Tag Archives: sexuality

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.

Backwards and forwards

Leave a reply

Yesterday was Noah’s birthday. He should have been 49. It will be really bad for me when I turn 49. That’s going to be savage. We spent the day cleaning the house and getting ready for my impending surgery. One day till my friend arrives to help. She wants a few days of settling in with the kids first. She is smart. Surgery is in four days. Due to the stress and vagaries of train travel I’m going the night before. I feel less resilient with Noah coming along. I think the surgery will be fine. It’s going to hurt like last time.

Unlike last time I won’t have to give a police interview 3 weeks into recovery so I’m less likely to have a sudden massive bleed out.

I’m having a hard time with my feelings. I realize that isn’t a huge shock or anything. I wish I could only remember good things about Noah. Instead my brain is going through all the memories–good and bad. Our marriage was extreme in a lot of ways I can’t nail down without feeling shame. We constructed a marriage that wouldn’t work for anyone else. Were we wrong to do so? Sometimes I can’t tell.

The part that matters to me is: I wouldn’t leave for anything. I would never have left. I would have dealt with being in pain or having to be smaller. He was worth it. He was worth everything. I loved him so much I feel I could explode. He was a very good husband for me.

I am behind on emails again. I haven’t caught up on neurotic tracking in a while. If I’m not sharing the data with Noah it feels so much less purposeful. I created data, in part so I could show Noah trends and patterns and he would decide when I had to go in and seek help for a problem. He was my designated grown up and care giver. Now I feel like I will drift in the wind because there is no one to care.

I feel so achingly lonely. I want him all the time. I miss his smile, his intense way of looking at me, how he touched me, and how made me believe I always had a place: beside him.

I feel like I will never belong anywhere again.

I am highly conscious, as I move forward as a human being who will never agree to monogamy again, that I will never feel like I belong to someone again. People will always keep a space between us for their own safety. I can’t blame them. I would too. I don’t think it safe or wise to get too close to me.

The person I am seeing keeps asking why I hard selling the benefits of being around me. Do I expect him to do the same? I don’t. I really don’t. It was one of the dominant behaviour patterns of my marriage. Noah and I both did it constantly. “See, I do x for you. It is better to have me around than to kick me out.” As if that is a healthy way to run a marriage. I am having a hard time stopping. I still feel like I am trying to beg people to not throw me away. I think part of me agrees that if I am not monogamous nothing else I do will make up for that. I am a poisoned pill.

It’s been sitting heavily in my craw that between 3 men, I have not had control over my sex life or my sexual development for about 33 years. The middle one had the least time with me, but he did a lot of the early hypnosis work that Noah built on for almost 20 years. It’s not that I lost control of my body at 10. It’s that I gained it briefly at 13. I gave it away at 19/20 (that was a muddy line). It was given back when I was 23. I regained *nothing* at 33. I did have a rebellion at 34. Now I’m getting it back permanently at 43. I pay a lot of attention to patterns. Numbers give me comfort.

As I contemplate what I need from dating, as my son likes to say, the bar is a tripping hazard in hell.

Going forward I am going to need to spend time around people who make me feel cared about. I’m going to need to spend time with people who act like I am a fascinating puzzle. I am going to need to be around people who are cautious with physical boundaries and who recoil like an electric fence when they are told no. I cannot be around people who body shame because I cannot ever be vulnerable with them. That is a sign that I am going to be attacked and I will feel deep shame. I don’t need more shame factories in my life. I really don’t.

What I need (and the reason it is worth my while to seek out) is to feel seen and appreciated.

Most people don’t make me feel like this. Very few people make me feel like this. I go through most of my life feeling intensely alienated because I can’t ask most of the people I spend the most time with to see very much about me. It creates an overwhelming deficit.

Noah used to fill that. I don’t know what to do now.

I fee sad and isolated a lot of the time. More than I deserve to, in my opinion. It will change when and if it changes. I want so much. I feel entitled to so little. Noah gave me so much. My whole life is going to be less full obsessive love after this. I will never be someone’s autistic special interest like that again. I don’t even know that I would like it again. It came with a lot of constraints. They were worth it. I miss him.

The kids are clearly well on their way to deifying him. I just nod. I don’t talk about his down sides. It’s too soon. Someday when they are bemoaning how they will never be as good as their super human father I will cackle and tell them about all the stuff they didn’t see. He was a man. He had his good parts and his bad parts. He was deeply and achingly human. He was frail in a good many ways. He was aggressive in ways he shouldn’t have been. At times he was violent. Yes, he did lose his shit. Only with me. I was his safe person, as he was mine. For people like us, part of feeling safe is being able to be all the parts we can’t use with other people. Some of those weren’t very nice.

I have intensely positive feelings about my marriage.

As I move into the next stage of my life, where I don’t have Noah to meet my needs, I have to consider other ways to meet them. It feels cold as fuck but also what else am I supposed to do? I’m not my mom to simply never date again. She had a threshold of abuse and was done forever.

I have data. I understand how low the rate of violence has been for me in terms of broader exploration. I see the fireworks of good. I can’t act like one very small part of the data set defines the whole. That’s silly. That is numerically unsupportable.

Thanks to having data I can see the positive changes in my trajectory. The kinds of people I could find at different stages of my life are very different.

I am grateful I am about to have help with the kids for a while. I need it. There are tasks I’m falling behind on because I can’t brain after this many hours on duty. I feel like my job shouldn’t be exhausting after all these years–I should be inured. I’m not. I still like my day job but I need to simplify aspects of it. I can’t be as much of a three ring circus without Noah present for support.

I am so much less capable without him papering over the cracks and finishing the last 20% of so many things. And on top of that I’m doing all the stuff he usually did entirely off-screen from me. This is hard. My brain is very overwhelmed all the time. I need to find a way to get Shortie more of a social life without me having to physically facilitate it. She needs it really badly. I’m having a hard time. The surgery recovery time is looking so brutal. Oh well.

Keep moving. Only for the first wee while it’ll be shooting for 1,000 steps a day level of “moving”. The point isn’t to keep a consistent speed the whole time. We are humans, not machines. The point is to be patient and loving and kind to myself on the far side as I struggle to regain fitness. It will be another journey. I will have to go slowly or I will hurt myself.

This process is going to be harder without Noah to fuss over me and force me to rest. He was literally looking at retiring early to be my full time carer. I’m scared. I get sick a lot. I have a compromised immune system. I don’t have a specific name for it. I just get everything and I’m down for long periods. My life doesn’t stop though. I stay sick longer because I don’t rest enough. If I don’t do too much, not enough gets done.

And now Noah won’t be here to help so there is even more work that I am responsible for. Fuck. Not all of it. His family is stepping forward to build more intense relationships to start the process of transferring intergenerational wealth. Noah turned it down throughout his life. The offer was always on the table. I’m going to say yes. I would be a fool not to. I’m going to need to pay attention to this education they are offering. I am now responsible for managing all of my money. I don’t get to wave at it and call it “Noah’s money”. I have made reasonably good choices so far. I like where I’ve gotten.

A very terrible part of me can’t help but notice that the severance payment for my first marriage is alright. Sure, the relationship was terminated but I am going to be safe forever if I manage it carefully. I can’t be profligate but I can still buy whatever groceries we want. I will never live like a tech bro again. Somehow this is karmically a place I can live with.

I have incredibly mixed feelings about the wealth transfer. I also know that I have two kids with noticeable physical disabilities and one kid where it’s too young to know. It’s connected to genetic issues in both kids. The NHS is finally starting to evaluate/track them.

I may have brought people into the world who are not well suited to the capitalist hellscape. Remains to be seen, of course. I’m not offering them a fully independent amount of help. They could have enough to live at home comfortably. I can’t promise a lot more than that. I don’t have more.

Noah doesn’t have 6 more years on his arc towards saving for retirement. There was a fair bit of input expected to get to what he wanted to hit. Oh well. Deep breath. I can turn a dime into a dollar. I will be ok. I am very good at denying Current Me things so that Future Me can have more options. I’ve been playing that game for a very long time. I can take a lot of denial in some ways and not so much in others. I will build in giving lots to other people, don’t worry. I’m still me. I am thinking really hard on the structure of that giving. I am going to have to have that firm in my head. I need guard rails and limits. I need to understand what I have to give. That’s a hard thing to figure out sometimes.

