Trauma Work Summer Part Three

 

Me at 16. That Deee-Lite-esque print top was my absolute favorite. Mom even got all the blood out after the Main Trauma!

Things got decidedly unlovely with the Summer Princess since I last wrote. I don't know how much I'll share about that, but it's part of a pattern. My pattern is, every couple years I burn out, need lots of rest, and want to flee whatever job I'm in at the time. The fleeing is generally for good reason, (The current one definitely is!) but I've never had this happen with two jobs at almost the same time!

The burnout cycle is partly just because of being really sensitive and spotting too many patterns, and maybe inadequate autism support. But also it's a chime of an old, rotten memory, the source of the intrusive thoughts that I've harmed myself and others with so much over the years: 

"I don't belong here. I have to get out of here before I get hurt." 

But, can intrusive thoughts sometimes just be intuition? Because sometimes, a lot of the time, I leave because a place isn't safe. 

I already wrote to you about my Worst Trauma, it's here if you dare. The one I'm working on this summer and telling to my therapist over and over ever Wednesday morning and then listening to recordings of on most other days, happened a few weeks after The Main Trauma. It's kind of worse because instead of violent near-strangers assaulting and berating me, it was my own dad.

I was sixteen and trying to let myself heal, but I couldn't find quiet or space to heal because at the same time, my parents' fights ramped up to new levels. On the night in question, my dad kicked my mom down the stairs, and I got in his face about it, like "Stop hurting my mom!" 

He was like "She kicked me in the balls so I kicked her down the stairs!"

Totally normal sentence to just keep living in my brain.

I kept yelling at him, and then he lifted his fists above my head and started pounding on me--head, shoulders. Ears. I crouched down on the floor and made myself as small as I could get, but he just kept pounding, and kicking too.

"You brought this into our house," meaning that I had caused my parents violence (with us my whole life long) by getting raped and assaulted.

That's the moment that I'm stuck in, and it translates to:

I'm bad.

I'm worthless.

I have to stay away from everybody or I'll bring this upon them, too.

When I called my friend B. for help, I was scared of scaring her, I tried to sound as calm as possible while I told her what was happening. I was afraid of her coming to get me because I thought dad might hurt her too, but I'm so, so grateful that she came.

At her place, I got those moments of peace that I needed. I don't remember talking too much or anything, but it felt good to be near her. She was a new friend, an art pal from school I was really excited to be getting to know! 

Though I wasn't out yet and wouldn't have put into words, I was attracted to this pal! Even in the hollow tunnel of trauma my brain was in, I felt giddy to be close to her, sleeping on her floor, floating free of my nightmare of a life. 

B's mom said I could stay longer, but my mom wanted me at home. When I got in the car, I saw that she had two black eyes to match my own. She wanted to stop for concealer, but I wanted her to let it show, so someone would see and help us. We were stranded on an island of terror together, and I was mad about having to go back to that terrible, haunty house, but here in 2025 I'm glad she wanted me with her.

I couldn't see how I could have a life after that night, I still don't see how I can make a life even though I've been making a life ever since.

I hate that the bad memories sometimes Godzilla through and help me sabotage my life. I hate this story and all the other trauma stories. Today, I kinda hate myself. I'm at a loss to imagine what my life will be like from here.

All I know is that tomorrow, I'll go to Summer Job and pick up a few things. I'll rest a little before my main job starts next week. I'll keep doing my trauma work assignments, including visiting my high school home town next week as a culmination of all my exposure therapy. I have no idea if I'm doing the right things, if I'm making it worse, but all I can do for now is the next thing, and keep writing.

The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow, Part Eight

I’ve read and thought so much about the ways that trauma gets stored in the body, the way that it lives and moves and gets processed in a way that is separate from time and the everyday. Why don’t I know very much about the way love is stored? I’m always pretty dazzled by the way that unexpected things can jostle it loose, can strike a gold vein and expose it, all sparkly and vulnerable and ready for mining.

After the first giddy rush of paintings and artifacts, we got some very strong coffee and sat outside the museum in the chilly sun, catching up. I honestly could have talked to him for five hundred and seventy-two more hours. I didn’t ask him enough about his last thirty years of adventures, I wish I’d talked less and asked more.

In the course of reminding me of my born-again-virginhood at the time we were together (It feels so cringy to even type, I’m sorry!) he said A Thing. It was A Thing that, I’m serious, rewired my entire brain. He was maybe just being campy and probably at least half joking but it hit me right down the middle anyway:

“You could’ve put out more.”

It set me free so much to hear this perfect angel I had idealized for so long just say a horny, jackassy man thing to me. The idea, even the little chance, that he had felt real desire for me shifted my perspective an embarrassing amount, really changed the way I saw myself in the past and present. It was unbalancing and delightful.

As you know if you’ve read this blog in past years, the story I can’t help telling myself about men is, they can (temporarily) want me, but they can’t love me. I believe this even though love has happened to me with men at least three times. I don’t know why the story is so embedded but no amount of paragraphs or therapy has ever dislodged it.

The story I’ve always told myself about The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow is that he was an innocent child whom I tried to corupt with my broken and slutty ways. I was a Bad Kid who hurt him. Seeing myself as a threat in general is one of the most annoying ways that rape culture has gotten under my skin, and I am happy to peel away another layer of it.

(Honestly though, writing this feels like I AM being a threat to him, like I’m still a bad influence on his lovely and put-together and situated life. I’m afraid I’m writing him right out of my life, that paragraphs are predatory in their own way, but I’m writing through it. Maybe I can be a good bad influence or maybe not I’m not even an influence at all, who knows.)

