Tag Archives: people hacking

Problematic people

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Years ago when I was teaching high school I did an incredibly dickish thing. I was covering another teacher’s class because she had an appointment. She and I were both first year teachers and around the same age but we had very different approaches. She wore a suit to work every day and she had strict rules and she moved through the curriculum textbook like it was gospel. I wore flouncy skirts, smart ass tshirts, stripey knee socks, and no shoes in my classroom. I never checked the textbook out of the book room. We used original texts and books I brought in from the world. We didn’t learn poetry from dry dusty poets that made it through a curriculum committee. I brought in Charles Bukowski, Tupac, and Daphne Gottlieb. I always started with Watch Your Tense and Case to follow after the grammar unit.

When I showed up to sub her class I was scathing about the course materials. I was rude and dismissive of people wanting to follow the trodden path. I was so fucking out of line. We worked together for two years after that. She was frosty and barely civil with me the whole time. I felt bad the whole time. I knew why she didn’t like me and I knew I deserved it.

When I was leaving because I was heavily pregnant and unable to stay awake for a work day I finally had a moment alone with her in the staff room. I brought up that she didn’t like me. I don’t remember if she told me that she knew what I did or if I volunteered that I was pretty sure that I knew why. Either way I said that I was both arrogant and insecure when I subbed her class because I knew she was a kind of teacher I could never be. I know that she is closer to the ideal for what a teacher is supposed to be like and I was wrong to tear her down so I could feel better.

I remember watching her body sink with relief. She said that she wished that she had confronted me about it years ago because it was hard to dislike me. She had to really work at it because I was funny and hard working and generally a good person. I told her that shame had kept me from apologising and I didn’t want to leave with that on my conscious. We parted on good terms.

I think we all fuck up. I think we all owe people apologies.

This is on my mind because of a situation going on in the Scottish bdsm scene. Some day all the Fetlife stuff will land here and the whole story is available as it happened. For those of you who are sensibly not spending your life on that social media site the long story made short is that I tried to be friends with a local guy for a while. I will admit that part of what I liked about him was that he sold me lsd. The last time we spent much time together was our one attempt to trip together. He left a couple of hours into it in a weird way and he stole a small physical therapy device on his way out. I asked for it back repeatedly and he laughed at me. Our relationship ended when he had a shitty breakup with a girlfriend and I picked the girlfriend. I thought he was abusive in her direction. Later, after Noah died, he had a different girlfriend tell people all over Scotland and in other countries that I helped Noah drug him and attempt to rape him but he escaped. That was very seriously not a thing that was going to happen. He used a bunch of quotes from Noah’s writing and he claimed that a stalker was using those words in his direction. It was one of Noah’s whackjob posts about our weird Godhood/worship part of our relationship. Anyone who read the full post is fucking clear that Noah was only interested in me. He definitely was not stalking the lying liar who steals after his death. It was preposterous on its face.

At this point the later girlfriend is now talking about how badly she was abused and how that man is a terrible predator. Ok. Fine. I agree with her that the lying liar who steals is a problematic abusive man. The thing is, she reached out to people in other countries to warn them off of being my friend. I had someone turn down meeting me after years of online conversation because she was scared of me. I was going to meet her in a public place with my daughter and she didn’t feel comfortable because of what I might do to her. Because of the lies told by the girlfriend of the lying liar who steals. She might want to sit on her victim pedestal all day long but she was a tool to cause harm. She isn’t taking responsibility for that and it sits ill with me.

I am really tired of folks who act like the harm they cause doesn’t matter because they are the enabler. They were manipulated. They were forced. They were used.

You still fucking reached out to people and told them that I was dangerous. Your actions are on your fucking head. Be a grown up and accept responsibility for your behaviour. Lady, you owe me a fucking apology.

Fragments, shards, tools, and usefulness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then he did drop dead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No one is perfect. No one is always good.

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

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

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

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

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?

So this is what is going on with me.

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Right now I am on a brief rest break before I either decide if this is a longer break so I can go to the queer social night or if I am going to go outside to work in the garden. Right now I am trying to get the house/garden set up for an open house with the home ed folks so I feel a lot of get up and go for the work. I’m trying to figure out how I can lay out walkways that let people understand clearly where I don’t want them stepping in my chaotic garden full of plants and different kinds of mulch all over the place.

