Tag Archives: poly

I am so proud of my babies

Middle Child has a strong desire to do a few programs in town that require qualifications. So they looked up where to go to get the qualifications and how. We have a few workbook type things in the house that help us figure out the local expectations for these ages/grades. Specifically they will need the English qualification and so they looked up the reading list and got started with stuff from our library.

There are a lot of times while home educating that I don’t feel particularly confident or secure that I am doing the right thing. I believe that education doesn’t need to come from a school to be valid. I also believe that when a person has been free they are able to catch up on years worth of learning in a very short period of time. My kids have done it with maths. MC has a plan to get through catching up on 6 years of expectations. It helps that we are a highly literate house and most of those expectations are going to be bargain basement effort for them. They will not have to work hard to understand synonyms or antonyms. The biggest issues will be handwriting legibility and speed. We have a plan for that too.

I act on faith with teaching them. I talk to them broadly about the world and their potential place in it. We have a lot of philosophical conversations and we talk about politics and history constantly. Anytime we talk about politics it turns into a 10 layer deep discussion of all the factors leading up to whatever event. We are passionate about seeing the world through stories. It’s hard to believe that this is the right thing to do but the results I’m getting are amazing.

Trusting children is not an easy thing to do. I’m not sure how much that is my cultural experience of the world. Does anywhere trust children? Does any culture believe that children are smart and able to decide their own path? Does every culture think that children are ignorant and unable to decide? I’m not sure. I certainly have my speech down pat when I say, “The reason you have parents is because we can see further into the future about the cause and effect cycle and we are supposed to help you until you can see further on your own. Now go brush your teeth.” I am kind of obsessed with teeth brushing. My mother had lost all of her teeth by the age of 40. I’ve only lost 1 so far. My children have barely had cavities and are not on track for losing any teeth at all. This is good.

Shortie is blossoming all over the place lately. She can pedal her bike! She can go really far! She’s reading rather advanced books at a blistering speed. She’s learning a lot about history because she thinks it is fun. She’s getting much better at helping to clean up after her own messes all of a sudden. She is becoming a fun housemate. She wants to bake and sew and the price is cleaning up her messes in common areas. She says that it seems very reasonable that the requirement for making big messes is being able to clean them up.

All of a sudden she can see other perspectives and she’s willing to be respectful in ways she literally couldn’t be just a few months ago. I love watching these developmental leaps. They make my heart soar. They make me feel like we are going to be ok.

Eldest Child is less than 4 months away from being 18. This is feeling overwhelming for both of us. He keeps saying emphatically that he’s not ready and he’d like to keep our current dynamic going for longer. I told him no, I’m not going to keep being this bossy with him. Hell, I feel like I am the ghost of bossiness past with him these days. I don’t have to lecture him. He sees me and rattles off all the things I would have said to him when he was younger. He lectures his sister constantly repeating things I’ve said to him. I will never again be entitled to want to commit suicide. That’s off the table as an option permanently. Even so, I feel like if I died accidentally he would be an excellent guardian as she finishes growing up. He has internalised my voice so strongly that I believe he is going to be able to handle issues as they come up throughout life.

It’s really intense sometimes. I believed that I could create interesting people and help them get through the world without hating themselves. It was a science experiment. I had no reason to believe it would work out. It was a leap of faith. I went through the system in such a hodge podge way that it seemed reasonable to me that my kids could skip the system entirely and still come out fine. I think that’s going to be true. I already feel quite confident about where my son has landed. MC is on track to find their path. Shortie is acting like a person who is going to be able to chart her own path with glee and fervor.

I am so sad that Noah isn’t here to be gleeful with me. He had faith in my ability to do this. He signed on for a whole lifetime of supporting me in doing this. I am really sad he hasn’t been here to see our youngest find this independent spirit. I am sad he won’t see our son become a man. I am sad he doesn’t get to cheer our kid on as they find their voice and independence. He would be proud too.

I see his face in my mind all the time. He was so beautiful to me. He wasn’t classically handsome with his snaggle teeth and his lumps and lopsidedness. But when he looked at me he beamed like a ray of sunshine. He was always so happy to see us. He was so giving and kind and wonderful.

EC says he has a weird time talking about our marriage with other people. People say it sounds very abusive. Then he gets to give a long explanation about consent and unusual preferences and how things are abusive or acceptable based on your agreements. He understands that his dad and I were doing the best we could given where we started in life and we were more and more gentle with each other with every passing year. As we could be. It’s weird that EC is going to be my most significant witness in this life. He saw me and Noah more than anyone else. He is going to be my longest term live in relationship.

He will spend more time with me than any other human and he both likes me and respects me. How the heck did that happen?

He is assigning himself long lists of reading books so he can better explain characters in his stories. He wants to understand their mindsets better so he is compiling lists of books from the canon that the characters would like. When his friends ask him casual questions about his stories he responds with a 6 page essay and illustrations.

My son existing makes me feel so much better about myself. I have incredibly strong feelings about how awesome he is and I can’t miss how alike we are. He makes me feel like I am already a better person. He writes a lot of stories about traumatised people. I can see where he steals from what he has seen of me and his dad. He is so deeply insightful it breaks my heart. He tells people who ask that he has undergone fairly little trauma in his life–he had a shockingly happy childhood. But his parents were traumatised people who did their very best and this is what he learned from living with us. It’s humbling. It’s deeply rewarding to know that a lot of adults are now asking him for advice about how to cope with their problems. He has the ability to go do a lot of things with his life. He has nothing but possibilities in front of him.

My kid existing makes me feel so much better about myself. I see the ways we are alike and I see how much better they are at loving themself than I was at their age. I see them moving through the world and coping with strife and challenges with grace and poise. They decide they want things and then they figure out how to get them. I can’t wait to watch them go far.

My daughter existing makes me feel so much better about myself. She is wild and free. She is bursting into the world with all the energy of a newly born star and I am here for this adventure. Maybe even more than the other two I see the ways we are similar. I see how she is going to have a much rougher road than my first two children. She is not going to have that exceptional experience of living with Noah and me both trying to create a Wonderland away from the world. I think she is going to find ways to really dig into life here and she’s going to make herself happy.

I have never tested my children for IQ levels or anything like that. I know that they are extremely precocious and able to learn. My son makes me feel stupid on a regular basis. The only reason he doesn’t already know that he is a lot more intelligent than I am is because he hasn’t quite caught my backlog of experience. I suspect by the time he is 30 he will start to understand that he is a lot smarter than me. It’s humbling to live with him. My kid is a very different kind of smart and honestly it’s been more difficult for me to work with. They have needed very different teaching. I’ve had to throw a lot at the wall before I caught their interest on a lot of different topics. It’s wonderful watching them get to the level of independence where they can just go do stuff and learn stuff without needing my assistance as fully. It’s taken them longer to get to the level of being an autodidact. It has been interesting to me coping with how differently all of my children are extremely high needs. My son’s dyslexia has meant that he needed verbal instruction all the fucking time all his life. It’s exhausting trying to keep up with him. My kid needs intense coregulation and body doubling and they learn things in very slow and careful ways. It’s exhausting trying to slow down to go at their pace. I have had to learn a lot of meditation to be at their speed. It’s been fucking rough. My daughter is the one who feels more at my level. Frankly she’s not great at verbal instructions. She only sorta listens. I’m wondering about auditory processing stuff with her as well. She is like me in that she taught herself to read by 7 and she is already reading at an adult reading level. Her vocabulary and comprehension are off the charts. She can understand ridiculously complex concepts that she picks up on her own and then wants to explain to me. More than with the other two I must be her audience. WHICH IS FUCKING EXHAUSTING. If you know my children you know that all of us need an audience to listen to us think and unpack our brains.

When I say a child needs way more of that than the rest of us… that should be scary. She’s a lot.

Thank you, Noah, for being so crazy intense that you looked at me and thought our kids would be amazing. Thank you for wanting to be my partner for this life. It was an amazing journey together and I am a much better person because I knew you. Our children are better people because they had so much of you. Thank you for the gift if your time and your presence. Thank you for loving us. Thank you for choosing us. You made us feel special and that helped all of us move forward with purpose and no shame. We aren’t too much. It’s ok that we are very needy people, because we have each other. We need to be in relationships and we have put a lot of effort into figuring out how to create relationships. We know how to be very deliberate.

Integration is coming. The kids will meet my boyfriend in March. That’s feeling very soon. I’m looking forward to it. I appreciate the way the kids have had time to mourn and grieve while also knowing that a change will come. Each of them has asked different questions about him. They have all expressed positive impressions of him based on the way he has treated me this year. He’s a really good guy. I am deeply relieved that every conflict he can describe coming up in his past relationships with step children are things that I wouldn’t tolerate. I don’t anticipate there being much reason for friction. I don’t see any big red flags or signs of obvious incompatibility. I’ve been looking. I’ve been trying hard not to be too steeped in NRE and the honeymoon phase. We spend a lot of time talking and I ask him a lot of questions. I’m mapping his story in my mind.

I have a lot of cautious optimism.

I have also started exercising again at a fairly blistering pace and I am feeling both sore and strong. I am dragging the kids out. I have intense internal conflict as I watch the teenagers struggle with physical disability. They are not lazy. They are not unfit. They have substantial struggles. They work as hard as they are able. I see reasons their lives are going to be challenging. I have mixed feelings about that. Would I have created people if I had known more about my genetics? I don’t know. They are going to suffer. I don’t know for sure yet about my daughter but the signs are there.

They are so fucking cool though. Like, yeah they are going to have struggles. Everyone has struggles. They aren’t going to be financially vulnerable. Provided we continue to get along the plan is to be ok living together basically permanently because we all need care giving at various points. All of us take turns being the one who can’t life. This is a lot harder for me now that Noah isn’t here because I don’t like accepting so much help from the kids.

At this point I submit to as much assistance as I do when I need to because I need them to be willing to fucking rest sometimes. They cannot become enculturated with American overwork culture. Naw. Fuck that. We got away from that. It’s poison. It’s self hating. It’s awful and not necessary.

So I don’t martyr myself. When I’m sick I’m sick. The rest of the time I am very particular about the difference in expectations between adults, quasi-adults, and children. People who are not adults do not get put into adult slots.

Shit. My son is going to be an adult in 4 months. That’s going to be wild. I still won’t treat him like he is the man of the house. He’ll be a housemate not the Daddy. It is hard being the head of household. It is very important to keep in focus. I don’t have to like it. I have to do it.

I say that to kids a lot. “I didn’t tell you to like it. I told you to do it.” It is an ongoing weird thing in my life that I am both extremely demanding and shocked that my children comply. Wow. They genuinely believe that their life will go better if they do what I ask the first time. Not the youngest, not yet. The older two do their very best because they don’t want me to have to nag them. It’s not fun for either side.

They still vote me in as project manager. We negotiate this shit. They appreciate that I have put a lot of thought into how to help them grow up. They appreciate getting to own the vast majority of their time. They appreciate getting to direct their own lives. We work very well together at a wide variety of tasks. We like a peaceful house though most of us are subject to hormonal mood shifts. All of us know how to look at the floor and avoid a confrontation when someone wakes up savage. It’s pretty funny. Some days people just can’t be talked to and that’s ok. We all understand now.

It was hilarious when the first two hit puberty and had their first week of being savage. They each turned to me at some point and said, “Holy fuck. Is this how fucking angry you feel?” I say, “Yes. They say, “HOW DID YOU NOT KILL US ALREADY?!?!?!?!?!”

I say, “I prepared for you for more than a decade before I was able to start creating you. I literally bled and barely survived your births. I’m not going to let a mood swing fuck up my life. I don’t kill you because I understood what I was signing up for. You wouldn’t be so difficult if you weren’t so much like me.”

The two reactions so far were different. One nodded, very much like his father when hearing hard truth, and said, “Right. So this is something I have to learn how to manage. This is not going to be fun.” He stomped off to his room and I heard screaming into a pillow. The other one started screaming “THIS IS NOT FAIR” while jumping up and down and flailing before running screaming through the house.

I’ll let you guess which one is a lot more like how I reacted at that age. Ahem.

I’m fucking excited about my daughter hitting puberty. I am willing to bet she’s going to put a hole in the wall. Who wants to bet me? I’ll put money on it. I will teach her how to patch the drywall in a very soothing voice. She will use her allowance to pay for all the materials we need. And she’s repainting the wall.

This is a lot of how I’ve been able to respond in a relaxed way to most of the things my children have done that have been really over the line. “OK. I have a plan for this.”

If you expect people to periodically totally fuck up and cross lines, you must treat it as completely normal; then you can guide someone into repair work without shame. My kids don’t have huge anxiety about their meltdowns. They do sigh deeply and start figuring out how to fix whatever happened. We work to make the meltdowns less intense and less frequent. We look for triggers and create plans together for managing them earlier. We can’t prevent every one but we can make life happen at a more tolerable rate.

My kids have periods of anxiety when they are in deep disequilibrium. Outside of those windows they are intensely self assured. They believe they have tools for solving problems and they learn like their life depends on it. They learn from all kinds of environments.

I believe they will be able to adapt to anything that comes up even though that is fucking hard for autistic people. We need a lot more support and guidance and patience than other people as we learn. That’s ok. Apparently I have a whole lot of patience. And I don’t even get it from bourbon. That was one of Noah’s jokes. A dad was sharing the recipe for a drink called “Patience” as they were planning to interact with a group of kids. I forget what thing. I’m not the funny one. The second dad goes, “Whoa. That’s a lot of bourbon.” The first dad says, “That’s because you are going to need a lot of Patience.”

I know when he would recite from his list of like 15 jokes. They were very formulaic and I literally record scratched my brain to kind of glitch on hearing it again. He repeated himself a lot and I needed to cope with that. It’s like my hearing just clicked out and all I heard was tinnitus. I would catch up with whatever he went to after the joke a second or two late.

It’s really common, when we are talking at a meal, for all three of us bigger people to stop and put our heads down in unison at the table when we know there was an opening for one of Noah’s 15 jokes. It’s like he says it into all of our minds at the same instant. Sometimes it’s so real that one or more of us starts openly weeping. That’s the hole where Noah is supposed to be. We all miss him terribly. But on we go anyway.

Life is no longer the shape I wanted it to be for the period of the Indenture. We are no longer that wonderful happy family. We are touched by sorrow now in a way that’s going to be complicated. We still are ridiculously happy together. We get along best when we rotate in and out of date time together. We all trust that our needs matter within the pod and we are all going to make sure that each of us is ok.

I created the family I wanted to live in. I have walked my talk and improved with every passing year. My children are people I like and respect. My children like and respect me and look forward to private time with extreme glee. Getting to go things with me alone is a reward and a treat and a wonderful thing.

That’s kind of wild. Wow. How is this my life? People used to not like me very much. It’s still hard not to expect it all of the time.

My kids act like I have treated them like doing things alone together is a reward and a treat and a wonderful thing. They all feel seen and appreciated. They don’t think I’m overly self involved. They think I am super invested in everyone around me. I’m always scared that the way I write means I spend way too much time thinking about myself. I need it, though. It helps me process my feelings and my thoughts. I think I need it a lot more now than I did when Noah was alive. I do so little talking.

The way that I move through my life decisively reacting to things that happen is the result of a fuck tonne of dithering in advance. I whine at myself and go back and forth on issues. I question why I believe I should act in various ways. I plot how to handle things in advance because otherwise I might do something that is not consistent with my overall values. I’m just as selfish and stupid as the next person. The only reason I have any wisdom at all is because I’ve fucked around and found out.

Now I don’t have Noah to save my bacon when it comes to giving our kids the kind of stable and secure environment I want them to grow up in. Being a single mom is a lot harder. Like, holy shit.

If I thought I was exhausted and deep in burn out before I lost my coparent? Yikes. I’m a lot more exhausted than I used to be. Or am I? I am doing a lot less. I don’t volunteer anymore. I have dropped out of almost every community event I participated in. I still go to munches and that’s about it. Almost all of the babysitting I pay for is put into the relationship with Gentleman. I have no regrets. I’m enjoying talking to him. He is an excellent storyteller. He makes me happy. He makes no demands upon me. He is very happy to see me when he can. We have had no reason to have strife. We do talk about some day hard stuff, but he’s not that eager to get into the long term theoretical way I plan. That’s going to be a big transition for me. It’s another way I am going to have to not look for Noah replacements. I need to be alone in my brain.

This is where the solo poly thing is coming up for me. I am going to not seek out another engulfing relationship. I loved my marriage. It was a one shot deal. I rode it to the end. I don’t want that again. I am always going to be managing a lot of stuff off stage. That means I need time to be off stage.

I had an excellent therapy session yesterday. I like working with them because they often interrupt and push me into somatic work when I am explaining stuff I am struggling. Last week, they had an off week. They needed to put themself into the session a bit. There were a couple of times where they were encouraging me strongly in directions that felt like appeasement. They were clearly having big feelings about it. They wish I was a more interactive client. They want to have more midweek check ins and exchanging of silly gifs. I’m not your girl for that. I need very clear time boundaries around therapy. I have issues around that. I’ve got stories for days about therapists and bad time management. And then it gets into my mommy issues because that woman can’t be on time to save her life.

So they sent me an apology after the session. I responded very minimally that I was totally fine and looking forward to seeing them next time.

This week I told them a little bit about Traci, a therapist I worked with for 5 years who OD’ed about 3 weeks after I ended our therapy relationship. I ended the relationship because I was pregnant and she was spinning out. I needed to transition into the care of someone who had more ability to support me through the next stage of my life and Traci was seriously going off the rails and needed reciprocal care I couldn’t offer. She was bringing her problems into my therapy. She really needed support and I didn’t give her any. I have a really intense amount of guilt for that. Yes, I know that I behaved in the appropriate clinician sliding off the rails way according to the guide books. But she was a person who put a lot into me and I didn’t do what I could to pay her back. I’m really upset about that.

Thus I told my plural rodent therapist that when they are having a bad day I am going to be patient with that. They do a lot for me by being able to be there for me when I am freaking out. They are learning a lot of really tough background things. I am a challenging patient history to learn. If they have days when they need me to hear what they are struggling with, maybe that’s where I am in therapy now and it’s not a bad thing.

Maybe the trade is slightly less about the money and a lot more like being friends who have cool tricks and insights to share. I’m not upset about this, not really. It means that I have to have times when I can pull my shit in during that hour a little and that’s complicated. Every relationship has costs. Usually in therapy the cost is financial and you get support in exchange.

Am I even trying to have a therapist or a coach-y friend who is exceptionally woo and down with how weird I am?

I am conscious over and over that I will never feel like I have company in my brain again. It feels hard.

It feels very hard that my children are going to know the most about me for the whole of my life and there’s going to be a lot that is always carefully off screen. I have lost the constant witness.

I liked that Noah and I spent 12-18 hours out of 24 together pretty much since we moved to Scotland. He gave me his brain and I gave him mine. We shared them. I think it is funny that I think of it like we were sharing a compiler. I have never used one but I’ve heard a lot about them. I think it is funny that I never got into tech but it permeates my brain.