Exploring the rest of the museum felt like one of those dreams where you keep discovering new rooms in old and beloved homes. (Writing this feels like one of those dreams where I meet a man I’m fascinated with then spend the rest of sleep tangled up in dream logic trying to find him again. But not in an unpleasant way.) The time just flew by until he had to go meet his boyfriend for lunch. We made plans to hang out in my city next time, at my local museum.

Sweetie had driven me to visit the Boy, so she finished up her time at the local fancy garden and met us in front of the museum. We waved goodbye and then she and I spent the rest of the day exploring and catching Pokémons.

I was crushy, and giddy, and elated, and trying not to be embarrassed about all those things. I had to admit to myself that teenage me, like Rory Gilmore, had had a wonderful boyfriend. (But way better than Dean and without the Donna Reed cosplay.) More vexingly, I had to (for like the millionth time) admit to myself that I still believe in and long for love, that my erstwhile fantasy life of asexuality and spinsterhood might not actually be what I want. Ugh, longing. I guess I was lucky to avoid it for the few months that I did.

The next day, my whole body felt like spring and I made the super most of it. I got naked on the (very private) back patio and made myself a new chalk mural. I danced in the sun like a goof and then went to bed for a very good long time. I want to give you all the details, but it seems like somehow Favorite Aunt would know.

So I’m trying to think of ways to honor my slutty self this summer—I can’t make the Sparkly Festival, but shall I brave the nude beach? I’ve definitely gone back to swiping, and I’m letting myself think that snuggles might not be too far away. It’s nice to be back in the present tense, grateful and glowing.

The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow, Part Six

He wore the fish shirt to the stupid drama performance, I think. I mean, he probably did, he was very sweet and thoroughly thoughtful.

I had so looked forward to him being inside my school, I so wanted to snuggle and PDA it up and show him off to my friends, but I couldn’t connect. What I remember of that weekend was sadness, a feeling that I was losing him, that he didn’t love me anymore, that all was lost. Whatever grace had shined upon me over the summer, whatever suspension of disbelief, had left me and now I felt a million miles away from everything.

The sadness, distrust, resentment, and disappointment I was feeling (toward the world, not toward him, he one of the few people I could probably have trusted) didn’t leave much room for kindness, tenderness, affection, love. Sometimes it still doesn’t.

But instead of being able to articulate all that, I was just an asshole. I had discovered, during one of our conversations, that he couldn’t name all four Beatles. The 8X10s from my dad’s White Album hung on my Smurf-blue bedroom wall like a shrine. John Lennon was like a religion to me, (I know! I’m sorry! Women born in the Seventies (or probably at any other time ever) are pretty fucked for pop culture father figures.) it being decades before I wised up and converted to Yoko-ism.

So I concluded, in archetypal teen-asshole fashion, that if he didn’t know the Beatles, he couldn’t possibly know me! (I’m not sure why I wouldn’t have just made him a mixtape? Somewhere in there is the sexist assumption that boys should provide the music?) I’m utterly cringing as I type this part of the story, (I still panic sometimes about weird pop culture disconnects. It’s one of my very worst qualities.) but there was a grain of truth there—not about the Beatles, just about life.

I didn’t understand (I still don’t understand, really) how he, over there all beatific and (I assumed) untraumatized, might really be able to understand the fear, pain, and horror that had colonized my head, my heart, my body. If I would have told him, he probably would have listened, but it all seemed too dirty and bad for him to know about and besides, I couldn’t even express those things to myself. So I was mean. I was petty. I wrote a dumb letter and broke it off about the Beatles.

(Favorite Aunt was PISSED: “He is wonderful and perfect and you just threw him away.” So not too long after that I lost her support for a while too. That was probably okay—when it was time for me to come out as bi she was pretty crapola.)

There’s part of my mind, a part I’ve only in the last few weeks decided to debunk, that had me convinced for the longest time that someone as messed up and harsh and inside-ugly as me could never have deserved his sweet and generous love. I’ve sometimes felt that about Sweetie too, about my nieces, nephews, and students, about my friends and, on the worst PMS days, about my cats.

No matter how much I meditate or get therapy or just generally live a kind and awesome life, I still have the stubborn belief that I’m just a goth-girl Tasmanian Devil of grief, despair, and destruction, annihilating everything and everyone around me until I’m back to my natural state—alone, safe, everyone once again safe from me.

But it’s well past time to let that belief shift. Thinking that The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow was a generous angel and I was a selfish mess is not only unhelpful, it’s dehumanizing. Past or present, he deserves better than to be stuffed in a box of imagined virtue, and I certainly don’t need to keep considering myself a threat. I’m glad it only took a few hours in a museum to start unraveling that story I’ve been telling myself, to wonder what will happen if we just get to try out being real human friends.

The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow, Part Five

An old painting, but apt. <3

It was such a pleasant weekend but I’m antsy to get back to the story, anxious for the part where the paragraphs drop me back in 2019, on a few-weeks-ago bright spring day in a nearby city, surrounded by people with fancy dogs and deeply curated outfits, pleasantly arguing with Sweetie (Still ex-wife, now freakishly close best friend and co-aunt) whether I was stopping to take pictures of forsythias or just boring yellow leaves.

While driving toward family for Easter, Sweetie and I decided to play YouTube DJ, with the rule that we could only pick fun-to-sing but wholly undignified songs. This led to a lot of belting hair-metal ballads and the over-optimistic decision to swing by my teenhood home. I was curious and it was on the way. I had this idea that it would be healing to be there and see how un-evil the place was, to be there as a strong adult with a reliable car for easy escape. But we hit a bad pothole and a hubcap flew off my pretty car, and Sweetie was worried about the tire.

