Coping skills.

 I have bad anxiety issues. I'm on a laundry list of medications to help me with it. It's due to a laundry list of trauma. It really sucks. I do my best to cope with it. Recently, I recalled that doing embroidery helps my brain calm right the fuck down.

So, I worked on the Ukraine sampler (you'll see it down thread in the feed) to cope with my anxieties over the war in Europe. Raised during the Cold War by parents that insisted that bombs were going to drop any day now and that we were going to be forced to do inhumane things to survive was bullshit for so many reasons on so many levels. 

I'm still dealing with anxiety even with my medications. So I am working on this projects. I didn't like the suggested stitch sections for various bits so I changed them. 

The leaves are a detached chain stitch in the center with a straight stitch to either side to fill out the shape. The orange blossoms are detached chain stitch with a single straight stitch in the center. The centers of the orange blossoms are leviathan stitch. The pink blossoms are satin stitch (done as per project directions, but I'll rant about that in a second). Their centers are French knots. The stripes on the pink bird are badly done satin stitch, because I was distracted and not wearing my reading glasses to get a good look at the fabric. Everything else is straight stitch or running stitch.

The pink bird's tail on the left side is whipped straight stitch, they wanted me to use chain stitch for it but that would have looked sloppy. I used straight stitch for the beaks instead of chain stitch for the same reasons. The project came with a sewing needle, not an embroidery sharp that was the correct size. Thankfully, I have plenty of embroidery needles and some in the right size for this fabric. They wanted me to work everything with two strands of floss. I managed the outlining of the pink bird and the satin stitch for the pink flower petals and came away wanting to throw the thing across the room. So I switched to three strands and things are working up much easier. 

When I outline the lower bird with the blue floss, it'll have to be with two strands to make match the upper bird. But the details are going to be worked with three strands of floss. I refuse to do the tiny circles in satin stitch. It will probably be more leviathan stitch, rice stitch, or something else that fills the space but looks more interesting. This thing is supposed to be cut out and mounted on cardboard. They want me to tape it to the cardboard, which just doesn't make sense. 

It's clear this project was for someone with minimal stitching history. I'm going to hem the edges and sew the project to the board with long stitches connecting the sides together just as my Grandma K. taught me to do with my other embroidery projects. The trick will be finding a frame for it and figuring out what I'm going to work on next. It'll probably be hemming the Dune Fear Litany tapestry that I  made.

Wut r werds?

 It's be a hell of a while since I posted, it feels like forever. On my tiny side blog which I use to promote my religious writing blogs, I got a Russian troll to anonymously send me propaganda with the expectation I was going to post it because I am not a supporter of neo-Nazis. I apparently am going places if I am getting that kind of response to posts calling out neo-Nazis for attempting to use my morning little prayers that I post on there for their bullshit.

I have another embroidery project. This is from the Jaydan company and is simply called Birds. It's a printed fabric one. I had a counted cross stitch one but discovered that the chart they printed was off by ten stitches in random directions. I got so frustrated with it I threw the damn thing away.

This project has been annoying in its on special way. They sent me a sewing needle to do fine stitched embroidery instead of one of the smaller embroidery sharps that you're supposed to use. I did the pink sections with that until I got fed up (bird and flowers). At which point I put my shiny new sewing needle into my sewing needle case and found my smallest embroidery sharp needle. They wanted the flowers and the leaves to all be satin stitch. But with this weight fabric and the small size of it all, even with two threads it was a pain in the neck. I did the pink flowers in satin stitch, managing not to throw the project across the room in frustration because I was doing embroidery with a sewing needle.

After I switched needles I did the brown sections in running stitch. They wanted the solid portions of the branches and the left most part of the tail of the pink bird to be in chain stitch with two strands of floss. I said screw that, it was just going to look wrong. So running stitch for the branches and that part of the tail was whipped running stitch. The leaves have a single detached chain stitch in the center and then single stitches to either side of it to fill it in. This way, they actually look like leaves. The centers of the pink flowers were supposed to be satin stitch but I used French knots because it looks better. I know that I'll keep modifying this thing as I go along. I am filling it in by color instead of my usual start with a motif and move on.

I still want to make the "I Can't Adult" project, but I think I will be freehand-embroidering it because the chart was awful and nothing was lining up correctly. I'll probably put a different motif than the cross stitch roses on the four sides of the motto. I've been working on a lot of embroidery and sewing of late to cope with my sky high anxiety. I forgot to take one of my medications and just about had a panic attack later in the evening because I didn't have my medication in my system to keep me calm.

I'm really frustrated with this whole business of being on a cocktail of medications to keep me calm and help me sleep. It doesn't help that there's a whole heap of learned shame over this because I'm afraid that if 'people' find out that I'll be deemed a drug addict and lose my kids. It's all programming from when I was a kid. I'm trying to unravel it but it's really hard. 

Glory to Ukraine!

 The war in Ukraine broke out and I started to panic. I grabbed some embroidery materials and started stitching. I wish the war was done as fast as this sampler was. It's on 14 count Aida cloth. I have learned it doesn't lend itself well to long back-stitch with the same issues as satin stitch. That's why some of the lettering looks funky. The smudged area is where I tried to wash off some pencil marks. It's just wet. When it dried out, the smudge mostly went away.

The garden at the base of the image is hope. The light brown fence represents the troops who are defending their homes and their hopes. The dark brown field represents Ukraine's importance as an agricultural center/breadbasket for the region. The central figure is Ukraine. The sword represents their willingness to fight for their homeland. The flower represents their willingness for peace. The crown is their sovereignty. I tried to incorporate traditional Ukrainian elements into the sampler. My counted cross stitch skills are filled with fail.

