Flee, Fly, Floe, Flum

iZombie (CW) did a Drop Dead Gorgeous (1999) episode (S05E09: The Fresh Princess), wherein Liv eats the brain of a 90s teen pageant star who has been in a coma since the last pageant she was in. It’s an excuse not just to 90s nostalgia or to act out DDG, but also to return Liv to her 90s relationships, stuck between her parents and disrespected by both. And an opportunity to be nostalgic about where the show came from, as we wrap up the final season. It’s not the best place to jump into the series, but I really appreciated the effort it made in this one. Do watch.

Shanda is sick and feeling terrible about being sick, which makes sick worse. All the cries about bad experiences being sick decades ago. But you’re doing okay taking time off work, and being cared for, and that helps. It would be great if you could avoid jumping to hopeless quite so fast but I get that it’s hard when you’re used to repressing and ignoring your needs while you’re sick.

There’s still a story about old men in the mountains and economic abuse on my list. But I’m not gonna get that done before robots. Maybe tonight. Writing has been slightly complicated by an unpredictable schedule this week, and sick-related feels outbursts. I feel like the household schedule and stress levels are recovering in general but sick is a big factor, and there has been a lot to catch up on from the previous weeks.

I’ve got a bunch of SRs I’ve been ignoring. There has been too much other day job for such things to take top priority this week – in theory they are what I should work on first but in practice they’re often the easiest thing to put off. I’ve got them all into my stack though and off the queue so I can ignore them into next week, which should be less hectic in the office. But I should get the release checklists done before I log off today.

C blew me off for the 2nd week in a row. I turned out to be plenty busy with Shanda needing care, but I’m still disappointed to have plans fall through. It’s stressful to anticipate and still sad when it doesn’t work. And I totally forgot about HA4H, even though I was free. There was even a Discord notification but I misunderstood it because it was labeled with the wrong title and I wasn’t paying attention.

I did get good things done today though. Got my hairs cut, face and head, got a flu shot ¹Go get a flu shot, unless there’s a specific reason you should not. Particularly if you don’t have time – being sick or being around sick people will make you even more busy. I’ll provide transportation and funding if that would help. Maybe make someone else go and imagine you’re providing care to them, if you can’t be motivated to go … Continue reading, bought some new makeup. Found a cool piece for a care package and started plans for back to school boxes. Thought for a minute about being someone’s artist friend. Ran up the stairs to 26th with Dog, cycled the dishwasher, thought about witchy style. Talked at @BPS about @NKJ (and saw they had further thinks already in an upcoming AD). Heard that budget is one step closer and confirmed that there was calm around soccer plans.

I wish sometimes I could get insight into the way you talk to other people about how your life is going and what you want your priorities to be and how you want to react to changes. Or that you could hear their priorities and concerns, rather than just assuming they don’t care in the same way your brain has been trained to not care. I feel like I’m often asked to stand alone as the voice for your repressed feels, feared and ignored and sometimes hated when I suggest that things could be different than the way they are currently so hard. I suspect other people would care and react, if they were allowed to know. But I’m asked to do it alone – I’m told that any other version is too dangerous to be allowed – and I don’t know how to make that be different. At least not without giving up and agreeing with that part of your brain that says the next 2 days if plan is more important than anything in the future.

Talked about fleeing in therapy this week. About the way I see it as safety even though it clearly is not. The promise of flight is the mantra I used for so long to endure intolerable situations. It’s what I chanted as I breathed though things I could not otherwise stand. Knowing that I can flee means that I’m in control of an upper limit if how bad things can be. The worst case scenario is that I wait until we’re at our closest approach to shore, grab a life jacket, and jump into the Sound. With a little luck I could be on a train out if town an hour later. I’d be wet, homeless, penniless, and utterly alone, but I’d be free. I’ve done it before and it saved me. Eventually. I could probably do it again. I’d have to get out if town for a while, until I could gather some resources, but that’s a good excuse to make a rural crossing into Canada. In a few weeks I can likely have a good enough ID to get a job, and then it’s just a decade of good luck and hard times to get back to a safe life. I could be back to living inside in under a year. It would be hard on my mental health and I’d have to be alone for a few years until I could have friends again, but I could probably get there. I did it before. I could eventually be safe. Well, safe enough, assuming I can still flee when things get tough.

But I should imagine I’m better prepared this time. If I give up the freedom to flee right this moment without ever looking back – if I could feel safe enough for the next 2 hours – maybe I wouldn’t need to run away. Maybe instead I could arrange a heist, where I take advantage of the high resource density in cities and don’t have to start at forest survival. It was hard when I was young – sufficiently young people aren’t allowed independence, and older young people are seen as dangerous and undesirable. But now I can convincingly play a middle-aged white dude, so often I won’t need to prove my personhood and can trade on people’s assumptions. I’d still have to give up a lot, but I wouldn’t have to wait a decade to recover. I could probably be back in an apartment in just a few weeks. Still alone and poor and using a stolen identity, but I wouldn’t have to give up quite so much of myself just to escape.

There’s probably some version where you help with the heist, with the better outcomes that permits. With a couple more people I could probably avoid being homeless altogether. But my brain isn’t prepared to believe that is quite possible. Certainly not that it’s safe – nor for you or for me. Even at the end of the Music Man, where the protagonist is accepted and even protected by the townsfolk, he still has to leave. It’s still not safe for him to stop fleeing. And many heists don’t go anywhere near that well.

So there’s still sort of a long way between where I am now and feeling safe enough to stop carrying survival tools on my person. A lot of space between trying to be sure you’ll be okay without me and being confident I will be able to provide ongoing support. I don’t know how to feel safe enough to survive a few hours on a corporate harbor tour. How could I ever be safe enough to be close to people?

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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