Greenstorm's Journal

I put fava beans in to soak yesterday so I need to plant them today. Not sure where, soil is too wet to till, so I'll be doing a classic digging-stick planting. I think I'll be doing that tonight.

Massage that was scheduled for last week was rescheduled to today since the massage therapist was sick last week. I've been working to try and fix my right elbow, which has been pretty painful for the last couple months. Fortuitously though I had a pretty bad night last night handling some breakup/relationship related stuff and ended up crying a bunch and clenching my teeth hard for 20 hours or so and a massage would really help loosen up my shoulders and headache from that. So the rescheduled massage feels sort of like a little gift. I've been stretching my elbow consistently and it doesn't feel as sharply painful anymore, though it still hurts quite a bit (I wish there was a physio close enough that I wouldn't hurt my elbow more driving the round trip to and from).

My potatoes have some of their first true leaves. The tomatoes are happy. My Hardin's mini x Sweet baby jade F1 is covered in green tomatoes full of F2 seeds. My apple seeds are coming up.

Today is sunny and though I haven't managed to change my sheets, I did manage to wash and line dry some to put on.

And.

I still don't know where the line is with Tucker. Some stuff came up last night. The attenuated thing we've been doing was fine but he is now in intense NRE with a new person, he had a longstanding connection with her, and it's stirring up all the stuff I wanted to be able to do with him and gave up on to enter into our current relationship (maybe more acquaintance/sorta friends with benefits?). It hurts because I miss being that sort of focus. I miss conversations where we talked about our perspectives and feelings; there's some irony that he's better at listening now and he's shown some ability to share his feelings with me but it's not something either of us feel safe doing now and I think he just doesn't want that dynamic with me. I miss looking forward to the future as a shared activity with him. I'm apprehensive of the pattern he has of creating distance, then when I create distance on my own he suddenly comes closer, and on my ability to stand firm on my distance when he offers closeness since I don't want to continue to swing that pendulum back and forth. I don't know that I can trust his offers. So the attenuated relationship, where when we're together it's great and I don't consider him a part of my life when he's not physically present-- that solves those issues. But it's hard right now, as is not surprising, that someone else is filling those spaces.

I spent a bunch of time yesterday doing PDA advocacy and education. There are a ton of groups with lots of parents of younger PDAers and I did a bunch of explaining how my life fits together, how I feel and experience things, how I relate to my family, etc. It takes work but also it puts a lot of my self-knowledge to use and hopefully helps both those parents and their young PDAers in the world.

There was also a PDA spat where a non-PDA I guess pretty well-known person suggested-- well, here's the thing. PDA is formally "pathological demand avoidance" but the difference between PDA and other kinds of nonconforming demand avoidance is significant, and telling a bunch of PDAers what to call themselves is a losing game anyhow. So PDAers keep bringing up nicer-sounding names like "pervasive drive for autonomy" to fit the acronym. It's important to them, personally I think it's bullshit (I'm not more autonomous, I'm just constrained to be non-normative in particular ways which NT folks can't imagine because they're all constrained by their neurotype to be normative, so they think this is autonomy). So anyhow, this more-than-PDA-circles well known person suggested renaming PDA "protective demand avoidance" and made a big post about it, which a bunch of PDAers didn't like because she didn't bother to talk to any PDAers first, and by the time anyone who wasn't just a PDA parent got there you had to scroll through and read a couple hundred or thousand "yes this is so much less stigmatizing" posts before even being able to comment, and then she tried to say that post actually was an attempt at getting comments. Unsurprisingly a bunch of PDA folks were upset, a bunch liked it, and a ton of people (me included) couldn't be bothered to read several thousand posts before chiming in. Seems like she had conflated all demand avoidance (which she said she saw "across neurotypes") with PDA demand avoidance. So that's a couple thousand commenters plus however many readers that have yet another additional name for PDA plus more misinformation about what it is. Figures.

And my cats and I spend the days saying "I love you" in cat to each other all day, the geese are on nests, I put down clover seed the other day, and there's basketmaking and more pottery in my future. I even have a friend to go for walks with sometimes again. I can feel happiness flowing from my life.