My feelings on all of this is the Russian army needs to get the fuck out of Ukraine, all of Ukraine, and go home to fix their own country. Vladimir Putin needs a kick in the teeth, literally. And I'm terrified that WW3 is going to break out. So I stabbed the shit out of some fabric to make something that showed my support for Ukraine and mentally was stabbing the dictator of Russia in the eye with each stitch.

Proof of Life.

So, here's a current pic of me just trying to get by. I am still depressed. My head still feels like there's a committee arguing in it, but they shut up when I tell them to. Or at least get quieter. 

I'm not doing well, to be honest. I try to sleep at night but I keep waking up around two to three times. When I do sleep completely through the night, I don't wake up rested. I stumble around as I get dressed and then make breakfast for the kids and I. I manage to stay awake long enough to see them get on the bus and then I pass out on the couch for an hour and a half.

After which, I stumble around making Beloved's lunch for work or just trying to figure out what the hell I'm supposed to be doing. I haven't been doing creative writing. All of my writing has been focused on therapeutic work. I've been having lots of memories from my youth coming up witnessing this war in Ukraine. My parents told us things like the Russians were going to enslave us and that we were going to have to fight off people like our neighbors to keep the farm safe. 

I had a nutball teacher when I had to repeat kindergarten (because the first time around, I didn't play with the other children and I talked back to the teacher when they said something that made no sense, I set an early precedent for myself) and she had us to nuclear raid drills. Her version of nuclear raid drills was to have the short students hide under their desks and the tall ones stand beside their desks. Theoretically, if the building collapsed, the taller students would ensure the survival of the shorter students by holding it up. This is exactly what this nutball teacher told me when I asked her why. I then got booted out of the classroom to sit in the hall for talking back when I asked why I had to stand when I was literally the shortest kid in the room. The more I learn, the more it becomes apparent that this particular teacher wasn't playing by the same rule book as the rest of the school.

It was special growing up during the Cold War. The windows of that bus were extra clean. I have been dealing with 10 different parts of myself. My therapy work has been focused on cross communication between them and my conscious mind. I've learned to recognize when I space out and wander that one of them is partially 'out' or completely. It's been hard because they don't generally trust me because they expect me to ignore them/abuse them/reject them. Basically, a repetition of the way I grew up. That sense of dread has ratcheted up higher with Russian bullshit happening.

I'm pretty sure that Vladimir Putin has lost his goddamn mind. That or he thinks that Covid has weakened the rest of the world enough that he can go and start steamrolling his way through places to get what he wants. I'm real worried about how his forces hold Chernobyl. I'm equally concerned about how they're fixing to get the other power plant, the one that's one of the largest functioning nuclear power facilities in Europe. I fear that he's going to turn them into dirty bombs before exiting. A way to start a nuclear war with out having to fire something at somebody.

As you can obviously tell, my train of thought is off the rails and my ability to focus is impaired. It's kept me from blogging and writing for the last month. It's kept me from doing my tarot reading thing. I am not doing great.

At a loss for words.

 This business in Ukraine (and I learned it isn't 'the Ukraine' but just 'Ukraine' because 'the Ukraine' was a Soviet propaganda movement to delegitimize the nation to a minor extent) is making me as nervous as a cat in a rocking-chair factory. I've been trying to focus on domestic things like cleaning up for spring and my daily routine. It's been difficult.

Now, I don't have any family in Ukraine, as far as I'm aware. The family members with all the genealogical records and I are not on speaking terms right now. Still, these people don't deserve what's happening to them. And the rest of the world is doing what little they can to oppose Russia's incursion with out setting off WWIII. I can't help it, though, I'm watching these people taking a heroic and defiant stand against the Russian army when they're clearly out gunned. It's gut wrenching.

It is terrifying the fact that we are a few footsteps away from an open conflict with Russia. I don't want a nuclear war to happen. I don't want this war in Ukraine to happen. I want Russia to close up shop and go home. The fact that they hold Chernobyl is disturbing. Especially with the reports that there's been an increase in radiation being emitted at that site. Who needs a bomb when you can just throw a nuclear powerplant (that is damaged) into chaos? It's a huge threat to eastern Europe and the various Baltic states between Europe and Russia.

I'll not be watching the State of the Union address tonight. My wrecked nerves can't handle it. I'll read about it in the news tomorrow. I'm suspicious about the Republicans and their holding the 'real' State of the Union meeting right now. Things in this country are a powder keg that no on wants to admit. They want to just sweep it under the rug and say that things are going back to normal.

Meanwhile, there's still a pandemic raging. Mask mandates are being discarded left and right for political reasons when wearing a goddamn mask is what keeps you from breathing in the exhalations of a carrier or someone who is sick with Covid. Our school district said that it is up to parents if their kids are going to keep wearing masks. Our family is going to do it because this thing, even in it's more 'mild' version could seriously fuck me up. We've got people around the world doing 'freedom convoys' and using big rigs to block traffic as part of their protest of mask and other covid safety protocols that have been instituted by various governments. These fucking morons are forgetting that we're losing over a thousand lives a day to Covid. They figure it's not happening to them or their immediate circle of associates/families/etc. so it can't be as bad as it sounds.

Donald fucking Trump is out there flapping his gums and encouraging these protests. He's also talking about how great/smart Putin is for invading Ukraine. In the process, he's been talking trash about the US. And his fan base doesn't even notice that. They're too star struck and brainwashed to believe that he's damn near the second coming of Christ rather than recognize that he's a charlatan and a general bastard. We've got people in the GOP talking along the same lines (who are members of the Trump cult). It's getting ugly.

