✚. rabbit .✚

He would yell at me anytime I was loading it, with knives sharp-end down; the handle's safety pointing towards the sky. I would reply with my own upset and explain how anything hazardous had to be pointed downward to prevent injury. I'd try to cite my mom and group homes in an attempt to convey the importance.

He was in the military; he made a career of it. He didn't see the worry, he replied to me something along the lines of "who would be ____ enough to be in that situation?". This now feeble old man, wondering how something worrisome could occur in that situation. It struck me as unreal. I think I remember yelling something about worrying about falls, slips, about his age and my children.

Lately, I'm thinking back on that moment and on my own sudden lack of cortisol and fear of the world around me. I don't have the same level of worry as I once did. My mother can come off as painfully over-worried sometimes and that's something peers in my past have pointed out. Despite that, she has also been right many, many times. I cling to her wisdom because we are poor and life is different when you are poor. She has experience and knowledge that I don't have.

I had this moment a few months back where I was crying at my mom that we should make some sort of safety plan or move somewhere where we can grow food. This sounds ridiculous, maybe. I always worry about food and apocalyptic situations. I imagined what would happen in the worst scenario and what I'd do. I know it's meant to be a therapy technique..? In that moment, with the stories of everything coming out, I sort of had this feeling of accepting I had no control over my death, my family's death, my friends' deaths, let alone anyone else in the world. Even in a movement, death happens. I'm so terrified of it, and then suddenly.. this beyond-level of peace and acceptance.

That it's okay to have no control over it? To be fearful but realize that nothing matters and that my death will always happen, regardless? Is it my mind trying to wrench power away from (not so) invisible enemies who want to kill me? To give up all will to some unknowable universal force that some might call God?

I used to be painfully suicidal. It was sort of like I wanted my death to be in my hands. I couldn't stop thinking about apocalyptic situations and how I'd have to overcome them (or that I was an antichrist and had to be eradicated - I knew it wasn't real but I couldn't stop thinking it).

Ever since then.. it's hard to describe my mind, but I've wanted to live and enjoy everything more? I'm crying out of overwhelming joy to so many things. This might also be coinciding with my recovery from Cushing's. A beginning of feeling again.

And then.. it clashes, somehow, for reasons I don't understand, with my thought-to-be unyielding need to be and prove my intelligence.. to the point that I kept engaging in accidentally self-destructive tendencies to prove my worth to everyone around me. In the worst ways.. pushing myself to study prestigiously looked at field after field with zero results because "ooh, interesting!", forgetting I am allowed to learn without needing a certification to prove it.

And the appreciation of the self-bimbohood sets in. Not a literal rejection of intelligence or adherent to sluttiness, but a realization that my mental health and the forces that shaped my being up to a point had pushed me to reject all the things I've loved that are aligned with femininity and aren't viewed as necessity by capitalism. Embracing hyperfeminine lesbianism and asexuality culture and having pieces of it in my life have felt so, so healing.