But I still also am tired, shaky, and have trouble getting out of bed and my vision is doing weird things and I should probably follow up with doctors and medication changes but I do not have the bandwidth but I do need to come up with an action plan for it.

Plus an action plan for selling the piglets.

My counseling was rescheduled for Wednesday (PDA counselor) and I honestly don't even know how to narrow a focus for this upcoming session.

I finally found something that gives me what feels like a rest: a TV show that lets my mind stop for a little bit.

I watched /Three Pines/ and that was not it, but I'd say is a pretty good taste of rural Canada right now and is worth watching. But, not a rest.

So I started watching /Bones/ which has an autistic-coded character and is significantly lighter, and it's doing the trick.

Problem is, after watching four episodes and then coming back into the world, my empathy has returned. Problem is, empathy really fucking sucks.

There's my high school acquaintance, who has apparently felt like a "loser" for 25 years because I don't talk to her enough, and who feels boring to herself.

There's T, who can neither ask for what he needs nor leave a situation where he's dissatisfied and so is trapped without agency or fulfillment.

And there's me, who feels unseen and unwanted for my actual self, good only for the manic pixie dream girl autistic services I provide to people, with no one ever as interested in my thoughts or experience as I am in theirs.

It's too much. It's flooding me. Is it possible to find someone happy to spend time around for a little while, just to give me a rest? Is everyone I know somewhere between discontent and anguish? If I'm going to be experiencing someone's emotions, can't I find someone else?

Mind still bad, but I have an appointment on the 27th with the gyne. That's the day I drop Tucker off at the airport and pick Josh up. Luckily it's a phone appointment so I just need to be in phone service.

Refilled the wood stand in the house, I think last time I refilled it was the 5th, so that's 9 days? Not bad.

Very cold coming up, -34C or so. My upstairs is so draughty/leaky, it's a real problem. I guess I can just bake things all day or do some canning. It's the point where if I wash the windows to put film on them, they'll just ice over (maybe the cloth will freeze to them, depending) and they probably won't dry. Inside the house is warmer than that, but windows just aren't that insulative even when double paned.

Made my potluck dish for work tomorrow. I'm trying the spanish lemon goose recipe on pork, it seems to be pretty ok. May make for a good canning spice inspiration. It can also hang out in a crockpot, which is key.

Hoping tomorrow goes ok. People are a problem right now. In-person people will probably be more ok. At leaat the landrace forum is a nice place to spend time-- that goodness they're moving to a free, reasonably-constructed site.

PS Avallu was sleeping by the fire and ...howl-crying in his sleep? It was a bit eerie. I eventually woke him up and gave him pets.

I grew up in a huge (albeit cold and unfinished) house, 4000 square feet and 5 acres for 6 people. There were always places both indoors and outdoors I could go to be alone, private, and safe. In the house if I didn't want to be in my room I could climb through the undrywalled bathroom, over the pile of contruction lumber and down the not-yet-or-ever-wired hallway, into the sauna-without-electricity which was basically an unheated unwindowed cedar room full of spiders, dust, and peace. It felt like the tombs of Atuan, known only by touch. Or I could go upstairs, through the library, into mom's office where she was never to be found during non-school hours since she was doing chores, making dinner, and taking care of my brothers and I could take a book off the shelf and hide under her desk (which faced away from the door). No one could find me and it was warmer in there.

When I graduated from highschool me, mom, and one brother moved into a 42" boat. The boat had three rooms plus a toilet room: mom's room with the shower in it, the front V berth, and then the galley-slash-salon with a couch in it on which I slept as long as I lived there. There was no privacy at all, visual or sound or anything, except when my brother was at school and mom was at work (and she didn't work in the office every day). The boat was (illegally, since we lived on it) moored in the city's downtown and I learned to live in public spaces at that time: the new library, the new plaza next to the transit station, the acres-big park with a bike path encircling it and swings, the big cheap clattering chinese restaurant with a million things on the menu which I could even occasionally afford.

