benjamindunbar | Recent Entries

Fear of abandonment is a hell of a drug.

I had a better thought about this while I was out on a night walk. It's almost always that way: while away from the confines and normalcy of your own home. The various nebula of thoughts burn into bright inspired stars and whole constellations in your imagination, yet seem to burn out a bit when you get back in where you'll be able to write things down.

But I'll do my best.

Things aren't going well, but I'm trying to not be despondent about it. As it happens, the succession of events similar to "I finally launched a business I've been working on for three years, my brother had surprise brain surgery and almost died, and then I took at least two months leave from frontline work so as not to bring a deadly pandemic into my home and kill myself or my benevolent housemate" is all particularly branded "a stressor" and "liable to freak you out from time to time." These are on the heels of spending a lot of the tumult of 2019 and examining my own life and interpersonal relationships accounting to how I was abused, how it carried forward into adulthood, and what action I was going to take to finally heal and also snuff out those fires I allowed to continue burning for such a long time. You really can have moments of clarity sometimes where you look at the path ahead and wonder how a phoenix can rise from a clean burn.

It's ok to feel lost and rudderless in that moment.

Realizing the extent of 39 years of abuse and habits I made to survive last year was the largest part of it. Distancing myself from various players in my abuse from friends to family has been critical, but it's a lie to pretend it isn't lonely. I am, from time to time, pretty lonely. I find myself thinking old habits of things, like "if I do x they'll finally realize y and things will sail smoothly and it will be fine forever." It's hard to not go back. A lot of the psychology suggests that it can be very similar to drug addiction, the type of people I've been flanked with for so long. You chase a high. It destroys your life or at least makes it impossible to live, and when you get clean you often miss it.

CPTSD from this combined with depression and anxiety help you push people away—not to mention that you are convinced how terrible you are by your abusers and you isolate. I feel like I've stopped pushing people away and am now instead closing doors. I don't know if I'll ever be convinced I'm doing the right thing even when it's the right thing. I have no illusions about "being fine/healthy now"
and always doing the right thing; you still know that you succeed and live more than you fail, but it's hard to come to terms with it.

I choose, as is my usual way, to endeavor to look forward. I took a sort of hiatus from toxic workplace and took greatly reduced hours there for 6 months. I launched my business. I make excellent things! ...then COVID19 hit. Quite honestly, it was a big gut punch to get knocked down in this way. That syndrome abuse-informed anxiety gives you where it's convinced that "Good things were happening to you, and quite frankly no." That's. .. at war with cognitively knowing that's not true. I don't think that's necessarily selfish like some people say. It's a monumental thing to "get over" or get past. But it's time to stand back up. Being in the mud is not the death of me, and getting up is definitely possible. Two solid months of cooking us through this crisis and leaving the house only twice for provisions, tomorrow starts cleaning everything up. Dusting myself off and taking the next right steps.

Ayumi has a lyric I like to hold close: "A human is much stronger than we think. I've stayed in the dark for a long time; it's time to go." One has to realize when you're in a self constructed prison, at some point, you just move.

There comes a point at which you feel like you're positioned so that saying anything would be begging for respect and used to further look down on you.

I have worked too hard on respecting myself and pulling myself out of the dirt and recovering from toxic friendships to let new ones suddenly fester. I've been assessed as not mattering as much as others so I'll grow support elsewhere and not pour myself into an unfillable place. I can't do that anymore.

It’s been a little over two weeks since opening shop for Normal Street. I gave myself the time, accepting the pace that it was going to take to launch. In my way, I had to make my own road map to make it happen. Now I’m here, and I want to talk about some things about it.

I was unable to find something that was an exact how-to for launching an enterprise like the one I wanted. I found a couple that got close, and I incrementally fought anxiety to push past different barriers it presented as each step branched into several sub-steps that needed working into the mold of what I do. Like a lot of “gifted children” of our generation, it takes work to get past each step of instant success not fruiting. I know it’s not a failure, it’s just starting! It’s a baby! It’s my baby. I made this, with opportunity afforded to me and learning many skills before finally launching it. With gentle, strong hands I can lead it to where it needs to go. I know I can. There are more roadblocks to come; I am ready for them. I can meet them and get through them.

