A Buffet Of Sacred Cow And Fatted Calf

What now
After making a major life decision the next step is to work on how that affects the other things near it and what making that change does for other initiatives (at least for me, but I understand what the word consequences means). Some decisions can be done with a lot of the thinking and planning before taking action, but some don’t do this all that well, and in many cases what will result from a decision is difficult to speculate until the tire hits the tarmac. It’s also counterproductive in some situations to switch to the thinking of post-implementation while some chance that decision won’t need to be. made So I’m now assessing how the decision will affect my life moving forward.

I have decided to no longer expend any effort or (if possible) mental energy on attracting or locating romantic relationships. I want to stop expending energy toward something that’s not getting any return – that smacks of hope thinking. So it’s time to evaluate how this will affect my life and what other plans I’ll want to make to fill in the gaps that effort was designed to fill or help in filling.

Again, it’s not my intention to avoid such entangling alliances should they come my way, but the effort to rectify my solitary condition is taking too much out of me, and it’s also leading to depressive episodes. So I’m stepping out of the game, off the board, away from the flame the other moths are throwing themselves against.

These issues also benefit other facets to my life, so this isn’t all about how I don’t seem to trip anyone’s trigger, or at least anyone I’ve come in contact with so far.

Issue One: Roommate
My roommate is problematic. I’m living with someone who I’m pretty sure has ADHD and is self medicating with nicotine and alcohol along with caffeine. She’s in debt to me, working a table service industry job that is about to become a much bigger concern because of supply chain and tariff issues. Her age is also a factor – she seems to be in good physical health, though not going to a doctor makes that uncertain, and both smoking and drinking to excess tax a body. She got her cosmetology license, which she’s let lapse, because she wants to be accepted as a woman without working on aspects of her presentation that scream male, and her low-pitched voice and deportment has gotten in the way of her getting a chair at any of the places where she’s applied. I won’t assume that it’s bigoted salon owners behind this, but an owner of a styling salon has to factor in customer reaction, and she absolutely will not pass. I’m being supportive, but this is not a healthy situation for me to be in thanks to the crazy increase in natural gas prices and homeowners insurance. I swore that when I moved in here I wouldn’t be The First Bank of Nyyki anymore, but here we are. What’s the real world situation here? I’ve overdrafted the last two months, and for the first time in multiple years I have a balance on my primary credit card. What’s sitting on there are my bill payments for power and exterminator service, nothing more. I’m hoping the warmer weather will solve some of the tight money issues, but I’m not sure how that’s going to play out. Also, I haven’t bought groceries since November of 2023, relying on my roommate to pick a few things up to keep things from getting dire and letting her grab stuff for me, most of it fast food or things from restaurants, which aren’t the most healthy sources for nutrition and needed substances.

I’m in a tight space here, because in a roommate I need someone who can help me out because I can’t do some key things like know what I’m taking from a group of cans in the pantry, and this is discussed up front before a roommate moves in, but this means I get folks who are down on their luck and their finances are unstable, and this can turn into a debt. So my roommate situation has got to change.

Add to that her car – it’s registration has been out for several years, as was her prior car, and the car hasn’t been inspected in a while . I keep wondering every time she takes me somewhere if she’s going to get pulled over and ticketed, or a worse case of her getting told she can’t drive or getting her car towed. I’m not all that up for walking home from my infusion clinic that’s located in Rowlett, especially thanks to me having no easy way to get myself out of such a situation (no folks who could pick me up, accessibility issues with the transport for hire service interfaces, etc.). All of this is normal for her – she’s used to taking side streets and being furtive in the presence of police cars to minimize notice of her car. That tense energy bleeds off from her, so I have to clean that out of my system – it’s no wonder I have higher BP readings when I first get to the infusion clinic.

Some of you might be wondering why I haven’t brought any of these concerns to her. That’s because she deals with any constructive criticism by shutting down and turning into a radiating stress ball of sad, and it’s an avoidance technique. She will consider the issue done when we finish talking, so there is no follow-up on anything we discuss, and she’s got a problem with remembering things, important things, like agreements she’s made and things she’s told me she’ll take care of. And she doesn’t look for ways to resolve problems, she continues to hope they’ll go away. I realized years ago that there was no value in trying to work anything out with her, and this flies in the face of how I operate, so a lot of stuff is left unresolved and I’m left uncomfortable and feeling like my feelings don’t matter. She often uses a tactic of postponing discussion on something until “the next day”, and as you might imagine I’ve got stuff where the next day hasn’t come after several years. She isn’t a supportive person, and she doesn’t exhibit empathy, at least not in a way I can perceive, until things start to get critical.

This leads to the point – I need a new roommate who’s going to pay their half of the bills and the small amount I ask towards the mortgage. I also need somewhere for my current roommate to go, where hopefully she’ll figure out how to move forward with her life. I have mixed results with finding roommates, and at this point a potential roommate either needs to already know me or come with a vouch from someone I know and trust.

