A mermaid tie is pretty easy, but I tried and tried and couldn't get it right. That's how life feels right now, friends.
Back when I was finishing up trauma work and processing what happened with Summer Princess, my next door neighbor brought me hibiscus tea, or maybe he was just bringing it out for all the neighbors and I just thought he wanted to talk to me. Who knows.
Either way, he was so fun to talk to. He's a Twin Peaks fan! And I felt so at ease with him that my David Lynch impression came out.
(WHAT A GREAT TIME TO BE ALIVE IF YOU LIKE THE THEATER OF THE ABSURD!)
Bonding. Cuteness. Eventually, sitting around listening to The National. But all of a sudden, he picked somebody else, blah blah blah trapped in a hell of my own making.
Sometimes friends who are also readers express worry about
having to change plans or other logistical stuff they think might not be up to
my exacting specifications. I always feel so sheepish when that happens, nobody
should have to feel self-conscious like that, and I and I don’t ever want
anyone to think their OWN logistics don’t matter to me. Besides, purely platonic
situations are never what triggers schedule-related panics, at least not
lately.
Okay, so I really, really love to plan. I don’t just make my
schedule, I curate it, and I do cling
to it for comfort. Part of that’s just being poly and being a busy teacher
lady, but also, I just spent a lot of years not doing what I want to do with my
time, so I want to make sure I’m using it to get what I really want. Because,
like most grownup people, I have such limited time for social stuff, any item
I’ve written on the calendar is special and there for very specific reasons.
I’m starting to understand that it’s not that deep for most folks, and that’s
probably okay.
Part of calendar fuss is just good old-fashioned existential
angst. Since I was about seven, I’ve been preoccupied with the finiteness of
life. Nonetheless, I managed to, even after I remembered I was bi and realized
I was poly, put off dating for about five years. I threw myself into work and
poetry and art and expected those things to fill the holes left by missing
relationships, by ALL OF THE VERY MANY missing penises. I avoided myself for so
long, afraid to risk humiliation (at least that’s decidedly behind me), afraid
of losing Sweetie, holding on to her for the safety when really we were the
most unsafe thing.
It is my fault that I left the best parts of myself off the
calendar for so long. I think that’s why I have the ongoing fear of the people
I’m attracted to forgetting me—there’s such a bigbig part of me that I forgot, that I willfully ignored for
so long.
Like all of the roadblocks, this one is about grief and
being angry with myself. When I got explodey with Mr. Sweetheart over the
summer for forgetting it was Wednesday, when I was overly vehement with Mr.
Shiny Eyes for even flirting with the idea of switching to another Friday, it
was partly from knowing those relationships couldn’t give me what I need, but I
think I was also giving voice to the parts of me that are angry at being pushed
aside by me and Sweetie for so many years.
Also there’s the more literal fact that I forget to give
myself enough time alone. I’m half-introvert and I’m surrounded by people
almost every minute, and it’s nobody’s fault but mine when I don’t make time to
read magazines, hike, or just go to bed early.
But mostly, there’s this: I really do think that people
might forget me, that I’m so unremarkable that I might just slip through the
cracks of everyone’s full lives. With platonic friends, there’s an easy fix, I
just pursue plans tenaciously and I’m as flexible as I can be. Noreally! Just
ask Angel Face—he’s been in NREtown for a while and it sometimes takes several
false starts until we have plans—this doesn’t stress me out at all.
But with sexytimes or romantic interests, it’s harder to
fight the conviction that there’s always somewhere better to be than with me,
the idea that they don’t think of me at all unless I’m present. This is why god
invented pressing “like” and why I enjoyed the Cutest Boy so much—his texts
were so constant that I barely had a chance to worry that he’d forgotten about
me—and he was happy to tell me I was unforgettable any time I needed. A recipe
for addiction, but still.
If I really like someone, a day on the calendar makes me
feel more anchored to them. It somehow means that they are less likely to find
something better and drift away. Writing a name on the calendar is like tying
one end of a string to the balloon of them and tying the other end to my wrist.
