Tag Archives: the shame factory

Running in parallel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My children do not overlap with my sex life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m about to fucking explode, y’all.

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I am not ok and it is perseverating in my head and if I don’t set it down somewhere I am going to continue to freak out in my house with my kids and that’s not cool. So let’s start there, shall we?

My kids are acting appropriate for their varying ages. All of these stages are hard at this moment in that awesome way that sometimes cycles pop up. My oldest is a fucking teenager with a fucking rude teenager mouth. I feel like he just has to tell me I’m wrong or express exasperation at my stupidity over and over all day long. Often at times when I am not actually wrong or being stupid. I mean… when I am wrong I tolerate a fair bit of sass but it drives me insane when I’m not wrong. Middle child is not wanting to accept responsibility for some areas of forward progress and I’m struggling with that. Youngest is pushing every button and boundary like it is her job… because it is.

So that’s all fun and the background noise of every single day.

I went back and checked my logs (hi, yes I am incredibly obsessive about tracking all kinds of stupid details) and starting in June I went from sleeping 8 hours a night on average over the course of the month to sleeping 6 hours a night on average. The months since then have hovered around 7 hours a night on average. That’s pretty certainly part of why I have been doing much worse. Why did I start sleeping so much less?

Ah, fucking lockdowns are over and I feel incredibly pressured (mostly internally) to get out and Meet People and Volunteer and Be Part of the Community. Also this summer has been quite energetic with gardening tasks as I’m moving towards the permaculture/low key food forest direction. I’m super tired. Also eldest said, “Let’s go ahead and finish the lounge” and I said, “Oh uhhh ok.” I was kinda hoping to procrastinate the work long enough for the paint to go bad. Then I found out my old buddy was coming and I have some projects I said he could help me with. So I started sprinting to get stuff done before he arrived.

Reader, I fucking failed.

I’ve been very much working beyond what I should be. Oh, and late May was my first trip down to England to see A & P then in June I went back down to England to bring Noah and the kids to see A & P. That is seeming like the best decision I made all year.

Oh, and I averaged 6 hours a sleep a night the month I had fucking covid and I slept through 4 days entirely. THAT’S REALLY FUCKING BAD.

I’m not ok, y’all.

July was a sprint of work I was not physically prepared for. I have never taken time to really fully recover from covid, not really. I certainly haven’t carefully increased exercise over time to get back to the fitness I had.

August was a super sprint of work and it was exhausting. September was a lot of work sprinting plus my birthday which was absolutely fucking exhausting to the extreme and I probably made some foolish choices. I was not physically fit enough to do what I did comfortably and I have paid for it. October has been more and more work and then Noah and EC went off to Helsinki then the morning after they got home I ran off to San Francisco in a last ditch effort to say goodbye to A.

In a way there are shadows of my uncle passing. I was too late. I feel like I failed and I am upset with myself. I did get to help P with one of the thornier parts of handling A’s belongings and I am deeply grateful I could perform this service.

Being in San Francisco involved a ton of driving (ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow) and many hours of work and many different social interactions one right after another and very little sleep. I just couldn’t except for a few times when I passed out in awkward scenarios. Three people said they wanted to make plans then cancelled at the very last minute. Woo. That’s always fantastic.

My buddy is a challenge in many ways. I don’t want to say too much about that but I will say that he is very emotionally needy and he wants me to help him process and understand his entire life and that’s a fucking tall order. I am not a therapist. I feel like I am drowning in his feelings. He also can’t remember a lot of our conversations because of how much he drinks so each conversation has to be repeated a few times and that is really frustrating. I don’t begrudge him the needs but my bucket is so fucking empty.

I feel empty. I feel like I can’t take more shit being dumped on me. I feel like I want to scream and scream and scream until I have destroyed my voice from screaming. I want to sleep for several weeks in a row. I want to stop speaking to people at all and I want to go back to lockdown. I am so far into burn out I feel like a pile of ash.

I know that I am a good person to help people process grief but right now I can’t handle the flood of it. It’s not just the one buddy. I feel absolutely surrounded by loss this year. Grandmother in law, A, my buddy’s parents, other friends have lost family members, a different buddy is dealing with her kid self-harming, a somewhat surprising number of pets have passed recently and folks want to talk to me because I give them comfort. Right now it feels so hard.

Oh, yeah, and it’s been an incredibly stressful year on the money front. I think things have settled down now and while we are not fully “on track” we are in a very reasonable place and I’m no longer worried about bouncing payments. But it’s been a fucking lot.

Err, also my roof just got replaced and the scaffolding and construction fuss have been irritating and challenging because to a large degree it has meant that YC has not been able to play outside unsupervised for over a month. That’s not a great situation.

I’m not exercising enough. I stopped my yoga classes because we need to be contributing more to savings. I’m not eating well enough–I am actually not enjoying the kids cooking 4 nights a week because rarely do they put more than 1 vegetable serving in a meal and it’s not doing great things to my body. I’m sleeping for shit.

It goes on and on and on. I’m sure I’m not remembering all the fuss. My head hurts. I am tired of being tired.

Pacing

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I am sure there are many people who would not appreciate me saying this: but I miss lock down. I didn’t have to worry about balancing the various needs of my family members with various outside the home activities and people while also figuring out when to get chores done. I slept more and more consistently. Lately my sleep is shit again.

One of the problems with the age spread of my children is that the shape of providing “structure” for each of them is different. Youngest Child is still small enough that she should mainly be around kids through classes and they all want to start mid-morning and last for around an hour before popping the kids out on the other side expecting snacks and a trip to the park. Most parents of children in similar ages are either nearly in nursery or already in nursery and they are specifically training the kids around having the habit of being out of the house 5 days a week for most of the day so the children manage the transition to primary school.

