Tag Archives: self-care

How do we define ourselves?

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I have a yoga class in two hours. Does that make me a “yoga person”? I like it when I get punched. Does that make me the cause of my own abuse? My husband can punch me for hours and all I will do in retaliation is suck his cock and thank him. But some random dude stopped his car to yell at me while I was out cycling and he slapped my hand and I called the police and he was spoken to about assault. My tiny neighbour is exploring boundaries and when you tell her no she is apt to slap you–your face or your hand, whichever she can reach. I picked her up and gently set her outside my studio and said, “No ma’am. You can’t hit me. That’s not ok. I know it is hard to be told no. You feel frustrated and sad and you probably think I’m being mean. I am sorry I have to say no but I don’t have time to pick up all the things in that drawer from the floor today. Another day I will say yes.” She gave me a suspicious look but stopped crying and ran off to play again.

When we try to figure out if we are a good person or not how do we decide which moment to judge?

My best friend, many years ago, was absolutely determined to get into med school. She accepted horrifyingly unsafe living conditions so that she “had time to study” for her exams to get in. She lived with her parents, who were a master class on unsafe and shitty parents. She studied for 8 years as of when I last knew her. Her university GPA was really nothing impressive and she needed a perfect score. I don’t remember what the scale is, I’m going to pretend it is out of 1,000. She needed 900+ to qualify for admission. 8 years in she had never gotten above a 500. The tests are expensive. The study materials are expensive. She ate poorly because she took no time to cook and she had almost no money because she worked the absolute minimum to devote her time to studying. She was sleeping on an RV mattress on concrete blocks. Her back was doing so poorly that she had a gallon size plastic bag full of meds. She was high as a fucking kite at all times and her doctor thought she is heading for surgery as the very best outcome and probably a wheelchair. She would not in any way consider doing anything with her life other than being a doctor.

She came to visit me. She was supposed to help me with my wedding reception (she offered, I did not ask). She couldn’t. She couldn’t stand or sit or focus long enough to actually complete a task. She ended up spending all the prep time hounding me about how I was supposed to take her to a fucking release party for whatever Harry Potter book was coming out. I still had not read any and I was completely uninterested in spending the weekend of my wedding reception hanging out in line to get a fucking children’s book at midnight. Sounded like hell.

These sorts of non-communications passed back and forth for a while. Then I exploded after she told me that she was saving up all her extra money because she wants really fancy earphones for her 2 hour each way commute. I asked her why she isn’t saving money for a decent mattress since she is looking at surgery and a wheelchair because of the damage she is causing to herself. I asked her why she won’t get a reasonable, attainable dream for her since she is killing herself chasing a star she isn’t going to reach. (I am paraphrasing. I don’t actually remember the words I said. I know I told her that she needs a new dream.)

I was a horrible fucking person. Whether or not I was “right” about any of that I shouldn’t have said it. I had no right to pass judgment. It was cruel. It was unkind. I made someone I love deeply cry.

I mean, there are my scene fuck ups too. Once I was overly defensive on the local public mailing list when someone said that I had made their fingers numb during a bondage scene. (Not long-term numb, there was no permanent damage.) I shouldn’t have been a twerp and I was. I was kind of right as well, slight numbness in fingers is not a reason to flip out though it does mean you should probably modify your tie so that it doesn’t continue. Meh.

You say that you are not your trauma (fiiiiiiiiiiiiine Alebeard I will argue with your fucking assertion since you CAME AND TAUNTED ME AS SOON AS I WOKE UP THIS MORNING~) which I can kind of accept, because I think a person is defined more by what they do than what they have done to them. How do you measure the trauma you cause other people? How do you figure out if you are being in the world who you want to be?

I had a dear friend–I’ve lost contact with her. I should look her up. Anyway, I had a dear friend. She was sweet and kind and gentle and one of the more scary bad ass masochists I have ever witnessed in person and that’s saying a lot. I have seen many thousands of people play and I know a lot of extreme edge players. She was special. She was able to recover from levels of physical abuse and say “more please” in a way that is pushing way past the edge of self harm. She also had an eating disorder and she self harmed, so.

We were talking about calling red. I have stopped scenes that crossed explicit boundaries; she had never done so. I asked her how she felt about that. She said it scared her. She said she was afraid that she was going to let someone kill her because she genuinely didn’t care if she walked away from scenes. I asked her if she thought that if she got to red once if she could do it again. She said she thinks so and that’s why she is afraid to do it. Doing it even once is telling herself that she deserves to live. She couldn’t do that.

