#And if I couldn't be in my bedroom I was at work dissociating so hard I got fired for it 😶‍🌫️

[blue-banditt]

hey brain can you please be stable for ONE DAY I beg of you I can't handle the never knowing my actual true feelings and opinions about things and feeling so dissociated from the person I was 15 min ago that I start questioning my existence

[butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway]

I don't have a lot of energy these days [because of The Horrors] so I'm looking at my day and my priorities and trying to plan how I'm going to spend what energy I have, because I do need to be able to rest and relax but there are also things that need doing and that is a careful balance for me.

I managed to [mostly] clean the kitchen last night so I've kicked it out of the priority list until next weekend. Unfortunately the living room, bathroom, bedroom, and my office all need cleaning too. I think of the priorities, my office and the bedroom are the most important to me, so I'll probably push the living room and bathroom until at least Friday.

There's also the laundry. I don't have any clean clothes and as we're moving into winter I need to be more rigid about getting that done because days where the clothes can be dried on the line will be more limited. So I definitely need to wash an outfit or two and hang them up in the next hour.

That's already a really busy day, so I'll probably cut it there. But it's definitely going to still leave me a lot of work this week. Half my cleaning, at least one more round of laundry, settling dog food for the next couple of weeks, planting the fall/winter greens, doing some set up work on my computer, work on some writing projects, cleaning out the fridge, and patching some worn clothes. My work week isn't insane atm, but it is definitely limiting. Right now I have 6+4+0+4+2+5+5= 25 non work/non-survival needs (sleep, food, shower, etc) hours available each week. I need to figure out a regukar distribution of these that means everything is getting done and I still have an hour a day to myself as often as possible. I think it's probably not realistic to give myself more than an hour a day for free time/fun, which is a bit unfortunate because I've found in the past that my floor tends to be getting 2-3hrs of free time most days because of how I deal with transition and decision-making.

25-7 [1hr per day] is 18 hrs, so I just need to decide where and how to distribute those in order to keep pace with things.

Lets say the garden needs 3hrs per week, the laundry needs 4 hours (specifically 2 sets of 2 morning/early afternoon hours), the cleaning needs an hour a day to get through a maintenance clean of the house, and 3 hours once a week to work down any deep cleaning that's built up. Which is....already three more hours than I actually have each week. So I guess I'll make a plan to work in the garden for 20-40min of 4 of my free hours each week.

It really doesn't leave me any wiggle room. Only about 4 hours a week that isn't explicitly allotted to something that needs doing, which means there will probably me a lot of weeks where I only get an hour or so at best across the whole thing for free time. I guess I've had a hard time accepting that at this point, having actual time for myself or a time-intensive project is only available if I've taken a day off work. I love my job, but it's ... not comfortable to realize that it's the only love in my life I actually have time for anymore.

I think that's probably why I end up here so much. It's this mindless little way of zoning out into my own head, dissociating away from the exhaustion, for a few minutes at a time. I keep thinking I want to use this space differently, make it more if the things I enjoy. But I think what I really want is just to actually have the time and energy to do things I love that take work. I keep crying a few times every day and I couldn't figure out why, but like

I dunno

Why **wouldn't** I cry a little every day? It's the closest I'm getting to actual emotional release or relaxation in my life. We'd probably all cry. Heck. A lot of us probably DO, capitalism being what it is.

I guess I'm starting to wonder why I'm doing what I'm doing. What is there left for me to sacrifice to this life? What is actually serving me about not just letting myself go up like a fireball and take my surroundings with me? What in the ever loving fuck am I fighting this hard for?

All I ever want, all I want now, is to be able to live. To really, actually live. How does wanting to live bring you this close to killing yourself, whether on accident or on purpose? What am I actually doing that is LIVING and what am I doing that is FACILITATION of living? It can't all be facilitation, or I'm not actually facilitating fuck all.

I'm 30 goddamn years old and I need to figure out what it looks like to actually love my life. I fundamentally refuse to zombify myself like this for everyone else around me forever.

[rragnaroks]

okay so it's been nearly a month since the p!atd concert and the london trip and i've had time to process and i feel like writing it down

first off i'd almost forgotten what it's like to have a mutual obsession with someone. my sister and i discussed the album and the songs and their various meanings to death and enjoyed every second of it.

my sis, before the concert, out of the blue realised what "maggie" meant and suddenly everything made sense. the whole album. it was fucking agonizing actually. sad clown especially. and don't let the light go out. we had seats in the seated portion of the audience but stood up for the entire performance because we wanted increase the percentage of people who stood up for the viva las vengeance songs. and not only because of that, but because the songds are fucking bangers. it fucking hurt my heart to see how few people actually knew those songs. the chick next to me was on her instagram the whole show up to "i write sins", when she took her phone out and filmed the show, then left immediately after. it made me so sad.

