Choosing The Price You Pay

It's difficult for me to say if my uncle was an introvert or an extrovert. Sadly, I can't ask him now. He did like to spend his time alone, would spend days at the lake, just drifting along in his boat. He loved living out in the country where he could be alone with the stars. But he also had many friends. Not just acquaintances, but people who were close to him. The sister of a friend of his came from 10-12 hours away, so she could help us out while he was in hospice, cooking us food, just being a shoulder to cry on. In those last years of his life, he had a hard time keeping up with all the people he wanted to talk to, between treatments and just being sick and tired, but he tried. 

I am not my uncle, however. I sit solidly in the introvert camp. Being around groups of people drain me. Even being around just a few people can be draining after a while. As the Professor, Ginger, and I plan on moving in together before our first child comes, I know that I will have to lock myself away in my room from time to time, veg out for hours to recharge when I need to. I'm glad we found a place where I won't have to share my bedroom with anyone, even my child. 

I have a few close friends. Two female friends who live in the metro, who I talk to more on facebook chat than anything else. Moneypenny lives four hours away, who I text with a few times a week (maybe) and try to see once a month. TyRoy spends his weeks 2 hours away and his weekends in the metro with his new wife, who I don't get to see very often because of our schedules and who I really should email more often. Occasionally, I'll talk or text with MP, more since I've been pregnant and he's concerned about how I'm doing. That's about it. Here and there, I will text with acquaintance-type people, but that's about it. It isn't a very large group.

I've tried branching out. Last fall, I tried to get out in the bdsm community as well as date through online sites. While I met many nice and fun people, nothing serious came of it. I stopped dating altogether just before I found out I was pregnant and then I stopped going to bdsm community events when my work hours changed and I started dealing with being pregnant. I was very overwhelmed and really retreated from more casual acquaintances, rather than have to expend more emotional energy on anything else. 

In the last few months, once I started to get adapted to this new 2nd shift schedule, I tried once again to find people that I could connect with through online sources. I was really lonely when I got off work, since none of my current friends are usually awake when I get off work. I just wanted someone to talk to, like you would with any friend after a long, tiring day. But I wanted someone who I had things in common with, who it was easy for me to talk to, who I didn't feel like I was always justifying my life to. I wanted someone it was easy to chat with, just like how it feels when you strike up a friendship with someone in any other context. But just like when I was dating last fall, I don't really have the emotional energy or the time in my life to expend on people I don't feel are a good fit for what I'm looking for. I know that sounds incredibly dismissive of other people and maybe it is. On the other hand, during neither period of time did I think that the people I chose not to have relationships with were not worthy people, in and of themselves. Even the people I had the worst dates with or the worst correspondences with still have good qualities and should have friends and romantic/sexual partners who they connect with. Hell, if I had unlimited time, unlimited emotional energy, and wasn't an introvert, I may have had successful friendships or other relationships with them. But I don't and we didn't. And, as much as I don't want to rob others of their own ability to choose to be in my life, I do feel like it is better for them to spend time with and on people they have a chance of a friendship or relationship with, instead of someone who probably won't be able to give them what they are looking for, or at least not for very long before she had to disappear again.

The older I get, the more I see the prices you have to pay for things, the trade-offs that have to happen. One of the big things you learn in DBT is radical acceptance, which is acknowledging how things actually are in this moment, so you can stop struggling with how it shouldn't be like this and start dealing with how it actually is. That means realizing your limitations and the limitations of the situation you are in, so you can either work within that or change how you see the situation. It's where you start to make the trade offs that you have to make to be an effective, not crazy adult. 

Sometimes, it means being selfish, knowing how much you have to give and only giving that to the most important people and things in your life, even when there are other people or things that are just as worthy or deserving. Sometimes, it means hurting other people's feelings, because they want to be someone you take a chance on, just like they are ready to take a chance on you. Sometimes, it means passing up a lot of opportunities, especially ones that you don't think are sure things, for ones you do feel more confident of, only to have those blow up in your face. Sometimes, it means being picky. Sometimes, it means being seen as a bitch or stuck up or difficult. 

And sometimes it means realizing that you'd rather be lonely because the price you'd have to pay to not be lonely is higher than the price you pay being lonely. 

There's one of those cliched self-help sayings that says that a person won't change until the pain they feel to stay the same is greater than the fear they have of the change they'd have to make, or the pain of making that change. For myself, this has definitely been true. I didn't put in the hardwork to change my life until the pain of that life was greater than my fear or change and the pain I worried I'd experience if I changed. Right now, I have to acknowledge that I'm not there in dealing with this loneliness. And I accept that I am actively making this choice. I'm not acting like there are no good people out there, for friendship or romance or sex. I'm not acting like there are not awesome people who would take a chance on me. I'm not saying that none of this makes me come off as a kinda shitty or difficult person, or even that I'm not those things. Just that I'm not willing to make this trade off. At least not right now.

Bad Touch

What a difference a few weeks make. Just a few weeks ago, I was here approaching my latest slutty-phase while also trying not to hurt people in the process and now i have forsworn dating for the immediate future.

A good percentage of that has been because I would rather spend my time alone, getting the feel of being on my own again after so long, than to spend my time and energy talking to strangers. But I have also run into another issue that has made me take a step back from dating.

I don't want people to touch me.

It's not really an active thing. I don't walk around thinking that I hope no one brushes against me or being terrified of someone trying to shake my hand or hug me. No, it's more that when people are touching me I really wish they weren't and I'm often wondering how much longer they will be touching me and how I can get out of this gracefully, without seeming crazy or frigid, and without hurting the other person's feelings.

At first I just thought it was a dating thing. Or who I was dating to be more precise. I went on a few dates with a vanilla guy and, when we did start to fool around, I felt really uncomfortable and stopped things because it just wasn't turning me on. I just kept wishing it would stop. Or that I would start to feel something. I  thought this was because it wasn't rough or aggressive like I was used to. We talked for a week about what we could do to make it work for both of us but, when it came time to go back to his house, I panicked and went home instead. This was the guy who I really liked otherwise. The most recent guy...well, all i could think of the whole time was how to get rid of him, how to stop him from touching me without being a bitch,  how I was going to wash my face where he'd kissed. I still feel sort of bad about the fact that he was really into me and my instinct was to run away. It's not like he was a gross guy, not like he had poor hygiene or bad breath. Just this thing in my head was going crazy.

But if it was just dates, I could chalk it up to not being in a place for dating, perhaps subconsciously still feeling like I belong to the Professor, or some other thing like that.  But it's not just with near strangers on romantic dates. Last weekend, Moneypenny was in town for some other activity and he managed to make time to hang out with me, to go out to dinner and see my new place. To be honest, I was hoping to cuddle with him. Because of illness and time constraints, I haven't been able to cuddle much with the Professor when I see him. Ginger and I are still working our way back to a platonic cuddly place and haven't seen much of each other either. Moneypenny and I have been able to be well-behaved lately, to not take things to a sexual place, and I've been cuddling with him for what is now almost half my life, so I thought it would be a safe and comforting thing to do. But no. It felt weird too. Thinking about it today, even hugging my folks lately has felt more like work than comfort.

While planning this post,  I kept thinking about how I would know when it's ok again. I have a hard time dealing with situations where I might normally be fine with the touching,  where it might be something I'd like to experience or get to explore, where it's with someone new or fun or interesting. I don't know how to tell the person that my mind might be interested but there's something broken. At first,  I thought it was a lack of attraction, a chemical pheromonal thing. Still a problem I couldn't easily explain but at least it was a problem I felt would be fixed when I met the right person. Now it's pretty much everyone for reasons I don't know. All the sudden I'm that frigid chick I never wanted to be. And forcing myself to keep trying seems like a bad idea.

Of course,  the Professor is the exception to this. *facepalm* I'd like to be getting over by getting some strange but even if I had the patience to deal with strangers I can't imagine enjoying anyone touching me right now. I'm not sure if I'd enjoy playing with someone else right now or not. Usually play for me is always wrapped up in sex and I wouldn't want to play with someone if I didn't also want to have sex with them. But maybe I could do play that didn't involve skin to skin contact. Right now I'm mostly just wondering outloud. I have no idea. I just know I really want to be touched but I really don't.

Gonna Get An Apartment And Never Come Out

I think I'm going to get an apartment and never come out.

Ok, so that's an exaggeration.  Of course I'll come out to go to work. I mean, I'll have to in order to pay for the apartment. But I think I'll be doing a great deal of staying in. Read all my baglog of magazines.  Read all my books so I can get rid of the ones I don't think I'll reread. (Hahahahaha. Like I'm ever going to get rid of them. See, I haven't lost my sense of humor.) I'll keep my hulu queue down to one page. (Again, hahahaha.) I'll try to work on my Netflix queue too. I'll watch all the movies on the top 100 lists and all the movies that have won a best picture Oscar.

