Greenstorm's Journal

I had my eye exam scheduled in town a couple days ago. I checked in with my friend there and conveniently was in time to help her move dorms after the exam. Afterwards we sat and chatted and ate sushi; I drove back late, in the light, because it's summer. I don't think I got home till 8:30.

My eyes are great. Vision stuff has no cause in my eyes. Also, about benefits in Canada: eyes aren't covered at all by universal health care, and my employer covers half an eye exam every two years. Whenever I push back gently on the idea of benefits for government work being generally awful, people do one of two things: "I didn't notice because my spouse has insurance and between us things are covered" and "oh, well, there's the pension". The myth persists though.

Not great but not surprising is that I am super exhausted. I got home, slept, went outside when I woke up to try and shake the tiredness, decided to work from home last minute, napped most of my breaks, napped after work, got in to work today and am tired and also it's just as hard to see the screens in here as before. IT doesn't bother me much at home, is this a florescent lights thing?

Very glad to have the timing of the drive into town work out though. Definitely work both the tiredness and the 4-hour-round-trip.

Either way I'm off early today to see if the massage therapist can handle my restless leg stuff caused by the same medication that makes me tired. Trying to scale it back this weekend but I need to do some pottery stuff so we'll see where I end up.

Brain still bad, body is channeling that like a lightning rod.

On social media one friend is arguing in favour of public executions for billionaires (me: do you mean this, or is it a metaphor? my friend: it's always ok to escape abuse me: by killing people literally?) and someone else seems to be arguing for imprisonment of cis men, so that's always nice. Maybe I normally can just overlook these and I'm in a bad way, or maybe I need to do another round of blocking.

Maybe I should give up on the coastal crew completely and focus up here?

It's dark, I left home in the dark, it's half an hour before I'm done work so I'll be back in the dark, and we're supposed to hit -36C in a couple days. I should put on a podcast and film the windows or something tonight.

There was a nice work potluck today, though, with quite an interesting range of dishes. I normally love these sorts of things and I enjoyed it, but it didn't stick. I want to sit at home quietly and make things and patch holes.

You gather together. You become a family, a close and ritual-sharing but not necessarily completely-agreeing group, and knock around a shared space for a bit. There is food, and food rituals, and spending time in the kitchen. The house is full of food and people go home with leftovers. You catch each other up on your lives. You feel abundance.

I only had a couple people up for thanksgiving. It was the right number of people, on for the upstairs bedroom, one for the downstairs bedroom, and I took the new couch down by the fireplace. The cats got snuggled well. The first day was a bit of a mess because I haven't hosted here in so long, I haven't hosted people with unknown food stuff in so long (one was celiac and no garlic/onions and also a couple other things I didn't know details of in advance, the other was lower carbs), and I haven't hosted on this food system (lots of home grown stuff and not much place to buy stuff) ever except for close, known friends.

It was nice. The unknown person was more talkative than I expected, and I think a little too forceful for the other person to be completely comfortable, though I could rise to match it. She had overlapping conversational style, which was very nice. We got to playing in the kitchen and made cauliflower fritters and a squash pie (which in turn required making clotted cream and a gluten free pie crust) and I seared a goose breast. There was a garlic-free caesar salad that was actually quite good and a frittata made with pork cracklins and maple smores and a chicken soup. We processed a bunch of lard and dried some peppers.

Before they came I had a big cleaning push and got the house in better shape than it's been in awhile, moving some things out to the storage and stuff like that. So now that they're gone the house is nice and clean and useable. I need to set up my sewing soon, really.

It was good to get up early and talk to Kelsey, who is a morning person, and then stay up late talking to Kris, who seemed to be more of an evening person, but I definitely have some sleep to recover.

It's amazing to have Kelsey close. She's one of the friends (maybe the friend) I've had the most conversations about meaningful topics with (usually interpersonal and social structures) and now she's two hours' drive away instead of two incredibly expensive flights away. She's in a masters thing right now so hopefully she can find more time to come visit sometimes.

It was also fun to do shampoo and conditioner bars with Kris. She's done a bunch of recipe formulating and has done lab work previously, so she brought a bunch of fancy chemicals up and we made the things together after Kelsey went home. Also lots of talking, since we've been in each other's orbits for twenty-odd years but have rarely been physically in the same space.

It felt like a housewarming. My house feels warmed, like a welcoming space for me to hang out in and do my projects. Whether that's catching up on the social stuff, catching up on my cleaning, or laying down some good memories and/or novel and not completely self-controlled experiences within these walls I am not sure. I'm happy for it though.

My whole life, a thing I've always wanted from where I lived was the ability to have a bunch of folks over and do (mostly food) things. I'd traded that for safety and self-building for a couple years here, now maybe time to relearn it?

