Please Leave So We Can Be Together

Travel was better on Monday than it has been other days. Not great but certainly less draining. It helped that I only had an hour or so of delays. I also paid for a first class ticket and picked a flight on a 757 so I could hide in the corner¹Seat 6A. [Fig 2] where it’s easier to ignore some of the people-related flying parts, and where I physically fit in the seat. I was able to arrange my feelings about my day job to not be a big part of the day, and that was great. I also arranged to have a full day’s worth of food in my bag, which helped with my survival fears. I skipped that the last few times because it’s not actually necessary – I never actually have trouble trading money for food while traveling – but it sure helps me feel more secure to posses a sandwich and a bottle of water and a candy bar.

The rest of the improvement I sort of did through light dissociation, which was less great. Effective – and when I consider it in retrospect a thing I’ve done often enough before – but pretty limiting both in the scope of its utility and in terms of what it permits me to do or experience. It only works for the parts where I can tune out entirely and so anything that requires my attention puts me right back in the anxiety. And it doesn’t let me do anything productive or communicate or even think about my feels or read a book. All I can do is glide through the day and try to float past my stress without getting any on me. So I need other tools, hopefully things that can help me keep the anxiety down instead of just helping me not die while it happens.

It also helped that I got to talk with M for a second on Sunday night. It helped not only with my anxiety about leaving you but also to give me the head space to prepared for the next day. And you let me be weepy and sappy on Monday morning, which was also useful. I started my vegetative state shortly after you left for the day so I got to just float there all morning and it helped keep me clam.

On a related note, my purple suspenders are not rated for travel. They set off even the TSA precheck metal detector and in doing so got me selected for additional harassment. That part of my day was less good, because the amount of time I can interact with the TSA and not be detained is like a few hundred seconds at best. I can’t arrange to act properly terrified of them for longer than that, and once I start into malicious compliance there’s like a 50% chance that the cops become involved. Unlike border crossings I wouldn’t actually get arrested at the airport because there aren’t actually any relevant laws to break and the TSA is not law enforcement, but it’s still a bad time and likely lead to flight delays. In any case, no more purple suspenders at the airport.

I finally got back to painting my nails. Did a pass in Cleveland this weekend and then amended it when I got home [fig 1]. I’ve felt too busy to do it even though it doesn’t have to take a long time. I do like to sit and futz with it though, to make it perfect, and I haven’t had much time for that. It was nice to have all my bits again. I particularly like the copper base layer with white glitter overlay.

I was thinking more about clothes. Shanda got me a stack of new shirts to try, which is useful but I fear is too much immediate investment in a thing I plan to keep changing. I definitely want better daily shirts but I also feel like 6 months from now I might want something entirely different, not just the marginal improvement I’m making today. Mostly I haven’t figured out how to me okay with spending money on clothes, and I feel like I have to make this set last for years to justify having it at all – or like if you buy me things without my participation that I just have to make due with them even if they don’t fit/aren’t what I want/etc. like I did in the past. That is if course one of the problems I’m trying to solve though, so I should probably imagine the happy medium is a lot closer to replacing all my current clothes than it is to buying a handful of new shirts. It would help if I could actually talk to Shanda about it. You’ve been helpful in terms of arranging for me to have some better clothes to try, and in helping me have less that don’t fit, but you seem really averse to doing it with me instead of for me. I don’t need you to take on the responsibility, I just want to share with you while it happens.

I watched the first episode of season 2 of Future Man (Hulu). That show is another one full of jokes, professional jokes. Jokes they spend 9 minutes setting up, pay off three or four times, and the reference for the next several episodes, maybe the next several seasons. They’re also not afraid to note the process of making a TV show or constructing a story, or to simply name the storytelling element they want and choose whatever McGuffin is most absurd. That gives is a sheen of silly on top of a scene that has no message other than the emotion, and lets them play both endearing and terrible at the same time (against some often really good performances). It’s a thing Archer still does fairly often and South Park has done when it’s good. Great music cues too; the whole show plays as “what if everyone in Back to the Future was unlucky and dumb” and they use literal BttF cues when they’re doing literal BttF references. But they’ve also got their own BttF-like cues for when they’re just taking the shape of it and not making a direct reference, so it doesn’t get stuck hitting one note. This show takes the better parts of things like Chuck and trashes the half-assed romance plots and other procedural elements in lieu of actual character development. Episode one also had Lilan Bowden in really great glasses [Fig 3, though it doesn’t do them justice; check around minute 12 in the episode for more angles] and the phrase “classic pig-spanking sensation” printed on a board game. I’m stoked to watch the rest of the season, and I haven’t even considered the purple-haired Eliza Coupe-nes²Episode 2 brings her back in some really good patterned leggings. Her hair is still great but I now I remember how it’s sort of disappointing that she has to fake the look they want instead of doing it directly, because in real life you can’t cut your hair and be an actress. It’s still exciting though, even if it doesn’t reach Killjoys … Continue reading of it yet.