Even if there hadn’t been car-upset though, the street would have felt rotten and bleak. Not even a couple of Pokéstops could redeem it—that place doesn’t deserve Pokéstops! The sky was trauma-grey and there was no escaping the fact that this was the place where the worst things of my life happened. The little park made me so angry and the old house had been painted a particularly upsetting shade of taupe. It was old-Twilight-Zone creepy there, without the fun or charm. I fucking hate that block, I hate that I’ve spent so much therapy time on it, I hate it, hate it hate it.

The magical thinking of mental illness clicked in and I thought I had broken my lovely car by getting curious about this awful place, but the tire was fine and if I want a new hubcap, the guy at the car place is very cute. Nieces and nephews several towns over broke the spell of the bad street, my youngest nephew chose a Captain Marvel book on our traditional comic shop visit, and all was well.

Back in the nineties, it’s still that summer. I’m pining and waiting for the mail—which, now that I think about it, was my default state for the ensuing ten years. I loved the feeling that someone cute was going to send you a card or a letter or a mix tape, sometimes they even still do.

Far more painful than the pining were the long and painful treatments for STIs—who knows if I got them consensually or not, I guess it doesn’t matter. The doctor was a harsh and judgmental old man, gouging and pinching away at the hurts, freezing my insides to try and heal them. There were big, intimidating, emphatic antibiotic pills. My mom was there with me for all of it, and, though we’ve spent big chunks of our lives at odds, for this, she was kind.

Once, after a particularly harsh doctor’s visit, I was walking in town and heard kids yelling “Slut!” out of a pickup truck at me. The summer was half ugly insult, half beautiful dream.

When school started again in the fall, everyday life settled onto me like a weighted blanket, not in a pleasant way. I gained so much weight (though I’m sure I was teensy compared to today, but this was WAY before Dietland/Roxane Gay/Shrill.) that my drama teacher (No Kate Moss herself) took it upon herself to tell me that I needed new jeans. I remember those jeans, high-waisted and acid-washed to almost white, devolving into a permanent wedgie as I got bigger. I want to say I didn’t care, it seemed like I didn’t, but I seem to remember it a little too vividly.

(This might have also been why I only got the teensiest, tinesiest part in that fall’s Drama Club production, one scream from backstage in a murder mystery. I hate this drama teacher. She also told me I’m too tall to ever be a leading lady, which I guess is true in the patriarchal sense. Fuck that lady though.)

ANYWAY, there was a very bright spot to look forward to! The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow was coming up with Favorite Aunt for the Drama Club production, maybe in early October. In anticipation, still glowing with love about the pillow, I sewed him a shirt.

Objectively, this shirt was probably pretty hideous. I LOVED fabrics that made not sense back then, I really kind of still do. It was aqua blue, light green, and purple, with a large and semi-realistic-looking fish print. (He told me the other week that it also had tiny turtle buttons, a detail I thoroughly enjoy.) It was the most structured thing I ever sewed, with a collar and buttonholes and all kinds of ironing and steps. There is NO WAY I would ever have the patience for all those steps today, good job teenage me.

The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow, Part Four

That teenage summer, there were just a few moments between us that genuinely felt connected to sex, at least as I understood it then. I remember being on top of him, both of us thoroughly clothed, on the floor of Favorite Aunt’s sewing room, while a family party went on below. It’s hard not to imagine myself with the intent an evil scientist, trying to pin down a beautiful and helpless butterfly. I’m not sure if he remembers it that way, if he remembers it at all. Present-day signs point to no on the helpless-butterfly-pinning. (At least not in a bad way. But I can only speculate.)

I had sworn off sex as a respite after the Big Trauma. (He told me a few weeks ago, while having coffee outside a museum on a perfect sunny-chilly spring day, that I had referred to myself as a “born-again virgin.” A LOT. That quote both breaks my heart and makes me laugh—of course that person would become a pansexual sex blogger! I feel really awesome at life right at this moment!) Anyway, I was doing the reasonable-seeming-at-the-time thing of blaming my sluttiness, my adventurousness, for the fact that I had been drugged, raped, and assaulted at a party right before that summer.

I told the Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow that we would wait until we were old enough to get married (by which I meant, like, when I was 20 and he was eighteen) and THEN have sex. Silly as it is, that strikes me as a pretty badass thing to say to somebody, especially someone you’ve only known a few weeks. Imagine saying that to a 2019 guy! Back then, the idea felt romantic and like a relief from all of the impersonal sex my body and soul had been though the previous school year. (Sex which, LET ME MAKE IT CLEAR, I chose a lot of and some of which I really enjoyed. I wonder if I can write about it in detail sometime?)

When I found out, years later, that the Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow (By then technically the Man Who Sewed Me a Pillow) ended up with a guy, I imagined he had been relieved by our lack of sex, maybe for the chance to rest in the performance of heterosexuality before embarking on the road out of the closet. So many oversimplified assumptions in one sentence! I told myself this story for DECADES, and maybe it is true, but I’m pretty appalled at my binary thinking, the ability to write off my own experience as well as the entire spectrum of sexuality and desire, even in the face of so much experience and SO, SO many paragraphs.

This seems like a good place to stop and let it all sink in over the long weekend. Kondo-ing my feelings takes a lot, and right now is that part where all the emotions are in piles all over the place and I need to slow down, touch each one, and see what sparks joy. Maybe next week I’ll finish the story and then everything will be treasured and have a place.

Dear people who are kind enough to read this, enjoy your Easter or Passover or Cherry Blossom Festival. Eat chocolate and look at flowers, I love you.