I miss Noah. I will never try to replace Noah being the Oracle. I will never have his recall. I don’t think I will meet many people in the whole of my life who will be as smart as him. That’s a weird thing. Even if I do meet people that smart they will not be interested in downloading my brain. I will be irrelevant to them. It’s hard to think about. I feel a wave of pain when I go through all the topics I’m thinking about that I will never speak out loud at all. I no longer have anyone who wants to hear what I’m thinking at that level.

I need time to cope with that. I need to be able to be in a room alone. I feel like it goes best when I wake up extra early in the morning and take my alone time then. I get to fill my bucket with attention before I go work. I don’t love when these essays pour out at night because the day has been a lot. My feelings are so big. I want to talk to Noah about them.

I got to explain to my therapist that I really don’t want to be encouraged towards forgiving someone I am having a social conflict with so that we can be friends. That would require a lot of sweeping really awful things under the rug and I’m not British enough. What I need from them is support in figuring out how to crank back my rage because it’s a waste of energy that I need for other things.

I don’t want to waste time feeling rage. I want to move forward. I want to put all of my energy into the work ahead of me. Goodness knows I don’t have a lot of energy going spare.

My babies are vowing to help more with the garden this year. It’s going to be interesting to see how it goes. We will see! I like that they are starting to see the extreme value of the garden we have built together. They all really appreciate the glut of amazing fruit. Especially because I’m not buying fruit that is £10+/kg. Nope. In order to get enough of it to make a dent in our nutrition needs it is horrifyingly expensive and shipped in from very far away. We need to eat stuff from what is in season and what we can get from this country as much as possible.

We are close to having a 12 month garden. This week I’m going to start in the poly tunnel. I have a plan for how to make it more usable. I’m pretty thrilled. I am grateful that I will have help with getting rid of all the wood inside that I haven’t been able to figure out what to do with. I am cleaning up a lot of stored rubbish and it’s making things feel easier. We are donating a lot of stuff. It’s time to make space in our house for future needs. We don’t need to fill every nook and cranny.

We are changing our shape inside the house and it feels good. It feels like the right thing. A lot needs to be fixed, still, and that’s feeling super freaking intense. This is a forking expensive place to live in. It will be entirely upgraded in like 3 more years. That’s wild to think about. I will have replaced and improved stuff from the roof to the floor joists and the underpinnings. I still need more cladding. The upstairs bathroom is in dire need of ripping out and starting again because of the levels of problems. It needed replaced when we bought the damn house. The entire upstairs is going to have the flooring done all in a big go. I will pay a decorator to do the painting so that those rooms will look like someone else lives here. It’s going to be like I’m staging the damn house. It’s so intense to think about.

I have a big ass fancy house and it’s getting fancier by the year. The garden is so freaking cool and I can do things like give comfrey starts to young budding permaculture interested queerlings. This brings me big joy. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to throw a 60th birthday party without Noah. Luckily I don’t have to decide yet. I’m still working on getting the garden and house ready anyway. I figure working towards what will be here in 16 years is a good timeline when it comes to a garden and fixing a house. At that point the house will be so completely renovated that we will truly never want to leave. We will grow in and around the house.

It feels good to talk about the kids. I feel kind of gross bragging about them to anyone but Noah. It feels like I am being an asshole about other people. I’m really not trying to. My children did not fit into school. They would not have done well if they had been pushed into more compliance. It took years of recovery time for my son to stop feeling suicidal.

What we are doing is working for us. I am grateful for the privilege that allows us to do this. It is shocking dealing with what it means to be a one of those Gibbs’. Noah was not that impressed by being from that family. It’s been a wild ride for me. Way more good than bad. I’m scared of the future. I’m also really looking forward to it because I have front row tickets to see three cool people launch themselves into the world. I’m looking forward to the show.

“Are you sure you want to ask me that?”

6 Replies

I’ve had this agreement with most friends and family members in my life. When they ask me a question I give them a second chance to see if they mean it. I will answer. I will answer in so much detail that you may regret your life choices.

I like that Gentleman is around while I’m doing chores more now. We talk while I’m doing stuff. It feels a lot more like an integrated relationship. It’s like how I get to be around while he practices sometimes. I like these overlapping points in the timetable. It feels like life sharing. We are testing the waters during this courting period. We are on no particular escalator with specific end goals.

I’m amused that going back and forth between his place and mine is resulting in me keeping my space more tidy than usual. He is a tidy individual. He takes care of his things and he cleans up after messes really quickly. Sometimes I feel intimidated because I’m going to struggle to match that in this house. I could in my house in California that was 1/3 the size of this house. I am often worried I got myself in over my head. With Noah I was alright. Now the house is a lot to manage alone. Gentleman offers help and I demur each time. Ask again next year. After he has waited through the mandatory window. A long time ago my children asked that there be a year period between when I start dating someone and when that person meets the kids. They asked for that when I was still married. It’s very important to me that I earn their trust in an ongoing way so I take this request very seriously.

I have a love/hate relationship with watching time pass. I hate thinking about the fact that tomorrow Noah has been gone for eight months. I hate thinking about how long it has been since I saw my mother. I love thinking about how much time I have spent doing different things. Like, the number of hours I’ve spent with Gentleman. That’s a fun thing to muse about. We are clocking the hours needed to form attachment. We are talking about things that are hard and scary instead of ignoring them and hoping for the best. We are both earning trust. I think courting is important at the start of a relationship. I bring up as many hard things as I can. I don’t believe in a honeymoon of “hoping for the best”. I am a difficult person to mesh with. Doing so takes time and doesn’t always work.

I often wonder how often Gentleman regrets his choices when he says he truly wants an answer to a question. My answers are so weird.

Yesterday it was interesting talking about the different attitudes among California naturists. He was horrified that my children have spent time in mixed gender naked environments. I’m less worried about the naturists than I would be a member of the clergy. The naturists know they are skating on thin ice on the edge of society. They have reputations to uphold if they want to be permitted in the community. He is adamant that no right thinking person in the UK could possibly agree with my stance. It is wrong, in his view, to allow children to be around naked adults.

I contrast that with my lived experience of my children skating past body dysmorphia because they are comfortable with the full actual range of human presentation and they know that their meat sack is not what defines their importance. My kids arrived at mainstream school contemptuous of the idea they should go on a diet. How stupid. If you cut calories as a growing person you can’t build the healthy muscles and bones and brain you need. Fuck that shit. I attribute a lot of their casual approach to existing to the fact that they have seen people live thousands of ways and it is all part of the range of normal for them.

Yes, I am intrinsically unbothered by the idea that at some point my children might see you nude. As long as you don’t make it weird I don’t care that much. It’s the making it weird part that is the bad thing.

My kids negotiate boundaries better than 90% of adults. Yes, I think they know how to advocate for themselves in most different environments. We practiced. They aren’t thrown by things that bother most people. They also have meltdowns from not being able to handle things that are considered a mandatory and unavoidable part of life for other people. We avoid them. Life is ever more complex than one can nail down. There are no universal rules, none.

One of the books I just finished, The Social Distance Between Us: How Remote Politics Wrecked Britain, had some interesting bits. The author, Darren McGarvey, talked about interviewing an incredibly successful philanthropist and he noted that he struggled to be as pushy/forward as he intended to be. He was more deferential and gentle than he had intended to be. He noted his own inhibition when it comes to pushing someone of a “higher class”.

There are times when I feel this but mostly I have learned to push through it. Silicon Valley was a trip. I don’t know how I would manage someone in a UK setting where class is less about success in your career and more about who you were born. I’m going to continue to ride the wave of ignoring social hierarchy that I’ve been on most of my life. I was born to be used and abused until I die. Everything else I do is gravy. When you are born as trash you have a choice. You can comply and conform, which most humans are wired to do as instinctively as they breathe. Or you can decide that the hierarchy doesn’t apply to you and you will simply exist entirely outside of it.

I have gone with option B in this life. Noah loved that about me. I don’t conform neatly into any community or set of expectations. He also hated that about me because I couldn’t cut myself down to only what he wanted me to be. He hated that I didn’t think of myself as being better than other people. I can’t do that. Doing that is agreeing to the hierarchy and I can’t do that. I’m not better than anyone. The primary thing I do really well is not die when maybe I should.

Yeah, I’m diversely educated and I know how to do a lot of shit. Everyone else knows stuff I don’t. How can it be compared? I have no idea. I don’t really bother trying.

I play with class expectations, though. I dress up or down to fit in better. I bought a suit to wear in court and ended up not needing it. I am glad I didn’t buy an expensive one. I bought a capsule of rich bitch clothing for world travel. I hold on to the beloved, full of holes old stuff that reminds me where I come from. I make sure my big house is company ready most of the time. I want people to just drop in, and more people are doing so. I know how to do barely-there rich girl makeup and that’s it. I never mastered the art of makeup past that. I’m too lazy. Also I’m not that keen on looking in mirrors.

Which isn’t to say I ever fit in well no matter which direction I move on the slider. I don’t really fit anywhere. That’s ok. I don’t fit in well but I do know how to make a place for myself in most settings. Sort of? I’m not feeling confident lately. I’m isolated and lonely. I need to get over myself. I need to get out more. It’s hard because I’m going to run into more people who react with the same level of vehemence about my opinions being wrong as I got yesterday. He let it go and didn’t continue to press about how he now kinda considers me a low key pedo.

That is a hard thing to carry. I know in my bones what it means to grow up with a pedophile. It was my life. My children have been bubble wrapped to a shocking degree. I have literally witnessed almost their entire lives. Sometimes there were naked people around because we were in a public bathing type environment. I am fine with dying on the hill that public bathing is not inherently a sexual activity and it is not pedophilia for people to inhabit the same physical environment while nude.

But I don’t particularly want to. I understand that this is not the norm where I am right now. I don’t drive and there isn’t an appropriate place nearby. I’m not going to upend my life to seek out these opportunities going forward. Being prudish about nudity is not a morally superior attitude. That said, my house is a clothes on environment at this point. The casual attitude that Noah and many of our friends had of preferring to be naked has not crossed the pond. Here my house is a fucking fish bowl. I face a walking trail and people look in all day. If I want light from the windows I have to be fully visible to everyone who passes. We wear clothes.

I definitely feel like I have let a lot of standards slip over the past while. I notice all the places where things are needing fixed/replaced/cleaned up. In the long run my garden will be build up in height and I will have more visual privacy but it is going to take a few years. I need to learn how to do a lot of this myself because I don’t want to pay for anything I don’t have to. If I can do it then I should. I don’t have Noah breathing down my neck judging how I spend my time. Anything I could farm out so that I paid more attention to him was his preference. I have built a life here where I do so much less than I did in California. I feel like it is showing. I have fallen behind in a lot of maintenance tasks. I’m going to stay behind for at least the next ten months. I have to be realistic about the limits of my body given the shape of my life.

Until the next summer solstice. I have that long to be a mess. I don’t think I will ever have an easy time believing in the hope of the winter solstice again. I lost Noah three days later. Am I going to start losing the ability to sleep between the 21st and 25th of December because I am waiting to see who will die? That’ll suck. I hope not.

Shortie is making it very clear that one year of not celebrating is all she can handle. After that, we go back to celebrating on holidays because she needs them. I agreed that I will. She still needs to have the rest of her happy childhood after the year of sad. I don’t get to stop giving my kids a happy childhood. I still have to do that.

It’s going to be a lot harder now but we will be ok.

Yesterday was pretty great. We spent about four hours in the garden and then the kitchen. The stone fruit trees should have been pruned a month ago to prevent damage in winter storms, but it is what it is. We got it done. We also harvested 8kg of plums along with 700g of blackberries. Then we cleaned it and processed it. Blackberries became cobbler. The plums are in the fridge waiting to become jam. We will be making little gift bags of stuff we made from our harvest for holiday presents this year. That’s about as far as we are going to get with any celebration this time. Fuck. I can’t handle thinking about winter holidays.

I am overwhelmed thinking about more immediate things. I should get more organised. Maybe I’ll get work done today. Maybe.

This is harder than it used to be.

Leave a reply

I’m still feeling comfortable in the walled garden. I think it is partly because my range of topics is limited and that guide is comfortable. I’m having a hard time writing here. I am more afraid of the consequences, partly because I will weave all the different categories together.

I’m really deep in my feelings, partly because there is a lot I shouldn’t do yet. Today is day 22 post-surgery. Tomorrow is week 27 without Noah. Six months and a week.

I keep thinking about Travel Boyfriend. That is a man who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. I haven’t explained what happened here. Some day, not too far in the future, I will start cross-posting all the stuff I wrote while hiding in the walled garden. It will be intense. My apologies to the email receivers.

I will probably do statuses in batches else it would be truly unhinged. There are over 500 journal entries. A great many of them are 10+ minute reads. As always, read what you want to and skip what you don’t. Me writing is never a mandate that anyone needs to read it or respond to it.

I feel like I need to move the whole story here and I need to figure out more about making back ups. I suspect at some point I will want to wade in and steal chunks for books. They are coming. That’s probably going to be my post-kid career. I will have to figure out how to sell books. Ew.

What am I having a hard time saying here?

Noah and I were having a rocky phase because I needed to go back to being poly. I am not by nature a monogamous person. I have a lot of personality/self to go around. Absolutely no one wants all of me. Not even Noah. Noah thought he could command me to change and have me no longer have the parts he didn’t care for. I say “command” as if it was simple. We did close to 20 years of hypnosis play and NLP. We did thousands of hours of work. He tried very hard to change me to get rid of the parts he didn’t want.

I’m always going to fall in love with people. I have been hiding from that by staying home and not letting myself develop intense friendships since I moved here.

It takes around 400 hours of shared time to establish a friendship; it works best if this happens over a short time. It takes around 2 years to get into a secure bond in a relationship.

(I’m thinking about Gentleman, the man I am seeing.) To make the math easier I am going to assume 15 hours a week. Many weeks it has been more than that, a few it was less. We just passed 15 weeks. 225 hours. If I include the fact that there have been a few weeks with way extra because of helping me with surgery, 250 hours.

We very often have differences of opinions. We give each other funny looks, shrug, and move on. It is an easy relationship. He doesn’t irritate me much. Everyone irritates me.

I catch myself asking questions about how he interacted with the children of his ex’s. He has mostly dated single mothers and that has been a fraught experience in a few ways. Mostly in the sense of making him afraid to attach. That worries me a little.

I have to be honest that as I think about dating it is important to me that my children see me do so in a way that I would feel good about modeling. I need to only bring people around my children if they are good enough to be role models.

Why date? Why not just mourn?

I’m seeking sources of energy. My life takes a lot out of me. I can’t crumble into nothingness and go join the mushrooms in the forest. That option is not open to me. I have to move forward. That means I need to have energy. The big way I get a lot of energy is sex. I promise that I’ve tried a lot of other ways. Yeah, I need to do all the body maintenance stuff too like diet, exercise (I cross train like it is my job), time alone, and rest. I know.

I need the energy. I need it. I need to not feel like I am stumbling forward in a blind haze. If I stumble forward I am going to trip and fall and hurt myself. I need to step forward confidently, even when I am not confident.

So far Gentleman is willing to figure out what polyamory means. He has a shockingly open mind and easy going mannerisms. Part of me feels like I should test that in a meaningful way before he meets my kids. I say that because I know who I want to explore dating from my friend-group.

I actually told Noah a few years ago that I suspected that I would eventually want to date this exact woman. I want to get to know her better first, but she is deeply intriguing to me. I have worked with her on community stuff. I see her around. She always flirts, just a bit. It got slightly more obvious this weekend. Not overt. Not a demand. A very subtle offer.

I no longer want to pretend I don’t see these things. I don’t want to retreat and run away because that is what I am required to do. I want to show up, say yes, and see what happens. I’m going to court slow and steady. I might have a lot of vocabulary to teach. That’s fine. I’ve been training for that for my whole dang life.

There was excitement in casting a wide net for my first hunt. I can’t deny that. Coming out of it with someone I like as much as I like Gentleman makes such a wide net less attractive. Instead of putting that much energy into necessary failure I’d rather rest or talk to him.

That doesn’t mean I want to hop into monogamy and start shaping my life around him. I specifically don’t want that. I don’t want him trying to fill Noah’s shoes. That’s a really bad set up for all concerned.

I am the head of my household and that is going to stay true. I want to have good friends who are good role models for my kids. There will be a diverse array of role models because I want my kids to see that I really do believe that it takes all kinds. I’m not going out with a shopping list of “types”. That’s not my point at all.

I feel a spark with lots of people, historically. I have not allowed myself to feel this much since I moved here. I think I’m going to allow myself to flirt. I will see what happens. I don’t think I’m going to do frequent drift net fishing. And when I do, it will come with writing requirements.

Do you know part of what is hot about this woman? She’s written a lot down. I can go find out what it looks like in her brain. I like that a lot. I’m in for such a glorious ride. It’s going to be more awkward to navigate flirting because I don’t do that in front of my kids.

In order to keep it from being obvious who I am fucking I’m going to have to start spending time with a lot more people. That’s going to be fascinating to manage. It means that for all of the people I date, there will need to be a non-flirty friendship core. We will have to have a comfortable mode that involves no amount of sexual tension. I’m going to go back to acting like I did when the older kids were young. Very prudish in front of the children. No hand holding, no kissing, no longing looks. Nada. What I have been doing since I moved here.

I am going to have to grow more comfortable with that kind of dichotomy. I need to have a public face that has no sexuality involved at all. That’s going to be a change. The last 8-ish years, Noah and I were a lot more flirty and grabby and we did kiss. It felt like a reasonable thing? We always landed in no more festive than PG-13 territory.

Now that is a harder thing. My children will not see a revolving door of bodies through my bed. I was really fucked up by watching my sister cycle through terrible men. She only felt seen by people who would punch her when she was antagonistic and mean enough.

I want better patterns and trends than that. I see a woman way out in front of me. The Future Me that I’m going to be some day. That woman is one who makes Vicki proud. Noah will be proud of me too. I don’t think my parents would be proud of me. It’s ok, I have a very proud Dad in my life.

There are a lot of patterns and events in my past that I know to look for. I have seen people be poly in a lot of crappy ways. Also, good ways.

It is time to get started on the day. I want to feel less ashamed. I think that means I should be doing my talking to myself the way I used to. People who shame me for it are not good people for me to bond to. That’s ok. There are millions of reasons for people to not be compatible with me. Billions, probably. That’s ok.

I don’t need thousands of people. I don’t even need significant relationships with hundreds of people. I need dozens. This is lucky because I already have a good two or three dozen depending on how you evaluate. I need a few more because I need them to be local. I don’t need to date all of them. But I need a vibrant community.

Sobonfu told me I would never fit in anywhere–I need to build my own community. I don’t think I am going to do that in the walled garden. It means being vulnerable. I am not a fiction writer. I write because I am creating myself. I write because letting people know who I am, to as deep a degree as they choose to opt-in to, is a way of letting them know me that doesn’t involve me having to open my big fat mouth. I worry a lot about getting into one of those modes where I blurt out way more than I mean to because I am so desperate to feel connected. Writing is a way to cope with that. Writing means that I am able to be more present for just listening.

