Household Hiding

Slept until almost 2 today. I had intended to get up and start my day with some power supply soldering, maybe hit my noon meeting, but that wasn’t to be. I’m glad to get some more sleep because the illness-related exhaustion is still high, and because the coughing was a significant disruption last night. But it would be nice to get back to normal human hours again.

Woke up sad and anxious. Lots of small reasons for both.

Missing Story came out of therapy yesterday, and is a big part of the sad. I’m trying to change my belief that being connected to young me is a bad idea. The whole point of LI is that being attached to my past self will help me build other attachments. That seems plausible to me, and I’ve used LI to improve my connection to the past, to recover memory, to recontextualize some bits of trauma where I was unable to understand my emotions at the time. But my brain isn’t really up for the attachment bit, as I wrote about yesterday. I don’t know what story I can tell myself – now or decades ago – that would be better than the one I already used. And the one I already used is pretty sad.

It’s sad to imagine that waiting and fleeing were my best choices. It’s sad that I can see other people in this same situation now. And it’s sad to imagine all the days in between, where I did flee and did make my life better, but never found someplace – never found anyone – to flee to. I still know that eventually my role is to teach people who depend on me to not be hurt by my absence, and then to flee again so they can be free of me. So I can try again to get it right, to start again at nothing and avoid letting anyone get attached or dependent, to avoid being trapped by housing and money and schedules.

I imagine sometimes that after I flee maybe I could Music Man my way from place to place – hiest people into supporting each other without ever letting them mistake me for a resource – and then flee again when the scam falls apart. But I also imagine that maybe I just wander off into the woods ¹I’d like to imagine I could bring a dog to the woods, but I know I wouldn’t be able to take care of a dog if things got bad, just like I couldn’t when I was young. and never come out again. Spend some time making a shelter and stores so I know I am capable of real independence (so I can spend a minute being a real boy) before I inevitably die from an infection or a busted knee or a cold wet spell that outlasts my dry wood stash, or any of the 100,000 other things that will eventually kill any human living alone. The Music Man version sounds like more fun but I’m not sure my brain could keep up with it, not reliably enough to do alone. The dying in the woods version though, that I can do even with really bad mental health.

This is one of those choices where my brain tells me to be indifferent. I know how to be a person who can scam their way through town. I scammed my way through Ames (and Boone) – I even started a pep band along the way. I know how to be a person who doesn’t die right away in the woods, and who doesn’t get caught when they venture out. Since I know how to be both those people my brain tells me it’s useless to want one over the other, even though they require me to be different people.

One of the bits of anxious is about the way I’ve stymied my therapist, with this belief that past me can’t have attachment, even in my imagination. They heard me yesterday, and told me they’d have to do out-of-band work after the session to respond in a useful way. It’s always hard to be in a place where a professional runs out of ideas about what might help. It’s not the first time this has happened – several therapists have told me up front they can’t help, and others have been so far away they can’t even tell they aren’t helping. But it’s still hard. I’m hopeful for recovery but I have never successfully recovered from this state to date.

One of the bits of anxious is about how I haven’t kept up with work this week. I’m not behind on deadline tasks but I prioritized all sorts of other things – sleep, Medicaid, D&D, etc. – over the rest of my work. I spent last week not working because sick so some of the work is getting old and it makes me nervous. In part I should worry less, because often things I choose not to do for a few weeks stop being important to anyone. But I should also get on the things I know won’t go away, so I can take them out of the worry part of my brain.

One of the bits of both anxious and sad is about L. I’m anxious about how the avoidance is building. I smashed part of it in September, after a day of blubbering, but there are still parts from August that I’m afraid to bring up. Not to mention the preceeding year where I bought into the avoidance, and all the silence around the bits I have risked sharing. So I’m worried I’ll repeat the avoidance patten, to our mutual detriment.

I’m sad about the limited success and slow progress in the current L heist. I’m not hopeless – in fact I think it’s mostly working – but I am discouraged this week. I’m also feeling alone about it. On one front there’s no talking. On another is the oppression of the world. On a third I’m always acting by myself, even when we make plans together, and even the plans only happen when I make them and reassure you that I’ll be in charge. I don’t want to always be in charge.

