Greenstorm's Journal

I think the solstice interregnum isn't a success, exactly. I'd been hoping to take a week off from the outer world. Instead I talked to both mom and Josh yesterday -- I normally have something like 2 phone calls per month, not 2 in a day! -- did a bunch of insurance and gun license renewal paperwork, and as one would expect after all that basically collapsed. Pretty much zero garden, and then this morning I had to run in to pick up some mail (neither couriers nor the postal service deliver to houses here, so when the dog food I order comes in, the dollar store which is the depot for courier services holds it and calls me to come pick it up).

I came home, made lunch, and fell hard asleep. Little Bear curled up on my legs and slept with me. It was the kind of sleep that feels like a hard cleansing rain to the mind, and where it takes a long time to remember how to move my limbs.

I want to go outside and do more gardening but I still feel exhausted and weak. It really is incredible how doing that mind work -- paperwork, socializing -- leaves me literally bedbound but if I can garden without any of it then I remain functional. I wish I knew the mechanism.

I've decided to attend a local(ish) SCA event in early July. It's in the big town nearby, a weekend's camping event. I can drive in and out as I choose, decide whether to stay the night or not and when to come back. I imagine I'll be able to sit or lie in the grass a lot. It's outdoors, which is obviously a lot comfier for covid. My local SCA friend has invited me to make some garb up this week, she does a ton of period sewing, so I'll bring some linen and maybe some wool and see if I can get my head around fabric craft again. I have actually been considering hand-sewing or hand-finishing some linen things for awhile; it's more straightforward than a sewing machine and much slower, so I may be able to handle it. Or, it might trigger the same issues as reading, and it wont' work. We will eventually see.

In the meantime I have fajita filling in the fridge and some wraps, a bunch of fruit, and I'm trying to work up the energy to walk back outside. The world is intruding into my thoughts again. When I try writing about it, it sounds terrible, but eventually I'll capture what I'm trying to say maybe.

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.

I've come up with a lot of ways to handle being upset. I write, I talk it out, I distract, I sit and feel it, I dance it out, I connect with new things, I connect with old things, I connect with my garden, I find patterns, all sorts of strategies depending on what's going on.

I do not have great strategies for what to do when I'm happy. I usually have a strong impulse to share joy or to make a plan to hold it. What I don't know how to do is sit with the intensity of it. I also don't know how to share it. I don't do joyful projects with other people in part because I don't do projects with other people (Josh excepted) but if I did I wouldn't know-- if you share the experience of making something, how do you then share the experience of pride and happiness and future-anticipation and whatever with someone? Do you just sit around and assume they feel the same? Josh will sometimes (years later even) comment on how happy he is with the pigshed we made and I'm happy with it existing as a memory of time we spent together doing the project, thinking together and working together, but I don't know how to share that with him.

When I'm happy with someone, say we're sitting in the car singing together or lying next to each other being close or sitting around a fire toasting meat or far away not talking and they do something that makes me feel like the world is perfect and wonderful and the moment rings like good crystal, I'm not sure how to share that. I know how to do things to make people feel loved, to learn their love languages and give them those things, but that's about creating a feeling in them and not in sharing a feeling when I have it. And love is different than happiness anyhow, for most people it implies a set of prescribed actions and thoughts and I'm just talking about happiness, about joy.

And when I'm planting the seeds of tomatoes or peppers I've crossed and they come up and I've created something in partnership with these plants, my mind and the world together, I can turn the energy into plotting out the next steps in the breeding process to distract but I don't know how to just sit and hold that feeling without it being so intense and overwhelming. Same as people, really.

I can deflect, distract, pour that energy into trying to drive towards a future with more of the same but I can't, I don't know, inhabit it.

When I'm upset the world comes apart, but when I'm happy the world also comes apart. When I'm upset I can talk through it and get support but when I'm happy? I go into myself, where I'm alone. Maybe I can write and hope someone finds and relates to that message in a bottle flung into the internet. But how do I share that experience? Or, how do I share myself, when I'm happy? How do I remain close?

Sometimes I just cry, and am held, and maybe that's the closest I've got so far.

Sometimes I play, like a dog with zoomies will frolic, but my play is weird and usually focused on wordplay and absurdities and few people can meet me in that space.

Anyhow, I don't know how to do this and it's probably part of why joy tends to come with an edge, I guess the edge of isolation and loneliness.

If Tucker and Josh read this they're gonna laugh, but: being close with an external processor is a whole skillset, isn't it? It's been a long time since I've spent much time with anyone who talks things through in order to think things through. That's how I operate; I talk my way through things, and so during talking I will catastrophize a bit and then rule catastrophe out, explore unlikely best-case scenarios, run through what-ifs, say all the things folks don't normally admit to and then release those feelings by talking. It's a big lift for my partners; they need to withhold belief and judgement because in working my way towards my correct actions and moderated feelings I pass through all this intense and ridiculous, off-the-wall talking.

That kind of talking needs to be set apart from the decision-making, relationship-navigating logistics discussions. It needs to be set apart from statements of intent and action; it needs to never be confused with clear communication of emotion.

So for anything to be successful there needs to be a way to differentiate and properly contextualize the difference between "this is new to me, I need to talk it out" and "this is new to me: here's my final response". There'll be cues involved; I suspect mine are talking quickly and continuously, using lots of what-ifs and eventualities in the conversation, not settling on any one particular scenario but instead flitting around. When my scenarios start to converge with likely reality, and when I start connecting potential multiple responses to scenarios ("well if that... then I could") then I'm likely coming down out of exploratory processing space.

