Darning and the Mending of Souls

Last time I bought extracts I had the vendor rank them by what he called “active-ness” and what I would call “anxiety”. I got one in the middle and one way off on the left end — something so THC-A heavy it’s a little silly. It’s probably mostly useful for mixing but I tried some straight on Friday. It’s good, but you really do have to be ready to burn off some of the twitch it brings. I used it to walk the dog and imagine new ways to worry about people, which I think went pretty well.

I had expected to do that early on Friday, maybe 3 or 4 PM, but C from D&D showed up a little after 3. We had made vague plans for them to come over for some help with a kit robot he’s building and programming for a class, but I was expecting them to make specific plans before showing up. I was in the middle of trying my new face paints and dreaming of drugs and early dog walks.

He’s clearly trying to be friends, and my brain is not super prepared for this situation. For one thing, the whole concept feels like a lie. People going out of their way to have my attention feels like it’s some sort of distraction or even a prank or other con. Most people complain about my attention, at least eventually, not seek it out. I’m regularly told I’m too overwhelming. For another my brain wants to keep D&D in a separate box, and not burn my limited supply of friend time on this game. Since all my relationships are bound to become worse over time it doesn’t seem safe to mix recurring activities that I might want to do for years with friends. Otherwise I risk losing both at the same time whenever I get to the end of their tolerance for me, or when they finally discover my inhumanity.

Plus there’s the thing where he imagines me as smart. Which I know is supposed to be good but it’s sort of a mixed bag for me. There were lots of circumstances where I was only valued for being smart, not as a person. Just like one might be valued only for being attractive or only for being rich. It’s a thing I was often asked to perform, to titillate others with my intellectual pole dancing, and then to be subject to their scorn and disrespect if I attempted to interact in any other context. Or less directly, lots of situations where I was expected to make decisions and bear responsibility because I was “smart” or “strong” or whatever other excuse people used for not being responsible for themselves. Or just to force me into a role where it’s easier for them to blame me for the situation that already existed. So while I definitely like to feel smart being told it’s true can easily feel like a demand, even if done carefully. My brain insists that the ideal situation is someone asking for my help and finding it just barely adequate so that they have no reason to expect anything more in the future. I have to keep expectations low, otherwise when my looks fade no one will love me.

And then there’s the part where I don’t feel like I can add an reliably human time to my schedule. It’s the opposite end of the “limited supply of tolerance” thing that I assume will make people hate me eventually. I have to come up with extra energy to spend on this and can’t expect any back because that’s not how my interactions work — I’m supposed to arrange them to be exceptionally low impact on other people, except in cases where I’m very confident I can be helpful in a utilitarian way, and even then I should arrange for the benefit to be provided by a system instead of my individual action. Meanwhile I should provide as much as is plausible, to ensure the other person gets as much as possible with the least about of contact. Otherwise people would have to put up with me to get the good parts of our interactions. And when I do have to interact I have to be up for acting fully human even though I’m only like 63% human on good days and much less on many days. When I’m below about 85% human it can be hard for people to handle, let alone for me to have a light touch.

I know that’s basically all nonsense, but it’s what my brain does anyway. M reassured me that I’m allowed to not like this, and to not do it. Which is useful. I feel trapped sometimes by my fear of scarcity. My unwavering belief that what I need will always be too much — will be more than is available to me — and that I must therefore make do with any scrap that is available to me, even if it’s not good for me. Which is essentially the fear that I won’t have enough food or socks or love. These days I don’t often have trouble saying no to individuals or situations, even if that means giving up things I like. Leaving is one of my special powers. But it still hurts to frame it that way, to imagine that it’s this or nothing and so choosing not accept this thing that’s 22% good means that I will instead be alone. My experience still says I’ll never have enough, but it’s simply inaccurate to imagine that I won’t have more opportunities, and it’s not at all clear to me that merely collecting more people means I’ll have more of what I want.

I did have an okay time with them. Nothing in particular that I didn’t like, other than the weak schedule coordination. Well that and the way they talk about individual violence as a way to produce better empathy in people with poor perspective. That’s a common cultural idea which I should read at least in part as an expression of the need to fight privilege than an actual threat of violence, but it’s still tricky for me. My tolerance for violence is really, really low. It has not produced good results for me no matter who wields it or how. I can imagine needing violence, and I have undertaken it in ways I would repeat, but it’s never a thing I think is a good idea just the least bad idea I can think of to resolve a crisis. And I know from experience it’s very expensive and only marginally effective even in a crisis.

