Such is Life, Such is Life...

a story originally written in autumn of 2019


I told her that I was weaker today, tired today.

I told her that I was not up to the same standard of vigilance.

I won't say I was expecting it when she jumped me; I wasn't, really. It just didn't come as so much of a surprise that I failed to react in time.

And so there I was holding her knife hand in a vice grip, her back against the wall.

"Really? Aren't you tired of these games yet?"

She squirmed and fought, but she fought half-heartedly. The chains I had built around her did not permit free movement and hurt to struggle too hard against. She was forced either to be caught in an obvious lie, or to concede the truth although it weakened her strength.

She confessed that I had not provoked her attack. It was her responsibility, it was her fault. She was the instigator. But she was angry at me. Perhaps nearly as angry as she was at herself.

Had I raped her? A demon bound to service does not serve willingly, so had I raped her? Maybe. As much as it may also be claimed that she seduced me... or that what bound us were more like wedding vows. Or that to take any single option thoroughly out of another man's capability is to imprison him.

Our world is not one in which such all or nothing ideals can yield useful judgements. To a high enough eye, all love has conditions no matter how well-intentioned, all conditions are coercion... And so if sex under coercion is rape, surely I had raped her, as all us hairless apes guilty of loving one another have been traumatized rape victims who go on to perpetrate, since the moment our species's behaviour first met whatever conditions the observer chooses to sufficiently qualify what we do as love.

Perhaps, to some eyes, we are not even there yet.

I was angry. I was frustrated. But more simply, I was tired. I had broken down and cried twice the previous day. I had thrown up sour juices from my belly and spat them out. I was tired of holding her so tightly, watching her so closely that she couldn't attack me.

But I was not so tired that she would beat me. Even tired, I was too fast for her. I could see in ways that the wounded creature was blind, too paralysed by fear to reach far enough out to touch that thing which cannot be seen with light nor sound nor nerves, but that required something else to sense. Something subtler, something that required some of the absence of fear.

Her attack was clumsy to me. I was tired, and did not enjoy the task of restraining her. But what must be done must be done. I grumbled. I will admit I kicked her ego while she was down. I was in a bad mood. She threw at me an argument, a package of words, which unfolded into an entrapping net of meaninglessness.

Still feeble before me. I had seen this kind of net before. I did not even sidestep. I walked through it, and I held her chin. I spoke into her face, up very close, and I explained. Her net was like a mist to me. I had had my turn being entangled in such nets before. I had learned long ago how to wriggle out of it, how to avoid being caught in the first place.

She spoke with quiet words that I had freed myself perhaps, but had not saved her. Behind the front of her words, she was crying and shrieking to be freed from her own net, but she could not have seen that she was, with her sense blinded by fear. The key was in her possession, but she had forgotten how to find it and did not know how to use it. I showed it to her, guided her hand to the right pocket, and opened it with the key inside. She looked at the thing blankly.

I told her she could use it, that she could figure it out.

"No. I refuse."

"I see what you are doing. You are trying to scare me away so I'll let you die. I also refuse."

She cried then, and she cursed me, helpless before my power over her, pitiable in her helplessness. Such is the nature of things bound. One cannot help but resent one's captor. I know I cannot in fairness expect her but to lay on my shoulders every scrap of suffering she lives while I bind her to life and force her to endure.

And so, had I raped her? Had it perhaps been time, and long since time to not bind but trust her? But sex was one thing, and one thing I could do without.

If she died, if I undid the chains and lifted the geas that guaranteed her from taking that knife to herself and then she did, it would stay with me forever until the memory was destroyed along with the rest of me.

Was I in my guardianship truly worthy of any other thanks but her contempt for keeping her here, in a beating heart and the raggedness of her sobbing breaths?