I do seem to be planning to take summer solstice for the pagan community's get-together schedule.

I'm also entering week 3 of the birth control and I seem happy. No way of knowing if that's environmental (Josh was here, then people were here, so I'm not lonely) or some other random thing or related to the pills, but I expect to go a second month on them and see. It makes sense that if my cycle has made me so strongly unhappy so regularly, that there's some magic mix of hormones that would not have that effect. Is it possible I found it on the first try? That would be AMAZING. Next up would be addressing cognitive issues and shading into stuff around executive function vs demand avoidance.

Three possible kinds of contact patterns with folks: regular or frequent substantive connections, regular check-ins with irregular or infrequent substantive connections, irregular or infrequent substantive connections.

Three other possible kinds of contact patterns with folks: supportive/hard times connections, celebratory/fun connections, maintenance/just whenever connections.

Makes sense to negotiate these in a friendship to make sure you're on the same page as the other person, right? So someone doesn't feel abandoned, or used for support, or like you hide rough times, or overcommitted, or whatever?

Tucker teases me about starting flirtations/relationships in the spring. I think I looked into it once and he wasn't strictly right, but anyhow: it's spring. Tucker is gone, not just physically but also in his loving-but-having-object-impermanence ND travelling way. Josh is far away. I've been deliberately looking for a plaything, not in a trivializing sense but in a very literal sense: someone with whom to play. All these apps haven't really got that for me, honestly I have Very Serious ties with my comet-type friends and most of them are in rough places right now, not playful at all.

However.

I went to the farmer's market and met that person who may be interesting. He's significantly older than I am, but I am twice as old as his daughter, so that's that. I'm going to sniff this out a little; it may be something I want to pursue. It may not be on offer, but I suspect it would be (he called and we talked for a couple hours), and (laughs) for an autistic person I'm awfully good at seducing folks. In fact I've missed it. So anyhow, the town may be offering me a spring thing. He's also not deeply embedded in any of the social-familial power structures of the town, so if it goes poorly I don't believe it will be as terrible as all that.

Anyhow, that's still in the sniffing phase, and in the chatting-with-partners stage.

Additionally, the person I get along with and have wanted to be friends with, but she has kids so her schedule is opposite mine: she has shifted her morning walk to before work. So I can pop down before work, walk with her and whichever other folks are along, and then go in to the office. I'll give it a start on Tuesday, it should be good.

So that's two opportunities I've been looking for that may have presented themselves. If I want to embed myself comfortably in this town, that's where to start.

One of the reasons I originally liked permaculture is that it's a deeply pragmatic approach. It says: look at what's going on, think about it, and then fit a system to it that seems like it has a high likelihood of working for your goals and for your environment. It offers some guidelines for how to do that.

I've been watching a permaculture channel on youtube called Parkrose Permaculture. The author of the channel was talking about saving the environment from a permaculture perspective. She said, think of it from a harm reduction and a good, better, best sort of system. She gave some examples along these lines: recycling is good, consuming less is better, advocating for right-to-repair and circular economies is best. Eating some organic is good, eating local is better, advocating for changing the food system is best. Her point was that doing something is better than doing nothing, that doing more is also great.

What she didn't explicitly say, but what I've been thinking about a lot, is that some of the left-leaning folks I'm involved with have a tendency to eat their young. It's easier to be upset at someone in the "good" category if you're in the "better" category; I think folks often tend to ignore the proactive part of the "best" category that she gave examples of, which is systemic change. I don't really want to be involved in these groups; I feel they've gone astray.

But anyhow, I feel like this approach to politics generally is a permaculturally sound one. Folks are more likely to step up when they're supported in what they're doing. As they learn more they can do more. And really we all should be advocating for systems that make it easy for everyone to do better things.

I'm pretty sure I had more to say about this when I started, but my mind is blanking and I have a meeting to get to. More later, I guess.

A friend of mine wrote this:

could this body be a wilderness
instead of a garden?
could it thrive, grow mysterious & intriguing,
develop shadows & secrets
and wild glens where herbs sprawl green
on the banks of burbling streams, and
aspens shiver gently in soft breezes,
their clean straight stems welcoming sun and wind.
could i be filled with endless summer sun
and the passionate torment of monsoon rains?
could i freeze hard in winter and come
to a complete stop
just breathing?

We played around in the comments a little, and eventually I added this:

could these humans be a garden
instead of a wilderness?
could they thrive, grow gracious and perceptive,
develop tolerance & knowing,
and walled rooms where creatures sprawl safe
in the murmurs of shared conversations, and
bodies melt in sympathetic support,
their nerves and muscles welcoming desired contact.
could i be filled with challenge and answer
and the passionate torment of empathy's exploration?
could i shed my armour in society and come
to a complete stop
just breathing?

