Tag Archives: pmdd

The roller coaster of emotions continues

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If I don’t do too much not enough gets done.

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My body is not happy with me. I am not doing enough cross training. The kids have been grumpy with each other. This means I am not asking for babysitting much. These periods are rough. Disequilibrium comes for us all. Mostly my children get along ridiculously well. Sometimes people are cranky. This too, shall pass.

Instead of being at lots of yoga classes and running I have been gardening a lot more. Things are really coming along. I’m going to get a lot more food this year and that’ pretty exciting for me. It’s definitely time to be picking greens every single day. This is good because I’ve been having an unpleasant IBS flare. The kids have been opting into cooking instead of other chores. They haven’t been wanting to bother with making vegetables a part of meals. I’ve been eating a lot of starch and cheese with occasional fatty meat. My body hurts. This is not sustainable for me. I’m feeling incredibly ill from it. I miss Noah.

This time is not forever. At some point I will have less overwhelming need to be present in the house. Then I will be able to go back to running on a schedule. Really, I should be doing it in the wee hours of the morning since I’m not sleeping anyway. It’s too bright (yes I have blackout curtains) and too warm (it’s 11C/51F at night). I am ridiculous. Maybe. Or maybe it is my body trying to shift with this season. During the winter time I sleep a lot more. I have actual data on this for almost the whole time I’ve lived here. I sleep around 6 hours a night in the summer and 9 hours a night in the winter.

I’m struggling with task initiation. I’m being hella productive in a revenge procrastination kind of way. I have so many things to do in every day that I wake up behind even though I have more hours a day to do stuff. This is highly annoying. Noah isn’t here to prompt me towards doing the “correct” task. I really hate being the designated adult. I have a lot of meetings that freak me out. I have to do a lot of paperwork. Holy crap did I under-appreciate him while he was alive. He did all the previous rounds of immigration paperwork. Ugh.

My nerve pain is terrible. It feels like no one in my house is fully able bodied. Every day is a triage between who is most able to function doing more work than is strictly ideal. We are still learning. We are still interacting with humans out of the house. We are still cos-playing as functional people but the cost is really high. We do too much borrowing from the future and having to pay back our functionality with extra painful levels of non-functioning. It happens for literally all of us. A lot of it is hormonal and cyclical. Given how synced up we are that means there’s about 18 days a month when everyone is doing well at the same time. Then there is the rest of the time.

The coil has seriously helped with my PMDD and painful periods. At this point I’m spotting a little bit when I have sex and otherwise I don’t bleed. I still have times when I feel a bit sad but that feels reasonable. I’m not having the hyperbolic suicidal jags. My brain has accepted that it’s not an option and I don’t experience the frantic keening need for it.

I feel both like I deeply and desperately need to integrate more people deeply into my life and I am feeling afraid and like I need to reject any offer of anyone getting close to me. I keep feeling trapped in the loop of feeling like I “know” that I will be rejected anyway so why bother trying. I have to try because I can’t get a yes without going through a lot of no’s. It’s the process. It hurts. I don’t want to go through the process.

Viktor Frankl teaches that humans can get through horrifying trauma if they have a why that drives them. My why for a long time has been modeling how to be a healthier human for my kids. That means I don’t get to stop. It is hard giving them what I did not get. It doesn’t matter that it is hard I have to do it anyway. That means I have to work harder not that I get to quit.

I’m tired though. Ugh. Oh well. Get up. Go shower and get dressed. Today I do need babysitting. I need to move and I need to see my friends. Part of modeling being a healthy human is having relationships. I make them tend to their friendships. Friends are the waves that carry you through life. They are very important.

Finding my way back to me

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Today I was told that someone needs to be cautious about their landlord seeing a book about kink because it could be a problem for their housing. I live in a place that has very different boundaries than what I am accustomed to. I can’t imagine a landlord caring what people getting up to in privacy.

This kind of difference is a lot of why I haven’t written much in the past six years in public. I’ve been afraid of consequences. I will be judged on what I do and on what I don’t do. There is no way to thread this needle and be ok for everyone, people are going to be uncomfortable, if I am going to be true to myself.

