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Hello again, Internet!

Welcome to my new feature! It’s called “disappearing for months on end and then writing an obscenely long personal blog post.”

AWESOME

New Feature Part 1
Overdue Response to Commenters

TW1 and CR: Thank you for the vote of confidence! As CR already knows, my job interview fell through. The governor released the mangled shat-upon budget a day before my job interview, and the position was cut before ever being filled. I am sad, because the position was caring for kids at a battered women’s shelter, and it’s really disheartening that the governor was all “fuck yo’ kids, I need a skidoo.” But mostly I feel relieved, like I came within inches of a dropping axe. Also, TW, I do not come off in real life at all like I come off in my blog. I am awkward and I am shy and I cover this up by looking fucking mean, so I imagine my interview would have skipped over all the incredible insights I might have and gone directly into hairy eyeball territory the more nervous I got.

Moody: Thanks!

Jemimisaalalalllana: (did I say that right?) Who Moved My Cheese, omg. Me and the bear got through our horrible weekend of moving this way. Once we got away from our roommates, all the pent-up horribleness was able to come out, which can so easily de-evolve into a mindloop of “and the time they did THIS!!!!!!” “Who Moved My Cheese” became like parenthetical notation for our anger. I’d be all:

Who Moved My Cheese
Do you remember when they let the baby play with the corkscrew and then put it back in the drawer and it was covered with snot (because he put it in his nose??!!!)?
Who Moved My Cheese

The moving is coming along terribly! I mean, we actually managed to get the whole moving part done without too many hitches. But all the surrounding shit got so fucking wild and perverse. When we arrived in our apartment for the first night, we discovered it was so incredibly filthy that we had to immediately go drop $70 on cleaning supplies and stay up until midnight just so we could lay down a blanket and sleep on the floor without getting chlamydia. The next day, we went to move the rest of our stuff out of our roommates’ house. If we hadn’t already been all “JESUS FUCK WE NEED TO GET OUT OF HERE” the process of moving would have put us over the edge. They had snuck toys we had given their baby into our moving stuff. We were leaving a lot of our stuff, because they had used it much more than we had, and also gotten it filthy and broken in the process, so we figured, obviously they want this stuff more than we do, and we’re not packing up this disgusting shit covered in chicken fat. But, no, they didn’t want our stuff because they “don’t use it,” but they did want us to take half their shit that they insisted was ours or insisted it would be just “easier” if we took it. Things are so weird, we couldn’t tell if they thought they were being really nice by insisting we take all their spices or the only pans in the house (burned chicken fat pans), or if they really thought it was ours, or if they just mistook us for the city fucking dump.

WHO MOVED MY CHEESE

Else: True confession time: I have no idea what those words you just used mean. I mean, I know they are rock words, but that is about all I got.

What I can tell you is that not knowing those words did not stop me from collecting rocks as a child. Not because I was interested in rock words and rock formation and real hobby stuff like that, but because… well, I don’t know, I was kind of obsessive compulsive? Maybe? I had bags of rocks. Big grocery sacks. I liked big rocks, big smooth rocks that changed color (sort of) when they got wet. I liked to put them in piles. I liked to separate them by color, by texture, by weight. I don’t think anybody really knew I had this hobby, and my dad found out by going in my room and getting a nasty toe-banging surprise when he bumped into what looked like a flimsy grocery sack and it was filled with, like, 50 pounds of fucking rocks.

It was one of those things from my childhood that I forgot about, and when I did remember, I’d think about how silly and weird that was, and how now that I was grown up I couldn’t do those things. The first birthday I spent with my bear, he took me to the U.P. and we had all sorts of fun. But while at Lake Superior, I suddenly found a rock, an awesome rock. And then another rock. And then, like a trail of bread crumbs, more and more rocks, rocks weighing down my poncho. “Um, bear?” I said. “Is it okay if I fill your car with rocks?” And it was! So many rocks I have now.

