Tag Archives: suicide

The weight of it takes my breath away

Content note: discussion of suicide, brief reference to incest, hell I don’t know what else. I write rough shit in with my nice shit.

The other day I was talking to one of my old friends/lovers. He is going through some difficulties in his marriage. Pieces of it feel like echoes of stuff that I have dealt with in my marriage and it was fascinating to me how I felt about his description of being on his side of similar-but-not-the-same challenges. Then he said that he had been talking to one of his (adult) children about mutual coaching of one another towards being better/happier people and he shared that they have a mutual agreement/understanding that if “this” waves hands broadly gets too hard they will both understand and completely forgive if the other has to check out.

The first time I remember specifically thinking that I wanted to die was when I was 7 after a sexual assault followed by a beating by my mother–she didn’t know about the rape. She just knew I was running through the Texas trailer park screaming profanity at the top of my lungs as I tried to get those boys to leave me alone. She was going to teach me a lesson–I was going to stop having a potty mouth.

I swear so fucking much. I know people judge me for it. I don’t give a flying fuck and you can kiss my fucking ass. I have earned the right to speak as I want. I have paid for these words with beatings and blood.

But that’s not the story today. A couple of years ago I realized I had not wanted to die in…. I wasn’t exactly sure. I know I was suicidal well into my early 30’s but somewhere in my mid-30’s I did a bunch of very intensive trauma therapy (including MDMA with a therapist) and then I stopped tracking it and I didn’t notice the precise timing of the shift. But I don’t want to die anymore. I want to live.

But when my friend mentioned that he has this agreement with his children I lost it. I started ugly crying. I had to go hide in the bathroom and run the shower so my kid wouldn’t freak out. I don’t get to commit suicide. I made a commitment when I had kids that I would not take that path. Well, aside from really extreme cancer or super aggressive dementia where I am going to be gone really soon no matter what I have no right to shorten my life. That’s the deal.

Amusingly my friend proved that he has never been a blog reader because when I talked to him about this crying session later in the day he was kind of surprised. He didn’t understand why it was this intense for me. My grandmother (maternal), father, and brother all committed suicide. Suicide is a god damn family tradition. Suicide has been there as the comforting exit for my whole life. I have attempted several times with the in-patient experience that goes with being caught before you finish. So to be slapped in the face all of a sudden with “I do not have an out available to me” was pretty jarring and shocking for my system. When random people/strangers talk about their relationship with the concept of suicide I don’t take it very personally but this is my friend. This is someone who has been inside me and he is someone who has been clear for going on 20 years now that he is very sad that he was not a candidate for co-parenting with me because he loves me very much. So the idea of his possible loss is personal.

I was thinking about this partly because @SkinS mentioned that starting from scratch increases in exercise/fitness are interesting topics sometimes. I don’t particularly exercise because I care about how I look or because it increases the number of people willing to fuck me; if someone won’t fuck me happily when I’m fat I am not interested in fucking them when I am fit. But I have a bunch of stupid health complications. I have to dance along a tightrope–if I manage to maintain a high level of fitness I can decrease how much pain I am in and I can control my IBS and both of these factors dramatically improve my mental health and make me easier to live with. I have to be careful not to over-train or be casual/cocky about how I wear this meat sack because if I get injured I get into this shitty cycle of hurting myself over and over and over and it tends to take 6 months or a year or more before I can do any kind of exercise without more damage. Which makes my body hurt. Which makes me overindulge in comfort foods that are bad for my intestinal tract. Which makes me kinda a raging bitch.

I’m not over here trying to make my kids or husband think “Did she really live a long time or did it just feel like a long time?“

I made a commitment to live as long as I can so that I can be there for these three people in the ways no one is there for me. I don’t actually get to decide what I get to have in terms of time but I have an obligation to monitor my health with vigor and evaluate choices and actions in terms of “is this going to help or hurt my ability to fulfill the promise I made?”

I think about that promise in so many ways. It is one of the reasons I am shoring up a house big enough for my children to share as adults with everyone having adequate private space. I put a 100 year roof on this bitch. I put in fruit and nut trees and I am doing what I can to set up a regenerative food forest. A lot of what I build and make is designed to last long enough for them to be ok after me.

They might stay. They might leave. I don’t get to have any control over that. I don’t want control over that. But I want them to have a home that they can come back to. The weight of the promise I made feels so encompassing and overwhelming that I feel like it is a weight that will swamp me.

Hell. I really have to take it seriously that I have to keep having a good sex life because otherwise I will be one nasty old biddy. I need to keep up my friendships because they fill up my bucket and I can’t pour with an empty bucket. The older I get the more I think finding a balance is necessary for me to be able to sustain the stamina necessary for fulfilling this promise. I want to be here and be physically and mentally well so I can continue to be capable of giving what I promised to give.

It’s all tied up. Wanting to know better and do better in many places in my life are all about trying to deserve a place in their lives in years to come. I don’t understand why it is as important to me to have a specific kinky life and a kinky self that I keep very specifically and deliberately under wraps but it is. I need to feel in myself that I am a complicated person with clearly defined boundaries. I don’t make many jokes about my sex life. I don’t give details beyond “I had a lot of fun and dated a lot of people before I got married because I wanted to figure out who I was and what I liked. It worked. I like who I am and I am happy in my marriage.” That’s the whole damn story.

Well, every so often they will figure out that of course some old friend is someone I dated. Once, years ago they had a conversation that went something like “What do you mean x is someone mom dated?” “Dude, probably every person who comes to the Christmas party is someone mom dated. Well… or dad.” It wasn’t literally true but it sticks in my mind as “Oh wow, that’s what they’ve picked up. Ok.”

The boundaries are important. “If you ever decide to go read my blog I strongly suggest browsing by tags so you don’t see things you really will wish you could bleach your eyes after seeing. But really you will be happier if you don’t read my blog.” So far they believe me. And thus I carry on feeling like I am managing to enact boundaries. After multiple generations of incest I have broken the family tradition. I figured out how to be from my family and still appropriate. It’s a miracle.

So I put a lot of focus on thinking about exercise and I talk about it. I am not worried about my waist line or my weight or my BMI but I am worried about how my heart reacts to stress tests and I do better with a much higher level of exercise. I worry about whether or not I will be exhausted and hurting all the time. I worry about my ability to be patient and kind and gentle. I worry about being strong enough to do all the things. Other than my husband I don’t have anyone who will rescue me if I have a problem.

I didn’t have people who loved me and brought me up with attention and encouragement. But I have to give that. Sometimes the weight of it feels like it will drown me. Sometimes out of the blue I am reminded that no matter how hard this gets I have to just get stronger and keep doing it. No, I won’t get help. No, I won’t have anyone I can call. Instead I have to find ways to build that for myself. I say I build the things I build for the kids. But really it is for me. What I am building is going to perpetuate itself for at least as long as I will live. Even if I fuck up a lot on money stuff I will be ok. I will be able to supplement myself with things that build my body up and help me feel better.

I am not going to say I “feel well”. I could list all the joints that are screaming right now but they don’t matter. I feel a lot better than I did. I will continue to make progress… until my next injury. Hopefully this time I will be smart enough to be more patient through the first recovery because being taken down for half a year is awful. Yes, yes, yes, maybe you can work through injuries without being a raging cunt but I can’t. And it is not fair for me to inflict that on folks.

At this point I should declare this circle of thought complete and go find that nice old dude in the house and ask him to bang me before I go to sleep. I would like the chemical high.

Every day is good and bad

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I’m trying really hard not to only focus on the bad parts. I burst into tears every day, keening his name. Sometimes I can’t help but scream his name over and over. How can he be gone?

I feel like I will never be seen completely again. I will always be a tiny fraction of myself going forward. Our relationship was so much. We were wonderful together and also terrible together. We were so good for each other and also abusive at times. We were intense, broken people together and we were trying to mend one another’s cracks. I feel so sad for the ways I could not make him feel secure. At least, by the end, he believed that neither of us would ever leave. At least we got there. That is something approaching secure attachment, right?