One of the good parts of me being gone for ~12 weeks is that it lets Shanda see how I don’t cause all of her feelings — how they happen with or without me — and how assigning them to me can make them harder to manage. It’s not knowledge the comes for free, or even that is pre-installed when I get back, but it’s still a bit of progress I’m happy to have. So often, particularly with avoidance-related feels, they come labeled with my name merely because I’m present and engaged. It’s easy for you to see my attention as hurtful pressure because what you expect is neglect. But you need pressure — we all do — just to balance out the weight of the world. I’m not trying to push you someplace you don’t want to go, I’m trying to keep you buoyant and moving in the direction you choose. It is pressure, but it’s the pressure of support, not the pressure of demand. And I’m glad that me being gone helps you see the way that you’re in control of it, and the way you can use it to help with the actual demands in your life rather than as the source of them.

One of the bad parts of me being gone for ~12 weeks is that it lets Shanda revert to a very non-integrated life, where we don’t do things together and instead have separate lists of chores we do for the other person, maybe interspersed with some distraction-heavy periods where neither of us has any goals (lest those goals reveal the separation between our lives). I suspect this is part of the shirts conflict, where you feel like it’s a task you’ve been assigned even though I just want to talk with you about fashion and maybe get your opinion on how things fit.

But demanding that people better integrate me into their lives is one of the things I’ve been learning to do while I was away. One of the ways that I have decided to expect more from my relationships. I don’t want to be invisibly useful; I want to be visibly supportive. I don’t want to be missed when my absent impact is noticed, I want to be missed because I’m not around to share things with. I want to be someone you think about even when I’m away, because I make your life easier when I’m around but also because you want to share with me the parts that happen when I’m not. Because my reactions are valuable to you and because sharing your joy and sorrow with me makes both of them better, even when I’m not present in real-time.

I got a pair of wooden propeller earrings. They were the best I could find in term of spinners. But they’ve just got a loose pin bearing so they’re terrible. One of them will spin for a second but that just makes people want to flick it harder, and when you flick it harder it just catches and tears at my earlobe. So not the best. I couldn’t find anything that had a ball bearing.

M is sick this week. I think you’re finally getting better now these days later that I get to writing, but I spent time thinking about it this week. About how small burdens can make our lives so much harder, and how easy it is to classify anything that doesn’t threaten survival as small. It’s a thing I do about medical treatment, so badly sometimes that I actually threaten my survival. And it’s something that I used to do about many things, when there wasn’t enough time in my life to worry about all of the things that might kill me. It’s something I feel like I could help people with but can’t ever seem to guess how to share what I know. Or how to get anyone to help with the parts where I still can’t do it correctly.

V is still running silent. Not longer than usual but plenty long enough for my anxiety. I spread it around a little this time, to make it easier to bear, but it would still be great to get even a taco from you, so I know you’re still attached. I have this fear of abandonment you see, and it’s very comforting to me know that you haven’t left me yet.

Cowboy is pretty quiet too, but it somehow seems more expected from you. Could be my bias though. I do wonder if there’s more I might be doing, but I don’t have a lot of information to work with, so I’ve decided it’s safest to wait for you. Let me know if that ever ceases to be a good idea.

One thing I’ve decided to try as I move back to Seattle is not going to work and feeling okay about it. Picking like 2 meetings to show up at and never going to anything else in the office without a good reason. Instead of the thing I had been doing where I don’t really plan about it and just feel equally bad about each meeting I skip throughout the week, plus a little worried after the fact even though it’s too late to change anything. It’s not that I want to go to more meetings, it’s just that I should stop feeling bad about not going using the power of planning. And this plan is mostly working to make my week tolerable. I had planned on this short week to only go in Tuesday; I got roped into a much worse meeting on Thursday but still I think I can just 2 meetings this week and skip my TMA on Friday. So I need a more subtle plan that can better react to the somewhat unpredictable nature of my week while still limiting my total number of meetings and controlling my anxiety about no meeting the expectations of my corporate overlords.

Had a lot of trouble getting started on SRs this week, even though they were fairly easy. Still sort of sitting on one but I got the other three going on Wednesday once I finally decided to do the first 3 minutes of work on them. Which was more of a challenge than I’d like to admit. Defiantly need to demand more from my job; there are some projects I could pick up that might be better than this nonsense, but only if I can have a few minutes out from under the SRs.

There’s definitely a bit about this week’s therapy to go in here, but I’ve already been baking this thing too long. I think they work better for all my purposes when they’re fresh and iterative than when I chew on them all week — part of the goal is to show my work. This is one of the side effects not just of the travel and related disruption in my life but also the way I handled parts of it with dissociation as it happened, and the way I prioritized getting errands and other logistics done this week so I could feel “done” later, none of which is great for having all the feels. So let’s start another one tonight, leave the bits I haven’t covered until then, and see if we can’t get back to a more regular schedule.

ZiB

• 

• 

•