For the years when I forgot/tried to squelch my guy-liking
side (and all the kinky stuff that emerged along with it!) when I tried my
heart out to be gay and monogamous, when I left entire body parts unexplored
and neglected, I think I owe myself an apology. How’s this:
Dear Self,
I’m sorry that I took so much away from you and that you’re
only beginning to find out how much you’ve been missing. I’m sorry I shamed you
and let you be shamed, treated you so narrowly, harshly, and judgmentally. I’m
sorry that I marched you through so much unhappiness when you could have been
yourself and free. I’m sorry I defined you by tragedy, by defensiveness, by the
things your stupid mother told you. I’m sorry I deprived you of all the penises
for so many years, and I promise you they’re not suddenly all going to
disappear again. I will try to never take away another thing because of
meanness or fear or overprotection.
I’m going to do my best to try and get you everything, so I
need you to just forgive me, chill out, and have a little more faith.
Love,
Me
As for the part where I think people will forget me, I’m
trying to note all of the evidence that the best ones haven’t and won’t so that
I don’t freak out when a cutie misses a call or doesn’t agree with me on the
definition of “a couple of weeks.” Though it sometimes weeds out things I feel
lukewarm about, I’m not going to let calendar fuss take away the stuff I really
want. Lately I’m forced to admit that some of the best stuff can happen without
planning, provided that I’m wearing cute underwear and/or am willing to grab
someone’s hand and pull her into a parade.
But I’ll always be impressed as all getout by an
asker-outer, by anyone who’s willing to be written in ink. Like reading me or
“good girl,” it’s just another way to my heart.
I’ve known I had to write this one for a while, but I’ve put
it off because I’ve had more fun things to write about and also because it’s
one of the worst things about me and I am so ashamed. It’s so annoying to me
that something from childhood could still be such a motivation at 39. But here
we are, fresh off a sleepless night of wondering why the hell I can’t catch up
to my friend’s accomplishments and why I never made the cut with her boyfriend.
We’ve already been over the fact that I wrecked my mom’s
life simply by being born, and that I was blamed for all of the family’s
problems simply because my birth instigated the family’s existence. My brother
had his own set of issues and traumas, but not my sister. She had an entirely
different childhood than we did. Where we ran the gamut from tolerated to
berated, she was the one who was always praised. She was cute as a button and
never did any of her chores, but she didn’t complain about it either, so she
was held up as an example: “Just be easygoing like your sister and you won’t
keep getting into trouble.” My sister has walked through the world her whole
life knowing she is loved and lovable, and I’m still pissed that I never
learned to feel that.
My sister knew from almost the time she WAS a baby what she
wanted to do with her life—she wanted to be a mother. She went very quickly
from carrying around her baby dolls to carrying around whatever small children
happened to be near. There was never any 1990’s style Douglas Couplandy angst
for her, she just always knew what to do. She met her husband in college and
was pregnant before they got married. Now she has five children, two of them
autistic, and I have never seen her express any moment of self-doubt or any
emotion more negative than mild exasperation. She sure is making up for those
years of not doing her chores- she hosts every holiday and her husband has
never washed a dish.
I never regretted any part of my adult life until this year
when I found myself 39 and freaking the fuck out about the fact that I somehow
need to find a husband. I’ve been so angry with myself lately about how I’ve
mismanaged my life. When I graduated from high school, I felt (even after a
life of mostly straight A-s) like I was too stupid to go to college or do any
demanding job, so (aside from a very brief trip to photography school) most of
my early 20s were spent waitressing and working retail, doing neither thing
well. I made art, I hung out in coffeeshops, it was the Nineties. Slacking was
okay. Art school and graduating from college seem like they should be
accomplishments, as should 10 years as mostly a full-time poet, but it all just
seems like such a waste, especially since Sweetie paid for it all and it’s part
of why we’re now so trapped.
Just like I feel ashamed of being so behind my friends
sexually, I feel awful about not having known what to do with my life sooner. I
wish, like my sister, I’d just known.
Having not-the-pretty-sister syndrome has never been helpful
in friendships or dating, and especially not in poly. My response to feeling
competed-with my whole life has always
just been to take myself out of the equation—there’s no way I could deserve it
as much as the other girl does (or girls do), so if she wanted it, it was hers.
I think I was trying to teach myself out of that reflex by struggling to stay
on Steampunk Guy’s radar, and in that light, interrupting him while he was
chatting up that girl at the party that time seems like kind of a victory.
Still bad form, though.
