Tag Archives: noah

He was my grown up

I’m having terrible thoughts. Did I need him to die so I could finish growing up? I definitely am struggling with all the tasks I’m having to learn at speed. I handled money once it entered our family bank account. He couldn’t handle paying bills–it freaked him out. But he did the accountants, and lawyers, and financial advisors and immigration stuff. I’m having to notify all of these people and explain my abject ignorance and lack of knowledge for how to move forward.

Did you know that people who earned close to 6 figures from working with you are very nice about writing out a primer that even my ignorant, autistic, immigrant self can follow. Money well spent. They know that I am helpless and pathetic and they are taking mercy on me. This is going to be expensive but it’s worth it to make sure I don’t fuck things up with two governments. Right now I am close to the end of the first cycle. There was a massive list of companies to contact. I think I only have one more that needs first contact and it’s another joint account.

Now I wait and send in documentation when demanded.

I don’t think there is a lot more I can push forward right now. So of course I was twitchy and difficult with the kids. That’s not nice. I was going to lose the ever patient ability at some point.

But I feel like I have more information to go on. I feel like I can see a shape we can learn how to fill.

The Crown has informed me that they do not believe a jury would rule in my favour so they are declining to prosecute my sexual assault. That means I don’t need to plan my whole year around making sure my kids have months of 30+ hours a week in child care.

Oh.

This makes the second government who has decided that I am an unrapeable whore. When men rape me, meh it doesn’t count.

Scotland is better in many ways. In other ways it is just the same. It’s not worse. But in some ways it is just as bad. Hey, fewer guns!

It means I don’t have to keep trying to force the Council to accept my obnoxious request for placement of high needs kids. I can just stop. I can accept help from people who offer it. There are a lot of retired grandparent-like folks who are happy to help us. I need to say yes. I need to start having standing dates for kids around town with folks so they develop relationships.

I also need to fundamentally alter how I react to the idea of scheduling my life. I need to be building in massive buffers of nothing because we are going to have times when we just fucking can’t.

I suppose it is for the best that I am still an unrapeable whore. I don’t have to waste my year on being a good victim. I can work on being a good mother. I won’t be distracted by being a good wife. That was such a massive time commitment in my life. Making sure I paid enough attention to Noah was a serious priority and his desire for attention was vast.

I am starting to realise that I have been going harder than I can sustain. I thought I was pushing until school started. Nope. I’m just… doing this. I need to push less. I need to rest more. I need to cuddle more.

Today’s task list included:

2 calls with solicitors
4 emails to solicitors/lawyers
1 call to obtain old tax returns from old company
1 call with 2 accountants to work towards streamlining my tax situation going forward
filled out the monstrously evil forms for a bank and insurance company. ew much words.
emailed and messaged with 2 people trying to obtain cleaning assistance
sat on chat for 48 minutes in order to figure out how to tell one bank Noah is gone
uploaded a fuckton of documents to banks, insurance companies, government websites
got the plumbing bill and paid it
finally responded to a WhatsApp message after a week
physically filled out a bunch of forms for kid-things
there were a lot more messages and emails about various stages. Most of these things took multiple iterations of coming back to it. I have a lot still in progress.
I negotiated poorly then less poorly with the kids.
We got absolutely plenty of housework done.
poked people who said they wanted to do stuff with kids but haven’t set it up yet.
decided we really need 3 at home days a week to counteract the 4 we have to leave the house

How in the fuck did I think my kids would adjust to school? They barely think a 3 day weekend is long enough to handle 1/4 the stimulation of school. Our life is so very bespoke. We do stuff. We just don’t like a lot of background noise or interference or interruptions. Without Noah’s piano the house is so quiet.

Mostly what I do is try to keep my bursts of sobs to a minimum. Keep moving. There is more to do. Also: I have to rest or I’m going to hurt myself.

Balance is tricky.

I need to build time with local friends into every week. It needs to be a priority. I cannot only be with my children. That’s insane. I can’t only be with their friends–that’s unhealthy. I will say things I shouldn’t because I won’t be able to help myself from loneliness. I need adults to talk to. And not just online or on the phone. I need Meat Life. It matters.

I am so scared and so sad. I miss Noah. I want to wake up from this nightmare. I miss him so much I feel like my heart will crumble into dust.

I’m not doing enough to take care of my exercise needs. It is part of why I am getting pissy. I restart yoga tomorrow. I’ve been to one climb so far. I have cycled 20 miles in the last 7 days. That’s not nothing. I’m not eating enough vegetables. I’m struggling with sleep regulation. I’m waking up super early because then I can masturbate and cry.

Like, this is the most sad, pathetic masturbating of my life. I think of Noah and cry. I feel like I can’t get off. Sometimes I couldn’t until he finished and that is what it feels like all the time right now and he is never going to finish in me again. That feels so unbelievably bad. I keep reaching for him in my sleep. Please be there. Let this be a terrible, vivid dream that shows me how badly my life could go if I am stupid enough to ask you to go ice skating.

Please come back.

You can’t. I know. I have your rings. You only took them off for a few minutes at a time and then you hurried to put them back on. You were so happy to have two. We had a marriage that was a blend of my cheap ass practicality and your highfalutin ways. You insisted on the fancier rings. You said they were my insurance. I have them. They aren’t worth enough to smuggle my family out of the country so I don’t see what kind of insurance they actually are. Not that I’m looking t o get out. I’m just sayin’.

You wanted me to have the experience of walking into Tiffany’s and having the salesclerk go “Oooooooh, that’s real.” I did not know that was a thing that could be determined at a distance. You were elated. You referred back to it many times over the years. See. You put your mark on me. Fancy people look at me and go real. Ok.

Only I will never feel entitled to wear your rings again my love. I am not your wife. I am your widow. It makes me feel so sad. I want you with my whole soul. I want to hear you giggle and see your glee. I want to feel happy again. My love I don’t know what the future is going to bring. I’m scared.

I’m doing all the grown up things you usually do. I’m trying to keep notes. I should go put all of this in your Dropbox. I may fix your shitty organisation finally. Now that it feels less like a really invasive version of needing to face all the bills in your wallet. He was a “searching is faster” guy. I was a “I worked in libraries pre-computers” gal.

Dad did most of the first level of cleaning up Noah’s room. I am so grateful. I went through paperwork. We haven’t fully cleaned it out or changed it for a kid. I think I would specifically like to wait for a day past the one month mark.

This is so much and so little and so hard and so awful. Life will never feel fair again. There is no fair here. Noah, I will miss you for my whole life. You were right that I am not ok without you. I feel like a walking corpse.

The walking part is the important part. Hey, now I can get therapy. Ha, ha, ha.

Today is the first day of the rest of my life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think my weight is at a plateau.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I feel so empty.

I feel awful.

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It’s been 16 days and I am plowing through work as fast as I can. Folks are trying really hard to be helpful but I am not good at being helped. It took so many years for Noah to learn how to help me without setting me off into a rage. My friends are wonderful and I am grateful for their presence. Also: it is hard having people here. It is hard accepting help because people don’t do it how I would. It is hard accepting that I am going to be required to accept help for the rest of my life.

I’m feeling overwhelmed by waves of different flavours of grief. I am really struggling with how much I am only allowed tiny moments of feelings before I have to shove that shit in a box or people will start acting towards me in ways I don’t want.

When I am really upset it is hard that people rush to hug me. I want to fling people away from me. I go hard into the fight reflex and I am required to go still and limp and let other people feel better by hugging me even though it makes me feel sick. It took years for Noah to fully understand that when I am freaking out I want someone to sit near me but not to touch me. I want them out of reach. If it feels like they can reach out and touch me I am going to feel threatened and scared.

I hate that I have to perform sad in the right way. I hate that I have to accept “comfort” that makes me feel alienated and uncomfortable and kind of sick. There are times I want to hug when I am upset and I initiate at those times. It’s why I try so hard to ask people if they want to be hugged.

I am not accustomed to touching people outside my family anymore. It’s not natural at this point. It feels weird and uncomfortable. I still feel like I am wearing the Choke Chain and I am going to get in trouble if I even look at someone too long. It doesn’t matter that Noah told me that part of our relationship was over months ago. He said it and we stayed in our house together and didn’t change anything.

I miss you Noah, I’ll stay in the house with just you forever. Just come back. I was wrong when I thought I needed more than you. I need you. I just need you. My chest hurts so much I feel like I have been hit by a truck. I don’t know how to accept that he isn’t coming back.

I am having a really hard time with this whole “being strong” bullshit. I just want to go to bed for months. I don’t want to think for other people. I don’t want to help people feel like they are helping me. I don’t want to ask for help. I don’t want to be touched. I don’t want to be alone. I don’t want any of the things or options or people who are available. There is a reason I moved to the edge of nowhere to live with Noah far from anyone I knew.

I want Noah.

I hate being me so much. Noah made it bearable. I don’t know how to endure being me for lots more years without him. I don’t want to keep walking the shithole road that is my life. Yes, I have good friends. Yes, I love my children.

How many more rapists are going to come knocking at my door? I am so scared I feel like my head will explode from pain. I am not ok at all. I feel like I will never ever feel ok again. How could I be ok? Noah is gone.

I don’t feel like I have the special place in history that he had. He truly changed the course of a lot of lives. I feel pathetic, useless, and like a burden. It’s fucking humiliating filling in forms here for disability recognition. I’m not even trying to get treatment. I want the bitches to admit on paper that I am in intense pain and dramatic emotional stress every fucking day and that way I will have a UK medical record.

It is humbling having to list out all the ways Noah took care of me. I have no idea how I will survive. My life will contract and then contract again and then contract again. Whoever I had the potential to be will shrivel up like a raisin in the sun.

Noah, how could you ever fucking think I wished for your death? I didn’t want to ever live through a day without you in the world.

It’s almost like you knew that I would need a much younger tether because you knew you couldn’t outlive me. There are so many lines to be drawn between his actions in the past and this outcome. It’s like he knew how to trap me into living as long as physically possible. He stole my ability to commit suicide. I can’t ever leave these people on purpose; the cowards route is not open to me.

I am a coward though. And a weakling. And pathetic.

Noah, I am so sorry for the ways I took you for granted. I’m sorry I skipped any days of having sex. I have never before wanted to relive part of my life so I could do it better. I’ve always believed it was hard enough once. I would go back when it comes to you. If I could go back to March of 2006 I would do the whole thing differently. I’m not sure it would be better in the long run. I would have destroyed myself trying to give to you because I would not have paced myself. Maybe we wouldn’t have had kids. Maybe we wouldn’t have stayed married. I don’t know.