What I need to imagine is that relationships could generate a net positive flow of energy, so that participating in them would be good for both me and the other person at the same time. This is a thing the neglectful, abusive and transactional nature of so many of my relationships makes it difficult for me to believe. Even today it’s what I do by default, and it’s all I demand from other people. I imagine that relationships work best when I ask for nothing, expect nothing, and give as much as I can. Which sounds virtuous but of course that is not in any way sustainable, let alone satisfying. And it keeps me from believe that I can have more, either in terms of my existing relationships or new ones, because I’m already working as hard as I can at not dying an I don’t have more to give.

I saw this today on RBN: https://www.reddit.com/r/raisedbynarcissists/comments/bd0u4r/ Which is more or less how I responded to the movie. There’s an unearned parental redemption at the core of this movie. Abuse bad enough it very nearly ruins a young person’s life, totally dismissed in the end because we don’t offer alternatives to family and so victims are just supposed to make peace with their role and make due with the limited benefits they can extract. I get that the movie is about recognizing how it’s hard for many people, but none of that is an excuse for the abuse. The power imbalance of the patriarchal setting prevents the movie from making a comparison among equals. But that’s not the way a lot of people talk about it.

I darned a sock today [fig 1], which is another sock first. I’m already so worried about ruining clothes by using them, particularly nice clothes, and I managed to pull out a good inch of weave in the first couple hours of wearing the best-fitting pair. They got caught on the dog’s tags when I poked him with my feet. I’m still unclear on whether or not that was negligent on my part, to touch Dog with my sock-covered feet — I do it all the time with my bare feet but I’m not sure what’s acceptable for socks. In any case, I did get it repaired today. And I think in a way that feels sufficient to consider them “fixed” and fully usable, as opposed merely “no longer getting worse”, which is the level of repair success I expected.

My brain is still having a hard time with clothes in general, as I try to feel okay about them and to dress like a human ¹To be clear, I mean to use the technology of clothing like a modern human, not to adopt a style that humans like. The style of a poly pagan goth clown cult leader is actually the part of clothes I’m most okay with.. For example, I’m starting to feel like it’s possible to have some amount of armor along with both comfort. Or to have clothing other than a jacket that I manage for temperature control purposes. Like, when I put on socks and leggings together I can be a human temperature sitting or standing around my home, and be covered from floor to neck to be sure none of my body leaks into the environment, and be comfortable enough to lounge. But it’s hard for me to accept the non-rugged version of armor (or even warmth) – the idea that I don’t need all of my clothes to stand up to forrest survival use is difficult to accept. It’s part of the reason that nice clothes aren’t for me, or will be ruined by me.

I’m also not even really sure how to feel about warm feet. It’s sort of a thing I only perceive as a detriment, the idea that my feet aren’t notably cool. It’s one of the reasons I don’t want socks, because it always seems better to me to have cold feet than warm feet. I’ve been sitting around today trying to like it. It’s tricky though. And it throws off my routines about how to stay warm when I’m out of bed. Probably I could learn to feel better about being warm, instead of feeling trapped by it. So many trauma bits though, all in the same place. Learning to not care ²Learning to not care about anything is very painful and almost always a bad idea. But I learned to not care about all the things. Would not recommend. about being cold, or about having clothes I liked or that were sufficient for hygiene or warmth or social expectation. Fucking punishment clothes. Even the thing where I try to wear socks in bed — I sort of like the practical aspect in which I can stick my leg out from under the blanket to regulate my temperature, and still keep my feet warm while my calves bleed off heat. But when I have warm feet and cool legs it triggers my fear of leg cramps; low leg temperature was sometimes a trigger for cramps, particularly when I was malnourished. Or the idea of wearing clothes to bed in general, after being sexually harassed about bedclothes for years. There’s just no end to the ways it fucking pushes my buttons just to playact human costumes throughout my daily life.