When jealousy comes, it never feels like the urge to take
something from the other girl. It’s always the wish that I not have to walk through
the world as myself anymore, unlovable and ugly. Since I can’t be her, I want
to be nothing. It’s a deep-seated urge to erase myself because I “know” that
nothing was made for me here, there’s no place for me in this world, certainly
no family. The more I’ve managed to prove that idea wrong, the harder the fear
is to fight, the more I feel like I should let go of everything I love, like,
or might want, because the person it really belongs to will be along shortly to
claim it.
No wonder the big deal guy of this story is someone whose
body is often angled away like he’s just about to leave. The
thing-that-happens-sometimes. The unpredictability, the rare praise that shines
on you sometimes like All Summer in a Day,
the this-could-never-be-mine-ness is the only thing that felt real sometimes,
the only thing, paradoxically, that really felt mine. Not-having. Yearning.
Starving until I am ready to accept way less than I deserve. These are my worst
habits and addictions, and I want to quit.
I can’t actually imagine a guy who’s mine, much as I want
him. I believe, all the way deep in my bones, that it’s a thing I’m not capable
of. I don’t know what’ll change that, except paragraphs and therapy, but I’m
ready to stop being convinced that I’m less than other women, because I deserve
every good thing for myself.
It’s hitting me so hard today—the feeling that I’ve failed.
I failed to make my family, failed to find the right love, and now I may have
lost my chance. I feel one million years old. All over my life, people know
how to do this, and I don’t: falling together, clicking into place and figuring
out what works for them, settling into the dailiness of love, and I’m writing
while my ex-wife catches up the bills in the other room. I hate it so much and
I don’t know how to get to the other side.
A week ago, for the past while actually, I’ve been feeling
good about things, feeling like my momentum would just carry me along to
wherever I need to be. For whatever reason, today that left me and I see the precariousness
of the situation, I can’t feel any faith.
I am so scared, everybody, that no matter what I do or try,
it will be forty years from now and I’ll be on my deathbed realizing that I
never realized the dream that meant the most, the only thing I ever really cared
about, that I never found true love. What if I have to spend the rest of my
life just WATCHING love and never having my own?
Because what if whoever made me just forgot to put the
lovable part in? What if I’m just not supposed to be a part of it?
I’ve always had a poet’s preoccupation with the finiteness
of life, and it used to be much worse. Lilacs are my favorite flower and every
May I used to worry my head off about whether I’d smelled them enough that
year. Of course, once I made room for a bigger life and other flowers, the
lilac-urgency relaxed, but I still do feel very upset about the passage of
time, especially with my 39th birthday coming up next week.
I came to both my career and my body at a later-than-usual point
in life. At work, I’m surrounded by experienced twenty-something teachers while
I’m just starting out. In the dungeon, it’s hard not to feel inferior to the women
who knew what they wanted right away and claimed it. I am so ashamed and
embarrassed for being so far behind, for all the time I managed to put off
growing up and making the most of things.
Although I’m pretty sure I don’t want a person to come out
of me (I have space issues, people!) my biological clock is pissed off at me
and twisting the knife in my gut lately. How did everybody else find the right
people to make families with? How did they trust themselves and their partners
and the world enough to take such big risks? Why did I automatically count
myself out for so long? I try to tell myself that the family I was with Sweetie
was what I needed for a while, but now I am just absolutely terrified that I
missed my chance to find the family I really want. Although I know millions of
ladies are in the same boat, 39 seems like an INSANE time for me to realize I
want a male primary partner—that statistic about being more likely to get
struck by lightning gets stuck in my head sometimes and it’s paralyzing.
I remember the panic I felt when I first realized how valued
younger women are, and that I was now sharing the dating pool with them. I was
fussing about how some crush of mine had taken up with his 24-year-old student
and another guy friend of mine said “Um, because he can!” as if she were some
special privilege he was entitled to claim. It pissed me off so much that she
was assumed to be better than me simply because of her youth.
Given the societal dictate that younger is better (How often
have I been in a rope class where the teacher who needs a demo bottom
automatically chooses the youngest and smallest girl in the room?) just how in
the world am I supposed to compete? I’m so excited to find authentic ways to
connect and express mindful adult sexuality and it doesn’t always feel like
there is a market for that.
I’ve known for a while that I’m having a pretty classic
midlife crisis—grief for what I have missed and a worry that I won’t be able to
make everything out of my life that I want to. I’ve wasted a lot of years
thinking that I’m too big, too ugly, too old for men, and I’m still trying to
take apart those assumptions.
