My thoughts, and opinions on many subjects. But it's always a mad world.
Well the good news is that after a week of being too sick to sit and draw Acidgirl is back with a double day.
http://acidgirl.thecomicseries.com/comics/15/
The better news is that I will be back to updating this blog regularly pretty soon after my birthday in the beginning of March. It’ll only be once a week, but I’ll be putting up one decent length article per week, and I guess that’s something.
No really, I’m not kidding. Worse than; in no particular order,
the pain,
the tiredness,
the diarrhoea,
the bleeding,
the constant low-grade headache,
the skin lesions,
or even having to deal with tin-god junior doctors.
Seriously, worse than any of that is living with the guilt. But what do I mean by “the guilt”? Well that’s going to take a bit of explaining.
The average person can do pretty much what they want to do. Want to see a movie with a friend? No problem, “Which movie, and what time?”
Tell their partner not to worry about the housework, that it’ll all be done when they get home; yup, got that covered.
Or how about wanting to go to bed with a lover, going all out with the flirtation, the foreplay, the making them feel like they’re standing at the centre of a sexual whirlwind; then having to stop because you’ve run completely out of energy, or because your body has decided that this is exactly the right moment to need to throw up?
My own life is a huge list of cancelled plans, lost connections, and missed opportunities. I can’t begin to count how many times I’ve gotten ready to go somewhere, only to have to cancel at literally the last-minute. Or how many times I’ve missed events that I was really excited about attending; many burlesque events, artistic events, movies. Hell not that long ago I had to miss one of my favourite singers, Voltaire, because my body decided that it really needed 4 straight days of bleeding from my bowel.
In essence, I am an involuntary flake. Totally unreliable where any social life outside of my own home is concerned. To be able to do something as minor as go do the weekly grocery shop I rely on medicating my body to a point where I will “probably” get a few hours of not needing to be within ten feet of a toilet. Note the “probably”, the quotation marks are there because about 1 time in 10 it doesn’t work, with sometimes rather cataclysmic results for my underwear.
Now, you’re probably thinking that this should all lead to my feeling sorry for myself. But it doesn’t, or at least it only does very rarely. I’m used to not being able to plan with any certainty. The best I can ever promise is “maybe”, or very occasionally, “probably”; I’m used to being like that. I’m used to never being able to even think “definitely”. Definitely simply doesn’t exist in my life, and I’m used to it, I’ve had to grow used to it.
But what I’ve never grown used to is the guilt that goes with constantly letting other people down. For example, I quite simply can not remember the last time I went out for a night with my Partner-in-Crime. No memory at all, it’s been that long. And I feel terrible about it. I know she loves a good night out. I know she would love to have one with me, but…
See, there’s always that but. Even if we manage to make it out the door, odds are I’ll need to come home very early when my bowel starts to voice its disinterest in staying away from its porcelain best friend.
The same goes with friends. Over and over I arrange things with friends, only to have to cancel at the 11th hour because I simply can’t leave the house any longer.
So, boom, guilt for letting them down. For cancelling plans and leaving them in the lurch.
Then of course there’s the other sides to the guilt. The the side triggered by the worry you cause people you love. Or the aspect of it caused by not being able to pull your own weight. Or the guilt that strikes when you realise that you’re just a bad girlfriend, a bad friend, a bad lover, daughter…the list goes on and on.
And all this means that you say “I’m sorry” waaaaaay too much. So you find yourself feeling guilty for being sorry.
Yeah, being ill is rotten, but feeling unending waves of guilt is worse. Now if you’ll excuse me, the toilet is calling my haemorrhoids, by name.
This morning while listening to the 80’s radio station on Spotify I actually came out and said the following to my Partner in Crime.
“80’s music was just better.”
Then I was called old.
I’m 35 years old.
Strictly speaking Amanda, is still less than a decade old.
But if I am totally honest I do feel old. Some days very, very old.
As any of my readers by now knows, I have a lot of physical problems. And one of the more troublesome aspects of those problems is that most mornings I wake up feeling as though I’d been beaten in my sleep. Hard. With a cricket bat. This manifests in my barely being able to walk the 15 feet to the toilet, and usually having to collapse back on to my bed for a little while afterwards.
Even 5 years ago I used to jump out of bed, and immediately be able to move gracefully. Now, I sort of half stumble everywhere for the first ten minutes out of bed.
Emotionally, I don’t fall for people like I used to. In fact in the past 12 months I’ve only had one crush. And even there I find myself not having any hope in my heart at all. It kind of feels like I found wisdom in loving, and that wisdom sucked the joy of adventure from my heart.
