His Name Is Off the Mailbox

 

Thanks, Mountain Goats!

The Guy Next Door is gone. I finally had the courage the other day to retrieve my flower pots that had wandered into his yard. On my side of the border between our places, he left his beleaguered monstera-y plant, with crinkled-up leaves and bent stems. I'm not a healer of plants or men, so I put the plant at the curb for someone the plant has less baggage with to rescue.

It's lonely without him. (The man, not the poor plant.) Even after we stopped talking, he was kind of an imaginary friend. I liked knowing when his car was home, the state slogan on his license plate felt like a comforting/vexing chime in my head. Whoever moves in next won't be like this, I hope, won't get all tangled up--I'll probably only notice them if they're having a particularly loud conversation or smoking on the patio, or if they have a cute pet.

This guy, I was insane about him and insane with him, but the connection still meant something to me. The door that opened between us, that let two messed up minds find comfort in each other, I still think it's a miracle.

In the cold cold depths of winter, when I was still learning not to go to his door, I lit candles for myself in the window, both to ward off the pain and to show myself love. (Also there was an Indivisible directive about window-candles. Mine can't be seen from the street, but they still count.) I hoped the light gave him comfort too, snowday after snowday, but that really wasn't my business.

I'm still figuring out how to thaw. I'm DEEP in my step work and leveling up my family estrangement, trying how to figure out how to treat myself if I am, as I'm beginning to see, worthy of kindness and care. I took a dating break until at least June, but I'm starting to wish and hanker.

When The Guy Next Door showed up last summer with his red cups of hibiscus tea, I was jagged and at sea from last summer's trauma work, from a lifetime of trauma work. He gave me such a pretty spark and distraction, a (kind of fucked up) way to care for myself until I was ready for the next phase of growth and healing.

I imagine him out and about in some beautiful sex-positive frenzy, having all the fun my codependent ass isn't ready for. I imagine him going home to Think About What He's Done. I imagine him joining the life of some more copacetic and traditionally-shaped girl and hitchhiking that life wherever that takes him.

I'll probably never know. I get to stay here and try to be emotionally sober and not get swooshed into any more distractions while I face myself, while I learn to love myself. I miss my friend, whether he was imaginary or not. He doesn't live in my heart forever, I don't think, but I wish him everything good. And I hope someone is taking good care of that plant.

Princess of Livid

Bridesmaid dresses were kind of wild back then!
Or maybe the ladies in my family are just weirdos?

 It seems like the dumbest thing I've ever been mad about, but I think it's important. Week before last, on a Sunday morning, I was figuring out what to say to Mr. Breakfast and feeling jangled about some other stuff, when I heard The Guy Next Door talking in baby voice to whoever his date was:

"...and I treat her like a princess. I treat you like a princess, too. No fetish is ever gonna..."

Now, I'm pretty lucky for someone who lives next door to her onerous unrequited kryptonite crush. I've only run into him once since our break-off conversation, and I don't overhear anything blush-inducing. I almost always have white noise or music on, there's only just a sliver of space where I can hear anything at all. But there he was in that sliver of space. I wasn't eavesdropping, I just heard it.

I'm sure he wasn't saying it for me to hear, he was just saying stuff. I know him well enough that I'm pretty sure he's not treating anyone like a princess, but that's not how it landed.

The message my tangled heart heard was that I wasn't good enough, that other women deserved to be treated like princesses and I'd failed some mysterious test. This is one of my oldest and loudest and most destructive intrusive thoughts: "You're not as good as other women, they know something you don't and can't know."

Why my brain appointed him the designated arbiter of my worth is a question for infinite Codependents Anonymous meetings, but in that moment, I felt like I winked out of existence, the woozy, drowning feeling of being not there. If they were the princesses, if they had somehow gained his fleeting and sand-castle-like attention, then there was no reason for there to be a me at all. 

(How am I ever supposed to date men when I have thoughts like that? Makes me want to get myself to some kind of non-denominational anti-Fascist nunnery where I could garden and call congress and read books and forget that men ever were.)