There’s no way in this world that I would ever want to go
back to my own twenties, though. I was selfish, mean, and afraid of every kind
of intimacy. My body may have been better by some narrow, sexualizing made-up
standard, but I didn’t have a single clue of what to do with it.
The current version of myself is decidedly the best one I’ve
had to offer, but I feel so very, very scared that no one will ever want it,
that there will always be some younger, better girl standing in the way.
Back in the spring I had to break off a friendship with one
of my guy friends for a while because he (42 years old, I think) kept talking
about the “vitality” of his 24-year-old crush. I have vitality—all you need is
life and excitement. I know the biological clock pressure is false because I
don’t need to reproduce to have the kind of family that I want. I can’t go back
and start over so that I’d have more experience by now. I know that any guy
who’s that into youth is a creep and not the guy for me.
The birthday-panic is so strong this year both because of
the divorce and because of the times I’ve felt so close to having what I
wanted. I’m going to try and filter out the influences that make me feel old
and dried up (Bye for now, porn and pre-Criss 30 Rock episodes…) and get out in the world among the real play and
real bodies. Though I do occasionally like to play as 17, I can’t and don’t
want to be younger, smaller, or magically at some further-along point in my
life. I can only do my best exactly where I am and hope that the right folks’ll
meet me here.
“Every generation thinks it’s the end of the world.” –Wilco
“Your pussy doesn’t care about your politics.” –Mollena
Williams
***Note: As soon as I finished sitting in a diner and
writing this post in my notebook, I went to an eye doctor appointment where I
got totally asked out by a really excellent 28-year-old. He may be scrolling
through at this moment and realizing he bit off more than her could chew, but
still, if that’s not incentive to kick down this roadblock, I don’t know what
is. As if the Steampunks and all of my other younger pals weren’t incentive
enough!***
Amusing as it was, my foray back into the world of OK Cupid
ended up being kind of triggering. It gave me kind of a trapped feeling—I’m
sure that was partly because I’m not ready for dating, and also there’s
something I don’t like about online sexting, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Anyway, it was fun at first to indulge in some
non-goal-oriented flirting. I wound in an amusing game of Truth or Dare with a
twenty-something guy and there was absolutely nothing wrong with that until he
revealed, about eight messages in, that he has a rape fantasy. That in itself
was not enough reason to stop the conversation—lord knows my fantasy life isn’t
chock full of consent, so I feel like I have kind of a double standard being
bothered by it.
But really, WHY is it okay to say the word rape to a girl
you’re trying to get somewhere with? I didn’t ask him that, just moved the
conversation on to other things, but I felt icky about him so I said a nice
goodbye. He was kind of a snot about it, so I guess I made the right choice to
cut him off. It was a fine afternoon’s entertainment, but it also inspired me
to try and tackle this topic that I’ve stopped and started writing about so
many times.
People who are in their twenties spent their entire
formative years in a culture where rape jokes are part of the mainstream. Sarah
Silverman (who I love, but who definitely adorabled rape jokes into okayness)
and Seth McFarlane (who I think I would punch in the face if I could) both came
along at the same time Buffy was getting sexually assaulted by Spike, and I really
freaked out about it being taken so lightly. After a while, though, it became
so normal that I, like most people, just kind of stopped fighting it.
Last spring, I was standing outside work at dismissal time
and I heard some sixth grade girls joking about how their guy friends were
trying to rape them. I put on the teacher voice and said, “Girls, I know you’re
just kidding, but that is a very serious thing so please don’t joke about it.”
“It’s not serious to us!” They said, and went back to
laughing and roughhousing.
There are studies that have shown that the definition of
consent is eroding, and umpteen million books and articles have been written
connecting those changes to the advent internet porn. I definitely don’t feel
comfortable making blanket statements about porn’s relationship to real-world
consent. I use it myself, about once a week, and not nice feminist porn either.
I just troll through YouPorn like anybody else. I actually think it’s helped me
to figure out some things that I would like to have happened to me, and in the
years before I found the courage to date men, it gave me a safe way to experiment.
Like any other porn user, sometimes it gives me ideas I want to use (I am a
girl who genuinely likes to be come all over) and lets me experience things
that would be terrifying in real life. (I probably wouldn’t like to be come all
over by 100 guys.)