And there isn't a damn thing I can do about any of it.

I'll be back soon.

 The last month of intensive therapy journal work has been hellish. I feel isolated (which is darkly funny given the fact that I have people in my head). I have been on the hell-ride of depression still though daylight lasts a bit longer. Theoretically, I should be doing better but I don't feel like it.

My blood sugar got fucked up by my medication as my psych and I were trying to figure out the right cocktail to get me to sleep through the night. I was on Seroquel (at it's lowest dose) to get me to sleep since October-ish. That made my blood sugar go up. I didn't put two and two together until recently. We're first trying a moderately high dosage of hydroxizine to see if it takes care of the problem. Hydroxizine is in the same family as Benadryl (which is why I shouldn't take Benadryl when my sinus allergies act up). At the dosage I'm on, I fall asleep relatively easily. The issue is am I staying asleep through the night.

We'll see over the next week or so. I wake up in the middle of the night and then around three or four in the morning. Recently, it's been five in the morning. I know I'm not in a mixed or manic episode. My mood and my behavior puts me pretty squarely in the mild/moderate depression state. I've been struggling to find the motivation to do anything. That makes hours of therapy journaling a struggle. Hell, it makes putting my laundry away a struggle.

Still, I'm trying and I'm planning on coming back to blogging next week. I don't have anything special planned, I'm just going to post random shit that comes to mind. As of the moment, I am tired but I'm doing my best.

Going Radio Silent for a Few Weeks.

 I am stepping away from social media and blogging for a few weeks to do some intensive therapy work. This business of voices in my head (which is different from hallucinations because I can make them shut up with some effort) is getting to the point that it is interfering with stuff like my ability to get things done around the house and causing me distress.

So, I'm taking a few weeks to work on this and try to find some kind of equilibrium that I can live with. My anxiety would be off the charts if it wasn't for the medication dosage being increased a while back. I'm having more flashbacks (typically of the emotional sort) back to when I was a child and things were awful. It's just all around not a good time and I am struggling.

I'll probably post on this blog once in a while to keep all six of you who are reading updated. I'm going to warn you right now, things are probably get weird for a little bit.

Looking over old posts.

 Looking over some old posts and noticing the ones with the highest reads are typically angry posts about bullshit that people in some group I've been involved with have pulled. I think I manage to stumble onto key words in my ranting and that's how I wind up with something like one hundred and eleven views on a single post. I also noticed that I was getting more traffic across all my blogs when I was posting more a few years ago when I wasn't having as severe problems with seasonal affective disorder and with my other brain issues.

This leads me to conclude that I should be posting more across all platforms. I just don't know what to write. I feel like my life is boring, depressing, and that no one is really going to be interested in the fact that I had the spoons to put a whole basket of laundry away today. I know what's going on here is that I internalized the bullshit that my mother spewed at me when the concept of blogging first came up: Nobody is going to want to read what you have to say.

That rattles around in my head a lot when I'm depressed. When I was younger and struggling with bouts of depression, I was regularly told to shut up when I asked for reassurance or even some understanding that I was struggling. I was regularly mocked in my home and at school for the outward symptoms of depression (i.e. evidence of poor self care, downcast expression, slow speech, etc.). When I attempted to do things that made me feel better (i.e. isolate from my toxic family members, spend time making art, writing poetry), I got the third degree. I was accused of taking drugs. My room got ransacked on a regular basis. They went through my journals when I started keeping them regularly (I didn't note which notebook was for what and carried the one that was my daily journal on my person almost all the time, so they didn't get into everything, but they tried). My randomized notebooks for poetry, fiction, and other writings made a half way decent method to secure the journal that was handling my life and inner thoughts. I also hid them in random places because of the fact that I had no privacy.

I digress, but who knows, maybe that'll pick me up a bunch of readers. I don't know what I'm doing. I just know that I need to write more. I've been writing more off line and that's getting a bit hairy. Exploring this plurality expression of trauma is creepy shit. I'm having trauma memories come up as I'm writing what feels like somebody else's memories being dictated to me by somebody in my head. Somebody that I don't know but knows me.

I just don't know what to write. Some of the therapy journaling stuff is horrific. Like being beaten for taking a single slice of cheese and accused of trying to starve my younger brothers. I don't think that stuff is quite appropriate to post on here just because it is distressing. If I do take the therapy writing online, which I tried a while back and then deleted after I got extremely anxious and uncomfortable, I will probably be doing it on a different blog.

I may post recipes on a weekly basis. I don't know. I'm not really cooking anything with variety now. There isn't the time and the kids won't eat it. Our menu has been fixed at:

Sunday: Pizza
Monday: Burgers
Tuesday: Tacos
Wednesday: Meatloaf and mashed potatoes
Thursday: Sandwiches
Friday: Fishsticks
Saturday: take out

We've been doing this for a few months now. I'm bored out of my skull. Lunches have been nothing but salads for me and sandwiches for the kids. Deviation from this norm gets the kids up in arms and kicks my anxiety about my carb load into gear. I can't have my favorite foods from the take out places. I've developed a shellfish allergy, so I can't even have my favorite soup once in a while (clam chowder). The stuff that I loved from the take out places are all too many carbs. This has Beloved and I resorting to scanning the nutritional facts about everything on a given restaurant's menu to try to find things. 

