No-longer-morning freewrite

[greenstorm]

Yesterday was again very hard. So much of my corn trial got eaten, there's not really a trial anymore. I can do some crossing but corn needs a large genetic base and I'll just be crossing a couple surviving individual plants. Sure landracing is about selection but the corn wasn't selected, the crows go over the field like rolling back a blanket.

But that's not it, really. Stanley Kunitz writes, how shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses? and that's really the issue. Since I've got here, holding on to Threshold has meant losing a lot of everything else. Every trade-off I've made to stay here prompts other trade-offs to support those first ones until everything is a compromise. This is how everyone I've known who is miserable lives, they trade away their entire lives for something they think is important. But, my entire life is important. I think a lot of the folks who do trade-offs think they themselves aren't important, only the object of their trade-offs are, until it gets too much and they shrug it all off at once in self-defense.

But here's the thing. Before I didn't really do trade-offs. I accepted a thing whole, or I did not accept it. Sometimes accepting a thing means breaking myself, I feel and experience those as deaths of the person I was, and then a new person rises out of the fertile space of that death. I haven't had or done that in awhile, completely surrendered, let my whole self die - because I always want to remain alive here with Threshold.

I now maybe conceptualize those deaths as some form of internalized autistic meltdown. That's not relevent.

I've been focusing on myself compared to other people in this writing. Actually, since trying to work on my autism diagnosis I've been doing that, since I learned that I was very different from other folks and not just showing different parts of myself. It's corrosive. The autism assessment itself is all about me trying to figure out exactly what neurotypical people are like (note, no neurotypical person is able to do this, I resent deeply being asked to do this) and then comparing all the bits of myself alongside and saying what's different. I'd say Fuck That Shit but I think I do need the diagnosis.

But here's the thing. My survival strategy my whole life has been finding similarities between myself and whoever I was in contact with. We all have some emotional resonance with something similar somewhere; we all have similar experiences somewhere. That was both a social defense, pulling out similarities so folks would empathize with me and thus offer some gentleness around my differences, and an internal one where I could feel less alienated and alone. When I roll that defense back I get less support from the world around me and I also feel more alone.

And, thing is, I may have forgotten how to lift that defense back up again?

And I need people right now, because I've also lost the defense of killing myself off and starting again.

It's helplessness I feel now. Helplessness has never been my thing. I do the things I want to do, and put strategies in place to make sure they can happen. People, though-- you know, consent is a huge thing for me. I love lots of people who have trouble saying no, who go out of their way to do things for other folks when they might not want to, and in so doing I've got some very delicate sensors for power imbalance and coercion and transparency. So even just beyond the base level of "one is generally helpless when interacting with people because people own themselves and make their own decisions" I also want to be sure I'm not coercing, I'm being transparent, that folks have room to grow and blossom into their own selves in my presence.

So then, if my goal is some kind of specific types of interaction with people, I need to go through a whole lot of people because they need to truly match me. A lot of folks can bring social shaming and pressure to bear, or individual interpersonal shame or obligation, and by doing so can round the folks they meet up into meeting their needs. That sounds gross but it sure does happen a lot and I'm fairly sure it's not often freely consented to under that third party social pressure that the folks accept. I will not use those tools though.

But I'm still unable to totally close myself off from people as I used to do when I was much younger. I don't think I needed folks as much then, but then again, I didn't know what I was missing. So I'm just walking around bereft all the time.

It feels worse because I have so much fullness of self with Threshold. The property brings me so much joy and then, like yesterday or when the piglets get eaten, so much grief, and there's no one to share those with and thereby make them more bearable.

Yesterday, when I discovered the corn trials wrecked, was really really hard. There was no one. I went and cut down the willow I'd been meaning to cut and that got me through the worst of it but still. I can't even write about it still because it's too personal, but still. Tucker was great at this: he'd make me a cup of tea, hold me while I cried, put on a show to distract me or listen while I talked.

Being cared for like that, I've unlearnt how to take care of myself I guess. I also just feel so unregulated these days, emotionally.

Eventually I ate, got to sleep, and now it's the next day and I have eleven months to plan my next corn, to think about what strategies I'll use. I may be able to get off a round of gaspe in the meantime. My mind is starting to turn that way: branch entanglements, low-level poison so they feel sick if they eat the corn and stay away, luring bigger predators like hawks into the territory, cutting down their nest tree, smaller patches of corn growing in tall weeds or greens, larger chunks of floating row cover, there are probably many ways to approach this and I'll need many overlapping strategies. But I still, I don't know.

