Tag Archives: noah

The roller coaster of emotions continues

One of the most intense parts of my marriage was the way that Noah made space for me to have every feeling. I didn’t have to only have the ones he wanted. He didn’t like it when I was in a bad mood. He didn’t like it when I fell in love with people. He didn’t want me to feel sadistic. He did try to control me such that I only had the feelings he wanted, but when I went off the rails he would build a protected site around the crash zone like he was defending evidence. He didn’t have to like everything I felt. He had to protect the space for it to exist.

I looked at one of my tracking things. Ah. This is going to be an exceptionally vicious PMDD cycle. It’s kind of a terrible thing the way bodies change each other. I’ve been talking to my children about our cycles. I’m real worried one of them has endometriosis. Their aunt recently had a hysterectomy and is having to go back in for a second surgery because they couldn’t get all the endometrial cells in one go. She’s in her 20’s. It is fascinating watching how people use my DNA and Noah’s to have experiences that are hauntingly similar to me and yet dramatically different as well.

Before I had kids I usually had my period 9-10 times in a year. That’s not awesome. Folks who are inflicted with a uterus are “supposed” to have more like 12-13 in a year. I had never had sufficiently good nutrition to bleed as often as I was supposed to. In a way this was protective because the depths of my suicidality were hard to bear 10 times in a year. I’m grateful there weren’t an extra 3 cycles.

My children bleed 12-13 times a year. It’s fucking wild. I now bleed 12-13 times a year. What the absolute fuck. Most of the time it’s moderately inconvenient but my PMDD cycles have improved dramatically over the years. At this point I have a really extreme PMDD cycle 2-4 times in a year. It has gotten lighter and lighter with the birth control I’ve been on since Noah died. I no longer hemorrhage every month! It feels super good for me.

When I am this kind of depressed and low and sad and self hating Noah would take the opportunity to poke me really hard. In this state, when I’m tetchy and crotchety and oversensitive like fuck, he could get me to say true things that I won’t say the rest of the time because I’m too inhibited. I would complain about things that I usually suck up. He savored having access to my brain in this weakened state. I couldn’t defend myself by hiding all the things that bother me. They come tumbling out like a waterfall.

I barely snapped at Gentleman on Sunday. I was a hair bitchy. I immediately walked away to calm down and I came back and apologised. He let it go. There was no drama.

I have barely spoken to him since. This is not a space I can inhabit with people anymore. When I feel like this I need to avoid people.

I am always the third to bleed. There’s an order with the kids. The severity of the first person often indicates how the wind is blowing. All of us are having an extremely low month. Not one person in my house has hope in their heart right now. Instead what we have is the ability to sit together and commiserate about how awful it is to have your brain do this. We bitch loudly about how much our bodily functions are ridiculous and impossible and stupid and mean.

We talk about a lot of what is making us sad. I am leaving big pieces of my sad out. I share the things that feel appropriate. I am careful. I am moderate. I think about their needs before I speak my troubles.

I miss Noah. I miss being married to a tremendous asshole who gave me permission to be an asshole because we matched. I could say any rude thing to him and I didn’t have to apologise.

I will certainly never feel ok being a raging asshole at my carefully polite English boyfriend.

It’s definitely a day to hide and scream all the things I will never feel ok speaking to another human being again.

Enh, except for all the hours I have to do my day job. And I’m meeting friends. Parts of the schedule have to go on even if I feel like shit. It doesn’t matter how I feel; it matters what I do. I need to see friends and not be an asshole. There is no space for me to be an asshole anywhere in my life. I don’t think I will ever deliberately bring an asshole into my life again. At this point I don’t have the time and space to smash the rough edges off before bringing them around my kids. I had years to work on Noah. He was allowed to be an asshole the way I was allowed to be an asshole: in a room alone together. Not at our kids. Not at our friends. Not at people we loved. Not at coworkers.

If people in public react to me being visibly distressed I can say “I miss Noah/my husband” and they will nod and stop asking me questions and that’s neatly handled. I don’t have to tell a very big piece of the truth. I am not allowed to word vomit my pain on anyone outside of my house. That’s private. It’s not a secret (obviously) but it’s the kind of thing people don’t want to see in public. There are rules to the social contract. The rules here are far more strict than where I am from. Publicly weeping and sobbing is not acceptable. Get your shit together.

I am definitely definitely definitely not allowed to say mean but very true things.

The only person who ever wanted that from me is gone.

It is a relief that what I am left with is people who weep with me and say things like, “I’m very glad that even on my worst days I am incapable of believing ‘no one likes me’ because I have you.” There is so much I have done wrong in this life, and so many people I have hurt with mean but true things. I feel the weight of it all the time. I am so conscious of how I have failed people. I have not failed these three people. I’m doing really well.

We live in each other’s pockets in a way that is far outside the norm for most humans. When Noah was here it was so intense. Since he died the older kids have started leaving the nest more as they gain adulthood. Pretty much the main time I am not in a room with my baby is when I am smoking pot. When I get access to pills I will have an unholy number of hours a day with her. Frankly, she needs them. She needs to be around other humans and she needs a lot of assistance interacting with the world.

I knew I would have high needs children when I was 17 based on my lived experiences. I wanted to have them and meet their fucking needs so I could find out what people like that were like.

My children tell me regularly that they appreciate all that I have done for them. Well, they don’t tell me that at all until they are about 15. At 15 they start having gratitude. It’s been terrific to experience. I thought it would take till their late 20’s if we ever got to this point at all. They know that I have pretty much given up having independence for this indenture. I have given it my whole fucking soul and almost all of my time for 18 years with another 9 years 5 months and 17 days to go on my term of indenture. I am a walking, talking, world interpreting edutainment experience. I am a fucking 3 ring circus. I help my autistic weirdos understand the gulf between their life and what everyone else is experiencing.

It is hard as my kids develop their own alphabet soup collection. We walk into assessments prepared with our fucking data. We talk about all the things we do actively on a daily/weekly/monthly basis to manage our complications and symptoms. I have to admit it is tremendously fucking awesome that in every case the specialists have said, “You are already doing everything we try desperately to get people to do. You are the embodiment of best practices.” I like validation as much as the next insecure nitwit.

I am struggling with the ways my internalised ableism rubs up against the reality I live with. I want us to make tremendous ambitious plans. I have always made ambitious plans. It’s different now that Noah isn’t here to catch me when I crash and burn. When I got home from the road trip in 2015 I was in so much pain that I had lost most of my peripheral vision. I didn’t move for about a month. I let him do everything for the kids and the house and unpacking from the trip. I was completely numb from pain. I shut down entirely. I pushed way past where I should have stopped because I couldn’t let myself fail.

Do you know how cool it is that my kids make prudent choices when facing risk? They understand the difference between pushing through something being hard and doing something stupid. I think back to the choices I made at their age and I marvel. These people are going to do fine in life. They are bold and they do cool stuff. They also make conscious space in their life for the need to collapse. They create room where it’s not failure, it is accepting that they can’t do something on a given day. They can get back to stuff later. They don’t feel the same drive I feel to push through no matter how much damage they are inflicting on themselves. They talk about the recovery costs and why something isn’t worth it. They actually believe the shit I say. I’m over here saying it hoping that someday I will believe it. They have arrived. It’s wild.

Living with them is really cool. It scares me though. I don’t like receiving help from them when I’m the one doing the worst. They are kinda insistent. We are so alike. We do a lot of staying out of each other’s personal business on stuff. Privacy is a very big deal in our house. Rooms are not to be entered without permission. I don’t like going through people’s stuff. It makes me feel like shit. I do it as little as I can. My plan here is to earn a relationship with my adult children. I have to respect them as autonomous humas to get that. I have to start early and practice what I preach the whole damn way through. It’s not easy. I have as big of an ego as anyone else. There are times I want to shine/shape them around making me look good. I breathe deeply and let it go. I need to look good or not based on whether I am acting right. Not whether I can make someone else act right. Which is complicated. I don’t believe I should control how my children dress/wear their hair/enjoy appropriate media. (Of fucking course I keep the inappropriate media away from them. My kids are sheltered little bastards. They will give you long lectures on the harms of watching pornography before you have your own sex life.)

I am feeling tremendously insecure. I never feel like I have done enough. I haven’t gone far enough to push my kids into learning/proving they know/earning some award. It’s an awkward thing to carry. I offer my children the chance to opt in to proving what they know in ways that will be more seen to the outside world. They shrug and move on with doing things how they like to do it. I have to cross my fingers and pray. At some point they will want to earn more money than I want to pay them. They will figure it out. I have faith.

It is a fascinating thing having almost all of my attention turn to Shortie. I’ve not had this one on one experience with a learning child before. My older kids are just over two years apart. They have been a pair for a long time, even though they were always learning at different levels. They had to share activities and time. My youngest has been baggage for most of her life as she was dragged to their stuff. Now my days are focused around her in a really dramatic way. This is the amount of time/attention my oldest is grateful he never experienced. He is quite certain that he is glad he is not an only child because I would have crushed him under the weight of being my sole project child. He is probably right. Shortie won’t be crushed because I am a lot more burned out than I used to be. I don’t have as much force to give. I am tired down to the marrow of my bones. I am with her. I answer questions and interact with her a lot of the time. I am also lying still while reading a book a lot of the time.

I am being very careful not to become my mother. A lot of what I struggle to forgive my mother for revolves around the ways her extreme neglect allowed me to experience really vile things. I was lonely and isolated and she had no way to try to ameliorate that. She didn’t have any money and she didn’t know how to do it while we were shifted from room to room in city after city. I have spent my entire parenting life afraid of the knock on the door from CPS/social workers checking up on the welfare of my family. It’s kinda funny. I’m really racking up points on that front. I’ve been reported in two countries. In both cases the social worker ended telling me that they have great confidence I am doing all that can be done in a difficult circumstance and they wish me the best. Authority tends to approve of me when it shows up to spot check my work.

People who don’t like me and who judge me stay trying the system though. They are certain that their dislike of my methods is proof that I am doing awful things. The first time the bad thing was entirely outside my control and I was managing it as well as a thing can be managed. The second time it was for absolutely fictitious and malicious bullshit. Something that was demonstrably untrue as soon as you walk into the house.

There are a lot of ways that I am a failure as a human being. I have never tried to deny that. I am a really good mother. I am an excellent teacher. I am as much of a saint in the patience department as Noah ever was and maybe even more. I am masterful at coregulating people who are distressed. For these three humans I am a gifted interpreter for the world. I can see the gaps in the schema they have experienced and the schemas of the people around them. I can talk about cultural/social differences and why other people are going to start every conversation with a completely different point of view. I talk very concretely about the water we swim in with our little pod. I talk about the rules and the structures that have shaped it. I talk about how their father and I came to the set of agreements we did about how to live in our little glass bowl together.

As young adults they tell me how grateful they are that they have completely missed that most of the world is obsessed with dieting. I fucking love that my child can boldly assert in their medical appointments which symptoms started long before they were obese and adult sized; they happened when they were a skinny little fuck of a young kid. The obesity came afterwards and was caused by the symptoms. When we talk about how active we are despite our demonstrative disabilities doctors express great surprise and delight. They wish they could get other patients to do even a small fraction of all the adapting we have done.

My kids have come with me on my journey towards taking care of my body. They watched the elimination diets and nutrition work. They understand why I exercise like it is a job. We are all as active as we can be and that means sometimes we drop out of everything for six or more weeks because we are simply unwell. Sometimes it is six months. Acceptance of this variability is embedded in the walls of our family home like a placenta embeds itself in the uterus. We carry this shell that permits us to be weak and not well without being impacted by the larger world. We have our own experience of being alive. It feels intensely privileged. I also know that I was sick like this when I was poor as fuck. It’s not always been like it is now. I have not always been safe. I have always been sick.

If I had a full diagnosis list before I had children, would I have had children? I don’t know. I know that two of my children are on a path to try to have their uteruses removed ASAP. They have no interest in 40-50 years of this. They watch what my body goes through and they don’t want it. They are each having their own painful and terrible journeys that are complicated for a lot of reasons.

I’ve been chewed out for using the language “inflicted with a uterus” because it sounded “derogatory to cis women”. Obviously I took that on and complied instantly, no? Obviously the feelings of cis women on the internet need to drive my language evolution. I should definitely not direct my language at the nonbinary person and the man who both happen to be inflicted with a uterus who are under my care. I should not care about their feelings at all. I should not at all casually refer to the fact that having this organ is fucking brutal when it doesn’t function easily and well. Some cis women have dandy experiences with their uteri and that’s not my damn problem.

We are humans having a collectively miserable experience with this organ that was inflicted upon us by fate. We didn’t choose it. There is camaraderie at many levels that are good for my soul. It’s also awkward sometimes complicated that I will probably have different conversations with my daughter. I don’t push her towards being cis anymore than I pushed her siblings towards being trans. I ask my children to confirm their identities and pronouns with me on a semi-regular basis. I want to respect status updates and I know that sometimes telling me is a little hard for a lot of complicated reasons outside of my control.

It’s kinda annoying that I am a fucking saint when it comes to accepting their various difficulties and they still sometimes go through paroxysms of terror that if they tell me a thing about them that I will suddenly reject them. It stays not happening. They have to have their feelings anyway. It’s kinda nice that the older they get the faster it is ok to slap a quick “Feelings are not facts” in their direction so they can mostly snap out of it. It’s really neat to have such a relationship with people who have been trained all their lives how to have feelings but not be controlled by them. They have all their damn feelings. They know how to walk out of rooms before the meltdown starts. They know what kinds of questions to ask to get the exact information they need. They understand themselves and how they fit into the world.

Yeah. There’s a lot of shit I have been repeating on loop in my head for days. True things. Mean things. I am not saying any of them. I’m not writing them down either. Instead I am letting myself be aware of how lucky I am that my baseline is hiding at home with these people. These people who understand that when they ask me who I am meeting and I say “I think you would be happier not knowing” they need to nod and change the subject. I offer information freely on demand. If they actually want to know something I will tell them even though sometimes knowing things can be a burden. I will tell the age appropriate version of that story.

There’s a lot I suck at. There’s a lot of areas of life where I feel like a giant failure. I will be grateful every day of my life that I got to make a family with Noah. I like our children very much. It is an honour to serve them. It is the blessing of my life that I get to raise people of my blood the way I see fit. I couldn’t make “perfect” children by the measures that other people use. My children will not validate me by graduating from top schools. They will have eclectic lives shaped by the disabilities they inherited. There was no way for them to avoid some of the poor hands they have received in this game of poker. The deck was stacked against them. It would have been awesome if Noah and I had understood our genetics better before we had kids. Instead we looked at each other and said you are shiny I wonder what the babies you make will be like? They are fucking rad and I love them so much and I am so proud.

Tomorrow my kid turns 16. One more official milestone without Noah. It is now hard that their birthday triggers the quick two week period with our wedding anniversary and my birthday. I think this is going to be a brutal run this year. It should be our 20th anniversary. We weren’t sure what we were going to do for it, yet. He was going to tattoo me for our 30th anniversary. It felt like a safe time to go so far.

I have a hard time every year with this span of time. Noah was not good at big days. It was a thing we agreed to mostly not have because he was excellent for 358 days per year. I couldn’t hold those particular failures against him. I used to go off and spend my birthday alone because I didn’t want to have to take care of anyone on that day. I also needed to move through the world in a set and a setting where of course no one said happy birthday. It’s a complicated thing.

Now I can’t go. I will go again someday. Not the now. I’m taking all of my time off from the kids to go have sex. I don’t have a very deep well to draw from in terms of child care for Shortie on a longer scale. Overnights are not small asks. It’s not worth it to me to be alone on my birthday this year. Also, my kids will be very nice to me. They will treat me how I treat them on their birthdays. They know no other way. They are excited that I won’t be gone. They haven’t spent that many of my birthdays with me because most of the ones they did involved me crying and I don’t like doing that to people. I don’t want to cry at them on my birthday. I have not had good birthdays, by and large. It is sad thinking that my birthdays are likely to improve with Noah gone. He really sucked at big days. No one else can deliver his intensity 358 days a year. They can manifest a handful of big days. It is weird sitting in my belly with how little that feels like it matters.

I would rather have shitty birthdays with Noah that great birthdays without him. What a terrible bind I have created. It doesn’t matter what I would prefer. I will get what I get. I don’t think they will all be great. I think I am going to spend my birthdays crying in my room now. I don’t think it is better.

My son writes fiction stories about people who endure terrible trauma and how they cope afterwards. People ask him if he has had a deeply traumatic life on a regular basis. He says that he didn’t have much of any significant trauma in his life, obviously now except his father dying suddenly. He says that he grew up with people who had were highly traumatised and he translates what he has seen to new characters. It’s a little creepy at times. He is writing translations of me and Noah. I can see it in the layers of complexity he puts into different perspectives. It’s never a blatant thing but if you understand the pattern you can see it super clearly. He’s a really good writer. I think he is going to be a much better writer than I am in the long run. That’s nice.

Even when I want to feel like there is no hope and everything is dreadful and I will never be fully accepted again I have to go have breakfast with these three people every day. It’s a fairly absurd claim. We are a massive mutual admiration society. We all have our areas to shine and we hand the spotlight around as much as possible. We are a fully fleshed out comedic/dramatic ensemble cast. It is fun to live with these people. No, we will never be a reality show. Ew.

We accept each other. We also understand that boundaries are great and everyone should be private about the things that family members would be happier not knowing about each other. We’ve been specific about what sorts of things go on that list. It’s not an ambiguous set up. When they were way the fuck too young to actually have such a thought about a given person we talked about how we can let them have personal space for privacy once they are adults who date. It is baked into the assumption of our household that someday most of the adult members of the house will probably have sex. Here’s how to do it politely.

It’s time to stop typing before I get more explicit on that topic because now it’s not my business to share more about that. I can face the day now. I can go do the thing that is my big success in life. I can kiss people awake and say I am so glad to see them again. They will believe me because I will mean it with my entire soul.

Yes, I do have their consent to talk about the stuff I do talk about. We have talked about the lines on a number of occasions and we will do so again. I don’t own their stories.

I miss sharing every thought with him.

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My son shares his dating exploits with me the way I write mine online. I find this touching. I have not modeled this with him as I have been dating. I have been incredibly moderate in what I have shared for lots of good reasons. He had no notion of how many people I uhh auditioned last year. I have always treated my friend reports to his dad like this, though. He watched me do it. It’s like he is live-tweeting at me now. I get little blurbs from him through the day.

It’s funny how since Noah died EC and I both notice that he is a lot more like me than he used to think. One of the things I wanted (and got) in having a third child was to break the “teams” shit we had going before Shortie came along. For a long time Eldest Child was Noah’s Gemini and Middle Child was my Virgo. In many temperamental ways the patterns are remarkable true and consistent. Noah and EC were both oldest kids. For a long time MC was the baby like me. Noah and EC tend in the stoic direction. MC and I struggle with our explosiveness. There are distinct and dramatic patterns.

MC is discovering ways that they had a lot more in common with their dad than they knew. Puberty and social isolation are combining to teach them a lot of the overwhelming anxiety that Noah struggled with despite growing up in a stable home. MC doesn’t have the bone deep sensation of being adored. I failed there. I didn’t manage to inculcate that a second time. I mean, they know I love and adore them. They have a lot more awareness of the world rejecting them. They feel more isolated and different. They didn’t spend as many years in the welcoming bosom of my queerkin in the Bay. They lost that and then went into lock down in a new country. They have a lot more anxiety than EC does. EC had a big bounce of anxiety when he went to school. With MC it is feeling like something where they will have to settle into long term management of chronic mental health struggle in this area.

EC wants to share every thought in his head. I am still his favourite audience. I choose shouting into the void. It is the only place I have ever felt comfortable. If people opt in to reading my words here, it isn’t my fault if they have feelings. I didn’t make you come here.

I am struggling really hard. I over extended myself. I should not have reached out to Pretty Lady yet. I needed her to have far more patience than was considerate. I wanted her to invest in me in the long run. She needed me to invest in her more upfront. I can understand not finding that deal appealing when I can’t match the energy she has right now. I can’t though.

