A Brief Gilmore Guy Revival: Part Two (Concern-Trolling Is Gentle Voter Suppression)

We didn’t talk much, at least not in the fun/deadening let’s-discuss-all-of-our-interlocking-relationship-dynamics poly way. After three hours of easy bliss, we lay in the afterglow. I was holding him tenderly as he started to talk, first about his day and then about the then-four-days-away Midterm Election:

“I want to believe there’s going to be this big, sweeping Blue Wave, but I just don’t think it’ll happen. I think we’ll pick up a few seats but…”

He went on to talk about how bleak things were going to be over the next few years. When he got to the part about how the Democrats didn’t have any strong candidates for 2020, my body went from being a sparkly cloud of bliss to being an angry spring. I disentangled from him as if I was disentangling from the entire last three years.

“Who do you want it to be then? BERNIE?!”

“No, actually I don’t really care for Senator Sanders…”

“WELL, you’ve got that going for you.” I hissed.

Part of my reaction, I have to admit, was good old-fashioned daddy issues. Gilmore Guy’s erasure of Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Corey Booker, et al felt too much like the anti-Gillibrand conversation I still felt trapped in with my dad. (OF COURSE dad didn’t acknowledge the letter I sent. OF COURSE he didn’t.)

It was also too much like the role-flipped therapy session I’d had earlier in the week, comforting a clearly-not-a-match therapist by trying to convince her that the Resistance does, in fact, exist and have an impact.

I’m so happy to have the election results to back me up as I continue to un-gaslight myself about this!

It frustrates me so much that they can’t see it, that they can’t see US or our work, even as it slowly but surely lifts the country out of our mess. I realize that as a member of the Resistance, it’s part of my task to HELP people see it, but having my own reality denied so often really hurts—it’s too much. The time theft is too much. The emotional labor is too much.

I’m not here to try and convince anybody of my existence, to convince anybody that the movements I love are not helpless or worthless or stupidly hysterical. (I’m all about reclaiming the word “hysterical” but that’s another post for another day.)

(My off-script textbanking exchanges with Republicans earlier in the Midterm process have really gotten to me as well, but the right is clearly not the only problem here.)

“I’m just worried about voter suppression,” He said. Of course! We all are. We were both up off the folded-out couch and I was angrily putting on my clothes.

“You’re DOING voter suppression when you tell us we can’t win!”

Concern-trolling is definitely not as evil or insidious as governors who purge voter rolls, exact-match laws, or Native Americans suddenly having to root out street addresses from obscure bureaucratic labyrinths, but it IS part of the problem and definitely should be voted most likely to keep me from snuggling.

I argued probably not very well. He said:

“Let me explain why Kamala Harris can’t…”

Perhaps realizing that I will be having some version of this conversation until she is elected, I fucking SNAPPED.

“I told you I don’t want to have this conversation. Do something about it or Shut. Up.”

(That may have been mostly for dad, sorry. But also yes, shut the fuck up.)

“Don’t scream at me in my own house.” He said, apparently out of arguments. My voice was raised, but screaming was an exaggeration.

The saddest thing about writing down that moment is realizing that he was happy to have me raise my voice in all of the sex-wails that I wanted, but not to stand up for myself, not even to defend my own worth.

“Have fun SITTING ON YOUR ASS and criticizing everybody who’s doing the WORK!” I hollered as I grabbed my purse and umbrella from the kitchen and headed for the door.

“Get. Out.” He said in that annoying I’m-the-reasonable-person tone that I know so well from back when I was married to Sweetie.

After I’d splashed through the rain to my car, the dash clock read 12:06. I’d aimed to turn myself into a pumpkin by midnight and he had (inadvertently, I hope) helped me along.

I wish I could say that I feel righteous and free after that, but I just miss him. I feel lonely about it, and sad. I’m glad I blocked his number and deleted his texts, because I keep wishing I could reach out, somehow repair the connection, somehow be in those arms again.

But even causally, I can’t be with someone who doesn’t live, at least mostly, in the same reality as I do. America has changed so deeply since 2016, and I’m one of the lucky many who can see the underlying positivity: The networks of activism, the interlocking movements full of loving, fiery momentum. Resistbot, Pantsuit Nation, Solidarity Sundays. THE MARCH FOR OUR LIVES KIDS, for god’s sake. The way PEOPLE ACTUALLY CARED about the Midterms!

