Unicorn Stuff, Part Two: New Hearts, Old Grief

 

As I’ve been going through some old unicorn and/or metamour stories (What a very nice assignment I gave myself!) two things became clear: 1. I’ve been a little reluctant to admit the kinds of closeness I wanted because 2. My early adventures are steeped in the confusion and grief of my divorce from BFF-Formerly-Sweetie.

Looking back at the story of The Steampunks (This gold-star breakup that didn’t really take is a good example: https://kittencalendar.blogspot.com/2013/07/a-girl-crush-wall-of-grief-and-gold.html?zx=592a17ae48503cbd ) I had forgotten I was drawn to both of them. I only pursued him, though, partly because I was hankering for dudes after all my time on Lesbian Island trying to fight the bi-ness, but partly because it’s easier for me to learn one person, at least at first.

But I also had this imagined binary in my head, a loyalty-like-thing to BFF-Formerly Sweetie—I felt like an attraction to a woman was extra-betraying her. Since I’d given attraction to men as my main reason for divorce, it didn’t feel fair to still be attracted to women too. Embarrassingly, I still sort of feel this way sometimes, like liking a woman would be the ultimate betrayal of Sweetie. Being a divorced bi lady who mostly likes men is really weird sometimes.

The couples aspect of being bi still feels too big and too out of reach, too outside the boundaries of what I’m allowed. This isn’t because of anything BFF-Formerly-Sweetie said then or now. Playing with a couple, the possibility of belonging to a couple, through any combination of romance and friendship, seems like asking for too much. Even boyfriend-and-beloved-friend-metamour(s) seems too much to hope for, but I hope to learn to let myself own that wish.

In my gratitude for The Steampunks and the perspective that’s come from the last nine years I forgot how painful the breakups from them (There were four different breakups from Steampunk Guy, I just couldn’t stay away. This is part of why I’ve gotten good at staying away now.) were, how much it hurt to be told I couldn’t play with him after I divorced--“We only play with partnered people.” is truly one of the cruelest poly rules I’ve encountered.

I can see why the tears poured out when I was worried about Mrs. Shy One vetoing me, about not truly fitting into The Shy One’s life—those fears were mixed up with divorce grief and shame at wanting so badly to be approved of and the losses and indignities that came from past couples.

But every dater, every human, is walking around with past griefs and indignities. Though I’ve been journaling about past constellations privately, I don’t want to spend too much time focusing on the losses of the past, on the bitternesses that bloom out of couple privilege and my own mistakes and garden-variety thoughtlessness. If I did that, I would truly never make it to the next snuggle.

Instead, if I should encounter another couple I’m wildly drawn to, I’d like to give myself the compassion and space to absorb those emotions, to acknowledge the monumental size and power of that particular want. I’d like to learn to believe that a loving couple or boyfriend-and-metamour(s) romance is something I deserve to hope for. Of course, that doesn’t guarantee that I’ll get it, but if I do, I’ll do my best to welcome it in with kindness and an expansive heart, and most of all, a deep and boundless care for my tender self.

In Which I Realize I Am Really Lucky to Have Had My Adventure Years, Part Two

The more we walked through the fountains and gardens and woods lit in hypnotizing and artful ways, the more playful we became. He dared me to push him up against a tree and I giggled at first and then shoved him with all my strength. He exhaled sharply, pulled my arms up so they were around his shoulders, and gave me a kiss that made me feel as if I was flying and falling at once.

We made out on many benches in that garden, but the last and best was on an unlit path behind the trees where a lightshow of birds taking flight was being projected. (I have to be awesome at life to have lived that sentence.)

He kept trying to feel me up, even though I pushed his hands away over and over—we may have been in a secluded spot, but it was still a family park. I may have been ridiculously, dizzily turned on, but I still wanted respect. I told him about wanting to be valued for my whole self, and he said, don’t you notice me enjoying every inch of you? Charming and clueless at once.

We wrestled a little, and he caught my wrists behind my back with one hand, bent me forward by the hair with the other hand, and had his rough way with my nipples though my pretty satin floral dress. I let out a groan and a “Huh!”—it was spot-on and not-okay at once. After just a moment, a deep “Stop.” came up from my belly and he let me gather myself. “Good boy,” I said, and patted him on the head.

As we walked out of the woods, chemistry-drunk and holding hands, the lights, the music, the flowers, it all became too much. I couldn’t take any more sensations. I was hungry and in need of coffee, so we got directions to a nearby diner and I agreed to follow him.

I put on The National’s High Violet and was prepared for more dreaminess, but also was headachey and having trouble concentrating. We got lost on the way to the diner and I ended up following him down dark country roads. The sky was full of stars and it was the week of the Perseid Meteor Shower, and I hoped to see one, but didn’t. We did see some leaping deer. We were lost for a long while, a good forty-five minutes. My headache got worse and I had the sensation that I was following someone who did not know where he was going. I found out later it was a while before he even checked his GPS—why didn’t I check mine?

When we made it to the main road, the only thing we could find open was a Hooters. I had the thought that if we ever became a thing, this would be a funny part of the story of how we got together. I am utterly amazed by my brain’s ability to hope, to let romance bloom, and I hope that doesn’t change.

I ordered cake as an appetizer and he had Key Lime pie. We fed each other and I drank weak coffee and we both felt sad that the waitress felt compelled to address us in a baby voice.

He asked me out for a fortnight from then (He has the kids every other weekend and had apparently not yet discovered the existence of babysitters…) and I agreed that that should be when I come to his house and jump in his pool. And then, alas, we got onto the subject of our exes. His divorce was fresher than mine and he talked about her in such a demeaning way. He told me she was depressed and I immediately suspected that he had made her that way. He even called her “dense.” I said, “I don’t like this. You can’t talk about her this way.” I kind of accused him of gaslighting her, and I’m pretty sure I wasn’t wrong.

We left the restaurant and sat in my car to talk. “I really like you, but you’re scaring me.” I said, and he kept talking, about money and housework and the ins and outs of insurance. I’m not a small talk person so I do tend to learn all kinds of things about people, but I laid down the law and said this was by no means second-date talk. I said that I could just see her, trying so hard to please him and never getting it right, I said I could see the same thing happening to me and I never wanted to be in that position again. We kissed gently and hugged for a long time. I was horrified and put off but I also didn’t want to let go. He was very hard to let go of.

He got in his car and we headed toward our respective homes. There was no reason for me to follow him anymore. I turned Mumford and Sons’ “I Will Wait” the way up, sped up in as tough a way as a Yaris can manage, and passed him. I was pretty sure that was it.

Next time: And yet.

A Year After Divorce: Confronting the Fireflies

Are you there, readers? I’ve missed you. A couple of conversations yesterday made me realize that even though I don’t fit into any scenes or anything anymore, my adventures are probably far from over. I’ve missed telling you stuff, so if you don’t mind that it might sometimes just be pictures of flowers, I’ll start posting every now and again.

Yesterday an old muse texted out of the blue with concerned questions, since it seemed like I’d ended the story on a down note—it didn’t seem that way to me but it WAS a rough spring, a hard transition from poly to post-poly, from unabashed to still-unabashed-but-with-pants-on. I freak out sometimes lately because I’m not sure where I fit into the world, but I do know that things are unequivocally better than they were a year ago.