He wasn't saying it for me to hear, but he knew it was a pet name I loved. I'd showed him my Feeld profile mentioning being a princess. (In fact, when he read the part about me looking for a sweet dom who's good with ropes, he said "Well you found him." That motherfucker could really SAY STUFF.)

Anyway, the morning of the overhearing, I was LIVID. I'M the princess, goddammit, how could he take even that away from me?

(The 30 Rock joke about "sexually transmitted crazymouth" comes to mind, although I guess it was transmitted via weird nebulous friendship instead.)

(Semi-platonically transmitted crazymouth?)

Anyway, it made me want to think about why the word "princess" feels so important to me.

I remember a moment, not too long after my teenage sexual assault, dressed up for Halloween in the above bridesmaid dress and looking in the mirror. The lipstick I'd just applied looked like clown makeup to me. All of me felt false, artificial, foolish, absent. I had some nerve dressing up as a princess, I was barely even a woman. I was barely even anything. I wiped the makeup off but wore the dress.

The next time I wore that dress, I was in my very early twenties and part of an art happening. My project was to create a pink-themed pyramid of everything about me, and let people take home anything that spoke to them. A stranger went home with a box of my love letters and I can't say I regret this choice! My brother got livid with me because I gave away the Barbie he'd given me the Christmas before.

After the show, when most of the pink pyramid was gone, I felt empty but also less alone. If I couldn't figure out how to be close to people, at least I could get them to take a piece of me home.

After that night, the friend who ran the art show started calling me Princess (My Name)--he even wrote a song about me! I LOVED being Princess Me. These were my raver years and also my shoplifting-at-my-friends'-mall-stores years, so I was never without shiny too-short dresses, manic panic hair, and Urban Decay makeup. And glitter. So, SO much glitter. And sometimes bubbles that were also candy. It was a magical time.

One time a guy I flirted with at the coffeehouse told me I looked like I was from space, and that felt like the highest compliment.

Between the mid-Nineties and whenever I made my Feeld profile, the Princess persona got less plasticky, but never lost its glitter. It morphed from a costume to a gender expression, a femme way of fiercely, adamantly claiming womanhood in a world that was never gonna declare me to be womaning properly.

Calling myself a princess was a way to give myself what I felt like no one else was ever gonna give me, a way to treat myself like a magical treasure, the way I saw (or more likely imagined) other, smaller, quieter, more conventionally beautiful women being valued, being attended to. It was a way to attend to myself, a skill I'm still trying to learn.

In the weeks following my unfortunate overhearing, I have been treated so, SO kindly. 

For example:

Sweet Valentine: What song is this?

Me: I Wanna Be Adored by The Stone Roses.

Sweet Valentine: And you are!

I've been treated kindly by my friends, too, and my Higher Power, and by the gently-thawing weather. And most importantly, by myself. People are welcome to join me in my princess-ness, but I have to treat myself that way, and keep doing it.

Right in this moment, I feel the truth: No one can decide whether I'm a princess, or any other pet name, except me. Right now, I feel like I'm up to the challenge of self-love.

Trauma Work Summer Part Eight: The End

 

This story feels like so long ago already! Spoiler alert: the trauma work seems to really have helped! When I returned to my school-year job, I felt a joy so strong that I might have been ACTUALLY filled with sunshine! I feel more three-dimensional and grounded, like here at almost-fifty-one I might be an actual adult. Maybe the work saved me, for a little while.

Back to a few weeks ago: the panic lit by the Fire Prevention Play just wouldn't go out. After I confessed my attraction to Summer Princess, I couldn't convince myself I wasn't a threat to her, that I wasn't somehow coercing her to be near me whenever she was near me. 

Prickly and sometimes-moody as she was, she did NOTHING but try and stay friends! While I was coloring/providing a sensory area on our field trip to Dave & Busters, she played an old version of Animal Crossing and sat quietly with me. Back at camp, she made August Valentines with me and the kids. Summer Princess and I took turns picking out dreamy/moody songs amongst the cutting and pasting. She was being a pretty wonderful friend, and I couldn't access the friendly, sunny part of myself.

