Calling Out to Myself: A Solo Adventure

One of my Codependents Anonymous friends suggested this and I love it so much. It's hard and takes discipline to love myself instead of focusing on what's lost, but every once in a while I can feel it pay off in progress and peace.

 Last week was a week of continued self care and good decisions, including an inbox abundant with dick pics (One million heart-eyes emojis) and fantasy flirting with all kinds of beautiful dears. None of them ended up suitable for in-person-I'm (mostly) actively trying to avoid any more fuckboys or overly complicated situations, but they were all dear, and they all made me feel glowy and flowy.

So Saturday afternoon, with nothing on the schedule til dancing o' clock, I took myself to bed. Pleasure felt a little out of reach at first, what with intrusive thoughts about how much more desirable Yoga Camp Hottie is than me. Plus, my Rabbit conked out a while back and I'm still getting used to (getting friendly with) my new one.

But I told YCH and her boyfriend to fuck off out of my brain for a while, and got myself to the pink sparkly glowy haze eventually.

And! When I was coming! I cried out:

"I love you! I love you! Oh! I love you!

That's happened with partners before, of course (Especially The Shy One, oh boy!) but I don't usually form ANY words while I'm getting myself off, let alone THOSE words.

It felt like such a release! Like those words had been waiting on my tongue to be hollered out, waiting maybe for a lifetime.

And yes, I was probably saying it to past and recent loves, to the gods and goddesses, to the sky and the trees and the flowers, but the important thing is! I was saying it, sighing it, to me! Oh my goodness!

Sometimes the feeling of having to love myself feels frustrating and lonely, but on good days, it makes me feel treasured, important, chosen. All those things I'm absolutely desperate to get from men, that keep me away from the men probably, I'm able to give myself. It was real. I heard myself breathe out the words in pleasure.

I love you.

Typing that gave me a warmth that started in my belly/soul and spread outwards. Maybe someday a partner will meet me in this place of self-love, but for now I'm happy and curious to practice on my own. Just like I practice my ropes! :)

Trauma Work Summer Has Actually Been Kinda Lovely, Part Five

One time I was reaching back to the shelf to get my lunch and I spilled her flowers on my head.


    

Summer Princess was hard to read, emotionswise, and I put my foot in my mouth almost constantly. Once, trying to change the subject from her gently food-shaming the campers at lunch, I said "We've gotta get you some kids." She sulked and said that sounded like I was making her a mammy figure. 

Very understandable chips on very beautiful shoulders!

One day in maybe the third week of camp, she came in late because she had a special errand. She said she would share the news at lunch! It was an official-looking sealed envelope and I thought it might be her name-change paperwork. I was right! We all celebrated for a moment before I stupidly said that I'd guessed what was in the envelope. The celebration went right out of her, and she asked "How did you know I was trans?"

Her mood shifted and I was desperate to get in her good graces. We bickered about other things and everything seemed impossible. The next day, I brought flowers to celebrate her milestone and some gentle weed gummies for me. Our bonding (and my enmeshing) resumed.

In the hot glaring middle of the summer, we walked the kids to the pool. Summer Princess had gotten a brand new bathing suit! This was her first time in a pool post-transition, and it made me dizzy with happiness. We played in the pool together. "Make sure nothing bad happens, she said before diving under. We did handstands and flips, I hadn't gotten that much pool water up my nose since I was a kid.

The sky was so blue and the clouds were so perfectly fluffy that they looked painted on. The city skyline rose hazy in the distance. Though it wasn't romance for her, to me it was one of the most romantic afternoons of my life, even if it did involve walking the kids back to camp down the blazing city streets. In my bathing suit and sneakers, carrying everybody's towels and water bottles and whatever, with tall and careful Summer Princess at the front of the line--dazzling.

I've often found my trans friends beautiful and sexy, but aside from a quick makeout with Angel Face before we decided to be friends, I've never gotten around to acting on those attractions. After that day, I knew I wanted to. I wanted to devour her, but knew I would just have to open up to other possibilities, to pay attention more. I forgot the word "chaser" and I wanted to chase her.

I felt the world and my heart exploding with hope and possibility, but I wholeheartedly wish I had kept this epiphany to myself. I could have just added some porn search terms to my life and expanded my horizons when looking at Feeld.

But I was overwhelmed with loving her and wanting to please her, and this was Camp Overshare! So the friendship didn't get to last long.

Proud Graduate of Summer Therapy!

