erika: Miniature dragon breathing fire. (games: WoW:  MANY WHELPS--handle it!)
therapy Yesterday. We walk there. Teyla and I both leave the house/neighborhood on Wednesdays, and then I don't have to leave again until next Wednesday if I don't want to. Usually I don't.

Quarantine and being sick has reactivated my agoraphobia big time. I sense so deeply that I need to be left alone?? It's probably not healthy I admit. Right now I'm so thin-skinned giving an awkward compliment makes me feel like—my default is to say god, you screw-up—hey, so just stop existing, stage right!

My therapist called me special, said I don't say this to everyone. I really believe you've got so many gifts. I told him I want to believe it, I just—don't. I stay adrift in a sea of "perpetual uncertainty, discontent and torture."

He said of course it's not logical, you were conditioned to insecurity your whole life.


... what the fuck I'd never thought about it like that. I mean yes, learned helplessness, but I'd never thought of it as insecurity on demand.

I know like—zooming out, the reason I got treated like that was all about control, and the inability of my emotionally immature system of care to treat difference with respect and sensitivity instead of criticism, alienation and harassment. I know they had to shut me up and I've known it all along, but that doesn't change the "conditioned uncertainty" of every layer I revealed.





Doc says the keys to recovery are "Repetition. Determination." Yesterday, listening to me rant, he thoughtfully added "Patience."
erika: Failed tetris game with next block being perfect.  Text: Shit Happens. (games: tetris: shit happens)
Happy New Year!

Time goes faster as an adult. So many things I was told I would understand when I'm older—small USAn political rant )—but I do see that time goes faster.

My abuela isn't doing well. cessation of life & jokes about being eaten because I'm an irreverent ass )




And now for something completely different! Here's some new resolutions, more short term this year:

In the next three months, I want to nurture my creativity by engaging in active recreation—by this I mean rather than passive consumption of media, I wish to create new works while engaging with the world around me in a relaxing and nourishing way.

I want to encourage my inner critic to release its vehemence which was necessary when it worked so hard to shield me from harmful and toxic soul-crushing, and now can transmute into a gentle and thoughtful advisor.

I would like to meditate regularly. I choose to set my intentions to be concrete here by meditating before lunch every day. No restriction on length—5 minutes would be fantastic. Just every day or as regularly as I can.

I'm proud of my desire to grow.
erika: (me: don't panic!)
I wanna talk about all the good things in my life!

Teyla is doing PHENOMENALLY. She's been on Prednisolone for about six months now, and it's slowed the tumor regrowth significantly. She's also on Gabapentin now, which means officially everyone and my dog is on it.

Trav and I both got new part time jobs! Mine is also work from home. I have to write a bio for this, which is ... weird, because the example we were given has a lot of diploma-ry that I do not, but also I have more practical experience, so that's interesting. (Trav will be working with the census)

I'm doing amazing in physical therapy. My knees are much happier with me and I'm having much less pain.
erika: Text: A traditional troll saying, from WoW. (games: wow: kill two dwarves)
Somewhere I picked up the meme that the 2016 election, Facebook and fake news are the crisis points directing us to implement ethics in computer science, just as the atomic bomb was a crisis point for physics and ethics in psychiatry have ...somewhat advanced since phrenology.

I spent age 8-28 on the computer. Not sure it was entirely a waste of time, yet now my day to day life is so dramatically different and I'm so much happier!

I cook. I might spend hours a day walking around, sitting on park benches, hours having conversations with and actually seeing other people face to face. On a technology heavy day, I actually boot up my laptop and might spend 2 hours on the computer. This happens...twice a week maybe.

Before now, before California, before being my own best friend and adulthood and functional living, I lived with my whole family but all I remember is being alone, constantly. I needed to be. Fake-busy chain-smoking cigarettes, up all night mainlining sodas to farm karma, typing furiously, electronic faux-Diogenes looking everywhere for an honest man. If I wasn't asleep, I stared through the Internet window into a life I believed I couldn't lead, from the wreckage I was too scared to leave.

I don't need the Internet to save me anymore. I save me. I keep me Okay. No matter where I am, whether other people like me or not, if I'm broke or flush, if I'm happy or sad, I'm the adult here.

Turns out I'm not that invested in meaningless internet points. When I was sad, when I was denying my own agency, that kind of thing meant more. I didn't see the grey areas where growth could be, too busy soaking up the pictures I could see clearly for the first time in black & white.

