Christmas Day
Talked with DerbyK for a couple of hours in the morning. After not nearly enough sleep; I still haven’t gotten to any sort of reliable schedule, and the travel and time zones aren’t helping. But it was great to chat. I can’t figure out how to do a rule-of-three meta-analysis of our talk and I don’t know what else to say about it, but I suspect you will pick out some of their contributions in the rest of this, and I want to thank you for them. I also wanted to thank you for your homework assignment, though I did utterly fail to complete it today, despite taking more than 250 other pictures.
Got an unprompted message from V today, I think the start of their own The Screed. I’m really excited that you’re giving that a try, and that you’ve found a format that you think might help you share more easily. I very much like doing mine and I hope yours is equally rewarding. I certainly like getting it, and I intend not only to read them but to actually respond, both here and there. Which is an area where my own The Screed doesn’t always get much traction. I can sometimes infer that I’ve had an impact based on some future behavior, but it sure would be nice to know the intermediate steps and not just hope for months that what I’m doing is useful instead of damaging. I don’t mean to complain, because I do get tacos and DerbyK pokes me all the time (and I sort of require Shanda react to The Screed all the time), but I feel like I’m at pretty high levels of prompting here and that a little more audience participation would make the thing more useful to everyone.
Lots of prep work today, for M’s first Christmas*. Lots of pressure to make it “right” in the hopes of recovering from lots of less-than-positive past experiences. For me that recovery feels like it’s more about grieving than achieving, but they’re probably both important. It’s hard for me to see how doing it right would help — I know in the general case that no amount of mechanically doing the parts ever makes a thing right. But of course I don’t understand how the parts work in the first place so how could I guess what they’re supposed to do?
Lots of cooking and cleaning and a huge accumulation of wrapping things — activities we’ve been doing all week in bits and spurts but they were the main goal today. And mostly group activities, which is always nice, particularly since I don’t have friends or out-of-the-house hobbies here in Cleveland. Changing that is on my list but it’s hard to push to the top; my residency will be short-lived so it’s easy to feel like it’s not important. So in the mean time I’m sort of a social mooch.
Had a 4.7 million people over at night, which is unavoidably stressful, but I think it turned out great. People had food and presents and games and chatting until late, and it all seemed a good time, even as someone who wasn’t really part of the group. There was even dressing up, after a day in pajamas, which I know is a Christmas thing but I’ve only ever experienced as a punishment. M had a real cute red top and green skirt and eventually made Eggsy change into their best sweatshirt. I pulled out my new deep green shirt** and once I remembered I had them even put in my red party eyes***.
Everyone had individual present time, which has traditionally be a source of great stress for me. There were an endless supply of rules and of course no hope of sufficient compliance, just like so many other things. And gifts with a narc are just a nightmare in the first place — it’s either literally for them or it’s about how they want you to serve them or it’s just random trash because they can’t be bothered to imagine you as a person. Not to mention the impossibility of getting them a gift that doesn’t make them angry. But this one was fine. People were happy to participate in each other’s presents with genuine joy and easy patience. And there were lots of thoughtful gifts that people actually liked and wanted to share with the group.
I haven’t seen much of A while I’ve been here — haven’t made any effort because I’ve been so busy myself — but he was here last night despite being clearly quite ill. He laid on the floor under a blanket and slept intermittently despite the chaos around him. It was super adorbs, if perhaps a public health hazard.
M got me some great presents [fig 1]. You suggested a couple of weeks ago that I might like eye makeup — I definitely would. It’s a thing I’ve been interested in but like so many other things simply didn’t imagine as being part of my own life even though I enjoy it in other people. In part that’s my general inability to have personal preferences, but in part that’s a whole thing with Mother and my face. She always had a thing about my face and how it was A) like everything else, hers and not mine and B) never good enough. For example, while I never had access to medical care even for serious injuries I was required to see a dermatologist on a fairly regularly basis starting in middle school. Mother treated me for acne (which never really bothered me) with drugs that cause depression and made me hand peel, forced me to have some sort of defect so minor I literally don’t remember it burned off my face, etc. So it’s extra hard for me to imagine that my face is a place I might express myself, even after choosing to say something. And saying this I now suspect it ties into the idea that making my face blank is a way to protect myself, like when I feel out-of-control when I can’t completely override the natural waggles of my eyebrows. In any case I’m really excited to have bits to do it with, and more excited still to have M spend some time on me to help me figure out what the shit I’m doing now that I have the bits.