I want a partner who, no matter how bleak and scary things get, can see the goodness and care that’s growing every day. I wish, in that afterglow moment, I’d mustered the empathy and strength to convince him, to bring him into that hopeful view and keep him safe there. I know I can’t keep him safe, can’t keep anyone safe no matter what. So I run when my body tells me to run, fight when it tells me to fight, and I hope for the best.

A Backtrack, A Cliff, and a Buffy Sing-along

After the last post, all full of accomplishment and yoga-y goodwill, I was inspired to send a sorry-I-was-a-jerk note to Scrabble Boy—I’d been thinking of him because our dalliance was an April thing and because our friendship ended, as so many of mine have, with me getting superpissed. Since the divorce, I’ve been working my way through the list of people at whom I’ve misdirected anger.

He accepted my friend request right away, as if he’d been waiting for it, and was equally apologetic and forgiving. We planned to do a call after I got back from Easter. (Hey everybody! I drove up to my sister’s and back without having a breakdown for the first time post-Sweetie! Credit to my cute little red car, I think. And time.) A funny thing happened when I hit the road though—all kinds of daydreams started to unspool about him—holding hands under the flowering trees, throwing him into my pretty princess bed and finally having my way with him, running away to join his life in Ann Arbor. (Cue Get Up Kids song…)

Though I loved the idea of reuniting with my poet self through him and seeing the last three years’ adventures through his eyes, the adventures seemed to pale in comparison with him. He was, at least in those daydreams, still the best one for me, the guy I’d choose out of all of them if I were given a chance. I hadn’t so much gotten over him as put a bookmark in that day we spent together, and as soon as we were on good terms, love started bursting out like so many tree-petals.

Easter was SUCH a good trip. I played Mario Party with the kids and earned almost no mini-stars. I took my niece and nephews to their local comic shop and bought my niece some manga and my nephew a sonic screwdriver. After we finished lovingly perusing the old-school Star Wars figures, we all went out for cocoa. It’s finally sinking in that I can still have my family, even post-Sweetie.

When I got home, I knew I couldn’t really bear to be updated about Scrabble Boy’s life. I’ve come too far to pretend that I want to be just friends with someone I love. (Annoying) gold star for being honest with him about that, and in the process I learned that he’d found someone shortly after his divorce and was happy with her. I sent him a perfect, distant, congratulatory response and that was that, but I was completely devastated by the news. I don’t know why it hurt so badly, but it did. I sometimes feel like everyone just pairs (or whatevers) up so easily and it’s still just a mystery to me.

The more I dismantle the defensiveness and fear that came from The Bad Thing, the more I realize some of that stuff was what’s holding me up, so it’s hard to hold myself together without it. I will probably find more of these pockets of feeling that got stuck because I was ill-equipped to face them at the time—my heart might be a TARDIS ride for a little while.

With that loss added to all the others and my defenses down, I felt like Wyle E. Coyote when he realizes he’s walked off a cliff. The bottom dropped out from under everything and for a few days, I was completely lost. I felt the loss not just of Scrabble Boy, but of my school, of Sweetie, of everyone I’ve lost in the past couple years’ adventures. I was so hyperventilatingly sad that I wondered if I did need a Girl Interrupted interruption, or shock treatment like Rory Gilmore got when she was on Mad Men. I thought I would never find love the way SB did because I would be tangled in this web of grief forever.

The feeling only lasted a couple of days—with yoga, sitcom episodes, and lots of writing, the devastation passed and I was able to get back on track. The main thing I learned from the Scrabble Boy thing is that hermit time is over, that reaching out has got to become the norm again. I’ve enjoyed these months of focusing on taking care of myself, but the loneliness is deep and wide and it’s time to rejoin the world.

So I did. Last night I joined some friends-of-friends for a Buffy sing-along and ice cream birthday party. (Can you believe that was a thing?!) I felt nervous because I’ve almost completely forgotten how to be social, but singing “Walk Through the Fire” with a bunch of cute near-strangers was as transcendent an experience as I’m ever gonna have, and I have been actually set on fire.

