Tag Archives: sexuality

Happy masochism, submission, and being degraded.

I am a flavourful woman. What can I say. I have more flavours than Baskin Robbins but I’m going to limit myself to discussing three of them today. (Many people have said that dating me is getting all the upsides of dating someone with multiple personalities. I’ve always cocked my head to the side when I hear that. Hrm.)

I’m feeling really excited about the beatings I’ve received recently. Two in the last three months! Look at me hitting warp speed over here. Once upon a time I was beaten multiple days a week but life evolves. Seasons change.

I like being a happy masochist. I will cheerfully direct you from the bottom how to hit me and where for me to get the most sexual enjoyment out of the experience. In my broad and storied existence this goes best with a service top, not a sadist. Even though this is the part of me most commonly paired linguistically as masochist/sadist it’s not actually a match. Being a happy masochist means that I enjoy the pain and I don’t suffer. Sadists, by and large, are not that interested in such a dynamic. Service tops love me though. They get to beat on me and grin while I get off. It’s very entertaining, I’m told. This is feeling like the bottomy part of myself that I have the most access to right now. It feels like a joyful reunion in myself.

Submission is different. Submission is giving up my will. I am a lot more passive. I don’t direct what is happening; I endure. I have mixed feelings about this right now at this point in my life. I recognise that a lot of it is literally just me using dissociation to barely be mentally or emotionally present in the room. I am a meat sack that will do whatever you want. I can take a really brutal beating this way. I will cry at some point but there won’t be orgasms. I’m not there to enjoy anything and I know it. I am there to be pleasing and I will accept whatever is poured into me. It’s not possible to kick this off then revert to happy masochist. I have to make a decision. Submission involves a lot of depersonalising. I am just a thing to work/be used.

Being degraded is very strongly related to the intense dark age play I do but it’s not always the same thing. It involves a lot of spelunking down into the layers of my psyche where I feel the most pain. Physical pain is such a constant part of my life that managing it isn’t that complicated in some ways. I am up for it or I am not depending on how my body is manifesting. Being degraded is different. It doesn’t line up with physical pain limitations. Being degraded is complicated. It’s psychological in a way the other two kinds of being on the right side of the slash aren’t for me. I need to be triggered into these negative emotional states to experience catharsis. I have to do it in a way that is sharp and pointed and impactful but has no lingering trails into my life. I have to find a way to not be overwhelmed enough to kick into frantic efforts to reduce psychological pain when I get back to my regular day job. That’s dangerous for me. Playing with the lower levels of this is my bread and butter of play. This is available to me when physical masochism isn’t safe. Dehumanising me, experiencing me as a thing to be hurt and used is very different from submitting. Submission doesn’t make me feel subhuman. Submission brings my soul with it to the dissociated place because only my meat sack is being set out for abuse. With degradation my soul is being hammered. What am I really worth? How could anyone love or respect something as disgusting as me?

This is a lot of why I insist on my long term relationships being with folks who very seriously treat me like a princess. They take care of me and adore me and make sure my life is as soft and fun as they can. They know I have suffered a lot in this life and they try to make sure the time I spend with them is better than the times when I have been alone or with people who didn’t love me at all.

I have learned a lot from Black women about what it means to crave a soft life. I eschewed such things for myself for years because I didn’t want to be like the awful rich white bitches I knew. Black women talked to me about how when you are this deeply traumatised it isn’t the same kind of entitlement. It’s allowing yourself to feel deserving of rest. I am not trying to get my softness through cruelty to other people or taking far more than my share and rubbing peoples noses in it. I have watched white women defend their soft lives with cruelty, entitlement, and avaricious selfishness. I want no part of being like them.

I want enough softness that when my battered and bruised body finally stops working I get to rest somewhere that has my pillow fort set up so I can support my fucked up joints as they repair. No, I don’t care about getting my hair or nails done. I don’t need fancy bags. I do have some nice dresses, but they are not from expensive shops. I’m a cheap bastard.

I have so much lingering resentment and rage for the wealthy. It makes my life surreal. I’m not asking for softness because I am better than other people. I’m asking for softness because my body is a few sharp taps with a mallet away from shattering. I want to feel like my partners believe I am a precious resource they desperately want to keep.

I have different levels of access to these three different flavours at this stage of my life. I’m really loving being a happy masochist. It’s so much fun. It feels like freedom and joy and being replete. I feel validated.

Submission is really hard. I think I would be able to access this in a limited way with one person at a time. I think I am past the part in my life where I can offer blanket submission to a group even for so long as a weekend. I think I can’t do that now. I am too hard to play with. I have too many small injuries and areas of deep trauma. I can’t put me to the side now and only give people what they want in a broad way. I would be able to pull off a one to one scene, maybe, but I haven’t tested it and I am afraid to. I sure as fuck will not be a pass around toy like this anymore. It’s not safe and I’m done carrying the damage for other peoples fun. My body is too fragile.

Degradation was the form of play Noah liked the most. He didn’t have to worry about hurting my meat sack and he could cause emotional torment with very little effort. The epitome of a lazy top. I say that without rancor. He inflicted a lot of emotional pain on me during sex. I get off on it like a race horse so I’m not actually complaining. I also don’t know how deep I want to go into this well with other people. It was safe with Noah because he knew my trauma mapping better than I did. His knowledge didn’t depend on state dependent memory. No one else is ever going to know me the way he did. It’s going to be a more dangerous game now. I suspect that this is the flame I will not be able to keep my moth self away from.

Submission is not all that appealing to me at this stage. I am in service 24/7 and it’s exhausting. I don’t want to give my fragile meat sack to someone who knows very little about it and let them do whatever they want to me. I am too fragile. The potential risks are so high for me and the people who will pay the price are the people I cannot take care of.

Being a happy masochist makes my day job easier for quite a while. It’s a lot of joy and energy for me. It’s like tapping a main water pipe when I need a glass of water. It’s so much energy.

Being degraded allows me to wade through the swamp of my brain and get the surges of fear/anxiety/lack of worth in a contained way that doesn’t blow up my life. My brain formed in a terrible soup of abuse and lack of worth. I don’t live there full time anymore but my brain will always find those ruts comfortable and home-like. It lets me siphon off some of the frantic energy that could otherwise fuck up my life. I think of this kind of play as harm reduction. I pretend I am being hurt by a very bad person so that I can avoid ever actually going to find a very bad person.

This is where Good Trouble last year was a risk. He wanted to step into degrading me without having a container. He thought me being good after the sex was me being silent and watching bad tv with him while he shushed me and told me not to talk. He didn’t know me. He asked for Daddy/daughter incest the first time we played and he didn’t ask me what such a thing might mean for me. He put me in a position that makes me feel nauseous from the start. He wanted the daughter to be intensely trying to “steal” daddy from mommy. Oh, and he wanted to meet my kids after 2 weeks of fucking.

I ran like my tampon string was on fire. That was not a good risk. That was a bad risk.

I am trying to be cautious. Mostly this means not doing all that much. It feels like a season for not pushing limits. It seems like a time to assume fragility and need for support at a level rarely inhabited.

I have to survive so I can’t be stupid. No risky choices.

Who in the fuck even am I?

Demisexuality again, or, I can’t help but stick my foot in my mouth.

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Statuses suck. Sometimes I don’t have the spoons to flesh out a thought. On those days I struggle to stick with light topics. I should though.

First: demisexuality is valid. I am not disputing that.

Second: the nuance that is impossible in a status (and perhaps I figured this out after having my ass handed to me) is that I experience people using demisexuality not solely as a subset of asexuality, but rather as a spectrum that is dropped on top of the allosexual to asexuality spectrum. I’m willing to accept that other people still think I’m wrong and an asshole.

In my experience, and I’m not the authority on anything here so give that very little weight, people who are demisexual can be incredibly strong in spontaneous desire once they unlock the key with the right person. Asexuals, as I understand the term, are people who never have that spontaneous desire no matter how much they love someone. They might still have sex because it’s a useful act for relationship maintenance and such but they don’t want it for themselves.

My understanding of demisexuality is that the desire is picky and selective and possibly incredibly rare.

I would venture to say that most allosexuals overlap with demisexuality. The majority of humans who are capable of feeling spontaneous desire don’t do so randomly with strangers very often. They have to get to know someone first. There is the generic thirst conversations about hot famous people but those are fairly theoretical and people don’t tend to actually follow up.

I am one of the sluttiest people I have ever met. I look for other ravenous sluts as hard as I can. People like us are a very small piece of the population.

I wrote the status the other day because I keep running into circumstances where people apologise for not being able to walk into a room and have sex with anyone there.

Why in the fuck are you apologising?

You are entitled to own your own attraction pattern. You don’t owe anyone lust. You definitely don’t owe anyone rapid access to your body sexually. It makes me feel really fucking upset when I see people using demisexual as a label mixed in with apology. I feel this towering rage and I want to cry. How fucking dare society make you feel like there is something wrong with you. You aren’t broken. It is good that your body gives you a pause before you make stupid decisions with strangers. You don’t have anything to apologise for and I am furious that life has made you feel like you should.

I am not angry with people for being demisexual. I am not angry with people for using the label. It is a logical and sensible thing to know about oneself. What I failed to communicate in the status is that I am very upset that so many people seem to see demisexuality as inferior or something to feel bad about or a way of being defective.

It’s not any of those things. It’s a healthy way for your brain to keep your body safe from harm. I wish I had more of it. You aren’t a freak or bad or wrong because your body waits to feel safe before you feel desire. That is positive. That’s good for you.

I am angry that the popular representation is such that needing safety before desire is described as being a “lack” of desire. Well, some people do have less desire than they would prefer. That’s reasonable for a person to decide on their own for their body. Some demisexuals are really close to the ace end of the experience and their desire is incredibly rare and genuinely isn’t something to be counted on, of course. Even that should not be pathologised. If you don’t like how close your body is to being fully asexual, that’s one thing. Fair. We all get stuck with things in our bodies that are annoying and frustrating. Asexuality is still part of the range of normal for human beings. It’s not anything like as rare as hypersexuality. Way more people aren’t having sex than are having lots of sex.

Hypersexuals are loud mouthed assholes who like to make themselves the centre of attention.

Hi. In this moment I feel comfortable speaking for my people.

The loudness of hypersexuals means that we get a lot of press and attention and we seem like a bigger percentage of the population than we are. It’s kind of like how if you pay attention to the number of news stories about transgender folk they must be way more than 1% of the population, right? No. They are a tiny minority who are getting more press time than their share of the demographic would otherwise indicate as reasonable.

If you put 100 people in a room more of them will be demisexual than either hypersexual or asexual. Probably there will be more demisexuals than there are hypersexuals and asexuals put together.

My loves, you never have anything to apologise for. If someone is pressuring you then they are a dick. You aren’t defective. They are being unfair. They are out of pocket. They are the problem, not you.

A status is a poor way to communicate.

For the demisexuals who are really far on the ace end, I can absolutely see how spontaneous desire seems really far away. I’m not trying to argue with that in any way. There are so many aspects of being demisexual that I can’t speak to because I am incapable of experiencing anything like that in my body. I don’t know the frustrations of living in a body like that. I know the frustrations of living in a hypersexual body.