 

“It really pisses me off that in like six months, I’ll be like oh, poor us, just a bad match. I hate magnanimous.”

--Me, a Little Over Six Months Ago

The last session I had with Summer Therapist, Tuesday before last, I’d given myself the assignment of telling her the whole fortune-cookie-Thursday-to “It’s Monday morning” Shy One breakup story without turning the frustration back on myself. I had the feeling she’d wanted me to get a little better at blaming him for what happened, and it seemed like a good experiment! It was!

I liked not stopping the story to empathize with TSO’s perspective, blame myself, or say for the millionth time “How did I let this happen?” or “Why couldn’t I have just made it til Tuesday?” (Or made it til our trip, or not sent so many needy texts, etc) Bargaining is a really powerful destination on the Billy Map of Grief!

Dear Young People Who Probably Don't Remember The Family Circus: This is what I mean by the Billy Map of Grief! He goes all over the place!

But when the experiment was over, there was something I had to admit to myself about my (dear!) Summer Therapist—she was really into the idea that TSO hadn’t really loved me! She even, in the midst of some advice about taking it slow heartwise, suggested that maybe I hadn’t really loved him either!

This seemed crazy to me, because I’d started therapy with the goal of taking the TSO experience on board, letting myself believe it had really happened so I could let it go! I was hanging on to him in my head and heart because I wasn’t sure it had happened, because maybe I thought he was the only one who could witness the fact that I’d been loved by a man. Of course, there was another witness there, the only one I’ll ever really need to check with: me.

I kindly typed this all into the therapy app and said a gracious and grateful goodbye to the Summer Therapist. Then I called BFF and sobbed. It was the kind of sobbing (I just mistyped it as “subbing”) that scrubs out my insides, that came up from my soul in a wail and a gust. And then I felt better.

I could see why ST wanted to downplay the relationship—it was a way of trying to make me be kinder to myself, to get me to expect more. But in wanting to assure me I deserve better, she ended up seeming dismissive of this experience that had meant a lot to me. I didn’t need it not to be love in order to let it go. I didn’t need to (as ST did) dismiss the realities of poly happiness in order to envision a partner all my own.

It made me realize that no matter how monogamous I get, and I think it might be quite monogamous indeed, I’ll never subscribe to the narrow, heteropatriarchal definition of love that my ST was (probably unintentionally) leading me towards. That’s because, no matter who or how I love, I’ll always be queer, I’ll always be silly, I’ll always be curious and expansive and wholehearted. I’ve never been more grateful for my adventures, for my weird heart, for the messy and ill-advised and beautiful alchemy I’ve always been able to lead myself into. And out of!

I realized a thing that maybe shouldn’t have been new at almost 49: I’m the only one I need to check with about what’s happened to me. I know when I’ve loved and been loved. I don’t have to run it by anyone. I don’t have to prove it.

Friends, it’s still a Billy map. Though I don’t visit the Hidden Folder much any more, there are days when my heart is full of him, of them, of bitterness, of what ifs. But there are also days when the banter is going well on the apps, or I get turned on by myself, or I start to picture what Boyfriend Life would be like, and I’m so, so grateful for all of it, for everything ever. Magnanimous is my heart’s default setting, mostly, and I hope that never changes.

Sex, Love, and The Shy One, Part Two

 

I think it was Lottie on last week’s Yellowjackets who said it’s hard to form memories when you’re in an ecstatic state. Not like anyone should be going to Lottie for advice, but the idea’s relatable. I can’t always access the sensations and emotions of my lost love, my first real grownup love with a man.

Some nights, close to sleep and looking for a little extra. peace, I say a little prayer inside my head: “Come back to me.” Now that I understand that he wasn’t the right one (one of the right ones) for me, I don’t think it’s entirely a prayer for his miraculous somehow-return. It’s like, let me reclaim the experience. Let me remember and care for the beautiful things that happened between us without the shame of rejection or the grief of loss, or at least alongside them.

Of course, sometimes “come back” is just “come back.” That’s love and heartbreak and I hate it and I love it.

The love part, I handled so badly. Not the part about loving him almost-instantly and thoroughly and eternally, that’s all fine and on-brand. But when the love word crept into his side of the text thread, I think in a GIF of a cartoon bear with a wheelbarrow of hearts saying “Goodnight, my love!” and then didn’t come up again for a while, I freaked.