It is a way to siphon off pieces of myself so that I don’t have a bursting pressure to share them with the person in the room. I am really struggling with not having Noah to talk to about everything. It makes me wonder if there will ever again be someone who gets to see behind the curtain. It certainly isn’t the people in this house. They don’t want to read my writing. We are all very clear about that. Maybe when I die.

I’m sad and I’m scared. I’m going to like people. I’m going to spend time with them. I will always be aware of the full ocean of self I am keeping away from them with a dam I am constantly repairing. Noah didn’t like all of me and I learned ways to manage that. I will do that with more people. I will do more compartmentalising and less self-editing. I can leave parts of me out of a container. I won’t ever try to eliminate them again. I’m going to need to find ways to walk forward ethically.

I’m going to need to talk to myself. Fuck.

I need to make breakfast.

Even though I feel weird, I’m going to talk about him.

1 Reply

I have been writing about this so prolifically in the walled garden that it is weird to figure out where to start but I feel like I should. Only talking about this on a password protected site feels too close to dishonesty.

I only managed 2 months of abstinence after Noah died. I’ve only had one period of abstinence that was longer that wasn’t medically necessary since I was 16. I don’t do so hot with abstinence. It ramps up all of my mood difficulties. It makes me very physically jittery and my anxiety spikes through the roof. I don’t feel ok physically if I am not having sex more often than most people consider normal. I’ve gotten very comfortable with the language of hypersexuality for myself.

I went looking on a swinger website, which seems to be the hopping place for casual sexual encounters for the local area. A pal from the munch recommended it. One fella made it to almost three months before his personal life shifted and he can’t have sex with me anymore. I wish him and his girlfriend many happy years of monogamy now that they have gotten to that level together. I have had a few people last a handful of times but I ended things with all of them for one reason or another. There is another one I’ve seen a few times and I need to officially end it. I’m not one for ghosting. I like clear openings and endings.

There is someone approaching three months. Due to a whole cascade of events he’s actually going to be the person staying with me after my surgery on the 8th. I have to stay overnight near the hospital in case of issues. For various reasons the surgery is happening a hundred miles away from where I live. A friend is staying with me for 5.5 weeks to help with the kids. Then I have arranged local people helping with the kids after that.

I have been calling this person Gentleman because he has an incredibly proper way about him. Some of it is me misreading his accent as being more posh than it is. A lot more of it is because of the knee jerk intensity he has towards a lot of behaviours I would consider improper. He’s intensely respectful. Every time I have expected him to be unpleasant or rude or cutting he has instead startled with shock and been incredibly kind and supportive instead. He probably doesn’t think of himself as a proper gentleman by the standards of his country. He is what I was brought up to think of as a gentleman.

He has achingly polite manners a lot of the time. He is deeply considerate. He accepts things about me that I’ve had to fight over all my life. Not in a “go limp with resignation” sort of way, he accepts me calmly and without fuss. It’s just true. I feel guilty every time I assume something negative and he comes back entirely positive or neutral.

I feel safe and comfortable with him. I’m scared he is going to turn and run every time I cry. I’m not always managing to be a fun toy. He doesn’t have a lot of expectations about me. I feel bad that I flinch as much as I do. It feels unfair. I am sad every time I know I am tense because Noah would have been upset.

I love Noah and I will until the day I die. It is also true that we were both intensely traumatised people. We had massive gangrenous wounds that had to be accounted for all day every day. We were together all day every day. I see all the ways he accommodated me and I see all the ways I accommodated him. I see the ways we were fairly abusive with each other at various points in our marriage. I’m not rewriting my marriage in the rear view. I saw all of this and wrote about it as it was happening. I talked about us screaming at each other. I talked about name calling when it happened. I talked about hitting when it happened.

I am not rewriting the story. I am seeing it come to a close and I am trying to assess the physical damage I will get to live with in the cells of my body because I shaped myself around Noah in ways that were not always healthy. I loved my marriage and I would have stayed forever. I thought he was worth the cost I paid. I would have been willing to pay twice what he cost me. He was good for me in so many ways. I don’t think I would be ok right now if I hadn’t had him. Noah gave me a home.

We both wrote quite a bit over the years about how we both believed that I would not have been capable of accepting anyone less abusive. I needed who and what Noah was.

If I had known how short our timeline was I may have made some different choices. If I had known what the timeline was then I made bad choices. I didn’t though. I was planning around 30 or 40 or 50 years together. I don’t think I made bad choices considering what I expected to have to carry. I would be ok with being a lot more burnt out in trade for giving Noah a better last year of his life. 2024 sucked. There were high points but mostly it was a brutal year from start to close.

I would have made different choices if I knew that was the last time I would have with Noah. I miss him so much that I feel like I will explode with pain. It’s been five months and I wouldn’t say I feel better. I am having more positive emotions. The lows are still pretty terrible and they are happening most days.

This is part of what I am scared to share with a new partner. I cry a lot. I always have, that’s been true for 40 years. I have always had a lot of reason to cry. This feels like it wants to swamp me the way Uncle Bob’s death did but I don’t have the structure in my life to support that much going off the rails. So I am not. I’m holding my shit together. I sneak off and I cry for some time almost every day. Some days are too busy and by the end of it I am jittery like I’ve just downed a six pack of Jolt. I cry to let the stress out of my body because it is better than almost every other way of coping.

I am having big feelings about the way I am crying with Gentleman. I have cried with him a number of times now. That’s not normal for me. Usually I hide. It is not safe to cry in front of people most of the time. I hate that I mostly could not let Noah touch me when I cried because I was really overwhelmed. It didn’t feel safe. There were too many times when I was hurting very badly and he hurt me more. He wanted to be my safe person. He would work at it really hard. Then something would happen and I would make him mad and he would hurt me again. He was always really upset that I couldn’t drop the flinch response. He didn’t want me to act like he hurt me.

I didn’t want him to flinch away from me either. Sometimes he did when I was angry and my tongue ran away with me.

He was the least bad bad guy I could find and we spent decades being deeply and overwhelmingly obsessed with each other. Sure, there were issues. It’s weird calling any of it abuse because so much of it was explicitly consented to. Even though he was allowed to treat me any way he saw fit he had to live with the consequences. Even if I said I would never leave and he could do anything he wanted to me that didn’t change the fact that I flinched really hard sometimes.

He was my white trash prince with all the violence and anger that indicates. He was also one of the kindest people I’ve ever known in my whole life. With every passing year his violence towards me was more calculated and surgical. He wanted to hurt me to shape me to be more pleasing to him. I was willing to follow anywhere he lead.

I don’t think I can have a relationship with a bad guy again. I’ve had a few encounters since I started dating. A few of these men have been deeply problematic. I’m not going to recount the wild stories right now. That’s not the point.

The point of this essay is I am having a very hard time accepting the way I am sinking into this relationship with Gentleman because he is so easy to be around. Instead of flinching I keep finding that instead I am softening. I usually start crying because I am trying to communicate about somewhere that I am worried about us developing a problem. Every time he hugs me and waits for me to be done and we move forward without there being a problem.

The fact that I want to trust him as much as I do makes me wary. That feels dangerous. He would like to be more helpful to me. He’s that flavour of man. I like doing homey care taker things for him and he’d like to do pieces of them for me. So far I am flinching away because it would bring about possible contact with the kids and it is too soon. I like arbitrary time lines. Why? Because they give me structure and purpose. Because the first 9 whole months of our relationship will overlap with the first year my kids have had to live without their father.

It feels respectful to wait.

It also feels compassionate to myself to allow someone to comfort me. Of course I only want to accept that from someone I’m having sex with. Duh. That’s my way. I have always bonded to people through sex. That’s been a big pattern. My kinky friends think I am demented because I consciously and deliberately went looking for vanilla sex. I was not looking for a pervert. I don’t need to have my boundaries pushed right now. I need the gap between my boundaries and my partner’s to be vast with me far in the lead. I need it.

I need to stop looking for bad guys.

I have stopped looking for bad guys. When a couple have wandered into my life I turned them around and pushed them right back out. Instead I am picking to double down on the people who make me feel safe. If I don’t feel safe I don’t come back. It’s really weird in my body.

I felt comfortable with Noah. I felt known. I felt accepted. I felt loved. I felt adored. I felt worshiped. Sometimes I felt safe; sometimes I didn’t. He never signed on to being my protector. It was explicit. We did the best we could by one another. In most ways I still feel absolutely convinced that he was better than I deserved.

I’m listening to a lot of songs that have been big parts of my personal soundtrack through this life. The Day Before You. The First Cut is the Deepest. I feel like my brain is trying to resort every part of my memory. There is now an end to the story arc with Noah. The songs that he sang to me with passion and fondness and tenderness cut like a knife. There’s a bunch of Irish songs that fucking wreck me. Shortie keeps asking me to play them. Noah had such a beautiful voice. He sang me to sleep or read me to sleep or talked me to sleep for two decades.

If I include the time we were engaged Noah and I lived together for just under 19 years. I lived with my cat Puff for longer than 19 years. There’s my kids; we’ll see how long they stay. My current cats have been in my house for 5.5 years. My mom’s longest stretch with me was 5 years; she also had a 3 year stretch. All the foster homes were crammed into the 10 years in the middle. I had a boyfriend I lived with for 3 years. I never made it longer than 2 years in Auntie’s house and my mom was there with me. The fostering without mom never lasted longer than a month.

I’m scared. I notice this all the time. I’m pretty terrified of being vulnerable. I am going to be. I’m exhausted all the dang time lately. I do need to start being more careful with my diet again but it’s not mostly that. Mostly I’m deeply burned out and depressed and I’m swimming through an ocean of grief. We are coping but I’m not at the top of my game. A lot more than usual is falling through the cracks. I can’t be more effective or efficient. I don’t have it to give. I’m seriously operating beyond capacity every day. I feel awful. I’m disabled and I’m doing my best to be two parents. I am getting mixed results shall I say.

I don’t feel like I have a choice. I’m aware of all the things I’m not getting done that other people manage. I feel like a loser pretty much every minute. I’m exhausted all the forking time. I feel like I don’t have a brain. I have started avoiding phone calls like they are electrical shocks.

I feel guilty for trying to construct a self that will move forward. I feel guilty because I feel like I am abandoning Noah. I’m not. I’m acting like the internet: I am routing around damage to keep going. I don’t get to stop. Maybe not ever. I am going to have to slow down a lot. I have less to give without Noah coping with all the awful parts of adulting. It’s funny because he thought I coped with the awful parts of adulting for him.

We’ve been doing a lot of talking in my house about the difference between codependence and conscious interdependence.

We’ve been doing a lot of talking in general. All of us are struggling without Noah around to talk at for hours a day. We have spent so much time together as a family and every single day is a reminder that our future looks nothing like our past. It’s really weird when I notice somewhere that I am not being difficult or blowing up in a way I commonly would because I’m not reacting to Noah. I’m not trying to head something off before it bugs him. I’m not trying to manage my emotional range for his benefit.

I didn’t expect that losing Noah means I get to soften. I don’t have to be defensive of the things he wants me to be defensive of. I can relax and not look to him to see how I’m allowed to feel. Our rhetoric was that he was watching me. I watched him too. A lot of the way he learned to control his affect and mannerism was because he was trying to not trigger me. I did the same kind of thing but it didn’t make me softer and kinder. It made me sad and wounded. I don’t want to feel like I am healing from Noah but in some ways I clearly am.

He is very much the best relationship of my life. There were still very hard parts. I’m not sure what my future looks like but it’s not going to look like my past. I won’t be going back to the day before Noah. I am not who I was. I like being Krissy Gibbs so much more than I ever liked being Krissy Archer. I am looking forward to when I will have been Krissy Gibbs longer. 6 years and 3 months to go. I’m so sad Noah won’t be with me.

I would not have accomplished 1/4 of what I did without him. He was always able to believe in me when I couldn’t believe in myself. Including believing that if he insisted hard enough I would somehow become monogamous in my spirit. There is no way to count the hundreds of hours we spent doing hypnosis and NLP actively trying to get me to only think of Noah.

This is how I know I am not a computer. I cannot be programmed. I cannot conform no matter how much I would like to. I am different. I would like to be able to comply and make people happen but I don’t have it to give. I’m feeling really bad about that lately. “Lately”. I have always felt bad about this. At this point I suspect that most of the disappointment for my failure to be shaped like cookie dough is only in my head. Other folks are fairly cheerful about taking me as they find me.

Other people do not look at me the way Noah did. They don’t look at me and see so much potential, if only I would stop doing _______________. For years I have struggled with how much I felt like I had to be the motor for all of us. I had to push people to get up and start chores and fucking leave the house sometimes. Noah was a cave troll. His children enjoy being such as well.

I feel like my motor has come to a stop. For a while I was hunting for sex and that gave me a huge boost of energy. Now I’m too weary to muster the energy to go end things with the last one I added. I am struggling with finding the unmitigated good from the sex with Gentleman because I am so anxious about fucking everything up. It’s pretty ridiculous of me, yet also predictable. He’s really happy to spend time with me. He takes all the opportunities he gets. He would like more. I don’t need to feel anxious. It’s silly. I’m being silly. I’m the one holding the brakes and I’m doing it for really good reasons. I’m doing it to create a safe container for my children to mourn in.

Noah was such a good father. It is going to be important for me to keep my mouth shut about the ways I’m processing Noah as a mixed figure in my life. They need Saint Noah and I need to let them have him that way. I also need to acknowledge for myself that he was a human. He was a human I loved with my whole soul. I would have stayed forever. I was comfortable with the ways we hurt each other. It was home. It was the safest home I have ever had. It was the home in which we both felt the most loved we ever felt in our lives. We were broken together and I’m not sorry.

Noah took in a feral stray and turned me into a pampered and well tended pet. He made me believe I don’t deserve to suffer the maximum amount every day of my life. That counts for a lot. Maybe someday I will even forgive myself for not being monogamous. I’m not. It’s not in my nature.

Maybe someday I will have a life in which I don’t feel like being this thing is the reason that I am irredeemably bad.

Maybe someday.

Finding my way back to me

6 Replies

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 isn’t fair

Leave a reply

It’s not a stretch to say that my mother in law and I didn’t get along well for the first 15 years of my marriage. At that point she decided I was staying and our relationship transformed to a large degree. She’s been very nice and accepting over the past nearly 4 years. I suspect part of that had to do with me supporting her through her mother’s end of life stuff. Her mother was a hard woman.

Since Noah died I have been talking with MIL a lot more often. When I want to feel that moment of shared pride in my spawn, she is the only person who feels available for sharing it with. I used to not send her an email a month. Now I send one or more most weeks, just sharing a picture of the kids.

She is due to go into surgery a few days after me. Her surgery is much more difficult and mandatory for survival. I’m worried. There’s nothing I can do to help. I’m talking to her more. I’m sharing more of myself and my life and my kids. Maybe it will be incentive. I don’t know though. I’m not feeling particularly able to keep people alive right now.

I’m scared to get to close to anyone because I feel like it will be my fault they die. I am so bad that I deserve to be alone and anyone who gets close to me will get lost in that mess. I’m not actually this powerful but paranoia doesn’t care about reality or logic. It feels true.

I wake up almost every morning and cry because he’s not there with me. I’ll be honest and say that the overnights I’ve had don’t have as much crying. That’s part of what I like about them. I get to have the experience of looking towards the future instead of crying about the past. I can’t change the past. Maybe I can change the future? Will I be responsible for a lot more deaths? I’m not over my brother or my dad. If I could endure more pain maybe they wouldn’t be dead. I know that Noah died from a freak accident but it feels like my fault. If he hadn’t wanted to come with me to help me feel better, he might still be alive. I don’t think that will feel easier anytime soon.

I feel so much shame. I failed to protect Noah. I feel like I don’t deserve to ever have a real relationship again. I am not good enough at looking after people. This feeling is making my day job really complicated.

My children take up the vast majority of my life and I’m not feeling like I am good enough, strong enough to take care of them. This hurts so much. I need Noah. I need him to be the backstop. I didn’t fuck up a lot but when I did he was there to prevent it from going too far. What am I going to do now? Just be perfect? I don’t think that is in the cards. I am so very far from perfect.

Yesterday was a good day though. The kids and I spent the day going through house stuff working towards a purge. We own too much. We cannot take care of it all. A lot of it has to go. We managed to do it without being super upset. We have a long way to go before our house is manageable though. Now we have 27 days till my surgery. We need to get a lot of this done so that maintaining the house is easier when I am incapacitated.

I have to make the future easier.

Mostly I am gobsmacked because my income (thanks to Social Security) is about the same as it was as a teacher before I married Noah. Time stopped for me in an uncanny way.

Past me deserves 9,000 gold stars for saying no to all the friends who invited us on expensive holidays or who wanted us to get a reverse mortgage so we could own a much larger house. I made financial choices that will keep me safe for the rest of my life. This is something I learned by watching my mother fail to do it. You have to pay Future You first.

Noah wanted me to play lottery tickets with him (metaphorically) to try and get rich. We did a round of Angel investing with Paul Graham’s company. I told Noah that the guys he wanted to support would not last 6 months. They were sloppy, unmotivated, and had a crappy idea but he insisted he trusted them. I was right. We lost that money. He let me handle investing the rest. I did well. Looking at the long term money freaks me out. I need a bridge over the next 20 years. 10 will be covered by Social Security. Then I get to levitate for a while. I think it’ll be ok.

I think I will save so well that it won’t be a problem. It’s time to teach my kids how to live like we won’t have money for a good long while. I know how. I’ve done it before and I can do it again. It will be good life skills. Life below your means. Scrimp. Save. Do without wherever reasonable. We have plenty of stuff for the next few years.

Time to hold my breath and see if I can turn this one year of savings into ten over the next ten years. That’s not so hard. I can do that. Just take a little off the top every month.

It’s not so hard when you have the privilege of earning enough to cover your bills plus having discretionary funds. I used to skip eating to do this and I will never be in that position again. I will never have to skimp on food again.

That’s what being rich means to me. It means I don’t have to worry how much food costs. I just buy it. It feels scandalous and cheeky.

I get overnights because Aunt Jenny is taking Shortie one night a month. The older kids ignore me in the evenings anyway. They are online talking to folks. So I go out. Of course I’m seeing more than one person. That will be true for the rest of my life. My kids aren’t going to meet people quickly. I have a horror of that dynamic.

I’m going to be shy for a while before I get around to writing about my love life with great explicitness in this space. It’s feeling scary. I’m already going full speed elsewhere. Here it feels scary in a different way. Not everyone here is a giant weirdo who would love to opt in to explicit details about my sex life.

The last few years have been a wild ride of self discovery inside my marriage, outside my marriage, and now in this post-marriage time. I have never been one to sit in stasis. I am meant to grow wildly in all directions. I am meant to explode with energy. This has been true for my whole life. This is a thing that people have commented on explicitly for my whole life. Now I need to figure out how to manage that without Noah shaping and directing my growth.

