Tired

I need to go on a whinge just now, which is probably not how the British would phrase it, but fuck all y’all. It makes sense to me and you know what I mean.

In the past three and a half years — and it has been almost exactly three and a half years; I think I left my daughter’s father’s house on the twenty-first of September in ‘21 (if not, I’ve nailed it within a day one way or the other and I don’t feel like checking at the moment) — I have lost my daughter (most important of all), my cats, my craft supplies, most of my books, most of my clothes, my nice comfy bed with the nice dark blue sheet set, my physical-media music collection, most of the few local friends (or friendly acquaintances) I had, my favorite city, my car, anything resembling my own home, my relationship with my father, and my entire MOTHER.

I’m sure I’m leaving things out. If that list ain’t enough for ya, I don’t fucking know.

I might as well go ahead and admit I played a role, sometimes a major role (I had sunk my relationship with my mother well before she passed, for instance; I had good reasons, but nevertheless), in all those losses. That’s not the point. This isn’t about what caused them. They happened. They’re done. Mostly they will never be solved or reversed.

My POINT is that for three and a half years I was running on autopilot, fumes, or both, focusing on survival and what was going on and what needed to come next. Always a new problem to solve. Always having to rally my personal energies to figure it out or at least figure out who to ask for help. 24/7 I was either in crisis mode or hiding from the crises (there was never just one at any given time) and I did not have the spoons to spare for anything else, like making new friends or whatever. So there was nothing positive to redirect myself to, either. Just wall-to-wall shit to wade through.

I’m not out of the woods. Got to do all kinds of rebuilding of my life before I can label myself “out of the woods” and I’m just not there yet. I’m kind of in a holding pattern, and also kind of in a foggy place and can’t see what’s ahead of me, but for right now nothing is jumping out of the fog to ambush me (I hear growling sometimes, metaphorically speaking, but that’s the worst it’s been lately), so I’ve been able to relax a little.

That was probably a mistake.

Have you ever been in a situation where your adrenalin was OMG THROUGH THE FUCKING STRATOSPHERE and then, as soon as the crisis passed and your levels fell back to normal, you started shaking and couldn’t stop?

I think something like that may be what’s happening to me mentally and emotionally. It doesn’t feel that dramatic, but I can’t otherwise explain what’s going on with me. That’s the closest I can get for an analogy. But anyway, it’s been going on. At least since December, when Mom died, and probably farther back than that.

Honestly I don’t know why I am even talking about this. I suppose on some level I am looking for sympathy again. Sorry. I know it’s irritating. I don’t have any specific expectations on how anyone should respond to this. I will probably get pissed off if you start shit with me about it (my definition of “starting shit” which, if you have any reason to believe we will disagree on that definition, best not in the first place), but that’s about it, and mostly reflexive because I’m already not in a fantastic headspace. I’m sort of functioning, and I’m not raving at people local to me (I’m not even raving at trans wackos on social media, just smarting off, and that’s saying something) or anything like that, but I’m aware I could be doing much better than I am doing, and… yet.

I did think I should probably say something, though, because this isn’t just affecting me. It’s letting at least one other person down too. I remember you, Person. I’m trying. You’ll hear more from me soon in that vein. “Soon” meaning by the end of this month.

I just want so badly to be better. I don’t know how I get there. Therapy’s an obvious suggestion, but I don’t have it in me to go through therapist after therapist in the fucking MediCAL (California Medicaid) system just when it looks like that’s going to lose funding (I don’t know yet how that will affect me, if at all, and I dread finding out), and when I don’t have my own wheels (I might at least have a bicycle soon, but I don’t yet know how far I can reasonably range on that thing at my current level of fitness) and when the entire therapist profession seems to be captured by gender-identity moronitude. I can’t, okay? The very thought of it is exhausting. And literally I could find a good therapist RIGHT NOW, and it would still take me months to start seeing progress.

