want anything to change. We don’t want people to walk on egg shells. We don’t want to upset anyone. We need to let big feelings out of our bodies. We have found ways that work well for us–as long as people stay the heck out of the room. If you come into the room when we are storming you aren’t a victim you are a volunteer. You were warned.

We always give warnings about this. We know it is happening. If a stranger walks by we can break character and apologise profusely for our manner of dealing with frustration–we thought we were alone.

If someone cannot see the benefit of something we do that’s fine. I assume most people think we are crazy. It’s going to go rough if instead of asking questions with curiosity you attack and denigrate us. We don’t respond to that. All of us can fight but we work really at making sure we don’t do that within our house any more than necessary. We have very passionate discussions and arguments at times. If someone is about too go far and say stuff that might have consequences any one of us will call a time out so that we can retreat and clear our thoughts and feel our feelings before we come back and try it again. We all know how to watch for signs of someone is about to cross a line because they are too upset. I love my housemates so much. I love the way we have decided together how we want to feel in this set of relationships. I love that we all feel we have the right to be demanding because we know people will compromise to the degree we are able. We won’t get everything we ask for. That makes it safe to ask for the stuff that is hard to ask for. Sometimes we get it because it turns out we are not able to evaluate what is easy or hard to give for someone else.

I was thinking about this last night as I was going to sleep. People are only compatible with my life if they are deeply curious as a reflex. If someone is instantly judgy I don’t have the time or energy to deal with the fall out of that. I cannot have patience for someone projecting onto me and assuming the worst. Naw. If you don’t see my desire to be there as evidence of my interest then I should walk on. I can have patience for all the respectful questions in the world when I’m in a room with you. I can’t answer pages of questions for you in writing. Mostly because my hands hurt. Also because I don’t have time. Also because I’ve already answered that and 9,127 other questions in the Archive. Go spelunking by topic in the tag list over to the right side of your screen.

My friend who is going to help with catching up old entries has had a few things come up but eventually she will get started. I’m looking forward to that. I have lots of patience for “You can earn money whenever you can squeeze it in.” She has a busy life. She will do a few hours of this when she needs a bit of extra cash. Happy to be a steady side gig for a couple of months/years/however long it takes.

I decided to ask her for help because she was already the local friend who asks me the most invasively insightful questions about myself. She’s really intelligent and keen on what I think about social dynamics. We have amazing conversations. She tells me equally intense stories about herself. We’ve been chatting for years now and we see each other when she comes to town.

I truly am finding my people in Scotland. I don’t think I will ever have a network like I had in the US. I don’t have enough spare time to build the relationships. I keep trying though.

I will keep trying because I am poly. Being poly doesn’t mean I will be fucking everyone I have an intense relationship with. I fall in love with people and they filter into my life to the degree that is suitable. One of the five folks I think of as my Kids around here comes over the most and helps me the most. He is filtering into my life to the level that is right for him and the other Kids see me in the ways that are right for them. I don’t duplicate time or ways of communicating. I’m not weighing and measuring things so everyone gets their “fair” share of me. Everyone gets what feels like a stable level between us.

The first year of someone filtering in is slow on purpose. I used to be a very hasty person. I made big commitments and then 3 months later the relationship fizzled out. Of people I have gone on a first date with 91% end in the first 3 months, 4% make it to 9 months/1 year, and 5% make it past 2 years. If there is too much intensity in the first few months it can burn out the relationship. Those are counting all the friendships that involve sex. If you look at people with whom I was seriously trying for a Relationship instead of a friendship + whatever it’s only 3 people who have ever made it to 2 years or longer. I see no good to making big changes or promises early on. Most people won’t be able to handle putting up with me.

I won’t be having an intense amount of sex with new people any year soon. I can’t see a way for that to happen. I’d have to feel safe and I’m not sure I have it in me right now. I feel so fragile. I feel so scared of getting hurt in a way that would make me a bad mother.

The fact that I’m not rushing into intensity with a new person is a conscious choice. When I’m in a really bad mood and I think I won’t be able to keep my tone of voice nice I tell Gentleman not to come over. I am not stress testing this relationship. I am terrified of the very idea of that. No. He can help me with tasks that I can do in a good mood. I’m still keeping my awful side away from him because I don’t want it to be his problem. Noah got used to ignoring stuff I said on bad days because I was reacting from pain and stress. He said that on those days I admitted to problems I wouldn’t admit any other day so he paid closer attention to what I said then compared to every other day. The stuff I can easily and casually complain about is not what is making my heart bleed.

That is part of what I don’t want to have with anyone anymore. That is going to be a major barrier to intimacy. This is a place where I am broken right now. I don’t want to hurt people like that. I want to be more gentle than that. I can’t always be a nice or gentle person though. It’s part of why I like being alone so much. Then I’m not hurting people by existing.

I wish I liked me more. I wish I didn’t feel like the problem. I wish I wanted less. I wish I had less to do. I am drowning in paperwork and phone calls and responding to people I really have to respond to or there are legal consequences. The emails that get sifted out for immediate response before my brain stops being able to focus as I look down the rest of the list. How to do this triage. I don’t know. I need less on my to do list.