Notice what isn't in there? Dating or fucking or romance. That's because it isn't going to be. I've hit that point today where I feel like I'm never going to be able to change enough to have anything close to a functioning long-term romantic relationship. I can be the kindest, sweetest, compassionate,  most generous person I can possibly be and I can even be with people who I love and who truly do love me but I will never not be too much.  Find a sane person and they'll either never understand or I'll make them crazy. Find other crazy people and I'll make them crazier. I can try to hand the times that my feelings are unjustified on my own but I won't always be successful. I'm not sure I'll ever not be more upset by more things more often than most other people. I work hard for these times to be further apart and less intense and to take them out on the people in my life less often. But I will never be a normal person. I will probably always need more handholding, more reassuring, more sex and play, and more tolerance. And in the end, no amount of those good things about me is going to make up for that.

So I'm going to stop trying. I'm going to try to sublimate and forget.

Maybe I'll use all that energy to keep track of my calories,  down to the last one, eating healthier and smaller. Work out daily. Go for long walks in my new neighborhood, no matter how good or not good it is, refusing to be afraid to walk around my home again, but also not allowing myself to be vulnerable again. No skirts or heels for me. And no pink.  Even if I get thinner, I will try to make it so I am also stronger.

Or maybe I'll eat as much as I want of anything I want. No one looks twice at the disgusting fat chick, right? I'm still not seen as the first & easiest target. Well, except for a mugging, since it's not like I could run after you. But I won't have to worry about sex or romance then.

Maybe I'll go back to devoting much of my time to caregiving for my family. My step-father's parents will be moving here in August and his mother has dementia and lung cancer. I'm sure they'll need help. If I devote myself to that, I won't have time for romance. And no one really wants the baggage that comes with that situation anyway. I don't remember if I missed having sex while I cared for my uncle. I was usually able to get it with TyRoy when I was in his area, but it's hard for me to remember what I did or didn't feel, especially during the time I was on the Lithium.

Recently, I've told other people that what I appreciate about DBT is that it doesn't really ask you to focus on the bigger picture things because right now you are probably having a hard enough time just getting through this minute, this hour, this day. It seems to be if more use to me than other things I had learned. I remember when I was 15 the therapist my parents' sent me to asked me what I would want on a deserted island with me. Since no one told me it was a trick question,  I answered honestly. I wanted some books and some cds and my cd walkman and some batteries and a journal and some pens. (I didn't say it then but I had read Lord of the Flies and the book they made into the movie where a teenage Brooke Shields has sex with her brother because they are the only ones on the island. I know that you can find food and water on deserted islands.) He acted like I was the dumbest kid ever. He pulled out Maslovs Heirarchy of Needs and told me how I needed to focus on the bottom layers, Physological Needs (food & water) and Safety & Security Needs (shelter) before I focused on the top needs. This was entirely unhelpful at the time. I was 15 and my parents took care of my food and shelter needs.

But right now, I think I need to combine the two, DBT and Maslo. I need to work on getting a job and my own roof above my head, as the time I will be able to depend on others is quickly running out.  And when I get overwhelmed, I need to do whatever I can to get through the next minute, next hour, next day, until it is bearable again, at least bearable enough to work on getting those base needs met. Right now, that is venting here until I can go to a movie with my friend Marcy so I can stop crying for awhile. Then, it will be time to take my night pills, including a sleeping pill, then I'll try to get up early and work on those needs. Maybe I'm overeacting about the state of my current relationship or about my future relationship prospects, so don't hold me to it. But then again, maybe I'll get an apartment and never come out. Don't say you weren't warned.

Loose Associative Links

"I've been thinking about a problem." Moneypenny and I are sitting in his living room, while I'm on my visit to larger Midwest City from Smaller Midwest City. "If you are working from a many worlds theory, where everyone's life is their own world, then you basically create your own world. What do you think people would do differently if they realized that they created their own world?"  I wasn't sure if this was a poke at how I had been feeling all weekend, so mired in the lack of a clearly, overwhelmingly good decision that I feel unable to make any, or was coming from his own place of wanting to make a better life for himself. Either way, it still put me on the defensive and I went on a five minute rant about how no matter what changes in life or attitude people may make there would still be things in their life that they couldn't change and that would still suck anyway. Then I felt guilty for not being able to add anything to his conversation. I ended up leaving an hour earlier than I might have originally because I couldn't stand to sit there anymore as I fought both being angry and wanting to cry.

These kinds of thought experiments used to be fun for me. Even when I couldn't completely understand or envision them, the seemingly kooky ideas that pop up in quantum mechanics always blew me away and I loved thinking about the possibilities they presented. When I was studying Buddhism and how we create our own realities, I could easily get carried away in those possibilities as well, the ability to unravel so much of the suffering that we have created in our own lives. Stone-cold sober, he and I could have the kind of conversations that people are only supposed to be able to have when they are on some sort of mind-altering substance.

But in recent years, I've drifted further and further away from those kinds of discussions and, on the drive home, I was plagued by the question of why. I used to love those kinds of thought experiments, would come up with at least half of the places we would start on my own. Now it rubs me the wrong way to even things of them. I'm trying to work out why. I'm going to try to arrange my thoughts as best as I can, but I'm not sure how good of a job I'll do, so bare with me.

I think part of it is that with the stuff that has happened in my life, it has felt less important. Who cares about the possibilities of the multi-verse or unravelling the cycles of suffering in our lives when we're caring for ill and/or dying family members? Or even when we are just trying to get by, paycheck to paycheck? When you're spending all your time trying to figure out how to pay the next bills or how to afford to move out or you'd be able to someday go to school to be able to get a better job so you don't have to worry as much about paying the bills, you don't have as much, if any, room in your head for thinking about more esoteric things. Or at least I don't. We had all these conversations when I was 21 and in college. Yes, I only had a part-time job and I had to think about my schoolwork and being able to pay bills, but there were much fewer of them and I was convinced that soon I would have a decent enough job that I wouldn't have to worry as much about paying bills. I was convinced that my near future looked brighter so it wasn't as much of a chore to worry about the bills then. Now I'm 32 and I'm hitting this wall where my future doesn't look any brighter, where my best case scenario is having a future that is this same shade and not a shade darker. As much as I might want to, I just don't have it in me to give a shit about that stuff any more.

But I think that a big part of it is the crazy. I read this article last week from the Atlantic's website that was about the link between creativity and mental illness. Near the end of the article, she writes about talking to another colleague about creativity and schizophrenia (emphasis is mine): "Heston and I discussed whether some particularly creative people owe their gifts to a subclinical variant of schizophrenia that loosens their associative links sufficiently to enhance their creativity but not enough to make them mentally ill." Her end conclusion in the article is : "Some people see things others cannot, and they are right, and we call them creative geniuses. Some people see things others cannot, and they are wrong, and we call them mentally ill. And some people, like John Nash, are both." This really hit home with me. Now, I do not have schizophrenia, or a family history of it, nor have I ever been a creative genius, but I do think that the ways in which I think of things that many others might not come from a different way of associating things. But I think that that much of this is tied to letting the crazy drive the train more. Now that I am not letting her drive the train as much, the less I have that. It is not as bad as I had hoped that it would be when I first started down this road of improving my mental health, but it is there and it is enough of a difference that i notice it. I also have to deal with the long-term side effects of psychiatric medications. My memory has never been the same after I took lithium. Being on a mood-stabilizing medication that wards against the brain chemically induced suicidality as well as bringing up the low parts of the low side and down the up side of the ups means that I don't have those periods of creative hyper-energy anymore. (You know, mania.) As we speak, I'm also having weird things happen which I'm not sure are mental illness or medication related (or neither), like spacing out and losing time, and increased light sensitivity and black floating spots in my vision occasionally. But if you take this and add it up what you get is less memory to cull from, less energy to make associations, and a quieter and more orderly brain with less loose associations. And a woman who is very sad and more than a little angry that she has to make the decision between living life at all and having an interesting brain, though she is pretty sure what decision she will keep making day after day, even though it means she doesn't get to have those conversations anymore.

The Slippery Slope of Day Drinking

I think that some days are just meant for a person to drink from the time they wake up to the time they go to bed. Most days, I like a cup of coffee or an energy drink with my small breakfast, usually taken as I walk run out the door to work. Though even then, with the coffee, I like the Bailey's Irish Cream Creamer over the French Vanilla or Creme Brulee, though those are good too. On the first anniversary of my uncle's passing, we all gathered at his neighbor's house for a get-together, a potluck and firepit. His boyfriend made "Antifreeze" and I drank from the time we arrived, at about noon, until the time we left, maybe 8. I might have also drank when we got back home. I probably would have drank on the ride home as well, as I think my mom was driving, but she has a whole thing about not driving with open containers in the passenger compartment and following the law and all that bullshit.

It feels like today is one of those days, where you drink all day. It's the Fourth of July, after all. Most people start their bbqs in the early afternoon. If they are smoking meat, like the Professor's friend who's party we are going to a bit later, they start much earlier in the day. And nothing goes with bbqing like drinking, right?

