Pagan Boy Visits in a Dream

 

A few weeks ago, there was this dream. I’ve had variations of this one lots of times--Pagan Boy and I were getting back together. We had a whole sexy thing brainstormed, but then I stepped out of his apartment for a moment. We lived in an art installation, the way you sometimes do in dreams. I spent the whole rest of the dream (I think it’s Prozac that makes my dreams so long and Byzantine…) trying to get back to his place. There was an electricity map where you could check to see who was home. I thought I’d find him back there, but there was someone else.

I woke up so sad. We’d finally made a date, we were finally on-again, but I realized all over again that he’s gone. Passed away from Covid last year while we were planning a remote friend-date to watch The Apple. We’ll never get back together. We’ll never meet for coffee and flirt. He’s just gone.

The griefs of Covid and its attendant tragedies take a long time to sift though sometimes. Everyone knows the stages of grief don’t come like a ladder, step by step.

Like any other lover, he… visits? during self-love times, and that happened the other night. It was a real memory, a real day in the summer of 1994. He was moody and I was crampy, but we went to the local naked swimming waterfall anyway. We sat on the margins of the fun, barely stitched together in our own misery.

I was self-conscious then about my tampon string, but my present day remembers one moment with great warmth and shimmer. Pagan Boy watched me from the shore or on a stone in the middle of the stream while I crouched down in the shallow water and opened my legs to him. The cold water and his half attention lit up my clit in 1994 and in 2022. He couldn’t really see me and I couldn’t feel much besides the cramps, but still, an opening up, a fresh opening-up.

We re-broke-up not long after that sunny sad day, but we shared a bed as friends after club nights a few more times. His monumental snores drove my roommates crazy, and I was smushed into the wall by our two monumental bodies in the bed. The smush of him felt good to me, made me feel real and loved.

We’d overhear the roommates fucking in the next room and the air between us would get tense and frustrated, but still, he stayed. Still, we slept.

By the time, in the twenty-teens, we were having coffee in the same town where my sister lives, we were both poly and kinky. He was an oasis of being myself in the midst of any family weekend. Without that oasis, I really don’t know what to do.

 

Epilogue: The Drummer

 

Once I like someone, I kind of assume they are going to evaporate into think air immediately. I guess that’s not such a weird conclusion to jump to these days, given that I did have a beloved longtime friend suddenly drop dead of Covid a few weeks ago. The Drummer didn’t evaporate, exactly, and I’m not sure if I made him disappear.

 

The Wednesday after our woods date was January Sixth. The Drummer, just texting every few hours or so, was a powerful comfort. I liked to picture his Nineties self, beating up the insurrectionists outside a hardcore show. “Bunch of clowns.” He texted, and I heard it in his adorably gruff regional accent. Bunch of clowns indeed.

 

Something unspecified happened with his family that following weekend. I knew he was caring for his mom who suffered from dementia and a brother on the spectrum, I hoped they were both/all okay! I imagined The Drummer having to bail out some lousy insurrectionist cousin or uncle, even though I was the one with the fascist aunts. I wondered if he secretly WAS one of the lousy insurrectionists! If he’d just been trolling me by playing liberal—he HAD mentioned still watching South Park… Things were very stressful and paranoid that weekend. I couldn’t physically relax.. My body knows the they’re coming for you feeling and I couldn’t shake it even though I was home and safe.

 

Not the best frame of mind to be trying to make plans for a date, but we did try. We were going to watch Wonder Woman 84, once I ascertained that we were NOT watching it as one of our bad movies. I looked forward to seeing the outfits again, to mediating upon Gal Gadot’s shiny hair. But we had to change plans a couple of times, he kept having to postpone, and it was one chaos, one vulnerability too many for me.

 

I told him I like to know my schedule, that he should reach out when things cleared up a bit, when things were less maybe-ish. He was so sweet and apologetic about the changes, but I never heard from him again. I regretted being (VERY GENTLY) sassy about the schedule. I worried that I hadn’t been compassionate enough. I worried that I was going to be alone with my schedule forever.

 

I texted one more time, to say I hoped he was okay, that I was here any time for comfort or distraction. I unmatched us on Bumble but I left his number unblocked, just so I can tell myself I’m open, I’m not too rigid, I’m here for imperfection and tumult and unspecified family stuff. Am I? I don’t know. The guys I’ve chatted with since are so BORING compared to him, I miss him a lot. It’s hard to be hopeful and hard to keep going, but I will, I am.