When I think about the words of my friends that bounce around in my head like a pinball that will never make it to the bottom of the table I come back to a dramatic theme. Different people in different ways at different times have all told me that the thing that makes knowing me so impactful is the fact that in every single moment I am overwhelmingly, achingly myself. I hold to my values and my truth and I move forward as I have the right. I believe in the core of my being that I have the right to exist as much as anyone else does.

I was not brought into this world as an act of joy or love. That is not my fault. I can’t do anything about the rage, control, pain, and violence that brought me into being.

I am not that powerful.

I can’t do anything about the violence and sadness and unwantedness that permeated my young life. That time is over. That book is closed.

I can’t go back to the marriage where I was cherished and adored and worshiped either.

Do you notice this theme? There is no going back. There is only racing forward. People tell me that seeing me stride forward boldly without reservation makes them feel like they can too. I am not perfect. I am not waiting until I have the perfect body or all the information or I have fulfilled all the prerequisites.

I have all the confidence of a mediocre white man in Silicon Valley. 60% prepared is definitely good enough.

People keep asking me how I am doing. I don’t know. I’m getting things done. I don’t feel like I am doing anything well and I don’t feel like I am getting every ‘t’ crossed or every ‘i’ dotted. I am dropping balls all over the place. It’s frustrating. For many years Noah and I traded tasks based on who could get 90%+ done effectively. We had different strengths and we were an amazing team. Between the pair of us we went from people with deeply spiky profiles of success and failure to being absurd and superhuman. We compensated for and eliminated one another’s failures. We both got to be much more effective human beings.

Now I have to do all of Noah’s tasks too, not just the ones that I am basically competent on. I am responsible for the really hard and scary parts. I now have to be the one who does the tasks where I cry the whole time I am doing it. I feel like I am being bad and I can and should be punished for what I am doing, sometimes just because I am doing such an inadequate job.

I have a core of perfectionism I try hard to smother with a pillow. Good enough is good enough. Everything doesn’t have to be perfect. Life does not require perfection. Life just needs us to move forward. Me. I have to be thinking about me moving forward.

For many years now I have used Noah frankly as a tool to manage a lot of my physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual needs. Having him drop out of my life is devastating in a way I struggle to wrap my head around.

I’m really sad my son has to share the date of his birth with the date of his father’s death. That’s going to be painful sometimes. I will not bring it up to him. He’ll notice and it will be painful enough. He definitely doesn’t want a huge deal paid this year. No parties. No celebrations. Not this year.

It’s really hard on Shorty. That is part of why I am taking her on a trip after I recover from surgery. She needs to have more going on that give her big learning experiences. I can see how and why she is struggling to get concepts we are explaining at home because she has been so limited in environmental exposure.

I have so much to tell you all. It’s going to be hard to explain all of it in a way that makes sense quickly. I don’t have enough free time for typing. I miss you. I want to seek more integration and that means I am going to have to be more honest with you lot. I’ve been hiding in a walled garden of people who were pre-screened for wanting to talk about sex. You are just here for me and that’s a lot weirder at times.

I’ve spent a lot of time in the past few years writing about what sex means to me. It has been contentious and difficult over the entire past year. Noah and I were struggling on that front in a bunch of ways. We were also having the best sex of our marriage. Noah was laid off last February. The last 10 months of his life he was unemployed. We were trying to figure out how to get him more immediately to retirement because my body is so shitty I could use a full time care giver. We were having a ridiculous amount of sex. It was so good. It was bonding on a soul level. A lot of it was part of active magical and spiritual rituals. We were on fire together.

We worked really hard to build the fire inside me to a raging inferno. For those of you who are not Archivists (old friends who have been reading me since livejournal across many platforms) I need to say that I am a hypersexual. I mean it in a clinical sense and not in a “I like to have sex” way. I have been actively pursuing and chasing sex in a wide variety of inappropriate and then appropriate settings since I was 3. Sex has been an overwhelming driving force in my life in ways it isn’t for normal people. I did not have a time of virginity or ignorance. That is simply not my life path.

Instead I have provided that path for my children. I have been in active trauma therapy for approaching 35 years now. I work very hard on being a person who acts consciously and deliberately. I make choices about where boundaries should be based on an excessive amount of deliberation and waffling between various theories. I overthink my life.

