Knotty Thursday: We're Not Helpless

 Last night, my church held a vigil for all those killed by ICE. About a hundred people came. The songs were my love-and-light favorites, and I found ways to sing while crying. We all did. It was helpful to just sit there and watch the candles burn, let my heart just go ahead and break for a while. Grief is healthy and warm when it gets to live, gets to be heard. The candles eventually became a small fire in a dish, and we let it burn.

Someone had 3-D printed whistles and strung them on cords, as talisman, the pastor said. There were little pamphlets about how to use your whistle when ICE comes. For us, it's not if, it's when. I already have my whistle, but I hung some in a beloved tree as hopefully helpful street art.

So as your good sweet Ma'am, I have directions for you: Find a whistle and learn how to use it. Call your representatives and tell them how you feel about state-sponsored murder: Bad I hope! Tell them to defund ICE. Tell them anything and everything that's bothering your heart. You can write if you don't want to call, but tell them.

I love you all a bunch, my dears. Do this and I'll send you all the praise, just like I always do. 

Power, Praise, and Trauma, A Love Story

 

I think I’m doing a pretty good job with the whole moving on thing. Most days, I forget it’s Ramadan til sunset reminds me. Sometimes I get excited about a new Feeld guy and see a glimmer of possibility, a sparkle of a bright future with a nice untaken man. But anger at myself is the strongest thing holding me back—I hate how desperate I was to please The Shy One, especially towards the end. And, because I’m broken, I hate myself for not figuring out how to please him.

He himself isn’t trauma to me, but there it was: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn.

And I wasn’t alone in that. Once in a fairly low-stakes argument, he said “I don’t want any more conflict. I already lived through a civil war.”

After he got back from his big trip, in a higher-stakes argument, he let slip there was a trauma coming back to him, and that he didn’t want to talk about it. I didn’t press.

That’s all the speculating I can do about his traumas, or what I imagined to be his traumas. I wanted them to be my business, but they weren’t and aren’t.

One thing I can’t quite get mad at myself for: I chose that ill-fated sequel. It was submission that sent me back to him. At that dinner last July, I offered to do anything, to be anything for him. I wanted to sit at his feet. Inspired by the new ways that The Song Sender’s scenes cracked me open and let the light out, I went in with a sense of surrender—to The Shy One, to the divine, to fate.

I felt giddily empowered that hot night in July, so adventurous that I even tried calamari. Submitting though I was, I think what made him feel safe trying again was my confidence. He really missed that confidence when it was gone. By the end, when he was shutting down post-trip, I asked “What am I for?”

I asked a mentor the same thing in my last days of classroom teaching: “I feel like I’m nothing, like I’ve got nothing to offer.”

The day after the breakup, I was laying on my living room floor crying “Come back, please come back,” I was a little bit talking to the heavens, a little bit to him, and a lot to myself.

It would be wrong and mean and kink-phobic to blame praise for what we both went through, but. He was so, SO HURT whenever I had a complaint. And I was utterly mystified about how I could be “good” for him.

The first time post-breakup that I had to file my Friday paperwork without asking him for praise after, it seemed impossible. Of course, it wasn’t.

I think the loss of his praise (or even just the times the praise felt rote) felt so scary to me because those many “Good Girl” texts had more power than I realized. Because deep down, just in part of myself, I knew I could never really be good.

Trauma wrote that message on my body and mind a long time ago, and one of the things he was doing, one of the many, many things he was doing for my heart and soul and mind was helping me rewrite it. I think the best partnerships do that without trying. It’s alchemy. It’s just life shining through all the closets and mess and fear. And it’s a permanent, if incomplete, transformation.

So I wonder if I’ll ever want to call someone a “Good Boy” again (probably) or if I’ll want to be anyone’s “Good Girl.” (Also probably.)

I wonder too if, given the way the trauma lives in my bones and steer me so persistently to self-sabotage, if the connection I had with him was the closest I could get to a man. Once, I let it slip that I thought he might be my last chance.

He probably wasn’t, but no matter what comes next I’ll do everything I can to love the broken parts of me, even on the days when it’s hardest.

 

 

 

Goodbye to The Shy Ones

(art's a Rumi quote)
Time for me to take a little rest in the praise ocean.

My desire to love and be loved by them, whether it was the platonic love that I was just beginning to feel for her or someday being able to be loved by both of them, was so powerful as to be unmanageable. It was so big I couldn’t even see it until I’d started to let it go. I knew (Or was afraid I knew, it amounts to the same in the end) that it was too big a want, too feral a need to fit into their lives as they’re constructed. I was so scared of that big desire. It felt like Kaiju want, Godzilla love. If I was a movie, you’d have to pretend the buildings had been evacuated before they got smashed. This is a terrible way to see myself, I’d like to change it.