I have been told recently that I like “folky” country music. I like stories, not hard rock anthems. Guilty as charged. It’s funny. I never thought of myself as such because I had never had the slider start in that position before. Usually I’m considered not very folky. I know a handful of artists and otherwise I can’t it through it. I’m too pop.

I have been listening to a lot of old albums lately. I don’t want to watch shows. I am reading more. I like having music on. I know I should embrace silence more. I do know. I like the way I get to ride my emotions like crashing waves when I have music on while I type. It is my companion through all the highs and lows and flashes of memory.

I love the way I get to re-sort my past memories that come up. I see each circumstance differently. Noah and I ran out of arc. It is really hard to feel like I am having to go in and put a manual end on each piece of the thread. “This is over now.” I am pruning off parts of myself that grew there because I had to accommodate Noah. I have absolutely no idea what this is going to mean in the long run.

It scares me a lot.

I am going to have to be mercenary with myself about my limits going forward. I need to catch up on budget work. I need to stop allowing myself this sloppiness. I’ve been scared to look. I can’t do that anymore. I’ve been watching the overall balance and keeping an eye on that. I need to look at how things are shaking out.

Then I need to hand a number to my in laws and that’s awkward. They don’t want me to stop having all fun. They want the kids to have big lives, still.

I have the option to choose a soft life.

Globally speaking this is righteously unfair. I’m aware. I’m having feelings about that. I also don’t see any global value in grinding myself to dust. Who knows what good I will do if I have the ability to learn how to thrive instead of barely surviving in “solidarity”.

I have always done my best to pay forward the help I have received. I either have credibility or not. I am not assuring private jet lifestyles. I am making sure we won’t lose the house and we never have to worry about food.

Our life together has been a mash between what he wanted and what I wanted. Now what? What about the parts that were only there because he wanted them? I’m having a lot of feelings about that. I’m having a lot of feelings about everything right now.

This is the path. I get to traverse it, not question it. All the feelings. I’ll have all the feelings.

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.

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.

This is going to hurt for such a long time.

Leave a reply

Yesterday I was informed that the Crown Prosecution Services has until December 2025 to decide if my case is moving forward. I don’t know anything until I get a notification. I am supposed to sit here in frozen, silent horror for over a year. My therapy options seem to be limited to “community support” of the sort where they will bring tea and cake and listen to me cry. Not very much actual help or support.

It’s funny, a couple of people have offered “me and Noah” support and then it turns out they only want to talk to Noah. Ah. Because I apparently already have so much support and he doesn’t have any. I am not arguing. If that is someone’s perception they can have it. I get so much that I don’t need anymore. Seems legit. I have gotten far more than my fair share of therapy in this life.

I’m struggling really hard with the dynamic where I’m supposed to be overflowing with happiness and sexual energy but also looking at the floor and not attracting any attention.

My stomach hurts really bad. I don’t feel like I have the opportunity to act “right” and not be bad. Whatever I do will be wrong. I don’t feel like there is much about me that is worth liking.

Apparently 2011 was the last time I negotiated honestly, in good faith, about my sex life. Ok.

It’s not ok for me to have experiences or feelings that I don’t predict in advance. I am a bad person if I don’t know I will have a feeling long in advance and warn Noah about it. This is why it is good that I was asked to stop coming to bike stuff. I shouldn’t be making friends here. I might have feelings and that would mean I was betraying Noah again.

I should probably go clean something. It’s what I am good for. I feel like I can’t. I feel like my brain and body are a solid block of wood. I feel stupid and useless and worthless and bad and mean.

Apparently I beat Noah’s sexuality out of him.

I’m scared about seeing TB in January. I feel like I am being set up to fail. I did not predict that we would be attracted to each other. That means I am a lying liar who lies. Everything I don’t know in advance is a way that I am bad. I am a fucking deceitful lying piece of shit because I don’t always know how I will feel in advance.

It hasn’t been ok since 2011 for me to say, “I want to go hunting.” I have been fighting my urges as hard as I can for nearly the whole time since. Doesn’t matter. Lusting in your heart is the full sin.

I’m going to be damned if I do and damned if I don’t in January. Just fucking watch.

My head hurts so bad it feels like it will explode. I wish I felt like there was any point in telling a doctor that I’ve been having overwhelming headaches constantly but it doesn’t feel like a safe thing to do.

Sitting alone in a room means I am bad because I am not working or providing care to someone. Not being alone means I am bad because I am failing to perform human in the way that people want.

If I had more energy I would hate myself. I feel too tired. I can’t do anything right but that doesn’t mean I ever get to stop trying.

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.

Everything feels raw like a cheese grater has been at me

Leave a reply

I’m rereading Noah’s email to me for his equivalent check in for the week. I wrote the last piece after skimming it on my phone. On a bigger screen I see more nuance but I’m still wildly hurt.

He didn’t say that M/s isn’t working for him he said it isn’t working for me. Which is probably partly fair. I should be accepting that he has the right to treat me any way he sees fit. That’s my role here. If I don’t like it I can leave. Only I can’t leave. Of all the options on the table that’s not one. Not because it is logistically impossible (it’s not) because I would never be ok again. Yeah, people try to tell me I’d be fine and I’d move on. They are wrong. I would never be ok again. This is my only shot at a family. If I don’t get to stay in a family then I’m not staying.

This is what I get.

I am struggling with layers of stuff around sex tremendously. The pagan book about consent I’m reading is actually really evocative and useful as I’m trying to figure out how to put into words why I’m not ok.

Historical actual slavery sucks because humans are not given a choice about being treated as objects to use until they wear out. They aren’t people. BDSM and consensual slavery is not the same thing. It’s about devoting your life to serving someone else’s life by choice. There are manipulative, evil, psychotic people in the scene who try to pretend that if you do M/s then you are genuinely becoming chattel. I’ve made my feelings plain.

Noah, the bits I’m freaking out about around you forcing me to do stuff, hurting me, orgasm control, and disapproval are all coming up around sex. Not elsewhere in our relationship though you are abandoning a fair bit of that consistency to instead be freaked out by me flirting. Last I heard you weren’t upset about how I’m washing your underwear. You don’t object to how I am raising your kids or how I manage your money.

The problem is sex.

I fucked up in 2016. I said shit that hurt you to the core of your being. I did that. I’m not claiming to be better than I am. I’m not delineating all of it because doing so doesn’t help. Not because it is a “dirty secret” but because I have fucking groveled for 9 years.

I fucked up in 2016 because I couldn’t handle the way my body was being disrespected sexually.

I fucked up in 2024 when someone sexually assaulted me.

Have I ever gone off the rails sexually at other times during our 18 year relationship? Not at all to the best of my knowledge. You have a fuck ton of trauma you need to work out Noah and you do need to go do that part with someone other than me. You yelling at me that I’m about to cheat on you again is not ok when I am literally giggling with a stranger whose name I don’t know.

Do I deserve your suspicion since I have already cheated? Hell, now you can say I’ve cheated twice. Both times quite soon after being raped. If you are going to treat me with this kind of suspicion and shame at all times then you need to stop pretending you want me to have a good opinion of myself. You think I am an untrustworthy piece of shit and I need to understand that or I will be incapable of understanding the parameters within which I must operate to be “good”.

The amount of “Carry the trauma and act like it has no impact on you” that is expected of me is quite literally inhuman. I can’t be fun and upbeat and harangued for hours about how inappropriate I am. Those are two states I can’t carry at the same time. I’m not that good. If the tirades are going to be part of every single time I am near a human male because I am not trustworthy then I need to cut my fucking life down.

I feel like fucking garbage because I feel like you expect me to do what I did the first time you raped me in 2006. I didn’t fight back and try to hurt you too; I put my head down and got on with expecting this to be the rest of my life. After that I had a fuck ton more therapy which lead to more self esteem and self respect and then I fought back. I will be punished for the rest of my life for it. If I die in the year 2050 I expect that sometime in the 3 months before I die you will bitterly scream “2016” at me.

I was talking to my new counsellor today and describing how I feel about my sex life. She said it sounds incredibly dehumanising. I’ve noticed that too.