From this position what I was trying to say was: turning people down is not a mean or harsh thing to do. In grad school I propositioned a lovely friend of mine. In many ways a lot of people would say he was kind of crazy. I was hella fit, slutty, and a very good time. He is morbidly obese and timid and had never dated anyone. Wasn’t I doing him a favor? (No. I wasn’t. I was attracted to him because he’s an amazing human.) He told me no. He told me that he is not capable of feeling desire until he knows someone is fully picking him and not just using him for a good time. We are still friends. His wife is great.

He didn’t hurt me by telling me no. He gave me a space where I could love and trust him even more. I knew he would say no when he needed to. I knew he was co-creating a relationship container in which we both knew the rules for being good for each other. He was showing me love as a friend.

He’s just one of a great many people who have turned me down. He’s one of the first that comes to mind though. That no was sacred. That no was holy. It was part of him respecting himself and me enough to be real instead of performing a script assigned by society.

Now, I totally see where it can be a lot more complicated to go to bdsm/kink spaces as a demisexual because it’s a hunting ground for hypersexuals to a really large degree. That’s a level of complicated social pressure that I can’t even begin to fully unpack today. My hands are getting done fast.

When I say that demisexuality doesn’t make you a freak what I’m really saying is that demisexuality is not statistically rare. Complete asexuality is rare, as I understand it, but I still wouldn’t say that being asexual makes you a freak. It does make you more of a statistical outlier.

Still less of an outlier than me.

It’s weird sitting in this place on the bell curve. As I age this is going to be interesting because my sexuality is going to continue to narrow as more and more humans are technically available but don’t turn my crank. It feels very different to be owning this hypersexuality now as a 44 year old than it did as an 18 year old. At 18 I didn’t prefer 20+ years older than me but it happened. Now I cannot conceive of touching someone 20 years younger than me. The thought makes me feel physically repulsed. I’m sorry, darlings. It’s not you; it’s me.

I wish people didn’t feel like they owed anyone anything. I wish people felt more entitled to want what they want. Of course this gets complicated when there is a mismatch either internally or within a relationship.

I am thinking about this a lot as I move forward with my life. Demisexuality honestly sounds great. I wish that I didn’t feel desire until I was closer to people. I wish I felt less desire in general because I’m tired of thinking about sex. It is an obsessive track in my brain.

You are not broken because you get to have peace in your brain (at least about this topic) more than I do.

I wasn’t trying to invalidate demisexuality in any way. I was trying to say that it is real and it is important and you deserve to be treated with respect on the path you are taking. If someone tries to challenge you or disrespects your need to accommodate your body’s timeline for sex they are in the wrong.

Go as slowly as you need to. Sex is not better when it is rushed while you are uncomfortable. That’s silly. That’s selfishness, not connection. As a hypersexual I have to think about this as I approach people. I can’t be selfish with them. I need to reach for genuine connection or what I am doing is fucked up. I have to work hard to find my brake.

None of you demisexuals owe assholes like me anything, not your body, not your time, and not your dignity. You don’t ever have to apologise for saying no. No is a complete sentence. You don’t need to JADE (justify, argue, defend, or excuse).

You may wish you had different stuff going on in your body. That’s fair! Most of us have that experience while being alive. The thing is, you are part of normal. We all are. Even the really rare statistical outiers are still part of the range of normal in the sense that we appear in nature. We happen. There is no way to prevent us from existing.

Someone like you is supposed to exist. You don’t have to like that you are the one getting stuck with it, fair enough. We need all of us to save us. We need all of us to understand how complex humans are. We need the differences and the similarities.

I need you. It’s super great when you can say “no” to things at important times. That lets me love you with greater respect. If someone chooses not to love you with greater respect, maybe that human is not good for you. Moving on is very hard and painful; I know. You are worth defending. You are worth protecting. You are good enough as you are.

Users Guide 4.1

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Users Guide 4.0

Holy shit. I’m heading into the 4th chapter of my whore life. That’s pretty intense. Time for a total rewrite.

Decades ago I copied the idea of a users guide from Lee Harrington because I know that I have a different approach to sex than other people. Therefore it seems like a lovely idea to have some sort of cheat sheet about how to handle me in general. Some of these things I have figured out on my own, some of these things I have had pointed out to me by friends and/or lovers/husband, some of these things are constantly in flux and will no longer be true in just a few months. Of course this is a living document and therefore subject to change and revision without notice. Just because something is in here doesn’t mean you should assume that for now and all times this is the only thing I like/want/don’t like etc. After the roller coaster that is pregnancy/giving birth/having chronic health issues, I promise you things change in my body over time.

It’s fairly cis-het centric, but I tried to not lock myself in a ghetto I don’t want to live in.

Index:
A. Before sex (including courtship/getting to know one another)

B. During sex (including bdsm play)

C. After sex (including relationship level interactions)

A. Before Sex

a. General

Never assume that you are going to get to go to bed with me. Yes, I go to bed with quite a few people—that doesn’t mean I will choose you. The phrase is cautious optimism. I expect and require that people treat me as an equal, and more importantly as an intelligent, thoughtful, responsible human being until otherwise negotiated. Please don’t act like I ought to be honored to teach you whatever it is you want to know about play/sex/whatever. I have taught classes, thrown parties, run a conference, and initiated both virgins and newbies alike. I’ve put in my time to the community. I can coast on doing what pleases me and only what pleases me.

b. Specifics in a Having-Kids-Lifestyle

I don’t have a lot of free time. I have even less time for dating. What little free time I have during the day is mostly spent alone exercising because I have a very high intensity life that requires me to be well regulated emotionally. I can’t focus on getting to know new adults in a really concentrated/intense way. It’s not that I am flakey, I don’t have much availability. Well, to be honest I’m a little flakey. My priority at this stage of my life is being nice to my kids. I have to keep the rest of my life quiet enough for that to happen or I have to drop other stuff. That is the deal until 2036.

c. Kissing

This gets a whole section. Way before sex because it often happens long before sex happens. I like to kiss. Kissing is a big thing for me. I think kissing is one of the most intimate activities and if I am going to bed or playing with you I am seeking intimacy. Intimacy doesn’t mean you’ll be my one twue love or that we will settle down. It just means I want to know you. If I want intimate contact with you, I probably want kissing to be part of that. (See below section on STI’s.) I do not like to kiss tobacco smokers.

a. Hair

Once upon a time I said that I prefer clean shaven men, but that has radically changed during my adulthood. My opinion now varies tremendously based on personal attitude, grooming standards, and just plain what suits each face. As for the hair on other peoples heads: I don’t care anymore. I barely notice. I’m interested in your mind. I like body hair on anyone of any gender. Pubic hair doesn’t affect me one way or the other; suit yourself. I sometimes shave or epilate large portions of my body. I sometimes skip shaving for over a year at a go. You have to be totally ok with either or go away.

b. Weight/height

My weight usually goes up and down in a 40 pound range like a yo yo, semi-annually. Over the past three years I have lost 75 pounds from my lifetime high after my second round of cancer followed by lock downs. (I’m sorry that I’m a fucking American, ok. I’ll translate a lot but the body weight one is hard.) You can’t be attracted to me for a specific look of my body. It might be different next month. My health is variable and my body shifts with my ability to exercise. I like people with bodies. I like fat bodies. I am more appreciative of slender/”fit” bodies than I used to be, but I still prefer some heft. I used to be a bit hung up on height (not that into anyone over 5’11”) and now I don’t care. I like people.

c. Gender

I am a cis-gender woman. If you haven’t picked up on the fact that I am queer then you haven’t been reading closely. I have had strong attractions to people at every point on the gender spectrum. I am completely comfortable having sexual contact that begins with, “What words do you want me to use for your body parts and how do you want me to touch you?” because I can’t guess. Everyone is unique.

d. Cocks (What the hell—since I am listing my preferences…)

Everyone should remember that the vagina is all about potential space. Yes, it can technically stretch, but in a normal resting spot it isn’t particularly large. My body doesn’t stretch terribly well or willingly (even after giving birth to three children) so I am not a fan of overly large cocks. If it is going to cause my jaw to be sore within five minutes of oral sex I will probably experience a lot of pain during vaginal sex and that isn’t good for me. I will not even attempt anal if you are large, are you insane? I am not a size queen. I do not have lower limits on the size of cocks I can figure out how to enjoy. Not all sex is about penis in vagina sex. But I do have upper limits. Ow. No thank you. It’s not personal.

e. Race/marginalization

This is complicated. I am aware that I am most comfortable treating heterosexual white men like pieces of meat. If I fuck them and don’t call later I don’t feel that bad. I clearly negotiate and label the deal I am offering. I have major hang ups around using people of color and women and folk of ambiguous gender in the same way. I feel tremendous shame and guilt around hurting already marginalized people and I don’t have a lot to give. Which is to say, I really like having sex with people who are not het white men. I have a hard time approaching them. I don’t want to hurt them and I am less clear on the boundaries. I err on the side of not being a user asshole. But if you are interested, let me know.

f. Oral Hygiene

YES. Bad breath/teeth that look unclean is really really really repellent to me. I generally won’t kiss someone with bad breath. I will elect not to even if you are a nice person. Just no. I smoke pot and that has impact on my mouth. I do not mind kissing other people who smoke pot. I still really am not fond of kissing tobacco smokers. I don’t like the taste at all. Notice how it is mentioned twice? Really not into tobacco smokers.

B. During Sex

I will say clearly and plainly that I want to have sex with you. Consent will be clear. Once consent has been established, game on. If I say no later, I mean no. I am not looking for resistance/rape play at this time. I don’t intend to pretend I don’t want to be there. I want to be there, probably quite badly.

The first thing that ought to happen before foreplay is a discussion of STI testing patterns and safer sex expectations. I don’t have habits at the moment because I’m just starting. I’m still adjusting. Depending on my rate of whoring I will go back to either every 3 months or every 6 months.

I have had HPV. I tested positive in 2003. I had cryosurgery. I have tested negative since.

I also test positive for HSV1, commonly known as oral herpes. I have had a few cold sores as an adult but they are rare and I feel them coming. If you think that HSV1 is a deal breaker for you for oral sex or for kissing, we are probably better sticking to being friends.

I am a big proponent of the idea that we are having “safer” sex. The only safe sex is with your hand. There is risk involved in the play I do and I acknowledge it and try to minimize it. I do not have a desire to play with people who are in denial about said risk. I like the current acronym: RASH. Risk aware, shit happens. We’ll all do our best but at some point something will happen to someone. Let’s cope like adults. Test often, use barriers.

I have gloves with me in my whore bag. I will be using them and asking partners to use them. I also have dental dams and flavoured condoms and lube.

Condoms are not negotiable for vaginal penetration with new partners. I have chosen to fluid bond with my boyfriend. I take it very seriously that I am responsible for his health. I will be operating like everyone is positive for multiple bugs and I will use the appropriate barriers. Safety is important, y’all. Luckily I’ve taken a bunch of classes on making sex fun while using barriers. San Francisco was a great place to become a pervert in the 00’s.

