Greenstorm's Journal

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.

This is why folks need occupational therapists.

I'm sitting in my cubicle at work, seven feet in each direction from two loud conversations and 14' from a third. One of those conversations is the most recent in a string of several loud, angry conversations about who's running health and wellness and the social committee and accountability for updating the OSHA manual; one is about First Nations stuff which is super interesting; the last is also a string in a series of loud friendly conversations about fishing, mapmaking, birthday parties, and a sauna.

I've been here, with a break for lunch, for six hours. When I came in I was reasonably energetic and in an ok mood; now the endless loud heating fan is hurting my ears and my brain is flinching each time someone raises their voice. I am not able to work, I am not able to think. If I was in private I would cry for a bit and it might reset how overwhelming this is for my consciousness, but I am not and I cannot. I would cry in public because fuck these people, but I can't give them that level of vulnerability.

With the return to office they want everyone in the office on the same days, so we're all doing team things. That means I come in on the day the folks from the other office drive up, everyone talks, nothing gets done. My other day this week there will be fewer folks in the office and maybe I will get things done.

I did manage to print out a 3'x6' map of what I'm doing this summer, so that was nice.

I made my first okcupid profile the first night I left Kynnin. Kynnin was my first big love, the first person I really talked to. I sat up all night in a basement suite with my friend/new roommate answering questions about how I wanted my relationships to be.

In that profile I put this poem, and reading it feel as if I've come full circle. This is the right kind of pain for right now:

The Quiet World

In an effort to get people to look
into each other’s eyes more,
and also to appease the mutes,
the government has decided
to allot each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.

When the phone rings, I put it to my ear
without saying hello. In the restaurant
I point at chicken noodle soup.
I am adjusting well to the new way.

Late at night, I call my long distance lover,
proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.

When she doesn’t respond,
I know she’s used up all her words,
so I slowly whisper I love you
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.

By Jeffry McDaniel

Tonight I'm thinking about the end of my relationship with Michael.

We had written to each other, back and forth. We had spiral-bound notebooks and I'd write in one and give it to him, then he'd write and give it to me. I don't remember how many notebooks it was. Over time he wrote less and less.

When it was over I wrote so much. What I wrote then feels so resonant now, eleven years later, that I don't have anything left to add to it. I'm hurt tonight but my past self wrote this to me more than a decade ago, wrote this to my self, and it sets up some sort of harmonic ringing that is vibrating my bones. Time collapses. Space collapses and I can't feel my body. I just read what before I wrote:

( two entries worth of past writing )

Over and over I've posted this quote I received from Ryan, which he attributes to Hitherby Dragons:

“So what is Hell?”

“A place where there’s something you can’t let go of,” I said.

Now I try to climb back into my body, finish dinner, brush my teeth, set things out so I remember them for tomorrow at work. I want to sit here like a stone monument to myself all night, staring into space, reading old journal entries, reading old poetry. It's eleven years later, though. Somewhere in that time I've picked up the strength to shut the lid of the laptop just a little bit sooner.

Talked to the trauma counselor I got through the work line today. Every counseling thing through the work line is very goal-focused. We're supposed to set our goals. There's the usual stuff about how to ground out of distress.

Thing is, I think there's a more intellectual/philosophical issue going on. I think I'm bumping up against "lacks understanding". Somewhere in the big pause and deep breath of the pandemic I changed. I've always valued kindness. It was one of my favourite things about Kynnin, way back in the beginning of me being able to see and value things in other people. Kindness can be short-term, like softness or gentleness or support in the moment, or it can be long-term like building a secure structure or tearing down a harmful one. In all cases its driven by a feeling of well-wishing, of warmth, of caring, or of love.

I don't always practice kindness. Like everyone, I have wounds and fears that drive me away from it in self-protection sometimes. Like everyone, I thought, it's still an aspiration.

And so for my life I've viewed people as an enormous patterned chaos of striving. If everyone felt safe and supported, I thought, they'd be kind to others; it's their wounds and to some degree the lack of kindness shown to them that drive folks to harm others as they claw their way towards their own security. Through their clawing they may harm others and perpetuate the cycle but it's incidental and thy are all trying to do better. Generally if I can lend folks a real sense of being safe and accepted they will relax into kindness.

I like that worldview, I think it's largely accurate, and... I miss it. I'm not yet sure what's taken its place.

I don't really believe in personal exceptionalism. I don't believe that I am uniquely positioned to see things that others can't; I don't believe I have feelings that others don't.

And between those things I really struggle to see where folks are turning their energy, where they are able to know and understand that beings outside their singular individual selves exist, where they are able to connect with generosity and empathy and understanding the experiences of another. I need to see people doing that in order to believe that humans are ok.

Trying to write this out, it doesn't make sense and I'm exhausted.

Today I started picking sweet cicily seeds, which I candy in sugar syrup and then dehydrate and they are my favourite candy. I need to also pick chive flowers to go in vinegar.

It's supposed to get up to 32C this weekend, I'm not sure what the record high is for this area but I haven't seen that temperature in quite awhile. That used to be the lower end of my comfort zone, it's amazing how northernized I've become. Maye I'll put some more green beans in the ground and see what comes of them. Maybe I'll drive to a beach on one of the lakes and put my feet in the water.

I just took a long weekend and I was so happy. I'm so happy here, on the property, in the garden and with the animals. I'm so happy without people.

Something in me is resisting going back so hard. I can hear the gears grinding and shearing. I need to break this self down and rebuild in order to go back but I'm not sure I can break down a self in whom I am so happy.

