hanging my tomorrows on the bones of yesterday

Meow.

I am doing about four loads of Bat’s laundry this evening, with about seven more to go, which is probably a bit less than completely sane, I know. ( Rambling feelings-processing about Bat. )

Thanks for listening to me process. I’m getting a better handle on this particular grief, and am now mostly resigned to the feeling of occasionally coming across something that reminds me of Bat and feeling like I’ve swallowed a sharp piece of ice. But it feels like that a noticeable degree less than last week. So: progress. I’ll take it.

I did eventually send a slightly nicer version of this letter to my dad. Nothing was ever said about it to me. He just pretended that it never happened and I went along with it.

But looking back at my codependent patterns, him and Mom are where I learned that. I’ve been carrying water for this relationship all my life, doing all the feelings work of maintaining it. And it’s time for me to stop.

( Hey Dad, )

Today has just been one long literal headache. It is mostly better now, but still. Ugh. But when I get feeling better after periods of pain it makes me introspective.

So: since I always feel responsible for other people's emotions when they are around me, and I have anxiety that says that in order to be truly helpful I basically have to predict the future and head all ill-feeling off at the pass, I am basically a neurotic mess on the inside when I am not on anxiety suppressing meds. I don't really have very many skills for coping with other people's bad feelings other than to feel bad right alongside them or to over-function and try to fix things that are not mine to fix. And I do this in all of my relationships. It's why I'm a bomb-ass massage therapist and occasionally an invasive and overly "helpful" friend. But it gets taken advantage of by people with learned helplessness, and worse, it can teach people in relationships with me to let me do everything instead of telling me to back off and let them take care of their own responsibilities and emotions.

So it is a huge piece of how I got into a codependent relationship; even though the beginning of the relationship looked healthy to me, I was slowly training the boy to not take responsibility for his feelings. Which is kinda shitty in hindsight. And he probably didn't even notice that part of things. So I guess I have to forgive him for a few of the things that went wrong, seeing as they were effectively my doing.

Introspection is uncomfortable. Boo. Does anybody have some good podcasts or book recs for emotional skills about letting other people handle their own feelings? I already know about Brene Brown, her entire bibliography is on my list.

Yay! The end of the Communication chapter! I think I am gonna take a few days off of therapy and then jump back in to a different chapter, but maybe under friend lock. Any requests?

I am sending a check to the Wichita Annual Dance Committee, the only section on the Wichita and affiliated tribes website that is accepting donations, in honor of Indigenous People's Day. My friend Dancinginadarkabyss had the idea that we should send support this week. You can look up the tribe whose land you are living on here. They even provide links to the tribes own websites whenever possible.

It is going to be a long week, OMG. I saw Merlin last night, and we did not really talk about the relationship stuff but we did have a lovely time eating El Salvadoran food and talking about childhood trauma, gender presentations, and how our lives and loved ones are doing. It was a good night.

Tonight is Movie Night at Bridget's, tomorrow I will be seeing either Mom or Josh, Thursday is the anti-Trump Beto rally, and Friday might have to be the Chat-down. Next monday is dental surgery. Yay. So very busy.

I am going to take yet another page out of ysabetwordsmith's book and start blogging answers to some of the prompts on how to encourage more meaningful conversation.

I am, however, having decision paralysis like a big dog. Anybody want to ask me one of these or should I just wait 'til my brain starts tracking?
Huzzah! We have a volunteer from the audience! Thank you brightandravenous


5. What’s something you want to do in the next year that you’ve never done before?

I want to dress up like a girl voluntarily, as a way to start exploring gender. I am now comfortable enough in myself, now that i know why it has always been so uncomfortable to hold myself up to other people's standard for my supposed gender, that i can now separate playing with the behaviours from trying to hold myself to that unfair metric. I will be trying out classic lolita fashion. I have a whole pinterest board for this, just wait. There will be pictures and awesomeness.


8. What makes you happy?

Sunsets, perfumes, complicated flavors, not being in pain, making people smile, destroying things what need destroying, and being silly. I have a Good Things List somewhere with all the things that are always soothing and good on it. It is helpful as a self care guide for really bad days when self care can't be therapy and dealing with trauma.


14. What’s some of the best advice you’ve ever gotten?

Watch where people's eyes go. Clock how long they linger on other people and things to guage how much they want that thing or that person's attention. People are made to feel vulnerable and uncomfortable stating their desires, so sometimes if you want to know you can't just ask. Knowing what people want is part of the four part personality metric for behaviour prediction that I was taught by my friend Jenn. It has stood twenty years unchallenged as a great way to know what was going on.

So apparently that antidiscrimination stuff in our code of conduct only applies to what we are allowed to say to clients, and it is "unprofessional" of me to *very gently* ask someone to not discriminate against me. I was threatened with firing today if I even talk about the subject with her or another client. Thanks for making me complicit in my own dehumanization, FailBoss.

I want to remember some good stuff that happened before it fades

Birthday party with miracle fruit (part 2!) and snowcones
We talked about Janelle Monae's new album, Dirty Computer, her similarity to Prince's sound on some tracks apparently due to his direct input just before he died. We painted a community painting, An Acceptable Amount Of Chaos, that is blacklight reactive and quite cheerful. D- and M- and Z- all hung out with Ghost and played Beat Saber and a game where you shoot at robots that looks very engaging and kinda sweaty. Blue brought brownies, we all made snowcones even though the cats scattered at the shaved ice machine starting up. Everyone had a good time, I gave A- chocolate for his birthday, K- and D- got invited to T- and Z-'s house party, and everyone got to know each other a bit better.

