hot pink monsters

The fog is so pretty this morning. It was so dense when I awoke, and it's still going strong. I love it.

Had really nice therapy this morning. My therapist is some sort of miracle angel human I don't understand. He sees things I need that I don't realize I need until he says them and I start weeping from like omg someone noticed that I have this need.

sigh.

(Needing to be heard, needing people who understand me, needing to have fun with friends and this deep need to create new holiday traditions with friends, needing to not live in lake oswego lol.)

He said that the deeper work we have to do involves recognizing these patterns, that repeat in all areas of my life, where I feel guilty expressing my needs - my need to feel seen and heard, my need to not live in lake oswego, my need to not be exposed to unwanted touch - and to work on this. However one works on that. Practicing making requests, maybe? I have already started to improve in some areas, such as in my relationship with Josh and with Tyler.

today he gave me a bit of a revelation on insight into my clutter. I kind of described the state of things lately and how bad it got especially a couple weeks ago (it's still pretty terrible but slightly better), and he mentioned how your bedroom is a reflection of your internal state which I have noticed and agreed with. But when I was contemplating Ian's new eBay habit and how bad that's going to get and how Karissa has no idea how badly this is going to ruin their lives and how deep the work would have to be to cure someone of hoarding, the other day, I realized for the first time that aside from this visceral disgust of the level of clutter I collect around my workspace, there is also a vague sense of a feeling of safety that comes with it. I liken it to how I've heard it described about obesity, that folks sort of add a layer of their own bodyfat to protect themselves and make themselves feel safer somehow, even though it's not really a healthy or functional way to create a feeling of safety. I just never noticed it before.

And my therapist replied, it's not just that it feels safer because there's a barrier that others might not be able to breech, it feels safer because of the fact that it reflects my internal state.

That is a brand new concept to me, and it makes so much sense.

He said it can be really sad and is often triggered by some sort of trauma.

I'm excited to have this insight and perhaps can develop an approach to address how I feel on the inside, so that my outside world starts to look and feel a little better. This sounds like a lifelong endeavor, but I'm game to tackle it.

I also think I might have scarred him a little bit because I talked about the Krampuslauf I did on Saturday and showed him my massive hot pink monster mask, and then we talked about an ecstatic dance event that Finley and Manders want me to attend and how unsafe I feel about it because I have multiple times had men at these events rub their dicks on me without consent and I kinda went off the rails and told him maybe I should just wear this thing to the dance and I put it on my head and said, "wanna rub your dick on me now? try me, bitch" and my therapist kinda lost it and was like ummmm, this might show up in one of my Teams meetings later, omg. lol.

We had a good laugh about it, anyway. I said maybe it could be a new suggestion for anyone dealing with unwanted dicks and he started cracking up again. oooohhhhboy.

I feel a lot better after crying about being scared to ask for what I need. I think I can actually manage to take a shower, today. Which would be great. Whether I can actually make some progress on laundry and cleaning the floors and getting the tree up, is as yet to be determined. But I shall try.

I need to get catfood and more xmas lights (my strings keep dying, they're old, it's time) and food for Josh (he's out of bread and dying oops) and aahhhhh so much to do so little time.

Got Avalanche's claws trimmed this morning, very happy about that. Litter is clean, she is fed, she is loved.