I really appreciate the friend who takes Shortie out for a few hours on Monday so I can work without interruption. I get more done in those 5 hours than I do in three weeks of constant presence. I know because I just went more than 3 weeks without the respite and my to do list is still very long. Maybe I’ll be able to get it all finished next Monday.

Why don’t I write more fun emails? I am being selfish and cruel and unkind. I am abandoning people. Yes. Clearly. My friends all hate me because I don’t write them enough emails. Right. Sure. Ok, turns out I am actually quite salty about that. I want to not be thinking about this anymore. It was an attack on a core wounding. Is my behaviour so poor that people can’t love me?

I am torn between feeling a wild amount of justification and security in how I live my life and this pernicious anxiety that people are going to have a lot of bad things to say about me. They aren’t going to like my results. I am not creating children with a lust to work themselves to death earning money. I am failing at capitalism. Instead I am having them read small business books about how to market and sell things they make because they are crafty little fuckers. An awful lot of the income around here comes from tourists. If we have to put up with the fuckers making the roads clogged, at least they can give back more money.

I did not raise people to succeed in big tech or high finance. I didn’t want to. I know people in those worlds and they are miserable motherfuckers. I raised people to feel like they have a lot of ability to learn new things and give back to their community. I don’t know where they will go with it. They get to choose their own adventure. Their stories aren’t really about me. I’m the spawn point. I’m part of the origin story. That’s complicated.

It’s weird hearing EC describe his childhood in stories. He gets feedback on body language. People ask him if he was abused a fair bit. He says he wasn’t but both of his parents were and he learned how to exist in the world watching us. Sometimes I wonder though. There were times I crossed lines. It happened way more often in the beginning. I haven’t been long term or large scale abusive. I think there have been moments I crossed lines. Not enough that he feels the need to hold me accountable for them. We’ll see if that evaluation changes over time.

I always tell my kids to leave space in their mind where they know that everyone opinion they currently hold very strongly might change. That doesn’t mean they were wrong in this moment. It means they learn new things and develop new context.

I have a lot of abandonment issues. No one is going to enter my life quickly. It’s going to take a long time before I build intense trust with anyone. I’ll keep trying though. You never know when serendipity will arrive. I simply sigh and nod knowing that I have an over 90% chance of striking out.

I fully understand that the level of harm I have experienced wasn’t intended. I know that. I’m not angry at her. I am processing what happened in my body when that thoughtless bit of communication was lobbed my way. It’s fine. I won’t be butthurt forever.

A long time ago a wonderful sex worker told me that I couldn’t be a sex worker because I took myself too seriously and I couldn’t laugh at myself. I still think she is right. I am not cut out to be in that casual of a role.

I believe that if one wants to be a slut then one must get over being butthurt at fast as possible. Not every swing connects with the ball. It is sad. Keep moving. The fact that I do not have another partner equally in a place in my life as Gentleman is not “proof I’m not really poly”. That is reductionist. I am going to hunting events. I am meeting people. I am working on putting tiny drops of comfort into buckets with new people. I am trying to build a community of people I can feel safe connecting with like that. I think it’s going to take me a while. I need more meat life time. I need to feel in my bones that I am not ever disappointing Noah again because he is gone.

I think he really believed that he had the strength of will to ensure he lived longer than me so that I would not suffer from the loss of the things he took away. He thought he would always be here to meet my needs.

Even when people are saying things they believe that doesn’t mean I can lean in to sharing that belief. The more intensely someone promises “forever” in the first couple of dates the more likely they are to flounce away when I don’t match the pretty picture in their head. I am a deeply flawed motherfucker. I am weak. I am over-committed. I have only tiny shards to share. If that shard is good enough then maybe we can have some fun. If it is not, no hard feelings. I know that what I have to share is not very big. It’s ok if it isn’t enough for you.

I wish you happy hunting. May you find what you seek. May the Slut Gods smile upon us all.

Good information to have, and why dating me is not a lot of fun.

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Shortie was not grounded for 4 days. Only 4 days. Then she took a packet of ramen noodles and a couple of packets of instant oatmeal and decorated the lounge. Sigh. I was talking to her about this today and she said that she feels like she got grounded on purpose. Even though it sucks to be limited in what she is allowed to do, I stay within a meter of her the whole dang day. She wants that kind of contact with me so much that being grounded is better than not being grounded.

You know what? I can work with that. If she is aware that this acting out is a cry for attention then I can handle that. I’m proud of her. That’s intense emotional work for an 8 year old.

Our life is hard because she used to spend 4-6 hours a day intensely interacting with Noah and now the other three of us are having trouble with increasing our hours. I have her in activities! Don’t tell me to add more fucking activities, ok? I am ferrying her around to as much stuff as my crappy crippled body can manage. I have no ability to do more. Would it be better for her to go to school? It would be if A) the kids wouldn’t beat her and if B) the school didn’t punish her for getting beaten and reporting it. We’ve tried school here with the older kids. I don’t need to put my last kid through that delightful formative experience.

