Repeated Exposure
I’ve been thinking about what makes it harder to write, on days when I don’t. There are lots of things of course, but an important one is that I don’t write on days when I don’t find time to return to a rest state before I sleep – days when I am busy with a project, or when there are people at my house, or when Shanda is having a hard time. It’s not quite the same as tired, though it can be coincident – it’s about how PIC is still in-charging right up until sleep. There’s no space for writing in that configuration.
There’s also the version where I spend my writing feels on something less public, which often happens to me on Wednesdays. Or there’s the version where I embrace being distracted during the times when I might otherwise right, like on weekends, particularly those where my rest feels precious.
Those are all good things to know, but not exactly a strategy for summoning PWW. There’s a lot of PIC in the writing this week and only flashes of PWW. I try to remember my goal is integration, not controlled switching, but that can be frustrating. It can feel like PIC can’t disconnect, and like the things PWW does are less available. Hopefully there’s some balance to be had. I’d like to smell it from a pure PWW perspective, to better judge where I am, but I’m not sure how to get that.
I’ve been thinking more about very young me, and times when they might have been out when I was older. I can guess they were around regularly before I was 12 because I can remember an intentional change where I stopped tolerating them, but I am still working on knowing. I do know there were several instances later in my teens in which that specific sort of switch would explain odd situations related to things like high food stress.
As I feel around the edges I wonder if 3-year-old me isn’t the place I put all my early sexual abuse. There’s good reason to believe that the type of sexual abuse that started when I was very young continued regularly until I was at least 11. It’s a thing that I can see the spaces for in the pattern of my life, but that I struggle to find in my experience. Cognitively I know it’s there but I can’t find the story. But I wonder if I’m stashing it in the same place where it started – that old toddler identity I always imagined as dead.
In the past it was easy to imagine that the physical sexual aspects of my abuse were limited to my very early life. The fragments I have about it feel very young, but I could imagine that I was trapped in that tiny trauma fragment many of the times I was assaulted, and that young is the egostate, not the time period.
That story would be consistent with the way Mother says I “changed” at 12. For a long time I assumed that meant I was old enough that Mother couldn’t project onto me as easily, or that they felt overshadowed by me, or just that they wanted to make me feel bad. They’re a narc and that sort of thing is common. But that was never very satisfying given how strong Mother’s belief is.
I could also imagine that I finally found a way to effectively deter the assaults – that I learned to make Mother feel disgusted with me while they hurt me – and that I learned to stop myself from being the toddler that had for so long endured these situations for me. That I learned to have control even while being assaulted, now that I could (unfortunately) finally understand the sexual components of it.
I am not super stoked by the likelihood that I’ve got food and sex trauma tied up in the same toddler-sized package. All things being equal I’d rather keep living the life where I don’t have to think about more than a decade of sexual abuse from Mother as part of my plan to figure out how to not hate food. But of course it’s all in a lump. How else could it be?
Mail migrations are going well, with 6 of 7 domains already receiving mail at the new host and the last one to follow as soon as tomorrow. There’s probably still some technical support required to get everyone transferred but I should be ready to move old messages next week. I’m excited to get out of the mail hosting business, and also to be able to play with and move my own mail server again. It will definitely make my cloud migration easier when it’s time to move my own mail – I only need to satisfy myself.
CS was back for yet more homework, hopefully for the last time. I’m happy to help but I’m super ready to be done – I’m supposed to be on leave. But with just a little luck you’ll have finished the course and the degree and can join me in my doneness.
This week has some driving planned for the holiday itself, to drop off packages in homes where I know it matters, but otherwise should give me a minute to do my own projects again. I want to get my screen up and give the idea a test turn. I want to progress the circuit board now that I’ve figured out KiCAD a bit. I want to organize some bits and bobs at home. But only as I have time. Goal one this week is still to feel like it’s possible to care about liking the things I need to survive.
ZiB
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Sent from a phone.