I just know that I miss you so much I feel like my soul is crushed under a glacier. Noah I miss you. I want you so much. You are the only one I want to have touch me. It makes other people feel better to hug me so I will accept it anyway. It doesn’t really matter. I don’t think I can feel better so maybe I shouldn’t try. I hurt so much. Time to sleep.

Keep moving

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Waking up for the 12th day of Noah being gone. It’s a weekend; the last weekend before I have to sign the kids up for school. Middle Child is very confident they are going to ride through the rest of secondary school because getting qualifications will simplify later life. Shortie isn’t sure about school. She is scared. I told her that we are going to try through the end of the next school year and if she has not settled, then we will discuss a return to home education. Eldest Child has plans and he is figuring out his forward facing routine. He is scared but ready to figure out his future.

The older kids are scared I will sell the house. They are really overwhelmed by this idea. That means I need to be careful with that option. It has to be only at absolute last resort. I think I am going to need to work very hard to keep this house. I think the kids are going to need that stability for a long time to come. This was our final home with Noah. Leaving here is choosing to leave him behind. I’m not sure we will ever be ready for that. We will make the decision in two years but the kids are acting like it would be a problem if we left. I need to consider that.

I love him so much. I am going to have a rough road. Missing him is going to be a blessing and a curse for the rest of my life. I’m going to know how much I was loved and I am going to know how much I lost. Even if it isn’t my fault it is my loss to deal with. It is a loss for my children to deal with. I am going to have to push my babies forward alone with no one adding to my bucket.

I feel bad because there are so many thoughts in my head that will never be spoken again. I won’t ever believe anyone cares. It makes me feel lonely in my soul. Sure, yeah, I will talk out loud to Noah but it’s not the same. It’s going to make me feel very disconnected from life that I am only safe talking to myself alone in a room.

Tomorrow is when we were supposed to wake up to go on our holiday alone after the aborted negotiation with TB. I don’t even know if TB is in the country. I don’t care. He poisoned that well this year when he told me he didn’t need to be upset about me being raped because I wasn’t his wife. That’s disgusting and nauseating.

I really do wonder if I am going to turn into my mother and just give up sex. Either that or I will cause problems. I struggle with believing I will find a healthy medium. I’m used to having sex every day, often two or three times a day. I can feel in my body that it is not happening and my body is not pleased. I would be literally pawing at Noah by now if for some reason I hadn’t jumped him already this morning.

It is hard going back to bed after my early morning trip to the bathroom. That’s when I would get excited every single morning because I could wake Noah up for sex. He would warm me back up from the chill of the bathroom and the process would lead into melting together.

Yeah. Last night was the last night a person who snores can be in my bed. I love you with my whole soul Pam but I need to be able to go back to sleep at 1am. I can’t lay awake for hours listening to snoring and thinking about how much I am scared. It’s not healthy. I need to be able to go back to sleep.

I had someone who wanted to know about every weird gurgle and blip in my body. Someone who wanted to know every discomfort because maybe he could help. He could help in so many ways. I am overwhelmed with sadness. I want to take care of him. He was so delighted with the ways I am confident. He made me feel special. Pam and Dad are trying hard to get me to feel special.

It’s not working very well. I feel like I failed the boss level at life. I didn’t protect Noah. I hurt inside my soul. Noah, I am so sorry. Noah I am sorry for every time I didn’t do what you deserved.

The only way I can continue in his service is to give our kids a good life. That starts with the building block of sleep.

Shortie and I were talking about that last night. She was annoyed because all the grown ups are harping on her to go to sleep. She was complaining about how it is stupid because sleep doesn’t do anything anyway. I told her she was so wrong and I started explaining what sleep does for your brain and body. It’s necessary for learning, growing, and healing. She asked a lot of follow up questions. She is so clever that it is really uncanny at times.

I am scared that she is going to end up being the kid who is most like me. Middle Child is firmly in the PDA camp with me and I’m absolutely certain beyond all measure that Shortie is too. When she is asked to do something she responds with snarls and a vicious physical retaliation if you physically try to push her into something. I’m going to have to talk to the school. She always comes back and apologises for these rapid bursts of emoting. That’s not how she wants to act it is just instinctive and utterly compulsive. If you have compassion for her and deescalate without taking it as a challenge then things can smooth right out. She is not mean or vindictive or unwilling to help. She has a really strong automatic anxiety reaction to being ordered about. I can’t judge.

She has also taught herself to read at 6. My other kids did not do that. She’s far further into maths than her siblings were at her age because she finds it fun and engaging. She is more than halfway through the elementary curriculum set I have. I’m a little worried that she is going to be advanced enough to really struggle in school. Or maybe they will let her read like I did?

I’m scared on so many levels. I’m scared of so many things. I’m sad. I feel this horrifyingly swelling well of sadness and depression. I want Noah and I will never have him again. Noah was my life, my happiness, my home. This house is just a building for me. My home was him being inside of me. It was the only way I ever felt fully secure. That is gone. I never get to feel like that again. I miss him.

I will keep going though. I have to. The older kids are processing in waves what it means that their dad is gone. My baby is flailing and uncertain and having all the feelings. I can’t be mean to her about the way she is feeling. I love the bones of her. That’s a thing I’m worried about–she is losing weight and that’s not ok. She’s already extremely slender. I can’t give on the candy front because she is super compulsive but I need to massively bend on controlling her food. She is so much like me and she struggles with digestion stuff because her diet isn’t varied enough. Right now I need to give her a lot of leeway around picking stuff that can give her what she needs. Mostly I need to stock my kitchen with stuff she is welcome to have at any minute and encourage grazing. She’s not great at meals.

It was worth arguing over when it was our biggest issue. It isn’t anymore. Survival is. I’m not giving up on the process of helping her learn to eat more food but I am going to push less.

I have to go limp in a lot of ways. A lot of things I would normally correct or criticise I can’t for the next 6+ months. I am waking the kids up every day and having chats with each of them or singing a cheerful song. Everyone gets a private moment with me to start the day. We are also touching base later in the day for directed attention outside of group stuff.

I have to take care of them. I am who they get to have. I think that sucks for them and is really unfair but it’s true.

I’m struggling with my shame around having chosen to have kids when I struggle so much with mental illness. When I had Noah to cover my fuck ups it felt more justifiable. Now I have to regulate myself more than I ever have in my entire life. That’s really hard. I have to do it while struggling with the worst things that have happened to me in decades. I believe they are worth the effort and I need to put my money where my mouth is.

I know that it isn’t healthy for me to spend the rest of my life living for my children. I’m pretty sure it is healthy for the next year. Maybe that’s all I can handle thinking about right now. Maybe I am not able to think past that to what will come in the next chapter of my life. I don’t actually want another chapter. I liked the one I was in. Noah. I miss you, Noah.

But it’s over. Life isn’t fair. There is no such thing as fair. No one gets what they deserve.

For a time I had Noah. It was really wonderful.

Frozen hell

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I’m going to have a hard time crawling out of the hole in which I believe his death is all my fault. Noah being gone feels like the end of hope, joy, love, and being cared for in this life. I lost it because I didn’t protect him enough. I let his fragile body be damaged. I loathe every aspect of myself. I pushed him too hard. I am a monster.

Is it actually all my fault that his body gave out? No. I am not in charge of the cells in other peoples bodies. However, if it’s all my fault then I deserve to be punished and that feels like the only justice possible given what happened to Noah. I deserve to be punished for the rest of my life because I didn’t keep him alive. My life will be a punishment of its own. I will not have Noah.

11 days without Noah. The longest we have gone without seeing each other since we got married was 6 weeks. I think that happened one time on the road trip. Usually we didn’t go longer than 3 weeks on that trip and never longer than a week and a half since. We don’t like being apart. We have never liked being apart.

I miss Noah so much. I have no idea how I will ever recover from this.

There is only pain, there is no hope.

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Today is the 9th day I am waking up without Noah. It hurts so much and I feel like I will explode with pain. I am grateful that Pam and Shortie are still sleeping with me but someday very soon that is going to probably change. I need to start getting up and getting moving in the morning absurdly early in order to have breakfast on the table before the kids go to school. Breakfast and dinner are big events in our house. We all have intense dietary needs and we take care of one another by sharing meals of good food.

Good here is going to get increasingly neurotic because I can’t get sick and my kids need to be able to be physically well enough to withstand school and we have to cook for ourselves because very few places around here put vegetables forward in the ways we require. We are all losing weight; it’s clear as the nose on my face.

All of us improved our relationships with Noah over the past year. The older two got a lot closer to him in 2024 because he had so much time for us. He played with Shortie every single day. He and I alternated between having uncomfortable conversations and having the best sex of our lives. I really felt like we were growing together in a way that would have paid off for decades.

Noah, how could you leave me? I am freaking out. I keep walking in circles flapping my hands and beating on my chest. Noah, how could you go? You said you wouldn’t leave me. Noah I need you. You are right. I will never be ok without you. There is no one but you for me. Yeah, I wanted to fuck other people for momentary distraction but no one ever crawled into my heart and mind and soul the way you did. Now they aren’t a distraction they are a reminder that I can’t have you and I don’t want anyone else. Not really.

I mostly wanted to think about other people because the end result every time was being grateful for you and feeling extra lucky because you are so much better than everyone else. Smarter, kinder, more diligent, more devoted–Noah you were the best of everything and my body cries out for you night and day. My hand moves under the covers to find the body next to me then recoils because it is not you.

I no longer think the phantom pain in my vagina is a bad thing. I hope it lasts forever as my payment for not being a good enough wife, for not taking care of Noah well enough. I want to be in pain every single moment I am alive. It is all I deserve for not making sure Noah survived longer than me.

I don’t believe I deserve to feel good ever again. I lost Noah. He was my reason for everything. He is why I worked so hard to be better; because Noah believed I could. Noah spent a lot of time doing hypnosis on me trying to change my brain. How am I ever supposed to feel good again when the thing that made me feel like I was good was putting my mouth on Noah’s body. I could kiss his hand or his foot and I felt like I was good. It was even better when I put my mouth in other places. His joy was my joy. His happiness was my happiness. I am so glad that I pushed for all the sex we had towards the end.

I am freaking out about my future now. It’s been hazy and cloudy and unclear for me for a long time–I had nothing to work towards. Now that feeling is magnified times a billion.

