I’ve started reading If I Was Your Girl (Meredith Russo) on M’s recommendation1I will read or watch basically anything you guys recommend. And then talk about it; I like to talk about media we share. I built a whole theater about it that idea, and shared all my media digital media to make it easier to do remotely.. I’m five chapters in; it seems to be about survival and fear and abandonment and isolation and the abuses rendered upon us by the hierarchies of illegitimate systems if power. Which is sort of my thing. I also like that there’s a character named B in it, because that’s what I call…

I got a new laptop at work. Took the smallest one they offer – 13″ MacBook Pro. It’s only slightly larger than my 11″ at home, but it’s so much heavier. I don’t know how anyone puts up with a machine you have to hold with both hands or set on a surface, and that you have to use plugged to a custom power adapter most of the time. I feel like you are all living in the past. My 11″ charges on USB1This 13” has USB-C power (so no custom adapter) but can’t be convinced to charge at 5V unless it’s powered off. It does *run* off of 5V…

I’ve talked a good deal about secrets and some about how the need for them limits options for expression. But I gave an example yesterday that surprised Shanda, which suggests I haven’t made the context clear. So here’s an example of how I had to keep all things secret at all times. When I was 12 – around the time Mother identified my dislike for being mistreated1She understands this as me “changing” and “not loving her”, though in a broader perspective she should link those events to me being 4 not 12 because that’s when she actually start to feel separate from me. Realistically it coincides with my ability to…

Here’s a thing I’ve heard from more than one of you: “I’m not sure if my feelings are ‘normal’”. I’ve seen it at times too; maybe more than I realize because I’m not very sensitive to it. The context is something along the lines of feeling anxious or sad or hurt and thinking maybe that feeling isn’t “right”, that maybe it’s one you aren’t allowed to have because it’s “bad”, or that it isn’t “safe”, or that isn’t “real” because you have anxiety in general, or that isn’t something you should react to because it’s not fair to other people, or won’t help you, or isn’t logical. I’ve been trying…

My anxiety is high today, as I leave Cleveland. I’m ready to be home, but sad to go for a bunch of reasons. And the travel and waiting and transitions and worry are making me downright twitchy. It’s easy for me to feel like my anxiety is about work but that’s not really true, or at least only half true. That’s just the thing with deadlines. The thing the world tells me that I must “succeed” at to deserve to live or take care of the people I love. The thing it’s easy to dump all of my other worry onto. I am slightly worried about work. There are a…

Emergency vet trip today, to deal with a guinea pig injury. It’s the weekend and an “exotic” animal so we had to go to Akron to be seen. Pig got hurt while being retrieved from an under-couch escape, possibly from a falling rear-channel speaker (though it’s hard to say precisely what the cause was). It’s not life threatening but it’s at least bad enough to need treatment. And there’s lots of waiting alone on a hard bench on a day when I did not get nearly enough speed. Plus it’s really starting to snow, which is very uncomfortable fro me when I’m away from home and without survival resources. Were…

Had another therapy session today. Felt better able to direct the discussion. But not really better understood. Initially I thought it was going better because I wasn’t so defensively positioned, but I still felt like they weren’t talking to me personally. Whether they weren’t hearing me, didn’t believe me, or simply was making inaccurate assumptions it continued to be an exercise wherein I could not get them to see where I was and adapt their technique to my needs. It’s very easy for me to think “eventually this will get better” and just keep putting up with it. And eventually it might get better, though Shanda tells me it’s been…

Worked a bit today. More than yesterday but less than is necessary to finish the things that people want done this week. I think I’m gonna split the difference and get one of the two big ones done, and punt on the SR I’m still holding. I was thinking today about how I was “not further behind than yesterday” and about the endless demand for higher productivity (without higher pay) that is demanded of us from capitalism. I think my goal should actually be slightly lower. I /should/ be slightly further behind today than yesterday, and more tomorrow. I should punt more and more things to keep my workload constant…

Here’s a thing some of you know but I wanted to state explicitly for everyone – you are welcome to share anything I tell you. Obviously some discretion is probably useful for both of us, but don’t ever feel like I’m burdening you with secrets. I well know the cost of secrets – they almost killed me when I was young, and kept me alone for years after. I have studied secrets both first hand and academically. I literally have a grad degree in secrets, their uses, and their costs*. And I am not in the business of creating them. That comes in part as an attempt to reassure you…

DerbyK suggested – in comment on the dissonance between my social skills and my understanding of their impact from the last The Screed – that I am sometime invisible not because of my own behavior but because of blind spots in others, or the inherently unpredictable nature of human emotion. That’s true if course, and in part was what I was trying to communicate – that success in any social engineering is statistical and it’s not reasonable expect each individual attempt to meet all of my hopes. That my perception of success should take into account that I hardly know what I want, let alone how to get a specific…