If I were talking to a friend who explained this whole thing to me I'd tell them to disconnect fully. I'd say, don't go back.

I'm pretty sure not going back isn't an achievable trauma goal.

Abuse is such a solitary experience. It doesn't exist if there's trust in people in the world around you to help, to make things better. You only stay if you know you're otherwise alone.

I'm used to carrying that early feeling of aloneness. I'm used to reaching out to connect anyways. I'm used to that part of myself, to those experiences, being a piece of me that will always be unseen because no one can really understand those particular internal knots.

The sense of abuse, isolation, no-help-is-coming and no one will understand, that's bad.

The sense of abuse, isolation, no-help-is-coming and knowing that far too many people understand, that's worse.

This was a good but challenging two weeks at work. One of the real learning curves of this career change was managing contractors; not folks-helping-for-a-day-or-two but: setting up contracts, selecting contractors or using contractors mandated by the company or by a previous bid process, doing QA on work in areas I may rarely or never get to see across multiple types of deliverable, capturing and sending along the correct information from my organization in a useful format, and ending relationships with contractors.

A lot of this work is done either by email or phone.

Forestry contractors are a very mixed bag. As with landscaping you often have a-guy-with-a-truck who did this for someone else for a couple years and wanted to go out on his own schedule. Then there are mid-to-large companies with actual employees and sometimes even internal structure. In nearly all cases folks go into forestry because they want to be Out There, especially contractors who do most of the on-the-ground work (paying enough employees year-round to do fieldwork is seldom something the big orgs do). Again in many cases, folks go into forestry because they're just not that into people, though in larger contractor companies often the folks who are better with people rise into communications positions.

All this is a long way of saying, contractors are a very mixed bag of interactions. Sometimes there's conflict, which is always hard for me in a new context until I learn what boundaries I'm allowed to set-- can I fire a contractor for yelling at me? For calling me an idiot?

And sometimes the contractor is incredibly professional and does good work, like this last one. When that happens I tend to want to reward them with more work and with good feedback. I'm not always able to award contracts for good work though.

Normally I choose an informal register for talking to contractors. Learning tradespeak when I was landscaping was revelatory for me: code-switching into it has really helped me be accepted as a competent rather than just a woman.

This time, though, I have a supervisor who manages to both quote a lot of legal documents and sound very warm and personable while she does it and a contractor I like a lot who writes very professionally. I've been working hard to come absorb those skills through this contract negotiation. That's meant lots of looking up legalese, carefully drafting emails, consulting with my supervisor, and finally sending.

It's been really good. The contractor is great to work with and I am pretty sure we both successfully conveyed lots of goodwill through these very formal documents. Plus-

I haven't really been able to write since the accident in 2015. I got through the rest of school by using speech-to-text because the part of my brain that writes was gone but the part that could speak coherently still existed. I could do a sentence but could not put it into a paragraph for love or money. A lot of short-term memory was gone too so I couldn't formulate a paragraph in my head and then write it down, and even my trick of working bullet point outlines up into sentences just... didn't work.

This week I've felt like I could write again, a little. That is, I could think of a couple points I wanted a text to address, structure that text, and then put it down in a document. I could go back and edit it some and think about how the parts influenced the whole. These were only single-page documents but it felt like being home again.

Any week that has an interpersonal and a skill challenge that both end up successfully addressed is a good one. Any week that offers hope I may regain my writing ability?

The world changes and I change with it. I accept that. Some of that change is a shearing-away of who I was. Some of that change is an accretion, a hardening or intensifying of the remaining self. Sometimes, though, I get to regain something and that is a gift.

When a dead plant has sat on the windowsill for a couple months, that's me.

When sun streams over the snow, reflecting off wall and south slope alike until it's almost too warm for long sleeves in January, that's me.

When there's much more clover than grass and the scent comes in through the windows, that's me.

When the boards are rotting off the old fence but the posts are still standing strong, it just needs new fencing panels, that's me.

When the grass and rhubarb and aspen and spruce concentrate their sugars so the sweetness prevents ice-cold crystals from rupturing their cells and wait until more favourable days, that's me.

When it's hard to anchor the gate because the once-living wood the gate needs to anchor in has hardened into what feels like rock over the years so it's hard to figure out where to start when keeping things in or out, that's me.

When too much traffic compacts the soil, that's me. When winter frost heaves deep into the soil and fractures it leaving it open once again to growth, that's me.

When a hard wind barely stirs winter aspens but sometimes the aspens need to unfurl their leaves and risk wind damage in order to drink in the sunlight, that's me.

When the land goes into darkness and again into light in relentless rhythm, that's me.

The city and her suburbs are muddled with the hands and thoughts of so many million people that each person devolves into the generality of humanity. Humanity is the environment and must be kept out just to have a little space to breathe so we slice off pieces: white, brown, black, smart, educated, stupid, sportsy, artsy, gamery, young, old, parents, childless, we divest ourselves of that oppressive wall of humanity in clean slices until it's whittled down to a manageable set. In the city the environment is people and so every day we must reject the environment to give ourselves a little peace and a little space.

Even with a little paid space closer in the rejection is a requirement. People are the landscape and every smaller piece of land is connected to the landscape. They will come in at us every time we raise our eyes to the horizon, every time we contemplate the outside of the walled garden.

How can I do this? Can I do this? I feel like it might drown me or suffocate me. The landscape can't be a vacation. The landscape is my home.