So I’m overwhelmed by oppression and indifferent about death and exhausted and alone. Like all the rest of the days but 4% worse and therefore cripling.

Ran to the post office and FedEx and tried the thing where I reward myself with food for leaving the house – I grabbed a car to run for fast food on the way home. I also wanted to try eating while sad, because usually I don’t. I don’t eat because of my emotions or because of my sugar addiction or because I’m hungry. I don’t eat when other people eat or on a schedule or before I leave the house or after I’m done with my day. In fact all those things are likely to make me skip eating even if I was otherwise motivated to do so.

I’ve been paying attention to when I eat and while there are lots of factors the time I’m most likely the eat – often the only time that eating feels like a sensible response to hunger – is late at night when I feel fairly safe and unobserved. I go to the kitchen and get one mouth full of food, ideally with no preparation, and wander away to do something else for a while, repeating this until I’m less hungry or more tired. Sometimes I can risk making a sandwich or using a dish or silverware but usually I just have a chunk of cheese or a piece of bread or a handful of puffed rice. This is a stupid way to eat but it’s one of my main modes of nutrition. It doesn’t feel safe to eat if anyone knows that it’s happening, and even at 1 AM in my own house with my own food with the blinds drawn and Shanda asleep I often feel like I’m too exposed to risk cooking or dishes hot food or more than 90 seconds in the kitchen.

I do like that Dog comes to hang with me when I am sneak-eating at night. I save some of his food for late at night so we can eat together. Apparently Dog doesn’t count as a person I have to hide my eating from, though I couldn’t say why. It helps that they understand eating in the same second-class, survival way that I do. We don’t get to eat people food under msot circumstances (and when we do it’s typically a performance not nutrition). We only get to eat our low-quality food when it’s explicitly indicated that we may, or when we can sneak it outside of anyone’s perception, if we’re willing to risk being punished when caught. He knows that food is safest when it’s inside you and that you should hide ²Dog’s food hiding is not that great. He only occasionally thinks about taking it outside. More often he tries to bury it in one of his blankets, but lacks any sensible strategy for making this happen. He wants to use his snout to like, push dirt over the prize, but blankets don’t move like a loose aggregate and he usually just ends up nosing … Continue reading any food you aren’t immediately swallowing. And he knows that hunger is a thing that makes you hunt, not a thing that makes you eat.

Talked to M yesterday and learned all sort of new things. It’s been a while since we’ve been able to chat, and I appreciate you finding time for me. I also appreciate having insight into some of the things you want. I’m always excited by things you want, but it can be hard to guess what they are just by smell, so it was nice to get some adjectives too.

Did HA4H today, after 4 weeks away. I wasn’t home in time to catch it all but I did get to talk about maps and orienteering and the whitespace of civilization. It’s also good just to interact for a minute with people I respect and who respond to me when I say and do things. I’m so terrifying (or overwhelming or disgusting or annoying) to most people that I don’t get feedback on anything I do or say. But when I HA4H I get whole sentences from multiple people in real time, and same-day emotion indicators that they have to explicitly select, and sometimes even pictures and paragraphs they construct with me in mind. It’s good to be seen sometimes, and to imagine that I can occupy someone’s mind space without corrupting them.

Had Pedro over for D&D tonight, for the first time in more than a year. It was really nice to see them again, and to imagine they might come back again. Nice to have a slightly bigger party. Nice to have someone remember me well. Nice to talk about things we’ve gotten rid of and things we’ve done. I also liked the way they were jealous of Dog. Most people like Dog but P wants to take him home. It’s been pretty rare in my life, for people to want anything I have and could give up, and even more rare for me to want to keep it.

Having my phone and computer use the same 20V charger is really handy. One adapter, one cable, one battery, and fast charging. I’ve been thinking of moving to iOS next time I phone – I am so sick of Google trying to mine me – but I would miss the unified port. Lightning will let me negotiate 20V from the same USB-C source but it will need a dongle. Maybe I can get that in a case ³I got my first phone case a month ago, when the glass on the back of my phone started to get crushed from the corner. Not to protect my phone but to protect my hand (and pocket and bed) from the bits of glass it was dropping. Turns out I really like having a color for my phone. I picked colors before but my goal was always to have the least … Continue reading.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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