The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow, Part Three

After I said goodbye-for-now to the cute boy and went home from the respite of Favorite Aunt’s, that summer is a fog of dissociated memories, but I remember this:

My mom wanted me to get out of the house into the sunshine, but I was afraid. She wanted me to walk a few miles down the rural stretch of road that our suburban street turned into, to pick some daylilies, sweet peas and black-eyed susans. (The only way I’m sure of the timeline of this memory is the kind of flowers she wanted me to go visit. The clock of the year has always been a loyal friend.) In fairness, flower-picking had been my m.o. since I was very little, on any given stretch of road. But just then, I felt frozen and afraid, in need of the deepest kind of privacy.

Mom said “Do it while you can, before you’re married and trapped and you can’t do anything.”

(I have to wonder what horrible-but-sort-of-true advice I’ve given my nieces and nephews and students over the years, what they’ll be typing into their blogs and/or quoting to their therapists…)

I couldn’t argue with her (for once) and I didn’t have a better idea of what to do with my afternoon. While I was recovering (or not) from the Big Trauma, my mom was concealer-ing her own bruises (I never covered mine, I felt like people should know. I still do, obvs.) and navigating her stay in a violent, contemptuous marriage, a lifetime of hurt, of controlling and being controlled. So I went and picked the the flowers. I felt empty and not-there, a summer afternoon in quotation marks, but I remember the colors. Maybe she was right, maybe the flowers did save me. (And also right that marriage feels like a trap, although in my case definitely a trap of my own making.)

In addition to flowers, better than flowers, even, that summer there was MAIL. The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow sent letters, and I wrote back on dolphin-themed stationary. (Why dolphins? I actually have no idea. I don’t think we saw dolphins at the beach or anything. Anyway, dolphins it was.)

(I wish Marie Kondo had a term for the opposite of sparking joy—the pang you feel when you realize you gave away something precious you probably should have hung onto. In my early twenties, I did my first performance art piece: I built a small pyramid of shiny pink boxes, suitcases, and other shiny pink things, all filled with memories and other things I (thought) I wanted to give away. I liked knowing that a stranger was taking home a collaged shoebox full of all my love letters, three loves to that date and so, so much treasure. The idea made me feel more connected to the world at large, but the practice left me with loss and emptiness. I’m glad there are blogs now so I can give away all my love stories to strangers and still keep them safe with me. And letters stay with me forever now, Marie or no Marie.)

(Another thing about Tidying Up: In addition to the excitement of having neat closets and always knowing where my headphones are, I like the way that Kon Mari has helped me to unstick myself from the present. “Live in the moment” seems like excellent advice for an Insight-Timer-addicted chakra enthusiast like me, but in practice, living in all of my timelines is better. It’s less lonely with all my past selves, past loves, past friends, past cities closer at hand and closer at heart, integrated with today—that’s kind of what this story is about.)

As you know by his name, he sewed me a pillow. I think he gave it to me on a visit, I remember hugging it on a Greyhound bus. (It’s also possible that he mailed it to me but I brought it on a Greyhound bus to hug. Totally something I would have done.) Favorite Aunt must have helped him make it. It was light purple satin, with a darker purple lace around the edges. There was a purple applique of a dolphin in the middle. It is the most perfect object I have ever owned, and I have no idea what happened to it. It might have been a casualty of cat pee in my first apartment, or perished in a housefire in my skater flophouse fourth-fifth-or-sixth apartment. I wish I had taken better care of everything ever. I’m amazed that I have anything left.

There were a few more days with The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow that summer. I think there were some cancelled plans, too—I remember being sad in a mine where you could look for phosphorescent rocks. When we were together, we got in our own little world (well, our own little world that almost always included Favorite Aunt) of giggles and inside jokes.

Also, we went to church together, holding hands sweetly in the front pew. I felt fresh and new there, cleansed, like I was doing something right for the first time in my entire life. It makes me really, really sad to think of that feeling, the idea that he, in addition to being an actual person I thoroughly adored, could feel like a source of legitimacy and redemption to a young woman who would maybe never know she needed neither. I want to rescue us both from that aspect of things, swoop in like Carol Danvers and sweep us both to a field somewhere, tell us both that we’re perfect and lovely and queer and have everything to offer, that the Catholic Church could just fuck right off.

Maybe he never would have needed that rescue, maybe he always knew his whole worth, maybe coming out was a breeze or a nonissue, who knows? We’re getting a little into not-really-my business territory, I haven’t asked him the million questions I have yet.

For a long time, I didn’t acknowledge the real connection between us because all of the Catholicism and trauma and patriarchy involved convinced me I must’ve been just a burden to him. For a long time the whole thing just seemed orchestrated, like a performance of normalcy that was probably less than convincing, a feint at something like virtue.

But then, weekend before last, my body was near him for like two seconds before I realized that that interpretation of things was nonsense, just as dumb and reductive and confining as religion itself. My body knew what my mind had written off, had stored love in my muscles and bones and veins for thirty years and gave it back to me like a gift, like a miracle.

Between us, this is still a very chaste kind of story. Within me, it is decidedly not.

The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow, Part Two

The Cool Room in Favorite Aunt’s house is still one of the most comforting rooms in the many-roomed house of my heart. It was where the air conditioning lived in that sweltering, old-fashioned house. It was perfectly Eighties and all the way comforting, wood-paneled walls, small, curtained windows, deep-turquoise-blue couch with some kind of white print, maybe flowers. Pleasantly cavelike, with a glass pocket-door that maybe we slid shut. It was where the TV lived, and where The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow and I somehow found ourselves alone.  (I still don’t quite understand how that happened, can’t decide if it was kind of Favorite Aunt to leave us alone or if it was weird creepy matchmaking—it’s occurring to me that I never experienced non-sneaky, non-naked kids-being-attracted-to-each-other situations so I really have no idea how it’s supposed to go.)

