Greenstorm's Journal

Social: how do I keep or create community when social media is a problem for me/I like its reminders of folks I know

Time use/work life balance: Assuming 9 hours for sleeping, 2.5 hours for cooking & eating, 8 hours of working, 30 minutes of laundry and toothbrushing, that leaves 4 hours for administrative details, friendship, hobbies, house maintenance, family, etc per day. Then if I'm supposed to get groceries, exercise, do mental health exercises...

Can I keep the farm? It's the thing that I feel matters, and doing farm things is one of the few soothing parts of my life. It's also most of my life. Do I need to give up the farm to have people?

Ok, I've had too many bad days in a row. Highly likely it's where I'm at in my menstrual cycle, but since I don't have gynecologist access I guess we try the other route again.

Made a game plan for some practical stuff with a check-in and assistance person (pig stuff, car stuff).

Verified with my employee line at work that they can't help with this, but am waiting for a callback on someone who can hopefully help me make a list of things to try and help me be accountable to doing them in the 5 sessions I get with we-can't-find-anyone-who-does-trauma-or-gender-or-autism random person (but-we'll-try-to-avoid-someone-who-will-make-it-worse).

Going to run some reality checks with my counselor (is this the right direction?).

Have probably secured funding for at least some of this, not because my government or workplace are competent at mental health but because I have friends with money.

Then:

Speaking to an expert at somatic experiencing therapy to make sure they're not gender and autism hostile (maybe international if I can't super verify someone in Canada), and to a Canadian expert in atypical autism and to make sure she's PDA-competent.

This brought to you by crying my way through another diversity and inclusion workshop at work (they're pretty good! But I'm so intensely triggered by them and scared of the idea of any sort of honesty at work that it's pretty clear it's a trigger attached to a ton of stuff and not a reaction to what's going on at the time, and I can't ground and continue because it was just continuous and I couldn't get out of it) and losing another day to being in a terrible place and honestly being pretty tired of all this and I'll be damned if I give up the farm and let my life diminish into nothing and let this fucking trauma win. Also to having started bleeding, which always helps so much.

Well. I found a role model. In the last day or two I've been reading a webcomic, Girls With Slingshots, and in it there's a loving, plant-loving person who ends up in effectively a poly relationship. She likes sex. She is essentially a main character, with human issues.

Do you know, guys, I don't think I've ever looked into any face, fiction or non, that could have been me. I haven't had many, or maybe any, friends where I've looked at their life and thought it could be a guide or template for my own except in narrow bands, or incidental details. And I have only rarely felt like anyone else had any real idea of what I wanted in my life, or thought that what I wanted was both ok and understandable. I've always felt like the leader or the trailblazer. Blazing trails gets tired.

So I've dropped out of blazing trails. I dropped out of creating the sort of plant business I'd want to be part of, I even functionally dropped out of poly for the last while, because envisioning the thing and then creating it whole cloth was too much for me.

Now-- do you know what it feels like to have stories that are similar to what you want, that you can follow, but where you are not the only person in them? To have someone else blaze a path and think, I can follow this a little bit?

I feel changed, like my heart was retroactively broken through all those years and is knitted now. I feel like maybe it's okay to look more closely at what I want, because it's not such a complete affront to the universe and everything in it to want what I want.

Oh lovelies, this is a hard time for me. With spring here I'm happy again, but I'm trying to shape my life, and it's hard.

You know, I've never read a graphic anything before except for Watchmen, which I did after I watched the movie?

Here are bits I want to remember:

http://www.girlswithslingshots.com/comic/gws1535/
http://www.girlswithslingshots.com/comic/gws-1270/
http://www.girlswithslingshots.com/comic/gws425/
http://www.girlswithslingshots.com/comic/gws-1386/ http://www.girlswithslingshots.com/comic/gws-1387/ http://www.girlswithslingshots.com/comic/gws-1388/