besides that the experience was. otherwordly. i sort of left my body there for a minute. i write sins not tragedies felt surreal. i cried so hard i felt i couldn't breathe. and i was in my dad's office, downloading the song on my mp3 player and actually paying for it cause i loved it so much, and arguing about my music taste with him; and i was in the back of the car that is now mine, leaving the big city far away from home, peeling the plastic off the record i'd been trying to find everywhere, and waiting for my turn on the remaining working portable cd player, reading the cover leaflet and feeling carsick but not minding it because there were songs on the album i'd never heard; and i was sitting on my childhood bedroom floor crafting something with my sister and trying to get her to like my new favourite band and failing because i was singing over all my favourite bits; and yet i was there at the O2 arena finding it really difficult to dissociate to THAT song, oscillating between the moment where I was maniacally happy and screaming every word in sync with the crowd and also sobbing and shaking, and visiting the past, while brendon told us he loved us, seeming like he really meant it and it really made him happy (the songs on the album and the music videos say this is what happens and that this is what he loves and craves, but needs to let go of for his own sake), and my sister was there behind me and put her hand on my shoulder as the tears poured down my cheeks and my shoulders shook. just before then brendon had sang nine in the afternoon, which is the equivalent song in meaning to my sister. we were both crying and singing and smiling and happy. i was fucking ecstatic, and close to hyperventilating. it was unbelievably meaningful to me and i'm tearing up just thinking about it.

i went to the second to last panic! at the disco concert ever. i'd been dreaming of that since i was like 12 years old. my sister and i had that mutual dream and we'd never made it a reality until now. and if we'd made it a reality before now it wouldn't have been as special. it would have been fangirling and worshipping at the altar of brendon and now it was. catharsis and like. personal fulfillment. it was a lifelong dream come true at the best possible moment.

[birchatthecrossroads]

How I became a stray.

7, August, 2024

We rarely get to learn it, but every stray has an origin story. I'll tell you mine as best as I can, but fair warning. There's a whole lot of heavy hard stuff here. Probably not as bad as you're imagining at this point, it's bad enough. It's been on my mind because of my CPTSD therapy. It's also almost certainly not the whole story. I've got trauma responses that suggest that there's more I don't remember or maybe blocked out. There's a thousand little stories between the cracks here, but when painting a picture, you work on the background first. This is that. Names have been changed.

I wasn't around for the first parts, what I know is from detective work. I think Marie was fourteen when she met her pimp, Will. I know she was sixteen when she married him. They lived in a trailer in Marie's mother's yard and fought often. It was a life of sex, drugs, and rock & roll.

Three significant things happened in the five or six years before the divorce. She became pregnant by Will, resulting in me coming into the world a week after Marie's 20th birthday. While she was pregnant, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Also, she met & became romantically involved with a client named Walter.

Will left after the divorce, he'd be out of the story for decades. Walter raised me.

My earliest memory of Walter started with me crying hard, my fingers tingled and it was hard to breath. It was a full-blown panic attack. Walter was screaming at my mother in the kitchen down the hall. When he stormed in, grabbed my arm and dragged me to see her, she was crying hard, standing at the kitchen table. The M.S. Was in it's early stages, so she could still stand, but she needed to lean on it for support. He told me it was my fault she was crying. I believed him. That's where the memory ends.

Incidences like that happened maybe once a week for the first 18+ years of my life. He'd separate us into different rooms. Scream at me for a while, he'd raise his fist to me, tell me how awful I am, how everything was my fault. How I'd never amount to anything. Then he'd go scream at my mother while I dissociated, hyperventilated, did my best to recover, then he'd be back while my mother recovered. Back and forth back and forth.

It would start for any reason at any time. Early morning, late night, mid day. Anything would set him off. Blow-ups like that would happen because someone cut him off in traffic, because someone looked at him wrong in the super market, or because I left my toys out, I needed glasses, because I was weird (no one knew I was autistic). If I misbehaved, he'd explode at us. If I did good, he'd explode at us, grasping at whatever loose thread he could find to unravel me completely. I learned that everything was my fault, nothing I did mattered.

Even when calm, if my mother wasn't around he would tell me that I wasn't wanted. That he was stuck putting up with me so he could be with her, that he couldn't wait for me to move out so he could have his girlfriend all to himself. My mother would confide in me that she was just with him so I could have a father. I didn't have the heart to tell them.

After the screaming fits, the breaking things, the slamming doors, sometimes he'd take all the cash he could find in the house and take off for a few days, & I'd have to take care of my disabled mother. Usually they'd disappear into the bedroom & I'd be alone.

After, usually a day or two after, he'd call a family meeting & apologize. We'd forgive him & group hug. I was maybe six when I figured out that apologies were meaningless. Mom & I would walk on eggshells, anticipating the next explosion, the next bad day, the next long night, the next apology. To this day, I don't like group hugs.

Early on I learned to keep my head down and mouth shut, disappearing was the best way to put off setting him off. Don't make noise, not ever. When the eruption started, I'd have to face it alone, recover alone. I thought all this was normal. I was specifically told not to make friends, I had no basis for comparison. Especially during my grade school years. We moved four times and I attended five schools before we moved to the trailer park at the end of fifth grade.

I graduated high school on a Friday. My parents told me I could take the weekend and have fun, but on Monday I had to find my own place. That they were done raising me.

