A running thread

 I started this post to talk about grooming and didn't even get there.

Because when I found out that my friend had died, it came up in conversation about it with another person that someone I had cut out of my life rather earlier had also passed away (of skin cancer of all things). I realized I'd cut out a large part of my formative social scene because of the hurt (and let's face it, harm) they'd done me over the years. I said something to the effect of "Lot of people who won't hear 'no' in that group". And it hit me; this is where it started. 

I loved the place I went on Tuesday nights to dance to a local band and talk about nerdy things. I felt seen for who I was, I felt supported, I felt attractive, I felt safe; all things that I did not feel at home nor at school. I finally found a place I could take some more tentative steps towards my own erotic fulfilment, and it was mostly with people my own age. But I also endured the advances of some much older men who I did not find attractive, while considering the advances of some men who I did.

We were all subject in myriad ways to the Five Geek Social Fallacies, spread over a community of a hundred or more people. These dynamics are toxic and harmful enough in small groups, but at that size the problem is exponentially worse.

There goes my brain, trying really hard not to think about this again. 

It starts simply enough with affectionate words from a man of the group. These are missing at home and so welcomed, and so is the chaste affectionate touch that follows. With some of them, it becomes less-chaste, but never outside the bounds of some group-understood propriety. You are underage, and you are safe. And because you're safe, you let them do things that maybe you wouldn't let other people do if you didn't know they were safe. A touch that lingers. Some inappropriate comment. You don't notice it slowly ramping up. You are exploring with other young people your age, and you interleave the humiliating and awkward things you do with people your age with the interactions with the older crowd. You're praised for being so "mature" and so in control of yourself. If you stand up for yourself, this approval is rescinded.

I gave up seeking my mom's approval in 2016. It is only now, some five years later, that I realize that the gap where I was trying so hard and not getting it, was a time that left me vulnerable.

I was not sexually assaulted as a teenager. But the simmering anxiety that was bent to someone's (or someones') selfish purpose led to the inability to say no that marked so much of the last twenty years of my life. I said yes to a lot of the things I wanted, and I said yes to things I didn't want, over and over and over again, because I thought it would make me a good person. That gap in the armor made me hyperaware and a people pleaser, which left me open to emotional abuse. I was not sexually assaulted as a teenager, but I was sexually assaulted, regularly, by an intimate partner for several years as a grown-ass adult. It's taken me so long to admit that that's what happened that it's a whole new form of embarrassment to have it out there in the open.

It made me popular (for a time) in a way that I'd never been popular among my peers in school. But more and more as I look back, that time was extremely bounded: between 18 and 23. The five years in which I could still be mistaken for underage; the years in which modeling requests came with a frequency that was annoying, but also rather flattering. The years when I was frequently asked to dance, winked at, pushed, prodded, hugged, fondled and groped.

I am thinking about this because I was thinking about the person I'd cut out of my life who'd died of skin cancer, and how in our shared high school theater classes (he was an upperclassman), he insisted on hugging me. Insisted. To the point that even when I didn't want to hug (when he started getting handsy and I started saying no), he made a joke of it with another guy in the department, and they made me their "hugging post". They hugged me while I stood defiantly stiff and glaring. They hugged me when I said no, laughing and high fiving each other. And then that guy who died of skin cancer wondered why I never wanted to speak to him, once it was made abundantly clear (a few years later when I was of age) what he wanted from me. 

Older men, this behavior is on you. It's not enough to say "sorry, you're jailbait". It is not enough to say "let's not date until you turn 18".  It is not okay to cultivate friendships with underage women on the chance that they might fuck you once they're legal. It's not okay to only withdraw, or threaten to withdraw, emotional support and friendship when they don't want to fuck you. This needs to be taught, along with the curriculum in consent that's now coming to the fore, to every man on reaching the age of 18.

I am now, twenty years later, still crippled with fear in the face of making new connections, because am afraid that I am valued only for sex, and I cannot believe that my desires would be accommodated. Let me say this again. I am nearly 40 and I am afraid to date because I am afraid that the people I form intimate connections with only care about fucking me and will not stop when I say no.

I am unpicking this thread from the weaving, bit by bit.

Incivility in unrest

Last week, someone I was once close with died of cancer. 