New Feature Part II

The Shit I Haven’t Been Writing About

It’s been complicated to keep this stuff quiet. Partly it’s because it’s all about my personal life, and I tend to gloss over my own personal stuff as if it’s unimportant, or should be. But partly because I was in the middle of it, emotions were running high, I could hardly think straight, and I knew that all I had in me was vitriol. There were some very good reasons to have vitriol, and while this is my blog and it’s okay if it’s personal sometimes (really, Harriet, it’s okay!), that doesn’t mean I want this to turn into a slambook. I don’t want to come here and just spout off massive value judgments about the people in my life, even if at any given point I feel like they really deserve some fucking value judgments. I try, as much as possible, to make my life all about me. Which means I don’t want to talk about what somebody else does, and how stupid/ugly/fucked-up it is. What I want to talk about is how what somebody else does affects me, because that’s the only thing that’s really fair game, and the only thing that should be worth my attention. And this year, I’ve found that nigh impossible to do, because I’ve been so enmeshed in other people’s lives in a way that is 100% unhealthy for me.

This past year, my bear and I have been living with a couple we know and their baby. Let us call the couple Swan and Levi. The bear and Levi have been bestest friends for years and years, and I liked Swan and Levi and they seemed to like me. We had a lot in common. Swan and I both had similar histories concerning boyfriends and families, and had both come out of those experiences wanting to get into helping professions. Swan and Levi were a young and committed couple, like us, and they seemed to have their lives, their futures, their ideas pretty well figured out. Like, they seemed to have it figured out enough that we felt jealous and inadequate around them, me and the bear being pretty “I dunno” about our lives and futures, without any really set and firm adult goals. Me and the bear went into this knowing that moving in with friends doesn’t always work out, but since he and Levi had been such good friends for years, we figured at the very least the two of them would always be able to communicate with each other.

Okay. So. IT DIDN’T WORK. I know, this is your surprised face.

I read the Co-Parenting 101 blog, and one thing I’ve seen there that really resonated with me was that you know you have accepted a break-up, and moved on, when you can tell somebody what happened in about one sentence, without intense emotion. This is not to say that “It just didn’t work” growled through clenched teeth meets the criteria. But something like, “I think we were just both too young to really know what we wanted, and  I didn’t want to see that,” indicates a healthier place of acceptance than “I’m glad you asked, because I have a timeline of each instance that she disappointed me which I can cover in exquisite detail, going back to stories from her childhood that she told me in confidence which should have alerted me to the fact that she was disloyal and also maybe a lesbian? Do you want to make some coffee because this is going to take a while.” The point is to be able to express a problem without laying that problem at somebody else’s feet, and without letting it take over your life. For example, Mr. Flint was abusive, and that is often my one-sentence when asked. But I could equally, and fully honestly say, “He wanted something from a partner that I couldn’t provide, but I didn’t want to admit that,” or “I wasn’t able to do the work he needed from me to be happy” or “I was too young and inexperienced to understand what I needed or wanted out of a relationship, and neither of us were willing to pursue the growth we both needed to learn.” Those are my stock answers for “I don’t want to talk about abuse right now,” but they also help me feel more normal, like I took some lessons from that relationship that weren’t just about what it’s like to be abused.

I am not at that place yet, with my roommate break-up. I am at the WHO MOVED MY CHEESE place. But these things come with practice, so here goes:

We did not work out as roommates because we had very different definitions of acceptable communication and boundaries, and none of us were willing to be flexible.

I am very angry at Swan and Levi. I feel like they’ve stolen the last year of my life. Of course, they likely feel the same way about the bear and me, and that’s okay. We were incompatible as FUCK, and I think we are all to blame for not being willing to admit that. We really let our ideals of “but we’re all friends” and “all we need to do is communicate” get in the way of the fact that we were fast becoming unfriends, and our attempts at communication failed so often and so painfully that they were soon worse than not talking at all. The idea that we should be able to work it out kept us all together a lot longer, far past the point where it obviously wasn’t working and wasn’t ever going to work. Because it should. And when you are at that point, with that massive cognitive dissonance ringing in your brain – it should work but it isn’t working – well, you have to pick one of two options: change the outward circumstance (it isn’t working) or change the inward belief (it should work). And for the better part of a year, we kept pounding away at “it isn’t working” instead of addressing the real problem, our belief that it should work.