Last Fourth of July, Sweetie and I went to watch some fireworks over the river. We were lazy and dawdled getting out, still in limbo out of the jumping-out-of-the-car incident, and I was all heartbreaky about Mr. Sweetheart. We pulled over to the side of the road and watched the fireworks, having missed meeting up with friends.

As we pulled away, families were streaming across the street, kids with glow bracelets and those light up toys that are always for sale at these things. I was supposed to meet Angel Face and his new boyfriend afterwards for dancing, but I was crying so hard on the way to being dropped off at the club that I had to ask them for a dancing raincheck. Sweetie and I went for a sad, slow, humid, beautiful walk in the woods instead. (We’re lucky enough to live in a city that magically has woods in the middle of it!) Gloomy as we were, the trees were not—they were completely full of lightning bugs, so bright and blinking that they rivaled Christmas trees. Like the girl in a movie that I sometimes am, even my heartbreaks tend to unspool in an aesthetically pleasing way.

Lightning bugs were always one of our things, so when they started to return this year, I was predictably grief-stricken. (It still comes, though a little less frequently.) The more she and I get along, the harder it is not to get nostalgic and want to go back. The trapped feeling, the name-calling, the feeling that I’m way too close to death, those are all gone, only the good parts are left. I pressed myself to do evening walks on my own, and was relieved to see that the lightning bugs are still there, and I still love them.

Last night I woke up in the night for no particular reason and saw, on my ersatz bedroom clothesline, a firefly. He lit up the front of a drying beach cover-up, flashed emphatically around the room, and was gone. Can’t confront the fireflies much more than that.

So today, I woke up happy. My life may still be in flux and missing some crucial elements, but the crisis part, knock wood, is over. I’ve been placed in a school for next year that seems, at least so far, to have a less mean-girl-oriented staff. I have the summer off and a season pass to the local fancy garden, and it’s sinking in that I can go and sit by the fountains all day long if I want to. My mom is planning me a 40^th birthday party at the end of the summer and I’ll be overjoyed to blow out the candles with my niece and nephews, hopefully after a family trip to the comic shop.

And, accomplishment of accomplishments, Sweetie is now a best friend who lives a few blocks down and was persuaded to join me in being old ladies at our city’s Fourth of July concert, which features, among others, my avatar/hero Nikki Minaj. We will make no effort to be near the front. We will sit in chairs and watch people. Tomorrow maybe I’ll join my aunts and cousins at the beach.

I’m not awesome at singlehood. I do panic hard every few weeks or so at the prospect that I may have missed out on having my own family. A few weeks ago, I was staying with my sister and got to see her kids off on their second-to-last day of school, and that really lit up the family pangs inside me. Of course, it may have been less cute if I’d been trying to see myself off to school at the same time, but we’ll see what the future brings. I have no way of knowing.

My point is, dear reader (if you’re there) is that this is nowhere near being a down ending. There’s no ending here at all, just life moving forward in its gorgeous, mysterious, sometimes-aggravating way. There’s no more fighting-through-it to do for a while, and I am, for a few months, nothing but free.

Big Therapy Project, Week Five: Walking a Tightrope

I was gonna take a blog break for the privacy, but that felt too isolating and plus I need the creative outlet. I guess I just have to trust you to know I won’t always be as bleak as these weeks are.

The big challenge lately is the way that the Big Therapy Project has been making my work life tricky. As of right now, I haven’t been assigned a grade next year because the principal has some hesitations about me. It’s my first full school year as a teacher and she doesn’t feel like I’m progressing as quickly as I should in some areas and thinks (as will come as a surprise to exactly no one who reads this blog) that I can be too defensive sometimes. I wish I were learning quicker and I’m not defensive about my defensiveness, but it’s kind of hard going in every morning, knowing that I might have to let the place go.

It’s a hard job in a tough school, there may be someplace more hospitable and less triggering, where I could learn and grow faster, and now that I’m breaking myself of the habit of trying to prove that I’m a good person through sacrifice (now that I know I’m not a masochist) I don’t need to do the hardest job. I don’t like feeling that I’ve failed there, or that the next mistake might be the one to make her feel like I don’t belong. I’m really sad about all of my failures as a teacher, but also about how much time and energy it takes and how many of my actual talents aren’t usable there.

Life just feels like it’s so much about loss and futility and shame at work, and the Big Therapy Project, the one awesome thing that I am unequivocally accomplishing right now, is making the tightrope I’m walking at work a little harder. On one hand, a new sense of autonomy and groundedness is emerging, but on the other having The Bad Thing story so close to the surface often makes me want to scream at everybody to get away from me—I don’t, but I know I can often come across as anxious, and yes, defensive.

One of the major things I’m confronting about The Bad Thing is that it wasn’t my fault. All these years, I’ve been telling myself I chose my rapist, I’ve been beating myself up for the illusion that I somehow could have protected myself from what happened. But whether I was drunk or drugged, I was in no position to consent, and I didn’t. I lost my autonomy in that moment and I’ve long wanted to make sure that never happen again, giving me an inflated sense of everyday humiliations, a need to protect some imagined dignity. As I really come to terms with the fact that it wasn’t a choice, a new sense of being indignant marked IT WASN’T MY FAULT is starting to come out.

But the thing is, teaching means being held responsible for ALL KINDS of things that aren’t my fault: the child who has nine brothers and sisters and is so starved for attention that he disrupts or leaves class and often feels like he might eat me alive, the overworked special ed teacher who snaps at the grade team because her caseload is so overwhelming, the autistic child whose parents refuse to get him services, the child who is just now entering school in third grade and can’t read at all, all of those issues, along with the general awfulness of poverty violence and inequality, are things I can’t change, and they are all things that will effect my evaluations—that’s how the system is set up right now—fewer and fewer resources and more and more strict ways to judge teachers.

So the whole defensiveness thing kind of feels like a catch 22. I want to take responsibility for the things I can change and tell people to fuck off about the rest. I think that’s ultimately how I’ll be able to forgive myself if I end up getting let go. I made mistakes in a hard job, I did my best, but ultimately I can’t control if I’m a fit.

Anyway, in the course of feeling like I have to fight people off, (A character flaw that I’ve always had and which the Bad Thing exacerbated) I’ve had bouts of being very fearful and angry toward men, especially if they seem to be attracted to me. I asked the therapist about this and she said that it would probably get worse before it gets better.

My point is that two of the things I’ve found the most meaning in, my job and my body adventures, are kind of out of reach as sources for fulfillment for a while, and the work of the Big Therapy Project is slow and painstaking. Each appointment, (every two week) I tell the Bad Thing story again, sink a little deeper into it each time, and I can feel it leaving my body little by little. I take a lot of comfort in writing to/with my teenage self—I always sleep soundly afterwards and sometimes I wake up feeling like I’ve just done yoga, even though I didn’t.

I’m accomplishing something I’ve wanted to do for 20 years, but right now it’s hard to see the good sometimes. About eleven years ago, I quit smoking, and this is a very similar feeling—I stayed a way from people a lot because I was afraid I would yell at them, I felt sad all the time, I took a little too much comfort in sugar. I felt separated from the good parts of my personality for years. This is an even more loving thing than quitting smoking, I just hope it doesn’t do too much damage to my life in the process.