I was raised by people who made incredibly bad choices. I don’t have a lot of strong role models in my head of who I want to be when I grow up. The only person I want to be is me. I see the person I want to be the same way I see the murals I paint in my homes. My homes erupt with plants and water and texture. I see that Future Me bursting out of me. She will know the right thing to do in an absurd number of circumstances and she will never be a twat about it because every new thing I learn unveils a thousand variations I will fail at. The more I know the more I understand I will never understand. I am a tiny drop in a hurricane.

For 18 years Noah was my path to controlling and living with my hypersexuality. He was my safe way to not expose my children to inappropriate behaviour. We were rigid about boundaries between our sex life and our kids.

Theoretical knowledge about sex? Heck yeah! These are some deeply educated mofos. They can deconstruct tropes. They are finding their own pathways into adult relationships in ways that have absolutely nothing to do with my path. I see the edges out of the periphery of my vision and carefully never look more closely. I am a nosy and invasive asshole, only I’m not. If I want my 30 year old children to respect me I have to nail this dynamic now.

What I am doing today is not about today. I am paying Future Me. Future Me will want to have the kind of relationship with her children where EVERYONE CAREFULLY DOESN’T LOOK. Cause no one is hiding or lying or being secretive. They just aren’t flaunting.

So I need to start figuring out what that means from myself as a single adult who is going to be polyamorous.

I am not going to fall into a serial monogamist pattern. Naw. That will be unstable and bad for my kids. People will not integrate with my life quickly.

For the love of Cheese, there will always be a locked door between me and my kids when I have sex. Preferably in a sound proof room. Hey wait, I have one of those.

I’m scared of this though. Not to hurt anyone’s feelings, but I’ve seen poly done in some ways I don’t want to emulate. I have known people who have done things in ways I thought were highly respectful all around. I’ve seen everything in between. I don’t live in the San Francisco Bay Area any more. I will not have the same kind of casual social tolerance for my antics. My neighbours here are probably already noticing. I’m having feelings about that. A lot of people use my road as a daily exercise destination. They comment on my weeding. They are going to notice and raise eyebrows about vehicles. That sits heavy in my belly.

Especially given how many of them stop to talk about how sad it is that Noah is gone. I live in a small town. This is a new thing. I am going to have to figure out how to allow them to have plausible deniability because I think they will want to have it. We already get along. If they can ignore things I think they will want to. I won’t shove it in their faces. I won’t flaunt my wanton lifestyle. I will let everyone only see what they want to see. I have spent a lot of time studying the social contract and I do ok in live tests.

I know how to be neither dominant nor submissive in a social situation. I am simply on a different hierarchy. Don’t worry about whether you are above or below me. We are parallel on different scales. No reason to raise your fur. I am not a threat and you can’t threaten me.

I’m sure I will be judged and there will absolutely be rumors. Since I am me I figure I ought to at least provide some actual facts for them to judge me based on. I like being judged accurately and I’ll take my medicine for what that earns me. I always have. I always accept the consequences for my mistakes as I try to learn.

I know the deal. I am not going to bother to talk back. I’ll take it and move on. I won’t slow down much. I have more mistakes to make. I have more learning I need to do. It doesn’t really matter that I am tired and I feel weary to the marrow of my bones. There is so much to do if I am going to create that Future Me I see in my head. She has been successfully speed running this game of life a lot longer than me and I’m desperate to catch up.

“If you don’t look back on yourself 18 months ago and say ‘Wow I really sucked‘ you aren’t trying hard enough.” I know, Noah. I’m trying. It’s hard to learn while this much of my brain is screaming in agony because how can you be gone? I am a tiny fraction of the person I was. I do not think I am better than I was 18 months ago this time, sweetheart. Please forgive me for this lapse in progress. Maybe in cooking? Mostly I have become less a spiky profile with a few low skills and a whole fucking flat line. I feel like I am barely moving in most areas.

My son said, “I thought we were your epilogue. Turns out we are your intermission” and it freaked me out.

I have never been single long in my whole life and that’s a bigger statement than it is for most humans. In 40 years if you add up all the months of not having sex I think it fills less than 3 or 4 years worth. I’m not sure. It’s around there.

I don’t know what this is going to be like here and I definitely don’t know what this will be like in this set and setting. I’m going to figure it out though. Since I got married I’ve had the privilege to fail upward. I don’t know if that halo will continue but I’m going to do my best to act like that privilege is like everything else I inherited from Noah. It is now mine. Not by birthright, no, I am not one of those good people. I am still shitty little me. But in my time and my place if I outlive my spouse I absorb all that they own. Some of the ways they address the mail are weird.

