Violence in the Rose Garden

Yeah, you're right. I'll try to force myself through it next time I have the chance and see how it goes.

She didn't want me to say anything to you about it either, but I'd rather you know that she still loves you dearly and she's hurting in her own way. She's just trying to match your energy the best she can because she's afraid of scaring you away, or giving you the impression that she has ulterior motives, or that she's trying to guilt you about me or the girls or anything else. She loves you. She's trying her best. She doesn't know what's going on with you, what you're thinking, what you're feeling.

I told her I didn't know either, but I agreed that you're probably trying to get rid of the girls. She tries not to take over any of your responsibilities with them because she doesn't want to imply that she believes you can't or won't take care of them. She doesn't want to insult you or step on your toes. I told her that I appreciate that and you probably would too if you knew but that it would be better for her to just take them to the vet and get them groomed and all of that whenever she sees the need. That way if we're wrong then you'll let us know but at least the girls are healthy and she'll have taken one thing to worry about off of your plate, which you benefit from even if it wasn't her place to do so. So she probably made the decision to go ahead without waiting for a response that she felt like she wasn't going to get. I'm not saying any of this with bitterness or accusation, I promise. I'm just giving you the only observations and information I have. I won't bring any of this up to her.

How was your day? How are you feeling?

Also, psychic

I don't know how you regularly stay up so late on work nights

I was so exhausted all day today and now I'm playing Contexto and eating Whataburger with Kuma and dreading this work week. 

Hope your dinner is going really great and you had an overall good day today

🎶🫰

If you want to pick a day and time, I'll go ahead and buy the tickets, and I won't pressure you to use them. I won't consider it a promise or an obligation. Just an option that you have the right to or to not exercise. 

The Bullock IMAX is supposed to be the best, but I'll go anywhere you want to go, if you want to go.

Let me know today if possible. The only day and time that would be bad for me would be this Saturday the 28th because I have an expensive prior obligation that was scheduled like a month ago, but if you think that would be the only time likely for you then I'll bail without hesitation.

Again, I understand that you letting me know a day and time that works best for you doesn't mean it works for you, or will work for you, and it doesn't mean you've made up your mind, and it doesn't mean you have to go.

I just want to make sure the option is available. I really want to go and would hate for you to want to go too but then miss out because there were no tickets left.

🎶🫰

Hope you're having a really good day 🎶

💕 📚 🧠 

I could ask Daphyne if she would join and she honestly probably would but I was just thinking about me and you. And, as I mentioned, any of your people that you wanted to engage and thought might actually do it. I would be genuinely interested in them joining even though I unfortunately wouldn't have access to them for reflection and discussion.

I could even read our books to you through a call on your rare slow nights at home while you cook or clean or brush the dogs or do yoga or whatever if that would help you stick with it 🙂‍↕️

I don't want to get ahead of myself because I know you have commitment issues 😛 but I would absolutely be willing to alternate turns selecting titles if you really do want to achieve your goal for books read this year.

But juuuust in case you weren't being cheeky, I'm sorry for laughing. Of course, that isn't what the book is about.

I genuinely don't think you struggle to apologize. 

But I do struggle with apologies. Believing in you was once something that I did with absolution. If you said something was true, and especially if I asked you solemnly three times and you responded with three agreeing answers, I believed it to be as true as the law of gravity. As true as the undeniable light of the sun. A genuine physical fact of the universe, woven into reality, a tautology of existence.

It's about me, I think. I don't think it would be a book for helping you find it easier to apologize. I think if anything it might be a book that could make it more difficult to apologize. But I hope it's a book that could help both of us, from our different perspectives, understand each other. Or at least understand apologies better.

I think that it's possible that the biggest obstacle preventing me from giving up and letting you complete your discard of me is that I just don't understand you. And when I talk to you, I can hear my words mistranslating into the wrong ideas in your mind. And I think the same probably happens in reverse.

Maybe this book might help us say goodbye in a mutually understandable language. 

Maybe it won't affect anything about "us" at all. But maybe it will help us with all of the relationships and interactions in our lives with others. Or maybe not. 

I'm open to bribery if you need it.

Will you read it with me? 

And if you don't hate me after finishing it, I promise I'll read anything you want to read with you :)

And you were being cheeky, right? 