I’m pretty scared.

In the past few days my son said, “I always thought we were your epilogue. Now I see that we were your intermission.”

Whoa.

Noah’s goal and plan was for all of us to be alone in this house together as much as humanly possible forever. He liked the Pod. We all liked the Pod. We have so much acceptance and love and support inside of it. We take care of each other. We are careful with our words and gestures and physical movements and expressions of anger. We know that we will deal forever with the consequences of strife within the Pod. We have all created this bubble together and people coming into it are a big deal. We treat that like a whole family negotiation.

That’s going to be complicated going forward.

Things are going to be a lot more complicated going forward.

Things are going to be a lot simpler going forward. An awful lot of everything revolved around Noah. We stayed home as much as we did because he wanted all of us to do that. He wanted to be at home and he wanted us with him so he wanted us at home. It was striking. He genuinely wanted us around existing all the time. We validated and motivated him. His life was a shrine of us. It has been fascinating living in a family this deeply enmeshed and wrapped about each other. This was not something I had background training for. This ended up being a whole different thing than I had planned for a bunch of reasons.

Home educating continues. We are starting to get back up to speed on doing academics regularly at the table. We are always learning but sometimes we can do it in ways that produce tangible results and sometimes we just learn for the sake of learning for a while. It requires a balance to live in the world. We are drifting through our grief. We talk about it a lot. We are not bottling up our feelings. We cry together. We are all writing separately.

I wonder a lot about their futures. They have a tremendous number of skills and talents and they are broadly and diversely educated but they are not going to fit in to a world of checklists. Their lives have been constructed around their individual needs and the absolute limits of what I am capable of providing. It is fascinating, now, to look at the work I see ahead of me with my youngest. My older two are settling into their own stuff and don’t need much of any input from me. All of my plans for this stage with our daughter revolves around Noah and his needs and his limits.

Balancing a house of five autistic people with weird limits and needs is a lot of fun. It is dancing on the head of a greased pin. You will fail to perfectly accommodate everyone and that is the lesson in that moment. That’s when I get to talk about distress tolerance. That’s when I talk about how to be in control of your nervous system even when you can’t control your environment. That’s when I talk about putting on a mask for social safety. Smile. Appear pleasant and non-threatening. Be curious. Put all of your panic and stomach pain in a box and put it in a closet in the back of your mind. We’ll deal with it later.

We do, in fact, come back together to deal with it. It’s so real. Compartmentalisation is a motherfucker.

I feel a lot of guilt, sometimes, because I am training my children in how to mask. I’ve been told it is similar to ABA therapy. I do know that I am a behaviourist. I actively teach and practice DBT. This is relationship oriented therapy. It is exposure therapy in a non-clinically valid method.

The main way I train my children is to take them on long journeys through many different cultures and settings and I help them learn how to evaluate what they see. What clues exist for how to behave? What patterns do you see? Does one group of people walk a lot faster? Why do you think that might happen? How do people manage walking through crowds? What can you guess about the cultural values based on these actions? What do you think they mean?

We do some searching on the internet to see if any of our guesses were close to correct. Sometimes we pat ourselves on the back for being able to easily spot something that is a major culturally point of pride. Yes. It really is clear.

My son told me that he describes our family as being full of autistic people for whom “social interactions” is our main special interest. I hadn’t thought of it that way but he’s right. We read books and watch shows because we want to talk about the social interactions. We want more representations in our brains. And we analyse what is happening in our own lives over the dinner table. We don’t grill people whether they like it or not. We all like sharing.

“So I was having this chat with someone and I said, _____.”

We then talk it out. “Ah, did you consider the thing from the angle of someone who is (list of various demographic markers)?”

“Oh. Shit. No.”

I love my house so much. We don’t put people down much but we do question everything. We are nosy and invasive and simply present.

It’s fascinating watching the teenagers start to develop their own sense of “What happens off screen is no one else’s business.” People are only entitled to know the things about you that you choose to share when you are in a room together.

Wow. What is up with all this drivel that comes out of my fingertips then? What is up with the whole darn internet? I choose to offer the world cheat sheets. I am a deeply complex person and if I don’t write about it I will never have the ability to share all of it in another form. I would only be able to share in sound bites of sanitised nothing. I do not want that in this life.

I am not an easy person to know but I want to be known. I have always wanted to be known. Being known is what has lead to increasing levels of safety for me in this life. I am a weird motherfucker. I also work hard to give more than I take. I try to conform in the ways I must. I am trying.

I am also a person who has been let out of a cage. I loved my husband and I would have born the price of staying married but I was not made to be monogamous. It was a point of enormous strife between us even when I wasn’t doing anything with anyone. It made him feel abandoned and betrayed.

I have no idea what the future is going to bring. I am betting on more growth and more change. I won’t always like it. A lot of it is going to hurt. That’s ok. I was never promised an easy life and I do not expect to have one. I am going to have a better life than the one I was brought up to expect. I am going to have integrity and honesty that did not exist in that set and setting.

Every individual family has their own vibe. Their own levels of awareness around sex and sexuality. I am struggling with the fact that my levels in California depended on their being enough ambient sex positive, sexuality displays that I could have a lot of theoretical discussions. My sex life never had to come up. Here I am going to be the first example of poly that my daughter really groks. This alarms me. That’s a lot of pressure for figuring out what “sharing information respectfully” means. It will be fine. I’ll navigate this like everything else. We are already the weirdos for a lot of reasons. It’s not going to make that big of a difference in the long run.

It feels like a life affirming thing to do at this stage. I am trying to build deeper connections than I am going to be able to access from my local friends. Boundaries are complicated things. Life is long and I would not be surprised if Noah is not the only partner I watch die. That’s scary. I’m only 43. I might have that happen again. Life isn’t fair. I’m going to experience a lot more loss. It’s really scary. I hate going under general anesthesia. It’s really scary.

And for the first time in 18 years, Noah won’t be the person who takes care of me. He was not good in the emergency crunch moments but he was awesome at babying me during recovery. Well, he got awesome because he did not like watching me crawl around the house doing the chores he hadn’t gotten to.

This time I am doing a big purge of stuff before surgery. I need to have less work to do. I need to have the ability to not fight with my baby over stupid stuff. I need to create a “Yes” environment. It will make a lot of things less stressful for a lot of people. We’ve had too much for a while. It’s time to do it differently.

Do you own your stuff or does your stuff own you? How much do you really need? I’m thinking on this really hard. I keep wanting to say “we” as if the kids somehow share responsibility but no I have too much stuff. Because I now own everything that was Noah’s. I’m having a lot of feelings about that. But it’s really past time to start the day.

Time to come out.

2 Replies

It hasn’t been five months yet. I’m dating. I’ve been writing about my hypersexuality for a long time. For the past few years I’ve been doing so in a hidden way. I have been giving in to the idea that I should be ashamed and hide what I’m doing. That’s poisonous.

I’m seeing people. I have needs. I’m meeting them. I’m doing so with a crazy quilt of experiences and situations. I’m being careful about not taking much time away from the kids. There is less babysitting happening now than before Noah died so I am not pushing my luck real hard.

I have rules. If someone is in my house to help with the kids they are strictly off limits. I won’t let anyone I shag meet my kids for at least a year; not until I am certain it will turn into a real relationship. There are a long list of reasons that someone will never meet my kids. If I don’t think someone has compatible values it is simply a non-starter. I understand that most of the people I meet are not going to have extensive background information on the many ways my children and I are weird. I will have to be patient as I explain all of our quirks. That is why it will be a very slow process.

I need to be careful. I don’t know how the future is going to happen. It’s scary to think about. I am going to try to navigate a path forward that is respectful to all concerned. I won’t walk a road that resembles the one that other people follow. It needs to be ok. I can’t live like other people. I haven’t had the training.

I don’t feel ready for this.

Leave a reply

I feel like I stopped being an adult when I got married. I feel like I was overly parentified as a child and then I barely survived for 7 years as a quasi-adult. Then I turned over a lot of the adulting to Noah. He was our public face in a lot of ways. He did all the hard parts. I may live here forever on Leave to Remain because taking the next step is probably beyond me. He was the adult.

As I look at the future I understand that paying other people to grown up for me is expensive and I don’t have an actual income. I am not a brilliant writer who can suddenly come up with a new book that will change lives and motivate people to be kinder in a whole industry. I am a useless person. I wanted to say bitch. I’m not really a bitch anymore, though. Well, maybe with special people.

I think the list of people I will go off on can be counted on my fingers and none of them live in this country. I don’t think I have been a bitch in my Scottish time.

Who knows what glory the future might bring? I’m going to be scared. That means I will be more reactive and tense and anxious. The whole time I have lived here I have stayed home when my anxiety was high. I hide. I let Noah be the grown up. I let him do the hard things. As my disability level has increased he has done ever more. He really was taking care of me.

I took care of him, too. His body was frail. It had a lot of surgeries and illnesses. When he went down he went down hard for weeks or months. We cooked for each other. I gave him a lot of foot care because he had a weird skin condition.

At some point when we had tiny babies I mildly observed that I looked forward to the future when I would have the time to properly care for his gross feet. He scoffed at me. He laughed. He said he knew that would never happen.

I am really glad I did that for the last 8 years. I am so grateful it has been this long. I started doing it in the new bathroom in California. It was lovely. It was a way to pay attention to him when I was pregnant and sex was awful. In so many ways, our third child has been placed to the side so I can spend more time with Noah. She has never been the centre of my world. Noah has been home her whole life. My life revolved around Noah. I spend time with her. I have a good relationship with her. Noah replaced a lot of my time with her so that I could do independent things. He was more involved with this child. The one that he decided to have because I was getting too uppity. The one that meant our house there was going to be too small in the long run.

Oh this was a fantastic house for lock down. I’m just saying. For a bunch of sensory sensitive autistics lock down wasn’t all bad. Noah was around 24/7. He functioned as a working mother. He was involved in meal making and cleaning and parenting and schooling. I’ve been treating this like a period of time where I was training Noah, MC, and EC to work with me as a semi-commercial kitchen. The times we all got together and really worked we have created magic. It was wonderful. Those were amazing feasts. We love food.

Noah taught me how to eat. He did so much work to broaden and expand my diet. He inventively prepared any weird vegetable I brought into the house. If I didn’t like how it came out, he would research how to fix the problem. I just had to go back and correct verb tense over and over. Now I can’t see because of crying. It’s fine. Noah always loved that I can type without looking at the keyboard. That was his favourite form of flirting. He would make his eyes all smouldery in an ostentatious way. He was never going to let me pretend there was any amount of subtlety to his approach.

Two years ago in my journal I wrote, “The ceilidh was so very fun! I had a lovely time. Today I ran 5.5 miles, biked 5 miles, and danced for hours. I feel fit and strong and free.”

If I could turn back time I would.

Noah, I miss you so much. This is going to suck really hard. But you made sure I will never be desperately poor again. You made sure I have resources to use as I recover. You made sure I have people who love me in my house for the next few decades if not forever. We’ll see. You helped me be a parent they can respect and love. Noah I am so grateful for you. You made me feel like I am indispensable instead of trash. You made me feel valuable and smart and funny and wise.

I spend a lot of time feeling really stupid because I struggle to follow kinds of nuance or jumps in conversation. I don’t have the same context as other people. It is hard for me to understand how other people see the world. It’s a lot of why my pattern matching skills have been such a focus over my life. I’m trying to figure out how and where I can understand things that people are saying based on patterns from my life. I’m lucky that I have a whole lot of different times and periods and people to think about when it comes to understanding behaviour. I just don’t always understand the connection between what I am hearing/seeing compared to what I already know. Noah would translate for me. I was so much smarter when Noah was in the room. Frankly, he was too. He wanted the same translation from me but for different things.

I think of the ballroom dance lessons we took together. He really loved that I interrupted the instructor and gave the teacher really explicit feedback on how to talk about Noah. “No. You cannot say ‘Feel the music’ to him because he will get angry and shut down his ability to listen. Never ever say that to him.” I shielded him in his tender places too. I was happy to be the one who handled being the authority on what happened to all of the bodies in our house medically, including his. I went with him to appointments and he would look to me to answer questions. He didn’t know what was going on with him. He hadn’t been paying attention. I did though. I knew him like he was my obsessive fandom.

I feel guilty for this, but I’ve read through his old letters and emails and daily reports and conversations with friends in DMs. I’m a horrible person. I have always wanted to consume him whole. I wanted everything in his brain to be in my brain. It’s really fucking cool getting this context from other relationships. I’m seeing things I couldn’t 43 days ago because I was giving him privacy so I lacked context. Now I feel sad that I didn’t do more of this before he died. I could have been a better wife.

It is humbling seeing him describe our problem periods to other people. I am so glad he had these people in his life for support. That is wonderful. He had really good friends who strongly advocated in his defense. That makes my heart feel less pain for a moment because I see the ways he was getting what he needed even though I wasn’t giving it to him. He was being seen. I am glad. I wanted him to be seen. I didn’t want him to be all mine. I wanted to share him broadly and diversely with the world because he was so cool he could change peoples lives.

He wanted me to be a cave troll with him. He wanted me to only look at him and he would only look at me. I see how my push for poly was forcing him to come to grips with things from his past that were not about me and I am trying to forgive myself for making him go through that. It’s hollow comfort now to say “It was for his own good.” Was it? I don’t know. We never actually dated anyone. There was the rape. Otherwise we had 8 years of monogamy. He wanted it to be for the rest of our lives.

I feel really really bad about being me. I don’t know if I would have been naturally monogamous without all the rapes but my body is obnoxious. I like people. I like them more than Noah wanted me to like them. It made him sad.

If I could have made a deal with the devil: monogamy or Noah dies I would have picked monogamy. I didn’t know. I didn’t know.

If I could trade my life for his I would.

I can’t. I can’t get him back and it hurts so much. I know what loss feels like. I know I will keep moving. My life is going to be really small though. I can’t sustain a big life without Noah. I am a fraction of a person. I am not who I was. I have no idea who I will grow to be but I will never take up as much space as I did when I was Noah’s wife. I never wanted that much anyway. The trajectory of our life freaked me the fuck out. I had a hard time in Noah’s circles. I had a hard time with Noah’s friends. I felt less than them and that’s complicated. Less educated, less intelligent, less motivated, less driven, less talented, less competent, less capable, less able, less worthy of respect.

It’s why I had to get out of the Valley. It was increasingly overwhelmed with people who were newly arrived and convinced of their superiority. Part of it is my bullshit. Part of it is that tech people are quite often fucking dickheads. I don’t see that being true here–people here who do tech stuff are paid like normal people so they aren’t arrogant fucks. Well, there are arrogant people here. It’s just different. The social culture is so different I really don’t understand what is going on most of the time.

I want to follow Scottish people around and see what their lives look like from the inside because I have no feckin clue.

Today is a climbing day. That will be good. We can all use the exercise. The future is coming whether we want it to or not. We have to be ready.

I want to stay in Inverness. I am scared here, but I am not as scared as I would be in the US. Scale is a very important thing. I am grateful to be in a place with gun control laws. It’s not that there are no guns. There are guns. People shoot. I know people who own and sell guns. But they are sane. They are tracked. If they engage in any antisocial behaviour they entirely lose the right to own the guns. People who have gun licenses are tracked by their car license plate and they are stopped randomly sometimes to make sure they are following every rule to the letter. If they aren’t, bam there goes their gun license. You have to be a model citizen to have the right to own a gun.

I can live with this.

I am afraid of violence because my life has been violent. I have to admit that the amount of violence I’ve experienced here has not been nearly so bad as what happened in the States. Life is not perfect anywhere. I pick this. I pick here.

My bloodline ran West until they reached the far side of the North American continent. They started in the original colonies. 3/4 of my grandparents have ancestry that arrived in first 20 years of North American settlement by British Isles folk. My people were then in California for a while. Not the 8 generations my mother claimed. We were not people who settled and put down roots very well. The way my people jumped then jumped then jumped again speaks to them not thriving in the places they picked. I have to wonder about that.

I want to thrive. I don’t want to barely survive. I am going to struggle with my guilt around that. I definitely have a piece of me that is struggling with how disloyal I will feel as I take step towards embracing being alive. He needs me to go on for the kids. I can’t do that if I feel I must demonstrate frozen horror out of loyalty.

People come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime and you don’t know which until you die. What fucking bitter words those are now. I wanted him for my whole life. We don’t get to choose. Life decides for us. I loved Noah. I will always love Noah. I owe him continuing. I have children to lead. I can’t do that if I am wallowing in my pain. I have to stuff that pain into a backpack I carry around with me. I can let it out in brief moments to gasp and sob and curl around the core of myself. Then I’ll nod and put it back in the pack and I’ll keep fucking moving. I don’t really have a choice. I have less choice now than ever before.

My survival has gone from “optimal” to “mandatory”. Now Mama wants to talk. That’s nice.

I choose me.

Leave a reply

Ok. My buddy Dave said I need to stop thinking about what happens to me as defining who I am and I need to write my own story. Fine. Be that way.

I have a habit of seeing potential in people. I make them feel inspired. I make them feel like they can go do wonderful things because they are so great. This is complicated because most of us don’t live up to our potential. Potential doesn’t mean you actually have the drive or skills to make something a reality. It means that if you have drive to learn the skills necessary you can make it a reality. Some people can’t make some things happen even with drive and skill. I could not be a professional stunt woman. My body can’t do that. I’m not sturdy enough. I lack the potential outside of whether or not I have the drive or skill.

Over the years I have invited several people into my life who had great potential and very little drive. They all kind of wanted me to be the motor behind them pushing them through. It’s a really unpleasant position for me to be in for my friends. It is hard enough as a mother.

I’ve been floating between fury and incandescent rage and deep abandonment for days. I cannot trust people who over promise and under deliver. That is a relationship deal breaker for me. It is too reminiscent of my family of origin. Someone wants credit for promising to do something even though they don’t do it. Like my sister claiming in mediation a decade later that she had been a huge supporter when I prosecuted our father. No you fucking did not. You iced me out. You told me it was my fault my brother died and my fault my father died. You refused to speak to me for months after raging at me.

Don’t fucking tell me that you are providing support when you aren’t.

With the fuck off letter from the NHS yesterday I am feeling incredibly vulnerable, weak, abandoned, and dehumanised.

Also, yesterday was the day when TB finally decided that he doesn’t want the possibility of sex to exist between us at all. He decided that 9 days after the cut off date for me paying for a rental house. I’m on the hook for a £500 romantic get away even though the person who invited me on it now is treating me in ways I don’t appreciate.

I went back through the handful of things he has actually been willing to commit to writing in the past seven months. He pushed me to invest in him really hard. He has wanted an avalanche of support. Do you know what he said to me after the rape and aftermath? That he was really disappointed that he wasn’t the next person to kiss me.

Fucking awesome.

He hasn’t been a source of support for me. Instead I went through chat logs and video call timing history and I have been leaning on 16 different friends (including Noah) to the tune of hundreds of hours of support in order to figure out how to cope with how TB has been acting.