I can’t stay up late anymore. I want to be in bed with a mug of hot milk by 10pm every, single, night. And if I do stay up late it takes me days to stop feeling tired.
I can’t drink anymore. It just makes me feel, yuck.
I find myself watching old movies, and preferring them to modern remakes. I actually realized last week that I prefer The Thing From Another World (1951) to The Thing (1982).
I find myself wishing that gaming companies would stop making new games, and start updating the graphics on old games. I’d love to play a version of the Breath Of Fire series, where nothing has been changed aside from the music and graphics.
Do all of these mean that I am now old?
I’d rather sit in with a DVD than go out to a bar.
Actually I’d rather sit in with a parasitic worm infection than go out to a bar.
Am I setting in my ways.
Are carpet slippers, and 30 cats my next port of call?
Is not that I’m transgendered. I’m cool with that. No, actually I’m very, very happy with that. It’s a big part of not just what, but who I am.
It’s not that my sexuality seems to have shifted a little. I may not be overly fond of the fact that I’m what I think of as a 5% bisexual. But I don’t hate it, I just don’t hugely like it either. After all your sexuality isn’t something to love or hate, it just is.
It’s not even the way that I am always sick, hard as that may be to believe. And believe me when I say that always being sick is a very hard road to travel. Never being able to plan more than a couple of days ahead, simply because it’s impossible to predict what your body will be capable of in a few days time. Not being able to do the things you love, because they hurt too much. It does suck. But after so many years like this being ill has become rather like my sexuality. Just something that is.
I don’t hate that I’m kinky, or poly. More love is usually better (barring the occasional psycho second partner, or that rare person who simply is incompatible with your other partner), and how can finding ever more interesting ways of expressing that love be a bad thing?
Nope, the thing I hate most about my life is the, for me, immeasurable hurt that my existence in her life has caused my partner. Well more precisely the hurt my existence has allowed other people to cause her.
I adore my Partner in Crime. I simply could not wish for a better partner. She’s loving, caring, intelligent, sexy, beautiful, and unlike me can actually cook. And after almost 9 years in each others lives I would be hard-pressed to come up with much of anything about her that I don’t love. She’s given me 9 years of mostly happiness. And I like to think that mostly that’s what I’ve brought her also. But my nature, which is so often an issue for people on the street, has also from time to time proven to be an insurmountable issue for members of her family, and I suspect for people who are now former friends.
So I hate that my existence means that she has lost inclusion by parts of her family. I hate that I’m the reason for her losing out on those relationships. I hate that my loving her has led to her missing important family events.
I come from a rather small family myself (excluding various adopted family members who rather dramatically increase the numbers). Just myself, my mom, and my brother. But I know how much it would hurt me to be excluded from anything that might happen in the years to come. So I can at least begin to imagine how this has hurt my Partner. And all I can do to make up for that hurt is to love her as much as I possibly can, while I try my hardest to deserve being in her life.
Anyway this post is really just about me getting this off of my chest. Its been bothering me a lot lately, and better to vent than to let it build up until I finally explode leveling a large part of Dublin County.
In my BDSM life no four words piss me off more than these.
“So, you’re a fake.”
These are usually used when, while getting to know someone, I talk about how I don’t go to munches or fet-nights. I mean, don’t get me wrong I used to. In my twenties. When I was younger, and everything was new and exciting. But it’s not anymore.
These days I hunger for the BDSM home life. A good meal, a roaring fire, a great movie on the telly, cuddled into my Miss, my pet cuddled up to me.
I find joy in BDSM being subtle. A glance that shows what I want. The look that shows what they need.
My hope is not to only gratify my base desires (no matter how fun they are), but to also show my pet that she is loved, adored, wanted, safe, protected.
So no I’m not interested in going to a fetish club. After all when I have got a femme-sub…
I don’t get off on training my sub in public, it’s a private act, between, her and I.
I don’t enjoy being surround by a crowd of horny people slobbering over me, my Miss, my pet.
I don’t enjoy watching people who haven’t a clue, showing off, and only revealing, (to those who know what they’re doing), that they actually haven’t a clue.
Hell I don’t like going to bars in the evening. Bars, you know where you sit, and drink socially. Why in the fuck would I, someone who is to say the least a home-bird, want, or be comfortable sharing the single most intimate part of my love life with total strangers?
Why should I have to?
Well I don’t, and I won’t. When I again have a pet, if I ever again have a pet, she will be loved, adored, wanted, safe, protected, and her submission treasured. I don’t need to prove that I’m real to anyone but my Miss, and her.
And you know what, if you have a problem with that, fuck you! The only thing fake about me is my hair color!