I knew he would get mad at me sometimes and act like a petulant, resentful child. But he wouldn’t go. We finally got there. It took more than 17 years to feel that kind of safe. I got less than a year of feeling that certain, that sure, that committed.There is no fair in this life.

I’m freaked out on so many levels. My poor kids are going to have to do without a dad for the rest of their lives. They have had a father for less time than I did. Not that my dad was good. Noah was a very good father. I feel absolutely devastated for my baby. She is not going to have him around for most of her childhood and that feels so unfair. There is no fair in this life. This is too much though. He saved his petulance and his resentment for me. He gave the kids all the good parts. His good parts were so good. He was such a good daddy.

He was so good that I couldn’t keep him.

My older kids have been talking about how I am going back to being the protagonist of some horrible anime series. Horrifying things rain down on me, tragedy after tragedy and I just stumble through it all. They told me they thought that raising them was going to be my epilogue, but instead they are an intermission between the awful. I’m not happy about this.

I’m really scared of my future. How much more awful stuff am I going to have to endure? I don’t feel very strong. I have a cold. My throat hurts. I’m dizzy. I’m exhausted and I feel terrible. I miss Noah. I have decades ahead of me of crawling to the kitchen to make my own fucking soup.

It was funny, someone offered to bring me soup, medicine, or other groceries. I said, “I already made soup and it is on the stove. I got medicine the first day one of my kids was sick so I’m covered. A grocery order is being delivered in 4 hours.”

It took so many years before I would allow Noah to help me. I don’t like accepting support from anyone. I don’t like being vulnerable in front of someone. I don’t have a lot of good memories around being cared for when I am ill. I had Noah and that’s it. Otherwise I hide like a cat and only come out again when I am able to defend myself.

I don’t come out until I am able to put a socially mandated happy face on. Masking is necessary for survival. People can’t be trusted when I am weak. That is when they hurt me the most.

I am so scared.

I’m not going to have Noah between me and the world anymore. I won’t be able to hide behind him when I am weak and vulnerable. People despise weakness. They want to hurt and crush anything that looks weak or sad or pathetic. It is a really standard part of human nature. It’s not the world being mean to me. It is simply how the world works.

It’s not personal.

I am grateful for the people in this life who help me feel seen. When Noah died a friend reached out and was able to recommend a therapist for helping me get through this transition. My friend said, “I know the exact right person for you.” My therapist is a plural rodent. They are heavy on the woo while also backstopping their intense multi-modality training on psychological therapy techniques with body work training. They really are a great therapist. We spent a lot of the last session working on the ways I’m having intense body reactions to dating.

I’m having a lot of anxiety around the topic for a bunch of reasons. Two of the people I’ve met in the last month are hitting old hot buttons. I’ve been trying very hard to give them chances to prove that they aren’t just like experiences I had in the past. I think I am pushing myself to be forgiving long past the point where it is healthy for me.

I am scared of putting an inappropriate amount of emotional weight on the one person I will be left seeing. One reason I like dating several people at once is because I spread out my too muchness between them and I don’t overwhelm anyone. I like this person. I’m scared of scaring him off when I’m doing the intense emotional up and down that comes with surgery recovery. I’m going to be intensely weak and vulnerable. I am going to be scared as shit the whole time. I can’t do my favourite bonding/soothing technique: sex.

When I’m recovering from surgery I shouldn’t get my blood pressure up. That means I don’t want any sexual contact. Well, I want it but it could literally be life threatening so I don’t do it.

How am I going to trust that someone wants to hang out and talk to me without me being able to barter for their time? I’m not going to be entertaining or useful at all. That makes me feel very scared and insecure.

What are the good parts of the days lately? Time with my kids. We are all being incredibly cuddly and loving and supportive. We are making a lot of progress on weeding this spring. Some years we let it get fully away from us. I think that I will be at a stable maintenance place while I’m crawling around post-surgery. This is good.

I have barely touched the garden in the entire last calendar year. My plan was to fall into it heavily after Pride but the second half of the year went completely sideways instead.

Like the first half of this year being a bit of a blur. There have been good moments but mostly I am going to remember this time as a haze of pain. I am so sad. My happily ever after is over. I don’t know how I will ever believe that anyone loves me again.

I’m pretty stupid. I am going to forget the way my friends are showing up. I am going to lose time and fall into always/never and forget that any good feelings have ever inhabited my body. Which is crazy. I have Miss Jenny and I’ve had her for 31 years. I followed her across the sea. I have the people who have showed up this year. I “know” it. I hate how hard it is to be in a room with most of them. I’m super avoidant. They are coming so far and demonstrating their love with such purity and openness and I’m still hiding to cry alone.

I used to hide away from Noah, too. I rarely let him see me cry.

I hate being sick. It makes me feel extra mopey.

Noah gave me a sense of belonging that I’ve never had with anyone else. I hate that I don’t have it with the kids but I don’t. With Noah here to watch me I knew I would be a good enough mother so I was allowed to stay. He made sure I wouldn’t be too bad. I trusted him to slam a barrier in front of me if I started to do something I shouldn’t. He wasn’t the only childish one in our marriage. Without him I am scared that I am going to be the problem; I am going to fuck up my kids so maybe it is better if I am not here. I’m not going to leave–neither through suicide nor desertion. Don’t worry about that bit. But I don’t feel like I belong. I feel like I am barely allowed to be here. Now that this isn’t Noah’s house it is harder to feel like I deserve to live here. I was allowed to be here because Noah wanted me.

For the last 18 years I have avoided suicide because Noah needed me. He needed me to love him. He needed me to accept him and support him and take care of him. He needed to be able to love me. He needed to be allowed to accept and support and take care of me. We validated each other existing. I don’t know what I am going to do without that structure. Without Noah wanting me don’t I take up too many resources to continue? I need too much medical care. I need too much support and I am out of strength to pay it all back. I can’t put decades of work in before I need help. I need help now.

I am having to ask for help and it fucking hurts. I’m not doing a great job of organising it because I feel like I am choking on it. I don’t deserve it.

I feel like I only deserved the support I got over the last 18 years because I made Noah feel so much better about being alive. I made him happy. I also made him miserable and sad. I made him angry. I made him feel safe and loved. He wanted all of the feelings and he wanted them with me. It made sense that I was way too extra because he needed all of that intensity. He needed all of me.

I am scared that the rest of my life is going to be tiny slivers and I will never feel fully alive again.

I hate that I’ve been feeling stymied and blocked about writing the story of my relationship with Noah. It’s been feeling too in medias res to consider. Now that is not a problem. It is over now. I still don’t have perspective because I can’t see me post-Noah very well. But it’s closer.

Noah, Vicki, the story of hunting before Noah, the Part 2 where I’m honest about my relationships with women the way I was too afraid to be when I got started on it years ago. So many book and stories in my brain. Will I write them or will I only whine to myself about what I “could” do?

I’m not big on talking about what I “will do”. I am big on talking about what I am doing and what I have done. Don’t inflate the future.

Noah is my past. He will always be there in my memory. He will always have given me the happiest home I have ever had. He will always be the person who gave me a family. He will always be the person who thought I was worth committing to. He gave me what he could. He gave me everything he could. He loved me so much.

I don’t think I will ever be loved like that again. He burned so intensely.

I am so upset that in the last months of his life he talked about how I was going to turn into Skye O’Malley. I wish he had not done so much foreshadowing his own death. The kids and I keep talking about it. There were so many stupid things in the last six months. He acted like he was on the way out. He acted like he knew.

I would have acted very differently if I had known. Would I have made better choices? I don’t know.

I feel like I don’t know anything. I don’t know about the past, the present, or the future. I am scared. I feel empty of hope.

This is why I go have sex. It keeps the worst of my depression at bay. The positive hormones give me a lift that lets me pretend I am full optimism, hope, and joy. Without it I feel dismal, pointless, listless, and like I should go become one with the mushrooms in the forest.