I knew it was wrong for me to be there with her in such a panicky/heartbroken state, so I ended up leaving camp a week early. I still love her so much (now in a peaceful, non-urgent way) and I'm so grateful for our friendship, however flawed and brief. If by some miracle you're reading this, Summer Princess, thank you. I'm honored to have spent a few weeks basking in the glow of you. I wish you a super-sparkly life and every wish come true.

The Monday after I said goodbye to camp, I went on a roadtrip I'd been planning all the hot, traumaful summer: A trip to my high school hometown, sort of an Exposure Therapy final project. I wanted to face the apartment complex where my Main Trauma happen and the house where my dad made the MT worse by providing my number one intrusive thought: "You brought this into our house."

I spent a two-day trip staying in the most lovely Airbnb, nurturing my inner teenage self and listening to lots of podcast recaps of Fire Walk With Me. In front of the (still very ugly) house, there was a beautiful yellow rosebush. It must've been an heirloom rose, the smell was exquisite.

Laura Palmer was there in my head, a shaman and a doula, helping me lead myself down the path to a new life of innocence and hope.

Maybe I'll write more about that adventure one day, but for now, I just wanted to tell you: I'm happy. My coworkers surprised me with an early birthday cake before the long weekend. This week I'll be both seeing my favorite band AND watching Fire Walk With Me on a big screen! I even like somebody who kinda makes sense for me.

I want to freeze all these happinesses in carbonite, make them permanent, unassailable, unquestionable. I want edges defined and boundaries drawn and a notarized certificate that says I'm not doing anything wrong.

But it feels okay to sit in the present, eat leftover early birthday cake, and hope.

Trauma Work Summer Part Three

 

Me at 16. That Deee-Lite-esque print top was my absolute favorite. Mom even got all the blood out after the Main Trauma!

Things got decidedly unlovely with the Summer Princess since I last wrote. I don't know how much I'll share about that, but it's part of a pattern. My pattern is, every couple years I burn out, need lots of rest, and want to flee whatever job I'm in at the time. The fleeing is generally for good reason, (The current one definitely is!) but I've never had this happen with two jobs at almost the same time!

The burnout cycle is partly just because of being really sensitive and spotting too many patterns, and maybe inadequate autism support. But also it's a chime of an old, rotten memory, the source of the intrusive thoughts that I've harmed myself and others with so much over the years: 

"I don't belong here. I have to get out of here before I get hurt." 

But, can intrusive thoughts sometimes just be intuition? Because sometimes, a lot of the time, I leave because a place isn't safe. 

I already wrote to you about my Worst Trauma, it's here if you dare. The one I'm working on this summer and telling to my therapist over and over ever Wednesday morning and then listening to recordings of on most other days, happened a few weeks after The Main Trauma. It's kind of worse because instead of violent near-strangers assaulting and berating me, it was my own dad.

I was sixteen and trying to let myself heal, but I couldn't find quiet or space to heal because at the same time, my parents' fights ramped up to new levels. On the night in question, my dad kicked my mom down the stairs, and I got in his face about it, like "Stop hurting my mom!" 

He was like "She kicked me in the balls so I kicked her down the stairs!"

Totally normal sentence to just keep living in my brain.

I kept yelling at him, and then he lifted his fists above my head and started pounding on me--head, shoulders. Ears. I crouched down on the floor and made myself as small as I could get, but he just kept pounding, and kicking too.

"You brought this into our house," meaning that I had caused my parents violence (with us my whole life long) by getting raped and assaulted.

That's the moment that I'm stuck in, and it translates to:

I'm bad.

I'm worthless.

I have to stay away from everybody or I'll bring this upon them, too.

When I called my friend B. for help, I was scared of scaring her, I tried to sound as calm as possible while I told her what was happening. I was afraid of her coming to get me because I thought dad might hurt her too, but I'm so, so grateful that she came.