Instead she has asked to be stapled to my butt going forward. She doesn’t want to be grounded but she doesn’t completely want to be not-grounded either. She wants more attention and connection and being in the same room even when that is slightly annoying. Ok. I will find a way to manage this even though it is hard.

I am reflecting a lot on the ways in which my most recent attempt to onboard a new person failed. I assume that a huge part of the failure is on me. What can I control next time to make things go better? I can’t control everything.

It is going to be hard for people that I genuinely need to have 12 months of building a relationship with you before you get to integrate with my life. I know that other people want that stuff to happen faster and I really don’t give a shit. If you aren’t willing to invest a year into getting to know me one on one then I don’t think you have the patience or ability to integrate with my life. Dealing with my actual children is far more difficult than dealing with a courting period. I promise. My children are not easy people to build a relationship with but we are likely to remain closer than average as time goes on. My 18 year old is not in a hurry to move out. He likes our life. He wants to keep doing this with us. He had about two weeks when he was 14 where he tearfully talked about “Maybe I will move out when I am 16 since YOU DON’T LIKE ME ANYWAY.” Noah and I spent a lot of time very submissively talking about how much we liked him and we didn’t want him to go and that passed quickly. Otherwise he is as convinced at 18 as he was at 8 that he is probably going to live with me forever, or at worst move out in his 30’s. My 15 year old kid is somewhat interested in pursuing jobs that travel and using our house as a home base to come back to. They want to explore but they don’t want to go.

Dating me means understanding how polysaturated I am from the beginning. My children occupy a huge piece of my heart and mind. They are my vocational focus for this life. They are my reason for staying alive. Having a happy family is the single thing I care about most in this life. Noah and I both sacrificed a lot to build this. And we are very happy together. My kids think I’m amazing. I think my kids are amazing. We are all very defensive of each other. We understand that we are all intense, challenging humans and not everyone is going to respond well to us. None of us are willing to listen to people badmouth the folk in our family. If you try you quickly get an icy reception. My son hates a few people in town for talking about how domineering I am. I think my earnestness can easily sound domineering and I can’t appeal to everyone. It’s not a big deal to me. He is fucking furious that they stated those opinions out loud. It’s fine to have them, but sharing them at a group social event went over his line. Ok.

We are a unit. We are a pod. We come as a package deal in a way I have never experienced as a person dating. I think it must be intimidating as hell to try to find a place in our tight knit little crew. You have to come in with curiosity, an open heart, and very few demands. You can’t date me if you are not exceedingly patient. I am difficult and my kids are difficult and combined we are orders of magnitude more difficult than someone else would be.

When I was young I believed people who instantly told me they loved me and would be there for me “forever”. I now know that when people say that in the first few weeks it is wise to carefully not invest too much in the dynamic because it probably isn’t going to last. Anyone who instantly professes how much they will do for me is going to have expectations I can’t meet. This happens over and over and over again. They aren’t in love with me. They are in love with an uncomplicated, undemanding, totally unrelated to me projection they have made up.

I think my kids show a really extreme amount of maturity and wisdom when they say “Spend a year figuring out the relationship, then you can begin integration.”

Yes, I prefer talking into the void over sending anyone emails. Even though I don’t get comments. I wonder if you know how scathing you sounded when you asked me why I prefer this. I prefer this because then I don’t have to wonder if someone is going to respond in a positive way or a negative way. I don’t have to carefully anticipate what kind of topics this person can handle. I don’t have to try and proactively deal with insecurity. I am kind of brutal and harsh while I talk to myself. I try not to soften the edges much. I feel how I feel and I don’t need to apologise for it.

I will not consent to having a relationship where someone expects me to write a bunch of messages to them. I don’t want to. It hurts my hands. I don’t get as much out of it as you do. It drains me. It makes me feel like I can’t handle doing the things I’m supposed to be doing with my time.

Two years ago Noah and I were talking about poly. We were doing so because I was infatuated with a guy I’ve known since I was a teenager. We had a holiday together. On the other social media site I called him Travel Boyfriend. We never kissed or had sex but it was emotionally intense. Right before Noah died I decided it wasn’t a good thing to pursue and I ended the courtship.

With Travel Boyfriend, Pretty Lady, and Good Trouble (a random pick up from a swinger website), all of them were pushy about meeting my kids. They wanted to integrate faster than I was comfortable with. In all three cases pushiness about the kids was a big factor in why I ultimately broke it off. If you can’t respect that my kids asked for a year I don’t trust you to ever treat my kids with respect. I don’t believe you care about them as humans. You are thinking of them as pieces to move around the board to suit your whims. Every single one of them was pushy because “they wanted to help me”. It doesn’t help me to make me feel anxious and like people aren’t respecting boundaries. That’s a hindrance to good mental health. That isn’t help; that is interference.

