I am a very passionate person who is loud about their opinions, so I've had a significant number of arguments with friends that were so heated we stopped talking. At that point they may have considered me their enemy, but I always expected that eventually we would talk it out, make up, and be friends again. I didn't really have enemies, I had friendships that were on hiatus -- though sometimes acrimonious hiatus. For all but 2 friends, this has been true.

A few years ago I had an interconnected group of friends. We invested in maintaining our friendships the way many people invest in their romantic partners, and we invested in us as a group. We were intimate, and I approached all these friendships with the goal of lifelong connection. I expected that if someone hurt another person, they would approach that hurt with integrity and a desire to help them heal.

Then one of the friends, Cora*, hurt another in a profound way, and when the hurt person, Alex*, expressed this pain and asked for help, Cora just ghosted for months. I thought this was mega fucked up and I stopped investing in Cora, but did not confront them because Alex didn't want me to.

I talked to another person in the group, Erin*, about it. Since Erin was close to Cora I felt like it was important to explain why I was not going to be investing in them anymore. I got permission from Alex to explain what happened and while we were in person, Erin agreed that Cora behaved unethically and that it was fucked up that Cora flaked out and left Alex in painful limbo for months.

Later, Erin defended Cora's choices and denied that the worst of what Cora had done even happened, despite being given proof. She decided to deny the truth and cut me and Alex out of her life rather than face what Cora had done in an honest way. To me this is a profound betrayal, and I am disgusted by it. After that, Erin was not a friend nor even a friend on acrimonious hiatus, but an enemy.

If you want to be my enemy there is an easy recipe for it: choose maintaining your relationship with an unrepentant abuser** over demanding ethical behavior from them. Or just be an unrepentant abuser.

Still, this status is not necessarily permanent, because I accept people growing and changing over time. But Erin and Cora would each have to put in a huge amount of effort and frankly, I don't ever see that happening, especially given their shitty lack of effort when it was fresh.

I lost one of my best friends over this, because of their ties to Erin. That is the one thing that still hurts, though I understand why they made that choice. Being friends with me was more work, logistically, and less reward, socially, because I didn't have ties to all the cool people.

Nowadays it is really important to me that I only build friendships with people who are willing and able to hold their friends accountable for hurting anyone, even a stranger.

*names have been changed
**abuser of people other than you, that is: I know it can be nearly impossible to leave someone who is abusing YOU.

When your parents or childhood caretakers have abused you, it is profoundly important to admit that it was abuse* (at least to yourself), regardless of your current relationship. Childhood is where you get your sense of normal; if you were abused as a child, your subconscious sees abuse as normal until you retrain it.

Trying to just "see the best" in your caretaker's actions or excuse their behavior is not a positive habit because if you don't label their behavior as wrong, you are extremely likely to end up doing the same thing. You might not do it exactly the same ways, but you can't tell what to avoid until you face it with complete honesty. There are just too many ways to act it out without even realizing.

You can still love them if they abused you. You don't have to throw them away to acknowledge that what they did was wrong (but also if you want to throw them away, that is 100% fine). Even loving parents can be abusive and often are, because it is common for abuse to stem from a sheer lack of understanding of what is going to be helpful.

Sometimes when they are trying their best to be good parents is when they cause the most damage. Their intentions do not make up for their behavior. You can acknowledge that they tried to be good while actually doing harm.

*I'm defining abuse here as actions or neglect by caretakers which caused long-term emotional or physical harm to the child they raised.

I have a dirty little secret to share about the queer world: it's just as misogynistic as the straight cis world, and even more femmephobic. At least among straight cis people it's fine for one group of people (women) to be femme, but among queer people (at least, white southern queer people), being femme whether you're afab or amab makes you undesirable or simply rejected as not real / not belonging. A common disclaimer on gay hookup ads is "no fems." (along with "no fats" "no Asians" "no blacks" because white gay cis men are every bit as disgusting as white straight cis men)

When I was a brand new baby queer, fresh out of a marriage to a straight cis man, I was completely devoid of queer friends or indeed, pretty much any friends. I came into contact with this group of queers and I fell in love with their sense of interconnectedness and I wanted to be part of that group so badly. I tried so hard to be friends. I was wide open to learning and willing to do far more than my fair share of the work.


But none of them wanted to be my friend. They never invited me to anything and the few people willing to spend time with me didn't find my company appealing enough to ever try to spend time with me on their own initative. Every time I spent time with one of them (except once), I had to drive an hour in my rickety, 20+ year old car down to their house or a place walking distance from their house because that was the only way they were willing to even see me, despite the fact that most of them had cars and lived near a public transit line.

If it was one person or even two people, I would have said oh well, they just don't like me. But there were at least five of them I actively tried to connect with, to varying degrees, and they all reacted the same. As soon as they learned where I lived, their willingness to invest in me dropped to zero (and it was low already). And the reason I lived where I lived (same as now) is because I couldn't afford to live in the city. Because you have to either be well-off, or know people who are willing to split a house with you. So they rejected me in large part because I couldn't afford to live in their neighborhood.


I'm also pretty damn sure that a huge part of why they rejected me was because I refused to wear the queer uniform. As a person with large breasts, wearing skirts and sleeveless clingy tops is not up to queer uniform code. It's too "straight"? too "gender normative"? (I laugh at this idea because no straight person dresses like me)

Femmephobia is real, and intense, especially in white queer middle/upper class circles in the south (apparently up north, masc is the uncool presentation). I remember someone approaching me about being femme and I didn't know what that meant and thought they were calling me feminine and I got very upset, partly because it felt like them affirming that I would never be accepted by queer society. Now I understand what it took to approach me, and why they did it, and I wish I had understood and taken that chance for connection.

I remember feeling immense pressure to change my look. I bought a binder, put it on and hated it thoroughly, instantly, and never wore it again. I cried because I felt like it damaged me in the 15 minutes I had it on. ...Wow I had never drawn the connection between the pressure I felt from those queers (nearly all of them masc) and buying a binder... I feel so bad for baby-me, so worn down by expectations and so lonely for a sense of community that I was willing to betray myself in an effort to become acceptable. My breasts have been one of my favorite parts of my body since I grew them, but I was willing to give them up in order to be accepted.

Being rejected by the entire group broke my spirit. It was first chance I had at in-person community ever in my life, because I had never had that in my family or in school etc. And they rejected me because I didn't have money and wasn't "on trend" or at least, that was how it read to me. It's possible I was just too socially awkward or too blunt or too excited or too invested etc, whatever it was, I needed them and they turned me away. All of them (except for the one who fell into drugs and cut contact and the one who moved away).

Godde, if even one had made even the slightest effort to include me, that would have changed my world. Or if they just foisted me off on some other set of queers they didn't like, that would have been wonderful. but no one bothered. I'm sure there are other queer groups in a city of over 5 million but finding them feels impossible and I am so tired of being rejected and/or ignored and/or disrespected.

This is why I don't ever want to go to gay bars. I expect to find anti-femme culture there and it hurts worse coming from people who should be my community.

Sorry I have been absent lately. It has been busy season at work, plus Topaz is moving so every weekend has been spent on that. And last week I hurt my back to the point that I took pain meds for five days in a row and after 8 days, it still aches at any strain and I feel so worried it won't completely heal. And my car conked out last week which reduced my energy to zero and pretty much wiped out my paycheck as well, but at least it is fixed now. And a close friend is going through agony about a personal betrayal they experienced and I'm attempting to offer support -- I'm glad to be able to offer what I can but I wish I was more capable.

Oh, and two weeks ago, someone who I was friends with at the time asked to send me an email and being the literal person I am, I said yes, not thinking that they had any expectation of response. When I read it, they started out with four paragraphs of praise of an ex-friend who they know hurt me, explaining why they trust this person because they met them through me, despite the fact that I don't trust them.

They then sent over a dozen more emails, together in length more than 12,000 words. I used google docs to get the word count. For context, that's a fourth of a short novel. It was more than 20 pages, single spaced. I share these details to explain why I was overwhelmed at the idea of trying to reply. Most people would not be willing to read that due to the length alone, honestly, and the content was super intense and involved a lot of talking rapturously about an ex-lover of mine who also hurt me deeply. It was heavy, but I read it all.

I replied a short message to only that part about the ex-friend because it felt urgent to me to explain, and said that I would try to respond to the rest but that I probably wouldn't get to it. I said this because they have known me for years and there have been many emails or messages that I have failed to respond to. I just have a very hard time with it and I feel bad about that but I don't seem able to fix it, and they are aware of this.

I thought they would be like "haha yeah that executive function fail, I know it well." I thought they would be like "yeah I know it's a lot, I just wanted to share it with you so thanks for reading." That was not at all what happened.

They got very upset that I didn't respond positively, and said that I disrespected them by doing this. Then when I replied explaining further they went to my facebook and said that they didn't read my further replies and they were confronting me in public because they didn't trust me in private, and said a lot of arrogant things implying that they knew me better than I did, etc etc.

Then they blocked me and then started posting negative shit about me on their wall (with notes saying that it was encouraged for mutuals to share with me) and messaging all of our mutual friends complaining about me -- along with uncomfortably over-the-top praise. Trying to talk to me without me having a chance to talk back, basically.

This activated a lot of previous trauma from being attacked by people I trusted. but I was relieved and felt very loved when our mutual friends kindly but firmly said "no" to the negative shit and pointed out that their behavior towards me wasn't okay. I was relieved also because I was worried that the stress they put on my friends would cause them to be upset with me for bringing this source of stress into their lives. I felt really cared about and understood and trusted by several close friends so that helped me cope much more quickly than I otherwise would have been able to. In particular Topaz, Nik, Allison, Rachel, and Serenity were kind to me about it and it meant the world to me.

This week there is road work making it difficult to get to my office, so my boss let us have three days of teleworking. I am so grateful because I needed it so badly. My house had turned into a giant horrible mess because it is a direct reflection of my mental state. So today is my third day of working from home and I have tidied my room and the hallway (neither fully but both much better) and did some dishes (which I hadn't managed to do for weeks) and managed to write this. Which I am going to post immediately rather than letting it languish at 95% complete for weeks.

My anxiety has been increasingly intense for at least a month, maybe 2. I haven't been able to eat without forcing myself, I lay awake for at least an hour when I try to go to bed, and I feel worried all the time and easily cry. Last week it all came to a head and I basically had a breakdown.

For over 72 hours I felt like someone who is afraid of flying feels right before they board a plane, though there was nothing scary happening. I kept feeling scared enough to cry but there was no threat! I turned everything over in my head trying to find what could have caused it but there wasn't anything. It felt like torture, and I couldn't bear to think of living that way every day.

I couldn't work, could hardly stand to be alive. (So grateful to have a job that allows me to take sick time at my discretion, and gives adequate amounts!) I couldn't control my thoughts at all and even writing my 2 sentence daily summary was way too much. I was having to consciously remind myself to stop holding my breath, which I do when something is too intense physically and apparently also when I am so anxious it hurts.

I finally wondered if my meds had stopped working -- which made sense considering the appetite and sleep symptoms which are usually fixed by my anxiety meds. I looked at the bottle to see the manufacturer and it was the same one that I thought was giving me less-effective adhd meds, and then I googled the name of the manufacturer and the name of my adhd meds and my anti-anxiety meds came up, with people saying that the quality is sometimes just shit!

That made me feel that my suspicion was valid, so I went to my pharmacy and talked to a tech who ordered a different generic for anxiety, but it wouldn't arrive for days. I had asked a similar question before but gotten a wrong answer (that they didn't have any other generics). Monday it finally arrived and when I picked it up I talked to the senior pharmacist who helped me get some of the other manufacturer meds to tide me over until my insurance will cover it again, and also found me a different generic source for my adhd meds.

Today is my third day on both (though only 2/3rds of my usual anxiety med dose, because I don't have enough to last me otherwise) and I think it is better. I am still pretty anxious and my brain is still trying to divebomb at every little thing but at least I can mostly breathe. I'm desperately hoping that within a week I can feel normal, at least my normal. Basically it was like I went off my meds even though I was taking them, and mirtazapine is one of those that is VERY BAD to stop cold turkey. it also apparently needs to be kept at even temperatures, so possibly I got a batch that went off.

In addition to that, I had run out of my serine supplement, which I take to counteract cortisol. I had thought I noticed a small positive effect but now I am thinking it had a much stronger impact as time went on. I plan to be more careful to maintain that one.

Also in the days leading up to my breakdown I had not been getting as much activity as before, and I realize now that exercise really helps with my anxiety. At the worst points it was literally the only thing that helped. Even cuddles and sweet attention didn't help as much, and literally nothing could distract me enough to escape the feeling. So since I realized that last week I have been getting at least 30 min of activity every day, more on most days, strenuous intensity on most days. Thank fuck I have finally come to terms with my sweatiness and thus it is not a barrier to working out any more.

Edit: after posting this, I actually had a good night with no huge anxiety spikes in it! SUCH RELIEF.

How has death touched your life, and what lasting impact has it had?

I've been lucky enough that no one who I was very intimate with has died. But the deaths that I have experienced all touched me with this singular feeling: a wish that I had reached out more while they were still here.


Other than relatives who I didn't have any real connection to (biological grandparents), my first loss from death was in March 2012, when Carol died. I knew Carol from the six months I lived at Serendipity, when we often attended the same family dinner. We hadn't been close then or been in touch after I left Serendipity, but Carol had made me feel included and cared about and as a proxy parental figure that meant a lot. I felt sad but grateful to have had the short time to know Carol.



My first lose of a close connection to death was someone I met through livejournal, Laura (musicandmisery). Laura died April 2, 2013, and I found out through facebook, which I was grateful for because there was no way for me to learn about it through livejournal and the idea of just never knowing is horrific. It was a shock to me because Laura was so young and we hadn't been in good contact for a year, so I didn't know what was going on (I think health problems?). Laura's sister friended me on facebook afterwards and we sort of vaguely interact here and there -- I think for both of us it's a kind of connection to Laura.

I had had Laura on my short list of people to meet, but I never had anyone to go with nor the guts to try and plan a trip to New York alone -- and even if I had managed that I wouldn't have had the money before it was too late. I still ache over that missed opportunity because Laura was really special to me. I can't explain why mostly because my memory is terrible, but it feels like we just felt the world in the same way. We both are the kind of person to cry at human kindness, even between two people we don't know and can't really relate to, and twice as much between other animals. And that's not something I have often had in common with people. I think if we had lived near each other we would have spent lots of time together.

We also have the same birthday, so every time our birthday comes around I think of Laura. And there was this mega-adorable little kid on MasterChef Jr season 5 who reminded me SO MUCH of Laura in smile and spirit that I cried. A quote from that kid: “You gotta stay focused, you gotta stay true to yourself and you gotta cook your heart out!”



Then in February 2016, there was Vanessa, someone I met in college who I felt admiration for and wanted to be friends with, but I never got up the courage to really express that, and then she died. I learned this when I went to her facebook with the goal of reaching out and saw the wall filled with "gone too soon" messages. I felt really overwhelmed with "why didn't I reach out sooner" then. Vanessa was also very young, in her early 20s still I think.