I had no money at this time, I was working a very part time job for minimum wage and I was supposed to be going to school. I'd go to the university and use the computers there but I failed out of my classes pretty quickly; I was too afraid to talk to adults to ask them for help, and too poor to afford the textbooks. I tried to get a job following mom's advice ("just go in with a resume") but through some combination of the early 2000s recession, being too afraid of adults to talk to them, never having been raised around non-abusive adults and not knowing what to say, having no idea what working actually entailed since mom was a college professor and had hoed beans as a kid and dad hadn't worked, being deeply depressed, and being autistic I had a two year job search that failed to get me more than the occasional month or two at part-time minimum wage. At that point it was clear I wasn't doing well in university, and to motivate me mom kicked me out: she said I either needed to pass classes (which I needed to pay for myself) or pay rent on the boat. I wasn't able to do either.

Luckily my boyfriend had started working at a nice job at his mom's workplace at that point, and we could move in together to an actual apartment.

(This is so painful to write about)

For awhile we lived together in a couple of what were probably fine apartments, but that felt amazing to me: carpet! that was less than twenty years old! Smooth, drywalled, mudded, sanded, and painted walls! Molding at the base of the walls! Doors that fit their frames and frames that were finished! Showers with curtains! I felt rich. I was not rich. I was living with someone who we thought we would be together forever, but I was still only working the occasional stint in call-center jobs. He worked at a regional airport, so we lived deep on what were then the fringes of suburbs whose population mostly commuted to the city. He could drive, I could not. The busses to the city took a couple hours, and they did cost money. I grew tomatoes on a south-facing deck, walked to a yoga class and to the local nursery where I hung out, and spent a tremendous amount of time online.

It didn't feel unusual for me to be dependent on my partner, to not be able to leave. I'd never had the option of leaving while growing up, of living on my own. I'd never had enough money at one time to make up a full rent cheque even if I were to take every cent in my account and the change in my purse and spend it on just that one thing.

That was at least two apartments in the suburbs. Long story short we moved to a third apartment in the city to be closer to another couple we were dating. A year or two more went by, maybe more, I'm really uncertain of the timeline at this point. I was completely unable to get work in the city; I volunteered at the botanical garden for years, sold knives door to door for a bit but didn't have the network that business model relied on to sell to all my friends.

Finally one of my friends from the polyamory group had to go on maternity leave; she owned a cleaning business that she'd built and wanted to pass it on to someone. I started cleaning with her and I was completely terrible in the beginning, but she was patient and trained me up for months, introduced me to all the clients, and then eventually left it in my hands.

As soon as I had enough money to pay my own rent, my first partner said he needed some time living apart. I believed him. I suspect he believed him. The last time we ever had sex or an intimate date was in our shared bed, though, because once I moved out he made excuses about not getting together in private, got married to part of that other couple we were seeing, that person vetoed me with him and my other partner (the other part of that couple), and every time we got together for the next several years he'd express what seemed like real interest in meeting up but never actually follow through.

Anyhow, when I moved out I didn't know any of that. I found a room on craigslist in a house full of gay dudes. It was a beautiful old house, immaculately kept, with a big fishtank in the livingroom. At this point I'd developed some social skills but I still didn't spend much time in the shared areas, just up in the little attic room I had my own rights to. I kept my rats in there, my own fishtank for a little while, and my bed: that's all that fit. I wasn't home much: I spent a bunch of time at the home of the couple we were dating (I didn't really know I wasn't dating the one partner yet, and the other was still seeing me), and then my commute to work and back took a couple hours each way on the bus if I wanted to be on time. I learned the city's bus system intimately.

This is when I was first buying my own food. I remember buying a frozen brick of masago, the cheap orange kind full of msg ad sweetener, and eating about half of it on rice, then not eating any again for months. I couldn't leave anything in the kitchen, not even a dirty glass overnight, and friends didn't come to my place.

My home at this point was really the home of the couple I was dating, and my time was spent more there than at the room I rented. I'd swing home, hang out for a day, feed and play with the rats, and swing away again for a day or two or even three, depending on how much the rats were eating/drinking. In the other house I had no bedroom or anything like that, not even a drawer, so I lived with my bag full of housecleaning supplies including little vaccuum on one shoulder, and my big hockey bag full of clothes and books on the other. The other house meant stability though, it was people who loved me at the time, who cared for me and who I spent time with, and I (and partner) had been spending time there for the last several housing moves so it felt stable. It felt like home.