It's stuff like basic burgers. It's depressing. It's also very stressful when we go to the in-laws. My half-addled father in law either keeps forgetting I have diabetes or is trying to insult me by talking about food that I should try. It's equally bad with my sister-in-law. It's been three years now since my diagnosis. You'd figure that they'd recall. I don't know. Maybe I'm looking at it the wrong way. I'm not ascribing malice to what could just be falliblity and/or stupidity. I'm just sick of it.

Anyways, old posts. They seem to get the most readership when I'm ranting and accidentally hit buzz words. I make a point to keep this blog separate from the other blogs that I have. I do my best not to cross-reference material. This is a more personal thing than the others. But sometimes it seems to bleed into them or vice versa.

Screw this weather.

 Seriously, the weather today sucks. We probably have over a foot of snow on the ground right now. Winter storm Izzy blew through. I was concerned about it being too cold for the kids to play outside but Beloved convinced me that they'd be warm enough in their snow gear and that they've got enough sense to come inside when they get cold. He was right on all accounts. I just worry too much.

But, there's another arctic front coming later this week. It's going to be awful. I don't know how much snow we'll get before it hits but it's the cold that I am troubled by. It makes my arthritis act up. It makes my rib ache where I fractured it a few years back. (I don't know if I posted here about how I fell down the shitty front steps and our snow shovel caught me. I can't remember.) It makes my depression worse. I just can't handle it.

Cold, grey days screw up my mood to begin with. I'm still trying to nail down exactly why. Signs point to it's because of the bipolar II. Because why not have your mood at the fickle whim of the weather? I have about six months where I am depressed and miserable. It makes it hard for me to function. I have more flashbacks. I have more nightmares. And there's the trauma memories attached to being physically cold. It just sucks.

Stupid weather.

/rant

Fuck depression with a chainsaw.

This is the face of someone who is depressed and struggling to sort out their brain. It's also someone who is desperately trying to be warm despite the cold weather. Our heater is trying its best but barely managing to be at 70 degrees when we have it set higher. Why? Because we're on the windward side of the building and the temperatures are fuck you degrees, with the windchill of go and die.

Being cold makes me depressed as much as the low levels of sunlight this time of year. It brings up flashbacks to living in my parents' house where it was cold all the time because it was super drafty despite their best efforts. Some of those flashbacks are meh, most of them suck. Because they consist of my asking them to turn the heat up and them telling me to suck it up (or something similar), fully aware of the fact that I lack the bodyfat layer that keeps you warm due to the fact I was a preemie. 

It's left a mark. I hoard blankets and quilts. I have a pile of sweaters. I tend to wear layers when it it just beginning to get cold and everyone else is out there trying to get just another day of wearing shorts out of the weather. I worry about the weather and its effect on my family. Today's temperatures, I was hoping that school would delay pick up because the wind chill was -12 deg F. I had the kids wait in the entryway of the building before going out to meet the bus. My youngest was freaking out over the idea that if he was outside, he was going to get frostbite. (He was fully bundled up and did not get anything like frostbite on his walk to the bus.)

I stay inside during the winter because the cold hurts. It feels like my hands and feet are burning, even with gloves on. It doesn't do my arthritis any favors. The weather systems that blow through still give me migraines. It's generally awful and I hate it. The problem is, I remember life before migraines and when I was young and dumb. I loved winter because it was beautiful. I remember getting bundled up into layers and a snowsuit to play outside. I hated shoveling the driveway, but aside from that, winter was fun outside and we didn't have to worry about my parents. My parents, however, strictly monitored how much time we were outside and didn't allow us to be out for very long. One of the few things that they were responsible about, I suppose.

Being trapped inside, however, there was a lot of verbal abuse and harassment. I got depressed and immediately was branded as lazy, selfish, and worthless. To say the least, that didn't help my mental state at all. I tried to keep up with things but it was exhausting. I hid in my room most of the time with my writing stuff and under a pile of blankets to actually be warm. I got accused of sleeping all the time and being lazy because of it. This was all on top of the usual verbal abuse and harassment because of the fact that I wasn't born a son.

The sad thing is when I do get depressed, I have emotional flashbacks to that verbal and emotional abuse and feel that I am lazy, selfish, and worthless. It sucks.
 

Update on the Screaming in My Head.

 It's been a challenging few days. I started doing the work of therapy journaling this purality stuff. It's been hard and creepy. When I talked to my psychiatrist about this, he was completely unsurprised by what I had said and gave me some suggestions on what I can do to start finding equilibrium with all this. I haven't begun looking into books yet. I'm still working out this journal stuff. I picked up a set of twenty four colored pens to use. I've got more than six colors in play right now. It's making me a little nervous.

Not everyone is 'talking' to me right now. This is my second attempt at this type of journaling. During my first attempt, it was more like having a conversation with strangers on paper. There was introductions and such. This time, I'm just basically writing whatever comes up. There's at least two insiders (I guess that's what some folks call 'em, I don't know what the right language is for this.) who are angry with me and each other.

One is young. The age fluctuates but never hits over thirteen. I suspect that this one is actually a pair answering to the same name for safety purposes. Generally, pleasant child but very anxious. She's also quite angry that I haven't let her make artwork or do stuff like coloring books. I am doing my best to make time for that now but it's hard. Tuesday mornings are her time for art stuff now. That seemed to mollify her upset with me. But then there's the anger that is directed at the other insider. I don't know how to manage that.

The other insider is an adult. A very angry and bitter woman of forty. She's furious with me for apparently using her abilities and not giving her proper credit, among other things. She hasn't stepped out as a spokesperson for the rest. But boy is she angry on their behalf. I literally spent two hours going back and forth with this insider. She wants me to commit to the journal work and to acknowledge the others. She wants writing time under her own name. (No, her name is not Brythwen,) She wants me to give her a place to do public writing, like a blog. 

