Go Team!

I’ve been making progress on Medicaid. Got most providers to re-bill, which has been waiting since like December. Still probably some follow-up in a couple of weeks to make sure we got everything, but it feels like it’s finally getting done. I’ve got to call the Medicaid office in one state to get them to generate paperwork for consumption by Medicaid in another state, but that’s the only task left on my short list. I think this might actually get wrapped up before we have to renew for 2020.

Here’s another LI feel, one that sort of popped out of the side — I never understood the social aspect of teams, sports or otherwise. I was thinking about being 6 for the memory about Mother’s movie sex projection and my first prompt was about team sports. I realized that as a 6-year-old I literally didn’t know what a team was, and would need someone to start with basic facts about human interactions just to be able to tell him about common life events. But it wasn’t just a problem when I was 6, it always was. It still sort of is. Obviously now I could describe the technical organization of a team, but I haven’t ever participated in one where I felt belonging. In the past I literally would have told you that it doesn’t exist, and that anyone who thinks it does is being influenced by social and individual expectation. Which is perhaps unkind but perfectly matched to my experience. People talk about sports and other teams like they’re a thing we belonging happens, but that still sort of feels like nonsense to me. I can believe that it happens to other people, but I can hardly imagine a sports team being a safe enough place to avoid intra-team harassment and violence and competition, let alone someplace where I human needs are met. When I did sportsball I was often encouraged to imagine team interactions as being harassing or violent, and told that being violent would help the rest of the team in-group me. Both my life and our culture are so insane sometimes. This is another topic where I could really use a story about the good version of this, because I can still only see the bad one. I don’t know what a good one is like, or how to feel about it.

A feeling that slipped out while I was thinking about sportsball, and about how I don’t trust my own feelings: I don’t feel in control of my physical exertion, or at least never did in the past. I can’t help but hate anything that even smells like exercise because I can’t be sure that I will ever be allowed to stop. The fact that I’m too tired, out of breath, inured, cold, hot, sick, etc. has no impact on how much labor is required. In the context of sportsball this meant participating in high-intensity drills no matter how I felt. Pete was often coaching — or harassing the actual coaches — when I was doing sportsball, and he was not up for me ever being less than 100%. He could tell I was faking, that I wasn’t sick (or freezing, or unfed, or any of 20 other shitty states I might have been in) and that I didn’t actually need to rest. He knew that I would become a welfare person if I didn’t go back and finish my sprints after vomiting. He knew that having the wind knocked out of you was a thing you needed to practice handling so it wouldn’t stop you when it happened “for real”. Because obviously when my diaphragm stops working what I should do is ignore it so I can gain an advantage on my attacker. Or something.

And that’s not even the worst kind of not being able to stop. The worst kind is the one you do to yourself, because stopping mean dying. When you’re out in the cold all day and you don’t have sufficient gear moving is the only option. Keep moving. Fast enough to stay warm, but not so fast as to sweat. Hard enough to keep your pulse up but not so hard as to exhale all your water into the 0% humidity air, or to become exhausted before it is safe to stop. Or be exhausted, and dehydrated, and hypothermic and just keep going anyway. Don’t stop because if you stop even for a minute you might never get started again, either because your body won’t go or your mind can’t care.

So I am real good at pushing through with physical activity, just like I am with many other things. Starting feels like death to me, because far too often it was. But the hard part of me is actually stopping. The worse I feel the more important it is to my brain that I keep moving. This part hurts and it’s affecting my judgement but I have to keep going because there is no other option. I’ll never make it in “the real world” if I can’t even hack this. Just because I’m 12 doesn’t mean I can’t haul a full-weight pack up a mountain, and if I can’t do this how can I ever expect anyone to take me seriously. It’s for my own good. Practicing this way will ensure that no one else can ever mistreat me like this. Only the patriarchy is allowed to hurt me like this.

There has been lots of M news, and even more related feels. Things were real tense for a while there – the better part of a week in expectant silence followed by a few days of escalating chaos. I think we’re into the relative relief of grief but it’s still a period of heightened emotions. A lot of it has been tough, and will be for a while. But parts of it have also been real good. New skills and new contacts and real, tangible evidence that many parts of life are better than before. Not just in one way but in lots of ways, and with clearly better outcomes. All the bits are intense and rolled together so emotions are all over the place. I feel a little guilty liking it ¹To be fair, I feel a little guilty liking anything. As noted previously liking things was often very bad for me and others. but there were parts where I was so proud and relieved and connected that I could not even. For a minute there my brain believed I might be a real human, and it spent a lot of the following days trying to work out how I translate that into actually feeling safe ²Not that I figured this out, but it felt tantalizingly close. Usually I don’t even know where to start, can’t find any framework that even comes close. But this feels close.. I feel like I want to have t-shirts printed about it, or would, if it weren’t also part of some pretty intense bad times.

