My therapist and I agreed yesterday that if I get through a stressful period at work that I have coming up without melting down, I can stop regular sessions.

!!!!!!!!!

BECAUSE I'M MENTALLY HEALTHY.

Like, I have a history of depression and will probably be on the lexapro indefinitely, and obviously if I need to I can go back anytime, but I have a support system and healthy coping mechanisms and I'm gonna be okay.

*TWIRLS*

::SCREAMS::

My abusive biodad sent me his annual contact last week (according to this journal, it's been more like semi-annual for the past couple of years: March '13, October '13, February '14, and now October '14), and I talked about it in therapy this week. It went badly.

My usually-great therapist has apparently forgotten all about all the times I have articulated why I don't want to be in contact with him. It's been years(a year and a half, actually, March '13) since she pushed me hard on the "what would be so bad about softening your stance of no contact ever under any circumstances" thing, and this time she actually used the words "devil's advocate", which is making my shoulders come up around my ears because the devil doesn't need advocates and that is the phrase that various abusive misogynists use online and I don't want my therapist to make my abusive biodad's case for him, I want my therapist to support me in making the best decisions I can make for my own safety and sanity.

So yes: I am mad that he keeps goddamn contacting me, I am mad that I keep having to defend this decision about not having a relationship with him, I am mad that it seems impossible to get past this place of "this is what I want and I get to decide that and maybe I'm wrong but I get to be wrong because I am an autonomous adult."

I can live with the thought of being wrong about him. I don't want to live constantly on the defensive — and right now I feel like every time he comes up, I have to armadillo up and be impervious because everyone else is just going to poke at my boundaries, and I am absolutely certain that if I gave in and let him talk to me, I would never ever stop being on guard and tense and wary.

And now I'm tired.

"I'm still trying to understand why you find these attempts at contact so infuriating. It's really hard for a parent to stop wanting to reach out to a child, to accept that the best thing they can do is nothing."

"Because he is — still, again — prioritizing his desire to say what he wants to say over my expressed wish not to talk to him."

......thank you, all the reading about rape culture and consent and boundaries that I have been doing. I'm not sure I had ever articulated it in quite that way before.

I grew up by the Hudson River.

The Hudson is the river that GE polluted for decades; they dumped tons of PCBs, polychlorinated biphenyls, into it, and then spent a while denying, in chronological order, that they'd done it, that PCBs were harmful and carcinogenic, and that the river needed to be cleaned.

But they lost the court cases throughout the eighties and nineties, and they looked like morons when they ran ads about how the river had "cleaned itself," late in the nineties and into the twenty-first century, and eventually, in 2002 or so, they agreed to have the river dredged.

I can't remember a time when I didn't know the word "dredge." When I didn't know what it meant.

Poor old Hudson. After Monday's therapy session, I have a little more sympathy for her.

The thing about dredging is, it's a violent process. You tear at the bed of the river, scrape away at everything that's fallen to the bottom and come to rest, and you rip out the pollutants. It had to be done to the Hudson, PCBs don't just go away on their own; and I know I have to do it to the various harmful pollutants that have settled their way into my brain. But it's an awful process.

Monday was a dredging session.

Last week at work was rough, and that's putting it mildly; I came down with a bad case of impostor syndrome, and poured a lot of energy into stomping on it; I worked really really hard on mastering a project which is huge and complex and has a tight deadline, and felt inadequate; I slept poorly and lost my appetite and was generally in a bad state.

This is the project which, when it came onto my radar about a month ago, I told my boss I didn't feel comfortable handling on my own. He said, "Yeah, and I'm not too pleased about making you be the tech lead on something on this scale so fast, but we don't have anyone else." So now I'm in charge of this thing which is frankly beyond my pay grade, and it's beyond my pay grade because I do not have the skills for it yet; and for the past three weeks, I have been relatively unsupported as I tried to level up as fast as I could.

I've needed help on this fucking project for at least a week now. I've known I need help for at least that long. But I haven't been able to bring myself to ask for it.

So this morning I sat on the floor of my sunny apartment, and talked to my therapist about this, and cried a little.

(It's funny; ever since I moved and had to switch to phone sessions, I have cried more — twice — than I ever did in the five previous years of face-to-face sessions. And I think I know why.)

Apparently my belief that if I ask for help, it will be denied me, and all I will have accomplished is making myself vulnerable, is bedrock-deep. I don't know when it started, but I can tell you this: it took me four years at Emma, the single most nurturing environment it has been my privilege to be in, to veneer over it with some amount of trust in the people around me, the authority figures in my life, and then that veneer got pretty thoroughly shattered during my gap year and my first year-and-change at college. I've never really gotten even the veneer back, much less the ability, the strength, to be that kind of vulnerable again.

This is my emotional truth: asking for help is dangerous and useless, and it is better to grit my teeth and survive as best I can.

I know that this is, in the simplest possible terms, wrong. Most people are not cruel. They will not deny help to someone who asks for it merely for their own amusement or because — you know, I can't even think of how to end that sentence. Because.

But I believe it.

This session was spent dredging at that concept, that bedrock belief, and I spent all day shaking a little from the intensity of it; spent all day with tears pressing at the backs of my eyeballs.

And then, because of Murphy's Law, I had a meeting with a co-worker, who had offered to support me on the Dreaded Project; that meeting did not turn into divvying up the remaining work for this week's deadline, but instead was about an hour of him going through everything I had managed to put together over the past three weeks, and explaining the ways in which I had diverged from agency style. Which I would normally be okay with — I am fucking delighted to have an agency style to adhere to, and am mildly in love with the process of code review — but now I have to go back and fix everything I've already done, plus everything else I already had on my plate. Which frankly was quite enough to be going on with.