My son made the comment that he doesn’t care how many people I go have relationships with, he cares that only people who have both staying power and respect get to come into our house.

Personally I think I need to make it much more clear way faster that if people want to read about me, the Archive exists. I will not be typing my history to people in emails. No. I don’t want to. I find it distressing. I will talk about stuff in a room with you but I won’t write it down for you in an email. I find that specific framing of inflicting my writing on an individual to be highly distressing. Part of how I make peace with writing things down is people have to opt in to reading it. Emailing people isn’t the same opt in experience.

It doesn’t have to be rational. It doesn’t have to be what would make other people comfortable. I’m not existing the way I have for over a quarter of a century because of you. I am like this because it works for me. If it doesn’t work for you that is completely ok. I won’t hate you because we aren’t compatible. I am not compatible with nearly everyone. I am compatible with very rare souls.

I am having a bit of a hard time here. I know a lot of people. I feel emotionally connected to 6, maybe 7 adults in this town if you squint and include EC in that total. That’s a low rate of connection vs how many I know for me. In the past I was used to feeling emotionally close to a much higher number of people. I can tell that I feel deeply bothered by my inability to spend the kind of time with people that would lead to such closeness.

I wanted it with Pretty Lady but I wanted to wait and develop it in the room and that made her feel abandoned and ignored. I feel so flat most of the time. I’m really struggling with the amount of cheer and patience my day job requires. I don’t have good cheer most of the time when I’m alone in a room. I just have apathy and ennui and burn out. Writing emails when I feel like this is fucking exhausting. It makes me feel like I’d rather carve on my legs with scalpel for entertainment.

That’s not a standard way for humans to feel. I’m the aberration. This being true about me is going to make me hard to date. I don’t have to want to make people feel bad to effectively do it.

I need to have relationships build in the room. I can’t have these long torrid email things these days. I genuinely can’t. I want to build stable interactions. I want to choose people over and over because being in a room with them is better than being in a room alone. The thing is, I really like being in a room alone. I am fucking awesome.

I want to date people. I want to have serious, long-term, interesting relationships with lots of room for growth. I’m willing to wait and be picky and see who comes along. I’m not in a rush. If someone is in a rush they are not for me. I’m not offended by that or upset. It is what it is. We all have to be free to go our own speed. I move at a glacial pace. I have to. I have a lot going on. I can’t inflict sudden drastic change on my life. Nothing is stable enough for that.

I keep feeling surprised that Gentleman keeps hanging on. I keep expecting him to get sick of my bullshit and stop coming over. Instead he leans in a little more. He waited 12 fucking months to meet my kids. He had to go through the process. No one else is going to be so fucking special they get to leap from the process. If you want to believe that you deserve better than to go through our process then you won’t fit with my family. Sorry.

My life has been full of people coming and going. It has hurt my kids. They have learned how to protect themselves from my endless searching for new connections. They know that most people flame out in the first year. Hell, most people flame out in the first three months. I have stats. Sometimes people make it to several years of friendship before things go south. I’ve had a few long term intense friendships end with fireworks. I try not to do that anymore. It hasn’t happened in a long time. I’m a lot more cautious about not stress testing relationships anymore. I keep my messy bits more private. Now that I don’t have Noah to talk to about any of it I don’t know that I will ever talk to anyone about my harshest pieces. I don’t think it will ever feel appropriate. I don’t think I will ever feel safe enough.

If you feel entitled to know stuff about me, you can read the Archive. Otherwise I’ll say what I say in the room and no you don’t get to be pissy about expecting me to write you emails. I can’t be doing that. I am not able. If you think you are more inconvenienced than I am by the ways I am disabled let me fucking set you straight.

I am grateful that Gentleman spent the night last night. I managed to get almost 10 hours of sleep. That’s a miracle. I’ve been struggling with insufficient sleep for weeks.

I feel deeply inadequate and unworthy of love today. Which is funny because I went to the park for a birthday party of a little person in our community. Many of the folks there like me just fine. We aren’t close friends but we are community and that’s great. We’ve been doing stuff together for years now. I behaved. I was good. I did what I was supposed to do. I interacted how I was supposed to.

I did it while feeling like I barely know these people and I’m scared of all the things I can’t/shouldn’t say to them. I did it while feeling physically weary to the point I needed to sit down almost the whole time I was there. I did it while feeling exhausted by the knowledge that I choose actively to live in this place as an alien invader and that’s complicated.

I got cursed out by some guy on the way home. He wishes all the fuckers like me would leave and not come back. I don’t look like a local. They can tell at a distance. Fair enough. In a field of gorse I sprout up like a redwood tree. I take up wayyy too much energetic space. This is true.

It is weird feeling exhausted by the strain of trying to integrate more fully into this life in town. I need to do more with my kids around people here and it sounds so terribly exhausting. People are so loud and pushy and difficult. Being out is hard and draining. It’s supposed to be “good for me” but it leaves me feeling wrecked.

I wish I felt less like an invasive species that no one ever wanted to have planted here.

