Sleepy & Hollow

Back to Seattle today. You know how I feel about being physically trapped and interacting with authorities. But otherwise it was a real good day. I had some Potato Oles, which I can’t get here. I got to meet DerbyK’s youngest ¹Technically we rode together in a car once but I don’t think it counts unless we actually interact. and provide emergency gravy and spin and build a house. It was lots of fun.

I am always the last one to sleep. Under stressful circumstance I’m also the first one up. There are lots of reasons for this. One is trauma and related feels about being physically vulnerable while asleep. Another is touch; touch and proximity make me tense. One is that I need to take care of all my most shameful behavior – eating, work, thinking about myself – only when I’m sure no one is around. Another is to be sure that the people who depend on me have the attention they need. But there’s at least one more reason.

Social help with sleep seems impossible to me, if not an outright threat. But this week I watched a number of people to it, sometimes even in person. Help getting to sleep, help getting up again, sleeping near other people. It’s one of those things I thought was maybe made up for stories; it never happened to me when I was young. When I was 7-11 years old ²From 5-7 I was locked outside on the porch at bed time, asked not to come back in until the next afternoon, and to not make my presence known. I’m not sure what the policy was before that, but it’s safe to assume it wasn’t bedtime stories and social support. After 11 I just wasn’t allowed attention after hours; I wasn’t usually locked in … Continue reading, if I was willing to take some emotional abuse, if it was after Mother went to sleep, I had about a 50% chance of being allowed to lay on the floor near her bed. If I paid enough for the interaction I might be allowed a blanket too.

But clearly help with sleep (and more generally attention during sleep periods) is a thing you’re supposed to have, particularly when you’re 4. My brain didn’t really believe that until today; developmental trauma sucks. My brain also doesn’t care, even now that I believe it – it still tells me this isn’t for me. I can’t have help with it, because I can’t be helped. Because my 4-year-old brain knows it hurts people too much to pay attention to me in that way.

Posted new pictures on my fridge. I’m exited to have them. It’s not the sort of paperwork my life has traditionally accumulated – historically I didn’t accumulate anything I wouldn’t be required to produce later as proof. But I am now.

Thought about interacting with toddler, in a place where noone’s anxiety is focused on me, from a role where my responsibilities extend only to the next 12 seconds, from a body more than a few inches taller, from a life that doesn’t require constant survival decisions, with a person who I haven’t had to repeatedly hurt to keep us alive. It was better than the versions where those things weren’t true. I have never found relating to young people to be a problem, but they rub right up against some of my triggers about being a 8-year-old single parent. So it was good to have a not terrible experience, to give my brain another way to feel about such situations, that isn’t just stress and constant exhaustion and guilt that you can’t provide enough or anything they need.

Talked about the the way even being perfect can’t protect you from outside forces in the world. You can make no mistakes and still end up someplace real bad; you can be the ideal parent and still end up in a situation where your kid is hurting and even your perfection wasn’t a sufficient shield. But you are not there alone. You can have help too. While we might never know the Answer I am sure we can keep finding opportunities even when things are dire. You’ve seen me do it, and I’d definitely do it again for you.

Mr. Robot was also about sleep, as was the Jemisin book I finished today. About what you need to find it, about the ways it is denied, about the way we simultaneously talk about it and ignore it, about the way we are afraid to want it, ashamed to need it, unable to let ourselves want rest. I’m not up for a take on either work tonight, but I was tickled to see them all on-messsge.

Took Dog out, for the first time in almost a week. My brain is still reluctant to imagine that he misses me. I sort of don’t want that to be true, because then he’d be hurt when I inevitably need to flee. He wouldn’t be ready to never need me again. He did seem to react to going out with me though.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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