I have recently come to understand myself as having a dissociative identity disorder. I initially identified as not having amnesia because I do not feel emotionally disconnected from any significant aspect of my life. But I have come to believe that my central identity shares an emotional space with everyone else, but not much episodic memory. I can sometimes trigger a memory with the right feeling, to connect me and whoever lived it. I can reason what things might have lead to a feeling I do remember. But it’s quite difficult for me to create an accurate narrative memory of my life as I change among roles. Which is what…

The fact that your concern about insurance hurts people – that it hurt us – is the problem with insurance. That’s not a problem with our specific relationship, but it is an issue that your profession is actively enabling. The fact that you talk about it with each other but don’t have organized support about it makes it seem pretty hopeless, or at least like therapists are collectively incapable of helping with it. I feel very vulnerable during the time between when you think I have plotted to manipulate you and the time when you realize that’s a feeling about insurance audits. During that period I’m not merely vulnerable in…

Dog is dead. There’s more to say on that but not tonight. Tonight is for quiet sadness, and for all the old feels about the times I choose death for another being, or wanted me own, or that abandoned someone who needed me to save myself. For related reasons I watched Hotel for Dogs (2020) today. It’s not bad for what it is, but it’s not very much. It has a solid concept but it’s stripped down to such nothing that even with long dog tricks the film is only 75 minutes. It’s ostensibly about saving dogs from the pound and to that end there’s a cute, simple heist story…

I have, since I was a very young parent, imagined that people only want me around if they depend on me for something. That the only ethical thing I could offer such people was a path to independence. That my duty was to keep people from mistakenly getting attached to me, and to train them to not need me. As I got older I imagined that people only depended on me because there were no better options, and that absent the circumstances that isolated them a better option would certainly become available. I imagined that my own selfish desire for connection made me manipulate people into such situations, instead of…

Here’s my political analysis. It’s the same as last year’s. We should stop having presidents. It’s worth a small cost to vote, because you can pick the branded flavor of your oppression, and because you can influence who you get to overthrow. But don’t expect it to matter. It never has. If it did you wouldn’t be allowed to do it. Dog is more obviously dying again. His back legs are weak and he’s notably more tired. Sometimes that’s temporary, but I suspect he hasn’t got a lot of temporaries left even if this one is. It makes extra snuggly, which though it has a sad cause, is still a…

One of the reasons I haven’t been writing is because my anxiety has been high. Like, real high. Which I attributed to, you know, lifelong mental illness. I am rarely stuck there these days, anxious in a way I can’t identify or resolve, but it’s a place that feels familar. Turns out my blood pressure spent some time in the “severe anxiety” section of the chart, and I was feeling terrible not because my brain is fried but because I was dying. My life is complicated sometimes; and some people’s obvious sign of distress is another person’s “hard day”. So I medicated my BP and I feel much better. I…