(End rant! Guess what was said to me this week?)
For the past ten days I’ve been trapped in a physical hell. My body, which is never exactly robust, has failed me in some particularly unpleasant ways. To put it one way, I’m not entirely sure that I haven’t flushed half my body weight, and 75% of my brains down the toilet. This period in my life has come with all the usual additional nastiness. Severe weakness, bad smells, mind bending levels of pain, joints which don’t want to move properly, and so on. But as bad all those are, it’s the emotional baggage that comes with this type of episode which causes the most damage.
Guilt is the largest part of it. The sicker I feel, the more worthless I feel, simply because those small things I can usually manage to do; light cleaning, bad cooking, making the bed, are now almost impossible. It takes away the little sense of pulling my own weight that I usually struggle to hold on to in day-to-day life. We won’t even get in to how utterly inadequate I feel when I’m struck with a total inability to have any kind of physical relationship.
But, as easy as it is to dwell on the crap that goes with episodes like this, it’s far more important to keep in mind the ways in which life smiles on me.
It’s easy to dwell on the fact that my video blog won’t be up on time, because I physically can’t sit at my PC for long enough to record the video, but less edit it.
But I should be dwelling on the fact that I have the first week of my webcomic drawn, and storyboards done for the next 5. I should be dwelling on the fact that after delays in abundance, I am now on course to finally launch it in the New Year.
It’s so easy to become disheartened when I think of how I’ll probably never get to work with other people again.
On the other hand, here I sit with one novel written, a second on the way. With some 300 articles on this blog, with the are bones of a future video blog series started. So I am hardly idle.
It’s easy to dwell on the fact that I’m too unwell to have a social life of any kind.
I should be keeping in mind that I have great friends, who I know will forgive my absence from life. And I should remember that even as sick as I am, I will get to see my mom on Friday, because my Partner in Crime is driving me down to her.
The easiest of all to dwell on is that I feel lonely right now.
But I keep in mind that when I’m this sick being around people often makes me feel far worse than mere loneliness. Why? Because I feel that I smell, I feel unattractive, and incapable. So being around people in the prime of their lives…well it can hurt. But what really makes it okay is when I remember that I own two very loving, very cuddly puppies.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that the key to not ending up in a black pit of depression when you’re sick for prolonged periods of time, is to stick to the positive. And with that I mind, enjoy…
I cry an awful lot. Well at least I think that it’s an awful lot, it may actually be a very normal amount for any human being. So maybe it would be more accurate to say that from my point of view I cry a lot. And I cry for all sorts of reasons.
I cry because I’m happy.
I cry because I’m sad.
I cry because I lonely.
I cry because there’s no milk, and I really want a glass of milk.
That’s the thing, it’s not rational, or even all that predictable. And that annoys the frikkin’ hell out of me. But this week I’ve cried so much I’m starting to wonder just how many tears a body can hold. Even a body as large as mine. I keep thinking there has to be a limit, there has to be a point where my body will just stop. It never happens though.
Why this week? Well in a life that has always been filled with pain, and illness I’ve had a week from hell. For four days I managed to keep down a couple of spoonfuls of food a day. While my bum did an even better than normal impression of an inverted chocolate fountain, and let me tell you, that takes some doing. Rooms have spun, headaches have been experienced. And through it all I’ve been upset because my Partner in Crime has had the dubious pleasures of living with me at my physical worst, without the benefits of my being at my kinky worst.
The latter is what upsets me the most.
I have always believed that a human being without the sexual expression which is appropriate to them (lesbian, gay, asexual, furry, whatever expression of your particular flavour might be), is probably not really entirely sane. At the very least it can’t be healthy. And yet there’s this sexually appealing, and expressive woman who I know adores me, and all my get up and go, has got up and gone. It upsets me, it makes me feel horribly guilty. And I think that’s what people who aren’t permanently sick, or otherwise physically challenged often don’t understand.
The guilt.
The unending feeling that the person, or persons (for those poly-folk lucky enough to have another partner) that you don’t deserve them, and that they are wasting their lives with you. That they are wasting their (relative) youth on someone who might in some ways be far too old, far too young.
I’m a deeply sexual person. I think there may be 30 seconds in a row when sex doesn’t cross my mind in some form. I can’t be certain of it, but there might be. But I have a pretty limited sex life, simply because so much of the time I’m physically unable. For example, it’s been four years and three months since I was shown my place by my Miss in that delightful BDSM way, because my body can’t take it. Which leaves me continuously walking around with two questions chasing each others tails in my mind.