So of course I decide to cut off two sources of sex because they don’t make me feel good enough. I am too much damn trouble. I just can’t be pleased. I can’t be forgiving enough. I can’t accept whatever I get. I have to have standards. I have to act like I am living in a highly traumatised body and I need to feel safe.

Isn’t that an impossible bar? Isn’t that just saying I will never be in a room with anyone ever again?

In some ways, yes. I’m scared of what will happen over the months I can’t have sex. I think about the consequences of having to believe that someone wants my company in order to ask for time. Will I be able to do that? Will he want to? I don’t know. I don’t know anything right now. I’m so scared.

I’m going to keep moving anyway. I don’t stop. That is the reason I am a protagonist. I keep moving when I don’t want to, even when it hurts and I want to stumble and fall before the boulder chasing me. I’d like to be squished. It sounds restless. I don’t get to though, I’m the fucking protagonist. I need to do some fancy parkour jumping bullshit even when I feel too weak to stand.

It doesn’t matter how I feel. It matters what I do. Not what I “will do”. Not what I dream of doing. What I do.

There is no margin of error, there is no forgiveness, there is no one left to save me from my mistakes. I’m on my own because The Family is not going to be the whole centre of my life anymore. That’s what poly means. That is what Noah was so scared of. That my entire existence would not centre around him anymore. I would instead have one foot in the family and one foot poised to run off on adventure. He was right to be afraid. I should not be as enmeshed with the kids as he and I were with each other. It would be wrong. Bonding outside the house is going to be hard for everyone.

When the kids find people to date there is always a “bring them over” energy fairly quickly and there won’t be fore me. My people will have to go through a dramatic, massive vetting process. The people I created with Noah are not the easiest folks ever created. They don’t blend in very well. Their home will always be a safe place for them.

What I am less certain of is whether I will always be in their home. I can’t imagine moving someone into this house. I can imagine moving somewhere else. That’s a weird thought but it gives me a touch of comfort. Even if I commit to this house staying in the family because it brings comfort to the kids to have this home base I don’t have to stay here.

That makes it a lot easier to think of the indenture as the time when I am setting this space up for them. It’s a lot of why I am trying to set up the garden to be as ignorable as possible compared to how much food will grow on its own because it has a self reinforcing ecosystem around it. If I think about it as having 10 years left on the run for that situation it makes it a lot easier to set my pace. That’s a substantial amount of work, but a tractable problem.

As opposed to the problem where Noah promised me that I would never have to be alone again. The problem is I tried to believe him. He had just about convinced me. And now I am looking at a future alone again.

I am going to have to buy myself flowers and hold my own hand. Not because I want to. Not because I chose this. Not because I wanted this. I wanted Noah. I put a lot of effort into training him as a partner. He knew how to make me feel loved. He knew how to make me feel safe. He knew how to make me feel respected and seen. He knew how to make me feel like there was value and purpose in my life.

I knew how to make Noah feel valued and purposeful and valuable. I knew how to make Noah glow with feeling loved. I also knew how to cut him to his core so that he sobbed on the floor. I saw all of him: good and terrible. I responded as I saw fit. I was not always kind.

I was always who he wanted.

I don’t know that I will ever be able to believe that again. I don’t think I will ever believe that anyone will ever know me well enough to convince me that they will accept all of me. I’m going to spend the rest of my life being a lying liar who lies. I will mask so hard they will believe that what they see is all that I am. It will fill me with internal revulsion and aversive feelings.

The reason that leaving the house sounds so appealing is specifically that I can imagine really benefiting from 6 months or a year on a remote location where I don’t see or speak to a person the whole time. I would not bring the internet with me. No movies. Just notebooks, books, pens.

What would I discover about myself if I didn’t spend all day censoring around what other people don’t deserve to know about?

It is really physically painful dealing with all the thoughts and feelings I can’t express in front of the kids. Noah was my outlet, my relief valve, my safe witness. He made sure I stayed being the person I wanted to be. He understood who I wanted to be and he was absolutely relentless about kicking my ass towards that future. He was a fucking asshole about it.

Noah made me feel like a real person because he got to see all the good and the shitty and the petty and the grandiose and the mediocre and he loved all of it. He was in the room watching me have my life. He also got to hear all the backstage notes. He watched me grow up into the mother I wanted to be. The mother I started out just crossing my fingers and praying I could conjure up out of thin air despite no realistic role models at all. He watched me buckle down and be the wife I wanted to be despite it being hard for me. It was often a struggle to be what he wanted and I did the struggle. He was worth choosing.

He made me feel worth choosing. He made me feel worth choosing in sickness and in health, for better or worse. Knowing that there would be a lot more sickness than health and that my life has always been a lot more worse than better.

I feel like I need to be able to see a future where I will be able to get the problems of being me further away from my kids. I am so sorry for the ways my fucking never ending stream of tragedies is impacting them. I wish I had a better self to offer them but I don’t.

I keep interrupting this essay to writhe around on the floor sobbing and screaming. It’s a rough morning. I really miss feeling safe. I feel like I don’t know how to give it to the kids anymore because I don’t have it in me.

He was going to keep me safe, and healthy enough, and loved, and looked after and that meant I knew I had those things to give the kids. Now he is gone and I am an empty shell trying to pour sand because there is no more water.

At this point my screaming is a weird high pitched squeak because my voice is gone. Bodies are hilarious. I feel like my throat will fully seize and cease to work at all. I know that won’t happen though. I’ll go inside and wash my face and I’ll find enough function to breathe and communicate. I may whisper.

It doesn’t matter how I feel; it matters how I act. When I go inside I will hug my babies gently. I will smile because I always have a smile on a shelf for them. I have back up smiles for my smiles because I am not allowed to run out. I will say, “I am so glad to see you again.” They will always get that from me. I’m not consistent about everything but I am about this.

I can be so fucking furious I want to scratch your face off and I will still greet you in the morning.

I love those exchanges.

“I am so glad to see you again. I love you. Also, I am super fucking pissed off at you.”

Cue beatific smile and “I know!”

Their casual arrogance about being overwhelmingly loved is good for my soul. Past Me did that with Noah. We made them feel that certain, that sure, that secure. Two anxious messes did that. I’m really scared that I am not enough to carry it forward without him.

I am so scared.

I just need one

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There is no doubt in my mind that if I didn’t have kids I would die today. I am so completely not interested in a future without Noah. I can’t even get my head around it. No. I don’t want it.

My kids keep telling me how much they love me. Then I think of my mother, sitting alone because all of her children hate her and have left her. I don’t feel like I deserve better. I haven’t done what she did, I did other things. I don’t feel better than her.

I feel like it is time to clear everything out of the house and spend the rest of my life wandering with a home. I don’t belong here. I don’t belong anywhere. I feel like my presence on this earth is a curse. I feel like I have been cursed. I will bring pain with me everywhere I go and I can’t stop it.

I don’t have hope for a better future. I have exhaustion and weariness and the desire to stop. Stop moving, stop breathing, stop fighting.

Instead of hope what I have is duty. I brought these people into the world. I won’t leave them. I won’t stay because there are three. I will stay as long as there is one. I just need one. I signed the contract on the debt of care I own them. I will honour it. I don’t need to feel good or happy or hope or love.

I just need duty.

Surviving rape

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

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

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

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

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

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

I want my body to stop.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fawning is a survival tactic.

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

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

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

We both deserve what we get.

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

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

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

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

I do not feel entitled to any Gods.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yup. Better than Gunlandia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just stop, Krissy. Stop being so bad.

Sorry about the spam

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I updated all my WordPress stuff. Sorry about the spam dump of all the posts from the past few years. Now I don’t know where the fuck anything is and the layout looks really weird. I’m not pleased. Assholes.

I managed to run yesterday. The mile with a tail wind was 12 minutes flat. I’m pretty happy about that. The mile with the massive head wind was 16 minutes and *mumble*. Yeah, the wind makes a huge difference. My muscles are confused. I’m trying to wake them up but I’m doing it haphazardly. My hips and legs and low back are really upset.