I don’t feel ashamed of using porn and I don’t think men
should either, but at the same time, I did enjoy the time before guys wanted to
choke me. Whitney Cummings has a great joke about that:
And I miss the time before guys would mention rape and expect
to get somewhere with me. There are very good things about taboos being more
out in the open, but dating just seems too harsh sometimes. I don’t know how
much of the harshness I’m perceiving has to do with my own fears and past
traumas (and Sweetie’s Rape Crisis Center view of men) and how much of it is
actual sociological change.
I know my fear of young people fed into my fear of the Scary
Party, (it’s the younger-skewing of the two main dungeons in town) even before
the thing with The Man. I felt judged and sexualized there. It was just a fear
and it was no doubt made worse by the fact that I was trying not to realize I
would much rather play with men than with Sweetie, but it was a sensation like
the bad, exploitive aspects of porn. I felt defined by the male gaze in a very
unfun way. It was a terrible, desperate feeling that the only way to be worthy
was to attract that gaze, and the only way to attract it was to fit into a very
narrow set of criteria. If I wasn’t young, small, pliable, childlike, and
deeply masochistic, then I was nothing at all.
A lot of that impression is about broken aspects of my
psyche just finding expression out in the world. I have referred to it as the
Cabinet in Which I Store My Fears. Some of the badness was something I was
projecting, but not all of it.
Part of my fear of young people, if not most of it, comes
from a sort of arrested development feeling that I’ve carried around since I
was seventeen. I still have a general suspicion that I might be conspired
against, rufied, raped, beaten and berated by mean kids just because ithappened that time when I was a kid. Now that I am shrugging off (blinking off?) that victim
lens, I am hoping I will find fewer ways to end up expressing it out in the
world.
I know it’s a skewed lens because many of the dearest people
I know, including one of my protectors, belong to that generation I get scared
of. I know they have nothing but goodness in their souls and no intention of
hurting anybody who doesn’t want to be hurt. Just like I think the TNGers' age cutoff of 35 is mean and arbitrary, so is making assumptions about people under
30. The best solution to dismantling the arbitrary limits I’ve placed on myself
and others is giving everyone a chance, getting to know them one-on-one, and
continuing to say good nos, parsing out which scary things are within and which
are without.
There’s a lot to be said too about my own anxieties about
aging, but I’ll save that for another day.
Part of every day is okay. There’s an overarching loneliness
that’s hard to take, but mostly I get through it. Sometimes, though, I just run
out of trying. I get a bad headache and feel trapped, feel like I’m drowning,
and the only thing I can do is get a drink of water and go lay down. As long as
I just go ahead and let myself do that, the drowny feeling passes.
With exercise being my main antidepressant, I panicked a
little when the city pools closed, but I went back to the gym at the community
center by my house. For some reason I can’t stop myself from smiling when I get
on the elliptical. Sometimes I am a little bit of a chick lit novel, I think.
Zumba classes started up again and the instructor has the hottest ass I’ve ever
seen, so I have that to look forward to.
On Monday, the Lady of the House and I had a nude beach day
and it was fantastic. We talked our hearts out and I trusted her enough to tell
her things I hadn’t told anybody, not even Sweetie. With Sweetie having gotten
so sick of the sound of my voice, it’s wonderful that I have at least a couple
of people in my life who don’t think I talk too much. (LOTH does think I might
think too much, and I’m inclined to agree.) In between swimming and adding cute
couples to my mental vision board, we worked on lists of what we want in our
next partners. We’re awesome wingpeople for each other since almost everything
we like is opposite—besides “Must love the ocean,” of course. I’ll post my list
soon even though I’ve already written (and ignored!) many such lists.
One thing I’m proud of from this week is that the other
night when I was crying it out over Steampunk guy, I didn’t lean on Sweetie for
help. When I was lying in bed crying and trying to write, she came in and put
her hand on my back but I sent her back out. I texted Angel Face a few times
but mostly I handled it on my own. I cried and wrote and then cried and wrote
some more the next day, until eventually they started to feel like productive
tears, tears of acceptance, the kind that give my heart a little more breathing
room. It’s important that I know how to fall apart and put myself back together
without having to depend on Sweetie to tell me it’s okay, to tell me I’m okay.