So I will. Walk through the fire, I mean. Though it seems impossible sometimes, I’ll keep moving forward until I work someplace safe and love someone(s) kind, until vulnerability and lightness and heart can thrive. Next weekend, everybody, is the Sparkly Festival of Awesomeness, not a moment too soon.

In Praise of Expectations and Other Human Things

If I’m in a facebook argument, you know something isn’t right. I usually am very careful about avoiding them—Sweetie loves them, but they make me feel stressy and gross. A friend of a friend, a young, adorable queer guy, posted that having expectations had caused every problem his heart had ever had, and he was making the virtuous pledge never to anticipate anything or have hopes about anyone. Reading this status tapped into a deep well of anger I only vaguely knew I had. I wanted to avoid the anger so it wouldn’t tarnish the nice memories, but I’m gonna have to slog back to Steampunk Guy for a few paragraphs. If you’re someone who gets squeamish about the less-attractive emotions, consider yourself warned.

I wish I hadn’t taken down the posts about our falling-out, but it came down to him saying this:

“You seem more excited about me than about trying anal.”

This felt like rejection on such a fundamental level. How LOW was I in his estimation that he thought I didn’t even deserve to have a PREFERENCE about which partner fucked me in the ass for the first time? How deeply inhumane is the expectation that I think only of the act and not of the person doing it. This fucking-a-fetish-instead-of-a-person cruelty is the root of everything ugly that I’ve seen in the alternative sex community, all of the post-consent-world mindset that the Scary Party crowd walks around with, it’s the deepest, starkest sexualization and I will never and should never open my mind to it. In order to be acceptable to him, I had to be literally nothing but a hole, and he had to be just a dick, too. How easy it would be if I saw the world that way, I’d be just the belle of the horror-themed fetish ball.

I didn’t say any of that at the time, just broke off the planning, said I was disappointed, and gave him some (admittedly somewhat tragic) background on why I’d been wanting to make it a nice experience.

He wrote back “Personal drama! Expectations! Shame! Apologies!”

At the time, I felt bad for being all of those things instead of just a simple, fun partner the way I assumed the other girls managed to be. But a month later, those four exclamations make me livid, so let’s take them one by one:

“Personal drama!”

Dude. You were going to be the first person (that I know of) to put his penis in my asshole. It seems reasonable that a person might have some emotions emerge around that, even in a casual situation. If you aren’t up for complicated emotions, you aren’t up for fucking me as a human being. (I know. We already established he wasn’t. It still makes me mad.) Yes, I have personal drama. I’m divorcing my wife of ten years and I was somewhat inconveniently in love with you. You saw those things as flaws, but  I’m relieved to find that I don’t.

“Expectations!”

I am sick and tired of hearing expectations vilified. We mustn’t hope, envision, or anticipate, lest we create some unnecessary strain on things. But you know what? Those things are only a problem if THE PERSON ALREADY DOESN’T LIKE YOU. It’s not the expectations’ fault; it’s the match’s, or rather, the lack of one.

Moreover, you had expectations too. You expected me to plan around your schedule, not mine, to somehow intuit exactly how much you could offer and not ask for one milliliter more. You expected me to put on a pretty outfit and be absolutely no one to you, to squelch every human emotion so much that I’d be an absolutely absent nothing.

And yes, this was my idea, I’ll admit. Denial is a tenacious thing.

“Shame!”

Is a feeling that many people have, especially when it comes to their assholes. Given the amount that I panicked after our last exchange, I’m guessing my shame runs pretty deep. That doesn’t somehow make me a bad player or a bad partner; it just makes me a person whose body has a lot of stories in it, just like everybody’s.

“Apologies!”

Yes, there were many. I shouldn’t have tried to stay friends with someone who made me so sorry all the time, but I did. Because I’m in a weird place, because I loved you and felt like I should learn you, because I wanted to get laid in the midst of my mess of a life.

I started this post angry but something about answering those exclamations helped. Here’s what I think: For any given encounter, I think we all deserve to value each other as whole beings. I deserve to have wishes and hopes both dashed and realized, because that’s what it is to be a real live girl. I deserve to dream and plan and fantasize, and to let go of anyone who makes me feel like those dreams are way too far away.