And so eventually our attempts to make it work became tinged with anger and resentment. We weren’t trying to make it work because we really believed in each other’s best qualities, or had faith in one another, but because it should work and if it’s not working it must be because you are doing something wrong because I am trying. Until every attempt at reconciliation was actually just a veiled and sideways release of anger, i.e. “We are all adults and should be able to work this out” is actually communicating, by tone and posture, that “I don’t think you guys are very fucking adult.”

This was all compounded by just how many relationships were in the household. Swan and Levi had a relationship with each other. Swan and Levi each had a separate and distinct relationship with their baby. Swan and I had a relationship with each other, as did Levi and I. Ditto Bear and Levi and Swan, and Bear and me and the baby. And then add in Swan and Levi’s family members, who spent quite a bit of time at our house, and who the bear and I did not particularly like. I am big on boundaries. I am HUGE on boundaries. Boundaries are the most important thing in my fucking life. And I don’t know if boundaries were impossible to keep with Swan and Levi, or if they are just plain impossible to keep in a household where you have a relationship more intimate than “roommate.” But impossible they were. Swan and Levi, who are a very young couple, would sometimes have marital difficulties. Sometimes they were really basic normal marital difficulties, and sometimes they were “holy shit I hope these guys get divorced” marital difficulties. And more often than not, those marital difficulties bled over into other relationships. Swan would talk to me, Levi would talk to me, Levi would talk to the bear, we would hear sides and try not to take sides, which was sometimes possible and sometimes not. But marital difficulties don’t exist in a vacuum, and they are usually triggered by the daily realities of living. So Swan and Levi are having a fight, and if Swan asks Levi to take out the trash, everything’s so raw that the fight will get triggered again. In the meantime, the bear and I need the trash fucking taken out, and we don’t want to cross the boundary that is Swan and Levi’s relationship to get it done. Or, say, Swan and Levi are having a fight, and they are talking to each other in a way that Bear and I are really uncomfortable hearing. Or Swan’s mother says things to Swan that we cannot think of as acceptable. It is SO SO SO not our place to cross into the boundaries of the relationships others have with each other, and yet having these relationships spill into our living space, our personal space, is crossing our boundaries.

There was no good way that I found to address these issues. And when I have no good way to address my boundaries getting crossed, I define my boundaries by silence and withdrawal. I leave the room, I refuse to talk about it, I hide. If I cannot get a satisfactory boundary definition that will be respected by another person, I will force that boundary to be respected by offering no ability for it to be disrespected. You won’t respect what I don’t want to talk about? Fine, then, I’ll stop talking. You won’t respect my personal space? Fine, then, I will never be in the same room with you. Swan and Levi, we came to understand, address things by addressing them to death, immediately and without reservation. I often found this inappropriate, uncomfortable, and invasive. But I wasn’t willing to tell them their way was wrong, because their relationships with each other and others are their business. But their relationship with me is my business, so I wasn’t willing to change my way of coping because it is a matter of basic safety for me, and it is my prerogative to define my boundaries however I want them defined. And while they were ostensibly willing to respect our boundaries by not pushing issues we had asked them not to push, they weren’t willing to accept that. They were willing to not bring it up, but they weren’t willing to stop resenting the fact that we didn’t want to talk about shit. Which meant boundaries still got crossed, except now it was passive-aggressively, which I viewed as an attempt to provoke us into responding to them the way they felt issues should be responded to: loudly and aggressively and angrily.

Eventually, me and the bear’s home life was reduced to one room. Our bedroom, the only safe space in the world. The kitchen is not safe. The living room is not safe. The bathroom is not safe. The only place in the world where we can be left alone, where our shit will not be moved around or touched, where we will not be forced into conversation we do not want to have, is our bedroom. And our bedroom was fucking tiny. It’s lucky me and the bear get along as well as we do, because being cooped up in one room, day in and day out, would probably be enough to break up some other couples. As it was, the bear and I upped our usual argument ratio from 2 a year to about 4 a year. And otherwise, we kind of just stopped having fun with each other. Being together was all about clinging and crying and releasing, but not about fun-loving adventure. And that sucked, because I could look at him and think about how much I loved him, and how much I enjoyed his company, and how little we had a chance to express that anymore, because we were both so fragile and tired.