Then March 27, 2017, Topaz' Papaw died. (his funeral was actually on the same date that Laura died) He had lived a full life and was in failing health so it wasn't a surprise but he was someone I felt a deep and intuitive connection with and I felt so sad that I had never tried to connect on more than a friendly-stranger level. Shortly after I met Topaz' family I hit the lowest point of my life so it took a while before I could even think about connecting with strangers, and after that I felt it wasn't allowed because I'm used to everyone being bloodist (saying that family isn't yours unless you are related by blood), and by the time I felt like I was allowed, he wasn't able to connect on a mental level due to Papaw's dementia. I feel like there was a sliver of time when I had a chance but I didn't realize it and I hate that I didn't realize it. I felt so grateful to at least be able to connect in our own unspoken way though.



Then November 26th of 2017, Topaz' Memaw died. She was a fierce and accomplished person who fought for an equal rights amendment and wrote a book about her life. I admired her and wished I had had the chance to connect with her more. Her dementia progressed on a similar timespan to Papaw's but was more external and had a lot of emotive aspects to it, so it was harder to handle. But it was so sweet and she was so supportive of me and Topaz.

When I first met Memaw, Topaz told her that we were partners and she was openly and comfortably supportive -- she later forgot, but knew that we were best friends and expressed strong support for that as a valid kind of family, which meant just as much to me honestly. There isn't societal oppression of best friends, but all my life I have felt that my greatest loves were treated as unimportant because they weren't romantic nor blood-linked nor legality-linked, so I have deep personal feelings of being marginalized in that way. I felt like Memaw saw us in a very true way whether she remembered we were romantic or not. I wished I'd had the chance to get to know her before dementia put the possibility out of reach.



On March 28th, 2018, Saleena died. They're someone I saw at least twice a month from summer 2009 to spring 2011. After that we drifted, but I always meant to pick up again. I had wondered about how Saleena was and how their life was going several times in the months before they died and I regret thinking "I'll have plenty of time." Saleena was near my age so I never expected her to die so soon.


At some point during the past decade two of my aunts died, but I saw them only a few times in my life and never really had a chance to connect with them. They never reached out and I didn't either. Last year or maybe the year before, my last biological grandparent died but I never had any connection with her either, so I did not care.

I'm not including deaths of other beings, but trees, cats, and fish have also left little scars on my heart, usually with the same wish that I had made more time for them. You'd think with this constant refrain I'd reach out to people all the time but I still procrastinate constantly.

Doing this prompt has made me realize that of all the deaths that impacted me, most of them occurred in the same calendar week - between March 27th and April 2nd. and two more happened right before that in the same season. I suddenly have more understanding of why late March through April has been hard for me the past few years... I also broke up with Kei-won-tia in 2015, had a hiatus in my most important relationship in 2016, and broke up with Evelyn in 2017 all in that same time period. I'm feeling a little more self-compassion about my lack of productivity in the past 2 months now.

I realized the other day that people who are not on the A-spectrum (Autism, Aspergers, ADHD) probably have no idea what it is like to experience brain overload, so I want to try to explain. When I am dealing with ADHD overload, all these things are true:


Trying to think at all is like trying to think with a massive headache; it takes a deliberate effort and it feels like a strain that almost hurts. Trying to focus my thoughts feels like when I haven't eaten for many hours and delicious food smells keep wafting by-- every single time, my attention is pulled away. But it's happening with every little sound or movement.



Also, all senses are heightened and not in a good way. Things I normally wouldn't even notice become so loud and annoying they make me want to scream -- the sound of paper sliding as someone turns the page of a book feels like someone scraping dull blades across my skin. I get deeply upset by an uncomfortable chair, hot room, or any smell. All I want is for the stimuli to STOP.



Trying to speak, trying to utter words feels like trying to jump when I have been walking for so long that my legs feel shaky and it takes a constant effort of will to make each step. Opening my mouth and coordinating my tongue with my thoughts feels like lifting my arms after I just carried something too heavy for way too long. It just feels like so much work that I can't do it. I can think a string of words but pushing them out is nearly impossible. Sometimes when I do manage words they come out garbled and they always are short, labored phrases.



Trying to to do things feels like when I haven't slept for so long that all my muscles ache and I am moving slow and dropping things. I'm clumsy and constantly fucking up and every time it happens I want to cry and scream. And it just keeps happening no matter how careful I am or how much I am used to doing it perfectly.


So when I say I am having an ADHD overload day, it doesn't only mean that I am extra scatterbrained and forgetful -- that's actually the least bad of the symptoms. It is like having a bad cold, but cognitive (thinking) rather than respiratory (breathing). I love my ADHD brain with all its daily quirks -- except when I am in overload.

I was looking through old emails from 2007 the other day (trying to find contact info) and came across gtalk conversations with someone I was close friends with back then. Here's a bit from March 2007:

( transcript of a chat )

This was my normal with close friends. I was highly effusive and constantly expressing affection and admiration. The person that I had this conversation with I was never in a romantic relationship with, yet we shared intensely affectionate expressions of love as a constant in our friendship. To an outside observer I probably seem really trusting now, but I am SO WARY compared to my natural self.


I feel like Ava, Kei-won-tia, and to some extent Aurilion and Evelyn broke something in me. Ava was someone I passionately adored and loved profoundly, who lied to me in profound ways and then cut me off completely when I called them on it. Kei-won-tia was someone who I thought shared my values, who I felt strong resonance with, and later I learned that they believed none of what they said and lied to me. They intentionally tricked me into loving who I thought they were. Aurilion told me over and over how important I was to them and how "this time I won't run away I promise" followed by them cutting me out of their life the second it got difficult. Evelyn did much the same, though for even shorter bits of time.

I feel wary of speaking of anyone with admiration for fear that they will reveal that everything I love is only a carefully created manipulation, or is a rug about to be snatched from underneath me. I would never have thought that people could keep up a facade for months on end but now I know better. Multiple people have done this to me. Now honestly I am suspicious of anyone who seems to agree with me on everything. I wait to see if they stay agreeing when they're mad at me, or if they express the same things when there is no prompt related to me. I can't bring myself to believe that they mean it independent of me unless they already expressed it before meeting me and I can find proof of that. The people who wounded me most were people who pretended to be changed by exposure to my words.

More recently, Cass and Heather both betrayed my trust and made me feel a fool for investing in them. I now have a great fear that people I love will trust the people I praise and then get hurt by those people. I don't want to enthuse over someone only to watch them harm my closest people. At the same time I desperately crave an interconnected web of friends, so I yearn to have my people invest in each other. But I won't be the vector of harm again if I can help it. I can vouch for Topaz and Allison but everyone else I'm unsure of, everyone. No matter how much I love them or how much I'm willing to trust them, myself.


My effusiveness is further withered by disuse and discouragement. For at least 5 years I haven't been close to anyone who is comfortable being complimented even a little bit, much less with the enthusiasm that is natural to me. Topaz allows it but disagrees with me every time, though they have at least become gentle in their disagreement. (and to be fair, we are effusive with each other and Topaz doesn't disagree with my expressions of love, only my expressions of admiration) Evelyn reacted to my effusiveness with discomfort or rejection, multiple times. Most people react with disagreement, embarrassment, by saying that other people disagree with me, or by telling me things they don't like about themselves.

Worse, some people react as if I am hitting on them, which is uncomfortable and upsetting for me because it shows such deep misunderstanding of me. If I adore you, that doesn't at all mean I want to have sex with you, and if I want to have sex with you I am not going to try to talk you into it with flattery! good god!

And it is difficult when I don't even know anyone else like this anymore. When they were in a self-love-focused place, some of my old friends had this effusiveness in them as well, and we could reflect each other in an ever-growing glow of adoration and just as importantly, acceptance and appreciation of that adoration. Can I even express how amazing it was to be able to say "I love this part of me" and have them look at that part closely and love it just as well, and express it even more than I had? To feel that my self-love wasn't just tolerated or envied or distance-venerated but actively, vibrantly, joyously supported and enjoyed! And even more so, to give that self-love support to others and watch the exquisite unfolding of new layers of selfhood in them.

They also had that way of seeing people truly and that almost irrepressible urge to express the delight of knowing. They also trusted me and took my emotion-words as truths. It felt so good to be so fearlessly affectionate. It felt so good to have my words taken with both hands, kissed, and put in a sacred place, rather than pushed back at me with a disgusted face.

I am still effusive with a small handful of people but it seems impossible to access with newer friends. I think about my current friends and I know there are at least 5 people who I have met in the past few years who past-me would have been SO effusive towards, but current-me is not. I'm waiting for some future safety that will never come.

My effusiveness was one of my favorite things about me and it crushes me that that part of me is so damaged and I have no access to it.

1. being triggered is literal torture, not mere dislike or discomfort.
   
2. your thoughts can get stuck in loops that take outside intervention to fix.
   
3. pressuring someone into a sensory experience (taste touch smell sound sight) may force people to relive trauma. don't.
   
4. The wrong therapist is a waste of time and it will wear you down trying to get help from them. if you don't click, move on as quickly as you can.
   
5. it can look like laziness when people are literally doing their best because people have different amounts of energy.
   
6. falling in love or experiencing lots of joy doesn't cure chemical depression. Not even if it is literally the best thing you have ever experienced.
   
7. after a depression crisis is over, the recovery starts, but it can be long.
   
8. survival stress is cumulative and causes depression. If someone is scrambling to survive, expecting them to be reliable and present at any given point is unrealistic and sometimes cruel.

Anika prompted me to share my experience with mental illness and how it has influenced [my] life or personality.

I don't know exactly when I first became depressed but it developed between age 8 and 12, and by the time I was 13 I was praying almost all day every day for God to kill me. I didn't feel like I had the right to end my life or I would have. It eased up somewhat when I finally got my first real friend at 13, but it was still a fairly constant state for me until after I got out of my parents' house, got married, and went through 2 years of therapy for the sexual abuse I experienced as a child.


--- trigger: fear of unknown men, panic ---
During that 2 years, I was deeply afraid of all male strangers. When the apartment sent men around with leaf-blowers, I hid in the bedroom to put 2 doors between us. I held the axe and my breath and waited until I couldn't hear them any more. I knew, logically, that these people were unlikely to attack me. But logic didn't enter into it because I was in a state of triggered panic. I use the word triggered only very deliberately. Each time I knew men were within 10 feet of my doors or windows I was in a state of utter unthinking panic until they left. Heart pounding panic like you might feel if a bear is that close and staring right at you and growling. I couldn't go out alone. For months even going to the mailbox was too terrifying. (when I finally did go that 200 feet alone, I felt so proud of myself!).
--- end TW about terror of unknown men ---



--- trigger: penetrative sex causing flashback-like thoughts ---
The worst part was the triggers that would happen every time I had sex, starting with the first time I tried to have consensual penetrative sex. My body reacted by closing up. It felt horrible and I felt so guilty for not being able to do it, but I literally could not, no matter how much I wanted to! It got worse from there -- I started having horrible intrusive visions of children being violated whenever I would try to have sex that involved penetration. It was extremely difficult to think of sex as anything other than a source of pain, shame, loneliness, terror, and guilt. And I was so disappointed because with my conscious self, I wanted it! but my subconscious was much stronger.
--- end TW about penetrative sex ---


Relatedly, memories attach to weird things so don't ever insist that someone watch, listen to, smell, or taste things! because maybe that makes them feel a violation again in their mind, and they shouldn't have to tell you about it to get you to stop. Sometimes mental avoidance is an absolutely necessary coping strategy and if someone has to tell you "that makes me remember [traumatic event]" then you may be breaking their ability to stay out of a horrible loop of trauma replay.

The fear and intrusive thoughts were my main issue in that period of mental illness, but the amount of work I had to do on those things was so much that it made me feel hopeless. I felt like I would never get better. I wondered why bother living if every future day was going to involve reliving the worst feelings I had ever experienced. I kept going because I had a supportive partner who treated my healing as an important contribution he was making to the world.

Then about a year in, after three failed therapists and one therapist retiring, I found a therapist that I actually clicked with: one who had experienced worse trauma than I had and was now so free of triggers that they could sit next to their abuser without fear. The fact that they had healed that much made me feel that surely I could too, but it still was a long journey with a lot of pain in it.

Eventually we worked through a lot of previous traumas and I started to feel less scared and I was able to control my thoughts again. I started to feel normal, back to my old self. I still was sensitive to certain words, and movies with realistic (true to the experience of a victim, not glamorized rape myths) sexual abuse or rape would trigger me and make it so that my mind was trapped in a loop feeling that experience over and over, but those instances happened less and less often. I was able to go back to work. I was able to interact with strangers and go places by myself. I was able to perform the minimum required, like I had been before I started therapy.


Then there came a day when I suddenly realized that doing things didn't feel like slogging through cold mud. I even had energy to spare! I could be cheerful in the face of grumpiness! I could be social with strangers for hours and still do stuff when I got home - LOTS of stuff! I suddenly realized that I had never been lazy -- it was actually that I had lacked the energy to do more. All my energy had been going to running coping programs for the abuse that I endured.

When I didn't need to spend energy coping because I had processed enough of it, all that energy welled up and sprang out of me. I was so magical, so loving, so creative. I was outgoing, as I always knew my true self was. I felt able. I was not-depressed from 2006 to 2010, then had 8 months of depression, then was not-depressed again from mid-2011 to mid-2012. I was so, so active and productive in those 6 years, to the point that it boggles my mind now.


So through all that I learned that sometimes a thing you think everyone can do is literally impossible for some people, and that when people say they can't, it's not just an irresponsible way of saying "won't." If you can understand only one thing about mental illness, I want you to understand that you can't tell WHY someone can't do a thing and there isn't always external proof. You just have to trust them.

Later, I went into depression again because I spent more energy than I had, day after day, without getting nourished. It sounds like nothing, but I was more depressed from that than I was about the abuse, because with the abuse at least I got a clear path to healing, I got reassurance that healing was possible, and all kind people were supportive. Even kind people are generally not supportive of healing from depression that has "no real reason" and the acceptable "real" reasons are very limited. The attitude is "get over it already."

Not long after I realized the cause of that depression, I fixed the cause and began the most nourishing and healing connection of my life -- the thing I had always yearned for since I was small. Even though I had this new source of brilliant joy, I couldn't really feel it because the pain had worn such a rut in my brain that I couldn't get out. I could not access the happiness I knew my experiences should be giving me.


Every day I thought surely this is the worst it can get -- and then the next day was worse. It was so bad that I could not access any feelings except despair; I could not even care about the suffering of others, which has always been one of my primary motivations. When I thought about injustice and suffering and had no emotional response, I felt I had died inside and was no longer a person.


Finally I got desperate enough to go to the clinic and get medicine, which formed a protective layer over the bottom of the rut and allowed me to slowly heal, layer by layer, until the rut was gone. But then the protective layer kept me from feeling things deeply which started to make me feel like life was pointless, so I weaned myself off against medical advice. I know my own brain and I knew I no longer needed it because it had started to cause me harm rather than good.

That experience taught me that even with a perfect situation, even in a time that should be your happiest, if the chemicals in your brain are messed up you are not going to be able to be happy. The chemistry of your brain is stronger than the strongest will. Just like you can't will yourself out of mono, you can't will yourself out of depression.

