Holding space

 What does holding space mean?  It means giving someone the respectful permission to feel uncomfortable feelings.  Being willing to feel awkward, even sad, so someone else feels heard, felt, cared about.

This is incredibly rare, I believe.  I think about all the miserable conversations I've had and how they all fall back on the other person's inability to do this.  Because no part of my life is not touched by some form of sorrow, honestly, it isn't possible to get through a conversation about myself that doesn't get stuck in the weeds.  Or maybe they're doing it by their questions?  Honestly I still don't get how it goes there every damn time. Well it seems it does.  Somehow we're talking about me and what I should be doing. In some context.  I know I don't ask for advice.  I often assert as much to the person asking them to stop doing it. They often refuse to stop. It gets to where I feel on the defensive and delivering way more self info yet, not wanting to, trying to ?  Help this person resolve why they aren't helping me? Why are they trying? What did I say or do to activate that?

I actively do not want those conversations and yet, there they are again.

We met a woman who lives in her car and she's a lovely lady till you sit and talk to her.  Then, well?  I dunno, but at the point she's observing that I sound angry, I was actually sick and tired of her bullshit.  i'd been failing to take the conversation.  I'd been actively scolded for trying.  I'd been corrected from having an opinion and any credentials entitling me to such were swept away in an insulting statement that I was probably delusional and filled full of lies. "Brainwashed" as they love to say. Then after being so insulted, i was expected to sit still and pay attention to the professor who wanted to deliver a rambling lecture of disjointed statements that don't even comply with known science on any subject I've studied.

Subjects include but are not limited to: biology, sociology, religion in many forms, linguistics, anthropology and history in general.   Seriously taken university level classes and special autistic interest level study.  To have it casually dismissed by an ignorant grade school mental dropout as irrelevant?  Phew.  

Well anyway, same shit Dan does, so I'm trying to fob her off on him.  It will be interesting to see if they get along.  It will go either way but not middling. 

Well it sure would be nice to have the kind of conversations I remember.  Stuff about books, or history, or I dunno, anything but fucking news and politics and feelings and problems!!!!!!  Damn. I do better chatting in stores, honestly.  Met a cool guy in a weed store.  Pity, though, because that store counter means it's not real.  I can't possibly know if the person actually enjoys my presence or fakes it for service and good sales.

Sometimes I wonder if there are any people I can like.  Is it me? Am I expecting too much?  Am I 3 looking for a 9? It's not possible to say, though.  

The funny thing is, I'm not as lonely as I feel.  I feel it when thinking about it, and at coffee time and when I wish I could sit around sharing a toke.  But that's it.  Most of the time I relish solitude.  It's my happy place.

Maybe all the great conversations of the past were faked by the other person in question for some agenda. They weren't enjoying it, just pretending to, because they wanted something from me.   of course all I have left is my sanity so that means the only people who'll pretend to like me now will be abusers? Exploiters and abusers.   Hmmmmm.  I hate to think that about some of my ex friends but after all, sex was an excuse to put up with someone and a lot of them were ex relationships.  I'm hard pressed to think of a friend who was neither doing it for sex nor for emotional abuse. I know people would say it's me, but maybe, just maybe, I'm cool, I"m fine, I'm worth knowing, but they're all so damn self centered and lazy brained they can't appreciate me. I am no small snack, that is definitely true. I also find the best conversations are with people who have staggering intellects, not people who merely think they are smarter than average.  But the ones who actually have this crazy depth of knowlege about something.   One or two things or a hundred, same thing, they're INTERESTING, and they often find me and my inputs interesting. 

But damn they're rare. Rarer still are the geniuses stuck in the gutter like this.  I mean, I realize now I've been getting sabotaged by one abusive person after another my whole life.  From my mother to my sister to my first husband to Valerie, and in between, staggering around shell shocked from the last one. Valerie to Tom. Tom to Dan.  People who sabotage me emotionally, and where they might have been useful and helpful, by neglecting me.  Valerie could have networked me into a lot of positive opportunities and she chose to isolate me. For one example.

And you know, I don't even give a damn what the excuse was.  I was weird.  I was awkward.  People felt weird around me, I didn't fit in.  I didn't read the room.  So fucking what? I wasn't violent, dishonest or dishonorable, cruel or insulting, manipulative or otherwise antisocial, i definitely deserved better than that.I still do.  I'm so sick of acting like the neurotypical point of view is that I'm awful to be around and people have to be protected from me.  It's bullshit.  There are definitely times and places where I"m actually delightful.  I make cashiers smile and relax.  I pick up litter.  I see the beauty around myself and share it with others. I do not deserve this life being crushed down onto me. All this fear and worry and stress.  I deserve a community.

I've been singing "all I want for christmas is a place to stay" but honestly, I just don't have any faith in any supernatural assistance anymore. 

I've got $350 left until january 1st and it's the 11th. That's 20 days.  Dan's out too.  He's not getting called.  The bus tank is down below half now. The heater diesel has 2 wks left.  Etc.  I'm cutting back on things, I think, or trying to.  But when it comes to pet food and keeping it warm enough for them, I really find it hard to cut back.  

Well anyway, that's where i'm at.  Currently boondocking around in a small area of nanaimo because saving fuel and there are a lot of decent spots around here.

I miss the chattle road site. That was so relazing for awhile. But we got kicked out by cop and that means it's closed to me now. I also get it now, if we stay long enough to be kicked out, we can't come back, because whomever did the phone call is forever going to be johnny on the spot if we return.   reasons not using logging roads or back country:  need to go get my stuff when the parts come in to west van. So we're stuck in nanaimo for that.  2, low fuel, can't be driving all over.

3 still don't have the manifolds replaced and now some red fluid is mysteriously spurting on the firewall from an  unknown location. and other repairs really want done. 4 we have no idea where that shit is at.