Tag Archives: noah health

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.

Being challenged is good.

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I’m trying to convince myself so please forgive me for protesting a bit too much right now.

I don’t know how people balance all the roles they play in life. I really struggle with the constant triage of priorities. There is no way for me to have a set list of what order I handle tasks in. My life is too complex.

This week became more complicated because we found out that Noah’s surgery wasn’t just to get the weird screw thing out of his arm it turned out that he had almost completely severed his tendon. Whoops. He can’t use his dominant hand at all for weeks. He is also having a gout outbreak in his left foot and he can barely walk and he can’t stand for long at all. So he literally must be in bed for a lot of the day or in a chair with his foot elevated. The last time he didn’t rest enough the attack went on for four months.

I mean, his job is having to just deal with him going on temporary leave but he also does a fuck ton in the house. Most of it he can’t do… indefinitely. Most of the time he does a lot of covering for my disabled ass. He does a solid half of the cooking. He cleans. He helps with kid-things.

Oh, and I had already scheduled going on a trip with one of my kids through some of the biggest art galleries in Western Europe starting nine days from now. We’ll be gone two weeks. At the end of the trip Noah has to bring our 5 year old to London to meet me because we could not get a passport appointment in Edinburgh in the last 5 months of trying. Yeah. That’s gonna be a fun trip.

My sexy life is really not in my top 10 list of priorities right now. I am tracking so many lists in my brain I feel like I am about to go mad.

I’m also trying to help my friend set up a retreat. She’s had a bunch of health complications and other life frustrations so the process is going slowly and I have to keep circling back around. It is taking up a lot of room in my brain.

The garden work I need to do right now is such a long list that my hands couldn’t sustain the typing. IT’S SPRING, DAMNIT. I can fill absolutely as many hours out there as I am willing to spend. (And all of them make me SO HAPPY.) I think about it so many hours of the day that it is definitely more than a 40 hour/week gig. I have learned so much more about soil biology and now I want to spend all my time figuring out companion groupings for plants. Thinking about other things feels like a serious imposition.

I’m just starting to feel enough better after being sick twice in two weeks that I can re-start running. I haven’t done it yet though. Today has really been the first day when it might have been at all reasonable and I’ve been working since my eyes opened.

The more things I have to do the more I want to type at myself to list it all so I can try to figure out what to do first. But not just a to do list. I need to reflect all the way down on why something is more or less important.

I have been maintaining excellent self discipline about continuing to plow through books. I’m really happy about that. I’m managing about two a week and that feels like a good thing right now since I’m mostly reading books about permaculture and I need to finalise my design layout for this year like yesterday. I’m also working on a couple of other non-fiction topics that I’m happy about. And I have a couple of kink books I have never read that I picked up recently cause they sound neat.

Cause I have a lot of time to think about sex. I drift pass this space mostly so I can be happy that at least someone is out there doing the fun stuff.

In the next week I need to do some batch cooking for the time when I am gone since they are going to be on pure survival mode. I need to write down organised lists of all the stuff that needs to happen. Once I write the list I need to put them in the specific order of most important to least important and I need to just hope that the top 3 things happen without being allowed to be cranky about stuff that is missed. I need to leave everyone with a full drawer of clean pants. It’s fine if their other clothes get gross but everyone needs clean pants for the whole two weeks. Hell, I bought Noah a whole extra week worth today because he will not be up for dealing with the laundry.

Triage, triage, triage.

As much as I like to do celebration cooking I absolutely loathe day-to-day home cooking. It’s boring as shit. I feel stabby. I have to just STFU and do it. So much of it.

I also need to finish the tax paperwork he was supposed to finish because that’s due when I’m leaving anyway. Fun. Paying taxes in two countries is kinda annoying but I’m happy to be here so I’ll keep it up.

Oh yeah–do I have friends? I think I have friends. I suppose I should see people sometimes? Luckily T talks to me every week by video call so it helps me feel less isolated. Which is mixed–I might have to work a lot harder at cultivating local relationships if I couldn’t still cling like a limpet to my Californians.

New people are scary. I’m a lot. I am definitely not everyone’s cup of tea. I am neurotically particular about a great many things. I get RSD like whoa. I was a professional new kid (was a student in 33 schools preschool-grad school) so I’ve met a lot of new people. Most of them just don’t have enough bandwidth in their brain for new people. Some will throw rocks. A few will like me. And then every very very small percentage of the time… I make a friend. I am a lucky woman because I have more than two close friends. That is not promised to anyone in this life. I should not be greedy. Maybe my luck is running out. Who knows. New people are scary. But you can’t get to yes without risking no.

It is hard absorbing the opportunity cost in terms of time and energy lost through connections that are briefly explored before I move on.

Even though I don’t live out in the countryside I act like I do. I live and work on my property most of the time. We are homebodies in a way I never expected. My life has not worked like this in the past. In California there were always so many strong ties, higher ranked priorities, and the fact that getting places in a car is just less effort than riding around so we didn’t stay home much.

I was really enjoying the constant fucking we were doing a few weeks ago. Now it seems like just a dream. Ah well. I’m old enough to know that whatever is happening now will not always happen.