I asked her if she wanted to red.

She started crying and she looked down for a while but eventually she nodded. We had played together quite a bit and we had long since negotiated physical limits and toy stuff so I could simply ask if she wanted me to make her red. She said she did.

I beat the shit out of her. The whole time I hit her I talked to her about why she is worthy of love. Why she deserves to protect herself. Why she is special and wonderful and strong and pretty and kind without being injured at the same time and why can’t she hear that? Why can’t she believe that she deserves to live?

I don’t know how long it went on. I remember it as being one of those “forever” scenes where you lose time completely and you can go for 3 or 4 hours before dropping in exhaustion. It stopped because at some point I was sitting on her and slapping her in the face over and over telling her that she has to tell me to stop. She has to live. She has to love herself enough to live. She has to say stop. She has to say red.

She broke.

Why is making one friend cry because I said unkind words enough to mean that I am a horrible person but beating someone for hours until she cries and tells me to stop is ok.

She made positive steps in her life after that. The rest of that is not my story to tell.

Sometimes forcing your will on someone is a service and it is desired and welcome and a healthy thing to do. It is negotiated and desired and created and facilitated through an agreement. Sometimes you are a fucking dick.

I have fucked up a lot in this life. If I am not the trauma I experienced in childhood, cool ok, am I the trauma I inflicted in my adulthood? Even you understand that there is a difference between the trauma you inflict with consent and the trauma you inflict without consent. I understand that you (particular, singular you) differentiate hard between people inside your sphere of care and people outside your sphere of care. Think about accidental trauma you inflict on me, or E or the kids. That has happened. All humans fuck up and hurt people. It is part of the process of learning how to exist in this life. We learn a lot more from mistakes than from always doing it right; at least that is what I tell myself to justify how much I have fucked up. I definitely have a bone deep understanding of why I will never speak to someone like that again.

But the real question is: will I ever beat someone like that again? Quite possibly not. I might get beaten like that again. It’s different. There is a very specific experience that comes from giving someone intense catharsis that is absolutely intoxicating. You know it well. Now the freaking yoga class is coming up sooner and I need to eat before I leave.

Was that a good enough argument?

~P.S. I love you, @Alebeard. You are weird as fuck and a troll and kind of mean and you still delight me. I’m not ok with your time on this world ending soon so knock off that line of talk. Too many people have died recently. I am not at all ready to lose more. Go for a fucking walk. I hope you are eating your hippy vegetables. Live long, my friend.

Shards and training

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It is funny to me how the ravenous cavern of emptiness inside of me feels different now. I notice that there has been a qualitative change in me in this AN time period. (After Noah, of course.) I’m at 15 months AN. It’s such a short time, really. Progress when measured in reverse is pretty shocking. We are doing ok. I am doing ok. No, I don’t feel “all better” but I can see where I am headed. I can see that I am doing what I need to be doing. More importantly, I can see that I really do need to chill on some pieces of impulsive joy even though I want to say yes to all of it.

I keep dating people who want to go to loud places with me. Why do I do this? Why am I picking loud musicians right now? Where are my Cheese damned priorities? I can’t hear. No, this is not a venue for deep conversation. So we will look at each for a few hours in an overwhelmingly loud space. Ok. This is happening. Also, I am too fucking old to make out in a pub.

It is really funny watching these layers of inhibition unfold within me. I can feel in my body how a younger me would have acted. No, I can’t do that anymore. No, I can’t ignore the whole audience and do whatever I want. No. The audience is desperately important. This is why I want to go to sex inclusive bdsm parties the most. That is literally the only environment where I don’t have to feel fucking paranoid about squelching shit I acted out for 25 years. I know how inappropriate I used to be. I have learned. It took a lot of researching child development for me to fully understand why I was so horrifying as a foster child. Right. That’s why they kicked me out. I was uhm, acting out in age inappropriate ways. I didn’t have much internal inhibition about sexual behaviour of any kind.

I’m 6 weeks away from having seen a whole healthy childhood. That’s been fucking wild. I have learned a lot of inhibition in service to being able to provide this to someone else.

My kids asked who I was going on a date with. I appreciated the wide eyes and big gasp before “Niiiiiiiiiiiiice.”

The show we attended involved a lot of the performers being there with their whole families in attendance. No, I was not going to make out. No matter how much that clearly would have been fine with Pretty Lady. She’s past caring. I am not. If I want to be useful as an ambassador for weird I am going to have to keep a lot of it behind closed doors.