Of course, I'm writing this at a quarter after 1pm, so I've already wasted a good portion of that drinking time. Sigh. Trying to be a good girl. I actually just started a cup of coffee-hot cocoa mix-creamer and I'm working on a 24 oz bottle of water as well, so I won't get dehydrated later. But the red, white, and blue jello shots that I've been working on since yesterday are calling me. (Note to self: next time, fill in more blue on each, so less shots overall, which will end up with a wider white section and fuller shots overall.)

The key to drinking all day is not getting too drunk though. I imagine it is the same for smoking pot continuously throughout the day, as opposed to just getting really stoned at the end of the day. Sadly I wouldn't know because I'm still trying to 'get high.' But you want to be able to function, maybe even drive a bit if you needed to, so you want to stay a bit buzzed but below the legal limit for much of the day. You also don't want to get dehydrated, so you need to have some water in there too.

I grew up with my grandfather drinking during the day on weekends and my uncle followed in this proud tradition. I definitely remember weekend days where my grandpa was having a beer at the kitchen table before he was properly dressed. Now I will say that I never saw my grandfather drink and then drive. My uncle really only did that after he moved out into the country where you could drive the gravel roads for hours, never get above 30 mph, and never run into anyone. He and his neighbor even had a name for it, "country cruising." (Don't get me wrong. I am very opposed to drunk driving. I try to be very careful about my alcohol consumption if I know or even think I might be driving later on. But sometimes we all do stupid shit and sometimes we can't stop the people we love from doing stupid shit.) Honestly, while it isn't as if he didn't have issues before he moved out into the country, I think that having a friend and neighbor who was (and still is) basically a functioning alcoholic did my uncle no favors. I am pretty sure that if he hadn't passed away, my uncle would have had to deal with some serious alcohol dependency issues. It seems to run in our veins, though. Many people on both sides of my mother's family have had chemical dependency issues.

It isn't like I blame them though. Everyone on both sides of the family were either poor or, at best, working class. Some of their kids reached middle class, but, as the middle class is shrinking year by year, I'm not sure most of them will stay there. A month or so ago, a friend texted me, forlorn about the state of his personal economy, that even though he makes what to me is a really good wage, he isn't making as much as he thought he would at this point in his life, he's had to go into debt over medical bills, and he doesn't know how he would be able to be married and raise a child on his current wage, especially since he would rather his child not be put in daycare but to have one parent stay home during those pre-going-to-school years. I sent him to a country song, Tip It On Back, by Dierks Bentley:

I see main street closing
Miles of “For Sale” signs
And them fields ain’t growing
Fast enough to get us by
I feel the sweet release,
Of a Friday night
For a couple of hours we can run this town
Till it runs dry

Tip it on back, make it feel good
Sip a little more than you know you should
Let the smoke roll, off your lips
Let it all go whatever it is
And tip it on back

I don't think he found it very comforting and, honestly, I guess it wasn't supposed to be. Shit sucks. For most of us, no matter what high ideals we had in college about not working for the man and not being like our parents, guess what? That's what we're gonna do. And most of our parents actually started out better than most of us because going to college was much cheaper back then, whether you went right after high school or went to night school. I'm not saying it was easy but there were somethings that were easier or cheaper for them. And our parents still smoked, drank, did drugs, were sometimes shitty parents, got divorced, etc. (Not all of our parents did all of those things, but you get what I'm saying.) A few weeks after I let him in on the harsh reality of what the rest of his adult life was probably going to look like, I had it myself. I was doing my budget and I knew I couldn't even get by working as much as I possibly could in the job I was at, where working close to full-time hours broke me, so how could I possibly imagine that I could do that and also go back to school for anything that might get me a better job while also working? But I had to do this everyday to pay bills. And this, folks, is why you drink once you are out of your twenties, once you stop partying.

Now there are some people who don't have this urge to escape when things are shitty. I know maybe one or two of them. I was in a fark comment thread (or was it a fetlife comment thread?) the other day that had something to do with alcohol and there were several people who asserted "Why would I want to not be present in my life and in control of myself?" It must be nice to be those people because, even though I know and, in reasonable mind, agree with all the DBT and Buddhist stuff about being present and participating and being mindful, I also know that life fucking sucks and I can't always deal with that, so there are a great many times when I would rather veg out in front of the tv or drink til I am buzzed (or beyond) or try to get high, or some combination of the above, than deal with what is in front of me. Now someday that might not be the case, but it is right now and I try to tell myself that it doesn't matter as long as I do the things I need to do before I start drinking, or if I can comfortably do it the next day and if I get up and go to work when I'm supposed to. But I also know that, for me, day drinking could become a slippery slope into alcoholism. You know, because things suck everyday so if you accept that there are days that just call for drinking all day then why don't all days call for that?

Anyway, here's a picture of my shots:

"Every Love Story is a Ghost Story"-DFW

This is not a love story. At least not in the way that this term is taken today. At the end, the girl doesn't get the boy (or girl, in this modern age.) At this point, it is a little early to tell what the girl does get. (And she's not a girl either. She's a woman. She's over 30. Not only is she older than her mother was when she had her, but she's older than her mother was when she remarried and did her 'happily ever after,' even though we should all know by now that 'happily ever after' is only the start of all the real hard work. Though of course we always forget that.)

But maybe it is a love story. Because the girl, wait, scratch that, woman has found love. Lots of love. Love she didn't think she'd find again. She found two people to love at the same time. On the same date that was supposed to just be for a side fling D/s relationship. (She was supposed to marry a lawyer and start having kids, but that didn't exactly work out like the fairy tale it was on paper.) So she did find love and people who wanted to commit to her and start a family, though not the traditional kind of family but a family nonetheless. She moved in and they started making plans for getting a bigger place, one to fit the three of them, allowing them each space and privacy and give the visiting child a place of his own too.

But this is not a love story because it doesn't end there. Love stories always end there, at the happily ever after. The woman has two major shortcomings. One is that she doesn't work a job that allows for her to work enough hours to pay (what she feels is) her fair share, at least not without working so much that she has a nervous breakdown. Which leads us to her second and larger shortcoming- she's crazy. I'm trying not to put this in a derogatory way, but just the facts. She is bipolar and has borderline personality disorder. To say the least, she has a low tolerance for distress and doesn't have as good of an ability to bounce back as the average person. She's doing better than she has in the past and she tries to work on being better but things are as they are right now and she will probably always be this person to some extent.

This is also not a love story because her lovers also have shortcomings. Not cute ones that resolve themselves by the time they decide to be together or ones that the lover is miraculously able to change by the time they coming running through the airport to stop their lover from leaving. Nope. These people are who they are as well. She knows this and loves them because they are who they are, though, like everyone, sometimes she'd like them to do something(s) differently. She tries for unconditional but she's not perfect. Mostly she just tries to not be one of those types who wants to change a person. But as things got closer to moving day, everyone was stressed and had turned inward and away from each other. "This is just how they are," she told herself. "It will cycle back and everything will be fine after the move."

This is not a love story because they didn't move. The apartment complex was gonna screw them and they decided not to sign the lease. They were a week away from moving, half packed. While they felt triumphant in not getting screwed and working as a family, they were now further away from their goal of living together in a larger place. And the woman was still just as worried as she had been before about being able to afford her share of any place they got that was big enough. Hell, if anything she was more worried. The place that they thought they could afford was only that way because they screw people out of money. Everyone else was still stressed and turned inward. She was so lonely. Every night she went to bed alone. There was very little physical or sexual contact in the household, which was what she craved to keep her head straight, to feel loved and wanted. It's not that they didn't show her or tell her that they loved or wanted her, just that it wasn't in a way that she could take in. That first week after she had a heavier schedule because she had told her work she needed more hours to afford the new apartment. She caved under all the pressure. By Friday, she missed a shift, no call no show. Only a compassionate coworker who's son has bipolar saved her job, or so she is hoping. She started to spiral into that suicidal depression she had struggled with all her life, blocking everyone out herself.

This is not a love story because the woman is leaving. It's not unreasonable for her to ask for the things she asks for. (At least for the most part.) And it's not unreasonable for them to say that they can't give her those things, at least not right now, at least not at the level she needs them. But that leaves her feeling lonely and unloved by people who are just in the next room. Which will leave her resentful and angry before too long. The woman has a friend who has space to rent out in her house for pretty cheap and, though it is her friend, if she can't pull her weight there, it will only be her who eats ramen noodles every night and her credit that gets fucked up. (Update: the woman's friend's therapist doesn't think it's good for two crazy chicks to live together so she's not really sure what she's going to do. )

This is not a love story because the woman knows that leaving could mean the end to their story. Though they cry together and reassure each other that they are still together and it will actually be more special when she comes to visit because they won't have seen each other for awhile and they'll be all over each other as soon as she walks through the door and they are making plans for how to actually shore up their relationship, she knows this could be the beginning of the end, the slow death of what they had but could not sustain. The woman has seen lots of movies and love stories don't end with the heroine alone with her two cats in a two room mother-in-law apartment on the other side of town. But the woman knows she'll kill herself if she stays, that she is killing herself with each night that she masturbates and then cries herself to sleep when the people she want to have sex with are just twenty feet away. The woman knows that it is killing them too. That there isn't enough for them to care for her hurt in the ways they do and care for themselves and/or each other too.