The thing, the ELUSIVE THING was so close. It might have been there all along, in its own way. He said the love word to my body the first night, easy and unencumbered. But no matter which way he said it, sometimes I just couldn’t hear it. Then, later on, in the highest heights of sex, he would withhold it. But first—

I freaked. He and Mrs. Shy One had fallen in love with the lady who came right before me, and in my worst moments, I wondered why she was easy to love and I was so impossible to love. This comparing, this sense of inherent inferiority, might be one of the things that makes it harder to love me and of course, sometimes I choose the situations that will trigger it the worst.

It’s a lifelong struggle—the thought that I’m missing some secret thing that other women have, like my orientation package was missing a map or some other vital page. In the background of that fear are my millstone words, or I guess my family’s words, probably both/and at this point: Stupid. Empty. Worthless. Here by mistake.

When someone loves me I think: Get out now or I’ll be humiliated. I’m already humiliated. I’m ALWAYS humiliated. Wish it was in the fun way a little more often.

I didn’t tell him the millstone words situation directly, but I did ask: Why is it easier to love (previous girl) than me? What was I missing? Jealousy tumbled out everywhere and he did NOT have the space for it, which made the panic worse. The shame of it is hard to argue with, even as I try to treat myself more kindly.

So when he, a day or so after all the jealousy and tears, texted “I love you” all friendly and sweet, I was overjoyed of course. Peace filled up my heart and spread warmth through the rest of my body, as it did again when I wrote the first draft of this post.

But as things fell apart, I couldn’t stop wondering (and I still wonder) if I’d manipulated him into saying it, it he’d offered that phrase to calm me down and keep me happy-enough.

When I look back at what happened, when I (so rarely, I swear) revisit the vacation WhatsApp thread or read his second-to-last email or putter around the apartment in either of the two robes he gave me, (One silky, one fuzzy) or see his fancy Eid-gift teacup at the back of the dish cabinet, I have to admit that his love was real, and I know I didn’t take good care of it.

What I’m trying to do with these paragraphs is to keep what’s mine, to honor whatever things belong to me so I can truly let him go. It’s hard, it’s sad, but I’ll keep writing.

Knotty Thursday: Figure 8 Knot and Tiny Steps Forward

 

(Note: the first draft of this post was a little more chill, but I’m in the middle of watching Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind so, yeah.)

It’s hard to find any hope about love. I’m impatient for the grief to be over, but about once a day, it sirens out. If it’s too close to work time, I just talk it through—I call BFF-Formerly-Sweetie and have Ten Minutes of Sadness. She listens to me loop though the whys and what ifs and whats nexts.

But if there’s enough time before work, I wail. Wail and drive or wail from under the weighted blanket or next to my In Full Bloom flowers-of-the-world thousand piece puzzle. The sadness wails out from my guts, harsh but self-loving, excruciating but productive.

It comes from my guts because that’s where my soul lives, and my soul has lost one of its dearest mates. The Shy One sent me off in search of My Person, but that’s just not how I’m built. I belong to him, as much as I belong to the rest of the characters in this story. As much as I belong to the spring azaleas or the Hope Diamond or the cats.

Someday, with distance and time that belonging-to-him will feel safe again, and I’ll love things for the way they were, not for how we wished they could be. Grace. Forward motion. Lavish and abundant and loud and beautifully vexing love with someone or someones who fit. But my soul says not yet. My soul whispers “come back” like a prayer.

Maybe The Shy One’s soul was only meant for one mate. Maybe that’s the unbridgeable ocean between us. It’s not for me to know.

For now, tiny steps toward the brazen and sexy person I was when he met me. One knot a week, and then back to my puzzle and my soothing movie podcasts. I’m proud of this knot, little and ordinary but infinite.

 

Love.

 

We’re in a new phase of the Kitten Calendar adventure now, friends. It wasn’t an accident when the word snuck into some goodnight GIFs. The Shy One loves me back. We had deep, complicated conversations in the days following my Big Jealousy Weekend, and those eventually landed at him saying the phrase.

He loves me. I’m loved. It feels like a safety net and a bedrock and a sunny meadow and a beach day.

Being loved isn’t new of course. Though I couldn’t always be in touch with it, I’ve been surrounded by so many different kinds of love all along. Work love, art love, nature love, friend love, even the sometimes-impossible-seeming family kind of love. Sweetie-Now-BFF and I have loved each other since 2001, with no signs of dissipating. On the teetering cliffs of romance, I’ve had a strong foothold in love, maybe that’s how I grew into someone ready, or just, he was one of the very-right ones.