Maybe Mrs. Shy One felt that fear too, because when I, last Friday, the day after all the texting joy, asked her permission to blog about her, she decided I needed to check with her every time I thought of writing about her. From potential friend and metamour to editor, just like that. For the sake of “healthy boundaries,” for “honesty and transparency.” (LADY. You pretend your girlfriend is just a friend on your socials. Your husband asked me to do the same. Come ON.)

Mrs. Shy One reaching out to grab my writing process was, to me, the exact opposite of healthy boundaries. To put it in Downton speak, she was putting her oar in. It was clear to me that the only boundary she/they cared about was the one around me.

The bottom dropped out from the whole plan then, and I saw the situation for what it was, for what I was. To keep playing with The Shy One, I needed to be controlled. Managed. Shrunk or at least stunted. Even, my now-panicking brain added, snuffed.

The box I’d agreed to, their affable and understandable closet, was not going to stop shrinking around me.

The part that was absolutely NOT her fault is that I felt completely submissive about the two of them. I knew that they probably didn’t mean to try and control me, but I felt helpless, without a voice to negotiate. I did have a voice. The so-big-I-couldn’t-even-see-it desire combined with the submissiveness I couldn’t talk through without crying, made it feel impossible to listen to them or advocate for myself. It shouldn’t have been impossible, I know. My body was telling me that the options were to fall at her feet or flee.

So I fled. More accurately, I blocked both of their numbers so I could stop crying long enough to get through my workday and get at least a little bit of the story into paragraphs.

The next day, seeing where the paragraphs were going and not wanting to break things off via blog post, I asked The Shy One to come over or call. He couldn’t do either, he said, so we broke up by text. I told him the closet feels bad, that I want them to be exactly them and exactly where they are, but that I just didn’t fit.

He was just as kind. He told me I deserve to love without guardrails or artificial limits. That made me feel appreciated for who I am, and not Godzillalike at all.

I know there’ll always be guardrails and limits because humans are involved and nobody needs to be falling off a cliff.

I’m sure I’ll have more to say about him, and I know I’ve got lots of Unicorn Stuff to paragraph out, but for now I’m just sad, grateful and quiet. I don’t think it’s kind or helpful to compare myself to Godzilla, but for now I’m happy to be back in the sea, at rest.

 

Ma’am Stuff Part Two

Quote from Rumi

Friends, last night I dipped my toe into some nice warm Ma’am waters again. No one I’m ready to talk about yet, but it both moved me on from AND stirred me up about The Good Boy. This new possible one has a very different vibe from TGB, and I was wholly present with him, but everywhere I went today, I saw guys who reminded me of The Good Boy. Like a bunch of sexy, bright-eyed ghosts. And of course I’m convinced I will never see the new one again, even though he has indicated otherwise. Grieflust. Melancholy joy. Ravenous wistfulness. Newness and time loop. The urge to cling and the urge to leave a me-shaped hole in the wall as I flee.

Anyway, back to those first Ma’am texts with The Good Boy. He typed something like:

“Ma’am, I’m getting hard thinking about being all wrapped up tightly in your ropes.”

He texted so generously and sweetly. Everything he said read like innocent, available happiness, and it opened me up like flowers.

So I told him every time he got off thinking about me, he should let me know so I could send some praise. I told him it was the best way to be a Very Good Boy for me until we had time to meet.

The combination of flirting and coaching was an absolute delight and revelation—not sure I’ve ever felt more like myself. His texts were nicely chaste somehow, despite often being jerkoff reports. He felt MINE so fast, bravely, nakedly, openly so. Just so sweet and mine.

AND. A thing that’s rare for me in dating and actually in ALL things—I knew exactly what to do! I didn’t feel the performative pressure that so often makes up early dating chats, I knew that whatever praise I gave him would be okay, would be gratefully accepted instead of seen as overwhelming or overbearing. There’s such a RELIEF in knowing that it’s okay to give. There was power, yes, but also a new kind of love. By lavishing him with praise, giving him my whole self in a new, unfiltered way, I was also better able to love myself.

And once we met, once I started to know him (And OH BOY fuck him) as both his own person and as my own work of art, I also got to love him in a very Marie Kondo kind of way—the joy and attachment I feel towards my most precious objects. My Valentine car, my vintage 1970s tulip glasses, my weighted blanket, my magenta ropes. Mine to maintain, to gentle-as-a-verb, to make sure he didn’t break. He was in my care, and he was mine.

