OMG a New Feeling: The Golden Loop

The Flaming Lips: Fight Test

I've been doing pretty well since last post, focusing on my Twelve Step stuff, enjoying work, getting situated for summer. The sadness of letting Sweet Valentine go is still with me, partly because I may never get to know his perspective on our two magical dates. He said he still liked me when he broke things off, and that may have to be enough. 

Hurt feelings and Symmetry OCD make it hard to talk about my own perspective, but something important happened to me and I want to try and get it into words.

Part if my unmasking autism process is, I feel emotions in new ways! With new physical sensations. Like, when I cry, I can physically feel it coming straight up from my heart, and that feels beautiful, like a real and healthy release instead of just a ripple in a river of unending sorrow. NBD.

Maybe it was yoga and not really SV at all, but on our first date, almost immediately after he sat down next to me, I felt a golden sparkly hula hoop light circling my lower waist, circling us both together. It wasn't moving hula-ish-ly, it was still, it was the stillest thing in the universe. I was the stillest thing in the universe, warmly and (it felt) permanently in god's grace with him.

I tried to think of a less-mystical way to type that sentence, but there isn't one.

This was different from my Pink Haze of Desire or the scattered giddy lunacy I felt towards The Guy Next Door. This was grounded and safe and exactly where I needed to be.

It feels wrong and unfair to think that Sweet Valentine didn't feel the same comfort and surety, and I don't know that he didn't, before reality sunk in.

I had the golden loop with me all through our break, it's what kept me strong and (I thought) kind in all that uncertainty. 

I can still feel it now, telling me I'm/we're safe, telling me that this is everything working itself out.

The next time I feel The Golden Loop with someone, I'll try to slow down and see what it's trying to tell me. I'd love to listen to that stillness instead of the urgency and ugliness of OCD. I would love, dear Golden Loop, for you to be in charge now. Don't let me chase any more treasures away, including the treasures that are me. 

My word for the year and my dating plan through June: Higher Power is my anchor partner, let's see where it goes.

 

Frilly Fridays: Last One in the Christmas Box!

 Well, there was one more frilly thing in the Christmas box, but it wasn't quite my style so I gave it to the Goodwill. Now the frillies are all hung up neatly, and the box can look forward to its life as a box to put Christmas stuff in.

This week was fun and a lot. Things didn't work out with the Thoughtful Guy, more paragraphs on that later. 

Another flirtation came and went this week too. These pictures are from a beautiful Saturday chat with a stranger who turned out, when face to face, to be Boring Guy.

Last night, I ended a SO BORING WhatsApp video call and felt a surge of joy. Partly it was the joy of not having to keep trying to make a conversation happen with Boring Guy ("I've asked all my questions." he kept saying. ALL of them?!) but there was a bigger joy too!

Going back to my puzzle, chatting with BFF, doing the dishes while listening to the MSNBC hosts talk about the Republican debate, I was just elated to be in my life. It's a good one, and I'm so proud of my quest for love.

Proud Graduate of Summer Therapy!

 

“It really pisses me off that in like six months, I’ll be like oh, poor us, just a bad match. I hate magnanimous.”

--Me, a Little Over Six Months Ago

The last session I had with Summer Therapist, Tuesday before last, I’d given myself the assignment of telling her the whole fortune-cookie-Thursday-to “It’s Monday morning” Shy One breakup story without turning the frustration back on myself. I had the feeling she’d wanted me to get a little better at blaming him for what happened, and it seemed like a good experiment! It was!

I liked not stopping the story to empathize with TSO’s perspective, blame myself, or say for the millionth time “How did I let this happen?” or “Why couldn’t I have just made it til Tuesday?” (Or made it til our trip, or not sent so many needy texts, etc) Bargaining is a really powerful destination on the Billy Map of Grief!

Dear Young People Who Probably Don't Remember The Family Circus: This is what I mean by the Billy Map of Grief! He goes all over the place!

But when the experiment was over, there was something I had to admit to myself about my (dear!) Summer Therapist—she was really into the idea that TSO hadn’t really loved me! She even, in the midst of some advice about taking it slow heartwise, suggested that maybe I hadn’t really loved him either!

This seemed crazy to me, because I’d started therapy with the goal of taking the TSO experience on board, letting myself believe it had really happened so I could let it go! I was hanging on to him in my head and heart because I wasn’t sure it had happened, because maybe I thought he was the only one who could witness the fact that I’d been loved by a man. Of course, there was another witness there, the only one I’ll ever really need to check with: me.

I kindly typed this all into the therapy app and said a gracious and grateful goodbye to the Summer Therapist. Then I called BFF and sobbed. It was the kind of sobbing (I just mistyped it as “subbing”) that scrubs out my insides, that came up from my soul in a wail and a gust. And then I felt better.

I could see why ST wanted to downplay the relationship—it was a way of trying to make me be kinder to myself, to get me to expect more. But in wanting to assure me I deserve better, she ended up seeming dismissive of this experience that had meant a lot to me. I didn’t need it not to be love in order to let it go. I didn’t need to (as ST did) dismiss the realities of poly happiness in order to envision a partner all my own.

It made me realize that no matter how monogamous I get, and I think it might be quite monogamous indeed, I’ll never subscribe to the narrow, heteropatriarchal definition of love that my ST was (probably unintentionally) leading me towards. That’s because, no matter who or how I love, I’ll always be queer, I’ll always be silly, I’ll always be curious and expansive and wholehearted. I’ve never been more grateful for my adventures, for my weird heart, for the messy and ill-advised and beautiful alchemy I’ve always been able to lead myself into. And out of!

I realized a thing that maybe shouldn’t have been new at almost 49: I’m the only one I need to check with about what’s happened to me. I know when I’ve loved and been loved. I don’t have to run it by anyone. I don’t have to prove it.

Friends, it’s still a Billy map. Though I don’t visit the Hidden Folder much any more, there are days when my heart is full of him, of them, of bitterness, of what ifs. But there are also days when the banter is going well on the apps, or I get turned on by myself, or I start to picture what Boyfriend Life would be like, and I’m so, so grateful for all of it, for everything ever. Magnanimous is my heart’s default setting, mostly, and I hope that never changes.