I am not finding my way back to me. Not really. I cannot go back. There is only forward. I am moving forward towards the me I want to be. I’m going to have a place in a little place. I’m going to know my neighbours and they are going to accept me as an ambassador of weird to varying degrees. Some of them will hate me. I’m sure I will be hassled in some ways but it doesn’t matter. I have the ability to cope.

That is something I have had since the very beginning, a lot of cope. I don’t always make wise or good decisions but good golly I get through.

I have an enormous pile of paperwork to get through because now I am responsible for my own taxes. I kind of want to throw up. I am a head of household with the IRS. I have never been that before.

My mother was my age when I was 11. I think perimenopause is hitting me harder at a younger age. The spotting is awful. I’m spotting for half a month at this point. “How are you doing?” people ask. I don’t usually tell them this. I’m looking forward to being a crone so much. I keep wanting to ask if there is a hormone that would make this happen faster. Then I could go off hormonal birth control. That may be part of the spotting, but it happened without the patch so I doubt it is the cause. I love being a neurotic, tracking, bitch.

If anything the patch has been doing really well at helping smooth out the PMDD symptoms. It’s not all bad to muck with hormones.

There are always two forms of birth control. This has been true since I was 12. I have been pregnant five times and they were all on purpose. If I were to fall pregnant despite heroic measures I would choose an abortion. I am too old and in ill health. I’m about to have the second of three surgeries to repair damage from my third child’s birth. I’m good. Factory is closed. I don’t want to get into a debate about birth control methods. I love you. I’m letting you know how I’m doing since I know you worry.

It’s been hard to talk to you. I tell you everything because you really are a whole cast of varying Ideal Narrators for me. I think of you so often. I love you. I’m so happy when you reach out and tell me how you are. Sometimes I don’t know how to respond. I am so deep in email fuckruptcy it is absurd. I don’t respond, but I read and then leave it there unread for months waiting to have the spoons to answer.

I have not gotten organising sorted. My brain is being a right cunt about admitting this level of vulnerability and opening myself up to hearing “no” when I ask. It makes me want to puke. I don’t like asking specific people for a specific thing. That is exactly my worst failure method. It took so many years before I could ask Noah. He had to actually watch me cry while I crawled around doing things for myself because I could not ask for help. He had to live with how awful that felt. He had to beg me to ask for help. He got increasingly anticipatory as the years went by because I don’t ask for help much.

When I do it falls into one of two modes: it is incredibly low stakes and a no or a yes is equally thrilling OR I am having an emergency and I am going to be in pain if you say no.

I’m not very good at managing that second part. My primary way has been to throw open the doors to the universe and ask for help with stuff of “anyone who can” and then some people throw their hats into the ring. It’s been bloody successful for me. My life has been good thanks to this approach.

I don’t know how it will work here. It’s ok. I don’t have to know yet. Future Me will know. I just have to get to her.

I’m feeling deeply conflicted about dating. I’m not replacing Noah. There is no way. There is no such thing. I am having fun. I am having opportunities for exploration and growth. I smile more than I would without the time. I say dating because I’m still trying to not be scandalous. I’m still scared. I smile more when I have shagging very soon on the calendar. There. I’ve said it. Practically on Facebook.

I have very mixed feelings about the way this feels more me centred around myself than I have been since I got married. I am not spending my days trying to earn someone else’s approval. I am doing what I want to do in service of my own happiness. Apparently my happiness is still bought with really bad jokes.

I can’t play the “you are not funny” game ever again. There are so many layers of me that will have to change. I never need to respond as Noah’s wife again.

I keep going, even when I’m crying and even when I’m scared, because Future Me looks like a really cool lady and I want to meet her. I can’t meet her if I stop.

Life is a struggle

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Things are good with the kids. Watching the collapse of the US government when I’ve been saying “It’s going to happen in my lifetime” means my kids are far more inclined to listen to me and take what I say seriously. Obviously I’m not an oblivious, stupid idiot. I see what is happening. So the big kids are more enthusiastic about gardening than they’ve ever been. Stuff is coming *along* this year. It’s going to be a really fun garden this time. They are going to learn even more skills for surviving the end of the global supply chain. The most important part is making friends and we are struggling on that front.

