I’m not sure why I’m not writing again. I mean, obviously it’s more of the same, but I’m not exactly clear why it’s harder now than it was last week. There were some schedule disruptions and extra errands related to holidays, but I’ve had opportunities to write, even ideas about what that might be. Still, I can’t quite bring myself to summon PwW, or at least it doesn’t readily take when I try. I suspect the amount of little things I’ve had to deal with are a factor. I’ve spent lots of time dealing with customer service and in other high-energy interactions trying to keep my house and life in…

One of the things PWW provides is a bridge for the gap between when PIC decides we can sleep and the time when sleep (or whoever runs it) meets us. This space can be full of restless terror; one of the things PIC provides is management of thinking and while letting that go is necessary for sleep the things my brain does without management aren’t all restful. There are other things that can navigate that gap. I often use verbal storytelling in the same space, so I have a through line to guide my thinking as I detach from my own motivations. I use food in that space too, after…

I’ve been thinking about what makes it harder to write, on days when I don’t. There are lots of things of course, but an important one is that I don’t write on days when I don’t find time to return to a rest state before I sleep – days when I am busy with a project, or when there are people at my house, or when Shanda is having a hard time. It’s not quite the same as tired, though it can be coincident – it’s about how PIC is still in-charging right up until sleep. There’s no space for writing in that configuration. There’s also the version where I…

I’ve had new thinks about eating today. I’m building a story about what my life must have been like when I was first abandoned to feed myself, at age 3 or so. A story that fits how I could have actually been eating at the time and how I saw Mother stop feed the Kids, one at a time. A story that fits how I know Mother fed themselves. A story that fits into the endless and capricious food rules that existed in my life. And I think I’ve got one. At some point around age 3 Mother lost the infant-as-narcy-self bond with me and went from being fed as…

Today I did finals with CS. I worked on pictures of circuits and spreadsheets about circuits and a surprising amount of reading about the coding language address model in PCLs. Plus some guessing about what a selfish old community college instructor means, because what they actually say is nonsense. Today I did post-finals recovery with M. I suspect there’s still plenty of tension but it seems like there’s now space for human need, and that’s always good. We lamented survival thinking about keeping things and letting them go, and about the trauma that can take away those choices 1I think there’s a story about Person of Interest and choosing the…

Why do I imagine that PWW comes out after PIC has decided to go to bed? I’ve tried lots of versions of writing during the day but it has only rarely worked. There’s some aspect of PIC being tired. I sometimes do these after very long days, even when sleep would be easy. They let me invoke well-worn processes that change my perception, and sometimes that lets me art with the stress instead of against it. But tired isn’t a prerequisite, just frequently coincident; there must be other factors. I’ll conspire to be in bed and done for the night at a time when I’m not terribly tired, and see…

I’m on disability leave from the day job right now, for however long I can figure out how to still be paid 1sometime in February. Which is great, to take a break for the first time since I was 14. I’ve had a lot of jobs over the years, often several at once, and didn’t get down to just one job until after I moved to Seattle. But for a while least I’m going to do none. In some ways that’s not much change, since I’ve been doing very little work even without being on leave. In some ways that’s a big change because I don’t know that I’ve ever…

It’s easy for me to imagine that I am Person in Charge, and that everyone else is just me playing a role. Certainly I have trained to make Person in Charge the one who shows up when I come to consciousness, including when I wake up. And they are who I must become again at the end, when crisis inevitably demands my self-control. Being PIC isn’t great because their life is necessarily very thin. To be PIC requires that I am not attached to anything I can lose. To be satisfied entirely with my existence in any state or have a plan to make it be different. It’s a solid…