She is yarrowkat / Kat Heatherington and you can find more of her here, her work is excellent: https://www.patreon.com/yarrowkat

But I want to talk about the process for a minute, because this felt really important to me.

I'm different from other people. That's really been the crux of this whole autism/PDA/whatever thing: it's that my experiences are just not the same as other folks, even given the same events. It makes folks very uncomfortable to know that my experiences are different from theirs so I spend most of my energy smoothing that over in various ways: highlighting the overlaps, shrugging off statements about "universal" or my own experiences, denying my own senses and the reality of my own thoughts.

A lot of folks don't seem to feel like people can be different from each other, so when I assert my experience they argue with me: no, I must have actually thought/felt some other thing. Or, if they accept that difference, they feel like then stating their own experiences somehow challenges the existence of mine, so they get real quiet. The concept of neurodiversity helps me put this into context. These folks don't believe in neurodiversity.

When someone states an experience around something I'm interested in, I want to find it fascinating. I want to dig in and compare. I want to both know their experience and share my own. Through this process I feel like I am both acknowledging/legitimizing this new experience and building knowledge about my own. So many folks view this as an adversarial invalidation, though, that I don't do it often. It's viewed as contrarian.

(I'm a little bitter: I grew up with "celebrate our differences" slogans and then when I go to do it folks feel attacked)

So when Kat wrote this poem (there's a bunch more to it) I kind of played with some of the lines. She identifies as a human, she is within the social and human sphere, and in the poem she's experiencing wilderness as external. I identify as a piece of nature, I guess, outside of the human sphere but interacting with it, and I identify wilderness as internal and humans as external.

In the comments of the poem we went back and forth: she'd write something, I'd use her formality of thought and her structure to invert her writing and gain a better understanding of myself, by using her lens. It was tremendously valuable. The exchange also reads as if I'm contradicting or challenging her. So for instance she'd write: "the wilderness is what doesn't fit. outside the comfort, the sunlight, the fence itself, it is what lies nameless and unknowable and necessary" and I'd write "humans are what doesn't fit. outside the intuition, the body, nature herself, they are what trade words for truth and congealed facts for certainty and busyness for the work of living and dying"

And through this process we built a thing, I learned a lot, and I also felt like I was allowed to exist as my actual self in the world: like making statements about myself didn't harm or challenge someone else. It was a precious experience for me. PDA never lets me just accept things, it always makes me assess them on their own merits (well, usually, I definitely have blind spots) and this leads to a worldview that's just... different. I got to play in that difference with another person, and I liked that.

Not quite sure where I'm going with this but I wanted to put the poem up there and to mark this. Notice what you like, so you can steer towards more of it if you see it around.

I can lie for survival, and a lot of my life did feel like that was needed. When I'm not in the kind of fear that comes out in my body, though, I am too resentful and angry at the pressure to lie to do it often. When I'm angry I can't lie but I can often misperceive the truth.

I've spent a lot of my life in the fear that lives in my body, often without knowing it. I've also spent a lot of my life outside of it: I've had a lot of life after all. When I'm afraid -- of being without food and shelter, of being without love or care or human consideration -- I often can't connect to other people in a real way.

When I depend on someone else for my needs I am afraid of them because they can withdraw support for those needs. My entire history is folks withdrawing Maslow's bottom-tier supports from me because I don't behave properly when my soul starts to wake up and connect. I'm too independent, intense, analytical, loud, absent, out-of-scale, inhuman, incorrectly emotional. People get deeply uncomfortable around that. They don't feel safe, they don't feel loved, they don't feel validated. If I only toned it down a little bit, shifted this or that a little bit, waited a little bit, compromised on a different set of things, was a little more secretive, lied a little more, then it would be ok. But it is not ok.

That's why I entered into this partnership with myself. That's why I'm here with Threshold. The land does not think I'm excessive: we understand and love each other and it's just ok. I don't need to be a little quieter, a little less intense, a little less excessive. I can put in my two hundred tomato plants and see what happens and the land doesn't tell me it's ridiculous or that it can't be done. We work together and out of it comes the joy of partnership I can't have on a longstanding ongoing basis with people. Threshold lets me decide how much of myself I'm going to put into what I want to do, then we do it.

People don't often ask me to be someone else completely. The manic pixie dream girl stereotype has served me well: people love a quirky unconventional person they read as female coming into their life and turning positive regard on them while they explore the edges of convention they'd never noticed before. People love someone weirder than them in the room who fits a comforting stereotype because it gives their own weirdness room to breathe; as long as I remain within the stereotype and follow the script I'm not challenging their construction of love or reasonableness. They love that at first.