That other counselor said something about why did I think everything I loved was going to leave me? And I said it was because pretty much it all has. And not to shit on neurotypicals completely, but I've learned to accept a much smaller definition of "staying" than most of them are capable of fully understanding: to be nourished by light and attenuated connections, by just less than most neurotypical folks even understand a connection to be. So by her definitions even more stuff has left me than by mine. And I had the corn, and it's also leaving me now, except for what little remains and I'm not sure how long that will last.

And I can feel-- Avallu is still there. I brushed him a bunch yesterday. Thea was really wiggly and I gave her a big hug. There are two new goslings. The roses are opening. I can have dinner with J and I'm going to make cookies with K. There's a herb witch in town who's befriended me for quite some time, I could ask her to go picking together. I can try planting a round of gaspe (I'm worried, I don't have a ton of seed) or even of paintd mountain since that might be a really intense early selection round for it and I do have a ton of that seed. I can do lots of kimchi stuff, diakons and napa cabbages, and turnips. I can seed greens to self-seed and work on my weed bed. There's a ton of lamb's quarters up right now, that's my favourite green, I could even try canning it if I don't want to freeze a ton.

I'm writing this after sitting down to a fancy breakfast, manechego cheese and croissants and sticky rice pu erh tea with honey.

I've been feeling sad and hurt and like I need to be supported.

I resent the fact that I have to support myself, but I guess that's how it needs to be. I need to make myself up some support stuff for when I'm feeling worst, because I can't support myself in that moment. Special tea, a nice activity, something else tasty like a snack, a good thing to look at, fuzzy socks and a blanket. Maybe I should make up some totes that say "open in case of emergency" and load them up. All in one place, all together.

Because if there's one thing I'm certain of, it's that this is going to get worse before it gets better. Part of the reason it's so hard is not just all the logic stuff above, but PMDD coupled with the first beginnings of menopause. I probably have twenty years of this in my future and the gynecologist wasn't super encouraging about what might help; the first option has the real possibility of making me more suicidal. And tbh I'll be damned if I let anything, whether it's the hormonal stuff, society being stupid about medical care to folks with either hormonal stuff or different brain wiring, whether it's stigma or dominant society just being so damn dominant it can't see its hand in front of its face, whether it's our current era's obsession with atomized families and urbanization, whether it's anything at all-- I'll be damned if I let that take the rest of my life away from me. This is mine, and I will keep it. Whatever it takes.

Even if it takes giving up, again, on anyone saving me.

Which, I know how that sounds, but I thought with crisis lines and employee help lines and mental health whatever in the world something would be able to help, but it kind of won't? So it's on me.

And if I need to be competent at this again I can be.

Comments

[squirrelitude]

Oh shit, the corn. :-( That hurts even to hear about.

[greenstorm]

It hurt. A lot. I have some left that's doing well though, so I've been walking up every morning and letting it soothe me. That open oak party is just rocketing, it's gonna be big! I've never grown big corn before!

[squirrelitude]

I was glad to see that you didn't lose all the plants for most of the varieties. I guess you can at least fold it back in via the freezer, even if this year doesn't let you grow out a full gene pool. Hard lessons, though.

Tall corn seems like trouble to me -- it gets knocked over by wind so easily! But I guess maybe it also might produce more per unit area, just by having that added plant volume? Maybe not. I have the vague impression that industrial corn operations prefer dwarfish (but apically dominant) plants.

I didn't know about tillering until one of your recent posts. I asked my dad about it, since I couldn't quite remember if I'd seen it happen in our gardens. He said that at one point he grew a very short blue corn (he gestured about waist high) that tillered quite heavily. Could be a good option for certain kinds of row cover, high wind, maybe other situations.

[greenstorm]

Look up er, peace seedlings (not peace seeds), they're breeding heavily tillering ("bush") corn. I wish I could find more pictures of their stuff. The mandan corns apparently tend to tiller, but it's been selected out of a lot of Dave Christensen's, and he made painted mountain from which a lot of other things were selected by other breeders so that kind of shuts it down. I've watched videos where folks say gaspe tillers heavily for them, so maybe it will fill in these empty spaces. We shall see!

Joseph Lofthouse selected for corn that had very heavy stalks and had ears very high above the ground, which prevented raccoons etc from eating it. So the height had a useful purpose there.

I know wheat is dwarf these days, I thought industrial corn was pretty tall but have no idea; everything is tall next to gaspe.

It's weird to me to think of plants being knocked over by wind. I know the east coast is more prone to that sort of thing. I guess I'll see what happens here!

[greenstorm]

Oh, that corn sounds excellent! I wonder what it was.

[squirrelitude]

Apparently it was a sweet corn from Seed Savers Exchange, "Blue Jade".

[greenstorm]

Oh yay, I have some of that in my stash for next year! Was gonna be this year but moving etc disrupted things, and that means it didn't get eaten by crows!