I’m seeing people at group social gatherings occasionally. I have a few folks I try to see one on one but I don’t see them every month. I’m feeling incredibly isolated. It is hurting so much that I was asked to leave the bike community. I feel like I lost my ability to make friends for exercising with. Because I couldn’t keep my stupid mouth shut. Because I have to make everything hard.

I’m the problem so I need to go away.

It’s feeling hard for me to leave my house. I get a lot of random verbal abuse in town. I *look* like I don’t belong here and people tell me so often. Sometimes with lots of swearing, but most often just through a passionate conversation with their pals about what a complete loser I am and how everyone wishes that people like me would stop coming to their city.

It’s same shit, different day for me. I’ve gotten this push back my entire life no matter where I was. I mostly try to pretend I don’t hear it and I press on with my life. I don’t have a lot of that energy going spare right now. I don’t feel comfortable or entitled to have anything or be anywhere.

People keep asking me if I have support. I don’t have a single person in the country I feel like I can talk to without heavily censoring every concept that comes out of my mouth. When I am around people I’m aware that my job is to listen, not talk. No one fucking wants to deal with me. I’m too fucking much.

I got bitched out at the leisure centre because I came in to take a shower and not use other facilities. My boiler has been broken for 5? 6? weeks now. I’m sorry that I exist so wrong.

I feel empty and worthless and not worth the effort.

I feel scared and bad. I feel desperately unwanted by the community as a whole. No, I don’t feel like I should go back to the US. At least here I don’t have to worry about someone pulling a gun on my kid when they run their fool mouth. Verbal abuse happens everywhere. The ambient level of violence is lower. It’s not like people ever acted like I belonged anywhere in the US either. I have been wrong since I was in preschool. I have been out of place and wrong. This is just the rest of the world agreeing. The problem is me.

I’m not allowed to do any of the things to hurt myself that would let me bleed off bits of the pain. Instead I spend a lot of time in the studio screaming until my head wants to explode. I am so scared. I don’t see a forward path that is not all consuming pain. I lost the only person who could bear my company. I lost the only person who wanted to talk to me and know me. I lost the only person who has ever lived with me for longer than 3 years. My mother never kept me for longer than 3 years at a stretch. She couldn’t bear me.

Only Noah could stand me. Someday my children will have a choice about leaving. I will understand if they go as far from me as possible. I won’t blame them at all. It will make sense to me.

I’m really sad that I’m not allowed to die. I feel like garbage. I feel like dog shit on the bottom of someone’s shoe. No, I don’t want to talk to anyone about how I’m feeling. I’m the problem and I don’t want to spread my pustulent disgustingness to anyone else.

I’m afraid that I shouldn’t try to make friends because I am nothing but a black hole of self hatred. There is nothing good in me to share.

I wish my mom had pushed harder and strangled me with the umbilical cord. I shouldn’t have been saved.

I wish I could die but I can’t. So instead I scream and cry alone in a room. Because this is the only safety I will have for the rest of my life. Other people are a risk every time. I don’t have it in me to nod and accept a lot more rejection right now. So I need to ask for nothing.

I hate my father for forcing me to be here. I hate my mother for not aborting me or strangling me at birth. I shouldn’t be here. I want to accept that it’s never getting better and just stop. I can’t though. People need me. People who weren’t given a choice.

I’m glad I get along with my kids. I sort of expect them to be my only real relationships going forward. Those incredibly curated and limited relationships in which I give and I bite my tongue off trying not to ask for anything in return.

I will never deserve to get anything from anyone again. I wish I could die.

Surviving rape

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Surviving rape doesn’t happen in one day. You don’t survive by getting the fucker into a taxi and out of your home. Out of my studio. Out of the place that is supposed to be my sanctuary. That is the first step, not the last. It isn’t like surviving a car crash where you wake up and the crash is over.

Surviving rape means being able to look myself in the mirror every morning afterwards. Surviving rape is about thinking that whatever you did to get to the next screen was harm reduction. Every single shitty thing that kept you alive was better than dying. Surviving rape is binge drinking and binge eating and screaming and crying and falling to the pavement when out on a walk because the panic attack made my vision go black. Surviving rape is believing that you do not deserve to be punished and harmed more because you were defiled and made dirty by someone touching you or you touching someone else because you felt like you had to.

