Invisible Non-Food

I was staring at my food cupboard today, lamenting the fact that I’ve done too little food management this week, I realized that I am hoarding some childhood survival foods. Specifically things I knew I could leave in the cupboard forever that no one else would eat, and that had years long shelf life if possible. And so I have a love-hate-avoidance relationship with these things ¹One of those things is a can of corn. I got rid of all the other canned plants but not the corn. Too valuable as food. I knew it was in some way better than fresh corn but could never figure out why. It’s the value as emergency food. Mother would never eat it, but I could feed it to the kids. But now I’m allowed to have more recently killed … Continue reading. When I ate them they felt like survival safety and nothing tastes better than knowing you won’t stave to death. But also they’re terrible foods that I don’t like. And I spent most of my childhood willfully ignoring them in the cupboard (other than to manage an excess of any one kind, to avoid detection).

So I can see that the cupboard is full and therefore I am safe from hunger I can’t actually eat any of the food because it’s all emergency supplies ²In lots of categories. Like shoes and clothes and even sort of furniture (I don’t have too much furniture but I imagining having good and bad pieces instead of only pieces that I like). It happens with anything that’s important to me. I hoarded soda cans as emergency currency (via recycling) for years. At work even, so it would be safe from … Continue reading. But I can’t see anything that I actually want to eat, because it’s either terrible (but still comforting) or unusable (because it’s only for emergencies) and there sort or isn’t anything even in the full cupboard. I even imagine the spots where formless “good” food goes – the spot where I store actual food when I have some. I accumulated so much non-food because no one ever forces me to eat it. Thank fucking Yaweh. So today I threw out a bunch of stuff ³On a related note, you should do this to your kitchen M. I guarantee I used my weird food hiding skills to populate your kitchen with emergency bad food. It’s intentionally easy to not notice and never looks like it’s gone off even if it has. Probably canned stuff. Maybe something in the freezer. Dried things. Plus all the stuff you got used … Continue reading. In retrospect I had stated doing for the fridge already but now I can be better about it. At least better at doing something when I notice instead of just feeling bad about it.

My book ⁴I finished The Fifth Season, and am on to book 2 of 3: The Obelisk Gate. I was going to interrupt to catch up on Rainforest Mind and Queer Art and Harry Poooter (which I did start and like so far), but I continue to love this series so much. The overarching metaphor is really valuable, at least to me, and so carefully crafted. The next book pulls … Continue reading has been talking about how hard it is to manage resources in a crisis. About how you need different resources if you expect crisis. And I’ve been trying to stay out of my own. It would help to not have a bunch of shitty food in my cupboard.

Got my urgent bug committed and dispositioned. Not sure I’m gonna get to my last SR before travel. Might get to the backport bug. I’m at least going to try because it would make my life easier in the future.

@RiffTrax has an always-on Twitch channel. I have feels about it but I’m not sure what they are yet. I think some of it is the way they often use “bad” movies to call out the damaging stories we tell. Whatever the cause it feels good to know that I can always have a robot complain at me about insensible media. And @JCVIM has a better shot of her hair up [fig 1].

I got a box full of this today [fig 2]. It’s full of colorful supplies and tools, unstable chemicals, and candy. I love it all. I’m slightly panicked about getting things I like – if Mother sees she’ll hurt me about it later. Worried that I’ll from a collection of things that I consider too good for me to use. Concerned about having my things take up space in the house. But really excited to have them. It’s the first care package I’ve ever had ⁵There was a box from Mother when she first stated sending things to Alex. It contained a dirty glass pan, leftover Easter candy flavors that she didn’t like, and a letter that complained that I didn’t handle Alex’s financial aid paperwork because when I did it for myself she didn’t have to pay anything, so I must have been selfish by not … Continue reading.

I also got these new eyes [fig 3] in the box. I watched @Felcia Day play with makeup in Fallout 76 for about 45 minutes and decided I wanted to do some for myself. Which was also good excuse to pop in the eyes. I really like the colored eyes. Other than the full-cover ones they’re fairly subtle from a distance but they can be really dramatic close up. And they don’t have to match; facial asymmetry feels transgressive to me and I like doing it. The new eyes are also phosphorescent — they glow [fig 4] in the light [fig 5] when exposed to UV.