It’s been a hard week, but I still feel like I’m doing what
I can to move myself forward. One of my main goals is to have more community
ties by the time my heart is healed, so I looked up a bunch of munches and
RSVPed. This week was the local Master/slave meeting and it was exactly the
right thing to go to. Everybody was so sweet and caring, and we/they talked
about deep, complicated feelings for two hours—that is like emo-girl Christmas!
There wasn’t any one person I felt an affinity towards, but the group felt like
such a good place to start—one of them, anyway.
I’d still been feeling very reticent about making friends
around the scene because of shame about the (way back when) Fireguy stuff and
the (still kind of hurty) Scary Party stuff, but the more I talk to people, the
more I understand that I’m not alone. The picture I had of myself as an outcast
or pariah was a. pretty self centered and b. incorrect. There are definitely
some mean girls who don’t like me, but for the most part no one ever says “Oh,
that was you?” and runs away or yells at me. It’s just a part of who I am, and
someday, I won’t be ashamed of it. While I do regret the fight with Fireguy, I
can’t say that I regret the Scary Party thing—I can’t see any other way that
could have gone. Plus, I kind of like tops to know that I have the potential to
fuck their whole shit up (at least for a night or two) if they ignore limits.
That being said, while I was talking to one of the Scary
Party regulars about The Man, a wave of compassion washed over me. He’s just
like me, just like everyone—kind of a brokeny person who needs love and fucks
it up sometimes. Not that I’d snuggle up to him anytime soon (I’m sure he’d be
TERRIFIED at the prospect) but I don’t really feel like I need to be mad at him
anymore, and I certainly don’t need to be afraid. With things in perspective,
he was a love like any of the others, and he always will be.
So even though the days are long and sluggish, I do feel
like I’m continuing to break down walls for myself.
Monday night when I came home all pink and happy from the
beach, I was joking around with Sweetie about my “must love the ocean”
requirement, and she said:
“You know, I grew up in West Texas. Most of the information
I had about the ocean came from Jaws.”
“Come to think of it, most of the information you had about
hetero sex came from working at the Rape Crisis Center.”
“Til I met you, yeah.”
Sweetie didn’t make up my fears and barriers, but she was
very good at enabling and encouraging them. My fears brought us closer
together, made me feel like I had to keep depending on her. I can see that her
influence, while ostensibly supportive, helped me to cultivate my
fight-or-flight habits instead of learning to react in more productive ways.
She loved me through so many panicky tantrums, and I’m grateful, but also that
wasn’t a healthy thing.
I want to be away from that influence, so living together is
an oppressive thing. Sometimes it’s tempting to just give in, give up on the
idea of my own place. This apartment is heartbreaking and suffocating, it sucks
out so much energy just to be here. When we first decided we were splitting, I
could see my new life so clearly, but now it feels much less clear. I don’t
know when’s the next time I’ll fall asleep with somebody, the next kiss, or
even the next spank. Sometimes that’s really hard to take.
Last week, my phone was finally repaired. (No miraculous
retrieval of cute texts, I’m afraid.) I’d been using an old kind-of-broken
phone and I figured out how to sync the phones so that I could transfer all the
contacts and pictures. I figured it out by just poking around, not by asking
Sweetie! These are the kinds of things that bring me joy lately, the little
victories that make me feel like I might just make it on my own.
I hate telling sad stories because I don’t want you to see
me as someone who thinks I’m a victim. I’m not. I’m a grown-ass woman and I
hate that childhood things still affect me. I’m trying to write through it all
so that I can move it aside in favor of better things.
Yesterday Sweetie got a letter in the mail from one of my
aunts, a lovely heartfelt note of thanks and support, telling her she’s still
part of the family no matter what. It’s a nice gesture and I’m so glad of any
support that Sweetie gets, but at the same time, my own aunt hadn’t reached out
to me. I had an irrational, childlike reaction and a wave of sorrow came over
me. This is what I was afraid of, being The Bad Guy in the divorce. Something
about that letter opened a fresh well of guilt and shame.
It’s a pretty huge leap, but I pictured my mom and aunt
sitting around talking about how amazing Sweetie is and how selfish and awful I
am for ending my marriage, how I never learned to love or be loved, how I’m a
monster and Sweetie’s a saint. It was a semi-crazy reaction that plumbed the
depths of childhood anxieties and fears, and tears welled up.
“I’m not doing this to hurt you,” I said to Sweetie, “I’m
trying to do the right thing for both of us. There’s nothing wrong with me.