Surviving rape means opening yourself up to lots of judgment, scorn, derision, and contempt. Good people wouldn’t survive the shit I have. They die.

My very survival is what marks me as a monster. Good people don’t do the things I do, the shitty, dirty, disgusting things that people like me do. Good people would rather die.

I am still alive. I feel like I owe the universe endless apologies for not having the decency to just fucking die already.

I have screamed so much today that my throat hurts enough that I don’t really want to eat this lentil soup that is the first food I’ve had today. I’d rather not eat. I also haven’t been drinking. I don’t want to.

I want my body to stop.

I want to be good. Good people don’t live through the things I do. That means the only thing I can do to be good is die. That hurts so much. I have tried so hard to be good. It doesn’t matter. When it counted, when I was supposed to display my loyalty I was only loyal to myself and my survival. And that is why I should die. If I will not pick death over disloyalty I am nothing.

I betrayed my family. I betrayed my husband and made myself the lowest of the low. I feel like I want to use a scalpel to flay myself alive. Maybe if I make myself hurt a lot lot lot lot lot more Noah won’t be so mad.

Mama told me I don’t need to stay and let Noah make me feel so bad about myself. I don’t think Noah is making me feel bad about myself. I think Noah is reacting reasonably to the consequences of being married to a nightmare. I’m in this pickle where I can’t act good enough to not hurt him and I can’t leave without hurting him more. I can’t see a path forward that doesn’t involve me wrecking his life even more than I have.

I’ve betrayed him a lot. It’s not like this is a one off. It’s who I am. I am shit. I am worthless and faithless.

But fuck me, definitely no EMDR before the trial. Couldn’t be having that. Fuck the NHS. I can’t believe I had the ovaries to say, “I’d like EMDR. If not that then Ketamine, MDMA, or LSD assisted therapy. If none of that then I want nothing from you.“

That was pretty intense. I was freaking out and shaking and clearly not ok and I just blew off one of the higher up doctors at the psych hospital. That was maybe unwise. That smart mouth comment is now in my permanent record. I mean, I started with wanting EMDR? It’s not a controversial treatment? It’s not a drug? It’s not a wacky thing to ask for. That was not inappropriate. I just can’t have it.

I can. I just can’t through the NHS. Curse my internal hierarchy structure. It is fucking inconsistent and I hate it so much. One of the harem actually does remote EMDR already. It’s just a trick in his tool bag. I could probably have a session today or tomorrow if I could just ask him. Hell, I don’t need to ask, I need to say yes to his offer. He wants so badly to be able to help me in some way and I have not been able to let myself receive anything from him.

Someone who has been in love with me for almost 20 years wants to help me because my health care system is letting me down and I can’t let him. I have also basically stopped talking to Travel Boyfriend. I am deep in not-fun-land and I just can’t accept help in this place from people I am emotionally close to. I can pay for it. I can’t get it for free. I don’t deserve it. I do not allow myself to be someone who has consistent support from specific people. Well, not beyond Noah. The few other attempts I made as an adult went pretty sideways.

I am feeling incredibly burned. I miss the God Mama. I miss my mother. I miss Sarah. I miss the Bonus Mama. All these women. Hey look, Katy Perry’s song The One Who Got Away just came on. I’ve been calling Sarah The One Who Got Away on Fetlife. I failed to sustain that relationship.

It’s kinda funny that I don’t miss my sister. Fuck that bitch. I hope she suffers terribly for every day that she is alive and that her death is slow and painful as she fucking deserves for being a child raping piece of shit. She had a chance in this life to break the chain. Instead she forged new links. I wish her nothing but pain. Given her romantic choices I’m pretty sure she’s been punched a lot since then. I wish I could feel bad for her but I really can’t.

My brother is single and whining about how women use men up and take everything from them. My brother, who never worked full time or even managed to fully pay for his own vices let alone support his three children. Yeah. Poor guy. Fuck the golden boy too. I don’t wish him as much pain. He is suffering a lot from being who our father loved. He will suffer for all of his days. He refuses to believe that our father was evil. He tells people that our dad committed suicide because he was depressed. lol. Yeah, scared of a life of prison rape depressed.

