Presumed Suicide

Today I slept almost like a person, and felt well enough to venture outside the house. For some reason it took me 30 minutes and 4 requests to summon a ride at noon on a Saturday, but I did eventually make it to the craft store. I couldn’t convince anyone to commit to construction work but we achieved ears and tails and wings and paint, and confirmed a plan for deployment, which is a moderate success.

M popped in today, or at least brushed up along side. Seems like things are still pretty high tension over there. V poked out for the first time in a long while, shouting dispair into the void and hoping someone is down there in the dark. I am. It’s where I’ve always lived. The dark places don’t scare me. It’s just everywhere else.

Watched Inside Out (2015) today with Shanda, after we poked at some 12-year-old painting feels. Or at least at the absense of them, and at a plausible story to fill the gap and explain why it’s so hard today to do a task that is technically easy and you want to accomplish. But that’s why I want to do it together – I can see that it’s going to trigger those old feels just like you can, and I don’t want you to feel so alone when that happens. Your sadness (or anger, or whatever) doesn’t drive me away, and I can help you have it.

Watched the first episode of Euphoria (HBO). It is pretty good ¹FEZCO: There’s some new girl in town that I think you gonna be friends with.
RUE: Who?
FEZCO: Shit, I don’t know. She came in yesterday lookin’ all Sailor Moon and shit. I’m thinking to myself, like, look like somebody Rue would get along with.. HBO wants to push the sex, and for some reason high school, but it’s a solid show regardless. At least for episode 1. And I agree with Whitney Moore about the makeup [fig 1].

This past week in therapy was pretty unfocused, as you might expect when I’m sick. Talked about errors in the way I evaluated the cost of things. In many cases I decide that knowing how to live a life where I can reliably do task X – some task I’ve decided is necessary to my safety and survival – means that there is no cost to living that life. I already did the hard part of figuring out how to survive that life. Who that life makes me is not a thing I can care about. Not if I want to be safe. Not if I want to reach my goal and finally escape, instead of being trapped forever at Mother’s home.

I’ve learned how to give up almost anything. It hurts to do of course but somehow that pain never seems relevant to me. Having access to medical care just doesn’t rank against being able to be calm and effective without medical care. Being better hydrated just isn’t as safe as being okay with thirst. I am absolutely positive that I know how to live a life where being thirsty isn’t a big problem. Not ignoring it, just managing my life with the disabilities imposed by not prioritizing access to water. But that life is exhausting, and it’s hard to be me while it happens, so I should imagine that choice is expensive, not free.

You shouldn’t tolerate things, waiting for conditions to improve while you hold your feels out at arm’s length hoping they run out of fight before you do. Toleration is a transitional state, as you move your thinking from one state to the next. Love it, hate it, decide not to care – but don’t get stuck feeling like you “have to” put up with a thing that is hurting you. Especially when that thing is you.

One upside to always being ready to let go is that you don’t get stuck doing things you don’t want. It’s far to expensive to keep anything you don’t absolutely need, including the belief that what I want affects the cost of things.

When we talked about the cost of water, and I was recalling my limited access to water and hygine when I was under 6, my therapist asked me if I was ever suicidal around that time. Which is a sort of hard question to hear – to know that the life other people imagine you had is so bleak that toddler suicide is worth asking about. I don’t remember being suicidal when I was very young. By the time I lived on the porch I imagined that I could always flee, if I didn’t like it here. That screen door is the only thing between me and independence, and I can go anytime I want. As soon as I’m ready. Once I’m good enough to survive without being a burden on the world. I didn’t need to seek death – I could always just leave, if I ever wanted to face the fact that I’m unworthy of survival.

I can see a story now, about having to sort food into categories like “will make me sick now”, “will make me sick later”, “might make me sick later”, and “probably won’t make me sick” by trial and error when I was very young. I learned to hate eggs and butter because when they were rancid they’d make me sick right away, not just later, and that was unacceptable. If Mother ever saw you be sick she’d be very upset, and you definitely wouldn’t get more food that day. Maybe the next day if she was mad. So no eggs. No butter. No mayo. Miracle Whip and cheese I cut myself. Canned tuna. Miracle Whip never makes me sick, even when it’s rancid. Having access to a knife makes cheese pretty safe. And canned meat is real food prepared for the emergency I lived in.

I learned to vomit out behind the garage, when things did make me sick, so I didn’t have to clean it up while Mother raged. So I wouldn’t be trapped with my sick all night and facing punishment tomorrow.

Eventually I learned to live a life where being hungry wasn’t a problem, at least not a bigger one than being sick, and where I could predict what would make me sick. It wasn’t hard, it was easy, because the other option was worse. And in my brain it’s still easier to have hunger be okay, even though the other option is no longer so harmful.

Also how fucking lazy do you have to be to not provide training – or pay attention to complaints and incidents – about what things are safe to eat? I used to not know how I ate before school gave us a routine. Before the Kids needed real food. And the answer is by trial and error, at great expense, and just barely.

I remember being told by another child (and then their parent) that some fruit I was eating tasted bad and wasn’t safe, but I knew you could eat a fistful of them and get stomach cramps at worst. They wanted to smash berries on the sidewalk for the joy of destruction. I was disgusted and distressed and then ashamed that I wanted something so clearly inhuman. It was hard at the time because I didn’t know how to be hungry and still be okay.

Shanda and Dog both walk right by – or on – some wild ²“Wild” in that they aren’t grafts of good-tasting apple cultivars, so they taste like shit. They were presumably planted by humans on purpose, given their location. apples that fall on the sidewalk just down the street. I don’t actually want the apples, but it’s still hard to see them smashed. I learned be okay with the hunger, but I never trained to be okay with the destruction. It seems expensive to do that training. It is, because I’ll have to feel pretty bad as part of making it go. It will be hard in much the same way learning to accept hunger was hard. But I should try to remember the cost of a life where being genuinely okay with hunger at any time is easy to accept. I’m good at it, but it’s still work.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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