I didn’t sleep enough. I woke up to cry for hours. Noah did not take the opportunity to lecture me more, that was good. But I can’t get out of my head that the only way I can stop doing the things that feel like such a betrayal to him is to stop doing anything. Who and what I am is not pleasing in its current form. I don’t know how to be better.

“You should be dead”. So many people have said it to me. So many doctors and nurses and therapists. At this point it feels like them speaking a wish. It feels like the wish of the NHS. It feels like the only way I will stop being so offensive and damaging to Noah.

There have been moments where I thought that me dying wouldn’t be ok because who would Noah look to for support? I’ve been reminded that he has needed support a fair bit in our marriage. He always finds other people to turn to. I should trust that he will continue to do so. He could find someone naturally monogamous to bond with. It would be better if I did it soon. He could still have a longer than 20 year relationship with someone else.

My daughter has been telling me that she wishes she could die when I don’t give her candy.

It is hard to believe that I am doing anyone any good.

It’s weird

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I like dropping bits from my brain like leaves on the stream of data that is the internet. It feels very alienating when I stop myself. I feel my personality, my sense of self constrict. If I am not sharing thoughts, did I have them? I need to be witnessed in a way that is awful and overwhelming and makes me feel empty. In it I see the way my children yell, “Look at me!”

Do we all want that so much it feels like a burning knife in our bellies?

I finally did something today. I cleaned the kitchen. It was pretty gross. Well, I cleaned most of the kitchen. As much as I could make myself do. I feel in myself this urge to go through and whip the house and garden into shape for the winter–it would take me 3-4 days of solid work if I felt whole enough to do it. Instead I think most of it won’t happen at all and I will stare at walls and wait to die instead.

Nothing expeditious will happen. I’ll just wait. Death is coming for us all. Every day we are always waiting for death. This is a morbid thing more than a suicidal thing. I am feeling morbidly obsessed with death. I feel like I can think about very little else and that’s really annoying.

I was listening to my “hope” playlist earlier trying to have some feeling in my body that isn’t negative and pessimistic and despairing. Fat fucking fail. I can’t.

I cuddled my baby and talked about how she is doing the best she can and no her mistakes do not mean that she is naughty. Sometimes she does do stuff that we aren’t very happy about. She isn’t trying to be mean. She isn’t trying to hurt anyone. She isn’t trying to destroy anything so no, she is not bad.

Why can’t I feel like that applies to me at all?

I’m freaking out about how much I want to see my mom and Auntie. I think I actually want to stop going back to California because I don’t want to feel like I could see them. I can’t. I have no idea how they would feel about seeing me. It’s been almost 14 years. It still hurts like a stab to the heart every single time.

Mama says I could leave Noah and move in with her if he is hurting me beyond what I can bear. I don’t think he is. Also: how in the fuck could I handle moving back to Santa Cruz? Drive past Auntie’s house every time I go to the Valley? Nah. Nah I can’t do that. I can’t. That’s a bridge too far. I really can’t.

Hell, I can’t go back to driving. Moving back to California is a non-starter.

Besides the fact that I don’t want away from Noah. That is the scariest thought. I am so much more afraid of losing Noah than I am of dying. I need Noah for what he gives me spiritually. Noah is the rock around which my life is built. I do not know what I would do without Noah. My life is built around serving Noah and that’s not something I feel motivated to change.

I would not be happier as a slutty single mom. I would probably turn into my mother and never have sex again because I don’t trust anyone. I would be terrified that I would expose my kids to a predator because I have famously shitty taste in people to trust. I like monstrous predators. Apparently. Or they like me. Or something.

I would not leave Noah. This is a hard phase. I’m not going to leave because he delivered on the “worse” he said he would give me during the vows. I knew it was coming. It was foretold and promised and everything. He’s hurting and not being gentle with it.

Noah tells a sad, pretty story about an orphan boy and his escaped, wounded rhinoceros. We trade back and forth who is the boy and who is the rhinoceros. I don’t expect him to always be gentle. I don’t know what I do expect. I don’t know what would be better. I have no idea what I would ask for. Right this exact minute I can’t imagine ever feeling happiness or joy again.

Right this minute I feel like I should cancel with Travel Boyfriend. There’s no way that I could deliver on the good time some other self who used to live inside me offered. That self is gone. She feels dead. She thought maybe it might be ok to really grow and change but no. I need to calcify and chip off edges. Right now it feels like she was the part of me who wanted to recover from being raped. You know what? Fuck the NHS. Medical malpractice my big toe. You are lazy and ineffective motherfuckers. I know it saves you fucking money. And it HELPS YOU CUT OFF THE EDGE OF THE BELL CURVE YOU MOTHERFUCKERS.

I feel sick and depleted and destroyed. My head hurts. My soul hurts. I hate doctors so much. This entire experience is so degrading.

How would I even be able to tell if I was so upset about Noah? How could I narrow down the sources of stress and distress? Do you know who supplies all of my support? Noah. Leaving Noah would be a form of self harm for me. Noah takes care of me through a great many times and types of incapacity. It’s not even just that he physically cares for me when I’m ill–he cares about my soul. He puts a lot of time and effort into trying to help me be ok. That’s one of the many things I’m really sad about.

Right now I’m not feeling better even though Noah is putting a lot of effort in. That feels like yet another betrayal. It feels like improperly displaying gratitude. That old chestnut.

I need to go to sleep.

I keep coming back to this deep unhappiness. I can’t perform good right.

Do I really deserve to be alive? Or am I far enough out on the bell curve that I really should have died already.

The NHS is going to be a mixed bag for me

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I am experiencing some frustration. This week I learned that the NHS would have denied me the vast majority of the care I received in California because a lot of it ran concurrently. In Scotland one is not allowed to work with multiple therapists and on varying parts of mental and physical health at the same time. It is medical malpractice in this country.

Well, shit.

It was kind of fun recognising that I will have to route around the NHS while in an appointment with a psychiatrist. She got to try and talk me into not giving up on myself. If I come back and beg enough times maybe the NHS will agree to me having more than one form of care over a long period of time where they control all the aspects of deciding what and when.

Oh. It’s like that, is it?

I am going to learn a lot more about private health care in this country and I’m going to get better about lying and denying the care I am receiving. That sucks. I’m not really into lying as a lifestyle.

The NHS will not allow me to have EMDR before the trial. Thing is, I’m not sleeping so good. Flashbacks/abreactions are really bringing me down. My PTSD responses are really dramatic compared to where they have been for years.

The NHS won’t allow me to talk to anyone else while I’m talking to the nice counsellour lady in town. The nice lady who is a student. The nice lady who works for an agency that is supposed to get me help as an overwhelmed mom supporting disabled kids.

That’s what I get.

She’s a nice gal and maybe I am underestimating where I am going to get in the 6 sessions I have with her before I maybe get another 6 sessions through a different charity agency.

Yeah. That’s going to dramatically alter my life trajectory. I’ve been through 34 years of trauma therapy. I’m sure this student will dramatically make progress with my usually “treatment resistant” PTSD in 6 hours. It’s going to miraculous.

I feel very much like I need to settle down and become a wraith. This country favours passivity and non-action in a way that is going to be a problem for me. I am not a person who sits and waits doing nothing. That leads to deep depression and self harming behaviour that I can no longer sustain physically. I can’t. I can’t go back to hurting myself to cope. Too many pieces of me are broken in ways that could be life ending if I keep it up. Too many head injuries.

Is it weird that I am not fucking ok with the idea of accidentally killing myself in a panic attack in a form of self harm that I intend to be a momentary relief of pain going too far?

If I am going to kill myself it is going to be in some way that is absolutely unmistakable. I don’t want to accidentally cause a stroke. Fuck that shit. If I swim out into the North Sea or go to a supervised euthanasia clinic so you fucking know I picked that. I desperately hope that the people who love me will find a piece of comfort in knowing that I waited as long as I possibly could. I know that probably something is just to break on its own and it won’t be my choice and that’s ok too. Then it really isn’t my fault in the same way and it won’t hurt the people who love me in the same way.