So that is one piece. I have various irons in the fire with the home education community. I’m trying to figure out which relationships I should cultivate harder and which ones are unlikely to be a good usage of my time. I am feeling incredibly scheduled again. Time is, as it will be for the rest of my life, the biggest limiting factor for everything I do.

Exercise is going to be really over-represented in my schedule for the next five months. I am increasingly conscious of just how much cross training I need to build supportive muscles that are not used in running and to relieve tightness. I’m old. I need so much more effort to get to baseline and it fucking sucks. I’m tired.

Which means that if I am going to effectively absorb and use this exercise to actually get stronger I must sleep. Like, a lot. Even though it looks like daytime until almost midnight and then it is dusk for a little while again before it is daytime again. I’ve never been a great daytime sleeper. Which means I have to get up pretty dang early every single day and get in bed before 10 every single night. I don’t do well with adding in a run later in the day. As my runs get longer and longer I need to mostly just start earlier.

Dang, the other day in the park I met this older lady who told me that she ran her first marathon at 51 and she did it in 4 hours and 45 minutes. Fuck. I can’t even. I am really really really really really really hoping that I will be at least 1 minute less than 6 hours. I am not greedy. My previous shitty time was 6 hours and 45 minutes. I would desperately like it to be shorter than 6 hours. But I’m nervous sending that wish into the universe because I kept saying “I would just like to finish labour in 24 hours” for all three births and I never fucking did. That was a giant failure to manage a prediction/hope/goal for my bodily functioning. I actually went into the first marathon thinking I’d be something in the neighbourhood of 5 hours and 30 minutes. lololololsob

Since I am trying to decide if I am going out tonight: I could go find the giant pride flag and figure out the flagpole situation right *now* and have it up for my ride in since it’s pride month. 🏳️‍🌈 And it is pride month. Seems like a great time to be bonding with my local homies before the big event happens with all the folks who travel in from the villages.

Sometimes I wonder if we really understand people in the past as much as we think we do. Like, if I did not practically tattoo “queer” on my forehead every so often I would be entirely unremarkable and perceived as a normal cis-het mother. I really do believe that queerness is an aspect of my personality that is outside of what other people describe as their normal. It is part of the ravenous predatory streak I have. I sit on myself so hard at this point. Although the funny thing is that I don’t feel it as intensely as I used to. I suppose I would describe it as once upon a time I know I would have gone there. I am not going to speculate if that would have gone well back when. That would not go well now. Ok, bounce eyes.

Sex is complicated in a place this small. Holy crap. The dynamics scare me. Like, honestly. I fucked around so casually for so long. I would not understand how to avoid pissing in other people’s cheerios. No freaking wonder most human beings have low body counts. Yikes it could get really challenging in a place this small. I think I lack the diplomacy to do this tactfully. I am glad I don’t have to find out. It will never matter because Noah is not allowed to die before me. He has been informed.

But good golly I’ll dress as a garish motherfucker and wave a flag sometimes and coyly answer questions about for whom am I advertising. Since it really will never get to anything other than friendship I must fly that kind of outrageously if I am going to find my people and I am going to find them and find ways to integrate them into my life. I believe that queers need each other. Many of us don’t have families of origin we maintain contact with. A very large percentage of us do not have children. That doesn’t mean that any of us deserve to be alone. We have to find each other.

I mean, I can literally say: “Hey if you are one of those queers who feels like they really want a place to go and spend time and make deep community… I am going to be buying a tiny piece of land.” A piece of land small enough that we can do the vast majority of work by hand with folks not feeling exhausted at the end. I know so many people who talk about how much they wish they could build something like that. I want to make community. You’ll be welcome to come hang out in the forest you build anytime. The gates don’t lock.

I don’t wanna be Auntie… but I wanna be Auntie. That woman has had a full house of people she has been helping all of her life. First it was foster kids her mom took in and then it was all the stray people having troubles she knew. She raised her sister… and her sister’s kids… and her sister’s grandkids…

I wanna be Auntie with upgrades. She helped people in a way that resulted in a lot of deeply dependent, incapable people. Not all of them. Some of them just needed a safe place to sleep and eat for a couple of months then they went on their way and did fine. But then there are most of the rest of them. Last I knew she was in her late 70’s and working to pay a mortgage to cover the refinances her husband took out and to pay to take care of all three of her children who live with her.

