Happy Friday! 65% Less Rotten Inside

Since I'm curious about that nice energy that started moving around in me at the Big Poly Conference, I decided to see what would happen if I chanted daily. And here's my gold star for doing so every day this week!

In addition to doing my om namah shivayas every day before work, I've been belting out early Beatles songs every time I'm in the car. I think I'm making my way back to my joyful self.

Happy Shivaratri!

More Songs of the Week:The Mountain Goats and Idina Menzel Want Me To...

Though I'd rather not meet the same fate as David Foster Wallace, I haven't learned to let go yet, but I enjoy the idea of being the only person who'd put these two songs together.

Worthiness and Whether I'm Not _______ Enough

Just would like to refer back to this the next time I'm tempted to ignore a genuine concern because it might not seem poly enough or anything else enough:

"When you get to a place where you understand that love and belonging, your worthiness, is a birthright and not something you have to earn, anything is possible. Keep worthiness off the table. Your raise can be on the table, your promotion can be on the table, your title can be on the table, your grades can be on the table. But keep your worthiness for love and belonging off the table. And then ironically everything else just takes care of itself."--Brene Brown

Song of the Week: Graceland

Big Therapy Project, Week Two: Ache and Gentle Progress

Heartwise, I’m still missing the Mysteries very much, and I probably will for a long time. I hope to never mix star-crossed love with internet-addiction again—I keep wanting to hurl my now-retweet-notification-less phone out the window for making me so lonesome for them. But I’m starting to forgive myself for taking comfort in a thing that didn’t make sense, because it also DID make sense. I wish I were still writing and receiving those “I love yous,” and now, in calm and quiet heartache, I still know I really meant them, so maybe somehow they did too.

I’m not really sure if I can go on identifying as poly, not because I don’t love a whole bunch of people at once but because I keep not asserting my real needs because I end up feeling guilty and ashamed of emotions and reactions that don’t seem poly enough. I keep pushing myself to accept more metamours than I can manage because not to do so doesn’t seem compersiony enough or something, and I try to power through and understand jealousy instead of recognizing it as the warning sign that it is for me. I should be able to identify and avoid things that don’t make me feel safe or cared for, but instead I try to process, change, and adapt to them lest I should not seem loving or understanding enough. When I type it out, those seem more like problems with my own boundary drawing than with poly, but I still don’t ever want to feel that nothing-feeling that I felt last Thursday night again, and I don’t know if there’s a way to avoid it in the poly world as I keep finding it. Relationships are a ways off for me anyway, so we’ll see.

Anyway, mental health: After last Thursday’s panic attack at school, my therapist made an extra house call Friday evening. By the time she got there I was in a pretty giddy state from being back in real life, but I had really worried myself the day before, so for the first time in my entire life, I broached the topic of being medicated. I wondered aloud if I should have an as-needed prescription for panicky times, but knowing how important it’s always been to me to not be medicated, she said it’s not necessary, that things aren’t serious enough to start messing around with my brain chemistry. I felt very validated, relieved and proud about that. (However, I threw a bottle of Tylenol in my work pocketbook—it’s been proven to ease existential despair, so maybe it works for temporary soul death too.)

Yesterday at work, another momentous mind-thing happened. I happened to witness something particularly ugly and triggering (in an inner-city school, this is a semi-weekly reality) and I didn’t scream or cry and my soul didn’t flee. I notified the proper people and teams and stopped downstairs after school to talk to my mentor about it. As we talked, I felt the experience physically leave my brain, like a little pain-butterfly. That doesn’t mean that it wasn’t an important or upsetting event, but if I could not carry around every scary thing that happens in my body, that would be a very good thing.

The Big Therapy Project is to start a dialogue with my 16-year-old self, and I wasn’t sure if she’d talk to me. Last week, she showed up in a dream, surly and sniping, in the guise of an old not-quite-metamour. She said I’d never given her any reason to trust me and then completely shut me out, so I’ve been asking her all week what I could do to help her feel safer. Somewhat unsurprisingly, she asked for privacy. She liked what The Puncher’s Girl said to me the last time I was at the Regular Dungeon: “Let me get your clothes, you don’t need to be any more vulnerable.”

And since I’m finally making her a priority, keeping her from slipping through the cracks, no longer putting her at the bottom of the pile, now that she is my highest and deepest priority, I have to take care of her and do what she asked for. This is a pants-on operation for a while (except Mr. Sweetface, whom she likes) until she feels safe again. I un-RSVPed from some nakedy things as an act of love for her. I don’t know how long it will be, but I do know that it will be worth it.