How it went was, chaste, beatific, awkward, sweet. I lay snuggled in his arms for long, quiet stretches of time.

Until him, I had only been kissed by selfish, careless, insistent (and, by 2019 standards, sometimes pretty rapey) men and boys, so there is a very good chance that I was a terrible kisser.

My new friend may have had less experience at kissing than I did, but I think he had much more experience treating others like human beings. If my kisses were terrible, hungry, aggressive things, he took it in stride. I can hope that he eventually mellowed me to a more loving and thoughtful pace. Or maybe we were just teenagers doing our best.

After what seemed like hours of making out but probably wasn’t, he said “No thank you” and backed his face away. That hurt and felt like a mystery, but I think (I hope) I just put my head on his heart and gave it a rest. There were eventually more snuggles and more kisses, but I’ve always wondered if I or society or Favorite Aunt or all three of those things pressured him into continuing to kiss me. I didn’t think about any of that at the time. My heart was floating and selfish and somehow also generous with joy. I was a blooming little flower of love.

I forget where we were going or coming home from, but I have a powerful image of laying in his lap in the backseat of Favorite Aunt’s van, in another highway sunset. Pink sky, low-flying airport planes, lots of toll booths. I gazed up at his face feeling both blissful and disjointed—was this the face I would love forever? The answer, as with most faces I’ve been that close to, is both absolutely yes and not at all.

Dating in the Upside-Down: A Like-Story (Part Two)

This isn’t one of those stories where I ignore a red flag and then everything goes awry—everything went PERFECTLY.

For our second date, I asked if he wanted to come over and watch a few episodes of Stranger Things, Season 2. The perfect, spooky, romantic, music-y date, I was proud of myself for thinking of it. I stocked the freezer with toaster waffles and he volunteered to bring wine. Again with the giddy.

When he arrived, (SO big and tall, dressed nicely all in black, looking like he was just custom-made for me…) I mentioned that I’d found our local radio station’s Halloween special “Too Bauhaus-y” and he said there’s no such thing. He showed me his Halloween Spotify playlist and it was indeed very Bauhaus-y, and also full of The Cure, and The Smiths, as well as a little Marilyn Manson I could mock him for: PERFECT. So perfect as to seem fictional. Maybe I was just really, REALLY happy to have a guy on my couch.

Even though it was a Netflix date, I’d worn my favorite red lace dress, and as soon as he sat down next to me, I started to suspect that the dress was coming off before too long. He had a warm, open energy, and draped his arm invitingly over the back of the couch. I think it took me about one episode to snuggle in, and when I did, it felt like it such a natural, easy fit. His hands (I’d spent all week thinking about them, tempted to text and ask if he liked spanking people) were big, soft, and warm, gently but insistently affectionate. As he stroked my arms, my hands, my hair, it became harder to concentrate on the Hawkins goings-on, though nothing could distract me from the terribleness of Bob’s taste in music (Team Bob 4life though) and the awesomeness of the rest of the soundtrack.

I finally turned my head and kissed him (is there anything better than that moment?) during episode three—it was easy, delicate, soft. I pulled away after a little bit (“Wait I really want to see what’s on that video tape!”) and made intermittent attempts to stay focused on the plot points, but after a while, it was time to switch to music, my mix called “Dreamy music” which has an inexplicable and not-super-helpful amount of Radiohead on it, definitely time to edit.

I knelt next to him on the couch and wrapped myself around him, pulled into a soft quilt of man-smell and comforting warmth. His hands went to my boobs in my favorite insistent-but reverent teenage-feeling-up way, and I growl-groaned, relieved and hungry, safe and ecstatic, just like that. He moved to the floor and spread me out over the couch like I was prey, but in the very good way.

“I’m in a place…” I said, and I was. I hadn’t been to a submissive place in my heart or head in a long time, certainly not since my ill-fated date with Mr. Makeout Music, and I was very happy to be back there.

I was wearing thick black tights, but when he ran his hand over my crotch I could feel the wetness soaking all the way through. I didn’t know whether to be embarrassed or thrilled, but I’d been this way since I met him, and it felt like very, VERY good news.

Next: I DO have a bed…

Daisy.

Between my condom struggle with J, newly-admitted motherhood wishes, #StandWithPP, and Catholicism smothering the infrastructure of major cities the way it sometime smothers the infrastructure of my heart, I realized this little almost-a-character from my teen years needed some love. My teen pregnancy-scare story sheds a strangely warm light on my current adventures.

The summer before my senior year of high school, my mom and siblings went away for a week to visit my grandparents, leaving me to fend for myself. My Best Friend, who lived a block away, came over every day and we drank what seemed like the entire liquor cabinet on the first day. My parents weren’t drinkers, so we did the ‘ol top off the bottles with water trick with little worry of being found out. I have very vivid memories of heaving up vodka and pink lemonade into the bathtub and then walking over to the diner for fries. We invited every male person we could think of over and played risqué-but-not-too-risqué Truth or Dare. I remember one of them chivalrously picking me up and carrying me across some gravel, apropos of nothing.

