Unfucking

I was told to write about my day.  I’m nervous about that because… because now S is reading and she’ll KNOW stuff!  😀  But I guess she signed on for that when she stuck around all those years ago after I “came out” about who I am.  And I guess she signed on for that when she wanted to read this blog, so… Sorry S!  You can totally cover your eyes if you want to…

Today was Unfucking day.  It’s not as exciting (nor as kinky) as it sounds…  A while back we found an app called UFYH which stands for Un-Fuck Your Habitat.  Sir fell instantly in love.  I thought it was a cool idea until I did it a couple times and changed my mind because, basically, it’s about cleaning, and… basically, I’m not.  But Sir believes in cleaning up at least once a week and making some kind of an attempt to stay on top of the dishes and put laundry in the laundry basket DURING the week…  Sigh…  Then on weekends we clean up a bit more so the house generally stays at a tolerable messy/clean ratio.

Usually we do our Unfucking on Saturday, but I spent my entire FUCKING SATURDAY dealing with my car in Boulder, so… there was no unfucking.  By the time I got home there was some cursing (mostly by me) and crying (entirely by me) and going to bed early.  It wasn’t a good day.

Today wasn’t super hot either, but… Sir said I should write about it since I haven’t been writing much and I worked all day and he wants my brain on something else for a bit.

So… it was Unfucking day.  We got to sleep in a little, then we got up about 8.  I was still in my T-shirt and panties, which is what I wear to bed, Sub Brother was in boxers.  I was reaching for my jeans when Sir stopped me.  He took my arm and swatted me hard, twice.  He swats very hard and it stung, but I was able to keep my face neutral.  He used his voice to murmur in my ear, “Do a good job, today,” then he gave me four more swats…  The four made me scrunch up my face and grit my teeth, and the sting was intense but it is different for me, somehow.  When he does that, to me, it isn’t a warning, it’s like… encouragement… helping me to be successful with my day.

Sub Brother’s swats somehow sounded louder to me than mine had.  I actually think about these things in the moment, because… bipolar brain never shuts up… I wondered if they sounded louder because Sir stripped him first so the swats were fully on bare skin, whereas I had at least a part of my skin protected (sure!) by panties.  Or if the sound was actually equivalent I just noticed more when my brain wasn’t also occupied with the actual contact being with my own nerve endings, or if Sir just hits Sub Brother harder than me on principle.  This is an ongoing debate in our house and a slightly touchy subject that I’m technically supposed to suppress my thinking about – whether I’m a baby and Sir coddles me because I can’t handle pain as well as Sub Brother.

I understand this isn’t logical in some ways – I actually process pain emotionally better than Sub Brother in this case.  Where I consider the Unfucking Day swats encouragement, Sub Brother takes them as a threat and a warning.  I come out of the bedroom psyched up to clean shit up… He comes out flinching.

It used to bother me that he processes pain that way.  I worried that he had some kind of complex that he thought he deserved punishment and was just in this type of relationship out of some kind of unhealthy self-abuse.  But I’ve come to learn that he’s just different.  And Sir knows he’s different from me.  Sir knows how each of us processes and he adjusts for that in how he interacts with us, and for that reason I’m supposed to shut up my brain about who gets hit harder or handled differently at different times.

But I’m bad at that.

Anyway.

We all went into the living room and Sir assigned jobs.  And here’s how Unfucking Day works…  A task or chore is divvied out to each of us.  The app does it for you, but Sir mostly decides instead of using the app anymore.  Then there’s a time limit given – 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes…  Then he says “GO” and we go… because… if your chore isn’t done by the end of the time limit… There are swats, and you have to do extra chores, and it’s just unpleasant.  It’s never really happened unless I was having a meltdown (Sub Brother has never fucked up Unfucking Day). Sir chooses tasks that can be done in the time limit when done at a reasonable pace.  So this morning we cleaned the kitchen first.  I did the dishes, Sub Brother cleaned the surfaces, Sir went through the fridge – I get away with leaving shit in my fridge too long a lot less these days…  He piles up things that need to be used soon in one part of the fridge, and tosses anything that might have gotten missed and gone bad, though it doesn’t happen too often.  Then the kitchen is clean…

We also gathered up the recycling, took out the trash, did laundry, and vacuumed, although technically vacuuming mostly just means me listening to make sure the robot vacuum doesn’t get stuck and start beeping for help.