Some days I pause long enough to feel in my bones how deep my burn out is. I was intensely burned out before he died. He wasn’t looking for a job because he wanted to be able to genuinely give me long periods of rest. I wanted to stop homeschooling when we moved to Scotland. I am tired. I have some friends who spend time with Shortie so I can be off duty for a bit. They all say that when they go home they are exhausted. Most of the time they fall asleep. Hell, my cleaning lady is here for two hours and she says she goes home and can’t do anything for the rest of the day because being in my house is so overwhelming. We are just talking around her. We aren’t being intense at her.

As I hide in my room because I am banished from the kitchen I have to take a moment to feel in my heart that I got here. I have one adult child. I have a quasi-adult child in 7 more weeks. (Scotland is weird.) I have one more small one to get through puberty. This is what I set out to get. I have always felt deep shame that “find a partner” was not my #1 life goal. I talked to Noah about this. He knew he was, in large part, a means to an end. He helped me have children. That was my goal. To make people of my bloodline who were ok and who made it to adulthood with as little trauma as possible. That level is higher than I would have preferred. I have my babies. They are magnificent to me. Including in the way that gets me banished from the kitchen from 10pm-12am every night. That is when I have a choice. I can let a magical fairy clean up my kitchen in complete privacy or I can incur the wrath of the furies if I enter the kitchen.

Really, is it even a choice?

All of my children have a lot in common with me. I find it affirming that we get along well. We can all set boundaries and make demands. Oh boy is my youngest making a lot of demands. This is tricky. MC, Shortie and I are all very PDA flavoured and that makes the fact that we are all demanding motherfuckers pretty complicated. It was easier to give them both the space they need when I had Noah giving me the space I need. I don’t feel like I can find Mary Poppins anymore. I am too tired. I don’t have the ability to be practically perfect and attentive to their every need. My battery has been empty for a long time.

In my mind I carry a picture of my grandmother in law. I have always considered her as a there but for the grace of God go I sort of character. She was a brilliant woman. She was also deeply hard and selfish and unable to consider the needs of her children. She was violent and cruel and abusive. She kicked my mother in law out, literally kicked, when she got married. She said her daughter had become a whore. That’s a fascinating view to have of someone getting married as an adult while not pregnant in the 1970’s. Hardly harlot behaviour.

Like Auntie was a martyr I don’t want to be. Like my mother was a perpetual victim and childlike in her inability to care for herself. Like my sister passed on the legacy of destructive behaviour we were taught. Like my mother in law didn’t get her PTSD under control in time to save her relationship with her oldest child.

I have so many examples I want to do at least slightly better than. Not because I think I am better than any of them. I’m not. I’m equally as damaged and distraught and overwhelmed and out of cope. I am better resourced than all of them put together, though. I don’t share their justifications for needing to lose their shit. My therapist keeps trying to convince me that my life is super hard. They would like me to give myself a lot more slack. They worry a lot about my nervous system. I appreciate that. I am definitely feeling the HPA axis dysfunction lately. My body is not doing well. I’m brittle. I’m cranky in ways I don’t mean to be. Stupid shit sets me off. I don’t like being this low in reserves. I keep feeling like I just need a little rest. Then I am interrupted by one of a million things.

I need to have more capacity. The only way to increase my capacity is to do less. I can’t do more with my capacity if I am doing less. I’m kinda fucked here. I feel terribly selfish for missing Noah because he gave me rest. He did a lot of taking work away from me and sending me off to be alone. He and I were very interchangeable in the house. It was amazing. He was doing more and more with every year. I really appreciate the way that we never stopped turning towards one another. We were both doing intense stuff to bring focus back to us as a dyad all the way through the end.

I feel like I will permanently have less than 40% of the capacity I used to have. I can’t manage to finagle that level of support in time before Shortie has outgrown the really intense period. I am in this death march until she hits increased independence. My coparent is gone. He was amazing. I can’t imagine having anyone try harder to support me in raising a family. I don’t seek another coparent. That is not a fair role to ask of anyone. Noah casts a big shadow.

I can see my daughter casting about for father figures to bond with, though. I am glad that she has a few different ones. I am glad that she gets to have a bunch of men who are being loving and considerate and careful of her as she goes through this period. I’m lucky. I laid the groundwork for this in advance and friends have stepped forward when I asked. She is clearly pretty interested in having a relationship with Gentleman. I keep thinking how much Noah would approve of Gentleman. Noah was always afraid of me choosing to date people who were disrespectful of me. He was very concerned that I not subject myself to any more substandard treatment. Adoring me is step one. If they don’t, off they fuck.

Noah both did and didn’t set me up well for losing him. In many ways I am struggling because I lost my main emotional support person on top of my main physical support person on top of my coparent and exercise buddy and there is the tiny little matter that he was the only real witness to my life. It’s overwhelming how hard it is keeping all of my shit off stage from the kids. I feel like such a liar all the time. I don’t share every thought with my kids.

They definitely think I exist to be an external hard drive for their brains though. Holy shit.

I am struggling with getting us to all the appointments. All of our fucking bodies are high maintenance and I don’t know how much it is ADHD and how much it is perimenopause and how much it is grief and how much it is cumulative brain injuries but fuck I can’t remember anything. I listen to my friend cite to the penny how much money she has in her bank account and I feel deep shame. I couldn’t keep numbers in my head right now if I was paid for it. I’ve always struggled with dyscalculia. It feels worse than ever. It’s a good thing I have people who are actually watching my finances. I can’t fuck anything up too much. The money is out of my direct control. That is both terrifying and quite a relief. I am scared of being this person. I am scared of having this kind of responsibility.

How in the fuck did I manage to end up the fucking heiress for some generational wealth bullshit?! This was not something I fucking planned for. It will allow me to keep my babies safe. It reminds me of the story Peter wrote about me. He depicted me as quite a savage creature, covered in scars and wounds. I crouch over my sleeping babies with a knife prepared to end any creature who accosts them. I don’t actually think the knife will be necessary. This is good. I’m not a particularly violent human as they go. No matter what my father would have wanted for me. No matter what my blood thirsty ancestors would have done.

I feel alone. I feel like I must be alone for all the hours of the night and day. I feel like this is a terribly heavy burden to carry forward.

I feel terrible because I should be soaking in how awesome my boyfriend is. He really is. Instead I ruminate on the story in progress from a holistic point of view. There are so many moving pieces. I feel like I am drowning. On I swim anyway. No time to stop.

Tactical errors, failures, and belonging

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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.

Defrocking a saint

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I’ve been calling him Saint Noah in a mixture of scorn and admiration for a long time. People started telling me that he was a saint not long after we got married. Obviously someone must be a saint to put up with me. He wrote a lot about how challenging it was for me that people would hear me talk about him and think I was so lucky to have him but also he would talk about me and people think I was so lucky to have him. People didn’t, by and large, think he was lucky to have me. People pitied him for putting up with me. It’s been a hard thing for me.

In the past few days I’ve had chats with my kids about their grief. We are all on different roads. We don’t have to perceive people in the same way.

One of the reasons I felt deeply compelled to have a third child was because we fell into habits of Team Virgo vs Team Gemini. When there were only two children we divided them as being more like me and more like him. This was manifested in ways big and small. My kid is still dealing with the results of this. I wish they had been given a chance to have a more mature relationship with their dad but life isn’t fair. As it stands, what they remember is they had a dad who didn’t like them very much. They remember having a dad who was constantly impatient with them and scornful about their challenges. They remember that when it was their turn to go to a programming conference with dad after years of waiting… he took their brother again because that was going to be more fun for him.

The patience that Noah gave me was all he had. He didn’t leave any in reserve for the kid who has a huge percentage of my challenges. My experience of raising this kid has been “Holy shit. A huge chunk of the stuff I’ve blamed on trauma was really just me being autistic because here is my mirror copy having the same struggles with an entirely different origin story.” Noah didn’t have the patience to help this one sort through food struggles after helping me. I have done it instead. I helped this one sort their feelings and learn how to have physical self control when it feels impossible. I helped this one feel normal and not broken.

My son still has a hero worship thing going on with his dad. Noah was the best parent possible for that child. The two of them had a lot in common. It’s interesting that my son keeps commenting on all the ways he is finding that we are actually super alike in a shocking variety of ways and he never noticed while his dad was alive. I feel like this is good. We are leaning into each other and discovering new levels of closeness. I fucking love having him be my adult child. We get along so well. We are so deeply compatible. This is great.

I am having a lot of mixed feelings every time one of the kids volunteers that if one parent had to die early, they are really grateful I am the one who is left because no one thinks Noah would have done well without me. This feels like a sharp contrast with my belief that he was the functional one and I am the failure. He was the designated grown up and I was the chaos. Enh, in some ways.

I have been holding on to a lot of guilt and shame for Noah’s death. I feel responsible. There are aspects of the story I can’t write yet and that is eating me alive. I feel like a liar. I can’t tell the whole story until the kids are grown. They all understand that someday I will write it all down eventually but they get to grow up first. They get to have their own story first.

I was talking to MC yesterday about my feelings of guilt. They told me that he didn’t die because he was sacrificing himself for me. He did something selfish and impulsive that I told him not to do and there were consequences. That isn’t my fault. My therapist and my boyfriend have both been telling me similar things for a long while. It hits different coming from my kid. It hits differently when my baby, who lived with both Noah and I and watched our relationship, says that their dad wasn’t a saint. He was a flawed human.

I don’t spend a lot of time shit talking Noah in front of the kids. That’s a no go topic. I will say that we had struggles sometimes but I don’t get into the nitty gritty much. Maybe I will as they get older. I’m certainly answering my son’s questions more honestly now.

My kid was telling me that they feel very guilty because people around the world have mourned for their father harder than they have. It sits heavy in my belly that part of the reason all of those people felt so connected to Noah was because he gave his time and his focus to them instead of to MC. MC is the one who lost out on the best parts of him because Noah didn’t make MC a priority.

A long time ago a therapist told me that when you want to evaluate a human, don’t ask their friends or coworkers; ask their children. Children see the best and the worst of their parents. They suffer from the failures and they benefit from the successes that come through their parents lives.

My child feels like their dad didn’t like them very much and never put much effort into seeing them. They feel bad about feeling like that. They feel like they should create a narrative that puts a better light on Noah since everyone else liked him so much. That’s a terrible kind of pressure to put on yourself. They have told me a number of times throughout their life that they are grateful to have me as a mom. I never make them feel bad about themself. When they struggle I help them feel like it is a speed bump and not a dead end. I am their biggest fan. I make them feel like they are a wonderful and deeply valued human.

My son has told me the same thing.

My daughter is young enough that I can be a self depricating dickhead and I can still write off her opinion as being developmental.

All three of them have said that if they had to lose a parent they are glad to still have me because they don’t think their dad would have coped very well. He was too dependent on me. Even my fucking 8 year old has said this. They all feel like their father would have abandoned them if I hadn’t been around to kick him in the ass and tell him to be a good father. I am so sad they saw him that way. I don’t know that I agree with them totally. I think he would have tried.

I can’t really say they are wrong though. Noah didn’t want kids on his own. He wanted me and this was the price. He was able to feel close to the children when they reflected him back at himself, when they were good at math, when they were precociously verbal, when they were very far on the stoic end of emotional expression.

I love MC to the moon and back but stoic is not a word that can be used to describe them. They are now a very controlled kind of volatile. They have the feelings and they express them without inflicting destruction at this point. We don’t quit. We complain. When I watch them clear the room before they start working because they will stomp and curse and shout and if they are alone they don’t have to deal with anyone getting butthurt about it. They learned that it is ok to do this watching how I put together Ikea furniture. Leave me the fuck alone. I will come back and not be angry when I am done with this task. This task is fraught with frustrating moments and my fingers will hurt and I will cry and scream. Don’t worry about it. That will happen and I will then move on without it being a big deal as long as no one around me makes it a big deal.

Noah made it a really big deal when MC needed this space too. It was hard to watch.

I miss Noah so much that sometimes I struggle to take in breath. I don’t think I will ever stop missing him. He was my companion at a soul level. We were so enmeshed we weren’t really separate people anymore, not completely. My son misses his father a lot. He is sad not to have that relationship. He cries about it on a regular basis.

I have told MC and YC that it is ok that they aren’t crying. There is nothing wrong with them. Everyone has their own path through grief. Even though all three of us are people who cry easily for many reasons that doesn’t mean they are obliged to cry over losing their dad. They are allowed to cry about the things that move them to tears. No one gets to judge what goes on that list.

I am grateful that my children are affirming for me that I am nailing the landing on this job. It is the most important thing I will ever do. I wanted to be a parent for selfish reasons. I wanted to be part of changing the dynamics of my family. I was going to make people who didn’t hate themselves for having needs. I was going to create a happy family that doesn’t have to lie and fake the happiness.

I have done that. We are a happy family. We love spending time together. We love going on adventures together. We love sharing care and support. We feel supported and encouraged together.

I am sad to know that pieces of this will be easier without Noah. Lots of other pieces are much harder. I am sad to know that my baby experiences less stress in their home without their father around. I never wanted that feeling for them. I wanted him to be as good of a daddy for them as he was for me. That’s the thing–he was also hurting me. He hated lots of things about me and he absolutely did his best to make me feel bad about myself for existing in ways that didn’t serve him. He also built me up. He was very blunt about his attempts to break me so he could build me back better. I think of him as being like a harsh Old Testament patriarch. Sure, sometimes he was a fucking asshole but he was an asshole because he was doing what was good for me….. right?

Right?

He wasn’t always good for our baby. Sometimes he was just an asshole. They feel bad about being relieved at not having to live with an asshole anymore. I knew he was an asshole. That was explicitly ok with me. My child didn’t get a choice in that agreement.

No, baby, you don’t have to cry.

I will cry but I cry over my mother and my father and Noah and Vicki and Andrew and Michael and and and. I am one who cries a lot. That doesn’t mean anyone else has to match my efforts. That would be a weird thing to push for.

You don’t owe anyone anything. You don’t owe people a performance. It’s been so cool talking to them about masking and acting and how the two are similar but different. It’s been really fun talking to them about the difference between the masking that I see and I can also see them drop the mask. They feel uncertain about their “true” personality because they mask so much. I feel really good about the fact that I can rattle off all the things that come out when they are under the most stress and they have the least cope. I have memorised you, muthafucker.

(Yeah it was funny at dinner when one of the big kids made a joke about Gentleman being the only motherfucker at the table. Yikes. The jokes fly hard and fast.)

I love that I can tell my children about themselves in tiny minute detail. I have been staring at you intently trying to learn how to understand your needs since you were created. I have read books and consulted experts and sought out evaluation over and over. I exist to streamline your jagged entrance to the world because people of our bloodline are going to have jagged entrances no matter what.

I have this overwhelming waterfall of acceptance for the challenges that come from existing in the world in the bodies they have. I get it. I help them feel like they are part of the range of human normal even when they are on the edge of a bell curve. They tell me that I make them feel important. This is good since I have devoted 28 years to study for taking care of them at this point. It is very good to hear that the only people who get to evaluate me think I am extremely good at my job.

I think Noah could have learned to communicate better with MC as an adult. I am sad they didn’t get that chance. I’m sad that Noah needed MC to come more than halfway to understanding him before he could understand them. That is truly unfortunate. I can’t change that. Noah did what he did as a father. Now we all get to live with the consequences.

I am still grateful to have had him. Marrying him was the best decision of my life. He really did make all of my dreams come true. He also made me safe for the rest of my life. He gave me the ability to be the mother that I am. I have about as low stress of a life as a human can have in this day and age. (My therapist would strenuously disagree with that statement and give me a very intense “give me a break” look.) Fine, I don’t have to earn money. At this point I am paying people to play with my money so I can have more money. My life is unreal. I read about shit like this in books as a child. I couldn’t imagine it being my future. Noah didn’t hand me this. Noah handed me a decent Silicon Valley paycheck. I scrimped and saved and gave me this. I created this future by denying myself lot of things for many years. This is yet another thing that Noah would have failed on without me. He would not have been able to scale back and live on less. He would have kept working to fund him being impulsive and selfish and careless.

I shudder to think what would have happened to the kids. He did not have my backbone of rigidity when it comes to serving the children first.

I didn’t wish him gone. I wanted to cling to him until I died. But he is gone now. I can fuck up my life now by not recognising the ways he created harm or I can help to heal that damage. I can insist on better going forward.

I am grateful for being the kind of mother who is safe to talk to about these hard things.

“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.

It’s all so mixed.

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I know that when I talk about dealing with the hypnotism stuff I did with Noah I am very ambiguous about how I feel. It’s because I have a lot of different emotions. Part of what he was doing was watching me chase women and end up being rejected and feeling destroyed. Even when sex isn’t on the table my relationships with women can be tempestuous. He wanted me to only need him. He saw that as the best way of keeping me safe. I can understand why he felt so convinced.

Noah did things to me that I didn’t always like. He tried to take urges away from me that feel integral to my individuality. Sure, he was selfish and in some lights it was pretty fucked up. In other lights I can see why he was working really hard to keep me safe. He watched me make bad choices. He watched me get attached to people and put up with some incredibly shitty treatment. He wanted to make sure that didn’t happen again. He was going to block me from doing that to myself.

I’m going to get past it. Not all women are going to treat me poorly. Even though I feel bruised emotionally I will keep moving on. I’m not going to quit women any more than I’m willing to quit men.

I am going to hide at home and lick my wounds for a while. I had a crush. I allowed myself to build sandcastles for a while. I had fun dreams. It was nice to get that experience. I can’t be bitter about trying. It turns out it won’t work out.

I am not allowed to depend on anyone too much. They will all go away. In the long run I have me. I know that Gentleman wants to be there for me. I know that my friends love me very much and will do everything they can to support me. Also I will have lots of time when I need to sit in a room alone. I need to remind myself that in the end whoever or whatever I am is stuck in this meat sack. Her Gloriousness Ms Cher tells me that sooner or later we all sleep alone.

I have to be able to keep walking on my own. I can’t need anyone too much and it hurts very badly. This horrible knowledge about the inevitability of my life has been in my heart for a long time. It’s why I usually go hide somewhere to be alone on my birthday. I need to know that I will walk through most of them alone because alone is better than sad. Alone is better than not being able to feel that anyone loves me when I am in a room full of people who love me intensely.

I know that I am loved in a cognitive sort of way. It is a fact that other people experience this sensation in my direction. It has been expressed with enough intensity that I’m not going to argue about it.

I understand why Noah was willing to devote his life to obsessively serving me because he wanted to try to protect me. He wanted so badly to keep me from being hurt anymore because he loved me so much. He was willing to hurt me to keep other people from hurting me. I can’t bring myself to feel regret, not really. I would never trust anyone else in such a position. Noah was as well trained and as focused as such a person could be and he wasn’t enough. It wasn’t his fault. It is not anyone else’s fault that I have this deep well of inadequacy and self hatred. It’s definitely not this recent person’s fault.

This goes back to curling up into a ball to sob when I was 3, the first time I was put in a foster home. Why am I not good enough to be kept? Noah kept me for 18 years. He would have kept me longer. I have to use that knowledge to assuage my soul. Even if I am alone in this room right now. That’s ok. It’s ok to be alone right now. It doesn’t mean I will be alone in every room for the rest of all time. So many things can be true at once.

I am not so bad that no woman could love me without being allowed to abuse me. I can’t believe it. Even if it feels like it is true.

I will get past this. I can. Fuck. I need to sleep. I wish I felt less awake. Go to bed. No good comes from entertaining mean brain hamsters late at night.

Vagueposting

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It’s a lot harder to figure out my feelings without Noah to talk to. I used to dump thousands of words on his lap and he’d sort them out and figure out what I was really trying to say. I am doing some of that with Gentleman but mostly he stares at me with big eyes waiting. Sometimes he asks questions. Rarely there is a comment. Then I start crying and he hugs me. It’s different. It’s good. I’m not complaining in any way shape or form. It’s really helpful at this stage.

There are things I’m going to have to sort on my own though. He can’t be handed all of my thoughts so that he can explain them to me. He hasn’t studied me for decades. That’s not a reasonable expectation. The hugging is good.

I try hard to be fair about the fact that a given behaviour isn’t necessarily a red flag for all people. It might be yellow or even green for someone else. There are things that I should pay a lot of attention to. I have a limited amount of precious time in this life. There are specific things that are going to be a problem for me. It’s good for me to think of them very specifically.