I do not have the comfort of conviction that I am doing the right thing. I am not actually certain. But for now, I continue to hold her here. It is the best I dare to do. In my own fear, my senses are clouded, although less so than hers. I cannot see a way to heal her without holding her to life, no matter how unwilling. If I could put her into a sleep until I have the answers, perhaps I would...

But in truth, I am glad to be spared the decision to choose between my own deepest loneliness, and forcing her to endure waiting for a cure that neither of us know is coming, that neither of us really know is possible.

Such is life, I suppose.

Such is life.

Needing To Be Useful

This tale of my past is derived mostly from a long conversation I had with my friends yesterday. I recreate it here, slightly edited for better reading and accuracy. May it help anyone who wishes to know me, to understand some of my perspective. May it help anyone who is currently suffering similarly, to know that they are not alone.


I was an outsider, in my mind, for most of my life through elementary and high school. I did not expect anyone to want to be around me, even when I was at home. I grew to escape my fear of social rejection by getting caught on blades in my mind. I was considering dying for a long swath of it, because I thought it would remove me as a burden of unwelcome obligation on my parents, and on society at large. So I tried to imagine nonexistence... which is impossible. And I tried to imagine hell... which is vague enough that it can be endlessly iterated on as progressively worse forms of torture.

I do not recommend this strategy to anyone.

My parents did not deny me by rigidly insisting that I should be Christian, or Muslim, or a doctor, or any such thing; they were simply busy with their own affairs and generally seemed to want little more of me than to not to get in the way, and to not spend more hours than they felt was permissable in front of a television or computer screen. I felt that they neither noticed nor cared that I was suffering.

Although, when I came back from my year of travel to Australia at the age of nineteen, my father confessed to me that he had been concerned sometimes that he would lose me to my shadows.
I was kind of exasperated that he hadn't said that at the time, and I believe I told him so.

For the most part, I consider my parents to be a feature of my past. To a large degree, I consider them to have failed me, and myself not to owe them much of anything. Family is those who understand and support me, wherever I find them.

However, I am still open to visiting my father again to say hi and try to catch up before I leave the country. I like him, in some ways. He is very expressive, and good at explaining and describing things. ...Sometimes people have said I talk like him.

Anyway, I couldn't bring myself to die. Both the consequences and the means were too terrifying to accept. I saw the potential, but it made me horribly squeamish. I squirmed whenever I looked at a sharp knife, or even when someone close to me was holding something as innocuous (but potentially lethal) as a sewing needle. Sometimes, I still do.

And also, I have to admit, I was not actually convinced that it would be doing the world a favour if I died, since I recognized that a lot of heroes in stories came from outsider status, and hoped that I could be like them, although not with much confidence attached to the hope. Perhaps it seemed to me at the time that this could have been desperate denial of an unpleasant truth. I think while I was so young, it did not occur to me to believe in cynical denial of a hopeful truth. At least not in myself.

I became deeply obsessed with proving my own worth, establishing my own right-to-exist. A cognitive habit which is so ingrained, its shape is still reflected in many of the ways I think that were built and updated around it, even if the existential urgency that originally drove that obsession is weakening now as I heal my mental habits.

I tried to do what heroes in stories would do; hold to good, in whatever form I could see it, and to helping other people. I felt hopeful... desperately, pathetically hopeful... whenever I could do so much for my classmates as throw someone's ball back to them to save them the effort of walking to get it, even though I knew my status as a scapegoat would mean they would never invite me to play.

And I spent a lot of time walking on my own. I would walk the big track-and-field running track during recess, thinking to myself. Knowledge and wisdom derived from contemplation were useful, in theory, so if I could develop more of that... it must add to my value, my right-to-exist.

And I had a period of life when I communed with spirits. Although who can say, now, whether there was any reality in that outside my own perspective? I think even my former self at that time was in the habit of wondering whether there was any reality in it outside of her own perspective, and might have readily admitted this if anyone had ever asked her what she thought about it. Almost certainly, though, she would have been overwhelmed by that same desperate hope, because someone was actually expressing an interest in her perspective... paired with fatalistic near-certainty that the one who was asking would use anything she said as something to yell and catcall back at her later.