When I was 21 I would have had my fingers up her skirt. When I was 23 I had been teaching long enough that I would have limited myself to making out with hands only around her waist. Now I could feel a shock in my body and I recoiled from her intense kissing. It felt out of place and wrong. That’s interesting and I should pay attention to that. It’s not that I’m opposed to the idea of kissing her, not even a little bit.

There are an interesting large number of power dynamic differences in this relationship. I am trying to pay attention to where I need to manage shit with a tight hand or it isn’t going to be sustainable to me. She has more ability to function on less sleep than I do. I suffer physically for days when I fuck up my sleep schedule. It’s why my pain levels are as bad as they are right now. My sleep keeps getting fucked up. I’m having too many late nights.

As much as I want to be all “Say yes!” I think I am hurting myself in stupid and predictable ways and it’s becoming a choice. I don’t love this form of self harm. It is really uhh crappy. Like, if I could cut and get a jolt of energy and power through my life with good cheer that would be a very small cost to me. Sleep deprivation makes every single aspect of being alive hard.

While the musicians were nice and all I need to say no next time. I need to be having one or two late nights in a whole month not one a week. This is getting really stupid. I am hurting myself and the amount of backlash in my body is exceeding coping methods. I’m struggling with exercise over the last few days. I’m having patches of numbness. Normal tasks are taking longer because I’m physically depleted and I’m dropping important bits of information out of my head.

I can’t keep impulsively adding late night joy. I am doing lots of planning around my body being able to handle specific events. I need to stick to those long term plans if I don’t want to get sick. I’m being stupid.

Saying no is hard. Saying yes is far harder on me.

My therapist asked me who is feeding me yesterday. They noted that I opt in to a lot of mentor type relationships, I offer help for parents who are overwhelmed, and I deliver food to neighbours who are going through tough times. All of this has pretty much resumed a close to normal pace on my calendar. I have a lot of relationships with people who need me to give. It was really nice that I could immediately rattle off a lot of people who are there for me near and far.

I want to get my sleep schedule back on track because it being fucked up means I miss the monthly check in call with my Elders. I don’t like doing that. It means that I don’t get to nurture that connection and it is important to me. It’s important to me that these people love me and believe in me and really want to continue being support to me throughout my life. They have been there through a lot of things.

I think I am messing up the balance and it’s not sustainable. New is good. Old is also very important. The thing about the long term friendships is the way we are witnesses to the arcs of our lives. Being impressed is not based on glamour it is based on experience and earned esteem. It’s like time with Bestie. The people who have known me the longest give me constant verbal affirmation about how far I have come. They saw the story happen. I don’t have to say anything or ask for anything from them. We talk about what has been happening for us each month and they stare at me with overwhelming intensity because I can see them playing the story arc out in their heads. They tell me I am doing so good and I can believe them because they saw how fucking hard I had to work to get to this moment.

I don’t have any scale for evaluating the evaluations of new people. When they give me compliments mostly I shrug. I don’t know how to hear them and understand them. I don’t accept any compliment without thinking really hard about it. I mean, in the moment I say, “Thank you” or if I’m feeling saucy, “I know.” The thing is, I know that each of these opinions is subjective and people vary in how they assign value.

I’m sorry to be so blunt about it, but compliments are part of positive behaviour modification. It’s a really common way that people train the folk around them. It’s usually utterly unconscious. I don’t think most people are trying really hard to be manipulative with a plan. I mean, I do but it’s because I’m super fucking autistic and I have learned that I need a detailed plan or I just don’t leave the fucking house. I have to know what is expected and what will be acceptable from me in a given environment. I no longer like places with fuzzy attitudes about behaviour. I have fucking learned the Social Contract like I want to stay out of jail. I will always err on the side of not drawing attention.

Wow. I really am scared in a way I’m not paying enough attention to. I think it is funny that three different woo fuckers have observed that I have a lot of blocked root chakra energy in the last two weeks. My life is hilarious. Yeah. Sure. Why not? Frankly, is that a worse thing to say than Generalised Anxiety Disorder? Enh? It’s funny how much more explanatory root chakra descriptions are than the DSM ones. It talks about where in my body I am experiencing different forms of stress around existing in the world. These things are often common among people. It’s kinda like how I can clock ECSA people by their bathroom habits. If you are raped a lot as a little kid you often have bathroom issues for the whole of your life. “Fun” fact.

