I was awoken by the sound of cat howling and verbalization; this cat has been lonely locked up in the office overnight. We took it to the vet today for an initial checkup, the original owners moved to Ohio and the couple who adopted her is from Greenwood. No idea how the cat showed up on our doorstop.
It meowed at our door every single night around 6pm for hours. Who knew that feeding a stray would make it come back? (Lol).
It’s a sweet cat, and I’ve run out of times how rare it is for an orange calico to be female.
The issue is that there isn’t room in the RV for two cats. I mean, people take themselves and their five kids and move into RVs. I just don’t think there’s room in the RV for Bottlecap and cat. Bottlecap is a single cat household and never quite got along with Amanda’s cats.
There wouldn’t be an issue if we weren’t moving, which I can’t believe is next weekend.
Speaking of that, it’s something I’ve been stressed out about. I can feel it in my body and stomach especially. I think that once actually there, it should be a relief. A relief to be out of Indianapolis and the busy roads, the homeless people who howl for money in front of the gas stations, the strip malls, and who come up to your car when parked. Especially a relief to be away from all of the shootings and crime.
Breaking it down, it’s more than just the move and the drive. It was planning to move out of Arlington and having the van I worked so hard on and all vehicles totaled out, then having the house burglarized during the move. I’ve been on edge and find myself peeking out the front window at night when up to make sure no one is breaking in.
It’s an unsettling feeling and my mind goes to thoughts of shooting, and the emotional fallout of someone breaking into the house or RV. I think about the blood and the phone call to police, being a suspect and potential self defense court case. I think about if needing to shoot someone for self defense that you better kill them so they can’t sue for personal injury due to how fucked up our country’s laws are.
I’m tired of hearing about Elon Musk in the news, he’s such a cunt and I hate him. I hate what he does to workers under him, how hostile he is to remote workers and worry about fanboys and other businesses copying his awful behavior. I hate reading about mass shootings everyday in the news, and I hate reading about the mass layoffs in the tech sector.
However much we needed a recession to bring housing and car prices back down. Fuck those wall street investors buying up homes in mass, and fuck my landlord’s automated emails that are full of “warm wishes” and fake empathy without a single real human behind them.
It’s been difficult deleting Facebook if only due to the muscle memory of trying “face” and waiting for the autocomplete when mindlessly browsing websites. I need to do the same for “news” which autofills news.google.com, then reddit.com. News.google.com may be the worst offender.
But enough bitching about the news and politics for now, I have a feeling it’s been a thing forever; just that I didn’t start “keep up” with the news until the pandemic. It’s truly an awful thing and would make anyone have an anxiety disorder and want to pop the pills they advertise on the commercial break.
I think about going to my moms and I have the automatic thought of thinking about that dry air, warm, yet cold walled, cigarette smoke basement and the sound of the furnace running and the unbalanced blower fan shaking the steel casing in a rhythmic fashion.
I think about being on the phone with Amanda and how giddy she was about Kayden shit. After all, they were talking about moving in together and I was at my mom’s after having a massive panic attack about being cheated on a month after getting married; being forced to go to my parent’s house due to *my* “bad behavior”.
It’s astounding how much I was gaslit and emotionally abused, blamed for “my feelings” and how “toxic masculine” I was because I wasn’t okay being cheated on right after getting married, lol. Jesus Christ, like, what a brain fuck, truly. The sad thing that’s perpetuated, often, in that awful “More than two” book and social communities is victim blaming and that their feelings are their own to handle, regardless of how hurtful or abusive your actions are.
And no, that isn’t the spirit or intent of what is truly meant, to be fair. It is however what happens, more often than not, when a monogamous couple dips their toes in and one person falls HARD into NRE (New Relationship Energy). There’s a whole sub-community of injured and traumatized people, the victims of polyamory and it makes sense, love triangles and trauma around love goes back so far in human history.
The other hard part to swallow was that I went along with it for as long as I did and that I was either dumb, blind, and/or intentionally unaware of what was truly happening. Like, I knew it in my gut that it was over the day he/she came over and they were in the RV, I just didn’t want to accept it and it felt so blindsiding.
But I don’t have to go through and analyze all of that again. I can laugh at how angry she was during our divorce proceedings, like I owed her something after all the abuse and damage she inflicted upon me for no other reason than her own immaturity, hatred of men, and insane metaphysical bullshit. I always made fun of one of my old landlords for “spirits” telling her that her husband owned her in a past life as a slave, and that’s why they divorced. I just never thought it would happen to me.
On one hand, I can totally understand why I have trauma to work through still; that was some truly awful shit and it makes sense that I’m sensitive and re-triggered by moving and going to my mom’s. Like, going back to France Park can and will bring back memories to deal with. On the other, I’m just so tired of it. So much of all of it is behind me and it’s not something I usually think about on the daily anymore.