16-year-old me is deeper and wiser than adult me in some ways, she’s even optimistic. As awesome as she was at the art of the zipless fuck, she’s the one who believes in sex for love and she would really like me to keep trying for it. Maybe it was that summer writing letters to that nice Catholic boy, or maybe she’s just where the heart part of me lives. After I spent about 45 minutes writing a conversation with her, I felt spent and warm, the way I did that weekend at the Big Poly Conference. I slept better than I had in a long time. If I can keep turning my attention to my own heart until it’s healed, I believe I can get better and be closer to the loving person I really want to be.

Facing Grief and Hoping for Forgiveness

For the last few weeks, my street, like many of the streets in our city, offered only snowbank/glaciers disguised as parking spots. Last Saturday, relieved to be home after a bout of sobby snow-driving, I pulled into one and was promptly stuck, pulled-in but crooked, my tiny front wheel drive car unable to move forward or back.

Though part of me saw this as a permanent condition, I went out every evening after supper and shoveled it a little, watching the sunset in the process, getting in long, somewhat overshare-y conversations with my downstairs neighbor while his two-year-old goofed around with the shovel. I wasn’t really hoping to unstuck myself, just to thin the layer a little bit so I could get out sooner if a thaw ever came.

Yesterday was the most beautiful day, the perfect day to finally drive somewhere, anywhere. I was shocked, shocked! when the car pulled right out and I was on my way. I drove around for hours listening to old mix CDs and stopped at a state park to take a walk. I loved the sunlight and the smiles on the other hikers. One girl behind me was so overcome by the relief of the weather that she began singing “Don’t Stop Believin’” in a way that made me immediately want to agree. I stopped and watched in awe as a constellation of geese made bright white shapes across the sky and disappeared into the distance.

When I stopped at a Whole Foods for supper, the girl who was ringing me up must’ve thought I needed Buddha so badly that she gave me my copy of Tricycle for free. From what I read over my sushi and chocolate cookies, she wasn’t wrong. I drove and drove, belting out early Beatles songs at the top of my lungs until the rottenness inside me started to break up and be replaced by warmth, the way the parking spot ice had begun to. I started to be free as soon as I realized that I have to just go ahead and be stuck for a while.

When I look with compassion at my most vexatious connections, I see a common motivation for all of us: trying to fight grief with love. All of my most painful mistakes happened with people in the midst of dissolving relationships, mourning deaths, post-traumatic stress, or just trying to forgive themselves for their parents’ sins and their own. People, that is, just like me, trying to build a fortress of sensation, experience, and love in the face of unfathomable loss, a pain so big it’s hard to even see, let alone start feeling it. I’m sorry for the ways I’ve combined with their pain to make it worse.

That last night, the Mystery Family asked me for forgiveness, but if I look honestly at the situation, there’s nothing to forgive. Once I stopped coming from a place of fear, stopped fighting to regain some imagined loss of dignity, I can see an honest attempt at connection that just didn’t work. Of course it’s possible that he could have been both missing me and playing with someone else—I was never nothing. I just wasn’t the right thing for me to be, and that was my responsibility too.

More important, though, is the fact that they were not nothing. The pain that I’ve caused others every time I’ve failed to take care of myself, failed to say the good no, is real. When I’m in that place of helplessness and smallness, I feel as if nothing I could do or say can have impact, so I scream and rage thinking no one will hear me or ever be affected, but I know they are. I know we were all trying to do what we could for each other and that every accusation, rejection, and harsh paragraph breaks down whatever was good between us. I’m very lucky to have been forgiven by some of them.

I know I can’t make it up to anybody, but I know I can act in better faith from now on, recognize my real limitations and not just what I wish my limitations were. Instead of trying to solve grief with outside love, let me turn and face it, let it be where I am right now. I’m not cute or compersiony, I’m pissed. Sometimes I’m simmering with bitterness and rage that my friends are at the center of loving families while I am here alone. Though I’m alone for the best and most necessary reasons, I hate it with every cell in my body. I want to be the person I want to be, not the one I am right now. I want to be loved and embraced and to do the same for others, but right now I have to admit that I can’t.

As long as I try to correct grief with new relationships, I will be dehumanizing people in exactly that way that drives me crazy. I’ll be the contradiction that upsets me most in others: both nakedly available and completely inaccessible, a plate-glass window for sparrow hearts to keep smashing into. The way I’ve played through grief has often been deeply irresponsible, and for that, I’m truly sorry.

I will try and honor the hearts I’ve harmed, accept the love they gave for what it was, and do my best to care for myself, shovel myself out a little each day until the thaw comes.