We're still in the negotiation phase on that one. Partly because I can't manage more blogs. Partly because this business has be sufficiently incapacitated at times that I can't write because my head is so full of noise. She wants to make herself known here but I'm not ready for that exposure. I don't know what she has going on and I want to make sure that it's something that's not going to be a problem. Like I said, negotiation is happening.

There are two others who have been making their presence known but weren't as emotionally charged today. They are adult women as well. I can't determine what their ages are but that's never come up in our conversations over the last few days. One is a warrior with a whole world of her own. The other is a priestess with another world of her own. It's weird to have this going on but it's been like this my whole life. I've just been keeping it under my hat and desperately trying to be 'normal'. And they have come out at different times in my life and masqueraded as me to handle whatever situation was going on.

That's why people remember actions or conversations had that I don't. Because I was not in charge when it happened. When these insiders of mine come up to the surface, things get remembered and I have an easier time with different things. It's been strange to me but as Beloved has said, there's never been any indication of these insiders having malicious intent nor have they demonstrated a major change in my behavior. It's all been real subtle.

I have a feeling as I work on this, that's going to change. A few nights ago, the child came forward looking for reassurance and I got bumped to the 'backseat' so that I was aware of this exchange with Beloved. I think that the child/children came out before in the past. I just hope that it's not going to be a thing where it interferes with my ability to take care of my responsibilities and be an adequate parent. 

Welp, screw my brain.

 I feel awful right now. And a large part of it is because of the transphobic and related bullshit on Tumblr in the Filianic community. I warned them literally years ago that these people are a menace. Their response was 'we don't want to strangle our fledgling religion in the cradle'. Now we've got a nice little collection of TERFs and SWERFs who are getting an echo chamber out of people who I had once thought might have been decent. Seeing that garbage is awful. 

It brings back memories of things like being assaulted at school because I wasn't femme enough, never mind I was wearing a dress and had breasts. In gym class, I had one time someone tried to rip my undergarments off to 'prove' I wasn't a 'real' girl. End result of that encounter, I punched her in the groin and backhanded her friend who was going to come in and settle the matter once and for all. When the two girls realized that I wasn't going to passively let them strip me in public, they backed off. I was declared a 'freak' and continually harassed about the fact that my vocal pitch dropped when I hit puberty. 

I was constantly the target of girls who decided I wasn't femme enough because I didn't wear make up, shave my body hair, or wear the latest fashions. I got called a tranny. I got called shemale. I got called it. All because I didn't fit the mold for their version of femme people. I got physically assaulted on a semi regular basis through junior high and the excuse was 'you look like a freak'. I fought the people who assaulted me, which didn't make me any more femme apparently. One kid who thought it'd be funny to try to pants me as I was going up the stairs, I kicked him in the chest and knocked him down half the flight of stairs before I turned around and said, "If you're going to come at me, be a man about it and do it to my face." That never got reported to the school officials. What's the kid going to do, admit he was attempting to assault someone and they kicked him for it.

The girls were merciless about the 'you're not a real girl' bullshit. The boys seized on the 'you have a period and it's gross' bullshit. I had them throw ketchup on me, or at least try to but I dodged out of the way so it just hit the floor. And then the person who threw the ketchup said loudly, "OH LOOK, SHE'S ON THE RAG!" because the ketchup was in the vicinity of my feet. Same moron who did this regularly tried to shove me into walls and lockers with his buddies laughing. I dodged as best I could, but when you've got three people at your back, somebody's going to land a blow. So, I turned around with my purse and brained one of the idiots with it. I got in trouble for my 'excessively violent' response. My parents, surprisingly, approved of what I did and told me next time to put a brick in my purse.

It was the moron with the switchblade who just pissed me off. He kept stealing the lock off my locker and once I had a keyed lock that he couldn't easily pick, he decided he was going to steal my purse and my locker key. He whipped out his switchblade and demanded I give it to him. I looked at the knife and scoffed. Then I walked away, because a kid with a switchblade isn't half as scary as your parent with a butcher's knife, and reported the little shit to the school superintendent. Fifteen minutes later, parents were there the kid was getting chewed out by his mom and my parents were starting the paperwork to pull my brothers and I out of that school in the middle of the school year.

Cue getting transferred back to the school we left because the bullying was so bad that some motherfucker decided they were going to try to strangle my little brother on the bus. Yeah, that hadn't improved. They hadn't forgotten us. We were harassed. My brothers got into fights and then people backed off of them. But I got the 'freak' treatment from a bunch of my peers. It only got worse when one of the ringleaders of my harassment from the other school transferred in to the school I was at. This time, my odds were heavily stacked against me. It was me versus my entire class, with the exception of about five people. Transphobic shit from the girls and sexual harassment from the guys. Explict sexual harassment.

It got to the point that we were getting ready to take legal action when mediation was attempted. One person out of the group of twenty showed up. He left the school district shortly after that incident. The rest, well, they were back at the sexual harassment shit and spreading rumors that I was a whore. I got to experience the ugly side of patriarchy in multiple ways. When I tried to get someone official to intervene I got 'boys will be boys, just ignore them.' When someone randomly groped me in the hall, I couldn't turn and deck them because I couldn't tell who it was. When another person tried to shove me into a locker, I did get a chance to do something about it. I stepped back and let his momentum carry him half into my locker and slammed my locker door on his head about a half dozen times. He never laid hands on me again after that.

