Frostbite

Did LI about fear today in therapy. I have a lot of fear in my life – I don’t really know how to feel safe – but I also don’t allow myself to do or not do things just because I am afraid. Which is a great skill in dire survival situations and a terrible thing all the rest of the time. In theory it’s useful to be able to do things even when you’re afraid but I suspect it would be much more useful to simply feel safe once in a while.

I can reconstruct lots of fearful scenarios from my childhood. Situations where my options were to do something I knew would be bad or risk something else that was worse. Where a bad thing was already happening and I had to do something worse to make it stop. The one I worked with this week was being left outside at an ice rink all day during a school break when I was maybe 9. That happened a lot but this day was particularly tough.

I got dropped off in the morning. Pete had keys to the warming house and let me in to get dressed in my hockey equipment, but then left and relocked the place. I expected him back after dark. He did leave the padlock for the outside lights unlocked. But I didn’t have access to clothes other than my sports equipment (not even the shoes or coat I came in) or food or water or heat or sun protection or communications or even timekeeping (other than the sun).

The benches were enclosed on the back so if the wind was northerly you could use them as partial shelter, but only in one direction. They provided sun protection too, but to use them for anything you had to stop moving. So if it was cold you just had to keep going. And it was real cold this day. I had an improvised knit headband to cover my ears, but it wasn’t big enough top to bottom so I have to choose where it covered (which was not easy under my helmet). And I had no neck protection at all. I must have had long underwear or I literally would have died. And I had a later of pads and socks and a jersey that helped me trap some air if it wasn’t too windy.

As you can imagine being abandoned and trapped like this is fearful. And exhausting. And hungry. And cold. It’s how I got frostbite on my upper ears. 9-year-old me decided that lobes were more important than cartilage, and easier to keep warm. A few times I looked across the field at the nearest houses and thought about going over to one. I would have had to take off my skates and go barefoot though, and if I didn’t get to go inside it would be impossible to warm my feet up again. Plus it was a break so no one wanted to be bothered. They’d probably just want to call Mother anyway, and that would make them feel bad, and get me punished.

So I skated around. Trying to keep moving fast enough to be warm but not so fast that I would sweat or need to stop. I piled some snow up in one of the benches to make a more complete wind block but didn’t know that I needed to trap air around me like an igloo, so it wasn’t super useful. When the wind died down I went to the lower rink so I could see the road. It helped to know that there was traffic sometimes, and so I really needed help – if the situation was bad for real humans and not just me – that I could probably reach someone. It was close enough that I could crawl and not need to take off my skates (walking on my blades would have damaged them and that would have resulted in both punishment and difficulty in skating next time this happened).

And thus I spent the day being ashamed of being cold. Of being hungry. Of wanting to be inside. Of wanting to be able to sit. Of wanting access to liquid water. Of being too weak to tolerate the conditions. Ashamed that I wasn’t doing a good job practicing my hockey skills or running drills. That I couldn’t just enjoy being outside like I was supposed to. And ashamed that I was afriad to be here, that I felt trapped, that I would even consider doing something other than what I had been assigned.

Eventually I did get to go home. And I only had to do this a few days a year, so if I could make it through the week things would be fine. I did this last year and it didn’t kill me. Maybe if I better used my time the next day I could actually improve my athletic ability a little, to stop being such a child and learn to tolerate the cold, to stop wanting things I didn’t need, to be good enough at hockey for other people to want to practice with me.

I was super afriad, and ashamed to be so. Positive that it was all my fault, either because my desires were too extreme to ever be satisfied – that my “needs” were part of a temper tantrum I was throwing because I refused to give up my infantile ways of thinking – or because I had failed to prepare correctly. If I had asked for the right sort of hat last winter ¹It had be winter, because you can’t buy winter hats in summer. But it had to be the end of winter because hats were too expensive to buy in the middle of winter. Not too early – definitely after the snow started to melt – but not too late either because convincing Mother to go shopping might take weeks and you have to get there before the … Continue reading I wouldn’t be having this problem. If I hadn’t demanded lunch every day at school Mother would have been able to afford a hat. If I had reminded her earlier that I needed a neck guard maybe if have one by now (never got one).

So I was abandoned in dangerous situations. Not just emotionally but physically. On a pretty regular basis. In situations that no one could handle in the way I was asked too. In situations where I had to make survival sacrifices, to will myself to do a thing I didn’t wanted to do in order to keep things from getting even worse. And I knew it would always happen again, because I attracted it. Because a real boy wouldn’t be in this situation.

I don’t feel safe. I don’t know how. I don’t understand how other people do it either. It doesn’t feel realistic to me, the idea that safer exists outside what I can reactivately provide for myself. Being afriad is just evidence that I’m not well enough prepared. That I’m secretly a terrible person – or maybe not a person at all. Good people don’t have to be afriad unless a bad person brings fear into their life.

