What strategies do you use to increase comfort in your daily life?

One of my now former friends said that to me, and I will never let go of it because it makes me angry and it’s also the truth. It makes me angry because I’m a spectrum. I have every emotion known to God and man coursing through me all the days of my life. To overfocus on my anger and not accept my love is based on what you see, not what you get. I am responsible for what I say. I am not responsible for what you understand. If you go into it looking for the fact that I’m an asshole with a God complex, you’ll fucking find it. This is my web site. It is the only thing I own cold, therefore it’s the one space I have in my life to figure out who I really am. You don’t want to see the actual struggle? I can recommend quite a few web sites that are crappier than mine. Enjoy.

However, if you focus on all the love inside me, you’ll find that, too.

I do not want to be the sort of person that lives to please anyone, especially now.

Remember I was talking about a guy who wanted to date me that completely went off the deep end and I laid down some truth for him? He deactivated his Facebook account. Therefore, I know he overfocused on “I don’t want to waste time on a man I don’t know” and not “if you want to know me, do it.” I meant that he was already so into it that I didn’t have a chance to catch my breath before he was talking marriage. Again, it had been a little over a week.

This is someone that I could see being friends with and possibly more down the road, but I’m not going to commit to anything on no information. I ran headlong into my beautiful girl before I knew what was up, and it was a mistake. I was reading over our conversations last night, and it has been a dumpster fire from the beginning. We bonded, and then spent the next ten years trying to undo it. We fought gloves off, constantly, and it became harder and harder to remain calm because writing letters to each other was just a clarion call to attack, because on the Internet, that’s what people do. They become disconnected from their compassion because of the wall of anonymity.

I think that’s why I don’t meet many people in person. I need to think in longhand, because I want to make things clear. I cannot do it as easily while talking, because I’m generally too flustered to get things out.

In the deep dive, here’s something that struck me as funny. At about 3 years, I started borrowing style and structure from her. Without even realizing it, she was fighting with herself in a different body. She Googled it, and she did not like it. My words in the way she would say them drove her up the fucking wall, and I didn’t even realize it so I couldn’t fix it. If you knew her, that boundaries conversation with “Michael” would have been out of central casting, and I doubt she would deny it.

At ten years, I am so much more comfortable writing because she whipped my ass into shape. It was like exercise. What I didn’t do was develop breathing techniques to kill the burn in my muscles. I’d put out feelings, she’d go nuclear. She said something about her ire only being in response to my shitty words, and that’s not true in the slightest. She took a sword and made patterns on my skin, drops of blood gathering at my brow, because I couldn’t afford to lose her and she was slipping through my fingers. She was right and I was wrong, but that didn’t stop the trauma bond from making me feel like I needed a hit.

Most people would think that’s because I’m a narcissist. That is incorrect. I was groomed by one, so when I was a teen/tween I craved her physically and she craved me mentally, because she was all about getting those dopamine hits. In retrospect, it was the best thing that ever happened for me that she finally decided we were done. I was discarded, and it felt like death.

I was reborn, and she was absolutelyfuckingnot.

So, when my beautiful girl and I trauma dumped, my physical reaction was based (somewhat- ngl, not all of it) on my past history, not what she actually said. I do not mean catching feelings. I mean the physical feeling of craving dopamine that’s now missing and finding things to replace it. The way I know I’m not a narcissist is that I recognize the symptoms for what they are and I am working on the problem. I am not trying to find a new “source…” I am fining that I am having fun being a creative and not worrying about my relationships.

Bryn makes gummy bears for a head shop, and she takes pictures of them for brochures and stuff. She said she needed a theme, and I said, “Teddy Bears’ Picnic.” She ran with it and did a balloon, a blanket, some ants, etc. I said, “I know you weren’t on Worship Team, but this is what it was like. Take a theme and fill in the details.”

It was actually good remembering a Big Yellow House memory that was good…… at first. Then, I got frustrated because I thought, “this is not a real church.” Pastors don’t have debates with people over whether we can drink at meetings….. although in other parishes, it would have helped a lot. No one asked me, but you can’t drink at church. Ever. I absolutely participated because I was new and they weren’t. Plus, it wasn’t like we were getting wasted. It was like having a working lunch with one drink. But if you drink at meetings, you’re excluding people who don’t drink and church isn’t about excluding anyone. People who choose not to drink are in a different situation than people who can’t drink. Alcohol is everywhere they look, and it’s hard to sit through a meeting without losing your mind when you need the dopamine so bad. Pastors aren’t supposed to be that person, the one that steps over complaints as if they are invalid.

