Author: jr

Well, my dad is in jail and I probably should be able to muster a feeling other than numb inside, but aside from a flash of guilt that there isn’t anything I can do right now and a lot of empathy for my mom, that’s all I’ve got.

I’m home solo with Louise for seven more sleeps and she is extra defiant the last two days so I don’t feel like I have much space to process any of this. I’m just checking on mom a lot.

He’s charged with aggravated assault and intimidating a witness for being belligerently drunk last night and threatening himself and mom with a gun. Mom had the guns removed from the house which is a start and since he’s in jail until someone posts bail and she is the victim so she was told she basically can’t post bail this is just a holding pattern. It’ll get figured out I guess.

I wish I were better at compartmentalizing my frustrations around Louise but also feel like I’m compartmentalizing all of these feelings too much.

As promised:

• Read books
• Podcasts
• Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp
• Cook thoughtful dinners
• Watch Chicago Med, The Good Doctor, Broad City, SVU, The Bold Type, etc.
• Give myself manicures and pedicures
• Play with web design
• Long showers, baths, and face masks
• Yoga
• LTAB

India, one of the young women in LTAB the last few years, performed this poem, “Kavanaugh,” in her bout on Saturday and I asked her to share the text of it with me.

the spider stands trial and screams silk at the ghosts of all the girlhoods he stole. the spider council looks at the 56% of this spider and fly country that does not believe he should make decisions about more posthumous girlhoods and decides that his web is worthy of defining the most important opinion that can be had.

my mother comes into my room crying when they announce it and my mouth fills with corpses. I am nothing except everything she has told me of moments she won’t call rape. her two sons unbirth in her shaking skeleton and her two daughters are in every tear track and i feel so bitten, so caught, what is the world if not a web for me to trip over, to count all the ghost girls in my life and divide them by five to figure out exactly how much trauma each of my shattered teeth are worth. how much venom can I fit in that cracking bloodshed? how do i stuff my tongue full of all the poems I wrote out loud in the car and immediately forgot? my heart has been racing since i heard my first horror stories, full of ghosts and blood and girls that got cut into pieces on their way to school. that heavy knowing was the payment to walk home alone at 11 years old, to fear every slow-moving car, to run from the old men that shouted obscenities from porches when my best friend and i were barely the shadows of what might someday become women. in a way i hope we never do. that’s a heartbreak i don’t know if i can endure.

i have been holding my breath for seventeen years because i know it is safer to be quiet, always wear headphones on public transport with nothing playing in them, lock my car the moment i get in it when it’s dark out. there are no girls left in this world, only clenched fists. we are born clichés about destruction, born “femininity is a razor blade”, we are born wood to be whittled into Fuckable, into worthy of bruise and broken blood vessels. into art the spider would finally call beautiful, all black and blue and red, a bloody midnight. a rotten patriotism. my lungs are full of a decade and a half worth of stale secrets and air i know im not allowed to expel for fear of taking up too much space.

but why shouldn’t i breathe? why shouldn’t every stretch of my ribcage push poison into that beast, why does he deserve oxygen when all these ghosts are lungless? are loveless? why should i feel guilty for all this not-dying I am doing, for me. for all this venom coursing in my veins. for my mother. and for all of my mothers. bitten. standing. still here. still alive.

“Kavanaugh” by India W.

I’ll journal on it a little more later on.

I spent the whole day planning a journal entry about how I don’t want to optimize myself anymore and then I walked by this at the library and checked it out without a second thought:

So, way to hit my goals?

I’m on this don’t-optimize-yourself kick because I read “How Millennials Became The Burnout Generation” by Anne Helen Peterson a couple months ago, and I guess it resonated with me.

I did so much in the last couple of months to optimize my housekeeping habits, in the last year to optimize our finances, and in the last five years to optimize my productivity. I’ve put a lot of focus on dishes and to do lists and reconciling bank accounts and having my phone organized in a specific way so that it’s less of a distraction.

After all of it, I’m burnt out and these attempts at optimization have become the distraction.

The more I give myself things to do and habits to form, the more perfectionism creeps in and highlights everything that isn’t crossed off a list. I’m not sure that I’m any better for it.

I told Mallory last week that I think I should work on being more independent in my emotional anchors. I think one of the reasons that I feel bad right now is that I rely on external validation when I’m depressed or anxious to pull me out of it. It would be nice to source that strength within myself.

I saw the new therapist again this morning and explained to him that I still have so much fear of abandonment because of things in my childhood:

1. Three grandparents dying within 18 months of each other when I was 4-5
2. Getting off the bus after grade school, expecting my dad to be home, and finding out later that he had taken the day off so that he could move out; and my mom being (understandably) emotionally unavailable in the immediacy of that event
3. My mom deciding she was going to move out for a while and “maybe never talk to you or your brother again” when she couldn’t handle my bisexuality

These things all spillover into my relationships and it’s hard to do therapy on them because adulthood obviously has its own challenges and those are always more pressing concerns for therapy. Harley suggested a book, Running on Empty by Jonice Webb. I can’t find it at a library, but I’m very interested in it. I’m somewhat reticent to do that work right now, but it may a good time since the fear of abandonment is so relevant right now.

I think therapy via reading and thinking is good for me right now. I’ve always been such an overly educated and analytical therapy patient. Therapists like that, don’t get me wrong, but it sometimes feels like I could get the same benefit of therapy session by talking to an empty room. That’s not completely fair to therapists, but lately I’ve felt like I walk in and explain everything that’s going on, do my own therapy on it, and then leave. It’s helpful to have my instincts validated, but I’m confident that I can do therapy work independently through books.

I finished The Art of Money last week. I took a solid month and a half off from it because I felt like I needed to go a little more slowly. I took so much from that book. I need to reread my notes every now and then so that I can think about it.