I say "once close" instead of "a friend" because we'd drifted apart over years - they were part of a group that was formative to my youth and to my young adulthood, but which turned quite toxic and eventually I quietly left. (At least I thought it was quietly.) The last thing she asked me was advice for making skirts out of the elastic-smocked-top crushed velvet yardage from Joann's, and that was more than a decade ago. She was medically obese, and was working hard to be seen as a woman. The skirts were an easy way to get an infusion of femme without trying to also tackle the toxic women's diet industry at the same time. I can only vaguely recall her deadname at this point, because her nickname was what we all called her. I hadn't really spoken to her since before her transition. I had cut off that entire part of my life like one cuts off a decaying branch.

I realized that I stopped doing Faire in 2006 (or 2009), and Dickens in 2013; it's been fifteen (or twelve) and eight years I've been outside those groups, respectively. While I miss the camaraderie and I miss the absolute joy of the places and experiences we created, I do not miss the toxicity of the people involved.

Dickens Fair is having its #metoo moment, simultaneously as it's facing criticism for it's casting policies, business practices around the volunteer staff, and acknowledging the hurt and harm that cast members receive at the hands of both patrons and other members of the cast and crew. There needs to be a change, that much has been acknowledged - even by the people who run the event. They've promised many things before and been caught short, so the performers are right to hold their feet to the fire. However, I do not think that the timeline set out in the demands are reasonable, and I believe one of the demands in particular is unreasonable. Others agree, but several of the leaders of this movement cannot abide others who don't agree wholeheartedly and are actively sealioning and dogpiling other folks who raise the slightest objection. I'm seeing signs of a cortisol/dopamine cycle addiction that I find really troubling. To quote something extremely relevant:

Self harm that is rewarded by society looks like: 

5. Social media ‘outrage’: social media outrage occurs when we (without breaks) consume content that puts us on a cycle of emotional addiction. These platforms are designed to use our dopamine + cortisol hits to keep us using the product. They can lead us to feeling helpless + have a narrative of the world that doesn’t necessarily reflect reality.

I've been trying to write this for an hour and I keep looking away. 

My brain does not want to talk about how traumatized I have been by people who I thought were my friends, who enjoy beating others down on the internet, and who have done it to me with a shockingly casual and final cruelty. Before it was Facebook, it was LiveJournal and Tribe, before that it was forums, and before that usenet groups and mailing lists. I have had these righteous types who I thought were my friends do real and lasting harm to my self-esteem and mental health, to say nothing of my social life and emotional connections. These are people who see themselves as good people, and who are blind to the harms they do, be it in the name of The Cause or on a personal whim. I will not abide this treatment, and I leave. For better or worse, when I disappear from their sphere of influence it doesn't even register.

I have been fortunate enough to not need Fair or Faire in the economic sense, and so cutting them out has impacted my social life but not prevented me from thriving. We talk about "drama is as drama does", but the reality seems to be that people who cannot control their external lives spend much of their time enforcing their views on the internet instead. I am all for moving the Overton Window in the direction of Social Justice, but I am not for magical thinking when it comes to social organizing. I get that people have been pushing these objectives for months and years, but it has been (slowly) getting better. I get that the time for BLM organizing is now, but I also think that timelines for demands should take into account that we're only just now starting to emerge from a global pandemic in which the things which shut down first, and most-thoroughly, were special events. 

There seems to be a thread of "we can rebuild this on our own if the Powers That Be deny our demands" and to that I just have to purse my lips grimly. If your main method of building consensus is to shout down people who hold other opinions, you are only going to have people join who already agree with you lock, stock, and barrel. And I doubt that will be as many people as you think. Facebook is the wrong place to organize, because it enables and normalizes building and maintaining the type of filter bubbles that enable other magical thinking movements, like Q-Anon. 

I want change for the better. But I also want to stop people from spending their entire days writing thousand-word rebuttals to people who say they disagree with any part of a plan. It turns out, arguing these things at this length, in person or especially on the internet, does not have the persuasive effect you intend. But keep chasing that dopamine.

I want change, but I also want people to stop being assholes.

I guess they're people, so maybe that's not entirely possible.

Just desserts

 Day 7 of Wellbuterin, and I wish I'd done this sooner.

