Incremental Abandonment

No trash service this week. They delayed a day yesterday and now they’re just canceling what was Monday’s run. Which I understand in a practical sense but it annoys me to have to pull old trash back in, particularly when the wind ate my (city supplied) trash can lid yesterday. Sometimes trash bins turn back up but I didn’t spot it as we wondered down the road with Dog last night. This snow was great on day one but Seattle is not prepared for the world where snow exists 3 days in a row. It’s only like the 2nd time it has happened since I moved out here though, so I should try to remember that mostly the weather here isn’t trying to kill me.

Got through the Medicaid call today, with only a couple of hours on hold. Even got them to talk to me directly; the last time I called they wouldn’t even though I’m listed as an authorized representative. So now we’re one step closer to dealing with medical bills from November. Now I get to be annoyed with the way the private-insurance middlemen in the Medicaid system try to force everyone into HMOs and other restrictive behavior and are somehow allowed to do so even though it clearly fails to live up to the federal requirements for access to care and costs extra while delivering less effective health care. As secondary insurance I think it will be tolerable but it makes me want to hulk-smash about capitalism and the way we directly extract value for the lives and bodies of poor people to let some rich fucker tow around a boat behind his 5th wheel behind his pickup. But still, one step closer to being done with some of the bills I don’t know how to pay. And hopefully we can keep up the progress.

I submitted my own insurance claims last week, which was better than I expected from past experience. They are mostly willing to just take billing statements, though for some reason I have to mail them a physical copy. I know for a fact they’re going to pay some third party to scan the thing and throw away the paper, but I’m not allowed to send them a PDF, or even a fax. A minor inconvenience in my life but it adds several days to the process and requires supplies and equipment and time that are all wasted. It feels like a thing they want to be as hard as is technically allowed to discourage usage, and that’s the sort of injustice we shouldn’t let people profit from. Just like the hours long hold times for Medicaid. There’s also Dog insurance to do for his eye, and whatever is going to be required to keep Melissa getting her meds now that she’s out of money for her health plan.

I’m basically not working today. Didn’t even hit my meetings. I was feeling bad about it before but that was mostly stress about dealing with Medicaid. I should try to get my code changes into review today if I get a minute this afternoon, but I’m feeling mostly okay about not working and it’s 2:30 so is not super likely. It’s also at least day 2 of Shanda being real stressed and real dismissive and avoidsbt about it. I know it’s tough to be there but it’s also tough to be here. Maybe getting better now, after you were able to take a minute to feel it.

Pete wants to message me again. He has been poking at it since I asked him for money last year. He lives in Facebook now, which doesn’t have the sort of filtering capabilities I want. The do finally have an “Ignore Messages” option which is closer. He wants to feel connected (or less kindly, perhaps controlling) but doesn’t want to do anything to be connected, not even with explicit instructions about how humans might interact in this scenario. He can’t be bothered to avoid being hurtful, or even to get invested enough to feel told off and stop doing it. FB’s chat service feels like the thing where I go to get abused a little by Melissa and Pete. The rest of you should stop (and I should get my private chat server actually running so I can integrate all the services I use to something I control and stop caring). I am going to use this opportunity to let him think I live in Ohio indefinitely though, because when there’s an opportunity for misinforming the people who hurt you you should take it.

Chatted with M for a minute about how making incremental improvements to my job would probably help in many areas of my life, even though it feels like putting work into improving my day job is just wasted effort I throw into the bottomless pit of late-stage capitalism. But the feeling I get about how interrelatedness makes things harder not easier is rarely accurate, and even when it is it’s not a good reason to avoid the work. Maybe effort I spend on my job will make other things easier.

In part it’s avoidance; after using work (and school and 20 other things) as avoidance for a long time I eventually trained myself to do without and be okay with not always being exceptionally busy. I trained myself to do less work and be okay with not having it as a constant distraction. Which is a great step. But I also need to train myself not to focus my anxiety on work in the first place, and to stay engaged enough to manage it in a way that’s more broadly useful to me that just having money.

It feels like item #84 on the list of self-improvement tasks I ought to be doing this week and my willingness to avoid it makes it hard to change the priority. I feel sometimes like a drastic change would be easier — and in some ways it would — but the thing I need to address is really the way that I don’t want to think about it what would make it one step better. Making that change first will make me better able to find the drastic change I want, if I still want it later. It’s the same sort of thing I was lamenting the other day; it’s sometimes hard to believe that things are okay now AND can get better in disorganized pieces. To believe that small changes are worth the work as part of a process and that anyplace is withing walking distance of you have the time.

A thing that might help is training other people to help me with this — or training myself to find people who can — so that I don’t have to do it alone. Maybe that’s what I’m hoping to do when I imagine building an interconnected social support network: to finally build a network that can help people like me*. I never have been any good at trying to align organizations to my goals or passions, not even when I’m in charge of them. I want something else that works better. And I want you guys to come with me so it’s not so hard.

Still haven’t heard from V. I stare at that sentence for a minute and breathe. I’m resolved to be patient even though my brain is not calm (on this topic or others). And I’ve decided to mention my impatience even at the risk of applying pressure, though my intent is merely to open a space to speak.

The concept of incrementalism is also hard for me to take in some of my relationships. Where I get a piece of comfort long waited for and am immediately disappointed that I want ever more. Part of that is my fear of abandonment, where I must have it all now because inevitably the future will find us further apart and no more will ever come.

But part of that is the people I pick; many of you are here because I have learned to share at a distance and to feel your love even across the space that stands between us. But like many things I’d prefer to meet in the middle. I should teach myself not to need less like I always fear I must, but to be satisfied with the flow by knowing genuine social safety. But I should also build a social network where I can get enough sharing in the first place, because currently the survival fear is still real and hoarding is still sometimes a good idea.

It’s hard for me to believe that other people will set appropriate boundaries to protect themselves from me. That’s both an overestimation of my danger to others and my bad training about how boundaries work. But in any case it’s a thing I worry about – that I’m inevitably harmful just by being around. A belief that’s reinforced for me far too often for me to quite ignore it.

Haven’t done my therapy homework yet. I’m supposed to list a memory for each year of my life, which I find fairly technically difficult. I have thought about it but never bothered to write anything down. I mean, I’ll definitely stress myself enough about it tomorrow to get it done before the session, but it probably would have been easier if I started in earnest sooner. To be fair, it’s been tough to get certain types of things done the past 2 or 3 of days, as household stress was high and mostly unacknowledged.

I’ve been thinking about bodily symptoms of anxiety, as part of my general effort to recognize and evaluate the accommodations I have made for anxiety in my life. And I sort of can’t connect to it. The muscle tension bit I understand and experience, but I’ve trained to regulate that very consciously so I rarely build that sort of tension. And other symptoms are often things I dismiss as unimportant and/or inevitable, which makes it hard for me to pick out from the background noise even when it happens. I’m considering this both from the perspective of how I need better tracking to ensure I receive appropriate medical care and how anxiety drugs might impact me. I want to better understand how other people physically experience anxiety so I can proactively check for those responses in myself before I force them out of my perception.

Shared The Screed as an incremental project with @BPS in response to their interaction with me about and through the Amnesia Diares. I’m excited to have done it – I like that the website gives me different options for sharing and more accessible context for myself – but also a little nervous to be noticed by senpai. Or not noticed.

ZiB

*Obviously not actually me, just other (presumably better) people with similar needs. It’s still hard for me to imagine that I can be helped at all. Certainly not with the parts that are hardest. It’s my role to stand between other people and pain, to teach them ways to avoid it, not to be protected from it myself.

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Sent from a phone.