Tracking Pixels

Today was tough for Shanda, particularly once more people showed up at our house. You spent the last week claiming that you weren’t going to change your schedule to accommodate the extra demands on your time, and that was still your plan today even though you felt stressed about being busy. And you were still trying to do it alone. It wasn’t great. But eventually you decided that taking care of yourself would make it easier to achieve your other goals and started making some changes. It took until pretty later for feeling better to make the top of the priority list, but late is better than never. And maybe it will be easier to prioritize tomorrow.

I did a bad job at day job today. I did more than 0 but not a lot. I had hoped to get a couple more SRs knocked out but that didn’t make my own prioriry list. It very hard for me to feel like non-reactive work is important on days when household stress is high. And mine is still medium high even without any environmental help. No robots tomorrow though, so I still have a decent chance at getting those 2 SRs done before the weekend.

We did make good progress on the bedroom move. Got a delivery plan worked out for the new wall bed, made real plans about painting in that room, scheduled a bunch of those activities, and worked through most of the stuff that still needed to be moved or trashed. It would be great if this project didn’t overlap with people using the bedroom but I’m glad we’re finally moving on it regardless. It’s been a long time since Melissa left and well past when we should have setup a decent spare bedroom. I’m also excited to own a wall bed, in anticipation of a day when I have a smaller house can’t always dedicate a room to a queen bed.

I write a bunch of these and I don’t really expect anyone to read them all. Certainly not same-day, even if you read most of them eventually. And I’ve intentionally designed the distribution system to not give me any tracking data so that I cannot check. But I do wonder how often I’m writing at nobody, and how long it is between when I scream and someone hears me. I’m trying to imagine that this is someplace I could get help when I need it. Or at least enough back pressure to keep me from drifting away.
I know that sending these is part of what makes it feel safe enough for people to talk to me during a crisis. I’m extremely grateful for that. The idea that I might be useful in hard times helps me feel like a tolerable human analog. But I wish I knew how to make it safe to talk to me at other times ¹I don’t mean to dismiss the interaction I get. That part is great – please know that I pay attention and it means a lot to me. I try to show that whenever I can.. Or maybe how to be more useful outside of an emergency scenario. Whatever it is that would make me feel ²I don’t mean to make any of you accountable for my needs, particularly not the intense ones that bubble out of my trauma and make it so difficult for me to feel any persistent sense of belonging. None of you, collectively or individually, are the reason I feel compelled to escape my life and find a way to exist even further in the margins with … Continue reading like the same people who see my thoughts and feelings want to engage with them as a recurring part of normal life.

No robots tomorrow, which is always a little sad. It’s a place where I often get to chat with people who only moderately fear me, and who rarely demand more than I’m interested in providing. We’re meeting Saturday, and while there likely won’t be many people around I’m going to that if only to get away from my unusually busy household for a few hours.

I haven’t been engaging much in the prescribed nerd activities at robots. Which isn’t unusual at this time of year, or after years of doing it, or given the other priorities in my life. But I’m more checked out from that aspect than I have been in the past, and I think more than I want to be. In part it’s because I have placed more value on less technical elements of robots, which in many ways has been better than building jenky machines ever could. But I should do something about the way I never want to do technical homework for robots anymore, because it will make me more useful to the team and better able to engage with the tech when I want to. And because it would let me push for organizational changes I think would make people’s lives better.

I made good progress on Medicaid today. Got all the government paperwork sorted and read. De-duplicsted the bills and figured out who I need to call. I’m still missing a couple pieces of data required to put the thing to bed, but it’s much closer than it has been anytime in the past 6 months. And I got all the scanning and labeling and filing done, which wasn’t trivial given the accumulation. I sort of used it as a distraction from my day job, but I think it was a good trade today. It was hard to focus and this was something I am not only motivated to do but that works to reduce some long-standing anxiety.

I decided to give up my cleaning service. We had already scaled way back when Melissa came but the price has been creeping up, particularly with Dog, so it’s time to stop. It’s a luxury that sometimes feels very valuable to me, even though in practice it often annoyed me to have someone here cleaning. The main benefit in recent years has just been to reduce my cognitive load – to keep the house a minimum level of clean even when I couldn’t afford the attention to manage it directly. Not that I’m excited to clean my own toilets – it always nice to have someone else clean for you – but it was rarely a problem for me either. And a big reason it feels so important is just that Shanda hates talking about cleaning, which is a thing we should change instead of paying someone to help us ignore.

M is running silent but I assume still pointed toward explosion. Which is definitely a factor in my household stress level. I try not to worry too much but waiting is always hard and only made more difficult when I’m feeling alone. Plus worrying about other people is one of the ways I manage my own anxiety. It lets me use the same sort of energy on a thing that’s more empathetic and useful than when I use it to deny myself compassion. And it’s how I can stare at nothing and learn things about you, focusing on the space behind your eyes until I can see through your sunglasses. All of which is good (I hope), so long as I’m careful to only hold on to sensible worry and not the all parts my brain projects into the darkness.

I still haven’t painted my nails, or cut out the bird. I haven’t finished organizing my drawers or closet. All those have been stalled out for a couple of weeks now. I was inspired to wear colors one day last week but could still only find a couple of minutes for it. Those parts all feel closer now, after some time when they were not in the fore of my mind. I had one day off this week but it turns out I needed several just to get back in the right quadrent. And I’ve been doing well with other bits, like the light and my back and Medicaid and the wall bed. So if I can string together a couple of days of typical productivity maybe I can work color back into my life.

That’s why I wonder how long it is between when I yell and when you hear me. In retrospect there’s lots of evidence here and would be great if someone could have told when I was at day 3 of a downswing, so that maybe I could keep it from lasting for 2 or 3 weeks. It’s not a thing you can fix if I decide to ignore it, but it is a thing I might be able to change if I knew it was happening. If someone else told me it was important to them.

ZiB

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Sent from a phone.

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