"enlist the cat in the impending class-war."

Been a couple of internally intense days.

I've resolved to think of Labdanum as an ally. I'm not sure how hard this will stick, but I did manage to inform Light that it was his responsibility to step up his planning game enough to trying to make plans for all four/five of us. (I'm unclear on if I get to meet her partner). I'm still full of prickly feelings, I'm still worried about the distances I see between what I say and what Light hears and then explains to Labdanum, but I have always been afraid of being mistranslated, this is just another example.

Delight took me to their house last night, and I got snuggles and internet shopping and sorbet and caramel and doggie kisses. I didn't manage to talk much after we got there, I'd been unable to finish my sentences at Clover, holding back tears or curses or both. I feel like I'm losing the coherency I can usually mostly bring to the table about my own emotions. It's all fear and self-loathing up in here, believing I should be better than each negative thing I feel and then trying to berate myself into to not feeling whatever I'm struggling with at the moment.

Labdanum isn't my competition, so being afraid of what change she'll bring with her makes me a shitty practioner of poly and a shitty feminist and a shitty wife.

Abundance has his dream job, something so engaging he's almost always deeply involved, and that makes him less present on the internet during the day and some evenings, and of course it does, it was never going to be the same as when he worked from home up in Maine, so feeling lonely and missing him is a shitty thing to do, because I'm saying I want him to pay more attention to me than to his dream, and if I knew this was going to happen (and I did) I should have been able to put coping mechanisms in place. And really, I'm only lonely because I want too much attention in the first place.

Lather, rinse, repeat. I want everything to be my fault, my lack, because then there's the illusion something someday might be controllable. I tell myself so often that things would be different if I was better, smarter, faster, thinner, happier because I believe that's better than the idea that things just keep happening.

But now I envy the idea of someone just being smitten with me from the start, instead of what has inevitably risen from my penchant for emotionally damaged boys, where I trip through minefields, half giddy and half tasked with remembering what it is I can't have, looking through cards to try to find one that doesn't say love, trying to understand how "probably" can be applied to loving me. (delight is an exception to this narrative, but our courtship and roundabout and hard to parse while it was happening)

(I like my coffee like I like my men, emotionally damaged by other people).

Therapy before class is hard, I'm distracted by my sore eyes, by trying to think through the things that came up, by trying to make pieces fit together. My therapist suggested that maybe crying is a sign of needing attention, as if needing attention were some value-less thing, and not the horrific manipulation I think it is, and asked why I wanted to be alone when I cried. And then she asked me if Tank wanted too much attention and I said, quite firmly, that Tank needed the exactly perfect amount of attention, and we did the pause and reflect quietly on my upbringing game as I tried to resolve the internal inconsistency.

Maybe tonight's the night I try headspace. Or maybe I'll try to track down why my house smells like something's rotting somewhere. Or maybe I'll just wash my glasses off and snuggle up to Abundance and pretend I don't have to solve anything right now.