Ambiguous

I had to re-live the conversation with Mac. Go over it with my lawyer. Send him the correspondence because the version my company has was Bowdlerized by some fantastic third party (feel free to self-report, my covert friends).

I do not wish to re-live the reasons I wrote to Mac; remember how I was trying to extricate Sjors without harming him; remember how he repaid me later with mistrust, hatred and betrayal. I do not wish to remember the pain I felt - nor the constant fear, wondering if I was in danger and ready to bolt if someone came after me. Nobody ever did. I wonder now if the option had ever been on the table.

But I've kept careful records because I'm a scientist and we take data dispassionately. And we back up our data. And when we conduct analysis, we use the assistance of other scientists - their opinions, their view of the data. Do they reach the same conclusions? What patterns do they see? It helps us have confidence in our results. And we retain the results and all of our evidence for years later. We can publish whenever we like.

I should have gone for a walk while the sun was out. But I had these things to deal with.

And I had documents to create. I need to keep my ideas alive, and relationships and programs that matter to me - in spite of the fucked-up nightmare this has become. It took most of the day.

What does this look like? I wake, shower, and sit with my computer until the sun sets. I fix a lunch of spinach and steak. I grind up fruit and vegetables in the blender. I drink green tea.

Tonight, I walked to a weight-lifting class 2 miles away. It was good to clear my head. It was good to lift barbells and do squats and pushups and 250 yard dashes. It wasn't a competition. But I beat every other woman in the room by a considerable amount. And all but one man.

As I lose the final trappings of the life I used to have, I feel some sadness. But I lost the thing that mattered most to me years ago.