Stand in the place where you are
Jul. 13th, 2019 10:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
j4It's probably about time I did a general update. Is it? I don't even know if anybody reads this. I started writing it 6 months ago and ground to a halt. I feel there's now too much backlog of backstory to start talking about anything. Maybe the answer is to forget it all.
The community I felt I had on LJ has gone, and maybe that community was more to do with the ages & stages of our lives than it was to do with the technology or the platform, and yet... I miss LJ, even though people are still over there. I miss IRC, even though I'm still on it occasionally. I miss usenet, even though it still exists. Those places aren't my places any more, and I don't have a new place to take its place. Twitter is still a thing, but it's horribly changed from the days when I signed up so I could text a group of people at Glastonbury.
So where am I? I'm still in the house I moved to in 2009, but not with any of the same people. These days it's just me plus Img (age 8) and H (age 2.5). How can Baby H possibly be 2 already? But here we are, she's walking and talking and thinking and singing and making jokes and counting and showing signs of starting to read (definitely recognising letters, possibly recognising words). This morning she told me we don't have wings. She's not wrong. Meanwhile Img is generally buried in a book or rolling her eyes at me. "It's MY CHOICE how I live my life!" she yelled at me the other day, week, month. (Eye)roll on the teenage years.
I have two lovely boyfriends, who we'll call A and D, but one of them is not out as poly, and the relationship with him is Complicated for Reasons, so that's ... interesting. I don't really know how to talk about relationships any more. I don't feel I'm doing very well at being there for anybody, including myself.
There is too much to do. There is ALWAYS too much to do. Someone said, ages ago now, "I don't know how you manage to do everything on your own!" and the short answer is: I don't. I don't miss having someone to help actually doing stuff around the house, because a) the Lovely Boyfriends do help when they're around, so b) the small amount of help lost is probably outweighed by help gained, and c) even if it wasn't, it would be TOTALLY outweighed by the sanity gained in the lack of obstruction and gaslighting and telling me I'm useless. I would miss having someone to help with the project-managing side of life admin, the deciding what to do rather than the doing it, except ... I don't remember ever having that? So it's hard to miss it. What I really want is to live in a commune of like-minded people and share things and concentrate on the things I'm good at. But all the people I know who share that desire are married to people who don't share it, and Being Married is more important than living your best life.
I feel like I'm not explaining any of this stuff properly.
H still doesn't sleep through the night. 4 hours of uninterrupted sleep is a luxury. I can't function without caffeine, not in a jokey "instant human being - just add coffee!!!1" kind of way but in an "I am 100% dependent on this drug and I suspect it is slowly killing me" kind of way.
I miss the friends who have gone. Every day. Every single day.
Is this all there is?
The community I felt I had on LJ has gone, and maybe that community was more to do with the ages & stages of our lives than it was to do with the technology or the platform, and yet... I miss LJ, even though people are still over there. I miss IRC, even though I'm still on it occasionally. I miss usenet, even though it still exists. Those places aren't my places any more, and I don't have a new place to take its place. Twitter is still a thing, but it's horribly changed from the days when I signed up so I could text a group of people at Glastonbury.
So where am I? I'm still in the house I moved to in 2009, but not with any of the same people. These days it's just me plus Img (age 8) and H (age 2.5). How can Baby H possibly be 2 already? But here we are, she's walking and talking and thinking and singing and making jokes and counting and showing signs of starting to read (definitely recognising letters, possibly recognising words). This morning she told me we don't have wings. She's not wrong. Meanwhile Img is generally buried in a book or rolling her eyes at me. "It's MY CHOICE how I live my life!" she yelled at me the other day, week, month. (Eye)roll on the teenage years.
I have two lovely boyfriends, who we'll call A and D, but one of them is not out as poly, and the relationship with him is Complicated for Reasons, so that's ... interesting. I don't really know how to talk about relationships any more. I don't feel I'm doing very well at being there for anybody, including myself.
There is too much to do. There is ALWAYS too much to do. Someone said, ages ago now, "I don't know how you manage to do everything on your own!" and the short answer is: I don't. I don't miss having someone to help actually doing stuff around the house, because a) the Lovely Boyfriends do help when they're around, so b) the small amount of help lost is probably outweighed by help gained, and c) even if it wasn't, it would be TOTALLY outweighed by the sanity gained in the lack of obstruction and gaslighting and telling me I'm useless. I would miss having someone to help with the project-managing side of life admin, the deciding what to do rather than the doing it, except ... I don't remember ever having that? So it's hard to miss it. What I really want is to live in a commune of like-minded people and share things and concentrate on the things I'm good at. But all the people I know who share that desire are married to people who don't share it, and Being Married is more important than living your best life.
I feel like I'm not explaining any of this stuff properly.
H still doesn't sleep through the night. 4 hours of uninterrupted sleep is a luxury. I can't function without caffeine, not in a jokey "instant human being - just add coffee!!!1" kind of way but in an "I am 100% dependent on this drug and I suspect it is slowly killing me" kind of way.
I miss the friends who have gone. Every day. Every single day.
Is this all there is?
no subject
Date: 2019-07-13 10:35 pm (UTC)...Meanwhile, I'm dipping a toe in DW, rather than immersing myself in LJ-as-it-was.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-18 04:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-14 09:53 am (UTC)It does pass. The no-sleep thing is mind-destroying, and passes eventually. The kids get less attention-demanding. (But I think the trade-off between too-much-to-do and gaslighting is intractable human condition.)
I was so knackered for so long, with one.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-14 12:42 pm (UTC)You might like the Queer Code Slack? You don’t have to have attended an event, you don’t have to live in a town that has its own Queer Code chapter, and you don’t have to be any more active on Slack than you want to. I like it and am on there quite a lot and will happily send you an invite if you want to try it. You can use it from your phone.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-15 11:17 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-15 11:42 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-14 01:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-14 01:48 pm (UTC)L was like that re sleep at that age too, so I remember the feeling (but I was definitely doing it on Easy Mode in other ways in re other responsibilities & my co-parent & so on, so). Or anyway I sort of remember the feeling, in that one of the things about sleep dep is it kind of screws with your memory, so what I remember more is when that *stopped* being the case. I don't normally drink coffee (tea!) but I was drinking a fair bit of it back then.
Out-ness of relationships sounds...complicated, too, yeah.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-14 05:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-14 06:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-16 07:30 pm (UTC)Social stuff with kids is hard. I've been thinking about this quite a bit since stopping work, with the added factor that I have extremely few close local friends. What I've found helpful is learning to embrace solitude more and enjoy but not need the company of others. There are different routes to getting there and I'm certainly not all the way. Mine has been a weird mix of meditation, yoga nidra, journalling and happening to read things that resonated in the right way at the right time, but what works is going to vary massively from person to person.
I was also reading some stuff recently about why communes tend to fail after a particular period of time, but I can't for the life of me remember where or the details, but it was good for me in terms of deromanticising that sort of idea. Life is messy and it's impossible not to make compromises I guess, and you never know if you have made the right ones or not.
no subject
Date: 2019-07-18 04:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-07-18 07:08 pm (UTC)