So this is not a love story.

"You get me dancing and you make me sing"

I really am supposed to be leaving for work, so this will be as quick as I can make it.

So I've had this little snipit of lyrics in my head for the past several weeks but I don't have the cd anymore and it's not readily available as (legal) mp3, so I haven't been able to listen to the whole song. This morning, as I took a bit of extra time to enjoy the amazing spring storm, I listened to (covers of) that song and another one of my favorites off that same album. And they hit me like a ton of bricks.

That maybe this is what the men and lady in my life feel, that part that I can't touch, part of a part of what keeps a bleary eyed Professor up hours after I've gone to bed.

This is a song that nobody knows
I couldn't begin to describe how it goes
But it makes me cry or laugh right out loud
It's a song that I sing when there's no one around

This is the man that nobody sees
He wears my old clothes and he looks just like me
Just one of the boys who gets lost in the crowd
He's the man that I am when there's no one around

It's four in the morning
Im lyin' in bed
A tape of my failures
Playin' inside my head
It's heartaches and hard knocks
And things I don't know
I listen and I wonder
Where will it go

This is a glimpse of the child that's within
He's so immature but he's still my best friend
If he could learn how to fly he'd never touch down
He's the kid that I am when there's no one around

This is the dance I do every day
I let my feet go and get carried away
I let my soul lead and follow the sound
It's the dance that I do when there's no one around

It's four in the morning
Im lyin' in bed
A tape of my failures
Playin' inside my head
It's heartaches and hard knocks
And things I don't know
I listen and I wonder
Where will it go

This is a song that nobody knows
I still can't begin to describe how it goes
But it makes me cry or laugh right out loud
It's a song that I sing when there's no one around
It's a song that I sing when there's no one around

But this song that I've been hearing the little bit of in my head is what my people make me feel like, how I hope I sometimes make them feel. It's Ginger's belief that everything will be all right. It's Moneypenny's belief that there is always something more profound to uncover and share with each other. It's TyRoy's straight-forward drive. It's The Professor's ...well, all the things that I can't describe or understand about what he does to me and his faith that this is the right thing for all of us.

(lyrics for those who can't bear the country)
This is how it seems to me 
Life is only therapy 
Real expensive 
And no guarantee 

So I lie here on the couch 
With my heart hanging out 
Frozen solid with fear 
Like a rock in the ground 

But you move me 
You give me courage I didn’t 
know I had 
You move me on 
I can’t go with you 
And stay where I am 
So you move me on 

This is how love was to me 
I could look and not see 
Going through the emotions 
Not knowin’ what they mean 

And it scared me so much 
That I just wouldn’t budge 
I might have stayed there forever 
If not for your touch 

Oh but you move me 
Out of myself and into the fire 
You move me 
Now I’m burning with love 
And with hope and desire 
How you move me 

You go whistling in the dark 
Making light of it 
Making light of it 
And I follow with my heart 
Laughing all the way 

Oh ‘cause you move me 
You get me dancing and you 
make me sing 
You move me 
Now I’m taking delight 
In every little thing 
How you move me 

"Show Me How To Fight For Now"

Weekend with Moneypenny & his new gf, taking my cats to live with him.  Visited with friends of my uncle's,  ppl I grew up with.  Cried on the way back to Moneypenny's house from the suburb I grew up in, knowing it would never be home again.  I can't even drive by gram 's old house.

I thought if I could touch this place or feel it, this brokenness inside me might start healing. Out here it's like I'm someone else, I thought that maybe I could find myself. If I could just come in, I swear I'll leave, won't take nothing but a memory from the house that built me.

But going back only tells me part of the story.  An important part but still only part. The part that is who I was and where I come from.  The part that with each mile under my wheels I'm getting farther and farther away from as I get closer to who I will be, to who I am becoming.  In many ways the person I thought I would be someday, the person I couldn't figure out why I wasn't yet when I was in my 20's. I didn't know then that what I needed was more pain, real pain not just suffering. And time. And hard work. So much more hard work. Hard work that I have to remind myself to do everyday if I can ever hope to get what I want. Well, all that and a little bit of luck.  

I also never knew that the pain would change the color of whatever joy would come. Or that all that "being an adult" that I always wanted would be so hard.  You know it's funny how freedom can make us feel contained when the muscles in our legs aren't used to all the walkin'.

But this weekend, spending time with my bestfriend and his new girl and having an amazing time, feeling that joy for him, for them, something I'm sure neither of us thought I'd ever be able to do as his ex, and thinking about Ginger and the Professor and how lucky I was to have them and how I wanted to work harder on being a better partner brought so much joy to me as I was driving home, when I heard this:

'Cause with your hand in my hand and a pocket full of soul
I can tell you there's no place we couldn't go
Just put your hand on the glass, I'm here trying to pull you through
You just gotta be strong

'Cause I don't wanna lose you now
I'm looking right at the other half of me
The vacancy that sat in my heart
Is a space that now you're home
Show me how to fight for now
And I'll tell you, baby, it was easy
Coming back here to you once I figured it out
You were right here all along

It's like you're my mirror
My mirror staring back at me
I couldn't get any bigger
With anyone else beside of me
And now it's clear as this promise
That we're making two reflections into one
'Cause it's like you're my mirror
My mirror staring back at me, staring back at me.

I just want to hold on to that joy and hope to reflect it back to the people I love.



"House that built me" Miranda Lambert
"Waste" Foster the People
"Mirror" Justin Timberlake

I Can Listen With My Heart

I'm not sure I'll be able to get this down right and its difficult doing it on my phone but I don't want to get up and lose this moment.  It's probably that this is a new relationship driving this feeling but I'm still at that "I want to tell you everything because it feels like I finally have someone who will understand it or at least appreciate it being shared. "

Sitting here with an odd sense of deja vu. Raining outside.  I opened the big Window in my bedroom to hear better. From where I sit in bed,  all I can see are trees and rain. I had a big window like this in the apartment in University Park,  when I was 12. I'd open the window to listen to the rain at night,  sad adult contemporary disks playing on my stereo, softly so they wouldn't wake my parents on the other side of the bedroom wall.  Crying myself to sleep.  That was probably when it should have been evident that I had a problem. 12 year olds don't cry themselves to sleep every night. Or listen to adult contemporary music, for that matter.

The rain made me want to listen to Mary Chapin - Carpenter's "Rhythm of the Blues," then the whole Come On Come On album.  Remembered snatches of a summer spent at The Nightmare on Spruce Street, watching the rain through the big picture window,  cranking up my uncle's cds as loud as I could,  singing at the top of my lungs.  Probably crying to.  I've always had a weakness for the sad songs. The therapist tells me I shouldn't indulge it but some habits are impossible to break. 

"it's a need you never get used to-  soft,  fierce,  and so confused. It's a loss you never get over to the first time you lose."

In those early teenage years,  I longed for. .. well,  hell,  I'm not sure I knew what I was longing for.  Love,  sex,  companionship.  I know I thought of it in very simplistic terms.  Find the right guy,  as it was still a guy though I knew I liked girls too,  and it all gets better,  sorta itself out.  That summer I was 14, my uncle was marrying his college sweetheart and they seemed perfect for each other.  Just hold out long enough to find it and you're set. 

Almost two decades on, with my uncle having come out, divorced and been just as poly as I am working on being now, I can't help but laugh at how naive that sounds.

Right now,  one of you is at work and the other is sleeping so soundly that my trying to cuddle with him didn't stir him at all.  It's beautiful and complicated and yet sometimes much more simple than you'd think it could be,  definitely more simple than my mind wants to make it.  Last night,  all of us in different tired and kinda grumpy mindsets,  hung out together in the living room,  me doing homework, her reading,  him playing video games.  No weird sex stuff.  No drama. Just three people living in the same space.

Once again,  I get to the end of what I had to say without any point emerging. Maybe it's that I feel very ambivalent right now.  Memories of the girl I was flooding back,  trying to evaluate if she got what she ultimately wanted,  and how I feel about it not looking the way she'd envisioned it,  and how it all doesn't feel the way she thought it would when she got it.  "Some people remember the first time,  some can't forget the last.  Some just select what they want to from the past."

"But Home For Me Was Always Someone Else, You Know?"

It's Wednesday morning, quickly slipping into afternoon, and  I figure I should start the dishes. We're supposed to go to the store later, but the Professor woke up with a bad backache and Ginger is currently giving him a very rough-looking massage. A part of me wants to stay right where I am and watch. I like learning from their interactions. But it also feels intimate, like I'm spying, like I should leave them along for a bit. I'm sure they'll come get me when they are ready to go and I don't feel it's my place to rush them.