Blood play requires extensive blood testing in advance and long-term negotiation. I do not do it casually. It would require a long-term serious relationship and given the limits of my life I can’t imagine being able to get there any year soon.

a. Breasts

This has morphed so much over my life. Dang. What I like can vary dramatically over the course of my menstrual cycle. I like everything from mild sensation to extreme pain but all pain play requires a warm up. If you act like you can just yank super hard at my boob out of nowhere I may elbow you as hard as I can. However, if you do it right, hurting my nipples gets me off a lot. But you have to do it right. On the right day of the moon. It’s a moving target. Always a fun adventure of discovery no matter where the journey takes you.

b. Ways to turn me on

First and foremost: talk to me. Tell me how hot you think I am. Tell me what you want to do to me. Tell me what you are doing while you are doing it. Just hearing you narrate how wet I am when you slide your finger into my cunt will increase the quantity of wetness. Read me porn. Have me read you porn. My brain is the most potent sexual organ in my body. Pay attention to it. Do you know why I like having sex with my friends? Because the ones I have sex with are the ones who have spent years buttering me up talking about what they like from sex.

Stroke my legs, particularly behind my knees. It is very easy to turn me on when I am lying on my stomach and my legs and back are stroked lightly. This is by far the most sensuous activity for me. I love having my neck and head stroked gently. It’s not a massage–it’s a waking up to sensual contact type of touch.

Receiving biting is hard. I like it when it is gentle but if it hurts too much it can cause me to go to dark mental place and I am prone to dissociation. To be fully clear: I haven’t done any experiments with biting in over a decade. I have done a lot of work on dissociation in other areas of my life but I haven’t done the work on biting specifically. It never hit the top of the triage list for fixing between Noah and I. It isn’t off the table but it’s complicated. Be really careful. Watch me. Make sure I am still “there”. Probably don’t try this on a first or second date because we should have some established trust first. I fucking love biting other people.

Tell me how to please you. I love having someone tell me how to get them off—it will usually be enough to get me off. An awful lot of what I get out of sex with people is that thrilling feeling of, “Yay!” We are feeling alive together!” So lots of instructions about what you want and how you want things to be done to you turn me into butter. (Once you have permission to talk to me like this. If I indicate a boundary you had better back off like you hit an electric fence or you’ll get the full force of my fury and I promise you won’t like it.)

Orgasm control is a complex part of my life. I tried to eliminate it from my body before and had poor success. I am going to continue to try to make progress on this but for now it is what it is. Guess what folks, long term M/s relationships have side effects. If we have sex you need to give me permission to come. You need to do it every time. “Yes” is a good enough answer. “Please?” “Yes.” is a great way to manage this with the least amount of embarrassment for me. Having to give the full freaking explanation every time because you forgot gets embarrassing. If you tell me to wait that is a D/s interaction. If we have not negotiated that you are jumping a fence. If you tell me that you won’t give me permission, I just have to come when I feel like it you are telling me that I don’t get to come. What happens is my body shuts down that part of me. I become a hole for use but I won’t feel almost any of it. I have a really extreme trauma history and dissociation was once a nearly full time survival tactic.

It’s not a fucking casual scene for me.

I like giving oral sex. A lot a lot a lot. I like it the most if there is some degree of being strongly encouraged involved. I’m not talking about serious forcing, but pushing my head down toward your cunt is going to get me all wet. Telling me to suck your cock will get me all wet. Asking me politely is a complicated thing now that I live in the UK. The level of manners is just different and I am having to find a new normal. I have no idea how this will shake out down the line. Given that my vanilla shagging skills are on the rise I expect I will find a way to cope.

For the record: if I have given you oral sex I consider you one of my sexual partners. None of this “oral sex doesn’t count as sex” crap. Don’t bloody ever tell me that we haven’t really had sex. You have fucked my body or I have fucked yours and probably (hopefully) you have come inside or on me. We have had sex. Sure, it was a different hole. Whoopie. It was still penetrative sex. Don’t worry about asking me if it is ok to come in my mouth. If I like you enough to let your dick in my mouth, I’m happy to have you come. I do prefer being told when it is happening so I can sync my breathing, but it is just a preference.

I do have a strong gag reflex and if I seriously fight to bring my head back after you have forcibly shoved my head down on your cock, for the love of Cheese let me go. I may be on my way to run to the bathroom and vomit. It has happened. It will probably happen again. I accept this. Please don’t let the possibility of this happening prevent you from fucking my mouth with enthusiasm. It is great for me. This being said, I’m not terribly thrilled with having a relationship centered solely around me giving blow jobs. I will feel used in a way that isn’t fun for me.

Since I’m talking about dicks so much. I haven’t played with someone who has a cunt in many years. I remember them fondly. I would like to believe I will figure it out with gusto if given the opportunity but there is the chance I am lying to myself. I could totally fail to be fun.

Also: I really like getting oral sex while wearing a strap on. That is fucktastically hot. The grinding is good for me.

Receiving oral on my pussy is a thing I do because I like you. You kind of have to have a magic wand to get me off that way. Some of you have one. I like you. It starts with the thighs. Stay on the thighs for a very long time. You think you’ve done long enough and you are ready to go for the little man in the boat? You are wrong. Stay on the thighs. How long? Three times that long. And then you touch the lower labia. You stay the fuck away from the little man in the boat. Am I making myself clear? You go back and forth between the labia and the thighs for a whole lot longer. Eventually I will indicate, yeah, go for it. Then and only then do you go for the little man in the boat. Being impatient will only make it suck in a not fun way for me. I guess we’ll see whether you are doing it for me or for yourself. Fingers are a very important part of this process.

I am old, cranky, and I have chronic pain. There are times when I am up for acrobatic porn-star sex. There are days when it is, “I am here. What more do you want from me?” I can be fun enough whatever my range for the day. But you will have to respect where my body is on a given day. Your fantasies take a back seat to my physical limitations. I have disabilities. Such is life.

Holy moly this section is changing. I might have vibrators in my whore bag. If you want them to come out, ok. I am unlikely to bother. I would prefer you. I am there because I want you.

This needs a whole section. Slut and whore are both words I have intensely positive associations with and they do not feel like degradation for me. They mean I embrace pleasure in this life and feel a sense of responsibility around sharing that with people. That’s not something that makes me bad. I’m very good because I do this. They are both affirmations of parts of myself that I am proud of. They do not belittle me. They do not mean I am bad or unclean or gross or shameful. Being both a slut and a whore is connected to how I am good.

However, I am not a bitch. I am not being mean. I am not gross or dirty or bad. I am a very nice woman who has come over to make your life a more fun place for a little while. I need you to pay me respect for doing so.

In short: “Slut and whore: good. Bitch: bad.”

Complicated. Once upon a time I spent a lot of time tying people up and being tied up. I miss it fiercely. I really like being tied up. I really like being suspended. I really really like being suspended and fucked. Oh the good old days.

I’m in a weird spot with group sex. I am theoretically open to it but I would need to feel like everyone involved was there as a completely autonomous adult to have fun. I am not ok with ever feeling pimped out again. Don’t fucking ask me to bring you women or I will want to burn you to the ground.

We need to be equals.

a. Choking

Choking is completely off the table. I have a long and storied history of head trauma and pre-stroke symptoms that are very concerning. I have children who need me. I cannot risk my life for your orgasm.

b. Impact play

I like punching and kicking. Those are basically my favorite things.

I thought being hit with a giant rubber mallet was absolutely awesome. Single tails are harder than they used to be, but I am open to learning how to process them again. I have a long-term love/hate affair with canes. Sting from a broad hand slap is really hard for me. I like thud. I dislike floggers because they impact too much skin at once.

c. Pinching

Don’t pinch me. Don’t pinch me. Don’t pinch me. I will fucking hate you. (Other than nipples. Do that slowly.) Grabbing a whole big handful of muscle/fat is different though. It can be really nice sometimes.

Due to some of the stuff that happened when I was very young I have a whole lot of scar tissue throughout my vagina/labia/anus. Scar tissue is like a dotted line in the skin that means, “Please tear here.” Despite my very strong desire for rough, and rougher, and rougher sex… I can’t actually handle all that I would like to handle. (Damnit.) Don’t pull roughly on my labia. Don’t pull my ass cheeks apart with any speed or force. Just DON’T. The skin has the potential to tear open and it will hurt and that might curtail sex for hours if not days. It sucks ass and so I try to avoid massive tearing. Gentle handling of the bits is important. I am delicate in a way you would not expect from someone with my overall temperament. I’m a fragile toy. Treat me with care.

But also finger bang me like you are playing the fastest game of ping pong in your life because I can squirt like a motherfucker and apparently that is amusing/satisfying/something.

Because we will be having sex with condoms lube must be very close by. It is my friend.

My third kid wrecked my asshole. I’ve had multiple surgeries to repair the area. It’s still not perfect. I do like anal stimulation it’s just fraught. I am interested in finding out what I can handle in the future after the last round of surgery but it has to be done with extreme care and deliberation.

C. After sex/play

Immediately after sex/play I will want to breathe and hug for a few minutes. I will probably want to spend an extended period of time talking and making out. I will want a check in email afterwards for any bdsm play–I do not need it for vanilla sex. I like being friends with people but that has to happen around my schedule. It is highly limited. I’m not rejecting you. I’m dealing with the fact that right now my life is about figuring out how to be healthy around my kids and that is much harder for me than you might think. It takes a lot of time and energy. It is very important to me that I do this right because now I am all they have. It will remain my focus for quite some time.

For the foreseeable future I am going into any and all sex or play with the mindset that there are no promises to be made. All encounters are done if they are fun for all involved and they work in that moment. I would like it if things started out with the option of being open ended if we both have enough fun, but no pressure if we don’t. I am not looking for anything that is a conscious one off from the outset. Vetting is laborious. I do not relish doing that much work for only a couple of hours of reward. That’s super low cost to benefit ratio. I want to have consistent and predictable sex with people who are going to be kind to me.

I have a boyfriend. I have a nice lady I am courting. I am solo poly with a hard bent towards relationship anarchy. I want more connection than I am capable of maintaining without giving up sleep. It’s going to be a balancing act for the next few years.

If you are already a part of my vanilla life with my children then I am probably going to decline sex with you for the foreseeable future. I need that community to stay stable for them. Sex is a catalyst for all kinds of change. Those changes can wait for a different season. I need to preserve the stability of my family above all.

Your first sexual relationship should be with yourself.

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I’ve gone through phases where I didn’t masturbate much in my lifetime. Given that my sexual experience with other people are such that there aren’t many 6 month stretches in my life where I haven’t had partnered sexual contact of one kind or another, that feels significant somehow. The times when I stop masturbating are when I feel out of control of my ability to seek sex. Most of those periods of not-masturbating happened when I was in monogamous relationships. It’s almost like I had the religious vocation that all my orgasms belonged to partners. It’s not linked to my actual orgasm training, though. The relationships I had that lasted longer than 6 months before I did that training also contained this pattern. It goes back a long way.