The therapist said to list all of the ways that loss relates to my current situation and to the Bad Thing, but every time I think about that list, I feel how big it is and I don’t know where I even could start listing. I feel blinded by it. I lost 20 years of feeling safe with men; maybe I’ll never get to feel that. I may be losing my job and all the things I love about it. I’ve lost so much of my life with Sweetie and I really don’t know which parts are okay to keep. I’ve lost so many friends from adventures gone wrong. It seems like I gave myself faith in the Mystery Family just so I could lose that faith. Dating has a necessary component of loss that I can’t handle right now, so thank goodness I’ve let that go.

How I’m dealing with it is that I’m doing my best. I’m chanting every day, taking long walks, eating lots of produce, hanging out with cute neighbor friends. Church and brunch afterwards have become my big social occasions. For all the loss, I’m free of the feeling that I’m slipping through the cracks—turning my attention to my teenage self is what I’ve been trying to convince myself to do all these years, and now I have. Sometimes it means staying home from something fun because I’m grumpy or panicky, but it also means taking responsibility for myself and settling into my own skin like I never have before. I’m doing my best. I hope I can see myself shining on the other side of it before too long.

Big Therapy Project, Week Four: Mini-Update

Well, the kids' interim reports are due tomorrow, so I'll just say it's been like this: panic, rest, write, repeat. As long as I keep the dishes up to date, keep writing reams, and! Outdoor recess! I think I can get where I'm going.

Her, The Circle, and the Meaning of Love

“That comment had 98,201 smiles and almost as many frowns, 80,198. But overall, as Mae scrolled through the messages, there was—as always when people were asked for their feelings—love.” –from The Circle, by Dave Eggers

I love a good dystopia. Her is not necessarily presented as such, it’s less judgmental than I am about the relationships people (including me) have with their devices and systems, but the when I saw it the month before last it made me see (but didn’t make me stop) the danger of disembodied love.

As everyone knows, Her is about a guy who falls in love with an operating system. You see him happily walking through the streets interacting with her, oblivious to the people present, many of whom are doing the same thing with their devices. We’ve all heard the lecture about technology making us too detached, but when it became a love story, I started to see the real horror in it. But the bad guy is not the technology; the bad guy is the void inside us that fuels the abstraction itself.

One of the saddest parts of Her to me was when the OS, feeling bad about not having a body, strikes up a relationship with a “surrogate,” a woman whose dream it is to help human/Os couples consummate their love. The scene is unicorn-familiar, especially when the plan backfires and the surrogate is rushed to a cab and dismissed, more human than the love interest but already irrelevant to the story, even as she professes to love both of them forever. That scene made me ashamed of every attachment I’ve formed to what is not and will never be mine just because I don’t feel good enough to just go ahead and have my own stuff.

Eventually, he finds out that the OS, being as expansive and superhuman as she is, has something like 693 other love relationships going. This has been praised elsewhere as a happy poly moment, but to me it was a real horror. This man was right to realize that he wasn’t special, that he wasn’t really loved. She was, as he and the audience had nearly forgotten, a machine, and it didn’t mean the same thing to her as it did to him. It couldn’t have “meant” anything—he was loving a thing that couldn’t truly feel.

All of this takes place in an emotional landscape familiar to me: divorce grief. Like my own love-simulacra of late, I think he was making a way to find love in the midst of grief, a place that is (to me, at least) essentially isolating. To be able to be both in love and alone, to have a love we could turn off at night and who would be there every time we log on, would be such a gorgeous risk-free solution, but the proximity-craving realities of love just don’t allow it, and aloneness has to prevail, even if it feels horrible. Grief from a lost relationship feels a little like death, and death is necessarily a one-person affair.

When, at the end of a movie, the OS is gone and he finds himself on a rooftop with a real-life friend, we feel relieved for him. He may be lonely and sad, but he is embodied, and the opposite of embodied is dead.

The Circle is not so gentle and kind. It’s set in a not-too distant world where social networking has been taken to the most absurd degree. The main character works for some totalitarian version of Google and as her job progresses, she goes further and further away from authentic experience and her life is more consumed by an oppressive “sharing” that both fuels her and opens up a tear in her soul. She says that making her life “transparent” and letting her every moment be filmed, she is assuring herself that she is seen and therefore has proof that she exists, but who she is eroded and shaped by the ever-present audience.

In the end (SPOILER ALERT) she gives up her last chance at a real physical connection and really any kind of physical life at all, all to preserve the thread of comments that follows her everywhere she goes.

Though I’m still trying to understand the pain of being told I’m not “real life,” of being wanted but not wanted as a physical thing (and therefore really not wanted at all) what I’m writing about here is not the internet, but grief itself. Those two stories so perfectly mirrored my story, the way I used internet “love” and “support” to cope with the emptiness inside me and then was devastated to find that the love itself was empty. Though I am still very ashamed of what I went through with the Mystery Family, I can forgive myself—grief is very hard to face. Like the Valentine chocolate I’m still kicking, it sucks to be without those admittedly false prop-ups, the illusion of relationship I got from peering in at somebody else’s, the insincere stream of love-chemicals pulsing through me with no real release.

The worst part of facing grief is the feeling that I no longer have anything to offer. I’m not hot, or cute, or entertaining. Just as I couldn’t really serve the Mystery Man’s life in any meaningful or vital way, I worry that I no longer serve my readers.  I have nothing to offer you some weeks but pain and boredom, and I miss bringing you something fun and good. I want to have something to offer and share, and dealing with The Bad Thing feels supremely selfish, this project feels so far up its own ass sometimes I could scream. For so long I’ve found a sense of purpose and worth in being fun and sex-positive, and when I’m not I feel I’m not serving the world in the way I want to. Though it’s not the way I want to live my life, I want to only be something you’d want to read, and that’s really, really hard to let go of.

The point here, I think, is not that social networking “love” is evil or bad, but that being embodied hurts and I see the appeal of trying to escape from it. As much as it’s been my quest to settle in to my own skin, to live as close to home as I can, sometimes the pain is too much. But always, at its core, disembodiedness feels very much like sneaking a peek at what the world would look like if I weren’t here, and that, because for all my depression I do love life, is terrifying.

I’ve given a lot of thought in the last month to the meaning of love, and here’s what I’ve got so far: it’s nothing if not a physical, holistic emotion, putting real arms around a flawed, broken, sometimes unavailable human being. Real love is about farts, and tears, and dirty dishes, about joy and mess, mistakes and shame, sparkling revelations and lazy Sundays. Right now, that kind of love may be too far away to contemplate without being knocked-senseless by what I’ve lost, but, as a friend or romantically, love is in the body, where, from now on, I would like all of my experiences (Even the typed and posted ones) to take place.

Well Enough to Be Bored Silly!

Now that I'm starting to get used to living on my own, the learning curve on my life has diminished a great deal and I'm starting to have some left over energy. Doing chores that were formerly Sweetie's is getting less fraught with emotion and more routine, and I'm getting used to the fact that I'm a cute-car-having adult who can take care of myself.

The thought of going backward in ANY way makes my body feel seized-up and nauseated, so I know there's no backtracking to drama and hurt. Being pants-on for a while, I'm antsy and unsure of what to do with myself besides work, write, and sleep. As I look for the next healthy inspirations, though, I'm trying to see the boredom as an itch that tells me my insides are healing.

