sideways-escape

[sideways-escape]

having a basically empty blog with zero known followers is kind of the shit actually. I can say whatever I want and nobody will be angry or weird about it for as long as nobody sees it

I know that's also what a journal is but this feels better because my stupid lizard brain is habituated to blogging but not journaling. despite this being as R says a distinction without a difference

[sideways-escape]

this is a completely empty blog right? okay cool

my lover texts me every night because she knows it's extremely variable whether I actually talk to or see another person all day- theoretically I can talk to internet or my few remaining long distance friends or call my dad but she knows my dad is also kind of consistently terrible for my mental health and internet sociality is not the same and the remaining long distance friends are kind of their own mess because depression has made me a shitty friend and some of them are really hard to talk to because the pandemic has left us in very different places

so since my boyfriend left me she texts every day. she's not always there for me for long and she often flags low wattage or whatever but frequently I talk to her about whatever's making me sad or we chat a bit about something else and some days a week she's there longer or even for a phone call, sometimes for several hours, but it's a big range where the low end is often me not responding because I am in a hole and the next step up is just some 'hey sorry you're tired, tell me something sweet' or if something bad happened me trying to be supportive and her getting off because she's low on cope and energy, and the high end is some hours of texting or talking

this has been a pretty consistent presence over the last year and actually more like the last year and a half since the suicidality went from 'most of the time' to all the time, which, her treatment of me was part of

we have had points where she would probably frame it as overextending herself because I was in crisis and failing to keep boundaries about her energy and kinds of communication that she can't deal with and I would frame anywhere from 'basically that' to 'actually you were stoking the problem and then because I was unsupported I had nobody to turn to' and in a couple of those she has dropped me for a few days to once two weeks when I was doing SUPER bad. like she used her boyfriend's surgery aftercare as an excuse / pretext- which was really wicked and unwise because that boyfriend has treated me like absolute dirt and for years his needs and security in the relationship were prioritised to such an extent that he was just being really exhibitionistic and unboundaried to the point of bullying and abuse at parties she threw and in shared work spaces and because I didn't have Relationship Seniority I couldn't stand up for myself and she didn't do anything while I wasn't allowed to be physically demonstrative or acknowledged as also a partner, so, don't heap resentment on a metamourship that's already fraught right? but that's something she did and. I hurt myself really badly a bunch that month and my nebulously-ex boyfriend totally stopped talking to me because he was so scared and triggered by my suicidality and it was really dangerous and. yeah, her dropping out is a thing she keeps promising not to do but she then just does and it usually ushers in a worse time for my mental health and objective life circumstances. and it's not fair to her to be carrying that much support but it's also, what the fuck else do we do and it's, like, I try to meet her where she is but she is really really bad at some of the basic 'don't be kind of cruel to your lover when they're in crisis and to can't handle it' shit

so I told her really explicitly Christmas through mid January was gonna be very fucking rough on me because of my boyfriend leaving me the week after New Year's and us having the horrible deathblow fight on New Year's and she made all kinds of promises- we had a lot of trouble seeing each other in December because I kept getting these one-day colds with horrible timing and her mom and mom's partner got an emergency fascism marriage and her sister (+ spouse + nibling) visited from Canada so I wasn't gonna see her in that and then. some horrible fucking fight landed a couple days before NYE, or I think something like that, because she talked about it as 'intense conversation' and 'I can't tell you the stuff because it concerns other people' which sounds like R code for, my boyfriend, having a meltdown about something. and I had had this great terror that her offer- which I had fished for but not asked for or especially expected- of spending NYE with *me* and not him, which has never happened before and based on his territorial behavior with her at their parties I expected might be a trigger but trusted she wouldn't offer anything that would be a problem for him, I asked is that going to be okay are you sure- was gonna set him off. and the way that poly shit between us has always worked out is punitive to me, you know? so I asked, unwisely: was this about me, and I was in crisis and she was spun out, and she said 'about my conduct in relation to you'. which put me from Defcon 3 to Defcon 1 right? so I was on drugs and crying and rambling and just barely keeping myself from hurting myself right there, she kept barking at me about this boundary of no processing and no ambiguity and. I have internalised this idea I cannot address his relationship with her or his treatment of me directly and sometimes had multi-day freakouts because the idea of even broaching it scared me. and I was suicidal and so drugged and she kept accusing me of prodding at the boundary and my brain just wasn't working and I was trying to not spiral out, and eventually I told her I was not able to filter, and she barked at me that that wasn't care for her and hung up. which she knows is a trigger, and she is usually really down on people deliberately triggering me, but whatever. and then she said 'oh I can't do NYE I'm sick and my brain is racing'. and I spent those two days having to take drugs and be nursed through my suicidality by half the internet.

so without getting into the rest of the last week. something is bad between her and her bf, I believe based on the ambiguous statements; she alluded to an intense conversation a few days ago that was why she didn't check in, and then was mostly unavailable the next day. she was there for me the anniversary of when Eugene walked out on me and that helped. but last night I was sad at her, it wasn't a huge long convo but I needed reassurance and she fumbled it and hurt me accidentally but landed there, I texted 'talk tomorrow?' and she didn't say yes or no but she didn't say no, y'know?

but she didn't text. and now I am starting to see a pattern.

and I'm really scared.