I worry sometimes that people only like me during a crisis. To be clear, I like to help people in crisis. I’m often better at it than others would be, because I have a lot of experience getting things done even during a crisis, and because, though I am still terrified, it typically doesn’t stop me from being empathetic or vulnerable or from listening. I’ve lived her for decades and I don’t even notice the train anymore. But sometimes it feels like I’m only good during a crisis, and that people would prefer that I de-spawned between them. I know in large part this is just my anxious brain looking for an excuse to stop feeling good. It’s my inhuman brain deciding that my interactions with people are harmful, and that crisis is the only acceptable excuse for my engagement. It’s not a real thing. But it does drive contact frequency and intensity. And I know more than a couple people who would never have said anything at all if they weren’t in crisis in the first place. This is the part where I’m trying to build safety. Where I want to hold onto the connected feel and believe that it’s real and not just a side-effect of today’s short-term circumstances. I wouldn’t mind a reminder now and then, if you can muster one. It’s not your job, but it would help me imagine that I can have that feel without always being bound in grade-A stress.

And I’m worried about revealing too much. The factual obfuscation isn’t usually hard, and in some ways is beneficial – it helps me write in terms of feels, which are typically more useful for me, for the subject, and for the general audience. But it’s not free either, and I never know where to draw the line. My brain imagines it’s a fragile balance, where if I say the wrong thing once I’ll never by able to take it back. But probably it’s not that sensitive. Probably the worries about plots points are driven by the way I’m ashamed to have feels about people, or to let my attention to them be obvious. I know my attention hurts people. I know that their social world would be better if no one in it ever saw me. And I am even more ashamed of describing a scenario where people want or appreciate my attention. It simultaneously feels like the best thing ever and proof that I’m engaged in selfish manipulation just to make myself feel good. Because I know it hurts people to pay attention to me. Or at least my broken brain does.

So I talked to M a lot and it was the best of times and it was the worst of times and I can’t want for it to be done and I can’t wait for it to happen again. Hopefully that starts to sort itself out before too long. I think you’re doing great, given the circumstances, and I’ve been really grateful to have all the feels with you.

Talked to DerbyK about your own fear of attention, your surprise that anyone pays it to you, and the way you frame it like an impossible goal that is only ever achieved by side-effect. I am very happy that you have someone in your life who pays attention to you and help you pay attention to yourself. I also hope someday it stops feeling so singular to you, like it comes from this one external source because of its unique match to you. Because I know the power is actually within you, to know what you need (most of the time) and to expect it from the people who claim to care about you. I see you sometimes put boxes around relationships, to keep your expectations separated in to the right roles. I know you see more value in distinct boxes than I do — I feel like my life is better with more integration — but I think we’d agree that you’d like the version where attention is the default and comes from all over. It’s sort of what you wish for when you imagine being popular and attractive (or more accurately, when you imagine you aren’t those things and would like to be) — that lots of people will pay attention to you — but instead of being broad and impersonal it’s specifically, individually, yours.

Had a clam weekend at home. No one else in my house. No social calls for me to go on. Spent some quality time talking potatoes and coping with the chaos of changing relationships, but also had lots of time for projects and lumping. Got the first round of paint pours done (pics when they’re dry) and worked out some of the complications in the process. Changed the projector lamp. Built a new sock bin. Went through a bunch of Shanda’s clothes. Sorted a big pile of earrings. Had time to finish Fleabag and get caught up on @BPS. And we watched the new @MMF, which was not her usual topic but came with her usual passion. It also came with a new eye color shape I’m going to try [fig 1,2] and a silly hat [fig 3], but my favorite part was when she got a package from her mother (while filming) and it contained these [fig 4]. I want a mother ³Not Mother, obviously. But a theoretical caretaker who cares what I want and wants to help. who sends me awesome giant earrings.

I’ve got feels for tomorrow’s Screed about packing and travel and running away. I still think potato feels are a good plan. And I want to talk about the end of Fleabag. There’s maybe a thing to say about how sex gets me a kind of connection that feels separate from all my abandonment feels — I’ve said lines like that in the past — but I’m not sure what that feel is yet to make it a story. I’m going out tomorrow with Shanda and Dog to pick up my new glasses and her shoes, to get my ear drops for Dog, and to mail off all the care packages. I’ve got an hour of work to do on the BZ project and one SR; if the queue stays quiet I can be done cleanly on Thursday. So still a fair number of things to get through this week, but I feel like we’re continuing the trend of burning down the backlog and staying low-stress enough to not generate any more.

ZiB

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