Single Life Week Eight: Some Good Closure and a Brand New Sex Adventure

It was a hard week but full of good progress and nice surprises. First, the hard part: during the big snowstorm of Tuesday night, right at the moment I was writing that post about self-love, Sweetie was getting onto a city bus and slipped, cutting her leg open badly. She has a condition called venous stasis that keeps the blood in her legs from circulating and makes her skin there very thin and hard to repair. She called me from the ambulance and I was scared to death, both for the normal still-care-about-her reasons and the bone chilling fear that this would be she’d have to move back in with me.

I know that might seem selfish, but I felt like the universe (caution, magical thinking ahead) was going to take away all of the good steps we’d taken, and that seemed so unfair to both of us, especially to her. She finally has a good job close to home, we’ve been working so hard to get ourselves apart, and it felt like fate was forcing us back together. (Sheesh, sometimes I sound like a character on Lost)

I knew without a doubt that I shouldn’t drive through a blizzard to go to the hospital and see her. It wasn’t safe physically or emotionally, so I did what I try and do whenever I’m panicky and overwhelmed: I went to bed early.

When I woke up the next morning, there were a whole bunch of texts from her dad on my phone and a nasty facebook message from her sister, sniping at me for abandoning Sweetie in her time of need. I freaked but wrote and backed her off, saying that I hoped someone was on their way because Sweetie’s family needed to be the ones to take care of her. “I thought y’all were still family,” she said. Funny how I hadn’t heard from them in the last six months and now all of a sudden they’re family.

I felt like such a bitch, but I knew I was doing the right thing. The sister had unfriended me but I went ahead and blocked her anyway, just for the relief of it. I blocked her aunt’s number when she called, and when Sweetie’s roommate emailed me for updates, I told her to please update people herself.

It all felt really harsh, but I really love the hard-won progress we’ve made and I feel very protective of it. I’ve been calling to check on her, I’m not a monster, but it was an enormous relief when it finally sunk in that nobody was gonna make us move back in together, that her dad was on the way to look after her and she and I could keep choosing to go forward.

Sweetie was a really, really hard person to take care of—stubborn, volatile, fragile, self-neglecting, and dependent on me for nearly every single social and emotional need (I think this is part of why lately I’m attracted to people who have a million partners—I like knowing they’re taken care of when I’m not fawning over them.) I felt horrible that I couldn’t love her in the exclusive, consuming way that she loved me, but I could never make myself have enough patience and compassion to give her what she needed. I hadn’t felt that guilt in a while, but last week there was a blizzard of it. And then I woke up the next day and the knots in my stomach were gone. I was set back a little, but I knew we’d separately be okay.

Partly because my Mystery Man said the wisest, most comforting things on that hard snow day, my break went back to “mostly.” I resumed lavishing him with attention and receiving lovey-dovey notes in return—so much of his appeal is that he lets me be my ridiculous, doting self instead of expecting me to try and be cool, which would be a futile effort anyway.

I cheerfully re-started sex-brainstorming with the Recurring Character for when I see him at the Big Poly Conference in a couple of weeks, and I reached out to Mr. Sweetface, too.  I’d been wondering if maybe he didn’t have enough attention for me, but he told me he thinks about me all the time, so I thought it’d be worth another date, especially one for which I could stay in my pajamas. But the weather got all dramatic again so I wasn’t sure if he would make it.

Know who’s good to have in a snowstorm? A Twitter guy. I’d already decided that we should consummate our relationship, and what better way get some company while I was waiting for Mr. Sweetface to make up his mind.

The Mystery Man is beyond chivalrous and polite (probably I’m the only girl ever to learn how to be treated chivalrously via the internet…) so I’d kind of wondered how I was going to get smutty with him. After about two tweets, though (you can read my side of the exchange here if you promise to forgive me the sex-typos) the special underpants I’d put on for both of them (blue sheer with tiny multicolored stars) were COMPLETELY soaked and I was swooning into the desk between interactions. (Guys. How old-timey am I? Why do I not have a smartphone or even a laptop? These are weirdly intimate moments to be having at the same desk where I type in my grades.)

I LOVED the fact that we were loving each other up on the public feed, and even though I got a little stage fright whenever somebody (especially a stranger!) favorited or replied, it appealed to the showoffy part of me that’s been kind of under wraps lately. One of the best parts was when I @mentioned one of his wives midscene (she’s his Mistress, and so I felt a little self-conscious about writing the spanky part) and she sent me some encouragement. “Well, as long as you believe in me Ma’am,” I typed with an enormous grin on my face.

When Mr. Sweetface texted to say he wasn’t coming, he may have found me surprisingly magnanimous about it. I do miss him and I was sad about it later, but I loved being absorbed in my Mystery Man and I was enjoying the challenge of trying to write something good and hot when all of the blood had rushed south from my brain.

One of the Mystery Ladies had been in the room watching him and she sent her applause as he finished. I took a bow and felt very adorable indeed. Aftercare took the form of chatting sweetly about other things until I felt sleepy and typed him a chaste kiss goodnight.

There are things that everybody kind of thinks of as normal that just completely fucking blow my mind. Internet sex has been around for two decades, but that was the first time I tried it, and I’m still trying to get my head around it. Being here in my body but also out in the ether with him felt natural at the time but was really quite a shock to the system—the next day I had a hangover from it, similar to ones I’ve gotten after happy-but-harsh nights at the dungeon.

I spent Sunday feeling surprisingly vulnerable about him, afraid the friendship would change, afraid that he wouldn’t like me anymore or that I wasn’t special or that he and the ladies would somehow be gone now. I’m so proud of what I did about that feeling: I told him. Even though I’m pretty sure I was interrupting some other fun, we got to talk about it. It didn’t make the fears go away, but it feels really important that I showed him my insecurities and had them met with kindness, reassurance, and love. I’m doing my best to take that to heart.

It feels very scary to let myself like someone, even just online, but I’m glad to be letting myself feel it, letting myself play a little part of his cute poly life that is so much of what I aspire to someday when I’m ready. But sheesh, everybody, there need to be some real-life spanks in my life pretty soon. Dear heart and soul, please keep healing, so I can get the heck back out there.

Why a Break and the Next Quest

It should be noted that I wished for extra time to write and draw this morning and then we got an early dismissal because of the blizzard. And a snow day for tomorrow! It’s pretty superstitious but I do consider snow days to be evidence that the universe hearts me.

As I’m typing this I reallyreally miss my Mystery Man (Yes, I got smitten with somebody via Twitter, are you even a little bit surprised?) but here’s how I realized I had to take a break even from him: On Sunday afternoon I was getting ready to go out and having a nice exchange with a couple of the Mystery Ladies and just for a tiny second I thought they might be displeased with me. (They were not.) Before I could stop and think, tears were coming right out of my face, and I realized several things:

1. Ohyeah, I’m kind of a submissive. And also just kind of not okay.

2. Even though I’ve never (as far as I know) seen him/them and only know some of their names, I have real feelings for him and his family. As Twitter followers and then as friends and then a flirtation, they’ve been in touch almost everyday for the past while, and I can’t afford to lose that.

(Also I can totally understand now how people get invested enough in strangers to be Catfished.)

3. He’s not a loophole, he’s just a guy I really like.

4. The internet is magic.

So when I got home from my weepy date with the new Spike Jonze movie (on not entirely unrelated themes) I wrote a love letter 140 characters at a time explaining why I have to let our cute little nice thing go for a while, and he wrote back all kinds of wonderful supportive poly-mensch things that made him even more irresistible. I feel like I’m fighting the tide of myself, but I can’t can’t can’t be worrying about messing up and losing friends right now.