I told them I'd move in with a friend they didn't like. Walter bought another trailer in the trailer park we were living in at the time, and I lived there. He'd still come over and rage at me. I'd never had a job before, I knew nothing of how to live independently. As a child, any time I managed to save up money, he'd take it. When I had my own place, I got a job sweeping floors for minimum wage. After rent and bills, there was little to nothing left for food. I learned about starvation that year. By the time he raised my rent the following spring (he wanted to start making a profit) my ribs were clearly visible.

I made an emergency temporary move, then another, then another. I'm good with kids, so sometimes I could stay on in some households helping out with those, but it never lasted long. Got to keep my head down and mouth shut, disappearing was the best way to hold off the storm, because when it started, I'd have to face it alone, recover alone. I've never known stability or safety. That's why I'm a stray.

Walter was a despicable, pathetic coward and a monster that preyed upon a scared kid and her son.

[buzzings]

letter no. 3

i never thought i would see for myself those two shiny, gold numbers floating around in the bouquet of balloons. but they were there, and i saw them; i was the one who put them there.

i say that i never thought i would see this age for two reasons:

the first reason is i lived in an abusive home for twenty-three years, and i couldn't conceive of ever having a life outside of that household, which i knew (arbitrarily) would have to happen by at least age twenty-five. i was raised by a narcissist who ignored my needs and forced me into a state of dependence in favor of her own grandiosity, even though she was adamant that i was at fault, and it was just that i was too lazy and ungrateful to change it. it was through sheer luck and circumstance—and with a lot of help from my friends—that i managed to claw my way out, and i've been away from her for nearly two years now.

the second reason is mostly as a result of the first, but i didn't think i would live this long. i didn't know when or how or why, but ever since i can remember, i had recurring thoughts that i would simply have stopped existing by now. i've had my share of near-death experiences, whether that be from parental neglect, personal negligence, or random happenstance. a lot of my memory is lost or hazy due to the aforementioned household, but the most recent, notable chunk of it is college. i remember most of my freshman year, and then almost none of the rest except for a handful of traumatic stretches of time (usually toward the middle and end of every semester). i thought i was living my best life, so to speak, because that's what everyone told me i was supposed to be doing. however, it was a four-and-a-half-year-long dissociative episode, during which i contemplated more than once walking out the front door of my off-campus apartment and lying in wait on the train tracks beside my complex. perhaps it was a lack of conviction or an abundance of fear of the unknown (or both), but i really couldn't say why i didn't do it.

it's strange. for one, the passage of time itself. for another, the way i have dreamt of and fought hard to be this age for as long as i can remember, yet it's nothing like i had imagined.

in high school, i would scroll through countless apartment websites during math class and daydream of twenty-five (the age i always associated with full independence). living in a nice, clean, modern apartment in a big city (it was always washington, dc), with a blooming career and vibrant social life (both of which were always completely vague in my mind but still appealing). very sex and the city, very the devil wears prada.

in reality, it is more broad city, hold the city.

at twenty-five, i live in a suburban two-bedroom apartment with my cat, two roommates, and their cat, hamster, two guinea pigs, and leopard gecko. my friends are mostly younger than me, which i didn't expect but rather enjoy; we get to help each other grow up while still getting to participate in youthful shenanigans. i don't have the office job of which i fantasized, and i can't say i'd even want it if i did (growing up, the adults around me told me i could be anything, and then proceeded to box me into a life of student debt and a terrible job market, which is miserable enough without the stress of keeping up corporate appearances just for the approval of people outside the situation). i work a low-paying, entry-level food-service job at a company which one could describe as the amalgamation of east coast bustle and fast food. it is thankless and not-at-all-glamorous or anything to boast about, but it is a job that pays me enough to live, covers my healthcare, and lets me enjoy my life as much as i can within the means i have been given. i am comfortable, and i am loved, and that's really all that matters.

this past year has felt like six. i lost one of my uncles, and then lost my last living grandparent not even a month later. her funeral was a disaster, and not only because the wrong burial plot had been excavated. i was broke and struggling to pay my bills for over half the year, and my SNAP benefit eligibility was revoked because i made just $37 over the income limit. i lost my wallet during my birthday trip to atlantic city. i ran out of forbearance time on my private student loans, which meant i had to figure out how to pay $800 a month on top of everything else. more often than not, i was not sober simply for the fact that i was depressed and had nothing better to do.

but this last year has also been the kindest to me. i held down a job. i saw a dentist for the first time in five years, and i only had one cavity. my friend's parents helped me get my car inspected and let me use their tools/garage to learn how to change my inner tie rods by myself (her dad also found my wallet). i saw the jonas brothers in concert, which is something i've wanted to do since i was eight. i was diagnosed with adhd and prescribed medications that have drastically increased my quality of life. i became eligible for workplace benefits. i met one of my best friends for the first time since we met online 7 years ago. i started writing a novel, and just surpassed 25K words in the first draft. my cat turned one.

to be clear, i'm not writing all this for pity or as a cry for help. this is a celebration; despite all the suffering and listlessness that i'd endured for the majority of my life, the clock struck midnight on january 1st, and i made it to twenty-five. here's to twenty-five more.