#nikkispeaks

[pastelcheckereddreams]

I feel like a new piercing could help with the horrors.

[pastelcheckereddreams]

Angry rant because for the first time in what feels like forever, I am putting my own self-respect first.

I sit for a number of owners, for a handful of dogs and pets, because the state of the world being what it is, it's the only way I can make ends vaguely meet. For that reason, I've sat this dog for two years despite dreading it since our first disastrous sit.

I have sat this dog since he was a tiny puppy with an untrained bladder and bowels, an attitude the size of the moon and separation anxiety to match.

He has not improved.

He is an adult dog now, and still needs constant vigilance 👏 and behaviour management 👏 because he has not been trained out of his impulsive hunting instincts and destructive habits, both of which aren't helped by his chronically unaddressed separation anxiety.

In retrospect, I shouldn't have had to put up with the constant peeing on the carpet a year ago, and the owner should've taken that as a sign to train him more.

But here we are.

I actually receive a long text from the owner pre-sit, a goddamn first, warning me to put everything up out of his way because he's now going for plastic bags and such. I already do that and have done since I first started to sit him.

This sit, he's obsessed with my socks and shoes because I have a cut on my foot. One lapse in concentration at 10pm on my way up to bed, arms loaded, and he grabs my shoe. When I get to him, and try to take it back - he snaps at me. Not like before, not a play snap. A warning snap, because as far as he's concerned, he has his prey.

He tears and eats the lining right out of my shoe.

Owner has told me the emergency vet details. I try to text her to let her know what he's eaten and how he's behaved. Note that this is not the first time he's got into something - last time, the bathroom bin - and eaten it - it being my sanitary pad. Which she knows about.

She tells me that when he gets like that with something important, she distracts him with the promise of a high value treat to get whatever it is back off him.

That is very revealing for why he continues to behave the way he does. Next night - last night - he has me up at 3am, asking for the garden. I let him out. He starts to play around, as is his norm. I don't want to try and grab him and take him upstairs in case he gets snap happy again. I scoop him up with a blanket, and deposit him in the bedroom. We sleep. I wake up waaay after my 7:30 alarm - to find he's quietly shit on the bedroom floor.

I'm at my wits end at this point, two years of cleaning up after the protest pooing of this dog, excusing it as puppy behaviour.

I text the owner that I'm seriously thinking of not sitting for her again. She's understanding but points out that she's just been laid off (not my problem) and we have a sit booked next week overnight so she won't be able to find a sitter so fast. The latter point is understandable. Then he shits on the floor again, while I go upstairs to shower.

I text her a photo. I'm at my wits end. She asks if the back door was open for him - he didn't ask for it, and had already shat on the floor upstairs, and I'm not going to leave a door open while I'm alone in the house in the shower. It was an accident and the first he's done, she says. No fucking shit. The paragraphs she sent me before this sit, the years of scrubbing his pee from her carpet. She knows what he's like and how she enables it. I was apologetic back then. Now she tells me she's not angry or worried about his accidents, to try and console me for being "nervous and worried" about him snapping.

No, I'm angry. I'm tired, and stressed out, and angry. So I'm done. I'm so done. I finally have more self-respect than this. ....

That said, I do need to grovel for help now I've quit my main dogsit client. If anyone wants to donate to my ko-fi to help me pay for new trainers and to tide me over the next month, I would appreciate it a lot. I promise to get back to my art soon, things have just been insane. But! I found some self-respect in the past few months, and I'm done with this dog, so that's something positive to focus on.

[pastelcheckereddreams]

The days are cold and dark. A lobotomy feels increasingly appealing. I need to return to my roots: being unwell about fictional men on tumblr.com

[pastelcheckereddreams]

Is winter over yet because I am very, very tired

[pastelcheckereddreams]

I'm dreaming of a beautifully dark and tragic Ran Yi fanart for mermay... but as always my imagination runs far beyond my skills 😩

[pastelcheckereddreams]

Increasingly feeling at the end of my fucking rope so I tied a knot in a piece of rope and I'm holding on and clenching my fist around it and just existing and enduring the bullshit of my own brain and I fucking hate it and I'm in pain and struggling and it feels endless but at least I'm holding on.

[pastelcheckereddreams]

I do not remember anything of this year and it's worrying me.

I have done a lot of important doing this year, around recovery and wellbeing and trying to heal over big chasms of trauma in myself ...but my daily life and interactions are all just a blur and I don't remember having most of them.

I will look back at messages in a full conversation and just not remember having that conversation at all, let alone just a few weeks ago. I am so far removed from the context of my own life because... I remember watching that show I was talking about but what do you mean that was a month ago and not at least a year ago? Time is getting weird. My personal perception of time. I'm worried that I'm walking the walk for broader "go get 'em kid!" recovery to get me functioning in society again, but actually also causing myself more damage by trying to plaster over the deep shit I don't have help to work through, at a pace that I cant handle. I'm worried I'm close to dissociating or already am because the curtain is peeling back too fast on a whole pile of messy family trauma the coping mechanisms were keeping locked down. I can feel my brain needing to check out and stop for a break we're not going to get.

So I'm struggling to remember what I do and conversations I have each day. This doesn't feel like I'm "functioning." It feels like I'm free falling.

[pastelcheckereddreams]

I'm being so adult and brave about being left behind for a beach trip. No one on the bus back knew that the little ten year old inside me was crying and I held it together all the way home until I could hug my mum.