Even though the crisis-level depression was over after 8 months of medication, the depression was not gone. It's like after a long illness when it finally breaks -- the healing is not done because the sickness is over, because your body has to recover from the battle. My mind had to recover, and that process was slowed by the constant and massive amount of energy I had to put into surviving because my job didn't pay enough for me to live on. For a while that process was not just slowed but reversed by the exhaustion of scraping a survival on what I could beg from my biofamily while I tried to convince employers that I was a valuable person and they should hire me and pay me a living wage.


When your ability to feed and shelter yourself is in constant doubt, there is no rest from the emotional and mental drain. Even when you are not actively worrying, it takes so much energy to keep it out of your conscious mind. Daily survival stress is cumulative and from myself and others I have seen, it always creates depression. Extra energy exists in a world of unicorns and dragons, and to think that you can have it while fighting to survive is a laugh.

A year ago I finally found a job that is perfect for me and pays me a living wage. Since then I have begun healing again, very slowly. I have only just now started feeling like I can actually count on this job, despite always doing my best and often getting appreciative comments from coworkers. I have only in the past few months started feeling like I can count on being able to stay in the place where I live.


I also have SAD (seasonal affective depression) but I have mostly learned how to cope with this so that it doesn't affect me too much. The most important part is that I have to get enough sleep on a fairly regular sleep schedule, and I HAVE to get up at LEAST three hours before dark. I have to get outside every day even if it's just 5 min, even if there is no sun. I need to drink lots of hot drinks (coffee, hot chocolate, tea) and try to stay as warm as possible. I need to eat regularly. I need to use my sunlight lamp as close to daily as I can manage.

When I say I am neurodivergent I mean my brain doesn't work like most people's. And I am not talking about small-difference variety, I'm talking the kind of difference where people express shock, dismay, or even disbelief when I tell them things about the way my brain works. There are a lot of pieces to this. I have ADHD, CAPD, prosopagnosia, aphantasia, profound memory issues, social anxiety, intermittent depression, sensory sensitivity, and very mild dyslexia.


My ADHD manifests primarily as what they call 'inattentive type' but if you have ever been the subject of my interest you know I don't lack for attentiveness. I think a better name for ADD would be ACD, attention control disorder. Because I and most of the other ADD people I know have basically 2 settings: completely focused and completely scattered. Without medication, it can be impossible to decide which one is going to happen, but with medication, some of us can use hyperfocus to great effect.

Before I was medicated, I used panic to turn on hyperfocus, but eventually I used that 'last resort' so much that I burned it out. I had a 4.0 over 4 years but if I hadn't gotten medication I would have flunked out in my last year, because I simply couldn't control my attention enough to realize when stuff was due, to plan for time to do it, or to actually start when I sat down to do so. how I cope with my ADD-PI (other than meds): supplements, caffeine, music, water, book, food, sleep.

Nowadays I am medicated and I can start stuff when I need to, but context-switching is still so difficult for me that I will hold my pee for hours and hours rather than interrupt what I am doing, even if what I am doing is completely unimportant. If there isn't some external factor, I almost cannot change gears, even when medicated. This is why I use external factors like plans with other people to help me do what I want to do when I want to do it. I don't know if I would ever manage to go out on my off days otherwise, because the context switch between "at home" and "out" is so intense. I often think about where else I could go when I am on my way home even though I don't actually want to be "out" I just want to put off the context switch.

A majorly noticeable effect my ADHD has on me is in speech. Audible speech takes lots of effort to make, and this is very apparent when I am tired and/or my meds have worn off or I am out of meds. I will get so frustrated just trying to make a simple 5 word sentence come out, and if I am interrupted it throws me so far off track I don't even want to bother trying to get back on and say the thing. I'd really rather not communicate with sound at all most days, which is part of why I need a lot of alone time because most people want you to talk and listen to them when they're around.

Another major effect of my ADHD is distractability. I am very distracted in conversations by rhetorical questions which I take literally and only realize after answering them that no one wanted an answer. I'm very distracted by anything that is readable, and can easily lose hours and hours and hours on the internet just reading whatever comes up. I'm very distracted by videos and I dislike the sensation of my brain being suction-cupped to a video so I generally don't watch them.



Listening brings us to CAPD, central auditory processing disorder. I can't process sound like most people. CAPD tends to go hand in hand with ADHD, and I think that they both have to do with the brain lacking the ability to partially block out stimulus. I can block out all sound while walking down the street, for instance, and I do in order to be able to think. But if I do that I can't hear people calling my name unless they are loud and do it several times.

I literally can't figure out what someone is saying if someone else is talking or lyrics are playing at a similar volume. And I rely so heavily on context that when someone says something to me outside of a conversation, it almost always sounds like complete nonsense. How I hear with CAPD: everything is mondegreens and listening to words is constant translation work.



Prosopagnosia is an impairment of the ability to recognize faces no matter how familiar they are. stimming and prosopagnosia (difficulty recognising faces). I was married to a person for 8 years after knowing them for 8 years previous to that and even during the last year of our marriage, if I saw them out of context it would take a moment for me to recognize them: at first I would think they were a stranger. There is no level of familiarity that allows me to recognize a face without effort. BUT seeing photos and especially videos of people does help me, perhaps because my 2D vision is stored in a different place, not sure. Prosopagnosia and my memory as it relates to taking photos and believing in love.



Aphantasia is the inability to create mental pictures. I only recently learned that other people can actually picture things in their head and I had much the same shocked and cheated feeling that Blake Ross describes. If I try to visualize a beach, for instance, the only thing that I manage is to mentally flip through photos I have taken at a beach -- and I can't see those clearly either, it's more like an emotional impression.

I cannot create a scene in my head. When I try, it's like everything is constantly warping size and angle, like a live-action surrealist painting but not in a fun way. I can't bring people's faces to mind, though I can bring up blurry impressions of certain features if I have looked at those features a lot. This is tied to my lack of memory, I think, because when I do take photos and thus temporarily flatten my perspective, I can remember things at least 4 times as well, if not better. Weirdly though, I experience my dreams more visually memorably than my waking life; they stick like my waking memories only do if I photograph or video them and then view the photo or video.



My memory is profoundly messed up. I can't recall things unless I have a visible memory tag like a photo or a written entry, and often I can't remember even then. I find this extremely upsetting, particularly when I have a profound experience that I fail to photograph or write about and it is then lost forever. Usually I realize this has happened when someone else refers happily to the memory, and then I can recall just enough to know that the memory is missing. What is more scary but less painful is when I literally have no memory at all of an event to the point where they could be talking about something that happened to someone else.

This is part of the reason I absolutely must only invest in people who loathe lies, because I can't tell if someone is lying to me about my own life. I usually will get a feeling that says yes or no, but the only thing I can know for sure is when I have a strong negative reaction. I will remember that if someone tells me the series of events. I wish it worked for positive events but it doesn't. It doesn't work for all negative events either.

I cry a lot about memory. I feel an intense loss of self due to my memory. If I ever forget something important to you, please know it is not by choice or carelessness. Remembering is important to me but I have very little power over what I can remember.

As to why my memory is fracked all to shit, I would guess that it is due to childhood trauma creating an automatic program of forgetting, plus an overload of stress for years on end and inadequate choline for the first four years of being vegetarian (PLEASE DON'T GO VEGETARIAN WITHOUT SUPPLEMENTATION).

I'm hoping that reduced stress and adequate food will eventually have a positive effect, but if they make the dementia ultrasound therapy somehow available to me I will do it so fast. (there are 2 kinds of dementia and one is caused by plaque on the brain which can be removed via ultrasound. I know what I have isn't dementia but I'm convinced it is caused by many of the same things).



I have social anxiety, which manifests mostly physically. I get sweaty and heart-poundy over talking in front of people, despite never being afraid to do it. As a kid, I always wanted the main role in every play and performance I was in, and I daydreamed about talking to huge auditoriums full of people. I like when people pay attention to me and I am not the least bit shy or worried that I will not perform well. It is so frustrating and it feels like a betrayal, because I am not nervous. But my body worries (probably thanks to a ridiculously constant flood of cortisol in my brain for 6 years).

In unstructured social events I also tend to get overwhelmed with how much I don't belong and then I get sad and then it all spirals with body worries into the worst experience. This stuff started only a few years ago and it doesn't feel like me at all and I very much hope it will eventually go away. Right now I am medicated for it and when I have my meds, it is manageable. When I don't, I can get stuck in a panic worry that I can't logic myself out of and sometimes can't even distract myself from.



I have intermittent depression -- sometimes it is deathly awful and other times it is mild. Depression for me manifests as an inability to motivate for anything but escape and absolute necessities. It has gone into remission twice and I really hope it will again. Right now it is fairly mild as long as I stay careful. I have SAD, seasonal affective depression, and the dark season can crush my spirit. I have to make sure to go outside EVERY day even if it is only a walk to the car to go through a fastfood drive through. A day that is 100% indoors is very bad for me in the dark season but also cold makes me want to stay inside and hibernate. A bad combination!



Sensory sensitivity is what I call my sensory issues. Similar to how children get overwhelmed by loud noises or can't stand how shoes feel or cry when you wash their hands, I feel extreme reactions to sensations that a lot of people wouldn't notice or would enjoy. I'm hypersensitive physically & energetically: takes work & time for me to enjoy touch. I sometimes hate my breasts because my nipples are at exactly the worst spot for brushing up against things and that feels SO infuriating, like nails on a chalkboard but worse because it lingers and there is no way to block out the feeling. Like nails on a chalkboard that creates an itch on your nose that you can't scratch.

I get really incredibly frustrated when I am pushed or bumped into: it makes me want to scream and punch, even more so when it is happening accidentally like when someone presses hard on the brakes and it pushes me forward. When I write this stuff down it sounds like nothing but it stops me from cuddling as much as I want to because it is so easy for it to juat feel awful.



I say I have very mild dyslexia because I transpose numbers in any series unless I am extremely careful, and I transpose letters in any unfamiliar word. I also find acronyms extremely difficult, and I can't spell out loud because unless I can look at the word I don't know what goes where. Fortunately I have a massive vocabulary and was trained on greek and latin roots so I rarely come across a truly unfamiliar word. Mostly this affects me in that it increases my cognitive load by a huge amount when I'm reading long blocks of text that are not broken into paragraphs, which is why I ask that if people are willing, they give more spaces between paragraphs.

possible tw/cn for childhood neglect and abuse

Yesterday I was watching a documentary with this family whose kin had died at age 19, and they saved all her art and poetry and they had several small boxes of artifacts she had created. Suddenly it hit me that if I had died at 19, I would have died having never really been loved or known. I spent 2 years dealing with the sexual abuse I endured as a child, but I never worked through the neglect. it doesn't seem like a big deal logically, yet it hurts so much. And it just hits me out of nowhere especially when I see a family treating the "weirdo" in their family like they matter and are welcome and loved as-is. When I see someone being valued by bio-family for who they actually ARE, it just rips my heart out.

My family would have thrown away my journals and poetry like old homework. They would have invented lies to tell about what I wanted to do and who I wanted to be, because they never had any interest in the truth. They wouldn't have had anything real to say about me at the funeral because they literally didn't know one thing I was passionate about. They wouldn't have even invited the people I loved to my funeral because they didn't know who those people were and they didn't care. They preached that family is the only thing that matters and none of them valued friendship and they probably didn't notice or care that I did.

So watching this other family handle the artifacts as precious, honored items, I just started crying because I felt so sad for rejected and neglected child-me, and I can't imagine what it would have been like to grow up feeling that loved and accepted. I was certain that I had been an accidental pregnancy, because I felt so unwanted. But apparently they did want a baby, just not really this one. They wanted someone they could sculpt into their ideal person, and I have never been sculpt-able. It wasn't enough to control my actions; they wanted to control my mind and they resented me for not allowing them to do that.

I almost never disobeyed them -- I didn't even passive-aggressively disobey by following orders badly -- but they called me "rebellious" because I didn't want to do what they wanted. Even though I literally always did my best with any chore they assigned me. When I would clean the kitchen they never thanked me for doing such a thorough, perfect job, always picking up the jars on the counter just in case an errant crumb had rolled behind -- instead they complained that I didn't do it fast enough (while my next sibling would do a half-assed job and they would say nothing).

I now realize that at least some of my parents' greater care for my siblings was guilt about the trauma my siblings went through, but that doesn't erase the years of watching them get what they asked for for Christmas while I almost never did. I still remember how much it hurt to open the right size package for the computer program I asked for and find something completely different, clearly from the clearance rack, and then see my next sibling open something much more expensive. Trying to act grateful and not hurt while I felt like they were saying "you just don't matter as much to us, but since we're not saying that out loud, you can't get upset." Then opening some awful gendered present -- perfume, or fucking plain colorless delicate jewelry -- which I had been very vocal about hating, and literally never wore. They didn't give to the person I was, they gave to the person they wanted me to be. And the person they wanted me to be was a girl who wore floral scents and subtle jewelry and was grateful for whatever they bothered to pick up.

They literally never expressed any pride in anything I did until I won some award in senior year of high school for my SAT score. And that, I knew, was because they were taking credit for it. One of them would talk about how they found out about the last retest date just in time (for me to win the award) and the other would talk about how they drilled me on the practice tests. Neither of them said anything about my efforts on those tests, just bragged about their input. I got a perfect score on the English section, but they never mentioned that. If they knew me literally at all, they would have known that I wanted to be a writer, and they would have told me that this was proof I could do it.

They loved to tell me how smart I was, but only ever as a reason for something they were demanding of me, never as a reaction to something creative or intellectually rigorous that I did. I got to the point where I hated being called smart; if I am clever, it is an accident of biology and no achievement of mine. You might as well praise me for having brown hair. But my actual achievements did not matter to my parents. So I guess, at least my parents helped keep me from becoming an elitist by highlighting how wrong it is to praise someone for their intellect rather than considering their efforts.

They loved to tell me how pretty I was for having long hair, when they weren't busy calling me names for being fat, suggesting that I should never have treats, and buying me weight-loss meds. Getting a doctor to lie to me about how digestion works so that I would wait many hours between meals, which fucked up my metabolism of course. Telling me my clothes were too tight, my jewelry too gaudy, and that I had to wear a bra at home because it was "too distracting" to my male sibling. The fact that it was my father who told me this made me feel dirty and violated; I wasn't just a person being comfortable at home, I was being looked at as a sexual object by my relatives and to protect myself I had to wear a bra even in my pajamas. Before that moment I never felt even self-conscious without a bra: after it, I never felt safe without one (unless I was in a nudist-friendly space).

Ugh. This just gets worse the more I think about it. Mostly my parents neglected me but when they did turn their attention to me it was never a good thing. I worked to be invisible throughout my teens and it wasn't difficult because they preferred it that way. I honestly felt far more like the hired help in my own home than I did when I actually worked as a live-in nanny. The first time I ever got thanked by someone I lived with for doing the dishes was when I was working, which is when I realized I was literally never thanked as a child. And I did my best with chores as a child partly to avoid getting hit but partly I think because some little part of me never gave up hope that if I did it just right, they would appreciate me.

I keep trying to end this post but there is no end. it's just a terrible knot of unresolved pain.

