As a poet, I should be better-prepared to be rejected. Over
the years, I have received hundreds of rejection slips for hundreds of poems,
manuscripts, etc, and only very rarely did I feel that they had any bearing on
the quality of my work. If only I could have that same confidence about myself!
Though it’s been mostly a very happy week over here, I’ve
been laying awake with very jealous, hurty feelings about the Mayor of
Kittentown. It’s isn’t so much that he belongs to her now; it’s that he
officially no longer belongs to me. I’m bothered by the difference between
being able to belong to multiple people and only belonging to one—instead of
just having a different heart, I worry that I might have a deficient one. I
think childlike thoughts like “How could he just throw me away?” in spite of
the fact that I broke up with him about two and a half times. I knew we weren’t
going to fall in love, I always encouraged him to keep looking (which looks, in
retrospect, like its own kind of cruelty…) but the loss of our physical
friendship is hitting me hard, it’s breaking my heart, making me feel a little
bit dismantled.
Rejection bogs me down. For whatever reason, his rejection
seems to negate everything good that he made me believe about myself: that I
could trust a man, that I could have a happy bisexual life, that I’m can be
beautiful and sexy to men. Somehow it feels like he took those things away just
by not wanting me anymore, that I need him (and Bill, and Fireguy) just to have
those hot feeling back, but I understand intellectually that that’s just not
true.
These men so far, things have gone so wrong with them that I
feel as if I have failed a series of entrance exams, that I failed to qualify
for their gender. Losing each of them has been so exquisitely painful that it’s
hard to feel connected to the good things that have happened, to all the real
progress that I’ve made.
I tend to mistake rejection for facts: Bill said he couldn’t
have a serious relationship with a poly woman, so I felt unlovable. Fireguy
didn’t like being written about, so I thought the project itself made me
unlovable. MKT’s simpler (?) idea of love makes me feel like I’m too
hopelessly, messily complicated for men.
And I AM complicated, but that doesn’t mean that there won’t
be a guy who’ll love me for it—I believe those are called, uh, polyamorous guys—who’ll be willing to share
his life with me. Two of the men in the previous paragraph identified as
monogamous, and the other was a heartbroken mess, so I don’t think I can make
any generalizations about them, other than 1. Duh, date poly guys and 2. Don’t
be a rebound redhead.
I would love to have back all of the good physical lessons I
got from them, to not have the hot self-discoveries cancelled out by the fact
that they’re gone. Not too long ago, in a Poly Weekly episode about minimizing
scene drama, either Minx or her guest said something like “Just because someone
disagrees with you doesn’t make you less awesome.” I would LIKE to think that
just because someone doesn’t want to fuck me and/or fall in love with me
doesn’t make me any less lovable and/or hot.” No one can turn back time and
take away those experiences—no one can take any of it away.
Of course this goes back to the heart of this
project—learning to approve of myself so that I don’t have to wear myself down
trying to gain approval from others, except in fun ways, of course. I started
this quest for my inner Bettie Page because I wanted her confidence, the way
the looks boldly into the camera, the way she returns the gaze. She is not
going to shrink timidly into nothingness when the lens turns away from her, and
neither am I.
Dear Divine Whatever,
Please help me to collect and feel whatever good they’ve all
given me so far, to take it in as fuel to bravely move forward, believing in
every glance and touch and step, having faith in whatever radiates out of me at
my proudest, most joyful moments.
(To which I can imagine the Divine Whatever saying: “Good
girl. So pretty.”)