The tears weren’t about the Mystery Ladies, of course. They were for all of the trying and failing to be good for Sweetie, for the emotional land mines I’ve kept running into over the past few years, for how hard it was to ever do anything right by anybody’s girl sometimes.

Last year, counting immediate metamours, I broke up with/broke things off with/ let go of at 11 people. Given that one of those was my wife of 10 years and there was also the whole Scary Party fiasco and a brand new career on top of everything, it’s no wonder I’m still randomly weeping.

I don’t want to take a break. I don’t want to keep saying no to genuine affection when it’s been my wish for so long. But in order to really be able to experience the love I’ve been wanting, I think I do have to shift the tide a little. I think that some of the crazy, excited, twitterpated love that gushes out of me all of the time (sometimes making a mess) is actually meant for someone in particular: me.

From years of bad decision, self denial, abuse and self-abuse, I’ve got the proverbial hole inside me. Like any vacuum, it’s eager to fill itself up, and will do so hungrily and desperately if I let it. The (sorry, there’s really no other way to say it) hole in my heart doesn’t care what’s healthy or fruitful, it just wants to be filled.

So I think what I really need to do here is to slow all the way down and let it be empty, then work on gradually filling it up with self-love. I’m not supersure how to do that, but I know that if I keep trying to love while I’ve got that emptiness, things will keep getting poisonous and broken, and I will really never learn to let myself be loved.

(It really is hard to write this without clichés, I apologize…)

I don’t think that I can fill up the whole thing in just a few months, but maybe I can learn some new habits, break the old patterns and learn some better ones. I think that if I can find a way to give all of the ridiculous love I keep feeling to myself somehow, I can turn myself from a vacuum to the endless fountain I was probably born to be, and give some nice people the infinite, generous love they deserve.

I got a pink glass vase from the dollar store to remind me of the gap in my heart I’m trying to allow to be not-filled-yet. I didn’t get anything to put in there, it’s just sitting there being pretty, with an empty space inside. (Okay, yes, like some other poor neglected pink parts I could name…)

The first few years of this story were all about learning to love my body, finding my inner Bettie Page, and as the Nakedest Person at thePagan Festival, I certainly achieved that. Whenever my work friends are fretting about their body issues, I kind of feel like they’re speaking a different language.

But now I would like to learn to give some of that brazenness and bravery to figuring out how to love my heart. I’ve spent so much of my life impatient with it, trying to tamp it down, pretending it doesn’t want things that other people decided I couldn’t have. In pursuit of experience and adventure, my poor heart has been through the ringer and I would really love to learn how to treat it kindly.

So the question is, what can I, on my own for now, give to my heart, to make it feel celebrated and loved like I did for my body? What’s the heart equivalent of Shibari or fireplay? Where is my heart’s nude beach?

Song of the Week (Okay, Just Letting it Win)

In the course of starting to write about why I'm on a break, I decided that this is a good song to belt out in the car a lot. Sorry, part of me that used to be cool.

Single Life, Week 7: Life After “Thrift Shop”

It’s too early to know what the song of this year will be, but “Thrift Shop” was my song of last year, the one I woke myself up with on the way to work, sweated to at the gym, and heard in my head when something, yes, fucking awesome was happening.

I wrote last fall about how it’s a good philosophy of life; just being delighted at what you find, letting chance and serendipity show me where I need to go. With that theory in place, I left the year with an armload of experiences, many of which were unequivocally awesome, some that didn’t fit, some that were stained and downright nasty. As unegalitarian as it feels for me to say this, chance threw some things my way that simply weren’t good enough for me, and I took them home anyway.

I like that seeing play as a magical thrift shop helped me to take down a lot of the structures of control that I had in place. Though I still do love planning and anticipating, I think that my calendar fixation was a lot about trying to make things stay the same, trying to keep things safe and cozy for Sweetie so that she wouldn’t yell at me and call me names. I learned how to be more flexible, to adjust my expectations, and even how to not want to claim people immediately upon kissing them. Well, a little shaky on that last one, but still.

I really, really miss it, just powering through and experiencing every single sensation that I could, even when the emotional cost was high, even when I had to fight my own instincts to do it. Last night was my first night skipping the Regular Dungeon in a long time, and though I had a fantastic time, I still felt nostalgic for the nights where I was able to experience thing after thing after thing, to slip seamlessly from bottom to top, from fire to floggers, and feel like a princess superhero while doing so. It occurs to me that very, very little of that experience had to do with the Steampunks, so I probably don’t have to give all of it up just because they don’t like me. I hope to eventually return to some of it after the wounds have healed.

Back to my metaphor: In real life, I don’t shop like “Thrift Shop.” Not even when I’m IN a thrift shop. I tend to mostly browse, enjoying the bright randomness of everything and only picking anything up if it’s really special, like a tulip-glass pitcher or a perfect grandma cardigan. I would certainly never take home anything that needs fixing, especially if I already had a broken keyboard at home.

In regular stores I’m even pickier. In fact, I’m currently refusing to buy work pants until tapered legs go out of style. I don’t have a shape or a budget for careless shopping. I’m a grown-ass woman who knows what she likes and should never have to settle for anything that doesn’t fit or that I don’t completely love. If I’m that picky with spending my money, can I be a little pickier with spending my heart?

When my therapist got unavailable because her supervisor wanted to Girl Interrupted me, I refused to even look for another one. I couldn’t stand the strangers’ input that came from the 10-minute screening process. So I waited seven months for my real therapist to get her own practice, and now she even makes house calls. There’s a lesson there about waiting for something that works, rather than trying to fit with things that don’t.

My point, and I do have one, is that I hope to find a balance between the natural excitement and momentum in my heart and the discernment that will allow me to get what I want and deserve. That way I can have chance and magic but also, you know, sanity.

That said, I reallyreally hate being on a break from the pursuit of sexytimes. My emotions are grateful to have the time to rest, but my body is like what. the. fuck?

But remembering what pants-on activities I enjoy is rewarding and comforting. On Thursday night, I sat in the meeting room of a neighborhood historic building (we have a lot of them) and drew while I listened to my friends sing and play the most lovely and gently moving music. I was flooded with a sense of (mostly) platonic wellbeing that nonetheless made me have to go home and ravish myself.

Last night, Gold Star Winggirl (So named because she sends me gold stars whenever I’m awesome at being on my break) came with me to a Bhakti dance, and by the end when we were Om Shanti Shanti-ing, I felt so good and loved that I could have Om Shanti-Shanti-ed for about 10 more hours. The best part was getting lots of time to catch up with GSW and root for her adventures too.

Transcendent and fulfilled as I was though, I still would have liked to have driven over to the Regular Dungeon and handed out some what-for. Funny how that’s the thing I miss most.

But guys! Guess what. Granted, it’s only happening on Twitter (hence the loophole) but for a few weeks, I’ve been spending attention on a guy who actually gives it back. Who is actually nice to me! Who checks on me if I’m sad and whose girlfriends and wives and metamours all seem to be delighted by our exchanges. I’ve never even seen any of their faces and at the moment I’m not ready too, but I do feel a genuine connection and I think this is excellent practice for letting myself be treated kindly when it comes time for IRL flirtations. A gold star for me, and one for the Mystery Man and his family. (I’m quite sure they’ll be good at sharing a star.)