New Blog Feature Part III
Harriet’s Sordid Past

This was all massively triggering for me. When I was 16, I ran away from an abusive home and ended up living with my friend Celena and her family. Celena and I had been friends since junior high, and I loved her family, total hippies. They were a safe space. But when they took me in, they obviously had no idea what they were really getting into. Working in the field of adoption, I’ve come to understand how common some of what happened with them is, and that’s helped me. And absolutely, positively, being with Celena’s family was better than being with my own. But it was still terrible for me, and still extremely scarring, to the point where living with Swan and Levi triggered all the PTSD from their household.

Celena’s family had problems. I don’t think I can really say whether they were the problems every family has, or more or less, because I don’t know very much about what normal families are like. But they had problems. And, like most families, the problems were hidden and unspoken. At a sort of equilibrium. So, enter a traumatized teen, and the equilibrium is thrown off. I didn’t know what was supposed to be unspoken, and it was like walking through a minefield sometimes, coming into a place and immediately noticing issues, and not knowing which things might trigger massive problems if I mentioned them, and which might trigger massive problems if I didn’t.

I didn’t know how to operate in a family, how to communicate, what was an expected level of interaction. I came from a home where rules were constantly changing, and punished erratically. I might get a Leave it to Beaver talk about my grades one day, and the next I would be made to stand at attention while screamed at for hours, and then made to pack my bags and sit on the porch past midnight until dad decided “what to do” with me. I might get a smile and a pat on the head for forgetting to sweep one day, and the next day I would get a “I can’t even stand to look at you, you’re so vile and evil. You’re not my daughter anymore. I don’t even care if you die.”

So the things a normal family might expect of their family members – chores, communication, affection – were things I couldn’t give, because I didn’t know how. I didn’t know the rules. Is it okay to sweep? Am I using the right broom? Should I wait until they’re not in the room? Is it okay to eat right now? Am I eating this right? Should I be eating less? Is it okay to hug? Can I ask for school supplies? What kind of voice should I ask for them in? Is it okay to ask now? How about now? How about now? I don’t think they understood at all how much fear and consequence was running through my head whenever I asked for the salt to be passed, how afraid I was that the wrong tone of voice would get me punished. And I don’t think they understood that telling me that their family wasn’t like that didn’t mean shit to me. Jesus, did they think my dad went around telling me “if you don’t sweep the floor I’ll call you a monster”? Of course not. He told me he’d love me no matter what and I’d always be his daughter. And I just grew to understand that those were the things you were supposed to say, another rule to follow. So when Celena’s family said I was their daughter and sister and they would never kick me out, I didn’t believe that for a second. I knew that was all true only as long as I could abide by their rules, and, of course, I couldn’t ask what the rules were: that was one of the rules.

I’m not trying to get into this to a degree that will make sense to somebody who hasn’t gone through it, because that’s a whole different blog post. I just mean to illustrate that I once lived in a house where I was an outsider, where I was powerless, and where saying or doing the wrong thing might trigger deeper issues I couldn’t control. I could tell that my presence was causing Celena’s family to cope with issues that had existed before I arrived, and I could tell that they weren’t coping well. I knew that wasn’t really my fault, but I also knew it wouldn’t be happening if I hadn’t been there. But I also knew I couldn’t leave. So I was stuck trying to navigate my own personal safety, having no idea how, while everything disintegrated around me, because of me. I needed a safe place. They were a safe place. But they weren’t a safe place as long as I was a part of their family. I had destroyed the safety of their home, and I knew the only way to make it better was to leave, but I couldn’t.

So I just had to learn how to keep my mouth shut, try and avoid them at all costs, and do my best to graduate and move out ASAP, so I could stop ruining their lives and soaking up all their hate and anger as my own. Communication wasn’t an option. I tried, a couple of times, to tell Celena’s mom that I felt like I was causing trouble in the house. She’d pish-posh me, tell me there were no problems, and I knew it was a fucking lie. So I naturally thought everything she told me was a lie: that it wasn’t my fault, that I was her daughter, that she loved me and I could stay as long as I wanted. Those were just things adults said while they prepared to fuck with you, because you did something wrong and deserved to be fucked with. I mean, honestly, it was part of the punishment: being told everything was okay and you were loved. It wouldn’t be half so bad if they didn’t say things like that, so of course they had to.