At her place, I got those moments of peace that I needed. I don't remember talking too much or anything, but it felt good to be near her. She was a new friend, an art pal from school I was really excited to be getting to know! 

Though I wasn't out yet and wouldn't have put into words, I was attracted to this pal! Even in the hollow tunnel of trauma my brain was in, I felt giddy to be close to her, sleeping on her floor, floating free of my nightmare of a life. 

B's mom said I could stay longer, but my mom wanted me at home. When I got in the car, I saw that she had two black eyes to match my own. She wanted to stop for concealer, but I wanted her to let it show, so someone would see and help us. We were stranded on an island of terror together, and I was mad about having to go back to that terrible, haunty house, but here in 2025 I'm glad she wanted me with her.

I couldn't see how I could have a life after that night, I still don't see how I can make a life even though I've been making a life ever since.

I hate that the bad memories sometimes Godzilla through and help me sabotage my life. I hate this story and all the other trauma stories. Today, I kinda hate myself. I'm at a loss to imagine what my life will be like from here.

All I know is that tomorrow, I'll go to Summer Job and pick up a few things. I'll rest a little before my main job starts next week. I'll keep doing my trauma work assignments, including visiting my high school home town next week as a culmination of all my exposure therapy. I have no idea if I'm doing the right things, if I'm making it worse, but all I can do for now is the next thing, and keep writing.

Heart Emoji Guy: A New Way to Break Me, Part Two

I chose the purple ropes for him. I remembered all the times that winding rope around a stranger had taken me to connection, an “Ohhey it’s you!” of recognition.

And it was beautiful! And silly! I have a four-month-old kitten, how was she supposed to resist playing with the bottoms of the ropes while I wound them around and around Heart Emoji Guy?! I really should train her not to do this, but I was laughing too hard to make her stop. I considered how much nicer an evening this could be if I could just end this performance and switch gears to cat-kindness and solitude. Am I destined to be alone with the cats forever? On my more confident days, that actually doesn’t seem so bad!

I reached around Heart Emoji Guy to cross the ropes at his back—usually a reliable segue to a kiss. I felt his sweet eyelashes against my cheek as he avoided my mouth again.

I was sure he didn’t want to kiss me. I had to honor that despite the loss bubbling up from my hearts like the patrol balloon thing from The Prisoner—evil, ominous, strangely effective.

I was sitting on the bed behind him adjusting the ropes at his lovely waist when I finally admitted it: “I’m so sorry, this just doesn’t feel right.” He was very understanding, I thought. He stayed smiling all through the process of getting dressed, finding his phone, getting his sneakers on; polite, kind, deferential.

After he closed the door, I felt lonely but relieved to be with the sad—the wistfulness of still missing Blue Ribbon Work Crush, the loss of this new hopeful-seeming connection. The idea of sex without kissing hurt so badly and clouded my heart and mind with teenage trauma and loss. A thunderstorm of shame was coming, whether I deserved it or not.

The other day at the pool. I saw a kid with purple hair and felt joyful that her hair color was playful, accepted, probably not fraught in any way.

I remembered my own teenage purple hair, right after The Bad Thing happened. I somehow found it comforting that it matched the deep bruises under my eyes. It was a way to define myself, to take control of my own body in the wake of losing all control. In the wake of almost losing myself. Or, in some ways, losing myself entirely. My purple hair was a haphazardly done piece of art, giving the finger to heartlessness, abuse, and rage.

My mom saw the purple hair as another thing people would judge her for, another way that I had gone completely out of her control. She kneeled me down at the tub with Chlorox bleach, made me bleach and rinse and bleach and rinse over and over until she finally let me stop. My hair wasn’t brown again, it was a sickly lichen green. The color of queasiness itself. Still, to her it was closer to “normal” color, so no one would know. She didn’t want anyone to know what she had allowed to happen to my body, which she definitely considered hers.

All this is to say, the STI diagnoses I got when I was 16 or 17, a bouquet of them from encounters both welcome and horrific, came at a time when I didn’t really know how to process what they meant. I wasn’t present-day me with all these years of sex-geekery under my belt. I was raised Catholic and everything I knew about sex was bad, except most of my own experiences.

