Laundry Lists
Cassie is here today, and through the weekend. Such things are always stressful for Shanda. I think you’re doing okay with it, in relative terms, but it’s still a lot, and you were already at a lot. Be sure you keep working on things that will help you actually cope, and not just things that will distract you without helping you find calm.
Day job went better Wednesday. Got through half my SRs, killed a new one same day, finished all my deadline work, helped with some out of band process, started the tracking framework that I need for the last few SRs. Did less good on Thursday but we’re still pushing toward a future with no December tickets.
I tired safety as this week’s topic. Meh. My therapist seemed to at least hear how this wasn’t the issue, and wasn’t as afraid to talk about it as before. But also couldn’t quite refocus on my question, to bring our understanding closer. I think I moved them toward the idea that the somatic seperation they predict isn’t true, which might be useful. They tried to framework my fear of housing instability 1because they still don’t understand the way I evaluate risk but as you might expect that didn’t go anywhere. They did drop it faster than they did similar interactions in the past.
There was also an unwise bit about food, but that’s to be expected – therapists like to imagine that they can prevent or mask disgust reactions, but my experience is that they can’t, not well enough for my actual life. Particularly not for things I’ve carefully studied and found myself on the outside of culture or even humanity. I still need to feel safer about it before they can do anything except make me feel worse, because it’s very likely they’ll have a reaction that will ask me to not share. It’s normal, but it sure makes getting help tricky.
Shanda is in the middle of feels about mixed feels. Which is good to work on, but also makes all the coping we’ve had for the mixed feels in ouf daily life is much less ineffective. We will get better tools, presumably, in the not to distant future. But right now it can be pretty intense. It’s can be real easy to point at me and assign the resentment and frustration and all the other bits of grief to me. It can be easy to stare past yourself and imagine you don’t have the “bad” part of your mixed feels at all, which leads to ignoring pain and anger and anxiety. Between that and Cassie and the robots competition and Dog’s injury it’s going to be a long weekend.
Talked with @Yana today, about mixed feels and old art. She is posting the pieces she still has from the past to a second IG account 2not the original plan for that account, but I think a great choice. They’ve got mixed feels about the art they made and the art they had to give up (or lost) while they were homeless and struggling with mental health and trying to keep their scholarship and fight with their school. It’s a story I’m sympathetic too. I wonder if I can smell it in her paintings – I picked her design as my first and still favorite colorful pants, months before I ever talked to her.
Did HA4H today. Had a video setup I was mostly happy with, though also a lot of interruptions as people were in and out of my house. I didn’t do anything very hands-y, but I did get lots of good coding work done for the pendant, and a solid v2 of the prototype. Watched @BPS do setup for a new show they’re in. A first public display of their book-to-video mapping AI, and some of their other AI-related work like the recursive makeup application pieces from a couple of years ago. Watched @VI play with Thinking Putty for an hour. Thought about getting out clay or paint but stuck to the keyboard. It was good to imagine again that I can use math to trick a computer into fleshing out my art. I used to do it a lot but it’s been a while. Next week though, maybe I’ll try a craft toddler me never accomplished – gluing together popsicle sticks. But old me owns an industrial hot glue gun an a whole pack of rainbow dyed popsicle sticks, so he might be able to pull it off.
Told my therapist the story about murder-suicide experiments where Mother smothered me with a pillow and asked me not to fight back 3She was trying both to get rid of me, and trying I think to see if she could smother herself. I’ll share a more narrative story later.. It’s been the first item on my memory cues since week 2, but LI/EMDR doesn’t require you to actually share the story, just a prompt to help you remember. She had some trouble envisioning the situation but I think got there eventually. I told they story to help them understand why I wasn’t suicidal when I was young – I didn’t think I could make it happen.
Mother taught me that I couldn’t simply will myself to die. Even with practice, even with dissociation, eventually your spinal column decides that breathing is a priority and you cannot deny it. Which was a huge disappointment for Mother – the fact that I wouldn’t die quietly. I hope that stories like these push my therapist into giving up on some of the “tell me about exceptions” bullshit she wants to peddle. I think sometimes it works. I wish there was a less painful tool to manage my therapy.
Watched another couple Killjoys. I forgot they put Dutch in purple so much of the first season. They all had their color coding for a while – not to the point of exclusion, but definitely a theme. It’s probably one of the reasons I liked the show. I definitely did notice all the choices they made about color, for the worlds and the peoples, but I was much less prepared to engage on color last time around.
Boring technical note: I’m going to segregate 1900s TV from more modern bits. It will all still be in Plex, and your watch state will be preserved, but old stuff will soon live in a new section. It should help with the churn in the TV section, and the query speed, and maybe fix our regularly failed scans.
ZiB
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Sent from a phone.
Stars for Later