"she opened her book and her box of tools"

Picked up Princess's ashes yesterday, and now she's in a small wooden box in our hutch, or at least her cremated remains are.

Still glowing from Hawaii (in the metaphorical sense. Due to Light's and my combined diligence, I escaped sunburn). I feel inexplicably better, and of course, I want to dissect that feeling, but I'm afraid if I try to pin it down, I'll break it. But I also want to be able to reproduce it, or remember it, and the only way I know how is to dissect it.

My therapist and I talked about the difference between un-learning and un-knowing, and how they are different and the former is possible, but not the latter. And I'm reading a self-helpish book that is actually kind of speaking to me, which is weird and uncomfortable but may prove to be useful. (It turns out that one of the ways to instantaneously endear someone to me is for them to confess that they are a recovering alcoholic for whom AA did not work.)

I spent a while mulling over the confessional post (for those of you who don't know, a woman who I don't know directly but who seems to be one of the faces of the local poly/kink/circus/convention/etc community each year posts/hosts a anon free-for-all in her lj, where people can confess crushes or any other sort of secret).

I think I would tell all my crushes straight up that I had a crush on them, in part because of the freeing realization that I'm really not interested in anyone but Light at the moment, because I want this wild, improbable thing from the universe that isn't about sex, and that if I actually got Right Now, I'd run away from full tilt.

I posted something to this post that after about two hours, I deleted, about wanting to feel pretty in this weird new body, about wanting to be crushed-on, crush-worthy and then remembering at the moment, silence is worse than never asking. And there's this weird economy where I still occasionally only want to belong to the clubs I can't gain access to, that rushes past all logical thought about whether or not I would want to be at such and such a party and only focuses on why I'm not invited, what I'm not doing.

I feel like I keep returning to this place, where I can grasp for a couple blinding moments that it's okay to stop trying to survive everything, I'm in a good enough place where I can actually just live for the joy of it, that thinking that I'm as safe as I'll ever be is an awesome liberating thing, rather than a terrifying realization.

One of the things that made it really hard for me to get over Asshat was that I was clinging to the idea that if I really had been in love with him, I should still feel that way even if he didn't, that if it wasn't love, then I'd just upset everyone's applecarts for no particular reason, that if I could move through an emotion, it invalidated ever having had the emotion. This is particularly not-useful in mourning my cat, because I have no doubt that I loved her, and that it's okay sometimes to be able to think about her not being here without crying, or even to be able to not think about her not being here anymore, and by extension, not dwell on the rest of my horde's mortality.

Ah, well. I'll do my best to make it all tea and tortoiseshells and waking up to Light from here on out.

"she opened her book and her box of tools"

Picked up Princess's ashes yesterday, and now she's in a small wooden box in our hutch, or at least her cremated remains are.

Still glowing from Hawaii (in the metaphorical sense. Due to Light's and my combined diligence, I escaped sunburn). I feel inexplicably better, and of course, I want to dissect that feeling, but I'm afraid if I try to pin it down, I'll break it. But I also want to be able to reproduce it, or remember it, and the only way I know how is to dissect it.

My therapist and I talked about the difference between un-learning and un-knowing, and how they are different and the former is possible, but not the latter. And I'm reading a self-helpish book that is actually kind of speaking to me, which is weird and uncomfortable but may prove to be useful. (It turns out that one of the ways to instantaneously endear someone to me is for them to confess that they are a recovering alcoholic for whom AA did not work.)

I spent a while mulling over the confessional post (for those of you who don't know, a woman who I don't know directly but who seems to be one of the faces of the local poly/kink/circus/convention/etc community each year posts/hosts a anon free-for-all in her lj, where people can confess crushes or any other sort of secret).

I think I would tell all my crushes straight up that I had a crush on them, in part because of the freeing realization that I'm really not interested in anyone but Light at the moment, because I want this wild, improbable thing from the universe that isn't about sex, and that if I actually got Right Now, I'd run away from full tilt.

I posted something to this post that after about two hours, I deleted, about wanting to feel pretty in this weird new body, about wanting to be crushed-on, crush-worthy and then remembering at the moment, silence is worse than never asking. And there's this weird economy where I still occasionally only want to belong to the clubs I can't gain access to, that rushes past all logical thought about whether or not I would want to be at such and such a party and only focuses on why I'm not invited, what I'm not doing.

I feel like I keep returning to this place, where I can grasp for a couple blinding moments that it's okay to stop trying to survive everything, I'm in a good enough place where I can actually just live for the joy of it, that thinking that I'm as safe as I'll ever be is an awesome liberating thing, rather than a terrifying realization.

One of the things that made it really hard for me to get over Asshat was that I was clinging to the idea that if I really had been in love with him, I should still feel that way even if he didn't, that if it wasn't love, then I'd just upset everyone's applecarts for no particular reason, that if I could move through an emotion, it invalidated ever having had the emotion. This is particularly not-useful in mourning my cat, because I have no doubt that I loved her, and that it's okay sometimes to be able to think about her not being here without crying, or even to be able to not think about her not being here anymore, and by extension, not dwell on the rest of my horde's mortality.

Ah, well. I'll do my best to make it all tea and tortoiseshells and waking up to Light from here on out.

(no subject)

There's something I have to puzzle out about limited media choices. On the one hand, I've got the entire internet available to me. On another hand, I've got anything in the minuteman library system available to me. On a third hand, I seem to limit myself these days, to what available streaming from Netflix and Hulu and what the library has as ebooks, which often ends me up watching something I'm not superexcited about, or reading second-string books, and I spend more time in the act of looking for something acceptable than I'd really like.

(no subject)

There's something I have to puzzle out about limited media choices. On the one hand, I've got the entire internet available to me. On another hand, I've got anything in the minuteman library system available to me. On a third hand, I seem to limit myself these days, to what available streaming from Netflix and Hulu and what the library has as ebooks, which often ends me up watching something I'm not superexcited about, or reading second-string books, and I spend more time in the act of looking for something acceptable than I'd really like.