Of course, while we were in this beautiful mist of submission and care, he was also his own person, of course he was. He seemed happy, cozy, and present, but I couldn’t see inside his head to know if there was fear or revulsion or impatience (there was definitely impatience) or (way less intense than mine) real affection. I want to be able to know. This is why the end of an attraction always feels like a trick—there’s no way to really know it was real, nothing I can hold in my hand as proof.

Bye and Thanks to The Socialist

My third date with The Socialist (a week ago yesterday) was just as warm and snuggly as the first two. I drove out to visit him in the suburbs, to his very guy apartment with a goth mix playing and Smiths posters all over the walls. He was wearing a Smiths t-shirt that matched the rest of the aesthetic, and all of it felt very homey and familiar. When I was nineteen, my boyfriend-type-person was a goth guy who took me to a rave club on Friday nights, and that seems to have influenced most subsequent decisions.

I felt so cozy sitting on his (velvety black) couch with my feet in his lap, talking about books and life and politics. I was SO RELIEVED when he made fun of the idea of a rigged 2016 primary! I told him he deserved ten blowjobs for that, and I meant it, but maybe I need to set my bar higher than “only buys into SOME misogynist news cycles.” Kinda where we are right now, though.

In bed, it was easy and warm. He knew just how to kiss me and just how to fuck me, didn’t mind when my exuberant moans rattled the walls of his crowded apartment building, though he did eventually get up and close the window. I couldn’t contain my joy, and he didn’t want me to.

After a couple of snuggly hours, I got tired of the goth music and (this is seriously one of the best date things that ever happened to me) put on one of his TWO Monkees playlists, singing along to cheery retro deeps cuts with his whole heart and his whole face. This, to me, is the miracle of dating, the way that, in spite of every wall and flaw and trope, a near-stranger’s perfect goofball humanity can shine out of him like the sun, and I am sometimes lucky enough to be there, naked and satisfied, to witness it. (And, in this case, laugh my head off.)

Definitely not hot songs, but I climbed all over him some more anyway—"Another Pleasant Valley Sunday” indeed.

The trouble started when I tried to tell him what I needed in terms of post-snuggle communication. He had disappeared for most of the week following our excellent second date, and as I tried to ask for something other than radio silence I felt stupid and needy and a little flower of hurt bloomed in my chest. I knew I wanted him to be more present by text, but everything I said felt like it had the potential to scare him away, everything kept coming out wrong.

We did spend a very pleasant half-hour joking our way through the emoji keyboard (Upside-down-smiley-face makes a much better ping than the businesslike thumbs-up, don’t you think?!) As I was putting on my pants, though, I knew I had to try and get serious, and he could not have looked more miserable about that.

I explained that praise is a really important part of sex for me. “Praise” makes it sound more BDSM than I meant it to. What I really meant was…softness. Kind words. He hadn’t given a single tiny sparkle of a compliment, and I explained that I couldn’t read his mind to tell if he liked me. He argued that he wouldn’t have had me over if he didn’t like me, but that is just nonsense when it comes to sex. (And I have, like, five years of blogging to prove it.)

“I’m just not good with praise” was the verdict and so was “I just don’t like all the talking.” I said that if we were fucking, he needed to communicate better, and he seemed to take it to heart.

On the long drive home, my phone chimed, and I got my hopes up that maybe he’d said something sweet. When I pulled up at home, I opened the phone and saw…more bantering about emojis, which is admittedly fun and cute but also nagged at that little void in me where kind words should’ve been. I have all the kind words to offer, and I wanted to believe that I deserved some in return.

He pinged the next day, but the connection felt broken. There would’ve been so many things to chitchat about all week—the Blue Wave! The new emojis! Orange heart! But my phone was silent except for reminders from ResistBot, so I had to admit that The Socialist didn’t like me the way I liked him.

After I let him go, I felt a return to myself, a relief from the emotional hangover that had made the sad election anniversary even harder to navigate.

What I want is simple, I want the cute person to tell me I’m cute. What isn’t so simple is remembering that I deserve it.

As the dust settled and I sent my OKC app to the cloud for a breather, I realized something I’ve never been able to non-judgmentally take in about myself before: sex is a scary thing to me. It’s all of the wonderful things, too, but sharing my space, my body with someone takes a deep investment of trust. I’ve always wanted it to be no big deal but with a sensitive body and soul and a heart that will leap into action at the least provocation, I have to take care of myself. I have to admit what I need.

So it’s a sad week, guywise, and I’m disappointed, but this is also a good, big step. I listened to him when he told me what he had (and didn’t have) to offer, and I believed him. Instead of treating the difference between us with self-sacrifice and eventual resentment, I treated us both kindly, setting us free to find a better fit. Sigh-go me.