I’ve had so many (JEEZ so many!) connections with men that have felt fulfilling, sexy, exciting, and (from my end at least) loving, for a few weeks or a few months. Sometimes I told them I loved them after they were gone, after a this-girl-is-crazy-loving-me-after-just-a-few dates reaction was no longer a worry or concern. I’ve loved. I’ve been wanted, liked, and THOROUGHLY fucked. But this.

It feels, a rare thing in my shifting/fleeing/healing/losing heart, like the earth is steady beneath my feet. My life can be serene, or lovely, or a cyclone of emotions, or a mess, or a newly vacuumed apartment, but his love is holding still beneath it all. A harbor. A cove. A weighted blanket. I can mix as many metaphors as I want. I’m in love.

It's tempting to remind myself to stay vigilant, to wait for some imagined other shoe to drop, and it always could. But The Shy One has asked me over and over by now: Have faith. There are tricky parts, disconnects and differences to listen and squabble and evolve through. But I have a home in someone beautiful. A home in this moment.

I fell asleep with him the other night. It took several Tums and some melatonin and eventually I’m going to have to stop feeling too self-conscious to get up and have my night cereal, but for a couple of hours, I slept. Next to his beautiful, strong body, his soft hands petting me, his breath in my hair.

My cat is very shy. She usually sleeps with me, either right next to me or perched on my hip. When there’s company, she generally hides in the closet. Dates have only known her as a grey streak as she runs from the closet to her hiding place inside the couch.

But Saturday night, while I was laying blissful and awake next to The Shy One, I heard the grey cat’s claws kneeding the side of the mattress. I reached down to pet her, and she jumped up. She sat on my hip for a moment before she remembered there was a non-me person in the bed. She fled almost immediately, but still. It feels like progress.

Knotty Thursday: True Lover's Knot.

 

A dramatically named knot for a heartache week. I miss The Shy One so, so badly. I'm at the part of heartbreak where I question every choice I made that led me away from him. Where I wonder if there'll ever be anyone(s) so special again. The fancy teacup. The daily pictures of flowers. His sweet face. The month of sunsets. The kisses.

I've started flirting again, because it cheers me up to picture putting new cuties into my ropes, but I'm not sure what I can/should ask for. The Shy One told me I had every right to ask for what I need, but there's nothing in the universe that gives me the right to find it. I may never find it. I know I've had three good romances and some hot playpals in the past year, but each heartbreak still feels like it must've been my last chance.

All that aside though, I had a lovely time with myself last night. I started from two True Lover's knots and ended up with this harness. I love the way the colors go together, especially since these are the ropes I ordered after my first date with This Charming Man--it was a treat to see and feel that harmony, even/especially two loves later.

Knotty Thursday: Simple Handles (There’s a Danger in Getting a Deep Need Met)

One of my favorite moments with This Charming Man was when, on our second-to-last date, I tenderly showed him how he could do a girth hitch around each of my upper thighs to use as handles.

Once the handles were on and cinched tight, he told me to get to the edge of the bed. I lay parallel to the headboard, knees in the air. He stayed standing, held onto my ass and thrust in, then regained the handles. I was always (and still am, writing this) soaking wet for him, the gushingest I’ve ever been for anyone, and that is REALLY saying something. Everything in me flowed out to him, to his smell, his charm, his humor, his beauty, and ohyeah the ropes. In all my years of adventures, I’ve never been as turned on as I was for This Charming Man.

I’m afraid I’ll never feel attraction that powerful again.

He tugged the ropes from side to side and then APART, pulling me open, wider and closer. Open, open, open, pussy, heart, and soul.

“You make me feel so good.” I heaved and sighed and huffed.

“I’m glad. You deserve it.” It’s kind of a miracle that I didn’t cry for him until our last day. His words threaded up inside me, stitched me up, gauzed up wounds with a peace I didn’t know was possible.

That’s a lot to put on one young man who has a lot of other stuff going on. I try now (though I certainly didn’t see it this way in the moment) to understand it was just dom stuff. I didn’t and don’t know where to go with all that fulfillment, all that healing, all that emotion. I don’t know how to take it to heart now that he’s gone, but I hope I can before too long. I don’t know what any of it felt like from his perspective, I wish I could. Either way, that bliss, that comfort, that rest, is mine and I hope it doesn’t always hurt so bad to think about it.

Anyway, we came together beautifully, and if I hadn’t already fallen for him like four dates ago, I was certainly a goner now.