I can’t accidentally kill myself by going too far with cutting. That’s not ok. That kind of thing is messy and dramatic and traumatic in a way I don’t want.

Today is not as bad as a lot of days have been this week but I’m still not feeling strongly attached to the idea of being alive. I can’t hasten my death, and in fact I am required to act in ways that will push it away to further in the distance. It’s feeling really hard.

Like most people I don’t love being in pain. It is hard knowing there isn’t a way out. I sure as shit am not going to be asking for much of the NHS. As much as I don’t love being in pain I’d rather just go through my life in pain instead of hearing over and over that I am not good enough for the thing I know will help me. I don’t qualify. I haven’t jumped enough hoops. Why don’t I jump a little higher and wait a little longer?

These are the people who think I shouldn’t be allowed to have the sex life I want or the marriage I want and they probably think I shouldn’t have been allowed to have children. I should have waited until I was all better to go have these normal things. I haven’t done enough time waiting to deserve the things that other people get as table stakes. I’ve heard this story my whole life.

I am allowed to have what those people need. Fuck my needs.

This is where I am an absolute rubbish example of living consent culture. I was told no, I couldn’t have what I asked for. So I went out and found a way to fucking steal it anyway.

Not exactly but it sure feels like it standing where I am in this moment. Really I just found a way to pay for it and I hunted high and low before I found people who would help me on my journey. I’ve done a lot of things to try and be more ok. I’ve been doing really well for a lot of years now with only a fairly normal person amount of range of volatility.

But hey, it doesn’t even count as rape in this country. It shouldn’t bother me so much.

In a major way I feel like I am far more wounded by how this affecting Noah than I am by the assault. My life is different than it was 4 months ago in ways that feel savagely unfair and painful.

I’m not working hard at chasing down Vicki interviews. I can’t focus. I can barely think. My productivity is somewhere between 25% and 50% of my normal and it feels like an enormous stretch goal.

I feel like a wraith who should fade away to mist. The fire and energy that usually propel my survival have abandoned me. I don’t feel like I have enough faith in what I am going to do moving forward to just charge forward blindly with great force. I don’t have the energy for a bunch of false starts. I don’t. I want to curl up under a bush and never come out and let my body go back into the earth.

I feel ineffective. I feel useless. I feel like there is no point to how hard I work because it will always come back to how fucking worthless I am.

It’s hard home educating three autistic kids. They need a lot from me. Most of it I have to repeat many times. It’s exhausting. I feel like depression is covering me like a weighted blanket on top of the burn out I’ve been feeling for a long time.

One of the hardest things about the way we home educate is we don’t have the neat and tidy ways to check and see if you are doing it right. We don’t have marking periods and standardised tests. We are just living and no matter how much I do for them I never feel like I have done enough. I always feel like I am failing to teach them a lot of the things they are going to need to know. I felt like that as a classroom teacher too, even though my students went up by more than one grade level on average after a year with me. Many of my students caught up on four or six years of learning with me because I could tune in to where they needed to be reached. I worked with kids who had a lot of emotional struggles.

My adult life has been spent trying to give children the things I never got and I am feeling like a very empty bucket. I have been doing this work for 24 years now. Hell, I was a nanny and a babysitter before then. Normally I’m pretty ok with taking it in stride that young people need a lot of reminders. Right now it is hurting me desperately.

I don’t think anyone is doing anything wrong in my house. It’s hard when I’m off my game. Noah does a lot of consistency management for our family but I’m usually the motor. I feel like I lost some integral part of my mechanism and the gears are just not going and I don’t know what to do.

No, I don’t want psych meds. They are not going to clear the cobwebs they are going to make my body start feeling like I am trying to kill it. No. I have walked that road. I’ve tried so many drugs that doctors pushed on me.

EMDR would be very helpful. I’m going to look for private. I think that’s a thing I can make happen. Holy shit. Maybe I really fucking should not. I am not a good liar. I’d really like to sleep better.

It’s been hurting so much that this overlapped with getting kicked out of bike stuff. The woman who had invited me into things in the first place no longer wants me there. She asked me to stop coming because I make her uncomfortable. It’s not that “everyone” there dislikes me–she was the person I was there to get to know because I liked her. I never tried hard to get to know anyone else because my assumption was that I would be too weird. I hope they do well in the future. I think it is important work.

It is not the fault of Highland Pride that I was sexually assaulted in any way shape or form. I am going to be scared to step forward with that community in the future anyway. I feel like I am trying to back out of a lot of kink stuff locally because I am obviously making so many people feel uncomfortable.

Hey look, the bitch who was “too much” in California is also too much in small town Scotland. Duh.

Maybe if I hide for a while before coming back some of my spiky edges will be forgotten. Maybe I will figure out some piece of work to do that will buy me a place even though I am so awful.

I don’t really have hope for things feeling better right now. I know they will at some point but in this moment that seems ridiculously impossible. This always/never place is really dark. I feel scared and empty. I don’t know how to keep giving right now without a lot of very bitter and sharp detritus coming out instead of water.

I’m in a bad place. It is what it is. There is no way out other than going through it.

I know Noah is trying to walk it back because this is hurting me, but I am deeply wounded by him saying that I betrayed him in this situation. I feel wrecked by this. I wasn’t a little bit bad I was so bad.

Right now I feel like I don’t know how to be good enough to deserve anything good. All I deserve is pain until I die. I’m not working enough to be a good tool. I do bad things that hurt people. I speak too sharply because my entire consciousness is permeated with pain and it leaks out and then I am even more bad.

I feel like no one should have to deal with someone as awful as me. I feel empty of goodness. If I ever had any it is gone.

All that is left is a haze of inefficient malice.

See, I’m being good. This is not social media where I will have lots of people yell at me that I am bad for saying any of this because it is not fair that I am “triggering them”.

Fuck me. Why don’t I just shut up or die already?

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.

Understanding masculinity

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I have been thinking about social dynamics I’m seeing as I manage to be around real-live people in Scotland more often and as a weirdo autistic person a lot of how I figure out what I know and make it coherent in my brain is by writing it out. But that gets super socially tricky! So how can I check if my assumptions/understandings are even vaguely close to reality? Can’t ask people directly because they will lie ~75%* of the time. So I like a long ramble about stuff that is associated in my brain. Is it kink related? Sometimes and often in a challenging to perceive way without a great deal of context. It’s part of why I am so long-winded. In order to understand A you have to hear about B and C and in order to understand B you have to know about D and E and F and… I’m like a Star Trek language.

I moved a lot of times as a child and young person but I often reference the aunt and uncle who raised me. It gives the shape of the relationship a casual reference frame that other people will understand but it’s also misleading. They didn’t get to raise me, not really. Sometimes my mother and I lived with them and sometimes I lived there alone in between other housing. I rarely was in their house for longer than a few months and when I was my mom was there.

I think of them as the people who raised me in large part because they both had incredibly strong personalities and they were the most frequent cultural touchstones of my early life. Until I was in high school they were the people I had spent the most time with including school peers because I changed schools so often. I didn’t watch people go through phases and change and grow and develop.

I watched my auntie and my uncle. And the two of them are very interesting models for me as I go on through my life and I deal with other people. Before I describe them in more detail I am going to say that I love them very deeply. I know that they were often the only reason I was not in a violent or dangerous situation. When I describe them I will use words that are very blunt and will be read as denigrating and negatively judging them. I’m not trying to be hateful. I am talking about my people and where I come from. I am honest about what it was. I am reporting what I was told. I am repeating what I was told to believe. I am just not using the same words they used because people lie all the fucking time.

My uncle was basically a walking stereotype. He was a redneck with a bad temper and a giant entitlement complex. He never got enough to feel satisfied with his life. Not in his work life, not in his children, not in his marriage, not in his house, not in his hobbies, not in his electronics, not in the travel he did, not in the vehicles he bought.