I can’t have lovers or friends or play partners who spend a lot of time negatively judging me as a parent without knowing my children. If someone watches me parent and thinks I’m doing something wrong I am shockingly willing to discuss my methodology. I fucking promise that I have put more thought into everything I do as a parent than almost everyone (or possibly literally everyone) you have ever met. I can tell you why I’m doing everything I’m doing. I have a motive, a method, and I can break down which theorists I am basing my principles on. I studied child development and education for 10 years before having kids. I was in therapy for over 20 years before I had kids. I did a lot to prepare for this gig. If you are in my house watching and you think I am doing something poorly, uhm sure. Share your feelings. If you aren’t in my house, and especially if you have never been in my house I don’t actually want to hear your opinion. I don’t. You don’t get to evaluate me. You have never watched me work. You don’t have anything to base your opinion on. It’s worthless. Don’t share it. There are reasons I get my kids in front of professionals for evaluation on a regular basis to see if I’m fucking up. I’m scared as hell I’m not going to do as well as these people need. I don’t need to have a relationship with someone who is going to run their mouth and insult me as a mother.

I struggle with feeling like I am judged on a large scale basis. I make a lot of unconventional life choices. I am different. People let me know that there is something wrong with me on a regular basis. It’s always weird how they think I don’t know that I’m different from them. They have to tell me. I’m existing wrong. If you want to tell me that you don’t like what I’m doing that’s fine. If you need to tell me how much other people don’t like what I’m doing then I have an issue. That’s not your place. Who the fuck elected you the speaker for the choir? I don’t recall any time when you would have been in a room with the people you are presuming to speak for. How in the fuck do you know their opinions?

If I am trying to explain the ways that my disabled ass is FUCKING DISABLED I am not going to be super patient if you tell me that everyone has to triage and I should get a notepad to help me remember things. Implying that I should take a biscuit and a coffee and get back to work is not going to be something I respond well to. I’m just fucking saying. That kind of implication is going to mean that I need to treat you as an active hostile force. Your advice could severely damage me. Your demands could cause me to harm myself in a way that harms my life. That’s not ok. That’s asking too much. That is not showing any respect for me at all.

Yeah, I am a picky bitch. I am fucking demanding. I need to be seen. I need to only have relationships with people who can fucking remember that they can’t have standard expectations for me. I’m not saying your standards for me always need to be low. Sometimes I’m pretty great. Just not in every way and not on bad days. Telling me to eat a fucking biscuit and get back to work is callous and destructive and hostile but oh you didn’t mean it that way. I’m over reacting.

I’ve played this game before. I know how this one goes.

Combine all that with the comments about obesity…

I think that’s a mast full of red flags. I think that’s incompatibility. If the first time you get upset and feel neglected you read me for filth I need to walk on. You deserve someone who can pay attention to you all day every day. I deserve someone who won’t make me cry and feel shitty about myself.

“Date a queer,” they said. “It’ll be better,” they said. “It’s way less work and way more reward to date someone who isn’t a cis het white guy” they said.

I dinno. Maybe mileage can vary.

It’s ok for us to each have deal breakers. Fatphobia isn’t something I want in my life. If you make those kinds of comments I don’t think I can be in a room with you on purpose for any kind of intimacy. If you make scathing comments about how impossible it is to have sex with someone who is obese I think you are a terrible lover and probably not a great person.

I have to think very carefully about who I bring into my house. I need to think about what kinds of off hand comments they are going to make. What kinds of jokes will spring out? Is there a tendency towards demeaning people or shaming them when there is a disagreement or rupture? These are things I do not allow in my home. If you do them you can walk the fuck out. My kids simply are not allowed. You can have an argument or disagreement without demeaning or shaming anyone. We do it all the fucking time. I know it is possible.

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

This is why I don’t say I will show up very often. I will come when I can and it won’t be much. If that’s not good enough for a relationship with you no hard feelings. I am one of those selfish asshole breeders and my life revolves around my kids. It’s going to stay true. Implications that I am doing this wrong are not going to win you points. If I feel sad and upset and shaky after interactions that is bad for my day job.

I can only have net positive relationship right now, fair or not. I don’t need anyone to be perfect but hoo boy. That’s a lot of flags.

Happy masochism, submission, and being degraded.

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I am a flavourful woman. What can I say. I have more flavours than Baskin Robbins but I’m going to limit myself to discussing three of them today. (Many people have said that dating me is getting all the upsides of dating someone with multiple personalities. I’ve always cocked my head to the side when I hear that. Hrm.)

I’m feeling really excited about the beatings I’ve received recently. Two in the last three months! Look at me hitting warp speed over here. Once upon a time I was beaten multiple days a week but life evolves. Seasons change.

I like being a happy masochist. I will cheerfully direct you from the bottom how to hit me and where for me to get the most sexual enjoyment out of the experience. In my broad and storied existence this goes best with a service top, not a sadist. Even though this is the part of me most commonly paired linguistically as masochist/sadist it’s not actually a match. Being a happy masochist means that I enjoy the pain and I don’t suffer. Sadists, by and large, are not that interested in such a dynamic. Service tops love me though. They get to beat on me and grin while I get off. It’s very entertaining, I’m told. This is feeling like the bottomy part of myself that I have the most access to right now. It feels like a joyful reunion in myself.

Submission is different. Submission is giving up my will. I am a lot more passive. I don’t direct what is happening; I endure. I have mixed feelings about this right now at this point in my life. I recognise that a lot of it is literally just me using dissociation to barely be mentally or emotionally present in the room. I am a meat sack that will do whatever you want. I can take a really brutal beating this way. I will cry at some point but there won’t be orgasms. I’m not there to enjoy anything and I know it. I am there to be pleasing and I will accept whatever is poured into me. It’s not possible to kick this off then revert to happy masochist. I have to make a decision. Submission involves a lot of depersonalising. I am just a thing to work/be used.

Being degraded is very strongly related to the intense dark age play I do but it’s not always the same thing. It involves a lot of spelunking down into the layers of my psyche where I feel the most pain. Physical pain is such a constant part of my life that managing it isn’t that complicated in some ways. I am up for it or I am not depending on how my body is manifesting. Being degraded is different. It doesn’t line up with physical pain limitations. Being degraded is complicated. It’s psychological in a way the other two kinds of being on the right side of the slash aren’t for me. I need to be triggered into these negative emotional states to experience catharsis. I have to do it in a way that is sharp and pointed and impactful but has no lingering trails into my life. I have to find a way to not be overwhelmed enough to kick into frantic efforts to reduce psychological pain when I get back to my regular day job. That’s dangerous for me. Playing with the lower levels of this is my bread and butter of play. This is available to me when physical masochism isn’t safe. Dehumanising me, experiencing me as a thing to be hurt and used is very different from submitting. Submission doesn’t make me feel subhuman. Submission brings my soul with it to the dissociated place because only my meat sack is being set out for abuse. With degradation my soul is being hammered. What am I really worth? How could anyone love or respect something as disgusting as me?

This is a lot of why I insist on my long term relationships being with folks who very seriously treat me like a princess. They take care of me and adore me and make sure my life is as soft and fun as they can. They know I have suffered a lot in this life and they try to make sure the time I spend with them is better than the times when I have been alone or with people who didn’t love me at all.

I have learned a lot from Black women about what it means to crave a soft life. I eschewed such things for myself for years because I didn’t want to be like the awful rich white bitches I knew. Black women talked to me about how when you are this deeply traumatised it isn’t the same kind of entitlement. It’s allowing yourself to feel deserving of rest. I am not trying to get my softness through cruelty to other people or taking far more than my share and rubbing peoples noses in it. I have watched white women defend their soft lives with cruelty, entitlement, and avaricious selfishness. I want no part of being like them.

I want enough softness that when my battered and bruised body finally stops working I get to rest somewhere that has my pillow fort set up so I can support my fucked up joints as they repair. No, I don’t care about getting my hair or nails done. I don’t need fancy bags. I do have some nice dresses, but they are not from expensive shops. I’m a cheap bastard.

I have so much lingering resentment and rage for the wealthy. It makes my life surreal. I’m not asking for softness because I am better than other people. I’m asking for softness because my body is a few sharp taps with a mallet away from shattering. I want to feel like my partners believe I am a precious resource they desperately want to keep.

I have different levels of access to these three different flavours at this stage of my life. I’m really loving being a happy masochist. It’s so much fun. It feels like freedom and joy and being replete. I feel validated.

Submission is really hard. I think I would be able to access this in a limited way with one person at a time. I think I am past the part in my life where I can offer blanket submission to a group even for so long as a weekend. I think I can’t do that now. I am too hard to play with. I have too many small injuries and areas of deep trauma. I can’t put me to the side now and only give people what they want in a broad way. I would be able to pull off a one to one scene, maybe, but I haven’t tested it and I am afraid to. I sure as fuck will not be a pass around toy like this anymore. It’s not safe and I’m done carrying the damage for other peoples fun. My body is too fragile.

Degradation was the form of play Noah liked the most. He didn’t have to worry about hurting my meat sack and he could cause emotional torment with very little effort. The epitome of a lazy top. I say that without rancor. He inflicted a lot of emotional pain on me during sex. I get off on it like a race horse so I’m not actually complaining. I also don’t know how deep I want to go into this well with other people. It was safe with Noah because he knew my trauma mapping better than I did. His knowledge didn’t depend on state dependent memory. No one else is ever going to know me the way he did. It’s going to be a more dangerous game now. I suspect that this is the flame I will not be able to keep my moth self away from.

Submission is not all that appealing to me at this stage. I am in service 24/7 and it’s exhausting. I don’t want to give my fragile meat sack to someone who knows very little about it and let them do whatever they want to me. I am too fragile. The potential risks are so high for me and the people who will pay the price are the people I cannot take care of.

Being a happy masochist makes my day job easier for quite a while. It’s a lot of joy and energy for me. It’s like tapping a main water pipe when I need a glass of water. It’s so much energy.

Being degraded allows me to wade through the swamp of my brain and get the surges of fear/anxiety/lack of worth in a contained way that doesn’t blow up my life. My brain formed in a terrible soup of abuse and lack of worth. I don’t live there full time anymore but my brain will always find those ruts comfortable and home-like. It lets me siphon off some of the frantic energy that could otherwise fuck up my life. I think of this kind of play as harm reduction. I pretend I am being hurt by a very bad person so that I can avoid ever actually going to find a very bad person.

This is where Good Trouble last year was a risk. He wanted to step into degrading me without having a container. He thought me being good after the sex was me being silent and watching bad tv with him while he shushed me and told me not to talk. He didn’t know me. He asked for Daddy/daughter incest the first time we played and he didn’t ask me what such a thing might mean for me. He put me in a position that makes me feel nauseous from the start. He wanted the daughter to be intensely trying to “steal” daddy from mommy. Oh, and he wanted to meet my kids after 2 weeks of fucking.

I ran like my tampon string was on fire. That was not a good risk. That was a bad risk.

I am trying to be cautious. Mostly this means not doing all that much. It feels like a season for not pushing limits. It seems like a time to assume fragility and need for support at a level rarely inhabited.

I have to survive so I can’t be stupid. No risky choices.

Who in the fuck even am I?

He is a gift to me/Raise your standards

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Noah liked to say that even when I couldn’t articulate the reason why I did something I usually had an intensely accurate perception of my needs. I am going to spend the rest of my life recycling Noah’s words to me and reinterpreting them in different circumstances. I will see his beautiful benevolent face in my mind as I try to forgive myself for not dying with him.

I was right that I needed to lock down sex. That has been the main thing that has improved my mood over the past 17 months. First the thrill of the hunt (which I get a lot out of) and then the gradual experience of someone growing past the box I wanted to put him in. When I met Gentleman it’s not unfair to say I was looking for a human dildo. I needed someone to get me off and it is less scary for me to approach cis men for casual sex.

Then the months went by and he kept doing more and offering more and he learned my bizarre maze of rules and regulations. He doesn’t have to be told things twice. When I say that something is out of bounds he may ask clarifying questions so he can be as respectful as possible but he never needs to be told twice.

I have a shitty memory. Noah was an asshole who took boundary assertions as dares. It’s fucking amazing to date someone who only needs to be told no once. No kidding, this feels shocking and confusing to me on a regular basis.

I stayed home from yoga and the munch today. I couldn’t. I am trying to be ok with my vast limitations. Gentleman came over afterwards and we had a really lovely date. He played with my daughter in the garden while I did some weeding. We picked up new wheels for my wheelbarrows. We had really lovely sex. I’m definitely less frantic than I was this morning. I am very much an addict when it comes to sex. Withdrawals aren’t pretty. It’s been an awkward last whole week and change so sex has been challenging to arrange. Today he laid me out like a pillow princess. He made me flood a small village. It was a good time.

Mostly though he listened to me talk/cry for a couple of hours. He held me while I cried. He gives me space to have feelings. I’m still so terribly unable to let loose like this with most of my friends here. I am scared to stress test the relationship like that. I need these friends very much. They are important to me. I won’t always be this hard and I need them to still be around later. I don’t have a massive pond of people to burn through here. I have to carefully cultivate the only options available.

I’m not sad about the friends I have made here. I have met some really neato people and I feel lucky to know them. I’m not saying that they are the bottom of the barrel or anything. I found some really great candidates of open minded folks who have a big Krissy shaped hole in their lives.

Gentleman is one of them. He unfolds like a flower in my life, slowly and carefully. I was pessimistic about our chances starting in week two. I kept expecting him to blow up at me or judge me or be nasty to me and so far… no sign of any of the above. Instead he shows up and listens to me cry about how overwhelmed I feel and he responds with, “What I’m getting from this is I need to not wait to be asked. I will come over and do things.”

And they say men don’t listen.

I feel like a lot of what is making this relationship go so well is that we aren’t super stress testing it. We haven’t jumped into the deep end with both feet. We have not had that many overnights yet. We both arrived at this relationship believing we didn’t want to live with a partner again. We both want freedom and companionship. It’s a great match. He appreciates that I’m not the only one in my house who has long term plans around him sticking around. We like him. We’d like to keep him. Not because he sweeps the floors (though that is fucking awesome) but mostly because he comes in and he asks all of us questions. He treats us as interesting people with stories to tell. He contributes and doesn’t expect us to be serfs while he lounges.

It took over a year for the first serious scene. I think that was so smart. We got to know each other first. We waited to see how we got along outside of the chemical storm of play. Also he is pretty dang good at topping. I am excited about the play we will do down the line. I feel like we are going to have fun discovering what we like together.

I needed to lock down sex. I did not expect to find someone so remarkably compatible and kind that quickly and easily on a swinger site. I did not expect to find someone who would slowly drift further into my life a little more with every month. Someday we will probably find the “just right” amount. I don’t think we have hit it yet. We are still building. That feels right. That feels appropriate. It feels safe and respectful. I feel like it continues to be the right path for me to set the hurdles high for entry into my life. People who want me have to put effort into it. I will not push myself on anyone. I am too horrified about the implications of that. People have to actively choose me. I am going to do my best to not let anyone accidentally opt into something that is outside their ability to cope with. I’m a lot.

I don’t think I’m too much. That’s a different thing. That’s a value judgment. I’m not making a value judgment in this moment. I’m simply acknowledging the shape and size of personality I have. It’s a lot. Like Alaska joined up with Russia a lot. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Space isn’t all bad. Maintaining a bond with something that huge is work and people should be allowed to choose it knowingly or opt out.

I like that he wants to be my sustenance. He wants to be my food, not my candy.

That makes me feel really happy because I desperately need a lot of vegetables and not much candy. I can’t take the inflammation.

I feel so incredibly lucky that he is in my life. He is being incredibly kind and thoughtful about slowly building a very conscious relationship. I feel like everyone in my house is being given a chance to slowly get to know him and develop affection on their own time scale. This feels so healthy and positive.

I have been a rusher for most of my life. Now that feels terrifying in an existential way. I can’t survive a lot of extra turbulence right now. I am skating on very thin ice. All the fucking metaphors.

He makes my body feel better. He makes me feel like I have good things to look forward to. I have fun short, medium, and long term plans with him. I like that he lets me take care of him and I like that he takes care of me.

I feel sort of guilty that he will calm me down enough to go talk to Pretty Lady. That’s a squidgy thing. People who are already poly can appreciate that desire sparks desire. It can feel harder when you are first leaving monogamy. I am so worried about all of the things I want from my future.

I want them so much I feel like my hands are seething flames of need. I need violence so very much. I need to give it. I need to receive it. I need to be able to love and adore a woman as much as I want without getting in trouble for it. I need to be able to be selfish.

It really feels like asking for all this is too much. It’s not fair. Surely someone wouldn’t put up with me when this is the deal.

I’m pretty sure I’m going to see him again tomorrow, even if only for a little while. If we don’t see each other we will still talk.

I believe him. I am finding him to be a consistent person who cares a lot about maintaining things and keeping them in good trim. He does the relationship maintenance work. He’s been briefed to a degree that seems reasonably fair. I haven’t told him every detail because we will probably never have those conversations. It doesn’t feel necessary.

Do you know how weird that feels to me? In my in person life I may never again have a relationship where I talk in gritty details about my past. Most of what I needed to talk through… I talked to Noah. If Noah was here we would have talked about that stuff forever. He would have dug ever deeper into my earliest trauma. He wanted to be able to shove knives into my trauma with ever greater precision. When he hypnotised me and told me to react like I was 3 or 4 or 5 he wanted to know what stage of trauma I was physically experiencing again.

I don’t think I want anyone else to know those things. I think, maybe, it is time for me to stop being reharmed in the same few spots. I’m allowed to close the door on that trauma and leave it alone. Maybe, just maybe, the scab will heal if I stop picking at it.

Maybe it is ok for me to do the kind of bdsm that Vicki loved. Maybe I don’t have to keep contorting myself into being Noah’s victim.

Maybe it is ok for me to have higher standards. Maybe I don’t have to buy acceptance and love with my willingness to let someone hurt me as much as they want. Maybe I am good enough without that.

Maybe.

I really like him. He’s a great boyfriend.

(I want you to know that I flinched over each usage of “just” but they felt necessary.)

The process is messy but I like the results

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Noah was retiring so he could forcibly take work away from me. That was well on its way to happening. Our kids are incredibly high needs. They need a lot of mental stimulation and a fair bit of physical support. I appreciate that my kids don’t have any shame for having a lot of needs. They don’t feel bad about themselves because they need support. We get on with it. They’ve not had to deal with being in an environment where they didn’t understand the rules and had to figure it out on their own. I feel mixed about this on a lot of levels. The older kids have done fine when they are tested out in the world. I feel both like maybe I have overly coddled my kids and like I don’t coddle them nearly as much as other people seem to coddle their children. Recently my parenting has been described as both entirely based on nurturing and draconian and Victorian. Where is the truth?

My therapist has applauded the weird grounding my daughter has gone through. I communicate with her about why I need it. She still has joy and support and physical activity and love but my central nervous system requires a break from being activated. I need to not suddenly find new messes/things to correct. I don’t need it forever. I need it to last a few days consecutively because I am deeply overwhelmed and on the verge of over reacting in ways I would not be proud of. I arranged respite care for a couple of nights this month. A good friend will come over and stay with the kids while I have 24 hours off. I need it really badly. It’s hard being on duty 24/7. It’s hard being patient all the time. It’s hard feeling like I have to provide anticipatory service for their needs all the time. The first one was last Saturday night and I’m feeling much better.

Also, the grounding is over. A three day grounding lasted 31 days because she kept sneaking out to do stuff she wasn’t supposed to. It was a learning experience all around. The big kids reflected on what they learned from their own epic grounding experiences. All three of them come out of these groundings saying that the biggest thing they have learned all the way down to their bones is that mom doesn’t bluff. If you push me hard enough to make a dire threat I then have to follow through. You and I will both suffer. I don’t care. I will be consistent with what I say. This is why I’m never allowed to use violent ranting language. It’s a bluff. There’s no bluffing in this house.