I almost consider Normal Street as a phoenix already burned and now rising from its ashes. Between pushing hard on making things in 2017 until now, finally launching in 2020, a lot of product was lost to time or was now not in line with the vision I had for how things should look (mostly for bar soap design). I have not yet officially partnered with LAWS women’s shelter in Leesburg, VA. They have, however, gladly accepted whatever soap I bring them for their clients to pick from, for free, however they like. I love that what would have been a grand failure mistake can get new life. I got to joke with one of their officials on last drop off how they had to mark some of them “do not eat,” and tell her how I get comments a lot that they look like food. Meanwhile, I take a lot of solace that I got to bring smiles to some people in desperate need of them. I plan to continue making for them in the future, which has always been on the table (which I believe I’ve previously written about here) and I really look forward to that. Probably mostly promotionally made soaps for exposure for new fragrance releases from some of my vendors. They’re hits on social media, they’re beautiful, and they’ll get to have this amazing second life after bringing me the joy one gets from making things by hand.

So far, though, I have not yet gotten an order from a stranger. I have gotten a great many orders from a lot of very supportive friends. They’re reporting back that they’re quite happy with what they received! I’m really glad about that. This is what success looks like, and community. I’ve put in a lot of work on Instagram to grow the presence of Normal Street, and gotten over 50 new followers there since the launch. I’m learning more each day about the patience involved in growing this sure and strong, in the way it needs to. It’s almost like watching a plant get new buds along a vine as it reaches for the sun, really. It’s really edifying.

I even still get chances to workshop new things. I try new body care recipes constantly, and read blogs about effects of various accoutrements I already have when combined in new ways (right now, something on the table is a salt-scrub cube for beards, which is fun and they’re really cute). I got hooked on body oils. Some of them might not ever make it to the shop, but it’s great to try them. When I can be sure they’ll be aesthetically the way that I want along with smelling how I like, they might show up. It depends on if they have a place in my own pantheon.

Success will, in time, bloom. I’m sure of it. I am just—for now—appreciating the rally of support that surrounded me as soon as I drew back the curtain. I felt the love, and I’m really ecstatic that it’s bringing people joy. My work will, beyond that, speak for itself.

Passed the momentous occasion of actually opening my shop online.

I don't have much to say about it, but it feels really good to finally be here.

I thought about doing a reflective of 2019 without something so banal as a list of the year's events, because it feels like a really important year. I was doing that, but then I realized how significant so many things were in really small ways that worked as a collective to move me forward.

Mostly, without being able to afford therapy or a psychologist (because our coverage through employment is a joke), I've been absorbing as many applicable introspective tools online as I can.

I had more thoughts on a late night walk, where I should have written right after I got home, but did not. Honestly, my end of the day work has been to not pour so much into unfillable people I had around me for so long. You internalize it. You start to echo it. I've had a lot of work to clean my own mental house and my own interactions and where I've hurt people too.

2019 was a waking up from a lot of abuse from outside sources that kept me pushed down and empty. I had let these people get very close to me; some of them for an extremely long time. Almost a lifetime for some. An actual lifetime for members of my family. I want to know what life looks like if I fill myself. I work on healthy "no." Healthy "yes." It's a lot of work, for sure. Every day takes pouring life into my own worth and reminders sometimes almost hourly to move very incrementally.

I find myself ruminating so much less than every year prior on the damage the abusers were doing. My mind is quiet when I want it to be, for the most part. I'm imagining more and introspecting more than reliving arguments or demanding distraction from the proverbial "devastating nightmare rectangle" that is a smart phone.

I want to see where this goes. I want to see what my impact is when I fill myself first for the nature of kindness to make me nurture what can be nurtured rather than expending my resources and spoons on people who are unfillable voids who have for so long been allowed to empty me and demand more that I just didn't have. It wasn't my fault, but correcting it is absolutely my responsibility.