I think that this is the big step and I think that is what scares me. Anxiety became more of a scary thing once I knew what extreme stress felt like, what it felt like to lay in a bed and sweat through the sheets, down to the mattress. It became scarier when she visited the campground we fell in love in on her birthday because I couldn’t think of anywhere else to bring the RV when she kicked me out and my heart rate was 160+ for hours on end just being around her.
But on the other hand, it’s like duh; just don’t be around people who trigger you like that, Ross. Have some boundaries and don’t let assholes stay in your life. Don’t make yourself vulnerable in that way and share a bank account, and have some self love and respect to demand more out of someone who claims they “love you” while they pay rent of a house you aren’t welcome in with your money.
I’m a much different person now and I feel like I’m with someone who really gets me for once. Kasey is a pretty amazing person, kind, kinky, we have a great sex life. We game. She gets super fired up about feminist topics and is quite a nerd. Lo and I are still good friends, she’s also a kind person and frankly, I’m a bit blown away she stuck around for all of my bullshit.
I think that this change is going to ultimately be very good for me, it’s going to reclaim some of my independence and get me traveling and driving more again. It’s going to help me get unstuck and help break remaining patterns. It’s scary, for sure, but I have plenty of other experiences of overcoming.
It’s this feeling of not knowing if anything truly exists out of my bubble and like I’m going to drive off the end of the earth if I drive too far or something. Like, I know what is on the other side and by the end of it, I’ll just be there. It’ll be like that feeling I was in the white truck with Lo, sitting next to the interstate on-ramp and just saying fuck it and going to Ikea and how good that felt.
It’s that fuck it that I’ll need, and the fuck it that will be rich to practice. It was the fuck it when I’d drive to Frankfort to pick up Lola every other weekend and never missing a weekend due to anxiety, even if I drove alone. And then it’s the feeling of just being there and that I made it. Then eventually, there won’t be feelings, just thoughts of what audiobook or music going to listen to or the warm feeling of driving through the hills in Brown County after a good breakfast at the Inn.
There’s a part of me that is sad. You take yourself with you wherever you go, but like, this is the final tie I’ll be cutting to what was and someone I really cared about for awhile, even if I didn’t have the vulnerability or emotionality to express it at the time. Under hate is hurt, under hurt is or was love, and under her hate is the same. No idea why, though. It was one of those weird ones where we know in our ego that we don’t have much in common but still, something was underneath. And I don’t think it was just a trauma bond.
Fuck you for using me as a rebound and not having done the work when I met you, though. Like, for real.
And I think that the previous comment, going back and reading, tapping edit after publishing (along with my spelling and grammar issues that I’m not going to fix) is part of the problem. What was really there? Because her new nickname, the “Mermaid”, going to emotional depths that no one else goes to sounds like a whole lot like emotional addiction.
It was not good to be a part of the situation, to be used for someone to get their rocks off on NRE, to be used to fuel those feelings. The feelings of her being in a hotel over the weekend with him and her clit tickling while on the phone with her husband (due to how… taboo it was and/or non-normative). I didn’t deserve to be anyone’s validation of queerness or that someone else was a “real man” due to my hurt.
I’m sickened by my own empathy to the point of wanting someone I loved to feel that, and being a willing participant, even at my own determent. It was this sick, as in mentally unwell situation for me. I found extreme depths of self hatred and I guess a kink for masochism. It was sad that it was pretty much an open, yet, unsaid joke.
I think the most unsettling thing about the whole thing is that there was a part of me that wanted to be abused and there were aspects to polyamory that were sexually arousing for all of the wrong reasons. It’s one thing to setup roleplay and do kink in a safe space, even cucking and what some would call more extreme things, but when it’s real life and divorce litigation and loosing your home, family, it becomes very damaging in a real way.
It’s like those people who want to be financially dominated, the darker corners of humanity. Surely it isn’t healthy to give into things like that in the real. And it wasn’t just me, it was her telling me that her and Kayden didn’t work without me, it was those intense feelings of NRE that was fueled by the triangle, the situation and I’m sure that there was a part of her that was mad that I wasn’t going to be the foundation of that.
Not sure why I’m coming back to ramble more, the same things I’ve written about countless times and deleted across several blogs. It’s the same story and surely writing about it brings it back up and gives it power? Or is it that by the act of writing it allows me to process it within myself a bit more and validates my experience?
First time in awhile writing about it, so it can’t be that bad and oh noes, gonna have to give this up when moving; what a tragic loss leaving this behind 😂
I think it comes out of the feeling of wanted to be seen, but I think the necessary realization will be knowing she’s read plenty of these type of posts, and likely gets curious and still comes around here and gets it and doesn’t care, knows what happened from my perspective, or I’m not even on her mind anymore. Either is fine.
If there is one thing I know about narcissists, it’s that even negative attention is still validating to them. In time, even these memories will fade and I’ll have it even further behind me.
One thing is for certain tho, it’s been longer now than the whole time we knew each other, yikes. Things are still allowed to be a big deal to me, right? Of course they are, or I come across as pathetic; but this is my space and I can journal and be vulnerable out in the open if I want to.
Ross Fisher 