Fuck, this is the best place for my favorite uncle story. So, he really liked camper vans and RVs. He is why I will never buy one. So, once he had a medium-sized camper van so I guess it was around 30′? He decided to buy… something I was unclear on what but he wanted to drive to go buy something and it wouldn’t fit in any of his current vehicles. It couldn’t be attached to the top/back and it wouldn’t fit inside.

So he used a fucking chainsaw to take off the top, sides, and back down to a level where it looked like a child’s crayon drawing of a “truck”.

I wish I had pictures.

Guess what he learned REALLY FUCKING QUICKLY? The right angles at the top angle of the RV are kinda important for the structural integrity of the entire awkward rolling box. Yeah. He held it together with rope. Rope. He tied the fucking thing closed. He managed to get whatever it was home. That RV sat off on a corner of the property until his next open heart surgery when his sons kidnapped it and took it to the dump. I can’t remember if that was the same time when it was a total of 16 giant dumpster truck loads to take away most of his hoard. There was still a lot of shit.

He had a whole bunch of heart surgeries. He tried every kind of heart implant. Single, double, triple, quadruple bypass surgeries. I think he went under the knife six times? They started taking loads away during the second surgery. This war went on for almost 40 years. I think the 16 truck load surgery was number four or five? He retaliated every time and acquired more stuff. He financed his shopping by repeatedly refinancing the house and taking out equity. They bought a $40,000 house in the 1960’s and the last time I spoke with them about their financial life auntie was working full time in her late 70’s because someone has to pay the mortgage and all three of her kids live with her and are disabled.

There was no such thing as enough for him. No one ever respected him enough. No one deferred to him the way he wanted. No one stopped what they were doing to give his words weight when he spoke. He wanted to be deeply respected and obeyed because his edicts were simply right. Because tradition says so. Because the Bible says so. He stopped using the Bible against me when I read the entire fucking thing when I was 13 so I could debate every.single.reference and explain to him why he was fucking wrong.

I was his favorite kid until my niece moved in with them because my sister is a fucking loser. My niece was three and much more susceptible to bribery and being bought so he put all his positive energy into her after that. He had a hierarchy of how he treated people.

1: Princess
2: Himself
3: Women he was flirting with and he wanted the positive attention
4: Men he thought of as high status and he was sucking up to them
5: Men he had no particular use for
6: His wife
7: Most girls
8: Women he had no particular use for
9: Men he actively disliked
10: Women he actively disliked
11: Girls he actively disliked
12: Boys

Let me tell you it was interesting gathering data for that set of understanding as a child. This is all I know of calculus.

That is to say once I was demoted from Princess we had a very different relationship and we showed one another a lot more sharp edges. He wasn’t mean to me most of the time and in terms of how he treated boys he was incredibly gentle and affectionate with me most of the time–definitely while I was Princess. I will absolutely admit that my draw to barrel chested men with a slightly Elvis twist in the front of their hair and strong side burns comes with the equally strong understanding that it is going to be an interaction stuffed full of conflict.

Is this where I am going to be called a man hater? Hey you can’t say I hate men… I married a man! Enh, see what I did there? Yeah. Uncle was absolutely full of ways to weasel out of labels. He wasn’t a racist! There is (name) down the road and he has never called him a (bad word). He really wished I would stop reading so damn many books.

I feel some regret that I didn’t get to thank him one last time for raising me right at the end, but I told him many times before that. He is one more brick in the wall of why I have intense feelings around displays of gratitude.

Relationships are not always simple. They are not “good” or “bad”. People are not “good” or “bad”. I think people do good things and shitty things and striking the balance is hard. I think that there are ways that men have a tough time in the world and I’ve watched some pieces of that pain right up close. I also have a carefully cultivated and culled group of men I am close with–people who have all done their therapy homework before I got there. People who understand their own damage and can figure out how to not be shitty at other people because of their own pain.

Yeah, that pain matters. That pain needs attention and care and support and you need to understand that the focus of attention has to move around a group and it won’t always be you. Not because of a statement about you being less worthy than other people. That’s not the point.

Life is hard all over. Sometimes I am not going to preen and serve the man in the room. Put your big kid panties on and deal with your problem for yourself.

I say this with more flow and force at this point in my life because I have bounced off this dynamic with an awful lot of men who I don’t happen to love deeply and feel enormous gratitude to them for saving my life. Yeah. Conflict. Because even with that deep well of gratitude and love I also said, “You have legs. Why are you asking a woman to go get you a drink? Have you become paralysed since I last stayed in the house?”

Yeah. I didn’t stay the Princess. I was thirteen when my niece moved in. I was not an easy person for a deeply ignorant, bigoted, racist, misogynistic, lazy hoarder person to love.

But holy shit can you see a whole string of hoarders in my friends circle for the rest of my life. I keep some of the traits and challenges. I just can’t handle the whole package anymore.

Cause it’s not about any of these one things. Cause any one of those labels diminishes the person he was very much. He showed up in emergencies and helped neighbors. He was giving and loving in his way. He was often fun. He got me to memorise the lyrics of every song he had on 8-track tapes. We had us some times. He snuck me treats and he cuddled me. He is the only man I have had a completely non-sexual highly tactile relationship with.

Like, that’s a weird thing for me every time I think of it. I have never had another non-sexual highly tactile relationship with a man. Outside of uncle men have fallen into four categories for me: sexual or just some serious flirting relationship of some sort, someone I am assuming is not interested in sex with me so I am tentative and awkward in my interactions and I almost never feel comfortable because I don’t even know what to say, someone I have to actively reject because they are assertive with their interest and I do not feel we are compatible, and rapists.

This is why I have traditionally slept with most of my friends. Now we are in a whole new life phase and I can’t do what worked in the past. I need to learn how to have a different set of categories because the primary way to be in a positive relationship with me historically is no longer available and that is going to be difficult. I know that Scottish men have a whole lot of major differences with the American men I have historically had big conflicts with but that’s ok we will just find slightly refined versions anyway. It’ll be close enough that a hand wave will explain the differences.

Sometimes there are platonic friendships with heavy flirting and there is a “dang can’t because x” exchange every so often and that much engagement lets me feel like I am in the “Ok I am not being problematic in this relationship.”

Uncle was the only person I ever brought my whole ass difficult personality to at the most extreme points in my development through a highly traumatic childhood who was a man who never sexualised me in any way.

Please do not come at me for how clearly I don’t love this man because I am so intolerant. Love is a complicated emotion. Feeling it does not mean that you agree with or share the same views as another person. Loving someone does not mean you have to act like them or justify their behavior. I mean, I could tell you about uncle’s hurts but frankly that’s not the point.

The point is the pattern. The point is the template. The point is the broad strokes. The point is caricature.

I feel like this might turn into a series because it is not as if uncle is the only man who lives larger than life in my brain. Understanding these people is how I have understood masculinity in my life. I am not saying that any one of them represent that whole of mankind or that they have had life trajectories like every other man. I am saying I knew this man. This is what I knew about him. This is how I saw him. This is what I heard from him. This is what I took away from the culmination of our conversations over multiple decades. I put in the time. I did listen.

I don’t even remember which bullshit thing he told me I had to do “because the Bible” that overlapped with my one brief overture into the 7th Day Adventist Church that happened not long after I was demoted from Princess. I took it hard. I tried to find a rule book that would agree with some of his weird extremist views and this was the option I had to immediate hand.

I really did not come out of that year and a half in the church with the set of beliefs that they all wanted me to have. And that was when I completely lost my shit and I tried to kill myself. Uncle did not come when the family visited me in the hospital. He didn’t even look at me for several months after it happened.

He was my one good man I didn’t have to have sex with. And to him I was now a ghost. Yeah. That was tied in with why we moved down to Bakersfield then my dad propositioned me again and I prosecuted and we ended up back in uncle’s house.

He barely spoke to me for the rest of my life. I mean, let’s be clear there were a few little girls and all boys that he was actively more hostile and nasty towards than he was with me because he was a petty, pathetic, loser. I scared him more. I would argue him down about absolutely every stupid thing he said to me so he just stopped talking.