Surviving rape is not pretty. I would argue that my sister’s soul has not survived. When she chose to justify her pain by normalising it and passing it to her children her soul died. What is left is a soulless monster.

I have not raped a child since I was a child. I’m not saying I get a pass. But my children have not been raped by family members. That’s something, I guess.

It’s really hard to eat this bowl of soup. My body does not want to. Why do I keep insisting on eating healthy food and exercising? Don’t I know that this is going to get me lots of years of more pain? 9.821 steps for the day. Even if I did have a panic attack.

I can’t keep getting punished for surviving. I don’t know exactly what that means, but I think maybe punishment is not something I can accept for something like this. I was ok with it when it happened. I consented. I consented, what, days after surgery? I kind of wonder how much I hope that you would hurt me enough to cause those complications I otherwise worked so hard to avoid. Could you have lived with that? Was it worth it? Sure. You think it was necessary to break the fawn.

Fawning is a survival tactic.

What I am doing now is not upping the chances of me surviving. I did that walking on the first day of my period without eating or drinking anything. Am I making good choices? I don’t know. I am flailing blindly. I’m trying not to talk to people more than I absolutely have to because I know that vile bilge will stream from my mouth. I’ve probably cut 80%-90% of my social chatter for the past I don’t know how many days.

Right now the random reinforcement of punishment (sometimes physical with consent in the context of our M/s dynamic and more often verbal in the form of lengthy diatribes about the crimes I’m about to commit) I have received in the past 4 months means I can’t risk talking to someone in a tone of voice Noah doesn’t like or I don’t know what will happen. I am afraid he will think I am fawning. He’s not ok and I’m not ok and I don’t know what will need to happen before either of us are ok.

I guess my sister and I both antagonise our partners to hit us. She does it by yelling insults and degrading their manhood. I cheat.

We both deserve what we get.

I say I won’t do things and then I go do them. Every time. Apparently.

It’s the first day of bleeding. With good luck part of this furious screaming in my brain will stop soon but I am not feeling like I’ve had a lot of luck lately. I feel like if it weren’t for bad luck I’d have no luck at all.

I listen to other people talk about family as if it is a permanent fixture that cannot be undone. I think of Bestie and the brothers she hasn’t spoken to in over a decade and my family I haven’t seen in a few years more than that. Family doesn’t feel very permanent to me, in a general way. I am having a hard time with the war in my brain. I have to serve my indenture. Do I really owe many more decades beyond that? Do I really? Why do I owe anyone this much pain?

I reread the book I bought at the Lakota reservation called Keep Going. Man. That’s not a book to make you expect much cheerful shit in life. I think one of the reasons I have never felt comfortable with most pagan community is because I’m not willing to co-opt an old-world-religion-that-was-and-has-been-reinvented. That’s what I see when I see most pagans. The heathen cultures I grew up around were indigenous cultural ones practiced by descendants. I sure as shit never felt entitled to join any of what I saw, but I feel like my ancestors closed their ears to the Gods. I had a Mayflower fucker in my chart and the most recent arriving branch was a bunch of Mennonites that had been running around Europe trying to be the most repressive dickheads around for a long time.

I do not feel entitled to any Gods.

I do believe that Akhilandeshvari chose me. The Hindu temple on the corner was full of people who were a little confused by the white neighbours who came to Hindi classes and who dropped by to pay respects to the Gods and Goddesses occasionally. I have been given the strong impression by every Indian friend that they are totally cool with a Hindu Goddess picking me. They said she obviously knew I needed her. I think that is most diplomatic of them.

Here I am breaking myself and breaking my husband. We had been at a much better place.

I did not deal with being raped in a way that worked for him at all.

I feel like I failed the exam. I do not deserve to stay in the program. This is not my first time failing and being kicked out because my body could not do what was being asked of it. I’m not being kicked out. Noah won’t kick me out. That’s not something I worry about in any way. Just like I don’t entertain the idea of leaving him. This marriage is till death parts us.

Surviving rape over and over and over and over and over is partly done in stutter steps of eventually asking to be allowed to have some kind of agency and autonomy for my body after more than 4 decades of not being allowed to make all the decisions. No. That’s a no, dog. I’m a set of holes and somebody bought them. How dare someone else touch them.