So my teenage self took in the STIs as more evidence that I was bad, that I was rotten all the way through and this was my own evilness just starting to show itself. There were no cheerful infographics Planned Parenthood’s Instagram page—that was a million years away. There were Sex Geeks in the late eighties/early nineties, I’m sure, but I definitely hadn’t met any of them.

Now, with my extremely low-stakes HSV-1 diagnosis, I have every resource and every support. I know that herpes is incredibly common and that the stigma around it is ignorant and cruel. But the shame is still in there deep. It’s my shame and I’m gonna have to be the one taking care of it for now, at least until the universe sends me my next fairy-tale kiss.

 

My Dad Was an Emotional Sea Monster

Content Warning: Child abuse, spousal abuse, and a brief mention of sexual assault.

The first draft of this post had like a jillion paragraphs about my family’s messed up relationship with food but

A.   I really just don’t want to talk about it.

And

B.    The emotions I’ve been uncovering here, the feeling of being judged, surveilled, the I’ll-never-get-it-right feeling, they don’t really come from fatphobia or my mom’s weird controlling/mystical ideas around sugar. They come from my dad being fucking terrifying.

In the present day, my dad is a mild-to-absent part of my life. He’s part of my lifeboat of family liberals, though he does mention Al Franken a little too often. (Ever is too often.) He’s doing this weird thing lately where he regales me with his slight calorie intake and his enviable walking routine, but it seems sad rather than judgey. He bought me and my sister Elizabeth Warren’s book as soon as it came out.

But of course the terror of him from my childhood still lives in my body, makes it hard to feel privacy or autonomy and trust.

I’ve written posts about incidents of explosive violence from him, but I think the frozen feeling comes from the day-to-day of him. It’s hard to focus on my dad, even in the kind care of Summer Therapist, even now with a pink wine spritzer and a Hazy Summer Lofi playlist on. Let me light a few candles and some incense, be right back.

Okay, here I am. I remember the feeling of getting home early for a half snow day and my heart just falling when I realized dad was home early too. I saw him out back chopping wood and all my festive snow day emotions just left me. I felt apprehension, sadness, a beautiful day lost.

I don’t remember a specific instance of him calling us worthless. I remember “lazy.” My senior year of high school, I remember “cocksucker” when I won a photography contest and didn’t give the prize money to him. Also from the teenage years, I remember “You brought this into our house,” (meaning I’d brought violence into our house by being raped and assaulted at a party) as his fists rained down on me, just after he’d kicked my mom down the stairs.

But “worthless” was the insult that sunk in deepest, it was so present that it feels like weather, like, what’s the opposite of a snow day? It’s embedded in my brother too, who’ll use it on me at the slightest provocation. Which is part of why we don’t hang out with that guy.

My dad loomed over everything like the worst supervisor. During the process of grieving the Shy One relationship, one of the hardest things was the way I could still feel TSO with me, fucking judging me all the time—I wasn’t getting over him fast enough, wasn’t doing dating right. I was wallowing too much in my feelings. Mostly, my brain had made up this snippy version of my probably genuinely-rooting-for-me ex, but he was buzzing around my brain for months, reminding me that I’d failed, that his rejection meant I wasn’t lovable, telling me to just fucking give up.

Worthless.

My dad was like a sea monster. You never knew what was going on under the surface or when he might come screaming out of the sea and sink the ship. The simplest things could turn from rumbling menace to terror on a dime.

Once, when I was around ten my sister and I were changing for something and, in the middle of a fight with mom, he decided he needed to come in our room and yell at us too. We locked the door but he kicked it and kicked it until it broke. My sister and I stood there naked and frozen with fear, nowhere to go for cover.

In present-day moments of panic, I feel that day: exposed, afraid, unable to solve the problem or shift the moment. Unable to protect the more vulnerable people around me. I knew there was no privacy or safety, that I didn’t and couldn’t own my own body. There was no place where he ended and I began.