I need to be owned. I am not good enough to own the way I come out of the box. I’ve been altered a lot over a lot of years by a shocking number of people. I feel like shit. I have never and will never be good enough as I am as a human being. I will never deserve to be accepted for who I am naturally inclined to be. I am bad. I hurt Noah quite badly if I stop centering him as the only actual human in my life. If I act like I am a person whose sexuality deserves to be treated as a thing of its own then I am saying I do not want Noah to own me. That is what I got from his email today.

What I am hearing is that if I want Noah to stop yelling at me I need to absolutely go back into the Choke Chain and never rattle it again. He wouldn’t be yelling at me if he didn’t have to because my behaviour is so bad and so out of line that if he told anyone about it to try and get emotional support their only response would be to tell him to divorce me.

I am the problem.

If I want to not get screamed at I know what to do.

I guess it is back to the Choke Chain. I’ve loved these last 9 years of being afraid to say what I’m thinking or feeling. It’s been really rewarding trying hard not to think about sex at all because it is not a thing I am supposed to want. It’s a thing that is done to me when other people want to. I am a bad person if I do not hurt myself fighting off a rapist other than my husband. I am a bad person if I fight back in any way when my husband rapes me. I have consented to that once and now the conversation is over.

I am a bad person because I went and sucked my rapist’s cock two weeks after he raped me. Why did I do it? Because it felt like the only thing I could do.

Noah is right. I am a disgusting piece of filth who should not be around humans.

I’m not going to reread that email again right now even though there are many many many paragraphs I’m not responding to.

If I want ownership the price is getting to have any kind of individual sexual autonomy in this life.

ok

Do I even serve?

1 Reply

For the past few months I’ve been writing weekly about my feelings about the M/s part of my marriage on a social media site. I am currently completely fucking melting down and I shut down my social media because I will do something I find embarrassing in the long run if I don’t. I can tell. I’m in that kind of place. I want to run my mouth. That’s not safe.

I should give a tiny bit of explanation about what I mean when I say M/s because out here on the open internet I could run into absolutely anyone. Y’all may not have any idea what I am talking about.

M/s refers to a Master/slave relationship. It is a formalised way of having power or authority transfer inside a romantic/sexual/maybe not either but still super intense emotional relationship. Noah has been questioning what we should be calling it.

I should stop referring to M/s then.

He is currently saying that the closest thing is like owning a feral cat, which isn’t actual ownership. I guess that means I won’t be doing a lot of these updates going forward because what I am doing with my life does not count.

I feel like the ways I serve are mostly devalued lately and Noah doesn’t acknowledge them existing outside sexual monogamy. That’s the only service he seems to value these days.

If I am not naturally, instinctively monogamous I am betraying him. I am not serving. I don’t count as property or as a slave.

Cats don’t capitalise titles.

Time is a thief

2 Replies

Rosanne Cash wrote a touching essay about Kris Kristofferson. (https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/kris-kristofferson-tribute-rosanne-cash-essay-1235129095/)

Write about it.

I deactivated social media accounts today. I’m not ok.

There’s a lot going on and it’s hitting me in waves. I’m struggling intensely with my overwhelming sense of inadequacy and badness. I am not dealing with the way I feel like badness is what my soul has in it and it is what I am and I can’t be anything else.

I thought I wanted the Choke Chain to end but I’m not really sure that it can. I’m not sure we will stay married if I change my behaviour.

When you are so bad that your husband goes to the police to document your horrible self harming sexual behaviour maybe I should go on drugs that eliminate my sex drive. Maybe that would be for the best. I should definitely stop trying to talk to people. I fuck it up over and over and over in ways big and small.

Right this minute I cannot perceive a future in which I am anything other than bad. I cannot perceive a future with less pain. I don’t see value in me or my existence.

I don’t understand why anyone wants me to stay when they don’t particularly like me or what I do very much. It’s deeply confusing to me.

Noah brought up the birthday book this morning. See–people wanted to demonstrate how much they care for me! Would you like me to go through page by page and list off all the people who don’t talk to me anymore? It’s almost everyone in the book. Some of them are dead. Some we’ve just drifted apart with distance… like me moving out of the country because those relationships were not working for me. Several they specifically divorced me in loud and messy ways. The ones who wrote the most about how I am the most amazing–those are the ones who read me for the most filth when they were done with me.

I am feeling intensely done with me so I’m not judging.

Write it down. Be bigger. Take up more space. But I feel like when I do that what I am actually doing is spreading toxic sludge all over innocent victims who don’t deserve that.

When I take up more space and put myself out there I am raped again. Then my husband is going to spend months or years analysing every interaction I have with men for more proof that he has to lock me down to prevent me reacting poorly to a rapist.

No. No I should not take up more space and put myself out there in the world. No. Stop fucking lying. It is bad when I do.

I am bad when I do.

Sometimes I stop and think really hard about how terrified I am of the ocean. Of how deeply convinced I am that the ocean is going to kill me. Then I think about being a counter phobic 6. That which scares me the most is that which I need to run at the hardest.

I know one way to make sure I only do one bad thing ever again and then no more bad things. I know one way. Every other way I will be more bad. I will fail more. I will hurt people more. Every other path is more fraught with more pain for me and everyone I inflict myself on.

I am not going to kill myself. I have a 6 year old. That’s not an option. There is not an amount of pain great enough that I deserve to have it stop in favour of her hurting more.

I hurt and I feel empty and unlovable and worthless. I feel defective and disgusting.

I feel like the single most heinous thing I do every single day is wake up and force the world to endure one more day of me being here.

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.

*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.

Just keep swimming

Leave a reply

Last night Noah was being a sensitive new age guy and he checked in if the current level of increase in meanness/friction on my cunt is a problem. He said he knows it is a lot compared to what had been happening and he just wants to make sure I’m ok.

I said, “Well I did tell you I’d be ok with you fucking me pretty much whenever and I’m still mostly initiating all of our sex. So mostly I’m thinking that you aren’t fucking me enough…. loser.” (We are having sex pretty much every day lately.)

He threw back his head and roared with laughter. “Well! Ok then!” Then he ripped his pajamas off real fast and started poking at my clothes. So I undressed and we, like the fully mature people we are, proceeded to spend about 40 minutes rolling back and forth naked telling stupid jokes and not getting around to having sex.

Finally I said, “This is my downfall. I am too funny. You can’t bear the seriousness of fucking someone as funny as me–it might ruin the mood.”

Really it just felt like we were young again and we had all the time in the world to just enjoy being naked together and of course eventually we will get around to sex.. it’s inevitable. Also inevitable: when we did it was of course very fucked up roleplay about how to manipulate a child into not having the right vocabulary for even reporting sexual abuse. After all, he is just having me pray every night and giving me a relaxing massage.

I met Noah when he was 26, we spent his 27th birthday together. I was 22 when we met. On one hand I felt so very worldly when we met but now I look back on it and I giggle. What does it mean to be worldly anyway? I was in such a rush to gain “experience” as if that would somehow make my life better. In some ways it was a good thing.

I have friends who settled down permanently with the first or second person they ever dated or had sex with. Most of them have told me that they have mixed feelings about the fact that they have little or no sexual experience outside of this primary relationship. They feel like they don’t know as much about what they do or don’t like.

I’m sure there are people who are completely content with their one lifetime partner, but those folks don’t talk to me about it.

I have never had a moment of pause where I have thought “Oh no if only I had more experience with other people.” Sometimes I miss the hunt because I was good at it and it was fun, but that’s not the same thing. Really I’m not even sure if I would hunt the same way going forward in any case. My life is so different and the Jenga tower is somewhat precarious. I don’t have much time to give anyone and the community in Scotland is so small that hunting with my normal voraciousness would very quickly create a challenging situation. Even if you are being honest and up front, not as many people are happy to be part of a truly extensive network as you think.

It’s a rare person who appreciates the sort of woman who can cheerfully pick up 8 new partners in a weekend. Daddy James you are always and forever the best first date of my whole life. I love you so much.

When you are fucking a lot of people you find out very intimately about peoples’ prejudices. I firmly believe that anyone gets to dislike whatever they want. Depending on how you say that people often assume that you end up on the side of disliking something they are on and they freely explain in great detail.

I asked about whether the older people I know remember a time when things were less judgmental because I saw a comment on a buddy’s post from someone I don’t know (who is ironically, younger than me) who said that they are old enough to remember a time when people in the community didn’t judge and they accepted everyone.