Then came the veto, and that house was no longer mine. I'd planted things there: a pawpaw tree, elephant garlic, raspberries, saskatoons. I'd built a greenhouse. I built a greenhouse in the backyard of the house I was renting a room from too, with the help of my other partner, and one of my roommate's friends offered me a job working with plants. I took it, and for the first time was, not full time employed or anything, but was actually employed by another person in a job where I could pay my rent.

A kaleidoscope of homes and partners follows: I moved on average once every six months for awhile, in with partners mostly but sometimes with roommates. This home had a hole in the floor that let in daylight and then the ceiling collapsed. That home we moved in as a group, lived there for six months while the landlord was always going to install floors, then got evicted when he finally did. This home was a studio space that one partner's brother let us live in for awhile, then kicked us out. That one I couldn't afford when the relationship ended. This one was really too much of my income. That one was a friend's place she rented me while she lived elsewhere, but I got the boot when she moved back in (that one was really lovely, and it's where I was the longest aside from here). There were sublets and sublets and sublets. I kept a PO Box in town, paid for, because it's the only way I could do all the legal documentation things you needed to receive mail for. When I needed to recover a password on the phone to do my taxes I ran through three or four possible postal codes when they asked what mine was.

I played ATM fishing every week, putting in two dollars so I could get at the extra 1.50 in my account and thus debit 3.50 at the store for groceries.

I remember moving my things in a wheely suitcase once in the summer, a gift that my aunt had got for me to pointedly suggest I should move out from living with mom before mom kicked me out herself. It was summer, and they're not made for that kind of use: the wheels melted right off.

If it was the right time of year I always planted things, if there was any outdoors at all. I tried to alway s be somewhere with outdoors. I could afford rent and mostly food, I always paid my rent, and sometimes I'd buy plants. I'd plant them where I was living. Years later I'd see them sometimes, flourishing if they hadn't been removed. I watched the saskatoons in front of that one house grow huge and full of berries.

I never stayed anywhere long enough to pick fruit. Tomatoes, a couple times. Mint, in very different types of locations, yes. I hauled pots of plants from home to home to home on the graces of friends who could drive and were willing to help me move.

I got so good at moving. I only ever had one dresser of clothes. I kept things in steamer trunks and books lived in boxes. The plants were awkward, of course, but there it is. I had a moving company I liked and that I eventually paid for; luckily I had a strong visual style so people would give me clothing they thought I'd like and I didn't have to pay for clothing; I could afford to move. Moving was my poverty hobby and my most expensive hobby.

Eventually my stuff went into storage. I don't remember when, or what spurred it; I think it was the breakup of a relationship where we were living together just the two of us, or maybe it was my decision to go back to school. Everything I loved was in a 10x10 box in an inaccessible part of the city (that is to say, busses didn't really go there) and I was in another box with a moldy futon on the floor, a rabbit, and a dresser in a house that was probably a negative 500k value on the multi-million-dollar lot.

Years later it came out of storage. I'd been at threshold a couple months by then, my own house, this house that I own. I'd been rattling around in it with a set of dishes I got on a facebook sales group, a week's worth of work clothes, a bed they'd left behind, and two of those tall barstools that are impossible to sit on. When all my stuff arrived on the truck it was like Christmas is supposed to be (did you grow up with nice Christmas presents?), all the things I wanted curated by someone who loved me and knew me well: my pottery wheel. My sewing machine. The mirror I liked. My lounging couch. My marshmallow mattress and the bed I can hang clothes on the frame of. Dishes I'd made. Festival clothes, fluttery silk and good for nothing but pleasure. Steamer trunks full of costumes and sweaters and kink gear and unfinished skirts. Boxes of books, and shelves for the books to go on. Old spiral bound notebooks. Booze I'd made and bottled in the hope of someday being able to sit somewhere and drink it.

People who place little value on stuff inevitably have enough money to get what they need, or a corner of their parents' basement where they still have stuff. People who say "it's just stuff?", I have no time for those folks.

Five and a half years ago I moved here, to Threshold, and my stuff came, and it was a completion. Three pieces clicked together: the land, me, and my nest of things. The next year we were evacuated for fires and I had one of the bigger trauma responses I'd ever had in my life: I was displaced, temporarily in someone else's home and unable to spend much time at my own home where I had put in a garden. My other partner was ghosting me and gaslighting me about the ghosting. I spent the weeks of evacuation in a dark dissociated haze where I could barely hear sounds; even with someone who loved me there, even with my animals close to me.