The next Saturday:

Won't You Be My Neighbor
Was a fantastic look back at the work of Fred Rogers, and an inspiration to curate and manage how I am talking and communicating with people. I am going to continue putting work into that until I feel more secure that I am treating other people well and communicating gently. It is more effective that way and people deserve mercy both before and after they upset me.

Then Ghost and his brother, M-, and my sister-in-law, S-, went to a

Fancy Italian Restaurant
Where I had some of the best Gnocchi I've ever had. Half of it was Gorgonzola and Pear in cheese sauce and half was in a palate-cleansing marinara so your mouth never had to get acclimated to the dish and miss the subtle flavors of the pear.

That night I still had spoons so I fixed the

CBD Bars V.2

On Monday I went to Dr. Ketha and then

Dylan and Applebees and never eating that much meat again
Even though it was fun while I was eating it, I burped the next three days. We had fried mozzarella sticks and he had a steak and I had a gigantic burger with onion rings and bourbon sauce on it. It was excellent, but a good reason to only eat meat occasionally and sparingly, because my stomach was heavy and indigestioned for about 12 hours afterward, including not being able to sleep.

Then we talked about childhood histories of violence and nonviolence while

Driving the Snocone machine to Mom's house
So Mom has now met D- and been informed that they are now one of Bat's parents. And after the drive home (we missed the traffic, yay!) I gave D- one of the CBD bars to give to a friend, and heard back as to it's effectiveness pretty quickly. Yay.

I feel really uninspired and uncommunicative lately. I think I may need to spend more time with my own thoughts and less time on social media to get back to having something to say.

I need to find my enthusiasm again after having had so little energy for so long. I need my opinions and curiosity. I have turned into this person I don't recognize, and some of it is okay, but I miss my other me. I don't feel like myself.

This me survived a hard thing and I am grateful. But now that those hatches don't have to be battened down, it's time for some new growth and some unfolding of previous growth.

So for a while Ghost and I had been having this problem where, since he is on reddit a lot and sees a lot of reportage on Donald Trump which he finds hilarious, and I have this thing where Donald Trump and incompetence in public service makes me annoyed and irritated, he had been telling me several things a day which he thought were funny and I thought were irritating to the point of slowly enraging. And it was slowly sensitizing me until every time I heard Trump's name I wanted to set something on fire. Fortunately I was able to identify this mis-gearing and limit his Trumpism communications down to a point where it no longer automatically makes me grind my teeth in an agony of frustration. Hurray for communication and foresight.

I went to the Dallas Arboretum on the 7th and bought seeds. I bought plants for the front flower pots so now I have an oregano, a chrysanthemum, a lantana, and a salvia in addition to the mint and catnip and aloe. I had the spoons to buy and plant them because I have had a couple more spoons per day since about a week and a half after starting the new vitamin regimen. Which reminds me that I need to get more PQQ. So yay for all of that.

One of my coworkers died over the weekend. She was very young. I don't know if she had a stroke or if she was a suicide or what happened, but it is a tragedy any way you look at it.

Life is, as always, a mixture of good and bad things. Hold tight to what is precious, and lift up your joys.

-- PUBLIC POST --

I used to be poor when I was a kid. Not that I'm not poor now, but there was this whole stint I did in the middle class during high school. Anyway. Once upon a time we lived on food stamps and my mom used to not eat so she could afford to buy us clothes. Some of our neighbors had that hard-bitten look like even getting enough to eat couldn't ease the strain of constant worry from thinning them down to the bone, from working their fingers to the bone, from being made of bones that rattled in fear and anger.

There was a lot of anger, when I was poor. Being wrong is a thing you can afford when there's always enough to eat. When you can't afford it, no one can admit to being wrong because then it's your fault that someone doesn't get to eat, or have gas money to get to work, or ...

Being poor is eating a lot of shame. It's being constantly defensive against any sign of unworthiness, because you have so little respect afforded to you that any loss is a significant blow. Being poor is not being able to afford to take a risk with your own self-respect rather than dismissing someone else's. Being poor is doubling down on being wrong because you can't lose face, when your public face is so much of what you have that can't be stolen or traded or sold off in ever-leaner times.

Being poor is eating a lot of mac 'n cheese, and being eaten by worry. Having all of your free mental time taken up with deciding which of four important things gets the next dollar doesn't leave a lot of room for creative problem solving. Poverty is like that. Shame is like that. It limits the scope of what you can achieve by making every decision perilous. Even long after you are no longer living in poverty, you still live inside the shape of it like a bonsai tree that doesn't understand the field it's been planted in. You have no concept of the world outside of the hand-to-mouth existence that has consumed you.

Poverty teaches you that something is wrong with you. It holds you up to a yardstick and if you're not tall enough, it chops your feet off so that you know that you deserve to never measure up. I knew people who worked sixty hours a week to afford to live in a trailer park. They weren't allowed to be angry at their bosses for underpaying them, so they were angry at their kids for needing things. Angry at their spouses for being disabled. Poverty is seething resentment that you can't measure up, and that nobody you know can measure up either, and looking down on all of you rather than breaking the yardstick you can't reach.

Poverty answers all the big questions in your life with "you can't afford the answer." So you keep being wrong. So you keep blaming yourself, and keep being easy to shame and underpay and control through fear and anger.

And it's fucking disgusting that there are people who believe that poverty is a thing that should exist.