I started 2016 with a lot of hope. In January I connected a lot with Kylei, Sande, and Hannah; I had two graduation parties and started making more plans to spend time with people, and I started meditating weekly-ish with Elizabeth. But by the end of January I ended up in a dark crash over how little I felt connected to people. The beginning of February was a little better -- I got to go to Big Trees with some of my favorite people, and Topaz hosted Heather's birthday which was also nourishing and fun. But then I went to a party at Kylei's and had a terrible anxiety crash which ended up leaking into the next day and causing a horrifically painful miscommunication with Topaz. Later that month I went to the activist meet-and-greet for the first time after meaning to go for ages, and met three awesome new people. But just introducing myself made my heart beat painfully hard. At the end of February I asked my psychiatrist to prescribe me anxiety meds and start being medicated for that for the first time.

In March I did a lot of social -- met with four friends as well as with my ex-mother-in-law. I also began a four-week break with Topaz, in an effort to re-set our relationship which had become too central for both of us. In April I had two tinder fails (one flaked and the other I could hardly talk with), made a new friend, hosted a crafty party and a cuddly communion, spent time with Roger and Serenity, and went to Euphoria where I gave a talk on intimacy and made a game with it. (yeah I'd say that the anxiety meds were helping!) In May I spent a lot of time with Serenity and Evelyn, hosted a cuddly communion, spent time with Katie, Allison, Serra, and Indie, and wrote a lot of important posts. In June I spent lots of time with Serenity, presented at APW and SFQP, hung out with Arizona, Sande, Allison, Kylei, Evelyn, and Cass, and had a truth-or-truth videochat with LJ friends, as well as writing a lot of important posts.

In July stuff started getting very stressful -- Topaz went through something really traumatic, Kanika had a medical emergency and I had to take her to the vet, my little sister came in town unexpectedly, and I ran out of money and had to start begging from my bioparents. But also I spent lots of good time with Serenity and had several gathers -- two with my lil sis, also Katie, Allison, Hannah, Kylei, Elliott, Evelyn, Sande, Cass, and even Adi, so that part was positive. But August brought a lot of painful stuff for Topaz, was when I ran out of ADD meds with no access to a doctor, and was the last time I saw Evelyn for months. Roger and Allison were supportive and helpful, and I went to a SONG membership meeting which gave me hope like nothing else except for TBC ever has.

September I got a job at Starbux and finally started getting call backs and interviews for a few of the hundreds of applications I had sent. My awful bioparents also invaded my house and stayed for a month, harassing me about money, rearranging my stuff and throwing some of it away without my permission, invading my bedroom, and being transphobic. October was mostly filled up with my awful bioparents and working at Starbux but at the very end I began doing LJ Idol again. In November things got still worse -- Evelyn officially broke things off with me and Kylei blew up at me and told me we can't be friends. Then later that month Evelyn invited me to a party at their house which ended up being an emotional disaster. I quit Starbux for my new job.

December was a very mixed bag. I started my new job, which was amazing; I got a new psychiatrist and finally got medicated for ADD again; I got to spend time with Arizona, Felix, Felix's people Blaire and Shay, Allison, Jonathan, Heather, Brian, Jessica, and my little sister. But also, my grandmother died and I had to spend time with my awful biofamily, and I was so emotionally drained that I couldn't really enjoy Solstice. It was also a sad reminder of my estrangement from Kylei and Evelyn, because I wanted them at Solstice so much.

( detailed events )

I started 2016 with a lot of hope. In January I connected a lot with Kylei, Sande, and Hannah; I had two graduation parties and started making more plans to spend time with people, and I started meditating weekly-ish with Elizabeth. But by the end of January I ended up in a dark crash over how little I felt connected to people. The beginning of February was a little better -- I got to go to Big Trees with some of my favorite people, and Topaz hosted Heather's birthday which was also nourishing and fun. But then I went to a party at Kylei's and had a terrible anxiety crash which ended up leaking into the next day and causing a horrifically painful miscommunication with Topaz. Later that month I went to the activist meet-and-greet for the first time after meaning to go for ages, and met three awesome new people. But just introducing myself made my heart beat painfully hard. At the end of February I asked my psychiatrist to prescribe me anxiety meds and start being medicated for that for the first time.

In March I did a lot of social -- met with four friends as well as with my ex-mother-in-law. I also began a four-week break with Topaz, in an effort to re-set our relationship which had become too central for both of us. In April I had two tinder fails (one flaked and the other I could hardly talk with), made a new friend, hosted a crafty party and a cuddly communion, spent time with Roger and Serenity, and went to Euphoria where I gave a talk on intimacy and made a game with it. (yeah I'd say that the anxiety meds were helping!) In May I spent a lot of time with Serenity and Evelyn, hosted a cuddly communion, spent time with Katie, Allison, Serra, and Indie, and wrote a lot of important posts. In June I spent lots of time with Serenity, presented at APW and SFQP, hung out with Arizona, Sande, Allison, Kylei, Evelyn, and Cass, and had a truth-or-truth videochat with LJ friends, as well as writing a lot of important posts.

In July stuff started getting very stressful -- Topaz went through something really traumatic, Kanika had a medical emergency and I had to take her to the vet, my little sister came in town unexpectedly, and I ran out of money and had to start begging from my bioparents. But also I spent lots of good time with Serenity and had several gathers -- two with my lil sis, also Katie, Allison, Hannah, Kylei, Elliott, Evelyn, Sande, Cass, and even Adi, so that part was positive. But August brought a lot of painful stuff for Topaz, was when I ran out of ADD meds with no access to a doctor, and was the last time I saw Evelyn for months. Roger and Allison were supportive and helpful, and I went to a SONG membership meeting which gave me hope like nothing else except for TBC ever has.

September I got a job at Starbux and finally started getting call backs and interviews for a few of the hundreds of applications I had sent. My awful bioparents also invaded my house and stayed for a month, harassing me about money, rearranging my stuff and throwing some of it away without my permission, invading my bedroom, and being transphobic. October was mostly filled up with my awful bioparents and working at Starbux but at the very end I began doing LJ Idol again. In November things got still worse -- Evelyn officially broke things off with me and Kylei blew up at me and told me we can't be friends. Then later that month Evelyn invited me to a party at their house which ended up being an emotional disaster. I quit Starbux for my new job.

December was a very mixed bag. I started my new job, which was amazing; I got a new psychiatrist and finally got medicated for ADD again; I got to spend time with Arizona, Felix, Felix's people Blaire and Shay, Allison, Jonathan, Heather, Brian, Jessica, and my little sister. But also, my grandmother died and I had to spend time with my awful biofamily, and I was so emotionally drained that I couldn't really enjoy Solstice. It was also a sad reminder of my estrangement from Kylei and Evelyn, because I wanted them at Solstice so much.

( detailed events )

Within the past two weeks so fucking goddamn much has happened.
Papaw (Topaz' grandparent, an incredibly sweet and gentle person) died and not only was I really sad for the loss and how intense it is for all who were close to him, but I was reminded of how kind he was to me and how little of that kindness I got to experience. I felt so glad to have known him and be loved by him, because he did make me feel loved. We couldn't have said more than a hundred words to each other -- fewer than 40 if you don't count greetings and farewells. But he was always genuinely happy to see me and I never felt like he wished I was different in some way. And I love Topaz like he loved Topaz' grandmother, and they are so alike. They would enthuse together and Papaw and I would glance at each other and smile, knowing we were feeling the same thing. In another life we would have sat on a porch and smoked cigars together. We just clicked, in a very intuitive way. At the funeral the first hymn they chose was The Old Rugged Cross which was my favorite hymn as a kid, and that made me feel so connected to him and I cried as I sang along. People got up and spoke about how many memories they had of him and how steadily loving, thoughtful, and creative he was.


And I was reminded that I have no memories of the grandmother who died before I was born or the grandfather who died when I was 5, and only three memories of the one who died when I was 18, and they're all bad.

In the strongest memory, I'm about six years old and he's shouting furiously at me for touching his chair (which his other grandkids were allowed to sit in, but I was not permitted to touch). That one I remember clearly because I didn't know I wasn't supposed to touch it and I was terrified to be attacked for something I didn't know was 'wrong' and no one defended me except my mother (who he treated like garbage), and her tentatively because she was scared too. My dad was silent, my grandmother was silent. I cried, and I hardly ever cried as a child. In another, he's yelling at my grandmother because the A/C isn't up high enough. That one only stuck in my mind because my grandmother sassed him about his 'hot air' as she obeyed: one of only two good memories I have of her. And the last isn't so much a memory as a muddle of impressions of him acting so pious it made me sick after his stroke, when he started to fear death. It was all so fake and guilt-driven. My grandmother was someone I didn't really know and who definitely never knew me, nor did she want to. Being around her was like being around a pastel, rose-outlined blinking light-up sign that reads "are you acceptable yet?" She died in December and everyone else at the funeral sobbed about how accepting and supportive she was and I felt like I was at the wrong person's service.


So standing there at Papaw's funeral, realizing that the one person who felt like an accepting, loving grandparent to me was gone forever, and that I didn't even have a history to reflect on, brought up all this repressed pain about my terrible biofamily. And also guilt because who am I to mourn when people who have loved him all their lives are there? And what a terrible support to Topaz, focusing on my own shit while they're hurting. Ugh. Lots of mixed-up guts.

The two days before the funeral I was in a wedding for one of my best friends which involved a really intense two-full-day project of interacting with strangers and once-removeds who have Very Specific Ideas of What Is Proper (fortunately I really liked the other brides-minions, as my sweet friend called us rather than misgender me). That was also a whirlbang of emotions because it made me think about my own wedding so many years ago.


Slight scroogy tangent: I'm generally of the opinion that it's better to not get married since the institution of marriage is both rooted in patriarchy and a very powerful force for role-enforcing which can wreck the noblest of egalitarian intentions, but

I think Allison and Jonathan do have the makings of a lifelong healthy, mutually nourishing connection and I think they will manage to maintain their selfhoods despite the influence of marriage, so I can support them in this choice.

Jonathan loves Allison in a way that I have rarely seen a person love another, and I so deeply appreciate for Allison. He doesn't want to change Allison at all, and he beams at her when she enthuses over things, when she's loud and silly and flails for longer than is socially acceptable. He never looks embarrassed or like he's trying to tone her down. Never. Which, as a loud, silly, flailing person myself, makes me feel respected by proxy and so relieved that I can trust Jonathan not to mistreat Allison.

The thing I really didn't expect and that hit me hard was that their families are treating this marriage as a merge and creation of a new shared family, which is so rare and so precious. The side effect of seeing how truly Allison is accepted and valued by family and friends and spouse and how the families are taking their metamour relationships seriously reminded me of how much my spouse and family tried to change and silence me and how they never even saw me, much less appreciated the parts of me that are not socially acceptable. It was tolerated at best if they couldn't manage to ignore it or snuff it out. And I know Allison's family is not perfect! But they really do try to understand her, and they keep on trying until they get it at least partly. Allison walked down the aisle to the Star Wars intro music, and Allison's mom thought that was terrible at first but came around to it. And I like that even with a knee-jerk negative reaction, she still tries to understand.

I wouldn't have missed it for the world though, family issues or no. Being able to witness and be part of Allison and Jonathan committing to each other was beautiful and sacred to me and I was so honored to be included.

This week my landlord told me I have to get out of my house by the end of the month, and then he took it back but I definitely am not safe here so I still have to get out as soon as possible.


Last week after allll the things, I ran out of energy and I realized that I don't have any to spare right now, and that it had been at least three weeks since Evelyn and I had an interaction that was nourishing to me. I've been feeling a lot of stress trying to maintain contact because they've been vague and brusque in responses which says to me that they don't want to be talking to me (because their natural cadence is verbose and specific). But then they tell me that it's not that they don't want to talk to me, and I have to discount my own senses and logic to believe them. I can only do this for so long before it starts to wear on my relationship with myself.

They're struggling to claim their own right to self-care, which I can very much empathize with but I find it really difficult to maintain my own self-care in such a situation because all I want to do is Be the Rescuer but that is so bad for everyone involved. So basically I need them to take care of themself at least SOME else I get filled with anxious urges I then have to spend a lot of energy fighting.

They had set a goal a couple of weeks ago to have at least one hour to themself every day, but they hadn't kept up with it. They spend literally every waking hour devoted to work or another person (not by request, but from their own impulse) and this wears them out to an extreme measure, by any standards. So I told them that until they manage to have a habit of at least a small daily amount of self-care, I need to be more cautious in my investment, which I will do by not initiating conversations or plans. I told them that I'm still open to seeing them and I'm happy to respond to whatever texts/emails they might send, but that essentially I wasn't going to devote initiatory energy to them right now. I tried to put it as gently and kindly as I could, but I think it might still have read to them as "you're not good enough and I hate you, get out" because they seem to see boundary-setting for self-care as a violent act, which is part of why it is so hard for them to do.

So, since they haven't responded at all, I don't know if they are angry, or sad, or just not bothering, or what. I texted once after sending the email to ask if they would at least send me two words to let me know if they had read it or not, but they either didn't get the text (their phone has been losing random chunks of my texts) or even that was too much. I don't want to break my intention by texting again so I'll just assume they read it and didn't feel able to respond.


Feeling the connection with Evelyn crumble slowly over the past few weeks was really disheartening because I thought things were changing, and I think I had good reason to think that. They made significant progress but they just slid back as far as they went forward. They didn't dig in and stay put. And I feel loss and I fear how long this will last -- is this another Aurilion? They show up in my life for a brief beautiful period and then vanish entirely for months or years? They told me they wouldn't leave, and I believed them. But so did Aurilion promise, every time they came back. So.

Oh also yesterday was the 7-year anniversary of my divorce.

I'm in a wedding on Sunday as part of the bridal party of my longest-term friend and going to the funeral of someone who was more of a grandparent to me than any of my biological grandparents on Sunday. There are way too many feelings with all this and the unstable housing situation and loads of empathy-stress from pretty much everyone I love. Also, my exercise ball (the one I was using at work) exploded and I was so focused on my work I didn't realize I was falling until I was on the floor and I bruised my butt and sprained my tailbone, which has been hurting ever since (though, nothing as bad as that first day, so I know it isn't broken). I'm overloaded on every level. Turned most of my feelings off until later. My ADD has been going absolutely haywire and I can barely manage to do the basics. Actually I can't really manage, I have forgotten to eat for most of this past week and then thrown some half-assed non-nutritious thing in my mouth to keep from falling apart. Just holding on.

So, I guess I put off the depression as long as I could. About three weeks ago I stopped being able to fend it off. I've been completely overwhelmed.

( illustrations from recent tweets )

I feel like there are blocks on every path but an increasing pressure pushing me forward against them. It seems like an endless succession of this-week-is-more-stressful-than-last, an endless series of needing to make efforts that I can't believe in. Every day that goes by with me not having a job feels like an additional punch of hopelessness and additional proof that I will never be valued by people in power enough to make even what I need to survive. I feel a need to protect myself from more punches so that I don't get too anxious/depressed to function or live, but I have no way to do so. So every day I feel more pressure to get a job immediately, which I have no real control over.