My freshman year of college, I was very alone. I basically went to college only so I would have a place to live and could leave Celena’s house ASAP, and give them their lives back. But I didn’t realize how much I still needed adults in my life. My first night at college, I called them to let them know I was okay, convincing myself that they actually cared, I mean, hadn’t they said so enough? So I called, and talked to Celena’s mom, and said, “So I got through my first day,” and she said, “And?…” And I said, “Well, I just thought I’d let you know that everything was okay.” And she said, “And?…” And I said, “Well, um, how are you guys?” “Fine. And?…” And I said, “Well, bye.”

So, okay, lesson one: stop considering having emotional needs met a necessity, because they aren’t and they won’t be.

But other stuff came up. I didn’t have a bank account yet, because I’d had a lot of trouble getting the right ID documents (runaway and all). And I needed to buy schoolbooks. I had a job, and I had checks, but needed to cash them. I knew that was something adults could do, so I called Celena’s mom again. She sighed angrily and asked if I couldn’t possibly get somebody else to do it, because really.

So, I started turning to Mr. Flint’s family. They cashed my checks. They had me over for dinner. They gave me rides when I needed. They co-signed loans. And then, when winter break came, when the dorms shut down and I had to leave, didn’t have an option to stay, I thought, well, maybe I can stay with them? I mean, I totally can. I bet I can. Why wouldn’t I be able to? So Mr. Flint asked them, and they sighed and asked, couldn’t I stay with Celena’s family? So I steeled myself and made the call, and got exactly what I knew I would: “I mean, no. Not really. We don’t have the room. Don’t you have somewhere else you can go?”

So. Now I was the Flints’ kid. And we went through the whole fucking thing again. “Oh, you’re our daughter, oh, we just love you.” But at least with the Flints, the rules were more obvious. Love our son. Fuck our son. Keep our son from bothering us. Do what our son says. Throughout the years, we ended up living at their house for various intervals, and I was always in the same hyperactive state. Have to say the right things. Have to dress the right way. Can’t bring up what Flint says or does to me. Can’t bring up that sometimes Flint’s dad talks to his mom the same way. Can’t talk about uncouth things. Can’t want to be a social worker. Can only want to be a lawyer. Can only watch the right TV, read the right books. Can only use this tone of voice.

I knew I wasn’t really their daughter. Even after we got married. And I told Flint that sometimes, that they only called me a “daughter” as long as I was with him, that I would never have a real family of my own. Oh pish posh, he said. That’s not true. And I feel a little sense of pride that I always knew that as soon as I stopped fucking Flint, I would stop being their daughter. That family, and friendship, was always predicated on some service being provided, some unspoken agreement. And of course it happened in exactly that way.

I hadn’t realized how much those issues still ruled my life until we moved in with Swan and Levi. But suddenly, there I was, in a house that was not my own, from which I could be ejected at any time, where my presence was causing a breakdown in the owners of the home, a breakdown I could not fix. And Swan and Levi were, in many ways, very much like Flint’s family. We discovered that the way we had perceived them – totally together, totally adult – was very much a perception they worked for. It wasn’t necessarily a reality, but as long as it looked that way, as long as they had all the trappings of success, that was almost as good as success. So to point out any flaws in that theory, to point out that just because the house was clean or intellectual books were on the shelf didn’t mean that the family was whole and perfect, was to ruin the structure of a home that wasn’t mine. And yet, it was mine; I lived there, and those lies were toxic to me, crossed my boundaries.

So when things got really bad with Swan and Levi, I reacted the way I had in Celena and Flint’s home: I disappeared. And for a while, I hated myself for that reaction. I’m an adult, I thought, I should be able to talk things out. But after talking to the bear about this, he pointed out that I had never lived in a place where my need for safety was respected. If I needed to shut down and disappear, that’s what I needed to do. But doing that was such an indicator to the families around me that everything was going wrong that it couldn’t be allowed; it ruined the fantasy. At Celena’s house, I could tell my unwillingness to participate as part of the family was considered abnormal and problematic. At Flint’s house, it simply wasn’t allowed; his dad would lose his shit and corner me and demand to know what I was doing to fix my marriage, or Flint wouldn’t let me sleep until I told him in intimate vulnerable detail all my feelings, so he could “fix” them. The fact that I needed to be left alone, that I needed a safe space, was never respected or treated as okay. And the fact that not feeling safe enough to talk indicated that I wasn’t safe was never dealt with; instead, it was platitudes about “we’d never kick you out” or “you’re our daughter.”