We usually clean the bathrooms, too, but Sir said we’ll do that later this week because… I had a shit ton of work to do for class this weekend.  I hate taking grad classes.  I have my grad degree, I don’t WANT to take any more classes.  But my district makes us take more classes, so I have to do homework and read books and write papers on the weekends.  😛

I also have to pack because I’m going away next week.  Sir and Sub Brother are going to go have a long weekend, too, but I have to pack for a week and that is stressing me a little bit.  Plus my car having issues, plus a bunch of money problems this month (not helped by the car issues!) and just… feeling really overwhelmed with life led to a slow rise to a panic attack by noon.

I never would have said, in the past, that I had panic attacks.  I wouldn’t have even described myself as a person who experiences anxiety.  And I’m slowly realizing that’s kind of hilarious… kind of in the same way that never thinking I had asthma my whole life (despite not being able to breathe half the time) is hilarious…  I just… don’t think that way.

I was thinking about that today (bipolar brain) as Sir started talking me down (before I noticed anything was wrong).  How I can experience a literal physical sensation in my body – an emotion, a feeling, a tension, anything… and yet it… doesn’t register in my brain.  It’s not as if I don’t know it’s happening, it’s… like… background noise in a restaurant.  If someone asked you you would totally stop and say, “Well yeah, there are a lot of people talking in the background,” but when you’re just having a conversation with someone, unless the background noise for some reason escalates to the point of disrupting what you’re trying to do, you just don’t notice.

I’m that way with my body, with my feelings…

And it’s strange.

And I don’t intervene on my own behalf until I’m fully disrupted by the background noise I had tuned out as it escalated.

So Sir is helping me learn to notice.  Today he told me to slow my breathing… I was trying to deal with suitcases and realized my large suitcase has a broken zipper so I’ll have to take my small suitcase which means cutting my stuff down to half…  and I knew I was stressed about that, and frustrated, but until Sir said, “Slow your breath,” I had tuned out the tight, cold, pressure in my gut – my symptom of anxiety.

So I tuned into it and tried to feel it, name it, recognize it.  And I realized how strange that seems, and how I assume “normal” people don’t have to do that.  Or maybe they do… being abnormal in one regard makes it really confusing to understand what areas of my experience are actually normal (everyone has them) and which are abnormal (related to bipolar or abuse or… various other things…)

I once told a friend of mine who is also bipolar that being bipolar is a little bit like standing in the rain while someone else is telling you the sun is shining, and being abso-fucking-lutely convinced that they are wrong, and it is actually raining, because the fucking RAIN is falling ON TOP OF YOU RIGHT AT THAT MOMENT… yet learning to trust that they are right and you are wrong.  That it IS sunny, and that there isn’t any rain, and that reality is not something you have the same access to as everyone else…

It is learning to distrust your own experience of life…  And that… is necessary for someone with a brain disorder such as he and I have to survive and function in a world of people who are not brain disordered.  But it can have… odd consequences… such as … learning to tune out that cold, tight feeling so effectively that I dismiss my emotional states until they become overwhelming.

That wasn’t actually the goal of therapy, it was an unintended outcome that we are now trying to remedy.

I’m supposed to notice when I have feelings.  I’m not supposed to buy into the stories attached to the feelings, but I’m supposed to notice the feelings so that I can deal with them.

That’s bloody well stupidly complicated and inconvenient!

So today, I had anxiety.  Too many things are upheaved right now in my life.  It triggers anxiety.  My story would be “I can’t do this because I’m too stressed and I don’t have time to finish everything and I’m not going to have enough room for all my stuff for traveling and… and… and…”  My brain spins and goes over all the random bits of things I’m afraid of forgetting to do before I leave, and spins and spins and spins until I choke on the dust.

But really, there is not a particular reason for me having anxiety.  I just do.  Human beings just desperately need the universe to make sense so we are EXPERT storytellers.  We experience a feeling and we instantly have an entire backstory for what CAUSED that feeling and why it is justified by the circumstances of our lives.  But it’s not.  It’s just a feeling.  The exact same circumstances might happen tomorrow, or a year from now, and your emotional response could be completely different.  Therefore – feelings are not logical and do not follow linearly from our experiences.  They just are.  And the more crazy you are, the more you are forced to learn that lesson.

So Sir told me to breathe, and I thought about the strange realities of successfully functioning with bipolar.

Even though Sir caught me early, and I did what I was supposed to do, and he was by my side through it… I couldn’t stop the escalation…  I had a panic attack… even as he was standing beside me speaking a mantra to me, since I couldn’t say it myself…  “There is enough time to do everything that needs to be done.  Everything will be resolved.  There is enough time to do everything that needs to be done. Everything will be resolved.”