I did love him. I tried to talk to him about neutral things. I would bring up songs. He would derail into his conspiracy theory. I would refuse to listen to the topic and ask him to talk about something else. It would turn into a racist rant. I would opt out of that one too. It went into a misogynistic screed about how I act like this because the feminists ruined me.

Yeah. It was awkward.

I mean, he was never my primary financial provider. My aunt earned more money the whole time I lived there. That’s how she got to over rule him and say that when someone needed a place to go she would always take them in. Because she was the one paying the mortgage. She bought the food.

So he refinanced the house and the hoard grew.

I am not saying I have a definitive view of masculinity but when I think of toxic masculinity I think of uncle. I think of the rage and frustration that was twisted into really toxic places because he didn’t get what he felt entitled to get in life. He was promised more. Who promised? This was not a conversation that ended well any time I pushed. I suspect I would do better now at getting him to admit out loud that he is sad because it turns out life was a trick and he never got rich. He was Willy Fucking Loman. And I lived in his house. And he always snuck me ice cream and treats even when he wasn’t speaking to me.

That’s the thing about the last few years. Our relationship changed. We were no longer able to have conversations but we did spend time in the same room. There would be these eye contact interactions that felt intensely emotional and bonding. One time around when I got married but before I had kids when I was over at the house for a visit. We had one of these moments where I was sitting on the couch as far away from him as I could get because we both didn’t know what to say. Sitting in that spot means you get blasted at top volume because you are right next to the tv. It means we can’t hear each other very well so we can pretend that is the reason we aren’t speaking. We looked at each other for 10-15 minutes while some stupid show played loudly in my ear. He crooked his finger at me like he has done since I was a very little girl. I came over and sat across the arms of his lazy boy like I have done since I was a teenager and I got heavy enough that he couldn’t really handle the pressure on his legs.

He pulled me in and he leaned his head on my shoulder and he put a hand on my back and he gave me a pat. I had this intense full body sob rock through me. I didn’t keep crying. Then he patted me on the back more intensely and nodded his head a few times. He said, “Yeah. I know.” I’m not sure we said more than hello or goodbye after that.

Moving is super fucking weird. When you move around an area you shift your web of people but you don’t entirely destroy it and rebuild from scratch. Changing countries has been a complete rebuild. Under different constraints and with different rules for the whole experience from start to finish.

Lately I have been noticing how hard it is to actively interact some days because my understanding of people and patterns and behaviour expectations are all based on a life lived under circumstances that would seem pretty alien to folks here in many ways. I don’t know the scripts. Learning is a slow and laborious process and it’s intimidating knowing that I have as many mistakes ahead of me as I have behind me and I have absolutely mere remnents and shadows of my history in my head as I try to figure out how I should be acting now.

Sometimes when someone says a thing or makes a hand movement like uncle with the same physical build it feels like I’m looking at a grainy 1980’s Polaroid. But that’s not what is happening. This is a different person and a different time. This person has completely different experiences and views of the world. Maybe? I don’t know. It always feels so difficult to find out. I don’t get the upside anymore. It’s harder to put in the work.

On I trudge. One more day. One more navel gazing.

Number made up out of thin air. I have no fucking idea what the percentage is but it’s a very tricky dynamic and will often create massive problems.

My safeword is “Long-term trauma’, bitch

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I keep getting comments from complete strangers, which is still slightly surprising to me. I write about myself and I had extensive and varied trauma as a young person. It comes up as I try to figure out how to handle situations in my life as an adult. I function best, as a person who is autistic and has PTSD, by writing out the things that I am having big feelings about rather than trying to talk about these things in real time. My side of the conversation is too big. I like to play in ways that will upset sensitive people. I encourage you to take care of yourself and not read my writing.

Lately we have been having to have the kinds of serious talks that fucked up people need to have before they go wading into the murky morass. Things like: it is ok to harm me if you are doing it on one axis at a time and it isn’t ok to stack traumas because I can’t process my way out of that fast enough to be appropriate with the kids.

My life is still incredibly structured around my ability to be level through my day to day life. I’m homeschooling my kids and I have over a decade to go before I’m done and that requires a high level of emotional regulation from me. (Not debating this choice here.) But this is the rock around which my life is built.

I have a lot of experience with complex trauma. Lucky me? I am a bit of a tight ass and I define trauma in my personal life as circumstances in which my survival has been in question and ongoing issues where my brain is not capable of telling a situation apart from things that might kill me. Being uncomfortable or stressed out is not a trauma in my personal nomenclature. Brains can be difficult. If something was a threat to your survival at a formative time in your life and it continues happening past the point where it can threaten your survival sometimes your brain struggles to turn off the “Oh shit I am going to die” part.

This is relevant because my father liked to tell me that I exist to get men off. I am the product of rape. Like, those fucked up incest stories? That was literally my childhood. He would tell me, from when I was a toddler, that if I am not pleasing there is no point in him continuing to let me be alive. That means that for the rest of my whole life sex is wrapped up in Do I deserve to be alive? Am I going to fail at getting this man off and then he is going to kill me? Or should I kill myself out of shame. That part was a lot less clear.

Noah is getting older. There are biological factors at play that influence when he can come a lot more than I can be the force that decides his orgasm. But if you tell me that I’m not getting you off that I’m just not quite good enough combined with putting your hand on my neck*? That is a singular layer of trauma for me that I can process and internalise and enjoy the mind-fuckery. I know Noah is actually very happy to be married to me and orgasm or not he is absolutely thrilled to fuck me for the rest of his life. He has demonstrated the absolute commitment he has to me not dying–I can deal with that.

But I cannot cope with that if I am already overwhelmingly upset or feeling suicidal for other reasons. This is part of why I cannot play like this if I am not writing. I have to tell you where my brain is so you can make decisions about what is safe.

This is why I don’t play with safewords. It’s not because I’m so bad ass. It’s not because I think someone should read my mind. It’s because either my play is so light that “Hm that’s kinda pinching” is the same as “red” or because I am doing play so intense that “red” isn’t a word I am going to come up with under pressure. I just won’t. My brain isn’t going to go there. I will be unable to use that as a word to help myself.

In the fourth month of our marriage he raped me. I don’t mean we did a rape scene I mean I was hysterically sobbing because I had spent the day talking to CPS about what my sister was doing to her kids and that was an extremely upsetting situation. I was not fucking ok and I felt like I was about to break into a thousand pieces. I have been raped quite a few times in my life. Every other time my brain has coped by freezing. That day with Noah I was completely unhinged and I fought him. I fought him until we were both bleeding. I lost. That had reverberations for years. I was scared of him and I flinched when he tried to touch me. That was before we had children. There was no reason in the world why I should have stayed.

Except I am pretty sure I could not be married to someone if they will not hurt me like that. I am pretty sure I could not maintain interest in a singular person who was not willing to do that to me.

So yeah, we are talking about the role of rape in our life going forward. I am someone who has spent decades teetering on the edge of committing suicide. It is kinda a family tradition: maternal grandmother, father, brother. It’s just there as an option, always.

I am 8 years younger than my father was when he quit. But hey, nobody is going to send me to prison for raping them as a child so I guess I don’t have his good reason to wuss out.

Anyway. When it comes to raping me that’s a topic of some delicacy. We have talked about the fact that what he wants is not a rape scene on a pre-negotiated day… where is the trauma in that? We are discussing ways to upset me/pick a shitty day that isn’t too shitty. As a recent example of oh-god-no: if he had decided to rape me on the day I got the news about Andrew dying I would not have been ok. I would not bounce back from that in a way that would be acceptable for the parameters of my life. The absolute best case scenario is I would get out of bed 10 or so months later and be maybe ok with trying to avoid dying.

So strategy is important.