I actually had a lot I was looking forward to. Noah was growing ever closer to me and we were spending so much time together. We fit like perfect pieces in a puzzle with our kids. We created a world together. We traveled the world together. We had so many adventures yet to come. We were such a happy family. I’m really scared that it all came from Noah and that time is over.

Noah was an avid photographer; I am not. I am going through 20 years of photos and only finding a few hundred of him while there are many many thousands of everyone else. That made me feel really bad for a few minutes but then I realised: the reason we were always smiling so big was because we were looking at Noah. He was the one who wanted the shrine of pictures as motivation; we just needed him. Him being part of the family was enough to keep us working and pushing forward.

In perfect love and perfect trust I tried to take care of him. I failed. If I had not been so depressed lately he would have opted out of ice skating. He would have said it would be no fun for him. But he wanted to be there to support me. I feel so ashamed of the way I only focused on our daughter and not on the pain and distress he was feeling. I feel so guilty that I wasn’t with him to help him not fall on the ice. I should have been. I knew he wasn’t comfortable and that the boot was already hurting his foot. There was too much pressure. I should have told him to sit out the activity. Jenny’s husband did. Why didn’t I fucking tell him to go sit with the other dad and not participate?

Because I am selfish and stupid and I thought I knew best. “Exercise is good for you.” Maybe it isn’t always. Noah wouldn’t be dead if he hadn’t gone ice skating. I’m not in any way upset with the friend who invited me. He came because of me. He wouldn’t have gone on that generic family outing if I wasn’t such a pathetic crybaby that he came so he could take care of me.

I’m having a hard time being around people. I’m not comfortable around people. I believe I have no value to anyone outside my family so being out in public is a rude thing to do. People don’t want me here.

I know it is actually a very small percentage of the population that is anti-immigrant and anti-American but they are pretty fucking loud. I got asked to leave the bike group over the summer. I’m now freaked out about any other community stuff I’ve been doing.

2024 was a fucking brutally hard, nightmare of a year. And it’s going to be the last good year of my life because I had Noah.

I’m going back through stuff Noah has been writing lately, Jesus we are both obsessed with our death being imminent. His actually was though and it is horrifying looking at date stamps and seeing how much it feels like we fucking knew it was coming. It is making me shake to the core of me. I felt like I didn’t deserve to have him. And I lost him.

It’s an accident. It’s fate. It is the only inevitable outcome of life.

It is not fair.

There is no fair.

Ted never predicted that I’d have a long happy marriage. He said I would win in court; he said I would never be poor again. Maybe it was not in my destiny to deserve Noah for more of my life. I wasn’t good enough at cherishing him when I had him.

I am scared of the ways I have hurt myself in the past that were blocked by Noah’s presence in my life. Without Noah the chance that I will go do stupid stuff is really high. The chance that I will put myself in a dangerous position is stupidly high. This is absolutely terrifying. Noah has been taking care of me in a lot of ways. He has done a lot to keep me safe in the past 18 years. I am deeply afraid of what I will do without him in my life.

I am expecting to be celibate until my youngest is close to legal age here. It would be deeply unwise for me to get into any kind of NRE situation before then. It would not be great for my parenting. I would act like my sister and that’s not ok. I need to reiterate this to myself a few thousand times. I never get to act like my sister.

I am so scared. Noah, I have only been ok because of you.

I wish we had put the Santa Barbara painting in your room instead of down here in the apartment. You should have been looking at this. I am sorry.

I am sorry for a trillion reasons. I was never as good to you as you deserved. You earned so much more. I am sorry. I am sorry for my pettiness and selfishness. I am sorry for my neurosis and depression. I am sorry I spent any minutes thinking about anyone but you. I was really enjoying the way you were specifically crawling into my head to try to change that part of me at the end. You finally felt like you had the right.

Noah you are right, I will not be ok. I will be a husk. I will be an empty shell, all that is left of a cockroach.

I miss you. You were everything to me. I will get the kids launched into the world. I will do that. I will help them build the kinds of networks we built, the relationships and friendships that carried us through. I will feel empty the whole time. I wanted what we had. I loved how much time we spent together. I loved being ever more enmeshed with every passing year. I loved that we were stunted trees that leaned until we found each other and then together we reached for the light.

Noah, I don’t want to feel better. I want to be feeling shitty but be doing it next to you. Noah don’t leave me.

How can you be gone?

I’m really scared.

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Noah and I have been writing intense long things to each other for most of this year. We did it in a walled garden. I’m rereading big chunks of it and feeling like absolute garbage. I was not as good as he deserved. I did not serve him in the ways he was owed and I feel so much shame. I feel self indulgent and pathetic and weak and unworthy of the glory that is sharing Noah’s life.

I lost it. There are nine million “what if’s” that could have changed this and every single one is beating in my head. I am so sorry, Noah. I don’t know how I will ever feel joy again. You were my joy. You were the center of my heart. You were my partner and my companion and the only one I had to care about pleasing in any way. You were so easily pleased. I loved pleasing you.

I wanted to spend the rest of my life gardening while you played the piano with the window open. We hit the fucking lottery. We were there. Our time was starting. And a perfect storm of stupid things mean you are dead. I am alone. I do hear your voice in my head but I sincerely doubt I will ever find a way to be ok with another human. I can’t. I lost the best one because I was stupid and I didn’t bubble wrap him enough. I shouldn’t have asked him to go ice skating. I shouldn’t have ignored him and left it to be his problem when he told me the boot was too tight and it was hurting the top of his foot. He didn’t have fun. He went for me and I was a jerk and I didn’t help him. I focused on making our daughter have a good time instead because I didn’t feel I could handle them both.

I am a selfish piece of shit and I hate me so much.

I am making sure your babies eat. Yes, including vegetables. Today I said I needed some time alone. Noah I am so sorry for everything. I’m sorry I invited that man to have dinner with our family so that he wrecked this part of our year. Hell, maybe you wouldn’t have died because all the rest of it wouldn’t have happened.

I feel like I have done everything wrong for a very long time. I did not make the choices that guaranteed me all the time with Noah. I fucked up the calculus.

The fact is that he died and it was a ridiculous odds loss and he was a grown up that picked all of the things that happened to him. But I am the daughter of alcoholics and that means that everything is always my fault.

I loved him so much. I loved his too muchness and his brashness and his silliness and his cruelty and his selfishness. I loved his relentlessness. He was so much. He could suck all the oxygen out of a room before replacing it an instant later. He made everyone sparkle and shine. He was good at making people feel interesting.

My chest is burning because it feels wrong for me to breathe if Noah can’t share the oxygen. I want to give to him so much it is ripping me apart.

I don’t need to keep designing my garden so there are hiding places for us to have sex. Well, that simplifies my needs. There are a million things on my list of “do for Noah” and now they are all coming to a stop. I don’t need to have a fucking subscription order for foot shaving tools. We will spend almost no money on alcohol and our food budget is going to go down a lot.

I have started cancelling your monthly recurring stuff. I’m so freaked out. I feel like I am editing you out of the world and it feels morally wrong. Hell, rebuilding rails just came up for renewal. I’m paying that one and letting it work until it stops working. Maybe one of the kids can figure out how to operate it.

I don’t want to.

It was hard shoving myself into the size of box that fit you but it was a good kind of hard. It wasn’t easy and sometimes it chafed but I knew so much happiness with you. Yes, I still suffered from all my shit, but I wasn’t alone. I trusted you enough for you to be the person who got to see me behind closed doors. All of me. You are the only person I trust to really love and want me. You looked for me like water in the desert. I did the same.

Then I lost you.

Noah, how could you leave me?

It’s been a hellish week.

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I can’t believe that a week has passed already. It feels like a day. It feels like 10 years. I feel like there is no sense of time at all. I am in a fog. I am dizzy all the time and I feel like I’m going to hurt myself terribly pretty much any minute. My life is going to get so small. I am going to stay home where I can butt scoot up and down stairs because I don’t feel stable.

I am so scared. Noah has been my bulwark in this life. I don’t want to face the world without him. It sounds horrible and awful and unfair in ways I don’t even know how to wrap my brain around. There are so many tiny what if’s. If he hadn’t broken his ankle. If he hadn’t had surgery. If he hadn’t taken medication. If If If If If If.

There is no fair when it comes to death. Even if someone lives a long time, that doesn’t mean their death is just. Maybe it should have come 50 years earlier and it is no fair that it waited so long.

I have never before noticed how well suited to keening the name “Noah” is.

I have no hope for my future. It will get smaller and more painful with every passing year. I will struggle on to raise my babies. I don’t think I can promise them companionship in their old age. I hope they will forgive me when I need to join their father. I miss Noah. I don’t want to live without him. I will. I have to. I don’t have a choice. I will raise our babies and I will ensure they are as stable and resilient as possible when they become adults but I am broken. This was my chance at a happy family.

I will always know that once I was loved. Once I was loved to distraction and beyond. Once I was everything to one person. He walked through fire for me over and over. In contrast I’m just going to have to keep moving in a frozen hell of pretended normal life. I will never be like everyone else and it doesn’t matter. I will go through the motions of a life but I will be watching through a screen.

I no longer have Noah justifying my existence and writing me permission slips to be in rooms. I no longer have the fact that Noah loves me more than everyone else in the whole world combined to make me feel like I am ok; maybe I am even good. If someone as wonderful as Noah would pick me maybe I am not all bad? If someone like Noah would decide that I was worth working like a demon for to ensure my safety? Maybe I’m not worthless?

Now Noah is gone. The vast majority of our money is tied in up accounts I can’t touch till I’m 67. Once I hit 67, I am set. That’s 24 years in between. I have 11 years, a month, and 14 days until I am done having a minor child. I don’t know yet, but I think we will get child support money from social security in the US. There’s the bank shares money that comes in every year. There is life insurance money. There are Noah’s parents. I’ll bridge the gap; I think.

I never fucking wanted to be a rich widow. This is not why I invested money. I invested money so I could take care of Noah. I was making sure Noah would be safe as he rode out his old age. That’s what I was doing. I am going to keep it and use it to take care of his babies.

We will have fun in the future. We will have adventures. We will explore. We will learn and grow. We aren’t going to stop. Noah would never forgive me if I stopped or if I didn’t push his kids to keep going. We will fucking go. I will be the motor for a long time until they are launched.

