Bootstrapped Care

This week I got to talk to DerbyK, after forever away. You’ve been very busy – too busy for how well you’ve been. You should fix that if life gives you the opportunity ¹you should maybe force life to find an opportunity for you. But we got to talk about disability and the morality of cleanliness and and the complexity of correctly imagining even our own futures, let alone planning for one we don’t know yet. And we strategized for about how to use the skills we do have to synthesize the parenting we did not ourselves receive.

M also showed up, anxious to move forward on a project you had been forced to delay. I’m glad you’re excited and optimistic about plans to feel in better control of your life (and that it puts you in a mood to tolerate a call for me). I miss you so much and I’m always so happy when you can share with me.

I can see you planning to have more help when you need it, both from yourself and others, and I’m really proud of you for finding ways to make that change. I’m also honored to be included in your plans. It’s easy for me to feel like people only think of me in crisis so being part of plans feels like acceptance.

I also know there are things weighing on you right now. I can see how sad you are, and how there’s still a lot to come out – on top of all the regular challenges of life. But I think you’re allowed to be sad, even to be overwhelmed by it, and I you’re doing a good job managing. I hope you can continue to find space to prioritize yourself, even when that means your rearranging your old plans.

I even tricked M into a second call by offering a connection to @BPS. I want to connect the different parts of my life, to feel like a human. But I’m also terrified of it. My brain knows that if people from different spheres meet they will be able to detect my secret and see me for the manipulative narc I really am. My experience knows that I can’t pretend to be a whole person across contexts and that some of them are incompatible with each other. My DID knows that I’m actually not the same person across contexts and fears discovery. My abuser knows that if they can see into my life they can isolate me from other supports. And my self-disgust knows that no one wants to be associated with me in a social context, even if they will tolerate me in private (or in crisis). It all was fine of course – none of these things I “know” have any bearing on reality. It’s tricky to live in a world that doesn’t match my experience, even if it’s better than the world that hurt me.

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We’ve started The Mandalorian. I assumed I just wouldn’t care because… StarWars ²What is with the “everyone’s a Cylon” video tag the franchise uses now? I could maybe handle the slideshow of characters – it’s not good but it’s what marketing wants – but I do not understand the scanning red eye lights. You can hardly see the characters, it’s not thematic for any part of the franchise I could name, and it’s … Continue reading… but it’s actually pretty good. The Spaghetti Western framing makes the series for me. I love the Man with No Name as a way to tell a story about a space cowboy without leaning on the colonial tropes of the Hollywood Western that birthed the franchise. It’s a way to bring the silly (and racist, etc.) world into something more platable for modern audiences – we can have a gun fight where 40 people miss for 90 seconds because the actual drama happens in a quiet moment where the (anti)hero does something decisive rather than explosive. Where the protagonist is lucky and skillful but mostly succeeds because they know when the game is up and are prepared to survive the transition.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s The Witcher with less singing and fancier swords. It’s still full of StarWars nonesense everywhere from names to religion to economics, the worlds still make no sense, the things they tell us are important in dialog literally don’t matter. It’s still misogynist and violent and there are still floating wagons pulled by livestock. But it comes out much better here than just repeating the 1970s bullshit of the original for the 7th time. Do watch, but also remember puppets are what keeps StarWars grounded, and that the series is based on someone not showing their face and mostly not talking.

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I had a lot of dread last night. It’s the sort of dread I might attach to an expectation that the next day will be dangerous or difficult in some way. In other weeks I might have assigned it to day job or other obligations I feel unprepared for, or that I don’t want to undertake. But I’m hard pressed to do that here. I had plans for a call with @BPS and M, and while my brain predicts disaster (as noted above) it’s not the same shape as my dread. I’m afraid of things all the time without dreading the advancement of time. And otherwise I have no short-term plans that anyone else is tracking or even observing. There’s something here I should try to find in these weeks while I don’t have day job distracting me with targets for dread.

It occurs to me that this dread is the same sort of shape as the one that kept me up every week as an 11-year-old. I’m not sure it’s the same dread precisely but it’s closer to that than most other things I could name. I was told to assign that stress to school, though obviously there were many challenges in my life at the time. I’m pretty sure that period coincides with the end of my domestic sexual abuse, which is definitely a thing that could generate dread. I think it’s also the period in which I trained to make PIC always the person I am when I wake up, perhaps specifically to protect myself from nighttime abuse. But I’m not sure what would have triggered that sort of emotional flashback yesterday specifically.

I’ve been working more on why simple food is so treacherous for me. I definitely have feels about the safety of all the various types of food likely to be available to 4-year-old me – feels that would line up with my theory of experimental eating without heating or preparation or the training most people get about what constitutes food or how to eat it. But I’ve found a more subtle piece too – there’s more than one way I get myself to eat, and I think more than one person who does it. I’ve been thinking about the feeding the toddler, but the toddler can be motivated with the usual sorts of stories, but won’t eat things that they know are dangerous.

There’s someone older in there too, someone who I can tell a more subtle story to when I’m tricking them into eating something fearful. It’s okay to eat this cheese even though there are slimy sulfer bits in it – that’s the onion and its expected and you like, at least when can distinguish it from rot. This person can eat lots of things, if and only if I can explain to them exactly what creates each flavor and texture and how those attributes are different than the dangers I remember from last time.

PIC sometimes does eating, but they only tool they have is guile. PIC is in charge of choking down girty, dirt-filled worms when we’re starving and of swallowing food in the morning when the day requires it. They’re the smart one telling us drown it in soy sauce so that it can be consumed even though it’s not really palatable, or at least as a way to get 40 calories of condiments. All of which are useful skills if you’re a starving slave but they’re particularly bad ways of eating, even by my standards.

There are probably others too. I don’t quite understand my behavior about indecisively picking the least good but still acceptable food. I vaguely understand the thinking process – it’s supposed to protect me against future food insecurity – but I don’t quite understand what puts me there as opposed to the other modes, or why that mode of thinking is so slow compared to others. There’s amnesia related to my nighttime eating so dissociative time dilation could be a factor, but I don’t have a clear picture yet.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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