People judge whores. People judge women who use the word whore for themself in complicated ways. I remain grateful for the sex workers in my life who were close friends when I was working through some of my really intense trauma who told me that whatever associations other people have with that word are not my problem. My experiences are mine and no one can take them away from me or say that I am not allowed to experience the world as I am. It’s really weird that my biological father gave me that gift. Apparently whore is a title that a man is allowed to gift to a small child and she can keep it absolutely forever no matter what anyone else thinks.

I think about the judgment that people pass because despite the press releases that the bdsm community likes to put out about how people in the bdsm community tend to have slightly higher than average EQ and they are not significantly more traumatized than the normal population…

I am a traumatized motherfucker. Much of what drives me to seek out predatory and vicious partners is not some abstract “I was born this way”; I was shaped by a monster. When I was young and in the scene I would occasionally hear outlandish stories about how the younger you were when you started being inculcated into “slave life” the better you will be for the rest of your life. There was a woman who claimed her family sold her into a bdsm slave family at 14. This was treated like a hot/good thing?

Yet in reality if the core of your sexuality is formed around extreme trauma and abuse and, frankly, brainwashing you make people fucking uncomfortable. The average person (even in the scene) you want to go play with and fuck is not able to handle even being too aware of the extent of extreme abuse that people like me live through. Because yeah I do want you to act that out with me. Yeah. I do want you to be that fucking evil.

My biological father held a gun to my head while raping me. If Noah wanted to do that we would have to do the scene on top of a Princess and the Pea pile of towels to catch the river of squirting I would do.

Because to be clear if you do to me what I like having done to me… you are going to have to sit real hard with the idea of whether or not you are a bad person. You are going to have to be ok doing fucked up shit to someone who has a documented police record of having incredibly fucked up shit done to them. You have to face it head on. You have to embrace it and really own it and be ok with the fact that other people are absolutely going to judge the fuck out of you if they find out what you do.

I am trickling out stories, yo. I know I have a new audience and I know that is pressure. I know that the Scottish people will get to know what I put out there in writing far faster than they will get to know me in person because I don’t leave the house that often. Nobody sees me week after week at a munch to get used to me slowly over time. I am going to be very much on the fringe for a long time, perhaps forever. Will I ever play publicly here? I don’t know.

I don’t particularly enjoy playing in the safe zone that I used to specifically inhabit in public play spaces. Well, I enjoyed it a lot more in the past but I don’t think I could get back to that headspace. I want to play for me now, not for advertising for the maximum number of potential partners. And I am fucked up.

I watch the age players defend that it isn’t about sex. Oh. Well sometimes it is. And sometimes it is about specifically degrading a little and making it very bad for them.

I watch pet play folks get upset about people bringing up bestiality. Oh. Well… I don’t think I could cross the line with an actual animal for all kinds of very good reasons but the stories are fucking hot. Roleplaying it? Fuck yeah. The more humiliating and disgusting the better.

Rand went down a list of things that most people would reject and it was a challenge for me to find a true hard limit on any of it. Much of it I want to be verbal/roleplay–there are no actual children involved in my sex life and there hasn’t been since I was the child and there never will be again.

I remember saying, “No children, no animals, no dead people other than that let’s talk.” But really if you want to roleplay any of those scenarios… ok.

I don’t find bodies off putting. I don’t find bodily functions to be deal breakers. I don’t have many limits or reasons I will tell someone to stop something in the abstract. There are days when I can’t do a certain thing for a transient reason and there are tons of obstacles to my having space and safety for most of them but that’s not the same thing.

When people get very upset about wanting to get rid of all predators in the scene I can’t help but wonder… but do you really want to? If you do then who are people like me going to play with?

Neither Noah nor I would be as good at crossing social more lines and being degrading and violent and vile as we are if we had never gone too far.

I always say that you learn more from mistakes than you do from always doing things right. I have made a lot of mistakes. A tremendous number of mistakes. I am sure that there are at least a couple of people who think of me and feel really bad sometimes. I know Noah has at least one woman who saw him in her nightmares. She came to me to process it because that is exactly the sort of thing that someone would do, right? I told her that I would support her in any way I could. She was entitled to say or do anything she needed to do to communicate to Noah how badly he fucked up. If she wanted him to pay for her therapy that would be completely legitimate. She wrote some very intense letters. I read them with Noah because he needed to understand fully how he fucked up. I am still friends with her and she says things are much better now. She’s happy.

You learn more from mistakes than you do from always doing it right. I know how badly I can hurt someone. Noah knows how badly he can hurt someone. Hell, he knows how badly he can hurt me. He fucked up really badly in the first six months of being married by the choice of when to rape me. It caused an extra layer of trauma that had to be unpacked.

Do you know how hard it makes me come when he hurts me and tells me that he is so glad that he gets to rape me decade after decade? It is literally completely fucked up. This is vanilla-land “You should run, not walk away from this man.”

Instead I am no longer allowed to say “Jesus Christ” because the only God I am allowed to worship is Noah so it has to be his name I say.

“The difference is consent” except when there is no consent and sometimes that is far better.

“We evaluate the risks to make safe choices” except when we totally fucking don’t and we flail and we hurt people and we traumatize them and then we put our finger on that trauma and push down a little harder because the bruise was starting to fade and we can’t have that.

I don’t do safe things. I do things that any reasonable therapist would tell me is a bad fucking idea and I am totally risking cracking my psyche wide open. Yes. The best orgasms live there.

Bdsm is not therapy. Bdsm is a place where fucked up people can do very fucked up things. I treat the bdsm community like the sea and I am a shark looking for a bigger shark. When I encountered stingrays and eels and angler fish I wished them well and kept looking until I found someone who could appreciate the kind of fucked up I am. Someone with just enough training in mental health to be able to properly enjoy fucking with someone who is as damaged as I am. I found a megalodon; just think of all the nice people I am keeping safe by keeping him off the market.

Noah didn’t pick someone who compulsively cannot say no to sex even when I really should because of physical damage by accident. He is a fucked up person. I mean that in the very best of ways. He is brilliant and he can hold many contradictory truths in his mind at the same time. He deeply respects me and he wants me to be a big person in the world taking up space. He is the reason I have most of the self confidence I have to just go do whatever I want. I used to doubt myself so much. I don’t have time anymore. He also wants to hurt me emotionally in ways I won’t shake off. He wants to specifically drill down on damage created by my father.

I can’t wait until he can go back to cutting on me.

In many ways it is much better for everyone that Noah put the choke chain on me. Scotland is a small sea and we are very big sharks.

Running in parallel

Leave a reply

I don’t understand the connection between wanting to have sex and writing. I see the connection between writing and medicating way more clearly. It is fascinating feeling like I have my brain back after 3 years of not feeling connected to myself in this way. This narration feels like more of my true self than any amount of being in a room with me can reveal because I will always do my best to mislead you in person.

I know the difference between being allowed to write what I am thinking and feeling and being allowed to act out how I am feeling or what I am thinking. The world doesn’t care how I feel it cares how I act. But I care what I feel. If you want to have the ability to crawl around in my head and fuck with me then you must care. I could just write to Noah, if I were actually more afraid of the consequences I would probably do that. I am getting comfortable and I’m not sure if that is good or not.

It is weird to me that I now live in a country where well actually the police might care what kind of consensual sex I have with my spouse. There are rules here that were not part of the background noise of being a Californian. I am unlikely to change enough to really be what they wish I was. The thing is, if neither I nor my husband ever complain then nobody actually knows what we are doing to one another so it’s kind of a moot point.

Side note: IT IS NOT A MUTE POINT. NOT EVER. FUCKING FORUM PEOPLE.

I do find that I am putting the more explicit stuff over on that site because it feels a little less like courting danger. I just want to gain citizenship so I can sit over here and garden and mind my business. La la la.

But I can’t. I have literally had my blog used against me in a legal mediation already. I was not a reliable witness about the things that were happening with my roof because of the swinger parties I went to. Super charming. If that, if the threat of getting in even more trouble isn’t enough to shut me up is that pathological?