Do I want to live that long? 24 years without Noah? Oh my god that makes me shake so hard. Noah. Noah I need you. How could you go? How could you let your body stop? How could something so small stop you?

How could a cockroach like me be the last one standing? I may wobble and look like shit when I walk but I’m mother fucking cruising on like I can’t be stopped.

I wished I believed in Gods so that I could believe that the suffering in my life was because they chose me for punishment for some reason. That I think I could honestly wrap my head around and respect.

Why in the fuck was I so driven to have children? Why wasn’t I happy with just Noah? I am feeling absolutely overwhelmed with grief and I am very upset that suicide is not something I can consider. Every time the thought tries to start “I want to” there is a glitch. No. That is no longer something that is available to me in this life. My children have suffered enough. I can’t want that. Not even in the privacy of my mind, never again. I have to honor Noah.

I have so many regrets right now. I am drowning in them. Did I really serve him as well as he deserved? He never got to be the complete sole focus of my attention and I regret that so much. If I had known that I would have such a short time with him, what choices would I have made?

He died for stupid reasons. He died because everyone has to die. He died because when you read statistics about what could happen if you have surgery or take medication or or or or or or or you never think that one in a million death will be you today. Noah got a higher than average number of lottery ticket wins in this life. His luck ran out.

I don’t particularly want to keep breathing if I won’t have Noah to hold me. I will though. I will keep breathing and eating and sleeping and moving. I will raise my children well. I will earn them sitting by my bedside someday with smiles when I am sick enough that I am allowed to go see their dad. I miss you, Noah.

I know exactly which hangdog expression he would make when I cry, “You weren’t supposed to leave me.” He hangs his head and says, “I know.”

We don’t get to choose what happens to us. There is no deserve. There is no fair in this fuckhole I call life.

I am so angry that a fucking rapist wrecked the last 5 months of my marriage. I have been so fucked up. Noah has been doing work all day almost every day taking care of me and trying to help me calm down. I feel like I let him down by being so weak. I should have been giving to him.

I am trying to think of all the accommodations I am going to need to ask for: like I need Shortie’s teachers to see me write down the things they need me to know in the notebook I am carrying around. If I don’t write it down I cannot be trusted to remember it. Assume I am incapable of forming new memories for the next while. I am going to be in a deeply dissociated state most of the time.

There is a reason I am asking visitors to be spaced out over time. I am worried about my ability to fully stay in the present tense and an outside adult forces me back into reality. This is not a constant problem, but it has been a problem over the last five months and I expect it to get much worse. I am actually literally afraid of being alone right now. I am afraid I will take myself outside in 0 degree weather and stay for hours. Not smoking, just sitting outside until I hurt myself.

I don’t think I’d push it all the way to damage.

I know I won’t if someone is here with me. I am grateful to the friends who are volunteering. I hope this actually works out. I’m scared. The future looks so terribly bleak. For a time I was the most important person in the world to the best man I’ve ever met.

Now I am just a cockroach who won’t fucking die.

I’m not ok

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I miss you, Noah. I am trying to get things done. I am in motion basically every minute because I am afraid that if I stop I will crumble and be unable to get up.

I am so sad. I wish I had died instead of you. I wish I could take your place. If one of us needs to die now, why wasn’t it me? I do not have the purity of soul that you have. The world loves you more than it does me.

I feel sad that the Ruby community around the world is shocked with grief. Your impact is so big. They don’t care that you aren’t there to do the work. You made people feel seen, loved, and important. Like you did for me.

There is no fair in this life. You were the best of us and you are gone. My soul is screaming in agony. I want to want to die. I want to feel so suicidal I don’t care about the pain I will cause my children.

I can’t though. Every time I try to think “I want to die” the thought short circuits in my brain. I can’t ever want that again. I am going to live forever. There is no one to help my kids if I go. Yeah, I have friends who would take them in and not leave them on the streets and they’d have enough money to be ok starting out in life. If our net worth was divided between the kids they would all get close to a million and my in-laws would round that up very soon.

They don’t need money. They need someone who can say every day, “I love you and you still have a future ahead of you full of love, happiness, fun, and belonging. You will find friends and romantic partners and you will have a whole life. I will help you get there.”

I just no longer believe that I have a happy future. My happiness died with Noah. I feel so bad. Noah, how could you leave me?

He’s gone and I will never be ok again.

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What I am doing is making sure my kids are ok. That’s it. I got them out of the house into time with supportive folks so I could strip Christmas from the house. The older two have already told me that they are not ok with us decorating next year.

I’m deep in the regret stage I can list 9 million what ifs that don’t result in me losing the only person who has ever consistently shown up and cared for me. There are a lot of people who have shown up at times. I am deeply lucky like that. Pam will be here in 13 hours. It’s a good thing.

Do you know what isn’t going to be the same cost/reward ratio going forward? Writing. For about 20 years I’ve been writing for Noah. He was my ideal reader. He was the person I most wanted to share my thoughts with.

My smallest one is telling me about how she is going to grow up to be like her dad: happy and joyful the vast amount of the time. This is a big change from the grumpy butt she often is. I told her that she is going to have all the feelings as often as she needs to happen and that is a good thing. She conceded that she will have other feelings, just like her dad did, but he chose to be happy and joyful because that is who he wanted to be and so does she.

When I cried just a little as I climbed into bed she told me, “You are safe. I am here with you.”

I sucked back that sob and said the same back to her. She relaxed into me and went to sleep.

It is remarkable that all of my children have embraced, “This hurts but we will keep walking and we will be ok.” We are roleplaying how to handle different situations that will come up at school. We are talking about how to not piss people off all the time and get hit. For the first time in my fucking parenthood I am saying with my whole heart, “If you know all the answers for the love of Cheese don’t raise your hand every time. Wait until no one else raises their hand, then you do it.” Don’t draw too much attention to yourself. When someone uses a word you don’t know, calmly and with curiosity ask them what it means. You are going to actually learn how to speak Scottish now! This is exciting! When they tell you a funny/clever one compliment them on their fun usage of language.

Don’t go looking for fights.

I went and saw a doctor yesterday. She told me that I could have benzodiazepine or melatonin for sleep because nothing else exists. Yeah. Neither is an appropriate choice for me to lean on as heavily as I would need to lean on something to sleep right now. I’m not going to sleep well at night. Frankly as long as this continues I should use as much time that the kids are in school to nap as I can.

I’m shaking all of the time. I’m being hooked up with bereavement support. I wish I thought it would help me. I think this is going to turn into another time where I am a bad person if I share any details about my past. I think it is going to end in me feeling more isolated and alone.

One of my ex’s is hitting on me and it makes me feel sick.

He got what he wanted. After the kerfluffle in 2016 he had permanent monogamy with me. I wish I could have given him a lot more years.

We touched each other all the time. We were both in the house most of the time and we’d walk past each other and trail a finger, or lean, or kiss, or wipe a cheek on one another hundreds of times a day. Even with how much contact the kids need I feel completely touch starved because I only need one person’s touch and I will never get it again.

It is so clear in my mind that I am not allowed to blame myself because then I would be a bad mother. It’s not my fault. There were a series of places where Noah made choices that should have been fine only they weren’t and if I try to take responsibility I will drive myself mad. This was a terrible accident. People die. I miss him so much.

Noah made a lot of choices in this life. Some of them worked out and some didn’t. That is the summation of a human life.

Soon I think I will need to pull back hard from social media. I can no longer sustain the level of typing I do since I don’t live with an in-house massage therapist.

I wanted to spend the rest of my life worshiping his body and telling him how grateful I was that picked me. He had gotten fucking fit over the past two years of us exercising together more. It was a wonderful body to worship. Every part of us fit so well. I liked where my head hit his shoulder. I liked how we lined up when we were in bed. I miss grabbing him and saying, “Mine.”

Combined with the rape abreactions that are still happening I feel deeply scared and out of control in my body. It doesn’t matter how I feel; it matters how I act.

One of my friends is setting up weekly knife/axe throwing with my son as a specific way to get him out of the house and into a relationship with an adult man. I have told him that he has to start doing things out of the house every week many days a week. Without Noah in this house we aren’t a full and complete ecosystem. We have to go meet other people and make more connections.

It’s remarkable how little I needed other people when I had Noah. He was everything.

Middle child is both looking forward to and dreading school. I think it will be ok. They really want to go do drama with people every day. I think that is a wonderful idea. Noah and I both loved theatre in high school.

I am going to start implementing a move towards school timing immediately because it will be an adjustment. My life is going to become very small and very routine and very rigid because it has to be. When they are at school I will exercise and garden. My mother in law is insisting I get weekly house cleaners; given that she is supporting me for the rest of my life, fine.

I did not cultivate a relationship with my in laws because I was preparing for this. It makes the kids feel better. I think it even made Noah feel better. I gave him a way to have a relationship with his parents that made him feel connected but not smothered. I am proud of that.

I wanted to see what would happen if Noah and I made children together. They are amazing and wondrous. This is going to be a big painful loss but we will walk on. He taught us to be strong. He showed us endless resiliency. He really was joyful and happy most of the time. And we were all such surly bastards so much of the time. I don’t think we will keep falling into that trap.

I told my Shortie that when someone does something and she has to think of how to respond she can think, “What would Daddy do?” Because he would tell a joke or be silly or lighten the mood–he wouldn’t pick a fight. That was not his way. He wasn’t a fighter. He was someone who wanted people to feel special and loved.

I would know better than anyone else.

It’s the end of the world as I know it

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I don’t feel fine. Noah died on Christmas Eve. My world is shattered. I don’t know that I’ll ever feel ok again.

Too many feelings.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s weird

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I like dropping bits from my brain like leaves on the stream of data that is the internet. It feels very alienating when I stop myself. I feel my personality, my sense of self constrict. If I am not sharing thoughts, did I have them? I need to be witnessed in a way that is awful and overwhelming and makes me feel empty. In it I see the way my children yell, “Look at me!”

Do we all want that so much it feels like a burning knife in our bellies?

I finally did something today. I cleaned the kitchen. It was pretty gross. Well, I cleaned most of the kitchen. As much as I could make myself do. I feel in myself this urge to go through and whip the house and garden into shape for the winter–it would take me 3-4 days of solid work if I felt whole enough to do it. Instead I think most of it won’t happen at all and I will stare at walls and wait to die instead.

Nothing expeditious will happen. I’ll just wait. Death is coming for us all. Every day we are always waiting for death. This is a morbid thing more than a suicidal thing. I am feeling morbidly obsessed with death. I feel like I can think about very little else and that’s really annoying.