“Don’t discuss underage sexuality.” Why is me documenting patterns that have existed during periods of abuse and then carried on into arguably non-abusive pieces of my life as well so fucking scary to you? I am not advocating for the abuse of children. I am reckoning with the cost of it. Why are you so upset by the idea of actually figuring out how the damage plays out in the long run?

I don’t mean to be making other people feel shushed out of self expression. When I comment and bring stuff up I am trying to encourage such expression. I feel bad when my uhh habit of giving unsolicited constructive feedback is not appreciated. This kind of bullshit is one of my love languages. People who voluntarily tell me ways I could do something better are people who are trying to tell me they love me.

Oh boy, how is this different from the fuckers who want to silence people and enforce a brutal form of conformity?

Well, I’m trying to give more information so that when you continue speaking you will be able to consider additional factors. It doesn’t mean I want you to stop. Oh please, don’t stop. Your voice is needed in the world. Your differences are important. You have to push through the parts of you that tell you that you aren’t important enough to bother looking at. You have to be your own main character. I’m sorry. I know that second person shit like this can be terribly grating.

I am saying you but of course I am writing what I need to read, right?

I don’t want to be the main character of your life. That would be fucked up. I want to be a bright constellation in your sky helping to guide you home. You have to take the journey though. You have to decide where home is in relationship to me. I don’t get to play any part in that.

I wish I could map my sexual awakening in terms that were more sanitary but I can’t. That’s not an option I have unless I lie or never speak at all. I’m not alone. For all that I am a statistical outlier there are billions of fucking people. I am incredibly like the other people who are on the edge of the bell curve with me.

I can find ways to be like just about anyone. We have a shared axis of humanity. I am usually open to find it if I have the time to sit and look at someone. I am really overwhelmed in some moments by my desire to be open to people even when they inhabit some aspect of humanity I already know I dislike. I am not perfect so I cannot demand perfection from anyone else.

I was looking over my last couple of writings (fucking typos are hard to catch in one go through so I edit over the first couple of days when people respond to it). I noticed an interesting pattern. I am coding “man behaviour” as inherently submissive in some interesting ways. The “man” in the relationship might be the one who is acting, who is asserting what to do, who is dancing attendance upon the “woman”. It’s not the same thing as the man/woman dichotomy.

I am assuming that doing things for someone is what “men” do and they should do so without end. I am treating this labour as service.

I’ve had some interesting conversations with my son recently about my marriage and how he experienced being in the house with it. He said he is baffled by the vast majority of gendered stereotypes and he gets into constant arguments on Tumblr because his lived experience of gendered behaviour is so inconsistent with stereotypes of men and women.

Ok, now I’ll switch the context. Men have to bring the shiny and win the pretty lady. They perform service out of gratitude for being allowed to be in the same room.

I promise, this is all related to my masturbatory life.

When I feel like I am not allowed to experience being in my body as a predatory animal seeking out animal lust encounters I stop masturbating. It feels frustrating and agonising. I don’t want to be teased. If I’m limited to what I can have with/from/for one person this part of me dies. The wanting stills. The ache to chase and demand and assert goes away.

The more I have to inhabit a submissive amount of desire I am locked into this weird state where I don’t feel able to inhabit all the layers of self I contain. It’s not that I exclusively seek dominant contact when I am escaping from the trap of submission. It’s not that I want one separate thing.

I feel like this is clear as mud. It certainly is murky in my brain right now. This variance between gender implications of various ways that I step into dominance and submission is feeling important for the next step but I don’t know how to take it apart. I will always be a system that is fronted by a cis woman and that’s fine. There are still parts of me that take their inspiration 100% from the male side of spectrumed behaviours.

When I was running the other day I had to acknowledge to myself that a lot of the ways that I am utterly relentless and demanding of being seen as an individual is very male coded. Women are supposed to be content to be in the background. Like, I’m full on annoying male autistic coded. It was weird balancing Noah’s resentment for the ways I had communities where I was more interesting than him. His communities thought I was pretty shit and that hurt him too. He wanted to figure out how to make his community value me. He had ideas for how I could be of service to them so they could grow to understand that I did actually have value.

It was exhausting.

I am really excited that my Hedge Witch says that my parties are the best ones she has been to and she will definitely be back. Normally she hates parties. She hasn’t been to one in 15+ years. She likes my friends.

It will be a very different centre of gravity in our house than it was when Noah was here. The people who tolerated me won’t keep coming around. Instead you know that if someone is here they have to have an appreciation of me. Make of that what you will.

A lot of what made Noah and I able to find a stability between our polarities was to swap up different gendered approaches a lot of the time. He was very in touch with retreating into feminine submission, which is not the same as the way male submission involves slaying dragons for your lady. He was pretty typically male in how he expressed dominance most of the time. When he expected us to step really far into cis normal pattern behaviours my desire went away. I am not great at performing the gendered behaviours that are expected of women*. Yeah, I’m empathetic but I have to work like a maniac every minute of the day to throttle my inherent aggression and desire for everything to move along faster already. I do not embody the feminine pining at home for the masculine to come back from providing. I go on adventures. I don’t sit home.

I don’t wait for someone else to come up with a plan. I try things. They stick as long as they work. I am a force for change. I always will be.

It’s funny how having the feminine urge to rip Pretty Lady’s soul out is making me feel more in touch with being a woman than I have felt in a long time. Women are monstrously powerful when they choose to step into it.

I am a monster. I am a deeply powerful one when I step into it.

If I had to lose Noah, I’d better make what I do next count. I get one life. Then how have I had so many lives? How am I going to find the time to live all the ones I feel called to? I can’t. Every choice is a shut door to other opportunities.

I will always choose to sometimes spend days in my house without company because I want to rest. I don’t always want to entertain and that is hard. I do a lot of sprints in life. I need recovery time. I should have built in more right after the party. I need to get more deliberate about these things.

Trying to build an in person community with people who are mainly united by how much they rarely feel like they “belong” takes a lot of energy. This is my target demographic though. It always has been. It’s funny how much it has been consistent at every stage of my life no matter where I am.

“So, how are you deeply unacceptable to everyone present?” It’s good that it is now easy for me to find ways to share that axis without even revealing intense trauma or inappropriate sexual content. Yay for growing up and developing hobbies.

It’s interesting that this recent round of furious masturbation has taken a lot of forms. I feel access to a lot of parts of myself. I don’t do well with imagining doing specific new/untried things with anyone specific. There’s a lot of I want to feel in my body and vague suggestive implications from book scenes. I don’t like to project fantasies onto people who wouldn’t like them, even when I masturbate. It feels incredibly disrespectful.

I don’t want to think about drinking a cup of man tears because I have antagonised random men in immature and hostile ways. I want to find a particular man who gets something emotionally out of the experience of catharsis and relief. I want access to a dyad in which this behaviour can be healing instead of a source of pain.

Somehow, wanting to inflict that violence wavers in me between feeling male or feeling female. The physical brutality feels male and the emotional violence feels female. Which is fun to embody all in one package. I feel entitled to that male violence within specific and deliberate containers.

I have fought with men and I have fought with women. Given that I think all of us are on weird spectrums inhabiting different aspects all at the same time, how can I make generalised statements of any kind? I have expereinced differences between sadistic women and “fighting like a girl”. Girls can be intensely violent. They come at your face with razor blades. Don’t underestimate them.

The violence I inhabit when I feel male about it

Invitation

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I feel like I have found my little livejournalesque bunch here and there are so many amazing ideas floating around in my brain. I find myself drawn deeply into the stories told by dominant women lately. A long time ago I found no draw there at all. I have changed. The funny thing is, I still don’t think I will grow up and be a domme. I don’t think that will ever be my primary identity. Not all that yields is weak. (Thank you Jacqueline Carey.)

I am freaked out by the idea of figuring out what to wear because I feel like I don’t know how to invite anyone into any kind of anything. I feel paralyzed, frozen, unable to assert my longings once I am in the room. It has been a very long time of being punished for identifying these longings too closely. He didn’t hit me or anything but he did talk to me most fiercely. It did redirect the mind control efforts quite a bit.

The worst punishment in the world is knowing that I disappointed Noah. His disappointment was crushing and devastating. He was my Daddy. He was my God. I wasn’t letting down an ordinary man. I was committing heresy.

I was talking with a widow friend in town a bit ago. It was sort of intense when she grabbed my arm intently and leaned in and said, “Don’t get married again. Hold on to your freedom.” Her second husband has been in the mental hospital for quite some time. He only got there after sufficient violence in the home.

Life is terrifying. There is so much risk. So many bad things happen. It’s always funny when some loud feminist tells me that obviously I have the views I have because of my enormous privilege and lack of trauma. I mean, I do have an enormous amount of privilege. That’s a fact. I completely agree with that assertion. My life is staggering. There are a lot of problems I don’t have to have.

I would quibble a tiny bit about “lack of trauma”.

I really like the way my brain works in musical interludes. I intensely walk around with my personal little sound track going in my brain. Right this minute out burst out with Garth Brooks belting [Standing Outside the Fire.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IaTYqFZ4-4) This was one of the songs I listened to for every ~~nitrous trip~~ dentist visit from 12-18. The dentist used to be so fun. Oh well.

I feel absolutely unable to contain the inferno inside of me. I don’t know how to express it. I don’t know how to invite contact with it in a way that feels fair and reasonable and appropriate.

Mostly what I am looking for is friends. People I can egg on into adventure. People who want to laugh and cry and experience life together. I want to have fun on my own terms and not at the direction of anyone else.

I want to search for sadomasochists. I want to find people who will lean in and encourage me to go harder when I hurt them. I want to find people who will be torn between wanting to hurt me and getting distracted by me hurting them. I want to tussle back and forth never certain about who is going to win until one or the other of us collapses from excessive want and someone can’t fight for control anymore. I want to not know going in over and over and over. I want to find people whose desire crashes over them as harshly as mine does. People who feel absolutely driven by the need to experience pain.

What I miss the most is Black Sheets. A long time ago there was a recurring party in a house that was normally closed to women. The entire house was decorated with phallic art from around the world. It was an experience. It remains crystalised in my brain as the epitome of what I wish kink parties were like. It was a queer sex party with heavy bdsm encouraged. It was what I dreamed of in my feverish masturbatory fantasies early in life. I got to participate. It was incredibly fun. All the fucking in all the ways with all the peoples. It was amazing. I loved my friends so much. I went often enough and socialised with folks outside the party so the sex was icing on top of a really great cake. The relationships were deep and complex but had very little to do with what one might think of in terms of a cis het mono “Relationship”. There were people who came to these parties and had no penetration of any kind with anyone but there was still a lot of sex.

I feel like I got through the monotonous torture of early parenthood by remembering that I had a really fun self before they came along. Without Noah here as the bridge sharing before kids and empty nest with me the journey is going to be different. I agree with my therapist on this one. I can’t go back. I wouldn’t go back in a hundred ways, top of the list meaning I won’t go back to the US if I can help it. I do have to move forward.

I appreciate the kind offer of a permission slip. It worked really well when Noah did it.

