Last Person Out
Dog is medicated and significantly less lathargic than he has become. It’s good to see him in less pain. I hope it helps him heal a little though, because he can only be on it for like 10 days. It’s frustrating though, because he feels good enough that he wants to run around again, but he should walk as little as possible. Rest will give him the best chance at recovery, or at least the best available during the global death. It’s likely we could do something else if it was safe to see a specialist. And it’s not great for household tension to have the fucking dog be restless and in quarantine too.
I started this week not feeling great about the day job, but it got better. I’m done with SRs. Technically I’m still holding one but that’s just to make the other end feel like I’m paying attention to what they need – I don’t expect to do any more work beyond closing the ticket. I’ve got a little research project to do this week but it shouldn’t be complicated, and I shouldn’t get any more work until Monday (when I’m unfortunately back on the queue). I’m also officially off Friday, so if I can manage 1.5 work days without a new assignment I should have a nice slow week.
I’m going to see if I can get a better stream setup for HA4H this week. I’d like to share my model rendering and possibly the code, in a way that’s actually legible. I can imagine making a faster video of it too, as part of the piece.
Therapy tomorrow had an LI topic in mind. Which I don’t remember but did write down…regaining consciousness. Yeesh. Even to me my old life is sometimes surprising terrible. That’s probably why I learned not to remember it. Hopefully we’ll see why, after I LI at it.
A while ago I did an LI attunement exercise, wherein I imagined my very early life, I realized that I really didn’t have a story for it. And so over time I cooked one up. It came together a little when I thought about my “last grandparent leaving”, an accurate but odd phrase that had more feels than I expected. But I think it might be from this story:
I was abandoned almost immediately, physical on the day visitors left, and emotionally just shortly afterward, when Mother said she “Didn’t know what to do with me”. I’m sure many mothers say those words, but here’s what mine meant:
Why haven’t you fixed my chronic depression and anxiety, my dysregulation around money and food and social interactions, you, the avatar of my salvation? I’m 26 and I completed the life script by brithing you, so I should be done [with life] now. I did my part, but it’s not happening, so it must be you that’s wrong. Why can’t you baby correctly, so I can be happy? My continued pain is evidence of your inhumanity. I don’t know what to do with you because if I actually did what I wanted some authority figure would make me feel bad.
So I imagine that as an infant I learned to be quiet, even though I could not be calm. I imagine that I spent a lot of time crying without sound, waiting for a human with the power of hearing to come back into my life. I imagine I spent a lot of time in distress, unable to rely on physical or emotional aid even when my survival was seriously threatened. I imagine a lot of infants feel like that – survival is hopeless when you’re an infant, and you have no perspective for trust – but I expect many of them get more regular relief.
I can imagine that people held me and looked at me and reacted to me. I certainly met normal people and they interacted with me in normal(ish) ways for short periods. There were likely times when Mother held me as a comfort object, or to control me, and infant me was satisfied with that level of attunement. But I also imagine that it was sometimes days between those events, and that they became less frequent over time, until after I few years I had to die so they could stop entirely.
That all sounds pretty terrible too. But I guess we got here from part of a terrible CASA story, so it’s a theme I guess?
Today Pete broke NC to leave a message (which I had Shanda screen for me) and which told me that I should expect to be contacted as a beneficiary to some fund controlled by my recently dead relative. So literally nothing, other than he hoped to unload some emotional labor on me. On the bright side – maybe free money? And distributed outside Pete’s control, so he can’t steal from his kids? I guess we’ll see.
I’m not looking forward to the part where I get involved to protect the Kids from Pete. To the part where they still need protection because they aren’t allowed to say no to him without being punished. I’ve spent the last 30 years developing an immunity to iocane powder, but it still hurts when I drink it. Both my part and his will push buttons that make Alex and Ben feel 11 years old and fucking resentful of my parenting. It will remind me of the times when they were 11 and I was resentful of needing to parent them (or anyone else).
ZiB
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Sent from a phone.