Afterwards, when he was up taking off the condom and I was laying back tangled in the comforter, feeling ravished and adored, this thing happened. I think he said a thing. It was the second or third time I thought I heard him say it, probably a dick-drunk trick of the ears:

“I love you.”

It could have been “how are you?” or any other set of syllables. I left it there because I couldn’t have heard what I thought I’d heard. This is the part (one of the parts) where I feel truly crazy, this shimmering hallucination of my dearest wish. He can’t have said it, not on the third date or the sixth, not in the afterglow or the throes. If he did, maybe it was a trick, maybe a spellish part of the charming. Or maybe it was real.

 

Supersweet Election Love Story: Part One

I spent a year hardly thinking about romance at all, but there’s always a perfect character to come along and break me open again, so that cartoon hearts swirl around my head and I remember who I was born to be. Like the election, this story didn’t turn out the way I’d hoped, but I’m reopening the blog to make sure none of the gifts of this experience slip through the cracks.

I work in my local library’s afterschool program. It suits me much better than teaching because the kids and I spend most of our time on art and I never have to make anybody do anything, except be respectful and kind. I can smile all day and tell the kids “I love you” without being accused of being too soft. The library is my happy place and my biggest source of love, pride, and friendship.

About a year ago, a new security guard (I know! Me and security guards.) transferred to our branch and the first time I saw him, I thought “Yep, that’s what a man should look like.” African American, beardy, glasses, locks, sigh, swoon, giggle. One of my goals for 2016 was to flirt daily, and I felt like I’d finally found a worthy recipient. I tend to sing out my coworkers’ names, so I wholeheartedly sang out his name whenever I saw him, chatted when I could, accidentally told him how very much I like the scene from The Avengers where Black Widow breaks out of the chair.

Eventually, he started hanging around. He would spend his breaks coloring with me and the kids and talking about music, helping me build up my ongoing playlist of kid-friendly love/friendship/inspiration songs. Lord help me, he owns vinyl. He kept suggesting songs that were either too emo or so R&B dreamy that I could barely walk after listening. I made fun of him for his makeout music, but it kept finding its way onto my personal playlist, turning my early morning walks into dreamy movie-sequence mushfests.

He was with us in the children’s department whenever he could be, and started telling me apologetically when he was scheduled elsewhere. (I found out later he’d been making the schedule specially to spend time with us! <3 <3 <3) We painted galaxies, flowers, we drew mandalas. We did coloring pages that said things like “Follow Your Heart” and “Don’t Stop Believing.” He’s in college, (This is as good a time as any to tell you he’s twenty-five and I’m forty-two…) so he’d sometimes just bring down his homework, talk to me about what he was working on, and then happily let me distract me from it.

In the way that sometimes happens when you make a truly great friend, I kept telling him way more than I meant to. He became my safe space, someone I could confide in about my election struggles, my feminist rage, my religious questiness, everything that was the most important. I hope that I was doing the same for him.

I’d gone through a good spate of not caring at all what I looked like, but I started to want to look cute when I got to work. I stopped wearing shlubby T-shirts and became more likely to put on lipstick and blowdry my hair. Eventually he told me he wanted his to be the only name I sang out, and that was both very sweet and probably a bad sign.

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.

A Snow Day Prayer

I'm so grateful and relieved for today's snow day--yesterday's very productive therapy appointment left me flattened and in need of extra writing time.

But it's the first snow day without the Mystery Man, and I miss his companionship very much. I want to honor whatever part of our thing was real and hope for the day when I can see the good parts of that tangled, ethereal collision.

But meanwhile, very loving and accommodating weather, thank you for the extra time to love myself. Here's what I'm meditating on today:

"The truth is that the inner Self of every human being is supremely great and supremely lovable...The divine Principle that creates and sustains this world pulsates within us as our own self. It scintillates in the heart and shines through all our senses." --Swami Muktananda

The Most Nothing I’ve Ever Been: The Last, Uh, Conversation? With the Mystery Family

On Thursday I woke up missing the Mystery Man a lot and feeling really sad about the choices I’d made with the Mystery Family, about having done the same self-erasing thing I’ve done so many times before. I felt like all of my efforts to take myself forward must be false if I keep doing this and maybe I would never be capable of loving people who actually want me. Though my Twitter account didn’t really feel like mine anymore, just a way to keep futile-ly reaching out to those unreachables, I wrote some sad Tweets before I went to work and I admit to hoping they’d get their attention.