Do you know what I don’t fucking need in my life? Someone who treats me shabbily enough that I need more than a dozen people providing support. That’s bad. It’s unsustainable. Between the time I spent processing with other people and the the time I spent giving him support… that’s all time away from focusing on my kids.

I didn’t participate in planting anything this year because I spent all of my gardening time talking to TB. What a fucking waste of my time.

I made him a man and now he wants to go off and spread his seed because he feels like someone will find him hot and want him. Wow. I’m sitting over here being a raging cunt and judging every aspect of his life choices and finding him deeply wanting in terms of a potential co-parent to an infant.

He’s never bothered to learn the language of the country he moved to in five years. Despite having a huge number of housemates he has no significant savings and no retirement. He thinks he’ll have to work until he drops dead. It’s a lot harder to earn enough money for the strain of kids that late in a career. His position in the country he is in is not stable. If he produces a child there, it is possible he will have to leave the child behind and go back to the US because he can’t stay. It is going to be fucking pathetic if he has to go try to learn German somewhere else so that he can get back to being with his family.

He’s almost 44 and he’s just starting to look for a partner. That means his vetting process is going to be sloppy and rushed because he is pressed for time. He is very likely to at best get to a point where it is appropriate to have a child with someone by 46-48. He won’t be one of the dads at high school graduation; he will be grandpa. He won’t be supporting his kids through their transition to adulthood; he will be needing them to provide his elderly care because he doesn’t have the fucking money for a home.

Someone choosing that turns my stomach. I judge. Something he doesn’t seem to understand is that I have very different metrics in my head for how I judge parents and how I judge non-parents. He went from me judging him according to a very liberal “Well if you are happy that’s good enough” standard to “Are you thinking about the well being of your dependents before your own happiness?” He’s not.

Frankly I also judge the digital nomad movement and fucking Americans traveling constantly all over the globe amassing massive frequent flier miles and pricing locals out of being able to afford to live in their traditional homes. The life he has lead over the past 20 years isn’t one I have a ton of respect for when I look at it as his “I am preparing to be a parent” period of life.

His entitlement is what I left California to get away from. Why in the fuck am I allowing this to be such a big part of my life? Because I care too fucking much about old friends from the old days. I’m a loyal bitch.

I don’t think I am loyal enough though. I think he has burned through the credit he had deposited in the Bank of TB & Krissy. He took and took and took until I have nothing left to give him. He used me up by never giving anything back. He has not been acting like my friend. He doesn’t help me with anything. He always offers to distract me with stories about himself. He sends me stupid emojis to tell me he is thinking of me. He likes to send “poke”. It gives him a little dopamine hit.

I’m not a fucking video game.

I’m fucking mad. But I think that this anger is healthy and good. My boundaries are being tramped into the mud. I can fix that. I will end this relationship. I will choose to put the energy that I have been giving to him back into Noah, my garden, my kids, and myself.

I’d rather spend my time talking to my supportive friends about myself instead of stupid fucking TB.

Click bait says, “Are you scared of saying the wrong thing?”

Leave a reply

Yes, yes I am. Thanks for asking. No I don’t want to hear your advice asshole. I was told that if I talk about my history of abuse I am just as bad as the people who did it to me. I’m scared of saying the wrong thing because apparently I’ve been even more bad than I thought. I’ve been bad since year 5 of my marriage. That’s a bitter pill to swallow. That’s the last time I acted right.

I can barely remember 2011. Apparently since then I’ve changed for the worse and I don’t know how to go back.

My lack of crystal ball is really compromising my ability to be a human being who isn’t a shit stain. I don’t predict myself all that well. I don’t predict what feelings or reactions I will have to people. That means I am bad.

I thought the goal was for me to change over time but apparently now that change means that I am doing a lot of very bad things. I don’t perceive any sign that any part of who I am is good enough. Noah is going to chirp up, “Me too!” Yeah I know. Which is why us doing this is stupid. We make each other feel like shit. The fact that I am not an untraumatised naturally monogamous person is deeply traumatising to you. My existence is a threat and I can’t undo it.

No, I can’t predict in advance where and when I’m going to feel attraction in advance to give you a warning every time. No, I can’t. I am a fucking piece of shit with a broken fucking crystal ball. What I remember about the stupid middle school teacher guy was that after that I was never to ask for any kind of contact or play or even kiss a friend ever again. That’s what I remember. So if you think I did that right and it was treated as me doing a good thing it resulted in the cessation of my right to ever be not monogamous again. I wonder why following that playbook exactly is not that fucking automatically appealing. The thing that locked down our marriage forever is not my boiler plate for opening it up.

Fucking shocking.

I feel like I might spit in your face the next time you say “Being with me is just like death.” Do you really want to keep writing that fucking spell? You are creating your future with your fucking words.

So am I, I know.

I think I am going to have to avoid other people like they have contagious diseases because anything else is me being disloyal. Because yes I will feel attracted to people. I will. I am a disgusting baseless whore. If you want me fucking *you* and getting off then yeah I have to be allowed to just have fucking natural desire in my body. Or you can have a set of holes that doesn’t experience any feelings. Because that is the result of not being allowed to have feelings except under very controlled and specific circumstances. Have you seen the last 13 years? I haven’t wanted a lot of sex when I feel like I am being watched for any sign that I am being disrespectful by feeling desire I should not be feeling. Better to not feel any desire at all.

It feels so extreme and binary and impossible to get out of this all or nothing state. It feels impossible to get to a place where you are not treating me with dripping contempt constantly.

You want your life to be a scratched record, a Groundhog Day of the same thing over and over until you die. You will have your odd night out chatting with the vaguely tech oriented people here and otherwise you are fine with pacing the house doing chores and playing piano and reading. You barely believe you need to leave the house for exercise–It took over a decade of pushing and being annoying about it.

Apparently my track record over the past 13 years of being a parent is such that my family, not even just Noah, thinks I am barely restrained from going and hopping on a bunch of anonymous dicks. It sure is nice being a respected person. I mean, I hear from people who are respected. I wouldn’t know. I feel incredibly degraded, disliked, and disrespected. Because yup, that’s what I do all my time. I go get laid.

Yup.

It’s getting harder to keep going in this Feri book. I remember why I put it down last time. I am not allowed to have a relationship with sex that is about myself. No. That is a lie. I cannot pretend to follow a path that requires me to be a human being with autonomy and self actualisation when it comes to their personal sex life. That’s a fucking lie. I don’t have it and I will never have it.

“Fine, you mean you want no rules.”

I mean it doesn’t matter what you say at this point I’m not the only one who can’t tell the truth to save my life. You say one thing one day and contradict yourself the next. You flip flop and set traps so you can berate me again. This isn’t fun playing. This is fucking abusive. I am not allowed to want anything. It’s like my physical objects: I’m not allowed to care about stuff. I need to expect that it will be taken from me and potentially destroyed or just removed. I need to not take a sense of comfort or joy from anything.

I counted out on the calendar all the 30 day blocks up till 500 days after I notified the police. That’s the median length of time such a case takes moving to verdict from reporting. I shouldn’t really be making plans in that time because I don’t have a lot of control over what I will be required to do or when. And looking at the bank balance that is going to be what we get to live on for as long as I can stretch it… I shouldn’t make plans anyway.

We will sit here. No, Noah, being with you isn’t like death. In death I won’t be in pain any more. I won’t hurt myself by wanting things. I won’t be bad anymore. No, being married to you is not like death.

You tell these elaborate annoying stories about how much I clearly dislike you. Well I fucking clearly dislike how you are god damn acting. I have deleted a lot of name calling in this one.

I have gone to great effort to create a life that revolves around you. I want your time more than I want more money. I do my best to offer up services that you turn down constantly because you’d rather I not wear out my body. It all leaves me feeling like there isn’t a lot of point in me even trying to serve you. You don’t want it. You reject it on a regular basis. The thing I am actually getting from spending more time with you is an increase in suspicion and controlling behaviour. It’s sucking.

I feel less and less like a cherished part of anything. I feel like an unfortunate obligation that you got stuck with. You tell me that you love me and you show me by devaluing everything I do and who I am.

This is not just my depression twisting everything you say and fuck you if you try to pull that bullshit with me.

If my life is not small enough then I am in a lot of trouble because I genuinely believe that less human contact would be psychologically damaging to our children. If I have to have less then they need to go to school because even being hit is better than literally being stuck with me on a permanent lock down. That’s not ok. That’s fucked up for them. It will damage them. I don’t have it in me to be a fun performing pony 24/7 to make up for all the other relationships.

You did help me out in the garden today for an hour. That was nice. I’m not saying you do nothing nice. You do a lot of nice.

You also let me know that for the vast majority of our marriage you have had a very low opinion of me. I got 5 years of high opinion and its been down hill since then. Well that’s a fucking awesome thing to know.

And these days I don’t perform rape victim well enough so that’s the cherry on top of the I do not deserve any trust or respect ever again for the rest of my life. The hope of being someone who is worthy is gone. 13 fucking years. I am one of those women. I am held in deep contempt and distrusted and devalued but as long as I keep opening my legs and mouth I am worth keeping.

As long as only one person uses the holes.

I feel so dirty. I feel like it wouldn’t be possible to boil me at a hot enough temperature to get rid of the filth.

I also feel like I am starting to feel my eyes close and I am weaving as I stand. Nothing more can be done in this day.

We mostly cleaned off the driveway. I folded laundry, cleaned the kitchen, did dishes, and sucked Noah’s dick before he fucked me. Some days that would feel like a very good day. Today I just feel numb. I don’t want to appreciate anything because then it will be taken away. I do want to criticise even as I know that doing so is only going to make it more likely to continue. I feel unable to stop. I fucking get it, Noah.

Maybe if I can make myself work more I will hate myself less. It’s worth a shot. I’ve also been getting through books at a blistering pace since I’ve been off social media so much over the past couple of months. I’m struggling with when I get offended by a book and I don’t want to continue. But I want these books read, damn it. Not tonight. Tonight I need to sleep.

You can’t “just stop” you have to start doing something else.

Leave a reply

I was unkind to TB tonight. I should not be rubbing his nose in my feelings. That’s not necessary or fair at all. Should I have ignored the feelings? Probably. I think I shot myself in the foot this year. Cause the funny thing is, part of what makes TB so wildly interesting and appealing as a secondary to me are all the reasons why there was no chance in the first place. It was really silly of me to think he’d do that kind of work to be a secondary. To be fair! If I had held the line at being a once a year travel girlfriend maybe it could have been a thing.

If that sounded good to me I could have it.

I have a lot of names in my little black book. I don’t need a new notch on the bed post. I have old friends who would treat me well all over the place. If what I had ever wanted was brief visits to fuck-friends I probably would have pushed for that.

For a short while I dreamed about what it would be like to be in a room with someone who only wanted to make love to me.

I need to go forward with the understanding that we entertained the idea of a few extra links of chain in the Choke Chain but we didn’t ever really take it off. We said we would. We said that the impact on my mental health was a problem but we say a lot of shit.

I think that the decision is that Noah being stable is more important and thus I can’t do disruptive shit. The vanilla social circle I tried to build has had a crash and burn. I think the vanilla queer community is well meaning but sorta stunned in their very Scottish way. Maybe eventually I will make some friends there but I don’t think it’ll be soon. I am experiencing total emotional freeze with most of the kink folks. I have a couple of friends but mostly I’m avoiding the other people because I feel like they don’t like me much. I’m not very fun.

I’m scared to shut down my writing entirely. As much as this might seem like I’m just whining, it’s better than it leaking out into my life. If I put it down here I feel less like I am about to explode. I am more appropriate with whoever is in the room. I’m really struggling with how little I like anything or anyone right now. I feel absolutely savage. It’s a good time to not say much. I don’t want to say “no” I want to scream “NO” so loud that I shatter glass. I’m not doing that!

Harm reduction is great stuff. Am I doing my best? I am not. I am struggling. Am I getting the very basics done and making sure my kids are safe? It’s a fucking convenient time for Noah to not have a job.

What are we doing going forward? Right now we are in a hellish limbo of waiting for this fucking trial and then waiting to see how long it takes the government to process our paperwork so we can arrange travel. Travel that I have distinctly mixed feelings about and a whole heap of dread.

Jeez, there doesn’t seem to be a good reason to be so upset. Those privileged rich white bitches, nothing is enough for them. Do you know what I have learned? Money doesn’t solve everything. I was a psycho broke bitch and I’m a psycho rich bitch.

Now I have different things I have to consider. I have to care about the load I put on my body. I have to care about subtle social dynamics I would not have considered in the past. I have to think about what is best for the three people who had absolutely no say in them being brought into the world.

It’s not really about me.

I don’t feel like it gets to be about me very much and that’s a hard thing. I feel like I make it about me way more than anyone wishes. Mostly it’s not things I choose or I want–I haven’t enjoyed my cancer or surgeries or recoveries from injuries.

I am in a place where I feel both resigned and really sad about the amount of sex I have had and that I will have that hurts me because it really doesn’t matter. Me feeling good is not a significant factor in a lot of my life, it can’t be. If I waited until I felt good I would simply not live. Maybe that would have been better but it is too late now. I picked this. I picked it good and hard. I made the indenture 28 years.

I don’t know what I will do afterwards. I mean, I’ll stay. I don’t know what hobbies I’ll be able to sustain in the long run. I don’t know which parts of me are going to fail the fastest.

I know that I need to never fall in love again. If it is starting to move in that direction I need to ghost the person hard. I can’t ever need someone. It’s not ok.

Every life has limits.

I hate being depressed

Leave a reply

I am angry. I am irritable. I don’t want to move. I feel only anger and fury and dislike for my children. I’m not feeling motivated to eat. I’m sleeping absurd amounts but not feeling even vaguely rested. The NHS page on depression is so belittling that I’d like to learn how to launch a DDOS attack and bring down the NHS website because I’m so fucking angry that I’m being told I should maybe talk to someone, eat healthy food, and exercise.

Here the treatment for depression is: nothing! Surely it will go away. Wait, it didn’t go away? Fine, then let’s give you a fucking self help book and you can go home and fix it without bothering us. You do a workbook on your own and a therapist checks up to make sure you did your homework. They might send me to a group exercise class since I can’t figure out how to exercise on my own. Bonus points for it being a kind of exercise that will cause me injury and then they can tell me that I don’t care about my mental health again. Then eventually if all that fails (which it will in 99% of fucking cases, but let’s abusively shove everyone through the process because EVIDENCE BASED MEDICINE) we will let you talk to a therapist many months of suffering later. When you talk to that therapist you will be told to go on an SSRI. You will get some cognitive behaviour therapy bullshit. CBT is widely considered to be gaslighting and wildly abusive. It is *the* form of therapy offered on the NHS. If I’m severe enough they might consider letting me have abusive CBT *while* I’m being forced on a drug that is going to make my life a living hell.

I want fucking EMDR.

Here they max out at 16 sessions for any kind of treatment. This is why I am considered treatment resistant because in 16 weeks a therapist has barely learned the shape of my problems.

Amusingly, the nerve pain medication I’m on–Amitriptyline–is their second line “I can’t take SSRIs” option. So I’m already on that antidepressant and I have been for years.

EMDR is not even on their list of possible treatments for depression. They won’t let me have it at all. I feel so angry that I am going to have to fight this hard for a non-invasive, non-drug form of help. That seems really broken to me. I want the least expensive option. I don’t want talk therapy for the rest of my life and 16 sessions is fucking stupidly a waste of time and resources. I am not a 16 session patient.

I feel sick and bad and useless and stupid and like I should die. I don’t want to snuggle and I feel like I am going to throw this fucking cat across the house if she doesn’t stop scratching me to ask me to pet her. (I haven’t thrown her.)

I feel like I don’t know how to stop roiling in rage and pain. Everything in my brain is saying that I am a piece of shit who should die. I don’t do anything that is good in the world. I am only bad. I feel guilty for backing out of the date with TB and also like I might cause serious damage to a long term friendship if I go and I flip out at him because I’m completely dysregulated. That’s not fair.

He dodged a bullet. Lucky him. He was smart to opt out of being a bigger part of my life. I’m really not worth it. And I think he was the one shot I’m going to take. He was barely passive and accepting and supportive enough of my marriage for Noah and no one else is ever going to care even 10% as much as he does about preserving my marriage. He’s a really good friend and I am lucky to know him. I wish I felt like there was any good luck for him in knowing me. I feel like a punishment and a curse.

I should be getting ready to bike over to go rock climbing. It’s hard to move at all. I want to lie on the floor in the fetal position for the whole day.

I want to fade away entirely.

Surviving rape

9 Replies

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.

There is a void in my day.

1 Reply

I’ve been talking to TB all day every day for four months now. It’s been really amazing. I have enjoyed climbing into his brain so much. Now I understand that doing so is going to block him from finding the future he wants and I have to stop. That’s hard. I feel like I am punishing myself.

I don’t say good morning and good night every day to anyone I don’t live with. That’s a lot of pressure for me. I’m a forgetful person. I have a lot of friends. I haven’t had a “we talk every day” friend since the Bonus Mama. I think I lost her in 2017? I feel absolutely allergic to the idea of having a friend I talk to that much ever again. I don’t trust the dynamic at all. If I talk to someone everyday for a couple of years then it is agonisingly painful when I am rejected because they don’t want to anymore or they found someone they want to talk to more. I don’t handle that detransition very well so I need to ensure that I don’t start that expectation within myself.

I have more abandonment issues than there are grains of sand in the Mojave. I maintain long-term friendships by making sure I never ask for or expect too much. I have to keep my needs to myself. I can share wants with friends easily, needs are harder. I have to be truly desperate before I will ask for help with a need. I would far rather do without or hurt myself doing it alone.

It’s why Noah works so hard at under promising and over delivering. He makes sure his actual promises to me are very conservative and easy to follow. He’s kind like that. He has learned how to be kind to me in this way.

I rarely worry about being too much for Noah. Today I was standing about 100m away from him; I was waiting for him and the kiddos to come in my vague direction. He ran over to me so that I didn’t have to stand alone. There was no reason to run. The kids were playing and having fun. He just wanted to. He didn’t want to be away from me for a second longer than he had to. He’s set the bar so high that other people can’t match it and maybe that’s ok. It sure makes the prospect of poly kind of weird. Someone has to treat me at least as well as Noah does or I am *choosing* to be less well treated every moment I spend with them.

I still believe with my entire soul that there was the potential for a life changing relationship with TB, it’s just not what he wants for his life. That’s ok. I really understand choosing hypothetical children over certain not quite enough. It’s a little funny because I don’t get told I’m the one who is not enough very often. It is fitting at its core though because I never pursued TB in the first place because I assumed I wouldn’t be good enough. Also, he’s nothing like Noah and I need Noah like I need oxygen and water.

TB fills needs I normally don’t even see in myself because they are so buried. I will go back to burying them because they are not things I can fill in my life with my current set up. It won’t kill me. These aren’t food and water and shelter kinds of needs. These are emotional needs around stability and being loved without being hurt. Noah is absolutely amazing and he loves me madly and deeply, but there’s a lot of hurt. I’m not complaining I am acknowledging.

