Practice Makes Permanent

Robots interleauge last Saturday. We placed 5th and played into finals, where we lost to a robot that’s almost identical to our design. We scored well enough overall to advance to the state competition in a couple of weeks. I’m glad the team did well, but I’m also ready to be done with deadline robots (and car rentals and driving and spending my Saturdays in a middle school gym) for a while too. I want to work on some things that will take more than a day, and those have to wait until we can tolerate downtime. Or until we decide we can have two robots again, a thing we’ve somehow forgotten this year.

Shanda and I poked at some hard feels Saturday. It was important to do, but pretty rough. There’s a 12-year-old with anxious parents and young siblings trying to leave in the car – someone who always had to wait and never got to leave on time and ended up doing everyone’s work as a perverse punishment for being ready first. The fact that none of those things are happening today does not protect us from the old feels, but with practice it’s possible to be triggered less. So today we’re tolerating the scenario, in spite of the strong reaction it generates, so we can eventually learn that it’s safe.

There’s the part where you feel trapped whole were out, and like the only thing that can provide relief is some form of “done” and “alone”. Trapped might have been a thing that happened to you in the past, but today you have choices, if you can see past your feels to find them. I know your brain tells you that will be safe, but I think your experience would tell you something else. When you get to “done” you’ll still feel like this, and your brain will still tell you that you just need the one next step to finally feel different. When you get to “alone” your brain will find distraction easier but is unlikely to ever advance your feels to a place where alone can end.

This was harder to tolerate. This resulted in driving where I felt unsafe, long periods of tense silence, and ongoing dissatisfaction with how done any task was, how urgently we were addressing it, even before we started. Eventually it resulted in you feeling like leaving immediately was the only option to feel better, despite the return trip taking almost 2 hours. It resulted in you being “trapped” by “changes” even when you are offered the choice to leave on exactly the schedule you had planned.

There was Dog anxiety too, which is reasonable as we try new things, but also just one more piece to cope with along sidr everything else. That mostly went fine though, particularly once we toned down some of the triggers and bits from early in the day. And I think it can go better next time.

I did capes and wings and colors [fig 1] and balloons, which seemed to go over well. It helped people interact with me in a better way, both by choosing how they paid attention and by making most of them too intimidated to say more than one line. Which is about as much conversation as a typical person should push at me without being prepared for me to engage. Which no one ever is.

T was worried about me describing myself as a “fuck-up”, apparently on the basis that magic phonemes will be punished by the robotics institution. That’s possible – there are lots of ways FIRST asks young people to be “responsible” while also asking them to be disempowered and sometimes even to play-act as incapable – though I think it’s fairly unlikely, at least against me. The idea that someone else would get to object to the sound of the word I use for self-identification seems pretty absurd and oppressive to me. It’s fine if you don’t want to be called a fuck-up, but I get to call myself anything I want, and gracious and professional people would accept that.

I’ve been having lots of trouble eating lately. Only a little more than usual in absolute terms, but my baseline is hardly good enough to stay alive, so disruptions are not great. It also feels like a lot because I’ve been working to pay more attention. I never exactly want to eat – my feelings about food are pretty uniformly terrible ¹When you ask people about liking food – when you tell them you have terrible feels about all foods – they are rarely prepared to help. Usually they are not even prepared to listen, and so they say things like “Have you tried a milkshake”, as though I can learn to like food by eating soemthing that “tastes good”. None of it tastes good. … Continue reading – but usually if I just start it’s not too hard to get it done. Yesterday Shanda made me a plate sometime after 9 PM, when I still hadn’t eaten. Today you left one for me in the fridge [fig 2] , which I never would have been able to make happen today. But I still had to finger pick it over two hours to make it go. I still had to ignore it enough to make Dog upset.

I should find something to do when this is happening, if I could figure out what would make it feel different. Drugs help a little, but not much, and I can’t be baked every time I need to eat. Picking at food slowly for a long time (after it gets to room temperature) usually lets me get food inside me, but it’s not great for thinking about food, and it’s not very compatible with having a human meal or eating with other people. I can make myself eat but that’s clearly worse. Changing my stressors would have an impact, but that’s only sometimes a reasonable coping strategy. I’m sure there are things that would make a difference, but I’m or sure what might be a tolerable place to start.

I’m annoyed to have to participate in an interview at the day job. Our process is definitely discriminatory, doesn’t do anything to actually identify good matches, and has no standards. It’s also scheduled to start more than an hour before I’m usually awake. On the bright side, all the rest of my meetings are canceled, so I can get through this I should have a decent day.

I think one reason I can’t have medical care is because if I learned anything about it I’d have to be in charge of it forever. Not just for myself, but for the Kids, and I can’t do it. I can’t even manage it for me as a 7-year-old, and I could never get them to a physican as often as they need. There are lots of parts to this situation, including the way I rarely get help even when people want to provide it, my historical need to hide injury and illness, and the strength that comes from genuinely not caring how you feel. I’ll see if there’s a thing I can do with that feel this week.

I need a new book. I want it read about oppression of some sort, preferably in speculative fiction. I’ve done a lot of N. K. Jemisen in recent months, which has been great. But it’s time for something else. What would you recommend?

ZiB

— Sent from a phone.

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