Why in the hell is she still interested in me at all? Yes, I know love. But contrary to what The Beatles had to say ont he subject, love is not all you need.
And.
When will I lose her? Yes I know on 99% of the levels of my mind that I won’t. But try telling that to the 1% that’s a frightened 12-year-old huddled in the corner wondering when the one person who makes her feel safe is going to say “Go away, I don’t love you, you’ve been replaced.” Go on, try to, ’cause believe me I’ve tried, and she ain’t listening.
Of course the stress from that feeds into the other stresses in your life, and that makes you feel sicker, and that stresses you more, so sicker, and so on, and so forth. Until the day when your body liquefies and you end up flushing down the toilet with the rest of the effluence.
I don’t know if there is a solution to this. Crying helps while it’s happening. But the guilt, and the fears are still there when I stop, they’re only overwhelmed by the physical sensation of crying, not healed. Talking about it…not so much, there’s only so many times you can be told that you’re silly before it stops helping, and that time is long past. In the end like so many other things in a persons life, it’s just another cross to bear. Just another trial to overcome.
I just wish for once that something would be easy.
In the past year my sexuality underwent something of a quantum shift. Changing utterly, beyond any, and all previous understanding. Leaving me a completely new per…well no not really. In reality I just realised that I could accept that I fancied a particular boy. And then I asked him out.
Asking him out wasn’t a small act. Despite the fact that it was accidental like almost all of my asking outs (It’s a real word in my head, okay?) of people. Seriously I have a well grounded tradition of accidentally asking people out…
But it was, and still is a big deal for me. After 2 months of being involved with my Boylesquer I’m still trying to understand this change in me. Hell I’m still trying to understand if it really is a change, or just my truly accepting something that I’ve always believed anyway.
What’s that Amanda?
Well I believe that no matter how straight, or gay you feel you are, there’s always the potential for one person of your non-prefered gender to knock your socks clean off. It happens all the time. I think just about everyone has that straight/gay friend, who has been straight/gay their whole lives, never deviating. Then suddenly they have a girl/boyfriend.
But this then leads to a language question. One that dovetails rather neatly with a bdsm post I wrote a while ago.
Are they bisexual? Or are they still a lesbian (or whatever), who just happens to have met their exception to the normal rules?
You see people say all the time that sexuality, like gender is a spectrum. But then they insist on slapping that type of phrase into a cage made up of a very confining, rather binary language. Leaving people who have been with one guy, ever, in the position of having to say that they’re bisexual, or Pansexual, or queer, or (insert makey uppey word), when they don’t know if that word actually applies to them. It’s an uncomfortable place to be stuck in, especially if your one of those writer types who uses labels the same way other people use oxygen. Writers of course mostly being bitter soul-destroyed anaerobic lifeforms, with concentrated, neat vodka for blood.
So getting back to me I’ve been left trying to find a word, or a term that I can use to comfortably explain who I am.
Am I bisexual? I don’t think so. I like my boylesquer a lot, I mean he’s cute, charming, sweet, intelligent, talented, ripped to fuck, well groomed, and has a very spankable ass. But he’s just about the only boy I’ve ever actually been into. (Kitten please stop laughing, and pointing at your Sir!)
I do adore transwomen, natal-women, and one or two utterly genderless individuals so am I some weird sort of Pansexual? Probably not, even though I mostly identify as a Futagirl (At its simplest girl who’s happy to have a girlcock, but wishes she also had a pretty kitty.) the operative part of that word is “girl”. The truth is I’m attracted to girls, of any sort. Hence my having a new girl-crush basically every day of the week. As for the genderless people…they’re just hot and let’s leave it at that, otherwise I may have no functioning mind by this time next week. But the girl, and primarily (99.99%) into girls would surely mean lesbian, right?
Okay so I’m left with a problem, how do I define myself?
Yeah, yeah I hear some of you saying “But Amanda, why do you have to define yourself?”
I just do, okay? You get to be all airy-fairy about defining yourself if you want, I get to be a pedantic bitch about myself if I want to. And I need to, otherwise I start to derail.
I guess the best way to define myself is to say that I am a lesbian with some bisexual tendencies. Or I’m a dyke with a fetish for one special guy. Or, I don’t know, I’m a meat-popcicle would you like a lick?
But really the best definition of my sexuality at the moment is probably “confused as fuck.” Because while I know that women of any sort totally light up my world, I don’t know yet how to integrate my adoration for a certain boylesquer into how I see myself. But life, especially when combined with a rather active sex-life, is a huge ongoing lesson. I’ll learn from this, probably excruciatingly slowly, but someday I will know exactly how to see myself in this new light.