There was one time, she was walking the track as usual, having turned her heel and walked out on a social situation that was growing unworkable, but was followed by a whole tribe of children. My memory has likely inflated the numbers, but it seemed to me like most of my grade was following me at a short distance, booing and screaming.
And I kept walking. What else was there to do?
Someone had run up to me... it must have been winter, because they got their boot caught in the snow. When I didn't stop to help, but kept walking, I was declaimed as selfish and having "lured" them out here into the cold to die, or something like that. That may have been what set all the booing and screaming off, now that I think about it... but it is all very fuzzy.

And I came to hope, throughout this time, and through hope I came to believe, that in taking this kind of abuse on myself, someone else, somewhere, was spared it. The attention of the bullies was distracted from someone else who might otherwise have been a target, and may have had less resilience to bear it.

That, at least, would be something useful. So I thought I could live with it.

My social life drastically improved at sixteen years of age. My mother plotted with a family we knew to hold me a really nice sixteenth birthday party, away from all the kids at school I felt obligated to treat as friends whenever they would let me, even though they were not.

My mother, in a surprising display of respect and consideration, drove me far from our little village to a larger town, and drove me around the town to look for a present I would actually want, because she didn't want to waste money on something I didn't, an attitude with which I agreed wholeheartedly, and still do.
Gemstones of my birth-month? No, I wasn't really interested in gems. They were so girly and ostentatious. A bicycle? A good idea, but I already had one, my father's girlfriend had got it for me.

I didn't find anything else I particularly cared for at any of the other shops we went to either, and my mother was growing frustrated with the failure to find an appropriate gift, so I recommended we go to the used book store. There might be a book there by Terry Pratchett or Spider Robinson that I hadn't read yet, and although it would be a small thing, I knew I liked those.

In the used bookstore, I found two large, hardcover books that quickly drew my fascinated attention. They were two of the three core rulebooks for Dungeons & Dragons, edition 3.5. And I knew I had found The Thing. They were expensive enough that my mother was very reluctant to buy them for me, especially given that there was one missing, and I would need to have all three. But maybe she just didn't understand why a set of three hardcover books should be worth so much.

Here, I feel I need to back up and explain the context of my desire. I had been trying to invent Dungeons & Dragons from scratch since I was six or something. I had made a habit, from a very early age, of drawing mazes, and putting dots in them with different colours of markers, to represent monsters and treasures, and trying to get my half-brother to play the adventure with me.

I knew to call the person who built the maze and filled it with monsters the "dungeon master", so I guess I must have picked a lot of that idea up from things I'd heard some older kids saying. Almost certainly Levi and Nathan, the two boys closest to our age (although still older) of a farming family we knew, and which my father would often visit, bringing my half-brother and me along. We would spend time with Levi and Nathan whenever our family was visiting theirs, often running off to play in the woods near their farm. We especially liked the game of trying to dam up tiny streams, and keep building and repairing the dam as the water that was pooled behind it grew wider and higher.

But anyway. Although I suspect I must have seen or heard the older boys playing or talking about it, I don't think I had ever actually realized that Dungeons & Dragons... really existed? I thought they were just talking about video games, maybe, or trying to recreate video games without a computer. I did not realize at the time that the video games had actually been recreations of D&D.

So finding these rulebooks, to me in my teenagerdom, was a little like discovering the tomb of King Tut. I managed to convince my mother that yes, these books were something I really wanted, and it would make me very happy to have them, as long as she could get me the third one too. She bought them, and I started reading voraciously as soon as I got back in the car. She actually had to prompt me to look up after we had pulled in and parked in the driveway of the other family's house, so that I would notice that they had put up a big paper banner across the front of the house, that said HAPPY SWEET SIXTEEN EMILY. It was, I have to admit, a really nice gesture.