Yes, I am this neurotic.

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Yesterday Gentleman and I were talking about how successful/not successful my dating has been since Noah died. Because my brain is genuinely not at the capacity it used to be I looked at my notes. I showed Gentleman my notes. It’s a really good thing I had positive things to say about him from the get-go because whoops there was my unvarnished opinion of him along with stuff about the other folks I’ve met/been on a date with over the past 16 months.

I keep notes because otherwise I would forget the real names/my blog nicknames. I worry a lot about all the things I am forgetting. My brain is truly not doing so great these days. I’m dropping a lot of important details and that’s kind of scary. I’ve met 15 people. I haven’t made the seks with them all. When I look at these notes what I see is the difference between me hunting now vs. how I hunted in my early 20’s. In my early 20’s I believed that anyone who put up with a date with me was entitled to sex. This round I slept with 9 out of the 15. For me that’s being pretty picky.

What I see when I look at this list is how often I am waving people off quickly when they make my stomach hurt. I’m 100% the sort who gets a stomach ache when I’m anxious. I ended things with men who made me feel unsafe. I am backing away from a woman when she steps too close to rocking the boat of my psychological safety.

I cannot overstate how proud I am of myself. I used to not think I deserved this kind of protection. I used to volunteer myself into all kinds of bad situations then I felt stuck because of a web of insecurity, lack of self worth, and the general impulse to have my life end as soon as possible.

I feel a little sad about it not working out with this woman but that’s how the cookie crumbles. I can’t be a good match with everyone. I write to keep myself company, to explore my brain, to sort my feelings, and because I find it fun. I am not great at sending emails. Apparently I feel significant hostility to the idea that I should duplicate all the explaining I do in my blog in individual emails. I am not going to reexplain myself at great length. If you want to know about me I have literal books on that topic. Expecting me to rewrite it for you means that you expect me to go through a lot of pain.

My hands burn all the time. I shouldn’t type anymore. I really should give it up. I want relationships that I build in the room. I am not interested in a long typing relationship back and forth anymore. They are depleting and exhausting. Frankly, insisting on me rewriting stories for you is not cool. You are saying that I deserve to be in pain because you are too lazy to go through tags on my blog to learn about me.

It’s funny feeling proud of myself for not putting up with entitlement. Looking over my notes makes me feel like I have come a long way. I don’t contort myself into painful shapes for other people now. I insist on taking up the space I need. If someone needs a lot of frequent contact I am a bad choice. If someone can handle intermittent reinforcement and time lapses maybe I can be fun for them.

They also have to be fun for me. They have to make me feel safe. If someone makes me feel unsafe I need to run. I can’t share any kind of intimacy with someone who will work actively to make me feel insecure. I can’t abide that now. I am really proud of myself. I’m not down in the dumps. I’m a bit sad. I was interested in that potential relationship. I entertained the idea of it for a long time. I was excited to find out what could grow there.

I can only grow a relationship inside a container where I feel secure at this point in my life. That’s growing up. That’s how I will make sure I can still parent. I can’t get too upset about failed attempts at dating. It’s life. I have to keep moving. I have to be of good cheer. This is my job. This is my choice. This is my vocation.

I like sex. I will keep pursuing it. I can’t be brought low by a failure in relationships. I have too much to do.

Fragments, shards, tools, and usefulness

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I am struggling right now. Writing this feels like an invitation to conflict but that’s not what I’m trying to do. I don’t have any intention of putting anyone down, making them feel bad, or blaming them for my current state. I’m probably going to have to negotiate some folks feeling bad anyway if I keep writing.

I love that people trust me to support them. It’s a big theme in my relationships, all of them. With adult peer friends, with Kids, with Elders, and with children I am usually someone that people come to when they have big feelings they need help understanding/sorting. I have no answers. I’m not going to tell you what to do or how to feel or how to fix your life. I’m not omniscient. What I can do is ask questions and share a different perspective. I like that I am good at this. I like that so many people trust me and love me in this way.

Also I have maintained the stability to be good at this over the last 20 years because Noah took care of my needs. He listened to me when I was dysregulated. He helped me tease apart where I was feeling bad about old stuff vs having a negative feeling about current actions. He helped me find my place in time. He could look at my face and have a good idea of about which age/trauma I was experiencing as an abreaction. He just knew.

Now I am helping other people untangle the threads of their lives. I feel ever more ensnarled in my own threads and incapable of pulling them apart. I need Noah. I will never have Noah again.

I talk about the hard parts of our marriage rather freely. My body is still ramping down from paying the costs of being his wife. I feel afraid to talk about the good. Thinking about how much I lost is much more painful. He was a very good husband. He was a flawed human being and he knew that meant he had to work on getting better all the time. That made me feel very safe. He was an asshole and I was an asshole and we wanted each other and it was ok that we weren’t perfect.

I am back in that place where I feel dirty and polluted and toxic for other humans. My only value is in being a tool to help. I need to do work or I don’t deserve any of the good parts of being in a relationship.

