Crawlspace

It’s been a rough day. Among other things I’ve been triggered about not having any place to be. It’s a complicated feeling about needing someplace where I can sit quietly until I feel capable of pretending to be human again. An escape for when I don’t have social support available – or when my usual support is one of the things I’m coping with – so that I can left all of my mental illness leak out without bothering anyone. So I can disengage the cognitive filter that lives between me and my expression and silently cry until I’m prepared to not be bothered by having now hope.

I used to cope with by owning a car, or preparing some outdoor space I could expect to remain private. For a while I had an outdoor couch ¹My tree-covered, terrain-shaded Seattle backyard is too wet even for plastic-covered furniture, so it had to go once the rainy season arrived. here, which wasn’t very secret but it was private enough that the cops wouldn’t harass me. When I lived with Mother I used outside when I could, but there was also a crawlspace accessible from the basement for when I couldn’t get outside. It was very dark and had a sand floor, it was only a few feet tall and full of dead bugs, but it was also a place I could hide for a long time if I was quiet.

So tonight I’m trying a new hiding place, in the hope that indulging my hiding might help me stop being triggered. I’ve brought a blanket to the one closet ²Does anyone know why this 120-year-old house has a glass panel in the closet door? The closet door matches the other two interior doors in the place, except it’s half glass. Into a closet. this house has and I’m trying to imagine being safe here. I’m trying to imagine there is a place in this world where I can be safe enough to survive the night without shelter and be free from harassment until I choose to leave. I’m pretty sure that’s worse than being able to feel like I have a home in this building I own, but it’s better than just swallowing the terror again. Maybe the familiarity being alone and this tiny under-stair room ³The version of Harry Potter where he becomes a cop is pretty sad, but the version where he drinks himself to death in a tiny room that reminds him of the “safety” of childhood is worse. will help me find something better for next time.

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Yesterday was a drug day. It mostly went well, as these things go. Psilocybin this time, thanks to my recently unexpected drug delivery. Less stimulant effect than LSD but still plenty disruptive. I lose my usual sub-cognitive coping when on drugs, or at least when on good drugs, which means I have a lot more body tension than usual. But I had good drug times too, if not quite as profound as the last run – I should have re-dosed to spend a little more time in it. I didn’t feel too burnt out by the time I went to bed (before midnight) but a drug day might explain why I’m so much more depressed than usual today. So might being triggered I guess.

I am super depressed today. Suicide feels like a thing I could use to plan improvements in the life of people around me. Feels like a source of relief. Shanda would own a house outright and wouldn’t have me around to interfere with the next Dog or to make food complicated. It would be hard but eventually they’d find other partners, and they’d be free from a lot of constraints that make life difficult. M would probably feel abandoned though, particularly by suicide, and I seriously doubt Shanda would be able to scam L to freedom without me. So I should probably find a scam to tolerate a few more years of this.

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Tomorrow I was planning to stress myself out about water, as part of my training about eating. Though I have strategies to deal with it I have a lot of trauma about access to water. A day or two of thirst is better than a day or two of waterboarding, but it’s still a lot for a toddler to deal with. So I want to seperate it out and look at it, apart for my other eating trouble, and that requires being engaged in the feel that put me here in the first place. That requires disrupting all the things I do to avoid and cope with thirst, and there’s a good chance it will put me in a triggered state. But I think two days in a row fighting dissociation and survival terror is too much, so we’ll save that for next week.

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CS is officially moving. I am glad they found something that looks like hope. I am sad they will soon be much further away. They did already live half way around Lake Washington, but they’re going much further. That was sort of a forgone conclusion all along – CS has motivations for flight that are very familar to me – but it’s still sad when it happens. Maybe I’ll be able to arrange my life in a way that isn’t just about giving things up and keep them in it. I could hardly manage that in-person, but you never know. Sometimes I’m better in writing.

The snow here is almost gone. Even living here without snow for a long time the rapid departure of it always feels like a surprise to me. I expect weeks of mixed weather on the way out – slush and mud and a few more storms of increasingly wet precipitation. But here is just a day or two. I moved here specifically because it is rarely below freezing (which makes hiding in a crawlspace or a car much safer) but being cold is so much of my life it’s hard to imagine something different.

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Probably other things too. But now that my hiding has subsided to the normal levels and suicide feels like a plan for the future instead of Q2 I should probably try to sleep. There’s not a lot of time left between here and the demand for labor that will fill the rest of my life – back to the day job on Monday – and I’d like at least part of it to be available to do something interesting with Shanda.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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