There were school mornings I couldn’t get out the door because I didn’t part my hair correctly. I would stand on a chair, looking into the little mirror on a wall sconce, combing and recombing. I would climb down from the chair, he would check it and find it crooked. I would have to climb back up on the chair and try again. The endlessness, the hopelessness, the feeling of just being too stupid to figure it out.

Worthless.

I feel so much regret, remorse, and loss for the for the ways the father I carry projected itself onto the relationship with The Shy One. I know part of me wished I could Get It Right this time, that that would somehow solve the childhood ache. Though TSO was in no way abusive or scary, I chose someone withholding, uncommunicative, snappish, and exacting, and set out to win him over, to make him into a safe home. I wanted him to make me worthy. Tale as old as time.

As my two months off from dating draw to a close, this is what scares me the most—will I really be able to hold out for someone emotionally available, or will I slip into this fantasy again, hurting myself and some unsuspecting guy in the process? Will seeing the pattern help me be kinder to myself, to believe in the chatty, joyful, equal relationship of my dreams? I hope so! I’ll do my imperfect best.

 

 

OMG I Almost Forgot This Awesome Ass Update!

Waaaaaay back during the Steampunks in 2013, I remember being jealous of Steampunk Girl’s story about her first anal sex. Her guy at the time had been so gentle, so careful, she said. He listened to her and let her go at her own pace, making it about intimacy, not conquest or transaction.

Marooned as I was with Steampunk Guy and my main partner, Divorce Grief, I couldn’t imagine a man ever being that kind, that tender towards me.

I’m kinda glad (Though still irritated!) that my Ass Project with Steampunk Guy got vetoed on account of feelings, because my ass journey with The Shy One was beautiful. I don’t remember exactly when my asshole came into the mix, but I love the memory of him playing there sweetly and lightheartedly, mischievous and amused. Standing over me, next to me, or behind me while I was on my knees.

Whereas Steampunk Guy would have ripped off the Band-aid (Probably a little traumatizingly) with gusto and wrecklessness, the Shy One was in it with me. He tried a few times, after lots and LOTS of other things, to enter my ass, but, though I relaxed my jaw (Like I learned in that one anal sex class I took!) and took deep breaths, I couldn’t convince my inner sphincter to relax. He tried, ring of pain, he stopped, repeat. Deliberate, responsive. A dream come true as he almost always was.

The closest The Shy One and I got to anal sex was during his after-the-big-trip visit. He’d missed me and he wanted all of me—even fucked me even though I was (I almost always was!) on my period. I wanted him to have all of me, and I pushed through the pain as much as I could. He was too big, or I was too deep-down tense, but it was close. He was inside me in a way that was totally new, in a way my body and my curious mind had wanted for SO LONG. Painful as it was, I was woozy with gratitude and wildly, helplessly in love, even more than I’d already been.

So part of the dream came true, hooray! Cue choir of slutty angels! But then, jetlagged and getting sick and also just him, he withdrew afterwards, both went home and became a little less reachable, and I felt abandoned. Abandoned is a big scary dramatic word for a grownup to be using, but there we are. In those needy, vulnerable, most love-dizzy moments, he went away from me. Even if he only withdrew a little, I felt foolish, lost, stupid. I felt like the world was being taken away just as quick as it had been given. Like the sun had stopped shining.

(I do wonder how much of that emotion I owe to my own trauma. I kinda wish he and I had been able to sit down and sort out our traumas like laundry. I wish I could know more about what he was feeling, whether those shifts to not-liking-me after sex were as real as they felt. But in the end, it’s as simple as “this feels bad” I think.)

I think, someday when I restart this part of the project, I’d like to be kinder to myself about it. I’d like to hold out for someone who wants to be with me after. A guy who feels the afterglow with me and wants to bask in it. Somebody patient who can pat my head and soothe the vulnerable feelings. He’ll bring me fizzy water and tell me what the experience was like for him. We’ll talk all night.

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.

 

 

 

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.