Yesterday I sat in my kitchen for 5 hours talking to a friend who is going through some stuff. It started to really kick off in their life before Noah died and they’ve been holding their breath and levitating, waiting until now to start feeling like they seriously need to change big parts of their life. They needed to talk it through with someone who isn’t going to think they are bad for having needs that their life isn’t currently meeting.

I am happy to be that for them. I really am.

Several Kids are going through rough stuff and they need to spend a lot of time processing. None of them have mothers they can really go to for processing and support. They have friends like me. Most friends aren’t like me.

My children know that they can come to me and say, “I need you to listen to me and support me like a therapist. I need you to be on my side and not advocate for or defend yourself.” It takes a few seconds for me to do the compartmentalisation necessary but I can do that for brief periods of time. I can’t live there but I can bring up a container where I am not for other people to visit when they need that from me.

Make the self into a vessel where the self is not.

I have not been able to have the rupture-repair conversations with folks from last year yet and it is eating at me. I feel ashamed. When I think about trying my insides explode with acid and pain.

I shouldn’t have approached Pretty Lady yet. I’m not ready. I am being avoidant in some shitty ways. She is in a great place in her life and she just got great news–a woman she is attracted to is also attracted to her. I am freaking out about my complete inability to close and do shit I want to do. I feel really sad that I have no container for this joy. I’m too busy feeling shame for betraying Noah. I’m too busy feeling like I am drowning in my day job. I’m too busy not being able to sort out getting my body to hurt less. I feel incapable of reducing pain at this point. It makes me feel scared and tense and angry. It reduces my capacity.

Rodent therapist says I am sitting in the intersection between resilience, tolerance, and capacity. I am not doing so great. My resilience feels almost nonexistent. My tolerance is not where I would like it to be. My capacity feels like it is nonexistent. All I have are knives.

The last few therapy sessions have involved a lot of time where my therapist is basically pleading with me to see that my life is very hard and I am genuinely dealing with more complicating factors than average people. I am not pathetic for struggling. Everyone would struggle with what I have going on. I am not a failure of a tool if I can’t work harder right now.

My inability to do more than I am doing is not proof that I am worthless. They would really like me to be able to hold on to this in my brain. Mostly I’m failing.

I can’t be there for everybody the way I wish I could. Failing to be there for people means they internalise that they aren’t worth having anyone be there for them. It is evidence that they are disposable, right?

If I can’t meet everyone’s needs why should they bother to have a relationship with me? I’m just going to disappoint them and fail them. Why bother?

I’m really not worth it. I have very little bandwidth going spare. My life is exhausting and depleting in ways I can barely wrap my brain around.

Years ago I was working with my then youngest child on anger management stuff. They are an apple that landed with their skin touching the trunk of the tree they fell from. I love them so much and I have tried hard to teach them all the stuff I was taught about how to manage living in a body that gets overwhelmed that easily. They asked, “Why is the answer to every problem ‘Get stronger’?”

I don’t know baby, but it is. That is the only thing I have seen in this life. Over and over it doesn’t matter how weak or incompetent I am. Sure, I’m going to fail a lot. I will also get back up and keep moving, working the whole time on getting stronger. I don’t know another way to experience being human.

“If you can’t look back on yourself 18 months ago and say ‘Wow I really sucked‘ you aren’t trying hard enough.”

I know, Noah, but 18 months ago I still had you. I don’t think I will ever really be able to look back on that time and think I sucked. I had you. I had a Daddy. I had a home. I was loved in this crazy, impossible, overwhelming, thoroughly engulfing way and I fucking loved it. I felt safe in my terrorised home. I felt abused, squashed, despised, and like I explosively needed to grow in ways he didn’t want to allow, sure. Mostly though, I felt loved and accepted. I knew that man was going to take care of me until one of us dropped dead.

Then he did drop dead.

I know other people love me. I am not trying to demean the gift of their love in any way. They are the flickering candles that light my path. My friends love me and carry me when I can not love myself. They keep me going.

Noah’s love wasn’t a flickering candle it was an explosive volcano that was going to permanently alter the landscape of everything he touched. I wanted him to burn me.

I feel so completely devastated that he isn’t my last rapist. I am so angry that a fucking loser stole that title from Noah. It breaks my heart. He wanted so badly to be that.

It was ok for Noah to break me. He always built me back better.

I don’t have that certainty in any other relationship and I shouldn’t look for it. I would hurt people and I don’t want to. I want to have relationships that are free from abuse moving forward and that’s going to be very hard given that I surround myself with people who are all suffering intensely from feeling abandoned and rejected as a core aspect of their selfhood. We are spiky folk.

What I offer is that I can sit with that pain and not be damaged by it. I can’t take it away. I can’t make you feel better. Your pain isn’t going to make my pain worse. My pain is about me and the journey I have been on. Well, sometimes your pain is going to make my pain worse. This is harshest when our Mother Wounds don’t align.