There’s nothing wrong with me.”
But in my family’s eyes, I’ve always been something broken,
I’ve always been someone who doesn’t belong, who keeps everyone from being
happy and safe. My brother once said, after an argument he’d helped instigate,
“You ruin every party.” That was a long time ago but it still shapes my
self-concept in a fairly unhelpful way. I’ve always felt like I had to somehow
earn my way in by finding some magic virtue.
One of the ways that she expressed her resentment towards me
was to automatically take the side of whomever I was in conflict with. If I was
bullied on the school bus or picked on in any way, she’d always ask what I’d
done to provoke it. I was trained to think of everything as my fault, even
things I had nothing to do with.
So my mother and I were in constant tension, my sister was
the favorite, and my brother’s just kind of an ass. As an adult, this meant I
had a hard time finding a place in the family. Sweetie somehow ended up being
my ticket in.
The way my mom tells it, Sweetie changed me into something
better—calmer, more easygoing, just generally more acceptable. My niece came
along around the same time, and that mellowed out EVERYONE in the family,
reduced the general amount of jerkiness in all of us, and we got a second
chance at having a happy family.
So one of the things that kept me married to Sweetie for
longer than I should have been was the worry that this new version of my own
family would go away if I didn’t have Sweetie around to make me acceptable. I’m
almost 39 and my goddamn mother’s opinion of how I should live my life still
holds power over me. After all of these many adult years, I still haven’t
managed to separate myself from her.
In real life, my family has been supportive and kind about
the divorce, but part of me is angry with them and really angry with
myself for staying in a not-right marriage to try to earn their love. While I
was able to approximate their version of love and marriage with Sweetie, the
version that I really want is never going to be what they want for me. For
whatever reason, my mother is never going to think I deserve for one man to
love me, let alone three or four plus their partners and their partners’
partners. And I have to grow the fuck up and realize that neither Sweetie nor
my mother is in charge of whether or not I deserve love. Every human being
does.
Some people may see our divorce in traditional terms of the
faithful partner and the unfaithful one, the heartbreaker and the victim, the
winner and the loser, but that bears no resemblance to what actually is. We were both faithful in our own way,
we were both victims and heartbreakers, and when this is all done, we will both
be winners.
Even more important than letting go of Sweetie is letting go
of the need for approval and creating the life I actually want, regardless of
how the family might receive it. Until then, I need some distance from them, to
carve out the time and space to just go ahead and grow the fuck up. I did it
when I moved across the country at 24, and I can find a (less migratory) way to
do it now.
There’s a terrible comedy trope about ugly and/or fat girls
being adventurous in bed because they’re grateful to be getting anything at
all. It’s a horribly sexualized idea and definitely not the reason I’m
adventurous, but I do find myself to be guilty of too much gratitude,
especially when it comes to men.
Because for most of my life I didn’t think I could attract
men at all, there’s part of me that tends to think that a guy partner is doing
me a huge favor and suspects he would rather be doing something else. This
suspicion rises in proportion to how much I’m attracted to him—the men I want
the most are the ones I’m least sure of myself around. I end up feeling
self-effacing and desperate, and that makes it very difficult to be a person or
make good decisions.
When I’m with a guy I’m superattracted to, something in my
brain tells me not to ask for anything, to compromise everything, to do
whatever he wants so that he won’t go away. I feel an almost physical strain
when I have to assert my own needs—I have to fight hard against the urge to be
a complete doormat. I can see how someday that might be channeled and shaped
into a healthy submissiveness, but for now, sheesh! How could I really see anything
but unbalanced relationships, no matter what they are like in reality?
I’m sure the gratitude partly has to do with having deprived
myself of an entire gender for as long as I did—my body is pretty pissed at me
and full of understandable urgency. After any breakup, there’s this feeling of
what-if-it’s-seventeen-years-until-the-next-guy? Not an awesome bargaining
position to say the least!
I’m not sure where I got the deep conviction that I’m
undesirable to men. Sweetie has pointed out on many occasions that it’s WILDLY
insulting to women-why shouldn’t they be seen as deserving the same aesthetic
standards? Why feel like I’m good enough for one gender and not the other? I
don’t know.