So, TL:DR I got the transphobic bullshit and the misogynistic bullshit both in school. When I see these young women spouting TERF crap and SWERF crap, it's painful. It brings up memories of fighting to keep my dignity. It brings up memories of people trying to hurt me because they felt that I wasn't enough of a girl to deserve any sort of respect. It's obvious to me that these 20 somethings have never experienced that level of harassment. I block some of them. Others I tried to educate. And they said that it was impossible that the transphobic crap happened to me because I'm obviously female.

The women I feel safe with are transwomen. There's a real short list of other women that I feel safe with and they usually turn out to be some form of queer.

But, this is the shit going round and round in my brain making me think maybe it's best to just stop blogging so that I don't have to go through the gauntlet of having to prove I'm femme enough again.

CW: Eating disorder vs diabetes

 As some of you may know, I am a recovered anorexic. It took about five years of Beloved forcing me to finish meals when we went out before I could eat a meal and not be filled with guilt that I was taking food from someone else who needed it more. See, when I was a kid, when I got hungry and tried to get a snack that was the line thrown at me "You're taking food out of your brothers' mouths." My parents strictly limited how much food I was allowed to have. I learned to take the bare minimum that was enough to make the hunger pains stop. Gradually, that lessened until I just accepted that a certain level of discomfort when it came to food was 'normal' as my parents heartily encouraged my brothers to eat more and gave me scorn when I tried to do the same.

When I got to school, I got harassed for eating a full meal because I was so skinny. Rumors flew around that I was bulimic and I started restricting what I ate in public. That was about when I developed a revulsion for watching and listening to other people eat. The confluence of my upbringing and the stressors of high school ended up with my weight fluctuating between 110 and 95 lbs when I was a senior and stood 5ft 8 in. My doctor never fully caught on to what was going on with me. He was a nice guy but assumed that my build was a result of the fact that I was born a micro-preemie. The secret about how food was managed in the household wasn't breathed for fear of dire punishment.

Backstory presented, I am finding myself struggling to do the things I need to in order to manage my diabetes. Fasting blood sugar numbers higher than 130 has me eating less than 30 carbs prior to taking my blood sugar lowering medication for fear that my blood sugar is going to run up too high once those carbs hit my system. I have spent the last three years (give or take) strictly limiting my food intake to between 30 to 35 carbs per meal. I struggle with the urge to skip snacks. I've lost a fair amount of weight. People praise me for it and I get nervous. I get afraid that I'm losing weight too fast. 

At the same time, I can't help the feeling that the more I restrict, the greater control I have over the diabetes. I struggle with the temptation to cut my meal carb load down lower. Especially when my fasting blood sugars a running over 160. I find myself sorting foods into forbidden and not forbidden categories. I get scared that I'm going to cook the wrong thing for myself or that I'm going to accidentally eat a forbidden food. I used to love cooking. Now I dread it. Between all the math I have to juggle to figure out to make the meal (and I'm bad at math) and the psychological torture of eating tiny meals compared to the rest of the family it's awful. 

I just don't want to cook anymore. I can't do that, because the boys don't know (and are not willing yet to learn) how to cook. I get emotionally torqued up over food and try to stick to things that I know are low carb as best I can. I keep finding myself tempted to switch over to the keto diet (which is basically what I was doing in high school) to limit my carbs even more. My doctor has explicitly banned the keto diet because it can be lethal for diabetics. So, I'm stuck gradually reducing what I am eating as I watch my blood sugars bounce around. 

And, as I struggle with the urge to restrict my food, I am sneak eating snacks that fall under the keto category. I am hiding when I eat. I am falling into the habit of eating my dinner before the kids come to the table to eat so I don't have to deal with the revulsion of my personal eating on top of the revulsion of listening and watching them eat. It's not good and it is slowly getting worse. But because I am a bit overweight, people are like 'oh, good job losing weight' and 'you can't possibly be an anorexic.'

Long day is long.

 I am weary. It has been a long day. I got a bunch of writing done on my other blogs to the point that I'm almost caught up on my work. I posted links to stuff on social media and I'm waiting for people to notice it. My goal right now is to hit between fifteen and twenty reads on a given blog post for a given blog. It was mentally exhausting to do three days worth of blogging on three blogs. For some reason, it is easier for me to sit down and work on a novel for an equivalent length of time than it is to do the blogging stuff right now.

I had a dentist appointment yesterday that actually went pretty well. I was a little nervous going in because I've been having some sensitivity in a tooth that has a lot of work on it. The dentist explained that the filling material transmitted heat and cold a lot easier than enamel and that was a relief. As was the fact that I had no cavities. On the whole, my oral health is a world better than it was a bit over ten years ago when I got so depressed I stopped taking care of my teeth. This resulted in my having a bunch of cavities, one almost bad enough to require a root canal. Thanks to the Eastman Dental Clinic, those got taken care of and my dental care has been excellent. And they have been patiently teaching me how to properly take care of my teeth. I'm always asking questions about how I am doing and how I can improve. 

That experience with getting all those fillings scared the hell out of me and made me change my approach to self-care. I still struggle with it because of being taught that my needs come last out of everyone in the household and that it is selfish for me to spend more than the bare minimum of time on my self care. Between the diabetes, my skin issues, and my eyesight getting slowly worse, I've been forced to take time for these things that I was all but prohibited when I was growing up. I am tired and I could probably use a shower but I don't know if I'm going to get one tonight. It depends on if the kids use up all the hot water and if I have the energy for it (and the associated task of moisturizing everything now).