In five months of job hunting, I have applied to so many jobs, literally hundreds. I have gotten a response from no more than five. I have had one interview -- and not for one of the jobs that will actually pay a living wage, but from a cashiering job. Hopefully I will get that and it will tide me over until I can get something that will allow me to actually use my skills, live without excessive worry, and be able to help others. I suppose the good part of it is I have become much less afraid of applying in general. Constant rejection has burned out my sensitivity to it.

Most difficult is lacking something to look forward to. If there was something I could look forward to it would help, but literally every potential joy feels blocked off by one thing or another, and money is a large part of it of course. I can't imagine the future -- it is all greyed out and I feel completely helpless.

( my parents might kick me out of the house I am in )

Apologies to new friends -- it's not a great time to be meeting me, but hopefully things will take a turn for the better soon.

No advice, please, but as always you are welcome to share stories from your life.

So today was really shitty. Someone posted anonymously on two of my posts, on my hpv post calling me "promiscuous" (as if that's a thing) which wouldn't have bothered me if not for the other comment they left, saying that people shouldn't listen to me about cat food because I "poisoned and murdered" my betta fish. It was more than a year and a half ago that I wrote about Mercury's death.

That brought up all my guilt and regret over that... In the moment it felt so awful I felt like I was in a nightmare. My fish had gotten injured, its eye was swollen to 10 times normal size, seemed in pain, barely moved, wasn't eating. I felt bad for it and didn't want it to slowly starve to death in pain, and looked up ways to euthanize it. I watched a video where someone used clove to put their fish to sleep for a surgery (in a low dose you can use it as an anesthetic). It looked peaceful, painless, kind.

But when I tried it, I must have done something wrong, because my fish didn't peacefully drift off. It was clear that it was upset -- it had barely moved for three days and when I added the clove it started thrashing. I felt so awful. I regret it so deeply. I hate myself for it. I feel like I should have not tried something like that, I should have waited longer to see if my fish would improve. If I could go back in time I would undo it. I worry that the fish wasn't in pain at all until I caused pain and suffering and death. Maybe I killed it because looking at it stressed me out and I projected my suffering. I hate that I did this. I feel deeply ashamed.

I'm mentioning it now because this is how I cope with being afraid people will learn something shameful about me and hate me: I confess. Now you can make your choice and avoid me if you need to.

A few weeks ago Pluto (my last betta, which I got when I got Mercury) died, and I couldn't bear to move the body for days because I was worried that maybe it wasn't really dead and maybe I'd take it out and it would suffer and die from shock (it was very old and had been lethargic for months). I just... I could hardly process the death. I couldn't have borne accidentally causing another of my fish to suffer so much that it died.

Anyway the fact that this person clearly has been reading my stuff for a long time, wanted to discredit me, and wanted to hurt me is really disturbing. I think it was someone who was angry about me criticizing intellectual elitism and use of the slur st*pid. I have had plenty of trolls over the years, but trolls don't know how to hurt me. This person did. I don't know who it was, but congratulations, you hurt me. I have no defense about this: it was wrong and I wish I hadn't done it.

I've told this story many times now, though never as one piece: How Loss of Alone Time, Constant Caretaking, & Medication Stigma Almost Killed Me. In the worst period of my life, when I was suicidal for months and felt in more pain every day, I learned several vital things:

1) relationships don't have to be abusive to be profoundly damaging.
2) self-awareness is as necessary for safety as anything else.
3) I literally cannot handle living in a place where anyone wants my attention randomly every day.
4) just because you can caretake someone does not mean that you should.
5) giving doesn't have to be in huge pieces to take a huge toll.
6) once you are situationally depressed for long enough, your brain can forget how to be non-depressed and need chemical help.

I love Kylei as one of my favorite people, but living with them when they didn't have someone else to have casual social interaction with (and thus talked to me randomly through the day whenever we were both at home) was one of the most depressing and draining things I have ever experienced. It was just as bad for me -- if not worse than -- living with an abusive person.

It wasn't good for them either because the best I could offer was not enough to be nourishing, so it drained them also. Let me emphasize here: I was not doing anything that felt generous; I was not doing anything that was significantly helpful. I was allowing them to come into my room 3-4 times a day and randomly engage me in conversation for 1-3 minutes. That's it. I didn't think to tell them not to for months because it was 'such a small thing' that I could 'easily afford to give.' But it was torture for me. They were small gifts but they took superhuman effort from me.

I felt just as much need to hide as I did when I lived with my abusive parents. I had to be just as hypervigilant and seeing them became a stress to the point where we couldn't have any good interactions. Yet I missed them and was sad to have none of the connection that I wanted because there was too much of the unwanted! this made it even worse than when I was living with someone abusive who I didn't want to be around: that at least I could withdraw from and feel better. Withdrawing from Kylei made me feel worse because I missed them! But I just cannot deal with unexpected real-time interaction. It only took about six months of that for me to be drained to the point where I could not recognize myself.

There was additional stuff going on at the time, but most of the reason I can't handle this is because with my ADD-PI, that breaks down my ability to process anything; it literally shatters my ability to think. My thinking becomes disjointed and even more forgetful, like the thinking of a person who hasn't slept in three days. I can't do any art or reading or anything that matters to me at all, which rapidly increases any latent depression and makes me feel worthless.

I learned that I mustn't allow people to randomly talk to me when I am at home, that I mustn't take on responsibility as a person's only source of comfort (nor be more than 70% of their comfort), and that I mustn't be the only one initiating connection with anyone for more than a few months. I was doing all three of these things and together it made me drained to the point where I could not even feel the most basic motivation of my life: empathy.

I could no longer care about any suffering, human or otherwise. Even when I realized the problem and stopped it happening, nothing got better. My brain ran completely out of the chemicals necessary to feel happiness, and stayed there for about four months. Every day I would have said it couldn't hurt more and then the next day it did.


--------CN/TW: suicidal ideation, deep depression, medication, stigma against mental health medication (the rest of this entry)--------

I would have committed suicide if not for the fact that Topaz had already experienced too much tragedy for me to be able to handle the guilt of causing more pain for them. I daydreamed about making them hate me so that I could feel free from that guilt and able to kill myself, but that would have required me breaking my ethical code to do things that would cause them to hate me. I didn't think about anyone else. I didn't feel like anyone else would really care, even though I knew logically that people would mourn. I felt unloved and unloveable and it was only through Topaz proving daily that they cared that I managed to believe that they did love me.

Eventually I felt desperate enough that I went to get medication. I was put on citalopram, and after a month of slowly stepping it up, I stopped feeling worse every day. Just that was such a relief I can't even describe. After a few months, I started to feel better each day rather than just the same. A few months after that I started to feel aware of being numb and it started making me feel worse, so I weaned myself off of the drug. This all totaled maybe 8 months. Mental health medication saved my life.

There are people who push their personal quackery on others who are depressed, telling them to "just" exercise, meditate, think happy thoughts, take herbs, change their diet, etc. That might work if you're just feeling a little bad one day. It does not fucking work when your brain has worn a rut in the negative emotion pathways and forgotten that the positive emotion pathways even exist! Also, while talk therapy is effective and important, it only works if the problem is that you need to process your experiences -- it doesn't work if the problem is chemical!

I suffered so much longer and so much worse than I had to, because of the stigma against depression medication. If not for the coincidental timing of Topaz, stigma against medication would have killed me. I did not try to get medication until after I was already suicidal enough to go through with it. I will not take any of that quackery lightly because it literally kills people.

My heart sings to me today through Florence + the Machine. It started with



"Heavy heavy i'm so heavy in your arms
(i'm so) Heavy heavy i'm so heavy in your arms
(i'm so) Heavy heavy i'm so heavy in your arms
(i'm so) Heavy heavy i'm so heavy in your arms

I was a heavy heart to carry
my beloved was weighed down
My arms around your neck
My fingers laced to crown

I was a heavy heart to carry
But you never let me down
When you had me in your arms
My feet never touched the ground

And is it worth the wait
All this killing time?
Are you strong enough to stand
Protecting both your heart and mine?"



Today I was feeling increasingly overwhelmed with sadness, with this longing ache, and I wasn't sure if it was mine, or the pain of someone I am connected to. It didn't feel poisonous or like it was damaging me, it just felt desperate, needing expression, needing LOUD needing SHOUTS, and I was grateful that today Serenity was away from the house because I went to the living room and put that song on (it had been repeating in my mind), put it loud, and sang and screamed along and wept and sobbed and danced in fury and meaning, flinging my roots down and my wings wide, thrashing wild. I kept on listening to more songs from Florence + the Machine's "Lungs" and "Ceremonials," singing and gesturing fiercely to the music.

I tell myself it will be worth the wait, I can make it through the slow death of time, I'll eventually be able to have joy that is not constantly strangled by they far-too-long sharply-thin unbreakable strings of my stress and have growth that doesn't wither every time I put out a new leaf. I try so hard to believe me, but part of me doesn't believe such a thing exists.

My heart is so heavy and I'm the only one strong enough to carry it. Why couldn't it be lighter? why couldn't I have people around me with light enough hearts and strong enough arms that they could help me with mine? But people with light hearts don't develop strong arms and people with heavy hearts always seem at their max. We don't know how to say no to carrying for others unless it will actually break us... so we allow gradually more and more to be added until we can't carry our own and end up dragging it behind on a leash, getting bruised and cut and bashed by every slightest bump in the road.



And every demon wants his pound of flesh
But I like to keep some things to myself
I like to keep my issues drawn

And it's hard to dance with a devil on your back
So shake him off, oh whoa

And I am done with my graceless heart
So tonight I'm gonna cut it out and then restart
'Cause I like to keep my issues drawn
It's always darkest before the dawn

And I'm damned if I do and I'm damned if I don't
So here's to drinks in the dark at the end of my road
And I'm ready to suffer and I'm ready to hope
It's a shot in the dark aimed right at my throat
'Cause looking for heaven, found the devil in me
Looking for heaven, found the devil in me
Well what the hell
I'm gonna let it happen to me

White men: we need you to start talking to other white men when they cause you pain. Only you are able & responsible to teach them empathy.

Note: do not complain to them about how some oppressed person hurt you; this only reinforces their dys-empathy. And do not talk about your pain to oppressed people without permission. We are forced to do too much emotional caretaking already.

On the other hand, IF you have permission, talking about the pain of your oppressed friend/love/family member in a sympathetic way to another white man is also effective. For instance, responding to a rape joke by talking about how your friend was raped and has ptsd and how it affects their life. Make SURE you have permission for this, else you are violating your friend's confidence. I give permission for anything I have shared publicly to be shared again, but this is not true for anyone but me!

( topaz )

( kylei )

( heather )

( allison )

( cass )

( serenity )

( arizona and evelyn and etc )

Last night was really wonderful. Topaz hosted a gather and Sande, Allison, Heather, Brian, Cass, and Jess came, and the 8 of us had alcohol and snacks and just hung out and talked. It was very relaxed. I got very drunk (first time in a long while, and more drunk than usual). I got sad at one point, thinking about Kylei and feeling abandoned, but people were kind to me and helped me feel better.

I loved watching everyone interact. I think this is the first time I felt like Allison was there for more than just me -- it's quite possible that happened before but this time I felt like Allison would still have attended if I didn't, and that made me happy. And I didn't catch much of what was being said, but Sande and Topaz seemed to have conversations with lots of resonance which pleased me lots. And I cuddled with Topaz and Sande and Cass and a little with Allison, all of which were sweet nourishing cuddles.

I'm realizing the more I think on it that I am really deeply sad about Kylei. I feel really lost and adrift. I feel a deep sadness in the loss of hope for being close with them anytime soon. I think it could still happen eventually but I no longer can trick myself into thinking it's just around the corner, next week maybe. It's not going to be soon. And I miss Kylei in particular, or rather, I miss the way we used to connect. I miss their magic. I miss doing magic together.

prompt from ragnarok_08: What was the most sobering thing your parents have said to you?

What comes to mind most strongly is my parent M telling me that no one would ever love me as much as M did. This bothered me at the time but it took me a while to fully understand why. For one thing, it felt like a threat; "I am your greatest source of love so you better value me because if you don't, you just won't get love." For another, M has almost never made me feel loved, so it felt like they were simply telling me I was unlovable and I should expect that people who claimed to love me would try to control my every action, disallow me to show negative feelings and demand that I placate their negative feelings, devalue the parts of me that I most loved, seek me out only to get me to do work for them, show no appreciation beyond a temporary cessation of criticism, and give to others what I crave while pretending to treat me the same. I think this is why when these patterns crop up (in far milder ways), they feel so normal that I do not realize them for a while. I simply get more and more convinced of my own worthlessness. I think I need to note feeling worthless as a sign that I'm falling into these expectations again.

Honestly when I look at my childhood I'm amazed that I managed to learn how to love at all. I always thought that I was relatively well-off as far as escaping abuse goes, but I didn't realize 1) that I was physically abused and 2) that I was almost entirely emotionally neglected and was emotionally abused. M would tell me that they loved me at least every other day and would give me a hug before bed. From at least the age of 8, I never wanted this hug and never felt any truth in those words; it was part of a ritual I had to perform to keep my parents from being mean to me in response to perceived rejection. I would feel angry that they were saying "I love you" when they never showed any care for my feelings at all and literally told me on several occasions "I don't care how you feel." For years, I refused to say the words "I love you" unless I was currently overwhelmed by a feeling of love (thus, never saying it in response) in order that I would be sure to never say it meaninglessly like M did.

M mistakes a desire to own as love. M wants to own me, to have me care about their opinion and want to please them, to build up the qualities that M values and erase the ones M does not, to behave in a way that makes M feel good about themselves, to enjoy and desire M's company. M in fact thinks that being my progenitor means that they have the right to these things. M was physically and emotionally abused by their parents, so I understand why they don't know what love is. However, I think they have a responsibility to learn in order to reduce the harm they cause others, and I consider it reprehensible that they choose to protect their pride at the cost of hurting everyone around them.

2015

"Shriek"

An abstract fractal in christmas green, coral orange, and bright rose red with accents of fuchsia, peach, and capri blue on a black background. At the top in the center is what looks like a snarling cat or hissing cobra, in profile facing left. Just underneath is another could-be face, this one like a dog, facing right and sniffing the 'air' of colored light, which you can see swirling into the dog's nose. In front of the dog's face is a bowing-out bubble of swirling blurry colors. Above that bubble behind the cat/cobra's head is a fragmented reflection that could be of the cat/cobra or the dog or both. In front of the cat/cobra's face is a misshapen cone of green light, with some flecks of other colors: it looks as if the cat/cobra is exhaling this and it is pouring down over the back of the dog's head. Neither creature has a body.