It was a hard hard day at work. The kids were winter-frustrated and fighty and it was the second time I’ve felt so panicked there that it felt like my soul had actually left. A day in a classroom with 23 riled-up children when I’m feeling like I’m not really there was a very hard thing to get through. Credit our Gangnam Style Emergency Dance Party with the fact that we were able to (mostly) retain our sanity and make it to 3:09.

I know the panic was mostly an after-effect of processing the assault stuff and the Twitter-claustrophobia—I wouldn’t have made it a day in my job if riled-up kids were that upsetting. My therapist had warned me that there might be a delayed reaction to Sunday’s appointment, and I wasn’t giving myself the space to be kind to myself about it.

When I got home, the Mystery Lady I felt closest to (and the one who instigated my “relationship” with the Mystery Man) had said a bunch of nice things in response to my sadness, but she also said this:

“You’ve got a lot of people pulling for you, both here and IRL.”

She was still claiming to love me, and yet she was reiterating that we aren’t in the same life. They were real life loves to me and nothing I could do or say could convince them that we all live in the same world. She also told me to stop feeling sorry for myself, which is a bonkers thing to say to somebody whose heart you just broke over the weekend. Seriously, Lady, (I did not say) YOU get rejected by eight to twelve people at once and see how it feels! (Not that I would wish that on her or anybody. I wouldn’t.)

I very much wanted to go back to being friends, to them being comforting confidantes, people whose messages always propped me up during hard times, but I didn’t know how to do that since they were part of the Bad Thing now. I told them I missed them (the last message I got from the Mystery Man was an “I miss you too” tweet, which would prove by the end of the night to have been the worst, creepiest, most vile lie.) and then told her how I didn’t understand loving somebody she wouldn’t have over. I told her I felt betrayed because after all the paragraphs she’d read about my struggle with personhood, in the end she’d asked me to be a fragment of a person. (Less than a fragment, you’ll see at the end of the story.)

After I tweeted her all the things (Jesus, may I never use the verb “tweet” again after this.) Gold Star Winggirl picked me up to go over to her house for a beer and then to the neighborhood music night hosted by the Cute Church Couple. (By now they’re much more friends than crush.)

GSW was the perfect antidote to the online mess: “Oh, you dyed your hair,” she said, “Because you’re real!” When I told her she seemed to be really stocked up on soap, she said “See, these are the things we’re supposed to be able to learn about each other. This is the way it’s supposed to be.”

My soul was still hiding, though, so I couldn’t quite connect with the nice music night, but it was the best possible place to be. All of the songs seemed to be about real, in person love, starting with my good old talismans, The Beatles.

When I got home, the Mystery Lady had said more things, mostly making me feel like she heard and understood me, so although my still-panicking guts were telling me to flee, I started to write back. While I was doing that, though, she wrote a post thanking another girl for playing online with him “just when he needed it most. #Compersion #Poly”

#Gross.

It was the most nothing I’ve ever been. While I’d been missing him and longing for all of them and feeling guilty for wrecking the friendships, he’d moved right on ahead to the next thing and replaced me. That was truly one of the most humiliating moments in all of my adventures, maybe THE most because of its non-corporeal quality. I blocked them all, but that wasn’t safe enough. I deleted the entire account. I took comfort in the idea of all of my messages disappearing from their Interactions, all at once. It was the only way I could take back some of what I’d so foolishly given.

I can’t for the life of me figure out what prompted them to reach out to me, what I could possibly have ever been to them, what need I could have possibly served. Maybe it’s just pure addictive behavior on all of our parts. Since I was the third time something like this had happened, GSW suggested that they need to “love” and then other other people, break hearts and get sad and band together over and over so that they can draw together against the outsider and keep telling themselves this story about getting stronger when they really are a house of cards. I used to do this to try and be close to Sweetie, choosing guys who would break me partly so she and I could bond against a common enemy. Whatever the Mystery Family’s motive was, I’m so ashamed that I got sucked into whatever ugly drama they needed to have, that I let myself get (even momentarily) flattened by it.

But the real ugly drama here is my own. In the interest of learning how to stop being one crazy story after another, I need to understand what draws me to situations that make me into nothing. Clearly, there is part of me that wants to keep experiencing that. It feels so good when I am not nothing again, when my feet are solidly under me and I can hear the birds singing and be all the way in the room with the crazy students I love so much. Maybe erasing and unerasing is a way to prove to myself that I’m still alive, but really, by now, that should be assumed.