And now, with Swan and Levi, it was “we’d never kick you guys out, we can all deal with this, we’re all friends” and it was just as much of a lie. They might not make us leave, but that didn’t cover up the fact that they wanted us to; that was plain as fucking day. And while they might not have thought that a very obvious “we wish you didn’t live here” vibe was tantamount to being thrown out, it was still a very tangible threat to me. Because I had lived in places where I wasn’t wanted before, and I had learned that when somebody doesn’t want you there but won’t admit it, they will do everything in their unconscious power to make you leave. They will make the environment toxic and hateful, so when you leave, it’s you leaving, instead of them throwing you out. I find most people don’t know they’re doing this, but they do, and it’s fucking horrible.

So, living with Swan and Levi, and all the unspoken anger and resentment, and all the disrespect for my need for safety, and all the disrespect for what my need for safety implied about the state of the home, was just a PTSD panic attack festival for me. I was pretty much on the verge of tears all the time, and yet knew I couldn’t cry, because then I would have to explain why I was crying, and I couldn’t explain why I didn’t feel safe to the people who had made me unsafe. If I felt safe talking to them about feeling unsafe, I wouldn’t feel unsafe in the first place. But I could tell that wasn’t understood or accepted – it contradicted too much with the idea Swan and Levi had of their relationship with us, and bled over into territory that wasn’t mine where I wasn’t comfortable, that of their relationship with others, and each other.

New Blog Feature Part IV
Shit I Learned This Year

I cannot compromise my boundaries. Ever. If that means moving out of a home I have just moved into a week ago, then that’s what it means. If that means ending a friendship over something seemingly trivial (THE CHEESE, WHO HAS MOVED IT), then that’s what it means. If that means doing something that makes everybody in the room uncomfortable as hell, like refusing to talk about something, then that’s what it means.

I also learned just how much guilt, anger, fear, and hurt I still carry around from Celena’s house, and Flint’s house, though I hadn’t connected the two as places where I felt unsafe, and not allowed to be myself, and not allowed to ever really be a part of the family. I feel like, because of my home growing up, and my experiences at Celena’s and Flint’s house, I will never fully feel like I am safe, no matter where I am. I will always feel like I am just one step away from being homeless, friendless, and orphaned.

But I have learned, through this experience and the experience of leaving Flint, that the way I imagine “homeless, friendless, and orphaned” seems much worse than actually being that way. It’s that fear that keeps me in situations that are actually far worse and much more damaging than being homeless, friendless, and orphaned would actually be.

And, too, I am rarely as close to homeless, friendless, and orphaned as I imagine. What I am often close to is a failure to live up to my unspoken (and frequently abusive) standards of what I should be. I was afraid, at Celena’s house, that I would discover I really was the worthless monster my dad said I was, unable to love, unable to act like a real human, incapable of being loved. I was afraid with Flint that I would discover I was unable to stand on my own, unable to succeed as an adult, unable to maintain any basic human relationships, unable to be perceived as normal and real. I have been afraid, this year with Swan and Levi, that I will find out I am unable to be a real friend to anybody, incapable of accepting others, incapable of overcoming a juvenile fear of conflict to act like a real adult. And with how bad Swan and Levi were, with how much I clung to my bear, I began to be afraid of what would happen if I lost him. What if I am just unable to stand on my own? Unable to operate with netting some poor schmoe into taking care of me? Unable to gather resources on my own?

The fact is, I have so many options open to me if it all falls apart. None of them are awesome options, but that’s because falling apart isn’t awesome either. But I inhibit myself from seeing those options, because they are tinged with these ideas of my failure as a human being. Fuck off to small town America and get on my feet with Badger? Could totally do that, except, you know, I’m always running away from life, I need to learn how to take care of myself without dragging somebody else down. Move into a flophouse with a bunch of college kids while I get on my feet? I guess I could do that, except that’s what kids do, not adults, adults with real lives have more friends and family than that, they have real jobs, they can get their own apartments, and what would people think if they saw you living like that? They’d think, of course that’s how Harriet, the abused runaway, ended up. She never could get her shit together.

