!!!11!!!¡¡¡Eleven! – The Daily Screed

Thought more about joy today, and how I imagine it as something I can’t share. About how almost all people are sad in response to me sharing things that I liked and feel good about, because the context of much of my experience is boundless sorrow. You being sad at my joy is hard enough, but not infrequently you’re overwhelmed as well, and thereby lose the ability to smell my feelings at all.

This makes it difficult for me to believe that I can share joy with humans, because in practice I often cannot. It happens regardless of how I feel or communicate. I know, I’ve checked a lot of variations. Sometimes can tell a story that doesn’t upset you, but only by hiding parts of myself, and often the story simply wouldn’t contain joy without the context that causes this reaction. So my options are to not share at all, or to accept that my sharing won’t help us be connected (and may even drive us apart). To accept that you can only feel close to me when things are bad enough that my experience feels like reassurance against hopelessness.

This makes it easy for me to imagine that what I feel isn’t really human joy, or that the existence of my joy hurts humans. I started feeling this way when I was mistreated in the past – I was lied to about how my joy came at the expense of others (and about how I should suffer to create joy for others) – but a similar situation frequently occurs today, even when people are paying attention and being careful. It’s not every interaction I have, but it happens several times a week, and it seems unlikely to stop.

I don’t particularly like that conclusion, but I don’t know a better one. I can probably change my feel about the existence of my joy hurting people. I know that’s not how feels work and can generate examples if I get stuck there. But I’m not sure I can change the way that sharing is often inaccessible to me, at least not without giving up all the parts of myself that you find so intolerable.

Did HA4H today. @BPS is with @Ev at Norfolk, and decorated a lot of barn with flat pack materials. They worried a lot about cultural appropriation, despite doing work in celebration of their own culture; I tried to help (as did @Vi) but the guilt was pretty heavy. Had talks about filling space and soldering and the definition of concealer versus foundation and the excessive amount of brown in makeup. Answered a rhetorical question from @BPS about their work, which they had enough feels about to not be able to read aloud; I hope that’s good and not bad. Wrote to @Vi about an art heist. Did day job instead of arts during the stream but had a good time, and I was happy to trade that art time for being done with work before the long weekend.

Did D&D today. Shanda rolled a stupid high pick pocket and stole some dudes Princeton ring. Later we got to plant it on a dead baddie to prove Princeton dude was leader of the baddies. It’s not exactly true but it’s actually less bad than the things he has done, and it’s a great heist. It’s also a good recovery from what was a fun but unwise theft, turning it from something that was causing us trouble to something that made us heros. Which is fitting in a scene where Shanda was celebrated as a hero for something she didn’t like – where her trauma was cited as heroic, and her reluctance as humility. I also got to breathe fire at zombies and had the DM call me “nestless” – an amazing slur about my life as an outcast bird person.

I talked to my therapist yesterday about keeping up with me. About not getting stuck in the assumption that having shitty stories means I’ve never healed. They promised to do better. Like everyone does. It’s impossible to tell in advance if that will make any difference, so we’ll have to wait and see. Decided to try to build trust where it was broken and discussed the oppression of young people. It still feels like a thing that might cut me off from other support ¹It would help if my therapist wasn’t surprised to lean I had already considered the answers to prompts they think are rhetorical. For example, they ask what the worst case is, if I risk overwhelming them. They imagine this will help me limit the scope of my fear, and that they’ll be able to offer reassurances against catastrophic predictions. … Continue reading, but I don’t know how to build trust other than taking a risk, so I’m doing it anyway. I’ve been careful to ensure my therapist doesn’t have enough information to directly threaten anyone other than me ²The actual worst case is that my therapist is strongly distributed by me and attempts to exert some sort of external control, but that’s both unlikely to occur and probably a thing I could mitigate when I detected it happening. If nothing else I could flee to avoid the problem, and I only have to see like 90 seconds into the future to be able to … Continue reading, so the danger is tolerable, at least for now.

Robots tomorrow, but I think that’s it. Maybe getting a release checklist done, so I don’t have to rush it when I’m back on Tuesday – it’s due that same day. But it should be pretty light and hopefully I can get home and have some weed and a movie at a reasonable time as part of an extended weekend. I’ve got plans for building and wiring and arts and drugs and food for Saturday and Sunday.

It’s my 11th wedding anniversary on Monday the 11th of November, and we both have the whole day off – not even robots on the schedule. Maybe we’ll sleep until 11:11 and bang 11 times and eat 11 dim sum dishes while we contemplate Armistice Day. We’ll at least watch this Burnistoun sketch ³When I started at F5 in ’11 our Scottish CEO really wanted to get version 11 released, after months of schedule slippage. This sketch was was edited and placed into more than a couple presentations around that time.: https://youtu.be/sAz_UvnUeuU

Last year life made it difficult to recognize the 10th anniversary, but I’m really glad you took a risk and reached out that day. What you gave us is much more valuable than anything we could have planned for ourselves. You’re definitely one of the things we will celebrate on Monday.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

Stars for Later[+]

Stars for Later
↑1	It would help if my therapist wasn’t surprised to lean I had already considered the answers to prompts they think are rhetorical. For example, they ask what the worst case is, if I risk overwhelming them. They imagine this will help me limit the scope of my fear, and that they’ll be able to offer reassurances against catastrophic predictions. But I know the answer because I’ve already thought about it. The worst case that’s likely to occur is that I lose the limited support I could get – support for topics they are prepared to handle – and have to spend months finding someone else to provide an equivalent, all without any hope stronger than getting back to the same low-quality support I had before.
↑2	The actual worst case is that my therapist is strongly distributed by me and attempts to exert some sort of external control, but that’s both unlikely to occur and probably a thing I could mitigate when I detected it happening. If nothing else I could flee to avoid the problem, and I only have to see like 90 seconds into the future to be able to escape reliably from the cops.
↑3	When I started at F5 in ’11 our Scottish CEO really wanted to get version 11 released, after months of schedule slippage. This sketch was was edited and placed into more than a couple presentations around that time.