I think that this kind of fucking around with my schedule because I want to please people is why I’m going to need to stick really hard with solo poly shit. I need to give people appointment slots. I can perform the kind of behaviour you want from me between these hours. During these other hours, should we be in the same space, I will be fucking sleeping. You can enjoy listening to live music without me. Oh fuck, fuck, fuck.

I’m torn because I want to support local artists. Also I feel like starting at 8pm is fucking insane and painful and cruel. Who the fuck are you people? How in the world are you fucking moving around and trying to be engaging at bedtime? What is wrong with you?

This is why I stopped doing theatre at 19. That was not a good career match for my body. I prefer jobs that start between 5 and 7am. I think this is partly because early afternoon is my preferred time for sex. Always has been. Noah and I literally built our life around making sure we spent as much of that time having sex as possible. Nights and mornings were more chancy because of vagaries of the day.

I’m going to have to be better about asserting my limits if I am going to date this woman. It’s on me. It’s fine that she asked. I should have said no. I made a bad choice. I’m not entirely sorry. It was nice to be asked. It was fun to dress up and catch at least 15 of the words she said all night. It was a high cost activity though and I am finding myself starting Saturday in spoon deficit. This was not smart. I am going to be limited in what I accomplish today. That’s not what I wanted for the day.

It’s my day to go make the big sweet breakfast for Saturday. I really don’t want to. That sounds vaguely like torture. It’s going to be the kind of day where I either get a burn or cut myself. Woo. I love days when I feel this bad and have no adult in the house to take over. Woo.

I miss Noah. Also, I see what I did to him by over-extending myself a lot more clearly. I see why he got increasingly picky about what I was allowed to do as our life went on. He had to pick up the pieces. I get it. Literally he was devoting his whole life to figuring out how to get me to rest more for the last 4 or so years. He was trying so hard to be a container the size and shape that would force me into healthier patterns. Of course that means there was behaviour other people interpret as abusive, duh. We were weirdos. We needed things other people don’t and we negotiated about them very directly.

Now I have to be an adult and carefully negotiate tiny pieces of interdependence over very long term periods. Itty bitty. Absolutely nothing is mandatory ever. Every step has to be explicitly agreed to. Every breech of decorum and assertion of an aberrant need must be explicit.

I am going to need to write a letter to talk to her. I need it to not sound like a rebuke because it isn’t. I am going to have to find a tone of explaining my needs that doesn’t sound like negative judgment about her. She is in an exciting period of her life. I get that she is going to be impulsive like a teenager. My whole life is dealing with what it means to live with impulsive teenagers. I feel really lucky that the main big impulsive things in my house are cooking, baking, writing, making or otherwise creating something.

Ack. I am summoned.

Energy

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I am going to be pesty to one of my pals because they do not like the term energy because it is excessively woo. I have no idea if this essay will get published because the last few days I have been dropping posts into drafts without posting.

Let me start by saying that I am not an initiate witch. I am not real into being told what to do and while I love working with teachers who share what they know/experience I don’t deal with being told what I have to do/experience. So I figure shit out as best as I can on my own. I learn from a lot of different sources. I am probably one of those shitty Americans who are appropriating from everything under the sun. Guilty as charged. I think every faith contains elements of truth and I want to follow truth wherever I can find it.

I was noticing this today while I was running. Your moue of distaste at the contemplation of woo was on my mind while I was noting a paradox in how I’m experiencing running this year. For a bunch of good reasons I want to mostly focus on a 5k. I don’t really have it in me to be going a lot further than 3 miles because it takes too long and my childcare is being pushed to the limit. The thing is, I don’t really turn on and fully engage for the first two miles. I can feel it. There is a difference in my pelvis.

For the first two miles I can feel my pelvis being cranky and critical of my efforts. It sends many strongly worded letters of complaint about what a horrible bitch I am. It’s not a lot of fun. I call it “running” but I start going up a really fucking big hill for the first 3/4 of a mile. Right now I am super fucking happy with myself if I can beat 16 minutes for the first mile. Like, 15:55 means I give myself literal pats on the back. Maybe I am less of a “runner” and more of an enthusiastically lurching jogger. The second mile I can usually knock down to 13 minutes, even though it’s still a bitchy amount of uphill. By the third mile, which alternates a lot of down and bits of uphill I feel different.