I appreciated the big kids talking to Shortie about how she has now seen for herself that when you break a rule you need to be very certain that it is worth the consequences you will receive. In many parts of life it is worthwhile. There are times when breaking the rules is worth the cost and you need to go into the act knowing that you will suffer for doing it. The ability to spread food through every box of toys in the library is not a good example of that. You don’t get to eat the fun food. It goes in the rubbish. Then you get grounded and lose good things. When you fuck around while you are grounded you find out that it can always get worse and it does.

By the end of a grounding my children are all super emphatic about the fact that most of the time their life has layers of awesome built into every day. I think about their preferences and I do things to benefit them all day long. I literally build my life around making sure they get as much happiness as possible. I think a deprivation vacation is good for the soul.

As I’m reading this book from my mother in law I feel ever more affirmed in my beliefs. It literally is harder for my children compared to most people like it was harder for me. There are genetic legacies here that mean we are playing a slightly different game than other humans. Our impulses are bigger. Our compulsions are terrible and driving. Our self control is barely there and requires a lot of outside support while we develop if we aren’t to fall into life harming habits. I knew I would have children who would need more support.

Here they are. The living embodiment of my planned science experiment. Can people like me grow up to be happy and functional human beings? Are we doomed to lives of intense misery and suffering before we die young? Everyone in my house has rough days and rough phases but we work through them. When someone is blindingly furious we give them space and we don’t allow ruptures to happen. You are entitled to your feelings. You are not entitled to be allowed to hurt us. Have the feeling. Work it out of your body. Then when you can be calm, come negotiate for how something needs to change. We are infinitely malleable in this house.

I love that my 8 year old can say, “I’m going to work hard not to get grounded again. Food stays in the kitchen. If I am grounded for another reason I am going to stay in my room for the first three days because I can’t take another long grounding. I don’t have the self control yet to wander around the house while I have limitations. I will wait it out in my room. That’s the way I can make myself follow the rules.”

Frankly, I’ve come to the same conclusion in my own life. When I have urges that are very dangerous or inappropriate I hide alone until they pass. It’s how I stay out of a lot of trouble.

I feel comfortable and safe in my family. I feel grateful that I am helping my children learn in their bones that suffering for a set time period is possible if you put your head down and breathe through it. (They are suffering through boredom and I choose to believe that they will be able to generalise that to other things later. It works for the big kids.)

They have learned how to not be a zoo animal like me. They are more domesticated. They do not instantly start hurting themselves when they get bored. They know how to channel frustrated energy in more healthy ways. I watch them and marvel and desperately wish I was as good as them. They are the ideal models for me to live with.

It’s a funny thing, teaching. I can teach all kinds of things. I taught a boy trigonometry. Do you know what class I have never taken? Trigonometry. Using the book and the knowledge the boy had from all his previous maths classes I talked him through teaching himself trig. He got an A on the final. He said I was the best teacher for maths he ever had. I thought that was hilarious. I was literally incapable of doing what he was doing. I would fail that test. I can’t do trig. I don’t understand it. Not even the basic bits.

My children understand things emotionally that I don’t. They have access to deep wells of understanding and knowledge that is outside my ken. They say they learned it all from me. I say I am a conduit and conduits don’t hold on to the thing they disperse.

Sometimes I feel as if I spend most of my life as a vessel where I am not. I can help people go through the journey they need to experience. I leave almost all of me out. I don’t say all of what I’m thinking. I don’t reveal the layers I am experiencing simultaneously. This is hard. I used to share them with Noah. There will never again be a person who knows so much about me. Now there is no point in talking about most of what is going on with me. No one has enough context for it to be useful.

My children now see the most of me and they still only see a comically small part of me, let me tell you. I ache with the lack of feeling witnessed. Honestly that drove Noah’s insistence on us spending so many hours together. He was trying to fill his own staggering insecurity and my deep wounding over not feeling seen.

Moving over 60 times in my first 25 years of life left a harsh mark on me. I feel like a fractional human in every circumstance. My children will be the longest relationships of my life in terms of time spent together. Now that Noah is dead I’m pretty sure no one else will even vaguely come close. I didn’t live with anyone in my family of origin much. I spent almost 10 years living with my mom spread out in chunks–never longer than 3 years at once. She only managed 2 jumps of living with me for 3 years. The first 3 of my life and from 15-18. I spent a similar overall, sometimes overlapping, amount of time with Auntie and Uncle. My mom could best handle living with me when her big sister was there to do all the work for taking care of me.

I’m very scared of coming to need someone and having them run out of give for me. I don’t feel entitled to anything from anyone. I don’t feel deserving of much. I’m achingly aware of how unfair it is to befriend/date a breeder. We are selfish. We put our energy into our children instead of into reciprocal relationships with adults. We have the need to take more than we give when it comes to adults because we are being drained so constantly in our homes. I don’t feel like I have paid enough into any local relationships to deserve that.

Whether or not I can pay it back now or not I have to be selfish right now. I am asking friends for help. I am trying to make my job easier. The transition into trying to carry my load as a single parent is achingly complex and there are layers that are going to take many years to sort out. I am really grateful one of my Kids is coming over and helping the house feel more maintainable a few days a week. I’m so grateful he has the time available and the willingness to spend his time this way. It is such a gift.

I ask for a lot from Gentleman. I am crossing my fingers he doesn’t think I’m going too far. I’m scared. I’m scared to get to the point of feeling like I need him a lot more than I do now. I already feel like my life would be tremendously harder without him. He makes me happy. I really need to feel happy. It’s hard to feel happy in the 24/7 demand cycle of my life. I have moments of happiness in my life but mostly I dwell in patience and suppression. Most of me is not allowed.

It would be really easy, right now, for me to fall into “mother” being the only identity I get to have. That will crush me like a bug. I can’t. I can’t subsume my whole self that way. I will explode. I will break and I will act out in problematic ways. I can’t feel too trapped. This is what Noah and I were working on at the end. His death flattened me almost as hard as having a baby does. Only I need sex.

I need a lot of things. Most of them I don’t get. I work as hard as I can to share as much as I can but it’s not enough. I am not enough. I am reminded this morning that what I have to give is not enough. I was silly to think that putting up with me is worthwhile. I am too hard.

I should have kept my head down and my mouth shut. Then I wouldn’t have hurt someone I never wanted to hurt. My inadequacy causes pain. I have to live with knowing I do that. It’s going to be a hard, slow day. I feel so sad.

It doesn’t matter how I feel. It matters what I do. I have to get up and serve. It is all I have.

Coming back is feeling hard.

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I have written a few million words over the past 6 years. I put almost all of them on Fetlife because I was feeling awkward and uncomfortable and unsafe in a variety of ways. I wanted to talk about my weird sex life and trauma in a place where I wouldn’t accidentally scare a new-to-me local person here in Scotland. Every so often I meet someone in town and they say they found my website because “they just knew I would have an internet presence.” Well. That’s not alarming or anything.

I am struggling to come back because there feels like so much that I don’t know how to explain. I have been dumping my stream of conscious over there and people here lack a lot of context. I think I just have to jump in and let there be some confusion.

Because I have more money than time or hand-spoons I have asked a friend to help me with tagging the old posts. She does all kinds of translation work and this is not far outside her wheelhouse. Also, she tends to read huge batches of my writing for free so we can talk about it and that means I don’t feel like a bad person asking her to do more reading for money. I’m not asking her to opt in to harm. She already opted in! Now I will be paying her some money and the history/context that is currently only on Fetlife will come here. Hopefully in more manageable dumps. We’ll see!

I am desperately over committed. That’s a lot of what is going on for me right now. There’s a lot to do and I am living in a house with people who all have intermittent health. Technically, I was even before Noah died. His health was more up than down but I have probably spent at least a full 52 weeks out of our 20 year relationship caring for him post-surgery/through an illness/after an injury. He was fragile, too. He was just sturdier than the rest of us. Maybe.

I’m worried about our future together. My newly hatched adult son is not handling doing his 3 hour shift at work. He’s experiencing really strong migraines. He can barely stand upright. Him feeling this bad is not unusual. I don’t think he will ever be capable of a full time job. He is unwell so much of the time. Living with him forces me to deal with my deeply ingrained ableism. I feel like he “should” do more work. I watch him literally work to capacity until he crashes and the amount he accomplishes isn’t that high. 5 hours of work out of 24 is genuinely outside his capability range for most work. He can draw more hours than that. Sometimes he can handle sitting and sewing for a little longer but if he does he will have reduced capacity the next day. He is a walking (sometimes) example of a spoonie life. His life is fairly unlikely to get much easier.

He does work at exercise–he’s fairly fit. He eats better than anyone else I’ve ever known. He wears supportive devices. He is doing everything he can to function. He wants to be a work horse. He can’t be though and I watch that hurt his feelings quite badly.

Do you know what he can do for many hours a day? Write on the internet. He regularly hits the limit of number of posts on Tumblr in a day. He is a prolific author over on AO3. His stories are read thousands of times and people tell him that his writing is deeply emotionally impactful for them.

I look at my boy and I think that in a very small, terrible way, it’s slightly good that I am no longer planning around the kind of retirement Noah wanted. We were going to spend the money. He had big plans and ideas. Instead I am going to live a small life and I am going to make sure my children are ok. I won’t spend all the money. I will pass it on so that they can be ok as disabled humans. Being disabled is very hard. Society expects disabled people to receive a lot of indignity and scorn and contempt in return for a substandard meager existence. I can’t make them super wealthy. I can make it so they have a roof to share and food to eat, basically forever. They will need to supplement for fun stuff. I feel ok about that.

In a way, this is more in alignment with who I was before I met Noah. I never aspired to the wealth we created. I never wanted/needed that for myself. I have coped with building it by thinking about it as Noah’s money. Now that everything is being put in my name I don’t get to have that buffer. I’m struggling with self identity. Poor white trash isn’t supposed to end up where I did. Oh well.

Luckily MC is fairly sturdy compared to the rest of us. They have a lot more physical stamina. I anticipate them working a job that is a very large part-time job/very small full-time job down the line. Like, maybe they will get to a 30 hour/week job. I think they have that capacity for some kind of work. They are looking into ways they can access stuff over the next couple of years now that they are older. They feel most comfortable in any environment if they know what they are expected to do; they prefer to be a worker over being an attendee. They like interacting with humans in environments where there are a few common scripts they can learn/follow. They want to be around people. I think they will do great once we find them a spot. They are currently getting around 10 consistent weekly hours with outside the house people. We have been looking for stuff for a while and the age segregation in the UK has been a major stumbling block. They are almost to the point where they are allowed to go do the things they want to do. Waiting is hard. We aren’t wasting the time.

MC has made a huge amount of academic progress this year. I’m quite pleased. They decided to finally master spelling/grammar stuff and their hand writing has improved so much. They have really struggled. Now they are writing like a fairly average teenager and I’m feeling a lot of relief. One of the more terrifying aspects of unschooling is believing that the kids will get around to needing things and they will drive their own learning. It has worked well so far but it’s scary. It’s really hard having this kind of faith in these people. The older the first two get the more I am convinced that this is the right path for people like us.

I combine faith that they will self motivate at some point with having a house full of learning materials in a wide variety of subjects and constant pushy conversations about new topics that I am wondering if they have explored yet. My kids are shoved in the direction of learning, it’s just in a chaotic “Choose Your Own Adventure” kind of way. There is a concept in unschooling called “strewing” that is basically about seeding the environment with learning materials on a wide variety of topics and at many developmental levels. Don’t surround them with stuff “for their age”. Surround them with interesting learning materials and they will play with them for fun. I don’t get it as often here in Scotland, but in California people walked into my house and said it looked like a school. Yes, like a Montessori school where children are invited to explore and learn any topic at all. That was the point.

I am starting to feel more urgent about the need to find consistent access to taking YC to more activities and classes. She needs to have a driver available. This is complicated. She needs to go take horse riding lessons. She needs to participate in the nature/woods activities the home ed groups do 1.5 hours from here. I can’t get her there. This is going to be really complicated. The thing is–it’s not just that I can’t physically do the driving. Sitting in the car for these trips is going to reduce my functionality in a big way. I will experience harm. I need to have people who have strong enough relationships to take her without me. That feels like a very big ask.

My life feels so ridiculously complex because all of the “just do x” answers don’t work out so well. I can’t send my daughter with just anyone. I need to send her with someone who is going to pay enough attention to be like a 1 to 1 aide. I need to send her with someone who knows her ways of trying to do things she ought not do. She does need that support. She’s not a bad child. She is in a stage where her competence outstretches her self control and she needs someone there to ask, “Are you sure you want to do that? What might be the outcome if you do that?” She needs to talk through how the consequences might play out a few thousand times. She’s not bad. She does learn some things kind of slowly in ways that can feel frustrating for grown ups.

Hilariously, my mother in law is sending me a book titled Original Sin because she is reading it and getting a lot out of it. After I read it she would like to have a chat with me about it. Both my family and Noah’s family all have long histories of, shall we say antisocial behaviour? We are addicts. We are explosive people who can be very violent. My family is full of sexual deviants–both the cute kinky kind (I ran into a cousin at a Leather event years ago) and the sort who should be locked in a small room to keep society safe. Noah’s extended relatives were the kind of violent racists who openly giggled about hate crimes at family functions. We don’t come from good people. My mother-in-law’s mother was an incredibly violent woman. The story I was told was that it was a strong suspicion that her husband walked into that farming equipment on purpose to get away from her. Maybe he died young in an accident and maybe he died young because he could not face going home anymore. My grandmother-in-law was a hard woman. Strangely, I managed her better than anyone else in the family. I talked to her like she was the child and I was the teacher. I explained what she was doing and why it was wrong and how she needed to do better. She was actually really nice to people when I was around. It was weird. The hospital staff asked if we could visit more because she was less violently racist to the staff when I was around.

I have a way of smacking down racists that seems to be fairly effective. They listen to me. I don’t understand why.

We are down to 4 days on the grounding and everyone is crispy fried done with this. Paying this much attention is physically depleting. So, let me clarify before I get more advice: grounding does not mean I lock her in her room 24/7. That would be over the line. She has exercise classes she attends. We have to cycle to the store to get food and other essentials (like plants–we still cycle up the big hill to the nursery). We go on walks because it is necessary for accomplishing tasks. Our life is not as sedentary any more. I love not living in California. My life is physical. Existing here requires that we move and it is so good for us.

Additionally: there is no way grounding would mean not having to do chores and that takes a fair bit of time at her enthusiasm level. She’s not in her room for very long in a day. Just when I have to do something and I can’t be within arms reach of her. Then an older sibling sits in the hallway to guard. This is not fun. Four more days. We will soldier through this for four more days. I am desperately hoping that we have all been miserable enough that she won’t keep doing the weird shit with food.

We are brainstorming all the different pathways she has to go eat whatever she wants in the kitchen without creating a problematic situation. For starters: keep food at the table. When you finish with food, sometimes it is good to go find other people and say, “I had half of (thing) do you want the other half?” In our house the chance of finding a yes is like 98%. If you do hit one of those 2% times, go get a container, put the food in the container, then put it in the fridge. This is not a problem. EAT THE FUCKING FOOD. THE PROBLEM IS NOT YOU EATING FOOD. The problem is acting like food is confetti and you need to sprinkle it into every container and surface of my house constantly creating 2+ hour cleaning binge requirements. I DO NOT HAVE FUCKING STRICT RULES, HERE.

We also spend literally multiple hours a day hugging/snuggling/talking in affectionate ways. Even when someone is in trouble in my house we still find ways to express love. Love is constant. Frustration comes and goes. Anger comes and goes. Hatefulness comes and goes. We are allowed to feel lots of feelings at once. We always have love.

I feel like, in many ways, this opportunity has turned into when I have had the kind of time to yammer at YC the way I used to do in the car with the big kids. I haven’t done this kind of constant lecturing YC about relationship currency and being a good citizen of the house and prosocial behaviour and creating virtuous cycles and having a genetic tendency towards addictive behaviour and learning how to manage that and how to have self control and how each stage of life is going to get more difficult. We are really in the weeds on the hard stuff of life over the past two weeks. She is hearing a lot of really deep philosophical stuff and she is blossoming with it. I think it is fucking hilarious that all of my children have thanked me at the end of long punishments. They know that it was hard for me to persevere but I needed to live up to what I said I would do. I don’t bluff. If I say a thing will be a way if you do a thing I will follow through. I don’t make threats. I make promises. There are restrictions, yes, but you have a path to redemption. The path is accepting that you don’t get to have everything you want all the time. It’s hard. It really is. Sometimes you have to be able to tell yourself “No, I don’t get to have that right now.” Maybe you will be able to have it on a later date. Maybe it will never be for you.

We all must control ourselves.

I can’t make it easy for you to learn. It is always painful. It was painful for me. It was painful for your dad. It was painful for your older siblings. Learning is hard sometimes. It’s a necessary hard part of life. I can’t make it not hard. What I can do is sit next to you while you endure it and let you lean on me and complain.

We don’t quit, we complain.

This is part of how I show my children that they can do hard things. We do them together. You don’t have to be alone until you become a teenager and then you will want to be alone and I will stop pestering you so much. I will still be available whenever you need me.

Really this whole year with YC has been such a blessing. I am so grateful Noah let me have her. I think I would actually be spinning out worse if I just had the big kids. I really feel like she is an integral piece in us having the family dynamic we have. I feel like her needing the super intense attachment stuff with me right now is good. I think that is how she will be able to thrive in the long run despite losing her dad. It’s a tragedy, make no mistake. We still have oceans of love in this house. Our boats will continue to sail.

Sometimes we will love each other while being frustrated and annoyed and irritated at each other for a while. That’s not the fun part. Luckily it never lasts too long. We revert back to our normal Addams Family vibe. It is hard without Gomez but still we persevere. We love each other and feel deep loyalty to each other because we have all earned it. We have been together through thick and thin. We have worked through lots of issues together. We have learned how to live together so that we cause each other the least harm. We did that. It was all of us together. It wasn’t any one of us.

I’m looking forward to reading the book my MIL wants me to read. I am a big fan of neuroplasticity. I think that what we are born with we can change. I think we can grow and be more. I also feel like everyone has the capacity to make good choices but it is a lot more work for some of us to figure out what they are. I genuinely believe that some of us are born needing more help to learn prosocial behaviour.

My father had bad intentions for me. He created me with malice of forethought. It’s on my mind because the hypersexuality stuff has been itching me for a while. I don’t particularly feel like I want to hunt, that is way outside my ability right now. It’s more that I’m not having enough sex. I hate this urgent feeling in my body. It feels like I am choking on it. I feel sad and useless and helpless. The thing that would change this is a lot more sex.

I have sex with my delightful boyfriend literally as often as I can schedule. The limit is logistics, not willingness. He has a truly incredible amount of responsive desire and I am enjoying our relationship very much. I don’t have more time in the day to go have sex. Well, I do between 4-7am . But we have gotten to a point where meeting that early for sex is not as much fun. I need sleep too. He needs sleep. We are old fuckers. The only solution to us being able to have more sex is for him to not have a job. This is not a thing I can afford quite yet. But frankly, if this relationship carries on I’d be happy to pay him for doing a lot of the shit I can’t do. I don’t see why I should feel bad about paying a partner when I’d otherwise have to pay a random person that I’m just meeting.

It seems entirely logical to my hypersexual brain that the most cost effective, in terms of both money and time, solution to a number of my problems would be simply paying my boyfriend a salary. I don’t want him to move in. He doesn’t want to live with a partner. He has expenses. They aren’t massive on my budget. I feel like we might be able to negotiate a way forward. I also then get to have some intense feelings like whoa about how things have shifted in my life. I’ve been a kept woman. I’m probably going to keep a man. I am going to keep him well enough for him to have his own life and interests and he doesn’t have to depend on my whims. We are negotiating the 6 month nest egg that has to be in his savings account before it can happen. I’m paying a fucking dowry.

This is so hot I can barely stand it. I don’t particularly want to hunt for random sex partners; it’s always a crap shoot. I am physically and emotionally exhausted. I feel half dead. I am getting over the top good vanilla sex I enjoy; he also shows great promise as a top. I see much joy for me in the future. The sure thing is a better bet for my needs-vanilla-sex part. Right now random sex isn’t a good risk. It’s funny to feel that in my body. I’m learning so many new feelings.