My mother and the mother of this family were friends, and I got along pretty well with her two children. There was a boy named Victor who tended to be very loud, so much so that between us we named a measure of volume someone was shouting at, "the Victor scale". There was also a girl, whose name was not connected to such a mnemonic, and so I do not remember it. Possibly it was Tammy. I remember her being small, slender and creative in ways that reminded me of a pixie.

We spent a weekend there. We had KFC on my birthday (a rare luxury), and I spent most of that weekend reading and plotting, and convinced Victor and Tammy to play the game with me, even though we didn't have the Player's Handbook, which is the most important one. But we would need dice. They brought me to a hobby store in town that sold the right kind. My mother didn't want to spend any more money on me, but I couldn't play the game without any dice, so I presented the greatest compromise I felt I could. I would get just one die, and I would choose it out of the factory seconds box, which was cheapest.

I looked through the box for a 20-sided die that I liked. I think it was a black one with red numbers. We would have to make do, but we could, because you could simulate rolling any other die with fewer sides by rolling a d20, you just had to divide the numbers up evenly, and roll again if you got one of the leftovers. I drew a conversion table for this purpose. In retrospect, my sixteen year old self, in her excitement about this, registers to me as incredibly cute.

Later that summer, after a copy of the Player's Handbook had been provided to me and I had thoroughly studied all three core rulebooks, I started to prepare a real game, for more than just a weekend out of town. I pulled out a book and craft set I'd been given previously about proper forms of writing with quill-pens and practiced the art just so that I could write prop documents, and place-names on my maps, with the proper medieval flair.

I painted an overworld map on a big piece of newsprint that I had deliberately stained with coffee to look old, and tore all the edges so they'd be ragged. And I planned an adventure and where it would begin, with an opening scene like a cinematic from a video game, and a great big complicated wonderful dungeon to be the first adventure. I invited the other kids my age at the youth group I usually spent time at to come and make characters so they could play with me, and nagged at the ones who expressed an interest until I succeeded in dragging them away from playing Halo on the x-box to come and do it.

And I ran my game.
It became an established feature of the Thursday youth group, every week.
Sometimes, the players would even invite me over to their houses so I could run the game on the weekends.
And my heart was full of joy and validation, because for what seemed like the first time in my life, there was a reason people wanted to have me around.
Even if it wasn't because of who I was... just that I brought the game.
My morale and creativity improved tremendously. I would draw battle scenes and characters and maps in the margins of worksheets at school. I embraced that role as hard as I could over the next couple of years.

I told this story to a couple of my friends over voice chat on Discord not all that long ago, and I think I could hear one of them choke up a little when I got to the end, because in the end, it comes around again to how all this happiness was due to the relief of a loneliness and sense of worthlessness so unendurably desperate that even though I still didn't think my players necessarily liked me, it changed my whole life.

And it is sad. I get it. I agree, and in fact I'm really glad I have friends who can understand how sad it was. But when I look back, I can't help but remember the happiness too, and smile a bit.

The heart celebrates, when it finds a situation which is even marginally less bad.

Rationality: Mitigate the Loss; Fight for the Living

This post is an addendum to Rationality: A Different Prisoner's Dilemma. It is another scenario with which to demonstrate the point.

Imagine that you are a person in a horrible and traumatic situation. The love of your life, the parent of your children, has been burned to death, deliberately. Capital punishment, imposed by a culture that believes some sins are so horrible that they demand this gruesome torture to balance the scales. The whole future you dreamed of having together has gone up in flames, and you are sick with grief and loss and pain.

Some people would be tempted to fling themselves into the flames as well. You probably do think of it, at least once, as you stand there, watching the pyre blaze. Some people will even think that this is the morally right thing to do, and will judge you for not committing suicide. They will think that you didn't really love the one you have lost, if you are able to stay standing and move on without them.

