And Some Things Still Suck

A good part of my life remains not about the sex, and with my decreased involvement in the BDSM community proper is leaves me flailing about a bit for where I stand on stuff. With Brick it’s something incredibly new, and hilariously, driven by my libido being several magnitudes over his (honeymoon phase he says. Ha. Nooooo this is who I am and that’s with a mild dose of SSRIs and their dampening effect.) But not all is sexy.

So, the family shit.

I am wrestling with my brother having landed in Montreal, sans means of support and in full psychiatric crisis mode. It’s not easy. Without my guidance he basically flops out unable to even get basic social services, with very little drive to look after himself. By setting hard boundaries I’ve avoided falling into enabling him to just keep up the non-functional life of hiding in a corner on the internet, but in cramped quarters. I’m worried about him being homeless but he is not keeping his agreements with other people regarding couch surfing, so the instant I let him stay with me he will never, ever leave.

The problem is that getting help is a full time job, and he is either too sick or too unwilling to put the effort in to do that, so being destitute is too difficult for him. I can help him with little nibbles, but I can’t really take on supporting a full time adult, particularly one who isn’t going to respond well to me just taking charge. I keep watching other people try to help him via teaching him how to adult and it is very frustrating to try to explain that the fundamental issue here is not that he doesn’t know how cooking works, it’s that he doesn’t have any motivation to do anything.

Brick, very sweet, keeps trying to explain dysthymia to me. He knows what he is talking about (although I do too) but he comforts via giving grounding blocks of information. But it’s a bit more than just blob-mode.

Last night I had to tell my brother that I can’t just keep giving him spontaneous grocery money, that the next level of help I had was a bus back to the Maritimes. With our awful family. But then he wouldn’t be homeless or starving. Because there really isn’t much in the way of stopgap measures and he keeps telling the social workers he is doing better than he actually is. And even when he is honest there really isn’t much in the way of support for basically anything short of vegetable or dementia case.

I’m trying to be an upright, functional adult myself and it is soul rippingly painful to admit I can’t help my brother. I keep going back to the idea that maybe if I give up everything remotely luxurious we can make a life of it on ramen, with him on a futon on my office floor and it is a really bad idea. He already tried to move in and perma live on my couch back when I was with Wildcard.

Christ, I cannot get away from people expecting me to take charge of them while giving me no cooperation.

I pulled out of the BDSM community because it was watching my partner chase everything but me, or policing people who had, on the balance, no interest in anything but minimal efforts to stop sexual assault and harassment. My nerdy community is doing the exact same shit and I am very much getting impatient with the local people being non-stop sources of ridiculous interpersonal sillies.

There’s a kind of twisted mirror here about femdom. I have a friend, lets call her Miss Ruffles, a sub. I know her through nerdy stuff, but the overlap between kink and nerd means that the Venn diagram s almost a perfect circle. She’s one of the few people I have met who intuitively knows how to hook into being supportive to someone else in a way that affirms someone’s leadership, without having to think about it.

But for most people, that knack doesn’t come naturally, just like most people hate and feel stressed out by managing. Most power exchange is bedroom only partially because it’s really, really hard to sustain any sort of non-sexual power.

I generally try to keep a distinction between my sexual/emotional kinks and my leadership, but I can see some parallels to a lot of the frustrations doms of any gender have in trying to sustain dynamics with any other leadership role I have had.

So yeah, things are not easy right now.