I was listening to my “hope” playlist earlier trying to have some feeling in my body that isn’t negative and pessimistic and despairing. Fat fucking fail. I can’t.

I cuddled my baby and talked about how she is doing the best she can and no her mistakes do not mean that she is naughty. Sometimes she does do stuff that we aren’t very happy about. She isn’t trying to be mean. She isn’t trying to hurt anyone. She isn’t trying to destroy anything so no, she is not bad.

Why can’t I feel like that applies to me at all?

I’m freaking out about how much I want to see my mom and Auntie. I think I actually want to stop going back to California because I don’t want to feel like I could see them. I can’t. I have no idea how they would feel about seeing me. It’s been almost 14 years. It still hurts like a stab to the heart every single time.

Mama says I could leave Noah and move in with her if he is hurting me beyond what I can bear. I don’t think he is. Also: how in the fuck could I handle moving back to Santa Cruz? Drive past Auntie’s house every time I go to the Valley? Nah. Nah I can’t do that. I can’t. That’s a bridge too far. I really can’t.

Hell, I can’t go back to driving. Moving back to California is a non-starter.

Besides the fact that I don’t want away from Noah. That is the scariest thought. I am so much more afraid of losing Noah than I am of dying. I need Noah for what he gives me spiritually. Noah is the rock around which my life is built. I do not know what I would do without Noah. My life is built around serving Noah and that’s not something I feel motivated to change.

I would not be happier as a slutty single mom. I would probably turn into my mother and never have sex again because I don’t trust anyone. I would be terrified that I would expose my kids to a predator because I have famously shitty taste in people to trust. I like monstrous predators. Apparently. Or they like me. Or something.

I would not leave Noah. This is a hard phase. I’m not going to leave because he delivered on the “worse” he said he would give me during the vows. I knew it was coming. It was foretold and promised and everything. He’s hurting and not being gentle with it.

Noah tells a sad, pretty story about an orphan boy and his escaped, wounded rhinoceros. We trade back and forth who is the boy and who is the rhinoceros. I don’t expect him to always be gentle. I don’t know what I do expect. I don’t know what would be better. I have no idea what I would ask for. Right this exact minute I can’t imagine ever feeling happiness or joy again.

Right this minute I feel like I should cancel with Travel Boyfriend. There’s no way that I could deliver on the good time some other self who used to live inside me offered. That self is gone. She feels dead. She thought maybe it might be ok to really grow and change but no. I need to calcify and chip off edges. Right now it feels like she was the part of me who wanted to recover from being raped. You know what? Fuck the NHS. Medical malpractice my big toe. You are lazy and ineffective motherfuckers. I know it saves you fucking money. And it HELPS YOU CUT OFF THE EDGE OF THE BELL CURVE YOU MOTHERFUCKERS.

I feel sick and depleted and destroyed. My head hurts. My soul hurts. I hate doctors so much. This entire experience is so degrading.

How would I even be able to tell if I was so upset about Noah? How could I narrow down the sources of stress and distress? Do you know who supplies all of my support? Noah. Leaving Noah would be a form of self harm for me. Noah takes care of me through a great many times and types of incapacity. It’s not even just that he physically cares for me when I’m ill–he cares about my soul. He puts a lot of time and effort into trying to help me be ok. That’s one of the many things I’m really sad about.

Right now I’m not feeling better even though Noah is putting a lot of effort in. That feels like yet another betrayal. It feels like improperly displaying gratitude. That old chestnut.

I need to go to sleep.

I keep coming back to this deep unhappiness. I can’t perform good right.

Do I really deserve to be alive? Or am I far enough out on the bell curve that I really should have died already.

Social anxiety at 11.

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I’m not doing well with people. I am grateful I have an excuse to hide in my house. Being around people feels like a horrible thing I’m doing to people. I feel deeply inadequate. I am upset that I managed to wreck one of the friendships I put the most effort into over the past five years. I am really sad that I managed to make myself unwelcome in the first vanilla community I tried to join. It is making me feel intensely more alienated and wrong.

This kind of thing is what comes up in my head when I think about myself as being bad all the time. I’m in my mid 40’s and I still don’t know how to act well enough to not get chased out of communities. That sucks.

I have a deep need for community and friendship that Noah doesn’t fill. He’s great but he’s one person. I do have a few friends here but I don’t feel welcome in the community. I am not assimilating that well. Shocking, I know. I don’t feel very likeable and it means I’m not feeling like I can or should go to things when I know the host would like me to come. I worry about inflicting myself on the other guests. I don’t want people to feel like they have to interact with me when they don’t want to.

I’m scared of the event in October. I’m going to have to manufacture a giant pretense of self esteem and confidence and right now that is sounding terrifying. I am not feeling very good about myself in ways that are hard to ignore. I’m feeling deeply unworthy. I am too high in cost and too little in return. I am a net loss.

This feeling makes me want to hide in a closet under a pile of blankets. I take extreme comfort from the knowledge that Noah thinks I am absolutely worth all the effort he puts into looking after me.

I can’t need anyone else. Just Noah. So when I feel like I do right now, where I am just a bottomless pit of need and fair I sit in a room by myself because I have nothing to give. If I have nothing to give then I need to be alone. I am a net loss when I am at full capacity. How in the fuck do I justify all that cost when I have so little value to anyone outside of my house?

I will get over feeling like this. I have felt this way before and then I stopped. I know that will happen again. It’s just going to take some time of being alone and trying to regenerate any sense in myself that anything I am or do has any value at all of any kind to anyone other than myself. I wish I had more of a sense that I just deserve to exist because of me because that is enough but I don’t.

I am deeply driven by collectivist and friend network building urges to amass a feeling of family. The trouble is, I am always too high in cost for that. It is what it is. I just don’t know how to shave off enough parts of me to cost less for people.

Noah’s plan

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Sometimes I wonder if Noah watched The Notebook and decided that he needed to have a tempestuous relationship with a writer so that he can be memorialised.

You can’t get to yes without risking no.

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Damn. I don’t even know how I want to start this. I don’t know what the frame is for this. I mean, a dude shared https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/the-state-of-our-unions/202302/why-are-so-many-young-men-single-and-sexless?amp and this article is making it hard to go to sleep.

So this will involve heavy trauma random mentions but I’m not talking about my pain or my victimisation–that really isn’t the point. It’s just for context.

More than 60% of American men under 30 are single and are probably very rarely having sex during their single life. Holy shit. I had more sex than these men before I was 15. I don’t mean the rapes. When you have an exceptionally early introduction to rape it is fairly common to translate that into an exceptionally early introduction to sex. I have spent a lot of time in therapy working through my feelings about whether or not I raped the children who said yes when I asked if they wanted to play. We were the same age. But my play was not age appropriate. Lots of mothers didn’t let their children near me again.

I’m not going to turn this into a dirty story. Lots of kids said no. I refined my approach. Lots of people said no. I refined my approach. Score.

Before I was a freshman in high school I had slept with more people than most people do in their whole lives. In order to get a body count that high I was told no over and over and over and over. This was all made much easier by the fact that I moved approximately 45ish times by that age. I had been to 20 different schools. I had so many prey opportunities and I am a pretty damn good hunter. It helps that I consider gender fairly irrelevant.

I learned the most from the people who told me no. There are some good fucking men in this world who will recoil with horror when a child asks for sex. Good for you, dudes. I wish you were less unusual.

But anyway. The point is that in order to figure out who you are and what you want you need to put effort in to having something to offer. I’m autistic and my special interest was sex through early childhood. I had a really fucked up/healthy boundaries on their part experience of being ostracised over and over and over and over and over.

My kid told me he felt like everyone in the world hated him when a couple of kids bullied him at one school.

God I had to try hard not to giggle. Oh baby. I wish I knew what it felt like to have four people not liking you feel like the whole world. Fuck.

So I really and truly do know how hard it is to ask people for sex and be rejected over and over. The thing is: do you want sex or do you want a relationship? Because if you just want sex then you really should pay a sex worker and be ok with that. It’s a dandy occupation for folks who choose it without any other coercion beyond living in a late capitalist hellscape.

If you want sex in an ongoing way as an adult then you have to make learning how to be a fun person to have sex with a priority. You need to learn how to have skills that make you good to have around. These are broad. Not every man has to have any particular specific skill–you are fully entitled to areas of weakness. I had to focus less on what I needed from someone else and more on what I can offer.

I married the guy who did the most classes. I don’t mean university. He took massage classes. He took dance classes (but holy shit don’t ever ask him to dance unless you want to hear a long rant about how much he hates all dance instructors 😂). He got a motorcycle. He took classes in hypnosis and NLP. He did tantra classes. He went to fucking spirituality weekend retreats all by his own damn self. He constantly reads books on how to be more effective at whatever new task he is about to add at his job. He went to a lot of kink classes. He went to sex classes. We still have all the damn handouts.

He knew that if he wanted to attract attention he needed to differentiate himself. When he arrived in adulthood he did not seem that interesting. He said that his dad told him that he better go learn how to have something to give because no one likes boys and young men.

Ouch. Yeah. I don’t think you could pay me to go through life as a boy. I was treated like shit. I knew beyond the shadow of doubt that I was white trash and every single one of the mother fuckers throwing dog shit at me would be delighted if I were to die. It happened in city after city after city after city. For years.

Fuck no. I don’t want to be a boy. That sounds really rough. How in the hell can people learn how to ask if the question is always wrong? How can there be a way of just magically knowing the right way? ~~You~~ I learn by making mistakes; I’ve made some fucking whoppers. My husband has made big mistakes.

I don’t know how to settle my brain around the limits of this small town. I think it is the best motherfucking thing in the world that I have a choke chain on.

The coping methods that served me well enough to create an extended network of friends and Leather Family really don’t work the same if I am never going to play with or have sex with anyone.

Throughout my life before moving here every single close friend I have had from early childhood has been a sex or bdsm partner. Now I’m just supposed to figure out how to do this thing I really don’t fucking know how to do. It’s terrifying and hard.

I have to go be told no over and over and over. I’m a polarising fucking figure. For every hour I spend trying to develop a friendship relationship with someone I probably get rejected for 15 overtures in a row. That’s not all with the same person. You can’t do that. It’s weird. People don’t like it. But if you wait a few months and try again it’s ok. Three no’s mean you stop asking forever.

Yes I am autistic and I like my fucking rules, ‘kay?

