Greenstorm's Journal

Not posted to fb yet, but there will be two today. One written a couple days ago, the other written today.

#15 Threshold-my-home, or, the trauma from years of displacement begins to ease.

Cloverhome
Scents of bees and safety and mom when I was little
Summer beckoner of lazy shade
And misty mornings with glimpses of glades between trees
Greeter-with-roses, pink and five-petalled and fragrant
Giver-of-bounty, grass and geese and aspens and apples
Wintersafe
Cedar cave of warmest wood
Ship’s hull that cups me against the wind
Place with warm fire’s beating heart
And the snore of sleeping dogs
Your walls are my living skin
Your fields are my tendrils of thought
That lead me
Back to the door
Way
Of
My
Self


#16 First smoke of wildfire season

When I write I think about displacement
Every day.
When the fires come I think about it
Every minute.

It’s a hot spring and my body is tense already
With the memory of wildfire smoke
And fleeing with trailers of animals
And that’s when I had somewhere to go.

Tension that came from years ago
Fleeing poverty from roomshare to apartment
Trading freedom for a roof over the head
And a couple months in the same bedroom.

Someone always helps me in the end
But it’s hard to trust the world without a system.
What happens when I’m not pretty enough
Or smart enough for this charity to fulfill my rich friends?

Whatever soft space once existed
Whatever joy peeks out and runs wild
In clear summer air is scarred
With drifting smoke awakening every old terror.

Land of my land of my land of my land of my
Heart of my heart of my heart of my heart of my
Body of my body of my body of my body of my
Memory of my memory of my memory of home.

You for whom the earth is not your body
You for whom the walls are not your skin
You for whom the seasons are not your heartbeat
Save me now
I’m curled under the bed
Hiding
I’d be crying if it was safe to move.
Bury me here
So my body can finally stay home.

So my dad is crazy. I don't have a ton of interest in trying to diagnose him, but his behaviour is well outside anything even near normal in a society. He hasn't really held a job. He has initiated and attempted to initiate a lot of very weird lawsuits. He writes relationship-revenge books and self-publishes them. He didn't mow his lawn for 24 years so now the mouldering house inside is invisible. He knows how things should be done. He's That Guy running in local politics. Etc.

Two of my three brothers are crazy. They have been institutionalized in various ways, they're on psychiatric meds, etc. They've experienced psychosis, breaks with reality, etc.

My third brother isn't crazy.

He didn't live with dad when the other ones did. He had a pretty reasonable but sorta bouncy career trajectory. He hasn't had mental health Incidents, maybe a bit of depression like everyone. He works in trades, he's starting to supervise now. He's married. And.

He's been talking lately about how the news media is a vast conspiracy, I think in connection to wanting to vote for a far-right party in support of free speech.

He dropped it into a family chat and I'm having trouble even reading it because I'm terrified. This is the freeze response. It's an enormous trigger response, I literally do not know what is actually happening. We'd, I mean. If I was close with anyone of us it was him.

Please don't let this happen.

Please don't let him turn into my dad (though to be fair my dad supported the same political party I'm planning to vote for federally, so. But I'm just afraid. My body is afraid. I'm afraid of who dad was. I'm afraid of how much contempt he had for everyone who didn't serve him).

What I should do is listen and clearly state what I think: there are lots of frames in the world, there is always room for interpretation, and folks will always be interpreting in ways that they need to for various reasons. It's your job to parse all that and do your own interpretation. It's your job to be knowledgeable in the things you care about. And people having other frames, or multiple frames existing, doesn't mean there's a conspiracy or that things need to be squashed. It just means that there are people.

Mom is handling it cautiously and with real grace and integrity.

Everyone in the world is people, my brother. They're not objects set to willfully obstruct you. They're people. Inside they are just. Like. You. Don't go down dad's road.

Ok. Since I'm completely unable to work right now, let's see what my deck has to say.

First: My emotions and intuition, my heart, is all at odds with itself. My body and needs are still safely held in the moment while I sort this out. It's safe.

Then: I have a calling. I need to honour it. My life has been well-served by following this calling, it's brought me here, and it's important I don't forsake it. "Embrace learning through mutual exchange and open conversation" "Think about what you are being inspired to create right now, what wants to be built and shared by your hands?" "How can you maintain momentum without being imprecise or impulsive?"

My well is coming up empty right now. It's true. And so I'm not able to orient towards creating, building, contributing towards the world. I don't feel a part of anything.