I've considered for a few days how to go about writing this entry. I have so much to say and not much I'd like to say about it, both because it's a lot to articulate and also because admitting defeat and walking away are difficult, in their own ways. I identify it as a necessary catharsis that I need to go through, to talk about it, though. If this remains in my head, my anxiety will have a field day with kicking it around until the heat-death of the universe.

Admitting defeat is a bit of a misnomer, but I don't know what else to call it. Here's what has happened: my step-down from a leadership position at my job is finally effective. I am now once again a part-time clerk, and my manager (who is great, though I don't know how long I will work with him) has agreed to my setup of working Thursday, Friday, and Saturday max of 7h each day. Also, I will only be working a schedule that's conducive to getting sufficient rest. No more 4AM shift, very seldom a midnight shift. I staged it this way to leverage getting my business launched in the way that will be successful for me. I would resign, really, for reasons I will talk about. But the job is a benefits mule I have assessed value in not being able to afford giving up at this time. It IS a step. And it has been a difficult hurdle of terrorizing anxious fear to get over.

My workplace of the last 19 years is...deeply sick. Yes, 19 years. That's a long time to have invested and just... let it go early. However, the company enables and insulates abusers and abusive workplace practices. Communication and integrity are both terrible, and encouraged to BE terrible with occluded practices and policies and a chain of command that does not see value in supporting its subordinates. It's a pattern I've long recognized, but once I sat down to write down a list of a particular abusive boss' patterns, the severity of it finally sank in. I wrote, by hand, page after page of abuses from her that I put up with that are more than "being demanding" or "tight ship" scenarios. It hurt. It was painful again realizing that I had let myself be abused in these ways and continued the classic abuse relationship with the occasional value and appreciation granted to me being used to excuse it all. We let ourselves get talked into, and talk ourselves into, the idea that "it isn't so bad," or that we somehow deserve the mistreatment. Even worse, in the name of the job, we convince ourselves that we cannot live without the abuse.

I was called at all hours of the day, workday or day off. About work. Texted nasty messages. Harangued about what happened or to call the store and make arrangements for things from home. From vacation even! Once, at my parent's 50th anniversary breakfast. "I don't care. Get on the horn and make it happen."

My health took a nosedive with the full time work. With the all-hours calls, abusive bosses, and physical and mental exhaustion from the work, I had all the trips and trappings of stress health impact. I joke with friends that I ate like an unsupervised raccoon in a McDonald's dumpster, but honestly that's pretty true and terrifying to think about. 4 years. 4 years of inactivity off the clock for health and induced depression (does anybody take this many naps when they're not depressed?) I am lucky to have come out of this non-diabetic (which I still need to check again) and, thanks to a stroke scare a couple weeks ago, I know I have fairly healthy blood.

Depression was the scariest thing. This is one of many examples, but on the loveseat in my living room? Two years--TWO YEARS--it was occupied by a pile of rotating clean clothes. Do the laundry, upend the hamper of clean onto the loveseat. I never knew I was a spoons person until on the way out of this I realized that spoons were exactly what happened that made things this way.

Then there's the shame. I have to admit that I am deeply ashamed that I let it get this bad. I was helping other people. I was redeeming the abuser with kindness. I was making things better where I could. I was all the things abuse victims tell themselves while their frog is rising to a boil. It's sideways from the norm; I never extolled to anyone that things were fine. Things are terrible.

I have to let them go. And now, officially, they're not mine anymore. At the urging and example of some friends, I am not jumping right in to the self-employment. It's hard to look at what I've done there and where I've arrived to get it ready. I have to acknowledge that I am severely damaged by the previous job, and need to recover. I have to recover.

I don't know all of what healing looks like. But I know that I've begun several steps of it, and not being willfully numb to what comes next will always be the next step.

I am eager to make and let it happen, and very eager to stop destroying myself.

I made the wise decision last weekend to buy a Microsoft Surface Pro, and I am writing this post on it to test out its keyboard cover. Seems agile so far.

Due to grocery reward points on a multiplier, I had already purchased a $400 Best Buy card some time back to get something else which I ended up not needing. Cue the major need: I will at some point need to get Soapmaker 3, which is a Windows only application. I had examined running Parallels or Boot Camp on my Mac, the brass tacks there nearly emptied my spoons immediately. But, as it's a suite that does SAP calcs, inventories, COGS, and myriad other things, it's something that will prove too vital to turn down when the time comes.