I am going to have to find this somewhere else. I have to make some kind of peace within myself between feeling like being a white trash whore makes me essentially toxic to humans and feeling like I have a lot to offer. I do have the potential to be toxic to people. I am not in denial about this. There are going to be a lot of people who can’t be near me. Sometimes for reasons I completely agree with and support and sometimes for reasons I am going to hate. It doesn’t matter. Either way my responsibility is to back away as much as I can.

I believe that is the social contract.

When people tell me about the bus that hit them I am probably going to ask why they stepped out into the street and they are going to be incredibly upset with me. They are going to ask why I am victim blaming. They are going to accuse me of minimising their trauma.

I am really not trying to. I am trying to help you find the pattern so that next time you can avoid the next bus if that is very important. If possible I can help you decipher if a given bus is actually very fun to get hit by and maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. Not because I will tell you that you should do it.

I am going to tell you that the sane thing is not opting into getting hit by a bus.

I will do that while consciously and deliberately looking down at the transit map for the perfect timing on stepping in front of certain busses.

I feel like certain other tantalising women do a better job of making this sound poetic.

So much of this desire is brutality and I don’t have the ability to make it sound ethereal and soul elevating right now. I’d better get ready to because book club is in 5 days. Woo!

I am very cheerful about getting to talk about this kind of stuff theoretically with other word people before going to the party. I won’t be actually doing any useful social networking because Americans but it will still feel reassuring. I’m still scared of the ways I will have to proffer my meat sack in order to build what I want to be part of.

I would love to find people in this country for the kinds of parties I think of with so much longing. I want to find the fire that lives in other people and stoke it higher. I want to be kindling. I want to help people feel permitted to desire.

I want Church. I want a river of desire and lust and wanting and permission and pain and transformation. I want to leave bite marks on chests while I use them to gain my pleasure.

Do you know how incredibly fun it was to go to a sex party with a bunch of friends when a verbal order to orgasm was fresh in my programming? I really really really appreciate that my partner went to such trouble when I was 19. That’s been fucking handy in life in all kinds of ways. It has also lead to a really deep and abiding alienation between me and the topic of owning my cunt. It doesn’t matter how dominant I act most of the time, I still need permission to come.

I can get to the point of begging from fairly little stimulation. If I don’t ask when I feel the urge I can make it go away entirely and then I won’t get off at all during the sex. That’s a complicated place to live in.

I cannot actually take my pleasure. Permission must be given. I really am a vampire. I cannot come unless you invite me in. Luckily when no one is in the room I’m fine. Or my life might be a much more miserable place than it otherwise is. I like this part of this timeline.

It complicates inviting anyone in. Needing to bring up that uhm situation fairly immediately creates a lot of tension and dynamic from the get go. Any amount of advertising myself in a sexy way brings with it the mandatory early conversation about orgasm control. It’s not an easy 101 conversation to have on the fly. “Well it’s fine if it’s just an impact scene.” No. No it is not. A lot of things drive orgasm in my body. I take nerve pain medication every day because my nerves shoot off in some troublesome ways no matter I do. Some aspects of this are very fun. I like that a lot of activities make me get off. It’s not that hard to get me off.

I have a sense of alienation from this at times. Needing this permission really triggers a lot of bullshit dominance behaviours from men. It’s a complicated dance at times. I feel like I have spent a lot of my life bouncing around in the manic pixie dream girl trope. Do you know what men want to do when they find their own manic pixie dream girl? Lock that shit down.

I do really love hearing about how other people pick their style. It would be convenient if I didn’t have such a knee jerk reaction to purple, perhaps. You know why and that’s enough. I don’t have to explain it to anyone else. I find this presence that is not present deeply comforting. Thank you for allowing me to talk to you again. I have missed you.

I have missed the me that I was with you. I have missed exploration without specific limits. “Go out; have adventures! Come back; tell stories!” I cannot go back.

How do I move forward inhabiting that kind of space, though? I’m still toying with the idea. Agonising might be a closer fitting term. This doesn’t feel fun. As the wise lady said, it’s a lot easier to gloss over how much suffering happens as you figure things out. Another wise lady was talking about why she stopped talking about her personal life in a public way many years back and she’s very happy about it.

This is how I figure out who I am and what I want and what I need to change to get to where I want to be from here. My life would be much easier if I fit neatly into boxes and didn’t need to explore the pain I feel when I consider exposing other people to the deep core of fire that is inside of me.

I do know that the power comes from me. Permission to exhibit it comes from relationships. Permission to radiate that power comes from active consent.

How in the fuck do I radiate a kind of sexy that contains the conundrum that while I want to rip you apart and savage your body I will still need you to control a pretty essential aspect of my biology. This is more than a little insane.

Honestly this is part of why I want to keep my clothes on with Pretty Lady for a very long time. Touching me changes the dynamic. If it is done in a wide variety of ways there I am begging and pleading for release.

I am not looking for people who want to have a go at the pinball machine. Not at this time. Maybe later. That’s for when someone is a friend and has already paid into the Bank of Krissy and _______’s Relationship. That’s for parties like Black Sheets.

In my mind and in my soul there is an understanding that such parties are not available at this time at any cost for me in this environment. That’s fine. I have less than 10 years left on the indenture. 54 is going to be a really good birthday for me. Halfway through the year after that I am free. Not that I will have an empty nest. But I will be free to pick up and go where I want and do what I want when I want.

Fuck. I want to feel E Ticket Ride sexy. You have to be willing to pay a whole lot of extra costs for me. I’m a lot. I have a lot to give. I have a lot I need to get. You have to jump over hoops to really get me to offer you my time in an ongoing way.

I don’t know how to describe this headspace. I want to open the door to serendipity. I think there is a very important difference between this and the app-driven mindset of “I have to keep looking at my options.” It’s a very serial monogamist way of looking at it. I don’t want to see if I can get an upgrade on the boyfriend unit.

I want to find out what kind of torment I can find with other people. Torment is my love language. How fucked up and awesome would it be if someone had to give me permission to come over and over while I told them no?

I MEAN, HOW COOL DOES THAT SOUND?! I mean, I have mental possibilities of sound tracks but they are all vague because this is potential space.

I have never done what I want to do now. This is a huge amount of moving forward into a kind of power I did not and could not have when I was young.

I don’t know how to radiate this power because I don’t know what it feels like yet. I have not yet been sexy in this way so I have no idea what it looks like or feels like. I took the yielding, perhaps too far when I was young. I didn’t know how to protect my crappy meat sack. I did not know how to limit the checks my mouth wrote by the amount my ass could cash. I was hit by a number of very large busses. I am not sorry.

I want to pick a route with a smaller bus next time.

I want to feel the sparkling electricity that comes from masochists slamming into each other with mutual gasps and squeaks and moans because does it hurt or does it feel good? I don’t know or care just don’t stop.

I feel like a raging volcano. Advertising as if I were just slutty would be underselling the experience by a lot. It would feel really unfair. It would feel like false advertising and trying to draw people into a web of intensity they are not actually prepared for. They would interpret my intensity as drama. I don’t intend to create drama and I work really hard at not disrupting peoples lives in bad ways.

It’s a risk though. If you trigger people to go through transformation sometimes there is some drama. Change is not always appreciated by the other folks in someones life. They liked things as they were.

Chaos agent. Chaotic good, if you will. Mostly? I strive but I fail. I am only mortal. I like to bit off more than I can chew and then I wonder why I choke.

I want so much that I am burning with it. I don’t know how to keep being normal without getting to bleed off this energy. I want to hurt someone so much my fingers itch. My cunt aches and longs for interaction. I want to rake my nails down your back because it makes you lust harder.

I do not know if I want a glamour. I do not know if I want to come naked under a sheer supplicants gown. Please use me. Please allow me to use you.

I actually own the dress I have in mind. I need to run a few hundred miles before wearing it again will happen. I am going to go for a run today.

I want and I want and I want. I do not know what manifesting this in fetching garb looks like yet. How do I attract what I want? I force and interest in leaning in to change. I don’t want to do the same tricks you have done with everyone ever on repeat. I want to find new tricks together. Don’t tell me what was best with other people as if I am supposed to try hard to best someone else’s personal score on the video game of your personal pleasure.

You don’t want to play that game with me. You really don’t. My pinball machine best score list is not something you want to think about. I was married for a long time to a really good lover. The person who instilled the initial programming considered a personal hobby to help me hit 4 digits of orgasms in our relationship. It was an intense experience.

Please, for the love of Cheese, don’t whack the pinball machine like you are desperate to be the high scorer. That’s just not a good look.

I don’t want to just be a pinball machine. Sometimes I refer to this feeling as being treated like a service provider. I’m a vending machine of the experience someone wants to order up.

I am not real big on “spontaneous” but I am huge on serendipity. It’s not an accident I walked into that room. I probably planned it weeks or months in advance. What happens once I get there is not fully under my control. I have to throw the dice and see what happens.

It’s not that “dating” means nothing to me. It is that dating is not the same as marriage and it is not the same as ownership. It means I have not relinquished my autonomy as a single adult head of household. I need to go in. Time to do that head of household bullshit. I want to alternate between typing and masturbating all day. Oh well. Such is not my lot in life. I wanted this Indenture. Time to serve it.

They won’t know that hiding behind my grin and cheerful, “Good morning! Good to see you again” will be a simmering need to savage someone’s body.

I am an excellent liar.

Here’s a problem: feeling sexy

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Gentleman and I were discussing the subject of party clothes earlier today. I have a handful of legacy fetish items but mostly I can’t wear them right now. Maybe in a few hundred miles. We’ll see.

We were looking at various items of clothing and I kept pulling faces. It’s hard for me to imagine myself dressing in a way to encourage a lot of sexual attention at this point. It freaks me the fuck out. I’ve been dressing as unsexy as possible for a long time. My wardrobe is childishly fun more than it is sexy. I do have a handful of pieces because of hunting last year. See previous reference to maybe I’ll wear them again after a few hundred miles.

Very little of what I own makes me feel sexy. I like wearing split crotch bloomers under layers of skirts and knowing that I can have sex without bothering to get undressed. That’s fun for me. It’s a very specifically coded kind of sexy that most people won’t be able to read at any kind of distance. Mostly I just look very modest and conservative. I like to wear my hair long but braided up. I look like a religious conservative.

I now have less than two weeks until I am going to a party. I don’t have much on between now and then. I have time to think about clothing. I keep wistfully thinking that I want to feel sexy. I don’t know what that means though.

I can’t help that growing up I heard over and over “If you go out dressed like a street walker you’d better come home with money.” I believe if I dress in overtly sexually suggestive clothing I’d better expect to be harassed. I expect to have to be ready to fight if I go out wearing slutty clothing. Amusingly I would not be very tolerant of a man stepping in front of me to fight for me. I might knock over the earnest would be knight in my zest to get to whoever was fucking with me.

Dressing slutty is inviting fighting. It takes a very specific kind of mood before that feels sexy for me. I have to feel strong and DTF with pretty much everyone and anyone.

I don’t think I have that kind of boldness in me right now. I wish for it. I miss it. I don’t know that I will have that again.