I foresee a week of nine-hour days at the office. I foresee a week of pouring intellectual energy into the Dreaded Project and emotional energy into being brave and I am going to be very surprised if I have physical energy to so much as take the stairs instead of the elevator after work.

This is going to be fun.

Oh my god what.

What was that.

What.

I don't even know.

...yes. I am inarticulate about today's session. Because it was weird.

There was lying down on a couch and lots of quiet and I don't know wtf was going on but I am trying to trust Dr. L because she has been more-right-than-wrong over the past four-plus years.

I am pretty sure we are still working on the "feeling feelings while they happen" thing. I am not sure how this new idea of hers works via-a-vis that, but it does not seem actively harmful, and hey, the likely-apocryphal Edison quote applies here as much as to lightbulbs.("I have not failed 700 times. I have not failed once. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.")

But seriously, even though Dr. L is a smart woman who knows what she's doing, I don't understand how this works. I don't think I have this skill! I don't know how to do this! I don't get how this will turn into having the skill!

Wahhhhh my life is hard.

::sulks and goes to read trashy romance novels at the public library::

Oh, my god, that was a hard therapy session.

( And it started off so easy! )

So then I went to Starbucks and bought a ginormous tea and a banana and a salted caramel square (which is kinda gross), because damnit, that was really hard, and maybe processed sugar and caffeine and potassium can't fix everything, but they sure can't make me feel worse.

The bakery next to the bus stop where I catch my bus home after therapy has closed. This is tragic; it has been, for the past two and a half years, my habit to get a cup of tea and possibly a muffin or a scone or a cookie to nibble on while I wait for my bus and ride home. It has made the prospect of facing rough sessions easier, because I know I have my ritual of comfort afterwards.

And I'm a little worried that I have a lot of rough sessions coming up; Dr. L and I have been talking about the fact that my life is going pretty well at the moment. Which means we're not putting out fires. And can concentrate on more abstract things. Long-term stuff.

How scary is that?

It has been bugging me, more and more, of late, that I am not writing. I have a novel in progress, two more waiting in the wings, a triple dozen poems that I want to revise and publish, half a dozen pieces of fanfic I want to write, a podfic I am dying to get my teeth into. All I am writing is nonfiction -- blog posts, policy, work recommendations, essays and papers.

I am not a nonfiction writer, by temperament, inclination, or training. I miss writing the way I would miss breathing.

I thought Dr. L got that, got that writing is so deeply a part of my identity that very nearly everything comes second to it.

Last week, I talked a little bit about feeling starved as a person, that I don't feel like myself with all of my creative work on the back burner, and she said that now is when I need to be working on social skills and my education — that writing will always be there. And, well, yes, but...I felt more than a little dismissed. This is who I am. It makes me happy.

I don't want to think this is everything Joanna Russ talked about in How to Suppress Women's Writing. I don't. But — it hurts not to write. It hurts to keep pushing writing later in my calendar. When I do not write, I am a lesser person; it really comes down to that. I need to write to be my best possible self.

Why should I be shut off, discouraged, from something that makes me better? I need my therapist to have my back in my attempts to be my best self, in my process of learning what works for me as a person, as the person I want to be. And right now, I am not sure she does.

Therapy two weeks ago sucked. Therapy last session sucked, in related although different ways. I think I got spooked, when Dr. L raised her voice and scolded me and called me on my behavior — I'm fine with her pointing when I'm being an asshat and full of shit, lord knows she's done that before, but that session was different and I freaked. So now I have to go back in and relax, figure out a way to remember that I trust Dr. L, that that session was an aberration, that she's human too and she was frustrated and maybe it was a mistake and maybe it won't happen again and this is all part of the process and I am not allowed to run away.

Because I was seriously considering canceling last week. I didn't and I'm glad I didn't, this is one of those things where it is not having been in the dark house, but having left it, that counts, and right now, this is the dark house, this is the part where I'm scared and hurt and alone and I want to cower and vanish like smoke into the stacks at the library, but that is not therapeutic and I am so sick of being broken and less-than-myself and repeating patterns that hurt me and hurt other people, and goddamn it, I will get better.

I am more than my fear and my programming and my habits. I will be more than that.

Sometimes, it's not me.

Sometimes I can do everything right and still get kicked in the teeth. This, for once, is not about depression, although this holds true there as well; I'm thinking now of a relationship I've been — I want to say handling, or involved in, but they aren't right, actively engaged in, I guess, for the last several weeks. It was inadvertently repeating a pattern I grew up with and which twisted up my insides in not-very-good ways: being promised love and care and attention, and then the person in question vanishing. And coming back, but never reliably, never consistently.

But this time was different: I'm in therapy, and my therapist pointed out when I said, "I am overreacting to this, why does this bother me so fucking much?" that I was not overreacting, that I was being teased and maybe not with intent to hurt, but I was upset and not without reason, and I took a deep breath and went home and tried to reach out and said "I miss you and I want you in my life and what you're doing is upsetting me because I've been here before and the person who did it to me never stopped hurting me." There were apologies, there was what I thought was understanding and regret, and I thought I had resigned myself to the fact that it was out of my hands now; if it got better, it would be because someone wanted my words to be effective, and if it didn't, then it was zir informed choice and zir loss.

I keep repeating that to myself. Because: it hasn't gotten better. I'm still feeling ignored and abandoned and insufficient and angry.

Sometimes, it's not me. Sometimes, it's people being people, and repeating patterns that happen to be powerful for me, and no matter what I do, no matter how much I try or how courageous I am, it won't work; the pattern stays, and I get hurt, and that is okay. It doesn't make me a bad friend or someone doomed to be alone forever; it doesn't even necessarily mean that my judgment in choosing friends is flawed (it might; this person has fucked over other people I know as well, but that's not the point right now).

Sometimes, people just suck.