Steampunk Girl told me the story of her first time having anal sex, a process that took months because her partner was so loving and thorough and gentle. I loved that story but honestly didn’t picture myself finding someone who’d have that much time for me. Something in me must’ve believed it was possible, though, and I love her for getting that story stuck in my head, for giving me better expectations, for (eventually) making me admit I wanted nothing less. Not more expectations, or fewer, just better ones.

Roadblock #4: Misdirected Anger

Don’t get me wrong, friends. I’ve seen some real jackassery in the past couple of years, and some of the outrage I’ve expressed has been proportional. But there were times when someone fucked up at about a 3 and I got upset at a 10, making it hard to have any perspective or move on with any kind of grace, often leaking friendships and potential friendships in the wake of the panic and hurt.

Part of the reason that guys’ messups end up being so devastating is that often I interpret them as containing some information about me. When Mr. Sweetheart forgot that it was our phone date night, I felt like the message was that I was inherently forgettable, not that he was just maybe a little silly and overbooked that week. When The Man acted like I wasn’t there, it activated a deep-seated fear that I might not exist, that he treated me like nothing because I actually was nothing. To fight that fear, I had to fight him, but that got me exactly the opposite of what I wanted. That’s part of the reason I’m trying to excavate and acknowledge those fears—it’s no one’s job but mine to soothe and fix them.

I think another reason I’ve made guys into enemies is out of some crackpot subconscious attempt to stay close to Sweetie, a way to let her keep saving me. We could snuggle up together and bemoan whoever was breaking my heart that week, and it kept me from having to actually go ahead and open up. I’ve tended to blame her introversion and monogamy for our isolation, but I was fighting off expansion too. I didn’t want to lose her to what I really wanted, so I made what I wanted into the enemy.

Like anyone who lashes out, I’ve often done it out of a sense of helplessness. For most of my life, I’ve seen myself as someone who is made automatically powerless by men, who has to always fight to get that power back. That’s just a false impression brought about by the tropes of trauma, and I’m doing my best to train myself out of it.

But I think a lot of the misdirected anger came from frustration—it was hard to live without male companionship all those years—I’m angry that I’m almost 39 and just now learning to let go and enjoy PIV sex in the grown-up way that I want to. I’m very sad that it took me this long to make friends with the penis, and now I have this ravenous urge to make up for lost time that just hasn’t translated into real life.

I am angry at Sweetie for all of the shame that came out of our mismatch, all of the times she called me a slut or a stupid cunt or a whore, all of the times she contemptuously spat out “Just because I don’t want to fuck anyone else…” or “Just because I don’t have a penis…” She said “fuck” and “penis” in the same tone of voice she might also use to say “George W. Bush.” I’m angry at her for reinforcing my fear that I’m a bad feminist for wanting to submit, and I’m angry at her for crying over recreational bruises or hot blog posts. The things I most love about myself, or most want to love, were the things that made her miserable and bitter.

I am so angry with myself for refusing to admit what I really wanted, for keeping us in a no-win situation for so long. I’m angry about the nonsense I’ve put up with in the hopes that the right boyfriend might take the pressure off and save the marriage—I’m so glad if that factor is never a part of my dating life again.

When we made the decision to divorce, about 80% of the anger just evaporated. I started to feel embarrassed about all of the times I’ve lashed out, and I made a mental apology list. I’ve been unblocking and refriending people and doling out apologies, and each one is a humbling relief. It feels good to come out and say hey, I was an asshole, but I’m committed to being less of one.

About a year ago, Sweetie and I had a terrible fight during which she locked the door and refused to let me leave. When I finally got past her and out the door, I sat in the car and called my mom to ask her to help me get a divorce. Mom talked me out of it, telling me that even if I had a different partner, I’d never be better, that the fights were a part of me I couldn’t change. (Never mind that no one else had ever locked me in an apartment or called me a cunt.) I am excited and inspired to start proving my mother wrong, to heal myself and then find partners who can disagree and express unhappiness without being terrifying, to stop going through the world always a little bit scared. I believe I can be better.