And none of that knowledge works if it's not put into practice; I guess a check when a conversation starts to lift off of likely reality and get a bit wobbly is good practice anyhow. I've definitely been reliant on my partners to make that assessment and catch a conversation early on; it's a part of situational awareness that's not well-developed for me. Wherever this settles, that is a skill I would do well to pick up.

The danger with two external processors in a conversation is the tendency to spiral, for one person to pick up the most extreme part of the sensitivity analysis and iterate on that with their own most extreme version. It's easy to get so far away from reality that it's not actually processing, but is just digging a hole. So for me it's extra important to honour someone else's processing space instead of reflexively processing their processing at the same time.

I'm also super grateful I've had partners willing to hold space while I did so much of his work myself. It means that when I can't, when I don't have anyone to talk to for situational reasons, I've already had a chance to work through my needs and boundaries in similar situations and I have a body of experience to rely on.

Oof. Okay. This new thing has taken up some bandwidth lately. Today is a gorgeous day out. Time to shift some energy back to my garden. The tiller hasn't arrived yet but I guess it's just time to improvise-- just as soon as I'm done this workday. Oof.

And maybe time to think about setting an alarm to be sure I'm asleep on time. This sleep deficit has done from something to be tolerated to actively interfering.

PDA counselor is working out well. I brought up an issue, she gave me a scientific overview of it, how it relates to PDA, and some tools around it. This wasn't the space for talking through what I felt about things today, it was for getting things done.

I suspect this is what working with myself would be like. I'm kinda into it?

One of the ways I first heard meditation described was that it's like trying to keep a small child or an animal nearby: it will tend to wander away and you notice that and gently redirect it back over and over. Focus, they said, is like that: return your mind's focus over and over gently and persistently.

I think living a good life is also like this. Both day-to-day and over the long haul many things occur which pull us in directions. It's ok to go in those directions, to look, to play a little. It's vital to notice those movements and then to gently redirect the ones which don't serve the overall purpose. Over time noticing and redirection become more automatic.

Some of the things that want to pull me off-course are pleasant: the lure of relationships have always been a strong one for me. Some of the things that want to pull me off-course are less pleasant, either a fear of the path ahead or something that isn't what I thought it was like the cor viriditas situation. I do tend to be pretty single-minded otherwise, honestly. I don't like to do many things that don't align with my long-term path (was gonna say "goals" but it's less of an endpoint and more of an ongoing type of involvement with life I aim for).

This week has been a lot going on and now it's time to gently corral and steer back.

It's looking like the garden at the cor won't happen at all this year, which means all that energy didn't go towards anything. It also means I didn't put that energy towards this garden and there are many things - tomatillos, true potato seed, tomato variety trial, pepper grex, perennials, many more - that just won't get planted this year. I need to pull back my energy and focus on corn and squash and the saved promiscuous tomatoes - which I guess I could do a test row of direct seeded ones.

I've been meeting folks for butchering and for selling piglets every day this week. It's good to have money from that, it's good to have meat from that, it's good to have fewer animals to care for. However. Having an extra appointment every day is wearing on my ability to do things. This weekend I have a lot of time off from work and from going places. I'm going to avoid planning anything except being in my space and letting things happen.

The little piglet was in the house for two weeks (?) and honestly has made it kind of gross. It was good to get her cared for but she's out with a friend in the quail house. I can start returning home to, well, home. Things can go out into the shipping container, floors can get scrubbed, animal blankets and whatnot are already being washed.

Eating has been a little weird. I should definitely try keeping some things around that are very easy and also tasty. Maybe I'll do a pork version of the Mississippi pot roast or something.

The birds are still in my greenhouses and are supposed to be until mid-June. They need to be there but I also need access to my original garden around the white greenhouse. I'll confine them to the greenhouse proper so I can reclaim that garden.

I haven't made time to pick up that tiller at the co-op; I hope it's still there. If I do that tomorrow then my weekend will be more interesting for sure.

I've made and soaked my fava grex. I've made my squash grex. I've sorted my magic manna corn. Time to work on the other corns, the peas, the beans. Maybe time to plant a flat of cabbages and one of tomatillos, just in case.

I'm setting up a porch swing on the deck and a hammock in the garden, so I can have points to land when I go out there.

The path is being in my garden. The alignment is being in my garden.

What if I think of my mind as an animal in my care? What would I do differently? How would I keep it calm and happy?

I can play with it, but not stir it up. I can do some necessary husbandry but if my regular handling of it causes distress, I need to rethink how I handle it. I definitely need to let it settle between periods of distress, calm and play a little, restore trust.

This is a shockingly useful metaphor really.

I slept last night, all night, for the first time in-- a month or two? I woke up with that kind of boneless feeling and had to lie there for several minutes before I could be sure I wouldn't fall over if I got up. It used to be normal for me to sleep long and deeply, though it's never been normal for me to take time waking up.

Today is the doctor's visit I scheduled six weeks ago, because she was booking six weeks out. I don't remember why I made it. I guess I'll talk to her about autism and choose a random body thing. It'll be my first time talking about autism to a professional doctor type, I guess. I should probably be prepared with the differences between autistic burnout and depression, but I'm not sure how much I care about anything today.

I'm still tired, as happens when you start to catch up just a little on sleep.

I just want the next two months to be over. What would have to happen for me to want to be present in them? I think I need to meditate on that question a little. I can't make it happen otherwise.

A place where I really need to get down in the mud and wrestle, every time, is: if something upsets me, is it because something is a little off with me (trauma/interpreting through past experiences/trouble with transitions/etc/AFOG) or is it my emotions helping me see a real situation I need to remove myself from (bad for me and my core self). Of course, putting it into a binary like that really is the problem. I wrestle with each new situation, each new person, in this very ambiguous muddy slurry of neither land nor water. Sometimes I even come to a decision.