And yet, this is something we are talking about working towards. Maybe it will start happening around 3 years in. Nothing is urgent. Nothing will be done suddenly. I am making careful long term plans because I have a long future to provide for and a specific pot to do it with. I have no anticipation of much income from work, ever. Maybe I’ll surprise myself and books will sell someday. We’ll see.

Also, I am feeling kind of like dog shit because I do not have the spoons to pay the amount of attention I want to be paying to Pretty Lady. I don’t. I feel crispy fried in my brain. I am so desperately over committed at every level right now that I feel like I shouldn’t have approached her yet. I feel like I am stringing her along.

This is where breeders super suck to date. I’m in the last gasping surge of all engulfing attachment behaviour with my daughter. I am struggling to have any time to myself and I’m feeling touched out to my soul when it comes to giving behaviours. I know that Pretty Lady would like to be support at this point but I do not have the ability to train her when I am this overstretched. There is no fair here. It is what it is. I am in one of those grind periods where I have to put my head down and endure until it is over. It will end. This is not forever. This is a developmental necessity. Every single one I’ve ever been in has come to an end. I trust this one too. I like feeling that trust in myself.

After this span I am going to have a lot of controlling energy going spare and I am going to enjoy the hell out of lavishing it on Pretty Lady. This does occupy my thoughts at times in the cracks when I have no ability to write an email. Life is just not fair. She is hot and fun and incredibly eager. I am having a lot of tension in myself over needing to go slow. It feels alien to me. I am a rusher. I rush into things. I do thing fast. Every physical skills teacher I have ever worked with (dance, martial arts, sewing, what-fucking-ever) has told me, “You need to slow down, Krissy. You will keep making mistakes if you don’t slow down.” I fucking know. Yes, I make a lot of mistakes. Going slow is hard. It feels mandatory or I wouldn’t be able to sustain it.

I want to get to know her better very slowly before I do anything intense. I want to know her story and what turns her on and what bothers her. I don’t know all of those things yet and as a result I feel frozen. I won’t be able to act in this relationship until I know how to do so in a way that won’t hurt her. I am absolutely determined to be good for her. That means I can’t be selfish or short sighted. I can’t rush.

I am not communicating well with anyone. I am so overwhelmed inside my brain I feel incapable of hitting someone else’s speed for communication so best not to start anything. I keep waiting for this to feel better. There are so many reasons it feels terrifying and overwhelming and I don’t know how to shift until things drop out. I am trying to cycle through so many different tasks in my brain that my volume control sucks. My emotional responses are all over the place and out of proportion. If I don’t want to fuck up, sometimes I have to choose silence even though it creates its own issues. My email inbox is a bit of a graveyard. There are conversations I really need to have but my stomach explodes in a ball of acid when I contemplate them. I can’t risk making a rupture worse because I am intemperate. I hate feeling like this.

I need the estate stuff done. I need to get all of the financial account stuff consolidated. Even though I am paying people to do a lot of the work it turns out I still have to do a bunch of supporting work and I must attend a great many meetings before I can get their help. Getting to all these things on time is stressful for me. I’m struggling quite badly since Noah died. I had really come to rely on him getting me to my appointments. I’m kinda fucked.

This is literally exactly why I know I can’t train Pretty Lady yet, I don’t have the bandwidth. I will though. I will when I get all of the support structure set up in my life so that I can be a successful single parent. I have the means. I just don’t currently have all of the ways and methods locked down. It’s improved a lot from where I was in the first few months. I have hope. Things have shifted in many ways and that’s been good. I have more offers of help and I am saying yes. I have specifically reached out to my Hedge Witch and one of my Kids. They are both going to show up more for a while with a mind towards doing specific work. I need support and they want to give it. The kids need to feel like they are a bit more taken care of. There are grown ups in our life who want and are able to give that care. I am very lucky.

As Sobonfu told me: I will never find a community that I can join. I have to build my own. I am struggling with stepping into the fullness of what that is going to mean without Noah. I tried very hard to be a supporting character in Noah’s story. He tried very hard to be a supporting character in my story. In many ways we held that against each other. We were trying to have a story where we were both the protagonist and we were struggling. In order for me to do that I had to cut off big chunks of my personality and spend a lot of my time doing stuff I actively disliked in order to be there with him. I will now admit that I was dreading pieces of it.

Do you think there was any chance I would have had fun helping him build the Ruby con he wanted to bring to our city? Naw. I would have been dealing with the kinds of people who have looked down their noses at me for my whole life. I would have been reminded over and over and over that all of these people believed he married down.

He was so proud of me he was deeply confused why these people didn’t like me. But they didn’t. It wasn’t my imagination. It wasn’t RSD. I lived in Silicon Valley for a long time. Yes, I had friends. They weren’t the ones who were the kind of international names that Noah befriended in his industry. Amusingly, this is not even a cis het white guy problem. This is a tech people problem regardless of race or gender or background. Many of them treated me with contempt because I didn’t jump through hoops to be a good enough person in their world. It is what it is.

I am really glad he let me leave.

Honestly it is refreshing when someone random in town is angry that I am here because I am an American. Most of the time I can join them in slagging off the country and it turns out ok. Sometimes it feels scary. Do I think my kids might experience anti-immigrant/tourist violence someday? Quite possibly. I breathe a deep sigh when I think of that happening here. There will be no guns. The chance of a knife being involved is pretty freaking low given where my children spend time. They might get yelled at or called names. They might get hit with fists or feet or beer bottles. Luckily I have put all of them in martial arts from very young ages. Bitches can fight. They can and have defended themselves.

I am grateful my children are going to get to stay here. I am grateful Noah did this for them. They live in a place where when they eventually wind through the medical system to care it will be adequate. Not stellar. Not world class. Adequate. Ok. Fair enough. As long as these motherfucking terfs stop coming for transgender healthcare. That part is getting scary. It won’t affect my body but it will affect my life and I am deeply frustrated watching this country go down this road. This is the super rich trying to fuck us all up.

I am scared of the next few years. I am making friends. I am building my network. I am finding people who want to engage in mutual aid with me. I have stuff I am doing for them and they have stuff they are doing for me. I need it to be clear and negotiated, not codependent and passive aggressive. I need for both sides to feel respected and like their needs are considered.

I am entirely failing to do this through writing with people at this stage. This is happening in conversations in real life where I can see peoples faces and bodies. After so many years of having lots of my life passive aggressively thought at people this is truly novel. It feels really important to not lean on writing the way I did in the past. I am no longer in an environment where I can have that kind of expectation of all of my close friends. I simply write too much and around here folks don’t read that much.

Gentleman is a reader. But he will never write back. That’s ok. I accept him as he is. I like him very much. Pretty Lady is going to wander by sometime soon. She is both a reader and a writer. This is going to be a very different kind of adventure. I still have to go at the speed of conversations in the room. I can’t coast on expecting reading. That won’t work. I’m not sure it really worked in the past. I think I messed a lot up by expecting people to understand things from writing that I wasn’t actually able to communicate. I thought people would know what it felt like to be me if they read my writing but that’s not how it works. They know how to feel like them reading my writing and that’s very different. It took me far too long to really grok this.

I am struggling with the amount of sex I am getting to have. I literally physically need more. I am flagging all the time. This is also not a reasonable expectation for my partner. I am not owed sex. I don’t get to demand constant performance. It makes me feel ashamed when I think of pestering someone as much as I want to right now. It’s far outside what average humans want to experience in this life.

It took Noah and I a long time to build back up to having sex 10-15 times a week after having kids but it was amazing and there was every sign we were going to keep that up…. forever. We were sex addicts locked in a house together. It was fantastic. We could use that constant dopamine rush to go do other things. We were very productive.

I will never have that on tap again. instead I will have years of burning and aching and being grumpy and sad and trying to pretend that I’m not. I don’t want a live in lover. I just don’t. I feel really bad about it but I need it to be ok that I have to spend my mornings out in the studio screaming and crying because I miss Noah and my mother and even my father and my brother and my uncle and auntie and my niece and nephews and Vicki and Andrew and Michael and Wendy and Jill and all the other people I can’t have back. I need to have space in my life for this wild grief and it will keep me from being able to be there all the time for someone else. I will never be a whole person again. I have given so much of me away. The containers that I shared with all of those people still take up a lot of space inside of me. When I sit in them I can still feel the good parts of that relationship. I also feel horrible pain. It would be quite poetic if I lived to a ripe old age then died of a broken heart because I just lost too many people. That would be an ending that no one would would feel bad about.

I am scared that my end is going to hurt people because I might be messy and selfish about it. I am praying I can hold on until something happens that isn’t my fault.

I don’t begrudge my children a buddy to keep them engaging in prosocial behaviour. I literally litter my entire schedule with people who are performing that function for me. I still need it. I can’t ever have it be one person who believes that they have the right to take away the parts of me that bother them again. That was too hard.

I feel like some of being frozen when it comes to exercise is partly because I know that when I am in better physical shape I feel a lot more frisky. I am still afraid of what will happen when I want to be slutty. It lingers in my mind as a worry. I don’t tend to hunt much when I am on the heavy end of my range. I am a lot less aggressive about everything when I am chunkier. My personality gets turned down a lot. This is how I manage to be a wallflower.

I feel like I have reclaimed small pieces of me and now the next few steps are going to be much harder. It requires the kind of boldness I could only attain when I was siphoning off of Noah. He was my greatest stimulant drug.

He should be turning 50 tomorrow. He isn’t. My heart is heavy. I’m catching up to him. He never got past 48. I’m turning 45 this year. I wasn’t supposed to catch him. I wasn’t supposed to catch a lot of people. My father died at 48 too. I will pass both of them when I turn 49. That feels really heavy in my heart. Only four more years until I pass both of the patriarchs of my story. I will. That’s going to happen.

I am sad. I am horny. I am tired. But at least my garden is super banging and I like my kids and my boyfriend and my girlfriend. I have fun short and medium and long term plans. I will put my head down and get through this. It will be fine. Surely. There’s no way out but through. It’ll be what it’ll be.

Fragments, shards, tools, and usefulness

6 Replies

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.

The end of the first marathon

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Today my oldest child is 18 years old. He’s a full adult instead of a quasi-adult. (Scotland has some interesting laws that create a soft-opening for being an adult at 16.) I think he is magnificent. I think he is worth every hour I have put into him. I only regret that I didn’t have more to give him. Well, and I regret that Noah is not here to watch him progress into manhood.

I want to write a lot about him because he’s so cool. He’s a writer! A good one! He has an intense online following. He writes about how traumatised people exist in the world. He’s a fiction writer. He says he bases a lot of his characters on me and that’s complicated to think about. I feel humbled and flattered. I’m glad he likes me so much and that he sees me as a person who overcomes even when it is terribly painful.

It’s fun negotiating with him as a housemate. It’s interesting watching the ways that it feels like we didn’t lose Noah because my son is so much like him. He really is a chip off the old block. I am so grateful that Noah left three reflections of him on this earth. I am glad my son got to share so much with him. EC went with Noah to work conferences over the last few years of Noah’s life and it was a wonderful bonding experience for both of them. I am so happy they had such a precious relationship together.

I do wish Noah had not said so many times to our children that the best thing he could do for their motivation in life is to die. That was, in retrospect, not a nice thing.

Today my son is feeding people pie. He says he wants to do all the work for his 18th birthday and after this he will again accept help. There is shepherds pie, pot pie, and fruit pie and I think a custard pie. He hates cake.

I don’t think my son is on the trajectory Noah followed when it comes to getting a “good job” and making a lot of money. Instead he is happier and more peaceful than Noah or I have ever been. He feels secure in a way we have never been. The closest I came to that security was being with Noah and now that is gone forever. I sometimes wonder what security is going to feel like in my body in the future. I don’t have much of it now. I have vague hope for the future but no certainty.

I am kind of glad he asked to have one more year of home education because the first year after Noah’s death was such an intense black hole of learning nothing. It’s going to be interesting negotiating this dynamic because I won’t be as instructive or demanding. I’ve been pulling my demands back very consciously for a while now. He has to fly on his own.

Only 10 years to go before I am done with the Indenture. Being done with 18/28 years is pretty good. I’m not quite in the home stretch but there’s a lot of progress. I feel good about the results I see. I’m proud of my children. I don’t need them to be high achievers. That’s not part of our family values. Sure, Noah was a high achiever but it was because he burned like the sun. He needed it for himself. He passed on enough to keep us safe fairly indefinitely.

Marrying Noah and raising children together was still the best decision of my life. I had such a good partner. My babies had a good father. Now we have to keep moving without him. Life isn’t fair and no one gets what they deserve. For a little while we got to live with a glorious and inspirational soul. It was such a privilege.

Living with Noah was so good. Living without him is hard. I keep hearing the Garth Brooks song If Tomorrow Never Comes and breathing slowly and deeply. I know how much he loved me. I know that I had a great love. When the spiteful bitch ex-girlfriend group got together to bitch about me stealing him three days after his death I couldn’t help but think that he didn’t break up with them because I made him. Instead he backed away from those groups because he found the person he wanted. I know that he moved us to Scotland because he wanted me to not have a huge network of people. He didn’t want to have a huge network. He wanted me. He wanted to be alone with me as much as possible for the rest of his life. We did that.

I’m glad that I buckled down and kept myself to the house for the years he wanted me to. It was worth it. We have children who glow with certainty of place and love. We did that one day at a time. On this day I can’t help but think about how lucky I am that I got to do all this with Noah. I am so lucky.

I like my housemates

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It’s blowing my mind that my oldest child is 12 days away from being an adult. This feels absolutely impossible and bizarre. Yet, here we are. My second child is 3 months away from being a quasi-adult in this country. (Scotland is strange. There are many ways in which you gain admittance to a softer version of being an adult: you vote (in some elections), can join the military, can leave school, and you can get married without permission. You may not buy a plastic picnic knife or a pair of scissors.) In our house one of the things that turning 16 gets you is that I no longer micromanage school/screen stuff. I go hands off and allow them to fuck with their schedule. I figure that making mistakes with running your body between 16 and 18 is one of the lowest stakes time in ones entire life. Might as well make as many as possible.

I feel like I have spent the last 18 years training housemates not raising children. They communicate so well, both of them. When one of my children is struggling with doing one of their chores they initiate a group conversation so we can re-divide chores. It’s miraculous and glorious. I feel so much pride I want to explode. MC (Middle Child) has figured out that they are happiest if they can do their contributions to the household when no one else is around. They clean the kitchen after everyone else goes to bed. They are now choosing to opt in to getting up early enough to make breakfast. These wrap around chores will make sleep slightly more of a specific issue but they want this combination because it produces the lowest amount of distraction while working.

It is really cool living with people who know who they are and what they want. I feel really proud of them. I watch them self advocate and I struggle with not crying. It never enters into their psyche that maybe they should just shut up and suffer. Their life hasn’t gone that way. When they are suffering they speak up about it and demand change. That said, we also talk through the things that must be endured because they cannot be changed DBT style. I love Dialectic Behavioural Therapy. It really works for me. The framing of it helps me a lot. I have been super active in teaching it specifically to the kids. There are things that must be endured: challenging developmental stages, security in airports, recovery from surgery. These things can’t be changed when you want to. Most things can be changed though and having the strength to make it happen is the obstacle. My children are so strong. That feels mystifying to me as they balance the contradiction of being very strong and also disabled.

MC had an adenoidectomy last week. They are really enjoying the way they can already breathe through their nose somewhat. It’s hard because they haven’t been capable in many years. I am overjoyed with the impending running schedule. They are going to be coming out with me several days a week and that thrills me. Up to age 24 is when you build all the fast twitch muscle mass you will ever have in your life. We have 8 years left to push hard together to make them stronger and capable for the whole rest of their life. That’s fun.

EC (Eldest Child) is frankly suffering a lot more. His body is crap and he is not getting a lot of help from the NHS. To be fair, I don’t know what they would be able to do for him. He eats in supportive ways. He does supportive work for his body. He is doing everything that someone with our alphabet soup of labels can do. He’s going to have a rough road. He’s going to lose a lot of time to feeling like crap and being unable to force his body through coordination. There is no avoiding this. So he takes on chores around the house that have a bit of wiggle room and he can do them in batches on days that he feels well.

YC (You are catching on with the naming convention, yes?–Youngest Child) is not so good at these things right now mostly because she has zero self initiatory drive absent an immediate reward and that’s a complicated thing. Her motivation isn’t present and I’m struggling with being consistent enough to make demands every day. It’s a negotiation and a production every day still and I’m really tired. It’s hard to be as consistent without Noah around filling in the gaps.

I miss Noah every single day. It’s not every hour at this point, that’s progress. It’s hard accepting all the ways I have less to give now because he is not the backstop. I commit to so much less than I did. I feel like my brain is constantly overwhelmed and I’m drowning in lists of things. Yes, I write them down. I still repeat them in my head because otherwise they will never happen. I feel like barely contained chaos at all times. Noah made order out of the chaos. I feel deeply helpless without him. I’m trying to learn that the maelstrom of words is not something that I can share in the same way. I will never be able to jump topics in a conversation the way I did with him again. No one else will ever have so much context for my thoughts. He could look at my face and know why I was crying. He knew which wrinkles in my face were for which layer of grief. It is hard the degree to which I will not be known going forward.

I don’t mean that no one will get to know me. They will do their best but I have a lot more history now and way less time to talk about it. What Noah and I had took so much time. I don’t have that kind of time to give anymore. It feels like I am not able to promise that depth and intimacy and I feel really mixed about that.

I feel lots of feelings at this point because poly is going to be complicated. I’m looking forward to it and also dreading it. I think that is a fairly normal set of feelings about poly. Poly is great! Also: poly is terrible! I really like my boyfriend. He feels like a really solid human. Our explorations together continue to deepen and broaden. I don’t currently have any idea what we are building towards. I don’t know what the limits of this relationship will be, exactly, yet. I don’t anticipate living together. For sure not any time soon. I am looking forward to when YC is older and I can sleep at his more often. He has a kitty who doesn’t appreciate being abandoned so he shouldn’t sleep here too often. We both have these anchors in our own spaces and that feels really comforting to me. He has been burned by relationship changes in the past. I like that we are both coming into this relationship with our own centres of gravity. (Also, if you are from the UK please give me spelling feedback. I’m trying to adapt but this shit is hard.)

I have started dating a nice woman I know in the queer community. It is still very early days and we can’t get together often. We’ve had two dates. We have not had sex. I feel like it’s going to take a while before I can be capable of having the kind of sex we are interested in having together. I have a lot of issues. My marriage involved a bunch of very conscious programming work that Noah did on my brain to try to change me. He wanted me to be monogamous. He wanted me to never top/dominate/hit someone ever again. He did a lot of hours of work on making it so that my body feels like it can’t access these urges I have. He wanted me to only need or want him. Now I can’t help but feel like I was right to refuse that.

I keep replaying in my head when he burst into tears saying that he was going to turn out to be only one of my great loves when I was absolutely the one big one for him. It feels like an indictment of my character.

The pain I feel right now because I couldn’t give him the single minded focus he needed so bad is part of why I feel like I should never live with someone again. My inability to have only one love hurts people and I don’t want to lead anyone on ever again.

It’s not that I spent my whole marriage cheating on Noah. I didn’t. He was always terrified of it though. He felt like I could at absolutely any moment and he never relaxed. He didn’t trust me. He didn’t believe I would keep choosing him. He was afraid that any amount of not looking at him would invalidate all of the time I spent looking at him.

He was suffocating me. I feel awful about this. I didn’t have the capacity to be satisfied from spending 20 hours a day with him. He was very stingy about how much time I was allowed to be out of the house. I didn’t want to leave. I did only want 10-12 hours a day with him. That hurt him. I couldn’t make that not hurt. For him that was overwhelmingly painful rejection. I talked about getting a crappy retail job to get out of the house and meet people and he was very upset. He could not accept me wanting to spend that much time away from the family. He would scornfully tell me that I would make so little money that it could not possibly justify being away from him. He missed the point.

I was trying as hard as I could to be ok in the small box he wanted me to live in. I wanted to be the wife he wanted. I am really sad I couldn’t be. I was going to keep beating my head against that wall forever. I’m sad that our journey together is over.

I am sad that my need to be alone and to have adventures with new people will continue to hurt people forever. I am selfish. I want myself. I want to be alone. I want to spend time in my brain. I want to form new understandings of humans and that means continuing to meet new people.