I’m rather inclined to Mick Dundee’s suggested cure of relying on one’s mates, but see what I said above about losing my friends — and that was just local; I’ve been losing friends from every possible walk of life since I first began pushing back against gender identity in ‘09. Yes. That long. Besides, if I had a regular friend group, none of them would be trained therapists, probably, and they all have their own shit to deal with. And the current situation is less about making new friends and more about “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours,” and it was made clear from early on that it wasn’t going to be much more than that. I get it. We’re all dealing with the effects of trauma here, and we’re none of us too trusting. That still isn’t very helpful for my general emotional and mental situation. And I can’t trust any new people I meet unless they already come recommended by people who have not bought into the gender bullshit, but people are busy and no one’s playing Friend Matchmaker. Welcome to adulthood. It’s just the way it is. I will just have to deal.

“Why are you making gender identity a dealbreaker for friendships?” you’re wondering now. “No wonder you’re alone. That’s insane.” Is it? If a person can’t tell the truth about what a woman is, for instance, exactly how am I supposed to trust them to tell me the truth about anything else? That person is lying to me, to my face, about what I am and you think I should trust them, trust being necessary to a true friendship. If I had a romantic partner (yeah… never going to happen again; absolutely no man finds me interesting in that way anymore, and I can hardly blame them, either) and he cheated on me, which is a form of lying, you’d be telling me to kick his ass out the door (or leave him, more likely; the last time I had my own apartment under my own power was literally half my lifespan ago). How is this different? It’s not. It’s an important litmus test and if more of us deployed it, this stupid fad would die yesterday, because no one likes losing friends. But more of us don’t deploy this litmus test. And so the fools are emboldened, and here we be. Lives ruined everywhere. Including mine. I am never countenancing that foolishness again. I’m fucking done.

This is not to say that gender identity is the only thing I ever want to talk about. And that’s another difficulty I’m having. Okay, I still share stuff about the ongoing war in that realm. Guilty. But it seems like this is all most of the people on my social-media contact lists ever talk about. Note I said “seems like”; I know it’s not true. But when you see the same memes and articles and rumors repeated over and over and over and over and over… it wears you down after a while. You know, I like these people for other reasons and I’d love for us to have normal conversations sometimes. But that mostly feels like asking for the moon. Mostly.

They talk about gender bullshit or they talk about the current political turn the United States is making, and half the time it’s ranting about some upcoming protest that will change exactly nothing, and the other half of the time it’s “wtf are you panicking about, lol” like this stupid orange man hasn’t murdered women with his policies already. Or it’s someone talking about the coming collapse of civilization — yep, that’s a thing, as it has been for every civilization ever, and we keep doing stuff that makes it more likely to happen faster. Everywhere I look, people sounding the alarm. Everyone yelling about how they want to fix it all. But they can’t, and instead of working on setting up “lifeboats” to weather the worst of it, most of them want to continue business as usual but just change who’s controlling it. I like to think I’m a smart person. I tend to also gravitate to other smart people. Why are so many of us being dumb about this?

It’s all so overwhelming. I want to explore my own take on it all but I can’t even put two words together about it anymore because it’s just too much.

And I want my life to be about more than facing the crisis. It’s like “if I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution” except it’s EVERYTHING. I would like to have something like a normal life again before I can’t have one anymore.

But it’s like everyone wants to shout from their soapbox and be applauded for Saying Things but never actually interact with anyone else. Some of the people I know are worse about this than others. Some of them I find very interesting and would love to build some kind of situation with — friendship, allyship, maybe something more in one case — if I could feel like they can even see me. They can’t. I don’t know what is in the way, but something is. Half the time I’m afraid it’s just their own egos and that I will be putting all this energy in this direction only to one day have it dissipate, uselessly, leaving me worse off than I was before. I don’t know what to do about that. I got nuthin’.

So basically my life is one big post-(continual?) traumatic stress response in isolation. I am never good at navigating a situation to improve it when I’m stressed out like this. And it usually comes out as bitching (yes, I know, but I can’t think of a better word for it), which of course alienates everyone, which of course makes the situation exponentially worse.

So here I sit, paralyzed. I want to believe I can navigate my way out of this. I just need to figure out how. But I can’t keep thinking I want to do this and then not acting. I probably don’t have another thirty years to throw away.

Thanks for reading my venting. You don’t want to know how long it took me to do this, and me typing at 100wpm. At least it was still all in one day, I guess.