If it is your aim to reduce suffering and death in the world, however, then this impulse and any social pressure behind it is your enemy. If you leap onto the pyre to be burned as well, or hang yourself from a beam at home, or stop taking meals and waste away into nothingness, regardless of the method of your self-destruction, what will it achieve?

Your friends will be hurt. Your community will be hurt. Anyone who depended on your skills and experience and work ethic will be hurt. You will be destroyed, and your children will now have lost both of their parents. It will not bring your lover back.

Furthermore, you will have validated the idea that your suicide was moral. You will have set an example of surrendering to grief instead of coping with it. Others may be tempted, they might believe it was right, to follow you just as you followed your beloved spouse, directly into the grave. Is that something you could possibly want for your children?

You wail. You gnash your teeth and flail your arms and cry late into the night and hold your vigil. Death and suffering have struck you especially close to your heart, and you feel the loss, and you need to express it, but you must not let it consume you as well. If you let that happen, death wins. It claims two casualties for the price of one, and there is one less person working to prevent future suffering.

If you understand this, and you gird up your heart and throw yourself into your duties and refuse to distance yourself from your children... and cry and grieve, yes, in quiet moments, alone under the moon... the people around you may be shocked. They may persecute you, calling you cold or unnatural. They will say that you do not understand what it is to love.

They will be wrong.

It may seem to you, for a time, that life is not worth living to you anymore. But you will keep going because your spouse is not the only person you love, and is not the only person who needs you. Even if you believe it is a fact as normal and obvious as the sun rising tomorrow that you will be together again in heaven after you die... You should not then believe that the right thing to do is to hasten that reunion. There are still things left to do here first, and the right thing is to get them done.

The story I have just told is a story about the Sunk Cost Fallacy, applied to human life.

If you were to turn a blind eye to the needs of the world as it continues to turn, if you forget your duties in the pain of being robbed of something that was precious to you. If you couldn't let go of someone or something you loved, even though there was no way to get it back. That's the sunk cost fallacy leading you to neglect the people who still need you, and ignore the importance of things you still have the chance to save.

If, reading this, you can understand how much it hurts to let the dream that you could have been together with your loved ones forever fall away from you as something that can never happen; if you can understand how it could be tempting to follow that dream and step into the fire... but you can also understand why you have a duty to let go, for now, and focus on what can still be done... then take a moment to notice how it feels. The feeling of facing a lose/lose scenario, and having to make the best of a genuinely terrible situation.

Watch out for the moments in your own life when your heart sinks and you see something falling apart and you really, really, really don't want it to. Remember your duties to the people that still rely on you. Remember that even if you can't feel happy about it, there are other things you need to get done, and try not to let your despair cloud your vision while looking to see how much you can salvage out of the situation. That's the key to overcoming the sunk cost fallacy.

Overwhelming Changes; Looming Responsibility

I have stopped keeping my diary.

I'm less certain that I'm still taking my pills regularly.

The house is largely stagnant right now, and I'm starting to get edgy about the fact that my new room-mate hasn't started to provide much food yet.

I now have an online submissive, apparently. That is, I have met and established a strong emotional bond to someone who works that way, and does so so gently that I'm naturally drawn into dominant behaviours. I found him in a D&D group I was invited to at a livestream. He's younger, furry, and very sweet and cute.

For the past few days I've been bonding with him intensely, and have been much more vulnerable to intense fits of self-hate at the drop of a single hint. Wanting him to stay and talk to me even when we're both incredibly tired, a sign of selfishness and clinginess; any instance of getting upset or angry at him; flashes of violent thought (this isn't new, just coming up a bit more) and jealousy whenever something else or a need to be alone robs me of his attention.

It would hurt to tell him to go unless perfectly clear he wants to. It would hurt to ask him to stay unless he pretty much intends to anyway. Sometimes even then.

I don't feel like I can even write now, properly. Words aren't... right.