I have avoided "drugs" all my life, because of the bogeyman they represented; my mother's fears about loss of self made manifest in her children. I remember my first time "driving" for a significant other on MDMA, and when he told me he loved me, I asked the next day if that was him talking, or the drugs? Who am I without tinkering with myself? Am I still me? It's an Odysseus' Ship problem, except on a more abstract scale: you could argue that the animating intelligence is what makes a person, no matter if their appearance, limbs, even organs, change. It's much less clear when you're tinkering with that intelligence, when what you're changing could materially affect how one thinks and perceives the world. If you are behind the wheel, but the drugs are driving, are you really behind the wheel?

So as I sat listening to music on the beach and Incubus came on, song that I rolled my eyes at in high school because it was "too popular", the line "let the fear take the wheel and steer" hit me like a poleaxe. I have been so afraid of letting the drugs steer, that now I find that, somewhere between 12 and 20 years later, that it hasn't been me per se driving, but my fear and anxiety.

It has been like realizing that you've been putting up with intense, grinding tinnitus for years and years without realizing it. It's like finding that you'd been carrying around a leaden weight for all these years, and like in a dream-state, been unable to look at it, put it down, or speak of it to other people. Suddenly, thinking about my relationship doesn't fill me with dread and terror. 

TikTok in loco parentis, TikTok in lieu of therapy; there are so many genres of self-help on the app that it's always amazing to me when I find something that makes me sob. And so I've been thinking about what happened to me around 2008, and I've been thinking about worthiness. I sobbed over a DnD NPC video where the barkeeper hands me the key to the tower room because I look like the kind of person who's not very good at letting themselves rest and I scribbled onto a post it note:

Why do I feel like I don't deserve:

• rest
• care
• to say no
• to ask for more
• to feel better

Sometimes catching the fleeting thought is an important part of acknowledging what hurts. I was in the middle of unloading groceries, thinking about the last time I felt like I could be sexually free, when it struck me: The last time I felt free was followed by horrible horrible times, and I felt I was being punished for something. An unjust breakup, a divorce, a housing situation falling apart, a job loss. Over the next year I rebuilt my life entirely, and closed myself off to many things. And while some of those things crept back into my world, I never fully uncircled the wagons, so to speak.

It's pretty shit, you know, when you're raised with these ideals of Karma, and how they're supposed to release you from a Judeo-Christian god-guilt. And yet, and yet, I felt like I had taken too much, and much must be taken from me in order to balance the scales. What rubbish. And yet here I am unable to truly fathom that things might go well for me without them also having to go poorly.

New starts

Appropriately, I started Wellbutrin today, on Ostara. 

I was not prepared for the emotional overwhelm of getting the vaccine on Monday. I was not prepared for the intense feelings of guilt about getting it while Martin couldn't. I was also 100% unprepared for the sudden burst of "omg pandemic is almost over, time to get the meatsuit in shape".

On Monday night I sent a flurry of emails, to my PCP, to my gastroenterologist, to my chiropractor, to a dentist. On Tuesday I scheduled a bunch of appointments. On Wednesday I cleaned frantically in prep for cleaners the next day, and my mood dropped. I started thinking about knives, and guns, and car exhaust while making dinner. I actually scared myself. At midnight, I wrote a short and slightly flippant note to the psychiatrist who I'd connected with in the weeks after my surgery. I considered using the "send later" feature, but figured that if nothing else could convey a sense of urgency, the timestamp would. She responded with an offer of a date in April, but also that we could work something out "if I needed to be seen sooner". 

Readers, I have never been so relieved, and felt so guilty, to see those words. I struggled to just *take the offered help*, but in the end we had a consultation on Friday during her lunch break. Filling out the family history forms was hard, and gave me a lot more fear. There's a lot to cover; anxiety, BPD, schizophrenia, manic depression, bipolar, avoidant depression, and that's not even touching the ADD/ADHD symptoms that are still lingering. (Even if the neurocognitive stuff is decreasing, the inability to focus isn't.) We didn't get through everything, but we ruled out a few things much to my relief. I was absolutely shocked (relieved-shocked) at how quickly we went from "nice to meet you" to "here's a prescription". Wilder still, after avoiding these things all my life, of struggling with everything related to getting mental health care covered, to have insurance cover my prescription with no questions asked, with a copay of $15. Trepidatious but relieved. 