The Boy Who Sewed Me a Pillow, Part Six

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What A Community Can’t Do

Last month, I made the painful decision to leave the Unitarian church that has been my spiritual home for seven years. It was over a philosophical difference that really snuck up on me, a lightning-strike realization that we (the church and I) weren’t on the same page. I try to see it the way it’s best to see dating deal-breakers, that saying no to what doesn’t work makes room for what does, but leaving was a huge loss. I’m struggling with a mix of shame, disappointment, and sadness that is very familiar to be because I seem to hit a wall of it at least every few years.

In her wonderful new book Rising Strong: The Reckoning, The Rumble, and The Revolution Brené Brown says that in order to get out from under disappointment, you have to be brave and really examine the expectations for the situation. So I’ve really given a lot of thought to the conscious and unconscious expectations that keep leading me to be damagingly disappointed by groups, scenes, and communities.

1. A community can’t be a correction for a hurtful family. Just the way I’ve sometimes gone to doms for approval, I go to communities hoping that they can love me into realness, approve me into existence. There’s an underlying hope of “Now that   I’ve found/become/befriended ___________, I will finally be okay, will finally be welcomed into the world and find unconditional love. It’s sad to realize that I didn’t have that with my original family as a child, but I can’t expect healing and wholeness to come from anywhere but within.

2. A community can’t replace my own family, flawed though they may be. I live too far away from my family of origin and I don’t have a family to share a household with right now, and that leaves a hole that nothing can fill.

3. A community can’t fix rape culture, because rape culture is in all of us. It is always easier for groups to be angry at the person pointing out the problem than to face the problem itself. I’ll always have to speak up against it, but I’d love to learn to feel safe doing so.

4. A community can’t erase heartbreak. I’ve realized that, though there were other factors, I left the BDSM scene because I couldn’t process the rejections I’d experienced there. I tried to patch each loss with another person, (and the whole thing was an attempt to patch divorce grief) but the grief kept walking me down the same path. After three years, I’m to the point where I can see the loss for what it is, and I desperately want to stop sponging that pain onto other people. It’s hard not to try and numb the loss of Sweetie and the life we created together.

5. A community can’t stay the same forever, and it can’t change as I change. Just the way that, in dating, I have to walk away from a bad match instead of trying to torture the person into changing for you, I have to let go of situations that aren’t a good fit. It doesn’t mean that I have to fear or fight forever, just that I need to constantly let things come and go.

6. A community can’t replace love. I am sick of being single, but I still have some inner work (and a whole lot of book-editing!) to do before I’m ready to start a life with another person, but I have to look loneliness in the eye, to honor it. I have to realize how much I want my own family and stop trying to shoehorn other things into that space.

7. A community can’t come to my rescue. If I ignore my instincts and walk into something that doesn’t work, no principal, no dom, no friend can be expected to “save” me. I am a grown woman, and I want to train myself to hear and respect my inner voice so that I can stop reliving abandonment or having childlike expectations of “loyalty.” We’re all adults being ourselves, and it’s up to me to find out what actually works, and do it.

8. A community can’t define me, erase me, or absorb me. It can’t give me an identity, and any identity it DOES give will feel constraining. The only thing I know I am is me, and I have to find out a way to be solid within myself, so I can stop expecting others to create me.

This has been a harsh, lonely time. The double loss of J. and the church has made for a very sad couple of months. It’s hard to have faith in anything right now, so I’m just trying little things as they come along, letting joy and connection in whatever little windows they can find. I’m also still trying to find help with the walls and wounds I keep running into. I don’t like being back in this Groundhog’s Day of sadness, this most vexing part of the labyrinth, but I’m doing my best to learn as much as I can while I’m here. 

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.

Checkmarks and March Goals: Loss and Recentering

I feel so much loss when I look at February's checkmarks. I started the month in the beginning of something new, with an admittedly illusory feeling of being surrounded and embraced, and I ended it more authentically but also with a bruised sense of reality and trust. I've learned so much and I wouldn't take back any of it, but I'm still so sad and lost about the Mystery Family's rejection, about how much they meant and how quickly it was erased. I can only hope that my real heart goals will prevail to take me forward into something real.