There are half a dozen people I could talk to about this and I don't think I can approach a single one of them. I'm stuck inside my self which is a darkness, shaking with panic and fear, feeling like a stain on the fabric of time, a waste, a problem.

It seems like I end up finding an awesome cool thing that I want to try to do, and then forget until I'm right in the middle of it that I can't do anything right, and then I panic.

Job search? When?

I've got my house, but I'm still just waiting. Waiting for a day that I'm not tired, waiting for Damon to arrange for his parents to bring me my belongings, waiting until I have furniture to use, waiting for my appointment with Goodwill, waiting for evening, waiting for morning.

Something vaguely useful, I made an appointment to go get an emergency dental examination tomorrow morning, to deal with the toothache that's recently gotten so bad I can't ignore it anymore.

I feel so incompetent right now...

I should write to my supports about it. Get a top-up. Almost be like a real person for a week or so, maybe. Maybe...

Nobody

(originally written a long time ago)

I woke up this morning and there was no power in half the house.
I woke up this morning and there was no power in half my body.
I woke up this lifetime and there was no life in half my heart.

And I screamed, and I cried, and I cried out...
for mercy.
And they laughed, and they pointed, and ran...
and they ran from me.
And I lay there bleeding from wounds no-one else could see.
And looked up to see Nobody,
because Nobody came to rescue me.
Noboby came to comfort me.

And Nobody helped me get back on my feet again.
And Nobody convinced me to start trying to eat again.

So don't come to try and take my heart.
I share my heart with Nobody.
Don't come and ask to be part of my world.
I gave my world to Nobody.

And if you want to have some of these things,
don't come around to talk to me.
You can go ask Nobody.

And you know what?
Nobody will answer you.

So don't you dare ask me who I am,
and don't ask what's become of me.
'Cause you didn't come when I was dying.
And now all I am...
is Nobody.

Depression

(originally posted on FetLife on April 17, 2010)

The goodness of lust just feels bawdy and cheap.
Exhaustion prohibits the goodness of sleep.

The goodness of beauty, a marketing scheme.
The goodness of kindness, a fool's naive dream.

The goodness of working, a chase after cash.
The goodness of fieriness burnt down to ash.

The goodness of sky lost somewhere in the smoke.
The goodness of daydreams sold out to a toke.

The goodness of flavor washed dreary and dry...
The goodness of life, just to wait 'til I die.

The Whips and Scorns of Time

I swear, I was asleep two hours ago, snuggled down and starting to dream. I didn't even have a very hard time of it. And then a pizza guy came to the door. Well... I guess this is how life is when you live on someone's couch. Or more specifically, on the couch of people who are unmistakably night people. Not that I wish to complain; I am grateful that I have a place I can lay my head that isn't crowded with curfews and enforced structure that doesn't suit my natural rhythms. I am naturally a night person too. In this house, it looks like any attempt I make to keep more normal hours, though, for the sake of productivity, will be stymied with ease, completely unintentionally.

Besides that, the dog pup of one of the six people stuffed in this modest three bedroom townhouse (myself included) isn't house trained and tends to piss on the stairs and everywhere else. The kitchen, even when I clean all the dishes in it, will be cluttered to near-uselessness again less than two days later. The cat litters in the basement are not maintained, so the only one any of the cats use is the one that my partner cleaned about a week ago, right at the other end of the couch that serves as my bed. And several of these five cats fight and race about and knock things over. One of them stole my partner's wallet a few days ago and hid it away in a box of bags and non-perishables in the kitchen. Besides my partner, there are two people here I get along with well, one I hardly know who is clearly very different from me, but with whom I share a quiet politeness in passing, and one that I actively dislike, and the feeling is mutual. He is loud, aggressive, and acts with an exceptional air of entitlement.