As much as I’m grateful to be polyamorous, the way some people practice it makes me feel unethical for being part of it. Polyamory is toxic when it’s used as a way to avoid actual intimacy. When it’s used as a way to treat people as if they’re interchangeable, it takes away their agency and sexualizes them. And of course I continue to be disgusted and dismayed at the way that outside partners are routinely treated with casual cruelty and neglect.

Since I can’t and don’t want to un-poly myself, the best I can do is be mindful of those possibilities and be more careful about choosing partners who fit my standards of egalitarianism, openheartedness, and genuine face-to-face communication. Those who remain on my dance card do, so I’m off to a good start.

Once I deactivated my Twitter account, I felt back on track. The next steps are to refocus on self-love and the Big Therapy Project, keep treating myself kindly about the griefs, and keep in mind the year’s goal of close-to-home connections. I wish the Mystery Family have come along with me, but in the end it’s a blessing to let go of any love that isn’t real.

Postscript to the Mystery Family, A Love Letter

In the end, I finally got to hear his voice, to tell him how much I love them all, how much I wish I could be with them. It didn’t make it any easier to break up, but it did take away the feelings of bitterness and helplessness that came from being confined to the internet. It did my heart and soul good to cry real tears to him, to tell his ears all the things I’d typed but never got to say.

As much as online relationships are still a mystery to me (The combination of seeing the movie Her, reading The Circle by Dave Eggers, and trying online love has convinced me that modern times are completely unfathomable.) I don’t know how I would have made it through these winter months without him, without the daily images of their gorgeous and complicated life, without his affection—it was all completely irresistible. But at the same time, it’s a relief to let go of my fantasy of them and accept what’s real—they don’t have room in their lives for everything I have to offer, they aren’t able to give me what I really need. It’s a relief to love them for what they are rather than try to wait or fight for things to change, to accept them and try to let the crush part go.

Dear Mystery Man,

The fact that I can even write you a love letter means you’ve taken me a long way forward. Thank you for keeping me company in such hard, cold months. Thank you for loving me in the ways that you could and for letting me love you too. Thank you for giving me a clearer picture of what I want someday, of why I have to pull my attentions close to home and be present here with my whole heart. I don’t know how to stop longing for you and the Ladies, I probably won’t. I hate that circumstances keep us apart and I will miss you very badly.

Until you, I hadn’t told a man I loved him in a romantic way and had it returned since 1995. I’ve always fought a very deep belief that it couldn’t happen, and now it has. Thank you for letting me say it, and hear it, and practice it, so that when the heartbreak heals I’ll believe a little more that being loved by a man is something I deserve. It’s such a blessing to meet someone whose heart is as eager and voracious and fragile as mine, to believe that such a thing is possible. I’ll look for it in future loves, and think of you.

I still wish I could give myself to you and the Ladies, every single part of me. I don’t really know how to let you go, so I’ll carry you around in my heart forever like all the other characters. I wish there were anything I could write that’s as beautiful as the sound of your voice.

My heart is broken but much better for having let myself love you. Thank you all the way to the stars.

Love,

Kitten

This Is Your Brain on Love, an Awesome Talk by Ginny Brown

Since the project that emerged for me at the conference was to learn how not to panic when I get excited about somebody, I was superexcited to go learn about NRE and neurotransmitters. I guess naming the talk kinda gives away which conference it was, not like it was such a big mystery anyway. If you ever get a chance to see this talk, I couldn’t recommend it more. If you're headed to Atlanta Poly Weekend, you'll be able to see it there!

I think most poly folk are familiar with the brain processes of love, but looking at the list of “symptoms,” of being in love made me realize there’s some overlap with anxiety and even depression. (Perseverating, obsession, jealousy…) But the biggest flash of insight came from learning that, during the early stages of passionate love, serotonin levels drop! As a (now pretty mildly, I’d say) depressed person who’s been treating herself with non-medicine fixes, that was the most helpful possible tip! If I’m going to wade into excellently lovey-dovey emotions, I have to make sure to take extra care of my brain first with as much sunlight as possible (rare these days but I’m hoping the sun will be back…) don’t skip the gym, eat lots of produce, etc, and slow down enough so that anxieties don’t snowball and turn something cute into something overwhelming.

As with the advice I got in the previous post, I got a chance to test this theory right away. On Tuesday night, I was planning an ironing-some-things-out talk with the fantastically NRE-ful Mystery Man, so I took care to put writing and getting to the gym first. Probably we’d’ve done fine anyway, (We’re very cute.) but it was a lot easier to talk past sticking points and be open with my needs when my brain was all thankful and calm.