So, rather than a netbook of questionable ability which will get All The Viruses as soon as it's powered up, much less connected to WiFi, I settled on the Surface. On another upside, it runs LibreOffice faster than my Mac, for label-making. I don't blame the developers for that; it's free and functions and replaces everything I liked about AppleWorks, which is dead and buried. Even slow, it beat the piss out of Pages. I will, in this way, be able to make the device into my entire tax-deductible office for Normal Street.

I'm still getting the hang of some things on Windows 10. We use Windows 7 at my day job, and I like that OS a lot. Windows 10 does some of the same things but has some other strange behaviors about it elsewhere that will take some getting used to. The Surface is so far doing everything I ask of it, so I count it as a success.

I've recently divested of full time corporate work in favor of launching my personal business efforts. It's been a lot of anxiety hurdles to get to working on soap as a viable, launchable business. In this time I did one of the cardinal mistakes a soapmaker can make, which is "the soap mountain." I started making some (small) retail inventory before I was ready to get off the ground. I possess a LOT of soap.

It's been hard to look at while I navigated the background work of doing business. Licenses. Taxes. Insurance. Business cards. There were a lot of things I wasn't ready for. So the inventory sat. And sat. I've lost money on some of it. Some non-soap items can go bad (body butters, balms, etc) and I can't in good confidence sell them. They've weighed on my mind and anxiety as I worked full time at Grocery and could manage just a few things on business work, occasionally making more soap for the cathartic joy of it, or as gifts or custom small orders. It's the low hum of something failing that anxiety feels you need to hear at all times. The last week, I've been boxing up and dealing with a lot of it and letting it go. This is ok.

It's ok.

One of the greatest additions to my own mental processes was learning "sunk costs" from a friend. We talked about it with writing, of course because I've got myriad writing projects I've cooked up over the years but never chased to their end or did just for fun. It's OK to let them go, and shelve them in my memory so I can move forward on other things. This is what I've been applying here. I'm going through it. I've discarded some that has gone off (YES, that is a thing that can happen with handmade soap, without getting into the chemistry of it). I've collected a lot of it for donation to a local shelter or two, if it's still viable but doesn't fit my direction. It's a substantial loss of time on the discarded portions, but I have less of that with what I can donate. It's a relief overall. It's something I invested a lot of time, effort, and money into. But I am in a place where I do not have to force it to succeed just because I spent time, effort, and money on it. It's liberating my mind and time and space to grow and succeed where I'm going to.

"Cutting sunk costs." What a liberty. Like clearing dead brush before planting.

And that feels really good.

No one who knows me well is a stranger to the fact that I am a soapmaker. I've known how to make soap since 2010, and working heavily on it since 2017.

Something that is seldom talked about in soapmaking is what soap can really mean. It's such a simple, everyday thing, but it would seem strange to hold it reverently or in much regard at all. Why should something we need so often be special?

I've had more than a few episodes of depression in my adulthood. Stressful situations. Exhausting days. Weeks of sickness that leave you feeling subhuman. Any number of circumstances can push you down in the proverbial dirt. People spend probably too much of their time down. With sickness as the most immediately real example to cite, there is so much to say about being cleansed. You go into the shower and scrub. The heat, the vapors, and the opportunity to wash what makes you feel filthy. Sadness or grime, illness or stress, the shower is a transitive space where you emerge new.

What I make gives the opportunity for a deeper personal touch to the metamorphic experience. So many out there before me do it, too. I want to provide charitable soap work for shelters and recovery centers, for people who need to feel new the most.

This is just something I think about that's important to me. It's a thought that makes my work important. More than a hobby or an artisan craft. It's important. It's small, but impactful.

I've occupied a bunch of time still setting some things up around the home for home business. Even though I've been at this for more than a year, I'm always finding new things I can fold into the operation to make things easier, while dealing with some it-works-for-now items (such as Apple's Pages for label making–hello can we just raze that to the ground) and still managing to make some pretty cool things.

