The kind friend who is supposed to come help through surgery recovery is currently stuck outside a big city approximately 170 miles away. Her car had trouble. Cars are like this.
I feel overwhelmed and scared right now. I don’t want to close doors. I don’t want to eliminate the chance of potential down the road but that means I will close a lot of doors by not deciding. There is no way to win this game. Today I am going to catch up on laundry and cleaning the kitchen and tidying the garden. That and getting Shortie to martial arts. My body is very sore and tired. I feel worn down. I’ve been trying to sleep. I’m going to bed at a reasonable hour. Unless I take drugs I wake up ungodly early. (The drugs come from my doctor.)
I miss Noah so much I feel like I will explode. I am scared of being alone. I am scared to be with anyone else. I am scared of asking my kids for help. I am scared of not being useful enough. I am scared I will over spend and wreck my childrens’ future. I am scared I will not do enough and our family will fail. I don’t know what that even means at this point but I’m scared of it.
I am scared I am not enough while also being entirely too much.
I wish I could spend a month or three not interacting with any humans at all.
I hate that I need help. I hate that I have to ask my friend to do a long and difficult and now even more expensive journey to help me.
I wish I had made life choices such that I could go lay down the mushrooms and be done. I didn’t though. I have to stay. I have to stay no matter how hard it is. I have to stay no matter how weak I am. I have to stay no matter how sad I feel for the rest of my life. My feelings don’t matter. My actions do.
So yes, I am absolutely using a lover as an antidepressant. Fuck buddies were a mixed bag. They always are. That’s the thing about sex with strangers, it’s like Forest says: it’s a box of chocolates. You never know what you are going to get.
What I will say in this medium at this moment is: I have made much safer choices than I did in the past. I am proud of myself. That feels pathetic. I shouldn’t have to beg and plead with myself for scraps of credit. I set the bar so low yet clearing it is so hard.
I have so much to do and I don’t know how much time I have. That is one of the hardest things about losing Noah suddenly. I always thought I would go first. Now I don’t know how to get everything done to make my kids safe in time. I don’t have him as a backstop. He was supposed to be there to paper over the cracks of what I missed. Now my children only have me.
That feels unfair in so many many ways. They deserve better than me. They deserved Noah.
It’s funny. I’m coming to grips with some of the ways Noah’s behaviour sucked because I need to avoid those patterns in the future. I still think he was a less shitty person than me. He did not have as much to make up for. Yes, he fucked up. Yes, he did abusive things.
I am not better.
I am a shitty, petty, awful person. I mean, my kids don’t think so. Whatever. They don’t see what is inside me. I’m pretty awful.
Noah said it didn’t matter what I thought, only what i did. But now without him I don’t know how to evaluate what I’m doing. I’m stuck in my head going round and round with my thoughts. I feel like I am going to go a lot crazier without Noah to talk to. So much of me feels like it is being forced into a weird impossible silo. I feel like it is much harder to know what is real and what isn’t.
I feel guilty for the way I am using my lover as an antidepressant. Oxytocin is my favourite drug.
I am finding it fascinating that I do not experience the same kinds of chemical surges I did when I was younger. They are different. I no longer believe that “falling in love” is a chemical reaction that happens quickly or not at all. I believe that love is a choice. Love is the act of choosing a person over and over even when it isn’t easy.
I am not having a hard time ending things with fuck buddies in the first two months. When they make me feel icky, when I realise that choosing to spend time with them means I am opting in to a set of behaviours that I have a problem with I bail really quickly. I am explicitly and consciously staying the heck away from friends. I choose to keep my friends despite them having behaviours that bug me. It’s about distance and proximity. I can handle different sized containers for relationships based on whether or not I’m having sex with someone. It changes the calculus.
Gentleman doesn’t fuck me. He makes love to me and I can feel the difference. Being with him is a balm right now. Not a lot is helping me feel better. Time with him does. He makes me smile and feel soft. He will not play “What Is Wrong With Krissy?” I confess that part of the reason I will be scared of integrating him more into my life will be the fear of falling off that pedestal. For now he hasn’t started complaining about me. It’s the honeymoon. We are in a bubble away from our lives. It’s an affair, not a relationship.
It’s a really nice affair. Like, super nice. One of the best of my life. I have mixed feelings about that.
I am having big feelings wondering how much this is a dramatic improvement because I am now willing to allow someone to be nice to me. I have run from it with great speed for most of my life. Noah was the nicest treatment I could tolerate for the longest time.
I haven’t written that much about the rape last summer in vanilla land. Part of that is because I flipped out and being super public about that is mixed. Part of it is how Noah reacted.
I needed to regain power. I didn’t think about it in a logical or wise way. It’s funny that I’m still hesitating. Soon I will be ready to cross post everything. I don’t like having secrets. If you have secrets people can shame you by implying they will expose you.
When I was raped I flipped hard into fawn mode. I basically had an affair with the rapist. I talked to him a lot in text. I went and saw him in town. I gave him a blow job in an inappropriate place. Well, he’d been telling me all about how he didn’t see a point in getting blow jobs because he never came that way. I took that as a personal challenge in my insane way.
Noah learned all this the day I had surgery. The next day when we got home he hurt me fairly badly. He waited until he could be in a soundproof room with me. If you are vanilla that sounds like abuse. It’s funny because, that’s not the part that felt abusive to me. I gave consent long ago allowing him to correct my behaviour or attitude in any way he saw fit. He owned me and I felt I owed him whatever it took to pay him back for being willing to own me.
I was sorry I couldn’t act the way he wanted me to. I was sad he had to punish me.
I couldn’t not freak out after being raped.