M is having a rough night, lacking the protections society usually offers and being asked to protect herself individually. No small source of stress; I’m sorry you have to deal with it. I hope all settles out before long, and doesn’t ratchet up your ongoing stress level too badly after it’s done. You’ve been quiet for a while and it’s real late there so I’m trying to assume things are quieter and not still getting worse. Be sure you talk about it with someone afterward, so you don’t get stuck alone with all that fear and trauma. I know you can handle it yourself, but you don’t have to. You’ve done a good job about it already, I’m just encouraging you to keep it up. And to have as much hug as we can muster over the Internet.

It finally became plausible to me tonight, the idea that I might have different clothes for different situations. That I could have enough clothes to not need 100% of them to be versatile and rugged and invisible. That I didn’t always need to be ready to deal with all temperatures or situations without changing. There are lots of bits that make clothes hard for me. General deprivation, enough instability that I needed to be always prepared for anything, homelessness, sexual harassment from Mother when I had pajamas. But today I imagined that I might have a state between prepared to sleep outside and naked — that I might wear different clothes at home than I had during the day, and that I might not be prepared to flee on no notice with only what I’m wearing. It even occurred to me that I might use socks or slippers to keep my feet warm; to date I have only used them to protect other people from my feet (socks), or to keep my feet slightly safer or cleaner when walking short distances outside. So that feels like a thing that might offer more freedom.

I was walking Dog today and realized I sometimes feel like I’m asking too much of him by requiring him to acknowledge me. I can often convince him to do things if he will just look at my eyebrows for a minute. If he can be convinced to stare at me for 4 seconds and maybe hear my tone of voice we often can come to an agreement. But I also feel like he’s entitled to ignore me, and that I shouldn’t try hard to get his attention if he isn’t offering it. This is silly of course; there are all sorts of times when Dog would be happier if he paid more attention to me. But I’m so afraid to be narcissistic by asking him to consider my opinion on something.

The same thing happens to us. My usual touch is so light that sometimes it feels like a demand on you when I ask you to have an opinion about your own life. You’re so used to neglect and so anxious that me caring what you want and noticing how you feel seems like oppression. It feels like pressure to know something or have an answer or hurry to reply or just invasive about a thing you don’t have settled feelings about. Invasive that I care about your feelings at all, or can see them when you want to hide. It’s easy for me to agree with that; to feel that I am asking too much by wanting to hear your opinion. By noticing all your reactions and reading feelings into them.

Here’s a thing I know though, that maybe your brain doesn’t believe. I’ve seen lots of your feelings. The ones you like and the ones you don’t. And I think all of them are okay. I think they’re fine when they’re big or small, angry or happy, “good” or “bad”, anxious or calm, sad or content. They’re all fine. They’re just the right size to fit you and your situation. You’re right to have them and I want to share them with you. Not to complain that your feelings are wrong or hurtful, or that you haven’t analyzed them correctly, or that you aren’t moving past them fast enough, not to quiz your or chastise you or force you to change. Just to be human at you — with you — as you live the human moments of your life. I want to share the happy parts because I want to get a piece of your joy. But I want to share the hard parts too, to keep you from being alone in them, to help you feel okay in them, to let you find the space to figure them out and support you as you decide where to point next. You’re sometimes afraid of the feelings themselves and somehow getting them wrong, but I’m just asking you “How do you feel” like you’re reconstituted Spock. It’s not a threat to your identity, it’s an offer to help you find it.

I think a similar feeling is part of why sharing can seem impossible. You’re worried that what you find to say to other people won’t be right. Won’t be good enough, engaging enough, normal enough, caring enough. Or alternatively that it’s too much. That the last thing didn’t “work” and that this next one still won’t be good enough to do what you want. That if the other person ever responds it will be with some sort of annoyance or resignation. And you’re afraid of sitting with that feeling for the (possibly long) time before you get a reply. Plus all the time you spend thinking poorly of yourself while analyzing the reply (or anxiously avoiding it), planning for something to be terribly wrong. I’m pretty sure though — the operating theory of this document is — that you can just keep working at it until it takes. That sharing isn’t bad for you, isn’t dangerous to try, and isn’t poorly received by the people you do it with. That you can do it even though it seems hard. That you want to do it because you like what happens when it works, and it can’t work if you don’t do it.