It was the year after the Bad Thing happened. I’d stopped being quite as slutty as I had been and purported to only have sex for love. Sometime in that week of shenanigans, Best Friend decided to introduce me to Dave. He was in a Misfits cover band, or maybe it was Danzig. It was the Nineties. She called him up, passed me the phone, and within ten minutes, he was telling me that he loved me, which I (think I) knew was insane, but the words had their desired affect. (I would repeat this mistake and lose a Twitter handle making the same mistake as an adult. *sheepish.*)

He was a teen version Bill, stocky and handsome, dark-haired and snarly. On the first day, we had angry, vocal sex with the windows open. Sometimes, when I was having sex back then, it was a simple “Fuck you.” to the world. Sometimes it still is.

The next day, after the sex, we went for a walk in the cemetery, the Catholic one that had all of the angel statuary and was therefore my favorite place to pose people moodily in front of for black and white photos. We took the bus to the mall and bought a tape, The Dead Milkmen’s Bucky Fellini.

But on the third day, it was off. He treated me like I was ugly and big, he called me by my first grade nickname, which had the word “barbarian” in it. I couldn’t make him see me or want me, and after that day, he was gone.

I desperately wanted him to be not gone. I looked for his parents’ pickup truck (a red one with one of those cover things on the back with windows) in every parking lot, hoping that I would run into Dave somewhere, that he would recognize me.

In a few weeks, I noticed that my period was late. (I haven’t always been the princess of safer sex that I am now, and I’m very grateful that the consequences were not worse.) Best Friend and I went down to the Birthright, the prolife clinic downtown, next to the little bakery where we sometimes got cinnamon donuts before school. It felt like a very grown up and important errand to be on.

I peed on a stick but never saw the stick. The nice Birthright lady, who in my memory is dressed all in pastels like a doll, just gave me the result: positive.

And I, almost-seventeen and pretty utterly lost in life, didn’t feel even a little bit of fear. Here’s what I felt: joy. The pressure of having my life ahead of me whooshed away and I knew what to do. Of course there was the silly teenage idea that I had made (literally made) a friend for life, someone who would love me and never leave, but there was also a real sense of calm and purpose. I didn’t have to worry what I was for anymore, because I only had to take care of this baby. I named her immediately: Daisy.

It’s seems bonkers now to think that no follow-up doctors appointments were made right away. There was no wait-until-third-trimester-to-tell-people rule back then either, I guess, because after I told my mom, she let me call up the aunts and tell them too. An amazing thing happened: For the first time in my short life, I felt valued and accepted. My mom was 100% on my side, and the wall of hatred that had lived between us for years temporarily came down. No one judged me or said I was bad, they just asked how they could help. My beach aunt gave me my (then) littlest cousin’s car seat.

That all of that happened without me even had a doctors appointment was complete madness, so I can be forgiven for calling the ambulance when my period came. (It warms my heart to think that my mom, who yelled at me for every single other thing, never gave me a hard time about that ambulance bill.) I called Dave, who had never picked up a phone after our third and last day together) from the hospital waiting room, grateful, if I’m honest, to have an excuse to call him, and left a message.

I wanted them to tell me it was okay, that I could still have Daisy, but what the doctors said was that the blood test proved that I had never been pregnant at all. There had either been a false positive or the lady at Birthright had tricked me as some kind of abstinence lesson. I always assumed it was the latter, but I just Googled the organization and it seems pretty not-evil, so most likely, it was an honest mistake. My main advice-giving aunt said to tell people I’d lost the baby, since technically that was true even though I’d only lost the idea of her. I do still love and miss her, even though she turned out to have been an imaginary friend.

That was twenty-five years ago and the closest I’ve ever come to pregnancy. The situation makes really no sense, but I have to take seriously the way motherhood settled over me like a magic blanket of hope and purpose. Though it’s unfair that only motherhood could unlock my family that way, I can still feel that time as an oasis of acceptance and love in those ugly and violent years.

I want to acknowledge that even as I rail against the coercions and injustices that come from the patriarchy, from the institution of motherhood, the actual spiritual fact of motherhood is in me. I felt it in those few teenage weeks, a white light lantern in my soul that I knew would guide me through it, to shiny and wonderful parts of myself.  It wasn’t really loss or fear that made me bury that light. It was just life and other projects. But it sure was a lovely little light, and even if I’m not blessed with a miracle baby or stepchildren, I would love to look for big and little ways to shine it.

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.

Big Therapy Project, Week One: Telling the Bad Story

***If you get triggered by images of sexual assault, definitely skip this series. Plenty of kittens and snuggles to come, I promise. ***

This past Sunday, my therapist helped me to begin the process of confronting the teenage trauma that’s unfortunately one of the defining factors in my psyche, in the hopes of making it perhaps less so. After I told her the story, she tasked me with starting a dialogue with my sixteen-year-old self, with the goal of reaching some kind of…forgiveness isn’t the right word…acceptance, understanding, amends? Maybe embrace. Last night after I wrote the story on paper and put it in the Box of Things to Be Worked Out Later By Unseen Forces (What, you don’t have one?), I actually could feel my young self, ragged and feral, holding onto me for dear life. Maybe I can write her to safety, since I couldn’t fight our way there.

It’s possible that such a process might repair some of the holes inside me, break down the walls of anger, defensiveness, and detachment that come between me and self-love.

Before I can start the dialogue with the girl (Let’s call her S.) I have to tell you what happened. I’ve written it here before but I think it’s important to tell it from where I am now, from a place of processing rather than panic. There are many echoes of the story in the present-day one—sometimes I’m very proud of the ways I’ve relived and rewritten it, how I came from a place of helplessness and shame and somehow became a person who wins at parties, gets rescued by the Cutest Boy, who smacked the shit out of the guy who put an unwanted hand over my mouth before I figured out I liked it. But before all that, there was this. If you read it, thank you in advance—you’re easing the project along and easing the burden.