Another Kid is entering my life. I am really enjoying having intergenerational friendships with folks. I love that these young adults are drawn to me. I love getting to talk to them about what is going on in their lives. I’m trying to map them out in my brain.

I feel really lucky that these people come and seek me out. I don’t do that great in group situations at this point. I hang out on the outskirts of communities. I am not a central pillar of anything. I hide in my house and garden. These folks come to me and share their hearts and life stories. I rephrase what I hear to make sure I’m understanding properly. This process is a big deal. I don’t have to have solutions or answers to anything. What I do is properly listen and help them frame the topic. That’s enough. Having someone else understand and validate what is going on is already a big deal.

I feel like I should put more effort into friendships with folks my age but they all have kids and the schedule conflicts are impossible.

I have been spending more time with Jenny. That’s really good for my soul. Once again she is pulling me into dancing. Now we go to line dancing classes together. She has been good for me for over 30 years and I cannot overstate how grateful I am. She is such a good friend.

I am not reaching out to most Californians. I feel incapable. I feel overwhelmed. I feel like I am drowning. I am fully present in every moment and I don’t have the ability to reach backwards for all the old ties. I feel like I am barely stumbling through my days. I am so tired.

Today I have a whole bunch of time. I get to weed! This is the big thrill for me right now. Yeah, yeah, “No mow May”. I’m not mowing. I’m removing grass from growing areas. I don’t have the space for a meadow. Luckily my neighbour is letting the patch next to me run wild. I finally acknowledged to myself that I missed the window on starting seeds so I have bought some plant starts. I try not to do this. Oh well. It is what it is. Food will grow. Asparagus (not to be harvested this year of course), a variety of different Asian green vegetables, a bunch of salad green things, some peas, some brassicas. I need to chuck my potatoes in the ground today.

I won’t get everything done today that I “should”. I’m not capable of it. That’s feeling really hard. I should also try to get all the tax documents sent off to the accountant. That should have happened already. Fuck.

Also I want to read more. I want to sleep more. I need more rest. I also need to exercise more. DO EVERYTHING MORE ALL AT THE SAME TIME.

Deflated by feelings

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I feel weary in my bones. The last 7 days have been incredibly emotionally intense. I finally saw folks in the chronic pain clinic and it was a very positive appointment. I am on the road to finding the right specialists within the NHS for my particular issues. They are putting in a letter that cannabis is the most appropriate medication for me and this will allow me to pursue getting a prescription through the NHS. This is going to be incredibly helpful because I will be able to stop smoking and go back to capsules. This is great news.

The thing about living in the UK is that everything moves slowly. Getting good news means that in a few months or a year I might see an impact on my life being different. The speed is hard to live with at times. It’s like how Noah’s estate isn’t fully settled because the rules here have hundreds of years of precedent and they are picky about paperwork. It’s nearly done but it isn’t done yet.

Both of these things being in limbo for so long is feeling hard on my body. I feel tired and worn down from being anxious. I was on the chronic pain waiting list for about 5 years. The NHS is very slow but it gets to people. Middle child had their adenoidectomy after being on that waiting list for years. Recovery is a process. They are excited about being able to breathe. Eldest Child hit the top of the gender affirming care list a few weeks ago. They called to tell him that seeing him down in Glasgow in the clinic that used to do care for minors is pointless. He will switch to our local NHS waiting list at 18 and he will probably be at the top at that juncture. Local will be easier for a lot of reasons.

Living here requires learning a kind of patience that feels unreal in some moments. My American nervous system is not trained for this much freezing and waiting. I learned long ago to act, to fight, to do anything to make things change. Here that’s not a good approach. Here, being messy and active slows stuff down. It’s hard to integrate this knowledge in my body.

I’ve talked to my solicitor and a lot of doctors this week. Every single one has emphatically told me that I am managing freakishly well and they are impressed that I am keeping everything together. I think they aren’t seeing all the balls I drop. It was nice, in a way, that the receptionist at the dentist was very kind about saying she can understand why stuff is hard because Noah used to do so much to keep us all on track. She could see that just from us moving through the reception area for appointments.

I feel less competent than I used to. Noah isn’t here to patch over the cracks of my mistakes. I make so many mistakes.

I am really struggling with all the ways I feel bad and too much and sad. My emotions feel too big to share with anyone else. I don’t want to drown people. Noah wanted all of me. He could handle it. I don’t feel like it is ethical to share very much with people now. Tiny drips and no more. I am feeling like a tsunami of pain and if I let it impact anyone else there will be consequences.

There are always consequences for being me.

How funny. I can tell that my face is scrunching up when I cry just like my son’s does.

There is no doubt in my mind that if I didn’t have the kids I would be dead now. Noah promised me that he would let me die first so I didn’t have to be alone. I am alone in my brain now in a way I haven’t been since I was in my teens. By my early 20’s I had people around me who were opting in at full speed. I think there are people in my life now who would say they want to opt in to the fullness of my brain and I am not able to trust them. I have been left too many times. I’m afraid to need anyone. Everyone goes away. I’m not fully alone. I spend time with my Jenny. I have made some really nice friends here and they care about me a lot. They show up. My boyfriend is a great guy. And still there is so much of me that I could only share with Noah. I miss Noah. I miss being good enough even when I sucked.

I hate that I feel no resilience. A very soft amount of correction feels like evidence that I don’t deserve to be alive or have relationships. I can’t react in a proportionate way and I hate this. I hate feeling like even the smallest amount of frown invalidates me existing. This is what Noah gave me. I annoyed the shit out of him. He corrected me harshly and I could handle that because I knew that nothing I ever did would be bad enough for him to leave me. Back I go into feeling like I don’t belong anywhere or to anyone. Being necessary for the kids is different.

It’s good! Don’t get me wrong. I am really grateful that I have positive, uplifting experiences with the kids every day. We get along. We are well suited to each other. We have a peaceful, loving coexistence. This feels possible mostly because I keep most of me in a box off-stage.

I am not sure I will ever feel seen again. I miss Noah. I miss the way he clutched me like I was his security object. I miss feeling like I was the reason someone felt whole. Instead I am back to being someone who makes people feel awkward and uncomfortable. I don’t like being me. I want to be someone who was born good enough to love. I have to work like a dog around the clock to earn my right to keep breathing.

I am really tired. I slept ok last night. This is exhaustion at the soul level. It is so hard going on without Noah. He needed me. He needed me so much that all by himself he justified my existence. Without him I feel like a burden the world doesn’t need. I know that my kids need me for a while longer, but I am afraid of their complete independence. I am afraid that I will see all the signs that I trained them to not need me as reasons I should go. The point of being a mother is to raise people who will be fine without you. If you don’t do that, you haven’t been a good mother. You can’t train apprentice adults to be dependent. They need to be able to survive my death.

I am struggling right now. I will get through it. I always do. Right now it hurts.

Old shit and new shit

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It’s been on my mind a lot lately how much Noah resented me having a lot of friends in the kink community. He acted like them liking me meant he wasn’t really part of the group. He did have his own friends who came to kink events, but he considered them more “visitors” to kink from computerland. He thought of himself and his friends as weekend warriors who “didn’t really count” in the eyes of the Leather people. He wasn’t all wrong.

He didn’t want to put the time in to go sit at munches or go to parties without any hope of play. For him if there was no payoff there wasn’t a point. Then he resented that I had so many friends. He resented that I had so many opportunities to play when he didn’t.

I practically lived at scene events for 5 years. I was at scene events at least 4 days a week and often 7. These events would last anywhere from 2 hours to all weekend. I was spending probably a minimum of 15 hours a week at scene events. Then there were the immersive conferences I went to many times a year that lasted 3 or 4 year. Even more rarely (but ever more precious) were the ones that lasted 7 days.

Of course I had friends in the scene.

If you assume 15 hours a week (totally ignoring conferences) and giving me two weeks off a year for illness, that is 750 hours a year. Given that a weekend event would add at least 50 hours to that and I went to several most years I hit at least 1,000 hours a year at scene events for 5 years running.

No fucking shit I made a lot of friends. That’s not including the time I spent with friends. I was one of those assholes who “only knows scene people” for a few years. I was grateful my vanilla friends forgave me for being a neglectful asshole for a while after I came back. I made a lot of them take minor walks on the wild side and they learned that they were not kinky. Oh well. At least they can say for sure that they didn’t like being tied up all that much. I have some very funny pictures that are on paper and will never be on the internet. I like that. In the old days, privacy was a much easier thing.

Some things are great to remember forever. Some things should be forgotten because they were only meant to live for a moment in a very small container.

I do really wonder about sending my buddy one of the pictures of him tied up and suspended. He is very very very very Catholic with his 7? 8? children. I wonder how old man him would feel about our youthful games. It was good clean fun. Sure, it was sex but it was the kind where everyone stays fully dressed and nobody touches any junk.

It was wholesome, damn it!

I could send other pictures to the dear old friend in Utah doing his best to expand the tolerance level of the Mormon church. He believes God brought me into his life and his heart for a reason. He is militant about advocating for people like me.

A long time ago I was learning and exploring and I was brand new. I didn’t feel responsible for the outcome.

Now I feel really shitty that I bumped into someone at the munch repeatedly in a playful way without ever having a conversation about such things first. I am grateful that he has accepted my apology but I’m too fucking old for this shit.

I feel this overwhelming responsibility to do it “right” all the time and I don’t.

I am having a hard time with the amount of personal space awareness the kink scene requires. I have fucked up several times since I came to Scotland and I am really upset with myself for being so messy about these things. They are small mistake size but there have been a couple and I don’t like it. I am not reticent enough. I am not contained enough.

I struggle, often, with how reticent and wary to act folks are locally. I have the polar opposite problem. I am overly comfortable with the idea of acting. I am the exact kind of asshole who, when someone is passing, will bump into them and say “oops” a couple of times. I don’t do it hard. I don’t try to hurt anyone. I’m playing. But I don’t have the right to be familiar with anyone’s body.

Noah wanted me away from my friends and he got his wish. I have very little time in a room with anyone here. Even the people I’ve spent the most time with I’m still awkward and I feel like I don’t understand the boundaries. I sometimes wonder if Bestie and I like to dance together so much because that is the only way we can manage to be in that kind of proximity to each other. We aren’t snuggly at all. I touch my kids. Gentleman and I have sex.

Noah touched me for hours and hours and hours every day.

I feel desperate for kinesthetic, tactile relationships. Being sober is the fucking worst. I don’t feel sexy and I’m not going to initiate sex. If I look anything other than horny he doesn’t initiate.

My body aches with the desire to be in contact with humans.

It is feeling a little rocky as I start adding stuff back into my life because I desperately need more fucking contact than I am having. Most of the time I’m filling is kid-stuff adjacent so it means very minimal physical contact and only that initiated by short people.

It is the size and shape of life I was allowed to have with Noah. He allowed me to have more than a full time job worth of socialising while he was working because I could justify pretty much all of it for the kids. It is literally my fucking job to socialise these children. That was well done of me to get my whole life set up around filling my particular needs.

As it gets warmer I keep thinking about the fact that I have about 5 months to go until It’s 2 years out from the rape. The last year and a half have been brutal on my sense of community. I am so lonely. I don’t get out enough. We don’t get out enough. Home educating is harder here. The community is spread out so far it’s a real problem since I don’t drive.

Building community here is a much harder path than it was in California. The population density is small. Also: I used to drive. This whole fucking process is a fucking nightmare sometimes. I choose this. I can’t go back, not for a million reasons. This is where I have to bloom. Maybe it’ll be ok. This country does glorify the thistle.

I’m not going to be able to get to scene events very often and when I go I am going to want to be fully present with the people in the room. I’m not going so that I can have a place to do public scenes with my partner. I mean, yes, that’s on the list of things I’m happy to do. It’s not The reason.

I’m having to think about this really hard because both Gentleman and Pretty Lady are making comments about wanting to be part of this. That’s fucking complicated. Because when I go to a party I want to see the people I don’t get to see all the rest of the time. I don’t go to a party to be watched. I go to meet people and talk and play with new people. I need to build a bigger friends network in this country. I need it. I am not saturated in terms of relationships. Nothing of the sort. I don’t know how much more serious dating I have space for at this point. Definitely not with anyone outside the radius.

My life is constrained. I want to get to know people who live on the coasts, and Borders, and central belt. (I am honestly not sure how I should be capitalising that sentence. Feedback? I go back and forth on whether Central Belt should be capitalised. I think “Borders” is a specific region and thus a proper noun? I’m trying to guess based on how people speak and I’m forking confused.) I only have chances to see those people at parties. Like, I’m not going to spend the whole time hanging out with my Kids either.

Mama is going to play. If I can. If not, I want to make new friends. It is less important to me that I find play all the time. I must feel the freedom to be able to get into a really deep, meaningful conversation with someone without checking my watch.

I am tetchy as all fuck about this. I’m being defensive when I don’t have to be. Maybe this is a bad month for a tolerance break. I am going to have to have a lot of control over my tone of voice in ways I’m not doing great at today. My kids don’t tell me to use this medication because I am easy to live with without it. “With your medication you are a very happy mama. Without your medication you are rather a fucking bitch. Go take your medication.” Direct quote.

I feel bad about that.

I don’t know how my relationship with Gentleman is going to survive a tolerance break. Maybe this month is not a good idea. We are going to have to talk through me going to a party on my own and going to a party with him. Maybe I am going to need an amount of control I just literally don’t have available while sober. My choice is not speaking at all because no, I am not going to be able to say it as nice as you need me to. I can’t. I literally fucking can’t. This is why I take medication. So that I fucking can.

Drug dependence is fucking real. But the thing is, I have all these issues without the medication. I’ve had problems my whole damn life. On the medication I am a moderately functional human being.

I remember when I went on the road trip I got into an argument with my Utah pal’s mother in law. She was taking something like 18 different medications. We talked about them a great deal. I went through the research on cannabis and how using it would probably knock her down to 1 or 2 pills. She said, “No. It’s illegal because it’s bad for you. Nothing about it could ever work or be useful.” The conversation went on for a while. She said a lot of things. I found it really amusing. We make ourselves believe so many things.

Literally 8 fucking doctors all signed on that cannabis is the most useful medication that exists for me and I should use it for the rest of my life. That included a fucking pediatrician and ob/gyn who worked with me through multiple pregnancies and I breast fed for 7 fucking years. That’s not good enough for this country though. I have to wait through the waiting lists then get rejected by the NHS for multiple kinds of treatment having no effect before I can get capsules here.

Life does not give a flying fuck about anyone. These things are silly.

I’m feeling oppressed and pieces of it are mildly reasonable even if they aren’t personal.

I feel exhausted to my soul.

One day of break. I don’t think this is the month. I think that’s going to go poorly. I don’t think I have that resolve to give. I think I will be too snippy and bitchy. I don’t think I have enough relationship capital in this relationship to be allowed to have a bad mood. That’s good to know. It is very important for me to respect the limits of a container. When I understand what caliber of self is required I can select the timing of my performance and make sure I don’t exceed my limits.

Noah and I took turns taking tolerance breaks and being grouchy shitheads. We knew to sigh deeply and ignore each other for a while. It will pass. Every feeling passes.

I don’t think I have space in my life for volatility right now. I don’t think that self is acceptable. That’s a hard thing for a bunch of reasons. Physically I do need the break. I don’t do them for fun.

I think this is one of those times when I have to pick what kind of selfish I am going to be. I can either be sexually selfish or I can be selfish about being moody. I don’t think I get to have both right now.

I think I’m getting close to 15 people with whom I’ve had enough conversations to fill more than 24 in person hours of friendship. That’s 6.5 years in.

I’m not popular here. I have an asshole telling people wild stories about me and my dead husband. I’m kind of an abrasive bitch and I’ve already had a messy falling out with one dude and that’s not great. Someone dislikes me for very good cause. I was far too aggressive in questioning them about a rapist. I was really selfish and it was wrong.

No, I don’t have a bunch of fucking friends right now. Well, I do, but my friends are mostly thousands of miles away. I don’t have a community here that I have built with time and shared connection. I have a bunch of strangers and a lot of hope. I have a desperate need for the kind of communion I have found with Leather people.

It’s not the same here, but it’s close enough. I’ll accept kinksters instead of Leather. I’m not snobby.

Now I have more like 12 hours in this month where I get to be around kinky people. Last month, because of the house party, it was like 72 hours of being around kinky people. Most months 10 or 12 hours.

I do not feel like this is all happening super fast. This feels glacial to me. I’m not going to have a lot of time in public kinky gatherings. I am going to talk to people and get to know everyone I can. Even the ones you don’t like. Even the ones I end up not liking. I still want to meet them all. This is a fucking small pond and I want to know who is in the ecosystem.

Why?

Because that makes me feel like a whole person. I don’t want to tell you what to do or boss you or decide who is good or bad or moral or ethical. I want to feel like there are a lot of people who are going to need to come together for my funeral. I want to be part of a lot of stories. I need it. I won’t be a main character for them, don’t be silly. I will be a recurring walk on with a scenery chewing personality. You can’t keep me around too much because I will steal the show. I shove people into building their own lives as hard as I can.

I can’t help being loud and sometimes difficult. I can make sure that people don’t have to put up with me when I am feeling like that. There are reasons I wanted a detached house so no one has to hear how obnoxiously loud and American we are.

I am feeling intensely harsh and imperfect. Feelings. Feelings I can’t word. Feelings that I would regret wording.

There is no fair to the fact that I am still over reacting to the repression Noah enforced. It’s not nice for Gentleman that I’ve had a lot of years of the same damn argument and I react like it’s the thousandth time instead of the sixth.

I think one of the big differences in my mind is that kink is for individuals more than couples. It’s not like swinging where there is the priority on enforcing the outside dyad dynamic. There are couples who are intensely together and monogamous entirely who are active in the kink community. That’s a fine and dandy thing. Most people are at least play poly even if they are otherwise monogamous. We come to make friends and share time exploring a mind bending hobby. It’s better than drugs.

My order of safer sex supplies arrived. I had been missing a few things. This is good. I sincerely doubt any of them will get used this weekend. I would put it below a 5% chance. It’s not a sex party. I like serendipity though. Chance favours the prepared mind. Those who fail to plan, plan to fail. Or plan to get cock/cunt blocked by their own stupidity and laziness.

Realistically I’m going to be lucky if I can get past feeling anxious as fuck and even talk to people much. I am opening a door Noah didn’t want opened. This feels existentially terrifying and hard and painful.

The thing is, I’m on the other side. I want to be fully me again and I am feeling inhibited. I am feeling like it isn’t ok.

The fun thing is, I won’t be going as a piece of meat. I’m too old and picky and bitchy for that shit. I’m a bitch who expects people to jump over hurdles for me. I can’t expect to find that at a random party. One can always maintain hope though. There are a lot of ways I can think that through to find some fun.

It all depends on who is in the room and I don’t know yet. I don’t know if I might as well rock up in my stretchy leggings and a prairie dress because comfort is over fashion while I’m chatting and getting no action. I’ll dress up if I have to. I am very lazy though. I like being comfortable so I’m not sure the kind of dressing up I’m up for will even count these days. I’m old and in pain and I don’t give a shit if I look like a fetish model.

If I run a lot more and maybe uhhh cut back a tiny bit on the cake I might be able to fake that shit for a couple of nights. I have some really cool leather dresses. Amusingly, Noah bought them both. He never wanted to go anywhere with me where I could wear them. That was always so strange to me. He knew that wearing these made me feel like a fancy bitch. He thought that owning them was the same as wearing them. He was so smart and also really stupid.

This is one of the things I am going to have to get used to and react like a grown up. I will never have a Daddy again. Daddy’s have to tolerate their children being moody and petulant sometimes. It’s part of the deal. I don’t have a Daddy anymore. I should be in bed. This is when Noah had an alarm. He’d come and get me and give me a stern look.

He took care of me in so many ways. He made me believe that I was worth an awful lot of effort and then he left me alone.

I think solo poly is awesome because I can appreciate a relationship without needing to be upset about all the things a relationship is not. In my home I will always be safe to have all the feelings without having to constrain them to what people want them to be. Come over when you can handle me. Go home when you are done with my bullshit for the day. It seems quite reasonable to me.