We talked a bit about sleep, and how it's one of the things I've struggled with - and how that's ticked up in difficulty recently, and how incredibly important it is that I get back to having long, restful, non-apneatic sleep. So now I'm also scheduling and ENT appointment. 

I spent a lot of time last night thinking through it all. There's the family history of hating and fearing western medicine. There's the family fear of spending money on doctors. It's a potent combo of scarcity mindset and naturalistic fallacy. There's this idea that if I was a good person, this body would be just fine for the duration of my stay on this earth with no medical intervention necessary, but boy howdy, with a history of chronic sinus issues, an UID, two dental crowns and fucking plate in my neck, that ship has absolutely sailed.

What would I change with this vessel, if I could? There are some [embarrassing items redacted], I'd get my knee and feet looked at by an orthopedist, maybe get Lasik? On a super long shot, I'd consider getting something done to stop my inner thighs chafing. (I don't need or want a thigh gap but I'd like to be able to wear a skirt without shorts and not make my tender thigh skin bleed. And yes I've tried body-glide et al, and I just sweat them all off.)

I've been thinking a lot in the last week about transhumanism - the idea of hacking your body to make it work better for yourself, and I think I'm going to lean into it. The idea that maybe I don't deserve to suffer for all the fun things I did (all those ballroom dance injuries), and that maybe I DO deserve care (what?!) is really hard to process. But I'm getting there.

So this morning I took my vitamins, took my allergy pill, and before I could think too hard about it and psyche myself out about it, my first Wellbutrin. 

Here's to fresh starts.

The Ides of March

 ...or, how I got unexpectedly stabbed.

On Friday I got a text from the state saying to review the current guidelines about vaccination eligibility. And to my surprise, I found out that anyone with a BMI of 30 or above was eligible here in San Francisco. So many feelings. My BMI has prevented me from getting care for my pain and suffering for years, so to find it suddenly is getting me preferential treatment is both humiliating and... feels a little like reparations.

I made an appointment for Monday afternoon, and the followup for April 5th. I didn't know what to expect and my cuticles are a mess from anxiety. In the end I convinced Martin to come with me; I was hoping they'd just give him a shot, but honesty won out in the end. But I'm glad I had him there. 

I didn't expect the massive emotional... thrum - there's no real way to describe it - when she lined up the needle. I closed my eyes and thought about all the fear, and the pain, all the uncertainty and the loss. Of people suffering and dying in the hospitals alone; of medical workers forced to do their best over and over in the face of mounting losses and public indifference; of mothers laboring and delivering alone; of my own terrifying solo walk towards major surgery and possible death. I thought about the trips we'd planned; Melbourne, Burning Man; Costume College and Carnevale, Hawaii, London, all the good things we'd had to let slip through our fingers, then further and further away. 

I was in so much emotional pain I didn't even feel the needle, only the hard plastic seat, the hot wetness at the edge of my mask, and Martin's hand in mine. I can't believe that this is almost over.

And then I looked up at my partner, who is not labeled obese, who is not eligible, and who I am now terrified for. I didn't expect the shot to come for me before July and I didn't expect that we wouldn't get it together and now I feel like a horrible person for taking it and not waiting. 

I got stabbed on the Ides of March, and I will be fully vaccinated by May Day. It's a lot to take in right now.

One year gone

 In two days, I will have been working from home for a full year.

It's strange to think of all the things that I've grown accustomed to, in that year. No N Judah trains rumbling by, no lunches at work, no commute, making my own coffee, doing nothing, seeing nobody. I can't make myself participate in any of the online versions of the things I love, because... well, I don't know why. Honestly, staying home seems preferable to the disappointment of the pale shadow of what it was.

The question I posed in my second pandemic blog post was - what will be left when this is all over? So many of our favorite things have opened again only to re-close, and each time they do it wastes precious resources. How many times will they open and close, and will they ever open as they were, again?

And what am I going to be like? I feel like some sort of slug, like a potato. I can't get up the enthusiasm to get out of the house or go anywhere. Martin wants to make plans and I just can't get excited about anything. 