One spring when I was in high school, my body woke up and made me antsy. Because I didn’t count myself among those who could have relationships, I opted for quick and anonymous sex with any good-looking man I could get my hands on. The basketball court, conveniently located in the park three doors down, was an easy place to pick them up, and I still kind of envy myself the ease with which I took them home, fucked them, and sent them on their way.

I’m not introducing the story of the trauma with the fact that I was slutty in order to suggest any cause and effect relationship (though I admit, for years I did) only to give you an idea of what people thought I was, what I kind of thought I was for in a situation where it might’ve been helpful to see myself any other way.

My best friend told me that her boyfriend had a friend who’d fuck me, so we set it up for a Saturday night. We did the classic thing of telling each other’s mom’s we were staying at another friend’s house and went to meet the guys. They picked us up at the grocery store, of all places.

They took us to a park on the outskirts of town. My friend stayed in the car with her guy and me and the friend hiked up a big hill that overlooked the lights of our suburban town—I wanted to leave on my glasses to enjoy the view, but he didn’t like the way I looked in them, didn’t really like the way I looked at all, I don’t think, but he fucked me anyway, doggie style, maybe so he wouldn’t see my face. I enjoyed letting out yowls that echoed through the hills, felt both pleasured and degraded, mostly kind of coldly successful at life.

When the guys were all done with us, it was only 12:30 and we’d told our parents we were at Kristi’s house so we really didn’t have anyplace to go. We sat in the little park by my house, thinking about falling asleep on a park bench, when a pickup full of whooping partiers stopped to see if we wanted to join them.

I felt absolutely no hesitation, enjoying the idea of how horrified my mom would be if she knew I was riding in the back of a pickup. They drove us to a nice, neat apartment complex with “green” in the name.

I can’t say for sure that I was drugged, but I do know I was way more drunk than the number of beers I had. They were drinking some Cisco and could have slipped that in, too. We were sitting around playing quarters and I was barely able to sit up when the ugliest, most snaggle-toothed of the men said “So, which one of us are you gonna fuck?”

I said nobody, that I’d had enough that evening, but they kept pushing and said I had to pick someone. They kept insisting and I did feel like it was who I was, like it was something I had to do, like I couldn’t escape them or my slutty self. So I picked the cutest guy there, who I also figured wouldn’t do anything because his girlfriend was with him. But he sent his girlfriend home.

He took me in the bedroom and closed the door, made me strip off all my clothes. I was kind of a sex robot. I lay beneath him and tried to do my job of making noises, but he put his hand over my mouth. I don’t remember what the sex felt like, really, just remember scrambling around after my clothes because he left the door open after so anyone could see in.

I did get most of my clothes on but after that I couldn’t really move and I started throwing up everywhere. I passed out and when I came to, everyone was hitting me, atleast 5 people including one girl, with what turned out to have been tennis rackets, blows coming down everywhere in the pitch black and I still couldn’t move. They were all calling me names, yelling at me for throwing up, telling me I was a stupid slut and in between saying “I’m sorry, I’m sorry” I was screaming my head off so that some blessed person heard and called the cops. Otherwise, those might have been my last moment on earth.

The next thing I remember was seeing my bloody face in the bathroom mirror, the girl who’d been helping to beat me up was making soothing sounds and cleaning me up. My favorite shirt (a bright mod swirly thing in the manner of De-Lite front woman and my style-hero, Lady Miss Kier) was spattered with blood.

As the police put us in a circle and questioned us, it dawned on me that my best friend had been in the front room, all of this time, standing by while those things happened, that she had let it happen.

I refused, no matter how many times they asked, to tell the police or anyone the sex part of the story. In no way did I think it wasn’t my fault for being drunk and slutty. I’d never seen The Accused, but I’d seen a review of it on Siskel & Ebert and I knew well enough who the accused would be. The not-telling is the part I feel most horribly ashamed about, the guiltiest. Some of them did go to jail for what happened, including the guy, but not for rape. I’m very, very sorry for not having done what I could to try and protect other women from that experience; I wish I could go back and do the right thing.

The following weeks were a family nightmare. My mom, horrified that I’d chosen to dye my hair the same purple as the bruises beneath my eyes, upset that it made her look like a bad mother, held my head over the tub and tried to bleach it out with Clorox. In the culmination of a fight with my mom, my dad pushed me down to the floor a week after the incident, kicked me and punched me, called me the same names the other people had and blamed me for bringing this violence into our family, though of course it had always been there. He pushed my mother down the stairs and the next day, she had bruises to match my own.

A newish friend, an artsy dykey girl I totally had a crush on, came and rescued me that night, but there wasn’t anyplace safe to be until I was shipped off for a few weeks that summer to my Catholic aunt’s house in the Maryland countryside, which had always been my favorite place in the world. I learned how to make homemade pop-tarts and fell in love with a boy from her church, who’s as gay as the day is long, but that didn’t stop us from kissing in the waves and whispering sweet nothings with the wild ponies of Chincoteague island. I took comfort in his innocence and it took me through that horrible year, but the wall of refusal and dread inside me was otherwise insurmountable. I’d already been a damaged girl, but now I was very often nothing but fight.

Being a Little Bit of a Teenager, Still

“My friends are all adults; I’m still a teenage girl.”--The Echo Friendly

We’re still on Bill, I’m afraid. Even though I haven’t been in touch with him, and after however many paragraphs, it still feels like there’s an invisible ribbon connecting me to him.