---



January
1-4 -- visiting biofam: racism, discussing sexual abuse history, misgendering, prompting family to grow
2 -- visiting Anika: having deep talks w Anika & energy work
* Unethical behavior: loopholes out of agreements, poking people's sore spots *
4 -- ritual for Nuit and Renenutet, Topaz keeps me company
7 -- I make a friending meme
-- trying to develop closeness with Anika
11 -- have a somewhat-disastrous crafty party where a new attendee says things that are very problematic and hurtful to Allison
17 -- I decide to require require gender-neutral pronouns in reference to me
18 -- ritual with LilyWolf for connections
24 -- met up with Cass and had our first meaningful one-on-one conversation
* 5-step educate or eliminate / when I realize I'm wrong / reducing privilege effects *
-- hung out with Heather at least once a week

February
2 -- Kei-won-tia has a major crisis, I find out through Abby, try to get in touch w KWT but can't.
4 -- meet Jezza for one-on-one conversation
6 -- have a great birthday night with Topaz, Kylei, Sydney, Heather, and Lilywolf; Allison, Nick, and Hannah drop in. I set up a photo-booth of sorts with weird colorful lighting and take some photos of people.
7 -- went to Heritage Park with Sydney & Topaz
9 -- met Kayla for dinner and conversation
* forms of intimacy and societal assumptions made: there is no highest form of intimacy *
11 -- my grandmother is in the hospital; I see my aunt and cousins for the first time in years
12 -- have intense conversation w Anika and Kei-won-tia about openness and intimacy and assumptions
* overwhelmed and ineffectual / cowardly and shit at making friends *
14 -- I get up in front of a huge number of people and speak a short poem about trans erasure.
** the intersection of openness, intimacy, and privacy as it relates to me **
20-24 -- Topaz and I go to the last Xenacon, which is worth it but emotionally very difficult because I can't bring myself to talk to anyone and I'm allergic to the air.
27 -- Heather casts runes for me on my next romantic relationship: I get 'wait wait wait'
28 -- art swap at Jezza's: my sorta-kinda first show of my fractals.
-- conflict with Kei-won-tia continues throughout the month, ends in them telling me they need to be able to lie to their friends.

March
7 -- I experience my first kirtan, with Heather.
* helping people figure out their desires without taking responsibility for their self-awareness *
11 -- march for Anthony Hill (with Jaime & Lilywolf)
13 -- meet Lisa in person for the first time! we hang out for the day.
15 -- mostly-online crafty party with Topaz, Jaime, Paige, Heather, Leah, Anika, Jezza, and Lilywolf.
** what nourishes me in friendship: self-care/growth/awareness, shared passion/enthusiasm, creating together, spiritual working together, asking me meaningful specific questions, cuddles/focused touch, gifts of effort **
28 -- Anika visits, Topaz and I take them to the Cherry Blossom Festival
** PSA: use of ableist slurs will cause me to unfriend you **
31 -- I pick up Anika from KWT's and take them to Big Trees and to my favorite metaphysical shop

April
2 -- do magic ritual with Anika, Topaz picks us up after
3 -- drinking and playing red dragon inn w Anika, Heather, Topaz, Kylei.
4-5 -- KWT is supposed to spend time w Anika but doesn't... lots of complex shit between Anika and KWT. KWT is supposed to take them to the airport but I do it instead.
9 -- crafty party: Lily & Fey & Alisha in-person, Anika & Paige & Allison online
** slurs are still very harmful when they are aimed at a situation/action/thing instead of a person **
** emotional/artistic work is still work / types of cuddles: giving, receiving, sharing, passive **
** essential qualities to be a good cuddler: good at consent, emotionally present & aware, not in need **
-- school stress
-- made a set of reflection beads
-- applied to be a professional cuddler: they wanted to exploit their workers, no thanks.

May
-- exhausted
4 -- sweet nourishing time w Kylei
* my eating habits: what I don't eat at all, what I generally avoid, favorite meals & ingredients *
* realization: I need group intimacy as well as one-on-one *
13 -- meet Rachel in Atlanta for lunch
15 -- sleepover w Odd Squad and truth-or-truth w Nicky & Aubrey via ghangouts
17 -- first zikr w Kaleemi Khanqah Atlanta
20 -- start work at my uni
* 4 levels of friendship: fun, support, learning, mutual accountability *
26 -- truth-or-truth gchat w Aubrey, Vola, Elizabeth, Jaime
** on the 'rudeness' of canceling/lateness caused by chronic pain/fatigue/anxiety/depression and/or ADD **
** energy work: 1st efforts, shielding / a funnel not a source / avoiding manipulation **

June
-- stressssssss
1 -- TransParence gather at my house: Jaime, Jazz, Jude, Hope, Serah, Allison, Michelle
4-10 -- Elizabeth visits! we do alllllll the things
5 -- shopping & Kirtan at SEWA w Elizabeth
6 -- Etowah Mounds w Elizabeth & Jaime, then chill game night w Elizabeth, Heather, Jaime, Topaz, Allison, Jonathan
7 -- Big Trees w Elizabeth & Topaz, then Cracker Barrel for dinner & Breakfast on Pluto with dessert.
8 -- to Margaret Mitchell house and Marietta square with Elizabeth.
9 -- to carlos museum then revolution doughnuts with Elizabeth, then Topaz makes us dinner.
10 -- take Elizabeth to airport.
13 -- intense videochat w Anika about the lack of balanced investment in our relationship
-- scattered ???
** why I identify as demisexual / what makes sex worth the effort / sexual vs sensual touch / kissing **

July
-- very stressed, can't seem to do much
-- Heather is out of town the whole month
12 -- host cuddly communion #1 w Serah, Alison, Hope, Evelyn, Cass, Heather D, and Joey.
-- elsewise, nothing but work & rest & topaz & writing
** rant: friendships are important / my levels of relationship for everyone **
* what makes me fall in love & how it feels when I am in love *
*** on saving kids from 'broken hearts' & teaching kids about consent / red flags for bad-at-consent ***
* on changing the amount of fat on your body: cortisol, blood sugar, stress, food as fat/carb/protein *
** 4 elements needed for me to feel sexual attraction: consent, bodily respect, awareness, generosity **
* depression is not a cramp, it's a broken bone: a 'mild' situation has intense effects when depressed *

August
* Open letter to self-proclaimed reasonable white dudes *
13 -- see Arizona, we have very connected time
16 -- host an OPALS meeting which is just me and Johan, also have an amazing talk w Evelyn at Cool Beans
20 -- emotionally falling apart
* too many variations to out myself in a sentence / wordweaving & thought remodeling are central to me *
23-29 -- time at the beach w biofam
30 -- OPALS meeting w me, Saleena, Alison, and Serah

September
-- dealing with name change paperwork, lots of trips to courthouse and notary
-- exhausted and overwhelmed, lonely
-- topaz' family has health troubles
-- run out of hope for being close friends with Evelyn
* lonely in any crowd / spirit-to-spirit contact / conflict is a tool of intimacy *
23 -- feeling terribly unwanted
27 -- OPALS meeting w just me & Garnet
-- make chant booklet for my reflection beads

October
1 -- worst I felt in a year, unwanted, useless
15 -- present about appropriation at Sex Down South, no energy to go the other days
* how I manage my neuro-atypicality in relation to others *
31 -- walked Springer Mountain w Topaz, then had a bonfire at their place w Topaz, Heather, Brian, Cass, Kelsey, and Elliott
-- spending more time w Topaz' family
-- reading The History of White People

November
** an analogy to explain why the privileged are responsible for ending oppression: the racist babysitter **
*** after learning more about microbes, I no longer believe in an afterlife ***
** people demonize spanking because of classism / how corporeal punishment damaged me **
** trust: what builds it and what burns it, for me **
* the art of hugs *
** if you mourn only for the deaths of white people, your empathy is broken. and racist. **
16 -- cry for hours
17 -- see bell hooks & gloria stienem
19-22 TBC w Topaz
27 -- name change denied
-- investing more in getting to know Cass

December
-- loads of work on final papers, getting minors made official, getting my name sorted
* 5 qualities needed to practice polyamory: awareness, norm-breaking, security, energy, connection *
6 -- great connected time w Cass
15 -- graduation
** my ADD-PI: stimming and prosopagnosia (difficulty recognising faces) **
* creating your own moral code: a ritual for finding your core values & strengthening focus on them *
* ritual tool: reflection beads for my core values, desires, gratitudes, people, deities, & nature kin *
19 -- Solstice gather! Kat, Summer, Abby, Topaz, Kylei, Heather, Sydney, Jaime, Allison, & Jonathan came and Cass vidchatted in due to being sick
22 -- Arizona visited with me for a little while at my house
23 -- breakup w Anika
24 -- Gabe reveals their transphobia
25 -- Xmas at Topaz' family, exhausting, realize how much worse my family is
26 -- time w Abby in the morning, walking in nature and then cuddling at my house, then intense time w Abby & Topaz at Topaz'
27 -- breakfast, coffee, cuddles w Topaz & Abby
28 -- terrible crash of a morning, bad for Abby, bad for me, bad for Topaz. endless crying.
29 -- awful day, more endless crying. reach out to Allison for the first time, feel glad that that feels okay to do.
** prosopagnosia and memory as it relates to taking photos and believing in love **
30 -- recovering some
31 -- connected time w topaz



2015 started off in an intense but growthful way for me, as I had my first ever real conversation with my biosib S, visited Anika and had deep talks with them. I also did a ritual for deities (something I had never done before), and another ritual for connection, connected in new ways with Allison and Cass, and spent a lot of time with Heather. Then Kei-won-tia had a major crisis and I was very worried about them but didn't really get to talk to them until two weeks later. They got very upset with me for talking about my worries to Heather, and there was a whole huge mess which finally ended when they said that they need to be able to lie to their friends. During the same month as the KWT conflict, I had a bunch of other really intense experiences -- Xenacon, my first art show (sorta), speaking about trans erasure in front of loads of people, gma in hospital, interacting with family I hadn't seen in years.

March was more nourishing and less draining, with my first kirtan, my first protest march, and my first time taking Anika to Big Trees. April turned sour with a huge conflict between KWT and Anika, and otherwise intense school stress. In May I had some good connected time with friends and experienced my first zikr, but overall I was exhausted. Lilywolf moved out which was sad and relieving and stressful, and I started working at my university as a student assistant. June started out with a bang, a trans-connection party followed by a wonderful visit from Elizabeth (which included my first visit to a Sikh service), and then became scattered and lost under stress, mostly shared/reflected stress from how awful Topaz' job is, I think. In July I hosted a 'cuddly communion' which was wonderful but otherwise that entire month was empty of nourishment. In August I had some connected times with friends, and spent 6 days with my biofamily which is both good and exhausting; August marked the first of monthly breakdowns, though I don't notice this pattern until later. In September Topaz' family started having health troubles, and I dealt with the laborious process of applying to change my name.

October I felt the worst I have felt in a year, managed to present at Sex Down South but felt so socially anxious I couldn't talk to anyone and couldn't participate in the conference; I went home crying. I started spending more time with Topaz' family (which is nourishing in some ways but a lot of added stress) because they all seemed to be feeling the need for more company with each other due to the health worries. I started actively building a friendship with Cass around this time. In November I was massively stressed and overwhelmed, but seeing bell hooks and getting to attend TBC gave me enough energy that I was able to give three talks and speak on a panel, and handle some very difficult emotional conversations and realizations with Topaz. But November ended with me finding out that my name change was denied, which is massively crushing. December started with me finishing my 2 huge final papers and giving a presentation for school, doing a shitton of paperwork and hoop-jumping to get my minors made official and my name read correctly at the ceremony, then finally graduating (where my biofamily mostly flaked out and I realized that my dad was planning for a graduation present for my cousin but didn't even congratulate me). I only had three days to recover before Solstice, which was the best ever though hugely energy-consuming. Then I had an intense conflict with Cass, then Arizona visited me briefly which made me miss them a lot, then Anika broke up our friendship by attacking me, then Gabe (my emotionally-adopted little brother) revealed that they're transphobic by choice not by ignorance, then I spent Xmas with Topaz' family which made me realize how bad my biofamily is, then I spent an intense morning with Abby and an intense evening with Abby and Topaz, and finally I had a massive terrible crash that negatively affected both Abby and Topaz and lasted almost through the end of the year. Honestly, reading over December I'm amazed that I made it through without falling apart much more. That was so much, way too much.

Looking back over this, I feel like losing KWT set off a sharp increase in my social anxiety because when we initially became friends, it was built on mutually valuing intimacy and openness -- I actually felt that KWT was better at being open than I was, that they were more willing to take risks in sharing. To have them do such a complete turnaround and say that they value lies in friendship and they want to control who knows what about them was so shocking and confusing that it made me feel like I can't know people, I can't believe them, and I can't find ones that I can genuinely connect with. A similar thing happened with Anika -- I can’t explain because it would be a breach of their privacy but even though it wasn’t the same on the surface, it felt very VERY similar. That followed by the OPALS meetings falling by the wayside and getting very hopeful about a new friend only to have that vanish -- by the time I got through September I was feeling so deeply sad about friendships that despite my repressing, I was having at least one multi-hour crying jag a month about it.

So overall, 2015 brought me a huge increase in social anxiety although the relationships that I currently have are mostly at all-time highs and are overall very nourishing. I think I learned a lot through my black feminisms class in the spring, my internship, my whiteness class in the fall, and TBC, and I made a lot of progress in designing my spiritual practice, but I feel like my interpersonal life stalled out in most ways, and I lost myself as far as my social self goes. This year I will regain my social self.

The other day I had a terrible depressive crash and I cried from 9am to 4pm, almost solid. The worst point was when I thought to myself that I could feel the truth that I am loved if I could picture someone looking at me lovingly. But I couldn't. I can't picture people's faces in my head, not even when I look at them and then close my eyes. I don't think it's just coincidence that the two people who have made me feel the most loved even when we're apart for a long time are the same as the two people who I have taken the most photos of. I can remember photos. And when I take the photo and then look at it, I can access that moment. So if I can take photos of people in moments where I feel loved, I can access that memory almost like other sighted people can in general. I feel like no one understands this as an access need. "You can't NEED to take a photo."

I remember someone talking about how taking photos requires consent and although I agree, it makes me uncomfortable because other sighted people can just look and remember, but I can't, so in not taking photos I am blocked off from remembering. I wish it was just a general habit that people took photos but never shared them without consent, so that it wouldn't be a problem for others. I understand that it is, and I respect that. But it means that my memory is a dark blurry mazelike gallery that I traverse with a flashlight. If I could take photos any time I was in a loved moment, I wouldn't have such a hard time believing that it's true. I can't just flip through memories- and my memory gets significantly worse when I am depressed or stressed.

If I had only one wish that applied only to my own self, I would wish for a perfect memory. Not money, not even love or the ability to find all the people who would be good connections for me. My lack of memory is the most painful part of my life. I can't even remember my own favorite things (music, books, etc), which is why I write them down. Otherwise I have to go actually look through what I own to know, and if I don't own it, it could be one of my very favorite books and I wouldn't remember it. I don't know if the bad memory and the prosopagnosia are related, but they make each other much worse.

This has been an incredibly hard week. Anika attacked me and scorned my efforts and was cruel to me. I feel drained and devalued every time I think about it.

Gabe (my little brother, emotionally, who I love more than any blood kin except Ace) revealed that he doesn't see me as a person and that he is transphobic. He posted a 'joke' about Caitlyn Jenner and when I commented (which took a herculean effort), he edited the post to fill it up with the reasons he thinks transphobia is fine. That is so much worse than I thought. I was assuming that he was just ignorant, but apparently he knows and simply chooses to believe that being queer or trans is wrong. I couldn't even deal with that. I tried to post a response comment but it either got deleted or didn't go through and I just couldn't post again. This is a sharp pain every time I remember it. It means I have no chance of being loved by the first people who ever made me feel appreciated and valued. It's effectively formal notice that if I were to reach out to them, I would be rejected without possibility of them reconsidering.