I'm not a manic pixie dream girl, though. They are not the protagonist in my life nor can they ever be the center of it; I do not always believe or feel the right way about things; and I'm not even a girl. I love my body; I value my voice and my curiosity; I don't mind going big just to see what happens as much as I sometimes get caught in just details to try and understand what makes up the base fabric of what I'm doing. I believe in the world, not just as backdrop, but as a system we're all part of. I love the world. I love my self. When I'm safe, I love every fucking thing whether or not I'm supposed to. It's typical in poly to say that love is infinite but time is not and yeah: my love is very fucking divided. The only things it recoils from are real fear about my survival and from the demand to love and people only demand love from people they believe love them. For so many people love is a contract. My love isn't a contract. My contracts are contracts.

In any case folks like the first taste. I don't know whether this is because they don't perceive me fully until later or because I tone it down a little in the beginning. This is where I was confused with the autistic concept of masking. I can't "mask" well: masking is lying about who you are and it would destroy my place in the world with anger and resentment so quickly I'd be lying in the gutter or a jail before you could even blink.

What I do is veil. I draw a mist around me that obscures my inner engine, that quiets that loud thrum into a whisper. I say I like gardening instead of saying my life exists to interact with plants and I have done variety trials with nearly the entirety of my free time. I stay quiet or add my pronouns to my signature or zoom name instead of saying, "hey, I'm not a lady and I'm only fractionally a man, this ladies' night/women's group/no men policy makes me feel pretty invisible". I say I have two partners instead of saying I don't base my attachments or commitments on who I have sex with. I say "I'm not sure that will achieve your desired results" instead of saying that everyone deserves access to food, shelter, community, love, and security of person regardless of their beliefs and actions. I say there's a big urban/rural divide these days instead of saying "don't dehumanize my neighbours". I say I think people need more connection to the land instead of saying that the human/nature divide is a ridiculous artifact or that our focus on the land as either an anthropomorphized security blanket or a source of resources is an impoverishment of our souls. For that matter, I don't use the word soul much and I politely ignore when folks lean hard into body/mind dichotomies.

I veil. I dim. I quiet. I polite. It's not quite lying so it doesn't bump into my demands and anger. It just diminishes me, living in fear, treating everyone as if they were an enemy because I can't afford to test them just in case they actually are.

Facebook memes tell me I should tell my friends I love them more. I don't love my friends. I love the people I feel safe unveiling around and who also are willing to unveil around me. I love the people I can say the above to and they respond, not like I've just pooped in their livingroom, not like I've just kicked their puppy-selves, but with whatever level of agreement or arguement or indifference they are feeling about the thing. I love the people for whom my existence, as I am, is not a personal affront. They don't need to like me or get along with me or anything in particular. They just need to not kill me either overtly or subtly. And, what do we need not to be killed overtly or subtly? Maslow says: food, shelter, love, regard, curiosity, beauty. The Blackfoot who inspired him say: self-actualization, meaningful community, and the belief that community is safe into the future.

Autistic communities ask all the time, in a kind of oppression olympics, is it better to be able to mask and burn out and collapse in on yourself and forget who you are, or is it better to not be able to mask and be marginalized by society and lose fulfillment of your physical and community needs? I started this post to explore whether it was better to veil since maybe that was a less corrosive alternative.

In the end? No. None of it's really ok. It's shivering in the snow and eating tree bark when we should be recieved into the firelight at a banquet. That's my only answer that isn't a lie.

Having people around the house is extremely different from not having people around the house.

Tucker, my local partner, has bought a condo in Vancouver and is moving there in spring. Both my regular-ish partners will then live 1000km away. I'll be looking around for folks closer but that'll be a bit of a reach. Longer term stuff is not decided but.

My good friend Kelsey is coming to stay from the 2nd to the 12th (unrelatedly!). We can talk for hours and she's super awesome. We're both in kind of rough spaces right now. I'm so looking forward to seeing her. By the end of her visit I suspect I'll have a better perspective on things.

The flooding/destruction of all reasonable (<12 hour drive) connections to he south means that Josh's visit will be delayed till next week, which is probably for the best. It'll overlap with Kelsey's visit a little and that's ok.

Feed prices have risen from $170/bag to $210 and is no longer local due to a bad crop year. I will be doing a very substantial herd reduction both for $ and for my mental health, I need to be able to handle being pretty sad for awhile without being overloaded with animal chores.

I think my chimney is leaking air a little where it enters the stove, that or the gasket around the glass door is finally going. Stove is still workable but is accumulating soot around the glass and I suspect in the chimney faster than it should.

Duck and goose abattoir date is Dec 17th. I need to look into flying the meat down to customers and what that will cost.