I believe with my whole heart that I am not doing anything wrong. I am enjoying my sex life with my legal spouse. Hell, I’m not even poly. I do believe I should have the right to sit over here with my pot and my husband and my kids doing our weird things. Obviously the kids are not involved in the sex weirdness. And that is the point. I have a very strict filter between which people are allowed to see what and when. I mean, my children could find my blog–they know it exists. It’s my legal damn name… I’m not being secretive. I have told my children over and over since they were small children that once they read my blog they can’t unknow the things about me that they will learn and I’m pretty sure it will freak them out. Given the questions that I will answer simply and directly my children are smart enough to know that when I say, “Are you sure you want to know that” that they probably don’t.

I will off-handedly give answers that make them want to rinse their ears out with bleach. If I suggest you don’t want to know something… I’m probably not being over cautious. I am not over cautious about generic information that might influence their lives in some way going forward. I believe in boundaries and privacy. I don’t have secrets because if I will spew them on the public internet it doesn’t count as a secret. I have things that I do not tell all people in all settings. Do you understand how much time and money I spent on therapy to learn how to compartmentalise like this? Decades. Personally I have paid many tens of thousands of dollars for therapy and the state of California has probably paid at least a quarter of a million if you count the times I was in institutions.

My children do not overlap with my sex life.

For some reason I still absolutely compulsively need to write about it. This is the exhibitionist part. I think that is something I dramatically underrated about my life in the bay. A lot of what I did in the bdsm and kink communities was massively spurred on by the fact that people were watching. From when I was 18, from the second time I went to the Power Exchange the energetic interaction with the crowd was absolutely integral to the experience of being kinky.

And yet when I went to Sydney I felt really weird about the fact that the only public play spaces were performance spaces on stage in front of a dance club. That felt different for some reason? Why didn’t it just feel like BaGG? People there referred to their play as performance. At the munch I was asked, “How long have you been performing” and I twitched.

Now it seems to me like the difference between “nae bother” and “all good” and “it’s no trouble”. They are just different colloquialisms. I mean, there are nuances of difference between play and perform but most of them are about structural differences in the locations. People moving between the two locations will mostly seamlessly move between the slight differences in behavior.

When I was younger there was this really sharp divide between sex and bdsm with a lot of my friends. My friends were people who liked public bdsm spaces (I’m including house parties) and most of them do not allow sex either through explicit rules or implicit culture. Having sex is mostly off screen. Although, how do you define sex, right?

It’s all muddy in my head right now. It’s like a dam bursting and things are coming through all at once instead of in a neat stream. I don’t think I like the lisdexamfetamine. I have not been able to access this many streams of thought at once since I have been on it. I mean, I think it is useful. If my new provider (I was switched people and I meet the new one in 2 weeks) is ok with me having a much lower dose and using it as needed then I think it would have a ton of utility. But not all day and not every day. It makes me hate sex. It makes me not want to write. It makes me feel flat emotionally and unable to orgasm. I can work like a demon but that’s not all good.

I can feel in my body how I acted when my big kids were small when I use cannabis. It literally feels like my entire body relaxes and I can access all of the lanes of the superhighway that is my brain to track being a patient mother and a creative teacher and a considerate friend and a person dedicated to fitness and a person who is drawn to eating the foods that actually best fuel physical activity instead of numbing emotional and physical pain and a filthy fucking whore.

More than one thing can be true. I have nothing to be ashamed of so why should I act like what I am doing should be a secret? There is a difference between secrets and boundaries and privacy.

I am talking in circles this morning. I can feel that spiral thing happening but I don’t have time to explore it. Breakfast will be on the table in 10 minutes because that is what Noah does. He does it because I asked him to. I owe him the respect of showing up on time.

Like a monster uncurling from hibernation

Leave a reply

For most of the time I have had children my sex drive has been utterly wrecked. I have no way of knowing how much is purely biological (for much of history it’s been “normal” for carrying parents to have a new child approximately every four years) as I have started pulling out of the dip when my body is around 4.5 years postpartum both times. Of course I do have a smaller gap in between my oldest kids, but that wasn’t about “whoops I’m pregnant because I was just having sex I wanted”. Naw. Despite my outrageous whoring around I have only ever been pregnant when I intended. I consider myself both A) a stringent user of birth control and B) a completely lucky bitch. [I tell my kids: if you are not ready to be a parent each person participating in sex needs to have birth control in use every single time.] I mean, let’s be real that I was stupid a few times and I just got lucky. But it was a very few times out of a really lot of times of being stringent.

Anyway. Yeah. I think there is a lot of basic biology. Did you know that your body is not 100% postpartum for four years because it takes that long for all of your organs to fully get back into a non-pregnant state? Fucking wild.

There was also a really strong emotional aversion when I was newly a parent that I don’t think was just part of the biological. It took a long time to unpack all of my trauma around sex in a house with children. That was really hard for him and me and getting through it just about wrecked us. I really struggled with it being ok to be touched in any kind of romantic way if a child I was responsible for was even in earshot. I was too deep in abreaction to find any kind of enjoyment there.

So as I was saying I seem to be in an uptick, by which I mean occasionally Noah is all “Yeah….. I literally can’t more.” I feel victorious. It’s reminding me of all the reasons that Noah is my person even though we still have challenges. His cock is fucking amazing. Like, he has the Baby Bear of cocks. Just big enough to hurt when we want it to but it doesn’t have to hurt. Fits nicely in all of the places. Incredible stamina for someone who has been in an almost complete drought for about five years.

Not to mention that he knows exactly how to be mean to me. When we started dating I told him I was looking for an abusive relationship with an on/off switch. He has been really freaking careful to stay in the off position for a long time.

He knows how to dance around my trauma like he is doing a polka on the head of a pin. He trusts me as an authority on a great many topics and he is openly deferential. He also fucks me raw and calls me every filthy name and he loves seeing me cry. He doesn’t use just any filthy names. He knows exactly which parts of my historical trauma will get me off instantly and which parts will get me off the bed and into the bathroom to curl into a ball and sob.

It’s not an adventure until someone is crying!

He knows me at my core in a way no person ever has or ever will. He has spelunked into every twisted corner of my deeply depraved brain. When I no longer have small children hopping into the shower with me on the regular he will go back to carving on me. The absolute hottest sex is the kind where one or both of you is dripping blood onto one another. Taking my blood and wiping it on his cock before putting it inside me is the best fucking feeling. And the taste! chef’s kiss Perfect.

Strange that I don’t like period sex. The friction is just utterly terrible and I end up with jagged awful tearing. Thanks you piece of shit motherfucker who wrecked my cunt before I could even go to fucking primary school. May your name be forgotten.

Anyway, Noah. He has studied me like I am his PhD topic. As my memory degrades he often remembers my stories better than I do. I only believe him when I wrote it down somewhere and I can go check. It was very useful that I wrote so many things down. He has read my entire archive I think 6 times? It isn’t obvious here on Fetlife but I used to blog a lot, including about my kink adventures. My whole archive is in the millions of words. The word count massively went up as I went through college. I can write a 20 page paper (including putting together all the bibliographical information) in about 10 hours once I’ve done the research. I had some stretches where I hit over 100,000 words in my blog in a couple of weeks.

And now my hands are shit. Whoops.

What I like about writing is that it allows me to think through my priorities and go back and forth dithering about what matters.

Noah has supported just about every crazy thing I have ever done. He is the reason I have written books and painted giant murals and created hundreds of square feet of tile mosaics inch by inch. Noah has kissed me goodbye cheerfully every single time I have wanted to run off and have an adventure, whether it was for a few days or weeks or half a year. He holds down the fort and makes sure that things in the house keep going the way I prefer more or less entirely because deferring to my preferences is so automatic at this point.

I met him almost 19 years ago. He was the first person who said, “What happened to you that made you end up like this?” He is the reason I have any coherency in my internal narrative, because he is always my assumed Primary Reader.

He wants to read all of it. No matter how cruel or angry or bitter or nasty I am being. If I keep a separation between my thoughts and my behavior he is happy, and even prefers, to know all the shitty thoughts. My thoughts do not define me; my behavior does. He wants to know how many shitty thoughts I have on the way to manifesting the behavior I do. I haven’t been telling him lately for a whole lot of reasons.

There is this thing about kink. I cannot be a closed box and do this in a healthy way. I tried having an M/s relationship that did not allow for navigating around my trauma. That went pretty poorly and while he was absolutely the best/most healthy relationship of my life at that point I have some deep sadness about some of the permanent harms he caused my body.