After that it slowly got better. When I came home the greenhouse had grown so much I couldn't get into it; Josh had set up automatic watering while I was gone and things had flourished. Winter, summer, winter, summer again: the seasons continued to come. The apple trees, here before me, bloomed every spring. Every spring! Ice locked the house and slid down off the roof and sheltered it in a cradle of white peace, while inside the woodstove breathed its heartbeat of full to empty, blazing to smouldering, over and over and over and over.

Last summer I was given a couch and put it in the basement, in the woodstove room. The room has a rack of squashes I grew for seed (I mean, also to eat) and is stacked with dairy crates of corn drying for seed. The dog door opens into this room and three cats and two dogs wander in and out freely. I spend so much time here now, sitting on the couch with my feet up on a suitcase (hard-sided, so I can set a drink on it if I need and my back to the firewood rack holding the next few days' heartbeat of heat. The wood stove creaks occasionally beside me, topped with the hum of a little heat-driven fan, and when it's windy I can hear the chimney singing. Outside is the winter's worth of firewood, right outside, the future sitting there in solid form and every week I split it and carry it indoors. Sometimes I go upstairs and get a jar of applesauce from the pantry, from the apple trees that where here before me, and I eat it.

This home makes demands of me and every demand is: stay, interact with me, I'm here, stay, you can't ignore me, stay. These demands feel like love.

I haven't opened every box from the moving years but I'm getting closer. Last night I took a rubbermaid of various things, noticed it was mostly winter gear, and I hung two dairy crates near the door. Shelves are beyond my budget, but dairy crates? I have a source. I labelled one "hats" and one "scarves" (considered, and discarded, "scarfs") and put the combination of work toques and unicorn toques in the one and the scarves from the box in the other. I took some other scarves off my coathooks and put them in too, which let the coats stretch out a little more.

The rubbermaid isn't empty but I'm one step closer to being unpacked. I have years of "important papers" to go through, mostly no doubt taxes and government correspondence about permanent residency and citizenship and paystubs that were so desperately valuable and so desperately hard to manage with all the moving, but can go on the fire now. There's another box labelled "ancestry" sent by my cousin on my unknown dad's side, and I think some sort of catholic baptism thing? My US birth certificate may even be in there somewhere.

Scarves and hats, two steps closer. In the summer I can reverse the crates and put pocket-vests and sunhats in them so I have somewhere to put eggs when I find them. Closer and closer.

The pottery wheel is out.

I've unboxed my sewing machine and ordered the part that got broken at Josh's place in 2016. I've made a spreadsheet of fabrics and put my patterns in one place, together, in one rubbermaid. I've assigned fabrics to patterns, pending toile making (I can't actually sew until the part arrives and I can fix the machine). I've cut out the base patterns, and much to my cat's delight have rolled out the big roll of paper to copy the patterns onto for useable templates.

I carry water every day for the animals.

I split and carry wood once a week for the house.

I move through my kitchen, through my livingroom and its current sewing space but sometimes its butchery space, its soapmaking space, its seed-saving space, for myself.

The wood shifts in the fireplace. The dog exhales and shifts in her sleep, head and limbs akimbo. Outside the geese honk quietly.

Last night there was something that could help me living in my house and I just did it, powerdrill was there to hand, screws were there to hand, I knew what the next months would be like and where I would need something, I put that thing there without it being a wasted effort or a ding on my damage deposit. That's the story. As you see I can tell you stories all day. The stories are just the setup, though, the context and feeling of chaos and kaleidoscope and helplessness and slow inching towards healing.

The noun to all these verbs is me, the person to this home, sitting next to the fire and beside the dog and typing thoughtfully on my laptop. Me, in the same home where last night I hung two dairy crates from an unpacked box, where four years ago I came back to find my garden overgrown and remnants of wildfire smoke still in the air, where five and a half years ago I rattled around on the floor in this basement with a puppy.

Somehow I'm still here.

Somehow life is still allowing me to unpack my boxes.

And you better believe I'm still planting things.

