Subjective Reality
Fleeing is the only tool I know to actually fight oppression. I don’t just mean running away from oppression and pretending I won’t have to deal with it elsewhere, I mean actually fighting it and making it be different. Fleeing empowers me in a way that almost nothing else can, making me invulnerable to many form of power and letting me burn too brightly because I don’t need anything for the return trip.
Fleeing is like jumping out of a plane – it commits you to an interaction with reality in the near future, but it also allows you a few minutes if great freedom. Some people plan to jump and they prepare something they think is safe, with a parachute and a landing zone. But they lack vision. This stunt works a thousand times better if no one knows you’re going to jump or that you’ve spent the last 7 years building up a tolerance to iocane powder.
The first time I learned to not need a parachute on the way down. It worked, for small values of worked, but it wouldn’t recommend the feat. I imagine I could do it now without breaking my legs, if I was lucky, but I also know that if I miss my roll out it would take me years to recover, and yet more luck to not fall apart during that time. So probably I should find another method, so I can move my finger back an inch from the doomsday button. Nothing will ever take that button away from me, but I could at least raise the threshold for bashing it. Door to door knife sales have a 3 day cooling off period, but my flee button sometimes get pushed on no notice when I’m thousands of miles from the more reliable parts of my life.
Went to work and robots today, but just bearly. Didn’t manage food or warm clothes or on-time departures. Had an okay meeting with my boss, got down to a single (updated) SR, and set out on the E line. Took forever to get up to 135th though – like 90+ minutes. The Aurora Bridge is down to 2 lanes so I sat along the lake in Queen Anne on a full, stationary bus for a goodly interval. Made it to robots just as everyone was leaving. Which was okay because I’m exhausted.
Got a message that stress had become identity, while I was still out, but didn’t get a call when I tried later. Stories have been thin the past 6 weeks, but I have hope for Wednesday. In the mean time I have hope because I know your identity isn’t just anxiety, and I’m not scared by the part that is.
Dog was still being weird when I got home – eating more but not normally, both clingy and restless. I took him out for a while and mostly he was willing to sit when we got home. Later he panic yelped and ran to be let out, which I really appreciate – not shitting inside is always a plus and I’m glad Dog knows he can have help instead of feeling trapped.
I don’t know what to do for therapy this week. I sort of want to come well prepared, so I can be in firm control of what happens and have a decent chance of feeling like it’s useful. That would put us back in a more comfortable space, and isn’t without value. Right now I feel like I should pretend to not know what’s happening in my brain, should believe my professional therapist when they pick an issue they’re prepared to address, and should learn to make that issue mine so I can have “help”.
This is eventually where I end up with any therapy – a place where I feel like I have to choose between being understood and getting help. If I’m too much for my therapist I can’t have help because they can’t pay attention to me in the way that I need. I can choose instead to be misunderstood and get some help, so long as I engineer encounters to avoid challenging my therapist. I can translate between my real self and the one other people can handle and I can probably get some benefit from the effort.
Or I can choose to believe whatever model they have built of me, even when I don’t think it fits my life. If I just accept that no one wants to hear from me, even after I’ve carefully checked. Or that setting a boundary would make me safe, even when I’ve claimed to have already set a much stronger one to survive. Or that being more angry or jealous or sad or afraid about a past things would free me from a threat that no longer exists, even though I’ve had all those feels and can see a current threat. Maybe I’m too broken to have help. Or not human enough. But I sure don’t seem to fit expectations from therapists.
Maybe I can prepare an appeal to storytelling. If I’m supposed to believe that it sensible to be connected to young me I need a story that makes that be safe, not just for young me but for current me. Like I whined about in Missing Story. I haven’t had a ton of success with selling the storytelling angle to my therapist so far, but it would at least give me a topic, and if it worked maybe also a way forward.
I should cook up an LI plan as well, so I can at least check to see if that tool is still available. That one doesn’t require anything my therapist can see – they don’t need to know the stories they are prompting me about – and would at least let me feel like there’s a bit that can help. Would let me practice one more time with someone else to help build confidence that I can do it alone, if necessary. Maybe I could do another round of economic abuse, since that’s still lodged in tight. Or maybe there’s a day job topic. I think my therapist would be comfortable talking about my day, at least in many contexts. I could poke at the way I don’t trust myself to do enough capitalism if I gave up my day job.
Voted on Sunday. Too many uncontested races. And too many more where all the candidates are old white dudes promising to maintain the status quo. Personally I could use ballot full of people laying out their plans to devolve the power of their office to the people and eliminate the position before the next election, but that’s a lot to hope for. I had to settle for candidates who didn’t promise to specifically punish the homeless allowed by law, or to eliminate voter education and target certain classes of voters for deregistration (these are claims that serious candidates made in writing in their statement to voters).
@Vi published her (quasi-monthly) newsletter and I was really excited to have seen all the parts while she was doing them over the couple months during HA4H. To know some of the feels from those arts and to see what parts of the process she shares and which parts she doesn’t show to the final audience. To know what many of the bits were before they became this published thing, and to have poked her about them while they were still soft. I was sort of sad that she wasn’t able to do all her usual things, but I also can see how she’s working on it with quarters and sculpy.
ZiB
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Sent from a phone.