What makes the me I am right now feel sexy? Mostly I feel desire in my body and clothes are fairly irrelevant and we simply rip them off. That’s been true for a long time. There has been no point in trying to appear sexy because it made absolutely no difference in any way shape or form. Gentleman is like Noah in this regard. They just don’t care that much about clothing or appearance. Which is great! It’s very convenient having relationships with people who are fine with me being the low maintenance bitch I am in terms of frippery and hygiene. I can (and do) dress up but mostly I wear a few basic outfits with high practical value and little to distinguish them.

I don’t feel sexy. I feel like I want to have sex. I feel like I have been absolutely blessed in this life with partners who are as antsy to have sex with me as I am with them. Hallelujah and thank Cheese.

I haven’t been in a relationship with someone who felt meh about having sex with me since I was 22. I feel good about the trajectory of sex in my life. The orgasm gap in my relationship is (apparently) more like a cricket score. This was a new idiomatic thought process for me. Now I know there are wickets (10) and runs (however many you get away with). Ah. Sure. I can get away with hundreds.

Pretty much all of that sex happened without me feeling particularly sexy. I felt horny. I feel an unholy amount of spontaneous sexual desire. Feeling desire is not the same thing as feeling sexy.

Years ago I was up at one of the house parties in Seattle and this woman walked through the room. Her hair was long and super dark black and it shimmered in waves. I thought, “she has actual fucking flowing raven locks”. Her hair seemed like the sexiest thing on the entire planet to me. I don’t think I have ever felt as sexy as her hair looked to me.

My hair is going grey and I can’t be arsed to do anything about it. Besides, my hair was always just a dark brown. My curls are neither completely proper spirals nor fun waves. I’m a tangled mess most of the time if my hair isn’t in a braid.

I don’t think the route to sexiness comes through my hair. I really miss the braiding that used to happen when I worked fair/faire. (Different weird reenactment shit. One was a Victorian Dickensian Christmas fair and there were a bunch of Renaissance faires. The dancing was so much fun.)

Dancing makes me feel sexy.

I feel deeply amused and powerful when I observe how intimidated people are by the bog witch shit I wear. I feel like “ha ha ha I am scaring you”. It’s silly. It’s also perversely sexual. I’m not wearing anything revealing in any way shape or form. This is desexualised clothing for the world. Yet I feel sexy in it.

I feel sexy when I feel like Mrs. Whatsit. I feel powerful when I feel like I am toying with someone’s perception of the world. Amusingly, I got a lot of this with Engineer. I’m glad that I am still talking to him. It feels weird to say it, but I feel like he treats me the way I treated my Shaman. He comes to me with ethical dilemmas and I force him to talk it through on his own. I have only questions, no answers. I don’t have to live with the results of any of his decisions so i should have no voice in what they are.

He treats me a lot like I treated Vicki. Well, sort of. Vicki kept her clothes on 100% of the time. I feel this weight over my shoulder. I have this responsibility to perform the behaviour I was antagonised into articulating as correct. I don’t have the right to tell other people what is right or wrong. I can only ask questions and decide how close I want to stand to them.

Vicki was sexy even when she frankly needed a shower and to change her dang clothes. I wish I could channel power the way she did. She lived so securely in her sadomasochism that there was never a doubt that she had power in a given scene. It didn’t matter if she was submitting or dominating. It didn’t matter if she was displaying masochism or sadism she had power. In that way I wish I could be more like her. I wish I felt entitled to embody my full power no matter what I am doing.

I don’t want to be exactly like any of my mentors though, not really. I don’t want what they lived. Not because they are/were wrong, but because my path is different. It’s not a repudiation. I like different things. We were always only going to be holding hands for a little while.

What makes me feel sexy?

The way Noah looked at me made me feel sexy. It had nothing to do with what I wore. It had to do with his perception of my soul. Noah looked at me as if I had all the terrifying power of a God. He believed that as much as I had the power to give love and life and nurturance I was even more capable of destroying and harming. He looked at me with awe.

It’s fun that Gentleman is currently working on how to send the right kind of signals for me to understand he is feeling interested in me. He’s getting way more grabby and assertive and verbally silly and it’s really great. I feel besotted. He is such a kind and wonderful man. I love that he puts himself out there in the world even when he doesn’t feel fully confident. He does it scared. His bravery and willingness to try new things make me feel really tender and loving towards him. I want to keep coaxing this bravery. Explore! Have fun! You only get one life. Get every morsel of joy out of it.

If I were a monogamous human being this would be the time when my brain would start to filter out other humans. It would alter my attraction pattern. However, I am not a monogamous person. My brain creates a big sturdy container that looks promising and like it has potential for a great deal of awesome over a long term. Then my brain looks a fraction of a degree to the left and sees vast amounts of self that is not in any kind of container and then there is some vertigo and oh holy shit balls no. No.

I don’t want to leave those parts of me in the dark. I miss them. I love them. I love them enough to not let go of them even though it would be deeply convenient for people who love me if I did. I love these pieces so much that I held on to them through over a decade of hypnosis and NLP work trying to force my brain into only desiring one man.

I’m not saying any of this as a criticism of Gentleman. The man sat very still and waited for me to complete a house chore before he left. He knew if he stood up to go I would get distracted and not finish the task. That shit is pretty magical. He made sure he kept me company so I could get a little bit more accomplished and head into the week with a lighter load. He is a super rad boyfriend and I’d like to keep him.

I’m really happy with this relationship. I feel pretty fucking seen in a lot of really deep and profound ways.

I also feel like the parts of me that fit inside this relationship represent a very small fraction of who I am. I feel guilty and ashamed of this knowledge. I wish that I had come factory standard instead of being so fucking extra.

I think the parts Gentleman puts into this relationship are a very small fraction of who he is, too. I am not trying to be self centred here. We are middle aged fuckers. We both have history and stories and complexity.

This is all tied up.

Throwing bait in the water is a complicated thing. I have inched my personality out in person here in the kink community while Noah was alive. Luckily most of the hyper local people don’t really read my writing (phew!) so they have gotten to know me in tiny pieces. In person I am a lot more reserved than you might expect. I wait to be approached. I ask a lot of questions and deflect questions I receive with non-answers or partial answers because my stories are all so complicated. Pull one tiny thread and who knows what fucking thing will fall on your lap. I endeavour to avoid trauma dumping so that means I have to be careful what stories I tell. I am genuinely afraid of being the reason someone else’s nervous system gets dysregulated so they can’t participate in fun.

I want to feel sexy. So much of feeling sexy is in being looked at and desired. I confess that even though it is great that this fella responds as if I am equally sexy in my comfy jammies and a bathrobe as I am when I dress up sometimes I want to feel like someone appreciated the effort. I write about the mixed feelings I had in relationships with fetishists. It was difficult being simply an object and not a person. I didn’t like the way I was appreciated more in latex and high heels. I find both fairly fucking uncomfortable. They are both challenging on a sensory level for me. But gosh I appreciated one lover I had very briefly who took like two hours to undress me every time. Sex took, like, four hours. It was amazing. Undressing was part of the show.

I think about wearing lots of layers for seducing Pretty Lady. My cunt will not be easily accessible. Oh holy shit no. My cunt will be the very last thing on the menu. It will be earned with thousands of words. I don’t need to take any clothes off at all to rub one out. I am a miracle of orgasming ability. There had to be some fucking benefit to all my weird health shit. Woo.

This party coming up on the east coast is uhm, not like a date with someone who already finds me thrilling. Let’s be clear that I assume that the most likely outcome is some awkward conversations that don’t really go anywhere and no play. I don’t know people well and I have very consciously held myself back for most of the years I’ve known them.

I don’t think I have it in me to strut in like I am hot shit and you should try hard to get me. I think that requires a level of security and being known that I currently lack.

The thing is, I haven’t earned regard here. I have not been in anyone’s life all that much. I don’t go to anything bigger than our Thursday munch every month. I know the two men who are the regulars at that munch very well. I’d be ok strutting in front of them because they would grin and tell me to have a good time. They wouldn’t act like it was for them. They would simply be my friends. Mostly I do not have the right to act like I am someone anyone should like. I have no idea how I am going to fit in with the social community in larger Scotland over time. I assume I will be disliked by a lot of people. There are already a couple of people who significantly dislike me and I’m ok with that. It feels inhibiting though.

How do I feel sexy walking into a room full of mostly strangers by myself when I don’t have any particular faith in this moment that I can be sure if any of them will like me in 10 years? I could strut into a Second Saturday party in the Bay without hesitation even though I don’t know most of the people. I don’t need to know everyone. I need the anchor people. I need my friends. I have not put in the time to have many friends over on the east coast. I’m not there for an event every year.

I have very particular metrics in my mind right now with regard to short/medium/long term goals. Yes, I am absolutely interested in Mx/Ms/Mr Right Now. Mostly I am looking for who is going to become a bigger part of my life. I don’t have a deep and broad network of friends yet. I haven’t put in the time. I haven’t shown up and been witnessed. I haven’t been the witness of other people’s stories. People will think I am hot shit based on whether or not they observe me to be. I don’t get to dictate that. I don’t get to act like me earning that off screen has any value whatsoever. Social capital is not transitive like that.

Frankly, I’m so out of practice at all of the skills of topping that I should not be trusted more than any other newbie. My muscle memory has gone to shit in the time I was married. Any amount of raising my arm was met with extreme hostility and force. I didn’t have to actually hit anyone. Any kind of threat was absolutely the same. No, hitting my friends in a consensual bdsm scene wasn’t permitted; if anything that was even more forbidden. Noah probably would have been more forgiving of me spanking the kids than he would of me spanking a friend. It would have seemed like a mistake, not a choice.

How do I feel sexy when I feel so insecure? I feel the lack of connection to the community here. I was not allowed to join in more than I did; I was allowed the Kids. What I got was somewhat grudging. Noah resented me wanting kinky friends because I want to flirt with them if they are old enough.

I am sad that one of the people I had hoped to hide behind will not be at the party. I haven’t made many friends on that coast yet but I count this person among them. We’ve talked a lot over the years. This is most unfortunate for me on an entirely selfish level. Such is life. I will go anyway. I have to start somewhere.

I am spending far too many brain cycles wondering what I want to wear. I went hunting as a slutty bog witch. It was really fun.

This is not that.

I do not want to walk in as if I assume I will ever have any kind of power over anyone present. I want that genie in a bottle. I am not Vicki to ooze power over anyone who came nearby. People who had their own power met hers as equals and she never played dominant pissing games. Ok, she usually didn’t. Sometimes she did. When she did she won. I don’t think I have arrived at having this kind of personal power. I feel like I forfeited any sense of power by how I handled this last rape. I feel like a failure. I feel like I failed to have any power at all. I feel like a stupid piece of shit. I didn’t handle that in a way Noah was proud of. I made the last 5 months of his life very hard. I feel deeply ashamed of wanting to reach so hard for new connection right now. It feels like I am trying to avoid sitting and home and stewing over what a complete piece of shit I am for failing Noah.