So if I want to do this, if I want to let the monster out and fight and lose and hurt and still be ok at the end of it I have to start writing again. He has to know what I am holding on to control of by tip of my fingernails. Following my brain is like trying to binge a new Netflix series every day for a month. It’s really hard to keep all the storylines straight.

He will do it. He will draw fucking diagrams if he has to. He thinks I am worth it. I see the overwhelming magnitude of work he puts into being in a relationship with me. His online organising system is kind of terrifying and he archives everything. He manages his own neurodiversity through a rigid knee jerk response to the system he has in place. He has scripted himself. And he manages me like he manages when to go check the oil in the tank.

It’s kind of overwhelming looking at just how much work he has put into me. He has iterations of the recipes he has refined over the years based on feedback because he wants to cook for my palate. I think he even has lists of gifts he has given me for holidays with how I responded. I’m not fucking kidding when I say I am his PhD.

I may miss the hunt but Noah is my heart and my soul and the only happy family I have ever had.

Did I mention his dick is perfect? And when I tell him that I want him to turn on the abusive switch he barely hesitates. I am enjoying life a lot more recently.

Steaming pile of mom wrath

2 Replies

This morning Eldest Child (who is now 12) started off a conversation with “You know how you think gacha videos are a complete waste of time?”

“I don’t think they are a complete waste of time. I think you learn things about youth culture and social interactions and music and video pacing and art technicalities and all kinds of things that I don’t need to learn at this point. So they are very useful for you and not something I want to spend my time on. That’s not the same thing as being a complete waste of time.”

“Uhm, well right now I’m trying to learn come backs for insults. Like if someone calls me ugly I can say ‘At least I don’t have an ugly personality.'”

She continued on with a few other similarly clever responses and I nodded along and smiled a little. Then she got to the humdinger.

“Or like, if the girl saying I am ugly is wearing a crop top I can say ‘At least I don’t look like a stripper!'”

There is this thing I do. If I freeze then slowly rotate my head towards you with a scowl on my face you know you are in trouble. She froze too. She knows. She didn’t know what was coming but she knew it wasn’t good and her whole body tensed up.

“Oh really. So at least you aren’t like my friends. Because you know I have friends who are strippers, right? At least you are better than those people who have jobs. Right? At least you are better than girls who are comfortable with their bodies and their sexuality, right? Those bitches should cover up and be ashamed of having a body and never have sex. RIGHT?” (If anything my volume got a lot lower than usual. This emphasis was all in intensity and not volume.)

She looked like I had slapped her across the face. She was stunned.

“You totally think girls and women should cover up and be modest and ashamed of having bodies, right? That’s your value system?” (For the record she has mini skirts, tube tops, and crop tops. She’s always too hot so she’s had these for years.)

“No… I don’t believe that at all.”

“Then why would you try to shame someone in exactly that way?”

“Oh god. It’s not even 8am and I have stepped in a steaming pile of mom wrath.”

“Well you tell me, what do you believe?”

“I believe that girls and women should be allowed to enjoy their bodies and enjoy sex. I will never say that again. I’m sorry.”

=============================================

Recently someone told me that they want to have kids who are comfortable with sex and sexuality so they have open and free conversations about their own sex life. I had a lot of trouble not reacting with repulsion and horror. You don’t have to talk about your own sex life to inculcate sex positivity in children. You don’t have to treat children like a peer in order to show how you live in the world. I am a freakily modest dresser. I cover up. There are a lot of reasons for it, none of them related to morality or shame. My children are not learning that scanty dress is fine by watching me.

But by golly I will go out with a pitch fork and defend someone else’s right to dress that way. I think we normalize and teach our values every single day by what we say and how we say it. I don’t flip out over every stupid thing my kid says (she’s at that age where about half of what she says is gob smackingly stupid) I mostly mildly redirect her or raise an eyebrow or roll my eyes. She will learn.

But in this house it is never ok to shame someone for having a fucking body and wearing whatever clothes they want. In this house it is never fucking ok to shame someone for having a job even and especially if that job involves sex work. Never. You don’t do it. Or yeah, you will step in a steaming pile of mom wrath.

(Note: my kids told me that they wished I was still writing about them in the blog because they want to see what I record someday. Ok lovies.)

Pieces of dysfunction.

Leave a reply

Mostly I keep my crazy ranting on my blog. I figure the few people who want to know my wackiness follow me over there and writing on a more public site is… I don’t know… forcing my insanity down peoples throats. But the thing is, the stuff I have to work on changing next is stuff that is rooted in my sexuality. That’s a journey that has been highly shaped by folks who hang out here. So once in a while my insanity will leak out a bit here.

I’ve worked pretty hard on changing my perception of myself over the years. I no longer believe I am worthless. I have substituted the belief that I am an incredibly effective tool. I know how to do a lot of different kinds of work and when I show up to do work… I get a lot done. I have developed quite a bit of pride in how effectively I can get work done over a broad swath of types of work. I’m not a one trick pony.

My family wanted me to perceive myself as stupid but all of the GATE testing when I was a kid and grown ups going “Holy crap this kid is SMART” means that their attempts to make me think I was stupid just kind of failed. I’m brilliant and I’m comfortable with acknowledging that. The rate at which I read complicated non-fiction books helps me not ever succumb to the belief that I might be stupid. But I have to keep working consciously on expanding what I know or I would start chanting this at myself. I view smart as something that has to be constantly worked on or it doesn’t count.

I could go through a long list of specifically triggering things I’ve worked on, but the problem that keeps coming up and I just can’t fucking deal with it in a rational way… is what I was born to be.

Let me explain. My father raped my mother when she knew she was fertile and she didn’t want to have more kids. He wanted to make another kid to rape. He was already raping the children they had. Like a true pedophile, gender wasn’t that important to my father.

So from when I was a tiny baby the story I was told about my existence is that I was made so that men would have more holes to use and how I felt about that really didn’t matter.

This is the problem I keep coming back to. This is the core belief I have not been able to shake or move or change in years of trying. This is what I am here for. It doesn’t really matter if it feels good to me or if I like it or if I want it. That’s why I am here. It is literally why I was made.

I don’t know how to alter these wires in my brain so that I stop giving a shit what my father’s intentions were and start feeling like I get to define what I am here for.

This piece is just sticky as hell and I have not figured out how to change it. This is what brings me to my knees over and over sobbing and feeling like I need to die to get away from the terrible burden of being responsible for taking more and more and more pain inside my body.

Even when my partners (my husband most of all) have tried to figure out how to fuck me without hurting me we always run up against this strong limitation that I can’t really talk in the moment about sex hurting my cunt. I dissociate away from that so fast I am literally physically incapable of talking when it happens. Even though I’ve done decades of work on trying to fix this.

I’ve fixed a lot of pieces of this. But this spot still persists and I have not yet figured out how to rewire this in my brain.

I can write about it when it’s not happening. I can barely speak out loud about this topic without melting down into tears or screaming swear words like FUCK YOU FOR HURTING ME. Which is not all that productive.

I continue to be impressed with my husband’s persistence in wanting to help me deal with my laundry list of problems.

I sabotage efforts to make sex not hurt me. Because I have this internal motivation that I have to be providing a lot of sex, even if it is damaging me and I have to initiate even when I’m in pain and….

I know I create a lot of this problem with my utter unwillingness to act like pain in my cunt is worthy of acknowledgment in the moment. There were a few times when I was very young when I mentioned that it hurt to partners and the response was a solid wall of “So?” and I just completely lost the ability.

The kinds of 25 year olds who like to fuck 12 year olds really don’t care.

This internal belief, that fucking is literally why I exist, is why I push so hard for sex with so many people. I have an internal programming that dictates that I must ask for sex. Because this is why I exist. To give this experience to people who want it.

This has gotten more complicated as my partner has gone through a shift from actively wanting polyamory when we met to very actively wanting mainly monogamy with very rare occasions of group sex.

Fitting into the expectations that are currently held for me takes a lot of work. I’ve adapted as best I can. It’s not always easy. But the good I get from being part of this family is so breathtaking. I get to belong somewhere. People care when I’m crying. People care about me in this house. I am important to them. It’s worth a lot of pain and suffering to try and deal with more layers of my mental illness to try and stay here for more of this.

Recently I went through a multiple month period where I genuinely didn’t want to die. That is the longest I can remember feeling like that in my entire life. I have always wanted to die. That has been the drumbeat chasing me through life for just about 30 years now. “I should die because this hurts too fucking much.” I want more of the not-wanting-to-die feeling. And I have to change this belief to get there.