Part of this is that I'm still healing, I'm sure. I'm not back to 100% and I don't know when I will be. I honestly feel like I've been chasing 80% for weeks now, and not quite making it, but trying to get back to "normal" life again, whatever the hell that means, despite the pain and stiffness. My 3-month check in is on Monday and I'm terrified that they're going to tell me that the fusion isn't working, or that the third level we were supposed to do as an artificial disk has now failed and that's what's causing the pain. I don't know. I don't know. I'm scared. And I want so desperately to get back to "normal" even though there is no normal to get back to.

Some part of me has been observing with wry detachment as my brain... recovers... from all this pain. The silence that's rung in my head since May of 2017 (interspersed with gratingly loud loops of gratingly repetitive snippets of music) has been fading away. I thought it could've been that the breakup damaged my brain, because the rest of me felt weirdly physically fine but - what if it was the car crash? What if this degeneration started with whiplash in May of 2017 and took nearly two years to blossom into the first spasm (March 2019), and another 18 months to cause the second? I oscillate between dubious and angry that it could be true.

I'm angry at a lot of things right now. The housing market, politics that pits humans against their own interest, the pandemic, climate change. 

I would just like to go somewhere for awhile where I can make things and not be angry anymore, and not have to worry about how I'm going to get money or food or shelter or healthcare. I just want some sort of rest.

Get to work

Day two back to work and I'm exhausted already. I'm remembering how tired, burnt out, and discouraged I'd been at work before the Shoulder Thing and the Going Public Thing and the Neck Thing and the Acquisition. I realized that there's probably no future for me at this company because of a couple of people who've been quietly undermining me since I got there - and, hilariously, they picked today to show themselves. (But hey, at least I get a reasonable payout if I exercise my remaining options and GTFO?)

It's sort of a grim parallel with what's going on in politics now too. Biden is in, and has been working his ass off to start undoing the damage of the previous four years. And of course, the opposition is doing all the same dirty awful shit as they always have. We're right back to the stonewalling that they gave Obama, except now the economy is a farce and we're in the middle of a recession and a public health disaster while they're very suddenly concerned about the deficit. For fuck's sake. The Democratic Party needs to take no fucking prisoners.

The good news from today is that I'm feeling better, and better, and starting to really see the end of the tunnel with surgical recovery. Today, for the first time, the scar looked shorter, and less puffy. I can see the edges of the incision and see them starting to diminish. And I feel like my range of motion is starting to get better, bit by bit, even though the rest of me hurts like hell. I'm hoping to get back to yoga next week, even if it's modified.

And we're keeping up with the steady flow of houses on our radar, though none have been worth a look just yet, alas. And I apparently have good taste in condos, because the ones I favorite seem to flip to pending within 24 hours of my interest, siiiiiigh.

So, back to work.

Gratitude

 Wow, so, first week of 2021, really packing it in, huh? Only six days in and our first Doomscroll day of the year. I'm extremely thankful for a lot of things right now, and one of them is that I was still unambiguously on medical LOA while an armed mob signaled the end of our track record of "peaceful transfer of power" Democracy. 

I'm also grateful that, if it taught business people anything, when these doomscroll days happen there's no point in expecting anything to get fucking done; almost everyone I know who was trapped in view of screens reported that their bosses had given everyone a Mulligan for the day. Nobody can be expected to focus on work when History is happening - it's just been happening more and more frequently in the last year or so.

I'm grateful for the rain we've been having - mostly overnight, mostly in long slow downpours, mostly with sun breaking through in the afternoons. I have my fingers crossed that our aquifers recharge and the snowpack is deep and wet, and that the fire season gives us a bit of a reprieve in 2021. And I'm enjoying walking along the beach in the thin afternoon sunlight.

On Thursday, I logged in to work email for the first time since before my surgery, to request that we extend my LOA from the "best case" 4 week duration, to the full 6 weeks. It was *so* needed, and, looking back at my cuticles (which are picked and bloody) it was giving me a lot of anxiety apparently.

So I'm officially off work until January 26th, and friends, oh my god I need it so badly. I'm so grateful to have it and so grateful that I'm in a place in my life where it's available. 