I watched a bunch of @Innuendo Studios ³https://www.youtube.com/user/mrskimps today, basically all of their 2018 videos. I was happy about the first one I saw: https://youtu.be/I-_4lNRMChI Wherein they discuss the typical coupling of the amount an audience is supposed to like a character with the amount of empathy they’re supposed to have — how you’re supposed to not care about what happens to “bad guys” in a movie and that you’re supposed to care a lot about “good guys”. They contrast specifically against Hayao Miyazaki films (e.g. Princess Mononoke) wherein you’re supposed to have empathy for everyone and still make a judgement. They use it as an argument against moral relativism, not by claiming that “we both think we’re right but I know my cause is righteous, so maybe we can compromise” but by claiming “there isn’t a compromise between my position and yours, and I’m right because my position does ”. They acknowledge the experiences and feelings that produce the division and still draw a judgement about the outcome to choose a side. It’s a sort of storytelling we could use more of, because the idea that compromise is our goal is contrary to the safety and even continued existence of many people in our world. I don’t need to compromise with Mother about her abuse, she needs to stop. I don’t need to compromise politicians who want me to die, I need them to stop.

I had lots of feels about their multi-part essay about the feminism of Mad Max: Furry Road (2015). It starts here: https://youtu.be/wmR8A1a8shk It’s easy for me to feel excluded from feminism, even though I feel like I’m fighting the same enemy. This series still does the a little, insofar as it identifies the trope as about women and not about segregation, but it’s pretty good. And it’s easier for me to take because it’s focused on a specific example and not individuals. I still think it would be worthwhile to note that, like all the other attributes of the archetypal tropes he identifies for action protagonists, actually being female is only a common trait, not a necessary one. I know that’s nitpicking, but I don’t think it’s a meaningless distinction, or a big ask for people to consider. In any case, the movie analysis is great. Not just of Mad Max, for which they make I think a really strong argument, but for all the tropes they carefully define and document. And it reminded me why we should love and talk about Mad Max. That movie is good in so many ways, mixing over-the-top long-form metaphor with a refusal to tightly define all of the important individuals. @IS doesn’t quite call it a heist movie, and in practice it’s not because our protagonist isn’t really organizing the heist, but there is a heist movie in — an escape-based heist at that — and honestly that’s enough by itself for me to like a movie.

Finally I watched this endnote on White Fascism: https://youtu.be/5Luu1Beb8ng Which has more than an order of magnitude more views than their subscriber count, and so clearly was made broadly popular in some other context. And I can guess why – they make a very good argument about the danger of refusing to recognize fascism for the fear of being called fascist, for a careful definition that allows for meaningful distinction between actual fascists and the groups that fascists want to intimidate by calling fascist. Which isn’t difficult, from my point of view, but clearly is a problem we have in society. Have had for a long time and continue to do anything about. Good points about how white-ness is defined differently than other races, in that it’s the supposed absence of race, and about how fascists continually try to lift language from more popular leftist positions even though the meaning is contrary to their goals. About how we should recognize one of the definitional features of fascism as an attempt to define itself as different from previous fascists while still accepting their basic positions (of course Nazis are bad but before they screwed things up those concentration camps were there to protect us from evil communists). And about the obvious and self-defeating but necessary narrowing of the power structure over time, because as a reactionary movement it’s always necessary to have an “other” to react against. I also love how all their work ties the hierarchy of capitalism, and our weird insistence that the existence of capitalism justifies obvious injustices, into so many of the power structures we are more openly worried about.

With Shanda’s help I got a bunch of bread on Friday. For the first time in a long time I feel we have enough that I am allowed to use it for whatever I want and to just get more out of the freezer when it’s gone. Unfortunately that amount of is like 14 bags worth (in various shapes and styles, not just sliced loaves). It does make me feel very safe. In the same way getting a chest freezer originally made me feel safe; I bought it to provide long-term storage for bread. This is silly of course. I haven’t actually been practically restricted in my ability to have bread since like 2001. But there are so many rules baked into my head about bread and when and how I’m allowed to consume it or even get it out of the freezer. I’m glad there’s an amount that feels safe to me but I should work on making the amount better reflect my actual usage. And I should feel empowered to get more bread, which is a thing I was never allowed to be in charge of in the 1900s even though I did all the grocery planning. How would Mother easily deprive us of food if she didn’t control our main sources of calories. Bread and breakfast cereal were always he exclusive domain. Still, it’s an improvement, to feel safe even if it’s still only at the extreme.