And then there was that realization I had on Christmas eve that my bioparent M (who is rich) suggested that my aunt give my cousin a flight to Japan for a graduation present (this was in a group email).  M did not offer such a gift to me and it seems to not even have occurred as a thought. Not only that, but I asked M for help with money this month because my work is closed for three weeks and then the pay cycle is exactly off so that the next paycheck I will get is three weeks into January.  Rather than responding, M forwarded an email from the terrible HOA who constantly complain about my yard.  No, I'm not going to fucking rake the leaves because that serves NO PURPOSE and DAMAGES the plants and the insects who need those leaves for cocooning.  Seriously.  M claims to give a shit about me, but can't be moved to help me when I need it, while giving money to my siblings and cousins etc who don't actually need it, because M wants their good opinion.  Also, while making more than 300% what P is making -- PLUS full military retirement -- M is requiring P to pay half of the bills at their place. They're married.  M is a fucking awful person -- the financial evil is honestly one of their lesser faults. 

Then my pibling and cousins (who live very close) call me on Christmas to tell me merry christmas, leaving a voicemail??? when they didn't fucking invite me and haven't, literally ever.  I just felt like that was a slap in the face.  Just pretend that you forgot I existed, like all the other times.  Don't rub my face in it.

Topaz' family reminded me how I have (almost) never gotten a thoughtful gift from my parents (because they gave me and Topaz thoughtful presents) and also gave me smelly presents (body spray, lotion) that reminded me of just how bad M's 'gifts' were. Plus I'm really fucking stressed about money and about not having the truck dealt with and I have to get my tag renewed which means I have to go talk to Jeff who has been on hold with the truck in their lot for more than a month, thanks to M not keeping their promise. And Kylei was gone which would have been minor except I really needed another close person this week.

And then there's good, exciting, but nervousness-inducing stuff happening and people keep thinking that my upsetness is about that, which is also upsetting. (I'll explain in a locked post)

So I realized I'm in the midst of a depressive crash. I feel like a sodden lump of disgusting worthlessness. I keep flickering between desperately craving connection and wanting to avoid all people so that I don't inflict my irrational overemotional fearful upsetting energy on them. I'm dealing the best I can, putting my trust in my close ones to help me decide on the truth since I can't find it myself. I can't trust my memory or perceptions based on memory on a good day, and in depression it gets so much worse. The demons in my head jab at every sore spot, and I cannot rationalize them away because I can't remember facts that would counteract them.

My soul hurts.

apparently my bad dreams are coming true. Last night I dreamed I was at the beach with Topaz, and we went to a food truck. Topaz went to do something else and I waited in line, patiently, even though there was no one ahead of me and they didn't call me to the front. I waited for half an hour. Then they announced that it was 6pm and they weren't serving any more, looking to the side of me as if I wasn't there. I started crying and woke myself up with it.

Then today I check the mail and I have received a response to my name change with pauper's affidavit attached. They denied it. No reason, just "no." The cost for a name change is more than a third of what I make in a month. I do not have even an extra $20 much less an extra $200+. I think they denied me because they knew they could get away with it and they don't want to help people who can't pay, just on principle.

I feel so fucking hopeless. I made two trips to court and two trips to the notary to get this done. It was one of the hardest things I have done in at least two years. I can't even explain how difficult it was to do. I have a huge amount of fear around filling out any paperwork that says 'make a mistake and we throw you in jail' even if I am being really careful and don't think logically that that would happen. Driving to places is hard because every time I drive I am hyper aware that my car could break down, and because gas costs money which I don't have enough of. Dealing with paperwork is hard because I fear trapping myself somehow. Talking to people who are involved in the legal system is hard because I hate it and being around them feels like wading through a pool of sleeping piranhas.

All that work, and stress, and pushing against overwhelming fear, for nothing.

I dreamed last night that I happened to go to my ex-spouse's family's old house, and they were all there hanging out and playing, and my biofamily (aunts and cousins) were there too. And they were like "what are you doing here?" with surprise but not even embarrassed that they had left me out and I knew. If they had any emotions about it, it was slight annoyance that I was there. I hadn't consciously been thinking about family but apparently knowing that I was going to be hanging out with Topaz' family today was bringing stuff up already.

Then while we were there today there was a moment where I felt abandoned and it triggered old feelings (of being abandoned, ignored, and lied to) which apparently haven't lost their power? Must I go through this every time I am around someone's biofamily? I'm so tired of it. But I feel like I'm always on probation and always will be, because I can't be enough of myself to even tell if they would accept me if they actually knew me. So... forever uncertain, constantly on edge.

Sydney was there and they had some really good talks with Topaz and me. I wish they lived closer so that I could spend more time with them.

Today was just really hard. I'm craving touch but have a hard time asking for it because if I ask without being able to handle a 'no' that's pressurey and gross, but there are only so many 'no's I can handle per period of time. So if I ask and get a no, it takes a while before I can ask again. And I associate having to ask for touch with being unloved, so it's this tangled mess -- I feel the need for reassurance that I am loved if gifted touch doesn't just happen.

Because when I love someone I crave touching them, so even though I logically understand that that isn't true for everyone, I don't emotionally understand it. Lots of people feel a strong urge to pet a kitten or puppy when they are nearby - I feel this about humans I love. It can be physically difficult for me to hold back (if we are in public and they aren't comfortable with PDA for instance).

Yesterday and today have been overwhelmingly emotional. Yesterday was emotional in general, but especially intimacy practice. We had two newbies and usually that means a somewhat low-key practice as newbies usually need at least one practice to get familiar enough to participate fully. But not this time! Everyone shared very openly and there was a lot of resonance around the circle. Everyone had intense topics and even truth-or-truth was intense, yet we finished in 3 hours and as far as I could tell everyone felt nourished. Topaz was actually energized! Afterward Topaz and Heather played "pump it up" (I graciously declined). It was the first time we'd had newbies in a long time, over a year I'm sure. I remembered/realized some things that I will explain when I do the intimacy practice talk at TBC.

But it brought up some stuff I had been repressing - ( my sense of failure at making new friends )

October 2:
I feel alienated from myself due to not writing. There's just so much going on all the time and I crave rest and feel like I never get any time. I start writing something on my phone, get halfway or even 90% done and stall. Yet I have been so productive in some ways. I've been doing things that are hard and scary for me. I've been keeping up with my heavy reading load, plus reading some extra. I've made two chokers and a pair of earrings, completed a very involved spiritual tool, worked on my forest crown, and completed an artwork for Kylei (a wall scroll with adjectives for the qualities I love most about Kylei). I just feel like I have no time for writing because I'm always either busy or brain-fried.

October 8:
Dreamed that I met and fell in love with a tall gangly black transwoman and woke up sad that they don't exist.

Today:
I'm sure you're all sick of hearing about this but I'm crushed about how incapable I am of making friends in-person. I don't know if I got worse or if I just never felt a desire to try before. I literally feel incapable. I sit there and try to push myself to talk to someone and nothing comes out. Yet I can make easy conversation with strangers whom I don't feel a desire to befriend. Maybe I'm just burnt from all my fails at making in-person friends. I don't really understand why it feels like such a giant need. I have Topaz and Kylei and Heather -- all local, meaningful, mature, nourishing connections. It's maybe not that I need more people but just that I need to be able to talk to people and I feel cut off when I can't. It's hard when I can't talk to people because they're full of terrible ideas but it's actually worse when they're not terrible and I just can't get my brain or mouth or anything to go. I really do have to make cards or else I don't think I will get past this.

How's this: "I'm terrible at initiation with interesting strangers but I would like to have a conversation if you wanna answer one of these questions [3 interesting questions] - or ask me anything!"
Or
"I'm terribly awkward, hi! I would like to have a conversation...[same finish as previous]"

Godde I'm ridic.

It also hurts my feelings every single time that no one thinks I am interesting enough to initiate a conversation with me. They talk to each other so clearly some of them are curious enough about each other. What is wrong with me? Do I radiate some negative vibe or just seem unapproachable? I really wish I knew.

In better news, I did get the talk on spiritual appropriation done for Sex Down South and it inspired useful conversation though I don't think most people liked it. I think two or three people liked it, at least 3 disliked it, and the other 5 or 6 didn't say much. There was a white yoga teacher who spoke in a way I found confusing, so I'm not entirely sure what they were saying but as I was critiquing the whole idea of a white yoga teacher I can't imagine they liked it. I hope everyone at least went away considering how they consume if not how they practice. I'm gonna do some edits before TBC, definitely want to add more quotes and probably set up a slideshow to illustrate (which I will describe as each image comes up).

Also Topaz is going with me to TBC this year, which is exciting and hugely relieving. I have a project payment from work that should go to other things but it isn't, because skipping TBC is way worse than a broken fridge.

I feel like no one talks about the loneliness of rejecting oppression. It's like being a creature that looks like its surrounding creatures but isn't, while the surrounding creatures just don't have the ability to connect with you the way you need. How there's this missing piece in most interactions. Their words, their kindnesses, their touch, their thoughts, just don't reach.

I can never tell by looking. I can't tell by touching. I can't tell by smell or taste or sound. I have to investigate their mind, and it takes such work, and the longer I go the more it stings when suddenly I fall into a poisoned thornbush of defensive privilege and refusal to empathize or learn. It takes so very much risk for me to connect. There are so few people who are safe. There are some who are safer than others, because I know where the thornbushes are and there are few enough that I can avoid them. But it still takes work because conversation changes the landscape and I can't predict when a thornbush will show up. I can never relax.

I marvel and shake my head at people who don't have this experience. Getting to know people, for them, is just about shared hobbies and lack of deliberate attacks, plus good intentions. Those are so easy to find, comparatively. So EASY!

Most humans need skin-to-skin contact. If they lack it, they feel a thing called "skin hunger." I spent my minor years in such a state of skin hunger that I would feel rage when people touched me accidentally, because I blocked it out and the slightest touch would open it up, which HURT. I think there is a similar thing for spirit-to-spirit contact.

I need spirit-to-spirit contact. But I can't have it with most people because if I run into a thornbush in that state, it will shut me down. It's shocking and painful: a sudden dehumanization while being in the most vulnerable state. And so many people don't even know how to make that contact to begin with. So there's already almost no safe people. And then there's even fewer who know how to make this kind of contact; yet fewer who aren't in such a state of spirit hunger that they won't devour you accidentally.

Sometimes I find someone who I can tell could share this spirit-to-spirit contact with me, but they're surrounded by thornbushes. That's the worst, but it also crushes me when they're mostly free of thornbushes but the world sucks so much from them that they don't have the energy to connect. That happens almost every time, because people don't usually clear their thornbushes unless they have endured the trauma of oppression, and that trauma drains your energy.

(I feel like I just realized why mixed-status relationships are more common than I would expect- the effort it takes to call someone out (if they are empathetic and growth-focused) may be less than the effort it takes to support someone else through their oppression while daily dealing with your own. I've never been genuinely close to someone who didn't have at least two axis of oppression, but I can imagine it's a relief to rarely be called on to comfort your close ones' suffering.)

Every person with whom I have felt that 'click' that should allow for easier, deeper connection but did not because of  thornbushes or trauma or lack of energy or space or time -- every one of those people I feel a gap in my life. Even if I think they are full of awful hateful ideas, I can still feel what SHOULD be and I still crave it.

I'm so passionately dedicated to creating intimacy wherever I can because I feel the holes where it should be. I know that some people probably see me quite negatively for for my furious and often rude resistance of evil. But human intimacy cannot exist without conflict because humans vary and that causes conflict. And in a world full of oppression, there's a shitton of trauma connected to that variation, which makes conflict way more common and way more difficult.

I used to avoid conflict because I wanted to be seen as a loving person. I wanted to be seen as loving more than I wanted to change this hateful world to one where love could flourish. I have given up being seen as loving. People who understand intimacy will understand that I am loving and that is enough.

I need more connection. I need to not have to fight endlessly through barriers to feel connection. I need it to exist for me in more than just two or three people in my 32 years of life! This is part of the reason I work to do whatever I can to create justice. It is only in a more just world that I have any chance of having my needs met. I don't just crave a world that doesn't damage people. I crave a world where I can meet a person, feel a click with them, and explore that with joy, knowing that there will not be evil dysempathetic ideas lurking or so much trauma and energy-drain that I cannot connect with them.

I have not killed off my naive former self who literally wanted to be intimate with every human. I fight against those who attack intimacy with oppression and denial, so that maybe someday another spirit like mine will have more of a chance of doing what my child self wished. I fight for all those who suffer and I fight for that little part of me that can't help hoping. I won't ever stop. I will not avoid conflict. It is not only a necessary tool for creating intimacy, but perhaps the greatest one.

This week I'm visiting my biofamily: parents M and P, sibling Ace, grandparent V, pibling (parents' sibling) L and cousin E. I don't have a laptop with me so I probably won't be able to read anything until September 2nd-ish, but I'm going to try to keep up with posting anyway.

Yesterday was the drive to meet my parents. Topaz brought me to my pibling's house and took me and Ace to coffee while we waited for everyone else to get ready. Parting with Topaz was difficult because we're both going to miss each other a lot, not least because we cuddle a LOT and they don't really cuddle with others and I am really particular about how I'm touched so negotiating cuddles with biofamily seems stressful and I fear I will just avoid touch (though, good job me, I asked for hugs this morning and got them). Wow run-on.

Before we left I was trying to convince Ace to consolidate their stuff into one bag to make space, and they got frustrated and told me that they were upset that I was bossing them around. I took that in and it took me like 30 seconds to respond, apologizing for being domineering. Usually when I see that my behavior is not ethical I immediately apologize without effort, but for some reason I had to really push myself to do it this time. I found that really weird. I know my biofamily tends to see that as 'losing' so maybe that made it harder. But once I did, Ace forgave me right away and it was done (and they were fine with consolidating stuff).

It took us forever to make the drive because we had to stop for a lot of different things. What we expected to take 4 hours took 8 and by the end my legs ached from being cramped up. But we had some good conversations while we were on the ride, about how to have a good partnership and lots of bits and pieces about memories.

I realized I get defensive when asked if I am hungry around my family, because I expect that they are asking because they think I eat a lot, as a fat person. (Actually part of the reason that I am fat is that I don't eat often enough and my body tries to store everything) But I think maybe they might be asking me for permission to eat. Especially my gparent, who is tinier than most 12 year olds and probably has the metabolism of a hummingbird. So I need to try to practice eating small snacks while I'm here, since I don't have to worry about running out of food.

Later P gave Ace a Canon DSLR. Ace was incredibly excited and I felt happy for them but at the same time I felt broken-hearted because it reminded me of being a kid, asking for a particular present, and being given a knock-off that did not even serve the same purpose, while my siblings got things that were more expensive and exactly what they asked for. I didn't handle it well, partly because I was already exhausted, and I went into my bedroom and cried. Ace came in and asked what was wrong and I explained, with a deliberate effort to be open. Then P came in and asked what was wrong and I explained that and that it reminded me of never being asked about my life as a child. P doesn't have the same memory, and I'm questioning my perceptions because I just don't remember shit. P told me that I won a science award for highest grade in my honors physics class which blew my mind.  Like, the way they told the story it sounded exactly like me (I didn't care about the award but wanted to win) and felt true, but I have literally no memory of it. I want to know who it was I was so invested in beating.