I almost got to find out what it is like to be loved and cherished by a partner without having to endure pain to deserve it. I came really close but this is neither horseshoes nor hand grenades. It was weird seeing the possibility of finding out what that is like. It seemed alienating and impossible and improbable. Turns out I was right. That is not for me in this life.

It is breaking my heart. I wish I had never considered the possibility.

The fucking worst part is I had a hideous thought that makes me feel sick. “Since I am not a suitable partner on my own, maybe I should abort an accidental pregnancy.” I have never tied anyone to me through negligence and I will not start at this stage of my life. Elsenet I have recently done a copious amount of writing about how absolutely not ok I am with the possibility of aborting a child. Especially a fourth child. Especially an unwanted fourth child. I am the fourth unwanted child and I should have been aborted. I will be very careful and not get pregnant. I’m good at being slutty without accidental pregnancies. I feel bad inside myself about myself that I would have such a thought. I would never force someone to be with me. He’s made it clear that I am not enough. That would be true with an oops child in the picture. God that would be so unfair. This particular bit of calculus is why I’m going to have one sex filled trip with him and then not see him again. Apparently there is a hyperfertility uptick during perimenopause. My chance of getting pregnant is higher than it used to be.

Naw. Not playing with that fire a bunch over the next few years. That would be looking for pain.

Why one sex filled trip since this is not going to turn into what I wanted?

I feel like I will think about this and decide over and over and over for a long time. All the way till January. 18 weeks and 2 days. As long as we courted. As long I poured energy to trying to figure out if we could be good for each other as more than friends. That’s a good thing. That gives me time to get over feeling butthurt and go back to being excited.

I get to bang someone I have wanted to bang for 25 fucking years. That’s awesome. I’m looking forward to it. I think it is still going to be tender and sweet and loving. He is my very dear friend and we have both nursed a simmering crush all this time. Being incompatible isn’t something that either of us have done to the other. We are still good people having a good friendship with deep admiration and respect on both sides. It just so happens that I also like having sex with friends. At least I used to a long time ago in another life. I’m not so big on it here in Scotland. I am freaked out by the idea and I can’t consider it.

I feel scared about the amount of fall out that is going to be the result of this failed courtship. I would still like to do some fun travel things with him as just a friend. Maybe I am hoping that the sex is unimpressive so I can get over wanting him. That is the result after sex with quite a lot of people. Most people are not that skilled at sex and sometimes I am not up for the amount of work involved with ensuring I have good sex with someone who isn’t all that good at sex. I can do it. I can push just about anyone through having sex with me in a way that will get me off acceptably; I am both easy to get off and very skilled at directing sex.

I have very strong feelings at this point about the trip. I am not ok with “let’s see what happens”. I am going to direct this very much. I am going to go in knowing what I am trying to get out of each separate encounter. I feel bad, but I’m basically setting up how I can ensure a just and equitable transaction of emotional and physical energy. I’m not going to give more than I get. Oh fuck that.

Nope. That ship sailed away on de Nile and it ain’t ever coming back. I can’t get back on that river again. I will not put pennies in a piggy bank I will never be able to withdraw from. I’m a selfish cunt and I am not running at a surplus in my life. I now need to be a lot more fucking honest with myself about the cost I pay compared to what I am getting back. Is it enough? What do I need to do to make sure that I’m not bleeding out? I can’t have any fucking holes in my bucket and pouring energy into someone who is that actively encouraging me to invest, while planning to walk away suddenly at any point, would put a giant hole into my bucket.

The amount of hurt I feel today is 1/1,000 of what I would feel in two years. I might have started to trust that I was going to be kept come what may. I would never try to keep TB from finding a different primary if keeping me as a comet/distant secondary was a priority. It isn’t a priority for him. I can’t invest more emotionally in someone who will drop me like a hot potato for monogamy. That’s acting like it’s ok to treat me like a resource to use until something better pops up. I will not let my friend treat me so shabbily because then he would have to carry the shame for doing so.

I think at some point along the way this sounded more ok to me? I think there have been too many statements about “for the rest of your/my life”. I can no longer put any trust in the words that are being said. They are not at all reflective of reality. They are things you sorta hope might come true but it’s not a serious priority or demand upon any future partners.

Maybe if I didn’t have that Mojave Desert sand depth of abandonment issues. I’m not securely attached enough in my own self to withstand the level of pain I would feel at being discarded later. That would totally fuck up my ability to parent/teach well. I can’t set my life up for that crashing pain to come down on my kids. That’s fucked up and unfair. I can’t compartmentalise well enough for them to be totally unaffected by my mental state. I have to take steps to increase stability, not make choices that make instability more likely.

“You can depend on me. I will always be there for you.”

Those two sentences really should get me running in the opposite direction as fast as I can run. Usually when someone says that I stop hearing from them soon after and then I never speak to them again. It’s a fucking death curse for my relationships. No, I can’t depend on people. No one will always be there for me. Not even Noah. Not because Noah is shitty or because he doesn’t try hard; life is fucking brutal, dude.

I had very large problems before I ever met Noah. They haven’t all completely gone away despite all the work that we’ve done. Some of these are chronic and permanent. I don’t have a choice. I am always going to fucking struggle. I do stuff for myself long past the point when someone else would complacently accept help. I will fucking cry the whole time I hold a fork but I will not allow myself to be fed. I will eat the food like a fucking dog before I will allow someone to feed me when my hands aren’t working.

I have a lot of big feelings about the increasing disability I am experiencing. I wonder if part of my freak out about TB is I’m well aware I’m going to have slim pickings for folks who want to date me as I get older and more disabled and a lot less rich. Given the reading requirement involved in dating me I might be deciding that I am theoretically poly but I never get around to it. I am fucking difficult. Lowering the admission bar would not improve the success rate, it would make it worse.

95% chance of flaming out before 6 months. I’ve got statistics based on a significant enough sample size that I can use percentages. Yup.

I am difficult and demanding and exacting and way happier being alone over putting up with bullshit. I also have a husband who acts like I hung the fucking moon. I am not in any way deficient in sexual attention.

I spent four months helping a friend learn how to have a variety of adult relationship conversations that he otherwise would have had difficulty with down the line. I can’t call it mentoring because I sure as shit did it with the plan to fuck him. I made sure this vanilla monogamous person was going to be making a well informed decision with regard to the risk involved in being in a relationship with me. There are lot of implications to joining my life. It exists in a lot of layers and either you are in it or you are someone I talk to sometimes.

I’m not being mean. I have to keep walking. No matter what I feel or what happens to me I have to keep walking until I can’t walk anymore and then I will fucking crawl. I will fucking horrify the NHS because I’m not going to ask for help until it’s pretty ridiculous. They will scold me for not calling them in sooner to help. After all I am entitled.

I don’t really believe I am entitled to much in this life. I have acquired much. I am doing what I can to make this house into a place that will survive for a generation after me before needing more significant repair work. Sure, someone will probably paint over my art. I know. Deep sigh. My kids will have a secure home from which to figure out their lives. I’m not promising to make them rich enough to not need jobs but they will be able to survive without assistance from the government and without needing a job like Noah’s. I am planning as hard as I can for a future where we don’t need that kind of money anymore to be ok. I have been paying Future Us hand over fist in a variety of ways that will outlast me.

I think our days of regular, unplanned, expensive travel are over. I don’t think we can come to the weddings. If Noah hadn’t lost the last big tech job, sure we could have done all of them without a problem. We would have been on track even with the bulge of unexpected financial loss. Now he hasn’t worked in six months and it looks like his next job will be pretty much exactly how much we need to live on and we will no longer be contributing towards retirement. Awesome. That’s with a lot of cutting out expenses in terms of “what we need to live on”. I’ll need to cut expenses by 50%. I’m going to be fixing less on the house and at a much slower rate. Good thing I already got most of the biggest ones done.

Was I so intrigued by TB because I am an asshole and I wanted help fixing my house? It’s not a 0% chance. That takes the air out of my balloon in terms of being indignant about him not wanting me. Am I mad about the benefits I won’t get? Don’t get all self righteous here, Krissy. Sure he wants to keep getting the emotional support benefits without the commitment. Are my motives actually only pure and altruistic or some bullshit like that?

Probably not. I’m a selfish cunt. Yo, brutal honesty dictates I say that I was frankly concerned about the mismatch in physical size for intimate matters. That was going to be a difficult thing for me. Combining that mismatch with the other disparities in sexual preferences I wouldn’t be getting so much out of the sex that it would fill up my end of need for emotional support.

I have a high opinion of the value of the support I offer as a partner. Demanding high return support in exchange has historically resulted in my life steadily improving and me having increasingly healthy and positive relationships.

I feel weird about that kind of a statement right now. It feels like a pie crust promise. It feels like a big claim without evidence. I don’t jump into bed with everyone I want to be friends with because it’s the primary way I know to get people to like me. It’s been more than 8 years since I’ve had sex with a friend. Holy moly it is the longest stretch of monogamy in my life. I think twice as long as previous stints? Why do I want it to end so much?

I have a narrow window. For one week I will have a travel boyfriend that I will have a lot of fun with. I have negotiated it painstakingly with my husband so that I can be as respectful as possible of his feelings through this whole experience. I think Noah will fall in love again some day. I think he will have friends he wants to have sex with. I have some hope about my ability to send him off for adventures with a big smile on my face. It will be a lot easier to do when I am not feeling constant anxiety about when TB will be dumping me. Noah and I will keep negotiating and talking. We will make friends slowly and not go out hunting for strangers/near-strangers here.

I have a husband who will give the full measure of devotion in service to my safety, health, and longevity. I don’t get to feel actual bitterness about not being so sparkly and shiny that I get to have another serious partner who is nearly so devoted. That’s a big fucking ego you have there, Krissy. Really think a lot of yourself, do you?

I guess I do. I think I need to be honest with myself and with anyone who ever tries to date me that I don’t accept inconsistency. Do not make pie crust promises while asking me to trust you. That’s not something I can work with. Know your own mind. Think about your shit. Figure out what you want. If it isn’t me then don’t waste my fucking time. I have a short life. Trying to prevent me from spending my time in ways that will build towards my long-term future is absofuckinglutely disrespectful. As I will try hard not to waste your time. It’s about respect.

I’m disabled. What I can get done in a day is distinctly finite. I have bursts of time where I overextend on a project and get an unhealthy amount done. I always pay in big and small ways.

What I do with my time is a big McFlippin Deal. Time is my most scarce resource in this life. I will be spending the vast majority of my time with my family. If a person does not particularly have any desire to integrate with that unit then they need to be a person I talk to sometimes.

I don’t have enough self to give to be doling out big chunks to a bunch of off-stage people who are not actually part of my life. It’s just math. It’s pragmatism. It’s reality. I need to treat people as not good matches for me when they are happy to use a lot of my time with no regard to the effect that has on my ability to live the life I want to lead. If someone does not notice or care about the holistic reality of my life then I need to keep them in a small box away from my life where I limit how far down the rabbit hole I go.

I need to believe that I deserve a good match. There is a void in my day right now because I want to be poking TB. I don’t want to though. I want to be poking in the direction of a fantasy I had, which isn’t at all the same thing as poking him. I want to be poking at a partner who is doing work to making themself better actively like I am to remind one another that there is fun in trade for the hard and the boring. “Hey asshole, poke your husband.”

I do. I poke and prod and talk to him all day long. I have a lot of RAM in my brain. Once he gets a job I won’t be able to take up all his time like I have been doing. Holy cheese I’m looking forward to retirement. I could keep more people busy. God I am a bottomless pit of need. I don’t want to do it for someone where I don’t get the long run benefit of nipping at their heels to get them to run just a little faster. It’s a lot of fucking energy.

The trade value for my time as a girlfriend experience is quite high. It’s not your soul but it’s pretty close.That is probably a highly inappropriate amount of hubris. Oh well. The down side is less time spent with people who don’t want to put much energy into me. That doesn’t sound like a down side when I say it like that. It kind of sounds like healthy self regard.

I don’t have a lot of unrequited loves left to come knocking. I think the ties of the past are finally fraying. I think that going forward it’s going to be a very weird process. Good thing I am primarily interested in making friends. That is a worthy endeavour and I strive to not have a lot of standards and demands for friends. Friends are free to be whatever kinds of fuck offs they want to be. It doesn’t impact my life too badly because of boundaries. I keep people in small boxes.

My standards for Noah are shockingly high at this point in a lot of ways. Very low in other ways. I don’t ever get to expect my birthday to be a good day for me. The most peaceful birthdays I spend alone. I don’t have expectations of anyone that way. I don’t have to take care of anyone. I don’t have to carefully monitor my tone to ensure that I am being respectful even when I feel shitty. My birthday is not a day that is good for me. TB has long since proposed me spending my birthdays with him.

He offered to be the one who made sure my birthdays are special while planning to dump me if someone better comes along.

I’m 10 days out from my birthday. I am glad I am downgrading my expectations in my mind from “boyfriend” to “friend with benefits”. That means I can stringently avoid getting myself into a situation where yet another person makes my birthdays feel full of memories of not being wanted or good enough. Fuck. That really fucking hurts. That’s not a small thing to offer. I refused it instantly. No. I couldn’t do that to Noah or the kids. They would take that very personally. I can go away with Aunt Jenny and everyone wishes me well with a smile.

If I am going to get back to interviews then I need to get my sleep schedule under better control. Good night.

I need to change my mindset.

2 Replies

“I’m not rejecting you” he said. Enh, it depends on your perspective. Are you rejecting an offer that would give you small pieces of what you want in exchange for not being willing to give up on finding the whole package? Yes, you are. It’s not a bad thing to do. I walked out on a partner when I was 23 because he didn’t want to be a parent and I did. I am not offended that I am being rejected but I am. It seems pretty logical to me, reasonable even. I just hope it works out how you want it to.

I feel rejected because I was offering a way that I would try to change myself to fit around someone in a way I usually won’t offer. I’m not a vanilla girl. Trying to figure out how I would exist in that kind of long-term relationship is quite an interesting mental exercise but it doesn’t matter. It’s not going to happen.

I feel bad because I am probably not going to be open to that kind of option in the future. I think that he thinks I will kind of wait around to be a Plan B if he fails to get what he wants in the next 10 years. I won’t. That would destroy my self esteem and I am not going to do or be that for anyone. Fuck no. I am not a fucking option you can pick up and set down when you feel like it. I am not a fucking doll. I am not the sort to wait and pine.

I will never stop loving him. I have loved him for most of my life and that won’t change. I have *intense* love for my friends. I will jump through flaming hoops to support my friends. I am devoted and adoring and full of encouragement. The thing is, I put most of me in a box in order to be respectful to my friends. I am so much and I don’t want to be inappropriate or overwhelm people. I leave most of me in a box and only offer a very small portion to each friend. I support this partition by not talking to people all that often. When I talk to someone too often I start wanting and needing them to accept more of me. My friends are friends instead of partners because more of me is not welcome in that relationship.

I’m not complaining. I’m observing. This is part of why I will sort of disappear from the Scottish social scene for a bit. I brought too much of myself in June and July and now I feel like I want and need to be accepted more fully as myself and that is not actually on offer. I am not going to reach a deep and meaningful level with most people here and it’s going to go quite poorly if I try. I don’t have the ability to absorb that level of failure over and over without flinching and I can’t flinch right now. I can’t look weak because that is when people attack the hardest.

I’m really scared and I feel desperately insecure. In a way this summer has been quite an adventure through what Noah and I moving back towards being polyamorous might bring up. Travel Boyfriend is a dear friend who entertained the idea of a walk on the wild side before figuring out it isn’t for him. Bad Timing is a selfish jerk who did not care that he was putting me in a bad position where my life would incur harm. I feel like acknowledging these extreme differences of what dating might bring up is important.

Noah and I are continuing to talk and negotiate because this is going to be a long and slow process for us. Luckily we are both starting from a truly advantageous position: we are wildly compatible and our relationship is really fun. It means that when considering the possibility of dating someone else we have to pass up on time together for it. That means the person has to be really special and not many people are going to land in that zone for us. We are intense weirdos and we freak out most people–that’s step 1. Neither of us can date someone who acts in destructive ways towards our marriage–that’s step 2. That’s not ok. If we tell someone about a relationship boundary and they are disrespectful that needs to be an immediate no. My life is a very carefully constructed creation and I’m not blowing it up for anyone.

I’m not confident that I will be as open to someone else as I was with TB. He coasted through showing up with a lot of history. He didn’t have to actively earn trust. He started out fully trusted and could only lose trust from there. That was maybe not fair? I’m not sure. It’s definitely not my default approach to new people. Usually people earn trust in painstaking increments. I suppose TB did, but he did it while running in the background and I wasn’t expecting it or demanding it of him.

Noah and I are talking very frankly about the fact that I shouldn’t have someone be more than a friend unless they have the capacity to be obsessed with me the way I need people to be.

A friend recently broke up with a partner because she felt like she was being used like a fleshlight. He said, “You feel better than a fleshlight.” He thought it was a compliment.

I live with someone who thinks my existence is magical and sparkly and worth devoting his entire life to supporting. Why in the fuck should I devote a lot of time to someone who doesn’t think about me much and who doesn’t care about me and my story and my skills and my life? That sounds pretty stupid to me.

I am not a person with whom one passes time.

Either you are devoted to me like your life depends on it or we are just friends who spend time together once in a while. I have traditionally enjoyed having sex with friends; I see nothing wrong with it. Not everyone I have sex with becomes a boy/girl/theyfriend. I have expectations of people I date. I don’t have many expectations of my friends. I take people as they are and I don’t spend a lot of time requiring that they care about me intensely. I accept the relationship they offer. I rarely ask for more.

I go out in to the world and I exist loudly and I see who reaches out to me. That’s how I find friends. I love my friends. My friends are people who appreciate me and love me very deeply. They carry me through life on a wave of devotion. The thing is, I have to accept that each person will give what they have to spare when they have anything going spare. It has to be the aggregate that carries me forward because I cannot depend on a single friend to be there to catch me. I have to just hope someone shows up. I get lucky a lot.

Jenny is amazing.

A lot of my friends are amazing. I have been caught and then passed hand to hand over and over. I trust that I will figure out how to build it again, it just takes time. It takes time and vulnerability and right now I don’t feel like I have a lot of resiliency to offer. I’m really scared and I’m really sad.

I have good reasons for both feelings. I am also full of joy. I am really and truly living the life I set out to live.

The funny thing about not gardening almost at all this year: literally my point is that I want to build a regenerating food forest that will thrive with neglect. I am trying to build something self reinforcing. In a way taking a year off is a great idea because I see more of what is trying to happen without my interference. That’s an important lesson.

Things with the kids are at a better place than they have been for a while, it’s super nice.

