Individually Frosted Poverty

I was thinking about the way interconnectedness can make challenges seem harder rather than easier. I should try to remember that it also means I don’t have to do all the parts. Because A and C both influence B, doing A and C makes B easier. So when I’m trying to improve my day job and my physical health and my eating habits and my motivation for projects and my clothes and 20 other things I can imagine that it’s reasonable to tackle the issues I am most able to address first. I don’t want to indefinitely delay any one thing while waiting for it to be “easy enough” but I definitely can stop when I run out of spoons even though there are still dozens of things on the list. I don’t want to prioritize only the one next thing that will make my life better and easier or otherwise more tolerable but I can dynamically prioritize based on which things I can actually get done. I shouldn’t let “easy” or “productive” things stand in the way of what would help most but I can put some things on temporary hold when there are too many things cooking.

For therapy today I had to list events from each year of my life. This is technically hard for me because I have trauma-related memory dysfunction. But I did eventually find an item for most years. One thing we talked about in session was age 5: moved to the porch. She asked me to describe the room I lived in and it gave me a several pieces of insight**: 1) I don’t think I had any clothes in my room. I think they were in Alex’s room inside where I maybe had a drawer in her dresser or something. There definitely wasn’t a dresser or closet in my room. 2) The room was tiny and didn’t have any furniture other than my bed. Not even a table to make my alarm clock accessible from in bed. 3) There was only one electrical outlet, which wasn’t in a spot that was convenient for my clock. I was made to feel as though 4-year-old me should have better planned for this either when choosing the position of the bed or when designing the room, neither of which were things I actually did or could have influenced (for unrelated reasons having an extension cord was right out). 4) I should have rolled the dice on foster care. Later when I wanted to protect my siblings foster care would have been clearly bad at least insofar as I couldn’t exert enough control to make it tolerable for all of us. But when I was alone at 4 I could have at least had someplace with heat and access to water and a place to store clothes (and probably more clothes and food and whatnot too). Even if it was still abusive it would have at least met the technical standards for housing children supervised by the state.

Which lead to further thoughts about how while I was poor my family was not and somehow I couldn’t see this. I can name lots of things that happened to me that you’d think couldn’t happen if we weren’t poor together. Even ignoring the lack of food and clothes and other basic necessities there were things like when Mother would “borrow” money to pay for survival items (like a water pump or fuel oil) that must have been about shared need, right? But I realized those were just times when Pete was so stuck in his own anxiety about never having help that Mother assumed control of the situation. And Mother did have money to solve this problem — my money — so she didn’t have to argue with Pete about it. I’m sure that’s why she asked me about “borrowing” the money instead of just taking it*, because she imagined that she was in desperate need even though that need was just about managing Pete and not actually about money.

And I realized that Pete would get into these states about all sorts of things not just out of willful neglect like he did about food and clothes and other “domestic” things that he decided weren’t his problem. He did it for all sorts of things that should have involved hiring someone to help. Like when a plumbing problem would leave us without water for days while he tried one repair a day for a week (and had normal access to water during the day at work and wherever he ate without us). I think it’s one of the reasons he talks so much about taxes – he is worried he screwed it up and needs reassurance. He definitely believes that there are all sorts of things he isn’t allowed to have help with for I think gender-role-related reasons in combination with his mental illness.

I also figured out that I can’t do improvement-type home improvements nearly as easily as from-scratch work because I imagine that if you don’t do “right” the first time it can never be improved, at least not without paying some huge cost. I imagine this cost as being some sort of labor I don’t want to do but it’s actually about the emotional cost of negotiating for the change. There would be blame for the failure of doing it wrong, punishment to prove that you were worthy of a second try, and some negotiation where you gave Mother a prize to make her stop making the situation so intolerable (and her favorite prize was some sort of repeatable pain). This whole concept applies even to things that were “right” the first time and just need to be different now for a new purpose, or to things that don’t even have a “right” and are only “wrong” because the “right” version would already be done via some sort of anticipatory magic. It’s sort of a mess of nonsense that starts with my not guessing that I needed to assert influence over the placement of an outlet in a room I didn’t design for furniture I didn’t yet own when I was 4 and continues through to me never being able to update my home theater. I could probably reduce this confluence of terrible feelings at least to something I can plan around.

V poked me today. We got to talk about isolation and motivation. About group projects and disappointment and the perception of risk. It helped me feel like I have real friends and that I’m a real human. And it pushed back the fears that grow when I imagine you’re having a hard time and feeling isolated. I know it’s hard to break past that but it’s a big relief when you do, and I hope it’s useful to you too.

M continued to help me with my attempt to peel anxiety away from myself and see it separately. You shared your strategy for managing the sort of thing I’m worried about, which reassures me that you’re putting time into managing it and makes me feel like maybe I could do it too, with some help. E reached out on a similar topic, in a way that I guess I asked for but didn’t really expect anyone to respond to directly. You do that frequently and I’m really happy to have it.

I didn’t recover well in terms of working today; got nothing but email done. I don’t have anything with short deadlines but I really would like to get some dev work staged and reviewed this week. And I should eventually show up at some meetings (even if snow days give me some cover). I’m hoping I can do both of those tomorrow afternoon with a trip to the office. I’ve got packages to mail and the last daily meeting of the week and there will be cleaning and Shanda’s sister at home so being in the office might be less distracting in general. Or at least that’s what I’m telling myself to make going sound like a good idea, and to feel like I might get to a couple more hours of work*** this week.

I told myself more pictures and then haven’t done any for all week. I even had a plan for one today and just never got to making it happen. I shouldn’t feel bad about it but I should do something different tomorrow to try to make it go.

I should also find some time for reading tomorrow. Today I let @Felica Day distract me with her fort clearing and inventory management via old Twitch streams. And that was great; it helps me externalize some anxiety and be genuinely entertained. Yesterday I got some Joe Abercrombie which was good to get going again. But I was also in the middle of bucks from V and M that I haven’t touched in more than a week. And when the household can stand it I want to get Shanda back on the C-PTSD book so we can share about it, because it’s been very useful thus far and I want to prompt her for more when she can manage it. I imagine that someday I might be able to talk to other people about bits of it but I’m even more afraid of applying pressure on that front.

ZiB

*As though there’s a non-coercive, non-abusive way to ask a 9-year-old about spending money on access to water

**This was not the goal of the exercise, just a thing I indulged in thinking about afterward. My therapist was just trying to get a sense of the general conditions of my childhood for future reference, and to ensure I was completing the broader exercise in a way that would be effective. There’s maybe talk that’s actually about therapy but not tonight.

***I should make some improvements here. And I’m working on some like better planning my meetings will make the job more interesting and less reactive which should help reduce my stress about not going to meetings. But I can also imagine that improvements in other areas of my life will help and make future improvements here easier and less necessary. Going to the gym will make it easier to go the office. Having food planned and available for lunches will make it easier to keep a schedule. Traveling less will let me use time off to recover instead of just doing something else stressful on my day off. If I’m lucky something I do about my anxiety will make it easier to separate work from anxiety, or reduce my survival fears about supporting everyone I love.