Oh shitballs.

Tonight has been a lot of screaming and sobbing. I don’t think I can do a month off right now. It doesn’t matter how much I hate this cough. No, I don’t have better options. Don’t bring them up. You can’t fix everyone’s situation. Your resources are different. We all have to figure out our own shit and it fucking sucks.

I am so tired of curling inward with shame because existing as what I am hurt Noah so much. I did. That’s a fact. I also made him beam with love and go out and do really cool things with his life because he wanted to fund our adventures as a family. He wanted to support us doing cool shit.

He’s gone now. I don’t expect anyone to be patient with my bullshit. When I am given grace it is a gift. I need to work very hard to make fewer mistakes. I need to practice more. It’s really hard finding the time. Typing at people doesn’t actually count, not really. Not for what I need.

I need to know which people in the room I can walk up to with great enthusiasm and throw myself at them because they enjoy that kind of thing. I need to know which people I should smile and wave at, maybe we will chat a little while snacking. I need to know who is going to light up when they see me.

I won’t find out if I am looking at the floor and bouncing my eyes. I hate that I feel like I am fighting against intense pressure. Oh wait, there were literal hundreds of hours of hypnosis about this topic. I’m not supposed to do this.

I’m going to have some feelings as I do it. It’s going to be fucking gnarly. I will be torn between crying and grinning like my life depends on it. Like I will get hit if I don’t.

I don’t believe anyone in this environment would strike me if I had resting bitch face. This is not rational. I am fully aware, thank you very much. The thing is, what I need is to be a positive force for folks. I have to show up when I can show up.

I have seen a lot of people live life to the fullest and I have seen a lot of people squander their precious time. The older I get the more blessed I feel that I had to move so many times. It’s funny how I don’t want to give that to my kids. It was a trauma, sure, but it gave me insights into the similarities of humans that not everyone sees.

I want all of you. Even the ones I don’t like. I need you. I need you to need me too. That means I need to show up and be open to serendipity.

I have to go meaning to say “yes”.

Your first sexual relationship should be with yourself.

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I’ve gone through phases where I didn’t masturbate much in my lifetime. Given that my sexual experience with other people are such that there aren’t many 6 month stretches in my life where I haven’t had partnered sexual contact of one kind or another, that feels significant somehow. The times when I stop masturbating are when I feel out of control of my ability to seek sex. Most of those periods of not-masturbating happened when I was in monogamous relationships. It’s almost like I had the religious vocation that all my orgasms belonged to partners. It’s not linked to my actual orgasm training, though. The relationships I had that lasted longer than 6 months before I did that training also contained this pattern. It goes back a long way.

“Don’t discuss underage sexuality.” Why is me documenting patterns that have existed during periods of abuse and then carried on into arguably non-abusive pieces of my life as well so fucking scary to you? I am not advocating for the abuse of children. I am reckoning with the cost of it. Why are you so upset by the idea of actually figuring out how the damage plays out in the long run?

I don’t mean to be making other people feel shushed out of self expression. When I comment and bring stuff up I am trying to encourage such expression. I feel bad when my uhh habit of giving unsolicited constructive feedback is not appreciated. This kind of bullshit is one of my love languages. People who voluntarily tell me ways I could do something better are people who are trying to tell me they love me.

Oh boy, how is this different from the fuckers who want to silence people and enforce a brutal form of conformity?

Well, I’m trying to give more information so that when you continue speaking you will be able to consider additional factors. It doesn’t mean I want you to stop. Oh please, don’t stop. Your voice is needed in the world. Your differences are important. You have to push through the parts of you that tell you that you aren’t important enough to bother looking at. You have to be your own main character. I’m sorry. I know that second person shit like this can be terribly grating.

I am saying you but of course I am writing what I need to read, right?

I don’t want to be the main character of your life. That would be fucked up. I want to be a bright constellation in your sky helping to guide you home. You have to take the journey though. You have to decide where home is in relationship to me. I don’t get to play any part in that.

I wish I could map my sexual awakening in terms that were more sanitary but I can’t. That’s not an option I have unless I lie or never speak at all. I’m not alone. For all that I am a statistical outlier there are billions of fucking people. I am incredibly like the other people who are on the edge of the bell curve with me.

I can find ways to be like just about anyone. We have a shared axis of humanity. I am usually open to find it if I have the time to sit and look at someone. I am really overwhelmed in some moments by my desire to be open to people even when they inhabit some aspect of humanity I already know I dislike. I am not perfect so I cannot demand perfection from anyone else.

I was looking over my last couple of writings (fucking typos are hard to catch in one go through so I edit over the first couple of days when people respond to it). I noticed an interesting pattern. I am coding “man behaviour” as inherently submissive in some interesting ways. The “man” in the relationship might be the one who is acting, who is asserting what to do, who is dancing attendance upon the “woman”. It’s not the same thing as the man/woman dichotomy.

I am assuming that doing things for someone is what “men” do and they should do so without end. I am treating this labour as service.

I’ve had some interesting conversations with my son recently about my marriage and how he experienced being in the house with it. He said he is baffled by the vast majority of gendered stereotypes and he gets into constant arguments on Tumblr because his lived experience of gendered behaviour is so inconsistent with stereotypes of men and women.

Ok, now I’ll switch the context. Men have to bring the shiny and win the pretty lady. They perform service out of gratitude for being allowed to be in the same room.

I promise, this is all related to my masturbatory life.

When I feel like I am not allowed to experience being in my body as a predatory animal seeking out animal lust encounters I stop masturbating. It feels frustrating and agonising. I don’t want to be teased. If I’m limited to what I can have with/from/for one person this part of me dies. The wanting stills. The ache to chase and demand and assert goes away.

The more I have to inhabit a submissive amount of desire I am locked into this weird state where I don’t feel able to inhabit all the layers of self I contain. It’s not that I exclusively seek dominant contact when I am escaping from the trap of submission. It’s not that I want one separate thing.

I feel like this is clear as mud. It certainly is murky in my brain right now. This variance between gender implications of various ways that I step into dominance and submission is feeling important for the next step but I don’t know how to take it apart. I will always be a system that is fronted by a cis woman and that’s fine. There are still parts of me that take their inspiration 100% from the male side of spectrumed behaviours.

When I was running the other day I had to acknowledge to myself that a lot of the ways that I am utterly relentless and demanding of being seen as an individual is very male coded. Women are supposed to be content to be in the background. Like, I’m full on annoying male autistic coded. It was weird balancing Noah’s resentment for the ways I had communities where I was more interesting than him. His communities thought I was pretty shit and that hurt him too. He wanted to figure out how to make his community value me. He had ideas for how I could be of service to them so they could grow to understand that I did actually have value.

It was exhausting.

I am really excited that my Hedge Witch says that my parties are the best ones she has been to and she will definitely be back. Normally she hates parties. She hasn’t been to one in 15+ years. She likes my friends.

It will be a very different centre of gravity in our house than it was when Noah was here. The people who tolerated me won’t keep coming around. Instead you know that if someone is here they have to have an appreciation of me. Make of that what you will.

A lot of what made Noah and I able to find a stability between our polarities was to swap up different gendered approaches a lot of the time. He was very in touch with retreating into feminine submission, which is not the same as the way male submission involves slaying dragons for your lady. He was pretty typically male in how he expressed dominance most of the time. When he expected us to step really far into cis normal pattern behaviours my desire went away. I am not great at performing the gendered behaviours that are expected of women*. Yeah, I’m empathetic but I have to work like a maniac every minute of the day to throttle my inherent aggression and desire for everything to move along faster already. I do not embody the feminine pining at home for the masculine to come back from providing. I go on adventures. I don’t sit home.

I don’t wait for someone else to come up with a plan. I try things. They stick as long as they work. I am a force for change. I always will be.

It’s funny how having the feminine urge to rip Pretty Lady’s soul out is making me feel more in touch with being a woman than I have felt in a long time. Women are monstrously powerful when they choose to step into it.

I am a monster. I am a deeply powerful one when I step into it.

If I had to lose Noah, I’d better make what I do next count. I get one life. Then how have I had so many lives? How am I going to find the time to live all the ones I feel called to? I can’t. Every choice is a shut door to other opportunities.

I will always choose to sometimes spend days in my house without company because I want to rest. I don’t always want to entertain and that is hard. I do a lot of sprints in life. I need recovery time. I should have built in more right after the party. I need to get more deliberate about these things.

Trying to build an in person community with people who are mainly united by how much they rarely feel like they “belong” takes a lot of energy. This is my target demographic though. It always has been. It’s funny how much it has been consistent at every stage of my life no matter where I am.

“So, how are you deeply unacceptable to everyone present?” It’s good that it is now easy for me to find ways to share that axis without even revealing intense trauma or inappropriate sexual content. Yay for growing up and developing hobbies.

It’s interesting that this recent round of furious masturbation has taken a lot of forms. I feel access to a lot of parts of myself. I don’t do well with imagining doing specific new/untried things with anyone specific. There’s a lot of I want to feel in my body and vague suggestive implications from book scenes. I don’t like to project fantasies onto people who wouldn’t like them, even when I masturbate. It feels incredibly disrespectful.

I don’t want to think about drinking a cup of man tears because I have antagonised random men in immature and hostile ways. I want to find a particular man who gets something emotionally out of the experience of catharsis and relief. I want access to a dyad in which this behaviour can be healing instead of a source of pain.

Somehow, wanting to inflict that violence wavers in me between feeling male or feeling female. The physical brutality feels male and the emotional violence feels female. Which is fun to embody all in one package. I feel entitled to that male violence within specific and deliberate containers.

I have fought with men and I have fought with women. Given that I think all of us are on weird spectrums inhabiting different aspects all at the same time, how can I make generalised statements of any kind? I have expereinced differences between sadistic women and “fighting like a girl”. Girls can be intensely violent. They come at your face with razor blades. Don’t underestimate them.

The violence I inhabit when I feel male about it

Invitation

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I feel like I have found my little livejournalesque bunch here and there are so many amazing ideas floating around in my brain. I find myself drawn deeply into the stories told by dominant women lately. A long time ago I found no draw there at all. I have changed. The funny thing is, I still don’t think I will grow up and be a domme. I don’t think that will ever be my primary identity. Not all that yields is weak. (Thank you Jacqueline Carey.)

I am freaked out by the idea of figuring out what to wear because I feel like I don’t know how to invite anyone into any kind of anything. I feel paralyzed, frozen, unable to assert my longings once I am in the room. It has been a very long time of being punished for identifying these longings too closely. He didn’t hit me or anything but he did talk to me most fiercely. It did redirect the mind control efforts quite a bit.

The worst punishment in the world is knowing that I disappointed Noah. His disappointment was crushing and devastating. He was my Daddy. He was my God. I wasn’t letting down an ordinary man. I was committing heresy.

I was talking with a widow friend in town a bit ago. It was sort of intense when she grabbed my arm intently and leaned in and said, “Don’t get married again. Hold on to your freedom.” Her second husband has been in the mental hospital for quite some time. He only got there after sufficient violence in the home.

Life is terrifying. There is so much risk. So many bad things happen. It’s always funny when some loud feminist tells me that obviously I have the views I have because of my enormous privilege and lack of trauma. I mean, I do have an enormous amount of privilege. That’s a fact. I completely agree with that assertion. My life is staggering. There are a lot of problems I don’t have to have.

I would quibble a tiny bit about “lack of trauma”.

I really like the way my brain works in musical interludes. I intensely walk around with my personal little sound track going in my brain. Right this minute out burst out with Garth Brooks belting [Standing Outside the Fire.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IaTYqFZ4-4) This was one of the songs I listened to for every ~~nitrous trip~~ dentist visit from 12-18. The dentist used to be so fun. Oh well.

I feel absolutely unable to contain the inferno inside of me. I don’t know how to express it. I don’t know how to invite contact with it in a way that feels fair and reasonable and appropriate.

Mostly what I am looking for is friends. People I can egg on into adventure. People who want to laugh and cry and experience life together. I want to have fun on my own terms and not at the direction of anyone else.

I want to search for sadomasochists. I want to find people who will lean in and encourage me to go harder when I hurt them. I want to find people who will be torn between wanting to hurt me and getting distracted by me hurting them. I want to tussle back and forth never certain about who is going to win until one or the other of us collapses from excessive want and someone can’t fight for control anymore. I want to not know going in over and over and over. I want to find people whose desire crashes over them as harshly as mine does. People who feel absolutely driven by the need to experience pain.

What I miss the most is Black Sheets. A long time ago there was a recurring party in a house that was normally closed to women. The entire house was decorated with phallic art from around the world. It was an experience. It remains crystalised in my brain as the epitome of what I wish kink parties were like. It was a queer sex party with heavy bdsm encouraged. It was what I dreamed of in my feverish masturbatory fantasies early in life. I got to participate. It was incredibly fun. All the fucking in all the ways with all the peoples. It was amazing. I loved my friends so much. I went often enough and socialised with folks outside the party so the sex was icing on top of a really great cake. The relationships were deep and complex but had very little to do with what one might think of in terms of a cis het mono “Relationship”. There were people who came to these parties and had no penetration of any kind with anyone but there was still a lot of sex.

I feel like I got through the monotonous torture of early parenthood by remembering that I had a really fun self before they came along. Without Noah here as the bridge sharing before kids and empty nest with me the journey is going to be different. I agree with my therapist on this one. I can’t go back. I wouldn’t go back in a hundred ways, top of the list meaning I won’t go back to the US if I can help it. I do have to move forward.

I appreciate the kind offer of a permission slip. It worked really well when Noah did it.

I am going to have to find this somewhere else. I have to make some kind of peace within myself between feeling like being a white trash whore makes me essentially toxic to humans and feeling like I have a lot to offer. I do have the potential to be toxic to people. I am not in denial about this. There are going to be a lot of people who can’t be near me. Sometimes for reasons I completely agree with and support and sometimes for reasons I am going to hate. It doesn’t matter. Either way my responsibility is to back away as much as I can.

I believe that is the social contract.

When people tell me about the bus that hit them I am probably going to ask why they stepped out into the street and they are going to be incredibly upset with me. They are going to ask why I am victim blaming. They are going to accuse me of minimising their trauma.

I am really not trying to. I am trying to help you find the pattern so that next time you can avoid the next bus if that is very important. If possible I can help you decipher if a given bus is actually very fun to get hit by and maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. Not because I will tell you that you should do it.

I am going to tell you that the sane thing is not opting into getting hit by a bus.

I will do that while consciously and deliberately looking down at the transit map for the perfect timing on stepping in front of certain busses.

I feel like certain other tantalising women do a better job of making this sound poetic.

So much of this desire is brutality and I don’t have the ability to make it sound ethereal and soul elevating right now. I’d better get ready to because book club is in 5 days. Woo!

I am very cheerful about getting to talk about this kind of stuff theoretically with other word people before going to the party. I won’t be actually doing any useful social networking because Americans but it will still feel reassuring. I’m still scared of the ways I will have to proffer my meat sack in order to build what I want to be part of.

I would love to find people in this country for the kinds of parties I think of with so much longing. I want to find the fire that lives in other people and stoke it higher. I want to be kindling. I want to help people feel permitted to desire.

I want Church. I want a river of desire and lust and wanting and permission and pain and transformation. I want to leave bite marks on chests while I use them to gain my pleasure.

Do you know how incredibly fun it was to go to a sex party with a bunch of friends when a verbal order to orgasm was fresh in my programming? I really really really appreciate that my partner went to such trouble when I was 19. That’s been fucking handy in life in all kinds of ways. It has also lead to a really deep and abiding alienation between me and the topic of owning my cunt. It doesn’t matter how dominant I act most of the time, I still need permission to come.

I can get to the point of begging from fairly little stimulation. If I don’t ask when I feel the urge I can make it go away entirely and then I won’t get off at all during the sex. That’s a complicated place to live in.

I cannot actually take my pleasure. Permission must be given. I really am a vampire. I cannot come unless you invite me in. Luckily when no one is in the room I’m fine. Or my life might be a much more miserable place than it otherwise is. I like this part of this timeline.

It complicates inviting anyone in. Needing to bring up that uhm situation fairly immediately creates a lot of tension and dynamic from the get go. Any amount of advertising myself in a sexy way brings with it the mandatory early conversation about orgasm control. It’s not an easy 101 conversation to have on the fly. “Well it’s fine if it’s just an impact scene.” No. No it is not. A lot of things drive orgasm in my body. I take nerve pain medication every day because my nerves shoot off in some troublesome ways no matter I do. Some aspects of this are very fun. I like that a lot of activities make me get off. It’s not that hard to get me off.

I have a sense of alienation from this at times. Needing this permission really triggers a lot of bullshit dominance behaviours from men. It’s a complicated dance at times. I feel like I have spent a lot of my life bouncing around in the manic pixie dream girl trope. Do you know what men want to do when they find their own manic pixie dream girl? Lock that shit down.

I do really love hearing about how other people pick their style. It would be convenient if I didn’t have such a knee jerk reaction to purple, perhaps. You know why and that’s enough. I don’t have to explain it to anyone else. I find this presence that is not present deeply comforting. Thank you for allowing me to talk to you again. I have missed you.

I have missed the me that I was with you. I have missed exploration without specific limits. “Go out; have adventures! Come back; tell stories!” I cannot go back.

How do I move forward inhabiting that kind of space, though? I’m still toying with the idea. Agonising might be a closer fitting term. This doesn’t feel fun. As the wise lady said, it’s a lot easier to gloss over how much suffering happens as you figure things out. Another wise lady was talking about why she stopped talking about her personal life in a public way many years back and she’s very happy about it.

This is how I figure out who I am and what I want and what I need to change to get to where I want to be from here. My life would be much easier if I fit neatly into boxes and didn’t need to explore the pain I feel when I consider exposing other people to the deep core of fire that is inside of me.

I do know that the power comes from me. Permission to exhibit it comes from relationships. Permission to radiate that power comes from active consent.

How in the fuck do I radiate a kind of sexy that contains the conundrum that while I want to rip you apart and savage your body I will still need you to control a pretty essential aspect of my biology. This is more than a little insane.

Honestly this is part of why I want to keep my clothes on with Pretty Lady for a very long time. Touching me changes the dynamic. If it is done in a wide variety of ways there I am begging and pleading for release.

I am not looking for people who want to have a go at the pinball machine. Not at this time. Maybe later. That’s for when someone is a friend and has already paid into the Bank of Krissy and _______’s Relationship. That’s for parties like Black Sheets.

In my mind and in my soul there is an understanding that such parties are not available at this time at any cost for me in this environment. That’s fine. I have less than 10 years left on the indenture. 54 is going to be a really good birthday for me. Halfway through the year after that I am free. Not that I will have an empty nest. But I will be free to pick up and go where I want and do what I want when I want.

Fuck. I want to feel E Ticket Ride sexy. You have to be willing to pay a whole lot of extra costs for me. I’m a lot. I have a lot to give. I have a lot I need to get. You have to jump over hoops to really get me to offer you my time in an ongoing way.

I don’t know how to describe this headspace. I want to open the door to serendipity. I think there is a very important difference between this and the app-driven mindset of “I have to keep looking at my options.” It’s a very serial monogamist way of looking at it. I don’t want to see if I can get an upgrade on the boyfriend unit.

I want to find out what kind of torment I can find with other people. Torment is my love language. How fucked up and awesome would it be if someone had to give me permission to come over and over while I told them no?

I MEAN, HOW COOL DOES THAT SOUND?! I mean, I have mental possibilities of sound tracks but they are all vague because this is potential space.

I have never done what I want to do now. This is a huge amount of moving forward into a kind of power I did not and could not have when I was young.

I don’t know how to radiate this power because I don’t know what it feels like yet. I have not yet been sexy in this way so I have no idea what it looks like or feels like. I took the yielding, perhaps too far when I was young. I didn’t know how to protect my crappy meat sack. I did not know how to limit the checks my mouth wrote by the amount my ass could cash. I was hit by a number of very large busses. I am not sorry.

I want to pick a route with a smaller bus next time.

I want to feel the sparkling electricity that comes from masochists slamming into each other with mutual gasps and squeaks and moans because does it hurt or does it feel good? I don’t know or care just don’t stop.