Blablabla🎶

And yes, I'm super down to read something fun! I think it'll help us stick to it and make it feel less like, uhh grueling maybe? Do you want to do Red Rising, or pick something else, or do you want me to find some options for you to pick from? If you want options then just tell me what genres you're feeling. If you can decide on something today I'll go to Half Price Books and look for copies or order them to your place from Amazon.

And do you think any of your people will want to follow along so you have more incentive to stick with it? I think I'm going to ask Daphyne if she wants to read so that I can have someone from the outside to reflect with too. But I'll keep it to just us if you're not onboarding anyone on your side.

I went out last night too and am also dealing with hangzisty so bad I couldn't even understand how to do my job this morning so I called out the be second half of the day. I know it probably sounds stupid to you but if you can put on an audiobook and just stand up and slowly walk around while listening to it, you'll eventually stay to stretch, or you'll see something that needs to be cleaned up and you'll just idly do that while focusing on the book, and eventually the anxiety will become completely under your thumb. It's just so hard to start because everything probably feels impossible right now. So is you want to try, just focus on the easiest part - listen to book or podcast (anything at long as it's unfamiliar but music isn't the best for this) and just stand up and wander around. It will help!

And yay yay yay! I'm so happy for your! I also called that because I know what I'm talking about and I knew you had it in you. 

And we're not minimizing the fact that you did it with the odds stacked pretty severely against you. Well earned, in proud of you.

Previously we got a little over $400 for every flip, and then we got a percentage of booked ARR for deals that fully closed won. This year we get a higher cap on commissions... But we get like $113 for every flip and 001.09% of the ARR value of the amount we increase a customers spend by, locked in at the time of the flip and paid regardless if it closes. It's... An extremely unhappy situation. I piped opportunities that would have paid out $1200 last month plus a bonus from a full close - but instead this month they paid out about $475 total. I've spent half my time fighting with AEs for stealing my work and not tagging me on shit and cutting me out of conversations that I started and stealing opportunities from me that I spent forever nurturing before finding out they snuck in without me and swiped it for themselves because they want to look like they're self sourcing the biggest pipeline. It's been a shit show and I've been dead inside with so little energy to perform. I'm getting increasingly nervous.

Proud of you.

You're still friends with the man you told me you didn't cheat on me with even though you were fucking him at a time when I didn't yet even know that you were discarding me. A time when I was still excited that we were looking at a future with marriage and kids and only a year or less to have to wait through to get there. A time when I was so fucking excited about the amazing year we were going to have here in this town. A time when you asked me what I wanted you to wear for my birthday but I never got to see it even after spending the day moving you and building your things and being happy to do it because I love you, and it genuinely made me happy to just be helping you build a home that I didn't yet know you had already decided I wouldn't be welcome to visit. A birthday that I didn't ask or want or need anything from you for because I was just happy to be spending it with you, a birthday night you ended by hiding in the bathroom for more than two hours so you could come out and lie down facing away from me and offer me your body while you went to sleep as if it were a payment for working for you, as if I expected it from you, as if I wasn't just happy to be curled up next to you after spending my birthday with my favorite person in the world who was fucking the only man I was ever insecure about and whom you had promised you would never even speak to again 

I don't think I'm going to buy your favor with a $13 book, and I find the sentiment insulting.

And if I wait for you to buy it for yourself, we may never actually get started.

Are you sure I can't buy it for you?

most annoying woman on the planet headass

Buy the books then! 

And stop taking every chance you get to pause and make sure that I'm aware that I'm not part of your life and nothing is ever going to make you want me to be ever again! I AM VEEERRRYYYYY WEEEEELLLLLLLLL AWAAAARRRRRREEEEEEEEEERRSSRFGFHGDDFDRWYIFGU

Are you gonna ask anyone else to book club with you? I wanna know how many people we might have even though I'll never get to talk to them. If feels very Black Ajah. Black Ajah Hearts are made of three sisters who know each other and each sister would also know one other outside their Heart. And each sister in a Heart would be known by a different member of the Council.

Spooky book club is honestly kind of exciting but I'll read with just you too. Not that a book club made up of just me and you isn't spooky enough

But if I said anything wrong, call it out.