Just like Hannah’s Adam on Girls, the addictive thing about Bill (aside from the delicious way he could fling me around the room) was the way that little glimmers of affection/happiness would somehow work their way out of him. On the rare occasions that he smiled, it was like a shooting star, magical but burning out quickly. Genuine moments of tenderness (or what I perceived as genuine moments of tenderness) punctuated the callousness, the dismissiveness, the occasional gentle choking. I guess I can admit now that I am every cliché girl with daddy issues, and those brief flickers of attention hit a nerve so deep that I couldn’t help but crave more. That’s what makes men so dangerous for me.

One such flicker of tenderness happened one morning while I was cooking Bill breakfast. The very sad Nineties song I’d named myself after (not “Pretty Ribbons”—my everyday name is made up too.) shuffled on and I said “Sheesh, what a song to name myself after. Good job, seventeen-year-old me.”

He smiled one of those rare smiles, looked happy and satisfied down to his core, took my face in his hands and kissed me, like seventeen-year-old-me was the most precious thing in the whole world. I’d certainly never seen her that way, it was wonderful to feel recognized and loved for a part of myself I’ve fought all this time.

The next song to come on was Violet by Hole. “At least I didn’t name myself after this one.” I said, “Though I would have been cute as a Violet.”

Again, the smile. He gathered me up protectively and gave me another perfect kiss. Whenever I hear either of those songs, I remember what it felt like when he saw that part of me and liked it.

Who knows what he really meant by it—probably he meant “I like kissing.” But to feel like someone loved the part of me I hated, it hit me so deep and it’s hard to get past it.

In the six months since I started dating guys, I’ve often felt like a teenager—naïve, curious, volatile, needy, horny and scared. Getting all grossed out because I didn’t know it was common to put condoms on sex toys, being all teary-obsessed before I really know someone, feeling like I have to fight for my body to be my own territory, wanting to jump up and down and say “Sex is a big deal, people!” when most people just take it in stride, none of those things feel like being an adult. It feels a lot of the time like being a lost, hurt kid, craving connection and wanting to experience springtime properly, but wandering into pitfalls and getting stuck.

Part of the reason I’m stuck there, is because I want to save that person, fix the traumas, not just the big, scary ones, but the everyday indignities of being a teen girl who doesn’t like herself. I feel like I’m a little bit of a perfectionist this time around, because my real first times were so depressing.

I don’t know where I got this idea, but when I was fourteen, I knew I was so ugly that no one would ever want me. So when Rob Kilgore (I’m sorry, but that’s really his name, and it’s too illustrative not to use.) said that if someone didn’t fuck with him, he would jump in the river and drown, I volunteered. My first kiss was mere moments before my first sex, and I have to say the former was more impressive than the latter. It took all of probably five minutes. My best friend Sherri was making out with her boyfriend in the next room. One of the following songs was playing:

Afterwards, when I was sitting in Sherri’s kitchen bleeding and reading the funnies, I read a horoscope that said my life had changed for the better, and I hoped that much was true.

Stupid as it sounds, I thought Rob Kilgore and I would have a special connection after that, and that things would change for me in recognition of my new found womanhood—I thought I would somehow be more acceptable to people. What did happen is that his girlfriend, Lisa (in my memory, all of the blondes in acid washed jeans from the late Eighties are called Lisa) quietly called me a freak and told me to stay away from him. But I would always hope for recognition. The following Friday, I wore the same shirt I’d worn that night, a T-shirt I’d designed with an intricate puff-paint pattern of hearts, ankhs, peace-signs. I walked past the high school (I was still in middle school) hoping he would see me, and he did, but he was never more that cordial.

Whenever he was at the youth center, I was always aware of him, and always aware when whatever-song-it-had-been came on. I thought he might notice and catch my eye, but of course he never did.

A while later, maybe a year or so later, I ended up over at the Kilgore house. His bedroom was in an unfinished basement; his bed was a waterbed on a raised platform. I’d worn my favorite underwear, shiny white satin with a bright paisley print. I’m sorry but I have to tell you about the picture he had pinned to the wall: a vivid, comic-like illustration in mostly reds and greens of a very busty woman with her arm getting ripped (Chainsawed? Gnawed off by an alien?) off, bleeding all over the place. It didn’t occur to me then that that was going to look at during. He told me to turn around, bent me over and almost had it in before his dad came home. He and his brother were clearly scared of their dad, they hustled me out of the house. I enjoyed mourning the loss of the underwear for weeks, imagined them tacked up next to the armless lady, another thing to look at.

I don’t know why I didn’t expect more for myself, why I didn’t think I could be part of the world of dating and kissing  and whatever else. I don’t know why, but I counted myself out of the emotional aspects of sex. It was a way to both deny and fulfill my needs at once. Erica Jong would be proud of the ziplessness of the fucks that got me through most of high school. I don’t remember any of them ever wanting to look at my face, but I don’t remember all of their faces either. Maybe that’s where my silly urge to feel beautiful comes from.

I do know that the times I have felt beautiful in front of a man these past six months have been either hard to believe in (as in my very nice relationship with MKT) or have felt like the recognition was shining right through to the center of me (like the first fire kiss)—these moments are very hard to let go of, and I guess I don’t have to. I’d like to have a little bit more perspective, though, so that I wouldn’t have to cling so hard that things get devastating.

My senior year of high school when I came out as bi, I thought that it would protect me from feeling so deeply needy towards men. I did have a few good relationships with guys, but mostly, fighting and denying the need for them all these years made it stronger, warped the need into a genuine scary neurosis. If I embrace it, if I let the need in, do you think it might stop hurting me? Let’s try it.