Since I’m still mostly a single girl (Well, as single as a girl with about five Valentines can be…) a lot of what I’ve experienced in the past couple of years has been the wonderfully anxiety-producing new parts of relationships, and to some degree I have used it as a (somewhat ineffective, it turns out) mood elevator, but also it’s just how I am.

I probably will always get very enthusiastic about lots of people, but I look forward to eventually seeing what comes after the “Call Me Maybe” phase of things—what happens when I’m calm and slow enough to ask for what I need and be able to hear what other people are asking for, too. I’m starting to feel like I can feel safe forming real attachments. As a lot of my snuggle pals are long distance, I’m clearly in a needing-some-elbow-room phase, but I’m curious to see which folks will end up evolving alongside me, becoming lasting bonds.

One thing that bothered me about the audience of this talk (Not the talk itself—seriously, see it.) was that even in this most poly of poly settings, people were still approaching outside relationships as potential problems, NRE as a threat to the existing structures. Nice poly person after nice poly person talked about “making it up to” the existing partners, with extra chores and hugs, as if excitement about somebody else were something to atone for rather than drink up and share.

It was kind of interesting to watch even the most seasoned of poly folks still separating themselves out into disparate relationships rather than feeling like a network of connections. When I love somebody, I love their whole thing, and to me that means loving their partners too, even if I don’t want to smooch them. (Probably I want to smooch them, though.) I guess not everybody wants to smush all their people together into one big pile, but that’s how it looks in my ridiculous heart.

Anyway, that day was one of the most illuminating learning experiences of my nascent sex geek career, and I’ll think about it all the time.

About “I Love You”

It will come as a surprise to exactly no one that I regularly exchange “I love yous” with the Mystery Man and his Family, none of whom I’ve seen in person. At first I wondered if maybe this wasn’t going a little overboard, but as a reader and a writer I’m quite used to adoring people I’ve never physically met. The stakes are a little higher, but it feels natural nonetheless.

Back when my best friend Angel Face and I were almost a thing for five seconds, he admitted to feeling overwhelmed at the amount of affection I sent (Those who balk at “Call Me Maybe” may be glad you missed my Ke$ha-ful “Your Love is My Drug” phase…) but as friends we talk like that all the time. Getting to say it romantically to a guy, though,  is new, and every time I read it or say it, it’s like a little more of me gets repaired, like I’m a little closer to getting to express my true self.

In the movies, (and in last week’s New Girl episode) the trope is that the “I love you” should be withheld until the big reveal, some big dramatic moment, but that isn’t how it feels to me at all. I love easily, instantly, and thoroughly, and that’s always made me feel a little bit out of sync. But what if there’s actually a place in the world for people who see life that way, for whom love is like breathing, like weather?

“I love you” is both momentous and ordinary. Or COURSE I love you, why wouldn’t I? My time on this planet is limited and I’m choosing to spend some of it with you. It’s obvious, it’s easy, it’s who I am. If I wasn’t loving everyone wholeheartedly, my job would eat me alive, divorce would have kicked my ass, and nothing would ever get done. All of it is running on love, all of the time.

It wasn’t until that really terrible casual sex with a random OKC guy right after Christmas that I realized I hadn’t really been having any casual sex these past two years. In some way, I’ve loved every person I played with, and every person whose person I’ve played with. I loved Cute Master and Pretty Slave from the moment they walked into that Kinky Karaoke party glowing with good sex (and probably good weed.) I loved the Cutest Boy at the Party as soon as he sat down and started chatting me out of my party tears. I loved Old-Timey Guy from the moment he smacked my behind with that godawful hurty ceramic star. (As a side note, I think it’s the romance that attracted me to BDSM in the first place—all the outfits, special names, and secret whispers, how lucky are we that that’s real to us?)  I loved the Steampunks from the moment I sat down at their table, would have done absolutely anything for them. Fireguy’s paternal gaze, The Man’s first bus stop kiss, the rope-compersion I felt for the Boss of Me and Her Boy before I even met them—all of it, love.

Most of those folks wouldn’t say they’re in it for love, or they had enough love already when I came along, and that’s easier to accept now that I can just go ahead and admit to loving them. I did, and I always will, no matter how the story ended.

And the ones who’ll take the “I love yous” and give them back, too? You’re changing the way I see the world, the way I see my place in it. You’re helping me to settle into my real self and guess what? I love you for it.