I am not fucking interested in disabling my children.

I want to help people learn more about how they can teach themselves the things they need to learn in order to move forward. I mean physical skills, intellectual skills, emotional skills, academic skills, and most importantly how to set goals and work towards something they want. They get to figure out what that is. As long as you are not able to pick one I’ll push you through picking something for a while and we will both learn a lot as you learn why you end up disliking it. Over time they gradually pick better and better projects for themselves. They still fuck up… a lot… but that is the point. Fuck up now. Fuck up in ways that won’t matter in 10, 20, 50 years. Hell, most of these fuck ups won’t matter in 5 minutes. Just do it. Fuck up. Learn the lesson. Don’t hold back and wait. Don’t waste time. Think of all the better decisions you will make once you learn this. Doesn’t that sound nice? At some point it will be easier for you to figure out which decision will work for you without having to suffer so much at so many junctions.

BUT THEN YOU MOVE TO ANOTHER FUCKING COUNTRY AND HAVE TO LEARN ANOTHER FUCKING CULTURE AND JUST FUCK YOURSELF ALL THE WAY UP.

Cheezits mother trucker.

So I’m sorta categorising my community efforts as:

  • bike
  • queer
  • kink
  • maker
  • community resource sharing
  • gardening
  • political
  • proximity

That’s why I feel like whoa. That’s why I don’t feel like I’m getting to know people quickly. I’m trying to duplicate the full spread of the type of web I had in California and build all aspects of it at the same rate at the same time. While I’m fucking exercising a lot. I suppose the bike community is sorta good for that but a lot of my time there feels super awkward because I am not able to hear that well.

I mean look at the size of the fucking social life I’m planning for the next few decades. I’m going to need to be a fit bitch to ride my bike around to all that shit.

Cause that is what I’m aiming for. I’m going to go do shit. I’m go to make things with people. I am going to invite people to help me with the property.

It’s a whole fucking thing. If you ask people to do something for you they will like you more. And co-working is my biggest love language so I will invite people into my bubble and see who self selects in. And that will be a lot of the inner layers of the core of the web. That’s how it tends to work. It won’t be a perfect alignment, sometimes those very first points on the web are smaller but they lead to a giant nexxus.

That’s how your bestie picked by proximity ends up being the one to tell you “You really should go to the Disaster House Party. I think you will have a very good time.” Reader: I married the guy throwing the party. And then she leaves you to marry an admittedly rather cool guy who happened to live almost halfway around the world. So you name your children after each other because you miss each other so much. Then you decide that 10 years is long enough and you move 2 fucking miles away from her.

I mean, some aspects of my story are pretty hilarious. I follow arcs a long way. I know I should write you an email Pam. Hello, this is my social anxiety voice. You write your journals privately and share them selectively in email. You have what normal people might call “boundaries”.

Hello internet I’ve missed you. I miss this part of my inner story. Most of the time since I moved here I shut it off as fast as I can. In any conversation there can only be a couple of paragraphs and I know that I’d better keep my transition points SUPER FUCKING OBVIOUS while not in any way shape or form seeming to put effort into my, inevitably slightly graceless, transition into the next topic. Cheers, mother trucker.

Fuck every person who has ever told me to just be myself. Dude you don’t even know. Cultivated, curated, deeply thought about choice goes into so much of how I hold my body. I fucking pre-game for social events. I specifically think about what attitude I am supposed to exhibit. I think about how I need to hold my body to get the response I want. It varies based on the crowd and reason for the event. I am not natural but I am comfortable with what I am doing. I have worn this personality/skin-suit mechanism for quite some time. I struggle when I know I’m going to spend a lot of time pin-ball whacking against a lot of barriers. That is the natural and normal early stage of a relationship.