Josh is gone again. It was such a good visit, full of fun projects and a mix of together and alone time. Now I'm sad.

I'll get a little more sleep and write about it.

Another part of the PDA experience is that the more I cover it up and act reasonable, the more the energy builds. I got that wording for the telework agreement this morning and was literally in panicky tears, which-- I can't do that two weeks in a row. So I called a counselor, talked myself down, got some validation that it seemed like an overstep, contacted the union and the diversity and inclusion office. I can't contact my boss to see if video/photos are ok because he's on vacation; until I get him to agree to that I'm not "safe" so all of the rest of this is either masking reasonably "I'm not sure if you're aware... I'm contacting you to better understand my options" or just emotional exhaustion.

But regardless of what else is going on, this pressure remains (and will remain to a lesser extent as a background threat even if they agree to a one-off exception for me) and the pressure builds. Last week the escape I was envisioning was a new job; this week it's moving to a new province and posting all this publicly on every possible forum.

It's been decades since I've learned I can't act on this sort of thing when I'm feeling it, but not acting does feel an awful lot like holding back the ocean with my bare hands. Luckily I'm good at that.

Well, this is PDA hell.

My employer has decided that the province I live in requires in-person home safety checks in order for us to work from home. Please note all the people who work remotely in this province, many of whom I know personally, do not have this requirement.

They've already used the safety card to say they are going to come to folks' homes if we're offline for more than an hour. That really gets my back up, but I've been handling it. If I print something out to read for work, I just set a timer and move the mouse every once in awhile or something. It's incredibly stupid but now it's been eclipsed.

I really don't want to let anyone into my house. There are tons of reasons, of course.

I feel super unsupported on safety in the first place: this is an employer who pays to dispose of ergonomic office equipment rather than allow us to bring it home (ergonomics is the safety they're inspecting the house for) and who does lip service to mental health but doesn't provide mandatory mental health anti-bigotry training or money for more than three mental health provider sessions per year. They've mentioned pulling training opportunities if I'm going to take extended sick time.

I don't like people in my house in the first place.

I don't trust my boss (!) coming into my house not to make discriminatory remarks until the end of time based on what he sees.

I don't like the look of being forced into a private space where I can't access help with a dude. It's not that I think my boss is gonna sexually assault me; it's that I don't like an institution which requires me and everyone working from home to put ourselves in a situation where that may occur.

But also I do not like being forced to do things that violate my body, and my house is my body. I might choose to allow things I don't like, but this isn't being presented as a choice.

My PDA is SCREAMING right now. I'm going to go into the garden and cry, come back in, cry some more, scream and rock and squeeze my nails into my palms and wander from room to room wailing. Then I'm going to look very calm, wipe my eyes, sit down, log into my work computer, and read the email again. I'm going to write a polite clarification: "is there a way to do this by video or through pictures, I don't feel comfortable with my employer in my home" or something. Then I'm going to go back into the garden and cry and stare into space and not even see the garden. I might dig a hole and plant something.

People don't usually see this part of me. In some ways my PDA doesn't allow them to; knowing I'm like this is a kind of power and I don't like people having power over me, especially people who have no empathy, no understanding, and have not shared vulnerabilities of their own. I'd mask; I'd smile. If I learned about this at work I'd say nothing and just be silent but when I got home it would bubble over.

And here's the thing. It literally feels like dying, or honestly worse than dying. It is the most extreme fight-or-flight response you can imagine. It feels like this will destroy me. And even if work comes to a compromise around allowing video or pictures I'll still have gone through this truly terrible feeling.

I'm so grateful I'm called in sick already for the ongoing whatever it was this week. I can process this, but on the other hand, there's no processing it. There's no thinking it through, rationalizing it, anything like that. There's just enduring the sense of helplessness and violation and threat until it's over, then trying to forget it ,all while trying to live my life and smile at my friends and eat dinner and whateverthefuck else people do.

This isn't a super rare experience. This is what PDA at its medium trigger feels like. This is my life some of the time, and honestly not an insubstantial amount of the time. I could lean into it and get self-righteous but that only makes it worse when its forced to happen anyhow. People supporting me and saying, "yeah, that's bad" makes it worse. Everything makes it worse. That's why I go to the garden.