But the idea of precision always calls to me. It's how I anchor general principles in the real. Operationalizing my calling is always the issue. What will my hands be doing? What movements will my body be doing? Who will I serve?

And, don't be impulsive. Ok. So don't move to Haida Gwaii.

Furthermore: Battling doubt about where to go from here. Yeah, no shit. "Pack light. Release. Prepare for departure." I think I've done that. "When you struggle to trust your own sense of direction, know that you have support. That may take the form of friends who help you process and offer guidance […] or intangible cosmic signs." "Be patient with the future, it will reveal itself slowly." "Gather your energy back to yourself and get ready to fling it ahead of you like an arrow."

I'm not finding direction in my friends right now, though I'm finding support. It's my friends that feel like what's knocking me off my course. I don't know how to balance the internal and external.

Oof: You're on a long slow burn, building up your vision gradually over time. Focus resources internally. And then basically, don't forget to support and hold space for other people (I have not been holding space for other people).

Plus the deck says: stop being impatient. Trust the process.

It says: "there is freedom in disrupting the status quo, for myself and for others"

So basically: be patient, and stop being so focused inside myself. Engage with the outside world and consider it in my process. My life is driven by this engine of my calling, don't forget that and do let it orient me, but that engine isn't only there to serve me.

Ow.

That was a disaster.

My neighbour was supposed to come over today and look at where I thought the waterline from my well might be. Avallu had been defensive towards him previously, possibly because he's been next door a lot with a big dog of his own, so I broke out the leash and hot dogs.

In the story that follows I'm second-guessing my actions a lot but I'll try and say it as straight as I can. I'm really struggling right now.

I gave the neighbour hot dogs and he was tossing hot dogs over the fence towards them, which is how I always start introductions. Then I had the neighbour come in the gate and toss hot dogs. Avallu seemed to be good, lying down on command, and I turned around to latch the gate with the leash still in my hand. At that point Avallu leapt at the neighbour and bit his arm.

I thought he'd just grabbed the neigbour's sleeve, and the neighbour said fairly calmly "he's got me" so I hauled Avallu into the house, locked him in, and came back. At this point the neighbour was on the outside of the gate, locking it behind him.

I don't remember this next part well, but I said something, and he said he had to go home and fix his arm and took his jacket off-- and Avallu had taken a chunk out of his arm. I said something like "he actually got you, got you" and I think screamed a tiny bit. The neighbour nodded, he was pretty calm, and there was a little back and forth. It went something like:

Him: nothing against you, but if that dog comes on my property he's dead
Me: I fully understand, I'm so so sorry.
(something here I don't remember)
Him: If a kid were to come by and put his hand on the fence it could go badly
Me: (something about how obviously it's not important right now, but he had let other people in and this hadn't happened before)
(something)

At some point, I think before I knew how bad the bite was, I'd said something like if he was willing to stand far from the fence and take treats to try to desensitize Avallu I'd appreciate it but understand if not, and he said something like he was afraid he wasn't interested in that.

He left, and I completely fell apart. I called the local kennel -- I'm worried about finding a good dog trainer in this area, but they'll be the ones who know who to talk to maybe. Then I called the emergency counseling line through work's plan and got myself less hysterical - she was a really good one-off counselor, I'll tell you that.

I'm equally terrified at the idea of Avallu hurting someone, Avallu hurting someone else now that I know he'll actually bite, Avallu being hurt/put down, and trying to repair the relationship with my neighbour.

So.

Every one of my relationships comes with personal work that needs to be done. If I want the person I must do the work. To be with Angus I needed to learn to be kind. To be with Josh I needed to learn to allow a partner autonomy. To be with Tucker I need to learn patience, and to hold space for feelings even when I can't fix them.

To be with Avi with any depth I'll need to learn not to be avoidant. That's one I've been nibbling at the 3edges for years but I haven't ever faced it head-on. My coping mechanism has been either to observe when I'm becoming avoidant and then to leave, or to find someone more avoidant than I am.

Factors:

I need time and space to myself and have often felt guilty about that when I'm needed. I don't know what it looks like to balance someone else's need for me and my own needs or desires; I have no model for how that's well-handled. If someone has lots of other supports the pressure on me is eased so this might be a societal issue, but still it is a real issue in this society.

I like to really super focus on my people or things sometimes. I like to dive in and immerse myself in a person or an activity. My attention is seasonal, it comes in waves. So don't even want a consistent hour a day with everyone; I want weeks on and weeks off with maybe a little connecting thread of contact through the whole.

But also.