I do not know how to feel sexy walking into this environment right now because I am not sure how to walk in with any kind of feeling of power. I think the two are tied together for me. There is power in being submissive, a slave, and a masochist. The power does not only reside on one side of the slash. Perhaps I will spend a lot more of my life being sadistic in the future. All of these expressions come from personal power. I’m afraid both of attracting the wrong thing and attracting nothing at all. I couldn’t tell you which would be worse. If I go in hoping to make friends that’s really about as optimistic as I should be.

I want to feel sexy. I want to feel seen and appreciated. I don’t want to feel afraid. In order to not be afraid I have to feel safe. I don’t believe scene spaces are ever fully safe spaces. I go there to drift around in the ocean of predators and prey and see who is living in this little ecosystem.

What kind of predator am I?

Oh. Oh that is an interesting question. After thinking for at least 13 seconds I’m going to go with lazy. I am a lazy predator. I like to know the history before I step in old shit. I am a predator who usually hunts predators. This is how my soul is deeply tied to you, Ale. I hunt for people like you. I deeply appreciate and value that you never fucking sugar coat how you feel. I find affirmation of my humanity in the ways we reflect opposite sides of the same coin. You understand my need to be a victim. I hate being a victim. It is a thing I feel unable to escape. I, at times, have learned to embrace being a victim because in its depths I find more about my strength and power than I do in any other way.

This is where I fear I am wrong and Vicki is right but I don’t know that I can follow her good example. Vicki taught me that power emanates from a person like heat from the raging inferno of a soul inside the meat sack. I experience my power coming from relationships. My power doesn’t exist in a vacuum. I have power only in as much as I have the power to help, to harm, to create, and to destroy parts of other people.

I think of you and I feel such shame. I harmed you. I was cruel and inflexible and overly demanding in ways I was not entitled to be. I failed you.

I am so afraid of this power that sparks to life and begins to burn and rage at the tiniest sign of connection. It’s like watching a pilot light go from being barely a flicker to being on full blast. Someone wants me to look at them. How delightful.

I am afraid that it is a terrible thing to be touched by the power within me. I appreciate the way that folks in my in person life are commenting prodigiously on their appreciation of my mothering. That’s nice and all, for people who actually deal with my family to think I’m doing well. I inhabit the power of this role uneasily and with great caution. I am terrified of fucking this up. I am now all they have. Someone else can’t fix what I fuck up. Not really. There used to be someone here watching me, giving me course correction advice. Letting me know when I was getting too heated or loud. Now it is just me. Am I gentle enough?

It is very hard that the relationships in which I have the most sense of power are entirely ones where I am terrified of crushing a delicate soul I love very deeply. It’s part of why I was so hard on Noah. He was the only sturdy soul in my network I could really unleash on. It had to be done in ways he permitted.

He wouldn’t allow me to push him to the edge of his boundaries because him exploding was even less permitted than me exploding. I am not trying to say I had the worst deal in my marriage. Noah was also in a very constraining box.

I am saying that I am stepping into a different environment where I have no sense of my place. I don’t want to come in my mother/auntie vibe. I don’t want to. I want to come as a peer. I want to come as someone who both initiates and receives desire.

For many years I have said, “Anyone who speaks at my funeral is required to start with ‘Krissy was a motherfucking bad ass’ and if they don’t, boo them off the stage.”

I don’t feel like I am truly inhabiting that. I feel weak. I feel vulnerable. I feel deeply unworthy of ever being loved. I failed Noah. How dare I walk on as if I am a whole creature.

I am not a whole creature. I am a sundered being. I am a tree that was twinned for many years before a lightning bolt took my love from me. I miss Noah. I miss the certainty of that container. I miss feeling that secure in being loved like a wildfire. I was ok with being burned if that was the price of that relationship. It was worth it. I miss Noah. I miss Noah but he is gone and I have to carry on. My day job takes a lot out of me. I need to fill my bucket.

I need to make myself happy. This is a pragmatic understanding. Most of my life depends on me being a cheerful, upbeat, optimistic soul. It doesn’t work when I am deeply depressed and buried in anxiety. I start being poor at my job.

I want to feel sexy but I don’t know if I can. I know that it is tied to my sense of power and my happiness but it depends on relationships. I can’t walk into a building and assume anything about anyone. Sure, they are there but they aren’t there for me. They are there for their own story. I am very afraid of finding out there is no story arc overlap potential. I am afraid that I am not walking into the building with any sense of personal connection and anchoring. That means flirting feels like inviting a fight when I don’t know anything about the turf the fight is happening on. That feels so dangerous and stupid.

I want to feel sexy. I am afraid I will only feel afraid.

It’s Ostara.

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Today I finished tidying the garden and planted the bits of colour. I’m trying to add more plants every year that bloom earlier. It’s a process. I started with like 6 plants that flowered by Ostara and I’m up to many dozens. In my defense, I didn’t fully tidy up because I know better. Not before May. But I did clean up all the tripping hazard sticks and I unburied some of the stepping stones so folks can see where to go more easily.

This has always been the season shift I feel the most intensely. It is time to start being outside planting, working, and playing. It’s when I start seeds inside because it’s too early to be doing much outside. After the party I’m chucking all the seeds onto my bathroom floor again; it’s warm enough to get stuff going. It’s awkward in my bathroom for about 2 months but oh well.

It feels like I am trying to co-opt this energy away from gardening into pruning my emotional landscape. That’s probably wise at the moment. Well, not pruning. Examining.

There is a part of me that teeters, on this equinox between the knowledge that having two people I see fairly seriously for different kinds of adventures and limiting myself to them would be less work, less anxiety for all involved, and way easier to schedule and the self awareness that forces me to admit how much I want everyone. I want to go flag down a rugby team. Not because I’m that into rugby. Because they would probably be able to literally hand me around and that sounds absolutely amazing. Sometimes I find myself checking people out at the rock climbing gym in ways that are wildly inappropriate. I have full on movies play out about what they could do with hands that strong. Holy shit for shoe shine I thirst so hard I worry that I will crack teeth.

It’s not because I’m that into fit people aesthetically. Strength is hot. Someone who can hold his body to a wall while dangling fully horizontally is someone who could do magical fucking things with his fingers. If he doesn’t know how yet that’s fine. I’m bossy.

I have to admit. I’m really bummed that Closed Book didn’t work out. He could have been a lot of fun if he had some boundaries. Ah well. This is how the cookie crumbles. Even though he lives exactly .4 miles from my house that does not make him a good person to mess with.

I am managing to say no to bad ideas. Pat myself on the back there. But what about questionable or neutral deals? I mean. There could be a lot of those over the next few years if I play my cards right. I want to be pithy and say “And I am very good at cards” but it would be a giant fib. Sometimes I get very lucky. The rest of the time I suck.

Which is how it goes when you are throwing bait in the water. It’s how I found Portland Boy all those years ago. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. He was the friend of a friend I did random pick up play with. He’s still my friend. I get to be a friend to his life. I get to watch his joy with the right partner and family.

So like, I feel like I would be down to go to a bathhouse and pick people up for sex but maybe they will stick around in my life for 20 years? It could happen. Literally, I know people.

I feel so torn. I know the lower stress route would be easier on all concerned. I feel really bad because it’s not as fun. I’m supposed to be teetering on the balance of equality today. I feel like I want to plunge off into the deep end. Sweetheart, this isn’t all happening all at once. I am moving glacially slowly for me. I’m being careful and mindful. I long but I haven’t made big self destructive choices recently.

What if the play wasn’t self destructive? What if playing with new people is healing and part of bonding and creating a new web of people? What if the play is a necessary step in ensuring that I will survive the next major catastrophe? I’m a fucking anime protagonist. There will be another major catastrophe and then one after that. Mostly they won’t be my fault! Ok, sometimes they will be my fault. This is because I am stupid and make bad decisions. This is one of those phrases I use that bothers people. I’m not actually stupid but sometimes I think with the wrong head. I am impulsive.

I went and saw Sue Perkins tonight. I have seen three comedy shows this year. I’m seriously on a roll. I loved this show. I have to admit it was quite hard to contain myself when she said, “No one wants a 56 year old sex addict.” I really wanted to yell, “I do!!!”

This is a small town. People fucking notice me around town. That would not play well. Sometimes people claim I have no tact. You people can fuck right off, I do too have tact.

I feel bad because it drove Noah insane that the more sex we had the more I craved sex with other people. It’s not that I was unsatisfied. It is that every act of sex feels like fuel for the next couple of times. It feels like bonus energy for existing and working and loving people.

My compost pile is absurdly high and I need to pull it out and sift it. I also need to get my hands on a serious wood chipper and go through my giant pile of logs. I need the wood chips. I keep thinking that if the universe were fair someone would want to do the labour to flip my compost pile for me in exchange for me feeding them and kicking them in the nuts.

Yes, this nut kicking topic is a thing. I’m pretty obsessed. It’s an intense focus that I’ve had for at least 30 years. Kicking people in the testicles is FUCKING HILARIOUS. I derive so much joy from the act that I can barely contain myself. I will always have gratitude in my heart that someone allowed me to have a container where that was a really good part of our relationship. I am sad the rest of the container didn’t work out. This is how life goes. We can’t keep all the containers.

Pavlov made excellent, important, accurate points about how it is broken to think of relationships in terms of transactions. I’m still really broken. I’m very very Silicon Valley about this sort of thing. “Let’s discuss the frank exchange of activities we want to have between us.” I fill your bucket by doing x. You fill my bucket by doing me. It’s very simple. Let me sell you on the services I have to offer. It feels dirty and I’m not sure if it is dirty in a bad way or a fun way. Not all the services are sexual. I am patterning off Auntie more and more as I age. She patterned off her mother who fostered a lot of children. Both Auntie and my grandmother were women who severely neglected their children in favor of the kids/grown ups they took in. My mom was sandwiched in between them, eternally the child needing to be taken care of.

Pete Walker says, in his book on C-PTSD, that every human should receive entirely unconditional love and support for the first two years of their life. After that it is basically a sliding scale as you move towards adulthood where you do have to earn love.

My therapist asked me today if I loved myself. I said I do. I listed off the ways I have earned my love.

I feel really bad for the ways I was not able to be what Noah wanted. Part of it was I was using so much bandwidth on being the mother I need to be. The amount of devotion and sacrifice required by my day job is pretty fucking overwhelming. It is not enough for me to be present. I am active and directive and patient and considerate about developmental levels and constantly adapting our environment to be easier to bear for my kids. They all have really intense sensory challenges. Living is painful. Managing their environment so that they can have optimal functioning requires a massive amount of bandwidth and energy from me. I am deeply relieved to see this work falling off a cliff as the people approach adulthood. I don’t have to do it for my son anymore. He knows how to manage now. It took a while. I know the others will get there too.

This work consumes me. I want to be able to give it my absolute best. My best is pretty freaking great. I’m a walking circus full of know it all monologues on hundreds of topics at the slightest hint of a key word. I trained for this. I watch these people suffer in ways I feel responsible for–my genetics are responsible for these challenges.

The Indenture is feeling long. I won’t have Noah here stepping in to give me breaks. This is me.