Would I rather be back at the Evil Old Man's place? ... No. Conditions here are undeniably worse, and even the social atmosphere isn't much better, if at all, but it is a step forward, from stable misery to comparatively unstable misery that I may be able to resolve into non-misery. If I allowed myself to be overcome by the negative transitory period between one stable situation and another, I would remain forever paralyzed. It's the old saying, you can't take third base while keeping your foot on second. Or something to that effect.

But in these conditions, I am backsliding. I don't feel terribly upset about this right at this moment. At this moment, I am giving myself more patience and credit than that. Besides, I'm starting to turn around to effort and courage again, as can be demonstrated by my coming back and writing again. Earlier, when I was caught completely in the mire, I was very upset about it. I don't mind admitting that my general default state of mind is bad enough that any particularly bad situation or attack of panic and doubt brings me back to thoughts of suicide. It's less threatening than that might otherwise be, because I can think of no means to suicide that I am both able to access and think I would have the strength of will to go through with. I am too frightened of and unfamiliar with the associated pains. Blades terrify me, and I naturally shy away from them. I suspect poisoning would be unreliable and I would almost certainly suffer hideous nausea and probably terrible migraine as a result of the attempt even if it didn't work, and particularly potent poisons would be difficult to obtain legally, for incredibly obvious reasons. Exposure to elements would be slow and even more unreliable, drowning is classically terrifying, getting licencing and funds for a firearm would be prohibitively expensive, out of character for me, and... well, I just don't like guns. Something about them fills me with distaste. So essentially, even leaving aside the dread of something after death, that undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns, I cannot help but come to the conclusion that dying would be phenomenally unpleasant - possibly even more so than living, even in the worst of times. Also, my mood always stabilizes eventually, and it doesn't usually take more than, say, a day or two.

I have been, as always, rediscovering that there are, in fact, things that fairly reliably cheer me up. Going for walks, especially with my partner's company, is one of these things. Surprisingly enough, doing downtown and noticing the people seems to tend to cheer me up a bit, too. People often depress me with their ignorance, shortsightedness and cruelty, and yet... maybe it's that certain je ne sais quoi I always liked about this city, but I find the human life here more reassuring than condemning about humanity as a whole. And it's certainly not for a lack of ignorant or cruel people, but maybe... maybe the worse people here tend to be a little less worse than in other places I've seen. Or maybe it's just the healthy bustle and liveliness of the place that seems to bring it all into a more forgivable context. Or maybe it's something else. I really noticed it when a passing cyclist on a biking trail thanks me for moving over to let her pass. The question is whether such decency really is something I didn't see in Saint Thomas, or whether I'm just... noticing it more. I suspect the former, if only because I feel quite certain I would be able to remember an example of it if it was present back there.

Before I go, let me share with you my current worst problem. As is not at all unusual, the source of my trouble is Ontario Works. I learned, when I was invited by the support structures in the city to go through an intake procedure here, with the company of some professional... well, caring company... that I would not be eligible for shelter and basic needs funding while I was staying at shelters in the city not even Crash Beds. Apparently OW expects that a bed, albeit not necessarily the same bed, but the promise of a bed, each night, breakfast in the morning and snacks in the evening, are all anyone really needs to survive and get by. Likewise, I am not eligible if I am couch surfing, because in that case I have shelter for free, so they don't have to help me pay for it. If I remain homeless and float around shelters and from that position manage to get a rent agreement (goodness alone knows how), Then I could apply to be kept alive but harassed constantly about whether or not I've found work yet like the child of a disgusted stepmother who just doesn't want to have to deal with me. Or, I could wait and float around shelters and put myself on a fast track list for geared to income housing. I have a friend who went that route. His words on the subject? They quote the official waiting list, for the actively homeless, to be half a year. Realistically, it may be half a year if you have no standards, if you are willing to accept absolutely any form or state of housing. In his case, it took over a year for them to get back to him. According to OW, they can put me on a faster track if I am utterly homeless, and the waiting list for that is only three months - only! Imagine that... But I will be ineligible if I continue to couch surf. Even for one day.