I also talked about how M spends money on stuff that isn't necessary while knowing that I am suffering and barely getting by. M just bought a new car, while telling me that they don't have the money to help me with stuff I need. If they're going to put their wants above my needs, they could at least do that across the board and not be more generous to my siblings than to me. I found out that I  get half of what my siblings do at christmas (each) and I just don't ask about birthdays. Mostly I put this stuff out of my mind. But when I can't, it really hurts. And it's why it is so fucking hard to even ask for the respect of being called by my name much less pronouns. If I ask and they refuse, they're not just being inconsiderate like now, they're telling me I don't matter every time they talk to or about me.

P was really defensive and I wish I knew if I  was wrong. I can't trust their perceptions any more than I can trust mine, because they cannot handle making mistakes and they do not admit when they did something they're ashamed of, or failed to do something they feel they should have. Somehow the conversation turned, I stopped crying, and P left the room (in a neutral way). Shortly after, L and E came in and asked me what was wrong, then P came in. I pushed myself and told them, as briefly as I could with as little blame to P as I could. I didn't want P to feel bad about giving Ace a camera because I am genuinely happy that they made such a huge sacrifice for Ace. (P is poor - they make minimum wage and M doesn't share their giant salary) I also wanted to be frank about my sadness and I think I did okay because P didn't get angry with me. E said they could feel my sadness from the other room and we made eye contact and I felt their sincerity and L gave me pats and empathy. I felt like they all (Ace, P, E, L) cared about my feelings and that was a new experience with my biofamily (except for Ace).

Later P said that they were going to get me a camera too, when they could, and I said that I appreciate the thought but before making such a huge purchase, talk with me because if I can't fix the bug that is breaking my renders, then tools for that would be a much better gift to me than a DSLR. I have wanted one for a long time, but I can take photos that I am proud of on my little camera, and not being able to render my fractals is eating my soul. I want to be seen as a photographer, but I am at least as much a fractal artist as photographer, and I feel like my fractal art gives more to the world. There are many people who can take good photos of nature but not many who can make fractals and almost none who make them in my style.

When everyone went to bed I started reading a book I got as a review copy from BloggingForBooks, and I couldn't put it down until I finished. Partly because I desperately needed brain rest, partly because I missed my second ADD-PI meds and therefore had less control over my focus, and partly because it was a really good read. I'm gonna try to do a review for it soon. But I didn't go to sleep until like 5am and slept badly because the bed was awful and then people started being loud at like 11am. E and L came in and tickled my arms and I grumbled at them. Ace came in and rubbed my feet which was a pretty great way to wake up, after they gentled up (I have extremely sensitive feet).  I got up and ready, slowly and tiredly.

I'm nervous about going swimming because walking around in a wet bathing suit gives me thigh chafing most of the time, and I super don't wanna deal with that. But I do really wanna go be in the ocean! So I'm gonna try it and hope for the best.

Ace uses my real name most of the time and E and L are trying. But that's because they asked me if I wanted them to call me by my chosen name and I said yes. I still haven't confronted anyone about my name. Yesterday I had a strange moment when Ace was introducing me to their girlfriend on skype and the girlfriend called me by my name and P said something like "they got your name right!" which felt really confusing because P usually gets it wrong. Maybe they aren't aware when they deadname me. M hasn't ever tried. Last time I talked to M about it was years ago and they didn't listen to me at all. I dunno how they'll react now but if the rest of the family is doing it they are more likely to be respectful.

I don't have chronic depression, but I have spent enough years of my life depressed to know about various effects. One of them is that seemingly 'little' things become huge and horrendous. Someone says something and (probably accidentally) implies something negative about you, and it hurts incredibly deeply. People will then respond with "oh it's not that big a deal" or "don't let it bother you" which is fucking ridiculous. It's not just perception; when you are already injured, small further injuries will have greater impact than they would if you were fine!

It's like depression is having a hand with broken bones in it, when the worst hand damage most people have experienced is a paper cut. And someone is like "why can't you high-five me, it's not that hard!" and sure, it's not much effort to lift your arm and aim your hand at the other person's hand. But you KNOW that it is going to hurt, it is going to cause you damage, and so you say "I just can't do high fives right now." And they get miffed that you're not willing to suffer a little to bring them some joy, because they high-fived you when they had a paper cut. Or someone shakes your hand and you cry out, and people are like "psh, that doesn't hurt, I do it all the time!" Or they tell you "oh it's probably just a hand cramp, I had one before and just needed to massage it out" and they grab your broken hand and start rubbing it! It sounds really obvious in metaphor but people really will try to apply their own diagnoses and then give you their 'cure' when it is absolutely going to make everything far worse.

Depression doesn't just sit in one spot, like disappointment or sadness, because it is not a fucking emotion. It is an illness, and it gets in every single part of your being. It's not something you can compartmentalize. It's not something you can ignore. It's something that has to be managed, and anyone who has been depressed for a length of time is far more of an expert on how to manage it than you are, if you haven't lived it.

My shoulder which has now been hurting for two weeks got so bad today that I took acetaminophen and ibuprofen and it is still just aching very badly. I don't understand it. I'm bringing my exercise ball to work tomorrow and hopefully that will help.

But in encouraging news Kanika seems to feel much better. I went googling trying to find the ideal diet for a cat who gets recurring UTIs and apparently dry food is just all around a bad choice health wise? That many cats are chronically dehydrated because they have a low thirst drive and need to eat their liquids? So I've started mixing Kanika's dry food with hot water and flaked up freeze-dried turkey, and they're eating it with seeming enjoyment (I was really worried they wouldn't). When I can afford it, I'm gonna try getting them a pet fountain. Tellingly, they're playing more - they brought me a toy to throw both yesterday and today. I am dreading ever having to go out of town now, because it is a lot harder to find someone to come over daily, but I feel like I have hit on a solution that will keep them happier and healthier.

I had a weird experience today where I was failing at words and logic, getting lost. Usually that kind of fail is ADD meds related and that had a little to do with it as I took my meds really early and forgot to break the pill in half and save the second half for the afternoon. But then I got disproportionately upset and suddenly realized I was projecting and trying to rescue my friend from my own fate, not theirs. My failure with my ex-partner in transitioning from monogamy to polyamory apparently still hurts. I really thought I was over it. I did everything I could and I really couldn't have tried harder, but it wasn't enough because when it came down to it my ex just didn't want to. We practiced poly for two years before we broke up, but they didn't actually try to change their thinking or understand me, they just avoided thinking about it and lived in denial - possible, because my relationships were all long-distance. They told me they were okay with it and even happy for my happiness but it wasn't true, as they told me later. Once they stopped being able to pretend, that was the end. They dumped me by starting to date someone else (while we were still supposedly together) and deciding to be monogamous with that person.

My greatest fear in relationships is that someone will pretend to be okay with something and not actually be okay with it. Pretend to love all of me and really just be tolerating parts of me or pretending them away. When I say greatest fear, I mean I'd rather someone get furious with me, be cruel to me, and dump me. I'd rather they express any possible negative feeling about any part of me rather than pretend like or indifference.

This is why it is so important to me that my close friends be willing and able to tell me when I upset them in any way, or when they don't like something about me, and be honest with me when they don't care one way or the other about an aspect of me or things that are important to me.

I'm at Xenacon and should be happy, right? but I'm sad and I feel so adrift. Everyone keeps talking about how accepting people are here but I know how fuckin quickly that changes as soon as you point out a problem, or expose yourself to BE a problem by your very (non-binary) existence. I know this is being exaggerated by my exhaustion after an extremely stressful week, and my recent profound disappointment in realizing that what I had counted on in one of my friendships is just not there. I just feel so weary at the idea of investing even a little in new people - but at the same time I really want to. So, I end up in a state of frozen indecision, and feel sad about it. I am not being fully myself, because I just don't have the energy to be.

I'm so fuckin wiped out. About to go to sleep and hope this many hours bring me enough energy to be a little more outgoing. I'm not lookin for advice so please don't give me any.

So my ADD-PI has gotten to the point where I cry every time I think about it. Just writing that sentence made my eyes well up. I talked about this at the most recent intimacy practice and cried. Heather offered to pick me up and drive me to the sliding-scale clinic and I got there and started filling out the paperwork - and in big letters it said that they don't prescribe adult ADD meds. I welled up but thought maybe they could offer me some other resources or maybe they had non-stimulant meds I hadn't tried, so I filled it out. Then the person checking me in called me over and pointed it out and I started crying, managed to choke out that I was hoping for resources or any kind of help, they sent me to finish the paperwork and before I did someone called me in back to talk to them. I was gasping and crying at this point, trying to get control of myself. I told them I can't remember things that happened three days ago, I can't do things I need to do to finish school, I feel like my brain is crumbling. They listened kindly but uselessly, and told me of some other places I could try. I now realize that before I try to go in, I need to check and see if they even prescribe these meds.

I loathe that the shitbrains in charge care so much more about punishing people who get high than they do about people who need meds to live. This isn't a problem for the rich fucks, a $500 test is all that stands in the way for them, or, y'know, choosing an independent psychiatrist who isn't paid by the government. It might as well be a million dollars: I can't see myself having $500 to spare within the next year.

I'm getting really desperate.

ETA: oh, *angry laugh* I remembered the other thing I was going to post. (ADD memory, so full of holes) Your Life Can Be Better, Using Strategies for Adult ADD/ADHD by Douglas A. Puryear MD is actually really useful, easy to take in, so sympathetic it made me cry many times. It's not a substitute for meds (you have to have SOME level of memory to even write things down) but I found it encouraging, mostly in that 90% of the suggestions it mentioned I had already been trying in one way or another and the last 10% were really great. It was the first time I felt validated in my diagnosis, reading this. And if you didn't have an undiagnosed ADD parent who passed down coping strategies, this will give you all those and more. It's written by a psychiatrist who has ADD: it's choppy but in a good way, most chapters are no more than 5 pages, so you can take it in in manageable chunks. It doesn't have unnecessary "this is what ADD is" crap, either, or medical bullshit that's only good if you're a social scientist seeking academic understanding. And the author makes the kindle version cheap on purpose so that it's more accessible, and keeps a blog where they share strategies. It's not perfect -- there's some fat-is-bad rhetoric, sexism, and classism, but it is MUCH less than I would expect from a default dude, especially one of that generation.

The other day I had an argument with a friend in which they got upset with me for not understanding what they were trying to say after they tried to explain a few times, and unfriended me. I realize now this is a place of old trauma, because I started weeping, and when Topaz asked, I realized it was because I felt punished for not thinking right/fast enough, when I was trying my best. This felt like a flashback, but I have no memory of being punished for thinking too slowly or not understanding. Maybe it was watching others be punished for that which taught me this fear. Whatever the cause, when people get impatient and angry towards those who are trying to understand, it makes me feel like a helpless child, and when it is me they are upset with I get just incapable of functioning, desperate for forgiveness, and cry with fear and hopelessness. If I am engaging at all, I'm always trying to understand: I am never being lazy or deliberately obtuse, and never ever ignoring what someone is saying. Luckily I'm good at it and most of the time people don't punish me for not getting it, but when I fail, its terrifying. It feels the same as when I am trying my best to be kind and I make a mistake and the person gets angry with me. I literally had no way to avoid my mistake, and I feel trapped and hopelessly not good enough. This is where my patience comes from, I think: doing my best to never make someone who is trying their best feel as though they will be punished for it.

It feels very tied to my sense of worth. As a child I was only valued for my "smarts" and I knew that this was conditional. My greatest fear was brain injury because I felt completely sure that I would no longer be valued by anyone. Later I think this morphed into a kind of emotional/intuitional "smarts" where I felt people valued me because I was good at making them feel safe and supported and understood, and if I fucked up at that, I would no longer be valued. This was affirmed by being abandoned at my first failure (that I was made aware of) several times. I think it was also compounded by living for 8 months with someone who expected me to read their mind and do what they wanted without them telling me, and when I failed I was treated with hostility and ostracized from all human contact (they had this power because my only friend was hours away). And then I was in a relationship for many years with someone who would radiate their stress and anger at me unless I figured out the source and helped them feel better about it somehow.

When I cannot understand, cannot show support in a way the person wants, or cannot give safe space, I feel that I am on the verge of true worthlessness, and my entire life depends on them forgiving me for fucking up and trusting my history of success enough to let me try again. It's not a logical thought progression but it feels unbearably real. When it happens with someone I like, it hurts for a little while: when it happens with someone I love, I can think of nothing else until I am forgiven or am certain that I have no chance of forgiveness.

With people I choose to have in my life, I always assume that they are doing their best, unless/until they tell me they do not want to try. I can't bear the idea of not affirming someone's best efforts. I can't bear the idea of someone offering up their best, and someone else not giving honor to that. I can't stand 'art critique' for this reason. The only person who can know if the artist didn't do their best is the artist themselves! And the only way for art to be bad is for the artist to not give full effort. It cannot be judged from the outside.

If I call you a friend, please always assume I am doing my best to offer understanding, support, and safety. If you doubt, ask if it is my best. If I could do better, tell me how. If you cannot start with the base assumption that I am doing my best with what I have, do not be friends with me. I need that assumption in all my friendships.

Sometimes I get this overwhelming feeling of stuckness and it makes me want to be slapped, hit, or stabbed, it's like an intense frustration at being in a body, I can't escape. Maybe this is my kind of anxiety. It's like being in my body makes me feel bad and I want out, I want to escape the static and I feel a desperate need for extreme sensation. I want to cry, I want to scream, I want out! Being able to intensely focus helps, but if I am lonely (like I am right now) I have such a limited number of things I can focus on without getting sad, and feeling this and sadness at the same time is the worst. What the fuck happened, three weeks ago I was fine.

I'm sorry I've been absent here, and I have gotten too behind to truly catch up. I'm going to try as soon as possible. Right now I am feeling achingly anxious and am not sure why, I can't calm down. I was really thrown by that awful night and I need to be overwhelmed, washed out. I'm going to catch up a little bit and then go to nature somewhere -- it may be a hot, wet mess but if I breathe it in and take photos, hopefully I can ground this out. This is why I consider myself mostly calm -- I rarely get this feeling. It's like right before the end of a timed test, when I'm not finished yet. Those last frantic squiggles have been my breath and blood for the past hour.

While I appreciate the intentions of comments on the previous post, I feel like no one understood what I was saying. It wasn't about Topaz, ze was just the trigger for old pain. I really wanted some empathizing for the old suffering dredged up - each one of those events/situations hurt me so deeply, especially the one with my parents. Topaz is far and away the best person I've known for being there for me when I'm sad. Today I cried all over zir again and ze was completely supportive, which is the norm with us. It's really important to me that I make this clear - it was a few half-baked discussions that we didn't have the energy to finish and never went back to and hashed out. I've never been able to lay in anyone else's lap and cry and ask them endless questions for reassurance and have them give patient love. I am still scared that one of those situations will happen again, but it is not a rational fear, considering Topaz' behavior.

Please dont fret if you made a comment, i probably should have rearranged the paragraphs and put the conclusion first and then the spark that caused it.