Took Shanda to your first riot today. You did a good job, even though you were afraid. Even though the rain was oppressive. I hijacked the way impulsivity can feel like relief to you, and proposed riot as catharsis only 30 minutes before I wanted to leave. Which is a good trick for making hard things happen but meant we didn’t get to coordinate or plan very well. We’ll try something a little less improvised next time. I was a little disappointed to not get to make individual cops feel bad. I feel like that’s a place I could really contribute. I dressed for the job today but did not…

Today for what I believe is the first time in at least a quarter century I actually felt reassured merely to hear someone speak, after having missed them greatly. We didn’t get to speak except to reschedule, but it moved me nonetheless, on the faith and investment in that relationship, and connected me with a feeling I have long been without. In many instances processing trauma is about being able to let go of the past, and to accept how things are right now. In complex trauma one of the issues is the way you teach yourself to accept ongoing oppression and abuse, not in ignorance but for practical survival.…

Here’s a thing that would have been handy for me when I was younger – someone caring that I was trading sex and emotional labor for housing with an abusive person I imagined as a romantic partner. I couldn’t possibly know, because it was a genuine improvement from my life with Mother. But other people did know, and many of them could have helped. Even just a little help would have made a big difference. We’re taught to not notice when people trade sex 1Or more broadly any labor, but in particular sexual, emotional, domestic, childrearing and other forms of “non-market” labor. for survival. Coercion is not just permitted but expected…

Does anyone know why Dog’s breath smells like hospital after he has been sedated? It’s nasty and it lasts for hours and I have no idea what it is. He was on profonol and presumably intubated, but otherwise was just sitting around being scanned. Talked to my therapist about their emotional masking. It clearly makes them uncomfortable but we did make progress. They verbally agreed to the concept of having had an emotional reaction that produced some barrier to a thing I’ve asked them several times to help me with. That’s rational brain on board. We’ll see if their feels brain is on board next week, because it wasn’t there…

Took Dog in today to and oncologist. They confirmed a 10-month median lifespan, with palliative radiation treatment. Maybe 7 months without. They did a CT scan to plan for radiation, but we haven’t decided yet if it’s a good plan. It would require a month of weekly radiation treatments and sedated xrays afterwards, is likely to cause some amount of lung complications due to its location, etc. We’ll see what the report says. In the mean time Dog got even more shaved patches – he already had one on 2 different legs (IVs) l, plus some on his chest from the MRI, and now he has a little shaved spot…

A lot of you talk to me about being overwhelmed. About how it makes you freeze and stop making decisions. I feel like overwhelmed is a state that I rarely stay in for longer than the space of one slow breath. I always have a plan, immediately whenever the situation changes. It starts out as a terrible plan, generally speaking, but in the absence of a good plan it has the virtue of at least being a plan. I’m almost never worried that I can’t think of anything I could do to change the situation. I could always flee. Fight. Burn it down. Yell “stop” and hope it buys me…

Recorded music is a point of some pain to me. It is not regularly a part of my life, except in the context of some mixed media. It has not been terribly clear to me why – certainly part of that is the enforced scarcity of my childhood, and I’m sensitive to loud environments in general – but I saw a new part today. When I was living in Cleveland recorded music was not infrequently ambient in the household. From a somewhat limited playlist, and so often repeated across the days, or even within. The music was usually tolerable nothing by my tastes, but over time I grew to feel…

We finished the quarantine theater, or at least got it ready for pictures. I’m pretty happy with how it came out, and was excited try it out last weekend. Shanda is still a little afraid to use it – you worry that we aren’t allowed to be noticed using out back yard the way other people do – but I think we can get past that with some practice. I haven’t yet successfully heisted L into attendance; the initial response was a somewhat harder “no” than I had hoped for. But I’m moderately confident I can turn that around in the coming weeks. Tricking nervous middle aged women into allowing…

There’s a pretty sad story about child murder in here, so if that’s not for you, bail. Here’s a thing I discovered after therapy and weed today – during some of the times Mother was practicing murder on me 1She was willing me to suffocate but not yet able to complete the act, or torturing me until I lost consciousness I learned several things. One was how to render myself unresponsive to escape such situations, as I discussed in Self-Induced Loss of Control. Another is the fear that I would, after this pain, not be dead and instead merely be disabled and even more trapped under her authority 2I didn’t…

I spent most of the day today yelling at the day job about injustice. It’s unlikely to be effective but it was a good break from real work, and makes me seem engaged, something I often have to fake. It started with my boss reviewing our employee surveys, which are lower on my team than most others because of our security (read: cynical) focus. The results are aggregated by team but there are only 8 people in my team, and I know how I answered, so it’s easy to see where I’m the one giving the most negative answers. It makes me boss worry but I like it. In any…