Therapy this week skipped the LI process to do more discussion of current life. I felt fairly in control about that choice but I’m not sure if I liked the session as much. It certainly didn’t feel like I got as much out of it. I already spend all week worrying about what I’ve done and what I could do differently and how realistic my fears and what things might reduce my distress in tense situations. The problem is that I don’t have good ideas about how to make it better, and I didn’t feel like my therapist was offering much, or helping me find new insights. It wasn’t bad like other therapy has been bad but I didn’t come away with anything I felt like was new. Maybe stress this week was too high to hope for anything else.

Or maybe I just don’t need someone to remind me that it’s still not safe for me to merely let other people’s avoidance skate off me. That my life is sometimes complicated by realistically, legitimately scary things that also happens to push my trauma buttons. That staying disengaged requires that I permanently add space to my relationship, because no amount of time or space will make the other person willing to think about the topic, even when it directly affects me. And so I have repeating conflicts about “making” someone do a thing they claim to want to do, or that I /need/ them to do, all while feeling bad about how selfish I’m being for bothering you. I know how it works. I know how to be patient about it. I’d like a way to make it better, so I didn’t always have to be so patient. So you didn’t always have to feel so coerced and separate. But that was not a bit of insight available in the session.

I did get one useful piece of reaction to the claim I make about picking people who I think I can be useful to, because being useful is one of the few ways I can feel good about myself. A reaction that helped me feel like it’s not uncommon to expect support instead of just giving it. That it’s okay to associate with people who can offer support and not worry that I’ll break them just by being present in their lives. I assigned myself the homework of calling DerbyK for real-time voice comms like it’s the 1900s. Because you’re a person I can actually get support from, and I should try a little harder to make that happen consistently. I probably would have done that anyway, but it’s still useful to name it out loud as a goal, to make it harder to put off yet again.

I thought some today about the way I feel like a revolting person. In part it’s because I know I would do revolting things — both symbolically/instinctually revoking things like touching or eating or watching unpleasant things and morally revolting things like hurting people — in order to survive. Because I have done such things and they make me feel revolting. I know that other people would do these things too, given similar circumstances. Probably even in lesser circumstances. But other people don’t actually do it. No one ever tested them and they have the comfort of believing they wouldn’t. This is a standard I’d never hold anyone else to: Justify your survival decision. A good person would have just given up and died instead of doing what you did. A good person would never have hurt anyone else no matter how bad their life was, no matter how much it cost them. A good person would never have let themselves be in this situation in the first place. It’s part of the same zero-tolerance for narcissism policy I have for all parts of myself. Like all zero-tolerance plans a ridiculous and counterproductive plan but my brain is pretty committed to it — the idea that my trauma is itself proof that I am not deserving of protection or respect or care.

Talked to V today for a few minutes and got lots of new information. Things that help me believe that you’re feeling more in control. You shared plans that made me feel like you weren’t so trapped in a path you felt like wasn’t working. It seemed like you felt more empowered to make changes and to deviate from expectations and to figure out what you needed. All of which makes me really happy for you. I hope you also feel like things are edging toward better. And I hope you feel like you can share some of those things with other people who care about you.

Talked to E about some plans that don’t require a membership. We’re gonna try for an outdoor activity next Thursday. We don’t quite have the freedom of movement in the city here that is guaranteed to all Scandawhovians, but I suspect no one will tell us about why they are required to oppress young people and why E can’t be present. And if they do I’m going to actually explode.

S talked like a real human today, which was pleasant. I’m starting to feel like my life might be okay again, but I’m plenty tired from all the stress this week, and it’s hard for me to still be “on”. So it was nice that they didn’t require any handling or active separation. Nothing much about me directly so nothing I want to document here, but a better interaction than many we had, and a comforting way to end a tough week. Particularly on a night when Shanda is away.

ZiB

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