This is tricky because I partially married my husband because he has the highest sex drive of anyone I ever seriously dated. He’s been the only one who wanted to keep up with what I wanted to initiate.

But a lot of what I initiate hurts me. And then there are waves of consequences.

This is so unfair.

It is desperately unfair to my husband and frankly it isn’t fucking fair to me either. It is fucking shitty being in my head and in my body. It isn’t anyone’s fault at this point that it sucks so much to be inside of me… but it’s a fact.

One of my buddies idly mused that I get a lot of self esteem from my interactions with my children.

Children are the only people I know how to interact with without feeling like I am failing in not offering sex. That’s the only time I feel like it is completely appropriate for me to not be offering sex. It’s safe in a way nothing and no adult ever is.

I don’t ask everyone for sex all the time for a variety of reasons (I’m pretty sure you don’t want to be asked, I’m pretty sure my husband would flip out, etc) but I have had to grow up and work on my boundaries to get to this point. It took a fair bit of maturing before I understood that my father was lying and not everyone wanted that from me.

Thanks to all the folks who have skillfully and tactfully turned me down over the years. I’m glad you didn’t follow that up with refusing to know me because I was so rude/tactless/gross/insert word of choice.

I’ve tried to grow up as fast as I have been able. I’m a lot closer to my goal of “grown upness” than I actually believed I would make it to… but I’m not there yet. I’m hoping I manage around the time my 9 year old makes it to adulthood.

What am I here for?

That’s this huge existential question, right? I’m super partial to the work of Viktor Frankl, a psychotherapist who went through the Holocaust. He wrote the book Man’s Search For Meaning. His general hypothesis is that folks can survive any horror in life if they have something they believe in and it doesn’t matter what it is. It could be “I want to see my wife/husband again”. That kind of belief is enough. If you believe that your love for someone else is your reason for continuing to be alive then you can make it enough to see you through anything.

I can’t control why I was made. I can’t control the intentions behind my makers.

But why do I stay alive?

Maybe that needs to be the focus of the next stage of work. I can’t change what I was made for or whether I did my best to live up to that for the first few decades of my life.

But why now?

I feel really guilty that a lot of why I’m staying alive at this point is a science experiment. Will I be a good enough mother that my children will want to know me when they are adults? Am I capable of treating them in a way that will cause them to want to know me?

I feel guilty about this because I feel like I “should” pick something that is more oriented towards my husband and… that’s different. It’s really complicated that I already feel like I have failed at being a good wife and I feel like there is no walking back from that. He’s not leaving because I’m better than nothing but I will never make it to good. I can’t hang my hat on that in this life.

Ok, so “I am bad” and “I am a monster” are strongly tied in with what is causing me these eternal problems.

It is hard because my husband is having a hard time with how much the shift into being a mother has derailed a lot of the hypersexuality and a lot of my strong need to be hit so much. I’m boring now.

I feel like I am bad for even trying to work towards a future where my cunt will hurt less because that will mean I am not meeting his expectations for how often he wants to get laid.

And the cycle continues.

Evolving sexual dysfunction

Leave a reply

I’ve been documenting the intense pain I feel in my cunt for over a decade and a half. It’s not… news. It’s a fact of my life. I’m 36 and I wasn’t aware for the first several decades of my life that it was weird that I thought cunts were supposed to burn and be in terrible pain most of the time. Oh. What do you mean your body doesn’t feel like it hates you all of the time?

I’ve had a lot of sex even though it hurts. Sometimes the fact that it hurts is part of the reason I seek out the sex, it’s a form of self-harm that people don’t question in the same way that they question me when I open myself up with a scalpel. Oh, you’re hypersexual? That’s fun! Sorta.

But I’ve hit this point in the evolution of my mental illness and suicidality where I need to reduce how much ambient pain I feel in my body. I can’t cope the same way I used to. And there are these people who would be devastated for the rest of their lives if I killed myself so I need to find some kind of way to be in less pain.

I see all the doctors and health practitioners to manage my fibromyalgia and other physical problems that can be managed.

How do I get my cunt to stop hurting? That’s… that’s going to be a big deal.

I’m not in the kind of marriage where declaring my cunt off limits semi-permanently would work out. I’m also not allowed to manage the pain in my cunt by doing the hyper-sexual thing so that my cunt becomes numb and it’s easier to dissociate. The more sex I have with lots of people the less I am capable of noticing the pain in my cunt. It’s not that it is gone… it is that my brain puts it in a compartment and I’m not allowed to look at it in the same way. It’s not a great long-term coping strategy because I cause physical damage as I use it.

Most of my life has been me flip flopping back and forth between various forms of self-harm trying to do slightly less damage with each change. I’m still not sure how to fix this problem without switching to something else that will cause a different kind of damage.

The intensity of my current suicidal jag combined with where I otherwise am in life stage events mean I have to make some progress on this issue that has haunted me since I was a toddler.

I have to make progress on this idea of my body being worthless and only existing for other people to hurt for their pleasure. Yeah yeah masochism/submission/whatever. I need some god damn limits. Only it’s hard to defend a self you don’t believe in. It’s hard to act like you have self worth when you are acting on issues where you have not been allowed to have the word no be effective.

It’s not that I can’t defend myself against anything. It’s that I have gaps in my sense of self where I can’t defend those gaps. Mostly I’m a wildly confrontational person. But not when it comes to defending my cunt.

I gave up that battle as hopeless decades ago. My opinion about what happened to my cunt mattered so little for so long.

But that has to change and it has to change inside of me before I can change how I let people treat me. I don’t know how to think of myself as someone worth defending, not like that.

This is really hard.

Reinventing yourself

Leave a reply

People who have known me since I was a kid tell me that I don’t seem like the same person any more; I have changed so much. I changed a lot in my time in the scene, then being a teacher was a huge shift, being a parent has kind of forced me to complete a lot of huge seismic level differences in my life.

For the first few years I had kids I went through a Madonna/whore problem where my body stopped wanting sex or bdsm. It was the way that my brain managed to pick a path through my personal history of having no healthy boundaries around sex. It wasn’t a healthy response because it was bad for my marriage.

But I grew up watching all of the adults in my family have sex. I needed to have some kind of shift in my brain that ensured that my children would not see me have sex. My kids have still never walked in on me having sex and I’ve been doing this gig almost a decade. It is a huge accomplishment for someone with my background.

I think that my libido partially shut off because that was a lot of what I saw happen to my mom’s life. She had a few boyfriends (all of whom I saw her have sex with) and she realized that I was acting out a WHOLE LOT and she… shut it down and to the best of my knowledge has never had sex again. I think she stopped when I was around 10. That was a quarter of a century ago. I’m pretty sure my mom has been celibate because she decided she didn’t know how to have a healthy sex life.

She might be right. She picked some awful people.

I feel this kind of long drawn out pleasure and shock that the vast majority of people I slept with are really awesome people and they are still all invited to my house if I have a Christmas party. Only a few people have fallen off the list because mostly… gosh I picked good people.

I read in a book about postpartum recovery that it takes a body 4 years to fully reset after having a baby. My libido came back like a sledge hammer about 5 years after having kids. 4-5 years is a natural child spacing in nomadic societies so it isn’t that shocking that my body picked that window for saying, “Moar seks please.”

It’s been complicated since then. My poor husband has adjusted from the extreme hypersexuality I experienced when we first got married and before our marriage to me shutting down completely to me being a bitch and fucking lots of people as my libido exploded and… now I’m pregnant again.

What is going to happen next?

I don’t know but healthier sex has to be part of this experience.

It is complicated for a masochist to stop something because it hurts. But there are kinds of pain that are positive/emotionally expressive for me and there are kinds of pain where I shut down my brain and go to a bad place. There are kinds of pain that increase my general feeling that I should die because I have no other escape from pain in this lifetime.

My kids and my husband tell me all the time that they want me to live for A VERY LONG TIME and I’ve tried to change how I live to reflect the fact that they don’t want me to die young.

I have to figure out how to convince my body that I can be in less pain. (Fibromyalgia makes this super complicated.) I have to figure out how to stop shutting down my self-protection mechanisms during sex. Because the specific pain I have during vaginal sex sometimes (it’s not all the time) is a problem. It is directly tied into the abuse from my father. It is a mainline to my internal reaction that I was born from rape; I was born to be raped; that is all I should deserve to expect until I die.