Today, enabled by a very helpful

celeloriel, I bought a Kitchen Aid stand mixer...for making body and beard butters. I haven't gotten around to making whipped soap yet, which will come up later, and saved the next bit in the long run. Previously, I had purchased a Farberware stand mixer due to it being $100 less. It's a fine machine, except for a few things. Shea butter is a mulish substance in some ways, while the products it makes are superlative. The FW machine lacked the bump in the bottom of the bowl I was familiar with on KA, along with lower horsepower and some lower end materials, particularly plastic connections on the whisk attachment. This creates a perfect storm for future breakability and the real killer: the flat space where the KA bump is collected shea butter that did not whip. Chunks of shea butter would be found in products, with the ultimate result being the need to slowly (did I mention shea butter is stubborn?) melt everything, let it solidify, and then whip it again. Thus, having run into Kitchen Aids on sale at Walmart for $189, I got one. A couple batches sold will pay for it, to be honest. I should have done this to begin with; lessons learned. Having not made soap in it, I can use it later in the kitchen with food due to its lack of acquaintance with HAZMAT.

Another piece of setup is moving from making labels on my stalwart MacBook Air from 2k13 to my iMac my dad guilt-bought me in early 2017 (which is a 2016 model year). At the time, I was trying to re-boot artistry and my old Mac no longer wanted to move with anything resembling haste after updating it off Snow Leopard. So I got this new one to accommodate Painter 2017 and my Wacom tablet and...haven't used it for nearly two years since. Depression makes for marvelous decision making and honestly, I got my MacBook for doing Not Much Work and more Typing, while most of nearly any of my other computing needs were met with iPhone and iPad.

Yesterday, I decluttered (which is such a mild word for what I did) my desk and dusted it heavily. I moved the old computer off the desk to cut sunk costs and centered this new one, attaching the second monitor, speakers, and the corded keyboard which... suddenly stopped working? Crap. The keyboard it shipped with is a short Magic Keyboard. I'd be fine wireless but for purposes of setting this up for bookkeeping and label making and SAPONIFYING CALCULATIONS, I was going to need a numeric keypad on a full sized keyboard. Enter an equally helpful

seventhe later in the Walmart when I went in search of finding said keyboard. The assortment they had there did not include a standard Apple keyboard, and what the rest were in the here-are-some-keys variety were just–to be delicate–fugly. I then spotted an Razer Cynosa Chroma keyboard, and oh was this thing ever homosexual. "BEM if I still had a job I would own twelve of those keyboards. I would decorate my porch with them for Christmas," she says to me. You see, typically I am her Professional Enabler, but today was her day in the sun.

So I got the gay keyboard. I even navigated my way to Razer's very helpful website with a driver to make the gay lights work, gayly. Honestly, this thing was $60 and an Apple keyboard would have been $120. I saved money! My friend Taylor puts it as such: "You saved money AND you made it gay. So you saved double money...in your heart." It's really a lovely keyboard, too. I've typed this whole post on it with no discomfort and wonderful key response, with low key noise. You really can't beat practical AND homosexual.

In testing some other products, I decided that among my line of products I was going to offer a pomade. Naturally, the response to this was to cut my hair. For the last year and a half, I've used my hair to show off how wonderfully my shampoo bars work (which, in all honesty, they left my hair sleek and shiny and soft, so I am a winner), but in the name of overhauling my look, I decided to give it a go with something new. I've never been one to stay in one haircut too long, anyway. I've had twenty looks over the last twenty years, so this will ultimately surprise nobody. Before and after, if you're curious.

I still haven't launched a store front. I need to set up a business account at a local branch bank here pretty soon, if I don't choose a bank online (which I am unsure which I'd like to do). Ahead of this, if I don't do it in a timely fashion, I'm going to be shipping a few orders, among which some belong to celeloriel and seventhe, which is pretty full circle. Part of this is deciding to do this in the worst time of year to also be working at a grocery store, as I'm pretty low on energy funds when I get home. The making is catharsis, as creativity is powerful, but the front-end items to business have been wearing me out on the smaller screens; ultimately the goal of dusting off a barely used beautiful desktop computer.