On a pretty regular basis I make a plea here for more sharing. Sometimes I phrase that plea in terms of responses to this, though I mean that only as an example and prompt not as the singular action I hope for. Sometimes I phrase it in terms of how it will help me, by keeping me from feeling so free-floating in a world were it seems like me and everything about me is overwhelming and dangerous. Today I’m going to frame it primarily in terms of you ⁴Several you are going to read this as pressure about you specifically. And you’re not wrong. But you should take some comfort in the idea that it applies exactly as much to other people who are close to me. I’m not calling you out, I’m trying to point out a way things could be different and I think better for many of us. Or if I am calling … Continue reading, and why I think it would help you. How I think not doing it enough makes your life harder ⁵Sometimes you imagine that even the people wedged up against you can’t share deeply with you, or that you don’t want them to or don’t know how. That it’s not worth trying with anyone else because you can’t even make it go with the people it’s supposed to be easiest with, or because it takes so much effort to try to keep even those … Continue reading, even though you imagine that sharing is a thing that would itself be hard.

I share because I know that isolation made every thing hard thing in my life harder. I didn’t always feel this way, but it was always true. For a long time I had plenty of examples of how isolation was a protection for me. How moving away from other people, making sure even the better ones never got too involved in my day-to-day struggles, kept me safe. And those aren’t false. Definitely there are cases where it’s necessary to create some space around yourself to be safe. If there are people around who are hurting you it happens all the time. But you have escaped much of that, and could again if you needed to. And for the now-common situation where the people around you are more invested in your wellbeing, isolation is rarely a good protection against anything.

One thing that more sharing requires is more time. You will have to find time to make it happen, prioritizing it over at least some activities, giving something else up (though in practice you’re always giving up something no matter what you choose). I recognize it’s not nothing to do that, and certainly many times you will have other, higher priorities. But you can get a lot out of that time, if you choose to make it. You get your own insight from thinking enough about how you feel to try to articulate it to yourself and someone else. You get an opportunity to think about all the parts that you’ve been anxiously avoiding. You get more careful attention to yourself and better decisions because of it. You get the insight of your friends into all the things you talk about and the pieces they can see you ignore. You get a sounding board to help sort out your own insights. You get the easy reassurances your friends can offer you merely by paying attention and responding to the feelings they hear you shout. You get better, more frequent support, less stress about keeping connected, less worry ⁶At least less of the debilitating, consuming sort of worry. Obviously we all worry about the people in our lives, but we can worry less if we know they are with us, kept close by our deliberate efforts. about the people around you. You get less time being alone, being trapped, being hopeless.

You get the comfort of knowing that someone is only one step away from you when you do want help. I know it’s work, to drag me along through your life. To find the time and the words to try explain your experiences and reactions and thoughts and feelings. To be frustrated when I don’t understand, or when you can’t yet speak. And even if you spent all day at it I’d only ever get half of it. But if you take the effort pull me with you and keep me at least within sight if not within arm’s reach, I can offer you so much more. All that energy you spend keeping me close lets me be right there, immediately available, on any day when you aren’t up to be the one pulling. Rather than playing a game of Marco Polo when you need help you can just look at me and expect me to figure out what might be useful, almost before you need it. You can have the power of my sunglass-defying stare turned on the parts of your life you pick — the pieces of joy you want to increase by sharing and the pieces of grief you need to share to reduce — and not just the parts I can divine from eyebrows and eavesdropping. You can have my validation and assurance not just about the parts of your life that build up into big barriers but about all the parts that trample small bits of your confidence and wellbeing and safety every day. You can have better gifts, better chats, better community, better control of your own direction in the world.

You get the privilege of having someone truly know you.

And all you have to do is let me see your life. To imagine the effort sharing requires brings you safety and calm and vitality in a measure at least equal to what you spend. To believe that bringing me into what you’re already doing will let you do it better. Just like I need to do with C. Just like I’m already doing with you ⁷I also share because I want less control of my own life. I want more of your intervention. I’m not doing a great job by myself and I don’t want more independence, I want more guidance and discussion from people who are paying attention and care about me. That doesn’t have to be what you want from sharing, but it would be great if you … Continue reading.

ZiB

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