The next pastor walked into a shit show and didn’t even blink. It was fascinating watching her “handle” a congregation. I mean, she fucking kicked ass and took names in a “no, we’re not going to do that” kind of way. She also never picked favorites, made them her inner circle, and actively sabotaged congregational growth so she could micromanage it. We got healthy over the next few years, and she is personally responsible. She stepped up in a big way, and I will never forget it.

It’s why I’m frustrated that I had no trust capital with my abuser’s partner, because she never asked me anything. She knew she was GREAT. She didn’t even have to ask me. There were several ordained pastors and preacher’s kids in the congregation. Not gonna lie here, either. I have no idea how those ordained pastors put up with her shit, and I’d definitely want to have THAT conversation.

For all practical intents and purposes, she was the stepdad with anger management issues. She saw me as a threat, and treated me as such. The carnage in her wake was also massive, because she couldn’t find objectivity with a map and a flashlight. It bothered me that she wouldn’t talk to me about complaints, because I saw her as a parent who needed help and she………….. did not. It all made sense to me, though, because she was my abuser’s partner. Eventually the abusive relationship settled into our version of “normal.” This is because since I thought of them as parents, I went to visit and then basically to live with them.

Why would I do that if she told the partner she thought I would go away? When the abuser was single, she was all about me coming to live with her because sh thought I needed to get out of the Bible Belt, and she wasn’t wrong. Portland was good for me, even though she dumped me within a month. She stopped hanging out with me and found a new source, pretending she wasn’t having an affair and everyone talking shit behind her back. By that time, the spell was broken for me. I said nothing, but I realized yesterday that her partner is also a victim in all of this.

For instance, Dana’s and my joke was always that there would come a time when _________ smothered would smother her partner with a pillow, and quietly go live with ______. I don’t care if my abuser likes the mirror, or whether the woman she had an affair with does either. Here’s why. I could fill that position with one of a hundred names. Even if she wasn’t fucking them, she had them by the short and curlies. I couldn’t get away, so they couldn’t either…… they were just smarter and eventually lost their minds like I did. It just didn’t take 23 years.

Things were good because I didn’t see myself as abused, I just didn’t understand the panic attacks and from where they were coming. They were flashbacks to being dicked around. They were flashbacks of all the confusion regarding drugs, sex, relationship issues, you name it. I was 14. I was the lockbox for her secrets and lies because she wanted it and I gave it willingly. I just didn’t know what contract I was signing.

Here’s the reason I started talking.

Her college friends came to visit and one of them told me that yes, she had wanted to sleep with me. When she denied it, her voice was fucking dead. She’s a sociopath, and I knew it then. No one goes into that tone, scary and emotionless, when they’re trying to lay the truth on the table.

Say I’m wrong. Say she was absolutely telling the truth. If you were me, would you have believed her, knowing her capacity for lovebombing and discarding? So, I took her shitty behavior and wanted to sleep with the messenger, because the given me the truth. It wasn’t believing them over her so much as it was a pattern for her to lie, and they had no such history with me. There was no reason to believe they were lying, and I’d been told she was trying to abuse me since I was young, because apparently, people have eyes. Who’da thunk?

No one was ever going to get me away from her without putting me in jail, a psych ward, what the fuck ever. That’s because if anyone said that, I never talked to them again. I snuck around like we were having an affair, because we were. Again, it wasn’t sexual. It was that her emotional energy was going to me and not her partner. Not that one. The other one. It was far easier to trauma dump on me than it was to tell her partner she was a train wreck and to get her shit together because she was going down and didn’t want to go with her. Instead, there were numerous stories about her alcoholic, drug dealing partner and how her job might be affected, like the time her partner brought home a POUND of weed.

If you’ve ever seen a pound of tobacco, you know the partner would have been in jail for at least 20 years. It was Texas in 1992. Please.

So, obviously when you want someone to process those problems with, you choose a middle schooler.

I was living at Neverland Ranch, all right.

My strategy is writing through it stream-of-consciousness style because then I can go back and analyze. My judgment is never off about me. It’s off about other people because I hold no authority. I can’t make them emote. I can’t even make them be truthful.

The strategy is learning to put responsibility on the other person to understand. I am not responsible for their reaction or emotional work, so stop doing it. It is unappreciated and invalid to people who don’t want to feel in the fist place, so shoving emotional work in their faces feels like an attack. It’s wasted energy, especially since in looking back over the last decade, I learned that she’d said originally that she didn’t have emotional bravery and never would. It was too hard and hurt too much. But then she would also thank me for calling her out on avoiding something, and I didn’t have that trust capital very long.

To be honest, I was frustrated that she told me through her words that I was her friend, but her actions didn’t line up. I really, really went out of my way to speak in her love language and not my own. It eventually destroyed me because it didn’t work.