Dating in the Upside-Down: A Like Story (Part One)

A lot has happened since I posted last. I’ve all but wrapped up my post-election trauma therapy, paring down the sessions from weekly to monthly, experimenting with how it feels to not spend QUITE so much time thinking about trauma.

Part of me hoped that I would be different once I finished this phase of exposure therapy for PTSD. I’d heard other survivors talk about feeling more open, more accepting, more affectionate, less quick to anger. I guess I’ve changed a little, but there are some boundaries I just can’t bring myself to cross—my yesses are sometimes stronger and easier but my nos are too. It’s disappointing not to just be open like a lovey-dovey post-traumatic flower, it feels a little lonely, but given the world we are currently trying to inhabit, I’m as open as I can be.

I went back to OK Cupid-ing a little while ago when I realized I was getting a crush on my massage therapist, whom I would never, ever hit on. I started swiping and chatting again, and I’ve honed my screening question to perfect bluntness: “Bernie or Hillary?”

To my heartbreak, I have NEVER gotten the chance to flirt with a guy who voted for Hillary in the primary (Seriously, if you know any, kindly send them my way. I will reward their loyalty with SO much generous sluttiness! And cake!) but I liked The Socialist’s answer. It gave me the immediate sense that he was solid and trustworthy, confident, and somehow, I even gleaned from his answer that he probably had a pretty excellent penis. (Spoiler alert: He does!) I don’t know how I could tell all of that from a tiny paragraph about politics, but I could, go me.

Plus, I liked his sense of humor, and he was a close-to-my-age goth guy who was EXCELLENT at the ultimate aphrodisiac: talking about Nineties music. I asked him out for wine and cake at my go-to first date spot, and I delighted in the chance to put a face on for somebody cute for the first time since the spring.

When I saw him, I was even more convinced that he might be a match—big enough to make Amazonian me feel little, so I knew he could probably throw me around. (Further spoiler alert—he could!) He was smiley and self-effacing in a charming way and so, so funny. What really sealed in the liking was finding out that we had both been at the same Dead Milkmen show in 1994-I’m an absolute sucker for that kind of meant-to-be-ness.

And then (there’s always an “and then”) The Socialist mentioned that he listens to Howard Stern all day every day at work. When I expressed shock and dismay, he defended himself a little:

“But Howard Stern supported Hillary Clinton!”

“He also helped create the atmosphere of misogyny that defeated her!”

Knowing that The Socialist was a fan of one of the grossest decades-long perpetrators of lady-objectifying, one of the deepest architects of rape culture, should have been enough to make me leave, but after he conceded that I was probably right, I stayed, and knowing we probably weren’t right for each other gave me a chance to let my guard down even more. I confessed that I’ve had a pants-wall since primaries, that I was worried I would always be at war with men. AND HE WAS THERE FOR ALL OF IT. What I liked so much about him was his ability to remain unfazed, to argue without getting defensive or fragile. He’s A MAN.

In spite of my doubt, I left there giddy. It could have been the wine (I don’t drink enough lately to take it for granted) but I think it was the laughter. He asked me out again right away, and I said yes.

Next: What kind of wine goes with toaster waffles?

Awesome Calendar Item: Reading Smut Out Loud

Of course the naked times get most of the credit on here, but I just wanted to stop and celebrate the thing that's been doing me such a consistent amount of good: our monthly local erotic reading. Of course getting to read posts in public appeals to my showoffy nature and lets me re-experience awesome stuff, but listening to other sex writers is what fortifies me the most.

Yesterday I came home from work completely zapped in body and spirit, but I nudged myself along, put on lipstick and went. For some reason a lot of the women last night were on the theme of reclaiming and celebrating sexuality after trauma, and I had to high-five them all. My body filled up with chi and love and pride and I felt all of the worries of the day and the years float away. I'm so proud to be in it with those girls, with all the girls, with all the people, kicking the crappy stuff's ass by being as authentically and gorgeously slutty as we can manage. Am I allowed to say "go us" to posts in a row?

Roadblock #4: Misdirected Anger

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.