When communicating the problem is the crux of the problem, how do I communicate the problem? It’s amazing that we have more ways as human beings for deflecting, denying, and ignoring communication than we have of communicating. That the biggest barrier to successful communication is on the receiving end, at least from my perspective. Am I choosing the wrong people to try to talk to? I have done as much as I can on my end to try to communicate better, but if it isn’t being received I’m also at a point where I can’t waste time troubleshooting the communication. Like, if there’s a fire and I call the fire department and it suddenly becomes about my attitude and fear and tone and… no. That is, as Bob Wiley would say, a bad connection. And if I’m used to blaming myself and trying harder when there’s a bad connection, and all connections being bad, and not being able to tell until long afterward that I should have hung up and bailed out, I’m wasting my time even more than the other person. And if I have to schedule a time when it’s convenient for someone else to have time to deal with something that’s already a crisis for me… I don’t know that on the appointed hour I’ll be coherent enough to express it. This is why writing things down in emails and on paper is easier, because I can seize on moments of coherency and need to communicate — but again, I have to find someone with the comprehension and capacity to receive what I write, what I communicate, no matter how I do it, in a timely fashion. I would be less snarled like a tangled fishing line had I had my needs for love, attention, and respect met long enough for me to build relationships based on those things and find people I could count on at any point. If it’s always based on money, and providing support as a service, I start to feel like someone who is a chore and a burden and supporting me is a job. Showing up for me is a job I have to pay top dollar for. Friendship comes with a very high price tag and is subject to denials of service. And then ‘friends’ are people who know your name somewhere in the world, who can maybe say, “Yeah, that sucks” when they get around to it, but they’ve always got A Thing. So I stop asking for help. And when I can’t pay the price of a service provider’s help, or deal with the administrative mess of getting in the door to ask, or have any faith that it’s worth it, we wind up with a snake eating its own tail in incoherent words that loop themselves and dissolve in the ether. Listen at your own risk. But hey, at least I’m not screaming at or abusing people, right? People have the option of tuning me out and ignoring me and I’m not going to do to them what my parents did to me. Or at least I’m going to fucking try my best. It gets harder every day.