I can feel heat and openness in my pelvis between the cradle of the bones. It’s when I feel like I could climb up a telephone pole then sit on the top and take the whole damn thing. It’s an amazing feeling. It’s where I feel the forever place get started and I can drop to 12 minute miles and keep going for another 10 miles without feeling much of a problem.

I don’t have the kind of time it takes to be running half marathons on a regular basis this year. It’s just not on the table. So even though I know that this magical sensation of wanting to take the entire world in through my vagina is living there, curled up and waiting to be accessed I don’t have much time to explore it this year. Not really. I get like 12 minutes of this glory then I stop and have to go on with my day. It honestly kind of sucks.

This specific feeling inside me is different from most of the other kinds of feelings I have. There is no anxiety in it. There is only intense ravening need to be filled. Is this just a “I want something in my vagina”? No, not even a little bit. I don’t actually need to put something inside my vagina after this to find satisfaction. The wanting is deeply satisfying. It makes me want to create, deeply connect with people, and it makes me want to run forever. It’s energy. It’s a connection to the energy that shivers under the top layers of the planet. You want science words for these things but I’m just some California woo whack job. I cannot give you that explanation. Bark up a different tree.

I can only tell you that there is a feeling of being connected to the earth, to the soil, to the magma at the core of the planet. It burns in a chain up through the ground into my legs and up into I’M GOING TO JUST SAY IT, OK the root chakra. Go ahead and be mad at me. I don’t have better language for this. Do I feel a bit like a person who should shut the fuck up? Yes and no. You have asked me how to understand this and I feel a lot of responsibility for answering questions long past when the asker is satisfied. This is one of my fatal flaws.

Running is one of the best ways I know to raise this energy outside of sex, for me. I can get there with meditation stuff and breath work with enough work. The best/fastest/quickest way to get there is ritualistic sex.

I feel like a giant dipshit. I went and saw a neighbour recently. She is a Reiki practitioner and she’s mentioned before that she’d be happy to do work for me since she knows what has happened. I demurred for a long time but eventually it seems like a good shout seeing as we share a fence and all.

I’m really amused by two specific comments, one was just telling me that my solar plexus is incredibly hot (linked to chronic pain and historical trauma, naturally), and that she was shocked by how open my entire channel was. She doesn’t usually see something like that.

I really do feel like I am mostly living at the self actualisation level of Maslow’s Hierarchy so that makes sense to me? I do speak my truth. I do take action to be the person I want to be in the world. I have a level of safety that feels utterly impossible to me.

This feels connected to me.

That energy I feel in my pelvis, it’s hotness, it’s both a new kind of tension and a release from the old/standard unpleasant painful knotting. It’s the difference between activating your core muscles and sucking your stomach in but it’s happening lower down in my pelvic girdle. I can feel it in the viscera. My body feels like it is all of a sudden slightly less weighed down by gravity. It just turned down by .5% or 1%. Not a lot, just enough to make everything feel able to twist and wiggle and undulate in ways I usually couldn’t quite manage.

It feels like freedom and strength and savage need to stay alive. It’s different than the kinds of energy feelings that I get in my chest. Amusingly, a lot of my drive towards being a whore comes from the heart chakra. I don’t feel drawn to hurrying out to find new people to connect with when I’m running. It’s not the same kind of energy. They feel differently.

I don’t want to whore because I want to acquire numbers. I am out of that game. For me (I don’t apply this to anyone else!) if I were to feel like I really wanted to go out and start hitting swingers parties a lot because I wanted a lot of variety that would feel like being slutty. I’m enjoying rereading The Ethical Slut because they are very clear that it’s ok for someone to be slutty while only masturbating. They are not saying that slutting is chasing numbers. This is about me and my body and how I feel when I use words.

I love being slutty, don’t get me wrong. That season of my life was pretty fucking epic and I’m glad I have all the stories in the hopper. I haven’t felt slutty in a long time. I should feel like last year when I was hunting on Fab was being slutty but I don’t. In retrospect I can say that in a way I was less looking for pleasure in all the slutting than I was speed running looking for someone to give me enough sex to not lose my shit in my life. I wasn’t looking to explore and enjoy variety for the sake of variety. I was a woman on a mission. I have a quota of fucking to fill or I am hard to live with.

Just getting up to functionality doesn’t feel like being slutty. Even though it meant auditioning more folks than many have sex with in ten years.