That potentially explosive conflict is a lot of why I am frozen when it comes to repairing some ruptures right now. Dancing around my Mother Wound is hard when I am feeling strong and stable. I am neither feeling strong nor stable. I feel weak. I feel pathetic. I feel incapable and sad and desolate. I feel like I got in over my head. I feel like I am failing at everything and there is no way to ever have anything be ok again without Noah.

Not everything was ok with Noah. There were big problems. Don’t bring reality into this relationship.

The ways I felt electrically uncomfortable with Noah were never going to fully go away. I felt a high level of nervous system activation around him. It felt comfortable. It felt normal. It felt like a shot of really strong espresso to keep me moving and energetic.

I don’t have that now. It’s weird. I have less nervous system activation than I’ve had basically ever in my life. I’m told this was supposed to be the goal or something? Why do I feel dead inside then? If this is the gold star point of all the work I did that strikes me as a problem.

I do have less nervous system activation. I feel locked into receive mode. I don’t have containers where it is safe to let out all of my crazy. I know people say they could handle more from me and it’s ok for me to talk too. I can’t. I can’t risk stress testing anyone or anything. I have to be in control of myself. I have to only bring out the tiniest of shards or I will hurt someone.

It’s going to be all my fault someone feels desolate and lonely and like there is no point in continuing to try to have relationships since everyone lets them down.

I have a lot of people who tell me that I am the safe person in their life for them to talk to. I am grateful every time. It is meaningful. I feel like something is broken in me that I don’t feel equally safe in these containers.

I felt safe in the container with Noah. I was allowed to be the most psycho extra bitch in the world and he thought I was fucking great. In tearing my soul out to splay it on his workbench like a butterfly he was examining he made me whole. The parts of me that he hated and he wanted to change were meticulously examined and understood. He took them apart down to the smallest molecules. He may have felt angry with me but he never felt repulsed. He was always drawn further in.

There has been a lot of scream/crying this week. My throat hurts. I’m getting that weird eye twitchy thing. I hate that.

I was disgusting and bad and a failure and he still loved me and wanted me. He would never have left me. Until he died suddenly in a freak way. It’s not fair. There is no fair. Someone wanted me. It was too good to be true.

He wasn’t even my Daddy for 18 years. That didn’t start until after I wrote the first book. I wrote that book 5 years in. He couldn’t be my Daddy until he saw the full context of how my father abused me. That’s objectively kind of fucked up. Also wonderful. He contorted himself as hard as he could to be the partner I needed. He put more pressure on himself to change than he did on me.

No one is perfect. No one is always good.

I don’t feel like I know how to be good enough for people going forward. A lot of how I was so good for Noah was because I was so intense and my nervous system was so activated. We matched. We spurred one another on. We combined into rocket fuel. We could try audacious things because when we fucked up the other cushioned the blow.

Noah was the person on this earth who thought it was worth night and day effort for the rest of his life to make sure I felt like someone wanted me enough that it didn’t matter if anyone else liked me. I could be bold. All the times I was rejected were tolerable because I could come home to this bubble, our whale pod of acceptance.

Now I don’t have that. I am trying desperately to create this feeling for other people. My source of it for myself is gone and I feel so very empty. How do I keep pouring water from my bucket when all that I have in there is sand. I need to water the souls of other people so they can grow. I need to live pretty much all the time in that container where I am not. It’s the only way to not be swamped by how much pain I am in.

It would be very hard to use text to talk when I am sobbing and screaming like this. I’m just saying.

Reading

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I need to feel in control of something. I need to feel like I can accomplish a thing. So I set myself the goal of 3 books per week for the year. I’m keeping up, barely, because I’m adding in graphic novels and YA fiction along with the harder books. At any moment in time I have 3-6 books on the go.

Right now my youngest is experiencing her second grounding in this lifetime. I know that grounding isn’t a consequence other people like. I know that the way I do it feels “unfair” to other people when I describe it. I also know that we lead a life outside the norm and we have to be able to work together. I don’t stonewall or act mean through a whole grounding but there is a massive cessation of the good parts of our life. It is a reminder that every action has a consequence. The older you get the higher the penalties get. This is a small taste of how awful things could be if you seriously broke laws as an adult.

Also, mostly, the kids are aware that I ground them only when I am starting to feel so furious that I am a potential danger to them. I ground so that they are not allowed to continue pushing me when I am on my last nerve. It is a safety measure as much as it is a punishment. We talk through the whole grounding about how my body activation is hard to reduce when it gets that high. I hate feeling like this. It’s way harder without Noah here. Luckily the big kids have always been so protective of their sister that I don’t worry about crossing lines the way I did with my oldest. No one was around to mediate my fury when he went through this stage. I have regrets about that.

He says that in the long run he is glad that he understands that he is as responsible for creating positive feedback loops as everyone else is.

I don’t hit my kids. Sometimes I will take away the extra joy that I usually provide so that they can experience what it is like when they actually have a terribly boring life. It’s a deprivation vacation so they can see how good they normally have it. I can live with this. I don’t believe that anyone should be so entitled they take their good stuff for granted.

