Reliable Power

The power went out today for a couple of hours. That’s pretty uncommon here both because I’m in the city ¹Power outages are just a fact of life if you live in the middle of nowhere. Particularly before modern reconnectors, when an outage meant someone had to physically find and replace a blown fuse. and because the weather rarely presents challenges to power delivery. But it made me miss the big UPS I had at the last place. I gave it up ²I do have plans for battery protection, just not with a giant central UPS. I have a small backup for Shanda’s desk – what good is a desk on wheels without a battery – but none of the network or AV equipment or lighting or appliances have backups yet. when I moved, which was a good choice, but the outage triggered old feels about having to give up things I needed for survival. About being hurt when I choose wrong, and having to adjust to a life that now included a pain I had been protected from. About knowing that my misjudgment would take a long time to recover from, if I ever could.

I have actually done a decent job not hoarding things for survival reasons, given my past. I have convinced myself that I can obtain most things again if I decide I need them, and once I can do that it’s easy for my smart and survival brain to agree that we don’t need to keep a thing.

For a long time I held onto the physical things I would need to be homeless. This is one of the reasons it’s hard for me to own outdoor gear these days – it feels a lot like being ready to live rough, and I don’t want to be ready for that anymore. I held on to all sorts maladaptive mental things too, like an active indifference toward temperature regulation or the ability to rest even in dangerous situations.

I realized today that I’m still holding on to the idea that I would fight my way back from nothing again. That if I lost my housing and credentials and connections and credit I would start over and build a life again. But I’m not sure I want that. I think maybe my life would be better if I didn’t believe that I would start over. If I didn’t keep myself ready to live a life where I can. There is a lot of pain I could endure, knowing that I don’t have to recover from it. There is a lot of freedom in deciding that you don’t have to. Maybe deciding that losing everything again would be fatal – deciding that I’d rather not recover – would give me the option to live a life I like more.

This isn’t suicidality. Or at least not more than my usual level. In my current life there are lots of options between here and the bottom; most threats to my survival have been carefully restrained so that I don’t have to face them regularly. I’m not worried about losing my job or my housing or my ability to reconstruct them, at least not until those problems have been brewing for many months.

But the threats do still exist – many of them are enforced by state violence – and I still don’t know a way to feel safe with them in my life. So maybe I can run this the other way around. Maybe I can decide that I will let those threats end me, if I have to face them again. Maybe I could just accept the risk and feel safe in my knowledge that no one will ever be able to cause me suffering for longer than I choose to tolerate it.

Or maybe that’s just my applying the one hope I know how to hold – death – to a situation where I might otherwise be rendered helpless by hopelessness.

My therapist tries to say something validating when I talk about death and hope this way. They have stopped giving me the suicidality side eye but they’re clearly still uncomfortable. The best I’ve gotten is something like “It’s good that you feel decisive”, as sort of a surprised reaction, which is pretty faint praise for the only hope I know.

My therapist told me last week that they don’t understand me and that it’s challenging for them to work with me because of that. This is not a great thing to hear from a therapist, but it’s also not news to me. There are not a lot of circumstances where I feel understood, and fewer still where I expect it. I feel like it would be useful to have a therapist that did understand, but if I waited for that I wouldn’t have access to therapy. The plan was always to train them to have the responses I need… as soon as I figure out what that is.

I was also frustrated to have them ignore their assigned reading for the Nth consecutive week. Thsy had the gaul to tell me that the exercises I was trying to do alone might work better with a therapist. I’m fucking aware of that. It’s why I assigned you the readings that literally contain sample dialog from sessions. But as always even knowing what sort of help I want doesn’t let me get it.

My brain is pretty sure that no one can help me with anything, at least not until I can clearly express what I need and communicate it calmly at a time they can pay attention. That isn’t made better when my therapist of more than a year understand me so poorly as to produce professional stress.

It is useful that they talked about it and want to change something. We’ll have to see if any change actually happens.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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