Sometimes people reassure me by telling me I’m a good person. But that feels like an accusation to me. I see the label “good person” as a lie told to justify bad behavior. You should like my abuse because I love you. I’m a good person so I would never hurt anyone. Even beyond that the concept doesn’t work for me because I am afraid specifically that I will hurt people without knowing how. That I won’t be able to correctly predict when I will hurt people and will therefore be unable to avoid it. So being told I shouldn’t worry because I’m good or want good things or have…

I wrote a couple of The Screeds yesterday that made Shanda cry and shout. It’s harder to tell how you react, since it doesn’t happen in front of me and direct responses are rare. I don’t mean to distress you, when I write, but I do imagine that I am trying to provoke emotions so we can share them. So you can see how you affect me and how I respond to the world. Work finally settled out this week. I’ve still got an SR I’m trying to punt before I call it a week, but everything else is finally clear. Lots of releases processes this week, and a couple…

In therapy we worked on a performance of illness circa 1989. Not quite the standard LI technique given the specific circumstances of the motivating event but still attempting to connect past you and current you to the past emotional state at the same time. I went to a professional sportspuck game with Pete, which required several hours of driving. On the way there it became clear to me I was ill. Pete was annoyed that I “made myself carsick” and I tried not to let him know I was feeling bad. At the game it became more difficult to hide my illness; I needed to lie down. And so I…

Here’s a a reassurance I need – that I can use my clothes as often as I want and not fear that I will have to do without in the future. One reason I can’t let nice clothes touch me – or even shitty clothes that I like – is because I fear using up my limited access to them. I fear the inevitable decay off all the things that I love, knowing that eventually my interactions will wear them out. Will consume from them the things that once made them great, if not ruin them outright with some more dramatic act. And that I will never be able to…

I got pillow covers today [fig 1], which are possibly the first piece of home decor I ever bought for myself. I have selected, purchased, and built many things but I always viewed them in the context of for another person, at least with respect to their appearance. Like colors it’s another one of many things on the list of personal preferences I failed to imagine I might have despite recognizing in others. It’s a skill that has made me very resistant to many forms of marketing and manipulation. At the cost of not being able to participate in many forms of expression or adjust my environment to suit my…

Many of you tell me you feel supported by your therapist. Some of you don’t quite use those words, but you talk about wanting a session when you’re having a hard time. Or about writing or calling your therapist when you are having trouble coping or reassuring yourself. And it just don’t get it at all. I don’t understand what you get out of it, or why your therapist would help with whatever that was. This comes up for me in the context of therapy mostly because I’ve thought a lot about how therapy is supposed to go. I’ve paid a lot of attention to representations and recollections and carefully…

People imagine that being male 1To be clear, this is statistical false at least in terms of crime reports by assigned binary gender. Overall rates of victimization by violent crime are as high or higher for for men as for women (particularly compared to white women) and have been for decades, even when violent crime was more prevalent than it is today. The specific crimes vary … Continue reading lets you not be threatened by violence. Or that being big does. But that’s not true. It can deter specific kinds of violence but, but it attracts others, and often it doesn’t allow you to avoid violence at all – the “deterrence”…

I watched Sorry to Bother You (2018) today, as you may be able to tell from the orange brow blobs in [fig 2]. That movie makes text the subtext that I read in all sorts of things – that rich people should be afriad of being murdered because shit is already real bad and literally starving to death pretty reliably makes the peasants revolt. It also reminds me a lot of my own experiences in being invited to the capitalist class, and deciding to step back so it didn’t murder my soul. Guilty about not doing more to become an equine-spanien. Trapped by the white voice that we all use…

Some of you will be tempted to remind me, after Bad Children, that I’m not a bad person. Even that I am a good person. But it’s not really a question of judgement; I don’t really believe there are good or bad people in the first place. It’s a matter of faith. I have unshakeable faith that the real me is harmful to others. And I’ve constructed a reality where your reassurance that I’m not is evidence that I’ve tricked you into liking me. Is evidence of the specific way in which I am already hurting you. Of course that view isn’t very kind to you. It assumes you don’t…

Medicaid achieved. Or at least advanced to the next step, wherein I have to call a bunch of providers and get them to reprocessed old bills with a secondary insurer. Or I guess step 0 of finding all the old bills. But still, progress. In theory I won’t have to call directly about Medicaid for the next 9 months or so. There wasn’t anything more they needed from us, they just failed to properly finalize things the last time we called. Which was itself just a call to get them to finalize things after we did all their verification paperwork. It’s a big relief to make progress here after months…