But as I'm doing the dishes, things start to feel familiar. It sounds like Prof and Ginger have moved on from the back rub to playful couple 'fighting.' But they are happy. That much is evident. And I'm happy, in a warm, contented way.

Having a house full of people just living, interacting, both working and playing, separate yet also together, reminds me of happier times with my family. Being at Gram's for the weekend with people doing stuff, some work, some visiting, some playing, some relaxing, wondering in and out of rooms occupied by others, but knowing we'd all come together again for dinner. That 'out of the corner of your eye' awareness of what someone else was doing without getting wrapped up in it. Knowing it was all ok and all going to be ok.

Last weekend, when I was about to start the dishes, there was a short summer rainstorm. I went outside and stood on the back porch, just breathing it in. It reminded me of standing on the cobblestone road in the middle of the night in the cool rain, taking a break from painting my uncle's new 'fixer-upper in exchange for no security deposit' apartment in his college town. I was dirty and hot and covered in paint, bone tired, and we stood out there, barefoot on the road, the only ones up at that hour. I remember eleven-year-old me being so envious that adults got to do this anytime they wanted to, sure that this freedom was what it meant to be an adult. It was then and still is now, another life and then some ago, one of my favorite memories. Standing on that back porch last weekend, I cried alittle, but I felt like, as he so often has this last month or so, that my uncle was trying to reassure me. That this might not have been the situation I had asked for, but it is a good situation and he is supporting me.

(Yeah, maybe a month from now or a year from now, if/when this all blows up in my face, I'll feel differently, feel like I was completely delusional, but I need all the support I can get right now so I'll take it. Even if it's all in my head, I have to hope that it is that part of me that comes from him.)

As I do the dishes, I think of all the times hanging out with him and his (now ex-)wife. In some ways, as a kid who could only see the world in terms of couple, of pairs, I felt like a third-wheel. But they never made me feel like that, even when they probably should have kicked me out so that they could enjoy more intimate times. Actually, it seems like growing up an only child with my mom and step-dad as well as the time I spent with my aunt and uncle, and hell, to a lesser extent, the time I spent with my grandparents as an only grandchild, has prepared me for how to blend myself into a couple, perhaps create a triad, now. How to not feel competitive. How to not feel excluded when they focus on each other. (Though I have to admit that in this romantic and sexual context I'm still getting over my embarassment when one of them is focused on me while we are around the other. As well as when both of them are focused on me actually.) But it feels nice for everyone to already be comfortable enough that they can do their own thing and I can do mine, that I can feel connected to them as we do and enjoy the snippets of eavesdropped conversation and play. I miss the feeling of that larger, connected but still doing our own thing family. Of course,sadly, I rarely appreciated it in the moment as much as I do this now.

Later, in the car, as we run our errands, I ride in the back and listen with bemusement as they banter and bicker, the way that long established couples do. It reminds me of so many car rides with my parents or my uncle and aunt, that familiar feeling of being part of a family while also having my separate space, enjoying the eavesdropping as they talk to each other as if they've forgotten that I'm there. I know it sounds weird, but this is what home feels like to me. This is feeling like the home I've so missed since my larger family started passing away. This is starting to feel like home.

I'm Not a Good Poker Player

There are some things that seem to come completely naturally to some people, but that I can't seem to wrap my head around.

When you're with someone, especially in a new romantic situation, and they seem to be saying the exact right thing, how do you not question if they have just read you well enough to know what will stroke your ego and make you pliable to their will, even though they are secretly laughing at you in their head or behind your back?

Anticipate- Ani DiFranco
you are subtle as a window pane
standing in my view
but I will wait for it to rain
so that I can see you
you call me up at night
when there's no light passing through
and you think that I don't understand
but I do

we don't say everything that we could
so that we can say later
oh, you misunderstood
I hold my cards up
close to my chest
I say what I have to
and I hold back the rest

'cause someone you don't know
is someone you don't know
get a firm grip, girl
before you let go
for every hand extended
another lies in wait
keep your eye on that one
anticipate

dress down get out there
pick a fight with the police
we will get it all on film
for the new release
seems like everyone's an actor
or they're an actor's best friend
I wonder what was wrong to begin with
that they should all have to pretend
we lost sight of everything
when we have to keep checking our backs
I think we should all just smile
come clean
and relax

if there's anything I've learned
all these years on my own
it's how to find my own way there
and how to find my own way back home

Last Night's Underwear in My Back Pocket

It's weird the things that make you feel grown up. Well, it's weird to start with that I'm 30, 31 in 3 days and don't feel like a grown up. But I live in my parents' basement and don't have a full-time job so that contributes quite a bit. Also, felt much more grown up when I was married, even though same living situation, but I was so-and-so's wife. I digress

It's weird the things that make you feel grown up. Leaving someone else's house in the morning makes me feel really grown up. When I was younger, I thought I'd have a slightly different slutty phase than the one I ended up having. One like in the movies or on tv, where you drink a little too much and go home with someone you picked up that night at a bar. Now, to my recollection, I have never done this. What they never tell you is that picking up people in bars is hard unless you have really good game, which I don't. The internet has been the savior of my sex life. Without it, I would be able to count the people I've fucked on my fingers, which, to me, would be very sad. But hooking up with people on the internet is different and happens at all kinds of times that aren't last call. Also, let's be honest, if those people were in a position to attract a potential mate, if they had things like a job or a place of their own, or they were unattached, they probably wouldn't be trolling Craigslist for ass in the first place.

Or maybe they've been more attractive to me because they didn't have the potential for me to be in a long-term relationship with them. Now that I'm looking for something long-term, and I'm ruling out people who can't host, I'm having a different experience. I didn't do it right with Troy. I didn't really plan ahead. I had to go to work the next morning but I didn't bring my get-ready bag or a change of clothes in my car. I also drank way too much and left my own car at the bar. Of course, it still worked out just fine. After a night of too little sleep, I grabbed a quick shower at his place and he drove me back to my car. I even had enough time to change at my own house before I went to work. Still not optimal however.

Neyo lyrics
If she leave the club with me
Then her maturity
Gonna make sure she follow me in her car
She's so responsible, she gone make sure
She leave in time to get home, get ready for work

I did it better last night. To be fair, this night was slightly more planned. With Troy, I had myself convinced it wasn't going to happen that first night. With (doesn't have a name yet), we had arranged that I would stay the night because that was the only way we'd have time together, with my work schedule. I had a small (for me) duffle bag with what I thought I might need. I had even planned out where I would stop to get a quick sandwich and my morning energy drink on my way to work. And now I'm sitting in a parking lot close to work typing this on my phone, as I have to twenty minutes before my shift starts. And I feel great.

fourteenth street and the garbage swirls like a cyclone
three o'clock in the afternoon and I am going home
F train is full of high school students
so much shouting
so much laughter
last night's underwear in my back pocket
sure sign of the morning after
...
maybe I'll live my whole life
just getting by
maybe I'll be discovered
maybe I'll be colonized
you could try to train me like a pet
you could try to teach me to behave
But I'll tell you, if I haven't learned it yet
you know,
I ain't gonna sit, I ain't gonna stay

Remodeling

People love that cliche, time heals all wounds. But live long enough and you'll realize that most cliches are true. It's amazing what even the smallest passage of time can accomplish, the cuts it can close, the imperfections it can smooth over. But in the end, it comes down to the size of the wound, doesn't it? If the wound is deep enough , there might be no way to keep it from festering, even if you have all the time in the world. -Being Human, US

The world breaks everyone and afterwards many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry. -A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway



Several times, he's said that he's broken. On good days, he says he feels like he may be healing, or that he may only be bent, not broken. When I ask him how or why he thinks this, what it is that he finds wrong with himself now, I never really know what to do with his answers. What he describes sounds rather normal for the people I've known in my life, nothing too extreme, especially considering what he's been through in the last year or so. Some of the things, like not really being able to tell when someone is being genuine or when they are actually trying to get something out of you, are how I feel all the time. Hell, they're how I feel about him sometimes. This is not to say that I don't support him being whoever or however he wants to be. I wholeheartedly do. It's just very far from my lived reality and that of most people I know. It also makes me wonder if we would be suited to each other, long-term, if what he thinks of as broken is what I consider normal.

And while I understand how it might feel like being broken for someone in his position, with his life experience, that terminology really gets under my skin. Just like "broken home" or "broken family." While talking to my therapist a few weeks ago, I put the word in air quotes and she insisted "But we are from broken homes." (She's a child of divorce too.) I didn't have words to express how and why I thought she was wrong, why calling my family broken made me angry, but I did and still do.