Issue 2: Socialization
I fit the definition of an extrovert, the social facilitation variety. I like to get people in a social group interacting, playing off each other, and having fun. Since I’m looking at a solo life there’s value in increasing my social interaction. Last month I left the house once – to get my infusion at the clinic. That’s what I have scheduled this month too, and maybe two in May because I’ll have a doctor’s appointment requiring a trip to get labs drawn, or possibly three if my annual checkup with the transplant clinic puts the date there. Notice the trend – I’m leaving the house for medical reasons and nothing else. Visitors to my home are rare, , so I’m sort of living a hermit lifestyle. I have social interaction online – I’m in four PBEM role-playing games right now. But still I have days where I’ll get a single email in a twelve hour period. This is not good. Also, I’ve done the online social interaction thing for 34 years now, and I know it’s not the same for people like me. Online interaction isn’t going to cut the muster.

How have I managed it so far? By shunting the need aside. I understand on a core level about letting go of needs to survive – I grew up in a very abusive household, and I learned early on how to do what it took to survive. This is how I’m shutting down the desire to find a romantic partner – I’m letting that drive fall by the wayside so I can survive the other stuff. This gets a lot harder when another table leg is missing – a table can have three legs, but a two legged table requires a huge amount of support. Note also that this isn’t suppressing or stuffing feelings down, if a need can’t be met I let it go, because it’s counterproductive to worry about things I can’t change or obsess on them – we live in a rare time when someone’s needs might all get met, and this is not normal across human experience, so if something isn’t in my life I cope; after all, a lot of people think human companionship is also a fundamental need, but I’ve lived with minimal amounts of it for a long time now.

So I’ve got to figure out a way that I’m less isolated. Note that I do get phone calls -- flamingsword calls me every week and we have a nice talk about many things, though so far we haven’t gotten onto the topics of nautical cargo vessels, footwear, sealant for letters and the use of signet rings, leafy vegetables nor monarchs. I also have a couple of others I talk to via phone, along with my weekly editing sessions with lanalucy. But that’s not enough, and my roommate isn’t giving me much social interaction either – she comes home and heads out to the back patio most of the time to watch things on her tablet and smoke because it’s a no smoking house, and at least one day a week and often more pass with no communication between us because our life flow is so different; she’s also a second shift worker most of the time, so our schedules don’t match (this also often means that I wind up eating at non-healthy times).

Issue 3: Self-Protection
The hardest part of this endeavor is not continuing to expose myself to broken glass and razor wire – self harm isn’t my schtick. This means I need to disconnect from things romantic. But cold turkeying isn’t productive, so I want to work out a plan for it.

First off, a majority of what I’ve read in the last two to three years, at least when it comes to fiction, has been either stuff with a romantic component or out and out romance. I know some folks can read these things and live vicariously through the romances the characters go through, but I’m not one of them – there’s a point in most of them where I feel the hit that comes from reading about something I might never have again. This is going to change my reading habits a lot – for one thing, I’m going to probably read a lot more nonfiction than I have in the last year. I had a plan of alternating between one nonfiction book and a work of fiction, back and forth, but in the last year it’s been shifted a lot towards fiction more than anything else. I’m at the mercy of the Library of Congress’s National Library Service for the Blind and Print disabled program, so I’m not the boss of this situation, and I’ll read the works of authors I’ve grown fond of, but I don’t know that I’ll pick up much stuff that has a romantic component in it unless the synopsis is enticing enough, and I’m going to be less picky about science fiction and mysteries. I don’t read westerns, war fiction, horror, or much fantasy – the big problem with a lot of epic fantasy is that in the end it’s all about the magic, so I’m a lot more selective, and I’m going to continue that. This will, however, probably give me the space to do that deep dive into Terry Pratchett’s Discworld some of my friends have suggested to me.

It's not only what books I listen to – there are songs I won’t be seeking out moving forward, even though I love the tunes. Hurting oneself isn’t a sign of healthy self care. Some of these songs key to specific times and events, because music is great at doing that, so this isn’t a light choice, it’s down to a survival one.

The bigger problem is in what I write. I’ve written two classic love stories, both of them edited, and I’ve got ideas for two more, with the next one into the plotting and characterization stage, but I don’t know how positive it’d be for me to dig deep into those works. Likewise, my next two Holly and the Wizards novels involve romantic content, and I plan to finish them, but I’m not sure when. I’ve got one speedbump to get past in a novel that starts out feeling like a romance novel but takes a drastic turn in the next two chapters after what I’ve already written, and I’ve got other things in progress that might or might not get any attention for a while. This is part of my dual extended middle fingers to genre conventions, because I float across genres like they never existed (Like Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Roald Dahl, and many others). Still, once I manage to procure covers for them there will be fans, I hope, and shippers gotta ship. So I can’t excise that from my life right now. Still, this is going to change my focus some in what I write. I don’t need the stuff in my face for multiple hours a day if I want to maintain my normal upbeat positive outlook.