And here we are.

So I have some dubious/not-so-dubious honors for the weekend. I think a close INTJ friend I've had for 25+ years has doorslammed me.

I'm not broken up about this. There's an amazing, possibly career-ruining reason he chose to do this.

A few weeks ago I shared a screenshot of a tweet about supporting trans rights on my Facebook. I'll post it here:

There is no "trans argument". There is no "trans debate".

There are simply trans people, the people who support them, and the people who participate, either actively or passively, in their oppression.

I support trans people.

So should you.
— gin. (@showupforthis) October 19, 2018

It got shared from my Facebook post over 700 times, and somewhere along the line some fuckmo pops the comment on there "I'm a giraffe." Now, a few people threw in on this stupidity [happy ending: he deleted the comment after someone sussed out his workplace and told him his boss would find his comments interesting], one of whom was my longtime friend. He...likes arguing. Especially online.

At one point he told the man that his stupidity was probably why his son "looked downsy." I came UN-GLUED in a private message to him after hiding the comments. I advocated for disabled people like a champ, appealed to intelligence to be too smart for that, among a few other impassioned paragraphs. He hard-lined that it was acceptable to say anything to hurt the other guy's feelings.

If I have to explain why the R-word and "downsy" or other congruents are not ok, you probably shouldn't be talking to me and expect your own feelings not to get hurt.

If a resolution had been reached about the rippling collateral damage of using these words on even people we don't like, I think it would have been fine. He followed up with talking about how PEOPLE WITH MARKERS FOR DOWNS SYNDROME SHOULD NOT EVEN ATTEMPT TO HAVE CHILDREN. I was horrified. I said so. I said "I don't want to talk to you right now, I will talk to you later."

And then he unfriended me.

Sorry, but that's eugenics and it's in fact horrific and if you broach Nazi ideals I am not interested in talking to you, because you advocate horrific shit.

If he reaches out to me and appeals that what he said was bad and understands why, I'll consider it. But if not, then doorslam right back, bitch. What the fuck ever, indeed. Losing a friend over adhering to my values and convictions is not a real loss.

I got my certificate of LLC establishment. I’m officially a business owner.

Ok, now what?

Are tags even globally searchable on this thing?

I'm making a temporary post to detail some things while I'm in a space to write about something. I have almost no audience on here, so I just want to reignite the habit of blogging before I need it, with the intent of dumping it later.

Since my last time blogging, eight-plus years ago now, a great many things have happened. The most significant is that early last year, I grew frustrated with beard products available [sometime in 2012 I grew a beard as a result of a disastrous haircut, and kept it] and decided that since I knew how to make handcrafted soap, I was going to research and make my own beard soap. Did I ever. This also involved R&D where I roped in bearded friends to also make beard balm, butter, and oil. Other handcrafted products have entered the fold and custom batches of soap as well that very supportive friends and family have purchased from me.

A not so great thing here is that anxiety is a powerful drug. I have made... so much beard soap. I dawdled greatly on opening a shop for it. Some friends and I have a catch phrase though: "when you're out of spoons, grab a knife." Yesterday I gathered my knives. I researched a service that would broker the business registrations with the state of Virginia, along with EIN registry with the IRS and handling of incoming paperwork. Not having to do it all on my own has evaporated the problem of "that's too much: I choose paralysis," and within a week I expect to open up a storefront online. I'll drop the link to the 3+ people who are reading here.

I want to have a blog for this and other social media presence for Google and sundry other search engines to chew on. It won't be here, despite liking the mission statement of this site, it's more conducive/necessary to get in bed with some other devils. For now I want to just use this site as a habit-builder and possibly reinvigorate personal blogging.

I have found something that will be as successful as I make it, which I truly love doing. I want to give this to myself and not be convinced it will fail or that I don't deserve it. I want my anxiety to just...shut up. Just once.

For examples of my work please visit https://www.instagram.com/anteateradvance/

While I wish that Instagram had the ability to search one user's tags, a way to do that is not known to me. For my finest hours please check out Lara Jean & Peter Kavinsky soap and Hygge inspired bath bars.

More to come in a few days.