Don’t let it go. I have already let so many things go. Every day my brain tells me that not wanting things is easier than having them. It’s one of the reasons I can’t deal with people who purport to help me be zen. People who imagine that desire is the root of all suffering, and that I can be free of only I learn to give it up. But am an expert at giving things up, and I know what happens if you try to eliminate suffering through loss – ego death. You can give up anything and if you do you will be free. But one of the…

I think I want the old office to be a studio space. Someplace where Shanda and I can leave things we’re working on out between sessions. And someplace our tools and supplies can live without being so tightly packed away – where there’s no intermediate unpacking step required before it’s possible to work. The room has been really dead since Shanda moved upstairs 1I moved upstairs years earlier to deal with the way my presence can make her resentful when she’s stressed at work, but that’s another story.. And the whole space had been sort of an avoidance trap for both of us. Shanda has been afraid to clean her…

There have been lots of times in my life where what I want simply doesn’t matter. This happens to everyone of course, but it happened to me a lot, about many things where what I want has to matter. Where it not mattering was repeatedly traumatic and never made okay. I have lost a lot of myself to that. Tuned my brain to just accept that I can’t have what I need or want and to not think about wanting anything other than what I have. I’m not okay, but I know that it doesn’t matter if I am okay, and that I won’t survive if being okay is a…

I spent all day today at home with Shanda. It was good. I helped her do all the best crying and calming. She helped me practice stillness. Together we achieved fence – inspection and repair and decontamination – and Dog is now rated for untethered flights in the back yard. It’s been on the list for a year and finally got done. We talked for a minute about keeping control of your attention so you can know and get what you want. And we poked at the feeling where new ideas mean stress and failure to you – feel like a demand for commitment to a thing you don’t want…

I realize last night that I imagine most food – particularly high quality food – literally isn’t a thing I can have without some sort of social negotiation. I can’t have peas, for example, because it takes at least 2, maybe 3 people to authorize the use of preserved vegetables. And there are lots of things I that category, where I can’t have them alone. Cooking itself often feels like it’s in that category – if it requires heating it’s a thing I can only do if it helps more than one person. Or at least one real person and not just me. There’s a whole seperate level of social…

I accomplished lots of things today, but didn’t do writing. Got real baked with Shanda and practiced cooking 1I want to make a baked-baking pune here but can’t be bothered to implement one. . We even did some together, which has never been our style. I learned that none of the normal food I own requires social negotiation to become available to me, but still don’t really believe it. There are lots of places in my life where what I wanted literally didn’t matter, and it sucks that food is one of them. But I got day job done and laundry and floors and cooker twice and imagined that I…

In therapy this week I talked about food. There are lots bits obviously but I started with a memory about rotten food and food denial and secret eatting. When I was like 4 or maybe 5 – before the porch I lived in existed because this took place on the stoop it replaced – Mother tried making yogurt. She bought some sort of heated petri dish or whatever cheapo kitchen appliance was supposed to facilitate this process. She loaded it up with dairy, but didn’t actually follow the instructions – as with many other foods she was happy to just skip anything we didn’t have, and to do things to…

I have a lot of trouble imagining that anyone can pay attention to me without being hurt, or at least annoyed. I can imagine people tolerating me when they need something and think my attention is necessary to get it. I can be unobtrusive enough to make tolerating me fairly undemanding, at least if you aren’t stuck with me 24/7. I can imagine people feeling guilty about my sad life and deciding to look at me even though it builds some resentment for them. But it’s hard to imagine that anyone actually wholeheartedly wanting to see me. It doesn’t help that many times you imagine me being in the room…

Started season 3 of GLOW (Netflix). I really love the excuse that wrestling gives that show for stupid makeup and costumes. It’s just my speed. So is its 80s nostalgia – The Americans and Stranger Things 1The Winona Ryder part of the 80s works for me, but the part where it asks me to remember being a child is uncomfortable and doesn’t really match my experience at the time anyway. I had terrible shorts and whatnot but because neglect not because 80s. don’t work for me, but GLOW does. It guess maybe I was already a washed-up old writer back in the day. I realized that I have used money…

One of my parenting feels is shame that I failed so badly last time. Shame that Mother was right, and that I could never do it well enough to avoid hurting people. I never figured out how to get them out of it, or even how to give them each other. Of course I didn’t, because I was 11 and poor and subject to my own abuse and unable to remove them from theirs and because I hadn’t even figured out how to parent myself let alone anyone else. Of course it was doomed. But it still happened. I still failed badly enough that Ben is trying to die alone…