You can’t put all your eggs in one basket. You have to put a small amount of energy in a lot of directions. And it’s exhausting. IT IS FUCKING EXHAUSTING. Then I read about how little effort many men are putting into figuring out how to get laid. SEX IS FUCKING AWESOME AND I DON’T KNOW WHY YOU AREN’T WILLING TO DO THINGS TO GET IT. I mean, I gotta work pretty fucking hard these days for platonic friendships and you won’t put in this much effort for SEX. Buddy, these days I get laid any time I go to bed in a nightgown. He even calls me names and hurts me. He knows exactly where to fuck with my deep seated trauma issues.

He also cooks breakfast 6 days a week. He reads to our family and he does the best voices. Girl Genius comic books are fantastic to read out loud to anyone and I will die on this hill. He was a really tremendously shitty labour partner for our first two kids. So our friend’s mom came with us to the third birth and she told him what to do. You can always go find ways to get support to learn how to do what you need to do to be a better partner.

He doesn’t ask me to teach him how to get better for me. I don’t ask him to teach me how to get better for him. If I can’t tell when my behavior and attitude please him after this many years and this many thousands of hours of conversation then I want my money back this program sucks.

I try to keep a sense of humor about how much it sucks to have to force my face back into that carefully practiced in the mirror face that projects just the right amount of “I would be cheerful if you talked to me.” Fuck this shit. I don’t want to need community. I want to live alone in a box in the woods.

Who am I kidding. I’d die.

I want people in my life so much. I don’t know what shape I want that to take. I have no idea what my relationships with people will look like going forward. I have no internal map for this. Even more fun: I am now going on 4 years out of therapy after being in therapy on and off for my whole life because a lot of shit went down.

I think all these men want people as much as I do. I don’t know what any of them need to do because the penalties for mistakes are so hard.

I know that when I get the same feedback from three people all of whom I already respect that I need to spend some very serious time looking at what larger truth they are seeing that I am not seeing. If I get a bunch of no’s to offers I just need to try again at a different time and get busy living my own life in the meantime.

I do not understand being unwilling to change to get people to like you. I feel like it has been a highly abrasive 30 year process of getting me to anything like socially acceptable behaviour. I have had to learn many things and I have worked really hard.

It is weird feeling all the iterations of personality. All of the mistakes I have made have made an indelible impression.

You never forget the first time someone throws dog shit at you because you were stupid enough to say you liked them. I was 7.

When someone tells me they are too scared to ask for time with someone, a relationship of some sort I marvel. What would it be like to have a place in which it was safe to hide and be safe? I mean. I have it now?

It’s really fucking weird. Sometimes it is almost itchy.

Ah, I know why I am up at 2am writing this when usually I would go to sleep and not think that much about the plight of all these men who aren’t getting laid. Tonight my teenager and I went and took a course out in the vanilla world to possibly learn an activity. Details are unimportant. The point was the man running the presentation spent about 60%-70% of the night talking to me. I know he is roughly 30 years my senior.

That was a man who cheats on his wife anytime he can. It’s like blood in the water. There is a way of really staring. Holy shit have I practiced and practiced and practiced and practiced how to settle my eyes on someone or bounce from person to person to carefully not raise hackles. I got to do it when I was young enough to not earn significant punishments.

I learned it because the kinds of men who will have sex with children are very good at that kind of intense attention.

These are very messy things.

On the ride home we talked about it. He had never seen that happen to me before. The mantle of white motherhood is a fucking thing. Now he’s taller than me so I don’t get as much halo from his presence. He was absolutely incensed. To him this was grotesquely inappropriate.

Oh my god. What would it be like to live in a brain that believes it has the right to say no to the male gaze and have that matter? Whoa. Wait. How are people who like to have affairs supposed to find each other if EVEN LOOKING AT PEOPLE ISN’T OK?!?!?! Like, holy cheesetoast that’s a fucking tight rope to walk. Wait, isn’t the fact that you are someone who will break the rules part of the reason for the intrusive eye contact? Fucking a. Why am I assuming that he would actually end up being successful prey? Maybe the signals aren’t the same and I don’t know shit.

I mean, I don’t know shit.

I’m really good at finding people to fuck, though. I started with the only standard being “will say yes when I ask”. When you ask people that indiscriminately there is this whole cascade of complications. I doubt I would have gotten laid if everyone had phones. Thank god I’m hella old.

I am praying for you fellas. I hope you figure it out. I don’t think anyone else will do everything just like I did and that’s a good thing. Surely there is a happy medium?

Food culture

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It is funny to me the ways in which my autistic challenges around food land differently in different spaces. This has been an intense and complicated roller coaster since I was a tiny child. This is relevant to kink mostly in as much as almost all of my earliest strong positive exposure to conscious sharing of food among adults was in kink settings.

I stopped going to church when I was in middle school. Most of my foster placements didn’t take me out into the community because I was an explosive, very difficult child. My mother, during the rare periods that I lived with her, never participated in anything in any community that I can remember. She was isolated and lonely and poor so her life with me involved a lot of stories about how good things had been when she was married. Back then she had friends and community and there were potlucks and all the kids on the blocks wanted her to make their birthday cakes because hers were the best.

She bought me shitty grocery store cakes that made me vomit. But hey, that just happened because I was ungrateful. I couldn’t possibly be having a physical reaction that was entirely out of my control, no I was just being rude to her with my constant ingratitude.

All of my feelings about food are wrapped up in all of my feelings about my mother and the kink community is a very interesting place to be dealing with different personality dynamics around food. For the whole rest of my life I am going to be grateful that I learned food sharing with the people I did it with. I know about the subtle quirks and preferences of almost every person I have ever prepared food for. For all of the years I was super active in the scene before I had kids (when my palate changed like whoa) I was on a pretty restricted diet. The list of things I would eat was much easier to contend with than even trying to list all of the things I wouldn’t eat.

People always made sure there was stuff for me. Even if they weren’t planning to eat it because it didn’t look very appetising to them, devoid of flavour as it was. I have very distinct memories of approaching a food set up with great trepidation and having someone wrap their arms around me and guide me over to exactly what had been made for me. I cried so many times. That right there made me feel more loved than any sexual experience I have ever had. Those people (because gender was not a factor–folks were all over the spectrum) made it very clear to me: *”I see you. I understand you. I’ve got you.”

The recreation events weren’t like that. My other hobbies didn’t do that. The parenting people did a different sort of dance around accommodating all needs because holy shit do homeschoolers have a whole dance around food needs. That shit is Tetris on a level that made me have to develop whole new neural pathways. That was so hard.

In the kink community it wasn’t hard. I had to learn how to talk about my body in order to be a safe person to play with. It was not ok that I had learned to dissociate all the time and I spent most of every single day feeling bad all the time. I had no ability to imagine a time when I did not feel on the verge of death. The sheer vigour of youth was pushing me still but I was very near the cliff where that wasn’t going to help me anymore.

My community members made me feel safe. That was not a feeling I had known in my life up to that point. Now that I am an adult I can describe my IBS troubles with great eloquence and fancy-pants words like “HPA axis disorder”. For a few decades all I could say was that everything burned. Of course people didn’t take this seriously, obviously I was just melodramatic. A whiner. I sat in the bathroom all day because I was lazy, obviously.

It couldn’t possibly be that I was sitting in the bathroom on the toilet rocking and crying because it burned so fucking badly All.The. Time. When all of your hypothalamus, pituitary gland, and your adrenal system develop in your brain from infancy through all of your childhood in settings that are violent physically, sexually, completely unstable in every metric you can imagine then a body is going to have a completely fucked up digestion system. It’s kinda like how I can watch someone pop up to have to run to the toilet every 45 minutes and go, “Ahh, early childhood sexual assault? Yeah.”

You want to know how I can talk about this easily and without shame? Because of the kink community.

I suspect that this happening in the groups with all ages are part of the reason that I never became particularly drawn to TNG groups. I guess I definitely already understand it isn’t universal. I stayed with the people who were 20, 30, 40, 50 years older than me because my experience of those kinky friends were that they genuinely wanted me to be around in the long run and that means I needed to take it seriously that things were done to me and I had to figure out how to fix what was broken. It didn’t matter that it was hard and that it would take a long time, they would be there. And the thing is–it’s not like this was one person who was all shiny and magical. It wasn’t. This built over years and it carried me through more than a decade of my life as the only support network I had.

Noah has done the vast majority of the heavy lifting on expanding my palate. He asked me if I would like to learn to like more food and I said yes. I will flat out admit that a lot of it has been the privilege of being able to spend a lot of discretionary money on food. He has spent 16 years taking me to fascinating restaurants and traveling the world to find out what food really tastes like in other places. I am a lucky fucking bitch and I know it. Now I know how to put things in my mouth without risking a panic attack because a texture is unfamiliar and my body cannot process that this thing is safe. It took years and a very gradual expansion of trust. This was the stage with learning how to make my mouth believe that food wasn’t trying to kill me.

Noah paid for the nutritionists who worked with me over time to slowly acclimatize my body to absorbing nutrients from food instead of flushing it out as fast as possible with as much acid as possible. It took years. People who have been with me for many years probably remember my elimination diet challenges. I still have the Poop Book notebook. Wasn’t that a fun adventure. This was the stage where I learned how to digest food. I struggle with feeling like it is deeply pathetic that I had to spend my late 20’s/most of my 30’s learning how to digest food but such is my fucking life.

The process of digesting didn’t stop with how to stop having agonizing pain that left me writhing on the floor trying not to scream from the pain of having large bulky items move slowly through my scar tissue laced intestine. It was a god damn nightmare. Do you know who emotionally supported me through that? The friends I made in the kink community. Especially the people who were older than me and who wanted me to be alive in this body for a very long time. They knew that the sooner I went through this the more years I’d have with actual quality of life.

It isn’t that things were perfect or that there were no problems in the community. Despite how much of my heart I left behind I had to go. So the good of being in California didn’t outweigh the bad.

I think about these things and I want to write them here because my experiences of food culture were such a big part of what made the bdsm community different from other hobbies I had. That is how bdsm/Leather crossed from being “those people you hang out with sometimes” to being my family. They wanted to know me. Nosey fuckers, I love it. We have to care about how our bodies are doing or we can’t keep doing this. This is a high intensity fucking sport, yo.