But like, I’ve started running again. I haven’t paid the fee yet but right now I’m thinking my self-masochistic act of physical pain for my birthday this year is running another marathon. If he were, say, to wait until I am tired and focused and all I want to be thinking about is the race to absolutely insist and piss me off and hurt me so that I have to feel that while I’m running?

Oh yeah I could still behave how I am supposed to behave in my day to day life. That is a reminder that my body isn’t mine. I have accepted that I like having times when my inconsiderate asshole of a husband lets me feel pain and additional physical burden outside of my usual standard chronic pain because I’m a lucky whore.

I know that there are a lot of feminists who would be extremely unhappy about the fact that I need my marriage to involve explicit sexual violence as the trade for my comfy rich bitch life. I would say that I am a lady of leisure if I ever stopped working. The working won’t stop because it is ingrained into my bones that you work until you die and that rest is for other people. But mixed in with that is constant gratitude that I get to choose my work and I get to choose the scale of my projects with almost no limitations.

Hi newish people. I grew up in really deep poverty. I didn’t have a “permanent address” until I got married. I moved every few months–more than 50 times before I was 18 and then 9 more times in the 7 years of being an adult before I got married. I went through more than a dozen different foster homes and when I was with my mom things were often bad enough that I stole food in order to eat. I mostly crawled out of that poverty thanks to a dog bite settlement. It’s why I am fervently in favour of universal basic income. My lawyer set me up so that the settlement could pay for college. Without it I would not have gone; there was no chance.

So marrying a trust fund baby has been weird. It wasn’t a big trustfund by such standards but he was able to buy a house in his mid 20’s in California in an intense housing market. He was able to go to a good school without loans and he has had a really blessed career in tech.

I get to do what I want. I get to focus on what I want. He lets me control a lot of pieces of our life and I get to decide how money is spent and how it is saved and invested. It blows my tiny little mind that I do the things I do on a daily basis. I was not fucking trained for this shit. I feel wildly out of my depth. I feel incompetent in the extreme even as according to all metrics that can be validated by outside professional sources I am doing extremely well. It feels like a farce. It feels like the house of cards will collapse at any minute.

Now that’s kinda a loophole you can drive a truck through. Because that’s not existentialist trauma. Fucking with me around those insecurities? Oh yeah, that’ll be fine.

Fucking me when I’m sick and I feel terrible and I am not going to enjoy any bit of it at all? I mean… not like cancer sick–don’t be ridiculous. (I’ve already had cancer twice so it’s a reasonable part of the conversation.) But a bad cold? The flu? Oh sure. Mock the fuck out of me. Great time to shove my face in a pillow so you don’t catch anything.

I have heard from other people with PMDD that they too have times of the month, every month, when they don’t have any interest in sex and it is very repellant. For the past almost decade and a half of having small children it’s been very questionable fucking with me when I’m on the low end of that cycle. I’m less stable if you do and the level of stable I have needed has been pretty difficult for me. I am not naturally a stable person. I have no useful training in stability.

Things are changing. I don’t have super little kids anymore. I have support in the day for me to duck in and out for a few minutes so I can take breaks and have time alone in my brain–I have literally never had this like it is now before we moved to Scotland. The way our life is set up now feels like an utter fucking miracle. This is beyond my wildest dreams.

Noah is nervous that this is a short uptick and it won’t continue. That’s a reasonable worry. The little kids part of our life has been hard on both of us. It has been hard to trust that there is a far side that will be fun. (If you do not feel in your bones that you must have children or your life will be incomplete don’t fucking do it. This shit is exhausting and frustrating and steals all your fucking time.)

The thing is: I have been in the bdsm community looking for people to do mean things to me from as soon as it was legal. I was desperately masturbating thinking about it and hurting myself before that. I think that being at a low ebb while I am going through the intensity of early parenting is reasonable. I’m just been fucking surviving. I don’t think that having kids is going to turn me vanilla in the long run of my life. I like it when people are crying way too much. I don’t care if it is me or someone else–if we are fucking someone should be crying. And bleeding at the same time is even better.

I miss you D. I will love you forever and I wish you only happiness.

Just like the growing tightness in my legs feels like carving off a layer of shell I don’t need anymore–a return to who I have been. My legs feel like I have been running. My legs feel like I have been bouncing up and down like I am dancing. I miss dancing so much. I used to dance 5 nights a week doing a wide variety of styles–most of which were extremely energetic. I’d go running at lunchtime.

I want that back. I tried to start running not long after we moved but I think it was too close to the more recent cancer and the house repair has been really demanding. I’m just to the point where it feels like I can.

I feel like that with sex. I feel like that with needing Noah to hurt me. I think there were reasons I could never walk away from the scene. I think there are reasons I started making friends before I was even playing again. I am a shark and I like swimming near other scary creatures.

Also: fucking terrified of the ocean. I am completely convinced I am going to be eaten in the ocean. It is not rational. FUCK MY OLDER SIBLINGS.

Anyway. I think I have followed this train of thought far enough. mwah

= Don’t even come for me about breath play. I didn’t say he choked me. He can’t choke me. I have had a significant number of brain injuries and I am at high risk for stroke. He is deeply invested in keeping me for a long time and that means I can’t be choked anymore. I miss it.

M/s and marriage

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After 11 years of marriage I feel pretty safe saying that I have a fucked up view of matrimony. I came into this with a fairly historical/chattel perception of marriage. I was brought up to believe that wives don’t get to say no. Wives are fairly disposable/replaceable.

I know I keep coming back to this and it’s annoying but you keep coming back to the shit you had indoctrinated into your head as a kid too. I was told that once you get married it doesn’t matter what you want, you are a whore now. I meshed that pervasive belief in with my issues around not feeling like I am a creature worthy of defense and I spent 10 years not expressing boundaries I should have expressed.

To be fair… I’m not sure my husband was ready to hear my boundaries during a fair number of those years. It’s complicated.

But I’ve been around the bdsm community so long that the idea of a “no limits slave” is just… bullshit. Liar. Idiot. No That’s not ok.

So why am I so ok with the idea that wives don’t get to have limits? It’s about presentation and perceived tolerance levels. I’ve been expecting a kind of marriage that has a firm basis in historical fact.

If you look at slavery around the world it functions very differently in different places. It’s kind of rare for slave owners to treat slaves like they are to be worked to death then replaced. Slaves are expensive. Especially well educated highly skilled slaves… you just don’t treat them like they are expendable because replacing them is costly and takes time.

For some reason wives feel so much easier to replace. I’m here to bear the children and clean the house–right? That’s all I am?

This is why my husband made the first line of our M/s contract that I have to prevent him from damaging me. He’s trying to find a work around for my self-destructive instincts. It’s tricky.

This is a lot of why polyamory is not a good choice for us. I believe that as a wife I am highly replaceable. If you start dating I am going to perceive that as it is time for me to exit stage left so you can move on to a different and better stage of your life.

Because surely anything is better if I am not around.

I don’t have the right to perceive my husband that way. He likes me a lot and he tries as hard as he can to demonstrate that he likes my company and he wants to keep me for as many decades as he can.

It really isn’t fair that he has to work uphill against my belief that anything would be better without me.

I think it is kind of cool that he is trying to find a way to hack a route around the damage in my brain. If I am incapable of perceiving myself as having value as a wife… he’ll call me whatever he has to call me to get me to stay.

M/s, sexual dysfunction, and healing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because making optimal choices is not my strong suit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But he keeps telling me he wants to keep me.

Pieces of dysfunction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is so unfair.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What am I here for?

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

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

But why do I stay alive?

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

But why now?

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

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

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

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

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

And the cycle continues.

Evolving sexual dysfunction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is really hard.

You just keep going

Do the best you can

Tag Archives: suicide

The weight of it takes my breath away

Every day is good and bad

I just need one

Surviving rape

Sorry about the spam

It’s weird

The NHS is going to be a mixed bag for me

Time is a thief

Understanding masculinity

My safeword is “Long-term trauma’, bitch

M/s and marriage

M/s, sexual dysfunction, and healing

Pieces of dysfunction.

Evolving sexual dysfunction