Fluffy Boy
We are again at the stage in my life where eczema makes my fingerprints disappear, and I cannot use devices that require them. It’s better now with swiped infrared sensors – they are much more sensitive to live tissue – but it still is a 1/10 success rate. This is better than the life stage where I can not operate capacitive touch devices (like phones or other stiff surface touch screens), but it’s still not great.
Dog had lots of appointments yesterday but didn’t get an MRI. They didn’t have an appropriate radiologist on staff this week due to the global death, so we have to go back again next week for that. They’re pretty sure though that he has a neurological problem, given his current symptoms, and suspect it might be some form of nerve sheath tumor. Since it’s a nerve issue he can have a different med though, which I hope will help. He’s back to being pretty lethargic again today and while it’s nice that he’s not barking it’s sad that he can’t get around the house.
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And then I waited 5 days while Shanda held her breath about Dog (and probably other things) and focused on trying to keep the household going. We did drugs and sex and crying and art about it, which mostly worked. It was a rough week though.
Dog definitely does have cancer. He’s already 13 so that’s not super unexpected, but it’s still sad. He’s got some sort of carcinoma impairing the nerve root at his right shoulder, making him lame in that leg. He will likely have decreasing function and increasing pain for the rest of his life. There’s some palliative care for the pain, and maybe even to shrink the tumor for a while, but it’s unlikey to get better in any meaningful way.
On the bright side it means we don’t have to baby him about soft tissue injury. Her probably need help learning to not hurt himself when jumping or doing other unwise dog things, but running around won’t make his cancer worse. Maybe we can even get him back on his Wednesday night walks, which he hasn’t done in forever. He still anticipates them – he can detect the schedule and gets very excited – but it’s been a long while since he had one. Probably not this week Dog, but maybe next.
I’m afraid that Shanda will be too scared to help me when it’s time for Dog to go. That I’ll be pushed away at the time and assigned resentment afterward. I know it will be hard Shanda, but I really hope you can do it with me, instead of being alone while you feel like I am forcing you to do something. Instead of treating me like a parent you hate. I really hope when the time comes you’ll put me down instead of letting me suffer while you’re too afraid to be engaged with me.
Other things, probably. I wrote a super cynical but also sincere letter to my team at work about how we shouldn’t worry about mgmt reporting beyond what they tell us they want to hear. My boyscout boss imagines if only we can get all our TPS reports into the right format mgmt will care about us. That seems… unlikely to me. So I presented some scenarios about how all the different ways we could do reports, and how they would all result in mgmt asking for us to do 10% more next quarter.
I am poking @BPS about an art heist. They engaged but haven’t committed yet. So I followed up with some location scouting, which again got their intention. They are super stressed about work right now, to the point of scheduled distraction, which makes doing arts with feels hard. This week I’m going to throw out some ideas for production that might disrupt their thinking.
I think it’s likely that taking a minute to let that super-focus fade and feel the pain that it’s keeping away would help. But in my experience people are unwilling to try, even if you can get them to listen. Life seems so overwhelming that the only option is to keep pushing, because if you let yourself stop for one second you might never recover. I have faith though, both that you’ll recover and that you can handle the pain and stress you’ve had to ignore. I can’t make you believe it’s safe to take a break, to let yourself be still and feel the feels, feel your body, feel your relentless push, but I can be there while it happens. I can reassure your overwrought brain that even if things aren’t perfect you will be able to continue again after you breathe.
Last week HA4H was going to be more guillotine modeling, but we ended up all doing face arts. I got to use the new pallette M got me, and tried magnetic-liner lashes. The palletes were great. I really liked the lightly-toned white shimmers, even if I use them like clown makeup, and the purple one was full of good colors. I didn’t do anything fancy but did do this [fig 1] while @BPS worked on their derby warpaint [fig 2].
The magnetic lashes were less good. They are nice in that you can take them on and off more than once, but otherwise they aren’t better for me than glue. The liner takes forever to set (it glued my eyelid open even after lots of waiting), requires a thick line, only comes in ferro-fluid black, and is less forgiving than glue because it’s so dark.
I feel like this [fig 3] is a) quarantine food b) a sci-fi prop c) product placement all at once. Also I got a vacuum sealer, which is as much fun as I hoped. I crushed (the remnants of) a bag of corn chips right away, which was very satisfying. Later we sealed up some brownies before shipping them for delivery on 04-20, and basically anything else I had lying around. Would recommend.
Delivered a global death/housewarming care package in person last week. Like everything else in that period it caused Shanda some stress even to consider, but I feel like it went well. After you heard a story about how it might work, about how having your name on L’s home might be good for you, about how delivery in person would let us include a helium balloon, about how it might lets L get to go through the box first and by herself, in case there’s anything they want to keep seperate from mother.
I thought it was great to see L peek out, even if they weren’t up to acknowledging us. I’m pretty good at insisting that I can feel love even against silence and hiding. I can imagine it is there even when I’m not allowed to see it. I wouldn’t recommend the particular training I did to get that skill, but you can share in this good version. We can use that feel to try to help someone who is scared and alone and unable to trust us enough to admit being seen. But we can still do the seeing, and try share the joy it gives us to see them, even when they can’t risk seeing themselves.
Tomorrow my therapist is going to spend too long trying to talk about Dog and take forever to get to the fear I actually have – that even if I was fluffy and liked touches and didn’t trigger childhood flashbacks it would still be too much to expect you to care for me as my health declines. That it would be too much to expose you to my pain because you would conflate it with your own and resent me for giving it to you. That I must finish my childhood training and learn to actually be independent, so I can avoid leaking my life on to everyone else. Maybe I’ll cook up a plan to get us there sooner, so I don’t get so frustrated waiting, or so disheartened by their relief at finding a pamphlet.
Maybe I’ll just keep it to myself and present a different story with the same feels, so they don’t get distracted. One thing I learned while being real high this weekend is that I’m readily hurt by the way people are afraid of me. Fear, disgust or frustration were what I could expect from Mother, but it’s not just the way Mother told me I was scary, or the ways people could smell the danger of my past life. It’s not just a perception I invent from nothing, or a flashback when my hypersensitive brain worries about an old pattern. It still happens to me, if I’m not careful to hide myself, and it fucking kills me.
Sometimes it happens because you’re triggered and your brain turns me into your parents – anxious and neglectful authorities. Sometimes it happens because I can’t keep my mouth shut about your “political” ideas that involve murdering poor people. Sometimes it happens because my daily, intentional life conflicts with people’s dogma about how the world ought to work. Sometimes it happens because I trigger you to see yourself. But mostly it happens when you are seen, when I can smell your feels, when I pay attention and refuse to pretend not to know.
It happens with strangers all the time, which is stressful enough. But when it happens with the people I love it’s hard to ignore. I can imagine that the fear isn’t meant for me, that the disgust is about something old that I merely triggered, but it’s hard to ignore when the people I am closest to are afraid of me, of my ideas, of my perception.
So maybe I can talk about that, and circle around to Dog once the topic is established. As I said above Dog’s situation makes me afraid that I will never be able to depend on care. That I already need too much and can’t expect even this to continue, let alone to have more in the futute as my body and mind continue to give out. I expect to be able to grieve about Dog. I have grieved many parts of my life without the help of benefit of forewarning. But I have no confidence that I will ever be able to stop hurting people for long enough to have real help with anything.
ZiB
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Sent from a phone.
