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.

Divorce Times: The Holidays Are Bearing Down

Full disclosure: This post was partly precipitated by a touching scene in the new Bridget Jones novel. That’s how girly I am.

Things are happy and friendly between me and Sweetie. I still call her at the end of most days as she’s leaving work. I still high-five her over smutty achievements. But it’s over soon, and I’ll be alone.

She’s supposed to be moved out by the end of November and I have no idea how we are going to get to there. Free and self-actualized as I’ve been in the past few months, I suddenly don’t want it to be over; I don’t want to let it go. She’s been my best friend and my love for all these years. She’s been my family.

And I don’t know how to make it on my own. I was hired this year to cover a maternity leave and though I’ve been told I’m keeping the same position when that teacher returns in December, I don’t feel like I’ve been earning it, so I really don’t know WHAT is going to happen. Even as I’ve grown more confident and person-like, everything in my life feels more fragile and more precarious. I wish I knew what to do to get through it.

I’m trying to bring dungeon-confidence into the rest of my life, to plant my feet and smile big and know I’m worthy, to ask for what I need and scroll past rejection with grace. But after a lifetime of being apologetic about existing at ALL, none of this comes naturally, and the stakes are much higher at work than at play. Learning to fight the reflex to apologize and make myself small is rewarding but taxing. Mostly I just have to go to bed early a lot to give myself time to grow.

In a few weeks, the holidays will start. I’ll do my yearly Black Friday shopping with my sister and come back to the house with my holiday-themed Real Simple and one eggnog latte, not two. When I made my goals for this year, this is not where I saw it all going.

I’ll probably still ask Sweetie to set up my Christmas tree, and I’ll help her with hers as well. It’s tempting to skip Christmas altogether, but after all the years of assuming we didn’t deserve one because we didn’t have children, I am never going to unperson myself like that again.

We split up the decorations months ago, but how could we really? For years, our hobby was birdwatching and so people bought us bird ornaments. None of those birds could be just mine or just hers. It will take so much more work than I’ve yet admitted to take it all apart.

I need to both find some serious inner resources and also just give myself a break. I feel the way my special-needs students must feel sometimes—I’m trying to give life what it’s asking me for, but I don’t have all of the tools I need yet. I’m getting all kinds of accommodations and modifications (My therapist makes housecalls, for crying out loud!) but everything’s just hard and slow. I think this is why I over-identify with my students.

For all I love the future I’m doing an awesome job of building, I’m slowly mourning the family I made with Sweetie, the household rituals that have left us one by one. In a few weeks, friends will start disappearing into their own families and I am afraid of how alone I will feel. It’s all part of learning to love myself, but I don’t know how to face it.

Cuddle Party Part Two: I Heart Practicing My “No.”

Before I go back into the Cuddle Party, I just wanted to celebrate the rules a little bit in a different way. As I’ve mentioned, I am training to be an elementary school teacher, and one of the things I’ve worried about the most is the amount that kids always want to be touching—it’s cute and endearing, but it can add up to being too much for me. I’ve given a lot of thought to ways in which I could carve out some space for myself in the classroom, so a few weeks ago, I tried a little experiment—I told my students to ask for hugs. We even practiced it. I said “When you’d like a hug, please say “Would you like a hug?” to me. I might say no, and that doesn’t mean you’re bad or I don’t like you, it just means that I’m not feeling huggy.” I tried this with first graders, and they took to it right away. This is a HUGE load off my mind—if I can create a friendly, open classroom AND have space for myself, it will be so awesome.

Anyway, back to the Cuddle Party. When it was almost time for the welcome circle, I went upstairs to get into my PJs, and ran into Cuddle Host Two, whom I hadn’t met before. She stopped for a mircrosecond to ask if she could hug me, and I said sure. She’s a fit, long-haired hippie-ish woman about my age, maybe a little younger. She had such a smile on her face and a glow in her cheeks-she looked like a Tantric pin-up girl, all bright eyes and flowy clothes. She complimented my PJs.

Before the welcome circle, we heard the Lady of the House, a beautiful, slight-but-strong African American woman (and owner of all the bi-friendly books, maybe) playing the harmonium and singing a song whose melody was “Om Shanti.” We all sang along. I Googled “Om Shanti”  and found out that it means “peace,” and that Shanti repeated three times represents the “threefold peace in body, speech and mind.” (http://www.wildmind.org/mantras/figures/shanti)

As I said in the last post, almost everyone had been in Tantric workshops all day. You could tell who was new by who wasn’t sensitive about space—I noticed that a couple of the new guys took up more space than others did, and felt free to touch without permission. It was a good opportunity to practice not seeing them as a threat, and being able to make space for myself.

The first exercise we were to do in the welcome circle was to practice our “no.” A few weeks go, in Tantric poetry class (I really like sentences that start that way) we were practicing our yesses and nos and my yesses sounded great, loud and full and a little defiant, but my nos rang a little false and hollow. The going wisdom is that your yes can’t mean anything until you have your no down, so I was glad to get a chance to practice.

“Turn to your left and ask that person if you can kiss him or her. The gender doesn’t matter. That person’s job is to say “no.” Practice this three times.”

The guy next to me was adorable enough; he looked like he had been sent from central casting. In fact, he was a massage therapist and training to host cuddle parties. He was young, sleekly muscled, and bright-eyed, with a receding blond halo of close-cropped hair. Too virtuous and clean-cut for me, so when he asked, “May I kiss you?” it was easy to say “No.” Easy to say it, but not so easy not to fill the awkward space after it with nervous quipping. We did a great job with that exercise and he accepted a high-five. There was lots more no-saying practice, with different partners offering any number of things—I had a real hard time saying no when the Lady of the House said:

“May I spank you with that copy of the Divine Androgyne?”

I really hoped that one would come back around after no-practice was over.

That offer aside, it should be apparent at this point that Cuddle Parties are not sexy, at least this one wasn’t. They are a way to make connections, yes, even in a divine way sometimes, but they are more of a way to create and practice your boundaries. Anything that happens should not just be a “yes,” but a “hell yes!”—some of us who grew up abused don’t know how to make boundaries, we feel guilty making space for ourselves. That’s one of the things I enjoy about BDSM play parties—both within scenes and during downtime, I can feel about twelve feet of caution-tape safe space around me, and it’s up to me to decide who comes inside it—that’s very powerful. Like play parties, Cuddle Parties are a wonderful way to practice feeling safe around bodies in general.

Next: A Very Chaste Threesome