Talked to @BPS in near real time on IG direct. It’s the first place I poked them but they never replied. Until yesterday. It’s pretty exiting to imagine an actual chat with them. Intimidating too, like when I do it with you, but I’m still going to give it a try. I’m going to do it anyway though – why let fear stop me now when it never has before (even when it really should have). They posted some art process work on Patreon too that I am having thinks about, about holes and light the power created by collection.

Still lots of trouble getting Shanda seen. The referral from last week went through but didn’t change their minds anyway about when she could be seen. We’ve got another appointment on the 1st. I don’t know if that will help any but it at least feels like a thing to do, instead of just waiting. It seems insane to me that simply getting the next test done – one that two independent physicians have recommended – requires waiting on some small physician group with months long schedules. I fraking Holman sure, but in major metro? Maybe we can get it done over the weekend in July when we’re in Canada. Or as the last physician intimated, just show up at the ER and present as accute rather than chronic to bypass some of the waiting rules.

Decades ago I took lots of pictures. All the time. I owned several film cameras and have digitized a ton of old prints. But I haven’t taken any for a long time, or even looked at them. They’re not stored someplace easy to access, they’re just archived away for some future I don’t imagine. And mostly the old ones don’t mean anything anymore. They’re mostly of times I don’t remember, or that if I’m prompted to remember were terrible.

I have no pictures of me ²I’m doing better on this front. I have no qualms about my face color pics, for example. I still can’t handle pics where I might be associated with anyone who knows me, but I’m not very worried about pics of just me.. I’m not afriad of how I look or anything that’s technically in the picture, I just don’t want to exist. Certainly not in a way anyone would document. No good can come from being recognized. From me having any recognizable identity of any kind. That makes it easy for me to not want a gender or a nationality or a family, but it also means I can’t have any belonging. I wanted to be invisible or as close to it as possible, to be sure none of me leaked onto anyone else. To be sure no one was close enough to notice the harm my existence caused. I wanted exactly none attention from anyone. Including myself ³And I lived a life to make that true. I still do in too many ways, though it’s getting better. Many of you live lives that try not to pay attention to yourself. Maybe not comprehensively like me but at least in certain aspects. You don’t want to think about your health or what you’ll do outside your day job or your identity or your … Continue reading.

I’m still ashamed to have pictures of you ⁴Consider sending some, if you’d like to help convince my brain this is unnecessary. Of yourself or others or just things that are important to you.. And mostly I don’t, not even if Shanda or Dog. It makes me feel like a creeper. Anything that acknowledges my attention to you feels super dangerous. What if someone foind out. What if they associated me with you in their minds. Then when I’m inevitably found out you won’t be protected. It would be much safer if no one knew I thought of you. Including you.

Next time I’m a thin young woman I should definitely be @EI [fig 1]. Particularly given that the reverse is this [fig 2]. In my current configuration that dress is no good, but I could maybe do shoulders. And I’m still working on the idea that I’m allowed hair.

Last robots tonight, at least for a couple of months. Mostly disassembled things and cleaned up. Made Stochastic a little uneasy about piercings. But had a good time chatting. I think I talked S into getting mini lathe. It’s a tool that’s not high on my list but I’d love to play with a few times a year, so it would be great if they got one ⁵It feels like unjust manipulation when I suggest that, but no one ever tells me it’s wrong when I talk about it so I guess maybe it’s okay? I literally can’t tell because of my broken narc aversion, and my brain won’t trust anyone else to tell me.. I still need to write to several people there but life has made even my own writing hard to get to. A couple of weeks ago I asked S for help with a social thing and they ignored me, but we pushed back toward it tonight on the way home so maybe they’d still be willing to participate if I found a framing that was less scary for them.

Chatted with DerbyK about chemical lights and chemical delights and interpersonal chemistry. I need a new prompt for you. That’s one of the things on my writing list that I’ve been unable to get to. I have decided I often want to take Wednesdays off, so I can have time after therapy to chew on things and get to sleep early and sometimes have weed (which makes it hard to write well for a few hours, and hard to be motivated to delay sleep for it).

Chatted with M about fungus and humidity and PARIS and the pain of wating for treatment. I owe you some work too. I pulled data for an analysis and haven’t done it all week. I ordered you some fun things this week, and got lodging worked out for August. I’ve let myself get back into a few anxiety list items which is pushing my thoughts of you toward logistics even beyond what my schedule has demanded. I’ll make that a priority to change.

ZiB

Kept up with work this week and ditched all my remaining SRs successfully, but didn’t get much work done on my BZ project. I might need to spend a couple hours on that this weekend, so I can be sure it’s in good shape even if I don’t get much time next week. I’m back on the queue starting Monday but only for one week, and then another two off, so we’re finally back to a normal schedule. I never got to my annual review stuff but that’s just gonna sit until at least Monday, or maybe later if no one brings it up. I know for a fact it doesn’t matter so I maybe can just opt out.

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Sent from a phone.

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