So I've been thinking quite a bit about being broken the last few days. As is usually the case, I couldn't think of a good response in the moment, but I am trying to develop one now. Maybe he is right that those things he describes are broken-ness and that my therapist is right about me being from a broken home. For the sake of the rest of this post, let's just assume that they are. It's not the kind of broken that occurs when a plate slips through your fingers and shatters on the floor, where no amount of gluing will restore it to it's previous usefulness again. It feels more like a broken bone, where your body can heal it naturally, with time and proper care, though how close it functions to it's previous state will also depend on how well it is re-set.

I looked up bone fractures on Wikipedia. If I'm reading it right, first, you get a blood clot between the fragments, then new blood vessels grow around the clot. The blood vessels bring the collagen which stiffens and becomes the bone matrix. Then a process called remodeling replaces the initial bone matrix with more mature bone. It usually takes about 18 months but is 80% of normal within 3 months in most adults. I can almost picture the blood then collagen then bone filling up the small space of the fracture, making what was a gap now whole again.

So, yes, I've been broken in many places, many times. I will be again. But when my family "broke" under the strain of a cheating and abusive spouse, my grandparents, my uncle, and, a little while later, my step-dad wove the broken places back together. I would not trade the closeness we shared as an extended family for a unbroken nuclear family. The rest of the broken-ness, well, sometimes you don't expect anything to every bridge that gap, to ever bind the pieces back together. Sometimes it doesn't for years and years. And then one day you realize that you can use that arm or leg again, just like a normal person, That years after a traumatizing robbery, you can walk alone to your car or down the street, without your heart racing. That after months of forcing yourself to hang out with friends, you find that you like doing it, that you miss seeing those people when you don't get the chance to for awhile. (Ok, so that comes and goes. The remodeling may have made the bone as strong, but the bone was never really a people person.) That two years after your last big loss, you can sometimes talk about it without even tearing up. Maybe you also find that the bones didn't heal exactly how they used to be, but that you are alright with that. Maybe you even like it better that way, because it reminds you that you'll never be the person you started out as, for better and for worse, though hopefully more for the better than for the worse.

Then again, I've also done some breaking on purpose. Tattoos, piercings, and scars are not how our bodies were originally, but I'm happy with them. In fact, I want more. I don't date how people are supposed to and I disclose too much too soon to everyone. There are a bunch of other things that society at large says that a healthy person doesn't do, but that I do openly and gladly. So I guess I also accepted a long time ago that I am broken, at least by most standards out there. Many times, I heal. I can bring those broken pieces back together and I find the remodeling to be sorta amazing. The rest of the times, I just develop new strategies for dealing with things while broken. Even if that means I'm too broken for most people, once they aren't broken anymore.

Gary Allan- Pieces

I've been broken, torn and scattered
I've loved holy, I've loved sin
I was rolling on the wind
It didn't matter

I was so sure of who I didn't want to be
Every smile and every fear
Every laugh and every tear
It was all mine, it was all me

Chorus:
Pieces of my heart
Pieces of my soul
Pieces that I'm gonna be
I don't even know
I gave a lot to lovers
Gave a lot to friends
Everything I took from them
Made me who I am
Pieces

We've all been lied to
We've all been liars
Nothing's perfect in this world
Everybody's been burned by the fire
Guess I'm learning
That what breaks you, makes you grow
But I'm not hiding where I've been
Gonna let the light shine in
What I don't need
Gonna let that, let that, let that go

Chorus:
Pieces of my heart
Pieces of my soul
Pieces that I'm gonna be
I don't even know
I gave a lot to lovers
Gave a lot to friends
Everything I took from them
Made me who I am
Pieces

Pieces, the good and the bad
Pieces, the happy and sad
Pieces, the wrong and the right
Pieces, that's my, that's my, that's my life

Chorus:
Pieces of my heart
Pieces of my soul
Pieces that I'm gonna be
I don't even know
I gave a lot to lovers
Gave a lot to friends
Everything I took from them
Made me who I am
Pieces

Fear of Walking

3:48pm. I'd only been walking 12 minutes. I felt like I should walk more. Wanted to walk more. But where I really wanted to go was near the park area a block down and a block over. It has a really cool lookout over the city, but is always populated by people who looked...well...sort of shady. Why are there always cars parked on the roads on the edge of the park, often with people sitting in them, all day long? Of course, I have some assumptions about why they are there, which might be wrong since sometimes I sit in my car just to kill time. But it is hard enough to enjoy walking on my own just around a few blocks, without having any major anxiety, so I decided to quit while I was ahead and just go inside the building where I go to my therapy and write. Hell, if it had been dark, I might not have been able to go on the walk at all.

When TyRoy was visiting, he would walk from his girlfriend's work to the downtown library, not far from where my therapy center is. In fact, the week after he left, when I had several hours between my individual and group therapies, I walked down there to read. In an email that night, I expressed that, though it was a brisk Midwestern January day, I enjoyed the walk, that I like walking through cityscapes. He agreed, said that he found the walk invigorating. But I'd seen him walking away from my car on his way back to his girlfriend's work, laptop bag hoisted across his back, and I'd seen a confidence, a carefree-ness, a self-possessed-ness that someone watching me, even on a sunny afternoon like today, would not observe.

The only time I've walked alone in my own neighborhood without my dog or a (male) friend was a few times when I walked to the bar a few blocks away and when I used to walk to work, which was only 5 blocks away. When I was a kid, I watched with envy when characters in movies would wander around late at night, whether they lived in a city or not. I envied people living in densely populated cities who could walk where they were going, or at least from the subway. I envied their autonomy, that they got to do this alone, without having to tell a parent or bring a friend or a dog. (Yes, now that I'm older, I realize that most of those people wish they could just drive their own car around and park it right in front of their house like i do.) Whenever my mom and I were out, or even if we were watching one of those tv shows or movies where I was envying a character's autonomy, she would drill into my head that you had to be vigilant while walking anywhere, watch out for robbers or rapists or murderers. Don't go here. Stay in the light. Keep your keys in your hands. Be aware of who is around you and what they are doing at all times.

Even once we lived in a better neighborhood, I wasn't allowed to just be out by myself (or at least that's how it felt.) I could walk short distances alone, like to friend's houses or the bus stop, but only if there was a specific person or people waiting for me on the other end of my journey. When I got the bug up my butt that I was going to get up early and go for jogs, my mom made me take the bigger and meaner of our two dogs. I was not told that this was because the dog needed the exercise, but that she was with me to keep me safe.

I know that my mom was just trying to keep me safe and trying to teach me how to keep myself safe. And I don't know how much it would have been different if my name had been "Christopher Michael," but I know some of it would have been. [Here is where I start to deal in some assumptions and some broad generalizations, but they aren't wild guesses. They're based on my observations and what I've read of/heard from/know of other people. Bear with me and don't be too quick to dismiss it.] You know why TyRoy walks down the city street like he owns it? It's because he does. Though he is subjected to a different cultural narrative as a black man, and I'm sure there are places where he will get a second (and third) look, a street in this part of the city isn't one of them. While I don't know this for a fact, I doubt he has been taught that everywhere he goes he needs to be constantly vigilant for someone who seeks to victimize him. I doubt he was told as a kid that he couldn't walk down his street without his dog or a friend and I know that didn't translate into an adulthood where he doesn't walk around his neighborhood without a dog or a friend.

My belief, deep down, is that I don't have any business walking around by myself, especially if I'm not going from one set point to another set point. If I do choose to do that, I need to be constantly aware (read: fearful) because I am a victim screaming out for a criminal.

Don't get me wrong. I don't agree with this. I don't think that women (or any people of color or gay people or transpeople) should feel any less welcome to walk down the street in safety and confidence. I just know that is not the lived reality for many people. (And, yes, I do know that there are plenty of non-minority cis men who live with these fears, but they don't have this fear because of this cultural narrative.) 

I just know how stifled and constantly fearful internalizing this cultural narrative has made me. Right now, I'm lucky enough to have constant access to a car for any and all transportation I might need to do, ample parking, and a small yard for my dogs to use the restroom in, but I'm not sure what I'd do if I suddenly didn't have those things available to me. Obviously, I'd have to use other options, but how do you switch that off? Just the other day, I mentioned the possibility of going on a walk later in the day to my mom. "Better take the dog" she said. Rrrr, "It might rain. She's such a princess. She hates walking in the rain," I replied. "Who will protect you then?" she asked, sorta joking, sorta not. What happens if I needed to walk to work or to public transportation because I didn't have a car or the money for gas or car insurance/tags? How do I suddenly turn off that fearfulness that doesn't let me leave the house without a friend or a dog? And if I am supposed to be scared enough not to go out alone, does anyone really think that my stupid little Corgi is going to make me feel suddenly safe and secure? As long as this shadowy robber/rapist/murderer petted her, she'd love them.

For me, it's also become bigger than just being fearful of going on walks alone. As I said earlier, that has seeped out, turned into a belief that I have no place on the street by myself which then turned into I have no right to be out on the street by myself. Then to not having a right to my own self. It sucks and it's horrible and I hate it, but that doesn't change the fact that if something bad happens to me, someone will ask why I was there at that time, because it's my job to be constantly vigilant, not that the person or people who victimized me absolutely should not have done it.