I can’t figure out if I’m being unreasonable with myself about how I’m dealing with the sexual assault trial. I want to stop feeling active anxiety in my body. I feel like I’m simmering in a low level panic attack a lot of the time right now. It is a lot of why I am consciously choosing to be anhedonic most of the time because it is that or feel too much of everything and be overly volatile and inappropriate. I need to be chill and calm and gentle and patient. Do you know what is hard to do when you feel existential dread and terror? Be chill and calm and gentle and patient.

It’s hard to learn when your brain is exploding with fear and anger. It’s interesting feeling this now after so many years of having my PTSD symptoms under control.

And I can’t exercise until October because of surgery recovery. Woo. Awesome to have all these feelings and nowhere to put them. Noah takes as much as he can. I write the ones I can. There’s still a lot left.

One of the ways I manage my expectations of friends is to not talk to them very often and always show up and act like no time at all has passed. I don’t bring a lot of my burdens to the relationship. I usually literally monitor time and make sure I don’t talk more than 50% and I usually try hard to not even get to filling half the time. I know other people need a place to express themselves and they don’t write. I do. I leave the pieces of myself on the internet that I wish I had enough intimacy in my life to share with real people face to face but that isn’t a reality in my life. It never has been. I think that is part of why I have such intense need to write. If I plop pieces of myself on the internet then no one can say I “forced” them to listen to me talk.

The difference between trauma dumping and being a writer is: you are not forced to read/listen to any of this. If you decide to spend your time reading what someone has to say about trauma that’s on you, buddy. That’s consent, which makes it not trauma dumping by definition.

I’ve been feeling really ashamed to write about myself publicly since I moved. I have a lot of weird sex stuff in my life. I have traditionally written it down because I’m trying to figure out how to practice harm reduction in my life. I think that is causing me harm. It is going to be far more scandalous here than it was in California.

Other folks would tell me to just be anonymous. No. That is acting like I have something to be ashamed of. It is acting like I am committing a sin. I’m weird but I’m not evil. I’m not doing anything that is wrong. A lot of it is non-standard and broadly disapproved of, maybe even for good reasons. Every rule has exceptions. I have been exceptional all my life. I don’t plan to change.

What does the future hold?

Leave a reply

The last few months have dramatically not gone to plan on many levels. Everything has ended up being way harder. In a way that makes me feel sad. In a way it almost feels like a relief. I’ve been waiting for the results of the last round of “My efforts towards the first wave of people have either flamed out or settled into a secure relationship”. I now feel more secure and confident about where I should and shouldn’t be putting energy. I learned who actually likes me and who likes me if I can lie really well all the time and care about their feelings instead of my own.

It’s ok. That’s normal human stuff. I’m not angry about it, just resigned. I’ve been saying since I moved here that some attempts at relationships would work out but most would not. It’s turning out to be true. I’m not shocked or upset.

I am in need of resting and regrouping. I am desperately in need of a chance to refocus on the parts that matter the most. The only people who are likely to show up for me in my old age live in this house. It’s simply, literally, true. I’ve been looking outside my house a lot over the past few years in ways that have put me in a tough spot.

Heck, even reopening the conversation about polyamory. I am patting Past Me on the back for saying, “Let’s start talking about this when we have no chance of either of us going out on a date with someone anytime soon.” Yes, I have a lover-in-waiting but from the very first day there has been the understanding that if it turns out this would be a bad thing for my marriage we won’t do it at all. I’m pretty certain it won’t harm my marriage. What might it turn into?

I think I am going to have an old friend I love very much I see sometimes. It’s difficult trying to figure out what is the best path forward for all concerned. I would respond more to stated wishes of the folks involved if they were more willing to state them. Instead I am just flying blind.

I’m thinking about the series of steps relationships usually have for me: getting past the first date, 3 weeks, 3 months, 6 months, 9 months, and a handful have morphed and changed over much longer periods. In terms of roughly the number of people I have dated: 78% only get one date, 10% made it to 3 weeks, 5% made it to 3 months, 2% made it to 6 months, 2% made it to 9 months, 2-3% make it more than a year. I’m counting the ending point only. I break up with ~95% of the people I date by 6 months. That’s fucking dramatic.

I’m 3.5 months into courting Travel Boyfriend and I’m having a lot of feelings. I wouldn’t say we are dating yet, not really. But we are courting to see if there is the possibility of a relationship there that could be good for both of us. Noah is being patient and understanding and supportive.

Most humans take on jobs, tasks, and relationships without really understanding how hard they will turn out to be in advance. This is the human “normal” as a way to approach the future. If we knew how bad it would be we wouldn’t try. So in a way this hubris is important and great and absolutely necessary for the species. The trouble is, when you sign on for something not knowing how hard it will be you sometimes get yourself into a situation where you can’t finish something and other people suffer. That is part of life. That failure is part of life. I feel like it is the kind of thing where people learn their own limits through trial and error, mostly.

I have failed a lot of times. I am pretty clear about a lot of the scope of my limits.

I am a human with a lot of limits. I have to respect those.

I am very nervous about aspects of this relationship with Travel Boyfriend. The very best role I can play in his life is to push him through fixing the stuff that stands between him and seeming like someone who would be a really great primary partner for anyone. There are specific aspects of his life that make it pretty impossible for him to find what he says he wants to have. Every single one of those things could be changed with conscious effort. If he actually wants what he says he wants. They are things that would be hard to change completely on his own. They are things that are significant enough that it’s hard to get buy in from a stranger that the payoff off for the work will be worth the effort. Every relationship is a crapshoot. Everyone is operating at a deficit these days. Who has the energy to help other people work through their shit?

Amusingly I’m writing this while listening to the song that played in the strip club the first time he ever saw me with my shirt off. I was 18. It was a friend’s birthday. I was pulled up on stage by the dancers. I had awkward tights and shorts on under my skirt so I didn’t try to remove my bottoms. I was fine with the ladies taking my top off.

I have to stop and think about our old Theatre Director. (That’s now his official nickname.) I don’t think I have written about this much over here. After I moved to Scotland Theatre Director ended up back in Texas providing hospice care to his parents. He helped them die. I knew he was a bad alcoholic. Before either of his parents died he and I talked about how he really didn’t know what he was going to do when his folks died. He’d have to leave the house and go somewhere and that was a big question mark. I told him that when he had to leave he could come stay with me for 6 months on a visitor visa.

Eventually he did come after everything finished years later. He stayed in the studio. He had a lot of identity wrapped up in being “that guy”. That guy you know who you can always call because he knows how to fix the problem. Time and grief and trauma and addiction were all weighing very heavily on him. He felt the weight of the failures in his life very keenly. It went about as well as such an experience is going to go.

I worry a lot about people writing checks they can’t cash. I worry about doing it. It’s not that I only worry about people handing them to me. I worry about the balance I get in return for how much effort I am putting out. There’s no fair here. I have already written a lot of big checks. How much do I really have left in my budget? What is realistic?

I am incredibly lucky that Noah has been unemployed right now. I have needed a lot of support and he’s been able to provide it. That means I haven’t asked local people for help. That’s what makes people feel like neighbours. I really can’t. I don’t feel like I’ve done a great job at making friends. People say that I can ask for help. But I can’t. I would much rather wither clean away than ask for help from people who have not demonstrated a desire for my company.

I do asks things of my Bestie in town. She is carrying a very heavy load though and I don’t do a lot to make hers easier. We are doing the best we can through this phase of life together. She is the sister of my heart and I followed her across the sea and I do not regret that. I am lying when I say that I can only depend on the people under this roof. Bestie has been a fair and foul weather friend for 30+ years.

When Theatre Director was here what he really needed me to do was participate in a facade where he “helped” me do projects that I could do on my own. The trouble was, I can’t do those things alone. He wasn’t actually able to help very much. That got me into some bad spots with my body and he expected me to ignore my pain to assuage his ego. That was not a thing I could do. That really hurt emotionally on top of the physical pain. Theatre Director was not able to assess “This project is too physically difficult for us and we should not do it.” When I said that he did not want to believe me.

The kindest thing I can do is try to understand when other people are trying to write checks they can’t cash and give them the pretense of belief. Meanwhile I must mentally put the claim into the “this is a pie crust promise” bucket in my head. I’m not very good at this. I have to consciously fight my inner fury about being clearly lied to.

It is hard that people don’t know they are lying. They mean it when they say it. They don’t know what they are promising and they don’t mean what they actually express most of the time. So much of the casual discourse people have in life is full of casual half-truth promises that have no intention behind them. That’s hard. I got hard dumped as a friend this week. It is stinging a bit. Ah well. Move on.

It is scary trusting someone enough to put time and energy into them. I don’t know how much this is social anxiety rebound from how much social time I had in June, how much is PTSD avoidance after the sexual assault, how much is surgery recovery, how much is (fill in the blank).

I just know that right now I feel absolutely terrified of risk. I have a lot to lose. If I don’t do the next few years right I will regret it forever. When I hit the end of surgery recovery I have to start doing a level of support work my kids aren’t used to. They are choosing tasks that are frankly obscene and in order to make it possible I am going to support them like they took on something that hard.

The thing is, doing it myself is faster and fucking easier and they have learned the skills. They will be able to get their cleaning deposits back someday. It’s time for them to focus away on other skills. I’ve always said this would come.

Hell, if the kids notice that with proper negotiations and exchanges of kinds of work I can be a lot easier to live with maybe they will do their chores more promptly in the future when we renegotiate? It’s a dream.

If I can understand clearly where someone’s limits are then I can understand with compassion where they are making pie crust promises. My life is going to require a lot of that very specific compassion of me over the next couple of years no matter what I do.

So what do I do? I complicate my life extra with something ambiguous and with a high potential to hurt a lot. I am scared this might end up in the loss of a dear old friend because one or the other of us does something unforgivable. It could happen. It wouldn’t be the first time in my life it went either direction.

The most likely outcome is a few fun holidays and then wishing him well on the rest of his life. Sure, it is having a really melodramatic long lead in and everything. I am too old to make rash decisions based on sex. I can’t withstand a lot more casual damage. I need to act like I am fragile. I need a melodramatically long and involved courting process before it is a good idea for me to give someone the opportunity to hurt me. My body is fragile. Someone needs quite an education before touching me is a good idea. There is a lot to communicate if someone is going to have enough information to make safe choices with me.

Over the next few years I think my dating opportunities will be few and far between. I think I will have very little to give and a lot of needs that I will be blatantly ignoring because I don’t have the ability to take the risks required to fill those needs. Making friends requires social rejection. I am bound and determined that I am going to know most folks in town before I ever go out on a date. I don’t want to date strangers ever again. I’ve had some success, but look at those numbers.

That’s a lot of fucking failures.

Are they all failures? Were any of them failures? Or did they just run their course and we moved on? I like to say that the great part of dating a lot of different people is you learn a lot about what kinds of things you can and can’t compromise on and that’s very useful.

Noah and I courted for six months then eloped. We weren’t dating when he showed up out of the blue and asked me to marry him. It’s a longer story but not for now.

How to measure time with someone I have loved for 25 years? TB is a very good friend. It feels more important than ever to make sure I don’t hurt someone negligently by being selfish and short sighted. Trying to figure out what is the most good for the least amount of cost is hard. There are so many variables out of my control.

Maybe I should just thank my lucky stars that TB waited this long to start getting his shit together because I get a chance to have a short term positive relationship that ends when it is a natural time to grow past it. It won’t be a failure. If the point going in is that it is going to end fairly soon then I can grab all the good I can for the amount of cost I can bear. I will have to be realistic to myself about my priorities. I am going to have to be realistic about how much rejection I can handle. I am, predictably, feeling it as a wave of rejection right now.

I have a lot of people counting on me and I can’t let them down. That means I need to limit the things I add to my life that hurt me. That’s complicated.

This will be awkward as a transition

2 Replies

For a while I am not going to know what to say or how to say it. I’ve been carefully limiting my writing for specific social media audiences over the past few years. Now I’m pretty sure some of my hate followers are getting notifications because they are subscribed to my RSS feed. That’s always fun.

It’s hard to figure out how to talk about all the things I need to talk about. I’ve been avoiding talking about parenting for a long time even though that is still the biggest part of my life. I am not feeling like the best parent lately. I’m not the worst but I don’t look at that bar.

I’ve been blow drying Middle Child’s hair when they shower for a while. It’s been one of the best ways for us to have tactile connection that doesn’t involve me being bossy or a controlling. I’m just taking care of them in a way they like that makes them feel special and pretty. (Their hair really is gorgeous after a blow dry. It gets awkwardly tangled when it air dries.) I haven’t really asked if they want me to, I just show up and take over. Maybe I am being an asshole. It’s the only part of their self care I am still involved in. I actually got them a birthday present that is a hair dryer/curling iron set. They might take it in their room and that’s the end of us sharing this. It’s possible. It isn’t my goal. I like playing with their hair. It reminds me so much of my mother’s hair and this feels like the only piece of that relationship I get to keep.

Youngest Child gets the short end of the stick in an awful lot of ways. I haven’t managed to create the same Wonderland for her and I regularly feel pretty bad about her not having the gaggle of friends we had in California. It’s hard to make friends here. I have had good inroads with a few folks but the majority of people I have met are not keen to see us again. I feel like her being my daughter is the worst thing I’ve done to her. How can I create a community around her when I am the problem?

I have some additional worry right this second because I restarted birth control for the first time in 17 years. Ew. But it’s better than having a baby at 43 or 44. I really don’t have it in me to restart the clock again on parenting. I love my kids but I’m running very low on reserves for being patient and giving and understanding around the clock 24/7. I am worried about the hormonal fluctuations that may come. I am not exactly so stable lately that it will be reasonable to tell what is coming from the meds.

I keep having these things happen that make me feel flattened and worthless and empty and then I need to hurry up and recover because there is work to be done. People need support. People need me to be giving and working and listening and supporting and that’s not a thing I do well when I’m flat and feel empty and worthless.

I worked 29 days in June. I had months of intensive work leading up to that. July was supposed to be a recuperation couple of weeks before surgery and instead I was sexually assaulted. Then I had surgery. Then came dealing with the police. I popped a stitch because my blood pressure was so high during the police interview. They rushed us to the hospital at the end.

I didn’t die. Woo. That’s not unexpected event with this surgery. No biggie. Just keep on moving forward. Sometimes there is a sudden massive bleed that stops after a bit in the first two weeks.

I shouldn’t exercise until October according to my surgeon. I’m going to listen to him. This is hard because exercise is the most healthy form of stress relief I have in life. Everything else is harder on my body. I am feeling fairly overwhelmed with stress right now.

I should be restarting interviews for Vicki’s book and I feel overwhelming panic at the thought. I don’t know how to set myself aside to that degree right now. I feel like pieces of me are leaking out all over the place. I feel utterly uncontained. I feel like I have been trying hard to shove all of myself in a box and I just can’t anymore. The closet has not been working well for me.

I am feeling disconnected, like the pieces of me are stored in different rooms all over a hotel and you have to run up and down the stairs a lot to gain access to the different pieces. It’s exhausting. It feels like integration is just too high of a bar to ask for.

I’m struggling with feeling coherence in my brain. I think coming back to my website will ultimately be good because I will get back to feeling comfortable with a full speed brain dump but I’m not there yet. I’m looking forward to it as a contrast with social media.

I like thinking of my writing as a full on stream of consciousness dump. I embrace the inconsistencies and contradictions as part of sharing thought. Part of what is going on for me right now is I am trying to figure out how “in the closet” I am going to try to be going forward. I’ve been pretty closeted, secretive, and evasive since I moved. I’ve tried hard to keep a lid on my history.

Now the lid is lying on the floor somewhere and ooze is streaming out of that hole.

I’m not going to retell every story, I have an archive for that. Instead how about if I just figure out how to talk about who I am now and why I am doing the things I am doing. It’s all so convoluted and stupid. I feel stupid. I feel like I’ve been in a very stable place and I shouldn’t rock the boat. The thing is, I’ve gotten to the point where loneliness is eating me like a cancer. There is so much that I have been suppressing or hiding or avoiding for years that it is a problem for me to continue doing so. I am hurting myself. I have to put significant effort into growing my community here.

That’s going to be hard due to physical limitations over the next few years. I haven’t talked about it here much (or at all) but I’ve had wicked hemorrhoids over the past few years. The surgeon said he couldn’t understand how I ride a bike like that. I shrugged and said it is my normal. Now that the big grape sized bits are gone I’m left with some much more modest skin flaps. These are going to be removed next May. Each surgery will involve a 10ish week time span afterwards where I cannot exercise at all. I can moderately walk but not too far. (Too far being above ~6 miles in a day.) I did walk more than 10 miles recently. I was flattened for 2 days afterwards and it still kinda hurts extra 5 days later.

I’ve got a lot of rest time ahead of me in the next 12 months. Ugh.

Yes, I want all the hemorrhoids gone because I’m tired of bleeding if I have to use regular toilet paper for a whole day. Also I desperately want anal sex back. It’s just not possible with the damage to my anus as it stands. Having kids is rough thing on a body. EDS means all forms of prolapse are more likely. I am going to try to be assertive about dealing with my prolapse stuff going forward. It’s not cool to have things falling out of my body. It’s sorta weird knowing that I am going to need to push to have anyone care about that.

The leaves are changing colours and falling off the trees. It feels too early. It feels like I have simply missed summer this year.

We have a six week block mapped out with a fairly vigorous schedule ahead of us. I won’t be exercising a ton (I am definitely failing to meet any kind of goal for this year) but I will be keeping the trains going and pushing people through their commitments. The kids are all adding additional classes/activities/tasks in ways that will expand their exposure to people in town. This feels really important. A lot of it has to fall on Noah because I can’t cycle. His legs and ass are looking a lot hotter lately. Let me give myself a little pat on the back for helping to push him in that direction. Oh it’s a joyous sight.

Noah and I have been talking a lot about polyamory. If you don’t know that word, in very short it means having romantic love with more than one partner. When we met we both had other partners. We have opened and closed our marriage a few times for logistical reasons. I refer to our recent, by far longest, span of monogamy as the Choke Chain. It’s capitalised because it’s a formal title for a concept and stage we went through. It was in response to a really bad period where everything around polyamory went shockingly poorly. I’m not rehashing that right now. I don’t have time.

It is hard trying to talk through all of the mistakes we have made and all of the times we have made unkind choices. It feels like a lot of “bringing up old stuff” but it’s important. We are talking about our different sets of reactions and what was spurring us in one direction or another. It allows us to understand more fully why some parts were harder or easier for the other. It gives us a chance to make better decisions going forward. It’s not always as simple as just waving your hands over something and saying “just don’t do that”. Which that? What part? We have been using that to mean having an open marriage but I do not believe that is sustainable.

See, this is where I stop and think “How would I say this to a random stranger in town?”

I believe that human beings are a species with a wide and varied range of sexual appetites. Much like our primate kin we have some who like monogamy and some who like one male and multiple females and some females with a lot of males and some who like to mate through sex with absolutely everyone without regard to sex.