Lifestyle's different where I live now. Levels of acceptance in the community at large too—I feel like I fit in. Now, if I need entertainment, I head to the off-leash dog beach. Usually the ocean can NEARLY drown out my beagle running around baying her head off at everyone.

(I walk around not introducing myself but instead my delightful dog.
She bays, bays, runs up and runs away
then I say, 'hello, I see you met my dog Teyla,
you should check your bags if you used to have food in there,
yes she's adorable, she's 12 actually,
oh right well
running around and getting into trouble keeps her young.'

The reaction she gets from other dogs makes me wonder if she has the doggie equivalent of autism like me—universally even other hounds go "wuuuuuuh so loud" and kinda walk away.)

I'm glad I have this journal and the friends I made here and through my online activities, don't get me wrong! Balance is what I'm getting closer to, is the thing, and that's why I'm starting to flourish.

(I'm over ignorance; I don't need to take care of your feelings anymore. Dropped the rope already.)
erika: e.e. cummings quote. (quotes: poetry: i carry yr heart)
I was reading a fanfic just now and started tearing up—I don't cry as much anymore, but I still read a lot of fanfic— because of the line, "He came out of the blue for me. In the last place I’d expect to meet the love of my life, there he was." That line struck me somewhere soft as truth, because I remembered, I felt what it was like, three, four years ago, there I was—

twenty eight and in San Francisco trying to convince myself I hadn't created a girlfriend out of whole cloth from an alcoholic who didn't actually like having me around and would've preferred me not inviting myself into her life, trying to convince myself I didn't need to distract my attention from a trash-heap of a family life in the God-fearing All-White Midwest that should be set entirely on fire because I couldn't imagine never coming back to my shithead of a manchild fuckbuddy-I-lived-with who couldn't imagine taking time out of his precious existence to do anything for me, respect me or love me and the parents who'd groomed me to tolerate that, to expect the least, to go along and do my best for everyone else and have no desires of my own——

getting some texts from someone back There, in White Bread Unhappy Land, go for Sushi and meet them and pretend I have a heart? don't imagine any of what follows, the ups and downs: a crime against me, a year apart——

and now I'm so very much happy that I asked Travis to propose, that we've been together for four years now and every goddamn day I'm delighted he's around, that his green eyes met mine and he said "Will you marry me", that we laughed and agreed to go to San Francisco for his birthday and a 'real' proposal to tell like a story, to select and savor—despite his family tradition of a ruined pot of soup inspiring a fight & the proposal*— because the idea of marrying(!) the man I spent a year missing, who I needed so much I had to move him out to California with me, even though I just smeared menthol all over him for his old-man joints—all of him makes me smile so hard my face hurts.

(Happy birthday, Travis. Congratulations on outliving Jesus for realsies at 34; next year I'll have to have some new jokes about how you have the ass of a Pisces.)

I still have to try goddamn hard to take care of myself and Teyla and Travis and be happy and write a little and move around a little more than I might otherwise. It's not easy, nothing's easy; my existential pain is at a quarter of its previous levels and I still crack jokes about how I moved to California because I've always wanted to go out Thelma & Louise style.

When it comes to my intimate partnerships, though, when it comes to Travis? I can't get enough of waking up next to the love of my damn life every morning. Oh my god, I'm incandescently happy, people. Money and jobs and housing and friends and dogs and life can be as difficult as they want.... I always wanted a fucking actual partner who could be relied upon and trusted and I finally have one who means and does what he says. He truly, utterly respects me, treasures my competency, and loves supporting me, not just in ways that come easy but in learning how to do the things in relationships that don't. Every time I talk about him to someone I gush and remember how much I appreciate him.

This man, y'all: every morning he brings me coffee in bed and feeds my dog, and every night he brings me a beautiful bouquet of a dozen earth-shattering orgasms. He's exactly what I fucking deserve. I finally stopped settling, stopped waiting, stopped forcing. Just loving.

I'm getting married. How are you?

* His mother made a pot of soup that was so bad
they buried the pot
with the recipe
in the backyard.

His dad proposed
just outside a restaurant
right before dinner,
his mom-type person likes to joke, and say
"I said yes because I was hungry"
and Travis just says
'of course, the restaurant in question was
way better back then, I wouldn't say yes
for dinner at the Brown Bottle now'.
(named&shamed for my hometown natives,
shout out [personal profile] panda)**

** Our fight was that he accidentally
left a giant pot of soup
out all night
(thus, wasting it)
(GOODBYE SOOOOOOOOUPPPPPPP)
that I'd spent hours making the day before.
Travis is delightful, and entirely human.

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Erika

October 2024

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