Those are the words I use like hammers on myself, keeping me in situations I shouldn’t be in, relationships I shouldn’t be in. As if there were some invisible tally board marking up all the things I could have done better in life. As if “better” is a viable and stable concept.

So I have learned to cut myself some slack. I have to admit that my reactions to trauma and stress aren’t outdated, juvenile behaviors, like sucking my thumb in public. They are very real and very capable coping mechanisms. And when they appear, it’s not because I’ve somehow failed to “get over” my past; they appear because they’re needed. If I feel like I need to cover my ears and retreat into a dark room, it’s because something is threatening me. It might not be the appropriate reaction to that particular threat, but that doesn’t mean that there’s not a threat. I have to learn that while I can choose my behaviors, I can’t choose my feelings. If I feel threatened, it’s because I’m threatened. I can choose to respond to that threat by addressing it directly, by moving away, by a thousand other things, but I can’t choose to say “I’m overreacting; this is not a threat.” That way lies madness.

And I have to learn that while I can, in retrospect, decide that I could have chosen a more effective behavior with which to respond, I can’t make a value judgment on the fact that I responded. This, to me, is the crux of it: I have learned throughout all my life to accept abuse and operate at maximum capacity no matter what is being done to me. The Biggest Rule of All is the You Are Not Being Abused rule. That’s the only way the abuse system works: the victim and the perpetrator both have to believe the abuse is not occurring, only deserved and reasonable punishment. Otherwise the victim would fuck off to a taco stand, and the perpetrator might have to feel kinda fucking bad. So perpetrators of abuse — whether or not they’re actually conscious of what they’re doing — have to convince themselves and the victim that abuse is not occurring, and if they’re really committed, they have to convince themselves and the victim that the victim’s life would be infinitely worse without the abuse, and that’s why she has to stay and take it. This is the fundamental (and schizophrenic) rule that has formed the basis of my relationships with others up until this point: you are not hurting me, and if I leave you, it will hurt worse than the way you are (not?) hurting me now.

The biggest lesson I’ve learned, I guess, is that whenever I say/think the words, “I can’t take such and such an action to relieve the horribleness of my life, because something terrible will happen…” the most terrible thing is already happening. Or something terrible will happen is a very plain threat, and a very unenforceable one. I.e: You can’t leave me, you can’t argue with me, you can’t point out problems to me, you can’t ignore me, or something terrible will happen. What, like living with you, agreeing with you, fixing you, talking to you isn’t already the most terrible thing that could fucking happen? I beg to motherfucking differ, Senor Made-My-Life-Shit.

I felt very much like I couldn’t move away from Swan and Levi because moving would be so terrible, moving immediately after moving in would do such horrible damage to our friendship, and admitting we couldn’t hack it with them would mean terrible things about my character. Of course, nothing could be more terrible, more damaging to our friendship, more damaging to my perception of myself than living with them has been.

New Blog Feature Part V
My Job Still Sucks

My job still sucks. But, after we moved out, I almost immediately snapped and went to the Bossman and said “I can’t work with a child abuser. I can’t I can’t I can’t.” Getting that out felt so so good. I forgot that getting stuff out feels so much better than keeping it in, and I am so surprised every time I have to re-learn that one. I mean, DUH. No action on that  yet, but just saying it made me less likely to fucking explode and walk out one day. And, well, taking all the lessons I just learned this year, I have been so afraid at work that speaking up is just going to make things worse. But really, they can’t get any fucking worse. And that’s so freeing! I can’t do anything to make my life worse here. I actually physically can’t. Somebody else has that shit covered, it’s not my job, they foolishly took that shit on. Once I accept that this is where I am and it’s not going to get better, my tongue has loosened up considerably, and the little gnawing pit of fear has gone away just about completely, to the point where when my Bosslady snapped at me about my conversation with Bossman, I snapped back at her, and we ended up having a very nice and pleasant conversation about it. For reals!

Fucking amazing!

New Blog Feature Part VI
Thanks For Listening

Thanks for listening!