Interior Sand Castles

Dog had a beach day, which he seemed to like. The sound is a little cold but he goes back and forth between swimming and eatting barnacles. Water is the only place he will do fetch activities. Even there he isn’t doing chase play – he watches you throw, watches it fly, sees where it lands, decides if he wants it, then tromps out to get it. He also won’t drop it until he’s back out of the water, no matter where you stand. It’s like nobody taught him how to dog.

He also apparently ate a rock ¹After pulling it out the official word is a crab shell and sand – he swallowed a sand-filled dead crab and compressed it into a rock with his small intestine. and gave himself a GI obstruction, so he’s been in the hospital all day today. He’s in surgery now and assuming that goes well he should be okay again in a few days.

In relative terms at least. He’s still dying of spinal cancer, and the ultrasound today suggests he has some sort of spleen cancer in addition to his spinal mass. The vet was worried about the 6-month median life expectancy but Cancer Dog was already on the dying-in-6-months plan so it’s actually not a big deal. They’re going to take out his spleen today too, but it likely won’t make much difference.

So that has been bunch. There are also the codependent racists that are charing me $18k as middlemen in my quest to pay someone else so I can stop having a landlord. Colonialism sucks, but so does homelessness, so I’m buying in, and paying a realtor to do it. But I can’t wait until I can block their number when this is done.

I have been making my therapist sing the break up dance again. They don’t like it not understand what I’m doing, and they particularly don’t like that I don’t think their favorite technique can help me. But I am bringing them around on the idea that not knowing is okay, and not an indication that something isn’t working. They liked it better when I framed it as culture – that I needed them to be better educated on my culture as a homeless orphan – and agreed to watch movies that I suggested.

The movies I suggested first were Short Term Twelve (2013) and What Maisie Knew (2012). STT is an “independent” flim by studio standards, but stars Bree Larson, so not really. It’s still pretty good. It provides a very clean but not wholly inaccurate perspective on the way we treat teenagers who have for any reason been seperated from their patriarchy of origin. The best possible outcome from group homes is that you are allowed to flee with no support and no money and a history of untreated trauma. And many don’t even get that.

WMK is a more specific piece presented almost entirely from the point of view of the titular child. We see the life of a 7-year-old who has rich, narcy, divorced parents who use the court system weaponize her, while otherwise neglecting and parentifiying her. It’s a well-conceived PoV concept and I was surprised to learn it’s based on a serial novel from the late 1800s. The title comes from the protagonist’s limited set of information about the chaotic and dangerous world she has to navigate, but the story is really about how she becomes a person and builds a family even though she is too young. In the movie we cut out before that premature independence starts to look like adult disfunction, but it pulls no punches in showing us this young person organizing her own abandonment, to escape her legal parents.

On a positive therapy note, I found a new model about attachment disruption that I’m pretty excited about. It has a whole list of points about how therapy for attachment might be different, a list with a very close correlation to the things I complained about or tried to make happen. It’s called Attachment Disturbances in Adults: Treatment for Comprehensive Repair (Daniel P. Brown). It’s more of a textbook than a direct guide to treatment or healing, but I think it might be valuable to me in getting my therapist on a slightly different tract.

I realized today that I don’t really think any external thing can provide comfort or relief to me. Not humans or dogs or drugs or any aspect of my external life or environment. I feel expert at being calm, or at least calm enough to do what I need at any given moment. I have no belief that anything other than my agency and action can provide any relief in my life. In some ways this is true, and it’s very resilient to depend only on one’s self for calm, but it’s also a reason I want to flee. Nothing here will make me feel better, so I had better find a different way to be lest I become overwhelmed.

I am really connected to the feeling I have been fearing since we started buying a house – that it isn’t really for me. My brain is 100% ready to think that my role, once I get someone I care about into stable housing, is to transition away so they can live their new life without me. It’s ready to believe that the only part of this new house I can use is the exterior entrance to the unheated, no-plumbing basement, and even that only until everyone is ready to get on without me. Because that’s my job in a new house, to hide someplace uncomfortable until it’s time for me to leave. I’ll have to get Dog and Shanda setup, but then it will be time for me to find a new life. It expect its still just as stressful as I remember, to be homeless and also employed full-time. But that’s the rule. Moving means it’s time for me to run away from everyone I know, to send back the support I can from outside (like money – some has to pay for the houses where my family lives), and to find a new me who can be happy with this new life.

So things are still a lot. Dog is still in the hospital. The bank is still using my dead name to harass me about my (literal) dead grandmother. And I’m only 1 step away from fleeing instead of my usual 2 or 3. Perhaps tomorrow will be easier.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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