What must it be to want to be touched.
In any sense.
It’s snowing. Been snowing for almost 48 hours.
So strange. I was so scared the night he left. He came to bed and pawed at me - twice. Then stormed downstairs. Banged around. Took a shower? I think I heard the word, “whore”. Went to the other bedroom. Overtired and awake. Imagining things that…weren’t true. Exaggerations. Scary things.
Everyone is safe. Everything was fine.
But I don’t know how he’s behaving like everything is…normal. He left for Moose Pass.
Normalish week except for a neuro test. And a sick day. Now he’s off for band practice tonight.
Listen, look. I’ve been criticized by this person for…being myself? From the get. I’m super-concerned these days - and especially in light of my behavior in past relationships - about ensuring that I’m not being abusive. That said, my baseline irritability is pretty high. But anyway: being tired is not a crime.
The recurring criticisms are that I am tired, not being present with the family, doing too much, not doing enough, not really spending time with the family because I’m often doing homework instead or reading a book or doom scrolling and really who isn't doing that? Or even "You can't do this it's all too much!" but presented in aggressive terms rather than, I'm worried about you.
There are several problems here and I'm one of them. But some of the others are that life doesn't just fucking stop. And there are assignments that need to be done by a certain date. The incessant pull of a child that is appropriate and needs to be responded to. The household operational tasks that are recurrent and don't go away. The parameters of the job that I needed to get because everyone is most comfortable with me working in one location for lots of hours rather than driving around town for less hours.
Getting around to journalling has been hard lately. Test after test almost done with the semester.
It's finally stopped snowing, but the temperature has dropped to 2 degrees and that's how that goes. I'm finally to the point where I'm starting to think: well, maybe I could OT somewhere warm when I'm done with school. Only took 12 years and record-breaking snowfall! ...twice!
I got to see my therapist yesterday for the first time in about two months. Just an hour session but we worked around rejection dysphoria and the childhood stuff. There's some child/teen/young adult stuff around that too. But really the moment I always come back to (that I don't even explicitly remember, probably) is being in a crib and crying and nobody comes.
There's a lot more explicit stuff around leaving the group if you're experiencing uncomfortable emotions, not speaking up because it's not my place and naturally, even though those experiences occurred (mostly) during childhood - I'm still that person on the inside. A person's a person and they carry their childhood person with them forever.
So anyway, hopefully keeping in mind that I need to go back through the wormhole of experience and re-parent myself - especially when I'm having a hard time with (perceived or actual) rejection. Because it's so damn consistent!
Life situation stuff: things are pretty okay in various quadrants. I got a 90 (!) on my last neuro test and I promised myself I'd get a piercing or tattoo for myself if I did because I'm 37 going on 18 and so I've got to figure out the logistics of that. If I get a B I get sticker!
My house is a shambles, but we're (I'm) going to tackle that today whilst hopefully catching up on lectures from earlier in the week. Then we're supposed to go swimming and go by Value Village or Fashion Pact to donate toys and clothes mostly and maybe pick up a proper winter coat (gestures at the temperature).
I've been using Chat GPT to generate meal plan ideas for the week and that's been pretty okay. I'm not trying to teach AI how to take over the human race (however tempting that might be), but I'm pretty crap at thinking of meal ideas and it just saves a lot of brains as far as figuring out grocery lists, etc. Only two meals in and batting even. The grilled chicken veggies with rice works because I know to add Italian salad dressing to the skillet for that. The spaghetti didn't really gel because Chat GPT doesn't believe in spices. So either a) robots don't know how to cook (yes, I'm aware AI isn't really a robot; hush) or b) I need to add in the parameters of QUANTITIES and SEASONING. So we'll see.
Aside: I have 12 minutes left to journal, that's why I'm blathering on.
Short list of things to do that I will probably forget because I am writing them down: call the psych grad students to therapize me for (their) hours, email SJ about a volunteer opportunity for this student organization I'm in, make and nail down a therapy schedule for S and me because that's just the next step it just is and putting it off because I'm already full on with roles and responsibilities is really just putting off the inevitable, print out Fair Play cards and brace self for the fallout that will happen as a result of that, hell maybe even look into therapy for L as I'm sure she needs it. Okay that was longer than I thought it would be and oddly one-track.
Hm.
L and I went to the museum on Thursday night for a tidal tank event because she always asks about touching the sea stars and the answer is always "no". But on this particular night at this particular event the answer was "yes". And it was pretty fun! She got to touch a sea urchin and two sea stars. There were even some other people there despite the questionable roads and wind. Getting a membership to the museum has been surprisingly lovely so far. It's not enormous, but large enough that if we set a time limit of an hour there's no way we can really see everything and there's always more to see the next week between stuff we just didn't get to and changing exhibits.
Funny enough, we've been talking about graphic medicine in one of my classes (think graphic novels) and one of the most recent exhibits to go up is about comic book art and storyboarding - that kind of thing - with an Alaskan twist (because: of course).
The burlesque company I'm tangentially still a part of has been working on a script for a new play that's murder mystery themed and I've been able to sit in on reading and help with brainstorming on that because it's low time-commitment. The connection there? Storyboarding.
Anyway - bye! Miss you. Hope you are well. :-)
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