So that’s why I ask you so so so many questions about food. That’s why I want to hear all your stories about food. That’s why I want to find out what kind of food culture existed in your life growing up. That’s why I want to know what you prefer to drink and how do you feel about spice? It’s why I am so intense about figuring out how I can get as many servings of vegetables in front of you that you find palatable because I am in this for the long game. I’m only 41, I might know you for 30 or more years past this. I want you to still be alive and feeling good and having fun. So I want to know how I can make you feel like your needs are seen. Like it is important that you attain the best health you can in this life so your body can carry you to all sorts of wonderful debauched adventures.

I want to see you out fucking 3 hot people when you are your 70’s. Oh my god. There was this particular woman in the San Francisco community when I arrived. I was young enough that while we had a few very passing conversations she really didn’t have patience for my bullshit. I would watch her saunter around parties in her black mini-skirt and her black lace bra and her sensible kitten heels with two dudes who were in their 30’s on a leash behind her. The dudes were ripped as fuck. She had the most salacious, glorious smile I have ever seen. When I was 18 I decided I wanted to be her someday.

I’d like you to be there too. So, what kind of vegetables can I serve you today? Food is medicine. Food is magic. Food is what gives us the nutrients to build the cells and the tiny invisible to the eye specks that form the entity that is you. Food matters. Food is part of community.

I would like to be in a community with you. I don’t want you to be a commodity or a notch on a bed post. I want your whole being. I know it is a little weird. I never claimed to be normal.

But which past behavior?

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I was reading this article about relationships (vanilla/romantic primarily) and one sentence really made me think.

“‘I often end up saying the strongest predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour.’” The author of the article is sharing what his coworker, a clinical psychologist, usually says to people who are stuck and unable to get out of a bad relationship. Not necessarily abusive bad, just unsatisfying/not meeting your needs sorta bad for the most part.

I had to meet a new psychiatric doctor yesterday. I was nervous because meeting new doctors is a crap shoot. Will they be older men who tell me that all of my testable, long-term health problems are all in my head? Naw, it was a young masculine appearing person who looked like they would fit right in at any party I would throw. I instantly felt comfortable. I was meeting him for the purpose of handing over the management of my ADHD and I needed to explain my history with medication, my other assorted neurological/mental health issues, a VERY brief summary of my physical health history, and about a 20 second primer on my history with assault so that I could explain how I came to cannabis in the first place and please for the love of god don’t tell me to go off it.

In the course of this conversation I came upon the challenge of how to explain that I am both consistent and inconsistent. My “past behavior” is all over the map on a variety of different axis. I managed to complete my bachelors and my teaching credential but I failed out of grad school at the very last minute because I just couldn’t do more of what I had been doing. We’ve lost a lot of money over the years because I fuck things up regularly. I fuck up in every relationship. I am incredibly variable in how intense/defensive/aggressive I am and if you come talk to me on the wrong day or at exactly the wrong minute on an otherwise good day I might react like a complete dick. That’s consistent.

What is also consistent is that I show up when people are having an emergency. I help people fix problems. I am gentle when I really need to be. My kids have figured out a trick. If they tell me, “I need to tell you something and I’m scared to because this is the sort of thing you might get mad over. I need you to not get mad.” Then I take a moment to pause every other single thing going on; I fully focus my mind and my energy on being calm and I say, “Ok I am ready to hear it.” Or I say: “I am not capable of listening until x” where x might be a time or the end of a current activity and then we go through the rest of it like normal. Then we fix whatever is going on.

I know that when they say that they are asking me to put myself aside and just be support. I can’t do that 24/7–it will grind me into dust. It is very high cost to put yourself aside like that. I don’t know how therapists do it. Maybe it helps because they usually aren’t having to do that in their personal lives? Dinno.

Anyway, the reason I put this here instead of my blog is because this idea that past behavior is the strongest indicator of future behavior is both useful and problematic. I started dating Noah when we were 22/26. If you were to look at the first four years of our knowing each other you would think that we would still be doing almost exclusively slightly rough penetrative sex and nothing else. That’s not at all what our relationship is like at this point. Neither of us have the physical energy or the time to have sex 2-4 times a day every day. That’s just not something we can manage in our life. Putting that much energy into sex requires you to not put it into other things (children, work, other hobbies) and we just can’t do that anymore. We made commitments. Commitments to be consistent. Oh, shit.

This is something I’m thinking about as I’m trying to learn how to deal with my body in the late-stage motherhood zone I’m in. I may have up to 10 more years until I pass into being a crone (a phase of life I am absolutely ecstatic about getting to because long story I’m not going to write here) and I need to figure out how to manage my body in the meantime.

I have PMDD along with all of my other things. Basically what that means is that I am exquisitely sensitive to every hormonal variation in my body. I think of my menstrual cycle like riding a dragon. There are times when it is wild and bumpy and I hold on to functionality with my fingernails and there are times when it is placid and easy and there are times when it takes every ounce of self control I have not to go get in trouble. I really like getting in trouble, except when I don’t.

A lot of the PMDD extremes were dulled by the postpartum period. It is amazing to me how much difference there is in inhabiting my body when I am not still reeling from the influences of parasites who would have been happy to kill me. Did you know that embryos/fetuses colonize the host body? There is a theory that it happened that way because it is a way for the first fetus to have influence over the future of the parent that will care for them. My body was not real interested in having another baby for most of the last four years. I don’t want another child but right now my body is telling me that the only important thing in the world is getting pregnant. At other times in my life when I did not want a child but my body said, “Hey let’s make a baby” that’s when I would go get into trouble.

You would think this would be a bonanza for Noah. He isn’t in his 20’s anymore and he’s had a lot of years of consciously dampening his sex drive because we just couldn’t do much about it even at the rare times I was even a tiny bit interested. Mostly I wasn’t interested and the idea was appalling.

So which past behavior should we look at to decide what I am going to do in the future? Yeah, that’s tricky shit. I mean, if I look at how Noah was behaving from 26-35 I should think he isn’t capable of getting up every day like clockwork and making breakfast for the family. He wasn’t a regular sleeper/riser at other points in his life. He chose to learn how to do that.

We go through phases. We go through stages. Noah wooed me by telling me that if you can’t look back on yourself 18 months ago and say, “Wow I really sucked” then you aren’t trying hard enough.

So now we have to figure out how to transition into how to ride out the next phase. We can’t run off for weekends together to break rules together to do wildly-inappropriate-for-children activities for hours and hours. We get a three hour date a week in a space that isn’t perfectly soundproof. We can have sex at night before going to sleep knowing that we need to be really really really quiet because you can hear freaking everything through the walls in this house. It’s a real buzzkill when it starts getting good and you hear a knock on the door and, “I need you; I can’t sleep without you.” Sigh. This is not forever.

Don’t have kids unless you believe you will never be ok without them because this shit is a lot.

There are lessons here I need to learn. Lessons about patience and being consistent enough and forgiveness and love and what it looks like to accept that you have to make mistake after mistake after mistake after mistake if you want to get good at something.

I want to learn what it means to be in a happy family, this is my one shot.

So how do I figure out how to manage the part of the dragon ride where all I want is to make decisions other people would view as “bad”. I’m not in that life phase anymore. I can’t go to a Burner party and do drugs with my friends and hunt for interesting prey. I can’t do a lot of things. I get to behave. I get to be a good role model. This shit is boring, y’all. I’m like a zoo animal. I hurt myself when I get bored.

You know how I have 97 projects going at once… most of which I will finish… eventually… I am not a person who stays bored.

But I have to. I have to figure out how to make furtive sex happen. I need to find a way to inspire Noah to continue on this road to queering our sex. Sex is not dependent on a hard cock. There are a lot of reasons that a 40-something dad who hasn’t been having a lot of sex for a decade and a half is not going to be able to get and stay hard for 3-5 hours a day.

It’s not fair to say that what a person has done is the only thing they will ever do. Our sex life once upon a time was tremendously centered around a hard cock and now it isn’t. If I am going to stay out of trouble then our sex life needs to be a much more diverse experience. That’s not a lot of fun when you have to be almost completely silent.

And I was paged for breakfast

It’s not about you

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We have played around with hypnosis a couple of times recently. The first time the induction was, in my experience as a bottom to this type of play, not particularly deep given how long it has been since we have played with going under. Given that most of the verbal dialogue was along the line of how we had been playing anyway it made stuff a little more intense but it didn’t feel like being hypnotised

I told him I thought we needed a more intense induction the next time because I didn’t really go down. So a couple of nights later we got to talking about how we were feeling and he mentioned that he kind of misses what we used to do with taking sleeping pills. I said I’d be happy to grab 2 pills and head to bed immediately. I suggested that the going to sleep part might be a good time to practice induction.

He did. One of the things that is interesting to me about hypnosis is how you can remember and not remember it. Like, I know what happened but I could not tell you what he was repeating rhythmically to me. I don’t know exactly what he was suggesting; I just have to trust him.

He asked me how it was for me and I said “It was a better induction, I felt more limp/unable to move around much. I felt like there was a lot of room for more of a goal/story. I know it was very sudden and you didn’t have time to think it out.

I am not sure what/how we should change something to make it easier for you to stay hard.

I also think that if you want me to actually go to sleep for it I will take M first then 3 L instead of 2. I have such a strong metabolism for sedatives. **

We should probably also aim to get started on that as close to 10 as possible.
Perhaps part of doing such play better involve you sending me to prepare for bed earlier so that I am already in bed and sleepy when you arrive.”

What he told me after that when we were lying in bed was quite instructive. He had not particularly wanted to be more hard. He wanted the gentle rubbing–that was for something inside of him. Something young and yearning and almost healing. It made him happy in a quiet way deep inside that it’s ok for him to use an immobilised woman to just rub on the way he has always wanted to. He isn’t bad for wanting it and in this context he isn’t even bad for doing it.

Oh shit, dude. My whiny selfish whore self had been thinking, “Enh it was alright but I didn’t really get fucked enough.” How very embarrassing. I have never been one for denial–people who try to withhold sex/orgasms as a way of making me interested usually find out I just don’t come back. But this is Noah and he gets to do whatever he wants and sometimes not fucking me is better for him.

Oh, shit.

So the thing is: if I want to transition from egalitarian into power imbalanced I have to find a new normal around this. I have to reframe what makes something a successful encounter. I didn’t need to get off. I was there for his use.

If he got to do something he has always wanted to do and he feels like this was a deeply satisfying experience… then it was wildly successful and I need to work on how I feel about it when it is happening and afterwards. I need to take pride in work well done, not feel cranky I didn’t get off. I can masturbate the next day. Well, until he tells me I can’t. Ugh.