***************************

A week later. The weather has turned back to what I think January should be like. It snowed this morning, though the streets are clear now. I bundle up, pop my earbuds in my ears, and force myself to go on another walk between individual and group. I even wore my ugly ass hiking boots, which are usually used for walking the dogs when it has snowed. I walk several blocks farther today. I left everything but my phone, ID, and debit card back at the therapy center. I try to walk with my shoulders back. The few people that I do pass on this chilly afternoon I look in the eye, smile, and say "hey" to. I'm not so much un-fearful today as I don't give a fuck. I don't walk all that long, just long enough for my face to be starting to feel numb. But this day I went for a walk. By myself.

"I'm not a 'good man.' But I'm prepared to be an honorable one."

No I can't change my mind. I knew all the time that she'd go. That's a choice that I made long ago.*

Peeking through the blinds, I just wished he would drive away already so I could start my crying. I'm not sure if it's harder on me when he or I leave after we've had a good visit or when we part after we've been fighting. No, actually, I'm sure that it's harder when we've had a good visit, because I'm sad that we can't have that whenever we want. 

In the last two weeks, I had to say goodbye to my two bestfriends after our official holiday visits. It sucks. Of course, anytime I get to see Moneypenny or TyRoy I know that I'm going to going to have to say goodbye to them, not just "see ya later" to your friend who lives across town, but "goodbye" to someone who is hours or half a country away, who you won't see for a month or several months. Yeah, I know that this is part of the package. And, yes, I'd rather have them in my life in some capacity than not at all. But it sucks. 

It sucks especially when there was a time that you spent all your free time with this person. Because they were your significant other. But you fucked it up. There is nothing you can do about that now. No amount of acceptance makes that sting less. Especially when you're finally back in a place where you would like to be in a romantic relationship again. 

I gave in to the loneliness, but I didn't give up nothing else.**

With every step of the therapy process, I have a little mini-meltdown about the changes I'm about to make, what they might mean for me. I always started questioning if I would still be "me" if I changed this thing or if I will be becoming someone I never wanted to be. My latest meltdown was about how uncomfortable I am with each step I take closer to being an adult. I'm finally at a place where I feel I'm ready to start working a full 40 hour work week at this job and I want to so I can start saving up to get a bit more education and so I can get my car repaired or get a new-to-me car when the time comes. But I never wanted to be an adult, at least not like the adults around me, who were all trapped by the things that they did to be adults. Of course, it's silly. Just because many (most, all) adults I've known have been like that doesn't mean I will be. More importantly, my experience has been that, despite my anxiety to the contrary, I always feel better when I make these positive changes and feel like I've become more myself, with fewer encumbrances and obstacles. 

Another thing I'm working on, after months (years?) of letting my actively ignoring how unhappy I was with it or making rationalizations for why I shouldn't even try, it getting my weight and body under more of my control. I've started off by setting a small goal, hoping that when I achieve it, I'll feel more motivated to keep going and set another goal. But that is life, right? You keep setting new goal posts. With any luck, the goal posts are achievable and you are motivated to keep working. Sometimes the area the goal post is in will change. Maybe at first your goal posts will be in your career, then it will be in your personal life. But when you stop having goal posts, I would think life would become really shitty really fast because all you're doing is struggling with no light at the end of the tunnel, even if the thought of working towards something more or changing your current situation scares the crap out of you. 

My reflection, in the window when I ride, could not save us, but I swear to god I tried.**

In my DBT notebook, at the very beginning of the book, which gives the newbie an outline of what the therapy is trying to do, it lists "Assumptions about Clients with BPD and Therapy." Number 1 is that clients are doing the best they can. Number 3 is that clients need to do better, try harder, and be more motivated to change. That these things are both true at the same time, that we are doing the best we can and we need to try harder, exemplifies what this therapy is all about. With each marker I hit, I still have more to go. 

The real thing behind my mini-meltdowns is that the resulting change is in direct conflict with the story I've told myself my whole life about who I am, what I want, what I can do. Though it's getting better daily, I've always believed that I was this really shitty person, so of course I'd do really shitty things. But reading this quote below by Ta-Nehisi Coates really flipped the script for me. Though it is in a follow-up post to one about guns, it is really about who we are versus what we do (emphasis mine): 

I've been with my spouse for almost 15 years. In those years, I've never been with anyone but the mother of my son. But that's not because I am an especially good and true person. In fact, I am wholly in possession of an unimaginably filthy and mongrel mind. But I am also a dude who believes in guard-rails, as a buddy of mine once put it. I don't believe in getting "in the moment" and then exercising will-power. I believe in avoiding "the moment." I believe in being absolutely clear with myself about why I am having a second drink, and why I am not; why I am going to a party, and why I am not. I believe that the battle is lost at Happy Hour, not at the hotel. I am not a "good man." But I am prepared to be an honorable one.
This is not just true of infidelity, it's true of virtually anything I've ever done in my life. I did not lose 70 pounds through strength of character, goodness or willpower. My character and will angles toward cheesecake, fried chicken and beer -- in no particular order. I lost that weight by not fighting the battle on desire's terms, but fighting before desire can take effect.
These are compacts I have made with myself and with my family. There are other compact we make with our country and society. I tend to think those compacts work best when we do not flatter ourselves, when we are fully aware of the animal in us. 

That one line just kills me: "I am not a "good man." But I am prepared to be an honorable one." For a long time, I've told myself that who we are is what we do, that I can ignore or work past my own feeling that I'm a shitty person if I just do good things. I suppose this is in that same vein except that it doesn't say that doing good makes you good. It seems to imply that being good is not the point, in fact we aren't good, but that we rise above not being good by being aware of what we are doing and truthful with ourselves about why we are doing it. 

Of course, that means trying. Maybe I'm not prepared to be honorable quite yet, but I am prepared to keep trying. 

Where there is desire there is gonna be a flame. Where there is a flame someone's bound to get burned, but just because it burns doesn't mean you're gonna die. You've gotta get up and try, try, try***

*Mandolin Rain, Bruce Hornsby and the Range

**Almost Honest, Josh Kelley

***Try, Pink

What Christmas Means to Me

My therapist wanted me to write what Christmas means to me, but she wanted me to do it after the holiday. I see her Thursday, so I thought I had better get on it. Of course, I don't really know how to put it in "what Christmas means to me terms," so I'll be doing it my own way. 

First off, fuck this. I fucking hate this because every time I've tried to think about what I might write, since before Christmas and then very much so tonight, I've cried. Quite a bit. Especially tonight. So, just so everyone knows, I fucking hate this. 

Christmas was a lot of fucking work. It was putting up Christmas decorations with my mom, with no help from my step-dad because he's a Scrooge. It was making cookies and food. It was cleaning like crazy because we were having family over and you can't have the least little bit of dirt if family is coming over. It was shopping and wrapping presents and never having enough money. It was final papers and final tests. It was a week of crazy, rapid cycling mood changes. Of having to take breaks from my studying so I could cry for no reason I knew and then of being so hyped up that I couldn't sleep, even when I was done cleaning and studying.

Christmas was always sad. I always felt this sadness, this incompleteness. Even before I had a context, I always knew that "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas" was a really sad fucking song. At least half of Christmas tv episodes made me cry. Still do. Christmas is the end, the last holiday of the year. Your last chance to get it right, which I never felt like I did. I got to see so much of my family but it only highlighted that I didn't live with them anymore. But it wasn't all bad.

Christmas was stolen moments. Stealing moments with friends and boyfriends, whenever the two of you could get away from family. It was trying to hang out with my uncle as much as I could. Cold car rides. "We're going out for a soda. Be back in a few minutes," only we were never back in a few minutes because it took us 20 just to find a store that was open. That one year it was searching everywhere for Crystal Pepsi. It was the Saturday Night Live Christmas Special on Comedy Central. It was sneaking a daiquiri or margarita in the kitchen with my grandmas while my mom was in the other room. It was spending the week between Christmas and New Years back in [the suburb of the Moderately Sized Midwestern City] with my grandparents. After Christmas shopping with Grandma. Getting to visit with the other kids I was in daycare with. Staying up until midnight with my grandpa every New Year's Eve. The neighbors shooting off fireworks or just banging pots and pans around in their front yard at midnight.

Now Christmas is, well, shit, I don't really know what it is anymore. It's still decorating, how the lights outside and the tree still make me feel, even if I have to do it alone. It's still making food. It's still buying presents, how it makes me feel when someone opens their presents. It's still Christmas music, even though I tend towards the newer and alternative, instead of the traditional. It's still about the Christmas movies and the Christmas tv shows- Scrooged, Gremlins, Rare Exports, Buffy's "Amends," the House show with "a Jew with antlers," Dr Who's "Christmas Invasion" and each year's new Dr Who Christmas Special. Oh, and the Grinch. It's still a sadness. It's still working over the holiday, this time because we aren't leaving town and Dad is on call, so I might as well. In years to come, it will probably be required of the job.