Empirically, I’m starting to understand that I’m not too
ugly or fat for guys. I have flaws and beautiful qualities just like any of the
other generous naked souls on the beach. Mr. Shiny Eyes pointed out that the
men in my recent life have no shortage of options and yet they chose to spend
time with me. I see that and I’m trying to absorb it.
But this is a very powerful block. The past few years have
come a long way towards dismantling it, but there’s still a ways to go. I’m
trying to do a better job of believing and gathering evidence that I’m desirable.
It isn’t their job to make me feel loved and beautiful (Though they certainly
help!) it’s mine. I am hoping that the more I treat myself like a worthwhile,
lovable creature, the more I’ll believe it.
Don’t get me wrong, friends. I’ve seen some real jackassery
in the past couple of years, and some of the outrage I’ve expressed has been
proportional. But there were times when someone fucked up at about a 3 and I
got upset at a 10, making it hard to have any perspective or move on with any
kind of grace, often leaking friendships and potential friendships in the wake
of the panic and hurt.
Part of the reason that guys’ messups end up being so
devastating is that often I interpret them as containing some information about
me. When Mr. Sweetheart forgot that it was our phone date night, I felt like
the message was that I was inherently forgettable, not that he was just maybe a
little silly and overbooked that week. When The Man acted like I wasn’t there,
it activated a deep-seated fear that I might not exist, that he treated me like
nothing because I actually was
nothing. To fight that fear, I had to fight him, but that got me exactly the
opposite of what I wanted. That’s part of the reason I’m trying to excavate and
acknowledge those fears—it’s no one’s job but mine to soothe and fix them.
I think another reason I’ve made guys into enemies is out of
some crackpot subconscious attempt to stay close to Sweetie, a way to let her
keep saving me. We could snuggle up together and bemoan whoever was breaking my
heart that week, and it kept me from having to actually go ahead and open up.
I’ve tended to blame her introversion and monogamy for our isolation, but I was
fighting off expansion too. I didn’t want to lose her to what I really wanted,
so I made what I wanted into the enemy.
Like anyone who lashes out, I’ve often done it out of a
sense of helplessness. For most of my life, I’ve seen myself as someone who is
made automatically powerless by men, who has to always fight to get that power
back. That’s just a false impression brought about by the tropes of trauma, and
I’m doing my best to train myself out of it.
But I think a lot of the misdirected anger came from
frustration—it was hard to live without male companionship all those years—I’m
angry that I’m almost 39 and just now learning to let go and enjoy PIV sex in
the grown-up way that I want to. I’m very sad that it took me this long to make
friends with the penis, and now I have this ravenous urge to make up for lost
time that just hasn’t translated into real life.
I am angry at Sweetie for all of the shame that came out of
our mismatch, all of the times she called me a slut or a stupid cunt or a
whore, all of the times she contemptuously spat out “Just because I don’t want
to fuck anyone else…” or “Just
because I don’t have a penis…” She
said “fuck” and “penis” in the same tone of voice she might also use to say
“George W. Bush.” I’m angry at her for reinforcing my fear that I’m a bad
feminist for wanting to submit, and I’m angry at her for crying over
recreational bruises or hot blog posts. The things I most love about myself, or
most want to love, were the things that made her miserable and bitter.
I am so angry with myself for refusing to admit what I
really wanted, for keeping us in a no-win situation for so long. I’m angry
about the nonsense I’ve put up with in the hopes that the right
boyfriend might take the pressure off and save the marriage—I’m so glad if that
factor is never a part of my dating
life again.
When we made the decision to divorce, about 80% of the anger
just evaporated. I started to feel embarrassed about all of the times I’ve
lashed out, and I made a mental apology list. I’ve been unblocking and refriending
people and doling out apologies, and each one is a humbling relief. It feels
good to come out and say hey, I was an asshole, but I’m committed to being less
of one.
About a year ago, Sweetie and I had a terrible fight during
which she locked the door and refused to let me leave. When I finally got past
her and out the door, I sat in the car and called my mom to ask her to help me
get a divorce. Mom talked me out of it, telling me that even if I had a
different partner, I’d never be better, that the fights were a part of me I
couldn’t change. (Never mind that no one else had ever locked me in an
apartment or called me a cunt.) I am excited and inspired to start proving my
mother wrong, to heal myself and then find partners who can disagree and
express unhappiness without being terrifying, to stop going through the world
always a little bit scared. I believe I can be better.