This energy that I get in my pelvis, this intensity, this feeling of heat and force towards life allows me to get a lot more done. It improves my ability to perform work for my life. It makes me feel alive and ready to show off how awesome my big mammal meat sack is as it does ALL THE THINGS. Can I enjoy it through fucking? Enh? It’s always worked better in theory than in practice. When this energy comes from ritualistic sex it still isn’t about fucking, it is more related to intense bdsm energy–I can be sadistic or masochistic either is fine. It’s about creating an energy loop with another person and the genitals are slightly a distraction.

The urge to connect emotionally, the need to whore comes from my heart. It comes from the centre of my being. I feel it as heat and also I see savagely bright white light radiating out from the core of me. I know this sounds fucking insane. I’m sorry. You want to know what it feels like. This feeling makes me want to meet every person I come across during my entire life with my entire full self spread open. They can take the parts that are appropriate and move along. I will never run out of self. The more they take the more I grow. Sometimes this is about sex but it doesn’t have to be. I really do walk up to strangers in public and start conversations. It’s how I make a lot of my friends.

“Hello. My name is Krissy. I am sorry to be so forward but I’m still working really hard on meeting people. Even from across the room something about you strikes me as interesting. I had to come say something to you or I wouldn’t forgive myself.“

That’s actually how I met Bike Lady, and the Coyote, and Vicki and… a lot of people. All through my whole life. I’m a forward motherfucker. At some point in my life my social feed got turned to permanently at full blast. I want far more connection than I can actually sustain. The way I do this is to make very careful tiny deposits in lots of buckets with deep apologies for being unable to promise when or if I will return. We will see how the wind takes us. I will turn to you with joy whenever I see you again.

I can’t promise much more.

This energy fuels me through a social life that looks more like a full time job. We are still getting back up to speed after Noah’s death but it is looking a lot like by the time we hit the 18 month mark we will be back to full schedules. It’s feeling kind of intense lately. We’ve added a lot.

The more contact I have with people, the more this energy in my chest grows. It’s really not all about sex. I get a lot out of teaching children. I get a lot out of being a good neighbour and I sure as shit am not hunting on my block for sex. That would be unthinkable. Boundaries, bitches.

Different kinds of energy in my body grow from different sources. These are the two, for me, that feel both life giving and related to sexuality even when no sex actually happens. I don’t have another way to describe the way these manifestations feel beyond energy. It feels like the raw energy of life. It feels like the heat that comes from a compost pile while it breaks down. It feels like raw potential energy that drives me through life. It feels like energy the same way lava streaming down a mountain feels like energy. Energy is about potential.

When I run I feel full of potential. I feel strong and capable and full of drive to succeed. When I allow my heart to be at the forefront of what I do every day I feel embiggened. I feel increased in space and time and potential. I feel like I am manifesting everything in myself.

I need to feel allowed to love. I need it or this energy hurts me. Trying to contain the force of an exploding volcano is incredibly painful. It is energy. It is energy that has to go somewhere or it breaks the container.

I don’t know what to call it if not energy.

Love and loss

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One of the attractive parts of poly is knowing that you get to share a divided self in the appropriate containers. I have found a delightful man who wants to explore topping in ways I find absurdly fun. I have found a delightful woman who is keen to explore submission.

I win!

I appreciate the way that both of these humans are interested in getting to know me and figuring out what a long term thing can mean. I don’t feel used or exploited. I feel like I am going to get as good as I give in both of these containers. That’s lovely.

I got to explain to Gentleman yesterday about some of the ways I have struggled with relationships in the past. I don’t like when I feel like someone is treating me like a service provider only they don’t even pay me. And yet some folks who have sort of done that have actually turned into long term valued friends that I will prioritise going to see at any opportunity. I am a complex creature.

Right now I am trying to ease into poly with two people who have zero experience doing anything like this. I feel like it is incredibly important that I keep my pace slow and careful. I can see long term healthy ways that both Gentleman and Pretty Lady are folks that have the capacity to be stable partners. I’ve watched some folks have a lot of churn in their romantic lives. I’ve watched some folks have really stable poly situations that last decades. I’m moving slowly and carefully because I have my eye on the long run.

I am mindful that when I choose to date people who are 10 or 20 years older than me, when I’m already past middle age, that I am signing on to a situation that will involve mutual care in the not too dim future.

I have to admit that given how young Noah died it feels slightly insane to want to love people that much older than me. It feels like courting more pain. Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. Noah was a major risk taker. In very particular ways the two folks I am interested in aligning my life with at this stage are very energetic folks who don’t take risks very often. Maybe that will be more stable?