I didn't feel like washing dishes or cooking dinner but I pushed through that. We had meatloaf and cheesy mashed potatoes for dinner tonight. I didn't have the Italian sausage to add to the recipe, so I used more beef. The kids didn't notice the difference and still enjoyed their meal. I ran out of space to put dishes to dry earlier. So, I will have to wait until tomorrow to wash the broiler pan from Monday's burgers and the dishes from tonight. My life is painfully boring and domestic on this front. My biggest accomplishments today it seems, aside from writing, was getting all my laundry folded and put away; washing a fuck ton of dishes; and making dinner. 

I'm really frustrated with how my tarot reading business is going. I was logged in for my usual hours and only got one call. Which netted me three dollars, that's one dollar per hour before you factor in stuff like tax. This has been the case for a few weeks now. I don't know if it is a case of clients not having the money for readings in the face of prices for everything going up or if there's something else going on. I did an experiment a few days ago of logging in at nine in the morning and staying logged in until four thirty in the afternoon. I only made fifty dollars the entire day. This is a sharp decrease from what I had going on in September. In September, I averaged something between five to ten dollars per hour on my calls. I ended the week with something around forty to fifty dollars. 

A part of me says I should just give it up. Another part of me says that this is just a fallow period and I need to hang in there. I just get anxious that we're going to need that small extra bit of income over the coming months. I know that my anxiety is based in the fact that I grew up poor and we needed every dime we could get our hands on. But I am struggling with how to market my business and my books. I'm actually getting some small royalty checks for my books. It's averaging to be around twenty dollars a month. I am hoping that the holidays may mean more sales but I'm not hanging my hat on that.

Suffice it to say, there's a lot of balls up in the air right now. I've been slowly gathering things for Yule. Because of my issues over the Summer and early Autumn, I didn't get anything made for anybody. I don't have time to craft stuff between now and the 25th. I just don't know what to get some folks and I am struggling with anxiety over pricing since going shopping and observing how much the cost of stuff has gone up since the last time I did serious shopping. A small ham should not be over ten dollars at the discount grocery store, but that's where we're at.

And this isn't even looking at my mental health picture right now. Let's just say that I'm tired, dealing with seasonal depression, and the different parts of my brain are arguing with each other on a semi-regular basis. Also, last week, I had three panic attacks. It sucked. I don't even know why they happened. But, I am struggling to find time to do my therapy writing in the face of everything else going on. I barely find time to get my daily work done. I haven't been sleeping great and I'm sure it's tied to all of that. However, I am a fighter. I'll just keep my shield up and press forward until I have ground the problem beneath my heel or forced the situation to one that I can bear, like I always do.

Sleep helps my brain reset.

 I took a nap after that last post and that screaming in my head sensation went away. If it stays away, I don't know. Apparently just a bad night's sleep is going to screw up my head now. *sigh*

This getting older with multiple mental illnesses to deal with is bullshit. /rant

There's screaming in my head.

 Fuck all, I've gone and talked about this on FB of all places. This blog gets barely any pings, it's a theoretically safe place to talk about it.

Today, there's someone in my head screaming. It's not the introject of my mother. That particular someone is locked up and gagged as sufficiently as I can manage by force of will and magic. But there's a part of me wailing in terror and cowering. I can't make sense of it. I just take the magic pill and the wall between them and I gets a little thicker. 

I've had almost as many panic attacks this week as there've been days. I've dissociated a lot when I wasn't panicked and just sat staring at things not really connecting with reality. This concept of being 'plural' or whatever it's called terrifies me. That might be why one of the people in my head is screaming right now. I've been stuck on trying to write all morning.

All I know is that there's a part of myself in deep distress and I can't do anything about it. I don't know why there is this distress. When the panic attacks hit, I feel like I need to run and hide. Not take my children and hide. Not prepare for a fight. But flee for my life and hide in or under something where I can't be seen. It makes being on the computer hard because my living room is not a secure location with it's three big windows. Yeah, it's a laptop and I could theoretically carry it off into another room to write. But that's not going to resolve whatever the fuck is going on in my head.

All of this started months ago when I couldn't sleep. I thought we had the sleep problem resolved. I'm starting to wake up stupid early again. (Last night was because I was coming down from a panic attack and forgot all my evening meds because I couldn't grock what time it was on some level. That doesn't exactly count like most of last week where I did take 'em and I kept popping awake at 0400.) My head feels even more fucked up than it did when this shit began.

I'm not having flashbacks, most of the time. But that's because of the magic pill that quells the panic response and short circuits the flashback. I keep dissociating in a fashion where I just sit and stare not really connecting with reality, just in a fog. I know there's a lot of trauma anniversaries through this time of year. I'm not too surprised by the dissociation, but this rising, repetitive sense of panic and feeling like my brain/personality/self is fractured and held together with spit and bailing wire has been growing stronger over the months.

I'll be talking to my psy doc about this soon. I know that he'll say that I really need a therapist. The problem is none of the therapists in my area will take my damn insurance. And I'll just suffer with this shit if my choice is going back to the county clinic. Those people damn near destroyed my life with their bungling of my case. No fucking way am I going to darken their doorstep, be it literally or figuratively.

Fiber fluff update

 Well, it's December and I've only got one present made. That's right, I've only made one present. We'll be baking cookies later on in the month. But, that's not the same as making stuff like scarves and toys. I'm panicking a little bit about what I'm going to give people. I was going to make my increasingly famous Apple Pie Moonshine but the list of people who can have it keeps growing smaller. I may just give out the recipe.

