Professional Anxiety

I’ve been working on a quarantine infrastructure project in the backyard, and I think it’s getting close to done. I tried to get to going during HA4H but it was pretty rainy by Seattle standards – actual drops – and so I’ll have to delay yet another day. I want to get it finished so I can use it as a prop for other heists. And so I can show it off. I had a cool plan for video sharing today but continued to be stymied by Discord ¹I have in the past prided myself on running independent comms systems for a variety of popular protocols. That all fell away over the years, for good reasons and bad, and for a long time I’ve been mostly limping along on the old tools. New ones are on the list – I wrote the external interface for an MMS server a few months ago (though … Continue reading garbling.

I poked at @BPS a little more about an art heist. They’re still on the line, but also still too overwhelmed with day job to think about it in any terms other than being “too busy”. I suspect busy might feel less oppressive with a change in routine, but that’s their call to make. I did see them working on another big newspaper piece, and that’s pretty close to what I’m asking them for, even if they can’t see it yet.

Shanda worked on this [fig 2] today and made good progress of her own. I think it’s ready for some fixation tests, assembly, and then on to the next layer. This family art got a little stalled out by mood but it’s back on track and I think ready for lighting design in the foreseeable future.

Had to convert my mail server to a new IP due to ISP changes. The new address is of course on everyone’s block list, because why wouldn’t it be. I hate the way these are organized as protection rackets. “Maybe if you bought our product, or even just paid us $80, we’d take you off the block list.” Given a couple of weeks I can probably get it mostly back to normal, but I’m annoyed to have to deal with it at all.

Yesterday I took a structured approach to therapy, which I think mostly worked. It kept us from getting bogged down on the wrong side of Dog. It also aligned well with a misunderstanding ²The underlying issue is fairly low stakes for me – it’s a thing it would be useful for my therapist to understand, but not likely to be a significant barrier. It’s just an observation of a change in our interaction that I associate with professionals pulling away from me, like they do often did when I was young. Still, I’m pressing on it … Continue reading from our last session – one that I didn’t know would be continuing this week, and that easily could have sidetracked us for half the session. Instead I was able to lay out a story about the parts I wanted help with before I explained my motivation. I was able to push past itinerary discussions ³They promised me that they had checked the rules and definitely should have said “grey duck” instead of “goose” when we were ending LI. I reminded them that rules are justifications for harm, not checklists for justice, and therefore more like a threat than a reassurance to me. and tie them back in at the end after they had been primed.

So I feel good about getting what I wanted, and also manipulative for the intentionally opaque way I made it happen. It was a therapy heist, but one I did to my therapist instead of with them. I also feel narcy for believing that I can have useful therapy while trying to manage the information my therapist has. I think that might be true, but it’s also the sort of thing narcy people choose to believe to justify their behavior.

Shanda is still at high levels of tension, though no longer so stuck on the same topics. Lots of anger, often thrown at me. But also more productive coping in many areas, and more attention to self. M is still in the middle of the big dark. When we last spoke I had hoped that there would be a time you were willing to be excited with me – you asked me to wait because you weren’t yet quite ready – but I’m pretty sure it’s not coming. DerbyK is moving and having feels all across the spectrum about it. Dog is feeling much better on the drugs, and interested in play and toys for the first time in like 2 months. D&D happened but it took a good hour of us fighting with a conference system and so wasn’t as social as one might hope. So my social life is mixed bag right now.

It’s easy for me to agree to other people’s avoidance, when they ask me to participate. Sometimes it seems like a genuinely good idea, for a period, and I expect that it will end when avoidance stops being useful. Sometimes impacts to me are small and so I am happy to defer to your preferences. Sometimes impacts to me are big but I’m willing to tolerate them to give you the space you need. But I feel like there are no good options when you ask me for “temporary” boundaries around something – when you repeatedly promise me “tomorrow” or “next week” or “after X” but do not follow through — because in my experience those restrictions are actually permanent. Sometimes that’s no big deal, because the thing you want me to avoid with you is specific and tiny and doesn’t impact our lives very much. But sometimes it’s a huge, broad category that means we can’t communicate about a whole range of things.

I think it’s easy for you to imagine that “more” aloneness — more space, more time, more isolation, more distraction – will finally make it be the “right time” to end the avoidance. That “more” will finally make you ready to face the thing that is too much right now. And sometimes that’s true. We all need space. Sometimes a lot of it. But it’s not sufficient merely to have space or time or any of the other bits you need more of. Without something motivating change it will be just as hard, just as surprising, just as overwhelming, just as poorly timed next time it comes up. Hence permanent avoidance. And I no longer want to live a life where the people I care about keep appending a broad list of things we can never share about. I don’t want to live a life where my relationships all get narrower over time as avoidance defines the ways we can interact.

I know you’re afraid, that the thing you can’t look at is too much, that it’s easy to attach the pain from it to anyone who get anywhere near it. I know that letting things slip into the parts of your mind that you don’t frequent has been an important and effective tool for coping. I know that being both genuinely adaptable and able to productively focus even when you don’t feel up to taking care of yourself have been vital skills in your life. I also know that sort of survival-focused life will eventually kill you. It does everyone. So I hope you can find a way to stop being trapped by it. You don’t have to figure out all your feels, you don’t have to work through all your issues, you don’t have to plaster over your pain or frustration or your fear. All you have to do is believe that some of it would be better with another human doing it with you, and trust someone to stand with you while you face it. I know the world has taught you that when things get tough people choose sides, and never yours. But I’m on your side. Always. Not because I’m loyal or dedicated, but because I trust you, even when you don’t trust yourself.

ZiB

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