I don't really know what it means. To me, it is certainly not the celebration of the birth of my Lord and Savior, as I have none. While I try to believe as my uncle did, that it's time off from work to spend with your family and friends, a time to come together and celebrate, even if you're only celebrating for the sake of celebrating, it sometimes seems to fall short of that when I feel like half that family is missing, when the family that remains is so small. I try to keep how he felt about it alive in my heart, however, so it remains something more than just a way to mark the year as it slips by.

Reframing and Building New Boxes

After the uprising of my LTRR feelings last weekend, my therapist had me create a list of boundaries that might assist me in staying in wise mind, instead of falling over that crazy cliff. Like a good girl, I did make a list of all the things that we do that "just friends" don't do. (Or at least that I don't think "just friends" do, but I'll get to that later.) Of course, even though I was at work, I almost broke down crying. I had planned on writing more about how I felt about stopping each behavior, but it was too much. I spent the rest of the week depressed and couch-bound. 

I guess I might as well share my list, huh? Ok. In no particular order:

• My friend paying for stuff
• Seeing each other dress and undress
• Asking the other person what they would prefer we wear
• Being sexual
• Cuddling
• Sharing the same bed
• Touching in everyday situation (for example: holding hands to get through a crowd, put your hands on the other person's hips to move them out of your way, walking arm in arm when I am wearing heels and need some stabilization)
• Sharing food and drink

After the general sadness and depression, my first feeling was willfulness. "I might make this list, but I'm not stopping this shit." *pout* 

Then, I tried to think through why I am so resistant. (Yes, I know that, on the one hand, that helps me to justify it. But I also thought that a better understanding of why I was resistant might help me stop. I'm sure you can guess which it did.) In general, all of the above behaviors are ones that I also engage in with other people who I am friends with and don't want to push for any kind of long-term situation with, so it seems counter-intuitive to me that I should stop doing any of them with my bestfriend. During therapy today, my therapist called me on how limiting the definition in my head of "just friends" was. I brought up that these were things that we would probably stop doing if/when my friend gets into a LTRMR (long-term romantic monogamous relationship.) For all her vanilla-ness, she said that things like one person paying for things if they make more money and feel comfortable with it as well as the touching in everyday situations are not outside of the boundaries for most "just friends." She said that she does that kind of stuff with her husband's best friend, holding hands to get through crowds and the like. It's about intention and how everyone feels. 

The next reason I felt resistant to stopping the above behavior is because those physical things are such tangible, immediate ways to feel cared for. Despite all of my friend's reassurances, I still feel very unsure of this relationship and how they feel for me. Though I don't feel this with everyone, when we are sexual or physical in any way, I do feel cared for. I also hope that my friend realizes that I don't sleep in the same bed with very many people, so that is something special for me, a way to show how much I care and how much I do trust (or try to.) Also, though I know everyone else things I'm deluding myself and using this as a way to justify continuing the physical relationship, I don't think that it was the physical that pushed my feelings from "we're friends with benefits right now while we're single" to "we should be in a LTRR." I think that it was the way that our attempts to rebuild the trust in the relationship triggered my long-time prejudices about friendships and romantic relationships. 

Let me try to explain. Growing up, I didn't have very good close friendships with other girls. It took me a long time to develop any friendships after I moved from the suburbs of the mid-sized Midwestern city to just outside of the large Midwestern city. It took years for me to make more than one female friend at any one time. Even when I did, whenever I would have an argument with a female friend, she'd use something that I told her in confidence against me. To be honest, I'm sure I did the same thing too. My friendships with guys, while complicated by possible romantic feelings, were more solid, more loyal, simpler. As I became a teenager, with one exception, all my close friends were male, and, with one exception to that, all my close male friends were my boyfriends. I always felt like your romantic relationships were supposed to be deep and trusting, more so than I felt most of my "just friend"ships could be. 

So when my friend and I, who are already each other's closest relationship, started to do all these things to deepen the trust, which eliminated things that had always bugged me, from the time we were dating on, all my previous attempts to "get over" my friend seemed to evaporate. We'll never be "just friends" even if we're monogamous with other people for decades. But making the relationship more trusting and deeper and closer and then getting along for two weekends in a row... well, it was to much for the 18 year old in me who had planned our wedding. She still believes that things will work out if you just love someone enough and do whatever you think they need to be happy with you. She is stupid. 

When my meltdown happened, weekend before last, my friend asked me how what we had been doing was different from what TyRoy and I do, thinking that we'd just change that, since I don't have these problems with my feeling for TyRoy. At this time what's different is being sexual and sleeping together, but it hasn't always been that way and I don't ..... FUCK....as I'm writing I realized something... Ok. So that weekend, I said that there wasn't much difference. As I was about to write, at this time, because of what TyRoy feels comfortable with while he's with the lady he loves, we aren't sexual, cuddly, or sleepy, but that hasn't always been the case. There was a period of time before he fell for his lady love where we did all that and more but it wasn't a big issue. I didn't feel like we should be working towards a LTRR, while I will always be open to that if things change for him. What I realized while writing this is that the difference is in the people. I already knew that it probably had a great deal to do with how our relationships started and the person that I was when the relationship started. But what hadn't hit me until I was typing this was something very different about them. Way back, when my friend and I were dating, his feelings on things would change and he wouldn't tell me, he'd just start acting weird. We were together for years after he knew he wasn't going to take the relationship further. He'd changed his mind, but he never told me. On the other hand, I remember during an argument with TyRoy where I was questioning if he still felt the same way about something. "Did I tell you that it had changed? Well if I didn't, then it hasn't." I feel really comfortable in the knowledge that, unless he's single and he has expressed that he'd like to give it a chance again because the previous impediments are no longer there, that TyRoy still doesn't want to pursue a LTRR with me. Things are the same, status quo. In a good way. Though my friend has recently said, "I'm a guy. We can go a week, a month, a year, and then pick things back up like it was yesterday," I have a hard time believing that. Can I be sure he hasn't changed his mind? If there isn't something physical to show me that he cares, how do I know he still does? If we don't talk for several days, maybe he doesn't want to be friends anymore and he's gone again? On the other hand, if we're getting along and things have been going well, how do I know that he hasn't changed his mind and wants to give it another go? That maybe he's just waiting for me to express my feeling, say that I'll take that leap with him first. (Yes, I know it seems ridiculous, but I'm sure that inside of your head would seem ridiculous to me. Let's try not to judge.)

So where does this leave me and those pesky boundaries?

Yesterday, it occurred to me that it would be easier if I assumed the same things about my relationship with my friend as I do about my relationship with TyRoy: It's ok if it's romantic or date-like when we are together. Whether anything physical or sexual happens will be gauged by our respective primary romantic relationship, if we have one, and what that partner is ok with. Nothing happens that we couldn't bluntly tell that primary partner about, kinda like a secondary or tertiary romantic relationship for open or poly couples. I will assume that my friend does not want to pursue a LTRR with me for the reasons previously stated and that those haven't changed as it hasn't been stated. I will work on radically accepting that we won't pursue a LTRR. But I also need to radically accept that I'm not going to put those boundaries up, at least not right, especially as we aren't seeing other people. Trying to force myself to do something that my heart isn't in won't work. I'll just end up breaking the resolutions that I've made and feeling bad about it. This is who we are. This is how we interact, especially when we don't have someone else who will get hurt by our actions. It might not fit into the "just friends" box that I envision other people have with their friends, but, as my therapist pointed out and my own friendships attest to, that box probably doesn't exist anyway. The more important boundaries I need to work on are internal. Between the girl I was who thought that a relationship would work if I just loved someone enough and the woman I am who knows that I love several people who it won't work with, not now, probably not ever. Between the failed romance we had and the deep, increasing-in-trust, not "just friend"ship but friendship we have now.  

I'm reminded of a scene on the tv show Bones. 

Dr. Temperance "Bones" Brennan: I'm... quite strong.
Special Agent Seeley Booth: Yeah, well, you've always been strong.
Bones: You know the difference between stength and imperviousness, right? 
Booth: Well, not if you're going to get all scientific on me.
Bones: Well, a substance that is impervious to damage doesn't need to be strong. 
Booth: Hmm.
Bones: When you and I met. I was an impervious substance. Now I'm a strong substance. 
Booth: I think I know what you mean.
Bones: A time could come when you aren't angry any more and I'm strong enough to risk losing the last of my imperviosness. Maybe then we could try to be together.

Though I have never been impervious, I'm not sure I've ever been very strong, at least not in this respect. But I'm trying. Not so we can be together romantically. Not really for the sole purpose of me being with anyone. But as a side effect, me being strong might make it possible to stick with this friendship, help make us strong as well. I just need to reframe the question and make a new box to fit what we already have.