I feel really bad that before I wanted “a partner” I wanted children. That was my focus. Ok, yes I wanted a coparent and what I needed was already so long and specific and demanding that requiring them to not have a penis felt like too tall of an order. Now I have the children and nice people I date.

This is a thing I have to think about and be clear about. This shame is not useful. I didn’t use Noah up and throw him away. This was not my fault. I have done a lot of bad shit in my life. I didn’t kill Noah.

My therapist is uhm encouraging me quite a bit in the direction of putting my wings on and exploring as much as I possibly can. They think that me being selfish is a healthy correction from the tight constraint of my marriage. Of course it is convenient when I feel told to do what I want to do. Of course it is deeply problematic that I have a pathological demand avoidance response to being told what to do. My brain is a little bitch.

But I also feel pushed towards monogamy. Pushed is too strong. I am aware that the desire exists. I feel like a constant failure, still. I am really frustrated and tired of this exact specific ache in my chest. Monogamy isn’t on the table. Ok, second preference would be one woman because that’s the easiest to kind of wrap a brain around.

I feel like I’d be pretty happy taking on the task of making sure the average orgasm count for the Highlands increases. That sounds like fun. I know that realistically I can’t schedule it. I probably would get tired of trying very quickly but that doesn’t mean I can’t give it a good old college try. (Is that an idiom on this side of the pond?)

I need to go to bed. People will be here in 10.5 hours.

I want. I feel flooded with this aching burning and want. I am really tired of feeling bad about it. I want to put myself in a room with people who might want to ask me to do things. I want to say yes.

This is harder than it used to be.

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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

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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

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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?”

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

Do I even serve?

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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

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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.

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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.

You can’t get to yes without risking no.

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Damn. I don’t even know how I want to start this. I don’t know what the frame is for this. I mean, a dude shared https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/the-state-of-our-unions/202302/why-are-so-many-young-men-single-and-sexless?amp and this article is making it hard to go to sleep.

So this will involve heavy trauma random mentions but I’m not talking about my pain or my victimisation–that really isn’t the point. It’s just for context.

More than 60% of American men under 30 are single and are probably very rarely having sex during their single life. Holy shit. I had more sex than these men before I was 15. I don’t mean the rapes. When you have an exceptionally early introduction to rape it is fairly common to translate that into an exceptionally early introduction to sex. I have spent a lot of time in therapy working through my feelings about whether or not I raped the children who said yes when I asked if they wanted to play. We were the same age. But my play was not age appropriate. Lots of mothers didn’t let their children near me again.

I’m not going to turn this into a dirty story. Lots of kids said no. I refined my approach. Lots of people said no. I refined my approach. Score.

Before I was a freshman in high school I had slept with more people than most people do in their whole lives. In order to get a body count that high I was told no over and over and over and over. This was all made much easier by the fact that I moved approximately 45ish times by that age. I had been to 20 different schools. I had so many prey opportunities and I am a pretty damn good hunter. It helps that I consider gender fairly irrelevant.

I learned the most from the people who told me no. There are some good fucking men in this world who will recoil with horror when a child asks for sex. Good for you, dudes. I wish you were less unusual.

But anyway. The point is that in order to figure out who you are and what you want you need to put effort in to having something to offer. I’m autistic and my special interest was sex through early childhood. I had a really fucked up/healthy boundaries on their part experience of being ostracised over and over and over and over and over.

My kid told me he felt like everyone in the world hated him when a couple of kids bullied him at one school.

God I had to try hard not to giggle. Oh baby. I wish I knew what it felt like to have four people not liking you feel like the whole world. Fuck.

So I really and truly do know how hard it is to ask people for sex and be rejected over and over. The thing is: do you want sex or do you want a relationship? Because if you just want sex then you really should pay a sex worker and be ok with that. It’s a dandy occupation for folks who choose it without any other coercion beyond living in a late capitalist hellscape.

If you want sex in an ongoing way as an adult then you have to make learning how to be a fun person to have sex with a priority. You need to learn how to have skills that make you good to have around. These are broad. Not every man has to have any particular specific skill–you are fully entitled to areas of weakness. I had to focus less on what I needed from someone else and more on what I can offer.

I married the guy who did the most classes. I don’t mean university. He took massage classes. He took dance classes (but holy shit don’t ever ask him to dance unless you want to hear a long rant about how much he hates all dance instructors 😂). He got a motorcycle. He took classes in hypnosis and NLP. He did tantra classes. He went to fucking spirituality weekend retreats all by his own damn self. He constantly reads books on how to be more effective at whatever new task he is about to add at his job. He went to a lot of kink classes. He went to sex classes. We still have all the damn handouts.

He knew that if he wanted to attract attention he needed to differentiate himself. When he arrived in adulthood he did not seem that interesting. He said that his dad told him that he better go learn how to have something to give because no one likes boys and young men.

Ouch. Yeah. I don’t think you could pay me to go through life as a boy. I was treated like shit. I knew beyond the shadow of doubt that I was white trash and every single one of the mother fuckers throwing dog shit at me would be delighted if I were to die. It happened in city after city after city after city. For years.

Fuck no. I don’t want to be a boy. That sounds really rough. How in the hell can people learn how to ask if the question is always wrong? How can there be a way of just magically knowing the right way? ~~You~~ I learn by making mistakes; I’ve made some fucking whoppers. My husband has made big mistakes.

I don’t know how to settle my brain around the limits of this small town. I think it is the best motherfucking thing in the world that I have a choke chain on.

The coping methods that served me well enough to create an extended network of friends and Leather Family really don’t work the same if I am never going to play with or have sex with anyone.

Throughout my life before moving here every single close friend I have had from early childhood has been a sex or bdsm partner. Now I’m just supposed to figure out how to do this thing I really don’t fucking know how to do. It’s terrifying and hard.

I have to go be told no over and over and over. I’m a polarising fucking figure. For every hour I spend trying to develop a friendship relationship with someone I probably get rejected for 15 overtures in a row. That’s not all with the same person. You can’t do that. It’s weird. People don’t like it. But if you wait a few months and try again it’s ok. Three no’s mean you stop asking forever.

Yes I am autistic and I like my fucking rules, ‘kay?

You can’t put all your eggs in one basket. You have to put a small amount of energy in a lot of directions. And it’s exhausting. IT IS FUCKING EXHAUSTING. Then I read about how little effort many men are putting into figuring out how to get laid. SEX IS FUCKING AWESOME AND I DON’T KNOW WHY YOU AREN’T WILLING TO DO THINGS TO GET IT. I mean, I gotta work pretty fucking hard these days for platonic friendships and you won’t put in this much effort for SEX. Buddy, these days I get laid any time I go to bed in a nightgown. He even calls me names and hurts me. He knows exactly where to fuck with my deep seated trauma issues.

He also cooks breakfast 6 days a week. He reads to our family and he does the best voices. Girl Genius comic books are fantastic to read out loud to anyone and I will die on this hill. He was a really tremendously shitty labour partner for our first two kids. So our friend’s mom came with us to the third birth and she told him what to do. You can always go find ways to get support to learn how to do what you need to do to be a better partner.

He doesn’t ask me to teach him how to get better for me. I don’t ask him to teach me how to get better for him. If I can’t tell when my behavior and attitude please him after this many years and this many thousands of hours of conversation then I want my money back this program sucks.

I try to keep a sense of humor about how much it sucks to have to force my face back into that carefully practiced in the mirror face that projects just the right amount of “I would be cheerful if you talked to me.” Fuck this shit. I don’t want to need community. I want to live alone in a box in the woods.

Who am I kidding. I’d die.

I want people in my life so much. I don’t know what shape I want that to take. I have no idea what my relationships with people will look like going forward. I have no internal map for this. Even more fun: I am now going on 4 years out of therapy after being in therapy on and off for my whole life because a lot of shit went down.

I think all these men want people as much as I do. I don’t know what any of them need to do because the penalties for mistakes are so hard.

I know that when I get the same feedback from three people all of whom I already respect that I need to spend some very serious time looking at what larger truth they are seeing that I am not seeing. If I get a bunch of no’s to offers I just need to try again at a different time and get busy living my own life in the meantime.

I do not understand being unwilling to change to get people to like you. I feel like it has been a highly abrasive 30 year process of getting me to anything like socially acceptable behaviour. I have had to learn many things and I have worked really hard.

It is weird feeling all the iterations of personality. All of the mistakes I have made have made an indelible impression.

You never forget the first time someone throws dog shit at you because you were stupid enough to say you liked them. I was 7.

When someone tells me they are too scared to ask for time with someone, a relationship of some sort I marvel. What would it be like to have a place in which it was safe to hide and be safe? I mean. I have it now?

It’s really fucking weird. Sometimes it is almost itchy.

Ah, I know why I am up at 2am writing this when usually I would go to sleep and not think that much about the plight of all these men who aren’t getting laid. Tonight my teenager and I went and took a course out in the vanilla world to possibly learn an activity. Details are unimportant. The point was the man running the presentation spent about 60%-70% of the night talking to me. I know he is roughly 30 years my senior.

That was a man who cheats on his wife anytime he can. It’s like blood in the water. There is a way of really staring. Holy shit have I practiced and practiced and practiced and practiced how to settle my eyes on someone or bounce from person to person to carefully not raise hackles. I got to do it when I was young enough to not earn significant punishments.

I learned it because the kinds of men who will have sex with children are very good at that kind of intense attention.

These are very messy things.

On the ride home we talked about it. He had never seen that happen to me before. The mantle of white motherhood is a fucking thing. Now he’s taller than me so I don’t get as much halo from his presence. He was absolutely incensed. To him this was grotesquely inappropriate.

Oh my god. What would it be like to live in a brain that believes it has the right to say no to the male gaze and have that matter? Whoa. Wait. How are people who like to have affairs supposed to find each other if EVEN LOOKING AT PEOPLE ISN’T OK?!?!?! Like, holy cheesetoast that’s a fucking tight rope to walk. Wait, isn’t the fact that you are someone who will break the rules part of the reason for the intrusive eye contact? Fucking a. Why am I assuming that he would actually end up being successful prey? Maybe the signals aren’t the same and I don’t know shit.

I mean, I don’t know shit.

I’m really good at finding people to fuck, though. I started with the only standard being “will say yes when I ask”. When you ask people that indiscriminately there is this whole cascade of complications. I doubt I would have gotten laid if everyone had phones. Thank god I’m hella old.

I am praying for you fellas. I hope you figure it out. I don’t think anyone else will do everything just like I did and that’s a good thing. Surely there is a happy medium?

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Tag Archives: sexuality

Happy masochism, submission, and being degraded.

Demisexuality again, or, I can’t help but stick my foot in my mouth.

Your first sexual relationship should be with yourself.

Invitation

Here’s a problem: feeling sexy

It’s Ostara.

This is harder than it used to be.

Backwards and forwards

Life isn’t fair

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

This is going to hurt for such a long time.

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

Everything feels raw like a cheese grater has been at me

Do I even serve?

Time is a thief

There is a void in my day.

I need to change my mindset.

tap tap tap Is this thing on?

You can’t get to yes without risking no.