In the long run I am incredibly happy about how I handled Travel Boyfriend. I’m glad I didn’t give a shit about his impulsive desire to spin up a relationship instantly. I’m glad I forced a waiting period before we saw each other because then he could disappoint me without me having to experience life collateral damage as a result. I am going to move slowly with Pretty Lady like I have with Gentleman. I feel like I have done an A+ job on integrating Gentleman slowly. His inclusion in my life is gradual and in tiny increments with lots of scaffolding.

I am learning that sometimes I need to stop having a conversation in text with Gentleman because I have so much hostility towards me in my brain that I can’t manage to hear/see/understand the correct tone. I don’t like getting butthurt when I don’t need to get butthurt. Some things I need to process with him verbally in person so I can see his body language and properly interpret his tone of voice. When we talk in person we don’t struggle to resolve conflict at all. Sometimes I’m misinterpreting stuff in text; I hear it more harshly than he intends and I hate that I do that. It’s a long term issue of mine and it totally is not his fault. This is a thing I struggle with. My internal narrative is pretty hostile towards me and it’s not because of anyone in my current life. I’m actually way better about this than I used to be! I’ve come a long way because Noah and my friends worked very hard to overwrite the hostile tapes in my head with their voices. With new people I still have to consciously overwrite my impulses/self talk and that’s hella annoying.

I feel so much hostility towards myself that I struggle with not projecting those feelings onto other people. It’s not fair at all and is a thing I will have to manage more carefully in the years to come. I confess that I got really lazy about demanding that Noah engage with that shit. I didn’t manage it all myself.

It feels really good to have earned Gentleman’s love. He is not scarred and broken in the ways I have traditionally tracked down like a blood hound. He feels comfortable and comforting and like a balm to my soul. When we are in a room together I can check and find out that his careful and reserved body language isn’t disgust/repulsion. It’s cultural. He’s not a grabby person. He takes a lot of encouragement before he feels entitled to be pushy. Luckily I am big on giving encouragement so this is going well for me. He gets way more pushy as the months pass and I am here for it. Our sex life continues to be over the top fantastic.

I must say for the record that my desire for novelty and difference is not about me feeling unsatisfied sexually. The more satisfied I am the more novelty I want. Sex is very addictive/additive for me. The more I have, the better it is, the more I want. Gentleman is a fantastic lover–he’s generous, attentive, and incredibly motivated towards getting me off. The orgasm gap functions differently in my life than it does for the average human. I have to really insist on time to adore him and focus on his pleasure. It’s a really fun balance. I like when I can get him to relax and lay back and let me do him for a while. Much fun is had. So much fun.

Knowing that I have the potential for a fun, glowy future with him makes me feel borderline insane for insisting on dating. I still need it. I will do my best to be respectful and careful. All the signs are there indicating that Pretty Lady is going to have big feelings really fast. I get that! I’ve had a crush on her for a long time already. She is already someone I have strong feelings of attachment for given our community associations. She hasn’t had a huge number of relationships and someone wanting her is pretty exciting and novel. Our emails are scorchingly hot.

The things I want to do with her are things I can’t/won’t do with Gentleman. He’s never going to be my buddy for Pride. This is ok. She wants parts of me that are not parts he wants. He is not motivated by submission and he is not a bottom. I accept this in him and it doesn’t bother me. I want to have people in my life also who are motivated by such things.

I like that she described me as more vivacious, energised, and emancipated on our last date. I feel like that. Even though, technically, this morning I’m feeling kind of rubbish. My body is being bitchy.

I like the way Polysecure tells you to find your reason for polyamory. For me the reason that I hold on to is that I need a larger range of loving people than most people do. I need it to feel whole. I need it to feel like I am fulfilling my purpose on this earth.

In many ways I think of relationships as keys that unlock potential. These don’t all have to be romantic but they work best for me when they are. Is romantic even the right word? I need intense emotional connection. Like with the Kids. I need those kind of intense emotional connections with people. The relationships I have with much younger folk allow me to feel like I am healing something for other people that I could not heal for myself. I could not fully deal with my own massive mother wounding. I have mostly spackled over the cracks and moved on. When I can turn to a younger person and give them the acceptance, the permission, and the guidance I didn’t receive I feel like I am completing a cycle. I feel like I am part of something bigger than myself. Yes, it’s great being with my actual children and being an actual mother. That’s a big deal. But the Kids are different.