I didn’t trust her no forgiveness plan, and not because boundaries aren’t a good thing. It was because she didn’t set any boundaries at all except putting her hand on my forehead and letting me windmill. To me, if you tell me I am forgiven, you mean it. I am not all of a sudden going to pick up on your shitty passive-aggressive attempts to push me away because I don’t see them. She thought I did, and that I was trying to hurt her. That I saw the manipulation she said I was doing, when she wasn’t even taking the time to get to know me to be able to read me like that. She doesn’t understand mental health issues on a practical level and beat me over the head with that, too.

I am not responsible for what she understands.

My reality has always been different from hers, and she’s treated me like I am lesser than because of it. As if her reactions are the correct ones and mine are just designed to piss her off. Meanwhile, I’m thinking about her all the time. I am trying to figure out how to be a better friend, because clearly I am falling down on the job. I had a complex about ever displeasing her ever again, and she treated me like a stalker because of it. It was terrifying, and she had no empathy for it because she thought she was sooooooo right about me.

I did move to DC to be near her. I did, and now I won’t cover it up. But at the same time, it wasn’t why she thought I did. Being terrified absolutely solved my need to be around her, so when she came barking up my tree after absolutely losing my mind with grief, I was unimpressed. I’d already tried to apologize, and she was a jerk about that, too. She wasn’t trying to get closer. She was trying to control me, because she thought that I’d blow her life to hell on my blog and I couldn’t convince her otherwise. If she didn’t have time to read, she’d sic an attack cat on it, and I know that because referrer stats don’t lie. If you’re dumb enough to come to my page from your work web site because you don’t know how web sites work, that’s not my fault. So yes, I knew she was watching, and I knew who she picked to do it. I’m not impressed with the heavy, either.

I always knew.

That didn’t stop me from absolutely groveling, because my dopamine was so low after complete isolation of my own doing. It also didn’t stop her from throwing me a bone once in a while, and it would make me insane. I won’t say more, but she fucked me over in every way imaginable in a divide and conquer move that cost me dearly. I didn’t hold her accountable because she wasn’t. I am responsible for what I hear, as well. I can tell when the difference between idiocy and malice aforethought.

She never thought in a million years that our trauma dump would cut me off from other people. That’s not all on her, but she does bear some responsibility in retrospect.

As I have said before, getting into a relationship with her hits different, and because she’s already her, she’s not so aware of that fact.

The difference between us was clear when I told her that it was terrible when she decided I was worth something, needed something, or read something on my blog and had to interject. Even when her opinion was beautiful, it sucked ass. I needed her so bad, and all she wanted was to be a fan. She had no awareness of the fact that every time she dropped in a propos of nothing, of course I’d react like a lovesick teenager without all the romantic crap. She knew how I felt. She did not need to hear it again, and it was too embarrassing to lay my guts on the table anymore…. and yet, I did it anyway, because I thought being vulnerable was the best way forward, because I thought she’d have more empathy if she understood where I was coming from. Nope. After a while, she continued to be so angry about everything while still ramping up my dopamine that she cared. We have never been telling the same story to ourselves, and it cost both of us dearly.

It surprised me that she absolutely cratered me every time I had feelings. She invalidated my feelings all the time, and I invalidated hers in return. We weren’t making the effort to get to know each other. After all this time, she knows me. We’d tell each other to fuck off. Sometimes I’d apologize, sometimes I got her attention, but it didn’t mean resolving jack shit.

She never realized that it wasn’t a case of chasing her. It was “if you’re going shopping, I know my place is sitting on the chairs outside the fitting room and holding your bags.” Every lesbian in the world knows that schtick. Its not a play. We just want to be near you, because if we can’t have you, we don’t kick you out of our lives if we’re not struggling with rejection. If we are, we’re fucking miserable because we go hard.

I don’t miss feeling miserable in the slightest, I just acknowledge that they were difficult emotions to dam, and of course she had no concept of how I would feel because she’d never been there. Or, I assume she’s never been there….. but I’m betting I’m not the only woman it’s ever happened to, either. I learned how to be direct from her, actually, and it was better to deal with a hard no than sugar coating, which she did at first because she wasn’t confident in my reaction and dicked me over by treating me as if I’d done something wrong when I absolutely hadn’t. She’s done that twice, actually, but I can’t dive into that one because it would be telling her story.

But I keep in mind that now I’m not invalidating her feelings because I’m not “Angry Anymore.”

Now I’m humming in my head

Growing up it was just me 
And my mom against the world.
My sympathies were with her,
When I was a little girl.
Now I've seen both my parents play the hands that they were dealt.
As each year goes by 
I know more about how 
my father must have felt.

The first line of that song just makes me want to get wasted, because it applies to most people I know.

When you see the range of human behavior, if you’re like me, that’s where you start with strategy. I’m trying to heal the world, one child at a time. Some are older than others.