I have been talking about my promiscuity with him because it feels grossly unfair not to. I don’t know yet how to properly explain that part of what I mean when I say I can’t be monogamous is there are times when I will react sexually in ways a monogamous person wouldn’t.
There are things in me that are broken. I don’t have a normal person’s reaction to pain or trauma. If I did I would have died a long time ago. I can fall in love with shitty people and find ways to justify continuing to serve them. Sometimes this is something I am only dimly aware of it happening as it occurs.
I don’t want to be punished for being what my father made me any more. I no longer believe that can be beaten out of me.
It is very hard to figure out how to talk about this with normal people. I am not chasing down sadists. I’m not looking for problematic encounters. I am trying to make safer choices. It is complicated figuring out how to be fair about warning off someone who is not fucked up and abusive. No, I’m not going to hit you. No, given how you respond to boundaries I can’t imagine screaming at you.
Noah had to hurt me sexually over many years, while I asked for change, before I got to that point.
I didn’t have the right to say no. My no didn’t matter. It was irrelevant. I could say it all I wanted and he would listen if and when he felt like. He resented the times he did follow them. He held them up like shiny toys “See, I let you have this boundary.”
I opted in and I would have stayed forever. I absolutely believe I would have stayed no matter what he did to me. He was trying as hard as he could to make me not my father’s daughter. He wanted to morph that piece into only serving him.
He was doing so from a place of basic misunderstanding. He thought he could make me monogamous. He thought he could make me into someone who reacted to sexual trauma by withdrawing and taking space.
No. I run into the fire. Over and over. I run all the way to the far side of it. I see what damage I can correct after the fire ends.
Even though the Scottish government finds me to not be a credible witness due to the muddiness of the case I feel good. I got a lot of other people to come forward. He’s in jail and going to stay there. I’ll tell you plain that part of the reason some of them agreed to step forward was because I was able to show them my receipts so they could see the pattern for themselves.
Once you see it you can’t unsee it.
When people feel alone they usually can’t start moving at all. I start moving when I need to find my compatriots. I don’t curl up into myself. I branch out. I put feelers into different communities and locations. I explode into building tiny itty bitty root tendrils. I need data and examples before I can make any of that happen.
Wanting me to curl into myself is saying that I should stop looking for the patterns. I never wanted that. I don’t want to be raped again. That’s not my point. When something shitty happens to me I don’t want it to be the focus of my life. I need to have the experience on as much of a speed run as possible because I don’t have time to do the slow motion thing that most lives see. I don’t have the patience for that. I’ll get bored and wander off without getting enough data. Then I won’t find the pattern.
I like that I explode briefly with each trauma into frenetic community building. I want that aspect of myself. It’s not always pretty though.
After going to the pub with Gentleman I can confirm that I 100% would never hunt in such an environment. It’s not for me. It’s disorienting and people are incoherent and ugly drunk. There’s nothing appealing about hunting for sex under those circumstances. Either I am there with a group of people and I am only going to pay attention to them or I am there alone and that makes me fucking rape bait.
Naw.
I am not courting trouble. Only I am. I had specifically not wanted to have only one partner because feelings and escalators and stuff.
I am going to disappoint someone who expects and wants monogamy. It is hard not to feel like I am bad. I don’t know for sure how I will react to other traumas in life. I wouldn’t put money on me being out of them.
It’s really hard to leave the house a lot of the time. But I do it. In my eye catching bullshit so people get used to seeing me. One way or another they will know I’m around and probably have some kind of opinion. It is harder to be alone in a room with a man.
I need the antidepressant. I feel guilty when I have someone want to make love to me without knowing what kind of crazy they are sticking their dick in.
It feels deeply unfair to let someone fall in love with me before I puncture their bubble about what kind of person I am. I can’t let people project all over me. I will behave erratically. It will be a bad experience. I will hurt them. It feels like if I don’t come with a long list of awful disclaimers it is wildly unfair.
If what you are looking for is loyalty I am a very broken toy. It will not look how you want it to look. Am I loyal? Very. I don’t always demonstrate it in the ways people need me to. They need loyalty to mean a set of behaviours I can’t live up to. I am scared of what this is going to mean for my future. Will I continue to feel willing to take risks on longer relationships even though they mean so much more insecurity?
Fuck buddies eventually fade out from my life for the most part. I don’t know what will happen with lovers going forward. Luckily I have a long time before I need to decide.
I’m having a lot of body memories collide this morning. My friend have difficulty getting here is ratcheting up my anxiety. I’m not upset with her, of course. She even had the car checked before beginning the trip. Stuff happens. It’s just that everything feels higher stakes now. Every hiccup feels more “oh crap should I be arranging backup?” It is hard to trust that things will fall into place in the ways I need them to.
They probably will. Realistically this is a very surmountable problem.
My body is shaking though. I hate living with layers of memories and feeling like my body doesn’t know where it is in time. I have to shake it off. I have a lot to get done today. I need to function and I need to smile, even though I don’t get to take my antidepressant. He says he is going to observe medical protocol to the letter. This makes me want to weep. Also it makes me feel secure. It makes me feel a lot of things I don’t know how to express.
I don’t know what I’m going to do. I feel like maybe I should be a giant cunt and make him want to leave. That would be the adult and mature thing to do, right? Kidding not kidding. Only I don’t want to.
When he is around most of what I want to do is sit in his lap and kiss him in between talking. I don’t really know a lot of reason to be mean to him. I’d have to stretch really hard.
His biggest flaw to date is that he isn’t big on soup. I’m not sure we can be friends. I really like being his lover though.
It’s time for the day to begin. I have sourdough starter to use up. I’ll start there.