That’s where you have to refine your mental image of this person to progressively more specificity as they become more and more of an actual specific ensemble cast member instead of being part of the chorus in setting B. This is an especially graceless stage for me. Because I am shifting through everything I remember about someone as I talk to new people. I’m trying to come up with every detail of every conversation for the first long while. That way I can follow up on specific topics and build a sense of connection. What? You don’t think through this process? You think I just know so much about you because I happened to have that for you? Nah, babe. I am far from perfect but good golly I work hard. It’s hilarious how often whatever that person’s name is doesn’t make the connection. It depends on how often I hear other people talk about them. It depends on how well embedded in the web they are from multiple directions. If I hear their name I place it in a storyline in a way that I don’t from talking to someone and looking at their face. I will remember all the feelings I’ve had with them and I can sometimes, when I’m lucky, get people to also have that glimmer of oh yes. We had fun. I’m fun. Then we go on with our lives without even having to get into it. But goddess that takes time.

I’d really like to figure out how to figure more rhythm around my efforts in various places based on moon stuff just so that I have to synch with it more. I think it would benefit my garden tremendously. There are a lot of gardening tasks that want about a month in between the next thing. I need to build that feeling into my body and associate it with other definitive parts of my routine and that means I need to tie it in with patterns in the house.

I get to play with building a system. The funny thing is that it will go best if I make a plan and organise and make whatever decisions I want to make then I inform the kids what work they will be doing the next day so they’d better make sure they don’t have an emergency project to do tomorrow morning. Planning and making an agreement about what you will do 100% OF THE TIME RESULTS IN SOMEONE BEING EXTREMELY ANGRY AND FURIOUS.

See, I’m teaching them life skills. Muahahaha.

We have a real live group project all around us every day. We are all working on projects big and small all day long. We bounce around talking to one another and then going off to do one on one with someone for a while then we have another most-of the group contact for a while then the whole family again. We do it over and over all day. They are all managing different pieces of it.

Dude. I need to start clearing off one wall at a time in the studio and deep cleaning it. Cause then I can invite other people to scribble on the wall when they come over. I’ll clean it very slowly adding new nice white space only gradually. That way if people ever want to come claim a new place much further around the room their part of the weft will show up brightly.

But right now I feel absolutely knackered. I feel like I have a 20lb sack on my head; I am so tired. I am going to be running 3 miles tomorrow morning. I am going to be running 6 miles on Saturday morning. I uhhh think that I probably ought to stay home tonight and not go out. Ok, one decision made. I need to be in bed by 9, not in a bar in town starting home at 9.

Yeah. I think I am out of typing. That’s all I can be semi-coherent about and I doubt any of that was coherent. But I feel better. And that is good enough.

It’s not about you, David.

I wonder if it will take a full year

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Settling into the house is a process. There are still books in boxes and closets because they can’t be on proper shelves. We are still acquiring things for baking and cooking because we haven’t gotten our full repertoire replaced yet. I’m still getting home schooling supplies because I hadn’t anticipated continuing to home school and so that wasn’t an early priority. I’m having to reimagine pieces of the house/property because we are using it more and differently than I thought we would when we first bought it. This is mixed. I’m glad I haven’t started painting at all.

Given how many things are still breaking in the house I am so glad I haven’t started painting. Looks like the ceiling in the kitchen and the dining room will have to come down because there are so many plumbing problems with the upstairs and we have tried all the second (first?) floor fixes that can be done and we still have massive leaks that are causing damage to the drywall. Plasterboard? Language is hard. So that’s exciting. And expensive. And inconvenient with lockdown.

I’m still in that existential exhaustion phase. It is good and bad that I can’t be making friends at this point. This Sunday is the usual last frost date for my gardening region. I’m going to start some seeds this week. Saturday is supposed to get down to 1 overnight. This week the high is 16. That’s feeling so balmy over here.

I have a lot of dirt to move around. Seedling soil. Top soil to put on top of where the herb garden is going to go. But I’m tired. It is going to take three or four weeks to dig the pond at the rate we are going. It may take all summer for me to finish the stairs I am putting into the hill in the front of the house. I am doing a few hours a week on each project. And by “a few hours” I mean two or three. I am doing so many different things that I am not focusing hard on any one thing.

I am baking a lot. Cooking is taking up a lot of time. Cleaning the kitchen is my largest time sink. Rhubarb crumble is becoming a weekly thing as we get big bunches from the veg box. I had no idea I would like it so much. I’m making cinnamon everything because I don’t like the store bought versions here. I make stuff that tastes more American.

