Greenstorm's Journal

The other day Angus messaged me to say he'd biked past our old apartment and it looked exactly the same. That night I dreamed about him and woke up with a fragment humming in my mind:

I dreamed of you so hard
My love
It did my heart good
And it was almost enough.

On the weekend mom came up. She's farmsitting while I'm gone doing pagany and pottery things and visiting Tucker. I had rested pretty much solid the two days before and was going to clean up on the day she arrived -- it's a 12-hour drive so I thought I'd have plenty of time to tidy up the house. Turns out she left at 4am, so she arrived when things were still chaos (I'd got about halfway through and then taken a nap, thinking I'd have time).

It's actually quite a nice visit but despite having told her about my weird body stuff lately I haven't been able to actually rest while she's here. I'm pushing through, and that just means I go through the heirarchy of symptoms: tired, then dizzy, then can't breathe, then headache, and then the next seems to be that my muscles alternately are too tight and too loose and my joints hurt. I could say, "hey, I'm going to go lie down for a bit" and she does that so it's not like there's not precedent, but I don't. The feeling of being a prey animal growing up is embedded so deep. The feeling of not being supported emotionally goes so deep.

That said, mom asked some questions when I was telling her about stuff, especially PMDD, and she seemed curious about diagnosis and supportive. I know she had some pretty intense cycle issues through her life, though I suspect they were mostly physical (?). Not sure she'd mention it if they weren't. It all comes from somewhere.

I'm worn out and I want to go somewhere safe and quiet and curl up in the dark and feel my feelings and be loved. And it's not-- it's just a wound and I can't imagine my life without it, nor what healing it would look like. I love mom so much but there's a level where we don't know how to be family to each other, or maybe don't know how to speak to each other about it. I don't feel like she doesn't love me. I see the things she does in her own love language, cleaning and coming up to farmsit and doing conversation with me and for so long trying to get me to exercise with her. I just don't know how to be parented by anyone other than myself, maybe.

And I don't know how to be someone's kid. This maybe hits one of those wells of shame around PDA I carry around: I'm not consistent, I can't do what I'm supposed to do, and I know that to mean that most people don't believe that I love them and can't feel that I care. I withdrew from my brothers more or less completely because I didn't want them to depend on me and then for me to not be there when they really needed me. Part of this is based on an old unhealthy understanding of what support looks like -- no one person really can be there all the time, and that's ok. Part of it is that I really can't be there in the same ways that most people can. And, yeah, I carry shame for that.

Anyhow, it's overcast and I'm sad today and my emotions are feeling tender and I'm at work looking like a normal person for all I'm worth. I'll spend time being tired.

It was awhile ago I came to terms with my dad living inside me: first my stepdad, charming, insecure, demanding, controlling, smart but maybe not clever, failing his whole life, pretentiously stringing together obscure references in patterns no one else saw, never letting anything go.

Sometime after that I came to terms with my dad living inside me, at least how I picture him from the small fragments I have; he ran off when I was very young so as not to hurt me, mom said. He lived in the bush for awhile in Florida, I was told. He was happy at the end, I was told, and left to ponder the implications of that. Hard relate, to be honest.

It's now, in this spacious winter when I'm alone up in my home, splitting wood and hauling water, that I am finally coming to terms with my mom living inside me. For so much of my life she has been the only parent I know. So much of my resistance in life has been to her voice, has been to learning not to have her voice be mine. It takes a lot of silence for me to finally hear the whispers of her as an accepted part of me. It doesn't escape me, though, that I am so much of her embodied, and with the exception of her marriages my life echoes hers in broad strokes in many ways.

It feels like something profound will happen when I love all the people who are parts of me, as parts of me, fully and without reservation. I'm not there now but it seems within mindshot, a couple glades over, a little ways down the path.

It helped. Gonna not think about it for a couple days.

I was going to be taking a summer student out into the bush, maybe for the first time, today. Instead he's off sick and I can go or not as I please. Before I decide I'm going to steal a couple minutes to actually write.

Last night I was out in the garden. I came in and mom was on the phone in the livingroom, the kind of phone conversation where even though it's theoretically not on the speakerphone I could hear both sides. I puttered in the kitchen a moment, went up to the loft to mess with my door, and I could still hear the conversation. They were talking about me. The guy on the other side kept referring to me as "your daughter" to mom. He was talking about how farming was a lot of work and didn't make a lot of sense to do, something like that, and mom was agreeing: "I don't know where she got it from, we did it a bit when she was a kid and you'd think she'd have learned" and "probably for a few more years before she gives up, it's a lot of work" were fragments I heard.

I said, "I can hear both sides of that conversation, just so you know" and they shifted topics a bit and talked about the pigs and more details some. But.

Two things. That's when I realized just how unknown I am to mom. We do not talk about our feelings - she was the main policer of my feelings as a kid, particularly she tried to shut down my meltdowns when my emotions just got really big, so I know not to take my emotions to her from that experience even though our roles now are so different. Further, and I guess possibly because of that, she doesn't know that I love this. I describe the garden to her but I don't tell her-- you know, I think most of my people understand, when I describe the garden, that I love it; they know the detail and the knowledge and the attention I give it are my way of loving things. I don't think mom knows that I get fulfillment and completion out of what I do here. I don't know why she thinks I do it.