Ok. I can work with that.

** For nosey people: my sleep medication usage is necessary for long term health concerns and without the play aspect there are times when I double or triple up. My doctor is aware and is comfortable with the number of pills I ingest on an annual basis.

My safeword is “Long-term trauma’, bitch

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I keep getting comments from complete strangers, which is still slightly surprising to me. I write about myself and I had extensive and varied trauma as a young person. It comes up as I try to figure out how to handle situations in my life as an adult. I function best, as a person who is autistic and has PTSD, by writing out the things that I am having big feelings about rather than trying to talk about these things in real time. My side of the conversation is too big. I like to play in ways that will upset sensitive people. I encourage you to take care of yourself and not read my writing.

Lately we have been having to have the kinds of serious talks that fucked up people need to have before they go wading into the murky morass. Things like: it is ok to harm me if you are doing it on one axis at a time and it isn’t ok to stack traumas because I can’t process my way out of that fast enough to be appropriate with the kids.

My life is still incredibly structured around my ability to be level through my day to day life. I’m homeschooling my kids and I have over a decade to go before I’m done and that requires a high level of emotional regulation from me. (Not debating this choice here.) But this is the rock around which my life is built.

I have a lot of experience with complex trauma. Lucky me? I am a bit of a tight ass and I define trauma in my personal life as circumstances in which my survival has been in question and ongoing issues where my brain is not capable of telling a situation apart from things that might kill me. Being uncomfortable or stressed out is not a trauma in my personal nomenclature. Brains can be difficult. If something was a threat to your survival at a formative time in your life and it continues happening past the point where it can threaten your survival sometimes your brain struggles to turn off the “Oh shit I am going to die” part.

This is relevant because my father liked to tell me that I exist to get men off. I am the product of rape. Like, those fucked up incest stories? That was literally my childhood. He would tell me, from when I was a toddler, that if I am not pleasing there is no point in him continuing to let me be alive. That means that for the rest of my whole life sex is wrapped up in Do I deserve to be alive? Am I going to fail at getting this man off and then he is going to kill me? Or should I kill myself out of shame. That part was a lot less clear.

Noah is getting older. There are biological factors at play that influence when he can come a lot more than I can be the force that decides his orgasm. But if you tell me that I’m not getting you off that I’m just not quite good enough combined with putting your hand on my neck*? That is a singular layer of trauma for me that I can process and internalise and enjoy the mind-fuckery. I know Noah is actually very happy to be married to me and orgasm or not he is absolutely thrilled to fuck me for the rest of his life. He has demonstrated the absolute commitment he has to me not dying–I can deal with that.

But I cannot cope with that if I am already overwhelmingly upset or feeling suicidal for other reasons. This is part of why I cannot play like this if I am not writing. I have to tell you where my brain is so you can make decisions about what is safe.

This is why I don’t play with safewords. It’s not because I’m so bad ass. It’s not because I think someone should read my mind. It’s because either my play is so light that “Hm that’s kinda pinching” is the same as “red” or because I am doing play so intense that “red” isn’t a word I am going to come up with under pressure. I just won’t. My brain isn’t going to go there. I will be unable to use that as a word to help myself.

In the fourth month of our marriage he raped me. I don’t mean we did a rape scene I mean I was hysterically sobbing because I had spent the day talking to CPS about what my sister was doing to her kids and that was an extremely upsetting situation. I was not fucking ok and I felt like I was about to break into a thousand pieces. I have been raped quite a few times in my life. Every other time my brain has coped by freezing. That day with Noah I was completely unhinged and I fought him. I fought him until we were both bleeding. I lost. That had reverberations for years. I was scared of him and I flinched when he tried to touch me. That was before we had children. There was no reason in the world why I should have stayed.

Except I am pretty sure I could not be married to someone if they will not hurt me like that. I am pretty sure I could not maintain interest in a singular person who was not willing to do that to me.

So yeah, we are talking about the role of rape in our life going forward. I am someone who has spent decades teetering on the edge of committing suicide. It is kinda a family tradition: maternal grandmother, father, brother. It’s just there as an option, always.

I am 8 years younger than my father was when he quit. But hey, nobody is going to send me to prison for raping them as a child so I guess I don’t have his good reason to wuss out.

Anyway. When it comes to raping me that’s a topic of some delicacy. We have talked about the fact that what he wants is not a rape scene on a pre-negotiated day… where is the trauma in that? We are discussing ways to upset me/pick a shitty day that isn’t too shitty. As a recent example of oh-god-no: if he had decided to rape me on the day I got the news about Andrew dying I would not have been ok. I would not bounce back from that in a way that would be acceptable for the parameters of my life. The absolute best case scenario is I would get out of bed 10 or so months later and be maybe ok with trying to avoid dying.

So strategy is important.

But like, I’ve started running again. I haven’t paid the fee yet but right now I’m thinking my self-masochistic act of physical pain for my birthday this year is running another marathon. If he were, say, to wait until I am tired and focused and all I want to be thinking about is the race to absolutely insist and piss me off and hurt me so that I have to feel that while I’m running?

Oh yeah I could still behave how I am supposed to behave in my day to day life. That is a reminder that my body isn’t mine. I have accepted that I like having times when my inconsiderate asshole of a husband lets me feel pain and additional physical burden outside of my usual standard chronic pain because I’m a lucky whore.

I know that there are a lot of feminists who would be extremely unhappy about the fact that I need my marriage to involve explicit sexual violence as the trade for my comfy rich bitch life. I would say that I am a lady of leisure if I ever stopped working. The working won’t stop because it is ingrained into my bones that you work until you die and that rest is for other people. But mixed in with that is constant gratitude that I get to choose my work and I get to choose the scale of my projects with almost no limitations.

Hi newish people. I grew up in really deep poverty. I didn’t have a “permanent address” until I got married. I moved every few months–more than 50 times before I was 18 and then 9 more times in the 7 years of being an adult before I got married. I went through more than a dozen different foster homes and when I was with my mom things were often bad enough that I stole food in order to eat. I mostly crawled out of that poverty thanks to a dog bite settlement. It’s why I am fervently in favour of universal basic income. My lawyer set me up so that the settlement could pay for college. Without it I would not have gone; there was no chance.

So marrying a trust fund baby has been weird. It wasn’t a big trustfund by such standards but he was able to buy a house in his mid 20’s in California in an intense housing market. He was able to go to a good school without loans and he has had a really blessed career in tech.

I get to do what I want. I get to focus on what I want. He lets me control a lot of pieces of our life and I get to decide how money is spent and how it is saved and invested. It blows my tiny little mind that I do the things I do on a daily basis. I was not fucking trained for this shit. I feel wildly out of my depth. I feel incompetent in the extreme even as according to all metrics that can be validated by outside professional sources I am doing extremely well. It feels like a farce. It feels like the house of cards will collapse at any minute.

Now that’s kinda a loophole you can drive a truck through. Because that’s not existentialist trauma. Fucking with me around those insecurities? Oh yeah, that’ll be fine.

Fucking me when I’m sick and I feel terrible and I am not going to enjoy any bit of it at all? I mean… not like cancer sick–don’t be ridiculous. (I’ve already had cancer twice so it’s a reasonable part of the conversation.) But a bad cold? The flu? Oh sure. Mock the fuck out of me. Great time to shove my face in a pillow so you don’t catch anything.

I have heard from other people with PMDD that they too have times of the month, every month, when they don’t have any interest in sex and it is very repellant. For the past almost decade and a half of having small children it’s been very questionable fucking with me when I’m on the low end of that cycle. I’m less stable if you do and the level of stable I have needed has been pretty difficult for me. I am not naturally a stable person. I have no useful training in stability.

Things are changing. I don’t have super little kids anymore. I have support in the day for me to duck in and out for a few minutes so I can take breaks and have time alone in my brain–I have literally never had this like it is now before we moved to Scotland. The way our life is set up now feels like an utter fucking miracle. This is beyond my wildest dreams.

Noah is nervous that this is a short uptick and it won’t continue. That’s a reasonable worry. The little kids part of our life has been hard on both of us. It has been hard to trust that there is a far side that will be fun. (If you do not feel in your bones that you must have children or your life will be incomplete don’t fucking do it. This shit is exhausting and frustrating and steals all your fucking time.)

The thing is: I have been in the bdsm community looking for people to do mean things to me from as soon as it was legal. I was desperately masturbating thinking about it and hurting myself before that. I think that being at a low ebb while I am going through the intensity of early parenting is reasonable. I’m just been fucking surviving. I don’t think that having kids is going to turn me vanilla in the long run of my life. I like it when people are crying way too much. I don’t care if it is me or someone else–if we are fucking someone should be crying. And bleeding at the same time is even better.

I miss you D. I will love you forever and I wish you only happiness.

Just like the growing tightness in my legs feels like carving off a layer of shell I don’t need anymore–a return to who I have been. My legs feel like I have been running. My legs feel like I have been bouncing up and down like I am dancing. I miss dancing so much. I used to dance 5 nights a week doing a wide variety of styles–most of which were extremely energetic. I’d go running at lunchtime.

I want that back. I tried to start running not long after we moved but I think it was too close to the more recent cancer and the house repair has been really demanding. I’m just to the point where it feels like I can.

I feel like that with sex. I feel like that with needing Noah to hurt me. I think there were reasons I could never walk away from the scene. I think there are reasons I started making friends before I was even playing again. I am a shark and I like swimming near other scary creatures.

Also: fucking terrified of the ocean. I am completely convinced I am going to be eaten in the ocean. It is not rational. FUCK MY OLDER SIBLINGS.

Anyway. I think I have followed this train of thought far enough. mwah

= Don’t even come for me about breath play. I didn’t say he choked me. He can’t choke me. I have had a significant number of brain injuries and I am at high risk for stroke. He is deeply invested in keeping me for a long time and that means I can’t be choked anymore. I miss it.

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Tag Archives: noah

He was my grown up

Today is the first day of the rest of my life

I feel awful.

Keep moving

Frozen hell

There is only pain, there is no hope.

I’m really scared.

It’s been a hellish week.

I’m not ok

He’s gone and I will never be ok again.

It’s the end of the world as I know it

Too many feelings.

It’s weird

Social anxiety at 11.

Noah’s plan

You can’t get to yes without risking no.

Food culture

But which past behavior?

It’s not about you

My safeword is “Long-term trauma’, bitch