I give the Kids what Vicki gave me. I find it hilarious just how many of the Kids I find are trans; either they are on the path to transition before I meet them or I meet them as eggs. Part of what I have to offer is my religious belief (thank you Ale) that gender diversity is one of the most basic aspects of humanity.

In general, I believe that one of the things I offer humans of all stripes in Scotland is my fervent acceptance of and devotion to people getting to transition. Even when I don’t “understand”. Even when I privately occasionally have a cunty thought that isn’t perfect because I am a shitty human being. I don’t have to understand. I don’t have to agree. I don’t have to agree with someone’s motives. I will die on this hill. Gender diversity is a human right. I encountered my first transgender person before I had two digits in age. Several friends in high school transitioned. At my first munch, at 18, I met two trans women who would shape my adult life in overwhelming and comprehensive ways. My friends group has always been 1/4+ trans despite the usual percentage in the population being closer to 1%.

I feel like part of what I can give Pretty Lady is also tied to what I learned from Vicki but it’s different. I feel like part of what I can offer her is the belief that by consuming her as prey I can make her more whole. She longs for being possessed. I can work with that. Vicki taught by example that predators are an important part of the eco system.

I’m not talking about serial rapists/massively abusive predators. I am talking about people in the bdsm community who seek out people who want to be consumed. I am talking about tops and dominants and masters and sadists who look for people who need to be used, possessed, forced, and beaten. There is something special in this dyadic meeting. We need one another because alone we are broken and out of sync with what society needs.

I think there are reasons that of all the people I’ve met since I moved here 6.5 years ago this was the one that I went “Her. Her. I want to ask her out.” Noah could see why I was intrigued. Not enough to get in trouble with her. I hoped to earn the right to ask her out after the Indenture. I am grateful I don’t have to wait so long. I’ll be honest and say she isn’t a spring chicken and I’m glad we will have these years to be festive before she needs ever increasing gentleness and support. I would have been up for just the support in the long run but I’m selfish. I’m glad we get to pay into the fun bucket first.

Sometimes, I will admit, I feel a little bit like a wandering prophet. Let me tell you what love and acceptance of diversity has to offer you. Let me tell you about gender diversity and human variance. Can I share with you the glory that can be found on the edges of the bell curve? I am from Queer Mecca and I’m here to share with you stories about how you can be loved and accepted even when you are different from the majority of the population.

I remain grateful that it is not up to me to decide who is redeemable and who is not. I can’t promise that I would make unselfish choices. I think it is a good thing my father is dead. I think it is a good thing that Bad Timing is in prison and likely to stay there for the rest of his life. There are people so bad that humanity has a right to say stop and I am glad that I am not the one who decides who those people are. I do not have faith in my own fairness.

What I do have faith in is my ability to fall in love with excellent humans.

It may be rough on everyone that mostly what I want is to go forward bouncing off of people and moving forward on my own. I am deeply uncertain how far I will go in binding my life to anyone. I will share time, resources, attention, support, and adventures.

There is a part of me that needs to know that I trudge on forward with the certainty that at the most terrifying and painful parts of my life I will feel alone. I may not always be alone. My children were in the house when Noah died but I am the one who failed to use CPR effectively enough to keep him alive until the ambulance came. I failed him all by myself.

I wasn’t alone very long. Bestie came for me as she has done since we were teenagers when she came for my brother and father’s suicides. I wasn’t alone for any of the big deaths. For most of the other ones I have sought community and support.

But I feel alone. No one is in your soul with you. I need to be able to live with my soul. I need to know that I am going to feel alone no matter how many people I love or how many adventure buddies I pick up. I feel the need to know that no one is leaning on me too heavily.

Just like even though Noah tried terribly hard to isolate me and prevent me from having support other than him I held on to my network of people. The people who came in relays last year. It turned out I didn’t want a full year of support but people were willing.

I am not alone in this life. I am loved in vast and deep and broad ways by a shocking number of humans spread across the globe. I am happy when people hold my hand and walk with me for a time, but I always return to walking alone. I have since I was very small. It’s like the way my first book is chaotic and hectic and full of so much change that it feels hard to wrap your brain around. That was my life and I moved through it alone with the speed of a bullet train. Noah held my hand for 20 years.

I am afraid of holding anyone’s hand too tightly. I need to love with an open hand. I need to be willing to let go and walk away with grace and ease if someone changes their mind. I cannot grasp. I can’t clutch. I can’t need anyone too much. I must appreciate the bright shining moments in between being alone. They fuel me.