I think it would be good for her to know? Reassuring? But she might not be able to understand it. If I got married to a person, or-- I don't even know, what are the typical markers of success that are supposed to be happiness? Maybe she'd understand that. I think she was glad of the possible A&E thing, even though I don't think she understood it. I don't know.

So there's that. And there's also Tucker, who I'm honestly too tired to write about I guess. Mostly, when I'm done dating someone in an intense, full-time way, I end to take a break for a year or two to reset. This doesn't mean no communication but it does mean not much, nothing that can pull me back into the old patterns of behaviour. It lets me get free to reshape my life without them; then they can be added back in when those habits are broken and replaced by something else.

He's-- you know, always right after a breakup you think things might change, someone might use that as a wake-up call and start doing what you needed from them. Sometimes they even do it a little, around the edges, for awhile. But my way of relating to him is the same as it's always been, which is definitely no surprise but also definitely not great for me. He's not going to plan the shape of his future to make this easier for me or more likely to continue, he is going to do short term things to make it easier, and at some point he'll get frustrated and burnt out on those short term things and become resentful. Long-term planning would make those higher-effort short term things easier but that's not his way.

We're still talking sometimes, on the phone, in the evening. A couple nights like that in a row and it feels like before: it feels like the kind of connection I'd be expecting someone to make time and space for me, and where I make time and space for it. That can't stand, it just kicks this ball down the road some. I can probably skip across it like a stone over a lake: when I feel that connection I can pull back, stay away a few days, then dip back in. I can set some structure to ensure it doesn't happen, like maybe I'll only talk to him on weekends, or on weeknights, or on Tuesdays, and only if we're both free.

I go and see him this weekend and I honestly don't know what it'll be like. My expectation is we'll argue a bunch at the end, like we did at the end of the last visit, because I'm shit at sticking my fingers in my ears and pretending everything is the same, and he is hurt by overt acknowledgement of relationship change. It's also possible it will be fine. I really do not know, but I will most certainly see. It'll probably be good information to decide if how soon we'll do something like this again.

Oh livejournal, I only come to you when I can't find peace. I've been so quiet, that's been a good sign? I've been busy and it's been mostly good if a little overwhelming. But now...

I'm mourning the death of my normality today. Some things have happened. I need to tell you about them.

I read an article about the game Cards Against Humanity this morning. I learned someone I knew relatively distantly, but who'd knit a scarf I own and smiled a lot, died very recently. And my boyfriend doesn't want me to tell his family I'm poly or to go to pride with them (they're in town from the maritimes).

After I reposted that article someone said, 'me too'. And the only thing I'd heard said about it before? 'No one could feel that way'. Well, I feel that way. When you think something that I am or could be is innately hilarious and laugh about it when I'm in the room you hurt me and you lose my trust. Likewise, when you're ashamed of something that I am, when you're hiding it from people, not for my protection or on my say-so but because you don't want to be tarred with the same brush? You hurt me and you lose my trust. That's not a negotiable sentiment. That's the feeling of it.

I feel like I'll never be in a room where people aren't rejecting something that is me with half of their thoughts. I feel (as always, I suppose) that people love the abstraction of how forthright and open and honest I am about myself but don't want the consequences of being that way themselves and want me to hide myself just for them. I feel like I'm inconvenient to everyone except when I'm a symbol or entertainment. I feel like I can't trust very many people to be ok with my being who I am.

Thing is, I'm too invested in being myself at this point to stop. Thing is, you can't love me without loving those other parts of me; I don't know what you're loving then, but it is not me. I'm at a loss for how you could *like* me without being somewhat in line.

The song I'm listening to says 'what if I was made that way?'. I am made this way. I made myself this way if nothing else.

And I'm tired of it, but I can't put who I am away. I can't put it away and I don't want to, because I can trust myself to stand up for myself when I need, to protect myself when I need, and clearly I cannot trust other folks to do that for me. So this is what I get, tired but one foot in front of the other. Forever.

I've spent parts of my life wishing things were "worse" so I could feel like my emotions were legitimate. Dad was horrifyingly emotionally abusive: he ignored me, he said terrible things, he denied my feelings in all cases. I spent years wishing he'd hit me so my feelings that he was doing something wrong would be justified. Poly, sex, gender, orientation, nudism: I'm invisibled, the butt of the joke that friends laugh at, not mentioned, not on the list of choices given me, nothing that's done is a big deal. So I wish sometimes that people would say something truly awful, hit me, attack me so that it would be justified. Because being denied as a human, because not being included, because recieving defensiveness rather than empathy doesn't seem bad enough to justify my feelings.

Except it is. I feel these things, so it is.

And today I'm tired, but I can do nothing about it but go spend a couple days on the ocean with my mom who at the least does not do these things to me, who believes I'm worthy of love as I am, and hope she stays around for a very long time.