That said, it’s hard passing the time in a grounding without doing shit to extend the grounding. I know this struggle. I’m inconsistent about interaction stuff during groundings. I spend as much time in the room with the grounded kid as I physically can stand without getting more frustrated. Now, with my baby, I’m paying the older kids for babysitting shifts of sitting with her. Mostly we don’t entertain/interact but we are a presence so she doesn’t actually feel abandoned (and so she doesn’t sneak off to get into trouble).

Yesterday I restarted the Circle of Magic series by Tamora Pierce. She’s one of my very favourite authors. I sat down and pulled my baby between my legs and put the book in front of her face. She read to me until her voice gave out. Then I read to her until my voice gave out. Then she had another turn. Then she wanted us to read silently while cuddling for another chapter. She is the best reader of all of my children. There’s no way in hell EC or MC could have read like this at 8 years old. They both struggled in different ways. EC is dyslexic. MC it is less clear to me exactly what is going on but reading was a slowly progressing thing. They were both very good readers by 11, it took them more time though.

I am in the middle of a biography of Terry Pratchett. It made me smile that he had to be bribed to read until he was 11 and then he took off like a rocket. I would have really enjoyed raising that man. He sounds a lot like my children.

YC is heading in the direction of being able to read like her father. That fills my heart with joy. She is good at reading out loud and she can do voices consistently. I’m not great at that. My voices kind of wander all over. Noah was amazing. He could have been a voice actor. YC has the same verve and toleration for strain on the throat. She did wear out yesterday but she went a long time. She read close to 50 pages. If she continues to do it the way Noah did she will have his ability to go 6 hours by the time she is grown. Seeing that is such a complicated thing. Parenting is magic because in each child I see shards of myself and shards of Noah and still they are completely and totally their own separate creature.

I see how YC is terribly vulnerable at this stage but I have a lot of hope for her. I’ve also reread Your 8 Year Old recently. I feel enormous pressure to get this year right. She needs me. She needs me to be delighted by her. She needs me to love her and hold her and help her see her own value. This is the exact time for this lesson. I have to do it now. This is when I must stick the landing. This is my last run through this process. My older children glow with love. I am going to give this to my baby even though her circumstances are very different.

She is still going to have a happy childhood. I will make sure of that. Yes, she has endured tragedy and loss and it will impact all of us forever. We are still together. We are still fortunate and blessed and lucky. We still have a safe life. We still have access to joy. We are still competent and strong and deeply aware that we have a lot to give on top of needing a lot of love and support.

I hate it when a kid is grounded. It makes my life suck. Nobody wants to have to deal with grounding in this house. No one. This is awful. Nevertheless I am teacher and mother and principal and authority. There are ways of being antisocial that can’t be tolerated. You have to care about the good of the group. If you don’t then you will be outside the benefits of the group. It’s never pleasant but it is part of life. It will be true forever. If you push people far enough they won’t come back.

Of course I will always come back. Don’t worry about that. I will. Other people won’t. You need to feel in your bones that there is a base level of decent behaviour everyone is required to exhibit. There is a social contract. It doesn’t matter if you are disabled or if it is harder for you than other people. No one cares. There is a bare minimum you have to hit. I am required to be the one who teaches this lesson as I am the one who elected to educate my child outside the normal routes. Other kids learn this through social ostracism at school. Frankly, it’s more emotionally damaging in the normal route.

My kids never worry about me failing to love them later. It’s not a question. They also learn “When mom says ‘No’ she means it and you’d better take it seriously.” I feel like this is a good life lesson. No one is beaten. No one is shamed. No one is made to feel less than. They simply experience what it is like to have less fun for a while.

Mostly our life is pretty darn fun.

Even within the less fun parameters I still want my children to experience cuddling and snuggles and love and adoration. Even when I’m willing to be an asshole and punish you because the alternative is you pushing me till I break and do something much more awful I still love you more than I love anything in the world. You are the reason I wake up every morning genuinely excited to say “I am so happy to see you again.” I mean it every day. That’s why I say it every day.

And now I have a baby who loves to read the way I love to read instead of children who read sometimes but mostly prefer other mediums of learning. I keep wondering who in this series will feel the most relatable to her. Clearly I am most like Tris and I am ok with that, even with the whole plant magic thing. My emotions are like the weather. They impact other people and I have to work hard at managing to let the full range happen without damage. Everyone needs all the feelings. I need all the feelings. I need to not create damage with all of the different ways I feel intense emotions.

Speaking of which, my stomach hurts. I was sick yesterday very early in the morning once and not since. I’m not sure if this is more digestive upset or if I’m simply anxious. I’m always anxious. I have control over so little. One thing I do have control over is reading all these books. I’d better get back to it.

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

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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.

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Tag Archives: mood tracking

Tactical errors, failures, and belonging

“That’s not poly, it’s sequential monogamy”

Yes, I am this neurotic.

Fragments, shards, tools, and usefulness

Reading

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