In NRE people are super inspired by me and their lives look different. Then the NRE fades and I can no longer make people's lives better by loving them a lot. I see people attribute wonderful things in their lives to me, wonderful developments, and then... they stop. And I feel useless, like a damaging influence, like I've failed, and I don't want to be part of it anymore. But I still love the person, so I remove my presence so it stops hurting them.

It's tough for me to hold space when my actions make people unhappy. I've only recently learned I will always make people unhappy when I rub my life up against theirs, and that the goal is not to never hurt anyone but is instead to hold space when I do, and to decide how to proceed. So I figure I'm poisonous to folks' lives because I hurt them, and I spend less time in their presence to hurt them less.

I can't hand over my bodily autonomy. It's a given in our society that if you love someone you'll grant them some level of control of, or exclusive access to, your body. I can't do that; I've been told to me face many times that means I don't really love people. I believe my love is broken, is flawed, and that it can't be good for anyone. So I withdraw my presence because I don't deserve to be near my partners.

I can't be there 100% of the time for anyone. I no longer trust my ability to know when I'm really needed. If there are folks who seem like they really really need me or else their lives will fall apart, I really want to be there for them but I am terrified of letting them down that one time they really really need me. So I control expectations by never being there when needed instead; that way I can never let anyone down.

I don't trust my ability to not hurt people. I learned to defend my needs, not with open vulnerability, but by tearing down any competing needs. I try so so hard not to do this but. I'm terrified of folks who won't push back against it, who won't say "that's unacceptable, please don't treat me that way". What if I spiral back to the way I grew up relating? So I give space from folks who are bottomlessly soft and accepting because I don't want to spend my life tearing them apart.

And then once I've started avoiding I feel bad about it and avoid more, because I don't deserve the presence of someone I love when I can't be forthright about my fears to them, and instead just leave them hanging.

And it spirals. It compounds.

I've done some work on parts of this.

I've been forthright in new relationships that I won't have constant availability and that I'm cyclic. I've worked, and always will work, on holding space when I cause pain. I've tried to select partners that don't believe my style of loving is innately flawed, and I get rid of ones who do so I don't reinforce those notions. I try to be clear when I need space, to own time apart as my own thing and not a punishment for my partners; I also try to be forthright about what kind of time I like to spend so folks know what to look forward to from me, not just what they won't get.

But.

It may be time to integrate it now. No, it's definitely time to integrate it now, regardless of what else happens.

These are deep old habits that hide behind avoidance and shame. There will need to be habit-breaking exercises, maybe a weekly assessment and check-in when I'm in unsettled relationships.

It's definitely something to dig my teeth into.

I don't want you to misunderstand me: most cold incidents happen right around freezing, when people get wet and then their clothes no longer function properly. We treat that sort of weather with a little more contempt, and our carelessness costs us.

But.

It's -40 here. That's where the streams cross, where Celsius and Fahrenheit meet. It feels perilous in my bones, at least whenever I'm not sitting home next to a really big pile of firewood and my woodstove.

It's not instant frostbite weather unless you're wet, and it's relatively hard to get wet at this temperature. I can go outside and do chores with single-layer work gloves and get cold fingers and my cheeks burn, but it doesn't damage me.

It's a little that nothing *works* in this weather. Batteries fail, so vehicles and flashlights and phones don't have juice to start or run. Tucker's little car won't start, and my 4runner with a brand new battery takes a bit. More concerning, my brakes don't really work; I get the feeling my brake fluid is, well, not super fluid in there and I really have to mash the pedal to have an effect. Normally my lights turn off when I use the fob to lock my doors, but they don't in the cold.

It's a little that the inside walls of my house get real cold and the inside of my windows and dog door ice over. The humidity drops below 10% (which is the tolerance of my equipment) because any humidity freezes immediately to the windows.

If you're dressed right and your car breaks down in cell signal (there isn't a ton of cell signal up here) you'll be fine. If you're in an accident, your car stops heating, and you are upside down or stuck in your car and can't think quickly to get help? You're dead.

Waterlines become an issue. My outside tap freezes around -25 or so.

Muscovies start to get frostbite on their feet around -25 too. If I don't manage them very well and carefully I have to cull.

The ground sounds like Styrofoam. Ice becomes like very solid rock, not really breakable or stompable anymore.

The laws of physics just seem different, and my body instinctively feels afraid. These are the days I don't think humans belong in outer space, it's just too cold. Maybe we don't even belong this far north.

A week of this, then it warms up, and maybe a couple more weeks of it this winter. Wish me luck.