Baroque

I've been reading back through my 2009/2010/2011 journals. I've been trying to remember who I was, what my life was like then. I more-or-less don't have memories but sometimes I can jog things loose with the right prompt. Sometimes I can infer things from the words I wrote.

It's tiring just reading it sometimes. I'm glad I don't live in that world anymore.

When I first came north in 2015 to work in forestry for the summer, that was the first time I existed unsexualized in my body. It was the first time I didn't have demands on my emotions. I could exist freely up here and I had not been that free since my very early teens, before I really knew any humans, when I poked around 5 acres and a library with no outside steerage. It felt amazing.

Now I'm old enough - 40 this year - and no longer skinny so I suspect even if I went back I'd be less sexualized. That feels gentler on my gender stuff, for sure. I'm curious if the city has any use for people it doesn't sexualize. I wonder if it's possible to be friendly down there?

I want to write but I'm tired. I'm contemplating a big change in my life, moving down to the coast. Seems like that's shaken a lot loose. I'm also cometing around, as gently as I can, with one of my longstanding people. There's stuff to explore there too, and also to put down so I remember it ten years in the future. I'm well-loved right now.

Meanwhile my tomatoes are up and growing, thinking about their first set of true leaves. I have Seville oranges to make vanilla marmalade. Eggs are rolling in and in and in, goose eggs primarily. The snow is melting and pooling and I can see the ground under the trees and in a couple select places. The draw is filling up with water into the seasonal pond it will be for a couple months, depending on weather.

I'm a piece within this pattern, a mote, temporarily bestowing meaning on these events.

This morning that is enough.

Baroque

I've been reading back through my 2009/2010/2011 journals. I've been trying to remember who I was, what my life was like then. I more-or-less don't have memories but sometimes I can jog things loose with the right prompt. Sometimes I can infer things from the words I wrote.

It's tiring just reading it sometimes. I'm glad I don't live in that world anymore.

When I first came north in 2015 to work in forestry for the summer, that was the first time I existed unsexualized in my body. It was the first time I didn't have demands on my emotions. I could exist freely up here and I had not been that free since my very early teens, before I really knew any humans, when I poked around 5 acres and a library with no outside steerage. It felt amazing.

Now I'm old enough - 40 this year - and no longer skinny so I suspect even if I went back I'd be less sexualized. That feels gentler on my gender stuff, for sure. I'm curious if the city has any use for people it doesn't sexualize. I wonder if it's possible to be friendly down there?

I want to write but I'm tired. I'm contemplating a big change in my life, moving down to the coast. Seems like that's shaken a lot loose. I'm also cometing around, as gently as I can, with one of my longstanding people. There's stuff to explore there too, and also to put down so I remember it ten years in the future. I'm well-loved right now.

Meanwhile my tomatoes are up and growing, thinking about their first set of true leaves. I have Seville oranges to make vanilla marmalade. Eggs are rolling in and in and in, goose eggs primarily. The snow is melting and pooling and I can see the ground under the trees and in a couple select places. The draw is filling up with water into the seasonal pond it will be for a couple months, depending on weather.

I'm a piece within this pattern, a mote, temporarily bestowing meaning on these events.

This morning that is enough.

"We've always been here"

I found this amazing description of PDA in an old post of mine:

You know how I deal with you? By destroying your expectations.

I am not reliable. I cannot serve in anyone's life as their sole source of comfort, of love, of snuggles, of venting, of conversation, of anything at all. If you need something so badly that you will collapse into a sucking black hole of misery if you don't get it, do not look to get it from me. Even if I would ordinarily give it to you gladly, even if I would ordinarily be completely unburdened through this transaction, if I suspect you are leaning wholeheartedly on me in some regard I will drop your heart.

This is because I can't stand your disappointed expectations. When it becomes clear that, more often than not, you are disappointed rather than happy with our interactions, those interactions will cease.

It happens to everyone. God knows, it's happened to my own damn self, but I've spent long enough at this that I know what to ask for from myself.

You see, the breaking is an alchemical process. I stop trying to give you what you want, you fall, you break. The world ends for a little bit, then it resumes. If there was something between us that meant more than the leaning, you will learn to trust me to do the things I do for people: I love people, like crazy. I am there to hold you through the midnight crazy voices. I make a good tea partner, and I'm good to talk with. We can take walks through the back doors of your mind or of mine. I see beauty in you, and I take joy in your flight across the world.

You will have learned, through bitter experience, not to trust me where I cannot be trusted: I am not consistent. I do not emotionally distance well. I do not reliably see the dark or the light side of something as you need. And I am never a replacement for your own sense of self-worth, for your ability to find love in other people in the world, for parents or siblings, for financial support or your right hand in bed or your right and need to comfort yourself and walk yourself through your own difficulties and griefs.

[…]

Maybe you and I can make something together out of what happens after I break your expectations or maybe we can't, but it'll be all that's left. It's what you get.

That was Dec 2010, here: https://greenstorm.dreamwidth.org/719714.html

It makes me grateful for the people in my life these days, all becoming more and more themselves and none of whom will be destroyed if I can't do something.