Likewise, the Recurring Character is being internet-adorable, telling me semi-daily which of my (G-rated) body parts he is rooting for. So a gold star to him, too.

Okay, so I’m somewhat terrible at taking a break, but I am still making a lot of progress: Friday I told Sweetie we can no longer do groceries together, and yesterday I told her that this is my last week of sharing the car with her. Next weekend I am going to try and find a car of my own. I’m getting better at letting Sweetie-things go, and that’s progress.

PS. As I leave on pop song behind, I just want to take a moment to celebrate and thank the part of my soul that will always sound like this:

Single Life, Week Six: Antsy But Enjoying the New Goals

Last weekend, I told my therapist that sessions might be boring for a while, and that’s how it might be with the blog, too. (Though adventures must not have been particularly unboring when I was hitting the same patterns again and again…) Anyway, I’m supposed to be mostly taking a three month break from sexytimes. In a way, it’s liberating, not having to worry about making plans or scheduling dates, and maybe letting the (already pretty lax) shaving routine lapse a little bit.

But since even in this hard transition I am still my horny, half-extroverted self, I feel antsy. The adrenaline of the past couple of years, though not always healthy, kept me fueled and inspired most of the time, and now I have to look for quieter, more sustainable forms of inspiration. I’m a little afraid that if I let myself rest for these few months I’ll suddenly wake up 60 with no one but cats. It’s the stupidest of tropes, but there it is anyway.

I know where the next adventure’s coming from: there’s a big poly conference coming up soon. And I don’t think I’ll be away from the dungeon forever—I’d thought I was probably graduated from there, but this morning when I saw the invite in my Fet inbox I felt a little surge of joy—right before I RSVPed no. In pursuit of this break-taking goal, I now even have a friend who’ll text me a gold star any time I RSVP no or just stay home in my PJs for any reason. It’s nice how the right influences tend to come along.

The story now is about self-care and about slow, safe progress. One big obstacle-removal is that Sweetie got a promotion and now works closer to home, allowing her to fully take over the car payments so that I can save up for a car of my own. Yay my future little red car! Trading the car back and forth has been a too-often chance to see each other, and that’s getting dicey. Plus, pretty soon I will never again have to drive the car that I jumped out of.

In some ways, it’s getting harder to let Sweetie go. Now that she’s free from her terrible commute and the job she hated, she’s getting frustratingly appealing. I’ve had to stop having her over for TV because the other night I got the biggest urge to hold her hands during some Community reruns. As the pain of the bad parts starts to heal, all I can see it the love and it’s hard to move on, even though it’s paradoxically the moving on that brings the appeal. It makes me both reluctant to and impatient to get further and further apart. Sometimes we still do groceries together but it ends up feeling like a date, so I guess we’ll have to knock that off too.

The big excitements of the past week or so have been little acts of self-care: staying late on Friday to give my Monday-morning self a break by getting the homework packets ready. Remembering to buy batteries, adding DVDs to my Netflix account so that I can have better movie nights. The big social adventures have been after-church brunches that have made my heart so happy and full. (Resolution with the Cute Church couple: “Waffles in ‘014!”)

Slowing down has given me the chance to do what I always wanted to do: feel all the feelings. I feel sadness at letting go of Cute Master and Pretty Slave, but a happy hope that I’ve left a pattern behind. I feel nervous excitement at making new neighborhood friends and navigating social situations at which I have pants on. I feel frustration, of course, at being away from sex adventures, but pleasure in knowing that I’m the only one I have to please.

I vacillate between shyness at the year’s goals and wanting to show them off, but I like the way you guys help me keep myself accountable. The theme of the year is kindness to myself, which I know will make some friends and readers (and also, me) sigh with relief. It’s fun thinking of new ways to care for myself, to reach out to people closer to home, to look for magic in the world, to try (though I’ve always had a nice time keeping it at arm’s length) to embrace my faith.

I’m still smarting from everything I’ve let go, but sometimes when I’m washing the dishes or making the bed or cooking myself breakfast for dinner, I feel the odd sensation of liking myself. It’s a real thing and I think I can learn it.

One Resolution: Give Each Adventure Time to Be Special

Yesterday, I was settling in to make gingerbread cookies and I realized that Sweetie had taken the rolling pin. This was one of those unpredictable divorce-grief floodgates, and suddenly I was a mess. Yes, I could get my own rolling pin, but I didn’t want to have a separate rolling pin from her. Etc.

That grief widened out into tears for everything that’s gone past this year, and it got overwhelming. I realized that I never took quite enough time to soak up the emotions of each thing. I often (sometimes literally!) ran from one person to the next in order to minimize feelings about them—negative or positive! Maybe especially positive. There was no need to come to terms with the depth and nuance of one relationship when I was spanking and sparkling onto the next! It sure was fun but it repressed some of the experiences and turned others into neuroses.

So yesterday I got stuck and sad about all of the things that happened, all of the adventures that went by so quick. The way that one love/hurt/infatuation/grief bled into the next and everything got all tangled up. It was a beautiful mess, but I’m not sure that I honored each experience enough.

I am going to stop pretending that everything doesn’t mean everything to me. In the coming year, I will stop and let myself feel every emotion that comes with every adventure. I’ll share those feelings when I can and whether they are returned or not, I’ll coddle them, love them, kiss them and put them to bed, or let them go. I will not spend any more time trying to pretend things are not a big deal to me. Things are a big deal to me, and it’s time to let that be who I am.

Single Life Week Four: A (Mostly) Good Christmas and a (Mostly) Bad Date

My favorite thing about this last week was going to Christmas at my own local Unitarian church—usually I’m out of town so I’ve always missed it. Since I went by myself, I expected it to be sort of a solitary, reflective evening—I stood at the cookie trays long enough to watch all of my peanut butter blossoms disappear and then made for a pew, drew myself inward and listened to the choir warming up.

Then this couple I’ve been crushing on for like a year walked in, all vitality and smiles. They happened to choose a pew with room for one more, so I made a beeline to go sit with them. Just as always, they were rosy-cheeked and friendly, either full of natural well-being or having just smoked a bowl, or both. We chatted about their pre-church walk in the woods and their upcoming holiday plans. I learned that they live nearby and often have brunch at the little place down the street from me, and promptly invited myself along. I found out that he grew up Unitarian and asked him what is was like to have so much less shame. They’re both musicians for a living and I was a little intimidated singing next to her since she’s a voice coach, but actually we sang together beautifully.

We giggled, grinned, and sang our hearts out through the service, singing all of the verses of the original carols with capital G God left in—not always the case with Unitarian songbooks, but I liked it. The packed church was beautiful and reverent as we passed the light from candle to candle for “Silent Night.” I felt so grateful to be home and then and there I committed to making my own church part of the yearly Christmas routine.

It made me so happy to have spent that time with the cute couple, not in a hitting-on-them way but just enjoying them and seeing that real, playful, spiritual love is a possibility in this world. I liked sitting next to their love and knowing it was real, knowing that I’d put myself on the right path toward finding it for myself.

As I walked home that night, the thought came to me clear as Christmas lights: “I’ve moved on.” It felt like I was walking into a new life. According to every Christmas movie ever, it’s a terrible tragedy to be alone on Christmas, but that moment of hearing myself felt just as festive as any other part of the week. Just listening to the chime of my own soul was a quietly awe-inspiring thing.