This is also probably going to involve me cutting some friends out of my online circle. I’m not going to do it here, because nobody here is going to cause me mental unrest, but over on Zuckerphuqt there will be some culling. Why am I keeping that account active? Two reasons – there are people there that I can’t find elsewhere, and it’s a decent place to announce the publication of my stuff. If that second item turns out to be false I’ll be much more prone to shutting that vector down.

Issue 4: Identity
I’ve been working hard with my higher power to rid myself of the thoughts that my inability to attract anyone (yes, anyone, not someone) is a failing of mine. The reality of it is that I’m isolated and out of public contact because of reasons outlined above. Also, my friends aren’t coming up with anyone who might find me interesting enough to want to hold my hand, much less do anything more. It’s way beyond being touch starved or deprived, though I don’t have a good word at the moment for the extreme isolation that’s involved (touch gulagged?). And this can be hard to take. I was told in meditation that it wasn’t me causing this, it was willing participants who weren’t interested in getting their participation award. Okay, but still, that can, thanks to the labyrinthine twisting’s of thought, come back to being an issue centered on me.

What doesn’t help is how greater society views independents as somehow failing – outside a diner or seats at a bar, how many tables for one have you seen? The other troublesome factor is that my life is about sighted guide for the most part – our society isn’t equipped to deal with blindness these days. Table kiosks don’t have an audible option and few servers know to fold a receipt so a blind person can know what line to sign on, and a tip is its own issue. This means that so often people see me with someone and make the jump to us being involved romantically. In a recent conversation I joked that I could buy scrubs sets for those guiding me so people would get that it’s someone helping me, not someone dating me, but that’s a funny idea and nothing more. Of course there are some people who would hit on someone who was with someone else, but I have no interest in those people, and nobody’s asking us if we’re involved, probably out of politeness or fear of rejection. And this leaves me slogging through life alone for the most part. I hate this. But what am I to do? Work on myself and get to where I don’t let those identity issues bother me, because I know I’m a valid person who has a lot to offer. Offering it to someone else doesn’t seem to be in the cards at this point. I don’t like it of course, but as Ringo said so well, “It don’t come easy”.

So…
I’m thinking about this, and I don’t think I’m going to let this define me. I prefer the belief that I’m taking care of myself over the more popular label of a loser in the love department. And myriad other factors are playing into this, like my health, my disability, and where I own a house. I’m going to make the best I can out of what I’ve got and what I’ve created for myself, and try to continue being the blonde, blind, badass broad that I know myself to be.

Right now I’m not working on any longer writing projects – I’m dropping short stuff, almost all flash or short story length, and jotting down notes for a potential project or two. I’m running out of talking books because I’m not getting as many of a particular genre that seems to have a high broken glass quotient for my emotions. This means I’ve got some time to think, and thinking is a gateway drug to introspection.

I grew up in a strange household. My mother was absent by court order, my dad became a father too young and had emotional issues and inadequacy problems, and he married a woman who had too many issues to list here without a cut tag. My brother could be a handful, because he inherited a mood disorder from Mom (the people that believe attention and mood disorders aren’t heritable and that they’re all nurture issues are either ignoring data or in need of more studying of the literature) and despite the labels people liked to put on us (I was the smart kid, he was the cute kid) he’s also bright. My half-brother was the kind of kid who was always at the ER because he didn’t understand things like risk analysis or moderation. This meant that I was the child that didn’t cause any problems; I was the fire that didn’t need to be put out, and I didn’t get much attention. This was to my benefit in many ways, because neither parent had stable emotional control, and the Step-monster could be vindictive and punitive. I also learned that not being seen meant not getting hammered down to the board surface.

So, this means that I struggle with being noticed. In social situations it’s not a problem, but I learned early on that it was wise for me to vacate places where I wasn’t wanted around. My gauge of when that condition exists isn’t the best, so I sometimes step back before anyone wants me to go away, and I will accept that I might even get back away when folks like having me around, but most people don’t have the assertiveness to say, “Hey, where are you going, I like having you around.”

I have no interest in being The Invisible Girl (I have a long list of Reed Richards’s flaws, for instance) but my musings in the last couple of days have opened a line of thought that I’m good at being overlooked. I don’t know how to change that or if in this current socio-political climate it’s wise for me to be on some folks’ radar. But I do realize that that approach isn’t getting me what I want, and it may also get in the way of getting needs fulfilled. This is a definition of being stuck – I am not me right now, and I haven’t been for a while, I’m a shadow or echo of me. Does that non-shadow me still exist, or is it lost forever? I have no answer for that either.

More to come from this time of analysis, I’m just getting started.