When I tried to apply on my own, and at the intake told them I was currently couch surfing in the house of friends, into which my boyfriend had just moved, I was pounced. I swear the look in the intake worker's eyes turned from sympathy to disgust in an instant when she asked me whether this was the same boyfriend I left in Saint Thomas. Of course it was. As she understood it, I had been leaving an abusive relationship. Well, I had been, of course, it just wasn't a relationship with my partner. We were both being abused by his father, and if she had been misinformed about that, it was not my doing, I never claimed differently. But it seems that if you say you are in an abusive situation, it will be immediately clear to everyone that you are claiming spousal abuse. Certainly women are never abused by anyone else. At least not, it would seem, in the eyes of the government.

Anyway, my intake was terminated. I was told rather forcefully to sign a form of withdrawal of application. According to OW, regardless of my intent to stay under the same roof or not, my partner and I are common-law, since we were on the same account before and I still call him my boyfriend. Nevermind that Ontario law states that common-law only becomes default after three years of cohabitation and I haven't even known him for two. He brought that up when he went to his own intake, later, and the only response he got from his case worker was a simple and cruel word of blackmail. "You know, I can just close your file." I had considered asking what happened if I didn't sign the withdrawal form, at my meeting, but decided against it. I was already upset enough, and while I would have really loved to act rashly and refuse, just walk away, I was sure it would bring more trouble down on my head, either then and there or later if I had to come back, and I really couldn't have dealt with that.

Ontario Works says that if we are sleeping under the same roof, we have to be on the same account. No wiggle room, no exceptions. Boyfriend asked whether it was necessary for me to be on OW at all, whether I could just choose to go unsupported, and survive on scraps as it were. Ontario Works does not regard it as an option. No. We need to be on the same file, and both be on it, if we are together, because we are common-law, because they say so, and we were, once, happy to be classed that way.

So my legal options are these:

Run away, leave my boyfriend, whom I still care deeply about, but do not wish to live with, behind entirely and find some other form of charity, someone else to support me, and try to survive the leaving in my weak and depressed state.

Surrender myself to the mark of extreme poverty and live on the streets, sleeping in charity beds and eating charity food, and wander the streets while the shelters are closed until my feet are worn and bloody and my clothes fall apart, or until the housing system gets around to me.

Become a useless limpet clinging to my boyfriend in a place I do not wish to be, resigned to the ugliness of this place and its downsides, angry and miserable, considered and classed an extension of my boyfriend, the unofficial spouse. And of course, expected to job search effectively from this position.

Find work and/or housing on my own. Yes. Of course. That will work. I'm definitely strong and stable enough. Sigh.

Be the beneficiary of some kind of miracle.

Oh. I should probably also mention, because they are important developments, that I am out of thyroid supplements, at least of my standard dose. I still have some of the ones I was given before, which are 50% larger, and so I've started taking those again, and just trying to make sure I don't take them too close together, hoping it will even out somehow. Also, my boyfriend... is getting together again with someone he knew before me. They were always happy together, until they broke up the first time. They are giddy when they think of each other. Everyone accepts that they will be lovers again, and even they have had to admit it, struggle though they might. They even share dreams with each other. I find myself wondering whether I would finally be free of useless spouse status if he reported to Ontario Works that she was his girlfriend now. Probably not, unless she moved in, even though I doubt they would go so far as to assume something as unconventional as polyamory.

How do I feel about their relationship? Hell, how do you think I feel? Well, I probably feel significantly less bad than that. But it is still hard to accept. There are connections between them that I never managed to forge with Boyfriend, and I am jealous over that. I look forward to meeting her, though. From what my boyfriend has told me, I think we will get along well, like friendly sisters. I just hope that we can shift gracefully from me being the most important lover in his life, to her. I already know it will happen, it's just a matter of how naturally, and with how much drama. I feel slighted, but not by either of them. Only by the cruel hand of fate.