As Δt approaches zero…

Another day sitting pretty still not doing much. And largely alone while Shanda worked and took care of the house and me and Dog. But I was able to write, and we found time to talk through it. And I got dressed and ate two meals and mostly didn’t let myself do anything that risked reinjury, so at least moderately good self care.

I’m getting sick of reclining. I usually sleep face down, and a often prefer to work that way too. But my back will have none of it right now. I am getting better – I expect to work tomorrow – but I’m still in a no bending, no twisting, no jarring sort of life.

I didn’t work today, even from home, on Shanda’s advice. Which is mostly fine. I’m on queue this week but probably it doesn’t matter if I miss a day (and I did not check yet if it did). I’m a little annoyed about the bugs I submitted last week. I went to some trouble to stage them in a special area, having been denied access to the mainline. This week they’ve decided the staging is no good and I need to commit directly. It feels like a lot of wasted work. I also need to get into the office this week to make sure I still own a chair and whatnot in the new building. And I have to go to the old one to get my computer which I labeled but they decided not to move anyway. But not tomorrow. Maybe Thursday.

Shanda’s CASA case went well last week. The final order is still pending but they took testimony from her to support it and everything is expected to close in the near future once the support package is worked out. Why that couldn’t have happened in the past 3 years is unclear but that’s how these cases go. I’m glad it’s finally done.

I got some replies from @BPS today, to several different things I talked at them about. So that plan is working correctly and I’m back to full moral superiority. I haven’t watched any more ADs yet but I’m excited to imagine them as more interactive. Also I had been anxious about their switch to longer, weekly videos but it looks like that has already ended. It’s a thing I should ask them about because mine feel a lot different when I try to build them across days. Sometimes I can use the time to make them more interconnected but that rarely feels easy. And to do it I have to give up the version where I hold the whole thing in my head at the same time.

When I start to spend time editing, or wondering what they’re about, I can make them better in some ways. But I also spend a lot of time teaching for connections and not nearly as much actually writing. More time being poetic and less time smashing out the feels. There’s value I working on these throughout the day. Sometimes even in holding a topic for tomorrow. But I rarely feel like I’ve got something better on day 4 – I think these are better as iterations.

It’s also a thing I do when playing sim games – get familiar, invent a strategy, try things, quit/die, devise improvements, and then loop back to trying. I do that until I can play in a way that feels like progress for a whole day of gaming. Then I’m done. I don’t want to play a save again tomorrow, I just want as much game as I can do in one go, as I can hold in my head at one time. When i come back months from now I’ll start over at getting familiar and invent a new way to play, and then pefect it over coming sessions until it to is something I can do all day with a consistent and reliable strategy.

There are other things I like better as iterations. It’s one of the reasons I like programming, because I only have to solve the next part of program to make progress. And it fits my continuous improvement philosophy. It helps keep me from feeling stuck in something too big, or from feeling like I have to know the whole plan before I start. It lets me focus on a problem that’s brain sized and train myself to solve the bigger one by building intermediate tools (cognitive or external). It’s a thing I should imagine about how I might like the day job better. And about how I might pick up some of my older projects. Things that feel overwhelming when I imagine pushing through but that I could learn to do in pieces until it all fits into a day’s work.

Chatted with M. I’m so happy to see you doing things that are for you and not just for external demands. I’m not super sure you’d describe things that way, but at least to me it feels like a step away from merely enduring and waiting for things to improve. A step away from hopelessness. And you’re doing it at a time when you could be doubling down on endurance. Plus you’re leaking bits of it out at me pretty regularly – sometimes even bits that smell like long-term feels – and that always makes me excited and relieved. You’ve also let me lean on you with more than a couple of rants, and you’ve been great about poking through them to see what I’m yelling about. Your sharing and listening is more help than you know.

I am not super satisfied with my ability to get help when I can’t be in charge. I think Shanda and I have mostly recovered from this most recent exchange and are pointed back together instead of further apart. But I’m not sure how to make it better next time. And I resent how it went this time. And am guilty. I’m afriad that I won’t, while I’m having an emergency, be able to get the sort of help I need. That I won’t be able to direct my own care, or won’t want to due to my own issues with self care, and that no one will help me even with getting urgent, emergency help from a third party. I’m resentful that I felt forced to choose between my survival and my humanity – that Shanda “got to” be triggered and respond like a human and that I “had to” suppress my own panic and be in charge of both of us, even though I was having a legit emergency in addition to my historical trauma. And I’m guilty about choosing to prioritize myself and demand help even though you weren’t really up for providing it.

I’m going to try again to practice some emergency procedures, though since childhood I’ve never been able to get anyone to care. They all feel like punishment to you even after I’ve explained how much like care they would feel to me. And how afraid I am of you or us not being prepared in an emergency. Not because we lack supplies or tools or information but because we didn’t check to be sure all those things worked and would actually be usable in an emergency. Not just present but functional ¹Please test all your emergency equipment and procedures. Not just to be sure it works – which is important – but to be sure you know how to easily use it. And to be sure your confident enough in the system to use it even when you’re having a real hard day. Because you expect to be using it in any emergency, when you’re busy and hurt and … Continue reading and within the confidence range needed for actual use in an actual emergency.

Emergencies are hard for you I know. The version where I have any emotion or ask for any help can trigger you immediately and in a way that takes you hours and a nap to even start to recover from. Which is unfortunate when I need help. And it doesn’t play well with my own issues, where beyond being injured and reacting like a human to that I am terrified of the way you notice and are upset by my emotion. If I was hurt badly enough for others to notice my first priority alway had to be to calm them down, so that they would stop making it worse for me. And usually I stated that game after being hurt baldy and not knowing how to improve even my own situation, let alone to manage anyone else’s. It’s why I’m so desperate to minimize my response, at least until yours had improved.

I can work on being more open to care, and less terrified by it, but I also need you to be better it. To see that my emotion isn’t a threat to you, but is actually necessary for you to see if you are going to help. You have to actually be paying attention to me and caring how I’m impacted in order to provide help and knowing my feelings is a vital part of that. I know training to recover from or set aside your own panic is no small feat. But it would make a big difference in my life if I could be confident that my survival doesn’t depend exclusively on my ability to self-rescue.

I want to spend some time thinking about how I hate my physical existence. I sort of know how it works, what caused it, and why I designed the insane rules that tell me it’s a good idea. I can see in theory how a lot of it is not mine. But I need to chase the feeling back to someplace I can be reassured about it. And I need to feel out the places where I’ve built structure to avoid it. That’s maybe an LI exercise. And the embodiment connection feels like a path in. It’s a thing I need to spend time thinking about in any case.

ZiB

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