For a little while he had me fold laundry with him while he spoke that over and over… trying to get me focused on something repetitive.  It worked to slow the slide, but couldn’t stop it.

I started to rock myself, while I was folding… And Sir took the laundry away.

He went to stage 2, started rubbing my forearms, my thighs, my calves, fast and hard, trying to bypass the cognitive and go straight to the nervous system.  Sometimes the sensation, the brisk rubbing all over my body, is enough to trick my nervous system into paying attention to something else and the anxiety will receded (because anxiety isn’t actually about a story at all, it’s about my nervous system short-circuiting…  stories just make it make more sense to the brain…)

Sometimes the rubbing works and I can soothe myself and calm down.  Today it worked only partially.  The tightness would loosen somewhat but not ease completely, then come back just as hard when he would stop.

The second time he paused to see if I was calming, I balled my hands into fists and punched myself hard in the thigh several times, “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you…”

I just finished a book… a silly fantasy book… but it’s about girls who cut themselves with razors.  They are magical and cutting allows them to speak prophecies.  If they don’t cut, they feel anxiety until they DO cut.  The story is about one of these girls who has escaped the people who keep these girls prisoners to sell the prophecies, and is trying to learn to survive without cutting herself.  But over and over in the books (it’s a series) she succumbs and cuts again.  She always has some incredibly important reasons, like, the prophecy is going to save everyone she loves so she HAS to cut…  But… Fuck you.

Fuck you, fictional book character who can’t beat your addiction.  Fuck you, author, for not writing her stronger…  For writing her weak and fragile and helpless and making it silly and justifying her “have to” when she does it.

Fuck you.

I haven’t cut for 8 years.

And it’s still hard to fight.

When the anxiety is eating me alive, buzzing under my skin, making me feel like electricity is crawling all over me like a thousand insects… and I know… I KNOW just one cut will shut it all off… bring peace… silence… stillness…  Just one… and I KNOW I won’t kill myself, I know I won’t even injure myself severely.  I cut for years and I knew what I was doing.  I quit because it was an addiction – an easy solution to my problem – like my best friend’s drug problem…  He quit and faced his problems without drugs… without an easy solution… he did it the hard way… he faced it and felt it and dealt with it… and faced disease and his own death – never giving in again to the easy solution to his pain.

8 years ago I promised him I would be as strong as he, I would give up cutting…

I haven’t broken my promise.

But fuck… sometimes… sometimes… there’s no story or circumstance I’m trying to escape… there’s nothing I’m running away from… my body just malfunctions and one cut… just one cut would put it back on track…  And maybe if I hadn’t used cutting to run away all my life, maybe if I hadn’t been an addict, maybe I could use it now, in a controlled way, to manage my biology… but I can’t.  Even putting aside the discomfort other people have with the idea, putting aside the risks inherent in opening the skin, putting all of those things aside… I was… I am… an addict.  I can’t have “just once.”

So, fuck you…

Sir grabbed my wrists hard enough I couldn’t hit myself again, his face was set and stern.  He doesn’t like me hitting myself (ironic, no?), it is too close a substitution for cutting for his tastes.  I’ve done it sometimes, in the past, when I was alone and I had no other options…  I’ve held ice cubes against my wrists, snapped myself with rubber bands, slapped my arms scarlet, and written my promises across my scars in red ink to remind myself not to break them… and maybe give my brain some comfort in seeing surrogate blood…

And I survived 8 years.  But when I have Sir, those are no longer acceptable choices in his mind, I am not a reliably controlled source, in his mind.

But he is…

So he pulled me to the bedroom, to the bed, across his legs, and made himself a reliably controlled source.  🙂  And eventually my brain and nervous system have to choose – which is more urgently demanding… the anxiety or the pain?

Pain always wins… 🙂

It isn’t perfect.  There remained twinges of tightness and cold in my belly this afternoon… There remained spikes of panic that took my breath and made my heart speed up, but they couldn’t sustain or escalate and so I have rested in a restless but not-escalating state as I finished my chores today.

Sir just told me to wrap up, it’s bed time in half an hour…  Checking in my gut is as calm as it’s been all day…  I need to make lunch for tomorrow.  But then I’m okay.  Everything that had to be done got done…  There was time for everything, everything is resolved.

And I wrote my story and even S will see it… and… well… that is slightly anxious-making, but… somehow a different, cleaner kind of anxious.  More in my heart than my gut – the anxious of being alive and connected and caring about and being cared about other people in my life.

And so I go… Unfucked…