I get it… but I also find that doing that in the morning mostly shoots my wad and I’m too tired to come home and do a big project of my own unless I do it after dinner and give up sleep. If I am out for the morning the mid-afternoon to dinner chunk is mostly me interacting with the older kids around their school stuff and my brain is just not currently capable of doing something for me while I talk to them. Yay ADHD medication? It feels like too tired because I can’t push my brain into doing many things at once on this medication unless I am super well rested.

If I get a good night of sleep and I start my project early in the day then I can normally handle talking to the older kids about a second thing while I work. (Most projects of this type being garden or cleaning related.) I can talk to them about their literature reading progress first thing in the morning while we continue working on removing nails from the old shed boards because we are going to repurpose the wood. But if I try to do the exact same thing starting at 1 or 2 I get confused and befuddled and irritated and angry. My brain says I can fuck all the way off.

So I’m not making forward progress on a lot of the outside projects I want to do since YC started classes and that’s feeling frustrating. The older kids have enjoyed the descent into too-much screen time that happened during my last painting project and they are absolutely loathe to give it up. They really won’t come out in the mid-afternoon and help me. I can push it in the mornings.

This pacing is not working and I feel exhausted and crappy most of the time. It doesn’t help that Noah’s work schedule is hard to figure out and manage. Working for a company that is 5 hours behind us in time zones gets to be pretty challenging.

I am almost to the end of this session of little kid classes. I am going to try and move the timing. If I can get her into classes that are more like after lunch and less like after breakfast then maybe I can get the big kids through helping me instead of getting on video games first thing then fighting to not have to get off later.

I am getting to the point where I am low key signaling distress in ways I don’t mean to and that’s a problem. Fairly random strangers keep asking me if I have any support because it sounds like I have a lot going on. It depends on what you mean by support but mostly… no. I have been shoving my mental health care needs in a box for a couple of years now. Every so often I open the box long enough to shove something else in then I quickly tape over it again. I’m not ok. I know that lots of people aren’t ok and I don’t have it bad in the scheme of things.

I’m not ok and I don’t have a way to cope with that right now. Therapy isn’t an option–I spoke with my GP recently about head injury stuff. In the course of the conversation she asked me how I was overall coping and I told her not that well. I had previously believed that I would be a lifer in therapy then I moved here and that’s not an option. She told me that she thinks I am being very kind to notice just how limited the access to therapy is here and deliberately not put myself on a waiting list. She told me that she has seen me enough times now to have a sense of me and she thinks that any of the therapists in town could be nothing other than a kind and sympathetic ear because they don’t have more training than I do after how much therapy I’ve had.

This is not the first local expert who has told me that I am the best source of support, tools, and tactics for managing my issues and those of my children in this area. Apparently I put those decades of living in the bay and having access to experts to very good use. Every so often one or the other of the older kids has something challenging happen with regard to mental health because they are people and life is complicated. When that happens I ensure that we have privacy and we get into the heavy stuff. Both kids have said, “I’m sure if I tell you about (_____) you will be upset with me.” I tell them to give me a minute so I can fix my face. Then I put on the “I will not judge you; I will be supportive and unsurprised by anything you say because it’s ok for you to be a person on your journey” face. We talk about their big feelings and the situation and why it is both normal and ok that they are struggling. We talk about the fact that it is hard that we can’t hire therapists to be there through these sorts of things going forward. We talk about what things they can imagine doing to change the situation. I ask if they want to hear about any other options I know about–sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. Boundaries, yo.

I am not your therapist. I will never be a completely neutral party. I will never be 100% on your side because I am often the person you are in the most conflict with. That is rough. But I am not going to judge all of the things you think I will judge. I am not going to be upset about even half of the things you think I will be upset about. And as you get older I will have to be less and less of who you consider when you decide how you will solve a problem. That is the way forward. I am not and I can never be your therapist but I can help you talk out some of what is bothering you. I definitely don’t have all of your answers but pretty often I do have useful questions. I have been very lucky in my life and the state of California made sure that I had access to lots of people who asked good questions.

I need to start writing even if I am afraid of consequences. I am going to be the closest thing to a therapist I have going forward. That process doesn’t work well without the blog. As my Eldest Child says: “When I write something just for me I delete it or rip it up most of the time because it never seems worth keeping. When I just go ahead and post it right away then even when it isn’t perfect I get feedback and I have to act like it was real and I have to carry on forward as if it has happened and can’t be taken back.”

Of course, she is talking about the status of her fanfic and she’s posting on Wattpad so it’s slightly different. I’ve gotta say that her comments are probably more vicious than mine ever are. I worry about the consequences of my writing because working out my feelings is not a pretty process. Sometimes I hurt people when they know what is going on inside me. If I just shut my stupid mouth and stand near them then they don’t know what an asshole I am and things carry on without too big of a problem.

Being real about all the strife inside my brain is scary. I just about always have as much pull towards people as I have push away from them. My magnetic polarity is really confused.

The thing is: I do shitty things to hurt myself when I don’t work through the stuff in my brain. I am long past the point of the kinds of self-harm that would land me in a psych ward but I am not kind to myself. I do not take good enough care. I do things that will cause long-term damage through neglect or lack of love. It’s little, cumulative things but nothing dramatic that will force other people to intervene. I am smart and I don’t want intervention so let me tell you I will stay below that fucking radar for the rest of my life. There is a lot of room under the radar line to hit a bird and have it destroy an engine.

I am not acting like I am a creature I love who needs to be taken care of. That means I can’t model what that means and that’s a problem. I am very certain that I will never again have a person I talk to all the time to help me sort out my brain. So I have to do it. I need to start doing it a lot again. Which also means I need to stop sitting in this damn chair and use the standing desk. That’s going to have to be step one, Krissy.