Christmas day, as I’ve already written, was pleasant but sad towards the end. I was glad to welcome Sweetie over and eat out favorite things, watch some Project Runway and do our family calls. In true Cindy Lou Who fashion, I didn’t miss presents at all, not the giving or the getting. I felt simple Christmas joy in my heart.

The night was rough, though, lonelier, and in the dark I started to scroll through all that was missing. Christmas falls on one of the longest nights of the year, and it really felt like it. I was glad to be home safe and warm to grieve in my own bed, and when I woke up the next day I was glad that it wasn’t Christmas anymore, just an ordinary day.

Friday I’d made a date to meet an OKC guy for the first time—he was cute and I was glad to entertain him as a possibility. We met in his (Slightly upscale, compared to mine) neighborhood. He could have been the ghost of everything I thought I wanted when I first started dating guys—tall, gentle, beardy, hipsterish in a well-scrubbed way, fairly inscrutable.

He was pleasant enough but I didn’t feel a spark or a pull, so I was somewhat surprised when he invited me down the street to his apartment, ostensibly to meet his cat. I’d already made up my mind that this could be a casual sex afternoon and if that’s how it turned out, and that’s how it turned out.

I loved his apartment. It was boyish and dark and full of pop culture toys. I could imagine taking many naps there. The very sweet orange cat was ensconced on a pillow beneath the window next to a Kermit the Frog doll. “That’s his sleeping friend,” the guy explained.

He (the guy, not Kermit) got very familiar very fast, so fast that I felt like “Huh?” but I went with it. It’s amazing how quickly bad decisions can was over me sometimes, like I’m in the cast of Girls or something. Not necessarily a good look at 39.

His dick as big but the rest of him was just kind of too smooth. He touched me sort of gingerly, like he wasn’t sure how to work me. He kind of fucked me like he thought I was fat and I feel apologetic to myself for the distasteful way he moved my belly aside—Dear Belly, I love you, I’ll try to never let it happen again. His couch smelled like cat pee and when I had the sex-moans that sounded like sobs, he said “Don’t cry, baby,” and I think I might have actually rolled my eyes at him.

I was getting off and bored silly at the same time and I told him he could be rougher, but I don’t think he could. He had these amazing big hands that couldn’t smack convincingly, what a waste.

Eventually we admitted that it wasn’t working and parted ways with no drama at all. What a blessing, a bad match that only lasted part of an afternoon. He tried to make noises about being friends but his number was deleted (I’d never even put his name in my phone) before I was half a block away. My only regret was that I never got to ask him why he had a set list of Hall & Oates songs on his fridge. Was he in a Hall and Oates cover band, or had he been to see a Hall and Oates cover band on a night significant enough to warrant the posting of a souvenir? Or had he been to see Hall and Oates themselves? Ironically or unironically? I’ll never know.

I felt wretched as I walked back to the bus stop. After all I’ve been through, all of the genuine and special moments I’d experienced, how did I let meaninglessness slip in, as it were? The simple answer is, I wanted a penis in my vagina, and he certainly provided that. Also now that I think about it, I was trying to gloss over some deeper feelings I was having about other characters. Not a good strategy, but nothing to feel terrible about. Though I wouldn’t repeat it, I’m kind of turned on writing about it (Pause for personal time…) and I’m glad I took a risk even though it didn’t pay off. They can’t all be beautiful stories. Though I’m not going to make any pronouncements swearing off vanilla guys or casual sex in hipster apartments, I am not, in fact, on Girls. I am a grown-ass woman who knows she doesn’t have to settle for disconnected. On (slowly) to the next things. Especially after hearing this in the supermarket really cracked me up and made me love my weird life:

Single Life, Week Three: A Good No, a Wreath, and a Special Occasion

Last week I was feeling like I had to build myself a new world, so lost that I wasn’t sure where I fit in in the universe. It is amazing what a good no and a good yes can do!

I’m not driving up to my sister’s for Christmas. It seems like I should be able to do it, but the idea gives me a stomachache. What I need most in the world is rest, and it seems like this winter break I am going to get it. Luckily, since modern times are sometimes awesome, it only took one post on the family facebook page and I was free. Christmas Eve and Day might be sad without my niece and nephews, it may bring out the divorce grief, but if it does, I’ll be safe at home where no one will be impatient with my emotions. I may be gleeful or somber, jolly or sobbing, but no matter what I will be warm and at home.

I’m glad to have acknowledged that things are different this year and made taking care of myself the highest priority, even if it means a lonely couple of days. Plus, I’ve never been to my own church for Christmas, so I’m looking forward to that. Making the choice to stay home felt amazing, and I’m proud that whatever else has happened, I’ve made myself a happy place to live.

In the process of tweet-bragging about my choice, I somehow accidentally dialed Mr. Sweetface, the rope-top friend who tied me to his wife a few weeks back. I texted to apologize for the misdial and somehow that led to him asking me for a playdate on Saturday. I gave him a resounding yes, bought some lacy new underpants, and was delighted to have visions of spanky snuggles dancing in my head as the last week of school before Christmas eked loudly by.

The next nice thing that happened was that my mom’s yearly wreath arrived. I opened it on the porch, not wanting it in my apartment, and was about to put it on the curb for someone else to find when I had a change of heart. It was all pearly white, with ribbons that said “hope” “joy” “love” and “peace.” It was too nice of a wreath and too nice of a gesture. I called and apologized for our fight, and she apologized too.

I think it’s time to change what I expect from my mom, to accept her genuine attempts at being loving, even as I distance myself from confiding in her. She’ll never be the trustable comfort I’ve always wished she’d be, she’ll never approve of my shenanigans, and it’s time to just let that be okay.

Sweetie, who happened to be over dropping off the car for the weekend (We’re sharing the car while I save up for my own. It’s not too bad.) helped me hang up the wreath and then went home.

Saturday I cleaned the house as much as I could and managed, for the first time since Sweetie moved out, to do the laundry and groceries by myself. For some reason, I’d been having a mental block about it—don’t know why I express grief through chore-aversion, but I’m glad I’m getting past it.

Mr. Sweetface was the first guy I’ve had over since the apartment became just mine, and the first (spoiler alert) man I’ve had in my bed since the year 2000. He was such a good choice. Though we both got good and spanked, it was mostly about warmth and snuggles, getting to know each other and feeling sleepily festive. He’s the one who helped me string Christmas lights over my headboard.

The thing about that playdate was, it was so easy. He is a spa day of a Dom and a sweet boy of a bottom, (So glad god made switches!) an emotionally generous talker who had me completely at ease. I remarked on my lack of anxiety or fear but started to think I should make that less remarkable, to stop being surprised by kindness and just keep letting it come to me.

There are moments sometimes when things are just working, when can feel the current that runs beneath things, when I feel life taking me forward without struggle or worry. Could be the endorphins or the chocolate I ate while spanking him, but I think it might be Christmas spirit—a new kind of Christmas, especially for me.

Single Life, Week Two: Welcome to District 14

“There is no District 12.”

I am certainly no Mockingjay, and my cute, overheated, modestly Christmas-decorated apartment and tough-but-fulfilling job are not quite a bombed out dystopian village, but I related to Katniss at the end of Catching Fire. She’d done what she had to do, she’d been brave and good, but the woods that gave her comfort were gone and she was headed someplace she’d previously thought was a myth.