I feel like a raging volcano. Advertising as if I were just slutty would be underselling the experience by a lot. It would feel really unfair. It would feel like false advertising and trying to draw people into a web of intensity they are not actually prepared for. They would interpret my intensity as drama. I don’t intend to create drama and I work really hard at not disrupting peoples lives in bad ways.

It’s a risk though. If you trigger people to go through transformation sometimes there is some drama. Change is not always appreciated by the other folks in someones life. They liked things as they were.

Chaos agent. Chaotic good, if you will. Mostly? I strive but I fail. I am only mortal. I like to bit off more than I can chew and then I wonder why I choke.

I want so much that I am burning with it. I don’t know how to keep being normal without getting to bleed off this energy. I want to hurt someone so much my fingers itch. My cunt aches and longs for interaction. I want to rake my nails down your back because it makes you lust harder.

I do not know if I want a glamour. I do not know if I want to come naked under a sheer supplicants gown. Please use me. Please allow me to use you.

I actually own the dress I have in mind. I need to run a few hundred miles before wearing it again will happen. I am going to go for a run today.

I want and I want and I want. I do not know what manifesting this in fetching garb looks like yet. How do I attract what I want? I force and interest in leaning in to change. I don’t want to do the same tricks you have done with everyone ever on repeat. I want to find new tricks together. Don’t tell me what was best with other people as if I am supposed to try hard to best someone else’s personal score on the video game of your personal pleasure.

You don’t want to play that game with me. You really don’t. My pinball machine best score list is not something you want to think about. I was married for a long time to a really good lover. The person who instilled the initial programming considered a personal hobby to help me hit 4 digits of orgasms in our relationship. It was an intense experience.

Please, for the love of Cheese, don’t whack the pinball machine like you are desperate to be the high scorer. That’s just not a good look.

I don’t want to just be a pinball machine. Sometimes I refer to this feeling as being treated like a service provider. I’m a vending machine of the experience someone wants to order up.

I am not real big on “spontaneous” but I am huge on serendipity. It’s not an accident I walked into that room. I probably planned it weeks or months in advance. What happens once I get there is not fully under my control. I have to throw the dice and see what happens.

It’s not that “dating” means nothing to me. It is that dating is not the same as marriage and it is not the same as ownership. It means I have not relinquished my autonomy as a single adult head of household. I need to go in. Time to do that head of household bullshit. I want to alternate between typing and masturbating all day. Oh well. Such is not my lot in life. I wanted this Indenture. Time to serve it.

They won’t know that hiding behind my grin and cheerful, “Good morning! Good to see you again” will be a simmering need to savage someone’s body.

I am an excellent liar.

Here’s a problem: feeling sexy

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Gentleman and I were discussing the subject of party clothes earlier today. I have a handful of legacy fetish items but mostly I can’t wear them right now. Maybe in a few hundred miles. We’ll see.

We were looking at various items of clothing and I kept pulling faces. It’s hard for me to imagine myself dressing in a way to encourage a lot of sexual attention at this point. It freaks me the fuck out. I’ve been dressing as unsexy as possible for a long time. My wardrobe is childishly fun more than it is sexy. I do have a handful of pieces because of hunting last year. See previous reference to maybe I’ll wear them again after a few hundred miles.

Very little of what I own makes me feel sexy. I like wearing split crotch bloomers under layers of skirts and knowing that I can have sex without bothering to get undressed. That’s fun for me. It’s a very specifically coded kind of sexy that most people won’t be able to read at any kind of distance. Mostly I just look very modest and conservative. I like to wear my hair long but braided up. I look like a religious conservative.

I now have less than two weeks until I am going to a party. I don’t have much on between now and then. I have time to think about clothing. I keep wistfully thinking that I want to feel sexy. I don’t know what that means though.

I can’t help that growing up I heard over and over “If you go out dressed like a street walker you’d better come home with money.” I believe if I dress in overtly sexually suggestive clothing I’d better expect to be harassed. I expect to have to be ready to fight if I go out wearing slutty clothing. Amusingly I would not be very tolerant of a man stepping in front of me to fight for me. I might knock over the earnest would be knight in my zest to get to whoever was fucking with me.

Dressing slutty is inviting fighting. It takes a very specific kind of mood before that feels sexy for me. I have to feel strong and DTF with pretty much everyone and anyone.

I don’t think I have that kind of boldness in me right now. I wish for it. I miss it. I don’t know that I will have that again.

What makes the me I am right now feel sexy? Mostly I feel desire in my body and clothes are fairly irrelevant and we simply rip them off. That’s been true for a long time. There has been no point in trying to appear sexy because it made absolutely no difference in any way shape or form. Gentleman is like Noah in this regard. They just don’t care that much about clothing or appearance. Which is great! It’s very convenient having relationships with people who are fine with me being the low maintenance bitch I am in terms of frippery and hygiene. I can (and do) dress up but mostly I wear a few basic outfits with high practical value and little to distinguish them.

I don’t feel sexy. I feel like I want to have sex. I feel like I have been absolutely blessed in this life with partners who are as antsy to have sex with me as I am with them. Hallelujah and thank Cheese.

I haven’t been in a relationship with someone who felt meh about having sex with me since I was 22. I feel good about the trajectory of sex in my life. The orgasm gap in my relationship is (apparently) more like a cricket score. This was a new idiomatic thought process for me. Now I know there are wickets (10) and runs (however many you get away with). Ah. Sure. I can get away with hundreds.

Pretty much all of that sex happened without me feeling particularly sexy. I felt horny. I feel an unholy amount of spontaneous sexual desire. Feeling desire is not the same thing as feeling sexy.

Years ago I was up at one of the house parties in Seattle and this woman walked through the room. Her hair was long and super dark black and it shimmered in waves. I thought, “she has actual fucking flowing raven locks”. Her hair seemed like the sexiest thing on the entire planet to me. I don’t think I have ever felt as sexy as her hair looked to me.

My hair is going grey and I can’t be arsed to do anything about it. Besides, my hair was always just a dark brown. My curls are neither completely proper spirals nor fun waves. I’m a tangled mess most of the time if my hair isn’t in a braid.

I don’t think the route to sexiness comes through my hair. I really miss the braiding that used to happen when I worked fair/faire. (Different weird reenactment shit. One was a Victorian Dickensian Christmas fair and there were a bunch of Renaissance faires. The dancing was so much fun.)

Dancing makes me feel sexy.

I feel deeply amused and powerful when I observe how intimidated people are by the bog witch shit I wear. I feel like “ha ha ha I am scaring you”. It’s silly. It’s also perversely sexual. I’m not wearing anything revealing in any way shape or form. This is desexualised clothing for the world. Yet I feel sexy in it.

I feel sexy when I feel like Mrs. Whatsit. I feel powerful when I feel like I am toying with someone’s perception of the world. Amusingly, I got a lot of this with Engineer. I’m glad that I am still talking to him. It feels weird to say it, but I feel like he treats me the way I treated my Shaman. He comes to me with ethical dilemmas and I force him to talk it through on his own. I have only questions, no answers. I don’t have to live with the results of any of his decisions so i should have no voice in what they are.

He treats me a lot like I treated Vicki. Well, sort of. Vicki kept her clothes on 100% of the time. I feel this weight over my shoulder. I have this responsibility to perform the behaviour I was antagonised into articulating as correct. I don’t have the right to tell other people what is right or wrong. I can only ask questions and decide how close I want to stand to them.

Vicki was sexy even when she frankly needed a shower and to change her dang clothes. I wish I could channel power the way she did. She lived so securely in her sadomasochism that there was never a doubt that she had power in a given scene. It didn’t matter if she was submitting or dominating. It didn’t matter if she was displaying masochism or sadism she had power. In that way I wish I could be more like her. I wish I felt entitled to embody my full power no matter what I am doing.

I don’t want to be exactly like any of my mentors though, not really. I don’t want what they lived. Not because they are/were wrong, but because my path is different. It’s not a repudiation. I like different things. We were always only going to be holding hands for a little while.

What makes me feel sexy?

The way Noah looked at me made me feel sexy. It had nothing to do with what I wore. It had to do with his perception of my soul. Noah looked at me as if I had all the terrifying power of a God. He believed that as much as I had the power to give love and life and nurturance I was even more capable of destroying and harming. He looked at me with awe.

It’s fun that Gentleman is currently working on how to send the right kind of signals for me to understand he is feeling interested in me. He’s getting way more grabby and assertive and verbally silly and it’s really great. I feel besotted. He is such a kind and wonderful man. I love that he puts himself out there in the world even when he doesn’t feel fully confident. He does it scared. His bravery and willingness to try new things make me feel really tender and loving towards him. I want to keep coaxing this bravery. Explore! Have fun! You only get one life. Get every morsel of joy out of it.

If I were a monogamous human being this would be the time when my brain would start to filter out other humans. It would alter my attraction pattern. However, I am not a monogamous person. My brain creates a big sturdy container that looks promising and like it has potential for a great deal of awesome over a long term. Then my brain looks a fraction of a degree to the left and sees vast amounts of self that is not in any kind of container and then there is some vertigo and oh holy shit balls no. No.

I don’t want to leave those parts of me in the dark. I miss them. I love them. I love them enough to not let go of them even though it would be deeply convenient for people who love me if I did. I love these pieces so much that I held on to them through over a decade of hypnosis and NLP work trying to force my brain into only desiring one man.

I’m not saying any of this as a criticism of Gentleman. The man sat very still and waited for me to complete a house chore before he left. He knew if he stood up to go I would get distracted and not finish the task. That shit is pretty magical. He made sure he kept me company so I could get a little bit more accomplished and head into the week with a lighter load. He is a super rad boyfriend and I’d like to keep him.

I’m really happy with this relationship. I feel pretty fucking seen in a lot of really deep and profound ways.

I also feel like the parts of me that fit inside this relationship represent a very small fraction of who I am. I feel guilty and ashamed of this knowledge. I wish that I had come factory standard instead of being so fucking extra.

I think the parts Gentleman puts into this relationship are a very small fraction of who he is, too. I am not trying to be self centred here. We are middle aged fuckers. We both have history and stories and complexity.

This is all tied up.

Throwing bait in the water is a complicated thing. I have inched my personality out in person here in the kink community while Noah was alive. Luckily most of the hyper local people don’t really read my writing (phew!) so they have gotten to know me in tiny pieces. In person I am a lot more reserved than you might expect. I wait to be approached. I ask a lot of questions and deflect questions I receive with non-answers or partial answers because my stories are all so complicated. Pull one tiny thread and who knows what fucking thing will fall on your lap. I endeavour to avoid trauma dumping so that means I have to be careful what stories I tell. I am genuinely afraid of being the reason someone else’s nervous system gets dysregulated so they can’t participate in fun.

I want to feel sexy. So much of feeling sexy is in being looked at and desired. I confess that even though it is great that this fella responds as if I am equally sexy in my comfy jammies and a bathrobe as I am when I dress up sometimes I want to feel like someone appreciated the effort. I write about the mixed feelings I had in relationships with fetishists. It was difficult being simply an object and not a person. I didn’t like the way I was appreciated more in latex and high heels. I find both fairly fucking uncomfortable. They are both challenging on a sensory level for me. But gosh I appreciated one lover I had very briefly who took like two hours to undress me every time. Sex took, like, four hours. It was amazing. Undressing was part of the show.

I think about wearing lots of layers for seducing Pretty Lady. My cunt will not be easily accessible. Oh holy shit no. My cunt will be the very last thing on the menu. It will be earned with thousands of words. I don’t need to take any clothes off at all to rub one out. I am a miracle of orgasming ability. There had to be some fucking benefit to all my weird health shit. Woo.

This party coming up on the east coast is uhm, not like a date with someone who already finds me thrilling. Let’s be clear that I assume that the most likely outcome is some awkward conversations that don’t really go anywhere and no play. I don’t know people well and I have very consciously held myself back for most of the years I’ve known them.

I don’t think I have it in me to strut in like I am hot shit and you should try hard to get me. I think that requires a level of security and being known that I currently lack.

The thing is, I haven’t earned regard here. I have not been in anyone’s life all that much. I don’t go to anything bigger than our Thursday munch every month. I know the two men who are the regulars at that munch very well. I’d be ok strutting in front of them because they would grin and tell me to have a good time. They wouldn’t act like it was for them. They would simply be my friends. Mostly I do not have the right to act like I am someone anyone should like. I have no idea how I am going to fit in with the social community in larger Scotland over time. I assume I will be disliked by a lot of people. There are already a couple of people who significantly dislike me and I’m ok with that. It feels inhibiting though.

How do I feel sexy walking into a room full of mostly strangers by myself when I don’t have any particular faith in this moment that I can be sure if any of them will like me in 10 years? I could strut into a Second Saturday party in the Bay without hesitation even though I don’t know most of the people. I don’t need to know everyone. I need the anchor people. I need my friends. I have not put in the time to have many friends over on the east coast. I’m not there for an event every year.

I have very particular metrics in my mind right now with regard to short/medium/long term goals. Yes, I am absolutely interested in Mx/Ms/Mr Right Now. Mostly I am looking for who is going to become a bigger part of my life. I don’t have a deep and broad network of friends yet. I haven’t put in the time. I haven’t shown up and been witnessed. I haven’t been the witness of other people’s stories. People will think I am hot shit based on whether or not they observe me to be. I don’t get to dictate that. I don’t get to act like me earning that off screen has any value whatsoever. Social capital is not transitive like that.

Frankly, I’m so out of practice at all of the skills of topping that I should not be trusted more than any other newbie. My muscle memory has gone to shit in the time I was married. Any amount of raising my arm was met with extreme hostility and force. I didn’t have to actually hit anyone. Any kind of threat was absolutely the same. No, hitting my friends in a consensual bdsm scene wasn’t permitted; if anything that was even more forbidden. Noah probably would have been more forgiving of me spanking the kids than he would of me spanking a friend. It would have seemed like a mistake, not a choice.

How do I feel sexy when I feel so insecure? I feel the lack of connection to the community here. I was not allowed to join in more than I did; I was allowed the Kids. What I got was somewhat grudging. Noah resented me wanting kinky friends because I want to flirt with them if they are old enough.

I am sad that one of the people I had hoped to hide behind will not be at the party. I haven’t made many friends on that coast yet but I count this person among them. We’ve talked a lot over the years. This is most unfortunate for me on an entirely selfish level. Such is life. I will go anyway. I have to start somewhere.

I am spending far too many brain cycles wondering what I want to wear. I went hunting as a slutty bog witch. It was really fun.

This is not that.

I do not want to walk in as if I assume I will ever have any kind of power over anyone present. I want that genie in a bottle. I am not Vicki to ooze power over anyone who came nearby. People who had their own power met hers as equals and she never played dominant pissing games. Ok, she usually didn’t. Sometimes she did. When she did she won. I don’t think I have arrived at having this kind of personal power. I feel like I forfeited any sense of power by how I handled this last rape. I feel like a failure. I feel like I failed to have any power at all. I feel like a stupid piece of shit. I didn’t handle that in a way Noah was proud of. I made the last 5 months of his life very hard. I feel deeply ashamed of wanting to reach so hard for new connection right now. It feels like I am trying to avoid sitting and home and stewing over what a complete piece of shit I am for failing Noah.

I do not know how to feel sexy walking into this environment right now because I am not sure how to walk in with any kind of feeling of power. I think the two are tied together for me. There is power in being submissive, a slave, and a masochist. The power does not only reside on one side of the slash. Perhaps I will spend a lot more of my life being sadistic in the future. All of these expressions come from personal power. I’m afraid both of attracting the wrong thing and attracting nothing at all. I couldn’t tell you which would be worse. If I go in hoping to make friends that’s really about as optimistic as I should be.

I want to feel sexy. I want to feel seen and appreciated. I don’t want to feel afraid. In order to not be afraid I have to feel safe. I don’t believe scene spaces are ever fully safe spaces. I go there to drift around in the ocean of predators and prey and see who is living in this little ecosystem.

What kind of predator am I?

Oh. Oh that is an interesting question. After thinking for at least 13 seconds I’m going to go with lazy. I am a lazy predator. I like to know the history before I step in old shit. I am a predator who usually hunts predators. This is how my soul is deeply tied to you, Ale. I hunt for people like you. I deeply appreciate and value that you never fucking sugar coat how you feel. I find affirmation of my humanity in the ways we reflect opposite sides of the same coin. You understand my need to be a victim. I hate being a victim. It is a thing I feel unable to escape. I, at times, have learned to embrace being a victim because in its depths I find more about my strength and power than I do in any other way.

This is where I fear I am wrong and Vicki is right but I don’t know that I can follow her good example. Vicki taught me that power emanates from a person like heat from the raging inferno of a soul inside the meat sack. I experience my power coming from relationships. My power doesn’t exist in a vacuum. I have power only in as much as I have the power to help, to harm, to create, and to destroy parts of other people.

I think of you and I feel such shame. I harmed you. I was cruel and inflexible and overly demanding in ways I was not entitled to be. I failed you.

I am so afraid of this power that sparks to life and begins to burn and rage at the tiniest sign of connection. It’s like watching a pilot light go from being barely a flicker to being on full blast. Someone wants me to look at them. How delightful.

I am afraid that it is a terrible thing to be touched by the power within me. I appreciate the way that folks in my in person life are commenting prodigiously on their appreciation of my mothering. That’s nice and all, for people who actually deal with my family to think I’m doing well. I inhabit the power of this role uneasily and with great caution. I am terrified of fucking this up. I am now all they have. Someone else can’t fix what I fuck up. Not really. There used to be someone here watching me, giving me course correction advice. Letting me know when I was getting too heated or loud. Now it is just me. Am I gentle enough?

It is very hard that the relationships in which I have the most sense of power are entirely ones where I am terrified of crushing a delicate soul I love very deeply. It’s part of why I was so hard on Noah. He was the only sturdy soul in my network I could really unleash on. It had to be done in ways he permitted.

He wouldn’t allow me to push him to the edge of his boundaries because him exploding was even less permitted than me exploding. I am not trying to say I had the worst deal in my marriage. Noah was also in a very constraining box.

I am saying that I am stepping into a different environment where I have no sense of my place. I don’t want to come in my mother/auntie vibe. I don’t want to. I want to come as a peer. I want to come as someone who both initiates and receives desire.

For many years I have said, “Anyone who speaks at my funeral is required to start with ‘Krissy was a motherfucking bad ass’ and if they don’t, boo them off the stage.”

I don’t feel like I am truly inhabiting that. I feel weak. I feel vulnerable. I feel deeply unworthy of ever being loved. I failed Noah. How dare I walk on as if I am a whole creature.

I am not a whole creature. I am a sundered being. I am a tree that was twinned for many years before a lightning bolt took my love from me. I miss Noah. I miss the certainty of that container. I miss feeling that secure in being loved like a wildfire. I was ok with being burned if that was the price of that relationship. It was worth it. I miss Noah. I miss Noah but he is gone and I have to carry on. My day job takes a lot out of me. I need to fill my bucket.

I need to make myself happy. This is a pragmatic understanding. Most of my life depends on me being a cheerful, upbeat, optimistic soul. It doesn’t work when I am deeply depressed and buried in anxiety. I start being poor at my job.

I want to feel sexy but I don’t know if I can. I know that it is tied to my sense of power and my happiness but it depends on relationships. I can’t walk into a building and assume anything about anyone. Sure, they are there but they aren’t there for me. They are there for their own story. I am very afraid of finding out there is no story arc overlap potential. I am afraid that I am not walking into the building with any sense of personal connection and anchoring. That means flirting feels like inviting a fight when I don’t know anything about the turf the fight is happening on. That feels so dangerous and stupid.

I want to feel sexy. I am afraid I will only feel afraid.

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Tag Archives: noah

The roller coaster of emotions continues

I miss sharing every thought with him.

Tactical errors, failures, and belonging

Defrocking a saint

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

It’s all so mixed.

Vagueposting

Happy masochism, submission, and being degraded.

He is a gift to me/Raise your standards

The process is messy but I like the results

Coming back is feeling hard.

Fragments, shards, tools, and usefulness

The end of the first marathon

I like my housemates

Deflated by feelings

Old shit and new shit

Your first sexual relationship should be with yourself.

Invitation

Here’s a problem: feeling sexy