You know that the silent treatment is an abusive form of manipulation. And you know that you're weaponizing silence with the intention of making me behave in a way you want me to behave without you having to make the healthy normal human effort of just talking to me about what you don't appreciate.

Is there anyone else on this planet that you treat with this level of cruelty? Anyone else who has to walk on eggshells to earn your decency as a human being? 

We were having a really good conversation. I'm sorry that I offered to buy books for you and your friends. And I'm sorry that I was too happy and too eager to get to read books with you.

But I don't deserve to be punished, which is what my entire point was in the first place. Because every time you tell me that you think I need to be reminded that there's nothing I can do to improve my standing with you, that's what it amounts to. A punishment. 

I didn't say all those things to make you feel bad about them. I said them to put huge glaring neon arrows around all the context that you keep ignoring to do this thing that I keep asking you not to do.

Cam you please just be nice to me? And if you need to tell me off before you can get there, then can you just do that? You can call me if you want to. You can tell me not to speak or reply if you want to.

But do I really, really deserve this? I even made the effort of reaching out with a softer, lighter, easier for you to ignore tone after standing up for myself. I intentionally diminished my own pain in order to make it more comfortable for you. 

What's really going on here?

I think I understand that if I want to have any connection to your life, like with these conversations or emails or a once-or-twice a year coffee, that I'll need to accept that my emotions are not a subject that I can bring to the table and still expect you to sit with me.

I really am trying. I really am sorry. You are still the gravitational center of my universe and I'm just trying to figure out how to stabilize my orbit around a vanished sun.

I understand that I made, and am making the choice to continue to try to be allowed to exist in some tiny corner of your life. And I understand that I don't get - hold on you literally just sent me a message -

Stop I hate you I'm literally going to cry 

You're so annoying!

I'm going to sleep too. Thank you for messaging me, let's talk tomorrow please yes

I'm really trying, I'm sorry, I really am. I'll be better at it with guidance. 

I hope you have sweet dreams.

Good night 😴 

I've been talking to my mother more, seeing her more. She's gotten a lot better at being supportive, at listening and sympathizing without trying to advise. 

Seeing the girls is always heartbreaking. Leaving Kuma is always heartbreaking. 

Can you be more communicative with my mother about the girls please? She's stressed about them (she doesn't want me to tell you) and she's concerned about their health issues and the lack of prioriry you seem to give in regards to communicating with her to get them taken care of.

If you need money for our babies (don't tell her I've helped) then please just let me know. If you ask for it, I wouldn't be giving it to you to try to get in your good graces, I would be giving it to you for the sake of our little girls and for my mother's stress, and also partially to let you show her that you do care.

While it's a normal human thing to do to appreciate people who are looking out for you, I don't expect that to apply to us. If you don't want or need the help, just say you've got it covered please and maybe thank me for the offer if you feel grateful.

I'm fighting through a panic attack at work. Again.

How's your day going, how does the week look for you? Any new updates or insights from the weekend?

I just wrote a really great email and accidentally erased it and couldn't recover it. I'm going to have a menty b

I know Banfield doesn't make it easy. Thank you for doing that, I'm glad it's taken care of. 

Okay and poopy don't seem to be interchangeable. 

Why don't you just update them? Would it just be the three of you or is it a big event for a double date?

I'm doing really really bad. I'm hurting a lot but I don't want to be too about it and risk you deciding to take another step back. 

I'm talking to my psychiatrist right now, she just joined. I'll be back

I think we're pretty good about hiring externally when there's an external posting so if you see something let me know, because they get filled fast but I'd be happy to write a recommendation and send your resume

I hope I can get another voucher. If this doesn't help we're looking at electroconvulsive therapy. 

How did your day turn out? 

And well, I'm making crock pot curry chicken now while I clean and pack, but I had to get a new weird curry paste... If you want to share your curry paste I'll split the chickens with you :)

Tell me what made your day so okay?

Remember that time you pooped your pants

That I was there for anyway 🧐

How are you feeling? What are you up to?

Otherwise, I'll just hope to hear from you soon. Let me know if I can do anything for you. Except for get out of your life and shut up 🎶🫰 

I'm still up, cooking taking longer than expected. Sure you don't want to chat for a minute while we wrap up our day?