I’m being a pill because one of my friends teased me and said she has never seen me make anything other than macaroni and cheese. She didn’t think I could cook; she thought I had Noah do all of it. This is like when the kids made a comment a few years ago about how only Noah knew how to cook because I was in the middle of a huge project and I hadn’t cooked in months. If you only come over on days when I am working 10-12 hours a day on a project no you don’t see me cook.

So because I am an insecure nitwit my cooking is getting elaborate and intense. I cook a lot of vegetables. I am elaborate with my seasoning. I am doing things that take many steps and multiple hours. Why? Because that way I prove that I am not just a user taking advantage of Noah. Also because he and I cook very differently and I appreciate the variety in diet.

Not long ago I heard the term “flexitarian” to refer to people trying to use fewer animal products in food. We are not vegan (or even very close) but it’s a process. Cooking vegetables and making them taste good is harder than just doing meat and starch.

Also baking. Lots of baking. I am doing my part to fatten the curve.

I feel like balancing everyone’s needs will always be a process. Different people change what they need as time goes by and adapting and figuring out what is reasonable and what is possible and what we can actually sustain is ever shifting. As soon as I think we have a pattern we blink and everything changes.

I’m taking this isolation period as a good time to try to remove sources of stress in my life. It’s a process. But I have three children. So I will always have stress. ha.

I’m really struggling with what I can write about going forward. If I write about my difficult moments or issues then people will be cruel. I used to accept that as the cost of doing business. These days… I don’t feel the same way. If people are going to be cruel I can just retreat into the positive family experience I am creating in my house. I no longer have any need to have any desperate need to have people in my life at the price of being put down. I’m not desperate. That’s a nice feeling.

But people are cruel. So what can I write about.

When did that bit change?

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I used to be absolutely frothingly nasty about people giving me unsolicited advice. At some point after being married I softened. I started giving people the benefit of the doubt. I started trying to soften my reaction so I wasn’t so “mean”. I think I took a wrong turn.

Recently the kids and I were at a store doing a bit of shopping and a lady heard us talking. She asked us where we were from because she couldn’t place the accent. We had a charming conversation for a while. Then she started proselytising to us. The kids were fairly confused why she kept trying to talk to us about going to church. I was evasive and soft as I tried to say that I was not interested in monotheism and I don’t really care that she thinks Jesus is waiting for me with open arms.

I need to start saying I’m a witch and when someone tells me that I can always turn to Jesus with my troubles I should tell them that the Gods and Goddesses of their ancestors are really hoping they will say hi sometime.

Fuck being polite. It is not polite to shove your world view down my throat so why do I need to be polite to you? I have this weird thing about not wanting to step on people’s toes about religion. But they don’t extend me the same courtesy so I need to get over it.

I need to get over a whole lot of thinking about other people’s feelings. It is not serving me. My anxiety is high and it is partially related to me not wanting to be rude about telling people I don’t want to hear their opinion about what I’m doing.

Unless I say something like, “Hey what do you think about me doing _____” or “May I ask you for advice about _______” it’s pretty safe to assume I am not interested in your opinion on my behavior, life choices, or plans.

I learned a while ago that it was not good for me to give other people my unsolicited opinion about their life choices. I’m not sure why people think I deserve less courtesy. But they really really really do.

It is to the point where I am deliberately censoring a bunch of topics I might otherwise write about because then someone will feel free to tell me their opinion about me doing it. That’s bothering me. I don’t have pot as a crutch for emotional management. I don’t think I will go on other psych meds. Starting tomorrow I’m on a pretty strict budget and I can’t keep drinking.

That means I need to get a lot more free with “Stop telling me your opinion of my actions” and I need to go back to writing more. I have lost friendships (partially) because I was free with putting in writing why I was upset with people. I need to start seeing those friendship endings as a necessary cost of me being healthy. I mean, I shouldn’t rant about how I think other people are stupid or making bad decisions… but I need to be able to talk about myself and my feelings. Not all of my judgments… but my feelings about my life.

Because let me tell you, whether I share them or not I have judgments about how you are living. Notice how I don’t just show up to share them with you? That’s called being polite.

