Blue Jewels & Other Forms of Separation

Chatted with @Yana about sadness and adoption and the perception of time. Maybe too much for day 2, but it’s the day I was having. Chatted with J about movies and names and capstones and hospitals and wrangling parents. And about a slightly different take on time. I was thinking about time yesterday, in a number of contexts, and I guess it showed. Got a message from M about sleep and the reason you’ll need it. Missed my usual call – maybe Wednesday – but it was good to get midnight chats from unexpected places, and better still to hear about movies. I’m going to have to watch a few old ones just to have an excuse to write about them.

Had a fancy supper ¹literally the “fancy” menu at Staple and Fancy with lots of little parts, which was too expensive but good fun. It lead to drinking, which is exhausting but has its virtues, including being allowed to do it at your table in a public restaurant. We did a little makeup on our way out; we got to use the new lipsticks – I did orange to match my shirt and I convinced Shanda to do dark. You’re afraid of dark lipstick but it looks good. And your hair is literally orange and half shaved right now so it’s doesn’t even stand out.

It’s winter in Seattle so when we left the house at 5:30 the sun had been down for more than an hour. I’m a big fan of the dark but my brain is pretty sure that once the sun goes down it’s too late for real humans to be awake. It tells me I should feel isolated, and that I should be prepared to keep moving until I find shelter. Or daylight.

There’s still lots of space around Shanda’s sadness. It’s good to do the sadness because there’s too much of it built up from the past. And it’s good to use our time off on things like this that aren’t very compatible with day jobs. But it’s hard to have sad be so present for days at a time. And a lot of times you are still living the life where being sad means you have to be alone. Be alone when you need it, but also believe that you can be sad with someone. I feel like we just watched a movie about not keeping sadness isolated.

Talked with DerbyK about isolation. About the way it leaks from the parts of our life where we need it to the parts we usually want to share. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but it’s easy to get stuck in isolation. To be overwhelmed by having to do all of the hard parts of your life by yourself. To become responsible not just for your own joy but for all of the systems that help you find it. To see the things you need and love being pulled away from by neglect and oppression and to feel like it’s your job to hold it all together. But you’re not alone. You’re not responsible for other people’s negelect. And if you lose a thing you need you can have help building something to replace it.

“I was servant-caste, too,” she said gently. “I remember the same lessons as you—but I remember, too, that some of those lessons were wrong, Gatherer-Apprentice. They were all about protecting yourself, making yourself strong enough to survive a servant’s life. There were no lessons about how to love safely, or what to do if you did not.” – N. K. Jemisin, The Killing Moon. It’s not so carefully developed as The Fifth Season, but it’s still really good. And the more literal description of colonialism and class has its own value, as you can see here. You should read some of her work. It’s worth your time. It’s part of how Shanda finally got to have your sad.

Read this today, which is sort of rare good news in that sub. There are stories about people escaping, which is much better than being trapped, but there are not a lot of stories about being found. https://www.reddit.com/r/raisedbynarcissists/comments/dvekyk/im_being_adopted/ The post and replies also discuss the complications of sharing such news with normies. Between the patriarcal labels for relationships and the way the world insists that family is permanent and secret, it can be hard to even get people to see how you feel, let alone to share it with you. I’d still like to be adopted, if I ever find someone to take me ²Getting married helps with some of the laws about parental rights, but not all of them. I want all their patriarchy roles revoked, off my birth certificate, never to have rights about me again. And I want someone who picked me instead of being stuck with me..

This story about clothes sizes (linked here in audio format) https://youtu.be/Kb4E9VC5ibw?t=456 happened to me all the time when I was young. Mother’s inability to imagine me as a seperate person lead to a thousand variations of this weird interaction. I was fat because she was fat. She thought we could share clothes at several points in my life. I did wear her coats and things, when I was allowed, because they were much better than mine, and often large enough to let me pull inside. And she definitely broke some of my stuff trying to wear it. It’s probably one of the reasons I had such shitty clothes later, to keep her disinterested. In any case I appreciate the existence of a story about a fat middle aged woman pretending to fit into very small clothing and not being able to admit even to herself that it isn’t true.

Was off work Monday, and sort of skipped today. I got up for my morning meeting but just didn’t have it in me. Rested until after noon and eventually made it to the reading nook. I’m not dying but I’ve definitely been better, and I didn’t accomplish much that required standing today. Took Dog out and installed one screw, but lived the rest of my life with my feet up. I’m off the queue this week so it’s easier to skip a day, but I should be sure I get enough done to make next week better.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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