I have changed so much about my destiny. I didn’t think I would ever have a forever home. I didn’t think I would ever be part of a family.

I have a really cool family. I mean, we are all flaming weirdos… but we like each other a lot and we spend a lot of time together and it is all so intensely positive…

I didn’t think someone like me would ever get this far, let me tell you. But I did it.

My current shrink is probably the most bdsm aware/positive shrink I’ve ever seen. They suggested that I’m going to have to face my dissociation head on and in their opinion I am going to have to do it within the structure of my M/s relationship.

Now that’s some awesome feedback to get from a shrink. I’ve never had a shrink talk so specifically about the difference between therapy and therapeutic and bdsm can be so very therapeutic…

I know. I used to not be able to set any boundaries at all with my body. Bdsm taught me how. My beautiful friends and play partners taught me how. Very therapeutic.

It is complicated on so many because having my husband hit me a lot is different from having my lovely friends hit me a lot. My husband is the only person on this god-forsaken planet who has given me any real safety. It’s complicated when he hits me. It isn’t that I never like it. It’s that there are so many layers of psychological events that happen around the physical events that… it’s hard to manage that and bounce back into my life.

My life is very constrained. I have to “behave” and project a kind of behavior that is very hard for me. I believe that children learn primarily through modeling and if I want to show my kids making good choices I have to make good choices and I’m really more inclined towards being a fuck up and doing everything wrong.

But the children. Sigh.

My kids are the reason I get up in the morning. My kids are the reason I put breathtaking amounts of effort into being a healthier person. My kids are the reason I’m trying to learn how to stop hurting myself so that I can handle being alive long enough to watch them grow up.

I haven’t cut myself in over half a decade. I have burned myself in longer than that. I haven’t beat my head on concrete in a bit longer than that. I have made a lot of progress on my self mutilation.

I really want to know what happens to my kids. I think they are so neat. I feel so lucky that I get to have another child. These people are the best people in my life. I wake up and go to sleep seeing their smiling faces.

I did not believe that my children would like me. I expected to be the recipient of contempt and apathy. Instead my children adore me like I adore them. It feels like magic.

Is it magical enough to propel me through figuring out how to stop allowing more pain into my body that damages me?

What does being kinky mean anyway?

Leave a reply

I feel like I’m in such a weird place in my body and in my mind. Yes, pregnancy is weird… but this predated the pregnancy. This got started over a year ago.

I still like the idea of being tied up and hit. When it happened last year I still liked the reality of it. But this is compounded by the fact that I don’t have a lot of childcare and when I did… it was not really during hours that were conducive to kinky play. I know that most of my friends have had a “Whoops the kids walked in during sex” story but I don’t. My sex life is off. fucking. screen. My children do not walk in on us having sex. And I don’t think they ever will. I have sturdy locks all the fuck over my house to prevent such a mishap.

Because given my background having my children SEE me have sex is a major violation and one I won’t be able to shake off.

If I could forget the sight of my mother and my sister fucking people maybe it would be different. My children will not learn from me.

Things with Noah are complicated for a lot of reasons. I have a strong sense of debt. Noah didn’t rescue me from the streets, I did that for myself thank you very much, but he did rescue me from being alone and that’s a big damn deal. Noah gave me a forever home that he’s serious about. If we divorced he would probably want me to have the house and he would leave. I’m a stubborn piece of shit and I wouldn’t accept but that’s different. Noah gave me a family. He didn’t share his family I’m still basically a non-person there (except with his grandmother and his aunties–I am glad for those women) but he gave me children. He helped me create a family where we both get to belong.

I owe Noah a lot. Noah has cared for me through several periods of time when I was all but nonfunctional. He feeds me. He makes sure I take my meds. He asks after my appointments and reminds me to go. When I express my overwhelming shame at stealing so many resources for my health he tells me over and over that keeping me alive and healthy is the point of us having money.

And the primary thing Noah wants from me as a demonstration of love is physical contact. Specifically, sex. The talking is awesome. The snuggling is great. He really gets a lot out of the sex.

My body is complicated though. I arrived at this marriage with sexual dysfunction in place. I arrived in his life with scar tissue and pain through my nether region. It wasn’t his fault. He didn’t cause any of the damage. But it’s there and I have to cope with it.

In my brain I want to be available for sex at any moment because that would be hot and fun for him and it would make him feel really loved. I tried to meet that standard for years. I hurt myself in the process and I damaged the trust in my marriage.

It isn’t Noah’s fault that I did that. He was negotiating in good faith. I was doing the best I could and I fucked up.

The thing is… I’ve been hurting myself for almost 30 years. This was just the latest incarnation and in some fucked up ways it was a healthier way of hurting myself than most I have tried. I still need to change it. But I also need to acknowledge that I am not as pathetic and back sliding as I feel.

This is complicated.

I feel like I don’t count as a kinky person anymore because in my mind kink is associated with exhibitionism and public play. The fact that I call my husband Daddy when he’s fucking me is just kind of meh, whatever. Basically vanilla people do that too.

cough

I may have some weird assumptions here and there.

It doesn’t help that when I got into the scene there was a lot of nasty back and forth in email lists about how having a strong focus on sex instead of just the SM part of bdsm meant you weren’t really kinky. And I like fucking lots of people so I’m more of a swinger, right? Only at swinger parties I have to ask humbly for exceptions to the rules because I really want to make this person cry while I’m sucking his dick.

Ok I didn’t actually make him cry. He’s really tough. But he made lovely noises.

I don’t feel like I fit in a community. I’m too sexual to feel properly “kinky” and I’m too kinky for most of the sex-only spaces.

And it doesn’t help that my behavior in private is way more timid and unwilling to set boundaries than I am in public. In public I am responding to the crowd and crowds take rock solid boundaries. I have to protect myself. At home…. I don’t want to. I don’t want to say no. I don’t want to set limits.

Which is incredibly fucking stupid and creates problems all over the place. I know.

Playing at home is complicated because the kids are always god damn here and I don’t want them hearing or seeing anything. Ever. Period.

It isn’t that I will never be “out” with my children. It’s that my sex life will always be off stage and kind of a mystery. I’ll hint. I’ll answer some questions in broad ways. That’s it. I will never discuss my kinks with my children. They know I have not been monogamous all my life. They know I went out with a lot of people before I got married (How are you supposed to know if someone is right for you without trying out lots and lots and lots of wrong people first?!) and they know I’ve been on dates since getting married.

I think that’s plenty.

I’m ok with talking to my kids about sex in the abstract or in ways that will increase their future safety… they don’t need to learn how to have sex from me. My way is kinda fucked up. Like at one point my daughter asked if there is one kind of sex (or something very like that question) and I said, “Oh no! There are lots of kinds of sex. There’s manual sex (with fingers/hands); there’s oral sex (that involves a mouth and a set of genitals); there’s anal sex (playing with a butt–can be with fingers or a penis); and vaginal sex (can be with a penis or with toys).”

My daughter’s response was to raise her eyebrows and kind of say “hunh.” We didn’t keep talking after that. It wasn’t a conversation that needed a lot of in depth follow up at that point.

I just will never have a child who is talked into anal sex because it “doesn’t count”. What bullshit. Also: a huge swath of teenage girls these days are being pressured into oral sex because it “doesn’t count” and it’s a way to keep from having “more happen” and oh hell no.

My children will have language about sex and about their body. They will know what they are saying yes to and what they are saying no to. And I’m pretty damn sure my kids are growing up with the idea that sex is a super fun thing to do when you are ready and with the right person(s) but until you are ready it’s a problem.

And that all feels weirdly tied up in my kinky. Because I still struggle to set the boundaries I want them to have. I still struggle to say out loud “I want _____.” I can ask for abasing things very easily. Not affirming things.

I still struggle with the idea that sex is supposed to feel good for me. When the first several decades of your sex life is incredibly painful… that’s a hard thing to rewire in your body. It is hard to change my expectation.

What does being kinky mean?

I think it is funny that my current M/s contract has been going on for 9 months and I still don’t think I’m that kinky. Even though I have rules around my body and my sexuality that I follow.

WHAT IS BEING KINKY?