I only had to save myself, and there’s a lot left that gives me comfort, but my marriage is behind me, my family feels like a death-trap thanks to the looming presence of my creepy mother, and the social cushion I tried to create within the poly and kink community isn’t really making sense.

It may be heartbreak making the Regular Dungeon feel like the Scary Party, but I suspect it might be something else. I fit within the ideals of poly and kink, wherein it’s supposed to be about expression, honesty, and communication, but the way I’m finding it actually practiced doesn’t exhibit those ideals at all. Thought many of my experiences this year have been life-affirming and good, I’ve seen so much (unintentional, I think) cruelty, judgment, carelessness, and emotional perfectionism that I don’t quite see where I can fit.

After that conversation with my mom where she berated me for not “behaving correctly” by having emotions she didn’t approve of, I realized that that’s what a lot of my relationship experiences have been about—trying to correct my feelings so that people would think I was nice enough, detached enough, openminded enough, that I wasn’t a threat to people’s narrow expectations or (apparently fragile!) relationships. I had to ask one lady to stop reading me because she just couldn’t stand the moments of frustration and would send me paragraphs of emotional correction until I felt like I might lose my civility. The worst mistakes of the year were made when I tried to tamp down my emotions but they just kept pushing to the surface like demanding sidewalk dandelions.

It’s not just the negative or “needy” emotions that have been met with fear, it’s positive, playful emotions too. Look at the way Fireguy scrambled to control my writing about an amazing, life-changing scene because he was petrified of his submissive’s jealousy, at The Man deciding I was a Glenn-Close-grade-stalker because I was nervous about meeting his wife, at the Steampunks making being excited for a playdate into something shameful and threatening.

Even the functional playpal situations only work as long as I don’t write too rhapsodically about people. Being able to keep people in perspective is a wonderful skill that I may never master and that I’m very grateful to have practiced this year, but it’s kind of sad knowing that playing with Old-Timey Guy has only worked for all this time because I’ve never gotten excited enough about him to get Punk Rock Girl’s hackles up. Pretty Slave and Cute Master, wonderful as they are, would ditch me the second I fell for one of them. Which would make sense, actually, in the monogamous world, but feels hurty in one where I still sometimes kiss them. I do know it’s a real friendship, but one that comes with its own guillotine.

As the judgy voices of blog-reading not-quite-metamours simmer down, I think that openheartedness and enthusiasm are two of my best qualities. It’s just that I keep putting/finding myself in scenarios where they’re not matched or welcomed, and that’s when they start to feel like crazy. According to one of the many, MANY How I Met Your Mother episodes over the weekend, the “Dahmer/Dobbler divide” hinges only on whether the feeling is mutual—what looks romantic in requited attraction can certainly start to look creepy when the feeling isn’t returned. So I guess if I want to value my romantic side and not keep feeling grossed out by it, I need to get rid of unrequiteds before they become a thing—like, three texts in if possible. It’ll be hard but probably worth it.

So I’m not sure where it’ll leave me, but I want to stay out of situations that call for the artificial tamping-down of emotions. There’s enough of that in daily life, why opt for it in relationships? More than anything, I want to find myself in situations where openheartedness isn’t met with fear and distrust.

Anyway, so my therapist, who maybe doesn’t have time for dystopian young adult novels, suggested that we make a plan to get me to District 13, but I explained that the residents there are very guarded and conservative from their years of subsisting underground.

So here I am in District 14. So far its accomplishments are modest: A small but very sincere Christmas tree, getting the bills sent on paper because I like paying them with stamps and envelopes, trying to figure out a holiday that won’t be too much pain to take. It will take a long time to build something stable, authentic, and unoppressive, but this is a start.

In the meantime, two gold stars:

1. That night the dungeon didn’t work, I left. I didn’t force myself to stay and keep being a sparrow bashing into the plate glass window of them. I had a bad feeling and (with the help of my super adorable friend) got the heck out of there. That is always to be rewarded.

2. Saturday I got asked out (actually, asked in) by a tall, beardy Beatles fan (“I spend my time thinking about…What I would say to Paul McCartney if I met him.”) and I asked him if it could wait until after the holidays because I’m having a spate of introspection. He said sure and I was so, so proud of myself for slowing down and taking the time I need. I did have all of those very urgent sitcoms to watch!

There’s still the matter of what to do about Christmas. I don’t want to make the 5 ½ hour drive to my sister’s, but I’m worried I’ll miss my niece and nephews too much if I don’t.

Yesterday Sweetie and I were in the Target picking up nonperishables for the food drive at work and we strolled through the Christmas section. I got the most AWFUL feeling in my gut and lower back until we walked out of that section. Day to day, I have a fair amount of Christmas spirit going, but something about the day itself is making me sick and afraid.

Is It Weird That I Asked My My Ex-Wife to Pick Up My Christmas Tree? I Don't Care

I used the snow day today to start making next year's goals and to tackle two tasks that were giving me single-girl anxiety: dying my hair (next time going to a salon like a grown-ass woman) and putting up the Christmas tree. Those things done, plus a nice talk with Pagan Boy, helped soothe some of the sting and worry. On to the next things!

Single Life, Week One

That janky dungeon night was just a sliver of what the first week of single life was like—although at the moment I’m still feeling dark and soul-separated, most of the week was fine-to-lovely. Sweetie finally moved out the Sunday before last, and that was such a wistful, sad, nostalgic night. That night I took the opportunity to finally watch Blue Valentine (I’d always joked that if we watched it, we’d have no choice but to get divorced…) and feel all the sad things, but I also felt like we were much more awesome than that couple—that bar’s not superhigh, but still. After that, I cleaned my apartment and listened to Minx and Lusty Guy’s handfasting ceremony on Poly Weekly and that gave me something to hope for.

The week was stressful because I’m going through a series of evaluations at work, but that gave me something to focus on besides heartache, and the evaluation went okay. The woman whose maternity leave I was covering came back and moved all of her stuff into her new classroom, so it was a week of making myself at home and gaining closet space.

I love the feeling of getting the apartment arranged just for me. I’ve been settling in, decorating, and moving furniture around, putting away reminders of the relationship and getting ready for the new. By the way, artsy types, if you have any artwork to lend or donate, I’d be much obliged!

And then there’s the new bed. All I want to do is be in it, and sometimes I fantasize about getting somebody (or somebodies) to come over and break it in, but I think that might be a while. I’ve spent many a content hour wrapped up in my new comforter reading library books—that’s actually what Saturday was about, before that other stuff: home. Nesting and snuggling in here, I get a deep and true sense of well-being. Maybe the key to surviving the bad parts is to draw inward for a while, let it be about just me, not worry where I’ll fit in in the world, try not to be scared that it’s all gone. I think that’ll help. I’m almost certain that the world and its parties will still be there when and if I can heal.

How much should I be allowed to hang out with Sweetie? Yesterday it was so snowy, and I was so tired, and I had to get the groceries and go to the laundromat so I called her for help. We had a very pleasant afternoon slip-sliding to the Target and reading magazines while the clothes dried. I don’t know if this is allowed but it made me feel better. Maybe I don’t have to be all the independent at once? I don’t know, but I know I’m doing my best.