On the preemie hat front, I'm grinding away at making hats. The people who write these patterns and say they work up in fifteen minutes lie. They're dirty, filthy lies. It's more like a half hour regardless of hook size and yarn weight. It is vexing but I'm going to keep at it. I've lost count as to where I'm at right now. But I know that I'm not going to hit my goal of 100 by January 1. Those few months back in the summer when I had a mental health crisis really screwed up my plans for the holidays. That's typically when I'm working on making things for people.

Spinning is on hold at the moment because I'm trying to finish off this damn ball of yarn for the preemie hats. I'm a bit frustrated. I love the way the Alpaca fiber is spinning up. I'm sure that it'll be a beautiful yarn. But I can't make anything for myself out of it because I will react to it. Nothing is as disappointing as getting all that work done and discovering that you can't do anything with it.

I'm debating rebooting my Etsy store and slapping up some of my yarn hoard for sale. I've been considering spinning for production for a little while. I enjoy spinning and I know that I can spin for production level work by the fact that I have spun a mile of yarn in the span of a month. And it was good, fine weight yarn. On a drop spindle. Since I have a kick wheel, I can probably do double that in shorter time. I am just in the situation that I don't have a comfortable chair to sit in and do this work. 

Looking at the yarn offered up for sale by others and the cost of their spinning services, I find myself thinking I could probably undercut some on the price and still make a decent bit out of my hobby. And not be left with the question of what the hell am I going to do with all of this damn yarn that I have spun. I'm still deciding on this one.

Monday Rant: Posted at the writing blog.

 So, I did my free writing exercise and it turned into a rant. Here's the link. 

https://evandarstories.blogspot.com/2021/11/aw-morning-pages-no-88.html

TL : DR - Fuck the holiday season.

Friday Life Hack: Gift Edition.

 So, we're coming up on the season of inundating people with things. We've got cookies to make, pies to bake, and C'thulu to wake (because somebody's gotta do something about the way things have gone down hill around my neck of the woods, people are just getting down right impolite and ugly about things).

Seriously, if you're someone who is hard to shop for (like myself) you probably get the deer in the headlights look when someone asks you what you want for [insert holiday/gift giving occasion]. What's even worse, however, is leaving people to just guess. Because then gods only know what is going to arrive and if there's a single thing you can do with it. 

Stop and take a moment before someone ambushes you with the big gift question. Come up with a handful of ideas based off of your hobbies and interests. Your list need not be exhaustive. It can also include the unconventional gifts of donations to charity in your name, random acts of kindness in your name, or some other form of giving to others on your behalf. People may think it a little odd that you're asking them to give to someone else on your behalf. Don't worry about it. A year or two of making that 'odd' request, they'll get used to it.

Monday Rant: What's wrong with being Chaotic Good?

 I make people uncomfortable by doing nice things for them. I don't understand it. Somewhere along the way, the practice of random acts of kindness started getting frowned on if they didn't meet a specific standard (usually some WASP suburbanite vision of it ala buying coffee for the next car in line). When I was in labor with my second son, I had brought with me a crafting project to keep me distracted. I overheard a mother in the next bed over (we were all waiting our turn for our c-section delivery) who was very distressed about being a single mother and her lack of goods for taking care of the baby. I asked the nurse if I could give that woman the baby blanket that I had finished, explaining that the entire thing was made from a hypoallergenic yarn and machine washable. The nurse was confused but said it was ok, as long as I stayed in my bed. My solution was to hand the blanket to the nurse to give the woman (which made the nurse visibly uncomfortable). The other mother started crying when she received the blanket.

I told this story to someone I knew and they got offended. I was chastised for making the woman cry when her situation was so bad. I pointed out that I had given her something that was going to help and they proceeded to defame this mother claiming that they were likely a 'welfare queen'. It took a great deal of restraint not to punch them in the face when they started talking smack about this poor woman who was in a hard spot that they knew nothing about.

This isn't the first time I've been told that my random acts of kindness and charity are 'wrong' because I'm giving to the 'wrong' people. Apparently, you're only allowed to give to the poor if you're part of an organization (preferably run by a church that you're a member in good standing), you're only allowed to give money to charitable organizations instead of directly to the people in need, and if you're making things to give away it has to be to charitable organizations instead of to people directly, because the people might sell it.

The general attitude that my acts of kindness and charity to others is going to enable some kind of nefarious behavior on the part of the people who are in need is bullshit. But I run into it a lot around these parts. There's always the assumption that the poor are going to use cash to get drugs or alcohol. There's the attitude that you've been conned out of your money if you pay for an impoverished person's lunch. And this vacillating sense of virtue signaling on if you're giving to a charity. If the charity is one that is considered virtuous based on their public image, you're a bad person for not giving to them when you choose someone else. (I'm looking at you, Salvation Army and your anti-LGBT+ bullshit.) I hate the default assumption that if a charitable organization is nominally associated with Christianity, that means they're better than the other organizations.

I tend to skip the organizations for the most part and just give to people in need as I meet them. Things tend to find me that people are in need of and I pass them along instead of insisting on charging a buck. The only organization that I work with is the spinning guild because they're well vetted and have a good set of contacts for distributing goods to the people who need it. I also picked to do so because they're secular. I know that nobody is going to be getting pressured to convert to anything in order to get what they need to be ok.

But this cultural attitude that all poor people of bad moral character and that by helping them I am enabling them to do nebulous, nefarious things makes me furious. If the homeless person I gave a scarf to decides to sell it, obviously they needed the cash more than the scarf, so it still helped them. When I give things away, they're no longer mine to dictate what happens to them. The same is true about any act of charity. You give it away, it's not yours anymore and you don't get to say boo about what people do with it. Don't like it, don't give it away.

Chaotic good for life. To Hel with the haters.