I’m feeling slightly weird about my interaction in giving Christmas presents this year. I give lots of presents and generally feel pretty good about it. Like greeting cards it’s a thing I’ve studied carefully and I think I’m pretty good at. I’m also an excellent spy and empath and can piece together things you want that you haven’t even talked about yet. But I don’t understand how it fits into the holiday parts. I feel like there are rules I should be following that I don’t know; logically I realize this isn’t strictly true but it’s the general feeling I have about not knowing how social traditions are anything other than harmful. There are rules, but they aren’t rules in the formal way I imagine rules. And even if I do it differently my non-compliance isn’t a problem for people, generally speaking. But I feel like I should have like, saved up my gift-giving impulses for a calendar day or something — people have suggested to me that this is a thing, and I don’t understand how to navigate it at all. It doesn’t help that over the past month I’ve done and purchased like 42,854 things for the people in my daily life, which makes me feel like I am incapable of choosing thoughtful gifts (even though it could be evidence that I’m good at it).
I’m not exactly sure what my disconnect is here. In part it’s just all my old Christmas feels leaking out. I should write about them sometime, or at least talk in detail with Shanda or someone, to help grieve all the Christmas-day punishments. In part it’s the recognition that’s inherent in gift giving — I tell Shanda not to get me things at all because it’s really high stress for me to get gifts. Maybe it’s just the first time I actually got something I liked and wanted that I will use and wouldn’t have been able to easily provide for myself. Which is always my own goal in choosing gifts — to remove barriers and help people do what they want — but like many other human activities is a thing I’m not quite prepared to have for myself.
I’m told that existence of time after the Christmas event will produce a change of tone in the household, and a reduction in stress. I’m not convinced that’s true, but I’d love to be wrong, because in spite of many great bits there are still parts that push me toward my abandonment whirlpool. But I have had some new thoughts on why it’s hard for me and how to talk about it — about why I feel like I can’t keep all the good bits and the hard bits in the same box. And I hope I can use that to find all the pieces I need and get them into the same place.
ZiB*Mine too, despite my decades of opportunities to do otherwise. Not that I haven’t ever done any activities that people associate with Christmas, but I’ve only ever done it in the framework of participating in the portions I find acceptable for the benefit of others, or maybe slotting things I want to do anyway into other people’s holiday activities. I was planning to give it a shot next year, but I’m glad to be part of M’s this year.
**A few months ago I asked Shanda to help me manage my clothing inventory, since it’s very hard for me to evaluate it on any basis other than armor. It took a while to get going but I think it’s finally starting to work like I hoped. She bought me 5 new shirts in tones of purple and green and they’re all great. They’re also the softest clothes I’ve owned in a very long time — if I had to guess I’d say since my dark red Arizona sweatshirt in high school (which Brenda kept). They’re not even super soft, they’re just not rough like literally everything else I own†. Soft and armor don’t go together so it just hasn’t been a thing in my life, even though I can see that other people like it. There are so many things I promote for other people that I have learned to deny myself so completely that I don’t even /want/ them — I’m not denying softness to myself I’m denying my freedom to care about it in the first place. Which is sad and infuriating, but a thing I’m happy to be able to grieve now, and start to recover from.
†Note to my equipment manager: I feel like soft should maybe be one of the options in my clothes. But you’ll have to hold my hand a little about how it’s okay to have thin, soft materials even if they sometimes get worn out or snagged, because currently I feel like I have to keep clothes until I die and it’s hard for me to appreciate things I don’t think will last literally forever.
***And late at night a white party eye, which is always great for freaking people out a little.
