And not what has been lost

 It's been an intense morning internally.

 

Abundance says something offhand about not getting enough sleep and I confess I feel guilty about not going to bed earlier (because I know that helps him get to bed earlier sometimes) and then I started thinking about all the things I feel guilty about and that's an alice-in-wonderland deep rabbit hole.  (lack of income, not sleeping upstairs with Light, not being better at poly in general, letting this house make me sad, being unable to drive down my driveway without a fence, not mopping the house every twenty minutes, not spending more time with the dog, not going to the gym, not being kinder, not being on top of my email, not knowing what I want. and so on.

 

I just finished Jes Baker's Landwhale: On Turning Insults Into Nicknames, Why Body Image Is Hard, and How Diets Can Kiss My Ass and I really, truly need to get on board that train even a little.   She said something about deciding to not exercise until she wanted to (rather than the motivate oneself gym-wards through self-loathing), and how she hasn't for 18 months or so and I longed for that.   She talked about how she'd gone back to childhood photos and discovered that despite her memory of being a fat child, she wasn't really.  And yeah, I'm still shocked by my childhood photos, because to now-me I look adorable and I don't really think of adore as a verb that has ever applied to me.

 

I just finished Morgan Jerkins' This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America and there's a lot I need to sit with, but tangentially it also brought me up hard against my religious intolerance.  And I get that some of it, maybe most of it is a jealousy about faith and peace and all that.  And I hate how much of atheism is couched in smarter-than language, and I know that I'm agnostic, I barely have certainty about breakfast much less the structure of the world.   And I probably have pagan leanings,  but am uncomfortable both with historic and ahistoric versions.  But I also shut down, emotionally and possibly intellectually once God comes into the picture.   And there's a lot there to do with mortality and a lot to do with my struggles with the randomness of genetic mutation and I'm sure a lot of other obvious and possibly sophomoric philosophical struggles. 

 

I started patreoning (patreonizing?) thelatestkate and yesterday in the mail I got this months two glossies, one of which is an adorable drawing of a sphinx cat that says "You do not need to be appealing to everyone" and that's combining in my head with Landwhale and shit's getting real weird up here.  Who do I want to be appealing to?  Myself?  People I haven't yet met? People who don't like me?

 

I've been binge-watching Criminal Minds, and on more than one occasion they talk about the childhoods of serial killers, and things like how infancy defines people.  I'm not a serial killer, I don't think I've got any impulses in that direction. But I do wonder how mine shaped me.   I had a fine childhood, they almost never hit me, they fed me, I was not sexually abused, I had clothes and a roof and food.  We were comfortably middle-class.  But now, when we talk about my niblings, my mother throws in asides about me, stories about how I didn't let her hold me when I was a baby and she had to prop me up against pillows to feed me, or how she didn't know children needed sleep regulation so she would just play with me until I passed out or how she used the old wives remedy for teething, vodka in the orange juice or how she thought if I really wanted therapy I would have pursued it on my own (as a 13yo).   And I know everyone's parents fail them in myriad ways and mine were nothing special.  But I'm also learning that I'm not crying to get anything, to get out of anything, to get help with anything or to make someone go easier on me.

 

None of this makes any sense or strings together at all, and none of these feelings are new exactly, it just feels like it's already been an intense friday and I haven't even made it to therapy yet.  (I also didn't make it to the gym because I was cleaning and writing this and drinking tea).  Time to put away laundry and shower, I guess.  And I still find virtue in vulnerability, even if I don't know exactly what a virtue is, so I'll hit post.