And while I'm at it, let me say how grateful/angry I am about my health care coverage? As I'm tallying up the charges for medical services leading up to this, it's approaching $400k of billing. I hit my out-of-pocket maximum right before surgery so theoretically I'm not on the hook for any of that, but it's not clear that the individual providers won't come after me for the shortfall, which the imaging companies are already doing. I've been keeping all those charges on a single card since last year, just for tracking purposes, and it's already over $600 in post-insurance-settlement charges. Fuck those vultures. I'm scared.

Today was my one month check in, and now I get to track down and schedule the PT. The xray shows that my fusion is going well, and my doctor was shocked that I was still wearing the hard collar the whole time, and said to stop wearing it unless my neck feels tired or sore. I was worried about how puffy and lumpy the incision site is still, but I'm told that it actually looks great, and the level of puff I have is totally normal. 

My biggest question that I kept worrying about - what happened during the surgery that took an extra three hours has been answered. Apparently they didn't start the procedure until about 4, and I was held up an hour in the OR because there was no room in post-op yet. (The ICU bed shortage, and the extra-thorough cleaning of the rooms between patients has some knock-on effects.) Let me tell you folks, looking at the bill, that's like another $10k in anaesthesia drugs alone. The doctor also amusedly told me that it explains why Martin got an incredibly drugged out Laura call several hours earlier than expected; apparently the anaesthesia people get the task of monitoring/hanging out with the patient while the rest of the surgical team is dismissed, and they'll do puzzles and have whole conversations with you and put you on the phone with people if they're bored. 

And now... I want a nap.

Hello, 2021

It feels really surreal. Maybe that's the drugs?

Readers, I am here now to tell you that it was, in fact, the drugs. They are in fact both the solution and additional problems. This procedure has made what's already a rough and emotional time of year well-nigh unbearable. I've been see-sawing between totally fine and burn-your-life-down sobbingly depressed.

It turns out that tramadol has an SNRI in it, which is like an SSRI except that it also treats nerve pain apparently (which is good to do if you're treating chronic pain). I've struggled with, and mostly beaten, depression all my life. I've been passively suicidal on and off since I was 14 or so. My care team asked if I was currently on an SSRI but they did not ask about my mental health in any other way. Each time I've tried to taper off the tramadol, I've apparently been doing it wrong because I've had zero guidance from the team, and with zero guidance from the internet/community, because googling for this just nets you page after page of ads for rehab clinics. And each time I tried to taper, it's been like kicking the kid on the bike who's just taken off the training wheels. I felt like I've been barely staying astride.

And also the rest of the time, I feel entirely fine. Good, even.  We take nice long walks. We've cooked and built things and enjoyed the pleasant weather.

This is not to say I'm feeling totally great. I mean, I have intense and layered Strong Feelings about the state of my meat suit and how it's failing me, how ugly and lumpy and just overall gory the surgical site looks right now. But that's nothing next to the feeling like I've just come out from some sort of trance and found that I've been walking on knives for three weeks, and then effortlessly falling back into that trance. I cannot tell what's the drugs, and what's the continued conflicts in my relationship bubbling over; I can't tell what is forgivable and what's inevitable. 

And, for what it's worth, at least I can walk just fine, swallow fine, take all my vitamins again, shower, brush my hair and do a bunch of stuff okay again. I'm not off painkillers and not back to 100% yet and I don't know when I will be, but I'm no longer prevented from doing everyday tasks because of pain or stiffness, or lets be real here, fear. Though I'm also not yet off the opiods and thus not permitted to drive (which makes me feel surprisingly trapped), or alas, to drink. That latter has been a surprising ache for me, not because I particularly care about being drunk, but because I enjoy the sensory experience and traditions of cocktails so much. The fact that I feel sad about it makes me question if I have a problem? I don't think I do, or else I wouldn't have gone this long without any alcohol, right? 

I cannot wait to be out of this collar, to be able to drive myself places, and to have a nice nightcap before bed.

We dressed up for New Years Eve, because that's what you're supposed to do, even if you're just cooking and spending the evening at home on multiple Zoom calls with friends. And we took off my neck brace for a photo, so I could feel just the slightest bit normal for the first time in 17 days. 

So here I am. Don't tell my orthopedist.