Edited to add: I can do none of the above now because I wrote that I would do it, which translates it into a demand, and I have zero ability to accept demands now. Isn't this fun? This is my actual life.

You've flipped it. It used to be that you huddled in community against the big bad dark forces of nature. Now you imagine we can huddle in the safe embrace of nurturing simple nature against your forsaken communities.

You are in for a shock.

Since you're human you're probably also in for a pendulum swing, probably to bemoaning the destructive forces of climate. When you come from the city you're used to having humans, usually just one or two, to blame. The landlord did this. The other driver did that. If only he hadn't been elected all would be well. You don't believe humans to be part of the natural order so you don't relate to humans as a natural system.

When you go to the country you bring your sense of blame. If only that storm hadn't taken down the power (or if only those damn humans had built an uninterruptible power grid). If only it hadn't got so hot that day. If only the well hadn't dried up.

When you go to the country we bring your sense of entitlement, the world should be there to serve you. It fails to do so. It rains twice on our picnic and dries up when your garden is thirsty. The trees are in the wrong place and the ants eat your structural beams. Unbidden also it serves you a gorgeous rainbow with your breakfast and a patch of ripe, improbably huge berries in the evening and sends the perfect cool breeze across your skin.

If you leave community because lack of control over humans scares you, because human behaviours feel like a runaway train over which you have no control, I have bad news for you about nature. Nothing there is designed for you; you merely can live within it if you learn to accommodate and band together with other people. If you observe very closely and learn very well you may be able to steer with a tremendous amount of work.

In the city it's easy to forget that food and water are prone both to great abundance and to great scarcity. It's easy to forget that trees both grow fruit and fall-- fall across your driveway and where are you without a chainsaw then? You're used to being able to plug in an air conditioner, flood another valley for electricity, and channel that power into surviving the summer heat with maybe only a second thought.

For all your wailing about climate these days none of that has changed.

When I sit down to write a post I feel arrested, my body suddenly frozen and blank. It's a similar feeling to how PDA seizes me sometimes and I'm not saying it isn't that, but I'm also not sure it is.

It's summer. Covid is functionally no longer limiting most folks' choices of behaviour except perhaps to keep them a little more strongly in (I use this word deliberately) cliques they by now prefer to unfriends even if they didn't prefer them previously. People are busy.

I've already written elsewhere about the lack of interdependency I feel in my life, how I miss it. It seems to have always been an issue for many neurodivergent folks to navigate what having people in their lives sometimes but not other times looks like; they say autism has black-and-white thinking (you're there for me or you're not) and I feel that; they say ADHD struggles with object impermanence and while I don't know about ADHD I know that my sense of people in my life recedes when folks are too busy for me. A lot of folks have interacted with me lately in ways apparently of their choosing and then expressed regret at doing so afterwards. That's hard on me; it leads me to take my distance.

And so I freeze when I sit down to write in part because I want to hide myself from these people. If they are not in some way mine, I want to not in any way be theirs. I want to hide both my hurt and my little joys from people who feel, to me, to have abandoned the work of me but keep me around for entertainment.

Writing that, I know that I also very firmly want to be in a space of being wanted and consented to with my interactions right now. Folks who come to me under obligation, instead of freely: those aren't the folks I want around. And it's also true that I haven't before let anyone make me stop writing on their behalf and I am not about to start now. So here I am, writing.

I talk about people this and people that but here's the thing. The crows ate most of my corn trial and it broke my heart and I had no one to talk to about it so it got stuck in me and I haven't processed it yet. It's big and it hurts and talking to a person about it is stabilizing, whereas writing about it means I go right down into the darkness until I reach the bottom and I'm scared to do that. When I sit down to write the corn trial looms up and threatens to overwhelm my feelings and so I can't write about anything else.

So I guess I'm resentful and restless around people because I want someone to make a safe space for me to talk about this and they haven't and won't.

I'm also in the dark part of my cycle right now, the cycle that was worse last time around and feels like it's gonna be worse this time around. It takes a lot more to settle me at this time.

I need to write about corn, loss, the process of pain and then unfolding that into fertilty and new options, but I need to feel loved when I do it.

And I think to do that I'll need to go sit with what's left of the corn, and plant my new round of it.