I did not have children because I wanted a convenient, easy life. I am not looking for more time to watch Netflix or sit around being idle. That is not appealing to me in any way shape or form. But I’m also not real driven to just “find a job” to fill my time.

My kids will go back to school when/if they choose to. It’s ok with me that they are done for the foreseeable future. I asked EC what made her decide that she was done and she said, “Mom the most important thing I am going to have in my life is my time. School wastes a lot of my time and I won’t be able to get it back.”

How can I argue with that?

I have decided I am not publicising a financial review because someone will feel the need to make comments and I might blow up a friendship over it right now.

I’m really over advice.

I want to spend 2020 making art, reading books about witchcraft, cooking, learning about the local ecosystem, and meeting people who can teach us about Scottish culture. I want to live as frugally as I possibly can. I want to spend time alone and time with my kids. I want to work on setting up outdoor play spaces for my children and I want to start shaping my garden even though I’m not spending money on plants yet.

I want to spend a lot less time worrying about other people’s feelings. If people don’t like me snapping at them to not share their opinions… maybe they should not share their unsolicited opinions.

I have survived the loss of many important people. I can survive the loss of other relationships. Life hurts. I will cope.

Just thinking out loud

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Do other people get to have epiphanies one time and then they change whatever they realized needed changing and they are fine forever? I really suck at that bit. For me it kind of works like, “Oh no! This is a huge thought! This is life changing! Oh shit! la la la living life la la la Oh shit! Here is this different situation! I have to have this huge thought about it! Oh shit! It’s the same thought as last time! I was too stupid to remember it! Fuck.” Apparently in my head exclamation points are king. I don’t have a lot of patience for this cycle in myself. It drives me batshit. Isn’t that the smart kid/perfectionist in me? It’s not ok to make mistakes? It is certainly unacceptable to make the same mistake over and over but similar mistakes also make me pathetic! But no pressure.

No pressure. (by the way if this actually works it’ll be my first time posting one of my medicated stream of thoughts things, let me know if this is coherent. most of it feels terribly profound in my head this second. ha.) No pressure. God I hate that expression. I am so tired of the casual demeaning of stress and how much it affects people. Pressuring people is so very very awful. But man I am getting off topic. See, I’m nervous. I don’t want to say the same things over and over again because that’s boring, right? People don’t want to listen to the same problems over and over again. It’s whiny. It’s pathetic. It lowers the whiners social capital. And I don’t have a lot left to lose. Although I suppose, to be fair, I would be really surprised if anyone who is currently showing up in my life disappeared. I might lose internet readers. Whoopie? Ok. On with my whining.

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On clean houses and class

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So my dear oldest friend in the world, Brittney, is coming to visit me today. She is doing so primarily because her mother is in town and her mother would like to meet my children. Brittney’s mother met me within days of my birth and has supervised to a greater or lesser extent our friendship of 29 years. It would be quite logical for me to want to “impress” Brittney’s mother. (for the record: Brittney reads this journal) So yesterday I felt like I should rush around doing the flight of the bumblebee making the house at least look completely neat and orderly even though it looks shabby and kind of run down. At some point while nursing Calli to sleep I had a great series of thoughts.

I’m thinking like a poor person. A poor person apologizes for the stains on the carpets, the chips in the paint on the wall, the weird cracks in the ceiling. A poor person notices and feels pain because a poor person can’t fix these blemishes. A poor person cleans everything to within an inch of its life and never has an item out of place. A poor person has to be visibly trying to look like a “good person” and feel shame about the visible slippage from grace.

But I’m a rich person now. My house is not degrading because I cannot afford to repair it. My house has not been remodeled because I would like to spend a month traveling in Europe this summer. We did not fix the interior of the house in favor of putting solar panels on the roof. We took out the lawn on purpose to reduce water usage and I haven’t gotten my act together to figure out a more visually attractive low water solution so my yard looks like crap. I don’t have better furniture because I fully expect my kids to absolutely destroy any furniture we have in the first few years and that’s ok and I don’t want to try to stop them. The list goes on.

My house is in various states of degrading because I bloody well don’t care and I have other things I want to do with our money. Ha! Flight of the bumblebee my ass. We played with Lego’s instead. 😛