I am no longer physically, emotionally, or mentally suited to having a truly large number of partners at any given time. I just can’t anymore. I don’t think I can continue only having one partner though. I know it is selfish. Literally that’s what makes it such a tremendously good thing. Yes, falling in love with someone who isn’t already part of my family is selfish. It is individuation from the pod. (We refer to ourselves as a whale pod.)

I need more emotional support. Noah is an amazing husband. He gives more support than anyone has the right to expect or demand. People are supposed to have a web of people who support them in ways big and small. I feel ashamed of this, and I shouldn’t, but I do need the emotional intensity in my life of having more than one sexual relationship. Sex does bond people. Well, it can.

This is where it is weird to think about explaining this to a random person in town. Oh golly. Sex creates hormones. It can be done fairly casually to get endorphins and dopamine followed by a high five and a fond farewell. It can also be done to raise oxytocin and fall in love and bond in the way that creates family connections–with or without sharing DNA to create a child.

I am slightly weirded out by the fact that Noah has literally colonised my body and remnants of his DNA and the DNA of our children are now parts of my permanent body. Being a carrying parent is fucking weird. His body wasn’t highjacked. WTF?

I need more intense connection in my life. I need it. I am not managing to create that very well without sex. I am also deeply uninterested in the drama that would come with having sex with someone who lives locally. I just can’t be arsed to care enough about the sex to want to deal with fall out. Nope.

That leaves long distance relationships with people from my past. I have very little interest in being back in the US. That narrows the pool considerably. As it so happens, luck brought someone back into my life. Someone who is quite invested in making sure I maintain my family life.

We are a species that has evolved to handle matters of bonding and creating support networks of very diverse sizes and shapes. Many people are still happy doing pair bonding and having involved grandparents/aunts/uncles/cousins. That is not an option for everyone. It leaves a lot of people out entirely. That’s a complicated situation. I know that in Scotland a lot of the answer is “ask the government for help” but this isn’t that kind of thing. I need community. I need deep emotional connection. I am also a hard nut to crack. For all that I will tell my story to anyone who asks I don’t volunteer it much in person.

I need to be known in an intense and deep way. I don’t trust someone easily. I assume people are not interested in knowing me more deeply because they don’t know what they are signing on for. I always assume that I am going to be too much.

tap tap tap Is this thing on?

1 Reply

Hi there, whoever you are. I haven’t felt ok about writing here for quite some time now. I’ve had a lot of self doubt and anxiety going on. For a little while now I’ve been blogging elsewhere behind a fence but that’s not feeling appropriate anymore. I’ve been trying hard to be in the closet because it felt safer. It no longer feels safe. Now it feels like a risk.

If you are in the closet people can try to use information to threaten you. My best source of safety is having no secrets. It has been my approach for most of my life. Sometimes I am scared for a while and I shut down. When I feel under threat or if something happens, once again I bust wide open.

I can’t get into details but I am dealing with prosecuting a sexual assault. It means that things are going to come out about my life. People will look me up and I have not tried hard to hide my life. I am not enjoying the fact that I get to come out to folks whether I want to or not. Not that being in the closet has been awesome for my mental health. It isn’t.

I’ve been really depressed for a long while. A lot of the time I’ve been in Scotland. A year or so ago I started getting past the post-partum hump and I have had a renewed sex drive. That’s been complicated with the restrictions and limits of my life. Noah has been pretty awesome about trying to ramp back up after years of me not being up for almost anything.

I don’t want to rehash everything I’ve been writing else-net but a lot has been happening. Noah and I are doing a lot of renegotiating our sex/bdsm dynamic. If you happen to be new here, bdsm is an acronym that means bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadism and masochism. Basically it is part of the human norm to like adventure during sex and this is the path that works for us. If it seems crazy, keep in mind that I went through what is essentially sexual torture as a small child. Yes I am weird and I have weird impulses, preferences, and needs around my sex life.

I’m feeling like I am drowning in shame. I am really hard into avoidance. The short version is I’m having a lot of PTSD symptoms. It’s been a minute since I have crashed this hard. I managed to get through the first couple of weeks post-assault just pushing through. In that process I did some good stuff and some stuff I feel really ashamed of and I feel gross and bad and like I deserve every bad thing that could ever happen to me. I feel like my reaction to the assault retroactively means it was fine because I am such a fucked up person.

I feel low key nauseous basically all the time. My stomach is hurting in a way it hasn’t in many many years. I’m having more nightmares. I’m having flashbacks. I feel trapped and helpless and like many many more bad things are coming. I’m sweaty a lot of the time from my level of anxiety. I am deep in hyperarousal. I’m irritable and cranky and I can’t sleep and I’m having memory problems. I am really emotionally struggling because of how bad my memory is right now. I am just not able to access a lot of memories stored in non-traumatised parts of my brain right now. I am deep in always/never and I just can’t access anything else.

I use the term “always/never” to refer to a really extreme version of state dependent memory. When I feel good I cannot remember how bad I feel sometimes. When I feel bad I cannot remember ever having any good feelings of any kind. My brain simply won’t acknowledge that the other side of the fence exists. This is not good.

It’s kind of funny that the standard wisdom for PTSD is that these symptoms appearing in the month after a trauma isn’t the end of the world, for most people this fades. It didn’t really get going for me until more than 4 weeks after this last assault. I was in “make everyone else ok” mode for the first 4 weeks. Then stuff started feeling completely out of my control. Now I’m freaking the fuck out. It’s been 6 weeks and it feels like the last week has been the start of a really shitty slide. I’m worried. I’m not ok. My desire to self harm or suicide is ridiculously high. I’m being careful and I’m not doing anything over the line. I’m careful to limit my drinking. I am no longer able to withstand the physical trauma of most of my long-ago preferred self harms. I can’t do anything that might create marks because that would be a cluster fuck of issues while I’m going through an assault trial.

I feel incredibly helpless and trapped and worthless and like there will never actually be an end to me being raped. I’m really fucking angry that I now have over 40 years of rape experience. I was really happy about only having 23 years of rape experience. Those 17 years where I didn’t get raped where pretty dang cool. I almost got to have a whole normal childhood span of time free of rape. It makes me feel really sick.

I had a hemorrhoidectomy and the recovery sucks. With all my health complications I’m supposed to not exercise for 8-10 weeks. Part of the reason I need to move back to blogging instead of using the other social media sites is that posting about my frustration about not being able to exercise leads to people pushing me to exercise. Yeah. That’s not ok.

The big change that is a greater deal of positive mixed in with the negative is Noah and I have restarted discussions oriented around polyamory. I have a boyfriend (whom I’ve never had sex with) and Noah is waiting a while because we have a lot to process. He will date. Hell, what I’m doing barely counts as dating. I’ll have sex with someone outside the marriage 8 months after we started negotiating. We are not rushing by any measure. The person I’m talking to is one of my oldest friends. We worked in theatre together right out of high school. We had a lot of interest in one another way back when and no skills for being able to have a relationship together. I still don’t know what’s going to happen or how this will all go but it is mostly a better experience than everything else this year so it’s the upside I get to have. I’m referring to him as my Travel Boyfriend.

I feel numb and empty. I feel like the only way for me to stop being in pain is to die. I mean, it’s true with my physical conditions. That doesn’t mean I get to die anytime soon. It just means I get to endure an unlimited and endless amount of pain for the rest of my life.

Today that is feeling very hard.

M/s, sexual dysfunction, and healing

Leave a reply

When I showed up in the bdsm scene as a fresh shiny 18 year old I was still reeling heavily from my childhood. My primary childhood rapist had been dead for less than two years. He and my brother killed themselves in a 3 month span when I was 16-17. I had been out of my abusive home of origin for less than a year.

I spent a lot of time cutting myself and I liked to burn myself and I hit my head on concrete. I engaged in extremely risky promiscuous sex. I would let almost anyone who asked politely hit me even if I didn’t think they would be safe.

I entered into my first M/s contract when I was 20. My Owner had been my boyfriend/Dominant for a while. My Owner wasn’t what I would call an emotionally supportive guy. He was not up for talking about my trauma or mental illness much. That was supposed to be kept off screen. Mostly he wasn’t even aware of my self harming because he didn’t want to be.

There were a few aspects of our relationship that were really important for my life and development. I think I have most of the executive functioning I have because he trained me. He taught me a lot about following through and executing on plans. He taught me a lot about financial solvency. He taught me about boundaries and agreements and ONLY saying you will do exactly what you will follow up and do.

I believe with all my heart and soul that my relationship with him was my first significant non-abusive relationship. Even though he spent a lot of time hitting me and objectifying me. He did it in ways we talked about very carefully and he absolutely never crossed a stated boundary. He’s a really good guy and I’m going to be grateful for the rest of my life that I got to spend the 4 out of the first 5 years of being an adult with him. I’m in a much better place now than I could have been without him.

What he couldn’t help me with in any way shape or form was my enormous dissociation problem nor my extreme sexual dysfunction. Mostly he didn’t have sex with me much… I think in part because he isn’t all that motivated by sex and in part because he damaged me internally almost every time we had sex (he had an absolutely enormous cock) and I think that was something he felt bad about but we didn’t really talk about it.

Fast forward to now. I’ve been married for 11 years. About a year ago my husband and I decided it was time for us to move forward with the M/s part of our relationship. When my husband asked me to marry him he asked me to be his wife and to be his slave. I told him I could be his wife but neither of us were ready for M/s together and we needed to figure out a bunch of shit together before we did that.

So we waited 10 years. I like to pretend this was us being responsible and trying to get to know one another. In reality it’s more complicated than that.

My husband doesn’t have a lot in common with my former Owner. He’s intensely interested in helping me emotionally process. He has training as a hypnotherapist and I would say that in the past 11 years we have spent hundreds of hours talking about my various psych problems and my history. He’s the only person who has ever been all that interested in me or in why I am so fucked up. He makes me feel seen and valid and important in a way I haven’t ever felt in my whole life. My husband is awesome.

But sex has continued to be complicated. I’m still very damaged internally. My cunt was shredded over and over throughout my life starting when I was a baby. My cunt isn’t in great shape. Two vaginal births have… strangely helped and hurt at the same time. A lot of scar tissue was broken up in the process of delivery. But I almost died because my cunt was not real able to function the way it was supposed to and I hemorrhaged very badly.

For a lot of our marriage we have both tried very hard to make one another happy. We are in what psychologists like to call a “repair marriage” where we both showed up intensely fucked up and we are trying to consciously help one another become healthier, more whole people. Mostly this is going pretty well. Except when it blows up like a fucking wild fire because we are both damaged people and that shit happens.

For many years I have operated under the assumption that my husband married me in large part because I spent my childhood with my parents actively telling me that marriage meant you were a permanent whore and you never got to say no to sex again.

I have a hard time believing anyone would want me for anything else.

But my cunt is uhhhhh damaged. Severely. That damage is a constant problem and it always has been. Sex that is barely too rough can cause significant re-tearing and sometimes bleeding. And I don’t mean rough sex. I mean if I am .00001 ounces too low in moisture for lubrication.

I’ve spent the vast majority of my life with my cunt burning like fire every minute of the day and night. Because I chase sex like my life depends on it. Because what else am I good for?

Last year I hit a wall with my husband where I couldn’t continue to do what I had been doing with him to manage. I don’t do most of the forms of self harm I used to engage in. I don’t cut myself, I don’t burn myself, I stopped beating my head… the only drug I use is pot and that’s with many doctors telling me that I MUST KEEP USING IT. It’s the most effective medication for my complicated array of mental and physical issues. I need medication. It’s not optional.

So I have worked hard on getting rid of most of my dysfunctional coping methods. That’s good! But what do I do now when I feel completely flooded and unable to cope? Well last year I tried to lean more heavily on my excellent dissociation ability and I asked a bunch of my nice friends to hit me and fuck me a bunch. They did. It was fun and I thank y’all for that.

My husband flipped out. That was… not a way he was ok with me coping and we’ve had a rough year since then processing all the damage I did to our relationship. Damage I did in part because I was trying to figure out how to twist myself into pretzels so I could meet needs of his that were hurting me really badly.

Now we’ve had over a year in a row of a lot of screaming matches. It’s been hella festive and hard. Why did we pick this fucking year to be like, “Fine. It’s M/s now or never?”

Because making optimal choices is not my strong suit.

Frankly having the first rule in our M/s contract be that I have to prevent him from damaging me is… quite the head fuck.

It means I am having to talk very explicitly about the extend of the damage I have sustained over 34ish years of harming my cunt. It means that I have to get very loud and aggressive about I CANNOT JUST BE AVAILABLE FOR SEX WHENEVER YOU WANT IT. THAT IS NOT OK.

Because I can’t. I am not physically not emotionally capable of doing that in a way that is even remotely healthy for me.

I have been struggling to carry the amount of pain I feel for my whole life. I have wanted to die for more than 30 years. I try year by year to reduce how much pain I’m in so it is less of a burden, so I can carry it longer. But it’s very hard.

Before some fucking asshole tells me to see a therapist… I’ve been in therapy for 33+ years. I’ve seen more than 35 counselors/psychologists/psychiatrists. I currently have a large and complex medical team who all talk to one another about my shit. My kids are in therapy. We go in and out of marriage counseling. My husband has seen therapists. We see a family therapist. Keep your obvious unhelpful advice to yourself, m’kay?

Suicidality is a coping method. It’s not an ideal one. It sucks. It hurts me and it hurts everyone around me. But I’m coping as absolutely best as I can. My medical team tells me constantly that the amount of progress I have made and continue to make is just about miraculous. People like me usually just die. I’m doing really well for where I started. Even if I do still feel like a festering pile of shit.

My husband wants to keep me for as long as he can. That means helping me figure out how to be ok with being inside this brain and inside this body because that’s the path my life just has to take.

That means we have to figure out how to have sex without hurting me. As a submissive masochist that’s a very hard thing for me to demand. It feels like a very wrong thing to ask for. It feels like I am bad and selfish and cheating him out of what he deserves for putting up with my stupid self.

But I have to change this. No matter how hard it is. Because this right here is a serious problem.

Some day I have to decide that the health of my cunt matters or all the work I’m doing to try and convince my body that I am safe and I should stop the hypervigilance and constant paranoia about who is going to hurt me next is wasted time and energy.

I don’t have so much time and energy that I can afford to waste it at this point. I’m so tired.

Not to mention how fucking expensive this god damn medical care is. I feel like such a waste of resources.

I like to be hit. But there are a lot of limits around what I can bear and still function.

I like sex. But there are a lot of limits around what I can bear and still be functional.

It is very hard to believe I am worth this much consideration and effort.

But he keeps telling me he wants to keep me.

{heavily filtered} Triggers

Leave a reply

Can I say that I'm getting fucking sick to death of how the word triggers is used? Mostly I hear it mean: 'So this person is crazy and reacting to ghosts… it's not my problem that they are over-sensitive but I guess I can give a lame-ass "I'll try to respect your 'triggers'" line.' Fuck you all. No really.

I'm kind of tired of having people throw it in my face that they are trying to be "sensitive" to my "triggers". Bitch you don't even know what the fuck that means. By the way, I'm kind of angry. Apparently having a trigger means that someone does the same asshole thing to you that someone else has already done. Or at least caused you to think hard about the previous time and consider how you want to react this time. People are so dismissive of "triggers" because it is a good way of saying, "You were already hurt here so it's not my fault you are hurting now."

Actually, an asshole act is an asshole act. Lying is lying. When you negotiate extensively for activity A and you instead engage in activity B… that's not a miscommunication and that's not about me being triggered.

You want to know the "trigger" part? My gut-level response to this behavior is to go sleep in a different bed and cry and assume there is nothing in the world that will change it. Because that kind of lying is something that people just do. I should stop listening to what people tell me. There isn't a point.

Things that were effective coping mechanisms during your childhood are hard to abandon as an adult. When someone lies to me, I have to withdraw trust. Fast. I have to shut down affection towards that person. I have to stop being vulnerable because if they smell blood… I'm dead.

I suppose that triggering me means acting like my family. So that I have to act like I do with my family. It's not about a set word or phrase or experience. If you act like my family… I have nothing for you.

My family would set terms on who you can know. If you had the audacity to want to be friends with someone they didn't like… well… that's going to result in nastiness, name calling, threats of abandonment (that aren't followed up on because the piece of shit bully is dependent on having you around to kick), and of course threats of suicide.

Wow. That all sounds like what I say and do when I tell Noah that I don't like him dating. Ironic. No wonder I feel like I shouldn't be saying no, no matter what. Because I have this gut reaction of not wanting to be like them. It's bad to say, "Actually this behavior is toxic to our marriage for 'x, y, and z reasons.'" Because then I'm trying to control him inappropriately. My adult spin on not wanting to be this person is to think that I should start shutting my mouth and putting my head down.

My family would rewrite history. Oh, it's not that anyone lied. We just miscommunicated, that's all. No one ever has to be accountable for their actions. That's why I have a scorched earth policy. Someone who is going to lie to my face and then go behind my back and do something else all the while maintaining a dialogue with someone else that perpetuates a lie… wow. I need to run, not walk away from that. You want to know what a trigger is?

It's the sure knowledge that a liar is poison. Someone who will lie to me… I can't know. I can't be vulnerable with. I can't pay attention to them. I can't worry about what they want. I know it will be a facade and I'll never know them anyway. As soon as you lie to me, and then tell someone else that we "miscommunicated" well… Yeah. Ok. The solution to this "miscommunication" is for me to assume you are lying going forward. Sounds great.

I lie too. I lie compulsively sometimes. I say things in the heat of an argument that aren't true no matter how you look at them. And I hate myself for it. That makes me want to run too. Because these topics are things that I can't be honest about. So I'd rather not discuss them.

At any other point in my life this kind of behavior would be cue for an abrupt turn on my heel and exiting the premises permanently. I would much rather leave than try to fix something like this. My life is complicated now.

I understand a lot of things differently as life goes by. I think about why women stay in domestic violence situations. I think about why my mother and my sister are the way they are. Why do they lie compulsively all the time? They were taught to. That's what hanging out with liars will do. It teaches you to lie.

The problem with being married to a sociopath is I am never sure if his vision of enlightened self-interest lines up with mine. My best-interest is considered to the extent that he wants to manipulate the correct
behavior out of me, preferably while volunteering as little as possible. Because the less he volunteers, the more control and power he has. There are cracks in my Stockholm Syndrome.

It's hard having such extreme opinions about Noah. Mostly I feel better about/toward/with him than anyone else on the planet. And then sometimes I don't.

(ETA: the formatting is weird and I don't know why.)

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Tag Archives: poly

I am so proud of my babies

This is harder than it used to be.

Even though I feel weird, I’m going to talk about him.

Finding my way back to me

Life isn’t fair

Time to come out.

I don’t feel ready for this.

I choose me.

Click bait says, “Are you scared of saying the wrong thing?”

You can’t “just stop” you have to start doing something else.

I hate being depressed

Surviving rape

There is a void in my day.

I need to change my mindset.

What does the future hold?

This will be awkward as a transition

tap tap tap Is this thing on?

M/s, sexual dysfunction, and healing

{heavily filtered} Triggers