And then I’ll probably want to get very, very drunk.
I’m sure everyone reading this will at the very least know a tea drinker. Many will in fact live with a tea drinker, it is after all very much the ubiquitous drink of our age. But I wonder how many of you live with that oddity of tea drinkers, the ninja trained maker of stealth tea.
So how does it manifest?
Imagine you’re sitting in the kitchen, some how the ninja tea maker manages to boil the kettle, make themselves a cup of tea, a snack and sit down next to you. But incredibly, the first knowledge you come into possession of that cup of tea being made, is when they start to drink it. By some fantastical means they have managed to hide the entire process from you, while doing it right in front of you.
My partner is one of those rare people trained in this semi-mystical culinary art. She can literally make a cup of tea, a sandwich and raid the biscuit tin,and the first thing I know about it is when the cup of tea lands on the coffee table. I should point out that we live in a small apartment with a kitchen/living room combo.
Of course the use of this wonderous stealth art is not what gets to us poor victims of its application riled up. No, it is the fact that the stealth tea maker manages, in addition to forgetting to make any sounds, not to consider that we ourselves might enjoy a lovingly made cup of delicious lesbian (for lesbian read fruit) tea.
That said, of course nothing tastes better than that delicious cup of lesbian stealth tea. You know the one we untrained practitioners occasionally draw forth from the aether, right under the nose of the unsuspecting in-house mistress. Pay back is a bitch, and she sure tastes sweet.
Recently, some experiences conspired to teach me, the truth of just how hard break ups can be. At the start of last Winter, myself and one of my partners broke up, this was after three great years together. Now let me say right off the bat, that it was a genuinely mutual break up. Our relationship had definitely run its course, and for our mutual happiness we needed to part, while we were still caring for one another. The reality was, that if we had forced ourselves to continue, we would have simply wound up hating one another. So, everything happened for the best.
Not that those facts made our relationships end even the slightest bit easier. The fact is that any break up, whether you still genuinely care for the other person or not will be almost unbearably painful. The fact that we lived together and continued to do so for another week, only made it doubly so. Actually for that week, we drove my other partner quite mad with out constant crying and general moping about.
But that’s not what this blog is about. Everyone knows that breaking up and thus losing the love of someone else, hurts, that is just a fact of life.
What this blog is about is how the other things you lose, can hurt almost as much. I’m speaking here about the plans, the home, the things which had been integral parts of your daily life. And worse still, those things you’d never got the chance to have together, but had always looked forward to.
After three years my two partners and I had built up a plan for our lives. It included someday building a beautiful house for the three of us, a cross between a modern interpretation of a Roman villa and a Norse longhouse. The plan also included silly little things like a holiday in Iceland, a small internet business building custom PC casings, looking after one another as we grew old. You know, being happy.
All of those ideas, hopes and dreams are at best now on an extended hold. I mean of course they could still be done and some probably will happen. But I am left wondering if they will have the same joy, the same sparkle that they might otherwise have had? Regardless, thinking about the things we had planned, that now we will never do together makes my chest ache, every time.
But in a break up if your relationship was good you will lose a lot of other things. You will probably lose an entire other family. I did, I was very fond of the elder of her two brothers, and I had eagerly looked forward to getting to know her other brother, as well as her mom and dad. My ex lost out as well of course. She simply adored my mother, and the sentiment was very much mutual. My dog, who back then had been our dog, for example was still a fairly little puppy when we ended. She hasn’t seen Winter since and that can’t be pleasant. I know how much I miss the furball when I don’t see her for just a single day. She also lost most of her relationship with my other partner. She lost the home we had found here in Ireland for us all, when she still lived in London. So did we a few weeks later, a place that big was simply unsupportable with just two of us.
This is all by way of a context for what I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. The loss of one of my best friends from my life, a friend who had also been my lover and my slavegirl, has left me thinking about how transient everything in my life really is. Some of my friends, people I see as family, will drift out of my life. My beautiful puppydog Winter by virtue of her species will only live 17ish years. Loves and lovers will drift in and out of my life. And worst of all as I get older I’ll start being called to attend more funerals than weddings.
But do you know what?
That’s alright. I’m ready for this stage of my life to start. When I met my ex she was lost and broken. I was still a little naive and unseasoned as an adult. None of that is true of either of us anymore. We both grew from our time together. We both left our relationship better and stronger than when we entered it. We changed each other, all three of us.
The thing about change is that it’s natural, change is actually okay. It comes from gaining and from losing and I’m happy that things change, ’cause maybe when they change my life will get even better. I like better. It makes me happy.
My Random Ruminations. 