I feel deeply dehumanised. I suppose that is a natural and obvious outgrowth of some of the kinds of play I choose to do. I suppose it is unsurprising that it is a natural and normal state for me to slip into sideways. You think maybe getting kicked out of a community for being a loud mouth who objects to homophobia, and dealing with denial of service from the NHS has something to do with it?

Hell, I’m even freaked out about how far from what I wanted the prosecution process is going to be. I’m going to have to go to court this time. They won’t let him out so he can suicide the morning of the trial. Phew. I have options about how to do it. I’m going to pick sitting in court and looking at him. That’s the least shielded way. Because why in the fuck would I do it by video in a room alone? That would be even more alienating for me. I would be even less of a fucking person just a figment on a screen.

My life is wildly out of my control right now. I can’t even seriously future trip as a hobby because I don’t know when the fucking UK government will finish our paperwork. We are picking this?

Yup. Better than Gunlandia.

I will take every piece of stress dealing with the NHS and the police and the courts and the cultural mismatch and low-key ostracism because I never have to worry about a cop pointing a gun at one of my children. I’ll take it. Most of my ancestors left this island (or the big one right next to us) almost 400 years ago. Yeah, there’s going to be some friction on reentry. I don’t resent that.

Noah is also unemployed for potentially the entire foreseeable future. It’s coming with a massive drop from where we had planned retirement income because otherwise all of the choices suck. I’d rather have his time than more money.

Yeah. Even though I had my door locked earlier tonight because I was not going to fucking talk to him right now. I feel like I want to kick him in the face and tell him to stop sniveling and get his fucking shit together. It is not your turn to fucking melt down right now and you are being a selfish dickhead. It can be your turn for the next 11 years, buddy. Knock it off until the trial. I guess you are right that it means you should just stop fucking talking for a while.

I just realised why I don’t like playing games. I don’t particularly enjoy feeling like a loser and I don’t have the desire to prove I can beat people. There is nothing for me in the process but bad feelings. I play because other people want me to. I never play enough to get very good.

Surviving rape never stops. The crazy shit I do that seems so inexplicable is maybe about my dad or Paul or Jeremy or Michael or Kevin and whatever the rest of those bitches names are. Fuck those guys. Fuck all of them. Every last fucking one. Right now I can’t remember the exact number and I really don’t want to try hard to figure it out. I think that would be really bad for me right now. I’m really glad I can’t think at all. Yay not eating or drinking.

The weekend that my rapist was arrested I played the song You Should Be Sad several hundred times. Yeah. That was fucking trippy to find out in the rear view mirror. I had no idea it was happening then. This song is going to loom large in my memory of this experience.

I think I am always going to be trying to survive all this. It’s going to be hard forever. I have a lot of physical pain that I can’t make go away with all the good food and exercise in the world. I am struggling on every level right now.

The most life affirming thing would be to throw myself on the net I have created. Instead I hide and scream and rock and cry. I can do very little right enough to trust that I am not going to get in trouble for it. Hell, an awful lot of this post feels like I am skirting the line of “don’t write about it”.

Wait for the trial to write. Wait for the trial to qualify for EMDR.

It’s like fucking no one wants me to survive.

I know you do. You don’t need to say it. Take it as read. I know. That’s not the point. I’m not whining about my friends doing an insufficient amount of reaching out. I’ve had more contact from old friends since I deactivated than I have in a long time all at once. I am not responding much. I can’t.

All I contain is poison. Am I even surviving? Traci said any amount of harm reduction that allowed you to get to another day was good enough. Traci ODed on heroin after getting kicked out by her wife and losing custody of her son. Yeah. I’ve gotten advice from some wacky ass sources in my life.

I have stopped daydreaming about the trip with TB. It is seeming less like a good idea by the day. I am scared that being in a room with me will be bad for him. I am going to fuck him up because I am so fucked up. 70 days from tomorrow. I wonder how I will feel by then? Fuck.

It isn’t feeling like a life affirming activity. It is feeling like proof of why Noah doesn’t trust me and why he should never trust me.

Just stop, Krissy. Stop being so bad.

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

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: pmdd

The roller coaster of emotions continues

If I don’t do too much not enough gets done.

Finding my way back to me

Surviving rape

But which past behavior?

My safeword is “Long-term trauma’, bitch